Sometimes I Wonder...

by Crazy Ivan

So Monk and I are chilling at HQ, watching the French Open finals and I find myself pondering.  I wonder if the guy who invented tennis felt the same way about his game as we feel about ours.

You figure that if you traced it back far enough, there would have had to have been a first person to ever play tennis... well, actually, a first two people ever to play.  I would imagine that the game they were playing back then was a long ways off of the game I'm watching Federer and Nadal play now, but they probably had a net and some rackets and some kind of sheep-gut type thing that they made into a ball.  I imagine the rules were about the same, though I would assume that at first the scoring made a lot more sense.

I think about that a lot, actually.  Whenever I encounter a game or sport, I find myself thinking about the person who invented it.  In some instances you know, of course.  With basketball, you can read all about it's history from conception to the modern NBA.  In other instances, the actual history might be lost, but you can easily see how the sport was invented.  Take soccer as an example.  Nobody knows who played soccer first, but it's pretty easy to imagine how it got started.

But there are some games that really leave a person scratching their head.  Think about billiards.  Somebody had to be the first person to come up with that idea and that person would have needed billiard balls, cues and a very specifically designed table.  It's hard to believe that a person would have gone to all that trouble without already knowing how fun billiards was.

But the other thing I always wonder is that these people thought.  Did they foresee the future of their sport?  Did the first tennis players ever imagine a worldwide spectacle like the French Open?  Did they ever imagine that their sport would revolutionize, for instance, footwear?  Did they think about the hundreds of thousands of school teams that would litter the world?

In truth, it's hard to imagine that any of these inventors saw what was coming.  They might have seen some of it.  They might have had grand plans for the future of their games and sports, but odds are their vision didn't exactly match up with reality.  The sports might even have gotten bigger than they ever predicted, though they likely went in unexpected directions along the way.

Which, of course, brings us back around to Myachi.  We have all kinds of grand notions about what the future of Myachi holds, but there's no way of knowing which are right, which are wrong and what craziness awaits that we never could have imagined.

All I'm saying now is that I can't wait for the day when somebody's sitting around in France watching the US Open of MYACH and thinking about the game that they invented.