The corruption of everything

This is in itself a trivial scandal, but as a symptom of the pervasive corruption of life in the Trumpist plutocracy, it’s symptomatic in a very revealing way.

Telling the story requires a little background about how professional men’s tennis works. Pro tennis features, broadly speaking, three levels of competition: The top level, the ATP tour, is what the casual fan thinks of as the pro tour. But there’s a tour one level down, the Challenger tour, where players are competing to qualify to play regularly, or at all, on the ATP tour. Then there’s a tour below the Challenger, the ITF, where players are competing to qualify to play on the Challenger tour.

The way you qualify is by accumulating ranking points. There are at this moment 2,164 players who are ranked, in that they have accumulated at least one point via play on these various tours. To play regularly on the ATP tour you have to be in the top 120 or so, because the way you qualify directly for tournaments on a tour is by having enough points. To play regularly on the Challenger you need to be in top 400, roughly. And so forth. Points roll off on a 365-day basis, meaning any points you have were accumulated over the last year.

There are two other ways to get into a tournament for which you’re not qualified directly, which is to play in a qualifying tournament to get into the main tournament, or by getting a wild card. To play in a qualifying tournament you need to have enough points to qualify to do that, unless you get a wild card into the qualies as they’re called. Wild cards are handed out by sponsors of tournaments for various reasons, the typical ones being national pride — for example promising young British players who haven’t accumulated enough points to qualify directly for the main draw at Wimbledon may get WCs to either the main draw or to the qualies for the tournament — or giving a top player who is coming off a serious injury and has lost ranking points as a result entry, or sometimes giving a famous player a slot simply because the player decided after the entry deadline to play the tournament anyway.

Needless to say the WC system is open to potential abuse, but one thing that’s almost always the case is that you have to be an actual professional tennis player in some sort of merit based sense of the word to be even considered for one.

Which brings us to Bill Ackman:

Bill Ackman, the billionaire financier, has succeeded at pretty much everything he’s done, professionally and otherwise. He built his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, into a winner. He backed President Trump’s third campaign — and second term. And he’s a prolific poster on social media, regularly plopping long treatises on X, which helped him become internet-famous.

Tennis, however, is different.

That was the lesson seemingly taught on Wednesday afternoon when Mr. Ackman, 59, and his doubles partner, the retired professional Jack Sock, lost in straight sets to a pair of journeymen in front of a sweaty and well-heeled crowd at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., a famed summer retreat for Gilded Age industrialists.

The loss came in the Hall of Fame Open, an official tournament of the lower-level ATP Challenger tour, which effectively made Mr. Ackman a tennis pro, if only for a day. It fulfilled a lifelong ambition — and, more than likely, he said, ended his career.

“I feel like maybe it’s one and done,” Mr. Ackman said, in the wake of his and Mr. Sock’s 6-1, 7-5 defeat, noting he wanted to support younger players getting their tournament slots — and shots. “But I figured one, in my life, that seemed fair.”

Yes this is trivial as I already said, but it’s also completely disgusting.

Bill Ackman, January 2025: “Once a society concludes that meritocracy is unfair, it is on a rapid path to self-immolation.”

I’ve never played any kind of serious tennis, but I know people who have, and one of them, who is a few years younger than Ackman and was a state high school doubles champion in a large state and a 5.0 player currently in terms of that ranking system, assures me that he himself would destroy Ackman on a tennis court, while he would also lose 6-0 6-0 to the three other players in the Ackman fake match, because a very good club player like my friend could not possibly take a single game off an honest to goodness pro, because that’s the way the world works, or doesn’t.

This person also forwarded me a message that somebody who has played and coached fairly high level tennis sent to the author of the NYT puff piece on this travesty. Here’s part of it:

Challenger players regularly play in Grand Slam events, and beat top 20 players any given day. Some are former top players and many are about to be. )

But the real crime, what made it a mockery, was the intentional tanking and gifting that his opponents did. Just embarrassing. 

Two more questions to ask: 

How much did Bill pay Jack [Sock] for the experience? No way on earth he played for free. Especially as they had never met before “the weekend of training” at Bills house in the Hamptons. Not illegal but definitely a topic of discussion among Tennis folks. 

How much did the opponents get paid to intentionally diminish their level and pad the score?
It’s against the rules of the ATP to not gjve 100% effort, especially now that their is so much gambling. The ATP took the match off the betting websites so the players apparently won’t get penalized. 

Another note: as much as I am ragging on Tomic and his partner Jasika, I have a ton of respect for their Tennis accomplishments. I think it does them a disservice to call them “not notable” and “journeymen”. As you note later, Tomic was top 20 and he is basically the same level as a top 100 player, which is again so many lightyears away from the level of Mr. Ackman. 

Just for some more context, Bill could not reasonably score a point against anyone ranked in the top 1500 in the world. 

About the result. I think you miss the point: if this was played as a real match, the 2nd set score of 7-5 would be a shockingly successful result for Ackman-Sock. So to say “they lost in straight sets “ and that implicitly it was a failure, misses the point. 

The three other players in this match threw the match, in the sense that they did not give an honest effort, which is a huge breach of ATP rules for obvious reasons. Bill Ackman, billionaire and influential political figure, bought his way into a pro tournament, and bribed three actual professional players to pretend to play him. He did this because he is so completely delusional that he thinks he deserves to be on a professional tennis court, on the basis of, to use one of his favorite words, “merit.”

It’s important to emphasize that this was not an exhibition, or a pro-am, i.e., the kind of event where Roger Federer hits around with Bill Gates for charity, and everybody realizes it’s not real. This was a real match, for real ATP points, with real players, except there was a billionaire out there who was deluded enough to think he deserved to be out there, because he’s been playing very well lately.

David Foster Wallace:

A child’s world tends to be very small. If I’d been just a little bit better, an actual regional champion, I would have gotten to see that there were fourteen-year-olds in the United States playing a level of tennis unlike anything I knew about. My own game as a junior was a particular type of the classic defensive style, a strategy Martin Amis once described as “craven retrieval.” I didn’t hit the ball all that hard, but I rarely made unforced errors, and I was fast, and my general approach was simply to keep hitting the ball back to my opponent until my opponent fucked up and either made an unforced error or hit a ball so short and juicy that even I could hit a winner off it. It doesn’t look like a very glorious or even interesting way to play, now that I see it here in bald retrospective print, but it was interesting to me, and you’d be surprised how effective it was (on the level at which I was competing, at least). At age twelve, a good competitive player will still generally miss after four or five balls (mostly because he’ll get impatient or grandiose). At age sixteen, a good player will generally keep the ball in play for more like seven or eight shots before he misses. At the collegiate level, too, opponents were stronger than junior players but not markedly more consistent, and if I could keep a rally going to seven or eight shots, I could usually win the point on the other guy’s mistake. I still play–not competitively, but seriously–and I should confess that deep down inside, I still consider myself an extremely good tennis player, very hard to beat. Before coming to Montreal to watch Michael Joyce, I’d seen professional tennis only on television, which, as has been noted, does not give the viewer a very accurate picture of how good pros are. I thus further confess that I arrived in Montreal with some dim unconscious expectation that these professionals–at least the obscure ones, the nonstars–wouldn’t be all that much better than I. I don’t mean to imply that I’m insane: I was ready to concede that age, a nasty ankle injury in 1988, and a penchant for nicotine (and worse) meant that I wouldn’t be able to compete physically with a young unhurt professional, but on TV (while eating junk and smoking), I’d seen pros whacking balls at each other that didn’t look to be moving substantially faster than the balls I’d hit. In other words, I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance. And I have been brought up sharply. I do not play and never have played even the same game as these qualifiers.

Wallace was one of the best high school players in the state of Illinois, so he was about ten or a hundred times better than Ackman ever was, as there’s no evidence that Ackman was even a good high school player. And Ackman is now 59! The anonymous coach I quote above is surely right: in an honest game, there is no possible way Ackman could take a single point, let alone an actual game or a set, off any professional player, let alone Jack Sock, who was top ten in the world a few years ago, or Tomic, who was top 20, etc.

This is obscene and disgusting and really disturbs me, as trivial as it is by itself. We worship billionaires in this society now like Stalin or Mao or Hitler were worshiped in their societies. Vladimir Putin scores eight goals when he plays hockey against professional Russian hockey players because that’s the way the world works I guess, but is nothing sacred? Not even the one place — the playing field — where the only privilege is supposed to be the privilege of actual, as opposed to purchased, ability?

Orwell:

WHEN I read of the goings-on in the House of Commons the week before last, I could not help being reminded of a little incident that I witnessed twenty years ago and more.

It was at a village cricket match. The captain of one side was the local squire who, besides being exceedingly rich, was a vain, childish man to whom the winning of this match seemed extremely important. Those playing on his side were all or nearly all his own tenants.

The squire’s side were batting, and he himself was out and was sitting in the pavilion. One of the batsmen accidentally hit his own wicket at about the same moment as the ball entered the wicketkeeper’s hands. ‘That’s not out,’ said the squire promptly, and went on talking to the person beside him. The umpire, however, gave a verdict of ‘out’, and the batsman was half-way back to the pavilion before the squire realized what was happening. Suddenly he caught sight of the returning batsman, and his face turned several shades redder.

‘What!’ he cried, ‘he’s given him out? Nonsense! Of course he’s not out!’ And then, standing up, he cupped his hands and shouted to the umpire: ‘Hi, what did you give that man out for? He wasn’t out at all!’

The batsman had halted. The umpire hesitated, then recalled the batsman to the wicket and the game went on.

I was only a boy at the time, and this incident seemed to me about the most shocking thing I had ever seen. Now, so much do we coarsen with the passage of time, my reaction would merely be to inquire whether the umpire was the squire’s tenant as well.

April 14, 1944

. . . Andy Roddick has a good comment on this (discussion starts 21 minutes into the video)

. . .