About a month ago, it all got to be too much.
It was the fears over the coronavirus. It was the pressures from my full-time job. It was my husband getting on my nerves. My kids asking all the questions. And then George Floyd was killed.
About four years ago, I published a post about sports fans getting their jockey straps in a bunch over Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams talking about police violence. I remember when I tweeted out the post and one of my favorite followers replied, in essence, "Yeah, but you should keep sports and politics separate."
But here is the thing. If you are black in America, it is not so easy to focus on your job. Because your skin color informs the way you are treated everywhere. Even at work. If you spend your entire life watching police do terrible things to black people, then explain it away with shady-ass police reports, it's hard to stay focused on your job. But you have to, right? It's like every black parent has said to their child: You have to be twice as good to get anywhere. That's also true. So there is this additional burden that you always carry. And Floyd's death really brought that into sharp relief. At least for me.
Kaepernick hasn't been able to get a job in football in those four years because he silently protested racism every week on the field. And I've been thinking a lot about what would have happened if people had listened. Because it wasn't just Kaepernick eloquently stating his cause -- there was case evidence happening around him and around us the whole time. What if the NFL had chosen to get behind Kaepernick when he first started talking about police brutality and racism? That was in 2016, before George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, before Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Elijah McClain, the list, this tragic list goes on. Now, when even the NFL is trying to make amends, everyone is catching up to this ongoing problem of police brutality. You want to be grateful that people are finally starting to understand what it means when you say "Black Lives Matter." At the same time, it took an awful lot of terrible things to happen before people realized that racism was a thing. And there's progress happening in important places, like newsrooms. But the president is retweeting people who are shouting "white power" in golf carts.
I don't really have a point. I guess I'm saying these weeks have been a lot for me. And it's been hard to think about tennis. Our league coordinator says it's safe to start league play again. Sure. Florida's down to over 5,000 cases a day from 8,000-9,000 a day. I don't know. I'm still working on my dress and I'll have plenty of time before I get to debut it at this point. And I did play for the first time since March a couple weeks ago. I was actually much worse than I thought I'd be. What do you call it when you don't have rust to knock off your game, but your racquet is a complete block of rust?
OK, one more thing. We are really having the U.S. Open this summer? And are we really inviting Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev? So Zverev tested positive for virus that has caused a global pandemic after playing in an ill-advised tournament that Djokovic put on, no masks, everyone all up in each other's faces. Then Zverev goes out partying and breathing on everyone? This is why we'll all be housebound until 2025. And he seriously shouldn't be invited to play in New York. We don't know anything really about the coronavirus -- it's too new. We don't know why it doesn't bother some people too much and why it lands others on ventilators. And it sounds like the plan is to ... allow infected players to come to a tournament with at least 127 other people, especially ones who are refusing to self-isolate?
That's it for now. Stop breathing all over each other, OKAY!