Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
I know y'all are members of SportsNation, and prefer a backwards baseball cap to a handsome fedora and Buffalo wings (I'll take the four-alarm sauce, please!) to a nice Snail Turd Risotto. Still, I assume that most of you have heard of William Shakespeare, and if you're guessing that he was an 11th-round NFL draft pick by Tennessee, you can stop right here.
Shakespeare wrote many famous lines, a whole bunch of which should resonate with tennis fans and, come to think of it, might have come from the mouths of players -- or the folks who love them. Let's look at some:
Now is the winter of our discontent: This is what tennis fans all over the world are grumbling, now that the Australian Open and Fed and Davis Cups competitions are over. There won't be a high-stakes convention of champions again until the two big Masters events in the U.S., Indian Wells and Key Biscayne.
A plague on both your houses: Novak Djokovic was heard to mutter this shortly before he whipped Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, back-to-back, last summer at Montreal.
Frailty, thy name is woman: You could hear people thinking that as they watched Elena Dementieva toss the ball to hit a second serve when break-point down.
Out, damned spot! Out I say: Said by Marat Safin, while watching one of his many line-call challenges rejected by HawkEye. Safin insists that HawkEye is unreliable.
Much ado about nothing: Roger Federer's reply to journalists when they asked what he thought about Djokovic taking him out in the Australian Open semis.
Love is blind: Anybody remember that Martina Hingis was once engaged to the man who celebrated victories by doing "the worm," Radek Stepanek? Come to think of it, Hingis might be blind, but she's sure as heck had a lot fun wandering around, bumping into the furniture!
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark: An ATP official was heard to mutter this line when he was informed that online booking agency Betfair had suspended betting on a match played in the Copenhagen Challenger.
Though this be method madness, yet there is method in it: Anybody else notice how John McEnroe has been transformed from reviled maniac into elder statesman?
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety: I hear Martina Navratilova is asking for a wild card into the Wimbledon doubles.
The better part of valor is discretion: Brad Gilbert spoke those words to his former protégé, Andy Murray, when the Scottish lad declared, "Brad, I think I'm going to take my serve right to Federer's forehand!"
Now sharper than a serpent's tongue it is to have an thankless child: Long ago and far away, a man named Yuri Sharapov pulled his little daughter aside and drilled those words into her. She hasn't forgotten.
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman: Pete Sampras was known to utter those famous words before any of his numerous meetings with Tim Henman at Wimbledon, where Pete never lost to the British icon.
Beware the ides of March: That would be March 15, when action gets under way at the next Masters event after this, the winter of our discontent.
