TV Sports

Aristotle said man was the political animal. Some religious say that we're the animal with a "soul" (or deny that we're an animal at all). You could also say we're the sexy animal. The chimp in estrus fucks every willing male. Shrimp in their annual orgy grab hold of anything: they'll fuck a piece of seaweed once the fit is on them. But man is the animal that fucks year round: including fucking seaweed.

We love to look at each other. Gary Cooper. Humphrey Bogart. Sir Anthony Hopkins. But there we don't think of it as sexual. We want to be looking up Marilyn Monroe's dress (helped by Hollywood holding it over her head for us) to think of it as sexual. Honey, for us, it's all sexual. But most especially when we're staring at the girl's coo.

We marvel at Joltin' Joe, and at at the Splendid Splinter ... You don't think we've got an eye on their genes? kleptocrats every one of us.

I was once especially conscious of general consciousness of sex while watching women's tennis one evening in Madison Square Garden: late 1970s. Of course I was staring at their coo. There were enough unsold seats that I kept changing mine to be right behind one or another of the best players as she bent over to receive serve. And if the individual woman didn't know it, professional women's tennis — her coach, her banker, her agent, her lawyer ... did — because they'd disciplined every one of the women to be depilitated within a micron of her whatsis. You've never seen so much hairless female as Martina Navrotilova and her marvelous sisterhood displayed that night.

Thing is, women athletes and women pinups don't normally go together. Athletic competence militates against the big milk jugs, the MacDonald's-size dumpster. The breeders have to carry a little extra fat. Modern women athletes have to defeminize themselves to the point where they cease to menstruate. Yet every once in a while, there's an exception. Gabriela Sabatini! I think of tennis because that's the women's sport I best love to watch: I play the game myself — however poorly — and I love to watch it well played. In fact, I love to watch the women play it well even better than I like to watch the men play it well because the women are just weak enough and just slow enough that you can still follow 90% of what they're doing: McEnroe, Sampras, Safin ... What happened? The point is over.

You want to appreciate tennis? Great tennis and great athleticism? Get some of Martina Hingis' matches on tape from when she was on her long tear of major championships. She never had a serve like Venus or a ground stroke (or volley) like Serena, but on the court she was like Caesar: all things to all men. She was everywhere, she was everything, she did what was necessary.

But then again, I'd have adored her even if she'd lost. Teen "baby" fat has never looked better on a young woman.

So there I was in 1970-something, staring up the coo of the most delicious of all possible tennis derriere's, that of German tennis pin-up Betinna Bunge (My God! Her tennis outfit that night was like a little sailor suit!, and now here I am, 1990-something, watching Martina Hingis during a changeover ... She goes up to her place by the net post, the camera following. She bends over to change rackets, or to get her water bottle ...

And the camera followed, our minds disappearing into the tender female fundament. Martina's precious teenage buttocks had swallowed her panties. Now they swallowed the camera and me along with it.

Alas! I say "alas" because I have never seen the camera follow near a female tennis player's behind since. There must have been hell to pay at NBC that day. Now the women wear underpants that "Spandex" half-way down their thighs. The camera could be inserted at their snatch and you wouldn't see a thing. Grr!

Which brings me to gripe #2. I now see that what's been griping me for years has grown epidemic: Ana Kournikova. She's blond. She has a tan. Her hips articulate. So what? Sure she's cute: but not half as cute as Martina Hingis! The two together aren't half as cute as Bettina Bunge! And if you want to get stuck in Sargasso-female, go no further than Sabatini!

I don't know: maybe it's because Ana Kournikova reminds me so much of my girl friend in college: the face is similar; the hair and ass are identical: and I had not loved her.

Now everybody's down on poor Ana. She hasn't won. So what? #1 means six billion who aren't. My beloved Bettina Bunge never won either that I noticed.

But here's how stupid, how ignorant, the internet is: Kournikova is all over TV, all over the magazines, the tabloids ... all over the sports news! Send a spider to search for Kournikova and you'll get pics galore. Now: find me one picture of Bettina Bunge. (Find me that picture of the camera swallowed by the Hingis' heinie.) (There were none of either when I wrote this.) How many pics are there on the internet of Helen of Troy? of Delila? of Nefettiti? (I mean in the flesh.) Where's Eve?

I tell you: you want to fall in love with Eve? First, read Milton's Paradise Lost beyond the usual assignment of the first two books. Then, read Piers Anthony's Geodyssey series. Eve appears in Isle of Women. I fell in love with her there.