By Ljubodrag Simonovic, Belgrade / Serbia *
How is it possible that a “top” tennis player can earn over 2 million USD for winning a tournament? In order to earn 2 million USD, a worker with an average salary must work for 500 years! Djokovic and his “colleagues” from the tennis world “earn” this amount for a couple of hours of “playing”. Why are players in the tennis circus paid amounts that workers can only dream of? What social values do they promote? Their actual “work” comes down to hitting a ball back and forth over a tennis net.
The technique of play in sport, instead of being emancipatory, has an entertaining and circus character. It serves to produce a “spectacle” meant to integrate people into the ruling order. Instead of developing genuine human powers, it develops forms of manipulation and destruction of people as cultural and natural beings. By mastering the technique of play, an athlete is in conflict with his spiritual and playing being. The more he improves as a tennis player, the more he is degraded as a human being. He turns into a peculiar specialty-idiot, both in mental and physical terms. By becoming a “tennis star”, a man is alienated from his humanness.
In order to understand the true nature of “top” tennis, we need to look at those who pay the world tennis “elite”. They are, above all, Bill Gates’s “charitable” foundations, “Monsanto”, the largest world banks, “Puma”, “Adidas”, “Coca-Cola” … Djokovic, Nadal, Federer – they are but the clowns for the most powerful capitalist clans and, as such, are the trademarks of contemporary capitalism. They are the stormtroopers of the “new world (American) order” that is annihilating humankind and all life on this planet. ‘Top” athletes belong to the 1% of the titled global “elite”. Yachts, grounds and mansions, exclusive holiday resorts, accommodations in luxury hotels, large sums on their accounts in Western banks…. They are the organic part of the wealthy “elite” that rules the world. Djokovic’s “distinctive quality” is his posing for billboards on buildings and erecting monuments to himself across Serbia!
The increasing amounts paid to tennis players are in direct proportion to the increasing misery of a large number of the world’s workers. “Sport is the cheapest spiritual food for workers – and it keeps them under control!” – this is the golden rule of sport, created by Pierre de Coubertin – the official “father” of modern Olympism. Athletes do not exemplify social values; they rather depoliticize the oppressed and thus serve to preserve the ruling order.
Rather than being the “representatives of their nations”, tennis players are an elite corps for the most powerful capitalist corporations, which use sport to destroy national cultures and national-liberatarian self-consciousness. Sport is the crown of a “mondialistic” worldview, and modern Olympism is the chief and most important mondialistic religion. Tennis players are running billboards for the largest capitalist corporations and are therefore the breeders of a consumer mentality – the driving force of a “consumer society” that increasingly threatens the survival of humanity.
The money “earned” and “donated” by Novak Djokovic is blood money taken by capitalist criminals from workers and used to pay mercenary athletes to “brainwash” the oppressed and turn them into obedient idiots.
To “support” Novak Djokovic and his tennis cohorts actually means to help the executioners of humanity finish their monstrous “work” : to deliver a final blow to the critical-changing mind and annihilate life on this planet.
* Lubodrag Simonovic (72) was a member of the Yugoslav national basketball team, which won the world championship in 1970. Several times he played for the national team along with Sergei and Alexander Belov. He was a participant in the Olympic Games in Munich. In protest against the cover-up of a doping scam with Puerto Rico, he left the Games, after which he was expelled from the national team. The author is a Master of Laws and a Doctor of Philosophy. He has published ten books in the fields of philosophy, sociology and historiography. His texts have been translated into English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Turkish. He taught at domestic and foreign universities. He is married and has three children and six grandchildren. Simonovic lives in Belgrade.
Translated from Serbian by Vesna Petrović (Todorović). English translation supervisor Mick Collins