> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://down-by-law.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Playing Nice, and Maybe Missing Your Slam - URL: https://down-by-law.ghost.io/playing-nice-and-maybe-missing-your-slam/ - Published: 2026-09-14T04:40:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-14T04:40:22.000Z - Author: Stacy Y. China My brother is six feet, five inches tall. He’s a big guy. He has spent much of his career in corporate America, working for a Fortune 500 company. He hasn’t talked about it much, but every now and then he’ll recall some instance at work where he made himself a little smaller, physically, to not seem threatening to his co-workers or supervisors. I’ve read similar accounts of black men who hunched their shoulders, stayed seated or adjusted the timbre of their voices to better fit in. I even saw a testimony once from a brother who said he wore glasses at work, not because he needed them, but because he thought they made him look a little softer. So if you’re a black man, particularly a black man moving through heavily white streets, these thoughts go through your mind, consciously or unconsciously. I think about this a lot when I’m watching tennis. Gael Monfils of France turned pro in 2004 and is taking a retirement victory lap this season, and his countrymen Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard are relative newcomers with long ways to go. So the black men we see most often are the youngins in their prime: Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada and Frances Tiafoe of the U.S. If you ask the tennis hive mind (similar to asking the NBA or the NFL hive mind about a player, so get your grains of salt ready), you will hear plenty of plaudits and criticisms for both Felix and Frances. The biggest criticism, likely, will be that neither one has won a Grand Slam tournament yet. They were part of the first generation after the Roger Federer/Rafa Nadal/Novak Djokovic stranglehold on the sport, and they were expected to be part of What Came Next. \[This wave also included Stephanos Tsitsipas, Taylor Fritz, Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem, by the way. Of them all, only the retired Thiem (the 2020 U.S. Open that was played with no fans thanks to Covid) and Zverev (the 2026 French Open) have broken through.\] Instead of men’s tennis turning into anyone’s game, however, two upstart spoilers named Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner pulled up and ate their own lunch, each other’s lunches, and damned near everybody else’s lunch on the flipping tour. They have been ruthless and ferocious (and in the case of Alcaraz, wildly entertaining) in snatching up every Grand Slam title they could find. Ok, so the sandwich generation has problems. For Felix and Frances, tho, there are additional problems. Go back to the hive tennis mind. The second criticism you’ll likely hear is that they both lose matches they should win on paper and in practice…but something tends to get in the way. Some inexplicable loss of momentum throws them sideways. Sometimes there’s enough time to recover from it, and sometimes…there’s not. The hive will debate you on all the typical things (loss of concentration, coaching issues, mental blocks). A friend offered this, tho: “genuinely I think he may be missing that killer mentality” Killer mentality. All champions have it. All multiple champions have stacks of it. That cold-blooded, winner-take-all mindset that makes you believe that not only can you do this, but you deserve to do this. To everyone else, it can appear a little bit selfish and a little bit greedy and a whole lot of arrogant and maybe a little bit dangerous. But that attitude often etches your name into the finest hardware the sport has to offer. How hard is it to develop a killer mentality, tho, when you’ve been socialized your entire life to be non-threatening? There ain’t but a handful of black men on the ATP Tour. I have to believe that as brown faces in mostly white spaces, they’ve felt that same pressure as brothers in the corporate world to get in and fit in. At some point that likely stops being a conscious thing, and it’s just assumed to be part of their personalities. What they do every day. It’s not a problem. It’s just Tuesday. Right. Still.. Success demands arrogance. Selfishness. And yes, a little bit of danger. Monfils avoided these very things most of his career. For many years, the knock on him was that he was the tour comedian (and sometimes the clown). Often, when he’d get close to making that grab and breaking that opponent’s will in a big moment, he’d back away. My biggest example of this is the 2014 U.S. Open quarterfinals. Monfils played like a freakin’ assassin for two and 7/8 sets. He had Roger Federer down and out. The people (including me) were excited. He was like two games away from glory. And then….he took his foot off the gas. He backed up. And Fed came all the way back, winning in five. Now, was that just the magic of a Federer in peak form? Some of it. But a lot more of it, I believe, was a guy who couldn’t throw the final dagger when it was time. Is that reluctance something that can’t be overcome? Of course not. But is it something that can probably be overcome faster once it’s acknowledged? Yeah, probably. I’ve watched Fils play for a few years now, and he seems….different. Like he understands, consciously or otherwise, that he needs that touch of danger and righteous unpredictability in his game. May this understanding only flourish over time. May it only flourish for all of them. \[First published by [Racquet Theory](https://www.racquettheory.net/?ref=down-by-law.ghost.io#essays)\] ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5f/a7/5fa7df3f-c495-44ab-80ff-cdc6cb7af8df/content/images/2026/09/kings.jpg)