The question wasn’t about a match, it was about a scale. Buse was dropped a rung, then another, and at every rung he still won. The exercise is neat enough: you take away places and you watch for the floor where the certainty starts to creak.
The floor he stops on is lower. “Top 1000… there, I’d say careful,” he replied. He backed up his answer by pointing to the differences between the men’s and the women’s game. According to Infobae Peru, he added that respect was due.
Silly question, but why do we stop at a thousand? Because it’s a round number? I asked three people and got three different cut-off points. I’m digging.
Elena Rybakina won the US Open and became world number one the following Monday. The clip went round on social media, and the debate about men playing women started up again, with the same arguments, the same screenshots and the same people answering in capital letters.
Céline, our C30.4 (a club-level ranking), took exactly one number away from the whole story, and it wasn’t the 35. She spent Monday lunchtime redoing the maths out loud over a cone of chips, stats folder open, trying to work out where she sits on that scale.
So there’s a border, and it’s at a thousand. I look at it from underneath, with binoculars. A lad who imagines himself 200th and still backs himself, I understand the pattern perfectly: I win too, on a Sunday, somewhere between the warm-up and the first game. Then I play, and we talk about it at the clubhouse bar. The scale always stops just short of me. Two practice sessions away, mind you.
She adds, for the record, that none of these rankings has ever had to perform on a Sunday morning on court 4, under the strip light, with a phone buzzing at the bottom of the bag during the big point. That should be somewhere on the scale as well.
It’s true, we checked: Tennis Actu.
