RIP to American Boon
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love the idea of this man and his large sons consistently eating three dinners in a row at three different restaurants
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Does “skip the soup” mean they’re leaving full bowls of broth behind at each restaurant??
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I’d assume that’s what he means but I choose to believe he means the complimentary tiny cup of miso soup
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part of an old episode of sally jessy raphael about toby, a person who describes themselves as neuter. it’s funny how it feels both a million years old and from a future where people are a lot more chill about gender.
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Call of Duty: Mobile has put out a new ad featuring professional tennis players Jessica Pegula and Jennifer Brady. Yes, it’s the same Pegula as the family that owns the Buffalo Bills. Jess, with fellow American Emma Navarro, is one of two billionaires ranked in the top 10 in the world, meaning that for the first time in history there are more billionaires in the top 10 than lesbians. It’s a very dark time for the WTA (women’s tennis association) indeed.
The ad speaks for itself. It’s one of the most baffling pieces of tennis-related content in recent memory. Why does the ad look like that? What was the breakdown of the budget on this thing? Did no one direct their acting? What audience of current tennis fans, latent CoD gamers do they think they are attracting? Why the mobile app, specifically? Why does Jennifer Brady not receive any billing for the ad but the title says “ft. Jessica Pegula?” Why Jessica Pegula?
Pegula is currently ranked #4 in the world and her ranking has fluctuated between #3 and #5 for the past 3ish years, demonstrating a high level of consistency. Her groundstrokes are flawless. They’re exactly what you would want to teach a child learning the game. She’s without the technical deficiencies of her fellow top competitors (e.g. Swiatek, Gauff).
She has made the quarterfinals of every grand slam and made it to the final of last year’s US Open. She’s also reached grand slam finals in both doubles and mixed doubles. She’s never won a slam but has racked up a few 1000-level events (this is the next level down from Grand Slams). She’s too good to be considered a journeyman, but she doesn’t really have a career-defining achievement either. I don’t expect she’s a household name, though those are increasingly rare in tennis. Coco Gauff, surely, at least as the one most Americans would be likely to know. Maybe Sabalenka or Swiatek.
I’ll take a second to address the Jennifer Brady in the room: I thought she retired. She is a former college tennis player (very rare) who actually had some success on the WTA tour. She doesn’t nearly have the results that JPeg has, but she made a Grand Slam final at the Australian Open back in 2021. A lot of Grand Slams come down to one person with a story and momentum and one who is basically just an NPC. Brady was the NPC that year. Her most notable moment on tour is actually probably this hilarious interaction right after she lost. A few months after that run to a grand slam final, Brady injured her knee and was out for two years. She had a mini comeback but mostly seems to have stepped away from the sport
Back to Pegula - like her tennis, her personality is pleasant, though not particularly fiery. Let’s be honest, no one on tour - except maybe Alcaraz on the men’s tour (wiping away his tears with his Rolex was a very nice touch) - has the charisma that the generation before had. None of them are graduates of the Maria Sharapova School of Marketing. Do you know what I was saving up for when I was 11? I needed a digital camera. Was I interested in photography? Not really, no, but Maria Sharapova told me that I needed to make every shot a power shot and I took that as gospel. It’s the tennis equivalent of 90s Martha Stewart telling you to paint your cabinets Robin’s Eggshell Blue. Bitch, you went out to Kelly Moore and you painted your cabinets Robin’s Eggshell Blue.
Pegula’s off-court persona is mostly comprised of small anecdotes strung together from years of grinding away on the WTA tour. There was a time she drank a beer after a loss and had a dgaf (though not combative) attitude in her press conference. There was another time when Cotton-Eyed Joe started playing in the middle of her match for no reason… and then when she went on to win the tournament they made her lift up the trophy to Cotton-Eyed Joe. Last year during the US Open she got branded a “public transit queen” because she posted a few videos showing how it was easier to get to Flushing Meadows via Subway/LIRR than by car (LIRR is 100% the way to go btw). These really resonated with the New York crowd because even the stadium announcer during the match would thrown in “…and she takes the subway!!” to raucous applause on the end of the typical “From America, your number 3 in the world, Jessica Pegula!”
This is so many words spent on what is seemingly a random partnership between a mobile game and a sports star (a second CoD: Mobile ad with her), but it’s at the intersection of so many interesting threads for me. Is this a curated decision? An “I’m just like you” move from a media-savvy billionaire who has maintained a pristine image, but also one with enough quirks to avoid the “boring” allegations her peers (e.g. Rybakina) face? FWIW, those public transit videos that got her so much love came out right as people were again rehashing her family’s fortune (fracking) and debating which WTA billionaire star’s dad was more evil (Emma Navarro’s dad earned his fortune from predatory credit loans). In the weeks since the ad launched we’ve seen JPeg start to talk about gaming and CoD for the first time, and I genuinely believe her that she plays and likes the game. She’s laidback and grew up with brothers and almost certainly grew up playing. It’s more the branding of it all, what message she might want to project of herself, that’s intriguing. Her relative anonymousness (complicated by her family’s prominence) makes her a WTF choice from CoD, but also serves as a reminder that tennis isn’t really pumping out stars the way they did in the early 2000s with the mononymous Roger, Rafa, Venus, Serena, and Maria. …and I know that they were just hocking product but, yea, I kinda miss it:
The final spoke of this CGI Call of Duty Commercial atrocity is that this might be indicative of… something… about “sportswashing” and how it evolves, though I’m not sure what. Tennis in particular has gone really hard on the sportswashing lately, as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has pumped tons of money into the sport. Rafael Nadal in particular went very hard on trying to recoup the Saudi image in his final years on tour (in exchange from the Saudi gov’t providing him money for his tennis academy) that online fans started referring to him as Rafa-el bin Nad-al. The WTA is always in a more financially precarious spot than the ATP, and so they’ve been the target of a Saudi takeover. The WTA finals (fifth biggest tournament of the year after the grand slams; an invitational for the eight best players of the year) used to be a roaming tournament but now it looks like it will be in Riyadh for the foreseeable future, even though women can’t drive there. Last year it was sparsely attended… very sparsely. But the WTA was happy because they got a big Saudi check out of it.
I don’t know that any of that works on the individual level or if Jessica Pegula’s particular style of branding counts as sportswashing in any sense, but it’s an interesting comp at least. Billionaires owning teams, like the Pegulas, tends to portray them as nefarious string-pullers. A billionaire playing an excelling at a sport though… that might make them likable. This is getting a little conspiratorial so I’ll provide a counterpoint: tennis is the worst sport you could choose for this. It’s exceptionally technical, requiring you start before the age of 5 to have any real shot. It typically requires foregoing college. It still has the reputation of leisure for the wealthy. And, ironically enough, until Jessica Pegula, players on the tour with wealthy backgrounds were typically terrible players, never reaching the upper echelons of the sport. So, thank you Jessica Pegula, for breaking the glass ceiling 
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What an incredibly bizarre ad. It looks like something out of a fever dream.
That burn with asking what name she prefers was also brutal.
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@Psinuxi @wickedcestus are either of you feeling this recent loss?
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I didn’t know this existed until today! I can’t say I’ll mourn a McDonald’s but it’s such a novel thing that it’s a bit of a bummer.
There’s a storm a brewing tonight so I wonder if that did it?
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Never heard of it. My parents moved to Vancouver just before Expo '86; that’s about all I’ve got.
Left that city behind a long time ago…
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You can take the man out of the city
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You can take the barge out of the water…
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…but you cannot take the cat off the lap
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the shading looks like, if i ran my hand over the surface of the form depicted, it would feel very smooth for a naturally occurring granite formation.
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