There’s a lot of sports stuff we could talk about this week – including Andy Murray reuniting with former coach Ivan Lendl in an attempt to stop Novak Djokovic’s bid for the Grand/Golden Slam. (Nole fan though I am, I’m all for the “It’s the eye of the tiger,; it’s the dream of the fight, rising up to the challenge of a rival” attitude Murray has adopted. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. There’s no point in lying down for an opponent. And no champ worthy of the name would want a competitor to roll over. I think Nole knows the Grand/Golden Slam will mean nothing if he doesn’t earn it.
But there are two ways to think about sports. Like the arts, they can take us outside ourselves. And there are moments when they simply pale in the wake of tragic events. ...
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Read MoreWhat would we do without Nick Kyrgios? After years of aloof politesse (Roger Federer), passive-aggressive classiness (Rafael Nadal), molten anger lying beneath an earthy crust of sportsmanship (Novak Djokovic) and barely contained annoyance (Andy Murray), we have no-holds-barred, heart-on-his-basketball sleeve Nick – railing against the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune.
During his first-round French Open victory against Marco Cecchinato of Italy, Nick was assessed a code violation after barking “Towel” at a ball person who responded with less than alacrity.
“How can you sit there and give me a code for that, but when (Novak) Djokovic pushes an umpire out of the way, that’s all right?” Nick asked chair ump Carlos Ramos. ...
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Read MoreRoger Federer’s out of the French Open with continuing injuries, and already the Mark Antonys are out in force to praise and bury Caesar.
No Fed fan here but, as with Mark Twain, reports of his (tennis) death are greatly exaggerated. Federer will never retire, because being a player on the ATP tour – as opposed to what John McEnroe calls the old fogey’s tour – is at the core of his identity and because Feddy fans, including The New York Times, would have a nervous breakdown. Already the planets are spinning backward with Novak Djokovic’s name being thrown into the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) ring. ...
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Read MoreI saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.
I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...
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Read MoreWith so much happening in the world of politics, this blog has been neglecting one of its passions – sports and, specifically, tennis.
Well, no longer.
The sports pages today are full of a stratospheric Novak Djokovic, who in winning the Miami Open Sunday passed Roger Federer as the all-time ATP earnings leader with more than $98 million. Yowza.
But that’s just the beginning. The win made him the career leader in ATP Masters 1000 titles, with 28, and the first player to win the difficult double of Indian Wells and Miami four times. It also enabled him to extend his streak of consecutive weeks as No. 1 to 92.
Miami was also Nole’s 63rd title, moving him past coach Boris Becker with 714 wins. (By the way, 714 was the number of home runs Babe Ruth hit lifetime.) ...
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Read MoreAt a time when the news – foreign and domestic – seems so terrible, here’s something to gladden the heart of many a lady (and more than a few gentleman):
Mr. Darcy’s shirt is coming to America.
Yes, the shirt that is for women what the wet T-shirt contest is for men will be part of “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” an exhibit opening in August at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (And, I need not add, we are so there.) The show will feature the shirt – one of several used, given the need for a fresh one for each take – that Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in a key scene in the 1995 smash BBC miniseries of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” ...
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Read MoreIt’s been a great week for news – sporting and otherwise – of the games men play.
First, it’s ba-aaack – Deflategate that is. You will recall that last September, federal court Judge Richard M. Berman ruled that the NFL had overstepped its bounds in its arbitration of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly masterminding the deflation of footballs in the New England Patriots’ 2015 A.F.C. Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.
Now a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has said, Not so fast. Taking a view similar to my own from the start of this delicious story, the panel seems less interested in the NFL’s triple role as judge, enforcer of punishments and arbitrator of appeals – a strange trifecta that would automatically make the league vulnerable to the charge of overstepping by the Players’ Union – than it is in the cover-up that always trips you up. To wit: What of Brady’s destroyed cell phone that might’ve contained incriminating information about his altered balls? ...
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