June 1, 2023 On Sports Game 6 By Rachel B. Glaser Rachel B. Glaser, Buzzer Beater, 2023. On Monday night, the Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics in definitive fashion in Game 7, winning the Eastern Conference Finals on Boston’s home court. It was a Heat fan’s fantasy. Caleb Martin played like a sleek god with magic powers. The three-pointers looked easy. With few shooting fouls, the game flowed swiftly and without controversy. For a Celtics fan, it must have been a slow nightmare, beginning with Jayson Tatum’s ankle roll in the first possession and ending with the starters on the bench, resigned to a nineteen-point loss. It was the opposite of the chaotic Game 6 of the series, which was one of the most thrilling and heartbreaking games I’ve ever seen. Read More
May 23, 2023 On Sports The Playoffs: A Dispatch By Rachel B. Glaser Rachel B. Glaser, Ref Huddle, 2023. These years, the only basketball I watch is the playoffs, but I take them very seriously, because they’re so fleeting, dramatic, and sublime. I love the ever-changing narratives. The pregame handshakes. The postgame interviews. The controversial tweets. The stupid commercials one can’t help but memorize. I love when a player “gets hot” and their teammates keep funneling them the ball. The rarely seen, silent green siren that flashes when a coach uses their challenge to dispute a call. The sudden announcement of a technical foul and the way the mood shifts during the single, solitary free throw. I love catching glimpses of the players’ tattoos of babies, ancestors, dates, signatures, playing cards, angels, lions, phantoms, and crosses emitting sunbeams. I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing. I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench. Read More
December 21, 2022 On Sports Today I Have Very Strong Feelings By Jonathan Wilson Manuel C., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A month ago, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, made his now infamous “I am Spartacus” speech at the World Cup’s opening press conference. “Today I have very strong feelings, today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, before adding, “Of course, I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied.” Two days before Sunday’s final, he returned to the microphone to announce, a bit prematurely, that this had been the “best World Cup ever.” It pains me to say it, n terms of pure football, and especially given the galactically great final—a game that will remain, as everyone pretty much agrees, unsurpassed in the annals of football history—he was right on the money. At the beginning of England’s penalty shoot-out against France in the quarterfinals, English fans were back at the Battle of Agincourt, the whole country ready to channel Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh and “cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George,’” when the local penalty pathology kicked in. In the 1996 Euro, Gareth Southgate, currently England’s manager, had famously missed a vital penalty against Germany, weakly side-footing the ball toward the goal. The next day one of the tabloids ran the unforgiving headline “‘HE SHOULD HAVE BELTED IT’ SAYS SOUTHGATE’S MUM.” This time, Harry Kane did belt it. The result was the same. Kane’s ball went way over the bar, effectively ending his country’s chances of beating France in the quarterfinals. England had probably otherwise deserved the win, on the merit of its second-half performance and in the wake of some egregious decisions from the referee Wilton Sampaio, along with the mystery that is VAR (video assistant referee). All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears. Harry lifted the top of his shirt above his chin and bit down on it. Read More
December 8, 2022 On Sports What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Goals? By Jonathan Wilson The U.S.-Wales Men’s World Cup Match and Opening Ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on November 21, 2022. State Department photo by Ronny Przysucha, Public Domain. Not long after Argentina lost in a stunning upset to Saudi Arabia and hardly anyone outside the losing country was crying, I read a new book, Dark Goals: How History’s Worst Tyrants Have Used and Abused the Game of Soccer, by the sports journalist Luciano Wernicke. Evita, I learned, once tried to fix a game between two Buenos Aires teams, Banfield and Racing, first by force of will and, when that failed, by offering a bribe to Racing’s goalkeeper: he could become mayor of his hometown. Of course, that kind of behavior is behind us (FIFA? Bribes? Are you kidding?), although government pressure and reward still hover on soccer’s periphery: Emmanuel Macron famously called Kylian Mbappé the best player in the current tournament, and urged him not to move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, because, he said, “France needs you.” After the Saudi victory, a national holiday was declared in the oil-rich kingdom, all amusement parks were free, and citizens could enjoy their favorite rides for as long as they wished. In Qatar, outside interference of another kind was exposed when it came to light that those bouncing, joyful, muscle-bound, tattooed Qatar supporters in identical maroon T-shirts were actually faux fans imported from Lebanon and elsewhere, all-expenses-paid. They had been trained in patriotic Qatari chants. Meanwhile, the Ghana Football Association appealed to a higher power and urged two days of fasting and prayer nationwide to give its team the necessary boost. This sounds quite reasonable; there’s been an awful lot of skyward finger-pointing and prostrations of thanks by players after they score a goal. Someone’s deity is clearly playing a part. No one, to be clear, ever thanks God for a loss. Read More
November 20, 2022 On Sports Kickoff: The World Cup By Jonathan Wilson Qatar Airways. Wikimedia Commons, LIcensed under CC0 4.0. The World Cup kicks off today in Qatar. To many people the entire extravaganza is one giant laundromat, a sports-wash of global proportions, designed to rinse clean the dirty laundry accumulated during the gulf state’s decade-long preparation for the event. An estimated six thousand five hundred migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were reportedly killed during the stadiums’ construction in the last ten years. To memorialize them, the Danish team will wear subdued colors and hold black in reserve as its third strip. Yet despite Qatar’s grim politics and dubious human rights record, particularly with regard to LGBTQ rights for both residents and visitors (criticism vigorously rejected by Qatar’s rulers as “slander”), FIFA projects that five billion of us on this dying planet will feel compelled to watch. Read More
November 4, 2021 Baseball, On Sports A Philosophical Game: An Interview with Saul Steinberg By Lauren Kane Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1959, gouache, ink, pencil, and crayon on paper, 14 1/2 x 23″. Private collection. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. The artist Saul Steinberg, who immigrated to the United States in 1942, was deeply preoccupied with identifying the essential threads of American life. For him, baseball was rich material. In 1954, he traveled with the Milwaukee Braves, taking them as subjects for his deft, sharp linework. The sketches from that trip are some of Steinberg’s most recognizable work, and were published in LIFE magazine in 1955. Read More