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Category Archives: On Sports

August 9, 2021
On Sports

No Balls, No Nets

By Kyle Beachy

Liene Vitamante, Venice Skateboarder on Ramp, 2016, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What percentage of skateboarding, I wonder, is talking about skateboarding? Half, probably. There is such rich joy to be found in these debates without stakes, these endless recollections that go nowhere, slowly. And if the impulse to write grows from the impulse to converse, one could reasonably suggest that writing about skateboarding is a natural extension of the activity, too. But skaters tend to have a cautious relationship with the written word. Our culture has produced an array of photographers and filmmakers and sculptors, so it’s not a lack of work ethic or creative energy that’s kept us from producing poets.

At some point in my early twenties, I decided I wanted to become a novelist. So, I worked very hard to become one. By necessity at first, and then by habit, I viewed most any non-novel writing as a threat to my primary purpose. For my second novel, it seemed obvious that I should write about skateboarding. It proved difficult. I hit a snag, as happens, and then another. By the third snag, which was substantial, I decided to send out an email to friends in the name of research. It was four questions, a brief survey about a basic paradox or conundrum central to our practice: Is skateboarding inherently competitive, I asked, like diving or gymnastics? Is it possible for any of us to treat going skateboarding like going for a stroll in the countryside? Or does something within the activity, some internal characteristic, urge its practitioners toward improvement? Read More
February 8, 2021
On Sports

On Sports Time

By Matt Levin

Photo: © 3asy60lf / Adobe Stock.

Michael Jordan is facing the camera. It’s May 7, 1989, and Jordan has just made the winning shot in Game 5 of the first round of the NBA playoffs. He is rising, effortless, his legs swinging open like scissors. Craig Ehlo, behind and to the left of Jordan, is sinking, crumpling into profile, making himself thin. Jordan swings his arm in sync with Ehlo; they are nearly perfect mirror images of each other. They hit the ground, magically, at almost exactly the same time, drifting in the same temporal current.

Time in a sporting event is, like accordion bellows, structural and flexible. On some throws the ball seems to stay suspended in the air for a long time, slowing time along with it, and accelerates as it reaches the players, like the moment the last of a liquid gurgles down a drain. On the TV of a bar in the Vienna airport I once saw a goalkeeper let a ball, leisurely struck, slip through his hands and go dribbling into the net; the scoring player swung wildly around, mouth tensed into a perfect circle, eyes blaring at nobody, kicking at the place he had just been standing as if he were abusing himself in the immediate past. A giftedly swift athlete makes others slow more than they themselves seem fast. Often, near the end of close games, time itself becomes a commodity, and infinitely valuable—where before the clock ticked on, ambient, it is now neurotically watched, brooded over, and stopped at strategic points. The moment of this transfiguration is variable, unique to each individual game, and sudden. All at once, it is late, and seconds are to be collected and held like a squirrel hoards nuts. Read More
February 5, 2020
On Sports

I Can’t Let Kobe Go

By Tara K. Menon

Photo: Keith Allison (CC BY-SA)

In 2016, in the final game of his professional career, Kobe Bryant scored sixty points. If that sounds like going out on a high note, it wasn’t. He took fifty shots—the most shots attempted by a single player in the previous thirty-three years of the league. Casual fans will cite the first statistic for years: Kobe scored sixty points in his retirement game. But in the following days and weeks, pundits voiced their disdain for this final selfish display. Proof, they chanted in unison, that it is time to say good riddance to this Narcissus.

They were right; it was time for him to bow out. Nevertheless, there is something odd about treating a great athlete’s defining characteristic as his failing. Kobe missed his first five shots that night and went scoreless for the first six minutes of the game. But when he squared up for shot six, he acted as if he had never missed a shot in his life, let alone all five in the last six minutes. Was it the arrogance of a superstar or the confidence? The jury is still out.

*

In the nineties and the 2000s, there was a dearth of female athletes for a sports-obsessed girl to watch on television. Only tennis reliably offered women who played for a living. I grew up on Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport and Justine Henin. I liked watching them but felt nothing more than cool admiration. Then came a young teenager called Serena Williams. She was astonishing, but she was also too loud, too angry, too aggressive, too proud. I saw myself in her and it made me uncomfortable.

It was easier and more fun to watch the men. Sampras and Agassi, Beckham and Zidane, Iverson and Shaq. I took pleasure in them all but I had only one idol: Kobe. I wanted to be him; I felt that I was him. The feeling that overtook me when I played tennis, soccer, basketball, netball, and touch football, I saw it in his eyes every time he stepped onto the court. Later, he gave that feeling a name: Mamba Mentality. Watching him play felt like willing a dream into existence. He didn’t just want to be the best, he always wanted to be better than himself. I wanted his confidence, his swagger, his no-apologies attitude.

*

When I first heard of the rape accusation against Kobe, I was fourteen. I played basketball for my high school. I refused to entertain the possibility that he was guilty. No hero of mine could be capable of this.

My denial continued for years.

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September 13, 2019
On Sports

The Jets, the Bills, and the Art of Losing

By Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with some very strong feelings about football.

Photo: Rowan Ricardo Phillips

“We’re from Buffalo. Obviously. That’s why we’re driving through this tunnel with you.”

It was Sunday, around noon. I was in a car with three men more or less my age. When driving through a tunnel there’s always a moment when I start thinking about the crushing tons of water overhead; how we’re kept safe by tons of concrete and steel; that traveling through a tunnel is an act of faith—either in science or in the benefits of simply following the person in front of you.

Somewhere outside the tunnel, the air was sun-kissed, bright, warm. But inside the tunnel, the murky orange lights overhead chased one another in single file. That’s when the dark side of our trip, something dubious tugging at our excitement, started to bubble to the surface. It was only a matter of time before we started stating the obvious as a way of confirming that, yes, we had agreed to do this. Because the question started to pose itself: “What the hell are we doing here?” Sometimes it’s as simple as “We’re from Buffalo.” Read More
February 26, 2019
On Sports

They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi

By Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi.

Lionel Messi/ Photo: David Ramos

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You’re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball. We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you’re about to do has no name.

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January 25, 2019
On Sports

A Loss Like a Knife: The 2019 Australian Open

By Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Our resident poet/tennis expert is back with some thoughts on the 2019 Australian Open.

Stefanos Tsitsipas (left) and Danielle Collins (right)

The two most in-form players at the 2019 Australian open, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Danielle Collins, met their ends in the semifinals. That their final sets both ended with scorelines of 6-0 is remarkable. That these rising young stars were defeated is surprising. But here we are. Stefanos Tsitsipas, the twenty-year-old phenom from Athens, was turned away by Rafael Nadal, 2-6, 4-6, 0-6. And Danielle Collins, the twenty-five-year old former college champion from the University of Virginia, met the end of the road in the form of a 6-7(2), 0-6 defeat at the hands of Petra Kvitová.

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