March 26, 2012 On Sports Death in the Afternoon By Andrea Aguilar On the fifteenth of June 2008, only a few minutes after stepping into the sand of Madrid’s bullring, the bullfighter José Tomás was covered in blood. Just ten days before, he had had his most glorious fight ever, a fight that turned even the usually skeptical aficionados ecstatic. That second afternoon the stakes were high, but the bullfight proved to be crude and epic. Tomás was gored three times. After each goring, he stubbornly stood up, planted himself on the ground, and fought on, never stepping back from the bull. His torso bent achingly slowly, inches from the animal, to subtly guide the charge. His calm was astounding. It didn’t matter that this time the bulls weren’t following his wrist but rather searching for his body—he wanted to deliver the same smooth performance as he had ten days before. Tomás had to undergo three operations as soon as he left the ring. One of the wounds ran twenty inches into his right thigh and tore his muscle. Some viewers accused him of being suicidal; others saw the consummate performance of Spain’s best bullfighter, one who was ready to fight steadily till the end. When a journalist asked the old former matador Esplá, “What is courage?” he answered, “It’s the spot where José Tomás stands.” Read More
March 7, 2012 On Sports Double Fault By A-J Aronstein Three months before I was born, my father bought an eight-court outdoor tennis club on three acres of land in New Rochelle, New York. The club sits at the bottom of what amounts to a gully, down the block from a swampy lily pond that overflows during thunderstorms and floods the basements of the handsome Tudor homes in the neighborhood. The courts themselves are made of a material called Har-Tru, a gray-green clay that smells like a mixture of coffee grounds and fresh-cut grass. It’s soft and easy on the knees, perfect for middle-aged investment bankers and ad executives but more difficult to maintain than hard courts. When it rains, the material softens, expands like a sponge, and turns into a shallow lake. During dry spells, it gets chalky and swirls around on warm breezes. Like lunar dust, Har-Tru sticks to everything. It gunks up sneakers, stains white tennis shorts, and accumulates in socks. As a kid, over the course of a given summer, I’d transfer an entire court’s worth of Har-Tru to our living room. The courts were our family’s livelihood; their quality was a matter of pride for my father. Like a farmer who knows the precise chemical composition of the soil in his fields, he could step out on the courts, sniff the air, and know whether to water them or let them bake in the sun. He never read weather reports (he called weathermen “crooks”) but developed meteorological instincts. He sensed drops in barometric pressure and intuited the approach of autumnal cold fronts. “Rain’s coming,” he’d say, looking out over the courts like an Oklahoman homesteader. Even when I went south to the University of Virginia, I found Har-Tru waiting for me. The company that manufactures it boasts on their homepage that Har-Tru comes from “billion-year-old Pre-Cambrian metabasalt found in the Blue Ridge Mountains.” I could have walked to their corporate headquarters from the center of campus. Charlottesville has brilliant sunsets thanks to the airborne coal dust carried on the wind from mines in West Virginia. I couldn’t help but stare at yellow-orange-pink skies over the Blue Ridge in autumn and think, Look at all that Har-Tru. Read More
December 5, 2011 On Sports The Sporting Life By Louisa Thomas Photograph by Nick Kenrick. It didn’t make sense to speak as we walked along an empty path by a lake in western Ireland, since the wind would carry only the sound of itself and of the rain against the stones and grass, and since there wasn’t much to say anyway. I tried not to picture our hotel, where there was a fire and books, and a tray of coffee and slabs of cake. Instead I stared at a sheep ahead huddled with some rocks. Bone-soaked, half numb, and disoriented, I thought of a little book I had recently read by John Casey, Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports. It is a lovely but peculiar collection of essays about his various athletic endeavors. Most of his activities are of the lonely, unwatched variety, like canoeing, sailing, and long-distance running. Casey spends a lot of time rowing a dinghy. Casey’s book is not really about a dozen sports (is rowing a dinghy a sport?). This book is about being sporting, about being a sportsman. What qualifies as a sport here is whatever encourages the cultivation of character. A sportsman is not merely athletic; he is fair and brave. He can read maps, tie knots, sleep in the snow, quote the Odyssey. He can take care of himself, though he is generous and self-deprecating. He is an ideal man from another era, an era that idealized its own nostalgia, too. Read More
September 29, 2011 On Sports On the Ball By Ian Crouch Baseball, perhaps because its players spend so much time in stillness, prompts us to say some pretty silly things about it. Grown men go misty and reach for metaphor: “Baseball is cigar smoke, hot roasted peanuts, The Sporting News, ladies’ day, ‘Down in Front,’ ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’ and the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’” as Ernie Harwell—genius broadcaster, magician of nostalgia, limited poet—said in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1981. The great appeal of Billy Beane, the general manager, beginning in 1998, of the Oakland A’s, who is played by Brad Pitt in the new movie Moneyball, is that he offers us an antidote to such sentimentality. He embraces innovative statistical metrics (called, with a ring of sharpness, sabermetrics); he is on a ruthless quest for efficiency. More thrilling still, he may not even like baseball all that much. One of the suggestions of the book Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis, and of its movie adaptation, is that Beane is at war with the game itself. As a middling professional in the eighties, he was tricked into thinking that he was good enough to play at an exceptional level, and there are hints that all his subsequent maneuverings have been fueled by a vindictive desire to upend baseball’s traditions, to make its most storied franchises look petty and stupid, and to stamp out its most deeply embedded myths. Read More
July 22, 2011 Softball TPR vs. NYM: Bittersweet Victory By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9 Total TPR |5|2|2|4|2|6|0|0|1 22 NYM |1|6|2|0|0|0|4|0|0 13 A preface: on Saturday morning we played The Wall Street Journal, and in classic capitalist fashion they brought their own umpire. Suffice it to say we lost, although not that badly. (13-8 sounds about right.) We can’t all be Wendi Deng. For our sake and yours, let’s move on to Monday’s game against New York. Without our lovable leader Stephen Andrew Hiltner (away on official summer business) the duties of captain fell to me, which only meant making sure we had enough people at the game. This proved harder than it seemed. (A few of our regulars were out of town.) With the help of a few ringers, though, I managed to assemble the greatest softball team this side of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant squad of ’92. New York managed to stay close for a few innings, but there was no chance they could keep pace with our top-to-bottom offensive juggernaut. There weren’t any lucky bounces or close calls—we hit everything hard. The usual suspects were up to their old tricks (“Sonny” Jim Rutman hit a laser off the scoreboard for an automatic home run), and the new blood didn’t disappoint (props to Tom “Jeopardy!” Nissley and to someone known in my notes only as “The Ringer”). The only blemish on the game was when I tripped rounding third base, falling flat on my face, in what was surely the highlight of the day for the other team. Up 21–9 in the top of the seventh inning, we assumed New York would be eager to call it a day. It was a pleasant surprise when they insisted we play a full nine. We cruised through the last few innings, aided by a dominant pitching performance from Marco “The Barber” Roth. Former deputy editor David Wallace-Wells was conspicuously absent (perhaps he was afraid to face his formidable former colleagues). As the game ended, the rain—which had held off until then—began to fall in a most unpoetic fashion. A few of us retired to a nearby tavern where we sipped whiskey and considered the Oxford comma into the wee hours of the morning. In our last six games we’ve outscored our opponents by twenty-seven runs, yet we’ve won only three times. This particular win is bittersweet, both a validation of our talent and a reminder of what could have been.
July 14, 2011 Softball TPR v. The New Yorker: Lucky and Good By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total TPR |5|1|3|3|0|2|0 14 TNY |2|0|0|1|0|0|1 4 After a month of losing to common thugs and schoolyard bullies, it didn’t feel bad to finally look in the mirror and realize that we had become the very thing we loathed: namely, winners. Although they had nicer uniforms than we did, we soundly defeated The New Yorker 14–4 (though, to be honest, we stopped counting after four innings), and the nectar of victory tasted oh so sweet. Even down a few key players (I’m looking at you Creswell), we had no trouble handling this Condé squad and their occasionally suspect defense. They say it’s better to be lucky than good, but it’s even better to be both—and today, we were. Remember these names: Thomas, Wizner, Rutman, Pashman, Hiltner. A veritable murderers’ row, these five scored early and often, catalyzing a five-run first that proved to be just a taste of things to come. In the field, Devin “Ol’ Stubblebeard” McIntyre took the mound again and, after a rocky start, pitched another gem. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and there was nothing and no one that could slow us down. The rest of the game went by like the pages of a calendar, eventful only in that they were over. In the sixth, our captain Stephen “Little General” Hiltner made a spectacular diving grab in the outfield, only to complain later that he got his favorite shorts dirty. The grass stains on Hiltner’s sparkling white shorts (they really are beautiful, Stephen) proved to be the only blemish on a convincing Parisian win. Far from satisfied, we stuck around for an impromptu batting practice before joining The New Yorker at our favorite pub, Tap-a-Keg, where, aside from a brief pizza-related scuffle, fun was had by all. Up next: The Wall Street Journal and their solid-gold bats.