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. Read More
August 2, 2018 On Sports The Spectacle of Women’s Wrestling By Mairead Small Staid Vintage newspaper photograph of women wrestlers. “The virtue of wrestling is to be a spectacle of excess,” Roland Barthes begins—but we are wary of excess in women, wary of too much flesh, too much blood, too much lust or power. Too much knowledge: Eve was tossed out of the garden, over the ropes. Too much beauty: Helen slaughtered two nations. Too much faith: Joan was burned at the stake. Excess in women is criminal, and the punishment is debasement or death. What becomes of wrestling’s virtue, then, when the wrestlers are women? The art itself risks diminishment, limited not by the action nor its performers but by the world outside the ring. The expectations of the audience play as great a role as the action itself; our participation is not optional. “A light without shadow elaborates an emotion without secrets,” Barthes says of the ring’s floodlights, but we aren’t used to seeing the emotions of women so bared. We think we are—the woman hysterical, the woman scorned—but such displays are the wave, the crest and the trough, and the ocean goes on below. Read More
March 29, 2018 On Sports Why the French Love Horses By Chantel Tattoli Years ago, the German photographer Jaroslav Poncar told me about running into the legendary French anthropologist Dr. Michel Peissel in Himalaya in the seventies. “People were saying, ‘Peissel is coming! It’s Peissel.’ So I went out to meet them—Peissel and his nice blonde companion,” Poncar added with a grin. Later, in Paris, Peissel and Poncar ended up living on the same street, and Peissel would hang around Poncar’s studio. He was, Poncar said, “a braggart.” Peissel would do things like forget to mention the two mathematicians he met during his seminal travels on the steppes—as if he were the only European to venture so far afield. “And! Michel did not discover that horse,” Poncar had sniffed, referring to an archaic Tibetan breed called the Nangchen, which Peissel is credited with bringing to light. “But the French love horses,” Poncar offered by way of explanation. I didn’t quite absorb his meaning. What he seemed to suggest was that Peissel could be forgiven because the French simply love horses so much. Recently, I attended the ninth edition of the equestrian competition Saut Hermès in Paris. There, people again and again recounted this fact: “The French love horses.” In France, riding is the top outdoor sport, one enjoyed, according to the French Equestrian Federation, by two million men, women, and children. I had heard there are some five thousand equestrian centers here, a remarkable figure, but when I reached the federation to confirm, I was told, “In fact, we have 9,351.” A preponderance of France’s competitive horsemen and horsewomen came out of the pony clubs—France hosts more international equestrian competitions than any other nation and is home to Equidia, Europe’s only television channel dedicated to horse sports. (Not to mention, here in the capital, beyond carousels, all the major parks from the Luxembourg Gardens to Buttes-Chaumont tender pony rides.) Horse country is up in Normandy. It is where, for example, most of France’s national stud farms, created in 1665 for the benefit of the nation’s cavalry, are located, including le Pin, the very best one, and where Thierry Hermès, a half-French, half-German orphan, went to learn the harness-making trade before founding a workshop in 1837 in the Grands Boulevards quarter of Paris. Read More
March 2, 2018 On Sports How Do You Judge Je Ne Sais Quoi? By Brent Katz Madison Chock and Evan Bates at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. Photo by Bernat Armangue. On February 19, when the American pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates glided onto the ice for the free-dance competition at the Winter Olympics in Pyenogchang, some Darwinian instinct in me whispered, Root for them. You won’t be disappointed. They were calm, focused, attractive. My faith was shaken for a moment when their risky music choice began playing—a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” sung live from inside the arena. But when Chock and Bates met eyes and began their routine, their synchronicity had a strange, tranquil power. A hush descended on my friend’s living room. Watching TV felt like being in nature. Their dreamy routine evoked stillness with motion, and their movements were so linked that it felt as if their individual personalities converged into one. I couldn’t tell the ice dancers from the ice dance. A few minutes in, they tangled blades and Bates went down like a teen at Chelsea Piers. The pathos of the moment was intense—years of work and hope vanished in an instant. In addition to their deduction, they got no points for that combination spin. They were hemorrhaging points. Read More
February 2, 2018 On Sports Don DeLillo’s Nuclear Football By Daniel Roberts American football had a violent year in 2017. The refusal by all thirty-two National Football League teams to sign free agent Colin Kaepernick, a black quarterback who had started kneeling during each game’s national anthem in the summer of 2016 as a form of protest against police brutality, ignited a national political debate that often devolved into ugly racial vitriol. After additional players began kneeling to take up Kaepernick’s cause in his absence, President Donald Trump made the NFL a target of repeated angry tweets, railing that the protesting players were disrespecting the whole country and condemning NFL team owners for not punishing the players. The sad apotheosis of all this noise came when Trump, in his first State of the Union address, appeared to make reference to Kaepernick and other kneeling players when he said that a twelve-year-old boy’s organized effort to lay flags at the graves of veterans “reminds us … why we proudly stand for the national anthem.” As the violent rhetoric spread on social media throughout the season, the NFL saw its prime-time television ratings drop precipitously. It’s unclear how much of the problem was political; people who say they watched less football in 2017 cited a whole host of additional complaints: too many games, bad games, unfair games, too many ways to watch a game on something other than television, too many things to watch besides football. Read More
October 30, 2017 On Sports The End of the Tour: Tennis Stars in Twilight By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Photo: Christopher Clarey There are stories. And then there are “story-stories.” The twin reemergence of Roger Federer and Rafael “Rafa” Nadal this year has been one of those story-stories, full of wait-that’s-not-alls and tell-me-what-happened-nexts. Their return to form has been as emphatic as it was unexpected, a jolt of sun in a strange year. When the two faced off in the final of the Australian Open way back in January—which Federer won in a tense five sets (6–4, 3–6, 6–1, 3–6, 6–3)—there was the sense that the stars had simply happened to align one last fleeting time. Federer was ranked and seeded seventeenth at that time; Nadal hadn’t reached the semifinal of a major since 2014. The match was expected to be lightning caught in a bottle, something to be savored before reality set back in. But since then, Federer and Nadal have played three more times, including in two other finals. They even played on the same team—as doubles partners no less—in a team-tennis enterprise dreamed up by Federer called the Laver Cup, after the great Australian Rod Laver. Most recently, they played in the final of the Rolex Shanghai Masters. Nadal was in imperious form coming into that final, having just won the previous tournament in Beijing and the one prior to that, some minor summer event played in Queens. When they flipped the coin at center court in Shanghai, Nadal was on a seventeen-match winning streak. Federer won in straight sets in barely over an hour: 6–4, 6–3. Read More