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
October 3, 2017 Baseball The Called Shot By Rich Cohen A detail from Robert Thom’s painting depicting Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot.” Courtesy the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Wrigley Field is beloved not just because it’s a beautiful place to see a baseball game, which it is, not because of its harmonious dimensions, which it has, not because of its context, its perfect neighborhood of stoops and taverns where men quote Bartman and Banks, nor because of its ivy, bare in spring, green in summer, but because of all the things that’ve happened there—all of the images and afternoons. Wrigley Field’s pitching ace Grover Cleveland Alexander, ruined by World War I, stashing whiskey bottles in the clubhouse. It’s the catcher Gabby Hartnett, hitting the dinger in near darkness, that basically put the Cubs in the 1938 World Series—“the Homer in the Gloaming.” It’s the slugger Dave Kingman, known as King Kong and as Ding Dong, proposing that Chicago trade the reporter Mike Royko to New York for the reporter Red Smith. It’s the famous rant of manager Lee Elia, in which he described the stadium as a “playground for the cocksuckers.” It’s the play-by-play genius Harry Caray leaning out the broadcast booth to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It’s me standing with Bill Buckner in the Summer of 1977. It’s the bleacher bums genuflecting before great the right fielder Andre Dawson, the Hawk. It’s Omar Moreno climbing the ivy to get at the hecklers, who drive him off with a delicious shower of frosty malt. But the most iconic event in Wrigley Field did not star the Cubs—it starred the New York Yankees, with the home team serving merely as foil. Backstory: In July 1932, as the Cubs were cruising, their shortstop was shot in a hotel room by a jilted lover. It’s enough to say that the ballplayer was Billy Jurges and the perp was a showgirl who’d later perform under the stage name Violet “What I Did For Love” Valli. Jurges was shot in room 509 of Hotel Carlos, a few blocks from the ballpark. He’d be back on the field before the end of the season. In the meantime, the Cubs needed a solid substitute infielder if they were going to make a pennant run. Read More
September 18, 2017 Baseball, On Sports Robert Coover’s Dark Baseball Fantasy By Daniel Roberts A miniature Woodstock Field, designed by longtime Strat-O-Matic gamer Larry Fryer. Robert Coover’s oft-forgotten 1968 baseball novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., opens in the middle of a game: “Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go!” Brock is Brock Rutherford, retired star pitcher, and Brock’s “boy” is his son, the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford. But Brock doesn’t exist, Damon doesn’t exist, and the game isn’t real. It’s being played out with dice and a pencil by Coover’s protagonist, Henry Waugh, alone in his kitchen. The Universal Baseball Association is a novel about fantasy baseball, though the word “fantasy” never once appears in the book. When literary people talk about Coover, who is eighty-five, they talk about him as a postmodernist and a master of metafiction. He’s known chiefly for his short stories or for his 1977 novel about Richard Nixon, The Public Burning. But in 2011, Overlook Press reissued The Universal Baseball Association in paperback, and the book is more relevant now than ever before. Read More
July 20, 2017 On Sports The Fall and Rise of Roger Federer By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Photo: Stefan Wermuth The year 2016 ended for Roger Federer on a Friday, July 8. In the fifth set of his semifinal match at Wimbledon, he found himself sprawled out along his service line, face down, ruefully lifting his left leg slightly up and slowly letting it back down, as if to prove to the shocked and silent crowd that he was still alive. Even when he had been ahead in the match against Milos Raonic of Canada, Federer looked weary. In the fourth set, he double faulted not once but twice, ending any hope for a classic. Raonic—six feet five inches of muscle topped with a Clark Kent hairdo—is an elite-grade version of the typical North American thumper: a thunderous serve, a strong but finicky forehand, and a two-handed backhand right out of an instruction manual; yet he approaches the net like it’s an electric fence. Federer had spent his career feasting on this type of player. But not lately. He hadn’t won a title all season; he had knee surgery earlier in the year; he skipped the French Open entirely. These days he seemed more gaunt than gracile, more canny than casually assured. Now and then, he would see what the other player didn’t, couldn’t. At such moments—half volleys in 2015 and overhead backhand smashes in 2014—his fans rejoiced in their nostalgia. David Foster Wallace’s Federer essay would make rounds on the Internet like uncorked champagne. For those of us his age, who grew up with Marlon Brando in Superman, Alec Guinness in Star Wars, Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans, it was familiar and fine, though we didn’t know why. He slowed, but slowed like a dangerous panther. He staged strange suicide missions to the net on his opponents’ second serves. His game—a sexy hybrid of tennis in black-and-white, tennis in standard definition and tennis in 3-D—looked good in defeat. Other players grunted, lunged, sprinted into swinging splits, found the worn patch on a grass surface to buckle over, the drizzle-slicked white line to slip on. Not Federer. In his tennis dotage, he was like a Fabergé egg spinning on a tabletop because it could. Read More
June 15, 2017 On Sports Orange Crush By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Photo: Krbo, Flickr Late in the nineteenth century, William Renshaw, an Englishman famed for his tennis game—he’d won six Wimbledons in a row—found himself with a dilemma. He was in sunny Cannes on vacation, planning to make some money on the side by giving tennis lessons. Back then, the game was played exclusively on grass; anything else was heresy. But when Renshaw examined the court at his disposal, he could see that the grass had grown brown and thin beneath the hot sun—it would wilt under the pressure of his well-heeled feet. A light went off in his head: he decided to have load after heaping load of red clay transported from Vallauris, a small seaside town known for its devotion to the ceramic arts. He convinced the town to part with some of its rejected pottery, pulverized the clay into tiny grains, and applied a thin, protective layer to the grass court in Cannes. The clay court was born. Today, it’s a fifteen-minute drive from Vallauris to Cannes, and less than an hour to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the home of the Monte Carlo Open, the first stop in the men’s clay court season. The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Clay games are a grind; the surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects. It forces the player’s body to adapt or fail. Shots sponge off the granular surface, slowing down and trampolining back into the air at unlikely angles. Returns that would have been winners on grass and hard courts come ricocheting back to you, sometimes bouncing as high as your shoulders, and players have to slide into their shots. It’s hard to stress how difficult it is to adjust to these conditions. Imagine a two-month span of the basketball season in which everyone was forced to play on a thin layer of sand. Suddenly there’s a premium on probing, strategic shots over straight-ahead power. Read More