Well, Rafael Nadal is out of the US Open (again) and Tim Tebow is out of the NFL (again). As a fan of both, I’m sorry to see them go but not surprised.
Rafa was up to two sets and 3-1 in the third against Fabio Fognini (yes, I know, Who?) in the third round of the Open Friday night into Saturday morning when, depending on your viewpoint, Rafa lost it or Fabio staged a fab comeback. ...
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So the San Francisco 49ers face-off against the Kansas City Chiefs Sunday, Oct. 5 for the first time in the regular season since the Niners traded quarterback Alex Smith to the Chiefs, signaling that Colin Kaepernick would be their guy.
The Niners seem destined for an embarrassment-of-quarterback-riches drama. This is the team that traded Joe Montana – possibly the greatest quarterback to date – to the Chiefs no less, because they had Steve Young.
When Alex Smith suffered a concussion back in 2012 and Kaepernick took over for him, leading the Niners to the Super Bowl, well, it was a bit like that moment in “42nd Street” when the star breaks her ankle, the ingénue goes on and the rest is theatrical history.
Even though Kaepernick has better statistics than Smith – and from a pure performance standpoint is a helluva lot more thrilling to watch, because he’s a running quarterback – the Smith-Niners reunion has led to the inevitable “Did the 49ers Make the Right Choice?” column.
Here’s the thing...
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How do you fall out of love?
Does it happen all at once? Or subtly over time until one day you realize that your heart no longer skips a beat when you look at the box score?
I had loved the New York Yankees and, by extension, all of baseball from the time I was about 6 years old. That’s when I first saw the old, old Yankee Stadium, all blue and white. To me, it looked like a wedding cake. The first time I walked inside and saw the field fanning out to embrace infinity, I had only one thought: “I belong here.”
Over the years, I had many memorable moments there – particularly watching the magical teams of the late 1970s – and I would go on to write about the Yanks during their magnificent run at the end of the 20th century.
But also over those years, I found myself so emotionally invested in the Bombers that I couldn’t take their defeats. Then my Aunt Mary, my beloved Tiny, who would’ve been 92 on Oct. 1, became fatally ill, and even winning became painful. Indeed when the team won the World Series in 2009, the gulf between its euphoria and my despair seemed unbreachable.
After that, Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick happened to me, and I made the journey that America has...
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So in the end after all the hoopla, Michael Sam – the first openly gay player in the NFL (almost) – didn’t make the cut with the St. Louis Rams.
There are just so many ways to look at this. How convenient for the those who can sigh with relief and say, “Hey, we tried but he just wasn’t good enough.” How vindicating for the skeptics, who will say, “He was such a lightweight to begin with. The only reason he got a shot was because he’s gay.”
But how sad for those of us who’d like to see the Sams and the Tim Tebows of the world find their places in the NFL sun regardless of the imperfections of their (still considerable) skills and their sexual or religious persuasions.
Some day, we won’t have to judge people by anything but those skills and what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the content of their character” – which in Sam’s case seems to be class all the way, and which is more than you can say for the Ray Rices of the game. ...
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Each August, I breathlessly await the arrival of the gazillion-page September Vogue, not for the fashion, silly, but to answer the question that flits among my neurons all summer: Who will editrix Anna Wintour anoint as her new TB (tennis boyfriend)?
For as I said in a post on this site last winter about Maureen Dowd, RGIII and Jane Austen, an accomplished woman of good fortune must be in want of a PB (pretend boyfriend).
Or, in Anna’s case, a PTB or just TB. As we all know, Anna – who has featured many, mostly male tennis stars in the pages of Vogue – has been pretend-dating Roger Federer – aka Feddy Bear – for years, sending racks and racks of clothes over to his hotel suite when he’s in town for the US Open, presumably while Mrs. Fed looks the other sartorial way.
Then in 2011, Anna’s journalistic instincts got the better of her and she decided to play the hot hand...
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celebrity couple. It was an enviable lifestyle for those yearning to be rich and famous, but McIlroy’s main motivation was to be remembered for his golf. So in May, with the wedding invitations on the way, he broke off the couple’s engagement.”
Let’s set aside the implication that marriage to Wozniacki would’ve necessarily produced a sort of Duke and Duchess of Windsor lifestyle, with the pair jet-setting from one party to another. And let’s leave off the devastation McIlroy’s last-minute exit caused Wozniacki – a subject I’ve blogged about before...
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Read MoreSan Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick has a huge, new tattoo of a snake coiled around a rising, Michelangelo-esque hand grasping at dollar bills that riffs on “the money is the root of all evil” biblical theme, Katie Dowd writes on the SF Gate blog.
But St. Paul didn’t write that “money is the root of all evil.” He wrote that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” That’s something quite different and in keeping with a fascinating piece in The New York Times’ Sunday Review by Arthur C. Brooks, “Love People, Not Pleasure.”
Brooks contends that the pursuit of pleasure – money, fame, sex – is the root of unhappiness, which is pretty much the tenet of every major religion but particularly Buddhism and Christianity. They hold that nonattachment – which is vastly different from detachment – alone brings peace. Or as Jesus says, “for whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” That nonattachment – not so much an absence of desire, but an understanding of it – is real power, not the kind that comes from a scepter or an army but from within.
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