The New York Times’ Fed love

June 29, 2015

What’s with The New York Times’ love affair with Roger Federer?

“Against the odds, Federer bids for an eighth Wimbledon title,” the paper noted in a headline on the eve of Wimbledon’s opening. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Feddy winning in 2007. For the Grey Lady, time stopped in 2007. Honestly, it’s as if The Times were Anna Wintour.

Unfortunately, for Fed, The Times and Anna, along came Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, who proved to be Fed’s real rivals, not merely his opponents. In a sense, however, they came along too late. ...

Tennis, everyone

June 26, 2015

Just in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.

The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos. ...

American Pharoah among ESPY nominees

June 25, 2015

Kudos to Novak Djokovic, Aaron Rodgers and American Pharoah, all among the nominees for ESPYS (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly).

AP got the nod in the Best Championship Performance category, along with San Francisco Giants’ ace (and World Series star) Madison Bumgarner, Florida Softball’s Lauren Haeger and LeBron James. No word yet on whether the Pharoah will attend, although his jockey and fellow nominee Victor Espinoza will no doubt be there.

Nole got two noms – Best International Athlete along with Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton, the LPGA’s Lydia Ko and soccer’s Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo; and Best Male Tennis Player, along with Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Marin Cilic. Aaron was also a double nominees as Best NFL Player (along with Tom Brady, Antonio Brown, DeMarco Murray and JJ Watt) and Best Male Athlete, with Watt again, James and Stephen Curry. ...

Black like her

June 18, 2015

There’s more than meets the eye in the Rachel Dolezal story – no pun intended.

Dolezal resigned from her job as president of the Spokane, Wash. chapter of the NAACP upon the discovery that she is actually a white woman who passed herself off as black.

Dolezal – who was married to a black man, had a child with him and has four adopted black siblings, one of whom is under her legal guardianship – says she identifies as black.

Which is not the same as saying she has been truthful with others. ...

Cover me: American Pharoah and the search for authenticity

June 11, 2015

What Anna wants, Anna gets – particularly when it comes to a sleek, gorgeous, well-muscled male.

And what Anna Wintour, Condé Nast creative director and Vogue editor, wants right now is American Pharoah.

Ahmed Zayat, who has pledged that the Pharoah will belong to the American people, has told Bloodhorse, which covers the Thoroughbred industry, that AP will grace the cover of the next issue of the fashion bible.

"We are breaking new territory," Zayat, who operates his family's Zayat Stables, said June 10 in a podcast interview with Bloodhorse.com.

I’ll say. Anna has featured some studs in her day – Tim Tebow (shirtless), Colin Kaepernick, her fave Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic (Speedo), Ryan Lochte (cover, with Serena Williams and Hope Solo at the beach). Now she has a soon-to-be real stud. ...

Goodbye, Bruce. Hello, Caitlyn

June 1, 2015

And Godspeed. Reaction to Bruce Jenner’s metamorphosis into Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair has been predictably all over the place and, just as predictably, says more about the commenters than it does about Caitlyn.

There’s no point in dwelling on those who think she’s sick or out for publicity. They just don’t get it.

More interesting are those comments that criticize the pinup aspect of the Annie Leibovitz cover. Let’s face it, if you’re going to transform yourself physically into the sex you believe you always were, well, then you and we want to see that transformation. As for the poster on The New York Times’ site who said that the way to be a smokin’-hot woman at 60 is to live the previous 59 years as a man, well, he – I’m sure it was a he – has a point. I’ve often said on this blog and elsewhere that men are the more beautiful, sexier and thrilling of the two traditional sexes. It’s part of the reason I write about beautiful, sexy, thrilling men in my novel series “The Games Men Play.” ...

Deflategate: Iceberg, straight ahead

May 22, 2015

So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will hear Tom Brady’s appeal, despite a request from the NFL Players Association that he recuse himself.

“One of the primary responsibilities of the commissioner is to protect the integrity of the game and to do what’s right for the game of football,” Goodell said.

“That’s my job. We have a process that’s been negotiated with the union that’s been in place for decades. It’s something that we’ve had in place for a long time and we’re going to do it that way.”

What planet is he on? First, there’s the NFL’s constant misuse of the word “integrity.” It means “wholeness.” In Jungian psychology, the integrated self is the self that is all of a piece. Alistair Cooke, the late, longtime host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was a person of integrity – a mess off and onscreen. Cruel but you get his point: “Integrity” doesn’t mean “honesty.” It means that you’d be the same way with the president of the United States that you are with your grocer. It’s a quality that the Dalai Lama and the pope are said to have. It’s not a quality that’s usually associated with football players. What a surprise. ...