Kings and presidents die, and nobody cares, Muhammad Ali once said. But Joe Louis died, and everybody cried.
Are they crying now for Muhammad Ali, who died Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz. of complications from Parkinson’s disease? No doubt.
Boxers are perhaps the most poignant of athletes, for in a sense, they absorb the blows for the rest of us. Boxing, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates observed in her nonfiction work, “On Boxing,” is “America’s tragic theater.” ...
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There are few more intriguing themes in journalism and literature than that of the brilliant loser – the superb racer who for a variety of reasons fails to meet expectations, be it runners Zola Budd and Mary Decker, speed skater Dan Jansen or Thoroughbreds Spectacular Bid, California Chrome and, most recently, Nyquist; the juggernaut so dominant in the regular season and so vulnerable in the playoffs (the Stephen Curry-led Golden State Warriors battling the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA playoffs); and, most heartbreaking of all, the “perfect” performer who finds that perfection elusive when needed most (Serena Williams against Roberta Vinci in the semifinals of the US Open last year; Novak Djokovic against Stan Wawrinka in the finals of the French Open last year; and, my favorite ...
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“So,” a publicist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art asked teasingly, “are there enough Alexanders for you?”
She knows me only too well. Lover of the ancient Greeks that I am, there can never be for me enough images of Alexander the Great – the Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. ushered in 300 years of Hellenism (Greek culture) in Asia, reversing the course of cultural influence from East-West to West-East, and underscoring a tension between East and West that is still with us.
And yet, there I was in the first gallery of “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” (April 18 through July 17), surrounded by Alexanders. ...
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I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.
I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...
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On a recent trip to Jacksonville, Fla. via Delta, I had a disquieting thought. The flight attendants were so friendly, so generous with their drinks and snacks that I felt guilty about the scene in my debut novel “Water Music” in which an officious flight attendant denies tennis star Evan Conor Fallon an extra package of nuts, precipitating an international incident known thereafter as “Nut-gate.”
Mulling the gracious treatment I have always received while flying, I wondered how fair and realistic I had been with Nut-gate. Mustn’t fiction reflect life?
Then while at the beach house my sisters had rented on Amelia Island, I read the introduction to Alvaro Enrigue’s intriguing new novel “Sudden Death” (Riverhead Books, $27, 261 pages) – about an imaginary 16th century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo – in which he writes something that buoyed me so much I felt as if I had made a new friend: ...
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I wanted to take a break from the usual sports/culture posts on this blog to discuss two subjects that have always fascinated me – fear and its companion, anger.
Indeed, anger is often the result of fear.
There’s a lot of both in America these days, the kind of fear that leads to prejudice, rage, indecency, betrayal, disrespect, destructiveness – madness.
It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who told Americans in the depths of the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It’s worth putting that quote in context as it comes within the first paragraph of his First Inaugural Address in 1933: ...
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As a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.
My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.
But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.
New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...
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