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Polo and the essence of modernism

September 10, 2014

It was a sparkling climax to the season at the Greenwich Polo Club Sunday, Sept. 7 as Royal Salute held off a surging Casablanca 10-8 in a taut match for the Royal Salute Cup.

The match, spectators were told, featured the highest quality polo in the Northern Hemisphere, with Facundo Pieres, the No. 1-ranked player in the world, the legendary Martin Aguerre and Peter Brant, the Greenwich club’s founder, anchoring the team for Royal Salute, the Scotch whisky company, while Nick Manifold, who oversees the club, and 9-goaler Hilario Ulloa (10 is the highest ranking) doing the honors for Casablanca, a polo-gear company that has a store on tony Greenwich Avenue.

If you’ve never seen this ancient sport, which dates from the Persian Empire, then you’re missing something. Polo is fast, exciting and, I suspect, more than a little bit dangerous. Just to see the horses thunder down the green expanse (10 football fields), the riders swinging their mallets as they sometimes mix it up – nose to nose and haunch to haunch – is, well, thrilling.

And did I mention sexy? Polo players are among the most attractive, masculine men in the world. ...

For Anna Wintour, everything new is old again… when selecting a TB (tennis boyfriend)

August 27, 2014

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...

Rafanole interruptus

August 21, 2014

There will be no Rafanole this year at the US Open, which gets underway Saturday with “Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day” at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, Queens, N.Y.

The big news is that defending champ Rafael Nadal has pulled out due to the wrist injury that kept him out of the early portion of the hard-court season. There appears to be a pattern here: Rafa plays lights out to ace the clay-court season, peaks at the French Open, cries when they hand him the umpteenth trophy at Roland Garros in Paris, flames out at Wimbledon, gets injured, takes some time off and starts the whole cycle again.

This would seem to favor Novak Djokovic, but wait. After a trifecta of Ws (Wimby championship, world No. 1 ranking and wedding to longtime love Jelena Ristic), Nole burned out of tournaments at Toronto and Cincinnati. The New York Times, which seems to have no enthusiasm for Nole, noted that he’s been “fending off charges” that he hasn’t been practicing much since the wedding. Fending off charges? Really? Is he a criminal? What’s next, blame the wife?

Phelpte shows glimmers of former glory

August 12, 2014

The U.S. national championships have been a disappointing meet for fans of Phelpte, the Michael Phelps-Ryan Lochte rivalry. (Also known as Phlochte, which sounds better.)

Anyway, Phelpte, Phlochte, it boiled down to the same thing: Phelps finished second in the 100 butterfly, perhaps his signature event; sixth in the 100 back and seventh in the 100 free. Lochte was second in the 100 free and third in the 200 back.

The only time the old rivalry kicked in was in the 200 IM, in which Lochte bested Phelps, with both posting among the fastest times in the world this year. They didn’t race next to each other, however, in the center of the pool, eyeballing each other as they used to, matching stroke for stroke, breath for breath. Instead they were in outside lanes, where mere mortals dwell.

"I guess we can say this is kind of our off-year," Lochte said of himself and Phelps. "Well, I can say that." (Love Ryan, and the way he can defer to Michael in friendship while still holding his own.)

Bottom line...

The Rock rolls in “Hercules”

August 10, 2014

"I like the gods,” my friend novelist and movie blogger Barbara Nachman says as we exit the new “Hercules,” starring Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, in the title role.

I do, too. The Greek gods were among my childhood companions, offering thrilling stories and transcendence without the guilt trip of modern religion. (A well-known classicist, who shall remain nameless here, once told me she would take the Greek gods over the Abrahamic one any day of the week and twice on Sundays, so to speak.)

This being the age of post-modernism, the gods are nowhere to be found in the new “Hercules,” and that’s too bad, because they’re such an entertaining lot and because the ancient Greeks believed in them – or at least the stories they could spin off of them – so passionately. (Certainly, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great did. He saw Hercules – Heracles in Greek, Hercules in Latin – as one of his paternal ancestors.)

Making a movie about an ancient Greek legend when you imply that the legend is really part PR campaign, part empowerment exercise, well, it doesn’t quite cut it, does it?

Otherwise, the new “Herc” is a not-bad movie that fits...

Awesomely athletic August

August 7, 2014

Summertime and the livin’ is supposed to be easy. (Thank you, Ira Gerswhin.) But for athletes and sports fans, there is no rest for the weary.

First, Phelpte (as in the Michael Phelps-Ryan Lochte rivalry) is back in action at the USA Swimming national long-course championships in Irvine, Calif., which will determine next year’s team for the world championships. They were slated to face-off four times, including Wednesday night’s 100-meter freestyle event.

The story lines go something like this: Phelps was bored in retirement and is glad to be back. Lochte – who turned 30 Aug. 3, Happy Birthday, Ryan! – moved to Charlotte, N.C., where he’s acquired a new coach and a new maturity, which should be music to fans’ ears. We’ll see how his newfound maturity and Phelps’ newfound hunger for swimming pan out.

Tonight, Colin Kaepernick leads the San Francisco 49ers into M&T Bank Stadium to meet the Baltimore Ravens for a nationally televised game that’s a rematch of Super Bowl XLVII. I am so there (i.e., in front of the tube) for this.

I wish I could be there (as in Cleveland) Friday for the start of the Gay Games (through Aug. 16), which always take place the same year as the Winter Olympics. But at least “Water Music,” my new novel about four gay athletes and how their professional rivalries color their personal relationships, will be there...

Will soccer eclipse football?

August 6, 2014

Today’s thought comes from my editor-friend Bill and my Uncle Johnny. As they uttered the same thought to me within hours of and unbeknownst to each other, I took it as a sign from the sports gods that I should write about it. And the thought is this:

We have seen the future in America, and it is soccer.

This because Manchester United and Real Madrid – perhaps the two best-known “football” teams in the world – faced off this past Saturday, Aug. 2, in a match at Michigan Stadium that drew more than 100,000 fans.

This is a sport in which you can see the passion and excitement on the faces of the players, which communicates to the fans, Bill told me. Not like a certain other sport in which the players wear helmets and are bent over much of the time.

Still soccer has a long way to go to supplant that other football game. For one thing, as this article makes clear, Major League Soccer doesn’t have the $49 million that Real Madrid has to pay Cristiano Ronaldo, the No. 1 player in the world. The money’s not there – yet.

But it could be, someday sooner rather than later, particularly as America becomes a more multicultural nation.