Rafael Nadal is a fever in a woman’s blood.
The sensual gaze. The tawny, molded muscles. The playful sexiness that makes a little skin oh so in.
He’s displayed all that and more in the Armani jeans and underwear campaign and now he takes it off again as the spokesmodel for a new line of Tommy Hilfiger underwear and clothes as well as the new Hilfiger fragrance TH Bold. ...
Read More
Well, once again the gazillion-page (actually only 832-page) September Vogue is out, and, once again, the big issue for me is not the cover or the fashion but whom editrix Anna Wintour has anointed among male tennis players for the ritual dressing (and undressing).
This year, tennis-crazed Anna, the sly minx, is offering a kind of two-for-one and her own version of doubles. In the “People Are Talking About” section, rising star and teen dream Borna “Identity” Ćorić looks like he’s headed off to Harvard, standing at the net in a gray and white Canali sweater with gray J. Crew sweats. Coach Brad Gilbert has given the 18-year-old Croat the nickname but the question is, “Whose identity?” ...
Read More
Tom Brady has lost home-field advantage.
The NFL Players Association had sought to have a union-friendly Minnesota court hear its suit against the NFL over its four-game suspension of Brady. But Judge Richard H. Kyle said, Not so fast. Where’s the jurisdiction?
Uh, precisely. Deflategate took place in Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. The NFL is headquartered in Manhattan and the union, in Washington D.C. This is an I-95 corridor issue.
As it was, the judge kicked it back to New York where the NFL filed its own suit to validate commish Roger Goodell’s right to suspend Brady. So the NFLPA lost whatever chance it had to have its case for an injunction heard in a receptive venue. The thinking was that Adrian Peterson’s case – he was suspended for taking a switch to his 4-year-old – was overturned in Minnesota. So why not go there? But Peterson plays for the – pause for effect – Minnesota Vikings. And anyway, his case turned not on his being disciplined by the NFL but on his being disciplined twice for the same thing ...
(Read more)
Read MoreFrom the standpoint of stupid, it’s hard to beat Deflategate. It’s a writer’s dream, a story that keeps getting more and more bizarro.
NFL commish Roger Goodell – hardly the paragon of Alexandrian leadership – has nonetheless grown a spine and upheld his four-game ban of New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, which followed an NFL-commissioned report concluding Brady probably knew that two Pats’ employees had deflated the team’s footballs before the A.F.C. Championship game with the Indianapolis Colts. ...
Read MoreTom Brady has apparently made the NFL an offer it can refuse.
The NFL Players Association, on behalf of the Deflategator, has offered to have Tommy Boy pay a big fine in lieu of a four-game suspension. The overture has “met with silence” in the office of commish Roger Goodell, who heard Brady’s appeal June 23. The New England Patriots’ quarterback is prepared to make a federal case out of this should he be suspended for probably having knowledge of subordinates deflating footballs in the A.F.C. Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts earlier this year. But the fact that the Players Association has put out an offer seems like the moment in a crime show when the defense looks to plea bargain. And that suggests a certain guilt ...
Read MoreFrench Open champ Stan Wawrinka is among those going au naturel for ESPN’s 2015 Body Issue.
“My body is for my tennis, it's for my sport,” the man they call “Stanimal” told the mag. “I'm not a model at all. I don't work out to go to the beach, I work out to play well and to do well on the court.”
Precisely. We each have the body we need for our work. That doesn’t mean we should abuse it. But that idea should disabuse of the need for a cookie-cutter look. We can’t all be models, nor do we all want to be ...
Read MoreYou would think that for two people who had reached the pinnacle of their profession, the world would be their oyster.
But no, no, things didn’t work out that way for Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic though it’s certainly not for lack of effort on their part.
Holder of the Serena Slam (all four Slam titles at once), Serena will no doubt win the US Open that begins on Aug. 29 and succeed Steffi Graf by capturing the Grand Slam (the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open) in one calendar year. She will be remembered as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, to play the game. Simply put, there is Serena and there is everyone else ...
Read More