Great Britain has won the Davis Cup, defeating Belgium.
More accurately, Andy Murray has won the Davis Cup.
Any Cup championship is, first and foremost, about teamwork, with the country of the winning team getting the honors. Sports are forever entwined in politics as I illustrate in “Water Music,” the first novel in my series, “The Games Men Play.”
But tennis, like swimming, is also among the most individualistic of sports, and the tension between the individual and the team in these sports– another theme of “Water Music” – is part of their flavor. ...
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Read MoreIf you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that one of its motifs – which also occurs in my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding” – is what I call “the literature of rejection,” that is the disproportionate rage at rejection found among certain antiheroes in literature and among assassins, mass murderers and terrorists.
I was reminded of this – or rather, my sharp-as-a-tack blog administrator reminded me of it – in reading an interview with Arie Kruglanski, co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), founded in 2005 at the University of Maryland with funds from the Department of Homeland Security.
Kruglanski has walked the walk. He was born in Nazi-occupied Poland and spent 15 years teaching psychology at Tel Aviv University. In this interview he echoes 19th-century psychologist-philosopher William James’ view of heroism as a primary spur in human nature, even unto, and perhaps especially if it means, death itself. ...
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Read MoreThe New York Times – the Paper of Record, particularly for the Federinas of the world – just can’t let it go.
The Sunday Times ran an opinion piece by former New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati – author of the forthcoming tennis memoir “Late to the Ball” – about how the booze-fueled pro-Fed crowd at the US Open final was really expressing its anxiety about Feddy – and themselves – aging. (And here I thought the booze-filled crowd, whose venom was directed toward Fed opponent Novak Djokovic, was really expressing how booze contributes to uninhibited ugliness.) ...
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Read MoreTennis is a game of doubles. In the Hitchcock thriller “Strangers on a Train,” the tennis star must confront and overcome his murderous doppelgänger. In Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” the tennis pro is his murderous doppelgänger.
In Nijinsky’s ballet “Jeux,” the male tennis player is involved with two women.
Marshall Jon Fisher’s juicy 2009 book “A Terrible Splendor” (Three Rivers Press) offers a very different pas de trios. ...
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Read MoreStanford research scholar Adrienne Mayor – a National Book Award finalist for “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy” – has a new book out, “The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World” (Princeton University Press, 519 pages, $29.95).
It blows the lid off the myth of the one-breasted she-males who kidnapped men for sex, abandoning any resulting male offspring, to paint a portrait of those Eurasian women who once and still live like men. ...
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Read MoreDzhokhar Tsarnaev has apologized for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.
“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering I’ve caused you, for the damage I’ve done – irreparable damage,” he said in court Wednesday. “I’m guilty of it. If there is any lingering doubt of that, let it be no more.”
Is he truly sorry, and does it make a difference? Should we expect the same from Dylann Storm Roof, charged with the murder of nine in the Charleston church? Fat chance. That one will probably go to his grave Timothy McVeigh-like.
“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. told the Boston court, quoting Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzokhar Tsarnaev.” ...
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Read MoreWell, one thing’s certain: Dylann Storm Roof – really? That’s a name? – is no Rachel Dolezal.
One couldn’t do enough to embrace black culture. The other couldn’t do enough to destroy it, allegedly gunning down nine people at Bible study Wednesday night in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, uttering the particularly lunatic thought, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” ...
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