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The best of frenemies at the Olympics

The triumph of Meryl Davis and Charlie White of the United States over Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada in the Olympic ice dancing competition marks the latest and perhaps last chapter in one of the best rivalries in sports. 

Rivalry has gotten a bad rap. Cain and Abel, for starters. And who can forget Tonya and Nancy? Certainly not NBC, which has a Mary Carillo documentary airing later during the Olympics as we recall the 20th anniversary of Nancy’s knee-whacking at the hands of Tonya cohorts.

But true rivals can be friends, intimates – and in my just-released novel, “Water Music,” even lovers – as long as they respect each other and leave the competition on the field of “battle.” As my rivals discover, that’s easier said than done.

But it can be done. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were true rivals. During the glorious summer of 1961, they chased Babe Ruth’s single season home run record – while sharing an apartment. (They even shopped and barbecued together.) 

Davis and White and Virtue and Moir are rivals in that tradition. Read More

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Shaun, Bode, Peyton and the winter of their discontent

Not a great season for the favorites, huh? First Nole loses in the quarterfinal of the Australian Open and Rafa is injured in the final of the same event, then Peyton has a disastrous Super Bowl, Bode Miller flames out in the Olympic downhill and Shaun White goes down in his signature half-pike.

Time: Time is another country. We tend to think when someone wins that he’ll win forever. But over time, new people come along to challenge the status quo, the way iPod challenged Shaun, the way Matthias Mayer took on Bode and the rest of the field to win the downhill. 

Afterward, Matthias thanked destiny: “My mother is very religious. She believes in this and of course I was brought up like that. It’s a little bit easier for me if I think that way: That everything turns out as it should.”

I would agree but boy, there’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to think that way. Is it destiny for some to suffer? Why? Read more

 

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Is Peyton the Michelle Kwan of football?

Forget Richard III. This is the winter of my discontent, and it isn’t just the unrelenting cold, snow and ice in the Northeast. (It’s like “Dr. Zhivago” without Omar Sharif.) 

No, it’s partly because my guys – Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Colin Kaepernick, Gov. Chris Christie and now Peyton Manning – have all fallen short this season. (Thank God Tim Tebow has found his calling as a T. Mobile pitchman and ESPN analyst, or this winter would be a total bust.)

Let’s leave off Gov. Krispy Kreme, shall we? Remember how in math you always had to pick out the one thing that didn’t belong to the set. Well, he doesn’t belong to the set. His is a different kind of performance to be judged by other criteria. What I want to talk about today in the aftermath of that dud of a Super Bowl and with the Olympics beginning Thursday, Feb. 6 with the new team ice figure skating event is why some people – brilliantly talented everyday achievers – fall flat in big moments. Read more

 

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Does Nole have the eye of the tiger?

So after losing to Stanislas Wawrinka in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, Novak Djokovic elected not to play the first round of the Davis Cup against Wawrinka and Roger Federer, who had chosen to descend from Mount Olympus for the occasion, thereby virtually ensuring that his beloved Serbia would lose to Switzerland. 

Nole claimed exhaustion and instead went skiing. (His parents were skiers under the old Communist system in the former Yugoslavia.) And while the Serbian Davis Cup team coach Bogdan Obradovic defended that decision, saying Nole has always been there for his country, others wondered why.

“I’m sure he’s exhausted after playing five matches,” one poster wrote sarcastically. (I love how the Internet has given us ignorant snark the way swamps once bred yellow fever.) Read more

 

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Stan the man

Wow, you gotta hand it to Stan Wawrinka – the everyman who has played in countryman Roger Federer’s (aka Feddy Bear’s) shadow for so long – electrifying Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final. This is the first time that someone other than one of the Big Four (Rafa, Fed, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray) has won a Grand Slam since Juan Martin del Potro defeated Rafa in the US Open final in 2009. Yes, that’s right, four years of domination over.

Stan’s win over Rafa was huge, bigger than his win over Nole and not just because that was the quarterfinals. Nole, the former defending champ who has won the tournament four times (including three in a row) is nonetheless the Maria Callas of men’s tennis: There’s so much drama in his matches. Indeed, when the tennis experts cull the top 10 matches each year, several of his are always in there, because the outcome is never certain. Read more

 

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Scaling “Brokeback” again

When people ask me to give them the “elevator pitch” for my novel “Water Music,” I always say it’s “‘Brokeback Mountain’ meets ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’” – not because I would equate my book with those works but because it deals with gay lovers and issues of power and submission. Such is our world – with no time for anything – that we must reduce everything to labels, boxes and clichés.

Everyone who writes about gay men in love today owes a debt, however, to Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful short story about two 1960s cowboys – shepherds really – whose love is doomed by an inability to communicate, by a closeted world and, in a sense, by the all-consuming nature of that love.

Now Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s equally haunting film version – starring the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, the more constricted of the two lovers, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, the more expressive – have been turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen, whose atonal style would seem pitch-perfect for Proulx’s Heminway-esque writing. (She contributed the libretto for the work, which premieres Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 11 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.) Read more

 

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