In the realm of Saturn: Coping with loss in the age of Trump

November 25, 2016

So Novak Djokovic lost to Andy Murray in the ATP Barclays World Tour Finals – cementing Murray’s ascendance as the new No. 1-ranked player and my view that 2016 will go down as the worst year in recent memory for people I admire. Perhaps Nole never recovered from attaining the long-held dream of winning the French Open. Perhaps it was some personal crisis alluded to in the press at the time of Wimbledon. Perhaps it was a nagging injury. Whatever the reason(s), he had a brilliant first half and a terrible second half (terrible for him: Remember he won two Slams and was the runner-up at the US Open and the ATP World Tour Finals).

A good year but not a great one. And when you’re great, good looks mediocre. Last year he was unbeatable. This year, he proved he could be had. There are few greater falls than the tumble from No. 1 to No. 2.

No doubt he will go on. Champions, particularly tennis champions, are enormously resilient. They don’t dwell. ...

Of talent and temperament: Nick Kyrgios and Tim Tebow

November 16, 2016

In his new book, “Shaken” (Waterbrook, 213 pages, $25), Tim Tebow considers the failure of his NFL career after his successful run with the Denver Broncos. He’s now trying to make it as a baseball player with the Arizona Fall League, where, once again, he’s been hailed for his good work ethic, leadership skills and clutch play but is still struggling to master the outfield. NFL legend and ESPN analyst Steve Young is among those pulling for him. But many who admire Tebow say he simply doesn’t have pro-quality aptitude.

He has, in other words, the temperament but not the talent. ...

The remains of the day

November 15, 2016

I’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.

Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...

The world turned upside down

November 9, 2016

For me personally, I can say with Frank Sinatra, “It was a very good year.” I got to travel a great deal and I got a contract for my second novel, “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity in the NFL. An excerpt from the book will be published in the Westchester Review, and an essay I wrote on love, sex and gender in the work of Colombian artist Federico Uribe will be part of a new monograph on him. For all this, I’m truly grateful.

I begin with an attitude of gratitude in this the month of Thanksgiving, because in other ways I’ve been disenchanted and disheartened as many of those I have loved have faltered. ...

Nick Kyrgios and the mystery of temperament

August 28, 2016

So The New York Times Magazine’s US Open Special is basically a cover story on bad boy du jour Nick Kyrgios, pictured biting on the cross he wears around his neck and, oh, you can imagine the posts in response – not just about the cross but on Nick in general.

But the cross is an interesting metaphor here. Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16: 24-36)

What indeed. ...

The Lochte caper enters the backlash-against-the-backlash phase

August 26, 2016

I had planned to write a post about the big, fat September Vogue and editrix Anna Wintour’s latest anointed tennis star, Alexander Zverev, who at 19 is the youngest player to crack the top 30 since Novak Djokovic a decade ago. (The magazine article’s headline blares “Alexander the Great” above a picture of a shirtless, Alexandrian figure indeed.)

But I’m afraid such pleasures pale with the news that Brazilian Police have recommended that Ryan Lochte be charged with falsely reporting a crime for saying he’d been robbed at a gas station during the Rio Games. ...

The Rio Games and the summer of our discontent

August 23, 2016

Is it just me or were the Rio Games ultimately dispiriting? Yes, I’m glad as an American that the United States won 121 medals and as a woman that American woman won 61 of them. (Give it up for Title IX.)

And I thought the Christoph Waltz/Samsung Galaxy commercial – in which the two-time Academy Award winner manages to mock superior Eurotrash and over-accomplished, multitasking exceptional Americans at the same time through a series of character vignettes – was just terrific.

But too many athletes reminded me that time is the cruelest opponent. ...