Phelps: A fish out of water no more

April 9, 2015

Michael Phelps will return to competitive swimming next week after having completed his six-month suspension for DUI.

Phelps will join a field that includes longtime friendly rival Ryan Lochte and Katie Ledecky at the Pro Swim Series in Mesa, Ariz. April 15 through 18.

After last competing at the Pan Pacific Championships in August, Phelps was arrested in September and suspended by USA Swimming in October.

He’s not on the roster for the World Championships in Kazan, Russia this August, but does anyone doubt that Phelps – the only U.S. men’s swimmer to post a world-leading time in an Olympic event in 2014 – will be there? ...

Andy Murray’s big, fat celeb-less wedding

April 8, 2015

You got to hand it to the press when it comes to making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Andy Murray’s getting married Saturday, April 11 – congrats again to him and Kim Sears – and there will be no Feddy, Rafa or Nole. (Thank God for Andy’s lack of famous guests. For a while there, I thought we were going to have to live with Nole’s Miami meltdown until the start of the Monte Carlo Open.)

So Andy didn’t invite the rest of the so-called “Big Four.” What a surprise. Well, it is to the press. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have been “banned,” “shunned” and “uninvited.” (Let us pause for a vocabulary lesson, here, shall we? In order to be uninvited, you would have to be invited to begin with.)

Look, when you play for the kind of stakes these guys play for, you’re not going to pal around. It messes with your head and your game. That’s precisely why I made the tennis players and swimmers in my debut novel “Water Music” rivals, friends and lovers: It’s delicious conflict, which is the meat of fiction. In my follow-up, “The Penalty for Holding,” the football players, too, find their personal relationships tangling their professional rivalries, although there it’s somewhat different, because football is a team sport.

Can rivals be friends in the real world? ...

She said, they said

April 8, 2015

Well, Rolling Stone magazine has really made a mess of it, hasn’t it?

A report from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, commissioned by the magazine, has concluded that the mag failed to do even basic due diligence in a cover story on a gang rape at the University of Virginia that it was forced to retract.

The author of the article – Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who will keep her job as will her bosses – failed to identify the attacker of the young woman, Jackie, or interview her friends. Apparently, her editors had a remarkable lack of curiosity about such details as well.

“Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, (managing editor Will) Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue,” The New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya wrote. ...

The literature of rejection, continued

April 8, 2015

In the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” troubled star quarterback Quinn Novak attends Stanford, where he encounters swimming legend Dylan Roqué (one of the heroes of my first novel, “Water Music”) in the wildly popular seminar “The Literature of Rejection.”

The first semester of the course is about literary antiheroes with a disproportionate rage at rejection – Achilles in “The Iliad,” Lucifer in “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” They are among the most attractive characters in literature but then, that’s the beauty of fiction. It isn’t real.

The second semester is about historical figures who share the same self-aggrandizement, including John Wilkes Booth, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.

To that roster we can now add co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who killed himself and 149 passengers and crew members aboard a Germanwings’ plane. Here’s a passage from Erica Goode’s April 7 New York Times’ piece about men – they are invariably men – like Lubitz that stopped me cold.

“The typical personality attribute in mass murderers is one of paranoid traits plus massive disgruntlement,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who recently completed a study of 228 mass killers, many of whom also killed themselves. ...

For Nole, love means having to say you’re sorry

April 6, 2015

Tennis, Andre Agassi once observed, is a lonely sport. A singles player is out there by his or her self, and has no one to blamed but his or her self when the match heads south. It can be particularly frustrating.

I was reminded of this after reading about Novak Djokovic’s triumph over Andy Murray 7-6 (3), 4-6, 6-0 at the Miami Open Easter Sunday. It was the third time that Nole’s pulled off the difficult double of wins at Indian Wells and Miami. He’s 25-2, a start that echoes the fantastic beginning to 2011, when he first became No. 1.

But what some will remember about the April 5 final in Miami is the way Nole shouted at his entourage after losing the second set to Andy and grabbed a towel from the startled ball boy. This was uncharacteristic of Nole, who’s tender with children. He knew it and he apologized. ...

Earning her stripes in the NFL

April 6, 2015

Kudos to Sarah Thomas, the first woman scheduled to become a full-time referee in the NFL. (Shannon Eastin worked as a replacement official in 2012 during the referee lockout.)

Thomas – a pharmaceutical executive and mother of three – has worked preseason games and the New Orleans Saints’ spring minicamp. Like most pioneers, she doesn’t see herself as one.

"I've always said as far as breaking the gender barrier, you never set out to do that,” she was quoted as saying in USA Today.

Does the hire smack of tokenism? Of course, it does. The NFL has a terrible rep where women are concerned so it floods the field with pink during October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And now it’s added a female official. Regardless of its motives, however, the league is still raising awareness.

And so will Thomas, who’ll have to earn those stripes she’ll wear. ...

Our bodies, theirselves

April 3, 2015

Freud said there are no accidents so maybe it’s no coincidence that the controversy over recently enacted (and hastily revived) RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) has occurred at the same moment that PBS has been airing “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.”

What do they have in common? An undertone of misogyny. I’m not suggested that the series – which was alternately informative, hopeful, horrifying and depressing – was misogynistic. But rather that the way in which female cancers used to be treated suggests a kind of savage disregard for the female body, and you have to wonder if a more enlightened approach – lumpectomy rather than radical mastectomy, which turns out to be ineffectual for early stage and metastatic breast cancers alike; a moratorium on hysterectomies, which used to be a dime a dozen – has to do with the rise in the number of female physicians and surgeons. ...