It’s that time of year when everyone does Top 10 lists so I thought, Why not join the fun? But if you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that I like to do things with a little twist. Here is my list of Top Five stories I covered in 2015, with a look at how they might develop in 2016:
1. American Pharoah’s Triple Crown win
To understand how big this story was, consider this: Before the Pharoah won the Crown, there were more men who had walked on the moon (12) than there were Triple Crown winners (11). In becoming the first horse to capture the elusive trifecta since my beloved Affirmed in 1978, AP galvanized a sport and a nation. And he did it with sweetness, charm and versatility – coming from behind at the Kentucky Derby, winning in the slop at the Preakness and going wire-to-wire commandingly at the Belmont Stakes. What’s next: Tours to see AP at Coolmore, where he’ll be standing stud, are already sold out – a sign that America’s love affair with its hero continues. ...
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Read More“Concussion” – the new movie about football and head trauma – is a beautiful film beautifully rendered. That may be an odd choice of words for a story about two of the sometimes uglier games men play – power and violence – but then, football, like humanity, is a multifaceted subject, at once mindless and Shakespearean, as one character notes.
This football tale is told from the viewpoint of an outsider who longs to be an insider, a Nigerian immigrant who has grown up thinking of America as God’s country. Armed with a slew of degrees from Nigeria, New York and London, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a proud, accomplished but obscure forensics pathologist working for Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the chief medical examiner in Allegheny County, Pa., in 2002 when he is given what he describes as “a dangerous gift” – a gift for knowing. ...
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Read MoreThe latest performance-enhancing drug scandal involves a star so big, so golden that to utter his name in the same breath as performance enhancement is to breathe sacrilege.
And yet here we are: The NFL and Major League Baseball are investigating an Al Jazeera report that implicates several of their players in the illegal use of human growth hormone, according to secretly taped – and couldn’t-be-more-appropriately-named-if-he-were-christened-by-Central Casting – pharmacy student Charlie Sly, who promptly recanted his claims.
There is really only one name anyone is interested in here – Peyton Manning, as in the superstar quarterback of the Denver Broncos, formerly of the Indianapolis Colts; Sports Illustrated’s 2013 Sportsman of the Year; scion of the Mannings of New Orleans, “football royalty,” as the press is want to note; and pitchman par excellence. ...
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Read MoreOne of my – and my family’s – Christmas gifts to myself was a trip to “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,” which is at the National Gallery of Art through March 20.
For me, an amateur classicist whose love of Greco-Roman culture threads all of my writing, “Power and Pathos” in Washington was something of a Holy Grail. It originated at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles – one of two big shows on the ancient Greeks to appear this year, the other being “The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece” at the British Museum.
But neither London nor Los Angeles was in my game plan and when my annual Christmas trip to Washington arrived, so did my moment.
That moment didn’t disappoint, for no sooner did my photographing nephew and I enter the exhibit than we encountered “Alexander the Great on Horseback,” a small first century B.C. silver-inlaid bronze replica of the bronze original by Lysippos, the only artist allowed to capture Alexander’s likeness besides the painter Apelles and the gem-carver Pyrgoteles. The backdrop for this equestrian statue is a reproduced portion of “The Alexander Mosaic” (circa 100 B.C.), depicting the Greco-Macedonian conqueror’s defeat of the Persian emperor Darius III at the Battle of Issus. (Both works are in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.) ...
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Read MoreAt Christmastide, I like to share one of my traditions, which is a reading of a selection from John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” As a classical Christian – I know, an oxymoron – I’m always struck by how the advent of Christianity sounded a death knell for Greco-Roman culture. But then, someone’s sunrise is always someone else’s sunset.
Yet Greco-Roman culture – with its sensual tales of gods and heroes, its dramas on the terrible wonder of the human condition, its emphasis on the body in all its brutal beauty – never died. (It’s a theme of Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel “Julian,” about the post-Christian Roman emperor who attempted to reinstall the Greco-Roman pantheon.) The Greeks would instead resurface in the Renaissance and at the turn of the 19th century. ...
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Read More“Concussion” – starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who blew the whistle on NFL head injuries and their relationship to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia – opens on Christmas Day and is already stirring the pot.
Some say it’s too easy on the NFL.
Others that the movie plays fast and loose with the events and exaggerates the relationship between football and poor health.
“Are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes?” Daniel Engber writes for Slate. ...
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Read MoreWell, now we have the backlash to the fallout from Serena Williams being named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year.”
How dare she be picked over fan fave American Pharoah, went the fallout.
How dare anyone compare her to a horse or pick an animal over an African-American female athlete, went the backlash.
Let me try to make a nuanced argument here, not the Internet’s forte. Williams was chosen as much for what she symbolizes – African-American female athleticism in a racially troubled country – as for what she has accomplished. ...
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