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Do clothes make the NFL man?

The NFL Awards were telecast on Fox the night before the Super Bowl. They’re like the Oscars only with men in suits that don’t fit. People: You’re multimillionaires. You can afford to go to a designer and have a half- dozen suits made. None of this squeezing into barely buttoned jackets as if you were sausages in casings.

Even those who looked good didn’t quite get it right. New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees was sharp in his blue suit, but the tan shoes stood out. Blue and tan is a big combo this spring – for women. Men don’t always rock it.

There were exceptions. Former San Francisco 49ers star-turned-NFL analyst Deion Sanders was elegant in a three-piece suit and scarf. Current 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick was stunning in a black turtleneck and a black suit that fit perfectly, squaring those broad shoulders. He presented the Best Play award to Green Bay Packers’ QB Aaron Rodgers with 49ers QB great Steve Young. The ESPN analyst, whom I profiled in WAG’s January “Super” issue, was once as Kaepernick is now – a running quarterback. But he graciously told Kaepernick that he never ran as fast as Colin can. It was interesting to see how compact Young is in comparison to Kaepernick. They certainly don’t make ’em like they used to. Read more

 

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Is Christie Coriolanus?

Recently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”

The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to  haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? 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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20 Questions to ask before the Super Bowl

  1. Will there be a super-duper storm for the Super Bowl as predicted by the Farmers’Almanac?
  2. If there is a storm, will Peyton Manning, who is said to have trouble in the cold, be affected by the weather?
  3. Will the rest of the Denver Broncos be affected by the weather?
  4. Will the Seattle Seahawks be affected by the weather?
  5. Will the fans be affected by the weather?
  6. Will anyone talk about anything but the weather before, during and after the big game?
  7. Why is the blogosphere just now waking up to the fact that the Super Bowl is going to be played outdoors?
  8. Why can’t the blogosphere understand that though Super Bowl XLVIII is being played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the teams that play in that stadium have New York in their names, hence New York is co-hosting the Super Bowl?
  9. Why can’t the blogosphere understand that Metropolitan Opera star Renée Fleming is more than capable of singing the National Anthem?
  10. How many people in the blogosphere can sing the National Anthem, getting all the words right? (Bonus question: How many know the second verse?) 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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