Blog

Men’s tennis at a crossroads?

November 16, 2014

Had an interesting conversation with a saleswoman the other day regarding watches. I remarked that it’s intriguing that so many watch manufacturers have tennis players for pitch men – and women. You don’t see as many NFL players representing watches.

That might seem counterintuitive since tennis isn’t played against a clock – although it certainly records the time of each match, whereas football is played in four 15-minute intervals, albeit with lots of timeouts and a halftime. Shouldn’t Peyton Manning be the spokesman for Piaget?

But a watch – a gift of time – is a classy thing, she said. Tennis players are classy, she added. By implication, football players are not.

It’s always dangerous to generalize, of course, but there is some truth in what she said, as I myself have pointed out in this blog. Tennis has prescribed rules for deportment and an intimate, relatively quieter setting – though it can get pretty loud – that underscores infractions. When Novak Djokovic sarcastically applauded the crowd as it applauded his double-fault in a semifinal against Kei Nishikori at the Barclay’s ATP World Tour Finals in London Nov. 15, he was quick to blame himself for letting the crowd get to him and losing his concentration.

The once and future king

November 14, 2014

You would think that someone whose earthly life ended more than 2,000 years ago would be beyond controversy. But then look at Jesus. He’s still “a sign to be contradicted,” to quote the Gospels, almost two millennia after he was crucified.

So it is with Alexander the Great. Some 330 years before Jesus was born, this king of Macedon and hegemon of Greece conquered the Persian Empire, ushering in a Hellenistic age that would unite East and West. (The reason we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ” is because of the Alexandrian spread of the Greek language and culture.)

Such is the Alexander mystique – he never lost a battle but died at age 32 in Babylon, possibly of cerebral malaria – that he thrives in the imagination today as a metaphor for many things, including leadership from the front; the ultimate gay in the military (many consider him to have been the lover of his right-hand man, Hephaestion); and the tension between East and West.

That tension has escalated recently with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s decision to give waxworks of Alexander, his father, Philip II of Macedon and his mother, Olympias, pride of place in a new archaeological museum in the capital city of Skopje, which already has the world’s largest statue of Alexander in its central square.

A little background here...

Michael Phelps, Adrian Peterson and the money game

November 12, 2014

The roster is set for the U.S. swim team that will take on the world in Kazan, Russia next summer and one name is, of course, conspicuous by its absence.

Michael Phelps is in rehab and serving a six-month suspension from the sport, following his second DUI arrest. His court date has been postponed until Dec. 19.

When Ryan Lochte, who’ll lead the American men at the world championships, said Phelps’ DUI “sucked” for swimming, this is what he meant. Of course, this is an opportunity for other swimmers to step up on the blocks and shine. But there’s no question, too, that the team would’ve been stronger with him than without him, and his arrest throws into jeopardy his competing in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, because it’s all about the build-up of training.

Yes, yes, yes, of course, there are more important considerations here, like addiction, like the possibility of a drunk driver killing or injuring someone. But those concerns are somehow buffeted by the games men play when elite athletes are concerned. ...

Alan Turing, gay sex and the real ‘Imitation Game’

November 11, 2014

Thanks to Marshall Fine, critic-in-residence at The Picture House in Pelham, I had the opportunity recently to preview “The Imitation Game,” which has “Oscar nods” written all over it, deservedly so. It’s a superbly crafted film about a story that resonates in our own time, acted with the kind of understated emotion that is the hallmark of British performance by a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Keira Knightley.

The film, which opens Nov. 28, tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II by creating a machine that was the forerunner of the computer, saving millions of lives in the process (although that, we shall see, was complicated).

Turing was a man ahead of his time in many ways. Today he’d be a gay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Instead he was a closeted social misfit – taunted mercilessly at prep school in the savage way that belongs exclusively to children and later prosecuted when his homosexuality was uncovered after the war. Forced to choose chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence, he committed suicide in 1954 at age 41 – one of 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts in England between 1885 and 1967. In 2013, Turing was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II – which still implies he did something wrong to begin with. ...

Why football won’t go up in smoke

November 10, 2014

The cover story for the Nov. 9 New York Times Magazine asks the provocative question: Is football the next tobacco?

The answer is “No,” and the key to that answer lies not in football or tobacco but in something else – influenza.

Like the flu, tobacco is airborne. If you were to smoke in let’s say an NFL arena, you would be subjecting not only yourself but the people all around you to carcinogens. Tobacco lost its household brand identity, because enough people came to understand that it wasn’t just about other people smoking themselves to death. It was also about how secondhand smoke could kill you.

But when you go to that same NFL arena to watch a game, you’re not risking a brain injury; someone else is. And for many people, that is, selfish or not, an acceptable risk.

President Barack Obama, a Chicago Bears fan, may have voiced the sentiment of a nation when he said that if he had a son, he would not let him play football. And yet, he says, he will remain a fan.

“At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” Michael Sokolove quotes him as saying in The Times Magazine piece. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

The president is a rational, compassionate man. So are we all – rational, compassionate people who are comfortable with other people bashing their brains in for our amusement, because, hey, they know what they’re getting into, much like a prostitute or a stripper or a porn star. It’s just another meat market. ...

A flag on the play for John Moffitt

November 7, 2014

Unsettling news out of the Nov. 6 edition of The New York Times, which chronicles the difficult time John Moffitt – whose departure from a $1 million contract as a Denver Broncos offensive lineman was the subject of post on this blog – has had adjusting to “civilian” life.

There were flirtations with writing and standup comedy – all well and good, particularly at age 27. But then came the drinking and the drugs and the possibility of jail time for possession, which was averted.

It’s difficult when you end a career to find the structure the job once provided, particularly when you’re a football player, with all the insular entitlement that implies.

That’s one of the reasons that Quinn Novak – the hero of “The Penalty for Holding,” my forthcoming novel in “The Games Men Play” series – clings to his football career, even though he thinks the brutality on and off the field is killing him. ...

Still California (Chrome) dreaming

November 7, 2014

Our old friend California Chrome was back in action this past weekend for the Breeders’ Cup but it was a case of “close but no cigar” as Chrome finished third, a half-length behind winner Bayern, who may take Horse of the Year honors away from Chrome as well. (There was some controversy about Bayern bumping against Shared Belief out of the starting gate. But hey, stuff happens. The winner is, in the end, the winner.)

So now it’s on to Chrome’s career as a 4-year-old. Will he get stronger or fizzle? His owners have said they’ll be choosy about the races he’ll run in his 2015 campaign. It used to be that racehorses had the speed and endurance for the Triple Crown, the Breeders’ Cup and any race you might throw at them. Now they’re bred for speed and stud fees. Nothing like the quick kill, though you could hardly accuse Chrome’s people of that as they continue to race him.

Who knows if Chrome will get better or if we’ll see a Triple Crown winner again. We may just have to wait for “Criterion,” the third novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” about a racehorse trying to win the Triple Crown.

It’s told in part from the viewpoint of the racehorse. Given the subject matter of the first two books in my series, people keep asking me, perhaps not entirely facetiously: Is the racehorse gay? ...