Local hero in love: Andy takes a bride

April 13, 2015

Andy Murray, the No. 3-ranked tennis player, wed longtime love, animal artist Kim Sears, April 11 in a ceremony that apparently had the feel of a small-town royal wedding.

Scores of Dunblane residents and reporters braved the Scottish weather (“oh, the wind and rain,” as the folk song goes) to catch a glimpse of the bride and groom – she resplendent in a Jenny Peckham gown with a sweetheart neckline and crystal-beaded bodice and half-sleeves (is there anything more flattering than half-sleeves?) that showed off her figure; he equally dandy in a blue and green kilt. (Male tennis players: To paraphrase another song, ZZ Top’s “Legs,” “They’ve got legs. They know how to use them.”)

The wedding – which took place in Dunblane Cathedral with a reception following at Cromlix House Hotel, which Andy owns – was in marked contrast to last summer’s seaside nuptials for Novak Djokovic and his longtime love, Jelena Ristic. That was a private affair in Montenegro with coverage appearing afterward exclusively in HELLO! magazine, which paid a pretty shilling for the rights. (The money went to the Novak Djokovic Foundation.)

Whereas Andy and Kim just let it rip, and so the day had the feel of a hometown party in which everyone could participate. ...

To ‘Sir,’ with love

April 12, 2015

A big shout-out to opera star Renée Fleming, a woman after my heart.

In The New York Times’ T magazine column “Take Two,” which juxtaposes comments from unlikely duos on unusual products, she has this to say about “Sir” (Taschen, 700 smackeroos), photographer Mario Testino’s ode to men:

“I had a lot of fun looking at this. It has more six-packs than a 7-Eleven. I like that men are now being scrutinized in the way that women have been for so long.”

Her mighty opposite here – Arnold Schwarzenegger, who knows a thing or two about sculpted male bodies – added: “What I discovered in here was an extraordinary celebration of men. It’s the ideal Christmas present. If I’d spend $700 on a pair of shoes, why not on a book?”

Why indeed? Certainly, Mr. Darcy himself, Colin Firth – one of the subjects, along with George Clooney, Jude Law, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and others – would alone be worth the price of the book. ...

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. ...