It’s ba-ack.
Just when you thought it was safe to move on to baseball, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the NFL and against Tom Brady in Deflategate, upholding the league’s four-game suspension of the New England Patriots quarterback for his probable role in deflating footballs in the Pats’ AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. That blowout victory paved the way for the Pats’ Super Bowl championship last year.
Though the Court of Appeals’ decision reversed a lower court’s ruling that the league overreached in suspending Brady – in violation of the collective bargaining agreement – for me this has always been about what Brady knew and when he knew it. ...
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Read MoreWith all the talk about this year’s crop of 3-year-olds for the Kentucky Derby – Will it be the presumptive favorite Nyquist or his gray rival, Mohaymen, or Exaggerator? – I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic for American Pharoah and his glory Triple Crown run last year.
Well, we Pharoah phanatics are about to get a phix: AP is the subject of a new book by Joe Drape that was excerpted in The New York Times.
“American Pharoah,” published by Hachette Books, will be available April 26. ...
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Read MoreIt’s an issue that’s not going away any time soon, because it’s not easily resolved. In the wake of a wage-discrimination suit brought by several women’s soccer players against U.S. Soccer, tennis has been held up as an equal opportunity sport. But that was debunked in a recent New York Times article that explored not only the gap between male and female players’ pay but the disparity in the attitudes of the sexes on the subject.
Noting that the Grand Slam tournaments – Wimbledon and the Australian, French and US Opens – have equal prize money, Billie Jean king, who fought long for that equality, said, “To have equal prize money in the majors sends a message. It’s not about the money, it’s about the message.”
Trust me, it’s about the money. Because the money is the message. ...
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Read More“So,” a publicist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art asked teasingly, “are there enough Alexanders for you?”
She knows me only too well. Lover of the ancient Greeks that I am, there can never be for me enough images of Alexander the Great – the Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. ushered in 300 years of Hellenism (Greek culture) in Asia, reversing the course of cultural influence from East-West to West-East, and underscoring a tension between East and West that is still with us.
And yet, there I was in the first gallery of “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” (April 18 through July 17), surrounded by Alexanders. ...
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Read MoreI saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.
I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...
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Read MoreThis has not been the best moment in the relationship between the traditional sexes. (And we have to say “the traditional sexes” when talking about men and women, because we are moving toward a time when people will define themselves as something other or by no gender at all.)
The situation between the sexes has gotten tense on the campaign trail – as we have practically daily proof – but recently the battle shifted to the sports world as five veterans of the U.S. women’s soccer team charged the U.S. Soccer Federation with pay discrimination in everything from per diems to compensation for participating in exhibitions. This despite the women’s superior achievements to the men’s team.
“We continue to be told we should be grateful just to have the opportunity to play professional soccer and to get paid for doing it,” Hope Solo told “Today.” “In this day and age, it’s about equality. It’s about equal rights. It’s about equal pay. We’re pushing for that.”
This comes on the heels of a misogynistic rant by Raymond Moore, then CEO of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., in which he said that the women rode the coattails of the men in tennis and that they should get down on their knees in gratitude. ...
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Read MoreWith so much happening in the world of politics, this blog has been neglecting one of its passions – sports and, specifically, tennis.
Well, no longer.
The sports pages today are full of a stratospheric Novak Djokovic, who in winning the Miami Open Sunday passed Roger Federer as the all-time ATP earnings leader with more than $98 million. Yowza.
But that’s just the beginning. The win made him the career leader in ATP Masters 1000 titles, with 28, and the first player to win the difficult double of Indian Wells and Miami four times. It also enabled him to extend his streak of consecutive weeks as No. 1 to 92.
Miami was also Nole’s 63rd title, moving him past coach Boris Becker with 714 wins. (By the way, 714 was the number of home runs Babe Ruth hit lifetime.) ...
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