In my novel “Water Music” – the first in my series “The Games Men Play” – the tennis-playing protagonists fall in love before a US Open final that they assume will be rained out.
That is no longer a plot option.
On Tuesday, the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, N.Y. unveiled the new retractable roof for its Arthur Ashe Stadium. And while not everything went off without a hitch, more than 200 invited sponsors, staffers and members of the press seemed most impressed with what is nothing short of an engineering Grand Slam.
“Oh, oh, did I feel rain?” Katrina Adams, chairman of the board and president of the White Plains-based United States Tennis Association, teased under sunny skies. “Well, guess what? It doesn’t matter now. A plan more than 10 years in the making literally comes to a close today before our eyes.” ...
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Read MoreWith all the viciousness in American politics right now, it’s a pleasure to take a break from it to focus on the Olympics, which begins Friday, and consider the searing questions of the moment, like why has swimmer Ryan Lochte dyed his hair ice-blue? So he’ll look like a merman? Except it makes him look old and flies in the face of his pronouncement that he’s matured. (Do mature people dye their hair blue?) Ryan, Ryan: We still love you.
Lochte and his great rival, Michael Phelps, will be taking one more plunge into the Olympics. Novak Djokovic – who just won his fourth Rogers Cup and 30th Masters title – will be there as well, having bounced back from his Wimbledon upset by Sam Querrey. Andy Murray – who’s shaping up to be his big rival once again, having taken Wimbledon – will also be there, while Rafael Nadal and his tender wrist are questionable.
One big name who won’t be there is Roger Federer, who’s taking the rest of the year off to heal various injuries. ...
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Read MoreIn the games men play, Donald Trump has consistently defined himself as a winner. It’s what suits him most to the presidency, he has said.
But what does it mean to be a winner? In the scriptural readings for Mass this past Sunday, both the Book of Ecclesiastes and Jesus warn against those who build up material wealth with either no concern for their spiritual development or the reality that someday what is yours now will belong to someone else.
Trump, of course, would not see himself in this admonition. He says he has sacrificed much, because he employs thousands upon thousands of people.
But can such a sacrifice be compared to that of Capt. Humayun Khan, the Muslim-American soldier who was killed on June 8, 2004 in the early days of the Iraq War protecting his unit from a suicide car bomber? ...
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Read MoreFrom the moment I became aware of Hillary Clinton when her husband, Bill, ran for the presidency, I thought she would someday be the first woman president of the United States. The superbly orchestrated Democratic National Convention did nothing to change that perception.
She is not, and never will be, the seductive speaker her husband is. Nor will she ever strike the delicate balance between the intellectual and the visceral that President Barack Obama has achieved, inspiring us not only to hope but to continue striving. She lacks, by her own admission, the temperament for that, being more comfortable, as she said, with the “service” part of “public service” than the “public” portion. Indeed, her naturally secretive nature, at the heart of the overblown email scandal, is no doubt exacerbated by her husband’s ability to feel everyone’s pain – particularly that of nubile women. ...
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Read MoreOK, let’s address the 800-pound elephant in the room right away – the Democrats’ email scandal.
Never write anything you wouldn’t say in public. Never send an email containing sensitive information that should be exchanged in person. And make sure that when you exchange information in person, that that person you exchange it with can be trusted.
Remember: The best-kept secret is the one you share with no one.
I don’t care if the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails, or if the dog ate their homework. It was stupid of Dems in disarray to try to micromanage the process and weight it toward frontrunner Hillary Clinton – and, if they were going to do that, they shouldn’t have put it on the oh-so-secure internet, should they?
Having said that, I was immediately struck on night one by the difference in tone between the two conventions. ...
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Read MoreA patron at a restaurant I frequent finds Donald Trump’s relationship with his older daughter, Ivanka, peculiar. He seems to be closer to her than to his wife, Melania, she has said.
Jill Filipovic – a lawyer and journalist who’s the author of the forthcoming “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness,” offers an explanation: A man wants a nurturer in a wife, who will care for his needs, and an independent-minded, strong woman in a daughter, who, after all, reflects him. I myself saw this with my own father and I’ve seen this with every man I’ve known who had daughters. Whether or not he was a feminist, married or divorced, gay or straight, he always wanted his daughter or daughters to succeed and thus women to have opportunities and pay equal to that of men. ...
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Read MoreMuch has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.
The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...
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