Ole!

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Tennis might not realize what it will miss most about Rafael Nadal now that he has announced his retirement following the November Davis Cup finals. Beyond his barely comprehensible success—22 major tournament titles (second all-time among men) in spite of chronic injury; beyond his delightful rivalry with Roger Federer that somehow never included a head-to-head match at the U.S. Open; beyond the early quirky beachcomber pants and sleeveless shirts and ongoing OCD attention to assuring his refreshment bottles were precisely placed courtside, there was a Nadal humility and respect rare among elite champions.

After a shocking early upset loss at the 2015 U.S. Open to journeyman Italian Fabio Fognini, Nadal’s analysis was typical, simply acknowledging that Fognini “played great. It was not a match that I lost, even if I had opportunities. It’s a match that he wins. So, accept. Not happy that he played better than me, but that’s what happened. That’s it.”

As his career began to wind down and he stalked Federer’s then-record 20 Grand Slam tournaments championships, Nadal was both philosophical and reasonable. “As I always say to you and is true: I would love to be the one to have more, yes. But you cannot be all day frustrated, or all day thinking about what’s your neighbor have better than you. You have to be happy with yourself. You have to do your way. If you are the one to achieve more, fantastic. If not, at least I give my best during all of my career. That’s all.”

Head-to-head, he eventually came out ahead of Federer, 24-16, though Novak Djokovic—the third of the 21st Century’s Big Three in men’s tennis—has passed them both with 24 major titles. But what made Nadal so appealing was his commitment to the moment, rather than history. He always was a one-point-at-a-time, one stroke-at-a-time player, and his disposition never changed.

He surpassed $60 million in career earnings, yet old champion Jimmy Connors once noted how “Nadal plays like he’s broke.”

There was a menace in his tennis, a dastardly persistence enhanced by a forehand groundstroke that could make your top spin. John Yandell, who for years used high-speed cameras to study tennis-ball rotation, pinpointed how it took “about a second for Rafa’s ball to get to [his opponent’s] strings. From .85 to 1.2 seconds. In that time, the ball turns over 50 to 60 times”—which worked out to between 3,000 and 3,600 revolutions per minute.

“It’s hard to believe that could actually be true,” But the topspin it produced was so severe that the ball “surged up from Nadal’s toes, more of an arc,” Yandell analyzed, “heavier but just as fast….If you look at his big bolo swing…my hypothesis is he’s increasing the sidespin as well” so that opponents were forced to strike the ball “at shoulder level or higher at times, and they may be a foot off the ground when they hit it….The full effect of the spin destroys your contact point.”

And still the fascinating dichotomy was how Nadal’s charging-bull-at-Pamplona playing style—goring opponents competitively and psychologically—didn’t jive with his declaration that he was having such a great time. “I love the sport like a spectator,” he often said. “So to have a chance to go on court in big stadiums that I saw on the TV when I was a kid always is really special for me.”

Each match, each point, Nadal said, was “not about experience, not about pressure or any of that stuff. It’s always about playing well. That’s it.”

There was a lot to appreciate about Nadal, who turned pro as a teen and played the tour for 23 years. (In 2017, South African veteran Kevin Anderson, then 31, made it to the U.S. Open final only to be thrashed by Nadal and said to him, “I know we’re the same age, but I fell I’ve been watching you my whole life.”)

Nadal had hip surgery, tendinitis in both knees; wrist, back, forearm, elbow, ankle and foot maladies as well as an abdominal tear that forced him out of a Wimbledon semifinal—and still made it to 38 with a high-intensity physical style. If his body hadn’t reached the moment where, as he put it, “raises a white flag,” he said he would have carried on. “Even though your head wants to keep going, your body says this is as far as it goes.”

It’s what has been described as the “little death” that awaits all athletes, long before they will shuffle off this mortal coil. But, boy, it was fun while it lasted. And not just for Nadal. That’s it.

Taking sides

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So, what’s your team? Yankees? Dodgers? Kansas City Chiefs? Golden State Warriors?

Whatever the theater of conflict, the taking of sides is basically assumed, and given the season—baseball playoffs commencing, football in full swing, basketball and hockey gearing up—neutrality does not appear to be an option.

Democrat or Republican?

It is a cliché that sports and politics don’t mix (though decades of evidence have debunked that argument). Anyway, to have attended Lilliana Hall Mason’s recent address at Hofstra University on “The Power of Identity in American Elections” was to have been struck by the parallel worlds of sports and politics.

The talk by Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor, was part of a three-day symposium on “Higher Education in an Election Year” and was chock full of we-vs.-they polarization, the thing that characterizes both party partisanship and fandom.

Listen to sports squawk radio—one host’s “hot take” so often is a blanket statement made to dismiss another’s opinion as garbage—and you are likely to hear such declarations as an old insistence by New York radio personality Chris Russo (who marketed himself as “Mad Dog”) that a “real” sports fan is required to “hate” his team’s primary rival.

That is exactly the language Mason used in her finding that Democrats and Republicans often don’t necessarily disagree about a specific policy yet describe a “hate” for the other side. She cited research that in creating any social identity leads directly to a sense of superiority over the others; about how attaching to one group involves insisting that your group to be the best. Tribalism, no?

She graphed how party identity—like team identity—leaked into adopting values of ideology, race and religion, so that any blow to that identity leads to a condemnation of others in every respect. Consider fans’ perception that they somehow are a member of their team—“We” won, etc. And how that identity is not so much a personal relationship to individuals as tribal. If you are a Yankee devotee, and the most hated member of the Boston Red Sox—“they”—suddenly is traded to your team and puts on the pinstripes, that player becomes one of “us.” Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that, though we may have favorite players on our team, we ultimately are not rooting for individuals. We are rooting for laundry. Whoever is in “our” uniform.

Mason’s analyses indicated a growing gap between the political parties regarding racial resentment, regarding women’s roles and patriarchy, based on being “on the other team.” Which resembles the sort of behavior that fans—the worst fans—have been known to direct at star players on the opposing side. Race clearly has been involved in the sometimes skewed comparisons—one is an outside shooter/passer, the other in inside force, totally different roles—of WNBA rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

Mason offered examples in the political world where differences of opinion have gone a step further—dehumanizing the other side, approving physical threats—that can be found in the seamier side of sports. And how those in positions of leadership—in sports, coaches and front-office types—can affect treatment of the other side.

To wit: Then-New Orleans’ head coach Sean Payton and his defensive coordinator Gregg Williams were suspended in 2012 for having offered bonuses to their players for inflicting a game-ending injury on opponents.

Mason pointed to the media enhancing animosity by stereotyping one side or the other, and often playing on friction because of a belief that readers/listeners/viewers are drawn to skirmishes. You want attention? Give the audience a fight, enhanced combativeness. (“If it bleeds, it leads,” went the old saw for sensational reportage.)

When ESPN executive Jason Horowitz was helping develop the network’s sports debate shows years ago, he said that “when we ask people what they’re looking for, the words that pop up are ‘independent,’ ‘original,’ ‘fearless,’ ‘thought-provoking,’ ‘defiant,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘rebellious.’” He said he was looking for people “who make the audience listen.”

A reviewer noticed that none of the words were “trusted,” “authoritative,” “reliable,” “credible,” or “knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

In her Hofstra talk, Mason further submitted that media personalities have more power than people in charge, with a listen-to-me-and-I’ll-tell-you-how-things-are bearing—flavored with too much us/them language. With politics, Mason said, less attention is paid to the so-called “undecided,” those who are not partisan. In sports, the results of which are less consequential, everyone is a partisan.

It’s called being a fan.

Soccer’s meteor

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You have to be fairly old, or Italian, or to have joined the soccer cognoscenti long before that sport made serious inroads around here, to realize the brief but somehow lasting impact of one Salvatore Schillaci, who died last week. Maybe you had to be there, at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

He was this poor kid from Sicily, subjected to longstanding regional prejudices in his own country, who nevertheless came to prove the aphorism that “fame in Italy lies in the back of the opponent’s net.” He had entered that World Cup a bench-warmer, a last-minute edition to the home team roster, yet emerged a national hero, scoring a tournament-leading six goals—five of them game-winners—in leading Italy’s Azzurri to a third-place finish.

A comedian in Florence named Roberto Benigni had snidely declared, in the midst of Schillaci’s flash-in-the-pan heroics, that “a Cameroon-Italy final in the World Cup would mean Schillaci could play for either team.” The not-quite-one-of-us slur. But Schillaci—“Toto” to friends and ultimately to an entire nation—is being remembered as the very face of that international event, the unquestioned star. “Toto was tutto,” James Horncastle of The Athletic wrote. “An everyman who, through sheer determination, seemed capable of everything. He showed that even the fleeting can paradoxically endure.”

With Schillaci’s death at 59—a relatively fleeting life, like his soccer masterpiece—that month-long tournament is being fondly recalled by Italians as the summer of the Notti Magiche—the Magic Nights—mostly because of his lightning-strike scores that set off gleeful, frenzied celebrations by fans and Toto alike.

He was a workingman’s hero who had spent eight years on lower-division pro teams in Sicily, was virtually unknown before—and essentially disappeared from the national team after—that World Cup.

He was 25 at the time, and acknowledged “living through a moment of sheer magic. I remember very very well when Italy won the World Cup in 1982 [when he was 17]. I was one of the fans running up and down the street screaming and yelling and waving a flag.” Only to become the spark for the same 1990 response, streets filled with fans, honking horns, brandishing Italian flags and chanting “Forza Italia!”

That tournament’s primary essence was to have set the record for the lowest average scoring per game in Cup history (2.21 goals), with a championship final—West Germany over Argentina, 1-0, on a penalty kick—that the New York Times’ Rory Smith called “perhaps the ugliest in living memory.” There was the famous Cup-associated debut concert of the Three Tenors supergroup in Rome and the goofy Lego-like tournament mascot, “Ciao.” Mostly, there was Toto, punching holes in mountains, bringing out the Roman candle in the tifosi—Italy’s soccer fanatics.

So, the Schillaci Papers:

Italy, a strong pre-tournament title favorite, had its artistic, flowing play on full display in its opening game against Austria but still was stuck in a scoreless tie when coach Azeglio Vicini brought Toto off the bench with just 16 minutes to play. Four minutes later, Schillaci leaped in the goalmouth to meet a high crossing pass from Gianluca Vialli, snapping his twisting body to the right to head in the winner.

Eyes wide, arms raised, Schillaci mirrored the shocked, awed reaction throughout Rome’s Olympic Stadium. Italian fans, after all, suddenly had perfection to go with the beauty they expect from their team, though soccer doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Crew cut and slightly stocky as opposed to most teammates’ dashing, long-haired look—and not in the starting lineup until Italy’s third game—Schillaci again scored the second-half winner against Czechoslovakia. And conjured the decisive goals against Ireland and Uruguay, and the opening goal in the semifinal before Argentina’s eventual shootout victory.

He was all over television. Staring from the front page of every newspaper. In his hometown of Palermo, Schillaci’s father was hoisted on neighbors’ shoulders and paraded around the square. When the 123 entrants of that year’s Miss Italia competition were polled on which national team player they’d most like to go on a date with, 87 picked Schillaci. “He enriches his performances with masterpieces of goals,” Vicini said of Schillaci.

You had to be there.

U.S. Open bottom line

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Was the U.S. Open really in any mortal danger before Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz made their unexpected marches to the women’s and men’s championship finals over the weekend? It was the first time in 23 years that both a U.S. man and U.S. woman played for U.S. titles, but was that rarity—two homies simultaneously at last getting close to a trophy—illustrative of the tournament’s atrophy?

Neither Pegula, sixth seed among the women, nor the men’s No. 12 Fritz ever had been past a major tournament quarterfinal before, so shopworn story lines were trotted out as they advanced unexpectedly through the 2024 draw. Those decades-old themes, of the forlorn state of American men’s tennis and the regularly disappointing search for another Serena Williams, merely were paused when Coco Gauff won last year.

For the women, there hardly has been the kind of drought that the men, so long depicted as on a tennis desolation row, have experienced. No U.S. female reached the final between 2002 and ’07, but Serena Williams enjoyed a three-year run as champ from 2012 to 2014 and was runner-up in both ’17 and ’18. And Sloane Stephens claimed the title in ’17. All that, while Andy Roddick was the last American man before Fritz to reach the U.S. championship match, in 2006, as well as the last U.S. male to win it, in ’03.

Still, any lament that the Open suffered from lack of Yankee dominance not only has been overdone but unsubstantiated. As this year’s tournament commenced with the highest seeds coming from Italy (Jannick Sinner), Serbia (Novak Djokovic), Spain (Carlos Alcaraz), Germany (Alexander Zverev)—and, among the women, Poland (Iga Swiatek) and Belarus (Aryna Sabalenka)—a record average of more than 75,000 fans descended daily on the tournament during the first of its two weeks. By the end, more than a million had attended the Open for the first time, even as ticket prices soared to more than $8,000 for a courtside seat.

Open officials, with little expectation of an American player presence on the final weekend, rolled out their first Finals Fan Fest. That offered $28 tickets just to be on the National Tennis Center grounds on the final Saturday and Sunday to attend a watch party at the No. 2 court, Louis Armstrong Stadium, while the championship action proceeded in already sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium next door.

So the adversity of the Open failing to guarantee an American champion has not been the least bit adverse. The event is one of those American spectacles that lures the In Crowd and In-Crowd wannabes, a place to be seen as well as to see. Furthermore, international tennis—being an individual sport—is personality-driven, celebrity stuff. So, while an added buzz indeed accompanied Pegula and Fritz right through their runner-up finishes, a player’s drawing power at the Open historically has been related more to his or her on-court success and style than country of origin.

The Open, contested on the grounds of the 1939 and 1964 Worlds Fairs, is just that—a world’s fair.

For two decades, Switzerland’s Roger Federer and Spain’s Rafael Nadal were virtual rock stars at the Open as, in the 1990s, were women’s favorites Steffi Graf (Germany) and Monica Seles (who played for her native Yugoslavia before becoming an American citizen). Just as true, more recently, were fan favorites Caroline Wozniacki (Denmark), Maria Sharapova (Russia) and Japan’s Naomi Osaka, the 2018 and 2020 U.S. champ.

Even the athletes themselves in fact are drawn to heroes and heroines with backgrounds and homelands quite foreign to them. Federer once said that his tennis inspiration came “from all around the world, and that was cool,” citing Sweden’s Stefan Edberg and Germany’s Boris Becker. Pete Sampras, the California-raised five-time U.S. Open champ, cited Australian Rod Laver as his example of greatness. And Stephens, a Black woman like the Williams sisters who called them “two of the greatest players ever to play the game of tennis,” nevertheless had Belgian Kim Clijsters as her childhood idol.

So, good for Pegula and Fritz for reviving something of an American tennis dream at the latest edition of the Open. They surely warmed the hearts of U.S. television executives by staying around so long. But the idea that only American champions keep New York’s Grand Slam tournament alive and healthy, or assure a flood of future elite players from the States—that success breeds success and fuels a nation’s thriving sports tradition—is only true until it isn’t.

The U.S. Open is doing just fine. Tickets for the 2025 tournament already are on sale.

Equal time?

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Interesting timing: We saw the hit Broadway musical “Suffs” three days after the Democrats concluded their nationally-televised convention, and the resonance was unmistakable. While one was a theatrical treatment of the women’s suffrage movement a century ago, and the other a thoroughly modern political rally, there was a persistent echo of issues and a take-it-to-the streets vibe.

There was, in fact, crossover language. Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala’s Harris’ repeated vow, “We’re not going back,” perfectly fit the theme of “Suffs,” of the long struggle of women working against generational, racial and class divides in pursuit of the right to vote. And the DNC’s opening-night speech by former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton included a direct quote from the “Suffs” closing number, “Keep Marching:” “Progress is possible, not guaranteed.” (Clinton, it turns out, is one of a team of “Suffs” producers.)

The play, like the convention, addressed the stalking of gender equality, touching on same-sex marriage, racism and the continuum of foot-dragging by a patriarchal society. Tony Award winner Shaina Taub—who wrote the book, music and lyrics for “Suffs”—was, in the title role, singing the same songs the conventioneers had heard.

To wit: “Let Mother Vote;” “Finish the Fight;” “The March (We Demand Equality);” “Worth It;” “Show Them Who You Are;” “How Long?;” “The Young Are at the Gates” and some 20 other tunes, including a declaration of refusal to “Wait My Turn.”

Woodrow Wilson, President during the suffrage fight, was depicted in the musical as “a cartoon fop,” as a New York Times review put it, “too silly to take seriously.” Wilson indeed was long opposed to women’s suffrage until he saw it as vital to winning World War I, shortly before it became law in 1920. And, though he was a leading architect of the League of Nations and considered a progressive on such matters as foreign policy, Wilson also authorized segregation in the federal bureaucracy and gave off fumes of racism.

There is one number in the show, the duet “If We Were Married,” which hammered home restrictive 1916 laws even as it referenced 2024 conservative policies on reproductive freedom:

He: If we were married, we’d fill out our family and life would be simply sublime….

She: If we were married, I’d churn out your children ‘cause contraception’s a federal crime….

A hundred years on, with clear advancements in society, certain fundamental aspects and patterns nevertheless have endured, including current reports of voter suppression. It was French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who wrote, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”—“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

That was in 1849. Given that truth of retarded evolution, “Suffs”—fun entertainment, for sure—broadcast the same frustrations (amid hope) repeatedly raised this month by Clinton, Harris et al.

An immigrant’s tale

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I am an immigrant. Came to New York at 22; didn’t speak the language or know the mores. Didn’t understand that CAW-fee came in different iterations, that “regular” meant cream and sugar added. Ordering a ham-and-cheese sandwich, I was flummoxed to be asked, “what kind of bread?” Where I came from, bread was bread. White. “Wonder.” In the hinterlands, I hadn’t been aware of a diversity of loaves.

Still here, though, after 55 years, a resident alien of sorts. Not based in Gotham itself—Manhattan—though I briefly shared a studio apartment long ago with a college acquaintance on the fashionable East Side before settling in a LAWN-Guyland suburb. Found a wife locally—a citizen spouse!—and assimilated. (No green card necessary.) Got a nice job. Paid taxes. Was never a danger to anyone but myself.

But, yes, an immigrant—a person generally defined as coming “from outside one’s community.” Immigrants are much in the news these days, prompting this consideration of my status as, technically, a furriner: born in Louisiana—raised in Texas, California and New Mexico and schooled in Missouri—before arriving in New York as what Australians call a “blow-in,” a non-native.

Can’t say I felt dismissed as “the other,” as some exotic invader to be shunned or disparaged. There was a time when some fellow college students—aware I had gone to high school in New Mexico and apparently oblivious to the “New” in that state’s name—seemed to find great humor in addressing me as “Gringo.” There are far worse maledictions.

Anyway. Though not actually from another nation (though I have been to Ellis Island among some huddled masses who also were visiting the Statue of Liberty), I would argue that New York is quite unlike the regions of America where I grew up, the way London isn’t the same as England and Shanghai is an entirely different version of China.

I certainly had never eaten a bagel nor ridden a subway before arriving. A person could live in the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles—as I did during part of my childhood—and have no comparison to what life was like in the Big Town or its environs. As Groucho Marx once observed on that matter, “When it’s 9:30 in New York, it’s 1937 in Los Angeles.”

Voluntarily uprooted, drawn to a job in New York and existing for a time as a stranger in a strange land, I never experienced any untoward discomfort. (Guilty of a few bumpkin faux pas, likely.) But as celebrated journalist Clive Barnes wrote in his introduction to a 1985 collection of essays on New York, it is “a city of born-again natives,” people from Out There Somewhere who came in quest of something and set down permanent roots. To live in New York is to be surrounded by ex-pats. Standard procedure. We’re all really in the same boat.

There is a song by Paul Simon—who was born in New Jersey, by the way; he immigrated with his family to the borough of Queens as a pre-schooler—that evokes the defining American story of immigrant millions bringing of hundreds of languages and customs to New York:

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower/We come on the ship that sailed the moon/We come in the age’s most uncertain hours/And sing an American tune.

Some of us came by way of Wink, Tex., Hobbs, N.M., and Columbia, Mo. Yet happy to say I haven’t been deported. And starting to feel acclimated.

A Paris medal ceremony

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Quadrennial Olympic recitals never cease to be fascinating on several levels. So, with that in mind, here is a final medal ceremony for the 2024 Paris Games:

GOLD. Sprinter Winzar Kakiouea from Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation (population 13,000) out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a touch north of the Equator. Kakiouea’s Olympics lasted 11.15 seconds, which is how long it took him to run the 100 meters in a first-round qualifying heat. Five runners in that heat ran faster, as did 34 of the 46 entered in the 100, which eventually was won by American Noah Lyles in 9.79 seconds in a smashing finish. All Kakiouea lacked were the top-notch training facilities enjoyed by large, rich nations; the coaching expertise, endorsement backing, regular competitions at the elite level and a deep pool of local rivals to regularly challenge him. (Those things had plenty to do with the United States and China winning the most gold medals in the Games, 40 apiece.)

SILVER. All the sports that NBC mostly kissed off—trampoline, canoeing, sport climbing, badminton, cycling, modern pentathlon, judo, sailing, skateboarding, surfing, taekwondo, weightlifting—so it could air endless hours of the U.S.-centric sports of basketball, swimming, gymnastics. Not to mention wall-to-wall beach volleyball. (The female players’ minimalist “uniforms” clearly had something to do with that.)

BRONZE. Doesn’t it seem odd that Olympic divers—marvelous, daring acrobats who train at their sport for hours on end—were so pale? Hardly bronze gods that an aquatic sport would appear to produce. (Must be from doing all their work indoors in natatoriums.)

TIN. Sorry; what is Snoop Dogg’s Olympic sport? From the Washington Post, there was this headline midway through NBC’s relentless attention to the so-yesterday rapper: “Are we watching the greatest sports event in the world, or a special episode of “The Voice”?

GOLD. The Clark Kent/pommel horse guy, Stephen Nedoroscik. We couldn’t see his viral fame coming any better than Nedoroscik apparently can see much of anything without his glasses. He reportedly can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 8.68 seconds and is a video-games champ—multi-talented even as he specializes in only one of the gymnastics disciplines.

SILVER. Table tennis. There were reports of U.S. basketball’s Anthony Edwards insisting that he could get at least a point in a match with any of the table tennis Olympians, who good-naturedly dismissed his claim. This is not ping-pong in your basement, with the family dog lurking to gobble up a wayward ball.

BRONZE. As a spectator sport, shooting hardly is riveting. Clearly there is a skill involved, but fans have to resort to a video screen image of the target showing each shot’s result. What was visual was 51-year-old Turkish air-pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec’s nonchalant stance as he prepared to fire—no protective glasses or headphones, his shooting arm outstretched, with his other hand in his pocket. Dikec won silver and several athletes mimicked his pose in post-competition celebrations, including Mondo Duplantis, the Swedish pole vaulter by way of Louisiana, after Duplantis set a world record in his event.

TIN. The inevitable Olympic downers: The IOC and boxing officials failing to agree—or to provide clear guidelines—on whether two female pugilists were in fact women. Doping accusations. Death threats targeting Opening Ceremonies director Thomas Jolly. Spying charges against Canadian soccer officials for flying a drone over New Zealand practice. These all are proof that, for all the unifying, escapist benefits of the Games, the Olympics reflect the imperfections of real life.

GOLD. Simone Biles in flight. The Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan winning medals in the 5,000 meters (bronze), 10,000 meters (bronze) and women’s marathon (gold). That’s almost 40 miles of racing (against the world’s best) in 10 days. Also: American Cole Hocker’s stretch-run finish to pass co-favorites (and committed rivals) Jakob Ingebrightsen of Norway, the defending Olympic champ, and Josh Kerr of Britain to win the men’s 1500.

SILVER. The variety of skills at the Games. Just how do those artistic swimmers pull off the flips and leaps from underwater during routines in which they hold their breath for up to 90 seconds? What sort of training, mentally and physically, prepares athletes for their various performances that feel a bit heroic? All pretty impressive.

BRONZE. How come the United States can’t settle on one uniform during the duration of the Games for all its track and field athletes? It would be far easier to follow them that way.

TIN. Biles’ brandishing of a G.O.A.T. necklace, a claim to being the Greatest of All Time. (There were plenty of “greatests” there—if in fact an operative definition of “greatest” is possible.) Biles won two golds in the five individual events she entered. Brilliant. But, then, American swimmer Katie Ledecky entered just two individual races, the women’s distance events, and won both, so she could claim dominance over her domain. However accomplished, many other Olympic athletes have only one discipline available to them—say, a shot putter or judoka, and therefore hope for only one potential medal. With a gold, might they be the greatest?

GOLD. French swimmer Leon Marchand. Always fun to see the host nation excited over its own stars, and Marchand got France off to a terrific start.

SILVER. Wonderful to see tiny countries winning Olympic gold for the first time against tremendous odds: Thea LaFond of Dominica in the women’s triple jump; Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia in the women’s 100 meters.

BRONZE. The non-flame Olympic flame cauldron. LED lights inside a 90-foot-tall, 20-foot-wide hot-air balloon was an inventive touch. Splendid, but felt like another step away from reality. Those LED lights were not lit from rays of the sun in Olympia, Greece, as has been the tradition.

TIN. A longstanding International Olympic Committee refusal to call Taiwan Taiwan, based on a political agreement with mainland China. So Taiwan has become Taipei at the Games, stuck with a generic Olympic flag.

GOLD. Swimming in the River Seine in the men’s and women’s triathlon. That’s bravery, there, even after $1.5 billion was spent to clean up the river.

SILVER. The big bell that track and field winners were invited to ring in celebration of victories. Made in Normandy, a gift from Olympic organizers to the city, the bell, assigned to hang in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame after the Games, was placed in Stade de France during the rugby competition and kept in the stadium when track events commenced.

BRONZE. Not enough was made of the presence of Ukrainian and Palestinian athletes at the Games and the escape from war they provided to their citizens.

TIN. Tom Cruise and Snoop Dogg in the Closing Ceremonies (in segments previously taped for NBC, yet!). There were 204 national teams represented at the Paris Games by more than 10,000 athletes in 32 sports, yet NBC’s Pavlovian instinct was to continually feature Boldface Names.

GOLD. The Marathon for All, opening the marathon route after Olympic competition to the hoi polloi for a citizen fun run.

SILVER. It’s probably not feasible for television to conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement. To witness the Olympics in person is culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff. But through the TV lens?

BRONZE. There were generally top reviews for the Closing Ceremonies, though the sense here was of an odd Cirque Soleil show—difficult to relate to the Games—and the only real highlight was of athletes from many nations joining in signing “We Are The Champions.” Of the World.

TIN. To the curmudgeonly knucklehead who awarded these medals.

Fee-fi-fo-fum

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English vs. Spanish (Armada)

Things that were worth paying attention to in this month’s 2024 European soccer tournament:

—There was plenty of highly entertaining sports theatre, concluding with Spain’s championship victory over England that was conjured with a bare four minutes remaining in the title match.

—The riveting final result came after England’s repeated narrow escapes from early elimination in the tournament had helped ratchet up the drama. (Especially for me, watching a couple of those tense matches at my daughter’s home in London.)

—More than the competitive sparks, though, the whole exercise, as England coach Gareth Southgate noted, was as much a national incident as a sporting contest.

There were, leading up to the final, references to longstanding hostilities between the contestants, starting with last year’s women’s World Cup, when Spain defeated England. And reaching back as far as the mid-16th Century attempt by the Spanish Armada to invade England. (Spain lost that one.) Such historical allusions seem unavoidable before these big games, as when one English sportswriter previewed England’s 1966 World Cup final with a reminder to “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

There is a root-root-root-for-the-home-team vigor on steroids, most of it in good fun. Flag-waving, chanting crowds flocked to stadiums in Germany, the tournament’s host nation, as well as to pubs and watch parties in their home countries. A Spanish newspaper reported that 87 percent of the populace took in the final. Powerful examples of national identity were manifested through soccer.

That England fans were marching through Germany singing “Football’s Coming Home”—a decades-old ditty referencing the country’s status as the sport’s birthplace and its only international championship at the ‘66 World Cup—was ripe for interpretation by non-English supporters as English arrogance and entitlement. Even, perhaps, a reminder that the English empire had once been the largest in history, ruling over more than a quarter of the globe.

“As English fortunes have risen,” University of Limerick psychology professor Orla Muldoon wrote on the eve of the championship final, “so too has the sense that there are many among us who really want the winners to be Anybody But England.” Muldoon, acknowledging “a strong sense of national identity” based on “passionate support for national teams,” further argued for what she called “disidentification.”

“It’s not indifference,” she wrote, “but rather an active process [that] allows us to actively express out dissimilarity and dissatisfaction from those who support English football.” The point is for Europeans who happen to share the English language to reject any connection to stereotypical “lager louts and violent hooligans” who have been associated with English soccer, and a “sense that the reputation of the English abroad is poor.”

Meanwhile, another zeitgeisty situation with national identity—immigration—was at work during the championships. Spain’s breakout star was Lamine Yamal, still 16 years old when he scored the goal to put his team into the title game. He had become the youngest player to appear in the European championships, the youngest to score a goal and the youngest to play in the final, turning 17 the day before that match, in which he assisted on the first of Spain’s scores in the 2-1 victory over England.

He emerged, according to one dispatch, as “the young prince of Spain.” But he was born to parents who immigrated from Equatorial Guinea and Morocco and hailed from the Catalan city of Mataro—near Barcelona—which right-wing politicians had branded as one of country’s “multicultural shitholes,” according to a report in The Guardian. So when Yamal celebrated his decisive semifinal goal by using his fingers to spell out the post code of his hometown, a former Spanish equality minister took the occasion to declare that “it’s very important we remind people who say that Spain isn’t big enough for everyone, or that there’s a problem with immigration that brings crime…that Spain is Lamine Yamal.”

In the moment, Yamal’s heroics seemed to cast him as thoroughly Spanish to national-team fans, the flip-side of what had happened to English forward Bukayo Saka, born in London to Nigerian immigrants. Four years ago, after Saka was one of three Black players who failed to convert penalty kicks in a shootout loss to Italy that left England as European runner-up, he and the other two players were targeted by relentless racial abuse on social media.

So it might be just soccer. But among the hoi polloi, national unity is best facilitated by success. Prior to this year’s Euro final, King Charles lightheartedly encouraged the English team to “secure victory before the need for any last-minute wonder-goals or another penalty drama” so that “the stresses on the nation’s collective heart rate and blood pressure would be greatly alleviated!”

Think of this, though: Charles reigns over a nation, the United Kingdom, that includes Scotland and Wales, two non-English lands whose ardent soccer supporters fit comfortably into Professor Muldoon’s theory of disidentification. And who likely welcomed that the championship trophy went to “Anybody But England.”

 

O Art! (Going for the gold)

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With the Olympics’ return to Paris this summer after precisely 100 years, Pierre de Coubertin lives. Well, not really. But his imprint on the Games endures. Mostly.

What hasn’t changed is the fact that de Coubertin—the French-born aristocrat, educator and historian—was responsible for the Olympic revival in 1896, some 1,500 years after the Ancient Games disappeared, and his idealistic concept of promoting international brotherhood, however imperfect, soldiers on.

But his brainstorm of melding strong body/strong mind competitions—by adding contests in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature alongside the physical activity—has not persisted. De Coubertin died in 1937 and his Olympic art competitions were gone after the 1948 Games.

He had wanted egghead tug-of-wars as a “pentathlon of the Muses.” His plan was to award medals to the best in creativity as well as to those ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs making a muscle in pursuit of the Olympic motto: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Latin for “Higher, Faster, Stronger;” a motto suggested by de Coubertin, by the way.)

“Deprived of the aura of the Arts contests,” he reportedly declared in introducing efforts of imagination in 1912, “Olympic Games are only World Championships. From now on, [Art] will be part of each Olympiad, on a par with the athletic competitions.” It was his conviction that one doesn’t have to go into oxygen debt to produce something memorable.

So, for the 1912 Games in Stockholm, just to make sure there would be participants in the literature playoffs, de Coubertin entered his own poem, a flowery tome he called “Ode to Sport” (though he did so under two fictitious names, George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach).

It won!

O Sport (it went), pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.

Second stanza:

O Sport, you are Beauty! You are the architect of that edifice which is the human body….

And so on through seven more grandiose sections…

O Sport, you are Justice!…And O Sport, you are Audacity!….O Sport, you are Honour!….O Sport, you are Joy!….O Sport, you are Fecundity!….O Sport, you are Progress!….O Sport, you are Peace!….

O Boy!

A Russian-born American named Walter Winans, who had won Olympic gold in the long-discontinued sporting test of “running deer shooting, double shot” in 1908 and silver in “team running deer shooting, single shot” four years later, then took aim at the new arts challenge in ’12 and came away with the first-ever gold in sculpture.

No animals were injured in “team running deer shooting,” which employed a moving deer-shaped target 110 yards from the shooter. Anyway, when Winans’ took the podium to receive the medal for “American Trotter,” his bronze casting of a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot, he “waved proudly to the crowd,” according to Smithsonian magazine. A champion again.

There is no record of de Coubertin’s reaction to winning the first composition competition (and, in fact, it apparently wasn’t common knowledge that he actually was George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach until years later). So, he was involved in nothing comparable to the medal ceremony at those Games in which King Gustav of Sweden publicly declared that American Jim Thorpe—winner of both the five-event pentathlon and 10-event decathlon—was “the greatest athlete in the world.” (That’s when Thorpe reportedly responded, “Thanks, King.”)

There were 151 artistic Olympic medals awarded from 1912 to 1948, and in ’48 the British artist John Copley, at 73, may or may not have become the oldest Olympic medalist in history with a silver for his engraving titled “Polo Players.” Alas, David Wallechinsky, the crack Games historian, in his regularly updated editions of The Complete Book of the Olympics, instead cites Oscar Swahn, who was 72 when he won gold in 1908 as part of Sweden’s running deer shooting, single-shot team.

The only person to win two Olympic gold medals in art, a recent New York Times article noted, was Luxembourg’s Jean Jacoby, the 1924 winner in “mixed painting” in 1924 and 1928 champ in “drawing and water colors.” Jacoby died in 1936 but, like de Coubertin, earned a piece of immortality when his design was used on Luxembourg postage stamps for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. And his own image was featured on a Luxembourg stamp in 2016.

The only woman to win an arts gold was Finland’s Aale Maria Tynni for “lyric works” in 1948. Her poem, “Laurel of Hellas,” referenced the laurel wreath, symbol of sporting victory dating to Ancient Games in Hellas (the Greek name for Greece).

When Avery Brundage, an ardent proponent of the Olympic poohbahs’ often hypocritical “pure amateurism” edict, became IOC president in 1952, he ended Olympic arts competitions and had all their results stricken from official records, arguing that the arts entrants typically were professionals in their fields.

But if Pierre de Coubertin and his arts concept were still around now….

Think of the 1981 movie “Chariots of Fire,” which focused on the dramatic journeys of British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell toward victories in the 100 and 400 meters during the last Paris Olympics, in 1924. The film won four Academy Awards. One of those for Best Original Score by the Greek composer Vangelis.

Gold-medal Olympic art, that.

Sport’s uncertainty principle

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The thing about sports and athletes is that their performances remain entirely unscripted. Unpredictable. No guarantees. This thought occurred with reports that Jerry West, a veritable poster boy for basketball excellence, has died at 86.

In his 14 pro seasons, West was an NBA All-Star 14 times. His Los Angeles Lakers made the playoffs each of those years and West literally came to embody the entire league—for a long time, we’ve known that is his silhouette on the NBA’s official logo—reliably stupendous, especially at the most crucial moments. He was known as Mr. Clutch.

Yet he played on only one NBA championship team despite his exceptional resume. And I was there during an exceedingly rare moment—especially atypical because Newsday rarely sent me on a pro basketball assignment—when West briefly went from hoops superman to a Clark Kent disguise. A fallible human.

That was during the 1972 playoff semifinals. The Lakers, who that season had won a then-record 33 consecutive games, were struggling mightily against the Milwaukee Bucks. In the series-opening 21-point Lakers loss, West—a career 47-percent shooter; a jump-shot master—made only 4 of 19 field goals. All layups.

“Kids of any age,” he lamented after the game, “should be able to shoot better than we did”—27 percent attempts converted by the team; a mere 21 percent by West. The Lakers won the next two games, but in the fourth, West missed 14 of 23 shots (31 percent) during another loss. And with a post-game shrug, the flummoxed West, who somehow couldn’t find the hoop with a search warrant, muttered, “God heal my jump shot.”

An anomaly, that. Though quickly overcome. The Lakers wound up winning the series and the championship final against the New York Knicks. And West, by the way, had lent a vast contribution to his team’s offense with a team-leading 8.3 assists per game during the Bucks series. So it was impossible to judge him guilty of dereliction based on the unforeseen reality of his sickly jump shot.

Still, that series hardly fit the West narrative of consistent brilliance that he carried beyond his playing days to coaching and front-office work. More to the point, it was an example of what can—and occasionally does—happen in the quirky universe of sports.

When the Lakers moved to L.A. from Minneapolis, having just used their No. 1 pick in the 1960 draft on West, I was in eighth grade, living in The Valley, so that was my team. West already was a widely recognizable star, the best player on the University of West Virginia team that was 1959 NCAA tournament runner-up. (A close-but-no-cigar result that would become a recurring, frustrating experience for West.)

On our playgrounds then—and despite the fact that televised NBA games were uncommon and we were left to visualize the Lakers through the voice pictures of radio’s frenetic Chick Hearn—our models to mimic were Elgin Baylor and West.

Baylor could defy gravity, the NBA’s first aerial showman (Julius Erving before there was a Julius Erving; Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan) with a hang-in-the-air jumper. Also on the Lakers then was West’s predecessor as West Virginia hero, a guy with a more picturesque name, Hot Rod Hundley. But it was West who was the model of perfection with his unerring line-drive jump shot, his knack for rebounding, passing and octopus-arm defense. We mostly wanted to be Jerry West.

For that 1972 playoff series years later, he was 33, in his 11th season, still at his best. During the ’71-‘72 regular season, he had averaged 25.8 points and a league-leading 9.7 assists per game. So it was a bit of a shock—bewildering, really—to witness West’s transitory descent into mediocrity.

Bottom line: His jump shot quickly was healed. He finally got his championship ring. But foregone conclusions are not the point in what was his world.