I don’t like being idle, even when sick, so over the last week I’ve come up with a plan that, if implemented, would put an end to concussions in football.
Surfing the sports channels, I’ve noticed that there is very often a football game being shown, even though this is not football season. They are reruns, of course, almost always of college games, but people must be watching them. And there have to be thousands of such games preserved – on both the college and professional levels – that could fill this season and many more to come. So that’s my proposal: Instead of playing new games, with more career-ending and life-impairing injuries, we content ourselves with the old games, a good number of which, as we all know, are classics. This way Americans would get to watch their favorite sport and nobody, absolutely nobody would get hurt.
The Marlins continue to amaze. Last Thursday I went to see them play Cincinnati, not expecting much, as they had just flown in from Texas after scoring a team record 22 runs. They beat the Reds 4-1 and went on to almost sweep them in four. Monday night they broke up the Nationals Gio Gonzalez's no-hitter in the ninth and had a chance to win the game thanks to fine performances by their own pitchers against the division leader. Last night, after receiving news that two of their injured teammates will be gone for the season, they got behind 6-0 to the Nationals and came back and beat them 7-6.
They are doing all of this with a depleted pitching staff and key starters on the DL. It would seem at this point in the season that they have nothing to play for, yet they have quietly climbed into second place. No team in baseball looks forward to playing them. Their resiliency is remarkable; they are giving nightly lessons in the art of overcoming adversity. And all the local sports media can talk about is Dolphins’ camp.
El Clasico, the match between Real Madrid and Barcelona, takes place tomorrow at 3 pm at Hard Rock Stadium. So in the heat of the day, in the middle of the summer, men whose sport consists of almost constant running will play outdoors in a city where the local baseball players, who spend most of their time on the field standing around, demand air-conditioning under a closed roof.
I wonder how many promoters are desperately trying to put together a John McEnroe-Serena Williams post-pregnancy match.
My favorite parts of the tournament were the moments of male compassion – del Potro consoling the sobbing, injured Almagro; Zeballos carrying into the locker room the gear of the likewise incapacitated Goffin – and the women’s semi-final matches as both tattooed ladies went down in defeat. Unfortunately, the victors in both those matches had chosen for the tournament the exact same outfit of white tennis dress with blue-and-green trim. This meant that the final would be played by look-a-likes, since athlete superstitiousness always supersedes fashion embarrassment.
That final was a little disappointing to me as I thought that, of the two, Ostapenko – who had just turned 20 – would have been less devastated by defeat. Halep had already lost one French Open final – to the now shunned Sharapova – and was, at 25, on the cusp of tennis middle age. And, in the hours after her victory, Ostapenko proved a little annoying by answering pretty much every question any interviewer asked her with: “Yes, I’m just so happy, I still can’t believe I won Roland Garros.” Perhaps she was so happy she no longer understood English. (Though, barely out of teenagerdom, she speaks it better than Nadal.) But this is what happens when twenty-year-olds win Grand Slams.
I had mixed feelings about the men’s semi-finals. I was delighted to see Wawrinka take down the thick-legged, malcontent Murray, a man whose black shoes and ankle braces, combined with his cloddish gait between points, always make him look like he’s playing in construction boots. But I wanted Thiem to rise up, as he had in Rome, and conquer Nadal. Or at least win a set.
I barely watched the final. But I take my hat off to Nadal’s team, which seems to have had some success in getting him, from time to time, to pick at his pocket instead of his underpants.