My ode to the Miami Open - and the beauty of tennis - appears in the new issue of The Miami Native: https://www.miaminativemag.com/articles/the-subtropical-open
I learned about the death of Willie Mays last night while watching the Panthers game, and with the news a piece of my childhood died.
Willie Mays was my boyhood idol. He made me a lover of baseball (a game that I, a small nearsighted southpaw, was terrible at) and of the San Francisco Giants (an apostate in a family of Phillies fans). He made me, a small-town Jersey boy, pine for California. My dream, never realized, was to watch him play in the winsomely named Candlestick Park.
You can debate his merits as baseball’s GOAT – he excelled in every one of the five essentials: fielding, throwing, running the bases, hitting, and hitting for power – but his love for the game, and the enthusiasm with which he played it, had no equals. You could not NOT watch when he came to the plate, or got on base, or roamed centerfield in search of a fly ball. He played a boy’s game with a boyish joy, one that has all but vanished today.
Today, like many days lately, you can start your morning watching a summer game – tennis – in the afternoon switch to soccer (the first round of the Euro Cup), and then this evening watch ice hockey (the Stanley Cup playoffs, featuring, to continue the absurdity, the Florida Panthers). Here in Florida, we’re hoping for a quick end to the hockey season, a gap that will be filled by the Copa America, beginning Thursday. Of course, there’s also baseball – major league as well as college – and basketball (the WNBA). Wimbledon, to get back to tennis, begins July 1, to be followed later that month by the Summer Olympics. This could be the summer of not only record temperatures but also a record number of sporting events.
Sunday in Philadelphia, I watched the French Open men’s final with my Polish friend Agnieszka, who doesn’t follow the sport (any sport). So she needed an introduction to the players. I told her first about Alcaraz, then about Zverev, noting that he was German but ethnically Russian.
“That’s a bad combination,” she said.
It’s raining for the second straight day in Paris, which means that all but two of the courts at the French Open are covered. The temperature is in the low 60s, an improvement over the other night, when it was 10 degrees cooler and Daniil Medvedev appeared for his match in leggings. Cool and damp is fine for Welsh rugby; not so much for tennis. Especially when the moisture makes the courts unplayable. The announcers all express sympathy for the players, made to start and stop, and then wait indefinitely. And I think: Yes, yes, it must be tough for them – but what about the tourists? The people who saved for years to visit the City of Light – at the end of May! In the era of global warming! – and now find themselves huddling in doorways or sipping hot chocolate in bright cafes. Luckily, they’re in a city with decent museums.
Bally Sports, the Marlins network, is not showing their games right now because of bankruptcy proceedings. Even though the Marlins have one of the worst records in baseball this year, it annoys me that I can’t watch them on TV. It's like the old Catskills joke: “The food here is terrible," a woman complains. "And the portions are so small.”