Sunday evening I settled down to watch the Australian Open on ESPN, the first grand slam since the U.S. Open in September. The first match featured Coco Gauff, the next, Rafael Nadal. Because men’s matches at grand slams are best-of-five, I went to bed long before the end of the second match, but waking up the next morning I saw that Nadal had won.
I also saw the Gauff match again, as it was being replayed on the Tennis Channel. Instead of giving us matches that were played while most of us were asleep, someone had the brilliant idea to show us matches we had seen before we hit the sack. It was followed by the Nadal match.
In the afternoon, I turned on ESPN (2 I think) and found that they had retaken coverage of the tournament, in the form of replays of course, since it was the middle of the night in Australia. And there on the court was a familiar face: Coco Gauff. She was followed by Señor Nadal.
Last night, hoping to watch a new day of matches, a new set of players, I couldn’t find any. ESPN was showing the Buccaneers-Cowboys game, even though it was also available on ABC. And, apparently because of the unique rights ESPN has to the Open, the Tennis Channel was not only not showing live matches, it was not televising replays, at least not of the Open. (It showed instead a match from Indian Wells, featuring – perhaps you guessed it – Rafael Nadal.) It seems to me that if one station buys rights to a tournament they should show it – every day of it – and if they decide that something is more important, like an NFL playoff game, they should let another station televise it while their attention is elsewhere. It shows the low priority tennis has in this country.
Saturday I got bounced from a bar for the first time in my life.
It was mid-afternoon, Hania and I had just checked into the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach, and I headed down to the Blue Anchor to watch the second half of the England-France match. The pub, whose exterior was imported from a pub in London, seemed the perfect place to watch the quarterfinal match.
As expected, the inside was packed with passionate fans, all of them cheering for England. I walked past a tall, thin man at the entrance and found a spot near the bar. Shortly, the tall, thin man came over and gruffly told me I was blocking the lane, which constituted a fire hazard. I asked if I could stand by the door where he had been standing. He said I could.
After a few seconds in my new spot I was approached by the tall, thin man again who asked even more gruffly if I was going to buy a drink like everyone else. This seemed an odd question from someone who had just chased me away from the bar. I explained that I had just arrived, and in fact was thinking of buying a beer, but now that he was being so rude about it I had begun to think I might not.
“OK, you’re outta here,” he said, and physically forced me out the door. As I stood on the sidewalk, stunned, he called me “rude” and asked if I were from New York.
France went on to win the match, to my great satisfaction (even though I had begun the day as a fan of England). Though it didn’t match my satisfaction at having gotten thrown out of a bar at the age of 70.
Nick Bollettieri, whose academy in Bradenton, FL, trained some of America’s greatest tennis players, died the other day at the age of 91.
One summer in the ’90s I spent a weekend at his academy for the purpose of writing a travel story for the Sun-Sentinel. He had opened it up to weekend players like myself, with teachers overseeing a seemingly endless succession of drills. Bollettieri was a former Marine and much of his method was based on training and attitude. His goal was not to turn out graceful players but to produce winners, which he did with astounding regularity. The red-stained sneakers that Andre Agassi wore to win his first French Open were proudly displayed in a glass case.
On Sunday, during one of the drills, my calf muscle cramped and I had to bow out. So to all his other accomplishments, Nick Bollettieri could add the fact that he gave me my first leg cramp.
We’ve all heard about the persecution of gays in Qatar – and the threat by European teams at the World Cup to have their captains wear armbands bringing attention to it. A letter in the Spectator last week noted that another persecuted group in the country is Christians. According to the letter writer, the watch group Open Doors has Qatar at #18 on its list of countries where Christians are persecuted, one notch below China. He then goes on to suggest that, along with rainbow armbands, the players could wear those with crosses.
Watching Christian Pulisic score a goal for the United States yesterday – which turned out to be the only goal of the match, sending the team to the next round (and Pulisic out of the game with an abdominal injury) – I thought that here was an argument for young Americans to take up soccer: It is a game that allows you to become a national hero like no other. In baseball, football, basketball, you can be admired around the country (see: LeBron James) but you are a hero only to a city (like Bryce Harper now is to Philadelphia) or at best a region (as Tom Brady once was to New England). There is no international stage for your heroics. (For basketball players, the Olympics pale in importance to an NBA championship.) When they put on their national uniforms, players like Messi, Ronaldo, Kane, and Lewandowski carry the hopes and dreams of their countrymen in a way that’s unknown to American athletes. It is the global aspect of the World Cup that makes it so epic, and its stars like homegrown gods.