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.
If was a good weekend for people who like sports whose names make use of the word 'foot.' In the morning there was the World Cup; in the afternoon, on Saturday, there were some of the biggest rivalries in college football and, on Sunday, the NFL. So fans of men running up and down grass fields could move almost seamlessly from the beautiful game to the bellicose game.
Yesterday I did a drawing of a man watching the World Cup as his wife says to a friend "He says it makes him more globally aware."
And lo, this morning before the England-Iran match the English players sang, for the first time in seven decades, God Save the King, while none of the Iranian players mouthed a word of their national anthem.
That sound you hear out of Philadelphia this morning is of thousands of people taking off their Phillies gear and putting on their Eagles jerseys.