This summer there has been a lot of basketball on television. Basketball is a winter game, invented so that young men could exercise indoors when the weather turned cold. And the sports pages, in the middle of baseball season, are full of stories about football (many of them, here in South Florida, having to do with quarterbacks). I'm looking forward to the start of football season in a few weeks because at least then these stories will make sense.
I try to watch the debates as I do baseball - while reading a book - but whenever there's cheering there's never a replay.
Just as one of my favorite things in tennis is the post-match greeting at the net, one of my favorite parts of a World Cup is the pre-match playing of anthems.
As the French Open nears, I wonder who is dreading the best-of-five-set men’s matches more – the players or the fans?
David Ferrer played his last professional tennis match yesterday, losing to Sascha Zverev at the Madrid Open. After the match, Ferrer was fêted for his long and successful career, despite never having won a Grand Slam title. (What happens when you play in the era of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic.) There was a video tribute, and appearances on court of family and friends, after which Ferrer was handed the microphone. Because he often lost in the quarter or semifinals, he rarely had a chance to speak in public, and I was impressed by how warm and composed and articulate he was. He had a personality, I saw, and was not just a man in shorts endlessly running down shots. And it occurred to me that, except for the champions – who on the men’s side have not been that numerous lately (see above) – fans don’t get to know the players they watch. They quietly play their matches and then disappear, and are not really heard from until they retire. And then they show the world, which is about to start missing them, what it’s been missing all along.
Angelique Kerber has been criticized for her ungracious comment to Bianca Andreescu following her loss to the young Canadian at the Miami Open, but I was impressed that an athlete whose first two languages are German and Polish speaks English well enough to know the phrase “drama queen.”