Yesterday saw the convergence of my favorite sports. In the afternoon I moved from the Miami Open (Gauff vs. Muchova) to the World Cup qualifying match from Warsaw (Poland vs. Albania); in the evening, I switched among opening day in Los Angeles (the late afternoon light in Dodger Stadium is just as beautiful now that it is Uniqlo Field), the Miami Open again (Sabalenka vs. Rybakina – the Ali-Frazier of the WTA) and March Madness (Purdue beating Texas on a last-second tip-in). And today there’s more of the same, minus the soccer. Though unless I subscribe to Marlins.TV, for $99.99 a season, I won’t be able to watch my hometown team.
Because of the washout on Wednesday, the Miami Open was packed on Thursday. People who should have been at work (there were few seniors there) watching people hit a ball for work. They hit it so hard that it’s difficult to comprehend how it stays in the court and how anyone can get to it and hit it back. And yet, on the practice courts, the top players’ hitting partners do it with ease. As an old partner of mine once said, watching some juniors play in Holiday Park, “It makes you want to take up bocce.”
I’ve been going to the Open for three decades now and, while my fascination hasn’t diminished – especially as the athleticism has increased – my enthusiasm has. The people swarming the practice courts trying to get a ball signed by Sinner or Alcaraz, just as they used to for Federer and Nadal, and before them Agassi and Sampras – all because of how well they can hit a ball over a net – seem silly and misguided. Many of them play tennis too, and know how difficult it is, which fuels their admiration. But on the global stage, athletes play a very small role. They show us the value of hard work (and good genes), and the beautiful pursuit of excellence, which gives us a lovely, perhaps inspiring diversion. But in the end – no matter how serious they look on those practice courts – they’re doing nothing more substantial than playing a game.
In January, after waking up, I turned on the TV to catch late-night matches at the Australian Open. Mornings last month I watched Olympic skiers racing down mountains in the Italian Alps. Currently to accompany breakfast I have World Baseball Classic games from Japan, often featuring the greatest player who ever lived. Games from San Juan, Miami, and Houston are shown in the afternoon and evening, when they compete with college basketball (professional, too, if you’re into that) and tennis (the BNP Paribas Open from Indian Wells). For a child of the ‘60s – who had sports only on Saturdays (on a black-and-white TV) – it’s a beautiful thing. Though it can make it hard to get any work done.
Bud Collins’ widow posted the other day that it was the 10th anniversary of her husband’s death. People who follow tennis remember Bud as the man with the colorful pants, yet he was sweet and unassuming; he let his knowledge of the game (he wrote the Tennis Encyclopedia) and his loud trousers do all the talking. When I was at the Sun-Sentinel he’d send me travel stories he would write while driving to tournaments (that spring-summer migration from Rome to Paris to London) and then, every March, he’d get me a one-day press pass for the Miami Open (in those days it had a corporate name) and I’d join him and his wife Anita in the media center. Watching matches with Bud – a man who had watched thousands of matches – I always wondered what he was seeing that I wasn’t. Yet more impressive than his vast knowledge of the sport was the fact that he called everyone in the cafeteria by their name.
I felt a little sad this morning turning on the TV and not seeing people doing remarkable things in snow and on ice. I watched quite a bit of the Olympics, was cheered by many of the stories (Liu, Shiffrin) and thrilled by both the men’s and the women’s ice hockey finals. Because of the Panthers, I was familiar with a number of the male players, and thought of Seinfeld’s old observation that, watching sports, we’re really just rooting for a jersey. The American team, we were told, really doesn’t like the Canadian team – and vice versa – yet Marchand and Reinhart and Bennett (who received a penalty for high-sticking an American player and drawing blood) – will be BFFs with Tkachuk on Thursday when they all wear the image of a cat on their shirts.
Speaking of which, Canada not only was the better team yesterday, they wore the prettier uniforms.
I watched some of the U.S.-Latvia hockey game yesterday and found myself partly pulling for Latvia. When I visited the country in 2001, I learned that ice hockey is to Latvia what soccer is to Brazil. One young woman told me that when Latvia beat Russia in the World Championship in 2000, hundreds of joyous Latvians marched to the Russian embassy in Riga and laid a wreath outside the gate.
Considering what’s happening in this country now, they could lay a wreath – unironically – outside the U.S. embassy.