That said, it was a helluva game: close to the very end, a defensive struggle for most of four quarters with some moments of running brilliance – including a heroic touchdown dash by the Heisman quarterback – a blocked punt and a game-ending interception. And the outcome salvaged Indiana's Cinderella story while doing nothing to deny the game's other narrative: the return of UM football.
This is why it’s so hard not to watch.
I had been torn over who to root for in tonight’s collage championship game. I generally go for the underdog – which is why every NFL team I was pulling for over the weekend lost – plus, I tend to support all Florida teams. Though I have a hard time with UM football, remembering their history of scandals and arrogance.
Then yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new economics of college football. “Miami has turned into one of the nation’s most aggressive aboveboard spenders,” the reporters wrote. “The Hurricanes have a payroll of about $30 million, a person familiar with the matter said, which is among the highest in the sport. That includes the $4 million spent last year to lure their star quarterback, Carson Beck…”
That not only turned me against the Hurricanes, it soured me on the whole enterprise. Indiana surely has its own, albeit smaller, payroll. Lots of things in America have gotten out of control, but few as obscenely as college sports.
Enjoy the game.
The Jan. 12th issue of The New Yorker contains an article about Pope Leo XIV that includes a short section on his time at Villanova University. I read this with interest – I was a senior there when the future pope was a freshman – and was surprised to find, in one long paragraph, two small errors. Both have to do with sports, specifically basketball, so could be seen as insignificant, but they did cause me to wonder about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department.
The author, Paul Elie, states that Villanova played its home games at “the Palestra” on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The team played some of its games at The Palestra – as did St. Joseph’s, La Salle, Temple and of course Penn – as part of Philadelphia’s celebrated Big Five. But its home games were played at the more prosaically named Field House on the school’s campus.
Elie uses this misinformation to suggest that the school’s success as a “men’s-basketball powerhouse” is a recent phenomenon. (He notes that three recent graduates now play for the Knicks; as always with New York publications, it's all about New York.) Yet in 1971, Villanova played for the national championship, losing to UCLA by six points. Hundreds of students welcomed the team home in the Field House, where forward Clarence Smith gave an emotional reading of Kipling’s If.
I sent a letter to The New Yorker, which I suspect will not be published.
This is a tough time of year for tennis fans. There are no big tournaments, or even small ones, as players take a well-deserved break from competition. Accustomed as we are to turning on the TV and finding live tennis (on the Tennis Channel, of course), we find ourselves in a kind of involuntary withdrawal.
But this year, for those of us fortunate enough to live in Fort Lauderdale, there is high-quality tennis we can watch in person, and for free. The famous Orange Bowl International Tennis Championships have moved, hopefully permanently, from their long-time home in Miami to the newly renovated Jimmy Evert Tennis Center in Holiday Park. They bring together the world’s most talented juniors, and you can stand literally inches from the court and watch the players who in a few years will be interviewed by Brett Haber and Mary Jo Fernandez. I’m off to watch them now.
Hundreds of people gathered yesterday for the dedication of the Chris Evert Stadium Court at the Jimmy Evert Tennis Center in Holiday Park. Evert - introduced by Chris Fowler as "the greatest champion ever to come out of South Florida" - said in her speech that in the early '70s six juniors from Holiday Park made it to Wimbledon.
She recalled that, when she was #1, she asked her father why he had taught all of his kids to play tennis. She expected him to say something like, "So you could see the world." Instead he replied: "To keep you off the streets." She didn't understand that, she said, until she had her own children. She added that he worked ten-hour days, every day of the year. He never took a vacation; never traveled to watch her play. (He got too nervous.)
Jimmy Evert was still teaching when we moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1989. For years I would see him and his wife Colette hitting in the evening - "the ball sailing smoothly over the middle of the net before its clean, untroublesome return - in a session that was as much a conversation, and the semblance of a marriage, as it was an exercise ritual" (from my essay "Florida Man" in the Winter 2024 issue of The American Scholar).
Saturday night’s Dodgers-Blue Jays finale was, according to many, one of the best game sevens in World Series history, which is little consolation for Toronto’s fans, in whose ranks I counted myself. It was partly the disparity in salaries; as my friend Ben Crandell, another last-minute Blue Jays fan, wrote of the Dodgers’ championship, “It couldn’t have happened to a richer bunch of guys.” And I usually pull for the underdog (one of countless things that distinguishes me from my president). Finally, I thought it would have been fitting for Canada to have the World Series trophy while Florida has the Stanley Cup.