Carlos Alcaraz, once again #1 in the world, is a pleasure to watch, and not just for the way he hits the ball.
Serving for the match yesterday at the U.S. Open, he had two championship points, both of which he lost. He returned to the baseline to serve at deuce, knowing that if his opponent, Jannik Sinner, won the game, the fourth set would be tied (5-5) and they would in all probability go to a tiebreaker, with Sinner holding the momentum.
Alcaraz won the next point, on an easy put-away at the net, and as he walked back for his third championship point, his face was briefly lit by a smile. I have watched a lot of tennis in my time (see the essay I posted on Friday) and I had never seen any player smile before a championship point. Bjorg, McEnroe, Agassi, Sampras, Federer and Nadal almost never smiled during matches; Djokovic does, from time to time, but never at a crucial point in a match. Alcaraz is blessed with exceptional talent and the even rarer ability to enjoy it – in the moment. He is the Say Hey Kid of tennis.
I wrote for Literary Hub about the surprising connections between writers and tennis players (just in time for the U.S Open finals): https://lithub.com/failing-better-on-the-tennis-player-and-the-writer/
The funicular accident that killed 17 people in Lisbon yesterday hit home for me. Lisbon is one of my favorite cities, the one, I always say, in which I became a travel writer. In 1989 it was the last stop on an Iberian tour that was my first assignment as a newspaper travel editor. In Madrid, Barcelona, Seville I had had the typical tourist experiences, moments that would do nothing to distinguish my story from those of other travel writers. In Lisbon, I called a friend of a friend, a poet, and spent a long evening with him and his girlfriend that ended in a dive listening to fado music. “It smells of Lisbon,” Casimiro translated one song for me, “it smells of flowers and the sea.” That night I discovered the secret of travel writing: you experience, as best you can, in the short time allotted you, the life of a local.
A few years ago I returned to Lisbon, this time with Hania, and stayed in an Airbnb just steps from the funicular.
At Archibald’s in North Beach Village on Sunday we heard three people speaking an interesting sounding language.
“Excuse me,” I asked them, “are you speaking Greek?” I lived in Greece for four months and am pretty good at identifying languages.
“Basque,” they said.
I don’t think I’d ever heard Basque spoken in South Florida. I’m not a fan of jai alai.
They said they were from San Sebastian. “That’s a beautiful city,” I said. “And you moved from San Sebastian to Fort Lauderdale?” I asked, in a tone of astonishment.
“Have you been to San Sebastian in January?” the man asked.
We found a table in the shade, next to a Fort Lauderdale lifeguard on his lunch break. Hania has a fear of sharks, so we asked him if he sees many.
No, he said. The Gulf Stream is pretty far from the beach in Fort Lauderdale, and that’s where the food is. “There’s nothing for them to eat here,” the man said confidently. “A shark who wanders in close is probably lost.”
He said the animal to be concerned about is not the shark but the Portuguese man o’ war. Its sting is powerful, and can be deadly. But there’s a season for them: November to March.
I’m going to be swimming in the ocean before November.
Saturday afternoon we drove to Coral Gables to see “Checkpoint Zoo” at the Coral Gables Art Cinema. The theater was sold out for the documentary, which tells the story of how a small band of volunteers rescued over 4,000 animals from the Feldman Eco Park outside Kharkiv after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Much of the film consists of videos made by the volunteers as they worked to save the animals, and includes shots of them taking shelter during bombardments. There is also footage of explosions in the city, apartment buildings being ripped apart. Nothing I had seen on the news captured so vividly the horror of the war.
And yet this ragtag band of young men spent the first few months of it, often cheerfully, capturing and transporting llamas, kangaroos, moose, orangutans, bears, and lions to the Kharkiv Zoo (which was not as close to the front as Eco Park was) and to the home of Oleksandr Feldman, whose love for the animals was unsurpassed. (Later we see the businessman’s depleted wine cellar, as he sold all his old bottles – as well as his art collection – to buy food to feed his menagerie.) After posting online about the park’s predicament, the group received some food and medicines from abroad, and there is an amazing scene of the veterinarian among the volunteers calmly, and successfully, delivering tranquilizers to lions and tigers through a blow gun. “I play the trumpet,” he tells a colleague nonchalantly.
Later, one of the volunteers says: “There are smart decisions. And there are right decisions.” Clearly, risking his life to save some animals fit only into the second category.
After the film, Ron Magill of Zoo Miami led a Q&A with the director Joshua Zeman. Before he asked any questions, he spoke with even more enthusiasm than usual, and with great awe, of the work of the Ukrainian volunteers. The tranquilizing scene, for instance, blew him away. At the zoo, he said, they weigh every animal to know exactly how much anesthesia to give it; at Eco Park, they were just guessing. And they got it right! “Except for that one leopard.”
He recalled the scene of the volunteer walking hand-in-hand with an orangutan. That looked like a lovely moment, Magill said, but a juvenile orangutan can rip your arm off. Clearly, he said, the animals realized that the people were helping them.
In the film, one of the volunteers says: “Humans are humans and animals are animals. But sometimes humans are like animals and animals are like humans.”
One of the problems with nationalism is that it’s indiscriminate: you support whatever and whoever is from your country, regardless of merit. At the U.S. Open, fans rally behind the American players, just as, at the French Open, all the French players get the crowd’s support.
But good and bad exist under the same flag, as this year’s U.S. Open has shown us. Last week, the Polish player Kamil Majchrzak was signing autographs after a win when a man in the crowd snatched the cap he had just signed for a young boy and stuffed it into his wife’s bag. Majchrzak, who was still signing autographs, was unaware of the petty theft, but learned about it later. He reached out to the boy and made arrangements to meet with him, at which time he gave him a new signed cap (and some other things as well).
This made me feel very good about Poles, a people I have lived among and written about. Then the news surfaced that the man who stole the boy’s cap was a Pole, a wealthy businessman. The callous act of one Pole led to the generous act of another.