I watch World Cup soccer before going to bed and turn on Wimbledon as soon as I wake up. The two most international sports are running simultaneously for the next two weeks, filling my days with brilliance and drama.
The big story at Wimbledon was the return from retirement of Serena Williams. They put her first-round match on Centre Court, where she lost the first set – to the 20-year-old Maya Joint – won the second, and seemed poised to take the third but lost it 6-3. Walking to the net after the final point, she gave her opponent a stiff-armed handshake and a tight-lipped smile.
None of the commentators mentioned this in their post-match analysis, but social media has been rife with criticism. A good sport would have said “congratulations” or “good match” or “good luck the rest of the way”; a true champion – I think immediately of Djokovic – would have smiled, hugged, chatted and wished the youngster a long and successful career. But as always with Williams, it was all about her. She returned to the game older but no wiser.
Every soccer match produces moments of disbelief, universally expressed by the flight of both hands to the head, one on each side, often with the head titled backwards. Players, coaches, and spectators all assume this posture whenever an opportunity to score fails – even though the vast majority of opportunities to score fail. Taking one’s head in one’s hands in stunned incredulousness is the default gesture in soccer, a body language cliché that is unique in sports.
The Florida Department of Transportation has talented writers. “Camp in FLA parks,” a message on I-95 advised this spring, “not in the left lane.”
But the department needs editors. A current message reads: “Revere rode fast so you don’t have to.” Huh? Replace the “so” with an em dash and the sentence is just as strong and no longer confounding.
The Tartan Army occupied Mickey Byrne’s in Hollywood yesterday afternoon, filling the inside with their navy blue jerseys and crowding the sidewalk outside, where a line stretched in front of a small tent from which a woman in a bikini top and tight shorts dispensed bottles of beer and the occasional bucket of bottles. Her face was painted with the Scottish flag.
I asked two blondes with four tow-headed children if they were Scots from Scotland or Scots from Florida.
“I live in Scotland,” the taller one said, “but I’m originally from Poland.”
“What city?” I asked her.
“Warsaw.”
“What district?”
“Ochota.”
I told her I lived for two years off of Opaczewska Street with my wife Hania.
“My name is Hania,” she said.
I mentioned that I taught English at the English Language College
“My father taught English at the Warsaw School of Economics.”
People started singing, “No Scotland, no party.” I bumped into a man in a kilt who immediately turned around and put his arm around me. Another man in a kilt, with a shirt that read “Tartan Army Copenhagen,” stood at a table drinking beer with friends. “I’ve lived in Denmark for 40 years,” he told me. “I love it. The people, the lifestyle.”
I asked about the weather. “To be honest,” he said, “when winter comes we go to South Africa.”
I asked if he wasn’t uncomfortable in his wool kilt. “It is a bit hot,” he said. “but we get a nice breeze sometimes that cools us underneath.”
The St. Augustine Pipe band, which had come down for the day, took their places next to the tent. And soon the majestic sound of bagpipes drowned out conversations and turned Hollywood Boulevard into The Royal Mile.
I finally read “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” the New Journalism classic by Gay Talese (included in the book Literary Journalism that I picked up at Big Apple Books the other Saturday). It lived up to its billing, capturing the mercurial singer who was warm and generous to his friends and cold and unforgiving to his enemies. And, of course, the piece is full of great lines. Listening to In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Talese writes: “it was, like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac.”