Between the motion and the act of my tennis game falls the shadow. Translation: too much thinking.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Robinson (Edward Arlington), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged "Hollow Men", "Minniver Cheevy", E. A. Robinson, Hamlet, Marshall McLuhan, Sports, T. S. Eliot, William Gladwell, William Shakespeare |
Andy Murray and Serena Williams were warriors as they won the U.S. Open, bringing to mind poems by Robert Burns and Tony Hoagland.
Caleb Gardner’s subtle but poignant tennis poem is about more than tennis.
David Foster Wallace’s ode to Roger Federer comes the closest to capturing his beautiful game.
In the immortal words of Muhammad Ali, Roger Federer floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee as he won his 7th Wimbledon title yesterday.
Posted in Ali (Muhammad), Pope (Alexander), Shakespeare (William), Tolkien (J.R.R.) | Also tagged Alexander Pope, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Muhammad Ali, Rape of the Lock, Roger Federer, Sports, Tempest, William Shakespeare, Wimbledon |
Robert Pinsky has written a tennis poem that dispenses useful advice.
Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are like the brothers in a Dostoevsky novel or a Grimm Brothers fairy tale: the two older brothers focus on each other and then the unassuming younger brother comes in and takes over.
Posted in Aristotle, Dostoevsky (Fyodor), Ellison (Ralph), Grimm Brothers | Also tagged Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Grimm Brothers, Invisible Man, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Ralph Ellison, Roger Federer, Sports |
Abraham Verghese uses the tightly strung rackets of Swedish tennis great Bjorn Borg as a metaphor for the state of his marriage, pushed to the breaking point by his workaholism.
Did the god that made the elegant strokes of Roger Federer also make the bruising style of Nadal? Like William Blake gazing at the lamb and the tiger in “Tyger, Tyger,” we can only shake our heads bemused.
Novelist Rachel Kranz talks about trust, both in poker and novel writing. Once you have the knowledge and the skill, she says, what remains is trusting yourself.
Sports Saturday I’m still trying to process the Ghana and Brazil defeats and will write about the World Cup in the next two Friday posts. For the moment, I’ll take a breather and turn to tennis. Trust Wimbledon, the classiest of the tennis tournaments, to work poetry into the occasion. I wrote last year about [...]
John Isner Sports Saturday – “It’s incredible! You could not write a script like this!” So proclaimed the announcer in the U. S. – Algeria World Cup match when Landon Donovan netted a stoppage time goal to avoid elimination and send the Americans forward to the next round. In other words, a sports announcer’s ultimate [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Bernard Malamud, Bruce Cohen, France, Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Isner-Malmut match, Jean Paul Sartre, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Nausea, Soccer, Sports, Sports film, the Natural, Voyage to the End of the Night, W. P. Kinsella, Wimbledon, World Cup |
Sports Saturday So my tennis idol, Roger Federer, is out of the French Open. Before the semi-finals. Federer’s astounding streak of 23 straight appearances in Grand Slam semi-final matches is one of the great streaks in sports and will never be approached. (To get a sense of its magnitude, consider that Rod Laver and Ivan [...]
An exhilarating and exhausting week at Wimbledon has come to an end with an exhilarating and exhausting match between Swiss player Roger Federer and American Andy Roddick. Roddick was once my favorite player and Federer is my current favorite so I felt torn as I watched the longest match in grand slam history. It came [...]
I’m going to put off my follow-up post to Twelfth Night until Monday because I just came across an interesting article that invites a timely response. As a tennis player and fan of Roger Federer, I am still vibrating over his having won at the French Open this past Sunday. After his archrival Rafa Nadal [...]
