When you really think about it, the whole notion that we shouldn’t get free refills is built on the idea that there isn’t enough beverage to go around. That if you have free refills, you might drink enough that other people won’t get any at all. That’s silly. The abundance of beverage is so well known, so evident, and so important that you can find it in the text of holy books. “My cup runneth over,” it says. You know what? All of our cups should runneth over.
Our mugs, anyway.
A couple of very interesting pieces about struggle over at TTW this week. You should check them out.
Back at the end of June, when the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision on gay marriage came down, I wrote of Antonin Scalia, “Either he is the worst kind of intellectual coward or else he is simply hideous.” Now, upon his death, I back away from that statement not at all. I believe history will judge him harshly, an embodiment of a backward time.
When I opened up the New York Times homepage Saturday afternoon and saw the news of his death, my first reaction was, “Oh my goodness. Game on.” It has been no surprise at all that the Republicans, who have asserted ad nauseum that Obama runs roughshod over the Constitution, have already publicly thrown down the gauntlet by insisting that they will do everything in their power to deny the current president his constitutional right to appoint Scalia’s successor. Shall I take a moment to point out that today we are still nine months from the election and almost a year from the start of the next administration? It’s never about principles in Washington. It’s always just politics.
For all its extreme nastiness, there’s been something kind of abstract about the presidential campaign thus far. It’s felt a little bit as though the campaign were a wargame, with dice and cards and plastic game markers and a gameboard that’s a map of the United States, played by people who hate each other.
But now Scalia has died and things just got very, very real. “Game on?” Wrong analogy. Far more accurate to call it the start of a war.
A piece from Jerry about how we learn to struggle, and a piece about a ski student of mine entitled, On Struggle, Flow and the Athletic Model: A Case Study.
Does confirmation of what we already knew constitute new information? The polls indicated that Trump and Sanders would win in New Hampshire, and they did. Has anything changed or genuinely become more clear?
I think a growing clarity is emerging about the major theme of the race so far. Yesterday’s results amplify something we perhaps finally started to understand after Iowa, where Sanders essentially tied Hillary, and Cruz and Trump together won about 50% of the vote: a substantial percentage, bordering on a majority, of Americans, irrespective of party affiliation, see the critical problem facing the country as the built into the system itself. The surprise success of the candidacies of Sanders, Trump and Cruz all point to an active distrust and disavowal of the establishment.
At this point, it seems we face two possible outcomes.
The first is that the presidency stays as our focus, one of the people running wins, and everything else stays the same. In that scenario, what can possibly happen but the further devolution of our country’s political system? What can happen but a further hastening of the partisan death-spiral that began in the ’90s when the GOP decided that Perot’s effect on the vote completely delegitimized the Clinton presidency and then did everything in their power to destroy it? For I see no good outcome from a general election in which any of our four current front-runners win. Trump is a bully and a demagogue, Cruz is insane, Clinton is absolutely loathed by half the country, and Sanders is so far to the left of most of the country that one has to imagine almost literal open warfare between a Sanders White House and the House.
And let’s face it, the above is the most likely scenario. The race for the presidency will consume everyone’s attention, someone will win the election, everyone on the other side will hate him/her, and things will get worse than they are now.
But if, instead, we are somehow able to realize that the driving motivation for an across-the-spectrum near-or-actual-majority of voters is that the problem with our government is built into the system itself, and we are somehow able to use this understanding and the momentum that’s building up around these outsider candidacies to create a pan-political movement around serious campaign-finance and electoral reform–up to and including amending the Constitution, if that’s what it takes–then we as a nation might still have a chance.
The presidency is a sideshow right now, and like every sideshow the carnies and freaks and grotesqueries sure attract the attention. We’re going to get nowhere if we let that noise draw all of our energy and we avoid the harder work of dealing with problems that lack the can’t-look-away fascination offered by the Combover Man, the Beady-Eyed Madman, the Ice Queen, and the Cantankerous Old Dude battling for the most powerful office in the world. Meanwhile America has become a shell of itself, half oligarchy and half plutocracy, as politicians, electorally safe in their gerrymandered fiefdoms, vie for the money of special interests who have few fetters in using their wealth to control as much of the world as they can. We face real problems. Without tackling our system’s enormous deficiencies, it’s hopeless to imagine that we’ll even begin to solve them.
If you buy the media’s view, a football game is mostly a battle between the two quarterbacks, and so from that perspective it would be easy to see yesterday’s Super Bowl result as the boring old white guy beating the charismatic young black guy, and that narrative might make a sports fan some degree of sad.
Because let us reflect for a moment on just how boring he was. He was so boring it was almost fascinating. Think back to the post-game interview. He had just won the Super Bowl, the capstone and possibly the final punctuation on a remarkable career, and it was like Tracy Wolfson had asked his opinion about a moderately thought-provoking but deeply flawed book he’d just read and he was giving a carefully measured opinion. It was easier for him to shill for Budweiser than it was to seem like he was thrilled at being involved in the game, much less having played on the winning side. This isn’t a time for passion or excitement, he seemed to be saying. This is a time for corporations to make money.
But I think any real focus on the boring white guy is to miss the better story. The boring old white guy played in such a way as to minimize his own mistakes. That is boring. It is not worthy of anything we describe as Super.
Let us tell a different story. There was something genuinely Super to behold. If we need synecdoche to describe and personalize the conflict, let’s do it like this: the freakishly gifted and charismatic young black man wearing number 1 on his black jersey battling, and ultimately being bested by, not a boring old white guy, but instead, another freakishly gifted, charismatic young black man. This man’s jersey bore the number 58.
As always on Friday, a new piece is up on Training Tiger Woods. You should go read it. And then you should go here, because everybody loves Mango.
As with yesterday’s piece, this goes out to Michael and Jeff. Hope you enjoy, fellas.
While keeping in mind that what I said about the Australian being a weird tournament still holds true, and thus it may be perilous to draw conclusions about the entire year-to-come:
5. Roger Federer. Against Djokovic, particularly when hitting backhand to backhand, Federer finally looked truly past his prime, unable to match either Djokovic’s power or movement. He got pummeled in the first two sets. He played brilliantly to win the third, but at the same time there was a sense that Djokovic’s attention had wandered somewhat, that Roger could continue playing at that level and so long as Djokovic refocused, Djokovic would win the fourth set. And that’s basically what happened.
Roger’s game remains the most beautiful in tennis, but he’s six years older than Djokovic and Murray and four years older than Wawrinka. They’re all at their peak, and he is clearly in decline. He won’t win another Slam without the help of major upsets elsewhere in the draw. He says that he keeps playing because he loves tennis, but I wonder, how long will it still be fun when he simply no longer has the physical skills to compete against the best when they’re playing their best? He’s apparently happy being third-best player in the world. How about the sixth? The sixteenth?
6. Andy Murray. The Derp King of tennis. I described the way he mutters to himself between points when things aren’t going well as “psychotic” until I thought “schizophrenic” might be more accurate. I mean, tell me you can’t imagine that face and bearing on a homeless dude, pushing a shopping cart and wearing socks for gloves.
Initially, I didn’t care for Murray, but I’ve come to really enjoy his touch and imagination. He’s a fighter, too. But he lives within his head sometimes and it gets in the way of his play.
7. Djokovic. Somehow, he’s still getting better. He hit shots in this tournament that I would literally describe as impossible had I not seen him do it. He played a terrible match against Gilles Simon in the round of 16, hitting 100 unforced errors, and still won. Really think about that. He gave away twenty points per set and still won, against the 15th-ranked player in the world. That’s simply amazing.
But despite his best still getting better, I think I saw chinks in the armor in this tournament. He walloped Federer for two sets and Murray in the first, and while it’s clear that both men elevated their games in the the subsequent sets, it seemed, too, that Djokovic let off the gas a little. Indeed, had Murray had the presence of mind to challenge a clear fault on Djokovic’s serve at 30-40 6-5 in the second set, what would have been Djokovic’s fifth-straight fault, Murray would have had a second-serve break point chance to force the tiebreaker. With a little good luck, he then levels the match at a set apiece. Sure, it didn’t work out that way, but you see Djokovic hit five straight faults in a crucial game and you can’t help wondering if Djokovic’s previously impervious-to-everything mental game is beginning to show a few cracks.
The tour is too long for anyone to be one-hundred-percent focused all the time. Trying to maintain that level of intensity would lead anyone to burnout. If you think back to last year, Djokovic occasionally lost matches that weren’t deeply important. He lost to Federer in the finals of Cincinnati, but won in the Open two weeks later. He lost to Federer in the round-robin of the Tour Finals, but won in the finals.
It’s well known that Djokovic wants more than anything to complete his career Grand Slam by finally winning the French Open. I wonder: if he wins there, does the need for a little mental relief, plus the signs we saw here that his attention is flagging, mean that he can’t quite be at 100% at Wimbledon a month later? At the Olympics, a month after that? At the U.S. Open just a few weeks later still? As great as he clearly is, there comes a point when he simply has to let down. It will be fascinating to see when that happens.
This one goes out to my friends Jeff and Michael, who tell me they really enjoy reading my writing about sports, which certainly inspires me. Thanks, guys.
The Australian Open is kind of a weird tournament. The main tennis season ends in early November with the WTA and ATP finals. After the tour finals, some players play events like World Team Tennis and the like to make a few bucks during what amounts to the off-season, matches that are all but exhibitions and don’t count for much. And some players just go home and take some time off from competition.
When the new season starts at the beginning of January, almost everyone plays exactly one warm-up tournament, be it Brisbane or Sydney or Doha, before going to Melbourne to compete in the first Major of the year. You see odd situations and uncertain mental states. There’s a wobbliness to a lot of the play. And so you get some results that wouldn’t make much sense if it was March and everyone had been playing for a couple of months. Consider: this year on the women’s side, eight of the top sixteen seeds lost in the third round or earlier. Twelve of the top thirty-two didn’t even make it past the first round.
Maria Sharapova. After what Serena did to Maria in the semis at last year’s Wimbledon–a 6-2 6-4 thrashing in which Maria’s second serve was to Serena what a Home Run Derby pitch is to a baseball slugger–and after Maria served beautifully against Belinda Bencic to win 7-5 7-5 in the round of 16, one hoped that maybe in this quarterfinal we’d finally see the battle that, on paper, Serena-Maria should provide but basically never does–going in, Serena led the head-to-head 18-2, with seventeen straight wins. But it was pretty quickly evident that whatever changes Maria had made to her game and whatever confidence she carried with her out of the Bencic match didn’t carry over once she stepped onto the court with Serena. It’s pretty clear that she is literally afraid of Serena, which, well, after seventeen straight losses, I guess you could consider well earned.
After the Wimbledon match, I said semi-seriously that Maria should start second-serving underhand, trying to drop balls just over the net with very little bounce. It might not look pretty, but at least it would limit the options Serena has in response. A high-bouncing short ball, which exactly describes a Sharapova topspin second serve, is, as we already discussed, Home Run Derby for Serena.
I looked over the match stats on the official Australian Open website, and it said that Serena only had three return winners in the entire match. It’s hard for me to fight with data, but that’s not how I remember it at all. I remember ball after ball coming right back down Maria’s throat.
I have to wonder: might it not be better for Maria to hit two first serves, which, yes, risks additional double faults, but at least creates favorable conditions when she actually gets into a point? If Maria ever wants to be more than the pretty blonde girl who, in this racist world of ours, makes more money off-court than Serena–if she wants to be a champion tennis player again–then she’s going to have to take some risks with her game.
Angelique Kerber. Gotta hand it to her. Kerber was playing her first Grand Slam final, against probably the greatest player of all time, who had to that point rolled through the draw like an eighteen-wheeler through a field of carefully folded origami kittens, and Kerber came out playing to win. And she did. While Kerber’s clearly no match for Serena when Serena’s playing at the top of her game, well, no one else is either. The best anyone can do against Serena is play her best and hope that Serena succumbs to the stress, which she has shown time and again that she is capable of. Serena did, and Kerber took advantage. Congratulations to her.
Serena. Looking back, I realize that I was subtly rooting against Serena at the U.S. Open. The reason was nothing personal. I just got sick of all the fucking media hype around the goddamn Grand Slam. American parochial triumphalism wears me out sometimes.
And I had to own that I was half-rooting against Serena for the same reason here. That if she won, there would be endless talk about, “Will she do in 2016 what she almost managed in 2015?” Especially if, as seemed likely after her first six rounds here, she demolished Kerber like she’d done to everyone else and lifted the trophy without dropping a set and (it sometimes seemed) barely breaking a sweat.
But she came out nervous and stressed against a player with nothing to lose, a strong desire to win, and the strategic mind to put together a game plan that would give her a shot. And that was all Kerber needed.
I don’t think I’m likely to root against Serena again. I’m finding that the more I watch her, the more I like her. It’s not especially because she’s an astonishing athlete, which my oh my is she. It’s because, though she always looks and usually plays like a superhero, she’s so incredibly human. Despite just rolling through the tournament, and despite facing an opponent whom she’s capable of defeating easily, she was nervous and tight and she lost.
The best moment of the tournament happened after the last ball was hit. Kerber fell to the court in tears. Serena was surely gutted at having lost, and no one would have questioned had she simply waited at the net to shake hands as is traditional, but she didn’t wait. She came around the net and gave Kerber a congratulatory hug. Her graciousness and warmth to her competitor were clearly honest and unforced. There are at least 18,000 reasons why Serena should be a pretty terrible person at this point, the way a weird successful famous life can warp someone. It would surprise no one were she the Kanye West of tennis. But it seems the opposite is true. She appears to be a genuinely good person. I hope to meet her someday.
And now any potential hype about “2016 Grand Slam?” is over. Though there is still all the talk about equaling and then surpassing Steffi Graf’s record of 22 Grand Slam wins, and though it’s clear that Serena feels that pressure, short of some unlikely accident like a satellite falling on her, she will win a few more Slams. At 34, she’s still far and away the best player on the tour. None of the current crop of top players are going to get much better than they already are, and the promising players of the next generation (particularly Bencic, Keys and Muguruza) are still too green to offer consistent competition. It won’t surprise me at all if Serena wins the three remaining Slams of 2016.
After a campaign that’s so far lasted eight million days, in which over the course of 550 televised debates the 139 Republican candidates have yelled furiously at each other while simultaneously blaming everything that’s ever happened or will ever happen on Barack Obama, in Iowa on Monday night actual voters caucused, and all of the sudden we moved beyond the realm of obsessive media speculation into actual important stuff actually happening. The results from Iowa were pretty fascinating, don’t you think? I’m gonna throw in my two cents.
The analyses I’ve read today want to claim that what happened is a terrible loss for Trump, but I’m not persuaded that Cruz’s 27% to Trump’s 24% is that big a deal. We already knew that Cruz had a sharp lead among Iowa’s sizable evangelical conservative population. What else were we expecting? This narrow win for Cruz hardly presages Trump’s collapse. Should Trump underperform in New Hampshire, it’s a different story, but it’s much too early to either anoint Cruz champion or compose dark threnodies for Trump’s campaign. And I don’t even know what to say about Rubio’s showing. “Congratulations?”
On the Democratic side, Hillary’s coronation has been put completely on hold. Sanders went from barely registering in the polls to forcing essentially a tie in a state that structurally should have belonged to Hillary. With Sanders apparently holding a big lead in the polls in New Hampshire, we might have a very different narrative about this race after next Tuesday’s primary.
I admit there’s nothing in the above analysis that you couldn’t read somewhere else (though doubtless my elegant sentences and interesting word usements delight and astonish). So I will assert this: what is most fascinating about this race is that in this first caucus, fifty percent of the vote on both sides went to candidates who are widely considered too ideologically extreme to have any chance in the general election. But after yesterday’s results it can no longer be considered an impossibility that we end up with Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee and Sanders as the Democrat, and should that happen, well, someone has to win the general election.
The popular (and, I think, correct) narrative explaining the appeal of both Sanders and Trump (a narrative fits Cruz less well) is that they both appear as outsiders to the current egregiously corrupt status quo. While Trump’s bonafides as defender of the little guy seem, ahem, questionable, it’s hardly for me to question Republican primary voters on what’s motivating their choice, and apparently the common description that his fans offer about him is that “he’s his own person.” Which is actually kind of hard to deny. Given that every single pundit or even halfway informed commentator (including myself) figured that his unscripted intemperance would lead to his downfall and has been proved wrong, well, certainly it genuinely appears that a substantial percentage of voters value his willingness to speak his mind, irrespective of little things like appropriateness and facts. On the other side of the spectrum, Sanders is a self-described socialist who whole candidacy is predicated on responding to the vast gulf of inequality our country currently is laboring under.
(I’m sure you’ve read the same pieces I have about Bloomberg possibly stepping into the vacant political center. He has both experience, as well as the financial resources to bankroll his own run. Here it is worth asking if a plutocrat attempting to claim the middle of the political spectrum is really the answer to what increasingly seems to be the key narrative of this election. Do Bloomberg and his billions really represent the way forward when dealing with a polity that feels disenfranchised by the concentration of wealth and power in our country?) (Never mind that it’s perplexing that billionaire Trump has managed to find a way to fit into this same narrative.)
For those of us who see the shocking concentration of wealth and power (since Citizens United, ever-more-increasingly the same thing) as the most important issue facing our country, and for those of us who understand that this isn’t a partisan problem but corrupts the entirety of our political process and political institutions, that it appears that dismay/disgust with this development has become a (the?) motivating issue for a substantial percentage of voters on both sides of the political divide can only be welcome. Now is the time to act and act boldly. No president, irrespective of party, is going to make a lick of difference in this regard until there’s broad enough electoral reform that Congress’ corruption truly begins to get addressed, and nothing is going to change a system that benefits the rich and powerful but a groundswell of people from across the political spectrum forcing that change. It is the only way.
We’re seeing in Iowa results that would have seemed unthinkable a few months ago. If we’re bold, this year we can cross the divide and work together to solve the structural problems that are corroding our political system to the point of collapse. We could be on the cusp of major change. Let’s not let the silly pageantry of the presidential election keep us from addressing the root causes of our political displeasure.