Happy equinox. A lot’s happening on Free Refills today.
We’re changing the way we approach daily publishing. The Monday-through-Friday pieces that you love and rely on are now officially known as Daily Refills. (This piece right here is the inaugural Daily Refill.) You can find your Daily Refill at dailyrefill.freerefills.net. For the foreseeable future, the Daily Refill will be published on the homepage as well, but we’ve got big plans for changes to the homepage this season, so if you find yourself looking for just the daily pieces, the above URL is the place to look.
New rules go into effect today. You can find the rules here. Within the rules you’ll find a more complete explanation of what to expect from your Daily Refill.
And perhaps most exciting, Jerry and I are launching a new project called Training Tiger Woods. Click on that link for the whole scoop.
Today is summer-transitioning-into-fall. Let’s go back a season to a story from spring-transitioning-into-summer.
June 15, 2015
Marie and I decided that for our day’s adventure, we’d head up I-80 along the Columbia River toward Hood River. We discussed several hikes we might take, and Marie suggested we go to Punch Bowl Falls. She warned me there’d be a lot of people there, but that its popularity was warranted: the hike is quite lovely, not especially challenging, and has a beautiful destination. Given that part of our plan for the day was to have enough time to find our way to a brewery for a few beers, a modest hike seemed to fit the bill perfectly.
It really was a lovely hike. As Marie promised/warned, we saw many people. It was the first Monday of summer vacation for Portland schools, and it was pretty clear that it was a well-known hike among local high school and college kids, given its modest difficulty, its easy access from Portland, and that it’s a fun place spend an afternoon.
Here’s a picture of Punch Bowl Falls:
Here’s a picture of the back cover of Styx’s 1973 album Styx II:
The water of Eagle Creek was very cold as Marie and I waded out carefully among the slick stones. We sat on a boulder and chatted. Around us, people in swimsuits dipped in the cold water.
Nearby, a group of six or seven girls–late high school, maybe early college–stripped out of their hiking clothes into their bikinis beneath. Marie and I watched their tentative movements, their obvious awareness of the implications of those bikinis, the girls self-consciously not quite comfortable with the bodies they found themselves in, still rather new to them at their age. It was kind of sweet, really.
Marie decided to head back to shore. “I’m going to stay here and sit for a bit,” I told her. “I’d like to experience the energy here.” The little canyon had a lovely energy, not overwhelmed by the presence of all the people nearby. The falls poured down maybe 50 yards upriver, and the creek had undercut the cliff face near where I sat, creating a concave space in the rock that held and contained the energy there. After Marie moved away I got into as comfortable and centered a position as I could and breathed consciously and let the feeling of the place wash over me.
Around me, people did what they were doing. I didn’t attach to their conversations or motions, just letting myself be in that place without too much judgment or narrative around it. After a while I felt I was done. I walked out of the stream, we put our shoes on, and we hiked back to the car.
Marie remembered a brewery not much further up I-80, on the bank of the Columbia River. We went there, got a couple of beers, and sat at a table outside, enjoying the sunny day and the river flowing mightily by.
“By the way,” Marie said. “I took a picture that was supposed to just be you sitting on the rock in the river.”
We call this picture, “Ben Attains a Certain Enlightenment.” Ben attains a certain enlightenment.
(Want to read more about Punch Bowl Falls, including that “it’s quite possibly the most photographed waterfall in the entire Pacific Northwest?” Click here.)
One of the goals of Free Refills–I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting this–is to grow the audience for my writing. Of course I recognize that a lot of that is on me. When I did research for my reflections on my pageview statistics, it was clear that there were bumps in pageviews on days when I actually made an effort to share the writing. Clearly I need to get off my butt and do regular promotion.
As I mentioned in that same piece, while there have been bumps, there’s been no real upward trend in pageviews, leading me to conclude, “There hasn’t been much in the way of word-of-mouth.” Word-of-mouth is clearly a major driver (perhaps the major driver) of audience eyeballs to online offerings, so developing it would certainly help with my goal.
Now, I know there are regular readers of this thing. That leads me to a bold and visionary idea: instead of trying to infer what generates word-of-mouth, or doing a long and convoluted series of experimental posts and then abstruse statistical analyses on my page analytics, I could simply ask you, Gentle Readers, for a little help.
So I’m asking. I’d love to get some comments here. If you’ve been sharing your Free Refills with other people: What types of pieces inspire you to share? And what kind of feedback, if any, do you get from those you share with?
And if you’re not sharing: What kinds of writings would you like to see? What would inspire you to tell someone, “Hey, you should totally read this?”
Rarely will you see a Free Refills title quite like this. Please savor the moment.
My initial intent, unsurprisingly, was to write about Serena for publication on Monday and about Federer-Djokovic for publication on Tuesday. That way I would have kept all of my U.S. Open-related tennis writing topical. Generally when it comes to sportswriting, if you’re not writing about something that just happened, you might as well be writing about something from the last century. E.g.:
“Thursday, September 6th, 1924, dawned cool and sunny over the New York Metropolitan area. It looked to be a pleasant but unremarkable late-summer day. No one waking up that morning would have expected that the quarterfinal match between E. Bartlett Witherspoon and Lucius Grimsby III would go down in history as one of the classic matches of all time. Witherspoon, elegantly tall, mustachioed, aristocratic in both mien and strategy, seemed unlikely to beat the upstart power game presented by Grimsby, whose new-technology maple racquet threatened to obviate the tactics of an entire generation of tennis players.”
Et cetera.
But I struggled to turn the zero-draft about Serena into a piece about Serena–sometimes I really envy people who have deadlines and get paid and stuff–so I let it become three pieces, and here it is Friday and I haven’t published anything at all about Federer-Djokovic, which is (to me) criminal, because it was an absolute classic tennis match.
However, the difficulty I ran into has created an interesting opportunity. Federer-Djokovic was a fascinating tennis match, but from the perspective of energy flow and dynamics, it was a complete master class. I’m pretty obsessed with tennis right now, but it’s the practice of energy dynamics that’s over the past year changed, well, pretty much everything about my understanding of how life actually works, and so Fed-Djoker remains worth writing about even as the match itself moves further and further into the past. What about the match still bears talking about a week, or two, or a month after the fact? With a little luck and some hard work, I aim to successfully answer that question.
Perhaps oddly, I could not look at Serena as having failed. In the wildness in her eyes, in the way her screams started to sound a little unhinged, it was clear that the pressure had simply grown insurmountable. Whatever reserves of energy she had been drawing on to get her through all those tough matches over the course of the year, she couldn’t access them anymore. At that point, all the analogies–the lioness, the superhero, the war goddess–fell away, and she was human, simply, beautifully human.
And that’s exactly what makes her so extraordinary. She’s always been human. Everything she’s accomplished–21 Grand Slams (so far) including four in a row twice, some ridiculous number of other titles, being at the top of the game for sixteen years–she’s accomplished as just a person, with human strengths and human weaknesses. Beyond a shadow of a doubt she’s one of the most extraordinary athletes we’ve ever seen–and note that I don’t add qualifiers regarding either her gender or her particular sport. She may have succumbed, but she didn’t fail. I find her more inspiring than I ever have before.
Serena’s first-round match, against Vitalia Diatchenko, was all but a walkover. She played so-so against Kiki Bertens in the second but advanced without much trouble. So far, so good.
Starting with her third-round match against Bethanie Mattek-Sands, however, the pressure on Serena quickly began to ramp up. No one who played her from then on appeared to have gotten the memo that this was supposed to be Serena’s Moment of Transcendent Glory.
80th-ranked Bethanie Mattek-Sands came out serving and volleying. Read that again. Against the best returner of all time, she came out serving and volleying. She won the first set and it was no fluke. For a while in the second it looked like she might actually win in straights, but then Serena dug deep, hit that higher gear and broke late to win the set. The fight seemed to go out of Mattek-Sands then, and Serena put the match away at love in the third.
In the fourth round, Serena beat Madison Keys in straight sets, 6-3 6-3, but Keys was no pushover. ESPN showed an astonishing graphic during the match: Keys hits her groundstrokes about 15% harder than Serena, about 74 mph to Serena’s 65. How is that even possible?
Next up was Venus, a match I predicted would be no match at all. I figured there was simply no way that Venus wanted to be the one to end her little sister’s fairy tale. Thankfully, I was wrong. Venus may not have been 100% devoted to winning, as Mattek-Sands and Keys were, but she comported herself like a professional and played a solid match. Serena won the first set easily, 6-2, but let down–again–in the second, allowing Venus to snatch an easy second set, 6-1. In the third, Serena pumped herself into Superhero Gear and pulled away.
And then came the match against Roberta Vinci. I had watched a bit of Vinci’s quarterfinal match against Kristina Mladenovic and was shocked that she won. The Serena-Vinci semifinal followed Flavia Pennetta’s win against Simona Halep, the only woman remaining who I thought had a chance against Serena, and I said to myself, “Well, from here it’s a coronation.” And through the first set, 6-2 to Serena, it looked like it. I was watching on a slight delay on the DVR, and after Serena cruised through the first I figured, “This is over.” I started to fast-forward, then stopped a few games into the second set to see what had transpired. The score was 3-2 Vinci, with Vinci serving. She’d managed to break Serena. They stayed on serve through the rest of the set and Vinci held 6-4.
“Okay, fine, Serena’s typical one-set letdown,” I said.
And everything appeared to be following the script at the beginning of the third. Serena held serve easily, then broke Vinci to take a 2-0 lead. (“Here we go,” I said.) But the game at 2-0 didn’t go as planned. Serena alternated easy points and aces with errors and poor movement to find herself at deuce, pulled a shot wide to give ad out, and then, shockingly, double-faulted to give back the break. Three reasonably straightforward games followed, and it was 3-3 on serve.
And then in the set’s seventh game, Vinci broke serve and broke Serena as well. A missed return by Vinci gave Serena the first point, but then back-to-back double-faults put her down 15-30. On the next two points, Vinci missed a drop volley wide, then hit long on a possible passing shot: 40-30, game point Serena. A terrible backhand volley by Serena brought the game’s first deuce, but she followed it with an ace to give her her second game point. And then came the point of the match.
It was a study in differing energies, one player well in flow, the other crumbling. Serena missed her first serve, but hit her second reasonably well and deep to Vinci’s backhand. Vinci calmly sliced the return to Serena’s feet. Serena hit a topspin backhand down the line to Vinci’s forehand, which Vinci returned down the line back to Serena’s backhand.
At this point you could really see just how far off her game Serena really was. Serena’s reply should have been straightforward, but she didn’t really set her feet, hitting a weak open-stanced backhand that landed at the T of the service line. Vinci again played a slice backhand to Serena’s backhand. Serena again returned down the line. Vinci again played a straightforward forehand down the line. Again Serena’s footwork was poor, and she hit an off-balance backhand wildly cross-court. Vinci duly sliced her backhand to Serena’s backhand, and Serena dutifully played the backhand down the line. Vinci, perhaps sensing the fragility of her opponent’s mental state with respect to her movement, hit her forehand forcefully cross-court. Serena ran it down and returned the ensuing cross-court forehand angled sharply into the forehand service box, pulling Vinci up toward the net and well wide.
The quality of Serena’s forehand didn’t leave Vinci with a ton of options. She hit a forehand deep to the backhand side, about midway between the center mark and the sideline. Had Serena been within shouting distance of her best, she would have prepared her racquet early as she moved back into the court from her previous shot and then hit a backhand winner deep into the essentially empty court. Here, she was desperately off her game and only managed to block the ball back to the T. Vinci comfortably ran it down and hit one more slice backhand to Serena’s forehand to keep her moving side-to-side. Serena responded with a desperate forehand cross-court, high enough that Vinci, now up at net, backhand drop-volleyed into the backhand service box. Serena, moving now like Bowser in the game Mario Tennis (fierce, powerful, but slow), did her best to charge it down but couldn’t get there.
Here was the look on Serena’s face as she tried:
Bowser
That brought the score to deuce once again, but Vinci knew that it was a big point: she threw her hands up and exhorted the (wildly pro-Serena) crowd. On the next two service points, Vinci returned comfortably. Serena responded with two errors, one into the net and one long, and Vinci completed the break to go up 4-3.
The shot-making from here to the end of the match was a study in contrasts. On an overhead at 15-30 in Vinci’s next service game, Serena’s scream, normally an incitement to herself, seemed directed directly at Vinci, like an animal lashing out at her tormentor. Twice, Serena responded to Vinci lobs with overhead (non-) smashes that Vinci was able to lob a second time. In both cases, Serena put the second overhead away, but still. This was not the Serena we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. She got up 15-40 but the game ended like this: error, error, error, double fault (a gift from Vinci), error, error, and it was 5-3.
And Vinci? After a straightforward hold from Serena to make it 5-4, Vinci’s touch got better still. In the final game she hit a lovely, calm drop volley to go up 30-0, and, moments later, an even lovelier, calmer drop half-volley on triple match point for the winner and the match.
And just like that, it was over. Serena stumbled away, stunned. Vinci, ecstatic, declared it the greatest moment of her life. And for many of us watching–well, what was there for us to do but speak to the privilege of having witnessed something extraordinary?
Ahead of the Open, friends of mine who know that I’d gotten pretty obsessed with tennis over the summer started asking me, “Do you think Serena will win?”
At her best, I said, she’s clearly the best player in the world. But over and over again at the Majors this year she either came out flat or let down mid-match to drop sets. Every time, she managed to fire herself up into that special Serena level and put the match away. (How do you describe that level? I always struggle to come up with an adequate analogy. A train at full speed? A predatory great cat on the hunt? A superhero? A war goddess?) She went to three sets twice at the Australian, five times at the French, and twice more at Wimbledon. The ferocity of her play at that level is astonishing, but there’s a cost to it. It requires extra energy to pull yourself up like that, above and beyond the cost of all those extra sets. It might be, I concluded, that ultimately she’d find herself trying to go to that well one time too many.
(“Damn,” you are probably saying. “That is one snappy title.”)
Last week, for the first time since I started this project, I checked the basic analytics available to me via my website host. It’s tricky to figure out how valuable the information is. It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of page visits are either search engine spiders or automated hacking attempts, which makes it hard to discern what’s signal and what’s noise.
However, after looking closely enough at the data, I realized I could use the spikes in pageviews on days when I promoted a piece to get some feel for how often the site is viewed by actual human eyeballs.
As best I can tell:
People are reading this thing, and there are more of them than I’m immediately aware of. Not many more, perhaps, but more.
Even modest efforts at promoting pieces clearly result in driving visitors to the site.
More concerted efforts (like when I posted my Advice for First-Time Burners to the Denver Burners page on Facebook) have very clear effects. People come to check out what I’ve written.
So even modest efforts have payoff. That’s good to know.
Digging a little deeper, I realized that there was a distinct before/after effect in the number of daily pageviews after I posted a link on Facebook to my (sort of) 4/20-themed piece, In Honor of 4/20, a Cannabis Story. The average daily visits clearly rose after that–some people who came to the site via that link have been coming back. On the other hand, since then, there’s been little to no growth in the pageviews. That suggests there hasn’t been much in the way of word-of-mouth.
Am I surprised? No, not really. I hadn’t checked my stats until last week partly because I wasn’t really working that hard to grow the site; the writing and publishing itself has been my raison d’etre. I have purposely allowed myself to write whatever comes up without too much concern about, “Is this valuable to an outside reader?” As my dad would have put it, “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” The practice and focus on craft needed to come first. Makes sense, right?
But now as we’re nearing the end of Free Refills Season 2, the practice is established and the craft isn’t likely to expand much more without expanding the focus and taking greater risks. Some of that, obviously, will be having the courage to promote my work more assertively. But some of that will be in what I choose to write about and how and when I choose to publish it.
I can’t really know ahead of time what will work and what won’t. The only thing I can do is play with it and see what happens.
(And yes, I’m aware today is 9/11. I thought about posting my remembrances of that day and then decided against it. I felt like there’s enough of that going on elsewhere.)
