From the historic political highs of Tuesday to the job-loss lows of Friday, it’s been a head-spinning week. Here are a few scattered pieces of it, picked up on the sidewalk, in front of the tube, staring at the computer.
- I’ve watched my share of Doha this week on ESPN360, which can be tucked in the corner of my computer screen at work. There seem to be two feeds, one with Tracy Austin commentating and one without. Guess which one I try to find? Combine the blessed silence with the high quality of the live stream and you begin to think you’re in the stadium, walking right next to the players as the camera pursues them all the way to their benches during changeovers.
- Are you a fan of college football? I follow it, in the papers and on Pardon the Interruption, but I haven’t watched all that much this year. The quality of play—still inferior to the NFL despite recent improvements to college offenses—the get-a-life obsession of its devotees, the phony rah-rah real-America amateurism, all of it must be put aside if you’re going to enjoy a simple football game. On the other hand, that phony rah-rah real-America amateurism can be pretty addictive, if it’s a sunny late-afternoon in fall and there are two legendary uniforms—college football is all about rooting for uniforms, the more venerable the better—colliding on a grass field in a gigantic, brightly colored stadium.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched college football in part just to see people. Where else can you get a look at so many Americans on a single afternoon, hundreds of thousands of them, sitting and chanting together from one coast to another? On the one hand, it’s depressing to get an idea of how just many people exist on this planet; on the other hand, it’s oddly encouraging. How bad off can the country be if it can provide a decent living for all of them, along with enough time on a sunny late-fall afternoon to stand and cheer their football team?
- From the “in case you think you’ve seen everything” department: Yes, that's a David Nalbandian lighter above. (Thanks to D-Wiz and ptenis for this find)
- Rachel Getting Married: At times it’s too intense, and the rehearsal dinner/wedding ceremony/reception could have been shortened by a good 20 minutes. But it’s worth seeing just to watch Anne Hathaway stick a cigarette in the side of her mouth.
- Lennart Bergelin, Bjorn Borg’s coach and keeper of his many Donnays, died of heart failure this week at 83. I think I’ve told this story here before, but hopefully you won’t mind. As a kid I remember watching an indoor WCT match between Borg and Nastase when the Romanian was well past his prime. Borg won the first set easily, then eased up enough that Nasty made the second competitive. Each time Nastase won a point, he’d stop and stare right at Bergelin as if to say, “What happened to your Mr. Perfect there?” Bergelin, stone-faced in the second row, didn’t crack a smile, but Borg eventually did.
- Will life be getting tougher for the men next year? This from Kamakshi at ESPN.com
*“The nine ATP Masters Series events are being reduced to eight "Masters 1000s," but players who skip one will pay for it the following season by missing the Masters event where they had their best result.
The rule is as follows, ATP spokesperson Kris Dent told ESPN.com: "It is planned that next season players who withdraw from any of the eight mandatory ATP World Tour Masters 1000 events, without fulfilling promotional activities or fulfilling requirements for an on-site withdrawal, will be suspended from a subsequent Masters 1000 event where the player earned the most points in the previous 12 months."*
But players who are legitimately hurt will be let off, he added. "Clearly, if someone's long-term injured, they're not going to have the suspension. I believe there's going to be an injury tribunal set up to establish whether people are injured or not."
James Blake, who, like many of his fellow Americans, usually skips one or two clay events during the spring, describes the expected workload as "mind-boggling" but is resigned to the new measure.
"I think we're going to have to deal with eight for eight mandatory events. It's unfortunate because I don't think that's good for the players," he said in Paris last week, where both Nadal and Roger Federer pulled out midway with injuries.
"You come in here to this tournament and you see the top two players in the world getting injured -- it couldn't be a clearer signal that the year is too long. There's too many mandatory events, too many times that we have to be playing."
Blake was the ATP player council vice president when the rule was being developed by tour officials, but said he had had little opportunity to prevent it. "I don't feel I had any say when I was on the council to begin with, but I don't think it's going to change," he said.
- Despite the new roadmap schedule, it just looks like [business as usual](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/sports/tennis/06williams.html?scp=1&sq=clarey%20wta&st=cse
) on the women’s side in 2009. Not that that's a good thing.
- Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. A good book, good subjects—cricket, New York—a great cover. But not a great book. Until this: A friend of the narrator has told him that he isn’t sure whether he should get married, because he won’t be able to pick up the girl who is walking past them down the street. The narrator thinks: We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?
- Voting is that rare moment when duty seems exciting, but it was a particular thrill on Tuesday. As I said here months ago, I had voted for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, and John McCain hadn’t done anything to change my mind (understatement of the year alert). In fact, I liked Obama more as I got to know him. He looked sharp, he shunned drama, he got down to business. I also read his deeply observant memoir, Dreams from My Father, in which he showed that the time he spent in poverty-stricken Indonesia as a child had made him more cognizant of what being American meant, and that he believed even more strongly in its values of individual morality and effort. I don’t know if Obama has a magic bullet for the economy, but does any president? Reagan cut taxes and started a long boom; Clinton raised them and did the same thing; Bush cut them again, and the economy boomed one more time. The Iraq War still loomed as the larger issue for me. Someone needed to answer for the murderous arrogance of the neoconservative “intellectuals” who had justified it, and the Bush administration that had bungled it.
Like Kennedy, Obama is a natural aristocrat, in style, bearing, and leadership qualities. And while “Yes We Can” is detached, even lame, compared to "Ich bin ein Berliner” or “I Have a Dream,” I like the way Obama delivered that line as he wrapped up his acceptance speech. Rather than gathering force, he pulled back a little further with each repetition. By the end, the triumph of the campaign had merged with the sober effort everyone could see ahead.
- You get up on a Friday morning, you have some coffee, you read the paper, you walk outside into a bright warm fall day. Leaves are still hanging on the branches and a little comforting humidity is in the air. You zip up your jacket and look across the street. There you see, rounding the corner, a tall, pretty girl with straight reddish hair riding a big, semi-rusty girl’s bike. Her long legs are in blue tights, and she has brown boots on that come up close to her knees. The bike makes a slight, sharp squeak as she pedals it by you and gives you a brief glance. You keep walking, in the other direction; you have to go to work. It’s only 9:00 in the morning, but the day feels heavy with possibilities that can never be realized. You wonder if wistfulness really is a respectable condition, but you don't care. What would you be without it?
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