Time once again for the Kentucky Derby (6 p.m. tonight). Tara and Johnny will be there, presumably to talk fashion, not horseflesh. And there will be the usual breast-beating about whether the Cinderella winner – it’s always a Cinderella winner, with California Chrome this year’s front-runner and feel-good story, though some like Wicked Strong – will go on to become the first horse since Affirmed in 1978 to win the Triple Crown.
A confession: I’ve always loved horseracing, particularly the Triple Crown, which is at the heart of “Criterion,” the third novel in my series, “The Games Men Play.” As a child, I once memorized all the Triple Crown winners. My favorite is Affirmed, a racehorse so smart that you could call him by name and he’d come to you. Or so Lou Sahadi, his biographer, once told me. There’s just something about that select club of excellence, its distinctive personalities and the way the horses thunder around the track, all that sleek power and speed. Plus, they’re beautiful animals.
But beauty often goes hand-in-hand with brutality – at least in my books, which deal with the world of sports.
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Can I pick ’em or can I pick ’em?
Four years ago, I picked Evan Lysacek to win gold in men’s figure skating in Vancouver, and he did. The moment the new team competition began in Sochi, I knew that Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan would win the men’s gold. He just had the right combination of athleticism and artistry, focus and looseness – even if his free skate was less impressive than his short program.
Still, he was clutch while Patrick Chan of Canada, the three-time world champion, never seemed to lose his deer-caught-in-the-headlights quality. Just as some people seem to inspire confidence, others make you wonder why they can’t consistently come through when it’s all on the line. As NBC commentators Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic noted, Hanyu’s flawed free skate left the door open, and yet, Chan failed to walk through. Read more
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In my new novel “Water Music,” the Summer Olympics in New York includes an opening ceremony as pretentious and ponderous as any of those sound and light shows that make up the actual opening ceremonies.
Let me ask you a question (or two or more): Why can’t the host country simply present its culture rather than hit us over the head with it? What did the opening ceremony for the Sochi Games really have to do with Russian culture? Why not an excerpt from “Swan Lake” or a clip from a film of “War and Peace”?
The irony of all these opening ceremonies is that they are supposed to celebrate the unique histories and cultures of the host countries, but they are actually interchangeable because they’re filled with faux PR symbolism. Enough with the cutesy mascots and whirling snowflakes and required releasing of a peace dove and that un-singable Olympic Anthem. Read more
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Forget Richard III. This is the winter of my discontent, and it isn’t just the unrelenting cold, snow and ice in the Northeast. (It’s like “Dr. Zhivago” without Omar Sharif.)
No, it’s partly because my guys – Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Colin Kaepernick, Gov. Chris Christie and now Peyton Manning – have all fallen short this season. (Thank God Tim Tebow has found his calling as a T. Mobile pitchman and ESPN analyst, or this winter would be a total bust.)
Let’s leave off Gov. Krispy Kreme, shall we? Remember how in math you always had to pick out the one thing that didn’t belong to the set. Well, he doesn’t belong to the set. His is a different kind of performance to be judged by other criteria. What I want to talk about today in the aftermath of that dud of a Super Bowl and with the Olympics beginning Thursday, Feb. 6 with the new team ice figure skating event is why some people – brilliantly talented everyday achievers – fall flat in big moments. Read more
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