Category Archives: Sports

Weekend Movie? Challengers?

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Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers has been getting good reviews (trailer). The cast is super: Josh O’Connor, Mike Feist, and Zendaya are the leads. And, if you’re as obsessed with tennis as they are, you may enjoy it more than I did.

The film cuts back and forth from the present, with three aging tennis prodigies. Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) is scruffy and down on his luck or likes to pretend he is—sleeping in his car, cadging meals. Art Donaldson (Faist) is near the top of his game, but faltering, more due to shaky confidence than lack of a serve. Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a former teen tennis star herself, sidelined by a career-ending injury, is Donaldson’s coach—and wife.

The men were best friends from childhood, inseparable, and “complete each other’s sentences” close. They met Duncan about a decade earlier, both starstruck by her beauty and tennis skills. Then the real competition begins. Over the next decade they play her back and forth like a, well, like a tennis ball, and even though she married Donaldson, it’s just possible Zweig still holds first place in her heart.

The movie cuts between scenes set in the current day, when the men are playing a second-rate match in New Rochelle that both are desperate to win. Zweig needs the cash; and Donaldson needs the win to qualify for the US Open. But what they’re really playing for is Duncan. I get that, but these characters aren’t so interesting as to hold my attention for two hours.

All three of them are master manipulators, but at least O’Connor can take the edge off with his sly smile. You see their practices, their various matchups over the years, and a lot of this final match. Walking out, my bottom line was “too much tennis.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 88%; audiences 73%.

On the Big Screen: The Boys in the Boat

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The predictable uplift sports movie generally provide is one of the greatest sources of its appeal: big goal, lots of work, sacrifice, setbacks, and, in the end—triumph! And sometimes an inspiring musical score too, viz., Chariots of Fire, Rocky.

The Boys in the Boat follows this model almost too well (trailer). Written by Mark L. Smith and directed by George Clooney, it breaks no new ground as it presents the amazing struggle by an eight-man crew from the University of Washington to compete in the 1936 Olympics. You know, the one when American athlete Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes) won four gold medals and scorched Hitler’s hackles.

The ragtag crew, brought together in the heart of the Depression, was led by actor Callum Turner (playing Joe Rantz), with my favorite performance coming from the megaphoned coxswain, who calls the speed and spurs his crew on, played by Luke Slattery. The cinematography is beautiful, and there’s a stirring score by Alexandre Desplat.

Not only were the Huskies underdogs when pitted against the East Coast Ivy League rowing powerhouses, the boat Coach Ulbrickson (played by Joel Edgerton) chose to enter in the preliminaries wasn’t even his most experienced crew. It was his junior varsity boat. Noses were out of joint. But Ulbrickson saw in the hunger and desperation (and shoes with holes in them) a drive that might take them first over the finish line. Joe Rantz gets some extra motivation through informal “occupational therapy”—late-night sanding and painting—with the elderly boatbuilder, played by Peter Guinness, as they work on the new racing shell for the Huskies team.

The Boys in the Boat is a feel-good film and, as it’s based on a true story (told in a 2013 book by Daniel James Brown), you don’t feel like you’ve been manipulated into those good feelings. The scores below tell the story.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 57%; audiences 98%.

It Ain’t Over

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The background sound to my childhood was my mom listening to baseball games on a scratchy AM radio. The Yankees were the greatest, though our sentimental favorites were the home team, the Detroit Tigers. If you’re at all a fan of baseball or even of people whose larger-than-life character sparkles like a jewel, you won’t want to miss the new documentary about Yankee superstar Yogi Berra, It Ain’t Over (trailer). Not in a theater near you? Get it here.

Conceived and narrated by Yogi’s granddaughter Lindsay, the documentary’s seed was a 2015 All-Star Game tribute to “the four greatest living baseball players.” No question, the four selected in a popular poll should have been there—Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, Johnny Bench, and Willie Mays. As the names were announced, Lindsay turned to Yogi and said, “What are you, dead?”

The documentary makes it abundantly clear that Berra should have been the fifth man on the field that day. He was an 18-time All Star. He had more MVPs than any of those others. More World Series rings than the four combined. Why wasn’t he there?

This documentary tries to answer that question. You see some of Yogi’s great plays. You hear sports broadcasters, other players, and friends—like Billy Crystal—weigh in. (It’s worth the price of admission just to bask in Derek Jeter’s smile.) And you’re reminded of Yogi’s famous sayings: “Nobody goes to that restaurant any more. It’s too crowded.” “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.” “You can observe a lot by watching.” “It ain’t over til it’s over,” and my favorite, “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” On the surface, they may sound good for a laugh, but when you really think about it . . .

The commenters believe people got distracted by Yogi’s colorful speech, unathletic appearance, and outsized personality, all of which obscured what a fantastic ballplayer he was. Then, after his playing years, he was a successful coach. And all the while, he was a devoted family man, married 65 years to Carmen Short.

Yogi died later in 2015 at age 90. See it! You’ll feel good afterward.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences: 96%.

Great Popcorn Munching: Air

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If you asked me whether I’d like a movie about a rookie basketball player’s athletic shoe endorsement saga, I’m afraid you’d just get a blank look. Then, if you said the film centers on one of the most exciting stars in any sport, ever, but he’s actually barely in it, I’d probably wander off looking for a snack. I would be wrong.

Air, the new movie directed by Ben Affleck and written by Alex Convery, is based on Nike’s 1984 effort to woo college junior Michael Jordan and his shoe endorsement away from (then) major competitors Converse and Adidas (trailer). The story will grab you because the outcome, even though you know it, is so well delivered by a top-notch cast and a wholly believable script.

Ben Affleck plays the legendary Nike founder Phil Knight, and he has some superstars on his own team, notably Matt Damon as fixer (I can’t think of a better word for it), basketball superfan, and chief risk-taker Sonny Vaccaro. Jason Bateman plays marketing innovator Rob Strasser, Chris Tucker as advisor Howard White, and Matt Maher as down-in-the-basement shoe designer and innovator Peter Moore. At the time the film is set, Nike’s a big sports company known mostly for its running shoes, trying unsuccessfully to move big into the basketball world. They need a star. Incessantly watching the films of college hoops stars and the top NBA draft picks, Vaccaro recognizes Michael Jordan for the game-changer he’s going to be. But other companies want his endorsement too.

An actor playing Michael Jordan barely appears in the film and has no lines to speak of. Instead, Vaccaro’s unconventional recruitment tactics are aimed at his mother, Deloris Jordan, in a pitch-perfect performance by Viola Davis. It’s not appreciated that he makes his pitch directly or that he end-runs Jordan’s flamboyant and foul-mouthed agent, David Falk, played by Chris Messina.

There’s humor there, too, in the marketing meetings, in Vaccaro’s manipulation of Phil Knight (knowing what good friends the two actors are, they can nevertheless argue with real heat), in how Vaccaro tells Deloris Jordan exactly what the other companies’ pitches will be and seeing how that turns out, and how she out-maneuvers all of them. In the end, the new kind of deal they struck became a game-changer for college and professional athletes alike.

Give yourself a cinematic treat, and see this film!

Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating 92%; audiences 98%.

popcorn

Murder on the Iditarod Trail

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Iditarod

By Sue Henry — To gear up for cold weather, you couldn’t do better than reading Sue Henry’s first Alaska mystery, Murder on the Iditarod Trail. Whatever winter throws at us in the lower 48, compared to the people who race the Iditarod, our situation is positively toasty. First published in 1991, the story won Macavity and Anthony awards. It has aged well and is worth a fresh look.

Pretty much all I knew about the race when I turned the book’s first page is that it is a thousand-mile dog sled race from Anchorage to Nome that you’d have to be near crazy to undertake. For from eight to fifteen days or more, mushers compete through blizzards, white-out conditions, below zero (F) temperatures, and brutal wind-chill. They traverse sea ice, travel through tricky areas that look frozen solid but may not be, and drive on in gale-force winds. There’s little (but mandatory) time to rest for dogs or humans. The fact that many mushers continue to compete year after year means . . . Brrr-r-rrr.

The story begins when the centrifugal force of a sharp turn sends a sleeping musher flyikng from his sled and crashing into a tree. The stub of a broken branch enters his skull. Accidents on the trail are inevitable, but death is not. This was a first, and Sergeant Alex Jensen, an Alaska State Trooper, is called in to investigate. An autopsy reveals the dead man’s coffee had been laced with a powerful barbiturate.

Because Jensen is new to Alaska, he doesn’t know a lot about how the race is run or the single-mindedness of the competitors. Over the next week, he finds out. He begins his inquiries at the Finger Lake Checkpoint, where the high temperature for the day will be a balmy 5˚ F and the low -3˚. There he meets many of the leading mushers and several race officials, people he will encounter repeatedly over the next nine days, as he and his colleagues leapfrog ahead to farther checkpoints.

If that first death unnerved people, a few hours later a sled careens off the trail north of Finger Lake and musher Virginia Kline plunges to her death. The gang-line on her sled snapped, and when Jensen arrives, he observes that the line had been cut nearly through. These apparent murders have occurred near the beginning of the race, when the sled teams are relatively close together, but as the race continues, the teams spread out, the number of people with the opportunity for sabotage shrinks, and the dangers mount.

Henry steers the novel’s tension as deftly as an experienced musher traversing Rainy Pass. On the one hand is the tension of the fiercely competitive race, with mushers determined to win despite the hazards of weather and terrain and exhaustion. On the other hand is the pressure on the investigators to identify the culprit or culprits before more deaths and injuries can take place.

A budding romance between Jensen and musher Jessie Arnold gives her the chance to explain what the race means to participants. This aspect of the story is a bit dated, with Jensen’s patronizing advice she should quit, but Arnold doesn’t let him get away with it. All told, it’s a thrilling adventure.

The Iditarod (the Athabascan name of one of the small villages the race passes through) was never more than of transient interest to me, but Sue Henry brings it to life. In recent years, animal rights groups have objected to the treatment of the dogs, which has resulted in some rules changes. By telling the race’s story so fully, she provides perspective on that issue, as well.

Photo: skeeze for Pixabay.

Maiden

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Twelve times since 1973, an international set of racing yachts has taken to the ocean for a Round the World Yacht Race (first sponsored by Whitbread brewery and now called the Volvo Ocean Race, under its new sponsor). It’s dangerous work, with crews pitted against each other, the weather, and the implacable seas. Until 1989, ocean racing was a man’s game, with women unwelcome even in the galley. Only five of the 200 crew members on boats in the race before 1989 were women.

But in that year, everything changed, as shown in the riveting new documentary written and directed by Alex Holmes detailing the voyage of the Maiden (trailer). Using 30-year-old footage it includes film of the trip, comments by other captains, and excepts from upbeat interviews with the Maiden’s captain, Tracy Edwards. Interviews with her today reveal how frightened she was. For a very long time, she couldn’t get a sponsor for the expensive venture; even running the race was costly, with a land crew to meet and help them at every stop. A lot was riding on her boat’s success.

No one expected them to do well against the 22 other boats in the race. Everyone knew “girls” couldn’t sail such a demanding course. The local Portsmouth punters took bets on how far they’d get—out of the harbor, then back? the Canary Islands? No one expected them to finish the race’s first leg, across the Atlantic to Uruguay, much less the entire race. The dismissive yachting journalists and rival captains reinterviewed today have vivid memories of how Edwards scuttled their assumptions.

The Maiden won the most grueling leg of the race, across the far south latitudes, icebergs and all, to reach Australia, then the shortest, around to a stop in New Zealand, which required precision boat-handling. It wasn’t just the physical challenge of controlling a 58-foot boat in heavy seas. It was a mental and endurance challenge as well, especially for Edwards, who served as skipper and navigator.

For every member of the crew then and now, this experience was the adventure of a lifetime. An uplifting journey for viewers too. Says Adam Graham in the Detroit News, Maiden “ tells a story whose tidal waves were felt far beyond the deck of her ship.” And you stay dry.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 98%; audiences: 98%.

*****Lost Empress

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Football, leaves

guvo59, creative commons license

By Sergio de la Pava – Does anyone these days have the time to read a 640-page novel? I made the time and was glad of it! This remarkable book came to me as a reviewer for crimefictionlover.com, and it bucks convention in more ways than its length.

In all those pages, a lot happens—interesting, challenging stuff you won’t find in a typical novel. It includes a meditation on Time, an evisceration of professional football, a hilarious take-down of the U.S. health care system, an exploration of the meaning of loneliness and the futility of religion. Fundamentally, however, it’s a kaleidoscopic, postmodern approach to the question “what is justice?” All the while, Sergio de la Pava’s sly sense of humor keeps the pages turning, as situations at first merely odd spiral out of control like a poorly judged forward pass.

Characters are described with juicy details that make their stories tantalizing, and as the story settles down, two principal characters emerge. The first is Nina Gill, former co-owner and brains behind the wildly successful Dallas Cowboys. Family maneuvering gives her a football team of her own—not the Cowboys, the decidedly non-competitive Paterson (N.J.) Pork.

Nina is a woman who gets what she wants, and what she mostly wants is a winning football team. The NFL players are in a lockout, the owners have cancelled the season, and gutsy Nina recruits men desperate to play. Her second-in-command is college student Dia Nouveau, and the laugh-out-loud banter between tough Nina and can-do Dia is like the script for a screwball comedy, sometimes even written in script format.

Nuno DeAngelis is a career lawbreaker headed to Rikers Island. Nuno is a philosopher. “They can put him in Rikers, but they can’t make him live there.” The story of his life in prison, how he gets out and back in again, is written in what you might call a suprarealistic style, not as gritty crime drama, but floating somewhere above reality. But, since he’s there, his various connections give him assignments: avenge a vehicular homicide, snatch a Salvador Dali painting Nina wants . . . you know, the usual prison malarkey. Nuno writes his own brief for his Grand Jury proceeding, and it’s both expletive-laced and morally persuasive.

Trying to give a sense of the plot of a novel this sprawling is probably irrelevant. De la Pava has created a three-ring circus involving clowns, daredevils, and high-wire performers, creating extraordinary characters from people engaged in seemingly ordinary activities—a 911 call transcriber, a man caring for his ailing mother, a parking garage operator, a priest in a dwindling parish, and a failed doctor who becomes the Paterson Pork mascot.

De la Pava’s first novel, 2008’s A Naked Singularity, was originally self-published, but when the University of Chicago Press discovered and republished it in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize for best debut novel of the year. His is a refreshing and unforgettable voice, one that busts out of the boxes of both crime and literary fiction, stretching the form and the reader as well.

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Borg vs. McEnroe

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Borg vs. McEnroeRight in the middle of Wimbledon’s 150th Championships we scored a Netflix copy of director Janus Metz’s 2017 movie about the classic 1980 matchup between Ice-Borg and the Superbrat, with a script by Ronnie Sandahl (trailer). While their rivalry makes an entertaining film, I’d still flunk a quiz on how to score the game.

Sverrir Gudnason plays Björn Borg, instantly recognizable, lean and riddled with doubt, and Shia LaBeouf does fine work as the temperamental, foul-mouthed McEnroe. Apparently, Gudnason had to put on muscle for the role, while LaBeouf had to take some off. They both looked in fine form for the on-court scenes at the 1980 Wimbledon. In what is regarded as one of the greatest tennis matches of all time, Borg blew seven match points as he attempted to win his fifth straight Wimbledon victory. McEnroe might be a bad boy, but he could play some tennis, and, in the end, he got a standing ovation from the Wimbledon fans who’d started the competition by booing him.

While the competition between them was always billed as a rivalry between opposites, fire and ice, what the movie shows is that from his youth Borg wanted to be best in the world. (The young  Borg is played by his son Leo.) As a teen, Borg (played by Markus Mossberg) was every bit as fiery as McEnroe, arguing with the refs and his coach, throwing his racket, stomping off the court. They’re also alike in how deeply they care about winning.

Finally, Borg’s coach (Stellan Skarsgård) told him he was through unless he channeled his anger and frustration into his game. He needed to become emotionless. It sounds impossibly difficult, but he did it. What he also did was develop a lot of peculiar habits and rituals that had to be followed to the letter: the way his rackets were strung, the kind of car they rented. Sports stars are legendary for having “good luck” rituals, and his were all-encompassing.

McEnroe also got his comeuppance from friend and fellow tennis-player Peter Fleming (Scott Arthur) who told him he’d never be regarded as one of the greats because nobody liked him. At Wimbledon, his volcanic persona was in check after that, at least in the film.

We see less about McEnroe as a young man (it’s a Scandi movie after all), and I would have liked to. Still, it’s an engrossing film even for someone not obsessed with tennis (me!), and it deserves more attention.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 83%; audiences: 73%.

The Catcher Was a Spy

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The Catcher Was a SpyIt might almost be worth seeing the new movie Gotti with a sneering John Travolta in the lead, simply because it has received a (surprisingly) rare “0” rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics. Unanimity about a movie’s goodness or apparent awfulness is so rarely achieved that this may be a cinematic low-water-mark. A filmic Sahara. A future cult classic.

Last weekend, I went to another movie most critics have panned, because it is crammed with components I like: spies! history! Nazis! baseball! Based on a book by Nicholas Dawidoff, it recounts a bit of the true story of Red Sox catcher Moe Berg and was directed by Ben Lewin (who gets most of the blame), with a good script by Robert Rodat (trailer).

It wasn’t perfect, and maybe it’s slow for action film devotees, but the acting was superior. Paul Rudd played Berg, a man who loved baseball and had a great smile, but was hard to know. Through his Princeton connections, he was recruited to the fledgling OSS by its head Wild Bill Donovan (Jeff Daniels), mostly because of his facility with languages and despite his somewhat ambiguous sexuality. He has a girlfriend in Boston (Sienna Miller) for much of the film, but that’s an on-again, off-again thing, first with his baseball travel schedule, then his work in Washington and overseas.

Finally he gets the kind of assignment he craves: the U.S. has the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon, and the Allies believe the Germans are attempting this too, led by Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong). But they can’t be certain (sorry). Berg is teamed up with a military man (Guy Pearce) and a physicist (excellent work by Paul Giamatti) to find out. If these suspicions are correct, Berg is to assassinate him. Unlike so many celluloid spies, Rudd’s Berg seems actually to weigh the significance of this assignment.

In a key scene early in the film, Berg signals the pitcher, but the pitcher waves him off. The opponent on first tries to steal second, but Berg manages to get the ball there in time to throw him out, ending the inning. Walking back to the dugout, he says to the pitcher, “Never ignore my signal when a man’s going to try to steal second.” Pitcher: “How’d you know he’d try?” “I just knew.” Berg’s skill in sizing up people was perfect for the OSS.

Rex Reed in the New York Observer said, it’s “a juicy story told blandly,” but still a movie worth seeing, and I agree. Maybe Gotti should get a second look.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 32%; audiences 67%.

Kentucky Travel: “Not Barry Manilow and a Glass of Wine”

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Derby HatThe first question everyone asked when they learned we were going to the Kentucky Derby this year was—“Do you have a hat?!” Yes, I did, and here’s the photo to prove it! It was like wearing a dinner plate on the side of my head.

Unlike the unlucky folks who didn’t spring for under-cover seating, we were nice and dry, even though the May 5 race was the wettest Derby on record, by far. Our seats were great—right across from the winner’s circle and in full view of the finish line.

Given the television coverage, which we watch year after year, mint julep in hand, we were prepared for the elegant hats, the snazzy men’s suits, even Johnny Weir. But we were surprised Churchill Downs’s food options aren’t any better than those at our local AAA baseball team. Our Derby package came with a tent buffet (only so-so), and I pitied the patrons who had to depend on the track’s concession stands. Though we’d been warned off the premade mint juleps readily available, the one the bartender in the tent made from scratch was delicious.

The Derby itself—“the most exciting two minutes in sports”—was of course the pinnacle of the Louisville portion of our trip, but we saw lots of other sights in town, notably:

  • 21C Hotel Art

    Art at the 21C Museum Hotel; photo: Vicki Weisfeld

    The Louisville Slugger museum and a tour of the factory, which makes millions of baseball bats every year. Down Louisville’s Main Street are plaques in the sidewalk commemorating key ball players, along with life-sized replicas of the bats they used. And here I thought if you’ve seen one baseball bat, you’ve seen them all.

  • A guided tour of the modern art collection at our downtown hotel, the 21C Museum Hotel (If you’re interested in modern art and don’t know about this small but growing boutique hotel chain, you’re really missing something!).
  • The Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. The 12th president’s tomb was of peculiar interest to me, because recent genealogical research unearthed a photo of the gravestone of my three-greats grandmother, which says she was a descendant of President Taylor. A modicum of digging proved this to be more fake news.

Lexington horse farm

Lexington horse farm; photo: Vicki Weisfeld

  • The nearly 300-acre Cave Hill Cemetery, with its graves of Louisville founder George Rogers Clark, Muhammad Ali, Col. Sanders, Confederate and Union dead, and more than 100,000 other Louisville residents, famous and not-so.
  • A bus tour that took us to Lexington and two horse farms, where we “met” the sire and grandsire of Derby winner “Justified” and saw lots of new foals. Also were briefed on racehorse breeding. “It’s not Barry Manilow and a glass of wine,” our guide said. No indeedy.
  • A pleasant self-guided walking tour of Old Louisville, one of the country’s largest remaining Victorian neighborhoods.

Where we fell short was on the Urban Bourbon Trail. We visited only three of the 40 or so bourbontastic watering holes included in our passport, and even forgot have it stamped in one of them. On a five-day visit, that performance would have to be judged weak.

Reading on the Go

When you travel to Kentucky, here are some books you might take along.

Churchill Downs

Churchill Downs’s iconic twin spires; photo: Vicki Weisfeld