I am at my grandparents’ house in Minnesota at the moment and have been since about last Wednesday. My time spent here is generally uneventful, which is good. Most of what I do is read books and watch whichever sports is on TV. This is almost always Wimbledon in tennis, and this year due to whatever happened last year that postponed everything to differing extents it’s also the NBA Finals and the European Championship in soccer. Also the CONCACAF Gold Cup in soccer, but that’s barely started and I have next to no opinions on it.
Over the weekend I read String Theory, a collection of essays on tennis by David Foster Wallace. These were collected and published in 2016 by The Library of America, well after Wallace’s death in 2008. I do not really follow tennis save for when I am up here in Minnesota, typically around the first or second week of July, which is typically when the Championships at Wimbledon happen. The book contains five essays, in chronological order from Wallace’s first tennis-based essay about his experience as a youth tennis player in Illinois to his final essay on Roger Federer from 2006.
Wallace’s tennis essays are interesting to me for two reasons - First, as stated earlier, I don’t watch much tennis on average. One of the missions of sports writing (or really any artistic work surrounding sports) I would think is to help outsiders to understand sports, and Wallace did an excellent job at conveying this. I get the sense that he understood his audience well, and that they would need to have defined many of the more nuanced aspects of tennis that the seasoned fan or player would understand innately through years of experience.
The second interesting thing about these essays was that I have read quite a lot of sports writing in my lifetime, mostly on sports other than tennis, and Wallace’s essays in this collection, by contrast, reveal how so many of the common conventions of sports writing can hold the genre back from its potential. In my head, I compared it to BubbleBall, the book I spent some time discussing last Monday about the 2020 NBA restart, and it helped illuminate some of my issues with that one. The writing in that book felt so shallow - Ben Golliver almost never went into detail on the more specific aspects of “The Bubble.” He mentioned once early on that he had to wear a sort of GPS distance tracker system that sounded an alarm whenever he got too close to someone, for example. I can imagine so many ways that this could have proven annoying, or disruptive, but he really glossed over all of that. That’s just one example of what I felt was missed, there were other aspects, too - What was the security apparatus like, what were the meals like, what did players say about living there - positive and negative? Instead we got pages upon pages of descriptions of the games that were played.
I think the major takeaway from my relative enjoyment of these essays and my relative boredom at Golliver’s book comes down to the understanding that the sports aren’t just defined by the sports, they’re defined by the environment around them and the people that make them. Wallace got stories from the security guards, the ticket takers, the spectators, the players ‘coaches, and the players’ spouses, and that helped heighten the interest level when he discussed the actual play on the court. I think that’s part of the difference between a literary essayist writing about sports and a sports writer writing about sports, though. I’m sure there’s an audience that loved Golliver’s book, and I just wanted something else in many ways. I promise I won’t complain about that book anymore next week.
Also Novak Djokovic is very good, looks like maybe one of the best ever. I don’t quite know how to understand or interpret greatness on that level in tennis at this point but even my novice eyes and brain can understand that he seems to be the guy holding the trophy quite often nowadays.
Like an hour and a half later there was The Euro Final. I think that I was in support of England for this one, mostly because it’s so rare for a major international final to be played at a venue that partisan and I wanted to see what it looked like for somebody to win in front of that many home fans. But it’s not like I was going to cry either way. It was downright literary the way that this all went, though. England got out to that dream start, then they practically parked the bus for the rest of the entire match, and it came back to bite them, then they went to penalties and they faltered in the penalties and it was… goodness, absolutely perfect.
I was so excited for them to be playing in front of the crowd in Wembley because I’m well aware of how the English fans tend to react to everything, positive or negative, outwardly and intensely (I can point to about six albums worth of evidence of that). The first goal meant that things went well enough for everybody to get euphorically excited, but the fact that it happened so early and they never followed up on it gave the crowd time to get outwardly anxious that England would concede. Then in penalties, even after they’ve supposedly overcome the English penalty jinxes of the 1990s, I could tell even just from watching on TV that the crowd was terrified. When Marcus Rashford missed that penalty - especially the way that he missed it, hitting the post after beating the keeper - I could just feel the atmosphere change.
I cannot understand Gareth Southgate putting Bukayo Saka in the position to kick fifth. He’s a very talented player but
he’s nineteen
Arguably your two best attacking performers over the course of the tournament in Sterling and Grealish didn’t even get the chance
I do not understand Southgate’s decision making. I also don’t get why he brought on Rashford and Sancho only minutes before the match’s end basically just to take the penalties. Again, both are good players (I think both probably could have seen more playing time over the course of that match) but to put them in that position completely cold seemed a mistake as well, and it costed them. I certainly hope that the vitriol from England fans is placed further on Southgate than on their players because they really were mismanaged in this match. It is astounding how England didn’t win that.
I used to commonly state during my days in college at KU that the football team would lose close games “because of the bird on the helmet,” meaning that there was some reason buried deep within the psyche of Kansas Football that meant they were predisposed to losing in the moments that decided those close games. What I am saying is that I think England lost because of the lions on the shirt here more than anything. I don’t think if it were any comparable put-upon team in a similar situation - like if Belgium was hosting this Euro final in Brussels, or if it were Sweden hosting in Stockholm - that they would’ve choked quite this way. But there’s a mythos around England that I really think crept up in the team’s heads - particularly Southgate’s - and caused them to falter here. Great teams can overcome that - Spain had a similar mythos back before their run from 2008-12 - and I really believe that this England squad is good enough to be considered one of the best in the world and prohibitively favorites for the 2022 World Cup. Playing that conservatively, though, they were bound to get beaten, and they were.
I cannot say for certain which outcome would have produced a better theoretical Los Campesinos album but I do believe that this loss deserves to spawn at least another Every Defeat a Divorce. (Which is one song in their catalogue that I’ve felt more in touch with in the ten years since I first heard it, after the years of KU Football, every Sporting KC playoff loss, Couva, et cetera. I wore a Los Camp shirt on Sunday in a sort of pseudo-support for England)
Also, and I’ll keep it short, The NBA Finals is going on. Internally I’ve been probably simultaneously the most and least interested in the NBA this season than I ever have been. I should clarify that I like the Dallas Mavericks (I know this doesn’t make a ton of sense given that I did not grow up near Dallas and my actual reasoning for picking them as “the team I like” dates back to childhood and is as simple and stupid and yet as steadfast as so many decisions made in childhood are) are good again, and I didn’t get NBA League Pass this year, so I basically had to make an appointment to sit down and watch them whenever they were on one of the national broadcasts during the regular season. At the same time, I was completely ignorant of everything else going on in the NBA.
I think I burnt myself out on the playoffs last year, I probably watched every minute that I could, and the season restarted so quickly that I never got the chance to get.. unburnt-out, or whatever. I never got the chance to miss it, I guess. Anyway, I had little idea of how good teams like Philadelphia, Utah, and Phoenix were during the regular season, so I was kind of unprepared to see them in the playoffs when they started.
Having watched most of the games from these playoffs, I will say that this is one of the most satisfying finals matchups in recent memory, at least in my mind. Not since 2016, probably, when the Warriors-Cavaliers rivalry was still fresh and they played that incredible 7-game series, had I felt this excited to watch an NBA Finals series.
The games haven’t quite delivered as of yet. The first three games weren’t all that competitive. I think the homecourt advantage has proven significant for two reasons -
Prior to the playoffs, both teams went a full year playing games in front of either limited capacity or zero capacity arenas
Both fanbases are witnessing their first finals appearance in either nearly thirty or nearly fifty years
The key to who wins this series will be determined by whomever can win a game on the road.
Really I’m just very grateful to see both of these teams out there. Though I don’t think it ‘kills’ the interest in the NBA for me, I’m as put off by the recent trend of these slapped-together ‘superteams’ as anybody else is, and I prefer it when you see a team like Phoenix that had to build together as a team reach their pinnacle, or when you see a team like Milwaukee go through the years of playoff disappointments before they finally put it all together. They play entertaining basketball - though, much like with the England National Football Team, I could see a Bucks team with somebody other than Mike Budenholzer playing much more entertaining basketball - and so I’m glad to see them both here. I just hope we get some more competitive games over the next few.
I will return next week, potentially having seen one or more Gold Cup matches and returning back to Kansas City.
This week my only outputs were on the blog, with a Belated Thanks to the Man Who Saved Us All and a deliberation about the 2020 MLS is Back Tournament. I’ll see you next week!