The Time Warp
Watching the U.S. Open Tennis AND the Tour de France at the same time is so confusing. It is supposed to be either Wimbledon and the Tour or U.S. Open and the NFL.
Not complaining, mind you. For all the noise about players dropping out of the U.S. Open and, but for one fan, pretty much no audience the tennis is as good as it ever was.
And the Tour is maybe a little better for having fewer interfering fans. Same grueling race and the coverage gets better every year.
I miss Wimbledon (on the couch with Mom) and I miss the NYC insanity that is usual at the U.S. Open.
But we're back. Stumbling a little, not nearly 100 percent, but so far there is no tragedy and a very few players affected by covid. The fly wheel of sports is slowly reengaging.
For all the millions of words spoken and written about how sports are ruined by money or by drugs or whatever, the single rider leading the peloton going over the top after climbing 40 kilometres of a mountain my car would have a hard time going up is a glorious site. And watching a grand dame in the making, in the historical lineage of Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe reminds me of the best of humanity.
Sports do something for us that we desperately need. The participants are but a few steps removed from us, close enough we can almost touch, close enough we can see ourselves in them, but are somehow stripped of the clay of mortality and for a moment become a shining example of what we didn't even know was possible.
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