Game. Set. Match. Slam.
This Week: The Wide World of Sports in Trump Time — with Claudia Rankine, Ed Pavlic, Syreeta McFadden and Darryl Pinckney. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
MM + RP: At the start of the week we were replaying the US Open match, like everyone else, and we were very lucky to score an interview with Claudia Rankine, one of the best Serena watchers out there.
Serena was featured in Claudia’s best-selling book of poetry and prose, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Claudia began by reading an excerpt:
And insane is what you think, one Sunday afternoon, drinking an Arnold Palmer, watching the 2009 Women’s US Open final, when brought to full attention by the suddenly explosive behavior of Serena Williams. Serena in HD before your eyes becomes overcome by a rage you recognize and have been taught to hold at a distance for your own good. Serena’s behavior, on this particular Sunday afternoon, suggests that all the injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives. Nothing, not even the repetition of negations (“no, no, no”) she employed in a similar situation years before as a younger player at the 2004 US Open, prepares you for this. Oh my God, she’s gone crazy, you say to no one.
And then Claudia went on to give us her own color commentary on the match:
Three people came out of that match looking incredible to me. One of them was Serena, one of them was Naomi Osaka, and the other one was the crowd. Because for the first time we had a stadium of fans who were able to read the situation and see Serena as a human being in need of their support and they gave it they gave it and it allowed her then to show up for Naomi in an incredible moment in her in her athletic career.
You know when Serena said “OK let’s let’s honor Naomi” she won the match and the crowd stopped. At that moment and things moved forward. So I think I think we have come come far. It really you know people were able to see the limits of the umpire whether or not by the letter of the law he’s right.
We could see his limits as a human being and which is not to say that that Serena wasn’t overwhelmed and emotional; she was.
1995 was Serena William’s professional tennis debut. Here she is four years earlier, at age eleven:
According to Ed Pavlic, writing in Rewire, Serena is “utterly unlike other tennis players. Even just by the numbers, her greatness is off the charts.” Here he reflects on last weekend’s match — what it tells us about tennis, about our culture, and about ourselves:
Crucially, in contravention of what’s called an “individual” sport, such intimate skill with rage is not something honed by “individuals” at all; it’s familial, social, and historical. In ways that confound American commentators, much of that isn’t at all a matter of “individual achievement.” It has everything to do with how bodies — one’s own and those around us, overlapping with us — move through history. Turns out, like everything else in life, tennis isn’t played on tabula rasa. Serena’s presence in the game and world, the way she’s carried the world into the game, has forced vivid and at times clashing elements of this into view unlike any presence before her.
The key point about Serena is that most of us keep most of this messiness backstage, pointed inward, private. Some of the mess remains out of sight and out of bounds even to ourselves and our loved ones. Meanwhile, Serena’s openly — at times radically, painfully — fraught presence coexists with her excellence and her graciousness in ways that connect us all to our own and each other’s tangled messiness. This sets feelings in motion that many in the audience would rather deny and hide, from ourselves as much as from each other.
For Pavlic, it’s significant that Serena “is gracious, not graceful.” Syreeta McFadden gestured toward how the demands of “gracefulness” intersect with race and gender for Elle Magazine:
The calls placed the problems of sexism and unwittingly, racism, in plain view. Williams’ swift response to sexism in that moment was recognizable to any woman who’s reckoned with the social and professional costs of expressing righteous anger. Women often face backlash to our rightful indignation. Rage is no virtue for women; it is the provenance of men. Instead, we must be graceful.
We fell hard for Serena this week. Here’s more of our reading list for the show:
Claudia Rankine’s piece for the NYT Mag: “The Meaning of Serena Williams.”
Wesley Morris (who wanted to join us but couldn’t make it work this week) in the Times: Serena Williams Came In on a High Road. It Made Her Fall More Devastating.
How did she meet Mr Reddit anyway? Buzz Bissinger on Serena’s Love Match (and Annie Liebovitz’s killer photo shoot)
MM: I’m a big fan of John Branch’s sports writing for the Times (he’s the guy who did that slightly over-the-top multi-media piece, Snowfall, about a deadly avalanche in Washington State). Here’s his Serena profile from 2015 and his piece comparing the NFL and NBA’s social justice policies. And while we’re at it, his latest, on Tiger Woods: Tiger in Twilight and a lovely piece Branch wrote about his own son, a champion cuber it turns out.
Ed Pavlic gave us a history of sports and race this week, from the 1968 Olympics to the new Nike ads. Everyone should watch the one featuring Serena Williams and her father, Richard Williams, he told us:
Here’s the full “Dream Crazy” ad (narrated by Colin Kaepernick):
Nike’s been playing the revolutionary game for a while… here’s their 1988 ad featuring the Beatles’ “Revolution.”
According to Alan Bradshaw, writing in Frieze, the reaction to the 1987 ad bears real similarities to the current outcry over Nike’s Kaepernick ads:
The Nike formula of associating with rebellious, radical and revolutionary issues emerged during the planning for a major campaign in 1987 designed to recover market share from Reebok whose successful aerobics shoes, largely sold to women exercisers, caught the patriarchal Nike unprepared. Nike, having previously eschewed television advertising, hired Wieden+Kennedy, a small Portland-based creative agency, to develop its first major TV campaign.
In pre-production, Nike anticipated a straightforward product-oriented campaign. But Wieden+Kennedy had another idea: structuring the ad around the Beatles’s 1968 song ‘Revolution’, suggesting a revolution around the way people exercised. The ad mixed images of Nike athletes like John McEnroe with ordinary people, sometimes clowning around, while participating in various sports….
The outcome was strikingly similar to Dream Crazy; the use of the Beatles’s ‘Revolution’ infuriated many consumers who understood the ad as betraying the song’s radical history (thus imbuing the song with a history it never had). Like now, consumers destroyed Nike paraphernalia and advised Nike that they would be boycotted evermore. Significant media commentary — mostly highly disapproving — piled up. One critic said that the ad was an example of ‘when rock idealism met cold-eyed greed’... And yet, like now, Nike profits soared, not just allowing them to recover their lost market share from Reebok, but also propelling them into the stratosphere where they have maintained their position as not just a blue-chip company, but also one of the most iconic brands of our age.
In 1995, likewise, a Nike television ad told us that the revolution wasn’t going to be televised:
We dipped our toe into the world of Afro-pessimism this week with Frank Wilderson III and writer Darryl Pinckney, whose piece analyzing Afro-pessimism was in the June issue of the New York Review of Books. Pinckney traces the movement back to Franz Fanon, on the one hand, and Frank B. Wilderson III, on the other. We’ll come back to this idea, which is bigger and more complex than we had time to air it out this week. We hear Claudia Rankine is writing a piece about it for the Times Magazine...
Our Reading List:
Jedediah Purdy on how the right “weaponized” the First Amendment
Robin D. G. Kelley’s spot-on (and spoiler-filled!) analysis of Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You
Why more jobs doesn’t mean less poverty
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the “inequality industry.”
Jill Lepore’s warning about technology and American democracy in an op-ed for New York Times. (Get hyped for our upcoming interview with Lepore about her ambitious new history of America)
That’s all for now, folks. Til next week,
The OS team
