Uncategorized

Is Novak Djokovic Likeable Enough?

by Daniel A. Hill

“Coming from a small Eastern European country with a recent painful past affects one’s popularity rating.” —Marion Bartoli, former Wimbledon winner on Novak Djokovic’s status

Are you ready for a word you almost surely don’t know and yet it may define your life as a sports fan? About two-thirds of Americans are infracaninophiles, meaning we love, admire and root for the underdog. I tend to be that kind of sports fan myself, although I also often can’t resist rooting for the champions whose driving ambition and accomplishments inspire awe. Either way, coming as he does from an obscure part of Europe the all-time tennis great Novak Djokovic should be my cup of tea and yet . . . and yet . . . I’m ambivalent about the Djoker, a feeling I share with more than a few tennis fans.

By comparison, who’s always been easy to adore? Roger Federer, the eternal fan favorite. Throughout his career the guy was lauded as a genius on court, a ballet dancer who embodied finesse, grace, beauty, and magic. Federer’s smooth strokes, his seeming lack of effort, and his panther-like career dominance combined with his gentle doe-like eyes lift “F” into the stratosphere of being simply and utterly irresistible.

Nor does it hurt that Roger hails from Switzerland. Yes, I suppose that country has its detractors. In Orson Welles’ movie The Third Man, Harry Lime (what a name!) has his doubts, observing that “in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.” What has Switzerland produced? According to Mr. Lime, 500 years of “brotherly love,” leading to nothing more than “The cuckoo clock.” Fans of Roger, however, can take that insult in stride. After all, the movie was released 32 years before our beloved Genius was born in Basel, Switzerland to a Swiss-German dad and an Afrikaner mom.

 

If Roger is tennis royalty, the king, then Rafael Nadal is surely the sport’s crown prince. The Spaniard from Majorca also has fans everywhere. Sure, the on-court spectacle is different in Rafa’s case. For starters, he looks more like a boxer or an NFL linebacker. And then to watch him play is akin to witnessing a boa constrictor snake slowly but surely squeeze the life out of his latest victim across the net. Yes, Rafa is all-effort, all the time, and yet . . . and yet . . . we love him, too, despite the endless nervous tics and superstitions that cloud but can’t obscure the Spaniard’s superb mixture of humility and lethal prowess.

Despite these two great rivals, however, Djokovic has by now cemented his place as the male GOAT of Wimbledon’s pasture and every other court, en masse. Add up the number of Grand Slam trophies, weeks at No 1 in the ATP Rankings, Masters 1000 titles, and so forth and you’ve got … ambivalence. What exactly are we to make of the Djoker? In 1375, the short-lived Serbian empire of Dusan the Mighty popped into existence. Surely, the Djoker is greater and will have more staying power than Dusan the Mighty but what will it take for legions of tennis fans to unabashedly herald Djoker the Almighty’s reign?

 

Speaking (endlessly) of almighty Djokovic, here is what we see of him on court versus what history tells us is going on behind the curtain of the Serbian’s psyche. First up are the Djoker’s two signature facial expressions. Take careful note, dear fans, of just how wide his eyes go. And don’t overlook how the Djoker responds to a challenge. Then his chin thrusts upwards, causing his mouth to form an upside smile from the guy who’s too hungry for greatness to ever be truly happy for more than the time it takes to lift another trophy.

Welcome to my analysis not only as an avid tennis fan who has been playing the sport for half a century by now but also, more importantly, as an emotional intelligence (EQ) expert who’s been interviewed on Tennis Channel by Mary Carillo. Why? Well, my certified ability to decode player’s expressions enables me to say what the emotions on display likely signify.

The eyes going wide bring victory born of being hyper alert. Djokovic joins Andre Agassi in being the other greatest serve-returner in the history of men’s tennis because the Djoker is always ready. When your eyes go wide, you see more. More specifically, you can see the tennis ball hurtling toward you at upwards of 120 to 130 miles per hour. If you’re Djokovic, you can then meet the assault and turn it back. Eyes wide open signal the emotions of anger, surprise, and fear. The underlying dynamic then is one of seeking to gain control. On earth, where it’s survival of the fittest (or according to Charles Darwin’s own words, survival of those who are the most adaptable and legendarily flexible, like Djokovic), any physical movement signals a change in the status quo — meaning, either an opportunity or a threat. Well, the Djoker is sublime at turning threatening serves into rocket returns that leave opponents vanquished, point by point, breaking their serves and turning them into broken spears.

Might Djokovic the almighty returner be frightened at those moments deep within his ball-striking soul? Perhaps. No Serb is, after all, ever existentially free of fear. At the same time, however, the Djoker also owns a superb tie-breaker record — surprising no one by now due to his superb ability to go into error-free, lock-down mode.

In turn, how about the upside-down smile that punctuates the GOAT’s hyper-vigilant stance? That expression signals a mix of anger, disgust, and sadness alike, meaning . . . it’s time to circle back historically to Dusan the Mighty. For Djokovic, an upside-down smile qualifies as proud defiance. Think of that expression being in this case the polar opposite of waving a white flag on court, surrendering to fate or to any mere mortal daring to enter your kingdom.

 

Am I making myself clear enough? Are you beginning to get the picture? Do you truly see what we all see? There is Djokovic winning yet another grueling match like he did in taking the ATP 1000 title in Cincinnati against Carlos Alcarez, which the Djoker celebrates by ripping his shirt wide open to expose his chest . . . his beating heart . . . his remarkable and terrifying ferocity.

We’ve seen this before, almost. In 1999, the American soccer player Brandi Chastain stripped down to her black sports bra by whipping off her shirt after she scored the winning penalty in the women’s World Cup final against China. What came next? Chastain celebrated by twirling her shirt around in the air over her head before doing a kneel-drop onto the pitch and then raising her clinched fists as she burst into a huge, joyous grin. Chastain’s reaction was (she admitted) “insane,” a “primal” reaction, making her very nearly Djokovic’s kindred spirit. What’s the difference?

Never forget that despite playing doubles in the Olympics on behalf of Serbia, the Djoker is on a solo Crusade. What Chastain did was to bask in a shared American dream, whereas Dusan the Almighty tore his shirt nearly in half to expose the whole force of his determination to resist defeat in the same way that the Serbs never allowed the Ottoman Empire to entirely subjugate them during some 400 years of foreign, Muslim occupation.

No, no female tennis player would ever likely “celebrate” in the way Djokovic did after withstanding Alcaraz and the heat in Cincinnati . . . but Serena Williams came closest to date. Are you familiar with the famous ORANGE episode? You can find it described in Serena’s first memoir, where she admits to a time when her dad’s friend brings a big bag of oranges to the practice court. Serena is eight or nine years old. The oranges are sitting in the shopping cart Richard uses to store tennis balls for his two daughters. Venus doesn’t touch the oranges. But Serena doesn’t want to eat any; she prefers to hit a few over the fence before smashing the others into a fleshy pulp.

“I was a wild child,” Serena confesses. “I unleased on these defenseless oranges. I didn’t think about it. I just went a little crazy.” What’s the take-away? For Serena the oranges episode confirmed that “You need a wild streak if you hope to be a serious competitor. You need a kind of irrational killer instinct.” Is Serena really any less ferocious than Novak? If so, then ever so slightly in keeping with the kinship that links her being a black female upstart from Compton, California and the Djoker heralding from rough-scrabble Serbia.

 

Again, what does celebrating look like? In anticipation of having one or both of his daughters soon reach the Wimbledon finals, Richard told a white Sports Illustrated reporter in 1994 that he might invite members of Compton’s Crips gang to watch the match. Wouldn’t it be fun to have the Crips sitting in the Williams’ box, not far from royalty. When Djokovic wins his 24^th Grand Slam trophy at the U.S. Open, that’s the start of celebrating. The heart of celebrating is when Dusan the Almighty joins Serbia’s national basketball team on the balcony of the Old Palace in Belgrade. His eyes are closed, head lowered; he’s weeping. A small flood of tears accompanies eyebrows pinched together in confusion. What’s going on, the GOAT must wonder. How can I be weeping in gratitude at the same time that thousands of my loyal, adoring fans are crowding the streets of my homeland’s capital?

What is so significant about the historic Old Palace (Stari Dvor)? It was the royal residence of the Obrenovic dynasty that intermittently ruled Serbia during the 19^th century. Simple enough, you might say. Only there’s more to the story of Stari Dvor than that.

Unlike what happened in most Balkan countries, the Obrenovic dynasty wasn’t an imported (German) dynasty. An indigenous hold-out, the family allied with the Hapsburgs but ideally on their own terms . . . having just pushed the Turks back far enough to have gained some breathing room. There is though, really, no breathing room in the Balkans. There never has been and there never will be. The Balkans remain on the edge of Europe, not fully in it.

Western Europe — the distant land of Roger the Magnificent and Rafa the Indomitable — has cohesion. The borders have been largely set for centuries. There, one’s language, religion and very identity isn’t a fight to the death. Remember the cuckoo clock and an Inquisition that ended long before General Francisco Franco momentarily brought it back.

In Djokovic’s back yard, by comparison, you historically had Rome and Constantinople battling it out for Catholic hegemony. And then you got the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Turkish Ottomans squaring off, and off in the distance the Prussians and the Russians and never a moment’s peace. All of Eastern Europe is forever doomed to be a land in between. It’s a good place to harbor grudges against distant leaders crowding your space. While leaders in the Balkans get to host minor, regional kingdoms, grand empires are reserved for outsiders.

Endless revolts and sieges. Everyone in Serbia and beyond longs for independence from everybody else. Belgrade gets bombed from the air by the Germans and the Allies in World War Two, and in 1999 Djokovic is 12 years old when his birthplace gets bombed by NATO.

 

The sight: a masked Djokovic boarding a flight from Melbourne to Dubai in January 2022 after getting himself deported for not complying with entry rules for vaccination. Why won’t Dusan the Almighty take a vaccine shot if it gives him a shot at winning the Australian Open yet again? As the GOAT will say repeatedly with nearly religious devotion in explaining his firm opposition to mandatory vaccines, they’re an infringement on “personal choice.”

Back in Serbia, the Djoker remains (to quote the sportswriter Ben Rothenberg) a “messianic figure.” Among the guy’s off-court honors the greatest local tribute is receiving the Serbian government’s highest civilian and military award, the Order of Karadjordje’s Star. But don’t overlook the Djoker also receiving the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Order of St. Sava, which forever honors the royal son who became a monk on Mount Athos so that he could become a “genius” in interpreting the holy word.

By now we are knee-deep in a region historically full of prophets and mystics more obscure than a certain local tennis star.

Meet Djokovic, a card-carrying member of the Serbian orthodox church who has contributed to monasteries in Kosovo and conducted charitable work in his native land. Nor is that the complete picture of the GOAT’s spiritual practices. At Wimbledon, the Djoker’s been known to meditate at a Buddhist temple in between matches. Devoted to his vegan diet, the Djoker wants to be as “natural as possible” and endorses other possibilities, too. His 2013 autobiography cites a “researcher” who can supposedly transform the color of a glass of water, depending on whether the researcher directs anger, fear, or joy its way.

Speaking of what most of us might regard as superstitions, roughly a decade ago, I tracked down the tennis club owner in New Jersey at whose estate Djokovic was using the owner’s hyperbaric chamber. What am I talking about?!? A pod in which you sit for up to 20 minutes a day, breathing 100% pure oxygen in hopes of improving your performance.

I got to use the owner’s pod myself. Did I serve any better afterwards? No, the experience didn’t transform me (as best I could tell) except to leave me feeling like I had just been a walk-on for a Jetsons’ TV episode. I guess Djokovic felt differently. In 2019, the Djoker bought his own pod for $75,000 and brought it to the U.S. Open, parking it on a trailer about 1,000 feet from Arthur Ashe Stadium.

 

Ever the pessimist about human nature and fate, in The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner writes that “no battle is ever won. They are not even fought.” Well, such was the case for Djokovic at the U.S. Open in 2020. There, as you’ll recall the favorite’s title quest came to an abrupt halt in the fourth round after he smacked a tennis ball in anger that hit a female line judge in the throat, forcing his automatic ejection from the tournament. Given that Dusan the Almighty had unleashed balls into the crowd at previous events like at Roland Garros in 2016, this mishap was surely an explosive accident just waiting to happen.

Indeed, how are the Balkans always described? Whether in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts or Jacob Mikanowski’s Goodbye, Eastern Europe, Djokovic’s native territory is known as a powder keg waiting to go off. Easily the most notorious evidence remains June 28, 1914, when Franz Ferdinand arrived in nearby Sarajevo from Vienna on St. Vitus’s Day, the anniversary of the Serbs losing the Battle of Kossovo to the Turks in 1389. On that inauspicious anniversary, a Bosnian Serb named Princip killed the Hapsburg potentate driving by him on parade, thereby igniting World War One.

Bloodshed upon bloodshed. In 1903, Alexander Obrenovich, King of Serbia, and his wife Draga are murdered in the palace whose balcony the Djoker would later grace, their naked bodies thrown from their bedroom into the garden below. Skipping past World War Two, we arrive at the point in 1987 when Yugoslavia is dissolving as Serbian nationalists put the body of Prince Lazar (the fallen hero of the Battle of Kosovo) on tour to Serbian Orthodox monasteries. That same year, the Serbian leader Sloban Milosevic gives a speech in Kosovo that by ending with the phrase “No one will ever beat a Serb again!” could have been a set-up for Mats Wilander joking about his victory over Ivan Lendl at the U.S. Open in 1988 by saying that “Nobody beats me seven times in a row!”

Seriously, though, things turn grim. Between 1991 and 1995, over 130,000 people perish in the former Yugoslavia as ethnic cleaning becomes a common term in Europe for the first time since 1945.

Throughout the strife, Djokovic’s hands stay clean. He’s still a boy. But that said, in September of 2021 the Djoker is photographed at a wedding party with Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and the paramilitary officer Milan Jolovic, whose Drina Wolves committed wartime atrocities. Of late, the Serb-majority Republika Srpska wants to move from autonomy within Bosnia-Herzegovina to outright secession and has given the Djoker its highest honor. Nobody is at ease in a region where a hilltop overlooking Sarajevo was transformed from a lover’s lane into a sniper’s nest three decades ago.

Djokovic is everything to everyone. He’s become both a globe-trotting international star and at the same time a provincial icon utterly devoted to his own people. He’s the son of a Serbian father, born in Kosovo, and a Croatian mother. The Djoker married his wife Jelena in neighboring Montenegro. The guy speaks six languages, not including political correctness. When his dad, Srdjan, was caught on video at the Australian Open with Djoker partisans holding Russian flags after Putin invaded Ukraine, Ducan the Almighty told the press with great, apparent sincerity:

“My father, my whole family and myself have been through several wars during the 90s. We are against the war. We never will support any violence or any war” for the simple reason that “We know how devastating that is for the family, for people in any country that is going through the war.”

Wartime tensions don’t die graceful deaths. Even today, Serbia is still not part of the EU or NATO. It’s a pariah state, feared but also respected by the Croat driver who took my wife and me from Dubrovnik to Mostar during our visit to the former Yugoslavia a few years ago. From his stray comments, the driver’s disdain for Muslims became obvious. Then he finally told me a joke: “In a war between Croatia and Serbia, who loses?” The answer was “Bosnia.”

 

I used to find it pretty easy to categorize Djokovic and his rivals. In my chat with Mary Carillo on Tennis Channel in 2015, I had the male Big Four down pat. Federer = happiness, being the lad with the coy smile. Rafa = disgust, his upper lip curling in distaste at the idea that he could do anything other than triumph. Next up: Andy Murray = anger. On court, the guy can become a portrait of self-loathing so convincing that I call him the Scottish Inquisition given how he tortures himself.

Back then, Djokovic the future GOAT was still just “one of the guys.” Novak Djokovic = surprise I told the ever-charming Mary, focusing primarily on the Djoker’s wide-eyed look as he prepares to receive serve. who cackled yet again as we covered the pantheon of tennis greats, male and female alike. Now though. . . I ponder anew two questions. First, who is Djokovic? And second, in addition to winning endless trophies is he likeable enough to also win the hearts of many more tennis fans finally ready to embrace him as the sport’s male GOAT?

So many tournaments to watch and so little time.

I look at my TV set and another televised match, and lately I see: the Djoker beating Taylor Fritz and in victory his arms are shaking, his fists are raised, his eyes are narrowed in what can only be described as borderline rage as he is apparently screaming (mouth wide open) the Serbian equivalent of “THAT’S RIIIIGHT!!!!!” – or “Let’s go!!!!!”–or “That’s how it is!!!!!”

An aberration? Hardly. When the Italian heavy hitter Matteo Berrettini goes down in defeat, the Djoker offers an emphatic swinging fist pump that ends with his ever-so-tight fist crowning the air above his own head. Is this a gut punch, a warning, to rivals who would dare contemplate beating him? I think so as I brood over the fact that Djokovic has become a world-class SCREAMER.

Maybe that newly enhanced tendency is part of what Rafa is alluding to when he very diplomatically fields questions in an interview about the relative popularity of Federer and the Djoker in comparison with himself. “[There] are tastes, inspiration, sensations that one or the other may transmit to you, that you may like one or the other more,” Rafa says. Then in specific regards to Djokovic he adds that “with respect to titles, Djokovic is the best in history. I think Novak, in that sense, lives things more intensely than the way I have lived them.”

Wow. Yes to “more intensely” – which is saying a lot when we are talking about Rafa, the King of Clay. And it’s a line of critique that Stefanos Tsitsipas swings in behind even more clearly in his own interview about the Joker’s legacy:

“He [Djokovic] is no doubt the best, going by numbers. He breaks record after record. He also has the thirst, even though he has nothing to prove anymore. That’s how he’s wired. He’s never happy; it’s like he’s always trying to prove something to someone. I don’t know what or to whom. It’s like he wants revenge. His eye shines.”

Maybe here I can in my way help Tsitsipas out. The revenge in question is eternal. The pair of eagles on the Serbian flag could be Djokovic with both arms flung back, chest out after a victory. Or if he collapses onto the court in celebration, that same spread-eagled look takes shape at a lower elevation. Don’t be fooled by Djokovic’s forgiving smiles he as accepts his rival’s inferiority and the fans’ adoration graciously enough during the awards ceremony that follows yet another victory. That’s only the version of Djokovic who’s also sincerely enough a member of the “Champion for Peace” club, a group of elite athletes committed to serving peace in the world through sports.

I would maintain that there’s also another, deeper version of Djokovic. You get more than a hint of it from hearing how the GOAT spoke about his 2023 U.S. Open victory:

“If I wasn’t from Serbia, I’d have been glorified on a sporting level many years ago, especially in the West,” Djokovic asserted. “But that’s part of my journey. I am grateful and proud to come from Serbia — because of that, all of these accomplishments are sweeter and even more fulfilling.”

Yes, the thirst and the revenge are eternal and as monumental as Djokovic’s shot tolerance on court. Serbian folk songs celebrate an epic past full of heroes, of which the Djoker is now one for the ages. He’s pure Serbian: quarrelsome, courageous, and tenacious. None of the Great Powers from Constantinople or Vienna or Basel or Mallorca will ever be able to touch him again. He’s Ducan the Almighty. He’s Prince Lazar minus a final, catastrophic defeat. His kingdom of records will rule forever more. He’s got it all: legitimacy and dignity intact, serving for the match at 40-love or some version thereof.

Daniel A. Hill is the author of 10 books including Emotionomics, which features a foreword by “The Simpsons” co-creator Sam Simon. He’s also served as an analyst of U.S. presidential candidates and debates for the past 20 years for major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Reuters as well as the programs ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and NBC’s “The Today Show.” For his work studying athletes for teams in professional and NCAA Division I sports, he received a front-page profile in The New York Times. Other media roles have ranged from frequently appearing as a guest on PBS’s critical ly-acclaimed show “Mental Engineering” to hosting the podcast “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” on the New Books Network (NBN), the world’s largest book review platform. His previous essays have been noted with honor in three editions of The Best American Essays.

Of Paunch and Punches: Boxing in Ukraine

by Paul Shields

It was a late summer evening in Kyiv when Yuriy, my 80-year-old boxing trainer, punched me in the mouth. “Hands up!” He continued to drive jabs to my head before charging an upper cut to my belly.

I considered a left-hook to his ribs, a counter to the shameless pounding. Yet there is an untouchable quality to those leathery trainers who somehow, over the years, magically shrink to the size of prunes. All I could do was stoically absorb my beating from this Ukrainian grandpa.

Eventually Yuriy stopped his onslaught, and I slouched over, my chest heaving for air. I lifted a glove toward the ring. Lit in an angelic light, two students sparred with impeccable technique. They were graceful, weaving a tapestry of sport between the ropes, taping each other as they sprung around the canvas. The only sounds across the gym were a ruffle of feet and the occasional smack of a leather glove finding its target.

“Am I ready?” I asked. I had been training for months and wondered whether I would be put in the ring at last.

 

It all started on an April morning in 2018 in the outskirts of Kyiv, where I lived with my girlfriend. I was shuffling to my job as an analyst for an international NGO, coffee spilling in hand, when I stumbled upon the faint outline of a boxer, drawn with white chalk on the sidewalk. Below was a number, hardly legible. From sheer impulse I called.

“What?”, barked a feisty voice.

“Do you boxing workout boxers for them?” My Russian was horrible. So I said something to that effect.

“We don’t work out.”

My heart sank. It’s strange to think, but as I got older I wanted to get into a fight. I wanted to be thrown into combat. I might not have looked like it at the time. I was twenty-something, bookish, and wore those glasses European bureaucrats all seem to have.

But the desire was real. It might have been from just living in Ukraine, a country enduring a four-year frozen war on its eastern front. Or it might have been this region’s culture of fitness with its pull up bars in every home and in every playground. Or it might have also been the gruff countenance in local interaction where, it seems, all Ukrainian men develop a martial hyper-masculine strut. Boys get it here around 8 years old. All I knew is I wanted to brawl.

After a pause there was a snort through the phone. “We don’t work out,” the voice said again. “We train.” He invited me to his gym that evening.

 

At 6 p.m. we ran. The unusually warm spring sun hissed overhead, dipping behind the Soviet-era high rises. Two dozen men huffed laps around a pot-holed track. It was a scene of sneakers, Adidas stripes, and people grunting pizdets (fuck) trying to keep pace. By the second mile we strung out in groups, and I struggled towards the back, getting lapped by those more fit.

Another straggler ran on my heels, hinged at the waist, his gut drooping in a testament to gravity. A few stringy hairs clung wildly to a bald head. His name was Anton. He had a constant look of bemused confusion, sort of like a bushbaby.

By the time we finished most gathered in clusters and conferred in whispers about Lomachenko, Usyk, and the Klitschko brothers; the heroes of Ukraine’s boxing pantheon. By the mid-2010s, Ukraine was experiencing a surge in boxing popularity thanks to its success in the sport.

Consider the twin Klitschko brothers, Vladimir and Vitalli, who dominated the heavyweight scene from 2008-2012. We never knew which twin was better (nor which one was fighting really since they have such similar names and faces), as they promised their mom to never fight each other. There was a boring sweetness to them. In the ring they developed a brilliant-in-the-basics style. In interviews, they had an almost mouse-like reservation. Vitalli later became the mayor of Kyiv and installed orange pull up bars all around the city.

Then there is Lomachenko. Lomo. Loman. Lo. The man who made footwork a new discipline for the boxing community thanks to years of training in Ukrainian folk dancing. His father, a boxing trainer, groomed his son to simultaneously hook and jab while twirling on his tiptoes to Balalaika tunes. It seemed to pay off. His swift and sturdy legs give him perfect balance. He strikes his opponents from inventive angles driving them toward insanity. Many have quit mid-fight out of frustration. Lomachenko earned the title, “The Matrix,” for his seeming ability to be in multiple places at the same time.

It’s puzzling why Ukraine, a prior little-known country with 40 million, excels in fighting. Part of me thinks the harsh realities of life here have something to do with it. A history of strife, poverty, genocide, and rampant political instability may have nurtured a microcosm for boxing. Indeed, all around the world, fighting has always been a passageway out of deprivation. All great boxers seemed to punch their way through dire circumstances, using their fists to carve a life in the ring. Ukrainians are great fighters because they have been fighting their whole life.

Yet I knew none of these men would ever reach the levels of the Klitschko or Lomachenko. We were a dusty bunch. Many of us were past their prime store clerks, construction workers, and truck drivers. One of the more athletic ones sold cell phones in kiosks around town and promised me a good deal on an iPhone. I was an Asian American abroad with a vague longing for adventure. No one here was a champion. But these men strove to be a part of their hometown heroes, or at least have a piece of them that perhaps they felt they lacked.

And that’s when the man on the phone appeared. He led us on a jog down a set of stairs to the murky depths of the capital. In his basement gym it smelled of mildew, rust, and a middle-school locker room. Heavy bags hung like sacks of onions under fluorescent lights. Chess boards sat staged on the side of the wall. In the center was the ring.

Yuriy was a peanut of a man. A raisin with limbs in tattered shorts. There was not an ounce of fat on him. Boxing seemed etched into his soul and radiated off his bones. He led us through a series of mobility and conditioning exercises. Ten minutes of jump rope. Duck walks, swinging arms, high knees, windmills, butt kicks, trunk rotations.

That first day, I was spent from running. My shirt clung to my body, drenched in sweat. Through all my panting and grimacing, my right glute seized into a knot. Yuriy spoke in a mix of Ukrainian and Russian called Suzhik, which left me stumbling, swiveling my head around, trying to copy others’ movements. I was a mediocre varsity athlete in high school, but that was long ago. My attempt to appear smooth and confident was beaten by age and too many emails.

It’s hard to describe what happened when we switched to technique. But it reminded me of a Soviet ballet class. We staged along a wall length mirror, and Yuriy called out punch combinations. We repeated in unison. Jab -Cross-Jab. Jab-Cross-Hook. We moved excruciatingly slow, bouncing on our toes while correcting our delicate movements. Yuriy wanted accuracy over speed. Precision over power. Grace over strength. More experienced students moved like well-oiled machines.

We shadow-boxed forever. Maybe 40 minutes. I couldn’t tell. Anton and I flung our fists in the air at some invisible enemy.

“My God,” Yuriy breathed in horror. He still demanded perfection from the two of us, shrieking something in Ukrainian before kicking my feet for being off half-an-inch.

Finally, he separated us into groups. Some students put in mouth guards and took the cue to spar, experimenting with the techniques we practiced. Yuriy picked a pair to enter the ring. Others took to the heavy bags for six rounds.

Yuriy grabbed Anton and I by the gruff of our necks and dropped us in a corner. He made us practice our jab again, the most basic and fundamental punch. Yuriy held out a piece of white paper for us to hit. Yet no matter how deliberate we jabbed Yuriy screamed, “Slower! Softer! Focus! Like this!” Anton tried to punch a bag, but Yuriy slapped his bald head.

Eventually Yuriy pulled me aside. “You don’t have any idea what I am saying. Do you?”

I squinted through my fogged-up glasses and pressed my lips together. I didn’t know how to respond.

Yuriy then stepped forward and punched my chest. He watched my eyes. He did it again. Each punch unleashed lightning through my body. It woke something deep within. And it left me dazed yet alert, weak yet strong, and in the kind of intense focus where time slips from its bounds.

 

The next morning, I limped out of bed and into the kitchen, my knees cracking like peanuts being crushed from a shell. My shoulders were sore to the point of being unusable, the coffee pot threatening to take me to the ground. My girlfriend helped me put on my coat and I dragged myself to work where I sagged deeply (and I mean deeply) into a chair, sliding lower and making the sound of a deflating beach ball.

Before leaving the gym yesterday, Yuriy asked whether I would be coming back tomorrow. “I might even let you spar,” he said walking away.

Great boxing trainers can read people like books. They are psychological masters. Perhaps even manipulators. They have to be. Because saying the right words can win a fight or change someone’s life.

Yuriy knew that I needed to get punched. He saw that I had never been in a real fight where my physical being and pride were at stake. I felt he was challenging me to return, almost a dare, to see what I would do.

I hobbled to the gym on my second day, late, yet determined and caught up with the others circling the track. Anton was there too, looking especially haggard, a slight gimp in his leg. We lumbered in circles and never spoke. A tension simmered between us.

We spent the majority of my time in the mirror, as Yuriy insisted, again, on moving at a grinding snail’s pace. It was frustrating, but I started to see the small details of boxing that I passed over before. It was about being loose. Arms like chains. Rhythm in the feet. A dance of violence. Power comes from the floor and shoots up your leg. Twist your hips and launch a punch like a piston from your torso.

Yuriy kept his promise and let me spar with an advanced student. His name was Sasha, and he was patient with me. Sparring is controlled yet intoxicating. It happens at 50 percent speed, so there was no chance of real injury, but we still got reps against a moving target. Sasha’s snappy punches to the face stung, but I understood the logic: it introduced the idea of having a challenger, a competitor to strive against. Bags and shadowboxing don’t hit back, or move, or come close to a real fight.

 

It took a month for the soreness to disappear, but by then I was a full-on addict. I was showing up after work almost every day, brain dead from making Powerpoints and reports. I would clamber to the gym and change before scuttling around the track with the others. We spared daily.

Yuriy never put me in the ring though. That was reserved for a real fight where you practice going all out. I gathered one had to earn time in the four-cornered arena. Though I didn’t know how. Anton didn’t seem to get the ticket either. We just kept practicing in the mirror.

One Sunday afternoon Maria, my girlfriend, caught me practicing combinations in the bathroom mirror. “Where is this going?” She leaned against the doorway.

“Where is what going?” I kept striking the air.

“This” She pointed at me. “Like you want to be a boxer now? That’s all you do.” She looked concerned, if not irritated.

I was getting more invested in boxing, and it became all consuming. Most evenings, I would slip in quietly through my apartment door. The place would be dark. A single light in the kitchen cast on a cold dinner. Training sessions led to late nights and on some mornings, I would gingerly wake up at five and get some more before work. I watched boxing matches during my lunch break. It’s all I wanted to talk about.

Where was this going? What was I after? Did any of it matter? It was clearly having a negative effect on my life. My performance at work slowed, my thinking foggier now that I was frequently getting jabbed in the head, my face bruised, before morning meetings. Moreover, I wasn’t focused on the internal politics of Ukraine, which I was supposed to do. I was dreaming about the next time I would be in front of a speed bag. I was dreaming about fighting.

 

Then one Tuesday evening it happened. Yuriy pointed at Anton then looked at me. “It’s time.”

The gym cheered. A growing circle crowded the canvas. Everyone had been waiting for this. Bout of the bottom. War of the worst. Sparring for suckers. It would be short: three rounds at two minutes each. I pushed through the throng of onlookers and slipped through the ropes. Under the lights, I could not have been happier or more terrified.

Anton stood across from me, bouncing on his toes. He ripped the Velcro straps from his gloves, tightening them around his wrists. He looked different from when we first met. Anton now embraced balding; his dome well-shaved. He was still heavy but had tanned over the summer. The fat around his face and neck disappeared.

I realized then why I never liked him. I saw myself in Anton. And I wanted to clobber him, believing that I could somehow beat the weakness I was so afraid of out of myself.

As I hopped around my corner, focusing on keeping the tension out of my back, I cracked my neck. I felt my heart beat against my ribs. I thought it strange to be here, in the boxing ring, in Ukraine, given I was once averse towards fighting. My father was a pacifist of sorts, instructing my brothers and I to be like a bear in a conflict, and walk away. As a result I became a nerd, a library dweller of sorts. I took up running and swimming as a child, grabbing onto the cerebral nature of repetitive action.

Now that I have a son of my own I know my father is right. Violence should only be used for self-defense and the defense of others. Though something felt off. Like celebrating Christmas in Arizona. And I felt this when working a job that slowly turned my back into a question mark. And it hit home when I looked in the mirror in the morning and saw through my smudged spectacles my body transforming into the shape of a pear.

I am not sure if I won or lost. Probably both. All I know is that when the punches fly, when the adrenaline pounds, and when people scream at you in Ukrainian, you feel everything. You feel a Tolstoy novel rip through you. Hate. Love. Courage. Honor. Humiliation. Shame. Satisfaction. Always and never ready.

Fighting, I found in that moment, is instructive because it reveals. It helps you understand yourself. It makes you come to grips with who you really are. Because in the ring you are completely alone. No one can save you but yourself. You cannot ride alongside Tom Brady or Michael Jordan and come home with a ring. Rather you think: Am I a coward? Can I take this pain? Can I keep going? It’s daunting. Whatever you have in the boxing ring is yours. It’s you in an almost pure form. This is my body, and this is my life, with all its problems and quirks. And though not perfect I must try my best.

The gym supported Anton and me, barking on the sidelines and slapping our backs. They gave us water at the breaks that gushed out of my mouth and onto my shirt. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to cry from the pain and the joy of it all. I hit. I got hit. I dodged. I swung. I clinched. I fought.

Anton and I tapped our gloves afterward. He sputtered “good job” before stumbling to his corner and flinging his body against the ropes like a beached whale. Yuriy said nothing. Though he dipped his head a quarter of an inch towards me, his nod of approval.

After the fight I walked home through the evening streets of Kyiv where it’s drab and dusty and beaming with potential. The late summer sun painted bars of pink and orange over the skyline. I remember looking forward to holding my girlfriend and eating watermelon together on our balcony. I remember thinking I didn’t want to fight again like that unless I had to, though it was right to fight here and now. I remember thinking how boxing is fair. Where you start in life is not. Who your parents are is not. But boxing is. And for that reason it dramatizes the redemption we are all chasing.

Paul Shields is a logistics officer in the United States Marine Corps. A Fulbright Scholar, he graduated with a Master of Philosophy degree from Oxford University and completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University. His writing on travel and culture around the former Soviet Union has appeared in online and print publications. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and two sons.

Bring Me the Stats of Biff Pocoroba

by Jon Fain

Paul was a big boisterous guy with a blonde brush-cut, a little older than me, a Vietnam Vet who got hired as the shipping and receiving clerk at the wallpaper company. Soon after he started, he came in to work in a St. Louis Cardinals jersey.

You didn’t see many of those around Boston, and when I asked about it, Paul told me he wore it “in solidarity!” During the previous year, 1981, after a couple of months of games, there had been a strike in Major League Baseball. The strike settled, and teams resumed play and completed a second short season. The Reds and Cardinals finished with the best winning percentages in the National League, but overall records didn’t matter, only the division winners made the playoffs. Cincinnati and St. Louis finished second in their divisions in both seasons. The Cardinals got especially screwed because in the second short season, the Montreal Expos through a scheduling fluke played and won one more game than the Cardinals, and so St. Louis got edged out for the division by a half-game.

Numbers mattered to Paul, who was something of a math savant. Maybe it was hereditary; he had two older brothers who worked at MIT. In Vietnam, Paul had been in Army intelligence (“insert joke here!”), tasked with deciphering troop and supply levels from captured soldiers’ documents. As the wallpaper company shipping clerk, he was always writing into notebooks, which I assumed at first was something like the weights and costs of everything he sent out. I would find out that they were about something else.

Paul loved baseball, although claimed he’d never played. He was not a fan of any team — he hated the Red Sox, their followers and “quirky bandbox!” especially. He didn’t seem to care particularly about individual players. He did like some of their names, however. One favorite was “Biff Pocoroba!” that he shouted for a while as a salutation whenever he saw me coming. But his real passion showed itself in a different way. The notebooks he kept weren’t for shipping — they were for stats.

Whenever Paul had a free moment, you’d see him tossing dice on the top of boxes of wallpaper pushed together. It wasn’t craps. He had created a dice baseball game, and if you came by, he’d invite you to play. Which basically meant you rolled the dice when it was your team’s turn, sometimes one at a time, and Paul would tell you what happened, less in a radio announcer’s play-by-play than a basic just-the-facts narrative. Every roll of the dice meant something different according to score, baserunners, numbers of outs, what inning. There were rolls for home runs, walks, strikeouts, and double plays. He eventually gave me a copy of a “rulebook” filled with charts, descriptions, and drawings that I still have. In it he says once you become fluent with the rules you can play a nine-inning game in nine minutes.

Paul designed his game to reflect actual big-league averages over many seasons and set up a seven-team league that played a 150-game schedule. You had to admire the rigor of his obsession. The most striking thing — in a manner of speaking ­— were the rules that described hit batsmen. If you rolled a two with both dice, then with a single die a four, it meant the batter was hit by a pitch. Then you rolled both dice to determine the extent of the player’s injury. If you rolled doubles next, the batter was injured and had to leave the game. But then, if a 12 was rolled three times in a row — like Roy Chapman, the only one it happened to in major league history — the player died from the injury. According to Paul’s rulebook, the “odds of a potential death in dice baseball are precisely 60,466,176 to 1.”

But the best part was that before Paul started each of his “seasons” he went to the Boston Public Library and looked through telephone books from around the country, to find names for players. He kept detailed stats in those notebooks of his, memorizing what happened in each game and recording the results when he was finished. He charged himself 10 cents admission for each game he played, and then, after going through the season and having playoffs, wrote checks to all the people whose names he had borrowed for the team that was the champion, and mail them to their addresses from the phone book. He didn’t send any note or anything, just the checks. I asked him what happened, and he laughed and said they usually just cashed them.

The wallpaper company had been in process of moving its whole operation across the country to San Francisco when Paul joined us, and like me, he had turned down the offer to relocate. A few years later, I’d moved out of town, but while walking down Comm Ave one morning after being back in Boston and spending the night at a friend’s, I heard someone call out my name from the street.

Paul was passing by on his bicycle, headed to work. We talked for a few minutes, one of those cool times when you’re unexpectedly in the presence of someone you knew for a while and liked a lot. And then they go away on their bicycle again.

Later, since I’d told him where I’d moved, I hoped that he might hunt down my address, add me to one of his teams, and if we won the championship, I’d get a check for my playoff share. I’d cash it with pride, remembering a great season. But I never heard from him again, and he’s one of those who’s even eluded any internet search.

Who knows? Maybe he ended up in St. Louis. I can see him in that replica Cardinals’ jersey, throwing dice and keeping track of hits, runs, and errors. And the occasional hit batsman, of course.

Jon Fain is a writer and editor living in Massachusetts. Some of his recent publications include short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Argyle Literary Magazine, flash fictions in The Broadkill Review and Midsummer Dream House, micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO, and a chapbook of flash fiction, Pass the Panpharmacon! from Greying Ghost Press. He has stories forthcoming in Yellow Mama, The Twin Bill, and elsewhere.

Running with Greeks

A Review of Sabrina Little’s The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners
& Andrea Marcolongo’s The Art of Running: Learning to Run Like a Greek

by Scott F. Parker

As runners, Andrea Marcolongo and Sabrina Little have almost nothing in common. Little is an elite

runner, with five U.S. national championships and a silver medal in the World 24-Hour Championships to her credit. Marcolongo, by contrast, was bookishly inactive life prior to, somewhat quixotically, taking up running in her thirties. But as students of running, both writers recognize the happy congruence between their sport and the culture of ancient Greece that is their first common passion.

That their two books should arrive in the same publishing season (Marcolongo’s in translation from the Italian) suggests to this hopeful reviewer the possibility of a shifting societal attitude away from the treatment of running as one more of life’s endeavors to be efficiencied and technologized into optimal performance (At one point in her book, Marcolongo wonders whether coaches think they’re working with athletes or machines.) and toward an activity that can be seen foremost as an expression of human nature.

Many authors before Little and Marcolongo have gone to literal and historical Greece in their writing about running. What sets these new books apart is that they are not satisfied with summarizing the legend of Philippides’s ultimate run from Marathon to Athens; instead, each in her own way engages seriously with the philosophy and literature of ancient Greece. Why? Simply, it turns out — and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised — because the Greeks have something to teach us.

Little, a philosopher by profession, noticed the convergence between the virtue ethics she studied and the virtues that running promoted in her life, and from there began a systematic inquiry into the relationship between running and moral virtue that resulted in The Examined Run.

From the outset, Little makes it clear that running is a human enterprise that happens in the context of a human life, a point she makes succinctly later in the book: “We are not just runners. We are humans.” This simple-seeming point is crucial for Little’s project, which “attempts to restore to sport a vision of the good life and how running fits in.” Equally important for Little is the recognition that humans are embodied beings. What counts is accepting our physical constraints and working with them, not transcending them through some disembodied act of will. As she writes, “we can create something beautiful within the limits we have. This would demand that we think about sports and life in richer, broader ways than the rhetoric of limitlessness affords us.”

According to Little’s assessment, running, like sports in general, tends to be too narrowly concerned with results that it assumes are distinct from an athlete’s broader well-being. But any athlete who pays sufficient attention to the experience of athletics will observe the many ways in which their sport is enmeshed with the rest of their lives and the tensions can arise between success and well-being. An unbalanced devotion to one’s sport, to pick the easiest example, comes at the cost of trade-offs to one’s other interests, be they social, familial, intellectual, or whatever other dimensions of human life contribute to the good life. Relatedly, the culture of running that concentrates its attention only on performance reduces the person who runs to its limited conception of a runner. It can be as dehumanizing as an employer seeing employees as abstract sources of labor. But in response to any book or podcast or coach that addresses only the abstract running body we can say that there are more things in being human than are dreamt in any training schedule. Little, never one to objectify, theorizes from experience when she writes of running’s effects, “But it was not just my body that changed. My character was edified, too.”

Recognizing Little’s claim about the effects of running extending beyond the physical, important questions follow about what constitutes character, virtue, and the good life. Little’s Aristotelianism holds that “virtues are excellences suited to the kind of being we are, and, in the classical tradition, they are constitutive goods of our nature. They are a means of becoming higher versions of ourselves, rather than turning us into something else.” That is to say that through the exercise of virtue we can become better versions of ourselves, even one of Aristotle’s virtuous persons, who “has a correct conception of the good, is motivated to perform these good actions, and does indeed perform them.” Virtue, by this understanding, is the stuff of theory in action. For Little, as for Aristotle, “both moral and intellectual virtues are acquired rather than natural.” And they are acquired through practice: “We develop good characters in the same way that we become better runners.”

This takes us to the core of Little’s argument and her original contribution to the discourse of virtue ethics: the recognition that running — not uniquely, but unmistakably — leads to a virtuous circle by which it cultivates better character, which cultivates better running. For example, Little argues, running promotes the virtues of resilience, joy, perseverance, and humor, which then become performance-enhancing virtues for the runner.

We could apply Little’s framework in the case of someone like the elite runner Kara Goucher, whose testimony against Alberto Salazar revealed a multitude of coaching violations. It’s possible that Goucher developed her patience (she had to wait years for her testimony to lead to sanctions against Salazar) and courage (to speak out when a successful outcome was not guaranteed but the enormous emotional cost on her was) at least in part through running, those being two of the virtues Little returns to in her analysis. Multiple studies have found that professional ethicists are no more ethical than the average person. From an Aristotelian vantage, it’s easy to observe that knowing a lot about the subject of ethics is far removed from developing one’s virtues through deliberate practice. If Little has the research funds available to her, it might be worthwhile to conduct a similar study of runners. Does the evidence support her first-hand experience and philosophical reflection? Are there a higher percentage of Gouchers among us than the general population? I, for one, would be curious to know.

In the same spirit of recommending a life that balances body and mind, Little once again follows the path of the ancients: “This is why Plato, Aristotle, and the classical tradition that succeeds them include poetry as a humanizing complement to gymnastics — because gymnastics alone would form young citizens of brutes.” The approach one takes to running determines the degree to which it will positively shape one’s character. The mind must be engaged as well as the body, and along certain specific lines that The Examined Run both identifies and attempts to engage. The opposite is true as well. Reading this book without then going for a run would be like reading recipes online and never stepping foot in the kitchen. People do it. But we don’t call it thriving.

While Little’s loadstar is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Andrea Marcolongo’s is Philostratus’s Gymnasticus. Philostratus — “The Athenian” — was a Greek writer in the Roman era, whose treatise includes accounts of early Olympic games. But it’s as “the first sports manual” that Marcolongo reads Gymnasticus. And she is delighted by what she finds in it: “He wasn’t trying to tell us how to play sports, or in what sequence to exercise our mortal muscles, or why we should exercise, compiling a list of practical benefits. At its core his book seeks to understand what sports are — and therefore what we talk about when we talk about physical activity.” The echo of Murakami is intentional, as the echo of Philostratus will be, too, in The Art of Running, which takes the very approach Marcolongo identifies in the Athenian.

That Marcolongo would take her lead from such an obscure source is explained by her first love and the subject of her first book: the Greek language. Marcolongo is a journalist by trade, and what she lacks in knowledge about running she makes up for in curiosity and essayistic spirit. Planted unapologetically in the center of her own very particular perspective, Marcolongo sees running through a beginner’s eyes, without the assumptions and blind spots of someone who has grown up in the sport.

It is this love of the Greek language and Greek history that, when she takes up running during the pandemic, prompts Marcolongo to register for the Athens Marathon, which serves as a framing device for the book and, one gathers, an effort made significantly for the sake of the book that would result. She will train to retrace the famous route of Philippides’s from Marathon, and along the way she will respond from myriad sides to the question of why we (herself now included) run.

Since Marcolongo doesn’t bury the lede, I see no need to. She comes quickly to the realization that “When I run, I’m not getting on with my life; I’m living.” Running for her is an end in itself. She could stop the book right there. What else is there to say, really? Well, how about unpacking the nature of the end in itself: “Every time I go for a run, long or short, my body and, by some miracle, my head along with it — that’s what runners mean when they talk about ‘mental health’ — does everything in its power to reach its one goal: to live life to the fullest, or at least far more than my body is permitted to when it’s planted in a chair. . . . This completeness of motion, pace Philostratus, is a love of life. Nothing more, nothing less — and therefore everything.”

As if that were not enough already to get us all out of our seats, let me offer one more glimpse into what it’s like to see running as Marcolongo does: “Running is the most contemplative activity there is. Once upon a time people considered it a mystical form of pilgrimage. Finally at a remove — freed — from the thousands of daily distractions, we’re left to contemplate only two landscapes when we run: the interior landscape of emotions and physical sensations, and the exterior landscape of streets, trees, rivers, and, for those lucky enough, mountains and seas.” The fact that the author of this fine sentiment could be someone who runs with earbuds, as Marcolongo reports doing, beggars my belief. But much of the charm of The Art of Running is Marcolongo’s idiosyncrasy. Her wandering mind sometimes wanders into some strange claims, such as “I’ve never heard a runner sing the praises of running while running.” But even when I don’t agree with her, it’s so refreshing to read someone thinking original pretenseless things about running.

Marcolongo’s beginner eyes also let her see things many runners take for granted. For instance, the fact that we take off most of our clothes and then run in public spaces, where we are sure to be seen by countless others. That’s unusual. “‘I’m going for a run,’ a phrase every runner uses, means crossing the threshold of polite society, which as a matter of decorum bars us from attending to our bodily needs in public, and visibly invading spaces where physical exercise is, as a rule, alien.” Most running books, needless to say, fail to address such fundamental dimensions of the sport, something Marcolongo does as routinely as she laces up her shoes. Then again, most running books fail to recognize that “we all need a little poetry in our lives, especially when we’re running.”

That is the enduring lesson of these two books—that the inner life of the runner is not separate from the outer, the two are entwined in the nature of the human. Understood broadly — and how would we want to understand but broadly? — running is about what it means to be a human being. The Examined Run and The Art of Running make this plain and, what’s more, offer to assist in attuning our mental and physical, not to mention our spiritual, faculties.

Happy trails, everyone.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Going With

A review of Lindsey A. Freeman’s Running

by Scott F. Parker

Reading Lindsey A. Freeman’s Running is like running a 5K. You know it’s going to be a short race, and once you start you don’t want to let up until you finish, no matter how much you’re hurting. In other words, I couldn’t put it down, even if a few times I wanted to throw it out the window.

Then again, it’s harder to write a book than to read one. Maybe Running is a marathon, and it takes the runner/author a few miles/chapters to get the nerves out and find a good pace. It does get off to a slow start. Freeman, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University, has an academic’s habit of throat clearing and qualifying her prose beyond common decency. There’s even something of a lit review by which Freeman seems to want to establish her right to write the book. And too often her own thoughts are followed by the assurance that Foucult or Barthes once thought something similar. Meanwhile, we’re a few chapters in before Freeman really begins what is a vivid, insightful, and above all knowing reflection on running, her love for which is manifest and contagious.

It is love that propels Freeman. Running belongs categorically to Duke University Press’s Practices series, books that “are by and about amateurs in the original sense — those who engage in pursuits out of sheer love and fascination.” Freeman was a successful collegiate runner, but it is not her past accomplishments (briefly discussed) that impress as much as her devotion and appreciation. Freeman’s expertise, as one hopes from a work of literature, stems from the quality of her attention to experience.

Running is a lovely assortment of occasional pieces about the wide-ranging experience of being a runner. Runners will recognize their own practices in Freeman’s stories and reflections. And non-runners, I suspect, will come to appreciate what it is that draws us runners so steadily to this activity. How could they not when they encounter passages like “With my senses heightened the world itself seems supercharged: in spring, the grass greens even brighter; in summer, limbs unfettered by jackets and tights relish the heat; in autumn, the fallen leaves crunch with a pleasure that travels from my feet up my spine; and in winter, the freshness and freedom of being warm outside when moving wins over the chilly start to the run.” Any runner knows these moments as some of the rich pleasures of running. And we all point, as Freeman points, to such intangibles when we try to sincerely explain why we run.

This question — what it is about running that inspires such love and fascination — is the mystery Freeman’s ode plums so well. Despite rejecting essentialist arguments,^[1] time and again Freeman limns aspects of running that resound across the usual identity categories.

Take just one example: “In most areas of life, you can’t show how much you want or love things, but in running, and especially in racing, there is the opportunity for this kind of near-naked display.” Exactly right and profound enough. But the passage continues, with Freeman ever attentive to the dynamic between the metaphorical and the literal: “This showcase of desire, effort, and personality is made all the more vulnerable for the fact that, in racing, you are often not wearing much clothing.” Aha! That feeling and that insight are undeniable yet, as far as I know, previously unarticulated. Maybe not every runner has that experience in common, but just about any runner could.

Superficially, Freeman and I have little in common, and yet I cannot read her book without recognizing her running and my running to be one running. We can, as she writes, “touch and be touched by others who love” what we love.

I am very happy to have taken up Freeman’s invitation to “go with me,” in no small part because she and I do not always see things the same way. Who wants a book that wins them over too easily or that they dumbly agree with? If I want to think my own thoughts only, I can always run alone.

^[1] Freeman is so dismissive of Christopher McDougall’s argument that humans are “born to run” that she refuses to even mention him or his bestselling book by name.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

 

What Did Coach Mike Leach Have That Bill Belichick Lacks?

by Daniel A. Hill

When The Athletic published its anonymous NFL players poll mid-season in 2023, one stunning result emerged. Did you see the poll results in response to the question, “Which current coach, aside from your own, would you want to play for?” Way out ahead was the Pittsburgh Steelers’ veteran coach Mike Tomlin at 26.4 percent. Second was the Miami Dolphins newbie coach Mike McDaniel at 14.6 percent. Left barely cracking the ranks of the top coaches being picked was the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. The Gray-Hoodie Grouch came in 12th place at 2.1 percent, quite the come-down for the guy hovering just behind Don Shula and George Halas in the race to be the all-time, winningest NFL coach.

Now, you might quibble with the results. If you’re a pure stats guy, you can say: well, a poll result based on input from only 72 players in a league with 1,696 players on the league’s active rosters covers only 4.2 percent of the waterfront. That’s a good point to make.

Nevertheless, stick to that rebuttal and you’ll be missing the boat here. For more than three seasons now Belichick has been drowning in the mediocrity that plagued his early days as a head coach for the Cleveland Browns, and I think I know the reason why. A contrasting example, the explanation, lies down in Key West, Florida, in a bar called Capt. Tony’s Saloon. There you’ll find that despite a history of famous guests ranging from Bob Dylan to Al Pacino and Dan Marino, only four stalwarts have been honored by having their bar stools hoisted on high. Between stools stamped with the names of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway and two U.S. presidents, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, you’ll find another stool bearing the name of a pirate who dressed up as a college football coach.

Meet the recently deceased Mike Leach.

Pegged as a “quirky, offensive mastermind,” the Dolphins newbie coach McDaniel has a profile that echoes the only pro or NCAA football coach I’ve ever known: the one-and-only Coach Leach. The Athletic quotes an NFL player saying of McDaniel, “He seems like a pretty fun coach to play for.” Could the same be said of Leach? There’s a lot of rah-rah, macho bullshit that goes on around teams — football foremost among the sports guilty of guys who would rather have an enema than admit to fear — so I can’t say for sure. What I can draw on is this when it comes to assessing Leach: a three-and-a-half-hour phone call with the guy as I drove from Salem, Oregon to Seattle; a nearly five-hour stint together in Capt. Tony’s; and three full days on site at Washington State’s stadium during the coach’s preseason camp.

The maverick I experienced on each of those occasions could be fairly described as borderline crazy, Sybil in cleats, somebody harboring a split personality. What kind of guy talks your head off while you’re navigating the #5 northward to Seattle and then, when you meet up at 10 p.m. at Capt. Tony’s, says barely a word until the clock strikes midnight? That’s Coach Leach for you in a nutshell.

Go into Capt. Tony’s now and the bar’s owner, Joey Faber, will tell you that Coach Leach told better stories than Hemingway and was way smarter than those Democrats that Leach, a die-hard conservative, never once spoke of to me. How to get Coach to talk, I pondered. The guy was nursing his favorite drink, grape vodka and water, barely making eye contact with me or Joey or anybody on the planet. I figured I had to join Coach Leach in outer space somewhere, so I finally broke the ice by asking him: “What’s your all-time favorite play, the one you ran that delighted you the most?”

Then I had my guy.

Leaning against the bar counter, Coach Leach pushed his finger along the top of it in a straight line. “Down the sideline,” he said, “flat out — bomb.” Only that wasn’t the play the Coach was proud of. “Down the sideline,” he said, “flat out — bomb.” No, I was only half drunk and hearing right. The Coach had run the same play for the second time in a row, and it still wasn’t the play he was so mighty proud of. “Down the sideline,” he said yet again, “flat out — touchdown.”

I looked into Coach Leach’s eyes looking for an answer that might only exist in the stratosphere. “I ran the play three times,” my drinking companion explained, “and each time with a different receiver. Fresh legs. I did it knowing the cornerback wouldn’t be subbed out. So, the guy was gassed, and we scored.”

If anyone else was still in the bar between 2 a.m. and when we parted ways an hour later besides Joey, who hovered, sometimes joining in, I didn’t notice. Once Coach Leach got going, you got comments like “If a pine cone war breaks out, you don’t really have any choice but to engage in it. I mean, there’s no neutral countries in pine cone wars.”

For those who knew Coach Leach well, that kind of comment wouldn’t be surprising at all. Leach will always be famous for having created an alternative universe peopled with favorites like the Apache chief Geronimo, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and the abstract painter Jackson Pollack, who hailed from Coach Leach’s home state of Wyoming. What was the Coach saying when he talked? It beats me. Go ahead and parse comments such as this one following a lost game: “It’s a little like breakfast. You eat ham and eggs. As coaches and players, we’re like the ham. You see, the chicken’s involved, but the pig’s committed. We’re like the pig; [officials] are like the chicken. They’re involved, but everything we have rides on this.” Go ahead and parse that press conference remark and tell me whether the guy was taking an indirect swipe at the officiating or merely hungry for his next meal. Who was Coach Leach? A Pepperdine University trained lawyer who looked a little like Archie Bunker and could talk like Yogi Berra.

If you get the impression that Coach Leach was an extremely extroverted Introvert, you’re on to something I think. When the guy did talk, he didn’t talk; he yapped. By comparison, nobody’s ever said that of Coach Belichick. Look at him on the sideline on Sunday during a Patriots game and what you see is nearly all that you hear: a scowl.

Truth be told, Coach Belichick isn’t human; he’s the Pillsbury Dough Boy cooking up mischief, bereft of the Dough Boy’s big smile. Asked to explain his success, Coach Doom-and-Gloom, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch, explained his formula as consisting of only two basic ingredients: 1) coach the players you have, not the ones you wished you had; and 2) keep it simple so your players don’t “fuck it up.”

I alone, however, know the secret of Belichick’s success. He’s a thief. While Coach Leach’s mind was until he died last year at age 61 a bank waiting to be looted, Belichick was and will always be a thief who cracks the safe in the wee hours of the morning. Not for him the bad odds of going in as a “hands-up,” free-shooting bank robber operating in broad daylight.

How did I arrive at my theory that distinguishes villainous, pirate-loving Saint Leach from the Criminal Mastermind holed up in Foxboro, Massachusetts? By getting Coach Belichick’s foremost accomplice to squeal in a manner of speaking. Of course, I’m now talking about Deflategate. In mid-January of 2015, I’m in San Francisco. More specifically, I’m in the West Coast studio of Bloomberg TV about to go live based on my recent front-page coverage in The New York Times.

The media likes fresh angles. So, while the article explored my use of facial coding to help pro and NCAA Division 1 sports teams draft, trade, and coach players more smartly, my recent appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning, America” focused on what politicians’ expressions can tell you about their emotional make-up. Now the producers at Bloomberg TV plan on having me walk through the signature expressions of Wall Street titans like Jamie Diamon and thieves like the Bernie who Madoff (with yours and everybody else’s money).

Then, only just a few moments before I’m scheduled to hit the airwaves myself, Tom Brady holds a brief press conference. Looking on in the Bloomberg studio, I see a guy uncharacteristically nervous as hell. A guy who is normally a combination of dimly lit smiles and full-on, cocky smirking, is betraying fear. Again, again and again his mouth pulls slightly wide, a tell-tale sign of anxiety.

For instance, during the Deflategate press conference, a reporter asks: “When and how did you supposedly alter the ball?” Even as the question is being asked, Brady swallows hard and the right side of his mouth stretches laterally, back towards the ear. Then as he answers, here’s what happens: (mouth pulls wider) “I didn’t” (mouth widens slightly more) “you know” (both eyebrows shoot upwards) “have any, uh… ” (mouth both widens again and falls open). “I didn’t hold onto the balls in any way.”

With a voice quavering at times, Brady will go on to offer other, not exactly on-point denials. One example is when he says, “I didn’t alter the ball in any way,” which Allysia Finley recasts in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece as follows: “Of course, you didn’t. Your ball boys did. That’s what flunkies are for: Doing things you don’t want to get caught doing and then taking the fall.”

Similarly, note Brady’s careful words when asked if he had cheated: “I don’t believe so. I feel like I’ve always played within the rules.” On Bloomberg TV just a few minutes after the Deflategate press conference ends, what kind of appraisal do I give on the air? How culpable might Brady be? Seeking a point of reference, I cite an old Second City comedy skit. In it John Belushi is playing U.S. Senator Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings. “What I want to know,” Belushi drawls, “is what did the President know and when did he stop knowing it?”

In the TV studio, I can hear the camera crew struggling to muffle their laughter. What I don’t hear, of course, is Belichick chuckling because he never does.

 

Locate photos of Coach Leach on game days and you can see what I see. Success is greeted by smiles that tend to be tentative half-smiles, the sign of an introvert. Meanwhile, play calling gone awry leads to mostly mild dismay. The eyebrows will lower in concern, and the mouth tends to either fall slightly ajar in a sign of mild surprise or there’s a faint raising of the upper lip that expresses mild disgust and anger. In short, as the guy stands with his hands on both hips along the sideline, Leach resembles a fairly docile brown bear hoping to eat some more honey sooner than later.

In contrast, Coach Belichick ups the ante on anger — an emotion that at its finest, inspires overcoming injustices but that at its worst becomes a matter of seizing control of one’s circumstances and outcomes, however one must, in a supreme case of the ends justify the means. What does anger look like in Belichick’s case? The Patriots long-time head coach pinches his eyebrows together hard. His lower eyelids are taut and straightlaced. His lips will not generally press together gently like Leach’s did. Instead, they bulldoze each other — leading to a bulge that forms below the lower lip. Throw in the upside-down smile created when your chin presses upwards, and you’ve got the complete picture. With his arms characteristically folded across his chest, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch becomes Fortress Belichick, inaccessible to mere mortals like you and me.

With Belichick, there is no joy in Mudville — just a long rap sheet full of allegations that have mostly resulted in either fines, suspensions, or other penalties lodged against the Patriots as a team, rather than against a coach who’s never been a glorious role model. Take a hard look. When it comes to competitive misconduct, Coach Grouch qualifies as a repeat offender subjected by the League to ever smaller financial hand slaps that ended altogether as he accumulated more Super Bowl trophies:

The 2007 Spygate scandal, e.g., signal-stealing in a game against the New York Jets. A $500k fine.
The 2012 case of grabbing a ref’s arm at game’s end to protest a call. A $50k fine.
The 2014 Deflategate scandal when underinflated balls help Patriots receivers grip the ball in the wet weather and keep Payton Manning’s visiting Indianapolis Colts on defense. No fine.
In 2015, headset malfunctions the visiting Steelers consider intentional sabotage. No fine.
In 2019, the Cincinnati Bengals video scandal in which a Patriot’s staffer is more interested in filming the sidelines, looking for signal calling, than in recording the on-field action. No fine.

And amid all these allegations of infractions, I’m leaving out the trick plays Coach Belichick the Conniver has called, many of which subsequently led to changes in the NFL’s rule book.

What a clever bastard.

Is Coach Leach really a saint? It’s complicated. But the answer is NO if you endorse his suspension in 2009 by Texas Tech for the sin of apparently ordering one of his players, Adam James, to be locked up in an equipment closet after James had sustained a concussion in practice. What a fool, you might say. What was Leach thinking? Why keep a player “out of the light” when his dad is a former NFL player and an ESPN analyst ready to shed plenty of limelight on why he believes his son’s alleged “humiliation” got so out of hand?

 

Okay, so I’ve now dawdled long enough here, dirty dish water circling the drain. You want the goods. Why exactly is Belichick failing lately, and what is it that Leach had that the Grump lacks.

To go there, let’s first acknowledge that what Super Bowls galore, 300-plus-wins Coach Belichick is IS a defensive genius. He’s a thief whose lineups and schemes succeed by stealing from opponents the plays they most want to run by shutting them down, hard. How else is the guy a thief? He’s rightfully “stolen” ideas from football books, 400 of which he donated to the Naval Academy after his father (a long-time coach) finally died. He’s also less righteously stolen opponents’ play signals and the lives of players and assistant coaches by demanding even longer hours than other NFL teams commit to.

Most of all, though, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch has stolen and locked away happiness to a degree that Mike could never abide. There I did it. I slipped. I called Coach Leach Mike because you could.

Who would dare call Belichick Billy Boy? Not I or anybody who would want to be on his team for long. The guy’s been so omnipotent. So gruff and hard-nosed. Tough. More than ready to damn with the faintest of praise. “Do your job” has been the Patriots’ mantra. Should you question authority, well, forget it. Belichick has reigned as the deviser of game plans and offensive play calls, and as the de facto general manager handling every trade and whom to draft. Which is why penalizing the team instead of also continuing to fine Belichick himself makes no sense. After all, there’s, frankly, ZERO separation between the Patriots as a team and Belichick as the team’s God almighty.

Why has the Gray-Hoodie Grouch reigned for so long in Foxboro? Success breeds tolerance. When the Grouch’s assistant coaches have tried to implement his brand of stern discipline elsewhere, what’s happened? The answer is some pretty awful failures. It’s one thing to lose. It’s another thing to have your players pop champagne bottles or light up cigars in the locker room when you get fired, as reportedly happened to a pair of the Grouch’s former assistants turned head coaches in the NFL.

Again, was Coach Leach a saint? I can’t say yes. In Pullman, Washington, I watched the losers of drills be forced to wear pink, pull-over mesh jerseys. Pink = wuss. That was the logic, screwy and sexist as it was and for once I didn’t want to catch Mike’s glance for fear he would sense my dismay. Nor did the Coach intervene when I warned him that one of his offensive linemen wasn’t gelling with his teammates and looked downright, catatonically glum, a hint that turned into a suicide attempt a few weeks later.

That said, how can you not like a guy who adored pirates and for whom time meant next to nothing? Legend has it that Coach Leach once stayed on a call for 90 minutes with someone who had dialed a wrong number. In contrast, Coach Belichick’s Naval Academy family ties are reflected in the Patriots’ military-style order, rigorously imposed, a culture where no insubordination is allowed, the AFC’s western division Raiders’ eyepatch-and-cross-swords pirates logo be damned.

 

A shipshape, uptight defensive mindset can have its merits in football as elsewhere in life. But going on offense rewards also having other attributes you can call on. That’s where Coach Grouch is vulnerable. For the longest time, Tom Brady could paper over the divide. Not one of Belichick’s Super Bowl victories came before Brady arrived in Foxboro or after he left. Meanwhile, Brady obviously went on to win it all again with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — oh, no: pirates again — in 2020, right after saying goodbye to the only NFL head coach the star quarterback had known.

In a New York Times Magazine profile of Coach Leach, the Moneyball author Michael Lewis happily described the Coach’s pass-happy, Air Raid offense as “a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than minimize the possibility of something bad happening.” Not by chance did Leach’s quarterbacks at Texas Tech, Washington State and, finally, Mississippi State all thrive. In Don Coryell’s San Diego Chargers offense, led by quarterback Dan Fouts, the NFL had seen a similar vertical attack mode beginning in 1978. But never had college football seen such an explosion of passing yards, and the idea that fourth down might represent just another opportunity to spread four or five receivers along the line of scrimmage.

In Coach Leach’s scheme, quarterbacks were meant to hunt for treasure on the high seas. The guy taking the snap from center might select as much as 70 percent of the plays being run given Leach’s approach: “You’re out there on the field. You can see the way the defense is lined up better than I can.”

The Gray-Hoodie Grouch doesn’t see the situation like that. What more than anything else apparently caused Brady to leave for Tampa Bay? He wanted to be allowed some input regarding how the offensive schemes would unfold. Out the door went a long-term, successful relationship. In a way, the end of the Belichick-Brady bromance was not unlike how during the making of the Abbey Road album, John Lennon suggested to Paul McCartney that George Harrison’s strides as a singer-songwriter meant The Beatles should move to four songs apiece on future albums. McCartney ignored the idea, cementing the band’s dissolution.

Poor draft picks. Lousy trades. Paying too much for some players and not enough to land others on the roster. It can get ugly fast. At age 71, is it possible that more than Coach Belichick’s arteries are hardening? Lately, he’s been favoring assistant coaches he already knows too well, raising the specter of inbreeding. Might the goal of eclipsing Coach Don Shula’s record for all-time victories be in jeopardy now that Patriots owner Robert Kraft has grown tired of so much losing?

You could never fault Coach Leach for having an open mind, always exploring. Can you imagine Belichick stepping in for a television weatherman like Mike once did during his time in Lubbock, Texas? Who among the coaching ranks ever sought to discuss Moby Dick and the shape of cornflakes at almost the same time? Who else was ever quoted at a press conference as saying, “There’s nothing balanced about 50 percent run, 50 percent pass, because that’s 50 percent stupid”? And furthermore, did so after winning with a game plan that led to zero net yards gained from rushing the ball.

The truth is that Coach Belichick, Mr. Doom and Gloom, can never buy that kind of care-free attitude at any price and wouldn’t attempt to do so. The Gray-Hoodie Grouch is way too busy consigning players to his doghouse for minor infractions of team rules to bother. At Belichick’s inevitable Hall of Fame induction ceremony, coaching giants like his former colleagues Bill Parcells and Nick Saban may laud him. But there’s something small and pinched about the Foxboro Fortress that not even the sweetest words will relieve.

P.S. As nearly predicted in this essay written during the 2023-24 regular season, Bill Belichick ended his 24-year run in Foxboro and did so 15 victories shy of surpassing Don Shula’s all-time wins record. The big shock was that none of the eight NFL teams with a head coach slot open post-season hired Belichick. Maybe if Coach Grouch hadn’t wanted to retain his distinction as the only head coach in the league with complete control over his roster, he might have secured a new job. As it stands, however, Belichick’s failure to resign any player he drafted in the first three rounds since 2013 looms as a black eye, indicative of someone who’s better at diagramming x’s and o’s than deciphering the magic of what makes a player tick.

Daniel A. Hill is the author of 10 books including Emotionomics, which features a foreword by “The Simpsons” co-creator Sam Simon. He’s also served as an analyst of U.S. presidential candidates and debates for the past 20 years for major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Reuters as well as the programs ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and NBC’s “The Today Show.” For his work studying athletes for teams in professional and NCAA Division I sports, he received a front-page profile in The New York Times. Other media roles have ranged from frequently appearing as a guest on PBS’s critically acclaimed show “Mental Engineering” to hosting the podcast “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” on the New Books Network (NBN), the world’s largest book review platform. His previous essays have been noted with honor in three editions of The Best American Essays.

 

 

FUN, FUN, FUN!

A Review of Taro Gomi’s Run, Run, Run!

by Scott F. Parker

Taro Gomi was already a household favorite in my family, thanks to his classic Everyone Poops, which we have long quoted and laughed at and learned from. The art in Gomi’s latest book to be translated into English from the original Japanese, Run, Run, Run!, a board book, is reminiscent of his best-known work. Plain-colored backgrounds, in this case white, featuring simple figures in action, in this case mostly running, don’t just illustrate the story but play a crucial role in its telling.

The narrative announces itself from the start: “It’s time to race!” Five children approach the start line and await the starter’s signal. From the moment the gun fires, it’s only a page until the first child crosses the finish line, where she receives a flag numbered 1. But wait, the text tells us, “Running is fun!” Are we really at the finish line already? The book just started. As the second, third, and fourth runners accept their numbered flags, the last runner continues past the finish line. The next several pages see this runner take to city streets, neighborhoods, fields, and forests. If running is fun, Run, Run, Run! asks, why would anyone stop?

Eventually, though, if you run far enough you come back to where you began, as the child in the book does, approaching the finish line a second time. This time, however, a dog that has been following the child since the farm surges into the lead and claims fifth place in the race, bumping our hero back to sixth. This is how far behind our hero has fallen: finishing sixth in a five-kid race.

Meaningless childish silliness? I don’t think so. Or, rather, not just. Gomi’s runner is not merely eccentric. The child understands what the race is and what it’s for but chooses, despite this, to break out of the race’s constraints entirely. The reader’s expectations about the narrative are revealed as this child asserts the right to make new rules. Why can’t a race be run without racing? Why can’t a book start one story only to tell another? Run, Run, Run! is as liberatory to the adult reader as it is perfectly sensible to the child reader.

What could be more sensible, more logical, than to explore the world by foot, to proceed according to what’s fun, to run your own kind of race, to be your own kind of self? Does it sound childish. Great wisdom usually does.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

The Personal is Political as Memoir

A Review of Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself

by Scott F. Parker

In another world, Caster Semenya’s memoir might have told the archetypal story of an athlete working hard with her considerable natural talent to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Needless to say, Semenya did just that in the course of setting numerous records and winning three world championships and two Olympic gold medals at 800 meters.

But in this world, Semenya’s memoir, like her career, gets totally subsumed by gender controversy. For all her accomplishments on the track, Semenya is far better known for her disputed status as a woman. “To put it simply” Semenya writes, “on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” This fact was revealed by a gender test given in response to suspicions about Semenya’s race results. “I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspaper reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher-than-normal levels of testosterone.” The official diagnosis was a variant of DSD (difference in sex development) condition known as 46XY, which is to say Semenya has male chromosomes.

Despite this seemingly undeniable fact, Semenya devotes much of The Race to Be Myself to asserting her status as a woman. Take two typical passages: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man.” and “I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman.” The claim lands squarely on Semenya’s sense of identity. She was raised as a girl, accepted as a girl, and understood herself as a girl and then as a woman, and therefore takes herself to be a woman, regardless of what anyone else says: “To be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are.”

Even the most sympathetic readers will notice that this emphasis on identification, no matter how understandable, avoids the central question, which is not how we define woman as such but how we define woman in track and field. The definition itself is relevant because women are protected from having to compete against men due to their relative physical disadvantages. A better analogy than to say LeBron James’s genes give him an unfair advantage over his competitors but we don’t ban him from the NBA would be to say that we have weight divisions in boxing to give more people a chance to compete. Following this analogy, Semenya simply has the misfortune of belonging to a class too small to field its own division within the sport. If this is unfair to Semenya — and it is — wouldn’t it be similarly unfair to the other athletes to let her race against women?

If you’d rather gain access to Semenya’s experiences of the extraordinary events of her life than engage such arguments, The Race to Be Myself feels mostly like a missed opportunity. As she writes, “it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports’ governing bodies, other competitors, and the media as I have.” Yet the book largely neglects the emotional toll that this experience placed on her in favor of defensive posturing. The greatest exception to this tendency comes in the book’s strongest chapter, “Nothing,” which depicts the low period in Semenya’s life after her private medical records were made public. “How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?” Yes, how do you explain that? I would love to find out.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

The Being and the Doing

A Review of Brendan Leonard’s I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too

by Scott F. Parker

Maybe I should consider it a sign. I was walking by a table of books at a church fundraiser when the word running caught my eye. Stopping, I read the full title, I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion. It looked, from premise to design, a little cute for my tastes. But one term in the subtitle intrigued me: irrational passion. It is one of the motivating concerns of this column to make sense of precisely that. Plus, the book was $1, and it would go to the church.

It didn’t take me long to realize that, assumptions be damned, Brendan Leonard is my kind of running writer: “This is not a how-to book or a memoir of a very fast person who has stood on podiums at the finish lines of races. It will not tell you how to train for a race, how to eat during, before, or after running and/or racing, or what kind of shoes to buy or clothes to wear, or what kind of stretches to do before or after running.” Pausing briefly to remember that some fast people write great memoirs, what I really want to say here is Amen. When it comes to reading about running, give me the intangibles every time.

But Leonard is being slightly ironic in his disclaimer. I H♡TE RUNNING most definitely is a how-to book; it’s just not about how to run a certain way or toward a certain outcome. It’s more elemental than that — it’s actually about how to be a runner. To wit:

Isn’t it more complicated than that? Not really. As Leonard explains, “At some point, every person was running zero miles per week.” Like Lao Tzu before him, Leonard recognizes wisdom disguised as the perfectly obvious: the way to get from zero to more than zero is to start. It’s impossible to argue against such clear insights. But the point isn’t to nod your head, it’s to take to heart.

Leonard challenges our conceptions of what it means to run so that we will be liberated to run. Here he is quoting Bart Yasso, the former chief running officer of Runner’s World: “I often hear someone say, ‘I’m not a real runner.’ We are all runners; some just run faster than others. I have never met a fake runner.” If you’re inclined toward ordinary language philosophy, you’ll see right away what Yasso and Leonard are up to. So many of us are insecure about our status as runners. Are we real runners? But we don’t stop think to about the implied contrast of real in that question. Do we mean that we are slow runners? That we are occasional runners? That we haven’t ever run marathon? Maybe we are slow, maybe we don’t run every day, maybe we max out at three miles. But these are just three ways of modifying what we are: runners.

This might start out as semantic, but one of Leonard’s key psychological insights is that it quickly becomes ontological. Noticing what words mean and using them precisely can produce a change in our self-conception. And that change in self-conception can propagate quickly in behavior. If I am a runner… I run. Or here is one of Leonard’s helpful charts:

The question then becomes, Why be a runner? Why run?

To this, Leonard offers several answers. There is the undeniable: “Either you think doing hard things is worth it to some extent, or you don’t.” The inspirational, by way of Alex Lowe: “‘The best climber in the world is the one who’s having the most fun.’ I think that ethos can apply to anything we do, including running.” The realistic: “Yes, I hate it most of the time, but maybe once during every run, I have a few seconds, or a minute or two, where I find myself thinking, ‘You know, this isn’t so bad.’” Different runners will lean into different reasons. And perhaps reasons is the wrong concept to apply here. We run because running is in our nature. We can but don’t need to tell a story about how it got in our nature. It’s enough just to notice that it’s there. If you do, the rest follows:

 

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Balance

A Review of Mylo Choy’s Middle Distance

by Scott F. Parker

At the same time, during high school, that Mylo Choy learned about running the most efficient line when cutting in from an outside lane during an 800m race, they “became interested in expressing more with less” in their drawings. This minimalist aesthetic maintains in Choy’s graphic memoir, Middle Distance, which is as sparse in its narrative as it is in its illustrations.

The book, then, is not unlike its subject — running. In the same way that the simplicity of running is the source of its depth, Middle Distance’s simple style creates the space for the rich experience of reading it. There is a whole felt world beneath the surface of this one runner’s outline of a story.

This is not to suggest that Choy’s work is vague or impersonal. To the contrary, the particular details of the style and story are crucial to its success. Choy chooses not to linger on their Buddhist upbringing or their nonbinary identity, but these aspects of the author’s life uniquely contextualize the role running plays in it and support Carl Rogers’s claim that “What is most personal is most general.”

Choy started running in sixth grade when their gym teacher sent the class out for a state-mandated timed mile. Choy’s response was immediate: “I felt free. A new way to be in my own world.” From this day on, running would be a source of meaning and stability in their life. “When I ran,” they write, “I could process my feelings without words, and without anyone else. It gave me the feeling of power in my own life.”

Of course, running doesn’t go only well for Choy. Training for the New York City Marathon, they get injured and are forced to give up running for what turns out to be years before working their way through a long, slow rehab that eventually culminates in their completing the NYC Marathon.

But this is not a story of mind over matter, or the conquering will of the heroic athlete. This is a subtler book than that. It’s about listening to what is and learning how to trust the world and expressing oneself through authentic acts. This period of struggle when they are not running is profound for Choy. They, like many runners, are not the same person when they are not running. And their return to running doesn’t return them to the person they used to be. Running the NYC Marathon leads Choy, instead, to a mature perspective and a mature sense of self that recalls the Buddhism of their childhood. “I never lost my love for running. That love taught me to look for a middle way.”

Choy’s running, finally, is quiet, balanced, receptive, and wise. As is their book.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.