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Just Running

A Review of Katie Arnold’s Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World

by Scott F. Parker

In Jon J. Muth’s picture book Zen Shorts, a panda named Stillwater tells traditional Zen stories to a set of three siblings. Among these is the story of the Chinese farmer, whose luck seems to fluctuate wildly over the course of a series of related events. First, he loses a horse. Then, the horse returns, trailed by wild horses that become his. Next, the farmer’s son breaks his leg riding one of the wild horses. Finally, the army comes through and conscripts every able-bodied young male, a category to which the farmer’s son no longer belongs. With the equanimity of a sage, and to the befuddlement of his community, the farmer keeps an even keel through these (seeming) ups and downs. Whether a given event is an instance of good or bad luck is never known. “We’ll see,” he says about each. As the youngest sibling in Muth’s book helpfully interprets for the reader: “Good and bad are all mixed up.”

Katie Arnold read Zen Shorts to her two daughters when they were young, a fact she recalls after her own leg is broken in a terrifying rafting accident. But Arnold is more skeptical than the farmer. It’s one thing to take a moral lesson from a parable. It’s another thing entirely to have the grace and practical wisdom to live by that moral. Admitting her skepticism, Arnold writes, “I had trouble getting on board with this idea at first. It seemed bogus, frankly. Of course there is good and bad in the world; terrible things happen to people, catastrophic things, atrocities, and there isn’t always a silver lining.”

How un-Zen of Arnold. But with the help of her friend Natalie Goldberg she’s coming around. She thinks of Muth’s book after Goldberg reminds her of the central Zen tennent that there is “No good, no bad—just this.” This wisdom, that it is not the world itself that is the source of our suffering but our judgments about the world, is one that Arnold has approached previously through running. The challenge for her is to carry that wisdom from running to her life broadly, a life that suddenly now does not include running. “I see that I don’t have to banish thoughts or make them cheerful. I just have to acknowledge them, note the fuss inside my head the same way I met the mountain when I ran up it, some days with a thrilling effortlessness, other days with unwanted difficulty. Running has taught me how to accept both. I used to run up a mountain; now I can sit like one.”

Accessing the spirit of the mountain, Arnold sees that the parable doesn’t have to be read skeptically but can be inhabited. “That my broken leg might be a form of liberation seems wildly paradoxical, in its own way mind-twistingly awesome. I want it to be true, but it is still too soon to tell.”

Everything I’ve quoted so far comes from one page midway through Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free, Arnold’s second book. Her first was the much-praised memoir Running Home, a meditation on grief and mortality, following her father’s death. Running Home factors crucially in Arnold’s new book. She is writing the first book as she rests and rehabs her leg in the narrative the second. One of the unforeseen consequences of her leg injury is the time and stillness it affords her to write. But Arnold’s takeaway isn’t a simple acceptance that there is a silver-lining to her injurty after all. She is a much subtler observer of her own experience than that.

Arnold’s injury thrusts her into uncertainty not just about her fortunes but about her self. Running for her had not been a hobby, but not just because she was good at it (elite-ultra-runner good). Running was Arnold’s way of being in the world. After her accident, there is a real chance she might not run again and therefore a real sense in which she might not be herself anymore. Naturally, this situation propels her self-reflection. Who is she if she isn’t running? Who is she if she isn’t a runner? Her response to such questions has the power to annihilate: “At its best, running is a true expression of the deepest part of me, but at its worst, it’s a crutch that feeds my ego; how attached I’ve grown to the word runner.”

And so, what has been Arnold’s practice becomes the object of her new (Zen) practice. The Venn diagram of runners and Zen practitioners isn’t a circle, but the overlap between the two groups is substantial. The kind of person who finds meaning in one is uncommonly likely to find it in the other. Reading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind during her rehab, Arnold makes the natural comparison: “I realized that if I replaced ‘sitting’ with running, he and I were speaking the same language. After all, the main principles of Zen—form, repetition, stamina, impermanence, suffering, awakening—aren’t so different from those of long-distance running, or anything you do with great purpose.”

Sitting instead of running gives Arnold the chance to be what Suzuki would hope for her: “my broken leg had broken the cycle. Like it or not, I was a beginner again.” And learn to like it she does, demonstrating that the only path for us is the one we’re on. The awakening Arnold relates in Brief Flashings is honest; and the authenticity with which she relates it, affecting. This isn’t a treatise or a commentary but a sincere expression of what it’s like to be human in a changing world. Arnold is an adept memoirist, drawing meaning and wisdom from experience without a trace of self-indulgence.

At the end of the book, her rehab complete, Arnold returns to competitive ultrarunning. As impressive as that feat is (not to mention that she wins the sport’s most iconic race), what is truly inspiring about Arnold’s writing is how she is able to find what she is looking for in running and then find it again in not running. If she can do that, I want to say, anything is possible. This is a profound work of embodied spirituality.

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.

Everybody Does Something, Usually, Anyway

A Review of Brendan Leonard’s Ultra-Something

by Scott F. Parker

Reader, a confession: I have run farther than a marathon only once and never in an official ultra race. So when I say I know what Brendan Leonard means when he describes the suffering of the last 20 of a 100-mile race, understand that I know by analogy.

All distance runners have had the experience of going far, running out of steam, and suffering to the finish. Narratively, then, an ultra is no different from a marathon or—I don’t know—maybe a 5K for some. At their most tedious, running essays take this same form: it was really hard, but I made it. Leonard has written this kind of essay before.^[1] (And, I must admit, so has your humble reviewer.^[2]) But Leonard’s challenge as an autobiographer of running is not just formal; he has also written his backstory a time or two before.

 

If you’ve read Leonard, you probably know the broad strokes of what you’ll read in his memoir. He was a smoker, then he ran a marathon to help quit smoking, then he pushed pause on running for nine years before finally taking up ultra-running in earnest. Luckily, Leonard recognizes that the facts of his past are of much less importance than what he does with them on the page and doesn’t burden the reader with an overflowing self-regard.

What he does instead is something fresh and playful and true. Ultra-Something refracts its narrative against Leonard’s meditations on books, movies, and scientific studies in a collage-like fashion that emphasizes not things or stories or ideas but the relations among these. The book covers ground the way a runner would like to: swiftly and easily. And Leonard being Leonard, he doesn’t limit himself to text. Ultra-Something is replete with the evocative and often funny hand drawings that have become Leonard’s trademark. Take for example the image that follows a short reflection on meaning: “Maybe it’s simply that things have meaning because we decide they have meaning. We stick with something because we believe it will be meaningful, and sometimes it becomes meaningful for no other reason than the fact that we stuck with it.”

This passage demonstrates not only Leonard’s humor but one of his primary achievements in Ultra-Something. Leonard is alert to the (seeming) absurdity of recreationally running unreasonable distances and is able to articulate the appeal of doing so to those who haven’t yet and those who won’t ever. What accounts for this strange human practice, he hears you asking. Answer: the strangeness of humans themselves. We are a creature capable of extreme effort to avoid the tedium and attendant meaningless of life, and we do it all through the stories we tell ourselves about what really matters. Had Camus been writing about an ultra-runner struggling mightily with thirty miles of rocky uphill to go rather than Sisyphus, his instruction would have remained the same: to picture the person happy. Such happiness—or, better, such meaningfulness—is a choice that is available to all of us, all the time. Runners, Leonard proves, have found one reliable way of choosing yes. It helps, too, if, like Leonard, we are self-aware enough to laugh at the absurd lengths we go to even as by going to those lengths we transcend them.

---

^[1] For examples, see his book Have Fun Out There or Not, which might be the best title for a running book there is. The subtitle isn’t bad either: The Semi-Rad Running Essays and Race Reports, and Some Funny Lists, and Some Drawings. While too much of this book takes the it-was-hard-but-I-made-it tack, there are some big winners mixed in. Don’t miss “26 Useful Facts about Running,” “Solitaire,” or “How to Go for a Run in 22 Simple Steps.” Humor tends to bring out the best in Leonard’s prose.

^[2] About the time I ran 30 miles. If you’re wondering: it was really hard, but I made it.

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, theBeliever, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

“Give Us this Day Our Daily Shred”: The Gospel according to Kevin

A Review of Kevin Carollo’s SHRED! Running and Being

by Scott F. Parker

Some of the first book reviews I ever wrote were for Rain Taxi Review of Books, where I later joined the staff in an editorial role. Kevin Carollo was, and to this day remains, a friend of and regular contributor to the magazine. I came in contact with a lot of poets and literary types in those days, some of whom shared my interest in sports (basketball, more often than not), but not many I might bump into at my next road race. Kevin became the exception, when, after an almost three-decade hiatus from racing, he decided to return to running in his forties. I was incredulous when he told me that he’d made his marathon debut at age twelve. More impressive still, he’d broken 3:30 in that race, a more than respectable time for an adult weekend warrior. What would happen in his return to the sport? Pretty quickly he’d push his PR down well below three hours: a 2:43 at the 2013 Twin Cities Marathon, which also happened to be the occasion of my PR (a more pedestrian 3:15). Which is to say that, whether also a child, a poet, a scholar, or a literary critic, Kevin Carollo is a runner.

It’s also to say that I know Kevin, and I like Kevin, and I come to his book SHRED! Running and Being uncommonly confident that it is a book for me. Please keep this in mind when I go on to tell you that it is indeed a book for me and that if you’re a certain kind of reader it might be a book for you, too. Whether you are the right reader for this book depends less on your interest in running than on your interest in literary nonfiction as an elastic form of writing that can accommodate the twists of a unique and playful mind loosed upon the page.

In other words, a warning: If you want a straightforward training guide or a straightforward narrative or a straightforward whatever, you are hereby directed toward less interesting writers. As Carollo’s running biography suggests, very little about him is straightforward. He proceeds in his writing as in his running according to his own distinct intuitions and improvisations. What begins as a report on a day’s run might quickly turn to a digression on music or politics or the environment. Except, is it fair to call a digression what is really the very method of Carollo’s practice? His method is his medium, and his medium is language: “The moment you start playing with words, you start playing with the stock-and-trade idiomatic ideas that serve as the very foundation of human cognition. In wordplay, like a speedplay or fartlek run, comes insight, surface-level meanings giving way to something more dynamic and resonant . . . Intense tensionality. As verbs tense their muscles, we flex our able, tensing a different kind of kindness in kind.”

Let me be more concrete. Heeding James Fixx’s encouragement to “go out for a run, and then write about it,” SHRED! takes its form as a running log interspersed with poetry. But Carollo devotes his real energy to espousing his running ethos: the eponymous shred, the idea of which “runs toward Singularity, Harmony, Revelation, Ecstasy, and Dynamism.”

That this log spans five months of running during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic makes for a somewhat claustrophobic read in 2024. But recalling the isolation and masks and Zooming of 2020 is an apt context from which to experience running as a relief. It affords a chance to be in the world, to breathe deeply and freely, to be a body and not merely a consciousness plugged into the internet. Even reading about it carries some of running’s benefits. I feel my spirit stirring when I am reminded that “Running is elemental movement, a transformative force for good, a singularly meaningful practice—and survival mechanism—that compels us to move beyond the psychic barriers that define contemporary existence.”

Strange, then, how much of SHRED! is devoted not to running but to not running. We spend many pages at Carollo’s Fargo home with him as he watches soccer, makes pizza, drinks beer, listens to music, considers the weather, thinks about running, writes about running, debates going running, and only sometimes does run. Or maybe strange isn’t the word; maybe honest is. “With everything to gain simply by getting out in the elements for a while, you’d think I’d do this running thing more often.”

Anyone who regularly avoids doing what is manifestly good for them (getting more sleep, spending less time online, etc.) knows how easy it is to fail to be the versions of ourselves we’d like to be. More generously, not running might be one of the most important parts of running. The pleasure runners take in the sport is inseparable from our reflection about it. Even in our most absorbed moments, part of us is hanging onto the absorption for future memory or online posting or, in a writer’s case, essaying.

But Carollo’s love for running is pure. (It doesn’t hurt (a slower runner imagines) that he’s very good at it. Carollo will casually mention winning races or stringing together miles at paces most runners can’t hit once.) He’s a student of the sport, including its cultures and technologies as well as its practices and histories. His passion is manifest (although one is left wondering about his extended hiatus), even as his intellect runs from the front. As the subtitle suggests, SHRED! stakes Carollo’s claim to inherit from George Sheehan the mantle of running’s philosopher. But there’s a reason Sheehan wrote for Runner’s World and Carollo is publishing with a university press. As running books go, this is perhaps the headiest, even as Carollo is deliberate in his effort to regularly touch grass.

But heady it must be. Carallo isn’t writing running (primarily) or himself (primarily). He’s evangelical for shredding as a way of being. “Today, I invite you to become part of a movement of movement in which we move toward each other as if our lives depend on it. I have come to believe that they do—and that our time is running out.” And while there are other means of shredding, running is perhaps the most elemental and, therefore, perhaps the best. Running is running, but never just. “This is a non-denominational book I’m writing, but I don’t bristle at the idea of running as a form of prayer and exercise of faith, part of an essential belief system and survival mechanism in a desecrated and devastated world.”

Of course it’s ambitious. And may the running gods bless him for it. Running gives no quarter to the cynic. To run as to shred is to love the world.

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, theBeliever, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

Celebrating Three Decades

Memory might fail me, but I believe we retrieved the first printed issues of Sport Literate from a Kinko’s on Michigan Avenue around St. Patrick’s Day in 1995. With a cover stock a little greener than anticipated, I didn’t realize we were publishing a ‘zine back then. Why would I? From that Magnificent Mile birthplace, we had big dreams for the publication that sold for $2.50.

Fast forward what sometimes seems like 100 years (not merely three decades), and we’re still swinging away with this small press publication. Something more than my father, our first cover model, could muster in a failed bunt attempt during his U.S. Army Air Corps days at the tail end of World War II.

To help celebrate our 30th anniversary, we’re inviting poets and writers to send us their honest reflections. No contest, no themes, we’re simply looking to honor our milestone in late spring or summer by publishing great work. The kind of work that has led to repeated accolades in a couple Best American anthologies over the years. The pub is rapidly come together, so send us something by the end of March to be considered for that. Of course, we will also be selecting work for an end-of-year issue to follow.

Of course, we could always use readers to go along with our contributors. Our two-issue subscription remains a bargain at $20. If you’re unfamiliar with the pub, you can take a test run for $12.95. I’d say we’ve got more than a few hidden gems in our current issue, but it’s all a bit under the radar in an increasingly virtual world where 240 characters can move mountains and rename oceans.

If muscle memory serves me, I spent a lot of time in Chicago bars when the Bulls were all the rage. Though we’re not trying to recreate that, we are planning a gathering over the last weekend in May at a still-to-be-determined watering hole. So if you’re in the neighborhood, we’ll let you know which one.

William Meiners
Sport Literate, Founding Editor

F Trump

Call it our own project 2025. Satire, by most any definition, holds up a mirror to society for the purpose of throwing eggs (overpriced, diseased, and otherwise) at those who deserve a good egging. Since our politics have become the new bloodsport, we at Sport Literate see nothing wrong with a little mockery of the clumsy oligarchy. Remember, it’s satire. Please don’t sue, shoot, or lose your shit over it.

“F Troop” was, according to Wikipedia, “an American television Western sitcom about U.S. soldiers and American Indians in the Wild West during the 1860s.” That whacky premise could have paved the way for a sitcom in a German P.O.W. camp, starring Bob Crane, a wisecracking sex addict. “F Trump,” for us, could mean many things, including the grade we’d give for the now two-time president.

Some of us have grown old in the Trump Era — now about a decade and counting. As exhausting as the news can be, we will not turn an Oath Keeper’s blind eye to the maniacal rule that threatens to send us back decades. When they’re citing President Andrew Jackson as the gold standard, we could all be effed.

It might be easier to poke fun at the absurdity reflecting back at us from a funhouse mirror. Certainly the late-night comedians often tell variations on the same joke. But we’re taking our own swing at it. If only for historical purposes and the possibilities of a child years down the road asking his mother, “What did Grandma and Grandpa do to resist Trump 2.0?”

In our first multimedia installment, we offer “Mourning in America,” a parody of the Ronald Reagan 1984 re-election commercial. Check it out here. Special thanks to Edward J. Dunn, from Dunn Productions, for his videomaking handiwork.

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.