#in a sport. carlos alcaraz bailed out five hundred overpaid tennis executives by being a young upstart man from spain

[theburialofstrawberries]

“I was looking back and I saw some old footage of that game and we both look really, really young,” Clark said yesterday. “It's cool to see how our careers have evolved.” It is cool to see careers evolve over four years; it’s been just as interesting to watch the rest of the world evolve, too. Maybe Lisa Bluder, who couldn’t cross half-court when she grew up playing basketball in Iowa, thinks about this often. Maybe Kim Mulkey, when she read a Los Angeles Times columnist call her players “dirty debutantes,” thought the world hadn't actually changed that much. The columnist has since apologized. In his quest to be an alliterative dumbass, he did help me understand what has been so captivating about this group of players. The debutante is a young woman in transition, acquiring some sense of herself just as the world imposes its own limits on what she can be. “I’ve been sexualized, I’ve been threatened, I’ve been so many things,” Reese said, choking up at the press conference after LSU’s loss to Iowa. One TV commentator turned this into a gotcha moment. “You can't be the big, bad wolf but then cry like Courage the Cowardly Dog,” he said. As if it weren’t the most ordinary thing in the world for a 21-year-old woman to take some thrill in being seen, and to, at the same time, feel frightened by how much of herself she has ceded to other people. I have thought of these college stars in a battle of orientation, one between portrait and landscape. The portrait focuses on its subject, the landscape situates her in something she can’t hope to control. Always searching for the great women’s sports novel, but not expecting to find one so timely, I picked up Rita Bullwinkel’s debut, Headshot, a few weeks ago. It studies eight teenage girls at a boxing tournament in Reno. Their stories unfold in bracket form; each chapter pits one fighter’s monologue against another’s in their bout. None of them will find lasting glory in her sport—this Bullwinkel confirms for the reader, as she peers into each girl's future. Boxing will leave Artemis Victor only with hands “so spoiled that it will be hard to open the refrigerator door. No one in her life at that point, including her daughter, will have any remembrance of the meaning attached to what it means to be a boxer.” One girl will become a pharmacist, another an admissions officer. But for this weekend in Reno, the girls are suspended in tournament time, which feels like forever, no matter how fleeting it really is. In their heads, we become party to their freakish drive and ambition, forces we know will be circumscribed by the outside world. The novel’s title evokes the boxer’s weapon, and also the act of portraiture, which has the same power to stun.  In this sense, they differ from the young women who headline the NCAA tournament, each of whom is made constantly aware of The Implications For Women's Basketball. “I'll take the villain role. I'll take the hit for it, but I know we're growing women's basketball. If this is the way we're going to do it, then this is the way we're going to do it,” Reese said before Monday's Elite Eight game. This year, amid the noise of the tournament, the actual games have come as relief. The players shine most when, like Bullwinkel’s boxers, they’re understood as something more specific than a jumble of stakes. And on the court, their loud, brilliant play crowds everything out. They take up the frame. Could you really watch what millions of people watched on Monday night, or what millions of people will watch tonight, and understand it only as the simple race war, as “milk and cookies” vs. “dirty debutantes,” as David vs. Goliath, or good vs. evil, or Magic vs. Bird? Can you do justice to Reese's blocks, each one so crushing, and to the hazy magic of Clark's pull-up shot, if you flatten them into something else?

'See The Subject Beyond The Frame', by Maitreyi Anantharaman for Defector (great website I'd encourage you to sign up but if you can't link to pdf here)

actually shaken just read some of the best sports writing I have ever read