1. Serena may not be built along the lines of the wonderfully dainty Martina Hingis, who played a set of tennis as though delivering a crisp, punitive lecture on geometry and basic physics to some hulking sixth form reprobate. She may not have the soft touch of Agneska Radwanska, who interprets the sport as a selection of beautiful little precision engineered moments, a bar room brawl that can still be won with a series of brilliantly timed sarcastic remarks. But nobody ever bludgeoned their way to 18 grand slams, just as power itself isn’t a gift but a craft, a product of timing and practice and technique. The Williams serve is a refined knockout blow. That famous forehand is a stately, beautifully orthodox thing of rotation and extension, and pure mechanical grace.
And this is the best thing about Serena: the comprehensive confounding of expectations. Here she comes: ditzy, a flake but somehow also supremely hard‑nosed, the girl who couldn’t concentrate but who is now the oldest WTA No1 of all time. Not to mention a career gadfly, with her avaricious outside interests; who is, it turns out, only the second-best-paid female tennis player behind Sharapova, who has remained top of the money charts through the last decade of being regularly swatted off court and who is even now hawking about her wretched sweet shop empire with apparent impunity.
2. Evans was jailed in 2012 for raping a 19-year-old woman. The woman was drunk, so drunk she could barely stand up; she had gone back to a hotel in Rhyl, north Wales, with Evans’ friend, another footballer, Clayton McDonald. McDonald had called Evans and he arrived at the hotel and had sex with the girl, after McDonald did, while others attempted to film it.
Both men were charged with rape. McDonald was acquitted; Evans got five years. Presumably the jury reasoned that although the woman may have initiated the liaison with McDonald, and so her behaviour was consensual, this did not extend to Evans.
The judge at the trial said the sentence took into account that there had been no force involved and the complainant received no injuries. He also said the complainant was not “targeted” and the attack had not been “premeditated”. Throughout the trial the woman insisted she did not remember what had happened. The footballers had left hours before she woke up; Evans via the fire exit.
Evans protested his innocence and continues to do so, claiming the act was consensual. Presumably that is why he feels no remorse, even if his behaviour – based on his own version of events – is morally reprehensible.
3. On Wednesday night in Coney Island, about 80 football players worked on their résumés in heavy rain in front of a small crowd on a field painted over a Class A baseball diamond.
Advertisement
The players for the Brooklyn Bolts and the Boston Brawlers, nearly all of whom had preseason or practice-squad experience in the N.F.L., braved the deluge in the brand-new Fall Experimental Football League in the hopes of climbing back to the sport’s top tier. For many of them, the Brooklyn crowd — stymied by the weather and the timing — was their smallest audience since Pop Warner.
“There’s things we’re having to endure that we haven’t experienced in a long time,” Brawlers quarterback Tajh Boyd, the 2012 Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year while at Clemson, said before boarding a bus for the trip back to Boston. He chose to give the F.X.F.L. a try after the Jets cut him in August.
The football landscape is littered with the remains of professional leagues come and gone: the United Football League, the United States Football League and the X.F.L. F.X.F.L. organizers acknowledged the challenge, but said the N.F.L. needed a minor league to help players with professional talent and nowhere to play.
“We’re keeping these guys battle-ready,” said Brian Woods, the F.X.F.L.’s founder and commissioner. “This is better than the Canadian football product. I can assure you it’s way better than the arena football product.”
4. This is the toughest time of the year for Lee and Yvonne Caminiti. Where they once shared in World Series joy with their son in 1998, now the beginning of October brings only searing emptiness.
For one hour each day, Yvonne walks on the treadmill in the basement. Usually, she will dig out one of Kenny’s games on VHS and continue her project of transferring them to DVD as she walks. The macular degeneration makes it challenging.
But in some ways, she’s already seen too much.
“We always worried,” Lee says softly. “You can’t control their friends, who they pal around with. I don’t think any parent has 100 percent access to their kid.”
That his son had the courage to go public with baseball’s dirty little secret is of little consolation now. He considers the idea of Ken performing a public service, contributing to the greater good, maybe even saving some lives while losing control of his own. Still.
“You don’t like to lose a son,” he says, noting that what Ken did was not against the rules at the time. “I just don’t like to talk about it.”
They’re thankful that Ken and Nancy had good business instincts, that some things were put in the girls’ names when they were very young. Kendall, 23, was at the University of Texas and now is studying in San Diego to be an audiologist. Lindsey, 21, is at Louisiana State University.
As best they can, Lee and Yvonne choose to remember the good times. They think back to the time in high school when one of Kenny’s acquaintances was hit by a car. He survived, but was left with scars. Though they weren’t particularly close, Kenny was a gentle enough soul that he felt responsibility to become the boy’s protector. He walked the kid to and from his classes, all to keep the bullies from picking on him.
“I remember Nancy telling me, ‘I’m his girlfriend, and he never walks me to class,’” Yvonne says, chuckling. “But Kenny knew when he didn’t make it, the other kids would be mean to this boy.”
They think back to the time in the Astrodome, when they overheard a father viciously chewing out a son for losing his baseball glove.
“I was going to say something, but I decided to back off,” Lee says. “I told Ken about it after the game, and he said, ‘You should have come down. I would have given him my glove.’
“That’s the kind of kid he was.”
Tears in his eyes, Lee stands up and turns away.
Ken Caminiti struggled with substance abuse all through his baseball career. After retiring, it was always going to a be a long road. And so it proved. This month is the tenth anniversary of his death from a drug overdose and Scott Miller from Bleacher Report goes in-depth on his tragic story.
A tribute to Serena and the sad ballad of Ken Caminiti; it's the week's best sportswriting
1. Serena may not be built along the lines of the wonderfully dainty Martina Hingis, who played a set of tennis as though delivering a crisp, punitive lecture on geometry and basic physics to some hulking sixth form reprobate. She may not have the soft touch of Agneska Radwanska, who interprets the sport as a selection of beautiful little precision engineered moments, a bar room brawl that can still be won with a series of brilliantly timed sarcastic remarks. But nobody ever bludgeoned their way to 18 grand slams, just as power itself isn’t a gift but a craft, a product of timing and practice and technique. The Williams serve is a refined knockout blow. That famous forehand is a stately, beautifully orthodox thing of rotation and extension, and pure mechanical grace.
And this is the best thing about Serena: the comprehensive confounding of expectations. Here she comes: ditzy, a flake but somehow also supremely hard‑nosed, the girl who couldn’t concentrate but who is now the oldest WTA No1 of all time. Not to mention a career gadfly, with her avaricious outside interests; who is, it turns out, only the second-best-paid female tennis player behind Sharapova, who has remained top of the money charts through the last decade of being regularly swatted off court and who is even now hawking about her wretched sweet shop empire with apparent impunity.
Barney Ronay of The Guardian pays tribute to Serena Williams, written off as a lost cause by Pat Cash in 2007.
2. Evans was jailed in 2012 for raping a 19-year-old woman. The woman was drunk, so drunk she could barely stand up; she had gone back to a hotel in Rhyl, north Wales, with Evans’ friend, another footballer, Clayton McDonald. McDonald had called Evans and he arrived at the hotel and had sex with the girl, after McDonald did, while others attempted to film it.
Both men were charged with rape. McDonald was acquitted; Evans got five years. Presumably the jury reasoned that although the woman may have initiated the liaison with McDonald, and so her behaviour was consensual, this did not extend to Evans.
The judge at the trial said the sentence took into account that there had been no force involved and the complainant received no injuries. He also said the complainant was not “targeted” and the attack had not been “premeditated”. Throughout the trial the woman insisted she did not remember what had happened. The footballers had left hours before she woke up; Evans via the fire exit.
Evans protested his innocence and continues to do so, claiming the act was consensual. Presumably that is why he feels no remorse, even if his behaviour – based on his own version of events – is morally reprehensible.
Ched Evans was released from prison on Friday having served half of his five-year sentence for rape. Jason Burt from The Telegraph argues he should never be allowed play professional football again.
3. On Wednesday night in Coney Island, about 80 football players worked on their résumés in heavy rain in front of a small crowd on a field painted over a Class A baseball diamond.
The players for the Brooklyn Bolts and the Boston Brawlers, nearly all of whom had preseason or practice-squad experience in the N.F.L., braved the deluge in the brand-new Fall Experimental Football League in the hopes of climbing back to the sport’s top tier. For many of them, the Brooklyn crowd — stymied by the weather and the timing — was their smallest audience since Pop Warner.
“There’s things we’re having to endure that we haven’t experienced in a long time,” Brawlers quarterback Tajh Boyd, the 2012 Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year while at Clemson, said before boarding a bus for the trip back to Boston. He chose to give the F.X.F.L. a try after the Jets cut him in August.
The football landscape is littered with the remains of professional leagues come and gone: the United Football League, the United States Football League and the X.F.L. F.X.F.L. organizers acknowledged the challenge, but said the N.F.L. needed a minor league to help players with professional talent and nowhere to play.
“We’re keeping these guys battle-ready,” said Brian Woods, the F.X.F.L.’s founder and commissioner. “This is better than the Canadian football product. I can assure you it’s way better than the arena football product.”
Matt Krupnick of The New York Times delves into the fledgling Fall Experimental Football League – an initiative that hopes to kick-start players who still harbour NFL dreams.
4. This is the toughest time of the year for Lee and Yvonne Caminiti. Where they once shared in World Series joy with their son in 1998, now the beginning of October brings only searing emptiness.
For one hour each day, Yvonne walks on the treadmill in the basement. Usually, she will dig out one of Kenny’s games on VHS and continue her project of transferring them to DVD as she walks. The macular degeneration makes it challenging.
But in some ways, she’s already seen too much.
“We always worried,” Lee says softly. “You can’t control their friends, who they pal around with. I don’t think any parent has 100 percent access to their kid.”
That his son had the courage to go public with baseball’s dirty little secret is of little consolation now. He considers the idea of Ken performing a public service, contributing to the greater good, maybe even saving some lives while losing control of his own. Still.
“You don’t like to lose a son,” he says, noting that what Ken did was not against the rules at the time. “I just don’t like to talk about it.”
They’re thankful that Ken and Nancy had good business instincts, that some things were put in the girls’ names when they were very young. Kendall, 23, was at the University of Texas and now is studying in San Diego to be an audiologist. Lindsey, 21, is at Louisiana State University.
As best they can, Lee and Yvonne choose to remember the good times. They think back to the time in high school when one of Kenny’s acquaintances was hit by a car. He survived, but was left with scars. Though they weren’t particularly close, Kenny was a gentle enough soul that he felt responsibility to become the boy’s protector. He walked the kid to and from his classes, all to keep the bullies from picking on him.
“I remember Nancy telling me, ‘I’m his girlfriend, and he never walks me to class,’” Yvonne says, chuckling. “But Kenny knew when he didn’t make it, the other kids would be mean to this boy.”
They think back to the time in the Astrodome, when they overheard a father viciously chewing out a son for losing his baseball glove.
“I was going to say something, but I decided to back off,” Lee says. “I told Ken about it after the game, and he said, ‘You should have come down. I would have given him my glove.’
“That’s the kind of kid he was.”
Tears in his eyes, Lee stands up and turns away.
Ken Caminiti struggled with substance abuse all through his baseball career. After retiring, it was always going to a be a long road. And so it proved. This month is the tenth anniversary of his death from a drug overdose and Scott Miller from Bleacher Report goes in-depth on his tragic story.
QUIZ: How big a FIFA fan are you?
25 signs that you’re playing for your club in a GAA county final
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Best Sportswriting ched Evans fall experimental football league ken caminiti Pat Cash Serena Williams Well read