On watching tennis, or beating against the boundary

The last few years I’ve watched more and more tennis. I’ve mentioned this before, probably many times before. Anyway, much of this rise in my attention to a sport I previously ignored is due to my wife, Gillian. Tennis is her favorite sport to watch. We also play each other with some frequency, although, because she’s four and a half months pregnant, we haven’t played in some time. The reason I think both of us enjoy tennis so much is that even though we each have particular players we pull for, the fluidity of the sport demands and allows for supporting quality play more than a particular player. In other words, you root for the long, creative point over the short, decisive point. You root for order that frays into chaos and not sudden trauma.

Where and what I wrote in 2015:

Pretentious image about writing.

@BallerBall

I am always appreciative of the freedom in basketball expression Jason Gallagher allows for at his site. I might even write pieces for The Baller Ball more often than my own blog, and, while most of the stuff is nonsense, I do think having a regular place to contribute without worrying about formalities has made me a better writer or at least helped me to keep up with my writing. I owe Jason something for that, so thanks, man, from the bottom of my basketball heart.

Halifax, Petersburg, & Moses Malone

A younger Moses.

I can’t remember who said it, whether it was my granddad at the kitchen table, by some folkloric wood stove, or my uncle out in the driveway, weeping willow branches bending behind the backboard. But someone talked of Moses Malone and how he twice slayed the mighty Comets of Halifax County. What’s so strange about the telling is how no matter who told it the voice of the defeated rang with loud pride. These people—my family—were happy to have lost because of who had beaten them. His name, with its mythic metronome, was larger than any state championship run ever could be. And so Moses Malone moved and sifted through my early memories of how people talk about greatness and how children learn to shoot baskets in midst of this nearby talk. And I wrote about it at The Classical.

(Also, for more on the actual games between Halifax and Malone's Petersburg, here is an article written by Tom McLaughlin for SoVaNow.com.)

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.  

A moment of silence until the next Grantland emerges.

Two of my favorite sites closed down this year: The Dissolve and now Grantland. The Classical started at the same time as Grantland, but didn't live up to its potential either, if making good on potential is judged by financial success only. To survive, The Classical eventually had to become a free for all blog where people volunteer and whose writing (like mine) is probably not of the same, consistent quality or renown as what the site intended upon its initial launch. 

Colin McGowan's NBA previews are recommended reading.

Don't look now, but the season has started, again.

When I’ve sat down to write over the last week, I’ve pretty much written only college recommendation letters or lesson plans. Someone who has, however, been writing like some feral creature born on the hellish wings of too many late nights over a typewriter is Colin McGowan at The Classical. 

Kyrgios in his youth

"On guard!"

Earlier this week, with the help of Mike Pielluci, an article I wrote on Nick Kyrgios appeared at The Classical. His summer malaise was the subject, mostly, but at the heart of my interest in the supposed future of Australian tennis was the question of youthfulness set adrift. After all, if summer is a young season, the conflicts that wrestle within its rugged months are caught between serious play and an active form of resting. I watch Kyrgios and he is either stretched taut on a rack or cocooned in the fetal position. And, in turn, I can never decide whether to root for or against him. Mostly, though, I watch him rushing and shuffling as if to do nothing and I think how the athletic body and the young mind are bound together in a counterproductive push and pull. If I had known then, what I know now.

Bachelors, Baseball, and Johnny Cueto

When Johnny Cueto pitched his first home game for the Kansas City Royals, my uncle posted to Facebook that he was in attendance at the game against the Detroit Tigers. I read this in midst of watching The Bachelor in Paradise, where Claire, a tried and true sojourner for love, was in the midst of telling her fellow contestants—all of them—that they were not in paradise for all the right reasons. She then stormed out of the rose ceremony in existential crisis about the meaning of love and commitment.

Interview with Joe Samuel Starnes @TheClassical

After reading Joe Samuel Starnes' novel, Red Dirt (2015), I interviewed him about the book and the sport of tennis. Most of this interview can be read at The Classical, but a couple answers that did not make the final cut have been included below:

Bryan Harvey: What I found most striking about Jaxie Skinner (the protagonist in Red Dirt) is how he exists between two worlds. He really does come across as a subversive boundary crosser, which seems apt considering the tennis athlete’s relationship with line judges. The tennis elite see Jaxie as somewhat of a redneck, but the rural population of Georgia does not necessarily claim him as their own. Moreover, even his romantic interests are forbidden to him: he sleeps with the quintessential high school jock’s girlfriend, stows away in a Russian star’s hotel room, and steals time with a cop’s wife. Did you intend Jaxie as a thief or trickster in the crafting of the novel? Or is his life on the edge an element of Southern noir and the private detective novel?

Joe Samuel Starnes: I think all exceptional tennis players have at least a little bit of a thief or trickster in their character—every point you win is one you’ve stolen from your opponent. It’s an intensely individual game, and all players are loners when out on the court—how many other sports are there where a competitor is forbidden from talking with a coach or advisor during play? It’s isolating. And although it has a reputation as being elitist, pro tennis has seen great success by outsiders—the Williams sisters, who rose up from the rough public courts of Compton, California, are a prime example.

And yes, everything I write has some element of the “rough South” or “grit lit”—as some southern fiction has been called—inspired as I have been by my literary lodestars: Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and William Faulkner.

BH: Aside from being a tennis novel, Jaxie’s story also speaks to the Southern parable of the family farm’s decline and the abandonment of the Southern economy to and by the textile industry? One of my favorite sequences in the novel is Jaxie banging a tennis ball against the ruins of this hard economic history.

JSS: Until I was fifteen, my family lived out in the country, six miles from Cedartown, Georgia, and about a mile from the nearest house. When my dad drove me to elementary school in the seventies, every day we passed a small family farm where the farmer waved at us without fail. That farm is now long gone and its fields are the site of a subdivision with newly built homes. The Goodyear Mill where my grandfather worked the second shift for thirty-five years closed down in the eighties, and later the vacant building burned in a spectacular fire. So yes, even though I’ve lived in or near big cities for past two decades, including the past fifteen near New York or Philadelphia, rural southern landscapes and economies are part of me and have been the primary settings for my fiction.

Bryan Harvey can be followed @LawnChairBoys. The above photograph on lease from The New York Times.

Fries & Ketchup: A stampede, the NBA Finals, and links

So, um, yeah, my students attached my head to a buffalo and placed that awesome monstrosity onto t-shirts. A longer story exists behind this shirt, the students who created it, and our year together in AP English 11, but I won’t tell it here or now. Right now, I’m still digesting how we arrived from September to now, and with time still left in the year, I’m not entirely ready to reflect on the school year as done. We’re still reading and analyzing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2010). So, I’ll just say thank you and that I’m incredibly humbled. 

Recent Rumblings: @TheClassical, @TheBallerBall, & @RushtheCourt

While Langston took care of last Saturday's SEC post, our blog's been reduced to a weekly football caption over the last month. However, that doesn't mean we haven't been writing elsewhere recently. Check out the links below, and we promise to diversify our portfolio here in the coming days (especially now that basketball is truly upon us).

Just make me look good guys, and I promise to give you all the credit. 

In the Name of Preserving Journalistic Integrity!!!

Jay Berwanger does exist!

I've been an admirer of the writing done at The Classical for a while now, and two of my favorite pieces of sports writing (of late) have appeared on their site: Ross Green's "Gael Monfils is Gael Monfils" and Jonny Auping's "Awareness, #Awareness, and Ray Rice". In the past, I've sent their editors some rather garbled ideas (like some nonsense about Tony Gonzalez playing the tight end position like Hunter S. Thompson), but this week something finally worked out: "Todd Gurley, Kareem Hunt, Running Towards, and Running Away".