Rafa Will Always Have Paris x-13.

10/12/2020

Notre Dame gargoyle and Rafa Nadal, Photo by Art Seitz with photo-shop help from his pal Zair Mansour,

Four superstars, overlapping.
I am referring to Rafa Nadal, one of the nicest people I have met in sports, who won his 13th French Open on Sunday. I am also referring to Chris Clarey and Karen Crouse of the NYT, who wrote about Nadal in the Monday paper. And I am also referring to Art Seitz, master tennis photographer, who has been snapping away, well, forever.

I loved reading about Nadal and seeing Art’s photos, having become a Nadal fan in 2011, the only time I met him. I had heard he was a good guy, a sportsman, and he lived up to his reputation on a miserable day, with the remnants of Hurricane Irene lashing New York much as the tail end of Hurricane Delta was drenching New York on Monday.

He had done his obligatory media conference and was eager to get back to Manhattan, but he was promoting his book and had promised me a few minutes for an interview. We got into a conversation, and I mentioned that I had covered eight World Cups by then, including my first, in his country, Spain.

I think it's fair to say that reporters do not expect their subjects to show much, or any, interest in them. But Nadal seemed intrigued that an American knew and loved soccer, even my modest dose of knowledge. I knew that his uncle, Miguel Angel Nadal, had been a mainstay for Johan Cruyff at Barcelona in La Liga in the 90s, and I had covered Spain’s World Cup championship in 2010. So we talked soccer…as well as tennis….as well as his penchant for cooking for himself and entourage on the road.

He could have ducked out at any time, but he stayed and talked, and my impressions of him since have been confirmed – a centered person who has willed himself to the top of tennis, and can speak with compassion about the pandemic, knowing it is more important than tennis.

My pals Chris Clarey and Karen Crouse caught him perfectly in Monday’s paper – Chris concentrating on the match and the career, Karen focusing on his values and his acquired trilingual abilities. When I first saw Nadal nearly two decades ago, he could not speak any English in public. Now he is eloquent, from the heart.
Felicidades, Rafa.

Chris Clarey:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/sports/tennis/nadal-french-open.html
Karen Crouse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/sports/tennis/french-open-rafael-nadal.html
My article in 2011:
https://straightsets.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/off-the-court-nadal-wears-chefs-whites/
For a sample of Art Seitz tennis photos, check out his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/100001883302306/posts/4593499944056070/?extid=0&d=n

Tom Schwarz

10/12/2020 01:10:06 pm

Oh man yet another GREAT one. Thanks GV!

Marty Appel

10/12/2020 03:42:55 pm

He seems like a well grounded guy, and it must have been a delight to spend that 1-on-1 time with him. We will look back on this era of "the big three" as we do on golf when Palmer-Nicklaus-Player ruled. What a time!

bruce

10/12/2020 03:49:33 pm

george,

well done.

i wonder what odds were available for him throwing a bagel at joko in the first set or any set for that matter.

rafa always comes across as affable and with his head screwed on right.

just trying to think if i've seen him take a wrong step and i can't think of any.

joko on the other hand....heard say some things that seemed rather too nationalistic about serbia which, i thought, was the worst of a bad bunch during the 'troubles' in their part of the world.

some serious bonehead shite and more than once.

as for rafa's english. he was hard to understand at times when he started out.

however, i hadn't heard him talk at all since--probably--his last major tournament and the improvement was incredible.

bruce

George Vecsey

10/12/2020 05:08:02 pm

Tom, thanks,
Marty, good point. To be at a sports event (or concert, let's say) and think these are the good old days. Take a look around. Did we appreciate Seaver, Brock, Gibson, Morgan in their prime. I think I did -- but is that the same as capturing that one mental photo for always?
Bruce, bagel jobs hard to come by. As for language, our colleague Chris Clarey moved his family from Paris to Segovia to for the experience -- now he is trilingual, like Rafa.

Curt Block

10/12/2020 10:18:21 pm

Do you know everyone who ever owned a
pair of laces?
Keep up the exceptional work.

George

10/13/2020 09:13:28 am

Captain Curt: Thanks for the nice words. You know from your own work how we meet people once....form our impressions....and move on. I've had some great one-time interviews with sports and non-sports people -- John McCain, great guy, Colleen Dewhurst between sessions on a matinee Saturday earth mother, Larry Flynt, obscenity monger -- but charismatic and smart, before he got shot, etc. etc. Plus athletes and coaches. You never knew. You've got your stories, too -- miss them at our lunches. Be well, GV

bruce

10/15/2020 02:39:51 pm

george,

as you know, it's my job to point out canuckistanis since there are so many who 'merikcans think are 'merikans.....dewhurst was one of us.

dewhurst was one of us. from montreal as were shatner, cohen and peterson and the rocket.

bruce

bruce

Alan Rubin link

10/15/2020 09:45:27 am

Another great humanist story. You are the master of putting people at ease and capturing their humanity. There is so much more to people than how then are perceived by the public.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Rafa Will Always Have Paris x-13.

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