Photographs by OK McCausland
One of the pleasures of watching Ilia Malinin, apart from his indifference to gravity, is to witness him becoming. Becoming a world champion, as opposed to a juvenile with a skate-park mentality and a face like a Disney prince. Becoming a master of quadruple jumps that no one else can land, rising with all the ease of a young Michael Jordan—before landing on a pair of butcher knives, on ice.
The National Basketball Association is now slime-identified with a crew of upstanders known as “Spook,” “Peso,” “Vez,” “Sugar,” “Black Tony,” “Scruli,” and “Doc,” thanks to the strenuous efforts of FBI Director Kash Patel to generate a headline. “Current and Former National Basketball Association Players and Four Other Individuals Charged in Widespread Sports Betting and Money Laundering Conspiracy,” Patel’s press office blared last week.
Some people steal valor. President Donald Trump steals machismo. Notice how he constantly positions himself alongside athletes, most especially mixed-martial-arts combatants and professional wrestlers. Like those purveyors of the “hammer fist” and the “rear naked choke,” Trump styles himself as an “Ultimate Fighter,” a crotch-kicker in chief who will stop at little to force his opponents to submit.
Give a guy from Bushwick several hours to day-drink and a chance to yell on Rory McIlroy’s backswing, and it’s going to happen. Garrulous and unseemly noises always seem to break out whenever golf and New Yorkers are adjacent. The organizers of the Ryder Cup have nevertheless brought the famously contentious event to Bethpage Black this weekend for the first time.
Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera’s glance. He sure looked like one of life’s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a “quintessential leading man” who possessed “near-iconographic physical beauty.” But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware.
Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.