30th December 2011
Test of Time
“ESPN covets the international sports market, so The Boss dispatched me overseas for a cricket match between India and England. This made sense, as I’d recently covered the Cricket World Cup on the subcontinent. I knew the rules and knew that a Test match was the original and purest form of cricket, a game that can go on for five days. Forty hours. I thought the same thing any sane person would think: How can a sporting event that lasts five days possibly still exist?
12th May 2011
Deadly Games
“Part of the city is breathtaking, a place of shimmering beaches and dark, trendy restaurants with stars on the wall. Men wear fedoras without irony. Models strut down the Copacabana Boardwalk. White-linen tourists sip from coconuts. There is always music, from a boom box on the beach, from speakers inside an open-air bar. This is the Brazil of glossy brochures. This is where things like these two sporting events — the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics — are born, things over which the poor in the slums have no control but which will have immense power to change their lives. The citizens of Macacos don’t know if the changes will be good, or if the changes ultimately will destroy them, or when or how their fate will come. A sporting event is like the volcano on Macacos’ horizon: It is mysterious and, despite the citizens of Macacos taking great pains not to anger it, eruption is inevitable. When the Olympics and World Cup were announced, the volcano began smoking.
The favelas, Rio’s guilty conscience, almost a thousand of them, overlook paradise but never, ever partake. Dense, urban slums with wretched educational opportunities, no social services, no police protection, they exist outside civilized society. Residents who live in the city don’t go up the hill. It’s possible to live a middle-class life without the violence of the slums affecting one’s daily existence. But the violence is always there. In 2010, there were 4,798 murders in Rio. That’s about a fourth the number of murders annually in the entire United States. (The U.S. population is about 300 million people. Rio has 6 million.) Favelas are desperate places, and they’ve been ignored since the first one popped up in 1897. Only now, some of them are close to venues for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
30th March 2011
Why You Should Care About Cricket
“The guy walking across the parking lot is famous. That’s easy to tell from the reactions. Crowds part for him. Security guards mirror his every step. Other cricketers who made this same trip to the locker room tiptoed around the puddles. He strides over them, head up, confident. I am following an Indian cricket superstar, but I don’t know who he is. That’s the kind of trip this is going to be — one of constant confusion and mystery.
He’s not a big man, but he’s got a big aura. Fans climb the stadium wall, cheek to cheek, pressed against openings to catch a glimpse. The player looks up at the apartment buildings crowding the other side of the street, like a zoo animal in reverse, all the residents leaning over to get a peek. He waves his bat at the kids on the wall. The kids scream with joy. I grab a photographer and point.
Who is that?
He looks at me like I’ve got three heads.
