The first Aussie to do everything in tennis: Wimbledon and Davis Cup champ, #1 player in the world. A cunning, nasty lefty with a cunning, nasty lefty serve. A long-serving, powerful administrator of all things Aussie tennis. Every year it takes 800 hours to shape a sheet of sterling silver into the Norman Brookes Challenge […]
“If I’m not winning, I’m every kind of monkey, gorilla, black bitch, nigger, choke-artist, man . . . The online abuse is constant.” (Sloane Stephens, 2021). I wanted to write about Sloane Stephens’ wings. Those wings on her feet like Mercury’s, the god of speed, messages, travel, boundaries. Laver thought one key to tennis was […]
January in Brisbane holding a Koala. Melbourne in a long black dress. February is Dubai’s white sands in a pink bikini and shades. Behind her in the distance, echoing her curves, is the Burj Al Arab, the most luxurious hotel on earth. Its sail shape soars upwards as Federer’s forehands and Tiger Woods’ tee shots […]
Angel, Madonna, Mother, Wife, Starlet, Actress: the one looking over all the dead, or the one Tony Wilding was about to marry. Child in arm. Barbed wire in the background. Troubetzkoy sculpted this angel, this monument to WWI. A decade earlier he sculpted Wilding hitting a forehand drive. “Physical Energy,” he called it. Women swooned […]
Death marches and concentration camps. Forced starvation and forced Islamization. Rapes and rapes and rapes and rapes and more than a million dead. Maybe that’s not the best place to start. My teenage daughter is recording Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto for the National Trumpet Competition. Gypsy lyrical. Exciting, too, with plenty of showy trumpet techniques. We […]