These are the sports moments from 2025 that the Defector staff enjoyed.
A’ja Wilson Hits A Game-Winner In Phoenix
By October, I think I did know subconsciously that A’ja Wilson was the greatest player in the history of women’s basketball. Her fourth MVP award now meant an astonishing hit rate: She has played eight seasons in the WNBA and won MVP in half of them. While Wilson’s teammates scuffled through the early part of the summer, she’d kept the team afloat into the later months, when the Aces started to look like Aces again.
Still, sometimes latent feelings need a nudge to the surface. At the end of Game 3 of the WNBA Finals in Phoenix, Wilson’s team verged on a brutal choke. Their 17-point fourth-quarter lead over the Mercury had dwindled to nothing. The MVP herself had just turned the ball over, but an Alyssa Thomas miss on the other end gave Vegas another chance. Slack alerts and texts flew across my laptop’s screen, all from co-workers and friends trying to process the late-game wildness from home. The Aces dribbled the clock down to five seconds and called timeout. They emerged from their huddle with the only solution: Wilson caught the inbounds pass and hit her turnaround midrange game-winner over a married couple’s raised hands. For a few peaceful seconds, I knew what no one else did, and in those seconds, the fact of her greatness finally clicked into place. There are hazards to making basketball games your job; big moments just become more blogs to file. I worry sometimes that I’ve lost my sense of wonder. In Phoenix, I welcomed a double epiphany. The other thing I realized: That feeling never goes away. - Maitreyi Anantharaman
Internazionale Vs. Barcelona Champions League Semi-Final, Leg 2
How good does a game have to be in order to ignore that your favored team lost? I can acknowledge that the New England Patriots’ most recent three Super Bowl losses were riveting contests, but that doesn’t mean I look back fondly at the experience of watching them, so I’d say the answer is “really fucking good.” That’s how I feel about the second leg of the 2024-25 Champions League semi-final between Internazionale and Barcelona, and it surprises me, all these months later, how often I remember the absolute thrill of it.
I wrote about this game, and the almost equally stellar 3-3 first leg, back when it happened, but in the time since, I have only come to enjoy the memories of a crushing defeat more. Obviously, the stakes and general star-studded nature of the affair pale in comparison to Argentina's win in the 2022 World Cup final, but it’s a similar type of exuberance that comes to mind when I look back at this match in May. While normal teams, on a normal day, might have looked at the goalfest in the first leg and battened down the hatches in order to try to reach the final, both Inter and Barcelona came out with a joyful abandon, and the scoreline slowly but surely climbed up toward the seven-goal count across 120 minutes.
If there has been a conflict between ideologies in soccer over the last 15 years, it has been possession vs. counter-attacks. The former was made world-famous by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona side of the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the mantle has been carried on both by the manager in future stints and by his old club under many different managers. As for the latter, I always look back at the 2010 Germany World Cup side as a catalyst for more hard-pressing counter-attacks, and Inter wisely deployed it against a Barca side that was constantly pushing back the hosts.
The result was soccer poetry in motion. There were mistakes, but that only made the chaos more exciting: At any point in time, Barcelona could mishit a pass, and Inter would be on the move before anyone could take a breath. By the time Davide Frattesi took two stutters and shot Inter into the Champions League final (the less said about that for the Italians, the better), I was exhausted, devastated, euphoric, and a bit sweaty. This is the type of game I point to when I say that the Champions League is the best sporting event on the planet. The stakes are often so high, and the action is so good, that it’s a gift that the tournament comes around every year. Inter might not have lifted the 2025 trophy, but I’ll remember the war against Barca for a long time to come. - Luis Paez-Pumar
Chiba Marines Vs. Fukuoka Hawks, April 12
I went to Japan for the wrestling, but I stayed for the baseball. Even though the Chiba Marines lost their home game, 8-0, the day I was there, their ninth inning was still the bit that I’ll remember the longest.
First, a plug for going to a Chiba game in general: It’s one of the more out-of-the-way options if you’re watching baseball on a Tokyo vacation, but it’s worth it—especially when the weather is as gorgeous as it was when I went. To see the BayStars in Yokohama or the Giants at the Tokyo Dome, it’s not hard to buy tickets specifically for English speakers, and as a result there’s a good chance you’ll end up in a section with, for example, some Australians who don’t know ball and/or perv on the women selling beer. But Chiba is obscure enough that I had to kind of bluff my way through a transaction with embarrassingly limited Japanese, so you know that anyone who goes is serious about the game.
That Saturday afternoon, I took a lengthy multi-train trip out to the east side of the bay, walked through an outdoor mall and some green space with other fans, soaked in the festival-like atmosphere all around the stadium, bought a hot dog (it was fine), decided against buying a “MARINES” shirt because it would have a different context in America, then sat up high in their retro cookie-cutter stadium on the water and waited in vain to tally a run for Chiba on my scorecard.
Fukuoka provided all the action on the field, but the best thing about Japanese baseball is that—not unlike soccer—their hardcore fans don’t wait for the stadium workers to implore them to make some noise. Each team’s fans in the outfield sings customized chants for their players when they’re at bat, and amazingly, Chiba’s supporters didn’t get any quieter even when the game became a near-guaranteed defeat. With former Pittsburgh Pirate Gregory Polanco at the plate in what would become the game’s final out, they absolutely belted a catchy song with lyrics that break the language barrier: “El Coffee Home Run.”
I was recently at a hockey game where the home team went down two goals with about five minutes to play, and it was like a huge chunk of the crowd couldn’t wait to bolt out of their seats and head for the exits. Chiba’s fans are a necessary reminder that you can still have fun at a loss, all the way to the bitter end. - Lauren Theisen
Cooper DeJean's Pick-Six
There was a drive in an NFL game this year where the Eagles sacked Patrick Mahomes on first and second down. The next play, Cooper DeJean intercepted Mahomes’s pass and ran it back for a touchdown. Perhaps you’ve heard of this, as it happened in the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl! That the Eagles won! In a rout! This entry would be longer, but I’m going to go watch that series again. - Dan McQuade
World Series Game 3
Even when I was on Twitter all the time, it was never something I felt good about. A lot of people I liked were there making jokes and sharing stuff they’d read, but even when it was good, it was very clearly a lousy habit. You can like a bar, and like drinking, and still know that you should drink less and spend less time in bars. It wasn’t really anything I did so much as some changes made by management, but when it was time for me to stop drinking in that particular bar, I found it surprisingly easy to leave it behind.
I didn’t kick the habit, at all, but if I don’t really miss the old dive, I have from time to time missed the feeling of watching games there. It wasn’t that the discourse was great, necessarily—it could be good, but there was always a whole lot of OMG-ing and fulminating—but it was fun to replicate the experience of watching a game alongside other people, while physically being near no one in particular. Sports, like most things, is more fun when enjoyed with other people; I’ve found that the stranger or later the game, the more the presence of other people enhances that enjoyment. It was fake, in retrospect, or a decently pale simulation, but the moments when you had the sense that you were watching a game with Everyone Else felt both uncanny and kind of thrilling. If there was anything to miss about it, I would have said that was it.
If talking about Twitter always felt a little shameful, Bluesky is doubly so. It is the new place, and while there’s nothing really wrong with it that isn’t wrong with any other place that people hang out online, the fact of having sought it out seems sort of shameful. I can’t just walk around with some of these thoughts in my head, though, and as Game 3 of the World Series stretched and stretched past late night and well into the morning, I found myself watching it on my own—when I finally crept into bed, at 2:40 a.m. ET, about 15 minutes before it all wrapped up, it occurred to me that my wife had been asleep for nearly five hours—and with everyone else on Bluesky.
The game was the thing, one of two all-timers in the best World Series in a decade or more, and it was an agonizing, excruciating pleasure in its own right. Staying up to watch as much of it as I did was the good sort of bad decision, and one I felt happy to have made even as I awakened the next day in more or less the same state that E.T. was in when they found him all white and sick in the creek bed. I don’t expect to see that many more World Series games like it in my life, and I wouldn’t want to miss any of the ones that remain. But I was grateful for that old simulation of fellowship, too—a bunch of other people, or their shadows, all making the same mistake that I was making, for the same stupid reasons, with the same gratitude, in something like the same place. I wouldn’t say that I’m proud of any of it, or of how much I’d missed the feeling. But I can’t really deny any of that, either. - David Roth
Ravens-Bills In The Divisional Round
This game was devastating to watch as a Lamar Jackson defender, but also kind of bittersweet. The Baltimore Ravens were a buzzsaw at this point, but in classic Ravens fashion, they decided a snow game would be the time to throw all over the field against the Buffalo Bills in their home stadium. Jackson had two bad turnovers in the first half, and it looked to be a typical Ravens collapse. But then something interesting happened: Jackson got it together and the Ravens climbed back from a two-score deficit. And then Mark Andrews shat the bed, first with a fumble and then with a dropped two-point conversion that could have sent the game into overtime.
The Ravens, even more than the Bills, are the NFL's tragic figure. Some combination of youth and John Harbaugh being the coach makes it so that their wings always melt as soon as they get close to glory. This game may have been the best it'll ever get for this version of the Ravens, and Jackson may be doomed to end up as a guy who people loved watching but could never get the final notch on his belt. But that comeback attempt was so glorious, and that hour when it seemed like he would finally climb over the hump will always stick with me. - Israel Daramola
Canelo Alvarez Vs. Bud Crawford
A long time ago, I realized how mentally healthy just having something to look forward to can be. That’s among the rare defensible excuses for loving boxing as much as I do. No other sport lets you anticipate an event quite like boxing. You wait just two weeks after the Super Bowl matchup is set, and fans of either team are frenzied come kickoff. The big fights give you months to get hyped. Crawford vs. Canelo was talked about as a fantasy matchup for years before it was officially announced last spring. By the time the opening bell rang on Sept. 13, “excited” didn't describe my state. I was dang near rabid in my desire for these mofos to get it on.
The fight reminded me of a time when boxing played a much larger role in my social circle, and any nationally televised bout was a fine excuse to get together with my buddies around a TV set. (Pretty sure McGregor vs. Mayweather in 2017 was the last viewing party we had.) My elder son, Eddie, is the biggest boxing fan in my orbit these days, but he was away at college, so the fight gave me an excuse to visit him and make an event of it. I came bearing ribs, fried chicken, and other blatantly bad-for-us but delicious foods, and hell if it wasn’t a damn joy to be with my boy.
So I would’ve counted the night as a win even if the fighters stank up the joint. They didn’t. Two all-timers still performed at a real high level. Not that it was close! When it comes to scoring title fights, I’m from the Ric Flair if-you-wanna-be-the-man-you-gotta-beat-the-man school, and gave the incumbent champ Canelo a few of the early rounds. But by the midway point, it was clear Crawford was faster and—surprisingly, given that he’d jumped a couple weight classes to face the Mexican legend—stronger than Canelo. And so much sharper! The Omaha loyalist turned in a performance not too far from his July 2023 bout with then-undefeated Errol Spence for the undisputed welterweight crown, when every punch Crawford threw was with bad intentions and on the mark. And nobody’s going to beat that guy. Canelo, as great as he surely is, wasn’t good enough. In the end, Crawford was given the unanimous decision, 116-112, 115-113, and 115-113, and his ring immortality was assured.
Netflix reported more than 41 million folks watched the fight. Great night for me and the fight game.
Now boxing has me looking forward to Shakur Stevenson vs. Teofimo Lopez at Madison Square Garden at the end of January. I’m going with my kids. I can’t wait. - Dave McKenna
The Quad God
None of us, a friend reminded me recently, have a contract with God. We can and do delude ourselves into thinking otherwise, with our vacation plans, long-term personal goals, and 12-months-without-interest credit cards. But that's a modern façade on the problem eternal: None of us really knows how any given day will go, let alone our own careers or lives.
Perhaps that's why I kept returning this year to the sheer dominance of the figure skater Ilia Malinin and his seven quad jumps. Because every time he competed, Malinin seemed to refute all that. No matter the competitors nor the stakes, he skated, he spun, and he hit those quads.
The son of former Olympic skaters Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, Malinin is not the first figure skater to land a quad jump in competition; that would be Canada's Kurt Browning, way back in 1988. It's his predecessors, Nathan Chen of the U.S. and Japan's two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu, who made landing multiple quads in a competition seem normal. But nobody has landed so many, across so many different types of jumps, and so consistently as him. All he has done is add and add—eventually reaching seven.
This puts Malinin in an almost too obvious position for the upcoming Winter Olympics, as the man expected to win it all. It's a position Browning, Chen, and Hanyu knew all too well. And they would be the first to say that nothing in the Olympics is guaranteed. Browning, a fan favorite in the late 1980s and early 1990s, never won an Olympic medal. Chen needed two Olympic cycles to win it all on the biggest stage. It was Hanyu's consistency, leading to back-to-back gold medals, that sealed his place in history.
Will Malinin win gold while smashing records and landing seven quads in Italy? He certainly will be the favorite. He might not have a contract with God, but damn if watching him this year it didn't feel like he was close. - Diana Moskovitz
Shohei Ohtani's Big Game
I hope it's not too insufferable for me to say that 13 years of professional sports blogging has altered the way I watch sports. I am still a total sicko when watching teams I personally root for, no different than when I was 12 years old, but when observing as a neutral, I often find myself taken out of the moment. To put it more bluntly: When I'm watching a big game in which I don't have a personal rooting interest, I am often just pulling for a result that will be least inconvenient to our workflow.
Within this framework, Shohei Ohtani's historic performance in Game 4 of the NLCS should have fallen squarely into the "inconvenient" category. A Friday night game on the West Coast in which something so incredible happens that it would look strange to leave it unmentioned on the site until Sunday is a nightmare for me. So, as soon as the game was over, while I was still sitting on my couch and feeling delirious over what I had just seen, I decided to blog about it.
The resulting post is nothing special—just a few paragraphs punctuated by highlights—but I was shocked at how good it felt to write it. Something that I thought I was doing out of obligation felt, by the time I had finished, like a little treat I had given myself. The truth was that I just wanted to talk to someone about that game, to shake my head in disbelief and say "What the fuck?" and maybe even cry a little bit. Without that option available to me, I got to do the next best thing, which was talk about it with all of you.
As I hit publish, I imagined someone walking into my house, seeing me hunched over my laptop in the dark at a time of night when nobody should be typing anything into a computer, and asking me what the hell I was doing. I would have answered: I love sports, dude. I love watching them, thinking about them, and writing about them.
Just like in any field, if you do the thing you love as a career for long enough, it can start to feel a little too much like a job. Lucky for me, athletes like Shohei Ohtani exist, and they are always ready to remind me how fun it is to be steeped in all of this every day. - Tom Ley
Everything Natasha Cloud Did
Shortly after I joined Defector, I wrote about how four lesbians turned me into a sports fan, speaking of the New York Liberty’s Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart, Courtney Vandersloot, and Big Mama Stef (Dolson). This year, my wildest dreams were realized when it became apparent that Sabrina Ionescu was the only straight player on the Liberty. But one lesbian stood above the rest for me. I am speaking, of course, of Natasha Cloud.
What could I possibly say about the point guard that hasn’t already been said? That she oozes charisma, even when she had to play part of the season in a Batman mask because of a nose injury? That she is loud about what she cares about, advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza and better working conditions for athletes in her union? That she is one half of a Liberty power couple with Izzy Harrison? There was no player more fun to watch on the court this year than Tash, whether she was dancing by the bench or actually playing on the court. I still have a layman’s understanding of basketball, and so I feel more drawn to the human dynamics of the game than actual strategy. No one felt more gloriously human, full of joy and occasionally rage, than Natasha Cloud. No matter who had the ball, I often had my eyes on her, watching the ways she goofed around with her teammates or Ellie. I’m keeping my fingers crossed she stays in New York, because I could watch her play forever! - Sabrina Imbler
The 4 Nations Face-Off
The NHL has never known what to do with its All-Star Game. Going backward in the event’s history, the game has been won by (to pick a random team from each “era” of format) Team McDavid, Team Metropolitan, All-Stars West, North American All-Stars, Campbell Conference All-Stars, First All-Star Team, and “the Toronto Maple Leafs.” The problem is always the same: A contact sport sucks ass without contact, and the players don’t care enough about the event to risk injury.
Simultaneously and for various reasons, hockey hadn’t had a real international best-on-best tournament in a decade. Mostly this was because NHL owners couldn’t make money on the Olympics. So in lieu of an All-Star Game, they threw together, somewhat hastily, a mini-tournament featuring four nations facing off, and gave it a very creative name. The 4 Nations Face-Off did not on its face promise a classic.
Then the real world intervened. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the U.S. was a nastier, more confusing place, and when he picked a fight with Canada, hockey was right there for the proxy fight. What had been a moderately friendly rivalry was suddenly a little less friendly, and the bragging rights were suddenly a little more valuable. Entering the group-stage showdown, Team USA’s premier meatheads decided in a group chat that afternoon that they were going to open with fisticuffs, and if any questions about the intensity level of the tournament remained, they were answered by the 12 gloves dropped in nine seconds, to the audible bloodlust of a red-hot Montreal crowd.
It was a hell of a show, retroactively diminished somewhat by the knowledge that the Tkachuks were probably actually trying to defend Trump’s honor, and the subsequent pile-on from a bunch of right-wing freaks who’d never watched a hockey game in their life deciding this was a win for them, personally, somehow. But good hockey trumps everything, and in the rematch in the final, both teams played squeaky clean and with playoff-level vehemence, and put on a beauty that needed overtime to decide—in Canada’s favor. Somehow, with its half-assed cash grab, the NHL had stumbled into a classic. Turns out all that’s needed to get players to care about a stakes-free exhibition is to turn it into an international incident. - Barry Petchesky
Games 3 And 7 Of The World Series
If baseball dies due to cultural neglect and societal stupidity, it won't be because the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays didn't try to make you fall back in love. If nothing, they made you fall back in love with the idea of multiple extra innings, one of the things the troglodytic reign of Rob Manfred has tried to eradicate. The two best games of this season, and damned near every other one to boot, took a combined 10 hours and 46 minutes, which is barely longer than the average streaming-service documentary series about wombats in love. Games 3 and 7 were epic tales in and of themselves, and the fact that the Dodgers won them both helped humanize them despite being the definition of money, and quite literally made heroes out of not only Shohei Ohtani and Vladimir Guerrero The Younger, but Alejandro Kirk and Will Smith, Eric Lauer and Will Klein, Max Scherzer telling his manager to piss off and Clayton Kershaw wearing his goofiest "Look at me retire" smile.
Every single inning told its own story, all the way down to Kirk's series-winning base hit-turned-double play to end the entire parade. No event in any other sport, and almost no event in any other pursuit, stood up this way in these two days, and the thousands of retellings were rendered pointless by the fact that you can watch the games themselves and get everything the story has to give. Take your 10-part Tampa Bay Buccaneers series and shove that stuff. - Ray Ratto
Weston Wilson Pitching
There is very little I love more than a position player being called out of the dugout and to the pitching mound. The drama is immense. This guy can't pitch! He's just a mere outfielder, or catcher, or second baseman. And yet there he is, on the mound in some game that doesn't matter, to fight against some of the best hitters in the world. Everyone knows this is funny. The position player himself knows it. His teammates certainly know it. Even the batters know this is funny. Homering off a position player barely counts. If he fails, this is to be expected. But if he succeeds, there is unending glory and a thrill that will evaporate the minute the game is finished.
In May of this year, I was in my seats at the Phillies' stadium when Weston Wilson took the mound. The Phillies were down 17-2 against the Brewers. It was such a bad loss that it had come all the way around and become fun again. I was hooting and hollering. My idiot sons ... they were so bad today! No one knew why! In the eighth inning, the Phillies sent Weston Wilson to the mound. His first three pitches were an average of 50 mph and a combined several feet out of the zone. But then—a strike! A diving play by Edmundo Sosa! One out! Then a batter popped up immediately to center! Two outs! I was screaming. Then Weston Wilson got a ground ball. Fourteen pitches for a shutout inning! It wasn't "good" pitching, per se, but it was more effective than most of the Phillies bullpen at that point, and beyond that, it was fun. I was having a great time!
Then in the ninth, god bless him, they sent Weston Wilson out again! Again, he got three outs with no runs! I was howling in my seat. It was so stupid. It was so fun. The Phillies scored five runs in the bottom on the ninth. For a minute there, it felt like they would do the impossible and score 15 to tie. They didn't, but I was still in a good mood when we left after a 17-7 loss. What a stupid sport baseball can be on a random day in May. What a fun time we had. Sometimes I think that's really what I love about sports: that kind of fervor based on nothing, with no hope and all passion. I screamed for Weston Wilson even though it didn't matter. And I'll do it again next year. - Kelsey McKinney
The Tour de France
Stage 13 of the 2025 Tour de France was one of the least exciting days in the race: a 10.9-kilometer time trial up the Peyragudes. Riders took off two minutes apart and suffered for roughly half an hour, totally alone, with all racecraft left invisible, determinable only by the cadence of their pedal strokes. Racing analysis went as far as noticing Tadej Pogacar's handlebar tape. There was nothing taking place that day for me to write about, and I spent a few hours in the press room clacking away at a story that would run a few days later, before getting trapped in a horrid traffic jam on the way out of the valley.
In other words, it was what passed for an uneventful day at the Tour, yet it was still a complete joy. I spent the race riding the cable car up and down the mountain, bugging Dutch mechanics for another story (that I would end up filing from the top of another mountain), fording the small stream dividing the press room from the team buses, harassing various Australians for sunscreen, watching French children lose their minds over Wout van Aert, getting into an argument with a forebodingly tall gendarme, and ending my day by going out the valley the long way and picking up some Spanish hitchhikers along the way. Pretty good for one of the worst days at the Tour.
I understand that the prompt for this list asks for a best moment, singular, though one distinguishing aspect of the Tour de France is that it can't be boiled down to a moment. It's a spectacle, one that unfolds across an entire country, for a month, for millions of people. I loved getting to be a small part of it. The access afforded to me with a media credential went beyond any other sporting event I've ever been a part of. If I didn't have a specific angle I was working on, I would find various staffers, coaches, and riders and ask them, What's going to happen today? And they would tell me!
It was a totally overwhelming experience for totally great reasons. A day might go something like this: wake up, immediately begin writing or transcribing for as long as I could before grabbing a croissant or some such to eat while driving to the start, where I would interview people until the race began. Often, we would have to escape before the peloton did, racing them for a few hours to the finish, where I would eat some form of lunch, write for about 45 minutes if lucky, then book it to the finish for more interviews. Leaving is usually the hardest part of the day, as it involves one form of horrid traffic-jam navigation or another, which means another few hours of driving, or, depending on how mountainous the finish was, sitting. After the Courchevel stage, for instance, we elected not to leave the mountain until traffic cleared, which left us to screw around until past 11:00 p.m. Whenever we returned to the hotel, I'd join the Escape Collective boys to record their podcast, usually during dinner, much to the disgruntlement of restaurant employees. At this point, we'd have perhaps an hour or so to write before going to bed to do it all again the next day. There was no downtime except for during the rest day, which we also spent podcasting. It was so overwhelming in the best way, and I want to go again. - Patrick Redford
Alcaraz Vs. Sinner In The French Open Final
Comb through history and you might suspect that Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner were set on some cosmic collision course. I concede that I am more invested in this rivalry than most, but for real, the omens were heavy-handed. In his very first match in the minor leagues, the Challenger tour, a 15-year-old Alcaraz lined up across from … a 17-year-old Jannik Sinner. After the duo progressed to the big leagues, they clashed in finals of steadily escalating stakes. First they met in the final of a 250-level event, then the final of a 500-level event, then the final of a 1000-level event. All that remained were the biggest tournaments: the four Grand Slams. And within the Slams, they had met first in the fourth round, then the quarterfinals, then the semifinals.
So tennis fans awaited the end of these stepwise progressions: the Slam final. Novak Djokovic had been a meddling interloper for a while. But he couldn’t stop the inevitable at Roland-Garros this year. By tournament’s end only No. 1 seed Sinner and No. 2 seed Alcaraz remained on the clay. Where I’d previously headed into their matchups hungry and elated, ahead of this one I felt queasy, like my two robust sons were meeting in gladiatorial combat. For a while I wondered if all those big feelings were misplaced. We appeared to be hurtling towards anticlimax. Sinner had won all 18 sets of his tournament before the final, and he tacked on the first two sets of this final, too, treating his archrival like early-round fodder. He let up, and Alcaraz took set three, but in set four Sinner was up 5-3, returning serve, 0-40. Triple championship point, plus the security of serving for the championship if need be. Would this match somehow be ordinary?
If you have made it this far you may know what happened instead over the next 105 minutes. My account is only partial. No useful notes from that span. I changed from a bodily presence into a gaseous floating eyeball; my purpose on this earth, such as it existed, was to witness this match. Because Sinner and Alcaraz were busy rephrasing contemporary tennis in avant-garde terms. It was as if they had acknowledged the brutal extremes the sport could take you to, and, in homage, built the entire last phase of the match, point-by-point, out of such extremes. Watch that passage and you could understand it all: raw physicality, in both fast-twitch bursts and long-haul endurance; psychological steel, in the embrace of highest risk while there is most at stake, or the irrational urge to fight on after fate already seems frozen against you. Patience and brinksmanship, delicacy and violence, sliding and sprinting, self-knowledge and experimentation. It looked different than the classic battles between the three greats who preceded them—faster and freakier still, the ball struck harder and at smaller targets. Even serious disciples of the sport did not know it could be played in such a belligerent style and sustained for quite that long.
In the months to come, men’s tennis was reduced to a standing appointment between these two. Sinner and Alcaraz played two more Slam finals that summer, both thrilling in phases, but neither one hit the apex of those five hours and 53 minutes in June, in terms of narrative sweep or absolute level of play. It was the sort of match that consumes entire days, that conquers the attention of people who don’t care about sports, that leaves you picking up the pieces of your own life, as if you’d been out there fighting, too. Whole weeks passed before I even looked at the highlights. I think I was almost afraid of them. - Giri Nathan
A Five-Euro Radler At Two* German Sporting Events
I will withhold the finer details of my German sportsgoing experiences for various reasons that will, god willing, eventually reveal themselves, but a notably pleasant thread across both events—a Bayern Munich frauen match and an Augsburger Panther game—was the refreshment. Considering the fact that you practically have to bankrupt yourself at an American sporting event if you want to purchase a little drink and snack, the euphoria of a five-euro Radler cannot be overstated.
A Radler (which means “cyclist” in German; there’s a fun little apocryphal story about the origin of the name) is essentially what is known in the U.S. as a shandy, which is beer and lemonade. As someone who does not go to a sporting event for the sake of getting shitfaced, but does enjoy a little drink, only having to pay five euros, plus a two-euro deposit on the cup that gets refunded once you return it, for a delicious low-ABV drink, is the ideal way of life. And this was all in or about Munich, which I was informed is the most expensive city in Germany. A better way is possible …
(An aside: I nearly bumped my sporting event count up to three to take into account the 11 consecutive hours I spent at Oktoberfest, which honestly could be considered a sporting event in the same way that hot-dog eating contests or, maybe, swimming across the English Channel can be considered sporting events. Unfortunately everything at Oktoberfest was too expensive, especially by German alcohol standards, for me to comfortably factor into the “five-euro Radler” bucket of experiences, but Oktoberfest nonetheless deserves a shoutout for falling into the “Radler/beer by the liter” bucket of experiences. Burp.) - Kathryn Xu
