Culture
Karolina Muchova’s U.S. Open run, and a blessing for women’s tennis
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NEW YORK — Karolina Muchova already had shot of the tournament sewn up when she produced an early contender for the best performance of the U.S. Open so far.
Muchova’s 6-3, 7-6(5) win over Naomi Osaka last Thursday night was a masterclass of variety and shotmaking. In one service game in the second set, Muchova held to love thanks to two volley winners, an ace, and a devilish slice that a discomfited Osaka could only flub into the net.
Osaka wasn’t at her best, but rallied in the second set, and briefly threatened to overpower her opponent. As a packed Arthur Ashe stadium illustrated, she remains one of the biggest draws in tennis despite her status as a wildcard entrant. A similarly rammed Louis Armstrong Stadium watched her overpower No. 10 seed Jelena Ostapenko Tuesday, and at the French Open in late spring, her encounter with world No. 1 and eventual champion Iga Swiatek electrified a dreary first week.
There was disappointment, still. Osaka said her “heart dies” when she loses, and her team had trailered the American hard-court swing as the moment that her return to tennis would explode.
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Saturday, Muchova stormed into the last 16, dismantling Anastasia Potapova 6-4, 6-2, in another display of textured tennis. And then on Monday, she took on the women’s story of the year, Italy’s Jasmine Paolini. Paolini had reached two consecutive Grand Slam finals, playing a confident, smiling brand of tennis that leaned into her stature rather than trying to play around it.
Muchova beat her 6-3, 6-3, flowing through the court again. After putting in one contender for the best performance of the tournament, now she has another. And despite their contrasting fortunes this year in New York, the return of Muchova and Osaka is a huge win for women’s tennis. Especially if they can stay fit.
Both players have been on the comeback trail this year. Muchova finally ended a nine-month absence after surgery on a serious wrist injury, and Osaka returned to the tour earlier this year after announcing her pregnancy 19 months ago. With the WTA Tour in an interesting place, as Swiatek dominates Roland Garros, Aryna Sabalenka does the same in Melbourne, and the other two Grand Slams stay more open, the top of women’s tennis welcomes back two more contenders.
Muchova is a quarterfinalist or better at all four Grand Slams, but her ridiculously high ceiling has been lowered because of terrible luck with injuries.
The current world No. 52, a 28-year-old from the Czech Republic, is a tennis player’s player. Seven-time Grand Slam champion Justine Henin told The Athletic in June that because of her variety and imagination, Muchova is one of her favourite players to watch. Osaka expressed similar sentiments after seeing it up close Thursday.
Karolina Muchova’s deft touch is a hallmark of her tennis (Robert Prange / Getty Images)
“She’s very athletic. She has a lot of variety,” Osaka said. “I enjoy watching her play and also playing her, even though sometimes it doesn’t go my way.”
Dissecting her own game, Muchova told The Athletic in an interview ahead of Wimbledon, “It’s who I am and how I like to play, what fills me up on the court. It’s just me. I wouldn’t like to play any other way — even though sometimes it’s too much. I enjoy it and I spoke with my team and we try to improve these things and I’ll try to keep on going this way.”
On Thursday, she said that she just enjoys playing this way. “It’s fun,” she said.
For those not so familiar with Muchova’s game, Thursday night offered a crash course. She rushed the net and volleyed far more often, and far more efficiently, than the vast majority of players on the tour are able to do. Muchova ended the match winning 13 out of 19 (68 per cent) points at the net, and she served and volleyed in clutch moments. She was accomplished from the baseline too, nicking the first break of the match in the seventh game with a feathered drop shot, and then wrapping up the set with two thunderous forehand return winners when Osaka next served.
Muchova and Osaka’s second-round match electrified the U.S. Open after a slumbering start (Luke Hales / Getty Images)
In the second set, Muchova hit some outrageous volley winners on the stretch, and dug in when Osaka served to take the match into a decider. Come the tiebreak, her relentless retrieval, and use of slice to disrupt Osaka’s rhythm, earned a horrible error on match point to bring proceedings to an end.
Now into the last 16, Muchova has come from a place that no tennis player wants to go. After that surgery in February, on the area of the body tennis players most dread becoming damaged, Muchova worried she might not play the sport again. Initially, she couldn’t get out of bed or brush her teeth, but gradually her strength returned and her mood improved. Going to regular concerts at home in the Czech Republic helped, where seeing English rock band Nothing But Thieves was a highlight.
She returned to the tour at Eastbourne, the British seaside grass-court tune-up, but withdrew after two matches to protect her wrist. She then lost to Paula Badosa in the first round of Wimbledon, in straight sets. Badosa, another player who has been cruelly affected by injuries, said her biggest advice to Muchova was to “have patience”.
“Maybe, to another player, I would say something different, but she’s so talented. Her level will come back.”
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So it’s proved. Less than two months on, Muchova has thrillingly knocked out a two-time champion out of the U.S. Open, and then a two-time Grand Slam finalist. She moves into the quarterfinals to face either Caroline Wozniacki or Beatriz Haddad Maia, neither of whom will be looking forward to seeing Muchova across the net.
As an unseeded player, the Czech will be a dangerous factor in tournament draws even before she improves her ranking (Luke Hales / Getty Images)
For Osaka, as she memorably puts it, the results haven’t been resulting during her comeback. Flashes of her top level, however, are a testament to what Badosa said to Muchova about patience, and the need for time and match reps to raise the floor to match the incredible ceiling. “She’s an amazing player, and I’m really happy to see her back,” Muchova said after her win.
The challenge now for both players is to put together a run of good performances, and to improve their rankings (from No. 52 for Muchova, and No. 88 for Osaka) so they’re not playing opponents the calibre of each other so early in tournaments. Osaka hasn’t been beyond the quarterfinal of an event since beginning her comeback on New Year’s Eve, while Muchova, only a few WTA matches into her return, has always been able to turn it on against elite players without that translating into titles. Per Opta, of the nine active WTA players to have beaten five former world No. 1s at Grand Slams, Muchova is the only one not to have won a major or Masters 1000 title.
Whether Muchova, or indeed Osaka, goes on to win big tournaments soon is not so much the issue. Their playing on the tour at all is a victory for tennis, because the sport benefits so much when they do.
(Top photo: Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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