can i make this vaguely historical... sorry it's just vibes.
Marc says to the intermediary, a small man in a brown suit, "Someone else," and then his face turns to Àlex -- just the side of his face, not his black eyes. The wind blows through the open window, the first hot wind of the year. The man in the brown suit is sweating and when he doesn't understand something he tries to speak church Latin at them.
Marc's face is carved out in the dusk of that little room: their mother's kitchen. Marc, without looking, knows from the air on the side of his face what Àlex is thinking so he says, with equal weight as the first sentence: "Alright, fine."
Àlex is of course the one marrying-in. The wedding will take place at the groom's home church, where they will marry outside the church door the old way. Marc debated train schedules but there were so many delays that he decided it was impossible. "At home would be better," he kept saying, annoyed, "At home would be better."
This was not, strictly speaking, true. The Carlists were fighting again and had been at it for nearly three years.
They took a steamship from Barcelona full of nervously smiling passengers, all aware that the SS Schiller had wrecked off Sicily in March and three hundred drowned. Marc and Àlex were not nervous. They knew how to swim and the water was warm. They had learned together around the time that they could walk, swimming in the reedy river, the village on its cliff and matted with grape vines behind them. And neither of them wanted the wedding, for all that it was unavoidable, so there was no hurry.
As the steamship rounded the boot of Italy Marc said what Àlex somehow already knew: "You can come home afterwards. He has, what do they call it? What do they call it? Soldier's heart?"
"Soldier's heart," Àlex agreed. He never liked the phrase.
"That. A bad head. And wounded, they told me."
They were walking together on-deck. The shore of Italy was impossibly green, just like the shore along Barcelona. Àlex watched their legs move in step like horses trotting side-by-side.
---
Waiting from them in Rimini was a letter from their mother: the fighting has moved to Treviño and it was best not to come home just now. Rimini seemed like a mad place simply because nothing was under siege. It was green with early summer and no one had dragged an army and artillery through any of the wheat fields.
They were fed well in the small town inland that presumably had a name, but no one needed to use it. The Rossi estate was outside of the village so they need not go there. They were put up in a third village down the coast and tried to learn the language. Marc knew it because of Valentino but he had tried to forget it and Àlex had never learnt Romagnole. It was a border-land, it took him a while to realize, so not everyone was speaking Romagnol. Some spoke Italian.
The infirm husband was not presented, as expected. All other politenesses were seen to. They ate polenta and they ate rice, and mushrooms and artichokes and eggplant and fish. They ate cakes with powdered sugar. Cherry season came and they ate cherries, and Àlex was married.
The husband showed, which was good, because Marc was already mad enough to spit. He was one of Rossi's boys which they knew was the offer.
Àlex knew him, of course, but it had been a long time. Franky had a slight limp but otherwise looked hale and whole. He spoke very slowly but he did not slur and he was not, Àlex realized, mad at all.
--
Alone together in Franky's bedroom Àlex undressed. They were both sweating. Franky moved slowly but it may have been the heat.
"Did something happen?" Franky asked in Italian, which he remembered that Àlex understood. Àlex paused. The shadows were dusty brown like home was hovering in the air of this room and any minute now the canon would start. Then he remembered and touched the back of his neck.
"Horse threw me," he said in Catalan, which Franky used to understand a little. Then, in bad Italian: el cavall-o si va imbizzarri. "I broke my neck."
There was a pause. Franky's hand was a loose fist and Franky's loose fist touched the back of Àlex's neck. Both fist and neck were sweating.
They held like that for a long, sharp moment. Àlex's body was not willing to move unless to sweat. The hairs on his neck rose like during a thunderstorm.
"Do you remember when you and your brother found me?" Franky asked, pulling away. His eyes seemed glassy but he had not drunk at the wedding. Maybe someone had given him something.
"'Trovata'?" Àlex asked, calmly folding his shirt and hanging it over a chair with a wicker seat.
Franky's face screwed up. His hair which had been long and beautiful was shaved short near the scalp. They had said he was infirm. Àlex did not know for sure why.
"...Germà," Franky said finally.
"Oh," Àlex said, "When we found you."
"Yes."
It had been another besieged town. These things happened: right in the middle of the wheat, the grapes, the rice here where it was sometimes wet enough. All at once the house became a trap and the village became a trap and there were field guns. Then someone would win and the children who lived never grew to be very tall because of the starving time and the cannon moved on. These things happened.
"I remember," Àlex said. He was naked now, but he did not know yet if he was naked in order to sleep in the heat or naked in order to keep the marriage from threat of annulment or for something else altogether. Through a tiny window, high up, wheat fields wavered in the heat. It was the first of July when Àlex was married in Italy. The church bells were still ringing. Somewhere, Marc was pacing. Àlex could feel it like a bird fidgeting on the end of a tether.
"I don't remember it," Franky said, "And for a long time I remembered nothing at all. I didn't know my mother."
Like a flinch Àlex pictured his mother at home where the sky was a little bigger, telling her sons not to come home this month. Wait out the summer-- like she remembered something that had already happened.
Franky was looking at an old tapestry hung on the wall. What house was this, and whose? A Rossi house to be sure, but perhaps not Valentino's.
"When I don't remember, I sometimes get angry," Franky said.
"Yes," Àlex said practically, "People do," thinking of his grandmother, who was gone now, but had raged against the slow exit of soul from body. Soul was memory, Àlex had thought, too young to be thinking that and using up most of his fanciful thought in one go. "Do you want to come to bed?"
Franky almost staggered to him. Àlex was glad to be naked. Their bodies were each so hot.
the bias of beautiful tennis: on owen lewis’s “negative tennis”
owen lewis’s “negative tennis,” published for n+1 on march 31, 2026, is a fluent, knowledgeable, and genuinely well-crafted essay about the state of men’s tennis under jannik sinner’s presumed dominance. lewis watches tennis closely and writes about it with real feeling. it is also, unmistakably, an opinion piece in a literary magazine; not sports journalism claiming objectivity, and not trying to. lewis wears his preferences openly, and there is nothing wrong with that. but what the essay presents as a meditation on the state of the sport reads, on closer inspection, as a single thesis stated early and then restated at length: sinner is boring, sinner is mechanical, sinner is diminishing tennis as a spectacle. the argument never meaningfully develops beyond this. it circles.
more importantly, the essay raises several genuinely interesting questions — about mastery, about efficiency, about what we want from athletes — and then retreats from all of them. it is as if lewis sensed that following those threads any further would complicate, or perhaps dismantle, the very case he wanted to make. the result is an essay that stays on the surface of its own best ideas, clinging to a familiar narrative rather than risking what might happen if it dug deeper.
the spectacle expectation
there is an assumption running beneath the entire essay that is never stated outright and therefore never examined: that a tennis match should be, above all, a beautiful performance spectacle. not simply a competition between two athletes trying to win, but something closer to theatre: dramatic, expressive, emotionally legible, aesthetically varied. lewis’s ideal match is one in which two distinct styles flourish in concert, producing moments that transcend the sport. he invokes the 2009 australian open semifinal between nadal and verdasco as the platonic ideal: five hours of ecstatic, collaborative brilliance.
this is a lovely vision of what tennis can be. but it is a vision, not a definition. tennis is also a sport in which one player tries to impose their will on another, and sometimes the imposition is so complete that drama is extinguished not by failure but by excellence. lewis treats this outcome as a kind of aesthetic crime. but there is another way to see it: as the logical result of a player being extraordinarily good at his job. the essay never pauses to ask whether the expectation of spectacle is reasonable, or whether it places an unfair burden on the athlete who happens to be too good for the show to go the way the audience wants.
the history of sport is full of this tension. dominant performers — from borg to sampras to djokovic in tennis, from mayweather in boxing to prost in formula one — have always been accused of draining their sports of entertainment. the accusation usually says more about what the audience needs from competition than about what the athlete is doing wrong. lewis is aware of this history, he mentions djokovic’s decade of being called a machine, but he does not seem to recognize that he is extending the same tradition rather than breaking from it.
what is beauty in tennis?
the essay’s deepest unexamined premise is that beauty in tennis is one thing. lewis writes as though there is a shared understanding: beauty means creativity, variation, risk, emotional expression. sinner offers none of these, and therefore his tennis is not beautiful. but beauty in tennis has never been singular, and the essay would have been stronger if it had been willing to sit with that complexity.
what does beauty in tennis actually look like? it depends entirely on who is watching. for lewis, it is alcaraz’s audacious shotmaking, the impossible angles, the joy radiating from every winner. that is a legitimate and widely shared view. but there are others. a coach watches sinner redirect a ball travelling at 140 km/h to the same deep corner for the twentieth consecutive time and sees something close to perfection: the invisible micro-adjustments in grip, timing, and weight transfer that make such consistency almost impossibly difficult to sustain. a club player watches his footwork and marvels at how he is always there, always balanced, always set, in a way that looks simple and is anything but. a former athlete from another sport watches the emotional discipline and recognizes what might be the hardest skill of all: staying locked in when everything inside you wants to react. a statistician watches the first-serve points won percentage climb into historic territory and finds beauty in the data itself.
none of these people are wrong. they are watching the same sport with different eyes. lewis never acknowledges this plurality, and the omission is telling. if he had, he would have had to reckon with the possibility that sinner’s tennis is not an absence of beauty but a different kind of it; one that his own aesthetic framework is not equipped to appreciate. that reckoning might have produced a richer essay. it also might have undermined his thesis, which may be why it never happens.
the questions lewis raises but won’t follow
to his credit, lewis stumbles onto several genuinely fascinating threads. the problem is that he picks each one up and then sets it down before it leads anywhere that might challenge his conclusion.
the “core shots” observation is a case in point. lewis surfaces the stat that sinner deviates from his standard rally shot less than anyone on tour — 11.7 percent of the time versus the 19 percent average — and that even after supposedly adding variety, he only moved to 13.7 percent. the interesting question here is not “why is sinner boring” but something far more provocative: what does it mean when a player’s optimal strategy is to simply do the same thing better, rather than expand his repertoire? that is a question about the nature of mastery itself: about whether depth can substitute for breadth at the highest level, and what it tells us about the sport when the answer turns out to be yes. lewis notes the stat and moves on. the deeper inquiry would have required engaging with sinner’s game on its own terms, which the essay is unwilling to do.
similarly, the djokovic advice paradox deserves far more attention than it receives. djokovic reportedly told sinner’s coach darren cahill that his player was “too predictable.” sinner’s response was not to become unpredictable but to make predictability irrelevant by hitting harder and deeper. the conventional wisdom said he needed variety; sinner proved it wrong. lewis tells this story well but does not seem to realize he has stumbled onto something more interesting than his central argument: a case study in how the received ideas about what excellence requires can simply be incorrect. following that thread would have meant reconsidering whether sinner’s approach is limited or whether it reveals the limitations of how we typically think about tennis. again, the essay pulls back.
the five-set record, sinner at 6–11 versus alcaraz’s 15–1, is another legitimately probing data point. lewis uses it as evidence that sinner lacks something essential. but the sharper question is whether there is a ceiling on what optimization without improvisation can achieve under maximum physical and mental duress. that is a question worth exploring with genuine curiosity, and it does not have an obvious answer. lewis, however, treats it as already answered.
and the essay’s closing image, the “darkly poetic” scenario of the least telegenic champion surpassing even alcaraz, is arguably its best moment. but lewis frames it as a grim future rather than an open question. if he had been willing to hold the tension between effectiveness and beauty without resolving it, the essay would have lingered. instead, the door closes.
in each case, the pattern is the same: a promising question is raised, and then abandoned before it can threaten the predetermined conclusion. the impression is not that lewis is incapable of following these threads further — he clearly is — but that he senses, perhaps correctly, that following them to their ends would leave him without the tidy narrative he set out to construct.
the timing problem
lewis published “negative tennis” a couple of days after sinner completed the sunshine double by winning indian wells and miami back to back, becoming the first man to do so since roger federer in 2017 and the first ever to achieve it without dropping a set across both tournaments.
the timing matters because several of those matches directly complicate the essay’s claims. the indian wells final against daniil medvedev was a taut, absorbing encounter in which medvedev — fresh from knocking out alcaraz — pushed sinner to two tiebreaks and surged to a 4–0 lead in the second. sinner responded by winning seven consecutive points to clinch the title. andre agassi, sitting courtside, reacted to one sinner forehand with visible disbelief. medvedev said afterward that he loves watching sinner and alcaraz play and urged them to never stop. in miami, sinner’s semifinal against zverev required navigating a second-set tiebreak under real pressure.
these were not the monotone walkovers the essay describes. they were competitive, compelling matches that sinner won through a combination of skill, composure, and clutch play. the essay’s claim that watching sinner “effectively defeats the purpose of watching tennis” is difficult to square with a run of results that had even neutral observers paying close attention.
the assumption that he cannot lose
there is something else embedded in lewis’s framing that deserves scrutiny: the idea that because sinner is dominant, the outcome is predetermined, and therefore watching is pointless. lewis writes that “the notion that he could lose is simply not realistic.” but this conflates dominance with invincibility, and the distinction matters.
sinner lost to djokovic in five sets at the 2026 australian open, in a match lewis himself describes as one of the best of their rivalry. he lost to alcaraz in the 2025 us open final. he lost early in doha at the start of this season. he is 6–11 in five-setters, a record that hardly suggests a player for whom losing is impossible. the essay acknowledges these results individually but frames them as exceptions to an otherwise airtight rule, rather than as evidence that the narrative of mechanical inevitability is overstated.
calling sinner a machine who cannot lose is not just inaccurate, it removes the very quality that makes competition interesting: uncertainty. if you walk into a sinner match having already decided the result is a foregone conclusion, of course the match will feel empty. but the emptiness is in the assumption, not in the match. the indian wells tiebreak was uncertain. the australian open semifinal was uncertain. the question is whether the viewer is willing to find the drama where it actually lives in a sinner match — in the margins, in the micro-battles, in whether an opponent can claw a toehold against that level of play — or whether they have decided in advance that the only drama worth having is the kind that comes with visible emotion and five-set theatrics.
the cold is the point
at the center of lewis’s complaint is sinner’s emotional blankness on court: the hardened eyes, the restrained fist pump, the absence of rage or rapture. lewis treats this as an entertainment deficit, a personality that has “evaporated.” but the essay never seriously considers the possibility that the blankness is functional, not an absence but a deliberate instrument of competition.
elite sport rewards emotional control. djokovic’s rages and alcaraz’s ecstatic celebrations are compelling to watch, but they are also, in competitive terms, moments when energy leaks outward instead of staying locked on the task. both players are talented enough to absorb those leaks. sinner appears to have made a different choice: not to have them at all. his flat affect on court is not a failure to feel; it is a refusal to let feeling interfere with execution. there is a counter-narrative among players and coaches that describes sinner’s demeanor not as emptiness but as something closer to predatory focus. opponents have spoken about the suffocating experience of facing him, not just physically but psychologically, because nothing they do registers on his face. that blankness communicates something devastating to the player across the net: you are not a threat.
lewis reads this from the stands and sees a deficit. sinner’s opponents read it from the baseline and see something far more purposeful. the essay centers the spectator’s experience so completely that it never asks what the competitors experience, which might be more relevant to understanding what is actually happening in these matches.
the man lewis doesn’t see
lewis builds his portrait of sinner partly from press conferences and a vanity fair italia anecdote about methodical fruit salad consumption. the implication is that the on-court blankness extends into every corner of sinner’s life — that the machine is all there is. but this collapses a performance mode into a personality.
the version of sinner that teammates, friends, and fellow players describe is markedly different. he is, by most accounts, warm, playful, and genuinely well-liked on tour. his competitiveness on court is a mode he enters, an operating system for tennis, not the sum of who he is. if lewis had explored this gap between the public and private sinner, he might have arrived at a more nuanced portrait: a young man who performs emotional restraint as a competitive strategy, not because he lacks feeling but because he has learned to channel it entirely into execution. that would have been a more interesting essay. it would also have been a less convenient one.
the doping scandal compounds this. lewis mentions sinner’s positive test almost in passing, noting that he “seemed significantly more subdued on court” afterward. but before the scandal broke, sinner was a visibly different presence — smiling, pumping his fist, flashing grins at his coaching box. the suppression of that expressiveness coincides with a period of extraordinary public scrutiny: the wada appeal, the whisper campaigns, the knowledge that every display of emotion would be dissected and used against him. lewis frames the personality change as aesthetic loss. a more nuanced, and perhaps more accurate, reading would see it as self-protection under sustained pressure. the essay’s unwillingness to consider this possibility is one of its most notable omissions.
the djokovic cycle
lewis’s treatment of djokovic reveals a pattern he does not seem to recognize he is perpetuating. he spends several vivid paragraphs on djokovic’s machine-like qualities before rescuing him with personality: the rages, the tears, the disqualification, the deportation. these are framed as compensations and evidence that a dominant player can be forgiven if he makes us feel something.
but djokovic spent most of his career receiving the same treatment lewis now gives sinner. he was called boring, robotic, unlikable. the retrospective warmth lewis extends to him is only possible because a more subdued successor has arrived. lewis almost sees this — “perhaps we should have been more grateful that djokovic made us feel anything at all” — but does not follow the thought forward: that the same rehabilitation will likely be extended to sinner once someone even more efficient takes his place. this is not a new observation about tennis. it is a recurring cycle, and the essay is participating in it rather than examining it.
alcaraz through a different lens
if djokovic gets a generous reassessment, alcaraz receives something closer to devotion. he plays on a “heavenly plane,” draws from a “fountain of joy,” and hits shots of impossible audacity. lewis does not merely enjoy watching alcaraz, but he treats alcaraz’s style as evidence of a deeper truth about what tennis should be.
i love watching carlos. he is genuinely one of the great joys in sport right now, and the way he elevates in the moments that matter most is extraordinary. but admiring alcaraz’s brilliance does not require diminishing sinner’s, and the essay never considers what alcaraz’s greatness owes to the rivalry. alcaraz’s improvisations are most spectacular precisely because sinner’s pressure demands them. without the suffocating depth that closes the window for conventional play, alcaraz would have less reason to attempt the extraordinary. the essay frames sinner as hostile to his “dance partners.” the sinner-alcaraz rivalry, which has produced several of the best matches in recent memory, suggests he may be the partner who forces the dance to its highest level.
the roland-garros discussion is worth pausing on. lewis insists sinner choked in the 2025 final, dismissing the consensus view as “outrageous.” but choking implies psychological collapse, and lewis himself describes sinner breaking back when alcaraz served for the match and hitting a shot he calls physically impossible. that does not sound like a player whose nerve failed. it sounds like a player who competed at an extraordinary level and lost to someone who, in that moment, found a level beyond. lewis needs the choke narrative because the alternative, that sinner played brilliantly and still lost, doesn’t support his portrait of a player undone by his own emotional limitations.
what the essay could have been
“negative tennis” is well written and clearly the product of someone who cares about the sport. but it ultimately suffers from the very quality it attributes to its subject: a relentless sameness. every thread — djokovic, alcaraz, the statistics, the biographical details — feeds the same conclusion without complication or doubt. there is no moment where lewis genuinely wrestles with the possibility that his framework might be incomplete. he is a talented writer, and the essay deserves to be read. it just also deserves to be read for what it is: one person’s aesthetic preference, eloquently expressed, that chose not to interrogate itself.
a different version of this essay, one willing to follow its own best questions, could have been something memorable. it could have explored what it means that the sport’s most efficient player is also, by his peers’ account, one of its most human. it could have examined why audiences need their athletes to perform emotion, and what that need reveals about us rather than them. it could have sat with the genuinely unresolved tension between effectiveness and beauty in sport, rather than pretending the tension has a clear winner. it could have reckoned with the sunshine double and asked what it means when a player dismissed as unwatchable produces some of the most compelling results of the season.
instead, the essay clings to its narrative. the questions are raised but never pursued, as though lewis sensed, perhaps rightly, that pursuing them would have dismantled the tidy case he wanted to make. and that may be the real lesson of the essay, though it is less flattering to the critic than to its subject: that the most dominant player in any sport will always be resented by those who preferred the competition he ended, and that this resentment will often dress itself up as aesthetic philosophy. lewis is too talented a writer not to sense this. he just is not quite willing to say it.
what we are left with, then, is an elegant restatement of a familiar position: that dominant, emotionally restrained tennis is lesser tennis. it is a position many people hold, and lewis articulates it better than most. but articulating a familiar view with style is not the same as saying something new, and the fact that the essay is now being shared as though it settles a debate it barely engages with is perhaps the most telling thing about it.
Would Toprak's Red Bull Rookie Cup races provide any useful data for track-preference analysis for MotoGP?
Yeah
Nah, not really
It depends (how so!)
Voting ended onFeb 14
I'm just curious if I can put anything in my spreadsheets for him. Actually if you want to explain your reasoning for any answer, I am genuinely pretty ignorant about this and would love to hear it. For context, I normally count MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 race results in spreadsheets.
