Rohit Brijnath

6 days ago | livemint.com | Rohit Brijnath

From fencers to swimmers, and boxers and tennis stars in Paris, it's feet we should be looking at"Stick it.”“Keep dancing.”Muhammad Ali never did just one thing. If he’s skipping, then he’s also talking, offering defiance, poetry, prediction. The video is from October 1974, days before he fights George Foreman in Zaire. Rope taps ground, sweat drips, words rain.

6 days ago | htsyndication.com | Rohit Brijnath

New Delhi, June 1 -- "Stick it.""Keep dancing."Muhammad Ali never did just one thing. If he's skipping, then he's also talking, offering defiance, poetry, prediction. The video is from October 1974, days before he fights George Foreman in Zaire. Rope taps ground, sweat drips, words rain. "I'll be dancing all night."Of course once the fight starts, he decides instinctively not to dance and leans against the ropes and fools everyone and exhausts Foreman but that's another story.

1 week ago | straitstimes.com | Rohit Brijnath

Sport isn’t fair, this is the plain truth, this is the deal athletes accept. Not everyone makes it, not everyone’s haircut like Carlos Alcaraz’s makes the news, not everyone’s bank balance swells like Novak Djokovic’s (US$187,086,939 or S$241,500,000, at last count), not everyone gets on centre court. Players shrug, it’s OK, but what everyone desires is a chance. That’s all. To be somebody. To get a shot. To be one of 128 in the French Open draw. This is harder than you think.

1 week ago | straitstimes.com | Rohit Brijnath

Soon the emotion would flow, but for a brief moment he was awkward on this court he made history on. He was a creature of action not words, defined by his duels, and yet now during the ceremony he stood alone. It felt strange yet fitting. For in a way Rafael Nadal in Roland Garros had no rival. He wept and so did some in the crowd as he spoke to them in English, French and Spanish. His words we mostly understood.

1 week ago | straitstimes.com | Rohit Brijnath

Every World Cup it was tugged from the bookshelf, a coffee stain on one page, pen markings on another, a book as dishevelled as an old companion. Into its learned chapters we dived and invariably emerged sounding smarter. The man who wrote The Story of The World Cup (published 1993) was born a year after the first Cup in 1930. Once it was impossible to know football and not him. Now Brian Glanville, the writer, is gone, up there in some celestial field, keeping notes on Maradona’s cunning.