More stories

  • in

    An Extraordinary Men’s Doubles Three-Peat at the U.S. Open

    Rajeev Ram of the United States and Joe Salisbury of Britain are the first pair to win three straight doubles titles in New York in the Open era.The 2023 U.S. Open has been characterized by the emergence of several young American stars seeking their first major titles. For Rajeev Ram, the veteran American doubles specialist, winning titles here is becoming repetitive.Ram, 39, and Joe Salisbury of Britain won the men’s doubles title on Friday afternoon and became the first team to win three straight men’s doubles titles at the U.S. national championships in 109 years.They beat No. 6 Rohan Bopanna and Matthew Ebden, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4, in a match underscored by an act of notable sportsmanship.The last team to win three U.S. Open championships in a row was the all-American duo of Tom Bundy and Maurice McLoughlin, who did it from 1912 to 1914. Ram, who is from Carmel, Ind., calls himself a tennis history buff, making the achievement even more meaningful to him.“It will be something that I will carry with me forever,” he said.The No. 3 seeds, Ram and Salisbury also won the 2020 Australian Open. But this title may have been just as unexpected after they rebounded from a difficult year to win the final major of the circuit. They had won only one previous tournament this year, the Lyon Open in France in May, and were 4-6 in their last 10 matches coming into the U.S. Open. Then, in the final, they played a terrible first set before recovering to win.Other legendary doubles pairs have compiled impressive streaks at different Grand Slams, including John McEnroe and Peter Fleming, who won four titles in six years at Wimbledon; the Woodies — Mark Woodforde and Todd Woodbridge — who won five in a row at Wimbledon; and Bob and Mike Bryan, who won three in a row and six in eight years in Australia. But none of those duos were able to string together three straight at the U.S. Open, the last major of the calendar year.Ram said it is extraordinarily difficult to win three U.S. Opens in a row. “A lot has to go right,” he said. “You have to get really lucky.”Americans have made a strong showing at this year’s U.S. Open, with Coco Gauff reaching Saturday’s final in women’s singles and another American woman, Madison Keys, going as far as the semifinals. In the men’s singles, three Americans made it to the final eight, and Ben Shelton reached a semifinal, where he lost to No. 2 Novak Djokovic in Arthur Ashe Stadium on Friday.Ram, 39, and Salisbury, 31, won their earlier match on the same court. After it was over, Salisbury put a towel over his head, hiding tears that he acknowledged later.“I don’t know why this one seems more emotional than the others,” Salisbury said. “I don’t remember crying after any matches, especially not ones that we’ve won, even at the Grand Slams. There’s something about being here, about doing it, doing it again and doing it after the year we’ve had. We had some struggles, some pretty low times.”The match featured a moment of fair play so notable that the chair umpire announced it to the audience.With Ebden serving at 2-4 in the third set, he hit a forehand that barely skimmed Bopanna’s right elbow before landing in Ram and Salisbury’s court for an apparent winner. But Bopanna immediately signaled to the chair that it had hit him, meaning they would lose the point. No one else, including Ram, Salisbury and the chair umpire, noticed it, and Bopanna had to approach the umpire and notify her.When she explained it to the spectators, they applauded the gesture, and the score was corrected to 0-30. It did not end up factoring in the game because Ebden and Bopanna won the next four points and held serve. But Ram said it was unprecedented.“I haven’t seen anything like that in all the years I’ve been playing, and especially not in a Grand Slam final,” Ram said. “Nobody saw it. Nobody heard it. It would have been only him that would have known that happened if he didn’t say something.”After the match, in the locker room, Ram expressed his admiration directly to his gracious opponent.“I don’t have the words to say how much I appreciate something like that,” Ram said. More

  • in

    Breanna Stewart Sets W.N.B.A. Points Record

    She has scored more points this season than anyone else in W.N.B.A. history, but had more games to do it.Breanna Stewart of the Liberty has now scored more points than any other player in a single season in W.N.B.A. history. But is she really the league’s best scorer ever? It depends on how you look at it.Stewart scored 40 points in a 94-93 victory at the Dallas Wings on Tuesday night. That took her to 885 points for a season, more than any other W.N.B.A. player in history.But she has benefited from the new 40-game schedule, which was introduced this season. For most of its history, the league played 34 games.Diana Taurasi, whose record Stewart broke, scored 860 points in 2006, the third season in her long career with the Phoenix Mercury. But she did it in 34 games, for a scoring average of 25.3 points per game. Stewart took 38 games to reach her total, giving her a 23.3-per-game average.For Stewart to match Taurasi’s scoring average record, assuming she plays both of the remaining games on the Liberty’s schedule, she would need to average more than 60 points a game, a feat beyond even her skills, one would think.“I have this back-and-forth feeling with the scoring record, because any time I’m in the same limelight as D, it’s amazing, just because of what she’s done in her career and what she continues to do,” Stewart said after the game.“But obviously, it’s more games. More games is more points. As we have 40-game seasons, and we continue to build off that, there’s going to be a lot of records that are broken.”Stewart is not the only one racking up the points this season. Jewell Loyd of the Seattle Storm has 852 with three games to play. A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces has 846 with two games to play. Both should also sail past Taurasi’s mark, and there is no guarantee Stewart will even hold the record by season’s end.Longer season or not, it has been a boom year for individual scoring in the W.N.B.A. Stewart’s game on Tuesday was the 13th time this season a player had scored 40 or more points; last season, nobody did it. Wilson had a 53-point game last month, tying the league’s single-game scoring record.Alyssa Thomas of the Connecticut Sun has also been taking advantage of the longer schedule. On Tuesday night, she broke the single-season assist record with 304, topping Courtney Vandersloot’s 300 for the Chicago Sky in 2019. Thomas also has 375 rebounds, fourth on the single-season list with two games to play.It’s all a bit reminiscent of Roger Maris’s home run chase in 1961. As Maris approached Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season, Ford Frick, who was the baseball commissioner, suggested Maris’s record could receive a “distinctive mark” in the record book, unless Maris reached 60 in 154 games, the traditional length of a season. The American League had lengthened its season to 162 games in 1961.Maris had 59 homers at the 154-game mark, and hit his 61st, breaking Ruth’s record, in the Yankees’ final regular-season game. As a result, many fans thought of Maris’s record as having an asterisk, although one was never actually applied officially.Stewart’s record is the latest accomplishment in a glittering basketball career. A 6-foot-4 forward, she won four national championships in four years at UConn and was the N.C.A.A. tournament’s most outstanding player each year. She had two titles in her six seasons with Seattle, won the league M.V.P. in 2018, and may do so again this season after signing with the Liberty as a free agent. She also has two Olympic gold medals.Stewart benefited from the longer schedule. But points do not score themselves. And for now, she has more of them in a W.N.B.A. season than anyone else. More

  • in

    WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury End 10-Season Playoff Streak

    The W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury will miss the playoffs for the first time since 2012. Their sustained success was rare among major pro sports teams.When the Phoenix Mercury lost to the Dallas Wings on Sunday, it ended an impressive period of sustained success. After a league-leading 10-year streak, the team will not be making the W.N.B.A. playoffs this season.Being good enough to make the playoffs year after year is surprisingly difficult in sports. Player turnover, coaching changes or injuries, or all three, can lead to a losing record and a postseason on the sideline. Even with expanded playoff fields in many sports, a decade-long run like the Mercury’s is rare in the modern game.Here’s a look at the current teams around North America that have been consistently good enough for the most seasons.After being the No. 1 overall pick in 2013, Brittney Griner has made the playoffs in every season of her career. Until now.Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressN.H.L.: Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs, 7Full credit to the Bruins and Leafs for their current seven-season runs. Neither streak includes a Stanley Cup though. The Bruins last lifted the Cup in 2011 and the Leafs in … looking … looking … 1967.But the most impressive recent playoff streak in hockey goes to the Pittsburgh Penguins, who made it 16 straight times, winning Cups in 2009, 2016 and 2017. Last season, the team missed the playoffs by a point to end that run.W.N.B.A.: Connecticut Sun, 7For the Mercury, the 10-year streak coincided with the arrival of Brittney Griner, a first overall draft pick. For the Sun, the key was starting Jonquel Jones, who had been a substitute in her rookie year. She scored 15 points a game and averaged a W.N.B.A.-record 12 rebounds a game in the 2017 season to take the Sun back to the playoffs.The team has not missed since, including this season, its first after trading Jones to the Liberty. The team has two finals appearances, but no titles, during the streak.The Connecticut Sun became a perennial postseason team once they elevated Jonquel Jones to the starting lineup. With Jones now playing for the Liberty, Connecticut is still thriving.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesN.F.L.: Kansas City Chiefs, 8Say what you will about Andy Reid, but he has led Kansas City to the playoffs eight straight times. How hard is that? The next-best streak is four, by the Buffalo Bills. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have three, three teams have two, and the streaks of the other 26 teams are at one or zero.While Reid has had Patrick Mahomes as his starting quarterback for the past five seasons, the streak also includes three seasons with Alex Smith as the starter. It also includes three Super Bowl appearances in the last four seasons and two wins.N.B.A.: Boston Celtics, 9The Celtics, who made 19 straight playoff appearances in the 1950s and ’60s, and 14 more in the ’80s and early ’90s, are back on top now as well with a more modest streak.That run has included a consistent core: six seasons of Jayson Tatum, seven of Al Horford and Jaylen Brown and nine of Marcus Smart. It has also included an N.B.A. finals appearance in 2022, a loss to the Golden State Warriors.The Celtics have a long way to go to match the most impressive recent playoff streak in sports. The San Antonio Spurs made the playoffs in 22 straight seasons before missing the last three times. A new streak could well be starting next season though, with the arrival of the No. 1 overall pick, Victor Wembanyama.Colleges are a different matter, of course, but that makes it no less impressive that Kansas’ men’s team has made 33 consecutive N.C.A.A. tournaments. And Tennessee’s women’s team has made every N.C.A.A. tournament that has ever been held — 41 of them.The Boston Celtics’ nine-season streak of making the playoffs started before the arrival of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, but the versatile duo has helped sustain it.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesM.L.B.: Los Angeles Dodgers, 10This streak is soon going to be 11, barring an epic collapse. The Dodgers lead the National League West by 12 games, though they haven’t technically clinched a playoff spot.The run includes back-to-back World Series losses, to the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox in 2017 and 2018, and a championship in 2020, albeit one that was played out in a Covid bubble in Arlington, Texas.Stalwart hitters for the team have been Justin Turner (156 homers, 2014 to 2022) and Corey Seager (.504 slugging, 2015 to 2021), yet with both players gone this season, the team is still among baseball’s best.The player most identified with the modern Dodgers, going back not just to the start of the streak in 2013 but all the way to 2010 when he was 20 years old, is starter Clayton Kershaw. He has 208 regular-season wins with the team plus 13 in the playoffs and three in the World Series, two of them in the 2020 victory.M.L.S.: New York Red Bulls, 13Here’s a chance to stump your friends: What major professional team has the longest active playoff streak? It is unlikely they will come up with the Red Bulls.The answer seems surprising because the Red Bulls have been around since the inaugural season of M.L.S., 1996, when they were the MetroStars, and have yet to win an M.L.S. Cup, which goes to the playoffs’ winner. The best they have done during their current 13-season streak is reach the semifinals, which they have done three times.This season, with nine teams from each conference making the playoffs, the Red Bulls are currently 11th, three points out with nine games to play. So you might want to ask that trivia question quickly. More

  • in

    In Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic Has a Much-Needed Gift: A Rival

    The budding rivalry between the two top-ranked players has added an unexpected thrill to the final act of Djokovic’s career, our columnist writes.Novak Djokovic had dominated all of the most significant moments of the first half of this tennis season. After winning his 10th Australian Open, he emerged with the Roland Garros crown, his 23rd Grand Slam tournament title, tied for the career record.A win at Wimbledon, on tennis’s most hallowed ground, would have put him three-quarters of the way to becoming the first man to achieve a calendar Grand Slam in 54 years. The Serb seemed destined to stand alone as an unchecked great of the sport, surpassing the win totals of both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal without a credible challenger to the throne.Then came Hurricane Carlito, a.k.a. Carlos Alcaraz, surprising the tennis world with a championship match victory over Djokovic on the slick Wimbledon grass, a surface assumed to have been the Spaniard’s kryptonite.How quickly fates can change. Wimbledon was just the third head-to-head match between the two. But when the final was over, as Alcaraz lofted the greatest trophy in tennis skyward, a budding tug of war had morphed into a full-blown rivalry for men’s tennis supremacy.What a gift Alcaraz is for tennis.What a gift this still-new force is for Djokovic.Now their pairing, the most electric in tennis, is widely expected to be the thrill of this year’s U.S. Open. Alcaraz, the world’s top-ranked male player, will defend his U.S. Open championship, which he won in 2022’s Djokovic-less field.Watching Alcaraz, a supreme talent at just 20, play in person is like seeing a fresh-off-the-assembly-line Maserati burst down the freeway, leaving every other make and model in its wake. You realize you’ve never seen something on the road so sleek, nimble, powerful or suited to its task.It is often a turning point in professional tennis when a gifted young talent ascends to stardom in such quick fashion. In the men’s game, to cite just two instances, think of 18-year-old Bjorn Borg helping open the curtain for the 1970s tennis boom by winning the French Open in 1974. Flash forward to 19-year-old Pete Sampras heralding a new era by winning the U.S. Open in 1990.Alcaraz’s emergence presents new possibilities.But even with a million miles on his legs and a right arm prone to injury, Djokovic, 36, is embracing the challenge of fending him off. He has described Alcaraz as something entirely novel: a mixture of Nadal’s bullish determination, Federer’s grace and the Serb’s canny guile. “I haven’t played a player like him,” Djokovic said of Alcaraz, in glowing and astonished terms.At the Western & Southern Open finals two weeks ago in the Cincinnati area, Djokovic often appeared ready to buckle in the center-court sauna that was the championship match.Between points of a classic contested for nearly four sweltering hours, Djokovic gasped for breath. During changeovers, he stared woefully downward and wrapped bags of ice around his neck.Then he rose. And took over.Djokovic beat back a match point and kept winning critical points — sprinting to all corners, redirecting Alcaraz howitzers with topspin, underspin and sidespin, besting the powerful upstart with speed, touch and cleverness.During the trophy ceremony at the Western and Southern Open in Mason, Ohio, Djokovic told Alcaraz he hoped they would play each other at the U.S. Open.Matthew Stockman/Getty ImagesWhen it was over, the scoreboard spoke to the small margin between these two. Djokovic won, 5-7, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (4). That’s the difference of one shot, maybe two. An inch more distance on a serve, an inch less heft on a lob.Given the sudden intensity of their matches, it’s remarkable to remember they played for the first time, on the Madrid clay, in 2022 — a match won by Alcaraz. After they traded the No. 1 ranking in men’s tennis this season, their head-to-head record is even at 2-2.Their pairing has added an unexpected third act to Djokovic’s 20-year career.Act I: The long-ago time when he seemed perpetually in the shadow of Nadal and Federer.Act II: In 2011, he embarked on the most stunning run in the history of men’s tennis, an epoch in which he won 22 of his men’s record 23 Grand Slam events and came to dominate his two rivals. Was it because of his gluten-free, plant-based diet? Or all the meditation and yoga and mental training? Did it matter?Act III: With Federer retired to run his business empire and Nadal’s injuries putting his return to the tour in doubt, Djokovic’s career was finally unshackled from those two stubborn threats. Then a new opponent emerged.For a player as prideful and aware of his place in the tennis firmament as Djokovic, the thought of Alcaraz’s next 15 years perhaps offers new motivation. Should he remain healthy, it is possible to imagine the Spaniard challenging Djokovic’s voluminous records, including the mind-boggling haul of Grand Slam events.But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What could be coming next is exciting enough.“I’m hoping we can play in some weeks’ time in New York,” Djokovic told Alcaraz at the trophy ceremony in Ohio. Knowing the top two seeds could meet only in the final, the crowd roared in approval. “That would be nice.” More

  • in

    A’ja Wilson’s 53-Point Game Ties the W.N.B.A. Record

    Wilson, of the Las Vegas Aces, became just the third W.N.B.A. player to score at least 50 in a game.Fifty-point games in the N.B.A. can almost be ho-hum: There were 25 last season alone, and they are increasing in frequency. But in the W.N.B.A., they are nearly unheard-of.A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces didn’t just score 50 on Tuesday night in Atlanta; she made four free throws in the last minute to reach 53, tying the league record.Wilson’s is just the third 50-point game in W.N.B.A. history, following a 53-point game by Liz Cambage of the Dallas Wings in 2018 and a 51-point game by Riquna Williams of the Tulsa Shock in 2013.There have been only 33 games in which a player has scored 40 points or more in the league’s history, which dates to 1997. But as in the N.B.A., the trend line is upward. A third of those games have come this season.After her heroic individual effort, Wilson chose to spread the credit. “I didn’t do this alone,” she said. “My teammates get all the glory because without them I don’t even get the basketball.” Chelsea Gray had 12 assists, and Kelsey Plum had seven for the Aces.Wilson, a 6-foot-4 forward, shot 16 for 23 from the floor with one 3-pointer and made 20 of 21 free throws. Defensively, she found time to record a game-high four blocks. The Aces defeated the host Atlanta Dream, 112-100.When it comes to putting up high-scoring totals, N.B.A. players have the distinct advantage of playing 48-minute games, rather than the 40-minute games of the W.N.B.A.N.B.A. teams also score more efficiently, averaging 114.8 points per 100 possessions last season, compared with 103.8 in the W.N.B.A. this season. (Or looking at it another way, W.N.B.A. players are more efficient defensively.) And N.B.A. teams also play at a slightly faster pace, averaging 2.06 possessions per minute compared with 1.98 in the W.N.B.A.That all adds up to higher scoring games: 114.7 points per team in the N.B.A. versus 82.5 in the W.N.B.A. in the most recent seasons.Looking at it that way, Wilson’s 53 points amounted to 64 percent of an average W.N.B.A. team’s point total. The equivalent percentage in the N.B.A. would be a 73-point game, something that has happened only six times in N.B.A. history and only once in the years since the W.N.B.A. was founded.The game was an outlier even for Wilson, a two-time league M.V.P. and an Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo. Her previous career high, 11 days before, was 40 points, and she has only 10 games of 30 points or more in her six-year career.Wilson also has the advantage of playing for the Aces, the league’s best team, with a gaudy 29-4 record, and the defending league champions. If they could win all of their remaining seven games, their 36-4 mark and .900 winning percentage would match the record set by the 1998 Houston Comets, who were 27-3 in a shorter season. More

  • in

    Once Rare, 40-Point Games Are Surging in the W.N.B.A.

    Breanna Stewart of the Liberty scored 42 on Sunday for her third 40-point game of the season, and the 10th in the league this year.The 40-point game had disappeared from the W.N.B.A. over the past several years. This season, it has made a comeback.Ten times this year a player has scored at least 40 points in a game, by far the most in a single season in the league’s 27-year history. Before this year, there had been no such regular-season showings since 2018, when the star center Liz Cambage had two. And with at least nine games left for every team, as the W.N.B.A. stages its longest regular season ever, there is still time for more scoring outbursts.“You see a lot of 40-point games this year, and I think that we’re just continuing to get eyes on women’s basketball,” Breanna Stewart, the star Liberty forward, said Sunday in a television interview after notching the league’s most recent 40-point game in a 100-89 victory over the Indiana Fever.Stewart scored 30 of her 42 points in the first half on the way to her third 40-point game in 2023, becoming the first player in W.N.B.A. history with three in a regular season. (In 2015, Elena Delle Donne recorded two 40-point games in the regular season and one in the postseason for the Chicago Sky.)True to her versatile style of play, Stewart scored on Sunday in myriad ways: backing down the smaller Kristy Wallace and finishing with a left-handed layup; making a turnaround fadeaway over Lexie Hull from the baseline; knocking down a long 3-pointer after trailing the play.Though she had not scored 40 points in a regular-season game until this year, Stewart had shown she was capable. She had 42 points, tying a postseason record, in her final game with the Seattle Storm, and that kind of output has continued in her first season with New York.In May, in her first home game with the Liberty, she scored a career-high 45 points against the Fever, who are very likely grateful that New York is no longer on their regular-season schedule. She also dropped 43 points in a win over the Phoenix Mercury in July.Stewart’s outing Sunday came only two days after Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson had her first career 40-point game, shooting 17 of 25 in a blowout win over Washington. Wilson and Stewart, past Most Valuable Player Award winners, are both in the top five in points and rebounds per game this year and are among the leading contenders for another M.V.P.“I don’t know, there’s something in the water,” Stewart said when asked if there was a “40-point rivalry” developing.A’ja Wilson and Las Vegas have a three-game lead on Stewart’s Liberty for the W.N.B.A.’s best record. John Locher/Associated PressTheir teams are atop the league standings, too. The reigning champion Aces (27-3) are within striking distance of the 1998 Houston Comets’ record for best single-season winning percentage, and the Liberty (24-6) are off to their best start in franchise history as they look to win their first title. The teams have split their two games, including a romp by the Liberty earlier this month, but they play three more times in August, including on Tuesday and Thursday.The Liberty made a splash by signing top players this off-season, but the Aces have elite talent, too, and one of those players, the two-time All-Star Kelsey Plum, has also recorded a 40-point game this season. While the sharpshooting Plum made six 3-pointers as part of her performance against the Minnesota Lynx in July, the 6-foot-4 Wilson racked up her points by overpowering defenders, maneuvering in the post and swishing midrange jumpers.Like Wilson, Plum had never scored 40 points in a regular-season game until 2023. Neither had Rhyne Howard of Atlanta, Jewell Loyd of Seattle, Arike Ogunbowale of Dallas or DeWanna Bonner of Connecticut.But one player who did it this year had.On Aug. 3 against the Atlanta Dream, Phoenix guard Diana Taurasi needed 18 points to become the first player in W.N.B.A. history to score 10,000 in a career. She reached the milestone with a deep 3-pointer over Howard in the third quarter, and she finished with 42 points — her first 40-point game since 2010 and the fourth of her career.“Tomorrow I’ll feel like I’m 50,” the 41-year-old Taurasi said in a postgame news conference.She added later: “I came here a little bit nervous. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. I just wanted to get it over with for a sense of relief, but at the same time I was just focused on trying to win a game.”Though the 40-point game has had a renaissance in the W.N.B.A., much like the triple-double did last season, the 50-point game remains exceedingly rare. There have been only two: Cambage’s 53 in 2018 and Riquna Williams’s 51 in 2013. Only three other players — Taurasi, Lauren Jackson and Maya Moore — have come within 3 points of it.But if this season shows anything, there are plenty of candidates to get there again. More

  • in

    Overlooked No More: Lily Parr, Dominant British Soccer Player

    She persevered at a time when women were effectively banned from the sport, and was the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Hall of Fame.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1921, the Football Association, English soccer’s ruling body, effectively banned women from playing the sport, deeming it “quite unsuitable for females.” But by then, a standout player named Lily Parr had already gained fame for her skill on the field.Her renown was part of the growth of women’s soccer at the time, exemplified by a match in which she played at Goodison Park in Liverpool that drew a crowd of about 53,000, with thousands more outside the stadium. (It would remain the largest crowd for a women’s club soccer match for 99 years, until Atlético Madrid hosted Barcelona in front of 60,739 fans in March 2019.)Though the association’s ban would hamper Parr’s career, barring her and other women from playing in stadiums, she competed where she could, in fields and parks in England and abroad, and continued drawing attention over her 31 years with the same team, Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club.In 1927, the English newspaper The Leicester Mail called her “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse.” By the time she retired from soccer, in 1951, she had scored an estimated 1,000 goals.Parr was “a great player in a great team,” said Gail Newsham, author of the 1994 book “In a League of Their Own!: The Dick, Kerr Ladies 1917-1965,” and she contributed to the club’s immense success alongside other star goal scorers like Florrie Redford, Jennie Harris and Alice Kell, the team’s longest serving captain.Soccer officials began lifting the ban in England — as well as those in other countries — in the 1970s. The first official Women’s World Cup was held in 1991, and interest in the event has grown considerably since then.This year, the Women’s World Cup, which is currently underway in Australia and New Zealand, includes an expanded field of 32 teams, up from 24.Club competition in England has grown, too; the Women’s Super League, which began in 2011, became fully professional in 2018. In the United States, the National Women’s Soccer League began in 2013.In 2002, Parr became the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Museum Hall of Fame, now in Manchester, and in 2019, the museum installed a life-size statue of her there, also a first for a British female soccer player.“We have come a long way since Lily Parr’s days, and she deserves recognition as a true pioneer of the sport,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, a spokeswoman for women’s soccer at the Football Association, was quoted as saying in The Guardian in 2019.Parr, with dark hair, leaps while training with her team. She drew attention as “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse,” as one newspaper wrote.GettyLilian Parr was born on April 26, 1905, in St Helens, about 10 miles northeast of Liverpool, to Sarah and George Parr, a glassworks laborer. Growing up, she played soccer in the street with her brothers.Women had been playing soccer in Britain since the late 19th century, but World War I offered an opportunity for them to blossom. As men were sent to fight and women filled the country’s factories, the government encouraged soccer as an after-work activity.Parr went to work for Dick, Kerr & Co., a locomotives factory that had switched production to munitions during the war, and joined the company’s team as a left back when she was about 15.Her manner could be rough and abrupt, but with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor she enjoyed strong friendships with many of her teammates, Newsham wrote.In one perhaps apocryphal story, the team was playing at Ashton Park in Preston, England, northwest of Manchester, when a male professional goalkeeper declared that a woman would never be able to score on a man. Parr, famous for her powerful left foot, accepted his challenge. She lined up to take a penalty kick against him and broke the man’s arm with her shot.Parr and her team in 1939 discussing tactics for a forthcoming match.GettyParr, who later moved to left winger, exploded onto the scene in 1921.On Feb. 5 that year, she scored a hat trick — three goals in a single match — at Nelson, England; she scored another three days later at Stalybridge in a 10-0 win. In a 9-1 win in Liverpool at Anfield Stadium the next week, she netted five goals against a team of all-stars assembled by the comedian Harry Weldon. That May she scored every goal in a 5-1 win over a visiting French team.Parr’s shooting and crossing abilities, as well as her impressive physique (she was a sturdy 5 feet 10 inches tall or so), quickly made her a star, and she finished 1921 with 108 goals, according to Newsham.That year the team won all 67 games it played and scored some 448 goals in the process while allowing just 22. Other players, including Redford and Harris, contributed to the team’s dominance. In one April 1921 match at Barrow, for example, the team won 14-2 with seven goals from Redford, four from Harris and three from Parr. Redford led the year’s scoring with a 170 goals.On Dec. 5, 1921, the Football Association unanimously passed its resolution declaring that soccer “ought not to be encouraged” among women. It mandated that all of the association’s clubs “refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.” Because association clubs owned virtually all stadiums, women’s soccer on any significant scale was, in effect, banned.Similar bans were common across the world for much of the 20th century. The momentum that had been building since World War I screeched to a halt, and the sport, for women, withered on the vine.Parr’s team nevertheless continued to play in front of smaller crowds and on tours abroad. In 1922, she captained a trip to the United States. That October, the team tied a men’s team, 4-4, in Washington, D.C. Some sources suggest that President Warren G. Harding kicked off the game and autographed the match ball.As she continued playing, Parr trained to be a nurse and worked at what was then known as Whittingham Hospital, a psychiatric facility northeast of Preston. Some have viewed Parr as a queer icon, but there is no evidence that she was gay. “Like all our great football stars there are as many myths as there are facts, and we all embroider her story with our own influences,” said Jean Williams, a professor of sports history at the University of Wolverhampton. “That is why she means so much to so many.”Parr’s career lasted into her 40s; she played her last game in 1951. In 1965, she retired from nursing. A few years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She lived to see the ban on women’s soccer lifted in 1971, but died of cancer on May 24, 1978, at her home in Preston. She was 73.Only in recent decades has recognition of Parr and her club’s accomplishments gained momentum. Historical markers for her team are now at the Preston factory site, Preston North End’s stadium and Ashton Park. The English National Football Museum installed a permanent display about her life in 2021.“Lily is a lens through which to look at the women’s game in the ’20s,” Belinda Scarlett, then the curator of women’s football at the museum, told The Guardian in 2020. “It will tell the stories of all the women she played with and against.”She added that “women’s football probably wouldn’t have continued if those groups of women didn’t fight that ban and just play wherever the hell they could find a space to play football.” More

  • in

    GOATs Are Everywhere in Sports. So What Really Defines Greatness?

    Athletes from Tom Brady to Serena Williams to LeBron James have all been tabbed the Greatest of All Time. Faced with the term’s pervasive use, our columnist considers how sports heroes become transcendent.If you are reading this column, I have great news: You’re the GOAT!That’s right: Among those who have happened upon this space, I deem you the Greatest Reader of All Time.Then again, if you’re LeBron James, or Serena Williams, or Nikola Jokic — with that sparkling N.B.A. championship ring — well, you already know you’re the GOAT. Everyone has been saying so.“Bahhh, bahhh, bahhh,” goes the bleating of a goat. It’s also the sound made by James’s Los Angeles Lakers teammates when he walks into the locker room. GOAT hosannas are practically the soundtrack of his life.Driven by its pervasive usage around sports, five years ago the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster entered the term GOAT in the dictionary as an acronym and a noun.LeBron James is considered by many to be the GOAT in men’s basketball.Kyle Grillot for The New York TimesDefining the term as “the most accomplished or successful individual in the history of a particular sport or category of performance or activity,” a Merriam-Webster editor nodded to the pervasive use of Tom Brady’s name along with GOAT in a popular search engine as an example of why the acronym had become dictionary official.Yeah, I know — this GOAT thing, it’s a little confusing. To be the greatest implies singularity, no? But now there are GOATs everywhere we turn.Even worse than the acronym’s overuse is its doltish simplicity. There’s not enough nuance. Too much emphasis on outright winning, not enough on overcoming.What are our options here? Maybe we should ban the use of the term outright in sports, following the lead of Lake Superior State University, which cheekily ranked the hazy, lazy acronym No. 1 on its 2023 list of banished words.“The many nominators didn’t have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical vagueness of this wannabe superlative,” read a statement from the university.Banning doesn’t quite seem like a possibility, however — not when a word has bored a hole this deep into our collective consciousness.No doubt, being a goat isn’t what it used to be. In sports, it was once a terrible insult, a term of shame hung on athletes who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Greg Norman, otherwise known as the Shark, was a goat for coughing up a six-stroke lead in the final round of the 1996 Masters, a tournament he lost by five strokes.Before Norman, there was the Boston Red Sox’ grounder-through-the legs-at-the-worst-possible-World-Series-moment goat, Bill Buckner.Need I say more?According to a Merriam-Webster editor, online searches for Tom Brady’s name and GOAT prompted the addition of the acronym to the dictionary in 2018.Elise Amendola/Associated PressMuhammad Ali is widely credited with first injecting the Greatest of All Time into the mix. When he went by Cassius Clay in the early 1960s, he recorded a comedy album anchored by the title poem, “I Am the Greatest.”After his upset win over George Foreman in 1974, he added a flourish, admonishing his doubters and critics, and reminding them of his status: “I told you I am still the greatest of all times!”But was it really Ali who came up with this particular egotistic flourish?Some say GOAT’s origins actually spring from a flamboyant, blond-tressed wrestler, George Wagner, who was known as Gorgeous George and who in the 1940s and ’50s earned lavish paydays by turning trash talk into fine art.In a precursor to W.W.E.-style braggadocio, Gorgeous George once claimed before a big fight that if he lost, he would “crawl across the ring and cut my hair off!” He added, “But that’s not going to happen, because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world.”Ali said he had learned a good chunk of his boastfulness from Gorgeous George.“A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth,” the wrestler is said to have told Ali after a chance meeting. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”This week marks the moment when sport’s most legitimate GOAT talk hovers over tennis and an event its organizers not-so-humbly call the Championships.Wimbledon starts Monday. The men’s favorite, Novak Djokovic, has 23 Grand Slam tournament titles, one short of Margaret Court’s record of 24. If he wins this year, his wildly devoted fan base will confidently proclaim the Serb’s GOAT status.That will drive fans of Rafael Nadal, who is stuck at 22 major titles, to distraction. They will argue that their idol would have won 25 major titles (or more) by now, if not for injuries.Then Roger Federer devotees will wade in. He had losing records against both Nadal and Djokovic. But, by goodness, he’s Roger Federer, fine linen with a forehand with 20 Slams and a raft of epic final-round battles to his name.Not so fast, Serena Williams adherents will remind. Not only does she have 23 Grand Slam titles — including one earned while she was pregnant — Williams braved playing in a mostly white sport and bent it to her will. Besides, she’s as much a cultural icon as an athlete. Can any male player say that?Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam titles in her career, bolstering her claim to being the GOAT of tennis.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThen there are the old-school partisans of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King. Stop the unfairness, they will shout. No more comparing superlative athletes from vastly different eras.Time has changed everything in every sport — better equipment, better training methods, new rules — so how can we reliably compare? Before McEnroe lost to Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon final, neither had the benefit of sleeping, as Djokovic reportedly does, in a performance-enhancing hypobaric chamber.On and on the argument will go.That’s the craziness of it. The foolishness and the fun of it.Who’s the GOAT?Well, to be honest, I’ve got four. Willie Mays. Joe Montana. Williams. Federer.I can remember each for their sublime victories, of course. But also their stumbles. A 42-year-old Mays lost in the outfield. A fragile Montana in his twilight, playing not for San Francisco but Kansas City.I was on hand to see Williams struggle and come up short as she chased that elusive last Slam. I sat feet from Federer as he held two match points against Djokovic in the Wimbledon final of 2019. Then the Swiss crumbled in defeat.“For now it hurts, and it should — every loss hurts at Wimbledon,” Federer said at the post-match news conference. But, he added, he would persevere. “I don’t want to be depressed about actually an amazing tennis match.”No one escapes disappointment and frailty. But if we do it right, we soldier on.You know what that means? It means all of us can be GOATs!Bleat on, my friends. Bleat on! More