There Was Some Really Bad Writing in The New York Times Last Weekend
Beneath the fatuous trend piece about yippity yipsters moving to L.A. that the New York Times Styles section gleefully shat out Sunday, there was some really bad writing in the Times last weekend. Let’s see what was the worst.
First, we had my third-least favorite Times columnist, Michael Powell, ringside at the Floyd Pacquaio-Manny Mayweather (whatever) melee, along with three other reporters (cutbacks? what cutbacks?). Michael Powell is a bad writerer. He writes very hard about sports. He writes about sports like he is spitting on the subway tracks, or eating raw steak, or running in combat boots. His writing grunts. More troubling, Powell writes extremely poorly about women, and how terrible sportsmen interact with (read: beat) them.
Here is what he wrote about documented woman-beater Floyd Mayweather last week.
LAS VEGAS — Boxing is admirable in its primal beauty. The best fighters are ferocious athletes, tacticians with the endurance of marathon runners.
They work amid broken noses, bruised organs, and head shots that send the brain rattling from one side of its casing to the other. You hope for your man to knock the other man senseless, and the sooner the better. A right cross below the heart, a left hook, and bye-bye.
Floyd Mayweather Jr., who on Saturday will meet Manny Pacquiao in a money swamp of a championship welterweight bout, is a master of this predator’s ecosystem. He swings an executioner’s ax and drops opponents with startling ease.
“Fighters aren’t scared of each other,” Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, noted. “That isn’t part of the sport.”
It is a reasonable bet, however, that the girlfriends, wives and children of Mayweather, a professional fighter with a body like coiled iron, view fear in a different light.
A reasonable bet, indeed! Boxing is so beautiful, and Mayweather, “body coiled like iron,” probably looks just as beautiful beating his wife as he does Pacquaio—a true athlete and man.
The column continues:
Mayweather has served a wee bit of time, although his sentence suggests a bill to society paid at pennies on the dollar. He pleaded guilty after beating Harris and threatening his own sons. The judge was kindly. He sentenced the champion who beats women to 90 days. Then he postponed the sentence so that Mayweather could fight for a championship that earned him millions of dollars.
Las Vegas is endlessly forgiving.
And what of Powell? Powell is endlessly forgiving too, in the mold of the most dastardly and useless writers. He is in love with his craft, his spit, his blood on the page. His job is not about doing any serious reckoning, whether it be for Josie Harris or Janay Rice. It is about being serious and masculine about sports.
Powell, after all, was in Vegas to write about the fight. He might have thrown in a few grafs about whatever wife to show that he remembered he needed to seem solemn and serious amid the spectacle; but all the while he used his pen as a way to partake vicariously in the absolute masculinity onstage. Those are the stories that Powell wants to tell.
Moving on. An essay in the Travel section of the Sunday Times, “How Doing Nothing Became the Ultimate Family Vacation,” seemed innocuous, and maybe even interesting, at first. Novelist Reif Larsen writes about how he got over his aversion to all-inclusive resorts after having a child named Holt. A beautiful tale of overcoming hardship. But then the essay devolves into a weird rant against American public transportation and the types of people one might meet while traveling on it:
But it was not just the infrastructural deficiencies; carting Holt around the United States, we constantly encountered what I call the “Really? Why you gotta be bringing that into here?” scowl from Transportation Security Administration officers, baggage attendants and our fellow passengers. It was as if people secretly wished we could stow our child in cargo so that we would not disrupt their game of Candy Crush.
This past Christmas we took an overly crowded Amtrak train to Washington. We looked but could not find a baby-changing table anywhere. We asked the conductor and he nodded vaguely to the wheelchair-accessible bathroom.
“I think there’s something in there,” he said. There was not. My wife ended up changing Holt on the gross bathroom floor, puddles of indeterminate substances pooling dangerously close to his head as the train rocked back and forth.
Wow... cool story... ? According to the author, absolutely nothing like the events he describes above has ever happened in Scotland, which is a perfect place that presumably has the “right” kind of people in it.
In conclusion, both of these essays are bad, but the Powell wins for the worst. There is nothing as horrific as overwrought sportswriting.
