Word: oaf
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...victor is supposed to leap the net magnanimously, not be dragged over it ignominiously. But after an exhibition volley with Martina Navratilova, 26, Duncan, the New Jersey Nets' team mascot, gave her an oaf-handed shake that she would probably like to forget. Navratilova could afford a forgiving smile though: last week she erased any doubts (held by Chris Evert Lloyd) about who is the top-ranked player in women's tennis. Winning the Toyota championship in New Jersey, Navratilova defeated Lloyd 4-6, 6-1, 6-2, for the $75,000 purse, season earnings...
...mythic dimensions, the quality of an American parable, like The Great Gatsby. Steinbrenner has invented an archetype for himself: Superowner, a primordial character, all barging and beefy dictatorial will, more famous than any of his players. He is a sort of celebrity despot; his enemies regard him as an oaf. But Steinbrenner is so thoroughly Steinbrenner, a kind of masterpiece of himself, that he invites a sneaking wonder of the kind we reserve sometimes for natural phenomena. He runs the team the way Don Vito Corleone ran the rackets. He dismisses managers the way Bluebeard ditched wives. Steinbrenner has gone...
...Brian McCue and Jessica Marshall) offers a solid basis for the two's relationship before their first exchange, and the relationship provides one of the few emotional landmarks in a wilderness of obscure Renaissance jokes. In other cases Lachow resorts to more familiar conceits of costume and mannerism: one oaf appears with a crew cut, a white-robed sidekick follows a black-robed curate and so forth...
JARVI KNOWS HOW to conduct Shostakovich almost as well. The composer, who chafed under the policies of the Politburo up to his death in 1975, wrote in his memoirs--the unexpurgated edition--that "you have to be a complete oaf" unless you hear that his Fifth ends in "irreparable tragedy," not triumph. He does the reverse of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Beethoven in their fifth symphonies; like them Shostakovich moves from minor to major key during the course of his symphony, but his finale nonetheless forebodes calamity...
...wishes that could be said for Ted Knight and Too Close for Comfort (ABC, Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.). As Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter, Knight embodied a wonderful comic oaf: vain, inept and hilarious. In his new series he is just another henpecked husband, who must put up with two nubile daughters and fall over a loveseat every eight minutes. The other seven minutes, Too Close slavers over the sight of bountiful Lydia Cornell as she ponders the implications of taking a deep breath. The show can not see the farce for the tease. The actors...