Basketball has 13 positions, not just 5May 01 2012

Muthu Alagappan used topological data analysis to group NBA players into thirteen different player types, including Role-Playing Ball-Handler, Paint Protector, All-NBA 1st Team, and One-of-a-Kind.

Welcome to the NFL, here's your new lifeApr 30 2012

Former NFL player Nate Jackson writes an open letter to future top NFL draft picks Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III about how their lives are going to change.

After negotiating your contracts, you both will surely buy a house in an affluent suburb where no 22-year-old would be happy living. Your new neighbors will be rich as well, facelifted, lipo-sucked, Xanaxed and dripping in diamonds, simply delighted to welcome you to the neighborhood. You will commission an interior decorator, recommended by a neighbor, to furnish your home. This will guarantee it feels nothing like Home. And someday, when all of this is over, you'll walk through and gaze upon the marble columns and the embroidered drapes like artifacts in a museum, wondering why you ever listened to that woman.

A fine companion to this letter from former NFL player Trevor Pryce.

Lenny Dykstra never grew upApr 23 2012

Remember this New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra's "improbable post-career success story"?

Dykstra ordered a Coke and French fries with ketchup: "And I'm actually going to have that as my meal-might be the oddest order of the day." (Healthy living was never his specialty.) When the Coke arrived, he sent it back, believing it to be Diet. After the fries were delivered, he made a show of extracting a "You're welcome" from the waiter, who had since moved on to another table. "I pay a thousand bucks a night -- actually, three thousand bucks a night -- and people are discourteous," he said, shaking his head. "There's some point in life when you have to grow up."

For many ballplayers, the growing-up point does not arrive until after retirement, when all the freebies vanish and equipment managers and hotel maids can no longer be relied upon for regular laundry service. Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet"). The occasion for our lunch, however, was a new venture: Dykstra is launching a magazine, intended specifically for pro athletes, called The Players Club. An unfortunate number of his former teammates have ended up broke, or divorced, or worse. The week before we met, the ex-Yankee Jim Leyritz, himself twice divorced and underemployed, had hit a woman while driving home from a bar. He never grew up.

"You've got the ten per cent who are going to find their way no matter what," Dykstra said of the athlete population. "And you get the ten per cent that are fuckheads no matter what-- we'll paste an 'L' to 'em." The rest need guidance, and Dykstra, who will write a regular column called "The Game of Life," is prepared to give it. "This will be the world's best magazine," he said.

Since then, Dykstra has declared bankruptcy, divorced from his wife, was sentenced to three years in state prison for grand theft auto (and several other charges), and most recently was sentenced to nine months in jail for assault and indecent exposure. He's also awaiting trial on federal bankruptcy fraud charges.

The glamorous life of a former professional football playerApr 23 2012

Trevor Pryce played in the NFL for 14 years and upon retiring learned that fame and money is not much if you're not doing what you love.

"Early retirement" sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in Pittsburgh. I was going to use my time to conquer the world.

Boy, was I wrong. Now I find myself in music chat rooms arguing the validity of Frank Zappa versus the Mars Volta. (If the others only knew Walkingpnumonia was the screen name for a former All-Pro football player and not some Oberlin College student trying to find his place in the world.) I wrote a book. I set sail on the picturesque and calming waters of Bodymore, Murdaland. And when I'm in dire straits, I do what any 8-year-old does; I kick a soccer ball against the garage hoping somebody feels sorry and says, "Hey, want to play?"

With millions of Americans out of work or doing work for which they are overqualified, I consider myself lucky. But starting from scratch can be unsettling. If you're not prepared for it, retirement can become a form of self-imposed exile from the fulfillment and the exhilaration of knowing you did a good job.

Full contact marathon runningApr 02 2012

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer officially entered the Boston Marathon, which was an all-male event at the time. Two miles in, race officials caught their mistake and one of them tried to remove her from the course. Switzer's boyfriend intervened on her behalf:

She finished the race but was later disqualified. (via mlkshk)

First 1080 on a skateboardMar 30 2012

Tom Schaar is the first person to land a 1080 on a skateboard ramp. He's only 12.

It was on a MegaRamp, but still. (thx, meg)

Lionel Messi documentaryMar 28 2012

A recent 45-minute documentary on Lionel Messi, which starts with his discovery in Argentina and runs through the end of last season.

It's funny seeing Messi playing as a kid...the style is essentially the same, but in an even smaller package. (via @dens)

All of Lionel Messi's 234 goalsMar 26 2012

Lionel Messi has scored 234 goals in his short career (he's only 24), making him the top goal scorer in all competitions for FC Barcelona. Here are all of them.

What strikes me about this video, aside from the crappy quality, is that the type of goals Messi scores are not generally what you see from other top scorers. Think of the booming balls of Ronaldo for instance, which may break the sound barrier on their way into the back of the net. Many of Messi's goals often don't look like much. They're chips and slow rollers and even the fast ones aren't that fast. But what's apparent in watching goal after goal of his is that what Messi lacks in pace, he more than makes up with quickness, placement, and timing. It's a bit mesmerising...I can only imagine how it feels as an opposing keeper to watch the same thing happening right in front of you. (via devour)

ps. I also enjoyed reading this piece by Simon Kuper on Barcelona's Secret to Soccer Success.

Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.

Nine-year-old ski jumper screws up courageMar 16 2012

This video shows a fourth grader trying a bigger ski jump for the first time. If you're a parent, I defy you to not tear up at least once while viewing. Oh, and the audio is essential.

#cryingatwork (via devour)

Super crazy taser soccer rugbyMar 06 2012

I swear this is totally not made up: Ultimate Tak Ball is an indoor sport wherein you try to deposit a large soccer ball into a goal while the other team tries to stop you with stun guns. As in, you're running along and then the defender tasers you:

Even Lionel Messi might go down if confronted with a taser-wielding Pepe. (via ★kyleridolfo)

Lionel Messi never divesFeb 27 2012

Ever since the World Cup in 2010, I've been watching a fair amount of soccer. Mostly La Liga, Premier League, and Champions League but a smattering of other games here and there. As my affection for the game has grown, I've mostly made my peace with diving. Diving in soccer is the practice of immediately falling to the ground when a foul has been committed against you (or even if one hasn't) in order to get the referee's attention. To Americans who have grown up watching American football and basketball, it is also one of the most ridiculous sights in sports...these manly professional athletes rolling around on the ground with fake injuries and then limping around the pitch for a few seconds before resuming their runs at 100% capacity. I still dislike the players who go down too often, lay it on too thick, or dive from phantom fouls, but much of the time there's only one referee and two assistants for that huge field and you're gonna get held and tackled badly so how else are you going to get that call? You dive.

Except for Lionel Messi. It's not that he never dives (he does) but he stays on his feet more often than not while facing perhaps the most intense pressure in the game. Here's a compilation video of Messi not going down:

In recent years, efforts have been made on various fronts to apply the lessons of Moneyball to soccer. I don't think diving is one of the statistics measured because if it were, it might happen a lot less. Poor tackles and holding usually occur when the player/team with the ball has the advantage. By diving instead of staying on your feet, you usually give away that advantage (unless you're in the box, have Ronaldo on your team taking free kicks, or can somehow hoodwink the ref into giving the other guy a yellow) and that doesn't make any sense to me. If you look at Messi in that video, his desire to stay upright allows him to keep the pressure on the defense in many of those situations, creating scoring opportunities and even points that would otherwise end up as free kicks. It seems to me that Messi's reluctance to dive is not some lofty character trait of his; it's one of the things that makes him such a great player: he never gives up the advantage when he has it.

Film footage of 1903 college football gameFeb 23 2012

This is the oldest surviving clip of an American football game, in which we see Princeton and Yale battle in 1903.

The game footage starts at around 2:00. It resembles the current game of football in name only...before the forward pass, yards and points were difficult to come by and the game seems more like rugby or 11-on-11 wrestling. (via sly oyster)

Life magazine's best picturesFeb 23 2012

Taken by some of the world's most iconic photographers, a selection of the best photographs ever published in Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. Here's a photo of Mickey Mantle from 1965:

The caption reads:

In one of the most eloquent photographs ever made of a great athlete in decline, Yankee star Mickey Mantle flings his batting helmet away in disgust after another terrible at-bat near the end of his storied, injury-plagued career.

Mantle was only 33 when that photo was taken but he'd already had 13 extremely productive seasons under his belt and his last four seasons from '65 to '68 were not nearly as good.

Snowboarding in an LED suitFeb 17 2012

I needed a little beauty this morning and this certainly fit the bill...a snowboarder covered in LED lights shreds in the dark.

(thx, finn)

How professional football might end (sooner than you think)Feb 13 2012

Writing for Grantland, economists Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier imagine how the NFL might end due to the increasing visibility of head injuries.

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players -- or worse, high schoolers -- commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn't worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it's mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

Is this how soccer finally conquers America? Not that soccer doesn't have its own concussion-related problems.

One athlete plays for your soulFeb 07 2012

A fun question from Joe Posnanski: if you had to choose one athlete to play on your behalf for your soul, who would you choose?

So, here's the game: The Jon Lovitz Devil has consigned you to an eternity of being stuck in traffic in a wheezing Ford Escort without air conditioning, and the only radio station plays Michael Bolton 24 hours a day. But you have one chance to escape your fate. You get to choose one athlete, at his or her peak, and one sport. Ever. And if that athlete wins, you get a whole different eternity, with chocolate-covered strawberries, DirecTV and a deck that overlooks the ocean.

Ah, but there is one catch. You get to pick the athlete and sport. But the Jon Lovitz Devil gets to pick the terms.

In other words, you might choose Tiger Woods circa 2000 and golf. That's fine. But the JLD can then choose Ben Hogan and say that the match will be played at Merion with a U.S. Open setup.

You might choose Mike Tyson in his overpowering youth. But the JLD can then choose a young and almost unhittable Ali and a big ring.

You might choose John Elway and one final football drive. But the JLD can then say he has to drive 80 yards in three minutes against the 1985 Chicago Bears defense in the Soldier Field wind.

The question Posnanski is essentially asking is: who is the most dominant athlete of all time across any sport? But not quite that question...Babe Ruth was quite the slugger in his day, but he might not fare so well against modern pitching. Same with Wilt, Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson, or even Gretzky. The game played is a factor as well. Aside from variants such as speed chess and Chess960, chess is chess and the board is the board...home field, wind, and teammates aren't really a factor. (Is chess a sport though? If so, I might take Kasparov against anyone.)

But the answer is probably someone not from one of the major sports and certainly not from a team sport. The comments of the article mention wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer, and Secretariat. And I know that there are athletes in other sports who are equally as dominant. Even so, I might go with 2009 World Championships Usain Bolt in the 100 meter dash. He's the fastest ever by a wide margin, he's current, and it's an individual sport. Of course, under the current one-and-done disqualification rules, he might be in trouble. Or if you could choose Jordan specifically playing 1-on-1...he would beat anyone -- Wade, Kobe, LeBron -- on any crappy hoop or shitty playing surface anywhere. (via ★djacobs)

Update: I knew I'd covered some of this same territory before but just couldn't find it. From back in August:

Speaking of sports, Grantland, and Federer, Bill Simmons said of Lionel Messi earlier this year that "he's better at soccer than anyone else is at anything". That's a pretty short list but got me wondering, if you expanded the criteria slightly, who else might join Messi on the "better at their sport than almost anyone else is at anything at some point in the past 5-6 years". Off the top of my head, possible candidates include Roger Federer, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Lindsey Vonn, Tiger Woods, Marta, Shaun White, Jimmie Johnson, and Annika Sörenstam. I don't know much about hockey, but maybe Alex Ovechkin? No basketball, baseball, or football players on that list; Michael Jordan and Barry Bonds are the most recent candidates in basketball and baseball (please, don't give me any of that LeBron crap) and I can't think of any football player over the past 20 years who might fit the bill. Barry Sanders maybe? His team never won a lot of games and didn't win championships, but man he was a genius runner.

I received several suggestions from readers about additions to that list, among them were surfer Kelly Slater, rally driver Sébastien Loeb, motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi, and cricketer Don Bradman.

Super Bowl preview for non-football fansFeb 02 2012

Just like they did last year, The Rumpus shares some of the stories of the players participating in the Super Bowl in a way that isn't as syrupy as Bob Costas.

For instance, there's Mark Herzlich, a former top NFL prospect who was diagnosed with bone cancer while in college, took a year off to beat the disease, returned to the game, and then went undrafted by every NFL team. As a last-ditch, he auditioned for training camp. By November, about two years after undergoing chemotherapy, Mark was a starting linebacker for the Giants.

There's five-foot-seven Danny Woodhead of the Patriots, a player considered too small even for Division I college football, who went to the only place that wanted him, a little school in Nebraska called Chadron State, where he worked his ass off, and by the time he graduated, he was college football's all-time leading rusher. He's still so anonymous that he worked at a sporting goods store on a day off last year and pretty much no one recognized him. Now he's a running back for a team in the goddamned Super Bowl.

The Danny MacAskill of snowboardingJan 09 2012

That's how a recent tweet referred to Scott Stevens and his snowboarding skills. Some pretty sick street snowboarding moves in this one.

MacAskill? Oh, he's just this guy. (via @polarben)

Best table tennis shots of 2011Dec 22 2011

If I made New Year's resolutions, one of them would be to play more table tennis. (via stellar)

Craziest possible mountain biking videoDec 21 2011

Three guys ride on tiny paths next to steep rock faces and over narrow wooden bridges. I could only manage watching a minute of this...I almost threw up in fear.

(via ★interesting)

The rise of the NBA nerdDec 16 2011

NBA players, especially the younger ones, are dressing like nerds.

In their tandem press conferences, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, of the Miami Heat, alternate impeccably tailored suits with cardigans over shirts and ties. They wear gingham and plaid and velvet, bow ties and sweater vests, suspenders, and thick black glasses they don't need. Their colors conflict. Their patterns clash. Clothes that once stood as an open invitation to bullies looking for something to hang on the back of a bathroom door are what James now wears to rap alongside Lil Wayne. Clothes that once signified whiteness, squareness, suburbanness, sissyness, in the minds of some NBA players no longer do.

If you happen to be someone who looks at Durant, James, or Amar'e Stoudemire's Foot Locker commercials -- in which he stalks along a perilously lit basketball court wearing a letterman's cardigan, a skinny tie, and giant black glasses (his are prescription) -- and wonders how the NBA got this way, how it turned into Happy Days, you're really wondering the same thing about the rest of mainstream black culture. When did everything turn upside down? Who relaxed the rules? Is it really safe to look like Carlton Banks?

See also Kanye West and his entourage circa 2009. (thx, sveinn)

What the NFL won't show youDec 02 2011

The NFL regards the "All-22" footage of their games -- the zoomed-out view of the game that includes the movements of all 22 players on the field -- as proprietary and releases it to very few people. But it's difficult to fully understand the game without it.

For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the "All 22."

While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage.

By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. "I don't think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game," says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a "fragment" of what happens on the field.

Art competitions at the OlympicsDec 01 2011

The Olympic Games used to include competitions in painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, and music.

From 1912 to 1948 rules of the art competition varied, but the core of the rules remained the same. All of the entered works had to be inspired by sport, and had to be original (that is, not be published before the competition). Like in the athletic events at the Olympics, gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the highest ranked artists, although not all medals were awarded in each competition. On a few occasions, in fact, no medals were presented at all.

(via @itscolossal)

Street snowboardingNov 29 2011

The street skiing video has more narrative structure but the tricks pulled in this urban snowboarding video are just filthy.

(thx, river)

Street skiingNov 27 2011

This is like street skating except with alpine skis down hilly city terrain. Includes jumps over hung laundry & parked cars, railslides down stairs, etc. Crazy.

(thx to @gnuhaus for the better embed)

Tony Stewart wins NASCAR's Sprint CupNov 22 2011

I can't find a great account of it (go here and here for the basics), but the story of how Tony Stewart won the 2011 Sprint Cup Championship at the Ford 400 in Homestead, FL is flat-out amazing and as thrilling as anything that's happened in sports over the past 12 months: an aging former champion wins five out of the last ten NASCAR races (more than 10% of his total career victories), including a final race in which he recovered from two slow pit stops (one of which was agonizingly slow), passed 118 cars total, came from back of the pack twice, made several ballsy four-across passes, and was saved from defeat by a passing rain shower. And the guy he was chasing the whole time (in this race and the points standings) was driving great...it's just that Stewart was racing insanely great, right on the edge.

I've seen very little coverage of this on the big generalist sports blogs...nothing on Deadspin and only a short "Tony Stewart won some NASCAR thingie" on Grantland. Come on! Simmons, Klosterman, someone, get on this!

Watch complete games of the Dream Team from the 1992 OlympicsOct 21 2011

Here's a little weekend viewing for you...Ballislife has put several complete 1992 Dream Team games up on YouTube. Here's their game versus Croatia to get you going:

(via @fchimero)

The origins of soccerOct 19 2011

All kinds of evidence has been uncovered that organized soccer was being played in Scotland as early as the 15th century.

He discovered a manuscript of accounts from King James IV of Scotland that showed he paid two shillings for a bag of 'fut ballis' on 11 April, 1497. More evidence came with we came across several diary accounts of football being played in places like Stirling Castle, Edzell Castle and Carlisle Castle. The games were played on pitches smaller than the current regular football field, and featured between 10 and 20 men on each side.

Maybe we can get that guy who wrote the epic Reddit thread about how a 2000-man Marine unit might fare against the circa-23 B.C. Roman Empire (and got a movie deal for it) to write a scenario in which Messi, Ronaldo, Rooney, Iniesta, et al travel back to Scotland in the 1500s to take on the King and his footballers. (via @tomfossy)

The last bullfight in BarcelonaSep 26 2011

The Catalonia region of Spain celebrated the last bullfight with a pair of matador dispatching their bulls in front of a sell-out crowd in Barcelona.

After putting to death their respective bulls in front of a sell-out crowd in the 20,000-seat arena, Mr Tomas, along with another bullfighter Serafin Marin, were carried shoulder high from the ring into the streets by ecstatic fans. Others, meanwhile, invaded the ring to gather some of its sand as a souvenir of the final fight, which follows a vote last year by the Catalan regional Parliament to ban bullfighting.

Photos here.

NFL TV maps for the 2011-2012 seasonSep 15 2011

These maps are updated every week and they tell you which games are on TV in which parts of the country. Not an issue if you have DirectTV or whatever, but for the rest of us... (thx, joshua)

Peyton Manning, best QB of his era?Sep 15 2011

I like Peyton Manning, but I found this whole article to be a little weird.

And in the most the most important single passing statistic, the one that correlates best with winning, yards per throw, Manning has an edge, 7.6 to 7.4 [for Tom Brady].

The most important stat? Is 0.2 yards really much of a difference? Correlates best with winning? Let's look at the stats. That lists Brady being slightly *ahead* of Manning...and Tony Romo and Philip Rivers ahead of both of them. I call shenanigans. For me, it's a toss-up between Manning and Brady...you'd have to flip a coin to find the winner. Both are really fun to watch and I hope Manning does make it back from his injury.

Two for tennisAug 31 2011

Now that the US Open is in full, wait for it, swing, a pair of articles about tennis. First, an account of last year's epic three-day Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut.

Both players, clearly, were serving well. But their ground strokes were near-perfect, too. They made almost no mistakes. Isner remembers feeling so happy with his game that "it's hard to explain. I never thought about technique. I had no dark thoughts in my mind. I was just swinging away and the balls were going in - no matter if it was a big point, or whatever. It was crazy."

Mahut, meanwhile, recalls an almost spiritual dimension to his play. "When we got into the money-time at 6-6 [he says 'money-time' in English], there was only John, myself, and my team. No one else. I didn't hear the crowd. There was only the present time. I didn't think about the point before, or the point after. I just stayed in the moment. I had absolutely no fear. The level of focus and awareness I had was so high. Normally, you don't keep up for a long time. But that moment - I kept it for a long time."

Mahut's enjoyment, he says, was triggered by more than competition. After the many frustrations in his career, his pleasure came from fulfilling his potential. In this regard, his experience recalls Jean Bobet, the French cyclist of the 1950s, who wrote about experiencing "La Volupte" - the rare and sensual state of perfect riding. "La Volupte," wrote Bobet, "is delicate, intimate, and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness."

How did it feel, to play tennis like that? "It was the biggest moment of my life," says Mahut, gravely. "It was magical."

And then, from Grantland, a piece by Brian Phillips about "the long autumn" of Roger Federer. The once near-magical Swiss, his best days behind him, is now merely the third best player in the world...but is also still really really good, hanging onto his greatness longer than he should maybe?

Roger Federer has spent longer as a "still" athlete than any great player I can remember. You could even argue that it's one of the signs of his greatness. Other top players hit the "still" moment, hang around for a little longer, and then whoosh, they're gone, broken up into memorial clips and Hall of Fame inductions, classic rock bands who've sold their copyrights. Federer, after three straight years of diminished results -- 11 to 12 singles titles a year from 2004 to 2006, then eight in 2007, and four to five every year since -- is ... well, still really amazing. He's still near his best, which means he's still playing some of the best tennis the world has ever seen. If anything, he's improved his serve to compensate for what's maybe been a slight decline in his movement and shot-making -- although, as McEnroe pointed out during the French Open, his movement is "still great." Heading into Wimbledon, historically his best tournament, he warmed up at the French by sensationally ending Djokovic's 41-match winning streak and playing as well as Paris has ever seen him play against Nadal.

But because he's been "still great" for so long -- because we keep seeing the end coming, even if it never actually comes -- Federer has also acquired an aura of weird sadness over the past few years that's hard to reconcile with the way we used to think about him.

Speaking of sports, Grantland, and Federer, Bill Simmons said of Lionel Messi earlier this year that "he's better at soccer than anyone else is at anything". That's a pretty short list but got me wondering, if you expanded the criteria slightly, who else might join Messi on the "better at their sport than almost anyone else is at anything at some point in the past 5-6 years". Off the top of my head, possible candidates include Roger Federer, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Lindsey Vonn, Tiger Woods, Marta, Shaun White, Jimmie Johnson, and Annika Sörenstam. I don't know much about hockey, but maybe Alex Ovechkin? No basketball, baseball, or football players on that list; Michael Jordan and Barry Bonds are the most recent candidates in basketball and baseball (please, don't give me any of that LeBron crap) and I can't think of any football player over the past 20 years who might fit the bill. Barry Sanders maybe? His team never won a lot of games and didn't win championships, but man he was a genius runner.

Baseball symphonyJul 29 2011

Music critic Anthony Tommasini goes to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and treats the game as a musical piece.

For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher's mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.

The most assertive soloists are the vendors. My favorite was a wiry man with nasal snarl of a voice who practically sang the words "Cracker Jack" as a three-note riff: two eighth notes on "Cracker," followed by a quarter note on "Jack," always on a falling minor third. (Using solf`ege syllables, think "sol, sol, mi.") After a while I heard his voice drifting over from another section, and he had transposed his riff down exactly one step.

Diver faceJul 28 2011

The Telegraph has a great photo gallery of divers' faces as they compete in diving world championships in Shanghai.

(via ★antimega)

1896 Olympic marathonJul 26 2011

Here's a photo of three gentlemen running in the first Olympic marathon in 1896 attired in what looks like street clothes.

This was the second modern running of the marathon; the first was a pre-Olympic qualifying race held a month before. In the Olympic race, seventeen competitors started the race and only about half finished. The winning time was just under three hours and the third place finisher was disqualified for covering "part of the course by carriage". I would also not be surprised if the three fellows in the photo above stopped off for a coffee and some painting along the way.

Bushwacker, a ballerina in hoovesJul 25 2011

Bushwacker is the top-rated bull in the US as determined by the Professional Bull Riders; he bucks riders off after an average of just under three seconds (eight seconds are needed for the rider to score points). The NY Times interviewed his trainer and some of his riders to find out why Bushwacker is so tough to ride.

Bushwacker short-hopped into the arena. Drool flew out of his mouth and whirled over Elliott's head. Bushwacker bounded more than two feet into the air, kicked his hind legs up, and drove his front legs into the ground. Instead of waiting for his back legs to touch dirt, as most bulls do, he sprung off his front feet immediately.

This is Bushwacker's signature move, and it is as effective in its offbeat athleticism as a point guard executing a crossover dribble to ditch a defender. Elliott came forward and lost the weight of his feet underneath him.

Possibly sensing the rider's weight shift, Bushwacker staccato-hopped to the right. He accelerated into five successive spinning jumps. His tail whipped his own rump with emphatic snaps. Elliott flew to the right and hit the dirt. The clock showed 6.57 seconds.

Don't miss watching the video inlined at the top of the page...Bushwacker is a total Ferdinand. And here's video of the ride described in the passage above:

The Xbox version of Dock Ellis' LSD-fueled no-hitterJul 11 2011

In 1970, professional baseballer Dock Ellis, who was good at pitching baseballs, threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. In 2011, professional blogger A.J. Daulerio, who isn't so good at video game baseball, attempted to throw a no-hitter while on LSD...playing a customized Dock Ellis in MLB 2K11 on Xbox.

But by the fourth game I started to pick up tendencies in all the batters. Jason Bartlett swung at first-pitch changeups. Will Venable couldn't hit the palm ball. In fact, most of these free-swinging Padres couldn't hit Dock's funky palm ball. I threw it often. But by then, also, the first acid distractions entered: the TV flickered; the cracks in the wall started to move; the hand soap started to breathe -- those sorts of things. Plus I was drawn to the outdoor garden between innings. Rain was near, I sensed.

The uneven pick-up basketball experienceJun 17 2011

A field guide to some of the people, places and things you might encounter playing pick-up basketball this summer. For instance, you might run into, literally, the guy who persistently sets needless picks:

We cannot end this discussion without addressing this guy. He has seen just enough basketball to notice that players occasionally set picks, but not enough to understand what they are actually for. He rightly recognizes that he best serves society as a fencepost, but his picks, which he sets on nearly every play, are usually counterproductive.

Unbelievably, he often sets picks on his own teammates, and on one occasion, I have actually heard him express disapproval when his pick was ignored. "I picked you, dude!"

(via @tcarmody)

Jordan vs. LeBronJun 08 2011

I watched this video the other day:

I'm grateful to Bill Simmons for covering my main thoughts about this video so well in his piece about "LeBron's playoff irrelevancy". Which are:

1. "Jordan never would have done THAT." The THAT in question is not bringing it in the playoffs. Taking your foot off the pedal in the playoffs is just not done if you're supposedly one of the top players in the game.

2. "We made so much fuss about LeBron these past two years and he's not even the most important dude on his own team." LeBron might be the better pure player, but Wade is a leader and winner.

The Heat may go on to win the title this year and for six or seven years to come but unless something changes with LeBron's approach to the game, he'll never be as great as Jordan was. There's more to being the best than just talent.

A blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rockJun 08 2011

From the just-launched Grantland (Bill Simmons' new thing w/ ESPN), Chuck Klosterman writes about the greatest sporting event he's ever witnessed: a 1988 junior college basketball game in North Dakota. Why that game? Because one team, the underdog, started the game with only five players, finished with three players, and won.

The Tribe had opened the season with a full 12-man roster, but people kept quitting or getting hurt or losing their eligibility. By tournament time, they were down to five. It was bizarre to watch them take the court before tip-off -- they didn't have enough bodies for a layup line. They just casually shot around for 20 minutes.

"It was always so goofy to play those guys," says Keith Braunberger, the Lumberjacks' point guard in 1987-88. Today, Braunberger owns a Honda dealership in Minot, N.D. "I don't want to diss them, but -- at the time -- they were kind of a joke. They would just run and shoot. That was the whole offense. I remember they had one guy who would pull up from half-court if you didn't pick him up immediately."

The biggest ollie everJun 01 2011

Aaron Homoki is, what, 20 feet in the air here? Wow.

Shaq retires!Jun 01 2011

Whoa, I think Shaquille O'Neal just announced his retirement on Twitter:

im retiring Video: http://bit.ly/kvLtE3 #ShaqRetires

A look back at the Magic (and Lakers and Celtics and Cavs and Heat and Suns and Fighting Tigers):

Bill Simmons: superwriterfanJun 01 2011

In this coming weekend's issue, the NY Times Magazine (appropriately) goes long on Bill Simmons and his new web venture, Grantland (horrible name chosen by ESPN and not Simmons).

At the center of Simmons's columns is not the increasingly unknowable athlete but the experience of the fan. His frame of reference is himself. He might not be able to tell you how a ballplayer felt performing a particular feat, but he can tell you how he felt watching it, what childhood memories it evoked, the scene from the movie "Point Break" it brought to mind, which one of his countless theories -- newcomers to his column can consult a glossary on his home page -- it vindicates.

A history of the crossover dribbleMay 26 2011

The NY Times has a great video on the crossover dribble, one of the most effective moves in basketball. Includes interviews with Allen Iverson, Tim Hardaway, and Dwyane Wade. (thx, aaron)

Messi, the genius of footballMay 23 2011

The NY Times ran a big feature on FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi this weekend. At only 23 years old, Messi is already being touted by some as the best player ever.

New NBA stat: points per missMay 19 2011

A couple nights ago against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Dirk Nowitzki scored 48 points and only missed three shots, prompting Bill Simmons to wonder if that was some sort of record. Jerod from Midwest Sports Fans dug into how useful a stat like points per miss would be as a measure of efficiency.

What is interesting about the table above is that Dirk comes in ahead of Bird, Jordan, and so many others. Does this mean Dirk is a better player than Jordan or Bird? Of course not. But it does mean that he is as efficient a scorer as those two were, if not better. Scoring efficiency only tells one part of the story on one side of the floor, which is why PPM can only be considered a small piece of the puzzle when comparing players, but it is a good way to give one of the most unique scoring talents in NBA history his due.

The biggest wave ever surfedMay 19 2011

From the Feb 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, a profile of big-wave surfer Ken Bradshaw by William Langewiesche. Bradshaw rode what was, at the time, the largest wave ever surfed.

Later he told me it was like skiing down an avalanche chute in the mountains. He said, "You know that feeling you get when you're going over a cornice and it's just straight down after that?" He counted the seconds. He went, "One. Two. Three. Four!" Already it was a long drop, and the wave kept rising higher. "Five! Six! Seven! Eight!" He went, "Holy shit!," and kept dropping. He went, "Don't fade! Don't even imagine it!" He got toward the base of the face, still well above the bottom, and rounded out of the drop as the surface curvature allowed. Bradshaw had never seen such wave expanses before-huge fields of sloping water to the right. He was aware of the mass gathering above and behind him. He went, "I gotta get out of here, now!" He dug his right rail in, banking the board hard against its will, and held it with all of his strength into a carving right turn. The turn was slow because the board was fast. Bradshaw kept at it, however, and went slicing up the wave face almost to the crest. He was briefly elated. Technically he had "made" the wave, but he wasn't done with it yet. From the crest he turned again and went angling back down the face. He intended to perform a full cutback toward the break, but no sooner had he started than a roar erupted behind him as the wave formed a giant barrel. The barrel spat spray at him from its throat. There was no way into that barrel from his position, and it blocked any turn back toward the core of the wave. The ride was almost over for Bradshaw. It had lasted 30 seconds, or hardly more. He exited straight ahead and over the wave's shoulder. He was angry with himself. He thought that he should have been in that barrel, and that he would have been if he had not shied away from the peak at the start of the ride. He did not care about having made history-and did not consider it until others began to insist on it that night. He did not even think that this had been a great run. He thought, Shit, I should have faded.

Revisiting 1984May 06 2011

After yesterday's post on Ghostbusters ("Don't cross the streams"), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:

• When I said 1984 was arguably "the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy," I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
• Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn't make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
• I didn't know this, but Aaron Cohen tipped me off: Jason actually already preemptively backed me up: "1984, a fine year for movies." As Jason says, "My God, the pop culture references."
• Also via Aaron, his own "1984 Was a Good Year for a Lot of Things" and Bill Simmons's 2004 post "1984, it was a very good year." Both mine the same pop culture vein, adding books, TV, and sports into the mix too.

I particularly like Simmons's note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):

College hoops meant something in '84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John's, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC . . . these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I'm telling you, a Georgetown-St. John's game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren't even possibilities anymore. They're gone.

My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson's Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers' amazing season that year. It's about baseball, but so many other things -- life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.

One last "what if?" note from Simmons:

Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.

Talk about crossing the streams.

How giving 110% is actually possibleMay 04 2011

Quantitative pedants always wince whenever anyone -- usually an athlete -- rattles off a phrase like "we gave 110% out there tonight."

"It's impossible to give more than 100%," they'll say. "That's what 'percent' means."

But of course percentages greater than 100 are possible. That's how Google's Android Market can grow by 861.5% in year-over-year revenue, just to pick one example.

It all depends on what your baseline is -- x percent of what. But it's usually easier for tongue-clicking know-it-alls to just assume athletes are dumb than to try to actually figure out what it is they might be talking about.

Here's actually a more serious (and more mathematically precise) way to look at this. Economist Stephen Shmanske has a new paper in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports titled "Dynamic Effort, Sustainability, Myopia, and 110% Effort" that actually brings some stats and benchmarks to bear to figure this out in the context of the NBA.

For Shmanske, it's all about defining what counts as 100% effort. Let's say "100%" is the maximum amount of effort that can be consistently sustained. With this benchmark, it's obviously possible to give less than 100%. But it's also possible to give more. All you have to do is put forth an effort that can only be sustained inconsistently, for short periods of time. In other words, you're overclocking.

And in fact, based on the numbers, NBA players pull greater-than-100-percent off relatively frequently, putting forth more effort in short bursts than they can keep up over a longer period. And giving greater than 100% can reduce your ability to subsequently and consistently give 100%. You overdraw your account, and don't have anything left.

I haven't dived into the paper (it's behind a subscription wall, natch), but doesn't this seem like a rough-but-reasonable analysis of what athletes and other people mean when they use language this way? Shouldn't we all calm down a little with rulers across the fingers, offering our ready-made "correct" use of the rhetoric of percentages?

(Via @pkedrosky.)

The Frick Collection's secretsApr 30 2011

I love this "bowling saloon" in the basement of The Frick Collection museum in NYC.

Gothamist has a bunch more photos of the Frick's secret places.

Bill Simmons' new siteApr 29 2011

...is called Grantland and will feature writing from Chuck Klosterman, Dave Eggers, Malcolm Gladwell, Katie Baker, Molly Lambert, and others.

Parkour schoolApr 26 2011

The Tempest Academy is a training facilty in LA for people interested in freerunning and parkour.

The world's only indoor Parkour Playground, made up of more than seven thousand square feet of X Games genius! Why X-Games you ask? Well as you know, Tempest is all about going big. So, we hired our good friend Nate Wessel (world famous X Games ramp builder) to design and build our dream playground. With his creative genius, and our eye for style, we've created an indoor city that is unrivaled in the freerunning world. Next to Disneyland it's the most MAGICAL place on earth!

(via ★mathowie)

More about the 10,000 hours thingApr 21 2011

The article about Dan McLaughlin's quest to go from zero-to-PGA Tour through 10,000 hours of deliberate practice got linked around a bunch yesterday. Several people who pointed to it made a typical mistake. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hours theory in his book, he did not come up with it. It is not "Gladwell's theory" and McLaughlin is not "testing Gladwell". The 10,000 hours theory was developed and popularized by Dr. Anders Ericsson (here for instance) -- who you may have heard of from this Freakonomics piece in the NY Times Magazine -- before it became a pop culture tidbit by Gladwell's inclusion of Ericsson's work in Outliers.

Putting 10,000 hours to the testApr 20 2011

Dan McLaughlin read about the 10,000 hour theory in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers -- basically that it takes someone 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become really good at something -- and decided to try it for himself. He plans to practice playing golf for six hours a day, six days a week, for six years in order to have a shot at making the PGA Tour. He's already a year in.

Here's how they have Dan trying to learn golf: He couldn't putt from 3 feet until he was good enough at putting from 1 foot. He couldn't putt from 5 feet until he was good enough putting from 3 feet. He's working away from the hole. He didn't get off the green for five months. A putter was the only club in his bag.

Everybody asks him what he shoots for a round. He has no idea. His next drive will be his first.

In his month in Florida, he worked as far as 50 yards away from the hole. He might -- might -- have a full set of clubs a year from now.

You can follow Dan's progress at his Dan Plan site. (via @choire)

Speed climbing tall mountainsApr 19 2011

The first ascent of the north face of Eiger, a mountain in the Swiss Alps (13,025 feet tall), happened in 1938 and took three days. Watch as Ueli Steck climbs it in 2 hours, 47 minutes, and 33 seconds.

The whole thing is pretty much insane, but you'll really want to start paying attention around the 2:15 mark. He's running up that mountain! (via devour)

FC Barcelona vs Real MadridApr 16 2011

In the next two and a half weeks, Spain's two best soccer teams -- FC Barcelona and Real Madrid -- play each other four times. There was today's regular season La Liga game, April 20's Copa del Rey final, and then two semifinal games in the Champions League, the European championship. As Mike Madden said on Twitter:

Barça-Madrid 4 times in 18 days. Would be like if Michigan and Ohio State played every week for a month, and everyone in U.S. was an alum.

Why you should care about cricketApr 06 2011

Knowing nothing about cricket, ESPN.com writer Wright Thompson heads for India to watch the 2011 Cricket World Cup and discovers he's a fan but that India's relationship with the sport is changing.

"The aggression, the brashness," says Bhattacharya, the cricket writer turned novelist. "It's now something which Indians see that this is what we have to do to assert our place in the world. We've been f---ed over for thousands of years. Everyone has conquered us. Now we're finding our voice. We're the fastest-growing economy in the world. We are going to buy your companies. Our cricket team is like going to f---ing abuse you back, and we're going to win and we're going to shout in your face after we win. People love that."

See also How To Explain the Rules of Cricket.

Floating soccer pitchMar 24 2011

Much of the village on the Thai island of Koh Panyee is actually floating; the island is too rocky to build much of anything on land. So when a group of kids wanted to start a soccer club, they built themselves a floating soccer pitch...which led to some interesting advantages once they started playing against other teams.

(via @dunstan)

Katharine Hepburn skateboardingMar 17 2011

Source. See also Hemingway kicks a can.

The bracketless March Madness bracketMar 15 2011

Gelf Magazine has an NCAA tournament bracket for those who hate filling out brackets: one devised by baseball stats master Bill James. Here's the quickie explanation:

Sign up for your Bracketless Bracket using your Facebook ID. Instead of picking the winner of each game, all you have to do is pick your favorite team from each seed line. You pick exactly one team -- no more, no less -- from each seed number. You like both Kansas and Ohio State? Too bad. Pick one. Every time your team on the one-seed line wins a game at any point in the tournament, you get 100 points. Every time your 2-seed wins, you get 110 points. You get the picture; if your 16 seed wins a game, you get 250 points.

Great idea...the best part about this is that you get to pick all sorts of underdogs.

A message in an NFL player's suicideFeb 22 2011

When former NFL player Dave Duerson shot and killed himself the other day, he aimed for his chest and not his head because he wanted his brain to be in one piece and therefore available for study for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which may have led to Duerson's suicide in the first place.

Players who began their careers knowing the likely costs to their knees and shoulders are only now learning about the cognitive risks, too. After years of denying or discrediting evidence of football's impact on the brain -- from C.T.E. in deceased players to an increasing number of retirees found to have dementia or other memory-related disease -- the N.F.L. has spent the last year addressing the issue, mostly through changes in concussion management and playing rules.

Duerson sent text messages to his family before he shot himself specifically requesting that his brain be examined for damage, two people aware of the messages said. Another person close to Duerson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Duerson had commented to him in recent months that he might have C.T.E., an incurable disease linked to depression, impaired impulse control and cognitive decline.

There's nothing good about that story at all.

Ronaldo retiresFeb 14 2011

Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, more commonly known as Ronaldo, retired from soccer today as one of the most decorated players ever: he won two Ballon d'Ors, three FIFA player of the year awards, was on two World Cup-winning Brazilian teams, and scored the most goals in World Cup history. The video is a bit fuzzy, but here are ten of Ronaldo's greatest goals:

That backheel in #8 is just otherworldly, as is the spin move in #5. See also Ronaldo's skills.

Big wave skiing?Feb 08 2011

Watch as Chuck Patterson skis (not surfs, skis) the Jaws surf break in Maui.

And for some reason, he's using poles!

Super Bowl preview for non-sports typesFeb 04 2011

This Super Bowl preview "for people who don't know football" from The Rumpus is pretty good, even for people who do know football. Especially if you've never heard about Donald Driver's childhood:

Growing up in abject poverty in Houston, Texas, Donald, his mother, and brother lived, at various times, in a U-Haul, out of a car, and on the streets. As a young teen, Donald used his intelligence, natural dexterity and quick hands to become an extremely effective car thief. He sold the cars to buy drugs, which he then turned around and sold for more money. He believes he stole up to thirty cars, and was only caught once.

One of us! One of us!Feb 02 2011

Writer Rob Neyer recently left ESPN for SB Nation and in his first column for SBN, he articulates the difference between "us" (professional journalists) and them (readers).

I've never thought of myself as a member of us rather than them.

I've got a lot of passions, and generally I won't bore you with them. But the passion I indulge almost every day of my life is good writing. I crave it, and when I find it, I treasure it. I surround myself with books full of good writing, and I can't get through the day without scribbling down a brilliant sentence or delightful word in a thick journal that's always close at hand.

Also, it's my business. I'm one of the lucky few who gets paid to indulge his first love.

Where the good writing comes from, though, is irrelevant. All that matters is the writing.

You're paid to write? I know lots of professional writers who either never learned to write well, or have forgotten. You work for a famous website or newspaper? The big boys don't have a monopoly on good writing, let alone facts.

Sportswriting, like writing about computing or video games, lends itself especially well to amateur participation because you've got, what, tens of millions of people who, even at an early age, are basically experts on football, baseball, basketball, hockey, etc. because they've grown up playing, watching, and analyzing those sports. The actual writing bit is harder but the passion is definitely there. (via hello typepad)

Super Bowl art betJan 27 2011

For the second straight year, the best Super Bowl bet is between art museums in the cities playing in the big game.

The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art have agreed to a Super Bowl bet! Even better: The museums have put major works by major artists on the line. The bet continues an annual tradition begun last year when MAN instigated a wager between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Both museums are offering up significant impressionist paintings: The Carnegie Museum of Art has wagered Pierre Renoir's playful, fleshy Bathers with a Crab (cicra 1890-99, above) on a Pittsburgh Steelers victory. The Milwaukee Art Museum has put on the line Gustave Caillebotte's serene Boating on the Yerres (1877, below).

Video game footballJan 11 2011

In the Seahawks/Saints game over the weekend, Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch made an improbable game-winning touchdown run. So, I can't decide which one of these videos is better. Marshawn Lynch's Tecmo Bowl Run:

Or Marshawn Lynch as Super Mario in star mode:

Messi named best player of 2010Jan 10 2011

Lionel Messi won the inaugural men's 2010 FIFA Ballon d'Or today, given to the best soccer player in 2010. The award was created for 2010 by merging France Football's Ballon d'Or and the FIFA World Player of the Year award, both of which Messi won last year as well.

FIFA also named the World XI team, the best eleven players in the world by position (kinda like the NFL's All-Pro team). Amazingly, six of the eleven are from a single team, Spain's FC Barcelona. (All three of the finalists for the Ballon d'Or were from Barcelona as well.)

I've been watching Barcelona this year and I'm not sure professional American sports has seen anything like what this team is¹. On paper, they're the best team on the planet by a wide margin (and that includes the World Cup-winning Spanish team, where several players -- but not, notably, Messi -- overlap) and in practice they're almost as good. Many of the players coming off the bench could start on just about any other team in Europe. But they still have to play the games and having six of the best eleven players on the planet doesn't guarantee wins, especially in a strongly team-oriented sport like soccer. Still lots of fun to watch them play, though.

[1] Maybe the Yankees in the 30s or 40s. Or the Celtics in the 60s. But neither of those teams had the three best players in the world on their rosters. ↩

Is the Manning/Brady rivalry really a rivalry?Jan 07 2011

In this week's column, Bill Simmons writes about the Peyton Manning / Tom Brady rivalry and contrasts it (somewhat) with Biggie/Tupac.

One grew up in the South; the other grew up in Northern California. One was picked first overall; the other was picked 199th. One looks like a bouncer; the other looks like a movie star. One has been considered the best at every level since high school; the other had to repeatedly fight to prove he belonged. For years, one was considered "the talented guy who can't come through when it matters;" the other was considered "the overachiever who always comes through when it matters." One embraced his celebrity and enjoyed it, making goofy commercials, parodying himself in sketches and cultivating an image as a relatable Southern guy; the other morphed into an actual celebrity, dating actresses and supermodels, moving to New York and then California, gracing various magazine covers, sponsoring watches and boots, and becoming famous for playing football and for being famous.

If there's an enduring snapshot of each guy, it's their postgame news conferences: Brady impeccably dressed and coiffed, looking like he has to bolt in a second because he's headed for a photo shoot; Manning standing there with that swollen, red helmet blotch on his forehead, looking like he's about to be whisked away to the hospital for X-rays. At first glance, you'd assume Brady was the No. 1 overall pick who had been anointed as "The Next Great Quarterback" since he was 15 and Manning was the one picked 199th who had to fight for everything. Nope.

But, as Simmons curiously fails to mention, the big problem with same-position rivalries in a game like football is that Manning and Brady do not directly compete against each other. Their teams play, but the two are never on the field at the same time. Never. Contrast that with tennis, soccer, hockey, and even (sorta) baseball. And basketball. Especially basketball. Kobe and Wade (to pick just one example) battle one another at both ends of the floor for the entire game.

The unexpected athleteJan 07 2011

Chrissie Wellington never really did sports growing up. Then, in her 20s, she started running and astonishingly soon after that, starting winning every Ironman triathlon she entered. Wellington's body and mental focus turned out to be uniquely suited to endurance events.

Then at around 130km into the bike ride, with Sutton's words "Don't defer to anybody" ringing in her ears, she started moving up the pack. "I came up to the lead group of girls and instead of thinking: 'These are the champions and the best in the world', I just went straight past them." Even so, Wellington never believed she would hold on. "Halfway through the marathon I still never thought I would win," she says. "You know they are behind you and you never know what they are capable of. I was running scared the whole way, thinking: 'They'll catch me, they'll catch me.' But they just didn't."

Allen Iverson goes to TurkeyJan 04 2011

Having lost a step and the confidence of NBA general managers, Allen Iverson is playing professional basketball in Istanbul. Philadelphia Magazine tracks the former Sixers star down to see how he's faring in his new job.

With his NBA career over, his marriage in trouble, and rumors swirling about drinking and money problems, the greatest Sixer of his era finds himself playing minor-league basketball in Turkey and spending his nights at a T.G.I. Friday's in Istanbul. Isn't it, weirdly, exactly how we always thought it would end for Allen Iverson?

How footballs are madeJan 03 2011

The manufacturing process for the official NFL football made by Wilson.

It's fascinating that every football used in the NFL for the past 20-30 years has been made by Deb, Loretta, Peg, Glen, Emmitt, Tina, Etta Mae, Pam, and Michelle. Also, they call the pre-laced, pre-inflated ball a carcass! (thx, peter)

Oregon's speed-freak footballDec 06 2010

Nice piece in the NY Times about the University of Oregon's innovative football offense, which turns the game into something that's paced a bit more like soccer or basketball.

In the city of the distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine -- Eugene is known as Tracktown, U.S.A., and is also where the sporting-goods company Nike was started -- Kelly has transformed football into an aerobic sport. This style is particularly of the moment because it is apparent that football, at least in the short term, will become less violent. Kelly's teams have found a new way to intimidate, one that does not involve high-speed collisions and head injuries. "Some people call it a no-huddle offense, but I call it a no-breathing offense," Mark Asper, an Oregon offensive lineman, told me. "It's still football. We hit people. But after a while, the guys on the other side of the line are so gassed that you don't have to hit them very hard to make them fall over."

...

In Kelly's offense, the point of a play sometimes seems to be just to get it over with, line up and run another. The play that preceded the last touchdown was a one-yard loss -- a setback in traditional offensive schemes in which down and distance are paramount. But "third and long" is not as difficult a proposition for the offense when the opposing defense can barely stand up. "Obviously, all of our plays are designed to gain yards," Gary Campbell, Oregon's running-backs coach, explained. "But our guys understand the cumulative effect of running them really fast."

The best of Barry SandersNov 30 2010

I may or may not have just spent 30 minutes watching Barry Sanders highlights on YouTube.

Probably my all-time favorite NFL player.

Intense training the key to long life?Nov 29 2010

Scientists are studying older athletes, like 91-year-old track star Olga Kotelko, to see how their bodies react to exercise. There is emerging evidence that a key to staying healthier longer is not just exercise but intense training.

You don't have to be an athlete to notice how ruthlessly age hunts and how programmed the toll seems to be. We start losing wind in our 40s and muscle tone in our 50s. Things go downhill slowly until around age 75, when something alarming tends to happen.

"There's a slide I show in my physical-activity-and-aging class," Taivassalo says. "You see a shirtless fellow holding barbells, but I cover his face. I ask the students how old they think he is. I mean, he could be 25. He's just ripped. Turns out he's 67. And then in the next slide there's the same man at 78, in the same pose. It's very clear he's lost almost half of his muscle mass, even though he's continued to work out. So there's something going on." But no one knows exactly what. Muscle fibers ought in theory to keep responding to training. But they don't. Something is applying the brakes.

And then there is Olga Kotelko, who further complicates the picture, but in a scientifically productive way. She seems not to be aging all that quickly. "Given her rather impressive retention of muscle mass," says Russ Hepple, a University of Calgary physiologist and an expert in aging muscle, "one would guess that she has some kind of resistance." In investigating that resistance, the researchers are hoping to better understand how to stall the natural processes of aging.

Michael Jordan advises LeBron JamesNov 29 2010

Cleveland's response to LeBron James' boner of a Nike commercial has more heart, but this mash-up of the LeBron commercial with a previous Michael Jordan Nike commercial is an absolute masterpiece.

Danny MacAskill rides againNov 17 2010

Danny MacAskill, the fantastic Scottish trials cyclist, is back a new video packed with gravity- and death-defying stunts.

I had a special screening of this with my three-year-old son this morning before I came into the office; he gave it two thumbs up. Way up! (via @mathowie)

Amazingly bad soccerNov 17 2010

In the 90th minute of a quarterfinal match between Qatar and Uzbekistan in the 2010 Asian Games, you'll see the worst ever play by a goalie and then it gets even worse.

Finger skatingNov 16 2010

It is more amazing that people can do crazy things on skateboards or that some of those same crazy things can be done on tiny skateboards using your fingers?

Skateboarding in KabulNov 11 2010

A nice short documentary on the fledgling skateboarding culture in Kabul, Afghanistan.

(via matt)

Update: The video on Vimeo was erased for some reason, so I switched the embed to one at YouTube.

Also, the Kabul skatepark profiled in the video is looking for donations of equipment (paging @tonyhawk, @tonyhawk to the front counter, please) and money and/or assistance with shipping (shipping to Afghanistan is challenging). They're also selling these fetching Skateistan t-shirts (and tote bags) in a variety of styles and colors.

Zenyatta's last raceNov 09 2010

With a record of 19-0, Zenyatta was a favorite to win the Breeders' Cup Classic. As her jockey eased her into the top of the stretch, she was dead last. Right where she wanted to be.

Her owners, Jerry and Ann Moss; her trainer, John Shirreffs; and for that matter anyone who had watched and loved the great racemare Zenyatta knew that the real running -- the edge-of-the-seat-drama -- really didn't start until she turned for home. Nineteen times before, Zenyatta had looked desperate and in trouble at the top of the stretch. Nineteen times before, she had found a gear to rocket past her rivals in the final strides.

So when jockey Mike Smith cornered the big girl and squared her shoulders toward the finish line in dead last, the more than 72,000 people here at Churchill Downs rose to their feet and held their breath. Zenyatta not only had 11 horses to pass, she also had a dozen or so lengths to make up.

And here's video of the race, just in case you thought that story was too good to be true.

(via big picture)

Photo finishersNov 08 2010

The NY Times has a photo slideshow of some NYC marathon participants right after they crossed the finish line yesterday. Why don't any of them look exhausted?

FoursquarathonNov 06 2010

If you're running the NYC marathon tomorrow, have an iPhone, and are a Foursquare user, 4SQ CEO Dennis Crowley has the low-down on how to track your progress throughout the race by auto-checking-in to 4SQ at all the mile markers.

I'm going to use Mayor Maker tomorrow during the NYC Marathon to auto check me in to every mile marker as I run past them. I'll be running w/ my iPhone in my pocket (with GPS turned on). Every time I run over a mile checkpoint, Mayor Maker will send that checkin to foursquare and foursquare will send it back out to Facebook and Twitter. Cool, right?

Nobody falls up mountainsNov 05 2010

Four boarding school friends (the charmer, the looker, the student, and the joker) attempted to scale Mont Blanc and only two came back alive. Two of the four had previously scaled Everest at 19 (without sherpas) and followed that up by travelling from the North Pole to the South Pole using only manpower and natural power. So what went wrong on Mont Blanc?

They spent their first two days with an emphasis on safety measures. Lebon and Atkinson were well advised of Mont Blanc's singular reputation. Any seasoned climber, when contemplating the world's most dangerous mountains, looks first to the Himalayas -- to Annapurna, K2, Nanga Parbat. These monsters are as forbidding as they come, and therefore have the highest fatality rates. Four out of 10 climbers who ascend Annapurna die there.

Mont Blanc comes in somewhere after Everest, the Matterhorn, and Denali, in Alaska, but in sheer numbers it kills more climbers than the whole lot of them combined. It is the Siren of major mountains; gracious and popular, it is summited by 20,000 climbers a year -- pretty much anyone can climb the thing, if not safely. But it lures overly ambitious suitors too high or deep, then brutalizes them.

Goalkeeper faster than speeding locomotiveNov 04 2010

Watch how quickly this goalie gets back to defend his own goal.

He's moving so comically fast compared to the other players on the pitch that it reminds me of the not-so-special effect of Clark Kent racing the train in Superman. (via unlikely words)

Michael Jordan's final shotNov 01 2010

After the Chicago Bulls won their final championship of the Michael Jordan era, David Halberstam wrote this fantastic article for the New Yorker about Jordan's final season, final game, and final shot, a jumper over the sprawling body of Bryon Russell.

The crowd, Jordan remembered, got very quiet. That was, he said later, the moment for him. The moment, he explained, was what all Phil Jackson's Zen Buddhism stuff, as he called it, was about: how to focus and concentrate and be ready for that critical point in a game, so that when it arrived you knew exactly what you wanted to do and how to do it, as if you had already lived through it. When it happened, you were supposed to be in control, use the moment, and not panic and let the moment use you. Jackson liked the analogy of a cat waiting for a mouse, patiently biding its time, until the mouse, utterly unaware, finally came forth.

The play at that instant, Jordan said, seemed to unfold very slowly, and he saw everything with great clarity, as Jackson had wanted him to: the way the Utah defense was setting up, and what his teammates were doing. He knew exactly what he was going to do. "I never doubted myself," Jordan said later. "I never doubted the whole game."

When NBA history is written, my guess is that no one will be able to top what Michael Jordan accomplished on the court (Bill Russell, possibly, aside). He was a fantastic athlete and possessed the focus and discipline to make the most of his physical gifts (by which I mean he had the pathological need to completely and totally dismantle everyone else on the court: opponents, teammates, officials, etc.). Basketball is full of mostly-one-or-the-other players: Larry Bird, for example, was not particularly physically gifted but more than made up for it in discipline and Shaq is an amazing athlete but lacked a certain focus at times. Oh, you'll say, but what about: 1. LeBron (might be more talented than Jordan but is missing the necessary clinical insanity that Jordan had) or 2. Kobe (slightly less talented and driven, but might make up for it with longevity).

But to be fair, the shot against Russell was not the final shot of Jordan's career. After that article was written, in 1998, Jordan returned to the NBA for two lackluster seasons with the Washington Wizards. His last NBA shot was a free throw in the final two minutes of a meaningless 107-87 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. Acting on the orders of his coach Larry Brown, Sixers guard Eric Snow fouled Jordan so that Jordan could score some points and leave the game on a high note. The Wizards fouled shortly after and Jordan left to a standing ovation. The intensity that propelled Jordan to such great heights early in his career also drove him to retire too early (twice!) and then come back after it was too late to put an odd sort of question mark on an exclamation point of a career. (via jb)

Even more parkour on a skateboardOct 29 2010

I know, I know, shut up already with the parkour and the skateboarding but this is worth watching:

The blooper reel at the beginning is entertaining (MOTHERFRICKER!), but final trick is the best one. (thx, cary)

Parkour on rollerbladesOct 22 2010

This is Mathieu Ledoux doing things on rollerblades that you ain't ever seen before.

See also yesterday's parkour on a skateboard, parkour on a bike, parkour with ladders, proto parkour, and just plain old parkour. (thx, @eastofwabansia and sam)

Parkour on a skateboard?Oct 21 2010

Ok, not quite, and Richie Jackson doesn't look much like a typical skateboarder -- more like a hippie hipster pirate -- but his skills on a board are amazing.

Watch at least until he goes over the rail while the board goes under it. This reminds me a bit of the stuff that Danny MacAskill does on a bicycle. (thx, ross)

Bill Simmons' "moss Vikings" postmortemOct 15 2010

Last week, Bill Simmons accidentally tweeted about a possible trade that would send American footballer Randy Moss from the Patriots to the Vikings and got the entire sports world whipped up into a frenzy. His explanation of what actually happened provides an interesting glimpse into how sports media sausage is made.

The first thing you need to know: I don't like breaking stories or the pressure that accompanies it. Sweating out those last few minutes before the moment of truth. Hoping you're right even though you're thinking, "I know I'm right. I have to be right. This is right. (Pause.) Am I right?" Wondering deep down, "I hope my source isn't betraying me," then rehashing every interaction you've ever had with that person. My stomach just isn't built for it. If I had Marc Stein's job, I'd be chain-smoking Lucky Strikes like Don Draper.

At the same time, I know a few Guys Who Know Things at this point. Whenever I stumble into relevant information -- it doesn't happen that often -- my first goal is always to assimilate that material into my column (as long as it's not time-sensitive). Sometimes I redirect the information to an ESPN colleague. Sometimes I keep it in my back pocket and wait for more details. It's a delicate balance. I have never totally figured out what to do.

Secretariat: a tremendous machineOct 08 2010

The movie Secretariat opens today, but I think you'll agree that however good the movie is, Secretariat the horse was far better. Here's his famous Usain Bolt-like victory in the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths.

It's unbelievable how far ahead he is at the end of the race.

NFL TV maps for 2010 seasonOct 08 2010

I'm a little late this year, but the 2010 NFL maps site has been up and humming for four weeks now. The site displays what games are going to be on TV in different parts of the country.

Crazy car driving skillsSep 28 2010

This is Ken Block practicing a sport called gymkhana, which is sort of the Mario Kart version of rodeo barrel racing.

The build-up is way too long...the good stuff starts at about 1:10 and the crazy-ass shit starts at 3:00. The move right at three minutes in is just absolutely fantastic as is the 360 sliding thing he does through a building. (via clusterflock)

Jure Robic, RIPSep 27 2010

Jure Robic, the world-class ultra-endurance cyclist I wrote about earlier this year, was killed in a traffic accident in his native Slovenia late last week. He died as he lived: on his bike. (thx, @ddewey and several others)

Dara Torres gunning for 2012 OlympicsSep 11 2010

I don't know whether she still looks this fit or not, but Dara Torres is going to try to make the US swim team for the 2012 Olympics. At 41 in Beijing, she won three silver medals; she'll be 45 when London rolls around.

Fakie-to-fakie 900 on a Mega RampSep 09 2010

Bob Burnquist pulled a fakie-to-fakie 900 on a Mega Ramp the other day. For those of you who speak only English, I consulted my skateboarding-to-English dictionary and that means he rode into the ramp backwards on his skateboard, rotated two-and-a-half times, rode out backwards, and did it all on one of those massive ramps. Or, you could just watch. As you may recall, 900s on a skateboard ain't easy. (thx, matt)

The physics of free kicksSep 07 2010

Why are long free kicks suprisingly effective in soccer matches? Science explains!

For a well-struck soccer ball, the researchers estimate, one might expect a gentle arc followed by a sharp hook at about 50 meters -- in rough agreement with the distance of Roberto Carlos's free kick. In other words, if a soccer player has the strength to drive a ball halfway down the field with plenty of velocity and spin, he or she can expect to benefit from an unexpected curve late in the ball's trajectory.

But really, this is just an excuse to show you Roberto Carlos' amazing free kick against France in 1997:

Pure awesometown. But it might not be even be better than this one:

The world's highest paid athleteSep 03 2010

...was a fellow by the name of Gaius Appuleius Diocles. He was a 2nd-century Roman charioteer.

His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period -- enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today's standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion.

Usain Bolt wants to play soccerSep 02 2010

Professionally. From the tail-end of a recent interview with the sprinter:

Ultimately, he says, he'd love to make a go of playing football professionally. He's being deadly serious. One of the perks of being Usain Bolt is that sporting stars love to meet him, so whenever he's travelling and there's time, he tries to train with a top football team. Last year it was Manchester United, a few days ago it was Bayern Munich. He's still carrying a copy of the French sporting newspaper L'Equipe, which features a spread on his football skills and praise from Bayern manager Louis van Gaal. He shows me a photo of himself with his arm wrapped round the dwarfed 6ft German forward Miroslav Klose. "If I keep myself in shape, I can definitely play football at a high level," he says.

"With his physical skills, I reckon he could play in the Premier League," Simms says.

Professional American football would be even more of a no brainer...Randy Moss with Darrell Green speed++.

The 1000-foot free diveSep 01 2010

World champion free diver Herbert Nitsch is planning on executing a no limits dive to 1000 feet. That's 300 feet more than the current record set by Nitsch three years ago.

(via @dunstan)

Slow-motion tennis anyone?Aug 25 2010

This series of videos from the NY Times is called The Beauty of the Power Game and I can't tell if they are cheap & exploitive or beautiful & revealing. They show women tennis players hitting shots in slow motion. The one of Victoria Azarenka is the best by far...the camera pans up her body slowly, showing first her footwork, then the pivot, backswing, intense focus of the eyes, swing, and finally the followthrough.

Blind soccerAug 25 2010

What blind soccer players lack in sight, they more than make up for in footwork.

Some lovely skill there. From a Wired article on the sport:

In blind soccer, there are five on each side, a goalie and four outfield players. The goalie can be sighted or visually impaired and must stay in his designated goalie box. His teammates, meanwhile, wear eye shields so as to take away any competitive advantage from those players that may have limited vision over those who have no sight whatsoever. There are no throw-ins, as there is a wall surrounding the shrunken (at least, by typical soccer standards) playing field, and each team has someone calling out instructions from behind one of the goals. The players can call each other either by name or by shouting "Yeah!" And when you're approaching to engage another player to steal the ball, you must shout "Voy!" -- Spanish for I'm here! That means that you've got to discern the voice of your teammates -- since everyone on the pitch is yelling "Yeah!" -- and have a sense of where you are with the ball (which contains ball bearings, to help with tactility on the foot) in relation to the goal.

Some crazy-ass yo-yo skillsAug 24 2010

And the thing is spinning the whole time? What I don't understand is how he manages to suspend the laws of physics only within his personal space...it's not like audience members are floating away or anything. (via mathowie)

Athletes are different from you and meAug 10 2010

In a letter to the editor in 1988, literary critic Eddie Dow tried to set the record straight:

In 1926 Fitzgerald published one of his finest stories, ''The Rich Boy,'' whose narrator begins it with the words ''Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.''

Ten years later, at lunch with his and Fitzgerald's editor, Max Perkins, and the critic Mary Colum, Hemingway said, ''I am getting to know the rich.'' To this Colum replied, ''The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.'' (A. Scott Berg reports this in ''Max Perkins, Editor of Genius.'') Hemingway, who knew a good put-down when he heard one and also the fictional uses to which it could be put, promptly recycled Colum's remark in one of his best stories, with a revealing alteration: he replaced himself with Fitzgerald as the one put down. The central character in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro'' remembers ''poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [ the rich ] and how he had started a story once that began, 'The very rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, yes, they have more money.''

World-class athletes, though, really do seem to be different from you and me, and not just because they have better physical skills and (some of them) more money. We act shocked when athletes we think we understand, like LeBron James or Tiger Woods, surprise us with their behavior, or when a great player like Isiah Thomas degenerates into a complete lunatic once he's off the court. (Sorry, Knicks fans.)

The strangeness (and unbelievable abilities) of top athletes is the theme of David Foster Wallace's 1995 essay "The String Theory," about the lower rungs of pro tennis:

Americans revere athletic excellence, competitive success, and it's more than lip service we pay; we vote with our wallets. We'll pay large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we'll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush cliches about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

This willful ignorance breaks down when 1) an athlete is sufficiently famous and dominant that we expect more from him, 2) an athlete suddenly fails to succeed, 3) an athlete allows those idiosyncrasies out more than is necessary, 4) an athlete's competing in a sport that we don't understand well or follow closely.

For instance, Michael Jordan is a great example of a top athlete who never broke character, whose talents never let us down (that stint with the Wizards being apocryphal, and best ignored), and won at the highest level in a widely followed sport. Yet by all accounts, he was a hypercompetitive, gambling-addicted sociopath. In The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons offers my favorite take on Jordan:

Chuck Klosterman pointed this out on my podcast once: for whatever reason, we react to every after-the-fact story about Michael Jordan's legendary competitiveness like it's the coolest thing ever. He pistol-whipped Brad Sellers in the shower once? Awesome! He slipped a roofie into Barkley's martini before Game 5 of the '93 Finals? Cunning! But really, Jordan's competitiveness was pathological. He obsessed over winning to the point that it was creepy. He challenged teammates and antagonized them to the point that it became detrimental. Only during his last three Chicago years did he find an acceptable, Russell-like balance as a competitor, teammate, and person.

And still, nearly everyone agrees (and I do too) that this made Jordan the best basketball player, certainly better than Shaq and Wilt and (so far) LeBron, who just had different pathologies.

At Deadspin, Katie Baker takes this in a different direction, looking at ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary on BMX and X-games legend Mat Hoffman:

[A] leprechaun-faced, sparkle-eyed freestyling daredevil who did things on sketchily self-constructed ramps in his tweenage backyard ("he's this shady little kid from Oklahoma just blasting," recalls one former pro from that era) that no one else in the sport had even conceived of. Hoffman was so instant a splash that in his first sanctioned competition he took first in the amateur bracket, turned pro on the spot, and then went on to win first place in that class as well. By the next day he had 15 sponsors lined up.

But while the retrospective into Hoffman's game-changing theatrics appears on the surface a delish amuse-bouche for the X Games, it also may cause a few viewers to choke. He nails 900s, yes, but he also breaks over 300 bones. He flies high, but then he lays low. Like, in a coma-type low. As one friend of Hoffman says in the film, describing his jumps off an ever-heightening ramp: "It would go from this beautiful soaring thing to a violent crash so suddenly. We'd be like, 'is he dead?'...

It's easy to see films like these and lament the death-defying choices of men who have families and children, to judge them harshly for their inability to say no, but I wonder sometimes what the alternative is. Some people are simply hard-wired this way. (It's almost too perfect that Hoffman had a dear friendship with Evel Knievel.)

Tony Hawk understands, saying: "That's who we are! We love it too much to hang it up. I hate when people ask me that: 'When are you hanging it up?' Like, if I'm standing on my own two feet? I'm riding a skateboard."

You can't watch the footage of Hoffman as a young kid and not see that he's different, that he can't not do these things. "I just kick my feet," he tells one professional rider who asks how he pulls off an impossible move, sounding like some kind of Will Hunting savant. He talks about lying in bed dreaming about how to build higher ramps. "That's the fabric of who Mat is," says one friend. Who are we to tell him to change?

Add in the fact that Hoffman suffered his most life-threatening injuries trying to perform for TV audiences for ESPN and The Wide Word of Sports, and it's hard to see exactly what the difference is between him and football players or boxers suffering one concussion (or some other major injury) after another, sometimes dying on the field or in the ring, in far too many cases dying too young.

The one difference between Hoffman and the others is that he didn't make fans feel betrayed by a celebrity like LeBron, he wasn't easily ignored like Wallace's low-level tennis pros fighting it out in the qualies just to make a living, and he didn't entertain a gigantic audience for more than a decade like Michael Jordan or Muhammed Ali.

We are all witnesses.

Update: Reader Nick pointed out that the first version of this post implied that Hoffman's career was significantly shorter than Jordan's or Ali's; the contrast I was trying to draw was between the allowances most of us make for athletes in "major" sports versus those in "extreme" competition, especially when the former are just as dangerous and personality-specific as the latter, if not more so.

Console jocksAug 09 2010

Any of the video games that you might play on a console are sitting on a mountain of annually released, highly popular, reliably profitable sports games. The internet, too, and Twitter and newspapers and radio and broadcast and cable television all sit on a mountain of sports chatter and sports programming. (The internet, in turn, sits on a mountain of porn.)

This makes it surprising you don't see more examples of thoughtful, detailed sports + culture + tech + gaming long-form writing like Patrick Hruby's article "The Franchise," on the history of the Madden NFL series for ESPN's Outside the Lines..

You can measure the impact of "Madden" through its sales: as many as 2 million copies in a single week, 85 million copies since the game's inception and more than $3 billion in total revenue. You can chart the game's ascent, shoulder to shoulder, alongside the $20 billion-a-year video game industry.

The Madden games had to overcome technological breakthroughs -- remember how the original Tecmo Bowl only gave you nine players on each side, so the screen wouldn't slow down with too many moving objects? And both offense and defense chose from the same four plays, turning the whole thing into a slightly expanded simulation of Prisoner's Dilemma? Yeah. Madden didn't do any of that. And that's because Madden himself insisted on it, the console processing improved (especially moving to 16-bit), and the programming guys figured out a way to do it.

The essay also argues that Madden was a cultural breakthrough in the way games were perceived. At the same time that games were moving from a freewheeling arcade style to a more rigidly statistical, differentiated, and realistic simulation approach -- in other words, when they way games were made became less artsy and more nerdly -- they moved from a hardcore audience that was perceived to be composed of loser nerds and became the casual gaming of jocks, teenagers, college kids, even professional athletes.

In 1990, EA had a market cap of about $60 million; three years later, that number swelled to $2 billion.

More crucially, video games were suddenly cool, the province of older teens and college kids, young men who loved competition and talking smack. Escaping the geek world, gaming set course for the center of the pop culture sun.

"Before 'Madden,' jocks did not play video games," Hilleman said. "Somebody playing games was more likely to get made fun of on ESPN than get featured on there."

I don't know whether the perceived demographic shift is true. Let's just say that this generation of sports games helped jocks embrace their inner, statistical/strategic nerds and helped nerds and losers posture with one another and channel their inner jocks.

You know how I was just hating on linear, narrative storytelling? This is the opposite, the color negative of that position, that shows a different kind of value. Here, Hruby tracks how the innovative Madden franchise became slower under the weight of its own legend. Seasoned players didn't like new interfaces. The NFL used its licensing agreement to dictate and prohibit content. The attention to detail on the minutiae of player apparel grew and grew, as fans and NFL players paid attention and complained about omissions.

If you want to know how gaming, tech, sports, and geek culture, particularly for men -- there's no discussion at all of female gamers, or even a single woman who appears in the narrative in any way -- came to be the way it is today, a field guide to Madden history is a worthy beginning.

Best penalty kick everAug 07 2010

I've been meaning to post these since the beginning of the week. Here's Ezequiel Calvente's penalty kick for Spain from a U19 game against Italy. He runs up to kick with his right foot, but just before making the kick, Calvente pushes the ball into the other side of the goal with his left foot. Fantastic.

And a bonus amazing sports play. Spiderman in center field.

(Thanks, Dave and Jonah)

50 Highest paid athletesAug 05 2010

Sports Illustrated is out with its list of 50 highest paid AMERICAN athletes. (This distinction is important because there's also an international list.) I wouldn't say I was surprised by the list, but there were several 'huh' moments. For instance, close your eyes. Close them. Now picture the 3rd highest paid athlete on the planet. What sport is he playing? If you said boxing, you're right. Floyd Mayweather made $60m last year. I'm curious if I were to make a list of the 50 highest paid American athletes how many of these names I would have come up with.

Other tidbits:
$28,847,406 separates #1 Tiger Woods ($90m) from #2 Phil Mickelson.
$73,733,163 separates Tiger from #50 A.J. Burnett.
Shaq still makes more than Kobe, which must really bug Kobe.
#2 highest paid QB is Matthew Stafford, who is the 2nd year QB of the Lions.
#28 Darrius Heyward-Bey is the first player I hadn't heard of on the list.
There are 15 football players on this list, not one of whom is Tom Brady or Drew Brees.
Maria Sharapova is the only woman on either list, #20 on the international list with around $19m.

There is an international list, which is filthy with soccer players and Formula 1 drivers. For some reason non-American athletes (Ichiro, Pau Gasol) that play in the US are on the international list.

Badminton RantAug 02 2010

This is the type of video you'll see the title of and just skip right through in your hurry to clear your RSS reader. Sure, you could do that with this video, but it'd be a mistake. Mary Carillo's rant is going to take someone through the night, it may as well be you.

(Thanks, Andy!)

North Korean team punished for World Cup lossesJul 30 2010

For losing all of their World Cup games, including a 7-0 defeat at the hands of Portugal, the North Korean soccer team was subjected to six hours of public shaming.

The broadcast of live games had been banned to avoid national embarrassment, but after the spirited 2-1 defeat to Brazil, state television made the Portugal game its first live sports broadcast ever. Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats.

What's annoying, beyond the obvious totalitarian issues, is that they played really well against Brazil, the top-ranked team in the world at the time.

Parkour with laddersJul 28 2010

No idea if this is an actual thing outside of advertising New Zealand energy drinks; this article indicates that a few circus folk dreamt it up (hello, red flag). Welcome to 2010, when you can't sort the ads from everything else. (thx, wade)

Tarp surfingJul 21 2010

Get yourself a skateboard, a big blue tarp, have someone lift the edge of the tarp over you as you skateboard by, and guess what that looks like:

(via mathowie)

Tony Hawk does a 900Jul 21 2010

At 42 years old, with the smile crinkles around his eyes to prove it, Tony Hawk can still do a 900 on a skateboard.

According to Wikipedia, Hawk is one of only four men in the world who have done this trick (he first did it in 1999). He announced on Twitter that he'd done the trick -- "P.S. I made a 9" -- and on his way out of town left one of his boards at the airport for a lucky fan to find. (thx, dens)

Novelist versus pro tennis playerJul 09 2010

Novelist Nic Brown plays his childhood friend Tripp Phillips (former ATP circuit pro) in tennis. The challenge? To win a single point.

What I can't do, no matter how hard I try, is win a single point. Not one. "You have no weapons," he tells me two days later, over a lunch of cheap tacos and cheese dip. He reviews the match in this specific analytical way I've experienced with other professional athletes. To them, match review is engineering, not personal nicety. The performance is fact, not opinion. "No matter what," he says, "I was going to have you off balance. And no matter what you did, I was going to be perfectly balanced. I knew where you were going to hit it before you hit it. It's the difference between me and you. But if I played Roger Federer right now, he'd do the exact same thing to me."

That bit reminds me of David Foster Wallace's article on tennis pro Michael Joyce (Esquire, July '96). Specifically, how much of a skill difference there was between Joyce (the 79th best player in the world), the players he competed against in qualifiers, and the then-#1 ranked Andre Agassi.

The Cavs say goodbye to LeBronJul 09 2010

The majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers has an epic car wreck of a goodbye/fuck you letter to LeBron James.

As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier. This was announced with a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his "decision" unlike anything ever "witnessed" in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment.

And that, my friends, is how you take the low road. (via @hurtyelbow)

Where did "soccer" come from?Jul 08 2010

It's not an Americanism:

"Soccer," by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby's nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers-a bit of upper-class twittery, as in "champers," for champagne, or "preggers," for enceinte. "Soccer" is rugger's equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The "soc" part is short for "assoc," which is short for "association," as in "association football," the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA-the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S.

There is BergkampJul 08 2010

Congratulations to the Dutch for reaching the World Cup final. To celebrate, here's a great Dutch moment from a past World Cup...Dennis Bergkamp's epic goal vs. Argentina in the 1998 WC. Turn the speakers up...the sound is everything.

Congrats also to Spain, but I couldn't find a Spanish WC highlight as entertaining to match.

Caster Semenya cleared to competeJul 07 2010

After sitting out 11 months awaiting the results of gender testing, runner Caster Semenya has been cleared to compete in IAAF-sanctioned competitions. For some background, check out this New Yorker piece on Semenya from last November.

The genius of MessiJun 29 2010

An ode to Lionel Messi, the best footballer in the world.

Messi simply does things -- little things and big things -- that other players here cannot do. He gets a ball in traffic, is surrounded by two or three defenders, and he somehow keeps the ball close even as they jostle him and kick at the ball. He takes long and hard passes up around his eyes and somehow makes the ball drop softly to his feet, like Keanu Reeves making the bullets fall in "The Matrix." He cuts in and out of traffic -- Barry Sanders only with a soccer ball moving with him -- sprints through openings that seem only theoretical, races around and between defenders who really are running even if it only looks like they are standing still. He really does seem to make the ball disappear and reappear, like it's a Vegas act.

I've watched just enough soccer to realize that despite having scored no goals and having, by FIFA's reckoning, only a single assist, Messi is having a great World Cup. He attracts so much attention on the pitch -- two or three defenders swarmed him on every touch in the Mexico game -- that he should get an assist on nearly every play for opening up the rest of the field for his team. It's one of those things that the new soccer fan (as many Americans are) doesn't catch onto right away. (thx, djacobs)

Manute Bol, RIPJun 21 2010

Former NBA player, shot blocker extraordinaire, and humanitarian Manute Bol died over the weekend at age 47. He died of a rare skin condition caused by a medication he took while in Africa.

"You know, a lot of people feel sorry for him, because he's so tall and awkward," Charles Barkley, a former 76ers teammate, once said. "But I'll tell you this -- if everyone in the world was a Manute Bol, it's a world I'd want to live in."

According to Language Log, Bol may also have originated the phrase "my bad".

Ken Arneson emailed me to say that he heard the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily). Says Arneson, "I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase." And Ben Zimmer's rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.

USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.

Update: As a recent post on Language Log notes, several people picked up on this and kinda sorta got rid of the "may have" and the story became that Bol absolutely coined the phrase "my bad". Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't support that theory (although it doesn't entirely disprove it either). The internet is so proficient at twisting the original meaning of things as they propagate that Telephone should really be called Internet.

Athens' modern Olympic ruinsJun 18 2010

Many of the stadiums and venues from the 2004 Athens Olympics are now lying abandoned, unused since the Games and symbolic of the disfunctional Greek economy.

Softball has no following in Greece, and the construction of a permanent softball stadium hasn't changed that. [...] Greeks like sports, but they like smoking more.

A city "winning" the right to host the Olympic Games seems like buying a pig in a poke.