One question I always had about the card was: why did Gretzky ever sell it? The Wagner might just have been an investment for him, but if you’re rich and a huge sports guy and you own the most pristine copy of the world’s rarest and most valuable sports card, why would you ever sell it? One possible answer: you suspected (or discovered) that the card had been doctored and got rid of the damn thing before the truth came out. That Gretzky, always skating to where the puck is going to be.
Abel Rodríguez waxes floors for a living in Los Angeles and takes two weeks of vacation a year to work gratis for Real Madrid when the European football club trains in Los Angeles every summer. He had always dreamed of seeing Real Madrid playing their Spanish rivals Barcelona in Madrid, so his family persuaded him to go. He went. With no hotel or ticket to the game, he sat outside the club’s training complex for hours until manager José Mourinho spotted him as he was leaving…”Stop! It’s the guy from Los Angeles.” Thus began Abel Rodríguez’s magical journey.
You never know when karma will come back and reward you for something. For seven summers Rodriguez worked for free for Real Madrid, even when the club was willing to pay him for his efforts in Los Angeles. Now he was about to experience the thrill of a lifetime.
I remember tearing baseballs apart as a kid and seeing the rubber core, but I guess I had forgotten that a baseball is mostly a leather-covered yarn ball. See also how footballs are made and homemade soccer balls. (via @marklamster)
Someone built a robotic goalkeeper and then someone else had the bright idea to pit reigning best player in the world Lionel Messi against it:
Iker Casillas, your job is in jeopardy. But maybe not quite yet…by the final attempt, Messi seems to have figured out how to send the goalie the wrong way, at least for an instant. (via digg)
If you need a little pick-me-up, try this video of two nonagenarians racing each other in the 100-meter dash. Seems like there’s gonna be a clear winner from the start but…
Both men were born in 1918; if the video were filmed this year, that would make them 95. (via @gavinpurcell)
His versatility amazes other runners, including Jurek, who today is a friend. Jornet has been able to run the very short mountain races like a vertical kilometer race that’s over in a couple of hours, Jurek says — and then, he adds, Jornet can turn around and win the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in California’s Sierra mountains, arguably the world’s most prestigious ultrarun. (Jurek himself won the Western States seven consecutive times between 1999 and 2005.) It’s a little like an Olympic-champion sprinter winning the Boston Marathon.
How is Jornet able to do these things? In part because of his upbringing in the mountains:
Even among top athletes, Jornet is an outlier. Take his VO2 max, a measure of a person’s ability to consume oxygen and a factor in determining aerobic endurance. An average male’s VO2 max is 45 to 55 ml/kg/min. A college-level 10,000-meter runner’s max is typically 60 to 70. Jornet’s VO2 max is 89.5 — one of the highest recorded, according to Daniel Brotons Cuixart, a sports specialist at the University of Barcelona who tested Jornet last fall. Jornet simply has more men in the engine room, shoveling coal. “I’ve not seen any athletes higher than the low 80s, and we’ve tested some elite athletes,” says Edward Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the limits of human exercise performance for three decades.
He also seems at one with nature and the mountains more than most people:
Observers and competitors describe him as someone who draws endurance and vitality, Samson-like, from being among high peaks. Runners who have served as pacesetters for him have told me with amazement how, when he was midrace at Lake Tahoe, Jornet didn’t run with his head down in focused misery but instead brushed the hairgrass and corn lily that grew along the trail with his fingertips and brought the smell to his nose, as if he were feeding off the scenery. Sometimes in his all-day solitary runs, stopping only to eat berries, he can seem half-feral, more mountain goat than human. He likes to move fast and touch rock and feel wild, he told me; he feels most at ease and performs best when wrapped by the silence and beauty of the mountains. He can’t abide cities for more than a few hours. The sea — its unrelenting horizontality — scares him. Leading long races like Western States, he’s been known to stop and exclaim at a sunrise, or wait for friends to catch up so he can enjoy the mountains with them instead of furthering his lead. “It’s almost insulting,” Krupicka told me. But it’s just Kilian being Kilian, Krupicka said. “He’s not rubbing it in anyone’s face. He’s truly enjoying being out there in the mountains, and he’s expressing that.”
Update: In the New Yorker, Stephen Kurczy has an update on Jornet and his quest to establish a “fastest known time” on some of the world’s tallest mountains. He’s already bagged Mont Blanc, Matterhorn, and Denali with an Everest attempt forthcoming.
Perhaps the most valuable thing Jornet gained on Aconcagua was a lesson about altitude. This was the highest mountain he had ever raced, and it will inform the next leg of his project, a trip to Everest this spring, and force him to invest more time in acclimatization — a challenge for someone more accustomed to just going. Montaz-Rosset told me that the aim will be to run up and down the northern Tibet side starting from one of the last inhabited places before base camp, Rongbuk Monastery, at sixteen thousand four hundred feet. That route would translate to some twelve thousand five hundred feet of elevation gain — a little less than on Aconcagua. Jornet intends to carry only a backpack, without oxygen or the assistance of fixed ropes or other climbers.
This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.
[My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. He is good at faking a casual conversation, especially on the phone. But if you sit and talk with him for a long time, he gets very anxious. He starts tapping his forehead with his fingers. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he’ll say. You tell him there’s no place we need to be, but 30 seconds later he’ll ask again, “Shouldn’t we be going?”
What happens to memories when they’re collapsed inside time like this? They don’t exactly disappear, they just become impossible to unpack. And so my father, who loved stories so much — who loved to tell them, who loved to hear them — can no longer comprehend them. The structure of any story, after all, is that this happened and then that happened, and he can’t make sense of any sequence.
That is the real hell of this disease. His own identity has become a puzzle he can’t solve.
Objects have stories, too. Puzzles that need to be solved. Like a pair of baseball bats, for instance, that each passed through Roberto Clemente’s hands before they passed through my father’s. One hung on my bedroom wall throughout my childhood. The other is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
These objects never forget, but they never tell their stories, either.
Without a little bit of luck, we’d never hear them.
Or more than a little luck:
My father has lots of old baseball bats given to him by players he worked with over the years. He has Mickey Mantle bats from his years with the Yankees, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker bats from his days with the Pirates. The one I always loved best was an Adirondack model with R CLEMENTE embossed in modest block letters, instead of the usual signature burned into the barrel. On the bottom of the knob, Roberto had written a tiny “37” in ballpoint pen, presumably to indicate its weight: 37 ounces. It also had a series of scrapes around the middle where someone had scratched off the trademark stripe that encircled all Adirondack bats. Former Pirates GM Joe Brown gave my dad this bat several years after Roberto died. For much of my childhood it hung on the wall of my bedroom, on a long rack with about a dozen other game-used bats.
My dad had been working at the Hall of Fame for more than a decade when, in 1993, his old friend Tony Bartirome, a one-time Pirates infielder who had become their longtime trainer, came to Cooperstown for a visit. Tony and his wife went to dinner with my folks and then came back to our house to chat. The only way to go to the first-floor washroom in that house was through my old bedroom, and on a trip there, Tony noticed that Adirondack of Clemente’s hanging on the wall.
Tony carried it into the living room. He said to Dad, “Where did you get this bat?” My dad told him that Joe Brown had given him the bat as a gift, sometime in the late ’70s. “Bill,” Tony said. “This is the bat Roberto used to get his 3,000th hit.”
My father was confused by this. “That’s impossible,” he told Tony. “The day he hit 3,000 I went down to the clubhouse, and Roberto himself handed me the bat he used. I sent it to the Hall of Fame. I walk by it every day.”
“Well,” Tony said. “I have a story to tell you.”
It’s a wonderful story, read the whole thing. Or get the book: the story is excerpted from Guilfoile’s A Drive into the Gap, available here or for the Kindle.
Broadcasters are starting to experiment with using footage taken from cameras worn by in-game referees. Here’s footage from a rugby ref’s vantage point:
Grantland’s 30 for 30 short documentary series continues with a piece on the most famous and valuable baseball card in the world, the T206 Honus Wagner.
Michael Jordan just turned 50 and so Deadspin’s Emma Carmichael asked former Cavs guard Craig Ehlo what it was like to guard Jordan in his prime. Sometimes Jordan would tell Ehlo what he was going to do ahead of time and still score.
Usually, Ron Harper would start on him, then I would come in and go to him, and Ron would go to Scottie Pippen or something like that. I always felt very lucky that Coach Wilkens had that faith in me to guard him. Michael was very competitive when he got between the lines. He was never a bad talker or too arrogant, but it was just like what Jason [Williams] said: He’d tell you. He only did that to me one time, from what I remember. It was his 69-point game, and things were going so well for him that I guess he just went for it. We were running up the court side-by-side and he told me: “Listen man, I’m hitting everything, so I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do this time and see if you can stop it. You know you can’t stop it. You know you can’t stop this. You can’t guard me.
“I’m gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I’m gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I’m gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway.”
If you don’t know anything about football and yet are interested in (or being coerced into) watching the big game this weekend, here are some players’ stories that might make it more interesting for you.
Whether actively experiencing the spectacle or not, there are a few reasons to like the Super Bowl in 2013, besides the fact that the Baltimore Ravens are the first major professional sports franchise, so far, to be named after a 19th century poem. For starters, in a sports year that’s already brought us doping cyclists and fake dead girlfriends, the teams in this year’s contest are welcome standouts. The San Francisco 49ers were the first NFL team to join the “It Gets Better” campaign, and their opponent, the Ravens, has a team captain who is the most outspoken advocate of LGBT rights in the NFL, and whose presence has evolved the once overtly homophobic locker-room culture of his entire team.
I loved this line in reference to Colin Kapernick’s replacement of Alex Smith as the 49ers’ starting QB:
The deliberate, steady bus was replaced by a flaming Apache helicopter flown by a nude Vladimir Putin.
Carlin Isles is one of the world’s fastest men at the 100 meters but that wasn’t good enough to make the US Olympic team. So he looked for other sports in which to make his mark and settled on rugby sevens. The difference in speed between him and the other players on the field is startling.
I saw this video back in December and didn’t think much of it, aside from “wow, that dude is fast”. But on Twitter the other day, Robin Sloan suggested it was Kottke-esque. Now that I’ve watched it again, I think I know what he was getting at.
People in tech talk a lot about innovation and disruption but there’s a lot of hand-waving that happens when you attempt to pinpoint what those things mean. One of the reasons I enjoy following sports — and in particular the sporting world’s outliers (Messi, Jordan, Billy Beane, Rodman, Magnus Carlsen, Vonn, Belichick, Federer, knuckleball pitchers, Barry Sanders, Serena, etc.) — is that you can see innovation and disruption in action, more or less directly. When Carlin Isles takes a pass from one of his teammates and blazes past the other team, it’s clear he’s playing an entirely different game than the other 13 players on the field and profiting handsomely from it…innovation results in disruption.
(Oh, and it’s not that Isles is necessarily any good at rugby…that remains to be seen. But the combination of speed and size that he brings to the game is a disruptive innovation and opposing teams will have to change the way they play when he’s on the field.)
Update: Like I said, it remains to be seen whether or not Isles has a big impact on rugby, but Jonah Lomu was a star rugby player who had a long-lasting influence on the game:
Lomu in his prime was not quite as fast as Isles (10.13s vs 10.8s in the 100 meters) but at 6’5” and 276 lbs, he had a brutal combination of pace and size. (via @dan_connolly)
The thought experiment is to compare players across sports. I.e., are basketball players better at basketball than, say, snooker players are at playing snooker?
Unless you count being tall as one of the things NBA basketball players “do” I would say on the contrary that NBA basketball players must be among the worst at what they do in all of professional sports. The reason is simple: because height is so important in basketball, the NBA is drawing the top talent among a highly selected sub-population: those that are exceptionally tall. The skill distribution of the overall population, focusing on those skills that make a great basketball player like coordination, quickness, agility, accuracy; certainly dominate the distribution of the subpopulation from which the NBA draws its players.
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.
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.)
CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the degenerative brain disease that could dramatically change the way pro football is played in the future (if it’s played at all), can’t be identified in victims until after death. That makes it difficult to prove (or disprove) the connection between pro football, concussions, and death from CTE. But researchers have discovered a possible technique that could diagnose CTE in living patients.
Last year five retired N.F.L. players who were 45 years and older and suffered from mood swings, depression and cognitive problems were given PET, or positron emission tomography, scans. The authors of the study said those scans revealed tau protein deposits in their brains, a signature of C.T.E. While not definitive, the distribution of tau in the retired players was consistent with those found in the autopsies of players who had C.T.E.
If it’s actually possible, this could be huge. Many more players, current and former, can be tested and diagnosed and if CTE was found regularly and consistently, you’d think that insurance companies would flee from the NFL like rats leaving a sinking ship and football would have to adapt (to be more like soccer? flag football?) or die.
“The worst injury I’ve ever had on the field — for my wife and kids, at least, and my mom and dad — was an injury I got against the 49ers,” says Matt Hasselbeck. “Patrick Willis hit me as I was diving for the goal line. He hit me, and twenty minutes later I’m in an ambulance on my way to Stanford Medical. I’d broken a rib on the left and I’d broken a rib on the right. The rib on the right was right next to my aorta, and it was really dangerous for my health. I couldn’t breathe. It was like there was a weight on top of me. It’s a scary thing, because it feels like you’re drowning. I couldn’t breathe at all, and I got up off the field because it was a two-minute situation - I didn’t want the team to have to take a time-out. I tried to run off the field, and when the trainers met me they saw I was, like, purple in the face. And they immediately put me on the ground. Sometimes they’ll put you on the ground to evaluate you and sometimes to give the backup quarterback a chance to get loose. They put me on the ground because I was purple.”
That instinct - the instinct to run when you can’t breathe in order to save your team a time-out - is not one often encountered in civilian life. Indeed, it is one encountered almost exclusively in war, in which people’s lives, rather than simply their livelihoods, are at stake. Now, the NFL is replete with military symbolism, not to mention military pretensions. But the reality of injury is what makes it more than fantasy football, more than professional wrestling, more than an action movie, more than a video game played with moving parts who happen to be human. The reality of injury - and the phantasmagoric world of pain - is what makes it, legitimately, a blood sport. And it is what makes Dr. Yates, the Steelers’ team doctor, define his job simply and bluntly: “My job is to protect players from themselves.”
Former NFL star Jason Taylor was so injured (and yet still playing every week) that for a period of two years, the 6’6” 240-pound linebacker couldn’t lift his kids into bed. So how did he play? Shots to kill the pain and then more shots to kill the pain of the first shots. And so on. Until he almost had to have his leg amputated.
The trainer rushed to Taylor’s house. Taylor thought he was overreacting. The trainer told him they were immediately going to the hospital. A test kit came out. Taylor’s blood pressure was so high that the doctors thought the test kit was faulty. Another test. Same crazy numbers. Doctors demanded immediate surgery. Taylor said absolutely not, that he wanted to call his wife and his agent and the famed Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion. Andrews also recommended surgery, and fast. Taylor said, fine, he’d fly out in owner Daniel Snyder’s private jet in the morning. Andrews said that was fine but that he’d have to cut off Taylor’s leg upon arrival. Taylor thought he was joking. Andrews wasn’t. Compartment syndrome. Muscle bleeds into the cavity, causing nerve damage. Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg. Fans later sent him supportive notes about their own compartment syndrome, many of them in wheelchairs.
Taylor’s reaction?
“I was mad because I had to sit out three weeks,” he says. “I was hot.”
He had seven to nine inches of nerve damage.
“The things we do,” he explains. “Players play. It is who we are. We always think we can overcome.”
At the New Yorker, Reeves Wiedeman reminds us that the NFL is unlikely to change because so much of what happens with injuries is hidden from view.
As we watch a game that we know is dangerous, we soothe ourselves with the idea that these men must be aware of the risks, too; that they are being well compensated to take on those risks; and that, at least when they’re on the field, in front of the cameras, they are living the dream that we all craved as kids, and they’re having fun.
But what we can take from this story, and from the fact that, on the surface, this weekend’s games were filled with such excitement, is the fact that so much of football’s barbarism takes place beyond our vision and behind closed doors.
Troy Aikman moves around the field at Cowboys Stadium as if he owns the place, but in a previous-owner kind of way. He’ll soon call a game here for Fox. People scream his name from the stands as he moves toward midfield to meet a head coach and a PR man. The sportcaster’s partner, Joe Buck, sits up in the booth, preparing. The Cowboys. The Saints. Thanksgiving Day. Here’s the behind-the-scenes look at how Fox’s broadcast of the game happens.
If Aikman — and Buck, too — have any misconceptions about their comedic chops, it’s because, for several months out of the year, they are surrounded by people who laugh too hard at their jokes or anything that even seems like a joke. The next day, Aikman makes the slightest quip about the size of the enormous screen that hovers above the field at Cowboys Stadium — certainly strip-mined ground even a couple of months after the place opened. The reaction he receives would seem improbable even if Louis C.K. had delivered the line.
Pretty interesting. Aikman and Buck are among my favorite football announcers, but they’re not as good as Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth or John Madden and Anyone At All.
Recent analysis by specialists shows that Junior Seau, the former stand-out NFL linebacker who committed suicide last year, suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at the time of his death. CTE is associated with repeated trauma to the head and has been found in many ex-NFL players, including a few that have committed suicide.
“I think it’s important for everyone to know that Junior did indeed suffer from CTE,” Gina Seau said. “It’s important that we take steps to help these players. We certainly don’t want to see anything like this happen again to any of our athletes.”
She said the family was told that Seau’s disease resulted from “a lot of head-to-head collisions over the course of 20 years of playing in the NFL. And that it gradually, you know, developed the deterioration of his brain and his ability to think logically.”
Experts caution that correlation is not causation, but as these incidents mount, the NFL is going to come under increasing pressure to act, causation or no.
Under certain warming forecasts, more than half of the 103 ski resorts in the Northeast will not be able to maintain a 100-day season by 2039, according to a study to be published next year by Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
By then, no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be economically viable, Mr. Scott said. Only 7 of 18 resorts in New Hampshire and 8 of 14 in Maine will be. New York’s 36 ski areas, most of them in the western part of the state, will have shrunk to 9.
The trouble with using statistics to improve the performance of sports teams is the difficulty in choosing what stats to track. Kirk Goldsberry makes that case that we should be tracking a new statistic called the Kobe Assist, which is actually a good kind of missed shot.
Kobe was wide-open; he caught the ball and shot without hesitation. He missed, and despite the great screen by Howard and the great playmaking by Nash, this beautiful basketball sequence was seemingly fruitless. Nash would not get his assist.
However, while Nash was busy playmaking and while Kobe was busy jump shooting, Dwight Howard had taken about seven steps toward his happy place — the restricted area — fought off the gigantic DeMarcus Cousins, and gained optimal rebounding position. Kobe’s miss ricocheted upward from the rim before descending back down into the hands of Howard, who quickly put the ball in the basket; the Staples crowd went wild (in the dark). Did Kobe just miss a shot or did he just inadvertently set up Dwight Howard for an easy score? Are some of Kobe’s missed shots actually good for the Lakers? Are some of his misses kind of like assists?
Wimbledon winner and world No 1 Novak, 25, wants the donkey’s milk cheese to supply a new chain of restaurants in his Serbian homeland. The delicacy, known as pule, is made in Zasavica, Serbia, and is described as similar to Spanish manchego. Donkey milk is said to be very healthy for humans as it has anti-allergen properties and is low fat.
What followed was something like the movie scene where every non-essential part on the plane is removed in order to make it light enough to take off from the short, improvised runway. First to go were any tunes longer than 30 seconds. Then, after the 2009 season in which Kelly became Oregon’s head coach, Wiltshire ditched the flipbook on which the songs were written in favor of hand signals. “By the time I flipped a page,” he says, “it was already too late.” Knowing he had to serve two masters — playing faster while still engaging the audience — Wiltshire hit upon a new idea: theme music. Now whenever one of Oregon’s star players gets a first down, the band plays the first five chords of a recognizable song: the “Hawaii Five-O” theme for quarterback Marcus Mariota (because he’s originally from Hawaii); “Mambo No. 5” for De’Anthony Thomas (because his nickname is “the Black Mamba”); and the “Superman” theme for Kenjon Barner (because he’s really good).
Tim Jahnigen has always followed his heart, whether as a carpenter, a chef, a lyricist or now as an entrepreneur. So in 2006, when he saw a documentary about children in Darfur who found solace playing soccer with balls made out of garbage and string, he was inspired to do something about it.
The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.
“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.”
You can buy one online and for every ball that you buy, one will be donated to a community in need.
Last week, the hosts of NFL Kick Off on ESPN, Trey Wingo, Mark Sclereth, and Tedy Bruschi, jammed as many Princess Bride references as they could into their half hour show. Jack Moore collected them. Genuine guffaw at “There will be no survivors” from around :45.
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