Diver face
The Telegraph has a great photo gallery of divers’ faces as they compete in diving world championships in Shanghai.
(via ★antimega)
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1896 Olympic marathon
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 hooves
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-hitter
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 experience
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. LeBron
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 rock
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.”
Shaq retires!
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: superwriterfan
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 dribble
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 football
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 miss
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 surfed
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 1984
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 possible
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?
The Frick Collection’s secrets
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 site
…is called Grantland and will feature writing from Chuck Klosterman, Dave Eggers, Malcolm Gladwell, Katie Baker, Molly Lambert, and others.
Parkour school
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 thing
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 test
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 mountains
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 Madrid
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 cricket
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 pitch
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)
The bracketless March Madness bracket
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 suicide
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 retires
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?
Watch as Chuck Patterson skis (not surfs, skis) the Jaws surf break in Maui.
And for some reason, he’s using poles!
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