Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
Monday, January 19th, 2009
“Down, down, down!” Trent yelled.
The snow cat had turned back up the slope, its lights pointing in our direction. Trent and I dropped flat into a small depression, our bodies hopefully obscured by the shadows. The snow was cold and hard, but I was wearing plenty of padding. We were at the top of Vail Mountain at night, and it was pitch black save for the snow cats grooming the ski slopes for the next day. We looked around for our third, but Matt’s tall, skinny shape was nowhere to be found.
The lights passed us over. “Go!” Trent cried. In the crunching snow at a full sprint, we covered the last open expanse, then slid baseball style down to the catwalk, fully out of view. Matt reappeared a moment later, clutching a square of folded black plastic to his chest. “I dropped my trash bag,” he explained.
The sledding we were about to do was not smart, legal, or safe. In fact, we were probably the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night. But that’s what made it great.
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Tags: skiing, sledding, vail
Posted in Sports | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
“One day at a time,” Shawn Johnson said through a giant smile. It was the day after she won her gold medal on the balance beam, and Bob Kostas was already asking whether or not she had any plans for the 2012 Olympics in London.
Could it be that a 16 year-old, only 4′9″ tall, is as wise as she is flexible? In her quest for the perfect full backflip with a twist, she somehow also discovered that achievement grows from steadfast, daily determination– and maybe even from enjoying this first great success as the world watches on.
Super-human feats are often preceded by big dreams. These long-term goals convinced a single mom to continue paying for her son, Michael, to take swim lessons and persuaded the Johnsons to double mortgage their house to keep their daughter in the gym. They believed that what was next could be astounding.
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Tags: Gymnastics, Johnson, olympics, phelps, Shawn
Posted in All The World, Career/Life, In The News, Music, Random, Sports | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I was in the bar at the Hyatt hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Both times. My girlfriend Jen and I were driving up from Baltimore to New York and dropping off two other wedding guests along the way. Jen and her friends sat down for some food at the end of the catered dinner, but I scarfed mine and headed for the bar. It was 10:10, and I knew I was going to see history.
This was the 100m butterfly, one of Phelps’ toughest tests. His qualifying time had actually put him 2nd to a swimmer named Cavic, not the 1st that he was used to. 100m means you only go up and back, and after the first 50m he was trailing pretty significantly. I had thought no one else in the bar cared, but as Phelps made the turn the sound started to rise. A pretty significant roar saw Phelps home in the last 50m, where he outtouched Cavic by the pencil width of .01 seconds.
But that was nothing compared to the next night.
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Tags: olympics, phelps, Sports, swimming
Posted in In The News, Pop Culture, Sports | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 11th, 2008
Olympic swimming smells fishy. Every day, someone is breaking a world record in the pool by 1, 2, 3 seconds. Didn’t anyone think it was weird that in so many races, more than one swimmer was breaking the world record? What about in that dramatic US win in the 4×100 freestyle relay, where the world record line was trailing everyone by several body lengths? What are these guys on?
The right question is, what is the pool on. From Outside Online:
To promote the breaking of swimming world records, the Chinese have optimized their Water Cube pool for speed by: (1) Keeping the water at 80.6 degrees, the temperature considered optimal for swimmers; (2) pumping “microbubbles” into the pool to break the water’s surface tension; (3) building the pool to a depth of 42.7 feet, which prevents water-temperature interference; and (4) introducing a ventilation system that whisks chlorine fumes off the surface of the water, allowing the athletes to breathe clean air.
Doesn’t anyone find that disheartening? It’s like throwing a slugger grapefruits so he can break a home run record–sort of takes the fun out of the idea. But I guess “…the world record, set in Beijing in 2008…” will be a common phrase going forward, which is exactly what the Chinese intended. Kind of upsetting, don’t you think?
Tags: olympics, phelps, swimming
Posted in In The News, Sports | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
As much as I hate seeing rampant steroid use in baseball, this Mitchell report is garbage. Some of the accusations, especially against Clemens, are serious and damning, but the idea of picking out forty some odd players for something utterly permitted by the entire culture is dubious at best.
Now lets look at who George J Mitchell is—former Senator from Maine and current member of Boston Red Sox front office management. Yes—I was stunned to hear it as well, a very interesting and underreported fact. This so-called impartial Mitchell Report was conducted by a man on the Red Sox payroll.
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Posted in Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Barry Bonds has been indicted by a federal grand jury for lying about his use of steroids. This is big, folks. If you were one of those people who vaguely heard your baseball fan friends complaining about Bonds’ oversize head but never paid much attention, this is the time to perk up. Now it’s real.
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Posted in In The News, Sports | 10 Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
I’m from Durham, North Carolina—the land of the Duke Blue Devils. I grew up loving college basketball and thinking the Cameron Crazies were the coolest things ever. I even got to go to a few Duke basketball games—my parent’s friends had season tickets and would give us the pair when they were out of town. On these occasions, my dad would alternate taking me and my sister. I went first and promptly reported back to Lizz that it “wasn’t that fun” and was “kind of boring” so that the next time the chance arose, she would let me be “the nice sister” and go in her place. (The cruelest irony of this story is that my sister went on to go to Duke and, yes, she camped out for a full week to get tickets to games. I was a mean older sister.)
I’m getting away from the point. At home in North Carolina several years ago, I noticed a guy with a blue devil tattoo on his arm. It was small—tasteful if you will. I liked it and it never even occurred to me that it was a little extreme to get a sports tattoo. Until the other day when I saw a photo online of a guy with the biggest Boston Red Sox tattoo ever.
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Posted in General, Sports | 6 Comments »
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an epidemic. Yes, bandwagonitis, an obscure but deadly disease that only appears in October, is sweeping the nation. You or someone you know may already have been infected. Symptoms include:
- wearing a Red Sox hat and a Rockies jersey because you “really like them both”
- purchasing baseball paraphernalia after October 1st, 2007
- rooting for the Colorado Rockies
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Posted in Random, Science & Technology, Sports | 3 Comments »
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
Anywhere you find a culture or subculture with passion and vibrancy, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find some place that is the epicenter of that culture. That is the nature of culture: people congregating to share in something important to them. Take religions, for instance. Islam has the Ka’aba, Jews have the Wailing Wall, Mormons have Palmyra, New York. The film culture has Hollywood, theatre culture has Broadway and the West End. And baseball–indeed America in general–we have Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Like many of these places whose history reaches back a hundred or more years, Cooperstown is built on a myth. In 1907 the Mills Commission, formed of ex-US Senators and baseball executives, declared that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown. They declared this despite the only evidence being a single man’s uncorroborated account of the event. But really, they declared it because like all things great and lasting and faith-inspiring, baseball needed a creation myth and a home.
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Posted in Pop Culture, Sports | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I baby-sat twin fourteen-year-old boys at their house in the Hamptons. The only warning their mother gave me was to not let them shoot their potato cannon unless she or their father was around.
Trouble was, that was all they wanted to do.
Have you ever seen a potato cannon (or gun)? It’s made of PVC pipe with a long barrel and an ingniting chamber. The potato is shoved down to the base of the barrel, and then some kind of ignitable material like aerosol is put into the chamber, and the fuse and igniter are lit. It takes a couple hours to make, plus some time to figure out the correct fuel/air mix, plus enough potatoes to feed a small Russian village.
The upshot, of course, is that you get to shoot a potato far. Really, really far.
What is it about guys that they want to make inanimate objects travel great distances?
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Posted in Gender, Science & Technology, Sports | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
I am not an athlete. I was the kid in third grade who got a hold of the soccer ball and scored a goal on my own team. Yup, and I was teased about it for years. I was also the girl who later in junior high and high school tried everything from basketball to field hockey and never knew what the hell way going on. I felt stupid and clumsy and out of my league, which is not to say that I don’t like moving my body. I love to swim. I love to dance. I love to have sex. But sports? Pain? Competition? Not my thing.
Last Sunday, I went to see my friend Molly May in the Nautica Olympic Distance Triathlon. I woke up at 6AM to get there by 6:30AM to see her dive into the Hudson River. Crazy girl. I did this for two reasons. One, I love Molly and wanted to support and witness her do something so badass. Two, I had never seen a marathon or triathlon and was curious. I was curious what made these people different from me.
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Posted in General, Health, Sports, Therapy Thursdays | 5 Comments »
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
I want to like Alex Rodriguez. I really do. After enduring so much criticism over the past few years as a Yankee for not coming up big when it matters, he’s had a season that’s all about coming up big. For Chrissake, he’s on pace to hit 56 home runs and 165 RBI (patently Babe Ruthian numbers). He’s about to reach 500 home runs by the age of 31, and barring injury, he will someday break the home run record that Barry Bonds is about to taint–without the smallest suspicion of steroids hanging over him.
But I can’t like him. I mean, I just can’t. Look at this photo. Look at his mouth closely. You could see it more clearly on TV last night, but–he’s wearing lip gloss.
(Mocking song after the jump.)
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Posted in Music, Sports | 22 Comments »
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Saturday night was the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s 73rd pay-per-view event: “Stacked.” In 2006, the UFC had more pay-per-view buys than all of boxing, and this year should be only bigger. It’s official: the belt has been passed.
About 20 years ago, some guys said, “Hey, in this globalizing age, why are all the martial arts still so fragmented? Why don’t we get top guys from each sport—boxing, muay thai, karate, jiu-jitsu—and face them off against each other to determine which style is the best?” The early UFCs were tough to watch. They’d put a Queensbury rules boxer in there with a kickboxer—who does everything the boxer does, plus kicks—and the boxer would just get destroyed. One martial art did emerge victorious: Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Royce Gracie would get his opponents to the mat, then grapple, twist, and turn until he put their arm or leg in a position to break, or their neck in a position to lose consciousness, and his opponents would “tap out,” admitting defeat.
From these beginnings came the heir to boxing.
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Posted in Sports | Comments Off
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Sports in American society have always been a natural battleground for social issues. Sports lend themselves easily to symbolic conflict: the 1980, fuzzy-cheeked, pull-yourself-up-by-your-skatestraps US Olympic Hockey Team against the Big Bad Russian Menace, Jackie Robinson against the white establishment. But no sport has lent itself as easily to this cultural duking it out than boxing. But boxing is dying or dead in this country, depending on who you ask.
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Posted in Pop Culture, Sports | 5 Comments »
Friday, June 29th, 2007
Had a piece in the Times today about parkour, a form of urban gymnastics. One thing I was surprised about was how all the practitioners were so supportive of each other and not competitive. But my editor wasn’t, saying it was the same in skateboarding, trick biking, etc–all those “extreme” sports.
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Posted in Gender, Relationships, Sports | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
I heard what I consider a very sad thing today– that American kids aren’t balancing on logs, crawling under tree trunks, and running through fields like they used to. Instead, they’re funneled right into athletic teams as early as at the age of five. Although organized sports obviously have a lot of benefits, such as leadership and sportsmanship, they may not teach all the coordination skills (and let’s not forget a certain sense of adventure) that good old-fashioned, unstructured play does.
This comes second hand, but ironically, from a coach at Velocity Sports Performance, a national franchise that trains youth as well as elite athletes to maximize their potential on the field or court. They boast a long list of clients who were prospects for pro football this year and advertise that they will “give you the training to get you in the game!”
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Posted in All The World, Career/Life, Health, Sports | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
So, my man casually mentioned “the draft” the other night, and I panicked. Don’t ask how, after hours of NPR on my road trip, I thought I missed the big news that instead of pulling soldiers out of Iraq we were going to begin drafting every kid who celebrates an eighteenth birthday.
“No, no. The NFL draft.”
“Well why’s it called that?”
“Because they’re drafted by teams to play in the NFL.”
I learned that the word drafted also means paid millions of dollars. The salary cap for each team is set at $109 MILLION this year. “So the average guy sitting on his couch, watching the all-American sport, is pinning his hopes on millionaires playing with millionaires against other millionaires?” Even my favorite Vikings fan admits that this is disturbing if he really thinks about it.
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Posted in All The World, Career/Life, Sports | 14 Comments »
Friday, April 27th, 2007
Last night I settled in to watch the first democratic debate and the Yankee game. Phil Hughes, the top prospect in baseball, was pitching his first game in the majors at the young age of 20. At the same time, the top prospect of the democrats, Barak Obama pitched in his first presidential debate. I flipped back and forth, until I remembered I could watch them both at the same time with that cool little bubble. Here’s my night, in a nutshell:
Hughes gives up two runs in the first inning.
Obama looks uncomfortable. Too abstract.
Yankees offense looks flat. I hope Arod does something.
Hilary criticizes prez for stubbornly refusing to listen to the American people as she stubbornly refuses to listen to the question she’s been asked.
Arod gets a hit. Not a homer.
How would people react if, during conversation, I said “I’m proud of the fact that I…” What would I say? ‘I’m proud of the fact that I was fully potty trained at the age of three.’
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Posted in In The News, Politics, Sports | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
Second semester Junior year of college is pretty much the universal “study abroad” semester at Tufts, my alma mater. My year, nearly half the class did a semester abroad, including my two best male friends (of cliff-jumping fame). My relationship with my then-girlfriend, H, was on the rocks, partially because without my male friends, I was so socially dependent on her. I lived in a basement off campus, and was fairly depressed. But instead of turning to alcohol or marijuana, I became addicted to sports.
Wednesday Night Hockey. Monday Night Football. Sunday Night Baseball. March Madness. Even the freaking NIT. My heart rate rose when I happened upon a West Coast baseball game, which usually went until 1 or 2 am. If a team I actually cared about was playing, I squealed with delight.
The thing is, if men have an emotional language, sports is it.
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Posted in Gender, Relationships, Sports | 19 Comments »
