She's 41 years old, has a two-year-old daughter, and won her first Olympic medal, a relay gold, in 1984. Torres is training to make the 2008 US Olympic team, but it's not some casual attempt to relive the good old days: Torres set the American record in the 50-meter freestyle just a few months ago. As the photo above attests, part of Torres' continuing success is due to her training regimen.
Torres calls resistance stretching her "secret weapon." Bob Cooley, who invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres "from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America." The secret to Torres's speed, Cooley says, is that his technique not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they produce greater power and speed. "What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?" Cooley asks. "They don't spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that's what resistance flexibility is doing for Dara - increasing her biomechanics."
The Olympic Trials are going on right now in Omaha, NE. The women's 50-meter freestyle preliminaries take place on July 5 with the final on July 6, broadcast live on NBC.
Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
In celebration of Euro 2008, public prankster and more-than-fair soccer striker Rémi Gaillard made the following video of himself using the urban landscape as a soccer pitch. Gaillard scores goals into police vans, trash cans, open windows, etc. to the annoyance of his oblivious goalies.
Something about the video seemed familiar and after a bit of searching, I discovered that the same fellow was also responsible for one of my favorite links from a few years ago, Rocky Recreated. There are tons of his videos on YouTube, most of them centered on Gaillard's brand of graffiti-esque performance art. I can't condone some of his actions but he's certainly amusing to watch. (via memeticians)
John Gruber, the sorest winner on the web when it comes to sports or Apple, points out that I was wrong in my prediction that the Lakers would win the NBA Finals this year. I didn't actually care about the series either way...but after rooting for him in Minnesota for all those years, it sure is great to see Kevin Garnett win a championship.
I was also wrong about Paul Pierce. I never liked him as a player; thought he was soft, lazy, & petulant, settled for the outside shot too much, and just didn't have what it took to be his team's star player. He's put all that behind him; in this series, Pierce showed that he's definitely one of the top players in the league, deserving of his accolades. Count me among the number of Paul Pierce fans.
"The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes another individual making a similar action." In other words, these peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.
This suggests that when I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk, a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself, am touching the rim. And when he hits a three pointer, my mirror neurons light up as I've just made the crucial shot. They are what bind me to the game, breaking down that 4th wall separating fan from player. I'm not upset because my team lost: I'm upset because it literally feels like I lost, as if I had been on the court.
The NBA Finals start tonight, pitting the LA Lakers against the Boston Celtics. Despite having finished with the best regular season record in the league, the Celtics find themselves underdogs against the Lakers, who ripped through the tough Western conference bracket with little difficulty. I'm going with the majority on this one: Lakers in six games (possibly even five) and continued heartbreak for New England fans after the high of the Red Sox's second World Series victory last season.
Every year or so, the same question is asked: how is the Moneyball strategy working out for the Oakland A's. This year's answer is: pretty damn good.
Additions like [Frank] Thomas, motivated by this incremental approach, help explain why the A's have won so many games in recent years even though they've consistently traded away or declined to re-sign their top players (Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, etc.), who demand top dollar--and largely on the basis of past performance. In short, Beane has bought low and sold high repeatedly and systematically, and as a result the A's have won more games this decade than every team in the league except the Yankees (whose team payroll is routinely two-to-four times larger than Oakland's).
The Griffey card was the perfect piece of memorabilia at the perfect time. The number the card was given only furthered the prospect of his cardboard IPO. Junior was chosen to be card No. 1 by an Upper Deck employee named Tom Geideman, a college student known for his keen eye for talent. Geideman earned his rep by consistently clueing in the founders of The Upper Deck, the card shop where the business was hatched, on which players would be future stars. Geideman took the task of naming the player for the first card very seriously. Using an issue of Baseball America as his guide, Geideman knew that card No. 1 would belong to Gregg Jefferies, Sandy Alomar Jr., Gary Sheffield, or a long-shot candidate, the phenom they called "The Kid." It's probably the most thinking Geideman ever did compiling a checklist, save for the 1992 Upper Deck set when he assigned numbers that ended in 69 to players with porn-star-sounding names. (Dick Schofield at No. 269, Heathcliff Slocumb at No. 569, and Dickie Thon at No. 769.)
I still remember when I got my one and only "Griffey card" (as everyone called it then). My friend Derek and I ventured out in a downpour in response to a call from Al, the owner of our small town's only card shop. Al ran his shop out of his mother's garage; he was maybe 30 years old at the time, still lived with his mom, and was one of the nicest, most generous people I've ever met. He had half a box of Upper Deck packs that he'd procured from who knows where. Derek and I bought the lot at a slight markup over retail and opened them right there in the cold garage. We both got a Griffey that night; I've still got mine sheathed in a hard plastic case.
When I think back on how precious those cards were to me then and consider my current purchasing power relative to my 16-year-old self, I feel a giddy power in the realization that if I wanted to, I could go out right now and buy 10 or 20 Griffey cards. Gah, where's that eBay login info?
Over at Stingy Kids, Adriana has a thoughtful and link-filled post about South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius is a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber blades in place of his lower legs; here's a video of him running in a 400m race. Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Pistorius can compete for a spot in the Beijing Olympics against "able-bodied" athletes, which overturned a previous ruling that he could not compete because his blades give him a mechanical advantage.
What's clear is that the seemingly politically correct replacement of "disabled" with "differently abled" is not only warranted but perhaps doesn't go far enough. How about "super abled" or "superbly abled"? Lengthen or add a bit more spring to those blades and Pistorius may win every race handily and take first in the high jump to boot.
Pistorius is not the first athlete with super abilities. Steroids and HGH are outlawed in most sports because it's felt they give too much advantage. Baseball pitchers routinely opt for something called Tommy John surgery, many athletes get laser eye surgery to improve their vision, and many more potential augmentation schemes are right around the corner. And lest you think this is just about sports, maybe the guy in the next cubicle over is regularly taking Provigil to improve his memory, concentration, and his chances at that promotion you wanted.
Richardson's title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0). On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).
Picking a subject from his upcoming book, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the difficulty in hiring people in the increasingly complex thought-based contemporary workplace. Specifically that we're using a collection of antiquated tools to evaluate potential employees, creating what he calls "mismatch problems" in the workplace, when the critera for evaluating job candidates is out of step with the demands of the job.
To illustrate his point, Gladwell talked about sports combines, events that professional sports leagues hold for scouts to evaluate potential draftees based on a battery of physical, psychological, and intelligence tests. What he found, a result that echoes what Michael Lewis talks about in Moneyball, is that sports combines are a poor way to determine how well an athlete will eventually perform as a member of their eventual team. One striking example he gave is the intelligence test they give to NFL quarterbacks. Two of the test's all-time worst performers were Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Famers both.
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
When Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hit her first career home run in one of the last games of the softball season, something odd happened. She missed the bag at first and when she doubled back to touch it, her knee gave out. Her teammates were unable to help her around the bases so it looked like her only career home run would turn into a single. Then a member of the other team, a senior with knee problems of her own, said:
Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance chart for the 2008 MLB season that compares team payrolls with winning percentage. The entire payroll of the Florida Marlins appears to be less than what Jason Giambi and A-Rod *each* made last year.
This season, baseball managers are being a bit more experimental in how they construct their batting and pitching lineups. For instance, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers started relief pitchers in games that they suspected might be shortened by rain in order to save the scheduled starter for the next game. The Braves shifted their pitcher to the outfield for one at-bat then brought him back to the mound for the next one.
The article is also notable for this quote from an Angels spokesperson, who said that Angels star Vladimir Guerrero is "somebody who's not affected by things". !!
MLB tracks every pitch thrown in a game using a system called PITCHf/x. You may have seen this system in action during televised games; it's used to show the viewer where the pitch was located when it crossed the plate relative to the strike zone. On his baseball statistics blog, Josh Kalk takes these stats and lets you slice and dice them however you want.
One of the most interesting statistics measured is the break of a pitch...how much up-and-down and side-to-side motion a pitched ball goes through after leaving the pitcher's hand. The break demonstrates why the knuckleball is such a difficult pitch to hit, particularly when used in conjunction with other pitch types. Here's a graph showing the break on knuckleballer Tim Wakefield's pitches so far this season:
The ball is all over the place...the hitter doesn't know where it's going. Compare that to the break on the three different pitches thrown by fellow Red Sox player Daisuke Matsuzaka:
Now take a look at the graphs on the player cards for Wakefield and Matsuzaka. Wakefield's pitches also have a wider range of velocities...Matsuzaka's pitches range in speed from about 77 to 95 mph while Wakefield's pitches range from 65 to 95 mph. And the graphs don't even account for the multiple breaks that a knuckleball can make during a single pitch. The uncertainties of speed and break of a knuckleballer's pitches combine to create a lot of trouble for batters...they neither know where the ball's going nor when it's going to arrive. (thx, fred)
P.S. So why is Wakefield not as effective as many other major league pitchers (his career stats aren't that impressive), none of whom throw the knuckleball? One guess is that sometimes the knuckleball doesn't break and essentially becomes a 60-65 mph meatball right down the middle of the plate, a pitch any decent hitter can put anywhere he wants.
Update: I thought that Wakefield's upper velocity range was a little high. I'm getting a lot of feedback saying that Wakefield's fastball is in the low 80s, not the mid-90s. Looks like we've got some screwy data here.
Also, another reason why knuckleballers are of limited effectiveness: it's difficult to throw a strike on command, which can be a problem when you're behind in the count and you have to throw your 80 mph fastball for a strike. (thx, jonathan & steve)
Few pitchers are able to throw the knuckler, giving those who can a cult-like status. It generally requires very large fingers. As Hall of Famer Willie Stargell explained it, "Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor's mailbox".
Yankees third baseman Wade Boggs once used the knuckleball to retire the side in an inning during a rare appearance on the mound. When he's got his stuff working, I love watching knuckleballer Tim Wakefield pitch.
A list of the top one articles by Neal Pollack about how sportswriters should stop writing about the NBA MVP race and, oh yeah, lists of stuff are dumb:
Sportswriters and pundits, on the other hand, are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That's because they make up the Electoral College. When they're debating who's going to win the award, they're not really talking about who they think the best player is; they're talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It's the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.
First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.
Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.
The comments are entertaining as well; the level of erudition is higher than most blog comment threads, but the insults and arguments are still there.
Rather than returning to their original proportions, the muscles of the steroid users who'd stopped taking the drug looked remarkably similar to those of the subjects who were still using. They also had larger muscle fibers and more growth-inducing "myonuclei" in their muscle cells than the nonsteroid users.
Just got around to reading Ben McGrath's New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader.
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").
But maybe not so improbably...Dykstra has a canny sense for business:
Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because "it was a business that couldn't be replaced by a computer chip." He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. "You get the shit out of the ground," he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, "or the shit made in the laboratory that's the perfect lubricant" (Syntec). "Meaning, it's either A or B. It's not about the oil. It's about the people. They got confused." He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee ("the good kind"), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.
One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here's a listing from the article:
The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be "major league," he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of ".300 hitters," and lining up sponsors to match.
Dykstra's business card gives an address for the "headquarters" of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as "big league-like, top five addresses in the world."
Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. "You worked for Esquire and In Style," he said, delivering a pep talk. "That's called the big leagues. It's like in baseball. You can't go above the major leagues. There's not another league. We're teeing it up high, dude."
He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks ("Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers") with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.
"My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting," he wrote. "I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging."
Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. "Do you know the studies and what they've proven?" he asked. "You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It's like the one-one count." The one-one count is another of Dykstra's baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he's in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life's count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.
Speaking of the Yankees, Derek Jeter always seems to get a lot of credit for those four World Series victories in five years but a quick look at the OBP stats for those years shows that Bernie Williams was the engine driving that offense. Jeter's a little overrated maybe?
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
Rather than think about the mechanical details of their swing, [expert] golfers should focus on general aspects of their intended movement, or what psychologists call a "holistic cue word". For instance, instead of contemplating things like the precise position of the wrist or elbow, they should focus on descriptive adjectives like "smooth" or "balanced". An experimental trial demonstrated that professional golfers who used these "holistic cues" did far better than golfers who consciously tried to control their stroke.
Related: a reader recommended George Leonard's Mastery as a good read about deliberate practice. (thx, jd)
Update: Another recommendation: Inner Tennis. kottke.org reader Stuart says:
Reading this book a couple of years ago quite honestly transformed my tennis game: I am good at deliberate practice, which had allowed me to become technically very sound, but until then I was completely unable to consciously enter a state of relaxed concentration and execute in a match situation: I was a classic "over thinker". Gallwey's book treats relaxed concentration as a skill to be deliberately practiced, and gives an approach to do so. Highly recommended, and fascinating for any (thoughtful) sportsman.
Stephen Dubner wrote a short article on one of my favorite topics of the recent past: deliberate practice.
This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:
1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
Around All-Star time a couple of weeks ago, Nike released a shoe called the Nike Trash Talk, "the first Nike performance basketball sneaker completely produced from manufacturing waste". The shoe, worn by Steve Nash in a recent game, looks a bit like Frankenstein's monster with all the exposed stitching; it's a beautiful shoe and I want a pair. The problem is that it's one of those limited edition deals...which means they're already all sold out and sitting on the shelves of sneaker collectors next to hundreds of other boxes of shoes that will never be worn. I looked on eBay and found two pair but not in my size. What are my chances of getting a pair of these at approximately retail price? I'm not looking for a collectors item...I just want to wear them!
a high-scoring scheme featuring four perimeter players and a host of innovations. Unlike Knight's classic motion offense (which is based on screens) or Pete Carril's Princeton-style offense (which is based on cuts), Walberg's attack was founded on dribble penetration. To Calipari, at least, it embodied two wholly unconventional notions. One, there were no screens, the better to create spacing for drives. Two, the post man ran to the weak side of the lane (instead of the ball side), leaving the ball handler an open driving path to the basket.
On average, suboptimal play-calling decisions cost each team .85 wins over the course of the season.
In particular, the world champion Giants should have won another game had they called the right plays at the right times. ZEUS also analyzed play calling in "hyper-critical" situations (those fourth-down decisions with five or fewer yards needed for the first down) and found that on average, teams made the wrong calls more than 50% of the time. Here's an interview on the results with the guys behind ZEUS.
At 1 o'clock on a bright October afternoon, I'm standing in a convenience store parking lot five miles east of Martinsville, Va. In the 24 hours before the green flag drops on the Subway 500, I need to find a ride to the speedway and a $75 ticket to the sold-out race. Problem is, all I have on me is $20, a cell phone and a camcorder. And I'm not allowed to use any media connections to get into the race-or so much as mention the letters ESPN (at least not in that order).
Thus, I can watch Roger Clemens striking out 15 Mariners in a brilliant one-hitter and place his frame right on top of Don Larsen pitching his perfect game (27 Bums up, 27 Bums down) in 1956. And I can admire the grace of Bernie Williams in center field, while my teenage memories see Mantle's intensity, and my first impressions of childhood recall DiMaggio's elegance, in exactly the same spot. I can then place all three images upon the foundation of my father's stories of DiMaggio as a rookie in the 1936 Series, and my grandfather Papa Joe's tales of Babe Ruth in the first three New York Series of 1921-1923.
Dueling Kickoffs: To begin overtimes, each team will kick off to each other on consecutive plays. The team that advances the ball furthest will have possession at the point on the field where the ball was advanced. Sudden death is preserved.
But if they lose -- especially if they lose late -- the New England Patriots will be the most memorable collection of individuals in the history of pro football. They will prove that nothing in this world is guaranteed, that past returns do not guarantee future results, that failure is what ultimately defines us and that Gisele will probably date a bunch of other dudes in her life, because man is eternally fallible.
Jill Lepore would likely agree with Klosterman. In her recent New Yorker article on Benjamin Franklin (the patron saint of bloggers, BTW), she argues that he failed to follow many of his aphoristic writings and in doing so became more interesting.
He carried with him a little book in which he kept track, day by day, of whether he had lived according to thirteen virtues, including Silence, which he hoped to cultivate "to break a Habit I was getting into of Prattling, Punning and Joking." What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.
It's also worth noting that, per Aristotle and Shakespeare, the hero in a tragedy always has a fatal flaw; it's what makes him a hero and the story worth listening to.
Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well -- about an extra stroke per tournament -- when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, "exempt" players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger's presence doesn't mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th-there's not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger's hot streaks, when his competitors' prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors' scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger's well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors' scores were unaffected by Tiger's presence.
Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer identity are revealed, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. However, in 2001, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. Following this policy change, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers, a pattern not observed in a very similar journal that provides reviewers with author information. No negative effects could be identified, suggesting that double-blind review should be considered by other journals.
In the journal Animal Behaviour, biologist Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania examines squirrels' caching of nuts. While the furry-tailed creatures made a show of digging a hole in the ground and covering it with dirt and leaves when watched, one time out of five they were faking and nothing was buried.
The squirrels' deception increased after their nut caches were raided.
Art Grand Slam would be the perfect name for a web site showcasing the tennis-related art of Martina Navratilova. And so it is.
Almost 20 years since her last grand slam singles title, Martina Navratilova is back in action on the circuit -- only this time she is turning tennis strokes into brush strokes as she helps to create a new form of contemporary art.
In its crudest and, perhaps, most joyful expression, it involves the player hitting paint-covered tennis balls at a canvas, usually marked with court lines and prepared to resemble a playing surface: clay, grass or artificial.
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it's no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins', don't you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I'd only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed's a bit hard on Boston here...there's some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
In their ongoing quest to be the world's greatest sports website—heck, the world's greatest anything website—The Wizznutzz "found" some "never-before-seen personal letters from Pres. Richard Nixon written to Kevin Loughery shortly after the Washington Bullets lost in the 1971 Finals to the Bucks." There's a long meditative section on watching crows in a field in winter that is particularly stellar.
After committing to a wave, the surfer must confront the sheer tonnage of hurtling water and hit a 10-foot-wide slot of the best spot to launch a ride with pinpoint timing, a maneuver that Washburn has described as akin to "trying to place a Dixie cup on the horn of a charging rhino."
Oher was named to the all-Southeastern Conference first team after the season and is considered one of the top offensive linemen prospects in the country. He has already shown the promise scouts predicted when he was a homeless 16-year-old who didn't know how to play football.
For the first time since 1982, an NBA team has won a game protest and the next time the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat meet, they'll replay the final 51.9 seconds of the disputed game before playing the scheduled full game.
With a second major storm bearing down, four of the most experienced big-wave surfers in the world launched a boat and two Jet Skis toward Cortes Bank, an underwater mountain range whose tallest peak rises 4,000 feet from the ocean floor to within about four feet of the surface. The perilous spot, about 100 miles off the coast of Southern California, had been surfed only a handful of times in the past decade. With just the right conditions, its shallow waters turn huge ocean swells into giant, perfect breaking waves.
Cortes Bank veteran Mike Parsons returned from the voyage absolutely certain that larger sea monsters are awaiting around the spooky open-ocean shoal. "It's getting closer and closer now...I guarantee you there will be a 100-foot-wave ridden out there," said Parsons. "For sure. There were several big peaks that jumped up at the top of the reef outside of us that could not have been too far off that size. If you put yourself in the right place at the right time, it will happen. It's only a matter of time now."
For photos and a nice audio feature with the crew that took the trip out there, head on over to Surfline.
The legend of touching the top of the backboard has gone on for years, and it has been excitedly attributed to so many different players that it's commonly assumed any number of guys in the NBA can do it. But in a sport where any individual achievement is promoted ad nauseam, we've never seen any proof of it actually being done.
Burton is offering a $5000 prize for the best snowboarding video taken at one of the three remaining US ski areas (Alta, Taos, Deer Valley, Mad River Glen) that don't allow snowboarding. The intro video is the perfect explanation for why these four areas don't allow snowboards.
Nurture is really kicking ass these days....first the IQ thing and now this.
The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found. Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.
That suggests, a la Moneyball, that buying horses with so-so lineages and training them really well could make for a better return on investment.
In light of the Mitchell Report, Yanksfan vs Soxfan has proposed a record book annotation system so that sports fans can tell which records were set under the influence of which substances. The asterisk is for straight-up steroids and some of the other marks are as follows:
! = Amphetamines $ = Gambling || = Cocaine ~ = Alcohol . = Dead ball era ∞ = Wore glasses † = Crazy religious freak X = General douchebag
New York's pigeon clubs, loosely organized by geography and custom, are a cross between an urban sportsman's lodge and a time capsule of immigrant, working-class New York. Even as recently as a generation back, fleets of racing pigeons swirled above New York like pulsing gray clouds, but the numbers of racers and birds have thinned, with not enough new fliers to replace the old.
The NFL, in their infinitesimal wisdom and utilizing their stupid scheduling/blackout policy, has ensured that the best game of the weekend (Steelers vs. Patriots) will not be shown on TV in the New York City area. We get the hapless Jets instead...a team that not even Jets fans care about at this point in their 3-9 season. Our cable provider doesn't carry any NFL stations and we don't really want to trek out to a sports bar with the kiddo. Are there any other options? An illicit online broadcast? Anything?
Update: We ended up watching the game online -- poor quality, dropped frames, and all. Better than braving the rain and sports bar. (thx to everyone who wrote in, especially kunal)
There is still some faint resistance to the notion that a kicker could ever really do anything great. Brett Favre can throw 10 more game-ending interceptions and fans will still cherish his moments of glory. Reggie Bush may fumble away a championship and still end up being known for the best things he ever does. Even offensive linemen whose names no one remembers are permitted to end their days basking in the reflected glory of having been on the field. Kickers alone are required to make their own cases.
Maybe soccer goalies can identify with NFL kickers?
My first and second years in the N.B.A., I used to get really nervous in a tight game. But now I wait for that moment when things are really close -- that's what I really love. Having the ball in my hands and the responsibility makes me feel calm and open. Not to have that, not to get to that point in a game, would feel really...really confining.
I also liked how he involved not-so-good players on his college team:
If he had a guy on the right wing in transition who he knew couldn't shoot the ball, he'd throw a pass that was just good enough to include the guy in the fast break, but just bad enough that the guy wasn't in a position to get off a shot and would have to pass the ball back.
"Babe" Ruth, a youngster, opposed the Giants, who made nine hits off him. Four double plays, all started by Claude Derrick, who handled twelve outs of the thirteen chances, kept the Giants from scoring more runs.
YvS and Soccer Dad also found a series that the Times did on another youngster, Manny Ramirez, back when Manny being Manny meant hitting .650 in his senior year in high school.
I'm no Yankees fan, but I got a little sad reading this article about Joe Torre's possible departure from the team after 12 years. It seems like the individual leader gets too much credit for successes and is assigned too much blame for failures these days. Surely the team's poor hitting and pitching was a big contributing factor that Torre couldn't do much about?
(Last night's game was great, BTW. The way those fans almost willed the Yankees back into the game while Cleveland held fast was fascinating to watch.)
As part of this weekend's New Yorker Festival, a parkour demonstration was held at Javits Plaza. Before the demonstration, Alex Wilkinson talked with David Belle, the inventor of parkour and the subject of Wilkinson's NYer article about parkour from April. In the interview and the Q&A that followed the demonstration, Belle explained that parkour is not about competition or showing off or being reckless. It's a test of self, of control, of deliberate practice. The journey is the point, not the sometimes spectacular results.
The demonstration consisted of a group of about 20-30 parkour practitioners, beginners and experts alike from all over the country. It seemed as though they included anyone with parkour experience who showed up and wanted to participate, and instead of a highly polished display of high skill (which is what I think the audience might have been expecting), we were treated to a more authenic look at the sport. The first five minutes were taken up with calisthenics and stretching in preparation of the jumps and vaults to come. After warming up properly, they began running through the course, each participant picking his way through the course according to desire and ability.
Experimentation was the rule of the day, not performance. With each pass, you could see the group learning the particulars of the course, where the good holds were, finding smoother combinations, and, much of the time, trying and failing. And then trying again until they got it. There was a single woman participant, one of several beginners in the group. When she had some trouble with an obstacle, Belle and his "lieutenant" stopped to show her some moves, a moment that revealed more about parkour than Belle's jumpacross a ten-foot gap twenty feet off the ground. Belle himself didn't do too much during the performance -- a couple of high jumps -- and had to be coaxed during the Q&A to perform one last big move for the audience. He shrugged off the applause and attention as he back-flipped down to the concrete, knowing that the true parkour had taken place earlier.
I love the idea of conservation of concentration conveyed in this piece about Roger Federer, that we've got only so much intense focus to go around and successful athletes like Federer are really good at saving it up for the big moments.
A couple of times during press conferences, I noticed something kind of interesting about Roger Federer. I'll get to it in a minute, but let me describe the scene first. Players enter Interview Room One, where all of the Rajah's pressers take place, at the corner diagonally opposite from where the players enter. The players come in and turn right, to take their seat behind the microphone on the little dais or stage. Most players look to their left as they enter, just gauging the room and who is in it and how full it is. Federer, though, always keeps his head down and eyes averted, until he sits and begins to answer questions, when he makes direct eye contact with each questioner.
Anyway, a couple of times during his press conferences, someone's cell phone went off, each time with an annoyingly loud ring tone. Both times, everyone turned, first to locate and then to glare at the culprit: have you no shame? And both times, I noticed, Roger kept his eyes locked on his interlocutor, never glancing in the direction of the phone. I'm sure he was conscious, on one level, that there was an interruption occurring, but he had decided to ignore it. Not even a darting of the eyes towards the irritant. Both coming in the room with his head down and refusing to allow himself to be distracted or interrupted seemed to convey the same thing: he chooses to focus selectively, and focuses intensely once he does.
It was difficult to keep the quoting down to those two paragraphs...just go read the whole thing. (And of course, this ties into my continuing fascination with relaxed concentration and the battle with the self as the true struggle in life.)
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most of them related to sports. #1 is Secretariat's 31-length victory at Belmont, the footage of which is well worth a look if you haven't seen it. That horse so totally pours it on down the stretch that it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. (thx, david)
This is interesting. The PGA offers a non-traditional pension plan for their players that depends on how they perform throughout their careers. Tiger Woods, who performs quite well, could be eligible for almost $1 billion for his retirement if he keeps playing and winning. Billion. Wow.
A rare positive review from Speak Up of the new London 2012 that everyone else in the world seems to hate. "I believe, despite any ensuing boo's, that this is some of the most innovative and daring identity work we have seen in this new millennium, and the lack of cheesy and imagination-impairing gradients gives me hope that identity work can still be resurrected on a larger scale."
Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently (previous installment is here):
My short post on Nina Planck's reaction to the recent "death by veganism", as she calls it, of a baby boy is a good reminder that I don't always agree with the things I link to. My only criteria for posting a link is that it's interesting, whether I think it's right or wrong or am still trying to form an opinion about it. Anyway, I got lots of mail about this one, much of it that said that the parents' veganism was beside the point -- which the prosecutors and jury in the subsequent criminal case agreed with (thx, matt) -- and that a headline like "Death By Stupidity" was probably more appropriate. After all, you don't see "Death by Omnivorism" headlines every time a baby with a more traditional diet dies of starvation.
Debra from Culiblog pointed out that contrary to Planck's assertion that "there are no vegan societies", the Jainists practice vegetarianism and veganism. On the other side of the aisle, meat fan Michael Ruhlman chastised Planck for going too easy on vegans, saying that "Veganism is a colossal arrogance, a refusal to admit to our own nature, a denial of our humanity. Sometimes it kills people. And it's not very much fun, besides." You can imagine the discussion that generated...although it was nothing like the 300+ comment thread on MetaFilter.
My opinion of Cars improved with a second viewing.
jkottke: Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons? ELLEgirlBuddy: do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons? that's a tough choice. jkottke: yes, to celebrate or merely recognize. that is a toughie. ELLEgirlBuddy: yes to celebrate or merely recognize that is a toughie? i dunno. jkottke: you seem like an actual 13 year old girl. ELLEgirlBuddy: i haven't really made a decision 'bout that. jkottke: growing up is tough, isn't it? ELLEgirlBuddy: i dunno.
