Living “outside the wire” meant being responsible for our own safety. Avoiding patterns was one of our core principles. We didn’t plan far in advance, and we didn’t advertise our movements ahead of time. Ten consecutive days of practice would constitute an unmistakable pattern. Therefore Rory and I decided to implement an experimental scheduling strategy. More…
Perhaps watching the Games at home was the best way to experience their Disneyland of nonthreatening passion, a guarded environment in which nothing unusual or unexpected was allowed to occur. The predictability of this world bled into the events themselves: we felt cheated when athletes didn’t conform to the narrative that had long been established for them. More…
Back on the big screen, sparkling two-subpixel green was the backdrop for the image of Roger Federer, sweeping his right hand through his princely hair, as he waited to return serve against the sixty-eighth ranked player in the world, Fabio Fognini. On the hillside, several hundred people with tickets to the grounds, but not this match, had assembled to watch him. More…
As a civilian, Balotelli is outlandish. Last year, his white Maserati was impounded twenty-seven times, accumulating £10,000 worth of parking tickets. He also accidentally set his house on fire with firecrackers, was fined a week’s wages for throwing darts at a teammate, and kept turning up unannounced in strange places, including a women’s prison in Brescia (“just fancied having a look”). More…
Slashing is the act of a player swinging his stick at an opponent. Any forceful or powerful chop with the stick on an opponent’s body, the opponent’s stick, or on or near the opponent’s hands that, in the judgment of the Referee, is not an attempt to play the puck, shall be penalized as slashing. More…
The Rangers do it differently. They physically insert themselves between the defenseman and the boards, and set up shop. The defenseman cross-checks them in the back repeatedly, with impunity. The Rangers dig and grind along the boards until someone can pop open to the front of the net. It’s a labor-intensive process, but the Rangers finally undertook to do it, and it was a sight to behold. It was almost enough. More…
Ovechkin is the oddest player going. On highlight reels he is always scoring acrobatic goals—goals while flinging himself through the air, goals from his knees, goals from his back—but in actual games what you see is that he’s out of control. Ovechkin is graceless. His great rival, Sidney Crosby, when he skates, looks like he’s barely touching the ice. Ovechkin looks like he’s trying to dig a hole in it. More…
The champions of baseball’s offseason were the Miami (née Florida) Marlins, who not only got a hip alliterative name and fresh uniforms, but also moved into space-age Marlins Park this week. To complete the makeover, they made a host of pricey upgrades, adding the twin loose cannons of Chicago, manager Ozzie Guillen and pitcher Carlos Zambrano. More…
The Cycle Messenger World Championships are usually quite a lo-fi affair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from Mad Max. Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns as long as they’re kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones they carried bandoleer style across their chests. More…
The thing about losing the Super Bowl is that it’s as much of an event, almost, as winning one. The number of articles written is similar; there is the same amount of anticipatory chatter, the same level of plans made with friends. The difference is just that the season is, if not a failure, exactly, then even more uniquely unsuccessful. Like a bad novel. More…
The last time the Giants faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Manning was a figure of frustration for Giants fans. During the 2007 regular season, he’d led the league in interceptions, despite the advantage of a strong running game, and New Yorkers were aching to run the whiny, flakey quarterback out of town. Then he led the Giants on an improbable playoff run. More…
Joe Paterno, football coach, liked to talk about the Aeneid. He gave speeches about heroism and the Aeneid as early as the 1970s. It’s a central motif of his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, and as recently as 2007, Paterno told GQ that the Aeneid has “probably had as much influence on me as anything in my life.” More…
At long last, we’ve gotten from Tiger what, according to nothing but the economy of grace, I think he owed us all along: a little bit of that other self, the one that can’t be bought or sold but only given. It’s not simply that we know certain sordid details of his preferred sexual perversions but also, for example, that he is perhaps more than a little lonely. More…
Tyson received the traditions of boxing in two ways: by day, in the light of the gym, through the grueling regimen of his trainers, and at night, sitting alone in the dark, watching old boxing films. Every night, reel after reel of images, projected onto a white bedsheet in his room, washed over the young Tyson. These silent, dancing forms followed him into the world of sleep. More…
I’ve spent these Stanley Cup Playoffs wondering why I prefer watching Tim Thomas tend goal to pretty much everything else on the ice. The answer would seem obvious to anyone who’s watched the man: he tends goal like no one taught him how. Which, as it turns out, is true: Thomas went to his first goaltending school during the 2004–05 NHL lockout. More…
What we’ve seen in the playoffs so far this year is the end of one era and the beginning of another. In the summer of 2007 the Boston Celtics built their team around a core of all-stars—Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen—and the next season they won a championship. It’s been three years, but the franchise model inaugurated in Boston has slowly begun to take effect. More…
Maurice Richard, the Canadiens, the Nordiques, and Mario Lemieux all helped establish their province’s distinctive tradition. They also have shown that Quebeckers can be ambitious and daring, that they are not the dispossessed people of “Canadien Errant,” or “Lost Canadian,” Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s famous poem. Through hockey, Quebeckers have been able to demonstrate that they truly belong to the continent. More…
After Steve Nash edged out Shaquille O’Neal, also known as the Big Aristotle, for this season’s MVP award, the media briefly engaged the typically hush-hush question of race, as several columnists and even an on-air TV analyst (Rex Chapman) wondered aloud whether Nash’s whiteness might not have had something to do with his defeat of Shaq. More…
Before he became famous for headbutting, Zinadine Zidane was actually known for his composure. At Bordeaux, Juventus, and Real Madrid, his hallmarks as a midfielder were Spartan efficiency of movement, incisive passing, and magnetic control of the ball in tight circumstances. Unlike Pele or Maradona and Chrisiano Ronaldo, Zidane wasn’t particularly flashy. More…
Solidarity is a hard case to make when so many high-profile players make so much money. It becomes easier, however, when we remember that the average career for an NFL player is three-and-a-half years, and that most will be dealing with the effects for a lifetime. It’s easier still when we consider the many billion dollar supplementary economy of working men and women. More…
He was not allowed to have girls stay over. He played street hockey in the driveway with Lemieux’s children and ate dinner with them every night. If he performed well following the meal, Lemieux’s wife would make it again the next day. Crosby kept his paychecks in his sock drawer. He signed endorsement deals with Reebok, Gatorade, and Dempster’s, which makes white bread. More…
When their coaches sense this rhythm allows it, Crosby and Ovechkin will join the game. They will spend much of their ice time along the boards or away from the puck, working within the play as others do. But every fourth shift or so, Crosby and Ovechkin will find chances to play in opposition to the game, as ghosts in the machine, with fugitive grace that outside of hockey’s scheme would be impossible to imagine, much less appreciate. More…
What brought me to the Whineys that night was pure desperation—the hope of catching a glimpse, in my fellow unhonored attendees, of something that remained catastrophically obscure to me in myself. For much of the preceding eleven years, I had been laid out behind drawn blinds, listening to sportstalk radio as if to the voices of angels, and I was looking for an end to this. More…
LeBron had been a great high school basketball player in Akron and had skipped college to go to the NBA. But he had not yet played a single game, and yet there he was, reclined on a gold and red velvet throne, draped with a white fur cape, like the pelt of the endangered spotted snow leopard, resplendently bejeweled and sporting a glitzy sash of a vaguely bellicose nature. More…
On the one hand I feel like I should root against Mexico because they are our main soccer rival and every time the US plays in Mexico the Mexican fans throw stuff at the American players. On the other hand, they mainly throw stuff at Landon Donovan, who once peed on a Mexican field. More…
Patrick Kane is a wiry, sometimes lazy winger whose game is anxiety. He’s always stopping short on the wing and daring someone to smush him against the glass, or he’s dangling the puck far in front of his feet and inviting a defender to paw at it—he loves to put his slightness in seemingly vulnerable positions and then make opponents look foolish when he flits past them. More…
And what fans! Some say irrational, entitled, and chauvinistic; others passionate and discerning. Twenty-two thousand of them filled the Centre Bell to watch Game Seven against the Penguins on a giant TV—and then rioted when the Canadiens won. Just like they did when the Canadiens last won the Cup in 1993, or when Maurice Richard got suspended, or when they eliminated Boston in the first round in 2008. More…
The best thing about forcing yourself to watch the endless fourth and fifth games of the Red Sox-Yankees series—eleven hours, twenty-six innings, and 887 pitches worth of baseball within a day’s time—was the way that fatigue so visibly reduced great athletes to human beings. So these guys were not assembled in factories. More…
Stereotypes abound in the hockey world. One is that Russians (and Europeans) are supremely talented but dispassionate. Hands soft as clouds, they lack the will to go into the corners and get dirty. Everybody knows Russians (and Europeans) can’t handle the rough, straight-line hockey played in North America because they grew up on international-sized ice rinks. More…
Generational talents excepted, most hockey players need time to mature and discover the role they play on a large team, so most earn a couple hundred bucks a week playing in Laredo, or the Quad Cities, or Pee Dee, South Carolina. Anyplace there’s industrial blight or a military base, there’s a good chance there’s also a minor-league hockey team. More…
I am not the best skateboarder, have not been the best skateboarder. I mean that literally—there are loads of tricks I cannot do—but I also mean I’ve also never felt an obligation to the culture of skateboarding. I’ve never loved the scene. Some kids, you name a spot and they will tell you every famous trick landed there, by which famous skater. Not me. More…
In the NFL this season, passing dominated as never before. Ten quarterbacks threw for over 4,000 yards, besting by three the old record set in 2007. Seven of those quarterbacks led their teams to the playoffs. It was—due to offensive trends, dominant receivers, stricter rules protecting QBs, and a host of other factors—The Year of the Pass. More…
It’s over. The best team in baseball in 2009 won the World Series, and for a fan of the New York Mets, it couldn’t have turned out worse. Our two most-hated enemies facing off; it’s amazing that I tuned in at all. This year, though, the Mets tanked so early that I was hungry for baseball again by the time the World Series arrived—and I watched every game. More…
We, The Blue Mist, the devoted fans of Kentucky basketball, have been watching The Door for twenty-four hours. A Memphis TV station has trained a web-cam on The Door, which leads to the University of Memphis athletic department. The video stream currently registers 12,611 views. There’s also sound, and so The Mist can hear cars passing, the camera operators tittering. More…
I saw Keri Russell, the star of Felicity, on the train to Flushing Meadows, which seemed like a good sign. But she got off somewhere in Manhattan. There are no celebrities at the qualifying tournament of the US Open. Instead there are players who’ve spent their lives at the game and are struggling to stay in it. All they want are points. More…
Chemistry is a huge, huge thing in hockey. A great pitcher is a great pitcher. And a QB needs some chemistry but he’s got a lot of options. And even the NBA has become one-on-one. But in hockey you don’t know what’s going to click. More…
The pathos of the NHL off-season is second to none. Baseball players switch teams as often, but baseball is played in warm, relatively pleasant places—Baltimore, San Diego, Seattle. There are two teams in sunny Los Angeles and two in the lovely Bay Area. Whereas here are some places a hockey player might wind up: Ottawa, Buffalo, Edmonton. More…
The Mist thirsts for University of Kentucky basketball 365 days a year. As soon as one season ends—and ours ended just two weeks ago—we set our sights on the next. The Mist originates in Lexington, a city of 260,000, home to the winningest team in the history of college basketball. It spreads over the entire Commonwealth, the thoroughbred horse farms. More…
And with housing projects and downtown highways roundly discredited, sports venues are the only large-scale civic works most urban publics find worth paying for. The Brooklyn Dodgers are never coming back, but countless American cities—even New York—are content to create gargantuan simulacra of Ebbets Field. More…
I can put my finger on exactly when I got addicted: the first time I traveled on the back of a flying gryphon. I saw the full moon rising over the ocean, the purple and green trees of Teldrassil disappearing behind me as I flew in to Auberdine, looking down on ant-sized players fighting rabid grizzly bears in the forest. More…
In Japan Kenta Kobashi is legendary at what he does: con onlookers into believing he’s in a ball-crunchingly real fight. The stolid Kobashi stands 6-foot-2 and weighs 265 pounds, with a wide chest and a variety of facial expressions that put Jim Carrey to shame. More…
She spits into the bucket at her corner—“Don’t stand near the bucket!” someone says—raises a glove to dip Vaseline from the blob of it on top of the corner post, rubs the glove into her nose and cheeks, to help the other’s punches slide off. “Kitch-die-muh hsshoo?” “What?” I say, suddenly panicked. “Oh!” I lean over to tie her shoe. More…
Let it never be said that athletes know nothing: they know bodies as well as yogis and surgeons, Beckett and Cronenberg, but their knowledge is of a different sort. Unsymbolic, systematic only insofar as sports science has imposed itself on instinct. Nonverbal its own poetry, paraphrased with difficulty, with loss. More…
