Homemade Soccer Balls
Photographer Jessica Hilltout has documented the game of soccer/football/futbol around the world, from the secondhand footwear to the improvised goals to the makeshift balls:
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A soccer ball for everyone
Frustrated by the lack of durability of traditional soccer balls and encouraged by an investment by Sting, Tim Jahnigen invented and is selling a more durable ball made out of hard foam.
Tim Jahnigen has always followed his heart, whether as a carpenter, a chef, a lyricist or now as an entrepreneur. So in 2006, when he saw a documentary about children in Darfur who found solace playing soccer with balls made out of garbage and string, he was inspired to do something about it.
The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.
“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.”
You can buy one online and for every ball that you buy, one will be donated to a community in need.
Princess Bride lines as play by play
Last week, the hosts of NFL Kick Off on ESPN, Trey Wingo, Mark Sclereth, and Tedy Bruschi, jammed as many Princess Bride references as they could into their half hour show. Jack Moore collected them. Genuine guffaw at “There will be no survivors” from around :45.
(thx, Alex)
Sixth man infraction spotted 19 years after Rockets/Sonics game
This is one of the nuttiest sports things I have ever seen. Ethan Sherwood Strauss was rewatching a second round game from the 1993 NBA playoffs. Shawn Kemp’s Seattle SuperSonics vs. Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets. Game seven. Overtime. Hakeem has the ball in the closing moments of the game. And suddenly, Strauss spies a sixth player on the court for Houston. The refs missed the extra player and so did most everyone else for the last 19 years. Take a look for yourself…the play in question starts at 16:50:
Number 22 just wanders off the bench and into the game!
Pitching the shoes
Brian Simmons is one of the two best horseshoe pitchers in the world. Without giving too much away about the story, he’s overcome a lot to reach that status.
Brian Simmons does not like the clay at this year’s World Horseshoe Tournament in Knoxville, Tenn. It’s powdery, slippery. Even the non-horseshoe pitchers can tell this, because the bleachers in the convention center, where the tournament is being held, are coated in a light gray dust and the concrete floor has gotten more slick with each passing day. The clay dust gets on Simmons’s shoes and then the shoes slip out of his hand. It’s supposed to be Kentucky Blue Clay but that is hard to believe. More like Kentucky Synthetic, one man says. It makes it damn hard to pitch a horseshoe with the accuracy normally attributed to a man like Simmons.
This is what Simmons is thinking about as he stares down a 14-inch tall stake. He is thinking about the slippery clay, and how he might adjust his release point, and as these thoughts slip into his brain, he has lost without even pitching the shoe.
Also, I have been throwing horseshoes wrong all these years.
The arrested development of Lionel Messi
This long ESPN piece about Lionel Messi and his hometown of Rosario, Argentina made me sad.
The next time people in Rosario heard his name, he was a star. “It is difficult to be a hero in your own city,” explained Marcelo Ramirez, a family friend and radio host who showed us text messages from Messi. “He didn’t grow up here. It’s like he lost contact with the people. He is more an international figure than a Rosarino.”
The Argentine national team coaches found out about him through a videotape, and the first time they sent him an invitation to join the squad, they addressed it to “Leonel Mecci.” In the 2006 and 2010 World Cups, playing outside the familiar Barcelona system, he struggled, at least in the expectant eyes of his countrymen. His coaches and teammates didn’t understand the aloof Messi, who once went to a team-building barbecue and never said a word, not even to ask for meat. The people from Argentina thought he was Spanish, and in the cafes and pool halls, they wondered why he always won championships for Barcelona but never for his own country. They raged when he didn’t sing the national anthem before games. In Barcelona, Messi inspired the same reaction. People noticed he didn’t speak Catalan and protected his Rosarino accent. He bought meat from an Argentine butcher and ate in Argentine restaurants. “Barcelona is not his place in the world,” influential Spanish soccer editor Aitor Lagunas wrote in an e-mail. “It’s a kind of a laboral emigrant with an undisguised homesick feeling.”
In many ways, he is a man without a country.
Vintage flannel baseball jerseys
Ebbets Field Flannels sells historic baseball jerseys made from “real 1950s-era wool blend baseball cloth”.
The Clowns were baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters. Players entertained the crowd with various comedic antics, including “shadowball”, where they would go through a warm-up routine with no baseball. When the team joined the Negro American League, they dropped the “Ethiopian” moniker and played straight baseball.
(via @tcarmody)
Bo Jackson 30 for 30
I missed this when it was announced in August, but there will be a third series of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary films, and one scheduled to air in December will feature Bo Jackson.
A close look at the man and marketing campaign that shaped his legacy. Even without winning a Super Bowl or World Series, Bo redefined the role of the athlete in the pop cultural conversation. More than 20 years later, myths and legends still surround Bo Jackson, and his impossible feats still capture our collective imagination.
Good excuse to post this (again?):
(via @sportsguy33)
Zidane head-butting statue unveiled in Paris
A 15-foot-tall statue of Zinedine Zidane head-butting Marco Materazzi by sculptor Adel Abdessemed has been placed in the courtyard of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The statue, entitled “Headbutt,” is by the Algerian sculptor Adel Abdessemed, and coincides with an exhibition of his work in the museum. “This statue goes against the tradition of making statues to honor victories,” said Phillipe Alain Michaud, who directed the exhibition. “It is an ode to defeat… Zidane’s downward glance recalls that of Adam, chased from paradise.”
But as Michaud knows, and surely as Abdessemed intends, it is both not so simple and much simpler. It is an ode to more than defeat; but it’s also a representation of very basic feelings complicated by literary analogy. The Headbutt was full of anger, stupidity, and recklessness, but beneath them lay a damaged sense of honor. This makes it hard for even the calmest football fan to wholly begrudge Zidane his actions.
How to not choke at sports
One hemisphere of your brain can cause you to over-think things and choke at key moments during athletic competitions. Scientists wondered if you could somehow break that pattern by doing something as simple as making a fist with your left hand. And it worked.
Lead researcher Juergen Beckmann, PhD, put it pretty profoundly: “Consciously trying to keep one’s balance is likely to produce imbalance.” Simple (brain-hemisphere-dependent) tasks that activate motor portions of the brain while drawing activity away from the ruminating portions can help experienced athletes perform (in terms of accuracy and complex body movements done from muscle memory) without being messed up by nerves. “Just let it happen; be the ball.”
The soccer in Iran…is explosive
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this video of a soccer player picking up a piece of garbage and casually throwing it off the field COME TO FIND OUT IT IS SOME SORT OF EXPLOSIVE DEVICE THAT EXPLODES WHEN HE THROWS IT is crazy. I didn’t want to bury the lede on that one. The game was an AFC Champions League match between Iran’s Sepahan and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli at Foolad Shahr Stadium, and the lucky player was Sepahan midfielder Adel Kolahkaj.
Here’s another version with some more detail/slow mo. I’m not wrong, right? That was totally crazy and not something you would expect during a soccer match? And it’s not fake, is it? (via cosby sweaters)
Lost radio interview with Muhammad Ali from 1966
From Blank on Blank, a great archive of lost interviews, a 1966 interview with Muhammad Ali conducted by Michael Aisner, then a high school student near Chicago.
From inside the club, Aisner and his friend watched out the front window as Ali screetched up in a red Cadillac convertible, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and jumped over the car door.
For the next 20 minutes, Ali talked boxing, footwork, why he wanted to fight — and launched into an epic, unprompted riff about traveling to Mars and fighting for the intergalactic boxing title. All went smoothly — until Aisner realized he’d forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
“I was mortified,” he says. “I said, ‘Champ, do you think you could do that again?’”
The champ obliged.
(via @LTBelcher)
The not-so-magic cooling glove
Writing for Slate, Daniel Engber takes a closer look at the magic cooling glove and finds some (but not a lot of) evidence that the thing actually works as advertised.
The study, which aggregates results from a decade’s worth of experiments, found that “palm cooling” helped people do 144 percent more pull-ups than they did before, on average. A closer look reveals that the effect might not be so beefy as it looks, however. That figure comes from testing just a handful of people in the lab-even after 10 years of research-and it has some honking error bars (+/-83 percent). To put it in perspective: Before the palm-cooled training, their scores ranged from 70 to 153 pull-ups in each session; after training, they ranged from 70 to 616.
Throwing like a girl
In almost every case, the perceived skill-level gender gap between males and females is overblown. One exception: Throwing. According to one researcher: “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at 4 years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger across age. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: Nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.” About the only thing I can do better than my wife is manage a browser with 65 open tabs.
Apparently no one told Erin DiMeglio about this throwing research. She plays quarterback on her high school football team in Florida.
NFL TV maps 2012
Once again, here’s the link to the maps that show which NFL games will be shown in which parts of the country.
Magic cooling glove “better than steroids” for athletic performance improvement
Leveraging the high number of specialized heat-transfer veins in the palm of the human hand, researchers at Stanford have developed a thermal exchange glove that is able to cool a person’s core temperature in a matter of minutes. Turns out this is helpful for athletes.
The glove’s effects on athletic performance didn’t become apparent until the researchers began using the glove to cool a member of the lab — the confessed “gym rat” and frequent coauthor Vinh Cao — between sets of pull-ups. The glove seemed to nearly erase his muscle fatigue; after multiple rounds, cooling allowed him to do just as many pull-ups as he did the first time around. So the researchers started cooling him after every other set of pull-ups.
“Then in the next six weeks he went from doing 180 pull-ups total to over 620,” said Heller. “That was a rate of physical performance improvement that was just unprecedented.”
The researchers applied the cooling method to other types of exercise — bench press, running, cycling. In every case, rates of gain in recovery were dramatic, without any evidence of the body being damaged by overwork - hence the “better than steroids” claim.
The cooling resets a temperature-sensitive enzyme that muscles need to generate energy, “essentially resetting the muscle’s state of fatigue”. I expect this will be either everywhere in pro sports in a couple of years or banned. (via @jsnell)
An amazing Paralympics performance
Or rather, just an amazing performance, full stop. I was alerted to this video by Dunstan Orchard who tweeted “this must be the most remarkable track race I’ve ever seen”. I don’t want to spoil it too much but pay attention to the guy in last place coming out of the curve.
Like a freight train! I’ve watched this race about 8 times now and it never gets old. The runner, Richard Whitehead, set the world record in the race. He also owns the world record in the marathon, which, amazing! Oh, and this table tennis shot is pretty great too.
Lance Armstrong totally doped
If you had any remaining doubts about Lance Armstrong’s involvement in doping, Tyler Hamilton’s book should put those to rest. Hamilton was Armstrong’s teammate on the U.S. Postal Service team, and in the book, he tells the story (corroborated by no fewer than nine former Armstrong/Hamilton teammates) of how Armstrong, the USPS team, and practically everyone else on the racing circuit doped in the 1990s/2000s. From an early look at the book by Christopher Keys at Outside Magazine:
The drugs are everywhere, and as Hamilton explains, Armstrong was not just another cyclist caught in the middle of an established drug culture — he was a pioneer pushing into uncharted territory. In this sense, the book destroys another myth: that everyone was doing it, so Armstrong was, in a weird way, just competing on a level playing field. There was no level playing field. With his connections to Michele Ferrari, the best dishonest doctor in the business, Armstrong was always “two years ahead of what everybody else was doing,” Hamilton writes. Even on the Postal squad there was a pecking order. Armstrong got the superior treatments.
What ultimately makes the book so damning, however, is that it doesn’t require readers to put their full faith in Hamilton’s word. In the book’s preface, which details its genesis, Coyle not so subtly addresses Armstrong’s supporters by pointing out that, while the story is told through Hamilton, nine former Postal teammates agreed to cooperate with him on The Secret Race, verifying and corroborating Hamilton’s account. Nine teammates.
No wonder he gave up.
Two old, black girls…still holding up America
As it received high marks from friends, I wanted to like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s recent NY Times Magazine profile of Venus and Serena Williams more than I did, but I think Sullivan had so little access to the sisters that it turned into more of a sick Frank story than expected.
The story has been told so many times, of these early years, when Compton got used to the sight of the little girls who would always be playing tennis at the public park — or riding around in their faded yellow VW bus with the middle seat taken out to accommodate the grocery cart full of balls — but somehow the strangeness and drama of it retain a power to fascinate. The idea of this African-American family organizing itself, as a unit, in order to lay siege to perhaps the whitest sport in the world and pulling it off somehow. “I remember even talking to my sisters and brothers,” Oracene said, recalling a time before anyone had ever heard of the Williams sisters, “and telling them: ‘The girls are going to be professional. We’re going to need a lawyer, and we’re going to need an accountant.’ “
Isha, the middle daughter — sharply funny and practical, fiercely loyal to the family — told me: “Life was get up, 6 o’clock in the morning, go to the tennis court, before school. After school, go to tennis. But it was consistency. I hate to put it [like this], but it’s like training an animal. You can’t just be sometimey with it.” She still can’t sleep past 6.
My favorite observation from the story was actually from a behind-the-story piece that ran on the magazine’s blog.
One thing Venus talked about that was interesting was how easy it is for professional athletes to pick up other sports. So what they are good at is not the sport itself, but it’s just a way of being in the world. It’s a sense of their own bodies and an ability to manipulate their own bodies and have sort of a visual map in your head of what the different parts are doing. At one point she was talking about doing a benefit with Peyton and Eli Manning. They’d almost never played tennis before and they started out awful, and she said it was amazing to watch them. It was like watching a film. Every stroke they hit was noticeably better than the last. Every time they hit the ball. She said you could almost watch their brains working and by the end of it they were totally competent tennis players.
The Super Manning Bros anecdote hits because, as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his evisceration of tennis player Tracy Austin’s biography, it can be difficult for gifted athletes to talk about why and how they are able to do what they do. But Venus obviously can and I wish there’d been more of that in the main essay.
European soccer disappears from American TV
Perplexed and irritated that I couldn’t find any Barcelona FC matches on TV for the past few weeks, I finally did some research and it turns out that’s because Qatar-based Al Jazeera bought up the TV rights to several European leagues but doesn’t actually have a channel to show the games to most American viewers.
Lionel Messi’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s league matches will disappear from the television sets of many American soccer fans, starting this weekend.
That’s because the U.S. television rights to Spain’s La Liga have switched from GolTV to the new beIN Sport USA network, launched this week by the Al-Jazeera Sport Media Network and available in only about 8 million homes to viewers of DirecTV and DISH Network.
And it’s not just Spain’s soccer that is affected.
Italy’s Serie A, France’s Ligue 1, England’s second-tier League Championship and England’s League Cup also have moved to high-spending beIN Sport, which is taking over all of them from News Corp.’s Fox Soccer.
“The ratings are going to be so low that they will be almost unmeasurable,” said Marc Ganis of the Chicago-based Sports Corp. Ltd., consulting firm. “Considering the push that European soccer is making in the United States, taking additional money and losing exposure becomes fools’ gold. They need to have a long-term strategy, not short-term.”
What. In. The. Actual. Fuck!?
Ayrton Senna’s last duel with Alain Prost
Alain Prost retired from F1 racing for the final time in 1993, with his last race coming at the Australian Grand Prix in November. He finished second in the race to his fierce rival Ayrton Senna but handily won the World Championship to the runner-up Senna. But the two of them raced for one final time in December of that year…driving go-karts.
Predictably, the pair took it very seriously: four-time world champion Prost having tested extensively before the event; Senna, a three-time title holder, having a kart shipped to Brazil so that he could practise.
Melky Cabrera’s fake website
San Francisco Giant Melky Cabrera recently tested positive for a banned substance and received a 50 game penalty per MLB’s rules. Prior to receiving the suspension, Cabrera made an attempt, new at least in the world of sports, to get off without punishment.
The New York Daily News has discovered that in an effort to beat the rap on his 50-game suspension, Melky and his “associates” devised a scheme that included purchasing a website for $10,000, making this website appear to sell a fake product and pretending Melky purchased and used the product, unaware that it contained a banned substance. Ohh, this close.
Cabrera offered the website as evidence during his appeal and the scheme devolved into comedy in short order.
Bernard James
Bernard James was this year’s second round draft pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers (immediately traded to Dallas). He’s also 27, and an Air Force veteran. This is a great story, I hope he has a long career.
Fans attend the NBA draft to boo. They boo Commissioner David Stern. They boo their draft picks. They boo other teams’ draft picks. They boo to boo.
They didn’t boo Bernard James. They chanted “U-S-A” over and over again.
The Life and Death of Sports Fans
Team Spirit is a wonderful short film for ESPN by Errol Morris about the funerals of die-hard sports fans.
I love the Steelers fan laid out in a recliner under a Steelers blanket in front of a television with a Steelers game on as if “he just fell asleep watching the game”.
Did Caster Semenya deliberately throw the 800 meters?
From Slate, some speculation that Caster Semenya sandbagged the 800 meter final in order to avoid further gender-related scrutiny.
After the race, track and field aficionados questioned her tactics. The BBC’s David Ornstein said it appeared that Semenya “had more left in the tank.” His story quoted BBC commentator Kelly Holmes, who won this event in the 2004 Olympics, suggesting that Semenya hadn’t made her best effort: “She looked very strong, she didn’t look like she went up a gear, she wasn’t grimacing at all. I don’t know if her head was in it, when she crossed the line she didn’t look affected.” Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden tweeted that Semenya “seemed oddly disengaged most of race and not tired at end.”
I watched the race and Semenya’s finish was odd…she made her move super-late and was moving at a tremendous pace when she crossed the line. Had she worked her way up to the front before the final turn, she may have beaten the field by several lengths.
Update: Here is a more nuanced analysis of Semenya’s effort in the 800 meter final.
Perhaps there is nothing to her performance other than that she runs a more even pace than her rivals.
A comparison between her semi-final and this race is interesting in this regard. In that semi, she went through 400m in just over 58 seconds, 600m in about 1:28 and then closed the final 200m in 29.5s, looking like she had something in reserve.
Tonight, she went through 400m in 57.69s, then through 600m in about 1:27.1, and then closed in a touch over 30 seconds. My point is, her performance in the final was slightly faster at every stage than the semi, until she closed slower over the final 200m. To finish SLOWER than she did in the semi implies that she has little reserve and that she is closer to the limit than she looks. She wasn’t actually that fast over the final 200m, it’s just that everyone else was very slow!
(via @andrewsmit)
Evolution of the uneven bars in women’s gymnastics
The uneven parallel bars event has changed a lot over the years. For one thing, the bars used to be a lot closer together. And obviously the routines have gotten a lot harder.
Some of those moves in the 60s and 70s were sweet though. More grace and less raw power. (thx, doug)
Jim Thorpe, greatest Olympian* ever?
Smithsonian Magazine has a good argument on why Jim Thorpe should be considered amongst the greatest Olympians even though his records and medals are not officially acknowledged by the IOC.
A week later the three-day decathlon competition began in a pouring rain. Thorpe opened the event by splashing down the track in the 100-meter dash in 11.2 seconds-a time not equaled at the Olympics until 1948.
On the second day, Thorpe’s shoes were missing. Warner hastily put together a mismatched pair in time for the high jump, which Thorpe won. Later that afternoon came one of his favorite events, the 110-meter hurdles. Thorpe blistered the track in 15.6 seconds, again quicker than Bob Mathias would run it in ‘48.
On the final day of competition, Thorpe placed third and fourth in the events in which he was most inexperienced, the pole vault and javelin. Then came the very last event, the 1,500-meter run. The metric mile was a leg-burning monster that came after nine other events over two days. And he was still in mismatched shoes.
Thorpe left cinders in the faces of his competitors. He ran it in 4 minutes 40.1 seconds. Faster than anyone in 1948. Faster than anyone in 1952. Faster than anyone in 1960 — when he would have beaten Rafer Johnson by nine seconds. No Olympic decathlete, in fact, could beat Thorpe’s time until 1972. As Neely Tucker of the Washington Post pointed out, even today’s reigning gold medalist in the decathlon, Bryan Clay, would beat Thorpe by only a second.
Update: I misstated what the Smithsonian article actually said about Thorpe’s official status according to the IOC. Here’s what the article says:
It’s commonly believed that Thorpe at last received Olympic justice in October of 1982 when the IOC bowed to years of public pressure and delivered two replica medals to his family, announcing, “The name of James Thorpe will be added to the list of athletes who were crowned Olympic champions at the 1912 Games.” What’s less commonly known is that the IOC appended this small, mean sentence: “However, the official report for these Games will not be modified.”
In other words, the IOC refused even to acknowledge Thorpe’s results in the 15 events he competed in. To this day the Olympic record does not mention them. The IOC also refused to demote Wieslander and the other runners-up from their elevated medal status. Wieslander’s results stand as the official winning tally. Thorpe was merely a co-champion, with no numerical evidence of his overwhelming superiority. This is no small thing. It made Thorpe an asterisk, not a champion. It was lip service, not restitution.
Thorpe’s family got his medals and is listed on the Olypmic web site. But as the article says, it does nothing to recognize just how dominant Thorpe was in the decathalon and pentathalon. In the decathalon, Thorpe led from the second event on and beat his nearest competitor Hugo Wieslander by almost 700 points. (For his part, Wieslander refused to accept the gold medal retroactively awarded to him because of Thorpe’s disqualification.) His victory in the pentathlon was even more lopsided…in an event where fewer points are better, the second-place competitor earned three times as many points as Thorpe. (thx, gary)
What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?
Nate Jones was disappointed about how women’s Olympic beach volleyball has been photographed at the Olympics so he decided to show us what other sports look like through the lens of women’s Olympic beach volleyball photographer’s lens. The results are hilarious.
(via ★mathowie)
The Mars Olympics
On Twitter right now, Neil deGrasse Tyson is imagining how various Olympic events would work on Mars.
Women’s Beach Volleyball on Mars: No protective ozone layer there. Solar UV would irradiate all exposed legs, buns, & tummies
Gymnastics: On Mars, with only 38% of Earth’s gravity, the Vault & other spring-assisted leaps would resemble circus cannons.
(via @jaycer17)
What cricket looks like to Americans
You may remember a small chunk of this video from its brief appearance in Get Him to the Greek…happy to find the whole thing.
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