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Dan Hill, who coincidentally is the director of web and broadcast at the aforementioned Monocle, has a thoughtful post about Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary film that follows Zinedine Zidane through an entire soccer match.
I haven’t watched much professional-grade badminton so I don’t know if this is normal, but this point lasts far longer than I would have expected.
The only known copy of the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card in near mint condition was sold recently for $2.35 million. “The T206 Honus Wagner card has long been recognized as the most iconic, highly coveted and valuable object in the field of sports memorabilia.”
Do Japanese pitchers, including Daisuke Matsuzaka, a new member of the Boston Red Sox, have an extra pitch called the gyroball? “The pitch started on the same course as a changeup, but it barely dipped. It looked like a slider, but it did not break. The gyroball, despite its zany name, is supposed to stay perfectly straight.” Nice accompanying infographics as well.
For the first time, Wimbledon will pay this year’s female contestants the same amount of prize money as the male contestants. “The WTA Tour lobbied for years to get Wimbledon to drop its ‘Victorian-era view’ and pay the women the same as the men.”
The WSJ reports on economist J.C. Bradbury’s new book The Baseball Economist, which sounds Moneyball-ariffic. Contrary to popular belief in “protection”, Bradbury found that “a weak on-deck hitter makes a batter more likely to get an extra-base hit”. Bradbury is also the author of the Sabernomics blog. (via biourbanist)
Nine months after the World Cup, Germany is experiencing a baby boom, which is good news because Germany’s birth rate is among the lowest in the world.
An interview with Tamir Goodman, the “Jewish Jordan”. Even in the Israeli pro leagues, he is the only Orthodox Jew playing. “Tamir [has] the respect of his coaches and teammates for his religious dedication, as well as for his ability to throw down two handed jams and no look passes.”
Video of a skydiver hitting the ground at 80 mph after his chute didn’t open properly. Here’s the full story.
Truehoop, a basketball blog that’s one of the best out there on any topic, has been purchased by ESPN. Congrats, Henry.
Steven Johnson has written up some thoughts on the Nintendo Wii. His fifth point is especially interesting and I can’t help quoting almost the entire thing:
Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation. What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports — and particularly Tennis — is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body’s motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I’ve half-perfected that’s unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I’m not sure I could even fully explain what I’m doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I’d know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that’s ultimately what’s so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules — as well as the imagery — of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we’d ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.
He’s not exactly right — for example, drifting in Mario Kart is difficult to do until you develop a “touch” for it and is not easy to explain to others — but the Wii does take it to a new level.
One of my favorite actresses is Cate Blanchett, but I don’t know much about her. A profile of Blanchett from last week’s New Yorker (not online) filled in the blanks nicely:
What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much as anyone else,” she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged autobiographical questions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten my childhood.” These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-consciousness. “I’m not interested in the character I am in myself,” she told James Lipton on the television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” “Any connection I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious.”
Her approach to acting sounds similar to the idea of relaxed concentration in sports, like the practicing of free throw shooting until you can do it automatically without having to focus on shooting and can instead just focus on being focused while shooting. The author of Blanchett’s profile, John Lahr, wrote a piece on stage fright for the magazine a few months ago that deals with the same theme. British actor and comedian Stephen Fry describes how he seized up after reading a review of a performance in the Financial Times:
The impact of the review was, Fry says, “phenomenal.” He describes the sense of acute self-consciousness and loss of confidence that followed as “stage dread,” a sort of “paradigm shift.” He says, “It’s not ‘Look at me - I’m flying.’ It’s ‘Look at me - I might fall.’ It would be like playing a game of chess where you’re constantly regretting the moves you’ve already played rather than looking at the ones you’re going to play.” Fry could not mobilize his defenses; unable to shore himself up, he took himself away.
To me, the battle with the self is one of the most interesting aspects of watching performance, whether it’s sports, ballet, live music, movies, or someone giving a talk at a conference.
The NY Times covers Mad River Glen, a quirky ski area in Vermont that has the only operating single-seat chair lift in the country, doesn’t allow snowboarders, and doesn’t groom (that often) or make (that much) snow. “Occasionally, snowboarders will hike to the top from a nearby road and ride down. If they tackle the tough terrain with crisp, accomplished turns, the Mad River Glen regulars will loudly applaud at the bottom. If the boarders aren’t very good, the abuse is just as loud. People will come out hooting and hollering from the lodge.” I’ve skiied there a few times; here’s some photos of the mountain and some videos I took. (thx, tien)
A paper on the tradeoff in baseball between home runs and hitting for average that I don’t fully understand but seems interesting. “Both models find a significant and negative relationship between home runs per at-bat and contact rate.” (thx, aaron)
Before NBA player Jason Kidd split with his wife, his free throw routine included blowing a kiss to her. After the ugly breakup, he kisses his fingers and wipes them on his butt…kiss my ass!
Long audio interview with Michael Lewis by economist Russ Roberts on “the hidden economics of baseball and football”. “Michael Lewis talks about the economics of sports — the financial and decision-making side of baseball and football — using the insights from his bestselling books on baseball and football: Moneyball and The Blind Side. Along the way he discusses the implications of Moneyball for the movie business and other industries, the peculiar ways that Moneyball influenced the strategies of baseball teams, the corruption of college football, and the challenge and tragedy of kids who live on the streets with little education or prospects for success.”
When the Chicago Bears take the field against the Indianapolis Colts in early February for Super Bowl XLI, a former foe of the Bears will be close at hand. A kottke.org reader writes:
The “Super Bowl Shuffle” earned The Chicago Bears a [1987] Grammy nomination for best Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance - Duo or Group. They lost to Prince and the Revolution’s “Kiss”.
Prince is headlining the halftime show at the Super Bowl this year. Will there be a battle of the bands at halftime between Prince and the ‘86 Bears? Come on, The Fridge needs the work! In the meantime, here’s the Super Bowl Shuffle music video:
Oh, the humanity. Kiss has held up much better. (thx, m)
If Roger Federer keeps going the way he’s going, he could one day be considered the greatest sportsman in history.
Update: Via email, a nomination for Pakistani squash player Jahangir Khan, who engineered a 5+ year unbeaten streak during which he won the International Squash Players Association Championship without losing a single point. (thx, abbas)
Update: Also via email, a vote for darts champion Phil Taylor, who has won 13 world titles, including 11 out of the last 13. (thx, krush)
Designers often have the design disease, where you “can’t stop looking at things through your designer eyes”. “But it’s not just books, it’s everything. You’ll choose wine by the design of the label and you’d stay [at a hotel] because of the sign.” (via emdashes)
Update: Bruce writes: “A parallel affliction to the Design Disease is Climber’s Complaint, wherein someone who takes up rock climbing begins to see every object and architecture as potentially climbable. Similarly, Skater’s Disorder afflicts those for whom every surface is seen to exhibit some measure of skate-worthiness.”
A pair of fine sports-related headlines from The Onion: Confused Bill Simmons Picks The Departed To Win Super Bowl and Bears Lead Rex Grossman To Super Bowl. “All season long, the Bears have shown that they can win, even in the presence of Rex Grossman.”
I’ve been asked to eat crow in public on this one: “Rex Grossman, 6/19, 34 yards, 0 TDs, and 3 INTs; or why the Chicago Bears, despite their current 10-2 record and weak NFC, aren’t getting anywhere near the Super Bowl this year.” Mmmm, that’s good crow. Still, the Bears are the worst team ever picked to go 16-0.
True Hoop’s Henry Abbott does a bit of research into baby names inspired by NBA players. “[Kobe] was drafted in 1996, and in 1997 the name debuted at #553. 2001 was its best year ever, when it was the 223rd most common name in America. Donald, Keith, Troy, Lance, Simon, Chad, Dante, Douglas, Tony, Joe all ranked lower.”
All Thoroughbred horses born in the Northern Hemisphere technically share the same birthday: January 1. Happy birthday, horsies!
Great True Hoop piece on Allen Iverson. “In other words, missed in all the hand-wringing about his lackadaisical practice habits in the NBA is the possibility that so much of his work is cerebral. Unlike, say, Jordan, who was a craftsman, someone who would take hundreds of jumpshots a day, Iverson imagines the possibility and then acts it out.”
In response to complaints from players, the NBA is going back to their old ball on Jan 1. “roundly criticized”…har har.
The NBA admits that its new ball is a piece of crap and that, hey!, they should have consulted the players before they made the change. I can’t believe that businesses still function like this…what a bunch of idiots.
Kids who grew up playing Madden NFL know the intricacies of the game better than many fans (and coaches) of the game “because of attention to arcane details that has demystified the complexities of football to a population that never before understood them”. (via tmn)
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up a list of stock responses to reporter’s questions…it reads like a script for almost every locker room interview I’ve ever seen. “We’re going to take the season one game at a time.”
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