I am way, way, way too fascinated by parenthetical remarks in song titles. Take the Simple Minds song “(Don’t You) Forget About Me.” “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” To give you an idea how insane I think that title is, I got it completely wrong the first time. I thought the (Don’t You) part was…
Month: January 2014
Playing Through Pain
There’s something small I will remember about the Australian Open men’s final last weekend. In case you missed it, Stanislas Wawrinka beat Rafael Nadal in four sets to take his first grand slam title. The result of the match was somewhat muddled. On the one hand Nadal wrenched his back very early in the second…
Emily Scott
Everyone can tell you the bad things about the Olympics. So why do they still resonate for billions of people around the world? There are many reasons. The story of Emily Scott isn’t a bad place to start.
GOAT
Bill Tilden did not lose a single tennis match of substance for seven years, between 1920 and 1926. He was so dominant a player in his time that he would often purposely lose points and games and even sets just to make the matches a little bit more interesting. One of his favorite tricks, when…
The extra point is up
Let’s start with this caveat: I don’t care about the extra point one way or another. I don’t care if the NFL keeps the extra point, and I don’t care if they eliminate the extra point. Maybe that speaks directly to its worthlessness, I don’t know. I figure the whole extra point talk is a…
No. 57: Roy Hobbs
Roy Hobbs was born in Sabotac Valley, Iowa in 1904, the same year as Hall of Famer Chuck Klein. Hobbs’ mother died in childbirth. His father, William, had played some semi-professional baseball before settling on a farm; Billy Hobbs desperately wanted his son to become a Major League player. According to legend, Billy would draw…
Postgame
Priest Holmes, the superb running back for the Kansas City Chiefs in the early 2000s, would shake his head every time we talked about postgame interviews. The whole thing just didn’t make any sense to him. Holmes was no taller than 5-foot-9, by midseason he probably weighed 200 pounds, he wasn’t exceptionally fast by football…
The Poscast Ep. 4 – Abstraction
[iframe style=”border:none” src=”http://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/2636712/height/50/width/480/thumbnail/no/theme/standard” height=”50″ width=”480″ scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen] Joe and Michael talk about the Golden Globes, perfection, the A-Rod mess and then have the most important draft in the history of mankind. Check out this episode
Tecmo Super Bowl
OK, first thing we have to get out of the way is the difference between “Tecmo Bowl” and “Tecmo Super Bowl.” The focus of this piece is Tecmo Super Bowl, the greatest football video game ever made, the second greatest sports video game ever made*. I’m going to hold firm to this opinion even though…
The 60 Minutes Report
The trouble with liars, as the old line goes, is that they don’t have the decency to lie all the time. Somewhere in his parade of nonsense, paranoia and self-aggrandizement, it seems evident that Anthony Bosch told some truths about Alex Rodriguez and performance enhancing drugs. It just doesn’t seem practical for him to have…