Runner's World: Usain Bolt and His Entourage
“The madness that surrounds him is growing. A global television audience of four billion is expected to watch Bolt perform at the London 2012 Olympic Games this summer. If the 25-year-old is nervous, it doesn’t show.
Peyton Manning's Long Game
“Manning likes to be in control. Of everything. In this process, he was. Elway played the game perfectly by doing precisely what Manning wanted him to do—make your case, then stay out of the way while I make my call. The story of Manning’s stressful fortnight of freedom includes misdirection car rides, secret meetings and workouts, and words of wisdom from trusted confidants. Here’s how it went down.
Unsinkable
“It was a classic match by any measure, two future Hall of Famers exploring the limits of their talent. Fans ringing the court applauded lustily, and the other players toasted the two men as they walked off at the end. The following day’s New York Times gushed that the match “was declared by old-timers to be one of the hardest fought tennis battles seen during the 22 years of tournaments at Longwood.”
Something gave the encounter a deeper texture, however. Few press reports mentioned it, and those that did hardly played it up. Certainly neither Williams nor Behr discussed it openly. Nor did the fans at Longwood seem to be aware of it. But just 12 weeks earlier—and 100 years ago next month—the two players, traveling separately, had survived the most famous maritime disaster in history.
Paintballing with Hezbollah
“We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.
Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports
“I think we’re pretty much done with the Are Games Art? question. How about this one: Are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn’t put it that way.) Many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set systems made dynamic by human interaction, out of which some kind of “story” emerges. This is, in fact, what excites a lot of us about video games: a brand-new narrative form, etc., etc., but here is my question: Sport itself is another such rule-set system, isn’t it? It’s based on just that kind of rules-meets-human-interaction dynamism and permits almost exactly that kind of emergent “story” to appear. Remember that the whole crux of the Ebert Position1 was that sports — and, thus, games — aren’t art but rather activity, no matter how beautiful and compelling said activity can be from the spectator’s point of view. Art, though, has intent and direction, meaning and submeaning, and is definitively not something that happens to arise within seemingly arbitrary rule sets.
The Fragile Teenage Brain
“If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion.
Test of Time
“ESPN covets the international sports market, so The Boss dispatched me overseas for a cricket match between India and England. This made sense, as I’d recently covered the Cricket World Cup on the subcontinent. I knew the rules and knew that a Test match was the original and purest form of cricket, a game that can go on for five days. Forty hours. I thought the same thing any sane person would think: How can a sporting event that lasts five days possibly still exist?
Monday Night Lights
“There is no rational way to explain the amount of time that Gruden invests in each “Monday Night Football” broadcast: he spends days memorizing the names, numbers, and tendencies of all fifty-three players on both teams, even though little of this information makes it onto the broadcast. Once he has a sense of each team, he starts editing, creating a series of four-minute demonstration reels, known as “cutups,” to share with his producers and fellow-broadcasters, partly so they can create highlight clips for the show, and partly so that he can be sure they know what he’s talking about. When he is finished compiling a cutup, he sits with the Cowboy clicker in his left hand and a mouse in his right hand, so that he can run back and forth over the plays and draw emphatic arrows and circles, while he records an audio commentary track.
Out of Thin Air
“The lowest point of his career occurred at the highest point he raced. Mexico City is surrounded by mountains and is over 7,000 feet above sea level. That the altitude would have an impact on the Games was predicted. Clarke had raised concerns himself, but had been told by the Australian sports authorities that whingeing was bad sportsmanship. Since those Olympics, however, scientists have stepped up their investigation into the link between athletic performance and altitude. This research, in turn, raises some deceptively simple questions, which have bafflingly complex answers. What counts as sport? What is its purpose: what are the rules designed to achieve, designed to measure? Where does sport end, and science and technology begin? The difficulty of these matters, and the lack of any clear principles, have made sporting authorities at times appear capricious and contradictory.
Alberto Salazar and the New York City Marathon
“For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance. Salazar has been widely credited with resuscitating the career of Alan Webb, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy miler, and with guiding the ascent of two female American record holders, Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley.
