I don’t get it

Fully one-quarter of the total time is remaining in the Argentina-Mexico soccer match and, with the score tied 1-1, the commenter on ESPN.com (the gamecast) says, “This is starting to look like it will go to extra time.”

Is there any other major sport where things seem so determined so early? Football teams rarely give up even if they are down by 17 at the start of the fourth quarter. Good basketball teams will fight back down six with 30 seconds to play. These too are uphill battles. Can someone explain the game psychology of soccer that seems to determine that similar comeback efforts are futile, even if only behind by one goal at half-time? This seems particularly strange in a sport where possession can change at any moment and a score takes just seconds.

Update: The game did, of course, go to extra time (overtime).

World Cup Tickets

Tickets still available. Check out the prices.

Land ho!

On this date in 1497, the Italian Giovanni Caboto, sailing for the English as John Cabot, made landfall. He and his English crew were the first reported Europeans to see North America. (Leiv Eiriksson had been in the area nearly 500 years previously, but left no record.)

Cabot’s own log and maps, if he had them, have never been located, and scholars have debated his route. He may have landed first in Labrador or Newfoundland or even Nova Scotia.

Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage has a good presentation.

American History Through the Eyes and the Letters of the People

The New York Times reviews a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington. An excerpt:

Ms. Bredhoff has avoided letting this exhibition settle into chronological or thematic or political predictability. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Jay, United States Secretary of Foreign Affairs, reporting on the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 — with its description of royalty consumed by rumor, and street mobs consumed by passions — is followed by the testimony of a Rochester election official who describes Susan B. Anthony demanding that she be registered to vote in 1872.

A letter from George Washington in 1775, worrying that the British might have deliberately sent smallpox-infected carriers into the ranks of American troops, is not far from where the 1937 voice of the radio broadcaster Herb Morrison can be heard, sounding as fiery, hysterical and consumed as the gas explosion he describes, which was engulfing the Hindenburg.

Events take on a different character, depending on how they are depicted. Lincoln’s assassination is seen through the eyes of his family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone, who finds a bullet hole on the back left side of the head, a hole “into which I carried immediately my finger.”

Jack Dempsey

… was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley. As Red Smith wrote in Dempsey’s obituary for The New York Times in 1983:

Jack Dempsey was one of the last of a dwindling company whose exploits distinguished the 1920’s as ”the golden age of sports.” His contemporaries were Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in football, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in golf, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen in tennis, Johnny Weissmuller and Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Paavo Nurmi in track, Man o’ War, the racehorse, and Earl Sande, the jockey. But none of the others enjoyed more lasting popularity than the man who ruled boxing between 1919 and 1926.

The obituary is worth reading.