Sports Illustrated, which faces fierce daily, even hourly, competition with ESPN, Yahoo Sports and others, has something its main rivals do not: a 53-year trove of articles and photos, most of it from an era when the magazine dominated the field of long-form sports writing and color sports photography.
On Thursday, the magazine will introduce the Vault, a free site within SI.com that contains all the words Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of the images, along with video and other material, in a searchable database.
Category: Sports
Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.
When is it over?
With apologies to the Sage of St. Louis, there comes a time when it ain’t over, but … it’s over. There comes a time in a relationship when a woman will still answer your phone calls, but you’re wasting your money buying flowers; you know what I’m saying? There comes a moment during a job interview when you’re still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes. There is a time in an illness when you’re not dead yet, but you might as well stop taking that nasty medicine.
Bill James in an article discussing his means of calculating when a basketball games is out of reach. Interesting.
Best understated line of the day, so far
“Man, that guy is good.”
Bart Bryant, who lost when Tiger Woods made a 25-foot birdie putt on 18 to defeat him.
Here’s the putt:
Excuse me?!?
“But it’s one thing if somebody just sets up a blog from their mother’s basement in Albuquerque and they are who they are, and they’re a pathetic get-a-life loser …”
Bob Costas quoted in The Miami Herald
A pretty good line from four years ago
From Sideline Chatter in The Seattle Times:
New England might never have won a Super Bowl, let alone two, had not Gen. George Custer decided to leave Felix Vinatieri — his bandleader and the great-great-grandfather of Pats kicker Adam — back at the fort with his band when the troops embarked for the battle of Little Big Horn.
Added Tom FitzGerald of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Those guys were the luckiest musicians in the world, not counting Ringo.”
Guess which party?
“Not only was I football player, but I also was in social studies class, and I have a passion for how this country works.”
Former Mizzou and NFL player Brock Olivo in announcing his run for congress.
STLtoday has the story. (And blogs everywhere have the quote.)
Slam!
Back when NewMexiKen went to high school, basketball had evolved well past the peach basket stage. Even so, there weren’t many boys who could dunk — at least not in Tucson, Arizona — maybe three or four. One of my friends was one of them, a 6-10 high school All-American — one of that year’s top 50 players nationally. In pre-game warmups Dave put on quite a show — I can remember the other team stopping their drills to watch when his turn for a layup — that is, a dunk — came. A dunk during a game was still very rare. Well, times have changed.
Byron, one of the official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent along a link to this video from his high school alma mater in Washington, D.C.
This is boys high school basketball 2008 style.
Hey, Olympic athletes
James Fallows has a photo you should see.
Running From Despair
An interesting article in The New York Times on American Indian runners. It begins:
SANTA FE, N.M. — On a cold Saturday morning last month, 16-year-old Chantel Hunt ran across a highway onto a gravel road where the snow under her shoes packed into washboard ripples. She ran around a towering red rock butte, past two old mattresses dumped on the roadside, and into the shadow of a mesa she sometimes runs on top of.
Chantel Hunt, 16, training for the national cross-country championships near her home on the Navajo reservation.
Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.“You say Wings of America to anyone in the running community — it’s synonymous with the best Native American runners,” said Eric Heins, the cross-country and distance coach at Northern Arizona University, a program that has benefited from having Wings runners in recent years.
American Indians have especially high rates of youth suicide, Type 2 diabetes and deaths attributed to alcoholism, and extreme poverty is pervasive on many reservations. Wings of America, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization based here, has embraced the challenge.
What’s your favorite sport?
We’re in those terrible February doldrums between the Super Bowl and March Madness. Even spring training games haven’t begun, and basketball is still just routine regular season match ups.
That makes it a good time to ask — what is your favorite sport to watch? If asked during the NFL playoffs or bowls or during March Madness or the World Series, your emotions might rule your answer. Right now it’s difficult to even have any emotions about sports (other than to despise Fox broadcaster Joe Buck, which if I were czar would be THE national pastime).
So, here’s the latest NewMexiKen poll. I’ve limited it to nine ten choices, knowing that I may have overlooked your personal favorite. But hey, too many choices and the poll becomes meaningless. [Belatedly I added NHL (pro hockey) in case I had a Canadian reader.]
{democracy:24}
You know what I loved most about yesterday, February 14th?
Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training.
Super!
Wow, that was exciting.
Censorship out of control
At the same time, we recognize that not everyone out there loves a potty mouth. So if there’s an obvious bad word on a blog, story comment, or message board post, we’ll try to censor it.
It seems though that FOX Sports’ censor can become a little too zealous. This is from This Week in History: Jan. 23-29.
Via Awful Announcing .
[It’s Walter Johnson.]
I hate the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl, in the eyes of real sports fans, is for the tourists. It’s not just that you must sift through the clutter of all the off-field hype for an interminable two weeks, or that it’s the one sporting event covered by morning talk-show hosts who otherwise have no apparent connection to the world of football today. (Like, say, Tiki Barber.) It’s that the actual game of football, at the moment when it is supposed to be at its glorious peak, is utterly irrelevant. It is impossible to keep up the appropriate level – the expected level — of psychotic fandom when the pregame show is 10 hours long, three-quarters of the people at your party are sprinting into the room when the commercials come on and Vegas is taking bets on the duration of the inevitable Tom Petty nipple slip. When the Patriots and Giants take the field Sunday, a fan can be forgiven for thinking, for the first time, that the game itself is oddly small.
Tiger Woods makes everyone else play worse
Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th—there’s not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.
The argument is that the other players sense they are playing for second place and so their incentive is less. I don’t believe professional athletes play only for money, but the numbers are convincing.
Woods is 12 under, leading by four strokes after two days in his first tournament of 2008.
Just when you think we’ve reached bottom for tackiness
Someone achieves new depths.
Bridget Moynihan is Tom Brady’s baby’s mom. Click the image to get your mask.
How much you think one of these could be worth if the Giants win?
Pointer via Awful Announcing.
Best line last night, so far
“Here’s what I think about the Patriots. Uh, let’s just say at half time the Giants are up 60 to nothing. The end of the game the final score will be 67-60 Patriots.”
David Letterman (to Dan Patrick who picked the Giants)
Scattered thoughts
Do professional sports teams have tattoo artists on staff like they do trainers and doctors and such?
This grandpa gave his oldest grandson an Eli Manning jersey for Christmas. How prescient was that? Real prescient, except all the credit goes to the grandson, Mack, who picked the Giants as his team to win it all back at the beginning of the season. (And yes, he picked the Colts last year and the Steelers the year before!)
Mack has a Tom Brady jersey, too. (And Favre, Romo and Peyton Manning.)
Until I looked it up, after listening to Joe Buck and Troy Aikman for a couple of hours, I thought Plaxicoburress was the guy’s surname. Were there some other Burresses I didn’t know about that we needed to hear the whole name EVERY time? But then again Buck would never use one word where two would do.
Oh, and there are two Mannings in the NFL. Manning and Elimanning.
Best NFL line of the morning, so far
“After the Cryboys lost to the Giants last week, [Cowboys coach Wade] Phillips concluded that the better team lost. He said so publicly, for the benefit of those of us who don’t know much about football and tend to judge teams by misleading stats, like ‘wins.'”
Let it snow, let it snow!
“There are two times a year it should absolutely, positively snow: Christmas Eve and during a playoff game at Lambeau Field.”
Cooper: The other Manning
Poor sports
Eli Manning enjoys “Seinfeld” reruns.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many NFL players have far worse vices.
But Jay Zollar, general manager of WLUK, a Fox affiliate in Green Bay, this week made it clear that he, not the Giants quarterback, is the master of that domain.
On a video on the station’s Web site, Zollar points at the camera and says, “Eli, no ‘Seinfeld’ for you!”
Yup, the station has pulled its regularly scheduled 5:30 p.m. Saturday “Seinfeld” rerun in an attempt to disrupt Manning’s preparation for Sunday’s NFC Championship Game against the Packers.
I’m thinking Eli can probably afford a portable DVD player.
The NFL’s Coldest Games
Update Friday: Green Bay kickoff (5:30PM) temp expected to be about 0º F, with a wind of 6-8 mph. That’s a wind chill of around 12 below. Foxboro will be a relatively balmy 20º F at kickoff (3PM), slight chance of snow. The wind is expected to be in the upper teens though, so a wind chill of around zero.
Many fans are familiar with the famous “Ice Bowl” of 1967, when the Green Bay Packers hosted the Dallas Cowboys for the league championship. Game-time temperature was 13 below zero, with wind chills making it feel like 48 below. At least the Packers sent the frozen fans home happy, riding a late one-yard quarterback sneak by Bart Star to pull out the championship, 21-17.
That game still holds the record for coldest temperature, but not for wind chill. That mark was broken in January 1982 in Cincinnati, in a conference title game between the Bengals and San Diego Chargers. Swirling winds whipping off the Ohio River made it feel like 59 degrees below zero. San Diego coach Don Coryell, normally clad in short sleeves, bundled up on the sidelines with a ski mask that nearly covered his entire face. His southern California team literally got iced, 27-7.
In Pictures: The NFL’s Coldest Games
This Sunday, Green Bay expected high temperature 6º F, low -4º F, wind around 10 mph. Foxboro high 18º F, low 5º F, with 30% chance of snow, wind around 20 mph. NewMexiKen attended a Lions-Vikings game in Detroit once with a game time temperature of 6º F. It was brutal.
New England is a 14 point favorite over San Diego. Green Bay is a 7 point favorite over New York.
War on Some Drugs
Malcolm Gladwell asks some good questions about which drugs are prohibited in sports and which aren’t and why.