I just read this silly National Post piece about Wayne Gretzky’s interest in his team moving to southern Ontario. The article contains a throwaway reference to the Great One’s ties to California:
“Why would Wayne want to go back to Canada?” asked Hollywood agent and friend Marv Dauer. “He’s been in L.A. for 21 years. His kids are in school here - one of them is a star football player who plays with Will Smith’s kid and Joe Montana’s kid - and his wife obviously likes the good weather.
That’s quite the pedigree. I went looking for confirmation, and found this great ESPN piece about the three superstars attending the same high school football game. It turns out that Joe’s son plays on an opposing team in the same league, but it’s still a charming story.
On the weekend I was watching an English Premier League match between Stoke City and Blackburn Rovers. Stoke City has an Irish midfielder named Rory Delap, and he has a particular talent. From Wikipedia:
Delap, a former schoolboy javelin champion, is renowned for having one of the longest and most-feared throw-ins in football; his throws, noted by Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill as equivalent to “a corner or a free kick”, often range 30–40 metres (98–130 ft) (averaging 38 m (120 ft)), and can reach the speed of 60 km/h (37 mph). They have served as an assist in more than one case before 2008. Numerous experts, including his manager Tony Pulis, have commented on the technique Delap employs, the length and flatness undoing many a defence.
Other players can execute long throw-ins, but clearly Delap is something special. In this video, he accidentally puts the ball over the crossbar:
That got me thinking about what I’ll call freakish outliers in sports. I’m not talking about the Gretzkys or Jordans or even the Fosburys. Rather, it’s those athletes who, by fluke of evolution or sudden insight, just do things differently. Sometimes the innovation is effective, sometimes it’s just weird.
Lucinda Ruh
Lucinda Ruh is, by any measure, a decent figure skater. She hasn’t won much beyond becoming Switzerland’s national champion a couple of times, but that still puts her among the top 1% in the world. She is, however, a ridiculously good spinner. Here she is apparently executing a world record spin, in which she rotates 115 times:
Chad Bradford
Chad Bradford is a relief pitcher with very unusual way of delivering the ball. The ball leaves his hand very close to the ground–something called a submarine delivery. He pitches so low, in fact, that sometimes his knuckles brush the pitching mound. I couldn’t find a decent embeddable video (the MLB has apparently been aggressive with the takedown notices), but here’s a clip. And here’s a nice photo, courtesy of Linda Thomas. Click for a much larger version:
On an unrelated note, there’s a charming non sequitur in the introduction to Bradford’s Wikipedia article: “Chadwick L Bradford (born in Mississippi) is also the name of a storied bioanalytical chemist.”. Storied, eh?
Mike Legg
Then there’s Mike Legg, who, during a US college hockey game, devises a very unorthodox way to score:
I don’t think anybody has ever scored this goal in the NHL, though several players have tried.
Björn Borg
Speaking of hockey, Björn Borg’s famous two-handed backhand was apparently adapted from ice hockey’s slapshot. I don’t know a lot about tennis, but he appears to have a very peculiar style:
Here’s some analysis of his backhand, with an explanation of “the immense topsin generated from his loose slap-shot style”. Thanks to James for suggesting Monsieur Borg.
Who else is there? Who played their game a little differently?
I participated in a playoff pool draft tonight, so I had to map out my predictions of who would make it to the finals. As you might imagine, it’s as much about picking the teams as it is the players. A mediocre player who plays 22 post-season games is more valuable than a great player who only plays seven:
Yes, I think the Canucks will beat St. Louis and fall to Detroit in the second round.
Of course, these things are all about probabilities and mitigating risk. It’s likely that a dark horse will emerge and unpredictably make its well deep into the playoffs. But that’s difficult to guess correctly, so I went with likely outcomes and I’m hoping for the best. Here are the players I ended up with:
ZETTERBERG
MALKIN
SEMIN
M. GREEN
HAVLAT
CHARA
KRONWALL
RYDER
BURROWS
HOLMSTROM
GUERIN
GETZLAF
UPDATE: Had I known about Rinkology’s fancy bracket creator (thanks to James for the pointer), I would have used that yesterday instead of plain old pen and paper. Here’s a more legible edition (click for a larger version):
Broadly speaking, Vancouverites (and, really, people everywhere) feel one of two ways about the Olympics:
They’re a huge, heinous waste of taxpayer dollars.
They’re a celebration of the city, province and nation which, through infrastructure investment and international exposure, brings new wealth to the region.
The more left of centre you are, the likelier you are to be in Camp #1. I like to think of myself as near the centre, and this conversation highlights that position. I haven’t done enough reading. However, looking at previous Olympics in North America, it seems that both outcomes are true, depending on who you ask. The key facts that I wrestle with are:
The money available for the Olympics wouldn’t necessarily be available to house the homeless or increase the police force.
It’s incredibly difficult to accurately measure the benefits of an event this big, which impacts so many sectors in the short, medium and long term.
We can see this discussion on a simpler, smaller scale in the current grumblings by the BC NDP about BC Place’s new roof. The roof will apparently cost CAN $365 million, and the NDP is running a marketing campaign against the expenditure. It’s worth noting, of course, that neither party are strangers to absurd over-spending (how now, PacificCat Explorer).
Here’s the NDP’s position, and here’s the BC Liberal’s response (I note that the NDP is winning the search engine optimization battle). To be honest, I can’t even grok this simpler issue. What’s the value of the roof’s refurbishment? How long will it extend the life of BC Place, and much event-related and spin-off revenue will that generate? How many jobs does the project and the subsequent expansion create? What’s the value of an MLS franchise to the city?
On the other hand, what would $365 million mean to the Downtown Eastside? Knowing that $1.4 billion over the past nine years has barely made a dent in that neighbourhood’s problems isn’t particularly encouraging.
It’s easy to say “I like sports, and therefore the Olympics and the roof replacement are a good thing”. It’s much, much harder to be a good citizen and dig up the empirical data that makes an unbiased case one way or another. I’m sorry that I haven’t done that in this blog post, but time marches ever onward and all that.
What do you think? Should BC Place get a new roof?
I’m in Winnipeg for a speaking gig, so posting will be light for the next couple of days. I spotted this charming story in the paper (I forget which one) this morning:
As the global economic downturn begins to impact on the world of sport, one French athlete has come up with an unusual way to try to secure a new sponsorship deal. Pole-vaulting champion Romain Mesnil, whose contract with the sports brand Nike was not renewed when it expired last year, has run naked with his pole through the streets of Paris and posted a video of his caper online.
Mon dieu! Here’s the video. It’s safe for work, as there’s a little hovering black box over his viande et deux légumes:
I hope that he doesn’t already have a sponsor, and this isn’t just some clever reverse-viral-video campaign to ‘find’ the sponsor.
Yesterday Julie wrote about the Skate Bug, a kind of auditory aid for getting from (to borrow Lee and Sachi’s metaphor again) A to G:
At the Four Continents Championship in Vancouver last month I saw the ‘Skate Bug’ for the first time. It’s a radio device that connects listeners with live event commentary. One part fits in your ear; the other part is hand held. With the Skate Bug, listeners can get real-time event commentary–even more detailed than those watching the event on TV at home–and can even ask questions about elements or scoring via text message during the event. The device is meant to make figure skating more understandable and fan friendly, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s kind of like a real-time tutorial in your ear. I remember watching figure skating on the BBC during the 2002 Olympics. The eloquent commentators did an astonishingly good job of articulating the nuances of the sport and the judging system. This was critical, as the Beeb’s audience probably only sees figure skating once every four years. I often feel that this is an explanation failure of North American coverage of the sport–the hosts assume that their audience know more than they do.
Apparently Skate Canada is offering this device directly, as a means of recruiting new fans to the sport. In their press release, they say they’re introducing “a new multimedia tool at Skate Canada events”. That’s a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it only offers the one media.
The next step would be to offer the feed in stream audio, so that neophyte fans at home could tune in. And it’s easy to imagine that these could be offered for other sports, too. The first time I go to a cricket game, for example, I could seriously benefit from one of these.
Hagman gets accidentally (and firmly) checked by a referee, gets kneed in the head and then almost gets the puck in the mouth. And then he scores a great goal. Good Canadian boy. Except, of course, that he’s Finnish.
I know I’m late to this ballgame, but I just saw this and it struck me as pretty amusing:
This isn’t the first of these remixes that I’ve seen using this snippet from the exceptionally good German film Der Untergang. Is there a Hitler video generator out there on the web somewhere?
Since most NHL players switched to graphite sticks, there’s been a bit of a plague of broken sticks. Rarely do I watch a game where at least one stick isn’t broken.
Here’s a simple idea for a charity campaign: every time an NHL player breaks his stick in a game, he donates the value of that stick to a particular charity. Maybe a group of charities get together, and the player can choose the one he wants to support.
How often does a given player break a stick in a game? It feels like there’s, maybe, two broken sticks a game. There’s 40 players in a game, so the odds of breaking a stick are 1 in 20. So does the average player break four sticks a year? If so, that’s $1200 a year. Multiply that by roughly 600 active players, and you get $720,000. Not an insignificant sum.
But the real money would be if they promoted and extended the program into recreational hockey. Maybe beer league players each agree to donate $20 per broken stick. According to Wikipedia, there are a million registered players in North America. That’s a lot of potential cash.
Actually, I take back the ‘player chooses the charity’ model. Using the Nothing But Nets model, I’d pick a very specific charity, something that I could clearly associate with the whole stick thing. Maybe something around planting trees? Of course, 95% of professional players use sticks made out of graphite, not wood, but the gist is there.
We had a couple of no-shows at the planned post-BarCamp hockey pool, so we weren’t quite quorate. I thought I’d take one more kick at this particular can and suggest a virtual pool, run in real-time over Skype.
I was thinking next Monday, October 6 between 5:30pm and 7:30pm. I know four games will have been played by then, but I don’t think that particularly matters.
I figure Skype is probably the most ubiquitous, simplest tool in which to run the draft. If you’ve got another suggestion–I guess Twitter would be a possibility–fire away.
If you’re interested in joining said, uh, Automagical Virtual Hockey Pool, leave a comment.
If we get enough, I’ll run it. If not, I’ll watch the 2008-09 season with a stake in only one, meagre, non-playoff team. And if there’s a torrent of interest, the maximum number of participants is 15. All other rules are as on the BarCamp wiki.
