I went to watch the Arizona Wildcats beat Northern Arizona University in the first home game of the season last night in front of a happy home crowd. I’ve only been to one other American Football game in my life, so there was a whole novelty dimension. During the halftime show, as the “marching band”:http://www.arts.arizona.edu/band/athletic/marchingband.html played Led Zeppelin favorites and marched in complex, quasi-aesthetic formations (it looked and sounded like you might imagine), the “color guard”:http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/colorguard/ drew a disproportionate amount of attention. (The color guard join in the band routines, twirling and throwing large flags. It looks tricky.) The color guard wore blue pants and sparkly, ruby-colored bustiers … except for one of them, whose whole upper body was covered in sparkly goodness. His presence was hard to miss, partly because he was the only male in the colorguard, partly because he was about twice the size of his fellow flag-bearers, but mostly because he twirled more effusively and pirouetted more extravagantly than anyone else. He flung himself _en arrière_ and _en avant_, he pirouetted under the posts and _jeté _-ed across the fifty yard line. He was terrific. Some people in the crowd got a little wound up, apparently annoyed that a gender boundary might be in danger of subversion on the very altar of American masculinity’s defining ritual. There were some catcalls and cries of “Get that guy outta there!” But mostly people loved it. And the guy himself could have cared less, blissed out as he was in front of 40,000 people, having reached a kind of camp Nirvana.
From the category archives:
Sport
Via Norm, a piece by Mike Brearley, who understands why cricket is thrilling and why this test series in particular has been so gripping. But he perpetuates a myth about Headingley 1981, that I want to kill. He says:
The comparison is no doubt indecent, but nevertheless valid: people remember where they were on the last day at Headingley, 1981, just as those of us who are old enough remember where we were when we heard of John F Kennedy’s assassination, or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Well, I do remember where I was on the last day of Headingley 1981. But that is incidental. What I really remember is where I was in the final session of the Saturday when first Dilley, and then Botham, truned a hopeless situation into one in which you started to fantasize about what eventually happened. I suspect Brearley remembers the last day better because, though he never says it, it was a day when a captain won a match.
Anyway, if you’ve got a TV, watch it tomorrow [or the day after, if you are reading this on Tuesday — thanks Chris] for Benaud. If you have a ticket, or can steal one, go for Warne. And pity the rest of us.
How fitting that the greatest sporting moment (so far) of the 21st century, and one of the greatest comebacks of all time, should be commemorated “thus”:http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0500liverpoolfc/0100news/tm_objectid=15870300%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=night%2dof%2dtriumph%2dcaptured%2din%2dlego%2d-name_page.html :
bq. WITH a triumphant look on his face, Steven Gerrard can be seen standing next to the Champions League Trophy flanked by his manager, Rafael Benitez.
bq. But look again. For this is not an image from the historic final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Turkey earlier this year – it is a re-creation of the scene made entirely from Lego.
bq. Artists Darren Neave and John Cake – who are known as The Little Artists – have built the work from the toy bricks and it will go on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery later this week.
Kevin Drum is “mystified”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006789.php by “cricket slang”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/england/4711875.stm. Me, too. The important thing to remember is that England are losing in a really entertaining way.
I’m too young to remember the D’Oliveira affair in any detail, but old enough for it to have made a dent on my consciousness, and, of course, to have seen D’Oliveira in his later, post-test-playing years. I remember quite vividly the affection for him in my circles, an affection which, if I’m right, contained not a whiff of pride that England had treated him well, but an bemused pride that he had chosen England. I was aware, of course, that the South African government was composed of evil racists and that the English cricket establishment was suspected of collaboration. But what Peter Oborne’s book Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Controversy
I should make a confession here.
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Les rosbifs ont gagne! London has beaten Paris to host the 2012 Olympics. I’m amazed at how happy this makes me. The last two cities I lived in were London and Paris, so for a while there I couldn’t decide which I preferred for the games. Before this week, I was a firm supporter of the Paris bid, believing the city to be far superior to London in infrastructure and the centralised sheer force of will it must take to pull off this event with real panache. I thought (and probably still think) that the construction and transport hell London’s bid involve make it a painful undertaking for Londoners – but no better city to get behind every obscure new sport, every under-dog, and make it an event the whole city mucks in to, with more colour, more culture, a few sharp edges and a hell of a lot more fun.
Chris mentioned the likelihood of antipodean interest in the Lions, and having attended tonight’s big football game in Brisbane, I’m happy to give a report. The home crowd was delirious with joy as the familiar strains of La Marseillaise floated over the ground, signalling a crushing win for the Lions. Bradshaw and Akermanis were brilliant, and the margin of 74 points was overwhelming.
In other sporting news, Australia beat France 37-31 in rugby union and NZ beat UK+IE 48-18.
From Slugger O’Toole comes the news that “corporate France appears to be unaware that Ireland is an independent nation”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/06/ireland_barely.php , and has been since 1922. Regular readers of CT will, of course, be aware that Ireland is indeed separate from Britain, although Irish people who achieve sporting excellence become “British” even faster than “Zola Budd”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zola_Budd .
“Well it wasn’t just the selection was it?”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4618309.stm Those debates had mainly been around the backs, but since the Lions never got near the ball, Henson probably wouldn’t have made much difference. O’Driscoll knackered within 90 seconds was a blow, but the real difference was the ability of the All Blacks both to get the ball and to handle it even in the torrential rain. Will Woodward change the selection? Comments open.
We haven’t had a sports thread here on CT for a while, but since we have representatives of at least three of the four nations making up the Lions, and some no-doubt-interested antipodeans, comments are open. Personally, I’m “astonished at the selection”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4118436.stm : overwhelmingly English. Henson, Shane Williams and Geordan Murphy miss out, and players who’ve done nothing for a while (Robinson, Wilkinson) are included. England, despite being World Cup winners, flopped badly in the Six Nations, and are currently ranked 6th in the world, behind Wales. Stand by for a massacre by the All Blacks on Saturday morning (or later on, depending on your timezone …)
I recently had a good time with some old friends on an email list sharing stories of the athletic humiliations of our youth. I’ve posted my favorite story under the fold.
Most bloggers and blog junkies are, of course, diamond-hard triatheletes jotting off a few lines between reps. For those of us who aren’t, share your funniest athletic embarassments as a young person. You’ll feel better.
One of the best comebacks ever, dead and buried at half-time, “Champions of Europe….”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/4573159.stm
11-year-old Katie Brownell, the only girl on her Little League team in upstate New York, “pitched a perfect game”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/nyregion/19perfect.html last Saturday, annihilating the opposing team “in an 11-0 shutout before a stunned crowd of about 100 parents and friends in the bleachers of the Oakfield Town Park.” Now, I am indifferent to baseball, but it has the virtue of being one of those sports that allow for the possibility of a well-defined “perfect game” of some sort. There are fewer of these sports than you might think — they’re generally confined to games where the player has to do something similar over and over again and never make a mistake. Watching a performance like that is quite a different experience from seeing a well-played football game or watching a track race where the winner does everything right. The tension builds in a different way. In the best cases, it takes some time for the crowd even to realize that something special might be on the cards. And of course in this case there’s the whole “who’s laughing now” angle, which I imagine some screenwriter somewhere is already bashing out a treatment of:
bq. Ms. Bischoff said her daughter had been an avid baseball player since she was about 6, and learned the game from two older brothers. But she said Katie’s first year as the only girl in the Little League was trying, and her teammates sometimes told her she should play softball with the other girls.
The BBC radio news this morning has been dominated by hours of whining about “the takeover of Manchester United by a Michael Moore lookalike”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4542913.stm . Meanwhile the disappearance of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of African children from London schools is relegated to mere mention status. (Some of the children have been killed, many more are probably in some kind of slavery.) The relative importance the BBC assigns to these stories is also reflected on its main news page.