The purpose is to give yourself an opportunity to get your best performance. It’s not about winning. There’s a difference. You want your best performance. You want your teammates’ best performance. And if you provide your best performance chances are you will win. But in order to have your best performance, you have to be relaxed.
Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.
Guardian – Football training. Soccer players working on their dives. (via)
Nothing that matters comes without dread. It’s the dread of failure. One team will get to cheat death; thirty-one will meet with the end to end all ends. For that damned lot, their tournament will turn out to have been a series of attempts to delay the mortal coil shuffle for just one more round, like someone joining a gym, or praying furiously. The beautiful cruelty of the World Cup is that it is held every four years, and four years is a purgatory of a time to wait for reincarnation. Every game assumes an unreasonable importance, which is what makes it such fun.
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance—this peak of ecstasy. During these moments, I no longer am my usual self, no longer human. I am connected to life. Call it bliss, call it ecstasy, call it what you will. In that moment, I not only see God, I am God. I am not only connected to life, I am connected to my TV!
Larry Bird: Greatest Passer of All Time. And part two. (via) A lot of these passes don’t seem strictly necessary to me, but 1) I’m not Larry Bird and 2) if you can, why not?
Asterisks, like footnotes, can be more distracting than clarifying, because they hint at a completeness to the story that a wise reader wouldn’t otherwise think to presume.
If you are feeling nervous, nervous is good. All right? It makes us stop thinking about things. It makes us ready to play. If you’re nervous, that’s fine. Feel nervous.
“Bill Simmons has set a new and unbeatable standard by writing like a fan—just far better.”
You can read my own story, from the most dramatic round of foursquare of the previous decade, in the comments section.
“At the most basic level, I stopped following sports because being a sports fan took too much time.” That’s pretty much my main reason for half-hearted fandom. (via)
Why I stopped being a sports fan – John Swansburg – Slate Magazine
One of those amazing/idiotic events with running, crawling through mud, navigating barbed wire, chopping wood, boiling eggs, trivia, brain puzzles, etc. I’m intrigued…
Surviving the Death Race – Video Library – The New York Times
Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell talk about sports and such. My favorite bit:
We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.
Facing Ali could be a really cool documentary. (It’s taken me a while to realize I kind of like boxing, for better or worse.)
Photos of celebrities playing table tennis. There are nine of Fidel Castro.
An audio slideshow about competing in the Barkley Marathon. Over the 22 years of the 100-mile race, only 7 have finished. It’s fondly called “the race that eats its young.” [via trails and tribulations]
“Baseball is poetic. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” [via fjm]
Mark Larson 
