RICK'S PICKS

Canopy pilots

Not sure if this sport is more about bravery or plain foolishness.
Skydivers have apparently been looking for something new to revive their sport and have found it. Swooping is a competition for skilled, experienced divers. Swoopers, or canopy pilot, as they are also called, jump out of planes at low altitude and come down on a marked field and then swoop across it, skimming the ground. They score points for speed, distance and accuracy as they fly across that field. Sometimes they swoop over water.  They sometimes skim the ground at 80kph. Injuries are not unknown. Broken legs are common, so common, they just call them 'femuring' in the swooping world.
Check out some action here.
As one competitor says, it's one thing to swoop well. But you also have to land well. Or else you can't do it again.

Explaining LeBron: A numbers game

LeBron James shot 2 for 18 and had 10 turnovers in game one of the Celtics Cavaliers series.
Just a bad game for LeBron?
Maybe.
Maybe there was more at work here. Turn out that the Celtics have gone a little MBA, in their approach to the game.They have a backroom secret weapon, a geek/ basketball nerd who spends his life analyzing and creating statistics.
The numbers wizard Mike Zarren was trained by Steven Levitt, the man who wrote Freakonomics. Among his findings  noted in a May 4 New York Times piece?

The story says  "the most efficient shot to take besides a layup? Easy, says Zarren: a three-pointer from the corner.

What’s one of the most misused, misinterpreted statistics?
“Turnovers are way more expensive than people think,” Zarren says. That’s because most teams focus on the points a defense scores from the turnover but don’t correctly value the offense’s opportunity cost — that is, the points it might have scored had the turnover not occurred."

All well and good. But read this passage from the Times story on Zarren, printed just before the series started. Is it prescient?

Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse clicks, he can call up every clip in which LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers has touched the ball at the top of the key and see whether he went left or right, was double-teamed or not, passed or shot — and, if the latter, whether he missed, scored or was fouled. So if the Celtics dampen James’s scoring the next time they play a high-stakes game against the Cavs, Zarren might be entitled to a smidgen of credit.

Falling short in the long game of life

We all know the magical tales of the athletes who made it big, overcoming huge odds, poverty, broken families. For so many athletes, sports is a way of escape from the lives that offer no other route out.
Those stories inspire us.
But what of those desperate for escape who choose that path but fall short? What of the dreams of those who stake their lives on making it..... and then don't.
George  Vescey writes in the New York Times this week about Alan Seiden, the star of Jamaica High and of St. John's College, at his time, the best basketball player in the city.
Of course you've never heard of him. He led his high school to a New York city championship in 1955 and four years later to a win at a national college tournament.
That was the high point of his life.

The time to truly appreciate Alan Seiden was on Tuesday afternoons and Friday nights, when he would dribble arrogantly, the gym going crazy, and finally elevate himself for the jump shot that would beat Lane or Jackson.

Seiden got his shot at the big time, but fell short. Basketball remained the centre of his life, but always as a tarnished dream, as he gradually fell lower and lower down the rung, landing in beer leagues and  with his reputation damaged by ties to some unsavoury characters.
He played until his 60s, that failure to make, it the defining moment in the course of his life. He died this week. Vescey, who knew him, writes a fond and perhaps too gentle obit on a man who never got over being not quite good enough.

“It ruined his life,” said (former teammate Artie)Benoit, a former star at Adelphi College who knew Seiden since they were 11. “Some people play college ball and get on with their lives, but Alan could not do that."

Click here to read Vescey's story.

Understanding the Derby

I want to help you understand the Kentucky Derby.
Apparently, going there is a bit like Woodstock, a bit like Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Who knew?
I thought it was all about a horsey set in big hats .
In fact, the Derby, the first leg in the triple crown is one of those sporting events that transcends its sport.
Even if you aren't into horse racing, but are a sports fan, you still pay attention to the kentucky Derby.
It's more than a race.
It's like the Masters is to golf, an event steeped in tradition and quaintness. Hats are a big thing. So are drinks called Mint Juleps. There is Millionaire's Row, the place where that rich horsey set goes.
But there is also the infield, and this is where the Derby resembles NASCAR. The infield is for regular folks and families. It sounds like more fun than the grandstands.
This espn travel article explains it all
even so far as suggesting you bring your own flask to top up those juleps, since the servers have been known to shortchange that part of the mix a bit.
As for the race itself, the Derby is a bit like the Daytona 500 in that it seems out of place in the racing season and an odd fit with the rest of the thoroughbred sport.
This year, all the talk is about Big Brown.
It's all explained here.

As for the history of the race, everyone knows the story of the great Secretariat, the greatest horse with the greatest win of all time.
Secretariat blew away the field by 31 lengths, the greatest margin of victory ever.

Work your way through all of this and you will understand the Derby.

See Barker and Giguere in action

Hamilton Tiger Cats say they got their two top ranked prospects in yesterday's CFL draft.
While they hoped to trade their first pick, there is no question they scored a talented prospect in Dylan Barker.
They took a chance on Giguere, the talented receiver who played in Sherbrooke but who will dip his toes in the waters of an NFL camp this summer.
TSN had a live video stream of the draft yesterday. They have video clips of all the players selected.
Check it out to see the Cats top two picks and other first round picks in action

Aligning all the Stars

CELTICS STAR TRIO COULD PLAY TOGETHER, BUT COULD THEY LIVE TOGETHER?

Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett

ARE ATHLETES superstitious? Do they have their routines?
Read this passage from a recent  Boston Globe article about star guard Ray Allen. ( appeared at the start of their opening round series)

Allen will leave nothing to chance. He will line up for the tip exactly as he has for his other 73 games. His pregame ritual does not waver: a nap from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m., a meal of chicken and white rice at 2:30, an arrival time at the gym at precisely 3:45 to stretch. Allen will shave his head, then walk out to the court at exactly 4:30. He will methodically take shots from both baselines, both elbows, and the top of the key.

But what if someone else's routine impacts on his? This piece is a fascinating insight into team dynamics, the clash not so much of egos, but of personalities. Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett all had to find a way to mesh not just on the court, but off it as well.

Allen is so finicky and so precise about everything he does that even when other players adopt his work ethic and pregame preparation ethic, he feels put upon. Three distinct styles, not of play, but of being:

"There’s the free-wheeling Pierce, who never does anything quite the same from game to game. There is Allen, who needs to complete a specific checklist of chores before tipoff. And then there is Garnett, a brooding pregame figure who requires an intense period of introspection to prepare himself."

It was inevitable that their approaches would collide.

Read the full article here

Wednesday is 100 days to Beijing

CAN THE BEIJING OLYMPICS STILL BE SAVED? 
Here's a piece from the Associated Press that sums up the issues, threats and flash points heading into the Olympics.

BEIJING — With 100 days to go, the battle has been lost to keep politics out of the Beijing Olympics.
Shimmering venues and billions spent to remake Beijing into a modern city have been dulled by pro-Tibet protests, chaos on the torch relay and an anti-Western backlash by angry Chinese who sense their coming-out party is being spoiled.
A year ago former International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch predicted Beijing would be the “best in Olympics history.” A few weeks ago his successor Jacques Rogge said the Games were “in crisis.”
The shine is off, and the question is this: Can China’s communist government and the IOC return some lustre by squeezing sports and goodwill back into the Games? The Olympics have been visited by politics before — Berlin ’36, Mexico City ’68, Munich ’72 to name a few — but these are the most contentious since the boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics.
“The Chinese leadership has a major international public relations problem on its hands,” said David L. Shambaugh, a political scientist and director of the China policy program at George Washington University.
“The Chinese government and citizenry are now involved in fighting a propaganda war with the West and the Western media in particular,” Shambaugh said. “This stance, taken together with hyper Chinese nationalism, has all the makings of a public relations disaster for the Olympic Games.”

Kids start legal fight over Beckham shirt

David Beckham, for all his celebrity, is generally considered to be a genuine and nice person.We recall in hamilton  the story by the Spec's Scott Radley of how Beckham phoned young Rebecca Johnstone as she battled cancer.
He'd give you the shirts off his back if he could. But even Beckham has only one shirt to give at at time and that is behind this story from Hawaii.

In a recent game his LA Galaxy played in a tournament in  Honolulu, Beckham took his shirt off after the game and reached over a barrier to hand it to a small group of young fans who had been cheering him on.
Nice gesture that has turned into a nasty sqaubble between the young kids- two long time friends and their families.
There are now threats of legal action.
Seems the parents and kids are fighting over who gets the  jersey. One kid says it was meant for him, the other says Beckham handed it to him.

There was at least one offer to share it, but now the families aren't talking to each other, but they are talking to their lawyers and the press. Wev'e got a wire story on the fight in Saturday's Spec.
Here's the story from the Honolulu paper.

If at first you succeed, what then?

What happens if at first you do succeed? You just keep doing it over and over again if you're Fred Newman . He's coach at Cal Tech. At 58, he recently made more than 200 three pointers in a row, each of them captured on video.
He once made 1,000 foul throws in a row. His mantra is the virtue of repetition.If you've got a few moments for some repetitive viewing, here it is, Fred throwing 209  3-pointers in a row.

binocular soccer

This clip is from a Japanese comedy show.
It's funny, with an element of cruelty. (Maybe that's true of most comedy?) Contestants had binoculars strapped to their eyes and then asked to play soccer, looking through the binoculars.
But the binoculars were attached backwards, so that instead of magnifying the players view, it made everything small and far.
Here's the result.