NYT: Roger Federer As A Religious Experience

More of David Foster Wallace on tennis. Here's my favorite part:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

WSJ: Tennis Becomes A Numbers Game

Tennis sabermetrics. This is a sport I'd like to get into more someday.

Vintage Vintage Base Ball and The Best Year in Sports

I caught June 17, 1994 last month. It (among other things) inspired me to look up the issue of Sports Illustrated that covered that day. While looking through that issue, I stumbled upon this article about a vintage base ball team that had been playing in Ohio since 1981. I wonder if the baseball strike inspired these guys to get off the couch and play. Why not? The Cosmic Baseball Association was one of the offspring of the strike. I play vintage ball, but only started this year. So I'm a little hazy on the rules, but the ones they play by seem a little off. But they play using older rules than we do.

This morning, or last nite, I started thinking about what was the best year in sports history. It might be 2008. NPR makes that argument and mentions 1960 and 1969. Maybe it's 1969, if you are a New Yawker. What say you? I don't think a year necessarily has to be a calendar year. SI didn't think so, either. They would occasionally print a special issue retrospective in the late winter from around 1977 to 1984. I'm partial to this one because it includes the Miracle On Ice. That might be the biggest sports story in my living memory.

Esquire: String Theory

I read this David Foster Wallace piece today. Wimbeldon's going on right now, after all. And Wallace seems to have a cult following that I'm trying to understand. (I think that both Bill Simmons and Bethlehem Shoals are fans.) I did like it even though Wallace and I are polar opposites when it comes to writing. I am terse while he was expansive; like a Joe Posnanski or Aaron Gleeman. Too, I tend to keep my digressions within the main body of the text, instead of shunting them off to footnotes. But I am beginning to see some advantages to his method.

Wallace also wrote this article for the New York Times Play magazine. I may tackle it later. I happened to read the Esquire piece in a compilation book. I didn't realize it was online until after reading the piece. Frankly, I find stuff that long much easier to follow in print than online.

It's Like Watching A Carwreck

Buzz Bissinger on his membership in the Twitterati.

Pato

Never heard of this sport before. Sounds like polo without mallets.

What ever Happened To Soccer

If someone tells you that baseball is the only sport that receives this pining-for-the-old-days type of treatment in the press, they should know better after reading this.

Game Theory and NASCAR

The link is in the title. I'm not sure if this is a new feature, but I just noticed it. Anyhoo, this guy is a football game theorist, not a racing one. He raises an interesting point, but I used to watch a lot of NASCAR when the Hayseed still lived up here in Connecticut and there are a lot of other considerations. Sometimes drivers play it safe and race for points instead of the win. You sometimes have to decide when to pit and when not to. And there's drafting; especially at Daytona and Talladega. The deals cut are reminiscent of the political conventions of yore.

Partial Football

Soccer's a pretty low priority branch on my sports tree, but I liked this article from Marketwatch. I think I'm more of a strat(egy)head than stathead. Hence, I find sites like Smart Football* interesting. Differing ethnic styles of sports also interest me as well, so this was right up my alley.

* It's about the other football.