Whacking a round ball with a club travelling 125 mph should never lead to perfect results. But ten years ago, over the course of four days, it pretty much did. It was the last time Tiger Woods appeared at a U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, and it was the greatest anyone has played the game, ever. He won by 15-strokes. He finished 12-under on the same course the rest of the best players in the game couldn’t even break par….
This Friday, to consider yourself a worthy dweller of the planet earth, you are supposed to participate in the month-long nuts-a-thon that is the World Cup of Soccer. It’s just what we do. It doesn’t matter that, for the past 47 months since the last one, you haven’t given two hoots or a hangnail about the “Beautiful Game”, it’s the spectacle that’s the thing! Last time around, it was the “spectacle” of those 79 people dying in WC related violence…
I worked with this guy earlier this year and he was, without a doubt, the most boring fellow I have ever had the displeasure to meet in my entire life. Humorless, listless and seemingly perma-beige, he was so singularly soporific; I had to pre-load a double espresso prior to our every encounter to avoid a rapid onset of coma followed by drool. So when he let it slip that he was on Twitter, naturally I couldn’t resist seeing what it…
A guy like me should never have 16 teams left in the Sweet Sixteen. In fact, nobody should. Hell, Barack Obama is kind of a busy guy and even he managed to get 14 right. A word that can never be associated with something branded as “madness” is “predictability,” yet here we are. There was precisely one “upset” in the second round of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. One. Perdue beat Washington, but it wasn’t that much of an…
If you are your average NCAA basketball fanatic, you’ve been spending the last few months boning up on all things statistical and informational getting ready for this very week. You are in full bracket mode. You know who the 6th man is on North Dakota State and who is the starting point guard for Morgan. You’ve spent sleepless nights wondering if North Carolina is the team to beat – and if Syracuse is really for real. You’re in a knot…
Thanks, Super Bowl – now February gets to piss us off even more than usual. The month that lingers on like a BBQ stain on a white T has just become even more onerous because all we have is a great game (the greatest game?) to look back upon – and little to look forward to. Sure it’s the shortest, but just consider the brutal withdrawal symptoms we will all soon be suffering through due to the lack of a…
On the morning of September 15th, 2008, the news from Wall Street was disastrous. Later dubbed as another “Black Monday” by the media, John McCain insisted in a speech that same morning that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” With those seven little words, his run for the American Presidency effectively was over. For the majority of voters, he was so clearly out of touch to the realities of living in tough financial times that all the Moose Hunters…
…and no, Michael Phelps does not make the list. Yes, he’s been everyone’s athlete of the year. Yes, he won more gold medals than France. And yes, he seems like a pretty nice guy, despite that terrible eating disorder. But let’s face it, we’re land animals and swimming is only interesting every four years. If swimming were an every year thing, 2007’s Athlete of the Year would have been someone named Martin Strel. That guy swam the entire 3274 miles…
Is this typical of these guys or what? For the first time in a long time, the PGA Tour had a tougher than usual decision to make when it came to naming the player of the year for 2008. And they blew it. From the tour that just introduced its third version of its playoff system that is only two years old, and that is reeling from a cascade failure of corporate sponsorship comes the choice of Padraig Harrington as…
I use computers every single day – and almost invariably there comes a time while perched over the keyboard that I find myself glancing around for something heavy to smack the thing, or myself, with. It is the nature of their complexity. They make our lives infinitely easier – yet on regular occasions also drive us – either through a fault of their own or ours – to apoplectic rages. Take Sunday for example. Had I been in the NCAA’s…