Tiger Woods speaking at Lincoln Memorial on Obama’s inauguration
While only 14 years old, tiger Woods understands his place in the world and what he plans to accomplish. We now know that many consider him the greatest golfer of all time. Who would have known from this interview?
Notice how the tennis courts are empty and the pickleball courts are busy at “The Villages” retirement center in Florida
This pickleball instructor makes $150 an hour off of clients that he describes as “Too unathletic for tennis and too poor for golf” in this revealing interview
Examples of artwork on a variety of subjects and in a variety of styles by Francis Elizabeth Wynne from a sketchbook (ca. 420 drawings): mixed media, including watercolour, wash and, pen and ink.
Pain-killers, anti-inflammatory drugs, cocaine and cobra venom — whatever it takes to keep the race going, keep the money coming. Splayed bone shards, shattered ankles, lungs full of blood — we rip them limb-from-limb. While some novel element of tragedy may yet be discovered in the particulars of the 12 dead at Churchill Downs, there’s no mystery in the near-identical deaths that have marred American race tracks for years.
There’s no more need to ask why. Whatever killed those 12 racehorses, it’s the same cause of death it’s always been. It’s us.
A friend of mine, Tom Homberger, who coaches a youth Sailing Team gave this analysis:
OK – I’ll take a shot. All sailing downwind.
GBR on Starboard tack has ROW over FRA & KIWI who are on Port tack (rule for vessels on opposite tacks).
FRA & KIWI???
Between these 2, FRA might be considered leeward vessel and have ROW over KIWI (rule for vessels of same tack). KIWI would need to give way by heading up.
Or – hard to tell but if FRA is overtaking KIWI boat from behind then KIWI is ‘boat ahead’ or ‘overtaken boat’ and would have ROW and FRA would need to give way (rule for same tack overtaking).
Generally ROW rules work well for keel boats, skiffs & dinghies. Not so much when zipping along at 45kts on a short ‘made for media’ course.
I remember the windsurf slalom racing in late 80’s/90’s basically threw out the rule book and it was every sailor for themselves. The tribe would settle disagreements in the parking lot afterwards. Kinda worked!
When NBC agreed to broadcast a few regular season and playoff weekend games and the Stanley cup finals in prime Time, NHL viewership was so weak that the network didn’t even have to pay the usual “rights fees” that sports leagues usually can demand.
So why is NBC getting record TV ratings for Hockey this year? For years hockey has struggled on television. As a kid after screaming myself hoarse at Ranger games in smokey Madison Square Garden, trying to watch a game on TV was excruciating. As hard as it was to see the puck, sometimes even the camera man would lose the puck.
So what changed? …the size of TV screens. With the spread of large-format, hi-def TVs, you could actually follow the fast-paced action. So a sport, which grew up on frozen ponds in cities like Chicago, now has a rabid fan base in the Sunbelt, with many local junior leagues.
NBA teams are clearly ego purchases, but rich guys hate losing money … and that’s about ego, too. In 2010 and 2011, six NBA franchises sold or changed hands, and another four were practically thrown on Craigslist.2 That’s one-third of the league. A steady stream of billionaires crunched numbers and came to the same conclusion: Unless it’s a killer market, the NBA isn’t a good investment. During 2011’s lockout, Philly sold for a measly $280 million as the league frantically looked for a New Orleans buyer (and didn’t find one).
Everything flipped in December of that year, after the NBA negotiated an owner-favorable collective bargaining agreement (and then some) that included a 50-50 revenue split, shorter long-term deals and a more punitive luxury tax system, as well as a pay-per-view event in which David Stern and Adam Silver poured Dom Perignon on each other’s heads and danced over the ruins of Billy Hunter’s career. Fine, I made that last one up. From there, everything kept breaking the NBA’s way. In no particular order …
• The economy rebounded (at least in rich guy circles).
• LeBron became the league’s most famous and talented superstar since MJ, right as we suddenly had the deepest pool of under-27 stars in 20-plus years.
• The 2013 Finals went down as one of the greatest Finals ever, followed by a LeBron-Durant rivalry emerging that could and should carry the rest of the decade.
• Americans stopped caring about PEDs and started worrying about concussions right when everyone should have started worrying about PEDs in basketball (a sport that rarely has any concussions).
• The YouTube/broadband/iPad/GIF/Instagram/Twitter era turned basketball into a 24/7 fan experience — just the ideal sport for the Internet era, the kind of league in which your buddies email you a bizarre Kobe Bryant tweet, an endearing Spurs team selfie and a ridiculous Blake Griffin dunk GIF in the span of three hours (and by the way, that happened to me yesterday).
• A new multimedia rights deal is coming soon … and it’s going to easily double the current deal.
(Repeat: easily double it.)
And I didn’t even mention basketball grabbing the no. 2 spot behind soccer as the world’s most popular sport. I’m not sure when it happened, but it happened. Buy an NBA franchise in 2014 and deep down, you’re thinking about stuff like, I wonder if fans from 250 countries will be paying for League Pass 20 years from now? Throw in the other breaks and that’s how you end up climbing from here …
So why is NBC getting record TV ratings for Hockey this year? For years hockey has struggled on television. As a kid after screaming myself hoarse at Ranger games in smokey Madison Square Garden, trying to watch a game on TV was excruciating. As hard as it was to see the puck, sometimes even the camera man would lose the puck.
• The economy rebounded (at least in rich guy circles).