Tag Archives: sports
Today, George Washington is a marble bust. Historians typically rank him as our second-greatest president, after Lincoln. But for most Americans Denzel is the first Washington who comes to mind if we’re talking about a person, vs. a city or symbol.
(Fun fact: Washington is the blackest presidential surname, even blacker than Black, which is 68% white. Meanwhile, there’s a 19% chance that a person named White is in fact African-American.)
If we conjure up an image of George Washington as a fully fleshed-out human, it’s probably one of those portraits that shows him with narrow shoulders, a spreading midsection, and womanly hips.
The actual Washington didn’t look anything like that. Here’s how a fellow military officer described the 26-year-old future hero:
“[S]traight as an Indian, measuring six feet two inches in his stockings, and weighing…
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I walked into the spelling bee just as my daughter was at the microphone for her first word of the day. She saw me coming in, and for a moment I panicked, thinking that I would distract her and she’d miss an easy one.
Fortunately, the word was “exclusive,” and I suspect Meredith could spell the word before she could pronounce it. As a seventh grader, it was no challenge whatsoever.
That’s the way it is in our family. Kimberly and I are journalists, and we’re all avid readers. Spelling comes as naturally to us as breathing. I wasn’t surprised to learn that spelling and reading proficiency have a very strong genetic component:
According to John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, both reading and spelling require a phenomenal amount of brain power. Deciphering…
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I started coaching my daughter’s soccer team last year, as I wrote about here. I’d never been a head coach before, in any sport, and had no confidence in my ability to do it. But I plunged in, and learned enough about the game on the fly to teach bits and pieces of it to the kids. We had a really good fall season, followed by an okay spring season.
For reasons that I think made sense at some point, I decided to move the team up to a travel league this year. We’re getting crushed on the field, but the kids are working hard and enjoying themselves, giving me hope that we’ll be a little more competitive in the second half of the season.
This past weekend, we played three games, all on Sunday. I entered our team in this particular tournament…
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Yesterday, as I was leaving the gym, I bumped into a fellow middle-aged guy who usually works out about the same time I do. “Must’ve been a good one,” he said, pointing to my sweat-soaked T-shirt.
I hadn’t really noticed that it was a particularly good workout, but after he said that, and after I broke a fresh sweat walking to my car in the mid-80s heat, I found myself re-evaluating. I’d tried a new circuit of exercises for my hips and core at the start of the workout, and I’d found a use for a new toy, my Gymboss timer. So, yeah, a good one.
I also thought back to Tuesday night, the first practice of the season for my daughter Meredith’s soccer team. It was probably 85 when we started, and within an hour several of the girls had guzzled through all the water…
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For a brief time in the 1970s, I cared more about football than baseball. The football Cardinals, under Don Coryell, were more interesting than the baseball Cardinals. And my college team, the Missouri Tigers, regularly upset the top teams in the NCAA. In 1976 alone, they upset #8 USC, #2 Ohio State, and #3 Nebraska — all on the road. That was after beating #2 Alabama in 1975 and before toppling #2 Nebraska in 1978.
And I’m sure they beat Notre Dame somewhere in there, along with some other ranked teams that I can’t recall just now.
Ultimately, though, the crushing disappointments inherent in following those teams, watching them beat some of the best teams one week and then the following week lose to some of the worst, wore me out. By the time Whitey Herzog came along to manage the baseball Cardinals in the…
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Back on the original Male Pattern Fitness, at the original louschuler.com, I wrote from time to time about steroids, particularly steroids in baseball, and most particularly the Golden Age of steroids in baseball, when Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds all crossed the 60-homer line at points in their careers when they should’ve been in steep decline.
(There’s no easy way to search my archives, but I did find this post, analyzing the career trajectory of another blatant juicer, Rafael Palmeiro.)
Early on, I thought the most logical starting point for Mark McGwire’s steroid use is the 1995 season, when his slugging percentage jumped up to .685, the highest it had ever been for a season in which he played 100 or more games. By comparison, in 1987, his Rookie of the Year season, he slugged .618. He was 31 in ’95,…
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When I started this blog, at the original louschuler.com, I gave an annual summary of my favorite books, movies, and events. (Or, in 2006, my favorite book.)
And from time to time, I would write about movies and books without any reason other than to note a trend I’d spotted. I particularly enjoyed writing this summary of recent biographical films. (Important lessons: If your brother dies when you’re young, you will become addicted to drugs. But if you’re not addicted to alcohol or drugs, no one will make a movie about your life, because you aren’t interesting.)
This year, as usual, I haven’t seen most of the movies that show up on the critics’ top 10 lists. All I’ve seen are what’s available on DVD. And, because of the Olympics and the election, I spent way too much time watching TV, and way too little…
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Let me say up front that I’ve never coached a team at any level before, and don’t pretend to have any particular skills or knowledge in that area. All I know is that my daughter’s recreational league needed someone to coach, I volunteered, and managed to get the team through the season almost undefeated.
In fact, we were undefeated until yesterday. But nobody expected our team to win that last game, so in that sense I still consider the season a remarkable success.
Readers of my original Male Pattern Fitness blog may remember this entry, about one of my daughter’s soccer games two years ago.
Here’s a quick recap of the part that’s relevant to this post:
My daughter [Meredith] is probably the youngest player in the league (her birthday was just on the wrong side of the cutoff), which means the median player is a year…
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