“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said, giving directions to his house. Either path, it turned out, got you there.
.. “Nobody goes there anymore,” he said of a popular restaurant. “It’s too crowded.”
.. A beautifully written story for a storied man. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” could be his epitaph. I’d add: now it is but it isn’t. Rest in peace Mr. Berra.
We should host the Olympics in the same place every time
Instead of investing billions of dollars for a new city every four years, we could create a permanent Olympics city, with facilities and athlete housing. Though any city could take this one, I’d prefer a small island with few inhabitants. This way, we’d avoid the disruption and social dislocation and eliminate the often-massive costs to citizens in the host cities. It would also serve our sportsmen and sportswomen. Younger athletes, especially from the less wealthy parts of the world, could practice there for years. The site could become an international convention center of sorts, serving as a gathering hub for arts and culture as well as sports.
.. The very recent Greek crisis provides an opportunity. The Greeks are in hock to around $271 billion to all official lenders. The government in Athens has agreed to transfer state assets of $80 billion to an independent fund. How about selling a permanent site in Greece for the Summer Olympics?
Notre Dame’s Big Bluff
“The whole south campus of the school was built with football money,” says Murray Sperber, who has written extensively about Notre Dame football. That the University of Notre Dame today is a big, important, wealthy school — ranked 18th among national universities in the latest U.S. News and World Report survey, with the 12th largest endowment — is directly attributable to football.
.. Thus, my first reaction upon reading in The Times that the Rev. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, was threatening to leave big-time college football if the athletes gained the right to be paid, was to scoff.
.. I think Jenkins and Bienen are aiming their remarks not just at the public, but also at the California appeals court that will soon decide whether to uphold a lower court’s decision in the Ed O’Bannon case. That decision calls for players to be paid up to $5,000, which wouldn’t exactly break the bank.
Mo Farah, Usain Bolt, and the World Championships
I also will say, in his defense, that I absolutely love his focus on form. We ran a profile of him a couple of years ago that included the detail that he was trying to get one of his runners to change the position of his thumbs while running. Salazar was mocked for that. But why shouldn’t there be an optimal position for one’s thumbs while running? I feel like form, in running, is treated the way defense was in baseball for many years. Because you can’t precisely measure it, you ignore it and just figure you can focus on the other stuff. But it’s essential to injury prevention and to moving efficiently.
.. In fact, as a serious runner, I can say that the thing that pains me the most about non-serious runners is their failure to understand that running is no more a “natural” or “intuitive” act than hitting a topspin forehand is. Do not heel strike—ever! Do not run with a water bottle! Running is not weight lifting! Relax your upper body!