We’ll be posting later today about the best books we read in 2009, but we thought we’d start the day by shouting out a book sure to be atop our to-read list for the coming months: Snake vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever. Drag racing owes much of its current success to […]
Tags:business·cars·Don Prudhomme·drag racing·funny cars·Hot Wheels·Snake vs. Mongoose·sports·Tom McEwen
Sad news out of Moscow, as word comes that Vladimir “Dynamite” Turchinsky has passed on. For those unfamiliar with the realm of Russian bodybuilding and/or action films, Turchinsky could legitimately lay claim to the title of “The Schwarzenegger of the East,” having transitioned from a successful athletic career to cinematic stardom. He also had an […]
Tags:bodybuilding·medical science·movies·plasmapheresis·Russia·sports·Vladimir Turchinsky
As is made clear in our mission statement, management reserves the right to occasionally drop the fascination with esoterica in favor of talking pro football (the American kind). Let us now invoke that right in order to discuss our beloved Indianapolis Colts, who yesterday clinched the top seed in the AFC playoffs. This accomplishment brings […]
Tags:books·facial hair·football·Indian·Indianapolis Colts·Moby-Dick·sports
We’re diehard Indianapolis Colts fans, and thus tend to hate the Denver Broncos with a fiery passion normally reserved for plague rats, ex post facto laws, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa. But we’re eternally fascinated by sports fans who undergo tremendous physical discomfort in the name of supporting their side—there is something beautifully transcendent about the practice, […]
Tags:Barrel Man·football·religion·sports
We’ve heard surprisingly little debate about the Meat Industry Hall of Fame‘s inaugural class. The same folks who spent years droning on about the pass-catching virtues of Art Monk have uttered nary a peep about whether Paul Engler deserved enshrinement in his own version of Canton. And why no wailing and gnashing of teeth over […]
Tags:food·Frank-a-Matic·handball·meat·Meat Industry Hall of Fame·Ray Townsend·sports
Late start today, due to the fact we stayed up late last night watching our beloved Colts mount a miraculous comeback against their archenemies. For the record, we think Belichick’s gamble was a good one—the Pats had been unstoppable in short-yardage situations all night, and the Colts’ D has been decimated by injuries. That said, […]
Seriously, basketball gods? We finally have an inkling of hope that our beloved Los Angeles Clippers won’t totally self-immolate this season, and then you see fit to break Blake Griffin’s kneecap? Ah, cruel deities—can you do nothing to reward our years of steadfast devotion? Or are you so incensed with owner Donald Sterling’s botched facelift […]
Tags:basketball·Blake Griffin·Donald Sterling·hip-hop·Los Angeles Clippers·music·Nice & Smooth·sports
Sad news out of New Mexico this morning: Sonny Jim, a true legend of the Indian rodeo scene, was gunned down during a property dispute. A man of Modoc descent who’d long lived in Navajo country, Sonny Jim was the nation’s top Indian cowboy during the early 1970s, renowned for his long, luxuriant hippie hair […]
Tags:Arizona·cowboys·crime·New Mexico·rodeo·Sonny Jim·sports
Some hopeful news out of southern Sudan: stability has returned to the town of Rumbek, and with it one of the region’s favorite sports: Rumbek youth have resumed their favorable game of wrestling for the first time since four years after bloody confrontations in cattle raids and inter-tribal fighting. The wrestling begun between two rival […]
Our first-ever overseas assignment was covering the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. We thus have incredibly vivid memories of Hermann Maier, the celebrated Austrian skiier who just decided to call it a career. We were at the downhill slopes the day of the crash shown above, and remember instantly thinking “He must be dead” […]
When folks ask us about out take on the health care mess, we always bring up the tale of our pal “Lancer.” (Names have been Robotech-ed to protect the potentially moritified.) A few years back, poor Lancer was playing a little pickup basketball when his ACL decided that it no longer enjoyed being a complete […]
We’ve always had a shaky handle on the definition of “feedback loop,” but we think this might qualify as a case in point. Yesterday, we noticed a fair bit of traffic coming Microkhan’s way thanks to a fantastic Ask MetaFilter thread slugged “Who are the best athletes nobody has heard of?” We were honored that […]
Tags:Bart Helmholt·Fierljeppen·Frisians·lasers·modern pentathlon·Olympics·sports
In the course of conducting some morning research on chimpanzee cannibalism, we found ourselves absorbed in a 2006 paper that compared the aggressive tendencies of chimps and humans. (A PDF can be downloaded by clicking here.) As it turns out, humans and chimps are equally adept that cold-blooded murder, but our primate brethren are far […]
Tags:Australia·biology·chimpanzees·football·Jane Goodall·primates·sports
Modern pentathlon is by far our favorite Summer Olympics sport, topping even our beloved hammer throw. There’s just something inestimably cool about an event that’s modeled after a 19th-century military mission. Plus you have to dig the fact that the fifth place finisher at the 1912 games was a 28-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant named George […]
Tags:George S. Patton·lasers·military·modern pentathlon·Olympics·sports
It gives us immense pleasure to announce Microkhan’s favorite rapping competitive eater, Eric “Badlands” Booker, is back with his fifth album, Extended Play. As always, Booker’s lyrical content focuses on his gustatory dedication, as well as the perks of being a minor celebrity. The cut above does an excellent job of conveying both the stress […]
Tags:Badlands Booker·competitive eating·hip-hop·music·sports·Yosemite Sam
In response to our post on athletic gender testing earlier this week, one of our most treasured commenters posed this stumper: Are there no sports where being a woman might be a competitive advantage over being a man? Equestrian events maybe, or long distance swimming? Tough one! We’ve long been familiar with some research vouching […]
Tags:gender·Olympics·ski jumping·sports
The rest of our day is all about the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, so we’ll outro with yet another clip of kabaddi mastery. Today’s legend is the late, great Harjit Brar Bajakhana, perhaps the best Indian raider to every play the game. Keep in mind that he performed at such a high level […]
Tags:Harjit Brar Bajakhana·India·kabaddi·Olympics·racewalking·sports
We generally shy away from Red Bull, due to a bad experience we had after consuming four cans of the stuff one night. (Suffice to say our earthly vessel did not appreciate the deluge of taurine.) But perhaps we should reconsider our aversion in light of this Winona State study. Because Red Bull may have […]
Tags:football·medical science·Napoleon McCallum·NFL·Red Bull·sports
In reading this quickie AP bit about a female runner whose gender is in question, we were left wondering about the shades of sexual grey that the International Association of Athletic Federations must contend with in the age of hormones. A quick peek in the pants, alas, is no longer sufficient to determine whether a […]
Tags:Caster Semenya·gender·Olympics·sports·Stanisława Walasiewicz
When the conversation turns to the all-time greats of kabaddi, the name Ameen Jatt must invariably be mentioned. The thick-bodied Pakistani raider was a dominant force in the 1990s, and still much-admired among the sport’s rabid fanbase: An awesome player, simply put out of this world! In 1995 World Cup he led Pakistan into the […]
Tags:Ameen Jatt·kabaddi·Pakistan·sports
We’re in the midst of working on a Wired piece about agricultural science, so you can expect Microkhan to dish up a plethora of farm-related factoids in the coming weeks. We’ll start today by highlighting a world us big city types know embarrassingly little about: the collegiate poultry judging circuit. Our journey began as we […]
We can’t say we ever watched more than 90 seconds of an Arena Football game, so news of the league’s imminent demise didn’t exactly make us cry hot, salty tears. But 22 years is a long time for an upstart pro-sports league to make it—the likes of the USFL could only dream of achieving such […]
In response to our recent post about Japanese tackle football, a commenter asked a salient question: I’ve always wondered if some of the high-ranking sumo wrestlers could make it in the NFL as blitzing specialists. There’s been a long history of association between football and wrestling in the US, with a lot of highschool wrestling […]
Tags:football·Japan·Masaru Hanada·sports·sumo
This week’s installment of Bad Movie Friday brings us some serious high-concept nonsense: the 1985 Kurt Thomas vehicle Gymkata, which sought to cash in on the nation’s post-Mary Lou Retton love affair with gymnastics. And what better way than to take a slightly past-his-prime male gymnast and insert him into a limp ninja flick? We […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Gymkata·gymnastics·Kurt Thomas·martial arts·Mary Lou Retton·movies·sports
Perhaps due to our early exposure to the Mel Brooks versus Gregory Hines fight scene in History of the World: Part I, we always figured that trident-and-net gladiators—known in Latin as retiarii—were decidedly badass. For years, in fact, we’ve always claimed that, should we ever suddenly be cast back to the year 100 A.D. and […]
We were saddened to learn of the death of Alexis “The Explosive Thin Man” Arguello, one of our all-time favorite boxers. And we were surprised to discover that just a year before his passing, Arguello had been elected the mayor of Managua. (Okay, we admit it—we don’t keep up on Nicaraguan municipal politics like we […]
Tags:Alexis Arguello·Bill Bradley·football·George Weah·Great Sasuke·Japan·Kevin Johnson·Peter Boulware·politics·sports
There’s a great passage in Luc Sante‘s Low Life, in which he recounts the 19th-century New York City spectacle of man-versus-rat fights. A human competitor wearing heavy boots was placed in a ring with a swarm of hungry rats, and challenged to stomp as many to death as possible without suffering terrible injury. It’s quite […]
Tags:Journal of Manly Arts·Luc Sante·martial arts·purring·sports
With so much focus on steroid scofflaws these past few years, it’s tough to remember that professional athletes are often forced to dabble in performance-sapping drugs, too. Such is currently the case with Spanish MotoGP star Dani Pedrosa, who’s been racing on painkillers since badly injuring his hip in a nasty spill. And while the […]
This morning’s sumo-related post stirred up memories of another Hawaiian-born legend of the sport: Konishiki, aka “The Dump Truck.” Though he never attained the exalted rank of yokozuna—perhaps due to anti-foreigner prejudice among sumo’s elite—Konishiki never let the disappointment get in the way of his artistic ambitions. As evidenced by the above video, the truly […]
The sumo world is saddened by the passing of Larry Loyes Kukahiko Aweau, the man most responsible for the sport’s “Hawaiian invasion.” A judo black belt whose cousin was among the first Americans to wrestle in Japan, Aweau spent decades combing the 50th state in search of sumo talent. His greatest scouting find was an […]
