One Shining Moment, Miracles and Michael Jordan
Spend any amount of time in a meeting when I’m discussing technical leadership and distinguishing talent and you’ll hear the name Michael Jordan dropped more than 3-point shots in a Final Four game. I frequently ask people to fill in the blank in “I’m the Michael Jordan of (blank).” The goal is to capture a [...]
Life Resembles Art (Devlin)
I had one of those “plate o shrimp” weeks. It started fairly simply as I was typing up directions for our youth hockey team’s annual pilgrimage to Lake Placid, New York. The landmark I give for our arrival in Lake Placid is Art Devlin’s Olympic Motor Inn, situated at the intersection of NY State 73 [...]
Kathyrn Bertine’s Olympic Quest
ESPN’s e-ticket follows Kathryn Bertine’s quest to represent the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Doing just about anything, it seems. The series is Bertine’s quirky, self-effacing and sport-defacing travelogue of her attempts to qualify in the women’s pentathalon, checking out team handball to a tortuous, tortured, and not at all circuitous route to [...]
Locomotive Cheer for Michelle Kwan
The locomotive cheer is one of the oldest college cheers. dervied from a pre-Civil War Army cheer. It’s forever ingrained in my Princeton experience, not just from four years on campus but through countless reunions and sporting events, in which a locomotive signals a job well done, a sign of respect, and conveys a thank-you [...]
Kwan-Dry: You Read It Here First
You read it here first, people. Michelle Kwan might punt on the Olympics. After she arrived Torino. After she marched in the opening ceremony and got way too much TV attention (hello, NBC, how about the women’s ice hockey team?) Here’s a suggestion for Michelle: Set an example for all of the young skaters who [...]
Challenging Convention, One Sunday At A Time
Scott McNealy likes to pick on “conventional wisdom” as lacking wisdom. It’s one of the reasons why so many coaching books, and books written by coaches or athletes, ring hollow: they’re full of conventional wisdom or hackneyed phrases that you could glean from an hour or two of ESPN Classic. In my on-going recovery reading [...]
The Next Olympic Sport: Synchronized Skating
Anyone who listens to me or reads my rants might think I spend all of my time in ice rinks dealing with hockey, hockey players, and hockey related injuries. Not so. I spend at least one very early weekday morning and part of each weekend with my daughter the figure skater, who has latched onto [...]
Marathon Man
Today was the 35th New York City Marathon. Nearly 35,000 people lined up in Staten Island to visit all five New York City boroughs. Running over the world’s longest single span suspension bridge (the Verrazano Narrows) into Brooklyn, the westernmost tip of Long Island, they defined a more pedestrian version of “island hopping”. The journey [...]
Best French Toast
I spend approximately 70 nights a year away from home. Part of my travel koan is to eat a good breakfast, because lunch often reduces to Altoids mints and a Starbucks coffee. I have become a self-proclaimed connoisseur of french toast, a veritable gourmand du pain frite, which is appropriate no matter how bad your [...]