Category: Sports

Posted on

Road Sign

Tour071906

Maybe Floyd Landis, until his disastrous showing today a U.S. favorite to succeed Lance Armstrong as Tour de France champion, should have known trouble was coming when he saw this sign on the first big climb of the day, the Col du Galibier: “Galibier 12%, Jack Daniels 40%.” Someone who’s over there could probably do a pretty decent feature-length article on all the stuff that gets painted on the roads of the Tour route and on the people out there doing the painting.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

Today’s Best Names

Nominated from the pharmaceutical category: Cephalexin and Cefoxatin, members of the cephalosporin antibotic family. The former is oral, the latter injected. I’m taking the former for 10 days after having a rear-end shot of the latter following some complications from the late unpleasantness between me and a local road. Complications? Well, I got four pretty good-sized abrasions when I fell off my bike last week. Three of them are healing just about as well as you could expect. The fourth, a big patch on my left shoulder, has been trouble; I may have suffered an allergic reaction to some antibiotic ointment I tried, from the adhesive on some high-tech dressings I tried, or maybe the thing was just infected from the start. In any case, it blew up into an angry, ugly mess that took on a life of its own (“I am not an animal! I am a human being!”). My whole left arm swoll up, as we used to say in the south suburbs. I went back to Kaiser twice. The first time, on Sunday, the doctor was unalarmed. The second time, today, the doctor blanched and said, “That’s cellulitis.” In a rare show of good taste and non-exhibitionist restraint, I’m suppressing the pictures. A day into the treatment, the thing seems to be responding, though.

Again with the baseball: Dan Uggla, rookie second baseman for the Florida Marlins. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel described his Wednesday exploits thus:

“Uggla became the first second baseman in franchise history with a multihomer game and knocked in a career-high five runs. … With the Marlins up 2-1 in the fifth, Uggla hit the first of his homers as part of four-run inning. His three-run blast to left knocked out starter Jamey Wright (5-5). In the ninth, Uggla sent another pitch into the left-field bleachers, this one from Tim Worrell with two outs and a man on.

” ‘I got lucky twice,” Uggla said. ‘I don’t even think my other at-bats were very good. A couple of balls, I guess I saw them pretty good and put good swings on them.’ ”

Uggla. Apparently it’s a Norwegian and Swedish name.

Posted on

‘Good Guy, Bad World’

Floyd Patterson died, and now that’s mostly a reminder of a time when there weren’t three or four or seven world championships in every boxing weight class; in other words, a time when boxing was a marquee American sport and the heavyweight championship had an aura of importance about it. I remember my mom’s enthusiasm for Patterson, listening to his fights with Ingemar Johansson on the radio, her excitement when Patterson won back the title Johansson had taken from him. The New York Times’s obit of Patterson talks about his “sensitivity”:

“He was a good guy in the bad world of boxing. He was sweet-tempered and reclusive. He spoke softly and never lost his boyhood shyness. Cus D’Amato, who trained him throughout his professional career, called Patterson ‘a kind of a stranger.’ Red Smith, the New York Times sports columnist, called him ‘the man of peace who loves to fight.’ ”

How “shy” and “sensitive” was Patterson? David Remnick’s beautifully written “King of the World” recounts many of the Patterson anecdotes you’re likely to read in the obituaries and more than a few that go beyond the usual euphemisms. When he beat Johansson to take back the title, he helped his stricken foe back to his corner. In another fight, Patterson knocked his opponent’s mouthpiece out. The dazed fighter lowered his gloves and proceeded to search for the missing gear; Patterson stopped and helped him before going on to knock the guy out. Part of Patterson’s odd legend is that he sometimes carried a fake beard with him to his fights in case he lost and wanted to depart the arena incognito; in fact, he used it after losing the championship to Sonny Liston at Comiskey Park in 1962.

But the Remnick passage that came to mind when I heard Patterson died is one that explores the depths of Patterson’s humiliation when he lost to Johansson:

“Patterson was a speed fighter, but against Johansson he never made his move. He froze, and Johansson, a burly Swede of modest talent, unloosed what his camp called, so annoyingly, his ‘toonder and lightning.’ After the first knockdown, Floyd got off the canvas and began walking dreamily toward his corner. Leaving the neutral corner, Johansson came in from Patterson’s blind side and struck him down again; the assault looked less like boxing than an angry drunk splitting open another man’s skull with a beer bottle. By around the fourth knockdown, as Patterson crawled around the canvas, staring through the ropes, his eyes locked on John Wayne, who was sitting at ringside, and, as he stared at the actor, Floyd felt embarrassed. Embarrassment was Patterson’s signature emotion, and never more so than now. The fight was not even over before he started to wonder if everything he had fought for — his title, his belonging to a world greater than the one he grew up in — if all that was now at risk. Had he ever deserved any recognition, any belonging in the first place? What would John Wayne think of him? The referee, Ruby Goldstein, stopped the fight after Patterson had gone down for the seventh time.”

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Road Shots

Three pictures from the ride yesterday.

The first is at the ride sign-in, about 6:30 a.m. Todd Teachout, the guy on the left, organized the ride for the San Francisco Randonneurs; in formal randonneuring parlance, he’s the Regional Brevet Administrator. He registers the riders, makes up their brevet cards and hands them out at the start and collects them at the end of the day, and more: He needs to make up maps and route sheets and ensure the course is the required distance, that the road is actually rideable (flooding and slides during the pre-New Year’s storms affected parts of the route) and that the control points — the places riders need to check in along the way — are in order. Todd’s habit at the start of the ride is to park his pickup in the free, dirt parking lot west of the bridge toll plaza, fold down the tailgate and use it as a desk.

Cimg5176Cimg5178Cimg5186

The middle shot is at the start, about 6:50 a.m., 10 minutes before the ride began. If you haven’t been to the Golden Gate Bridge, there’s a little plaza at the south end of the span and on the east side of U.S. 101. Among other objects of attention, there’s a gift shop and a statue of Joseph Strauss, putative genius behind the bridge. It’s a popular spot for cyclists to meet up early on weekend mornings. The little circular flower bed is the focal point for the pre-ride brevet gatherings: lots of milling around and greeting riding buddies and saying hi to folks you know from past brevets. As one of the guys I rode with in 2003 said, “What a bunch of recidivists.”

I stopped a couple times to take pictures along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, a long road that begins just outside San Quentin — yes, that San Quentin — and runs west all the way to the end of Point Reyes, about 42 road miles west. The storm was coming in squally showers, with short breaks between gusty bursts of rain. I took the third shot during one of the breaks. Didn’t take any more shots after this; it was too wet, for one thing, and after a certain point I didn’t feel much like stopping.

Posted on

There and Back

Two hundred kilometers in the rain. It was even wetter than it sounds. Windy, too: Coming back across the Golden Gate Bridge just before dark, the towers were funneling wind downward; the turbulence was strong enough to nearly knock me down when I rode the little semicircle around the tower bases. The rain at that point was cold and driven nearly horizontally in off the ocean; it stung like sleet.

More later. I’d do it again. Just don’t ask me to saddle up tomorrow.

Posted on

Cycling Forecast

I’ll stop later to consider why we really do this stuff — superficial analysis suggests it’s because it make great storytelling later — but the ride tomorrow is on (meaning: I’m riding; the event, with 75 riders signed up, would obviously go on without me).

In the meantime: No reprieve from the forecasters or their all powerful weather models. The probability of measurable precipitation in the area we’ll be riding in the morning is 90 percent. At some point, when those in charge of interpreting all the weather data realize their models are actually a reflection of reality, they seem to relax and shift their predictions from “chance of rain” or “rain likely” to “the hose will be on full force; don’t even think anything else can happen.” Besides the rain, which is an interesting element in which to ride, there will be wind. Maybe 30 or 40 mph gusts on the coast. Parts of the route, I know already, are going to be a slog.

Time to stop talking about it and go to bed so I can rest up a little for it.

Posted on

Brevet Weather

Saturday is the first brevet of the year on the Bay Area randonneuring calendar. “Brevet” and “randonneuring” are French words that mean — well, they mean something about riding your bike a long way (I covered that ground last year about this time). Anyway, first brevet of the year: From the Golden Gate Bridge, north into Marin County and through a string of small towns: Sausalito, Mill Valley, Larkspur, Ross, San Anselmo, Fairfax before riding up west into rolling country out to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, 50-some miles from the start. Then the route returns to the mainland and heads north for a piece, then doubles back, eventually, to the bridge. It’s a 200-kilometer route — the shortest regular brevet distance — about 125 miles. I’m signed up and mostly ready to go.

Just one thing: Here’s what the local National Weather Service forecaster has to say about Saturday:

“EXPECT RAIN TO DEVELOP BY SUNRISE ACROSS THE NORTH BAY AND THEN ENVELOP MOST OF THE BAY AREA BY LATE MORNING. RAINFALL SHOULD EVENTUALLY REACH AS FAR SOUTH AS MONTEREY. … THIS HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE A MODERATE RAIN PRODUCER … WITH RAIN TOTALS IN EXCESS OF AN INCH ACROSS THE NORTH BAY. … SOMEWHAT BREEZY CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY AS WELL ACROSS THE NORTH BAY ON SATURDAY WITH THE MAIN FOCUS ALONG THE COAST AND IN THE HILLS.”

Well, the upside is that it’s only a bunch of supercomputerized mathematical weather models that say this is going to happen. They could always be wrong.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Cruelest Irony

ESPN’s Stuart Scott and Neil Everett go way deep on the death of the son of Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy:

Everett (opening SportsCenter): Death always comes too early … or too late. Alongside Stuart Scott, I’m Neil Everett.

Scott: In an instant, Tony Dungy trying to game plan against a team he might well see in the Super Bowl but in a meaningless regular season game Christmas Eve becomes meaningless itself.

Cruel irony — all season long we’ve been prophesizing when the Indianapolis Colts would lose, and when they finally did lose and failed to become just the second team ever to open fourteen and oh, we discussed how that loss might affect them, never contemplating that a real loss hits harder than anything on a football field.

If I thought there was a remote chance that ESPN or any other broadcast outlet might be moved to say something on the air about my passing — or, hell, anything about me, period — I think I’d consider a pre-emptive payment to get the enterprising journos to do a story on the local hamster overpopulation problem or something else that might be within their abilities. Anything to avoid a TV eulogy.

Posted on

George Best

The Chronicle has the obit: George Best: 1946-2005.

The handful of soccer players I heard about growing up — a very small group — included Pele and George Best. I remember reading something about Best in Sports Illustrated once. His exploits for Manchester United were described as little short of incredible. Nice article, but it didn’t mean much because soccer wasn’t a U.S. game and I never got to see him play. But following scraps of career news over the years — I took an interest from afar because he was Irish — I knew that alcoholism had cut short his brilliance.

Two bits from the obit worth noting:

” ‘I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars,’ he once said. ‘The rest I just squandered.’ ”

And:

“Best had battled alcoholism for decades and was diagnosed with severe liver damage in 2000. He received a liver transplant in 2002 but later resumed drinking.”

The American sports star who comes immediately to mind is another preternaturally gifted athlete and helpless boozer whom the fans never stopped adoring: Mickey Mantle.

Posted on

Look Ma, No Pedals

I was out riding late yesterday afternoon — a short loop out a flat route to San Pablo Dam Road, north of Berkeley, then south along the far side of the Berkeley Hills, then back up Wildcat Canyon Road through the hills and home to the flatlands below. Near the top of the 2.7-mile Wildcat climb, I thought I felt a little looseness in my right pedal, but when I really focused on it, nothing really seemed amiss. This put me in mind of an April ride out to the Point Reyes LIghthouse, when my left pedal sheared off as I stood up to climb a little hill, and I had a low-speed crash. I started to ponder whether I could have ridden on one pedal back to the nearest town, Point Reyes Station, in time to find a bike shop, get new pedals, and ride the second half of the 188-mile ride I had started. That western end of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, where my pedal disintegrated, is severely rolling. Obviously I could have walked up the steeper stretches on the way back to town, then coasted the downhills, and propelled myself one-legged on the reasonably level stretches. I’m guessing it’s about 15 miles back into Point Reyes Station from the lighthouse. Just idle speculation: It was just after 1 in the afternoon when my bike broke. I’m sure I could have limped back to town in say, three hours. So maybe I could have done it; I probably would have finished the ride at about midnight. Of course, then I wouldn’t have seen the two gray whales that cruised by the lighthouse as I waited for Kate to pick me up. And I’m leaving out of the equation the fact my front wheel was trashed when I went down and pretty much unrideable.

Anyway. I stopped at Inspiration Point at the top of Wildcat Canyon to take a look at Mount Diablo and the hills to the north and east in the dusk. The moon was a few nights short of full last night, but very bright, and Mars was rising. Just a beautiful evening. After a couple minutes, I clipped in and started riding back to town; the view of Mount Tam against the still-red sky was striking. After a quarter-mile or so, the road bends to the left and starts descending; as I picked up speed, suddenly my right foot seemed to come unclipped. Weird. I couldn’t seem to feel the pedal to clip in again, so I stopped. As soon as I put my right foot down, I could feel that I the pedal body was still clipped to my cleat and shoe. My first thought was that somehow the pedal had worked loose from the crank arm. But when I shone my light on the crank, I could see that the right spindle had sheared off, just the way the left one did in April.

Another cyclist — no lights, no helmet; “Maybe I have a death wish,” he said — appeared out of the dark and asked if I needed any help. He took a look at my pedals and said, “Those are shit. Get yourself some Dura-Ace or some Speedplay.” “What?” I exclaimed. “Those are Look pedals.” It wasn’t until later it struck me what a lame response that was. My guess is that, absent some sort of impact that would cause a fracture, this kind of failure should happen approximately never. And I’m not aware of ever having crashed my bike hard enough to damage either of the two pedals that have broken this year.

Pedals

[My intact left pedal and the broken right one.]

Anyway. Five miles from home. One pedal. I had to walk up one little bump of a hill on the way back to Berkeley. The rest was a cruise. But: It hadn’t really occurred to me how tough it might be to ride one-legged. There was no way to get up out of the seat for bumps, for instance. And since I was a little out of balance on the bike — I rode most of the way with my right foot on top of my seat post water-bottle cage and my right knee pointing way out to the side — I really didn’t feel safe letting myself go too fast; in fact, at speed it seemed unsafe to take my hands off the bars at all. So, to get back to Point Reyes: With a working front wheel I could have made it, probably. But it would have been a different kind of workout, and not much fun.