1. THEY PLAY FOR sums of money beyond our wildest dreams. This week they’re in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. The best hotels, the finest food, their every whim catered for. But there’s a price for everything.
Paul Kimmage: Okay, thanks for doing this guys. I’m going to start with something a little different. (I plug my phone into a speaker.)
Padraig Harrington (laughs): He’s going to play music for us.
PK: No, just a couple of lines from a song. Are you ready? (A piano fills the room. A man is singing.)
City of Stars,
Are you shining just for me?
City of Stars,
There’s so much that I can’t see . . .
Shane Lowry: This is about LA, is it?
PK: Yeah.
PH: I dunno.
SL: City of Stars?
PK: Yeah.
SL: Who sings that?
PK: Ryan Gosling.
PH: Oh! It’s from La La Land.
PK: Yeah.
PH: I haven’t seen it.
PK: That was the question.
PH: No, my wife has seen it.
SL: I actually wanted to go and see it. Wendy (his wife) has seen it.
PH: We’re not going together!”
An excerpt from Paul Kimmage’s chat with Padraig Harrington and Shane Lowry about life on tour in the Irish Independent this week.
2. “Leicester City, Brexit, and Donald Trump have made this a weird stretch for math. And yet despite those high-profile instances of low-probability outcomes hitting, when the New England Patriots fell behind the Atlanta Falcons 28–3 in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, viewers still flocked en masse to websites that calculate win probability, a metric designed to reveal how likely a side is to prevail — and a metric that failed in the aforementioned cases.
The parameters vary site to site, but the guiding principles remain the same: When it comes to football, a win probability model is constructed to account for the score, the time remaining, the field position, the timeouts remaining, and many other small factors. And at 28–3, the metrics gave the Patriots less than a 1 percent chance of winning the game.”
The Real Super Bowl Loser? Math — Kevin Clark for The Ringer.
3. “This is the glory and the pity of non-League: an entire world run on a shoestring budget. “We can’t turn the radiators off, the valve’s gone,” Doswell says. “The valve’s gone. The boiler’s shot to pieces. Arsenal will be getting lukewarm showers at best. The floodlights are shocking. The chairman said we can add two extra bulbs. That’s a big thing for us. It’s life-changing for the club. There’s a responsibility. We won’t waste a penny of it.”
Which is why the visit of Arsenal means more than a little fleeting media attention and some good PR. It means survival. It means a future. It means four new dressing rooms and showers, so the dozens of junior teams can get changed at the ground. It means the club can continue to offer the lowest season-ticket prices in England’s top five divisions, which for a parent with two children works out at around £5 a game, all in.”
The Telegraph’s Jonathan Liew on the importance of Arsenal’s FA Cup visit to fifth-tier Sutton.
4. “Two nights before Saturday’s Slam Dunk Contest, in a mostly empty Smoothie King Center crawling with overzealous security guards, Aaron Gordon tested his secret weapon. As NBA executive Kiki VanDeWeghe, former Dunk Contest champion Brent Barry and a small group of onlookers watched, the 21-year-old forward pantomimed his interplay with the Magic’s mascot, smoke billowed off the stage, and the Star Wars theme song kicked in. Then, a custom-build drone, managed by a team of six from Intel, lit up, rose above the hardwood, motored into position, and dropped an alley-oop pass to a waiting Gordon, who passed the ball between his legs and pounded the rim with a right-handed dunk.”
Aaron Gordon’s initial vision for his “Drone Dunk” was to merge basketball and tech in a new way—but then his biggest fear, the dunk’s timing spoiled the show, writes Ben Golliver.
5. “Western society has long admired ‘the strong, silent type.’ We revere the man with no name who looks up from the card table and deals the occasional monosyllable. But maybe this cult of silence is killing too many of our young men. Maybe we need to talk about things more.
One person wondered if the onset of Joost van der Westhuizen’s motor neurone disease was accelerated by all the blows to his head accepted as a rite of passage during his rugby career. Another questioned if Sione Lauaki’s renal failure could be linked to the use of creatine, a legal supplement that allows players to bulk up.
We tell them that it is far too soon to ask such questions. We tell them that they are showing disrespect to the dead. We don’t want people picking over the bones on rugby’s killing fields. We want a solemn silence.”
Mark Reason: After the death of Dan Vickerman the cult of silence is killing too many of our young men
6. “Nothing personal Emmet, but I’m suing you because I’ve had enough of that fat f**k.”I took a lot of angry calls from Shelbourne chief executive Ollie Byrne in my day but that’s the only opening line I can remember. You have to admit, it’s a doozy.
The call came January 24th 1999, the morning after The Irish Times had run a lengthy interview with Pat Dolan in which the then St Patrick’s Athletic chief executive had referred to the FAI’s handling of a dispute between himself and Byrne over the use of Tolka Park by the Inchicore club for a Champions League qualifier against Celtic thus: “You don’t sit Adolf Hitler down with Winston Churchill and ask them to compromise. You can’t because you just have to side with good.”
Answers on a postcard as to which of them Dolan reckoned was which.”
The League of Ireland needs rivalries like in the days of Ollie Byrne and Pat Dolan, writes Emmet Malone.
7.
“Wen Rory falls down the rabbit hole, he doesn’t tumble like any other. These days Rory makes and lives in his own wonderland, where his loaded wallet and demigod golfing status gives him opportunity and position. But he just keeps tripping.”
Johnny Waterson on Rory McIlroy teeing up with Donald Trump.
8. “With its gates touching the edge of the Falls Road, standing church-like between a row of houses and a line of shops, St Mary’s is set at the very heart of the working class community in West Belfast.
The main building has stood since 1900 and while bits have been added here and there in a century-and-a-bit since, the retention of its style and shape almost a century on offer a clue as to what happens inside.
And it was the working class virtues of modesty and humility and sheer bloody hard work that were right at the heart of the college’s second ever Sigerson Cup success at the weekend.”
St Mary’s DNA wrapped around stunning success, according to Cahair O’Kane in The Irish News.
9. “The death threats started almost immediately. “We are going to find you, and kill you.” “You are going to get it.” One person posted a video on social media. “I am going to splash acid in your face,” he said.
The death threats continue to this day. Just this week, Louis Smith, the four-times Olympic medallist in gymnastics, whose life went into meltdown in October after a video was leaked to a newspaper in which he appeared to mock Islam, received a message saying: “I am going to cave in your face.”
For weeks after the story broke, Smith was forced to take out 24-hour protection. “I had a guy with me all the time. Wherever I went, whatever I did.”
Matthew Syed speaks to gymnast Smith about the backlash.
10. “Arthur Mathews’s period in purgatory is nearing an end. After four months wondering if he’d get to see a sporting pearly gates, the co-writer of Ireland’s most successful comedy is returning to a predictable script.
While he readily admits he is not the most devoted of Drogheda’s disciples, there’s a level of worship that resonates with other members of the flock, the Friday night ritual of the car and the road, the journeys to shaded towns, bypassed by motorways – Longford, Athlone, Bray, Cobh.
Each place possesses its own charm, though, and even now, as he prepares for his 47th season as a League of Ireland fan, there’s still that boyish excitement within Mathews as he visualises the approach to grounds through narrow, old streets, guided by the floodlights in the sky and the smell of fried onions on the pan. Haute cuisine hasn’t made it to too many League of Ireland grounds thus far.
Then again, nor have the majority of Ireland’s population.”
Irish football is no joke for Father Ted creator, writes Garry Doyle for The Sunday Times.
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