IN NO PARTICULAR order every Sunday, we flick back through the week’s newspapers, websites, blogs and magazines to bring you the best sports writing.
1. “The smell of ammonia assaults the nostrils at the Norwich city training ground in the heart of Norfolk and Wes Hoolahan takes in a lungful and exclaims: ‘Welcome to the countryside. Beautiful smell isn’t it?’ So sweet is life at the moment that even the most pungent of fertilisers come up smelling of roses.”
Paul Rowan of the Sunday Times (subscription required) meets Wes Hoolahan in East Anglia.
2. “Notable sportsmen and women leave us every week, and stock phrases of sorrow are rolled out by people who never met them, but few will depart to so much anguish as Ballesteros, 54, who succumbed to a brain tumour after a three-year fight. His age is especially poignant, because Ballesteros is synonymous with precocity, with a fine bearing and youth. Perhaps a third of his life has been stolen from him in an age when the virtues he expressed are rare in the modern corporate world of sport.”
Paul Hayward remembers European golf’s departed legend Seve.
3. “A few years ago I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a climber who got caught up the Himalayas in treacherous conditions. With no oxygen and no food, the bitter cold would suck the life from his body. The chances of survival were remote. When death is your adversary it takes exceptional things to get back to the light. Such was this man’s grim resolve to cling to life, it summoned an unquenchable drive not to succumb to the inevitable and he prevailed. An improbable act in the circumstances. The storm lifted, he found a dead man’s oxygen tank, he got further down the mountain and instinct led him to safety. Asked to explain it, his words incorporated the complexity of the human spirit. “Death blinked,” he said. He just wasn’t giving up.”
The Sunday Independent’s Neil Francis reflects on Leinster’s victory over Toulouse at the Aviva Stadium last weekend.
4. “Baseball is all about getting home. But what happens when you get there and it’s gone? It happened to Hueytown (Ala.) High School baseball head coach Rick Patterson on Wednesday. He walked to his house only to find a tornado had taken it. Pitchers love making saves. But what happens when the save you have to make is your sister’s life? It happened to 15-year-old Hueytown JV pitcher Brandon Miller that same day. He was hiding under a mattress in the hallway of his house, wearing his baseball helmet, when a twister took the roof off. Then it started to take his 14-year-old sister, Sara. He reached up and grabbed her in the final fraction of the moment.”
ESPN columnist Rick Reilly on the baseball team that kept on playin’.
5. “Boxing has consumed his life with a blurring combination of pride, fame and Parkinson’s disease. Words now tumble from him in a softly spoken slur which is a reminder of the damage done to such a warm and open man. Before he became the best trainer in the ring today, working with the greatest fighter on the planet in Manny Pacquiao, Roach used to be a boxer. ‘Yeah,’ Roach says wryly, ‘I had five fights too many. I lost four of ‘em. I had the finest trainer there’s ever been, Eddie Futch, and he knew I’d had enough. But I was 26 years old and still hard-headed so I couldn’t see it. This is how it is. Boxing gets in your blood and you just can’t quit.’”
Freddie Roach meets The Guardian’s Donald McRae.
6. “Back a couple of years ago, when that ‘If Teams Were a Pop Star/Item of Clothing/Car’ concept beloved of newspaper sports sections was at its height, someone — it might even have been yours truly — declared that if Kilkenny were a film character they’d be The Terminator You know, that grim, remorseless Schwarzenegger alter ego. An inhuman killing machine, tooled up to the eyeballs with hi-tech firepower. Implacable, indestructible, never liable to let emotion get in the way of business and always looking ahead to the next job.
“I’ll be back” indeed.
Enda McEvoy on Kilkenny’s slump in the Irish Examiner.
Let us know if you read anything worth inclusion this week.
