1. “The scariest question I ever had to ask was 25 years ago, on the Wednesday of what would become the most unforgettable Masters week ever.
I was greener than an Augusta fairway then. I was 28 and had never covered a Masters, never written golf for Sports Illustrated and never met my idol, Jack Nicklaus. Nicklaus meant more to me than golf. He was one of the few people I could talk to my dad about. For most of my first 20 years, the two things my dad did best were booze and golf. He was scratch at both. Sunday mornings, though, came down mean and hungover.
You’d tiptoe until you heard him leave for the course. But on one Sunday in April, he wouldn’t go play golf. He’d watch the back nine of the Masters. And I could sit there and watch it with him.”
Rick Reilly? Like music snobs often say, I prefer his early stuff. But this week, one of my favourites over the years, reminds us why he’s one of the best. Jack Nicklaus and fatherhood.
2. “The queen’s presence at the stadium used to be the centrepiece of a joke about unsuccessful counties winning All-Irelands, but now it appears that it will be a reality in May 2011. This visit is loaded with significance, as it can only be intended to address in some way what happened in 1920, not on the basis that it was the worst outrage in the bloody entanglements of our shared history, but as recognition of the GAA as the immensely significant social and community presence it has been and continues to be in modern Ireland. Reflecting this, the association through the symbolism of Croke Park and its past, will presumably receive on behalf of the nation an acknowledgement – however overt or understated – of the pain and difficulty caused by a peculiar and long-running colonisation as well as hope for a better future.”
The Irish Times’ Sean Moran on the Queen of England’s planned pop-in to Jones’ Rd next month.
3. “LeBron owning a piece of Liverpool is a story precisely because it’s a marketing stunt, because it occurred to someone as a viable marketing stunt: because a few years ago, becoming a stakeholder in an English soccer club had absolutely no presence on an NBA superstar’s horizon of personal brand management. I haven’t looked into this, but I’d guess there’s a really good chance that Larry Bird hadn’t heard of Liverpool Football Club, much less thought to own a minority stake in it.”in
Brian Phillips of the excellent Run of Play on the fascinating move by LBJ into the world of Premier League soccer.
4. “It was a miserable night for Kerry. Nothing went right as their performance lurched from bad to disastrous. The future prospects of this bunch of players cannot be completely dismissed and this display could be an isolated case. But certainly there was no one who put their hand up to convince Jack O’Connor as he journeyed home that they would energise his senior set-up in 2011.”
The Irish Examiner’s Fintan O’Toole exhumes the bones of the Kingdom’s humiliation on Leeside on Wednesday night.
5. “In the past, sports fans first stop in the search for sports news would be ESPN.com . Twitter changed all that. Twitter means we dont have to go to ESPN.com, we just check our twitter stream. Those people we follow always send us the updates we needed right to us. And we like it. And if we want more information, we just clink on the links they send us. Today, sports news finds millions and millions of sports fans first via twitter. Unfortunately for ESPN.com, they don’t control any ad space on your tweet stream. ESPN no longer makes a penny from the first sports news you receive. Thats not good for them.”
Mark Cuban is the bazillionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Entourage cameo star. He also writes an interesting blog – though I don’t always agree with him. Here he asks if ESPN is falling behind because of Twitter.
6. “The first golf course where I walked all 18 holes was Augusta National. That was 1992. I had never played a full round of golf. I had never covered a golf tournament. And suddenly I found myself writing the lead column at the 1992 Masters for The Augusta Chronicle, the hometown paper. It was pretty ridiculous. I was in the unique position where every single person who read my column — literally every one — knew more about golf than I did.
My one advantage was that I was working with David Westin, an Augusta sportswriting legend, and with infinite patience he explained”
The superb Joe Posnanski has now taken over Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated back-page spot. This is typically good.
7. “The first time it happened he couldn’t have been sure. The second time? The diagnosis was carried out in his own mind before anyone came to his assistance. Mark Davoren knew when he collapsed to the ground that the same cruciate ligament in his knee, which he had painstakingly rebuilt over an eight-month period following surgery, had torn again. It was April last year and Davoren admits now he was a man in a hurry. Too much of a hurry.”
The Irish Independent’s Colm Keyes on the curse of the cruciate.
8. Not strictly writing but the Guardian‘s interactive Grand National guide is cool.
