Like many sports that rely on brute force, taekwondo sometimes requires athletes to cut weight. We just call it cutting, which to outsiders might evoke associations with another kind of unhealthy behavior. My 5’2” frame is small enough that many are surprised I need to cut at all, but not quite small enough to fit into weight classes created for tiny-boned Korean women.
“She never seemed a hundred percent after that,” Isabella Bersani, a sophomore teammate and friend of Caroline Feeley, says while recalling a match in December of 2012. Certainly, Caroline was less than 100%. On that day during the annual mixed doubles Christmas tournament, Caroline had hurt her MCL in nothing more than a game held for fun between the men and women of Princeton squash.
Rumor has it that at the Nass, there is a gap in the otherwise omniscient knowledge of the staff, and that that gap is called “sports.” Not so, ladies and gentlemen. Let me tell you a thing or two about … Read More
My dad always joked that he encouraged me to play sports because I was supposed to be born a boy (I am the youngest of three girls—his final, failed attempt at contributing a Y chromosome to the world). After trying … Read More
Flanked by two shaven-headed handlers, Martin Brodeur sat at a rickety wooden table that looked slightly too small to be comfortable in a bookstore that has long since been put out business. Outside the store, devoted fans lined up for yards, standing in concentric loops in an adjacent strip mall, chattering excitedly or fidgeting with their fans’ jerseys—this was before smartphones dulled the pain of waiting on a line.
It’s the opening game of the 2014 NFL season and I’m at Buffalo Wild Wings with friends. As always for such events, the restaurant is packed. It’s a good mix of Seahawks and Packers jerseys and the pregame atmosphere is already buzzing.
It is 6 p.m. and I’m sitting with hundreds of fellow equine fanatics in a stadium flanked for miles on either side by farmhouses, wooden fence lines and flat, sandy fields speckled with horses. Many around me wear baseball caps to keep the sinking Florida sun out of their faces; a few had the foresight to bring a blanket for the inevitable temperature drop later tonight, when the stadium will be lit by giant electric flood lights.
“The static cleared and the broadcast resumed. But I didn’t see the game. I didn’t see the court or the players or the ball. The screen was filled with a close-up of Larry Bird’s face.”