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This Week in Sports: Weight-Cutting
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…
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Rules of Pool
Here’s a proposal. Next time you play pool, ignore the rule that scratching on the eight-ball makes you lose. Hold on, that’s madness: That’s like the main rule in pool. In my small experience, a frustrating majority of games of amateur eight ball end in someone scratching on the eight ball or hitting it in…
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The Closer
My parents’ room had the smallest TV in the house. My mom was already under the covers and I was watching while kneeling to her left on my dad’s side of the bed. He arrived home from a business trip right around the eighth inning—just in time to see Jorge Posada drop a game-tying bloop…
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Caroline Feeley
“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…
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Furbizia: On Loving Italian Soccer
Lionel Messi, the star of FC Barcelona and the man widely considered to be the best soccer player in the world, is stepping up to the penalty spot. He stares down the goalkeeper for a moment, takes a few steps back and then slams his left foot into the ball, sending it predictably perfectly into…
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The Great American Grand Prix
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…
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Radio Killed the Hockey Star
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…
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From Fantasy to Reality
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.
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Ball for Show
Gregg Popovich doesn’t care what you think about him. The head coach of the San Antonio Spurs is famous for his stony demeanor, relentlessly curt interviews, and impeccable coaching record.
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Olympic History
Few people know the story of how four Princetonians—Francis Lane, Herbert Jamison, Robert Garrett, and Albert Tyler—competed in the first modern Olympic Games, except perhaps the archivists at Mudd Library where Lane’s scrapbooks are kept.
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