The Tiger Woods Mess

The biggest problem with the Tiger Woods media frenzy? It's that the commercial image we have of the golfer, carefully crafted over ten years by his sponsors, is a total sham. He was, and has always been a womanizer at worst and a regular guy at best -- not the family-friendly hero we've been told he was.

Charles P. Pierce, who profiled Woods for Esquire in 1997, giving us a glimpse of the real man, has updated his assessment. Here's an excerpt:

"I can't say I'm surprised — either by the allegations or by what's ensued since Friday's wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger's People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he'd been born married."

Back in 1997, Pierce was in a limo with Woods when the golfer says to his driver, a former college basketball player, "What I can't figure out is why so many good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball. Is it because, you know, people always say that, like, black guys have big dicks?"

This is Tiger Woods. Brash, awkward, sort of a jerk. (The answer to his question: Women don't hang around golfers because golfers are not athletes.) As amazing as Woods' golf skills are, his acting out may be -- consciously or unconsciously -- a product of all the issues contained in that inappropriate question to his driver: race and sports, race and sex, race and golf. And add to that all of stresses of corporate sponsorship, and it was just a matter of time until he went nuts.

Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street...Barclays Center?

I was stunned to learn that Brooklyn’s Atlantic-Pacific subway station, a giant underground maze that connects 10 different lines and the Long Island Railroad, is not even among the top ten busiest stations in the City (it ranks 29th in all of NYC with 9,643,487 riders in 2007). In fact, it’s not even the busiest in Brooklyn—that’s Court Street/Borough Hall, which connects only six lines.

No, the busiest stations in New York City are all in Manhattan, and “busy” is measured simply by how many riders pass through the turnstiles. Times Square is the busiest station, with 58,506,230 riders in 2007 on its 12 lines.

Measured by how many lines run through a single station however, Atlantic-Pacific is number two in size. This is what gave me the impression that it was so busy, and of course transfers from line to line -- certainly a logical measurement of busy-ness -- aren't accounted for in the turnstile figures.

All of these thoughts ran through my head as I learned yesterday that Barclays, a London bank that I know nothing about, bought the rights to name the Atlantic-Pacific station from the MTA. Barclays bought Lehman Brothers last year, so their U.S. holdings are growing, but the bank does not have a Brooklyn office. The MTA, which has apparently trying to sell off the names of its stations for years, convinced the bank to buy the station name because it had already bought the rights to name the proposed New Jersey Nets basketball arena near the stop in Brooklyn.

But as the architecture blog BLDG BLOG points out, the $4 million, $200,000/year for 20 years price tag is awfully low. As a measure of how many eyes will see the name, associate it with the bank, and see it as a sign of financial strength and legitimacy, the price seems modest. It seems like the MTA (which is dying for money and will be raising fares from $2 a ride to $2.25 as of June 28) could have asked for more. It is, after all, selling the name of a piece of public property to a private (and foreign) entity.

Blogger Jason Kottke points out that many stations already have brand names, some of them quite old:

Rockefeller Center
Columbia University
JFK Airport
Museum of Natural History
Lincoln Center
Hunter College
Yankee Stadium
Aqueduct Racetrack
Times Square
Herald Square
NY Aquarium
World Trade Center
Brooklyn Museum
Mets

It’s interesting to note though that when the New York Mets opened their new stadium, Citi Field (for which they will pay $400 million over 20 years), they passed on buying the nearby subway stop (which is currently called Mets/Willets Point).

Were it not for the difficulty the MTA has had in selling off station names (the Times says the MTA has been trying for five years), one would be concerned for all stations.

No one is saying yet what exactly the station will be called—maybe it’ll just be named after the basketball arena. Some have been speculating that the Barclays name will just be tacked onto the existing name, making it longer and more awkward.

I think what offends New Yorkers about the whole thing the most is the fleeting nature of stadium names and endorsement deals these days. To all Americans, it seems as capricious as new celebrity products (for example, rapper 50 Cent is coming out with his own cologne. The late Ed McMahon had a vodka.).

I remember when the Utah Jazz basketball arena was called the Delta Center, after the airline. As of late 2006, it’s called the EnergySolutions Arena. It changed when Delta decided to cancel their 15 years contract. EnergySolutions, which describes itself as “a world leader in the safe recycling, processing and disposal of nuclear material,” stepped in and apparently paid at least as much as the reported $1.3 million a year as Delta was shelling out. At the time, The New York Times reported that fans were already making fun of the new sponsors, coming up with nicknames for the arena like: The Glow Bowl, the Isotope, the Dump, ChernoBowl, JazzMat (“short for Jazzardous Materials”), the Big Bang, the Tox Box, the Fallout Shelter, and the Melta Center.

When these things are bought and sold like this, it lends an air of impermanence to what should be stable landmarks. But then, they don’t build arenas and stadiums like they used to.

Wingsuit Base Jumping in Norway

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

This video is best seen in a larger format -- see it in a full-screen version here.

Basically, these guys are jumping off of Norway's steepest and highest fjord cliffs with small, light parachutes. The object though, is to soar for a while using flying squirrel-like wingsuits. They used to do it in the winter, jumping off with skis so they could get a good distance from the cliff walls. Now they do it in the summer, merely jumping off the cliffs.

One jumper, Loic Jean Albert, explains 1:17 into the video:

"At the beginning of wingsuit base jumping, we were trying to get as far from the wall as possible, so basically clearing the whole thing, but now it's getting boring so we play around."

That means flying nearly close enough to cliff jagged faces that they can touch them, diving in and out around rock formations as they free-fall, and then glide, twist and somersault, and dive again. It's breathtaking to watch.

About 3:12 into the video, a Norwegian named Espin Fadnes swoops down over a winding mountain road, buzzing the ground at an alarmingly high speed before soaring off over the next drop-off. It's chilling to see a man fly like that, gracefully, without visible propulsion. It's not like Superman; more like an animal.

Glen Plake

Here's another ski video: extreme skier Glen Plake on a monoski in a scene from one of Greg Stump's movies. Watch how calm his upper body is while his legs move like pistons through the moguls. Add to that the fact that his feet are bound together on one board -- not a snowboard. His skills are rivalled only by his mohawk.

Obituary: Ingemar Johansson

“There is something strange about my right hand,” the Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson once said. “Something very hard to explain. The arm works by itself. It is faster than the eye, and I cannot even see. Without my telling it to, the right goes, and when it hits there is this good feeling all down my arm and down through my body.”

Johansson only lost two fights out of 28 in his professional career. Those two fights were both against American Floyd Patterson. The first time the two met, Patterson lost badly, saying later, “He hit me so hard, I didn’t know where I was.”

The two later became friends. Coincidentally, both suffered from Alzheimer's Disease in their old age. Patterson died in 2006.

Read the New York Times obituary here.

Below, footage from Johansson and Paterson's second fight:

Ski Cross: The Sport that Short Attention Spans Built

Are Americans utter philistines when it comes to entertainment? Consider the story that European football, er, soccer fans like to tell about how Americans lobbied to increase the size of the goals to make for higher scoring games. The rest of the world liked the game the way it was.

Or how about the popularity of NASCAR, with its endless left turns, over Formula One with its higher-tech engines and more complicated courses.

Downhill skiing has been slowly losing popularity in America over the last couple decades. Part of it is the rise of snowboarding, part of it has to do with how expensive winter sports can be (equipment, lift tickets, etc.). But a big part of it must be how difficult it is to become an expert.

In an article in the sports section of today's New York Times, we're introduced to ski cross, a sport that will be in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, one that many hope will help revitalize skiing for Americans. But is this sport, which is the equivalent of roller derby on skis, taking all of the subtlety and technical skill out of skiing in order to appeal to the American short attention span?

Take American skier Daron Rahlves, one of the best racers of his generation. He's won the Alpine World Cup a dozen times. He retired three years ago as a traditional racer, but at his peak, he was recognized all over Europe as a celebrity. And yet in America, no one really knew who he was.

Below is a video -- the only one I could find of Rahlves' racing -- that shows his famous crash at Adelboden in the 2006 Olympics. He walked away, but was out for two weeks with injuries (a relatively short time). In traditional ski racing, crashes like this are a frightening danger, a byproduct of the sport.



In the next video, we have ski cross. Here, like in roller derby, crashes are the point. Now that Rahlves has begun ski cross, he is suddenly an American celebrity. “Everywhere I went for a while — the post office, the hardware store, wherever — someone stopped me to talk about the X Games,” Rahlves told the Times. “They had seen it live, on prime-time TV. Ski cross is not some renegade sport any longer.”



The Times produced that video a year ago; Rahlves has since won ski cross at the X-Games.

Below is another ski cross video -- one that shows the sort of chain reaction crashes that make the sport exciting to watch. In this sequence, American Casey Puckett was leading a ski cross event in Grindelwald, Switzerland last March, but gets hit from behind in a smash-up that takes out three of the four competitors. Puckett is the one lying motionless at the end of the video. He was unconscious, and suffered a concussion and a season-ending shoulder injury.



We have a way of simplifying things in America, of finding the heart of something and simmering it down so that little else is left. Racing cars in a highspeed oval. Getting to the bottom of a snowy hill as fast as possible with bumps and other skiers as obstacles. Where an F1 course might weave through a city's streets, the NASCAR oval track is built for racing. Likewise, the ski cross course: it isn't using the natural features of a mountainside, but taking it and molding it with jumps, bumps and drop-offs for the racers.

Ski racing is jumping the shark, trying a crazy stunt to save the sport. It's not the existence of ski cross as a sport that should sadden skiers -- it looks fun and it's fun to watch -- it's the normalization of it. It's an underground sport gone mainstream, and once it hits the Olympics, it's all over. When over-caffeinated attention-deficit pastimes and their creators become the tastemakers, the rest of the mainstream suffers. The scalpel is replaced by the amputation saw.