Showing posts with label the new yorker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the new yorker. Show all posts

5.06.2009

David vs. Goliath

“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence -- the slingshot part -- is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.


Made me think of this:
“Again, we’ve got a genius on the bench next to me, the architect, Matt Matheny, who again doctored up our pressure just a little bit. We actually almost got a 10-second violation once. But he had Andrew bang back and forth between the two guards rather than just initially trap the first guard. And by trapping that second guard, it forced Landry to bring the ball up the court. Now Landry is starting to swing offense. Landry maybe gets tempted to drive it all the way to the basket. All of a sudden the rhythm of their offense is broken.”

1.27.2009

R.I.P. John Updike

Dead, at 76, writer of one of the very best sequences of words in the history of sports writing or any other kind of writing:

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.