Hi All and Happy Labor Day Weekend!
I know all of you are lying around wondering what you can possibly do with yourselves now that your primary hobby (I’m talking about wearing white pants, of course) is coming to an end. Here are three good sports related stories to fill the void with.
Amazing Sports Photography
In their ongoing attempt to link ingesting caffeine, taurine, glucuronolactone, B-group vitamins, sucrose, and glucose with exciting adventure sports, Red Bull sponsors a tri-annual sports photography contest. Many of the photos are amazing and I enjoyed paging through them all. Voting is still open for the people’s choice award.
Name Dropping – Hip Hop and Basketball
Hip hop and basketball have always shared a special connection. They’re both forums that reward creativity and style within well defined boundaries. Rap is full of cultural references and basketball players often find themselves planted in a lyric. Usually this is just because the rapper admires the basketball player’s style or performance, but sometimes it’s as a form of coded speech. Bdon.org created a handy infographic that charts the number of mentions a basketball player gets in raps against the number of points he scored in that year. A couple of surprises to me were how few Allen Iverson references there were given that he is generally thought of as the player who brought hip-hop to the NBA and also how references to Scottie Pippen have accelerated in the bast few years despite his having retired years ago.
Thanks to Deadspin.com for finding this infographic.
A Sad Story of Loss and Love and Basketball
A year or so ago there was a story that popped up in the news that bewildered me. A former NBA player, Dan Roundfield, had drowned in the Caribbean where he had been on vacation with his wife and family. The news stories were all a little unclear about what exactly had happened but they all said that Roundfield had died saving his wife from drowning and they all portrayed the deceased as a remarkable man. My eyes perked up the other day when the New York Times returned to the story a year later. The story is sad, obviously, but like the best eulogies or obituaries it conveys the great joy of Dan Roundfield’s life as well.