by Steve Wulf
While those words proved to be prophetic, Christophe came to hate the color. He complained that spectators and riders alike teased him and imitated canaries during the whole course: “Ah, the yellow jersey! Isn’t he a beautiful canary?”
Funny, Lance Armstrong had no problem with it.
ALL THE RAGE
THE FIVE BEST (OR WORST) SPORTS TANTRUMS
Because pro sports are played at such a high level of intensity, players and coaches often let their emotions get the best of them. Whereas such eruptions may lead to fines and suspensions for those involved, they provide plenty of excitement and entertainment for the average sports fan. Here are five of the best (or worst?) on-field temper tantrums:
John McEnroe. The Godfather of Gripe may hold the record for the most blowups. His most memorable moment of rage still rings loudly in fans’ ears. En route to his first-ever Wimbledon title in 1981, John McEnroe disagreed with the umpire’s ruling during his first-round match with Tom Gullikson. Citing the chalk that supposedly “flew up” as the ball hit the line, he tore into the chair umpire, roaring the now famous words, “You cannot be serious!” McEnroe went on to argue, “Everyone knows it’s in, in this whole stadium, and you call that out?” and concluded, “You guys are the absolute pits of the world.”
Phillip Wellman. The manager of the Class AA Mississippi Braves made a name for himself and a video for the ages on June 1, 2007, in a game against the Chattanooga Lookouts. Phillip Wellman was not pleased with a particular call by the home plate umpire and was ejected while arguing from the dugout. He came charging onto the field, slamming his cap to the ground, and getting so close to the umpire’s face that he could have kissed him. But Wellman clearly wasn’t in an affectionate mood. His ensuing antics included covering home plate entirely with dirt (drawing the outline of a new, much bigger one to illustrate his point), chucking third base into center field, and imitating all of the umpires in a less than flattering manner. The most creative portion of Wellman’s performance came when he dropped to the ground and crawled toward the pitcher’s mound, finally grabbing the rosin bag and tossing it, grenade-style, at the home plate umpire’s feet. After a few more sardonic gestures, Wellman made his way off the field (taking second and third base with him) and exited to a raucous ovation. And the Braves weren’t even the home team.
Eric Cantona. Admittedly, angry outbursts don’t always end well for the fans. During a 1995 regular-season match against Crystal Palace, Manchester United forward Eric Cantona was shown his fifth red card since joining the English powerhouse, and he was not happy about it. Rather than take his frustration out on the referee who sent him off, he chose to channel his rage in a different direction. As he was being escorted off the field, Cantona flew toward the stands, landing a kung-fu-style kick on the chest of a Palace supporter while throwing a few punches for good measure. Cantona’s intentions were never determined. When asked about the incident, he was cryptic at best, offering, “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”
Bob Knight. An entire list could be devoted to Bobby Knight tantrums. One, however, will forever live on in sports infamy. During a 1985 game against Purdue, Knight received a technical foul for protesting a call. As Purdue guard Steve Reed was setting up for the free throw, Knight staged another protest, this time launching his chair across the court, nearly hitting Reed. Knight was given a one-game suspension and two years’ probation. Bobby seemed to have something against people named Reed: He once choked Neil Reed, one of his own Indiana players.
Indiana coach Bobby Knight winds up and throws a chair across the floor during Indiana’s 72-63 loss to Purdue on February 23, 1985.
Jim Schoenfeld. After his Devils lost to the Bruins, 6–1, in game 3 of the 1988 Stanley Cup semifinals, coach Jim Schoenfeld took out his frustration on referee Don Koharski. The coach followed Koharski toward the officials’ dressing rooms, ripping him and the rest of his crew. During the fracas, Koharski fell down, blaming Schoenfeld (who had to be restrained) and yelling that Schoenfeld would never coach again, to which the coach eloquently replied, “That’s ’cause you fell, you fat pig! Have another doughnut! Have another doughnut!” Schoenfeld was suspended for the next game but got a court order overturning the suspension, a move that instigated a boycott by the game 4 referees, who refused to officiate with Schoenfeld on the bench. The league was forced to use local refs for the game. Schoenfeld would later be suspended for the incident— with no court order to protect him.
MAKING WAVES
GERTRUDE EDERLE NEVER STOPPED SWIMMING
The ticker tape parade for her drew 2 million spectators. They wrote songs about her, invited her to the White House, and put her in a short movie about herself. Heywood Broun wrote of her, “It may be that she will turn out to be an even greater discoverer than Columbus—it was only a continent which he found.”
American Olympic gold medalist Gertrude Ederle enters the water for her cross-Channel swim on August 7, 1926.
She was Gertrude Ederle, and on August 6, 1926, the 19-year-old became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, entering the water at Cap Gris-Nez, Pas-de-Calais, France, at 7:05 A.M. and coming ashore at Kingsdown, Kent, England, at 9:35 P.M. Her time of 14:31 was 2 hours better than the previous best.
The daughter of a Manhattan butcher, she had thrown herself into swimming after a near drowning in her youth. A product of the Women’s Swimming Association, the club that also produced Eleanor Holm and Esther Williams, Ederle won three medals in the 1924 Paris Olympics, including a gold in the 400-meter freestyle relay. She had made an attempt at swimming the Channel in August of 1925, but her trainer pulled her out of the water against her will.
While other women were planning and training for their own attempts, Ederle found a new trainer, Thomas Burgess, for her second try. She also donned a revolutionary two-piece bathing suit, designed by her older sister, Margaret; slathered herself in sheep grease; and wore goggles kept tight to her face with candle wax. Braving the choppy seas, she would occasionally sing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to the rhythm of her crawl stroke. Crew members on the accompanying boat would urge her along by holding up signs saying “One Wheel” and “Two Wheels,” to remind her of the new roadster she had been promised. During her 12th hour at sea, Burgess was so worried about the unfavorable winds that he shouted, “Gertie, you must come out!” Ederle raised her head from the water and replied, “What for?”
By one reckoning, Ederle ended up swimming 35 miles to make the 21-mile crossing. Waiting on the other side were hundreds of people, some with flares. Years later she would recall, “When I walked out of the water, I began thinking, ‘Oh my God, have I really done it?’ When my feet hit the sand, oh, that was a wonderful moment.” A British passport official approached and jokingly asked for her papers.
A week later, Ederle returned home on the steamship Berengaria, and as the ship entered New York Harbor, she was asked to go to the top deck. She recalled, “I went up there. The planes circled around and swooped down and dropped those bouquets. They were just gorgeous.”
After the parade, the visit with President Coolidge, the obligatory vaudeville tour, the song (“Tell Me Trudy, Who Is Going to Be the Lucky One?”), the movie (Swim Girl, Swim),… came—well—if not tragedy, then obscurity. Her manager frittered away her money. Her fiancé ditched her when he discovered that her hearing, weakened by a childhood bout of measles, had gotten worse from all that swimming. She suffered a nervous breakdown. She slipped on some tiles in a stairwell in 1933, injuring her spine and bringing on constant pain.
But she simply went on with her life, living in Queens, New York, working at La Guardia Airport, teaching deaf children to swim. “Since I can’t hear, either,” she said, “they feel I’m one of them.”
She died in a New Jersey nursing home at the age of 98. Before she went, she said, “I am not a person who reaches for the moon as long as I have the stars. God has been good to me.”<
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It’s time for another movie about Gertrude Ederle.
TAKE A HIKE
A LONG SNAPPER ON WHY IT’S NOT A SNAP
Combine the loneliness of the long-distance runner with the arcane routines of the knuckleball pitcher and the masochism of the sparring partner, and you have … the long snapper. Taken for granted until he screws up, the long snapper—the man responsible for hiking the ball to the punter or the holder in football—is a special breed. Rob Davis is one.
Back when he was a 17-year-old defensive lineman at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, Davis practiced long snapping with an almost farcical devotion. He did the same at Pennsylvania’s Shippensburg University and used the skill to become the first Shippensburg player to make the NFL. After failed attempts to land a job with the New York Jets, Kansas City Chiefs, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Chicago Bears, Davis caught a lucky break in 1997 when Green Bay’s starting long snapper, Paul Frase, injured his back.
At the time of his retirement, 10 years later, Davis had played in 167 straight games, placing him third all-time on the Packers’ list of players in consecutive games, behind Forrest Gregg and Brett Favre. Now the director of player development for the Pack, Davis admits to just three bad snaps. He says, “Long snapping is the job everybody thinks they can do—except on Sundays. As a defensive lineman, you can miss a tackle and get another set of downs. This margin of error does not exist for our kind.”
As the long snapper first lines up, his quadriceps, triceps, and back start to tense, coiling the necessary springs to snap the ball to the holder or the punter. Gripping the ball with both hands, he lets fly a picture-perfect spiral—upside down! In regard to hand position, Davis says it varies from center to center: “Guys hold the ball differently, just like throwing a football. As for myself, I never had my hand on the laces because I felt more comfortable and better able to control the rise of the football.”
On September 21, 1969, Jets rookie punter Steve O’Neal got off the longest punt in NFL history, 98 yards, from the Jets’ one-yard line to the Denver Broncos’ one-yard line.
When the holder or the punter calls for the football, the snap hand (the hand used to throw the football) and the guide hand break simultaneously in a whiplike motion. The level of the guide hand is key, since this hand directs the ball’s path. With a 10-yard punt snap, the guide hand should be level with the punter’s crotch, but for a 6-yard field goal attempt the guide hand should be level with the holder’s biceps. It is essential that long snappers practice from different angles and parts of the field to better control accuracy. Says Davis, “On Sundays, I would go out with either the punter or the kicker and his holder and practice about 12 punts and 20 to 30 field goals from different spots.”
Kansas City Chiefs long snapper Jean-Philippe Darche snaps the ball during a home game against the Cincinnati Bengals at Arrowhead Stadium on October 14, 2007.
That’s actually the easy part. Once the ball is released, “guys are immediately on you,” says Davis. “Teams rush fairly quickly, with linebackers ready to block the ball.” Thus, the hardest job of a long snapper is to quickly ready his hands, previously between his legs, to block 300-plus pounds of force. “You have to keep guys from traveling 10 yards for a two count until the ball is in the air.”
And if you don’t? Well, that’s when a long snapper will find himself with his tail between his legs.
ROLL THE DICE
STRAT-O-MATIC’S ALL-TIME BASEBALL TEAM
There are gods who walk among us. Mariano Rivera. LeBron James. Tom Brady. Harold Richman. If you’re unfamiliar with Mr. Richman, he is the inventor of Strat-O-Matic Baseball. If you do know who he is, then you also know that he has given pleasure to millions while taking countless man-hours from schools, workplaces, and families. He came up with his dice simulation of baseball when he was 11 years old, in 1952, and began selling it out of his parents’ basement 10 years later.
Now there are Strat-O-Matic versions for the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL, as well as cards covering most of baseball history. Among the game’s devotees are Spike Lee, George W. Bush, Tim Robbins, Drew Carey, a host of sportscasters and sportswriters, and a fair number of people who actually have cards of their own, like Cal Ripken Jr., Dale Murphy, and Keith Hernandez.
The baseball game and Richman are still going strong. We asked him for his all-time Strat-O-Matic team, his go-to guys for the times when he goes to play his own game. Here they are, with fielding and speed ratings for the position players:
Position, Player, Team Stat Highlights Fielding Speed
C Yogi Berra, 1950 Yankees .322, 124 RBIs 2 D 1-13
C Johnny Bench, 1972 Reds 40 HRs, 125 RBIs 1 D 1-12
1B Lou Gehrig, 1927 Yankees .373, 47 HRs, 175 RBIs 2 C 1-13
1B Mark McGwire,* 1998 Cards 70 HRs, 147 RBIs 3 E 1-8
2B Rogers Hornsby, 1924 Cards .424, 25 HRs 2 D 1-15
2B Charlie Gehringer, 1934 Tigers .356, 127 RBIs 1 B 1-15
SS Ernie Banks, 1957 Cubs 43 HRs, 34 doubles 2 C 1-15
SS Cal Ripken Jr., 1991 Orioles .323, 34 HRs, 46 doubles 1 D 1-13
3B Mike Schmidt, 1980 Phillies 48 HRs, 121 RBIs 1 A 1-14
3B Wade Boggs, 1987 Red Sox .363, 24 HRs 2 E 1-12
LF Ted Williams, 1941 Red Sox .406, 37 HRs, 120 RBIs 3 D 1-13
LF Barry Bonds,* 2001 Giants 73 HRs, .515 OBP 2 B 1-14
CF Willie Mays, 1954 Giants .345, 41 HRs, 13 triples 1 C 1-17
CF Ty Cobb, 1911 Tigers .420, 24 triples, 83 SBs 1 AA 1-17
RF Babe Ruth, 1927 Yankees .356, 60 HRs, 164 RBIs 2 C 1-14
RF Hank Aaron, 1957 Braves .322, 44 HRs, 132 RBIs 1 D 1-14
DH Joe DiMaggio, 1941 Yankees .357, 43 doubles, 13 Ks CF-1 D 1-16
DH Stan Musial, 1948 Cardinals .376, 39 HRs, 46 doubles LF-2, 1B-2 C1-14
RHP Bob Gibson, 1968 Cardinals 22-9, 1.12 ERA, 13 ShOs
RHP Pedro Martinez, 1999 Red Sox 23-4, 2.07 ERA, 313 Ks
LHP Sandy Koufax, 1966 Dodgers 27-9, 1.73 ERA, 317 Ks
LHP Ron Guidry, 1978 Yankees 25-3, 1.74 ERA, 248 Ks
rel. Mariano Rivera, 2005 Yankees 43 saves, 1.38 ERA
rel. Bruce Sutter, 1984 Cardinals 45 saves, 1.54 ERA
If you’re wondering why McGwire’s and Bonds’s names have asterisks— well, then you haven’t been following along.
BOOK MARKS
FIVE REASONS SPORTS LITERATURE ISN’T AN OXYMORON
Forests have been felled to feed the market for sports books, and there is no shortage of good ones out there. But to narrow the field, and to risk folly, we asked Daniel Okrent, the acclaimed author of Nine Innings and Public Editor #1, to name the five sports books he would take to a desert island. Here is his selection:
About Three Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount Jr. Blount spent a season with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers, on the verge of their dynasty. Here he is on training camp: “‘Yunh. Yunh, nngOomph.’ It is strange and a little unnerving to hear this sort of thing for most of a morning or afternoon while watching people spit and lunge and blow their noses in their hands and heave against each other over and over again, doing the fundamental things repeatedly, not for the immediate purpose of advancing or stopping a drive, but for the sake of the fundamental things. It was something like watching a pornographic movie.”
Ball Four by Jim Bouton. The journeyman pitcher wove anecdotes from his career into a diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros and gave us this classic description of a meeting he had with manager Joe Schultz: “At the precise moment I started to explain why I thought I needed more work, Joe Schultz took a huge bite out of the liverwurst sandwich he was eating, got up off his stool, went to the Coke machine and mumbled something to me through his full mouth over his shoulder. I didn’t pitch. That’s how I know what he said.”
Snuffy Stirnweiss, a Yankee outfielder who won the 1945 American League batting title, died at the age of 40 when his New Jersey commuter train plunged off a bridge after the motor
man suffered a heart attack.
The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling. This compilation of the great writer’s boxing pieces transports you to a world that’s brutal and noble and poetic. Talking about the practice of putting sparring partners on the undercard, Liebling wrote, “Sparring partners are endowed with habitual consideration and forbearance, and they find it hard to change character. A kind of guild fellowship holds them together, and they pepper each other’s elbows with merry abandon, grunting with pleasure like hippopotamuses in a beer vat.”
The Summer Game by Roger Angell. The first of Angell’s collections covers the years 1962–72 and sets an impossibly high standard for any baseball writer other than Angell himself: “Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
Picking Winners: A Horseplayer’s Guide by Andrew Beyer. An odd choice, maybe, but how often do you find epiphany—the now-famous speed figures— and literature on the same pages? A bettor should never play the horses if he hasn’t read this book because, as the Harvard-educated Beyer writes, “he is playing the toughest game in the world, one that demands a passionate, all-consuming dedication.”
HIDING IN THE HALLS
BEHIND THE SCENES IN COOPERSTOWN AND CANTON
Fame does have its privileges. Just ask any of the recent inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The baseball shrine has collected hundreds of thousands of items since opening in 1939, but it reserves some of its most historic items for a private tour that each Hall of Famer attends prior to his induction ceremonies.
The tour is designed to form a strong bond between each inductee and baseball’s rich history. Steve Carlton, the first to experience the walk-through, called it a “godsend,” and players have emerged with a greater understanding of baseball’s impact on American culture and the way the game endures.