In the NFL this season, passing dominated as never before. Ten quarterbacks threw for over 4,000 yards, besting by three the old record set in 2007. Seven of those quarterbacks led their teams to the playoffs—and they're joined there by Donovan McNabb and Kurt Warner, each of whom failed to reach the 4,000-yard mark only because they missed games early in the season. (Warner also sat out most of the Cardinals' final game, with a playoff spot secured.) It was—due to offensive trends, dominant receivers, stricter rules protecting QBs, and a host of other factors—The Year of the Pass. Read More

My father claims that when I was a sophomore in college he was at the Madison, Wisconsin apartment I shared with three roommates—I don't know why he would have been there, but no matter where I am, or how old I get, there inevitably comes a time when I need my dad to come help me with something—and my best friend and I were watching a golf tournament, out of our heads rooting for Tiger Woods to win. I suppose it's possible—this would have been when he was still all hype, and it's not hard to imagine how we might have been eager for him to validate that hype with actual greatness. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated Tiger Woods, and not for the same reason I used to hate Michael Jordan back when he was the greatest athlete on the planet: because I loved the Milwaukee Bucks. Rather, my dislike for Tiger Woods has always had to do with the way in which, a generation after Jordan, he emerged as not only the next greatest athlete on the planet but the next greatest athlete brand. Far more by way of the Tiger brand than any of the golf tournaments he's won over the years, Woods has surpassed a billion dollars in earnings. A billion dollars. That's a thousand million, for those of you who—like me—are disposed to think of the quantity in terms you can more easily relate to. Of course, if you are like me, you can't really relate to the concept of a million dollars. These days—I've come a long way baby—I operate on the level of thousands. So to put it in terms that people like me might be able to relate to, that's a million thousands: having a thousand dollars a million times over. One could also say—for those who, as I did just a few years ago, still relate to things on the level of single, individual dollars—that that's a billion single, individual dollars. But then we'd be back where we started. Read More

It's over. The best team in baseball in 2009 won the World Series, and for a fan of the New York Mets, it couldn't have turned out worse. Our two most-hated enemies facing off; it's amazing that I tuned in at all. This year, though, the Mets tanked so early that I was hungry for baseball again by the time the World Series arrived—and I watched every game. I don't know what I was looking for, but I was looking. Maybe I wanted to see the Phillies' Pedro Martinez crush the Yankees' hopes—something we'd never gotten the chance to see him do while playing for the Mets.

There were great moments: Chase Utley's and Hideki Matsui's home runs; Pedro laughing at the crowd as he exited Game 2 to chants of "Who's your daddy?"; Cliff Lee's chillingly nonchalant fielding in the first game; the free Brooklyn Lagers my friends and I were given every time the Yankees hit a home run on Halloween (that place was great: beer, a jazz band, a holiday atmosphere). But an uneasy feeling arose as the Yankees closed in on the win in Game 6, and, as some kind of self-defense, I fell asleep during the eighth inning. When I awoke the game was over.

I have plenty of reasons not to hate the Yankees. A relative on my mother's side, Herb Pennock—the Knight of Kennett Square (Pennsylvania)—was a star pitcher for four champion Yankee teams, including the famed 1927 squad, and is in the Hall of Fame. And my father's family comes from the Bronx. But they were always Giants fans, before the Giants fled to California, and they were happy to see the Mets take their beloved Polo Grounds (at Coogan's Bluff in upper Manhattan) in 1962—they moved to Shea two years later. And I've always associated the Yankees with the bad, Giuliani New York. In any case, I'm glad to be a Mets fan. Read More

March

We, The Blue Mist, the devoted fans of Kentucky basketball, have been watching The Door for twenty-four hours. A Memphis TV station has trained a web-cam on The Door, which leads to the University of Memphis athletic department. The video stream currently registers 12,611 views. There's also sound, and so The Mist can hear cars passing, the camera operators tittering. They must find it funny that we want to watch The Door.

Our hope is that John Calipari, Memphis's basketball coach, will walk through The Door and tell the camera he's leaving Memphis to coach at the University of Kentucky. Really, even to catch a glimpse of Coach Cal, as we've already come to call him, would be enough. In seventeen seasons at Memphis and U Mass, Coach Cal has amassed the second-best winning percentage of any active college coach. He's been named the Naismith Coach of the Year twice, one of only two repeat winners of the award. Read More

I saw Keri Russell, the star of Felicity, on the train to Flushing Meadows, which seemed like a good sign. But she got off somewhere in Manhattan. There are no celebrities at the qualifying tournament of the US Open. 

Instead there are players who've spent their lives at the game and are struggling to stay in it. All they want are points. Points (along with prize money) are the foundation of professional tennis. They determine the rankings and rankings determine who can play the most point-rich tournaments—so players travel around the world like knights, plotting and training for the wins most likely to maximize their numbers. Read More

Josh Hamilton (With Tim Keown). Beyond Belief. Faith Words. October 2008.

The most striking pages of Beyond Belief tell the tale of Texas Rangers' All Star Josh Hamilton's astoundingly precocious talent. At the age of six, Hamilton could throw a baseball 50 miles per hour—his first peg from shortstop in Little League knocked his bewildered first baseman to the ground. Shortly thereafter, he was elevated to a "Majors" team in North Carolina's Tar Heel League, where his manager (also his dad) batted him ninth behind boys twice his age for the sake of propriety. The first-grader punched his first home run over the left-center field fence off a pitcher who must have had at least the beginnings of pubic hair. It was Hamilton's earliest spiritual moment: "It's hard to explain, but on contact, I felt nothing. It's one of the best feelings in the world." 

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 [Click here to read the article in Spanish.]

In 1997 I was twenty years old and had never traveled anywhere where Spanish was not the official language. For reasons that are opaque to me now, I decided to visit China that summer. Most of the trip is unrecoverable at this point, two months full of strange interactions without the benefit of a common language, wherein I tried to interpret inscrutable gestures and failed consistently. These episodes have melted together and, in many cases, taken on the color and shape of an extended hallucination. I recall learning how to ask for steamed dumplings, how to say hello and thank you and how to order a brand of bottled water called WAHAHA, which I enjoyed saying almost as much as my Chinese hosts enjoyed hearing me say it. I had moments of small beauty with kind strangers, usually involving a camera or a dozen bottles of beer, and ending with an embrace. It was an optimistic time for China: Hong Kong was to rejoin the Motherland at the end of July, and the economy was booming. Everywhere I went there were internal tourists, the new urban middle-class, in tour groups organized by color: red, bright orange, green. There were packs of them at every temple, park, or archeological attraction, usually led by a young woman with a megaphone and a brightly-colored flag. They wore matching t-shirts and hats, spoke loudly into their cell phones, smoked incessantly, and took photographs of everything. I don't know exactly what I expected to see in China, but this was not it. I was aware enough to be simultaneously annoyed by the tourists and a little ashamed of my resentment. Their presence did, after all, represent a step forward of sorts, and what right did I have to judge the Chinese finally having the opportunity to see their own country? Read More

I've just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts. 

Day 1

n+1: Steve! Game-time.

Steven: Let's go!

n+1: Steven Ovadia, thanks for coming on the internet with us today. What happened during the off-season?

Steven: With the new CBA [collective bargaining agreement], teams can't afford to hang on to their best players—because paying them what they deserve will put those teams over the cap—so we saw a lot of movement.

Chris Drury and Scott Gomez, two of the best players in the Eastern Conference, going to the Rangers was probably the biggest splash. Interestingly, since the Rangers weren't weighed down with huge superstars and their contracts the way they used to be, they actually had the money to make a run at Gomez and Drury. Read More