Some poor intern was kind enough to highlight parts of my story for Dana Carvey, a temporary Regis replacement on “Live With Kelly”—and he still thought it was about a rain dance in San Francisco. Oh, well. Party time!
Not long ago, my flight into Vail was diverted to Denver, as the conditions were so snowy that the plane couldn’t dip into the mountains and land safely. As it turned out, this had not been a problem for many weeks, and it was only a problem that day because of what had occurred a few hours earlier: a snow dance.
My front-page story for the Journal today details that very ceremony at Vail’s base and also mentions a few more recent snow dances in Park City and Lake Tahoe. In other words, even the most powerful ski resorts in the world are sometimes desperate enough to use that same tired-and-true method you used in middle school, when a blizzard was forecasted and you had a quiz the next day. Also, here’s some audio of me yapping about the snow dance on a podcast, some video of the snow dance, and more video of me talking about the snow dance, though not me snow dancing while talking about the snow dance.
You might ask if Eddie Box Jr., the Southern Ute who led the Vail snow dance, stuck around the mountain to shred himself. Actually, he wasn’t too interested in the white stuff. He hasn’t skied since he was a twentysomething and visited a mountain known as Purgatory. His last run is now named Lower Hades.
This weekend, thousands of Louisiana State fans will swarm New Orleans to watch the Tigers in Monday’s BCS Championship game and generally enjoy the closest thing to Mardi Gras outside February. But before, possibly after and most certainly during the contest, these celebrants will gather in the French Quarter and indulge in the one thing they’re better at than perhaps any other group of American sports fans: boozing. In other words, LSU fans make most other tailgating troupes look like traveling Baptist choirs. Put it this way: When LSU visited West Virginia, one of the only college stadiums that sells beer, Tigers fans were responsible for over $120,000 in beer sales that day. In no other game this season did Mountaineer Field even break $90,000. The tab might have been higher, too, if the venue didn’t run out of cold Bud Light at halftime.
So here’s my story about all this in the Journal, naturally.
Plus, a deleted scene! In 2003, LSU traveled to Tucson for a matchup with Arizona, and it was followed by parties in purple and gold. One business-school executive organized a trip for 40 couples with the concierge-like assistance of his counterpart at Arizona. About a month after the game—an LSU win, of course—the Arizona professor received a call with a bit of surprising news. He was being honored by the Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau for ushering in so much commerce to the area. He still keeps the plaque in his office to this day.
It’s that time again, so I’m pleased to present the Journal’s second-annual Sports Photos of the Year. This year’s choices, in no particular order: Carrier Classic, Tebowing, Vancouver riot, Paterno TwitPic, Cuban’s cigar and Mayweather’s knockout. But wait. There’s more! I also spoke with the very professional and very amateur photographers responsible for all six shots for a behind-the-lens perspective on 2011 in images. Oh, and one more thing: Happy New Year.
Holiday Cheer
A few months ago, while looking through the magazines at McNally Jackson on a Sunday evening, I happened to notice one of the zines on a featured rack. It was about Tyson Chandler, the basketball player, and it was called “Tyson Chandler.” The zine cost $10. The next morning, I tried to track down Ari Marcopoulos, one of the two artists responsible for the publication. That took about a month. He forwarded my emailed questions to Camilla Venturini, his collaborator. At the time, they simply hoped Chandler wouldn’t be mad at them for making this 20-page black-and-white tribute.
It took another month to track down Chandler himself. He was walking around Chelsea, visiting galleries, and he stopped by Printed Matter and bought out the bookstore’s supply of “Tyson Chandler.” I spoke with Chandler immediately after he had called Marcopoulos, who was in Italy at the time, and the piece ran a few days later.
But the story didn’t end then. Not a month later, Chandler signed with the New York Knicks—in part, I like to believe, because the zine’s last page gave him the idea—and phoned Marcopoulous to tell the photographer that they would be hanging out soon. Now they trade frequent emails and text messages. On Wednesday afternoon, Chandler surprised Marcopoulos by telling him that there were tickets to the Knicks’ final preseason game waiting at the Garden if he wanted them. He did.
Before the game, during warmups, Chandler pointed at Marcopoulos and thumped his chest, pointing to his heart. And after the game, he invited him into the bowels of Madison Square Garden. It was their first meeting. This time, the professional basketball player was the photographer.
I visited Gill St. Bernard’s for its basketball scrimmage last week against St. Anthony—yes, that St. Anthony—for a profile of the country’s most unlikely hoops powerhouse. The story’s on The Classical, the lovely and excellent new sports website that I trust you’re already reading. Hope you enjoy!
I wrote for the Journal about why rabbis in Denver—and also Buddhists, Muslims and atheists—are kosher with rooting for Tim Tebow.
"He was the subject of a limited edition 100 copy zine titled “Tyson Chandler”. The zine was created in fall 2011 by Camilla Venturini and the photographer Ari Marcopoulos, and was the subject of a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal."
My profile of Mike Krzyzewski, called The Art of Winning, was released as a Kindle Single earlier this month. Today he was named Sports Illustrated’s 2011 Co-Sportsperson of the Year with Tennessee’s Pat Summitt. Here’s a lightly edited and condensed transcript of a recent conversation with Coach K.
One early morning in October, I flew down to North Carolina and drove to the campus of Duke University to interview Mike Krzyzewski, who emerged from an elevator a few minutes past 11 a.m. and quickly grabbed a can of Diet Coke. He was wearing mud-stained Nikes, gray track pants, and a black polo with the words “Duke Basketball” stitched over the heart when he walked into his palatial office and sat down in an upholstered seat among the commemorative folding chairs, more basketballs than he would need for a shooting drill, and framed newspapers, jerseys, and photographs, including a shot of the 2008 Olympics team with the words “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” On the side of his messy desk was a potted plant.
I had a half-hour blocked off on Krzyzewski’s schedule, and I knew that not even a conversation about the meaning of life itself would delay his 11:30 a.m. meeting with his coaches. And yet we still found ourselves talking about baseball, not basketball, for five good minutes. The news on that overcast, sometimes drizzly day was that the Chicago Cubs had reached a deal with Theo Epstein, who would leave his job as general manager of the Boston Red Sox for the same position with Krzyzewski’s favorite baseball team. My recorder started about a minute after he did.
When I got sick in 94-95, we were 13-18 and 18-13 the next year. We had gone to seven Final Fours in nine years. Everyone here said, “Just take your time.” Well, then, it’s paid off. We’ve even gotten better. Those are the types of things — like, I don’t think you tear out a lot of infrastructure. It’s not like putting someone in for a show, like a Broadway show. Teams take time to develop. To me, their pitching staff was decimated. If they have everybody the same? I don’t know. You have to do a lot of strange things when you don’t have pitching.
And they lost by, you know, an inch.
I think it’s such a knee-jerk reaction. But the Cubs haven’t had any knee-jerk reactions. They’ve had their knees and feet in cement for a long time.
Did you watch the Bartman documentary a few weeks ago?
I heard about it. We were at USA Basketball meetings in Vegas over the weekend, and a couple of guys were talking about it. It’s a sad thing. I was at the game.
Were you?
Sitting first row, right-field bleachers.
Better than first row, third-base bleachers.
Forty thousand people were yelling “asshole!” and the game was going on. We committed an error at shortstop. I mean, we had the lead! And I’m telling my buddies — I’m with all my buddies from the fantasy camp, my Jewish buddies from the North Side — and said call timeout, go out and see the pitcher. We’re still winning! But that’s the way Cubs fans are. There’s gotta be an excuse.
People said they felt the atmosphere in the stadium change when it happened.
It did. I don’t think the atmosphere changed. The focus changed. Like, everybody was yelling “asshole!” here, and the game was going on here, and we’re playing to get into the World Series. Like, you’ve got to be kidding! It’d be like a fight in the stands during a basketball game, we have a 10-point lead, and, oh, we’re losing. Then you have an excuse to lose the next game. Those are the types of things that can happen if you let them happen. So, anyway.
