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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Category Archives: Sports

Box to the Right Rhythm

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by jrbenjamin in Music, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Box to the Right Rhythm

Tags

Boxing, Drumming, Fighting, Johnny Bratton, Max Roach, Muhammad Ali, Rhythm, Robert O'Meally, Sugar Ray Robinson, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture

“I was jiggling my shoulders as I shadowboxed, trying to get that rhythm flowing through my arms and legs… in the minutes before I would box, I was searching for that rhythm. In some of the bootleg shows there had been a band playing between the bouts, and that music would be blaring as I came into the ring. I always wished they had continued to play while I was boxing. I think I would’ve boxed better.

Rhythm is everything in boxing. Every move you make starts with your heart, and that’s in rhythm or you’re in trouble.

Your rhythm should set the pace of the fight. If it does, then you penetrate your opponent’s rhythm. You make him fight your fight, and that’s what boxing is all about. In the dressing room that night I could feel my rhythm beginning to move through me, and it assured me that everything would be alright.”

__________

Sugar Ray Robinson, reflecting in his autobiography Sugar Ray. Pictured above: Robinson walking on Ali’s right.

You’ll also find this quote in Robert O’Meally’s The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, which features the following observation from Max Roach stuck right in front of it.

Interviewer: Do you think boxing is comparable to music?

Max Roach: I think it is a definitive skill that’s been raised to the level of an art form by black fighters. It’s not just beating somebody, but is as highly-developed as fencing or tennis. Rhythm has something to do with timing.

Where, when, and how to slip punches is all rhythmic. Setting up somebody is done rhythmically. I know quite a few boxers who make a point of having something to do with a percussion instrument. Sugar Ray Robinson and Johnny Bratton both played the drums. Quite a few fighters got involved in music so they could develop the kind of coordination that was required. Dancing has a lot to do with good boxing too because it’s very rhythmic. The same is true of baseball, and you could see it in Jim Brown’s running when he was playing football. The way he could slip tacklers came from a keen rhythmic sense, as did the knowledge of when to take a breath and when to make a phrase, so to speak.

Photo credit: Neil Leifer

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Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Barbarian Days

Tags

Barbarian Days, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Cancer, family, Joseph Conrad, Medicine, Mortality, Oncology, Surfing, The Mirror of the Sea, William Finnegan

“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

__________

From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

  • Laird Hamilton reflects on the lessons of the waves
  • An elegy for Sherwin Nuland, author of my favorite book on medicine
  • One of boxing’s great coaches tells how to lose your fear in the ring

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The Problem with Fighting Angry

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abe Attell, Anger, Boxing, Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense, Fighting, Jack Dempsey, Kid McCoy, Sports, Strategy

“Anger provides the number one difference between a fist-fight and a boxing bout.

Anger is an unwelcome guest in any department of boxing. From the first time a chap draws on gloves as a beginner, he is taught to ‘keep his temper’ — never to ‘lose his head.’ When a boxer gives way to anger, he becomes a ‘natural’ fighter who tosses science into the bucket. When that occurs in the amateur or professional ring, the lost-head fighter leaves himself open and becomes an easy target for a sharpshooting opponent. Because an angry fighter usually is a helpless fighter in the ring, many prominent professionals — like Abe Attell and the late Kid McCoy — tried to taunt fiery opponents into losing their heads and ‘opening up.’ Anger rarely flares in a boxing match.

Different, indeed, is the mental condition governing a fist-fight. In that brand of combat, anger invariably is the fuel propelling one or both contestants. And when an angry, berserk chap is whaling away in a fist-fight, he usually forgets all about rules — if he ever knew any…

Let me suggest that any time you are about to be drawn into a fight, keep your head and make a split-second survey of your surroundings… In 99 out of 100 cases you can force the other guy to move to an open spot by challenging his courage to do so. Don’t let the action start in a crowded subway car, in a theater aisle, in a restaurant, office, saloon or the like. Keep your head and arrange the shift, so that you’ll be able to knock his head off when you get him where you can fight without footing handicaps…

In connection with that danger, never forget: The longer the fight lasts, the longer you are exposed to danger… When you square off, you hope to beat your opponent into submission in a hurry… it is imperative that you end the brawl as quickly as possible; and the best way to do that is by a knockout.”

__________

Some advice for boxing, and life, pulled from Jack Dempsey’s 1950 book Championship Fighting.

As my trainer tells me, be more composed than your opponent; “if you can make him miss, you can make him pay.”

Read on:

  • What is courage, really?
  • Andrew Bacevich makes a timely observation about when war is justified
  • One of the great trainers, Cus D’Amato, on how to conquer fear

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Getting up One More Time

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Sports

≈ Comments Off on Getting up One More Time

Tags

Angelo Dundee, Boxing, Fear, Fight, Jack Dempsey, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, Thomas Hauser

Jack Dempsey

“Jack Dempsey once said, ‘When I was a young fellow I was knocked down plenty. I wanted to stay down, but I couldn’t. I had to collect the two dollars for winning, or go hungry. I had one fight when I was knocked to the ground eleven times before I got up to win. I had to get up. I was a hungry fighter. When you haven’t eaten for two days you’ll understand.’

‘Take the average person walking down the street,’ [Angelo] Dundee continues. ‘One punch in the neck from a fighter will tear his head off. Even things that look simple are tough. Everyone knows a fighter is supposed to keep his hands up. Try it! Don’t even throw punches. Just walk around with your fists clenched at eye level for three minutes and see how tired your arms get.’

There are no shortcuts to becoming a quality fighter. A boxer takes out of training what he puts into it. If he hits the heavy bag hard in training for three minutes a round, he’ll be able to punch hard for three minutes a round during a fight. If he plays pitty-pat with the heavy bag, he’ll get arm weary when the chips are down. Wasted talent is the oldest story in boxing…

No athlete spends emotionally like a fighter. His life is one intimidating situation after another, and to succeed he must be emotionally disciplined in the ring. That means learning to curb anger, making the right mental moves at the right time, and above all conquering fear.”

__________

Found in Thomas Hauser’s book The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing.

Photo: Daily Dose Sports

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Thankful for the Waves

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Autobiography, Bible, Christianity, Faith, fate, Laird Hamilton, Life, memoir, Philosophy, Predestination, religion, Spirituality, Surfing, Water

Laird Hamilton 3

“Water always finds the path of least resistance. It flows. You never see square turns on a river. There’s always a curvature. I think life’s like that, too… So you could say that I believe in things being predestined. How could I not? When I think of my life, I feel as though I’ve always been given the absolute right circumstances to help create who I am. If I hadn’t grown up in Hawaii… surrounded by the era’s greatest surfers throughout my childhood, I don’t know where I would have ended up. And I don’t want to know. I’m grateful for all of the twists and turns of fate that have brought me here.

My spiritual beliefs have helped me walk the path that I knew I needed to be on. I’ve been reading the Bible since I was 16, when I first discovered it (through a girl I was dating — how else?). I’ve always found something golden and truthful in its pages. […]

I believe that our imagination is our connection to higher knowledge. It’s the most formidable tool that we have, an amazing source of inspiration. And then, of course, there’s the world we live in, which is no slouch in that area, either. What we’ve been given here is precious: majestic in its smallest details and its grandest spectacles. Anytime you feel like you’re in danger of forgetting that, I recommend taking a good look at a 50-foot wave. Anyone who can be around something that powerful and not feel humbled has some serious analyzing to do. You can’t deny the spritual world when you’re staring into its eyes.”

__________

From part three of Laird Hamilton’s Force of Nature: Body, Body, Soul, and of Course, Surfing.

Photo credit: lairdhamilton.com

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Lose Your Fear in the Ring

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Lose Your Fear in the Ring

Tags

Boxing, Constantine D'Amato, Courage, Cus D'Amato, Fear, Fighting, Mike Tyson, Sports

Anthony Joshua 2

“Fighters are the most exposed athletes in the world. During a fight, the crowd observes every twitch and movement. Still, spectators rarely see fear in a quality fighter. ‘That,’ says [boxing trainer Cus] D’Amato, ‘is because the fighter has mastered his emotions to the extent that he can conceal and control them.’ But whatever a fighter says, the fear is there. It never goes away. He just learns to live with it. ‘And the truth is,’ D’Amato continues, ‘fear is an aspect to a fighter. It makes him move faster, be quicker and more alert. Heroes and cowards feel exactly the same fear. Heroes just react to it differently. On the morning of a fight, a boxer wakes up and says, “How can I fight? I didn’t sleep at all last night.” What he has to realize is, the other guy didn’t sleep either. Later, as the fighter walks toward the ring, his feet want to walk in the opposite direction. He’s asking himself how he got into this mess. He climbs the stairs into the ring, and it’s like going to the guillotine. Maybe he looks at the other fighter, and sees by the way he’s loosening up that his opponent is experienced, strong, very confident. Then when the opponent takes off his robe, he’s got big bulging muscles. What the fighter has to realize,’ concludes D’Amato, ‘is that he’s got exactly the same effect on his opponent, only he doesn’t know it. And when the bell rings, instead of facing a monster built up by the imagination, he’s simply up against another fighter.'”

__________

Pulled from a section on Cus D’Amato in Thomas Hauser’s The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing.

D’Amato was the trainer behind legends like Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson, who he adopted at sixteen when Tyson’s mother died. When D’Amato passed away, Tyson discussed his old trainer:

[D’Amato] didn’t know me. He told me with no hesitation that I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time… If it weren’t for that old, Italian white guy, I would’ve been a bum. Cus D’Amato was a physical person like I am. He was impulsive and impetuous like me. If somebody upset him, he would just go after them — even at 75… the psychologists would’ve had a field day with him.

He’s simply up against another fighter… It applies to a lot of life.

Move along:

  • There’s only one way to get good at fighting
  • Teddy Roosevelt: “The best men I know are good at their studies or their business, fearless and stalwart… but always tender to the weak and helpless.”
  • Why the south loves football

Photo courtesy of Irish Mirror

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They Were Men

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Sports, War

≈ Comments Off on They Were Men

Tags

army, Army Rangers, Athletics, Boxing, D-Day, Football, Military, Randolph Milholland, Sports, Training, World War Two

Robert Kennedy

“Every American boy should be made to play football and box and participate in all kinds of athletics, and above all the American should be taught discipline and decent living. Then he should be given a year of the toughest kind of military training, not the kind that we know, but the kind I gave my Rangers.

God, but I wish I had those boys now; we would tear the Germans stringy. I hear of those boys now and then and although they are almost all gone now, they have done unbelievable things and are spoken of almost in a tone of reverence by officers and men alike who have fought with them.

They were men.”

__________

The closing of Major Randolph Millholland’s letter to his daughter, Ginnie Schry, on December 22, 1944. Millholland trained the 29th Rangers for the D-Day invasion, leading them in a five-week course in amphibious landing, cliff scaling, and hand-to-hand combat. The group was ultimately disbanded and never saw combat as a unit, though Millholland’s men were later deployed separately throughout Europe.

I found this excerpt in chapter four of John Robert Slaughter’s book Omaha Beach and Beyond. The picture is of Bobby Kennedy, taken by Jacques Lowe, and available at 1stDibs.

Move on:

  • The story of the photographer who stormed Omaha Beach
  • “Who wants it more?”
  • How the Spartans scared the Greek army with one word

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Red Auerbach’s Victory Cigars

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Red Auerbach’s Victory Cigars

Tags

Basketball, Bill Russell, Boston Celtics, Cigars, Coaching, Earl Lloyd, Hubie Brown, leadership, Maurice Podoloff, Red Auerbach, Sports, Winning

Red Auerbach and Bill Russell

“[Red Auerbach] was a master at handling people — a master psychologist.

Time and again you hear Celtics describing Red as ‘a player’s coach.’ To the world outside his own huddles and locker room he was… a boisterous dynamo who peered at you through cigar smoke after his troops had impaled yours.

But not with his own players. He supported them. He had their backs. They knew it, so they did everything to please him. He emphasized people far more than X’s and O’s.

‘Red Auerbach convinced his players that he loved them,’ said Earl Lloyd, the NBA’s first African-American player. ‘So all they wanted to do was please him.’

Former NBA coach Hubie Brown remembered what worked so well: ‘[Red] had a relentless fast break, pressure defense and Bill Russell in the back that allowed him to play this style. They were also very organized in their play sets. Then, I feel he had the ability to motivate them individually, because it is extremely difficult to maintain excellence. It comes down to that ability to maintain excellence. He knew how to push the right button on each guy to get him to be subservient to the team.’ […]

The 1960-61 squad may have been the Celtics’ finest under Auerbach. The team went 57-22 and, amazingly, had six scorers averaging between 15 and 21 points a game without one finishing in the top 10.

‘In any good coach is the ability to communicate,’ Auerbach explained. ‘In other words, a lot of coaches know their X’s and O’s, but the players must absorb it. Team was important. We didn’t care who the starting five was. The sixth-man concept was my idea.’ […]

Auerbach could be a taskmaster in practice. Sure, the Celtics were knee-deep in talent, but they also worked harder than other teams…

Bill Russell and Red Auerbach

As the Celtics’ routinely whipped the opposition, Red would frequently sit back and enjoy the end of the game — with a cigar. Hence, the ‘victory cigar.’

‘It all boils down to this,’ Auerbach said. ‘I used to hate these college coaches or any coach that was 25 points ahead with three minutes left to go, and they’re up pacing and they’re yelling and coaching because they’re on TV, and they want their picture on, and they get recognition. To me, the game was over. The day’s work is done. Worry about the next game.

‘So I would light a cigar and sit on the bench and just watch it. The game was over, for all intents and purposes. I didn’t want to rub anything in or show anybody what a great coach I was when I was 25 points ahead. Why? I gotta win by 30? What the hell difference does it make?

‘The commissioner [Maurice Podoloff] said you can’t smoke the cigars on the bench. But there were guys smoking cigarettes on the bench. I said, “What is this, an airplane — you can smoke cigarettes but not cigars?” No way. I wouldn’t do it.’ […]

On April 28, 1966, Auerbach, who earlier in the season had announced he’d be retiring, coached his last official game. Appropriately, it was a Game 7, at Boston Garden, against Los Angeles. Russell had 25 points and 32 rebounds, enough to offset Jerry West’s 36 points, and the Celtics narrowly won, 95-93.

Red’s victory cigar was knocked from his mouth by the surging crowd. He lit up another in the dressing room and Russell pointed to Auerbach, saying, ‘There is the man. This is his team. He puts it together. He makes us win.'”

__________

Pulled from Ken Shouler, who has written portions of Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia. You can read more in John Feinstein’s book with Auerbach, Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game.

Auerbach won 9 championships in 10 years, a record that’s only surpassed by Phil Jackson, who won 11 in 20 years. He was the first coach to implement team defense strategies and fast breaks as an offensive weapon. Auerbach also spurred other innovations: he drafted the first African-American, Chuck Cooper, in 1950 and fielded the first all black starting five in 1964.

… knee-deep in talent, but they also worked harder…

(Photos courtesy: SNCA, Boston Sports, Rompedas)

Red Auerbach

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Why Do Southerners Like Football So Much?

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Interview, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Why Do Southerners Like Football So Much?

Tags

America, American Football, American History, Americana, Football, Friday Night Lights, interview, Mark Halperin, Sports, Stuart Stevens, The Last Season, The Last Season: A Father a Son and a Lifetime of College Football, The South, With All Due Respect

Stuart Stevens

Mark Halperin: Why is football such a big deal in the South?

Stuart Stevens: It’s actually a profound question. In part it’s because the South had no professional teams for many years, and that had an impact on the “Friday Night Lights” atmosphere that you had. I think that for a long time, when the South wasn’t very good at much, it was good at football – so there was an inverse pride in football which people clung to. I also think that there is something about the violence of football that appeals to southerners in a special way.

And the way in which football has changed the culture of the South, particularly the racial elements of the South… I find fascinating. It’s parallel with rugby in South Africa. It really was the first time, for many southerners, that blacks and whites cheered for each other, and meant it, and that’s been a very powerful force.

__________

From Stevens’s interview with Halperin on With All Due Respect in September.

Stevens, who was the top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, took leave from work the year after the failed run. In this time, he and his 95-year-old dad (pictured above) committed to revive their long dormant family tradition and attend every Ole Miss football game that season. You can read about their experiences and Stevens’s reflections on family, legacy, and the South in his new book The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football (I haven’t read the book, but you can see a short introduction below).

There’s more:

  • Teddy Roosevelt’s essay about football and American manhood
  • Shelby Foote discusses what the Civil War sounded like
  • John Updike describes the American autumns of his boyhood

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Boyhood, Manhood, Football

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Boyhood, Manhood, Football

Tags

Boyhood, Football, manhood, Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

“Of course, what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man…

No boy can afford to neglect his work, and with a boy, work as a rule means study. Of course, there are occasionally brilliant successes in life where the man has been worthless as a student when a boy. To take these exceptions as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to advocate blindness because some blind men have won undying honor by triumphing over their physical infirmity and accomplishing great results in the world. I am no advocate of senseless and excessive cramming in studies, but a boy should work, and should work hard, at his lessons—in the first place, for the sake of what he will learn, and in the next place, for the sake of the effect upon his own character of resolutely settling down to learn it. Shiftlessness, slackness, indifference in studying, are almost certain to mean inability to get on in other walks of life. Of course, as a boy grows older it is a good thing if he can shape his studies in the direction toward which he has a natural bent, but whether he can do this or not, he must put his whole heart into them. I do not believe in mischief-doing in school hours or in the kind of animal spirits that results in making bad scholars, and I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horseplay in school. While they study they should study just as hard as they play football in a match game. It is wise to obey the homely old adage, ‘Work while you work; play while you play.’

The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy—not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy. I do not mean that he must love only the negative virtues; I mean he must love the positive virtues also. ‘Good,’ in the largest sense, should include whatever is fine, straightforward, clean, brave, and manly. The best boys I know—the best men I know—are good at their studies or their business, fearless and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting to wrongdoing, and equally incapable of being aught but tender to the weak and helpless. A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys or tortures animals. […]

In short, in life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is:

Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

__________

From Teddy Roosevelt’s essay “The American Boy,” found in his collection The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses.

Theodore Roosevelt 2

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The Girls of Fall

22 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, Sports

≈ Comments Off on The Girls of Fall

Tags

Fiction, In Football Season, John Updike, literature, Short Story

John Updike

“Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear; by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousand-fold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

[…]

Now I peek into windows and open doors and do not find that air of permission. It has fled the world. Girls walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace, and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a hearse, and remembers what pierces him.”

__________

The opening and closing paragraphs of the short story “In Football Season” by John Updike. (Full text)

More from the master:

  • Writing about our past selves — and coming to grips with them
  • Elaborating on why its possible to assume God’s existence
  • Discussing cosmology and its implications with Jim Holt

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