Sport

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS:

I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What It’s Like to Survive.: On coming to terms with a near-death experience. (Maggie Slepian, April 2, 2024, Longreads)

I didn’t consider whether or not I was comfortable paddling that stretch. Along with the desire to keep up with my peers, my ability to assess risk was skewed after years of narrow backcountry escapes, a well-documented phenomenon where your risk perception shifts after successfully navigating unpredictable situations. From outrunning lightning storms to losing the trail to tackling climbs well above my grade, I’d encountered plenty of tenuous scenarios and always figured it out, scraping by without too much damage.

The Adventure Experience Paradigm describes this well; it uses a simple line graphic to show the interplay of risk and competence. When the risk is low and the skills are high, the person is toward the bottom of the chart in the “realm of exploration and experimentation.” When competence and risk are balanced, the participant is in the middle, and when risk exceeds competence, the outcome can be catastrophic. The more experience someone has with navigating risky situations, the more confident they become, skewing the variables. My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination.

JUST WALK AWAY:

The Original Story of ‘The Perfect Storm’ (Sebastian Junger, Sep. 30th, 1994, Outside)

Sword boats come from all over the East Coast—Florida, the Carolinas, New Jersey. Gloucester, which is located near the tip of Cape Ann, a 45-minute drive northeast from Boston, is a particularly busy port because it juts so far out toward the summer fishing grounds. Boats load up with fuel, bait, ice, and food and head out to the Grand Banks, about 90 miles southeast of Newfoundland, where warm Gulf Stream water mixes with the cold Labrador current in an area shallow enough—”shoal” enough, as fishermen say—to be a perfect feeding ground for fish. The North Atlantic weather is so violent, though, that in the early days entire fleets would go down at one time, a hundred men lost overnight. Even today, with loran navigation, seven-day forecasts, and satellite tracking, fishermen on the Grand Banks are just rolling the dice come the fall storm season. But swordfish sells for around $6 a pound, and depending on the size of the boat a good run might take in 30,000 to 40,000 pounds. Deckhands are paid shares based on the catch and can earn $10,000 in a month. So the tendency among fishermen in early fall is to keep the dice rolling.

The Andrea Gail was one of maybe a dozen big commercial boats gearing up in Gloucester in mid-September 1991. She was owned by Bob Brown, a longtime fisherman who was known locally as Suicide Brown because of the risks he’d taken as a young man. He owned a second longliner, the Hannah Boden, and a couple of lobster boats. The Andrea Gail and the Hannah Boden were Brown’s biggest investments, collectively worth well over a million dollars.

The Andrea Gail, in the language, was a raked-stem, hard-chined, western-rig boat. That meant that her bow had a lot of angle to it, she had a nearly square cross-section, and her pilothouse was up front rather than in the stern. She was built of welded steel plate, rust-red below waterline, green above, and she had a white wheelhouse with half-inch-thick safety glass windows. Fully rigged, for a long trip, she carried hundreds of miles of monofilament line, thousands of hooks, and 10,000 pounds of baitfish. There were seven life preservers on board, six survival suits, an emergency position indicating radio beacon, and one life raft.

The Andrea Gail was captained by a local named Frank “Billy” Tyne, a former carpenter and drug counselor who had switched to fishing at age 27. Tyne had a reputation as a fearless captain, and in his ten years of professional fishing he had made it through several treacherous storms. He had returned from a recent trip with almost 40,000 pounds of swordfish in his hold, close to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth. Jobs aboard Tyne’s boat were sought after. So it seemed odd, on September 18, when Adam Randall walked back up the dock at Gloucester Marine Railways and returned to town.

AND THE VIDEO GAME:

Formula 1’s American revolution – how the series finally cracked the USA (Mark Mann-Bryans, 4/28/25, Motor Sport)

“Look at the whole Drive to Survive effect, which I think has had a global impact but is especially important in the United States – and when you look at the demographics, the sport has gotten younger, it’s gotten more popular,” he said.

“I have meetings all the time with guys like me, and I ask if they like Formula 1? And an American guy will say: ‘No, I don’t really follow it, but my college-age daughter loves the sport, so we watch it together’.”

Domenicali touched on Cadillac’s impending arrival and the F1 movie, released in June, with Slack highlighting Drive to Survive, which has been renewed for season eight. John Rowady, founder and CEO of US-based sports marketing agency rEvolution, believes the three things are intrinsically linked to F1 finding a home in the United States.

“It is an excellent signal that F1 has become a part of the American sports fabric, and it is here to stay,” he told Motorsport.com.

“It is the only truly global ‘super league’ offering fandom from anywhere without having to displace it from stick and ball sports. American sports fans gravitate towards authenticity – now that the sport has re-entered the American market and zeitgeist in an authentic and meaningful way, fans are connecting, exploring and engaging.” […]

“I find the real story for F1’s growth trajectory is in the demographic capture. Compared to the big four leagues, F1 boasts a younger fanbase and is particularly successful in attracting 16-24-year-olds, many of them females. In the U.S., the average F1 fan is between 32 and 35 years old, notably younger than the NFL (average age 50), NBA (42), MLB (57), and NHL (49). F1 doesn’t need to chase the 40–50-year-old demographic — it’s already cultivating Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the future leaders and consumers in America. The future lies with them.

DEEP IN THE HEARTLAND:

Bobby Fischer: While conducting a search that turned into an obsession, the author discovers a great deal about the chess genius who drifted into seclusion after winning the world title (William Nack, 7/29/1985, Sports Illustrated)

During those two months in Iceland, Fischer attained a folkloric celebrity that attracted millions of Americans to a game they had long associated with the relative obscurity of park benches and coffeehouses. Looking out from the cover of national magazines that wild summer, he was depicted as a gallant cold warrior, a solitary American genius taking on and crushing the Soviet chess juggernaut, with its Moscow computers and its small army of grandmasters arrayed against him.

The 29-year-old Fischer emerged a hero, of course, but he promptly rejected scores of offers, worth millions of dollars, to capitalize on his fame. In fact, though promising to be a fighting champion, he turned back every offer to play chess again. To this day, since Spassky resigned in the 21st and final game on Sept. 1, 1972, Fischer has not played a single game of chess in public. He forfeited his world title in 1975, turning down a multimillion-dollar offer to play challenger Anatoly Karpov in the Philippines when the world chess federation refused to meet all his conditions for the match.

So Bobby Fischer was gone. Ever since he won the championship, Fischer had been drifting quietly into seclusion, finding refuge in Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, a fundamentalist cult that observes Saturday as the Sabbath and believes in the Second Coming. After several years of serving as what is called a coworker—Fischer hadn’t been baptized—he left the church, too, and since then has retreated even further into his own private world. It is one in which journalists are not permitted. Indeed, his closest friends are sworn not to speak about him to the press, under the threat of Bobby banishing them forever from his life.

After Fischer relinquished the title, Karpov was named champion. Karpov still holds the title, but his crown has not been without a singularly painful thorn, for Fischer is still alive, out there somewhere in Southern California. No longer merely a former world chess champion, he has grown to almost mythic size, leaving behind him a trail of rumors and a chess world that is still reaching out for him in the void.

Much the same kind of effect was created in the 1850s when Paul Morphy, a New Orleans chess prodigy then recognized as the world champion, returned in triumph from Europe and soon simply stopped playing. Morphy was regarded as one of the game’s true innovators. Fischer revered him. They are the only two Americans ever acclaimed as world chess champions, and there remains that striking parallel in their careers. “Fischer’s like Morphy,” says international master Igor Ivanov, a Soviet defector. “What’s the story with you Americans’? You win the title, go home and don’t play any more.”

Later in his life, after abandoning chess altogether, Morphy suffered from delusions of persecution and withdrew into his own private world. Occasionally he strolled the streets of New Orleans, muttering, in French, “He will plant the banner of Castille upon the walls of Madrid, amidst the cries of the conquered city, and the little king will go away looking very sheepish.” He died of apoplexy, at age 47.

DOWN:

The Balloon That Fell from the Sky (Nick Davidson, March 2025, Atavist Magazine)

Each balloon in the race bore a yellow banner on its gondola identifying it as a Gordon Bennett participant. Race organizers had secured permission for the pilots to pass through any country the winds might carry them over, barring Russia. Just seven weeks prior, the country had scrambled fighter jets when a Virgin Atlantic passenger flight crossed Russia on a new route to Hong Kong. The jets threatened the plane with gunfire and forced it to land—even though the airline had cleared it with authorities. The organizers considered the country too unstable for competitors to enter its airspace, making the Russian border the hard eastern wall of the race. Any balloon that approached would be required to land or face disqualification.

Belarus and Ukraine, however, were young nations rendered independent by the Soviet Union’s collapse not quite four years prior. Both had agreed to open their skies to the race for the first time. The Cold War’s embers had darkened, and Wallace, for one, found the idea of more room to fly enticing. He felt good about their prospects as they entered a third night with plenty of ballast to spare. Behind them, Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were faring just as well.

Brielmann had better eyes than Wallace, and he performed most of the navigation aboard the Spirit of Springfield once the sun set. Night flying was serene if disorienting; Brielmann enjoyed it. He took occasional 20-minute naps, the sky illuminated by a full moon, and the night passed without incident.

At 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean flew south of Bialystok, a Polish weather probe ascended 60 miles to the west and, for a time, followed the balloons’ course. Both teams crossed into Belarus nearly an hour later.

At 9:34 a.m. local time, a Belarusian border guard in Brest looked up and noticed an object drifting through the skies 40 miles to the northeast, heading toward the town of Pruzhany. The guard wasn’t sure what the balloon was but thought it might pose a threat. He picked up the receiver and dialed the antiaircraft command post.

NOT THE MOST SHAKESPEAREAN (profanity alert):

“Who Do You Think You Are? I Am!” The Oral History of the Greatest Outburst in Sports History (Alan Siegel, 3/13/25, The Ringer)

After growing up in the shadow of his distinguished father, Dick, the first face of the sport, he became the hard-partying, trash-talking, trophy-collecting bad boy of bowling. His personality made him, well, polarizing. “Half of the staid bowling community hated Pete because he seemed to buck tradition,” says Tom Clark, commissioner of the Professional Bowlers Association. “His father was the perfect ambassador. It would be like if Arnold Palmer had this wild son who became Happy Gilmore.”

That comparison isn’t quite apt. “Only because in that specific analogy, Happy had no idea about the game,” says current PBA superstar and former Weber rival Jason Belmonte. “I think Pete is, for all intents and purposes, just one of the most gifted players to ever throw a ball down the lane.”

Weber turned pro as a teenager in the late 1970s. As a young man, he talked openly about his cocaine use and drinking. He got suspended twice from the tour for “conducting unbecoming of a professional.” Yet somehow his theatrics—the WWE-inspired crotch chops, the spiking of sunglasses, the verbal outbursts—never fully derailed his career. In fact, like John McEnroe, he tended to feed off confrontation. Over 40-plus years, he piled up 37 total PBA tournament titles, 10 majors, and $4.1 million in prize money.

His most famous victory, the moment you might know him for even if you know nothing about bowling, was Weber at his most pure: deeply melodramatic, extraordinarily clutch, and bizarrely charming. On February 26, 2012, in North Brunswick, New Jersey, he won his record fifth U.S. Open championship by a single pin. When he clinched it on his final roll, this leapt out of his mouth: “Yes, goddamn it, yes! That is right, I did it! Number five! Are you kidding me?! That’s right! Who do you think you are? I am! Damn it right!”

At first, the nonsensical celebration was treated like a punch line. “I made all the halls of shame,” Weber says. Then, something strange happened. The lowlight turned into a highlight. “All of a sudden, it was a catchphrase,” Weber says. Strangers shouted it at him. High-profile athletes began repeating it triumphantly. Thirteen years later, it’s one of the most famous explosions in sports history.