“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.Malcolm Gladwell also wrote the forward to Simmon's upcoming Book of Basketball. I've already preordered my copy and hope to have it signed by the Sports Guy when he visits Professor Thom's on October 28th.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Gladwell on Football, Dog Fighting and Brain Damage
Bill Simmons called it the best sports piece of 2009. I call it just another Gladwell masterpiece. The first hand accounts of life in football's trenches (i.e. the line) are crazy and the details of dog fighting are grim and repulsive.
Labels:
journalism,
sports,
writing
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment