via Gene Tunney’s boxing gloves tell tale of friendship with George Bernard Shaw – The Washington Post.

The Long Count is just one of these old gloves’ stories. In the office, Jay Tunney, who never boxed, starts throwing some of his dad’s lefts and rights, feinting and dancing like a true Tunney. Which brings up another story.

Tunney wasn’t a crowd-pleasing populist slugger, like Dempsey. He was a pugilistic artist, a thinker, a “scientific” boxer who studied anatomy and read serious literature. He kept Dempsey waiting in the ring while he finished “Of Human Bondage.” Boxing fans thought he was putting on airs. Dempsey said, “I’ll knock that big bookworm out inside of eight rounds.”

The quartet also uses recordings to teach and to prepare for concerts. Musicians have listened to themselves since recording became possible, but the Borromeo players take it to an extreme. Before every concert they run through a program and immediately listen to it, “with the rule that nobody should talk while they’re listening,” just like an audience member, Mr. Kitchen said.

“Along the way you notice hundreds and hundreds of details that you want to fix,” he added. “Then next time you play it, it’s transformed.”

The quartet’s other pioneering work lies in its use of laptops as music readers. The technology has been around for a while. Several pianists, including Christopher O’Riley, the host of the public radio program “From the Top,” are regular practitioners. But the Borromeo is a rare ensemble that has adopted the laptop stands.

via Borromeo String Quartet and the Digital Tide – NYTimes.com.

Kelly’s overarching philosophy owes to business texts, most directly, the writings of Jim Collins “Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” among others, who argues that successful organizations coalesce around a concise, easily communicated core mission. Kelly said: “If someone says to me, ‘What do you stand for?’ I should be able to invite them to practice and in five minutes, they’d say: ‘I see it. I get it.’ They stand for playing hard and playing fast.”

via Oregon’s Speed-Freak Football – NYTimes.com.

Trying to reach (or exceed) competition speed in training is a common goal across a range of sports. I once asked Bob Bowman, the longtime coach ofMichael Phelps, why Phelps did not swim the languorous distance sets that were part of some other competitors’ regimens. “We don’t want him to swim slow in meets,” he said, “so why would we have him practice swimming slow?” John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, was known for fast-paced practices that reduced the need for aerobic training.

But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct. Coaches , after all, get into the business because they love a sport and want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game. Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection.

Imagine the following, which you would see at a typical football practice across nearly any level: An offensive-line coach wades in after a play, puts his hands on the shoulder pads of his big left tackle and tries to correct the angle on his block or some subtle aspect of his footwork. Another play is run, and the coach says, “Better,” but he wades back in to make another small adjustment. That’s how a crisp two-hour practice becomes a three-hour ordeal.

via In Spain, Genius Has Company in Messi and Ronaldo – NYTimes.com.

via In Spain, Genius Has Company in Messi and Ronaldo – NYTimes.com.

Its team, more than Colorado, is pushing boundaries not previously observed in the country. Hyndman, born in Macao and also a coach of jujitsu, spent 25 years at the Southern Methodist University before the Dallas owner, Clark Hunt, tempted him to Major League.

Hyndman has no designated player. He has a captain, Hernández, who has spent an entire career shuttling between U.S. and Mexican soccer leagues. On his travels, Hernández, born at Tyler, close to Dallas, noted that Mexico’s clubs had a far tighter group of players than the American teams he played for in New England, New York and Dallas.

Hyndman knew Hernández from when he had played as a college student at S.M.U. He knew he was taking on a spiky, challenging leader. He probably envisaged how Hernández, whose kid brother had been paralyzed in a car crash, would galvanize the group to extract every moment of their playing experience together

.“Its always about the team for Daniel,” said the Dallas midfield player Dax McCarty this week. “He is always hosting barbecues and putting on functions for the team, getting us to do stuff off the field together.” That stuff, coming from the players themselves, binds a team.

via M.L.S. Final Lacks Stars, but Not Quality – NYTimes.com.

via M.L.S. Final Lacks Stars, but Not Quality – NYTimes.com.

On the top floor above us was another little workout room where he followed a regimen of simple but gallingly difficult exercises. Throw a tennis ball over your head, catch it behind your back without looking. Drop two tennis balls with your wrists crossed, catch them with the cross of your wrists reversed. Jump onto a volleyball and balance.

We went up to the room later, and he ran through the exercises, a blur of darting hands and blind catches. He jumped onto a volleyball and balanced as deftly as a seal in a circus. He had the quickness of a mongoose in the body of a giraffe.“You can’t try too hard,” he said, handing me a couple of tennis balls. “You have to relax. It has to be soft.” The passport in my shirt pocket was soaked in minutes. “Soft,” he said as the balls I fumbled pinged and ponged around the room. One of Prokhorov’s main sports is kickboxing, and the reason he prefers baggy Brioni suits to more tailored ones is that he doesn’t want his business costume to keep him from putting his foot over his head, not that he routinely has cause to. He demonstrated some kickboxing moves that made use of what he’d been rehearsing with the tennis balls.

via The N.B.A.s Oligarch and His Power Games – NYTimes.com.

via Crazy Perfect Practice Kick Boxing Workout.

But, he added, “Knowing how to accept that allows people to improve their performance.”One trick is to try a course before racing it. In one study, Dr. Swart told trained cyclists to ride as hard as they could over a 40-kilometer course. The more familiar they got with the course, the faster they rode, even though — to their minds — it felt as if they were putting out maximal effort on every attempt.Then Dr. Swart and his colleagues asked the cyclists to ride the course with all-out effort, but withheld information about how far they’d gone and how far they had to go. Subconsciously, the cyclists held back the most in this attempt, leaving some energy in reserve.That is why elite runners will examine a course, running it before they race it. That is why Lance Armstrong trained for the grueling Tour de France stage on l’Alpe d’Huez by riding up the mountain over and over again.“You are learning exactly how to pace yourself,” Dr. Swart said.Another performance trick during competitions is association, the act of concentrating intensely on the very act of running or cycling, or whatever your sport is, said John S. Raglin, a sports psychologist at Indiana University.

In studies of college runners, he found that less accomplished athletes tended to dissociate, to think of something other than their running to distract themselves.“Sometimes dissociation allows runners to speed up, because they are not attending to their pain and effort,” he said. “But what often happens is they hit a sort of physiological wall that forces them to slow down, so they end up racing inefficiently in a sort of oscillating pace.” But association, Dr. Raglin says, is difficult, which may be why most don’t do it. Dr. Swart says he sees that in cycling, too.

via Personal Best – The Secrets of Elite Athletes – NYTimes.com.

Just how music impacts the body during exercise, however, is only slowly being teased out by scientists. One study published last year found that basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics in this case, the Monty Python classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”. The music seemed to distract the players from themselves, from their audience and from thinking about the physical process of shooting, said Christopher Mesagno, a lecturer at the University of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, and the study’s lead author. It freed the body to do what it knew how to do without interference from the brain. “The music was occupying attention that might have been misdirected otherwise,” Mr. Mesagno said.

via Phys Ed: Playing Music During Exercise – NYTimes.com.

via Phys Ed: Playing Music During Exercise – NYTimes.com.

Midway through the second half, while watching Howard rush the ball toward his mates, I thought about something Alexi Lalas told me more than a decade ago when he was playing for Calcio Padova in the Italian Serie A. Some players on that weak team would give up if they fell a goal behind on the road, Lalas said, but American athletes would never give up.

It was an interesting point of view, and I was reminded of it again on Wednesday when Tim Howard sent the ball downfield, and a whole track team of runners sprinted after it for the goal that did, at least for three days, change everything.

via Sports of The Times – Donovan’s Goal Proves American Spirit Alive on World Cup Squad – NYTimes.com.