How one handles success and failure often speaks greater volumes than the outcome of one’s challenge, particularly if that challenge is something as relatively lighthearted as the Super Bowl. Even in coping with the hardship of an immensely public shortcoming, the losing team isn’t exactly a fleet of trapped Chilean miners, non? There are unexpected challenges to winning the big game, and inherent optimism to be found in a loss. With the help of visual aids, in the tradition […]
Poetry in Motion: Letter from a Framingham Jail – An Imprisoned Patriots Fan Speaks Out
(as told to Nick Curley, via exclusive interview.) FRAMINGHAM, MA – Watching the ’98 Honda Accord I torched outside the Cask ‘N Flagon go up in flames, I couldn’t help but see Tom Brady’s impeccable cheekbones among the whispering embers. The final seconds of Sunday’s American Football Conference Championship felt like getting pelted by ice chunks during elementary school games of King of the Mountain all over again. It’s funny how sometimes, in sports, fire is like ice.
Poetry in Motion: Sympathy for Notre Dame Football from Great Irish Writers
This week, Notre Dame woefully dongs its bell tower, with each member of the proud college’s football phalanx feeling like a true Quasimodo. A crushing 42-14 defeat in Monday’s bowl-game-of-all-bowl-games to Forrest Gump’s alma mater inspired many an armchair Lombardi nationwide to – in ways both fair and callous – damn the Fighting Irish as faux-contenders. “Unfit to the cleats of several squads arguably more deserving of BCS title game contention,” says some easily imagined surly grump.
Poetry in Motion – The Literature of Basketball, Weeks 3 & 4: Meet the Houston Rockets’ New Starter, Donald Barthelme
Despite a win-loss record of 9-8, the Houston Rockets this week emerged as the internet’s new favorite team. On Yahoo’s blog Ball Don’t Lie, Eric Freeman has devoted serious e-ink and cautious optimism to the Rockets, hyping their big off-season acquisition James Harden as “if not a bona fide superstar, then at least an excellent player who could be a first option on a pretty good playoff team.” Bethlehem Shoals asked on Twitter last week if the Rockets were this […]
Poetry in Motion: The Literature of Basketball, Weeks 1 and 2 – Mike and Phil and the Other Mike and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Pump up the tiny plastic bubble on your sneakers and unleash theme weaver John Tesh from his crypt: the National Basketball Association’s sixty-sixth season has begun. With it begins a new recurring feature at Vol. 1 entitled Poetry in Motion, chronicling “the week that was” in hoops news through the slam-dunked lens of literature.