Word: amateurs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...human spine simply wasn't designed to swing a golf club. A 1996 study showed both professional and amateur golfers generating "peak spinal compression loads" of 6,000 newtons (a measure of gravitational force). That's the equivalent of eight times an individual's standing body weight. These back-crunching levels are "close to the known failure loads associated with lumbar intervertebral joints," concludes Thomas P. Headman, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Southern California...
...Coordinated muscle function. That's what enables John Daly to hit 1,000 practice balls a week with a swing speed exceeding 130 m.p.h. "An uncoordinated swing is much more likely to hurt the spine," Watkins says. "Pros don't generate these peak torques on their spine like the amateur does, because of coordinated muscle function. They can still get in trouble, because they do it 10,000 times. But it's not because they don't have the coordinated muscle strength to protect their backs...
...Internet. Anybody who logs on (at www.zone.com can vote on a variety of moves suggested by a panel of young grand masters. The most popular move is made; 24 hrs. later, Kasparov responds. And a few sniffles aren't likely to prevent the mighty Russian from beating amateur pawn pushers like you or me into a bloody pulp. "I don't expect us to win or anything," says Irina Krush, the 15-year-old U.S. women's chess champ and world-team coach, "but it'll be a fun game...
...battle against Alzheimer's, which ended with his death in 1991, Myers was in a slump. He had milked his Saturday Night Live skit Wayne's World for two films, then had appeared in the dud So I Married an Axe Murderer. Driving home from his practice with an amateur hockey team, he heard Dusty Springfield cooing The Look of Love on NPR, and images swirled in his mind: fuzzy memories of free love and Nehru jackets, trashy movies like Casino Royale and Our Man Flint. While soaking in Epsom salts that evening, he started spouting randy Brit-speak...
...equaled only by the cruel ease with which he vanquished them. Jones won an unprecedented (and still unmatched) 13 major golf championships in a brief seven years, culminating in his 1930 sweep of all four majors, the only Grand Slam in the game's history. And then, still an amateur and determined to remain one, he retired, at 28. From that day forward, Jones played competitively only once a year--at the tournament he invented on the course he co-designed: the Masters at Augusta National...