Word: sporting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Melbourne or Adelaide but in Potchefstroom, on the high veldt near Johannesburg. Most of the kids were from nearby black townships, bussed in for a couple of hours' practice with players most had never heard of. For the kids, the meet was a chance to try a new sport. For the St. Kilda players, it was a key part of summer training. And for Australian Rules football, it was part of a push into a most unlikely market: Africa. "We think it's the best game in the world," says Saints coach Grant Thomas. "And with the natural skills...
...over a century ago by globetrotting Australian miners and soldiers on R & R from the Boer War. But a local competition petered out and "footy" disappeared. Then, in 1997, a group of Australian soldiers played a few exhibition games and ran coaching clinics in an attempt to reintroduce the sport. Four years later, the Australian Football League got serious and, linking up with Australian Volunteers International, sent a development officer to South Africa to spread the footy gospel...
...rugby union and soccer-mad South Africa, Aussie Rules remains an oddity. At the Potchefstroom training session, one school teacher supervising his students laughs when told that Aussie Rules teams have 22 players, 18 of whom are playing at any one time. "What kind of a sport has so many players?" says Robert Noah. "It's like a miracle to us that you can get so many people on the field...
...footy fever is quietly spreading, partly because the game lacks the racial overtones that, 11 years after the end of apartheid, still mark rugby as a mainly white sport and soccer as a black one. Thanks to a series of energetic young development officers funded by the AFL, Aussie Rules now boasts more than 1,000 regular players, from 9-year-olds to seniors in their 20s. In 2002, the South African national team, the Buffaloes, traveled to Melbourne to compete in the inaugural International Cup, which brings together such Aussie Rules outposts as Canada, New Zealand and Samoa. Though...
...very height of the Cold War protected professors, who allegedly had communist ties years before, from a hysteria led by the angriest and most powerful voices in Washington seems now bent on driving from office, as might some mob out of control, its own leader. It seems like good sport, but with deadly consequences for Harvard and liberal universities everywhere. Who would want to succeed University President Lawrence H. Summers, or indeed even teach at or attend a place so disconnected from its glorious past? When will some new delcared truth entrap our next leader...