Word: sporting
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...expected him to vanish from the sport. When he lost the Dallas Cowboys, the team he loved, everyone expected TOM LANDRY to move on to another, to lead a different tribe of men to even more victories, even more Super Bowls. After all, Landry was the third most winning coach in the National Football League, after Don Shula and George Halas. But following a graceless dismissal by Dallas' new owner in 1989, Landry remained a silent, mournful football widower, reproachfully if silently carrying a torch for the team that moved on without him to further victories. At his firing...
Watching is one thing, but what about having a vicarious sensory and kinesthetic experience of your favorite sport? Within the next 50 years, neural-input units will become as standard a feature of your entertainment console as the remote control. With this hairnet-like apparatus sending complex algorithmic signals into your motor cortex and parietal lobe, you'll actually feel what it's like to be slashed across the eyes by a high-sticking Tie Domi. Seated on your couch, you'll writhe in agony from lactic-acid accumulation at the end of an Ironman Triathlon...
...entitlement have caused them to lose their starting positions and who then succumb to unlimited sex, drugs and fried foods will remain ascendant, their posters plastered on the walls of boys' bedrooms across America. But it's pro wrestlers who will reign supreme, because they are the embodiment of sport as soap opera. With wrestling's incomparable melding of the trailer park and Valhalla, its intricate and interlacing narratives, its music, pyrotechnic stagecraft and glorification of oratory, it is the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total artwork--of the sports and entertainment world. Professional wrestling will be the single most powerful influence...
...more and more televised sport is pumped into our homes, how will our children be affected? I need only extrapolate from my own experience. Several weeks ago, during her final soccer game of the season, my six-year-old daughter, while chatting with a friend and seemingly oblivious to the game, inadvertently allowed a ball to ricochet off her hip into her own goal. She responded with a vicious throat-slashing gesture directed at her teammates. She later spit at me, apparently mistaking me for an autograph-seeking fan. And that night at a local restaurant, she confessed to intentionally...
Unfortunately, even these inchoate stirrings of competitive spirit will fade with maturity. As William Wordsworth (whose brooding peregrinations of the Lake District constitute perhaps the original Ironman sport) wrote, "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" Someday even my daughter, or her daughter's daughter, will mist over at the memory of the androgen-swollen, coach-garroting, endorsement-besotted free agent ridiculing his teammates after a tough loss. Like today's purists who long for the bunt, the pick-and-roll and touch tennis, they too will pine for the good...