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“The Bubbles Were Accurately Measured By Specially Built Calipers”

September 28, 2014 in Sports, Videos | Permalink

On the final day of the 2014 Major League Baseball regular season, here’s a repost of a ridiculous artifact from the sport’s past.

Bazooka Joe: Eye lost to knife fight on pier.

In 1975, Joe Garagiola hosted a remarkably stupid and wonderful bubble-gum blowing competition among baseball players, which was sponsored by Bazooka, a brand of gum favored by hobos during World War II. One entrant was Philadelphia catcher Tim McCarver, whose head was the size of a medicine ball. The moment the contest ended, the players went in search of the nastiest groupies they could find.

“It Is Merely Part Of An Odyssey”

September 25, 2014 in Sports, Videos | Permalink

Why the fuck did the soon-to-be-single Bruce Jenner do it to himself? Here he is in 1976 becoming the greatest athlete in the world, before the divorces, the Village People, the cosmetic surgeries and the Kardashians–before he performed reverse alchemy, going from gold to plastic.

From a 1980 People profile of Jenner at 30, just as his first marriage ended: “At the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, Bruce Jenner won the gold medal in the decathlon and became the great American Olympic hero—perhaps the last of the line, given the parlous state of the Olympics today. He was lionized shamelessly. He and wife Chrystie were invited to a state dinner at the White House. His was the face on the Wheaties box. He apparently learned from the amazing vanishing act of Mark Spitz. 

Today Jenner endorses everything from lines of shoes and sporting clothes to 10-speed bicycles and weight-lifting equipment. He has a syndicated sports advice column and a sky-high deal to advertise Minolta cameras. He didn’t pass his screen test for Superman, but makes his movie debut in June in Allan Carr’s Can’t Stop the Music (co-starring Valerie Perrine and the Village People). He has co-authored a spectators’ handbook to the Lake Placid Olympics. He has a sports commentator’s contract with NBC that will take him to Moscow if the American athletes go. He is negotiating with NBC to produce a couple of made-for-TV movies. He makes big bucks on the lecture circuit (‘I’ve just raised my price—it separates the men from the boys’), mostly from corporate audiences. And when others might grab for the Geritol, Jenner, at 30, feels on top of the world. ‘I’m very fortunate,’ he says smugly. ‘I now no longer have to do things I don’t want to do.’

But Bruce’s decathlon of life since 1976 has taken atoll. One casualty is his seven-year marriage to Chrystie, who worked as a United stewardess to see him through the grueling training that led to the Olympic gold. ‘Chrystie didn’t like the whole public scene,’ explains Bruce tersely.”

Old Print Article: “Can’t Pick The Winner,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1911)

September 24, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, but he wasn’t alone. The automobilist will forever be crowned the inaugural winner, but fellow driver Cyrus Patschke also handled the wheel of his car, the Marmon Wasp, for a spell, a maneuver common to drivers in early auto races who wanted to take a breather. Ralph Mulford, another entrant who drove his vehicle all by himself for the race’s duration, was actually considered the more impressive driver, and protested Harroun being named winner. The complaint, though, wasn’t directed at Harroun employing a “relief driver,” but rather the fact that Mulford received the checkered flag first, and while he was running several extra laps just to be sure that he’d completed enough tours of the track, Harroun made his way to the winner’s circle. The historic moment had left Mulford in the dust.

An article about the soon-to-be-run race in the May 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which featured the comments of driver Ralph DePalma:

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In 1961, Harroun appeared on What’s My Line? fifty years year after his most famous moment:

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“The City Faces A Painful Post-Games Hangover”

September 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The Olympics are never mostly about the sports. They’re an examination of contemporary geopolitics, a survey of the latest media and technology and a narrative about the host nation, which presents not just itself, but its aspirations, to the world. Of course, such an idealization can have short shelf life. After the success of Sochi, Russia seemed pointed toward the future, perhaps becoming another modern Germany with its technological might and post-conflict politics, but the country was quickly yanked back into the 20th century by Putin’s folly.

Even when the aftermath doesn’t undo the good will, the cost of such an event is beyond onerous. From an Economist article about the buyer’s remorse of Tokyo, the “winner” of the 2020 Games:

“Disquiet over construction plans has been heightened by growing concerns about cost. Estimates for the stadium refurbishment have more than doubled as construction and labour costs have soared under Abenomics, Japan’s bid to end years of deflation. City officials revealed recently that this year’s consumption-tax hike of 3% was not even factored into the original budget. Cost concerns may now force some venues out of the expensive city to the far-flung suburbs.

The 1964 event cost many times more than its predecessor in Rome four years earlier, and added to the Olympics’ spendthrift reputation—not a single games since then has met its cost target. The Tokyo Olympics also triggered the start of Japan’s addiction to bond issuance, which continues unabated today. Tokyo’s original estimate of ¥409 billion ($3.7 billion) for the games now looks unrealistic to most critics. If, as some expect, Abenomics runs out of steam, the city faces a painful post-games hangover.”

“What If We Could Just Rewire Hitters’ Brains To React To Pitches Better?”

September 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The Red Sox brass’ attempts at rewiring their batters’ brains didn’t pay dividends during the team’s woeful 2014 season, but we’re just at the beginning of cognitive experimentation. PEDs will be seen as crude rudiments compared to what will eventually be permitted on and off the field of play. From Brian Costa at the Wall Street Journal:

“Take a peek inside the frazzled mind of a major-league hitter these days. It isn’t a pretty sight.

Pitchers are throwing harder than ever. Batters are striking out more often than ever. And their judgment is getting shakier: Hitters are chasing more pitches outside the strike zone.

It is enough to make some teams wonder: What if we could just rewire hitters’ brains to react to pitches better? As it turns out, at least three major-league teams are engaged in a covert science experiment to find out.

Several years ago, the Boston Red Sox began working with a Massachusetts neuroscience company called NeuroScouting. The objective was to develop software that could improve hitters’ ability to recognize pitch types and decide, with greater speed and accuracy, whether they should swing. The result was a series of no-frills videogames that became a required part of hitters’ pregame routines in the minor leagues.”

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“It Expects Nearly A Third Of Retired Players To Develop Long-Term Cognitive Problems”

September 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The real way to severely punish Ray Race for his horrific act of domestic violence might be to not ban him from football but to force him to play. For the first time, the NFL has acknowledged that a high rate of serious brain damage is endemic in the game. It’s a remarkably popular sport, in the same way that boxing used to be. From Ken Belson ta the New York Times:

“The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at ‘notably younger ages’ than in the general population.

The findings are a result of data prepared by actuaries hired by the league and provided to the United States District Court judge presiding over the settlement between the N.F.L. and 5,000 former players who sued the league, alleging that it had hidden the dangers of concussions from them.

‘Thus, our assumptions result in prevalence rates by age group that are materially higher than those expected in the general population,’ said the report, prepared by the Segal Group for the N.F.L. ‘Furthermore, the model forecasts that players will develop these diagnoses at notably younger ages than the generation population.’

The statements are the league’s most unvarnished admission yet that the sport’s professional participants sustain severe brain injuries at far higher rates than the general population.”

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“It Was The Fever Dream Of My Adolescence”

September 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Sports, Videos | Permalink

From James Camp’s Guardian grab bag of notes about a Werner Herzog appearance in Brooklyn:

“To his audience at the opera house, he described film-making as a ‘pilgrimage.’ In person, as on screen or page, he is off the wall and over the top and beyond the pale. He is a pilgrim on his way to a place that is really an idea: too far.

‘Ski-jumping,’ Herzog said. ‘It was the fever dream of my adolescence.’

He played clips of airborne jumpers in slow motion and commanded Brooklyn to scrutinise their faces.

Their lips rippled in alpine winds.

Herzog said: ‘The ecstasy of solitude!’

Holdengräber reminded him of the dictum, attributed to Blaise Pascal, that opens Lessons of Darkness, Herzog’s 1992 documentary: ‘The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.’

Herzog repeated it. He said, ‘Actually, Pascal didn’t write that. I wrote that.’

Holdengräber said: ‘But it sounds so very like Pascal.’

‘Pascal should have written it,’ Herzog said, of the 17th-century philosopher. ‘That’s why I signed his name.'”

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Herzog’s original German-language 1974 profile of ski-jumper Walter Steiner:

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“Widen The Plate By 25 Percent”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Long gone are the days when baseball owners like Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley would take any idea that popped into their heads and give it a test run during a major-league game. (Little people as pinch hitters? Orange baseballs for night games?) It was fun, though not all of them were winners. In 1962, Veeck had some suggestions for speeding up the pace of the game, which has become even a sorer subject today, with seemingly endless commercials between innings and infinite pitching changes. His proposals were pretty poor. From David Schoenfeld’s fun ESPN post about Veeck’s mad scientist schemes:

“1. Widen the plate by 25 percent. 

Umm … if this was the case, would Clayton Kershaw ever give up a hit? 

2. Three balls for a walk, two strikes for an out. 

If you think we have a lot of strikeouts now, this idea would excessively increase strikeouts even more. It’s hard enough to hit with three strikes to work with. Imagine just two. 

3. A limit would be placed on the time permitted for throwing the ball around the infield, or eliminated altogether. 

And batters should have to run up to the batter’s box from the on-deck circle! 

4. The pitcher would be limited to one warm-up toss between innings. 

Of course, Veeck’s book came out before the wide increase in number of games broadcast on television. I suspect that a large chunk of the increase in game time from the 1960s to now isn’t just the pace of game but the time between innings — when baseball makes money by showing commercials. If the average break between half innings is 2:15 (longer for postseason games), multiplied by at least 16 breaks, that’s 36 minutes worth of commercial breaks/inactivity. A generation ago it was probably half of that, and in Grover Cleveland Alexander’s time he was probably throwing his first pitch as he ran out from the dugout. 

(I wonder: If you simply add up the commercial breaks and all the mid-inning pitching changes, how much of the 30 extra minutes per game since 1980 are tied up in just those two elements and not slow pitchers or batters scratching themselves or adjusting their batting gloves?) 

Anyway, good luck telling baseball, ‘Sell fewer commercials on TV broadcasts.'”

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Old Print Article: “Fame Takes A Flogging As Alex Does Act In Dime Museum,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1939)

September 3, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

World War I, which started exactly a century ago, claimed 16 million lives, but there were many more casualties among the living. One of them was the brilliant baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. He emerged from battle having inhaled mustard gas and experiencing hearing loss, something akin to epilepsy and what we today would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A drinker before the war, he became a two-fisted one after the fighting ceased, sometimes taking the mound inebriated. So great was he, it took nearly a decade for alcohol to ground his career, but once his playing days were over, he found himself unemployable in the league he loved, no one wanting to trust a temperamental alcoholic as manager or coach.

A year after being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1938, Alexander found himself an attraction in a raffish New York City dime museum, among the anomalies and curiosities, giving the same speech about his glory days a dozen times daily. The shell of his former self was all he had left to sell, and the press and public brought their cameras to capture a piece of what once was. From an article in the January 20, 1939 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about “Old Pete” in steep decline:

Cameramen swarmed about the great pitcher as he stood there against the green background, both hands holding a baseball above his head as if starting a windup.

“Hold it! Hold it!” they chirped as they focused their cameras.

But the pitching immortal couldn’t “hold it.” His arms came down and he almost dropped the ball. He tired that quickly. The great Grover Cleveland Alexander wasn’t weary from pitching a baseball game. He was starting a series of three weeks’ appearances at Hubert’s Dime Museum, on 42nd St., yesterday.

It’s a Different League

This series is in a world far different from the fresh air, sunshine and roaring crowds that the mighty right-hander knew in the old days. And the man is far different too. The posters outside the museum notify passers-by that the “Great Grover Cleveland Alexander” is on exhibition within. But that’s not true. They’re exhibiting only what’s left of the man that was.

The tall man with the dusty brown hair, bulgy waistline, splotched complexion and somewhat bleary eyes is older and more tired now than you would expect of his 51 years. He is weary and bitter. He believes that the game of baseball didn’t do right by him. He feels that the pastime somehow should have warded off the necessity that is sending the great Alexander of Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame into Hubert’s hall of freaks and flea circuses and dancing girls. 

A year ago this month the Baseball Writers of America elected Alexander to the Cooperstown shrine where his name joined those of 13 other immortals. But on this January day the tall man in the wrinkled brown suit stands on a tawdry little stage downstairs in the smoky light and tells how he won the seventh game of the 1926 World Series. How he fanned Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded and two out.

He gives this little talk twelve times a day, starting at noon and ending at midnight, to earn bread and shelter in this bleak twilight of his life. Between lectures he sits in a little wooden cubicle, below the stage–away from staring eyes. Into this little cubicle come reporters and former players to chat with ‘Ol’ Pete’ and to wonder.

It’s the same platform, cubicle and rigmarole that knew Jack Johnson, the Negro who was former heavyweight champion of the world. That was a year or so ago, when ‘Li’l Arthur’ was hard pressed.

First Time Here Since 1930

“When the museum telegraphed me the offer of a job, I thought somebody was kidding me,” Alexander said. “I hadn’t been in New York since 1930 and I thought a museum was a place where they keep skeletons and things. But, anyway, I took a chance, wired back and got the job.”

A reporter asked why it was that a man with his reputation never was offered a job in major league baseball after his pitching days were over.

“Booze! I used to take a drink now and then when I played. Almost every player drank a bit then, and I guess they still do. But I made the mistake of taking my drinks openly. The word got around that I was a drunkard, which I never was. I believe that’s the reason I never even got a coaching job.”

When Alexander asked managers or owners for work, they told him he hadn’t kept pace with the game and they couldn’t use him because he didn’t know the ‘inside stuff.’

Old Pete laughs bitterly at this when he recalls his 19 years of education in the big time.

“I was in the National League almost 20 years,” he explains, “from 1911 through part of 1930–with the Phillies, Cubs, Cardinals and finally the Phillies again. I know the game inside and out.”

After his retirement in ’30 he managed the House of David team for three seasons. Last year he was out with a semi-pro club in Nebraska, but the going was tough because the farmers had been through a drought.

Despite his bitterness, Alexander seemed to get a thrill out of reliving the old days as he talked to the dime-a-toss listeners.

“I guess my biggest thrill was in the 1926 World Series,” he said. “I was with the Cardinals. We had won three games and the Yanks had won three. Jess Haines started the last game for us and along about the seventh inning he hurt his hand and they told me to go in. There were three on base and Lazzeri was up. I had pitched and won the sixth game the day before, but my arm felt fine. I only threw three times but I struck Tony out. He fouled my second pitch into the left-field stands. Then I threw him a hook and he missed it by about six inches. That proved to be the game and the series.

“Yes, I could strike ’em out in those days. But I kinda struck out myself after I stopped pitchin’.”•

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“We Really Think [Injuries] Are The Largest Market Inefficiency In Pro Sports”

August 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Sports teams want to use high-tech tools to quantify everything about their players, being able to monitor when an injury is likely to occur and alter training patterns and to know in advance which athletes are particularly prone to injury. It’s predictive diagnoses, more or less. Of course, players’ unions may not favor such information being shared since it could compromise an individual’s earning ability, but it’s likely to become widespread eventually in some sort of grand bargain. From Brian Kamenetzky at Fast Company:

“In sports, injuries don’t just cost wins. They cost money. By one estimate, teams across Major League Baseball spent $665 million last year on the salaries of banged-up guys and their replacements. NBA teams lost $358 million last season; $44 million alone by the injury-ridden Los Angeles Lakers. And in the NFL, where the average salary is about $2 million, starters missed a record 1,600 games in 2013.

Until recently, this was largely seen as the cost of doing business, subject as much to the will of the sports-injury gods as advancements in training. Now, the fast-growing industry of performance analytics says it can minimize those massive losses. The trick: using data to anticipate how an athlete will get hurt before it actually happens.

‘We really think [injuries] are the largest market inefficiency in pro sports,’ says Adam Hewitt, assistant GM of Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, CA, one of the country’s leading centers of sports science and performance analytics.

What was once the domain of a relatively small group is now hitting the mainstream, increasingly embraced by teams across American pro sports and even the leagues themselves–including the San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City Thunder, Seattle Sounders, Pittsburgh Pirates, New England Patriots, and Philadelphia Eagles, and more. There are a variety of companies and technologies in play, all utilizing the principle of turning everything measurable (from movement to body chemistry) into data, analyzed for distressing patterns.”

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“He’s Loosed A Lot Of Lightning In His Day”

August 27, 2014 in Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Muhammad Ali in 1972, after losing the “Fight of the Century” to Joe Frazier, on an Irish chat show hosted by Cathal O’Shannon. In Dublin to fight Alvin “Blue” Lewis, Ali was his usual mix of joking braggadocio and serious politics.

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“Wearable Fitness-Trackers Are Just Not As Addictive As Smartphones”

August 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oh, we’re going to be quantified whether we like it or not, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy sledding for makers of fitness monitors, especially with so many people seemingly wired to hate exercise. It appears to be less laziness than a natural proclivity. From an Economist article about the steep climb ahead for Fitbit and the like:

“The immediate problem is their limited appeal. They are primarily aimed at fitness fanatics, yet well over half of all Americans do not exercise regularly, and thus have little interest in the product. Fitness trackers also fail to keep the attention of those health-conscious consumers who do go out and buy them. Strikingly, one-third of users discard their devices after six months, according to research by Endeavour Partners, a consultancy. Some industry insiders speculate that the true number may be much higher than that. Wearable fitness-trackers are just not as addictive as smartphones and the like, it seems. The novelty of being able to track your steps, calories or other metrics is appealing at first, but swiftly wears off. Use a fitness tracker regularly, and you get pretty good at guessing the numbers.”

Old Print Article: “Grid Star’s Family Wants Him To Quit Cult,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1938)

August 26, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

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There’s something curious inside us all, a pre-program if you will, and it’s more prominent in some than others. It’s not that we don’t have free will, but it’s not absolutely free.

Harrington “Heavenly” Gates was everything his parents wanted him to be, but that wasn’t what he wanted to be. He left his excellence as a Dartmouth scholar-athlete behind one fine day, much to his family’s chagrin, and began a 72-year-old religious odyssey, something he seemed almost born to do. From an article in the November 2, 1938 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Boston–The family of Harrington (Heavenly) Gates, ‘as soon as we get our breath,’ will make a pilgrimage to his New Hampshire religious retreat and try to persuade the Dartmouth football star to go back to college and graduate with his class.

Gates’ father, mother, four brothers and five sisters will make the trip to the cult farm of the ‘Holy Ghost and Us’ Society at Amherst, N.H., Mrs. Elder Gates, the mother, said today.

Gates, after helping Dartmouth beat the Yale football team, left school for a religious colony because of the profanity of the team and commercialization of the game.

From her home at Saugus, Mass., Mrs. Gates, wife of an ironmolder, issued this statement on her son’s resignation:

Want Him to Graduate

‘Shocked as we are, we are all still proud of Harry for his splendid record as a student and athlete. When we get our breath we will all go to him and see if there is anything we can do. It has been quite a financial hardship for us, too, in spite of the scholarship and outside help that he received. We wanted to see him graduate next June with his class.’

No less astonished and disappointed than Gates’ family were members of the Saugus Lions Club and other hometown organizations which had donated to his college expenses.

Last December, when a football rally was scheduled at Saugus in his honor, he declined to attend despite the fact that the sponsors offered to pay his fare from Hanover, N.H.

Working on Cult Farm

Exchanging gridiron togs for overalls, the 24-year-old Saugus, Mass., youth, a senior student, was working today with fellow members of the religious cult, also known as the ‘Legion of God,’ on its Salem turkey farm at Amherst.

The cult believes that it alone can save souls from annihilation. Its regulations forbid the use of liquor, certain foods and contact with the outside world.”

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“He Turned Combative — Punching Holes In The Wall”

August 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

NCAA fighting college football players’ efforts to share in the huge revenue they produce would be maddening enough even if the sport didn’t leave a lot of these guys with a lifetime of serious health issues. The era when we thought of the game as a healthy way to build school spirit is over. It’s a destroyer. From Jimmy Golen at the Associated Press:

“BOSTON (AP) — Michael Keck played just two years of college football before he was knocked out during practice at Missouri State and gave the sport up for good.

He turned combative — punching holes in the wall. He began to struggle in school. Soon he was spending most of his time indoors, with blankets covering the windows to darken the room.

Keck died last year at age 25 of what doctors believe was an unrelated heart condition. His brain, at his request, was donated to the Boston University lab that has been researching a degenerative brain condition frequently found in contact-sport athletes.

The disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, had advanced to a stage never before seen in someone so young.

‘When you talk in terms of his age, being young, and you talk about his limited years of playing, it is one of the more severe cases,’ said Dr. Robert Cantu, a co-founder of the CTE Center at BU. ‘Had he lived to 70 or 80, we would have expected this to be a Grade 4 (the most severe form) case.'”

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“[They] Smuggled Cubans By Boat Into Mexico, Where They Were Held Until Ransom Payments Were Made”

August 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you ever wonder what baseball players like Yasiel Puig or Jose Abreu or the just-signed Red Sox outfielder Rusney Castillo go through to slide out of Cuba and into MLB unis, let’s just say that no one is helping them through the goodness of their hearts. It’s nothing personal, strictly business, less a freedom flotilla than a pirate ship. And these athletes, though they’re shaken down for big dough, are the lucky ones. If you can’t stroke a double to deep center, you’re little more than a hostage. From Curt Anderson of the Associated Press:

“MIAMI (AP) – A man accused of masterminding a human trafficking ring pleaded guilty Friday to U.S. extortion charges involving the smuggling of more than 1,000 Cubans, including baseball players such as Texas Rangers outfielder Leonys Martin.

Eliezer Lazo, 41, entered the plea Friday in Miami federal court. Lazo is already serving a five-year prison sentence for money laundering in a Medicare fraud case and now faces up to 20 additional years behind bars. Lazo agreed to cooperate with investigators, which could reduce his prison time when he is sentenced later this year.

Prosecutors say Lazo led an organization that smuggled Cubans by boat into Mexico, where they were held until ransom payments were made. The cost was typically about $10,000 for each person, although it could be much higher in the case of Cuban baseball stars such as Martin.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Davidson said the migrants who were not sports stars were often crowded together in rooms of 20 or more under armed guard, in prison-like conditions. If the smugglers weren’t immediately paid, Davidson said, ‘the Cuban migrants in Mexico were restrained and beaten while relatives could hear the screams on the phone.’

Court documents show that the valuable Cuban baseball stars were treated far better than others involved with the smuggling ring, even though they were watched over by armed guards.”

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Old Print Article: “Man-Driven Plane Flies In Paris Test,” New York Times (1921)

August 22, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

A small plane powered for a matter of feet by a person on a bicycle is utterly useless in a practical sense, yet achingly beautiful to admire. From a July 10, 1921 New York Times article about French wheelman Gabriel Poulain, who was a pioneer in this odd endeavor:

“Paris–Gabriel Poulain, the French champion cyclist, succeeded this morning in the Bois de Boulogne in winning the Peugot prize of 10,000 francs for the flight of more than ten meters distance and one meter high in a man-driven airplane. In an ‘aviette,’ which is a bicycle with two wing planes, he four times flew the prescribed distance, his longest flight being more than twelve meters, or about the same number of yards.

Poulain for several years has been devoting himself to the solution of the problem of flight by the power of his own muscles and several times has come near winning a prize. This morning’s exhibition, however, was by far the most successful, a cyclist never before having been able to rise from the ground a sufficient height to enable him to cover more than six or seven meters.

For today’s attempt Poulain altered the angle of the small rear plane of his machine and it was this alteration, it seems, that solved the problem. 

Poulain made his attempt just after dawn on the smooth road at the entrance to the Longchamps race course. Several members of the Aero Club, donors of the prize and a large company of journalists and photographers were present. A square twenty meters each away was carefully measured off and chalked so as to mark the points at which the ‘aviette’ must rise one meter from the ground and that two flights must be made in opposite directions.

Rides Smoothly in Air

Poulain, who was confident that this time he was going to succeed, rode his machine at top speed toward the chalked square. As he entered it he released the clutch which throws the wing into proper position and at once the miniature biplane rose from the ground gracefully and steadily to a height of more than a meter. 

The flight was as steady as that of a motor-driven airplane and Poulain declared afterward that the motion was smoother than when traveling along the ground. When the judges measured the distance between the wheel marks on the chalk they found it lacked only two centimeters of being twelve meters.

Poulain’s flight in the opposite direction was not quite so successful, though he succeeded in covering eleven and a half meters. In landing he broke two spokes of the rear wheel.

M. Robert Peugeot declared the prize won, but Poulain wished to make further proof of the powers of his machine. After changing the wheel he started from positions chosen by the judges, and in each case he succeeded in covering the prize-winning distance. His longest flight was the last, of twelve meters thirty-two centimeters.

In order to cover so great a distance Poulain worked up to a speed of forty-five kilometers an hour on the ground. According to his own estimate, the muscular force required for flight is equal to three horse power. The total weight of the machine, with the wings, is seventeen kilogrammes, or about thirty-seven pounds, and the cyclist himself weighs seventy-four kilograms, or about 165  pounds.

After the flight Poulain declared that he intended to set at work at once on another plane, which, he believes, will enable him to fly 200 to 300 meters. On this machine he will make use of a propeller instead of depending, as he did today, simply on impetus.

Once in the air, Poulain says that not so much power is needed as for the take-off. He says the pedal-worked propeller will be strong enough to continue flight for a considerable distance without fatigue.”

“Lately He Had Started Telling People He Was The Dalai Lama”

August 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of deranged leaders who prey on the needs of others, emotional and otherwise, Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s film about John du Pont, a madmen who wrestled the amateur sports world into his madness, is to be released in a couple of months. Most reviews so far have been positive. Here’s a reprint of an earlier post I put up about du Pont.

John du Pont was the wealthy benefactor of amateur wrestling, a schizophrenic whose money kept treatment at a distance, who descended into utter madness in the 1990s, and ultimately murdered Olympic hero David Schultz. The heavily armed du Pont, who’d played host to underdog sports since the 1960s, was arrested only after a two-day stand-off with the police. The opening of “A Man Possessed,” Bill Hewitt’s 1996 People article about the tragedy:

“Lately he had started telling people that he was the Dalai Lama. If anyone refused to address him as such, he simply refused to talk to them. That was bizarre, but then John E. du Pont, 57, a multimillionaire scion of the fabled industrial family, had always been odd. For fun he drove an armored personnel carrier around his 800-acre estate, Foxcatcher. He complained about bugs under his skin and about ghosts in the walls of the house. By and large, friends and family shook their heads, fretted about his ravings—and waited for the inevitable breakdown. ‘John is mentally ill and has been mentally ill for some time,’ says sister-in-law Martha du Pont, who is married to John’s older brother Henry. ‘But this year he really went over the edge.’

No one realized how far over until Friday afternoon, Jan. 26. Around 3 p.m., Dave Schultz, 36, a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, was out working on his car at Foxcatcher, in leafy Newtown Square, Pa., 15 miles west of Philadelphia, where du Pont had established a residential training facility for top-level athletes. Suddenly du Pont pulled into the driveway of the house where Schultz lived with his wife, Nancy, 36, and their two children, Alexander, 9, and Danielle, 6. From the living room, Nancy heard a shot. When she reached the front door she heard a second. Looking out in horror, she saw a screaming du Pont, sitting in his car, extend his arm from the driver’s side window, take aim at her husband, facedown on the ground, and pump one more bullet into his body. After pointing the gun at Nancy, du Pont drove down the road to his home, leaving her to cradle her dying husband. 

During the two-day standoff that ensued, some 75 police and SWAT team members surrounded the sprawling Greek-revival mansion that du Pont called home. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, du Pont emerged, unarmed, to check on the house’s heating unit, which the police had turned off, and was taken without a shot being fired. That evening, a gaunt, ashen-faced du Pont was arraigned in a Newtown Township courtroom on a charge of first-degree murder, which in Pennsylvania can carry the death penalty. As investigators tried to piece together a motive for the seemingly senseless killing, there emerged the sad, scary portrait of a man believed to be worth more than $50 million who was rich enough to indulge his madness and to put enough distance between himself and the world at large to ensure that no one really bothered him about it.”

“The Notion Of A ‘Pitch Clock’ Was Mentioned During The Owners’ Conversations This Week”

August 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

I don’t know if Rob Manfred is the best person to be the new baseball commissioner in the post-Selig Era–maybe too much of an inside man?–but I’m heartened that he and the other candidates focused on speeding up the game, spreading the content better through new platforms and doing a superior job selling the players. (Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen should be household names even to non-baseball fans.)

On the first item on the list: You can only hasten the game so much because the number of commercials is mind-numbing, but there should be a 15-second pitch clock and a failure to beat the timer resulting in a ball call. Some think this would lead to more pitcher injuries because they’d be rushing, but I doubt it would exacerbate that problem. From Jon Paul Morosi at Fox Sports:

“Ultimately, the owners’ occasionally contentious discussions served a noble purpose: They forced the candidates — and themselves — to confront concerns about baseball among contemporary sports consumers.

The game often moves too slowly, and baseball has lost young fans to other sports — particularly soccer, which fits neatly into two-hour blocks on kid-friendly Saturday and Sunday mornings in the Eastern time zone.

The notion of a ‘pitch clock’ was mentioned during the owners’ conversations this week; old-school types are certain to cringe, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that Manfred will need to consider to ensure baseball’s viability to future generations.

‘Folks see Rob as a person who can take where we are and jump-start it into new dimensions with new ideas, fresh ideas,’ Baer said. ‘We have to figure out ways to make (baseball) relevant to that 12-year-old … We want to make baseball as relevant as possible to them — with their handheld, on television, getting more people playing the sport.'”

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“I Am Absolutely Sure That In Due Course A Computer Will Be A Really Outstanding And Terrifyingly Good World Champion”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In a 1979 Omni interview, Dr. Christopher Evans spoke with chess player, businessman and AI enthusiast David Levy, who defeated a computer-chess competitor that year but was unnerved by his hard-fought victory. Just six years earlier, he had confidently said: “I am tempted to speculate that a computer program will not gain the title of International Master before the turn of the century and that the idea of an electronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book.” Levy knew before the matches at the end of the ’70s were over that our time of dominance was nearing completion. An excerpt:

“Omni:

When did you first begin to feel that computer chess programs were really getting somewhere?

David Levy:

I think it was at the tournament in Stockholm in 1974. One of the things that struck me was a game in which one of the American programs made the sacrifice of a piece, in return for which it got a very good positional advantage. Now, programs don’t normally give up pieces unless they can see something absolutely concrete, but in this case the advantages that it got were not concrete but rather in the structure or nature of the position. It wasn’t a difficult sacrifice for a human player to see, but it was something ! hadn’t expected from a computer program. I was giving a running commentary on the game, and I remember saying to the audience that i would be very surprised indeed if the program made this sacrifice, whereupon it went and made it. I was very, very impressed, because this was the first really significant jump that I’d seen in computer chess.

Omni:

So somewhere around that time things began to stir. To what do you attribute this?

David Levy:

Interest in computer chess generally was growing at a very fast rate, for a number of reasons. First of all, there were the annual tournaments in the United States at the ACM conferences, and these grew in popularity They inspired interest partly because there was now a competitive medium in which the programs could take part. Also, there was my bet, which had created a certain amount of publicity and, I suppose, made people wish that they could write the program that would beat me.

Omni:

How much of this has gone hand in hand with the gradually greater availability of computers and the fact that it no longer costs the earth to get access to one?

David Levy:

Quite a lot. As recently as 1972, in San Antonio, I met some people who were actually writing a clandestine computer program to play chess. They hadn’t dared tell their university department about it because they would have been accused of wasting computer time. They were even unable to enter their program in the tournament, because. If they had they would have lost their positions at the university. Today the situation is dramatically changed, because it is so much easier to get machine time. Now, with the advent of home computers, I think it’s only a matter of time before everyone interested in computer chess will have the opportunity to write a personal chess program.

Omni:

Times have changed, haven’t they? Not very long ago you’d see articles by science journalists saying that computers could never be compared with brains, because they couldn’t play a decent game of chess. There was even some jocular correspondence about what would happen if two computers played each other, and it was argued that if white opened with pawn to king four, black would immediately resign.

David Levy:

This presupposes thai chess is, in practical terms, a finite game. In theoretical terms it is because there is a limit to the number of moves you can make in any position, and the rules of the game also put an upper limit on the total number of moves that any game can involve. But the number of possible different chess games is stupendous — greater than the number of atoms in the universe, in fact. Even if each atom in the universe were a very, very fast computer and they were all working together, they still would not be able to play the perfect game of chess. So the idea that pawn to king four as an opening move could be proved to be a win for white by force is nonsense. One reason you hear these kinds of things is that most people do not understand either the nature of computer programs or the nature of chess. The man in the street tends to think that because chess grand masters are geniuses, their play is beyond the comprehension of a computer. What they don’t understand is that when a computer plays chess, it is just performing a large number ol arithmetic operations. Okay, the end result is typed out and constitutes a move in a game of chess. But the program isn’t thinking. It is just carrying out a series of instructions.

Omni:

One sees some very peculiar, almost spooky moves made by computers, involving extraordinary sacrifices and almost dashing wins, Could they be just chance?

David Levy:

No. Wins like that are not chance. They are pure calculation, The best way to describe the situation is to divide the game of chess into two spheres, strategy and tactics. When I talk about tactics I mean things such as sacrifices with captures, checks, and threats on the queen or to force mate, When I talk about strategy I mean subtle maneuvering to try and gradually improve position. In the area of tactics, programs are really very powerful because of their ability to calculate deeply and accurately. Thus, where a program makes a spectacular move and forces mate two moves later, it is quite possible that the program has calculated the whole of that variation. These spectacular moves look marvelous, of course, to the spectator and to the reader of chess magazines’ because they are things one only expects from strong players. In fact, they’re the easiest things for a program to do.

What is very difficult for a. program is to make a really good, subtle, strategic move, because that involves long-range planning and a kind of undefinable sixth sense for what is ‘right in the position.’ This sixth sense, or instinct, is really one of the things that sorts out the men from the boys on the chessboard. The top chess programs may look at as many as two million positions every time they make a move. Chess masters, on the other hand, look at maybe lifty, so it’s evident that the nature of their thought processes, so to speak, are completely different. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Ihe human knows what he’s doing and the computer doesn’t.

I can explain this with an example from master chess. The Russian ex-world champion Mikhail Tal was. explaining after one game his reasons behind particular moves. In one position his- king was in check on king’s knight one. and he had a choice between moving it to. the corner or moving it nearer to the center of the board. Most players, without very much hesitation, would immediately put the king in the corner, because it’s safer there. But he rejected this move, and somebody in the audience said, ‘Please, Grand Master, can you tell us, Why did you move the king to the middle of the board when everybody knows, that it is safer in the comer?’ And he said, ‘Well, I thought that when we reached the sort of end game- which I anticipated, it would be very important to have my king near the center of the board.’ When they reached the end game, he won it by one move, because his king was one square nearer the vital part of the board than his opponent’s. Now this was something that he couldn’t have seen through blockbusting analysis and by looking ten or even twenty moves ahead. It was just feel.

Omni:

This brings us up against the question of whether or not a computer will ever play a really great game of chess. How do you feel about I. J. Good’s suggestion that a computer could one day be world champion?

David Levy:

Well, ten years ago I would have said, ‘Nonsense.’ Now I am absolutely sure that in due course a computer will be a really outstanding and terrifyingly good world champion. It’s almost inevitable that within a decade computers will be maybe a hundred thousand or a million times faster than they are now. And with many, many computers working in parallel, one could place enormous computer resources at the disposal of chess programs. This will mean that the best players in the world will be wiped out by sheer force of computer power. Actually, from an aesthetic and also an emotional point of view, it would be very unfortunate if the program won the world championship by brute force. I would be much happier to see a world-champion program that looked at very small combinations of moves but looked at them intelligently. This would be far more meaningful, because it would mean that the programmer had mastered the technique of making computer programs ‘think’ in rather the same way that human beings do, which would be a significant advance in artificial intelligence.

Omni:

Which brings us around to the tactics you adopt when playing computers. When did you play your first game against a chess program?

David Levy:

The first one that I remember was against an early version of the. Northwestern University program, and it presented no problems at all. These early programs were rather dull opponents, actually.

The latest ones, of course, are much more intelligent, particularly as they exhibit what you might also describe as psychological characteristics or even personal traits.

Omni:

Could you give an example?

David Levy:

Well, there is this thing called the horizon effect. Say a program is threatened with the loss of a knight which it does not want lo lose. No matter what it does, it cannot see a way to avoid losing the knight within the horizon that it is looking at — say, four moves deep. Suddenly it spots a variation where by sacrificing a pawn it is not losing the knight anymore. It will go into this variation and sacrifice the pawn, but what it does not realize is that after it has lost the pawn, the loss of the knight is still inevitable. The pawn was merely a temporary decoy. But the program is thinking only four moves ahead and the loss of the knight has been pushed beyond its horizon of search, so it is content. Later on, when the pawn has been lost, it will see once again that the knight is threatened and it will once again try to avoid losing the knight and give up something else. By the time it finally does lose the knighl, il has lost so many other things as well that it wishes it had really given up the piece at the beginning. This often brings about a reeling in the program that can best be described as ‘apathy.’ If a program gets into a position that is, extremely difficult because–it is absolutely bound to lose something, it starts to make moves of an apparently reckless kind. It appears to be saying, ‘Oh, damn you! You’re smashing me off the board. I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to sacrifice all my pieces.’ Actually, the program is fighting as hard as it can to avoid the inevitable.

Omni:

That sounds very much like The way beginners get obsessed with defending pieces. But it also sounds as though you’re saying that you feel the program has a
mood.

David Levy:

Almost. One tends.to come to regard these things as being almost human, particularly when you can see that they have understood what you. are doing or you can see they are trying to do something clever; In fact, as with human beings, certain tendencies repeat themselves time and again. For example, there are definite idiosyncrasies of Ihe Northwestern University program that one soon comes to recognize. In a particular variation of the Sicilian defense, white oiten has a knight on his queen four square and black often has a knight on black’s queen bishop three square. Now, it’s quite well known among stronger players that white does not exchange knights, because black can launch a counterattack along ihe queen-knight tile. Now, I noticed quite often that when playing against the Sicilian defense, the Northwestern University program- would exchange knights. Its main reason was that this maneuver leads to black having what we call an isolated pawn, which, as a general principle, is a ‘bad thing,’ So the Northwestern University program, when in doubt, used to say, ‘I’ll take his knight. And when he recaptures with the knight’s pawn, he has got an isolated rook’s pawn. Goody.’ What it didn’t realize is that in the Sicilian defense, the. isolated rook’s pawn doesn’t actually matter, but having the majority of pawns in the center for black does. So when I played my first match against CHESS 4.5 in Pittsburgh, on April 1, 1977, I deliberately made an inferior move in the opening, so that the program would no longer be following its opening book and wouldn’t know what to do. I was confident that after I made this inferior move the program would exchange knights., which it did, and this presented me with the sort of position that I wanted.”

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“Imagine You’re In Jail For A Couple Of Years”

August 10, 2014 in Sports, Videos | Permalink

In 1986, David Brenner interviewed 20-year-old Mike Tyson, just before he won the heavyweight title, along with Jake “The Raging Bull” LaMotta. It would be easy to say that young Tyson had yet to fall from grace, but he was falling from the start, desperately trying to return all of life’s blows, a flurry that did little good, especially since his retaliation was scattershot. He didn’t truly know who had wronged him. It all seemed wrong.

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“The League Is Acknowledging That Football Can Be Extremely Hazardous To Your Mental Health”

August 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Pacific-Standard, Steve Swayne predicts that brain damage caused by football will force the end of most American high school and college programs within 15 years. It’s difficult to imagine that the coup de grâce will be administered so swiftly, but class-action suits will likely proliferate as we proceed. One note: The editor who wrote the article’s subheading should realize that “futból” also has a nasty head-injury problem. From Swayne:

“I’m not the first to make these suggestions; in a 2012 story in Grantland, economists Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen looked at historical models of businesses dying off and provided some illustrations about how America would look without football. And the NCAA’s recent announcement giving more autonomy to the biggest conference schools will, in my estimation, only accelerate the speed of the changes as colleges and universities re-evaluate their finances and mission and weigh the place of football to both.

Even if football’s demise doesn’t come to pass as starkly as I imagine and they outline, we all can see that the world of football is changing rapidly and dramatically. At first the NFL was a league of denial when it came to the connection between concussions and brain damage. Then, having been sued by former players, the league offered a limited settlement. Now, ‘the N.F.L. has made an open-ended commitment to pay cash awards to retired players who have dementia and other conditions linked to repeated head hits,’ according to the New York Times. In short, the league is acknowledging that football can be extremely hazardous to your mental health.

It’s why I believe institutions of learning are going to re-evaluate the place of football and other high-impact sports in their missions. And I believe this re-evaluation is coming sooner than any of us imagine.”

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“I Wouldn’t Be Afraid Of Any Robot Or Mechanical Man”

August 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When I was noodling around the other day to find a robot image for the piece about the automated 1929 department stores, I came across an illustration of Jack Dempsey squaring off with a life-size bucket of bolts. It was the window dressing of a 1934 Popular Mechanics article in which the former champion, retired by that point, explained that he would always be able to deliver a KO to AI. I don’t know; I think the “Manassa Mauler” would have been in trouble if a robot had hit him in his pretty, pretty nose. 

Anyhow, it booked artificial intelligence and boxing on the same card 35 years before the computerized Ali-Marciano fight. The piece’s opening:

“I CAN whip any mechanical robot that ever has or ever will be made. Maybe that sounds a bit egotistical, maybe you will say it’s just the voice of a ‘has-been,’ but I assure you that neither is true.

I was talking over old times with my friend Captain W. H. Fawcett and during the course of conversation he remarked that undoubtedly mechanical ingenuity has done much to improve the work of many boxers.

‘That’s true,’ I answered, ‘but nothing mechanical will ever be able to whip an honest to goodness boxer. Even right now, despite the fact that I am definitely through with the ring as a fighter, I wouldn’t be afraid of any robot or mechanical man. I could tear it to pieces, bolt by bolt and scatter its brain wheels and cogs all over the canvas.’

The reason is simple: Engineers can build a robot that will possess everything except brains. And without brains no man can ever attain championship class in the boxing game. It is true enough that we have had some rare intellectual specimens in the higher frames of boxing glory, but I can truthfully say that no man ever attained genuine boxing recognition without real headwork.”

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“I Don’t Want Anything Artificial In My Head”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

When embattled chess champion Bobby Fischer wasn’t searching for God and girls, he was living an odd and paranoid existence. In William Knack’s fascinating and fairly crazy 1985 Sports Illustrated article, the reporter relays how Fischer once reluctantly passed on a 1979 meeting with Wilt Chamberlain at the basketball star’s mansion and also reneged on a deal the same year to play an exhibition match at Caesars Palace for $250,000. Oh, and Knack also disguises himself as a bum and stalks Fischer (with some success) at the Los Angeles Public Library. It’s probably the best and most apropos thing I’ve read about the chess champion’s break from public life–and reality. An excerpt:

Moments later I was heading for the library in Los Angeles. Time was getting short. By now, the office was restless, and more than one editor had told me to write the story whether I had found him or not, but I was having trouble letting it go.

So what was I doing here, dressed up like an abject bum and looking for a rnan who would bolt the instant he knew who I was? And what on earth might he be doing now in the desert? Pumping gas in Reno? Riding a burro from dune to dune in the Mojave, looking over his shoulder as the sun boiled the brain that once ate Moscow? And what of his teeth? I had been thinking a lot lately about Fischer’s teeth. In the spring of 1982, one of Fischer’s oldest chess-playing friends, Ron Gross of Cerritos, Calif., suggested to him that the two men take a fishing trip into Mexico. Gross, now 49, had first met Fischer in the mid-’50s, back in the days before Bobby had become a world-class player, and the two had kept in irregular touch over the years. In 1980, at a time when Fischer was leaving most of his old friends behind, he had contacted Gross, and they had gotten together. At the time, Fischer was living in a dive near downtown Los Angeles.

“It was a real seedy hotel,” Gross recalls. “Broken bottles. Weird people.”

At one point, Gross made the mistake of calling Karpov the world champion. “I’m still the world champion,” snapped Fischer. “Karpov isn’t. My friends still consider me champion. They took my title from me.”

By 1982, Fischer was living in a nicer neighborhood in Los Angeles. Gross began picking him up and letting him off at a bus stop at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax, near an East Indian store where Bobby bought herbal medicines.

That March, on the fishing trip to Ensenada, Fischer got seasick, and he treated himself by sniffing a eucalyptus-based medicine below deck. Fischer astonished Gross with the news about his teeth. Fischer talked about a friend who had a steel plate in his head that picked up radio signals.

“If somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking,” Fischer said. “I don’t want anything artificial in my head.”

“Does that include dental work?” asked Gross.

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I had all my fillings taken out some time ago.”

“There’s nothing in your cavities to protect your teeth?”

“No, nothing.”

Gross dropped the subject for the moment, but later he got to thinking about it and, while taking a steam bath in a health spa in Cerritos, he asked Fischer if he knew how bacteria worked, warning him that his teeth could rot away. “As much as you like to eat, what are you going to do when your teeth fall out?” asked Gross.

“I’ll gum it if I have to,” Fischer said. “I’ll gum it.”•

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“Bobby Decided That The Last Thing He Wanted After His Triumph Was The World That Lay At His Feet”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Speaking of chess prodigies who declined young, Bobby Fischer, who was profiled in Life by Brad Darrach in 1971 prior to his Cold War showdown with champion Boris Spassky, was the subject of the same writer for sister publication People in 1974, two years after dispatching of his Soviet opponent and becoming one of the most famous people on Earth. Darrach wrote of Fischer as a man who’d shaken off the world’s embrace, who had briefly found God–one of them, anyhow–and had entered into an exile from the game. What the piece couldn’t have predicted is that he would never really play another meaningful match. The opening of “The Secret Life of Bobby Fischer“:

Whatever happened to Bobby Fischer? Six weeks after winning the world chess championship on Sept. 1, 1972, he abruptly vanished without a trace into the brown haze of Greater Los Angeles. Rumors flew, but the truth was weirder than the rumors.

At the pinnacle of chess success, Bobby abandoned the game that had made him famous and took up residence in a closed California community of religious extremists. With rare exceptions, the world outside has not seen or heard of him for more than 16 months. Reporters who tried to track him down were turned back by the private police force that patrols the church property in Pasadena.

On the day he finished off his great Russian opponent, Boris Spassky, in Iceland, Bobby had realized the first of his three main ambitions. The second, he said, was ‘to make chess a major sport in the United States.’ The third was to be ‘the first chess millionaire.’ As history’s first purely intellectual superstar, Bobby was offered record deals, TV specials, book contracts, product endorsements. ‘He could make $10 million in the next two, three years,’ his lawyer said after Bobby’s victory at Reykjavik. And to promote chess, Bobby promised to put his title on the line ‘at least twice a year, maybe more.’ Millions of chess amateurs enthused at the prospect of a Fischer era of storm, stress and magnificent competition.

But it didn’t happen quite like that. After curtly declining New York Mayor Lindsay’s offer of a ticker-tape parade (“I don’t believe in hero worship”), Bobby made impulsive appearances on the Bob Hope and Johnny Carson shows—and then was swallowed up by the Worldwide Church of God, a fundamentalist sect founded in 1934 by a former adman named Herbert W. Armstrong. Well advertised on radio and television by Armstrong’s hellfire preaching—and more recently by the charm-drenched sermons of Garner Ted Armstrong, the founder’s son—the church now claims 85,000 members. They celebrate the sabbath on Saturday and observe the dietary laws of the Old Testament—no pork, no shellfish. Smoking, divorce and cheek-to-cheek dancing are forbidden. Necking is the worst kind of sin. Tithing is mandatory—the church’s annual income probably exceeds $50 million. Church leaders live palatially and gad about the world in three executive jets provided by the faithful. Recently, however, scandals and schisms have shaken the flock.

Bobby Fischer, the child of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, first tuned in on the elder Armstrong while still in his late teens. Lonely and despairing after he muffed his chance to become world champion at 19—Bobby found strength in the church’s teachings and has adhered to them closely ever since. He turned to the church in the crisis he faced after Reykjavik. Verging on nervous exhaustion after his two-month battle with Spassky and the match organizers, Bobby decided that the last thing he wanted after his triumph was the world that lay at his feet. In the large and outwardly peaceful community that surrounds the Armstrong headquarters, he saw a safe setting where he could unsnarl his nerves and find the normal life that he had sacrificed to competition and monomania.

The church welcomed him. Though Bobby is not a full church member—he is listed as a ‘coworker’—he offered Armstrong a double tithe (20%) of his $156,250 winnings. ‘Ah, my boy, that’s just as God would have it!’ Armstrong replied, and passed the word that Bobby was to be given VIP treatment. A pleasant three-bedroom apartment in a church-owned development was made available. So were the gymnasium, squash courts and swimming pool of the church’s Ambassador College. Leaders of the Armstrong organization were told to make sure that Bobby had plenty of dinner invitations. “The word went out,” says a church member, “that Bobby should never be left alone, or allowed to feel neglected.”

To make doubly sure, the church assigned a friendly weightlifter in the phys. ed. department as Bobby’s personal recreation director. The two of them played paddle tennis almost every day, and Bobby worked out with weights to build up his arms and torso.

Not long after he arrived in Pasadena, the 31-year-old Bobby confessed to a high church official that he wanted to meet some girls. There is a rigid rule against dating between church members and nonmembers like Bobby, but the official allowed that in Bobby’s case the rule would be suspended. What sort of girls did he like? Bobby said that he liked “vivacious” girls with “big breasts.” A suitable girl was discovered and Bobby began to date her frequently, taking the weightlifter and his wife along as chaperones.•

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Old Print Article: “Dangers Of Blindfold Chess,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1906)

July 29, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Pillsbury has for a long time been insane, becoming violent at times through blindfold chess playing.”

A great light of the nineteenth-century chess world who burned briefly, Harry Nelson Pillsbury was a brilliant player as well as an accomplished mnemonist capable of quickly absorbing and regurgitating seemingly endless strings of facts. Pillsbury never had the opportunity to become world champion because his mental health deteriorated, the result of syphilis which he contracted in his twenties. An article in the April 9, 1906 Brooklyn Daily Eagle assigned his decline to more genteel origins. The text:

“Harry Nelson Pillsbury, the greatest chess player since the days of Paul Morphy, is to be taken from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where he is at present, to a sanitarium at Atlantic City, N.J. Pillsbury has for a long time been insane, becoming violent at times through blindfold chess playing. The fact became known through a letter from William Penn Shipley, of the Pennsylvania Chess Association, to a friend at the Brooklyn Chess Club.

The game of blindfold chess requires intense concentration of the mind, and, according to the physicians who have been working on Pillsbury’s case, ultimately destroys the memory cells of the brain, if carried on to excess. A player is placed in a room by himself and plays the game, entirely from memory, while his opponent moves for him at the table.

One instance of Pillsbury’s remarkable skill was shown when he payed for thirteen hours, sitting all alone in the little anteroom which leads into the main rooms of the Brooklyn Chess Club. He did not stop even to eat, and bore in mind twenty-four games during that time. Blackburn and Morphy kept no more than fifteen games in their mind at once. Physicians state that the gift to play blindfold is a gift and cannot be acquired.

While Pillsbury’s case is considered practically hopeless, every effort that can be brought to bear to bring the former champion into the knowledge of the world again will be made.”

 

 

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