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May 2016

3:33 Sports Short #25 // Quitter by Brooke Randel

The first sport I quit was softball. I had been playing since elementary school, but by junior high, everyone had become bigger and stronger. They outgrew me. My bat speed wasn't fast enough, my fielding wasn't fast enough, I wasn't fast enough. I didn't even quit fast enough. The last season I played I got beaned in the head by a foul ball from another game.

3:33 Sports Short #24 // So Far by Mindy Misener

Today's pair of 3:33 Sports Shorts both concern one's relation to sports as time passes. Mindy Misener's piece below and Brook Randel's piece "Quitter" both explore loss, albeit in interestingly contradictory yet complementary ways. Enjoy!


I am in first grade and I am running full-tilt after a boy who has—as is the custom—seized and taken off with some girl’s plastic headband. My own teacher steps in front of me, intercepting me.

"Why are you doing this?” she asks me.

“If I don’t get them,” I say, “who will?”

*

There’s a scrawny, pale boy in my fourth-grade class. We are both on the track team, a connection I treasure. I am an industrious, rule-abiding student; this boy tells dirty jokes when the teacher leaves the room.

3:33 Sports Short #23 // “Mad Man” Pondo by Dylan D. Debelis

Screams. Drowned out by the weedwacker whirr slicing skin off “sick” Nick Mondo’s chest.

Light-tube graveyard. Florescent ghosts lodging themselves inside the gummy throats and wounds from barbed wire that replaced the ring ropes.

I called in sick to school more than once to stay home and watch Cage of Death matches.

Looking back on my skinny arms I’m not sure what drew the lines in like fish hooks through my eyes.

How far the knee will bend before the bone pokes through.

Two bodies, just over forty years between the two of them, sticking their veins with tacks and glass for a fifteen hundred person sellout crowd in a high school gym.

The reverence of violence. When his skull cracked against the concrete I heard the crowd let out a gasp of solemn prayer.

3:33 Sports Short #22 // Foil by Ann E. Michael

Today's duo of Sports Shorts both share formal qualities insofar as both are short, lyric, meditative bursts on sports quite different from one another: fencing and professional wrestling. Below is Ann E. Michael on the former, click here for Dylan D. Debelis on the latter.

3:33 Sports Short #21 // Pick Up Soccer in the City by Rob Jacklosky

Seven years ago, six strangers met in the "dust bowl" of Central Park on a hot Saturday morning to kick a soccer ball around. The woman who organized this "Meet Up" was named Julie. It was called the "The Manhattan (Beginning) Pick-Up Soccer Meetup." Others in attendance that day and the succeeding Saturdays were Dale, Paul, and Simon. Like other Meet Ups organized through Meet Up.com, these people had nothing other than soccer in common, and affiliated randomly on the basis of a whim. They somehow found the Meet Up post, paid two dollars and met at the corner of Central Park West to see what was up.

3:33 Sports Short #20 // Twenty Years of Tango by Tariq al Haydar

Today's pair of 3:33 Sports Shorts are both about the most popular sport in the world: fùtbol, or, as we more commonly call it, soccer. Below is a post by Tariq al Haydar about how a Saudi winds up being a fan of Aregentina's soccer team. Click here for Rob Jacklosky on playing pick up soccer in New York City.


I’m a Saudi who loves soccer but hates the Saudi national team. I started rooting for Argentina in the early nineties, when the great Diego Maradona’s career was tiptoeing toward its twilight. Sometimes, I tell people that Maradona seduced me into loving Argentina, but that’s a lie. I fell in love with Argentina because of a video game. Pixelated players with fictional names: Fuerte, Domingo, Repala, Capitale. My cousin gave his fictional Germans nicknames like “Son of Satan” and “Hell’s Messenger.” To this day, I can’t stand Germany.

3:33 Sports Short #19 // Sixth Man by Nick Ripatrazone

Havlicek, McHale, Walton. Sundays meant 10:30 mass at Our Lady of Mercy, then our family cramped on living room couches, watching the NBA on CBS throughout the afternoon. The Celtics were our team, Boston Garden my home, and my dream was to step on that parquet. I hated the flashy Lakers. Jack Nicholson was an asshole in The Shining but he was even worse courtside. I preferred Bird and Parrish over Worthy and Johnson. I was raised to love the Celtics.

3:33 Sports Short #18 // Green Monster by Marissa Landrigan

Today's duo of 3:33 Sports Shorts share a geographical affinity... both relate to Boston, Massachusetts, one of the truly great American sports cities. Marissa Landrigan's piece below gives us a first person account of just what it's like to be in Boston's Fenway Park. Click here for Nick Ripatrazone's piece about Boston Celtics Sixth Man John Havlicek.


The only time I’ve ever come close to getting punched in the face was at Fenway Park. I was somewhere around twelve or thirteen, on one of my family’s regular summer Saturday outings to see the Sox play. The air was heavy, thick with humidity, and smelled of hot dogs. My father’s clear plastic cup of beer nearly melting in his hand, my ears buzzing with the electric hum of the crowd’s cheers, the drumbeat of stadium anthems a constant drone.

3:33 Sports Short #17 // On Saturday Night’s Coin Flip, Cardinals 26, Packers 20 by Rob Stephens

Modern athletes stretch their bodies upon an anvil, the spectators raising the scalpel, the clamps, the hammer to destroy that body, a reverse transubstantiation in which the body turns into spiritual nourishment for the spectators, their bodies an oozed opiate leaking into the stands and through the TV. The sporting event bills skill as the deciding factor in a match between the bodies, and that skill is a measure of the body’s malleability as the athlete dashes, hops, throws, catches, crushes, or sways. Football players cover this malleability with the plastic and styrofoam of their pads, and so we demand more brutality from them to expose the body for an hour.

3:33 Sports Short #16 // Sports are Fun? by Theressa Slind

The 3:33 Sports Shorts are back! We're kicking off this week with two posts that explore one of sports' most consistent bedfellows: anger! In this post Theressa Slind talks about raising a daughter who plays sports for *gasp*... fun. Click here to read Rob Stephens's post about the (occasionally) rigteous anger that sports fans direct at referees.