Nathan Fowler Posts

We all went to the Garden tonight to see Stephen Curry put on a show. Sure, there were some West Virginia fans, but I bet even they were kind of hoping to see Curry go off while they still pulled out a win. The Villanova and Texas fans were certainly pulling for Davidson. There was a large contingent of Curry jerseys and bright red "Witness" hats and t-shirts in the crowd. It was one of the biggest crowds in the history of the Jimmie V Classic, largely just to see Curry. Everyone was excited - the spectacular scorer was coming to the big city to dazzle us.

For the first 35 minutes of the game, as Curry deferred to his teammates and struggled to hit shots against the suffocating Mountaineer defense, it appeared we were going to be let down. I wasn't the only one starting to think that Curry was simply not capable of living up to the venue and the attention, that maybe being an unknown in the NCAA Tournament had been one thing, but being a star in the most famous arena in the world was just too much for him. As 3 after 3 clanked off the rim you could feel the frustration in the crowd - this wasn't the script for the evening. The Garden is where big time players put on shows for the fans, not where they go 1-13 from 3. Maybe New Yorkers are spoiled, but that's the expectation.

And then he delivered for us. When he hit a 3 pointer with just under 5 minutes to go, the cheers started. When he drilled an impossibly difficult shot from the left elbow beyond the NBA line, the Garden exploded. This is what we wanted to see, and the fact that he was carrying his team from behind just made it more impressive. And then Curry hit the final 3 of the night to give Davidson a lead they wouldn't relinquish, a shot a mere mortal wouldn't have even gotten off, let alone buried without touching iron. Curry was more than redeemed.

Some players just have a flair for the dramatic, and an ability to deliver on the big stage. Curry has that in spades. New Yorkers love players that live up to expectations, and the expectations are very high. I'm sure this won't be his last game in the Garden, and he'll have some that are better and some that are worse, but he won't have another chance to make a first impression - and nobody is going to remember the first 1-13 from 3, all we could talk about was the final 3-3. Curry earned his New York chops tonight.

With apologies to Tyler Hansbrough, the two best players in the country faced off in Norman, Oklahoma tonight when Blake Griffin and Stephen Curry led their squads onto the court. Curry poured in a career high 44 points for Davidson, but Oklahoma's depth and a monster performance by Griffin (25 points, 21 rebounds) in the paint were just too much and OU held on for the 82-78 win.

Curry is remarkable to watch and is clearly the best guard in college this year. Unfortunately, I'm afraid we'll see a lot of what we saw tonight when Davidson faces top tier teams - it's just too much to ask for one player to be the primary point guard and playmaker and as well as the best scorer. While he drilled remarkable shot after remarkable shot, he just wasn't able to create easy shots for his teammates while also working relentlessly to get himself open.

In the first week of the Olympics, Michael Phelps won a ridiculous 8 gold medals, Usain Bolt made the best sprinters in the world look like also-rans, Misty May-Traynor and Kerri Walsh have continued to roll in beach volleyball and the Chinese gymnasts have won what seems like every single available medal. Everyone in the US has seen those events, but there's been a whole lot of other stuff going as well. Here's a quick recap of some of the bigger story lines that didn't get a lot of airtime in the US.

Wrecked and overturned boats, wild storms and days worth of protests ... Sailing has been crazy

First there wasn't enough wind in the Qingdao area to have a sailing competition. Then there was a storm that snapped the sail off a Danish boat and overturned an American one. The Danes ended up winning the 49er class race while borrowing a boat from Croatia, but that kicked off a flurry of protests that 6 hours of deliberation by the judges hasn't cleared up (they are scheduled to reconvene again on Monday to attempt to sort out the mess).

Olympic boxing judging is still broken at best, and corrupt at worst

It's becoming repetitive to complain about judging in boxing at the Olympics, but this year might even be worse than normal. There's already been so many individual complaints that it's impossible to list them all, but the fight involving Ecuador's Luis Porozo might have been the worst. There's been accusations of a pro-Chinese bias in scoring fights, there's been a continuation of the brutal inability of amateur judges to properly score body shots and there's little understanding by any of the boxers on how the scoring system is working. In other words, business as usual in Olympic boxing.

Huge upsets in Archery shocked South Korea

South Korea entered the Olympics as overwhelming favorites in all the archery events, but shocking upsets in both the men's and women's competitions left them without an individual gold medal. The women's tournament was possibly the biggest upset of the entire Olympics as South Korea brought the top 3 archers in the world and had won every women's gold since 1984, but they watched #27 seeded Zhang Juan Juan of China beat all 3 of the Koreans head to head on her way to the gold.

British Cycling had a phenomenal week

First, Nicole Cooke won the women's road race, then Emma Pooley got silver in the time trial. For most cycling teams, that would have been one heck of a week. For Great Britain it was just a start, as they have utterly dominated the track events in the Laoshan Velodrome with wins in the men's team sprint, men's keirin, men's and women's sprints and women's individual pursuit. Of the 7 gold medals given out in track cycling so far, Great Britain has won 5 of them. What is happening in the velodrome is possibly the most dominant show by one team in any sport so far in the Olympics. (ed - corrections made on number of medals)

Brazil and Argentina are facing each other in soccer ... in the semi-finals

The absurdity of the soccer draw has come to a head, as Brazil and Argentina have dominated the field but are still facing each other before the gold medal match. Argentina's Lionel Messi is one of the 2 or 3 best players in the world, and has been the unquestioned star of the tournament with his spectacular play, but Brazil's loaded squad has been equally as good. Both countries sent their best teams possible, the semi-final matchup on Tuesday should be epic. It's just too bad it's not for the gold.

Evidently the reason that Michael Phelps is so fast has nothing to do with his 6'7" wingspan or his double jointed knees and ankles or his monster heart ... according to Alexei Koudonov at The Doping Journal in an article from 2004 titled "Doping by the pool" and comments in a Baltimore Sun piece from earlier this week from several other scientists, Phelps is guilty of "doping" by using his iPod on the pool deck to artificially increase his performance.

Previously published research (J Nurs Res. 2003 Sep; 11(3): 209-16) showed that in humans, music makes saturation of oxyhemoglobin (SPO(2)) significantly higher (compared with control subjects not receiving music therapy, p<0.01), and that as a result of music therapy the level of oxygen saturation returns to the baseline faster compared to the control subjects receiving no music, p<0.01), making it hard to detect the transient oxygen saturation shortly thereafter. The statistically significant higher SPO(2) level indicates the "enhancement of oxygen transfer" and implies that "music by the pool" is prohibited by The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in competition blood-doping method of "the use of products that enhance the uptake, transport or delivery of oxygen", apparently conflicting with the essence of olympism, and WADA calls for "ethics, fair play and honestly".

If you didn't feel like wading through that - the basic summary is that there is some research in human infants that shows that listening to music might help the blood carry more oxygen for some indeterminate period afterwords. How long that period of extra oxygen carrying capacity lasts could vary from seconds to minutes, no one is sure. In his original article, Koudonov opines that Phelps listening to his iPod is tantamount to using a product specifically designed to increase his performance.

So is Phelps guilty of "doping", or is he just a guy trying to get himself focused before each swim by blocking out distractions? I would say that the second factor has far more impact on his performance, given his legendary mental toughness and focus and the extremely minute effects of the alleged "music doping". Each athlete has their own way of "getting into the zone" and Phelps seems to do it through listening to rap. The absurdity of claiming that using music before a swim is "doping" makes this just sound like this researchers and journal were trying to find any way possible to invalidate Phelps performance.

Ok, the old gymnastic scoring system on a scale of 1 through 10 wasn't working very well (and led to a couple of huge controversies during the Athens games) ... but after sitting through multiple 5 minute stretches of dead programming while waiting for scores during the live coverage of the men's gymnastic team finals tonight, I'd take it over the new system in a heartbeat.

As just your average American sports fan, I could at least make sense of the old scoring system, and I could compare scores from one event to another. In the new system, I'm still not sure what a good score is from event to event unless the commentators let me know - and as a nice bonus, I'm apparently going to have to spend five minutes watching the next competitor wander around the apparatus while waiting for the score to be posted. During the men's competition tonight, I swear I saw more of the judges sitting behind laptops looking at who knows what than I saw of the actual competitors. Maybe they found the Fanhouse Attractive Olympians?

I understand it's basically impossible to make everyone happy with gymnastics scoring, but I'm with Bela Karolyi and Mary Lou Retton - I hate this new system. Making it an excruciatingly slow for scores to be posted only compounds the problem.

There's nothing that will get American sports fans to bond together faster than someone else talking smack about an American team. Make it a Frechman saying they are going to "smash" an American team? And have the Americans then win in an unbelievable come from behind finish? There's a recipe for patriotic celebration and national hero status for Jason Lezak. And if you thought the pre-game chatter from the French team didn't have an affect on the race - the celebration by Michael Phelps and company after Lezak ran down the 100m world record holder Alain Bernard in the final stretch of the race showed just how much this meant to the US team. Garrett Weber-Gale calling them "Frenchies" in the post-race interview gave a flash of the bad blood that seems to have built up between the two teams.

It was a truly remarkable race, maybe the best relay race in the history of swimming. The US won by the narrowest of margins in a crazy finish and set a new world record by almost 4 seconds, but even the 4th and 5th place finishers (Sweden and Italy) broke the previous world record. At one point the moving green line that NBC was using to show the existing world record pace was in danger of falling off the screen it was so far behind the leaders. An Australian swimmer broke the existing 100m freestyle world record on the opening leg for his team, and they still only finished third. Alain Bernard is certainly the goat of the day for losing the lead to Lezak, but he still swam his 100m split in 46.7, which in any other situation would be considered blazing fast. The depth of sprinting worldwide has greatly increased in the last decade, and this race was unbelievable in terms of pure speed. Throw in the pre-race drama and this was possibly the defining moment of the 2008 Olympics.

It's not often that swimming dominates US sports discussion, but pretty much every US sports fansite had people talking about the race tonight (best line I saw tonight: "Bernard must have thought that Lezak was a German name") - if Phelps' chase of 8 gold medals didn't already have people fired up about USA Swimming, tonight surely sealed the deal.

For anyone who has driven through the southern portion of the US, the name Cracker Barrel brings up images of biscuits, chicken fried steak and a general store packed with goodies like Moon Pies and all sorts of trinkets. Evidently though, an East Carolina fan noticed a small problem at the local Cracker Barrel in Greenville, NC - it didn't stock enough ECU gear, but had plenty of items bearing the logos of UNC and North Carolina State. Being a conscientious college football fan, he sent in an e-mail to Cracker Barrel requesting they stock more Pirates gear in Greenville ... and got this in response:

[...] since this is a small school that plays in a small conference there are few manufacturers that will make ECU merchandise [...]

That wasn't a very well thought out response from the PR rep - ECU is a school with a very proud football tradition, has put a number of players into the NFL (Jeff Blake and David Garrard, to name a couple), has a large and rabid fanbase in the coastal region of North Carolina, and there is no shortage of available purple Pirate gear in the entire region, obviously someone is making it. Predictably the e-mail ended up on the popular ECU fansite Boneyard Banter and ECU fans took to their e-mail inboxes and launched a protest campaign against Cracker Barrel. They won a quick victory, as Cracker Barrel responded:

[...]I also am very sorry for the response sent by one of our Guest Relations Representatives. The response was not an informed nor researched response. I apologize the response seemed insensitive to your concerns for the lack of ECU merchandise offered by Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. Please be assured this error has been addressed and corrections have been made within our department.[...]

[...] We do have a limited number of items available in East Carolina University in our Greenville, NC location only. We have sweaters, t-shirts, hats, children's cheerleader and football outfits, coasters, garden flags, a hand-painted Christmas ornament, quilt, hand-painted lamp, and a coffee mug. If while you are visiting our Greenville store you don't find this merchandise, please ask one of our retail sales associates to assist you in locating these items. [...]

"Corrections have been made within our department" certainly sounds ominous, maybe the Pirates have forced another one to walk to the plank. In any case, sign me up for one of the hand-painted Christmas ornaments and maybe a coffee mug. And some chicken fried chicken with that awesome white gravy. Oh, and can college football season please start soon? I think the offseason is starting to drive some folks crazy.

Much like he did during Michael Phelps' preliminary round swim in the 400 IM, Rowdy Gaines has to be questioning whether or not I came out too fast on the opening day of the Olympics and didn't leave enough in the tank to hold up over the next 2 weeks. After watching 5 hours of coverage last night, I woke up and watched the cycling road race live on the internet followed by 14 hours straight of TV coverage on the NBC family of networks. There was a bit of everything - I watched cycling, boxing, team handball, beach and indoor volleyball, gymnastics, weightlifting, badminton (I'm so going to dominate the next family get together), swimming, rowing, fencing and something else I'm sure I'm forgetting.

And you know what? It was AWESOME. Maybe because we're just coming off of the two worst sports months of the year and I'm starved for good sports TV content, maybe because there's just something about watching athletes play for their countries that gets me fired up, maybe it's because the sports I competed in growing up (swimming and cycling) only get attention in the US once every four years, or maybe because this is just such a remarkable global event for so many reasons - these Olympics have really hooked me. I don't know if I can do 14 hour days for two more weeks, or even pull another one tomorrow, but today was a great start.

Highlights of the day? Samuel Sanchez bringing home the gold in the road race for the Spanish cycling Dream Team, Michael Phelps' scintillating world record swim in the 400 IM, the USA sweep of the women's sabre competition, watching an 18 year old man win the 400 free 4 years after he was a 14 year old boy who fell off the start blocks and didn't even get to swim, the velour finish on the uniforms that China's gymastic team is wearing, Bob Costas' live report from Tiananmen Square and the expected domination of one dominant American beach volleyball team being matched by the complete failure of another. Just a complete smorgasborg of sights, sounds and drama.

A Chinese man attacked two relatives of the US men's volleyball coach with a knife, killing one and seriously injuring his wife and their Chinese tour guide late yesterday evening before committing suicide. Evidently the Chinese police completely cleaned the crime scene before any foreign journalists were even aware of the event, but from the official reports it sounds as if it was a single act of random violence. The victims have been identified as Todd and Barbara Bachman who were visiting the Olympics with their daughter Elizabeth, a former Olympian and the wife of current US volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon.

China has made every effort to present a safe and welcoming face to foreign tourists at the Olympics, and to have an incident like this on the very first day of the games has to be a huge disappointment for the organizers. Beijing is one of the safest large cities in the world to walk around in, and the Chinese population in general is normally very friendly to foreigners, so a street crime like this one is particularly shocking. I imagine that we will see the already strict levels of security in Beijing increased even more over the next few days as the Chinese authorities attempt to prevent any more random violence.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Bachman family and to the entire US Volleyball community.

This summer, the Spanish have already won the European Cup in soccer, Wimbledon and the Tour de France, and today Samuel Sanchez added the gold medal in the men's cycling road race. On a brutally hot and smoggy day in Beijing, Sanchez took advantage of a tremendous performance by the entire Spanish team and capped it off with a strong charge up the final climb to sieze the first cycling gold medal of this olympiad.

Spain had sent a cycling "Dream Team" to these Olympics with superstars Carlos Sastre, Alejandro Valverde, Alberto Contador along with Sanchez, and it paid off with one of the best examples of organized teamwork you will ever see from a national team. Sastre and Contador are the last two winners of the Tour de France, and yet there they were in Beijing putting in the tough work of domestiques for Valverde and Sanchez, a remarkable sight. When they managed to get Sanchez into the final break move, he rewarded their hard work with a perfectly timed sprint to seize the gold.