Tag: sports

My buddy suggested this book. He runs fast. Damn fast. So I figured I’d give the Daniels running formula a whirl to help me kick ass (in a relative sense, of course) in 2011 running events. It feels like I figured right, at least it does sitting here with the winter ahead of me and plenty of time to plan my 2011 running season. Daniels’ book is a comprehensive treatise on running. He’s been a runner and a coach for a long time so he has reservoir of knowledge pertaining to any distance or skill level.

For the immediate future, I’m using this book to put together my 24-week training plan for a 2011 half marathon. I have the Google Spreadsheet set up so that once a I decide on my fall date, it automatically backfills the dates for my 24-week training schedule. This 24-week training schedule is the main takeaway from this book. Daniels feels that it is the most productive way to peak for your event.

But first, I’m angry at the Kindle version of this book because it leaves out some important pictures. I was reading along and it would reference a picture, then it would say “This image has been removed.” WTF? I glanced through the Amazon site and I didn’t notice them mentioning that they were going to leave pix out. I think I’m gonna have to buy the damn paperback. Oh, by the way, I still love the Kindle, but lesson learned – rant finished!

So Daniels breaks down the steps to running success nicely. Here they are:

1. Map your season.
2. Break down the training into four, six-week phases.
3. Determine the amount of quality training.
4. Plot a weekly schedule
5. Include planned breaks.

As you can tell, if you clicked on my link, I’m on top of steps one and two. Now I’m spending time figuring out the whats, whys, whens and wherefores of my quality training. I have time because at the earliest my 24 week session won’t start until early April. Until then I’m going to get my mileage up and do strength training to prevent injury. I feel relatively focused, but concerned about my execution because I’m pretty lazy.

So here’s the deal, if you really want to improve you have to spend some time doing some figuring in three main areas. First, you have to understand the different types of training paces that your program should consist of and how to get the most of those sessions. Second, you have to make an honest assessment of your ability so you can set the appropriate paces, paces that don’t lead to overtraining or undertraining. And finally, you have schedule your sessions with the prescribed variety of training paces for 24 weeks leading up to your event.

Daniels’ prescribed programs mix the following different training paces. This stuff is right from the book.

• Easy pace (E) is for warm-ups, cool-downs, and long runs.
• Marathon pace (M) is a little faster than E and can be used as an alternative to easy runs when conditions are good and there is adequate time for recovery.
• Threshold pace (T) is used for tempo runs and cruise intervals.
• Interval pace (I) is used for interval workouts with a 3-5 minute duration.
• Repetition pace ( R ) is usually race pace or faster (faster if you’re training for a longer race).

Daniels puts numbers to each of these paces, which is one of the coolest parts of the book. But first, you need to pick a VDOT. I’m not going to get into the details of VDOT because it’s complicated. Suffice it to say that it’s Daniels’ preferred method for “measuring a runner’s aerobic profile.” He gives you tables to back into your VDOT based on previous race performances or by testing yourself at certain distances. It’s up to you to make an honest assessment of your abilities. Once you do so, he has a VDOT table that gives you your training paces.

For instance, I’m going to go out on a limb and say my VDOT is 40. That corresponds roughly to someone who can run a 7:07 mile at top speed or can do a 1:50:59 half marathon. I know, I only did a 1:55:21 half marathon in September, but I think I’m faster than that (I want to run a sub 1:50:00 half marathon). I have a few months to figure it out, so I’ll retest myself in the 1Q some time. Consider this an example. But pressing forward with a VDOT of 40, here are my training paces:

• E pace – 10:11 mile
• M pace – 8:46 mile
• T pace – 8:12 mile
• I pace – 1:52 for 400 meters
• R pace – 1:46 for 400 meters

Daniels’ secret sauce is how to combine all of this quantitative information for an optimal 24-week training plan. It’s great stuff, intellectually challenging and fun to figure out, kind of like a puzzle.

The first 6-week session is mostly easy running, it’s not hard to schedule that. It’s the last three sessions that get a little more complicated because you need to schedule two or three quality sessions a week. The quality sessions are mostly threshold runs, intervals, or reps. Occasionally Daniels throws in a long run at marathon pace as a quality run depending on what distance you’re training for. Daniels describes it all in detail and throws in plenty of sample training plans for all different levels of ability. It’s the heart of the book.

But that’s not all, he fills the spaces with a ton of tangential information about running. He has sections on:

• Training at altitude
• Coming back from injury
• What to do when you’re sick
• Training in humidity
• Racing strategies
• Cross-training options and examples

There’s more, believe me. This is a rich book that I don’t hesitate to refer to as a training bible. The more I talk about it, the more I feel like I need to get this in paperback. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a tattered paperback version of this with margin notes and bookmarks? Yeah it would. But it would be cooler to run a damn 1:45:00 half marathon next year. Whoa there Johnny, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, you’re short and fat, remember.

Agassi is one of my favorite athletes of all time. I’ve always pulled for him to beat Sampras, Courier, Edberg, Becker and Chang (who am I forgetting?). I think I held Agassi’s balance in high regard. The guy won on every surface and has a career Grand Slam, something that none of the others mentioned can claim. That’s a big deal in my estimation. So I grabbed his bio.

In retrospect, I haven’t read that many biographies. I read maybe only one or two a year.

What’s the definition of a biography? Webster says that it’s a “written history of a person’s life.” I’m taking that in the strictest sense and calling something a biography only if it relates to the person’s whole life, from birth to publication date. Books like River of Doubt (Theodore Roosevelt) or Called Out of Darkness (Anne Rice) have certain biographical aspects, but they don’t weight the person’s whole life as much as they do a certain time frame or theme; so they’re not biographies in my view. This Agassi book is a biography for sure. He starts with his childhood and goes into the scathing details of his life and the people connected to him up through the present day.

Speaking of the present day, did you see the little tiff that Agassi and Sampras got into the other day at that exhibition match? This book shines a little light on what’s going on there (Agassi tells a “Sampras is cheap” story). It’s understandable how some people can be disgusted or disturbed with Agassi’s book because he didn’t hesitate to throw anybody under the bus, including his dad, Sampras, Bollitieri, Chang, Courier, and Brooke. But it feels very honest, and that makes it acceptable to me and a boatload of fun. I loved this book and Agassi has separated himself even more as my favorite tennis player of all-time and probably one of my top five favorite sports stars of all-time. Here’s a list (on a whim, in no particular order) if you care:

• Clark Kellogg
• Andre Agassi
• Barry Sanders
• Tiger Woods (even now, I’ll explain later)
• Jerry Pate/David Duval (tie)

I know, kind of obscure huh? I actually haven’t given this much thought and I’m treating this list as temporary. We’ll circle back on this when I read the next sports bio.

Agassi’s father pushed him into tennis at young age, which is why Agassi grew up hating tennis. His father was nuts. Agassi gives plenty of examples, like this:

For instance, he often reaches a thumb and forefinger inside his nostril and, bracing himself for the eye-watering pain, pulls out a thick bouquet of black nose hairs. This is how he grooms himself. In the same spirit, he shaves his face without soap or cream. He simply runs a disposable razor up and down his dry cheeks and jaw, shredding his skin, then letting the blood trickle down his face until it dries.

Not only did his father force him to practice insane hours, but he would also drag him around to clubs and hustle tennis games for Andre. Heck, when Andre was nine his dad actually challenged Jim Brown to a tennis match with Andre. Yeah, that Jim Brown. The way Andre tells it, his dad worked at a local club giving lessons or stringing rackets and overheard Jim Brown looking for a game, and even offered to wager his house or $10,000. It’s a good story, read the book to hear how it comes out.

His dad even tries to give him performance enhancing drugs of some sort. But Andre takes them only once and plays horribly, on purpose, to fool his dad into thinking they’re bad for his game. It works and his dad never tries again, but it’s a glimpse into how Andre doesn’t hesitate to rip even those he loves.

He rips Bollettieri pretty much, but also spent a big chunk of his early tennis career in a very close relationship with Bollettieri. Here is how Andre described the Bollettieri academy:

People like to call the Bollettieri Academy a boot camp, but it’s really a glorified prison camp. And not all that glorified. We eat gruel – beige meats and gelatinous stews and gray slop poured over rice – and sleep in rickety bunks that line the plywood walls of our military style barracks.

At times Agassi describes his relationship with Bollettieri as “harmonious.” But eventually it breaks down and Bollettieri quits and tells the press before he tells Agassi.

I remember watching tennis on TV a ton during the 90s and the cameras often panned on Bollettieri. Reading this book made me think that these could have been the glory days of American tennis. There were so many American stars. What I didn’t realize was that it was also a much bigger soap opera then I could have imagined. Andre does plenty of dishing on his competition, like Chang:

Once more I square off against Chang, who’s developed a bad habit since we last met. Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God – credits God – for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang’s box, feels ludicrous and insulting, I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke.

Courier and Becker get dished on too. As does Connors and the aforementioned Sampras. He saves the praise and worship for his team, his entourage if you will. And one of his closest friends and confidantes is his trainer, Gil Reyes, who remains with him throughout his career. It’s one of the coolest parts of the story, this trainer-trainee relationship, which evolves into something much deeper.

Agassi walks into the UNLV gym one day and asks if he can use the facility to get in shape. At the time Gil is the strength and conditioning coach for UNLV After a few months of training there, they strike up a friendship and Agassi brings Gil on full time after the UNLV sports season ends.

Here what’s cool. Gil doesn’t have a gym so he fashions all of the training equipment with his bare hands. He tells Agassi:

I want to weld the metal, make the ropes and pulleys, with my own hands. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I won’t have you injured. Not on my watch.

Gil has no experience with tennis but learns quickly, and works his ass off.

From the start, Gil keep a careful record of my workouts. He buys a brown ledger and marks down every rep, every set, every exercise – every day. He records my weight, my diet, my pulse, my travel. In the margins he draws diagrams and even pictures. He says he wants to chart my progress, compile a database he can refer to in the coming years.

Doesn’t this sound like Mickelson’s caddy Bones? Mickelson and his caddy have been together forever and supposedly Bones has a massive database of every shot that Phil has taken on every course. I love stories like these and think about how I need to start building the same database in Google Docs for myself. Is that strange?

Agassi and Gil become tight and Gil accompanies him everywhere and at times acts as his bodyguard, buddy, and therapist. Agassi’s cadre is made up of his brother Philly (tennis manager), his high school buddy Perry (business manager), Gil, and J.P. (spiritual-like adviser). He has a connection with this crew and they stay together for the bulk of his crew.

Soon, they start winning tournaments and Agassi wonders what the point of all this fame is (I call this his David Duval moment, but with less disillusion).

I find it surreal, then perfectly normal. I’m struck by how fast the surreal becomes the norm. I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They’re confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do. It’s something we always hear – like that old adage money can’t buy happiness – but we never believe it until we see it for ourselves. Seeing it in 1992 brings me a new measure of confidence.

I find this interesting because reacting with confidence isn’t what I expected, but it makes me like Agassi. It’s like yeah, this stuff really is stupid and meaningless, but let’s make the best of it, and use it to our advantage.

Then he hooks up with Brad Gilbert and wins more tournaments. Gilbert seems like quite a character and makes some tweaks to Agassi’s game. Gilbert puts it this way according to Agassi:

…You don’t need to assume so much risk. F*&% that. Just keep the ball moving. Back and forth. Nice and easy. Solid. Be like gravity man, like motherf*&%ing gravity. When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you’re doing? Your chasing something that doesn’t exist.

At age 33, Agassi ends up being the oldest play ever ranked number one (Darren Cahill is his coach at this point). That is cool.

Then Agassi pulls out a wild card to jack up his cool cred with me. During the 2006 U.S. Open he cracks open J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar.

During my final U.S. Open in 2006, I spent all my free time reading J.R.’s staggering memoir, The Tender Bar. The book spoke to my heart. I loved it so much, in fact, that I found myself rationing it, limiting myself to a set number of pages each night.

J.R. ends up collaborating with him on the book but refuses to attach his name to it. Agassi finishes with this:

…I was late in discovering the magic of books. Of all my many mistakes that I want my children to avoid, I put that one near the top of the list.

How can you not like this dude? I’ve had a rough relationship with sports the last few years. At times I find myself, for the first time in my life, disinterested in being a sports fan. But stories like this bring be back, man. Beautiful stuff.

My brother heard Tony Dungy on the radio the other day and called me up after. He said he thought Dungy had a lot of good things to say, so I grabbed it on the Kindle. That’s where the Kindle is most insidious; you are literally seconds away from buying a book that you hear about, so it takes a big man to resist the temptation and defer the gratification. That’s appropriate, because part of Dungy’s quest with this book is help men do less of that, to think about their decisions and make the right ones instead of the easy ones.

There aren’t many stunning revelations in this book. It’s a very basic treatise on leading what Dungy refers to as a significant life. Near the end he puts it succinctly like this:

Real, true significance doesn’t come from winning games or running a successful business. It comes from having a positive impact on the people around us.

If one non-religious thread runs through this book, it’s that Dungy continually stresses how important it is to love, listen to, and help the people around you. He extends this call beyond the family. It extends to friends, co-workers, and even casual acquaintances. The guy has the idealistic view that the simple act of one individual helping another can make the world a better place. He says:

I read last summer that Indianapolis’s public schools had the nation’s lowest graduation rate for males—19 percent. That’s fewer than one in five. My goal shouldn’t be to cast blame but rather to determine what I can do to make an impact on that statistic, even if it’s “only” for one kid. One kid, or one small group—and then another and another. And, who knows? As the word gets out about my one-man crusade, maybe someone else will join the effort. How many kids could we reach then?

I love this view. It’s good to hear it from someone who has devoted a large amount of time to helping troubled youths. I think he’s saying that there is hope, we all just have to wade in and start helping.

Dungy delivers this stuff to the reader in 31 chapters, each themed for a lesson that he wants to teach. He is responding in some respects to a religious calling. He is about as religious as can be without actually being a pastor. You have to wait until the end to get to this, but here is where he is coming from:

I believe my purpose is this: to serve the Lord and use all that He has given me to help others to the best of my ability. When I’m staying focused on that, it allows me to find the joy and abundant life that Christ promised, even if we don’t win the Super Bowl or I don’t meet every goal that I have for my life.

I didn’t, however, feel like I was being preached to. He doesn’t couch his whole message in religious values. I don’t think it clouds the message.

I’m reading this stuff because I live in a big city and that’s had a horrible year for student homicides and I often wonder if there is any hope of changing this trend. Chicago is my home. I love this city. It’s full of vibrant businesses, great people, and endless opportunity for work and pleasure. Yet in big chunks of this city, kids cannot walk to school without being afraid of being shot. Can you imagine that? In this place I call home, there are thousands and thousands of teenagers that need to carefully plot their route to school every day to insure that they have the best chance of making it there alive.

Dungy is trying to change this, one man at a time. He is reaching out to males, speaking directly to them, and telling them to be uncommon. This is his tone:

At the end of the day, I’m sure of one thing: accumulating stuff and women and titles and money are wrong keys. Fitting in, following the crowd, and being common are not what we’re supposed to do. There’s more in store for us.

He does it by telling a lot of stories, quoting a lot of philosophers and the Bible, and using a lot of folksy straight talk.

It’s an appropriate time to be talking to any male because it has been a rough year for high-profile men. I note:

• South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford tells his constituents that he is hiking in the mountains, when actually he’s visiting his mistress in Argentina.
• A-Rod has to go on national TV and apologize for using steroids. He actually teared up a couple of times I think.
• Letterman has his own mea culpa during his show and comes clean on years of sleeping with female staffers so as to thwart an extortion scheme against him.
• Kanye gets drunk during the VMAs and wanders up on stage while Taylor Swift is accepting her award, grabs it from her, and says it should have gone to Beyonce. Then he weepily apologizes on Letterman.
• And finally, Tiger Woods. ‘Nuff said on that.

Like I said, rough year for testosterone. These are certainly not the role models that Dungy has in mind. This is how Dungy feels about being a role model:

This idea of stewardship is another area where I think our young men have gotten the wrong message over the years. I see it in our players a lot. They are told that because they’ve worked hard and sacrificed, now that they’ve made it into professional football, they deserve the rewards that go along with it. And it is tempting to get the nice car and the nice clothes, to acquire some of the things that you’ve always wanted. There’s also a great deal of peer pressure to “look like a professional athlete.” But the idea of being a role model, of giving back to the community where you grew up or where you live now, is not talked about much. It doesn’t have to be money that you give back. It can be time, encouragement, or simply role modeling—letting our young men know that they don’t have to follow the crowd; they don’t have to do the stereotypical things. I tell our players that being good role models is one way we can be good stewards of the positions God has put us in.

It’s clear that Dungy is speaking to all of maledom, not just high school boys on the wrong track. And he’s not the type of guy who’s going to get frustrated and feel like he’s beating his head against the wall. He’s almost puritanical. I mean, the guy gave up golf to spend more time with his wife and kids.

One of the things I decided to give up was golf. Although I enjoyed playing, I was never very good at it, and we had such limited time off in Kansas City that I couldn’t justify not being home when I got the chance. I’ve never really picked it back up, and I’m sure if I did, my game wouldn’t be pretty anyway. Maybe, however, if one of our younger children takes up the game and needs a playing partner or a caddy—we’ll just have to see.

Who does that? And that’s just a smattering of his parenting and relationship advice. Here is his take on balancing work and family:

To me, “balance” cannot be achieved simply by walking out the door at a set time or by scheduling a certain number of family activities. Rather, it is a function of our preparation and performance in those realms that we are seeking to balance, measured against our prescribed priorities. In other words, if I work hard and get my work done, I can go home knowing that I have given my employer my best. If I am diligent when I am at home about being present for Lauren and my children, then I can leave with a clear conscience and right relationships when it is time to go back to the office. The two biggest obstacles I have seen to creating margins in our lives are poor time management and workaholism. The former keeps you from ever feeling like you can allow yourself to leave the office, while the latter is a function of misaligned priorities, a distorted self-image, or some combination of both.

I don’t think this flowcart pertains to Dungy. He’s also anti-video game and anti-TV violence.

I am troubled by a society that devalues life directly and insidiously and then markets that idea to our kids through video games, music, movies, and television. This, in turn, contributes to kids not realizing that life should be respected, nurtured, and protected.

Maybe he’s on to something. I’ve always thought that watching violent movies or playing violent video games doesn’t contribute to real violence. I’ve given humanity enough credit to discern between real and fake. I figured most people could watch Kill Bill without actually killing Bill. But Dungy disagrees strongly with me. He abhors this part of our culture.

The guy has a lot of good things to say. Makes you think.

I was reading Newsweek (on my Kindle, for a $1.49/month) and there was an article about this book. It looked cool, so I bought it (also on my Kindle, for $9.99). All this, in a 4 minute span while sharing a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop (Sip) with Gail. Like I said, the Kindle is transformational. It was my aha moment, as Steven Johnson discussed in the WSJ.

At times, I’ve voiced displeasure with the reporting of Jimmy Roberts. So it may come as a surprise that I purchased a book written by him. But hey, it’s about golf, and this topic of the slump really, really interests me. Actually, the whole synchronized interaction of physical, intellectual, and emotional that golf requires is what interests me. Johnny Miller puts it best:

“There’s no game that’s ever been invented that exposes someone’s choke point like golf,” says Miller. “It highlights all your weaknesses, mental and physical, and choking can really be part of a slump. It’s the most interesting thing about the game.”

I agree strongly, especially after watching Kenny Perry break down just a few weeks ago at Augusta. A buddy of mine was discussing this the other day and says (I’m paraphrasing) “any competent professional could go par-par or par-bogey and just win it.” He said it with disdain, as if Kenny Perry was some big loser not worthy of my buddy’s sporting attention, as if golf were not worthy of his sporting attention.

This is a common perception of the casual fan and reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of the game. Here’s the deal: it does not matter how proficient your golf skills are, you are NOT in control of how your body and soul react on the golf course when the pressure is on. You can’t control it, you can only hope to contain it! Kenny couldn’t contain it this year at Augusta, Phil couldn’t contain it a few years ago at Winged Foot; and countless others have had Van de Veldeian breakdowns with apparently no explanation other than “they choked.”

And Jimmy Roberts helped me understand this a little better. For that, I’m grateful. So I’m a fan of Jimmy now. In this book he talks to 18 people about their slumps; each one has a chapter devoted to them. Fifteen are current or former PGA Tour professionals, one is an Olympic figure skater (Dan Jansen), one is a former POTUS (George H.W. Bush), and one is a former LPGA player (Dottie Pepper). Each chapter was enlightening to varying degrees.

The Norman chapter was great. In 1991 he had gone two years without winning after dominating the world stage for most of the 1980’s. He pulled his car to side of the road near his home in Florida and had a long talk with himself:

“And I said to myself, ‘What the f&%# am I going to the course for?’ I said, ‘What are your intentions? What do you want to do? Do you want to get better? Do you want to get out of this thing? What’s your attitude?’” Norman says he sat there for perhaps forty minutes just staring at the clouds and talking to himself. “I swear I could take you to that spot today. It was on Hood Road.” Then he put the seat up, continued on to Old Marsh, and, for the first time in a long time, practiced with “a free mind.” It was an epiphany.

He went to win a bunch more in the mid 1990’s, but it was a cursed career, which Norman has come to terms with:

“I always address my career not on my successes, but on my failures,” he says. “I’ve got this little thing written on my desk, and I can’t remember who the quote came from, but it says, ‘Show me a path with no obstacles, and that path will lead you nowhere.’” This is classic Norman, who has always been Don Quixote—occasionally tilting at windmills—on an endless trek to find answers, and not just about golf. “If I had a different thought than somebody else,” he says, “I always wanted to know why I was right or wrong.”

This tortured career was nothing compared to that of David Duval. By golly, did he drop off the face of the earth or what? It seems like neither Duval or Norman really stood guard over their confidence. Here is what Duval says:

“The thing I feel like I learned the most through anything,” he says, “is that the most precious commodity in golf that needs to be guarded is your confidence. By far, you’ve got to protect it at all costs. Losing friends, losing whatever—you’ve got to protect your confidence.”

You just can’t let negative thoughts creep in. It means the end of your golf career basically.

The Dan Jansen chapter was the best of them all. He choked horribly in two Olympic Games, but finally won gold in his final race. He did so by convincing himself that he “liked the 1,000 meters.” He had always had all the talent, so he basically talked himself into the confidence he needed for the victory. Now he is a golf junkie and he relates his experiences back to golf. Enlightening and interesting stuff.

The Johnny Miller and Dottie Pepper chapters were solid. And Jimmy Roberts proved himself to be a pretty serious golf junkie. I’m looking forward to NBC’s golf coverage, but we really don’t get Johnny Miller and Jimmy Roberts back until The Players on May 9th and 10th and the US Open on June 20th and 21st. Oh well, I’ll sit tight.

Buzz Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights, which is on of my favorite books and movies, and clearly the greatest football film of all time. But Bissinger, it turns out, is actually more of a baseball fan than a football fan and 3 Nights in August is the baseball book he’s always wanted to write. It’s the story of a three game series in St. Louis between the Cubs and Cardinals in 2004, told mostly from the perspective of Tony La Russa, the Cardinal’s manager and collaborator on the book.

Bissinger starts when the players begin wandering into the clubhouse for game one and finishes with the last out of game three. But the book is more than just a description of the preparation, the strategy, the pressure, and the decisions made during the series. It’s about the people and personalities involved in baseball – human beings doing something that they love, often at the expense of their health and their relationships.

The MLB clubhouse is different from the locker rooms of the NFL and NBA. Baseball is a complicated game, as complicated as American football, but the baseball regular season is 180 days long with only about 20 off nights. Engaging in something this involved requires more than a locker room and some offices. It requires a clubhouse. And the Cards gave Bissinger unlimited access to the clubhouse, which made for a richly detailed book about baseball. The Cards also gave Bissinger unlimited access to La Russa, which made for a richly detailed book about management of any sporting endeavor.

It makes me want to spend more time with baseball. I’m a golf and college football guy, you know that. Those are my sports. But what you probably don’t know is that I was a baseball junkie from the ages of about 13-18. Don’t believe me? Well, ask my buddy Zu about how quickly I could regurgitate the top hitters, pitchers, or starting lineups from any major league team back in the 80’s. Ask Zu how often we would haul our tails to Cleveland or Detroit to catch a game. Heck, ask Zu what we would eat without farmers (inside joke, sorry).

This book is rich; it’s full of great sporting questions and assertions that transcend baseball. If you call yourself a sports fan, run to the library or bookstore and grab this book now. I’m just going to go through some of my favorite parts.

Dave Duncan, the pitching coach and La Russa’s main confidant, sits the starting pitcher down before every game and goes through “the binder” with him. Here’s what Bissinger has to say about the binder (page 46-47).

…. He also had a red binder in front of him. This particular one is marked “Cubs,” but he has one for every team in the league. He stores them in a red steel case that goes on the road with him. It looks a little bit like a vault on wheels, maybe because the knowledge it holds is priceless.

The binders contain his charts, a packet for every opposing player, a remarkable Rohrschach in which he has tracked every pitch each batter has been thrown by his pitchers and what that batter did with it. Using a system of grids, three up and three across dividing the hitting zone into nine sections, he has made small notations that record the type and location of every pitch. …

That’s the type of inside-the-clubhouse detail you can expect from this book.

I love this stuff. I get caught up in the preparation and recording aspects of competition. Related to golf, the act of preparing my equipment and studying the next course I’m going to play is as enjoyable as playing the game. The act of going through my round after the fact and attempting to learn something about my game is as enjoyable as playing the game. I get caught up in the process, maybe to a fault. But if La Russa’s post game actions are any indication of what it takes to achieve excellence, I’m severely lacking.

Here is what LaRussa does after the game (pages 94-95):

… He will eat in silence at J Bucks restaurant several miles from the stadium. He will have a book with him, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, about the battle of Iwo Jima. He will climb into his Cardinals-red Cadillac Escalade. He will return to where he lives in St. Louis, a residential suite in a hotel in the city’s west end. And he will follow the routine that he has followed since he first went into the foxhole. He will pull out the little lineup cards that he uses to keep score during the games. They help him keep track and stay ahead when he manages, and now he’s reviewing certain situations the players faced – the count, an RBI situation or a steal situation or a hit-and-run situation – and whether he reacted appropriately. …

… He learned to keep a list from Dick Williams, the manager of the A’s when they won world championships in 1972 and 1973. Williams told him that if you don’t make notes about a game as it’s occurring and review them afterward, you will forget what happened, because of the daily grind of the season. …

I played golf today and I’m looking at my scorecard, going back through the round trying to recall where I made the right decisions and the wrong decisions. I need to take better notes on my rounds if I’m going to achieve the kind of excellence that La Russa has. This is important. La Russa has inspired me to be more copious.

La Russa certainly has his act together from a baseball perspective, but this book delves into the personal, and Bissinger doesn’t sugar coat the life of a manager (or player). Bissinger explains how difficult it was to live with La Russa from his wife’s perspective. So difficult in fact, that they don’t even attempt to live together. La Russa’s wife and kids live in California and spend very little time on the road with him. La Russa is very frank about a situation early in his managing career where he decided to stay with the White Sox rather than fly home and help his family while his daughter was hospitalized with pneumonia. He regrets it to this day, but baseball is his life, and living away from his family for 8 months a year is just part of it.

This isn’t the end of the personal stories told by Bissinger. One of my favorites was about a pitcher named Carl Eldred, on oft-injured pitcher whom the Cards helped stage a comeback. Eldred left the game for a little because of injuries but was tinkering around one day and found that his arm didn’t hurt. He tossed around the idea of getting back with a team and here are some of his thoughts (pg 168):

Eldred missed the competition. He missed being part of a team. Those are the things that you expect an athlete to mention when you ask what he misses. But there was something else. He knew that his wife might have a difficult time truly understanding it, as would anybody who hasn’t done it. It was the feeling of what it felt like to grip a baseball, know the grip felt right in the fingers because you were coming with a full-heat hothouse four-seamer, throw that four-seamer to the very spot you intended, then watch it pop into the back of the catcher’s glove as the hitter swings through it. It wasn’t a macho feeling to Eldred. It was simply one worth trying to have again.

In one small paragraph Bissinger captured why I will play golf for the rest of my life – why I love the game so much. I do so because of something that happens about once or twice per summer (out of about 3,000 strokes on average). It’s the perfect execution of a stroke that gives an unexplainable feeling of satisfaction (that something else mentioned above). It’s the 5-wood (maybe 3 years ago) from 205 that found the green after I worked it right to left around some trees and over the marsh on number on 17 at Royal Melbourne. It’s the 4-iron (maybe 5 years ago) from 190 into a stiff wind on the 15th at PGA Ryder to a back pin that hit pin-high and ended up about three feet behind its ball mark, never wavering from its line. I will hack it around for an eternity as long as I have a chance to feel shots like these even once a year – even at a ratio of 1/3,000.

So many cool things; just so damn many. Bissinger relates a conversation where La Russa thinks about “… how many players La Russa had managed who have had that rare combination of talent and fiery heart (page 129).” It came to seventeen all total. Bissinger lets La Russa ruminate about how great Pujols is, on every front. Bissinger contrasts keeping notes on paper (La Russa), keeping them digitally (the video guy), or using both mediums (Duncan, the pitching coach). Then, back to the game, Bissinger comes up with lines like this (page 240):

Morris retires the side in order in the sixth, the final pitch a sweet 12-to-6 curve that Sosa misses by so much, even the Arch smiles.

Finally, in the version I have, Bissinger finishes with a strong afterword. He compares and contrasts his book to Moneyball – managing by instinct versus managing by numbers – “humanistas versus the statisticians.” It was a good way to finish, be it a little self-indulgent. I read Moneyball and liked it and I’m a big Michael Lewis fan. Take a hint from a guy that has read both – read them both, back-to-back, in any order. It’s on my list of things to do some day after retirement.