Roll Over Beethoven
One of the most insightful and entertaining weekly columns on football and other topics is Tuesday Morning Quarterback, by author Gregg Easterbrook, who is also senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. I look forward to his columns every week during football season. He knows the game.
He also throws in comments on non-football topics. Once you get past the cheer babes, sweet plays of the week and obscure college football scores, this week he caught my eye with this startling factoid:
"The Wall Street Journal reported there are only 28 radio stations left in the country that play a classical music format -- versus 500 sports stations, 1,200 talk stations and 2,000 country music stations."
To use a common Easterbrook-ism, "This is the kind of hidden indicator that is essential to an insider's understanding of the game. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it means."
He also throws in comments on non-football topics. Once you get past the cheer babes, sweet plays of the week and obscure college football scores, this week he caught my eye with this startling factoid:
"The Wall Street Journal reported there are only 28 radio stations left in the country that play a classical music format -- versus 500 sports stations, 1,200 talk stations and 2,000 country music stations."
To use a common Easterbrook-ism, "This is the kind of hidden indicator that is essential to an insider's understanding of the game. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it means."
posted by JP at 3:07 PM
2 Comments:
I initially had to concur with your observation but then the memory of an old man slowly came creeping and a revelation, perhaps, presented itself. If, indeed, Mr. Easterbrook’s insight into the sport of football is as deep as you have presumed I have concluded that it must have been an insider’s intellectual recollection of one of football’s greatest innovations. And that being the “backfield shift” attributed to none other than Knute Rockne and his Four Horsemen. The year was 1924 and it was of course the great Notre Dame.
History, as I have noted from an article to which I refer, speaks of it as follows:
“When Rockne spoke to his player working on the shift he would use soft words in speaking to his players. He used words ike "That's lovely", "that's marvelous", and "that's sweet" to his players. And it worked. Somehow when he spoked those words in that low tone of voice the players got the count better. He even had his men singing in beat time to make rhythm more accurate.”
(Article Reference: http://home.no.net/birgerro/shift.htm)
Surely Mr. Easterbrook was insightfully referring to the beautiful and sweet waltz “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss.
So I think I will be content to believe, although I have absolutely no deep insight whatsoever into the sport of football, that for one fleeting moment perhaps I had a moment of football genius – or perhaps not.
Later
haha...thanks AG, that was marvelous AND insightful.
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