“Anchorman” is one of our favorite Will Ferrell movies, and this promotional video for Ron Burgundy’s “audition” with the fledgling ESPN channel back in the day before it was launched might be the funniest Ron Burgundy clip out there.
Category: Sports (Page 44 of 51)
Let’s state the obvious up front: golf is an expensive sport, and if you’re anything like us, there are certain pieces of equipment where you tend to, well, go cheap. The one area where function completely dominated form in terms of gear has always been the golf glove. Does it come in black? That’ll work, ring us up. Needless to say, when we were asked to review Hirzl’s golf gloves, at first it seemed a bit silly. Now, of course, we know better.
The weather conditions for our initial test were about as ideal as one could ask for – partly cloudy with temperatures in the low 70s. This means that we didn’t get to really test how well the gloves (we used Hirzl’s Trust Control gloves) would function in extreme heat or rain, but you can work up a sweat even on the driving range in weather like that, and the gloves, which contain kangaroo leather (who knew?) with mesh on the tops so your hands can breathe, remained bone dry the entire time. When we removed the gloves after taking about 80 swings, the backs of our hands beaded with moisture, but the palms of our hands were as dry as the gloves, despite the insides of the gloves themselves feeling damp. The Trust Feel gloves, meanwhile, are promoted as the thinner of Hirzl’s Trust line, but the difference between them in terms of feel is negligible, and compared to our previous gloves, which had a tendency to inflict the occasional blister despite the fact that we’re not big swingers, these puppies felt like Snuggies for your hands. If anyone loses the grip of their club while wearing these gloves, they’re going out of their way to do something wrong.
So lesson learned: golf gloves matter, and these Hirzl gloves will be a godsend to monster swinging, ‘leave nothing in the bag’ golfers and finesse golfers alike. They also have us taking a long look at our golf shoes, and wondering if an upgrade is in store there as well.
Baseball fans love their stats, particularly fantasy owners looking for an edge. Whether you’re a certified stat geek or your fantasy league’s reigning champ, you could spend hours digging through the vast pool of information found in the Bill James Baseball IQ app. Created by Steve Selfors in collaboration with noted historian and stat savant Bill James and developer American Eagle, Baseball IQ sets itself apart from other statistics-based baseball apps by putting the sport’s endless stream of useful data into the hands of its most rabid fans with full color graphics that are easy to both navigate and understand.
Say, for example, you want to see how Toronto’s Jose Bautista, the game’s current home run king, has fared against Yankees ace CC Sabathia throughout his career. Well, for starters, that’s just too simple for this app. In fact, with a few clicks, you can see Sabathia’s lifetime stats against every hitter on Toronto’s roster (Bautista, incidentally, is 0-30 against the large lefty with 14 strikeouts…yikes). Want to see a location breakdown for Bautista’s 14 Ks vs. Sabathia? Check out the K Zone chart. Wondering how those numbers stack up against Bautista’s stats against other Yankee starters, or any other pitcher in the game over the last year? Last two years? Last three years? Check. With Hit Locator, you can see where Bautista is most likely to hit the ball in certain situations (against particular pitchers, in a specific ballpark, with an 0-2 count, etc.), and with Hit Zone, you can see the location of pitches in and around the strike zone where Bautista tends to get his hits. Of course, these breakdowns are available for every player in the game over the last three years, and the app also allows you to stack one player’s stats up against another’s over a set time period and against particular teams and/or pitchers. Pretty cool.
But we’re just scratching the surface here. The bottom line is, you’ll find stats on the Bill James Baseball IQ app that you won’t see anywhere else, giving you the knowledge you need to impress your friends at the bar while continuing to dominate those same friends in your fantasy baseball league.
Reebok has been on a roll lately with recent entries into the sportingwear market like the huge hits of EasyTone and ZigTech shoe lines. While most companies would sit back and enjoy these successes Reebok chose to expand their formidible lines even further with the RealFlex footwear.
The RealFlex technology is inspired by the barefoot/natural/minimalist running movement that is recognized nationally and is becoming the hottest technology in the running world. Our test pair were the RealFlex Run edition that weigh in at 9.2 ounces sporting 76 “sensors” underfoot that give you an incredibly “natural” feel when running.
“Barefoot or natural running makes a lot of sense from a biomechanics standpoint because all the shock absorption happens in your muscles, not your joints,” said Reebok’s Head of Advanced Innovation, Bill McInnis. “The problem is that natural running works best in the natural world, not on man-made surfaces. In creating RealFlex technology, we took everything that works with natural running and made it work in today’s world. Simply put, RealFlex is natural movement perfected.”
It’s December of last year. Christmas is creeping up on me, and I haven’t bought many presents for my lovely wife. So I did what I normally do and hit Target, because that way, I can browse as many of her potential interests in one stop. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that there is an updated edition of “Wii Fit,” titled, simply enough, “Wii Fit Plus.” It’s a no-brainer of a gift. It’s also very much of a Homer Simpson kind of gift (as in buying Marge a bowling ball with his name on it), as I probably spent more time on the original “Wii Fit” than she did. And as it turned out, I ran the “Wii Fit Plus” Island Bicycle game’s beach ball course nearly to the point of contracting plantar fasciitis, but that’s another story.
There are several new games on “Wii Fit Plus,” and ironically, the one I avoided playing at first was the Driving Range game, thinking it would be like hitting off of indoor Astroturf tees and give you false confidence. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and so I set it up to hit 20 mid-range shots. Now, the thing with most interactive golf games is that you don’t really need to swing like you do on the golf course, but for the sake of authenticity, I went at it from the approach that if they’re going to get the balance board involved, I probably shouldn’t goof off.
And, wouldn’t you know it, my mind was subsequently blown.
Quite possibly the straightest drive, virtual or otherwise, that we’ve hit in years. We heart Wii.
I hit the Wii balls just like I hit real balls – to the left (I’m a lefty), slicing nearly every ball into what they consider out of play (which it would be, on most golf courses). It said I was swinging too hard, even though I’m not a masher. It said I wasn’t rotating my upper body enough, and that was definitely true. I began to incorporate their suggestions into my Wii swing, and subsequently began crushing straight, long drives. Would it transfer to the real game?
Well, that part is still a work in progress. After all, golf takes lots, and lots, and lots of practice to perfect any single aspect of the game. However, based on my first experience at the driving range (it’s rained a lot here; I have kids, blah blah blah), the results were eye-opening, to say the least.
I started off like I always do, with my 7-iron. It’s a good warm-up club and if memory serves, “Tin Cup” anti-hero Roy McAvoy said is the only club you really need. I rotated my shoulders, and tried not to swing too hard. Pow, straight as an arrow and uncommonly long. Huh. Do it a few more times, and see if this is a pattern and not a fluke. Again and again (mostly), the balls were flying farther and straighter. All right, time to switch to the most important club in the bag: the pitching wedge.
The first two balls I hit were two of the highest, straightest pitching wedge shots I’ve hit in my entire life. Holy shit, I’ve cracked the code!
Not so fast. I went to my 5-iron from there, and all hell broke loose. Didn’t really hit a single ball flush with that club (my apologies to the local worms), so I went to the 5-wood. The results weren’t much better, but in swinging the much longer club, I noticed something that proved valuable: As I worked on rotating my upper body, I was inadvertently swinging around the ball, not through it, on my follow-through, and as a result began hooking shot after shot. The exact opposite problem that I was hoping “Wii Fit Plus” to fix, yes? Yes, and once I processed it all, everything came together.
I moved up to my 3-wood, and continued the swing that I had been using before. Sure enough, I was hooking the ball, something I had never done before. At that point, I was conscious of two things: slowing down my swing, and following straight through the ball. (Any golfer will tell you that it’s best if you don’t think about your swing, but they’re all lying to themselves. They are always thinking about their swing, especially when they’re swinging.) And just like that, the problem corrected itself. With a slower yet straighter follow-through, I was suddenly hitting some of the longest, straightest drives of my life. You think that silly balance board is just measuring how much you’re leaning toward or away from the ball, but let me be the first to tell you that it measures much, much more. You also burn a surprising number of calories swinging a golf club. Isn’t the joke about golf that it’s a sport for people who don’t play sports?
The obvious next test is to see how I fare on a course, going from one club to the next on each shot. Based on what I’ve witnessed so far, though, and with a little more practice on the virtual range, “Wii Fit Plus” has managed to fix a flaw in my swing that had been plaguing me my entire life, and it did so in about 10 minutes. Used copies go for less than nine bucks on Amazon. What on earth are you waiting for?
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