A noose was discovered in the garage stall of Black race car driver Bubba Wallace at a NASCAR race in Alabama on Sunday, less than two weeks after Wallace advocated successfully for NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag at all tracks and facilities. Read the rest
Dalton and Kanaan Dern turned their Apopka, Florida abode into a skatepark. Watch them shred the house. Don't tell mom.
The brothers won the "Murder Your House" contest sponsored by Liquid Death and The Berrics. The prizes included six months of mortgage payments (up to $10,000) but not the new roof that they'll likely need sooner rather than later. Read the rest
Last month, engineer Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here impressed the Internet with his curiously engineered wooden basketball backboard that helps the ball into the hoop. (Video below.) His latest version, above, employs computer vision and robotics to track the ball and tilt the backboard to direct the ball through the basket.
An original 1985 pair of Air Jordan 1s, custom made for Michael Jordan, worn in a game, and signed, are now up for auction at Christie's. The sneakers were estimated to sell for $100,000-$150,000 but the current bid is already $160,000 and there are six days left in the auction. From Reuters:
Like most of Jordan’s basketball shoes, they are a mismatched pair in a size 13 (left) and size 13.5 (right), Sotheby’s said.
The shoes are being sold by collector Jordan Geller, founder of the sneaker museum Shoezeum, where they were previously on display in Las Vegas. They were the “crown jewel” of the museum, drawing fans and collectors from all over the world, according to Geller.
Twenty years after Tony Hawk set a skateboarding world record by landing a 900 degree aerial spin on a vertical ramp, the record has been broken. Over the weekend, Gui Khury, age 11, landed a 1080 using only a vert ramp. So fucking rad. From The Guardian:
Read the rest“The isolation for the coronavirus helped because he had a life that was about school and he didn’t have a lot of time to train, when he got home from school he was tired,” the skater’s father Ricardo Khury Filho told Reuters.
“So now he is at home more, he eats better and he has more time to train and can focus more on the training so that has helped. He has an opportunity to train here, if he didn’t have [the skate facilities] ... he would be stuck at home like everyone else and unable to do sport. So the isolation helped him focus.“
During lockdown, Khury’s family make the 20-minute journey to his grandmother’s house on most days to deliver food and drop him off so that he can train on the vertical ramp, bowl and street course they had built in her back garden. It was on that ramp that he completed the historic feat.
The legendary Fred "Curly" Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters died this morning. He was 77. I remember the first time I saw the Globetrotters as a kid in the late 1970s. I was disappointed when the team was introduced and Curly was nowhere to be seen. Then suddenly, one of the players tore off another's afro wig and we realized it was Curly in disguise! From ESPN:
"We have lost one of the most genuine human beings the world has ever known," Globetrotters general manager Jeff Munn said in a statement. "Curly's basketball skill was unrivaled by most, and his warm heart and huge smile brought joy to families worldwide. He always made time for his many fans and inspired millions."
Neal played in more than 6,000 games in 97 countries for the barnstorming Globetrotters from 1963 to 1985, when the team appeared in numerous televised specials, talk shows, television shows and even cartoons that included the team's own animated series [first episode below].
Fred “Curly” Neal – the Harlem Globetrotters icon known worldwide for his trademark shaved head and charismatic smile – passed away this morning in his home outside of Houston at the age of 77. pic.twitter.com/JdZa6zTvZU
— Harlem Globetrotters (@Globies) March 26, 2020
International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound announced today that the summer games in Japan will be postponed until at least 2021, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“On the basis of the information the IOC has, postponement has been decided. The parameters going forward have not been determined,” said Dick Pound, a longstanding veteran of the organization.
Added Dick Pound: "It will come in stages. We will postpone this and begin to deal with all the ramifications of moving this, which are immense.”
Dick Pound's comments followed IOC president Thomas Bach's earlier suggestion that it was possible the Tokyo Games would called off.
Earlier, Dick Pound had taken a wait-and-see line -- "we can kind of see how things develop to see whether there are more effective means to prevent the spread and to mitigate the lethality of it that we don't know yet" -- but the withdrawal from the games of major nations and the outbreak's increasing severity led the committee to take a more conclusive approach.
"The Games are not going to start on July 24, that much I know,” said Dick Pound, born Richard William Duncan Pound in Ontario, in an interview with USA Today.
Dick. Pound. Read the rest
Citing “the COVID-19 public health threat,” the NCAA is canceling March Madness and all other winter and spring men's and women's college basketball tournaments amid a growing coronavirus pandemic. Read the rest
Watch this coach's incredible reflexes as a young gymmast misses her landing during a recent competition in Nashville, Tennessee.
ViralHog quoted the girl's parent:
Read the rest"This was my daughter's first run on vault and when jumping back on her back handspring she went sideways and could've badly hurt herself but her coach saw that she wasn't aligned and ran in to catch her before she hit the ground."
Trail runner Joseph Oldendorf badly injured himself on the Duckabush River Trail in the Olympic National Park, Washington. His tibia detached, Oldendorf was unable to walk. He was wearing lightweight running clothes and it was literally freezing outside. He had a cell phone but there was no service. So he crawled. For eight hours. From CNN:
At 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, he realized his phone had a signal because he received a text message.
He called 911 and kept crawling, (a Jefferson County Search and Rescue) release said.
Oldendorf told the station that he tried lying down to wait, but he was too cold and believed that if he didn't keep moving he could die. Thoughts of his family kept him going, he said...
A crew from the Brinnon Fire Department along with Jefferson Search and Rescue volunteers responded and started up the trail to find the injured runner. A Jefferson County Sheriff's deputy managed coordination and communication at the trailhead, said.
The runner was located by his voice five to six miles from the spot where he was injured, the release said.
image: "View from the helicopter as the basket was lowered to retrieve the subject" (courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard) Read the rest
Over the weekend, the Luchon-Superbagnères ski resort in the French Pyrenees used a helicopter to bring in fresh snow to the slopes from higher elevations. The chopper dumped 50 tonnes of snow on the beginner and ski school slopes. From The Guardian:
Read the restHervé Pounau, the director of the local department council, said the cost of the operation would be recouped many times over by the business that would have been lost to a lack of snow.
“It will cost us between €5,000 and €6,000, in the knowledge that over the long term we will get at least 10 times’ return on that investment,” Pounau said in a statement...
The operation has angered French ecologists. Bastien Ho, the secretary of Europe Écologie Les Verts party, said the snow transfer operation was evidence of an “upside-down world”.
“Instead of adapting to global warming we’re going to end up with a double problem: something that costs a lot of energy, that contributes heavily to global warming and that in addition is only for an elite group of people who can afford it. It is the world upside down,” he told French television.
Watch this guy jump off the balcony of a Louisiana shopping mall in the name of wrestling.
What a stunt! Read the rest
Actor, comedian, golfer. Bill Murray has style.
Bill Murray with the best thing you’ll see today. Just wait for the club flip 😂 pic.twitter.com/eDobeAkyVH
— 95.7 The Game (@957thegame) February 9, 2020
After the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV, President Donald Trump tweeted his congratulations to the team who, er, "represented the Great State of Kansas."
Seriously.
Within a few minutes, he deleted the tweet and posted a corrected version. Here's a response from Claire McCaskill, former Democratic senator from Missouri (2007-2019):
Read the restIt’s Missouri you stone cold idiot. pic.twitter.com/O1cAAOFsJ6
— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) February 3, 2020
In addition to being an amazing skateboarder, Tony Hawk is also just cool. Read the rest
