Sports Talk

Good day for sports today.

If you’re a fan of Tiger Woods and the New York Yankees.

Today Tiger won the British Open, upping his major victory total to ten. Today I got thinking about how it’s special that I was old enough to appreciate Tiger when he turned pro, and I’ll be around when hes right there to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major (professional) victories.

I have to think that Nike, American Express, and Buick executives are popping some Cris right now. Especially if they bought into the Tiger will never be the same hype.

I then thought about how I take a genuine interest in Tiger, which is unusual for me because I often scoff at magazines like People or Us because celebrities are just people, and one celebrity is no more important than an everyday person. This got me to thinking about how I occasionally reflect on the absurdity of the media coverage of OJ Simpson’s murder trial. OJ’s just a guy, right?

Then again, I never saw OJ play in the NFL, except for clips, which aren’t the same. I knew OJ because he covered the NFL for NBC. (I wonder if NBC will bring him back for their new Sunday night package.) But I was never in OJ’s corner. I never rooted for him. But if Tiger were in that position? Yeah, I’d root for him.

In other news, Al Leiter returned from the dead today. Last week the Florida Marlins designated him for assignment along with his 3-7 record and 6.64 ERA this season. Yesterday the Yankees acquired Leiter from the Marlins for a player to be named later and cash roughly equivalent to the remainder of Leiter’s pay for this season. (I am borrowing heavily from ESPN.com’s story on the game, here.) Leiter, a former Yankee, made his first start for the Bombers in 16 years and 82 days, breaking Babe Ruth’s record for time between starts. So what does Leiter do? He pitches 6⅓ innings, allows one run, and strikes out a season high eight batters. Crazy.

Oh, and the Yankees pulled to within a half game of the Red Stinx.

Finally, have you noticed that ESPN.com offers many of its articles in paginated view, but gives you the option to click on a single page view? What is the point of the multiple page format? At first I thought it was so pages will load faster over a slow connection, but loading three pages worth of graphics has got to take longer than loading one page worth. I always click the single page view link. Always. ESPN.com should provide users with a cookie to set preference on this.

And as long as I’m on the subject of article format preference cookies … every web site in the world should look at Wired News and emulate the system it uses for font size selection. The single biggest drawback of a high resolution display is that all the fonts get small, and you either squint or sit closer. With sites like Wired News, you can literally sit back and relax.

Sports Talk

One thought on “Sports Talk

  1. Okay, ESPN.com articles offer users four font sizes. But Wired News offers the feature on its front page.

    A few months ago, I predicted that ESPN.com would unveil a new front page. I based this on the fact that all articles featured a new design, inlcuding the big, simple ESPN logo, a horizontal Flash-based navigation, the paginated view or single page view option, and the font size tool. Perhaps to vex me, the front page has not changed. It remains entirely too busy. And on 1280×1024 screen resolution, the font is too small. ESPN.com should simplify its front page, and implement a font size tool in line with that of Wired News.

    And speaking of implementation, Wired News’s font size tool is implemented better than ESPN.com’s. The Wired tool is dynamic, meaning that the page doesn’t have to reload; no additional bandwidth is used. True, half the country has officially upgraded to broadband, but an attitude of “we’ll never run out of bandwidth” should be shelved along with the notions that “we’ll never run out of IP addresses,” “we’ll never run out of phone numbers,” and “we’ll never run out of oil.”

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