March 02, 2006

Great link, WC. They both write nicely (Gladwell especially) and I really enjoyed some of that Mickelson analysis.

posted by JJ at 05:38 AM on March 03, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell certainly knows how to spin a yarn and stretch it elastic. He writes: "Rural Ontario is not, exactly, a hotbed of athletic ability. I think I read somewhere that Jason Williams (the point guard) and Randy Moss went to the same high school. How is that even possible? If Brian Scalabrine went to my high school, it would now be called the Brian Scalabrine Memorial High School." First of all, what Gladwell calls "rural Ontario," he's not talking about villages north of Lake Superior, he's talking specifically about Elmira, a bedroom suburban hamlet of 15,000 people that looks barely different from anything you might see a couple miles away from college towns like Bloomington, Indiana with some pastureland out the backyard and a 5-10 minute drive to a neraby small city (Kitchener-Waterloo). The high-school Gladwell attended was the same high school attended by Dan Snider, the Atlanta Thrasher killed in an auto accident by Danny Heatley. No change on the school name. And when Gladwell was a high school student, nearby Kitchener-Waterloo schools were stuffed with future professional athletes the same age as him. KCI alone had 8 or 9 future NHLers, including Brian Bellows and Al MacInnis. At that point Bellows was 16 years old and already recipient of a full-page profile in Sports Illustrated. Another student at KCI at the exact same time was world record holder in breastroke swimming and future Olympic gold medallist Victor Davis (wot a nutter!). Those same years, just down the road at Cameron Heights was Lennox Lewis, who was another gold medallist and later became undisputed heavyweight champion, and at Forest Heights was future Stanley Cup captain Scott Stevens, and over at Eastwood was Markus Koch, who won a Superbowl with the 1988 Redskins, playing football. Those schools are all pretty close, and Kitchener-Waterloo is hardly a huge city. At the time Gladwell was in the neighborhood there was probably 250,000 total for the twin-cities and only a small handful of highschools, just a few miles from where Gladwell was raised. The highschool parties, yes even bush parties in St. Jacobs (which is where Darryl Sittler is from) and a rocks throw from Elmira, were regulared by many of these guys, it was common (sorry, I don't name names about what athletes burned their lips doing hotknives) and none of the other metalheads, boozers or teenage-dopers batted an eyelash, it seemed normal. At the exact precise time Gladwell was a student in the neighborhood and laying back on his bed fantasizing about NBA stars on the posters of his walls, there was an amazing cast of athletes in his own backyard he missed, and none of the locals cared that there names weren't Brian Scalabrine.

posted by the red terror at 11:03 AM on March 03, 2006

Also, Malcolm Gladwell looks like Phil Spector and Sideshow Bob.

posted by worldcup2002 at 03:58 PM on March 03, 2006

Hey, I used to work with a guy from Kitchener, Ontario in Darwin, Australia about 20 years ago. Why isn't the high school named after him?

posted by owlhouse at 05:14 AM on March 04, 2006

ps. things work differently in Canada than they do in the United States. I was riding my bicycle through Northampton, Mass 22 years ago (part of a 2000-mile cycle trip my buddies thought was a good idea at the time) and everything in that town, from the school, to the main drag, to the bridge over the river was named after former president Calvin Coolidge. That seemed peculiar to me, because the high school I attended was the same alma mater as MacKenzie King, and hardly anybody that even attended the school knew it. MacKenzie King is the longest serving Prime Minister in the history of the British Commonwealth, he was PM for 21 years, he worked with Churchill and Roosevelt to wage war against the Nazis, and decades afterward was virtually unknown at his own high school. When history teachers mentioned him in class, they were more inclined to chuckle about how during WW2 he used to channel his deceased mother during seances with his pet dog Pat. Last year, for the school's 150th anniversary, they erected a small statue of King at the school, so hopefully teenagers will get clued in. But if this had been America, like Gladwell says, the school would have been renamed. And history teachers would probably be too scared to talk about occult seances for fear they'll get snitched by outraged Stasi-style students.

posted by the red terror at 12:16 PM on March 04, 2006