UEFA futbol müzesi 2010 Avrupa Kültür Başkenti projesi kapsamında 16 Ocak’ta İstanbul’da açılıyor. Bu müze bildiğimiz müzelerin aksine göstermelik değil ortamı yaşamayı sağlayan bir yapıda. Plati’nin olacağı PS3, langırt vs oyunların bulunduğu efsanelerin futbol aksesuarlarının olduğu(collina’nın düdüğü, zidane’nin kramponu) efsane bir müze.

Gökten forma yağan bir bölüm de olacağı söyleniyor. Bizde kapan gider alarm koymaları lazım

So my heroes used to be Don Mattingly, John McEnroe, Wesley Walker and Mark Messier.

I’d say with the exception of McEnroe, I chose pretty wisely as a kid. I thought Johnny Mac was so cool for the way he blew up at umpires and humiliated them, until I grew up and learned that for all his remarkable talent, he was just a big baby and remarkably immature. I outgrew McEnroe and was sort of ashamed that I used to love him.

But I’ve got a new hero now, and he’s kinda different from any other role model I’ve ever liked.

His name is Lance Allred, and he’s a 6-foot-11, deaf, OCD sufferer who’s a former Fundamentalist Mormon and grew up on polygamous compounds in Montana and Utah. He’s been battling in basketball his whole life, and for three shining games in 2008, finally made the NBA.

He just wrote an astonishingly honest, hilarious, forthcoming and tragic book about his life called “Longshot,” and I finished reading it last night.

To say it’s one of the best sports books I’ve ever read would be an insult, like calling Rembrandt just one of the 17th century’s best painters. Allred’s book is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in my life.

Unlikely, you say? Wait till you hear his story. He was an awkward, gangly child who was seen as a bit of an outcast since his father “only” had one wife. He became deaf immediately after being born but was undiagnosed for years.  He was told by a Sunday School teacher that he couldn’t hear because of sins he’d committed in a previous life (I hope that teacher got fired immediately, but I’m sure he didn’t.)

Eventually, his parents broke away from the compound and moved to Utah, before another family split made them homeless for a short while.

As a kid, Allred struggled to find his place (you know how kind kids can be to children who are different), and he finally did on the basketball court. Of course, that only brought more suffering. A much-beloved coach at the University of Utah named Rick Majerus treated Allred unconscionably while he was there, humiliating and destroying Allred’s confidence and once telling him he “was a disgrace to cripples.” (Majerus was eventually investigated for his behavior, and resigned from Utah shortly after Allred transferred).

Allred became a star at a smaller school, but then found himself battling through the bizarre and highly unpredictable world of minor league basketball in Turkey, France, and the United States (if for no other reason, buy the book to hear Allred’s wickedly funny description of travel life in the NBA Developmental League). 

There were so many times Allred wanted to quit, and so many times coaches and others gave up on him. But he finally made it to the NBA, if only for a few days, and when you get to that point in the book, you almost feel like cheering.

In his beautiful writing style, Allred weaves metaphors about life and basketball together with meditations on religion, the monotony of practice, and too many other topics to count. He refused to blame others for his failures, and is quick to credit others for his success. He’s funny, smart and had me looking at some things in a whole new light.

I got to meet Allred last month at an NBA summer league camp, after having heard about him on this NPR podcast, “Only A Game“. I wrote this column about him for my newspaper, and I was so impressed with his intelligence and humility that I knew I had to read his book. It blew me away.

Lance Allred will not become a major superstar, of  that I’m pretty certain. But he’s why I love sports; proof that beyond the reprehensible reputations of Michael Vick, Plaxico Burress and Barry Bonds there are good guys with amazing stories to tell of will and determination.

I defy you to read this book and not become a fan of Lance Allred. If money’s tight and you’re not able to buy “Longshot,” you can probably find it at your local library.

“I do not care about the money, or the fame,” Allred writes in a letter to God in the book. “I just want to say that I set an “unreachable” goal and I made it.”

He certainly did.

The most recent episode of Only a Game includes an interview with Peter Golenbock, author of George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire.

You can hear the segment here.

It’s easy for us to think about either the very good or very bad of particular leaders. The truth is that all leaders have a bit of both in them. The goal is for the good to increase and the bad to decrease. Unfortunately, sometimes the bad directly counteracts the good. This appears to be the case in the life of George Steinbrenner.

In this past week’s episode of Only A Game, the host Bill Littlefield interviewed Peter Golenbock, the author of George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Build the Yankee Empire. Golenbock points out that the Yankees had their best years following times when Steinbrenner was suspended from his duties as Yankee owner. During these times, the capable people that he hired were able to work their plan without intereference.  The Reggie Jackson years of the 1970’s followed a Steinbrenner suspension or else Jackson may have been traded sooner. A similar course of evenst happened in the 90’s. Steinbrenner has always been suspicious of prospects and has often pressured general managers to trade prospects before they hit the big leauges. In this case, a suspended Steinbrenner was unable to pressure the general manager to trade s star shortstop. Today, Derek Jeter is a nine-time All-Star with four World Series rings.

So, what do we learn from this? First, Steinbrenner hired capable decision makers and managers. Second, Stenbrenner resourced those decision makers to succed. Third, quite unfortunately, Steinbrenner involved himself far too often in the decision making process. With this poor practice of micromanagement, Steinbrenner directly negated his own good leadership qualities.

It’s another tale to illustrate a basic leadership prinicple: Hire good people. Give them what they need to succeed. Leave them alone!

“It’s just a game.”

For people who care about the possibilities and promise of the interactive medium, those can be stinging words. They’re not entirely wrong or off the mark when it comes to most games. Many games are, indeed, just games. There are a few that have tried to reach beyond “just a game,” even if their grasp doesn’t always measure up. But often times, “just a game” is a phase used by people pulling a huge cop-out.

In a preview story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Atomic Games president Peter Tamte talks up his company’s upcoming shooter, Six Days in Fallujah. The WSJ reporter says Tamte and Atomic view Six Days as more documentary than mere FPS, even going so far as working with soldiers who lived the events depicted in the game to ensure accuracy.

“For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames,” Mr. Tamte says.

…

“Six Days,” which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. “We replicate a specific and accurate timeline — we mean six days literally,” says Mr. Tamte. “We track several units through the process and you get to know what it was like from day to day.”

To develop the game, Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game’s appearance is faithful to the actual location. In addition to creating the game, Atomic will also use some of the material to create a training simulation for the military.

But asked if his game would have a moral component of some kind, or a slant, a message or theme, Konami – which is publishing the game — strangely backed away, saying:

“We’re not trying to make social commentary. We’re not pro-war. We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience,” says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game’s publisher. “At the end of the day, it’s just a game.”

Some people are upset about that statement. Patrick Klepek was the first to shake his head over this (nod – that’s how I heard about it), and I think there will be many more doing the same in the next couple of days. I’m disappointed, too, and not only that Konami seems to be copping out. It’s disappointing that we seem to want to have it both ways. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, that maker and marketer would have two different visions for the product.

Whether the developers like it or not, there inevitably WILL be some kind of messages gleaned from Six Days in Fallujah. As the WSJ story pointed out, nothing exists in a vaccuum. Everyone brings their own viewpoints, backgrounds and biases to the table when they absorb any form of media. Depending on how a player feels about the current war in Iraq, he or she will likely see what they want to see in the game. Any steps Atomic takes toward narrative realism in this game is a step toward a message — it just may not be a message they intend to send. I’ll bet you a few space bucks there will be no shortage of debate about Six Days once it’s released.

And if the gaming community feeds off of that attention, and holds up this game as yet another yard stick for how far the medium has come, then we have to be prepared to own up to the consequences, too. Did you notice that Atomic is also working with the military to create training software based on the tech used for Six Days? Do you not think that little fact won’t end up being used against the industry by the “murder simulator” wing nuts? We can’t have it both ways. Konami is muddying the waters for all of us, and I hope they know that. When the wing nuts come calling, the “just a game” cop-out won’t hold water. So don’t cop-out, Atomic and Konami. Own it. Own it now, and save yourselves and all of us the headache and embarassment later on.

One source expected, the other more unusual.

Pearlman, author of the scathing new Clemens biography, The Rocket Who Fell to Earth, was a guest on WBUR’s Only a Game this weekend. Just as players, I wonder if authors get tired of answering the same questions as they make the rounds. All part of doing business, I suppose, except the athletes aren’t dependent on making a good impression on the media to help their livelihood.

The second Pearlman “sighting” is as a contributor to the current issue of Psychology Today with his article, “Winners and Losers,” which considers the qualities a championship athlete needs to excel in their sport. You can read an excerpt here.

This week’s Only a Game featured a Bill Littlefield interview with Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg, authors of Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball’s Most Enigmatic Slugger. This one is high on my “to read” pile as it seems to go beyond the standard player biography.

The segment comes at the 21:58 mark, preceded immediately by a brief recap of the WBC.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Treat, originally uploaded by wasabicube.

You know the drill: Public radio is a rarefied stew of heavy reportage and deep analysis. Car Talk is one of the few salutatory antidotes to the immobilizing profundity of it all.

Click and Click aside, rest assured you can find plenty of other effervescent nuggets of fun on 90.9. Below I’ve posted a few gems, submitted for your listening pleasure.

You say say “LIME-AH”, I say “LEE-MA.” Oops. Here & Now fill-in host Anthony Brooks fumbled the pronunciation while welcoming a new affiliate in the Buckeye State. A number of you called us on our East Coast insularity and the result was this fun bit:

Speaking of mispronunciation, our in-house chronicler of the odd, offbeat, and frankly just plain wrong (and here I speak of Only A Game, of course) parses the correct pronunciation of Chinese place names. The piece aired on the cusp of the Summer Olympics and re-aired on their best of show for 2008.

A million dollar duck decoy? ‘Nuff said.

Anything on the humorous side caught your attention on the radio recently?

Only a Game gets
me through Saturday morning –
nice weekly round-up.

Ken Mink is not your average college sophomore. For one, he took a 52 year long break after his freshman year. For another, he’s the only senior citizen on Roane State Community College’s basketball team. Only A Game’s Kim Green brought these photos back from her visit to Harriman, Tennessee.

read more | digg story

Author Declan Hill argues that without major changes to security and enforcement, the game of soccer will be forever damaged by criminals’ efforts to fix games around the world. Bill Littlefield shares his thoughts on The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime.

read more | digg story

(I know this is an older article, but I’m still setting the tone here so stick with me.)

One of the big reasons I wanted to create WG was to shine a light on the burgeoning field of videogame criticism and analysis and all the interesting viewpoints, opinions and thoughts that go with it. Why do this? The main reason is that I like reading it, and thought it would be cool to link what I could find from a single place.

But another underlying reason is the conventional wisdom that this kind of stuff doesn’t truly exist. Any attempt at detailed writing about games is, at best, the occasional off-beat review by an enthusiast site or, at worst, the ravings of a self-indulgent wanker with too much time on his (or her) hands.

There are no interesting critics for games like there are for movies or rock music, The Coventional Wisdom says. We have no Lester Bangs, according The Conventional Wisdom – and Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman wasn’t the first to come up with this argument, he just happened to articulate (and quite well) what many others have said in the pages of a major magazine:

But what these people are writing is not really criticism. Almost without exception, it’s consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It’s expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself.

Because it appeared during that summer lull that usually finds a lot of navel-gazing in the games industry, the column got a lot of attention. Chuck’s right in that there aren’t (still) one or two main voices at the top of the heap who can speak to the feel and meaning of a game. Sure, there are a few people who are rising to “elite” status in the gaming press (with the requiste backlash) but in general this whole thing is playing out on the Web — which means a plurality of voices, as Wired columnist Clive Thompson pointed out in a response column:

Actually, there are Lester Bangs of video-game writing.

Tons of ‘em, in fact! But they’re not writing in mainstream media venues. They’re blogging their witty analyses on 1Up.com, or doing exuberant podcasts and video blogs, or flamewarring their way to the truth on rollicking discussion boards. Or they’re like the geniuses (genuii?) behind Penny Arcade, crafting insanely funny webcomix that communicate more in three panels than most critics can do in 1,000 words.

So true. Which is why I want to have a place to pull all of this stuff together. It’s a collectathon — only with well-thought out turns of phrase instead of purple coins or combustible crates.

Klosterman also brought up a point that a lot of gamers who care about mainstream acceptance (or at the very least, getting out-of-touch troglodytes off our backs) are wrestling with: the divide in the gaming community between those who see the potential of the Interactive Medium and those who think it’s Only A Game. Former 1Upper Jane Picknard probably summed up that end of the spectrum best on her blog, Game Girl Advance:

The problem is, no one really cares for the stuff beyond a small group of like-minded folks who are mainly writers and developers. Gamers, for the most part, don’t care to read about how a game makes you feel. Without an audience, fine writers who style themselves critics languish unread on blogs or in tiny niche websites.

… The difference really is why we want to read about certain writers’ reactions to films but not about their reactions to games. So the answer is, there is a Lester Bangs, there are probably hundreds of them, but no one gives a shit.

Tiny niche blog ahoy, mates! I’ll be coming back to both of these topics, and so you’ll find these kinds of stories under the categories Rethinking Reviews and Only A Game? in the sidebar.

Full articles: The Lester Bangs of Video Games; Why No Lester Bangs of Gaming?; Looking For Lester

On the June 21 edition of Only a Game, Bill Littlefield offered this interview with John Feinstein, author of Living on the Black. (Sorry, but you have to listen to the preceding stories before you get to the Feinstein segment.)

Read an excerpt from Living on the Black.

The Leonard Lopate Show of June 24 featured this chat with Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Crowd Sounds Happy, a memoir about his childhood with a mentally ill father.

Those of you reading this in a timely manner and geographically available might be to know that Dawidoff will be speaking and signing books tonight at 8 p.m. at the Happy Ending Bar, 302 Broome Street (between Eldridge and Forsyth Streets).

Read an excerpt from The Crowd Sounds Happy.

Google allows me to indulge my obsessional nature.

I eagerly type “WBUR” into Google every workday morning. And, naturally, I am unable to curb the impulse to click on just about every link the results serve up.

The search behemoth is now a sacred part of my morning ritual, second only to the 9:00 a.m. beeline for the free Joe (one of the big perks here at the station). Calls go unanswered, e-mails pile up in the in-box, and I am habitually tardy to the daily staff meeting.

Sorry boss.

I am especially eager to catch up on the latest ‘BUR mentions in the blogosphere, and here Google is indispensable to my intelligence-gathering.

So if you suspect someone at the station is reading your blog posts about 90.9, then in all likelihood that someone is me (cue maniacal laughter).

Here are some selections culled from recent searches:

Photographs featuring images of workers clad in white hazmat suits slathering a large dome with blood red goop, not surprisingly spooked and puzzled. Radio Sweethearts.

They needed some answers and reassurance as apparently we overlooked the captions.

Oops.

Rest assured, Radio Sweethearts. It is just an innocuous bit of installation art. And no one was no one injured in its creation.

And I promise I’ll get busy captioning.

It goes without saying that it is always good to see WBUR mentioned in “Pit Bulls in the News.” Yes, you heard me right, that’s “Pit Bulls in the News.”

We have truly arrived.

It was also nice to see Minnesota Public Radio’s Jon Gordon recognize our Twitter initiative. Granted it is a teensy, weensy mention, but you know what they say about beggars:

I’d rather follow people than programs or organizations, but if you feel differently you can follow NPR News, Whad’Ya Know?, WBUR and MPR.

Uh…thanks?

And we do receive our fair share of criticism. To wit: Ed of Ed’s corner of the web:

I’m driving up Route 2 towards Concord, enjoying “Only a Game.” The usual WBUR sponsor bit comes on, but this time instead of Landry and Arcari or the MFA, the nice female radio voice spits out the name of a school of homeopathy! Let me say that again – homeopathy. You have got to be kidding me.

But it was not an “Only A Game underwriter,” but the tortoises featured on the show that garnered Eric on the Road’s attention.

Matthew Mash over at Our Daily Red blogs about accompanying the Radio Boston folks on a pilgrimage to public art displays throughout the Hub. Here are photographs of some of what they saw.

A recent On Point segment received mention in the heady Neurophilosophy blog. It seems that Jill Price can’t, quite literally, forget a thing. Refrain from smarmy wisecracks, as the condition is at times quite debilitating.

Poor Spencer Ante. His prerecorded interview with Bob Oakes keeps getting bumped. Ante is the author of a new book about venture capital pioneer Georges Doriot. Sorry Spencer, we don’t manage the news, the news manages us. But thanks for being such a good sport and for the link from your blog. Least we can do is reciprocate. And, if I am not mistaken, <a href=”http://www

Wizards Sign four to development deals

Unfinished Furniture

Wizardry of imports on display

Wizards Reserves Top Drake

After open Loss, United Looks Ahead 

Give Me Soccer or Give Me Death  Podcast halfway down the page

United Listless in MLS opener in 2-0 lost to Kansas City

Which teams need to be successful in 2008

South American invasion

Who will be MLS’ best in ‘08

Wizards Win Opener

Wizards win season opener in front of sell out

Lopez scores 1st game, leads Wizards to 2-0 win over D.C. United

Flying start for Crew, Revs and Wizards

Q&A: Conrad on Beckham, money, Rome, diving

New Forwards Trujillo, Lopez lead K.C. over D.C

MLS Round-Up: New England, Colorado Wins, Galaxy Fall

Wizards Notebook

Its Game Day

Colorado Over LA – Yeah, It was That Bad

AG

National Public Radio’s Boston affiliate, 90.9 WBUR is doing a series on football in South Africa (as a lead-up to the 2010 World Cup). Here’s the pitch:

“… Fifteen years ago, at a sold out King’s Park Stadium in Durban, the newly integrated South African national team celebrated its return to international soccer competition with a 1-0 win at home against Cameroon. South Africa was awarded the 2010 World Cup, the first such competition to be played on African soil. But Only A Game’s Ken Shulman found that in this land of many colors, sport is still a matter of black and white.”

You can stream it here.