The Klitschkos do not lack charisma. They simply don’t mug and caper for the cameras. If you want to say they lack something, it would be showmanship.
After 8 years of drawing millions of viewers, the Bud Bowl seems to have forever departed this mortal coil.
Since I don’t speak Russian, it amounts to the same thing.
The Klitschko’s are the best one-dimensional fighters in the world. Jab, jab, right, and move. Every third exchange include a left hook. Repeat. They keep with it because they win, at least the one who hasn’t retired, but unless they get TKO’ed every ten seconds of their fights looks like every other ten seconds.
It’s not that they don’t mug and caper - it’s that they don’t do anything except move and jab and drop in the right. I saw Klitschko vs. Samuel Peter, and eight rounds on the heavy bag would have had more variety.
They won with it, but that doesn’t help much. At least Mayweather has moves, although I won’t watch him for reasons mentioned above. I watched a YouTube analysis of Roberto Duran the other night, and seeing an all-time great like Duran made watching ordinaries like V. Klitschko and V. Klitschko like drinking stale lemonade after aged bourbon. Yes, it’s unfair - Duran was the greatest lightweight ever, and Klitschko isn’t a household name even in his own household. But I can dream, can’t I?
Regards,
Shodan
They are from Ukraine, not Russia.
WRT to their performance in the ring, sticking to a winning strategy whether it entertains you (the spectator) or not is distinctly a lack of showmanship.
Women’s 6 player basketball.
6- and 8-man football, probably because the tiny high schools that used to play it were consolidated out of existence.
I know that at least in Michigan the 8-man class is the fastest growing one in the state, as fewer kids turn out (or enrollments drop) and more schools abandon the 11-man game and replace it with the smaller version. But in the long run you might be right. Even the bigger schools might be very different physical entities in the next couple of decades and having a thousand kids bussed in to the same place five days a week might not fit into the new structure of education.
The high school I graduated from in Wisconsin switched to the 8-man format because of their smaller size and have been the top team in the conference for a few years now.
And the next nearest school is about 20 miles away or so. Back when I was in high school we actually had a consolidated football team with them. They split apart some time after I graduated, and then went to 8-man less than a decade ago.
I highly doubt there’s going to be any consolidation since the school district I went to is about 36 miles long as it is (with the school roughly in the middle. Joining with the next nearest school district would create a potential for very long distance for some people.
I think Red Wiggler’s post is far closer to what’s going to happen in the future.
For those interested, it looks like the ball is in Mayweather’s court now as to whether the big fight will happen May 2.
Manny Pacquiao agrees to terms for fight with Floyd Mayweather - ESPN
Also, there’s a set of 9-man rules available for high schools now. This has the advantage of schools with 11-man teams being more likely to play the school using 9-man rules, which is not quite as much of a jump as it is to 8-man - especially if the 8-man school has an 80-yard field.
However, something else may lead to an increase in 8-man football; the trend of more and more parents keeping their kids out of football.
I seem to recall reading years ago that more people attended horse races in a year than any other sport. Doubt that’s even close to true now.
Is auto racing the new #1 or is it baseball?
In terms of live per-event attendance NASCAR eclipses everything.
Except Formula 1. A bit of Googling gave 98k for Nascar and 161k for Formula 1.
For total attendance it is baseball because they play so many games.
Hmmm. Looks like you’re right. NASCAR attendance has dropped considerably since its mid-2000s heyday.
I supposed it depends on how you define “total attendance”. If you mean just US Major League Baseball versus, say, the English Premier League, then you’re right. But I don’t see why you’d only count the EPL, and if you count all top-flight football then it’s miles ahead. Come to think of it, Premier League teams might be about level with baseball on their own if you count cup and European play.
MLB alone, i.e. ignoring Japan and any Caribbean countries that play baseball, has higher attendance than EPL, English Championship League, Bundesliga, Serie A, and La Liga combined. Cite.
I expect that if you totaled all the countries that play football versus all those that play baseball, then football would come out ahead. But when looking at single countries, those 162 game seasons pile up the attendance.
And don’t forget all the minor league teams that play between 80 and 144 games per season. There is a lot of professional baseball being played in this country and there’s a real possibility that more than 200 million tickets are sold each year.
They just don’t play enough games, not even close, even with other games.
Average EPL attendance isn’t actually THAT high. Average per game attendance is about 36,000, versus Major League Baseball’s 30,000. Teams like Man United and Arsenal draw hordes of people but the down-table teams are happy with a crowd of 20,000. Even counting European and cup play there’s no comparison in terms of the total draw.
Baseball is absolutely the king of spectator sports in terms of the total number of tickets sold, at least at the “major league” level of any given sport. But, clearly, that is but one way to judge a sport’s success and there are a lot of others.
And there is something to be said for having such high average attendance per game with 81 home games. That’s quite a commitment as a fan (obviously it isn’t always the same fans) - of course the per-ticket cost is cheaper.
For average fans per match, car racing definitely wins out, followed by American football.
Lawn Bowls was huge in Australia from the 50s-80s. It had a fantastic, built-in attraction. Because of the Liquor Licensing laws, the only place you could get a drink on a Sunday was either the Bowls club or the Golf club - and at the Bowls Club, you didn’t have to walk around chasing a little ball for 4 hours.
Pubs also used to shut at 6 every evening - so if you wanted a drink with your mates and didn’t just want to sit at home - ‘Gotta go to Bowls practice, love’.
It is also interesting that Bowls clubs have as many ‘Non-bowling’ members as playing members - they can do croquet, darts, fishing, snooker, knitting, whatever - but because they are under the ‘Bowling Club’ authority - you can have a drink while doing it.
In may country towns, the Bowls Club is the heart of the town - the main restaurant, bar, sometimes cinema, dance hall, everything.
As the licensing laws were relaxed during the 70s, bowls did drop in popularity, but it was so well established in the culture, there is no chance of it dying out in the next few decades.
I’m a big Forza fan, and I bought the Fanatec wheel and pedals for Forza 4.
Then I bought an Xbox One with the main goal of playing Forza 6 on it, and discovered that my wheel is incompatible. This is a wheel that works on the PS3/PS4, the PC, the Xbox360, and has a standard USB wired interface. It didn’t even occur to me that it wouldn’t be compatible with the new Xbox One.
There is no upgrade path, other than to buy $800 worth of new hardware and scrap my old stuff. Not going to happen. So my Forza days are over. I’m moving my wheel setup to the PC and I’ll play Project Cars or iRacing, hopefully with a VR headset. Xbone is dead to me for making such a blatant anti-consumer decision.