Category: Sports

The Mishap at Mammoth

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Bob Lefsetz:

My inbox and voice mail are filling up with questions/concerns re the tragic accident at Mammoth Mountain today.

With 79″ of new snow, the ski patrol had to do a great deal of maintenance work to make the hill safe for skiing. In clearing up the Face of 3, a group of ski patrollers went to adjust a fence around a volcano vent on the far side of the slope. The ground collapsed and they were trapped and the latest report is three people died. It is not clear whether the fall killed them or the lack of oxygen or the volcanic gases.

It was very strange. One started to hear whispering. And then the upper lifts were running but they wouldn’t let anybody board. And then they stopped the upper lifts completely.

Different stories were circulated. One, that the snow just collapsed. Two, that by covering up the vent previously, the gases found a new exit and a larger area was rendered unstable.

Usha Lee McFarling notes the risks for those who work and play atop one of the nations largest active volcanic systems. Steve Hymon and Amanda Covarrubias have more.

Mammoth has had 638 inches (!) of snow this year. The lifts will be open until July 4th!

Mammoth Mountain

A Delightful Few Days Skiing at Wisconsin’s Whitecap Mountains

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A March visit to Whitecap Mountain

Spring break 2006 presented an opportunity to check out a ski area that was within a reasonable distance (avoid flights) and promised a decent amount of snow. I surfed the web last week seeking such a destination and found Whitecap, a resort that Ski Magazine has posted favorable words on the years. Those reviews, along with a very attractive package ($199 per person for 3 nights, 3 day lift tickets, 2 dinners, 3 breakfast meals, rentals and a one hour daily group lesson) sealed the deal.

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Taos Ski Valley

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Lisa Reed:

I’m here for the famous Taos ridge, which offers some of the most difficult, unspoiled terrain in any ski area in the country. The ridge is double-black-diamond terrain accessible only by foot; to get there, skiers must take lift No. 2 to its highest point, take off their skis and hike up a steep trail to the top. Because of the hiking and the double black diamonds, skiing the ridge has a hard-core cachet.

Not that I’m all that great a skier. But Taos’s “learn to ski better week” is about to change that, with a immersion program at its much-praised ski school. When you sign up for the “learn to ski better” program, you are assigned to a group at your level (there are many levels; “expert” alone has 10 different gradations, with the highest one being professional, and then ski every morning, Sunday to Friday. You’re on your own in the afternoon to practice what you’ve learned.

I came here last January to learn to ski better, and to ski terrain that was fun and challenging for me. Here is what I was not here to do: ski tedious blue runs just to keep a friend company; squabble about whether to stop for lunch; spend two hours looking for my missing nephew. These things tend to happen when you ski with friends and family. Inevitably, people have different skill levels. Last time I was at Taos, I went with five friends and family members. We skied together the first hour of the first day and then broke apart. No two of us were at the same level.

A Pleasant Saturday Morning at Tyrol Basin

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I’ve been avoiding trips to local ski areas from many years. The AA tag on my ski bag tells the story. The last time the bag was used was a flight from Albuquerque to Dallas – our last pre-children ski trip. The ski bag, along with my boot bag made the journey from Dallas to Madison in 1993.

Living in a four season climate, my recreation thoughts have generally drifted toward warm weather vacations. However, and perhaps giving in to the inevitable, I put my fun but evidently outmoded skis (purchased at Denver’s Gart Brothers during my days there) in the car and made the short drive to Tyrol Basin early Saturday morning.

A glorious, sunny day, there were perhaps 15 cars in the lot as we walked toward the ticket office. The temperature and conditions were quite good, with only a bit of ice detected here and there.

Moments later, standing on top of the basin, I enjoyed the view and thought that it was quite pleasant to be within an hour’s drive of this place.

While checking out the basin’s runs – all except the moguls, my thoughts turned to:

  • Training:
    I saw two (surprising) examples of skiers evidently losing control and requiring ski patrol assistance. Years ago, when I learned to ski in a more serious way (via a Swiss instructor at Loveland), he advised that I take a lesson at the beginning of each ski season. I think this is correct – and I spent a bit of time on Tyrol’s bunny hill last weekend, regaining my alpine perspective.
  • The Road Not Taken:
    Like Frost, I prefer the less travelled and popular routes. Tyrol makes it easy to turn right off the main lift and ski down toward another lift, where very few people where skiing (moguls – not for me, but the black and blue runs were enjoyable). I chose this route quite a few times and very much enjoyed the views, serenity and a rather quiet late morning outing.
  • Safety:
    There’s quite a bit more safety enhancements than I recall. A large, orange plastic fence now greets the skier as she turns off the triple chair. An out of control skier will be caught in this, rather than careening down the hill.
  • The rise of snowboarding:
    Just starting to take off when I last skied, snowboarding is big time, today. I can see the friction between traditional alpine downhillers and snowboarders.
  • Variety:
    Snowboarders, downhillers and telemark skiers mingled reasonably well at Tyrol. It’s great to see a few telemark folks sliding downhill.

Finally, my eldest added these notes:

You are weird skiing is odd and my lower back is sore!!!!! Overall it was a fun experience, and I would love to go more often next year!!! Thank you Nora for teaching me!!

Gladwell: Lazy Centers

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Malcolm Gladwell:

David Sally, a behavioral economist at Dartmouth, responds to the discussion I had with Bill Simmons yesterday on the tendency of NBA players to so dramatically over-perform in the last year of their contract:

With regard to the contract year phenomenon, we can go a little further–we can predict that the likelihood of the post-contract dip is positively correlated with the height of the player. Why is that? Again, the answer lies in the environment-individual link. The seven foot guy has heard that he should be a basketball player since he was eight years old or even younger. He’s been pushed his whole career onto the grade school team, onto the varsity, into Division I, and then the NBA draft. He is much less likely than the six foot guy to ever have made a committed choice. He may never had to exert anything approaching his maximum effort level until his contract year. As a result, he has either no idea how to persevere or no intrinsic motivation. So, Simmons’ rule is actually too blunt: it seems he should be able to draft contract-signing point guards and two guards for his fantasy team, but never centers or fours. Small forwards–we’d have to do the empirical study.

A Homecoming for Bart Starr

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Allen Barra:

For the man who will stride to midfield for the coin toss before the Super Bowl next weekend, it will be something of a homecoming.

Bart Starr, one of football’s greatest quarterbacks and the most important player of the Green Bay Packers dynasty in the 1960s, stepped away from the game and the public eye in 1988 after a family tragedy. Kickoff of Super Bowl XL will see his public reunion with the National Football League. And after the game he’ll be presenting the Lombardi Trophy, named after his old coach, the man with whom he won five NFL championships and two Super Bowls.

Leadership/Decision Making: Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep

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Michael Lewis:


The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz’s view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the “midlevel schools” in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech’s numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation’s highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach’s first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior – like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie’s 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

Paterno on Alvarez

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This weekend’s Penn State – Wisconsin game should be entertaining. Long Time Penn State coach Joe Paterno prepares with a few comments on outgoing UW Coach Barry Alvarez:

I think Barry has been a great coach. I am sorry to see him get out of coaching. He was a big, fat kid down there in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. We turned him down and he never forgot that. Every time I talk to him he reminds me of it. Barry is a great guy. He will be a great athletic director as he has been a great football coach. You hate to see guys like that get out of coaching, but everybody has their life to live and the whole bit. Barry and his wife are good friends and, obviously, he has been a good coach. He kicked our ears in most of the time. That part I won’t miss.