Old white men can be a curious lot. Through much of the country they’re bellyaching for freedom, against the tyranny of outside forces, like the government, taxes or unions from impeding them in any way. However, sometimes, ideals be damned, they need to stand up for other old white men who feel aggrieved by people exercising the very freedom they harp about defending.

On the day the Knicks introduced Carmelo Anthony after a months-long courtship, the Nets acquired the alleged coach-killing Deron Williams from the Jazz. Not to mention this being less than a year after LeBron, D-Wade and Chris Bosh orchestrated a coup that allowed the three to join forces in Miami. And let’s not forget that Chris Paul isn’t exactly thrilled with his situation either playing for the league-owned Hornets. Well, this isn’t sitting well with old white sportswriters and talking heads.

Dick Vitale thinks the inmates have taken over the asylum, a New York Daily News beat writer takes to the airwaves to argue players have too much power, Ken Berger of CBSSports.com calls it all a “shell game” that exposes a “dark underside,” which portends league-wide “Armageddon,” Rick Reilly is tut-tutting over these egotistic stars deleterious effects on the game, SI’s Michael Rosenberg rails against Carmelo’s selfishness and the same magazine’s Ian Thomsen said these deals just about assured a lockout because owners won’t stand for player machinations of this sort any longer. Yet, I didn’t see anyone writing stories about how wrong Denver was to trade Chauncey Billups, who wanted to finish his career in Denver–so much for player control.

As much as “The Decision” was a disgrace and that the whole ‘Melo trade talk was needlessly protracted, this endless handwringing over players pushing to play on the team of their choosing is fraught with stupidity; a pervasive attitude that athletes should stay under the thumbs of owners. The hive mind of sports media seems to agree that the olden days of owners maintain total control like in those wondrous days of yore before free agency, when sports was closer to indentured servitude.

This idea is hardly new. Chuck Klosterman enjoys arguing that if you polled sports writers on their personal politics, they majority would appear left of center, however the lens through which they view sports makes them seem oppressive and antiquated. None of them would want an asshole like Bill Parcells as their boss, but they insist that players need to stay in lock-step with his dictatorial demands. Columnists, like the current Supreme Court, are firmly on the side of bosses and our corporate overlords. That means the NFL’s dean of journalists, Peter King, writes slurpy love letters to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in Sports Illustrated on the eve of a major labor negotiation that’s looking to fleece the players and Buzz Bissinger idiotically opines that the NBA is too black for white America.

Somehow, owners have co-opted the notion that their actions represent the ones that are for THE GOOD OF THE GAME and that players, in opposing ownerships’ moves, are in the business of destroying sport. Mind you that it’s the owner Tom Hicks that bankrupted the Texas Rangers and eviscerated Liverpool FC with his over-leveraged idiocy. It was George Shinn whose moral and financial bankruptcy has nearly brought the NBA’s Hornets to their knees. The NHL, in their lust for money, expanded idiotically into the Southern US, diluting and bankrupting their sport. Donald Sterling’s naked profiteering has kept the LA Clippers from ever being great, on top of him being a horrid human. The NFL owners create a system where they don’t guarantee player salaries, forcing them to destroy their bodies to keep a roster spot, but then get fine-happy when the players start destroying their bodies too much, and yet the owners still push to add two more games to an already grueling season. For THE GOOD OF THE GAME, indeed.

The sports media has been complicit in this charade for a long time. These guys have been so used to carrying water for ownership, that siding with them in these current labor disputes must almost be a Pavlovian response. There was hardly a whiff of dissent back in the 1990s, when America’s cities went on stadium-building binges with their own cheering section in the media.

Those halcyon times when a predominantly conservative group of multi-millionaires and billionaires built their entire economic model on government subsidies and handouts in the form of opulent sports palaces constructed on the public’s dime. In these pursuits, sports talk radio and newspaper columnists handled the PR for them by heralding the “need” for stadiums for the city’s economy despite countless studies by the likes of economist Andrew Zimbalist that point to the contrary. They held up the idea that to be a “World Class” city, you had to have professional sports teams, but as was aptly pointed out back when the Seattle Sonics begged for a new arena, the visiting Prime Minister of China didn’t meet with the owners of the team, he met with Bill Gates.

The media helped fleece cities to benefit owners and now they’re primed to do the same to wrest money and rights from the players. Perhaps because with the advent of free agency, sports fandom has become a practice in rooting for laundry, so it makes sense to stick up for those who own the laundry as apposed to the ones who are loaned the shirts and short pants on a limited basis. But in the coming labor battles in both the NBA and NFL, the Tea Party should break with the old white men in the front office and get on the players’ side to demand that they keep their freedom.

Before the season started, I told my editor at Popular Mechanics “Some big pitcher is going to blow out his elbow and need Tommy John surgery, let me write a story right now that explains how it works and how the science is changing to help pitchers recover from a torn elbow ligament faster.” He agreed and here it is! p.s. Sorry, Strasburg fans, he won’t be pitching at a high level again until 2012.

Here’s my list of my five favorite pieces of long-form journalism in 2010, in no particular order:

“Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” by Steven Hyden, The AV Club
One man’s journey back to his youth to explore the music that defined the 1990s; charting it’s ebbs and flows in a multi-part series that also explains why alternative rock has largely faded from memory.

“The Empty Chamber” by George Packer, The New Yorker
Packer captures the maddening inactivity and ineptitude of our nation’s deliberative body.

“The Dirtiest Player” by Jason Fagone, GQ
Not only a fantastic piece of reporting and a well-told story of Marvin Harrison’s alleged involvement in another man’s death, but an indictment of sports journalists (and perhaps sports journalism in general, which equates being good on the field with being good off) who did features on Harrison and never dug any further to actually understand the man and his past.

“Roger Ebert: The Essential Man” by Chris Jones, Esquire
From one of the best writers in America right now comes an amazing profile of the venerable film critic, who has lost his jaw to cancer but not his passion for work. Let’s just say it got a little dusty in the room when I got to the part about Siskel. You should also check out Jones’ exceptional, National Magazine Award-winning piece “The Things That Carried Him.”

“The Late Shaft” by Bill Zehme, Playboy
Zehme is one of the absolute masters of the form and few people on the planet know more about the intricacies of the late night comedy world than this man who has covered it since he first profiled Dave back in the early 80s. In the process of writing about Letterman around the time he started Late Night, Dave introduced Zehme to a promising young comic, Jay Leno, and for the last three decades he’s chronicled their rise and feud (along with Johnny’s eventual ouster) in the pages of Rolling Stone and Esquire. Zehme has trolled the mind of these comics more than most, especially Jay, whose autobiography he penned.

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Honorable mentions have to go to Atul Gawande’s “Letting Go,” Michael Lewis’ “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” Mark Greif’s “What Was the Hipster?” Chuck Klosterman’s profile of Jonathan Franzen in GQ and the gang at Slate’s preseason NFL Roundtable with Josh Levin, Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson and Tom Scocca–it was truly a thinking fan’s guide to the game.

Seems that most everything your high school gym teacher told you is wrong. Well, at least when it comes to all that start-of-the-class stretching.

A recent spate of studies shows that when it comes to warming up before exercising, phys ed instructors didn’t do us any favors by having us to go through a series of calf extensions, hurdler’s stretches and the like.

The latest salvo against stretching comes from a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which found that static stretching before a workout lowered runners’ endurance and made their body less efficient. While previous studies have illustrated the effects of stretching on anaerobic activities, this was the first one to show the effects on runners.

Read the rest at Wired.com

At 28 years old and approaching the downside of his career, a rib injury kept American tennis player Mardy Fish out of last year’s US Open. A few weeks after the tournament, nursing two bad knees, he had the left one surgically repaired and realized his chronic pains and slipping world ranking weren’t merely a product of age.

The 6-foot-2 Minnesotan acknowledged what others had already known: “I was just too heavy,” he told Wired.com. “Flat out too heavy.”

Read the rest at Wired.com

This article originally appeared on Popularmechanics.com.

In the 2004 US Open tennis quarterfinals, Serena Williams couldn’t catch a break against Jennifer Capriati. Faced with a comedy of linesman and chair umpire errors, the world’s best player looked on as one bad call after another went against her, swinging the match in Capriati’s favor. The decisions were so egregious that US Open officials dismissed the chair umpire from the remainder of the tournament and apologized to Williams for the calls. But an even more significant development in the aftermath of the match was the increased pressure to introduce technology into the game that would assist in line calls; a shift which would change the game.

Two years later, the US Open became the first of the four major tennis tournaments to allow technology that could have prevented the 2004 controversy when it introduced Hawk-Eye. The system works by mounting 10 high-speed cameras around the court with five dedicated to each side of the net to capture the ball’s movement from multiple angles, measuring its speed and trajectory. Then a computer processes that information, pinpointing the spot on the court within 3 mm of where the ball hit the ground and calculating the ball’s compression to determine the size and shape of the mark that represents where the ball touched the court.

Now with three of the four majors and numerous pro tournaments adopting the technology, it has gained support among players, broadcasters, fans and officials alike. The overwhelming success of tennis’s adoption of Hawk-Eye to aid officiating provides a model for sports still reticent about technology, like soccer, on how to integrate it into their game.

Even before the 2004 US Open, the need in tennis for a replay system was becoming apparent, as the pace of the game was fast becoming too quick for the naked eye. “String and racquet technology has made it so you can hit a tennis ball so much harder than you used to be able to,” says Mary Carillo, a former player and now a commentator for ESPN, CBS and NBC. “There’s so much more spin on the ball that it’s that much harder to judge whether a shot’s on or over the line.” So for years inventors have come to tennis’s governing bodies proposing innovations ranging “from sensors in the line to metal flakes in the ball to try to find a better mousetrap in terms of calling lines,” says David Brewer, US Open deputy tournament director.

Dr. Paul Hawkins built that better mousetrap. He premiered Hawk-Eye for cricket in 2001 and soon after he adapted the system for tennis. Networks began calling on Hawkins and his system that showed computer animations of a ball’s flight path to augment the instant replay in their broadcasts. Hawkins approached tennis’ governing bodies to propose that his tool officially adjudicate close line calls.

With the International Tennis Federation supportive of new technology, it tested Hawk-Eye at lower level tournaments to examine its viability. Then came the Williams-Capriati match that further pushed the tennis community toward wanting assistance on lines calls. “We always hesitate to say ‘this is the thing that was the tipping point,’” Brewer says. “But that probably was the tipping point.”

After two years of extensive testing the USTA put their full support behind Hawk-Eye. Yet the system didn’t displace umpires and linesmen altogether. They’re still in place, but now players can make three incorrect challenges per set and receive an additional challenge if the set goes to a tiebreak.

“I think it’s great that big matches are not decided if a linesperson or a chair umpire makes a couple of mistakes,” says Darren Cahill, formerly the world’s No. 22 ranked player, now a coach and commentator for ESPN. And in contrast to other fears about video review detracting from the game, Cahill believes Hawk-Eye has enhanced tennis. “It creates a little bit of suspense when you call for a challenge, making tennis a better sport for spectators and also a better TV sport.”

Although “it’s clearly more accurate than the human eye,” Carillo says, the system isn’t perfect. At a tournament last year, Hawk-Eye’s onsite tech called up the wrong bounce for review, erroneously calling a ball in that had actually bounced out; an error that Hawk-Eye and tournament officials didn’t recognize until after the match ended.

While tennis has shown that it is open to new technologies, other sports, like soccer, have resisted the camera and computer aid. Despite missed calls nearly as infamous as the Williams-Capriati match, including the go-ahead goal by England in the 1966 World Cup Final over Germany that may have never crossed the line, soccer has kept electronic aids out of the game. But a terrible call by a linesman in 2005 that cost Tottenham a goal—and a win—prompted English Premier League officials to explore technological solutions. Hawk-Eye for soccer tested well, impressing league officials by accurately showing whether a ball crossed the line even in “a far more crowded penalty box than has ever happened in any goal line situation,” Hawkins says.

In spite of Hawk-Eye’s promise and Adidas’ developing a ball with a chip embedded inside that could detect when it crossed the goal line, in March FIFA ruled that it would no longer continue testing the technologies; justifying the decision by saying, “we were all agreed that technology shouldn’t enter football because we want football to remain human.”

Baseball purists similarly lobbied for preserving the game’s human element, successfully keeping replay out of baseball for years, until a spate of incorrect home run calls in 2008 caused the league to allow umpires to use instant replay to determine a homerun. But the purists have won out in preventing the use of video review for close calls on the base paths.

Since its inception, Hawkeye has had a very noteworthy detractor: world No. 1, Roger Federer. “He’s a traditionalist,” Cahill says. “For the game to change in any sense, Roger would be a little questioning about it because he has great respect for the game of tennis.” But Carillo says Federer’s dislike of Hawk-Eye goes beyond merely introducing a change to the game’s protocol, “Federer questions the accuracy as well.” Most famously so in the 2007 Wimbledon Final, where he pleaded with the umpire to disregard Hawk-Eye calling a ball in by a millimeter that Federer was convinced was out.

But Federer’s voice is a minority one. “Most players think this a hell of a lot better than it used to be,” Carillo says. “In the beginning of tennis, the notion was always that it was just a bunch of retired wing commanders at Wimbledon calling the lines and falling asleep during the matches in the sun,” Carillo says with a laugh. “Over the years it’s got better as the stakes got higher.”

While most of the media focuses on the Oscars’ glamour awards like Best Picture or Best Actor, Popular Mechanics convened a panel of experts that includes past winners, to sort out the nominees in technical categories. Our award-winning group’s insight is the ultimate cheat sheet for those looking to win their Oscar pool.Read the full story at Popular Mechanics

As football fans around the world turn their attention toward the Miami Dolphins’ Sun Life Stadium for Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday, Popular Mechanics looked at the other 30 NFL stadiums and found five that lead the league in innovation.

To read the full article, which originally appeared on Popular Mechanics, click here

As Seattle’s building boom has gone bust with capital drying up, a massive three-acre hole sits dormant in the middle of one of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods—and it isn’t going to be filled anytime soon.

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It just sits there, taunting neighbors and passersby with all of its unrealized potential laid bare. A gigantic hole the size of two-and-a-half football fields that looks more like a swimming pool with the water drained out than the construction site it should be. Inside it there are no cranes, no workers, nothing.

The stillness of the hole is head-scratchingly curious. Most people walking around it have no idea why someone has carved this three-acre, 20-foot-deep chasm into one of Seattle’s best neighborhoods and just left it to sit. But sit it does—a casualty of a boom gone bust.

During this decade’s real estate boom, holes like the one on the east side of Green Lake dotted the city’s landscape. Back then capital flowed, credit was easy and a pit quickly became the home of a gleaming new development. However, the cavity at 71^st and Woodlawn, a stone’s throw from the lake that gives the neighborhood its name, has been sitting dormant for nearly two years with little hope of being filled anytime soon.

Before it turned into an unsightly hole in the ground, the Vitamilk Dairy occupied the block facing the Little Red Hen country western bar. But after six decades of operation, the Hen’s milk-making neighbor closed its doors in 2003. Although their business went belly-up, the family who owned the dairy retained the site and teamed with developer Lorig Associates. In 2004, they outlined plans for a new mixed-use retail and residential space that would be “a legacy for the neighborhood,” says Lorig’s Krista Blackburn, the site’s project manager.

It was a venture evocative of the age—what was old and had outlived its usefulness would be demolished and made new again. During the last 10 years, we imploded the Kingdome to build Qwest and dismantled the UNOCAL transfer station to make way for the Olympic Sculpture Park. In that vein the family would raze their abandoned dairy and replace it with a six-story building replete with 480 apartments and 120,000 square feet of retail space.

The plan was fine in theory, but the execution hit a significant snag as demolition began in 2007. In the spring of that year, Lorig announced upscale grocer Metropolitan Market would likely be the property’s all-important “anchor tenant”. Unfortunately, the store pulled out of negotiations a short time later, leaving the developer to seek another supermarket to take Metropolitan’s place. After the withdrawal, a Portland-based store showed interest, but talks with them stalled as well.

The lack of an anchor tenant paralyzed the project. Lorig removed equipment from the hole it had just dug and halted construction while it searched in vain for a grocer. Prospects of finding this elusive lessee were all but dashed last fall when the nation was hit by an economic tsunami that washed away the credit markets. In the wake of the downturn, “a ridiculous inaccessibility to finance” gripped the region and froze building, says Bob Gregg, an Edmonds-based developer, who himself has a 50-unit condo development on hold until “financing loosens up.”

As if the lack of cash flow wasn’t bad enough for developers, the fancy-free days of perpetually rising property values also ceased.  The market fell so far that the cost of developing a property actually exceeds the value of the finished product, says Levis Kochin an economics professor at the University of Washington. “Building now is a way of guaranteeing yourself a loss.”

For the owners of the giant hole, they’re in the fortunate position to weather the recession because they own the land outright. Letting such a valuable property sit idle for so long would cause “a lot of other developers to go bankrupt” says Michael Cornell, a realtor who chairs the Green Lake Community Council. With the luxury of being patient, the site will remain dormant for at least another year, according to Blackburn, who says “our best hope is that we would start construction in June 2010.” That means Green Lake will be waiting at least three years before development’s completion.

However the prospects of building are improving, as the chilly real estate market shows signs of warming nationally. Locally, Gregg sees the economy strengthening with the recent uptick in sales of his condos. These signs of a rebound give Blackburn optimism about the future, saying potential tenants are looking long term and are banking on things not being so bleak in the years after construction finally begins.

“When all is said and done, it’s going to be two to two-and-a-half years later and the world is going to be a much different place than it is today.”

It would be too harsh to call Don Terry a cautionary tale. He’s closer to a warning—and a gentle reminder—that in the 21^st Century, the business of journalism, the careers of newspapermen, are all too fleeting and fickle.

A talented writer and reporter, Terry crafted great stories on topics ranging from the genocide in Rwanda, to the life of an exonerated death row inmate, to Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. He got into the profession with the noblest of purposes: “To be a freedom fighter. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and I still try to do that.” Despite his prowess and body of work, in February 2009, the Chicago Tribune laid him off, a casualty of the decline of the American newspaper.

Now with the Chicago Sun-Times, writing columns nearly one-tenth the size of his features, he has time on his hands. Time to discuss his career, impart some knowledge and ruminate on the future of the business. So at the end of the 20-foot-long table Terry sits, surrounded by students, discussing his brilliant 2006 Chicago Tribune profile of Reverend Jesse Jackson, “God’s frequent flier”. “One of the best long form pieces I’ve ever read in a Chicago newspaper,” says Alan Solomon, himself a longtime writer and the man who invited Terry to speak to this group of aspiring journalists.

Describing his journey with Jackson, Terry endears himself to his audience, with a quiet charm and wit. In his brown tweed jacket and white button-down shirt tucked into his jeans, the 52-year-old with the salt-and-pepper hair looks and behaves more like an affable history professor than the stereotype of a grizzled, bitter newspaperman. After ditching his prepared script, his mood becomes jaunty and self-deprecating. When a one-liner elicits a round of laughs, he boosts himself up in his chair playfully like a meerkat, grinning, extending his neck and jutting his jaw to the side.

The audience’s attention is rapt as Terry recounts following around the peripatetic preacher for the better part of the summer, wanting to see what made his fellow South Sider tick and to explain who Jackson is, beyond the sound bites and characterizations. Terry trailed him from LA to New York, from Atlanta to Venezuela, observing the man, trying to peel back the layers to see what resided in Jackson’s core.

“To get into someone’s head and heart takes a long time,” Terry says. “Especially with someone who’s so used to reporters, cameras, questions and protecting himself around the media.” Unfortunately, time is money. Something the bankrupt Tribune Company lacks at the moment, so the paper can’t make the significant investment needed to write and report stories the caliber of the Jackson piece.

“The Tribune was paying for every hotel, every meal, every airplane flight,” Terry says. “We were all over the place. So that’s really expensive. They’re going to do less of that. It’s not going to disappear, but they’re going to do less of that,” which leaves a seasoned pro like Terry relegated to the sidelines of the industry. He admits the current media landscape, defined by budget cuts and time constraints are “keeping [him] unemployed.”

“Right now I have to cobble together all kinds of stuff to make ends meet. If I wasn’t married to my wife, I’d be living out of my mother’s house right now,” the gallows humorist says with a chuckle.

To a room full of graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism his assessment of the industry is as portentous and depressing as the damp, cloudy skies in full view through the windows spanning the classroom’s eastern wall.

It’s hard to see when the newspaper industry’s growing pains will subside, while it sheds customers and its remaining subscribers age. “One of the great challenges in our business is finding a way to maintain a quality product and also appeal to the next generations who have to support you to exist and it’s been a difficult task,” says Solomon. The baby boomers may be the last American generation to engage with the printed version of the daily paper and Solomon can see the change every day at his doorstep. He’s noticed that in his 11-unit condo building “the seven people who get the Tribune are all in their 50s and above,” he explains. “The audience is changing and it’s dying out”

The generation divide is evident to Terry as he peers around his alma mater’s classroom and sees every student with their computer in front of them.“I went to Medill, class of 1980. You all have laptops, when I came in and they had a selection of IBM typewriters and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. So fancy!” he says to a chorus of laughs.

Perhaps more importantly than changing the way news is reported, Terry says technology has changed the way journalists are compensated, which could make the profession prohibitive. “One reason that we were able to make a living as journalists for as long as we did was because we were paid a living wage,” Terry explains. “I see this internet stuff, they basically want you people to work for free.”

Yet among the aspiring scribes, there’s a feeling that a new order may emerge from this uncertain time and that with the current economy, journalists aren’t the only ones licking their wounds. “There’s tons of laid off bankers right now, what’s the difference?” Kim Wilson says, “It’s maybe cyclical and there may be opportunity with things in flux.”

Terry tells the students it’s in their hands to figure out the future of the profession. The students tell the old master there’s still reason for hope. Still a reason to pursue the profession he loves. Still work to be had.

“I’m an optimist,” remarks Emily Co. “I heard there’s spots open in Baghdad.”