Monday, September 9, 2019

The Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips

when he comes into the ring, Hakuho, the greatest sumotori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants — his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him — and wearing his embroidered apron, the kesho-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, Hakuho climbs onto the trapezoidal block of clay, two feet high and nearly 22 feet across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyo, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: One step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyo before the tournament; above, a six-ton canopy suspended from the arena’s ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Colored tassels hang from the canopy’s corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese 1 constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north. Over the canopy, off-center and lit with spotlights, flies the white-and-red flag of Japan.




Thursday, September 5, 2019

Narrative Voice, Description, Imagery and Steph's Shot





The game clock reads 6:31. The ball rises up Curry's body into the ideal shooting pocket just below his chest, while his middle finger and forefinger -- his shooting fork -- search instinctively for a seam at the center of the ball. As the ball continues its ascent, his right palm bends back flat until the skin of his wrist begins to wrinkle. The last thing Granger or any defender wants to see in this situation are the 16 Hebrew characters that Curry, in June, had tattooed on the inside of his shooting wrist. By the time that message from Corinthians (love never fails) flashes, it's too late.


-David Fleming
 ESPN
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/10703246/golden-state-warriors-stephen-curry-reinventing-shooting-espn-magazine

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