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fantasy football tips - part 2
Waiver Scavenger
Since it’s impossible to predict 100% what will happen in a given fantasy football season, it’s also impossible to conduct a pre-season fantasy draft that will reflect 100% of what the upcoming NFL season has in store. What...
Football, Professionalism, and T.O.
Professionalism is the professional status, methods, character, or standards one must possess to be considered professional. Professionalism is something that Terrell Owens lacks. Owens is a lonely, yet, ignorant human being. He makes a bank-load...
The Key to Fitness Success
"If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one." - Anthony Robbins,...
The Top Five NFL Stadiums
A good football stadium can make even a losing game not seem like a total loss. If you’re not a fan of one of the top teams in the NFL then at least you may be a fan who gets to watch games in one of the top stadiums the NFL has to offer. Out of all...
Using Bodybuilding Supplements To Build Muscle Mass!
OK, first let's get something straight here... If you think that buying a shake or taking a few pills will all of a sudden make you huge, then you are mistaken. No supplement will help you if you are not training and dieting correctly -- they will...
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Ancient Olympians Were Really In It for the Money
(ARA) - The athletes will be feeling a lot of nostalgia when the 2004 Olympic Games get underway next August. For the first time in nearly 100 years, the games are returning to their place of origin: Athens, Greece.
Today’s Olympic games are all about the heat of competition. Athletes from around the world will compete against each other to prove they are the best at what they do. The winners will take home medals and pride of country.
“A lot of people think that’s what the ancient Greeks competed for too, but they’re wrong. Ancient athletes were in it for the money,” says William Blake Tyrrell, a professor of classics at Michigan State University. Tyrrell has done extensive research on Greek athletics from the period stretching from Homeric times through the 4th century B.C. His findings are published in the new book, “The Smell of Sweat.”
The 350-page book covers the events themselves, the religious and athletic centers, the festivals in which the games took place, the voices of the games’ celebrators, the critics and the athletes themselves.
“In this book, you’ll learn that Greek athletics was a cut-throat business, engaged for victory and victory alone without even a glimmer of the modern Olympic notion of competing for its own sake and doing one's best,” says Tyrrell. “In ancient Greece, if one's best was not the best, then it was nothing. To miss by an inch was as disgraceful as to miss by a mile.”
Tyrrell focuses on the bias in earlier treatments of Greek athletics and the “myth of Greek amateurism” in the book’s introduction. Chapters one through six examine evidence from Homeric times to the Golden Age of Athens.
The text moves from discussion about the virtue of the warrior as a model for the athlete to the role religion played in the games and the development of Olympia as an early Panhellenic center. In the early days of the Games, “heavy events,” such as wrestling, boxing and pankration -- a no-holds barred fight considered the ultimate combat sport -- were the competitions held in the highest regard. Later on, games of skill such as the pentathalon, jump, discus and javelin took on more importance.
“Athletics was a mediated battle that replaced the individual glory that once was the warrior’s, the glory that Greeks had heard of all their lives from epic poets, but could not achieve,” says Tyrrell.
“The Smell of Sweat” is accompanied by an extensive bibliography and companion CD-ROM of sources, translated into English. It is good reading for students of Greek athletics and culture, and available on Amazon.com and in major book stores. Orders can also be placed directly with Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers by logging onto www.bolchazy.com.
Courtesy of ARA Content
About the author:
Courtesy of ARA Content
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