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Author Archives: Rory Masterson

On Spain, Barcelona and the “death” of Tiki-Taka

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July 8, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum

Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

–Robert Harrick, “To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time”

For the better part of the last five years, at least since Euro 2008 signaled the dawn of a Spanish renaissance in the sport, the Spanish men’s national football team has ridden a possession-heavy, triangular passing-based game to great success and historic heights, and not only by Spanish standards. The style they have made their own, affectionately dubbed tiki-taka for its quick passing, had its roots in the Ajax/Netherlands “total football” system of the 1970s. When the greatest Dutch player ever, Johann Cruyff, became FC Barcelona’s manager in 1988, he brought the total football mentality with him and placed the greatest burden in the field on his most talented midfielder, Josep Guardiola. Guardiola ascended to the throne at Barcelona in June 2008 and left it four years later having put together perhaps the greatest list of accomplishments in any four-year span in the history of club soccer.

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Purple Reign – Baby I’m a Star

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July 1, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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soggy-soccer-field

It wasn’t quite a wet, windy Tuesday night in Stoke, but it was a hazy, overcast Sunday afternoon in New York that eventually, mercifully brought rain and tremendous heartbreak to Purple Reign’s second match. On the same day as another, slightly less important game of futbol, the commute to Riverside Park was far less stressful (mostly because I left my apartment with more than enough time), though I am still not convinced I have found the most efficient way of crossing from the Bronx to upper east side of Manhattan; this time, I traversed the entire island laterally, itself a full workout and showed up to the field drenched in sweat. Fortunately I had remembered to put on sunscreen prior to departing, not that it ended up mattering at all given the clouds. Walking up to the field, I ran into two teammates, and we discussed how perfect it would be if the skies opened, only slightly, allowing a few precious, cool drops of rain to fall.

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Illadelph Halflife

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June 28, 2013
Music, Pop Culture
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Questlove

…well Tariq?

So begins the mid-life memoir of Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove. Thompson, whose drumming with neo-soul outfit The Roots and, consequently, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon has catapulted him to fringes of the American musical conscience, a place which seems hard-earned and well-deserved, yet perhaps not entirely desired. The dedication, directed toward Roots co-founder Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, sets the tone for an exploration of Thompson’s ego, which rides a strange line between pretension, generally about the history of the music he loves, and modesty, generally about his own career and the experiences which have made him who he is.

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The Lord’s Prayer

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June 26, 2013
Hockey, Sports
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The 2013 Stanley Cup Finals will be remembered for a variety of reasons: it was the first final in twenty years to feature at least three overtime games,  it was the first final since 1979 to feature two of the Original Six franchises and it included perhaps the most improbable Stanley Cup-winning comeback in NHL history, a 17-second burst of offense that began with the Blackhawks pulling their immovable force of a goalie, Corey Crawford, and ended with a rebounded shot from Dave Bolland.

Really, it was an alignment of all the things that make postseason hockey a seemingly different sport from regular season hockey, one which people are more willing to ingest as a result of the excitement and fervor with which each team plays its games. No one leaves anything on the ice during the playoffs, or at least that is what fans are led to believe, and when a team has already played a legendary first-round series, with a legendary game 7, it is hard to continue putting out the effort to defeat team after team in route to a championship.

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Purple Reign – Let’s Go Crazy

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June 24, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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Courtesy Warner Bros.

When I moved to New York City for college, there was a list of things that I knew I would need to do to take full advantage of my time here in between classes and, you know, working my way toward being a half-decent, functioning human being in the post-undergraduate world. Along the way, various items have been added, put on hold, scrapped altogether or forgotten. One of the tasks I knew I needed to complete once I decided on staying in the city for the summer after my junior year was to join and play in a recreational city soccer league. After extensive research with the help of some people on the world wide web, I decided upon ZogSports as my league partly for its relatively reasonable entrance fee and also for its association with charities in and around the city (ZogSports requires teams to play in the honor of a charity of their choosing). After unsuccessfully trying to get a few of my friends to join with me, I went for it alone. I paid the bill and began the waiting game, hoping the almighty Zog would not stall too long before alerting me of my teammates.

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A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, And Back Again

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June 22, 2013
Auto Racing, Sports
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Now that the basketball season is a wrap, and with hockey soon to follow, only one of the four major North American seasonal sports, Major League Baseball, will be in session. While the great American pastime certainly carries with it a tradition which is engraved in the hearts of millions, the dog days of summer can get repetitive in the nationally-televised sports world, as diving catches and cannonball home runs take sole possession of center stage on ESPN. By the third instance of a 4-6-3 double play in the SportsCenter Top 10, viewers find themselves rolling their eyes with the reluctantly accepting frustration of Lester Freamon in the pawn shop unit.

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Tuesdays With Horry, a Prologue

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June 20, 2013
Music, Pop Culture, Sports
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Robert Horry, San Antonio Spurs vs. Los Angele...

Robert Horry, 7-time NBA champion and demigod of the crunch time DNA strand.

From a world where perspective blogs from anyone with a computer and a drive to create a WordPress account are a dime a dozen, Tuesdays With Horry has risen. As another voice in an already bombastic journalistic front, we look to provide views and opinions on sports and pop culture ranging from the supreme moral worth of March Madness to the low-brow insidiousness of hot Top 40 singles, and everything in between. We do not necessarily expect to shoot higher than others; rather, our aim is merely in a different direction, to capture the essence of what fans may feel about a given performer, athlete, team or album, and so on.

The name Tuesdays With Horry is, of course, derived from two sources: the first, Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, an examination of the relationship between student and teacher, and the second, seven-time NBA champion Robert Horry, whose exploits in crunch time situations  from the forward positions (and remarkable tendency to be on the right teams at the right times) have solidified him a place in NBA lore as the man with the most rings who did not play on the Boston Celtics with Bill Russell. He’s got more rings than Michael Jordan, for goodness’ sake. The name works on a number of levels, as we look to learn from our predecessors (namely, Run of Play, FreeDarko, The Classical and, most prominently, Grantland) and perhaps build on their success with achievements of our own. Basically, this group of writers does not mind being the sixth man who can consistently hit a clutch 3-pointer.

As the brainchild of a few students, past and present, we expect to open dialogues on a variety of subjects both popular and under-the-radar, and our geographic web is wide enough at present to be able to comfortably gauge the reactions of people in a given moment, the most important of which may help to define our limited time here. At the same time, we hope to engage you, the reader, in a way which invites thoughtful commentary and discussion on the topics at the forefront of popular society, for better or for worse.