All Posts Tagged With: "ESPN"
Closing shop on the Beijing Bureau
The Olympics came, bringing color, joy, sound, culture. People arrived with drums, face paint, flags, chants. For two and a half weeks, they helped transform the city into a place befitting the center of the world, giving us something to smile about and take pictures of (or with) every step of the way.
And now it’s gone, all gone. Only a few reminders of the big party are left, regular tourists who have stayed to watch the city’s post-Olympic depression manifest itself in the empty streets, the folded-up volunteer kiosks, the subway tunnels where once again the only faces are those of the Chinese. The clamor has been turned down. Life returned to normal. I can’t bear to even turn on the TV because all I’d see are reruns — reminders of what was.
Sigh.
Final entry here.
Bureau archive here.
The pressure on China’s athletes
ESPN The Magazine’s Beijing Bureau rolls along. Here’s Monday’s entry.
Also, I’d meant to post this picture with yesterday’s soccer post but forgot. Cheerleaders!
From Fengtai Softball Field
From a U.S.-Venezuela softball game on Tuesday. More on ESPN The Blog. (The early game was Taipei vs. Canada, in which the Canadian pitcher had a no-hitter through five.)
More pictures:
And… hey, look, it’s Jennie Finch!
I’d just like to say that I can completely understand why Finch is popular. She doesn’t always come off as the most articulate on TV — thus knocking her down a couple notches in my book — but she has an aura on the field that’s hard to capture, even on magazine covers. You just always know where she is on the field, who she is. It’s her long legs, the American blond hair, the way she struts on the field, claps her hand, winds up her hips — it’s all of that put together. I can imagine the first journalist to peer upon her and think, Hey, she would be great posing in a swimsuit. Then it happened, and that’s how a personality got launched. Now she’s the face of softball.
Is it better that she and not, say, Crystl Bustos, the Babe Ruth of softball, is the face of the sport? Well, it sure doesn’t hurt that Finch is darn good: she struck out five in four innings and didn’t allow a hit.
More photos and videos:
Chinese Taipei’s Chiu-Ching Li homers in the bottom of the 7th for her team’s only run in a 6-1 loss to Canada. How ’bout props to me for catching this — a home run, for crying out loud — live.
UPDATE: Because NBC said so…
U.S.A.’s Crystl Bustos circling the bases after a home run:
Bustos’s hard single in her next at-bat:
Watching the Opening Ceremonies from Ditan Park
I’ll have more thoughts on the Opening Ceremonies later, but first… my story for ESPN The Blog.
