JJ’s profile

JJ
927
Name: John McClure
Homepage URL: http://www.ultimateolympian.blogspot.com
Location: UK
Member since: October 15, 2003
Last visit: November 17, 2008

JJ has posted 117 links and 1455 comments to SportsFilter and 22 links and 219 comments to the Locker Room and has written 5 columns.

Sports Bio

To raise money for a local charity in Oxford in the UK, I'm having a go at all 136 Olympic events between the Athens and Beijing Olympics. Go and look at the website if you want to know more or help me out.

To avoid future confusion in golf threads, yes I was once a pro, but no I wasn't very good, and after less than a year of playing in South Africa (and a mere two proper tournament starts, from which I managed to make the cut - and therefore a cheque - precisely no times), I severed a tendon in my hand (in 1999) and now I just play for (mentally agonising) fun.

Recent Links

I will be in Washington DC on Saturday... and so will the US soccer team, playing Cuba at the RFK. I'm toying with the idea of going along. Anyone fancy it?

posted on October 08, 2008 - Go to the detail view for this result

An Instant Classic - Single link YouTube post. "Unbelievable. I knew he'd hole it."

posted on June 16, 2008 - Go to the detail view for this result

Cardiff's FA Cup Run... in Lego. A dedicated fan has reenacted Cardiff City's journey to today's FA Cup Final in Lego. With some very odd music in places. [part one, part two]

posted on May 17, 2008 - Go to the detail view for this result

Recent Comments

Five Aces in a Week? "It's incomprehensible this kind of luck could happen, but it does happen ..."

posted by BoKnows at 04:10 AM on November 16

Latest ruling in history, but if anyone's still checking, the hole in one stands. Rule 1-1 states that the game is played from the teeing ground to hole, so once your ball is in the hole, it doesn't matter what else you do. In the R&A decisions book, it's Decision 1-1/3: Player Discovers Original Ball in Hole After Searching Five Minutes and Then Continuing Play with Provisional Ball.

Q - At a par-3 hole, a player, believing his original ball may be lost, plays a provisional ball. He searches five minutes for the original ball and then plays the provisional ball onto the green. At that point, the original ball is found in the hole.

What is the ruling?

A - The player's score is 1. The play of the hole was completed when the player holed the original ball (Rule 1-1).

(In the USGA decisions book, it's decision 1-1/2)

Comment icon posted at 01:10 PM on November 16

Five Aces in a Week? "It's incomprehensible this kind of luck could happen, but it does happen ..."

posted by BoKnows at 04:10 AM on November 11

I have been golfing for more than 20 years. My handicap is 6 and I have never had a hole in one,or has anyone I have golfed with.I can not believe this story.

Nearly every week, someone wins the Lotto in the face of odds close to 14 million to one. I never have, and neither has anyone I know, but I'm fairly sure I still believe it happens.

It is a pretty short course (card here) with only three holes longer than 364 yards off the yellow tees. If he's a long hitter, he's probably having a go at the green at most of those other 15 holes. It's still incredibly unlikely, but far from impossible.

At university, we would practice as a team three times a week during the winter on a nine-hole par-three course. Ten of us would play 54 holes a week each, with hole length varying from about 100 yards to almost 200, and it would be a very odd week if we didn't have at least one hole in one between us. The most we ever managed in a week was four.

Comment icon posted at 07:28 AM on November 11

Tottenham Hotspur Clean House, Dump Coach Juande Ramos Spurs, with just two points after nine matches, have fired coach Juande Ramos, assistant coaches Gus Poyet and Marcos Alvarez, and sporting director Damien Comolli. No Premiership team has started this poorly and avoided relegation in 10 years.

posted by rcade at 07:04 PM on October 27

The won't get the Pope. Not without rcade's signing a release anyway.

Comment icon posted at 02:45 PM on October 27

Gimme a High Four! On the football field, a place where Trevor Wikre says "time slows down", he felt something like "wet popcorn" in his right lineman's glove.

posted by BoKnows at 04:35 PM on October 20

I've twice asked two different surgeons to cut the top two joints of mine off, but they won't do it.

My sports career was ended by a severed tendon in the right pinkie. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't a lineman, but a professional typist of the letter P. No, wait, golfer.

The surgeons tried to put it together again: the frustration of spending months without doing anything that might have caused me to try and close my hand - no drinking, no driving, no drink driving - only to then go for the weekly check-up and be told the tendon had snapped again despite my caution. The surgery itself failed, but the time it took (about 15 months in total) alone would have been enough to set me too far behind the curve to catch up again, so I jacked it in and got a real job.

The middle joint of my finger is now bent at 90 degrees and I can't straighten it. I shake hands with strangers and they think I'm a Freemason.

Twice I've had a notion to try and get back into golf, and both times it has seemed to me that the only way to do that would be to have the top two joints of the finger removed - just to get it out of the way. Both times, the surgeons have refused to do it with some reasonably compelling arguments. The best argument is that there's no certainty that having half a finger would serve my golf swing any better than having the mangled digit I have now.

Given a time machine that could take me back to the emergency room (but that was somehow not good enough to take me back half an hour further to tell myself to stop using the dodgy knife to cut grips off clubs), I'd tell myself to decline the surgeon's kind offer to reconstruct my tendon.

If they'd just stitched the wound (two stitches, max) and left the tendon in two pieces, the only loss of movement would have been in the top joint, which, let's face it, unless you're a concert violinist (and a left-handed one at that), isn't exactly vital. I could have taken the flight to Australia I was booked on and played on the Australasian Tour as planned.

And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

Fair play and good luck to Trevor Wikre. He told the surgeons what he wanted and he got it. I hope he doesn't ever regret the decision, but from what I've just read about him, I can't believe that he ever will.

Comment icon posted at 05:34 AM on October 20

The comedy club of Newcastle Utd F.C Continues to have us all rolling in the aisles. When he was at Wimbledon, Joe Kinnear, Newcastles caretaker manager used to come across as quite avuncular and jovial, as soon as he turned up at Newcastle though, he looked old, sad, lost and bewildered. Time (a full week) in the job seems to have taken its toll, if this transcript of a press conference is anything to go by. You need to read right until the end for the full belly laugh.

posted by Fat Buddha at 02:58 PM on October 03

The guy on the BBC played some of the audio with beeps.

"Sounds more like Morse code than English at times."


Comment icon posted at 06:37 PM on October 03

9 years of Ryder Cup angst ends With a raucous crowd covering every inch of the grounds around the hole, U.S. captain Paul Azinger riding down the fairway in his cart pumping up the fans and "Boooo" cheers echoing throughout the golf course, the underdog Americans pulled it off.

posted by dyams at 03:15 PM on September 23

"... and celebrated like if it was 1999."

Thankfully not. They celebrated perfectly appropriately this time, and not until they'd actually won.

My only experience of actually being at a Ryder Cup was pretty similar - 40,000 people trying to watch four games of golf makes it a bit tough to get a decent view.

Comment icon posted at 09:47 AM on September 23

9 years of Ryder Cup angst ends With a raucous crowd covering every inch of the grounds around the hole, U.S. captain Paul Azinger riding down the fairway in his cart pumping up the fans and "Boooo" cheers echoing throughout the golf course, the underdog Americans pulled it off.

posted by dyams at 03:15 PM on September 23

Drood, seriously, how many times do you need to be told that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the course changes?

The better team won and it was the best Ryder Cup for years. The course changes partly made it so - we didn't have to watch people hacking it out of tall grass all day, but instead we got to watch them demolish the place in very entertaining style.

For all Zinger's disappointment that he wasn't playing, I think Tiger's absence made the biggest difference. It's the first time the US has looked like a team since 1991.

Comment icon posted at 03:45 AM on September 23

Spofi EPL pool 08-09 Week 4 update....

posted by gspm at 11:24 AM on September 17

I'd like to say that too, but it would be a lie.

I'm on Setanta Sports...

Comment icon posted at 07:45 AM on September 17

Lance Armstrong to return to pro cycling Armstrong, who will turn 37 on September 18, cited 41-year-old US swimmer Dara Torres's Olympic comeback in Beijing as proof that age was no barrier to an elite sports career.

posted by Amateur at 06:19 PM on September 10

Me too, bprek. As Phil Liggett said: "You've just ruined my life."

Comment icon posted at 09:33 AM on September 10

Lance Armstrong to return to pro cycling Armstrong, who will turn 37 on September 18, cited 41-year-old US swimmer Dara Torres's Olympic comeback in Beijing as proof that age was no barrier to an elite sports career.

posted by Amateur at 06:19 PM on September 10

Calling all steroid experts - what benefit, if any, could be derived from three years away from testing? Could he have loaded up on something, put the miles in his legs, then cleaned up and come back? Or am I reading too many conspiracy theories again?

It's odd that this was the first thing I wondered when I heard about the comeback, given that I'm a big fan of Lance and the kind of thing Drood just said used to send me off on rants about how he was the most tested son of a bitch on the planet (Armstrong, not Drood) and never got caught, so the most likely explination is that he wasn't doping.

It was bad enough to discover that "the look" wasn't a look at all. I'm not sure I want to see him either flog himself to pieces and fail (anything less than victory would be failure), turn up to make up the numbers and bleat on about how he "beat" cancer (or, as most people would have it, "got lucky"), or, worst of all, turn up, do well, then test positive and ruin all my sporting recollections of him.

What a story it will make if he wins it though...

Comment icon posted at 06:03 AM on September 10

LPGA Tour will suspend memberships if players don't learn English The LPGA will require its member golfers to learn and speak English and will suspend their membership if they don't comply.

posted by BornIcon at 09:35 AM on August 29

Plus, JJ, they are not going to throw a player out of the LPGA.

Sorry, Bo. I was using the word "out" in the sense that it is antonymical to the word "in", which is what a suspension would stop you from being as far as I can gather.

I suspect the lact of outspoken players has a lot to do with the fact that although the foreign ones might not speaka dee England good enough for the sponsors, they're mostly smart enough to know that being publically critical of your sport's organising body - no matter how discriminatory and ridiculous that organising body is being - isn't going to land you any new deals either.

"For an athlete to be successful in the sports entertainment world we live in, they need to be great performers on and off the course, and being able to communicate effectively with sponsors and fans is a big part of this," said the LPGA's deputy commissioner Libba Galloway.

The monkey has strangled the organ grinder and is now dancing around on the top of the piano in a panic wondering why it won't play. This whole thing is fucktardedness of the highest order. No player is bigger than the game, and neither is an organising body.

Comment icon posted at 06:36 AM on August 29

LPGA Tour will suspend memberships if players don't learn English The LPGA will require its member golfers to learn and speak English and will suspend their membership if they don't comply.

posted by BornIcon at 09:35 AM on August 28

I blame Sandra Post.

I understand the organiser's desire for players to do press conferences in English, but the LPGA needs to keep in mind just how international an organisation it has become.

In the 2008 season, more than 30% of the events on the LPGA Tour will be played outside the US. Of the 185 playing members of the tour who have so far made a cheque in 2008, 121 of them are "international" players [list of them here - .pdf]. Even if you discount the 27 players from Australia, South Africa, Canada and the UK, that's still more than half the players on the tour for whom English is not their mother tongue.

The money list hasn't been topped by an American since Betsy King in 1993. Julie Inkster is the only American in the top five of the all time money winners on the tour.

It's an international tour now, and it's only going to become more so. I'd be interested to see how the legal battle would pan out if the LPGA ever did try to implement this and throw someone out because they couldn't speak English.

Comment icon posted at 05:43 AM on August 28

LPGA Tour will suspend memberships if players don't learn English The LPGA will require its member golfers to learn and speak English and will suspend their membership if they don't comply.

posted by BornIcon at 09:35 AM on August 27

Will the requirement extend to those players for whom English is allegedly their mother tongue? Will they stop telling me that they "played real good"? Will they learn how to form a sentence without using the word "like"? I like totally doubt it.

Comment icon posted at 06:53 PM on August 27

Bolt wins Olympic 100m and breaks the world record Michael Johnson can't believe what he's watching. The best bit? He didn't even bother to tie both of his shoelaces.

posted by JJ at 03:54 AM on August 18

Had he:

1) Tied both shoelaces
2) Kept pumping his arms
3) Not beaten his chest, and
4) Leaned

He could have knocked two tenths off that.

He said afterwards he hadn't really noticed the time until he finished his victory lap and that the world record wasn't important to him, just the gold medal.

TV broadcasters couldn't fit in any commercials

Loving the BBC's lack of any commercials whatsoever!

Comment icon posted at 07:54 AM on August 18

This is Football's Biggest Player Fine Ever Adrian Mutu can finally count the true cost of his positive drugs test while a Chelsea player after Fifa yesterday ordered him to pay 13.8m in damages to his former club. It is the biggest fine ever handed down against a football player.

posted by tifosinyc at 06:45 PM on August 15

bperk, I think the award is to compensate Chelsea for the fee they paid for him in the first place. They paid Parma 22.4 million EURO for him. Caveat emptor would seem not to apply.

Comment icon posted at 03:40 AM on August 15