If you are under 50, it’s likely that every high jump you have ever seen on TV was a Fosbury-style jump, known as the “flop”. It’s the standard now, has been since Mexico 1968 where Dick Fosbury won the Olympic gold. Hard to believe that they used the scissors-style jump and the straddle jump for centuries, isn’t it? Imagine it’s 1965, and put yourself in Fosbury’s shoes for a second. When he decided to committ all his training to the “flop” (he did not invent it, but he convinced the world it worked), he had not won anything with it yet. It’s not as if he fiddled with a detail and found a small improvement. He changed the run-up. He changed the take-off. He changed the turn, and the landing. How confident must you be, to travel so deep to the left, into uncharted territory, when to the right there is a tested concept? He did it, because high jumping had stopped developing. It had hit a ceiling, and Dick Fosbury broke through it.
Torbjörn Blomdahl is our Dick Fosbury.
You can’t get a proper perspective on Tiger Woods’ achievements without knowing a thing or two about Jack Nicklaus. So before I say anything about TB, I have to talk briefly about Raymond Ceulemans. At the peak of his career, Ceulemans was not only the best player in the world by a mile, he was even pretty close to being the best player a person could theoretically be, with the knowledge available at that time. He had the rock-solid stance, the authoritative stroke, immaculate concentration, temperament and nerve. As a match player, he was extremely hard to beat because of his tactical ability (which is a polite way of saying he always kept the chicken breast for himself, and left the chicken shit for his opponent). His position play was as good as anyone’s, in that era when Blomdora’s box had not yet been opened. He played a technical game, a precision game. Control was the key word: the cueball usually hit the third ball with just enough speed, + 10 inches to keep positions open. His gameplan: hit the second ball with accuracy, send the cueball off into the desired line, and it will hit three rails and ultimately the third ball. If this third ball is close to a rail, be more precise. If it’s frozen to a rail, be unbelievably precise. Is the second ball eight feet away from you? Then your stroke had better be laser-straight. Ceulemans dedicated himself to this; his cueball ran in honest, straight lines across the table. He took the calculation of bankshots (of all shots, for that matter) to a higher level; three cushion was a science. His mindset was apollonian: logic ruled over emotion, and reason over intuïtion.
The Great Man honed and perfected that gameplan, until it could go no further. He averaged 1.5 for many years, 1.6 even in some tournaments, and that was it. He had hit the ceiling, or rather: his game had. There was no way for him to get to 1.8, because he already did everything as well as it could humanly be done.
In the early eighties, a young fellow from Sweden walks into Ceulemans’ life and changes the textbook of three cushion forever. He has a different gameplan. He is like Fosbury, who says: “Trying to convert more run-up speed into height has been tried often enough, apparently it does not work.”. Blomdahl seems to say: “Precision and more precision does not pay off. I am not even going to try to find that last rail when the third ball is so close to it. Why look for a 2 mm chance when there is a 61,5 mm ball on the table, waiting to be hit? I’ll try different lines, different combinations of spin and draw, spin and run-through, and different speeds. What do I have to lose, if conventional
Torbjörn Blomdahl is our Dick Fosbury.
You can’t get a proper perspective on Tiger Woods’ achievements without knowing a thing or two about Jack Nicklaus. So before I say anything about TB, I have to talk briefly about Raymond Ceulemans. At the peak of his career, Ceulemans was not only the best player in the world by a mile, he was even pretty close to being the best player a person could theoretically be, with the knowledge available at that time. He had the rock-solid stance, the authoritative stroke, immaculate concentration, temperament and nerve. As a match player, he was extremely hard to beat because of his tactical ability (which is a polite way of saying he always kept the chicken breast for himself, and left the chicken shit for his opponent). His position play was as good as anyone’s, in that era when Blomdora’s box had not yet been opened. He played a technical game, a precision game. Control was the key word: the cueball usually hit the third ball with just enough speed, + 10 inches to keep positions open. His gameplan: hit the second ball with accuracy, send the cueball off into the desired line, and it will hit three rails and ultimately the third ball. If this third ball is close to a rail, be more precise. If it’s frozen to a rail, be unbelievably precise. Is the second ball eight feet away from you? Then your stroke had better be laser-straight. Ceulemans dedicated himself to this; his cueball ran in honest, straight lines across the table. He took the calculation of bankshots (of all shots, for that matter) to a higher level; three cushion was a science. His mindset was apollonian: logic ruled over emotion, and reason over intuïtion.
The Great Man honed and perfected that gameplan, until it could go no further. He averaged 1.5 for many years, 1.6 even in some tournaments, and that was it. He had hit the ceiling, or rather: his game had. There was no way for him to get to 1.8, because he already did everything as well as it could humanly be done.
In the early eighties, a young fellow from Sweden walks into Ceulemans’ life and changes the textbook of three cushion forever. He has a different gameplan. He is like Fosbury, who says: “Trying to convert more run-up speed into height has been tried often enough, apparently it does not work.”. Blomdahl seems to say: “Precision and more precision does not pay off. I am not even going to try to find that last rail when the third ball is so close to it. Why look for a 2 mm chance when there is a 61,5 mm ball on the table, waiting to be hit? I’ll try different lines, different combinations of spin and draw, spin and run-through, and different speeds. What do I have to lose, if conventional
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