Very Cool Sports Article from the NYT

[arsenius]

This article doesn't actually talk about billiards, but talks about why the Russians are so good at creating fantastic athletes. A lot of the focus is on tennis, and it gives a lot of good insights into why practice is important vs competition. I think the ending gives some insight into why some say Americans are beginning to lag the rest of world in billiards also. You have to have some dedication to make it to the end, it's 8 pages long. Most of the meat is towards the middle somewhere.

I'd be interested to hear what the people who think gambling is more important than practice have to say after reading this.

Article Here.

This quote is from the final paragraph of the article:

"You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time," Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach in Los Angeles, told me. "You've got to make them an independent thinker." Lansdorp, who is in his 60s, has coached Sharapova, along with the former No. 1-ranked players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport, all three of whom grew up in the same area and played at the same run-of-the-mill tennis clubs near Los Angeles. "You don't need a fancy academy," he said. "You need fundamentals and discipline, and in this country nobody gives a damn about fundamentals and discipline." Lansdorp also mentioned that he'd visited Spartak last year to teach a clinic. "It was a pretty different place," he said. "But that Larisa, she sure knows her stuff."