ORAL TOPICS(10) NOTES & ARTICLES:

1. SPORTS:

Extreme Sports

1.With the Thrills come Extreme RisksDespite several well-publicized accidents, like thedeath last year of the snowmobiler Caleb Moore, just 25, the popularity of extreme sports has soared in recent years. Participants in the X Games and other sporting events regularly perform heart-stopping tricks on skis and snowboards, skateboards and mountain bikes, all of them endlessly replayed on YouTube and television for a growing audience of thrill-seekers. Unfortunately, many young people eager for an adrenaline rush are trying to copy their extreme sports idols, putting themselves at terrible risk. Filled with overconfidence, many participants lack the skills and training for these stunts. And often they fail to use safety equipment that could reduce the risk of serious injury. Amateurs without referees, coaches or medical personnel around can end up with broken bones, crushed skulls, severeconcussions, ruptured blood vessels or lifelong disability if they survive.More than four million injuries attributed to extreme sports occurred from 2000 through 2011, according to data collected by theNational Electronic Injury Surveillance System. In the first-ever study of the nature of these injuries,Dr. Vani J. Sabesan, an orthopedic surgeon at Western Michigan University School of Medicine, and her colleagues examined the incidence of head and neck injuries, the most serious hazards short of death.At the recent annual meeting of theAmerican Association of Orthopedic Surgeons, Dr. Sabesan reported that more than40,000 such injuries occur annually among participants in seven extreme sports, including skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking and motocross. Her analysis showed that 83 percent were head injuries and 17 percent neck injuries, with 2.5 percent described as severe, resulting in potential lifelong disability or death.The level of competition and injuries were seeing keep rising, Dr. Sabesan said in an interview. Many do recover, but not necessarily without long-term consequences.Dr. Sabesan noted that head and neck injuries were of particular concern because of the increased awareness of their short- and long-term consequences: concussions, fractures and traumatic brain injuries, which can result in outcomes such aschronic depression, headaches,paralysisand death.Skateboarding caused the most head and neck injuries: more than 129,000 reported during the studys 12 years. Snowboarding produced more than 97,000 such injuries, while skiers experienced more than 83,000, and motocross participants more than 78,000.Dr. Sabesan said that not only were more people engaged in extreme sports each year, but also that the participants were younger. With very young kids tearing down ski slopes at 60 miles an hour, the risk of suffering a life-changing injury is all too real, she said.Young people often lack judgment, she added. They see snowboarder Shaun White take the sport to a whole new level, and some kids try to emulate his tricks. In effect, the culture says its O.K. to try this.According to Dr. Sabesan, skateboarding is particularly hazardous because helmets, now routine for skiers, are not required. Yet, she said, when you land on your head on concrete or asphalt, its not as forgiving as snow. The study found the risk of suffering askull fracturewhile skateboarding was 54 times that of doing so while snowboarding.Her first recommendation to reduce the risk of serious injury is to use proper safety equipment. A simple thing like wearing a helmet can go a long way toward preventing a lifelong disability, she said.Her own experience underscores this advice. While training for a triathlon, she flipped over the handlebars of her bike and landed on her head. A helmet protected her brain.My 23-year-old nephew, Sam, was spared permanent disability by the protective garments he wore during a terrifying fall while biking on a mountain trail two summers ago.Coming very fast downhill into a blind turn, he said, he was able to hop over two logs across the trail, but his front wheel caught the third log and he was catapulted over the handlebars. He landed on his head hard enough to split his helmet. He was knocked unconscious and badly banged up, but no bones were broken and his brain recovered fully.I was wearing a full-mask helmet and a full upper-body suit of armor called a pressure suit, as well as knee and shin guards, he said. The suit and guards protected a shoulder and knee that also landed hard, he said, but if I hadnt been wearing that helmet, I probably wouldnt be here.Even after sustaining serious injuries, extreme sports participants often come back for more. Dr. Sabesan said she recently treated a 28-year-old woman for a broken arm and two fractured femurs suffered while she attempted a jump at an all-terrain-vehicle racetrack in Michigan. The woman, who works as a bank manager, had previously suffered a broken neck and ribs in a similar accident.The occurrence of serious injuries is definitely increasing as participation rates in extreme sports go up, Dr. Sabesan said. Yet, she added, adequate studies of the associated risks have not been done.We have no baseline, she said. No one is monitoring injuries that occur during the X Games. Theres minimal literature on hip and knee dislocations, broken bones or the long-term effects of head and other injuries.Dr. Sabesan said her findings pointed to the need for trained supervision and medical assistance at extreme sports events, as well as proper training of participants and mandated safety equipment.Her message to parents: Require children who skateboard to wear a helmet and elbow and wrist guards. Snowboarders, whose feet are strapped to the board, should wear wrist guards to protect them if they fall on outstretched hands. And, of course, everyone on a bike, skis or a board should wear a helmet designed for the activity.2.Extreme GriefOne year later, even on film, the words are as chilling as they were that fateful day on the snow-covered mountain.Rob, Rob, do you copy? the voice on the hand-held radio transmitter says alarmingly of events still unfolding at the time.Ben Clarks decision to begin The Alaskan Way with the ominous scene that followed the March 13, 2012, avalanche and the deaths of the helicopter ski guide Rob Liberman and his snowboarding client, Nickolay Dodov, were motivated by the message that appears on a blackened screen near the end of his film: Is living the dream worth risking it all?As Clarks 60-minute documentary makes the rounds of film festivals, the dream has become a recurring nightmare for families and friends of the skiers. Alex and Natalia Dodov, whose 26-year-old son died, say they are still confused and angry about what actually happened that day on the west side of Takhin Ridge near Haines, Alaska.We know that our son Nicks death could have been prevented had there been stricter guidelines imposed, the Dodovs wrote in a Jan. 22 letter to Californias two United States senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and other Congressional representatives, requesting an independent investigation, improved safety conditions and standardized regulations for helicopter skiing in Alaska.It has been equally painful for Katherine Gill, who is known as Kit, and Robert A. Liberman, the divorced parents of the 35-year-old who moved to ski country from Manhattan and found devoted friends and an identity as an accomplished ski guide. Libermans father, who has seen Clarks film, said he was still very tender about his sons death.I think my son really needed to get those rushes in life, Liberman said. They meant a lot to him, and he felt very good about it, but I would tell you Im sorry I ever showed him a pair of skis.Clark, 33, who successfully scaled Mount Everest 10 years ago, met Gill at a memorial service in Telluride, Colo., after the accident. Her grief so profoundly affected him, he said, that he has given up extreme skiing and rock climbing, although he still hikes and runs. Gill, a former fashion model, has declined to speak publicly about the accident.Even though I thought I had a sense of self-worth, Clark said in a recent phone interview, I had no idea until I talked to Kit the day before the memorial and understood, truly, what was left behind when Rob passed away. Kit started to unravel the past to me thinking that I might have some answers. I just looked at her and broke down in tears and thought to myself: Oh my god! Here is a deep loss that I cant even begin to explain the empathy that I had for her.I started to think about my own parents and about my own wife, Clark added. Now that I have a son, its sort of like, wow, my whole life could still completely screw up and I could become a terrible father. But I can think of nothing harder than just wanting to know something and losing them in this way.Headlines of skiers buried by avalanches and the deaths ofthe 25-year-old snowmobiler Caleb Moorein January andthe 29-year-old freestyle skier Sarah Burkelast year have overshadowed growing concerns of the increased risk-taking and lack of regulation in extreme winter sports and their impact on families. Clarks film, and another documentary,The Crash Reel,by Lucy Walker, which is scheduled for HBO later this year, may help change this perspective.Walkers film looks atthe life of Kevin Pearce, an American snowboard champion who sustained a traumatic brain injury on New Years Eve in 2009 while training in Park City, Utah. Granted access to many aspects of Pearces rehabilitation, including an emotional family get-together last Thanksgiving, Walker explored the divide between risk-driven, free-spirited young athletes and their supportive, but tortured, families.Having recovered after a long, often painful process, Pearce talked at the dinner table of feeling 100 percent confident of a return to snowboarding. But he was confronted by a distraught younger brother (I dont want you to die), a tearful mother who feared the likelihood of another traumatic injury and a father who equated his sons passion to an addiction.If I was smoking every day, Simon Pearce told his son, you wouldnt feel good about me. If I said Ill cut it back to one cigarette a day, then it would be two cigarettes a day. When can you realize youre clumsier? For me, its hard, because I dont see your awareness. ... That gets back to my point that Ive had this entire time, Pearce interrupted, that you guys have no faith.Pearce appears to have reconciled realities, and returned to the sport as a commentator and supporter of education and research on traumatic brain injuries. In the case of the Dodovs, Kit Gill, Robert Liberman and friends of other families affected by fatal incidents, the transition has been more difficult. Last month a 24-year-old German employee at Revelstoke Mountain Resort in Canada, enjoying a day off, skied out of bounds and was buried and killed in an avalanche. One week earlier, another German heli-skier died in Canada. On Sunday an enormous cornice failure a collapse of overhanging snow outside Haines in the area called Kicking Horse Valleyclaimed the life of another heli-skiing guidewhen the snow gave way beneath him.TheColorado Avalanche Information Centersaid 14 skiing deaths have occurred this year in the United States.There has been a steady increase, Ethan Greene, the director of the center, said in a phone interview. There is definitely an upward trend. Its disturbing, but its peoples choices. With more people come more accidents.Our media push to be extreme is a strong lure to young, athletic people, said Marilyn Davis, a skier and close friend of the Dodovs in Bear Valley, Calif., who has been assisting them in their appeal. Nick was a young, athletic, very skilled person. It was not out of his capability to do what he was doing. But what we feel is that the regulations, what weve learned through this whole reading of this permit and operation and safety plan, is that the heli-ski industry imposes its own set of standards. Theyre not governed or overseen by any monitoring agency. We feel thats inappropriate.The Dodovs, who came to the United States from Bulgaria 18 years ago, received a positive response Jan. 30 from Boxer, which said, Please be assured that your matter will receive serious attention. But in an indication of how regulations may differ across regions, the office of Senator Mark Begich of Alaska wrote, Unfortunately, our office is prohibited by law from intervening in legal matters and cannot interfere with an investigation.No formal investigation is under way.Vicki Gardner, an owner of Alaska Heliskiing, which operates tours and a school for guides, and supervised the trip on the day of the March 2012 avalanche, said she had not seen Clarks film and could not comment on the Dodovs charges that the group was not informed about the dangerous snow conditions that day and that the search-and-rescue response was slow and inadequate. She also declined to comment on conflicting reports about when and where their son had died and why his body was taken to a hospital in Seattle rather than kept in Alaska for an investigation.The Dodovs claim that Alaska Heliskiings permit required the company to submit a detailed accident report to Haines Borough within 72 hours of the incident. Such a report was not submitted, they wrote in their letter. The Dodovs also claim the company filed a false accident report seven and a half months later with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.Greene said the center had received the report, but that we dont make any judgments on the accuracy of the report. I talked to the parents a number of times, and they certainly disagreed with a number of things in the report.Stephanie Scott, the mayor of Haines Borough, said she had not seen Clarks film. But she said the Dodovs 23-page letter, which was first filed as a complaint Aug. 17 and reported inthe Sept. 13 edition of the Chilkat Valley News, was distributed here. In a Feb. 23 e-mail, she wrote: I have personally expressed condolences to the Dodov and Liberman families. I too am the mother of young men and a daughter, and the suffering experienced by families when sons and daughters are lost is almost beyond imagining.Alex Dodov, who spent much of his career in the ski industry in Bulgaria and lives near Tahoe ski resorts, said: The best skier, and the best snowboarder and the best mountaineer is the one who is alive because he has to tell the story. Only the wise people survive and enjoy this world of skiing.Liberman is a nonskier who first took his son, at age 3, to a ski resort near their home in the Berkshires. He talked to him by phone the day before the accident, and he describes the world of extreme skiing as a kind of Russian roulette. I dont think its worth it, he said.Before the accident, Clark had been filming around Haines with the hope of producing a series of 8 to 12 instructional episodes on helicopter skiing. The documentary brought him full cycle from the confrontation he had with his own parents when he told them he was going to quit his job and attempt to climb Everest.Until I spoke with Kit, it finally sunk in to me why my parents were upset, Clark said. It had nothing to do with dying, doing something you love or being willing to risk your life for something that thrills you. People think thats admirable. But the people who think thats admirable are not the people that were close to me, that I loved, that I left behind. We need to let people know that it is not just about you and the risk that you take, its about what you leave behind when you make this decision.After the accident, Philip Drake, a close friend of Rob Libermans, was designated to empty the remains from Libermans black 1999 Toyota Tacoma. Above the passenger visor, he found assorted holiday cards and letters. One of the cards was signed simply Mom.Drake was uncertain about the origin of the card until he received a thank-you letter from Kit Gill after the memorial for introducing her to Libermans friends. The signatures matched.Drake phoned Gill and relayed the episode. She broke down and started crying, Drake recalled. Its just a tragic story from all angles.

3. EXTREME SPORTS; Taking Life to the Edge, And Spins and Jumps, TooIt is always the same memory that comes back. When Mat Hoffman emerges from unconsciousness, he will not know who he is or what he has done. But he will remember that he is alone. His mother is dead.As the premier rider in freestyle BMX -- an extreme sport in which bicycles are used on ramps to perform stunts like backward flips, 900-degree spins and jumps as high as 50 feet -- Hoffman says he has had many concussions, broken close to 50 bones and undergone 14 major operations, including one without a general anesthetic.This is fine, the 30-year-old Hoffman says. He says there is a tax he must pay for the life he leads; he is a 10-time world champion and is widely regarded as the most innovative extreme athlete. Activision sold more than one million copies of his Pro BMX video game; fans have bought more than 1.7 million Mat Hoffman toys and action figures; his earnings are into six figures; and last month HarperCollins published his memoir, ''The Ride of My Life.''''If you want to experience all the pleasures and successes in life, you have to be willing to take all the pain and failures,'' he said, sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Midtown, where the clothes are neatly packed away, the counters bare and clean. Hoffman averts his eyes.''But my mom was the center,'' he says and his eyes close.Now every time he tries a flair or a flip or a gnarly spin, Hoffman knows that there is a strong chance he will relive her death from cancer in 1990 as if it were still fresh. The more he pushes the limits of his sport, the greater the risk. When amnesia strikes after a concussion, his first thoughts upon revival are that he has remembered this before, and survived.''That,'' he says, ''is why head injuries are the worst.''Hoffman has a gash under one of his eyes and flecks of red along his pleasant, unassuming face, the result of a concussion last week while doing a demonstration for an ESPN show in Oklahoma City. His helmet cracked in two places and he was out for almost a minute. When he revived, he remembered his mother.His father, Matt, said, ''That is a pain highway we don't go down.''Although Joni Hoffman could not bear to look out the window at the ramp her husband had built in the backyard of their home in Oklahoma when Mat Hoffman began training at 11, by the time he was performing in tournaments soon after, she began taking cameras.But a new memory has been added to his postamnesia routine: the birth of his 3-year-old daughter, Gianna.''I remember before when I first had Gianna, my baby, that was a shocking moment when that came to me,'' Hoffman said, looking up and grinning. ''I was like: 'Whoa! I'm a father. Where are the pictures?' It was a trip.''After Hoffman was nearly killed last year, rolling like a rag doll down a ramp, his wife, Jaci, intervened. As he danced their daughter along his knee, Jaci Hoffman said, ''You don't want to miss that.''Hoffman agreed, and cut out big-ramp racing, in which a motorcycle drags the bike to the top before letting go. ''I'd already seen him close to dying a couple of times and didn't want see it again,'' Jaci, 33, said. ''There's only room for so much scar tissue up there.''But she loves to see him riding, the way Hoffman rises in the air and spins so fast it looks like a burst of fireworks.''I have a fire inside of myself that I have to express,'' he says. ''I don't do it in social situations, but I do it inside of myself, through sport, through art, through actions.''People can see it as being insane. But I've trained myself accordingly in order to make it happen. I think that's the difference.''Hoffman always wanted to fly. When he was 5, he said, he jumped off the roof of his house holding an umbrella after watching episodes of ''The Flying Nun.'' At 11, he sat astride a bike and asked his brother Todd to hold him over a ramp in the backyard. Don't let go, he told Todd. Todd let go.Hoffman became consumed with biking, saddening his father, who had dreams of sitting in football stands and watching his sons snatch passes along the 50-yard line.''It killed me,'' the older Hoffman said. ''But when he was making $40,000 at 14 riding a bike, I thought, well, he made a pretty good choice.''Hoffman became the ambassador of the sport, founding his own bike company, which produces close to 30,000 bikes a year, and creating television programs for ESPN and video games. Hoffman also promoted BMX riding during the dark years of the early 90's, when money and support for the sport had dried up.Hoffman was the first to complete a 900-degree spin -- two and a half times around -- in competition. Tony Hawk later achieved one on a skateboard, and the two athletes are frequently compared.''To me, he's the godfather of all the bike stunts these days,'' Hawk said. ''He's the biggest risk-taker that we've seen in our types of sports.''But when asked about the comparison, Hawk hesitates. ''Some of the stuff that he's done, the consequences would have outweighed the benefits of doing it,'' he said. ''I would have been a little more wary.''Hoffman will join Hawk tomorrow in Portland, Ore., for a 24-city tour, incorporating skateboarding, BMX riding and motorcross freestyle elements into a choreographed exhibition with live music. The Boom Boom Huck Jam tour will arrive at Continental Arena on Nov. 7 and Nassau Coliseum on Nov. 9.''It's going to be a lot of fun,'' Hoffman said. ''I hope I can last through the whole thing.''Photos: Mat Hoffman is a 10-time world champion in freestyle BMX who is known for his innovation. (Tony Donaldson/Icon); Hoffman, who began training at 11, has had numerous injuries in his career.

4. Extreme Sport, Extreme Chic, Extreme Hype

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo.IT was a moonlight night in January, and the second Winter X Games, developed by ESPN, had just completed Day 1 at this resort town known for its young, free-spirited alternative athletes.After the ice climbing, downhill snow biking and snow-boarding competitions were over, and after the Mountain Dew-drinking contest was over, too, a pack of middle-aged men could be heard howling from the slopes. They were salesmen for Salomon, the ski and sporting-goods company, getting a ride in a snow-grooming tractor. ''You have to have fun to sell fun,'' one said.Nearby, at the Marriott, it was Las Vegas night for X Games sponsors, including Salomon, the Gap, Taco Bell, AT&T, Nike, Starburst Fruit Twists, Mennen Speed-Stick deodorant, Visa and the Marines.John-Sandy Santucci, a former freestyle skier, who now films winter sports, was watching the crowd from above. ''It's funny, you hear Generation X and extreme, and you think purple hair and nose rings,'' Mr. Santucci, 44, said. ''But what do you see? A bunch of 40-somethings clinking Champagne glasses and smoking cigars.''Maybe they should have called it the Winter S Games. There seemed to be as many sponsor representatives as competitors at the games, a sort of Gen-X alternative Olympics held Jan. 15 to 18. The sponsors came to support 250 of the world's gnarliest athletes, of course. But they also came to get in touch with a 20-something cable-television audience in the millions.Why? Because they were there.Once, snow boarding was a semi-outlaw sport for nonconformists -- with other so-called extreme sports like sky surfing and mountain biking. Snow boarding's baggy clothing and in-your-face attitude has inspired designers from the avant-garde to the Gap. Big marketers like Pepsi-Cola -- whose sky-surfing goose commercial was a Super Bowl hit -- have borrowed the rebellious image of extreme sports.But inevitably, the mass-culture bearhug changed such death-defying fun. This weekend, you can watch snow boarding's grand debut as an Olympic sport in Nagano, Japan, with all the surrounding hype and glory. Not all snow boarders are happy about seeing their radical athleticism being brought in from the cold, in what they suspect is largely a ploy to lift Olympic television ratings with young viewers.But the overall commercialization of extreme sports is so far along that protests by a few purists seem unlikely to make a difference. The crowd of viewers and participants that gathered here was so label-conscious, so image-driven, that the monolithic presence of corporate America hardly seemed to bother them. Instead, they hoarded the free plastic beer mugs given away by the Gap (which plans to add an extreme sports line to its stores in the fall) and the free dog tags and bumper stickers dispensed by the Marine Corps from a promotional Humvee.With the persistence of fishing penguins, hordes of young people who affected the look of nonmaterialists (snow boarders pierce and tattoo themselves into unemployability, listen to nihilistic music and call things they like ''sick'') kept alighting at the Salomon tent.''Its scary that this is the customer we're after,'' said Nick Pachmeyer, a Salomon employee besieged after giving out the last T-shirt. ''It's good to see so much enthusiasm, but it's too bad it has to be so media-generated, and it's kind of sad to see that all everyone wants is free stuff.''The fashion world, always attuned to youthful subcultures, was one of the earliest to latch onto the image of extreme sports, with Daryl Kerrigan, downtown's ripstop-nylon queen, leading the way. ''Ive always been interested in the latest fabrics from the sports industry,'' she said. ''And I like clothes that work with the body's movement. Besides, extreme athletes are a lot more interesting to look at than pasty-faced fashion and city people.''Now, Jil Sander is offering Teva-inspired sandals, and Calvin Klein is selling parachute-nylon and drawstring styles inspired by people who would just as soon invert themselves in the air over a half-pipe as ride coach to Los Angeles. Ralph Lauren has introduced a fragrance called Extreme Polo Sport.Being extreme has become so extremely chic, in fact, that last year, Kalman Ruttenstein, the creative director of Bloomingdales, went around telling people that he was on crutches because of a snow-boarding accident, rather than a massive stroke, which it was.''I said that because it sounded tomorrowish,'' Mr. Ruttenstein said.In the last five years, as the alternative sports scene (following alternative music and film) became fashionable and lucrative, Salomon's sales grew 40 percent, from $543.7 million to $762 million, but only as the company introduced X-Scream skis, mountain bikes, snow-board clothing and snow boards to buck the trend of decreasing sales in traditional skis and ski wear. ESPN, which has produced five X Games, three in summer and two in winter, maintains that its coverage reaches more male viewers ages 12 to 34, per household, than any other major sporting event on television.It's as much a gold rush as a race, and the athletes are into it as much as the corporations.''All snow boarders say they're anticorporate,'' said Megan Kleinheinz, a Colorado college student and snow boarder. ''But they'd give their eye teeth to be sponsored.''

Sponsors are a big part of this cultural avalanche, and every extreme athlete who doesn't have a sponsor seems to be looking to hook one. Sponsors provide sunglasses. Sponsors provide clothes. Sponsors provide the hardware, too, from snow boards to mountain bikes and snowmobiles, as well as the cold, hard cash for amateur athletes to travel.''These kids are just trying to make a living,'' said Mark Bryant, the editor in chief of Outside magazine, which has been covering alternative sports for 20 years. The magazine recently published an article mocking the tendency of extreme athletes to play up their radical attitude for mercenary purposes. ''Some of their old-fashioned virtues like courage and stamina and strength get lost in the race for sponsors,'' Mr. Bryant said.''The fact is, when you're loaded down with that many logos, you aren't really alternative,'' he added. ''It's like all those alternative musicians who are now millionaires partying with Ahmet Ertegun.''Paul Fournier, a k a Fabio, a plumber from British Columbia and a top-ranked snow biker with waist-length hair, said he gets around $20,000 worth of bicycles, clothes and travel a year. Like most extreme athletes, he lives modestly, even though he has someone else picking up the tab for his fun.''I have a nice life,'' said Mr. Fournier, who questioned the commodification of his adventurous spirit, while simultaneously pushing for the name of his mountain-bike sponsor, Norcross, to appear in print. ''And I don't take it for granted.''While sponsorship money is modest for most, for some it's more, well, extreme.Missy Giove, a favorite bad-girl mountain biker on the scene, said she has two-year contracts worth $1 million with Volvo and Cannondale. Although she won last year's downhill snow mountain biking race at the X Games, she didn't compete in this year's event because she had sponsor conflicts: her personal sponsors didn't want her to be seen in ESPN's racing bib, with the names of X Games sponsors on it.For the genial Ms. Giove, whose nose ring matches her earrings, bowing out was no big deal. She got paid $1,000 a day to be an on-air commentator for ESPN, which was as much as she could have won in competition.''I'm learning not to talk so fast and curse so much,'' Ms. Giove said after her second day as a commentator, when she was heaving a medicine ball against the wall in the Marriott's tiny fitness center and ignoring the Winter X Games coverage playing on a television.''This is very good for the arms and abs,'' she said as her medicine ball hit a Stairmaster electric plug and broke it. ''Oh well, they're making lots of money this weekend. They can fix it.''Ms. Giove wasn't the only gnarly top dog around. Shaun Palmer, a world-class snow boarder (who explained on the air to an ESPN reporter that he prepared for the X Games by drinking beer) now has his own snow-board company.Trace Worthington, a three-time world freestyle-skiing champion, may have his own company soon, too. Right now, he's sponsored by Tommy Hilfilger, whom he also advises on design. ''When Seventh Avenue gets involved, you know it's big,'' Mr. Worthington said after he finished competing on Jan. 17. He is the skier in Hilfiger print advertisements who seems to exist on some metaphysical plane between the snow and sky.His agent, Robert Evans, a former top-ranked freestyle skier himself, has been approached by other major retailers, too. ''It's very lucrative,'' Mr. Evans said. ''Everyone's trying to get hooked up with this scene now.''Recently, he hooked up Polo Ralph Lauren with Allison Gannett, a popular freestyle skier, who likes to wear lipstick and fake fur when she competes. In November, Ms. Gannett took a meeting at Polo's Madison Avenue offices. She wore black.''It was very plush, very cherry in that office,'' she said between ski-boarding and snow-boarding events. ''After shooting the breeze for a while, they started asking me what I liked in clothing. I told them that I'm sick of techno stuff and that I liked faux-fur, satin, fun colors. When you're in these clothes 24 hours a day, it's like office clothes. You don't want them to be boring.''Ms. Gannett, who accessorizes her MTV-inspired style with irony, did not advise Polo on how its new Extreme fragrance should smell. When asked, however, she suggested: ''Like winter, a cold, fresh scent.'' She let that idea linger for a moment, then broke into mocking peals of laughter as crystalline as the icicles hanging from the trees.While Ms. Gannett is trying to hook in major investors for a television show about women in extreme sports (''I need a big, fat sponsor,'' she said), Dave Swanwick hopes to produce a show about freestyle skiing. Like many athletes who grew up with these sports, Mr. Swanwick, now in his late 20's, finds himself wheeling and dealing in a blizzard of opportunities.''I used to have fun,'' he said on Saturday night of the X Games weekend, when a hip-looking crowd had gathered at his house here for a Ketel One martini party. ''Now I pimp it.''As friends thanked him for his hospitality, they told him, ''You're the money.''IT was dusk on the last day at the Winter X Games. After the final awards ceremony, some fans were on a stage at the bottom of the mountain, dancing like puppets on a string in the frigid air. They were being egged on by two masters of ceremonies with the promise of a free snow board. The crowd was frozen to the spectacle like snowflakes on a windowpane.Many athletes, however, chose to leave the scene.''This is crazy,'' said Cara-Beth Burnside, a snow-boarding champion, who is sponsored by Vans sneakers.Jeff Ruhe, a vice president at ESPN, didn't notice her departure. As he surveyed the giddy, greedy crowd with a smile, he said, ''This will only grow.''5. The Genetics of Being a DaredevilWatching participants inslopestyleand half-pipe skiing and snowboarding flip, curl, cartwheel and otherwise contort themselves in the air during the Winter Olympics competition, many of us have probably wondered not only how the athletes managed to perform such feats but also why. Helpfully,a recent studyof the genetics of risk-taking intimates that their behavior may be motivated, at least in part, by their DNA.For some time, scientists and many parents have suspected that certain children are born needing greater physical stimulation than others, suggesting that sensation seeking, as this urge is known in psychological terms, has a genetic component. A thought-provoking2006 study of twins, for instance, concluded that risk-taking behavior was shared by the pairs to a much greater extent than could be accounted for solely by environmental factors. If one twin sought out risks, the other was likely to do so as well.But finding which genes or, more specifically, which tiny snippets of DNA within genes, might be influencing the desire to huck oneself off of a snow-covered slope has proven to be troublesome. In recent years, scientists zeroed in on various sections of genes that affect the brains levels of or response to the neurotransmitter dopamine, a substance that is known to influence our feelings of pleasure, reward and gratification. People who engage in and enjoy extreme, daredevil conduct, researchers presumed, would likely process dopamine differently than those of us content to watch.But the results of some early genetic studies comparing dopamine-related portions of genes with sensation seeking were inconsistent. Some found that people with certain variations within genes, including a gene called DRD4 that is believed to be closely involved in the development and function of dopamine receptors in our brain, gravitated toward risky behavior. Others, though, found no such links. But most of these studies focused on so-called deviant risk-taking, such as gambling and drug addiction.Cynthia Thomson, then a graduate student in the exercise physiology department at the University of British Columbia, wondered whether these past studies might have been looking at the wrong activities, and if it wouldnt be more telling to examine risk-seeking in sports like skiing and snowboarding that allow for a broad range of styles, from sedate and cautious (my approach) to hurtling and occasionally airborne.To find out, she first developed a questionnaire specifically related to on-slope behavior, which asked questions about how often, fast and recklessly someone schussed or rode. Did they leap from cliffs? Or did they stick to blue, intermediate runs?Then she visited several of the large resorts dotting British Columbia and approached patrons between the ages of 17 and 49, asking them to fill out her questionnaire, as well as a second, standard personality questionnaire. A high combined score on these tests would indicate a strong tendency to embrace risks. The volunteers also provided a cheek swab for DNA typing.Returning to her lab, she began quantifying variations within the volunteers DRD4 genes. Focusing on a single, tiny section of the gene, she found that skiers and riders who harbored a particular variant of DNA coding there were much more likely to score high on the tests of risk-taking.Because the number of volunteers in this experiment was small, only 117 men and women, Dr. Thomson, who is now a teaching fellow at Quest University Canada, went back to the mountains and recruited an additional 386 participants.And again, in this expanded group, she found the same association between the variation of the DRD4 gene and a willingness to take risks on the slopes. The variants overall effect was slight, explaining only about 3 percent of the difference in behavior between risk takers and the risk averse, but was statistically significant and remained intact, even when Dr. Thomson and her colleagues controlled for gender and sport expertise.In essence, the findings suggest that some people might have an innate, inherited need to turn to risky activities to reach their optimal level of arousal, Dr. Thomson said, even if their parents are quiet, respectable types. (The DNA from each parent can contain different portions of the variant, Dr. Thomson said, which can combine in the child to create a slopestyle medalist.)Given no healthy outlets for their sensation seeking, such individuals might turn to more problematic behaviors, like gambling or drugs, Dr. Thomson said, emphasizing that this idea is speculative and that no single, isolated aspect of our genetics will ever fully explain why we act as we do. But if you have a 4-year-old who performs back flips off the couch, she said, you might consider directing him or her to freestyle skiing or gymnastics classes, rather than, say, curling.

Keeping Fit

6. How Exercise Can Keep the Brain FitFor those of us hoping to keep our brains fit and healthy well into middle age and beyond, the latest science offers some reassurance. Activity appears to be critical, though scientists have yet to prove that exercise canward off serious problems like Alzheimers disease.But what about the more mundane, creeping memory loss that begins about the time our 30s recede, when car keys and peoples names evaporate? Its not Alzheimers, but its worrying. Can activity ameliorate its slow advance and maintain vocabulary retrieval skills, so that the word ameliorate leaps to mind when needed?Obligingly, a number of important new studies have just been published that address those very questions. In perhaps the most encouraging of these, Canadian researchers measured the energy expenditure and cognitive functioning of a large group of elderly adults over the course of two to five years. Most of the volunteers did not exercise, per se, and almost none worked out vigorously. Their activities generally consisted of walking around the block, cooking, gardening, cleaning and that sort of thing, said Laura Middleton, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and lead author of the study, which waspublished last week in Archives of Internal Medicine.But even so, the effects of this modest activity on the brain were remarkable, Dr. Middleton said.While the wholly sedentary volunteers, and there were many of these, scored significantly worse over the years on tests of cognitive function, the most active group showed little decline. About 90 percent of those with the greatest daily energy expenditure could think and remember just about as well, year after year. Our results indicate that vigorous exercise isnt necessary to protect your mind, Dr. Middleton said. I think thats exciting. It might inspire people who would be intimidated about the idea of quote-unquote exercising to just get up and move.The same message emerged fromanother study published last week in the same journal. In it, women, most in their 70s, with vascular disease or multiple risk factors for developing that condition completed cognitive tests and surveys of their activities over a period of five years. Again, they were not spry. There were no marathon runners among them. The most active walked. But there was a decreasing rate of cognitive decline among the active group, the authors wrote. Their ability to remember and think did still diminish, but not as rapidly as among the sedentary.If an inactive 70-year-old is heading toward dementia at 50 miles per hour, by the time shes 75 or 76, shes speeding there at 75 miles per hour, said Jae H. Kang, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Womens Hospital at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study. But the active 76-year-olds in our study moved toward dementia at more like 50 miles per hour. Walking and other light activity had bought them, essentially, five years of better brainpower.If we can push out the onset of dementia by 5, 10 or more years, that changes the dynamics of aging, said Dr. Eric Larson, the vice president of research at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle and author ofan editorial accompanying the two studies.None of us wants to lose our minds, he said. So the growing body of science linking activity and improved mental functioning is a wake-up call. We have to find ways to get everybody moving.Which makes one additional new study about exercise and the brain,published this month in Neurobiology of Aging, particularly appealing. For those among us, and they are many, who cant get excited about going for walks or brisk gardening, scientists from the Aging, Mobility and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of British Columbia and other institutions have shown, for the first time, that light-duty weight training changes how well older women think and how blood flows within their brains. After 12 months of lifting weights twice a week, the women performed significantly better on tests of mental processing ability than a control group of women who completed a balance and toning program, while functional M.R.I. scans showed that portions of the brain that control such thinking were considerably more active in the weight trainers.Were not trying to show that lifting weights is better than aerobic-style activity for staving off cognitive decline, said Teresa Liu-Ambrose, an assistant professor at the university and study leader. But it does appear to be a viable option, and if people enjoy it, as our participants did, and stick with it, then more of us might be able, potentially, to ameliorate mental decline well into late life.7. KEEPING FIT ON THE ROADAbout a year and a half ago, I joined a Manhattan health club. Friends think it's trendy, but the exercise classes at this club can border on the brutal. As a result, after months of panting and pain, I am no longer the person who can't do a push-up, the person who gets winded running for the bus. I am, in fact, in pretty good shape.The predicament, then, is how to keep working out despite occasional business or pleasure trips. I now get cranky unless I can work out every 48 hours. More important, I have an overwhelming fear that without regular exercise I will get out of shape and have to suffer all the pain again to get back up to speed.Recently, I found a solution: I let my fingers do the jogging.With some help from the Yellow Pages in the telephone directory, I have found exercise classes almost anyplace I go. So far, I have taken aerobics classes in Lexington, Ky., Boca Raton, Fla., and East Hampton.The workouts have varied in quality. One was quite rigorous, another was barely worth lacing up my sneakers for. But classes on the road are usually not expensive; they provide a nice break in the day, and keep me in at least reasonable shape.My first experience with traveling aerobics came last summer, when my work sent me to Lexington. Suspecting that I would be gone most of the week, I packed shorts and sneakers with my suits and asked the corporate travel department to book me into a hotel with a gymnasium.Lavish it was not. The gym was a small room in the hotel basement that featured one rickety exercise bicycle, a few weights and hardly enough air conditioning to cool me and the two other people who were already there. S o back in my room, I decided to investigate what other possibilities for exercise the city might offer. I found the local Yellow Pages under the Gideon Bible, and after a couple of false starts - nothing listed under gymnasium or physical fitness - discovered a section labeled exercise. (This heading, by the way, seems to be the one universally used around the country.) Again, I had false starts. One club was for women only. Another had gone out of business. But on the third try, I was lucky: There was an exercise studio with an advanced class that evening. The woman who answered the telephone - she later turned out to be the instructor - was pleasant, saying they would be delighted to take an out-of-towner and giving me impeccable directions for driving to the shopping center where the studio was situated.An hour later, I was doing the same kicks, twists and lifts that I learned back home and was working up the same welcome sweat. The instructor seemed embarrassed about the size of the class - there were only six people - but that was fine with me, considering the crowds at home and the individual attention the six of us were given on each exercise. And the price was certainly right: just $3.50 for a class than ran more than an hour.Boca Raton is a more conspicuously affluent community than Lexington, so naturally the prices for exercise classes were higher. Yes, prices, plural. My first night in town, I took something called a Lou Anderson workout for $6. The second night, I returned to the same studio and took a plain old advanced workout for $5. I am still not sure what the extra dollar was for. Both classes ran about 80 minutes and included warm-up stretching exercises, about 20 minutes of aerobics and then the usual abdomen, buttocks and leg work.Still, I am not complaining. I was in Boca Raton to attend a securities industry convention, and after listening to speeches all morning and being cooped up in my hotel room writing all afternoon, I was happy to leave my name tag on the dresser, drive half a mile to the shopping center where the studio was and shake my body awake.My lucky streak ended on New Year's weekend in East Hampton. My fiancee and I thought a Sunday morning exercise class would be a nice relief from all the reading, cooking, bicycling and walking on the beach. But only the price was impressive: $7 a person.The workout was not advanced enough for me, and it seemed disorganized. A good class basically starts with work on the upper part of the body and proceeds downward. But this class skipped all over, was heavy on taking deep breaths and never got to the legs, though mine and everyone else's were far from perfect.Nonetheless, I plan to continue looking for workouts when I travel. I have learned some new exercises: in Lexington, we used a bar for stretching the waist, and in Boca Raton, we used Heavy Hands, those portable weights that runners carry. I have since bought a pair. The supervision that is possible in small classes can also be worthwhile; I never knew why a particular leg exercise seem to hurt everyone else but me until one of the Boca Raton instructors showed me what I was doing wrong.An exercise class is particularly satisfying when I'm traveling on business. I find business travel lonely, and running at the end of the day - if the weather is cooperative - just means I'm alone some more. But an exercise class puts me in a group of people, better yet, people with whom I don't have to talk business. In addition, I tend to be tired after working all day and prefer to have someone else do the thinking and shout directions at me. Left to my own devices, I would not put myself through nearly as difficult or complete a workout.For those who belong to a health club and plan to seek an exercise class on the road, it might be worth inquiring at your local club before departing. Some clubs have arrangements with groups such as the Association of Physical Fitness Centers, so that club members on the road can use local facilities.In New York, however, most clubs do not participate in these reciprocal programs, according to Jimmy Johnson, the association's president. ''Unfortunately, the New York clubs feel like they are on the receiving end, with all the people passing through the city,'' he said.Other advice: Make sure the club you select accepts people of your sex. Try to find a club with classes of different levels, and pick the right one for you. East Hampton had one-size-fits-all classes, which was probably one reason that it was inappropriate for me. Also, ask what services are provided; most of the workout studios that accept out-of-towners do not seem to offer showers or changing facilities. Change before you leave the hotel, and take a towel in case the floor is hard.Finally, I suggest filing the directions and phone numbers by location when you get home on the chance you will return. I did. After all, I might get sent to Lexington again.

Risk-Taking

8. Reaping the Rewards of Risk-TakingSINCESteven P. Jobsresigned as chief executive ofApplelast Wednesday, much has been said about him as a peerless corporate leader who has created immense wealth for shareholders, and guided the design of hit products that are transforming entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

All true, but lets think different, to borrow the Apple marketing slogan of years back. Lets look at Mr. Jobs as a role model.Above all, he is an innovator. His creative force is seen in products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and in new business models for pricing and distributing music and mobile software online. Studies of innovation come to the same conclusion: you cant engineer innovation, but you can increase the odds of it occurring. And Mr. Jobss career can be viewed as a consistent pursuit of improving those odds, both for himself and the companies he has led.Mr. Jobs, of course, has enjoyed singular success. But innovation, broadly defined, is the crucial ingredient in all economic progress higher growth for nations, more competitive products for companies, and more prosperous careers for individuals. And Mr. Jobs, experts say, personifies what works in the innovation game.We can look at and learn from Steve Jobs what the essence of American innovation is, says John Kao, an innovation consultant to corporations and governments.Many other nations, Mr. Kao notes, are now ahead of the United States in producing what are considered the raw materials of innovation. These include government financing for scientific research, national policies to support emerging industries, educational achievement, engineers and scientists graduated, even the speeds of Internet broadband service.Yet what other nations typically lack, Mr. Kao adds, is a social environment that encourages diversity, experimentation, risk-taking, and combining skills from many fields into products that he calls recombinant mash-ups, like the iPhone, which redefined the smartphone category.The culture of other countries doesnt support the kind of innovation that Steve Jobs exemplifies, as America does, Mr. Kao says.Workers of every rank are told these days that wide-ranging curiosity and continuous learning are vital to thriving in the modern economy. Formal education matters, career counselors say, but real-life experience is often even more valuable.An adopted child, growing up in Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs displayed those traits early on. He was fascinated by electronics as a child, building Heathkit do-it-yourself projects, like radios.Mr. Jobs dropped out of Reed College after a semester and trekked around India in search of spiritual enlightenment, before returning to Silicon Valley to found Apple with his friend, Stephen Wozniak, an engineering wizard. Mr. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, went off and founded two other companies, Next and Pixar, before returning to Apple in 1996 and becoming chief executive in 1997.His path was unique, but innovation experts say the pattern of exploration is not unusual. Its often people like Steve Jobs who can draw from a deep reservoir of diverse experience that generate breakthrough ideas and insights, says Hal B. Gregersen, a professor at the European Institute of Business Administration, or Insead.Mr. Gregersen is a co-author of a new book, The Innovators DNA (Harvard Business School Press), based on an eight-year study of 5,000 entrepreneurs and executives worldwide. His two collaborators and co-authors are Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, and Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, whose 1997 book The Innovators Dilemma popularized the concept of disruptive innovation.The academics identify five traits that are common to the disruptive innovators: questioning, experimenting, observing, associating and networking. Their bundle of characteristics echoes the ceaseless curiosity and willingness to take risks noted by other experts. Networking, Mr. Gregersen explains, is less about career-building relationships than a search for new ideas. Associating, he adds, is the ability to make idea-producing connections by linking concepts from different disciplines intellectual mash-ups.Innovators engage in these mental activities regularly, Mr. Gregersen says. Its a habit.Innovative companies, according to the authors, typically enjoy higher valuations in the stock market, which they call an innovation premium. It is calculated by estimating the share of a companys value that cannot be accounted for by its current products and cash flow. The innovation premium tries to quantify investors bets that a company will do even better in the future because of innovation.Apple, by their calculations, had a 37 percent innovation premium during Mr. Jobss first stint with the company. His years in exile resulted in a 31 percent innovation discount. After his return, Apples fortunes improved gradually at first, and improved markedly starting in 2005, yielding a 52 percent innovation premium since then.There is no conclusive proof, but Mr. Gregersen says it is unlikely that Mr. Jobs could have reshaped industries beyond computing, as he has done in his second stint at Apple, without the experience outside the company, especially at Pixar the computer-animation studio that created a string of critically and commercially successful movies, like Toy Story and Up.Mr. Jobs suggested much the same thing during a commencement address to the graduating class at Stanford in 2005. It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, he told the students. Mr. Jobs also spoke of perseverance. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick, he said. Dont lose faith.Mr. Jobs ended his commencement talk with a call to innovation, in ones choice of work and in life. Be curious, experiment, take risks, he said. His admonition was punctuated by the words on the back of the final edition of The Whole Earth Catalog, which he quoted: Stay hungry. Stay foolish.And, Mr. Jobs said, I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.9. Reducing Incentives for Risk-TakingIt is now widely accepted that compensation structures in financial firms should be devised to avoid excessive incentives for risk-taking and that doing so requires tying executive compensation to long-term results and preventing cashing out of large amounts of compensation on the basis of short-term results.What long-term results are we talking about though? We propose that risk-taking incentives could be improved by tying executives pay not only to the long-term payoffs of shareholders but also to those of preferred shareholders, bondholders and taxpayers insuring depositors.In examining how executive compensation can affect risk-taking in financial firms, attention has focused on distortions that can arise from the ability of executives to cash out large amounts of compensation before the long-term consequences of risk-taking are realized. The importance of eliminating such distortions, which was first highlighted in a book,Pay without Performance,that one of us published with Jesse Fried five years ago, has become widely accepted in the aftermath of the financial crisis.But there is another type of potential distortions that should be recognized. Bank executives payoffs have been insulated from the consequences that losses could impose on parties other than shareholders. This source of distortions is separate and distinct from the short-termism problem; and it would remain even if executives payoffs were fully aligned with those of long-term shareholders.Equity-based awards, coupled with the capital structure of banks, tie executives compensation to a highly levered bet on the value of banks assets. Bank executives expect to share in any gains that might flow to common shareholders, but they are insulated from losses that the realization of risks could impose on preferred shareholders, bondholders, depositors or the government as a guarantor of deposits. This gives executives incentives to give insufficient weight to the possibility of large losses and therefore provides them with incentives to take excessive risks.How could pay arrangements be redesigned to address this distortion? To the extent that executive pay is tied to the value of specified securities, such pay could be tied to a broader basket of securities, not only common shares. Rather than tying executive pay to a specified percentage of the value of the common shares of the bank holding company, compensation could be tied to a specified percentage of the aggregate value of the common shares, the preferred shares and all the outstanding bonds issued by either the bank holding company or the bank. Because such a compensation structure would expose executives to a broader fraction of the negative consequences of risks taken, it will reduce their incentives to take excessive risks.Indeed, even the above structure would not lead bank executives to internalize fully the adverse consequences that risk-taking might have for the interests of the government as guarantor of deposits. To do so, it would be necessary to broaden further the set of positions to whose aggregate value executive payoffs are tied. One could consider, for example, schemes in which executive payoffs are tied not to a given percentage of the aggregate value of the banks common shares, preferred shares and bonds at a specified point in time, but rather to this aggregate value minus any payments made by the government to the banks depositors, as well as other payments made by the government in support of the bank, during the period ending at the specified time.Alternatively, one could consider tying executive payoffs to the aggregate value of the banks common shares, preferred shares, and bonds at the specified time minus the expected value of future government payments as proxied by the product of (i) the implied probability of default inferred from the price of credit default swaps at the specified time, and (ii) the value of the banks deposits at that time.Even if such schemes are not used, however, tying executive pay to the aggregate value of common shares, preferred shares and bonds will already produce a significant improvement in incentives compared with existing arrangements.Similarly, to the extent that executives receive bonus compensation that is tied to specified accounting measures, it could instead be tied to broader measures. For example, the bonus compensation of some bank executives has been based on accounting measures that are of interest primarily to common shareholders, such as return on equity or earning per common share. It would be worthwhile to consider basing bonus compensation instead on broader measures like earnings before any payments are made to bondholders.Recognizing this problem highlights the limits of corporate governance reforms for fixing the design eliminating excessive risk-taking incentives in banks. Concerns about excessive risk-taking have led legislators and regulators, both in the United States and abroad, to adopt or propose various corporate governance measures, such as say-on-pay votes, aimed at improving pay-setting processes and better aligning pay arrangements with the interest of banks shareholders.Although such measures can discourage some inefficient risk-taking that is undesirable from bank shareholders perspectives, they cannot be relied on to eliminate the incentives for excessive risk-taking that arise from moral hazard: The common shareholders in financial firms do not have an incentive to induce executives to take into account the losses that risks can impose on preferred shareholders, bondholders, depositors, taxpayers underwriting governmental guarantees of deposits and the economy. This moral hazard problem is at the heart of the extensive body of banking regulations that we have. Consequently, regulatory encouragement or even intervention may be needed to eliminate all excessive risk-taking incentives.Be that as it may, any attempt to eliminate excessive incentives for risk-taking requires a full understanding of the sources of such incentives. Such understanding requires focusing not only on the length of executives horizons but also on the definition of long-term results to which executives interests should be tied.

Sports for Life

10. Sports Teach Kids Valuable Lesson

For the past 75 years, parents have enrolled their children in local Little League programs. Of the millions of children who wear the Little League uniform patch, very few actually enter into Little League competition, one of ournine World Series tournaments. But the lessons young players gain between the foul lines have guided some to become astronauts, emergency first responders, bestselling authors, military heroes, professional athletes and even president of the United States.

To be successful in baseball and softball, you need to learn from failure and losing, more so than the act of winning. Perfect games are a rarity. Even some of our World Series champions have had to fight back from a tough defeat earlier in a tournament. Striving to win is important -- its a line in the Little League pledge -- but the more important lines are I will play fair and win or lose, I will always do my best.

While striving to win, children learn about teamwork, leadership and sportsmanship, all of which can contribute to their development as solid citizens. In organized team sports, children work together to accomplish a task and learn from their mistakes. These lessons directly translate into the classroom and beyond, and they are the reason that Little League considers itself a youth leadership organization, as much as it does a competitive baseball and softball program.

Every summer, millions watch the Little League World Series tournaments and are reminded that there are extremely talented athletes on our fields. But more important, they see a pitcher shaking the hand of a batter he just hit with a pitch, or a third baseman giving a high five to an opposing player as he rounds the bases after a home run. These wonderful, heartfelt scenes, brimming with life lessons for all ages, were inspired by the spirit of competitive team sports.

Sports Violence

11. We All Share Responsibility for a Culture of Sports ViolenceAs a microcosm of our society, sports reflects and reinforces inequalities and behaviors that are endemic. In contact sports especially, where there is a premium placed on aggression and violent behavior, athletes are rewarded from a very young age for expressing these behaviors.What we are witnessing at the professional level is a culture that condones, promotes and rewards aggression and violence, even though some players are not psychologically equipped to compartmentalize that behavior on the field or arena. Because this has been their way of life since youth sports, and now it is their livelihood, these athletes are expressing accumulated years of character underdevelopment. These behaviors carry over into their personal lives, harming those around them.Teams and leagues can protect their profit margins for only so long by distancing themselves from these athletes, as the New England Patriots did when they cut Aaron Hernandez. Leagues would show corporate responsibility if they confronted their cultures of violence and developed sound programs to address the characterunderdevelopment they are inheriting.Sports leagues can be leaders in the fight against gun violence, not with ephemeral press conferences or public service announcements, but with practices that discourage players from owning guns.With its High School Character Development program, the N.F.L. could extend the curriculum to include anger management and conflict resolution. Youth-level coaches and administrators must also be aware of how they may harm their players by promoting aggression and violence over character development.Ultimately, we will have to determine whether our favorite sports are more valuable to cheer and athletes more worthy of idolizing when we take a stand to stop the violence.

Nation Building

12. Nelson Mandela Grapsed the Power of SportsISTANBUL Countless political leaders around the world have known how to court the popularity of sports. But none of them has had a better feel for it, or a more genuine, yet simple, grasp of the nation-building potential of sports thanNelson Mandela.From childhood, he loved to run. In his youth, he learned to box. While imprisoned on Robben Island, games of soccer kept him and his fellow prisoners sane. And once he was freed, once he was handed the mandate to rebuild a broken, apartheid-riven South Africa, he used what he called the power of sports to help unite his people.It is a phenomenal legacy, the real power of the mind to grasp that by playing together and wearing the same shirt, South Africans could learn to be one Rainbow Nation.Those of us lucky enough to have met him in the 1990s grew to cherish his incredibly bold, yet almost childlike, trust in sports to heal horrendous divisions.The 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 African Cup of Nations in soccer, the 2003 Cricket World Cup, and then the big one the 2010 FIFA World Cup were all played on South African soil. Those events forged and framed a philosophy that by playing together and cheering together, people could realize that the notion of dividing men, women and children according to the color of their skin was a nonsensical as it was disgusting.Of course, it was not just one mans vision. Mandela grew up as a child in a sporting nation before he was a fighter against apartheid, yet after 27 years of imprisonment, his spirit and his reason remained unconquered.We are privileged that sports were such a tenet, a tool if you wish, to Mandelas way of forgiving, if not forgetting.Sport, he said, has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. He used that speech a number of times, honed and developed it to later include an overt reference to the breaking down of racial barriers and of all forms of discrimination. It was, of course, spoken with a lawyers mind and a politicians sense of opportunism.The moment when South Africas rugby team won the World Cup on home soil in 1995 just a year after Mandela was elected the countrys president will forever be cast as the ultimate picture of sport overcoming apartheid.When Mandela wore the green jersey and cap of the Springboks and handed the trophy to Franois Pienaar, it became the symbol of unification.For here was the black leader, the freedom fighter turned head of the government, knowingly embracing the blond captain of a game, rugby, that was up to that time a singularly white game in South Africa.But it didnt just happen. Pienaar was invited to tea with the president before the final. The rugby captain was and still is moved by a life-defining experience of an acceptance by and friendship with Mandela.It was not a show for the public. Mandela acted just the same, and was just as genuine, with the young players from varied backgrounds at the less trumpeted African Cup of Nations.Soccer happened to be the game played in Soweto and other townships. Yet whites were never barred, never excluded from those games. They could and one or two brave souls did play soccer together even in the worst times of bigoted rule. And they were accepted for their skill.So soccer, I once had the temerity to say to Mandela, had earned the right to be South Africas game because it eschewed prejudice.He replied that South Africa would bid for the Olympic Games and for the soccer World Cup when it had the resources to do so.Cape Town did bid for the 2004 Olympics, but lost out to Athens.South Africa went for the 2006 World Cup, but it was rebuffed in favor of the safer option, Germany. But South Africa persevered. Mandela was personally involved, and had to be, to win the votes, to give those power to change the world speeches when he made a personal appeal to the FIFA executive committee.Mandela, though, could not look after the bid full-time, or steer it through the inner politics that motivate FIFAs dreadful selection processing of choosing where to play its billion-dollar tournament.Mandela chose Danny Jordaan, like himself an anti-apartheid activist from his student days, to lead the successful bid to bring the World Cup to South Africa in 2010.When Mandelas presence was needed, he was always there. When the gamble paid off and the decision was made six years ahead of the tournament, Mandela said he felt like a 15-year-old handed a dream.Already old and always delegating, Mandela knew that this was the greatest test of nationhood that his country could and would face in his lifetime.Africa not just South Africa was tested by all the demands of having 32 nations taking part in a monthlong tournament: building the needed hotels, airports and roads; welcoming millions of foreign visitors; and securing massive new stadiums that the nation could hardly afford.Ke nako, the people, and Mandela, said. Its time.During the World Cup, there was a wretched sadness the tragic death in a car crash of his 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zenani, on the eve of the opening that reminded Mandela how cruel fate could be. Just before that, guests had popped into Mandelas home in Johannesburg for fleeting visits: Cristiano Ronaldo was one, and Zenani was dancing, literally dancing with joy, over the soccer idols visit to her great-granddad.And then she was gone. Mandela did not make the opening ceremony the next night. He did appear in the stadium at the final game. It was his last major public engagement.Mandela was by then frail, but not in spirit. He said one last time, Ke nako. The gist of his parting speech was We did it.And we suspect that without him, there might never have been such a sporting event on African soil. Sports are simple, but it sometimes takes great leaders, exceptional human beings, to see that.

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