A brainwave from the vicinity of this office today. Donny Mahoney has a dream of setting up a fake US sports site, maintaining it for a couple of months and building up its credibility by doing stories on allegations against Peyton Manning and composing lists of the greatest slam dunks ever seen, before proceeding to write articles listing hurlers among the greatest athletes of all time and naming Padraig Harrington as the greatest British golfer of the past 50 years. Traffic heaven in this country.
The Skinny365.com, a newly established website with no fewer than 83 twitter followers, has attracted great interest in Ireland after naming handball legend Paul Brady among the fifteen greatest sports stars in the world.
In today's episode of the Racket, we phoned up the founder of the site Jim Ewing to learn a little bit more about their reverence for Brady.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/247715740" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]
Though the venture is only a month old, Jim confirmed that a lot of folk from Ireland are checking out the site. He pointed out that the author of the Brady piece - as it shall henceforth be known in this country - is a former handballer.
He's (the writer) Michael Ewing, he's actually a long-time handball player and one of his good friends is Sean Lenning so he's actually really deep into the handball community.
Elsewhere on the pod, we spoke to the PDC World darts champion Gary Anderson. The interview ranged across many topics, from the life of a professional darts player and an astounding disclosure about his first attempt at the sport.
People laugh at us. You pick anyone in this world who is fit or a health freak. You stick them on the road with us for a year. I guarantee you that they'll be fucked. They cannot do what we do. When you're sleeping, I'm driving for eight hours through the night. Where do you stop to get food at that time?
It's just whatever you can get. We do hundreds and hundreds of miles on the road. People mock about it. But we've got no home life. We're in hotels. If we're not in hotels, we're in airports, if we're not in airports, we're in trains, if we're not in trains, we're driving.
I've said it before. Anyone who thinks they're fit. Come and do what we do for a year and you'll be a bundle of mess.
