Word: planking
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...Qaeda ever got hold of Saddam's weapons, the future didn't bear thinking about. The afternoon after the attacks, Wolfowitz, in conference calls with other officials, started voicing suspicions that Iraq might somehow have been involved. Within hours, he was lobbying Cheney on the topic, arguing--a central plank of the neoconservative analysis--that Iraq was also somehow behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Within days, James Woolsey, once Clinton's head of the CIA but who had joined the neoconservatives on Iraq, was dispatched by the Pentagon to find proof that Iraq...
...game rages on. Some guy hits something with a misshapen plank of wood and everybody in the room goes “Ooooooh.” Instead of being rowdy, the audience is mostly reverent. Mild shouts of “What a bowl!” greet the instant replay. When something goes terribly awry, they tilt back their heads and make a disapproving yet dignified “tsk” sound, or place their heads in their hands while groaning or (when things get really rough) raise their arms at an oblique angle and flail their forefingers...
...Plank knows he's still an underdog in the face of competition from the likes of Reebok, which he describes as "some pretty big people taking shots at us." One thing, though, is certain: he'll never let them see him sweat...
When he started Under Armour, says Plank, "I decided to bypass athletic directors and go straight to equipment managers. They control what's on that field." After his initial sale at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, he maxed out his credit cards and hit up his mom and brothers for cash to set up a small production plant in Baltimore. That fall, Dave Campo, then equipment manager for the Atlanta Falcons, admired Georgia Tech's shirts and ordered 100--with long sleeves to protect his players' arms against burns from artificial turf. These were dubbed Turf Gear. Later, Plank...
...company's big break came when director Oliver Stone used Under Armour in his football movie, Any Given Sunday. Stone called for a futuristic-looking jockstrap for Jamie Foxx to wear in a locker-room scene with Cameron Diaz. Plank had it stitched up, and seized the chance to plaster an Under Armour logo front and center. When the movie premiered in December 1999, Plank gambled his working capital to buy his first ad, a half page in ESPN magazine. That and the buzz about Foxx's eye-popping jock brought $500,000 in sales almost overnight and boosted...