Word: pros
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once the U.S. team qualifies for the Olympics, go for the pros: take that group of NBA players who've always wanted to be Olympians, put them in a summer camp before the Games, and bang, the U.S. has a medal contender. That's ridiculous, you say. What sports executive would let a multimillion-dollar investment play some silly sport in the off-season? Well, if basketball general managers let their guys play Olympic basketball in the summer and hockey bosses permit their stars to play in the Olympic tournament during their season, why wouldn't they let them hurl...
...that when Brazilian players make it big and are signed to play for major European professional teams, they lose their identity and national pride. (Indeed, there are currently more than ten other countries, ranging from Spain and Portugal to Croatia, Poland and Japan, that have awarded citizenship to Brazilian pros in order to field them in their national soccer teams.) Players earning millions of dollars abroad on their pro teams don't have the same passion for representing the national team as do those that stay close to home, runs the conventional wisdom. "If you look at the Brazilian team...
...Seven Dwarfs - and contemporary hits like The Lion King and Pixar's Finding Nemo - didn't convince the Academy that those animated films deserved to be considered alongside live-action ones. That's because animated features enjoy scant support from the largest branch of the 6,000 film-industry pros who select the Best Picture candidates every year: actors. "Actors tend to vote for live-action performances," says Variety columnist Anne Thompson. "Lord of the Rings got to Best Picture without any heavily praised performances, but that's very unusual...
Obama's campaign initially defended the placard but later declared the seal "a one-time thing for a one-time event." Whatever the original intent, it was a serious gaffe for an operation that has made miraculously few mistakes during a long, tough campaign. Political pros say the mistake is a reminder of how dumb even a smart campaign can be--reflecting a blindness to the danger that Obama can at times come off as too sure of himself...
What's that? Well, let's just say Ana Ivanovic, the French Open champion and new top-ranked women's player in the world, had a slightly tougher ride than most tennis pros. Reared in the war-torn Serbia of the 1990s, Ivanovic has risen from her home country's ashes to become the best in the game, the leader of the unlikely Serbian revolution that includes Jelena Jankovic, the second-ranked woman in the world, and Novak Djokovic, No. 3 on the men's side. At 20, Ivanovic has all the assets of a megastar-in-the-making: looks...