General Sports Archives - Page 3 of 6

Why do Sports Fans Care More Than the Players?

The other day I was talking to my Mom about the post I wrote following the United States’ loss to Canada in the Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey semi-finals. She complimented me (thanks Mom!) on how well I expressed the emotions of a fan who has just watched their team lose. Our conversation led into a discussion of why it seems like fans take losses harder than the athletes themselves. I decided to turn that conversation into this short essay on why sports fans care more than the players.

sad fans — Toronto Maple Leaf fans react in horror to their team’s collapse in last year’s playoffs.

The day before the U.S. vs. Canada game, I had the opportunity to hang out in the USA house in Olympic Park. There I met the mother of an Olympic Snowboard Cross competitor. When I asked her how he did, she grimaced and said “Not so good.” I commiserated with her and when it was clear that she hadn’t let the loss get in the way of her enjoying the Olympic experience, I asked her if her son was able to enjoy himself after the loss too. Of course he was, was her answer. She explained that he usually takes fifteen minutes to a half-hour to get over a bad performance and that she and her family have learned to give him space until he’s done processing. By the time another American racer had won the competition, her son was already able to enjoy it with him, grinning and lifting him up in celebration.

At the depths of my despair about the fate of the United States Men’s Ice Hockey team, I felt as though I had come thousands of miles for nothing — just to see them lose. But then I thought of this woman and her son. If he was able to get over his loss, which he had traveled thousands of miles for, not to mention the thousands of hours of training, then certainly I should be able to get over my feelings of loss. That’s when my Mom mentioned that when my brother and I were kids and our soccer teams lost, she was always more upset, for longer, than he or I was. She said that our behavior was a lot like the snowboarder’s — by the time we got home from the game, it seemed like we had moved on.

Why is that, we wondered? Why do sports fans care more than the players?

The common answer to this common question, usually asked about professional athletes, is that they care less than the fans because it’s a job for them while it’s a passion for the fans. There’s probably some truth to this. There have been lots of stories in the past year that clarify that locker rooms are workplaces and being an athlete is a job. The Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito story was about workplace harassment. The brain injury story has been about assumptions of safety and fair disclosure of risk in the workplace. The Michael Sam and Jason Collins story has been about freedom of preference expression in the workplace. Meanwhile, players are being traded and cut by their teams left and right, each one clarifying that athletes are hires, not members of a team family. I’m suspicious of the logic that adds all of this evidence together and comes out with the conclusion that this is why professional athletes don’t seem to care about losses as much as fans. First of all, if this were true, then we wouldn’t expect to see fans of youth or amateur sports care more than the players. Secondly, the selection process to make it into a professional league in a team sport is so competitive that I think it selects for people who care more about the team than most rational people would.

My explanation is that fans care more than the players because they have less agency. Another thing I did on my trip was read a lot. My girlfriend (this is turning into quite a family post!) recommended The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. In it, a psychologist treats victims of what they called “shell-shock” or “hysteria” during World War 1 and, despite mixed feelings on the matter, tries to cure them so they can go back to the front. Dr. William Rivers (who was a real person — much of the books is based on his and some of his patients’ writings which have survived) uses his few free hours to theorize about the nature of the psychological disorders that he’s working on. He theorizes that the connection between the common incidence of shell-shock among men at the front and the hysteria that during peace-time was a more common female issue, is lack of agency. He doesn’t think that what pushes soldiers or house-wives over the edge is the horror of war or an abusive husband but instead it’s the feeling of being completely invested in something that you have absolutely no power to influence in any material way.

The same, do a much lesser extent, of course, is true of sports fans. We sit in the stands or on our couches and invest ourselves in the success or failure of our teams but we have absolutely no control over what happens to them. As much as we try with lucky jerseys, lucky food, or other rituals, we know that we’re just observers and not a part of the action. My guess is that that is psychologically harder than what the athletes go through during most losses. At least they impacted the game — even if they kick themselves for a bad catch or an errant pass or a missed defensive assignment, they know that they did some good things and some bad ones; they know they had an effect on the game. The athlete who loses doesn’t feel the helpless meaningless feeling of the fan who knows that she cares so deeply about something completely uncontrollable… and that she’s going to continue to next season.

What is a Southpaw? Why Are They Called Southpaws?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a southpaw and why are they called southpaws? Where does that term come from?

Thanks,
Sally,

— — —

Dear Sally,

A southpaw is someone who is left-handed. I’m guessing that you’re asking me instead of an etymologist because you heard the word used in the context of a sporting event. That’s apropos because the term comes from sports, baseball in particular, and was first used to refer to the handedness of a pitcher in particular. Here’s some background about baseball to lead into an explanation of the southpaw phrase.

Of all the major sports, baseball is probably the one that makes the biggest show of respecting its own tradition. One of its longest held tradition is playing games at night but not fully embracing it. According to Wikipedia, there have been night baseball games since the 1880s but major league teams “initially dismissed as an unwelcome gimmick by the big-league clubs.” The last hold-out in the major leagues, the venerable Chicago Cubs, succumbed to the night game trend in 1988, a hundred years or so later. There are still more day games in baseball than any other sport.

Hitting a major league pitch is an incredibly difficult feat and it requires, more than any other quality, great eyesight. As we know from the excellent book, The Sports Gene, the average vision of professional baseball players is 20/13 (they can see at 20 feet what most people can see at 13.) Doing anything to damage this vision, like painting the seams of the baseball white so that they cannot be distinguished from the rest of the ball, makes it virtually impossible for even the best baseball players to hit a pitch.

One naturally occurring factor that could effect the eyesight of the batter is, of course, the sun! If a batter were forced to look towards the sun in a low (rising or setting) position, it would seriously effect the game. Baseball at sunrise is unlikely but baseball games, particularly because of the tradition of playing during the day, could easily be played at or around sunset. You never hear about a batter with the sun in his eyes — fielders, yes, but not batters. This is because baseball stadiums are almost universally designed so that a batter standing at home plate facing the field will be pointed somewhere between due East and due North. This gets them away from the setting sun and, in the Northern Hemisphere, away from the Southerly winter sun as well. Popchartlab has a wonderful poster for sale that shows this.

In a baseball diamond where the batter faces East, the pitcher, standing opposite him, faces West. Imagine facing West and using your body as a map’s key or compass. Your eyes point West, your butt points East, your right arm points North, and your left arm… points South! This is how left-handed pitchers first became known as southpaws. Their paws literally face South in a traditional baseball stadium.

From baseball, the word has moved into other sports and into common use. I hear it most frequently in sports where handedness is a major tactical factor. Sports like hockey and tennis where which hand you favor marks which way you are more comfortable swinging your racket or stick are nice fits for using the term. I’ve also heard it used in basketball and boxing, two sports with motions (shooting in basketball, punching in boxing) that are asymmetrical and handed. In a recent episode of the NPR show, Radiolab, the hosts interviewed an English professor turned mixed martial artist, Jonathan Gottschall, whose first experience fighting was against a lefty and who talked about a theory for why lefties have been evolutionarily retained. The theory suggested that despite many negative aspects of left-handedness (lefties are more prone to any number of diseases and other early deaths,) they have a significant advantage in hand-to-hand combat because their relative rareness means that righties who are used to fighting righties can’t make sense of what’s coming at them until it’s too late.

I hope this answer has been both helpful and interesting. If not, can we blame it on the fact that I’m a life-long northpaw?
Ezra Fischer

Winter Olympics: All About Curling

Today we have a special guest feature on Curling from our friend Brian Reich who gets down with his own bad self on thinkingaboutsports.com. He worked with USA Curling to prepare a special Winter Olympics Curling preview site (www.HitTheBroom.com) making him the perfect person to write this preview for us. Thanks Brian!

Does talking about last stone advantage at cocktail parties or describing a critical eighth- end takeout with your colleagues already come naturally to you? If not, then you are not alone. Curling is an exciting sport filled with strategy, athleticism, and action, with millions of fans around the world. But, for most people (in the United States), the sport is still new and possibly a little confusing. If you are a casual fan, or a potential fan, you may have questions: What is curling? Why are they sweeping? What are they yelling about?

We launched www.HitTheBroom.com, a site devoted to curling, to answer these questions and more to help casual (and would-be) fans get a better grasp of the sport. The more you understand and appreciate what is happening on the ice, the more likely you will be to watch, and enjoy watching, and the more engaged you will become as a fan.

We also put together a casual fan’s guide to curling, a line of t-shirts, and we will be sharing insights and details throughout the Olympics.

To help get you started:

What is Curling?

Curling is played on a long, narrow sheet of ice with a marked target area, called the house, at each end. Two teams, each with four players, take turns sliding 42-pound granite stones to the far side of the ice sheet. The objective for each team is to get its stones closest to the center button of the house.

Players vigorously sweep the ice in front of the stone to keep it moving. The friction caused by the sweeping polishes the ice briefly, which makes the stones travel farther and straighter.

Each curling match is divided into ten ends. Each end includes both teams delivering all of its stones (eight stones per team). After all the stones have been delivered, the team whose stone is closest to the button gets a point. Additional points are scored by other stones in the house that belong to the same team, at one point per stone.

The team with the most points after the tenth end is the winner.

How Does Curling Work?

Before the shot: As the person delivering the shot steps up to the hack, the foothold located behind the house that is used to push off, she looks to the far end of the sheet for instructions. Another player, usually the skip (captain), communicates the type of shot that should be used and the distance it should travel with a series of hand and arm movements, and uses a broom to mark the shot where the shooter should aim.

Delivery: From a kneeling position, with a foot flat on the ice, the player with the stone begins a shot by sliding forward and releasing the stone before crossing the hog line, painted under the ice. The player delivering the stone gives it a slight spin upon release, depending on which direction they want it to travel. The stone is now in play and the team begins working to get it as close to the target as possible. The spin allows the stone to travel in a curved path, or curl, as it approaches the house.

Communication: Immediately after release, the skip yells to the other two teammates, telling them whether or not the line is good and whether adjustments are needed.

Sweeping: The primary method to assist a stone’s movement down the curling sheet is sweeping in front of its path. Players may not make contact with the stone, but they can clear the ice in front of the stone to enable smooth movement.

Scoring: A team receives one point for each stone that is within the house and is closer to the button (center of the target area at the end of the sheet) than any of the opposition’s stones. Only one team can score points in an end. Each stone that meets these criteria is worth one point.

What Should You Watch For?

There are so many things to watch for with curling. A couple to start with:

Last Stone Advantage: If a team has the hammer, it will try to keep the house clear of stones so as to have access to the button area at all times and finish an end in position to score points. If a team does not have the hammer in an end, it may try to clog up the four-foot zone in the house to deny the opposing team access to the button.

The Skip’s Signals: The skip uses a combination of hand signals and broom placements to communicate what shot is needed.

Yelling: As the stone moves down the ice, the skip often yells to communicate how the sweepers should help to influence the shot. Some common calls made by the skip include: Hurry (sweep as fast as you can), Hurry Hard (sweep as fast as you can, with downward pressure), and Clean (keep a broom down on the ice, without applying much pressure, to clear away anything that could disrupt the movement of the stone).

Sportsmanship: Sportsmanship is a big part of the culture of curling. There is no trash talking. Players always shake hands, and curlers say “good shot” (or similar) to their opponents when appropriate. And tradition dictates that competitors share a beer after a match. It is genuine, not gamesmanship.

What are Some Fun Curling Stories?

Craig Brown, the men’s team alternate, and Erika Brown, the skip of the Women’s team, are siblings. Their father, Steve Brown, is a legendary curler with multiple national titles, and is now the National Wheelchair Curling Team Development Coach. Both John Shuster and Erika Brown, the Team USA men’s and women’s skips respectively, are both making their third appearance in the Olympics. Vernon Davis of the San Francisco 49ers is an honorary member of Team USA as well. China and Japan qualified to curl in the Olympics for the first time this year. And you won’t be able to miss the Norwegian Curling team’s pants.

More Information

For more about curling, visit www.HitTheBroom.com and download the casual fan’s guide to curling. You can also find out more on twitter (@ThinkSports).

Thanks for reading,
Brian

Playing Well vs. Playing Good

One difference I’ve noticed between European sports fans and American ones is that European fans are more interested in whether their team plays well than American fans. I won’t say that they are more interested in their team playing well than their team winning but it sometimes seems like it. This is a difference that I’ve read about before, mostly about soccer fans, but I experienced it myself today.

I was buying a sandwich at a small shop right outside Park Guell, a really cool monument park designed by Antoni Gaudi, and I started talking to the guy helping me about the local Barcelona soccer team. He said he hoped that the team played well against Real Sociedad tonight; that it was a chance to recover from a loss this past weekend. He hadn’t liked the way they looked during that loss. He went on to explain that the game tonight is the first leg off a two game semifinal in the Spanish championships, Copa del Rey. I probed a little to see if he thought a victory was likely and he would only say that he’d like the team to play better soccer together.

This is so different from most American fans. A conversation with an American fan would focus first and foremost on winning and losing. The loss last weekend hurt because it dropped the team in the standings. The game tonight would be a “must win” or something like that. Rarely would style or playing the right way pop up in conversation.

I can’t say exactly why this is. There are some elements of soccer that seem to at least augment the European way of thinking. Soccer is so low scoring that a single lucky bounce or missed tackle can make a more dominant team lose a game. Perhaps this understanding that wins and losses are sometimes luck leads fans to judge their teams on style and emotion — things that should be able to be consistent from game to game. Maybe too, the two leg (two games, one at each team’s stadium) tournament round makes it so that (at least in the first game) signs of life are more important than the result.

I’m not sure but I bought a ticket and I’m going to the game so I will report back tomorrow!!

Great Sports Writing from 2013

It’s a little absurd to re-blog someone else’s list of great articles from 2013 but… I’m gonna do it anyway. Deadspin’s editors put together a list of excellent sports writing from the past year including Brian Phillips’ Grantland piece on match-fixing in soccer, Eric Nusbaum’s ESPN Magazine article on the intriguing world of gender-bending Mexican professional wrestling, and many, many more. I only remember about half of them from the past year and I’ve been enjoying reading through them today. I hope you will too!

Sports is for Lovers

I know, I know, Virginia is for lovers is the line, but three articles popped out at me recently that made me think that really Sports is for lovers too! One is the story behind sports blog Deadspin’s “Favorite Sports Photo of 2013.” The other one, found by another sports blog, The Big Lead, is an obscure scientific study investigating the legend (or reality) of a baby boom in Barcelona exactly nine months after a dramatic soccer victory. The last is a bonus collection of great hockey hugs!

San Fran Kissing — This photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice went viral.

The legend of baby booms nine months after events is common story. The study made reference to the 1965 blackout in New York but I can remember other stories following events like the olympics, big blizzards, and even the election of Barack Obama (although that one, at least, seems to not have been true.) The event these scientists studied was the goal Andres Iniesta scored in dramatic fashion to send Barcelona to the Champions League final. The Champions League is a tournament where the best teams from each of the national leagues in Europe play each other for continental bragging rights. Their conclusion?

We may infer that—at least among the target population—the heightened euphoria following a victory can cultivate hedonic sensations that result in intimate celebrations, of which unplanned births may be a consequence.

That’s some great writing, guys! I love scientific studies of lay subjects!

Might lay also have been the operational word in the story behind the wonderful story of two San Francisco 49ers fans kissing to celebrate their team’s victory in last year’s NFL playoff semifinals? A gentleman never tells — and in this case, both of the people captured in the photo were gentlemen! Photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice writes that the wonderful response the photo received in the days after she took it, “made [her] realize we have gained some ground in terms of acceptance and broader thinking.”

When was the last time you were so happy?

To put the cherry on top of our sports-love-fest, enjoy Yahoo’s hockey blog, Puck Daddy’s “Top 10 Hockey Hugs of 2013.” It’s just great! My favorite is this one between Hurricanes Jeff Skinner and Jay Harrison but there are nine more good ones to check out. Enjoy!

Creating Narrative from Sports

The Nets are talented, experienced, and expected to win. What story can I tell myself to make me get behind them?

One of the things that I think is the most misunderstood by people who don’t watch sports is exactly how much story-telling the average sports fan does. Sports leagues, sports media, and even the athletes themselves actively try to create stories about sports for fans to consume. Sports fans activate their imaginations themselves and project narratives they themselves want to see onto their favorite teams and players. This mixture of consuming and creating stories from sports is one of the elements of fandom that keeps sports fans coming back game after game and year after year. It’s a way in which the following of sports is not so different from the playing with legos or dolls or stuffed animals that we all did as children. It’s also a reason why the idea of “fantasy sports” is a little silly. Sports are already an exercise in fantasy!

A recent article in The New York Times by Randal C. Archibold profiled “Juan Villoro, one of Mexico’s most decorated and esteemed writers — who also happens to be a leading soccer analyst.” Written a few weeks ago, when Mexico’s chances of qualifying for the World Cup looked bleak Villoro was eloquent about how he interprets international soccer:

“Every World Cup team reflects its country’s social model,” he said a few days after the column. “When Spain won last time, it was about middle-class aspiration, a nation making it. France’s victorious team before that,” in 1998, “reflected the multinational ideal it aspires to be.”

“And Mexico now,” he said, “it’s a combination of the nation that has been promised a lot, but the promises have not been fully fulfilled and there is a feeling like maybe they never will be. It is a very Mexican team in that regard.”

I wonder what Villoro thinks now that Mexico has qualified for the World Cup by beating New Zealand in a two game playoff? You may guess that he has come up with a new narrative or that he’s found a way to wedge the current (fleeting, he might write) success of the team into his existing narrative of unfulfilled promises but my guess is that either way he’s still telling stories about his country’s team.

Towards the end of the article, Archibold writes a line which I think is exactly right, “But more broadly, Mr. Villoro sees how we entertain ourselves as essential to understanding who we are.” I think this is a major reason why I find it harder to root for my favorite teams when they are, well, really good. It’s much harder for me to create compelling stories with a team that is more talented, more experienced, and expected to win as the protagonist. It’s much more fun to root for a young, up-and-coming team. That type of team fits into coming-of-age narratives, into stories about the dawning of a new era, about young David’s beating established Golaiths. The opposite can also be fun. I am in the process of convincing myself that the Brooklyn Nets this year are worth rooting for. The Nets this year are perhaps the most outrageous collection of over-priced, over-the-hill former stars ever. Their lineup every-night sounds like an all-star team from 2007; and because of that, I’ve found it hard to get behind them. But, now that they’ve started the year with only three wins in the first dozen games, I have a perfect story to tell myself about them. They are the group of bank robbers come back together for one last score (Oceans’s Thirteen,) they are a group of Samurai or gunfighters who band together to protect a village from bandits even though they themselves are weary of fighting (The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven.) I love stories about old-age and treachery staving off youth and vigor for just one more day, one more game, one more season. And now, I love the Nets!

The way we entertain ourselves is revealing about who we are, so the next time you watch sports with someone, ask them what the plot is — ask them what stories they are telling themselves about the game they’re watching.

How Difficult is Running a Marathon?

Dear Sports Fan,

I live in New York along the path of the Marathon. I enjoy cheering the runners on as they go by but I’ve never been tempted to train for a marathon myself. I’m wondering, how difficult is running a marathon?

Curious in Queens,
Carl

A lot of people run the NYC Marathon each year but that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult.

— — —

Dear Carl,

That’s so cool that you live on the route of the New York City Marathon. I’ve heard from friends who have run it that they really appreciate the people on the route who cheer or set up their houses as giant stereo systems or in some other way enliven the long slog to the finish-line. I’ve never run a marathon, so I can’t write from personal experience, but it seems like a marathon is very, very difficult but accessible to most people who want to run one.

A marathon is a 26 mile, 385 yard race run by over half a million people each year. 48,000 people will run in the NYC Marathon alone! Most of these people are amateur runners, people like you and me, except that they for any number of reasons decided to train for and run in a long-distance race. Most of the runners don’t treat the marathon like a race; at least, not the kind of race you might have had as a kid when you and a friend ran to see who could reach the end of a path the fastest. For one thing, there’s no way that 48,000 people can start at the same time. The start of the race is highly regimented and staggered event^[1] where the relatively small group of professional runners who actually have a chance to win start 25 minutes before the next wave of slower runners. No, most of the people who run a marathon are trying to beat only a personal goal they’ve set. Data, put together on Deadspin.com by Rueben Fischer-Baum suggests that many are successful in this; instead of a smooth curve of finishing times, there are little spikes at even ten and thirty minute marks.

Almost all (98%) of the marathoners who start the race, complete the race. That’s very different from what would happen if amateurs tried to complete other professional sporting feats. An amateur, even a trained amateur, would have almost no chance of hitting a major league fastball, finishing a shift in hockey, scoring more than a fluke basket or two in an NBA game, or even just making it through a football play without a major injury. Then again, a layperson might have less chance of hitting a baseball than completing a marathon, but they’d certainly be less sore after trying. Just finishing something doesn’t mean that it wasn’t difficult to do.

The curious distance of the race and its history speak eloquently, if somewhat unreliably to how difficult it is. The marathon was invented as an athletic event in 1896 by some of the architects of the first Olympic Games who were searching for an event to catch the imagination of spectators and journalists. They recalled the Ancient Greek story/myth of an Athenian soldier who ran from Marathon to Athens to spread the news of a victorious battle over the Persians. The legend ends with the runner’s end as he dies of exhaustion after successfully delivering his message. There’s a lot of conflicting reports of this story — had he fought that day? did he follow the path of the road that was measured in 1896 to get the figure of 26 miles, 385 yards? or was it a shorter road? had he just run a 150 miles on another mission when he left on the 26 mile run that killed him? did he really die?

A very small percentage of runners these days die. There was an article in Time magazine entitled “Running a Marathon Won’t Kill You” that stated the death rate of marathoners as 1 per 259,000. Of course, that’s consistent with the 1 per 1 of the legend but I would suggest we just take that whole story with a grain of salt. Talking about salt, marathon runners today keep themselves fresh by eating and drinking all kinds of things during the race. The Huffington Post’s recent article on marathon nutrition suggested everything from specially created and marketed runner’s gels to gummi bears and marshmallows. Counter-intuitively, one thing that actually kills a marathoner once every other year or so is too much water, according to this article in the Washington Post. If you see someone in distress tomorrow, make sure to check how much water they’ve had before you offer them some more.

The popularity of marathon runners has brought on a slew of articles minimizing the difficulty of running a marathon. The New York Times ran an article a few years ago with the mildly obnoxious headline, “Plodders Have a Place, but is it in a Marathon?” In it they quote an experienced marathon saying, “It used to be that running a marathon was worth something — there used to be a pride saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore. Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?’” This past spring the Running Blog of the Guardian surveyed runners trying to distinguish themselves from the increasingly common marathoners by performing feats like running seven marathons in seven days or running across the continental United States.

I don’t think the fact that many people can run a marathon suggest it is anything other than an extraordinary feat worthy of congratulations. Here’s two suggestions on how to show people just how impressive marathons are. First, have them tune in to ABC at around 11:30 tomorrow morning. The professional men’s runners will be nearing the end of the race. After 24 or 15 miles of running at a pace of under five minutes per mile, the runners will begin to sprint, raising their pace to around four and a half minutes per mile. After that, ask the skeptic to go run a single mile with you. If even that doesn’t work, you can break out my favorite fact about marathons, and one that I once lost a bet on. Ask your friend if they think a runner could ever beat a person on horseback in a race of this distance? Then show them the Wikipedia page for the amazing Man vs. Horse Marathon run each year in Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells which was won by a runner twice in the last ten years.

Happy running and happy cheering,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

As opposed to the finish, which sees many people staggering to the finish line, exhausted but victorious.↵

Why Are Athletes and Sports Fans so Superstitious

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are athletes and sports fans so superstitious? You never see articles about stock brokers or opera goers doing insane things but for some reason sports seems to create so much craziness.

Thanks,
Hugh

bengals-fans-750x256 — The team always wins when I wear my orange beard and headband. Right?

— — —

Dear Hugh,

It’s Halloween today, so it’s a perfect time to answer this question about sports and superstition. You’re right — sports do seem to inspire an enormous amount of mystical lunacy among the people who play them for a living and the people who follow them closely. I happen to think that superstition is one of the more amusing elements of following sports, so I’m going to share a few examples. After that, we’ll deal with the question of why sports create this lunacy among us.

Much has been made about the World Series winning Boston Red Sox and their superstitious beards. After they won the series, Reuters posted an article with the headline, “Boston Bond and Beards drive Red Sox to Victory.” While we won’t get into the fact that the playoff beard is a well-known and thoroughly explored phenomenon in hockey, it is worth noting that a reputable news organization is suggesting that the growing of beards had an effect on the outcome of a sporting event. This is, of course, more or less the reason why hockey fans across the continent stop shaving when the playoffs begin — they are hoping their own shaving patterns affect the outcome of sporting events.

On the subject of beards, Deadspin.com ran a story about a man in Minnesota who decided he wouldn’t shave his beard until the local NFL football team, the Vikings, won the Super Bowl. That man, Emmett Pearson, died this past Monday, 38 years after he made that promise, still unshaven. Long championship draughts seem to breed that level of superstition as well as wry humor. A long-time Cleveland Browns fan gained posthumous notoriety after specifying in his obituary that he “respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pallbearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.” The Browns didn’t go that far but they did send two representatives of the team to his funeral in appreciation for Scott Ensminger’s long-time support of the team which apparently included writing a song for the team and sending it to them each year.

Bud Light has an entire ad campaign based on the concept that drinking bud light will somehow grant good luck to the team you root for. The clever slogan is “It’s only crazy if it doesn’t work.” Business Insider^[1] published a list of the 30 strangest superstitions in sports, including one of my favorites — that NBA player Jason Terry falls asleep with the shorts of whatever team his team is playing the night before the game. It makes such logical sense — if you want to win, you’ve got to sleep a night in your opponents’ clothes. Perhaps the best sports superstition I’ve read about in a long time comes from the New York Times article about the various compulsions of players and coaches on the New York Jets football team:

One Friday night about 20 years ago, the Jets’ offensive line coach, Mike Devlin, and his girlfriend, Julie, had a fight. Devlin, then an Iowa Hawkeye, had a great game the next day, and so the next week, he insisted that they fight again. Again he played well.

A tradition was born. Devlin and Julie did not add it to their wedding vows. But in sickness and in health, in Buffalo or in Arizona, they have staged a fake argument by telephone the night before every game — about 350 of them to date.

What is it about sports that inspires players, coaches, and fans to act so strangely? There are lots of fairly obvious reasons. For sports players and even sports fans, the outcome of a game can be very important. Yes, for players there are gobs of money involved as well as the downside of being fired, and for fans there is only the joy of winning balanced against the frustration of losing, but I would argue that most players who make it to the pros are likely to be people who are internally driven to win. Being driven to win has to explain the time and energy put into becoming a professional athlete for most people who do it. There’s also a lot of chance involved in the outcome of games. Sports are incredibly complex and it’s also very difficult to analyze why a game is won or lost. My experience with playing spots is that individual performance, like the result of a game, is highly unpredictable and it’s hard to tell why you feel strong and fast one day and slow and clumsy the next.

If superstition is an attempt to bring rationality to an inexplicable world defined by chance, then it makes sense that sports are the most superstitious area in many people’s lives; they are the most important and most unpredictable aspect in many people’s lives.

There may be another, more curious answer, as suggested in the conclusion of a scholarly study of superstition in top-level athletes done by Michaela Schippers and Paul Van Lange of the Rotterdam School of Management; that it works:

One may speculate, that in preparing for a match, the most important concern is to regulate one’s own psychological and physical state. Thus, sportspersons realistically may see a strong link between enacting superstitious rituals and a desired outcome.

As for fans — there’s no proof of any of our superstitions working, despite what your friend who hasn’t changed his underwear in six months says. The last word on this topic should come from Chuck Klosterman’s essay about why he doesn’t enjoy watching DVR’d sports:

If you think your mind and heart play a role in the game you’re watching, a DVR’d game is like trying to hug a dead body. Your hopes and desires immediately become irrelevant. Which, of course, they always were — but now you can’t even pretend.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

I guess it’s inside the business of sports, but I’m guessing it’s mostly just a way to get views on their website.↵

Why do Sports Teams Report Injuries?

Dear Sports Fan,

One thing I’ve never understood about sports fans is why they seemed to be obsessed with injuries? Why do sports teams even report injuries?

Thanks,
Rhea

This player is likely to get a Probable (neck) designation on next week’s injury report.

— — —

Dear Rhea,

Like many artifacts of sports culture, the reporting of injuries has historically been driven by gambling. Sports and gambling have a long and curious symbiotic relationship and even omnipresent elements of sports like the injury report often have gambling origins. An injury can affect a player’s performance and therefore the outcome of the game. Information about which players are injured therefore is helpful if you are predicting what will happen in a game, which is essentially what sports gambling is. In the major American professional sports leagues, teams are required to give information about their players’ injuries to the press. I always believed that this was evidence of the hypocrisy of the leagues. How can you claim to be anti-gambling when you require teams to publish information that is only really useful to sports gamblers? In fact, this is only partially true. The requirement of reporting injuries began in the late 1940s as a response to a plot to fix the 1946 championship game. Then NFL commissioner, Bert Bell, figured that publishing who might not play in a game or who was likely to play at less than 100% effectiveness was a good way to prevent gamblers or bookies from profiting from inside information.

Fantasy football is a form of sports gambling and is similarly, if not more, obsessed with injury reports. Fantasy owners pay very close attention to the injuries of their players. Because of how fantasy football works, owners get a chance each week to choose from among the players on their team those who they think are going to perform the best. Injuries to their players or to players who affect their players, like the quarterback who throws the ball to one of their wide-receivers or the linebacker whose job it is to hit their running back go a long way to helping decide whose stats to have count each weekend.

Injury reports have their own peculiar vocabulary. Here’s some of the common words and phrases and what they mean:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.
Upper/Lower Body Injury — Searching for a way to avoid exposing injured players from being targeted by their opponents, hockey teams are now only required to release whether an injury is an “upper body” or a “lower body” injury. This is silly in an era when players can watch replays of plays that happened five seconds ago or five months ago equally easily on team ipads.
(body part) — In sports that do give a little more specific information about where the injury is located than hockey does, you’ll often see this: Player Name, Probable (knee). This has led to the convention of announcers saying that a player is “out with a knee.” Sports columnist Bill Simmons has been poking fun at this convention for years.
(neck) — In the past few years there has been an increasing understanding of the seriousness of head injuries, particularly concussions. As a result, I believe that teams have started defaulting to the neck when reporting any head injury when they are not absolutely sure it is a concussion. Calling an injury a neck injury instead of a concussion allows the team more freedom in how and when the player returns to play. Crooked and dangerous but true.

One last thing to think about when it comes to injury reports is that they are evidence of how cooperative sports truly are. Sports has the reputation of being a refuge for the extremely competitive but the sharing of injury reports belies that to some extent. If the Jets were really trying to put the Dolphins out of business, they wouldn’t tell them about their injuries on their offensive line before playing them. Sports teams are at least as much collaborating with one another to make a communal profit within agreed-upon guidelines of behavior as they are competing to win at all costs.

Hope this has answered your question,
Ezra Fischer