Category: Other Sports

What's a goalie? Why are they so crazy?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people say goalies are crazy? What’s a goalie anyway?

Thanks,
Jean

Dear Jean,

When I was in middle school, I discovered ice hockey. I remember lying on my bed and watching games on a little square television at my Dad’s house. Even back then, I felt compelled to jot down interesting things I heard, as if I was preparing to write a blog, despite this being years before blogs existed and decades before I started Dear Sports Fan. I still have some of the quotes I wrote down. One of them was about goalies:

Some people say 90% of goaltending is mental. I say 90% of goaltenders are mental!

I’m not positive who said that but it’s a safe bet that it was John Davidson, a former NHL goalie who was then the color commentator for the New York Rangers. He and partner Sam Rosen were definitely the most common hockey voices in my early memories of the sport. Goaltenders or goalies are frequently described as being a little bit crazy. It’s unclear whether the position attracts players who are a little bit… different or whether the position takes normal people and twists them. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both. In order to appreciate the colorful nature of goalies, it’s important to understand what the position entails.

The position of goaltender exists in many sports: soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, team handball, and water polo. In each sport, the goalie is the most specialized position. She exists solely to do whatever she can to prevent the other team from scoring. Usually the goalie is granted special privileges in order to help them in their task. The most dramatic of those is in soccer where the goalie is the only player who can use his hands. In ice hockey, the goalie gets to wear thick leg pads, a large chest protector, a catching glove on one hand and a blocker and wide stick in the other. An ice hockey goalie also has special rules which apply only to her, including protection against being hit. Lacrosse goalies are allowed to have sticks with much larger heads than other players to make it easier to block shots with them. Water polo goalies are allowed to touch the ball with two hands and even touch the bottom of the pool.

You might think all those extra privileges make goalie the easiest position to play. Not true! The extra privileges of the goalie in most sports are a recognition of how difficult their job is. The margin of error for goalies in lower scoring sports (which is most goalies because, not coincidentally, there’s a strong correlation between having a goalie and having a low-scoring sport) is tiny and the consequences for error are enormous. Take poor Robert Green, for instance. In 2010 he was one of the best 40 people in the entire world at his profession yet all he will be remembered for (literally, it’s going to be the first line of his obituary one day) will be this momentary lapse against the United States in the World Cup. Hockey goalies who save 90% of the shots they face are probably not going to last long in the NHL where the best goalies save over 92.5% of the shots they face. Compare that to a non-goalie who scores on 20% of the shots he takes and is celebrated as an extraordinary goal-scorer. Even in a relatively high scoring sport like team handball, where, according to the New York Times, a goalie “can allow as many as 30 goals and still be thought to have had a good game” being a goalie comes with its down-side. Goalies are so frequently injured by shots that the international federation in charge of the sport is considering changing its rules to reduce injuries.

The challenges and pressure that goalies face seems to attract or create two types of people: those who compensate through obsessive behavior and those who compensate through aberrant behavior. Almost all goalies are one of the two types, some are both. Hockeygrrl lists some of the more well-known obsessive behavior in her post about hockey goalies, including Patrick Roy’s refusal to let anything, even ice shavings into his net, Henrik Lundqvist’s ritual of tapping the wall the same number of periods he’s played so far in the game, and my new favorite, Jocelyn Thibault’s tradition of pouring “water over his head precisely six-and-a-half minutes before a game began.” For the more far-out their behavior on the other side of the spectrum, see Colombian soccer goalie Rene Higuita, who was literally nicknamed “the lunatic” and hockey goalie Ilya Bryzgalov who once responded to a question about the offensive threats on an opposing team by saying that he was “only afraid of [a] bear.”

No matter how you cut it, goalies are some of the most important and most colorful people in sports.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How does scoring work in golf?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does scoring work in golf?

Thanks,
Ian

Dear Ian,

Scoring in golf is dead simple but that fact is obscured by the unnecessarily complicated language that golf uses to talk about scoring. It’s not all bad though, golf’s language is actually pretty enjoyable and easy to learn. Plus, the way that golf thinks about scoring expresses something about the essence of the sport which is useful to understand. We’ll run through how the scoring works and then explain how to talk about golf scores.

In any golf competition, the player who gets the ball into the hole in fewer hits, wins. It’s that simple! Whether you’re talking about a single hole, an 18-hole round, or a tournament which is usually four rounds of 18 holes each, the player who can complete play using the fewest number of strokes is the winner. Things can get more complicated with various team formats, many of which I explained in my post about the Ryder Cup, but the concept is always the same — use the fewest swings possible.

By now you might be wondering why, if the scoring concepts are so simple, the words used to talk about the score is so complicated. When you watch golf on TV or get into a conversation with golfers, you hear a lot of strange words like “par,” “birdie,” “eagle,” and “bogie.” Huh? Here’s the deal. Three concepts will make all of those vocabulary words make sense.

  1. Every golf hole and course are unique and of varying difficulty.
  2. Golf is designed to work equally well as a competitive sport played against other golfers and a puzzle played individually.
  3. No more than four players can play on a single hole simultaneously, so in any large competition, play is staggered across several hours. Despite this, both for the golfers and for fans, a way of expressing the standings at any moment is needed.

Golf’s solution is to express score in a relative way. Every hole on every course is given a number of strokes that the designers of the course think that an excellent golfer should be able to complete the hole in. That number is called par and is generally from three to five strokes. Instead of saying that a golfer used four hits to successfully complete a hole, her score is expressed relative to par. Here’s where the vocab words come in:

  • Par – Derived from the latin word meaning “equal,” par means that a golfer finished a hole in the number of strokes the course designers expected him to.
  • Birdie – A birdie is finishing a hole in one fewer stroke than expected.
  • Eagle – Once birdie was established as the term for one better than par, golf took off on the bird metaphors in that direction. An eagle is two shots better than par.
  • Albatross – An albatross, as you might have guessed, is three shots better than par. It’s very, very unusual.
  • Bogey – A bogey is the opposite of a birdie. A player who has shot a bogey has taken one more stroke than par to complete a hole. There are no separate words as players use more and more strokes to finish a hole, the way to express it is by adding a modifier before the word bogey. Two strokes worse than par is a double-bogey, three a triple-bogey, four a quadruple-bogey, and five a dear sports fan special. Just joking, I guess you’d call that a quintuple bogey…

The purpose of this is not to confuse beginners! Think back to our three principles of golf. Expressing scores relative to an ideal, almost platonic score that’s set for each hole and course is a remarkably effective way of making golf an exciting challenge even if played alone. Without needing to compare your score to a competitor’s, you can judge how well you’re doing. Shoot a birdie? Celebrate! Hit a double-bogey, cry a single tear and move on. If scores were simply expressed in an absolute way — five shots for a particular hole — there would be no way for a solitary golfer to know if she did well or poorly. As a bonus, by setting a par particular to each course, a golfer can move from course to course and still compare his play to previous rounds on other golf courses. Sure, the course he played today may have been more difficult than the one he played on a week ago, but if its par was set correctly, it was higher. Shooting par should be equally difficult on every course in the world.

The other element of genius to the relative approach to scoring is that it doesn’t matter where a golfer is on a course, you can always create a leaderboard by using their scores relative to par. Golfer A who has finished all 18 holes of a round and completed them in two shots more than par has a score of +2 or two over par. Golfer B who is halfway through the course and has used one fewer shot than expected so far has shot one under par or -1. Golfer C who just played the first hole and completed it in the expected number of strokes is currently at par or 0. You can line these golfers up easily to see who is winning at the moment.

  1. Golfer B — -1
  2. Golfer C — 0
  3. Golfer A — +2

Golfers B and C are still playing and can improve their score or mess up and make it worse while Golfer A is done and can do nothing but wait and watch but by using relative scoring, we can rank them at any moment of the day to see who is winning.

Hopefully this all makes sense out of the madness,
Ezra Fischer

2015: U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships

In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 US Map.

Rhode Island — U.S. Figure Skating Synchronized Skating Championships

Synchronized Skating — February 25-28, 2015

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country and one of the strangest. It has a long tradition of being on the cutting edge of sporting events. It hosted the country’s first outdoor polo match in 1876, the first open golf tournament in 1895, and the first national lawn tennis championship in 1899. The state is well-known for its hosting of folk and jazz music festivals in Newport. Even the circus first came to Rhode Island in 1774! This year, the biggest sporting event of the year is the U.S. Figure Skating Synchronized Skating Championships.

Synchronized skating is admittedly, not a very well-known sport, but it has a lot going for it. Synchronized skating is seriously athletic! Like synchronized swimming, which is an Olympic sport, synchronized skating features individual athletes performing feats that most people couldn’t dream of doing alone, much less in completely regimented, virtually flawless lock-step with a team full of athletes performing the same tricks.

The championships will not, as far as I can tell, be televised or available in a streaming fashion, so you’ll have to head over to the Dunkin’ Donuts center in Providence, Rhode Island, to see them in person. The schedule is available here and generally follows a young to old pattern, with the younger teams starting on Wednesday and doing most of their routines before the tournament transitions to its most serious divisions Friday night into Saturday.

How does synchronized skating work?

Synchronized skating is a team sport where groups of ice skaters perform coordinated dance-like routines to music. Synchronized skating is a judged sport, just like the individual or pairs figure skating you might be used to watching in the Winter Olympics. Teams consist of between 12 and 20 people depending on the level of competition (from Tot to Youth to Collegiate to Senior.) One of the coolest things about the sport is that, although most of the participants are female, there are no sex or gender requirements whatsoever. It’s a totally egalitarian sport. In competitions, each team will perform two routines, a short program and a free skating routine. Like in Olympic skating, the short program is all about performing difficult technical elements while the free skate’s length allows for more artistic expression. Each routine is scored before the competition based on how difficult it is. During a competition, the judges will be looking to see how well a team executes the planned routine. A more difficult routine therefore has a higher potential score than an easier routine. A lot of a sport’s strategy must be about finding the exact right balance between too easy and too risky.

Each routine must have a set of required elements, although there is room for variation and creativity within the rules. The Wikipedia page on the sport has a list of these elements and nice descriptions of each. Many of them, like the Wheel, Block, Circle, Intersection, and Line requirements are descriptive of the overall shape of the team. If seen from above (or imagined) the entire team must do something in the shape of a wheel, block with three parallel lines, etc. Other requirements are about what skaters do within formations. For example, in a Spin move, each skater must spin the same number of rotations at the same speed as his or her teammates. To fulfill a Pair requirement the team must do something where pairs of skaters hold onto each other. The lifting of one skater by another, like in pairs figure skating, is allowed, and, since there are so many more skaters on the ice, synchronized skating teams sometimes do group lifts, like you might see from cheerleaders.

In an article about a local team going to the national championships, The Frederick News Post quotes the mother of a skater as saying that watching the team is like “watching a flock of birds.” That’s a very apt description. It’s hard to do the sport justice by describing it, you’ve really got to see it. Luckily, there’s Youtube! What you’re about to see is a routine by the most successful American Sychronized Skating program, the Haydenettes from Lexington, Massachussets. Their team has won the U.S. Championships every year but two since 1999! The performance is impressive for some of the same reasons that a fighter-plane flyover before a football game is — power, speed, and precision. I am guessing that the team’s name is an homage to another impressively synchronized team, the Rockettes. The difference with the Haydenettes, and the thing that makes this sport so cool, is that they’re on ice. The positive of being on ice is that it allows for speed, power, and fluidity that would be hard to achieve on solid ground. The downside, of course, is that any mistake is magnified. Get an inch off, and the ice will make that inch into a foot. Also, and it’s hard to emphasize this enough, being on ice means you are wearing deadly weapons on your feet while you move backwards at high speeds mere inches from a teammate who is herself moving backwards at the same speed. Talk about trust!

Who’s going to win?

Like most competitions that involve the creation of beauty — ballet, beauty pageants, cheer leading — my assumption is that beneath the surface, synchronized skating is every bit as competitive as football or ice hockey. With that in mind, there’s no way I’m betting against the reigning champion Haydenettes who will be competing not far from their home town. The two teams that could challenge them are the Miami University team and the Crystallettes from Dearborn Michigan.

The About Fencing book – a surprising gift to myself

Last night, I got home to find a mysterious package outside my door. It was addressed to me and it seemed to have come from England but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what I had ordered. An unexpected package is among life’s most sublime mysteries.

Box from London

I immediately grabbed a knife and opened the box. Maybe there would be cookies (or biscuits, as I guess the British would call them) inside! Okay, so there were no cookies, but what waited for me inside the box was exciting too!

About Fencing Cover

Massimiliano Longo’s book About Fencing is a wonderful instructional and educational book aimed at beginner fencers, both young and young at heart. You can purchase a copy of it for only $15 here. I discovered this book back in September while I was doing research for my post on why people like fencing. At that time, the author was running an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for translating his fencing manual for kids and adults into English and producing a UK and USA edition of the book. I helped fund the project and promptly forgot about it. I think forgetting about and then being surprised is one of the best aspects of crowd funding. The text suffers a little in some parts from having been translated from Italian but the author’s spirit and excitement about fencing shine through. Longo (like a good fencer should be able to do) masterfully walks the thin line between simplifying enough for children to understand while not talking down to them in any way.

Here are a few of my favorite parts of the book.

Interactive diagrams that show the correct target area for each weapon on a line-drawing in green and ask you to “use your finger as a” sword and start training with the book.

Hit the Target

Amazing visualizations that show how a fencing sword is put together.

Epee Diagram

My favorite written section of the book provided full coverage of fencing for the disabled, including a description of the mechanics of fencing in wheelchairs and the various divisions based on what type of capabilities the fencers have. Best of all, it introduced the concept of fencing for the blind! I know, this sounds like an incredible training exercise that the Inigo Montoya and the man in black may have done, but according to Longo, it’s also an increasingly popular worldwide sport. It’s also egalitarian; sighted fencers can join in with the aid of a simple blind-fold.

If you contributed to the crowd funding of this fine book, you’ll probably be enjoying your copy soon. If not, it’s never to late to purchase one for you or the aspiring fencer in your life. You can find a copy on the Leon Paul website.

 

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Thanks,
Greg

Dear Greg,

With the NBA All-Star game coming up soon, it’s a good time to tackle your question. All-Star games are an exhibition that many sports leagues put on in the middle of their seasons. Based on voting by fans, coaches, or some combination of the two, the best and most popular players are selected to play a game in mixed teams against each other. These games take many shapes and have different histories, but the common theme is that they generally lack the competitive nature typical of professional sports. They are essentially an entertainment, not a competition, and they are often accompanies by a host of other sports related competitions. All-Star games are loved by some fans, hated by others, and both loved and hated by a third group. They are more successful in some sports than others. So, why do sports leagues have All-Star games? Like any good child of children of the 1960s, my short answer is: follow the money.

From the start, All-Star games have been about money. The roots of today’s All-Star games can be found in games that were quite literally about money — benefit games. The NHL seems to have been on the forefront in this department. Wikipedia lists several early benefit games including a 1908 game to raise money for the family of a player who had drowned, a 1934 game to benefit a player who had his career (and almost life) ended in a violent hit, a 1937 game in honor of a player who had his leg shattered and died soon afterwards, and a 1939 game to benefit another drowned player. From raising money for a particular cause, All-Star games soon became about raising money directly or indirectly for the league itself.

Wikipedia tells us that the first professional league to have an All-Star game was Major League Baseball which held what they thought was going to be a one-time event in 1933 as part of Chicago’s World Fair. (quick side-note, if you haven’t read Erik Larson’s book about the fair, The Devil in the White City, you should!) History.com has a good article about the game, in which they claim that, “the event was designed to bolster the sport and improve its reputation during the darkest years of the Great Depression.” In the three years before the All-Star game, baseball’s attendance had dropped by “40 percent, while the average player’s salary fell by 25 percent.” Teams were experimenting with all sorts of promotions to try to bring fans and money back into the game and while Major League Baseball donated the proceeds of the All-Star game to charity, they surely profited indirectly from the attention it garnered. The All-Star game was a success, with hundreds of thousands of fans casting votes for which players they wanted to see and the top vote-getter, Babe Ruth, hitting a home run during the game. After the success of the 1933 game, baseball decided to make the All-Star game an annual tradition.

Other professional leagues in the United States soon followed along: the NFL in 1938, the NHL in 1947, and the NBA in 1951. For newer leagues, like Major League Soccer, the WNBA, and Major League Lacrosse, the inclusion of an All-Star game must have seemed like an obvious move. It seems like the All-Star game is primarily an American thing with some international sports leagues following along, but not all of them. The world’s most popular leagues — all soccer leagues, of course: the British Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, and the Italian Serie A don’t have All-Star games. The Canadian Football League had one on and off from the 1950s but has not had one since 1988.

The format of All-Star games and accompanying competitive side-dishes have been tweaked over and over over the years to try to make the games slightly more competitive and therefore more entertaining to watch. These innovations seem to have generally moved in waves. Early on, some All-Star games were between last year’s championship team and a mixed team of players from other teams. After that, the now standard game between two mixed teams based on conference or league came into fashion. Two other formats that have been experimented with in the hopes of ginning up some competitive juices have been teams based on geographic origin (often the United States or North America vs. the rest of the world) or having teams chosen by two players or former players alternatively picking from the pool of All-Stars. I’m not sure that either of these have been very successful. The more successful though rare and extreme version of this is to actually invite a foreign team to play against a team made up of All-Stars. This happened very successfully in 1979 and 1987 in the NHL when teams of NHL All-Stars played against a Soviet national team. It’s hard to replicate that success because it was so reliant on the Cold War. Major League Soccer’s All-Star team plays against a European club team which kind of works but also is an admission of how weak the MLS is in comparison to other leagues. All of these innovations are intended to make the game more competitive. Perhaps the most extreme attempt came in 2003, when Major League Baseball took the extraordinary step of awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the league whose team won the All-Star game.

All-Star games are not only an opportunity for professional sports leagues to attract attention and earn money, they are also great opportunities for players. Players on the NBA All-Star teams this year will make $25,000 for playing in the game and another $25,000 if their team wins the game. The side-show events like the dunk contest and three point contest have their own purses that go to the individual winners of those competitions. Like for winning the Super Bowl, players may also have negotiated bonuses in their contracts for making the All-Star game.

The NBA All-Star game, which takes place this weekend in New York City, is definitely the biggest and most visible of the professional All-Star games in the United States. Check back in later today for a beginner’s guide to all of its elements.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

2015: USA Sevens Rugby World Series

In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 US.

Nevada — USA Sevens Rugby World Series

Rugby — February 13-15, 2015 —  on NBC, NBC Sports Network, and Universal Sport.

You know rugby, right? It’s like American football but the players don’t wear pads and you’re only allowed to pass the ball backwards. Also, play doesn’t really stop all the time like it does in football — it’s more of a fluid game, like soccer or basketball or hockey. It’s played mostly by crazy people from Australia and New Zealand. Well, rugby sevens is an exciting version of rugby played with half the number of people on the exact same size field. By reducing the number of players without changing the size of the field, rugby sevens play becomes way faster and higher scoring than it’s full-size counterpart. The sport is growing quickly and will be a medal-sport for the first time in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. One of the sport’s biggest organized leagues is a series of nine international tournaments played over the course of a year. This weekend, one of the nine tournaments will be hosted in Nevada at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas. It’s the only one of the nine held in the United States.

Rugby Sevens has an interesting history. Many people believe it is the future of rugby but that doesn’t mean it is a recent invention. It’s current popularity could be said to have started in 1973 when the first international rugby sevens tournament was held as part of the sport’s 100 year birthday celebration. That’s right, the sport began in the late 1800s in Scotland! Over most of its history, it’s been thought of primarily a training ground for players to develop skills that they could use in traditional rugby. Today, this is less true than ever. Sevens is different enough and popular enough that few players cross from one sport to the other.

For a beginner viewer, the sport has some real advantages. It’s simpler to follow than the fifteen person version and it’s very, very fast. A game consists of two seven minute halves with only a one minute halftime break. In the time it takes to watch one quarter of American football, you could watch two whole games of Rugby Sevens. The championship match is a little longer, but even that is only two ten minute halves separated by a two minute half-time. There’s enough hitting to make you feel like you’re watching an extreme sport but surprisingly little of the disgusting bone/ligament/brain injuries that make watching football tough these days. Give it a try!

What’s the plot?

The stakes for this year’s Sevens World Series are high. The top four teams receive automatic qualification into the 2016 Olympics. Countries that don’t get these spots will still be able to get a spot in the Olympics by doing well in regional international tournaments or, failing that, another global qualification tournament. Still, this is the first chance to qualify and it’s a prized one. After four tournaments, South Africa is a surprise first place team, followed closely by New Zealand (which has won 12 of the 15 championships ever), Fiji, and Australia. Australia is trailed closely by the England team who are only two points behind them. The United States is in eighth place. For our team, that’s actually a pretty good showing so far. They’ve never finished better than 10th in a Rugby Sevens World Series. The United States is not a traditional rugby power-house by any means but a good effort in this tournament at home would give them confidence going into the other opportunities to qualify for the Olympics.

The tournament works a little bit like the soccer World Cup. It begins with a round-robin group stage composed of groups of four teams each. Teams play three games in the group stage, one against each of the others in their group, and receive three points for a win, two for a tie, and one for just showing up. At the end of the group stage, the top two teams advance to the next round. The next round begins with eight teams that play single elimination games. Then there are four and finally two left who play for the championship. In this tournament, the groups are as follows:

  • Group A: New Zealand, Fiji, Wales, Samoa
  • Group B: England, Kenya, Argentina, Canada
  • Group C: South Africa, USA, Portugal, Japan
  • Group D: Scotland, Australia, France, Brazil

If you want to follow the United States team, they’ll be playing Japan at 7:22 p.m. ET and Portugal at 10:18 p.m. ET on Friday, February 13 on Universal Sports and South Africa at 3:40 p.m. ET on Saturday, February 14 on NBC. The elimination rounds will also be televised and hopefully the USA will be playing in them. NBC has coverage on Sunday, February 15 from 3 to 4:30 p.m. ET when NBC Sports Network takes over.

Who are the characters?

Carlin Isles — Isles is the star of the USA men’s Eagles Seven. He’s also representative of how the United States hopes to become a power in this sport — by stealing athletes from other sports. Isles was primarily a sprinter until just a few years ago when he gave up his dream (and a very reasonable dream, it was) of qualifying for the Olympics as a sprinter. Instead, he got interested in rugby and quickly became an extraordinary member of the USA team. With the inclusion of the sport into the 2016 Olympics, he may get his shot after all, just in a different sport than he expected. Rugby players are fast but virtually none of them are as fast as Isles. Once he gets even an inch of space on the field, it’s hard for anyone to keep up with him and no one is going to catch him.

Here’s a highlight reel of great Carlin Isles plays (it’s got a vaguely NSFW Kanye West music, so be warned). Watch for the shrugs of despair from Isles opponents as he turns the corner on them and they realize he’s just too fast:

Grantland did a short biographical video on Isles that’s also worth working:

The New Zealand All Blacks — I mentioned that New Zealand kind of runs this sport, right? They’ve won almost all the world cups but they’re not in first place this year. They’re called the all blacks because their traditional uniform is, you guessed it, all black, and has been since 1905. In addition to being famous for winning, they’re also famous for performing a Maori Haka dance before each match. Here’s a video of them performing it in the rain before a game last year… shirtless:

Who’s going to win?

Oh, who knows. Probably New Zealand. Maybe South Africa or Australia or Fiji. Possibly France. Or, you know what? How about the United States? Let’s do it!!

Why watch downhill skiing?

I watched an hour of the Women’s Downhill skiing race at the Alpine World Championships today. It was enjoyable and exciting but exactly why this was so, was not totally clear to me. As I watched, I started listing some of the reasons why it shouldn’t be exciting:

  1. Aside from Lindsay Vonn, who is American and famous and dates Tiger Woods and who I am largely ambivalent about, I didn’t know anything about any of the ski racers before I started watching. There’s not much of a chance to get to know them either, they are wearing full-body suits, helmets, and goggles that cover most of their faces. They are on camera pretty much only when they are skiing, except for the current first-place skier, who is periodically shown expressing relief or anguish as they stay in first place or are replaced by another skier.
  2. The difference between first place and tenth is only a few seconds. The course is around one and a half miles long. There’s no way any casual viewer could tell, without the assistance of the announcers and the time differences that are shown periodically through the race, who is winning and who is losing. It’s basically watching the same thing twenty times.
  3. The entire time I was watching the race, I was torn between wanting the racers to finish safely and the desire to see something truly spectacular, like a big crash. Unless you really know what you’re looking for, a crash is more interesting and compelling to watch then a safe finish. This is a weird line to walk, because it makes me feel bad about myself. I guess the difference between ski racing and football is that when you watch a ski race, you can tell if someone has been injured, whereas in football, even if you can’t tell, someone probably has.

So, why would I keep watching? I guess there were a few reasons for that as well:

  1. It’s an international competition, so there are built-in reasons to root for one person over another. I reflexively root for the United States. Because it is a snow-based event, I will also root for people from most Scandinavian countries. I root half-for and half-against the Canadians. I root against the traditional powers of skiing, the Austrians, Germans, and Italians.
  2. Even though you couldn’t actually tell who was winning without the announcers and the clock, you have both those things! It’s exciting to get a check on what place someone is currently in five or six times during the minute and a half down the hill.
  3. You also get to learn some of the intricacies of how to know who is going faster. Like any racing sport, the person who is slipping through the air, water, snow, sand, etc. with the least disturbance to the material around them, is the one going faster. You can watch how much snow a skier is kicking up on their turns and get a feel for if they are going to win or not. As each successive racer goes down the course, you also get a sense for which line or path down the mountain is better. There are trade-offs — if you take one turn wider, it can get you into the next turn faster, but then you might be in trouble at the following turn. There is a line which is the best, but sometimes a skier is able to take a unique line and make it pay off.
  4. As with all sports, there is the possibility of seeing unexpected greatness as well as the certainty of . Downhill skiing is such an incredibly demanding athletic achievement, that although you become desensitized to it quickly, it’s worth appreciating each racer who gets to the bottom. I’m pretty sure I would be a) too scared to go down that steep of a mountain, b) would have to stop about ten times on my way down because my legs would be burning, and c) would actually tear ligaments or tendons in my knees if I could even somehow take a turn at that speed. Once in a while, a racer will do something that’s uniquely remarkable to watch. In downhill skiing, I’ve mostly seen this when racers look like they are absolutely going to fall but somehow torque their body around, with all their weight on one leg, going at ninety miles an hour, and avert disaster.

For those of you who are interested in watching some skiing, here’s a full TV schedule of the 2015 Alpine World Championships.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is sportsmanship? When is it appropriate?

Mirriam Webster defines sportsmanship as “fair play, respect for opponents, and polite behavior by someone who is competing in a sport or other competition”. Sportsmanship is an interesting concept. In some ways, it’s like obscenity according to the Supreme Court. When faced with trying to “categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters” you sometimes just have to say that you “know it when you see it.” We all know, of course, that this type of definition is not good enough. Different people view different things as obscene or not obscene and the same holds true with sportsmanship. I grew up playing soccer, just like lots of other people, but I gravitated towards playing defense and over time turned into someone who stayed in the starting lineup despite being slower than most of the other players by doing the little treacherous things, like knowing exactly how long I could hold a player’s shirt before I would get called for it and understanding exactly where to place my body so that an opposing player would stumble over it without attracting attention. I thought that type of infringement was breaking the rules but not breaking the ethic of the game. In other words, I thought I was still showing good sportsmanship. An attacking player would be more likely to try to draw a foul by taking a dive or feigning injury. I always thought that was bad sportsmanship but now that I view soccer as an observer and not a participant, I can see how people might have varying opinions. Sportsmanship is an important concept because it defines the cultural (as opposed to rule-based) norms of a game but it is hard to define and varies from sport to sport and participant to participant. In the past couple weeks, I’ve read a few articles on the topic of sportsmanship that I enjoyed and would love to share with you. I think they create a compelling conflict within and between sports.

Sportsmanship Captured at NCAA Cross Country Championships

by Alison Wade for Runner’s World

This article represents almost a control case for our investigation of sportsmanship. It’s a classic human interest story that lauds athletes who stop and sacrifice themselves to help an injured or disabled competitor. It’s actually more balanced than most, in that it points out that there is an NCAA rule against helping another athlete and by doing so, excuses some of the other runners in a video of the incident who did not stop to assist the falling runner. Still, there is no criticism of two women who do stop to help the fallen runner, quite the contrary.

“It does not surprise me at all that Kate would do that. She is all about team and loves the sport,” wrote Minnesota coach Sarah Hopkins in an email to Newswire. “She saw someone struggling and tried to lend an arm to get her to the end. This was her first national meet, and I am sure that somewhere in her head she thought how awful it would feel to not finish, so wanted to keep anyone from feeling that.”

Is Competitiveness Poor Sportsmanship?

by Sarah Barker for Deadspin

In this article, Sarah Barker discusses several incidents including the one described in the previous article and asks a few important questions: Could media (social and traditional) be driving athletes to help each other even at the cost of their own disqualification to their team’s detriment? Why does it seem like women are disproportionately in the news for showing this type of sportsmanship? Barker, a runner herself, gives us the benefit of her own experience to answer these questions as well as sharing answers from some of the runners and cross-country coaches she reached out to.

Sportsmanship has been a way to ensure that no one goes too far to win, that individual competitiveness doesn’t pass into the realm of cheating or impeding other runners. It’s been about fairness and honoring the efforts of all competitors, but has not, in the past, gone so far as to sacrifice one’s own result to help another runner.   Spectating at a girls’ high school cross country race in the early 2000s, a competitor collapsed right in front of me. Though apparently uninjured, she lay on the grass, sobbing, as scores of runners streamed by. I must say, it felt cruel not to reach out and help her up, but as I bent toward her, a race official appeared and warned me she’d be disqualified if I did so. Some of the other runners urged her on as they passed by, but no one stopped. Eventually, she pulled herself up and carried on. That was just one of several such instances at the same meet.

Volvo Ocean Race: Sportsmanship on the High Seas

by Aaron Kuriloff for the Wall Street Journal

This is a similar article to the first one. It absolutely praises the sailers who went off course during a race to their own detriment to provide assistance to a competitor’s boat who ran aground and was in distress. [The article is worth going to, even if you don’t read it, for the crazy video that captures the power of the ship running aground on a reef as well as the amazingly calm demeanor of the crew as they respond to mitigate the damage.] What I find most interesting about the way the author writes about this, is how clearly he describes the cultural clarity within sailing of going to a competitor’s aid. It seems obvious to me from reading this article, that no one involved with sailing would ever write an article arguing against doing so like TK did in the context of running. A basic rule of the sport and of the Volvo race: Never leave a competitor in danger… “There’s a code amongst thieves out there,” said Ken Read, who skippered PUMA Ocean Racing’s il Mostro team to a second-place finish in the 2008-09 Volvo. “One minute you’re trying to beat the guy at all costs, the next you’re his life raft.”

2015 in the United States of Sports: Interactive

For the last week or two, I’ve been slowly adding features to the 2015 in the United States of Sports feature. First I designed a map and offered a free paper or .pdf copy in exchange for an email subscription. That deal is still going, by the way! Then I added a table showing all 51 (with Washington D.C.) events in a table view in order of date. This is an easier, albeit less beautiful, way of perusing the sporting events. Over my holiday vacation last week, I worked on my newest addition to the map, which I am releasing in this post. It’s an interactive Google map that looks just like the original map, but it’s interactive! Click on each of the states to see its event, date, and sport. As I preview all 51 events over the next year, I will add a link to the post in this interactive map. This  interactive map will slowly become your guide to the biggest sporting events in each state during 2015!

Here’s the map:

Just watch out, unlike on the original, I was unable to transplant Alaska and Hawaii into the missing Mexican mainland. They are in their geo-normative positions in the interactive map.

The deal — get a free copy

If you’d like a paper or .pdf copy of the map, please subscribe to our email list and I will mail you one.


 

More to come

Keep your eyes peeled to this channel — by the end of New Year’s Day, three (three!) states’ biggest sporting event of 2015 will be in the rear-view mirror. I’ll have a preview of the Rose Bowl (California), Sugar Bowl (Louisiana), and Winter Classic (Washington D.C.) written and added to the interactive map by the time the ball drops on New Year’s Eve!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Old media covers sports in old age

Snarky headline aside, the New York Times and Associated Press really has been on a roll lately with their sports coverage of the elderly. Two recent articles celebrating people whose unique perspective on sports is only partially due to their long experience on our planet. My suspicion is that these two characters would have been interesting subjects for profiles twenty years ago, forty years ago, even seventy five years ago!

A Hole in One for a 103-Year-Old Golfer

by The Associated Press in the New York Times

Gus Andreone, an 103 year-old resident of Sarasota, Florida, recently became the oldest person to hit a hole in one. Two things popped out to me in this short profile. First, in hitting a hole in one, Andreone took the record away from its previous owner, an 102 year old woman. I’d like to know what her story was! Second, I love that Andreone claims to have hit eight holes in one since 1939 and that he seems to fully expect to hit another in his life. Let’s hope he does!

He said he used a driver on the 113-yard 14th hole of the Lakes Course, like he normally does, but then noticed something different. The ball hit the ground about 30 yards from the green and then rolled into the hole, he said.

His golf partners jumped up and down, but Andreone kept his cool.

“I can’t say that I felt any different about one or the other,” he said of his most recent ace. “I just felt another hole in one.”

At 107, a Buffalo Bills Fan Who Sees It All

by Andrea Elliott for the New York Times

There’s so much to love about this profile of Evelyn Elliott, a 107 year old Buffalo Bills fan. It was written by her granddaughter, Andrea Elliott, and Elliott’s love and familiar granddaughterly bemusement come through brilliantly in her writing. Evelyn Elliott, the subject of the piece, is an inspiring woman. Although her first date with the man who eventually became her husband was to a football game, it wasn’t until after he became sick, six months before his death, (and 65 years after their first football date,) that she got into football. Since then, she has been a true fan of the Buffalo Bills and nothing in this article suggests that will change any time soon. The Bills were eliminated from the playoffs last weekend, after this article came out, and I’m sure Elliott is disappointed but I’m equally sure that she will be in her living room to watch them finish out the year against the New England Patriots this coming Sunday. She’s a true fan!

I kept trying to discern what it was about the game that captivated Grandma’s mind. I knew she paid close attention to strategy.

“What do you think happens in the huddle?” I tried.

“They decide what to do,” she sniffed (in the tone of “Are you an idiot or what?”).

I have interviewed militant jihadists, prosecutors, drug dealers and counterterrorism specialists at the Central Intelligence Agency. None of them prepared me for the challenge of extracting personal information from my grandmother.

At the beginning of the third quarter last Sunday, with the score tied, 10-10, I started up with my questions again. She frowned.

“I can’t concentrate when people talk,” she snapped.

Grandma’s spectator style might best be described as Zen. She watches the game closely and calmly, getting neither flustered nor excited. This disposition mirrors her general approach to life.

“I just go with it,” she likes to say. “I take it as it comes. Let the best man win.”