Other Sports Archives - Page 7 of 12

2015 in the United States of Sports: Calendar View

Last week, I released my little piece of annual sports data art work, a map showing the biggest sporting event in each of the 50 states. It was fun and painstaking to create. Some states, like Arizona where the Super Bowl is located in 2015, were easy to figure out. Some states, like my home state of New Jersey, which didn’t seem to be hosting any big sporting events in 2015, were much more difficult. The map itself was a delicate balance between too much data and not enough. I felt I had to get the name of the event and its starting date into the map. To keep those items legibly, I sacrificed the names of the states. We all know where Montana, Missouri, and Mississippi are, right? No? Yeah, me neither. So, to help out with deciphering the map and to add to the map experience, here is a list of all the top sporting events of 2015 sorted by date. The year starts with three big games on January 1, college football’s tradition heavy Rose Bowl in California and Sugar Bowl in Louisiana plus the National Hockey League’s biggest exhibition, the Winter Classic, this year in Washington D.C.

I’m going to keep adding to this map until the end of the year. To keep track of all the updates to the map, bookmark this page or follow the blog.

If you’d like a copy of the map, sign up for our email list and I will send you either a link to download a high quality .pdf or mail an actual physical copy to your home or office! If you’re already a subscriber and want a map, send me an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com.

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2015 in the United States of Sports

With the new year approaching, I wanted to do something to celebrate the last year and look forward to 2015 with you all.

2014 has been an enormous year in sports and also for Dear Sports Fan. The year began with the NFL playoffs and a decisive Super Bowl win by the deserving Seattle Seahawks. The day after the big game, I took a train to John F. Kennedy airport, where I, like almost everyone who had been to the Super Bowl in New Jersey, waited while our planes were delayed by a snow storm. It was actually a pretty funny sight. All the gates to the Denver area were full of depressed people wearing orange and the gates to the West Coast were packed full of hung-over but happy fans wearing neon green. I flew off to Barcelona where I eventually and slowly made my way over to Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympics. In Russia, I got the chance to watch a bunch of men’s and women’s ice hockey plus some speed skating, curling, and cross-country skiing. It was all good, even when the United States lost to Canada 1-0 in the semifinals of the men’s Ice Hockey. Just a few months later, the nation’s imagination was captured by the most exciting World Cup in my memory. The United States Men’s National team did the country proud, more by generating bizarrely exciting soccer games than by winning, but still. The United States found itself in the throes of a soccer passion that mimicked, if not met the rest of the world’s normal experience. The summer was notable in the sports world for LeBron James deciding to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, a tectonic shift in the power dynamics of the NBA. For Dear Sports Fan, and for myself, the biggest move of the summer was my decision to leave my job of seven and a half years and throw myself into working on Dear Sports Fan full-time. Since then it’s been a roller-coaster ride. The Kansas City Royals rode their way, bunting and bunting some more, to the World Series before falling to the San Francisco Giants. The focus of the NFL season blurred when off-season issues like domestic abuse, child abuse, institutional idiocy, and the long-term effects of concussions overwhelmed the normal focus on football, fantasy football, and gambling. Like these issues made football seem like an insignificant side-show, so the great cultural issue of police brutality and our legal system’s inability to properly deal with it made sports in general seem like an insignificant side-show.

That’s where we are as we begin to hurtle towards 2015. 2015 is a year of great promise and plentiful sports. To celebrate it with you all, I’ve created a map with the biggest sporting event in each state in 2015 labeled. The events were chosen by me, so your results may vary of course, but I’ll be happy to hear from you with all disputes of import. The events vary in size and national stature, of course. Minnesota may not have anything to match the national profile of Arizona’s Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean their Star of the North Games in June are anything to sneeze at. In fact, with four to six thousand athletes competing in around twenty sports, the Star of the North Games are a massive undertaking. The sports range from the expected big four of football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, to more unusual events like New Jersey’s international Fistball competition and Delaware’s World Championship of Punkin’ Chunkin’ where teams compete to build the best pumpkin throwing machines.

The United States is truly a great sporting nation and 2015’s sports will truly range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Enjoy them all year with a copy of Dear Sports Fan’s 2015 in the United States of Sports map. If you’d like a copy of the map, sign up for our email list and I will send you either a link to download a high quality .pdf or mail an actual physical copy to your home or office! If you’re already a subscriber and want a map, send me an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com.

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Thanks for the support,
Ezra Fischer

Strange sports: jousting and zoning out

Here at Dear Sports Fan we tend to have inclusive opinions about sports. Oh, sure, I like getting into bar arguments about whether baseball or soccer or darts or pool or car racing or boxing or log rolling is really a sport as much as the next guy, but at the end of the discussion, if any of those things are being shown on TV, I’ll happily watch it. As long as something is competitive and requires some combination of physical and mental expertise, I think it’s a sport. Recently two strange sporting events came to my attention. The first requires total precision and complete focus in the midst of a high speed world. The second requires total relaxation and complete inattention in the midst of a high speed world. It’s hard to say which is a more more impressive feat. The first is a modern form of the Middle Ages sport of jousting. The second? An innovative “spacing out” tournament held in Seoul, South Korea.

Most of us have a general understanding of jousting from movies or books. Two heavily armored knights charge at each other on horses with long wooden spears called lances and the winner knocks the loser off his horse. Jousting emerged as a sport in the 1300s out of fairly disreputable duels fought between people on horseback. These pre-sport jousts often began with two or more combatants on horses with lances but would continue with hand-held weapons once the fighters were close enough to make lances unwieldy. As the principles of chivalry swept through the upper classes of Northern Europe, jousting transformed into a generally non-lethal competition. Throughout the Renaissance, the joust became increasingly specialized and distant from actual fighting. A barrier was put in to separate the two competitors and specialized jousting armor was created which could weigh up to a hundred pounds. Jousting as a popular form of sport came to its end at the very tail end of the 1500s when King Henry II of France was killed in a jousting accident.

Luckily for us, that’s not the end of jousting’s story. Jousting is still done today, it just looks a little different. Since 1821, the Natural Chimneys Joust has been held in Mount Solon, Virginia. This makes it one of our country’s oldest continuously running sporting events. Older even, members of the jousting community contend, than that other horse related competition, the Kentucky Derby. Modern (if you can call it that) jousting, is competitive but not confrontational. Competitors take turns running their horses down an 80-yard path and, at full speed, catch small rings on the end of their lances. This sounds reasonably tame until you see how small the rings are: one inch in diameter for the best jousters. Each jouster gets three runs down the course and the one who catches the most rings after three attempts win. If there is a tie after the three runs, the remaining jousters move to single elimination runs, like a soccer shootout after the first five shots. During these ride-offs, the rings get progressively smaller. To break particularly insistent ties, rings the size of life-saver candies can be used.

The jousting community is tight-knight and multi-generational. Andrew Jenner‘s descriptions of “Zula Casady, the 91-year-old matriarch of the Natural Chimneys Joust” and her family were my favorite parts of his article The Fading Glory of America’s (Allegedly) Oldest Sporting Event in Modern Farmer. This article is what led me down the path of jousting discovery and I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it too.

From rural to urban and from Virginia to South Korea we go for our next strange sport: spacing out. That’s right, there was a tournament held in Seoul, South Korea recently that crowned a nine-year old as its champion. The various athletes who decided to enter the competition had to sit or lie or sprawl for three hours with no access to smart phones or other technology. According to Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku, organizers would “go around and check people’s heart rate or try to make them laugh to see who, in fact, was truly spaced out.” Jeanne Kim, writing for Quartz, relayed a statement from one of the organizers of the tournament: “Because of smart devices, we are unable to escape from external stimulation even for a moment. In such a society, I wanted to contemplate the idea of not doing anything.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this sport is a great idea. I’d love to participate! Watching it… now that’s another story. I doubt it would make for a very good spectator sport, although this one minute youtube clip is delightful. Enjoy!

How do the NASCAR championships work?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read your Cue Cards series every morning faithfully. This morning you admitted that you didn’t really understand how the NASCAR championships work. Isn’t that your job? Figure it out!

Get on it,
Arturo

Dear Arturo,

You’re right, it’s unforgivable. I should know how the NASCAR championships work! So, I did some research and figured it out. It’s an interesting model. Here’s how it works:

There are 36 races in a NASCAR season. Of these, the final ten are part of the NASCAR championship series, called the Chase for the Sprint Cup. In some ways, these final ten races are just like the first 26 races in the season. Each is its own event with its own results and prize money. For example, the Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500, run on Sunday, October 26, 2014 had a total purse of $5,036,108 that went out to the forty-three drivers who competed in the race. During the final ten races though, there is another set of standings and results super-imposed on top of the normal race results. This extra structure is the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

The Chase for the Sprint Cup begins with 16 competitors and slowly reduces the field to four before crowning a champion in one final race. The first round consists of three races and is called the Challenger Round. After those three races, four drivers are eliminated and the next round begins. The next round is called the Contender Round, also consists of three races, and has twelve competitors. Once the three races are done, another four drivers fall out and only eight remain. The eight compete in the Eliminator Round, also over the course of three races. The final cut happens and the field is reduced to four drivers for the Championship round which is a single race.

The sixteen driver field is initially chosen based on the results of the first 26 races in the season. Drivers in these “regular season” races are assigned points at the end of the race based on what place they finished the race and whether or not they led during the race. The racers with the most wins in the first 26 races will be given spots in the sixteen driver Chase field. If there are more than 16 winners (which almost never happens,) the winners with the most points will qualify. If there are fewer than 16 winners (because some drivers won a lot of the first 26 races) then the field will be filled in order of the points standings among non-winners. It’s a little convoluted, but basically the best 16 drivers from the first 26 races qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Before the Chase starts, the 16 qualifiers are assigned points based again on regular season wins. Every driver is given 2,000 points plus three points for every regular season win. This year, the standings at the beginning of the Chase looked like this with Brad Keselowski in first place with 2012 points and a three-way tie between drivers 14-16 who all qualified without having won a single race that season.

At the end of each round until the Championship round, the winners of the three races in the round (note that because each race has the normal complement of 43 drivers, there may not be three eligible winners) automatically advance to the next round and the rest of the available slots are filled in order of how many points they accumulated during the round. At the beginning of each round, the points are reset, so each driver that survives the cut has an equal shot to win the next round. There are no cumulative standings. The final Championship round takes place during a single race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway on November 16, 2014. Of the four remaining drivers, whoever places higher in that race wins the overall Chase for the Sprint Cup.

There are so many things about this format that are interesting. First of all, the idea of having a race within a race — a set of drivers within a field of 43 who care more about beating each other than winning the race is curious. How does that impact the tactics of the race itself? It’s tempting to want to see just the sixteen, twelve, eight, or four drivers still alive for the championships race alone on a track but racing with so few cars on the track probably alters the sport enough to make it unfitting for a playoffs. Still, it’s strange to think of a driver other than one in the final four winning at Homestead-Miami. Then you’ll have two separate victory celebrations happening simultaneously at the end of the race. The Chase for the Sprint Cup is an evolutionary approach by NASCAR to trying to maintain the one-day excitement of their sport while creating the week-to-week suspended drama of a playoffs.

I learned a lot — I hope you did too,
Ezra Fischer

Fund this project: Cycling Party

Whether you’re an avid sports cyclist, a fan of professional cyclists, or just someone who rides her bike to work everyday and loves board games, you might be interested in this clever board game that represents cycling in an innovative way. Cycling Party is the product of two cycling and board game enthusiasts, Leandro Pérez and Diego Hernando. You can find information about the game on their website, www.cyclingparty.com, follow them on Twitter, and help fund their game on Kickstarter.

The game’s simplest version, the junior game, does a great job of teaching the basics of bicycle racing. For example, riders can be in three situations — in the big group of riders, the peleton, a smaller group, the paceline, or alone in a breakaway. In each setting, how far and fast the racers go is determined by rolling two dice but the results are interpreted in different ways — ways that make sense given how things actually work in a race. Riders in the peleton generally move together at the pace of the fastest rider (the highest roll) in the group. Only an extraordinarily good or bad roll will see a rider fall off the back of the peleton or escape away from it. In a small group, a paceline, the riders will still generally stick together but it takes less to break the group apart. A difference in roll of only four will see one rider move ahead or behind the group. When a rider is all alone, his pace is up to him and him alone. In the real world, this means that a group will almost always catch a lone cyclist because the group can trade off the hard work of leading the pack. In the game, the group moves at a pace set by the highest of several rolls while a lone cyclist only gets one roll. The junior version of the game recognizes the difficulty of climbing mountains by forcing every rider in a peleton or paceline to act like a rider in a breakaway — moving only at their own pace — on mountain roads. It’s a clever way of teaching beginning cycling mechanics while also creating a compelling game.

The senior game adds specialized roles for riders into the mix. Players designate riders as sprinters, climbers, roulers (cyclists who are good at everything,) flat domestiques, mountain section domestiques, and lanterne rouges (basic riders.) Each type of rider has slightly different variables which modify the effect of the die rolled for them each term. The senior game also adds some tactics other than go-very-fast to the game: attacks, retreats, and risky descents abound.

To the excellent gameplay of the junior and senior games, the last version of the game, the master game, adds the element of a multi-stage tour to the mix. Cycling’s greatest and most popular race is the Tour de France. Run annually since 1903, the Tour de France is run (rode) in 21 stages over 23 days. It covers more than 2,000 miles each year. The brilliance of the race, from a fan’s perspective, is that it combines amazing physical feats with interesting one-day tactics and team strategies that bridge the race from stage to stage. The master version of Cycling Party tries to emulate that. I’ve always found the season or campaign version of sports games to be the most compelling. The length of these modes give your imagination a chance to run its course and get attached to the imaginary athletes you control.

I love the way Cycling Party demystifies the physical realities that drive professional cycling and puts players in the place of team managers and riders, forced to make tactical choices to win the race. Help make the game a reality!

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden — international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

What happens when a forest grows in a NASCAR track?

The Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was one of the first race tracks in NASCAR history. A .9 mile long, oval dirt track, it was purchased and expanded by NASCAR pioneer Bill France and was ready for racing during NASCAR’s inaugural season in 1949. The first NASCAR race at the track was won by Bob Flock and drew 17,500 fans. The Occoneechee Speedway continued to be used as a NASCAR track until 1968 when, in part due to complaints from local churches that didn’t like racing on Sundays, it was closed down. There’s a little bit of dramatic irony in this choice because the first Super Bowl had just happened a year before, in 1967. Little did those church-going folk know but Sundays were just starting to be dominated by another sport and getting rid of the raceway was not going to be the most effective move ever.

After a few years, the speedway fell into disrepair and a fast growing forest sprung up in and around the track, covering what used to be wide open fields with beautiful trees. In 2002 the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A walking trail was created along the path of the track soon after and restoration of the grandstand and some of the track buildings in 2006. There is a local group devoted to the track’s restoration which you can join here and which also runs an annual racers reunion and car show.

I’m visiting friends in North Carolina this week and I had the pleasure of walking a few laps of the track yesterday. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place which makes it hard to imagine dozens of cars powering their way around the track while thousands of people watched and cheered. I took some photos:

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If you’re wondering what it looked like in the old days, check out the video clip of the track at the bottom of this New York Times article about the track by Robert Peele. The footage was taken in 1963 by the Peele’s father!

The Occoneechee Speedway is a great example of how sports weaves itself into the cultural and natural history of the world. It was fun to visit it!

What are the Asian Games?

Dear Sports Fan,

When and how did the Asian Games start and how are they different from the Olympics?

Thank you,
Jeehae

— — —

Dear Jeehae,

The Asian Games are a lot like the Olympics. They’re held every four years and they are an international multi-sport event. Right now they are happening in Incheon, South Korea, where they will continue until October 4. They vary from the Olympics mainly because they only welcome competitors from Asian countries instead of the whole world. They also have some very interesting different sports.

According to Wikipedia, the Asian Games were born after World War Two out of a desire to find a non-violent way of expressing “Asian dominance.” The first games were held in 1951 in New Delhi and consisted of fifty seven events in six sports: “Athletics, aquatics—broken into diving, swimming, and water polo disciplines—basketball, cycling—road cycling and track cycling—football, and weightlifting” although there was also a non-medal event that crowned the “Mr. Asia of 1951” based on “physical development, looks, and personality”. From the beginning, the competition was modeled on the Olympics. People even called the first Asian Games the, “First Asiad” similarly to how an Olympics may be called the “14th Olympiad” or “26th Olympiad.”

The Asian games are not alone in being an Olympic-like international sports event restricted to some smaller group. There are many other similar events, including the Francophone games, the All-Africa Games, and the Islamic Solidarity Games. There’s even a Bolivarian Games for “countries liberated by Simón Bolívar.” There are 45 countries eligible to compete in the 2014 Asian Games and all have sent teams. The two biggest teams are the Chinese with 894 participants and South Korea with 883. The smallest are Brunei with 11 and Bhutan with 16. Saudi Arabia is the only country not to send any women as part of their team.

One of the key differences between the Asian Games and the Olympics are the inclusion of some sports more popular in Asia than in the rest of the world. Here are some examples:

Wushu — a form of martial arts that includes a solo performance judged sort of like figure skating and an opponent based sparring component.
Soft tennis — which is just like tennis but played with (wait for it…) “soft rubber balls.”
Sepak takraw — which is Volleyball with a woven rattan ball where players are not allowed to use their hands, just like in soccer.
Kabaddi — a sport that sounds totally fascinating to me. It seems to be a combination of capture the flag, tag, wrestling, and holding your breath.

If you’re anything like me, or even if you’re not, you might be wanting to watch some of this now, especially the Kabaddi! I can’t quite tell if you can watch events live anywhere (and even if you could, you’d have to wake up in the middle of the night to do so from the United States,) but you can get highlight packages at eversport.tv. The official website for the 2014 Asian games is here and you can also follow them on Twitter.

Happy rooting,
Ezra Fischer

How does the Ryder Cup work?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does the Ryder Cup work? I know it’s an international golf tournament but I’m not sure how it’s different from other golf tournaments.

Thanks,
Alf

— — —

Dear Alf,

The Ryder Cup is a men’s golf competition that happens every two years between a team made up of golfers from the United States and a team of European golfers. It’s quite a bit different from most golf tournaments but I think that it’s actually more exciting and accessible for people (like me,) who aren’t golf fans ordinarily. Although it’s funny to joke about how complicated the event is — Bleacher Report’s intro to the Ryder Cup by Tyler Conway made me laugh out loud at its introductory statement, ” The 2014 Ryder Cup begins in less than a week, which means it’s time for one of the best biennial traditions in golf: explaining how this strange event works.” — but I don’t think it’s all that hard to understand. Let’s run through how it works and you can tell me what you think.

The Teams

Each team is made up of 12 golfers. Each team has a captain who, as part of his responsibilities, gets to choose three of the 12 players. Somewhat interestingly, although both captains are picked by continental golf league leaders (the PGA executive committee in the U.S. and the European Tour Committee in Europe,) only the European players get a chance to vote to ratify the selection. If a U.S. player doesn’t like his captain, too bad. The other nine players are selected automatically by selecting off the top of ranked lists of top golfers intended to reflect performance.

Tournament Format

The tournament is held over the course of three days. During those days, 28 separate competitions, called matches, are played. Each match is worth one point: a win gives a team one point, a loss, zero, and a tie, one half point. Whichever team has the most points after the 28 matches are complete wins the Ryder Cup. It is possible for the two teams to end the tournament with 14 points each. If that happens, the side that won the tournament two years ago keeps the title! This seems like a shockingly unsatisfying way to resolve a tie but, really, so many ways of resolving ties in sports, like shootouts in soccer, are unsatisfying. There’s something traditional in sports about the idea of having a tie favor the reigning champion. In boxing, this unwritten rule goes at least as far back as 1973. It states that, “you can’t dethrone a champion unless you beat him badly.”

There are three different formats for matches during the Ryder Cup: singles, fourballs, and foursomes. Of the 28 matches, eight are foursomes, eight are fourballs, and 12 are singles. Each of the 12 players on both sides must play one of the 12 singles matches but the captains have free-reign to select whoever they want to play in the foursome and fourballs matches with the only restriction being that no single player is allowed to play more than five total matches.

Singles

Players are paired against a single opponent. They play eighteen holes of golf together in direct competition. For each hole, whoever completes it successfully in fewer strokes gets one point. If they take the same number of hits to compete a hole, they each get half a point. Whoever has the most points at the end of the round wins the match for their side.

Fourballs

Fourballs is just like singles, except instead of two players, there are four in two teams of two. Each of the four players plays each hole but for each hole, only the best score from each team counts. For example, if USA 1 gets a six and USA 2 gets a four while Europe 1 gets a 3 and Europe 2 gets an 8, the scores from USA 1 and Europe 2 would be discarded and only the two best scores from each team would be compared. USA 2’s four would get lined up against Europe 1’s three and Team Europe would get the point for that hole. This format is also called “best ball.” It’s theoretically possible that a player could go through an entire round of fourballs and never have their score count if their partner does better on every single hole.

Foursomes

Foursomes is an even more intertwined teamwork based format. Like fourballs, each match is played with teams of two, but instead of both teammates playing each hole, they use a single ball and alternate strokes. If USA 1 drives the ball off the tee, USA 2 has to hit the second shot on the hole. They continue alternating until they get the ball in the hole or one of them sues for divorce. Just kidding, there’s no divorce allowed, but I can’t imagine a sports format more clearly designed to create friction between partners.

How Score is Kept

Unlike regular golf tournaments, the total, cumulative number of strokes a golfer takes doesn’t matter. Teams and players concentrate only on beating their opponent, so the score is kept relativistically between the two golfers or teams. CBS Sports’ guide to the Ryder Cup format does a great job with the scoring vocabulary for this tournament and match play in general:

2 up thru 11: A player/twosome who is 2 up thru 11 has won two more holes than their opponent(s) through 11 holes.

All Square thru 15: The match is tied through 15 holes.

Just like within a playoff series or soccer shootout, once a team is mathematically eliminated, the match is over. If a team is up by more strokes than there are holes left, the players pack up their bags and walk off the course. The exception to this is if a team is up by more matches than there are matches left — no matter what, teams play all 28 matches.

So When is it On?

The 2014 Ryder Cup is from Friday, September 26 to Sunday, September 28. It’s being televised on the Golf Channel (there’s a golf channel? yes, a golf channel) and NBC. The thing is… it’s in Scotland, still a part of the United Kingdom and still between five to eight hours from the continental United States. Play starts at 2:35 a.m. ET on Friday, 3 a.m. ET Saturday, and a civilized 6:15 a.m. ET on Sunday. If you do decide to watch some of it, I would recommend the foursomes matches on Friday or Saturday which have the highest potential for excitement and comedy and begin at 8:15 a.m. ET.

Good luck waking up and watching, let me know what you think,
Ezra Fischer

Why do people like volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like volleyball?

Just wondering,
Jennie

— — —

Hi Jennie,

Volleyball is a funny sport when you think about it. I mean, why shouldn’t the ball hit the ground? Why do teams of people go to such lengths to keep it from hitting the ground that they look like semi-trained seals? Like most sports, once you accept the invented framework of the game, it’s a lot of fun. Volleyball has a few features that make it exceptionally fun to play and to watch. Here they are:

Volleyball has great vocabulary words

How can you argue with a sport that has wonderful words for so many of its actions?

To bump the ball is to hit it under-hand with clasped hands, usually to a teammate.
That teammate often sets the ball, or hits it gently up with two outstretched hands facing each other.
If you’re tall enough or can jump high enough, it’s possible to spike the ball. This is when you make contact with the ball above the level of the net and send it hurtling along a downwards path towards your opponent’s side of the court.
If that opponent has the reflexes of the cat and their fearless, springy athleticism, they might be able to rescue the ball right before it hits the ground with a bump. This is called a dig.
My favorite term, although I’ve never seen it done personally, is the six-pack. No, not soda or beer, and not stomach muscles either, this refers to the rare occasion when a spike bounces off an opponent’s head, or in the case of this absurd video, three opponents’ heads. In the bad old days of volleyball lore, the spikee owed the spiker a six-pack of their choosing.

Volleyball punishes selfishness

This is probably my favorite part about volleyball, both as a player and a viewer: volleyball punishes selfishness. How does it do that? In volleyball, a team loses a point if the ball hits the ground on their side of the court. Each side of the court is roughly thirty feet by thirty feet and each team consists of six people. This is a reasonably small area for that many players to be at the same time. Compared to soccer or even basketball, it’s very crowded. Keeping the ball in the air is hard enough but if a selfish teammate tries to wander into someone else’s area to hit the ball, it almost always ends badly. The first problem is that there usually isn’t enough time or space for the person being encroached upon to get out of the way. Even if they are able to skedaddle and the poacher hits the ball, he or she is usually out of position to respond to the next hit for the other team.

In this way, volleyball teaches great lessons about teamwork and… revenge. I have fond memories of beating selfish jocks in gym class with a team of kids they wouldn’t ever dream of losing to in a sporting event.

Volleyball scales well with the player

Volleyball is unusually flexible in terms of who can play it. It remains fun whether you play it with young children, on a recreational league team with other aspiring volleyball players, or competitively in college, a professional league, or international play. At all levels, the object remains the same (keep the ball from hitting your side of the court, make the ball hit the other side of the court,) but the challenges vary. When played with beginners, the main challenge is just hitting the ball over the court. With intermediate players, hitting the ball over gives way to working with your team to hit the ball over in a way that makes it more difficult for the other team to respond to. At the highest level, the challenge transforms into out strategizing and executing your opponent. The complexity of the tactics available are impressive. It’s no coincidence that the Wikipedia page on volleyball has pictures of both Buddhist monks and nudists playing the sport.

It has a good mix of competitive and non-competitive aspects

One of the things that turns a lot of people off sports is how thoroughly devoted to competition most sports are. Volleyball, especially at more beginner levels, isn’t really like this. If the biggest challenge in the game, as we wrote above, is just to get the ball over the net, then it really isn’t that competitive of a sport. Sure, the team that fails to get the ball over the net fewer times wins, but that’s really a judged team activity as opposed to a competitive activity. Not until intermediate or expert play does volleyball become a sport where players actively engage with opponents they are trying to beat.

At high levels, it’s incredibly athletic

Watching really great athletes play volleyball is incredibly. Top level volleyball requires incredible reflexes and hand-eye coordination, explosive jumping power, strength and endurance, all of which is exhibited in this wonderful video from 2011 World league play:

That was an amazing play by two great teams playing a very cool sport.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer