As the world turns: evolution of sports culture

The sports, they are a-changin’.

Today we bring you four stories about how the sports world is changing to adjust to the wider cultural changes of 2014. From the long-pending acceptance of families with same-sex parents into mainstream sports culture to the inevitable dissolution of the NCAA’s hypocrisy to the generational shift away from football to less brain-injury inducing sports, to the simultaneous banning and normalization of the N-word, the world is shifting and sports is adjusting to fit in.

This article tells the story of a family remarkable in its formation and makeup but exemplary in its core of love and support. The sports connection is the son in the family, Max Lenox, who is in his senior year at West Point where he plays point guard for their basketball team.

Max Lenox’s amazing journey to much-admired Army hoops captain

by S. L. Price for Sports Illustrated

It was strange, really, how the fear just leaked away. The first days and months Dave and Nathan kept an eye out for any effect of Corrine’s drug abuse on Max, but within a year his tensing had stopped. He grew up moving so hard and fast, and he picked up sports — gymnastics, swimming, soccer, tennis — so easily. Yes, Max was diagnosed with ADHD, but intelligence tests found him average to above, and besides, half of suburbia seemed to be popping Adderall.

He emerged as a rising talent in the D.C. area, an AAU star known for unselfishness and for twists that would soon grow into dreadlocks. Neither Dave nor Nathan had a sports background; one Christmas, Max gave Nathan Basketball for Dummies. And nothing, Dave and Nathan say, taught them how not to parent more than the rabid, backbiting AAU scene. Of course, few AAU parents had seen a family like theirs, either. Double takes, puzzled looks — Max’s teammates loved to see the nickel drop. Black kid, two white men: What the … ?

What follows here is my favorite part of the article. This is how sports can operate as a progressive force in society. Within a sport, if someone is honest about themselves, every cultural belief they have should be secondary to observations of performance and conduct within the field of play. Good for teachers and coaches like Fletcher Arritt who put their own beliefs secondary to their responsibility to the students or players.

A Woodson connection provided an option: Fork Union Military Academy, a Baptist boarding school in rural Virginia. Never mind that coach Fletcher Arritt had spent more than 40 years at FUMA reshaping more than 200 egocentric, unhappy or plain underbaked prospects into Division I freshmen. FUMA prohibited homosexual acts, mandated thrice-weekly chapel attendance and didn’t allow what Arritt calls the Five P’s — press, parents, posse, perfume (girls) and penguins (bad refs). Cellphones were banned. It seemed the worst match for someone like Max.

When Carter, Max’s AAU coach, called the then 70-year-old Arritt to give him a scouting report, he said, “Coach, I want to be honest with you: He has two dads.”

“What does that mean?” Arritt said.

“They’re gay,” Carter said, thinking, Here it comes.

“I don’t care,” Arritt replied. “Is he a good kid?”

The Washington Post has a long history of taking down seemingly invincible institutions… ask Richard Nixon. So when they and their respected sports editor Sally Jenkins set aim at the NCAA, I sit up and take notice.

It’s not that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s doing; it’s that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing

by Sally Jenkins for the Washington Post

The need to dissolve the NCAA and put its Indianapolis headquarters into foreclosure has been fully demonstrated in the past weeks. Repeatedly, the NCAA exceeds its authority in petty matters or intrudes in large matters where it has none, while completely failing in its one real responsibility: education.

Before any talk about how to “fix” the NCAA comes the question of what it is needed for at all. To establish rules? It has no means of enforcing them — short of extortion tactics. To negotiate TV contracts? All the big conferences can do that for themselves and are establishing their own networks. To stage championships? The biggest event of all, the $440 million College Football Playoff, isn’t even run by the NCAA, but instead by the five power conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision, who hoard the revenue.

The NCAA has proven incapable of reforming itself, or anything else.

Wright Thompson specializes in cultural description sports articles that make me want to read everything he writes AND take a road-trip with him. In this article, he gives his readers a glimpse into the true Texas football culture of today. Not everything is Friday Night Lights anymore but if you go on this trip with him, you may meet some familiar faces. The selection I chose was from Thompson’s profile of country musician and former football player Charlie Robison.

9 Exits on America’s Football Highway

by Wright Thompson for ESPN

He lights another Marlboro Red, checking football highlights on the television. His knee aches when the bus rumbles along the highway, town after town, year after year. Vicodin helps him out of bed in the morning, 16 surgeries total on his knees. After so many concussions, he sometimes finds himself in the grocery store without a clue why he’s there. His 11-year-old son, Gus, is a star athlete who refuses to play football; he says watching his dad get out of bed cured him of that temptation. Charlie needed football, to sort out who he was and to become who he wanted to be, living in rough-and-tumble Bandera, a place still fighting for itself. His son, living in a moneyed enclave near San Antonio, doesn’t ask those questions. Football is something from his family’s past he wants to avoid.

Baseball is Gus’ sport, and Charlie coaches his team. Instead of pushing his son to remake his mistakes — which his hard-driving father, also a coach, pushed him to make in the first place — Charlie celebrates Gus’ decision, even brags about it, understanding on some level that it makes all the pain that football caused him somehow mean something. A cycle has been broken.

The NFL has been a popular cultural target this fall. They’ve been behind the curve on domestic abuse and child abuse. They have been seen as being arrogant and unyielding in the face of criticism while simultaneously pandering to public opinion without pause. On the subject of this next article, the N-word, it’s less clear where the NFL lands. Are they out in front, leading the charge or are they reactionaries, holding on to cultural history that’s no longer relevant. I suppose, it depends who you ask.

Redefining the Word

by Dave Sheinin and Krissah Thompson for the Washington Post

There are some who would say that debating the merits of the n-word is missing the bigger picture. The problem isn’t the n-word. The problem is racism. But it’s easier to fight a word than a complex, institutionalized system of oppression.

If life were as simple as the National Football League would like us to believe, the United States could simply police the word with yellow penalty flags, as if everyone were referees. A yellow flag on the hip-hop artist with the egregious lyrics. Another flag on the white kids at the mall, dropping the word on one another with no thought to its history. Another, if you wish, on the NFL for trying to ban in the first place a word used largely by African American players to other African American players.

Bryan Curtis on the language of sports

Here at Dear Sports Fan where we try to make the world of sports accessible and understandable to everyone who wants or needs to understand it, the technical language of sports is an obstacle to be cleared. We’ve written about phrases like “and one,” “ball don’t lie,” “faking a spike,” and “pulling the goalie.” Grantland is one of my favorite sports sites. It writes for sports fans who are on the inside of sports culture but who have other interests, particularly pop culture. They assume that sports fans are well-rounded people who can have other interests the same way that we assume that well-rounded people with other interests can still be curious about sports. Bryan Curtis is a staff writer for Grantland and has put together a list of clever definitions of sports terms in the vein of Ambrose Bierce’s famous The Devil’s Dictionary (which is available for an insane $.99 for Kindle or $3.50 in paperback on Amazon.) Here are a few of my favorite definitions from Bryan Curtis’ Devil’s Dictionary of Sportswriting and Devil’s Dictionary of Sportscasting:

Olympics, the (n.) — A broadcast every American hates and watches with equal devotion.

sideline reporter (n.) — A woman who’s expected to be as sophisticated about football in three minutes as the men in the booth are in three hours.

“Signed off the street … ” (exp.) — Announcers love to talk about a new player who “just last week” was selling used cars. Of course, it’s no surprise that a marginal athlete would take a temporary job between playing gigs. The surprise would be if he were signed off the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

columnist (n.) — a writer who produces less copy than a blogger.

immortal (n.) — common as a noun, i.e., “one of the immortals.” Becomes awkward when an athlete dies — an act that would seem to establish his mortality beyond all doubt. A 1953 obituary for Jim Thorpe proclaimed, “Immortal Athlete Passes.”

mature (adj.) — a mature athlete, for a sportswriter, is one who spends his every waking hour on sports.

Curtis has so many more enjoyably snarky and insightful definitions in his Devil’s Dictionary of Sportswriting and Devil’s Dictionary of Sportscasting. Check them out now!

You can't always get what you need in sports

Marcus Lattimore was a star among stars in the world of college football. As a running back at South Carolina, he ran around and over the competition like few can. That all stopped after his second catastrophic knee injury. Despite his medical history, he was drafted into the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers who felt his talent was worth the risk that he might never recover. This past week, Lattimore decided to retire at the age of 23 because of chronic knee pain he could not rehabilitate his way through.

The Martyrdom of Marcus Lattimore

by Michael Baumann for Grantland

Lattimore directly contributed 3,444 yards from scrimmage and 41 touchdowns to the cause, at the cost of countless hours of work and the unimaginable physical agony that comes with being the title character in a game of Kill the Man With the Ball. His efforts led to the Gamecocks’ first SEC East title, first two 11-win seasons, and first two top-10 finishes in the AP poll. They also led to a boost in recruiting3 that helped make that success sustainable.

So what did Lattimore get for his contributions? A scholarship that paid for most of three years of college and prevented him from seeing a dime from the sale of merchandise that bore his number and the sale of tickets and television carriage fees bought by people who wanted to see him play. The promise that his time would come when he cashed in with the NFL. And the knee injuries that left him physically unable to cash in once that time finally came.

When a person like Lattimore suffers a career-ending injury while serving his school for no pay, making him whole shouldn’t be an act of kindness or compassion, as it is here. It should be the norm. It should be required.

Chivas USA was one of the more interesting experiments in the U.S. professional soccer league, Major League Soccer (MLS). Chivas is the nickname of a Mexican league soccer team — officially called Club Deportivo Guadalajara. The owner of the Mexican team bought the MLS team to use as an American outpost and minor league version of his main team. The experiment didn’t go well and the team has now been bought and sold and part of that sale is an agreement to shut the team down for a year or two and then reopen it with a new name, brand, and location in downtown L.A.

The Once And Future End Of Chivas USA

by Connor Huchton for The Classical

Many bad decisions must be made for failure to arrive this spectacularly. These are some of the required ingredients, in short — a shared stadium and the second-fiddle perspective produced; an unclear identity; discrimination lawsuits and HBO investigative reports, league misstep after misstep; a few unremarkable teams. Eventually what’s left is desperate marketing ploys and cries of “Free tickets!” A good amount must go badly for a growing league to produce a team so haunted and solitary, and here, it did.

Some of the best Chivas games were two-goal losses, games when Wilmer Cabrera and his players hardly feared embarrassing final scores or the BigSoccer forum jokes that would follow. These were free-floating performances, runaway trains built from spare piston parts, heading for the cliff at high speed — because if you can’t beat them, then fuck it, still don’t join them – just play soccer of a more unhinged metaphorical sort. This identity wasn’t the troubled one Jorge Vergara and Don Garber had in mind, but somehow, it makes a lot more sense than any rebrand ever could.

One of the appealing things about sports is how clear its goals are. Winning is an objective thing. Statistics can be kept. This means it acts more like a true meritocracy than almost any other activity. Which is not to say that discrimination hasn’t and isn’t a part of sports. Black athletes in the United States were restricted from competing in the white professional leagues for decades and remnants of that discrimination continue today. What is usually the case with sports though, is that if a minority can get into a game, the game itself should be able to help prove their point about equality. One enormous exception to this rule has been transgender athletes, who continue to be barred from competition in many places. This article places a current legal battle in Minnesota in its historical context.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Myths: The battle for the rights of transgender athletes

by Parker Marie Molloy for Vice Sports

The reality is that even today, nearly four decades after Reneé Richards won the right to compete, trans people remain largely unwelcome in the athletic world—a world that is already well behind when it comes to LGBT inclusion. The NFL still hasn’t had an openly gay athlete on a regular season active roster. The NBA just recently had their first. Baseball and hockey remain a refuge for straight individuals.

Trans athletes strong enough to brave this harsh world are pioneers. Richards to Allums, Fox to Jönsson; unfortunately, they are sometimes also martyrs. As Leva and her ilk look to hamper competition, we should aspire to a world in which all athletes can perform free of hormone testing, “gender testing,” or the pseudo-scientific ramblings of the world’s Joe Rogans; a world in which all are welcome to compete.

Every profession has its unsung heroes. Carli Lloyd, a player on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is one of those heroes. This profile of her brushes the surface of why that might be but instead of getting caught up in that, it instead celebrates Lloyd for who she is, what she has done, and what she will do.

A Star (Still) in the Making

by Jeff Kassouf for NBC SportsWorld

Lloyd is a two-time Olympic hero, scoring the gold-medal winning goal for the U.S. women at both the 2008 and 2012 Games. She is the only player in history – male or female – to score in back-to-back Olympic finals. She wears the 10 shirt for the national team (customarily given to the top field player on the team). And yet, despite her heroics, she is hardly the face of U.S. Soccer.

Lloyd isn’t shy about telling you that she trains harder than anyone, and she’s frank about her quest to be the best player in the world. She forever carries a chip on her shoulder, fueled by a crowd of naysayers whom Lloyd doesn’t specify, yet acknowledges their existence. Lloyd said she doesn’t play for accolades, but she’s only human. She sees marketing and advertisements that don’t involve her. In 2013 she was left off the NWSL all-league first and second teams, and didn’t make the first team in 2014 after carrying her struggling Western New York Flash club through the season. But Lloyd was traded to the Houston Dash in October. Two weeks later she won the Golden Ball as the best player of the qualifying tournament.

Her attitude is classic if not cliché New Jersey: Work harder, always. And Lloyd is proud of that, calling herself a “Jersey girl for life.” She lives a few towns over from where she grew up.

Why do sports suspend women while honoring men?

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. This weekend, I read a wonderful profile of the aging boxer, Bernard Hopkins, by Carlo Retella in the New York Times. It’s an excellent example of a classic sports profile. Rotella choses an intriguing athlete and spends time and effort to understand him. The result is a fascinating story about a complicated man who defies expectations to exceed in his sport. I loved it and had it lined up to feature in this section of the website. Then I read Amy Bass’ thought-provoking piece, ‘Calling Nature a Cheat’ in the Allrounder. Bass tells the story of Dutee Chand, an eighteen year-old Indian professional sprinter who was recently suspended from competition because of high androgen levels. She is not being accused of cheating but she’s not allowed to compete either. Bass persuasively poses the question – why do we laud male athletes who exceed our expectations while suspending female athletes who do the same? What makes Chand’s chemical advantages different from the mental and physical advantages that allow Hopkins to consistently beat men his exact size who are fifteen or twenty years younger than him?

This question struck home for me, because it’s absolutely true — we sports fans love talking with fascination, admiration, and wonder about the physical characteristics of male athletes that help them do things we could never do. Whether it’s a basketball player’s wingspan that far exceeds his height, or a cyclists heart that beats one-third as frequently as mine, we know that male athletes are not like us. Why should the female athletes be physiologically “normal?” These articles made me think twice and more about the way we think about male and female athletes. I hope they do for you as well.

Bernard Hopkins, Boxing’s Oldest – and Most Cunning – Champion

by Carlo Rotella for The New York Times

One key to his longevity at the top of the fight world is that he has come to consider it “barbaric” to exchange blows with an opponent.

There are masters of defense who rely on will-o-the-wisp elusiveness, making a spectacle of ducking punches. Others build a fortress with their gloves, arms and lead shoulder, deflecting incoming blows. Hopkins can slip and block punches with the best of them, but his defensive technique is founded on undoing the other man’s leverage by making constant small adjustments in spacing and timing that anticipate and neutralize attacks before they begin. It’s somehow never quite the right moment to hit Hopkins with a meaningful shot. Boxers, especially big hitters, feel a kind of click when the necessary elements — range, balance, timing, angle — line up to create an opening to throw a hard punch with proper form. Hopkins doesn’t run away, but an opponent can go for long stretches of a round without ever feeling that click.

Calling Nature a Cheat

By Amy Bass for the Allrounder

Women on the field continued to be understood within the confines of a biological determinism that solidified the notion of their physical incapacity when compared with men. In short, there was only so much that the male-dominated, male-defined, sports world expected of women, and if they performed beyond those expectations, they were suspected of being men.

Chand’s appeal to CAS, then, goes far beyond the question of defining women competitors: she is questioning the very nature of how we conceive of competition. What does it mean to compete with the body that one is born with? Can we applaud strong women athletes if one is categorized as a man when she gets too strong? And, perhaps most importantly for sport writ large, what actually constitutes an unfair competitive advantage? If an advantage comes naturally, can it be deemed unfair?

Sports enthusiasts marvel over Michael Phelps’s disproportionate torso or the height of Yao Ming – there is no problem accepting the seemingly genetic freakiness of these male champions. Athletes with unusual training regimens, too, whether runners working at high altitude or someone like Shaun White pretty much buying his own mountain, are commended for their dedication, their effort. But, the natural make-up of Chand’s body is considered to be, for all intents and purposes, cheating because, according to the rules of the IAAF, it makes her less of a woman and, hence, too much of a potential athlete.

Beneath the surface of sports

This week, I chose four articles that delve beyond the surface of sports to examine the strange, quirky, sometimes charming, sometimes complicated underpinnings of sports. What are athletes and coaches really like? How do cultural changes effect the game? What can we learn from how we organize our sporting events? What is life like for athletes a tier or two down from the stars?

We start with an article about the complicated relationship between an eccentric, demanding coach, and his strong-willed quarterback. There’s a melancholy addendum to this story, which is that Connor Halliday, the quarterback in this story, broke his leg during a game the week after this was published. His college career is over.

The Pirate and His Pupil

by Michael Weinreb for Grantland

He tends to treat his quarterbacks a little bit like fiction writers treat their protagonists: He projects himself onto them,5 sets them in motion, and puts them through an emotional and physical wringer, and they emerge on the other end having fundamentally changed, most of the time for the better.

Part of the burden of being a Leach quarterback is in the inherent freedom of the offense: Every play call that Leach makes is meant to be viewed as a suggestion. If the quarterback sees something different… he is free to change the play call at any time.

Because Halliday had to adapt to Leach on the fly — because he was thrown into a leadership role starting in place of the oft-injured Tuel before he was fully prepared — he struggled to decipher this balance. He often felt that he was being blamed for things that weren’t his fault; his offensive line wasn’t accustomed to all that pass blocking, and Halliday took a beating, spraining ankles and injuring and then reinjuring his hip and taking shots that constantly threatened to knock him out of games. He is naturally a headstrong and outspoken kid — “A cowboy,” Loscalzo says — but those first couple of years, he was weighed down by the burden of the manners he’d been taught, by the idea of respecting one’s elders, and especially by the idea of respecting one’s head football coach. If Mike Leach called the play, he thought, what makes me think I could possibly call a better one?

At the very least, Leach and Halliday appear to have reached a mutual understanding, so that when Leach fell into that long digression about Guadalupe and the Bermuda Triangle and Jacques Cousteau and volcanoes during the quarterbacks meeting, it was Halliday who egged him on with questions, who encouraged him to go deeper, who seemed to be enjoying this latest wholly unpredictable left turn more than anyone else in the room.

We all know how much the iPad changed our lives. For some, it freed us from our desks and let us work in a radically more mobile way. For others, it was just a new and innovative way of reading in the bathroom. This article examines how technology has changed the balance of football.

How Technology Is Killing NFL Defenses

by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal

Until now, the chess match before the snap had always been a fair fight. Offenses get to come out in a set formation and can make minor tweaks—a different route here, an adjusted blocking assignment there. But defenses can change their whole scheme based on what they see from the offense.

But then technology intervened. For about the last four seasons, players have had tablets to watch film on. This year, the effects are being felt for perhaps the first time. “Things that used to be subtle, like a safety lining two yards outside of a hash mark, is now a dead giveaway,” said former NFL lineman Shaun O’Hara, now an analyst at the NFL Network.

Cameron Heyward, a Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman, said that research of pass-rushing moves has gotten so advanced that he rarely wants to make the first move, since the offense will know what’s coming.

“It’s totally changed the way we’ve played,” said Steelers lineman Ramon Foster. Fellow lineman Kelvin Beachum said that the team excels at “anticipatory management” with the new technology at their disposal.

“We’ve trained ourselves to, when I talk to Kelvin Beachum, I make sure to say, ‘Yo, let’s not do this with our hands. Just know it, no pointing,’ ” Foster said. “The technology part is crucial.”

“Playing for love of the game” is a quaint, almost anachronistic phrase and idea, but as this article teaches us, there are many soccer players playing at the highest professional level in this country who are doing just that. While salaries for star players have increased to attract better players to Major League Soccer, pay for the rank-and-file players has lagged behind in a major way.

Many in M.L.S. Playing Largely for Love of the Game

by Andrew Keh for The New York Times

In many ways, this year has been a high-water mark for soccer in the United States. After years of fighting to gain recognition alongside the more established major sports in the country, soccer reached an unprecedented level of public consciousness during last summer’s World Cup, where an intrepid run by the American team charmed a fresh crop of casual fans.

Yet in some ways, salaries in the league show how far the sport has to go… The league’s median salary is about $92,000, with an average of about $226,000 in guaranteed money, and there is a belief in the union that the number must be considerably higher to attract and retain better talent, which in turn would ensure the future of the league.

As Nasco said, “When you compare this to anything else in professional sports, you really are playing for the love of the sport, and you’re hoping, if you can stay in it and stay healthy, you can eventually get the money you deserve.”

This year marks the first year of a new era in college football. For years people have been loudly calling for a college football playoff and they’ve finally got it. This article outlines why you might not always want what you want, not really. Learn all about the unexpected downsides to a playoff system.

Tossing the Crystal Ball: What’s Lost When the Path to College Football’s Championship Is Made Clear

by Michael Terry for Grantland

October 28, 2014, is meant to be the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. On that fine autumn day, the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings will be sent down from on high, and finally, following a debate that extended from stadium bathroom lines to the Oval Office itself, we will have our College Football Playoff. And with it, supposedly, the era of injustice will be over.

In our increasingly uniform way of choosing champs, we want to believe there is clear reasoning: that if we give more teams a pathway to the playoff, we are creating a journey the champion must complete in order for us to feel that the team in question is a justly deserving winner. More often than not, though, the narratives that have been most compelling are actually those in which the outcome seems unjust. Whether it’s a judge robbing a boxer of a deserved victory, or a fresh horse being sent out at Belmont to prevent a Triple Crown, or a system that chooses the wrong two teams to play in a purported title game, these stories drive home the reality that sports aren’t actually fair, nor were they meant to be.

What was interesting about college football was that it stood out from the increasing uniformity of sports through the intriguing inadequacy of its system. Its frequent inability to make sure the best team was awarded the championship was fun to watch because of that inability, not in spite of it.

Basketball, the international sport, then and now

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. This week I decided to focus on articles about basketball to celebrate the start of the National Basketball Association’s season this Tuesday, October 28. The biggest story of the offseason was the return of Lebron James from the Miami Heat, where he won two championships, to the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he started his career and near where he grew up. The first of our three articles takes a look at the maturation of LeBron James as a player. The second and third articles explores the international side of basketball. Besides soccer, basketball may be the most international sport around. There have been great players from all around the world for decades but they didn’t always have the opportunity or ability to play in the NBA. Oscar Schmidt, the subject of the first article, is widely thought to be the best basketball player never to play in the NBA. His dream was to play for Brazil’s national team, which he did to great effect. The second article is an illuminating comparison of the efforts to recruit Arvydis Sabonis in the eighties and his son Domas, today.

All The King’s Men: LeBron takes his team-building talents to Cleveland

by Lee Jenkins for Sports Illustrated

When the Cavs trailed by two points late in Game 1 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals, against the Pistons, James drove left on small forward Tayshaun Prince, but Richard Hamilton and Rasheed Wallace rushed over to help. James passed to forward Donyell Marshall, stationed in his beloved right corner. “I missed, we lost, and everybody asked him why he gave it up,” recalls Marshall, now an assistant coach at Rider. “But what I remember was the next day at practice when we went over late-game situations. We ran the same play, and LeBron passed it to me in the corner again. I knocked it down, and he jumped on me like we’d won.”

The Cavs will follow him, but not because of his posture or his pep talks. “Let me tell you what he’ll do,” Boozer says. “He’ll get a tape of each of [his teammates]. He’ll go home and watch each one for half an hour. He’s very smart about all this, so it won’t take him long. He’ll figure out some things he can do to get them going on the court.” They’ll follow him because he provides what everyone in the NBA wants, a little space and a clean look.

The Holy Hand of Brazil

by Amos Barshad for Grantland

At halftime, Brazil was down 68-54. So in the third quarter, Schmidt came out firing. Meanwhile, de Souza was leading the mind games. “I told [the Americans], ‘Hey, I’m an old man, I can’t guard you,’” he explained at the time. Adds Schmidt now, “We said [to the Americans], ‘Shoot now! Everybody looking at you. Shoot now!’” On the other end, Schmidt took his own advice: He splashed his way to 35 second-half points, 46 overall, and Brazil came back to win 120-115. It was the first time U.S. men’s basketball had ever been beaten at home. There were plenty of opportunities for Schmidt’s trademark double-fist-pump exultation. But the image that lingers is him on the floor, overcome, weeping with joy.

That it’s impossible to know his NBA ceiling is the point of this legend. Because now, unperturbed by pesky facts, we can just imagine the fireworks. Oscar Schmidt was the band you loved fiercely and could never convince anyone else was the greatest thing on earth. Oscar Schmidt was indie rock.

Jay Triano, now an assistant coach with the Portland Trail Blazers, remembers running into Schmidt at the 2002 World Championship, back in Indiana. In front of the assembled young guns, many who’d never heard the name “Oscar Schmidt,” Triano challenged Mão Santa to show off the goods. “I said to him, ‘Can you still shoot?’” Triano remembers. “He said, ‘Of course!’ And he stood at the top of the key, in his suit and shirt and dress shoes. No warm-up. I gave him the ball and he made 10 in a row, and he walked out of the gym. The players stood there with their mouths open.”

The Old College Try

By Luke Winn for Sports Illustrated

Brown had no connections to the Soviet sporting apparat, nor had he ever spoken to Sabonis. (The coach was occasionally spelling Sabonis’s first name “Arvadis” and referring to him as Latvian rather than Lithuanian.) It was public record that Brown had told his Tigers, “The hell with the Communists!” before a 1977 exhibition against the Soviet national team. He had only four months to get Sabonis to America and cleared by the NCAA. It looked like the most geopolitically improbable recruitment of all time. When people asked Brown what he thought his odds were, he put them at 50-50.

Lloyd made two more trips to Spain, and he persuaded Tuti and Domas to take an official visit to Spokane in August 2013. A few other schools got involved in the recruitment, but by then the brothers had a strong rapport with the chipper Zags assistant who showed up everywhere in the same slip-on blue Converse, and who kept in touch with them on the mobile-messaging service WhatsApp—to an extent: They told him they “didn’t need the constant [fawning]” that American recruits expect, so daily texts weren’t necessary. Before they set foot in the States for any visits, the brothers told Lloyd that if Domas came to college, they were 99% sure it would be Gonzaga.

2014 World Series Preview

The World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants begins tonight, Tuesday October 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. World Series preview articles cover the internet like so many fallen red and yellow leaves. Two stood out to me as being of particular quality and interest.

Joe Posnanski’s Rule of Three focuses on the biggest tactical story line of the baseball playoffs so far. It’s not Kansas City’s love of the bunt, it’s another of their innovations – the use of three one inning relief pitchers to pitch the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. All teams have a specialist pitcher, called a closer, who pitches the ninth inning when their team has the lead. Most teams have a designated “set-up man” who pitches just the eighth inning. The Royals have taken in one step farther, designating a pitcher to pitch the seventh inning too. So far, it’s been extraordinarily successful: the Royals have won 94% of their games this season (regular season an playoffs) when they had the lead after six innings compared to just 88% for all other teams. Will their success continue and if so, how will it reshape the game in the coming years?

Rule of Three

By Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld

For more than one hundred years, baseball postseasons had been dominated by the starters, by Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, by Christy Mathewson and Curt Schilling, by Whitey Ford and Chris Carpenter. Everyone believed in it, from old-school thinkers like Detroit’s GM Dave Dombrowski to Moneyball mogul Billy Beane. You win in October with great starters, and so Detroit and Oakland went to get themselves great starters.

The Royals’ three-man closing law firm of Herrera, Davis and Holland has been the single dominant weapon of the postseason. In the wild-card game, while Lester and the A’s bullpen disintegrated, the Royals’ threesome kept the Athletics scoreless in the seventh, eighth and ninth. That allowed the Royals to come back. In the Angels series, the threesome kept the Angels scoreless in those pivotal three late innings, and the Royals took control with back-to-back extra-inning victories.

You know the old joke about the guy who prays daily to win the lottery and then finally hears a heavenly voice say: “Look, I’d like to help you, but you have to buy a lottery ticket first.” The Royals might have been lucky getting those three pitchers. But turning that trio into perhaps the greatest closing machine in baseball history is the Royals’ doing.

For a less tactical but much more emotional approach to the World Series, we go over to Grantland and life-long Royals fan Rany Jazayerli. He digs into how it feels to love a team that loses for twenty five years straight and then suddenly, almost without warning, is in the World Series.

One Away: The Total Improbability of the Royals’ World Series Run and the Agony of Potential Defeat

By Rany Jazayerli for Grantland

The team that couldn’t win anything for nearly three decades suddenly couldn’t lose. The Royals didn’t lose to the A’s, when by all rights they should have. They didn’t lose the ALDS to the Los Angeles Angels, who led the majors with 98 wins this season. They didn’t lose the ALCS to the Baltimore Orioles, who posted the second-best record in the American League. They haven’t lost once in eight playoff games, the first team in baseball history that could make that claim. They haven’t lost even though they’ve gone to extra innings four times, were tied in the ninth in a fifth game, and won two other contests by one run. They’ve literally won one game in the playoffs whose outcome wasn’t in doubt until the final pitch.

There’s also an element of survivor’s guilt, as with an infantryman who watched his friends get slaughtered at Ypres. Having dealt with failure for so long, it’s difficult to adjust to success, especially when it comes at the expense of A’s fans, who have watched their team lose seven elimination games in a row now, or Orioles fans, who had gone longer without seeing a World Series than Royals fans had. There’s a sense that if the Royals don’t finish off their dream season, the suffering of A’s and O’s fans will have been in vain — that it will be easier for fans in Oakland and Baltimore to accept defeat if they know that one of their comrades in lucklessness went on to defeat the entrenched powers that be, the San Francisco Giants, who have won two of the last four World Series.

Crazy as it sounds after the Royals have gone further than I ever dreamed they would, I’ll be more disappointed if they lose now than if they had lost three weeks ago against Oakland. Winning hasn’t diminished the fear of losing; it has only heightened it, and a championship is the only release.

News Clippings: October 18

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers out there these days. He is overwhelmingly enthusiastic and incisive about the subjects he chooses. In this article, he says farewell to the U.S. Soccer player, Landon Donovan, who retired from international play this week.

Inside Out

By Brian Phillips for Grantland

Donovan carried a zone of retirement around with him, the way fighters sometimes seem to move in a zone of potential violence. There was always this slight hint of removal, as if he were surrounded by a Photoshop blur set to 1 or 2 percent — hardly detectable, but enough to let you know that you were seeing him, and being seen by him, through a force field of self-created privacy.

He refused to be anything but himself… But what he was — complex, reflective, observant, careful with himself — was so out of step with our expectations for a major sports star that he left us with a sense of something unresolved.

Eric Kester is a former football player and NFL ball boy. This gives him a rare perspective with which to reflect on the violence and virtue of football.

What I Saw as an N.F.L. Ball Boy

By Eric Kester for The New York Times

Spend an extended period of time behind the N.F.L. curtain, as I did, see eerily subdued postgame locker rooms filled with vacant stares and hear anguished screams echoing from the training room, and you’ll understand how the physical and emotional toll these players endure is devastating enough to erode the morality of a good man or exacerbate the evils of a bad one.

This is not to say players who commit crimes deserve even a little exoneration. But what they and all N.F.L. players do deserve — and need — are improved resources to help them cope with the debilitating consequences of on-field ferocity.

The Allrounder is a great new site that “looks at how sport impacts communities, shapes culture, and taps bodies and emotions.” Created by a history professor, a senior research fellow, and an analyst at a think-tank, the Allrounder has a valuable scholarly presence without being pedantic in the least. I look forward to more great pieces from their writers in the coming months. This article about the singing culture of Welsh Rugby comes from their Guide For the Global Fan series.

Welsh Rugby Songs

by Daryl Leeworthy for The Allrounder

The oldest Welsh rugby song of all is “Men of Harlech,” a stirring tune penned in the eighteenth century that tells of Welsh defiance in the face of the English invader during a medieval siege that lasted seven years. It was originally sung to accompany the Welsh team as they entered the pitch, the “battlefield” if you like, and is still a key part of the pre-match build up. Then there’s the comic classic “Sospan Fach” which is literally about cat scratches, an unwell and then dead servant called Dafydd, a soldier called Dai who can’t seem to tuck his shirt in properly, and a couple of saucepans. There’s no real logic to the song but it established itself as a firm favourite of rugby crowds in Llanelli and is now one of those songs that every Welsh person knows, regardless of whether they like rugby or not.

But on the whole rugby songs are much less problematic than soccer songs, there’s almost none of the hostility that’s present in the songs sung at an Old Firm derby in Glasgow for instance. That’s not to say that some of them aren’t obviously couched in a degree of playful dislike… But generally they’re harmless and build on a Romanticised stereotype we have of ourselves as a nation. At their heart they seem to say it doesn’t matter if we lose (as we often do) to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, France, or Ireland; as long we beat England by a single point, it’s worth it in the end.

The European Champions League is an exciting tournament for fans but it might be even more exciting for team owners. Just qualifying for the tournament is a financial windfall. This article looks at one unintended consequence of this money — the destabilization of small soccer leagues. In this case, the author focuses on the Swedish league.

A Glamorous Event Injects Cash and Concerns

by Sam Borden for The New York Times

Money is always front and center in professional sports, and it is no different in European soccer. Malmo won the Swedish league last season and made its way through two qualifying [Champions’ League] rounds before arriving in the 32-team group stage. For its accomplishments, Malmo will receive more than 78 million Swedish kronor (more than $10 million), regardless of what happens during its six group stage games.

Tony Ernst, the chairman of the Swedish supporters group that encompasses fans of teams in the country’s top two divisions, said the sudden influx of money for Malmo — which is already poised to win the Swedish league again this season — had left many fans worried about competitive balance.

“Traditionally, the Swedish league has been very hard to win two times in a row — it is very open,” Ernst said in an interview. “I think there is a fear that this will make the other teams’ chances that much harder.”

This week marked the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco area. So many people around the country remember that earthquake, not just because it was strong and damaging, but because it happened during the pre-game telecast of the World Series. Sports fans experienced it live through the lens of baseball. Well-known baseball writer, Richard Justice, was there and shares some of his personal memories of the quake in this article, including waking up in a hotel room to find that the furniture was all out of place.

Remembering the Quake

by Richard Justice for Sports on Earth

And yet, in the worst of times, these two great American cities did themselves proud, too. This is the part of the story that sometimes gets lost in the retelling. We focus on the shaking and the death and the damage.

We laugh at how we huddled in dark hotels and jumped as the aftershocks came in waves over the next few days. We remember the one baseball writer who got stuck in traffic because he was, as usual, running late and never got to Candlestick Park. We occasionally pass over the best part of the story. That’s how people pulled together and helped one another and resolved to rebuild and carry on.

I would just about guarantee that those of us who experienced the earthquake and then stayed around the city until the World Series resumed 10 days later would tell you the same thing.

If they didn’t love the Bay Area before, they fell in love with it in those two weeks. And if they already loved it, they had those feelings reinforced. There was such a spirit and a resolve it was impossible not to be inspired.

News Clippings: Sunday, October 12

This article profiles former NBA player Keyon Dooling and his life long struggle to come to terms with and recover from being abused as a child. It’s a fascinating and eventually uplifting piece that reminds us that no matter how big, strong, and fearless athletes look when they’re on stage, they are real people with their own struggles.

Keyon Dooling’s Secret

By Jordan Ritter Conn for Grantland

Now, when Dooling looks back on those years, he sees how he tried to cope with the trauma of his past. He sees himself in fourth grade, sneaking to his father’s liquor cabinet, pouring himself strong drinks and sipping them until the world was gone. He sees himself in middle school, smoking weed with friends, letting the drug ease the anxiety he’d felt since that afternoon. He sees himself at that same age, flirting with girls and then taking them home. The more girls he slept with, he thought, the more he proved that he was no longer that little boy.

Basketball helped. On the court, he could assert his dominance. With the ball in his hands, he never felt like a victim. He loved the power his talent gave him, the confidence that grew from knowing that almost every kid in his school and his neighborhood could only dream of doing what he could do on a hardwood floor. The first time he dunked — as a freshman, in a game — he felt invincible. As he grew older, the memory of that afternoon faded, but the coping strategies remained.

This past week, I reblogged a piece about how baseball fans need to decide — do they want a clean game or an exciting game. This triggered a back and forth with a baseball fan and friend of Dear Sports Fan who sent me this well-written piece as a rebuttal. I have to admit, after reading this defense of the pace of baseball, I question how much of my attitudes towards the sport are the product of hearing other people’s cliched criticism.

What Pace of Game Problem?

By Russell Carleton for Fox Sports

Allowing for the fact that some of the rule changes would spawn some workarounds, you might save 20 minutes off the average game. All it would cost you is the clock-less-ness of baseball, the idea of free substitution, and a small piece of the integrity of the game. In other words, baseball would become a different game and for not much benefit.

What I find interesting is that baseball seems to have a pace of game problem because everyone says that it does… Maybe it’s just time that baseball recognized that there are people out there who enjoy a slower game and stopped trying to be all things to all people… Baseball should simply embrace the fact that it is a slower game and market itself accordingly. It’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no pace of game problem because there’s nothing morally superior about playing rushed games that take two and a half hours instead of three, no matter what United States culture tries to say.

This essay grapples with the difficulty of producing accurate statistics comparing NFL players to… well, to who, exactly? That’s part of the problem. With all of the scary statistics flying around about the health effects of playing professional football, it’s very hard to know what is real and what isn’t. I hope someone can take the work of this charmingly skeptical article and do the hard work to produce more reasonable and accurate scientific studies. There’s undeniably something scary happening to some percent of pro football players. Let’s figure it out.

NFL Players Die Young. Or Maybe They Live Long Lives.

By Daniel Engber for Slate

For every 770 men who play the sport on a professional level, we can expect one extra death from ALS. (Extra deaths from Alzheimer’s are even more unusual.)

Any extra death is cause for grave concern, but if you look at other, much more common deadly conditions, the change in risk goes the other way. The same dataset suggests that for every 770 football retirees, we should expect 13 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease and 14 fewer from cancer. So while it’s true that Alzheimer’s and ALS rates among NFL athletes could reasonably be described as “through the roof,” the number of players’ lives saved from heart disease and cancer exceeds the number of lives lost to those diseases by 2,150 percent.

But the methods used to find these stats raise a familiar and important question: Should football players really be compared to average men their age, of any race or body size or income level? How much does the choice of analysis affect its outcome?

So is it better to control for income or race, or should studies strive for both? And what about body size?

These may sound like simple questions, but they’re exceedingly difficult to answer. To some extent, the best approach depends on how you think about the NFL, and what point you’d like to make.

This charming story about the financial plight of the Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer teams reminds us that not all athletes have financial support on NFL levels. Sometimes it takes a desperate tweet and a kind opponent to get things started so that the Clinton foundation can finish things up!

Haiti pledges money to Trinidad and Tobago soccer

By Kurt Voigt and Anne M. Peterson for the Associated Press

Upon getting word that the Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer team might not even have enough money for lunch, Haiti’s team took a look at its fundraising for World Cup qualifying — an account totaling a little over $1,300 — and decided to turn it over to the competition.

Start 'em young: babies and sports

Here’s a little much-needed cuteness in the sports landscape. In the midst of NFL scandals, corrupt international organizations, and serious injuries, The New York Times decided to focus their editorial lens on very young people playing sports. I’m grateful to them for it!

High-Fives, Not High Reps: CrossFit Programs for Preschoolers Focus on Fun

By Mary Pilon for The New York Times

Pilon flourishes in the incongruous mix of CrossFit, the hardcore workout movement that borders on being cult-like, and pre-schoolers just looking to have a good time.

CrossFit instructors say they are aware of the skepticism that sometimes greets their preschool efforts, and they say it is a misunderstanding. They argue that their low-key preschool classes are more akin to the tumble sessions and in-school physical education programs of the past. The emphasis for 3- to 5-year-olds, they say, is on fun.

In preschool CrossFit, dangling off hanging bars is likened to being a monkey. Squats are frog-inspired. Box jumps, plyometric leaps long beloved by elite athletes, are smaller and rebranded for children as superhero leaps.

Before Learning to Crawl, You Must Learn to Swim

By Seth Casteel for The New York Times

This photo essay from the magazine section is both adorable and inspiring. I’ve been told that as a toddler, I jumped into a pool without knowing how to swim. These classes that teach babies to be comfortable and safe in water seem like a great idea to me!

The first time she saw her 5-month-old daughter, Zoe, carefully dropped underwater in a pool for infant survival swim training, it was nerve-racking. “She looked surprised,” Ubiera says. “Like, ‘What are you doing to me?’ ” Zoe was being introduced to “self-rescue,” in which babies are taught to hold their breath underwater, kick their feet, turn over to float on their backs and rest until help arrives.