An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
We link to other people’s pieces about sports that we think either explain the Sports Fan nicely or would be enjoyable to the non-Sports Fan for other reasons.
The problems in the real world are bad enough, but if we can’t even get things right in this alternate universe full of fake laws and uniform policies and codes of conduct, that just makes everything seem twice as hopeless. Sports are supposed to be an escape, not a reminder of everything that’s unfair and hypocritical everywhere else.
There’s a cliche in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What people mean by that is no matter how much practice and coaching and hard work a basketball player puts into his or her craft, if they’re not tall, there’s only so good they can get. The flip side of this, of course, is that if you are very, very tall, there’s a place for you in basketball as long as you are coordinated enough to run. As a consequence, NBA centers, the tallest of the tall, are often very interesting people. As a group they tend to be less single-mindedly obsessed with basketball. They may not have needed to be that obsessed to have successful NBA careers. If you follow sports, you get the sense that some of them might not even like basketball very much.
Retired NBA center Yao Ming is very, very tall. He’s seven and a half feet tall or, as they would best understand it in his native China, 2.29 meters. He’s absolutely not of the type that did not like basketball, on the contrary, I think he loved it, but he is a well-rounded person. I’ll always remember his comment in response to media concerns that he would be devastated if forced to retire because of foot injuries:
“I haven’t died,” he said. “Right now I’m drinking a beer and eating fried chicken. What were you expecting, a funeral?”
Recently Yao Ming’s name popped up in the news for his role in an effort to save Africa’s “dwindling elephant population.” Simon Denyer brings us this story in an article in the Washington Post and it is well worth a read. I was impressed to find out that Yao Ming’s effort to save elephants from poaching by reducing Chinese demand for illegal ivory has a precedent for success. He’s done the same for sharks by “pressing the Chinese people to give up shark fin soup.” In fact, after his campaign against shark fin soup, “prices and sales of shark fins in China [went] down by 50 to 70 percent.”
I wish Yao Ming success in his new drive against ivory sales and elephant poaching. Saving animals in Africa from extinction is a worthy cause for everyone who loves the earth but especially for retired NBA centers. Why? Because as Yao Ming jokes, he loves Africa because in Africa, many animals are even bigger than him!
In today’s soundbite and meme-laced world, it’s easy to empathize with someone whose ten seconds of fame came because of a misunderstanding. It’s easy to feel bad for a reporter whose name, when it was brought up, was invariably used as an example of asking a stupid question. Inspired by his death a few days ago, the true story of sports reporter Butch John is starting to come out. I saw this story reblogged by Barry Petchesky on Deadspin.com but its source is reporter Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinal.
The myth of Butch John is so unbelievable that it’s hard to comprehend it having lasted as gospel truth since 1988. In that year, the Washington Redskins faced the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. Washington’s quarterback was a man named Doug Williams. Williams was the first black man to quarterback his team to the Super Bowl and in the weeks leading up to the big game, that fact became the subject of many stories, television segments, and interviews. During the fateful press conference, Williams was getting a lot of questions about the topic, and he answered them dutifully until Butch John supposedly asked this hum-dinger, “How long have you been a black quarterback?” Now, this is a silly question. As we all learned from Mean Girls, you can’t ask someone why they are (or how long they’ve been) their race.
Of course, this isn’t what John asked. What he actually asked, according to Mike Bianchi, was this, “Doug, it’s obvious you’ve been a black quarterback all your life. When did it start to matter?”
I’m sure that if Williams had heard the question correctly and responded truthfully, he would have said, “it has always mattered and it always will.” I’m sure if we could ask him, Butch John would deny it mattering whether people think he asked a dumb question once upon a time. But I think it matters and so do his former colleagues like Rick Cleveland who writes in an obituary for John:
He wrote well and he wrote often. He was a fine writer and he worked hard. He was versatile in that he handled news, features and columns with equal proficiency.
Better late than never, I suppose, but it’s another lesson to think twice about the stories we read and hear. Things are not always what they seem.
In the spirit of one last Summer vacation before the season is over, I’m excited to bring you two wonderful stories about American sports going abroad. One story explores the recent and rapid adoption of American Football in Poland while the other profiles the National Basketball Team of the Philippines and their newest countryman, Andray Blatche, who was born in New York and has played his whole life in the United States.
“What happened in the championship of the Polish American Football League” sounds like the first line of a pre-political correctness ethnic joke but actually it’s a legitimate question for the tens of thousands of people who follow American Football in Poland. Rick Lyman of the New York Times brings us a gripping story about how Poland has embraced American football. It’s a wonderful window into how another culture views the game of football, free from some of the cultural implications and the pressure of billions of dollars that weigh down the conversation in the United States. Some of my favorite parts were the description of how family oriented the live experience of the games are:
At the game against the Goats, besides a bouncy castle, there was an inflatable sliding board, a giant dinosaur, a Starbucks tent, a bubble tea concession, a very popular burger van, a kielbasa grill, a small beer garden beyond the end zone and a “Zibi & Steczki” (steak and potatoes) stand run by the Harley guys.
“We also encourage picnicking,” Mr. Steszewski said. “Of course, we are not up to the standards of American tailgating.”
and a brief look into the one all-women’s team in the league, the aptly named Warsaw Sirens:
“Our colors are pink and black,” said Kamila Glowacz, 29, the team’s president. “You know, because we’re girls.”
The team got started when some of the women visited America and happened to see a game. “Many men told us we should go to the kitchen, not to the field,” she said. “But women, you know, we do what we want to do.”
It’s a wonderful article and is well worth reading to the final, hysterical line. I’ve definitely taken note of Lyman as a writer to follow and I’d love to watch some Polish football if it were ever on TV.
The second story about what happens when American sports go abroad is about the successful recruitment of American Andray Blatche by the Filipino National Basketball team and the process of introducing him to the team. Written by Rafe Bartholomew for Grantland.com, this article is a fun look into a wacky basketball player in a completely curious situation.
International basketball allows for one naturalized citizen to play for each country’s national team. This often means that American college players who either couldn’t make an NBA team or who have tried and failed in the NBA get recruited to play for another country. Recruitment in sports isn’t unusual, it happens at every level, but it is notable when signing up means not just signing a contract but becoming a citizen of a foreign country. In this case, Andray Blatche had to be the subject of a law that passed through the Philippines congress and signed by their president before he could begin playing with the Filipino team.
Once Bartholomew ably tells the tale of how Blatche was courted and signed, he moves on to the important question of how a talented but unreliable 6’11” NBA American center will fit into a team of undersized relatively lesser skilled Filipinos. The answer seems to be, “Pretty well.” The Filipino coach, team, and fans are refreshingly (for our stats obsessed sports landscape) focused on playing with heart and passion. For whatever else you can say about Blatche, he’s got both of those in droves. I loved the parts of the piece when Bartholomew focused on Blatche’s growing relationship with his Filipino teammates and staff. Here’s one choice bit:
Blatche even seemed to develop a genuine closeness with Gilas ball boy Bong Tulabot — and not just because Bong spent the 15 minutes before every practice massaging weapons-grade menthol liniment into Blatche’s calf muscles. “Where’s my guy?” were often the first words out of Blatche’s mouth when he’d enter the gym, and he’d jockey with Alapag for Bong’s attention. The unlikely bond between Blatche, the 28-year-old, 6-foot-11 NBA center, and Bong, the 48-year-old, 5-foot-6 Filipino team handyman who used to sell rice porridge in the street, was consummated when a morning practice ended with a visiting SBP official placing $200 at half court and inviting everyone in the gym to shoot for it. Blatche launched his half-court attempt, and when the ball rattled through the rim Bong leaped in celebration.
“DAT’S MY MAN! DAT’S MY MAN!” Bong shouted in a peculiar falsetto as he ran in circles around the gym. Blatche melted to the floor in laughter, then got up to meet Bong for a running, jumping chest bump, although their height disparity made the maneuver look more like Bong delivering a flying head butt to Blatche’s waist. Nevertheless, the moment was enough to make “DAT’S MY MAN!” the team catchphrase for the rest of its time in Miami.
So far, so good in Blatche’s time with the Filipino national team. The true test comes over the next week when the Philippines will try to upset the world and qualify for the knock out round of the FIBA Basketball World Cup. We’ll be running an article on how that tournament works later today, so keep your eyes to the grindstone.
Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers.
The other day I wrote a post about the sounds you hear when you watch sports on television and which of them are real, which enhanced, and which fake. Then yesterday things got very real when I quit my job! Today we’ve got a story about (as Dave Chappele might say), when keeping it fake goes wrong. Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers. Two recent pieces from Deadspin and Snap Judgement covered this quasi sport in interesting ways.
Deadspin republished an article from Jacobin, a magazine offering “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” The article covers the history of labor relations in professional wrestling and is devoted to it’s thesis that “the billion dollar spectacle of pro wrestling relies entirely on the ruthless economic, mental, and physical exploitation of its performers.” Its tone is a little arch for my taste but it’s quite convincing. I was particularly interested to hear how pro wrestling’s leaders used the very fact that its competition isn’t real to their own advantage:
Another delicate maneuver: is a pro wrestling match a competition, or an exhibition? A seemingly minor distinction—but in the eighties, the money men of pro wrestling broke kayfabe, that code of silence safeguarding the industry’s competitive integrity, to all but bellow at state lawmakers that the matches were predetermined, that the whole show was “fake.”
Why? The benefits were compelling. If pro wrestling is just “entertainment,” there is no need for regulatory scrutiny. By pushing through deregulation, with the help of sleazy right-wing lawyers like Rick Santorum, the WWF wriggled out of paying taxes on their TV broadcasts and sloughed off any oversight by state athletic commissions. In New Jersey, for instance, following the state legislature’s 1989 deregulation of the industry, the state “would no longer license wrestlers, promoters, timekeepers and referees,” and wrestlers “would no longer be required to take physical examinations before an exhibition”—a fateful dereliction in a business rife with injury.
As the quote above hints at, professional wrestlers face terrible physical risks. Wrestling is “fake” in that the results of the matches are known by its participants but its physical toll is very real. The acrobatic violent simulations in the ring take close coordination and can easily go wrong. Beyond that, wrestlers take drugs. Lots and lots and lots of drugs. For all the talk of whether its worth trying to ban performance enhancing drugs in “real” sports, wrestling provides a clear example of what can happen if you allow anything. You can understand the dangers of wrestling through numbers — as this wrestlinginc.com article from 2011 shows, of the “of the 51 talents who appeared at the 1991 WWE pay-per-view WrestleMania VII, 14 have died prematurely.” It compares that to top level boxers, football players, and musicians from 1991 and there’s no contest whatsoever in how fatal the activities seem to be.
You can also understand the danger through personal stories like Kevin von Erich’s as brought to you by Snap Judgement. Von Erich was one of five wrestling brothers who followed their father into professional wrestling. It’s a great and horrible story made all the more poignant by von Erich’s gravely voice and his clear love for the profession that did him and his family so much harm. Listen to it here.
Have you ever watched a sporting event on television and thought, “what sounds are real in sports?” What about the squeaking of basketball shoes on a wood court? How about the grunt of a boxer taking a blow to the ribs? The sound of a hockey puck hitting the boards? Is that really what the game sounds like? Are they real sounds just amplified to be heard over the crowd or are television sound engineers playing tricks on us by adding sampled sounds in? Would it matter if they were?
This is the subject of an episode of 99% Invisible called The Sound of Sports. 99% Invisible is an independent podcast about “design, architecture, and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” It’s a great podcast and I enjoy a lot of their work. This episode is actually a rebroadcast of a show produced for the BBC by Peregrine Andrews. It delves deeply into that 99% to explore how sound designers shape our experience of sports on television.
The first two thirds of the podcast cover how sound engineers have revolutionized the sports experience over the past thirty years or so by cleverly miking and then mixing different sounds of sporting events into the television feed. I particularly loved hearing from one engineer about how his childhood desire to amplify an acoustic guitar came back to him when approaching the problem of how to convey the sounds of gymnastic in the olympics. Like with his childhood guitar, he took a contact mic and slapped it right onto the most resonant part of the event — the balance beam. As you might expect, the show is lushly illustrated with clips from sports broadcasts. My favorite is a thirty second clip of two coxswains from the biggest rowing race of the year in England, an annual race between Oxford and Cambridge known just as “the boat race.” Coxswains are people who sit in the back of the boat facing the eight rowers and SCREAM. Their job is to set a rhythm, inform the rowers of how they’re doing, to know tactically when to speed up and when to stay steady and to motivate through a mixture of enthusiasm and intimidation. It’s amazing to hear just the sound from the two coxswains in this race, a man and a woman, scream their hearts out.
Things really get moving in the last twenty minutes or so as the show explores the aspects of sports sounds that are fake or “enhanced” as the engineers like to say. For me, the most important message in the segment came from an engineer who was explaining how the familiar sound of a basketball swishing through a hoop is real but never heard in person. He says “Most of us involved in sports sports try to… enhance the experience. We tread the middle road between what’s real and what’s unreal.” What I love about this line of thought is that the more I learn, the less clear what’s right and what’s wrong. At first, it seems wrong to change how the game sounds so materially. Does it matter if the basketball swish is real or sampled if its amplified so far out of proportion to reality? Maybe a little. But then you hear about the challenge of mixing the sound for a rowing race in the olympics. The course is long and winding. The rowers move fast. Worst of all, in order to capture video of the event for television, the race is surrounded by four motor boats and a helicopter, each of which makes enough noise to drown the sounds of the race out. Together, they produce a cacophony of sound to depress even the most truth-devoted sound engineer. So, what do they do? They go out earlier in the day, when the river is quiet, and record the sounds of a few random people rowing. Then they mix the sound, layer it with some cheering, and off they go.
By far my favorite story of fake sounds in sports is that the familiar sound of hooves hitting the ground in a gallop during a horse race is actually a slowed down clip of a herd of buffalo stampeding. The sound engineer who spilled that trick of the trade chuckled and said he thought everyone had probably been using the same clip for the last thirty years! I just love that. It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons my friends and I loved to quote in high school. Some guys are filming a movie (yes, within a cartoon television show) and they need to film a cow. They use a horse. Someone asks, “Uh, sir, why don’t you just use real cows?” The reply is “Cows don’t look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.” Another question comes, “What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?” And the payoff is “Uh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.”
Usually, when cats get taped together (metaphorically, of course) in sports sound engineering, it seems to be to heighten the reality of the sporting event for far away viewers. Towards the end of the podcast, another possible reason surfaces and it’s what I was left thinking most about after the show. One of the key interviewees in the show is a sound engineer who works for EA Sports on sports video games. Doing sounds for video games, he’s totally free to use whatever fake sounds he wants, and he takes full advantage of that. For example, in a boxing video game, he layers in the sound of celery snapping to evoke ribs breaking when a video game boxer takes a body blow. He points out that televised sports are actually competitive with his games. This is true. As a sports fan and a sports video game fan, there have been times when I’ve switched off a boring game to instead play a sports video game. Part of this competition is a sound effects arms race. The fake sounds in video games sound more “real” than the real sounds of miked sporting events. To keep their viewers, television stations must match the reality of its fake competition!
99% Invisible is a good show to subscribe to and this episode in particular was a great hour of listening. Check it out today!
What happens when the manager of West Ham’s soccer team calls a heckling fan’s bluff and invites him onto the field?
From NPR’s Snap Judgement podcast comes the true story of one soccer fan’s dream come true. Steve Davies was your prototypical English soccer fan. As we know from the New York Times’ excellent study of when people form lasting fan-team relationships, many of us, especially boys, become fans of a team that wins a championship when they are between 8 and 12 years old. When the British soccer team, West Ham, won the championship in 1975 it began a “massive love affair” for Davies. He attends as many games as he can and has a “West Ham ’till I die” tattoo on his arm.
One day, when Davies was 22, he and some friends went to a West Ham pre-season game. Even though it was only a pre-season game, Davies and his friends had high hopes and high standards for their team. Davies in particular didn’t think the team’s striker (forward most attacker) was trying hard enough, and like die-hard fans everywhere, was vocal and colorful in telling him so. The venting and exhorting went on into the second half but the striker did not. He got injured and was substituted out. At this point, something truly remarkable happened. The team’s manager, Harry Redknapp, turned towards the stands and asked the most belligerent fan there if he thought he could really do better than the striker.
That fan was Steve Davies and the rest was history. You’ve got to hear this one:
Snap Judgement is a wonderful collection of stories collected by host Glynn Washington. I enjoy it quite a bit and I suspect you would too. Check it out on npr.org and snapjudgement.org or subscribe on your favorite podcasting machine.
One of the topics I’ve heard and read about the most since the United States team was booted (pun intended) out of the World Cup last week is what the team’s performance and our country’s World Cup fever might mean for the future of soccer in the United States. Cynics on the subject say that the country gets into the World Cup every four years and then studiously ignores soccer for the next three years and 11 months until the World Cup begins again. Soccer optimists (who owns soptimists.com???) claim that this year is different, that the interest in the World Cup is stronger than it’s been in the past and that we are closer than ever to joining the rest of the soccer loving world.
My friend Brian Reich of thinkingaboutsports.com falls somewhere between those two groups. Brian set out and sat down at the start of the World Cup to “watch every game of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, review every ad, and read/watch/listen to every bit of coverage and analysis I can find” and write about it on www.clumsytouch.com. His writing has been great fun to read and I admire and envy his dedication! His post on the question of soccer as a brand in the United States was innovative and insightful and I encourage you to read it in full here. His conclusion on the topic? That soccer’s current “resonance is deeply connected to the World Cup – a unique tournament, staged every four years” and that the “experience, the connection that people feel right now – cannot be sustained. A new and different approach to creating a ‘brand’ for soccer needs to be considered – before the energy is lost completely.”
What do you think? Is soccer gaining steam or slowly deflating? What would make you more likely to follow soccer between World Cups?
I rarely center a post around a single story but this one from Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog is too good to resist. John Raut, owner of the Canberra Knights, a hockey team in the Australian Ice Hockey League, announced at the end of last season that he was disbanding the team due to financial losses and poor competitive prospects. He didn’t bother telling the players before he told the media and when they found out they reacted in an unusual way. The players said to owner John Raut, “you can’t fire us, we refuse to quit” and began a quest to keep the team alive.
Once the players, led by team captain Mark Rummukainen, decided to try to keep the team alive, they had three challenges: they had to find $100,000 of operating funds, they needed to negotiate a new deal with their arena, and they had to prove that their team (which had won only 2 of 28 games the previous season) could be competitive. Owner (now former owner) Raut owned the arena and was willing to work out a deal to let the player-led team stay providing it did not use the name and brand Canberra Knights, which he owns. The money, as you might expect in 2014, came pouring in from fans through a crowd-sourcing campaign still open for donation and about 60% to their goal. In terms of competitive balance, the league helped out by modifying the rules to allow the new Canberra Brave team to sign more imported (European or North American) players. Additionally, some former Canberra players decided to come out of retirement for at least a season to help their old club. Of course, the irony here is that some of the players leading the charger to save the team may find themselves out of a job because of their own success.
It’s a great story and Harrison Mooney does a wonderful job of reporting it. As he writes:
Everything’s backwards in Australia. The toilet water swirls the other way, and the players run the hockey teams.
Read the rest of the story here.
It’s a little absurd to re-blog someone else’s list of great articles from 2013 but… I’m gonna do it anyway. Deadspin’s editors put together a list of excellent sports writing from the past year including Brian Phillips’ Grantland piece on match-fixing in soccer, Eric Nusbaum’s ESPN Magazine article on the intriguing world of gender-bending Mexican professional wrestling, and many, many more. I only remember about half of them from the past year and I’ve been enjoying reading through them today. I hope you will too!
