Reads Archives - Page 7 of 8

Portraits of the Manning Family

If you’ve been exposed to any NFL football in the past few weeks or years, you’ve probably heard of the Manning family. Father Archie was a well-respected quarterback whose personal brilliance was always undermined by the mediocre to terrible teams he played on, first in college at Ole Miss and then in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints. He married the college home-coming queen, Olivia, and they had three sons, Cooper, Peyton, and Eli. Peyton and Eli have both had successful college and professional football careers. The long-time quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and for the last two years of the Denver Broncos, Peyton is generally thought of as one of the top five or ten quarterbacks of all time. Eli, his younger brother, has been the Giants starting quarterback since he was drafted in 2004 and has won two Superbowl championships; one more than Peyton. The oldest brother, Cooper, was diagnosed with a spinal abnormality in high school and had to give up playing football. The Mannings are the “first family” of football.

This year the Mannings have been a particularly prominent part of the football season. Peyton’s team, the Broncos, is undefeated and he has been playing some of the best football of his career… or anyone else’s. Eli has been having exactly the opposite kind of season. His team, the Giants has lost every game so far and he has thrown 15 interceptions — the same number he threw all of last season. Coincidentally ESPN released a documentary about the Mannings two weeks ago called The Book of Manning.

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers on the Grantland staff and has an absolutely fabulous Twitter feed. Phillips in his own abstract way often seems to have a direct line to the Zeitgeist so I wasn’t surprised to see he had written an article about each of the Manning brothers last week. I’m going to excerpt from each of the articles but I recommend you read them in full.

Peyton:

You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage… Peyton Manning crushes. Peyton Manning burns. Peyton Manning annihilates. And yet … have you ever seen a football player less likely to crush, burn, or annihilate anything than Peyton Manning? It’s possible to imagine, say, Ben Roethlisberger, if a night took a weird swerve, actually wielding a torch in anger; Peyton Manning would spend that same night at home, in his sock-folding room, folding his socks. I doubt he has ever shredded anything in his life. (Maybe a document.) On the field, he’s Genghis Khan as portrayed by your 11th-grade trigonometry teacher. The language that best describes his accomplishments is also the language that most completely misrepresents his style.

And Eli:

Eli is more Archie’s natural heir than Peyton will ever be — like Eli, his dad was a fun and scrambly quarterback, more a seat-of-the-pants adventurer than the lucid math-compulsive then playing in Indiana — but because Peyton came along first, the definition of Manningness has somehow shifted in a way that includes Eli out… Eli is the un-Manning. He is the Manning who makes mistakes, and thus, as a Manning, he is unlike himself.

This is the kind of sportswriting I enjoy! I hope you do too.

How the NFL can Ruin Your Life

Fan is short for “fanatic” and the fanaticism of NFL fans is never too far from the surface. Two articles recently struck me as being representative, in different ways, of just how important sports can be to a fan’s life. Read on to hear about how sports can make you fat and broke or svelte and rich!

One of my favorite quotes about sports, attributed to the late Sam Kellerman, talks about why fans treat sport like a matter of life or death: “Sports is man’s joke on God, Max. You see, God says to man, ‘I’ve created a universe where it seems like everything matters, where you’ll have to grapple with life and death and in the end you’ll die anyway, and it won’t really matter.’ So man says to God, ‘Oh, yeah? Within your universe we’re going to create a sub-universe called sports, one that absolutely doesn’t matter, and we’ll follow everything that happens in it as if it were life and death.” An article^[1] from the New York Times by Jan Hoffman, suggest^[2] that Kellerman might have been right in a very concrete way:

Researchers found that football fans’ saturated-fat consumption increased by as much as 28 percent following defeats and decreased by 16 percent following victories. The association was particularly pronounced in the eight cities regarded as having the most devoted fans, with Pittsburgh often ranked No. 1. Narrower, nail-biting defeats led to greater consumption of calorie and fat-saturated foods than lopsided ones.

In my life, I observe that it is more the act of watching football that leads to the consumption of nachos, hot-dogs, mozzarella sticks, and other delicious and waist-band stretching foods.

If putting your life on the line is not enough for some fans, there’s now a brand new way for them to put their money on the line. Gambling has long been a central focus for many who follow sports. If you don’t believe me, go watch the 1932 Marx Brothers’ movie Horsefeathers and it’s incredibly contemporary story about the fixing of a college football game. Fantasy sports has brought gambling on sports out of the alley and onto main street, in part because it distances the raw gambling from the outcome of the game. Now startup company Fantex has come up with a new way to gamble (or invest as they would have us think about it) on sports — by investing money in a player. Billy Gallagher reports on this story for TechCrunch:

Fantex strikes deals with professional athletes who give up a certain percentage of their income (presumably over an allotted period of time, like the length of their active career) in exchange for the proceeds of [an] IPO. People can then buy shares of that player’s brand, like a stock… presumably, if San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis has a monster year and looks like he’s going to get a bigger endorsement deal or a larger contract in a few years, his stock would rise and a fan could sell their Davis stock and cash out with a real, monetary profit.

Gallagher argues that this is probably not going to be a great deal for the players (surely they can find something better to do with their money) but he is more optimistic about profit for the new class of fan/investors. I can’t wait until they create a market for people who blog about sports — I might be a penny-stock but who knows…

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Thanks to Patty Gibney for sending me this article!↵
If you believe in the dangers of obesity↵

NFL Pregame Excess

As a sports fan, I am also a big fan of Sundays during the fall. I like nothing more than to have already had a weekend full of social events so that I can sit down on the coach and feel totally wonderful about watching football all day. As a fantasy football owner, I’ve also been known to have my laptop (and my phone, and my ipad, and whatever other screens I can find) propped open so that I can simultaneously follow my fantasy football team and as many of the non-televised games as possible. I’ve tried the NFL Red Zone channel a few times. Red Zone is a term which refers to an offensive team having the ball within 20 yards of the end-zone they are trying to score in. The Red Zone channel flips back and forth between games to show the most exciting parts of all of them — it will even split your screen into three or four games at times. I find it to be a dangerously hyperactive experience that leaves me feeling sort of shaky and not like I’ve enjoyed watching sports at all. But I understand the appeal of the Red Zone channel.

What I don’t understand is the appeal of NFL pre-game shows, so I was really happy to read the recent New York Times survey of them by Richard Sandomir. In it he describes the growth of the Sunday morning NFL shows as an inevitable but ridiculous consequence of the NFL’s popularity^[1]

Starting Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. (all times Eastern), there will be 19 hours of pregame N.F.L.programming. Four of the new hours arrive courtesy of the CBS Sports Network, which is producing “That Other Pregame Show” next to the studio in Manhattan that is used by “The NFL Today,” the CBS broadcast network’s venerable pregame show. This flagrant addition of four hours, in one stroke, is excess piling on extravagance.

Keith Jackson, a retired legend of football broadcasting, was profiled recently in the LA Times by Chris Erskine. Erskine asked Jackson if he had any wisdom to impart on today’s broadcasters and Jackson replied, “They talk too damn much. You wear the audience out.” It’s likely Jackson was thinking about commentators during the game when he said that but I’d like to think he would feel the same about pre-game shows.

If there is one nice thing about all the NFL coverage and promotion, it’s that each channel has it’s own NFL theme song. These constants have become like Pavlovian conditional reflexes to me. They make me sprawl out, relax, maybe freak out a little about fantasy football, but mostly get ready to indulge myself in a day of sports. If you’re conditioned like I am, you might enjoy this inventive YouTube video by Ansel Wallenfang which I found on deadspin.com.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

And the low-cost of studio shows compared to other types of programming.↵

Diana Nyad Swims from Cuba to Florida — But at What Cost?

Nyad's shows off her guns and the marks that jellyfish left on her body. Photo by Catherine Opie — Nyad’s shows off her guns and the marks that jellyfish left on her body.
Photo by Catherine Opie

Yesterday when I read that Diana Nyad had finally succeeded in her quest to swim from Cuba to Florida, my first reaction was “but at what cost?”

Nyad completed the 100 to 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida in almost fifty three hours of continuous swimming. She is the first woman^[1] to complete this feat without a shark cage. This may seem like only a safety concern, but when swimming in a shark cage, the swimmer benefits enormously from the drag or current in the water created by the boat towing the cage. Nyad had a large support team including a team of shark divers who swam ahead of her with shark repellants and a support boat which she did not hold on to at any time. It was her fifth attempt at the swim. The first attempt was in 1978. Diana Nyad is 64 years old.

It’s an inspirational story of age and determination overcoming youth and vigor. Nyad herself said when she reached the shore:

“I have three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team.”

President Obama congratulate her on twitter, “Congratulations to @DianaNyad. Never give up on your dreams.” Terry Savage of the Huffington Post proclaimed Nyad a hero who reminds us to “never give up” and that “persistence pays.” So why was my reaction “but at what cost?”

My reaction was informed by memories of a New York Times magazine article I read about Nyad in 2011, shortly before her fourth attempt. The author, Elizabeth Weil, did a wonderful job of characterizing Nyad and her quest. What stuck with me was the relationship between Nyad and one of her friends and lead handler, Bonnie Stoll:

Whatever the case, in early November Stoll decided she could no longer abide Nyad’s “Groundhog Day”-like optimism. If she was going to discuss another swim with Nyad — let alone, train her for one — Stoll needed Nyad to watch a video of her jellyfish stings. So one Wednesday morning, Stoll drove over to Nyad’s house, where Nyad’s nephew, who’s making a documentary about his aunt’s swimming, cued up a six-minute clip. The two women sat close on the couch, hunched toward the laptop on the coffee table. The footage was gruesome. Gone was the swimmer’s strong, confident, singing, counting athletic self. Nyad’s eyes looked desperate, terrified. “Wow wow wow,” she said on the video, treading water, trying to manage her pain. “Are we all the way across?” she asked, attempting to orient herself. “This can’t be all the way across.” Back on the couch, Stoll flinched. Nyad’s eyes teared up. The body in the water — Nyad’s body — was going into shock. “It’s under my arm, the armpit. . . . It’s paralyzing my back.” Stoll’s voice on the laptop strained for control. “Diana in, out. Diana in, out! Breathe!”

For a few moments after the video ended, Nyad seemed cowed. “That’s the first time I’ve seen what you were living through,” she said to Stoll, wiping away a tear. “I look like a child who is scared.”

But five minutes later that fear was gone. Nyad has a rare gift: muscles and a psyche that can swim for days straight.

We sports fans celebrate the outliers. Diana Nyad has rare gifts that allow her to swim and swim and swim, forgetting past failure and current pain. We marvel at how Michael Jordan could overcome the flu (or food poisoning… or a horrible hangover depending on who you ask) to score 38 points in 44 minutes during the 1997 NBA finals. We lionize “genius” coaches like Mike Leach whose eccentricities are matched only by their winning.

Nyad’s, Jordan’s, and Leach’s performances are all admirable and inspiring, but is there a necessary downside to athletic achievement? Jordan competitive drive led him to gamble compulsively and psychologically terrorize his lesser teammates.^[2] Leach’s try anything attitude ended his employment at Texas Tech when he ordered a concussed player to stand in a dark closet. When Nyad walked up the beach in Key West, Bonnie Stoll was there to hug her but I have to ask: Was it worth it? What was the cost of success for her life? For her friend’s life?

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

It’s a little hard to tell if a man has done this. A long-distance swimmer named Walter Poenisch claimed to have, also in his sixties, but there are doubts about the veracity of his claim.↵
And they were all lesser.↵

Three Good Sports Links for the Long Weekend

Hi All and Happy Labor Day Weekend!

I know all of you are lying around wondering what you can possibly do with yourselves now that your primary hobby (I’m talking about wearing white pants, of course) is coming to an end. Here are three good sports related stories to fill the void with.

Amazing Sports Photography

This photo was taken by Lorenz Holder and was entered in the New Creativity section.

In their ongoing attempt to link ingesting caffeine, taurine, glucuronolactone, B-group vitamins, sucrose, and glucose with exciting adventure sports, Red Bull sponsors a tri-annual sports photography contest. Many of the photos are amazing and I enjoyed paging through them all. Voting is still open for the people’s choice award.

Name Dropping – Hip Hop and Basketball

Hip hop and basketball have always shared a special connection. They’re both forums that reward creativity and style within well defined boundaries. Rap is full of cultural references and basketball players often find themselves planted in a lyric. Usually this is just because the rapper admires the basketball player’s style or performance, but sometimes it’s as a form of coded speech. Bdon.org created a handy infographic that charts the number of mentions a basketball player gets in raps against the number of points he scored in that year. A couple of surprises to me were how few Allen Iverson references there were given that he is generally thought of as the player who brought hip-hop to the NBA and also how references to Scottie Pippen have accelerated in the bast few years despite his having retired years ago.

Thanks to Deadspin.com for finding this infographic.

A Sad Story of Loss and Love and Basketball

A year or so ago there was a story that popped up in the news that bewildered me. A former NBA player, Dan Roundfield, had drowned in the Caribbean where he had been on vacation with his wife and family. The news stories were all a little unclear about what exactly had happened but they all said that Roundfield had died saving his wife from drowning and they all portrayed the deceased as a remarkable man. My eyes perked up the other day when the New York Times returned to the story a year later. The story is sad, obviously, but like the best eulogies or obituaries it conveys the great joy of Dan Roundfield’s life as well.

What is a Good Football Book? The Blind Side

Dear Sports Fan,

I have a question for you from my coworker. He is making a last ditch attempt to get his wife interested in sports, especially pro football. She loves murder mysteries, so he asked for book recommendations that would merge the two. Do you have any recommendations? Preferably murder mysteries, but any engaging book will do!

Thanks,
Helen

— — —

Dear Helen,

Last ditch attempt, huh? I too am a lover of detective novels but when it comes to introducing someone to American Football through a mind-blowingly good read, there’s only one book I would recommend: Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side. I know you might be thinking “wasn’t that that chick flick from a couple years back starring the woman from Speed?” And you’d be right — yes, the material from the book was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. I’ve seen parts of it and I think it’s probably a good movie but it probably wouldn’t get your friend’s wife into football. The book? The book might just do it.

Michael Lewis is an economist and a writer and a sports fan and he uses all three to great success in The Blind Side. The book has two key chronological stories. One, the one that the movie focuses on, is the story of a young, poor black boy growing up near Memphis. Michael Oher, the kid, is taken in by a rich white family and grows physically and academically until he is a 6’4″, 300 pound potential star college and eventual high NFL draft pick playing the position of left tackle. This is a great story in and of itself, and Lewis does a great job telling it without flinching or sensationalizing any of its many dicey elements — from Oher’s extreme poverty, to his academic and social struggles, to the suspicion that the Tuohy family (who basically adopt Oher) have designs on his playing for their alma mater, Ole Miss.

The other side of the story is a remarkably accessible history of football’s tactical evolution from being dominated by teams that could run the ball the best to teams that pass the ball the best and the effect that this evolution had on the position of left tackle. The left tackle is one of the offensive line-men, and thirty years ago the left tackle was just one of the offensive linemen, the big guys whose job it is to either clear the defense away from where the running back wants to run or to protect the quarterback from defensive players). As football began to tilt towards emphasizing the pass and the left tackle starting increasing in importance until around the time Michael Oher was in high school, when the left tackle was usually one of the top three players in terms of salary and importance. Why the left instead of the right tackle? Well, because most quarterbacks are right handed, when they prepare to throw the ball, their body is perpendicular to where they want to throw it, with their right arm cocked back. In this position, they cannot see defenders attacking them from the left side of the field. The left tackle protects a quarterback’s blind side when he is passing the ball.

The brilliance of the book and the cleverness of its title comes also from a mostly hidden third narrative. This narrative asks a tough question about our society. If so many semi-miraculous things had to go right for Michael Oher’s talent to make him successful, how many other talented poor children are we missing out on? If rags to riches is so insanely difficult on the football field, where talent is so objectively measurable (again — 6’4″, 300 pounds, and unbelievably athletic) how difficult is it for our society to identify talent in more subjective fields? The quarterback’s blind side makes him vulnerable to defensive rushes. He needs a strong left tackle to protect him. Social stratification makes our culture vulnerable to missing out on some of its brightest talents. Where’s our country’s left tackle? On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America.

Let me know if this works,
Ezra Fischer

Did a Woman Strike Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?

Jackie-Mitchell-1 — Ruth and Gehrig look on as Jackie Mitchell warms up.

From Tony Horwitz in the Smithsonian Magazine comes the true story of a woman who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back to back in a baseball game in 1931. Back in those days it was more common for today to have professional teams that existed outside of the structure of the major leagues. The Harlem Globetrotters are the only example of this today that I can think of and though they have a rich competitive history, today they rarely play games against major league teams. The Chattanooga Lookouts (who still exist today as a minor league affiliate of the LA Dodgers) were an independent team with an entertaining history. Reports Horwitz, “The Lookouts’ new president, Joe Engel, was a showman and promoter whose many stunts included trading a player for a turkey, which was cooked and served to sportswriters.”

In 1931 Engel signed 17 year-old pitcher Jackie Mitchell to a contract days before playing the New York Yankees in two exhibition games. On April 2, Mitchell got her chance to pitch after the Lookout’s starting pitcher gave up hits to the first two batters he faced:

First up was Ruth, who tipped his hat at the girl on the mound “and assumed an easy batting stance,” a reporter wrote. Mitchell went into her motion, winding her left arm “as if she were turning a coffee grinder.” Then, with a side-armed delivery, she threw her trademark sinker (a pitch known then as “the drop”). Ruth let it pass for a ball. At Mitchell’s second offering, Ruth “swung and missed the ball by a foot.” He missed the next one, too, and asked the umpire to inspect the ball. Then, with the count 1-2, Ruth watched as Mitchell’s pitch caught the outside corner for a called strike three. Flinging his bat down in disgust, he retreated to the dugout.

Next to the plate was Gehrig, who would bat .341 in 1931 and tie Ruth for the league lead in homers. He swung at and missed three straight pitches. But Mitchell walked the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, and the Lookouts’ manager pulled her from the game, which the Yankees went on to win, 14-4.

Was it real? Horwitz tries hard not to take too strong of a position on either side but it seems to me that he favors it not being completely honest. He notes the game was originally scheduled for April 1 (for those wondering, April Fool’s day is apparently really old; like 1392 old!) and that Ruth’s reported rage seems, in the few remaining photos of the game, to be a little tongue-in-cheek. For her part, Mitchell always insisted that it was real. Of striking out the two hall-of-famers, she said:

“Why, hell, they were trying, damn right,” she said of Ruth and Gehrig not long before her death in 1987. “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they’ve been any different?

Hope you enjoy the article here and you can follow the Smithsonian magazine on twitter @SmithsonianMag. Thanks to Deadspin.com for leading me to the article on their post here.

Sports and the Star-Spangled Banner

Sporting events are among the few times and places where the national anthem of the United States, the “Star-Spangled Banner” is predictably performed. In fact, if you believe this ESPN article about the history of the national anthem at sporting events, the adoption of the “Star-Spangled Banner” as a baseball tradition preceded and perhaps contributed to it becoming the official national anthem in 1931. The anthem and sports have had their highs and lows together, both literally and figuratively. This supports Dear Sports Fan’s proposition that sports are so ingrained in our society that they are worth understanding and enjoying if possible.

Juxtaposing the anthem with a sporting event often leads to interesting customs, not all of them completely dignified. Almost every audience I’ve ever heard begins cheering before the song is over, as if to say, “let’s get this anthem business over and get to the real event!” The Chicago Blackhawks fans stand and cheer throughout the entire song. The Baltimore Orioles fans holler “O” along with the “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave”. And of course, there are plenty of anthem singers who mess up in almost every way imaginable.

Rueben Fischer-Baum of deadspin.com (no relation that I’m aware of) recently did a study that attempted to discover where the most treacherous parts of the song were for anthem singers at sporting events. Writes Fischer-Baum:

The danger zone seems to be a pair of lines in the middle: O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming? These lines are tough for a few reasons. First, as everyone learns in Intro Psych, it’s harder to remember stuff that’s in the middle of a sequence than it is to remember stuff at the beginning or end. Second, the structure of this whole section is poetically jumbled (easier to understand: “Whose broad stripes and bright stars / were so gallantly streaming / through the perilous fight / o’er the ramparts we watched?”)

It’s not really our style at Dear Sports Fan to post cringe-worthy videos of people messing up in public, but this one of Natalie Gilbert is a famous and heartwarming one because of how former basketball player and then coach of the 76ers, Mo Cheeks, comes to the rescue of the young singer.

As Fischer-Baum also mentions, the tune itself is notoriously difficult to sing. The Star-Spangled Banner is set to the tune of “a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith for the Anacreontic Society,” a “popular gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians.” How difficult is it? Difficult enough that a few years back it made the New York Times Magazine‘s now sadly defunct “Year in Ideas“. The idea was that lowering the official key of the tune to create a “singable national anthem” could have a positive effect on our entire culture as it pertains to singing.

”The Star Spangled Banner” has contributed to a nationwide decrease in singing, because Americans are routinely embarrassed by how badly they sound hollering it out. “This has caused a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in our culture,” [Ed Siegel] says. “People freak when asked to sing.”

Of course, changing the song’s key doesn’t fix its absurdly wide range, and the new lows will be too low for some. ”People can mumble those parts if necessary,” Siegel says. ”But everyone should be able to hit the high notes — that’s where it gets exciting.”

The anthem can be exciting indeed when it is sung by master musicians, and there is a tradition of popular singers taking the anthem before a sporting event and making it their own. The aforementioned ESPN article about the anthem reminds us that “Whitney Houston’s rendition before Super Bowl XXV in 1991 has been a top-20 single not once but twice: first in 1991 during the Gulf War and again in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.” Grantland had an entire feature article about Marvin Gaye’s famous anthem before the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Gaye took such a nontraditional approach to the anthem that as soon as the beat dropped, the Lakers’ public address man, Lawrence Tanter, thought, “Ah, shit, man, they’ve got the wrong tape. This is ‘Sexual Healing’.” NPR remembered the performance on its twentieth anniversary and credited Gaye for having opened up the pregame national anthem as a vehicle for musical statements instead of simply a straight-ahead, nationalistic, musical requirement.

Sometimes though, the straight ahead way is the best of all, like at the first Boston Bruins game after the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite all of its faults, it’s a pretty nice song.

How Well Does Anyone Know the Rules?

lou-pinella — Of course, if no one knows the rules, what are they arguing about?

From ESPN.com today we bring you a story that asks the question, “How well do we know baseball’s rules?”

One of the objections I hear most from my friends who are not sports fans is that the rules of sports seem to be completely arbitrary and incredibly fickle. Why so many whistles, they wonder? How can one not particularly violent act be a penalty while a figurative mugging goes unpunished? There are two sides to responding to this sentiment and we try to represent both of them on this site: the rules will seem less arbitrary the more you know about them; and of course they are arbitrary — let’s have some fun about it!

On the educational side, we’ve had posts explaining some basic concepts like What is a Down in Football, What is Being Offside in a number of sports, What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give, and How Do the Shooting Space and Checking Rules Work in Girls Lacrosse? We even addressed the issue directly when asked “Are Basketball Fouls Really Arbitrary? We’ve also had some fun with the issue. In the post about Girls Lacrosse we reminded you that:

even professional athletes are sometimes confused about the rules, like Donovan McNabb, a quarterback in the NFL who famously did not try very hard at the end of overtime because he thought that if the game was tied at the end of one overtime, they would just play another instead of the game ending in a tie… which it does.

This is exactly the conclusion the ESPN.com piece comes to: “We had 20 of the most astute players in the game take the quiz. Their average score: 5.5 out of 10.” The author Jayson Stark has some fun with the subject and collects a few gems about the rules of baseball:

Sam Fuld has to be one of the brightest human beings in baseball. He got better than 1400 on his SAT. He understands stuff like matrix methodology. But even he has a hard time understanding the rationale behind the rules of baseball. And can you blame him?

“Most of these rules are just illogical,” he said. “I tried to base my answers on logic and reason. … But baseball and logic don’t mix very well, in many respects.”

If you’d like to take the test yourself, here’s the link, post your results in the comments section!

Hockey Culture and Ken Dryden's 'After the Hit'

On May 8 we answered a question about the rules of lacrosse from Alana. In it the subject of how different sports deal with players who put themselves in dangerous situations came up. In women’s lacrosse there are rules against endangering oneself. In ice hockey, we noted, the rules and the ethos of the sport are the opposite. If you put yourself in a dangerous position in hockey you are likely to get hurt by a player acting within the rules and hockey culture will tell you that you have no one to blame but yourself.

On the same day Grantland.com published an article by Ken Dryden about the same topic. The first sentence of Dryden’s Wikipedia page describes him as “a Canadian politician, lawyer, businessman, author, and former NHL goaltender.” He was a Stanley cup winning goaltender for the Montreal Canadians in the 1970s and later wrote a book about his experiences called The Game which is widely thought of as one of the best books about hockey ever written. He’s definitely got the credentials to be well respected and closely listened to about hockey.

In the article, “After the Hit,” Dryden comments on a violent collision and the resulting injury and suspension from a recent game between the Ottawa Senators and the Montreal Canadians^[1] and he wonders if hockey’s ethic on responsibility as it pertains to endangering oneself has gone too far:

It’s this aftermath to the hit that I’ve found most remarkable. There is an ethic in sports that wasn’t always there. It goes, As a player, I can do what I want to do. I will do what I must do. I will face the consequences of my actions and of the rules. Other players will and must do the same. It is my responsibility to protect myself; it is no one else’s. It is their responsibility to protect themselves; it is not mine. If, out of this, things happen, they happen. I may feel sadness as a human being toward another human being, but sadness is not the point. I will feel no regret. I expect none from others. That’s hockey. That’s life.

There is another ethic in sports that has also always been there, and still is. It is worn as a badge of honor, particularly by the “tough guys.” It goes: I will not hit someone when he is down. I will not hit someone when he is defenseless. There is no courage in that. There is dishonor in the doing. The question in this case: What makes a Gryba hit clean and good on a defenseless Eller when a punch to the face of someone lying on the ice, equally defenseless, is not?

I encourage you to spend a few minutes with his article!

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

There are some graphically violent videos in the post so watch out — but you don’t need to click on them if you don’t want.↵