Understanding Sports Archives - Page 23 of 43

Sports are an escape

As a sports fan, I pretty frequently am asked why I spend so much time following sports. I find this question to be pretty difficult to answer. It’s such a complicated question for me, but like, “how’s it going?” I don’t think people who ask it are actually looking for a ten minute answer. One of the reasons is that the sports world provides a consistent source of humor and inspiration. On days like today when you awake to news of a dozen artists being killed by men with AK-47s, that facet of sports is a real comfort. Sports doesn’t help you escape the horrible things in the world but it does remind you that there’s a balance. Today I want to share a couple of elements of sports humor and inspiration that cheered me up. They’re not the funniest or the most inspirational things ever but they brought a smile to my face today. Hopefully with some explanation, they will to you too.

The New York Times Trolls the New York Knicks

You wouldn’t expect irreverence from the Grey Lady, but yesterday, the New York Times took a shot at New York’s primary professional basketball team, the New York Knicks, it this short piece. The background of this piece is that the Knicks have lost almost all their games so far this season — 32 losses out of 37 games — and that was before they traded two of their best five players earlier this week to the Cleveland Cavaliers. In return, the Knicks got… basically no one who will help them win this year. Trades like this are a common peculiarity of the NBA, which has a relatively hard salary cap and therefore teams are frequently willing to make trades to benefit their financial situation even if it hurts their basketball situation. After the trade, the New York Times had this to say:

We feel it’s only merciful to give our Knicks beat writer, Scott Cacciola, a break from such woeful basketball. He deserves to see the game played at a higher level. For the next month or so, we would like to point him to some good, quality basketball, wherever it might exist. Any suggestions? Maybe there’s another N.B.A. team that warrants his attention, or perhaps a high school or a college squad. For that matter, maybe you know of a strong coed team at your local Y that Scott should write about. Tell us where to send him.

Coach suggests a reasonable strategy. Hilarity ensues.

Last night, the Detroit Pistons played the San Antonio Spurs in just one of the 2,460 NBA regular season games. It was a totally ordinary game, interesting perhaps to Pistons and Spurs fans as well as NBA junkies but what happened at the very end of the game transformed it into must-see TV; into an event; a happening. The situation was this: with less than a second left, the Pistons went ahead by 1 point. The Spurs were able to take a time-out so that they could talk about what to do once they threw the ball into play from the sideline just over the halfway line into the Piston’s half of the court. The game clock was set to 0.1 seconds. Two rules dictate what can happen here: first, the clock does not start until a player on the court touches the pass that’s thrown in; second, a tenth of a second is officially not enough time to catch the ball and shoot it, so the only thing the Spurs could try to do was to tip the ball into the basket; more a volleyball move than a basketball one. The Pistons coach, a man named Stan van Gundy who famously bears a slight resemblance to an infamous 1980s era porn star (this is already getting funny, right?) quickly recognized the situation and began to instruct his team to simply create a human wall around the basket and keep the opposing team on the outside. The exact phrase he used to convey this idea, which was caught and broadcast live on television, was equal parts profane and hysterical in its simplicity.

Mike Prada broke the whole thing down with game analysis, diagrams, screenshots, memes, and close reading for SB Nation. Give it a look!

NHL stars try their hand at sledge hockey

Okay, so this one is tainted slightly by its commercial association with Gatorade, but you know what… if a brand wants to spend money to inspire people, I’m okay with that. In an idea that was surely ripped from Guinness’ moving commercial last year that showed a group of friends playing basketball in wheelchairs so they could compete on an even playing field with the one of their group who actually needed a wheelchair, Gatorade arranged for a handful of NHL players to play in a sledge hockey game. Sledge hockey is the ice hockey equivalent of playing in a wheelchair. Players play from a seated position on a sled with a single blade running down the middle. They have two short sticks which are used for propulsion around the rink as well as stick-handling, passing, and shooting. The best part of this video for me is seeing the sledge hockey players skate circles around the NHL players as they try to adjust to playing without their legs. Still, by the end of the game, it looks like the NHL stars had picked up some tricks.

Watch videos of game highlights, the day from the perspective of the sledge players, and the NHL players.

Why don't Giants fans like the Cowboys?

Dear Sports Fan,

I am still learning about American football. There are too many rules. 🙂 Anyway, last night watching the game of Cowboy and Lions with friends in NYC, I realized Giants fans don’t like the Cowboys. Why is that?

Happy New Year,
Eunee

Dear Eunee,

No fan of an National Football League (NFL) team particularly likes any of the other 31 teams in the league but you’re right that fans of the New York Giants like the Dallas Cowboys less than most. I know there’s a little bit of ambiguity in that statement. Let me clarify. Fans of the New York Giants like the Cowboys less than they like most other teams AND fans of the New York Giants like the Cowboys less than fans of other teams like the Cowboys. I meant both meanings because they are both true! There are a few reasons for this, one obvious to football fans but which requires some explanation to everyone else and a couple more subtle ones. The football reason which needs to be explained to be understood is that the Cowboys and Giants play in the same division.

The NFL is made up of 32 teams. These teams are split into two 16 team conferences. The conferences are based on history, not geography. The National Football Conference (NFC) is made up mostly of original NFL teams while the American Football Conference (AFC) is made up of mostly teams that were originally part of the American Football League (AFL), a professional league that competed with the NFL before the two leagues merged between 1966 and 1970. Within each conference, the teams are divided into four groups of four teams each called divisions. Conferences and divisions are importantly largely because they help define a team’s opponents each season and affect a team’s playoff chances. As we discussed at length a couple of weeks ago, playoff spots are reserved for the best team in each of the four divisions, regardless of how that team compares to other teams in the conference or league. Each year team’s play every other team in their division twice, six games against other teams in their conference, and only four against teams from the other conference. Not only do games against the other teams in their division mean more for determining whether a team makes the playoffs but because the teams play against each other twice a year, every year (that’s somewhere around five times more frequently than teams in the same conference but not the same division and eight times more frequently than teams in the other conference) divisional opponents tend to develop fierce rivalries. Fans pick up these rivalries and often carry them even more ferociously than the players or coaches involved.

The New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys are in the NFC East division along with the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins. Giants fans, of course, (sports) hate the Eagles and Redskins as well as the Cowboys (and if either of those teams had been in the playoffs, you would have heard complaints about them too), but maybe, Giants fans hate those teams just a smidge less. There are two reasons for this: the first is simply a question of geography. Philadelphia and Washington D.C. are at least mid-Atlantic cities. They’re not the same as New York, and from my understanding of New Yorkers, they don’t pose a threat to New York from a city-comparison perspective, but they are at least understandable. The Cowboys, on the other hand, are from way out in Texas somewhere and the identity of their team and fans, while not as outwardly offensive as the Washington Redskins, is totally foreign to New Yorkers. Dallas epitomizes everything that’s foreign and slightly embarrassing for football fans who grew up in New York. This is particularly true because somewhere in the 1970s, the Cowboys became one of the most overall popular teams in the NFL. This led to their being nicknamed “America’s Team” in 1978 by NFL films itself. This legacy has lived on and, despite only having won a single playoff game before this past weekend since 1996, the Cowboys have remained central to the NFL. They are the premiere team, the most talked about team, the most widely loved team, even when someone else wins the Super Bowl. That plays into them engendering more hatred than any other team as well.

Whether you decide to be a Cowboys fan or hater, I hope you enjoy the playoffs,
Ezra Fischer

How do substitutions work in soccer?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do substitutions work in soccer? I have been watching a bunch of English Premier League soccer on TV and it seems like teams often make a bunch of substitutions right at the end of the game. I don’t know why they would do that — the game is basically over.

Thanks,
Della

Dear Della,

Great question! A substitution is when a player on the field is replaced by a player who has been sitting on the bench. Substitutions are a big part of the tactics of most of the sports we’re used to watching on TV. Football teams substitute players on almost every play. In basketball, there’s an official award given each year to the best substitute called the Sixth Man of the Year Award. Baseball substitutions are notoriously tactic-y, especially in the National League where teams substitute hitters in order to avoid having their pitcher at bat. Substitutions in soccer are less obvious tactically because of soccer’s fluidity of play and the restrictive nature of the rules that pertain to substitutions but they are important nonetheless. We’ll take a quick run through how substitutions work, why and how teams use them, as well as looking backwards and forwards through time to the history and potential future of substitutions in soccer.

How do Substitutions Work in Soccer?

A soccer team can choose to substitute a new player for one who has been playing at any point during a game. When the coach decides to make a substitution, he or she tells an official who hangs out near the team benches, and that official signals the referee. At the next dead ball (a stop in play that occurs when the ball goes out-of-bounds for a throw-in or goal-kick but not for a corner kick or a foul) the ref stops the game and allows the substitution to be made. There are two somewhat picky rules about this process. The substitute is supposed to wait at the side of the field at exactly the half-way line until the player who is being substituted for leaves the field completely. Refs are allowed to discipline (by giving yellow or red cards) players who violate these rules…

[begin detour] I never understood these rules when I played soccer — I thought they were an arbitrary way for the referee to establish superiority over the players. In researching this post though, I came across a funny thing in the Wikipedia article on substitutions in soccer:

The referee has no specific power to force a player to be substituted, even if the team manager or captain has ordered their player to be substituted. If a player refuses to be substituted play may simply resume with that player on the field.

So, that’s curious — if the ref can’t force a player to be substituted, then it makes sense to make the steps of substitution so formal and obvious. That way the ref can at least quickly identify when a player refuses to be substituted. In any event, this basically never happens, I just thought it was interesting. [end detour]

Two more rules make substitutions more interesting in soccer. First, a player who has been substituted cannot, once she or he has left the field, return to play. Not in the next half, not in overtime, not for a shootout. This is different from football and basketball but the same as baseball. Second, substitutions are very limited in number. At top competitive levels like the World Cup, British Premier League, Bundisliga, La Liga, even MLS, teams are only allowed three substitutions per game. There are no exceptions to this rule. If a team has used all three of their subs and a player on their team gets injured badly enough to have to leave the game, too bad, the team plays down one player. If a team has used all their subs and their goalie gets kicked out of the game, too bad, they cannot put a new goalie in although they can designate one of the regular players as a goalie and give her gloves and a different colored shirt.

Why and how do soccer teams use substitutions?

There are three main tactical reasons for a soccer team to make a substitution: removing an under-performing or injured player, shifting the team to be more offensive or defensive, or wasting time. Let’s start with the third, since that was the tactic you identified in your question. Substitutions take time to perform. The player being substituted for has to run (or walk, or saunter, or limp,) from wherever they are on the field to where the substitute is waiting to come on. A team that is winning that has substitutes left to use near the end of the game may choose to substitute mostly just to waste the time it takes to execute the substitution. When this is the intent of the substitution, you’ll see the player coming off the field move as slowly as he or she can without attracting the ire of the ref. He may wave at the crowd or clap in appreciation. She might slow down to hug a teammate or give some likely unnecessary instructions. This is a little cynical and it shouldn’t actually work since the ref keeps the official time and can simply pause his or her watch to counter-act the hijinks, but it’s still commonly attempted. The second tactic is making a substitution to shift the stance of the team to be more aggressive or more defensive. Based on the situation, a team might choose to play it safe by replacing an attacking player with a defensive one or gamble by taking a defender off the field and putting on an attacking striker. Other substitutions are made to replace a player who isn’t playing up to snuff based on an injury or just general malaise. Because substitutions are so limited, being forced to make one for injury or bad play is perceived as a bad thing for that team.

What is the history and future of substitutions?

Another thing I was surprised to learn from the Wikipedia article about substitutions is how recent of an innovation it is in soccer. Soccer has been around in one form or another for hundreds of years in Europe and possibly elsewhere before it was formalized in the mid 1800s in England. For close to a hundred years after the soccer rules were written up in 1863, substitutes were simply people who played in a game when some players on a team didn’t show up — you know, like they got stuck in a bad carriage-jam on the interstate. It wasn’t until the 1950s that substitutes were allowed during a game. Before then, an injured player was expected to either play on or put their team at a numerical disadvantage. The number of subs slowly increased until in 1995 when the rules were changed to allow for the current three.

We’re likely to see another change coming soon to modify the game to handle head-injuries better. One problem with limited the number of substitutes is that it gives an even greater incentive to players and teams to play through injuries, even potentially dangerous ones. As we learn more about concussions, we know that they are important to test for as soon as possible and that a player who suffers a second blow to the head after a concussion is in much greater danger than she was after the first injury. The problem with the current rules is that players don’t want to leave the field to be tested, much less to be substituted. We saw this a few times during the last World Cup when there were a couple of high-profile incidents with clearly dazed players playing for some time before eventually being removed. No one knows exactly how soccer will evolve, but something has to be done, and it will probably modify the way substitutions work.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

How does kneeling work in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does kneeling work in football? This is one part of the game that I just don’t understand. Even in a close game, it seems like both teams decide that the game is over while there is still time on the clock. Why is that? And when does it happen?

Thanks,
Jack

Dear Jack,

Football is the ultimate effort sport. It’s a cliche that football players and coaches talk about “going 110%” and “leaving it all out on the field.” To which most people reply, “you can’t go harder than 100%, that’s nonsensical” and as for “leaving it all out on the field, we hope that doesn’t include your pants, underwear, or long-term health.” Nonetheless, it does seem like football players and coaches constantly give their full effort to winning the game. That makes it all the more disconcerting for viewers when the game ends with one or a series of plays where neither team seems to be trying at all. These plays are called kneel downs or quarterback kneels. The quarterback kneel is sort of like what happens in a chess game when one player sees that their opponent will be able to checkmate them in a few moves, no matter what they do. It’s a concession, but in this case the initiative is taken by the winning side instead of the losing side. When a team kneels, they’re saying that they are willing to sacrifice their attempt to advance the ball in order to safely run time off the clock. Here’s how it works.

Football is a game with a clock. In each quarter of the game, the clock starts at fifteen minutes (for this post, we’re assuming that you’re watching the NFL, but things are almost the same in college football) in each quarter and counts down to zero. When the clock hits zero in the fourth quarter, the game is over and whichever team has more points, wins. It’s also a game of alternating possessions. One team has the ball and keeps it as long as they can move the ball ten yards in four plays (if this concept is still blurry for you, read our post on down and distance). Although most plays last for only a few seconds to a dozen, the clock may count down between plays. Whether or not the clock runs is based on the outcome of the previous play. The rules that dictate this are somewhat Byzantine but to understand the kneel down, you only need to know that if a player who has the ball is tackled within the field, the clock runs between plays. When a player (usually the quarterback) kneels with the ball, they are performing a ritual equivalent of being tackled with the ball — instead of actually being tackled, according to NFL rules, they are allowed to simulate being tackled by voluntarily kneeling. When a quarterback kneels with the ball, that play is over and the ball is set up for the next play. Teams are allowed up to forty seconds between plays. So, a team that kneels the ball can expect that action to allow around 42 seconds to run off the clock. The reason why it’s 42 and not 40 is that the play itself might take around three seconds and a team will snap the ball with about one second left on the forty-second play clock.

Like so much of football, the simple concept of kneeling is complicated by a few technicalities. If you enjoy technicalities, you’ll love football! There’s a reason why so many NFL referees are lawyers! The first technicality is that the clock always stops on a change of possession. A change of possession, when the team that starts with the ball on one play does not start with the ball on the next is normally the result of an interception, a fumble, or a punt but it can also be the result of a fourth down play that isn’t a punt but doesn’t result in a first down. In other words, if a team kneels on fourth down, the game clock will immediately stop at the end of the play; it will not run once the play is done. That effectively limits kneeling to be a first, second, or third down tactic. The other technicality is that each team gets three timeouts per half. These timeouts can be used between any two plays and they result, not only in a commercial break, but also in the game clock stopping between plays. A time out can counteract the effect of kneeling. The last technicality is the two-minute warning. This is an arbitrary timeout that’s called (but not charged to either team) after the last play that starts before the game clock has hit 2:00 remaining in the second and fourth quarters. The two-minute warning would also stop the clock between plays, so kneeling before it is rare.

So, how do you know when a team is going to use the kneeling strategy? Usually, a team will only kneel if, by kneeling on successive plays, they can run the clock all the way to zero and therefore conclusively win the game. The exact time in a game when they can do this is modified by the number of timeouts the team without the ball has and the down for the team that has the ball and is leading the game. It’s a sliding scale best expressed as a table:

Remember, a team can waste 42 seconds per kneel down but that is made up of three seconds to execute the kneel and another 39 that runs off between plays if the clock does not stop. Here’s a few examples of how I got to the numbers in the cells:

1st down, one timeout remaining: 1st down — kneel for three seconds, defense takes a timeout; 2nd down — kneel for three seconds (6 total), defense has no timeouts remaining, so the clock runs an additional 39 seconds (45 total); 3rd down — kneel for three seconds (48 total), defense has no time remaining, so the clock runs an additional 39 seconds (87 or 1:27 total).
2nd down, no timeouts remaining: 2nd down, kneel for three seconds, clock runs an additional 39 (42 total); third down — kneel for three seconds, clock runs an additional 39 (84 or 1:24 total).

You can see from this chart how the two-minute warning affects this strategy by effectively giving the trailing team another timeout. If it weren’t for that official timeout at 2:00, the top left cell would read 2:06 and teams would be able to safely start kneeling six seconds earlier than they do now.

The tactic of kneeling in football is a bit of a strange cultural fit. It’s odd to see teams that have tried so hard and so violently to beat each other, go through the motions of the final plays in the game. Allowing the offense to mimic being tackled in order to run the clock down isn’t a fair representation of a normal football play because it takes away the ability of the defense to create a fumble or interception and get the ball back immediately for their team. Nonetheless, it’s the way things are done today by rule and by custom. At least now I hope you understand what it is and how it works.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is sportsmanship? When is it appropriate?

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

Sportsmanship Captured at NCAA Cross Country Championships

by Alison Wade for Runner’s World

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

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

Is Competitiveness Poor Sportsmanship?

by Sarah Barker for Deadspin

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

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

Volvo Ocean Race: Sportsmanship on the High Seas

by Aaron Kuriloff for the Wall Street Journal

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

2015 in the United States of Sports

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

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

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

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

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Thanks for the support,
Ezra Fischer

Should we talk about social issues on a sports site? My thoughts on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, police violence, and grand juries

I was on the sports-only social networking site Fancred a few days ago and I saw a post showing a photograph of Anthony Ujah, a Nigerian striker playing on a German soccer team. Ujah had just scored a goal and, in celebration, had raised his jersey to reveal a white undershirt with a handwritten message, “Eric Garner #can’tbreathe #justice”. I quickly upvoted (Fancred’s version of Facebook’s like) and then looked down at the comment thread below the post. Another Fancredder had posted a brief complaint. “Should stay out of sports”, he wrote. The original person who posted the photo challenged him by asking, “Then where can we discuss racism and injustice?” The answer from the commenter was, “Not on FANCRED and not on the field.. Do it after the game there are other ways to deal with this.”

This conversation got me pretty worked up. This view of sports as a refuge from social issues is a common one but not one that I believe holds any historic accuracy or moral righteousness. Sports has often been a forum for social or political expression. Just in my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the rise and mainstream reaction against the “hip-hop” athlete as personified by basketball player Allen Iverson. I’ve seen Jason Collins’ coming out as the first active male athlete in one of the “big four sports”. I’ve seen issues as wide-ranging as dog-fighting, gender equality, gender testing, using the N-word, and xenophobia played out in the context of sports.

Sports in America, even with a Black president, are home to the most visible African-Americans in our society. Insofar as the issues underneath the Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice cases are racial, it makes sense that they are discussed in the context of sports. In the last few week, athletes in football, basketball, and as we saw above, even soccer, have been making that point for us by reminding us of these issues before and during games. Four St. Louis Rams players came out on the field before a game with their hands held in the air, a symbol of protest in the Michael Brown Case. Basketball players, starting with Chicago’s Derek Rose, moving to LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, and several other Cavaliers and Nets, and continuing with the entire rosters of the Los Angeles Lakers and Georgetown Hoyas have worn “I can’t breathe” T-shirts during warm ups. Even lesser known players got in on the action, like Ariyana Smith of Knox College who was initially suspended for her protest preceding a game in Clayton, Missouri, where the Michael Brown grand jury was, and Johnson Bademosi of the Cleveland Browns, who wore a handmade shirt with the same message during a game and wrote about why in The MMQB later.

There have certainly been times when sports has been a refuge for some people, including African-Americans, from the worst forms of discrimination in society, but the argument that sports should be a refuge from the discussion of social issues is simply wrong. Sports has not ever been, nor should be a refuge from actively participating in social issues.

As I thought about this and made that case in my mind, I realized that I was not exactly living up to my own ideals. I have a platform (small though it may be) in Dear Sports Fan that I write in every day and which every day is seen by hundreds of people but I had not used it to express my own opinions about Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, the police that killed them, and the local legal response to their deaths. So, whether it’s my responsibility, my choice, or my privilege to use Dear Sports Fan as a platform for my thoughts on the issues of police violence and the legal system’s response to it, I am going to go for it.

Here’s what I think:

• I’ve been wondering why Eric Garner’s case has captured my passion more than Michael Brown’s or the many other incidents of police brutality. There are several reasons. First, Garner was killed in New York, where I live, so his death has more immediacy for me. Second, the results of the grand jury proceedings about his death were just that, second — they came out right after the Ferguson grand jury had primed us to react in a particular way. Third, while it’s possible for me to imagine (rightly or wrongly) Michael Brown’s killing as the result of misguided panic, the killing of Eric Garner is much harder to rationalize. Oh sure, the police who attacked him were never intending to kill him, but the use of a prohibited choke hold which there have been over 1,000 complaints to the police about in the last 5 years, is not the result of a momentary and unfortunate lapse. No, the choke hold that killed Eric Garner is a symptom of systemic abuse on the part of a police force that suggests a cynical negligence for the wellbeing of the public. The last reason why Eric Garner’s death was so striking is one that we sports fans should be familiar with: video. There was video of Eric Garner being killed but none of Michael Brown. Video is so powerful. It’s a key reason why the sports world was stirred up so much more by Ray Rice’s domestic abuse crime than by previous incidents. For that matter, it’s most of why you’ll find many more sports fans who think Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player ever than who argue it was Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain, whose 100 point game is captured only in a photograph, not on video.

• I’m afraid we have too many of the wrong people in our police force. Police should be people so passionately opposed to violence that they are willing to devote their lives to preventing violence and catching people who perpetrate violence on others. Police should not be people with violent tendencies who seek to have their nature legitimized. While I am sure that there are many police of the first sort, it doesn’t seem like we have sufficient skill at avoiding the second type of police recruit or of weeding them out of active duty before they are able to be violent from the privileged position their badge grants them. This issue is not dissimilar to the one we face in politics where it seems as though anyone honest and upstanding enough to be a good congressperson or governor is so turned off by the rampant corruption and selfishness in politics that they never enter the political arena. Like in politics, fixing this problem in the police force is going to be a slow, probably even a generational process but it needs to start now.

• Seeking justice from federal authorities in cases of police violence is not good enough. I find it incredibly depressing that this is what leaders of the movement for justice from Al Sharpton to Letitia James were calling for immediately after the Eric Garner grand jury result came out. I understand the dynamic between local prosecutors and police involves close cooperation and mutual support but that is not an excuse for gross misbehavior. I’m unwilling to simply take the past, current, and future refusal of local prosecutors to indict police accused of violent crimes as a given. I’m a fan of movies and television shows about crime on the organized spectrum like The Godfather movies, The Sopranos, and The Wire. One of the redeeming qualities of the cultures that those shows represent is that even in the murky moral world of the Mafia or of drug dealers in Baltimore, there is a shared moral code with boundaries. There are lines beyond which even people who will go to jail for decades without identifying their friends or kill someone on command without questioning why will not protect you if you cross. Why is that not true for police and local prosecutors?

If St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch was as sympathetic towards the policeman, Darren Wilson, as his twisting of the grand jury process suggests, then I think he should have started a fund for Wilson’s family. He could easily have seeded it with $5,000 or $10,000 of his $160,000 in base annual salary or if he really wanted to make a statement, he could have promised to give a whole year’s salary to the policeman’s family. I would have no problem with him using the celebrity the case has given him to express his support of the police or of Wilson in particular. But he had to do his job. He had to apply the same standards to Wilson as any other person accused of a violent crime. McCulloch didn’t do that just the same way that the public prosecutor in the Eric Garner case, Dan Donovan, didn’t do his job. Seeking justice from federal authorities may work in individual cases like these but relying on them as a permanent solution is an admission that local systems are immoral and irrevocably broken.

• Why don’t we have stats on police violence? Last week, when the Eric Garner non-indictment became public and the streets filled with protesters, I was stuck in my apartment with a fever. It was frustrating because this was the first time in my life I had ever felt clearly and unambiguously about an issue to want to join in a public protest. Stuck at home as I was, I spent a lot of time reading on the internet about the case and I came across something which is unbelievable to me, particularly as a sports fan who has witnessed the statistical revolution in sports over the past twenty years: there are no reliable national statistics about people killed in interactions with law enforcement. This is something which a man named D. Brian Burghart is trying to fix. He’s been working for the past two years on creating a database of people killed in interactions with law enforcement and he wrote about his experience in this article for Gawker. His conclusion, which he admits he cannot prove, is that “The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.” If you’re inspired to donate, as I was, you can do that here.

I know there are far more knowledgable people, far more passionate people, and far better writers than me expressing themselves about these issues but there’s also power in all of us doing our part to make this issue stick around for longer than the normal two-week news cycle. I hope that we all find ways to keep this issue alive until we can transform our society into a more completely fair one. I know that’s a big, long project but it’s an important one as well.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Why do soccer fans whistle?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why is it that when you watch a soccer game on TV, especially an international one, you always hear the crowd whistling? Why do soccer fans whistle? What does it mean?

Wondering,
Whitney

Dear Whitney,

When international soccer fans whistle, they are expressing displeasure with what they see on the soccer field. It’s very similar to how fans in the United States boo in sports stadiums, with only minor differences. I don’t really know why we use booing while most of the world whistles to express themselves in this way. As far as I can tell, there internet doesn’t know either.

You’ll hear wide-spread whistling from soccer fans for three main reasons:

The crowd disagrees with a foul the ref has called or not called
The crowd is holding a grudge against a particular player for some reason and he or she has the ball
The crowd feels a team is playing cynically through “simulating fouls” by diving or time wasting or playing too passively by passing the ball backwards excessively

It’s the last scenario that is a little different from how American fans using booing as a weapon. I would say booing is a little more aggressive and whistling a little more derisive. The only direct parallel to a crowd that whistles at their own team for playing too passively is a crowd that boos an American football team for running when they think they should throw or for conceding the end of a half when they think the team should try to score.

The roots of whistling to express these feelings are, as I mentioned before, pretty obscure. The Wikipedia page about whistling gives plenty of speculative meat to chew on even if it doesn’t make any of its own conclusions. In its section on superstition, Wikipedia states that whistling “is thought to attract bad luck, bad things, or evil spirits” in many cultures. Examples given are in the UK, where whistling is thought to “foretell death or a great calamity” and in Russia and its surroundings where whistling indoors is “believed to bring poverty”. I imagine that the flip side of repressing your whistling instincts to avoid bad things happening to you would be wanting to whistle aggressively in situations (like sporting events) where you fervently (if somewhat light-heartedly, I hope) wish bad things would happen to others.

As for why international soccer fans whistle to express negativity while American fans boo, I do have a wild guess. In American arenas, even during the most exciting games, the prevailing noise is applause, rhythmic but non-melodic chants, or scattered, disorganized shouting. In international soccer arenas, the prevailing soundtrack of the games is the organized singing of fans supporting their teams. If you’re trying to cut through the normal background noise to express your displeasure, a long, drawn out “boooooooooo” on one tone might work against the noise of an American sporting event but it definitely won’t against the singing of an international soccer game. A high-pitched whistle on the other hand is shrill and loud enough to break through even the most fervent supporters song.

Hope this answers your question,
Ezra Fischer

Sidney Crosby and the talent penalty

Sidney Crosby is the greatest hockey player on earth today. He’s also the most hated. Wherever he plays ice hockey, unless it’s in his home town of Cole Harbor, Canada, or his professional home of Pittsburgh, PA, he is subjected to boos and curses. Last night, I went to a Rangers vs. Penguins game in New York, and despite what I would characterize as a very friendly atmosphere in the stands, I heard him described as a bitch, a pussy, and worse. Hockey fans hate Sidney Crosby. That’s a strange phenomenon in an era when sports stars, due to a combination of television exposure and a natural instinct among sports fans to admire and respect the very best in the world, are generally more liked than hated. It takes a massive public misstep like LeBron’s fateful “decision” blunder to turn the casual fan against a star. So why is it that Crosby is so reviled?

People hate Sidney Crosby because he doesn’t fit into the hockey fan’s image of how a supremely talented player should play. The greatest players in hockey history have mostly had a detachment from the physical extremes of the sport. Wayne Gretsky was 5’11 and 175 pounds. He used deceptive quickness, a preternatural ability to know what was coming before it came, and the intimidative power of some of the games toughest enforcers on his team to stay largely untouched during his record breaking career. Mario Lemieux had the size (6’4″, 230 lbs) to inflict a physical toll on anyone who tried to prevent him from scoring, but because of his chronic bad back and his elegant style, he didn’t get into too many scrappy situations. Power forwards like Bobby Hull and his son Brett or Alexander Ovechkin certainly throw their weight around the rink but their remembered more for their rocket shots than anything else and they specialize in scoring from distance.

Crosby is different. He is a pest, he’s a scrapper, he thrives in the dirty melees in front of the net. If you use Sporting Charts’ awesome NHL shot chart tool to visualize Crosby’s goals compared to one of his closest peers and biggest rivals, Alexander Ovechin, you will see the difference. Crosby scores many of his goals from only a few feet from the net. Even his most spectacular goals usually involve him hurtling into traffic to split defenders or fantastic shots he makes while being knocked over. There’s not a lot of elegance to the way he scores, he just gets it done. Even his equipment bears witness to his utilitarian desire for goal scoring — he uses one of the flattest sticks in hockey so that his backhand can be almost as good as his forehand.

Crosby is a physical player. He’s got a low center of gravity and he’s incredibly strong but unlike Ovechkin or Eric Lindron, that doesn’t translate into highlight producing body checks. Instead, Crosby uses his strength defensively, to withstand the fierce body checks that his opponents throw at him to try to tire him out, wear him down, or intimidate him. Indeed, he often bounces off the player who’s trying to hit him, leaving them in a worse position than when they started. When Crosby does use his strength aggressively, it usually comes out in a slash of the stick at an opponents unprotected wrist, a dangerous slew-foot, or a seemingly casual elbow that just happened to connect with an opponents jaw. Crosby also has a reputation for the darker arts of hockey: diving and for complaining to refs.

Crosby probably doesn’t sound like a very nice guy from this description, at least on the ice. That’s true, he’s probably not, but the curious thing is that fans normally love players like that. Every fan base has their favorite pest. The pest’s job is to play on the third line of forwards and go up against the best players on the opposing team, play solid defense, and annoy the shit out of them. The goal is to be so annoying, that the opponents best player is knocked off their game. If your team’s pest can convince their opposition that winning tonight is not worth the effort, bruises, and cuts or switch the opponent’s focus from winning to beating them up, your team has a significant advantage. Often these pests are also surprisingly effective as offensive players. They fight their way in front of the net and tip shots in or bang rebounds into the back of the net. Just off the top of my head, I can list some examples of players of this type who were absolutely loved: Dino Ciccarelli, Tony Amonte, Jarkko Ruutu, Johan Franzen, Mats Zuccarello, Sean Avery, Brad Marchand, and Max Talbot.

That is exactly how Crosby plays, except Crosby also happens to be the most talented player in the world. If he weren’t, he’d probably be happy to be a pest, toiling on the third line, killing penalties, making his living annoying his opponents with trash talk and a never-ending flurry of slashes, cross-checks, and face washes. And trust me, he would be embraced and loved by his teammates and fans. Fans of opposing teams wouldn’t like him, but they would respect him and if he ever ended up on their team, they’d embrace him as “their pest.”

Sidney Crosby plays hockey the way the players we love to love play hockey but because he’s so talented, we love to hate him. In Chuck Klosterman’s mastercollection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, he has an essay exploring a similar phenomenon in the career of the supremely talented but mostly unloved basketball player, Ralph Sampson. Sampson was a 7’4″ center who enjoyed playing the more highly technical, less physical game on the perimeter of basketball games. “Why” fans asked themselves, “does Sampson play so delicately? If I were 7’4″, I would dunk on everyone.” It’s the same thing with Sidney Crosby. Fans believe that if they had the advantage of talent the way that Crosby has, they would play more honorably. And yet, they, we honor the less talented players who play the vital pest role on team’s third lines. Why do we penalize Crosby in our judgement for the talent he possesses?

The greatest hockey player in the world is a pest stuck in the body of a superstar. Why is that so bad?

Five rules for being a fan of the away team

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m a Boston Celtics fan living in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve got tickets to see my team play later this week and I’m super excited about it. But then I started thinking about going to the game and I realized that I don’t really know how to act or what to wear. Can you help?

Thanks,
Kirk

Dear Kirk,

You are a sports fan. You spend dozens of hours watching your team on television. You read about your team obsessively, you follow players on twitter, you know the names of your team’s beat writers, and you have more than three bits of team paraphernalia in your closet or on your walls. You don’t live in your team’s city anymore (or maybe you never have) but you haven’t let that stop you from rooting for them. Finally, your team comes to town and you splurge for some tickets. You’re excited to see your team play in person. It’s the day of the game and suddenly, you starting thinking… oh man, what am I going to wear? How should I act? Is everything going to be cool? I’m rooting for the away team tonight. How should I act?

It’s an age old conundrum: how should you act as a fan for the away team?

I’m going to a hockey game as a fan of the away team tonight, so this is something I’ve been thinking about today. At first I thought I would write this piece with a certain amount of uncertainty. “I’m not sure what I think,” I thought I should write, “but here are the variables in play.” Actually though, the more I think about it, the more I feel certain that I do know how one should act as an away team. When you are a fan of an away team, you are basically a guest in someone’s house. You should act accordingly. Here are five rules for being a fan of the away team:

By all means, wear your team colors, but do it with restraint. A hat or scarf is great. A jersey is fine. A full team warmup suit accompanied with team pom-poms and face paint? That’s a little too much. Save that for when you are going to a home game.
The same holds for your behavior. Don’t get belligerently drunk and scream. That type of behavior is permissible (some might say ideal) when you are rooting for the home team, but as an away team fan, you should be more demure. Applaud your team. Cheer when they score. But you know what? Stand and applaud when the other team scores too. You’re watching with thousands of people for whom that is a good thing. If you want them to welcome you, show that you appreciate their hospitality.
Don’t try to affect the game. Home teams deserve to have the advantage of being supported by their fans. In most sports, this advantage simply consists of the emotional boost players get from hearing the support of their fans. In a few sports though, fans have more direct ways to try to affect the game — by making it impossible for offenses to communicate in football or by distracting a free throw shooter in basketball. It’s not your right to do this as an away fan. You’re already limiting the impact of home court by taking a loyal supporters’ seat and you don’t have to apologize for that but you don’t get to try to impact the game as if you were at home.
Being an away fan does not make you a legitimate target. Good natured ribbing is fine and can be enjoyable, but you should not put up with intimidation or abuse. If you do find yourself the target of anything from a crude or mean-spirited home fan, be firm but do not escalate. Either ignore them or remind them that you’re simply a visitor who want to watch the game and support her or his team. Ask them how they would like to be treated if they traveled to an away game with their team. If things get bad, don’t be afraid to move away from them or appeal to a stadium worker for support. There are almost always other seats that you can move to.
Be knowledgeable. This goes back to acting like a good guest. It wouldn’t be nice to show up at someone’s house for dinner and not know their children’s names, what they do for work, or why they walk with a limp. That’s what you’re doing if you show up as an away fan and you don’t know the home team’s record, players, coach, history, and traditions. You don’t need to go overboard and memorize everything, but take a quick glance at the standings, a team depth chart or roster, and the team’s wikipedia page before you go. It gives you something to talk about with the people who will be sitting around you.

Sports allegiances always come down to coincidences: where you were born, who your parents were and who they rooted for, or what teams were winning championships when you were around nine years old. The relationships you create with people, even if they are only for a few hours while you watch a sports game, are more important than your devotion to a team. Being a fan of an away team can be a tricky balancing act, but it is worth it. Have fun!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer