Understanding Sports Archives - Page 30 of 43

What is a national sport?

This question was transcribed from Stack Exchange’s sports site, sports.stackexchange.com. Stack Exchange is one of the premier question and answer sites. I’ve re-written the question a little and anonymized the name of the person who asked the question. The original question is here.

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a national sport? What criteria must a sport meet to be said to be the national sport of a country? For example, I think soccer is the national sport of Italy but I’m not sure. Is there a list of official national sports?

Thanks,
Sandy from Stack Exchange

— — —

Dear Sandy,

Your question is an interesting one. What makes something a national sport? There are two answers, one straightforward and one complex and hypothetical at best. Which answer you care about depends on how much you care about obscure laws.

“Laws?” you say. That’s right, laws! There are a small number of countries in the world and states within the United States that actually have official sports. Just like the national flower of Sri Lanka is the blue water lily, the national sport is volleyball. Canada has two national sports, lacrosse for the summer and ice hockey for the winter. As for states, the state bird of New Hampshire, the Purple Finch, is joined by its state sport of skiing. North Carolina made the sport of stock car racing officially its state sport in 2011. Perhaps North Carolina has a thing for droning, buzzing sounds because its state insect is the honeybee! These are just a few examples of sports that have become officially, in law, representative of a nation or state.

It’s a funny concept though, a national sport. One of the lovely things about sports is how they so frequently are able to cross boundaries of culture, ethnicity, race, and nation. The Olympics, the World Cup, even the Little League World Series, which might seem like the most American thing around, has been international since the 1950s. How can a country claim a sport that’s loved world-wide? Indeed, that seems to have been on some countries’ minds when they selected a national sport. Take Brazil, which, if you watched the World Cup this past summer, you know is one of the most soccer crazed countries in the world. Why is Brazil’s national sport capoeira not soccer? Or the Philippines, a country who loves basketball more than anyone, but whose national sport is Arnis, a weapons based martial art? I honestly don’t know, but my guess is that soccer and basketball seemed too international and therefore not suitable to become the national sport.

That leads us back to your initial question. What criteria must a sport meet to be said to be the national sport of a country? Reasoning from the sports chosen as official national sports, I would say these criteria are important:

The sport should have been invented in the country. Example: lacrosse in Canada.
The sport should be extremely popular. Example: kabaddi in Bangladesh.
If it’s not popular, the sport should be “important” in some cultural way and therefore worthy of conservation, reenactment, and reverence. Example: Charreada in Mexico.
When possible, the sport should convey something meaningful about the country, ideally in a kick-ass way. Example: Varzesh-e Bastani in Iran.

These same factors are important when talking about unofficial national sports too, but here I think that popularity takes precedence. There’s no need for unofficial national sports to be unique to each country. One could easily say that soccer is the unofficial national sport of Brazil and Italy and the Netherlands and many other countries. Cricket would be another popular choice as an unofficial national sport in former British colonies in Asia or the Caribbean. Then there are some countries which, for reasons of nature or nurture, seem to produce an inordinate number of skilled athletes in particular sports. These too could be said to be unofficial national sports, like marathoning in Kenya, sprinting in Jamaica, or Cross Country Skiing in Norway.

National sports may shift over time, especially if they are left unofficial, as most are. Forty years ago, baseball would have been the most likely unofficial national sport for the United States. Some sports fans still reflexively call it the “national pastime.” Today, that sport is football. Things change. As we covered a few weeks ago, the unofficial national sport of Poland has been soccer but American football is rapidly gaining steam there. Who know, in time any sport could gain in popularity pretty much anywhere, or maybe even a brand new sport could take over!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why do people like fencing?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like fencing? I went to my cousin’s fencing tournament and I couldn’t follow it at all. It looked like people just jumping at each other and arbitrarily scoring. What am I missing?

Thanks,
Frances

— — —

Dear Frances,

Good for you for supporting your cousin, even if it was hard to tell what was going on and to enjoy the fencing tournament. You’re absolutely right that fencing can be bewildering to watch if you don’t know what’s going on or are far away. That said, there are lots of good answers to your question of “why do people like fencing?” Here are just a few:

Fencing is the Paleo of sports — what is more “natural” than fencing? I suppose boxing or any of the track and field events are on the same level with fencing, but it doesn’t get much more instinctive than grabbing a long object and trying to hit the other gal before she hits you. There’s an appeal to sports like fencing that abstract a real-world (and in the case of fencing, absolutely vital) activity and puts it into a sports context. If you care to learn more than you ever thought you’d know about the history of fencing while seriously enjoying yourself, Richard Cohen’s By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions is your best bet.
So many awesome cultural parallels — If there was ever a sport to capture the imagination of children and adults alike, it would be fencing. In our days of seemingly constant, low-grade but disturbing armed conflict, there’s something romantic about the days when combat was done face to face between people armed with swords. Not that war was ever actually romantic in any way but it certainly seems that way from the way it shows up in our culture. From the lightly satiric The Princess Bride to the many versions of Robin Hood (I grew up with Errol Flynn’s version and, of course, the comedy, Robin Hood: Men In Tights) to one of the consensus top ten movies ever filmed, Seven Samurai, to the modern classic of revenge, Kill Bill, sword-fighting has been at the center of many of our favorite movies. Even our best science fiction movies like Star Wars take fencing into the future to grab viewers’ attention. In terms of books, there’s almost an entire genre (fantasy) that leans on the appeal of fencing to draw its audience in. I’ve recently enjoyed a new epic series called the Mongoliad that’s chock full of sword fighting and describes in great detail different styles of fencing from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean to Mongolia. LARPing or Live Action Role Playing is an increasingly popular activity for people interested in sword fighting. None of these things are fencing but any of them could be a reason for picking up the sport and giving it a try.
Fencing is incredibly fast and graceful — As you mentioned in your question, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happening because fencers are so fast and it’s definitely hard to tell how precise, measured, and graceful their movements are because great fencers package seven distinct motions in the time it takes most of us to think about getting off the couch. A practiced fencing fan, likeRay Glickman, the grandfather of top U.S. Junior Boy’s fencer Ethan Mullennix, can learn to appreciate fencing in person. “It’s just beautiful to watch. They move like ballet dancers,” Glickman said to Mike Kepka for his article on Mullennix in SFGate.com. For the rest of us, luckily, we can watch videos of fencing in slow motion like this amazing one
http://youtu.be/Z86tpjRaiK8?t=1m36s
It’s an amazing workout — I did a couple weeks of fencing camp when I was a kid, so I can personally attest to this benefit of fencing. It may not look like it would be as much of a workout as some other sports, but the main challenge is not one that’s easy to see if you’re not looking for it. Virtually every move in fencing, from the start of a bout to the end, is done in a full-on deep knee bend position. It’s like playing a sport while doing squats. After just a minute or two of fencing, your quads begin to burn and they don’t stop. If you’ve got bad knees or are trying to protect yourself from ever having bad knees, fencing is the perfect sport for you. According to www.findthebest.com, you can burn 430 calories for 150 lb person in one hour of fencing.
Technicalities and technology — One of the common themes that runs through enjoyment of sport is understanding and enjoying the technicalities of an activity. Fencing has an enormous number of technicalities! First of all, there are three types of fencing, each which has a different weapons and a different set of rules about where you are allowed to hit your opponent. Even more delightfully technical are the right-of-way rules that dictate who gets the point if the two fencers hit each other at exactly the same time. The action is so fast and the rules so precise that most guides to watching fencing, like this one from Crimson Blades fencing academy, suggest watching the referee to see what has happened. Even this takes some work to learn how to interpret the referee’s hand signals as you can see in this awesome poster:

This wonderful illustration of the referee signals in fencing (one wonders if, in action, they look just a little like this,) comes from fencing instructor and author Massimiliano Longo who is currently raising money for a US and UK version of his wonderful illustrated guide to fencing for children. Please give his Indiegogo page a look and think about helping to fund it. I donated today!

So, there you have it — five answers to the question, “Why do people like fencing?” I hope these give you a reason to go back to your cousin’s next fencing tournament or even think about starting to fence yourself! If you’re interested, U.S. Fencing is a good resource for finding a fencing club near you.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

I don't always watch sports, but when I do, I prefer contrasts

Vamping on the great Dos Equis commercials that feature the “Most Interesting Man in the World” claiming, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis,” I don’t always watch sports, but when I do, I prefer contrasts. I think many sports fans are like this. I’d rather watch a great defense play against a great offense than watch two great offenses score mounds of points on each other or two great defenses circle each other cautiously. In boxing, I’d rather watch a hot-headed slugger face off against a tactically sound boxer. In baseball, I want to see if a great pitcher can throw his way through a murderer’s row of hitters or whether they tire him down. Even in individual sports like downhill skiing or golf, it’s more compelling if you can watch people approach the puzzle of winning in different ways. There are two sporting events tonight that promise big contrasts in style and I am looking forward to catching at least part of both of them. I’ll lay out the contrasts in this post, tell me if you watch and if so, whether you see and enjoy the contrasts I describe.

Cool vs. Hot at the U.S. Open

Tennis is perhaps the most psychologically difficult sport because its players are alone on the court for up to five hours. In major tournaments like the U.S. Open, they aren’t even allowed to speak to their coaches. To win a tennis match, men (women play only three sets) need to win three sets out of five. To win a set, they need to be the first to win six by two games or win in a tie-break. Games require them to get to four points but they have to win by two. In matches between players of relatively equal skill, temperament or injury almost always mean the difference between winning and losing.

Roger Federer’s name is all over the record books but perhaps his most impressive record is that he was ranked number one in the world for 237 weeks in a row. This record expresses his nature. He is cool. He doesn’t get ruffled. His movements are smooth, graceful, and efficient. He never looks like he’s trying that hard or, frankly, that he’s physically strong enough to keep up with his opponent. All of this explains, in part, how Federer can still be playing at such a high level at 33, an age at which most tennis players’ physical skills have degraded to the point that they cannot keep up anymore.

Gael Monfils looks like the member of a tennis playing species

Federer’s opponent is the exact opposite. Gael Monfils is a physical freak. Federer looks like a robot programmed to play tennis. Monfils looks like a species genetically designed to play tennis. He’s tall, incredibly muscular, and flexible. His springs around the court like a modern dancer — never quite centered but never out of balance either. If it weren’t for his temperament, he’d probably be completely unbeatable. As it is, he spends a lot of time self-destructing on tennis courts. He screams at himself, gives up, tries again, gives up again. He can’t seem to help being a showman. The more important the moment is, the less he seems to be able to help leaping into shots or trying to hit the ball between his legs. The most dominant he’s ever looked on a tennis court was a rain delay dance competition at the French Open:

At least until this U.S. Open, in which Monfils, playing without a coach, hasn’t lost a single set. Monfils remains as compelling as he is confusing.

I have to admit, I kind of love both these players. I can’t help but root for old-age and treachery to win out over youth and vigor, so I want Federer to win. Meanwhile, Monfils’ unpredictability and pathos make me love him, and he just looks like he’s having more fun when he’s having fun out there than anyone else. We’ll see what happens tonight around 8 p.m. on ESPN.

Defense vs. Offense to Start the NFL Season

The first NFL game is a celebration and would be must watch TV for sports fans no matter who was playing. That said, tonight’s game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers provides a great contrast in everything but color. The Seahawks have the best defense in the league, with big, fast, and brash defenders flying all over the place, hitting anything that moves. The Packers offense has been in the top third of the league in scoring for the last five years. The Packers have a well established star at quarterback who leads an offense based on quick throws and immaculate timing. The Seahawks specialize in messing up offensive timing by hitting receivers (legally or illegally) at the line of scrimmage. The Seahawks offense tries to pound their opponents into the ground with powerful running attacks. The Packers defense was, well, frankly bad last year.

The only similarities between these teams is that they are both good, they both think they have a chance to win the Super Bowl this year, and they both wear green. See what happens at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC.

Understanding Michael Sam's NFL experience

One of the biggest National Football Leagues (NFL) stories in the weeks leading up to the start of the season has been Michael Sam, the first openly gay man to be drafted by a professional team. As interesting as this story has the potential to be, most of the coverage just misses the mark because it fails to establish enough context. Almost all of the stories that I’ve read have assumed a base of knowledge about the offseason process in the NFL that only hardcore NFL fans have. Furthermore, even most attentive sports fans don’t have a real understanding of what the experience and expectations are for a marginal NFL prospect. Without this context, it’s very difficult to tell how much of what Michael Sam is going through is unique because of his historic status and how much of it is completely normal. We simply don’t often pay this much attention to low draft picks or undrafted players in the NFL. In this post, I’ll do my best to explain the context so that we all have a chance of better understanding Michael Sam’s NFL experience. In this effort, I’m aided enormously by Charles Siebert‘s amazing New York Times Magazine profile called The Hard Life of an NFL Long Shot about his nephew, Pat Schiller, who was, in 2012, in a similar situation to Sam’s.

How does the NFL offseason work?

The NFL offseason begins the day after the Super Bowl and ends when the first game of the season is played. It’s a seven month affair. To understand Sam’s experience, we should start at the NFL draft in mid-May. Over the course of a few days, the thirty-two NFL teams select 256 college players, an average of eight players per team although some teams may have more picks, some fewer. The Rams this year had eleven picks. After the draft, the draft picks agents negotiate with the team and most eventually settle on terms and sign a contract. Next up are OTAs or “organized team activities” which are basically glorified practice sessions in June or July that serve as the players first introduction to their teammates and coaches.

The official pre-season consists of four games exhibition games in consecutive weekends starting on August 7th this year. These four weeks of pre-season football work like a giant audition that teams hold for players. Strict rules and dates apply to this process. For the first three games, teams are allowed to have 90 people on their rosters. After the third game, teams have to cut their players/applicants down from 90 to 75. After the fourth game, that number drops to the regular season norm, 53 players per team. In the course of a month, the number of players on NFL teams goes from 2,880 to 1,696 for a reduction of 41%. In a lot of ways, this whole process reminds me of the job market for professors. Each year hundreds of new PhDs come out of graduate school but the number of professor jobs remains relatively static. So it is with football players. Each year, around 300 college players try to get jobs in the NFL but the number of available jobs remain the same. There’s simply not enough room for everyone.

Football is a brutal game on the field and a brutal business off it. Players who get cut get nothing — contracts at this level have no guaranteed money. Their options are bleak because there aren’t many other football leagues where you can make a good living. What they can do and do do is go home, keep training, and wait for a phone call from an NFL team that may never come. When that call comes, more often than not, it’s for a place on a team’s practice squad. The practice squad or scout team is a group of up to ten players that a team can employ in addition to their 53-man roster. These players are usually used to imitate the tendencies and peculiarities of an opponent in practices for the week leading up to a game. Practice squad players are officially free-agents so they can be signed to the full-time roster by any team who likes them whether that’s the team whose practice squad they are on or not.

This whole process is physically and psychologically incredibly challenging for the players who go through it. Let’s lean on Siebert here for a feel of what it’s like to go through it.

First, players who have been the best of the best for their whole lives have to come to terms with their new status and struggle. As Schiller said to Siebert:

And then you come to the N.F.L. and, well, I’ve never felt so bad at a sport I know I’m good at.

Injuries are suffered in silence for fear of being tagged as injury prone or simply replaced with a healthier aspiring player:

There was no thought, he said, of seeking out a trainer. Everything a rookie does in camp is documented, and visits to the training room leave the wrong impression.“We have an expression here,” he told me. “ ‘You don’t make the club in the tub.”’

Injuries to great to hide are a marginal player’s biggest fear:

He picked up an empty bottle of anti-inflammatory pills and tossed it in the trash.“Even if I make it,” he said, “the average career is what, three or four years tops. But if I get hurt now, I’m gone. It’s nothing personal. If I’m injured, I’m dead weight. I’m stealing their money. Do you know how many linebackers there are sitting home right now that want my job? Hundreds. I mean, let’s get real. As much as Coach Smith or Coach Pires might like me, it would be: ‘Hey, it’s been a fun ride. You’re a good kid. But see ya, Schiller!’ ”

But they are also a source of great hope because an injury to an established player could make room for them on the team’s roster:

Pat sat bolt upright, grabbed the remote and scrolled back through the game to determine the precise moment James entered. He then went to the Falcons’ game thread on his computer, eyes narrowing, lips slightly parted in anticipation.“Stephen Nicholas,” he muttered. “Ankle.”For the next two days of my visit, we were on the Stephen Nicholas ankle watch.

What happened to Michael Sam?

Michael Sam was drafted in the seventh round by the St. Louis Rams. In some ways this was an ideal result for him. Coach Jeff Fisher is well-known as one of the more progressive coaches in the league. He was firm in stating that Sam’s sexual preference was not going to be an issue or a factor within the team and he has the standing to make most observers believe him. The Rams also have one of the best defensive lines in the league. Their two starters at defensive end, the position Sam plays, Chris Long and Robert Quinn, are as close to being household names as you can get playing that position. Sam was in a position to learn from the best but he also had a tough fight ahead of him to make the team. As Siebert writes in his article, “The math of making an N.F.L. roster seems straight forward. There are 40 or so players who are Ones and Twos on offense and defense. Then there is a punter, at least one kicker, a long snapper and often a third-string quarterback. This leaves just a handful of positions available.” Those positions often go, not to the next best player at a position, but to the player who can be most valuable to a team on their Special Teams’ units that return or cover kickoffs and punts. As a former star in college and a big dude at 261 lbs, Sam is at a disadvantage in this arena. He’s probably never played on a special teams unit before and players his size at his position usually do not.

Sam made it through the cut from 90 players to 75 but not the last one to 53 players. The St. Louis Rams cut Sam on August 30. He wouldn’t have long to wait before his next opportunity though. On September 3, the Dallas Cowboys signed Sam to their practice squad. The Cowboys have a less heralded defensive line but even so, Sam will be working hard on the practice squad, trying to impress without getting injured, probably needing an injury on the Cowboys or on another team in order to get signed. This is more likely than it seems. There have already been 113 players put on Injured Reserve or the Physically Unable to Perform list since the start of August. My guess is that Sam will play in an NFL game this year.

How typical was Sam’s experience? Did his sexual identity matter?

This is the hardest question to answer. From what I know, it seems like Sam’s experience was fairly normal for a player drafted in the seventh round. I did a little research on the 41 players drafted with Sam in the seventh round this year and of them 19 or just under half have already been injured or cut. Of the Rams’ four seventh round draft picks, none made the team.

The two questions that loom largest in my mind about Sam’s experience, both of which I cannot answer, are whether his sexual identity could have made him get drafted later than he would have otherwise (which would make it harder for him to make the team because the team perceives themselves as having committed less and sunk less cost into him) and how much the pressure of being a trailblazer may have affected his play in the pre-season.

Of course Sam’s sexual identity or more accurately, other’s perception of his sexual identity and the focus it created on him, affected his experience in innumerable ways. That said, I’m not sure we’ll ever know whether it may have changed Sam’s NFL outcome in the ways I suggested above. I hope, for Sam’s sake and for our sake as a culture, that Sam makes them a non-issue by playing well in the NFL later this season. If it’s not in the cards for him, I don’t think we’ll have long to wait for another brave, gay football player to come along.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what happened to Pat Schiller, the aspiring football player from the great New York Times magazine article? He’s still pursuing his dream. He was one of the players competing with Sam for a spot on the Rams this summer. He made the team as a fourth-string linebacker and special teams player.

Why are fantasy football drafts so exciting?

I’m hours away from my most important fantasy football draft of the year. I’m full of anticipatory energy. I’m not alone in this feeling this way about fantasy football drafts. The other day I talked to a self-professed fantasy sports obsessive and he described his experience of draft night as “shaky – nervous and excited.” For people who don’t play fantasy sports, and here’s some common ground that many sports fans and non-sports fans can find with each other, the experience of draft night is a strange one. Let’s see if I can explain it.

For a very, very quick reminder, here’s how fantasy football works and what a draft is. Fantasy football is a game that people play with a small group of people, usually friends or colleagues. Just like most other games, the outcome of fantasy football is based partially on choices made by its players and partially on semi-random events that occur in the game’s universe. In a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, these random events may be generated by rolling dice. In video and computer games, there are semi-random events programmed into the game itself – Sim City might generate a challenging natural disaster, a shooting game may present its player with more or fewer enemies to defeat. In fantasy football, the outside force that modifies how the game goes is the real performance of players within the National Football League (NFL). In fantasy football, each player or owner of a fantasy football team has a selection of real NFL players on their team and depending on how the real players perform in real games, their imaginary team will win or lose.

Draft night is the primary time when fantasy football owners construct their teams. There are two ways that this happens. The most common is a “snake draft” where teams take turns choosing players. Not unlike a playground game, when all the teams have chosen a player, the order is reversed for choosing the second player, and so the draft goes, snaking back and forth. The other model is an auction where players go up for auction and every team has a chance to bid on them with a (fake) budget. While there is some wiggle room during the fantasy football season to trade players with other teams or to drop players from your team and pick up players who are not on any team, the draft is the most meaningful tactical moment of the whole game.

Beyond simply winning or losing in the imaginary world of fantasy football, draft night is exciting because it establishes which real players you’re going to root for in real football (albeit for your own imaginary team’s purposes) for the next sixteen weeks. Especially for people like me who don’t have a favorite NFL team, my fantasy team’s real players are the ones I end up following and rooting for. This is so widely true that choosing “boring” players has become a good strategy for winning in fantasy football. Because fantasy owners enjoy rooting for the players on their team and they enjoy rooting for volatile, explosive playmakers, there’s a market inefficiency that rewards going against the grain and selecting consistent, not flashy, boring performers.

Players I’ve had on my team for several years are sentimental favorites of mine. In the league I run, we are allowed to keep three players from year to year. I find myself rooting for the players I keep and keeping the players I root for. The best example of this is Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Marshall is an outspoken advocate for the normalization of mental disorders, one of which he suffers with himself. Every time he does something for his cause, like wearing lime green cleats (which represent mental illness like pink represents breast cancer,) in a game, I feel proud because he’s on my team. If he weren’t a good player, I wouldn’t keep him on my team, but if he weren’t a good person, I might choose to keep another good player instead. This allegiance can cause problems too, because the truth is that you can’t ever really know someone you don’t know. Take Ray Rice, for example, the star running back suspended for domestic abuse. I can’t remember if I’ve ever had him on my fantasy team but he did play for my alma mater, Rutgers, so I’ve rooted for him for at least a decade in a similar (but probably less intense) way to if he had been on my fantasy team. When your success is tied to a player’s success, the tie you create in your mind with that person is strong. It makes a moral or legal transgression by that player feel more like a betrayal.^[1]

One of the good things about fantasy football is that it’s a long period of enjoyment for (usually) not that much or no money. The draft is a big piece of how much I am going to enjoy or be tormented by the it over the next four months.

Fantasy football may be a simulated experience but the excitement is real.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Did we collectively react to Tiger Woods’ moral transgressions more strongly because of the best selling video game, Tiger Woods’ golf that gave the player the chance to play as Tiger Woods? I bet we did.↵

How do serves work in tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do serves work in tennis? I’ve been watching the U.S. Open and the commentators seem to make a big deal over them. Why is that?

Thanks,
Titus

Best in the world at returning serves, Rafael Nadal is not so shabby at serving either.

— — —

Dear Titus,

Great question — you’re absolutely right that tennis announcers make a big deal about serving but they don’t always explain how it works. I’ll take you quickly through how serves work in tennis, in particular, what the rules are and why they’re important to the game.

Visualize a tennis court. It’s split into two halves by the net. On each half there are three rectangles created by white lines. One big rectangle covers the half of the half farthest from the net. The area closest to the net is divided into two narrower rectangles. When a player serves the tennis ball, she has to stand outside of the boxed in area on either the right side of the court or the left. Serves from the right hand side have to cross the net in the air and bounce in the left hand small rectangle. Serves from the left hand side must do the opposite and land on the right side rectangle closest to the net on the opponents side of the court. Got it? It’s just like ping pong.

Although pros make serving look easy, it’s actually very difficult and lots of things can happen to a serve to make it illegal. This is so common that it’s not truly penalized like a foul, it’s called a fault. If a tennis player faults on his or her serve, they get a second chance. If they use their second chance to serve legally, the point goes on normally. If they fault again on the second attempt, they lose the point. The important terms here are first serve which is a player’s first attempt to start a point, second serve which is any serve preceded by a fault, and double fault which is when a serving player’s opponent gets a point because the server faulted two times in a single service attempt.

A fault can come for many reasons. The most common is that the serve fails to land in the correct opposite rectangle either because it gets stopped by the net or because it lands outside of the box. The only other reason I knew of off the top of my head was a “foot fault” which happens when a serving player steps on or over the baseline when they are serving. According to Wikipedia there are some other ways to fault on a serve but they don’t happen very often. One exception to the fault rule that does happen pretty often is when the ball hits the net but goes over and lands in the proper serving box. When this happens, it’s called a let and the serving player just gets a do-over. If they are on their first serve, they’re still on their first serve. If they are on their second, they are still on their second. If you’ve watched enough tennis, you’ve seen a player win a point because, in the normal course of play, they hit the net and the ball skips over and falls into their opponent’s side of the court. The player who won the point usually holds up their hands in a universal “I’m sorry, that was luck” gesture. It’s good sportsmanship but I think it may stem from this rule that establishes the idea that hitting the net shouldn’t be good for either player.

Serves are important because they carry a significant advantage to the player serving the ball. According to the ATP World Tennis Tour’s stats page the best player in the world at winning points when he makes his first serve legally is Ivo Karlovic and he wins 80% of those points. Why is that? Well, Karlovic has one of the fastest serves in the world. His fastest serve ever went 156 mph. Here’s a great video of him serving in slow motion:

The best men’s player in the world at winning points when he is not serving is Rafael Nadal who wins 35% of points even when his opponent’s first serve is legal. On second serves, players usually take a very safe approach to serving. They don’t serve as hard and they aim a little closer to the center of the service box than they do on their first attempt when they try to hit the lines. This reduces the impact of the serve. For example, the man who wins the highest percentage of his second serve points is Roger Federer at 58%. The player who wins the highest percentage of points returning a second serve is Rafael Nadal at 57%. Federer and Nadal are not coincidentally the best players in the world. Basically, a second serve means that the best player is likely to win the point. A first serve is a strong enough weapon that it can override a big skill difference.

This is why tennis matches are so often won when a player wins a game that they are not serving. Because the serve is such an important advantage, players expect to win games they serve. Winning a game when a player doesn’t have the serve is called a break. Without any breaks, a tennis match could theoretically go on forever. American giant (6’10”) tennis player, John Isner, is the closest person to making this a reality. He’s almost unbeatable when he serves — he wins 93% of those games — but can barely ever (9%) seem to break his opponent. It’s no coincidence that he once played in the longest match ever against Nicolas Mahut at 2010 Wimbledon. The match lasted over 11 hours although it did stretch across three days because of rain and darkness.

There you go — probably more about the serve than you bargained for. Hope you enjoyed it,
Ezra Fischer

How Does the Basketball World Cup Work?

The FIBA Basketball World Cup begins on Saturday, August 30. As many of us found out or remembered earlier this summer in the Men’s Soccer World Cup, international sports are a great mixture of top level talent, patriotic fervor, and cultural sharing. Unlike soccer, where the World Cup dwarfs the Olympics, the World Cup of Basketball is a second tier tournament. Going up against the start of college and professional football, it’s unlikely to draw the full attention of all but the most die-hard basketball fans. Despite that or perhaps because of that, I’m oddly looking forward to it. Here’s some information about how the tournament works and who might win.

Tournament Structure

The tournament is structured very similarly to the soccer World Cup. It starts with a group stage. The twenty four teams in the tournament are separated into four groups of six teams each. There is a round robin whereby each team plays the other five teams in their group. The top four teams based on record and then a (you guessed it) somewhat Byzantine set of tie-breakers. Also oddly, two points are given for a win and one for a loss. Only a team that forfeits a game can walk away with no points. Once the group stage is done, there is a single elimination knockout round starting with the 16 qualifying teams. Teams from groups A & B won’t play teams from groups C & D until the finals or the third place game. The top two ranked teams coming into the tournament, the United States and host country Spain, we’re placed in opposite sides of the tournament so that they can meet in the finals if all goes as expected.

Differences in NBA vs. FIBA Rules

If you are at all familiar with watching NBA basketball, you’re likely to notice some major differences in the rules. Games are shorter – forty minutes divided into four ten minute quarters. The three-point line is fourteen percent closer to the basket which has a major tactical impact on how the game is played. Players foul out of the game after five fouls instead of six. Once the ball bounces off the rim of the basket and doesn’t go in, anyone can tip it (in or out) freely as opposed to in the NBA where players have to wait for the ball to clear the airspace above the basket before legally touching it.

The U.S. is going to win, right?

Yeah, probably. The two favorites in the tournament are the United States and Spain. A recent Vegas sports book has the United States as 4-7 favorites (you have to bet seven dollars to make a profit of only four if the U.S. wins) and Spain as the second most likely winner at 3-2 (if you bet two dollars and Spain wins, you stand to make a profit of three dollars. There are a handful of other teams in a clump as the next most likely winners: France, Brazil, Argentina, and Lithuania. All four of these teams are 30-1 (win thirty for each dollar you bet) from which you can tell that Vegas doesn’t think it’s very likely for them to win.

So why is this worth watching?

Mostly because it’s fun. The United States’ first game is against Finland and maybe it’s just me but I think watching a bunch of hockey-player-name-having Finns like Mikko Koivisto and Hanno Möttölä try to hold down the fort against the United States will be fun, at least for the first five or ten minutes. Among the other countries, there are a few teams that I think will be really fun to watch. Brazil is full of skilled big guys, Serbia and Croatia are both staffed by clever, quick, sharp-shooting players, and Greece could sneak up on people. Australia has a player named Matthew Dellavedova. I don’t know much about him but just hoping that he meets, falls in love with, marries, and has children with WNBA star Elena Delle Donne will keep me happy.

CBS Sports has a full preview of all twenty-four of the teams here.

I’m convinced. How do I watch?

All the games will be televised or streamed live. ESPN, ESPN2, and NBA TV are the main television carriers. All the U.S. games will be on ESPN or ESPN2 during the group stage with NBA TV televising other select games. If you’re interested in a game that’s not carried on one of these channels, (I have my eye on Spain vs. France at 4 pm ET on Sept. 3,) take a look at the full schedule. You can stream every game live on ESPN3.

When is a football game a cupcake?

The 2014 college football season starts this weekend. College football is a peculiar sport in a few ways. It’s a very short season — most teams play 11 or 12 games. There’s no real pre-season, so teams don’t get that much of a chance to warm up. Any loss during the regular season almost eliminates most teams from championship contention. Add to these three factors, the fact that colleges are able to schedule their own opponents for the first three or four weeks of the year, before conference play begins, and you get a recipe for… a pretty boring first weekend of football.

Why is that? Well, there’s a real incentive for the top teams to win their first several games. There’s a ton of money involved. Top teams are expected to go almost undefeated every year and the financial difference to their university between going into the fifth or sixth game of the season undefeated or with one early loss is immense. So, many top teams schedule what they think are going to be very easy games for the first few weeks of the season. They actually pay smaller or weaker teams to go on the road and play them in their home stadiums. Last year the biggest single game payment was made by Alabama to Colorado State. Alabama paid $1,500,000 for Colorado State to travel to Tuscaloosa where they lost, as expected but not arranged, 31-6. Losing is not part of the deal, but it’s part of the deal.

This isn’t all bad, it gives small teams a chance to make lots of money and also to play spoiler. Some of them can make a name for themselves by playing better than expected or even upsetting the host team. But it does mean that big established teams play a lot more at home than smaller teams which doesn’t seem fair if you think about the players as people who have families and friends who want to see them in person. It also means that a LOT of the games in the first few weeks are really not worth watching.

Using the preseason Associated Press Preseason Top 25 and Jeff Sagarin’s ranking of all teams, I put together an analysis of the opening weekend games to see which of the top 25 teams had scheduled easy games, moderate games, and which had scheduled games against opponents of relatively even strength to them. The term cupcake is a commonly used term to refer to a game a good team schedules against a weaker team and should win. I rolled with it and invented the terms “dinner roll” to refer to the not-so-unfair games that some teams scheduled and “spinach” to refer to an evenly matched game. From my perspective, it’s these spinach games that we should watch this weekend.

Without further ado, here is the first ever Dear Sports Fan infographic:

Why Major League Soccer is like a New York co-op

Jermaine Jones was assigned to sign with the New England Revolution

Recently Major League Soccer, the top professional soccer league in the United States did something which raised eye-brows and exposed one of its oddest elements, its organizational structure. If you remember anyone from the United States Men’s World Cup team from earlier in the summer, it’s probably goalie Tim Howard. But if you remember anyone else it might be Jermaine Jones the dreadlocked maelstrom of a midfielder who was probably the best non-goalie on the team for the duration of the tournament. Jones is one of our many German-American players. He grew up in the United States but moved to Germany as an adolescent and began his professional career there as a fourteen year old (which is not rare for German players). He’s spent his entire career in Germany and Turkey but became interested in playing and perhaps finishing his career in the United States. And that’s where the weirdness began.

Major League Soccer has a “single entity-structure” in which, according to Wikipedia, “teams and player contracts are centrally owned by the league.” Most other leagues in the United States are connected, but much more loosely, like a neighborhood association connects property owners throughout the country. Instead of operating independently on the important things and in unison when necessary, Major League Soccer operates independently until the decisions become important. This type of structure is familiar to me only from living in a co-op apartment building where I am a “tenant-owner” the same way that Robert Kraft (who owns-owns the New England Patriots football team) is an investor-operator. Through this peculiar organization, the signing of Jones became an assigning.

The MLS team most interested in Jones was the Chicago Fire and had been pursuing him for months. According to MLS rules, most players are able to negotiate and sign with teams of their choosing if they are free agents. Players who fit this description, as a “U.S. National Team player who signs with MLS after playing abroad” however, have to go through an “allocation order” where teams that did worse in the previous year have first dibs until they sign a player that fits that description. Then they drop to the bottom of the list. Okay, that’s a little arbitrary, but I can see what they’re going for there. But what is this? There’s an asterisk?

*Designated Players of a certain threshold – as determined by the League – are not subject to allocation ranking.

That, my friends, is an elastic clause if I’ve ever seen one. So, in some cases, the league can just bypass the rules and do whatever it likes. In this case, MLS decided to have Jones skip the allocation process and they decided to choose between the two teams interested in him with a coin-flip! The two teams were the Chicago Fire and the New England Revolution (it boggles the mind to believe that these were the only two teams who wanted him, but…) and the Revolution won the coin flip.

Not only does this feel anti-competitive and arbitrary, but as Barry Petchesky argues in his Deadspin.com article about the assignment, it’s “shockingly anti-labor. If MLS wants to be the league of choice for the world’s best players, it’d better start allowing those players to choose their situations.” I couldn’t agree more. The worst thing a sports league can do is create the appearance of favoring one team over another or one player over another from an organizational standpoint. The NBA lives and flourishes with a little bit of this sentiment thanks to conspiracy theorists who think the draft lotteries are fixed or the refs are instructed to favor big-market teams. Too much of it can only lead to bad things, like the UFC’s recent issue with President Dana White’s removal of a judge mid-fight. The perception of true competition is essential for the enjoyment of sports.

What's with all the screaming and grunting in tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s with all the screaming and grunting in tennis? Why do they scream so much? Why don’t we ever hear other athletes scream? Is it just some weird tennis thing?

Puzzled,
Paula

Dear Paula,

You’re absolutely right. One of the most noticeable things about watching tennis on television is its sounds. Tennis is a funny mixture of silence punctuated by horribly loud and awkward noise. Let’s dig into it.

The Silence of Center Court

First of all, it’s silent most of the time. The U.S. Open is known as the loudest and rowdiest of the major tournaments but that’s just because sometimes, once in a while, the crowd makes a little noise. There’s a weird division in sports between sports where the crowd makes as much noise as possible and sports where the crowd isn’t supposed to make noise at all. Tennis and golf are the most notable examples of the non-noisy sports. In golf, players are known to scream at the crowd for any little noise it makes at the wrong time, while in tennis, play won’t even start until the crowd has hushed. Given the number of times you hear athletes in noisy sports claim that, beyond just not being negatively effected by crowd noise noise, they can’t even hear it, golf and tennis’ attitude towards crowd noise seems a little silly.

The Sound of Screaming

Once you get used to the contemplative sounds of tennis — the silence, the rhythmic thwacking of ball on racket, the scraping, scuffling, or squeaking of tennis shoes on the court — you are interrupted by the only real jarring sounds in the sport: the screaming and grunting of the players themselves. Tennis players are so loud partially because they are miked well and partially because there’s not much crowd noise to drown them out but also because there seems to be a couple of major voice-viruses that have taken hold in the ranks of professional tennis players and refuse to be eradicated.

The first of the voice-viruses you notice is the grunting. Tennis players grunt a lot. Depending on player and situation, these grunts range from short, strained grunts to obscene sounding moans to full on horror movie screams. Matt McCarthy wrote an article for Deadspin.com about why tennis players scream so much. His answer is that it gives them a competitive advantage. The effects, he writes, are many. Grunting allows players to hit the ball harder than they would otherwise. Screaming serves to release tension and relax the screamer. Moreover, screaming has a negative effect on your opponent. In a control study, participants were “21 to 33 milliseconds slower, and they were 3 to 4 percent less accurate at predicting where the ball was going” when distracted by screaming.

Tennis’ Classic “Come On!”

All of this talk about screaming in tennis reminded me of another article I had read, also from Deadspin.com, about a year ago. This article, about why tennis players say “come on” so much by John Koblin looked deep into the history of tennis for an answer. Like many cultural phenomenon, there really isn’t a clear answer. Tennis players yell “come on” a lot just because that’s what tennis players yell. Not for lack of trying but Koblin couldn’t even get a straight answer on when it began. Nonetheless, the article is very enjoyable, especially when it verges on the comic as in these two paragraphs:

“Sharapova’s working on a daily double,” said [Pete] Bodo, who’s been covering the game for four decades. “She’s got the horrible scream plus the really desperate comeonnnn. It doesn’t even sound like come on! It sounds like something else.”

“You used to be able to hear, like, ‘Come. On.’ Now it’s just like a yell,” said [Nick] McCarvel. “[Petra] Kvitova is famous for this. She’ll say pojd—which is come on in Czech—and it comes out asprruhhh, and you’re just like, ‘Wait, what?'”

As you watch the U.S. Open this year, also listen. You’ll hear silence, screaming, grunting, and “COME ON!!”

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer