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

Cue Cards 8-27-14

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Tuesday, August 26

  1. Almost Perfect — A very rare and exciting thing in Baseball is a “Perfect Game.” This is when a pitcher pitches the entire game without allowing a single person from the other team to get to first base. Not even who! San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Madison Bumgarner had a perfect game through seven innings but allowed a hit in the eighth. No one else got on base though and that runner did not score. It was still an impressive and notable performance by Bumgarner.
  2. Strong Little Fifteen — The U.S. Open’s opening round was enlivened yesterday when fifteen year-old CiCi Bellis from California beat the tenth ranked player in the world, Dominika Cibulkova. When told after the game that she was trending on twitter, Bellis said, “I know some of my friends were doing hashtag like ‘takedowncibulkova,’ something like that,” she said. “I know three of my friends did that.”
  3. Sports as Soap Opera — Two interesting non-game-based sports stories developed further yesterday. One is heartening — Michael Sam, the first openly gay professional football player, made it through the first round of cuts on his team. Still, his team has to go from 75 players to 53 by this Sunday, so we’ll have another week of watching this story before things are settled. The other story is bizarre — a couple days ago, USC football player John Shaw hurtled into the news when he explained to his team that he had sprained both his ankles badly by jumping from a balcony onto concrete to save his nephew from drowning in a pool. As the story became big news, it also became… suspect. Now the story is that USC has started to back away slowly with its hands held up, gesturing to the world that they don’t know what happened and aren’t fully supporting Shaw until they know more.

Six Months Later the False Sochi Media Narratives Continue

I had the great luck of being able to attend the Winter Olympics games in Russia this past year. I blogged about it extensively which you can see here if you care to browse. In one of my final posts on the subject, after I had returned to the United States, I wrote about how I felt the media had done a disservice to the Olympics and to Russia by pushing the narrative of how messed up things were way too far. Here’s what I wrote:

I’m disappointed in how the Western media portrayed Sochi in the lead up to the games. Before I went, I was concerned and scared from what I had been reading. The hotels were unfinished, radioactive shitholes. There were suicide bombers on every block and even if the Russian Army were somehow able to deter or demolish them, the people living in the area would be overwhelmingly resentful because of having been forced to live under martial law for months before the Olympics even began. Oh, and any food in the area would have been in storage for at least three months because that was the last time any shipments of anything were allowed into the area.

With the possible exception of terrorism, this simply wasn’t true. None of it.

Six months after the Olympics, the disappointing narrative continues. Gizmodo.com reblogged a photo essay by Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy under the headline, “Just Six Months After the Olympics, Sochi Looks Like a Ghost Town.” This is misleading at best and intentionally, journalistically yellow at worst. Now, I will admit to not speaking Russian. So, when I look at Belenkiy’s photo essay, I have to rely on a combination of just the photos, my memories of the Olympics, and Google translate. Google translate does its best, but… well, lemme just quote the opening paragraph accompanying the photos:

Just six months ago, at the Olympic stadium cried chubby teddy bear. He did not fall, as his ancestor from the eighties, but also among us can not see it. Hiding in the woods?

Setting humor aside for a minute, here’s what angers me about this coverage. All those photos are of Krasnaya Polyana not Sochi. Krasnaya Polyana was where the alpine and cross country skiing events and the sliding events were held. The Russians ambitiously developed an almost completely brand ski resort town up in the mountains to host these events. Their hope was that, in time, this resort would become a national and international ski destination, pulling some of the business away from Europe’s alp resorts. Whether or not that comes to pass, I can’t say I’m surprised to see it virtually abandoned in August! Compare the mountains in Belenkiy’s photos with what the mountains looked like in February. Here’s one of my photos from the Olympic games:

Olympic Mountains
When the snows return, my guess is that the people will too.

Send some photographers to Jersey shore towns in January and see what they look like or even Colorado mountain towns in Summer. Meanwhile, back to Sochi. Sochi is a coastal city that, although it was the city name used as the host of the Olympics, didn’t actually have any events in it. None of these photos are of Sochi at all! Sochi is a bustling small city of over 300,000 people. I promise it’s not abandoned today!

Cue Cards 8-26-14

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, August 25

  1. Traditional Hegemony Trickling Back in Baseball? One of the unique and refreshing things about this season in Major League Baseball is that most of the traditional powers have been struggling and some teams that have been very bad for decades have been doing well. The two extreme examples have been the New York Yankees who are the winningest team ever but have not been good this year and the Kansas City Royals who have been one of the sorriest teams for the past thirty years but are doing great this season. Yesterday the two played each other and the Yankees won 8-1. This was their fifth win in a row and makes me wonder/worry if there’s enough time left in the incredibly long baseball season for things to turn back around.
  2. The U.S. Open Begins — Big tennis tournaments usually start pretty quietly. There’s enough predictability in tennis and the tournaments are big enough that the first few rounds are usually pretty easy for the big names who get to play much less well known names. The most common story (until there is an upset) will be how some well-known player almost lost or, when that’s not possible, how the well-known player had to try harder than expected. In day one, Andy Murray had to try harder than expected against Robin Haase and Venus Williams had to try harder than expected against Kimiko Date-Krumm and an annoying bumble bee.
  3. Rematch of British Titans — Last year’s English Premier League Champions, Manchester City, and Runners-Up, Liverpool, played yesterday afternoon. This might explains some funny furtive departures from the office in mid-afternoon and then more funny returns smelling slightly like ale. The defending champions trounced Liverpool 3-1 and from watching part of this game, I can tell you that it wasn’t even that close. Manchester City dominated almost as much as Germany did Brazil way back a few months ago. The English Premier League is fun to watch but mostly makes me miss the World Cup.

Basketball and Baseball Uniform Posters

One of my favorite professional experiences came several years back when I was working as a business analyst for Return Path. My boss back then, Jack Sinclair, found an Edward Tufte one-day course and decided to send me to it. Tufte is one of the foremost practicers, proponents, and gurus of data visualization, the art of showing information through graphics. One of Tufte’s favorite techniques is the use of small multiples. Small multiples are graphics that repeat the same basic frame over and over again in a single view to emphasize the differences. Think the frames of a flip-book but instead of flipping from one to another to deliver a message, you display them all at once.

A good example of this is Tufte’s reworking of an instructional display of air-craft marshaling signals, as reproduced by businessweek.com.

small multiples

One of my favorite creative poster companies, Pop Chart Lab, has a couple of sports posters that use this principle of small multiples. They’re running a sale through August 29 on these and other charts. Use the code, “solongsummer” to get 15% off. My favorite is the visual compendium of baseball uniforms. This poster shows 121 tiny baseball uniforms from teams from 1869 through 2014. Each tiny uniform is a lens to an era. Baseball, with it’s rich cultural of historical respect and nostalgia lends itself perfectly to this treatment.

Also good is a similar visual compendium of basketball uniforms. The concept is the same and it still works. Basketball has a shorter history and doesn’t really share the timeless nostalgia of baseball. What it does have though is a strong fashion and pop-culture presence. Hidden among the professional jerseys of this poster are jerseys from movies like White Men Can’t Jump and He Got Game as well as jerseys designed for record companies like Bad Boy and No Limit Records.

Visual Compendium BaseballVisual Compendium BasketballBoth posters are available for $35 before the 15% discount and are printed in my home borough of Queens. Get ’em while they’re hot!

 

Why Are U.S. Open Tennis Courts Blue?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are U.S. Open tennis courts blue? What happened to the normal green and red variety that we all played on growing up?

Thanks,
Simon

— — —

Dear Simon,

U.S. Open tennis courts have been painted blue since 2005 primarily because the organizers of the tournament thought they could make more money with blue courts than the traditional green and red variety. The blue court is good for its organizers for reasons of branding and visibility. Since 2005, many other tennis tournaments have copied the U.S. Open and made their own court color changes.

The most understandable reason why the U.S. Open and other tournaments switched from green and red painted asphalt to blue is that it makes the tennis ball easier to see for players and spectators. The tennis ball itself is a shocking neon green-yellow. This is the kind of green-yellow normally found in road signs or reflective vests because it’s very easy to see. Still, tracking a green ball going a hundred miles an hour or more is likely to be easier if done against a background that provides a good contrast. A duller green isn’t going to offer must color contrast. Red is opposite green in a color wheel but the green of the tennis ball is a lot closer to yellow than it is green green.

In this clever color wheel from asmartbear.com, you can see that blue or purple are better opposites for a tennis ball than red or green.
In this clever color wheel from asmartbear.com, you can see that blue or purple are better opposites for a tennis ball than red or green.

Therefore, a blue or purple is going to create the best contrast to spot a moving tennis ball. This contrast is particularly important for television viewers. Not only are television viewers the largest group of people to watch the game, they’re also the one that injects the most money into the sport. No wonder their viewing experience was at the core of the decision in 2005 to shift to blue courts.

The other key reason to paint the U.S. Open courts blue is branding. In 2005, when the United States Tennis Association made the decision to move to a blue court, they did so, not just for the U.S. Open, but for all the major tennis tournaments played in the U.S. and organized by their group. As USTA executive Arlen Kantarian was quoted as saying in this espn.com article:

In addition, it provides an instant visual link between the US Open Series tournaments and the U.S. Open, helping to create a unified ‘regular season’ for tennis leading up to the U.S. Open.

If the USTA can create a visual signature, they may be able to promote their lesser tournaments as being just like the popular U.S. Open. Using color to promote a sports brand is nothing new, even in Tennis, as Christine Brennan pointed out in her 2005 USA Today article on the subject, the failed World Team Tennis league tried the gimmick in 1974. This time though, it seems to have succeeded. Or at least, the trend of colored courts has become very mainstream. The Australian Open changed from green to blue in 2008. Other big tournaments have experimented with purple courts. On a smaller level, on municipal and personal courts around the country, the demand for unique colors has increased. According to Andrew Cohen for Athletic Business resurfacing in green and red has dropped from about 95 percent of the market to between 50 and 75 percent. It’s common now for “sales reps [to] have to step in… to perhaps dissuade a court owner from choosing garish or excessively loud color combinations”

To close on a personal note, my instincts are often traditional when it comes to sports. The biggest change in tennis surfaces over the past fifty years hasn’t been the colors, it’s been the surfaces themselves. Until 1974, all four of the major tennis tournaments were played on grass or clay. When the U.S. Open and later the Australian open moved to asphalt, they kept the green and red surfaces of grass and clay as a way of connecting with their pasts. Shifting the color to blue doesn’t have much of an effect on the way I watch or think about them but it does make me treasure the natural grass of Wimbledon and traditional red-clay of the French Open.

Whatever the surface, enjoy watching the tennis!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How to Enjoy a Fantasy Football Draft

This post is about fantasy football. If you don’t play fantasy football or don’t understand it, read this post on how fantasy football works.

If you’re new to fantasy football, you may feel unprepared during your fantasy football draft. The people you’re drafting with and against probably seem like they know a lot more than you do. They are familiar with the players names and nick-names; their reputations and their past performances. There’s likely to be some good-natured trash-talking while the draft is going on. People may disparage a choice you or someone else makes or show congratulatory agreement for what they perceive as a good pick. Towards the end of the draft, some people may start congratulating themselves on how great of a team they’ve put together. Put together, this exhibition of knowledge may be intimidating and could even spoil some of the enjoyment of choosing your own fantasy football team. I’m here to tell you it shouldn’t. There are lots of easy ways to make sure you enjoy a fantasy football draft.

The first thing to remember about fantasy sports is that they work as a form of enjoyment only because people cannot predict the future. No one actually knows which football players are going to produce the best stats this year. Lots of people think they know but they’re really only gambling on which players seem the most likely to produce the best stats. You can feel completely confident in your choices, knowing that they can only be proven to be wrong in hind-sight and by the time that hind is in sight, every other fantasy owner in your league will have at least one decision they are kicking themselves for having made. You won’t be alone. Football, of all the sports, is the least predictable and the most subject to chance. With only 16 games in a season, the margin between a great player and a good player can easily come down to luck.

I think fantasy drafts should be collegial and relaxed. I don’t really think that psyching another owner out, even if you could do it, is worth the effort. Not everyone feels the same way though. Every time someone groans or nods knowingly after a pick, think to yourself — this person may be faking this emotion for their own purposes. If they can make you second guess yourself by making fun of your pick in the fourth round, they might be able to get you to pick badly in the seventh round and because of that get to draft their favorite player who you otherwise might have taken. This type of psychological warfare is silly but it happens all the time. My recommendation is to ignore it but if you want to take part in it, steal a page from my childhood chess-teacher: bring a delicious looking sandwich and break it out half-way through the draft. Don’t share it but make sure everyone knows just how delicious and satisfying it is. A hungry mind is a distracted mind.

The other thing you can do to avoid feeling like you’re drafting from a position of weakness is to have a plan. This was one of my key suggestions in a post last year on tips for your first fantasy draft. I even suggested a few simple plans to follow. This year I came across another very simple way to create a plan. The Fantasy Fix offers this three-part flow chart (say that ten times fast) that you can follow. It tells you which position to take in each round given what you choose to do in the first round. For example, if you start out by taking a running back in the first round, you should then take two wide receivers and then either another wide receiver followed by three running backs, a quarterback, and a tight end, or two running backs, a wide receiver, another running back, and then a quarterback and a tight end. I think these are quite reasonable paths to follow and narrowing your choices by position in each round formulaically will lend you a ton of confidence in your choices.

Hope you enjoy your fantasy drafts. Shoot me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com to tell me how they go, what they feel like, and what questions you have.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards: 8-25-14

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, August 24

  1. Sam Bradford’s Knee — St. Louis Rams Quarterback Sam Bradford tore his ACL and will miss the entire upcoming National Football League season. Bradford was the last quarterback drafted under the previous collective bargaining agreement when rookies made way more money than they do now, so, as upsetting as it is to lose your team’s starting quarterback before the season even starts for Rams fans, at least this means the team will definitely move on to a more affordable quarterback option next year.
  2. Angels beat the Athletics — It’s rare that the two best teams in any sport are in the same division. In baseball right now, the two teams with the best records are not only in the same division but in the same state. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they’re actually called these days) beat the Oakland Athletics last night 9-4 to move into first place. Of all the major league sports, baseball has the fewest playoff teams, so this jockeying for position really does matter.
  3. Sunderland ties Manchester United — The most famous team in the world, Manchester United, has a new manager this year, the way-out-there Dutch Louis Van Gaal. In two games so far this season, they still haven’t won with him at the helm. Yesterday they drew with the decidedly mediocre Sunderland. Let’s all just wait quietly for the Van Gaalian eruption to happen.

How Do Defensive Positions Work in Football?

Although most of the glory goes to the offensive players on a football team, who we covered yesterday, I prefer defenders. It probably goes back to when I was a kid and played defense on my soccer team but I think playing defense is harder and more glorious than playing offense. After all, especially in football because of its complexity, the offense has a big advantage. It knows what it’s going to try to do. The defense has to make up for that knowledge gap through savvy anticipation and quick and flexible reactions.

Although there is a lot of variation from team to team, here are the three major groups of defenders:

Starting from the closest to the line of scrimmage where the ball starts each play are the defensive linemen. Defensive linemen vary from huge to gigantic based on their team’s strategy. Their assignment is to prevent the opposing team’s running back from sneaking through their line or, if the attacking team tries to throw the ball, to find a way to hit the quarterback before he can throw the ball.

The next defenders back are called linebackers. Linebackers are usually faster than defensive linemen but still almost as big. They make the majority of the tackles on the field.

Last are the defensive backs. Defensive backs may well be the best athletes on the field. Their job seems almost hopeless. They need to mirror everything the fastest players on the offensive side, the wide receivers, do to prevent them from catching the ball. Defensive backs need to do this without knowing what pattern the wide-receivers are going to run in and do it running backwards. It sounds impossible, and often it is — so defensive backs will team up amongst themselves to cover a single wide receiver or an area of the field. The best among them though, don’t need any help to shut down a wide receiver, and this can be a big strategic advantage for their team because it frees up another defender to do something else.

How Do Offensive Positions Work in Football?

The end of summer means one particular thing to most sports fans in the United States: Football! Football today is the dominant sport in the United States. Even meaningless professional football preseason games are reliably the highest rated television programming of the week. One the season starts in earnest, people will be talking about it left and right. Even if you’re not all that interested in the sport, it’s useful to get to know a little about how it works so that you don’t feel left out in conversation or if you find yourself watching games with friends or family.

Last year I wrote in-depth but high-level descriptions of how each position in football works. Today we’ll run through just the players on the offensive side. (In football these days, almost no player plays offense and defense.)

The quarterback is the leader of the team. He spends the most time with the ball in his hands and is usually seen as the key to winning or losing. His most important characteristics are quick decision making and fearlessness.

The running back comes in many shapes and sizes from agile star to laboring workhorse. He takes the most punishment of any player, and because of this, it’s more common now for teams to rely on several running backs with varying skills than a single transcendent one.

Although you might think that the quarterback is the smartest position on the field, it’s usually the giant offensive linemen that top the IQ chart. The offensive linemen are the construction vehicles of the game, plowing defenders out of the way for running backs and building protective dikes around vulnerable quarterbacks.

In the closely interdependent world of football, the wide receiver is the most dependent position. As the player whose job it is to catch passes, the wide receiver doesn’t have a chance without a good quarterback to throw the ball and a good offensive line to protect them.

The tight end is a hybrid between a wide receiver and an offensive lineman. Bad tight ends are jack of all trades but masters of none. Great tight ends are masters at both disciplines.

That’s a quick rundown of the offensive positions in football. Next time we’ll tackle my favorite side of the game, the defense.