When Fake is Too Real: Professional Wrestling

Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers.

The other day I wrote a post about the sounds you hear when you watch sports on television and which of them are real, which enhanced, and which fake. Then yesterday things got very real when I quit my job! Today we’ve got a story about (as Dave Chappele might say), when keeping it fake goes wrong. Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers. Two recent pieces from Deadspin and Snap Judgement covered this quasi sport in interesting ways.

Fake results, real danger, real exploitation
Fake results, real danger, real exploitation

Deadspin republished an article from Jacobin, a magazine offering “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” The article covers the history of labor relations in professional wrestling and is devoted to it’s thesis that “the billion dollar spectacle of pro wrestling relies entirely on the ruthless economic, mental, and physical exploitation of its performers.” Its tone is a little arch for my taste but it’s quite convincing. I was particularly interested to hear how pro wrestling’s leaders used the very fact that its competition isn’t real to their own advantage:

Another delicate maneuver: is a pro wrestling match a competition, or an exhibition? A seemingly minor distinction—but in the eighties, the money men of pro wrestling broke kayfabe, that code of silence safeguarding the industry’s competitive integrity, to all but bellow at state lawmakers that the matches were predetermined, that the whole show was “fake.”

Why? The benefits were compelling. If pro wrestling is just “entertainment,” there is no need for regulatory scrutiny. By pushing through deregulation, with the help of sleazy right-wing lawyers like Rick Santorum, the WWF wriggled out of paying taxes on their TV broadcasts and sloughed off any oversight by state athletic commissions. In New Jersey, for instance, following the state legislature’s 1989 deregulation of the industry, the state “would no longer license wrestlers, promoters, timekeepers and referees,” and wrestlers “would no longer be required to take physical examinations before an exhibition”—a fateful dereliction in a business rife with injury.

As the quote above hints at, professional wrestlers face terrible physical risks. Wrestling is “fake” in that the results of the matches are known by its participants but its physical toll is very real. The acrobatic violent simulations in the ring take close coordination and can easily go wrong. Beyond that, wrestlers take drugs. Lots and lots and lots of drugs. For all the talk of whether its worth trying to ban performance enhancing drugs in “real” sports, wrestling provides a clear example of what can happen if you allow anything. You can understand the dangers of wrestling through numbers — as this wrestlinginc.com article from 2011 shows, of the “of the 51 talents who appeared at the 1991 WWE pay-per-view WrestleMania VII, 14 have died prematurely.” It compares that to top level boxers, football players, and musicians from 1991 and there’s no contest whatsoever in how fatal the activities seem to be.

You can also understand the danger through personal stories like Kevin von Erich’s as brought to you by Snap Judgement. Von Erich was one of five wrestling brothers who followed their father into professional wrestling. It’s a great and horrible story made all the more poignant by von Erich’s gravely voice and his clear love for the profession that did him and his family so much harm. Listen to it here.

Why I'm Quitting my Job and What's Next

Ezra Fischer
I’m off into the unknown

Today I’m using Dear Sports Fan to share a major moment in my life. I’m celebrating my thirty-second birthday and my final day working at Return Path. After seven and a half years working at the same company, I’ve decided to launch myself into the unknown.
Rather than work a regular 9-to-5, I’ll be working on three ventures: Dear Sports Fan, Fantasy Blend, and Fish for Metrics. Each project reflects an aspect of myself that I want to explore. Each is scary and exciting in its own right and seeing the three together elicits an intimidating and exhilarating jumble of emotions for me. Let me tell you a little bit about the projects.

Project 1: Dear Sports Fan

I’m planning to throw myself into Dear Sports Fan close to full time. I started this website three years ago as a way to explain myself as a sports fan to the many non-sports fans in my life. I pretty quickly realized that the better mission was to try to help non-sports fans live in harmony with the sports-obsessed mainstream, and I’ve noticed that sports fans enjoy it too. I guess even we sports fans are curious to know more about how offside rules relate from sport to sport or how to understand and cope with the playoff beard. I’m excited to devote myself to this project more completely and experiment with creating other resources to help people negotiate sports in everyday life. It would be a wonderful show of support if you signed up for the email list and shared the site with your friends and family.

Project 2: Fantasy Blend

I’m also going to be working on an idea that’s rattled around in my brain for the last few years. I love fantasy sports but when I play them, they cannibalize my brain so that I don’t have space for much else. I don’t have time to think about other things I enjoy, like music, literature, food, television, and politics. If only I could play a fantasy game with all of those topics… Well, it doesn’t exist, so I’ll just have to build it! Introducing Fantasy Blend, the fantasy game of all pursuits for all people. I’ve already started making progress on this idea, so you can sign up now to be a beta Fantasy Blend owner soon.

Project 3: Fish for Metrics

Lastly, I’m going to try to take the heart of what I loved about my work at Return Path and do a little Salesforce reporting consulting under the name Fish for Metrics. I’ll be helping companies who are struggling to get the reporting they need out of Salesforce but don’t want to plunk the money down to buy a fancy Business Intelligence tool.

Be a Part of the Celebration and the Adventure

This feels like a crazy thing to do. I had great times at Return Path and learned so much from my team, mentors, and colleagues, during my time there. As someone who loves stability, it was almost a perfect fit. But as time went on, I found myself thinking more about the “almost” than the perfect. The stability of my career, matched with my own predilection for stability, had me feeling trapped and static. In the past couple years, I’ve had trouble feeling excited and I’ve not felt like I was learning new things.

So, yes, I know that the consulting game, the sports blogging game, and the fantasy game game are all brutal markets where new entrants are often eaten up like raisins glued to celery with extra crunchy peanut butter. It’s okay! It’s important for me to try and to risk failure right now. Sure, I’ll learn a lot about writing and promoting and advertising and web design and game design and customer discovery and entrepreneurship and networking and nurturing business partnerships and a ton of other things. But even more importantly, I’m hoping to remember how to feel excited. I want to remember how to be a beginner and how to learn. I don’t want to shy away from the impossible anymore.

You can help!

My biggest fear in leaping off this particular cliff is that I risk sliding into social isolation from working by myself so much. I’m going to do my best to stay organized and to reach out to friends and family to talk on the phone, see each other for a drink (maybe I’ll have to learn to drink coffee), or share a meal. So, stay in touch, however you can.

Of course, I’d love to have you as a subscriber, beta fantasy owner, or client, too. Sign up for Dear Sports Fan’s email list or ask a question! Join the waiting list for Fantasy Blend. Or hire me or refer me as a consultant at Fish for Metrics.

One of my favorite children’s books is Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. It’s about siblings who have adventures camping and sailing on their own. Before they leave, they telegraph their father, who is serving in the Navy, to get his permission. His response: If not duffers,[1] will not drown. If duffers, better off drowned.

It’s time for me to go sailing. I hope to see you on my way,
Ezra

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. modern translation: incompetent, internet translation: noob↵

What Sounds are Real in Sports?

Have you ever watched a sporting event on television and thought, “what sounds are real in sports?” What about the squeaking of basketball shoes on a wood court? How about the grunt of a boxer taking a blow to the ribs? The sound of a hockey puck hitting the boards? Is that really what the game sounds like? Are they real sounds just amplified to be heard over the crowd or are television sound engineers playing tricks on us by adding sampled sounds in? Would it matter if they were?

Horse-racing-1
And they’re off! But what is that sound?

This is the subject of an episode of 99% Invisible called The Sound of Sports. 99% Invisible is an independent podcast about “design, architecture, and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” It’s a great podcast and I enjoy a lot of their work. This episode is actually a rebroadcast of a show produced for the BBC by Peregrine Andrews. It delves deeply into that 99% to explore how sound designers shape our experience of sports on television.

The first two thirds of the podcast cover how sound engineers have revolutionized the sports experience over the past thirty years or so by cleverly miking and then mixing different sounds of sporting events into the television feed. I particularly loved hearing from one engineer about how his childhood desire to amplify an acoustic guitar came back to him when approaching the problem of how to convey the sounds of gymnastic in the olympics. Like with his childhood guitar, he took a  contact mic and slapped it right onto the most resonant part of the event — the balance beam. As you might expect, the show is lushly illustrated with clips from sports broadcasts. My favorite is a thirty second clip of two coxswains from the biggest rowing race of the year in England, an annual race between Oxford and Cambridge known just as “the boat race.” Coxswains are people who sit in the back of the boat facing the eight rowers and SCREAM. Their job is to set a rhythm, inform the rowers of how they’re doing, to know tactically when to speed up and when to stay steady and to motivate through a mixture of enthusiasm and intimidation. It’s amazing to hear just the sound from the two coxswains in this race, a man and a woman, scream their hearts out.

Things really get moving in the last twenty minutes or so as the show explores the aspects of sports sounds that are fake or “enhanced” as the engineers like to say. For me, the most important message in the segment came from an engineer who was explaining how the familiar sound of a basketball swishing through a hoop is real but never heard in person. He says “Most of us involved in sports sports try to… enhance the experience. We tread the middle road between what’s real and what’s unreal.” What I love about this line of thought is that the more I learn, the less clear what’s right and what’s wrong. At first, it seems wrong to change how the game sounds so materially. Does it matter if the basketball swish is real or sampled if its amplified so far out of proportion to reality? Maybe a little. But then you hear about the challenge of mixing the sound for a rowing race in the olympics. The course is long and winding. The rowers move fast. Worst of all, in order to capture video of the event for television, the race is surrounded by four motor boats and a helicopter, each of which makes enough noise to drown the sounds of the race out. Together, they produce a cacophony of sound to depress even the most truth-devoted sound engineer. So, what do they do? They go out earlier in the day, when the river is quiet, and record the sounds of a few random people rowing. Then they mix the sound, layer it with some cheering, and off they go.

By far my favorite story of fake sounds in sports is that the familiar sound of hooves hitting the ground in a gallop during  a horse race is actually a slowed down clip of a herd of buffalo stampeding. The sound engineer who spilled that trick of the trade chuckled and said he thought everyone had probably been using the same clip for the last thirty years! I just love that. It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons my friends and I loved to quote in high school. Some guys are filming a movie (yes, within a cartoon television show) and they need to film a cow. They use a horse. Someone asks, “Uh, sir, why don’t you just use real cows?” The reply is “Cows don’t look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.” Another question comes, “What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?” And the payoff is “Uh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.”

Usually, when cats get taped together (metaphorically, of course) in sports sound engineering, it seems to be to heighten the reality of the sporting event for far away viewers. Towards the end of the podcast, another possible reason surfaces and it’s what I was left thinking most about after the show. One of the key interviewees in the show is a sound engineer who works for EA Sports on sports video games. Doing sounds for video games, he’s totally free to use whatever fake sounds he wants, and he takes full advantage of that. For example, in a boxing video game, he layers in the sound of celery snapping to evoke ribs breaking when a video game boxer takes a body blow. He points out that televised sports are actually competitive with his games. This is true. As a sports fan and a sports video game fan, there have been times when I’ve switched off a boring game to instead play a sports video game. Part of this competition is a sound effects arms race. The fake sounds in video games sound more “real” than the real sounds of miked sporting events. To keep their viewers, television stations must match the reality of its fake competition!

99% Invisible is a good show to subscribe to and this episode in particular was a great hour of listening. Check it out today!

What the Reaction to Paul George's Leg Injury Means

During a televised intra-squad scrimmage of the U.S. Men’s National Basketball team in their preparation for the upcoming World Cup of Basketball, Paul George, a star basketball player, broke his leg. The word used most frequently to describe the injury seems to be “horrific.” It was an open fracture of the tibia and fibula. Almost as soon as George had been carted off the court and the rest of the scrimmage canceled, the predominant story among the media became variations on the question, “What will Paul George’s leg injury mean for the future participation of NBA players in international competitions?” The thought running through my mind has been, “What does the reaction to Paul George’s leg injury mean? Why is this the media’s reaction? What can we learn from it?

NBA: Indiana Pacers at Charlotte Bobcats
Is the story of Paul George’s injury about his career or the Indiana Pacers?

The implication of the Paul George story that’s been percolating is this: now that a star player has been injured in a national team activity, NBA players should stop taking part in international competition. Who does this make sense for? There’s three main actors in this power play. There’s the NBA owners who employ the players. There’s the players. And then there’s the fans. Not to get all political science on you here, but they nicely represent Capital, Labor, and Consumer. Let’s go through this one at a time:

The Fans

Fans of the Indiana Pacers, the team that Paul George plays for in the NBA, are upset today. They just watched the best player on a team, someone who they’ve grown fond of after watching him play since he was twenty years old, snap his leg on national television. George will probably be okay, the surgery is said to have been successful but it’s not clear how okay the Pacers will be. They’ve been the second best team for two years running in the Eastern Conference, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be that good when George comes back in a year. Their second best player, David West, is in the final third of his career and may not be as good then. They lost their third best player, Lance Stephenson, in free agency, and their fourth best player, Roy Hibbert, is a riddle wrapped up in a seven foot enigma.

All that said, it’s hard to argue that the fans as a whole lose from international play. Basketball fans love basketball and international basketball is wonderful to follow and to watch. Furthermore, if you’re a fan of one of the other fourteen teams in the Eastern Conference… well, you’re not crowing about it but your team’s path to the finals just got a little easier. As a consumer of basketball, international play is a net win for you, a fact even the most depressed Indiana Pacers fan would admit if you stuck her with truth serum.

The Players

Paul George certainly lost out in this particular case. His leg is broken and he won’t be able to play basketball for another year. The players as a group, however, only gain by playing internationally — with a few exceptions. The first thing to understand about this is that contracts in the NBA, unlike those in the NFL, are guaranteed. George’s contract, which begins this year, runs for five years and $91.5 million dollars. His injury does nothing to affect that. Of the other players playing in that scrimmage, only one of them is slated to become a free agent in the next twelve months. Basketball players, even during the offseason, play basketball. It’s just what they do. They may take some vacation but most of the time during the offseason, they’re in gyms, playing high intensity basketball against the best players in the world. This injury could have happened in any practice at any time and the consequences physically and financially would have been the same. Playing in international competitions doesn’t increase the risk of injury for most players and it has great potential value in the form of professional development and exposure for sponsorship or endorsement deals.

The one major exception to this are players who, for whatever reason, feel or are compelled to play in these competitions, even if they are injured. Yao Ming, the Chinese great, forced his 7’6″ body up and down the court every summer for China and it almost definitely shortened his career and lowered his earnings in the long run. The solution to this isn’t to get pros out of these competitions, it’s for countries not to force their players to play.

One last point about the players. The likely alternative to having professionals play in these competitions would be to have amateurs, mostly college kids to play. The cost-benefit for them is significantly worse than for the professionals. College athletes don’t have guaranteed contracts. In fact, they’re not “paid” at all. If a college athlete broke his leg like George did, he might never get drafted, never make a fortune, never have a dream career. Let’s not have the grownups vacate something not-so-risky so that kids can take it up even though it’s more risky for them.

The NBA Owners

NBA owners don’t make any money directly from international competitions. It’s probably worth writing that again. NBA owner don’t make any money directly from international competitions. The downside of their players playing is exactly what happened on Friday. The Pacers owner is likely to make tens of million dollars fewer this year without Paul George than he would have with him playing. The upside? It’s hard to measure. Professionals playing in international competition definitely attracts new fans to basketball who then become fans of the NBA. Players who come through uninjured often benefit from the experience and become more valuable employees.

That’s why the story of this injury quickly became “Will this mean that NBA players no longer are going to play in international competition?” It’s because team owners, who employ the players, don’t want their players to play in international competition. At least they don’t want the players to play (to be allowed to play if we tell the truth about it,) without the owners getting paid.

 

As fans, I don’t think we should take the owners side on this one. I love watching international sports with the best players in the world competing against each other and it’s really not a bad deal for the players, not even for Paul George, truth be told. So resist the urge to take up the owners side on this issue!

Celebrating Women in the NBA

Two stories popped up recently about women in the NBA that are worth knowing about. The women in the spotlight are Becky Hammon and Violet Palmer. Both were successful point guards during their playing days and both have become pioneers for women in men’s professional basketball.

 

Violet Palmer

_MG_2587
Violet Palmer, trailblazing NBA ref

The first story was mercifully underplayed because it’s really no big deal. Violet Palmer, who became the first female NBA ref in 1997, married her long-time partner, Tanya Stine. Palmer said in an interview that although she came out as gay to her fellow refs in 2007, this is her “big formal coming out.” Palmer has been a trailblazer for women in an arena inexplicably dominated by men. ESPNW covered this exhaustively in 2011 and unfortunately not much has changed since Jane McManus wrote this:

No women call NFL, Major League Baseball or NHL games. The NBA has one female official, Violet Palmer. The elite levels of professional and Olympic soccer are opening their doors to women, with the majority of the opportunities coming in the women’s game.

Being a ref is a tough job for anyone. A common cliché about refs, which I think is pretty true, is that the best refs are the least noticed ones. This is because fans usually only remark on a ref when they feel he or she has made a bad call. Violet Palmer has done it for seventeen years and has been thoroughly unremarkable for all the best reasons. Women, gay people, and all lovers of equality should be proud of her.

Becky Hammon

Becky Hammon
Becky Hammon, first female NBA Assistant Coach

Becky Hammon has had an interesting career. Despite having been a star at her college, Colorado State University, she was not drafted by any WNBA team. Instead, she was signed as a free-agent by the New York Liberty where she became a solid player. That was 1999. Since then, she’s played professional basketball in one league or another for the past 15 years. She became mildly notorious in 2008 when, frustrated by not being invited to join the U.S. Olympic program, she became a naturalized Russian citizen and joined their team. This is slightly less crazy than it might seem at first. Like in some other women’s sports, while the most competitive league in the world may be in the United States, the salaries are significantly higher elsewhere. Many women who play in the United States also play professionally elsewhere for part of the year. Russia was a common destination for many top female players during the late 2000s. If you’re curious about the lifestyle, I dug up a great article from a few years back by Jim Caple that profiles a few top American players in Russia. For the past seven years she’s played point guard for the San Antonio Silver Stars.

Yesterday news broke that she was retiring from the WNBA to become Assistant Coach for the San Antonio Spurs, the men’s professional basketball team in San Antonio and reigning NBA Champions. Any major hire that the Spurs make would make news but this made big news because Hammon will be the first female Assistant Coach in NBA history. Hammon is already familiar with the Spurs and they are familiar with her. While rehabbing a major knee injury last year, she spent a lot of time at Spurs practices with the blessing and mentorship of long-time Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. According to Andrew Keh in this New York Times article, Hammon called that time an “internship.” She must have impressed because Popovich not only hired her but covered her with praise (effusive praise for the normally taciturn Popovich,) saying that he is “confident her basketball I.Q., work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs.” 

The best part of this is that just because the Spurs did this, the rest of the league is waking up this morning not only respecting Hammon’s hiring but frankly scared of it. The Spurs have done such a wonderful job over the past twenty years and have developed such a reputation for finding talent where other teams miss it that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the WNBA ranks were thoroughly scoured for other coaching talent in the next year. That’s a good thing.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

Why Does One Player Wear a Different Color in Volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the World Cup Championships of Men’s Volleyball the other day between the United States and Brazil. Why does one player wear a different colored jersey in Volleyball?

Thanks,
Nora

— — —

If you’re interested in other Olympics sports, I’ve written about all the events and have worked on some schedules too. Find it all here.

— — —

Dear Nora,

I’ve been wondering about the person in volleyball who wears a different colored jersey for years. I’ve known they were called a libero and that they played by a different set of rules but I didn’t know what they were. Now I do!

The libero is a defensive specialist by nature and by rule. He or she is usually the best player on the team at keeping the play alive by digging the opposing team’s best shots before they hit the floor. The libero, which literally means “free” in Italian, is something of a magical position because it is allowed, by rule, to ignore most of the normal rotation and substitution rules in volleyball. Like soccer, volleyball limits the number of substitutions allowed. Teams are allowed six substitutions per set in international play but the libero may substitute infinitely. This allows a team to protect their front-court specialists (usually really tall players who like to spike the ball but aren’t great at getting down on the floor and defending the other team’s spikes) from having to play the back line. The libero can also play the whole game while normal court players must rotate off and then back on after they serve.

As is often the case, with great freedom comes great restriction, and that is true with the libero. The libero is only allowed to play in the back line and cannot attempt any truly aggressive maneuvers like blocking or spiking a ball. The libero usually bumps the ball (hits it with her hands below her chest) but is also allowed to set the ball (hit it up gently using two open hands,) but only from more than three meters behind the net. If the libero sets the ball from closer than three meters, play is allowed to continue but the libero’s team has to just hit the ball over the net, they cannot try to spike it. The libero never gets to serve the volleyball. There can only be one libero, he or she is designated before the game by the coach (and by coming to the game wearing a different shirt,) and must remain the libero the entire game unless injured.

The libero is a recent addition to volleyball. It was added on April 20, 1998 by the president of FIVB, the organizing body of international volleyball. Soon after it was introduced, the libero rule was adopted by U.S. high schools and colleges who, in addition to the benefit of longer, more exciting rallies, found that another benefit of the rule was inclusion. Volleyball is a sport that rewards height. Smaller players cannot play nearly as well near the net as their taller counter-parts. The angles just don’t work well up there unless you’re tall enough to get your hands above the net. The libero gives an opportunity for at least the best of the shorter players to succeed. Said 5-foot-4 libero pioneer Kirstin Higareda to the Washington Post, “It’s a big deal. It’s really given shorter people the opportunity to play volleyball.”

It’s fun to think about it in the context of rule changes in other sports that are intended to offset an imbalance favoring either offensive or defensive play. In NHL hockey, the offensive zones were enlarged to create more scoring opportunities. In the NBA, the most obvious example is the introduction of the three-point shot to increase offense but other examples abound. Major League Baseball probably comes the closest to having a libero in the form of the designated hitter. The designated hitter or DH is a position who, like the libero, only plays one half of the game. Unlike the libero though, the DH only plays offense, batting regularly but having no responsibility in the field.

The libero has cultural parallels that reach far beyond sports. It seems like every group of people and every pastime has that one person who’s a little different; who plays by another set of rules. Shakespeare’s plays are full of these kind of characters, the most famous of which is probably Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In a deck of cards, there’s four of every card plus a couple of jokers. The unique character is called the fool in some traditional English dance forms like rapper and molly. Every group of friends needs a good oddball, just like every volleyball team needs a good libero. So, if you’re ever trying to remember what a libero is, just remember: a libero in volleyball is just like Ol’ Dirty Bastard was in Wu Tang… except less offensive.

Groan inducingly yours,
Ezra Fischer

 

Football is Coming

Football is coming. As inevitable as winter in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, college and NFL football is rapidly approaching and when it does, it’s going to wipe every other topic in sports off the landscape. Already it’s beginning to dominate. The first two stories of my favorite show in the genre of sports guys yelling at each other, Pardon the Interruption, were about NFL football. Four of ESPN’s top eleven stories right now are about football. At si.com it’s seven of fifteen. Fantasy football preview magazines fill the newsstands as passionate owners begin their preparation for the upcoming season. If you don’t believe me, there’s even a website, howmanydaystillfootball.com that just lists how many days till football there are. Football is coming.

Football is coming and I have mixed feelings about it. I love football. It’s not a sport I grew up with but it’s become one of my favorite to watch. I once answered a friend who asked, “Why Do People Like Football?” and I listed a bunch of reasons. Among them were the fascinating tactics, the obscure technicalities that are so much fun to argue about, the crazy athleticism of its players, and even the violence. I also listed “fantasy football” and “sitting on the couch” in the list. Here’s what I had to say about them:

  • Fantasy Football — A subset of gambling, fantasy football has taken off in the last five years in a crazy way. Around twenty million people now play fantasy football, there’s a half hour television show on ESPN dedicated to fantasy football owners and our own blog has already had a fantasy football post!

  • Sitting on the Couch — There’s really nothing better than sitting down on the couch on Sunday knowing that you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for the rest of the day. The mid-afternoon football induced slumber is also a glorious feature of the sport.

It’s these two factors that I feel the most divided about. It’s not that I don’t love playing fantasy. I do. I’m even messing around with my own idea of an innovative new fantasy game, but more on that another time. And you know I like sitting on the couch. I’m doing it right now! It’s just that I don’t love the extent of the power football has over me. I enjoy watching other sports. The recent World Cup was so much fun and it didn’t dominate my life the way the NFL can. I enjoy reading and seeing friends and family outside of the context of sports. I’ve been enjoying listening to non-sports podcasts on my commute, like This American Life, Risk!, and Ask Me Another. I like traveling on weekends without fighting off the urge (or giving in, more likely) to compulsively check my phone. Most of all, I like having my brain free from thinking about how to win at fantasy football so it can think about what moves to make next in my career or how to be a good friend, partner, brother, son, and grandson.

So this year, when football swarms over the landscape like the zombie populated winter storm in Game of Thrones, I’m going to weather it more gracefully than before. Maybe I’ll plan a few weekends of travel now so I lock myself into not watching every weekend. Maybe I’ll do a better job picking and choosing only the games I think are legitimately interesting each week to watch. Maybe I’ll go out more to watch with friends instead of hiding in my living room. Football is coming and I can’t wait, I just want to find a way to savor it without letting it sabotage me.

Why Don't They Race the Last Stage of the Tour de France?

Dear Sports Fan,

Something a little strange happens on the last stage of the Tour de France: the riders drink champagne. Why is this? What is going on? Why don’t they race the last stage of the Tour de France?

Thanks,
Julio

— — —

Dear Julio,

You’re absolutely right, the last stage of the Tour de France isn’t much of a race and some of the cyclists will have champagne in hand during the race. The Tour de France is a 21 stage race held over 23 days. The total distance of the course is 2,276 miles and the overall result of the Tour is the cumulative time it takes to complete all 2,276 of these miles. The primary reason why the last stage is largely ceremonial is because the standings are almost always set in stone by the time the riders get to the last day. For instance, this year, the leader, Vincenzo Nibali is 7:52 ahead of the second place rider, Jean-Christophe Peraud.

The time gaps between second and third and third and fourth are much closer — each around a minute. This leads us to the second reason why the last stage is not often the setting for any real racing: the course. The course of the last stage varies from tour to tour but it is almost always easier than a normal stage. It is flat and it ends with several loops around city streets in Paris with the finish line on the historic Champs-Élysées. On this type of course, winning the stage by more than a few seconds is almost impossible, even if the riders were to try to do so. The main way that cyclists pick up time on one another in the Tour de France is by making sprints up mountains that their competitors literally cannot force their bodies to keep up with. Cycling is a brutal sport because you usually can’t win by being more clever than your rivals and you usually can’t lose unless your body hurts so badly that it simply refuses to keep up with the winner. This isn’t to say that there are no tactics in cycling — there are — but they all involve applying pain to rivals. There’s just no way to do this on a flat stage.

The third reason why they don’t race the last stage of the Tour de France is tradition. To try to improve your overall standing in the last stage is thought to be highly uncouth and against the ethics of the sport. How can top-flight, insanely competitive athletes put up with a tradition that involves not trying? It’s perhaps not as rare as one might think, especially in situations where the chances of success are very low — where the game is basically over. This happens in American Football when the team leading the game has the ball and because of the minutiae of how the clock works, doesn’t really need to do anything to win. In this case they “kneel it out” — simulating plays by hiking the ball to the quarterback and then kneeling down. In NBA basketball, it’s common for a trailing team to intentionally foul the leading team in the last couple minutes of the game because, although they give up free throws, they stop the clock which gives them a better chance to catch up. Teams that are down by more than 10 points or so don’t normally do this, even in elimination playoff games where there is no competitive reason to give up. Nonetheless, the power of tradition, professional ethics, and social mores outweighs the competitive truth that .00001% chance of winning is better than 0%.

This doesn’t mean that the last stage of the Tour de France is a bore. It’s not. The last ten or fifteen minutes of the race are fascinating and exciting! While the overall standings won’t change, it is extremely prestigious to win the last stage of the tour. Teams with sprinting specialists who have survived the mountains of the tour will be desperately trying to set them up to win the last stage. The way a team can help a sprinter is by racing really, really fast (but not as fast as he can go) in front of him until the very last moment when he bursts out from behind his teammates and powers himself up to almost 50 mph. As a consequence of all these teams attempting to lead their sprinters out at precisely the right moment, the peloton (large group of cyclists) looks like this massive, lunatic monster that is trying to burst out of its own skin. It’s a sight to behold.

The final stage of the 2014 Tour de France will air live on NBCSN beginning at 9:00 a.m. EDT, Sunday July 27. Tune in at 9:00 for pageantry and scenery but if you want to see the final sprint, 12:45 p.m. EDT might be a good time. The race is predicted to end somewhere between 1 and 1:20 p.m. EDT.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Understanding Tour de France TV Graphics – Department Numbers

Dear Sports Fan,

While watching LIVE broadcast from Tour de France, from time to time there is a note with the name of place, city where particular racers are. And there is always a number in brackets. And I’m wondering, what does that number mean?

Best Regards,
Michal

Tour de France Number
What does the 88 mean?

— — —

Dear Michal,

Thanks so much for your question and for sending a screenshot of the TV graphic you’re asking about. I had no idea what those numbers are but this morning, I woke up and searched around on the internet for a while and I think I’ve figured it out.

The number in brackets next to the name of the town the Tour de France riders are racing through is the department of France the town is in. For example, in the image here, the riders are traveling through Saint-Etienne-les-Remiremont. Saint-Etienne-les-Remiremont is a small commune or township in France which is 70% covered by forest and has around 1,500 households in it. It sounds like a very nice place except for the periodic tragic floods it withstands due to being at the base of a water-system from a glacial lake in the mountains above it. The town was first settled in 870 by a monastery of women. Most importantly to our discussion though is that it is within the Vosges department.

A department is one of the tiered level of regional government in France: regions, departments, and communes in order of size. The history of the department is fascinating. It was created during the French Revolution and was intended to be a rational way of dividing the country. Each of the 83 (there are now 96) departments was designed so that its farthest inhabitants would still only be a day’s trip on horseback from the capital of the department and its borders were intentionally drawn across traditional boundaries to break up older political identities. The departments were named after geographic  features instead of ethnic or political ones. A pessimist would say that this was because the leaders of the French revolution had recently seen just how vulnerable a government can be if it can’t control its people but an optimist would reply back that a certain amount of central control and assimilation is necessary to establish the identity of any nation.

Of course, at this point, all we’re trying to do is enjoy watching the Tour de France on television! Today’s stage 20 will travel through the department of Dordogne [24,] so watch out for the number 24 as you go! If you want to know more about Dordogne or almost any department of France, you can go to its website which is usually www.cg[department number].fr. Dordogne’s is www.cg24.fr.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of the Tour,
Ezra Fischer