Sports Forecast for Monday, March 9, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:

  • International Women’s Soccer – Algarve Cup – Brazil vs. Germany, 1:30 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1.
  • FA Cup Soccer – Arsenal at Manchester United – 3:45 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1.
  • NBA Basketball – Memphis Grizzlies at Chicago Bulls, 8 p.m. ET on NBA TV.
  • NHL Hockey – Pittsburgh Penguins at San Jose Sharks 10 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

Why do people like boxing?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get why anyone watches boxing. It’s brutal and doesn’t seem all that interesting. Why do people like boxing?

Thanks,
Nick

Dear Nick,

Boxing is a truly brutal sport and you have my permission not to like it if you don’t want to. No one will make you! There are lots of people who do like boxing though and I think they have some pretty good reasons. There are a lot of things that are appealing about the sport. It’s a sport where fans really get to know the athletes because there are only two of them and they barely wear any clothing. Along with running, it’s the most elemental sport there is. It’s both highly technical and very emotional. Over the years, it’s also inspired a wealth of wonderful stories and the legacy of those movies, documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, and books imbues the sport with an air of drama. Lastly, it’s kind of an old-school sport. During the middle of last century, boxing was one of the biggest sports in the United States. Being a boxing fan today gives you permission to enjoy a big does nostalgia. It’s also honest. There’s no pretending that the sport is about anything other than damaging someone’s brain or their body. There’s something to be appreciated about that, even if it is brutal.

Let’s explore some of these reasons in greater depth.

Boxing is elemental

Boxing is to sports what the paleo diet is to nutrition. There’s no sport which calls to our ancient hearts more than boxing. If prostitution is the oldest profession, then boxing (or running) is the oldest sport. Boxing is sport stripped down to it’s base elements. It’s just two people, trading punches until one person falls. Every other sport seems artificial and contrived in comparison. Offsides? Two-line pass? Block/charge calls? Boxing doesn’t deal with any of that nonsense — don’t kick or head-butt, don’t hit someone in the crotch… those are about the only rules. Part of the joy of watching sports is wondering what you would do in a similar situation. Would you come through? Would you battle through pain? That’s increasingly difficult to do in sports like football. How can you imagine yourself in a situation whose details are virtually beyond understanding. It’s hard to daydream about catching a hook route or a stop-and-go much less how you would attack a pulling guard to get to the quarterback. It’s easy to imagine being in a fight. Fights happen in real life all the time. You hope it doesn’t happen to you but it’s not hard to put yourself in that situation and think about how you would respond.

Boxing is highly technical

Of course, any real boxing fan will be squirming in their seat reading the previous paragraph. While it’s true that boxing is fighting and fighting is elemental, it’s not true that boxing is simple. It’s highly technical. If you listen to boxers talk about their fights, what’s usually going on in their heads is as foreign for most lay people as complex football concepts. Boxing is a highly tactical sport. Despite the fact that they’re getting hit, often in the head, constantly, boxers are busy trying to think one step ahead of their opponent. Something seemingly small, like how a boxer moves his left foot out an inch before throwing a particular punch, or how, after landing a punch to the head, they leave their right elbow a smidge too far to the outside, can be the difference between winning and losing. Clever boxers will spend whole rounds sussing these little weaknesses out or setting their opponent up by simulating a weakness of their own, only to make it disappear when the other guy least expects it.

Boxing tests athletes to their limit

How many times have you watched a soccer game and seen the players hug, trade shirts, and walk off the field smiling. Or an NBA game where players give each other dap before the games and stroll off after the game to get changed and do some media interviews. Forget about baseball, where professionals can still play two games in one day. Those sports are all hard in their own ways but they don’t test their participants the way boxing does. When a fighter steps into a boxing ring, they’re guaranteed to have an intense, life-altering experience. It happens every time. That’s why boxers only fight once to a handful of times a year as opposed to basketball with its 82 game regular season or baseball with double that amount. There are no substitutions or injury timeouts in boxing. If a fighter is injured, they lose. That’s kind of the point.

Boxing has great stories

Boxing has inspired great fictional movies like Raging Bull, The Fighter, and Million Dollar Baby, not to mention the all-time classic, Rocky. There’s a slew of great articles and books about boxing like David Remnick’s King of the World, Norman Mailer’s The Fight, and Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing. If you’re in a documentary mood, check out these two lesser known films, Ring of Fire – The Emile Griffith Story about a fight that begun with gay slurs and eventually led to the death of one of the boxers or Kassim the Dream about an Ugandan child soldier who became a champion boxer. Boxing is one of the most personal sports out there and it’s rawness lends itself to compelling characters and dramas.

Thanks for reading, hopefully this has explained some of why other people like boxing, even if you never do,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Friday, March 6, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:

  • Men’s Tennis – Davis Cup, United States vs. Great Britain, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET on the Tennis Channel.
  • International Women’s Soccer – Algarve Cup – United States vs. Switzerland, 12 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1.
  • NBA Basketball – Phoenix Suns at Brooklyn Nets, 8 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NBA Basketball – Dallas Mavericks at Golden State Warriors, 10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • Major League Soccer – Chicago Fire at Los Angeles Galaxy, 10 p.m. ET on UniMas.
  • Women’s College Basketball – Rutgers vs. Northwestern, 2:55 p.m. ET on the Big Ten Network.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Thursday, March 5, 2015?

  1. Westbrook can do it all, but he can’t do it ALL: Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder has been on a roll lately. Last night, he continued that roll by scoring 43 points against the Chicago Bulls but his team still lost 108-105. Westbrook is playing Super Man while his co-star, Kevin Durant, heals from minor foot surgery. It’s fun to see how much Westbrook can do by himself but I’m sure the team would love to get Durant back.
    Line: Westbrook is Super Man but I guess the Bulls had some kryptonite.
  2. Nothing to see here, just two good teams: It’s time to stop being surprised that the New York Islanders and Nashville Predators are good at hockey. They’re good! They just haven’t been over the past few decades, so it still feels funny to hockey fans, but no more! The Islanders beat the Predators last night in a tight, 4-3 game in Nashville.
    Line: I know it’s hard to believe, but believe it. They’re good!
  3. Trail Blazers win but lose: The Portland Trailblazers handled their game against the Dallas Mavericks like it was nothing, winning 94-75 but the victory had an enormous cost. One of their best players, Wesley Matthews tore his Achilles tendon. That’s a big blow for a team that was expecting to make a deep run into the playoffs.
    Line: Ugh. Injuries are the worst part of sports.

Mascots through the eyes of Errol Morris and the ears of This American Life

The sports and pop culture media outlet, Grantland, is featuring six short films by Errol Morris this week in a series they’re calling, It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports. I’ve been following along, watching, thinking, and reviewing here. I wrote about the first film in the series, The Subterranean Stadium on Monday, and the second and third films, The Heist and The Streaker on Wednesday. Today’s release is Being Mr. Met an extended interview with AJ Mass, the first person to play the New York Mets mascot when the team revived the character in 1994.

Being Mr. Met is a disappointing effort in what is increasingly a let-down of a series from one of my favorite film-makers. Of the four films, only the first had the type of emotional depth that can elevate this type of short film. Morris barely scratches the surface of what it’s like to be the person inside of a mascot costume. Oh, sure, there’s the obligatory mascot getting hit in the nuts story as well as what could have been a truly scary moment with a group of middle-schoolers with baseball bats. There’s a gesture (one might even say a head-fake to use sports language) at the disconcerting process of separating the actor from the character when Mass was fired by the team.

Mass is a modestly interesting character but nothing in this film even approaches the hilarity and interest in the excellent This American Life radio piece about Navey Baker, a shy high school girl who comes alive when she puts on the school’s tiger mascot costume. That story grabs your attention from the beginning by describing Navey as a four year-old obsessed with pretending to be a dog.

Navey drank from a bowl, crawled around sniffing crotches, and, let’s let her Dad tell the piece de resistance:

I mean, I was fine with her being a dog until she started crapping in the yard. I didn’t think that was very funny [chuckles]… it is funny though.

From that moment on, you’re transfixed to the radio as Navey’s cousin, Elna Baker, leads you in an exploration of her Navey’s life and just how strange the full embodiment of a character can be. Towards the end of the segment, Elna tests her cousin to see if it’s true that she can’t do a simple cartwheel without wearing her tiger costume. It is. Outgoing and acrobatic in costume, Navey remains shy and awkward without it. That’s the type of examination into the power of character and mascots that I would expect Morris to be engaged in with his story about Mr. Met. Instead, Morris seems satisfied to ask softball questions about the “trouble” between Mass and the New York Mets organization and, instead of pursuing a deeper answer, retreats back into detached bemusement.

What's a goalie? Why are they so crazy?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people say goalies are crazy? What’s a goalie anyway?

Thanks,
Jean

Dear Jean,

When I was in middle school, I discovered ice hockey. I remember lying on my bed and watching games on a little square television at my Dad’s house. Even back then, I felt compelled to jot down interesting things I heard, as if I was preparing to write a blog, despite this being years before blogs existed and decades before I started Dear Sports Fan. I still have some of the quotes I wrote down. One of them was about goalies:

Some people say 90% of goaltending is mental. I say 90% of goaltenders are mental!

I’m not positive who said that but it’s a safe bet that it was John Davidson, a former NHL goalie who was then the color commentator for the New York Rangers. He and partner Sam Rosen were definitely the most common hockey voices in my early memories of the sport. Goaltenders or goalies are frequently described as being a little bit crazy. It’s unclear whether the position attracts players who are a little bit… different or whether the position takes normal people and twists them. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both. In order to appreciate the colorful nature of goalies, it’s important to understand what the position entails.

The position of goaltender exists in many sports: soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, team handball, and water polo. In each sport, the goalie is the most specialized position. She exists solely to do whatever she can to prevent the other team from scoring. Usually the goalie is granted special privileges in order to help them in their task. The most dramatic of those is in soccer where the goalie is the only player who can use his hands. In ice hockey, the goalie gets to wear thick leg pads, a large chest protector, a catching glove on one hand and a blocker and wide stick in the other. An ice hockey goalie also has special rules which apply only to her, including protection against being hit. Lacrosse goalies are allowed to have sticks with much larger heads than other players to make it easier to block shots with them. Water polo goalies are allowed to touch the ball with two hands and even touch the bottom of the pool.

You might think all those extra privileges make goalie the easiest position to play. Not true! The extra privileges of the goalie in most sports are a recognition of how difficult their job is. The margin of error for goalies in lower scoring sports (which is most goalies because, not coincidentally, there’s a strong correlation between having a goalie and having a low-scoring sport) is tiny and the consequences for error are enormous. Take poor Robert Green, for instance. In 2010 he was one of the best 40 people in the entire world at his profession yet all he will be remembered for (literally, it’s going to be the first line of his obituary one day) will be this momentary lapse against the United States in the World Cup. Hockey goalies who save 90% of the shots they face are probably not going to last long in the NHL where the best goalies save over 92.5% of the shots they face. Compare that to a non-goalie who scores on 20% of the shots he takes and is celebrated as an extraordinary goal-scorer. Even in a relatively high scoring sport like team handball, where, according to the New York Times, a goalie “can allow as many as 30 goals and still be thought to have had a good game” being a goalie comes with its down-side. Goalies are so frequently injured by shots that the international federation in charge of the sport is considering changing its rules to reduce injuries.

The challenges and pressure that goalies face seems to attract or create two types of people: those who compensate through obsessive behavior and those who compensate through aberrant behavior. Almost all goalies are one of the two types, some are both. Hockeygrrl lists some of the more well-known obsessive behavior in her post about hockey goalies, including Patrick Roy’s refusal to let anything, even ice shavings into his net, Henrik Lundqvist’s ritual of tapping the wall the same number of periods he’s played so far in the game, and my new favorite, Jocelyn Thibault’s tradition of pouring “water over his head precisely six-and-a-half minutes before a game began.” For the more far-out their behavior on the other side of the spectrum, see Colombian soccer goalie Rene Higuita, who was literally nicknamed “the lunatic” and hockey goalie Ilya Bryzgalov who once responded to a question about the offensive threats on an opposing team by saying that he was “only afraid of [a] bear.”

No matter how you cut it, goalies are some of the most important and most colorful people in sports.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Thursday, March 5, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:

  • NHL Hockey – New York Islanders at Nashville Predators, 8 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA Basketball – Oklahoma City Thunder at Chicago Bulls, 8 p.m. ET on TNT.
  • NBA Basketball – Dallas Mavericks at Portland Trailblazers, 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Wednesday, March 4, 2015?

  1. U.S. Women challenged but come through: The United States Women’s National soccer team played their first game of the Algarve Cup, an international tournament in Portugal, yesterday against Norway. Despite dominating play in the first half, the United States went into halftime down 1-0. They regrouped and scored twice in the second half to beat Norway 2-1. This tournament doesn’t, in and of itself, mean that much, but it’s the best warm-up the world’s top-flight teams have before this summer’s World Cup.
    Line: The team looked good, but I’d be more comfortable with a 4-1 or 5-1 win than a 2-1 score.
  2. Russell Westbrook is unstoppable: Playing with a clear plastic mask to protect a broken bone in his face, Oklahoma City Thunder player, Russell Westbrook, scored 49 points, 16 rebounds, and 10 assists for his fourth triple-double (double digits in three major statistics) in a row. That’s an amazing feat, extremely rare in the modern game.
    Line: Westbrook is a force of nature.
  3. Hockey ramps up: More than any other sport, ice hockey transforms from the regular season to the playoffs. It’s almost like two entirely different games. As we approach the start of the playoffs in mid-April, the games are starting to get more and more intense. The Detroit Red Wings’ 2-1 overtime win over the New York Rangers fit that bill with tough defense and great goaltending.
    Line: The Red Wings look like they’re going to make the playoffs again… did you know that will be 23 years in a row?! By far the longest streak in American men’s professional sports.

Errol Morris on streaking and stealing

I’m not sure Errol Morris is a sports fan. As I watched the second and third installment of his six part series of short films on Grantland, it became increasingly clear to me that Morris is in this primarily for humor. The Heist and The Streaker,  like the first film in the series, The Subterranean Stadium focused exclusively on the strange behavior of non-athletes.

The Heist tells the story of four Duke men’s college basketball fans who sneak into the stadium of their arch-rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels, and steal a ceremonial jersey which was hanging on the rafters. There’s a tradition in American sports of honoring a great player by “retiring” his or her jersey. Once a jersey is retired, no one on that team can use that jersey number again. To symbolize this, a giant jersey is ceremonially hung from the rafters of the stadium. In this case, the number was 23 and the player was Michael Jordan. The four Duke fans, who remain nameless throughout the film and whose faces and voices are are obscured, concocted a plot to sneak into the stadium, steal the jersey, and then reveal it during a game between the two team, temporarily modified to support Duke instead of North Carolina. This simple, sophomoric prank goes smoothly, although the hoped for reveal never happens. It’s not, by itself, an extremely interesting subject for a short film but Morris clearly enjoys himself applying all of the tropes of a true-crime film to this nominally illegal act.

The hijinks continue in Morris’ third film in the It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports series with The Streaker. Mark Roberts, the eponymous streaker who gives the film its name, is the world’s most famous streaker. He has streaked at every major sporting event and despite the fact that police forces and security companies all over the world know who he is, he manages to keep doing it. Now in his fifties, he’s still blithely unapologetic about what has become his life’s work. To my disappointment, Morris does not press him on the real potential danger of allowing or encouraging other people to run onto the field. I would have been fascinated to hear what Roberts said if confronted with questions about the times when a fan has run onto the court with violent intent, like the fan who stabbed tennis star Monica Seles in 1993. Instead, we get more high-spirited frivolity, including Roberts’ answer to the question, “would you want to die while streaking?”

I can’t say that I haven’t enjoyed these short films but I am mildly disappointed so far. Morris is such a wonderful film maker and interviewer but I feel his choice of topics is limiting the quality and meaning of these films. In my review of the first film, The Subterranean Stadium, I enjoyed how Morris used a light-hearted subject to examine deeper and more emotive aspects of real life. That second level was missing in these two films for me. What did you think?

What's a franchise tag?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s a franchise tag?

Thanks,
Aaron

Dear Aaron,

A franchise tag is a contractual technicality National Football League (NFL) teams can use in negotiating with one of their players who is going to become an unrestricted free agent. Of all the major American sports leagues, the NFL is the one where the power is most unevenly shifted towards the teams and against the players. The franchise tag, although it does have some benefit for a player who receives one, is an expression of the power teams have, even over star players.

Players in the NFL can sign contracts with teams for one or more than one year. The best players often sign longer contracts than their coworkers. Three or four years is fairly ordinary for these players. At the end of every contract, a player becomes either a restricted or an unrestricted free agent based on the small print in their original contract and league rules. A restricted free agent is allowed to negotiate with other teams, but if they receive an offer from another team, their current team is allowed to match it. If the first team matches the offer of the second, the player stays on his current team. It’s not up to him. If the team chooses not to match the other team’s offer, the player will go play for the new team but his original team receives some compensation for his loss from his new team – usually in the form of a draft pick in an upcoming draft. Unrestricted free agents don’t need to deal with any of this complication. They are free to negotiate with all the NFL teams on the open market. If another team offers them a higher salary or is more attractive for some other reason, they can go play for that team. The choice is 100% the player’s and their original team gets nothing in return.

The easiest way of thinking about the franchise tag is that it’s something each NFL team can do place restrictions on one of their unrestricted free agents each year. This seems unfair, doesn’t it? Well, I suppose it’s not because these rules were collectively bargained for in negotiations between the NFL and the Players Association, but I’m sure it still feels unfair to a player whose free agency is taken away from him in this way. When a player receives a franchise tag (or “is franchised”) he receives a set salary based on the position he plays and the type of franchise tag his team placed on him.

There are three types of franchise tags:

  • Exclusive – This is the most restrictive form of a franchise tag. When a team uses an exclusive franchise tag on a player, they have effectively resigned him for one year at quite a high salary. An exclusive franchise player gets either the average salary of the top five players at his position or a 20% raise over his salary last season, whichever is bigger.
  • Non-Exclusive – This is the most common form of franchise tag. A non-exclusive franchise tag restricts a player very much like being a restricted free agent. He is free to sign an offer sheet from another team but if his team does not match the offer, it gets two first round draft picks from the other team. That’s a high price to pay for even a great player. If the player stays on his original team, he gets the same deal as described above in the exclusive section.
  • Transition – This type of franchising is not really used anymore. It was once a way of restricting a player’s movement without even guaranteeing him a salary but that unfairness has been rectified. It’s still a little cheaper for a team to use a transition tag but if another team signs the player, the first team receives no compensation.

Teams don’t need to use a franchise tag every year. In fact, only a handful of teams use one each year. They are, after all, pretty expensive since the team is then responsible for paying one of their players at a rate commensurate with the top players at his position. Teams can tag a player as a franchise player for a second or even third year but it gets more and more expensive each year. Not only do those 20% raises add up but after the second time, the team is required to provide a 44% raise instead of a 20% one! The one counter-intuitive loophole to this is when a team has the best player at a relatively cheap position, like kicker. In this case, the best player may be able to get a significantly higher salary on the open market than the other top players at his positions. Paying that player the average of his and the next four players at his position might be a lot cheaper than just paying him what he’s worth.

Why do teams use franchise tags? Aside from the rare case when it’s cheaper, primarily, it’s a negotiating tool with a player the team would like to hold on to. If the two sides are having trouble negotiating a long-term deal, the team can use the franchise tag as a way of forcing the player’s hand (see, you’re not going anywhere, now let’s figure out how to make a long-term deal.) That’s the best case scenario. In the most cynical view, it could be used by a team as a way of holding on to an important player without committing to him in the long-term. The risk for a player is that if he gets hurt during a year when he’s on a one-year franchised player deal, he may not be able to command as high a salary in as long-term of a deal as he once was. In a worst-case scenario, a franchised player could suffer a career ending injury and never have a chance to sign the long-term deal they thought they would be able to get.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer