culture Archives - Page 6 of 11

Sports are an escape

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

The New York Times Trolls the New York Knicks

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

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

Coach suggests a reasonable strategy. Hilarity ensues.

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

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

NHL stars try their hand at sledge hockey

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

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

How does kneeling work in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Jack

Dear Jack,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is sportsmanship? When is it appropriate?

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

Sportsmanship Captured at NCAA Cross Country Championships

by Alison Wade for Runner’s World

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

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

Is Competitiveness Poor Sportsmanship?

by Sarah Barker for Deadspin

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

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

Volvo Ocean Race: Sportsmanship on the High Seas

by Aaron Kuriloff for the Wall Street Journal

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

2015 in the United States of Sports

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

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

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

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

Sign up for the Dear Sports Fan email list:

Thanks for the support,
Ezra Fischer

The top ten Christmas or holiday gifts for a sports fan

The Friday after Thanksgiving is infamously the first day of the holiday shopping season. Black Friday, as it’s called, is a time for sales of questionable worth and dangerous hordes of stampeding shoppers. The whole phenomenon is a funny one though, because by and large, the only people I know who actually get their holiday shopping done before the last minute are all people I would classify as being the least likely to riot over reduced-price electronics. Most of my friends are just rounding into shopping form now, with plenty of gifts left to buy before the 25th. Their motto (our motto, I suppose I should say,) is “if you leave it until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” Here are the top ten sports related gifts that I’ve reviewed over the last couple years. All are guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of the sports fan in your life!

Bob Ryan’s Scribe

Bob Ryan is one of the best known and most respected sports writers in the country. He started as an intern at the Boston Globe in 1968 and retired from full-time work there in 2012 after 44 years as a beat writer and columnist. He is a Boston sports writer, through and through — never bothering to adopt the feigned objective neutrality of many journalists in sports. Although he is “retired” now, he remains almost as prolific as he ever has been and this book is proof of that.

Stadium prints

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

30 for 30 sports documentary box set

ESPN and Bill Simmons’ series of sports documentaries, released under the 30 for 30 brand name, have been home to many of the best sports documentaries of the last several years. Their model of targeting filmmakers from outside of the sports media conglomerate and then asking them to work on a subject of their choosing has produced some very interesting pieces. My favorites (Once Brothers, The Two Escobars, and June 17, 1994) from the series are all included in the box set of twelve films.

NBA player art

Baseball is the sport of the trading card but that leaves some very interesting niches for other sports to fill in. Seattle-based illustrator Matthew Hollister decided to create player artwork for every basketball player in the NBA. He displays and sells these funky and attractive prints at his site, EveryPlayerInTheLeague.

The Stanley Cup of popcorn

This gift should be a perennial on every top ten list of gifts ever written. It’s hard to beat the combination of the Stanley Cup, the greatest and most desired trophy in all of sports, with the equally desirable delicious goodness of home-popped popcorn!

Baseballism shirts

The holidays are the perfect time to invest in some stylish, clever baseball apparel for yourself or for the baseball fan in your life. Baseballism is a great place to find baseball apparel that looks and feels good. Their style plays on the traditional aspects of baseball without taking on the conventional and a slightly ugly characteristics of old-school baseball uniforms.

The Blind Side

A best selling book and Hollywood movie, Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side remains a classic and incredibly contemporary. On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America, one that has incisive insight into this fall’s cultural issues.

Baseball stadium prints

Not only are these minimalist baseball stadium prints by S. Preston great presents but they’re also a good defense against the fan in your life buying a regular sports poster to remember the season by; one that you will not want hung in your living room. A gift of one of these prints says, “I like how big of a fan you are and I support your team” without saying “let’s turn our house into a locker room.”

Rep your school this holiday season

For fans of college sports, December is not just the holiday season, it’s also the time when college football enters into its postseason bowl games and when college basketball starts its regular season in earnest. It’s a great time to pick up something sports related as a gift for yourself or the college sports fan in your life. Here’s a selection of college sports gifts that range the gamut from useful to kitschy.

Sports books for children

How better to pass on the gift of sports than to give a young sports fan a book that will spark their imagination and inspire them? Two of my childhood favorites, Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks and Ice Magic by Matt Christopher are joined by three wonderful baseball books, Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, and You Never Heard of Willie Mays?! by Jonah Winter.

Bonus: Who’s on first?

Holiday time is classics time in many households. It’s the perfect time to slip back into the wonderful nostalgia and legitimately great entertainment of the mid-twentieth century, back when men were real men, women were real women, and comedians were really funny. Whether it’s an introduction or a reprise for the fiftieth time, watching or listening to Abbott and Costello’s classic Who’s on First comedy bit is a great time. Celebrate the genius of their humor with this selection of Who’s on First memorabilia.

Stumbling to the end… the NFL in 2014

The story of the year in sports has been the downfall of the NFL’s institutional standing at a time when it is still close to its pinnacle in popularity if not expanding. The NFL and the sports media companies that cover it have dealt with some serious issues this year, from domestic abuse all the way to child abuse with lots of other abuses between. At every step of the way, they/we have proven to be rigid, self-impressed, and unable to adequately or elegantly meet the challenges it faces. This year-long travail continued in the news this week with three new stories covering the poor treatment of NFL cheerleaders, a fan who finds himself unable to be a fan anymore, and some insight from ESPN’s ombudsman on his way out of the position.

Buffalo Bills Cheerleaders’ Routine: No Wages and No Respect

by Michael Powell for the New York Times

Mark Bittman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday where he argued that all of our issues from police brutality to minimum wage to climate change are all connected and should be confronted that way. I imagine he would draw a direct line from the casual and incomprehensible abuse of power between the NFL and its cheerleading teams to the other high-profile social issues of our times. For myself, I can say that I simply do not understand the NFL’s treatment of its cheer squads from a financial perspective. Paying and treating them fairly would have no negative impact on NFL teams’ bottom lines. It would be like a single drop escaping from a bucket the size of Rhode Island.

The National Football League, that $10 billion “nonprofit” business, is the occasionally repulsive gift that keeps on giving. An all-American empire, the N.F.L. is structured with various and many principalities and emirates, and fixers who cushion the leadership from the unsightly details of league business as usual.

The team’s contractor handed the women a contract and a personnel code, and told them to sign on the spot. The team dictated everything from the color of their hair to how they handled their menstrual cycle.

The contractor required they visit a sponsor who was a plastic surgeon. He offered a small discount if they opted for breast augmentation and other services. Larger breasts, however, were not a condition of nonpaid employment.

The Jills’ subcontractor, Stejon Productions, readily acknowledges that it is a front operation.

The National Football League, as is its practice, has little to say on the question of uncompensated work by these high-profile women. Goodell offered his patented I-know-nothing routine.

“I have no knowledge,” he wrote in an affidavit, of the Jills’ “selection, training, compensation and/or pay practices.”

A contract surfaced that laid out the terms and was signed by Goodell. A league lawyer asserted that Goodell’s signature was affixed by a stamp.

Vijay Seshadri Struggles With Watching Football

by Liz Robbins for the New York Times

Vijay Seshadri is a poet who hurtled into the public consciousness when his poem, The Disappearances was published by the New Yorker in the issue following 9/11. In this small profile, Seshadri expresses feelings of conflict and loss over his Sunday routine which used to consist of football, football, football; no longer.

I feel a little reluctant to tell you what else I do on Sunday. I feel bad about it now. I feel conflicted. Usually in the fall I would watch football. I was a Steelers fan. My parents still live in Pittsburgh and I went to high school there. I always felt like somehow that was one of the things in my life that ennobled me.

So this year has been very bad for me in terms of the normal rhythms of a Sunday. I can’t really comfortably sit down and watch the pregame shows. It’s weird if you’re a sports fan to have all this karmic weight bearing down on this experience that you approached with a certain amount of innocence.

Inside the ESPN Empire

By Chris Laskowski for Slate

Like many enormous companies, ESPN has an ombudsman, someone within the organization but independent from its normal hierarchy who can investigate disputes and, in the case of media organizations, comment publicly on them. Richard Lipsyte has been ESPN’s ombudsman for the last year and a half but has decided to leave the post. On his way out, he gave an interview to Chris Laskowski and Slate magazine. It’s a revealing look inside the sausage machine of sports news and surprisingly (at least to me,) Lipsyte flips the script and puts the majority of blame for the tenor of ESPN’s “see no evil, hear no evil” coverage on its fans.

The tension here isn’t just between ESPN and its business partners in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. It’s between ESPN and its viewers, who mostly don’t seem to care whether the leagues are doing evil.

Lipsyte says he received close to 20,000 emails during his time as ombudsman. Lots of viewers complained about specific on-air issues—why is this person still on the air, or why does ESPN hate my favorite sport, particularly if that favorite sport is hockey. But what really bothered ESPN’s core audience, Lipsyte says, was “the intrusion of what they called societal issues into what was, in a way, kind of a sacred place. People so often come to sports as this sanctuary from the real world, where they can sit in their living room with their family and not be assailed by anything that will upset them.” For some, that upsetting thing was the sight of football player Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend to celebrate being drafted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I think:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Why do soccer fans whistle?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Wondering,
Whitney

Dear Whitney,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope this answers your question,
Ezra Fischer

The best sports stories of the week

No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:

Wilt the Stilt Becomes Wilt the Stamp

by David Davis for the New York Times

I just love that these stamps are extra long. Fitting for a man who was 7’1″ and loved to (ahem) rack up statistics.

Chamberlain, the only man to score 100 points in an N.B.A. game, will become the first player from the league to be honored with a postage stamp in his image. And fittingly enough, the two versions being issued by the Postal Service are nearly two inches long, or about a third longer than the usual stamp.

That time an NFL team used truth serum on an injured player

by Andrew Heisel for Vice Sports

This article wins the award for craziest sports story of the week. And the craziest part of it is that the contract the Buccaneers were trying to get out of paying by proving that their employee was malingering was not even a big contract. If they went as far as injecting him with sodium pentothal, how far would they have gone to avoid paying a player with a bigger salary?

In a drug-soaked environment where the ends almost always justified the means, is it really shocking that an NFL team doctor would shoot a player full of a substance that was used by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a top-secret mind control program? As McCall emphasized about Diaco, when a player enters a team’s training facility, he’s not dealing with his doctor but “their doctor.” There’s a difference.

When dyslexia blocked his path to college football, Maryland high school player took unusual route

by Dave Sheinin for the Washington Post

Wait, did I say the last story won the prize for craziest sports story? Hmm… let’s just say it’s a tie then. I’m actually surprised false identities don’t happen more often in order to get around the academic requirements to play top-level college football or basketball. I guess there are so many quasi sanctioned ways to cheat the system that going this far out of the box is rare.

He wasn’t a former power-lifter who turned one season of football at a prep school in Maine into a scholarship to Kansas State. He was actually a former all-state lineman from Maryland who, after failing to qualify academically for the NCAA, assumed the identity of his best friend — John Knott — and, using Knott’s transcripts and some forged documents, went off to chase his NFL dreams.

Yes, there was a real John Knott. But instead of the 6-foot-5, 280-pound black man who showed up in Manhattan, Kan., in January 1996 — touted by the National Recruiting Advisor as the “sleeper of the class,” because he was big and fast and nobody knew much about him — the real John Knott was actually a 5-9, 140-pound former high school teammate. And he’s white.

Thunder At Dawn, Or Prayer Of A Rugby Dad

by James Howdon for The Classical

Children often find ways to separate themselves from their parents’ avocations. For some children of sports fans, that means learning to play music or joining the debate club. For others, like the son whose father lovingly describes in this article, that means choosing a sport to play which his father knows nothing about.

There are outbursts of loudness, sudden messes, emotional extremity and inexplicable decision-making in our house, part of life with a bright and hasty teenaged boy. In rugby, it’s reversed: he’s the recipient, the object of constant chaos. Especially during the first few workouts, it must’ve felt like life in a tiny random universe: balls came his way without warning, bodies careened and bumped, and the flow of play suddenly reversed or stopped or accelerated in ways utterly surprising to him.

He is learning a sport about which his old man definitely doesn’t know better. He digs that part of the deal with a really big shovel, to be the one teaching.

Fantasy Football Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

by Courtney Rubin for the New York Times

As I wrote about earlier this week, the fantasy football playoffs start this weekend in most leagues. That means people all over the country, not just men, will be going crazy — screaming with joy, frustration, and staring fixedly at their phones, hoping for miracles!

Unflattering stereotypes abound about the female fantasy football player — does it only because of her boyfriend/husband, picks based on how cute the players are — but these days, young women are turning to fantasy football as a way to bond with friends, especially faraway ones with whom they communicate about their hobby on social media and GChat.

She [Adrienne Allen] is so competitive that she refuses to name her favorite research sources, lest she tip off the competition. But she will reveal that her diligence includes scanning the Internet for articles about players’ personal lives because drama can affect performance. “It’s a huge soap opera,” she said of the N.F.L.

In review: Ray Rice

With the end of the year approaching, Grantland, along with basically every other publication out there, has started to run some reflections on the past eleven months. That’s fortuitous timing for a reflection on the Ray Rice domestic violence story that has spanned almost all of 2014. The story is ongoing; Rice was just reinstated after winning an appeal of the NFL’s attempt to suspend him indefinitely. He won’t return to the playing field immediately or perhaps ever because his former team cut him while he was suspended, but there’s a good chance that some team will hire him again. Following the ruling on Rice’s suspension, the majority of the stories were about how poor NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, was made to look by having his suspension overturned. Brian Phillips, one of my favorite writers, argues a different case in this look back on the Ray Rice story. It’s not just Goodell who should be ashamed, it’s all of us who were only outraged once we saw the infamous video of Rice assaulting his then fiancee in an elevator.

The Dark Room

by Brian Phillips for Grantland

For the Rice tape to help you understand the extent of the domestic-violence problem in the United States, you have to imagine that TMZ kept posting videos — that it posted one two seconds later, in fact, and another one three seconds after that. It started throwing up 24 videos a minute, faster than you could play them, too fast for you to keep up. In three of these videos during the first day, you could watch a woman being murdered by her partner. Then three more on the second day. And so on. You kept playing them; TMZ kept churning out GIFs. You watched a million videos a month. Twelve million in the first year. And the videos kept coming.

Roger Goodell should lose his job. But if you’re angry enough to want Goodell fired, shouldn’t you be angry enough to think about the other victims of violence? To talk about them?