Tag: culture

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

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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.

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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

 

Reflections on the 2014 World Cup for the United States

A few minutes after the United States lost 2-1 to Belgium and was eliminated from the 2014 World Cup, I posted “My hands and lungs hurt. That was a great effort by the US team. Also, its fans” on Facebook and Twitter. Now, after a nice consolation dinner and a night’s sleep, I feel like I should revise that statement: “My hands still hurt but now it’s more my throat than my lungs.” And expand upon it too. Here are some of my thoughts:

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There’s more to celebrate than mourn thanks to this United States team

Sports are better for die-hard fans when casual fans get involved. This may seem like an obvious statement coming from a die-hard sports fan who writes a blog about sports for casual fans but it’s true nonetheless. It’s way more fun to follow the World Cup and root for the U.S. team now that so many casual fans are interested and invested in the games. Soccer has been the sport with the least casual fans for a long time, partially because it is so low scoring, possibly because the best leagues in the world are in Europe, so following them involves watching early on weekend mornings and saying things like “Tottenham Hotspur” and “Crystal Palace.” Yes, nodding at other people wearing U.S. jerseys on their way to work (the die-hard fans) brought a smile to my face, but even better was talking to the many casual fans who were really enjoying the World Cup and soccer for the first time. I hope that this experience was a two-way street; that the casual fans out there who got into the World Cup found that they enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.

It is way more fun to root for the home team. Due to the vagaries of life, I only live near one of the teams that I root for, so rooting for the home-team is a relatively rare occurrence for me. It’s great! I’ve got to do more of it. My plan for years has been to become a fan of the football and baseball teams in the next city I live in, since I don’t have favorite teams in those sports, but maybe I should think more radically about changing allegiances. It’s much more fun to root for the team that everyone around you is rooting for and that the media you consume is universally supporting.

All of this is magnified when the home team is one that you can be proud of. The U.S. team may have ended the World Cup with what looks like a mediocre showing, one win, one tie, and two losses, but the way they played was inspiring. Sure, there are a few moments from the Belgium game that will stick in my memory and haunt me when I least expect it. Chris Wondolowski’s poorly hit shot in the closing minutes of regular time that could have, should have won the game is tough to swallow. The fact that we executed such a cool tic-tac-toe free kick in last ten minutes of the game which left Clint Dempsey alone with the ball in front of the Belgian net but he could not beat the keeper also lodges in my throat a little. But the positives overwhelm those sore spots. Tim Howard. Tim Howard! Tim Howard was a rock in goal, making what I believe was a record number of saves to keep the U.S. in the game. Without Tim Howard being heroic, we’re not even talking about the close calls we missed at the end of the game because we would have been down 4-0. Michael Bradley, much maligned as he was by the media during this World Cup for sub par play, was tireless during the game against Belgium. He missed some easy passes, sure, but in the last overtime, when everyone else was looking a little ragged, Bradley (who runs more than anyone during a game,) was the one trailing back to the defense, picking the ball up, and racing forward with it, over and over and over again. The two youngest players on the team, DeAndre Yedlin and Julian Green, both impressed and should give us great hope for the future.

The United States team was great and now they are gone. We can still enjoy the World Cup. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants and hyphens, and it’s okay to root for another team. My neighborhood pulls strongly (and loudly!) for Colombia. My household is part Dutch, so also pull for the orange jerseys of The Netherlands. I have friends at work who root for Argentina, France, Germany, and more. I see posts from old classmates and soccer teammates of mine who root for Costa Rica and Brazil. I’m sure I even know a few people who favor the Belgian team. It’s all good, even, I suppose after a few mean glares, for the Belgian supporters. The World Cup is an international celebration as well as a tournament. It’s a chance for nations to represent themselves to the international community as well as try to win. This U.S. team and our support of it was a fine representation of who I think we want to be as a country, so let’s lick our wounds, hold our heads high, and enjoy the rest of the World Cup.

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To celebrate the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer? and Why do World Cup Soccer Players Blame the Ball? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

What Does "Ball Don't Lie" Mean?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “ball don’t lie” mean? I’ve heard the phrase used in basketball but I’m not exactly sure what it means.

Thanks,
Dot

ball don't lie
Rasheed Wallace, the most devoted follower of the “ball don’t lie” way.

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Dear Dot,

“Ball don’t lie” is a great basketball phrase that means roughly “you get what you deserve.” Its meaning is similar to other common phrases like “karma is a bitch” or to saying someone got their “just deserts.” While it’s true that basically every human endeavor can be interpreted through the lens of karma or just deserts, sports, because they set up high pressure situations and then resolve them with a high degree of luck involved, are uniquely suited to being interpreted through this lens. Of all the sports, basketball is the most well suited to embracing this philosophy.

Basketball is the highest scoring major sport, so if you’re looking to confirm a theory, you’re more likely to find evidence for it in a basketball game than any other sport — there’s just more stuff happening! Of all the major sports it also has perhaps the most subjective (or arbitrary) foul calls. This leads to players and fans on both sides feeling righteously indignant about the calls that went against them. They express it by screaming, “BALL DON’T LIE” and then, no matter which way the next play goes, one side will feel vindicated and consequentially have their belief in the existence of just basketball gods verified.

As one of basketball’s signature phrases, “Ball don’t lie” pops up in unexpected places. Yahoo’s NBA blog is called Ball Don’t Lie and there was a selling novel by that name by Matt de la Pena which was turned into a movie. Retired basketball player Rasheed Wallace was the world’s foremost proponent of “ball don’t lie” as a way of life. Before he retired, he left behind this exemplum of the phrase’s use. Someone put together a six and a half minute compilation of Wallace yelling “ball don’t lie” and more or less acting like a total lunatic goofball basketball yogi. There’s even a t-shirt of the phrase with Wallace’s likeness on it. My favorite example though comes from Hedo Turkoglu in an often misunderstood post-game interview from 2010. During the interview the sideline reporter asks him what he did differently that night that lead to him having such a good game (usually the best player in the game is chosen to do the on-court post-game interview) and Turkoglu responds simply, “ball.” The reporter tries to interpret this mysterious comment as best he can, but I like to think it was more mystical than mysterious — Turkoglu felt that he had worked hard or been unjustly slighted in a previous game and that according to the basketball principle of “ball don’t lie,” the basketball gods owed him one.

Now that you know what it means, you should feel free to shout “ball don’t lie” as much as you can. Watch out for those wonderful moments when the person who cut you off on the sidewalk while texting bumps into a light-post or when that guy who keeps moving your laundry from the washer mistakenly dyes his underwear pink. Ball don’t lie!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

The "Gang Ties" Dilemma

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Desean Jackson escapes a tackle.

People often say sports brings people together, which is true in many ways. Bringing people from all walks of life together also often serves to highlight the gaps and misunderstandings that separate them, which can be a good thing as well.

Recently, a professional football team – my Philadelphia Eagles – released a star wide receiver amid rumors that he had “gang ties.” The cause and effect here is unclear: the Eagles have not, and likely will not, say that is why they released him. In fact, they will likely not ever discuss these “gang ties” at all. (Note: “gang ties” will be in quotes throughout this column, because no one anywhere has published anything remotely conclusive tying the player to actual gang activity).

But this happens from time to time in sports because many athletes come from impoverished backgrounds and grew up in circumstances that seem alien to the fans who follow and root for or against them.

It’s much easier for a kid from the suburbs (New Jersey, in my case) to shake a finger at someone for having “gang ties” – I couldn’t have found a gang to join or gang members to hang out with if I’d wanted to (Note: I did not want to and no gang would’ve had me). But too many kids who grew up in Compton, or Chicago, or Camden couldn’t help brushing shoulders with other kids who were in gangs, whether they wanted to or not. Another athlete with a similar background – Richard Sherman of the Seahawks, who has walked into the cultural buzzsaw a couple of times himself – made this point particularly well in a recent column.

I don’t think commentators and fans usually judge a person’s actions without stopping to consider how different their life experiences or circumstances maliciously; they do it because they’re people, and people view the world through the lens of their own experience. I also don’t subscribe to some notion of absolute moral relativism: I love David Simon more than any living artist not named Allen Iverson, but I don’t agree that I’m incapable of judging someone else’s moral choices simply because their life experiences are drastically different than mine.

But incidents like this highlight the sheer hypocrisy in criticizing people for having “gang ties” without stopping for a second to ask why gangs have taken root in so many of our cities – let alone what we would have done growing up in the same situation.

This reminds me of the cultures-colliding aspect of rap music, which for years was derided as not real music, exploitative, violent, and reflective of society’s moral decay – with the critics somehow managing to miss, or ignore, the fact that those lyrics were frequently a reflection of the world that surrounded the rappers. The fact that rap has been around for thirty years and a portion of the population still doesn’t get it suggests that the Desean Jacksons and Richard Shermans of the sports world will continue to make waves simply by putting their life experiences front and center.

Thanks for reading,
Brendan

How Tough is Too Tough in Sports?

There’s a great scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business, where a mobster mistakenly hires Chico and Harpo as henchmen. He asks Chico how tough the two of them are and Chico responds:

You pay little bit, we’re little bit tough.
You pay very much, very much tough.
You pay too much, we’re too much tough.
How much you pay?
I pay plenty.
Then we’re plenty tough.

We all know that people who play sports are tough — it’s one of the things most sports fans admire about the players — but how tough is too tough? And what is the right way to respond as fans to that toughness?

Boston Bruins v Vancouver Canucks - Game Seven
If Rich Peverley does have to hang them up for good, hopefully having won the cup a few years ago with Boston will soften the blow of early retirement.

This question came to the forefront this week when Rich Peverley, an ice hockey player on the Dallas Stars, collapsed during a game. His heart had stopped but thanks to the quick action of team doctors and his teammates who immediately piled onto the ice en masse in a successful effort to stop the game and signal the seriousness of the situation as quickly as possible, Peverley’s heart was restarted and he is in stable condition. Peverley had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in a pre-season physical and had a procedure designed to fix it. The game was (rightly, in my mind) postponed by the NHL following the incident.

Soon after it was reported that Peverley was in stable condition, a story started floating around, sourced from the Dallas Stars twitter account:

 

As Deadspin commented, “The most Hockey dude ever is in stable condition at a Dallas hospital.”

And indeed, there is something admirable about Peverley’s determination to get back into the game at all costs. It’s similar to the admiration we have for hockey players like Patrice Bergeron who played the final game of last year’s playoffs for the Boston Bruins with broken ribs, torn rib cartilage, torn rib muscles, and a separated shoulder. It’s the admiration we have for basketball players who “walk-off” ankles that we’ve just seen bend in ways that shouldn’t allow their owners to be upright, much less playing a sport. It’s not limited to men either, who can forget gymnast Kerri Strug landing a vault on a broken ankle for the U.S. Women’s gymnastics team or U.S. Women’s National Team player Abby Wambach going up for headers while blood streamed down her head from an earlier injury. A big part of a fans enjoyment of sports comes from admiration for people willing and able to do things that you, the viewer, could not do. Playing through injuries is part of that.

There’s a flip-side to this toughness though. There are some injuries that shouldn’t be played through: head injuries and heart injuries or conditions seem like obvious candidates to us but they are routinely ignored and even hidden by players. Bruce Arthur of the National Post wrote an article about this (as well as the strange need of some hockey fans to denigrate other sports as less tough) yesterday. He writes of Peverley, “Asking to go back in wasn’t so much about toughness as a form of insanity.” He also reminds the reader that two basketball players, Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis both died of heart problems on the court. When Peverley went down, many people thought of Jiri Fischer, a hockey player who was similarly brought back to life after a heart issue during a game, but there are other examples: Corey Stringer was a prominent football player who died of complications from heat stroke but there have been many others, Kris Letang, a player on the Pittsburgh Penguins, had a stroke this year resulting from a small hole in his heart. He is recovering now but managed to get to the training facility and fly with the team to an away game before the trainers found out and hospitalized him. The concussion story is well documented but it’s worth repeating that a big problem with preventing concussions, particularly the far more damaging second and third concussions in a short period, is that players at every level actively hide them from their coaches and trainers.

So, how tough is too tough in sports? I guess the answer is: when it comes to heads and hearts, don’t be tough; when it comes to anything else, be as tough as you want. That’s a pretty hard psychological change to ask athletes to make though: put the team before your knees, your legs, your arms, but not your head or your heart. It would be better to put structures in place in all sports that, without increasing the incentive of players to hide head and heart injuries, identified them and treated the players medically as people first and players a far distant second. I think it’s okay to enjoy a player whose heart tells him to get back into the game even after it’s just been shocked back to life as long as, as Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, his coach, teammates, team doctors, and the league itself were all determined that it was “never, ever going to happen.”

Why do Sports Fans Care More Than the Players?

The other day I was talking to my Mom about the post I wrote following the United States’ loss to Canada in the Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey semi-finals. She complimented me (thanks Mom!) on how well I expressed the emotions of a fan who has just watched their team lose. Our conversation led into a discussion of why it seems like fans take losses harder than the athletes themselves. I decided to turn that conversation into this short essay on why sports fans care more than the players.

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Toronto Maple Leaf fans react in horror to their team’s collapse in last year’s playoffs.

The day before the U.S. vs. Canada game, I had the opportunity to hang out in the USA house in Olympic Park. There I met the mother of an Olympic Snowboard Cross competitor. When I asked her how he did, she grimaced and said “Not so good.” I commiserated with her and when it was clear that she hadn’t let the loss get in the way of her enjoying the Olympic experience, I asked her if her son was able to enjoy himself after the loss too. Of course he was, was her answer. She explained that he usually takes fifteen minutes to a half-hour to get over a bad performance and that she and her family have learned to give him space until he’s done processing. By the time another American racer had won the competition, her son was already able to enjoy it with him, grinning and lifting him up in celebration.

At the depths of my despair about the fate of the United States Men’s Ice Hockey team, I felt as though I had come thousands of miles for nothing — just to see them lose. But then I thought of this woman and her son. If he was able to get over his loss, which he had traveled thousands of miles for, not to mention the thousands of hours of training, then certainly I should be able to get over my feelings of loss. That’s when my Mom mentioned that when my brother and I were kids and our soccer teams lost, she was always more upset, for longer, than he or I was. She said that our behavior was a lot like the snowboarder’s — by the time we got home from the game, it seemed like we had moved on.

Why is that, we wondered? Why do sports fans care more than the players?

The common answer to this common question, usually asked about professional athletes, is that they care less than the fans because it’s a job for them while it’s a passion for the fans. There’s probably some truth to this. There have been lots of stories in the past year that clarify that locker rooms are workplaces and being an athlete is a job. The Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito story was about workplace harassment. The brain injury story has been about assumptions of safety and fair disclosure of risk in the workplace. The Michael Sam and Jason Collins story has been about freedom of preference expression in the workplace. Meanwhile, players are being traded and cut by their teams left and right, each one clarifying that athletes are hires, not members of a team family. I’m suspicious of the logic that adds all of this evidence together and comes out with the conclusion that this is why professional athletes don’t seem to care about losses as much as fans. First of all, if this were true, then we wouldn’t expect to see fans of youth or amateur sports care more than the players. Secondly, the selection process to make it into a professional league in a team sport is so competitive that I think it selects for people who care more about the team than most rational people would.

My explanation is that fans care more than the players because they have less agency. Another thing I did on my trip was read a lot. My girlfriend (this is turning into quite a family post!) recommended The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. In it, a psychologist treats victims of what they called “shell-shock” or “hysteria” during World War 1 and, despite mixed feelings on the matter, tries to cure them so they can go back to the front. Dr. William Rivers (who was a real person — much of the books is based on his and some of his patients’ writings which have survived) uses his few free hours to theorize about the nature of the psychological disorders that he’s working on. He theorizes that the connection between the common incidence of shell-shock among men at the front and the hysteria that during peace-time was a more common female issue, is lack of agency. He doesn’t think that what pushes soldiers or house-wives over the edge is the horror of war or an abusive husband but instead it’s the feeling of being completely invested in something that you have absolutely no power to influence in any material way.

The same, do a much lesser extent, of course, is true of sports fans. We sit in the stands or on our couches and invest ourselves in the success or failure of our teams but we have absolutely no control over what happens to them. As much as we try with lucky jerseys, lucky food, or other rituals, we know that we’re just observers and not a part of the action. My guess is that that is psychologically harder than what the athletes go through during most losses. At least they impacted the game — even if they kick themselves for a bad catch or an errant pass or a missed defensive assignment, they know that they did some good things and some bad ones; they know they had an effect on the game. The athlete who loses doesn’t feel the helpless meaningless feeling of the fan who knows that she cares so deeply about something completely uncontrollable… and that she’s going to continue to next season.

What is a Southpaw? Why Are They Called Southpaws?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a southpaw and why are they called southpaws? Where does that term come from?

Thanks,
Sally,

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Dear Sally,

A southpaw is someone who is left-handed. I’m guessing that you’re asking me instead of an etymologist because you heard the word used in the context of a sporting event. That’s apropos because the term comes from sports, baseball in particular, and was first used to refer to the handedness of a pitcher in particular. Here’s some background about baseball to lead into an explanation of the southpaw phrase.

Of all the major sports, baseball is probably the one that makes the biggest show of respecting its own tradition. One of its longest held tradition is playing games at night but not fully embracing it. According to Wikipedia, there have been night baseball games since the 1880s but major league teams “initially dismissed as an unwelcome gimmick by the big-league clubs.” The last hold-out in the major leagues, the venerable Chicago Cubs, succumbed to the night game trend in 1988, a hundred years or so later. There are still more day games in baseball than any other sport.

Hitting a major league pitch is an incredibly difficult feat and it requires, more than any other quality, great eyesight. As we know from the excellent book, The Sports Gene, the average vision of professional baseball players is 20/13 (they can see at 20 feet what most people can see at 13.) Doing anything to damage this vision, like painting the seams of the baseball white so that they cannot be distinguished from the rest of the ball, makes it virtually impossible for even the best baseball players to hit a pitch.

One naturally occurring factor that could effect the eyesight of the batter is, of course, the sun! If a batter were forced to look towards the sun in a low (rising or setting) position, it would seriously effect the game. Baseball at sunrise is unlikely but baseball games, particularly because of the tradition of playing during the day, could easily be played at or around sunset. You never hear about a batter with the sun in his eyes — fielders, yes, but not batters. This is because baseball stadiums are almost universally designed so that a batter standing at home plate facing the field will be pointed somewhere between due East and due North. This gets them away from the setting sun and, in the Northern Hemisphere, away from the Southerly winter sun as well. Popchartlab has a wonderful poster for sale that shows this.

In a baseball diamond where the batter faces East, the pitcher, standing opposite him, faces West. Imagine facing West and using your body as a map’s key or compass. Your eyes point West, your butt points East, your right arm points North, and your left arm… points South! This is how left-handed pitchers first became known as southpaws. Their paws literally face South in a traditional baseball stadium.

From baseball, the word has moved into other sports and into common use. I hear it most frequently in sports where handedness is a major tactical factor. Sports like hockey and tennis where which hand you favor marks which way you are more comfortable swinging your racket or stick are nice fits for using the term. I’ve also heard it used in basketball and boxing, two sports with motions (shooting in basketball, punching in boxing) that are asymmetrical and handed. In a recent episode of the NPR show, Radiolab, the hosts interviewed an English professor turned mixed martial artist, Jonathan Gottschall, whose first experience fighting was against a lefty and who talked about a theory for why lefties have been evolutionarily retained. The theory suggested that despite many negative aspects of left-handedness (lefties are more prone to any number of diseases and other early deaths,) they have a significant advantage in hand-to-hand combat because their relative rareness means that righties who are used to fighting righties can’t make sense of what’s coming at them until it’s too late.

I hope this answer has been both helpful and interesting. If not, can we blame it on the fact that I’m a life-long northpaw?
Ezra Fischer

On Michael Sam's Coming Out: Why we Should Feel Proud, Ashamed, and Old

This past week, a major college football player, projected to be taken in the third or fourth round of this Spring’s NFL draft came out of the closet to the media. His name is Michael Sam. He’s a defensive end and spent the last few years wreaking havoc on offensive linemen in the SEC. The SEC is widely recognized as the best conference in the country and it’s strength is defense. Sam was named as co-Defensive MVP of the league this past year. If drafted, Sam will become the first openly gay player in the NFL.

This story makes me feel proud. It makes me ashamed. And it makes me feel old. I’ll tell you why.

Sam coming out makes me proud in the same way (but to a lesser extent) as the election of Obama. I’m against any exclusion based on an unchosen personal characteristic not germane to the task at hand. If you want to keep the NFL free of people who can’t do more than five push ups, fine. For most people, that’s a choice (I’d rather write than lift weights) and it’s not hard for them to change that choice if they want. But race, homosexuality, gender, hair color (Andy Dalton, trailblazer,) etc. should not be held against someone. I’m proud to have lived through the election of the first black president and hopefully soon, the drafting of the first openly gay football player.

Then again, it’s about time, isn’t it? This is where the shame comes in. As Jason Whitlock pointed out in his fine on Sam, (http://m.espn.go.com/ncf/story?storyId=10437883&src=desktop) sports is really, really behind the curve on this cultural shift. We’ve had gay congress people for years, gay television stars, favorite gay characters (hell, Obama’s favorite character in the Wire is a gay hold-up artist named Omar.) When Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, he was the head of the arrow of integration. Sam is somewhere amidst the fletching. This is not his fault, but everyone involved in sports should feel at least a little shame that this took so long; that major sports are, (at least on this issue,) woefully behind.

From shame I transition seamlessly to old. Look, it’s a shame that still real weight of being the first is going to fall on a yet-to-be-drafted college senior. Really? With close to 3,000 men on and off NFL rosters each year, that group of grown, professional men is going to let a young-adult bear the burden of this? The truth is though, that the generation ten years younger than me has grown up under different circumstances and with different values. They were eight the last time anyone could reasonably think that America was not only a force for good but that everyone in the world felt that way too. They were fifteen when the State of the Union was first given by a black man. They couldn’t care if Michael Sam was straight, gay, identified as queer, identified as a woman, or was asexual.

When new values line up with mine, as they do here, it’s great, but it makes me feel a little old that my generation couldn’t have achieved this. It makes me think of some talking head’s comment on one of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speeches that focused a lot on education — even in the “Jobs” section of the speech. What he’s saying, this talking head said, is that there won’t be a solution for the current generation of workers; the future will be the future.

Michael Sam is taking the sports world to the future and I’m proud, I’m ashamed, and I’m feeling just a little old.

Of course… that could have been the roughly 16,000 steps I climbed today on a hike from Vernazza to Corniglia. Thanks for reading,
Ezra

Reflections on a Visit to Barcelona FC's Camp Nou

Hi Everyone,

I’m on my last of three nights in Barcelona. Last night, coincidentally the biggest and best known of Barcelona’s major soccer teams, Barcelona FC, hosted a game against Real Sociedad. I figure that was too good to pass up, so I grabbed a ticket and went to the game.

Barcelona’s stadium, Camp Nou is big. I mean, you might think your local stadium is big, but that’s just peanuts to Camp Nou. Camp Nou holds over 110,000 people when it’s filled to capacity. Which it wasn’t last night. Not even close. It might have been about 1/3 full, which is still pretty good for a soccer game on a Wednesday night that starts at 10 pm. But the problem with enormous stadiums is that if they’re not full, it’s easy to feel isolated. Of course, since I barely speak any Spanish and am traveling alone, it’s easy for me to feel isolated anyhow.

Here are some things I noticed about the experience and the game.

There was one section of fans down at the bottom who were having a ton of fun. They spent the whole time jumping up and down, waving banners, and leading songs and chants that the rest of the stadium picked up. They must have been a supporters club or something. Many of their cheers sounded familiar. I took notes and positively or partially identified a bunch: Yellow Submarine, Stars and Stripes Forever, theme from Carmen or Marriage of Figaro or something which I should probably know, something that sounded vaguely Southern or old-timey which might have been Camptown Races and which I recorded as “Bah bah bu bah bu bah bu bah ba da da du da da dah da dah,” and finally Yankee Doodle.

The stadium was more clearly designed to prevent riots than any I’ve been to in the States. Each section had a specific entrance at the bottom of the stadium and once you entered, you climbed all the way up in your own staircase. No mingling with people from other sections and no overwhelming numbers if you needed to get out in a hurry. Once above, there was a little more leeway in moving from section to section, but more than four or five sections down there were medal gates closing off that area from the next. The concessions were also (although maybe not for riot control reasons) pretty rudimentary. They sold hot dogs, sausages, beer, soda, and potato chips. No more, no less.

The game itself was not much to write home about (although that won’t stop me, will it?) Barcelona was clearly superior and from the first few minutes the game took on an air of tragic inevitability that I only really enjoy when I’m rooting for the underdog. After about four chances that should have resulted in goals, Barcelona put one through. Following the goal, one of Real Sociedad’s players must have said something bad to the ref and was sent off with either a second yellow or a red card. Down a man and already outclassed, the game was pretty much over. Barcelona seemed content to win on their superior talent and didn’t seem like they were trying all that hard.

That’s it for now, perhaps more later,
Ezra

Playing Well vs. Playing Good

 

One difference I’ve noticed between European sports fans and American ones is that European fans are more interested in whether their team plays well than American fans. I won’t say that they are more interested in their team playing well than their team winning but it sometimes seems like it. This is a difference that I’ve read about before, mostly about soccer fans, but I experienced it myself today.

I was buying a sandwich at a small shop right outside Park Guell, a really cool monument park designed by Antoni Gaudi, and I started talking to the guy helping me about the local Barcelona soccer team. He said he hoped that the team played well against Real Sociedad tonight; that it was a chance to recover from a loss this past weekend. He hadn’t liked the way they looked during that loss. He went on to explain that the game tonight is the first leg off a two game semifinal in the Spanish championships, Copa del Rey. I probed a little to see if he thought a victory was likely and he would only say that he’d like the team to play better soccer together.

This is so different from most American fans. A conversation with an American fan would focus first and foremost on winning and losing. The loss last weekend hurt because it dropped the team in the standings. The game tonight would be a “must win” or something like that. Rarely would style or playing the right way pop up in conversation.

I can’t say exactly why this is. There are some elements of soccer that seem to at least augment the European way of thinking. Soccer is so low scoring that a single lucky bounce or missed tackle can make a more dominant team lose a game. Perhaps this understanding that wins and losses are sometimes luck leads fans to judge their teams on style and emotion — things that should be able to be consistent from game to game. Maybe too, the two leg (two games, one at each team’s stadium) tournament round makes it so that (at least in the first game) signs of life are more important than the result.

I’m not sure but I bought a ticket and I’m going to the game so I will report back tomorrow!!