Happy Thanksgiving! How to Enjoy the Football as much as the Food

Dear Readers,

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, signed up for our email list or followed us on Twitter or Facebook, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year. Writing this blog has been a really great part of my year. I hope everyone has a wonderful day today whether it’s full or devoid of sports!

Here are several posts I wrote to help prepare for more football filled Thanksgiving celebrations. Enjoy!

This post explains why football is an important part of celebrating Thanksgiving for many sports fans: how football is about tradition, how it’s a marker of time passing, and how it makes me feel like I belong.
I also wrote plot summaries of each of the three games today:

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
The incredible story of Matt Flynn, a backup quarterback who only plays well for Green Bay.

Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
The Cowboys wear the white hats, the Raiders have black souls.

Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC
Just when you’re ready to sneak back into the kitchen for a turkey sandwich… BOOM! another football game begins.

All the best,
Ezra

Plot in Football, Thanksgiving Edition: Steelers at Ravens

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

SteelersRavens
The Ravens in purple and black play the Steelers in black and yellow

The turkey’s been brined, basted, braised, and broiled. The pie has been eaten. The family has been feuded with. Just when you’re ready to sneak back into the kitchen for a turkey sandwich… BOOM! another football game begins.

When the people who create the NFL schedule put this one on the docket for Thanksgiving night, they probably thought they were pretty clever. Baltimore had just won the Super Bowl and Pittsburgh, although it had just missed the playoffs, was a perennial power that had made it to the Super Bowl three times in the past ten years and won it twice. As two of the four teams in the AFC North, Baltimore and Pittsburgh were natural rivals known for playing close and fierce games against one another. Finally, both teams were known for being led by smothering, violent defenses whose aim seemed equally to prevent their opponents from scoring and from finishing the game without broken bones. They were the perfect choice to lure fans back to the television after a long day and to keep them alert through a haze of tryptophan.

In the NFL, the best laid schemes of men and schedulers often go awry. The defending champion Baltimore Ravens started the season by getting blown out by the Denver Broncos, rallied a bit, and have now lost four of their last six games. They’re really struggling and at 5-6 are two games back from the division leading Cincinnati Bengals. The Steelers are in exactly the same position at 5-6 but got there very differently. They started the season with four straight losses and looked like they were doomed to a painful few years of losing a lot while slowly rebuilding the talent on their team. After their second loss the veterans on the team decided to ban the rookies from playing ping-pong or pool in the locker room. After the fourth loss, the coach tried to “unify” the team by banning everyone from playing any games[1] in the locker room. This seems to have had[2] the intended effect and from that point on the Steelers have won five of their last seven games.

Based on the team’s identical records and their both being two games behind the division lead with only four games to play, their game on Thanksgiving night will have a big impact on whether or not they will make the playoffs. In every sport, there is a palpable difference in play between a regular season game and a playoff game. The NFL is less different from other sports because its short 16 game season makes every regular season game proportionally more important than one of 82 in the NHL or the NBA or one in 162 in the MLB. Still, the hitting will be harder, the scrambling more desperate, and the decisions even more agonized over in this game.

Enjoy the drama and the leftovers!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. With the exception of football, I assume
  2. With the millions of factors that go into the outcome of every play, it’s just as good to attribute turns in the fortune of a team to this as anything else.

Plot in Football, Thanksgiving Edition: Raiders at Cowboys

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Oakland Raiders at Dallas Cowboys, 4:30 ET on CBS

Cowboys Raiders Football
The Raiders in black and silver play against the Cowboys in blue and silver

This is probably the weakest game of the three on Thanksgiving this year, which is good because, plopped right down in the late afternoon, it’s likely the most disruptive to every single non-football related element of your Thanksgiving celebration. This doesn’t meant that there aren’t compelling stories surrounding the game, nor that the sports fans in your life won’t be compelled to watch it. Here are some of the plot points for this game.

The first thing to understand is that everything about the Dallas Cowboys is a big deal. The Cowboys are the most popular, most profitable team in the NFL. According to Wikipedia, they have an estimated value of $2.1 billion and annual revenue around $269 million. Their nickname is “America’s team” which, beloved as they are by their fan-base, makes virtually every other football fan seethe. They are simultaneously the most loved and the most hated team.

The Raiders are an almost perfect foil for them plot-wise. As hated as the Cowboys are, they think of themselves as wearing the white hat. The Raiders don’t just pride themselves on wearing black hats, they like to think they have black souls. For most of their history, the Raiders took their cues from now deceased owner Al Davis. Davis was famously antagonistic. He sued several cities in California as he moved the team from one to another. He sided with another football league in an anti-trust suit against the NFL. His imprint was seen on the style the Raiders favored which was aggressive on offense and especially on defense. Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful obituary of Davis in which he describe him as “a hard man — a genius contrarian who seemed intent on outliving all his enemies in order to irrefutably prove his ideas were right.”

Unfortunately, neither team is that good this year. The Raiders are 4-7 and have almost no hope of a playoff spot. The Cowboys are 6-5 and because the rest of their division hasn’t been very good either, tied for first place in their division. The Cowboys are much more talented than the Raiders and should absolutely win this game but, like the Lions from the first game of the day, are known for being consistently unpredictable. More than that, they are known specifically for losing games in embarrassing ways. The Cowboys quarterback, Tony Romo, takes most of the criticism for this. If it is a close game, listen for the fans in the room to start talking about how Romo “always messes up at the last-minute to lose the game” or how he “just isn’t clutch.”

We’ll see what happens when they play!

Plot in Football, Thanksgiving Edition: Packers at Lions

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Green Bay Packers at Detroit Lions, 12:30 ET on Fox

Packers Lions
The Packers in green and gold play against the Lions in silver and blue

The first game of Thanksgiving Day begins early in the day, when the turkey is just starting on its eighteen hour journey to being slightly over-cooked when you serve it. The Detroit Lions are one of the two traditional teams (along with the Dallas Cowboys) that always host games on Thanksgiving. Since 2000 this has often meant that there wasn’t much drama to the game they were involved in. Since that year, the Lions have only had one winning season, and more often than not they were out of the playoff hunt and, frankly, a bit of a joke. This year is different. The Lions are tied for first place in their division and their opponent, the Packers, are only a half game back. We covered what “games back” means in a post recently but in this case the half game is because the Packers tied last week, not because they’ve played fewer games than the Lions.

The Lions are a predictably unreliable team. They are undeniably talented but prone to dumb mistakes and run-away tempers. They score the seventh most points in the league behind an exciting offense featuring quarterback Matthew Stafford, running back Reggie Bush, and wide-receiver Calvin Johnson. Sports writer and media mogul, Bill Simmons, recently wrote an ode to Johnson on his website Grantland that is worth reading. In it, he makes the case that Johnson is not only one of the best wide receivers ever but also, amazingly, almost totally non-controversial. Johnson wears 81 and truly is exciting to watch. Here’s how Simmons describes him:

And other than Randy Moss, I can’t remember being more excited about a receiver during that split second when his quarterback is heaving a football downfield, and the light bulb flickers on, and you say to yourself, “Wait, he’s going deep!”

When Stafford throws the ball deep to Johnson, tear yourself away from the potato chips and sneak a peak of a wide receiver who is a uber-talented physical freak.

The Green Bay Packers have had much more success over the last few decades than the Lions but they are missing their most important player. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers fractured his collarbone a few weeks ago and isn’t going to play tomorrow. That leaves the Packers reliant on rookie running back Eddie Lacy who has been performing excellently and in one of the most curious stories of the year, replacement quarterback Matt Flynn.

Here’s the story with Matt Flynn. He backed-up Aaron Rodgers from 2008 to 2011. In 2011 the Packers were so good that they had their playoff spot clinched before the last game of the season. They chose to hold Rodgers back from playing the game and played Flynn in his place both to prevent Rodgers from injury but also, I’d like to think, to pay back the long-time backup Flynn by giving him a chance to showcase himself to other teams before he became a free-agent at the end of that season. Showcase himself, he did! Flynn passed for 480 yards and 6 touchdowns, both of which set all-time team records. Sure enough, in the offseason he signed a three-year, $20.5 million dollar deal with the Seattle Seahawks. But before he played a game with Seattle, he lost the starting job to rookie Russell Wilson and at the end of the year, was traded to the Oakland Raiders. That brings us to this year when he AGAIN lost his starting job in training camp, this time to a second-year player, Terrelle Pryor. After a few poor performances when Pryor had a concussion, Flynn was cut. A few weeks later, the Buffalo Bills had some quarterback injuries themselves and signed him briefly but only as a last resort and then cut him a week or two later. And that’s when Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone.

Now Flynn is starting on a nationally televised game with first place in the division and the playoff hopes of the team and their fans riding on the outcome. He played the second half of the last Packers game and did quite well, but it will be very interesting to see how he plays now that he’s the starter. Is there some special magic for him on the Packers that will transform him from the player who lost his job twice to unheralded younger players back to the record-setting backup? Or will he fail and go down in history as one of the weirder footnotes?

Creating Narrative from Sports

The Nets are talented, experienced, and expected to win. What story can I tell myself to make me get behind them?

One of the things that I think is the most misunderstood by people who don’t watch sports is exactly how much story-telling the average sports fan does. Sports leagues, sports media, and even the athletes themselves actively try to create stories about sports for fans to consume. Sports fans activate their imaginations themselves and project narratives they themselves want to see onto their favorite teams and players. This mixture of consuming and creating stories from sports is one of the elements of fandom that keeps sports fans coming back game after game and year after year. It’s a way in which the following of sports is not so different from the playing with legos or dolls or stuffed animals that we all did as children. It’s also a reason why the idea of “fantasy sports” is a little silly. Sports are already an exercise in fantasy!

A recent article in The New York Times by Randal C. Archibold profiled “Juan Villoro, one of Mexico’s most decorated and esteemed writers — who also happens to be a leading soccer analyst.” Written a few weeks ago, when Mexico’s chances of qualifying for the World Cup looked bleak Villoro was eloquent about how he interprets international soccer:

“Every World Cup team reflects its country’s social model,” he said a few days after the column. “When Spain won last time, it was about middle-class aspiration, a nation making it. France’s victorious team before that,” in 1998, “reflected the multinational ideal it aspires to be.”

“And Mexico now,” he said, “it’s a combination of the nation that has been promised a lot, but the promises have not been fully fulfilled and there is a feeling like maybe they never will be. It is a very Mexican team in that regard.”

I wonder what Villoro thinks now that Mexico has qualified for the World Cup by beating New Zealand in a two game playoff? You may guess that he has come up with a new narrative or that he’s found a way to wedge the current (fleeting, he might write) success of the team into his existing narrative of unfulfilled promises but my guess is that either way he’s still telling stories about his country’s team.

Towards the end of the article, Archibold writes a line which I think is exactly right, “But more broadly, Mr. Villoro sees how we entertain ourselves as essential to understanding who we are.” I think this is a major reason why I find it harder to root for my favorite teams when they are, well, really good. It’s much harder for me to create compelling stories with a team that is more talented, more experienced, and expected to win as the protagonist. It’s much more fun to root for a young, up-and-coming team. That type of team fits into coming-of-age narratives, into stories about the dawning of a new era, about young David’s beating established Golaiths. The opposite can also be fun. I am in the process of convincing myself that the Brooklyn Nets this year are worth rooting for. The Nets this year are perhaps the most outrageous collection of over-priced, over-the-hill former stars ever. Their lineup every-night sounds like an all-star team from 2007; and because of that, I’ve found it hard to get behind them. But, now that they’ve started the year with only three wins in the first dozen games, I have a perfect story to tell myself about them. They are the group of bank robbers come back together for one last score (Oceans’s Thirteen,) they are a group of Samurai or gunfighters who band together to protect a village from bandits even though they themselves are weary of fighting (The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven.) I love stories about old-age and treachery staving off youth and vigor for just one more day, one more game, one more season. And now, I love the Nets!

The way we entertain ourselves is revealing about who we are, so the next time you watch sports with someone, ask them what the plot is — ask them what stories they are telling themselves about the game they’re watching.

Cue Cards 11-3-2013: NFL One Liners

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

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Kansas City 23, Buffalo 13 — The Chiefs are undefeated but people suspect they are not quite as good as that would suggest because they’ve played a lot of weak teams or teams missing important players this year. Down, 10 – 3 at the half, the Chiefs looked like they were on their way to confirming those suspicions before they rallied to win.

Minnesota 23, Dallas 27 — The week after losing in the last minute of the game against the Lions, this week the Cowboys won in the last minute. This proves only that cowboys love drama.

Tennessee 28, St. Louis 21 — Football is a brutal sport and resting often helps. Before this game, the Titans had a week off. The Rams had one fewer day of rest than normal because they played last Monday. In a matchup of two mediocre teams, that might have been enough to decide who won.

New Orleans 20, New York Jets 26 — It’s starting to get creepy how Jets rookie quarterback Geno Smith alternates good and bad games. If you average ESPN’s proprietary measure of quarterback success, the QBR (quarterback rating) for the odd numbered weeks in the season so far (1, 3, 5, 7, 9) Smith receives a 52. Over even weeks, he has an average of 8.4. This week was an odd week — the Jets won.

San Diego 24, Washington 30 — Like the Cowboys, these two teams seem incapable of playing unentertaining games. Washington won, in part, by faking the Chargers defense out three times on the same running play from close to the end-zone they were trying to score on. Each time they gave the ball to little-known fullback Darrel Young who had only touched the ball twice all year before this game. This infuriated fantasy owners everywhere who were counting on more well-known Redskins scoring touchdowns.

Atlanta 10, Carolina 34 — It sure seems like when the Panthers win, they really win. Of the five games they’ve won so far, the closest one has been a 15 point margin.

Philadelphia 49, Oakland 20 — Eagles quarterback Nick Foles threw for seven touchdown passes in this game, tying the NFL record. You might remember that Peyton Manning threw seven touchdowns of his own on the opening night of this season. Before that, it hadn’t been done since 1969. Something strange is in the air. Or, you know, it might just be random.

Tampa Bay 24, Seattle 27 — In the same vein as the undefeated Chiefs, Seattle inspires suspicion that its true talent is not as good as its 8-1 record would suggest. The yet-to-win-a-game-this-year Buccaneers almost pulled off the upset but lost in overtime.

Baltimore 18, Cleveland 24 — Last year the Washington Redskins were 3-6 before winning their final seven games and making the playoffs. Their neighbors, the Baltimore Ravens would like to emulate them now that they are 3-5, and it’s possible, but it certainly feels like the defending Super Bowl champions have succumbed to what basketball coach Pat Riley famously called the “disease of me.”

Pittsburgh 31, New England 55 — For the past few weeks, the narrative surrounding Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady has been “what’s wrong with Tom Brady?” This week the narrative will be “nothing.”

Indianapolis 27, Houston 24 — The Texans were up 21-3 at halftime when head coach Gary Kubiak collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Without Kubiak in the second half, the Texans were unable to prevent the Colts from coming back to win the game.

Portraits of the Manning Family

If you’ve been exposed to any NFL football in the past few weeks or years, you’ve probably heard of the Manning family. Father Archie was a well-respected quarterback whose personal brilliance was always undermined by the mediocre to terrible teams he played on, first in college at Ole Miss and then in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints. He married the college home-coming queen, Olivia, and they had three sons, Cooper, Peyton, and Eli. Peyton and Eli have both had successful college and professional football careers. The long-time quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and for the last two years of the Denver Broncos, Peyton is generally thought of as one of the top five or ten quarterbacks of all time. Eli, his younger brother, has been the Giants starting quarterback since he was drafted in 2004 and has won two Superbowl championships; one more than Peyton. The oldest brother, Cooper, was diagnosed with a spinal abnormality in high school and had to give up playing football. The Mannings are the “first family” of football.

This year the Mannings have been a particularly prominent part of the football season. Peyton’s team, the Broncos, is undefeated and he has been playing some of the best football of his career… or anyone else’s. Eli has been having exactly the opposite kind of season. His team, the Giants has lost every game so far and he has thrown 15 interceptions — the same number he threw all of last season. Coincidentally ESPN released a documentary about the Mannings two weeks ago called The Book of Manning.

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers on the Grantland staff and has an absolutely fabulous Twitter feed. Phillips in his own abstract way often seems to have a direct line to the Zeitgeist so I wasn’t surprised to see he had written an article about each of the Manning brothers last week. I’m going to excerpt from each of the articles but I recommend you read them in full.

Peyton:

You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage… Peyton Manning crushes. Peyton Manning burns. Peyton Manning annihilates. And yet … have you ever seen a football player less likely to crush, burn, or annihilate anything than Peyton Manning? It’s possible to imagine, say, Ben Roethlisberger, if a night took a weird swerve, actually wielding a torch in anger; Peyton Manning would spend that same night at home, in his sock-folding room, folding his socks. I doubt he has ever shredded anything in his life. (Maybe a document.) On the field, he’s Genghis Khan as portrayed by your 11th-grade trigonometry teacher. The language that best describes his accomplishments is also the language that most completely misrepresents his style.

And Eli:

Eli is more Archie’s natural heir than Peyton will ever be — like Eli, his dad was a fun and scrambly quarterback, more a seat-of-the-pants adventurer than the lucid math-compulsive then playing in Indiana — but because Peyton came along first, the definition of Manningness has somehow shifted in a way that includes Eli out… Eli is the un-Manning. He is the Manning who makes mistakes, and thus, as a Manning, he is unlike himself.

This is the kind of sportswriting I enjoy! I hope you do too.

Plot in Football: A Case Study

Sports fans watch sports more like fans of dramas, sitcoms, or soap operas than one might expect. Sure, the sporting contest itself is interesting, but there is a whole lot of interest driven by plot and character. The NFL football game tonight between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is a particularly good example of this. As is most often the case with football, the most visible and compelling characters are the head coaches and the quarterbacks. Here’s a description of who they are and the plot that intertwines them.

Before this year, Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent the last 13 years as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. During that time, he led the team to five NFC Championship games (basically the semifinals of the NFL) and one Super Bowl but never won the championship. For the NFL, this is a notably long tenure and a very successful one, only partially marred by a sense that he was responsible for some of the failure to win “it all.” His last few years were saddened by the death of his son from a drug overdose. It’s unclear whether his death was intentional or not. The gravity of that situation and the way Reid handled it[1], his long history with the team, and his close relationship with the owner made his firing at the end of last year surprising despite the flagging success of the Eagles over the last few seasons.

Reid was hired soon after the season as head coach of the Chiefs and has won his first two games this season.

Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the man who took over for Andy Reid, is a polarizing figure. Before this season, he was head coach at the University of Oregon. While there, he developed an offense that has become known as the “blur” offense because it emphasizes speed in all ways. He likes his players fast, and he has them run plays on offense as frequently as possible. Where most offenses may run a play every 25 or 30 seconds, Kelly’s teams aim for 10 to 15 seconds in an attempt to exhaust the opposing defense. Kelly does this by reducing the amount of thinking his players have to do between plays and increasing it during the play. Instead of calling a play with a voice command, Kelly’s teams use some still unbroken code involving hand gestures and large cardboard cut-outs. During the play, his quarterbacks often choose between handing the ball to the running back, running it themselves, or throwing it to a wide-reciever. Because the quarterback is supposed to make this decision based on what the defense is trying to do, this strategy is called the “read-option.” One of the big stories coming into this NFL season was whether this combination of speed and read would work as well in the pros as it did in college. So far it seems to be working although the Eagles are only 1 and 1.

The plot surrounding the two starting quarterbacks in the game is one of great heights, a great fall, and potential redemption but in very different ways.

The Eagles quarterback, Michael Vick, has prodigious physical talents. I once ran across Vick in an airport and I watched as a man went up to him and said, “Michael Vick??! I love playing with you in [the video game] Madden!” Vick’s talents were rewarded with great fame and fortune until he was charged and convicted for running a dog-fighting ring. He served over a year in prison and returned to the NFL when Andy Reid and the Eagles took a big PR gamble and signed him. His personal redemption has been successful, but he hasn’t reached the playing heights in Philadelphia that he did before his incarceration. Perhaps Chip Kelly can help him get there.

The Chiefs quarterback is Alex Smith. Smith was the first pick in the 2005 draft by the San Fransisco 49ers. Although he showed some promise in San Fransisco, he mostly struggled until last year. Last year it seemed he had finally put it together and was not only playing the best football of his career but also as one of the best quarterbacks, as judged by statistics, in the league through the first half of the season. That’s when Smith got a concussion and had to miss a couple of games. The backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stepped in and played so well that Smith never got back on the field. The 49ers went to the Super Bowl. Alex Smith was sent to Kansas City where he will try, under Andy Reid, to prove that last year’s first eight games were no fluke.

Will the notoriously nasty Philadelphia fans boo Andy Reid when he walks onto the field tonight? Will the new whiz kid Chip Kelly stump the old maestro Andy Reid? Which quarterback will continue on his path to redemption? Tune in tonight at 8:30 to find out. Sports!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Reid did not miss a game

Cue Cards 6-18-13

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

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Monday night, 6-17-13
Context: Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The seven game series was tied 1-1.
Result: The Boston Bruins win 2-0.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Boston Bruins goalie, Tuukka Rask, who hasn’t let in a goal since the first period of game 2.
  • Blackhawks player Marian Hossa who injured himself in the warm-ups and missed the game. Given what injuries players regularly play through, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him miss the rest of the series.
  • The series got a little rough in the third period once it was clear the Blackhawks were going to lose. How will that effect the next game?
  • Is a Bruins victory inevitable? It’s starting to feel that way after two straight victories, particularly because the Bruins have now won seven of the last eight games. Can the Blackhawks raise their game to match the level of their opponents?

What’s Next: Game 4 is Wednesday night at 8 p.m.

Why Isn't Everyone Tired of Nadal and Federer?

Dear Sports Fan,

Doesn’t anybody ever get tired of watching Federer and Nadal in the finals of every tennis tournament, forever? Is there any reason to even watch Wimbledon now that Andy Roddick is out?

Thanks,
Game, Set, Watch?

— — —

Dear Game, Set, Watch?,

I’m sure that it does get awfully tiring for all the other men’s tennis players, but for sports fans and specifically tennis fans I think it’s something that far from getting tired of, they savor every minute of.

First of all, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer’s consistency at the top of men’s tennis is really unusual. So what seems like a boring fact of life for the last seven years is a rare anomaly in the context of the last fifty plus years of tennis. And even during the Federer-Nadal years, it may seem like they meet in the finals every tournament, but before this year’s French Open a month ago, they had not played in a final match for over two years!

Tennis fans root for Nadal and Federer to play each other in part because they play with such contrasting styles. Federer is a mix between a magician and a matador. He is a magician not only because he always seems to be pulling winning shots out of his sleeve, but also because he has the slightly smarmy elegance of a magician. Everything he owns is monogrammed with a big RF in an annoying faux-royal font. Federer makes very little fuss on the court. He almost never grunts and he rarely even appears to be sweating. Roger Federer is your older brother who beats you and doesn’t even dignify your efforts by looking like he’s trying hard or cares at all. Federer also had the luck of being profiled by David Foster Wallace in a New York Times Play magazine article that made a lasting impression on the literati; check it out, it is worth reading.

Nadal, on the other hand, is most often compared to a bull. He has even embraced the comparison by adopting a bull logo as his mascot. Nadal is the younger brother. He never, ever, ever, stops trying. He’s a powerful player and his natural talents are defensive. He’s frustrating to play against because no matter how good of a shot you hit, he seems to be able to get to it and return it back to you. Nadal looks more like a cat than a bull. His movements are quick and powerful without being out of control. Every step is aggressive. When the players talk to the chair umpire before the match begins, Nadal bounces up and down on his feet like a boxer.

Would you enjoy Bugs Bunny more if he didn’t always face off against Elmer Fudd? An episodic Star Wars where Luke Skywalker fights against a different bad-guy each hour would surely be less satisfying than his epic contest with Darth Vader. There is something special about watching two people who know that no matter how well they do, to succeed they have to beat the other. The diner scene in Heat expresses this understanding perfectly.

Right now there is a special pathos to the Nadal-Federer rivalry. The normal narrative of the younger player succeeding the older is being challenged. Federer is not diminishing quite as quickly as people expected he would and because of Nadal’s powerful style, there is a fear that his body will break down at any moment. They are two of the best players in history but they are increasingly both vulnerable and mortal.

Enjoy the tennis if you can, I will!

Ezra Fischer