15 posts tagged “sports”

Let's say you are hired as the new coach for some kind of sports team. What do you tell the press to give fans hope that the team will improve under your leadership?  You can't slag the players because they have to play for you, and it's discourteous to slag the previous coach. One day you'll be the previous coach and you don't want people talking you down when they replace you. There seems to be one thing you can say that's politically correct in the culture of coaching, and that is that you will improve strength and conditioning. Every new coach talks about how he's putting in a new strength and conditioning program that will make everything better. The sad thing is, until recently I actually believed it.

I like Peter King pretty well as far as sportswriters go, but you have to wonder about a guy who goes on vacation in Europe and hits the local Starbucks (skip to the last page) in every port of call. This is a guy who bills himself as a "coffee nerd". In his dreams, perhaps.

I have no good reason to care about the AFC Championship game this afternoon, but I still want the Colts to win. Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in the NFL by any objective measurement, other than Super Bowl wins. Super Bowl wins are nice, but they really don't say much about a quarterback's individual performance. Plenty of mediocre quarterbacks have won Super Bowls, several truly great quarterbacks never won the big one.

Because Peyton Manning has never won a Super Bowl, some people refuse to acknowledge that he is truly great. I find this widely held opinion jarring, and if the Colts win today, and even better, if they win the Super Bowl, it will no longer exist. So even though I don't really care about Peyton Manning one way or another, or the Colts, or the Patriots, I have a strong rooting interest in seeing the universe become slightly more ordered.

Here's a column from John Clayton at ESPN. In the column he explains why the Patriots beat the Chargers in a playoff game this weekend. Note that both teams have had excellent seasons, and that the game was decided by the barest of margins. The Patriots won 24-21. As in any close game, the outcome turned as much on freak bounces of the ball as it did on anything else. For example, on one of the key plays in the game, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady threw an interception on fourth down, and one of the Patriots receivers stripped the ball and the Patriots recovered, giving them a first down that led to a score.

But the idea that the outcome of close games hinges on luck more than it does on character is boring, so sports writers ignore it. It's much more entertaining to think of games as soap operas where the guys with "heart" win and the guys who are "playing not to lose" go down in defeat.

I think that this kind of sports writing taps into a basic human impulse that forces us to deny the fact that many things in life are basically beyond our control. The idea that we might be hit by a bus on the way to work through no fault of our own is terrifying. The idea that we have hundreds of people confined at a detention center in Cuba because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time is unthinkable. And the idea that one team wins a football game and another team loses because a ball bounces in the wrong direction is fundamentally unsatisfying. So we make up fairy tales to discount this uncertainty and go on with the illusion that things are well ordered. Whatever gets people through the day, I guess.

Reports are that David Beckham is getting $250 milllion over five years to play soccer in America. $50 million from the actual soccer league and the rest in endorsements and so forth. Unfortunately, nobody in America cares about David Beckham. The soccer fans here know he's washed up, and the David Beckham fans aren't interested in the fact that he actually plays soccer. 

Today I read a story about a coach who was fired for punching his players in the crotch in the name of humor. As an athlete, you're conditioned to put up with this sort of thing, so I'm surprised that it got out. I remember when I came to football practice one day and heard one of our coaches tell a teammate, "Last night I dreamed I saved you from a shit eating dog."  Wonder where he came up with that one?

Boise State 2 point conversion

The crowning play in last night's Fiesta Bowl instant classic was the Statue of Liberty play that Boise State ran in overtime to give them the one point win over Oklahoma. First of all, the audacity of using the Statue of Liberty play in that situation is incredible. The play (where the quarterback pretends to pass and hands the ball behind his back to a runner) is most commonly used by kids playing football in their front yards. The idea of using it in a crucial situation in a major college game is absurd. We may never see it in the NFL.

The main reason that play and other trick plays aren't used often is that these days players are usually well coached and incredibly athletic, so they make few mistakes and when they do make mistakes their physical skills can compensate for them. So when I watched the play, I wondered how Boise State got away with it. The running back is right there loitering behind the quarterback until he's handed the ball, then he scampers off into the end zone untouched.

On the second watching, I noticed that Oklahoma's weak side linebacker was assigned to keep an eye on that back. He stayed at home and watched the back, ready to take him on if he went out for a pass or otherwise got the ball. On the third watching, I noticed that Boise State's left offensive tackle was in position to block the linebacker, and successfully kept him out of the play, insuring that Boise State would score. The fourth time I watched, I saw that the block was by design. The tackle pretended that he was going to pass block, and then looped around the tight end (who was blocking the defensive end) and sealed off the linebacker assigned to the running back. The rest is history.

The play illustrates the best thing about football, which is the tactical chess match between the coaches. It all starts with the fact that this play is a variation of a two point conversion play Boise State had run previously in the season. Boise State's coach knew that Oklahoma's coach would have seen it and would have prepared his team to defend it. So he used that knowledge to start the misdirection. He must also have known that Oklahoma would keep a player in position to stop the running back in that situation, and made sure that he'd have a blocker there to keep that from happening. The rest was up to the players, who executed the play to perfection. Football at its best.

Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor is one of my favorite shows. It's the "story" of a clan of meerkats who live in the Kalarhi desert. The thing that separates it from every other show about wildlife is the writing. Rather than treating it as a clinical examination of a highly organized group of small mammals, the writers anthropomorphize the animals and provide narration that ascribes human motivations and emotions to everything the animals do. It requires suspension of disbelief, but if you can give yourself over to it, it's a lot of fun. (You really have to watch it for yourself to get what I mean.)

Everything that's good about Meerkat Manor is what's bad about modern sportscasting. This weekend I watched a football game, and the color commentator felt it necessary to describe the players the way Sean Astin describes the meerkats. No play is just a play. Every tackle, turnover, completion, and score is an event in the opera that is college football. A running back runs into a tackler whose helmet dislodges the ball, creating a turnover. Freak occurence in the course of a football game? No. Incredible act of leadership by a player who's ready to step up for a team that has lacked leadership all year. Long completion on third down. Nice pass to an open receiver? No. Evidence that the quarterback's mental defect that prevents him from performing as he should may soon be a thing of the past.

Perhaps this is what most sports fans want, but it just annoys me. It's fine for meerkats where everyone can see that it's obviously absurd, but it seems idiotic when the subjects of the commentary are human beings.

Tonight I went to the Durham Bulls game and wound up seeing a no hitter. Jason Hammel pitched eight and a third innings (25 outs) but was replaced after a couple of batters reached on errors. Juan Salas came in and got the last couple of outs to close out the Columbus Clippers. You can go to baseball games your whole life and never see a no hitter, so witnessing one first hand was a thrill. It was also interesting to see the typically inattentive minor league crowd really get into the game, and to see so many people stay until the end. Oddly, the greatest moments of suspense occurred when the crowd waited for the official scorer
to rule whether a couple of hard hit balls that were misplayed were errors or hits. The scorer got a couple of good cheers when he made the rulings that insured the no-hitter.

The Bulls' manager was lustily booed by the fans when he pulled the starting pitcher, but that sort of thing is pretty common in the minors, where his job is to prepare the pitcher for the big leagues. 

Here's a link to the local paper's account of the no hitter.

I'm a bit fatigued by the outraged over Zinedine Zidane's head butt in the World Cup finals. Was it violent, excessive, and uncalled for?  Of course. Was it unusual or particularly horrifying in the greater context of soccer? Hardly. This is a sport where people stomp on, knee, and head butt each other whenever they think they can get away with it. In the Portugal-Netherlands game, Portuguese midfielder Deco took down a Dutch player with a violent tackle as immediate retribution for a breach of soccer etiquette. He took the yellow card and everybody knew why he did it. Soccer is one of many games where the creative use of trash talk to set off your opponent is a time honored tradition. It's a violent game is what I'm saying.

I must assume that the outrage in this case is a product of ignorance or denial. Zidane is certainly ashamed of losing his temper and perhaps costing his team the chance to win, but I doubt he regrets the violence of his act. Few athletes would. His "vicious" head butt was certainly less vicious than any number of acts that played out on the pitch in that game. There's a context to this thing that seems to be lost, at least to me.

In the confrontation, Zidane lost and Materazzi won. He got inside the head of the other team's best player and provoked him to get himself tossed out. Sportsmanlike? No. An effective tactic? Yes. Moving on ...