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“How Could We ALL Blow It?”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

You get passion and emotion in a Twitter storm–which can be useful–but not nuance. You would assume based on words raining down from the cloud that there’s a good chance that Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the transgendered subject of Grantland’s controversial article, “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” took her life because the publication was set to out her sexual reassignment. Bill Simmons, the EIC, says the site was gong to rightfully reveal that the inventor had apparently engaged in fraudulent business practices, but it would have never revealed her sexuality had she not died. He does acknowledge, however, that mistakes were made. From his response to the tumult, a list of areas in which he feels Grantland failed:

“We made one massive mistake. I have thought about it for nearly three solid days, and I’ve run out of ways to kick myself about it. How did it never occur to any of us? How? How could we ALL blow it?

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up. Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things …

1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate. That’s a crucial piece — something that actually could have evolved into the third act and an entirely different ending. But you missed it completely.

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting.

3. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn’t).

4. You botched your pronoun structure in a couple of spots, which could easily be fixed by using GLAAD’s style guide for handling transgender language.

5. The phrase ‘chill ran down my spine’ reads wrong. Either cut it or make it more clear what Caleb meant.

6. Caleb never should have outed Dr. V to one of her investors; you need to address that mistake either within the piece, as a footnote, or in a separate piece entirely.

(And maybe even … )

7. There’s a chance that Caleb’s reporting, even if it wasn’t threatening or malicious in any way, invariably affected Dr. V in ways that you never anticipated or understood. (Read Christina Kahrl’s thoughtful piece about Dr. V and our errors in judgment for more on that angle.)“

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“After A Miserable Year, Obama’s Presidency Is On The Clock”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

I’m there whenever David Remnick focuses on politics or boxing or writers. Other topics also, but those three in particular. The New Yorker EIC touches on that trio of subjects in a piece about President Obama, who is trying to sprint to the finish line rather than run out the clock. Three quick clips from the early stages of the article follow.

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Obama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane, in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins–Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn’t feel at all ambivalent about following the sport. He didn’t.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”

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When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.’

Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

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Obama’s advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don’t find a way to attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. “There were times in our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.”•

 

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“They Are Scientists Dissecting The World’s Most Popular Game”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In 1977, the year the Apple II was introduced, Tom Landry, coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was the focus of a People magazine article due to his forward-thinking reliance on computer data. Today the other kind of football (soccer) has joined, in earnest, the information revolution. And that makes a lot of sense. I’m not enough of a fan of the world’s game to say this with complete assuredness, but I think it’s likely that because of the size of the field and ball and the pace of the game, final scores are often as influenced by luck as by skill. (Chris Anderson and David Sally agree.) And single- or double-elimination tournaments seem particularly meaningless statistically, so it’s best to grasp whatever edge you can. From “The Winning Formula,” Joao Medeiros’ Wired UK piece about data’s entry into the Premier League, a passage about one coach who was an early adapter:

“Some managers, however, did get it — and one in particular was Clive Woodward. He had been the coach of England’s World Cup-winning rugby team in 2003, and in 2005 had been offered a one-year contract to serve as Southampton’s director of football. He had been the first coach to adapt Prozone to rugby, installing it at Twickenham four years before the World Cup, which allowed him to collect data on how England and its opponents played. ‘When I first saw it I was fascinated because I’d never seen a game where you’re looking down and just see dots and data and movement,’ Woodward says. ‘It removed a lot of the preconceived notions we had about how other teams played. It made a big difference when we started to see them as data, as opposed to teams we had never beaten before.’ Once, after his players insisted that there was no space on the field to run into, Woodward took a printout of a Prozone freeze-frame taken 24 seconds into a match against France. It showed both teams around the ball in a small area on the pitch and acres of unoccupied space everywhere else. He stuck it on board with the message: ‘The space is the green stuff.’

‘Clive would challenge me at every level,’ says Wilson about Woodward’s time at Southampton. ‘He would ask questions about every aspect of the game: why do we spend so much time working out how to score goals and not how to stop them? I would try to explain to him what they’re doing and he’d just keep asking why.’ Woodward and Wilson tried things such as filming players striking the ball, to study technique from a biomechanical perspective. Those initiatives, however, never had much impact. Redknapp left before the end of the year and Woodward departed at the end of his contract. Wilson had left the club shortly before Woodward, convinced that there was a better way of running a club. ‘Woodward believed that evidence, be it video or statistics or any kind of data, was fundamental to how you prepare a team,’ Wilson says. Woodward remains his biggest influence. ‘He taught me that we didn’t have to do things just because they had always been done in a certain way.’

Today, 19 of the 20 Premier League teams use Prozone. Each has its own team of performance analysts and data scientists looking for the indicators that quantify player performance, the events that determine matches and trends that characterise seasons. They are scientists dissecting the world’s most popular game, looking at data from Prozone and other sources to understand what dictates the difference between winning and losing. In the environment of the multimillion-pound Premier League, clubs don’t just want a competitive advantage, they need it.”

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“They Were Known As Lady Wrestlers, And Many People Found Them Hard Not To Watch”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I interviewed the now-deceased lady wrestler The Fabulous Moolah some years ago, and I was glad it was a phoner so she couldn’t gouge my eyes. I was fascinated by someone who did what was then considered a very unladylike thing beginning in the harsh years of the Great Depression, though I knew going in that her stories would largely be bullshit. Wrestlers who came of age when the entertainment still had one foot inside the carnival tent never really told the truth because they were so committed to selling a ruse–that something fake was real. They were actors who never exited that stage. The things she did say that were true, however, were stranger than fiction. For instance: “When I was known as ‘Slave Girl,’ I managed the wrestler Elephant Boy, and he’s a priest in Ohio now, you know?” No, I did not know. This was new information.

I asked Moolah (real name: Lillian Ellison) if she considered herself a feminist, and she got a little flustered–perhaps annoyed. It occurred to me later that she thought I was asking her if she was a lesbian. I quickly explained what “feminist” meant, and things moved forward again. Moolah’s close friend, housemate and fellow ferocious wrestler Johnnie Mae Young just passed away at 90. From her obituary by William Yardley in the New York Times:

“Before thongs and silicone and spray tans made women’s wrestling the overtly sexualized spectacle that is now orchestrated by W.W.E., Ms. Young was among the most famous in a colorful cast of women who first rose to prominence in the 1940s, in part because World War II reduced the number of men who wrestled professionally. They were known as lady wrestlers, and many people found them hard not to watch.

‘When I first started wrestling professionally, the men didn’t like the girls,’ Ms. Young said, ‘because we would go out and steal the show.’

Crowds loved to hate her. Organizers sometimes shielded the ring with chicken wire to help protect her from the rotten eggs and vegetables people would throw. Other wrestlers were intimidated by her techniques and her titles.

By the late 1960s, she had become the National Wrestling Alliance’s first national women’s champion. In the late 1990s, W.W.E. hired her and her longtime friend Lillian Ellison, better known as the Fabulous Moolah, whom she had trained.

Ms. Young fought much younger wrestlers and starred in campy skits with young male wrestlers that suggested that her prowess went beyond the ring. Some of her older opponents said the work tainted the legacy of women in wrestling. Ms. Young paid no attention.”

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“First Offense, A Team Loses Two Wins”

January 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Of all the terrible suggestions regarding MLB’s discipline of PED users, Troy Renck of the Denver Post has come up with the most ludicrous and illogical. He wants to deduct wins from teams when one of its players tests positive for banned substances. That idea suggests that a team should be punished because it somehow failed to properly police its players. Teams, of course, have no ability to test players for drugs. That’s handled by the commissioner’s office in conjunction with the MLBPA and the clubs themselves must remain passive in the execution of these tests. It’s a part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and can’t be defied in any way. From Renck:

“The Yankees are freed roughly $25 million of ARod’s salary. They can take that savings and stay under the $189 million luxury cap threshold. Or throw it at Tanaka. ARod has three years and $61 million left when he returns. I realize that’s a big amount, but the yankees, more than any other team, would be in position to eat it to make him go away. 

The Yankees get an advantage getting rid of a declining player’s contract for a season. That doesn’t seem fair… In regarding PED punishments, I’d like to see team penalties. First offense, a team loses two wins. Too often, a team gets the positive stats, then washes hands of players after PED test. Would a team sanction create a different view of roster construction?”

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“Fewer People Want To Actually Attend The Games”

January 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1979, J.G. Ballard believed the future was shifting from mobile to home-based, especially the way we entertain ourselves. That’s happened, largely. Going to the game is not so important now because there are so many ways for the game to come to us. From Kevin Clark and Jonathan Clegg in the WSJ: 

“The NFL enters the first round of playoff games this weekend with soaring television ratings, billions of dollars in network TV contracts in their pocket and a nation of football fans who can’t wait to hop on their couch and watch a weekend of games.

The league has never been a more popular viewing option. There’s just one problem: Fewer people want to actually attend the games.

In the latest evidence that the sports in-home viewing experience has possibly trumped the in-stadium one, ticket sales were slow for the first week of the National Football League’s marquee stretch of games.

Three teams hosting games this weekend asked the league for extensions to sell more tickets for the games to avoid a television blackout in local markets, which is imposed by NFL policy if a game isn’t sold out. The teams, the Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts and Cincinnati Bengals, needed large corporate assistance to ensure the sellouts.”

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Walter Cronkite in 1967: “We could watch a football game.”

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The Best Book I Read In 2013 Was…

January 5, 2014 in Books, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

…The Sports Gene by David Epstein. 

The SI writer looks at the role of genetics in sports, never discounting the hard work athletes do, but making a strong case that you probably have to be born with the “right parents” if you want to be a superstar at highly competitive athletics. 

So many topics are considered in this compact 290-page book, including how genetic mutations, race, region, poverty, disease, PEDs, customs and culture determine the development of the elite athlete. It really looks at the question from every angle imaginable.

In doing so, the volume directly defeats foolish narratives we like to attach to sports, even one doozy perpetrated by the magazine Epstein works for, a jaw-dropping 2010 article that asserted that Bulls center Joakim Noah, one of the most ridiculously lucky people on the planet in the sports gene pool, a near seven-footer with a tremendous wingspan and a tennis-champion father, was somehow not “gifted” and had to overcome his “lack of talent” with a “strong will.” The display copy for the story actually read: “Bulls center Joakim Noah doesn’t have the incandescent talent of his NBA brethren. But he brings to the game an equally powerful gift.” Um, really???

Also covered is the idea that someday (probably not soon) we’ll be able to test babies to see if they have the genetic makeup to be great athletes and to guide them into sports that favor explosiveness or stamina depending on whether they will develop more fast-twitch or slow-twitch muscle. That, of course, leads the mind to wonder how such tests would work if expanded beyond sports: Would newborn Robert Zimmerman (later to be known as Bob Dylan) be persuaded from music because he didn’t have the gene for a great singing voice?

Epstein’s book is a brilliant and probing work that’s given me enough ideas to return to for years and years.

And now my ears will bleed even more when people lazily refer to the “10,000-hour rule” as if that standard fits everyone who achieves mastery in some field. Sure, practice is good, but it’s not everything.•

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“I’m Chasing One Of Britain’s Hottest Properties”

January 1, 2014 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a 1971 episode of the British version of This Is Your Life, which features soccer legend George Best, who was in his prime, a remarkable athlete who looked like a member of Led Zeppelin, a swashbuckling playboy envied by all. But he was already dying–he’d been dying almost from the beginning. Like his mother who is seen in this program, Best was an inveterate alcoholic who wrecked his career and himself at an early age. He had it all, except what he needed most, whatever that was. It was a miracle that he made it to 59. Was it nurture or nature? 

We never know what’s inside of somebody else–sometimes even inside of ourselves. Of course, that’s not only true in the negative sense. People can unfold in beautiful and surprising ways also. And why do some people keep growing, changing, evolving? Again: Is it nature or nurture? Probably something innate that may need to be unlocked by experience.

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“Some Back Tracking Was Needed To See How The Story Leaked”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out his first coded sentence: “What hath God wrought!” And in the 170 years since then, the tools that have been wrought have been increasingly wonderful and terrifying. You really can’t legislate the more ill effects away, but the bright side is that they are double-edged swords, and those who misuse them are also prone to them.

On the topic of tools run amok: A passage from a Cleveland Plain Dealer article by Paul Hoynes explaining how the Indians signing of outfielder David Murphy, meant to be kept a secret for a while, spread accidentally at first and then virally:

“The Indians signing of free agent outfielder David Murphy to a two-year $12 million deal didn’t belong in the same airspace, let along the flight path, of Seattle’s deal with Cano. Still, it will go down as the most intriguing of the winter because the story was first reported by Murphy’s five-year-old daughter, Faith, at her Dallas-area preschool.

The deal wasn’t officially announced until Nov. 25 even though it hit Twitter on Nov. 19. The trigger to the story – a lesson on the meaning of Thanksgiving at Faith’s preschool.

‘She was in preschool and they were learning about Pilgrims and Indians,’ Murphy told reporters on the day his deal became official. ‘She spoke up that her dad was going to the Indians. Obviously, the word spreads quickly because of social media. It’s not the best situation, but it’s a good story to tell her when she gets older.’

There are no more scoops in the news business — at least not in the traditional sense. Breaking news hits the Internet in a matter of seconds. No one knows that better than a general manager of a big league baseball team, but even Chris Antonetti was taken back by a text he received from a reporter concerning Murphy.

‘Initially, I didn’t know how it broke,’ said Antonetti, entering his fourth year as Indians general manager. ‘Then I got a text from a writer and it said, ‘There is a kindergarten teacher in Texas Tweeting that David Murphy is going to be an Indian. I said, OK.’

Some back tracking was needed to see how the story leaked.”

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“I’m Glad You’ve Got A Computer Being The Man That Makes The Decision”

December 17, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

While Muhammad Ali was suffering through his Vietnam Era walkabout, he “boxed” retired great Rocky Marciano in a fictional contest that was decided by a computer. Dubbed the “Super Fight,” it took place in 1970. Marciano dropped a lot of weight and donned a hairpiece to provide viewers with some semblance of his younger self. The fighters acted out the computer prognostications and the filmed result was released in theaters. Marciano awkwardly stumbled onto a great description of this Singularity moment: “I’m glad you’ve got a computer being the man that makes the decision.”

“There’s No Way Tommy John Pitches So Well Into His Early Forties Without His Bionic Elbow”

December 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I don’t agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s logic in diminishing the importance of satire, but I’m on board with him in this Grantland exchange with Bill Simmons about the hypocrisies in the discussion of performance-enhancing drugs:

“Malcolm Gladwell:

As you know, I’ve had mixed feelings for years about doping. It’s not that I’m in favor of it. It’s just that I’ve never found the standard arguments against doping to be particularly compelling. So professional cyclists take EPO because they can rebuild their red blood cell count, in order to step up their training. I’m against ‘cheating’ when it permits people to take shortcuts. But remind me why I would be against something someone takes because they want to train harder?

Bill Simmons:

Or why blood doping is any different from ‘loading your body with tons of Toradol’ or ‘getting an especially strong cortisone shot’? I don’t know.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Exactly! Or take the so-called ‘treatment/enhancement’ distinction. The idea here is that there is a big difference between the drug that ‘treats’ some kind of illness or medical disorder and one, on the other hand, that ‘enhances’ some preexisting trait. There is a huge amount of literature on treatment/enhancement among scholars, and with good reason. Your health insurance company relies on this distinction, for example, when it decides what to cover. Open heart surgery is treatment. A nose job, which you pay for yourself, is enhancement. This principle is also at the heart of most anti-doping policies. Treatment is OK. Enhancement is illegal. That’s why Tommy John surgery is supposed to be OK. It’s treatment: You blow out your ulnar collateral ligament so you get it fixed.

But wait a minute! The tendons we import into a pitcher’s elbow through Tommy John surgery are way stronger than the ligaments that were there originally. There’s no way Tommy John pitches so well into his early forties without his bionic elbow. Isn’t that enhancement?”

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“We Learned During Our Wait For Spitz To Show Up That The Olympic Village Had Been Murderously Invaded”

December 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As David Remnick prepares to offer analysis of Russia’s Winter Games, which hopefully will be a safe and joyous event, here’s the opening of E.J. Kahn’s 1972 New Yorker reportage in the direct aftermath of the tragedy in Munich, the so-called “Serene Olympics” which became anything but:

“Into the unreal Olympic world, where inches and ounces and seconds are what traditionally matter most, the real world cruelly intruded at five o’clock three mornings ago. The first inkling most of the four thousand journalists here had of the dreadful events that should have terminated these now cheerless Olympics came just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, at which hour we had been invited to attend a press conference with the American swimmer Mark Spitz, who, having won an unprecedented seventh gold medal the night before, has been crowned by the German press ‘der König von München.’ Like just about everything else around here, though, his gilt had been tarnished. He had carried a pair of brand-name athletic shoes to the presentation ceremony for the third medal, and had felt constrained—probably under pressure from the United States Olympic Committee and under at least indirect pressure from Avery Brundage, the crusty American octogenarian who is retiring this year after twenty years as president of the International Olympic Committee—to make a public apology to his teammates. On my way to the conference, I glanced at the first editions of the local morning papers. They featured a queen not just of Munich but of all West Germany—the sixteen-year-old high jumper Ulrike Meyfarth, who had never cleared six feet until the previous afternoon, when she went three and a half inches above that and won a hysterically applauded gold medal of her own. Her glory was brief, for we learned during our wait for Spitz to show up that the Olympic Village had been murderously invaded. While we were reeling from that shock, Spitz arrived and gave sober, clipped answers to a few meaningless questions. He remained seated throughout the session, and a factotum explained, ‘Mark Spitz does not want to come to the microphone, because of the Israeli incident.’ (He is Jewish, and nobody knew who, if anyone, might be the next target.) As a result, the swimmer’s responses were all but inaudible to us. It didn’t much matter, because must of the questions, dredged from the near-bottom of the sportswriters’ cliché barrel, were absurd and obviously irrelevant. Indeed, all the things that had been ceased to seem very consequential—even the prodigies of the regal Spitz himself.”•

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“Our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized”:

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“Is It Morally Permissible For Parents To Encourage Their Children To Play High-Impact Sports?”

December 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

As often as I’ve criticized Bud Selig and Joe Torre for not acting quickly enough to eliminate home-plate collisions from baseball, I should stop and praise them for finally eradicating the concussion-inducing crashes. It’s time for the sport to progress, and this step is a good one.

Football, on the other hand, like boxing, has no answer for what ails it. No helmet is going to stop brain injuries. Football is in trouble. From Joshua Shepherd’s Practical Ethics post about the moral role parents play in their children participating in contact sports:

“A number of ethical questions arise in connection with this growing awareness. (What should the governing bodies of sports leagues do to protect players? What do teams owe players in such sports? Is the decision to play such a sport, or to continue playing in spite of suffering a concussion, really autonomous? Should fans speak up about player protection, and if not, are they complicit in the harm done to players? And so on.) Here I want to consider one question that has received little attention. It involves the role of parents in fostering participation in high-impact sports.

Without parental encouragement, participation in such sports would dramatically decrease. Certainly, parental encouragement or discouragement can be trumped. In societies which highly value such sports, some adolescents would find a way to participate. But I will not consider here the (vexing) question of how best to respect an adolescent’s budding autonomy. Arguably, if an adolescent wants to participate in a high-impact sport, a parent should acquiesce. Whether that argument is plausible depends, in part, on the risks of playing the sport in question. The question I want to consider is the following: is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?”

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“What Happens Invariably At Every Olympics Is There Is A Kind Of Non-Athletic Aspect To It That Gives It Dimension”

December 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

Because of the Costas factor, I tend to mute or just block out a lot of NBC’s Olympics commentary, but hiring David Remnick, longtime Russia expert, for its coverage of the Sochi Games was a smart move by the network. Remnick tells Richard Deitsch, in his steadfastly excellent Sports Illustrated “Media Circus” column, what his role will be. An excerpt:

“[Jim] Bell said Remnick’s role for the opening ceremonies will come during what NBC calls the ‘creative part of the broadcast,’ where the host country usually tells a story about itself. Remnick served as a Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and earned a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism in 1994 for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

‘I have an interest in sports and I grew up in a time where the Olympics were highly charged events,’ Remnick said. ‘I’m 55 so I have pretty vivid memories of Mexico City. I remember Bob Beamon, as apolitical an act as there could be, and John Carlos and Tommie Smith. I think that everyone would have benefitted in 1968 from understanding what a gesture of black power meant in the context of a sporting event because not everyone was paying attention to the splits between the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What happens invariably at every Olympics is there is a kind of non-athletic aspect to it that gives it dimension.’

Remnick said he had been given assurances by NBC Sports that he would have editorial independence with his commentary. Among the topics he will surely address: LGBT issues within Russia, the relationship between Russia and the Ukraine and the nature of post-Soviet Russia.

‘There is nothing in the world — and I know they don’t intend to hinder me in this way — where I would not be honest in my analysis,’ Remnick said.”

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“In My Grandson’s Lifetime, Professional Boxing Will Be Banished In Most Parts Of America”

December 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Filip Bondy has an article in the New York Daily News calling for NYC to ban boxing. It’s a funny venue for such a fierce op-ed because it would never have been published while that paper’s legendary boxing writer Bill Gallo was alive. For all his good qualities, Gallo was an apologist for boxing while railing angrily against against MMA. seemingly because his career was invested in the former and not the latter. MMA is just as bad as boxing but no worse, really. I think anyone honest would be for allowing both or banning both.

While I don’t personally support either, I’m really not for prohibiting anything consenting adults want to do. But I don’t believe children should be permitted to box, which would obviously further doom a sport in steep decline. From Bondy:

“Boxing has seen its time, and thank goodness that primitive era is done. In a more enlightened age now, we are concerned with concussions and other head injuries in sports. It is therefore absurd to sanction a competition in which the chief aim is to knock the opponent into unconsciousness. Yes, car racing is dangerous, but intent matters. Yes, a few rare fighters make a fortune from boxing, but they pay a huge price. The vast majority of professional boxers are just poor, desperate minorities getting their heads ripped apart internally, synapse by synapse.

It is hypocritical for the state to allow these events to continue while banning MMA, which at least offers the possibility of victory by submission, a more humane finish. Whenever a boxer gives up, like Sonny Liston or Roberto Duran, he is mercilessly mocked for the rest of his career.

I have no doubt that in my grandson’s lifetime, professional boxing will be banished in most parts of America, as it has been, on and off, in several other countries.”

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“We Are Not Going To Spend Taxpayer Money To Put A Roof On The Stadium”

November 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Billionaire Ted Lerner and his family don’t seem like awful people, not the kind of wealthy folks who are lobbying on behalf of politicians who want to punish the poor. But they should stop trying to rip off the taxpayers of Washington D.C. The district already financed a stadium for the Nationals baseball team that the Lerners own, which cost locals close to a billion dollars with interest factored in, and now the patriarch is requesting a retractable roof on the stadium to also be paid for by taxpayers. Building sports stadiums for billionaires to improve the economy is a fool’s errand to begin with, but this roof business is even more egregious. This project will create zero permanent jobs and will enhance no one’s financial standing but the Lerners. It’s corporate welfare at its ugliest. If the Lerners want to enhance the value of their holdings, they should invest in them themselves. Thankfully, Mayor Gray is holding firm against this preposterous request. From the Washington Post:

“Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Tuesday that Washington Nationals owner Theodore N. Lerner pitched him earlier this year on a pricey plan to have the city build a retractable roof over Nationals Park — a proposal, Gray said, that he swiftly but politely rejected.

The private one-on-one meeting took place in the John A. Wilson Building in mid-July and lasted about 15 minutes, Gray said.

What Lerner wanted to talk about was the possibility of a roof on Nationals Park,’ the mayor (D) said. ‘That was it. There was no discussion about how much it was going to cost and no further details. I’ve had no further discussions.’

An administration official familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly on it confirmed that there have been no recent talks about improvements of that scope for Nationals Park, which was built with well more than $600 million in taxpayer financing and opened in 2008.

‘The mayor was polite but unequivocal,’ the official said. ‘We are not going to spend taxpayer money to put a roof on the stadium, regardless of the cost.'”

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“They Are Concerned About The Fact That I’m A Violent Person, Almost An Animal”

November 27, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Few things make me sadder than Muhammad Ali being unable to speak. By the time I discovered him in my childhood, he was at the very end of his career, a legend but washed up, already slurring his speech, his motor skills screeching to a halt. For all his flaws, Ali still seemed immaculate, and I became obsessed with him. (I may have watched a.k.a. Cassius Clay a hundred times.) But I didn’t become a boxing fan because of his shaky, then quieted, voice.

So, I never paid close attention to the spectacle of Mike Tyson, the last amazing heavyweight, though it was hard to completely recuse yourself from his greatness and his badness. As Norman Mailer astutely reported, Tyson was the uneasy king of what were really just gaudy, late-century cockfights, a man crumbling inside of a sport that was crumbling.

Mike Tyson is sad for reasons beyond the usually depressing second act of retired boxers, as they endure the slowing of brains that have been treated like speed bags. His reckoning is America’s reckoning. He’s the son of broken promises, of neglect, even of the failure of our best efforts. Raised first by a prostitute and then in the cages of Spofford, he was the boy who could only really love pigeons, and later he was the chicken that came home to roost.

From Joyce Carol Oates’ New York Review of Books piece about the autobiography Tyson has co-authored with Larry Sloman:

Mike Tyson, at twenty the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and in the early, vertiginous years of his career a worthy successor to Ali, Louis, and Jack Johnson, has managed to reconstitute himself after he retired from boxing in 2005 (when he abruptly quit before the seventh round of a fight with the undistinguished boxer Kevin McBride). He became a bizarre replica of the original Iron Mike, subject of a video game, cartoons, and comic books; a cocaine-fueled caricature of himself in the crude Hangover films; star of a one-man Broadway show directed by Spike Lee, titled Undisputed Truth, and the HBO film adaptation of that show; and now the author, with collaborator Larry Sloman, of the memoir Undisputed Truth.

In his late teens in the 1980s Mike Tyson was a fervently dedicated old-style boxer, more temperamentally akin to the boxers of the 1950s than to his slicker contemporaries. In his forties, Tyson looks upon himself with the absurdist humor of a Thersites for whom loathing of self and of his audience has become an affable shtick performance. He liked to come on as crazed and dangerous, screaming in self-parody at press conferences:

I’m a convicted rapist! I’m an animal! I’m the stupidest person in boxing! I gotta get outta here or I’m gonna kill somebody!… I’m on this Zoloft thing, right? But I’m on that to keep me from killing y’all…. I don’t want to be taking the Zoloft, but they are concerned about the fact that I’m a violent person, almost an animal. And they only want me to be an animal in the ring.•

 

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“Some Observers Saw That Battle As A Historic Test For Human Intelligence”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands–well, not exactly hands–of Deep Blue was supposed to have delivered a message to humans that we needed to dedicate ourselves to other things–but the coup de grace was ignored. In fact, computers have only enhanced our chess acumen, making it clear that thus far a hybrid is better than either carbon or silicon alone. In the wake of Computer Age child Magnus Carlsen becoming the greatest human player on Earth, Christopher Chabris and David Goodman of the Wall Street Journal look at the surprising resilience of chess in these digital times. The opening:

“In the world chess championship match that ended Friday in India, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the cool, charismatic 22-year-old challenger and the highest-rated player in chess history, defeated local hero Viswanathan Anand, the 43-year-old champion. Mr. Carlsen’s winning score of three wins and seven draws will cement his place among the game’s all-time greats. But his success also illustrates a paradoxical development: Chess-playing computers, far from revealing the limits of human ability, have actually pushed it to new heights.

The last chess match to get as much publicity as Mr. Carlsen’s triumph was the 1997 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov and International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue computer in New York City. Some observers saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an ‘early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come,’ wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ 

But after Mr. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in dramatic fashion, a funny thing happened: nothing.”•

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“In Norway, you’ve got two big sports–chess and sadness”:

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“Pop Warner Lost 23,612 Players”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another bit coming from the Frontline program “League of Denial,” which looked at the impact of brain injuries stemming from American football:

“The nation’s largest youth football program, Pop Warner, saw its participation rate drop 9.5 percent from 2010-2012, according to an Outside the Lines report by League of Denial authors Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. ‘Pop Warner lost 23,612 players, thought to be the largest two-year decline since the organization began keeping statistics decades ago,’ the report found. ‘Pop Warner officials said they believe several factors played a role in the decline, including the trend of youngsters focusing on one sport. But the organization’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bailes, cited concerns about head injuries as ‘the No. 1 cause.’”

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“It Contained Her Husband’s Severed Head”

November 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

You like to believe that India sending rockets into space or South Africa building soccer stadiums for international competitions will bring something meaningful to poor people in those countries: infrastructure, information, medicine, money. That’s questionable, but even if that occurs, it’s painful to crane your neck past the horrors to get a good view of the action. But most of the Western reporting about such events focuses on the safety and comfort of the tourists, not the at-risk locals.

The opening of “A Yellow Card,” a Grantland essay by Brian Phillips, an uncommonly graceful writer, about the grandeur of the World Cup being visited upon the poverty of Brazil:

“Three points make a trend, but in a World Cup year, two points are good enough. So here’s one: Early on the morning of October 29, 31-year-old Geisa Silva, a social worker with the Brazilian military police, found her husband’s backpack on their front porch in Rio de Janeiro. Joao Rodrigo Silva Santos was a retired professional soccer player, a journeyman who’d spent most of his career knocking around the Brazilian lower leagues; post-retirement, he ran a food shop in the city’s Realengo neighborhood. He hadn’t come home the night before, and Silva had been worried, jumping up at the sound of every car. Before dawn, she got ready to leave for her job with a police unit responsible for conducting an anti-gang crackdown. When she opened the front door, she saw the backpack. It contained her husband’s severed head.

And here’s point two: Four months earlier, on the afternoon of June 30, during a pickup soccer game in the northeastern Brazilian municipality of Pio XII, a 19-year-old amateur referee named Otavio Jordao da Silva Cantanhede showed a yellow card to his friend, a player named Josemir Santos Abreu. Abreu protested. A fight broke out. Cantanhede pulled a knife and stabbed Abreu twice. Abreu died on the way to the hospital. In retaliation, a group of Abreu’s friends attacked Cantanhede. Cantanhede was — I’m quoting the New York Times — ‘tied up, smashed in the face with a bottle of cheap sugarcane liquor, pummeled with a wooden stake, run over by a motorcycle and stabbed in the throat.’ Then his legs were sawed off. Then his head was cut off and mounted on a wooden post near the field.

And here’s a quick question, just an aside. How do you feel, hearing these stories? I don’t mean how do you think you’re supposed to feel; I mean how do you feel, in fact? Are you intrigued? Disturbed? Sad? Curious? Titillated, in the way that horrifying real-life stories can sometimes leave you titillated? You don’t have to answer. Just think about it.”

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“Do We Make Too Much Of The PEDs?”

November 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

There are reasons to dislike Lance Armstrong. For instance, he’s a bully and a liar. That’s enough. But while he broke the rules of his sport with PEDs, labeling him a cheat is problematic. It’s even hypocritical. From students to classical musicians to truck drivers, people are using drugs to aid them in their endeavors. But for some reason, athletes are held to a higher standard. In fact, in sometimes they’re denied legitimate medical treatments because the rules of their games are so arbitrary. We’ll all be relying on enhanced performance more and more in the future, so perhaps we should have an honest discussion about what “cheating” means. I think we avoid that conversation in the name of maintaining some sense of “purity” that never existed. Athletes have always cheated and so have the rest of us. For some reason, some of it is considered permissible and some isn’t. We need to sort that out.

From an excellent interview that Grantland’s Bill Simmons conducted with Alex Gibney, The Armstrong Lie director:

“Bill Simmons:

What about the part when people talk about what is cheating and what isn’t cheating and what is performance enhancement and what isn’t? So, I’m a pitcher, I blow out my arm, they pull a ligament out of some dead guy, they sew it into my arm and I can pitch again. That’s legal. I can’t write anything in the morning unless I have 20 ounces of coffee. Caffeine. That’s legal. That’s fine. We like coffee, all of us like coffee. Let’s say Lance takes HGH which is given from patients aged 60 and older to help them recover faster from surgeries or just feel better, whatever.

Alex Gibney:

Well, they use to give EPO to cancer patients to regenerate blood cells.

Bill Simmons:

Right, these are things given to people to make them feel better, but with athletes we draw the line. No, they can’t do that. That’s bad, they can’t do that. If Lance blew out his knee, he could put a dead guy’s ligament in his knee and that’s fine. Think about it. We’ve never really made sense of what makes sense and we doesn’t make sense.

Alex Gibney:

That’s what led somebody like [Armstrong’s coach Michele] Ferrari to be totally cynical. They keep making up these rules. You can sleep in an altitude tent, but you can’t take EPO. What’s sense does that make? But on the other hand, I think we can say that cheating is breaking the rules.”

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“Current Guidelines Classify Players As Amateurs, Prohibiting Them From Earning Compensation”

November 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

There are few more puzzling entities in American life than the NCAA, the governing body of college athletics that is supposed to maintain the “integrity” of sports but instead uses every draconian measure imaginable to keep universities wealthy and players poor. Of course, you don’t want school boosters bribing linemen or shooting guards to attend their alma mater, but the NCAA spends great effort on enforcing the minutia of rules while ignoring the bigger picture: That college sports are a gigantic industry and that the players, who often sacrifice their bodies and brains, should be paid for their work. And, no, a scholarship isn’t fair compensation for those programs that have lucrative contracts for TV, radio and video games. 

The opening of a Frontline article about a legal decision that may or may not change this one-sided arrangement:

“In a case that could fundamentally shake the economic model of college athletics, a federal judge on Friday agreed to partially certify a lawsuit challenging restrictions on how student athletes may be compensated in exchange for playing sports.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken allows a group of about 20 current and former college players to press ahead with a class action against NCAA rules that prevent athletes from sharing in licensing deals or television revenue. Current guidelines classify players as amateurs, prohibiting them from earning compensation beyond the value of their athletic scholarships.

However, the ruling also came with one major caveat: While Judge Wilken cleared a pathway for players to share in future revenues, she rejected a separate bid that would have allowed them to collect damages for the past use of their images and likenesses both on television and in video games. Had that effort succeeded, the NCAA’s legal tab could have run into the billions.

The split decision left both sides claiming victory.”

“AMF Made My Job A Snap”

November 12, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Never knew this until now: In the 1970s, AMF, the sporting-goods manufacturer, sold a computer system and printer that would tabulate rankings of bowling leagues with the push of a button–the DataMagic Bowling Data Computer. It seems a stunning waste of computing power and coincided with the company going into a decline, so I doubt it was a big seller. But as this commercial makes clear, it was a declaration of war on the pencil.

“It Gave Them Both The Sense Of Righteousness They Needed To Lie”

November 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

With Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Alex Gibney made one of the most heartbreaking films ever about the American Dream. In the most essential ways, it’s reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ film, Fargo, which lamented that streak of American competitiveness that says that doing well isn’t good enough–you have to dominate. As if we can somehow grow enough ego to shroud our unhappiness and fear. There are parallels in Gibney’s new film about Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who just had to be the best. From a new Economist interview with Gibney:

“Question:

The final film has a lot in common with Enron, in that it dispels a myth that people really wanted to believe in. Do you find it tough shaking people’s belief systems?

Alex Gibney:

Yes, that’s why I originally wanted to do a redemption story. He comes back clean in 2009 and wins? How awesome would that be? The problem with both Enron and Lance was that the myth they created became too big. Both Jeff Skilling [Enron’s CEO] and Lance were motivated by this strange purity of vision; Enron couldn’t just be a successful company, it had to be the future of capitalism. Lance wasn’t just a cyclist, he was campaigning for cancer survivors. It’s noble-cause corruption. It gave them both the sense of righteousness they needed to lie.

Question:

In your interviews with Lance after the Oprah show, he admits to doping and using blood transfusions up until 2005, but not during the 2009 tour, when you were filming. Was it disappointing not to get a further confession?

Alex Gibney:

Yes, very disappointing but also revealing. I find his body language in that interview interesting. Slumped in a chair, he’s not a towering figure anymore.

Question:

You don’t think that’s theatre?

Alex Gibney:

I think it was defeat mainly.•

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“Just Two Combatants Grapple For The Slenderest Advantage In A Brutal Duel For Supremacy”

November 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Sometimes I think it’s odd that I’m interested in chess even though I have no desire to play the game myself. But I don’t want to play baseball and I like watching that game, too. I guess what I like best about chess is that there seems to be no way for a great player to lose, yet tiny margins exist and are capitalized on. The biggest match in a decade is upon us, as world champion Viswanathan Anand is set to meet Magnus Carlsen. The opening of a portrait of the former by James Crabtree in the Financial Times Magazine:

“Sitting in his modest home in the southern Indian city of Chennai, Viswanathan Anand – five times world chess champion – is describing the psychological pressure that bears down on top-level chess players. ‘What happens to you at the board begins to feel like it’s happening to you in person,’ he says quietly, before pausing and frowning, as if reliving an especially gruelling game. ‘When you lose, you really feel a sense of self … You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.’

Such intense feelings creep in during major tournaments, where many elite performers do battle. But at the very pinnacle of the game, in a world championship match, just two combatants grapple for the slenderest advantage in a brutal duel for supremacy. ‘A [world title] match has that feeling much more strongly because it’s the same guy doing it over and over and over … When you play a single person, it becomes narrower because you are so focused on each other. It is a lot more personal.’

Next week, Anand, or ‘Vishy’ as he is known, will walk out on to a stage at Chennai’s Hyatt hotel to defend his world title. It should be a triumphant homecoming. Anand is widely acknowledged as one of the true greats of the modern game, competing to retain his crown in the city where he learnt to play as a child. The match will be front-page news, reflecting his position as one of India’s few world-beating sportsmen. Yet, rather than starting as favourite, their champion will begin as the overwhelming underdog, reflecting the formidable reputation of his youthful opponent – Norway’s 22-year-old prodigy Magnus Carlsen.

The forthcoming contest will be Carlsen’s first stab at the title, making the 12-game match arguably the most anticipated chess event in more than a decade.”

 

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