Hua Hsu

You are currently browsing articles tagged Hua Hsu.

“These Games Would Be The First ‘Free-Enterprise, Private-Sector Olympics'”

February 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Olympics weren’t always a corporate event treated like a telenovela on TV–that began in 1984. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and IOC organizer Peter Ueberroth took a Games no one wanted and put it in the black by drowning it in corporate green. It was a financial success, though it changed the event for good. Ueberroth’s Olympic glory led him to be named Time’s “Man of the Year” and become MLB Commissioner, his five-year run marred by the collusion scandal, which not only broke the rules but was also a colossal misunderstanding of baseball economics. The opening of “The Branding of the Olympics,” Hua Hsu’s Grantland article about 1984’s changing of the guard:

“Tom Bradley liked to tell the story of how he watched the 1932 Olympics through the fence of Los Angeles’s Memorial Coliseum. He was 14 at the time, and the pageantry and spectacle of it all offered a welcome reprieve from the uncertain world around him. There was no Great Depression, no future, no worries — just these races he could still recall in startling detail nearly 50 years later. He could never have imagined that an African American might one day be mayor of this growing city and that it would be him. It could never have occurred to him that this moment of pure astonishment would become part of a story he would tell over and over — a story that would change the Games forever.

Nobody wanted the 1984 Summer Olympics.1 But the success of those Games revitalized the possibilities of such global spectacles. We take it for granted nowadays that hosting big, expensive, and complicated events like the Olympics or World Cup is a desirable thing for cities and nations. They have become ways of announcing a regime’s makeover or burnishing a national brand; at the very least, politicians and developers invoke hosting duties as an official mandate to raze like hell. In the late 1970s, though, the Olympics weren’t seen as profitable or peaceful. Violence had marred the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics. The 1976 Montreal Games overran their budget so drastically that the debts weren’t paid off until 2006. When it came time in 1978 to find a host for the 1984 Games, the only cities that expressed interest were Tehran — which withdrew before making a formal bid — and Los Angeles.

Taxpayers and city officials balked at Bradley’s proposal to bring the Games to L.A., especially as tales of Montreal’s financial woes began to circulate. But Bradley used that unwillingness to his advantage, agreeing that taxpayers should not have to bear the burden of the Games and floating the possibility instead that they be staged without any direct public funding. The city’s existing facilities were sufficient, and corporate sponsors could pay for whatever else needed to be built. The rest of the operating budget would come from ticket sales, television, merchandising, and licensing.

Besides the initial Games in 1896, no Olympics had been underwritten entirely by private money. And other than the 1932 Games in Los Angeles and 1948 Games in London, no Olympics had ever reported a profit.2 In 1980, Peter Ueberroth, who had been appointed to head the L.A. Olympic committee, explained to the New York Times that these Games would be the first ‘free-enterprise, private-sector Olympics, with no taxpayer money.'”

______________________________________

The 1932 L.A. Games that Bradley watched as a child:

The 1984 Games, featuring a UFO:

Tags: , ,

“Local Papers Described Him As Crazy, Arrogant, A ‘Homeless Computer Geek,’ An Eccentric Stats Hobbyist”

August 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted about some pre-Beane baseball theorists who never had Brad Pitt play them in a film. There was Walter Lappe, who sensed that something was wrong with the way “experts” analyzed the sport, and Eric Walker, who was one of the earliest to figure out exactly what was amiss. But I’ve never mentioned Mike Gimbel, a numbers-cruncher who was mocked from the game before Moneyball took hold, in a time when advanced analytics, much like taking a walk, was still viewed in the mainstream as a form of weakness. Grantland’s Hua Hsu sought out Gimbel at the recent Left Forum. The opening of his resultant article:

“There are a lot of useful ideas about justice and democracy exchanged across the hundreds of panel discussions that constitute the Left Forum, a three-day meeting of scholars, activists, and concerned citizens that takes place every year in Manhattan. My main interest was baseball. Another was crocodiles.

I had come to listen to a paper being presented by Mike Gimbel. In the 1990s, Gimbel put together a nice side career advising major league teams on player transactions. He had a day job working for the New York City water department, and in his free time he sat in front of his computer, inputted stats, and came up with what he believed was a unified theory of player value. He talked his way into a part-time gig evaluating talent for Dan Duquette, soon to become the general manager of the Montreal Expos. When Duquette moved to the Red Sox, Gimbel was the only Expos staffer he was allowed to take with him — he was a secret weapon of sorts. But during spring training in 1997, Gimbel sat for an interview with the Boston Globe‘s Gordon Edes. Once word spread of Boston’s ‘stat man’ — itself an epithet back in the pre-Moneyball days — the Sox front office immediately distanced itself from him. Local papers described him as crazy, arrogant, a ‘homeless computer geek,’ an eccentric stats hobbyist. He was ridiculed for his unkempt beard, his yellow teeth, and the heavy coat he wore despite the Florida heat. ‘I guess Duquette calls him like he would call the Psychic Network,’ Jose Canseco joked to the local beat writers. Gimbel’s contract expired at the end of the 1997 season. It was his last formal contact with a major league team.”

Tags: ,

“How Does One Begin To Explain How Unlikely NFL China Is?”

May 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because the word’s highest cancer rates aren’t killing citizens at a fast-enough pace, China may be in the midst of importing American football. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has at least 99 problems–many of them-concussion-related–but he gets breathless over the thought of cracking the world’s biggest market. The opening of “Hard Knocks: Shanghai,” Hua Hsu’s new Grantland article:

“The National Football League currently maintains four offices around the world. There is an office in Mexico City. The NFL has been popular in Mexico since at least the 1970s, and some of the largest-ever crowds to watch preseason and regular-season games were recorded in the nation’s capital, where the league has staged games since 1994. There’s another office in Toronto, where the league claims a fan base of nearly 1 million, the most die-hard among them along the border. NFL Europa shut down operations in 2007 but an office continues to thrive in London, where an annual regular-season game is played at Wembley Stadium. Commissioner Roger Goodell has even mused, carefully and obliquely, about one day placing a franchise there.

The last office is in Shanghai.

How does one begin to explain how unlikely NFL China is? Anything you want to assume about a nation that constitutes nearly 20 percent of the world’s population is probably true. China is whatever you want it to be: Massive and diverse and black-hair sameness, ancient and postmodern and blink-of-an-eye changing, it requires a different scale of description. But it’s probably not the riskiest generalization to suggest that China does not conform to anyone’s vision of a hotbed for American football. When I arrived in Shanghai, I was offered a litany of reasons, ranging from the cultural to the genetic, for why the sport would never catch on among locals. For example: There isn’t a deeply ingrained sports culture in China, and what little energies were devoted to following such things usually involved international competition. Team sports aren’t big in China, either, and the one-child policy has made parents more averse than ever to subjecting their kids to potential harm. And beyond all this, there’s football itself, which has never been an intuitive product for American export. Even nations with an appetite for American things have traditionally found football exotic and inscrutable, one of those aspects of the culture that simply doesn’t translate well.

But something unusual is happening throughout China’s major cities, where football is one of the fastest-growing sports. ocal Chinese kids are buying cleats and pads and starting teams and football clubs.”

Tags: ,

“We Will Be Able To Keep A Thousand ‘Pictures’ In A Box As Big As A Dictionary”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Picture 3 in the third row from the top looks like a precursor to Shepard Fairey's Obey the Giant.

On the gorgeous, newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books site, Hua Hsu writes about the history of office chair designs. In his piece, he mentions the legendary Italian designer Bruno Munari’s 1966 book, Design as Art. An excerpt from the book about the house of the future:

“The private house of the future (some are already lived in) will be as compact and comfortable as possible, easy to run and easy to keep clean without the trouble and expense of servants. A lot of single pieces of furniture will be replaced by built-in cupboards, and maybe we shall even achieve the simplicity, the truly human dimensions, of the traditional Japanese house, a tradition that is still alive.

In the house of the future, reduced as it will be to minimum size but equipped with the most practical gadgets, we will be able to keep a thousand ‘pictures’ in a box as big as a dictionary and project them on our white wall with an ordinary projector just as often as we please. And I do not mean colour photographs, but original works of art. With these techniques visual art will survive even if the old techniques disappear. Art is not technique, as everyone knows, and an artist can create with anything that comes to hand.”

••••••••••

Munari sharing design lessons with schoolchildren on Italian TV, 1976:

Tags: ,