Month: March 2011

mma

The Ultimate Fighter: Season 13, Episode 1: Unlucky 13th

Posted on by Beau Dure

“They said he didn’t belong in the UFC” are the first words we hear. They’re referring to Lesnar? Who said that?

Dana is wearing a Saturday Night Live shirt. Is he bidding to host?

Quick glimpses of a couple of fighters. Nordin Asrih is the first German, but unlike the English fighters, he doesn’t get subtitle treatment.

Dana says Junior dos Santos stepped aside from his title shot to come in and teach on TUF.

Brock Lesnar doesn’t want guys who’ve been spending the last month sitting aroud eating pizza and drinking beer. That rules me out.

Lesnar goes scientific in his evaluation. His strength and conditioning coach puts heart-rate monitors on the fighters and puts them on the bike. A couple of guys get up to 160. One is at 110. Either that guy was slacking, or he’s Lance Armstrong.

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sports culture

Gender equity debate won’t end, but can it change?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Gender equity has become one of those topics about which it’s nearly impossible to have a rational discussion.

If you see the last discussion I had on this topic, you can get a sense of my frustration. Legitimate points are there to be made — sports programs are getting cut, and while Title IX may sometimes be a convenient scapegoat, it’s hard to ignore that complying with Title IX can be messy or even counterproductive.

The examples I always use are Georgia Tech and North Carolina. The latter could easily be a victim of its success if it were ever seriously pressed to meet “Prong 1” of the Title IX test, proportionality (tying athletic opportunities to the gender ratio of the student body). In reading The Man Watching, the biography of Carolina women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance, you can trace Chapel Hill’s history from an overwhelmingly male student body to a 60-40 female ratio as, only partly coincidentally, it gets serious about women’s sports. Georgia Tech is still puttering along with a 64% male student body. Guess who has no trouble meeting the proportionality prong. Why use this law, which was supposed to be about educational opportunities and not just sports, to make things difficult on the university that has become a haven, if not heaven, for female students and student-athletes while not using it to encourage more women to go to schools like Georgia Tech?

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cycling, medal projections

2012 cycling: The wheels on the bike go round and round

Posted on by Beau Dure

Cycling should be a relatively straightforward sport, like track. Three things ensure that it’s not:

1. Drafting. Cyclists conserve so much energy riding behind someone else that they’ll do just about anything to avoid being in the lead until the end.

2. Doping. The modern-day scandals are merely a vestige of the old days of cyclists sacrificing themselves by putting anything and everything in their blood streams. It’s ironic and sad that half-witted cultural commentators pronounce mixed martial arts as some civilization-ending return to the days of the mortal gladiatorial combat when the reality is that sports of a few generations ago were far more brutal.

3. Oddities. Also brutal and yet colorfully amusing were the old six-day races, full of all-night pedaling and the occasional serenade. This tradition lives on in track cycling’s complex Madison race.

British athletes fare well in events that involve sitting (cycling, rowing, sailing), so they’ll be looking for a few medals on home roads and tracks.

Predictions are fraught with difficulty. Road cycling is one of those sports in which the Olympics aren’t necessarily the grand prize. The track cycling program has been reshuffled like a poker deck. Mountain bike and BMX racing circuits have their own idiosyncrasies as well.

So here we go …

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soccer

The Freedom of the Majestic WPS FCs

Posted on by Beau Dure

Here’s a quick attempt to summarize what is known about women’s soccer teams in the Washington area as of 5:30 p.m. ET, March 24, 2011:

– The Northern Virginia Majestics, affiliated with the PDL’s Northern Virginia Royals and Super-Y teams, will remain in the W-League, playing to the southwest of DC between Manassas and Dumfries. (See Tweet from @NovaRoyals)

– A new team, tentatively called Washington FC, will also play in the W-League. This team takes over the territory ceded by the former Washington Freedom and will play in the Freedom’s former home, the Maryland Soccerplex, northwest of DC in Boyds, Md.

– The Majestics ownership will be involved with this new team at the Soccerplex, with competitive controls built in to prevent any issues with player movement between the two teams. (Confirmed today with USL management.)

– D.C. United may also be involved with this new team, tentatively called Washington FC, but that cannot be officially announced as yet.

– Meanwhile … magicJack, the WPS team formerly known as the Washington Freedom, may yet hold the door open to play in the Washington area, though their home base will be in Florida. Borislow says he wants the team to play some in the D.C. area but is meeting resistance from Puma. (This from conversation with Dan Borislow today and Potomac Soccer Wire interview.)

– Coincidentally, Borislow’s MagicJacks won the U14 title at the Jefferson Cup, not too far from the Freedom’s former home. (But significantly closer to Manassas.)

Got it? You will be quizzed later.

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mma

‘The Ultimate Fighter’ tryouts and the soul of MMA fighters

Posted on by Beau Dure

Can you look into a mass of humanity and find something wonderfully human?

Yesterday in Newark, I shared a long table with Dana White, Joe Silva, ESPN’s Franklin McNeil and other people who had more business being there than I did for tryouts of The Ultimate Fighter. The hotel as a whole was a stunning sight — hundreds of fighters, some with training partners, coaches or even the occasional significant other, all waiting their turn to grapple for a couple of minutes, hit pads for a couple of minutes and, if they were lucky, talk to the show’s producers for a couple of minutes.

More than 400 fighters showed up — a few hours into the proceedings, the official count was 405. With groups of roughly 50 fighters each taking more than an hour to get through the big room in which UFC president White and matchmaking mastermind Silva were holding court, some fighters were waiting around for several hours. Some found nooks and crannies of the hotel for a quick nap, some chatted with their fighting buddies, some shadow-boxed perilously close to passing journalists.

After all that waiting, the actual audition and the cut can happen quickly. Within each group, the fighters are paired off to grapple, and then White or Silva immediately calls 20 or 30 names to continue to a brief striking workout. Not called? Thanks for your time — please clear the room.

The striking workout eliminates a few more fighters. Out of the 400-plus fighters who showed up, roughly 150 advanced to another long line, waiting for their individual interviews with reality TV guru Craig Piligian and his staff. From there, they’ll cut to a small group to bring out to Las Vegas for final casting.

One rule of thumb is that the interview, which is closed to the media, is by far the most important part of the process. But it’s just a couple of minutes long, just enough to get the idea that fighters can string together a few words. I spoke with one fighter who said he only heard one question, and it related to something on his application.

More likely, the application is essential, and some fighters had an advantage (or long odds) before arriving in Newark. The 20-30 names White read after the grappling phase weren’t necessarily the 20-30 best grapplers in the room. Some guys who barely held their own advanced; some who made their opponents tap more than once didn’t get the call.

Before reading the names in each group, White stressed that the people who didn’t make it were usually those with inferior records. After hearing a few polite protests in the first group, White launched a pre-emptive strike in succeeding groups: “If you’re telling me and Joe these other guys padded their records, pad yours, too.”

Some fighters didn’t grasp the situation. One fighter did a lengthy interview with a TV crew, calmly but pointedly griping that he was more of a striker than a grappler but didn’t get a chance to show his punches, knees and kicks. But if your record shows a long line of knockouts, how are you going to enhance your status by making a few loud pops on some pads? Silva and company probably knew he could strike and figured that wasn’t enough. That’s a life lesson: If you’re interviewing for a multifaceted job, be prepared to answer questions on the parts you haven’t clearly mastered. A job interview that fails to progress past “Hey, tell me more about your awesome typing skills!” is not a good interview.

Yet what was notable about the complaints was their scarcity. American Idol, this was not. No one made a scene, dramatically departing with an entourage of obese enablers while yelling that Simon and company were going to be sorry when they made it big. A camera crew covering these auditions would’ve been bored.

Mutual respect was the order of the day. Fighters slapped hands before their grappling sessions and hugged or occasionally bowed to each other afterward. Hallway conversation sounded more like a business convention or class reunion than a competitive endeavor.

Sure, sharing an experience creates a bond, and perhaps some Hollywood auditions are similarly professional. But while American Idol thrives on deluded wannabes and while NFL players and owners battle over billions, seeing people treat each other and their sport with such respect after driving 25 hours to grapple for two minutes is reassuring. And it’s a sign of a special sport.

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medal projections, olympic sports

2012 canoe/kayak: Hail Slovakia and Hungary

Posted on by Beau Dure

This morning, my former full-time employers at USA TODAY unveiled their 2012 medal projections, produced in conjunction with Infostrada. It has considerably more technical resources behind it than my old 2004 Virtual Medal Count.

Please do check it out along with mine. Between the two, you’ll get a good sense of what to expect in 2012. Their projection will be better-produced, but mine will include commentary. And the occasional Cheap Trick video:

Which serves as an appropriate lead-in for the canoe/kayak projections, which are relatively easy because the World Championships are held every year. In 2011, we’ll have flatwater (sprint) championships Aug. 18-21 in Szeged, Hungary, and the slalom championships Sept. 7-11 in Bratislava, Slovakia.

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mma

Welcome to the big leagues, UFC

Posted on by Beau Dure

MMA has a long-standing paradox. A monopoly of power would be a good thing in the sense that fans would have true world champions to celebrate. Yet it could be a bad thing in the sense that fighters could have little leverage over their pay and treatment, and MMA-related businesses could be pushed around.

And so the MMA community has had mixed reactions to the news that Zuffa, the corporation that has built the UFC into the world’s dominant MMA brand, has bought Strikeforce, the No. 2 MMA promotion in the world.

The deal doesn’t quite turn the UFC into the NFL of its sport — the world still has hundreds of promoters of varying sizes. It’s basically the NBA — clearly the best in the world, though other countries have a few good players as well. On a given day, a champion elsewhere might beat the NBA’s best (see Barcelona vs. Los Angeles, 2010), but on the whole, the NBA is the destination for the world’s best.

It’s an imperfect analogy because other major sports have teams that must compete to sign players. Major League Soccer, with its single-entity structure, is an exception but faces much more competition from overseas teams and leagues.

Whatever the structure of the league, most dominant U.S. sports brands have faced legal action and labor strife. The NHL missed a whole season. Congress uses baseball’s antitrust exemption as an excuse to stick its nose in the commissioner’s business. MLS faced a player lawsuit in its early days and went down to the wire to avoid a work stoppage last season. The NFL … well, I’ll assume most people follow the news at least in passing.

I asked about this prospect in yesterday’s conference call. The UFC’s Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White were confident that the future would be a smooth one, pointing to all the other promoters out there who could offer fighters another option.

And at the lower end of the talent pool, where most fans would worry most about fighters’ welfare, that’s surely true. The higher end is less of a concern. The UFC didn’t get where it is by short-changing its top talent, and it won’t stay there by starting now.

But near-monopoly power over the elite levels of the sport will ensure that the UFC will have to be careful. Any predatory practice could trigger an opportunity for a salivating law firm.

So the deal could create the best possible scenario. Fans could have undisputed world champions and a clear hierarchy of talent in each weight class. The pressure on the UFC to treat fighters, sponsors, broadcasters and fans appropriately will come not from a would-be competitor of Strikeforce’s stature but from watchful lawyers.

Over the past five years, the UFC has gone from controlling perhaps 50-60 percent of the world’s MMA market to roughly 90 percent of it. Japan’s once-dominant Pride declined and was sold to the UFC, and the promotions that sprang up in its wake have been teetering since inception. A long line of would-be challengers in North America, ranging from the outright hostile (EliteXC) to the benign but successful (Strikeforce), has either been beaten by the UFC or joined them.

The story of the next five years: How will the UFC manage its near-absolute dominance?

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soccer

A realistic 2011 MLS season preview

Posted on by Beau Dure

The predicted order of finish in MLS this season is …

I have no idea. And neither do you, no matter how many thousands of words you’ve written or podcasted to the contrary.

We really should get over the concept of being able to predict this league. This isn’t the NBA, where well-established veterans are joined by players we’ve seen for at least a year in college. Or the NFL, where Mel Kiper and his clones thoroughly vet every draftee and no one comes in from Europe. Or the NHL and MLB, where only the top junior phenoms skip the minor leagues. (Sure, it’s much more common in hockey, but even then, we know the players who are ready to make the jump.)

I’m not going to pretend I know how any of these scores of newcomers are going to fare in MLS. The only thing more ridiculous than pretending I can project a draftee’s MLS potential from a dark FSC college soccer broadcast is pretending I can tell you whether the Whitecaps have bought wisely from the Swiss Super League.

I didn’t scout the Uruguayan league to find out if Diego Chaves and Gaston Puerari are the answers up front for Chicago. I know far more about Ole Einar Bjorndalen than I do about Jan Gunnar Solli.

Some of these guys will be the next Christian Gomez or Joel Lindpere. Some of them will be the next Franco Niell or Isaac Romo.

Of the expansion teams, Portland has more proven MLS players than Vancouver has. That means Vancouver’s first year could be a Chivas USA redux, or maybe the Swiss league is to the Northwest what Eastern Europe was to the 1998 Chicago Fire.

This much we know: A couple of teams (Salt Lake, Seattle) have solid cores and didn’t make too many changes. New York has a solid core but made a few more changes than the others. Los Angeles and Dallas made a few high-profile tweaks.

Predicting the newcomers’ success is really a question of judging the recent track record of the people who brought them in. With Steve Nicol in charge, New England can maintain some cautious optimism. Houston also has management with a solid track record.

Other than that, let the crapshoot begin. And when Team X wins it all, I’ll be the first to say I didn’t tell you so.

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soccer

Are sports better when they’re great or mediocre, but not good?

Posted on by Beau Dure

For the first time in my life, I attended a boxing card last night. Two things stood out:

1. The Virginia commission has issues. See my comments at the excellent Boxing Along the Beltway blog if you’re really curious about all that.

2. The early bouts were more entertaining than the two main events, featuring former WBA champion William Joppy and local hero Jimmy Lange, who has held a couple of minor belts and appeared on The Contender. An unbeaten Maryland heavyweight walked out to A Country Boy Can Survive, listing all the wonderful things country boys can do, but beating a journeyman with a 6-8 record was not among them. Another up-and-coming prospect had all he could handle from a guy on an 18-bout winless streak, and the decision was initially announced in favor of the journeyman until they realized that was a little far-fetched.

Joppy, Lange and their opponents were clearly the four best boxers in the arena. Lange’s bout might have been better without the nagging feeling I had that his opponent was being ripped off by a home-state ref. Joppy’s fight was full of nice-looking flurries that didn’t seem to do much.

This wasn’t quite boxing at the highest level, though. Manny Pacquiao commands a lot of money for a reason.

I can’t extrapolate too much from one fight card, of course. But it mirrors something I’ve noticed elsewhere. The top echelon is usually worth watching (exception: World Cup finals, where players are usually trying to keep their underwear clean), and the very bottom is dreadful. But of that 80 percent in between, the unpolished athletes often bring the entertainment. That’s why we have fond memories of the first season of MLS, where the defenses would see a cutback move from Preki and react like confused dogs. “Huh? Huh? Where’d you go? Where’d you go?”

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