Graham Hays passes on a quote showing the extra urgency in softball, a sport with an underdog pro league and an uphill fight to get back in the Olympics.
None of us who play in this league know when our last at-bat is going to be. We don’t know when the last time we’ve ever going to play softball again is. So there wasn’t really any time to waste in the sixth inning.
Did anyone sense that urgency about women’s pro soccer from the sport’s stars? Perhaps there’s no reason to feel that way — overseas leagues, the WPSL and the W-League can always provide other options.
The Paralympic Games start Wednesday with the opening ceremony. Then we’ll have archery, track cycling, equestrian, goalball, judo, powerlifting, shooting, sitting volleyball, swimming, table tennis and wheelchair basketball on Thursday
No, I’m not doing medal projections. That’s a bit too complicated. But I will grab some of the more interesting things I see and pass them along.
Like so:
– Tatyana McFadden is doing five events ranging from the 100 meters to the marathon. Let’s see Usain Bolt top THAT.
– Need a guide to the Paralympic classifications? Give it a try.
– A Norwich charity is helping North Korea participate in the Paralympics for the first time.
– The Paralympic torch made a ceremonial stop in Trafalgar Square.
Glad to see the great columnist come out of retirement for this:
Was Armstrong using some more potent drug, or using it more often? I doubt that. My guess is that cycling has been the ultimate level playing ground we all say we want for sports. It was also a lethal business, by the way: young Tour aspirants were falling off their machines, quite dead, because their altered blood was the thickness of tomato bisque.
Bobby Fischer never gave up his world chess championship. In his mind and in perhaps the minds of a handful of people, he was still the champion.
Lance Armstrong isn’t quite as delusional as Bobby Fischer was. But like Fischer at the chessboard, he’s trying a shrewd gambit: Armstrong believes he has a better shot at casting reasonable doubt on the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s case against him outside the arbitration process than within it.
That’s not necessarily true. But it’s not a wild idea.
Armstrong will have more supporters than Fischer had. Alberto Contador had kind words. The International Cycling Union remains skeptical of USADA’s jurisdiction. Overseas at the Telegraph, many writers and readers sympathize with Armstrong.
Even the judge who ruled against Armstrong’s challenge of USADA’s jurisdiction took issue with USADA’s claims — see page 17 of his ruling. (Page 18 had one of the more ominous footnotes I’ve seen in legal documents: “If it should come to pass that Armstrong does not actually receive adequate notice sufficiently in advance of the arbitration hearing, and it is brought to this Court’s attention in the appropriate manner, USADA is unlikely to appreciate the result.” Page 28 refers to “troubling aspects of this case,” and page 29 calls USADA’s conduct thus far “mystifying.”)
That leaves two questions. The first: Did he do it? The second: Does it matter?
Internet commenters always think they know the answer to the first. They say Armstrong passed every test. And he did. But so did Marion Jones, before she admitted — in the face of considerable evidence — to using a designer steroid carefully constructed to pass tests.
It’s not to fair to say Armstrong is just like Jones. Every doping case is different. Swimmer Jessica Hardy had a particularly murky case. LaShawn Merritt had an embarrassing but convincing defense. Floyd Landis had a good, detailed case against his doping accusations, and then he confessed to all sorts of other performance enhancements that weren’t caught.
That brings us back to the cycling world — which, it’s fair to say, has had a drug problem in the past. If Armstrong was doping, even to the extent alleged by USADA, it’s not a case of a bunch of East German swimmers systematically doping their way to victory over athletes with no evidence of wrongdoing. Jan Ullrich and Andreas Kloden, who could theoretically be named Tour champions in hindsight, have had their own issues.
(Thankfully, Cycling News translates: “By deleting Lance, the list of winners doesn’t become more credible.”)
From a bookkeeping point of view, naming Tour de France winners in retrospect is impossible. No doping agency is going to go back through each cyclist’s history and make sure he was clean the year he might have finished on the podium.
And Armstrong knows the arbitrators and USADA, ultimately, can only affect the bookkeeping. What they learn from Armstrong’s case is ultimately more important going forward — what can they learn for future doping cases to ensure cycling in the 2010s is cleaner than cycling in the 1990s?
And so Armstrong is gambling that his reputation will survive the bookkeepers’ red pen. Given the good will he has built up through his advocacy for cycling and cancer, plus the uncertainty of any 8-year-old Tour de France records, that’s not a bad bet.
Bobby Fischer’s gambits in real life were rash and doomed to failure. Bobby Fischer’s gambits at the chessboard were meticulously analyzed and usually successful. Armstrong’s gambit is a lot closer to Fischer at the chessboard than Fischer in real life.
When Dana White is angry, he doesn’t hide it. Even through the impersonal nature of a conference call, White’s anger crackles over the phone lines.
Dana White is angry. And he’s angry at his best fighter, Jon Jones.
That in itself would be a big story. The fact that the UFC has just canceled a card for the first time, at least since White and the Fertitta brothers bought the company more than 10 years ago, is a bigger story.
So today, White held that conference call and dumped all over Jones and his coach, Greg Jackson. The issue, in case you don’t follow the MMA blogoTwittersphere that immediately revved into high gear: Jones’ opponent, Dan Henderson, is hurt. Chael Sonnen volunteered to fight Jones. But Jones refused to fight Sonnen on short notice.
The UFC line is to place the blame for the card cancellation squarely on the broad shoulders of one person — Jon Jones. It’s not just Dana being mad in the conference call. A couple of hours later, a UFC press release started like this:
For the first time in the history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship®, a UFC® champion has refused to face an alternative challenger after an injury to his original opponent, forcing the organization to cancel an event.
It goes on:
White explained: “UFC 151 will be remembered as the event Jon Jones and Greg Jackson murdered.”
The release ends with quotes from Henderson and Sonnen, both of whom are shocked that a champion would turn down a fight. But the meat of the release is in between — White laments the financial losses incurred by the other fighters on the card, PPV distributors, sponsors, etc.
Have others piled on? Oh yes. They have. The reaction from fighters isn’t unanimous, but it’s lopsided, particularly among those who lost a payday Sept. 1. (The two fighters on the co-main event, Jay Hieron and Jake Ellenberger, had a restrained response.)
One point people seem to forgetting: Jon Jones didn’t cancel the card. The UFC did.
And the reasons the UFC canceled the card go far beyond one injury and one fight refusal. In the long term, several conflicts within the UFC world have been violently yanked to the surface like Frank Mir yanking an arm.
(Or Ronda Rousey, for those who are a little newer to this sport.)
Those conflicts are:
1. Supply and demand/too many cards. MMA Mania made a prophetic point last month:
The cards have become increasingly top heavy. UFC President Dana White used to criticize the boxing model for having one big headliner littered with undercard bouts no one cared about, but his company is slowly but surely moving along this path.
White deflected this question in the conference call, insisting that the UFC’s bosses know what they’re doing. But this problem has been brewing for a while, as the numbers-mad MMA media digest the disappointing ratings and PPV buy rates this year. This year — and last year, to an extent — has been a year of more fights, fewer blockbusters.
For a hard-core fight fan who isn’t cynical — if such a person exists — the explosion of UFC fights is a good thing, as Bloody Elbow’s Tim Burke points out in something that will take you a few days to read. When White has been asked in the past about putting on too many fights, he responds that he’s besieged by people from every city and every country asking when he’s going to bring another UFC card to their local arenas. And he has a point.
And it’s not as if the UFC is stretching the same talent pool more thinly. The UFC has ballooned from five weight classes to eight. When White and company bought Strikeforce, they brought over more good fighters. And as a younger generation grows up in this relatively new sport, the talent pool grows steadily deeper.
But for both the hard-cores and the “casuals,” the problem is the lack of main event-worthy fights. Georges St. Pierre’s injury woes don’t help, nor does Brock Lesnar’s retirement.
The first UFC card I attended was the promotion’s Atlanta debut, UFC 88. It wasn’t considered one of the UFC’s biggest cards. At that time, it was still unusual to have a card without a title fight. That card’s main event — Chuck Liddell vs. Rashad Evans — featured a UFC Hall of Famer against someone who has a shot to join him. The co-main event had former champion Rich Franklin, still a company star, against Matt Hamill, an alumnus of The Ultimate Fighter whose life was chronicled in the excellent film The Hammer. The third bout on the main card? Brazilian submission ace Rousimar Palhares against Dan Henderson — the same Dan Henderson slated for the main event at UFC 151.
Not bad, is it? If Chuck Liddell had been hurt at the last minute, that card surely would’ve gone on without him. Henderson would’ve been the co-main event, at least.
The next time the UFC was in Atlanta, in April 2012, the co-main event featured rising prospect Rory McDonald against Che Mills, a British fighter with a good track record who had nevertheless failed to make the cast of The Ultimate Fighter a couple of years earlier. That was Mills’ second UFC fight. His first was in his native England — on the undercard, broadcast on Facebook.
Still, the UFC kept up the “show must go on” mentality — even for UFC 147, where plans to bring Anderson Silva and Sonnen to Brazil fell through, and Vitor Belfort pulled out of his fight against Wanderlei Silva. The UFC offered refunds in advance of the show. The PPV sales were abysmal by the UFC’s lofty standards. The UFC took the hit and moved on with a very strong UFC 148.
UFC’s 151 co-main event, Hieron-Ellenberger, would’ve been one of the weakest main events of any UFC pay-per-view card. But Greg Jackson has a point when he says, “I didn’t know they had it all riding on one fight.”
And Jackson leads us to another point …
2. Brawling vs. technical fighting. “He’s a (bleeping) sport-killer,” White says of Greg Jackson, the fight guru whose cerebral approach was recently chronicled in a compelling Sports Illustrated piece. Jackson is a game-planner. He has been accused of taking everyone from Georges St. Pierre to Clay Guida and turning them into dull fighters content to grind out decisions.
It’s not just Jackson. The 13th season of The Ultimate Fighter was full of plodding wrestlers. Even Sonnen, for all his wild-man talk outside the cage, isn’t a particularly interesting fighter — he gets the takedown, pounds away without much result and tries to remember not to get submitted.
Jackson says he and Jones would’ve had only three days or so to prepare for Sonnen before starting the weight cut, press conferences and other obligations of the days leading up to the fight. To the coach, that’s not enough. That attitude may not sit well with an audience nostalgic for the days of Tank Abbott’s devil-may-care approach or at least Chuck Liddell’s hands-at-the-hips striking style. But until someone proves Jackson’s style to be ineffective in the cage, he’s going to keep teaching it.
And that leads to the third issue …
3. The legitimacy of the sport. The UFC prides itself on being real. They don’t do gimmicky matchups (usually). They don’t tell you Kimbo Slice is one of the world’s top heavyweights.
Given that, why would Chael Sonnen get a title shot in the first place? He lost his last fight — at middleweight. Before that, he had an unconvincing win over Michael Bisping. He hasn’t fought at 205 pounds in years. But if he had fought Jones, landed a lucky punch and won, we were supposed to hail him as the legitimate light heavyweight champion?
Kid Nate and Luke Thomas discussed one option — have Jones fight a non-title bout … against Sonnen, against a heavyweight, against whomever.
That might have worked. A Hieron-Ellenberger main event might have worked. Even better — between UFC 151 and 152, stack one of the cards with a couple of decent fights (the 152 card was already solid before moving Jones there to fight Lyoto Machida), and promote the other as a “Fight Night” card.
That’s hindsight, of course. But looking ahead, the problems that led to UFC 151’s cancellation aren’t going away on their own. From fans’ expectations to front-office planning, those problems are part of a new reality. Time to adjust.
Yohan Blake just provided more evidence that we’re living in a Golden Age of sprinters.
The Jamaican posted a time of 9.69 seconds into a slight headwind to win the 100 meters at the Diamond League’s Lausanne stop. That ties Tyson Gay for the fastest time ever recorded by someone other than Usain Bolt.
In fact, it ties Bolt’s then-world record from Beijing. Bolt went faster to win the 2009 World Championships (9.58) and the Olympics earlier this month (9.63).
Gay ran a quite-respectable 9.83 on Thursday to finish second. Jamaica’s Nesta Carter was third, and the USA’s Ryan Bailey was fourth at 10-flat.
Then Bolt himself came onto the track for the 200 meters and also tied Tyson Gay’s best at 19.58. The commentators spotted a few flaws in his race, then pointed out that only four people have ever gone faster (one of whom is Bolt himself).
He also plays some air bass. No, not air guitar. Not at that angle. Air bass. Trust me on this. I’ve played both.
– Carmelita Jeter made such a stunning comeback in the women’s 100 meters that the announcers had pretty much given the race to Olympic gold medalist Shelly Ann Fraser-Pryce (Jamaica), assuming that Jeter had done no better than make a close race for second. Fraser-Pryce probably assumed she had it, too, and might have had a more convincing lean at the finish had she realized the danger. They both finished in 10.86. If you follow Jeneba Tarmoh after the whole Olympic trials kerfuffle — she was sixth in 11.13.
– Matthew Centrowitz ran a personal best 3:31.96 in the 1,500 meters, good for third place behind Kenya’s Silas Kiplagat (3:31.78) and Ethiopia’s Mekonnen Gebremedhin. Leo Manzano had his best time of the season (3:34.08), good for 10th. We told you those Diamond League meets with their pacemakers were faster than the Olympics, right? Galen Rupp didn’t finish — that’s worth checking on later. But if you don’t know Centrowitz’s name, learn it now. He was third at Worlds last year; fourth in the Olympics this year. Worth hyping when he runs.
– The men’s 110 hurdles were disappointing — Olympic champion Aries Merritt false-started. Silver medalist and world champion Jason Richardson won in 13.08, just ahead of the resurgent David Oliver.
– New Zealand shot putter Valerie Adams continued her Belated Gold Medal (Thanks, WADA) Victory Tour by smashing a meet record that had stood since 1989. Not saying that previous record was questionable, but it was well before WADA was established, and the holder was from East Germany. That record was 20.36 meters. Adams tossed 20.73 on her first attempt, watched as no one else came close (the USA’s Michelle Carter was second at 19.60), then came back for her unnecessary final attempt and threw 20.95. Now she’s just showing off.
– Seven of the eight runners in the women’s 100 hurdles were from the USA or Canada. No, Lolo Jones wasn’t there. Neither was Kellie Wells. So you won’t be surprised that Dawn Harper won. But her time of 12.43 is very good.
– Don’t ask about the U.S. high jumpers.
– Brittney Reese is still in her post-London doldrums.
Neat event starting tomorrow — the 3-on-3 basketball world championships. It might be over 100 degrees on the outdoor court, but the venue is cool. For the USA, Skylar Diggins will be there. And we can’t wait for the opening matchup of Slovenia and Nepal.
Should be tons of fun. And organizers are hoping the 3-person version of the sport will be … in the Olympics?
This isn’t the only variant of an existing sport being pushed for the Games. Futsal, the indoor soccer game without walls, had a bit of a push recently.
It’s easier to add a new event than a new sport … unless, for some reason, you’re talking about women’s ski jumping. You already have the federation involved. That’s how cycling has managed to add mountain bike and BMX in the past few decades.
But like futsal, 3-on-3 basketball has a few issues:
1. The Games won’t get the best players. Beach volleyball is an exception to the rule on having two variants of the same sport — some players are better-suited to the sand, and the two-player format in particular brings a different dynamic than the indoor version. Soccer players don’t grow up aspiring to be futsal greats, and it’s hard to imagine basketball players growing up aspiring to play 3v3.
2. No one watches basketball and thinks, “You know what I hate about this game? Fast breaks.”
3. If the Olympics are really desperate to get the younger demographic, they’ll just add skateboarding. (Though skateboarding is not one of the eight sports being considered.)
So a World Championship at a Greek historic site? Cool. Olympics? I’ll just say I’m skeptical.
Hi, I’m U.S. volleyball veteran Logan Tom. I play for Fenerbahce. Really! There’s a video linked elsewhere in this post. (Find “Turkey.”)
Women’s soccer isn’t the only sport in which the USA is a world power but struggles to keep a league of its own. Volleyball and water polo are in the same boat.
(Yes, this is indoor volleyball. Beach volleyball, like tennis and other sports for individuals and pairs, has an international circuit and the reborn AVP. Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal just clinched the FIVB beach tour title for the year.)
As it stands now, most U.S. players go overseas. Check the Olympic rosters for the men’s and women’s team and count the countries represented: Italy (3 men/3 women), Russia (3 men/2 women), Poland (3 men/2 women), Brazil (2 women), Kuwait (1 man), France (1 man), Azerbaijan, Turkey and Puerto Rico.
And it’s not just the national team — USA Volleyball tracks many players around the world.
In the USA, volleyball had one high-profile league effort in the 1970s, the International Volleyball Association. Andy Crossley has some of the details, understandably focusing on the league’s star player — Wilt Chamberlain. You may have heard something about his basketball career.
This history will sound familiar to fans of any women’s sport or niche sport. (In other words, anything other than football, baseball, basketball and hockey.)
Will it work this time? No idea. But it’s just peculiar that Puerto Rico could support a pro volleyball league while Southern California can’t.
I have NO problem with games not streaming for free anymore, I think they aren’t really worth the laborious efforts and will never generate enough interest and should not be done unless a time comes where it can be shown they generate pay-per-view subscriptions or ticket sales. However, goals and highlights videos should be put on official youtube channels (free on demand hosting) weekly, as well as new coach/player interviews daily.
I can only speak for myself, but live streams generally don’t do much for me unless they’re professionally produced — usually a live local TV broadcast replicated online. They usually go like this:
Hey, that green blob just passed to another green blob. This could be a chance. Where’s the ball? …. (buffering) ….. WHY IS THE ANNOUNCER SHOUTING AT ME?!?!
But highlights and interviews are good. Maybe “daily” is a stretch. But weekly? Should be possible.
Being an amateur videographer myself (in a promotion/relegation scheme, I’d probably be eighth division), I’d suggest a few tips for teams to keep the budget low and still put forth some solid video content:
1. Get one or two cameras, maybe just basic Flipcams, in addition to whatever they’re using to shoot the game for scouting purposes. Get creative with placing these — maybe in the corners, or maybe use the behind-the-goal view in this D.C. United Women highlight reel to show how the plays unfolded.
2. Free video editing software is abundant. You Mac people could probably recommend something better than what I’m using.
3. Captions are your friends. Who’s that Number 8 who just scored? Who got the assist? Was this the 23rd minute or a stoppage-time winner? If your free video editing software makes captions difficult, choose again.
4. Learn how to frame an interview. Notice the difference between ESPN’s typical studio interviews and the “camera in the face” interviews you often see elsewhere. (To be fair, Fox is professional, and I once thought they were about to push the camera up Ives Galarcep’s nose.)
Maybe NSCAA could help teach teams how to do this. Amanda Vandervort has led popular sessions teaching coaches and team managers to to do social media. Video is the next step in social media.
Live games just don’t need to be a priority. If the new league gets a TV deal, great — and maybe some of the teams’ highlights can be featured in an “Around the League” segment at halftime. But before everyone tries to rewire the Maryland Soccerplex and hire webcast commentators, mastering YouTube would be a great step.
When we last left the War on Nonrevenue Sports, we were asking a few college revenue questions tangentially related to Title IX, and we were still fretting a bit over the Sports Illustrated piece wondering why we should bother to keep funding sports that lose money.
In the meantime, we’ve had the Olympics dubbed the “Title IX Games,” in which female athletes won tons and tons of medals. (Well, female athletes from the USA and a few other countries won tons and tons of medals — they didn’t really change the number of medals women could win or start handing out six medals per women’s event.)
And we’ve seen the start of the college soccer season. I’m pleased to say my alma mater’s women’s team is already 2-0. Just imagine how they’ll fare once the freshmen move in later this week.
How does that tie together? Basically like this — for all the talk of the “Title IX Games,” colleges are in danger of contributing less and less to the U.S. Olympic movement.
One reason is obvious: U.S. women are winning medals in sports that aren’t traditional college fare. In these cases, Title IX is more of an abstract inspirational force than a direct catalyst. And even so, it’s not as if the USA is the only country whose women are winning medals.
The other reason: Student-athletes in sports other than football and basketball are still on the endangered list.
Football continues to move toward “superconferences,” which will ramp up the expenses for football programs and make athletic departments wonder if it’s really worth it to fly their volleyball teams from Boise to New York for a “conference” game. And if you read the SI story about college football teams emulating Nick Saban’s “Process,” which seems to entail hiring tons of people to take care of various details from academic advising to film review, you wonder how many resources will be left over. (Yes, Saban’s program has made more money from its higher spending. But he can’t win the national championship every year. And what about the other coaches trying to do the same thing?)
Even aside from the financial muddle, the NCAA seems to take particular joy in making silly, pointless decisions on nonrevenue sports. That explains why soccer has kicked off before students are even in session, forcing W-League, WPSL and PDL teams to wrap their seasons in late July, while the “spring season” is being whittled away. That explains the college tennis recommendations that have drawn a petition drive.
And we still have the sensitive subject of Title IX. The gloating about U.S. women winning more medals than men is surely a terrible idea that could easily lead to backlash. A cursory glance at college campuses finds colleges adding large teams in women’s rowing and “equestrian” (not quite the Olympic events), while USA Wrestling is tracking the status of embattled men’s programs under the heading “Title IX.”
The counterargument says male athletes in the USA devote a lot of attention to football, which isn’t going to be in the Olympics any time soon. And that’s true. But so is this, from the NCAA’s 2010-11 Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report:
Since 1988-89, there has been a net loss of 312 men’s teams in Division I. By comparison, since 1988-89 there has been a net gain of 715 women’s teams in Division I.
Yet the more you dig into the numbers, the more you see it isn’t just men’s Olympic sports teams getting cut in D1. Women’s sports are getting the ax, too. Here are some women’s numbers, with men’s numbers added for comparison (except where noted, the “from” number is from the 1981-82 school year):
Archery: Down from 4 (1998-99) to 0 (Men, too)
Badminton: Down from 7 to 0 (Men never had more than 2)
Synchronized swimming: Down from 5 (1995-96) to 0
Fencing: Down from 39 to 23 (men: 43 to 20)
Field hockey: Down from 95 to 79
Gymnastics: Down from 99 to 63 (men: 59 to 16)
Meanwhile, women’s bowling, a non-Olympic sport, is on the rise (3 in 1998-99, 33 now). Women’s equestrian, an eccentric cousin of the Olympic sport, is up from 8 (1999-00) to 18. Women’s golf, now technically an Olympic sports, has blown up — 83 to 248.
But women’s rugby hasn’t benefited from its new Olympic status, holding steady at 2 D1 varsity teams. Women’s lacrosse, meanwhile, is up from 39 to 89. Softball, recently excluded from the Olympics but fighting to get back, has nearly doubled from 143 to 283.
Some Olympic sports are doing a bit better. Women’s cross-country is steady, slightly up. So is women’s swimming/diving. Women’s rowing may be the height of absurdity with an average squad size of 61.1 (!?!), but it is indeed an Olympic sport up from 28 to 85 teams. Women’s basketball is still growing, women’s water polo is up to 33, and women’s soccer is still going through the roof. Women’s volleyball, women’s indoor track and women’s outdoor track are still comfortably over 300.
And that’s where men can claim some inequity. Men’s rowing can’t get back over 30, men’s swimming/diving has dropped from 181 to 136, men’s tennis trickling down downward, men have fewer track teams, and men’s volleyball is down to 23.
Then there’s wrestling, down from 146 to 80. Maybe it’d help if women’s wrestling could gain a foothold.
So why is all this important? Should colleges prepare Olympic athletes? Is the bigger issue the lack of opportunities after college, particularly for women’s team sports?
Perhaps. But colleges have the facilities. In many sports, college-age athletes are at a critical spot of determining whether they have world-class potential.
So maybe the USOC and NCAA should get to the same table and figure things out. Maybe we could see some partnerships. Maybe at the very least, the NCAA shouldn’t launch initiatives — from tweaking the rules to favoring certain sports — that make college less attractive to athletes on the Olympic path.
(We’ll get to the “pro league” part of things soon. Don’t worry.)
Duresport.com 