Month: September 2014

soccer

2014 NWSL Draft: Year-end assessment

Posted on by Beau Dure

I compiled this for a couple of reasons:

1. I wanted to include in an epilogue to Enduring Spirit that I’m now abandoning, and I’m putting useful stuff I gathered on the blog instead.

2. I was seeking proof of my hypothesis that NWSL teams cannot and should not rely on immediate help from the draft, no matter how talented the draft class might be. I know that takes away some of the fun of previewing and reviewing the draft, but we might just need to take a longer-term view of it.

Feel free to flesh out some of the descriptions in the comments — I’m game for some crowd-sourcing and some discussion. Here’s the info to get you started:

First round

  1. Crystal Dunn, Washington – 21 games, 18 starts, 3 assists. Sparkplug in attack but sometimes burned defensively.
  2. Kealia Ohai, Houston – 23 games, 21 starts, 4 goals, 1 assist. Heated up toward season’s end.
  3. Julie Johnston, Chicago – 21 games, 21 starts, 2 goals, 2 assists. Former U.S. Under-20 captain was named Rookie of the Year.
  4. Vanessa DiBernardo, Chicago – 23 games, 19 starts, 1 goal, 3 assists. Had 11 shots on goal.
  5. Kassey Kallman, Kansas City – 18 games, 18 starts, 1 assist. Steady defensive presence.
  6. Maya Hayes, Sky Blue – 23 games, 13 starts, 1 goal, 1 assist.
  7. Amanda Frisbie, Seattle – Injury wiped out season.
  8. Nkem Ezurike, Boston – 11 games, 6 starts, 2 goals. Also played a little bit with Breakers Reserves.
  9. Courtney Verloo, Western New York – 1 game (1 minute); waived in late May

Second round

  1. Rafaelle Souza, Houston – 16 games, 6 starts, 1 assist.
  2. Marissa Diggs, Houston – 13 games, 11 starts, 1 goal, 1 assist.
  3. Morgan Marlborough, Kansas City – 9 games, 2 assists, 2 goals.
  4. Natasha Anasi, Boston – Never reported to Breakers; signed with IBV in Iceland.
  5. Cloee Colohan, Western New York – Did not play and seems to have retired from pro soccer.
  6. Hayley Haagsma, Sky Blue – Tore ACL in first preseason game.
  7. Jenna Richmond, Kansas City – 22 games, 20 starts, 1 goal, 4 assists.
  8. Megan Brigman, Seattle – 2 games (17 minutes).
  9. Kelsey Wys, Western New York – 10 games, 9 starts. Pressed into service in goal after injuries to Adrianna Franch and Lydia Williams.

Third round

  1. Frances Silva, Kansas City – 18 games, 5 starts, 2 goals, 1 assist.
  2. Mandy Laddish, Kansas City – 2 games (15 minutes).
  3. Jazmine Reeves, Boston – 17 games, 13 starts, 7 goals, 1 assist. Steal of the draft.
  4. Hayley Brock, Chicago – 8 games, 3 starts, 1 goal, 1 assist.
  5. Mollie Pathman, Boston – 21 games, 18 starts, 1 assist. Versatility helped.
  6. Michelle Pao, Sky Blue – Did not play. Stayed with Sky Blue’s reserve team and was called up when national team players were absent.
  7. Emily Menges, Portland – 23 games, 22 starts. Solid defender.
  8. Molly Menchel, Washington – Did not play. Former Spirit Reserve trained with French power Lyon and wound up signing with Norway’s Røa.
  9. Annie Steinlage, Western New York – Did not play. Signed with W-League’s Ottawa Fury and played 11 games.

Fourth round

  1. Jordan Jackson, Houston – 20 games, 13 starts, 2 goals, 1 assist.
  2. Shasta Fisher, Washington – Did not play. Played a few games with the WPSL’s Westside Timbers.
  3. Ellen Parker, Seattle – Did not play.
  4. Elisabeth Sullivan, Portland – 1 game (1 minute). This was the pick the Spirit traded for Tiffany Weimer.
  5. Jami Kranich, Boston – Made roster but did not play — backup keeper behind NWSL goalkeeper of the year Alyssa Naeher.
  6. Elizabeth Eddy, Sky Blue – Did not play. Went to another “blue” team — LA Blues, which beat the Spirit Reserves in the W-League final.
  7. Kim DeCesare, Boston – 1 game (9 minutes). Spent most of the season with the Breakers Reserves before moving to Eskilstuna United in Sweden.
  8. Maegan Kelly, Kansas City – Did not play. Signed in Iceland with Stjarnan.
  9. Kristen Hamilton, Western New York – Did not play.

Again — updates, suggestions, observations and promises to buy me beer and pizza go in the comments.

Thanks to dayecarter on Twitter for chasing down some of the European signees.

4
mma

Art Davie, The Ultimate Fighter and the changing face of the UFC

Posted on by Beau Dure

Female fighters have taken the spotlight in the UFC. And I haven’t heard anyone complaining. (Please don’t dig up some misogynist troll on Twitter — I’m sure they’re out there, but they don’t deserve any attention.) The current season of The Ultimate Fighter is all-female, and the fights are the most compelling in years.

davieSo it’s a bit of a culture shock to read Is This Legal?: The Inside Story of the First UFC from the Man Who Created It, by UFC founder Art Davie with longtime MMA/soccer broadcaster (and therefore friend of SportsMyriad) Sean Wheelock.

Davie is a throwback in every sense. With a gun tucked in his waistband, a few Cuban cigars as currency and a predilection for hiring attractive women, it’s easy to picture him as a lead character in a film noir about a 50s nightclub owner.

You might like the guy, you might not. What you can’t deny is that he took a compelling idea and pushed it into existence. That wasn’t easy, even after he fell in with the Gracie family and earned the trust of people who were eager to prove the superiority of their martial art in a new arena.

Davie had long had the question in his head of who would win fights between different styles of fighters — boxers, wrestlers, various martial arts practitioners, etc. But previous efforts to make such matchups always bogged down on the rules, leading to farces like the Muhammad Ali-Antonio Inoki fight. (This Guardian story on that event weighs in at 4,000 words, and it’s worth it.) And TV programmers didn’t know what to make of it.

Each problem weighed on Davie’s shoulders until the last minute. Like Apollo 13, you know the ending, but you’re still left in suspense as Davie and his broadcast partners play hardball until a few hours before the event. Davie and Wheelock also describe the contentious fighters’ meeting in which the rules were fodder for a few good shouting matches until a sumo wrestler put his weight behind the proceedings:

Then Teila Tuli, in the most dramatic and theatrical of gestures, stood up and announced, “I just signed my paper. I don’t know about you guys, but I came here to party. If anyone else came here to party, I’ll see you tomorrow night at the arena.” He then slammed his signed paper down on the table. The sound reverberated throughout the room.

And so began the Ultimate Fighting Championship and, with all due respect to now-defunct Japanese organizations, mixed martial arts as we know it.

Fast-forward 21 years. With Dana White at the helm, the UFC still hires women for the ornamental position of Octagon Girl. But The Ultimate Fighter, the reality show that pushed the UFC over the tipping point into the mainstream, is relying on women in its pivotal 20th season.

It’s also the first season in which the winner will be named UFC champion. They can pull that off because it’s a new weight class — strawweight, or 115 pounds. (The only women’s division already in the UFC is Rouseyweight, er, bantamweight. They’ve skipped flyweight, 125 pounds. See all the top fighters per class at MMA Rising’s rankings page.)

Personally, I was so excited by the prospect of seeing notable fighters squaring off on TUF that I forgot to consider whether the show was … you know … any good.

At Fight Opinion, the always candid Zach Arnold says it’s not. Among his complaints:

  • No tactical or technical talk about what’s going on in practice or what the fighters are trying to do. (To be fair, they haven’t done this in a lot of seasons. That said, this season has been more emotional than past seasons. Which is saying a lot.)
  • Not enough background on the fighters, personally or professionally.
  • The fights should air in the middle of the show, making it tougher to guess how long it goes. (He’s right. Fight starts at 10:52? First-round finish coming up. 10:35? Three-rounder.) Also, they could use the time after the fight to dissect what just happened and tell more about what’s coming next.

The third idea is simplest to implement. Start each fight at the halfway point of the episode.

The first two ideas illustrate the challenge for TUF producers: How do you balance casual fans and hardcore fans? The petty stuff at the house (Zach posted before Wednesday’s episode, which featured a raunchy slam-book session, though they left out the winning entry) drives the hardcore fans crazy but amuses the casuals. A point-by-point breakdown of striking combinations will have the casuals reaching for the remote control.

This season’s fights, at least, are hardcore heaven. Instead of leaving matchups to the vagaries of coaches who might send their top fighter to face the other team’s top fighter in the first week, potentially leaving one of the show favorites sitting around idle for the rest of the show. This time, they felt they had enough information on the fighters to seed them, 1 through 16. The result is the most compelling MMA tournament since PRIDE threw heavyweights at each other.

UFC 1 was a tournament as well. Aside from that, the sport has evolved quite a bit since Art Davie’s vision of tough guys from various fighting disciplines seeing which is the best. Now we’re talking about well-rounded athletes, male and female. I doubt Dana White tucks a gun in the waistband of his worn-out jeans.

So it’s a bit jarring to read Davie’s book and then tune into women punching each other in The Ultimate Fighter. But they’ve all played their part in growing this sport. And for that, we should be thankful.

0
sports culture

Football (American) still king of high school sports

Posted on by Beau Dure

I don’t know many kids who play youth football. But in my local elementary school, tons of people play youth soccer. I saw some spreadsheets at one time from which it was easy to figure out that nearly half of the boys in second grade were playing.

But the death of high school football, Bob Cook reports, is greatly exaggerated.

One big reason:

Or it could be that football, like track and field, will always have high numbers because at most schools it’s one of the few sports in which nobody gets cut.

It’s easy math. A typical high school may have 50, 60 or even more football players on its varsity, then similar numbers on its junior varsity. Maybe even a C team or a “freshman” team. At a lot of high schools, previous football experience isn’t a prerequisite. They need the numbers.

High school soccer? Good luck. My town typically has 200 boys and 200 girls per grade level playing soccer. Roughly 30-40 percent of those kids will go to the same high school. That’s 60-80 per year. If you’re not playing travel soccer, it’s going to be really difficult to make the team.

Then you have the rituals, as Cook points out:

When I’ve picked up my son after he emerges from the locker room after a game, girls are there saying hi and telling him what a good job he did. This does not happen after his chess tournaments.

It’s Homecoming week at my son’s high school, and it’s a big, football-centered deal. I don’t recall my son getting his locker decorated because of his water polo participation, nor a cheerleader asking to wear his jersey on game day, though that might be because in water polo there was no homecoming, nor jerseys.

Anachronistic? We might think so, but it’s still going on.

2
soccer

Hope Solo: The backlash against the bandwagon

Posted on by Beau Dure

As the belated outrage over Hope Solo’s status on the U.S. women’s national team continues to grow, we’re seeing a lot of voices reminding us that the issue is much more complicated than it’s being presented in a lot of quarters. It’s certainly more complicated than the “if Ray Rice is suspended, why isn’t Hope Solo?” nonsense from the “men’s rights” knuckle-draggers.

This post, which will be updated (feel free to send me links), is to highlight those voices in the hopes that they’ll be part of the national conversation.

Not all of these voices are in complete agreement about how to handle the Solo situation. Some call for her suspension but have misgivings about where the discourse is headed. Some agree with my take that U.S. Soccer erred in celebrating her shutout record but think there’s no point is suspending her now. (After her trial, anything goes.) But they’re all good at bringing out the nuances in a case that really isn’t that simple:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic: 

It is now becoming fashionable to ignore human history and dump all manner of insupportable violence committed by athletes into the same bucket. The label on that bucket reads “Something Bad, Which We Should Punish.” It is true that what Ray Rice did was violent and wrong. It is also true that what Adrian Peterson did was violent and wrong. And it also true that what Hope Solo is alleged to have done is violent and wrong. But they are not the same specimen of violent and wrong.

Jen Doyle, The Sport Spectacle:

Fans of the USWNT will know well that Solo is facing assault charges. That story is not new. Washington Post editors might want to claim that this is “the domestic violence case that no one is talking about,” but that claim only works we ignore The Seattle Times, which, for example, has covered the story consistently, and responsibly, through their Seattle Sounders FC blog (Solo plays for Seattle Reign). The fact is that the national news media basically doesn’t give a shit about women’s sports stories unless they can be made into stories about men. Unless Solo’s case, in other words, can appear as a footnote to the Ray Rice story and (worse) absorbed into some broad popular sense that women, in general, are somehow getting away with something.

Jeff Kassouf, Equalizer Soccer: 

On Friday, Solo was suddenly “the domestic violence case no one is talking about.” People are “turning a blind eye” on the Solo case!

Except for the entirety of mainstream and niche media alike when it happened in June (including those …very … outlets writing those Friday pieces). The news on Solo’s alleged domestic violence was hardly ignored then. Every major media outlet in the country reported on it, giving it the red breaking news bar and top-of-the-headline-stack treatment similar to these NFL stories.

The cases “no one is talking about” are the 12 million people affected each year by intimate partner violence, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Amanda Hess, Slate:

All of the players who have been benched in the past couple of weeks are taking the heat for their league’s long-standing ignorance of domestic violence. It’s not clear that this approach—which penalizes highly visible players while letting the league off the hook—is ideal. What we do know for certain is that it’s not applicable to U.S. women’s soccer, which has no such systematic, decades-long history of ignoring the fact that certain players abuse their partners.

Kate Fagan, espnW:

What’s concerning about the dialogue around Hope Solo is this: It’s diverting us from the core issue. It feels like a distraction tactic to take the pressure off male athletes, off men in general, off the social epidemic of domestic violence.

Christine Brennan, USA TODAY:

(USOC CEO) Blackmun is not calling on U.S. Soccer to remove Solo from the women’s national team roster now. While Blackmun did not say why, it’s believed that the USOC is concerned about Solo’s right to a hearing and due process under the U.S. Amateur Sports Act while she awaits a November trial.

Stephanie Yang, The Soccer Desk:

As an additional complication, female athletes are certainly held to a much higher standard of moral behavior than male athletes. The least deviation from “appropriate” behavior for women is as or more remarkable than extreme instances of deviation by men. Look at the level of violence required to generate large-scale commentary and/or condemnation in the Ray Rice case. Look at how Floyd Mayweather is still allowed to compete and is, in fact, lauded by many. Ben Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault multiple times. Look at the sheer number of professional male athletes who are arrested, not just for domestic violence, and allowed to return to their teams after an insignificant period of “contrition.” Here is an article discussing arrest rates among NFL players. So I think there is false equivalence in media coverage of Hope’s situation as comparable to these other instances of DV.

Laura Taylor, Happy Go Snarky:

Editor: But we’ve got a problem. There are people out there writing rebuttal articles and blogs that are being very well-received. They’re making us look like amateurs who don’t know anything about women’s soccer and are only covering this because the Ray Rice story is huge and we want to make some tenuous connection to a famous, pretty girl who also allegedly committed the same crime. Terrence, I’d like you to write a new article about her.

Terrence: About women’s soccer, sir? But I’m the foreign affairs writer and we just bombed Syria and Iraq. Shouldn’t I focus on that?

(Feel free to add more links in the comments — again, I’ll update this post.)

 

4
mind games

Best chess writing: 2014

Posted on by Beau Dure

I was paying attention when Fabiano Caruana tore through the star-studded field at the Sinquefeld Cup (including world champion Magnus Carlsen), but no, it wasn’t exactly viral.

So I agree with the premise of this Slate piece, and I highly recommend it for passages like this:

There are a few things you should probably know about FIDE—or the Federation Internationale des Echecs, if you’re feeling continental. FIDE is, by all accounts, comically corrupt, in the vein of other fishy global sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC. Its Russian president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has hunkered in office for nearly two decades now, was once abducted by a group of space aliens dressed in yellow costumes who transported him to a faraway star. Though I am relying here on Ilyumzhinov’s personal attestations, I have no reason to doubt him, as this is something about which he has spoken quite extensively. He is of the firm belief that chess was invented by extraterrestrials, and further “insists that there is ‘some kind of code’ in chess, evidence for which he finds in the fact that there are 64 squares on the chessboard and 64 codons in human DNA.”

Kudos, Seth Stevenson.

 

0
soccer

Wrong time to suspend Hope Solo

Posted on by Beau Dure

One of the many peculiarities of covering women’s soccer is seeing something you’ve known about and discussed in public for a long time suddenly becoming “news” because someone with a platform suddenly noticed it.

That was the case a couple of years ago, when one writer at a major publication wrote about Lori Chalupny’s predicament of being cleared to play in pro soccer but not cleared to play for the national team. Another major writer said he had been working on the same story. Women’s soccer reporters weren’t working on it because we all knew about it and talked about it openly, and it was a little surprising to see people surprised about this.

This year, it’s Hope Solo.

We all know for Solo was arrested in June and pleaded not guilty to two counts of fourth-degree domestic violence, a gross misdemeanor, after a family fight. Solo’s 17-year-old nephew says she got an argument with him, charged him and punched him. Then, he says, she attacked his mother when she tried to intervene. Solo’s lawyer says Solo was actually the victim and is looking forward to making that case Nov. 4.

The Seattle Reign briefly benched Solo, but she played most of the rest of the season without major incident.

Then came the controversial part.

With Solo poised to break the U.S. women’s shutout record, the press kicked into gear a bit. The most notable effort: Christine Brennan, my colleague from my USA TODAY days, who wrote the following:

These are disturbing charges against one of the more famous role models in women’s sports, coming at a time when the issue of domestic violence has become a focal point for the nation after the terrible Ray Rice video and his controversial two-game suspension from the NFL.

Nonetheless, U.S. Soccer, the national governing body for the sport in the United States, decided to go ahead with its promotion of Solo this week.

What a mistake this is.

This is not the time for U.S. Soccer to be celebrating Solo and her accomplishments.

Brennan followed up, traveling down to North Carolina to see Solo’s attempt to break the record, which was also apparently some sort of game between the USA and Switzerland. But Solo didn’t break the record, and Brennan was unable to interview Solo. There are a couple of sides to the story of how Brennan and Solo didn’t chat, but it has to be said that Solo has been evading the media this season the way Obi-Wan Kenobi evaded stormtroopers in the Death Star, and the code of silence in women’s soccer is far greater than it is in the men’s game. (Brennan, of course, was abused on Twitter — fans should know by now that the louder they shout, the more likely journalists are to tune them out.)

Fast forward a few weeks. The USA played a couple of games against horribly overmatched Mexico. Solo broke the record and was honored with the captain’s armband in the next game. Coach Jill Ellis gave a lot of players a chance to get some game time in those games, but Solo played the full 180.

Then, all of a sudden, “everyone” noticed that a domestic violence suspect was playing for the U.S. national team. And with the NFL dealing with Ray Rice et al, it was time for the outrage machine to spin into motion.

Washington Post, New York Times, ESPNW … everyone started talking about the case “no one” was talking about. They didn’t seem to mind how badly it undercut their point to mention a USA TODAY column that had been written a month ago.

Some of us had misgivings for weeks. I think it was absurd to make such a big deal out of the shutout record in the first place, and making her captain was just thumbing our noses at karma.

But here’s the thing: It’s too late for the outrage.

Sure, maybe some of you just put 2 and 2 together and realized there’s a domestic violence case in women’s soccer. And your concern is being hijacked by the “men’s rights” blowhards standing up for those poor oppressed men who get suspended for punching their fiancees unconscious in a case with a clear-cut evidence.

Solo’s case isn’t Ray Rice’s. First of all, the evidence is anything but clear-cut. Sadly, we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we may never know what happened on the night in question. It’s two people’s word against Solo’s, and the police may or may not have enough evidence to figure out who’s telling the truth. Solo apologized on Facebook while understandably avoiding any details, which either means she’s sorry for something or was simply doing what her legal and PR folks wanted.

Her case is also much more complex. It’s difficult to imagine that Solo was just sitting quietly in her relatives’ house and was suddenly attacked by two people, but was she provoked? Whose words led to whose attack? Is anyone in the house blameless? (Even in the nephew’s account to police, he says he insulted Solo and her late father. That’s provocative in every sense.)

There’s really no case as yet to deny Solo her profession. I don’t recall any people insisting that she couldn’t play for the Reign. The Washington Post‘s Cindy Boren, who started the Solo outrage bandwagon on Friday but was well aware of the case in June. (If she called for the Reign to bench Solo, my apologies — I couldn’t find it.)

Was it proper for U.S. Soccer to honor Solo while a domestic violence case hung over her head? Probably not. And it wasn’t really necessary to play her at all in those friendlies, much less play her the whole time.

But now? Sorry, but that ship sailed.

You simply can’t suspend Hope Solo for Women’s World Cup qualifiers just because a few journalists suddenly saw a disconnect between her treatment and Ray Rice’s. Maybe you can do it if TMZ suddenly comes up with video from the house where Solo and her relatives had a disagreement. Otherwise, no.

The facts haven’t changed. You can’t go back and make Solo hand back the captain’s armband for her team’s ritual destruction of Mexico. It’s not OK for her to play for three months and then suddenly not play her just because a column went viral.

Algarve Cup next spring? We’ll see. For now? She plays.

Update: Here’s a statement from U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati: “U.S. Soccer takes the issue of domestic violence very seriously.  From the beginning, we considered the information available and have taken a deliberate and thoughtful approach regarding Hope Solo’s status with the National Team. Based on that information, U.S. Soccer stands by our decision to allow her to participate with the team as the legal process unfolds. If new information becomes available we will carefully consider it.”

I’d still like someone to ask Jill Ellis why it was a good idea to make a fuss over the shutout record, which is just a sign that coaches tend to leave her in the full 90 in the WNT’s many blowouts, and make her captain. Keith Olbermann just pounced on that like sportswriters pouncing on a buffet.

13
track and field

The unconscionable treatment of Lolo Jones

Posted on by Beau Dure

Clear your mind of any images. Now look at the following accomplishments:

– World indoor champion, 60-meter hurdles, 2008 and 2010

– World Athletics Final champion, 100-meter hurdles, 2008

– 4th place in 2012 Olympics

– 2nd place in 2010 Diamond League

– Leading 2008 Olympic final before tripping on a hurdle

– 6th place, 2007 World Championships

– Second-fastest time in the world in 2009

– Fastest time in the world (12.43, Olympic semifinal) in 2008. Since them, only three hurdlers have gone faster (Australia’s Sally Pearson five times, USA’s Brianna Rollins twice, USA’s Dawn Harper Nelson once). Rollins, the U.S. record-holder and current world champion, is just 23 years old and has a bright future.

– Sixteen international outdoor wins

The USA’s Queen Harrison, Danielle Carruthers and Kellie Wells have had some Diamond League success, which just underscores how tough it is to even make a U.S. Olympic team in this event. (Also why some people haven’t made it to the World Championships.) This person was the clear-cut No. 1 in 2008, then made it back in 2012 (after spinal surgery) and took fourth place behind Pearson, Harper Nelson and Wells.

Pearson and Harper Nelson also medaled in 2008 — flip the order with Harper Nelson winning and Pearson silver. They’re clearly the top two hurdlers of the past six years. Wells may be third — she took bronze in 2012 and was in good position for a major title (2011 World Championships) but stumbled.

So we could say the person in question was the best hurdler in the world in 2008 and still in the top four in 2012, an accomplishment after surgery.

Oh, by the way, she also won a World Championship gold medal in bobsled in the 2013 mixed team event, she made the U.S. Winter Olympic team in 2014, and she was named 2008 Visa Humanitarian of the Year after donating her prize money from the Olympic Trials to a single mother who was affected by flooding in Iowa.

OK, now you can put the picture back in your head. Obviously, we’re talking about Lolo Jones.

And that resume is considerably better than that of Danica Patrick or Anna Kournikova, two other athletes derided for being more famous than their accomplishments supposedly merit.

Patrick and Kournikova also take more flack than they deserve. We can debate Patrick’s GoDaddy ads or whether Kournikova put in the practice time to turn her potential into success in singles, but Patrick has the compelling story of a female driver carving out a space in a sport that has been rather harsh to women (you’ll never convince me Mike Wallace didn’t take out Shawna Robinson after she won the pole in a Grand National race), and Kournikova she still had a terrific doubles career.

Critics hate Lolo Jones because … she’s self-promoting? Not at the expense of anyone else. Because … she’s considered attractive? First of all, that hasn’t hurt a lot of male athletes. Second of all, shouldn’t we be happy that athletic women are lauded for their looks? Isn’t that a healthier body image than the emaciated figures who have dominated modeling and Hollywood for so long? As much as I cringe at the Alex Morgan fanboys who turn up at Portland’s road games and care nothing about the home team or any other players, at least they’re getting out of their parents’ basements, getting some fresh air and being pulled away from tweeting a bunch of misogynist crap about female athletes.

If you think Dawn Harper Nelson should get more attention than Lolo Jones, I have a novel suggestion. Write about Dawn Harper Nelson. She’s a two-time Olympic medalist who ran a personal best of 12.37 in London, second only to Pearson’s Olympic record of 12.35. Her coach is the legendary Bob Kersee. She’s remarkably consistent, winning the Diamond League season title in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

And she exists on social media. She has a solid Facebook presence with 1,514 likes. She’s also happy to be in an algebra textbook.

Bottom line: Track and field doesn’t get as much attention as it should. If someone actually manages to be noticed and gets on Dancing with the Stars, good for her. If you think it’s unfair that other athletes aren’t getting as much attention, do you think it helps those athletes when you snark on Lolo?

Lolo Jones is a world-class athlete with a charismatic personality. Dawn Harper-Nelson is the world’s most consistent hurdler who gets a kick out of being mentioned in an algebra textbook. No reason we can’t appreciate them both.

1
sports culture

Championship time in football offshoots

Posted on by Beau Dure

Besides the USA, two other countries have a prominent game called “football” that is not played with 11 people kicking a ball at a goal without using their hands, and this is the season for their versions of the Super Bowl:

In Australian rules football, we’re down to a surprising final four. The playoff format, which I’ve long argued should be used in U.S. soccer, favors the top four seeds, giving them a second chance if they lose their openers. Last weekend, No. 3 Geelong and No. 4 Fremantle got the boot. See North Melbourne’s two-minute defensive stand to stop Geelong on the AFL site, which also has an eight-minute highlight reel that shows you how deep a hole Geelong had to climb out of.

This weekend’s “preliminary finals” (we would call them semifinals, since the winners advance to the final) will be shown in the USA, though not necessarily live. Sydney, which won a three-way tiebreaker with Hawthorn and Geelong to take the top seed, hosts sixth seed North Melbourne. No. 5 Port Adelaide goes to Hawthorn.

I’m finding broadcasts at 11:30 p.m. ET Friday (Fox Sports 2) and midnight Saturday/Sunday morning (Fox Soccer Plus). That should be Sydney-North Melbourne first and then Hawthorn-Port Adelaide, but I couldn’t verify it.

The Grand Final, an event with all the pomp and excess of the Super Bowl, is Sept. 27. Fox Soccer Plus has a live broadcast at 12:30 a.m. ET.

A lower division final (no, there’s no promotion/relegation) was recently stopped at halftime by something even more violent than the game itself, with fans getting involved.

In Gaelic (Irish) football, Donegal faces Kerry on Sept. 21 in the All-Ireland final, which had a few good storylines leading up to it, including Donegal’s massive upset of Dublin and a semifinal replay controversially moved away from Croke Park by the Penn State-Central Florida (American) football game.

In other Gaelic sports a little farther removed from football:

– Hurling: Kilkenny and Tipperary played to a draw in the All-Ireland final Sept. 7. They’ll replay it Sept. 27.

– Camogie: Cork rallied to beat Kilkenny today in the All-Ireland final of the women’s equivalent of hurling.

If you want to see the football and hurling finals, chances are you’ll need to check out your local Irish pub. As if you needed an excuse.

0
tennis

USA avoids relegation in Davis Cup … did you hear?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Fresh off their record-setting U.S. Open win, the Bryan brothers clinched the USA’s spot in the 2015 World Group (top tier) of the Davis Cup, beating Slovakia.

We hope the crowd was a little better for the Bryans than it was for singles.

Busted Racquet throws much of the blame at the USTA and local folks for underpromoting and overpricing the event. Maybe the media deserve a bit of the blame, too, for failing to pay attention to such a terrific tournament.

Or blame the ITF for shoving aside reform ideas ranging from forcing top players into the event or playing more than one round at a time.

The USA hasn’t won the Cup since 2007, when Andy Roddick and James Blake combined with the Bryans to win the trophy, but it hasn’t been relegated out of the 16-team World Group since 1987.

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