Month: December 2014

soccer

Indoor soccer and the remnants of outdoor, through SI’s eyes

Posted on by Beau Dure

I recently came across a classic Frank DeFord piece on the MISL — Show, Sex And Suburbs — and got curious to see what else Sports Illustrated had written about the heyday of the indoor game and the nadir of U.S. outdoor soccer.

Fortunately, SI’s vaults are open (to subscribers, at least), so I was able to trip through history.

Here we go …

July 9, 1979: Watch Out! The Sky Is Falling: The Houston Hurricane jump-started its outdoor season with a successful run indoors.

Houston Forward Kyle Rote believes the indoor experiences did more than just instill self-esteem in the Hurricane players. “Eight of our 11 outdoor starters played indoor, and we gained a lot of technical skills, particularly the Americans,” he says.

Feb. 18, 1980: They Get Their Kicks On A Hockey Rink: Bob Rigby offers up what might be the first mention of the phrase “human pinball” while SI contrasts the surging indoor game with the fading outdoor game.

Foreman also finds a chauvinistic satisfaction in the arrangement. “We felt that people wanted to see American kids, their own kids, playing,” he says. “The NASL hasn’t done much for them. We wanted to be the league where no American would wind up holding Beckenbauer’s warmup jacket. …

No wonder that some of the most talented young Americans are now signing up with the MISL instead of the NASL and finding themselves beneficiaries of the early stages of what could develop into a bidding war between the two leagues. Professional-quality U.S. soccer players are still in woefully short supply. Ty Keough, 23, a talented defender, signed with the MISL’s Cincinnati franchise when he graduated from St. Louis University in ’78. He now plays with the Steamers–Cincinnati being defunct–but last summer he was loaned to the NASL’s San Diego Sockers. He is now considering offers for the coming outdoor season. “I’m happy I signed in MISL,” Keough says. “I get a lot of game time and I can be choosy about NASL offers. I’ve got a steady income.”

(The story also has a Joe Machnik sighting.)

Feb. 15, 1982: Stan the Fran, Free Spirit: Even with the NASL and the Cosmos still going, SI found a good story in Stan Terlecki, who had challenged Polish authorities and found a home in Pittsburgh.

Did you hear about Brezhnev calling all the top Soviet scientists together, Terlecki asked, and telling them how disappointed he was that the U.S. had beaten Russia to the moon? He proposed that the U.S.S.R. land a cosmonaut on the sun. One scientist had to tell Brezhnev that this was impossible because of the sun’s great heat. His boyish face beaming. Terlecki looked around the table to make sure everyone was ready for the punchline: ” ‘No problem.’ Brezhnev says, ‘we will land at night.’ ” Terlecki roared, and the group spent another 15 minutes cracking Brezhnev jokes. By the time the check finally arrived, everyone had defrosted.

May 21, 1984: 19th Hole: One of several letters in response to a story on the NASL reads as follows:

I was dismayed by the article by Clive Gammon, which purports to explain the many reasons for the near demise of the NASL. Gammon is another of the closed-minded “experts” who put the blame on everything from the players to the owners to artificial turf. What they can’t admit is the simple fact that outdoor soccer fails in the U.S. because it’s boring. While the NASL plods along with talk of “world sport,” the Major Indoor Soccer League has spruced up the staid European game and made it fun to watch. We Americans shouldn’t be ashamed of our preference for excitement. Our heritage is one of innovation.

The original story will be an uncomfortable read for NASL enthusiasts, scoffing at everything from the goofy rules to ignorant owners while labeling its non-Beckenbauer players as listless shadows of themselves or second-division European fodder.

June 18, 1984: The Blast Had One At Last: The Baltimore Blast, coached by one Kenny Cooper, won its first MISL title.

Most ebullient of all, though, may have been lame-duck team chairman of the board/director Bernie Rodin, who, after helping found the MISL six seasons ago, had just seen his final game as an owner. Last March Rodin sold the Blast to a local businessman, Nathan Sherr, for $3 million, effective June 15. “I’m the only original owner left in the league,” Rodin said, grinning. “I helped write the rules for this sport. It’s an incredible feeling. Like being Abner Doubleday, only I’ve got one thing Abner never had. A team that won the championship.”

March 4, 1985: Not In It For The Kicks: All about Ricky Davis, the U.S. national teamer playing indoor out of necessity. And there’s a club vs. country undercurrent worth reading — not just the difference in the outdoor and indoor games but a looming schedule conflict.

The situation in general:

At the moment, this is where U.S. soccer happens to be. Fans have turned from the outdoor NASL—its 1985 season, with three living franchises, down from 24 in 1980, is in grave jeopardy—and are flocking to the MISL. The league is headed toward an attendance record for the second consecutive year; at present St. Louis is No. 2 on the list with an average of 12,829. Davis reportedly earns $100,000 a year from the Steamers, yet the indoor game that affords him so much fame and fortune may also be a barrier to the fulfillment of his dream.

Let’s be serious. The possibility that the U.S. might win the World Cup in 1986 is too remote even to consider. But the U.S. could win a berth in the final 24-nation field.

And you just have to read this part …

That lesson, along with his ever-improving skills and wholesome good looks, has made Davis the most visible symbol of the American game. “Davis has replaced Shep Messing as the pinup boy of soccer,” says Baltimore Blast coach Ken Cooper.

“True, but I have a better body,” says Messing, who once helped publicize soccer by posing nude for Viva magazine. Such a thing would be unthinkable for Davis, whom U.S. national team coach Alkis Panagoulias calls “a magnet and a model for American youth.”

“Put it this way,” says Messing. “The difference between Ricky’s image and mine is that I do Skoal chewing tobacco commercials, and he does Ivory soap.”

June 9, 1986: Dynasty With An Asterisk: The dazzling, fractious San Diego Sockers win their fifth straight indoor title between the NASL and MISL.

Any boring, bovine team is an endangered species in the MISL, which has been a slaughterhouse for 17 franchises in its eight-year history. The league held firm with 12 teams this season, and playoff attendance rose to an average of 11,985 per game from 8,509 last year. Things should get even better next year, when a new franchise in New York, the Express, will join the league with co-owner Shep Messing in goal.

But the game is the thing, and it has evolved into a good one as more players have come in from the outdoors. “The game is streaks away from where it was four years ago,” says Newman, an indoor coach since 1980. “It takes a soccer player to play this game, and we’ve started getting some really good ones.”

Oct. 27, 1986: Alive But Barely Kicking: A look at the post-NASL landscape, with Paul Caligiuri, John Kerr and David Vanole scraping by.

The NASL’s major sin was trying to make soccer a national sport without developing a foundation for the future. After an over-the-hill Pele gave the fledgling American game a star, naive owners continued to pay exorbitant amounts to so-called world class foreign players whose name recognition was zero and whose motivation to perform was possibly even less. Meanwhile, American talent remained undeveloped. ”Everyone thought Pele was a messiah,” says Cliff McCrath, coach of the Division II champion Seattle Pacific. ”It wasn’t his fault, but in my opinion, Pele was our executioner.”

The scars run so deep that the idea of launching another national outdoor soccer league anytime soon seems absurd.

March 9, 1987: The Shirtless Wonder Tatu Scores With Goals and Discarded Garments: Starts by drawing a distinction between the Dallas Sidekicks star and the Fantasy Island sidekick.

Tatu is a promotional dynamo. He makes unpaid appearances at the birthday parties of his youngest fans, puts on soccer clinics, coaches a youth team, makes instructional films, poses for posters and signs autographs until the last kid has gone home happy. ”Tatu Toffee” is the latest Baskin-Robbins flavor to hit the Big D.

”I am determinated to make our game work in this country,” he says.

Other players are among Tatu’s biggest fans. They take no offense at his protracted postgoal celebrations, possibly because they are used to seeing people involved with indoor soccer lose their shirts. Recently the New York Express, whose projected success was thought to be the key to landing the MISL much needed national exposure, went under. Before Tatu came to Dallas three years ago, two soccer franchises had failed in the Metroplex.

”He’s not doing the shirt thing to put it in your face,” says San Diego Socker defender Kevin Crow, who often marks Tatu. ”He’s doing it to put people in the stands. Everybody is for that.”

I could not find anything about the MISL (then rechristened MSL, just to confuse everyone) folding. An AP story from 1992 has the news of the league’s final collapse and says its existence had been threatened each of the preceding years since 1988. Andy Crossley’s blog Fun While It Lasted rounds up several MISL teams’ histories, and David Litterer’s American Soccer History site has several essays on indoor soccer history.

But the SI pieces are particularly interesting — relics of a time in which indoor soccer had a lot of believers. And the outdoor game was all but dead in this country.

2
Uncategorized

Best of SportsMyriad 2014

Posted on by Beau Dure

The best-read posts and the most-overlooked posts of the year. (In other words — what you read and what I’m still attached to even though you didn’t read it, so in the spirit of the holidays, please give it another chance!)

BEST-READ (not counting the 2014 medal projections and all related posts, which destroy all, and not counting 2012’s Single-Digit Soccer: Flunk the 2-3-1?, which still gets traffic)

5. Women’s soccer: Show me the money: Building off Allison McCann’s piece on NWSL salaries and her ill-timed piece on Tyresö.

4. Wrong time to suspend Hope Solo: If nothing else, I confused people who think I wish nothing but ill on the USA’s controversial keeper.

3. Washington Spirit vs. FC Kansas City: Goal rush: An early game for the Spirit and an atypical game in retrospect, rolling over the eventual champions with a first-half surge instead of waiting until Minute 90something to conjure up an unlikely result.

2. Single-Digit Soccer: Give U10 travel the boot: This will be one of the big issues in my book.

1. Remembering Dan Borislow: Once the shock of the news passed, I wrote a remembrance of the former WPS magicJack owner that I hope captured his complexities.

(Hey — no pro/rel posts!)

MOST OVERLOOKED

MLS, USA and Canada 2022: One vision: A few offbeat suggestions for soccer’s future along with a couple of current trends. And Peter Wilt as FIFA president.

NWSL: Spirit, Breakers and the end of reality: One of the craziest women’s soccer games of the year.

An offbeat proposal for NWSL 2015: Solving the scheduling dilemma.

MLS: Time to quit playing hardball: Written nine months before the CBA talks really got underway.

UFC, MLS, markets and monopolies: Why the MLS lawsuit is a bad precedent for the fighters now suing the UFC.

Why I prefer the Olympics to the World Cup: Really. Includes a good John Oliver clip.

College athlete unions, paying players and unasked questions: Not just picking a fight with Jay Bilas.

‘Enduring Spirit’ epilogue: Thoughts from Diana Matheson: Hey, she was nice enough to respond to my postseason questions. Read them!

U.S. Open Cup: Top 14 teams and upset history: See the spreadsheet!

Break up the Olympics: Let all four U.S. bid cities host the Games.

War on Nonrevenue Sports returns: USOC gearing up: Has anyone noticed that sports other than football and basketball are endangered on college campuses?

STUFF I WROTE ELSEWHERE

A little knowledge on the USA TODAY layoffs: Essentially a pointed rebuttal to some guy who thought he knew what was going on.

Weird Al-related question: Lamest claims to fame: In which I point out my strange connections to everyone from Kim Basinger to George Will to Ben Folds.

Why we believe utter crap: Political scientist Brendan Nyhan has figured it out.

Leon Sebring Dure III: 1931-2014: My father’s life as a Marine, designated hitter opponent, survivor, and man who showed his love for the world with a sense of responsibility.

In defense of the Spin Doctors: Seriously.

Farewell to Landon Donovan: My memories of covering the legend.

Most Essential Simpsons Episodes of the Last 5 Seasons: Written to coincide with the marathon.

More from me at OZY.

In the New Year, expect a lot of Single-Digit Soccer and the start of the 2016 medal projections. Can’t wait.

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soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: Coming soon to a convention near you

Posted on by Beau Dure

I will be speaking about my forthcoming book, Single-Digit Soccer: Snazzy Subtitle to Come, on Jan. 17 at the NSCAA Convention in Philadelphia. (Yes, I’m on at the same time as a Laura Harvey presentation, but she’s doing several, so you can still see both of us.)

Single-Digit Soccer is about youth soccer, specifically the “single-digit” years — ages 9 to 6, 5, 3, etc. For parents, it’s a guidebook through all the complexities, oddities and entertaining bits of youth soccer. For coaches and administrators, it’s a plea for sanity.

The presentation will be for coaches (though some of them are surely parents as well). I’ll be dealing with issues and radical ideas, a few of which I’ve already addressed in blog posts:

– Why play travel? What you think is wrong

– Learning from Little League baseball

– Give U10 travel the boot

– An alternative to tryout-based travel

– Don’t specialize … really

– Dissension in the ranks (from last year’s NSCAA)

– Flunk the 2-3-1 (I’m a little disturbed that this is the most popular post in the series)

– Great moments in halftime speeches

– Parental habits develop early

– Can youth soccer be an afterschool program?

Catch up on all of the posts and get ready for more in 2015. Tentative book release date: June 2015.

0
mma, soccer

UFC, MLS, markets and monopolies

Posted on by Beau Dure

UFC fighters may have several legitimate points about how they’re treated. The lawsuit against the UFC will, at best, force a stronger discussion of those issues and maybe even a few changes. But it’s going to be really difficult to get an outright court victory.

You’ll find a lot of good analysis on this suit — economist/antitrust guy Paul Gift at Bloody Elbow, Dave Meltzer at MMA Fighting (read especially from the Bellator reference onward to the end), sports law specialist Michael McCann warning in SI of the worst-case scenario of “unraveling” the UFC, a 90-minute chat with Luke Thomas, and Josh Gross with a few details I haven’t seen explored elsewhere along with the embedded lawsuit document itself. And generally, you should keep up with Bloody Elbow, where Brent Brookhouse and John Nash broke the story.

I’m going to come at it from this angle: Precedent, including the MLS players lawsuit against the league in the 1990s, tells us the antitrust argument will fall on one key word: “market.”

What’s the market for mixed martial arts fighters? Does the UFC have unfair control of it?

The MLS players lawsuit (covered in my book) failed to prove that MLS had unfair control of the soccer market. The suit is often portrayed as a challenge to the league’s “single-entity” structure, but the verdict and appellate court decision left several “single-entity” questions unanswered. The specific words from the appellate court, addressing a part of the suit the jury didn’t consider: “(T)he single-entity problem need not be answered definitively in this case.”

The suit unraveled when MLS convinced the jurors (and the appellate judges agreed) that soccer players could go elsewhere — Europe, Latin America, the A-League (which, like the current NASL, could occasionally pay an MLS fringe player more than he would make on an MLS bench), or even indoor soccer.

Cung Le et al will tie themselves in a knot trying to define the market. Here’s Gift’s take:

We haven’t heard from the UFC yet, but the fighters have already revealed their interest in a small geographic market by claiming “the relevant geographic market for both the Relevant Input Market and Relevant Output Market is limited to the United States and, in the alternative, North America.”

 

Legally interesting, practically absurd. (The fighters, not Gift.) The UFC would not have the clout it has today without signing the best fighters in the world. It’s almost as much of a Brazilian company as it is an American company these days.

In MMA, fighters can sign with smaller MMA promoters like Bellator or international promoters like One FC. The soccer marketplace is similar — players can sign with the NASL or hundreds of soccer leagues around the world. And that argument killed the player suit. Ridge Mahoney’s Soccer America summary: “Once the jurors decided both a global market existed and other domestic entities could compete with MLS for players, the players’ case collapsed. No further deliberations were necessary since the jurors had determined the monopoly alleged by the players did not exist.”

Note that the UFC lawsuit isn’t strictly a monopoly lawsuit. It introduces the word “monopsony,” which is more or less the inverse. The fighters aren’t really UFC employees. They’re contractors, and the UFC bids for their services. The UFC is in many senses a buyer, not a seller.

And the key to the case is not necessarily whether the UFC controls the marketplace. At Bloody Elbow, former FTC antitrust lawyer David Dudley puts it like this:

Outside the merger context, the question or market power is considered alongside the particular conduct at issue. The worse the conduct, the less evidence is necessary to establish market power. Conversely, the more benign the conduct, the greater the necessary showing of market power.

That’s good news for the fighters in a way: Everything the UFC does wrong in its contracts is fair game. The fighters wouldn’t have much of a case if the UFC was treating fighters well, even if it controlled 99% of the marketplace. (Of course, they probably wouldn’t be suing in the first place if that were true.)

But it’s bad news in the sense that, as Gift says, the UFC isn’t doing anything wrong by simply beating the competition. The allegations on pages 47-50 of the lawsuit look weak. The UFC didn’t “force” Affliction out of the fight promotion business; Affliction overpaid for fighters and was unsustainable. Near the end of the suit, when the plaintiffs seek “injunctive relief barring Defendant from engaging in the anticompetitive scheme alleged herin,” we need to ask, “How?” Quit holding fights the same night as Bellator fights?

Here’s another problem: What would MMA look like without the UFC?

In the MLS lawsuit, players were unable to convince district judge George O’Toole that someone else would’ve formed a Division I soccer league operating at anything comparable to MLS level if MLS hadn’t done it. In other words, MLS essentially created the market. To argue that MLS monopolized the U.S. Division I soccer market is a bit like me inventing some sort of palatable peanut butter wine and then monopolizing the peanut butter wine market.

In the MLS suit, the players brought out some sports economists to make dubiously specific claims that having multiple Division I leagues in the USA would have sent player salaries skyrocketing. That led to one of my favorite Paul Gardner quotes:

For an entire session, this totally fictitious exercise dragged on, as the good Professor Zimbalist revealed charts and calculations to ‘prove’ what must have happened had a whole series of improbable conditions existed. They never did exist.

That “whole series of improbable conditions” would include having two leagues in a spending war with each other that were somehow not splitting the previously nonexistent (since the NASL died) Division I soccer market. With MLS bleeding red ink and nearly going out of business in 2001-02 (just after the initial lawsuit verdict but before the appellate ruling) even with the power of a “monopoly,” those conditions were beyond improbable. They were impossible.

And in sports, monopolies (or monopsonies) aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Would the World Cup be the World Cup if we had two competing organizations, with Germany winning one and Brazil winning another? As much as everyone with half a brain and a payola-free bank account wishes FIFA would see the light on basic ethics, no one wants a world with a disputed world soccer champion. No one wants to see Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki on separate tennis tours.

With the demise of PRIDE and other organizations, few people would dispute that the UFC’s champions are generally the best in the world. That’s a good thing.

So what happens next?

After the players lost the lawsuit against MLS, they formed a union, and they have collectively bargained since then. (They’re doing so right now, trying to race against the expiration of the current CBA to get the next season started on time.) Fighters may need to form an association rather than a union — I’m hazy on the details, frankly — but perhaps we could see an end result like that.

As Luke Thomas says, “Keep in mind what success actually means.” Baseball player Curt Flood lost before the Supreme Court, but the cause of free agency was ultimately successful.

In the UFC’s case, their position as the top promotion in the world isn’t cast in stone. It’s impossible to imagine someone challenging Major League Baseball’s supremacy at this point. It’s not impossible to imagine top fighters opting for Bellator or some other promotion instead of the UFC.

So the UFC needs to think about “success” as well. Winning in court won’t be enough. They’ll need to “win” in the sense of continuing to have the goodwill of fighters and fans that recognize it as the top promotion in the world. And the UFC has done a few things that don’t look good in the all-important court of public opinion:

  • Imposing a Reebok sponsorship on its fighters on top of harsh restrictions on sponsors that have helped fighters in the past.
  • As alleged in the suit (the UFC may argue differently), sponsors may either be exclusive to the UFC or banned from the UFC.
  • “Ancillary rights” clauses giving the UFC rights to likenesses in perpetuity.
  • Starting fighter pay: $6,000 to show, $6,000 to win? That’s not much. And fighters often have to pay training expenses out of that money.
  • And even if you’re a fringe UFC fighter with only two bouts in a given year, you can’t go taking a bout on someone else’s fight card.

To date, the UFC has been tone-deaf in reacting to fighters’ concerns. A “tepid piece on fighter pay,” to quote the ubiquitous Luke Thomas, on ESPN’s Outside the Lines drew a hysterical response from the UFC.

That approach can’t fly any more. The fighters may not be able to win in court. But if the UFC doesn’t recognize their leverage, everybody loses.

0
cycling, general sports

Cycling is the new golf?

Posted on by Beau Dure

From a participation point of view, anyway, according to this BBC Sport report.

More worryingly for golf in England, participation has fallen by about 180,000 in eight years. Cycling, on the other hand, gained about 270,000 pedal-pushers in the last year alone. This figure does not include people tootling to work or down to the local. Cycling waxes while golf wanes.

And a fun phrase here:

Golf and cycling overlap in terms of their socio-economic profiles. Both sports can be reasonably cheap, but they can also be eye-wateringly expensive. Golf has always had players with ‘all the gear and no idea’, but cycling also has its own somewhat pejoratively named demographic: ‘Mamils’, or ‘middle-aged men in Lycra’.

This is why I do all my cycling in regular old cargo shorts. I’m under no illusion that I need $200 in body-hugging clothes to add 0.1 mph to my blazing 8 mph top speed.

But speaking as someone who is equally incompetent in each sport, I can see a few pros and cons here.

In cycling’s favor:

  • Flexible scheduling. Go whenever you’re free from work.
  • Actual aerobic exercise.
  • No looking for a lost bike in the woods while cursing your slice.
  • Groups of three, five, two or one are perfectly acceptable. No waiting for a foursome.

In golf’s favor:

  • Much easier on your backside.
  • If you hit the wall, it’s in the literal sense, and you just pick up your ball and move on.
  • No dismounting on ridiculous uphills.
  • I actually find it less of a pride issue to get skunked on the golf course than I do to have 60-year-old dudes in lycra ripping past me.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m off to yoga.

0
olympic sports

Break up the Olympics!

Posted on by Beau Dure

The U.S. Olympic Committee may soon select a bid city for the 2024 Olympics, picking from a pool that includes Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

The correct answer is … all of them. Why not?

That’s the direction the Olympics are going, and with good reason. The IOC’s new Agenda 2020 adds some flexibility for multiple cities to bid together.

And on a related note: Agenda 2020 is big on containing costs by asking cities something very simple — quit building big, expensive stuff that won’t have much use after the Closing Ceremony. Don’t build entire mountain cities or coastal villages that may or may not be used after the Games. Looking your way, Sochi.

The other cost-containment measures make a little less sense. Cutting the 200 meters, 10,000 meters and shot put so local organizers can add something they like?

IOC reformists want to avoid white elephants, using existing infrastructure wherever possible. Boston comes close, using a lot of university facilities. And yet Boston has some powerful opposition. San Francisco got a Dave Zirin smackdown. D.C. has a few existing facilities but doesn’t seem to address whether the new D.C. United stadium, likely to be approved this week, could host something. Maybe rugby? Maybe archery? That’d be fun.

It’s not as if every Olympic event can be held in one place, anyway. They can’t hold sailing and canoe/kayak events on the Potomac. The 2008 equestrian events were held in Hong Kong, which is near Beijing in the sense that they’re on the same continent. Soccer games are held all over the host country.

The 2018 Games might be split. The feasibility of a sliding track in Pyeongchang is suddenly an issue, though maybe things sped up a bit when the idea of moving those events to Nagano came up. (Hey, it worked for the 2002 World Cup, right?)

There’s no question the Olympic movement is suffering after Sochi, even though a lot of the money went to construction and goodness knows what else. Frankly, some of the trouble is perception. The media fanned out through Sochi a few months later to find no one there, but everything looked fine when Formula One raced there in October.

The USA is losing a bit of Olympic spirit as well. Colleges are worried about keeping nonrevenue sports afloat. And it’s been a while since we hosted.

So imagine the possibilities:

– Sailing in San Francisco, just like the 2013 America’s Cup.

– Could we get a track back in the Los Angeles Coliseum?

– Add baseball back to the program and hold it in Fenway Park.

– An Opening Ceremony in a new national stadium on the site of RFK Stadium, which is still standing. Last time I checked. Has anyone stopped by to make sure it’s still there?

The Olympics need bold new thinking. Olympic cities can’t keep up with building new facilities for every event. (Yay, golf in Rio!)

So why pick one when all four can host?

1
mma

The (sex!) marketing of (catfights!) women’s MMA

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s get this straight: Women’s MMA is fantastic.

Women’s fights are often the highlights of a typical fight card, especially when they’re sandwiched in between a couple of wrestling stalemates with one dude leaning against the other up against the cage. And the athletes are compelling.

Don’t believe me? Let Tommy Toe Hold sing the profane praises of all-women’s organization Invicta.

Tommy was also ahead of his time in spotting the extraordinary talents of Rose Namajunas, one of the finalists in …

The Ultimate Fighter 20: A Champion Will Be Crowned

Yes, a champion will indeed be crowned. This is a unique season of The Ultimate Fighter — the UFC is adding a new weight class, and most of the fighters they’ve signed were in the TUF house. Instead of letting coaches pick matchups to benefit their teams (even as Dana White insists this isn’t a team sport), the UFC seeded the bracket to increase the odds of getting the top two to the final.

So these were the most accomplished fighters in that house for a long time. Namajunas made a mockery of her seed (seventh?!) by demolishing her opponents with wicked submissions. If I may repeat myself …

Her opponent in the final was the top seed, Carla Esparza, who got through a few tough fights to get to this point. They also had seasoned veterans like Joanne Calderwood, Jessica Penne, Felice Herrig, Bec Rawlings and Aisling Daly.

And these people are interesting. The inexperienced but talented Angela Hill is an animator who took up Muay Thai. Alex Chambers has a physics and math degree. Calderwood is a wispy-sounding Scot with a wry sense of humor. Several of the fighters, including Namajunas, had a tough childhood. A couple of them are moms.

So what will people remember most about this season?

(Now I feel guilty for using that phrase in a recap of one particularly nasty episode.)

It is reality TV, after all. Angela Magana may not have gone into the season intending to be this season’s Junie Browning or Jamie Yager (men who got a lot of attention for their antics in their TUF seasons), but she wound up on that path and likes where it led:

Magana uses her TUF castmate Emily Kagan as an example of the opposite.

“Nobody is gonna f—ing remember Emily,” Magana said. “I love Emily, but she has no charisma. She has no personality on TV. Even if she puts on a great fight, nobody remembers those people. The only people they’re going to remember is people who talk.”

One thing that didn’t help was TUF Talk, the Fox Sports 1 segment hosted by Karyn Bryant, who brings her own questionable decorum to the proceedings and made sure she highlights all the feuding.

https://twitter.com/mmaencyclopedia/status/542900077162143744

The first women on The Ultimate Fighter had a little bit of these undercurrents, but what most people remember from that season is that Roxanne Modafferi might be the friendliest person on the planet.

But women’s MMA has this “Mean Girl” precedent … in the UFC. And how did that start? Ah, I remember asking a young Olympic athlete if she had thought about cashing in on her ability by going into …

https://twitter.com/BuzzNgayon/status/540269328906850304

Yeah.

Some of these antics are simply part of the sport. In the height of my UFC-covering days, I covered UFC 100. Dan Henderson knocked out designated bad guy Michael Bisping and followed up with a forearm to an unconscious opponent, for which he didn’t really apologize. Brock Lesnar beat Frank Mir, taunted Frank Mir, taunted a UFC sponsor, and made us all picture him having sex. It was foul.

And some of the drama on this TUF season was intriguing. Heather Clark was built up as the season’s villain, but it turned out some of the girls ganged up for no good reason. And who could really fault someone who vaguely resembles the truly awesome rock singer-songwriter Poe?

(Why do most streaming services play the toned-down version that erases all the guitars from the mix? This song rocks, people. Save the dance grooves for Haddaway.)

You could also make an argument either way on Randa Markos choosing to get her two training sessions a day even if the rest of the team wanted to split up to keep opponents apart. Esparza really didn’t help her image in that one.

In any case, the drama is done for the time being, and now we have a new class of interesting fighters in the UFC. And they have history beyond the show:

– Esparza has beaten Rawlings and Herrig (but finished neither).

– Torres beat Herrig and Namajunas (and Paige VanZant, who wasn’t able to go on TUF because she’s under 21 but was a smashing success in her UFC debut).

– Namajunas beat Emily Kagan and has one loss — to Torres, who lost a pair of close fights on the show.

– Penne beat Lisa Ellis and Magana.

– Herrig beat Clark and lost to Esparza and Torres.

– Ellis beat Daly and lost to Penne.

– Markos lost to Justine Kish, who was injured and unable to fight on the show or on this finale.

So do I have a few reservations on how women’s MMA is presented? A couple, sure. Will I be watching Friday night? Hell yeah.

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mma

The Ultimate Fighter 20, Episode 11: No quarter

Posted on by Beau Dure

My enthusiasm for this one was diminished ever so slightly when I saw a headline with more fights announced for the TUF finale. Obviously, the fighters with new matchups are the ones who lost in this episode. Note to self: Just stay up and watch this show live.

But we’ve got two fantastic matchups here. This could’ve been a viable Invicta pay-per-view main event and co-main event. We’re getting it free. Cheers.

To recap:

1. The two quarterfinals today are:

  • Carla Esparza-Tecia Torres (winner faces Jessica Penne)
  • The one I’ve been waiting to see for weeks, Rose Namajunas-Joanne Calderwood (winner faces and probably beats Randa Markos).

2. The cliques are:

  • The “Skrapettes,” named after coach Gilbert Melendez’s “Skrap Pack” but united here by losing early and hating Heather Clark. In order of hostility to others: Angela Magaña, Bec Rawlings, Angela Hill, Namajunas, Emily Kagan (unofficial member?)
  • The “Chumpettes,” the rest of Team Melendez (including Torres who went to Team Pettis). In order of hostility received: Heather Clark, Tecia Torres, Lisa Ellis
  • People Who Hate Randa Markos: Carla Esparza, Felice Herrig
  • Penne and Kish (not really hostile toward anyone): Jessica Penne, Justine Kish
  • People Who Seem to Get Along with Almost Everyone: Joanne Calderwood (but also Namajunas, Kagan, Penne and Kish, plus the next two)
  • More Withdrawn But Not Controversial: Aisling Daly, Alex Chambers
  • Controversial: Randa Markos 

Remember all that for later.

So anyway … we first see Torres talking about upcoming opponent Esparza. Torres says she has a history with the current Invicta 115-pound champion. In her last fight, Torres beat Herrig, only to see Esparza walk in with the belt and immediately call her out. Awkward, but Torres respects Esparza as a well-rounded fighter. The Torres plan: Keep it standing.

Esparza says Torres is a tough opponent and someone she though could make the final. Esparza, who apparently has never seen The Ultimate Fighter in her life, thinks it’s unfair that Torres got a second chance in the bracket after losing. And there are no secrets here: Esparza wants to take Torres down. She likes wrestling.

We immediately skip ahead to Fight Day. Not much time for drama in the house when you’ve got two fights in an episode.

Tale of the tape: Each woman is 5’1”. Esparza has a more experience. Referee Herb Dean gives the long version of the “two five-minute rounds, then the inaccurately named sudden victory round” speech (where’s Dana White this season?), and we’re off.

Torres looks sharp on her feet and shrugs off a couple of Esparza’s takedown attempts. But Esparza hangs on to her ankle, and when Torres turns toward her to punch a few times, Esparza gets more of a grip. Esparza still struggles to get Torres down, but she’s able to control Torres’ body long enough to get in a few shots. They stand after a while, but Esparza shoots and gets a full-fledged takedown to set up some ground and pound until the horn sounds. Round 1 to Esparza.

Second round has a tentative start. Esparza shoots for a takedown from too far away. Then again. On the third try, she gets Torres’ ankle and lifts it like a really overbearing yoga teacher. Torres escapes, but it’s clear she’s going to have a hard time getting close enough to establish her striking game. Esparza finally gets both legs and gets Torres down. Torres gets to the cage and tries to walk her way up, but when she gets up, Esparza is on her back. Esparza lands a couple of knees to the head at awkward angles. But that’s the only offense anyone has in what’s otherwise a grappling stalemate.

Coaches say to prepare for a third round, but no. We have a decision.

Fight recap: Anthony Pettis is impressed that Torres managed to evade Esparza’s takedowns, but he knows Esparza wasn’t going to give up.

Decision: Majority decision (mild surprise, I would have said unanimous) to Esparza.

No bad blood anywhere. Torres and Esparza slapped hands at the final horn, Torres applauded the decision, and both fighters had kind words. The only drama: Esparza races to a bathroom to vomit. And she’s a little sad to be facing a friend in Jessica Penne.

Next up, perhaps the two most likable fighters on the show. Joanne Calderwood speaks in a soft, high-pitched Scottish lilt, like a character out of Scottish mythology, sometimes with a little smile. Rose Namajunas had a hardscrabble childhood and has grown into a tough fighter whose sense of humor is evident in videos with her boyfriend, former UFC heavyweight Pat Barry.

Calderwood has been training hard. Namajunas is thrilled to be facing good competition, saying it’s actually better to fight when your opponent knows what she’s doing. As we saw last time, Namajunas sometimes battles her nerves and has self-confidence issues leading up to a fight. Didn’t seem to bother her once she got in the cage last time.

Pettis, finally able to return to a fighter’s corner now that it’s not a battle of two fighters from his own team, says he’s going to hold back on instructions and just let JoJo do what she does best.

Then at last, it’s the fight I’ve wanted to see for weeks …

And in the early going, it doesn’t disappoint. Namajunas walks out and throws a kick. Calderwood immediately starts backing her down as they exchange punches, then gets through her defense for a takedown. Namajunas has her legs up near Calderwood’s neck, giving Calderwood something to think about before unleashing any strikes. Namajunas also lands some elbows from the bottom. Calderwood tries to improve her position, and Namjunas scrambles up. But Calderwood lands a nice knee that sends the off-balance Namajunas tumbling. Namajunas is quickly back to her feet and gets the better of a close-range exchange, then works Calderwood down to the mat. Calderwood stands and tosses Namajunas, who works for just about any submission known to grapplers, including an ankle lock that just looked nasty.

With a minute left in the round, Namajunas starts cranking on the arm of Calderwood, who grimaces as she’s forced to give up position to the tenacious Namajunas. The round ends with Namajunas on top, literally and figuratively.

Round 2, after Namajunas gets a very simple question in the corner: “Want to be a champion?” “Yes I do!”

Calderwood comes out aggressive again with a variety of kicks. She’s taller than Namajunas, and keeping her distance seems to be a good idea. But she also looks good in a clinch, landing a few knees and elbows. Through nearly 90 seconds, it’s Calderwood’s round, and Namajunas goes for a takedown to break the pressure. Calderwood counters and ends up on top.

But as we’ve already seen, Namajunas is really dangerous off her back. We hear “Watch the kimura” from a corner. She’s also working her legs up toward Calderwood’s neck again. The end comes suddenly — from the angle we’re shown, it’s hard to see what kind of grip Namajunas has on the arm or even Calderwood’s tap. Namajunas briefly yells in excitement, then immediately embraces Calderwood.

The fight recap shows how much damage Calderwood was inflicting before Namajunas fought back in the second round.

Calderwood is upset, being comforted by Irish fighter Daly in a bit of Celtic sympathy. She hopes it was a good fight. Oh yes, JoJo, it most certainly was.

Semifinal “announcement” formality:

– Esparza vs. Penne, and they’re all smiles at the staredown.

– Markos vs. Namajunas. Markos tries to look mean, but Namajunas seems pretty serene and tired after such a huge win.

Let’s be clear: If Namajunas faced Markos in a UFC fight with proper training time, Namajunas would win handily. But we’ll have to see how much of a toll the Calderwood fight took on Namajunas.

So let’s get to the finale fight card as announced so far:

– Tecia Torres vs. Angela Magaña. A little bit of hostility from the house, and probably a test to see if Torres — originally the third seed but beaten twice in three fights on the show — can live up to her hype. Magaña took Aisling Daly to the third round, so you can’t count her out.

– Joanne Calderwood vs. Seo Hee Ham. Interesting test for the excellent Calderwood against one of the top fighters from Asia.

– Felice Herrig vs. Lisa Ellis.  Can’t remember any flareup between them in the house.

– Angela Hill vs. Emily Kagan. Might be fighting to keep a spot in the UFC.

– Aisling Daly vs. Alex Chambers. Curious one here. Chambers is practically the invisible fighter in the house. Daly has a pretty big rep.

– Bec Rawlings vs. Heather Clark. Well, Rawlings clearly doesn’t like Clark. The issue may be how Clark looks after healing her knee.

Justine Kish must not be fully healthy yet, so she’ll wait for her debut. Then we’ll surely have the losing semifinalists and the winning semifinalist.

I think Namajunas will be champion at some point. Whether she does it right away depends on how well she holds it together in the house after a really tough fight.

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soccer

MLS, the state of (abridged)

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s try to wrap up a tempestuous day in North American soccer …

The D.C. Council cast aside its mourning for Marion Barry long enough for a heated discussion and vote on (and, mercifully, in favor of) a D.C. United stadium deal. The NASL announced it will run the owner-deprived Atlanta Silverbacks next year. The W-League (North American version) lost another traditional power in Ottawa.

(Insert gratuitous photo of proposed United stadium here)

And MLS commissioner Don Garber held his annual State of the League press conference in yet another new format, this time relaxing in comfortable chairs in a TV studio with a roomful of journalists who just happened to be affiliated with MLS rights-holding organizations.

Fans at least had a roundabout way into the room. They could ask questions on social media while Amanda Vandervort, the meta-guru for social media in the U.S. soccer community, sorted through everything. That was a thankless job.

Even when things are going pretty well for a sports league, you’re always going to see a bit of snark floating around. Just imagine what Vandervort’s NFL analogue would have to see if Roger Goodell tried this format.

Garber also made the occasional gaffe or oddball statement. One was simply amusing: In explaining for the umpteenth year why MLS isn’t likely to go to a fall-through-spring European-style calendar, he described the temperature in a prospective MLS city as “minus zero.” I’m not sure what to call that. It’s not a double negative. Maybe a one-and-a-half negative?

The other was more worrying. He said, in an unexpected bit of candor that didn’t sit well with other glowing assessments, that the league isn’t performing financially as well as owners would hope.

That’s apparently not a gaffe per se, because he doubled down on it in talking later with the Associated Press.

From that story:

Garber said the teams and the league are losing more than $100 million combined as they invest in player acquisitions, stadiums and league infrastructure. And he said owners are making financial investments that they were not expecting to still be making at this point.

The possible reactions to that story — some reasonable, some not:

1. This is just posturing for the collective-bargaining talks with the union.

2. This is a conspiracy — there’s no way the league is actually losing that much.

3. This means little — they’re investing a lot of money now in facilities, academies and Designated Players, and while they’re in investment mode, they’re going to deposit a couple of $100 million expansion fees. If MLS wasn’t investing for the future, it would probably turn a profit. SOP for a growing business.

4. Oh crap — everything is collapsing.

5. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! MLS will soon collapse, and we can usher in a new era of American soccer!

I’m inclined to go with 1 and 3, maybe a bit of 2. It’s not unusual for a league commissioner to talk in glowing terms about the league’s prospects moving ahead for the benefit of fans and sponsors, then plead poverty when the players are asking for more money. That said, MLS surely doesn’t have the financial security of better-established leagues.

The root of a lot of MLS debate is that some people are sick of being patient. They didn’t imagine in 1996 that we would be nearly 20 years into this venture and our national team wouldn’t be significantly better. Or that the league would still trot out obscure, unusual policies to get players like Clint Dempsey and Jermaine Jones to the teams they want.

On one hand, we still have to be patient. While D.C. United, NYCFC and a couple of other teams are sorting out their stadium issues, this league is still in start-up mode on some fronts. (So, no, MLS isn’t ready to start promotion and relegation while its teams are still investing on the assumption of being first-division teams — but at least Garber said “not anytime soon” rather than “never,” right?)

On the other hand, it’s disappointing to hear the commissioner going into CBA talks pleading poverty and failing to reassure everyone that the league won’t have a work stoppage. Investing in academies and facilities (and USL teams) is great, but are we really going to go to the brink with current players and risk a work stoppage that would shatter the league’s credibility?

It’s always helpful to remember things can change. So it was a nice coincidence that Vice Sports recently had a piece on a bit of U.S. soccer history — people chasing down collectibles from the glory days of the Major Indoor Soccer League. And that piece linked back to a Frank Deford piece from Sports Illustrated that offered a snapshot of the indoor and outdoor game circa 1983:

This season the NASL, which has atrophied to 12 franchises (from 24 in 1980) but still managed to lose that $25 million in 1982, permitted three of its franchises—Chicago, San Diego and Golden Bay—to field teams in the MISL as well. The toothpaste is out, and it’s never going back in the tube. Whenever the two leagues achieve some form of consolidation, it will be the NASL that must end up as the subsidiary partner. Already Samuels acknowledges that next year two or three more of his outdoor franchises will want to play indoors, too. Lee Stern, the owner of the Sting, which now plays in both leagues, says, “There’s no way pro soccer can survive anymore in this country without indoor soccer.” And Bob Bell, Stern’s counterpart with the San Diego Sockers, says, “I’m convinced now that indoor will be what makes soccer in the U.S.”

There is, however, no way of knowing yet whether indoor soccer can do what hockey failed to do—win national acceptance and network contracts and become America’s fourth major professional team sport. But for better or worse, it’s becoming clearer all the time that if soccer does succeed as a spectator sport in the U.S., it will be the indoor brand that will thrive.(*)

Sure, soccer fans these days may think of Deford as the curmudgeonly vestige of old-school anti-soccer cynicism. But this piece was written more than 30 years ago. And at the time, it certainly seemed like he had a point.(**)

About 15 years ago, reasonable people thought women’s soccer would outpace men’s soccer as a big-time sport in the USA. Then 13 years ago, MLS nearly died, struggling to turn the corner from its debt-ridden start as the recession kicked in.

So things can change rather quickly in soccer. In the time it took Landon Donovan to go from youth prodigy to retiree, we’ve seen European soccer go from the occasional ESPN/Fox Sports World curiosity to big-time U.S. programming. We’ve seen MLS expand to 20 teams while only losing three along the way, a record not many leagues can match in their first two decades. We now see kids walking around wearing Beckham, Messi, Rooney and Dempsey jerseys.

When I checked in about the Garber quote with someone at MLS, asking specifically whether fans should be worried, what I got back was, “Don’t worry — MLS isn’t going anywhere.” And yes, it’s unlikely that the whole thing would go belly-up. But it faces a challenge in terms of thriving in an ultracompetitive environment. The USA is one of the few countries in which soccer isn’t the dominant sport (Australia, Ireland, India, Pakistan, maybe China, Japan and Indonesia), and it’s one of the few leagues in the world in which its domestic fans are repeatedly badgered for supporting the league at all.

Fans cannot take MLS’s future success for granted. Nor can MLS take it for granted. With all the long-term investment in place, MLS isn’t exactly complacent, but it’s time to get creative — or in some cases to just take off the training wheels.

What about actual free agency? What about a nice pay raise for first-team players? How about replacing the muddy allocation system with a simpler revenue-sharing plan that makes teams pay into a general pool when they splash out on a big contract?

And why aren’t we closer to a CBA at this point, just 82 days before D.C. United is expected to field a team in the CONCACAF quarterfinals?

(Also in the State of the League roundtable, Rob Stone won fans and admirers by holding Garber’s feet to the fire on NYCFC and LAFC’s lack of concrete stadium plans, Garber wants to press onward to 24 teams but isn’t thinking of anything beyond that, the commissioner tossed out a neat idea for aligning the final meaningful games of the MLS regular season at the same time and getting the best ones on TV with NFL-style “flex” scheduling, and the 12-team playoff might not be happening after all. See RSL Soapbox for the rundown.)

Footnotes:

* – Indoor soccer has its own issues at the moment.

** – The whole story is a recommended read. It has some amusing anachronisms (hey, remember when SI and The New York Times set the sports agenda for the nation?), but some of the arguments over special treatment for American and Canadian players are still ongoing.

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