Category: sports culture

olympic sports, sports culture

Myriad links: The Onion on water polo, dreary Americans, new Olympic sports

Posted on by Beau Dure

A few late-night links that I haven’t had a chance to work into full-fledged posts today:

1. The Onion brought the funny on water polo and other sports (if you consider baseball a sport) in one of their video segments.

2. At Fox Sports, Jen Floyd Engel ponders the difference between American “thou shalt not cheer in the pressbox” journalists and those from elsewhere, who cheer, hug, get kisses from athletes, etc.

Having spent my last Olympics sharing press tables with a corps of Russian journalists that was mostly grumpy old men (the exception was the lone woman, who looked a bit like Tori Amos and might have smiled once), I can tell you it’s not universal. But yes, many other countries are a bit more … expressive. Most of the time, it’s harmless. In soccer pressboxes, though, we’ve all seen a few really annoying situations.

3. Following up on the fun discussion we’re having on golf in the Olympics (the driving range/miniature golf biathlon has potential), I’ve seen some musing on the next wave of sports competing to make the Olympic programme. Around the Rings tells us the IOC is warning sports federations not to spend a lot on their campaigns, because that would be unfair to those who don’t have much to spend. (Imagine American TV advertising if the Republicans and Democrats had to limit themselves to what the Green Party can afford.)

Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog (Andrew’s on vacation), The Atlantic takes a look at all of the contenders. The most sensible inclusion would be karate. It has immense global popularity, and no one needs to build a new venue — just rotate it into the same arena or convention center that’s hosting judo, taekwondo or weightlifting. But no one said these decisions made sense.

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olympic sports, sports culture

When Olympians deserve better from the rest of us

Posted on by Beau Dure

I don’t mean to pick on Mike Wise here, because this isn’t the first column to take a couple of stray mixed-zone comments and berate an Olympic athlete as if she let down her family, country, boyfriend and dog.

He does take it to new heights, though, in this column.

“Pretty much all my mistakes cost me the bout,” Zagunis said, adding that any bout she ever lost had less to do with the skill, smarts and perseverance of her opponents than it was “my lack of concentration.

“Congrats to them for winning, [but] in my opinion, if I was completely 100 percent on mentally, then I would have been able to win again. It’s happened to me before.”

First, I’d like to see the full context here. Second, she’s basically saying she choked. That doesn’t strike me as arrogant or petulant.

Ready for it to get worse?

That is, no one but fencers care about fencing after the Olympics are over. And nothing is as over as when the Olympics are over.

So while they’re going on, niche athletes need to savor the Games and smile more often for those two weeks, give opponents that beat them credit more often — because they really matter to most of us only every four years.

So take THAT, Miss Not As Composed As Journalist Would Like After Shocking Loss On World’s Biggest Stage. You’re utterly useless the rest of the four years between Olympics, when you’re just off getting an education and winning the occasional world championship.

I sometimes wonder why people would want to be Olympic athletes. You devote your adolescent and young adult years to developing a rarified skill, and then if you’re anything less than perfect when the international broadcast feed clicks on, you’re subject to ridicule from an increasingly snarky media feeding off the perpetual snark of Twitter.

NBA and NFL players usually have one more game to play, and their mistakes are quickly forgotten. A media firestorm passes with time, and the player goes back to being an athlete. But if you screw up on or off the field, piste or pommel horse in that one instant America notices you before preparing for a fantasy football draft, and that window is gone.

Fair? Definitely not, even when the journalists are less explicit in their harrumphing than Wise is here.

We won’t change the armchair-Olympian attitude, though in the new media age, people can fight back:

Yes, that’s fellow fencer Tim Morehouse, who has also responded in more detail:

Mr Wise: Maybe she didn’t respond to defeat to your liking, but she didn’t make excuses, throw her equipment, curse anyone out or do anything but respond as best she could to an emotionally challenging situation.     I have seen far worst displays from athletes and this one certainly didn’t warrant the zeal to which you attacked her in your article.

It is legitimate to criticize athletes for their behavior (yes, even fencers), but your article was a personal attack.

And to the “every four years” point, Morehouse says this:

Fencing is a great sport and Mariel Zagunis is a great champion.  Whether people are writing about it or not over the next 3 years, she’ll be working hard to achieve her goals while conducting herself as a role model and contributing to our society.   She pursues excellence not for the Bob Costas sit down or the Wheaties box, but because she is trying to be the best she can be.    And in the end, that IS the Olympic spirit.

PS Don’t mess with the fencing team.   We have swords.(and twitter)

One more point, possibly self-serving: I’ve always tried, at USA TODAY and elsewhere, to get people to care about Olympic sports in non-Olympic years. And these Games have inspired me to redouble my efforts. That’s why this little blog is going to stick with Olympic programming. (And soccer and MMA, don’t worry about that.) When Zagunis wins another world championship, you’ll read about it.

And if we’re looking for Olympic controversies, shouldn’t we be looking at the boxing judges?

UPDATE: Wise has really gotten into it with some people on Twitter, alternating between gracious smoothing-over …

… and upping the ante on the attacks …

Being a Dukie who interviewed this fencing team in Beijing and had a funny conversation with Becca Ward about skipping the closing ceremony in favor of Duke’s freshman orientation (I told her she wasn’t missing much at the latter, but she insisted), I’m moderately curious about this. Ward went on to a fantastic college fencing career at Duke, in any case.

“She and her mother bully people and have a sense of entitlement” is “something positive”?

This is why people hate journalists.

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sports culture

Title IX-related questions

Posted on by Beau Dure

I pride myself on being less cynical than the typical journalist. And I’m certainly not someone to rain on the parade of Title IX’s 40th anniversary. Griping about an anniversary commemoration is like showing up at a July 4 fireworks display to gripe about drone attacks or Guantanamo or all the Native Americans who died when Columbus came over here. Time and place. Time and place. And besides, I think we’d agree that Title IX, like the Declaration of Independence, is generally a Good Thing.

That said, this sort of celebration brings out a few groups of people:

  1. People who have legitimate concerns over Title IX enforcement.
  2. People who twist those concerns into spurious self-defeating arguments and defenses of every penny spent on football.
  3. Title IX advocates who understand some of these concerns.
  4. Title IX advocates who ignore these concerns and won’t rest until every college and high school has a women’s modern pentathlon team, no matter how many men’s sports are cut to reach that point.

(All right, I’m exaggerating slightly on groups 2 and 4. Slightly.)

I’m in no mood to write an essay. I did that 15 months ago, and I either got it right at the time or haven’t made enough intellectual progress to think of anything better.

But I’m hoping the following list of questions — to which I’m willing to listen to answers — will spur some reflection among groups 2 and 4 to ease them into groups 1 and 3. Maybe they’ll even find some middle ground and become group 13. OK, 31.

Questions:

– Shouldn’t we be more concerned with mostly male Georgia Tech adding more female students than majority-female North Carolina adding more female student-athletes to a staggeringly successful women’s sports program?

– Who’s going to speak up for traditional nonrevenue sports against plans like this while football programs bleed athletic departments dry? (Yes, they quite often do.)

– Why do we see NCAA numbers showing how few programs make money while the Business of College Sports blog ranks programs as if they were Forbes billionaires wondering which building should be rebuilt in marble?

– If you’re trying to meet the desires and aptitudes of the underrepresented gender in your student body (one of the prongs of the three-pronged Title IX test), wouldn’t a JV soccer team be better than a varsity equestrian team?

– Why is Title IX all about sports, anyway? What about us musicians? We draw bigger crowds than some sports teams. We travel a bit.

– And what about scientists? Your daughter has a better chance at a career in medicine or engineering than she does at a college soccer scholarship. Shouldn’t she be pursuing it?

– Why should college scholarship opportunities play any role in determining what counts as a sport? I can tell you right now that 95 percent of the kids in my local U8 boys soccer league have no shot whatsoever at a college scholarship. Should they quit?

– Why does the third-string tight end for the football team need a scholarship while the starting left midfielder doesn’t?

– Why are colleges adding sports such as rowing in which nearly 90% of all intercollegiate athletes had no experience before entering college? (See the study.)

– Women’s wrestling is a valid Olympic sport in which the USA is pretty good, and adding it requires little to no new equipment for a school that already has a wrestling program. Why aren’t colleges adding that rather than cutting their men’s wrestling programs?

– Why are schools so good at adding rowing and bowling but so bad at the very basics of meeting all female students’ needs? (Case in point: sexual harassment)

– College biathlon. When’s it gonna happen?

– Can’t some sports be identified as Olympic development and protected in some partnership with the USOC?

– Does anyone have patience to let sports grow? For example: When I was at Duke, women’s basketball rarely drew in the hundreds. Now they draw in the thousands.

– Why do we tolerate the corrupt college football bowl system?

Maybe that’ll get the conversation started so that we really will preserve all that’s good about Title IX and not end up with a bunch of lawsuits and a ton of program cuts blamed (rightly or wrongly) on the law’s enforcement.

2
sports culture

Sports and religion … oil and vinegar? (Or “oil and Linegar*”?)

Posted on by Beau Dure

David Brooks, one of the more independent-minded and therefore one of the more thoughtful pundits around today, offers a thoughtful but flawed take on sports and religion, citing the Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow crazes.

Ascent in the sports universe is a straight shot. You set your goal, and you climb toward greatness. But ascent in the religious universe often proceeds by a series of inversions: You have to be willing to lose yourself in order to find yourself; to gain everything you have to be willing to give up everything; the last shall be first; it’s not about you.

Not that Lin and Tebow are exactly the same, as my terrific former colleague Cathy Lynn Grossman points out at USA TODAY. Tebow, perhaps through no fault of his own, sparked a conversation about divine intervention in sports. I don’t see Lin doing that. As someone who would struggle to explain why a divine entity would mess with field goals but not with famine, tsunamis and so forth, I’m therefore a little less agitated by the Lin craze than I was with Tebow-ism.

Brooks says Lin, being a thoughtful guy who surely had to grapple with deep questions at Harvard, has wrestled with the balance of God and team:

In a 2010 interview with the Web site Patheos, Lin recalled, “I wanted to do well for myself and my team. How can I possibly give that up and play selflessly for God?”

It’s a strange question to those of us who grew up in the “muscular Christianity” ethos of the Athens YMCA and its camps, where I was taught to be a good Christian by beating the crap out of other kids in games like “water basketball” (basically water polo with less officiating, more water in lungs) and “ball” (essentially, whoever has the ball is fair game for just about anything).

But somehow, we were also taught sportsmanship and respect for opponents. We believed we could compete all-out, then pray together afterwards, as NFL players such as my fellow YMCA alum John Kasay have done for decades. (Yes, before Tebow.)

Sports and religion can be an awkward mix on the personal level. MMA fighters and boxers sometimes say plenty of nasty things about each other before a fight, only to follow up the fight with a shout-out to Christ for making everything possible. Some athletes — like a lot of celebrities, politicians and other people in power — take advantage of their positions for all sorts of sordid behavior, whether they profess to be religious or not.

And Brooks has a point about the balance of self-confidence in competition and humility in Christianity. Athletes may need to ask themselves whether their competing to better themselves or destroy others. The former is easy to fit in religion, teaching lessons of self-sacrifice and perseverance that can be sustained in other aspects of life. The latter is more difficult.

Ironically, more secular Europe might be better at competing for all the right reasons than the Bible-thumping USA. Crowds gather for Olympic-sport competitions and cheer all the athletes — maybe a little louder for their favorites, but  they’re not antagonist. Soccer is an exception, of course, and the nastiest antagonism is actually the sectarian-driven nonsense most notable in Glasgow but also seen elsewhere.

But even once you get past the rowdier crowds, you have athletes who often compete with mutual respect. Some American pundits lament that respect, longing for some mythical good old days in which the Colts and Packers genuinely hated each other. Those days, if they ever existed, have faded. What we see now is (mostly) honest competition.

Brooks’ piece is worth a read. But the conclusion rings false to those of us who have talked with elite athletes who can psych themselves up to hit each other without hating each other. Ultimately, Brooks’ conclusion puts a limit on the human spirit. And sports are all about challenging such limits.

* I have now fulfilled my obligation as a sports journalist to make a Lin pun. I don’t intend to make another.

(HT: @JeffKassouf, who also disagrees with Brooks)

1
sports culture

Anonymous Genius: Fighting elitism with sexism and racism

Posted on by Beau Dure

I went to Duke, but I get it. The country is tired of hearing about how great it is. Ever since the back-to-back titles in ’91 and ’92, they’ve been overexposed and at times overrated. Plenty of reasons to get a little irritated.

Then there’s this from “RealTalkIowa,” the latest nominee in our “Anonymous Genius” series:

Must be the fat chicks and little Asian kids are spending too much time at the library.

Maybe this is why the Duke atmosphere is thought to be fading. Dukies used to be mean! I mean — they threw Twinkies on the court when Dennis Scott was introduced! Coach K went scrambling over to apologize to Bobby Cremins.

But when it comes to sheer obnoxious hostility, Duke simply can’t compete with the Anonymous Geniuses of the Web. Those days are gone.

For the record — Duke is just getting harder and harder to get into, and out of an undergrad population of 6,000 or so, it’s no longer realistic to expect 20% of them to find the time to camp out.

Fabled Cameron Crazies succumbing to Cameron monotony at Duke – NCAA Division I Mens Basketball – CBSSports.com News, Scores, Stats, Schedule and RPI Rankings.

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sports culture

Questioning the place of sports in college: Drop football, save academics?

Posted on by Beau Dure

A Chicago-area junior college has dropped its football program. Sad day for student-athletes? A tale of Title IX excess? No, says the Chicago Tribune‘s John Keilman (listed as “reporter” though this is clearly an op-ed).

I think a lot of bigger schools would be well-advised to study Harper’s sensible example. What would they discover if they put their athletic departments under a similar microscope? Do their teams really add to the educational experience? Or have they drifted into isolated orbits, estranged from their schools’ true purpose?

I have a feeling that if other colleges and universities had the courage to act on what they found, America would have a lot more empty football fields.

So on one hand, we’re being told that sports — particularly women’s sports — cultivate a sense of belonging and empowerment that go hand in hand with learning and developing our full potential. And yet a football team at a junior college somehow ruins that school’s educational mission?

2
soccer, sports culture

How education helps athletes

Posted on by Beau Dure

Monica Gonzalez wasn’t writing specifically about high school and college soccer here, but she makes an argument here that bolsters the notion of keeping the USA’s “school and soccer” combination alive:

Education affects sports performance. Think of it as a gym for the mind. Sitting through classes hones concentration. Incorporating studies into life trains discipline and focus. And studying for finals prepares one for stress and pressure. Every player on Canada and the U.S. has either finished college or will soon. I can say the same for only half of the Mexican womens team. Even fewer on the Mexican mens team, but dont get me started on them. Boys are forced to quit school to enter fuerzas basicas, which is the pro system. It is a flaw on the Mexican mens side, but thats another article for another day.

via Monica Gonzalez: CONCACAF must close the disparity gap – espnW.

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sports culture

The war on nonrevenue sports, ctd

Posted on by Beau Dure

The argument as laid out in Sports Illustrated:

1. There’s a lot of money flowing into big-time college sports.

2. They should give some of that money away toward charitable causes.

3. But wait, many athletic departments are actually losing money. So …

“The first obligation is to restore fiscal sanity by using [the savings in salary] to plug that hole,” says Zimbalist, who also proposes reducing the number of football scholarships, having FBS schools cut spending on nonrevenue sports and instituting an NCAA football playoff.

The Zimbalist here is Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor who has done pretty much all there is to do in sports economics, from research on Ken Burns’s odes to baseball to a Title IX analysis with advocate Nancy Hogshead-Makar.

(I do have to mention that Zimbalist appears in Long-Range Goals, testifying on behalf of MLS players in their lawsuit against the league, much to the bemusement of Soccer America columnist Paul Gardner:

The players called sports economist Andrew Zimbalist to show how Division I competition could have driven up salaries. (Rhett) Harty’s 1996 salary, to give one example, would’ve been $115,275 instead of $41,356. Gardner was unimpressed: “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.”)

In the case of college sports, Zimbalist certainly understands the issue. It’s just curious to see him and SI‘s Alexander Wolff tossing aside nonrevenue sports as collateral damage.

But that’s not the first time we’ve seen such a suggestion from SI. Or elsewhere.

So if you believe in college soccer, swimming, track, volleyball, wrestling, lacrosse, tennis, golf, etc., you might want to start speaking up.

(The first “war on nonrevenue sports” post is here. I’ll start tagging them from now on. Not that I’m hoping for more.)

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sports culture

Questioning the place of sports in college: Character

Posted on by Beau Dure

Forget about the BCS for a moment. Forget Title IX. Forget conference re-alignment. In the post-Penn State scandal world, we’re seeing something that runs far deeper: People who aren’t sure colleges should be in the sports business at all.

They’re popping up a bit more at the Washington Post’s education page, where Jay Mathews bemoans the greater attention paid to the BCS than to a study showing a lack of analytical skills among college students. (Frankly, he should take that issue up with his editors rather than his readers.)

And The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken up the topic, today with a lengthy take on whether sports build character:

Do Sports Build Character or Damage It? – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The piece hints at something I had drilled in my head by my father, a philosophy major and high school QB who went on to become a biochemist: Ancient Greeks believed strongly in developing mind and body. But the writer has a different take here, calling on Plato to bolster the argument that sports help warriors find an outlet for their aggression when they’re not at war.

In a civilization that doesn’t send many people to war (no disrepect to Iraq and Afghanistan vets — their numbers are simply far smaller than the entire generation sent to WWII), that argument suggest that we don’t need quite as many athletes. Maybe we should all be re-training our brains for gentler pursuits like deconstructing 19th century’s women’s literature through the lens of 17th century patriarchal hegemonic archetypes for a post-structuralist buzzwordist obscure-termist discourse, or whatever English departments are doing now while the entire country forgets how to speak English. But I digress.

It’s a funny coincidence — some might call it “ironic” — that people are questioning the idea of sports as character development while Title IX enforcers give a hard sell on the notion that sports are good for women. But it’s not such a bad idea to stop and take stock while the sports landscape is rapidly changing.

And while most questions on sports lead back to football, the most violent and warlike (but also the most complex) of our sports, we can’t forget how much these questions apply across the board. Grantland had a story this week about concussions in football, saying the risk in football was far more than the second-placed sport. But that second most dangerous sport was one that may surprise parents. It’s girls’ soccer.

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sports culture

Title IX: Would it ever collapse under its own weight?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Many thanks to the folks organizing the NCAA convention for streaming today’s session on Title IX.

If only it weren’t so depressing.

Sure, this wasn’t some rah-rah session to cheer about how much progress women have made in American sports, progress that shouldn’t be taken for granted. The target audience was athletic department types who have to make sure their schools are compliant.

And the middle segment was a topic that’s not going to be pleasant under any circumstances — sexual violence and what universities need to do not just to prevent it but help victims. Hearing some of the examples of what victims can face is just heart-rending.

The more mundane details were just overwhelming. If I were a compliance officer, I would have walked out of that meeting with an overriding sense of hopelessness. (Granted, I might have walked into that meeting with the same feeling.)

We know the basic issues — as colleges skew more female, it’ll be tougher for schools to meet strict proportionality. North Carolina has one of the best women’s sports programs in the country, but the student body is more than majority female, so it’s not likely to meet proportionality as long as it keeps up a football team. The next two tests are more nebulous.

So what did we learn in this session? Well, for one thing, “lack of facilities is not a defense.” They didn’t go into detail on that point, but I’m wondering where the line would be drawn. If you have enough people who want to play tennis, do you need a tennis facility? A competition-quality pool if you have a demand for swimming? Maybe a velodrome for track cyclists?

Well, maybe not. The one thing that I learned from the session that made me think athletic departments are going to survive is that sports don’t need to be added unless they have enough students who are not only interested but reasonably capable of competing at a varsity level.

And yet we have enough giant rowing teams with marginally interested athletes that they actually joked about them in the presentation.

So it seems like something’s gotta give. That, they didn’t talk about.

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