Category: sports culture

sports culture

When a shocking event hits you at home

Posted on by Beau Dure

Terrific read here: A Penn State alumna on a community’s heartbreak – espnW

I’ve had a few misgivings about the reactions in all directions on the Penn State saga. Those who actually rioted — a small percentage of Penn State students and community members but still a substantial group — are going to regret it. (Imagine a job interview in which an employer recognizes the dude who celebrated on top of the toppled news van.) But I’m equally skeptical of the piling-on against Penn State as an institution.

Two reasons for the misgivings:

1. I distrust howling mobs in general.One reason I love The Simpsons is that the show has done such a good job in so many situations skewering our tendency to get irrational at the drop of a hat.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/hNrDAWOGCYP5UVfeIg4ufA

Even if many people have good intentions, they end up fueling those who don’t. And you simply cannot have a rational conversation with someone who is caught up in it.

2. I’ve been through this. You know my school? Duke? Right. First, we were the evil Southern country-club school that looked the other way while our lacrosse team did everything up to and including rape. Then, when it turned out the rape story was fabricated, we were the bastion of political correctness that threw everyone under the bus so the African-American Studies department wouldn’t get offended. A couple of writers turned the latter into a nice little cottage industry.

But you don’t have to go through such a thing to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Picture the most admirable person in your community or someone you admire in the world at large, perhaps even a member of your family. Now suppose you’ve just learned about that person what we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks about Joe Paterno. You may be angry, yes. But you’ll also be shocked. And saddened. In some cases, you may not even want to believe the worst, clinging to any shred of exonerating evidence. (In the Penn State case, that would be the notion that Paterno only heard part of the story and didn’t realize how serious it was.)

When you walk that mile in someone else’s shoes, you still won’t be ready to forgive a decade of inaction among a handful of people. You’ll still scoff at Mr. Celebrating On Overturned News Van Guy.

But you’ll also be a little less inclined to pile on everyone at Penn State. The players. The fans who wore blue to yesterday’s game. The alumni who are more than 60% of the way to an ambitious goal of raising $500,000 for sex abuse-survior support group RAINN.

And you might even remember that coming to terms with what happened at Penn State will require a calm, patient investigation. Engaging in a contest to see how loudly you can denounce everything at Penn State won’t help a single abuse victim.

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sports culture

Student-athletes: Going on the endangered list?

Posted on by Beau Dure

So BYU is flirting with the Big East, Boise State may go anywhere, the SEC is adding teams that aren’t “Southeast” in any sense, and the Pac-12 is looking farther and farther inland. I’m still waiting for the University of Heidelberg to join the ACC.

The driving forces here are: football, TV, football, money, football, men’s basketball, money and football.

Then there’s Topic B in college sports: Whether to pay players a stipend or a little extra.

Not considered in these discussions: The existence of sports beyond football or men’s basketball. Even men’s basketball is hardly considered — it’s a factor in the ACC’s raids on the Big East but not much else. The current ESPN magazine has a stark claim on its cover: Superconferences will be very bad for college basketball. (Disclaimer: I do a good bit of freelance work for espnW.)

Football is unique among college sports, of course. For one thing, it’s difficult to have the marching band do a halftime show at a water polo game. (Surely Stanford’s band has tried.)

The two biggest considerations with football: It’s college sports’ biggest revenue-generator AND biggest expense sink. Check the numbers on college sports, and you’ll see that football is a gamble. From a financial point of view, schools can win big … or lose.

The “superconference” movement raises that stakes. Yes, there’s a lot of TV money on the table. But the expenses will creep up as well.

What the media have not noticed is that those expenses will be much worse for the nonrevenue sports. It’s one thing for Boise State to take its football team to South Florida for a Saturday football game. It’s another thing for Boise State to plan its conference travel for volleyball or softball. Midweek cross-country travel every week? That’ll be great for “student-athletes,” right? Especially the ones playing sports that don’t have professional futures.

ESPN’s story mentions the problem:

So it may be great for Syracuse’s football team to leave the poorly monetized Big East, but now its men’s basketball team has to fly once a week, if not more, to Miami and various spots in North Carolina to play. Its travel budget will balloon. Syracuse, like many schools in large conferences, will come to rely even more on football to provide for its other sports. The more money football doles out, the more power it wields.

Now suppose the “pay the players” movement gains momentum. Again, everything becomes more expensive.

Now suppose we have a downturn in a superconference’s TV revenue. It could happen. Bubbles burst.

We’d have athletic departments looking at red ink. What do you suppose will get cut?  Probably not the football teams.

The great blog tracksuperfan.com has rounded up a few of the reasons for alarm, including George Dohrman’s thoughtful, thoroughly researched SI piece this week exploring a few options to pay players while making the whole operation viable. One option in that SI piece: Make a lot of the nonrevenue sports “club” rather than varsity.

In a way, the “club” idea brings sports back into the realm of normal college activity, and getting out from the NCAA’s umbrella is tempting. In another way, it’s brutally unfair to nonrevenue sports, particularly when other options are saner. And it means you’ll have Olympic athletes holding bake sales so they can take one flight to a national championship.

Already, nonrevenue sports’ spring seasons — a small attempt to give soccer players and company something beyond their absurdly short fall season — are under attack. For soccer players, this is particularly galling. They could lose their poorly publicized spring games, but they’re expected to leave their summer amateur teams in early August to get back to “school” before the dorms even open? That’s more cost-effective? Better for the players? How?

SI’s piece has a rather chilling quote in bold type: COLLEGE SPORTS IS FULL OF TEAMS THE MARKET DOESN’T SUPPORT, YET THEY GET FUNDED.

Before we leap into Ayn Rand’s America, let me make this counterargument: The value of college sports to a school goes far beyond tangible revenue. If we reduce college sports to NFL and NBA development leagues with everything else puttering around at the “club” level, what’s the point?

(Technically, because of Title IX and the SI piece’s suggestion that schools should just focus on strict proportionality so they’d be able to cut sports without violating Prongs 2 and 3, we’d have football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and a 65-member women’s rowing team. But let’s not digress down that road just yet.)

Take a look at the 2010-11 standings for the Directors’ Cup (long associated with my former employer and frequent freelance client, USA TODAY) and the newer Capital One Cup. Look at these schools. Stanford. Cal. Notre Dame. Duke. North Carolina. Virginia. Northwestern. Michigan. Lots of good schools. (Yes, Duke gave me two degrees, but it’s still a good school.) Even a non-scholarship Ivy League school such as Princeton can check into the top 40 ahead of a lot of the schools that can fill their swimming pools with football money.

From the Greek academy to the Bay Area, sports have been part of student life. It’s a big selling point for a lot of schools. Hyperachievers like to hang out with hyperachievers.

Does “the market” support that? No more so or less so than it supports the marching band, the art museum, the library’s updated card catalog system or the people who clean up the statue of John Q. Schoolfounder when he’s TP’d after homecoming.

So let’s toss out a few ideas:

– Football conferences are simply different entities than basketball conferences, lacrosse conferences, soccer conferences and so forth. Let football conferences go national while the other sports stay regional.

– Figure out a way to trim a few athletes off those giant rowing teams without falling out of compliance with Title IX. Maybe put a few more of those athletes on the teams in, say, swimming, track and other sports that actually have millions of high school athletes from whom to choose.

– If football is going to be the rainmaker for the rest of the athletic department, fine. Beef up the minimum support given to other sports. Let it be the rainmaker.

– Ease up on additional financial aid for needy athletes. But don’t pretend it’s some problem that’s unique to athletes. I knew plenty of people who had trouble paying for a holiday flight home in school. The fourth-string tight end shares some problems with the band’s second-chair tuba player.

Whatever the solutions, the sports that don’t rake in money should be part of the discussion. And part of the schools.

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sports culture

The Atlantic, the NCAA and the wrong discussion

Posted on by Beau Dure

By now, you’ve probably seen at least three of your friends Tweet or share The Atlantic’s sprawling expose, The Shame of College Sports.

My question: Was anyone else disappointed? Is anyone else worried that the wrong issues are emphasized?

A lot of effort went into reporting this story, and it touches on several issues that rarely see the light of day. The NCAA comes across as a petty organization, consumed with power, that aims to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to question nonsensical rules. The cases are shocking and should be fodder for follow-up discussion.

But reporter Taylor Branch digresses from this damning expose to pontificate about amateurism and offer simplistic solutions for paying players. And in doing so, he doesn’t address the fact that most schools with football programs actually are NOT making money on sports, and many of them are losing money on football alone. See for yourself. And it doesn’t help that the bowl system is a gravy train for all the wrong people.

So most schools’ athletic departments are accomplishing two things. First, they’re enhancing the prestige of the school, giving students more reason to attend and alumni more reason to donate. My alma mater’s rise to national prominence came partly through a slow-moving movement to enhance and advertise its academic stature, but the 1986 Final Four team of Dawkins, Bilas, Alarie and company turned that slow growth into an outright boom.

Second, they’re fulfilling that Greek ideal of developing mind and body. Or, more simply, offering students activities through which they can be well-rounded. A swim team is like an orchestra — it won’t generate much direct revenue, but it’s a part of the school’s student life. And the occasional rare talent may go on to make a living at it.

So before we can call football players slaves — a suggestion Branch dismisses and then uses anyway — we have to bear in mind a couple of things. The money from jersey sales (as an aside: I was told in my college days that schools couldn’t sell jerseys that *named* a player — is that no longer true) does more than fill coaches’ and administrators’ pockets. And while those coaches may be overpaid, their work enhances a player’s earning ability down the road. If they’re excelling on a college playing field so much so that they’re selling merchandise by the ton, they’re likely in that 1-2 percent of people who’ll reap pro benefits down the road.

All that said, Ed O’Bannon’s suit is interesting. Once a player has completed college eligibility, shouldn’t he be allowed to trade his fame for modest fortune? Perhaps so.

And paying college players, frankly, would be less of an issue if other people paid them. What is the harm to the game if Lauren Cheney takes her bonus money from winning the 2008 Olympics and returns to the UCLA soccer team? If a collegiate golfer wins the U.S. Open, what’s the point of returning the money?

Sponsorships are trickier. If Nike and adidas start sponsoring college players, the divide between “Nike schools” and “adidas schools” will just get wider. But if the school doesn’t gain a recruiting edge from, say, a basketball player endorsing Starbucks, then why not allow it?

Those are the real issues of “shamateurism.” The NCAA is full of counterproductive rules, and woe be to the college tutor or student-athlete who questions them. Might be nice to see a follow-up that focuses more on that aspect and less on questions of slavery.

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soccer, sports culture

MLS All-Stars, overreaction and reaction

Posted on by Beau Dure

Hysterical overreaction is as much a part of the Internet as inappropriate photos and conspiracy theories.

Given that, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard today from the dude who kept Tweeting at me last week about MLS “fixing” games by playing reserves in the second half … of friendlies. Oh no, it couldn’t be a prudent decision to rest starters and give reserves some experience in a game that won’t count in the standings. It’s a crime.

The Internet is noisy. After any event that draws hype, many people will sound off. And just as the UFC survives to fight another day when a main event is disappointing, so too will MLS survive a round of friendlies in which European elites have basically wiped the field with indifferent, inexperienced or inferior teams.

All that said, MLS fans and the blogopundits are well within their rights to look at last night’s game and ask whether the league has any players capable of hitting the broad side of a barn from the penalty spot.

The league has already set a record for scoreless ties, and it’s not even August, as Steve Davis laments in a sound analysis. Then last night, the MLS All-Stars laid a goose egg.

Yes, Manchester United is one of the world’s best teams, and yes, they’re clearly taking this U.S. tour more seriously than many teams have taken it in the past. Their attacking flair was brilliant last night, and it’s hard to begrudge an All-Star team that never practices together the four goals it conceded to Rooney, Berbatov et al.

Yet United gave the All-Stars plenty of space, appropriately enough for a friendly. No one’s getting “stuck in” on a challenge in a game like this. (Jamison Olave left with an injury, but it wasn’t caused by contact.) The All-Stars, though unfamiliar with each other, completed 86% of their passes and managed 13 shots, two more than a well-oiled Man U machine. Goals? Zero. And it’s not as if Man U’s two keepers had to dig deep to keep the All-Stars at bay.

Can we prove anything from one game? No. Is it one more sad piece of evidence to the well-supported theory that MLS players can knock the ball around all day, just as they do in those ubiquitous possession drills, but can’t put the ball in the net? Certainly looks that way.

And fans have every right to say, while supporting the league in near-record numbers, that GMs should be looking for goal-scorers and coaches should be devoting a bit more time to finishing drills rather than possession exercises.

That’s not an overreaction to one game. The All-Star Game isn’t even the last straw. It’s just a well-publicized example of a legitimate problem. The result — Manchester United winning — doesn’t matter. Overreacting to the game is silly. Reacting is not.

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soccer, sports culture

Choke! Why there’s no double standard for women’s soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s rewrite history, shall we?

1. 1988 World Series: The Oakland A’s choked in Game 1, when Dennis Eckerley got out to an 0-2 count with two out in the ninth and a 4-3 lead but hung a slider that Kirk Gibson, so hobbled he might have been thrown out from left field, hit for a home run. (Sure, Nate Silver lists this as a choke in passing, but we remember Gibson in that situation much more clearly than we remember Eckersley. Silver also points out the ugly aftermath of living with a “choke” — Donnie Moore’s 1989 suicide.)

2. 1982 NCAA Championship: Georgetown gave away the national men’s basketball championship when Fred Brown passed the ball straight to North Carolina’s James Worthy. Oh yeah — some guy named Michael Jordan hit a big shot before that, a shot that some report today as a “buzzer-beater” even though it hit the net with 15 seconds left.

3. 2010 World Cup: Oh boy, did Slovenia and Algeria choke!

Get the picture?

Frankly, “choke” is a term that doesn’t interest me, mostly because I associate it with insecure guys trying to exert some sort of power over the sports they watch. It’s a word for the keyboard warrior and frustrated fan, and it’s not applied with any sort of consistency to either gender or any sport. If you think it doesn’t apply to women, talk to Daniela Hantuchova.

“Choke” is sometimes used as a way of distancing ourselves emotionally from a loss that would otherwise be painful. Our college hoops team lost? Oh, they choked. Our baseball team blew a 5-game lead in September? Choke! Scott Norwood missed a difficult 47-yard field goal — or a “chip shot” in the words of revisionists — that would’ve spared the Buffalo Bills the indignity of being perennial runners-up? Choke!

So in a weird way, yelling “choke!” is just a way of saying you care. Thanks?

3
general sports, soccer, sports culture

The effect of arguments

Posted on by Beau Dure

A message came in over Twitter from a private feed (I’ll identify him if he likes), asking a good question: “Why on earth do you engage with complete morons?”

This was in response to last night’s Twitter fight, in which I was arguing with two guys with a combined Twitter followership of less than 50 people about the incident at yesterday’s Masters in which Bergen Record columnist Tara Sullivan was denied entry into the locker room.

No one credible is jumping to say Sullivan shouldn’t have been in the locker room. Her male colleagues rallied to share quotes with her. Augusta National very quickly apologized and pinned the blame on a misinformed security guard.

Don’t confuse the Sullivan case with the question of whether the locker room should be open in the first place. That’s a legitimate question, raised recently by Toronto FC’s Aron Winter. The norm in other countries and many smaller-scale U.S. leagues (including Women’s Professional Soccer) is to keep the locker room closed but make athletes available for interviews in a timely fashion. Some sports handle it better than others, of course. But if the powers that be have decided that the most expedient way to handle interviews is to open the locker room, then barring women at the door is an impediment to their jobs.

As my buddy hoover_dam said: “Either you let everyone in or you do a mixed zone where you let nobody in. Get with it, ya jerks.”

Continue reading →

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sports culture

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

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

Continue reading →

5
basketball, sports culture

College hoops, dunks and generation gaps

Posted on by Beau Dure

Happened across (via a former Duke roomie’s Facebook feed) this compilation of “the best dunks in NCAA history.”

I don’t want to be that guy who stumbles across a list of best guitarists and says, “How could you leave out Blind Elderberry Pie?! Jimi Hendrix just stole everything from him!”

I will, however, point out the following:

1. Charging could’ve been called on about half these dunks.

2. This guy rounds up tons of clips of guys dunking on other guys, yet he misses Phil Henderson over Alonzo Mourning, showing us how to dunk over someone without charging:

Yes, I’m a Dukie, but even the selections involving my school are questionable. The Dahntay Jones dunk in the top 10 is OK, but I’d argue for a few items from the Robert Brickey catalog instead.

And two of the honorable mentions should be in the top 50, maybe the top 10. Grant Hill’s alley-oop off a pass that frankly got away from Bobby Hurley was just insane.

And as one of the commenters put it — if Jerry Stackhouse’s dunk against Duke’s Parks and Meek is “honorable mention,” there’s no reason to keep watching.

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soccer, sports culture

The frustrations of free-lance blogging

Posted on by Beau Dure

Two interesting posts from respected bloggers (well, *I* respect them) in the past 24 hours:

– At Pitch Invasion, Tom Dunmore takes the news of a spat between BigSoccer and Premier League pundit Ollie Irish as a launching point for an insightful look at the business of blogging.

– Fake Sigi, sounding curiously frustrated, says it’s time for a breather.

(For the record, FS, I didn’t “invite” Sirk but welcomed his company — same goes for you.)

The fundamental question here is what you can reasonably expect from blogging. And the answers are as diverse as the blogosphere itself.

Continue reading →

1
soccer, sports culture

D.C. doubleheader intrigue: Watching crowd … and Emilio?

Posted on by Beau Dure

D.C. United and the Washington Freedom play a doubleheader on Saturday, and it’ll be interesting to see how many United fans stick around for the women’s game. The typical MLS-women’s doubleheader has been ladies first. This one’s reversed. I’ve posted about it at The Huffington Post, tracing what has happened since a Freedom-United doubleheader would draw more than 20,000 by halftime of the first game on the bill.

The MLS game could have added interest thanks to a dramatic development today — D.C. United re-signed former league MVP Luciano Emilio. He might be cleared to play Saturday, says the Post‘s Steven Goff. The injury-riddled team has started 0-4.

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