Adjusting for Era

ROUGH JUSTICE: It occurred to me while watching Bill Belichick: A Football Life that, were Alexander the Great born today, he would end up in pro sports. Or Wall Street, I guess.

OIL CAN SAMSON: Except wasn't he basically tiny and not much of a specimen?

RJ: Right, but coaching.

OCS: Oh, you mean like how Mark Jackson would've conquered Persia a couple centuries ago.

RJ: HANDS DOWN, LANDS DOWN!

OCS: MAMA THERE GOES THAT MONGOL!

RJ: Red Auerbach would have conquered the known world.



RJ: Shaq certainly would have been a Goliath-type character.

OCS: "David, tell me how mine ass tasteth!"

RJ: And everyone would have laughed, because they would have been malnourished and 5'4" and he would have been fucking terrifying to behold.

OCS: Yup. He eats two steaks, cracks a fair to good joke, everyone goes home and starves a little more.



RJ: Do you think the visigoths got Rome because someone like David Kahn ended up in charge of Rome's defenses?¹

1: Turns out Honorius was the emperor at the time.

OCS: Nah. Just too many Urkels in their Legion.

RJ: "Man, how about that city-state of Buffalo in the early 90s? They seiged the shit out of everybody, but just couldn't seal the deal!"

OCS: "No one had an answer for their no-huddle warships!"

RJ: I can certainly see Tom Brady ending up as a Homeric figure. Or Kobe, for that matter.

OCS: Somehow I can't Dan Marino, though. Just how his face looks.

RJ: Yeah, I had the same apprehensions about Peyton Manning. Although the brothers angle plays well with oral traditions!

OCS: Rulon Gardner might end up a Little John-type; but he'd probably just live a brawny, anonymous life farming the shit out of some land.

RJ: KG, on the other hand, would die in battle seven or eight times.

OCS: Man, that dude would take a lot of people with him. He would get a statue and statue KG would be riding a horse, and he would have gone down so hard that the horse would be rearing all four legs off the ground.

RJ: Just resting on its giant, metaphor-laden balls? (I'm sorry that I'm not sorry about that one.)

OCS: HEY GUYS
THIS IS PRETTY UNCOMFORTABLE I GUESS
I WONDER WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO CARE ABOUT THAT

No One Man Should Have All That Power

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
—Don DeLillo

So LeBron opened his mouth about contraction. I assume this was at least semi-prompted by a reporter, but I don't think that is much of an excuse. I'm on record as not having a problem with his free agency machinations, but this is taking things a bit too far.

"Hopefully the league can figure out one way where it can go back to the '80s where you had three or four All-Stars, three or four superstars, three or four Hall of Famers on the same team," James said. "The league was great. It wasn't as watered down as it is [now]."

Say what? I'm not going to spend the time on Basketball Reference to really break it down, but that's nonsense. Sure, there are seven more teams in the league than there were in the 80s, but how much is that offset by David Stern's global reach? I have to go wrap my presents in a minute so I'm not going to find the exact demographics, but you have to figure that the Manus, Yao Mings and Dirk Nowitzki's make up for a good portion of that "watering down". The talent pool the league skims the top of may not be large enough to field thirty teams as strong as those twenty-three, but if not it can't be off by much.

Beyond that, though, LeBron is just making things up about the 80s. It's hard to fault a guy who was born in 1984 for having his history wrong, but if he isn't going to do the research he should probably avoid making concrete statements that are so blatantly self-serving. The media narrative about 80s ball being teams not stars is predicated on the only three teams that won titles that decade playing a strong team game. Bird and Magic shared like few other superstars ever have¹ and the Bad Boy Pistons' ringleader was the prototypical star point guard. That league had its share of stinkers too. It's hard to argue that a decade where only three teams won the title was had a better competitive mix than today, when five teams have won over the past ten years.

1: I am legally obliged to point out here that LeBron has the least selfish game of any superstar wing since those two dudes, but you knew that.

LeBron has every right to be wrong, I suppose. The real reason this puts my hackles up is that he's telling thirty guys that they should be fired. I get why he wants to hearken back to a mythical time when every team had "three or four superstars"² because then he wouldn't take so much flack. But this sort of talk undercuts the players' union in a really shitty way. If he disagrees with them philosophically I'm all for him airing that tactfully, but he's directly saying that the NBA would be a better place if the six worst players at each position didn't have jobs. Maybe he thinks that's true, but if I were his union rep I'd be screaming at him. Those thirty guys don't affect the money in his pocket, so why is he trying to take theirs? If you're going to buck the union this hard, you damn well better be able to back it up with facts, which he doesn't come close to doing. I can see a legitimate case being made for contraction, but this doesn't come close. Merry Christmas, scrubs, LeBron's made up history obviates the need for your jobs! Enjoy the D League and Europe!

2: Of course, if every team had three or four superstars, we would all mentally recalibrate our superstar threshold, because in a world with sixty basketball superstars superstardom would be meaningless.

Palate Cleansing!



It would be unseemly to throw up an unmitigated negative post in the midst of our staunchly non-denominational (wink wink!) holiday season! To make up for that, here are a few presents from those of use here at the No Fours central office.

To start, the two most wonderful non-dunks of the past week.



Hedo, that's a pretty bad way to start the conversation.




Andray Blatche has the power to let power go!


Finally, everyone's favorite Tom Waits Christmas non-carol. Happy holidays one and all, merry Christmas, happy belated Hanukkah, and a joyous Kwanzaa to every one of you!

The Burdens of Respect

The practice of the world goes farther in teaching us the degrees of our duty, than the subtlest philosophy, which was ever yet invented.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

How to Shoot Somebody Who Can Outdraw You: Tom Boonen

“In fact one is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly.” – Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

In (team) sports, as in all human interaction, respect is one of the basic forms of currency. Any time cooperation is necessary or impediment is an option, respect gets factored into the strategic calculus. Football schemes, how much of the plate a pitcher is willing to hit, who gets double-teamed when they get the ball, whether a rider gets help on a breakaway or just drafted, all are at least partly functions of respect. The same is true of our appreciation of athletes: A-Rod and Barry Bonds¹, for example, will never have their staggering achievements fully lauded because they have never quite earned the public’s respect. What athletes have the opportunity to accomplish on the field and the ramifications of such accomplishments hinge to a large degree on respect.

1: I’ve always thought it’s a shame that Barry Bonds is held in universally low respect because, before he was forever tarnished by the BALCO revelations, he had the misfortune/bad judgment to be a surly black man in a largely white game. (Sure, he was an asshole too, but still.) Go look at his numbers in his prime in San Francisco. Yes, he absolutely was using steroids, but so was a significant segment of the league, and he had four straight years with an on-base percentage over .500 while slugging .749 or better. That’s not even possible, but he was never quite recognized enough as he should have been.

In the springtime, cycle racing has its Classics season. In contrast to the grand tours, the weeks-long races where the winner is the man who grinds his opponents away through carefully-laid plans, strategic attacks, team strength and attrition, the Classics are one-day races which are won by the man willing to go hardest at the front with the best legs that day. They are full-bore, chaotic affairs in which a single misstep or mishap² can end a rider's chances of victory. You need a strong team to put you in position to win a classic, but you can't just rely on your team like you do in a tour. By the end of the day, the front of the race is a select few riders, all trying to win, and cooperation is often key in putting yourself in a position to contend.

2: If you want misfortune, ask George Hincapie about Paris-Roubaix…

In this year's Paris-Roubaix, in some corners considered the crown jewel of the classics season, Tom Boonen fell victim to the respect in which he was held by his peers. One of the world's finest sprinters, Boonen has the power to ride away from others on a flat course like Paris-Roubaix, and as a three time former winner was one of the heavy prerace favorites. As a Belgian sprinter in a race that is a Belgian monument, he was born and built for this. His race was going as planned with about fifty kilometers left: he was in a small group of elite riders at the front of the race. Barring the truly unexpected, the winner of the race would come from the group, and Boonen was right where he needed to be.

Until he wasn't. Fabian Cancellara, a Swiss rider who is the reigning world time trial champion, attacked when Boonen was at the back of the group. He quickly gapped the group, and powered away on a long solo attack. No one else went with him, and by the time Boonen saw what was happening, Cancellara was too far gone to cross the gap.³

3: It’s worth recognizing what a ballsy move this was by Cancellara. He had faith in his ability to beat that strong group of riders over 50 km even if they took up pursuit the way Boonen wanted them to. It may have been a lapse for Boonen to be in the back of the pack, but that’s a boldly early time to launch your attack.

A quick digression on the mechanics of bicycle racing (if you're more than passingly familiar with the sport, feel free to skip this paragraph): at its physical center, bike racing is governed by two factors, aerobic capacity⁴ and aerodynamic drag. A rider can go as fast as his legs and lungs can propel him, but if he has no one ahead of him, he has to punch through the air ahead of him. With a rider directly before him, he can use the slipstream that rider leaves in his wake to significantly reduce how much work he has to do to travel at that speed. All cycling tactics revolve around the interplay of these two things. This is why, despite its individual prizes, cycling is a team sport.

4: This disregards the anaerobic work of sprinting, of course, but that would really be getting pedantic, wouldn’t it?

By attacking alone with fifty kilometers left in the race, then, Cancellara was taking a risk. He would have to be faster than a group of riders, taking turns pulling at the front of a paceline to spread the hard work between them, for about an hour. If any man can do it, Cancellara is that man, given the course-he is monstrously strong, and as a time trial specialist he excels at the specific agony of the discipline-but success was by no means certain. If the group he had left behind gave its all chasing him, they could well catch him.

But they didn't. They didn't catch him because they didn't try. Not because they were throwing the race, not because they didn't think they could catch him, but because of their respect for Tom Boonen. Boonen immediately began trying to organize pursuit of Cancellara, but no one would work with him. Once Cancellara attacked, Boonen needed help. As much as a group chasing Cancellara would gain from taking turns exposed to full drag, a solo pursuer, no matter how fast or fit, would have little hope of catching him after spotting him a head start. I have no idea what was said on the course, but nothing Boonen said or tried did was to any avail, and because this was a classics race he had no teammates with him to help. Every rider in that group was there because they were in a position to do well in the race; no one was riding altruistically.

So why, then, concede victory to Cancellara? Such a move only makes sense if you're terrified of Tom Boonen. The only reason you would refuse to form a chase group is if you're certain that all you'd be doing was working hard enough to hand the strongest rider in the group a victory over the others. If you don't think you can beat Boonen after a hard chase for Cancellara, whether or not you catch him, then you're only going to get second, or third if you can't catch Cancellara. If you don't chase, you may be able to beat Boonen in a field sprint, especially if he works harder than everyone else in vain hope of reeling in the attack. You won't win, but you could take second.

In other words, your respect for the abilities of Tom Boonen overrides your competitive instincts. Despite the fact that winning Paris-Roubaix would either make or burnish the career of every single rider in the group far more than a fourth would Boonen's, collectively they decided that they would rather drag race for second than turn themselves inside out for a chance to win. I'm sure it's small comfort to the man denied a chance at the win he clearly wanted badly, but it says something that professional racers in their prime quailed at facing Boonen without his making any sort of move. Any strategic decision in such a situation has to consider what all opponents might do, but to give up hope for victory without any fight at all because of what the man next to you could do speaks volumes about the esteem in which he is held. It may well have been the optimal decision for their race results, but it's competitive cowardice. At least in that race, had he been respected less by his peers, he would have had a chance to win. It's not a trap he had any way to avoid, but he was hamstrung by being so respected.


Why Don’t You Love Me Anymore: Alexandre Vinokourov

As I see it, the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those who answer to us – only to conversation partners. We are not responsible either to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us.
— Richard Rorty, Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition

During a sporting event, respect matters mostly between competitors. Spectators can and do cheer and boo, but they don't tend to have too large an effect on competitive balance. After the results are in, however, imbuing them with meaning falls to the audience. Athletes decide what happens during the contest (often with an assist from chance or officiating) but the viewing public imbues these results with meaning. Consider some still consider Hank Aaron to be the baseball's home run king, or why Duke basketball (for example) is despised in so many corners. There is no such thing as an objectively meaningful result; narrative importance is constructed after the fact, consciously and not, to fit what has just happened into the framework of our fandom, biases and to connect it to history.

About a month ago, Alexandre Vinokourov won Liége-Bastone-Liége. What is remarkable about this victory is that Vino has recently returned from a two-year suspension for PEDs and seems to have not lost much riding ability at all. Where previously most suspended riders return quietly, if at all, taking their place as a diminished figure, or as part of a narrative of change/redemption a la David Millar. What sets Vino apart is that he seems to have returned to the sport at roughly the performance level he left and has never directly addressed the cause of his suspension. Any question about his reception was answered when he crossed the finish line at L-B-L victorious and was met with a chorus of boos from the fans at the finish.⁵

5: I wasn’t there, and I got the impression that it was a smattering of boos and no real cheering, not an overwhelming salvo of derision, but even that is a staggering reaction for a crowd at such an important race.

Vinokourov has single-handedly, in the explosive manner of all in his career, blown open the debate about the role a no-longer suspended racer can and should play in the pro peloton. He has sat out the past two years, as the rules mandate. Legally, he is once again fully qualified as a racer, but how should we, the public, feel about him? The ex-dopers who tend to get a pass are those, the David Millars of the world, who show genuine repentence for their transgression(s) and express a desire to use the rest of their career to prove what they can do clean. That seems like the natural path for someone caught in such an act: confess to the crime for which you've already been caught, and salvage what you can. I don't mean to seem overly calculating, but the zeal of the convert seems to be the sensible path for a pro who thinks they have something left and don't want to be left out as a pariah. Vino has the advantage of not having to worry about sponsorship-Astana was built for him by hometown Kazakhs, so they'll (presumably) stick with him through thick and thin. Given his secure position, he spent his time off concerned primarily with not losing his form.

By the letter of the law, he has done his time off, fulfilling his punishment and clearing his name to race. As he said in his post-race press conference, "We are here to talk about my victory. I paid two years and now I want to show I can win without doping." Absent a seemingly perfunctory "I condemn doping" at the beginning of his remarks, Vino seems to feel that, those two years being over⁶, he is here to talk about the present.

6: Given the career length of the world-class athlete, a two year suspension must be an unbearable eternity for the athlete to live, bereft of professional meaning.

So the question is how those external to Vinokourov react. No man believes himself to be the villain; it is the masses who condemn or exonerate. So far as I could tell, the responses to the whole brouhaha were split between outrage that such a man would be allowed to win, or at least that such a man would have the gall to be outraged at boos and mixed emotions. No one seemed interested in a full-throated defense of a man who presumably has followed all of the rules save the one he was punished for breaking. He is a man who has lost the respect he used to hold in the eyes of the amorphous audience that his peers, fans and media followers constitute.

The wrench in the works here is the impossibility of certainty regarding both the guilt for doping and repentence of the caught doper. When I say that the natural path for the caught doper is an energetic contrition, this is partially because it doesn't necessarily matter how earnest about it the player is. So long as he plays to the cameras when he returns to the public eye, avoids obviously suspicious behavior and generally keeps a low profile as a good citizen, past transgressions will be some combination of forgiven and forgotten. Vino has chosen the harder road of acting as if he has nothing left to prove after his suspension. As a result, he is stuck. As he is performing at roughly the same level he was before his suspension, the reasonable conclusion appears to be that either a) his doping didn’t help him overmuch or b) he is still doping. To view his current results as anything but suspicious requires a pretty generous interpretation of the facts we have and few onlookers seem to be so inclined. We don’t (and can’t) know what exactly he did or didn’t do and what he is or isn’t doing, so his reputation is at the mercy of collective opinion based partially on speculation.

The collective disdain of the public has no mechanism to affect competitive results, but the wisdom of the crowd does have the power to undercut a title by not considering it cleanly won. If it is decided that Vino's victory is fatally flawed because of who he is and what he represents, then there is little he can do to salvage it. He may be able to affect some degree of character rehabilitation moving forward, but it may be that,


Minerva’s Owl Flies at Dusk: Floyd Landis

“The only facts which seem genuinely independent of any scientific theory are those of the present experiences of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight that each individual scientist is currently experiencing. But such facts are not, of course, public facts, they are private to each individual. So we have the dilemma that, if facts are truly independent of theory they are private and do not form part of the public domain of knowledge; if they are public facts they are affected by all sorts of influences particularly from previous knowledge and upon which their exact form and our confidence in them depend. At least for science, there are no brute facts.”
— Rom Harré, Philosophies of Science

When I started it, this post centered on Boonen and Vinokourov and the role respect plays in their current situations. Earlier this week, however, American pro cycling’s current prodigal sun Floyd Landis set off another earthquake when he (sort of) reversed the defiant position he’s fought for the past four years. Briefly, Landis, who has spent his time since 2006 trying to clear his name after having his Tour de France title stripped for a positive synthetic testosterone test, owned up to using EPO throughout his career and fingered pretty much every current major American cyclist for the same. Lance Armstrong’s Team Radioshack camp has responded by making public emails from Landis they say undermine his credibility, while the cycling press generally has had to come to terms with how much they believe all the parts of Landis’s confession/accusations.

Landis hasn’t truly been relevant to pro cycling since his suspension, but being an American cycling fan has required forming an opinion on his innocence/guilt. At least initially, there were enough discrepancies about his positive test that his protestations of innocence were plausible, and his dogged pursuit of a cleared name helped his case if you were inclined to believe him. He was a sympathetic enough figure that much of the money he spent chasing what he called justice in court was donated by fans.⁷ He was a good man wronged if you believed him or a cheater trying to game the system if you didn’t. After that, the LeMond debacle and his inability to return to professional relevancy undermined a lot of his appeal.

7: He truly was a sympathetic figure for a while: Mennonite boy grows up to become mountain bike racer through practicing against his father’s wishes, then switches to road racing and is the third American to win the Tour de France. It wasn’t too hard to want to believe him when he claimed he was the victim of a false positive.

So Landis’s new remarks are something of a neon example of the trouble that comes with any such revelations about drugs in sports. The source is a man who is about as discredited as you can be. He is not only a convicted doper and at least tacitly complicit in a blackmail attempt, but if you believe him now, he has spent years of his life in the legal pursuit of a lie. Charitably viewed, he could be a man who, after spending years under the shadow of a lie born of self-preservation, has embraced searing honesty to move forward with his life. If you don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt, here is someone who, after years of ebbing credibility and relevance, lashes out the only way he still can, soiling names of his enemies and maybe trying to blackmail the Armstrong camp.

Landis is lying about all, some or none of this. The VeloNews summary of events, while totally accurate in its treatment of the facts, misses entirely with its conclusion. The whole point, to me, is that these accusations involve what happened seven or so years ago. I don’t see how an investigation would turn up anything new from that period now, especially not something like a positive EPO test. The scrutiny that Armstrong especially has lived under for the past decade makes it vanishingly unlikely that there is damning evidence under some unturned rock. Like any doping accusation that doesn’t revolve around a solid scientific test, there is no way to elevate the charge above hearsay. The only court that will be able to judge here is the court of public opinion.

Whatever his goals and motivations are and were, Floyd Landis is in a position where even his apologists, however many remain, will be hard-pressed to imbue his statements with much sense of credibility. If he’s telling the truth now, he’s been living a lie since 2006. It’s not knowable for those of us who weren’t on the Postal Service squad at the time just how much veracity there is in his accusations, but it’s quite certain that he has lost the respect of just about everyone in the cycling world. For the sake of Landis the man, I hope that he is now committed to being honest, no matter what, but I’m not sure there’s a road here for him to salvage any sort of good name in cycling for himself. He’s too compromised at this point, his actions are too rife with possible ulterior motives, to be trusted. He has lost the respect of his peers, the media and the fans, so unless he can produce some sort of overwhelming evidence of these salacious claims his word will never be trusted.


So What

Respect is one of the main currencies of sports.⁹ Wins and money are the scoreboard statistics, the concrete facts that can be gathered to settle arguments: Bill Russell is a winner because of his eleven championships; Nolan Ryan is the best strikeout pitcher ever to walk the earth. But beyond the accretion of those two things, respect is the most important thing athletes can win or lose. In competition, the respect (or lack thereof) of teammates and opponents dictates strategy, and therefore wins and losses, in games. Its impact is greater, however, outside the lines of competition. The meaning of a victory or championship is not intrinsic, but contingent on society valuing it. Lance Armstrong is a marketing force not because he won seven bike races in France, but because American sports culture, having been told that that was a (italics)big thing(/italics), respected that fact. Sports being, like any part of society, at its base a social construct, the respect of others is what drives recognition. Alexandre Vinokourov may yet earn back his good name, but only if he can succeed and keep his nose clean long enough to shift the narrative of his career arc away from its current focus on his drug suspension. Floyd Landis seems unlikely to ever find the redemption that clearly still means so much to him. Respect plays a role in who wins and who loses, but it has everything to do with whom we think of as winners and losers.

9: All right, of human society in general, but of sports no less for being a part of that.

Aesthetics And/Or Justice

"I fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar." -Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

"The first umpire said, 'There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like they is.'
The second umpire said, 'Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em as I sees 'em.'
The third umpire smiled. 'Well, there's balls. And there's strikes. But they ain't nothing until I calls 'em.'" -Allegorical

In a recent post, The Run of Play's Brian Phillips discusses the structural role of blown calls. His defense of bad calls is beautiful: whereas if a sport's¹ meaning exists in terms of its skeleton of rules, any flaw in enforcement necessarily undermines the sport, "[i]f soccer is a story... the narrative can take in anything and... its aesthetic greatness doesn’t depend on the sympathy between actions and the rules. You wouldn’t stop Macbeth from killing the king, because then you wouldn’t have Macbeth."

1: Run of Play is going steady with soccer, but the issues at hand are obviously more universal. I'm not gonna bother mangling quotes in the name of semantic consistency or avoid relevant non-soccer examples.

The post's paradigmatic example is Maradona's Hand of God goal. In Phillips' exegesis, "the Hand of God was too great and all-comprehending a moment for the rules to have created it: it was a total summation—of Maradona’s character, of the nature of that rivalry, of everything on up to the international climate in the years after Falklands War and arguably the entire 1980s—that couldn’t possibly have existed if it weren’t at a slant to the rules. Lose that and you’re left with a fair, pure, antiseptic match that fulfills the ideal of the sport but sacrifices almost all its truest and deepest significance."

But that presupposes that narrative power is somehow endemic to the moment; or that it occurs in a vacuum; or that, depending on circumstances, it happens or it doesn't. Narrative is constructed retrospectively, though, making that counter-factual sort of glib. Had the Hand of God been called in strict, omniscient compliance with the rules, you're left with an intensely competitive World Cup quarter final featuring "The Goal of the Century", charged with all the baggage of the Faulklands War and ending regulation in a 1-1 tie. Fair, sure. But pure and antiseptic? The hypothetical match might not match the historical match's depth of significance, but there would be no sacrifice, no lack of truth: it would be a different game, signifying differently. But the point remains that la mano de Dios did happen, and it was a pure, searing Moment that transcended its match and struck hard at some supposed locus of truth and justice.


So we're left with the moment as it really happened, to interpret how we will. Analyzing this choice, Phillips offers up a dichotomy that I can't quite get behind. On one hand, there is "the game", a stern, legalistic endeavor seeking only to operate within its parameters. On the other is "the story", casting wide its net without judgement so much as interpretation. For one, there is no good and bad; for the other, no right and wrong². But that formulation both limits the aesthetic possibilities of sports and ignores the very real link between game and story. To my mind, the proper analogy is the relationship between grammar and literature. Language, like sport, is a consummately human realm, with its formal rules and suggestions and exceptions, susceptible of a whole slew of teleological and aesthetic significances. There is value in both Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein. And just like in sports, the rules and the beauty of language overlap imperfectly.

2: This is, of course, a huge oversimplification, and just like in real life, something is lost when you boil things down this much. Demi-glace this ain't.

A bigger problem is how Phillips tries to reconcile his ideal of soccer's philosophical acceptance of bad calls with the governance of the sport, what he calls the "'game as a story/save the Hand of God' line... as an argument for design". He fully recognizes that premeditated bad calls are a hopeless cause, but totally misses why: "There’s no doubt that a certain amount of bad refereeing enhances the narrative of the game, but that isn’t FIFA’s angle, and in any case giving match officials a certain quota of blown calls to reach would just trade epic accidents for bureaucratic stupidities. The Hand of God wouldn’t mean anything if it had resulted from discretionary refereeing choice built into the rules of the game, because you can’t program spontaneous mysticism."


What's really missing here is the recognition that a blown call is not merely an error or an aberration, it is a failure. To ignore that is to reduce the referees to automatons, to deny them their dignity, agency, and yes, their narrative and tragic power. The NBA has reached the point where referees have name recognition and individual reputations³ for fairness, bias, or incompetence. This is fine grist for the narratively-inclined, but the uncertain ground from which it springs doesn't simply reduce out. It's a necessary part of the game as it is played, by athletes and referees alike, because the parameters are fluid. There is a long history of diegetic whistle-swallowing⁴ in basketball, especially come playoff time. Fundamentally, refereeing is a human endeavor, fluid and rife with contingency.

3: In more concrete analysis, there's some fascinating work going on collecting referee stats.
4: To say nothing of "star calls". Really, let's say nothing about them.

So to say "human error is part of the game" is a lame excuse only holds water if you reduce the game to its rules or reduce the referees to an abstraction. Phillips claims, "The wider the circle within which you’re willing to see the game as aesthetic, in other words, the more you wind up relying on chance and accident," but I don't think that's it at all; the wider the circle within which you're willing to see the game as aesthetic, the more you wind up relying on people.

Racing Like a Pro Now

"Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.”
– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

The Education of an Athlete




I recently plowed through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball. I have a lot of opinions about it, but this is not a review, so I won’t get too into it here.¹ One thing that grabbed me, though, was a point he made about a player’s finger roll.² He talked about the homogenization of the route elite players (at least growing up in America) take to get to the NBA. AAU camps and traveling teams create a monolithic culture where everyone works toward the same platonic jumpshot form (Hello, Ray Allen!) and idiosyncrasies are ironed out of everyone’s game. I’m not saying that there isn’t a right way to shoot a jumper (God knows no one should have to shoot like Shawn Marion), but I do think that the paradigmatic nature of sports culture is accelerating, and as a result valuable avenues of athletic possibility are dismissed or not even considered.

1: My take: however you feel about Bill Simmons, this book will likely reinforce that. He’s a pretty good writer with a pretty set schtick. If you hate him, I doubt you’ll like the book. If you love him, you probably already own it. It’s a flawed but still quite worthy addition to the basketball book pantheon. For way more in-depth analysis/review, head over here.

2: No, I can’t remember whom. I thought it was Dr J or Earl the Pearl, but a cursory look didn’t turn it up, and I’m not wading through 700 pages for two sentences. Sorry.

I blame television. Bear with me a bit and I’ll explain. Bill James gets at what I mean in this conversation with Joe Posnanski when he talks about professionalism:

“Bill pulls out his spiral notebook -- he always brings a spiral notebook to games -- and on a page he draws two ladders, one on top of the other. The higher ladder is the ‘professional’ ladder. The lower ladder he calls the ‘amateur’ ladder. He then draws a picture of someone dangling from the bottom rung of the professional ladder. That, he says, is the Kansas City Royals.

‘It's so important for them to be considered professional,’ he says, ‘that they are unwilling to try anything that might make people think they're amateurish.’”

He’s certainly correct,³ but I’d like to extend the point further. I think that a fear of looking amateurish is hampering not only the low men on the totem pole of professional sports, but also high-level amateur sports, and therefore everyone coming into pro sports. It used to be the case that the line demarcating amateur and professional sporting endeavor matched exactly the line of national media coverage.⁴ The only reason you cared about high school sports was if it was your local team or a team they were likely to play. This of course has broken down, leading to things like LeBron James’s senior year playing out partly on ESPN and the like. As I write this, the Wendy’s High School Heisman Awards are on ESPN2. The college Heisman was first awarded in 1935; the High School Heisman was started in 1994. Instead of playing for scholarships or draft position, elite prospects are already playing to establish a brand and jockey for endorsements. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; it’s the way things have been done in Europe with soccer for decades, for instance. The issue is this fear this arms race creates of not looking “professional”. Half-formed players can, do and should make mistakes. They’re works in progress. Being afraid to make a mistake is how you stagnate, and being afraid to do anything a non-conventional way totally stymies anyone not ideally suited for the current best way of doing it. If you’re trying to impress someone who has Nike’s ear, you don’t want to look silly toying with an unorthodox that doesn’t work yet; you want to have a textbook jumper, forty-inch vertical leap and nothing that’ll make them scratch their head.

3: Though I think his idea about Kansas City stocking its minors with pitchers who throw under 90 is sort of asinine. I do think that velocity is overrated in baseball, but not wildly so. You can be successful without lighting up the radar gun, but your margin for error is thinner the slower you throw. Look at Brian Bannister, for example. The guy has everything you need to succeed except velocity, and consequently has ups and downs. Stocking your system with guys like that might find you the next Greg Maddux, but you would have to deal with the entirety of the haystack to get the occasional needle.

4: For a number of reasons, I’m going to consider NCAA Division I sports to be on the professional side of the divide here, despite the fact that the players receive no (legal) money. At least at the highest levels, the “student-athletes” are students in no more than name.

Television also gets at this more elementally. In addition to driving the media exposure and advertising that pushes the horizon of where your career starts earlier and earlier, an inundation of coverage also pushes the current paradigm on a young player’s consciousness. If you get your sports intake from box scores in the newspapers and the game of the week on network television, you’re going to spend a lot of time imagining how players operate and going with whatever works for you. If you have a league pass, highlights on the internet and the blogosphere, you’re going to be working on whatever works for your heroes. You’re going to be trying to get AI’s crossover, Derek Jeter’s batting stance, not come up with your own whole cloth. I realize that this makes me sound like more than a little bit of a reactionary Luddite, and I’m not suggesting we collectively renounce mass media, but I do think it’s true that this oversaturation ossifies the edifices in charge and narrows development into mimesis.


Case Study: Bill Belichick⁵

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." – Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m not just talking about player development, either. I’ve had a pet theory for a while that, while professionalism has long been an emphasis in sports, the content of the notion has undergone a shift over the past decade or two from centering on social reaction to physical action. Watch a sports game from several decades ago. When players do something spectacular, they act as if it is nothing. When they congratulate each other, it is largely handshakes. At the same time, a lot of kooky things were going on. Knuckleball pitchers. Finger rolls. Eddie Gaedel, for goodness’ sake! I’m certainly oversimplifying, but I think it’s not false to say that the expectation was that you could play how you wanted (legally), so long as you comported yourself. Contrast that to today’s players, who largely seem to be trying to approach some sort of platonic standard, but celebrate plays as if they had won a game. ⁶ I have no real issue with the move away from emphasizing social decorum. It’s the other part that bothers me.

5: Two other stories I thought about using as case stories:
a. Dick Fosbury’s improbable and accidental invention of the Fosbury Flop. He revolutionized the high jump in a way that was totally dismissed by the track and field powers-that-be until they couldn’t ignore its results. (He also only saw high jump as a way to get into college, and seems to have had about as much fun as you can at an Olympics when he was in Mexico City. The article is a great read for several reasons.)
b. Cliff Young was an Australian sheep farmer who torched an endurance race through the simple strategy of not stopping to sleep. He revolutionized a race by using a tactic others hadn’t even considered as possible. (He also sounds like a stone badass and gave away every cent of prize money he won, which is spectacular.)

6: Please don’t think this is a reactionary rant against celebrations in sports. They do annoy me, but I don’t see them as any sort of moral degradation, and in fact often feel such reactionary arguments are wrongheaded and racially tinged. I’ve just always preferred the guy who doesn’t feel the need to shout about himself.

In week ten of the current NFL season, the Patriots had a six point lead but were stuck at a fourth-and-two on roughly their own thirty yard line near the end of the game. Conventional wisdom screams punt in such situations, but Belichick decided to go for it. The Pats fell just short of converting, and the Colts marched in for the game-winning touchdown. Belichick was excoriated by the announcers and commentators, including some former players. The move was decried as a crazy gamble that betrayed a lack of faith in his defense. The thing is, by the percentages Belichick made the right call. You would just never know it from listening to 95% of the media coverage. There is no examination of the percentages⁷, because received wisdom gives you all the assurance you need that you’re right. If you cloak yourself in righteousness, you don’t need to worry about being right. Nobody checks to see if The Right Way is correct.

7: And this isn’t rocket science here. Check out that NY Times article. Combining two percentages isn’t regression analysis; you would hope anyone with a high school education (and these ex-professional football broadcasters are all college graduates!) could do it without breaking a sweat…

Decision-making in sports is almost wholly reactionary. If Belichick had punted and lost, the chattering would all have been about his team’s defensive woes and/or Peyton Manning’s late-game heroics. By having the rare courage to buck pro football’s decision-making paradigm, Belichick got absolutely creamed in the media even though he was right. The problem is that he made a percentage play and got burned. Most coaches will happily give up a 60/40 chance of winning for a 50/50 if the 40% will blow up in their face, because they’ll get backed up by their boss(es). Chuck Klosterman makes the point pretty convincingly that, for all its conservative aura, the NFL is far more radical in its willingness to accept new tactics on the field, but this only holds at a macro level. Coaches will run the wildcat, but they'll still do things like punt to save face even when it reduces their chance of winning. Baseball doesn’t even gladly do this, as the slow acceptance of statistical analysis has shown. Branch Rickey was fully aware of the importance of on-base percentage sixty years ago, but Murray Chass still goes apoplectic over some sabermetric assertions. (And he’s hardly alone.)


The Point

To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he woud have to learn his ABCs again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears. – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

We have built a magnificent chain of cause and effect, of resources and effort which fuel our major sports. They are channeled into a narrow set of options, which leads to ever greater achievement within that paradigm, but stifles anything foreign to its worldview. The unwritten rules of sport have a tighter and tighter grip on everything within their purview the more money and prestige the sport controls. Victors write history, but it’s more pernicious than that. Victors write the present too, and the media writes both on the victors’ terms.

Think about the treatment of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. They never won a championship, but that, so far as anyone can prove, is as much a product of Amar’e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw leaving the bench when Robert Horry mugged Steve Nash as it is of any fundamental flaw in their game. But, barring the current Suns pulling off a huge upset or Mike D’Antoni’s Knicks coming up with an Impossible Dreamesque season, the old saws that “defense wins championships” and uptempo ball can’t win consistently will go unchallenged. Conventional wisdom will always do a poor job of separating relevancy and contingency, and we pay our storytellers and interlocutors for packaging narrative, not fact. So Steve Nash’s golden years will go down more Scythian than Hellenic.

I have no solutions to offer. Much like Marcuse in his critique of industrial society in One-Dimensional Man, I see ours as a trap that has been sprung. The finger roll is dead, unless some unheralded wonder rises to enough of a height that little kids will be emulating it. Granny shots are a good idea on free throws, but do you think we’ll see anyone trying that? The perceived rules are now as important as the written rules, and the narrowing of possibility that we’re left with saddens me. The arc of sporting history will be bent to their will. What magnificent possible players will we never see? I have no idea, and you don’t either.

For Now We See Through A Glass, Darkly

"The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)" -Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

"I am prepared for anything: KG pulling a Willis Reed, Jordan and Bird showing up, Rondo hitting John Salmons with a chair, Doc running the series-deciding play for Tony Allen, Kevin Harlan's head flying off his body, Tim Thomas experiencing a human emotion, you name it. That's the best thing about this series: Anything is possible. The ceiling hasn't just been removed, it's been obliterated.
Call it Game 7, call it Round 15, call it whatever you want. Just remember to call it the greatest first-round series ever played." -Bill Simmons, Chicago Bulls Boston Celtics Game 6 Diary

Sail To The Moon (Brush The Cobwebs Of The Sky)

There are sports events and there are sports Events. Transcendent moments for which "'we put up with every story about Clemens and Bonds and Michael Vick and Terrell Owens and everyone else who conspires to make sports less fun,"¹ moments that form the frameworks of our fandom. As a cursory poke about our archives will tell you, one of the main reasons we feel sports in general is worth our emotional and intellectual engagement is that it provides "a bottomless well of compelling narrative."² I'm going to go a step further here: I'll go ahead and posit that as far as our individual fandoms are concerned, sports events derive lasting significance almost exclusively from their narrative significance.³ This works on all sorts of scales. We use evolving mental narratives on various levels to define athletes, franchises, even entire sports. There are events and Events; there are transcendent moments and there are Transcendent Moments. I feel a hastily conceived, extremely biased chart coming.

1: Same Simmons piece. It is, I must say, enormously convenient to have such an invested, articulate Celtics fan around to quote, so long as he's not making "Godfather" references or talking about women.
2: While I have a few differences with Justice on the subject, they're more emphatic than thematic. Read his post, read the Run of Play series linked therein, we'll all high five, it'll be great.
3: This isn't incompatible with the other things Justice was on about earlier. It's different in the same way spending a whole season flipping on ESPN when you're channel surfing is different from spending a whole season flipping on ESPN when your team is on.

Karma Police

All of this mythologizing is an internal, personal process, but it's hardly unique and it doesn't happen in a vacuum. From the staid, journalistic AP recaps to deeply partisan hometown newspaper columns, there is a structure to the unfolding media discussions. A sort of teleological progression towards an interpretive narrative that grows more abstract and orthodox in proportion to the narrative power of its subject.⁴ Now, to a great extent this is just humanity doing its thing-- finding, applying, and adjusting broad patterns is one of the primary ways our brains interact with the world. But every so often it is good to be reminded that sports is "a business where developing, maintaining, defending, attacking, and manipulating broad narratives [is] an important tool of the trade." Controlling the story is vital; most teams would like to land the next David Axelrod almost as much as they'd like to land the next LeBron James, I'd imagine. But on the level of the individual fan, what this boils down to is that, unless you avoid journalism like the plague and only talk sports with a bloody-minded, manifesto-toting group of friends, discussions that deeply influence the narratives you will internalize are largely framed for you in broadcast media studios.

4: If this seems like a stretch, tell me: does anyone ever bother trying to claim that this was a low-percentage shot leading to a somewhat flukey win? Because it was.

Motion Picture Soundtrack

I became intensely aware of this process trying to follow the Celtics' postseason from New Zealand. Between the massive time zone difference and the NBA's peripheral status to a people in rugby's thrall, I was totally relegated to playing catch-up on the internet. YouTube highlights, recaps upon recaps, and a handful of blogs read religiously left me with all sorts of predigested data about the games: who got what statistics in how many minutes, what the key plays were and what they looked like, which coaching moves could be dissected and how, every bench player's contribution and so forth. But the aesthetic experience of watching a game of basketball was utterly stripped away. It was like being led around blindfolded instead of going for a walk. It was like reading Cliffs Notes. My rooting took on an edge of desperation-- if we could only advance far enough, ESPN Australia would have to televise all our games. As the first round series gathered steam, poring over the gobsmacked ebullience pouring out of damn near every corner of the internet dedicated to NBA ball became downright excruciating. Derek Rose matches Kareem's playoff debut scoring record while posting the second 35-x-10 postseason line in history and icing the winning freethrows in overtime. Meanwhile Rajon Rondo, a developing star in his own right and my favorite player to watch, holds his own in the point guard duel, going 29-9-7, and an exhausted Pierce comes up just shy of bringing home the bacon. And that was just game one. Then there were six overtimes in a three-game stretch. Game five happened:

And so did Game Fucking Six:
⁵

And acres of text flowed forth.

5: I chose this picture over Noah roaring like the ugliest lion for the same reason Time magazine chose Giuliani over Bin Laden as 2001's Man of the Year. Ray Allen was the FDNY.

How To Disappear Completely

Basketball moved on. The Celts put up another gutsy seven-game series, but couldn't put the hammer down on Orlando and went to their respective summer homes disappointed. And basketball moved on. Once the dust had settled, what was just as striking as the ecstatic tenor of the round one coverage was how there was no place in any of the sundry postseason retrospectives for "the greatest series you've ever seen in your entire life". Once the games are all over, well, the game changes. The serious fans know the score and have gone home. The only demographics paying attention are Lakers fans looking to wallow some in victory and The Casual Fan, a much easier creature to predict than, say, The Reader. The order of the day isn't really retrospection, it's hagiography. And so the Lakers' hiccup against the Rockets, while it was never compared to the handful of greatest series the Association has ever seen, was the early-round series of note, because it was vindicated by what came later. Past is prologue, and the Celtics-Bulls got left hanging, waiting for its book.

"Vindicated by what came later" also happens to mark the exact point where analysis starts turning into total speculation, which is kind of fun or sort of worthless, depending on how you choose to look at it. If The LeBrons' backcourt hadn't disappeared and they had pulled out some more games (and hell, if we're spotting Playoff Lyndon B. James some teammates playing well, we might as well just give them the title, too), how much more vital would this shot have been? If Bird and Magic had both pulled J.J. Reddicks, would the 1979 NCAA championships have transformed anything?

But let's go another direction with this idea that, recontextualized by what follows, events can change significance. The question at hand is not "what if?" but "what next?"

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

To second-guess the past is one thing; to second-guess the future quite another. There are simply too many variables at play. The core of this team could win anywhere from zero to two more titles⁶, and each scenario would cast things in a different light. Maybe it bypasses the franchise level altogether and becomes a touchstone in some players' creation myths. How bright can Rondo shine? How high can Rose rise, and how long will it take him to put it all together? Can Ray Allen pull out a few more big performances and officially pass Reggie Miller in the jumpshot pantheon?

I can't even pretend to guess with any vestige of authority, which, really, is sort of the point. Nothing kills a good story quite like predictability, after all. Simply pointing out the unknowability of the future is both obvious and played out, but beyond the next few times the Bulls and Celts meet up, who knows when and how this series will find relevance? All we can do is wait and see how things work out.

6: If we do manage to pull out two more, could Kobe deal with an asterisk the size of KG's knee next to His Championship?