The Shape of Things to Come

“When deeds speak, words are nothing.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In the corners of the sports world where volume outweighs substance, there was a debate over whether or not the US Women’s Soccer Team “choked” by losing to Japan. I’m not interested in the merits of the case; I have always thought labels like “choker” belong to the sort of glib moralizing that pretends to know what’s in an athlete’s head and heart while projecting the author’s pat opinions onto them.¹ Despite the vapidity of the debate, though, I was happy to see it. It means we’ve come to a place where discussions of women’s soccer are about the nature of the play, not merely the fact that it exists.

1: I have not yet run into a single article of this kind that manages to marry its moralizing to meaningful analysis of the actual play of the match, or really of any kind. I suppose such writing is possible, in the same way that a manned mission to Mars is possible, but I'm not holding my breath.

High-level women’s team sports is a relatively recent phenomenon. Women have competed in tennis for decades and in the Olympics starting in 1900², but professional women’s sports leagues didn’t really become a viable enterprise until the 1990s.³ The calculus here seems pretty simple: Title IX flung open the gates to team sports for young women starting in 1972. By the 90s, the infrastructure had been in place long enough for there to be a generation of women who had grown up playing soccer and basketball under more or less competent coaches, the best of which women were good enough to go pro and the rest of whom were at least potentially interested in following them. Leagues for those sports have existed more or less since, though never as raging financial successes. The WNBA is operated by the NBA, reportedly at a loss, and women’s soccer has seen one league fold and WPS is currently fairly marginal.

2: Women competed in track and field starting in 1928, but some many of the competitors collapsed at the end of the first 800m run that it was not run again until 1960. That probably speaks most to interwar-era female athletic training regimes, but it also says a lot about those runners. Way to go hard, ladies!

3: I am, of course, dealing here with American athletes and markets because that’s what I know at least a little. The story obviously varies depending on where you look, but for Western sports things seem to hew pretty closely to the timeline of a spike in interest concurrent with women’s suffrage movements early in the 20th century which was then stamped out by male-run organizations, and things lying largely dormant until some point after the 1970s and before 2000.

Is that really surprising, though? The big three sports are multimedia juggernauts because they had a century of build-up, not to mention the luxury of not having to overcome prejudices about what athletes should look like. They make millions upon millions these days because they command large television audiences and the advertising dollars that stalk those demographics. Anyone expecting female pro sports to simply vault into prominence is fooling him- or herself. No sports league has jumped from non-existence to sustained juggernaut. There have been a few flashes in the pan, but even those were direct competitors to existing leagues. But dismissing the WNBA and WPS as irrelevant ignores the mechanics of fandom. We root for the sports we understand, that have become ingrained in how we think about sport in general.


Play is a universal human impulse. Some of us feel it more strongly than others, but everyone is wired to play, and therefore on some level also for sport. Male dominance of the field has nothing to do with it being a uniquely male impulse and everything to do with the historical interplay of physiological dominance and sexism. We think of athletes as male by default because athletes have always been presented to us as male. That’s why it’s the called the Women’s World Cup. Arguments that the WNBA and WPS are doomed to failure, either because they're economically inviable or a pale imitation of “true” (i.e. men’s) versions of the same sport, pretend that the sports universe is static.

Very few of us care passionately about sports that we didn’t play or follow as children. I am a baseball fan because the Cincinnati Reds won the World Series when I was seven, and I wanted to be an infielder because I wore glasses and so did Chris Sabo⁴. Were I female, the first such role model I could have had would have been a member of the 1991 Women’s World Cup-winning national team, with the first regular pro teams appearing for me later that decade. I’m sure plenty of women have grown up with male athlete role models, but there’s a world of difference between wanting to play a game like someone and wanting to grow up to be your own version of them.

4: Were I cooler, I would have wanted to be Eric Davis or Barry Larkin. But this was a year or two before I supported Ross Perot's bid for president because we both had big ears. Cool was not on my radar when I was seven.

Joe Posnanski wrote a piece that was about, among other things, watching the WWC final with his two daughters. He focused on their different reactions to the US team’s loss, but I was struck by the fact that those girls will be growing up in a world where women have always had the option to be professional soccer or basketball players. The most powerful things are those that everyone takes for granted. The viability of the WNBA and WPS is debatable because they’re still new and we can easily imagine them not existing. Those arguing against aren’t interested in what they’re selling, and, whether for reasons of misogyny or other bias, would prefer they go away. Those arguing for are the already converted.⁵ But twenty years from now, I would be shocked if there weren’t two or three relatively profitable women’s professional sports leagues. Women, you may have heard, make up roughly half of the populace, and despite all the messages in sports and culture telling them to go away and not pay attention, have long cared about sports. Right now it is in some ways remarkable that these leagues exist, but when they have been around for a generation, it will be normal, and that’s how they will get big numbers. Unless women disappear or television and the internet vanish, I can’t help but think their growth will be as inevitable as it will be slow. We’ll all be the better for it, because everyone deserves role models who look like them. Besides, how can more and more varied sports be a bad thing?

5: I of course think that those arguing for the leagues are wholly right. But the point is that there is no debate. That's more or less impossible when one side is a casually misogynistic polemic and the other side is marginalized by the size of its platform.

Intentional Fallacies

There has been a lot of brouhaha in the NBA media and online world about KG’s “cancer” trash-talking to Charlie Villanueva, some of it insightful and interesting and some of it not. Jay Kaspian King posted a take at FreeDarko of the event as illustrative of what’s wrong with KG that has gotten under my skin, and I’ve been trying to figure out just what about it I react to so violently.

He starts the piece out musing about the Giants recent World Series victory as affirmation of the social transcendence sports occasionally offers, but then contrasts that to his Red Sox fandom. He moves from watching the 2004 World Series to his disaffection with the 2007 Sox and discovery of liberated fandom, of viewing sports as existing in an “aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers”.¹

1: I love me some FreeDarko, but I’ve never been able to get on board fully with liberated fandom. I take some umbrage at the term, at the implication that my loyalty to my favorite teams is some kind of cage I need to escape to fully appreciate other players. I’ve never felt a conflict between the knot in my stomach as the clock ticks down on a Celtics overtime game and the elation I feel when Chris Paul solves the geometry of the halfcourt set in a way I never would have imagined. They are very different things, but both are essential to what I love in sport. Both are part of what Angell calls the “business of caring” that grounds my love of sport.² I have no problem with the FD idea that you should care about players, not teams, but that decision has always seemed to me like a false dichotomy that would rob me of a lot of the pleasures of my fandom.] But I think his take on this realm is flawed. He’s right that there’s an unspoken line athletes get crucified when they cross, but it’s not when they “remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than ours.” If that were it, things like the DRose Fast Don’t Lie commercial would infuriate the public, not sell shoes. The line is that athletes can’t let us know that their investment in the game is different from ours. Fans, collectively, care about their teams with a nigh-religious sort of fervor. Athletes care about the game and winning, but that’s on a personal level. The team itself is their employer. Maybe one they love, maybe one they hate, but their relationship there can never be the same as the fan’s purely emotional one. LeBron James infuriated the sports media/public not because he called an unseemly amount of attention to a change in employers, but because he did so in a way that callously disregarded the emotions of Cavs fans. We don’t want LeBron to act like switching teams is like us switching employers, we want him to take our feelings into account, to gracefully account for the fans whose lives he is affecting. I don’t really care if a player is the “sort of guy…we can have a beer with”, and I don’t think most other fans really do either, we care if a player acts in a way that disrupts our fandom.

2: King partially dismisses that Angell quotation in his piece, which I find funny precisely because Angell’s point is that his love is sentimental, but that doesn’t make it ridiculous, exactly the linkage King casually makes. Here’s the whole thing:

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

But on to KG.

“With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions.”

This is the polar opposite of how I read the man’s excesses. To me, it has always seemed like the fire that burns within Kevin Garnett, the intensity that fuels him to be the defensive force he is comes with this. His intensity and buy-in transformed Paul Pierce and Ray Allen into 40% of one of the best defensive NBA teams ever. I’ve never seen him play with anything but full effort, and to maintain that kind of drive all of the time would seem to me to necessitate walking the thin line between zealot and lunatic. If you find that distasteful, fine, but even his oddest moments, the barking like a dog, the clapping in a guard’s face, seem to be born of an inability to escape the outer reaches of a genuine drive, not some sort of performative enactment of a role he thinks he should be playing. I’ll gladly concede that other interpretations here are totally valid, but that specific and damning a reading of the man’s actions to me demands some sort of proof. King seems to think that the lack of “Isiah’s grim determination…Rodman’s ‘fuck it, we’re winning’ mentality” is some sort of fundamental flaw, that his lack of Jordan’s “impenetrability of the mask” or Kobe’s “visible intelligence” (what?) is what’s wrong with him. But those are all projections, rather than character traits. King reads KG as a bully, while Jordan, who is universally acknowledged as a huge bully gets off the hook because he was “impenetrable”? If we’re talking presentation, maybe, but King is trying to make a more sweeping claim than that.

Rewatch that John Thompson interview. That has always seemed to me to the at the core of Garnett's appeal. Sure he's crazy and does weird things sometimes. But look at that interview. Thompson wants to talk about the numbers KG is putting up, but KG won't let him. He's unwilling to talk about individual success in the face of team failure. Commenter Ben calls the interview a man "grappling with the deconstruction of his identity" as a winner. That rings far truer to me than King's dismissal of it as "Jimmy Swaggert style...wild theatrics". If he's putting on a show, wouldn't he want the cameras to stay on? It's a plausible explanation, I suppose, but requires a fundamental mistrust of Garnett above and beyond the grain of salt all such interviews need to be taken with.

“And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.”

“The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams.”

“Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters.”

Listen, I’m as interested as anyone in plumbing the performative aspects of professional sports. The idea of persona is fascinating to me, the construction of identity in the press and through televised action, but the risk is mistaking your reading of someone’s persona as indicative of who they are as a person. King throws away any notions of contextualizing trash-talking in that first quote, and then gleefully blurs the line between persona and person in what reads as a very personal takedown trying to tell me how to think about Kevin Garnett. I have no idea what gets said on the court at NBA games, but it’s hard to evaluate the “cancer patient” line without context. If Villanueva is tweeting it it clearly got under his skin, but that doesn’t mean it’s head-and-shoulders worse than what other players are doing. Maybe it is, but the fact that other players aren’t jumping on KG seems to imply to me that it’s at least within the ballpark.

Nobody is obligated to like Kevin Garnett. There doesn’t even have to be a reason for the dislike. I certainly have players who I don’t like for no reason I can identify, and there are plenty whose demeanor puts me off. But that doesn’t mean I get to run around saying they’re bad people.

“Why can’t we call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole?”

Because being an asshole is context-dependent. If KG brought his act to a pick-up game near me, he’d be the biggest dick around. But he’s paid millions of dollars to win, not to make friends, and getting into opponents' heads is part of that. If Michael Jordan played in your rec league, you wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But he brought his pathological competitiveness to the NBA, where it was appropriate. Garnett had the misfortune of being a dick to someone with a twitter account, but don’t mistake that for making him qualitatively different from the other shit-talkers who came before and after him. If you can prove he is, cool, go for it, but that’s the thing, you have to prove it.

"What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?"

You owe the man a fair assessment. You can think he's a dick, you can think his act is a show, but if you're going to call him out on it, you have to show me something to back it up. You have to show me some proof that he's different from those around him and that his earnestness is a put-on. Otherwise, I’m sorry you dislike him enough that he ended your fandom of the Celtics, but please don’t couch yourself in liberated fandom so you can throw stones at a picture of who he is that you painted. Attacking strawmen makes you the asshole.

Theodicy and Saint Jeter

“When we explain action in terms of desires and beliefs we are not putting forward any explanatory theory to account for action. It is true that desires and beliefs explain action; but the explanation is not of any causal hypothetical form. It is not as if the actions of human beings constitute a set of raw data – actions identifiable on their faces as the kinds of actions they are – for which we may seek an explanatory hypothesis. On the contrary, many human actions are not identifiable as actions of a particular kind unless they are already seen and interpreted as proceeding from a particular set of desires and beliefs.”
— Anthony Kenny : Free Will and Responsibility

If you pay any attention at all to baseball, you must have heard the squawking the other day when Derek Jeter acted like a pitch that hit his bat hit his hand well enough to fool the home plate umpire. Joe Posnanski had a good take on it over at his blog. I agreed with a lot of what he said. "I save my deep admiration for people who choose fair play over a momentary advantage," in particular is a notion that resonates pretty deeply for me. Posnanski turns Jeter into a bit of a parable, as is sometimes his wont¹, but in doing so conflates Derek Jeter the man and Derek Jeter the media construct in a way that isn't really fair.

1: I think the reason Posnanski is way up on my current mental list of sportswriters is how he doesn't shy away from turning a yarn into a parable but does so in a way that sidesteps the pat pieties of the Rick Reillys of the world.

"I don't think what Jeter did was wrong, not at all, not in baseball terms. So what was my reaction? Well, I think what Jeter did was kind of ... sad. Has he become so impotent as a hitter -- do you realize the guy now has an 86 OPS+? -- that now he's willing to hop around and have trainers look at his forearm when the ball clearly did not hit him? That's what Derek Jeter has become? And then afterward, he's sheepishly defending the move by saying it's his job to get on base, well, is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he has stood for all these years?"

Look at what he does there. He's making two points here about how Derek Jeter let him/us down. The first is that Jeter, who is having a pretty bad year and looking more mortal than he ever has before, has now crossed over the line between young and great and old and hanging on, and that's why he did what he did. This may be true, but for that to be the case we'd need to know what's going on inside Jeter's head, or at least that he wouldn't have tried this earlier in his career. Neither is knowable, it seems to me. I agree that playacting is a cheap move, but I don't know how we can claim with any certainty that this is something that he wouldn't have tried a decade ago.

But fine, some license here isn't a huge deal. It's undeniable that Jeter is in his decline, and he needs every break in a way he never has before. I think the point Posnanski makes about aging and cheating is valid, just maybe not as applicable here as he thinks. But look at the second thing he does: "That's what Jeter has become...is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he stood for all these years?" As a Red Sox fan, the media trope of Derek Jeter as all that is good and just in baseball has driven me crazy, at least partially because he's never really offered a chink in his armor². But what Posnanski does there is to subtly hold Jeter the man hostage to Jeter the media narrative.

2: Other than his crappy defense, of course, but now I'm just being petty.

There was a bit of an internet scuffle about how we should view Kevin Durant after the FIBA championships. By all reports, Durant is a kind, mature young man who lives and breathes basketball and is working hard to max out his talent. But that's the thing, "by all reports". Very few of us know the man at all, and the media we rely on to tell us about him only sees him in his professional context. The upshot was an interesting debate about whether it's fair or a good idea to hold Kevin Durant up as an ideal(ized) player³, and if to do so is simply setting him up to be turned on by the same media that would do the building up.

3: The tweets from Nate Jones are also very worth looking at, but hard to link to. You can find the links in the Bethlehem Shoals article I linked first up there.

I don't think Posnanski is trying to be unfair to Jeter here, but that doesn't mean he isn't. Derek Jeter never told us he was perfect. He certainly never gave us a Barkleyesque disavowal, but who is going to argue with media coverage presenting him or herself as representing truth, justice and apple pie? I'm sure he made a lot of money in his career by being the face of the Yankee Way, but it's a position to which he was voted by others, not one for which he volunteered. "Is that what he stood for all these years?" Maybe that's what Derek Jeter^TM stood for, but that's because the media decided he did. Faking his way into a HBP wasn't a betrayal of anything, it just serves as a warning not to trust the media when it holds anyone up as a symbol of capitalized values. Derek Jeter, like Kevin Durant, LeBron James and any other athlete you choose to look at, is a man, not a myth. We do the athletes and ourselves a disservice any time we lose sight of that fact.

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.