Due to popular demand (okay, one guy asked), I'm compiling all the pieces in the Volunteer Commissioner Series into one helpful post.
In the VCS, I graciously offer my services to fix broken sports. Or rather, to enhance sports who have not asked for my help. Some of my suggestions have already been enacted (You're welcome Baseball!) and some I've changed my mind about (the USA-Portugal match in the 2014 World Cup showed me the entertainment value of a draw).
Anyway, enjoy:
Fixing Softball (Women's softball)
The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)
The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)
The Slowest Game (lacrosse).
The Winter Classic (Major League Baseball)
Swimming is Boring (Swimming...which is unfixable.)
I was going to help out Major League Baseball again - incredibly long low-scoring games are not good for the sport - but MLB is already testing out some of the suggestions I was going to make.
And eventually I'll get around to fixing Women's Lacrosse, which has the single stupidest - and easily fixable rule I've ever seen in any sport.
Showing posts with label volunteer commissioner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label volunteer commissioner. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Beautiful Game's Flaw
[This is the fifth in an unplanned series called The Volunteer Commissioner, in which I fix broken sports. In previous installments I singlehandedly fixed pick-up basketball, women’s softball, and men’s lacrosse. You’re welcome. Unfortunately, swimming is unfixable.]
Soccer, obviously, isn’t broken. According to ESPN, 147 zantillion people on 64 planets spread over 9 galaxies will watch every single minute of the 2010 World Cup. (And if they’re not watching in further galaxies, I’m sure they can hear those damn horns). Nothing this popular needs the help of the Volunteer Commissioner.
But that never stopped me before.
If you’re a fan of the beautiful game, you probably assume I’m an uncouth, red-necked, barbaric, gun-toting, beer-swilling, pot-bellied ugly American who wants higher scoring games because I'm aesthetically incapable of allowing a sport to slowly reveal its beauty. Well that’s not true. I don’t own a gun.
But my complaint is not the lack of scoring. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind the occasional slugfest. I love a pitching duel in baseball, where two hurlers trade wits and skills for three hours backed by graceful and acrobatic fielders. But not every frickin’ game. Would it kill these guys to throw out a 6-5 score once in a while?
But still, I’ve learned to appreciate that a goal in soccer is special precisely because it is so hard to achieve.
And it’s not the officiating, though I wouldn’t mind if the officials explained what they’re calling once in a while. The disallowed goal in the U.S.-Slovenia game was so frustrating not just because of the injustice, but because nobody was charged with a crime. Habeas corpus, anyone?
And it’s not the overdramatic flops, though I find it ludicrous to see a player act like they’ve been chest-shot by a high-powered sniper rifle as they graze an opponent’s jersey. When the delightfully named Brazilian star Kaka received a red card for this, I felt the urge to don my Volunteer Commissioner cape.
But I decided that all sports have their own ethics*, and those ethics come from specific places in the sport. In football - I'm sorry, American football - a defensive back is considered wily and shrewd if he can grab a receiver’s shirt as long as he shields it from the referee. So what’s the difference?
* Golfers take great moral pride in the fact that they call penalties on themselves. But this is not because they are at their core more honorable people, but rather that in a sport played over many miles, self-policing is a must; the social mores of the sport grew out of its geography.
No, the flaw in the beautiful game is the ties. Through the first two weeks of the World Cup, nearly 1/3 of all games ended in a tie. The United States nearly advanced to the Sweet 16* without winning a single game. Their opponent in the knockout phase, Ghana, made it through their group without scoring a single non-penalty goal. Get a bunch of ties, and you’re in.
* Yeah, I know it’s not called the Sweet 16. I also am aware that the game is called football and that a 1-1 game is a draw, not a tie. You use your vernacular, I’ll use mine.
I’m willing to concede that there is something about American culture that makes the whole idea of a tie harder to accept. After all, the animating idea of communism and socialism (two philosophies that, like soccer, found more fertile ground in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa than they ever have in the U.S.) is to, as much as possible, create an economic draw among all its participants. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is built on the idea of winning: if you reward society's strongest contributors, you create the incentive to perform at a high level, which benefits the entire society.
In fact, I think it was Adam Smith who coined the term "A tie is like kissing your sister". Karl Marx, meanwhile, posited that if the owners of the means of production had a 2-1 lead, the officials should allow the proletariats a penalty kick.
So what do we do about this problem? I know that shootouts aren’t the ideal solution, but if they are good enough to settle games in the far more important knock-out phase, why aren’t they good enough to settle them during Group Play? (I have no idea if I’m using the right terminology now…but work with me).
On the other hand, 147 zantillion people disagree with me, so maybe I should shut up.
Soccer, obviously, isn’t broken. According to ESPN, 147 zantillion people on 64 planets spread over 9 galaxies will watch every single minute of the 2010 World Cup. (And if they’re not watching in further galaxies, I’m sure they can hear those damn horns). Nothing this popular needs the help of the Volunteer Commissioner.
But that never stopped me before.
If you’re a fan of the beautiful game, you probably assume I’m an uncouth, red-necked, barbaric, gun-toting, beer-swilling, pot-bellied ugly American who wants higher scoring games because I'm aesthetically incapable of allowing a sport to slowly reveal its beauty. Well that’s not true. I don’t own a gun.
But my complaint is not the lack of scoring. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind the occasional slugfest. I love a pitching duel in baseball, where two hurlers trade wits and skills for three hours backed by graceful and acrobatic fielders. But not every frickin’ game. Would it kill these guys to throw out a 6-5 score once in a while?
But still, I’ve learned to appreciate that a goal in soccer is special precisely because it is so hard to achieve.
And it’s not the officiating, though I wouldn’t mind if the officials explained what they’re calling once in a while. The disallowed goal in the U.S.-Slovenia game was so frustrating not just because of the injustice, but because nobody was charged with a crime. Habeas corpus, anyone?
And it’s not the overdramatic flops, though I find it ludicrous to see a player act like they’ve been chest-shot by a high-powered sniper rifle as they graze an opponent’s jersey. When the delightfully named Brazilian star Kaka received a red card for this, I felt the urge to don my Volunteer Commissioner cape.
But I decided that all sports have their own ethics*, and those ethics come from specific places in the sport. In football - I'm sorry, American football - a defensive back is considered wily and shrewd if he can grab a receiver’s shirt as long as he shields it from the referee. So what’s the difference?
* Golfers take great moral pride in the fact that they call penalties on themselves. But this is not because they are at their core more honorable people, but rather that in a sport played over many miles, self-policing is a must; the social mores of the sport grew out of its geography.
No, the flaw in the beautiful game is the ties. Through the first two weeks of the World Cup, nearly 1/3 of all games ended in a tie. The United States nearly advanced to the Sweet 16* without winning a single game. Their opponent in the knockout phase, Ghana, made it through their group without scoring a single non-penalty goal. Get a bunch of ties, and you’re in.
* Yeah, I know it’s not called the Sweet 16. I also am aware that the game is called football and that a 1-1 game is a draw, not a tie. You use your vernacular, I’ll use mine.
I’m willing to concede that there is something about American culture that makes the whole idea of a tie harder to accept. After all, the animating idea of communism and socialism (two philosophies that, like soccer, found more fertile ground in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa than they ever have in the U.S.) is to, as much as possible, create an economic draw among all its participants. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is built on the idea of winning: if you reward society's strongest contributors, you create the incentive to perform at a high level, which benefits the entire society.
In fact, I think it was Adam Smith who coined the term "A tie is like kissing your sister". Karl Marx, meanwhile, posited that if the owners of the means of production had a 2-1 lead, the officials should allow the proletariats a penalty kick.
So what do we do about this problem? I know that shootouts aren’t the ideal solution, but if they are good enough to settle games in the far more important knock-out phase, why aren’t they good enough to settle them during Group Play? (I have no idea if I’m using the right terminology now…but work with me).
On the other hand, 147 zantillion people disagree with me, so maybe I should shut up.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Slowest Game?
" Don't Shoot!"Lacrosse bills itself as “the fastest game on two feet”. But if fans of hurling (“the fastest game on grass”), hockey (“the fastest game on ice”), and jai-alai (“the fastest game on earth”) tuned in to yesterday’s NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Final, they can be forgiven for scoffing at this notion. Because the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame slowed the game down so much it could have been sponsored by Sherwin-Williams and called the “Watching Paint Dry” Lacrosse Final.
* All of these sports base their “fastest” claims on the speed of the ball or puck, but none are faster than a badminton shuttlecock, which can travel as fast as 206 mph.
Okay, I’m being unfair. On many levels it was a very exciting game. Notre Dame and Duke traded goals in the game’s opening minutes and the score was close or tied the entire game. A sudden death OT lasted only five seconds, thanks to a thrilling faceoff-scoop-run-and-score by longstick middie C.J. Costabile. And in a sport that has been dominated by a quintet of teams (Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Virginia, Princeton, and North Carolina have won every title since 1978) the appearance in the Final of two teams who had never won a title is a great thing for the sport.
But still…lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in America (that claim might actually be true) and many people tuned in to ESPN yesterday to see this exciting sport they have heard so much about. Sadly, they were treated to a game that, as announcer Sean McDonough said, looked like a North Carolina Tar Heel basketball game before the shot clock.
Credit Notre Dame for the right strategy, which we’ll dub the Irish Famine. Coach Kevin Corrigan, realizing he had the least talented team in the tournament, slowed the pace of the game down to a crawl, starving the Duke offense of the ball. On nearly every possession, his offense was content to pass the ball around and bleed the clock. They were given multiple stall warnings and half their shots seemed designed to miss, so that instead of turning the ball over their X attackman can race to the back line and reclaim possession. (for lacrosse newbies, when a shot goes out of bounds, possession goes to whatever team gets to the out of bounds spot first)
The result: a 6-5 decision, the lowest scoring title game in NCAA history. And while Notre Dame goalie Scott Rodgers was as good as advertised, let’s not pretend that this game was about defense. This game was about Notre Dame playing keepaway, holding the ball for huge chunks of time doing nothing but playing catch. Duke features the best attack in the country, but Ned Crotty (63 assists this season), Max Quinzani (68 goals) and Zach Howell (51 goals) spent most of the game standing and staring at the other end of the field.
In a showcase moment for the sport, with its popularity at an all-time high and the first finals team from West of the Mississippi, it delivered a snoozer.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger (and if the Irish has the ball, I don’t have to worry about that)
This is not meant as a critique of the sport in general. I played a little lacrosse myself back in the day (with an emphasis on the word “little”). I sat at the end of the bench for a Long Island high school in the early 80’s, and found my way to the middle of the bench (3rd and 4th midfield line) for a Fairfield University club team that dominated New England club lacrosse in the late 80’s.
* I graduated in 88, and from 87 to 89 the Stags went 33-2. In ’93 they went Division I and today are good enough that earlier this year they beat one of the teams in yesterday’s final.
I picked up the game late and wasn’t very good – I scored 3 goals in my entire college “career” - but I loved the sport and still do. Today, lacrosse is wildly popular where I live in Rockland County. My 10 year-old daughter plays, as do all five of my Rockland nephews. My two brothers-in-law coach their sons, and a buddy announces high school lacrosse on MSG.
Lacrosse is a genuinely great sport – one that offers the ideal combination of speed, athleticism, toughness, knowledge and grace. But one has to ask: how many coaches across the country watched a mediocre Notre Dame team – one that was unseeded and went 10-7 on the year – get to within one goal of a title, and think, hmmm? Maybe I’ll slow down my offense next year…
And that would be a terrible thing for the sport.
The Fix
Luckily, FreeTime is here to propose a solution – to fix the problem before it manifests itself. You already know what it is, don’t you? You knew it as soon as you saw the basketball shot clock reference above. It was once said that the only man who could stop Michael Jordan was his own coach at North Carolina, Dean Smith. And basketball as a sport does not benefit if the rules can stop Michael Jordan.
Well, we don’t want to stop Ned Crotty, Max Quinzani and Zach Howell either. The NCAA – the only governing body of the sport that matters – should institute a shot clock immediately. I’ll leave the details up to smarter laxheads than me, but there’s no need to be too aggressive right away. I’m leaning towards two minutes but even three might be fine.
But you also need an intent rule. In other words, you can’t have guys launch shots 10 feet over the goal just to reset the clock.
The sport is at a key moment in its growth. Don’t let the Irish Famine slow it down. Literally.
(Hat Tip to the Rock Star, who suggested this post and served as research assistant.)
[This is the fourth in an unplanned series called The Volunteer Commissioner in which I helpfully point out the flaws in various sports and suggest fixes. Previous installments were The Losers Out Manifesto, Swimming is Boring, and Fixing Softball. And before World Cup fever has passed, look for a piece on soccer.]
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Fixing Softball
Some sports, like swimming and golfing and nearly all track and field events, feature an athlete competing against himself. You put up the best score or time possible and hope it is good enough to be the best.
But in many other sports, like boxing and tennis and nearly all team sports, you compete against another team or athlete, and react to their actions. In those cases, the entertainment value rests largely on the maintenance of a balance of power.
For example, baseball has been played professionally for over a century, and generally speaking balance has been maintained between run prevention (pitching and fielding) and run creation (hitting and running). Pitchers have occasionally gotten the upper hand (like in the 60’s) and hitters have occasionally gotten the upper hand (recently), but the sport tends to do little tweaks like lowering the mound or cracking down on steroids when these things get out of hand.
In Stephen Jay Gould’s book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, he shows how, even as .400 hitters have disappeared from baseball, the league batting average has remained an almost constant .272. That is balance.
So, too, in football. As defensive players get bigger and stronger and more lethal, and as defensive schemes get more complicated, the NFL makes little tweaks to the rules to keep the offense up to speed. (And yes, in both baseball and football, the rules-makers tend to, if anything, give an edge to the scorers, as that’s what people like to see).
And some times, the balance is threatened by advances in equipment. The ability of male tennis players to crush 150 mile per hour serves with larger racquets forced the governing bodies to tweak their rules to allow for longer volleys.
This is a rather longwinded way of saying that in some sports the balance has been lost, making the game boring, saddled with odd rules to address the balance problem, or both. Welcome to Women’s Softball.
The Hurler’s Dominance
This is the part of the article where I intended to present you with statistics demonstrating how pitchers utterly and completely dominate softball, and then attempt some sort of explanation as to why this is so. So I began googling around for statistics and found a piece by Rob Neyer, a baseball writer at whose altar I worship. So I will liberally quote from his piece, The Softer They Come: Why is it So Hard to Hit a Softball:
Ted Williams was fond of saying that the toughest thing in sports is hitting a round ball with a round bat. Williams was right, just not as precise as he could have been. The toughest thing in sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat when the round ball is thrown underhand from 40 feet away...In the 2000 Olympics, the gold-medal-winning U.S. softball team allowed only seven runs and 24 hits in 10 games.
This year, Team USA won again and was even more dominant. In nine games, the Americans allowed one run and 18 hits... But it's usually not just Team USA's opponents who struggle to score. In 2000, in their six games against China, Japan, and Australia—arguably the Americans' toughest competition—the U.S. team scored only six runs...Though the Americans did much better this time around with 51 runs in nine games, when great players face off, softball is clearly a pitcher's game. In this year's Olympics, there were 19 games that didn't include weak sisters Greece and Italy. In those games, an average of 3.8 runs were scored per seven innings.
Why is it so hard to hit a softball? Distance, time, and uncertainty. In international competition, the pitcher's plate (or "rubber," as baseball fans know it) is only 43 feet from home plate. What's more, thanks to liberal rules, softball pitchers release the ball from even closer than that, slightly less than 40 feet—about 20 feet closer than a baseball pitcher. Top softball pitchers like Jennie Finch can throw roughly 70 miles per hour, the equivalent of a low-90s fastball thrown from 60 feet away. There are, of course, many hundreds of human beings who can hit a low-90s fastball. But most of them play professional baseball, and nearly all of them are men. And anyway, fast-pitch pitchers don't just throw fastballs. They keep the batters guessing with rise balls, drop balls, curves, and in-shoots. Pitchers with speed and a varied repertoire—like current U.S. Olympians Finch, Lisa Fernandez, and Cat Osterman—make life almost impossible for even the best hitters.
In softball, there are no famous hitters, only famous pitchers.
I couldn’t say it better myself.
The FixLuckily, I’m here to offer my free advice. The powers that be in softball have come up with one fix, a silly one, to address its problems. Realizing that low-scoring games could go on for weeks and weeks as overmatched hitters helplessly flail at lightning fast rise balls, they actually begin extra innings with a runner on second. Yes, you read that right: as the players take the field to begin a half inning, there’s a guy (well, a gal actually) at second. This is an abomination.
There’s a much easier fix, and I offer it now in all its elegant simplity: move the mound back.
Sadly, my advice comes too late: softball is not returning as an Olympic event. For the fascinating backstory, click here.
Other Stories in the Volunteer Commissioner series:
Note: This is part of the Volunteer Commissioner series, in which I graciously fix problems in various sports. The others posts in the series are:
Fixing Softball (Women's softball)
The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)
The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)
The Slowest Game (lacrosse).
Swimming is Boring (Swimming)
The Winter Classic (Baseball)
You’re welcome. Unfortunately, swimming is unfixable.]
But in many other sports, like boxing and tennis and nearly all team sports, you compete against another team or athlete, and react to their actions. In those cases, the entertainment value rests largely on the maintenance of a balance of power.
For example, baseball has been played professionally for over a century, and generally speaking balance has been maintained between run prevention (pitching and fielding) and run creation (hitting and running). Pitchers have occasionally gotten the upper hand (like in the 60’s) and hitters have occasionally gotten the upper hand (recently), but the sport tends to do little tweaks like lowering the mound or cracking down on steroids when these things get out of hand.
In Stephen Jay Gould’s book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, he shows how, even as .400 hitters have disappeared from baseball, the league batting average has remained an almost constant .272. That is balance.
So, too, in football. As defensive players get bigger and stronger and more lethal, and as defensive schemes get more complicated, the NFL makes little tweaks to the rules to keep the offense up to speed. (And yes, in both baseball and football, the rules-makers tend to, if anything, give an edge to the scorers, as that’s what people like to see).
And some times, the balance is threatened by advances in equipment. The ability of male tennis players to crush 150 mile per hour serves with larger racquets forced the governing bodies to tweak their rules to allow for longer volleys.
This is a rather longwinded way of saying that in some sports the balance has been lost, making the game boring, saddled with odd rules to address the balance problem, or both. Welcome to Women’s Softball.
The Hurler’s Dominance
This is the part of the article where I intended to present you with statistics demonstrating how pitchers utterly and completely dominate softball, and then attempt some sort of explanation as to why this is so. So I began googling around for statistics and found a piece by Rob Neyer, a baseball writer at whose altar I worship. So I will liberally quote from his piece, The Softer They Come: Why is it So Hard to Hit a Softball:
Ted Williams was fond of saying that the toughest thing in sports is hitting a round ball with a round bat. Williams was right, just not as precise as he could have been. The toughest thing in sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat when the round ball is thrown underhand from 40 feet away...In the 2000 Olympics, the gold-medal-winning U.S. softball team allowed only seven runs and 24 hits in 10 games.
This year, Team USA won again and was even more dominant. In nine games, the Americans allowed one run and 18 hits... But it's usually not just Team USA's opponents who struggle to score. In 2000, in their six games against China, Japan, and Australia—arguably the Americans' toughest competition—the U.S. team scored only six runs...Though the Americans did much better this time around with 51 runs in nine games, when great players face off, softball is clearly a pitcher's game. In this year's Olympics, there were 19 games that didn't include weak sisters Greece and Italy. In those games, an average of 3.8 runs were scored per seven innings.
Why is it so hard to hit a softball? Distance, time, and uncertainty. In international competition, the pitcher's plate (or "rubber," as baseball fans know it) is only 43 feet from home plate. What's more, thanks to liberal rules, softball pitchers release the ball from even closer than that, slightly less than 40 feet—about 20 feet closer than a baseball pitcher. Top softball pitchers like Jennie Finch can throw roughly 70 miles per hour, the equivalent of a low-90s fastball thrown from 60 feet away. There are, of course, many hundreds of human beings who can hit a low-90s fastball. But most of them play professional baseball, and nearly all of them are men. And anyway, fast-pitch pitchers don't just throw fastballs. They keep the batters guessing with rise balls, drop balls, curves, and in-shoots. Pitchers with speed and a varied repertoire—like current U.S. Olympians Finch, Lisa Fernandez, and Cat Osterman—make life almost impossible for even the best hitters.
In softball, there are no famous hitters, only famous pitchers.
I couldn’t say it better myself.
The FixLuckily, I’m here to offer my free advice. The powers that be in softball have come up with one fix, a silly one, to address its problems. Realizing that low-scoring games could go on for weeks and weeks as overmatched hitters helplessly flail at lightning fast rise balls, they actually begin extra innings with a runner on second. Yes, you read that right: as the players take the field to begin a half inning, there’s a guy (well, a gal actually) at second. This is an abomination.
There’s a much easier fix, and I offer it now in all its elegant simplity: move the mound back.
Sadly, my advice comes too late: softball is not returning as an Olympic event. For the fascinating backstory, click here.
Other Stories in the Volunteer Commissioner series:
Note: This is part of the Volunteer Commissioner series, in which I graciously fix problems in various sports. The others posts in the series are:
Fixing Softball (Women's softball)
The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)
The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)
The Slowest Game (lacrosse).
Swimming is Boring (Swimming)
The Winter Classic (Baseball)
You’re welcome. Unfortunately, swimming is unfixable.]
Friday, August 15, 2008
Swimming is Boring
I’m trying to get into this Michael Phelps thing. I really am. But I just can’t shake the fact that swimming is kind of, well, boring.
Here’s what I see when I watch a swim meet: a bunch of guys who look exactly alike (long, lean, hairless and white), all doing exactly the same thing, all at roughly the same speed. Then one of the guys, who NBC helpfully informs me is Phelps (because really, how else would I know?) touches the wall a little ahead of all the other guys. Rinse and repeat.
It has so few of the elements that makes watching sports fun. There has never been, in the entire history of swimming, a great play. There is very rarely (the freestyle relay an exception) a dramatic comeback. A swimmer never has to adjust to anything unexpected, the way most athletes have to adjust to an opponents’ play, or a golfer has to adjust to wind or a shot he’s never seen before. You can't fall in a pool, so swimming doesn't have heartbreaking moments like the Olympic skier or gymnast, whose dreams come crashing down because of a momentary lack of concentration.
It has none of the eye-popping 'how do they do that?' wonder of gymnastics or diving. It's just, you know, the breaststroke. I can do that. Not that fast, to be sure, or that graceful. And nobody wants to see me in a Speedo. But it's not as unimaginable as 3 somersaults, 2 corkscrews and a tuck off a 20 meter platform without making a splash.
Even the speed doesn’t dazzle, like the 100 yard dash. If my 8 year old daughter was running alongside the pool she can probably take all those guys, what with the water slowing them down and all.
And I’m pretty sure that swimming isn’t one of those sports that, if I only understood the complexities and subtleties and strategies and tactics better, I’d truly appreciate. For example, I don’t like NASCAR. All I see is a bunch of cars festooned with ads driving in circles. But I know that NASCAR fans are seeing much more. They understand the strategies, tactics, and differing styles that are being employed throughout the race, and are therefore enjoying it far more than I could.
But I don’t think that’s really true of swimming. You push off, swim fast, turn, push again, get to the other side. Did I miss anything? I guess you have to pace yourself a bit, but it’s only one to two hundred meters – you can pretty much let it all hang out, can’t you?
Don’t get me wrong. I respect the greatness of Phelps’ accomplishment. It has everything you associate with true athleticism: speed, strength, grace, skill, commitment, desire.
And I admire the fact that Phelps is the sole architect of his greatness. Many American football fans think Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback ever. But if he hadn’t been given the greatest offensive coach ever, the greatest wide receiver ever, one of the greatest receiving backs ever, and oh by the way, a consistently great defense, he might have had Bert Jones’ career. Phelps doesn’t rely on teammates, systems, equipment, or coaches. It is the human body against one of Nature’s elements.
So, I will be rooting hard for Michael Phelps to win his 7th Gold tonight, and his 8th tomorrow night. And I’ll probably even watch it.
But I’ll thank all of the Gods on Mount Olympus that it will only take a few minutes of my time. Then I’ll put on the Mets game.
Here’s what I see when I watch a swim meet: a bunch of guys who look exactly alike (long, lean, hairless and white), all doing exactly the same thing, all at roughly the same speed. Then one of the guys, who NBC helpfully informs me is Phelps (because really, how else would I know?) touches the wall a little ahead of all the other guys. Rinse and repeat.
It has so few of the elements that makes watching sports fun. There has never been, in the entire history of swimming, a great play. There is very rarely (the freestyle relay an exception) a dramatic comeback. A swimmer never has to adjust to anything unexpected, the way most athletes have to adjust to an opponents’ play, or a golfer has to adjust to wind or a shot he’s never seen before. You can't fall in a pool, so swimming doesn't have heartbreaking moments like the Olympic skier or gymnast, whose dreams come crashing down because of a momentary lack of concentration.
It has none of the eye-popping 'how do they do that?' wonder of gymnastics or diving. It's just, you know, the breaststroke. I can do that. Not that fast, to be sure, or that graceful. And nobody wants to see me in a Speedo. But it's not as unimaginable as 3 somersaults, 2 corkscrews and a tuck off a 20 meter platform without making a splash.
Even the speed doesn’t dazzle, like the 100 yard dash. If my 8 year old daughter was running alongside the pool she can probably take all those guys, what with the water slowing them down and all.
And I’m pretty sure that swimming isn’t one of those sports that, if I only understood the complexities and subtleties and strategies and tactics better, I’d truly appreciate. For example, I don’t like NASCAR. All I see is a bunch of cars festooned with ads driving in circles. But I know that NASCAR fans are seeing much more. They understand the strategies, tactics, and differing styles that are being employed throughout the race, and are therefore enjoying it far more than I could.
But I don’t think that’s really true of swimming. You push off, swim fast, turn, push again, get to the other side. Did I miss anything? I guess you have to pace yourself a bit, but it’s only one to two hundred meters – you can pretty much let it all hang out, can’t you?
Don’t get me wrong. I respect the greatness of Phelps’ accomplishment. It has everything you associate with true athleticism: speed, strength, grace, skill, commitment, desire.
And I admire the fact that Phelps is the sole architect of his greatness. Many American football fans think Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback ever. But if he hadn’t been given the greatest offensive coach ever, the greatest wide receiver ever, one of the greatest receiving backs ever, and oh by the way, a consistently great defense, he might have had Bert Jones’ career. Phelps doesn’t rely on teammates, systems, equipment, or coaches. It is the human body against one of Nature’s elements.
So, I will be rooting hard for Michael Phelps to win his 7th Gold tonight, and his 8th tomorrow night. And I’ll probably even watch it.
But I’ll thank all of the Gods on Mount Olympus that it will only take a few minutes of my time. Then I’ll put on the Mets game.
Update: I watched a lot of swimming last night. I saw Torres win the Silver, get her medal, and rush back to the pool to win another Silver in the Relay. Then I watched the American men win the 4X100 medley relay, Phelps' 8th gold. It was awesome. The sport itself is still boring - it requires the contextual personal drama of stories like Phelps' and Torres' - but I did thoroughly enjoy it.
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