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Sports
March 2, 2007
Home, Sweet Home (Road, Bloody Road)
Glancing at the English Premier League tables the other day, I noticed a strange thing: The top four teams have combined for just one home loss, in 55 games. Yet on the road, the quartet (Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Arsenal) have combined for 17 losses in 54 games. In fact, not a single team in the league has a better record away from home than at home, and only the four teams slated for relegation have lost more games at home than they've won. Home-field advantage exists in every sport, but nowhere near this pronounced. What's going on?
Sports
February 28, 2007
Bracketology Folly
On February 11, Duke lost its fourth straight game, to Maryland. That same night, Syracuse beat St. John's to end a string of four losses in five games. Judging from the commentary at the time, both teams were at risk of missing the NCAA tournament. Fortunately for them, the tournament selection committee was going to wait another month to make its decision. Duke and Syracuse are now both in good position to make the field of 64. Neither will be a favorite to win it all, but perhaps they can help win something else for the rest of us: The end of sports media obsession with predicting the future.
Sports
February 26, 2007
The Supernatural Demon Miracle Pitch
Does the gyroball—the mysterious Japanese pitch supposedly invented by physicists and perfected by hurlers such as Red Sox $103 million man Daisuke Matsuzaka—exist? Figuring that out sounds like it would make for a great story; indeed, major sports media companies ESPN and Sports Illustrated both ran features on the subject, as did the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. (With its multi-part investigation, Yahoo Sports probably did the best job of covering the story.)
Sports
February 19, 2007
Tim Hardaway Disappoints Former Coach
As an assistant coach at University of Texas-El Paso in the 1980s, Rus Bradburd discovered and recruited Tim Hardaway—which was a major coup for the young coach and affords him a unique perspective to evaluate his former dribbling student's homophobic comments last week. Hardaway, reacting to news that former NBA player John Amaechi had come out as gay, told a Miami radio station, "I hate gay people." Bradburd told Gelf, "It was a major disappointment to have our hero appear to be a mean-spirited bully." Here's more from Bradburd, author of Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops and an English instructor at New Mexico State:
Sports
February 8, 2007
ESPN Wants You to Type 'g.a.y.'
ESPN.com recently introduced a commenting feature, and readers have responded by showering some articles with hundreds of comments. Yet readers can't use certain words that aren't verboten to espn.com writers. LZ Granderson wrote the word "gay" 15 times in his column about former NBA player John Amaechi's announcement that he is gay. Granderson also employed "anti-gay," "gaydar," and "Gaytopia." Yet ESPN.com readers who used the word "gay" in their response to the column found it was being replaced by "####"—not even the right number of # signs—and instead had to write "g.a.y.," "g-a-y," "g@y," and other variations to avoid the dreaded hash-mark treatment.
Sports
February 5, 2007
Team Nike v. Team USA
Take a look at the photo for Nike's "The Second Coming" ad campaign. Go on, check it out, and while you're over there, see if you notice anything different about the guy third from the left. Now come on back. What's that? My, you're perceptive. Yes, that's right, he's Canadian.
Media
February 2, 2007
Coonass Controversy
As you may have heard by now, new Alabama football coach Nick Saban has gotten himself into a little bit of trouble after using the word "coonass" to refer to a man of Cajun heritage in an off-the-record but still-taped chat with Miami media (Deadspin). One of the reasons that the incident has aroused attention—even though the word appears to be on the lighter end of the slur spectrum— is because it (intentionally or not [Wikipedia]) combines the words "coon," which is a pretty derogatory term for black people, with "ass," which can also be a somewhat mean word. Confusion over the nature of the term has led to two separate government incidents in which a black person complained after misconstruing the nature of the insult.
Sports
February 1, 2007
The Sopranos' Wisdom About Barbaro
If you're inclined to react cynically to the grieving over the late Kentucky Derby champion Barbaro, you won't have much trouble. We eat meat, wear leather, use animal-tested health and beauty products—and mourn a horse? T. J. Simers said as much in the Los Angeles Times; so, too, did Barbaro, in a manner of speaking, as channeled by the Mighty MJD. But one oracle preceded them all: A late, fictional mobster.
Sports
January 30, 2007
Grappling with Headlines
On the ESPN.com home page, there's a link to an Associated Press story about the Minnesota State High School League's decision to ban wrestling competitions and practices indefinitely after athletes from 10 different teams came down with herpes simplex Type 1, the type of herpes that is caused by skin-to-skin contact and causes cold sores. It's a bold move calculated to prevent infections that could lead to blindness, but it was ESPN's headline—"Grappling with Herpes"—that aroused the mirth of several message board posters and bloggers. ESPN isn't the first publication with a sense of humor about herpes and wrestling headlines.
Sports
January 23, 2007
Understanding Parity in the NFL
Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column over at ESPN.com tries to define parity, and fails miserably. He claims that the current idea of parity in the NFL is a myth because "supposedly parity is proven by an outbreak of close games." He goes on to show that there are no more close games now in the NFL than there ever have been. "Some earthshaking trend," he writes. But all that Easterbrook has done is to knock down a straw man of his own creation.
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