Birthing a Sport--Snowboarding & Olympics

If you think about it, it really makes no sense. A board, just a board, with a person on it. Put wheels on the board and you can skate around, if you can balance yourself and not fall over. Put the board on snow with some wax and you can ride the snow balancing and spinning and doing cuts that traditional skis don't permit. Put the board on the water, stand up, hold your balance, look for a breaking wave and you can surf.

People do amazing things just for the hell of it, just for the sheer joy of it. I mean shooting a round ball through a peach basket or kicking a ball around and between two poles or hitting a ball, any old ball with a bat, a racket, a paddle, none of it makes any particular sense. Except the rhythm of the motion, the clarity of accomplishment the thrill of mastering the activity, they add up.

Many of our sports emerge from the simple fascinating kinetic joy of doing something. Kids try it; as they get older they refine it. Someone does something on the board, with the ball, and someone else, probably a male, thinks, "I can do that." Then they think, "I can do something even more interesting or harder. They spend time practicing it. Hitting the ball against a garage, practicing the skate on the streets or on a slope avoiding skiers. Then, the inevitable happens. Two skaters, hitters, surfers, kickers, basket-shooters challenge each other. Who can hit if farther? Who can kick it farther or who can get it between the poles more often? Who can skate the farthest, or jump the skate onto a rail or skate over an ice covered stump and fly. The evolution flows naturally.

So sports emerge. The ancient sports almost all trace their lineage to skills needed for survival or war. Modern sports emerge from more loose kinetic free form, the sheer diversity and joy of moving in space in different ways. They grow from a cauldron of experimentation and street activities. Stick ball; kick ball, football; skating.

One aspect of the Olympics I enjoyed the most was watching the skateboarding competition. Only two Olympics old, the sport still flaunts its bad boy/girl image. The skaters are inventing it as they go along and so Shaun White become so important simply because he keeps pushing physical boundaries of his sport, his body and the possibilities of a human being flying through the snow and air and tumbling, contorting, twisting and then sticking it.

The sponsorship disease will soon overcome aspects of it, but it has not yet professionalized itself in its pipelines; anyone with a board and time and mountains nearby can give it a try.  The sport still sports a raw danger. White smashed into the edge of the pipe during a practice run and one of his greatest rivals, Kevin Pearce, struggles to recover from massive brain trauma when he shattered himself by crashing head first against the ice edge of the pipe.


The sport migrated from street to slopes to Olympics in about thirty years. It reminds me about the infinite variety and capacity of human movement whether in dance or athletics. It reminds me that  some individuals will push the boundaries of the body and discover the emerging possibilities of a form of movement just for the hell of it. It reminds me that some of us will seek not only to push the form but to prove we can do it better or faster or higher or quicker than others. The movement grows into a competition which grows into a sport.

I'm looking forward to Parkour in the Olympics.

America's Cup Race: Is this really sport?

The recent America's cup nonrace victory by the BMW Oracle team's S-90 behemoth demonstrates what happens when technology trumps humanity in competition. It demonstrates what happens when sport no longer becomes a test of individual or team skill, training and effort matched against each other on a playing field. When does an competitive activity cease to be a sport between humans and reduce to a technological arms race?

You have two high trained human beings with roughly equivalent skills, tenacity, and  training regimes. In normal competition they would each beat each other fifty percent of the time. But suddenly one wears a swimming suit with special bouyancy and friction attributes; that swimmer now wins 100 percent of the time. Two equal tennis players; one now uses a newly developed racket with a larger sweet spot and greater recoil; now she wins 100 percent of the time. At this point we are no longer witnessing sports competition based upon human attributes and discipline, but technologically mediated advantages that nullify skill and judgment.

Most sports from NASCAR to softball manage the balance between human competition and technologically enhanced superiority with severe regulation of technology. The attempts are two fold. First, they try to keep the sports human based and second to ensure a level and fair playing field where if there is a technological innovation that creates assymetric competition, everyone has access to it.

The America's cup has always been the hobby of the rich. First the idle rich, then millionaires,  then multi-millionaires, now multi billionaires. The last race no longer reflects sailing skill, but superior technology. Larry Ellison of Oracle and  Swiss  billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, two time winner, have battled for a decade over rules and technology. Gone forever are the beautiful old fashioned monohulls of Captain Courageous Ted Turner. Those boats relate to the modern hulls as a biplane to a jet.

The BMW-Oracle Godzilla  is an awesome technological marvel. At the cost of 200 million dollars (its' OK, the Alginhi side spent over 200 million also) the boat represents multiple revolutions in technology. Now a tri-hull versus Alginhi's catamaran, it carried a rigid wing for its sail 18 stories tall. It's three hull catamaran construction permitted it to literally fly through the wind and sail close to the wind in unimagined ways even four years ago. It simply destroyed the Alinghi boat by virtue of its quantum superiority in design. Images of the boat with two of its three hulls out of water entranced people who follow the billionaires' squabble from afar.

To me the race symbolizes what happens when technology trumps sport. Minimal regulations exist that create something like an equal field so that the competition is not predtermined at the begining, not by the quality of the humans doing the sailing, but by the designers of the sail boat, or the new baseball bat, or the newest swim suit. The screwy America's Cup home advantage rules lead to innumerable legal battles, utter lack of sportsmanship and anger driven innovation.

Barring act of God, this race was over before it started, and it had nothing to do with the skill of the crews but of the engineers. Judgement and skill could simply not hope to overcome the technological differential, where is the sport in that? Where is the competition on the field in that?

In some ways I'll take soccer or basketball where the game remains fundamentally the same; same ball, same baskets, same shoes (no jet assists allowed yet).  The differences emerge from intelligence, developed skill, focus and the humanly controlled dimensions that make sport a human activity and a celebration that we can all share and admire because of our shared humanity.

The Olympics and Nationalism

The Winter Olympics opens today. Pageantry, glory, promise, 800 plus hours of NBC TV on 5 channels, no snow and 30 athletes  disqualified so far for positive drug tests. I love the Olympic ideal and truly believe that athletics like art and science transcend cultural and national boundaries. The founders of the  modern Olympic movement dreamed that the Olympic peace (all the Greek city states agreed to stop their wars for the period of the competition) of the original Olympics would promote harmony and respect across nations rather than the realpolitik of endless competition and war.

Even as I enjoy the artistry and achievement of the Olympians, I remember that the athletes compete for themselves but are here for their country. In this world of vagabonds and mercenary athletes this is a time when athletes return to the womb and compete for their country. Lest we forget, they march in together and wear the same uniforms (can you imagine Ralph Lauren designing military uniforms?).

The original Olympics held a tenuous peace but that did not prevent a form of war by proxy in the Olympic games. Nor did it stop regular attempts to steal athletes from one city state to compete for another, just as modern Olympic citizenship can become rather porous.

This aspect of Olympic competition seems to grow from a collective egoism. As a citizen I identify with them not because of excellence but because they win; they conquer; they prove superior to everyone else (if you root for the Yankees you know what I'm talking about). The Olympic peace transforms, as it did in the original games, into a war by proxy; I prove my superiority over you as a person or country when my team beats your team. Hitler raised this to its most exalted insanity with his Berlin Olympics designed to showcase the superiority of the master race. Unfortunately Jesse Owens and the University of Washington crew team, among others, showed up and punctured the Swastika clad  propaganda staged Olympics. During the cold war years TV commentators breathlessly kept medal counts, kind of like the ballistic missile counts, to see whether the US or USSR would "win." (Now if you think about figure skating as an agent for the cold war, it does seem a little silly).

The Olympics also permits a form of assymmetric war to occur. Small countries or poor countries can invest alot in athletics or pick a few sports to excel in.  The most successful and tragic episode occurred with East Germany, a small state, the Prussian remnant of Germany occupied by the Russians at the end of World War II. The country made a concerted and secret effort to reinforce its identity and legitimacy through sports superiority. Young boys and girls were recruited at a very early age; sequestered in sports clubs and academies where they trained relentlessly. They lived in splendid and privileged isolation from the poor society at large. The kids were also fed a finely calibrated diet of "vitamins" to ensure their health. The steroids and hormones they ingested generated immense strength, more rigorous training because they bounced back faster and created prodigious human beings. For over 15 years East German men, but especially women, who looked like mutant Valkeries, dominated swimming, track and field and weight lifting. The whole state sponsored system was designed to prove the superiority of communism over capitalism. It provided a great counterpoint to the relative failure of West German athletes and offset the incredible West German economic and political success.

The Olympic and World medals piled up. Other countries noticed the inhuman physique of the athletes. The whole house of cards came down as drug testing got better and the East European communist system collapsed. The lingering results today are a group of men and women who against their knowledge were permanently injured, as were many of their children, by the experiments upon them in the name of garnering Olympic glory and stature for their country.

I will enjoy the athletes, ignore ice dancing but wallow in curling and laugh at the antics and spectacular innovations of snow boarding. But I will remember these are humans first, athletes second, citizens third. I will not let some atavistic glory in their relation to my country or other countries take away from the true glory of their achievments.

NLI Day, College and Team Loyalty

A seventeen year old high school senior sits before assembled microphones and gazes out at the national TV audience of ESPN-U; a sly smile, looks again at the three hats before him and reaches out, a fake toward one hat, and then plucks the next hat with its distinct university color and logo, plunks it on his head and smiles. So the ritual of NLI (National Letter of Intent) day for football occurs. It's the culmination of weeks of frenzied speculation in local media and sites like rivals.com. Like the hotstove league, it's an off season pasttime of speculation and unbelievably intense recruiting, commitments, rumors of commitments, uncommitments, re-recruiting. The season takes on a frenzied aspect about dreams, hopes and possibilities for teams who wish to stay on top and others seeking to gain their place in the son. This relentless ruthless recruiting now makes college coaching a full time job.

I want to think about a different dimension of sport that NLI day underlines. I continue to grapple with the question of why and how folks like me invest their loyalty and time and identity into sports teams especially when the teams have no organic relation to their own community. But these signings signal a difference. Most of the signings occur at local school, city or state wide celebrations. Families, teachers, principals are all there with festive colors. It's  a success because the young man or woman. They won a scholarship and are pursuing a dream to plan and to graduate with a degree.

College sports actually provides a unique counterpoint to the trend of teams becoming mercenary assemblages brought together for a  single campaign and then disassembled and reassembled into new teams for the next campaign.

NLI day signals an initial intent by a player and a coach to have a continuous relation together with each other, a sport and an institution for a four or five year period.  If all goes well, here, at least, a relationship exists between the athlete, the institution and the fans. The athlete actually attends school, lives on campus or nearby, attends classes and “represents” the institution in a strong moral and symbolic sense.

When alumni roots for their school team, they know that the player is going to class and playing for the same institution that they attended. When a booster or citizen of a state or a a fan who has adopted a team, as we often do, roots for the team, they understand that the kids actually go to that school and if they graduate will carry that school as their alma mater.

Many of the student athletes will not come from the local area where the school resides, but welcome to America. Heck some of them will come from foreign countries as well as foreign states (UW gets lots of kids from California!). But the athletes voluntarily choose to attend the school, they choose that hat, they choose the school colors, that  coach, that conference to attend and play for. As many of us know who attended schools away from our home, this is the United States and the experience of living and learning at that place can engender an identification and memories that help forge our  fluid identity. So rooting for my alma mater, unlike rooting for the corporate shell that assembles teams for a single campaign, is actually culturally different.

Obviously reality can inrude with this picture. Players sign to play and win and get noticed, not just to attend a college. In college basketball 40 percent of all players transfer because they become vagabonds more committed to playing thatn to schools. But in the Olympic sports the transfer rate is 3-4 percent and in football it is 8 percent. Leaving aside basketball with its one and out types and deeply distorted youth culture, most student athletes stay and play at the schools they commit to. Most graduate, even in football the graduation rate can approach 65 percent roughly the same for regular students at large state universities. Most of the players don't go on to the pros but enjoy college and being a part of the team .

Here at least a more organic relation exists between our fans and our loyalties and the players on the team.

(photos courtesy of AP)

Politics, Identity and Sport: Review of Invictus

Place traditionally defines sports identification. People follow "my" team which lives in a place of habitation or memory.  Teams and team loyalty grow from place like towns, cities or countries and represent community and self.

The movie Invictus recounts an historical parable that exposes the complexity of this seemingly simple dynamic of identifying with and rooting for teams from your place. The Clint Eastwood directed  movie portrays the story of how President Nelson Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, nurtures a counterintuitive connection between an Afrikaaners rugby team, the Springboks, and the recently empowered black majority citizenry of South Africa at the end of the apartheid era.

Mandela had recently been elected the first black African President of South Africa after serving over 27 years in prison as an alleged "terrorist."
In that  same year South Africa  was finally allowed to compete in the world Rugby tournament after years of being denied entry because of apartheid and they also were hosting the tournament.

No one could envision the team, emblematic of the most rabid apartheid supporters, the Afrikaaners, becoming the symbol of a racially united South Africa; it makes no historical sense. The point of the game  was politics. The intractable problem remained that white and black Africans inhabited the same place, but fought each other over control of the place. For a hundred years the minority whites had dominated and fragmented the black tribal communities to maintain their hold on power. The place of South Africa meant very different things to Afrikaaners and black South Africans, and neither side was sure they could coexist in equality in that place.

Now Mandela was the first black African elected leader of South Africa. He desparately needed ways to create a common identity when both sides defined themselves as blood enemies. He had to  reassure the white communities to encourage them to remain, and he needed some means to generate a shared identity across the racial divide. As Americans know only too well, sport can divide, but also can unite. If the people love a game, in this case rugby, and appreciate it's strength, demands and glory, sometimes, following a team that plays the game with greatness can unite people across many divides. Yet South African rugby's segregation only replicated the segregation and domination in the community. In prison Mandela, like his fellow black countrymen, always rooted for whomever played the Springboks.

Mandela loved the poem Invictus, a paen to an "unconquerable soul" to overcome endless adversity. He read it constantly during his isolation and prison. He never forgot that he remained  "The master of my fate; The captain of my soul." What fascinates about the story is how Mandela, who loves sport, made a realpolitik decision to seek out the Springboks club and publically woo their captain Francois Pienaar, played by Matt Damon. He deployed the club and its quest for victory in  the world cup as a rallying point for a divided nation.

This was not easy, as the movie makes clear. His own party wanted to strip the Springboks of their status and beloved colors. Others complained that focusing upon sports sapped energy needed to devote to more serious structural issues. The Springboks remained true underdogs; in this connection, Mandela gave the captain Pienaar a hand written copy of Invictus.

Mandela risked and  invested significant political capital to  support  the team. His support blessed them as a "national" team, a representative of the nation itself, not a tribe, not a race, but a dream of a united South Africa. When he wore the Springbok colors, both whites and blacks scowled. The movie does not flinch from the calculation behind this decision as well as the touchy relation between him and the archetype Afrikaaners. It  tends to romanticize the transformative power of Mandela and the team, but it nonetheless illustrates how a winning and excellent team can evoke an emotional response from disparate folks, even once and future enemies.

The dream of being united together with a shared commitment and shared love of excellence can play out in following a team from your place playing a sport you mutually respect, enjoy and love. The identification can bring folks together in watching, rooting and enjoying the victory as well as suffering with the loss.

I vaguely understand the dense dynamics of why many of us identity so strongly with sport teams as extensions of our sense of place and community. Mandela's strategy and the team's success conjures this reality. It also emphasizes how people can view sports as a proxy for a we/they battle and feel superiority with each other when their team wins. Teams bring us together as a "we" but "we" need a "them" to compete against as well as a shared glory to identify with.

The team wins the world cup in what remains a high point for South African sport and mythos of national unity. South Africa struggles today to hold itself together in face of huge intractable misery. Yet the Springboks, their old colors, once symbols of apartheid, now national, are still revered, much more integrated and have regained the world rugby title.

In this case the politics of identity play out as politics of sport. The story of the Springboks helped heal a still divided and struggling country and remind them, if only for a moment, of the possibility of shared bonds and admiration of excellence of those who represent them on the world athletic stage.

Coaching Roulette Gets Stranger

College coaching roulette just got a lot more interesting and a lot sadder. Pete Carroll of USC, who should know better, suddenly ejected from a crashing USC and soft-landed as Coach and VP of the Seattle Seahawks. The landing was cushioned by a 3 million dollar salary increase and considerable discretion over player personnel--the team wants a "collaborative" relationship between Carroll and its as of yet unknown General Manager, yeah. Unfortunately the agreement did not entail the elimination of a pro-football draft in favor of allowing coaches to "recruit" college seniors to their teams.

Carroll's sudden career change drove USC to scroll madly through a list of potential coaches, including Mike Riley, another NFL refugee who had found incredible success in college ranks at Oregon State University. The school ended by plucking Lane Kiffin, exUSC assistant, ex-Oakland Raider coach, ex-Tennessee coach (and that's only in four years!!) as their new coach. 34 year old Kiffen left Tenessee after one year and in a heart beat, abandoning a "top ten job" for "the best job in America." (Has he talked to Nick Saban,  Mack Brown or Urban Meyer, sorry he and Meyer aren't speaking after he falsely accused Meyer of cheating). Kiffin's departure lead Tennessee into a whirlwind search where bodies flew around like in a twister and Derek Dooley football coach and AD at Louisiana Tech ended up finding himself falling out of the sky and  landing in Tennessee where he introduced the idea of building a program on "integrity" not a concept his predecessor worried about.

This whole process gets speeded up since national letter of intent day is three weeks away, and athletes who committed to one coach have not signed a letter and  are now swarmed by locusts from other schools. In typical fashion, Kiffin's head recruiter innocently answered questions of Tennessee recruits about how to come to USC! So what should be a thoughtful process involving athletic directors and Presidents occurs in days to forestall defections by prized recruits-so much for Presidential control and academic concern in coaching searches.

Two points strike me in this unfolding scenario. The first, I've talked about before, some coaches are much better suited to teach college kids than coach pros. Rick Pitino is another example to add to those I cited. College coaches not only teach, but they motivate; Carroll's unique competitive advantage has been his capacity to captivate, relate to and motivate 18-22 year old males. They flock to the program for its success, its glamor but also its unique brand of serious focus and fun accomplishment. The problem with motivators is that they grow very thin after a couple of years.

Motivating coaches elicit and demand intense emotional and cognitive commitment and a willingness to focus and sacrifice for the team and program. In college it works because they kids are young and only stay for four years--the intensity, team loyalty and emotional demands imposed by a coach resonate and stay alive as every year twenty-five percent of the team arrives new and enamored of the spell. But pros grow leery of too much "motivation." They must act on their cold self-interest given how short and dangerous their careers are. They invest in careers not teams and not coaches who can be fired in a micro-second or who will cut them even faster.

Carroll's style, like Pitino's, is uniquely suited to college; Nick Saban who motivates in a a more fierce but just as intense manner also asks and gains deep emotional and disciplined commitments; but could not expect the same of the pros he coached in Miami. I'm pretty sure this will not end well for Carroll and wish he saw more clearly the "fit" he once revelled between him and USC and college coaching. On the other hand, all coaches intensely compete. Being a competitor defines them; this focused fury and desire to win; to be the best; to extract from others their best; defines elite coaching. Carroll said I thought "I would be here forever," but "I can't pass up a competitive challenge." Behind his ageless California gold boy mystique lay an intense competitor he loved challenges, enjoyed winning (unlike many coaches) and absolutely abhorred losing. But he also looked for new challenges; maybe the moment had come; maybe the challenge beckoned and the pro failures still rankled him. Maybe 9 years of winning and one year of stumbling meant college had lost its magic. I'm not sure.

Second, Kiffin  reveals a more sordid reality of coaching life. Much like Brian Kelly who left Cincinnati on the eve of their most important bowl game for the Notre Dame job; he illustrates the raw ambition and untempered self-interest that can infect all coaching (heck it infects most major American corporations and CEOs). However, the whole enterprise of college athletics depends upon the claim that through athletics, Universities both create a unique form of human excellence, but in doing so help young men and women grow as people, not just athletes. Everything depends upon the coaches. Kiffin's actions teach another lesson, but maybe it is more real, but not one I think colleges want to teach--money and ambition trump loyalty and commitment.

The very men who preach sacrifice, team loyalty, mutual trust abandon the kids (and they are kids) on a moments notice to run to the next best job. So much for the moral power of coaches and college athletics.

(pictures courtesy of LATimes)

Domino's Pizza and the Reality of College Athletics

It was only a matter of time. College football and basketball have become commodities to be consumed by viewers on TV and for a privileged few to view at the stadiums. Big time University programs obsesses over "branding" and spend ten of thousands of dollars on refining their product; targeting their "demographics" (almost never students by the way since they buy so few tickets or products) and working with "sponsors" to give them product placement at games.

It was only a matter of time once sport becomes a commodity for an University to simply give up all pretension that college sports is anything other than a retail business. The University of Michigan, a proud academic institution, fallen on hard sports times, hired David Brandon the CEO of Domino's Pizza to run their athletic department.

Now the University can utilize all the techniques of selling pizza to sell their football and basketball (and hockey since this is Michigan) programs. Brandon actually did some fun commercials, and one thing Dominoes has attempted lately is running commercials that admit their short comings and turn this into challenges to improve quality.

Well he has his hands cut out at Michigan given the festering Rich Rodriguez football mess, the lingering scandals and mediocre basketball teams of recent years. And will somebody figure out how to beat Ohio State, I mean, come on! The once proud Michigan brand, much like Domino's, has fallen on hard times. Maybe a brand expert and pizza seller is what the program needed.

The other interesting issue is how this appointment highlights a harsh and enduring schism between the academic and athletic cultures. At most universities the academic hue (leaving aside Business and Engineering schools) leans liberal and open, as one would expect for institutions dedicated to experimentation and expanding the bounds of knowledge. Brandon's hard right political views and putative political ambitions simply highlight this divide, after all this is the school where Bo Schlembechler coached and presided, but this cultural divide represents one more of the many divides across this shot gun wedding of academics and athletics. I must admit I'm flummoxed by having a supporter of teaching creationism as a senior administrator at a major academic bastion like Michigan.

To be fair, appointing a CEO who is taking an 80 percent salary cut and is doing the job out of love and passion, illuminates another trend. A number of college presidents have grown increasingly disenchanted with the professional pool of athletic directors and the career path many of them follow. The path itself is fraught with multiple role demands from fund raising, to hiring coaches, to managing complex physical plants to being a public spokesperson to managing crisis to actually paying attention to the academic welfare of student athletes. The job, like the university presidency, has become almost impossible. Many university presidents are looking outside the traditional pool of candidates, sometimes it works, sometimes it fails.

One of Brandon's true attractions is that his a a "Michigan man." This means a Bo Schlembechler clone, sort of. He is demanding, hires well and has a finely tuned sense of the integrity and trusteeship of the University (he served a a University trustee), This makes the appointment intriguing because it brings in an outsider who is also an insider. Michigan has gone this route before when President Lee Bollinger hired real estate mogul Bill Martin to serve as AD. Brandon's tenure will be engrossing as a portent of the future, a fascinating experiment and an ironic and sad commentary upon the state of big time college sports.

pictures courtesy of AnnArbor.com &and Domino's Pizza