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Talking about sports. Thinking about other stuff.
Browsing All Posts published on »February, 2010«
How to Broadcast Curling: notes for 2014
Most sporting events I watch on TV are broadcast exactly the way they were when I was a kid and TVs were small, square, and mostly black-and-white. And even worse, games on TV are still “called” the way they were on radio when my dad was a kid, with the play-by-play guy (yes, in the […]
Chess on Ice; Chess Board on Pants
February 28, 2010
There’s an irresistible cliché for broadcasters of many sports: the “chess match.” Often an announcer is simply pointing out that there’s a tight back-and-forth battle going on. But to make sense of the metaphor there has to be some strategic rationality, where player A tries to predict what B will do before A makes her […]
How Good is Women’s Hockey?
February 26, 2010
Pretty good, that’s how good. The gold-medal game, like all of the games I can remember between the only two consistently-elite women’s teams — Canada and the USA — was certainly a thrill from start to finish. But when we ask, “how good is it?” we usually mean, “how does it compare to men’s hockey?” […]
The Russians Weren’t Coming
February 26, 2010
What happened to the Russian men’s hockey team in their much-hyped showdown against arch-rivals Canada last night? On paper the teams were evenly matched, and clearly the most talented two teams in the tournament, with 7 of the top 8 NHL goal-scorers between them. And yet the Canadians dominated every facet of the game, including […]
“Sports are holy”
February 24, 2010
Surely what most of us Olympics skeptics react to is not the Games themselves, but the way they are packaged and presented. And I found at least part of the explanation for this on the flight home in Esquire magazine's Olympic preview by Stephen Marche, which asks in its title, Are the Olympics Ruining Everything?
Kitsch as the natural aesthetic of nationalism
February 17, 2010
Again, I can’t claim to have watched carefully all of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in recent years. Even the highlights are usually painful. But this quote from Michael Ignatieff in 1993, with Yugoslav civil wars and a recent visit to an exhibition of Nazi “art” fresh in his mind, clarifies a few things: “There is […]
We are more. And less.
February 16, 2010
As a Canadian expatriate — some might say, ex-patriot — I have to say, those opening ceremonies in Vancouver were brutal to watch. If I’d watched them in a room full of friends here in North Carolina, I would have been apologizing on my native country’s behalf. And, of course, my friends here would have […]
Putting American football to bed for awhile
February 13, 2010
(Originally posted 10 Feb. 2010) It’s always kind of surprising how quickly a sport disappears from our minds within a day or so of its championship game. For many true fans of the sport — i.e. not simply fans of a particular team, who lose interest as soon as their team is eliminated from the […]
Of balls and brains
February 13, 2010
(Originally posted 8 Feb. 2010) In a world steeped in traditions and wives’ tales, it takes courage to be sensible. Prairie women of my grandmother’s generation were sure that the best way to kill germs in milk was to boil it. But it turns out this also kills “good” bacteria, which makes milk more susceptible […]
Thus Spake Football Outsiders
February 13, 2010
(Originally posted 7 Feb. 2010) If you don’t think you have the stomach (figuratively and, perhaps, literally) for several hours of pre-game hype on TV today, but would actually like some useful pre-game analysis, spend some time with this lengthy breakdown by the stat-inventin’, amateur play-chartin’, number-crunchin’ wizards at Football Outsiders. If you don’t know […]
Football fallacies
February 13, 2010
As I begin typing these words, the NFL season has 25 hours and one game to go. I have listened to about 13 days of chatter about who will win that one game and why. And in general, a season’s worth of prognosticating is fresh in mind. Brian Burke argued, in a NYT blog post […]
Art follows life
February 13, 2010
Some of us like sports for the same reason we like, say, movies. For the drama. I am often mildly troubled by the fact that spoiler-alerts are even more important in sports than they are in movies. Why does the drama depend so heavily on our ignorance of the outcome? I typically record games rather […]
The sporting soul
February 13, 2010
David Brook’s column today is one of the relatively rare ones on those two pages of The New York Times to fall right into the wheelhouse of this blog. The fact that it popped into the NYT’s current “top-10 most popular” list gives me some hope there could be an audience for This Sporting Life. First, a […]
Prognosticating big games
February 13, 2010
Brian Burke’s explanation of his skepticism about his own Super Bowl predictions in a NY Times blog is the best thing I’ve come across over in this fortnight between the NFL conference championships and the Big Game. This is a period of time when the ratio of chatter-to-football approaches infinity. What’s most interesting is not […]
Some-stars game
February 13, 2010
I can’t remember the last time I watched the NFL’s all-star game, which is mysteriously called the “Pro Bowl.” My dad watches it every year. But he’s an NFL junkie, and coming a week after the Super Bowl, it was always his only available hit of football methadone to ease him into a long winter, […]
This sporting life = This life
February 12, 2010
I hope this will be the last “programmatic” post for a while. And the last time I ever post the word “programmatic.” How is the sporting life like the life life? Here is a quick list of four themes I’m often drawn back to. Punditry. We live in the world of the 24-hour news cycle. In […]
Play ball!
February 8, 2010
This is a blog about politics, philosophy, sociology, and punditry. But it will talk exclusively about sports; usually spectator sports. My working hypothesis is that the way we think and talk about sports isn’t just analogous to the way we think and talk about some other important things in life – like business and politics. It […]
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
February 28, 2010
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