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Talking about sports. Thinking about other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »identity«
Signaling – and Sharing – your Sports Fandom
Here are a few more reflections inspired by the discussion over at Overcoming Bias of nerds using game-playing to signal social messages to the world outside the game. (Robin Hanson’s original post was here, my first extrapolation to the situation of sports fans was here, and his brief comment on that is here.) This Sporting […]
Nerds v. Jocks: twin brothers from different mothers?
August 28, 2010
OK, it’s not exactly Superman v. Batman, but a pretty fierce and very nerdy debate has erupted following a post over at Overcoming Bias, and continuing on at Marginal Revolution (two of the consistently smartest blogs in the ‘sphere). Why do nerds — for want of a better term, though we may also be talking […]
World Cup Memories
August 19, 2010
A month after the end of the World Cup, I think it is about time I close a few tabs on my browser that have been holding particularly memorable reflections on that delirious month in the early summer. Here are a few quotes. I like this from the English novelist Tim Parks, in the New […]
World Cup diary #3: the beginning of the end
June 28, 2010
A busy travel schedule has allowed me to see most of the matches so far, to keep up on the press and bloggers, yet not to comment much myself. But now the real tournament has begun, in the second round. I’ll be blogging regularly from here on in. It’s hard to give a comparative assessment […]
Root, root, root for…the underdog
May 16, 2010
In the previous post I began with the intention of quickly introducing a link my colleague David Wong sent me to a fun article in Slate called “The Underdog Effect: why do we love a loser?” But before I could think about why some of us cheer for underdogs, I couldn’t help pausing to worry […]
Why is hockey analysis always so lame? Part 3: It’s hard
May 10, 2010
I’m obviously making this up as I go along; but if you’ve read Why is hockey analysis (almost) always so lame? Part 1 and Part 2, thanks for bearing with me. So far I have talked mostly about the ways in which hockey analysis (on TV, in the daily press) is so frustratingly superficial. I […]
Ernie Harwell, legendary baseball broadcaster dead at 92
May 4, 2010
One of the last of the legendary (and I think that word is appropriate here) baseball broadcasters dies last night after a year-long bout with cancer. He is most famous for covering Tigers’ games, from the late 1950s until 2002; but he already had a decade of big-league broadcasting under his belt before he arrived […]
Why is hockey analysis almost always so lame? Part 1
May 4, 2010
My friend Andrew Potter (author of the sizzling new book The Authenticity Hoax) tweeted a link on Friday [when I began writing this post] to a compelling contrast between the two biggest stars in the world of ice hockey, the Russian Alexander Ovechkin and the Canadian Sydney Crosby. The column in question was by Steve Simmons, who has covered hockey […]
Why the NCAA basketball Tournament is the “American Idol” of sports
April 25, 2010
[Warning: What follows is an overly long post, even by the standards of this rambling blog. It is summarized over the last 3 paragraphs or so.] At some point during the month-long March Madness gabfest on sports talk-radio Mike Greenberg (on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning”) was railing against proposals to expand the tournament […]
What can we learn from Tiger?
April 11, 2010
Tiger Woods could be the poster child for This Sporting Life. When I began this blog I identified four broad areas of interest for me at intersection of sports-philosophy-sociology. Thinking about sports can tell us a lot about punditry, institutional design and ethics (or sportsmanship), cultural identities, and what it is that we find beautiful […]
Are women’s sports “separate but equal”?
March 19, 2010
We are rightly suspicious of arguments that justify institutional arrangements that promise to be “separate but equal.” These three conjoined words have had a unique ring in American culture ever since the landmark unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education case (1954). The Court declared that “separate educational facilities are […]
Meta-bracketology, part 2: Madness by design
March 12, 2010
I am willing to defend the NCAA’s current system for selecting the 65 teams in the national championship Tournament. But first a confession. I am also willing to admit that I know very little about basketball. I guess I know as much as most casual fans: I can follow the ball with the best of […]
Why Medal Counts Don’t Really Count
March 4, 2010
You have to wonder what the ancient Greeks talked about after their Olympic games finished. (I mean, we know what the modern Greeks talked about, or should have talked about, after their Olympics: how the hell are we ever going to pay for this?! Does anybody here have any connections at Bear Stearns?) After all, […]
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 […]
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 
August 28, 2010
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