Subscribe:
RSS feed
Talking about sports. Thinking about other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »moral education«
David Foster Wallace: confessions of a depressed sports fan
Courtesy of Marginal Revolution and a tip from Business Ethics Blogger, Chris MacDonald, here is some food from thought from a 1995 article in Esquire by the great, and unfortunately, late American novelist David Foster Wallace: … it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get […]
“Perfectly unfair”
June 10, 2010
A five-part series of posts on what we learn from a bad call in a regular-season baseball game is more than enough. There will be no Part 6. But I can’t help adding a shout-out to a terrific little column by Robert Wright in The New York Times which I discovered too late. For Wright, […]
Student essay competition on Ethics, Business, and Sport
May 5, 2010
Do you buy into the mission of This Sporting Life and want to earn some cash explaining why? And are you a student? The International Pierre de Coubertin Committee and the UK-based Institute for Business Ethics are offering £2,000 for the best student essay on “Olympic ideals applied to business.” The competition’s overarching aim is […]
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 […]
More on what makes golf great. And not so great.
April 11, 2010
In the last post I sketched out some of the reasons why Tiger fans (and some Tiger haters) like golf. And by “like” in sports I don’t mean merely “enjoy” it or have a “revealed preference” for it. A true sports aficionado likes sports in the way an art-lover or wine-lover likes their thing. As […]
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 […]
“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?
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
August 18, 2010
0