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Talking about sports. Thinking about other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »partisanship«
Shameless “Linsanity” link
In an over-committed personal and professional life — which includes teaching, overseeing another blog, being an editor of an academic journal, trying to get better on electric guitar, running, Bikram yoga, and refereeing on-going incidents involving two house-bound tomcats — this blog seems to have drawn the short straw for the time being. But to […]
Is there nothing we can’t sportify?
February 22, 2011
Sumo, discussed in the previous post, is a rare example of a sport that is threatening to desportify. Perhaps the last one to do this was “professional” wrestling, which began as a version of one of the oldest competitions known to humans — hell, to beasts — and replaced the entire competitive element with scripted […]
Is sumo a real sport?
February 22, 2011
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about sumo wrestling over at Ethics for Adversaries. A lot of the stuff I used to blog about here — especially issues over rules, regulations, and norms of sportsmanship — is also fair game over there, but I will try to at least cross-reference posts that could fit […]
Gamesmanship, showmanship, and sportsmanship, in Jets-v-Patriots
January 19, 2011
I have a keen fascination with the territory between sportsmanship and gamesmanship in sports and other adversarial institutions. That is, between “the high road” of following both the letter and the spirit of the rules, on the one hand, and the “low road” of cheating within the rules, or of cheating when you think you […]
The end of the beginning of the 2010 NFL season
October 4, 2010
A well-rounded sport-spectator experience involves following several sports through the course of the year. Different sports showcase different features that make sports spectatorship rewarding: from the mental determination and courage of individual athletes in, say, golf, tennis, or the marathon, struggling to maintain focus in the face of self-doubt, pain, and exhaustion; to the perfectly […]
Should we all root for the Washington Generals?
September 23, 2010
US Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito visited the Law School at my university last week, and worked in a curious sports reference for those interested in reading the tea leaves of his moral psychology. We all want to know how those on the bench decide cases when the law itself is unclear and they have […]
More on “Why no gatherer-sports?”
September 18, 2010
[This post picks up where the previous one left off. Both are jumping off from a question posed on the blog Overcoming Bias. Somehow two weeks elapsed since that last post — coincidentally the onset of my fall teaching term at Duke.] It seems to make sense to enquire about the “primordial” roots of either […]
Blemishes on the beautiful game, part 1: Luddite officiating and the ethics of diving
July 6, 2010
It’s been a terrific World Cup so far. We all have to keep our fingers crossed for the semi-finals and the finals being as intriguing as the quarters, because our individual and collective memories of the overall quality of any given World Cup lean heavily on the quality of those contests. The nil-nil draw and […]
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 […]
Root, root, root for…some team or other
May 15, 2010
An uncharitable, but not wholly inaccurate, line on This Sporting Life is that it’s all about how to be a sports snob while still being a genuine sports fan. Of course, nobody wants to admit they’re a snob. (“Connoisseur” is so much more urbane.) If you’re into the themes of this blog, you really like […]
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
February 18, 2012
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