23rd January 2012
Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports
“I think we’re pretty much done with the Are Games Art? question. How about this one: Are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn’t put it that way.) Many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set systems made dynamic by human interaction, out of which some kind of “story” emerges. This is, in fact, what excites a lot of us about video games: a brand-new narrative form, etc., etc., but here is my question: Sport itself is another such rule-set system, isn’t it? It’s based on just that kind of rules-meets-human-interaction dynamism and permits almost exactly that kind of emergent “story” to appear. Remember that the whole crux of the Ebert Position1 was that sports — and, thus, games — aren’t art but rather activity, no matter how beautiful and compelling said activity can be from the spectator’s point of view. Art, though, has intent and direction, meaning and submeaning, and is definitively not something that happens to arise within seemingly arbitrary rule sets.
12th January 2012
The Fragile Teenage Brain
“If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion.
30th December 2011
Test of Time
“ESPN covets the international sports market, so The Boss dispatched me overseas for a cricket match between India and England. This made sense, as I’d recently covered the Cricket World Cup on the subcontinent. I knew the rules and knew that a Test match was the original and purest form of cricket, a game that can go on for five days. Forty hours. I thought the same thing any sane person would think: How can a sporting event that lasts five days possibly still exist?
6th December 2011
Monday Night Lights
“There is no rational way to explain the amount of time that Gruden invests in each “Monday Night Football” broadcast: he spends days memorizing the names, numbers, and tendencies of all fifty-three players on both teams, even though little of this information makes it onto the broadcast. Once he has a sense of each team, he starts editing, creating a series of four-minute demonstration reels, known as “cutups,” to share with his producers and fellow-broadcasters, partly so they can create highlight clips for the show, and partly so that he can be sure they know what he’s talking about. When he is finished compiling a cutup, he sits with the Cowboy clicker in his left hand and a mouse in his right hand, so that he can run back and forth over the plays and draw emphatic arrows and circles, while he records an audio commentary track.
5th December 2011
Out of Thin Air
“The lowest point of his career occurred at the highest point he raced. Mexico City is surrounded by mountains and is over 7,000 feet above sea level. That the altitude would have an impact on the Games was predicted. Clarke had raised concerns himself, but had been told by the Australian sports authorities that whingeing was bad sportsmanship. Since those Olympics, however, scientists have stepped up their investigation into the link between athletic performance and altitude. This research, in turn, raises some deceptively simple questions, which have bafflingly complex answers. What counts as sport? What is its purpose: what are the rules designed to achieve, designed to measure? Where does sport end, and science and technology begin? The difficulty of these matters, and the lack of any clear principles, have made sporting authorities at times appear capricious and contradictory.
7th November 2011
Alberto Salazar and the New York City Marathon
“For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance. Salazar has been widely credited with resuscitating the career of Alan Webb, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy miler, and with guiding the ascent of two female American record holders, Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley.
2nd March 2011
Smash
““The guy’s driving me fucking nuts ringing me up every hour of the day telling me how well he’s playing,” Tim Boggan confided to me on the first morning of the Open in Fort Lauderdale. “But he’s living in a fool’s paradise. Sure, he’s practising, but against the same opponent. Steve Berger. Always Steve Berger. He isn’t tournament-hardened. My heart says yes. But he’s got no chance.” You listen to Tim Boggan. Himself one of the game’s old hardbat lions, he is American ping-pong’s most impassioned historian, a one-time English professor at Long Island University whose specialty was Romantic and Victorian poetry but whose true love was always table tennis; a grizzled, exasperated man with an icy beard, dreaming thwarted dreams, another mariner chasing the gleaming margins of the untraveled world. So you listen to what Tim Boggan’s heart says, as well.
But then whose heart doesn’t say yes to Marty? He is the fatal Odysseus you have to follow beyond the sunset. Succeed or fail, just one more voyage. Opinions differ as to whether Marty Reisman was America’s greatest ping-pong player ever, but he was certainly its boldest adventurer, lifting the prestigious British Open title when he was only 19, enlivening a doleful postwar European ping-pong community with Lower East Side effrontery, an extrovert belligerent with one of the loveliest and most lethal forehands you could hope to see, a natural who seemed to be inventing the game anew every time he played it. And now here he is, over half a century since he first became United States National Junior Champion, wanting another shot at another title. Of course the heart says yes.
24th January 2011
The Final Days of Favre
“There may have been a point where Brett Favre played football because he loved it. But he kept playing it long after it made sense, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He never bothered to create another identity. The fact that others conspired to bestow this shallowness with meaning and virtue isn’t Brett Favre’s fault. I use my one question here to ask him about “life after football.” He instantly shoots back, “Is there?” It functions as a laugh line in this room of reporters—and Favre is indeed quite funny in other parts of the presser (“I think my stubbornness, my hardheadedness, and stupidity at times has enabled me to play for twenty years”)—but when Favre says the thing about life after football, he isn’t smiling.
19th January 2011
The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots
“With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?
