Month: October 2011

When Will People Stop Playing Violent Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Someone died in an Indy Car race today? Why do people do this to themselves? When will they stop?

Seriously, this is crazy,
Fernando

 

Dear Fernando,

It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?

Dan Wheldon who was a former Indy 500 champion died today during a race in Las Vegas  in a crash that involved 15 cars traveling at over 200 miles an hour. I don’t know what makes people do risky things. In sports there are obvious dangers — car crashes, broken bones, and torn ligaments. Taking a stick, puck, elbow, or fist to the face leaves a visible and sometimes permanent mark of the perilous life of an athlete. We now know there are less visible but still insidious dangers that lurk in the repeated collisions that take place on every play of every football game and practice. I’m not sure what attracts us to sports. Are we attracted in spite of or because of the danger?

When it comes to injuries short of death (and to an increasing extent, brain injuries, but that’s another story…) sports cultures tend to build off the courage and intolerance to pain that are a necessary part of doing anything as physically challenging as playing a sport to create an intolerance to the admission of pain. There is a cliche that there is a line between being hurt and being injured. You can play hurt. You can’t play injured. The line moves a little from sport to sport, but reasonably bizarre things are often on the line of hurt. How far you are willing to push that line for your own body generally has a lot to do with how your teammates and coaches think of you. I played soccer for about 10 years growing up and I am still proud to say that I never missed a game with a “hurt.” Sure, I dislocated each of my kneecaps twice… but those were “injuries.” At the level (low) that I was playing at, this is usually a fairly innocuous attitude to have, but at higher levels, it leads to people pushing their bodies into all sorts of situations that are likely to have long-term effects on their health. This Malcolm Gladwell article made a big splash for its revelations about concussion, but when read carefully, it suggests something else — that willingness to put ones own health at risk for the good of the team is basically selected for throughout youth sports, so that by the time you get to the highest levels of competition, basically everyone is like this.

One would think that death cannot be an extension of this attitude towards your own body. And in fact, I imagine it’s not. But risk of death might apply. There is some risk of death inherent in every sport. It’s certainly higher in sports like football, hockey, cheerleading, boxing, and racing than in sports like baseball, soccer, and basketball. I can’t speak for drivers, but I imagine that like with injury in other sports, people who do not have the quality of being willing to risk their lives in their sport are weeded out long before we ever see them on television.

I don’t know why there are people willing to risk their bodies and their lives for a particular activity, but I do know that for the most part, these are the people who are successful enough to make it to the professional ranks of each sport. It’s almost a catch-22, but the reason drivers are crazy enough to get in cars and risk their lives is because only people that crazy can drive professionally.

Let’s hope risk doesn’t turn to loss again for a long time,
Ezra Fischer

What's Up with Realignment in College Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s up with realignment in college sports? That seems to be all anyone is talking about these days.

Thanks,
Ken

 

Dear Ken,

If you’ve ever wondered why national borders are so messed up — why they break cultural groups in half, ignore obvious geographic boundaries like rivers and mountains, and  geometric conventions like straight lines — then this is the perfect non-violent real life lesson. Over the past couple weeks (and years,) several schools have committed to moving from one conference to another. The borders are shifting.

There’s no need to get into the specifics[1] but suffice it to say that many of them involve relatively impractical moves like Pittsburgh (366 miles from the ocean) into the Atlantic Coast Conference and Texas A&M (Southern, but not particularly Eastern) into the South-Eastern Conference. It’s not all geography — the Big Ten conference now has 12 teams.[2]

The sport that’s driving all of this is football. There’s an enormous amount of money made on college football. According to this CNN article, in 2010 the average school with a football team in one of the major conferences made over a million dollars a game. The important phrase in that sentence is not “over a million,” it’s “major conferences.” Right now the major conferences are the SEC, the Big 10, the Big 12, the Pac 12, the ACC, and the Big East. As these conferences threaten to break up, the member schools are wriggling around in their chairs, trying not to be the last one standing when the music stops. This creates MORE instability, which creates more nervousness, which creates more movement, which creates more instability… I could keep this up all night if it didn’t wear out my suspenders.

There’s nothing I hate more than people who simply argue that everything that once was was better than anything that will be. This is mindless nostalgia, the subject of a recent brilliant essay by Chuck Klosterman,[3] and I will try to avoid it. However, it seems to me that letting the profit from a single sport drive who everyone other athlete in those schools play (and how far they have to travel to do it) is too bad. It’s another sign that the big money college sports, football and basketball, need to be more fully divorced from track and field, swimming, soccer, field hockey, etc. We can have semi-pro football and basketball teams affiliated with universities that do not drag everyone else through this mud and that are not as inherently hypocritical as the “amateur” leagues are now but that still are profitable enough to fund the non-money sports.

Not sure if I answered your question or just added to your list of people who are talking about realignment but thank you for your question.

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Because it’s pretty boring, even to crazy college football fans. This website does a ridiculously compendious job of covering it.↵
  2. They compounded this mistake by dividing the league into two six team divisions, one named “Legends” and one named “Leaders.” Both divisions are made up of teams of college kids.↵
  3. Although I must say… his writing used to be way better in the early aughts…”↵