Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

Dope

Posner on doping in sports:

So is the ban on doping athletes just a mindless reaction against novelty and science, a Luddite reaction? Or does it just reflect a confusion between cheating when drugs are banned and lifting the ban? I think not. There are two valid reasons for the ban. One is the pure "arms race" character of the doping; there is no improvement in the entertainment quality of football if 400–pound linemen confront each other rather than 200-pound linemen. In contrast, the overworking law firm associates increase their firm's utput.

The other justification for the ban is that it is a rational means of protecting children. Because successful athletes earn high salaries, because success as an athlete does not require a high order of intelligence, and because an athletic career to be successful must begin in high school (in the case of tennis, perhaps even earlier), there is enormous competition by minors to achieve athletic success. If performance-enhancing drugs were legal, their use by teenagers would be pervasive, and teenagers lack sufficient maturity to trade off the benefits of an athletic career (discounted by the very low probability that any given teenage athlete will have a really successful athletic career) against the long-term damage to their health. Of course adult athletes could be permitted to use such drugs but minors forbidden to do so, but such a legal regime would be difficult to enforce, especially given the "role model" status of adult athletes in the eyes of minors. The lifting of the ban would remove all stigma from the use of such drugs. Their legal and widespread use by star athletes would validate the drugs in the eyes of impressionable youth.

Suffice it to say I think this analysis misses the point. People are interested in bigger, badder, meaner, mroe obese football players; witness, for evidence, the popularity of "The Fridge" in the '80s. (See this morning's earlier post for yet another round of football-bashing, if you're interested.) People are interested in who can belt a home run 600 feet 40 times in a season, and still steal 40 bases in a season (hello, Jose Canseco!).

Etc., etc.

Of course, you may still argue that, to retain the "purity" of sport and competition, it is necessary to ban certain performance-enhancing drugs. But it doesn't follow from any of this that the race to bulk up to monstrous proportions is in any way anything like a nuclear arms race; applying history lessons learned from the 1980s to the world of professional sport is the kind of folly of which only an academic is capable.

I would also add that Posner's counterpart, Gary Becker, destroys any credibility he has on the issue by misspelling Mark McGwire's name. That is sacrilege.

Yankees vs. Evil

Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, the Yankees are busy kicking the shit out of the Red Sox.

At Fenway.

Boston will continue to lick its wounds, and slide ever further into obscurity.

WTF?

The Yankees have suddenly won five in a row, and are now eleven games above .500.

I repeat: WTF?

The team against whom they have won their last two games, the Detroit Tigers, nonetheless still have the best record in baseball, at around .660.

Steroids & Technology

One reason I don't subscribe to the theory that steroid use in baseball (or other sports) threatens to "ruin" those sports is that a similar thing has happened with sports technology over the past decade or so: titanium golf drivers, graphite composite bicycles and tennis rackets, new types of bowling balls, etc., etc.

Further, new advances in physiological medicine, nutrition science, weight-training, and sports psychology have all given professional athletes an edges that participants in bygone eras did not have.

What is so special about the advantages steroids confer on an athlete that they deserve special scorn? The Journal reports on a bowler-activist who has taken to oiling bowling lanes in hopes of diminishing the number of perfect games bowled:

The first official perfect U.S. bowling game was rolled in 1907. It was the only one that year. Two more players managed the feat in 1908. Last year, members of the U.S. Bowling Congress, the sport's amateur association, tallied a record 51,192 perfect games in league and tournament play.

Are today's bowlers so much better than their forebears of a century ago? Mr. Pierson doesn't think so, and most bowling experts agree. They say that bowlers, like golfers and tennis players, are taking advantage of technology to improve their games.

That bothers traditionalists, who say the integrity of some of the world's most nuanced precision games is at risk. Golf officials have tried to fight back by lengthening championship courses and limiting the size of titanium club heads. Former tennis star John McEnroe has called for a return to the wooden racket.

But while golfers are driving farther and tennis players are hitting more aces, they have nothing on bowlers. To score a strike, bowlers are generally aiming to hook the ball into what they call "the pocket," the space between the front pin and the next pin on either side. If the pins are walloped just right, they knock or bounce into one another, and all 10 pins will fall. It used to be an extraordinary feat to knock down all the pins at once a dozen times in succession. Few players had the consistency to do that. But in the late 1980s, the sport began to shift away from polyester balls to super-engineered polyurethane balls with special resins and particles that grip the lanes better and strategically weighted cores that make aiming easier.

The arguments against steroid use are not especially coherent, given that all manner of other technological improvements are seen by sanctioning bodies as legitimate.

Sports and Detroit

Can sports teams' success help a city to grow?

On its face, this question is so utterly ludicrous that it does not even warrant a serious answer. However, many people seem to be of the opinion that a city can, in fact, tie its economic success to its sports teams' athletic prowess.

Sports teams have at best a temporary effect on a city's economic growth and, at worst, an illusory effect which lulls the city's people into a sort of complacency.

A column in the Wall St. Journal purports to ferret out the truth on this issue:

Of course, winning sports teams can't solve an area's underlying problems. Today's Detroit teams worry about fans moving away in search of work. A recent poll shows that 51% of area residents doubt their children and grandchildren will find jobs in the state. "Season-ticket holders pass good seats at Lions games from generation to generation," says Detroit sportscaster Eli Zaret. He likens it to a "sense of patriotism." But if young people move away, local sports seats could go empty. The area's economic troubles are "a colossal wake-up call for all of us," admits the Pistons' Mr. Wilson.

Still, Detroit's teams have a history of lifting residents during hard times. In July 1967, racial rioting left 43 dead and 2,500 stores torched or looted. That summer, Tigers players became civic leaders, with outfielder Willie Horton famously venturing into the riot zone, in uniform, to calm people down.

The following season, in a city beset by white flight and the ruins left by the rioting, residents both black and white celebrated together when the Tigers won the World Series. Many believe the 1968 Tigers gave the city hope, which residents held on to for years afterward.

Of course, that Detroit has been declining for the past forty or fifty years is left unsaid when considering whether sports teams' success can help a city.

Cities grow and prosper because, as Jane Jacobs pointed out, people want to be there. Good sports teams are not a sufficient reason for (most) people to stay in a city.

Apotheosis

When man looks back on the 1980s and 1990s, one of man's crowning achievements of that era will be the growth of Michael Jordan as an athlete, from around the years 1988 through 1994 or so.

In any event, a recent Nike ad, in which kids recapitulate famous plays made by Michael "Air" Jordan over the years, has been generating a lot of buzz, not only because the kids' moves are uncannily recognizeable, but also because the ad, well, it gives you goose bumps.

Now, Nike has re-released the ad, with a montage of the original His Airness on the side, showing, in fact, that the kids' recapitulation of Jordan's physicality is every bit as good as those good bumps would imply.

Michael Jordan is, of course, the apotheosis of human athletic achievement, and he dominated his field in ways that few other men have ever dominated theirs.

More here.

If Shaquille O'Neal Played Tennis...

Wikipedia's entry on Pete Sampras contains this odd statement:

his long arms meant that he could serve like a 210 cm (7 feet) man although he was only 185 cm (6 ft 1 in).

A 7 foot tall man can reach his arm up to a height of roughly 10.5 feet (arm length is roughly half the person's height, per Da Vinci). The statement about Sampras therefore implies that his arms comprise 80% of the height of his body (ten feet being four feet higher than the height of a six foot tall man.)

Even if we assume that Sampras had unusually long arms, it seems a stretch to claim that each of his arms was equal in length to eighty percent of his height. That would imply that his arms reached below his knees! Someone needs to check their geometry. Even the swimmer Michael Phelps, who is said to derive much of his success from very long arms, seems to have arms of normal length.

Naismith, Etc.

Not being much of a college basketball fan, this is all I will say about my alma mater's team: they will get crushed by the Harvard of the South tomorrow.

Me, I will have better things to do than watch basketball. I get to go to Masa for sushi and not pay for it!

Sportswriters

The Wikipedia entry for Roger Bannister contains this curious, and accurate, assessment of sportswriters:

The claim that a four-minute mile was once thought to be impossible was and is a myth cooked up by sportswriters -- never the most rigorous of thinkers -- and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile, 1955.

Seems to me that I recall more than one sportswriter making the claim that Michael Jordan's infamous leaping ability was due to his musculature. The implication being that the sufficiently well-muscled have greater leaping abilities than we mere mortals. Were this line of reasoning cogent, it should follow that Dorian Yates and Arnold Schwarzenegger could also dunk basketballs from the foul line.

It seems more plausible to assert that Jordan's unusual leaping ability is a function of his unusually well-developed spatial awareness. This would be true of other dunkers as well, or even those soccer players such as Freddy Adu, who are renowned for their uncanny footwork.

But I digress--sportswriters are, as a lot, rather incoherent and lazy in their thinking.

Barry Bonds Does Paula Abdul

Barry Bonds dressed as Paula Abdul.

He looks obese in this picture, though that may be because of his musculature and the angle of the shot.

The New York Times Lies!

The New York Times reports that a black man won a medal at the Winter Olympics.

Clearly, this is not true, as Bryant Gumbel pointed out that the Winter Olympics, like the GOP, is devoid of blacks.
Damn MSM.

(Those who do not see the humor in this post are missing the point.)

Stupid Bowl Ads

So Google has a link to all the Stupid Bowl ads I was smart enough not to see last night.

I clicked on the link curious to see what kinds of stuff they advertise for...and it's all rather dull and boring.

Budweiser tastes like piss--its blue collar appeal has never made any sense to me. Give me a Belgian or German lager.

There are some things I understand...and then there is the Stupid Bowl.

Stupid Bowl

Football is an uncouth, stupid sport.

There are those who would disagree with that statement; I say it's unfortunate they can't see the light.

This idiot should put to rest the idea that football has any redeeming qualities.

Surely man can aspire to greater heights than this.

Wilt & Kobe

And now for a rare post about sports.

Wilt Chamberlain played basketball in an era in which he was the only person close to seven feet tall. He scored 100 points in one game in 1962.

Kobe Bryant, who is Michael Jordan's height, falls squarely in the middle of professional basketball players' height distribution. Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in last night's game.

I aver that Bryant's was the greater achievement, given (1) there are many players around his height and (2) there are many players significantly taller than he.

The assumption in this argument is that height confers great advantages in basketball. It should have been easier for Chamberlain to have scored 100 points in an era in which he was the tallest player by far than in Bryant's era, in which Bryant's height is but middling.

Obviously, there is a caveat to this assumption: height alone is not a sufficient condition for a scoring advantage. Another condition is that a person of great height be able to move with celerity and efficiency. Shawn Bradley and Manute Bol were marginal players, but Shaquille O'Neal, David Robisnon, and Patrick Ewing were all very effective seven foot tall players. Robinson and O'Neal were more dominating than Ewing, to be sure, but it's still true that height confers great advantage to those players who can move effectively.

Bloody Socks

The best way to remember the Red Sox World Series victory is...a bloody sock? Even this lifelong Yankees fan will concede that the baleful Red Sox achieved something with their World Series victory (to say nothing of embarrassing the Yankees in the ALCS)...but, surely the Hall of Fame could have picked something better than a bloody sock?

There's a joke there somewhere, about a bloody sock and Boston's decades-long wait for a World Series victory, but I can't find it.