Pastime to Present
Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite
and furthermore always carry a small snake.
One hundred years ago, Barking Carnival would have been blogging enthusiastically about America’s three obssessions: baseball, boxing and horseracing. Blogging back then largely consisted of standing on a street corner crate shrieking incoherent opinions about immigrants while backed by a bevy of Irish toughs wearing bowler hats set at a rakish angle; which, incidentally, is exactly what I was doing when I was discovered by the Barking Carnival talent scout. He gave me a keyboard, all the Crystal Lite I could drink, and paid me in chits giving me access only to the overpriced perishable goods in the company store. Why would I consent to this? You see, a pimp’s love is very different from a square’s love…
I digress. Back to baseball, boxing, horseracing. These sports ruled the American sport consciousness and were embraced equally between rich and poor. Quicker than one of Pac Man’s entourage can say,”Oh my Ga, Uncle Boo got shot!” our sporting interests have schismed like a Protestant Revival church and evolved like JKocurek’s landlord’s hate when he tries to pay him with a sock full of arcade tokens and a hastily scribbled IOU on an Arby’s napkin.
In 2008, other than King Football and Prince Basketball, the niche sports all jockey for position across myriad geographical, demographic, and socio-economic markets: MMA, extreme whatever, beach volleyball, tennis, cycling, hockey, backgammon, bullfighting. It’s a good bet that if you ask someone their favorite three sports, they’ll reply with two mass market traditionals (football, basketball) and one exotic. For me it’s Football, Basketball, Mixed Martial Arts. For Henry James it’s Extreme Embroidery, Napping, and Competitive Sarcasm.
This Jack Johnson scored more white strange than the current Jack Johnson.
In 2008, my passion for boxing is shared by bilingual swarthy guys pouring concrete and the elderly. Quick - can you name the heavyweight champion(s) without aid from Google? Any red blooded male who couldn’t name the heavyweight champ between 1900-1980 would have been hooted at, if not outright gaybashed. Now, we both shrug at each other and agree that it’s some fucking Moldovian or Ukranian. Nations whose primary exports are sex slaves and bogus heavyweights. Somewhere a weeping Bert Sugar drives a cigar into a lamb’s eye.
People used to care about this. No, really.
Horseracing, once the passion of the common man, is the now the sole province of a handful of elites and degenerate Vegas types - the fat Armenian guys clothed in muu-muu starter jerseys and rolexes betting on Australian Rules Football at 2:43 am in the Hooters sportsbook, pissing themselves when Adelaide doesn’t cover against Melbourne. The Kentucky Derby is revered primarily as a spectacle rather than an actual sporting event and it gets national coverage to the extent to which women tune in to look at pretty horses and to see what Jessica Simpson is wearing on Millionaires Row. “I wish I had more events to which I could wear big hats!” they lament with a sigh before slipping on their faded Team Aniston t-shirt and heading to Spin class. Dog fighting has a bigger following than horseracing. Maybe they should have Big Brown fight a rock-wylla to raise public interest. Jockeys, like celebrities, are all mean pill-popping alcoholics who are far shorter when you meet them in person. Like all has been celebs, they need a reality show to draw interest. Show them fucking up a McDonald’s playscape. Equine interest is as dead as Barbaro.
The great Cy Young shown here stacking Dianabol. He’ll smooth that stack with a little HGH around Week 4 and then top it off with baboon tranquilizers.
Though baseball has not been completely overthrown in the national pantheon as the two aforementioned, it was for a century the only team sport that mattered. Now it’s solidly #3 behind football and basketball. Wrestling on TNT has more relevance at the average American water cooler. Like horseracing, baseball’s pleasant atmosphere counts for more than the sport itself. A baseball game is a way for guys to catch some sun together without the shame of asking another dude if he wants to go lay out. The events on the diamond are secondary. I’ll have baseball fans debate this point, but the American enthusiasm for this game is currently an inch deep and a mile wide. Baseball is facing an 0-2 count with Popular Opinion on the mound and it possesses a fastball that makes Bob Feller look like Tim Wakefield. Watch out baseball, faggy soccer is breathing down your neck and say what you will about it, but it really does have amazing hair.
Now the question is simple: one hundred years from now, what sports will rule our lives? MMA? Soccer (think demographic shift people)? Will football still reign as undisputed king? Will rugby rise from obscurity? Or will we all just devolve into secular hobbyists: mountain biking, snowboarding, jetpack races?
My personal opinion is that if MMA were a stock, you should be backing up the truck to buy.
Who wants a Zrrrrbbbbbtttt?
Tell me: what does our future hold?
May 9, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Give me boxing over cuddling, errr, MMA.
May 9, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Does this last pic remind anyone else of CA and his dog?
(Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you.)
May 9, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Man. Poor ChrisApplewhite is getting thrown under the bus on this dog issue.
May 9, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I sincerely hope baseball fades into nothingness, sooner rather than later.
May 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Man, you’re way off-base when it comes to proper football (aka “soccer”–you know, the game that’s actually played by foot!). Everywhere outside the USofA it’s a religion attended by tribal zealots, and nothing can compare to its menace on match day in other parts of the world. Sure, no matter the league on any continent you’ll find your namby-pambies, but that’s really a sidelight to the visceral thrills. And what’s sport without panto villains?! The problem in the US is that it’s been co-opted by those that can’t compete in the more established sports, so we Americans tend to see it as effete. Almost everywhere else the elite athletes want to be footballers first, which leads to an expression of the game at a much higher level.
Look at this:
Don’t be afraid of it just because Europeans like it! Even the worst indulgences compare favorably to the NBA’s “All-Star foul”. I’m not trying to glorify hooliganism, but there’s a good reason why football gets ‘em wet.
May 9, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Argentina is not in Europe, damn it! I just checked the map.
May 10, 2008 at 3:34 am
Is the fact that David Mamet just released a MMA movie (”Redbelt”) a sign of its ascendency, or its coming demise?
Used to be a huge baseball fan; it lost me when the players started muscling (’roiding) up. You used to think they were just good athletes (with exceptional reflexes) who focused on their craft. Caminiti showed that an average player could dominate the league if he injected enough.
May 10, 2008 at 6:20 am
you overestimate pro basketball. The NBA is on life support. Baseball still draws pretty good crowds. If I were rating the American pantheon, Football comes in 1st, base/basket ball tie at a distant second, and the rest is niche.
I hate soccer. So Boring. So very, very boring. Hockey has all the good of soccer, takes away all the pussy stuff, and adds 100% sheer manliness. Plus the hockey crowds are rough. fun stuff
May 10, 2008 at 6:22 am
Football and basketball are team sports.
I have yet to see a good plan for turning MMA into an entertaining team sport. It’s an individual vs. individual thing. Always will be.
It will never compete with the natural instinct whereby sports fans want to associate themselves with a team. There have, of course, been psychological studies done showing that sports fans that associate themselves strongly with a team are less likely to suffer from depression. I believe it was theorized that fans rationalize their team’s successes as their own (Fuck yeah! We’re National Champions!) and the team’s failures as the team’s fault (Greg Davis is an assclown).
I find it hard to believe that MMA fans can internalize a fighter’s success as their own given the individual nature. MMA is in a battle against boxing, tennis, golf, etc. for king of individual sports. I personally think it will win that battle.
May 10, 2008 at 7:27 am
Irish Hurling. Of course.
Then college football.
College basketball.
College baseball.
Major League baseball.
The rest barely get my attention.
Soccer definitely has significant room for growth in the US (I could have typed that same sentence in 1978, 1988, you get my point) but I do believe regardless at whatever level it does finally plateau, for Americans it will remain far behind football and still behind basketball and baseball (less confident on basketball and more confident on baseball).
Fighting, martial arts et al - don’t ever see it with a high interest in the general populace for a number of reasons, including you will never get most women to sign off on it.
May 10, 2008 at 11:38 am
First, pro-basketball is not decisively more popular than baseball. I am not sure that it is more popular at all. I would have to see some numbers (ie TV ratings) to accept that. I know for a fact however that baseball far outdraws basketball. Even the best basketball teams would have a hard time filling a 35 000 seat stadium. Many baseball teams drawn much better than this and do it despite playing twice as many games.
Second, MMA has some problems. Any talented athlete can step in and compete at near the highest level of sport with just minimal training, witness a pro-wrestler doing well now against top flight competition despite less than a year of technical instruction. This isn’t true for boxing. Technique is far more important in this sport because it is much easier to defend against the lucky knockout punch. This means that name-brand boxers can last a decade or more in their sport where as the silvas and chuck lidells flame out much more quickly.
Also I think you pronouncement of boxing being dead is much premature. I believe that last year boxing retook the distinction of having better PPV receipts than MMA after temporarily losing that bragging right. This despite the fact that the heavyweight division is still in shambles.
May 10, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I’m pretty much with Black Scholes on the list.
As to the soccer thing, the Euros invented soccer and we invented basketball. Enough said.
May 10, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Amen, Scholes. Hurling is truly awesome. My brother goes to Croke Park for the All-Ireland most years now. I hope to take it in one day.
May 10, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Charrd:
I really don’t have a problem with soccer per se. Every few years I give the World Cup a try with an open mind. The energy and passion of the fan bases are undeniable. It just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe if Brazil’s culture of play dominated, I’d like it better. But Italy was as boring as watching paint dry. The flopping gets to me as well.
Taylor:
Red Belt getting made is a good thing. Mamet is a jiu-jitus enthusiast and it’s clear that he saw some parallels between the artist in both vocations. MMA has a sharp demographic delineation. No one over 40 gets it or likes it. Every remotely aggressive guy I know under 40 loves it.
doog:
The words “pro basketball” are nowhere in my post. I’m talking about basketball. High school, college, pro - the weekend pickup games at Enfield in Austin. It beats baseball. College baseball is a regional non-entity on par with college hockey; college basketball and March Madness dominate the sports culture in ways even college football can’t touch in many parts of this country. I kind of hate the NBA actually. I’m just describing the world as it is.
Scholes:
Regarding women and MMA, you’d be very surprised at the off-the-charts level of hotties found in the crowds at all of the major events.
honk:
See my comments to doog regaring pro basketball.
Boxing isn’t dead. I love boxing. But it’s not a dominant sport by any means. The hold it had on our popular consciousness between 1900 and 1980 was considerable. It was THE SPORT discussed when a group of men got together for a beer. That no longer exists.
As for your MMA comments, oh my. Where shall we begin?
You wrote:
Any talented athlete can step in and compete at near the highest level of sport with just minimal training, witness a pro-wrestler doing well now against top flight competition despite less than a year of technical instruction.
The cage is littered with the carcasses of athletic phenoms who ran into some skinny kid with three years of jiu-jitsu and got choked out in 20 seconds. You didn’t follow the rise of this sport very closely. Ever hear of the Gracies?
You don’t understand the other fighting disciplines at all if you think Western boxing has the market cornered on skill. A modern MMA champ has to have all three tools: submissions, ground fighting, stand up. That’s the evolution that makes the game so exciting. Have you ever wrestled with a high level college wrestler? Or rolled with a jiu-jitsu black belt? Fucked around with a Thai boxer? I have. They’re skilled, trust me.
In fact, the very artificiality of certain aspects of boxing are what makes it an incomplete martial art. And I say that humbly as an enthusiast where my skills best rest personally.
I assume you’re referring to Brock Lesnar with the pro wrestler comment. Brock Lesnar is one of the most decorated amateur wrestlers in American history. He was a national champion wrestler at Minnesota and finished his amateur career as a two-time NJCAA All-American, two-time NCAA All-American, two-time Big Ten Champion, and the 2000 NCAA heavyweight champion with a record of 106-5 overall in four years of college. He’s also an athletic freak with more HGH in his system than Barry Bonds multiplied by Roger Clemens. So newsflash: wrestling is a martial art. It’s one of the core martial arts and if you don’t know how to fight on the ground, you don’t know how to fight. Period. Brock Lesnar has one of the key components for success in the game - his ultimate rise will depend on his ability to add the other two tools. That you’re trying to pass him off as just some entertainer with a good bench press who took up MMA as a passing hobby is absurd.
In his only appearance in the UFC, he lost to Frank Mir - a borderline Top 10 heavyweight - in a minute and 30 seconds. The submission he fell into could have been avoided by most Brazilian schoolchildren.
I’ve boxed, wrestled and done jiu-jitsu and the time and skill level commitment in each discipline is exactly the same. The UFC is littered with former Olympic gold medalist wrestlers - elite explosive athletes - who were utterly destroyed in the Octagon. Do you know who gold medalist Kevin Jackson is? This is what happens to a guy who doesn’t understand submissions - his off the chart athleticism notwithstanding:
That’s one clip. I could post dozens more supporting my point. There are some wrestler one tool guys who adapted their game and learned the stand up and submission world and became legends (Dan Henderson, Randy Couture - both Greco-Roman, which is not a coincidence). If you can’t fight on your feet and on the ground, you will be exposed in today’s world of MMA.
I can tell you with great confidence that if Mike Tyson in his prime stepped into the Octagon without 18 months of drilling takedown defense and submission defense, he’d be submitted and/or mounted and knocked unconscious by a quality MMA heavyweight in less than a minute.
May 10, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Huck:
You make an interesting point and I like your categorization between team and individual dynamics. However, you understand that fundamentally boxing and horseracing are the ultimate individual sports? And they were ascendant for quite some time. How do you explain their incredible grip on our sporting consciousness for decades?
People identified pretty strongly with Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Ali, Tyson…they were rock stars. Folks lived and died with their success. They wept when Dempsey lost to Gene Tunney. America exploded in ecstacy when Louis beat Schmeling. Ali was the poster boy for the counter culture…you get my point. Don’t get me started on Secretariat or Man O War.
Look at the Lance Armstrong worship and its responsibility for the growth of American cycling. Not much coverage for US Postal as a team.
However, I readily concede what I think is one of your broader points: teams are eternal. They are always us. Individuals rise, fall, grow old.
May 11, 2008 at 12:39 am
Pretending to be hurt = Faggy Communist Sport
May 11, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Pretending to be hurt = Faggy Communist Sport
You mean, like when a guy’s taken off “the pitch” in an ambulance with a sheet over him, and then suddenly pops back to life on the sideline as soon as the ref pulls out the red card? Right out of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Playbook.
May 11, 2008 at 9:21 pm
No doubt that individual sports and their stars can be immensely popular. My only point is that MMA is not in a battle with football and basketball.
American entertainment in all its forms will always have a place for celebrity and hero worship. That’s what Ali, Armstrong, Secretariat, etc. are examples of. But idolizing individuals just won’t ever be the downfall of team sports. You got my point, though, so no need to expand on it. There are lots of people out there that want to feel like they’re part of a winner. When your favorite fighter wins you can say I told you so or be excited. But I just don’t see how a fan could ever feel like he won a championship when that happens.
Meanwhile, I can’t imagine how many people said “We did it!” within the first 2 minutes of the end of the Rose Bowl against USC. Even though the fans really didn’t do anything. I certainly said it even though it didn’t and doesn’t really make any sense to say that. “We” doesn’t apply, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like “we” sometimes.
May 11, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Discussions like this never go anywhere. Just inevitably descends into sweeping generalizations and people bashing what they don’t understand or have the eye to appreciate, be it Italy, MMA or whatever. Just enjoy what you enjoy without crusading to convert everyone else.
May 12, 2008 at 6:37 am
nice post,
I don’t consider baseball to be a team sport. Outside of the pitcher-catcher relationship. You could basically put any number of able players on a field with the same uniform and perform. When there is a mistake you single out the person with an error.
Is there any other major sport where an all-star team can just come together and play like this? There is not even a scheme or a system on offense/defense.
May 12, 2008 at 6:54 am
I don’t watch MMA so my observations may be incorrect. But it seems that identifying with individuals in that sport is difficult because those individuals are not on top for very long. It seems like every time I pay attention to the sport, there is some new guy that everyone is celebrating. Then I’ll pay attention a year later, and that dude is done.
May 12, 2008 at 7:42 am
vanderlei:
Baseball is definitely the most individualistic team sport. In fact, I don’t know if there’s a sport that lends itself to simple projection of individual statistics (if you’re looking at the right ones) into team success more than baseball. Moneyball was a revelation for me. Our own Huckleberry wrote a pretty interesting piece about the individualism of baseball once. Perhaps we’ll get a reprise one day.
HJ:
There is some validity to what you write, but the top guys have a pretty good shelf life. And fans do identify strongly with individual fighters. You also see camps form around certain dominant styles (muay thai, wrestling, jiu-jitsu) and around nationality. The last point is an important one - when national identity enters into fighting, it doesn’t really get more passionate. Fedor Emelianenko, a dominant Russian heavyweight, is one of Vladimir Putin’s poster boys for his vision of a virile Russia. George St. Pierre is more famous in Quebec than any member of the Montreal Canadiens. Brazilian fighters are second only to soccer guys in fame in Rio De Janeiro. And the USA is where everyone who is anyone comes to train.
MMA is in a tremendous growth stage. That means the natural order is constantly overthrown, unless the guys at the top evolve their game.
It’s also about matchups. And it’s fighting, which is an inherently uncertain enterprise, particularly when you have dozens of ways you can lose.
Even the most dominant fighter faces some degree of peril every time they enter the ring. I consider that one of the sports real strengths.
May 12, 2008 at 9:01 am
I agree with the turvover of the top ranked guys and its relationship with the growth phase of MMA. It seemed like just a little while ago that Tito Ortiz was the baddest man on the planet, now he’s a top end 2nd tier guy in the sport. Just a couple of years ago, it seemed like Rich Franklin was the future of the sport and the only guy who had a chance of beating Chuck Liddell, if he moved up a weight class. A lot of this has to do with the Zuffas/White creating a market. It allowed for the consolidation of a regionalized talent pool, and hence, improved competition and skill level.
Now, guys like Matt Hughes, Chuck, and Franklin, don’t appear to be athletic enough to compete with the St. Pierres, Anderson Silvas and Rampage Jacksons of the sport. These guys are starting to make a decent living at this sport and as that happens, more and more top tier athletes will choose MMA as their career path. It’s a very dynamic sport and the general IQ of the participants seem to be much higher than that of the average boxer. The USA on an international level sucks at soccer due to lack of public interest and pay scale for the athletes when compared to football, basketball and baseball. I’ve always argued that, if you handed Allen Iverson a soccer ball instead of a basketball when he was 5 years old, he would probably be one of the top 3 soccer players on the planet. The world class athletes go where the money is at, and the money is just starting to come into the sport of MMA. As money continues to pour into it, the talent level will increase and you will continue to see Burger King written in the center of the ring versus some obscure energy drink.
That being said, the money will never be on the same scale as football/basketball/baseball (or at least for the foreseeable future) in the U.S. Therefore, the champions will continue to communicate to us through a Portuguese translator or in a broken French/Canadian accent.
This also brings up a lingering question for Scipio.
As a casual observer who has never participated in the sport, is it a prequesite that you get a new tattoo after every match? There’s a couple of Muay Thai guys that lift at my gym and I’ve noticed a that it seems SOP to get a tiger tattoo on your calf once you reach a certain skill level…..Even though, you may sell insurance as your primary source of revenue. I would assume this has some kind of point of origin relevance to the tiger and its revered nature in Southeast Asia.
May 12, 2008 at 9:29 am
I think its a tradition for a lot of muay tai guys to get a tattoo when they are able to make the trip to train in thailand. You will see many a tiger/dragon that will be associated with a pilgrimage.
As far as top fighters i think that there is currently a lot of change at the top because the combination of the two top talent pools coming together. UFC and Pride previously had some title holders that had been on top of their division for years, before the merger.
Fedor
Chuck
Vanderlei
Hughes
Gomi
All five of these guys had really long winning streaks with high levels of competition. Fedor has only lost once and even that was a cut stoppage, and vanderlei had a 4 year winning streak.
I think things are starting to settle down again with dominant champions in most weight classes in the ufc right now.
May 12, 2008 at 10:50 am
MMA - I love what I see so far but I’ll withhold judgement to see what the reaction is after something horrible inevitably happens in the cage, i.e. death or vegetation/coma. it’s coming & when it does, the outcry could finish off its chances as a mainstream sport, but we’ll see.
Soccer - all I can is, enough’s enough. It’s going on 35 years that I’ve been hearing how us ignorant Americans will inevitably fall in love with subtle, intricate game and its popularity will sweep this country with a tidal wave of shin-clutching nosedives.
Please.
It’s popular all over the rest of the world because poor people could easily scrape up a gym ball, 4 rocks and a empty field. Basketball courts, football uniforms, baseball gloves & bats - a little more expensive.
And as a matter of fact, look around. The USA isn’t adopting soccer - the rest of the world is playing our sports in record numbers every year. Why? Our games are more fun & you can use your hands. It’s not complicated.
Maybe our fans don’t have 7 verse battle hymns for every situation like El Futbol, but that’s because we’re too busy watching the games to come up with that shit. If all I had to watch was soccer, I, too, would be a pissed-up amateur Bernie Taupin sitting in the stands and itching to leadpipe any gap-toothed Frog who looked at me cockeyed.
May 12, 2008 at 10:52 am
Red
I suspect the fact that an actual catastrophe could happen will only make it more titillating. Bread and circus. People who would be turned off by that are already not watching it.
May 12, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Where the fuck have you been dude? Seriously quit being lazy and write more.
ready go
May 12, 2008 at 7:27 pm
First off, I’m a little surprised no one’s mention NASCAR as a mainstream sport for the future. I personally hate watching a bunch of southern white dude drive around in a circle for what feels like 36 hours, but it’s hard to deny it’s popularity.
Also if the PGA ever uncovers a true rival to El Tigre than the public’s interest in golf could take on more than just a passing interest. Instead of checking in to see just how much Tiger’s going to win by we could watch actual compelling sport. Alas, that might only be a pipe dream.
As for some of the opinions expressed on here regarding futbol I give you this:
vs.
and this:
vs.
Iverson’s isn’t even legal. It’s called “traveling” or “carrying”. Ronaldo is twice as creative, twice as quick, and probably twice as tall and he does what Iverson does with his f-ing feet.
And more to the whole flopping thing? At least futbol players don’t spend the whole damn game complaining. Look Kobe, you didn’t get fouled you missed the shot because you were human. Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Play defe…oh and there’s your man dunking on Andrew Bynum. That’s great. No, no, by all means keep complaining about how your elbow got fouled by that dude’s face. What’s more futbol is the only team sport I know of that will voluntarily stop play to see to an injured player. I realize none of this translates to success in the U.S.. It just irks me when people call futbol players soft, when the “national pastime” can be derailed not only by weather elements, but that a starting pitcher (the most important member of the team that day) can be sidleined by a I-shit-you-not hangnail.
May 12, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Manu flops harder than a $2 whore. Basketball players make futbol players look like hardened Navy Seal vets. I’ll take 10 seconds of diving over 48 minutes of whining like a baby any day of the week.
May 12, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Manu comes from Argentina, land of futbol. Where do you think he learned to flop like Maradona?
May 13, 2008 at 12:18 am
Okay, then how about Everybodywho PlaysAgainstShaq? He’s usually from the good ol’ U.S. of A. Look, I’m not saying basketball isn’t a great sport. It is. I’m not even suggesting that Americans should like futbol. I mean, I’m Texan, I’m American (and for the record I’m part of the shrinking demographic) and I like futbol but I can understand why a lot of people don’t. I don’t like watching most Italian futbol for precisely for all the melodramatic bullshit they pull. At the same time though, I understand that if it keeps getting called, they’re going to keep doing it. That’s why I stick to the EPL where that crap is at fairly low clip. Lower than say watching a Suns/Spurs game. Between Manu and AStout it’s like watching fish trying to catch their breath out of water to use a very old cliche’. But I digress. My point is simply that futbol can be a beautiful sport that highlights creativity, unselfishness, patience, tactic and form under pressure. It is not a game filled with guys who were too soft to play other sports. It is filled with guys who make lots and lots of money playing the game they love. And I would not recommend telling Wayne Rooney, well anything when he’s drunk, but especially I would not recommend telling him he is soft. There’s a good chance he would eat your face.
May 13, 2008 at 7:20 am
Yeah, but you don’t have to get stupid about it.
Cristiano Ronaldo is not twice as quick as Iverson. He’s not even quicker. That’s absurd. And Ronaldo has historically been one of the worst divers around. He gets clipped a lot but he also dives a bunch.
Finally, Iverson actually doesn’t carry that often. I’m not a fan of the NBA because the rules don’t actually mean anything in that league, but notice how high Iverson’s hand gets on his crossover setup. That’s because he’s keeping it on top of the ball. He never applies an upward force to the ball and then brings it back down.
May 13, 2008 at 7:41 am
Thanks for making spit coffee all over my white shirt with this line. Damn funny and true.
May 13, 2008 at 9:57 am
Sailor -
agree 100% - people would absolutely watch.
However, it’s usually the people who would never watch in the 1st place that will screech the loudest, ergo give sponsors cold feet, ergo guarantee that it never becomes more than late night cable & pay per view show.
In other words, I guess I’m saying I don’t think it would really sink below where it is now, but you need to keep from scaring Coca Cola & Microsoft and the like for it to take that next step into the mainstream.
May 13, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I’d take Pacman, or Ray Lewis, in a fight any day or night over a drunken soccer player from the UK. Now, drunken soccer hooligans from the UK are another story.
May 13, 2008 at 4:43 pm
flamingmonkeyass—-
Italian soccer can be either brilliant or incredibly boring. My favorite team, and has been since I can remember, is AS Roma. They’ve been smoked by Man U in the CL the last two years, but if you watch them play, they truly play “the beautiful game”…
This may be my Dutch genes kicking in too…the way the Dutch play and the game Roma are incredibly similar.
Also, as a Dutchman, I wish to say that Cristiano Ronaldo is public enemy #1. I love seeing him get tossed around, and especially love when he cries. There is a great article out there about how he almost quit playing the sport when he was 13 because the kids at Youth Development camps would make fun of his accent.
And Spawn— There are some people I simply wouldn’t want to mess with in the EPL. People like Vinnie Jones would eat you if given the opportunity.
May 13, 2008 at 5:07 pm
There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.
May 13, 2008 at 6:30 pm
-Spawn I agree. I’d take Ray Lewis and Pacman Jones over any player in the EPL in a fight. Of course, why wouldn’t I take a murderer and gangsta on my side? I guess the difference is that the EPL has a tendency to try and keep that sort out of their league instead of making them the faces of their franchise. That does not mean however that the players playing the game are soft. You don’t have to be a criminal to be a man.
-GDRTSB I generally agree re: the Italian game. There are moments of pure beauty, and they are probably the most strategically varied teams clusterd into a league in the world. My issue with Italian football is that, generally speaking, there’s 15 minutes of pure gold and 75 minutes of diving and screaming and gesturing and writhing in pain. That makes for great sex but lousy futbol. It kills the pace of the game - which is why enjoy English football so much. It’s also why I’ll make a point to watch the Spanish league whenever the top 5 or 6 teams square off. My problem with the Spanish is the bottom of the league’s lack of real quality.
For what it’s worth I’ll confess that I’m a ManU fan (if it wasn’t already obvious), and I’ll concede that there are teams that play a prettier game than ManU, just not any that are more effective.
As for Cristiano - to me the burning hatred people express towards him is a testament to how good of a player he is. Myself I make the comparison to Didder Drogba in that I hate his goddamn guts, but if ManU had the chance to acquire his services I’d be pissed as fucking hell if they didn’t take advantage of it. If nothing else I’m tired of playing against him. Same for Terry Henry.
P.S. As a ManU fan I love the Dutch. They’ve helped us win quite a bit of silverware.
May 14, 2008 at 7:26 am
Do they all keep their peelings in the skinbox?
May 14, 2008 at 8:52 am
SI Rivalry Pics: LINK
Gracie Family Fighters Are these guys a cult or something?
May 27, 2008 at 5:41 am
MMA defines niche sport. Its appeal will always be limited to 18-34 YO white males.
Did someone really claim that millions of foreigners are taking up American sports every year? What a crock of shit. Sure, basketball is popular internationally, but baseball is dying outside of the Caribbean. Soccer is taking over throughout Asia (including Japan) and Central America.
Cricket is more important internationally than baseball. Rugby is far more important than american football.
June 8, 2008 at 3:05 am
MMA is awesome. I’m 59 and was resistant for many years but started watching some MMA with my son and got hooked. It is very technical, at least an order of magnitude more technical than boxing.
I don’t like the ground and pound aspect of MMA since it is not very sporting (just blood sport). I would restrict blows from the ground game.
Real wrestling (especially by the Brazilian dudes that know all these esoteric holds that immediately disable you) is much more interesting to watch than I anticipated (though I am not real interested in wrestling another guy myself).
One strange thing about MMA is how bad at boxing most of these guys are. Mike Tyson would have been awesome MMA guy once he had sufficient wrestling training.
Some people seem to differentiate between submission and wrestling, why? Isn’t that like differentiating between a knockout and boxing?
Since the defense against a take down is to sprawl, why shoot from the center of the ring? Why not first get your opponent near the perimeter and then shoot (so that we when attempts to sprawl, he runs into perimter webbing)?
Soccer is a great sport but does have a fundamental problem: it is too difficult to score. This means that a clearly inferior team can tie a superior team much more easily than should be the case. Then the tie is settled by penalty kicks (what an abortion). Why not instead either reduce the number of guys on each team until somebody scores? Or disable offsides in overtime.
June 8, 2008 at 5:32 am
June 8, 2008 at 7:53 am
“MMA defines niche sport. Its appeal will always be limited to 18-34 YO white males.”
The anectdotal evidence suggests otherwise to me; half the big MMA fans I know are black.
August 27, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Geek Check: Anyone around here know how to fix that HTML shit?
August 27, 2008 at 6:52 pm
August 27, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Thanks! You better hurry. There’s a Star Trek re-run on.
August 28, 2008 at 6:28 am
I would watch the re-run, but I’m anxious to see your latest application of statistical analysis to fantasy football drafts.