NBA Arbitrarity (18 June 2010)

I haven't watched much NBA basketball over the past decade, and it's not just because the team I used to follow, the New York Knicks, have stunk for all those years. It's more that (a) there seem to be long stretches where players don't have to give as much effort, as compared with, say, hockey, and (b) I began to have the distinct sense that the refs controlled the game more than the players -- that at any point, the game could be determined by free throws because the refs are at their own liberty to enforce the nebulous rules how they see fit. That's apparently what some believe happened in last night's championship game. Matt Yglesias writes:

I do want to note a complaint from a Celtics loyalist about “how the refs inexplicably decided to call touch fouls on the Cs in the 4th qtr leading to 21 laker FTs. That’s on pace for 84 FTs for the game.” I haven’t gone back and watched the tape or anything, but it was definitely my sense during the game that the officiating standards suddenly tightened in Q4 for no real reason. There are always a lot of complaints out there about the quality of NBA officiating, and I think they’re generally a bit overstated once you consider the inherent difficulty of the job. But it really is crucial that even if things sometimes get missed that people still feel there’s some kind of consistent theory of what the rules are, and I really don’t get that from the NBA.

This is hardly an isolated incident. (Consider, for instance, Lakers-Kings Game 6, in the 2002 playoffs.) One can crunch the data on home-court advantage and easily conclude that the refs favor the home team under the pressure of pleasing the crowd, even if the refs are not flat-out corrupt. Yglesias captures well what's wrong: the rules about fouls seem arbitrary, and this makes the refs' judgment seem subjective, governed by their own obscure agenda. But this is not because they have an agenda; it's just there is no "right way to call the game" that the refs' performance can be judged against. It often seems as though fouls can be called whenever, on whoever, on any scoring attempt that is not a jump shot, and even then, a foul can typically be called when players block-out for the rebound.

Baseball umpires are surely not flawless, and they often decisively affect a game's outcome, but you can usually have the satisfaction of pointing to exactly which calls were blown, as in the case of umpire Jim Joyce missing a call to spoil the perfect game pitched by Armando Galarraga. The Celtics fans have nothing nearly so concrete to point to; they just end up sounding like spoilsports, loony conspiracy theorists.

Quitting spectatorhood (16 Dec 2009)

I partially sympathize with John Swansburg, the writer of this Slate piece about taking a break from spectator sports. He argues that it is much easier to consume other forms of entertainment with DVRs and so forth -- that seems like a bad reason to me, confirmation of my suspicion that in deciding how to entertain ourselves. taste has been supplanted by a concern with ease of consumption. We want to maximize throughput in our brain, since there is so much "cool stuff" out there that we are supposed to know about. So when he also argues that the limitless amount of information available to consume about sports makes it an all-consuming proposition if you are going to "really care" about following a team, he's verging toward an ideological conundrum. His wish that culture was more convenient to consume is what's driven the trend of remaking spectator sports in the image of celebrity culture. Gossip about the players, grumbling about their salaries, rumors about trades and signings, all supplant to a degree the interest in sheer on-field performance, since these can be consumed in bite-size nuggets, not in three-hour sessions at a stadium in some suburban swampland. And fantasy leagues turn sports viewing into an analogue of day-trading, turning the scores and the on-field winners into arbitrary details, distractions from the real interest in relative statistical moves within individualized portfolios of performers, isolated from the context of their team.

None of that is why I am watching less sports though. I'm not watching football so much anymore because of the instant replay system, which is patently corrupt and allows referees to determine the outcome of the game as they see fit even more so than the arbitrary calling of penalties permits. The NFL system is incoherent as it is -- why should you have a limited number of challenges of referee errors? If you permit one, you almost have to permit as many as are necessary, otherwise you concede that "getting it right" has nothing to do with the system. The replay scheme instead is about generating momentum shifts with the assistance of refs, who are notoriously swayed by the home crowd's wishes (if not the casinos'). And it allows for more interminable commercial breaks.

A piece on TNR's site by Josh Patashnik looks at a legal discussion about whether every play should be reviewed. He points out helpfully that every referee decision is pretty arbitrary in football, so replay review is a Potemkin system of crypto-fairness at best. I agree with this completely:

Football does well when it successfully masks the arbitrariness of calls. When these calls are made, as they inevitably must be, it's best just to let sleeping dogs lie, grumble, and move on with the game. By attempting to achieve a standard of refereeing perfection that isn't attainable given the nature of the game and the nature of instant replay, the main effect is to heighten the salience of that arbitrariness, in a way that detracts from the confidence football fans have that the game, in the end, is a fair one.

The current replay system, for me, does precisely that for me: "heighten the salience of that arbitrariness." I hate it and that's what I don't watch many football games anymore. Once who wins or loses seems randomly determined, why bother?

The limits of fandom (30 Oct 2008)

I am very happy that the pro-sports team that I care about the most, the Philadelphia Phillies, won the World Series last night, something I have often doubted I would ever see again. Their triumph seemed to vindicate a by-the-book approach, as "baseball lifer" Charlie Manuel, the Phillies manager, stuck to familiar recipes for success and trusted his players to perform, while opposing manager Joe Maddon, regarded as a kind of baseball intellectual primarily because he wears distinctive 1950s-scientist eyeglasses, tried some unconventional moves that ultimately didn't pan out.

It's a novel experience for me to have the baseball season end with my team winning the last game played, but what I'll probably remember from the season is less that sense of total relief when it's finally over but the recognition of the passive spectator's impotence that grows as the stakes get higher for the team you're rooting for. As the Phillies progressed through the playoffs, I became more and more superstitious, assigning significance to entirely meaningless aspects of my life -- which door did I enter work? which train did I ride to my friend's apartment to watch the game? which chair did I sit in? what beer glass did I use? -- as if these things would have an impact on the outcome of games. I desperately wanted to feel like what I was doing mattered to something that had become (perhaps disproportionately) important to me, but the more important the games were, the more desperate my ludicrous magical thinking would have to become. But it's only when the Phillies secured the last out and they were celebrating in a pile on the field did it struck me with a bolt of undeniable clarity that my watching had nothing to do with it. My sense of agency had left me completely, and I was filled with pure vicariousness, a peculiar baseless pride that is bound up uniquely with participating in mass fandom. It's exhilarating but also sort of scary.

I'll probably forget that feeling as it is replaced with nostalgia for what just happened, and agency will be restored to me in the way I describe the big plays and the peculiar way I felt about them as they happen. I'll turn the Phillies' World Series win into a story about me, for anyone who's willing to listen.

The ice-men of competitive minigolf (17 Nov 2007)

I love miniature golf, the more preposterous the holes the better. I like loop-de-loops, rotating obstacles, crossing wood-plank bridges over moats, the whole thing. I even played a glow-in-the dark goofy golf course in some dingy cellar on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls.

But though I like a healthy amount of chance mixed into my mini golf, I still play to win. When I used to go down to a friend's beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey, we became dork aficionados of the many boardwalk courses and eventually got to the point where we'd bring our own putters and balls to the courses, to up the level of competition (and to perhaps compensate for the edge taken away by the beverages that were also brought along). But no matter how geeky we got, we never approached the level of the men profiled in this Wall Street Journal story by Charles Forelle about competitive minature golf, as it's played in Scandinavia.

In Europe, competitors like Mr. Ryner play a rigorously pure form of miniature golf. Course designs are more Mies van der Rohe than Myrtle Beach -- clean lines, crisp angles, geometric obstacles. There are no garden gnomes astride the mini fairways. No toy windmills. No water hazards teeming with plywood crocodiles. Here, minigolf is an athletic fugue of golf and billiards, a challenge of precision and consistency.

I was shocked to discover that these hardcore minigolfers have a range of balls that they use for different surfaces and different angles, and that they can hit shots with deliberate spin. They even go to the trouble of heating or cooling balls when necessary to get the right amount of bounce off the walls.

Forelle maintains throughout the perfect A-hed-story tone of haute seriousness ("athletic fugue" is genius), but what makes the story priceless is the quotes collected from the stern Europeans who compete with such rigorous purity.

Minigolf requires stamina and precise control. Most of all, it takes mental fortitude, says Hans Bergström, a computer specialist at Volvo and president of the European Minigolfsport Federation. "You have a very small muscle movement that makes the difference. If you cannot control your nerves, you will get it wrong," he says. "The very best players in the world are ice-cold men."

What does this say about the Swedes and Germans who seem to dominate the sport?

To grow the sport in America, some entrepreneurs are encouraging enlivening the sport with goofier holes. But one of the champions is not pleased with the idea that courses will become more gimmicky to make the sport more enticing and perhaps televisable (and if you've read this far I definitely recommend you watch all the clips on the WSJ's interactive video feature):

Walter Erlbruch bristles at the memory of a round of American-style minigolf. The passing blades of a windmill scooped up putted balls and flung them into a pool. "Luck," sniffs Mr. Erlbruch. "If you make a nonsense of my sport, I don't like it."

I'm sure somewhere in America, miniature golf is played with this level of intensity, but it never managed to reach even the level of horseshoes in terms of respectability here as an adult game. That's probably because it tends to be a family activity, meaning competitors are at unequal levels of ability. This encourages course designs that negate the role of talent, or else it makes adult players not to get too hung up on playing well in order to keep it "fun" for everyone -- so they play down to the level of the kid who's whacking the ball around with no conception of the rules or the purpose of keeping score. Also, it's probably never caught on with adults here because, unlike, say, bowling or darts, drinking is not usually integrated with playing minigolf. Mini golf courses -- inexplicably, to my mind -- don't typically have bars on site. You are discouraged from beer drinking while putt-putting, which is strange considering how commonplace drinking is on real golf courses, where players typically have to pilot motor vehicles around and send flying projectiles through the air with as much velocity as they can muster. But then, my pleasure in minigolf may strictly be a nostalgic thing for childhood, when cutthroat competition meant trying to get the ball in the clown's nose for a free game, not trying to make sure you weren't forced to work overtime without compensation just to keep your job.

Manly Sunday (21 October 2007)

Where would the NFL be without its advertisers, who help complete the package of masculinity it has so successfully managed to sell over the decades? During a football game, the ads -- invariably for trucks, beer, and junk food -- reinforce the kind of paradigmatic manliness on offer as a vicarious fantasy. When you are not butting heads with your grotesquely muscular closet paramours on the gridiron, you are cracking open light beers and trading leering sexist remarks or participating in some other bonding ritual (often involving passive spectatorship, often literally watching TV, mirroring the position of the viewer). Or you are conquering some barren, open landscape in your truck, or doing some kind of sainted, vaguely patriotic salt-of-the-earth, real-American manual labor involving hauling something unbelievably heavy. The sum of all this makes watching football on a Sunday a somewhat surreal excursion into the pure ideology of modern manhood, where women, if they appear at all, are never anything more than a punchline to some joke shared between men, whether among the characters in ads or between the ad writers and the viewer.

The best example of this currently is a Taco Bell commercial touting its chili-cheese nacho chips; the setup is the older brother is inculcating his younger brother with his life rules -- don't marry a woman with tattoos is one of them, and the joke is that in the end, he is pussy-whipped by just such a woman, who appears to yell at him. The joke is sort of on the would-be macho man, who we are supposed to laugh at -- but we are laughing at him primarily because he hasn't been able to keep his life in line with his desires of living manly, unfettered by cloying femininity, dreams which are more or less validated by the shrew. The younger brother makes a crack-the-whip motion to reinforce the idea that we should not be on the woman's side here; we should imagine ourselves to be the smarter, younger person who still hasn't been spoiled by the demands and compromises of adulthood. The commercial makes absolutely no effort to describe the product it ostensibly is selling -- the nachos -- perhaps because there is nothing really to promote there -- they are almost literally an empty vehicle for other ideological fantasies, so that the chili-soaked grease boats carry not flavor but the pleasingly salty savor of manliness.

I think the gist of commercials like these is to associate the brand with a feeling of empowerment, which for men, hits home most deeply when the power comes at the expense of the women in their lives. Why should this be? Evolutionary psychology? Doubtful, though I'm sure the argument has been made somewhere. Another theory: The careful development of the commercial potential of sexual difference that evolved with capitalism as it became clear that the economic system was going to erode male privilege in other ways, luring women into the workplace, disseminating the value of individual liberty generally, and making it clear that no traditional values were safe from creative destruction. So marketers have taken notions of sexual hierarchy and turned them into brands to give them continuing currency, even as the socioeconomic circumstances that helped produce them disappear.

March madness (19 March 2007)

The NCAA men's tournament is now almost universally known in America as March Madness, presumably because the insane amount of college basketball excitement drives fans absolutely delirious. And the lunacy is supposed to build until a champion is crowned a few weeks from now. But that's not exactly how it plays out. The phenomenon has now far outgrown people who actually care about college basketball or know the slightest thing about it, so that part of the madness has to be that rubes who know nothing about the sport (me) are willing to wager in bracket pools where they try to predict the winner of every single game in the 63-game tournament. This plays out like a prolonged lottery, with buzzer-beater jump shots taking the place of ping-pong balls being suctioned out of a vat. And excitement doesn't build as the weeks go on, it tends to fizzle out, even though the games become generally more competitive. Unless one is affiliated with one of the schools, one probably doesn't especially care who's going to win once it no longer can help the bracket.

So for many, the madness seems confined to the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament, when 64 teams are wittled down to 32. Not only can one still be optimistic about one's bracket picks, which are still fresh in mind, but one can get swept up in the thrill of underdog victories, for this is the round where the true underdogs compete, and inevitably a few of them pull off unlikely victories against the established athletic powerhouses. This affords commentators a chance to bring out all the bromides about teams working hard and being disciplined and having faith and believing in their coach, their dear leader and so on, or perhaps the other team was complacent and ill-prepared, lazy, unmotivated, not working together as a unit, taking their success for granted. All these ideological notions become more salient the greater an upset the outcome is, and it's easy for the novice to figure that out. The teams are conveniently seeded with numbers, so you know exactly how shocked you should be at an outcome.

But what's most "mad" about these first few days is that they constitute a pseudo-surreptitious holiday for those working at offices, as office betting pools are typically condoned, along with tracking the games' results from one's desk. It can seem a mini office Mardi Gras, in which ordinary rules are suspended or turned upside down, and you are watching TV at your desk. But March Madness still permits office workers to have the sense they are getting away with something. Last year, CBS made live video streams of the games available for the first time over the Internet, and introduced the "boss button" innovation, which allows you to hide the mini-screen on your computer with one click. This institutionalized promise (and this should tip everyone off that it is not in any way subversive) that the network is on your side in being sneaky and fooling management creates the illusion that for these few days, the worker is winning. This is the real Madness. Hence the slew of newspaper pieces calculating the lost productivity that is alleged to stem from people paying attention to the tournament -- this is not so much to chastise American workers as to give them a sense of the scope of their pseudo-triumph against the bosses (who often organize the betting pools themselves). But nothing is being wasted; instead the pressure that has built up in the social system of production has an opportunity to be let off in a controlled and entirely expected fashion. After the first two days of the tourney, few enough teams are left that all the games can be scheduled during evenings and weekends. This ends the madness and returns office life to business as usual.