Today in good sportswriting: Karen Crouse sneaks in classic Bob Knight

August 12th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

It’s not often enough that I just stop and say, hey, that’s a good piece of sports journalism, but today is that day. The New York Times’ Karen Crouse not only wrote an interesting profile of 50-meter freestyle swimmers, she dropped a semi-funny (or maybe I’m just not caffeinated enough — trying to ditch the habit) reference to Bob Knight:

Jones’s stroke rate was high, indicating he was spinning his wheels, not catching the water as efficiently with each arm pull as he had in the preliminaries when he was clocked in an American record of 21.59 seconds. Garrett Weber-Gale, who took first at the trials, lowered it to 21.47. “I was rotating my arms too fast,” Jones said. Or in layman’s terms, he said, “I panicked.”

The 50 freestyle is perhaps the most misunderstood of Olympic swimming events. Because it is the first race most children try when dipping their big toes into year-around competitive swimming, it is easy to get the wrong impression. To be a specialist in the event is to continually fight the perception that, to paraphrase former basketball coach Bob Knight, all swimmers learn to race the 50 freestyle in the second grade and most go on to better things.

Yes, Karen Crouse, you sly journalistic devil you. Working in a self-reference about Bob Knight’s views on journalism into a sports journalism piece about swimming is notably brilliant. Also: So meta my head burst. But again, that might just be the caffeine.

NY Times: Golf sucks before you’re drunk

August 11th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

At least, that’s how I read this story about the pre-tee time nerves on a golf course.

For whatever reason, that first tee is symbolic. It’s a first impression and a microcosm rolled into one, and if you’re a terrible golfer (I am), it’s even worse. All of your friends, who usually aren’t polite enough to just let you fail without saying something biting, insist on giggling or insulting you to the point where you no longer even want to play that wretched fucking sport. It’s terrible.

The good thing? Pro golfers feel it too:

They call this the first-tee jitters, which sounds a bit wimpy for something so vexing. In the theater, they give it a beefy name: stage fright. In golf, we ought to call it first-tee terror.

It’s one of golf’s most common maladies and even the great Tiger Woods has admitted to having it. Lee Trevino once said the only people on the first tee of a PGA Tour event who weren’t nervous were the volunteers keeping score. Gary Player meditated on the first tee and Ben Hogan slowed his every movement.

“That’s why I tell my students to step on the first tee, take a practice swing about three inches from the ball, immediately step closer and hit it,” said Butch Harmon, rated the country’s best golf teacher last year by Golf Digest. “There shouldn’t be any more thought than that. The other thing I tell them is this: No one watching cares what you do. Golfers are too worried about what other people will think of them. No one cares. The other people are busy worrying about their own first shot.”

With all due respect to Butch Harmon, I think golfers should consider my theory: Get drunk. Not only are the jitters gone, so is that existential ache in your head about why, in the small amount of time you get to be on Earth, you choose to spend your Saturdays hitting an tiny ball around in circles. Screw that sissy nonsense; the cart girl is kinda cute, and I need another beer.

Boys play like this, girls get hurt like this

May 12th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

The great thing about Sundays is the opportunity to read. Between weekend FanHousing and various other pursuits — OK, video games — it’s hard to get a good read in, but I was able to yesterday, and I learned some valuable, albeit perplexing, information: Young female athletes are injuring themselves at an almost terrifying rate.

Here’s the gist: Thanks to Title IX, girls are now playing sports in a more widespread, and more competitive, way than ever before. What’s more, training tactics and expectations for girls and boys are largely the same, and increase similarly in high school as kids begin to enter puberty. However, because girls and boys gain physical maturity differently — who knew? — those similar training tactics are causing girls to struggle through the sorts of injuries boys are less vulnerable to, such as the mother of all athletic injuries, the torn ACL:

But among all the sports injuries that afflict girls and young women, A.C.L. tears, for understandable reasons, get the most attention. No other common orthopedic injury is as debilitating and disruptive in the short term — or as likely to involve serious long-term consequences. And no other injury strikes women at such markedly higher rates or terrifies them as much. Rachel Young, a former soccer player at Virginia Tech who had to stop playing after two A.C.L. ruptures and substantial cartilage damage in her right knee, told me that young women she knew feared the injury but rarely talked about it. “A.C.L. is like a curse word,” she said. “You just cringe when you hear it.”

To openly discuss this, as the Times Mag story bravely does, is oftentimes tantamount to saying girls are weak, which, as we all know, they are. Finally, science has proven it. Score one for unfounded sexism!

UPDATE: For any uninitiated readers, I should probably add here that I’m just joking — I don’t think women are “weak.” Just differently abled. Which sounds like I’m describing the female body as some sort of handicap, but I’m not: Women just have different physical abilities than men, and the resistance of trainers and coaches to that reality is obviously a problem. How can you remedy this problem? I’m not sure. But the “warrior-girl” mentality the story describes is something that needs to give way to reason, especially in high school athletics where the stakes are relatively low.