The greatest

I always watched Wide World of Sports. It was a Sunday afternoon ritual. Jim McKay, Howard Cosell, those yellow blazers, and whatever random sporting event they were covering. (Based on this early experience, I would have projected cliff diving to feature much more prominently in my life than it actually has.)

I watched with my dad, mostly. Probably my brothers were around, too. But it was my dad I was aware of, in the room, following the standings of the giant slalom or weightlifting. And it's my dad I thought of immediately when I heard this morning that Muhammad Ali had died.

Wide World of Sports was the Muhammad Ali show for a lot of those years (with short breaks during which it become the Evel Knievel show). Howard Cosell was Ali's foil. Wide World previewed the fights, showed the fights, interviewed Ali before, after, and for all I can remember, during the fights. Cowell and Ali, Ali and Cosell, verbally jabbing at each other, engaged in a joyous dance, each endlessly amused by the other, needing each other.

Ali was on Wide World so much because he was a personality. He must have been great for ratings. And because of that, I felt ... odd about him. It wasn't always about the sports, is what I realized. Often it was just about putting entertaining, unpredictable people on air and waiting for the fireworks. I intuited, in a childish way, that Cosell was something of a parasite, when it came to Ali. I was disturbed that he could get so far by so blatantly hitching his wagon to a star. (There was more to Cosell, too, I know, but the relationship still felt one-sided.)

What I wasn't quite sure about was whether I should be equally disturbed by Ali playing along. Was he in on the joke? Was he doing an act for the cameras? Was he giving the people what they want? Or was he desperate for attention? In my world, one was expected to be self-deprecating and gracious. All the boasting and grandstanding -- it made me uncomfortable. And the Wide World machine enabling and encouraging it, egging him on. I really did not know what to think.

Boxing was different in those days, for sports fans. Now the title fights are all on pay-per-view. They're still very popular, no doubt, but they aren't a mass-market product. Back then they were on network television and we all watched them avidly. When Ali fought, that's when my confusion melted away. He was actually engaged in a different sport than his opponents. He was playing a different game. He could tell the whole world his exact strategy, like the "rope-a-dope" (which I remember so well), and still nobody could do anything about it.

Someone who could back up his braggadocio with actual domination -- someone who was bigger than life in a seventies wide-lapel suit and in boxing trunks -- someone who made for equally great copy in his interviews as in his contests. That's what I wasn't prepared to understand. Someone who always played his own game and expected us to come to him, in the media world and in the ring alike. I didn't know how to judge that, how to value it.

Race was a factor, there's no doubt. We were privileged white folks. I had very few black classmates in my private schools, and at least in the arenas where I interacted with them, they displayed few cultural traits or habits that weren't my own. We employed a black maid. Dad interacted with black truck drivers or other workers in his job sometimes, I knew. Our large and prosperous church was all white. Obviously I wasn't comfortable with black assertiveness, black speech patterns, black politics, black power. Obviously I was bound to see it as alien, as a threat, even if I had the most generous of curiosities.

I watched with my dad, and part of my discomfort was my suspicion that he wasn't okay with the changes in sports that Ali represented. I idolized and learned my sports fandom from my dad. I didn't know whether I should be okay with them or not. But we kept watching, together. There was never any question that when it came to the fights, these were monumental events, and that Ali's triumphs represented a historic dominance of the sport.

That ambivalence mixed with fascination defined my view of Ali during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Boxing moved away from the mass market, and I stopped paying attention to it. It wasn't until the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (which Noel and I attended) that Ali re-entered my consciousness in a big way. I was stunned by the significance of that event, by the courage of the fighter bowed by disease standing up once again to be seen, taking it as his due. In subsequent years, the documentaries When We Were Kings and The Trials of Muhammad Ali (both tremendous, powerful films) filled in the massive gaps in my knowledge. I don't remember Cosell asking about, or Ali talking about, resisting the draft -- maybe he did and I just didn't know what was going on. I was ignorant of all the context surrounding the Rumble in the Jungle. I was ignorant. I'm glad in a way that I was too conflicted to have a strong opinion, besides just fascination. I didn't know enough to have an opinion.

Since then I've read David Remnick's biography. I've read many great sportswriters painting a picture of the man, in all his dimensions.  (Check out Jerry Izenberg's obit, just for a sample.) He has only grown larger, more imposing, more improbable with each detail. What I wasn't equipped to appreciate until only a few years ago, I think (having been fortunate enough to be educated by many eloquent, thoughtful, forceful, patient people of color on social media, especially), was how important he was as a black man. How his politics and religion unapologetically flowed from that singularly American experience. How paying attention to that could teach me things I could never learn on my own.

Muhammad Ali made me a better, more well-rounded, more nuanced and perceptive person for paying attention to him, for thinking through what he showed me, especially when it was uncomfortable for me to do so.

Yet he didn't exist for my benefit. That's what made him the greatest. He was exactly the person he wanted to be, almost from the moment he burst onto the scene until the day he died. I'd thank him, only it's beside the point. Better to say to the universe: We didn't deserve that. We're grateful.

Replay ruins everything

At some point during almost every football game Noel and I watched this season, he had to endure the same rant from me. It's the replay rant. There are ancillary rants, but they are all related to the replay rant. I can sum it up with the title of this post, although of course there are so many nuances.

Here are some of the things replay has ruined:

1. Pace. It's very possible that replay is what prevented Oregon from competing in the national championship on Monday.
2. Refereeing. All calls are provisional now. I even heard the color announcer Monday night praising the referees for making a call precisely to provoke a review so they could see what really happened.
3. The rulebook. The infamous Calvin Johnson rule is only one example. Verities on which I have built my life -- the ground cannot cause a fumble, for instance -- are now subordinate to bizarre standards that stretch the definitions of "catch," "fumble," "possession," and even "move" into absurdity.
4. Touchdowns. Even though the new rules require players to "control the ball" all the way through their fall to the ground and beyond, the "break the plane" standard for touchdowns means that as soon as the ball pierces that barrier, nothing that happens thereafter matters. Players shove the ball toward the plane knowing that even if it leaves their hands, they still score.
5. Consequences. Coaches have challenges, which was supposed to keep the play moving on the field so that every incident wasn't litigated in replay. But now referees call for reviews much more often than coaches, and certain plays are automatically reviewed, so the coaches don't have to make those calculations about whether it's worth it to challenge.

Tennis is the only sport I know where replay -- in the form of the Cyclops -- has actually improved the game, helping the officials "get it right" without destroying the athletes' pacing and provoking an infinite regress of arguments. Baseball is moving in football's direction, even after only one season; the idea that a replay of a close play at first is more likely to yield the truth than the ump watching the foot and listening for the ball to hit the glove is a fantasy. And it's a dangerous one -- a fantasy that insists that higher frame rates and better definition and more detailed rules will result in more justice, when what it actually does is disintegrate the event under examination until it is completely lost.

If I ever teach that class on philosophy of sports again, I'm going to hold a class full of students hostage with that rant. I hope somebody in the league offices is wise and powerful enough to ski off this slippery slope before then.

Waiting for a win

When the news is relentlessly bad, when the numbers are in the tank and the sniping is vicious and the disasters just keep mounting and no one seems to have any answers, sports become a refuge.  It may be bread and circuses (or just circuses, really), but we can escape the drumbeat of doom when our team chalks up one in the win column.

Unfortunately, my team -- the Braves -- haven't gotten one in the win column for a week now.  A nine-and-a-half game lead in the National League wild card race has become a four-and-a-half game lead.  Leads have been few, and squandered when they occur; hits in RBI situations have been anemic, the slim one- and two-run margins of victory have consistently not fallen in our direction.

I get piqued at times with how personally Noel takes all of this.  He gets angry or cynical or fatalistic when the Braves can't get it together.  I usually want him to show his frustration less, to maintain a front of "ah well, it's only sports," at least for the purposes of the smooth functioning of our home life, which gets disrupted when somebody's mood goes black.  But deep down I understand.  When nothing else in the news is going well, when the outlook everywhere is negative, when the political "teams" or causes that we root for are on the ropes and gasping for air, you need the more even-handed and less morally-charged world of sports to throw up a couple of moments of joy for you.

Probably I shouldn't be writing this while the Braves are still in the midst of their game tonight, with a small lead still out there to lose -- or before their playoff spot is clinched.  And I recognize that the view of the sports world as fair competition without significant moral downsides is horrendously blinkered.  It's hard for me to take the same refuge in college football, for example, being all too aware of the tradeoffs schools make in ethical standing and prudent academic management to bring us those contests.

But damned if we don't really need those wins right now.  Every one gives us a few hours, maybe a day or two, or feeling like it's possible to do something right.  Go Braves.

Smart sports

Every once in a while, Noel gets a chance to write about sports on the A.V. Club.  And every time he does, readers who enjoy popular culture and geeky obsessions get a chance to sound off on a subject usually left to the jocks and frat guys.  They come out of the woodwork, and I wonder anew why there's so little out there for them.

Sports is a natural for people like us.  It has characters, storylines, history, taxonomy, hit points, strategy, stats, 'shippers, and endless opportunities to play "what if?"  But because it's associated with the kind of people who used to shove us into lockers -- not to mention the kind of people who despise literature and art -- we tend to turn away from it.  And if we don't, it's hard to find a community of likeminded people to discuss it with.

I'm hoping that The Classical, a new sportswriting site, will becoming such a gathering place.  It's got an impressive roster of writers lined up (if a predictable dearth of female voices), and a mission I can support.  They're looking to raise a year's budget on Kickstarter.  Every single person who commented on Noel's piece on Sunday Night Baseball should head over and kick in a few bucks.  It's just what they're looking for.

You gotta love sports

On Sunday, we hurried home from church to catch as much of the women's World Cup match between USA and Brazil as we could.  The kids love watching sports events, and will often excitedly comment on the stats being shown on the screen and the rules being followed by the players.  It gives them a chance to understand the structure of an activity that's highly structured, building up a diagram in their minds of how the sport works, cog by cog.

When we're watching baseball, Archer will frequently stop whatever he's doing and trot out to the living room to check on the score and the situation.  He often delivers a sportscasterly bit of commentary on what he sees, something like "This is just an epic duel between two players."  And if we yell or get excited, he'll come running to see what happened.

So when Abby Wambach headed the ball into the goal in the last minute of injury time on top of extra time to tie the game, and Noel and I exploded in joy, both Archer and Cady Gray dashed into the room from their designated play-in-your-rooms time.  And of course we let them stay to see the penalty kicks.  They perched on the loveseat together explaining to each other how it worked and counting the goals each team scored.  When Hope Solo made the only save of the PK's, they crowed.  And when the last USA kick found the left corner of the goal, they leaped off the coach and screamed along with their parents.

Sports can bring families together -- that much is a commonplace of nostalgic commercials and greeting cards.  What surprises me are the characteristics of sports that attract them.  The numbers and scorekeeping, sure, for Archer; but also the boundedness, the comprehensibility, the transparent structure of them as rule-governed activities.  In the act of understanding sports, the kids find handles to understand how all kinds of things work -- or should, in a perfect world.

Sports Shouting

Noel's insightful essay on ESPN, sparked by the release of a lengthy oral history of the network, appeared today on the A.V. Club and has precipitated quite a bit of thoughtful commentary.  Here in middle age we are often astounded to look back and see what pieces of media used to feel fresh, exciting, and indispensable to our lives.  Did we leave them behind, or did they leave us?

I think about this every time I see a promo for Desperate Housewives on ABC and find myself astonished that the show is still on the air.  During its first couple of seasons we watched it religiously -- everyone who wanted to be part of the cultural conversation did.  And then the cultural conversation moved on, and yet the show somehow kept going, sustained by a demographic who aren't a part of that conversation.  It feels like a coelacanth when you run across it -- a living fossil.

SportsCenter is like this, too.  Time was, youngsters, when SportsCenter was appointment television.  It was the only place on the dial where you could get the sheer volume and breadth of highlights, delivered with panache.  Now the show not only seems to be merely a parody of the genre it spawned, but also appears to be going out of its way to actively alienate me and people like me, with little effort expended to actually comment on the highlights and as many tired catchphrases and empty panels of experts spouting meaningless opinion as they can pack into their hour.

Have these shows and their networks changed, or have I?  Is my distaste for their style a function of getting older and leaving the target demo, or are the shows the ones that survived too long, drew the wrong lessons from the prevailing trends, got complacent and synergistic, and stopped caring about the people who forgot them or grew to despise them -- people like me?

All together now

What a day for a sports fan! We barely had time to register the US national teams' stoppage-time goal, miraculously lifting them out of the Group C doldrums into the round of 16, before it was time to switch over to Wimbledon where two relative unknowns were slogging out a 118-game fifth set that by itself was longer than the previous longest tennis match in the championship.

I love moments that bring the nation together in breathless anticipation of an unscripted result And today's examples are stellar. Anything could have happened -- and that made what did happen supremely unbelievable. More than anything, we simply marveled at the unpredictability of it all, so striking in the moment and so difficult to recover in hindsight.

It's instructive to compare those moments with the other cultural event recently that brought millions of Americans to their TV sets at the same time: the Lost finale. Whether you thought it was a hit or a miss, the conversation afterwards is about what should have happened. Control of the outcome by the little gods of Lost is presumed. What makes sporting moments like today's matches so mind-boggling is that they can only be about what happened. Praise or blame, even if apportioned liberally to players and coaches, can't be absolute, because a sports event is so supremely contingent. I've argued theologically that only in the presence of the contingent is a true response of faith and wonder elicited from human beings. The awe of these moments and the gratitude of those privileged to witness them speaks to that point.

The madness begins

As if my conference last weekend, and admissions events, school musicals, and fun runs this week weren't enough, we've got company for the weekend. But what company! For the first time in years, our oldest dearest mutual pal Scott Tobias has made the pilgrimage to Conway for the first weekend of March Madness. As with many other families, groups of friends, and workplaces around the country, the NCAA men's basketball tournament is a near-religious event.

My boss and I were reminiscing about the days before the internet, when you hand-drew a bracket and scribbled in teams during the Sunday afternoon selection show so that you could start working on your matchups before the newspaper with the full-page printed bracket appeared the next day. And then after writing in your picks on the newspaper's bracket, you carried around that folded-up, quickly-decaying piece of newsprint for the next three weeks, scratching out your losses and clinging to your remaining final four entrants.

I've been working so hard and running around to so many events, that I'm really looking forward to a weekend on the couch agonizing over teams in which I have no intrinsic rooting interest. (And then there's Wake Forest.) After last weekend and this week, I think I've earned it. And the best part about it is that Scott's visit gives the whole thing a festival atmosphere. Bring on the barbecue, the beverages, and the buzzer-beaters!

Recruiting

A member of the football coaching staff at my university called me earlier this week to solicit my help. He had a potential recruit with top academic credentials coming for a visit with his mother on Saturday morning. Could I or someone else from the Honors College come over to the football offices and talk with them?

Over the years I've talked with plenty of potential college athletes. Anytime the recruiters are interested in someone who has great grades and standardized test scores, they call us in to provide a picture of what the university can do for the student academically. And many times those recruits end up coming to the university, entering the Honors College, and graduating. We've had our share of intercollegiate athletes in football, women's basketball, soccer, volleyball, and so forth. The only sport that we have trouble helping to recruit for is baseball; their brutal road trip schedule is difficult to combine with an academic program that prizes participatory learning, since the players have to miss so much class.

I'm happy to help out the coaches and recruiters, as I did this morning. We have a lot in common with athletics -- in some ways, more so than we do with some of the academic colleges in which our students major. We emphasizes types of performance that have real-world evaluative structures, rather than classroom assignments. Students test their ideas and creations out in public, and get judged by those standards. It's akin to a football team: you can assemble a squad with stellar credentials, but your success is based on their performance on the field, in a setting that's to a large extent outside of your control as their mentor.

I wish the university could devote as much energy and resources to the recruiting of top academic performers as they do to top athletic performers. Over at the football offices today, a couple of dozen people -- coaches, staff, student hostesses -- had gathered on a Saturday morning to woo one quarterback and his mother. But I understand the worldview in which this young man returns the investment far more readily on the field than in the classroom; his cash value for the university certainly is more easily quantified in booster contributions and notches in the win column than it is in GPA, undergraduate research, or grad school admission. I'm still glad that the coach calls me to participate. It means that there's a value to what I do and the student services I offer that the football program can hold out as a lure to their recruits. I'm just happy that the value is real and has depth -- that I've got something to talk about that I believe in and can demonstrate. A coach can't hide the truth when he brags about his winning program; an academic program shouldn't be able to, either.

The human drama of athletic competition

People of a certain age tend to associate the Olympics with ABC's Wide World Of Sports, because so many sports we now see only every four years used to appear on our televisions regularly on Saturdays -- gymnastics, diving, weightlifting. Everybody remembers the "agony of defeat" guy in the program's opening; the web is full of tributes to Vinko Bogataj, the ski jumper whose wipeout was featured week after week. But I remember just as vividly the close-up of a gymnast's face as she grimaced with her chin on the balance beam, her legs arching back over her head until her feet were at eye level. A quick googling turns up nothing about her identity.

Of course, those of us who watched Wide World (and its lighthearted Sunday cousin Superstars) also grew up with a decidedly skewed idea of what counts as a sport. Cliff diving? Motorcycle jumping? The Harlem Globetrotters? Check, check, check. I imagine that Jim McKay and Keith Jackson would have been right on top of the Olympics' recent flirtation with "junk sports": trampoline, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized diving.

Not that I don't watch all those with fascination -- hey, I couldn't do it, and it sure is fun to listen to Bart Conner pretend that he knows what makes for a good "tramp" routine -- but you can't help but feel like the athletes in those sports are the ones who couldn't quite cut it in their older, more respectable traditions.

Tennis, anyone?

Sunday's epic battle at Wimbledon between Federer and Nadal took me back to my youth. My parents were avid tennis players, and all of us got lessons at Cumberland Youth Foundation, the recreation center to which we belonged. When we moved out of town and built our house in the country, Mom and Dad decided to put a tennis court right in the front yard -- really, instead of a front yard. Morning and night, someone was hitting a few balls; I remember many evenings where we played until we couldn't see the ball anymore.

All the Grand Slam events were must viewing at our house, but especially Wimbledon. The problem was that the men's final took place on Sunday morning, so usually by the time we got home from church we'd only be able to catch the last set or two, if we were lucky. I seem to remember a couple of occasions where we stayed home from church to see the match, but perhaps I'm only channeling my wishes from those days.

When I became interested in professional tennis, the age of Ilie Nastase and Jimmy Conners was just ending, and the age of John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg was arriving. I learned to play with a wooden racket that I kept in a press, and I remember vividly the controversy over the larger composite rackets that were starting to appear on the professional circuit.

The match at this year's Wimbledon brought back memories of a time when pro tennis was at the center of American sports consciousness, when as many people talked about it and followed it as followed pro basketball, for example. Even though we weren't watching, legends were being made and genius was happening on the courts of the world. Sometimes a great rivalry can regenerate interest in a sport; is Federer-Nadal that tipping point to bring tennis back from the well-groomed lawns of the rich into the mainstream of the middle class, as Tiger Woods did for golf?

And down the stretch they come

I was a typical horse-crazy teenager once upon a time. When Affirmed and Alydar battled it out over the course of the three Triple Crown races and Affirmed came out victorious, I was twelve years old. The Triple Crown and the tennis Grand Slam events were probably the most closely watched sporting contests in our house.

Now my kids have developed a keen interest in racing of all kinds -- mostly for the opportunity to have a rooting interest in one competitor, and for Archer, the chance to keep track of the running order at all times. While the race is being run, there's much shouting, cheering, and as Archer puts it, "pretending to be a horse race."

For this year's Belmont shocker, Cady Gray picked number 6 to be her horse -- and then ended up with the longshot winner. Archer picked number 3, but was happy to be the track announcer for Cady Gray's win. Noel picked Denis of Cork and got the place. I went with the sure thing, Big Brown, and like everyone else, I was stunned at the result.

Given Archer's fascination with the numerical aspects of all kinds of sports, we experimented with watching the Indy 500 and the French Open this year. Sports are governed by sequence -- cause and effect, periods of play, batting order, game-set-match -- and Archer bombards us with questions until he gets that sequence straight in his head. Although horseracing affords him an opportunity to watch the numbers of the competitors change order, it doesn't have the intricate scores-within-scores-within-scores of tennis, or the complex pitch count and base progression of baseball. Looking through his eyes, I can see the appeal of both the simple sport of racing and the intricate path to victory involved in something like tennis. In recounting when things happens and how a certain outcome was reached, Archer is "storytelling" in his own way, and it's clear that it gives him great satisfaction.

Citius, at least

I've been an Olympics buff ever since I can remember. ABC's Wide World Of Sports, with its frequent broadcasts of international sporting events, was a weekend staple on our TV growing up. I loved the pageantry and exoticism of the unfamiliar sports, and the international cast of characters. The Olympics were like a two-week smorgasbord of that feeling, and I gorged myself every four years.

In 1984, my family went to several events at the Los Angeles summer games. When Atlanta got the bid for the 1996 Centennial games, I celebrated by geeking out at the Olympic stores that opened around town, stocking up on memorabilia featuring Barcelona's superbly cute mascot, Cobi. Noel and I attended the games in '96, too. I always look forward to sixteen days of round-the-clock Olympic broadcasting glory on the TV -- heck, I wish they'd bring back the Triplecast.

So it's with deep fascination and ambivalence that I watch the massive turmoil surrounding this year's torch relay. In one sense, it's thrilling to see such a large population come together in solidarity to protest the world's collusion in China's Olympic farce. The country does not deserve a free propaganda platform in light of its regime's disregard for the Olympic ideals of peace, equality, and brotherhood. You can feel the excitement of activists sensing that for once, they have the upper hand -- that they control the message of this moment, not the managers who sought to carefully orchestrate it.

I even look forward to seeing how NBC handles the touchy political and publicity issues of the Beijing games -- how much attention will they give to the controversies and contradictions, and how much will they seek to downplay the conflict in favor of Wheaties-ready stars in waiting? It would delight me to no end to see an opening ceremony pockmarked by boycotting teams, a spectacle crippled by the refusal of the world to collude in its lies.

But of course, I want my Olympic drama, too. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. The up close and personals. The unlikely heroes and tragic falls from grace.

The Olympic torch has now been extinguished and rerouted to keep it from falling into the hands of the people it is supposed to inspire. How much of my Olympic idealism will follow suit?