Sport

In the brutally competitive, take-no-prisoners world of fantasy sports team managment, sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands. That’s when McSweeney’s guide to heckling might come in handy.

While you’re out and about in your town, try heckling some of the locals to build your confidence and work on your repertoire.

To the Mailman: “Karl Malone would be ashamed.”

To the Paperboy: “Who taught you how to throw? David Cassidy?”

To the Grocer: “This orange blows.”

To the Bank Clerk: “I can buy and sell you at will.”

To the Bus Driver: “Flunk out of chauffeur school?”

To the Ice-Cream-Truck Driver: “Flunk out of bus-driver school?”

To the Town Vampire: “Even I have bigger teeth. And you call yourself a reanimated corpse that has risen from the grave to suck the blood of the living? You suck. In a nonliteral, yet highly amusing, way.”

To the Waiter: “How’s that whole aspiring-to-be-an-actor thing going? Not good? At least you got your degree in …? Oh. I’m truly sorry. Can I get a refill?”

As some of you may have noticed the new English football season is upon us. The BBC is running its “fantasy football game”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/fantasy_football/default.stm for the last time this season, and I’ll be entering as I usually do. There’s a facility to run a “mini-league”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/info/friends.asp consisting of friends, relations, enemies, critics, critical critics etc. So if any contributor, regular commenter or reader wants to join our league — the “Crooked Timberites”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/friends/friends.asp?pin=700279 — they are very welcome to do so. You have to “register”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/signup/signup.asp with the BBC and choose your team first, and then email your PIN to me, the Chairman of the League, at crookedfootball-at-yahoo.co.uk . Those who know nothing whatsoever about football can always use the “lucky dip” facility to have the BBC computer pick a team for them. Try to register before 1230 BST on Saturday, 28 August 2004

As most of you reading this outside America will know, the 2004 Olympics have begun. Of course in America none of this has been seen yet, because it is technologically impossible or something to broadcast live from Greece. So the film of the opening ceremony is being sent by carrier pigeon to New York, where it will arrive in a few hours to be shown.

Now I don’t really care when or where the opening ceremony is shown. But I do care about when and where they show Olympic events in which Australians have a decent chance of doing well, especially swimming. And if one is stuck in the televisual hell-hole that is the United States, the answer is “Nowhere live, and unknown time and location on tape delay.” Because NBC refuses to show any swimming events live, and refuses (as far as I can tell) to say just when it will show events on tape delay, it is practically impossible to tell how much of a commitment will be needed to actually see Australians (or anyone else you might be interested in) in action. If you’re lucky NBC will, just like a cable company, say that the event you want will turn up sometime in a 4 hour interval. Just why Americans tolerate this kind of behaviour from a TV station is a little unclear, but I can’t imagine it would be possible to get away with such behaviour anywhere else in the western world.

“Tom W. Bell”:http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_agoraphilia_archive.html#109172158390376761 has a fun post analyzing surfing as a system of non-state enforced property rights. Surfers apparently have a very-well developed set of norms regarding who gets which wave. Bell, who is a hard-core libertarian, sees this as mostly reflecting surfers’ “profound respects for property rights.” Surfers, by his account, behave like Lockeans when divvying up the waves. However, there’s an alternative explanatory framework that does a better job, I reckon, of explaining what’s going on – Lin Ostrom’s “account”:http://www.cipec.org/research/institutional_analysis/w98-24.pdf of common pool resources, and the rules governing them.

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The Irish athlete “Cathal Lombard”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 has “tested positive”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/3544612.stm for “EPO”:http://www.drugs.com/cons/EPO.html, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In “interviews”:http://www.irishrunner.com/cathal03.html he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.

Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just “compare”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=24 and “contrast”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where “earlier this year”:http://www.irishrunner.com/04stan.html he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.

This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.

My first real encounter with Norman Geras’s writings was when I read his excellent Marx and Human Nature. I subsequently saw him give a talk on the book at one of the SWP’s Marxism conferences (87?), and was struck by the way that he kept his temper despite extraordinary provocation by the audience. This experience combined with my more or less simultaneous encounter with the work of the analytical Marxists, and a class I took with (my subsequent colleague) Andy Levine, to convince me that normative philosophy was worth doing — resulting in my exiting philosophy of language for political philosophy.

So I was delighted to discover that he writes about the greatest sport human beings have invented. I was pleased, but also incredibly frustrated recently when I had the good fortune to stay at the home of a friend who possesses a copy of Two Views from the Boundary. I got half way through the book — and had to leave on the next flight out. Now, the relative obscurity (sorry Norm) of his cricket writing means it is not readily available in the US, and it never occurred to me to seek the book directly from him till I found this ancient post on his blog. Now that I have selfishly secured shipment of numerous copies for myself, my dad (he doesn’t read CT, so it’ll be a surprise as long as you don’t tell him), my godfather, etc, I can advertise the offer to all. Email Norm at his site, and see if he’ll cut you a deal on his cricket writing.

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/international/asia/04MONG.html?pagewanted=print&position= tells us today about some bloke who’s playing golf across Mongolia, treating the entire country as a course, and dividing it into eighteen holes. Par is 11,880.

Sounds impressive – until you consider the Surrealist Golf Course in Maurice Richardson’s “The Exploits of Engelbrecht”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html (previously discussed in “this post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000981.html). According to Richardson

bq. To start with, a surrealist golf course has only one hole. But don’t get the idea that it’s any easier on that account. … Par is reckoned at 818181, but anything under 100,000 is considered a hot score. The hazards are desperate, so desperate that at the clubhouse bar you always see some pretty ravaged faces and shaky hands turning down an empty glass for the missing members.

These hazards include Sairpents, Vultures, the Valley of Dry Bones, Muezzins and Butlins Holiday Camp. In comparison, the Gobi Desert sounds like a cakewalk.

The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? “Moments like tonight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3860105.stm are what make football the great sport it is.

Greece, “in the final”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/euro2004/minutebyminute/story/0,14582,1251717,00.html ! Whod’a thunk it?

Germany, Spain, Italy, England, all gone. And now France! This is getting interesting.

Brian Weatherson watched the England–Croatia game with us the other night, so he can attest to the general level of invective directed towards the television at Chateau Bertram. But, whilst I didn’t watch last night’s proceedings with detachment, I can say that one event followed another with the depressing inevitability all long-term England watchers expect. The early goal (Michael Owen, 6/1 at bluesquare.com — thanks very much!) reminiscent of Germany-England 1996 followed by the Portuguese equalizer just before the 90 minutes. Then the disallowed goal (an exact re-run of England-Argentina 1998), all ending, finally, with the penalty-shoot-out (too many precendents to bother listing here). At least we can enjoy the rest of the tournament free of “Rooneymania” and most of the St George’s crosses will disappear from assorted motor vehicles. Come on the Czech Republic!

bq. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

That’s always been pretty much my least favourite Orwell quote, but I couldn’t help thinking about it when contemplating “tonight’s Netherlands-Germany match”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787535.stm at Euro 2004. The Scotsman has “a useful guide to the history of footballing enmity”:http://sport.scotsman.com/football.cfm?id=670242004 between the two countries and one of the protagonists of the “last really nasty episode”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,6903,1009645,00.html (scroll down to #6) — Rudi Voeller — is now the German coach. The football should be pretty good too … at least from the Dutch.

They’ll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff tonight after England’s “last minute collapse to France”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787491.stm at Euro 2004. Not fatal, but very deflating to English morale. It is the worst way to lose a game, to think you’re home and dry and then to concede twice in extra time and I’m feeling almost as let down now as I did when Man U beat Bayern Munich in the European Cup (it isn’t quite that bad). Still, an entertaining start to the tournament with a “splendid Greek performance”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787343.stm against Portugal yesterday, and I rather fancy the Danes to shock Italy tomorrow.

Endless playing with the “BBC score predictor”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/score_predictor/default.stm has me anticipating an England–France final with England beating Italy in the semis and France having knocked out the Dutch. But, of course, whatever happens in the real world, it won’t be that. The Dutch are the big mystery, of course, they always screw up in the end (and with Clarence Seedorf threatening to quit if he’s not played in his favourite position, it looks like business as usual). Group C looks the hardest to call: neck and neck between the Swedes and the Danes to avoid relegation [I meant non-qualification, of course]. And I expect the Germans to get just one point, a miserable goalless draw with Latvia. And the final victors? Like everyone else I can’t see beyond France.

[Update: my hot betting tip is Fernando Morientes for top scorer at 20/1]