Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
May 12, 2014
"Track and Battlefield" by Steve Sailer and Stephen Seiler, 1997
Track and Battlefield
Everybody knows that the "gender gap" between men and women runners in the Olympics is narrowing. Everybody is wrong.
by Steve Sailer and Dr. Stephen Seiler
Published in National Review, December 31, 1997
Everybody knows that the "gender gap" in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.
This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.
When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers. So, I began an in-depth study with my research partner, Dr. Stephen Seiler, an American sports physiologist teaching at Agder College in Norway. (Yes, we do have almost identical names, but don't blame him for all the opinions in this article: of the two of us, I am the evil twin).
The conclusion: Although the 1998 outdoor running season isn't even here yet, we can already discard Ward and Whipp's forecast: women will not catch up to men in the marathon this year. The gender gap between the best marathon times remains the equivalent of the woman record holder losing by over 2.6 miles. In fact, we can now be certain that in fair competition the fastest women will never equal the fastest men at any standard length race. Why? Contrary to all expectations, the overall gender gap has been widening throughout the Nineties. While men's times have continued to get faster, world class women are now running noticeably slower than in the Eighties. How come? It's a fascinating tale of sex discrimination, ethnic superiority, hormones, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconfirms the unpopular fact that biological differences between the sexes and the races will continue to play a large, perhaps even a growing, role in human affairs.
January 29, 2014
My Super Bowl prediction: Manning to regress toward mean
I don't know anything about football, but let me make a Super Bowl prediction.
Las Vegas initially established the strong defense and run Seattle Seahawks as the favorite, but a flood of public money on Peyton Manning's high-scoring Denver Broncos reversed that. (Both teams are 15-3.)
After all, Manning set records this years for touchdown passes and yards passing. In the regular season of 16 games, he tossed 55 touchdowns compared to only 10 interceptions and was sacked only 18 times.
He had a great game in the AFC championship against archrival Tom Brady's New England Patriots, throwing for 400 yards. This is all despite the 37-year-old Manning being one of the weakest-armed and least mobile quarterbacks in the league. Much of the season, he looked more like a symphony conductor, waving his arms around to direct his players in what to do, than a football player.
I'm a big Peyton Manning fan, as I'm a big Tom Brady fan. In fact, the endless Manning vs. Brady debate helped inspire one of my bigger (and most boring) ideas: Back in 2009, when Malcolm Gladwell was denouncing Steven Pinker in the New York Times for citing known crimethinker Steve Sailer's research debunking Gladwell's contention that the performance of NFL quarterbacks "can't be predicted," Pinker and I got to discussing why humans are most fascinated by arguing over things that are least provable, such as who's best: Manning or Brady? Pinker told me, "mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal."
Still, that doesn't mean that Manning is bound to win.
The Seahawk's quarterback Russell Wilson is 25-years-old and in his second season in the NFL. He had strong statistics but not up in the stratosphere with Manning's. (Wilson, who is black, is remarkably short for an NFL QB: at 5'11" a half foot shorter than Manning.)
Since pro football is increasingly dominated by quarterbacks, you gotta bet on the guy with the big numbers, right?
Maybe, but I have this hunch that Manning is due for some regression toward the mean. I mean, how likely is it that he's going to be better on Sunday than he was against New England or the average for his remarkable season? In contrast, what's the chance that playing outdoors in New Jersey in February is going to catch up with him?
And I suspect Seattle has devoted some careful thought over these two weeks to how they are going to make Manning feel less like a young philharmonic conductor and more like an old football player.
So, I'm picking Seattle.
By the way, I was wondering why the Seahawks' Russell didn't make the NFL until age 24. It turns out that, after redshirting his freshman year at North Carolina St., he started three full seasons, and completed his degree (in communications, of course) while playing minor league baseball in the summers. But after three good seasons as a starter, nobody invited him to the NFL draft combine -- he's under 6 feet tall.
So, he transferred to Wisconsin (without having to sit out a year because he enrolled in a graduate program at his new school) and had such a spectacular season, 33 touchdowns and 4 interceptions and winning the Rose Bowl, that he was drafted in the third round.
Russell comes from an upscale black family in Richmond. His father was a lawyer. I believe Russell's Wonderlic test score equates to an IQ of a 114, same as Manning's. Here are Wonderlic's for active Super Bowl winners:
Here are the Wonderlic scores of active Super Bowl winners, with the mean equaling 21 and two IQ points per additional right answer.
Eli Manning, Ole Miss 39 -- 136
Aaron Rodgers, Cal 35 -- 128
Tom Brady, Michigan 33 -- 124
Peyton Manning, Tennessee 28 -- 114
Drew Brees, Purdue 28 -- 114
Joe Flacco, Delaware 27 -- 112
Ben Roethlisberger, Miami (Ohio) 25 -- 108
These guys probably study up for the Wonderlic, which boosts their scores, but still, it seems plausible that a 3-digit-IQ is an advantage for 21st Century NFL quarterbacks.
By the way, I was wondering why the Seahawks' Russell didn't make the NFL until age 24. It turns out that, after redshirting his freshman year at North Carolina St., he started three full seasons, and completed his degree (in communications, of course) while playing minor league baseball in the summers. But after three good seasons as a starter, nobody invited him to the NFL draft combine -- he's under 6 feet tall.
So, he transferred to Wisconsin (without having to sit out a year because he enrolled in a graduate program at his new school) and had such a spectacular season, 33 touchdowns and 4 interceptions and winning the Rose Bowl, that he was drafted in the third round.
Russell comes from an upscale black family in Richmond. His father was a lawyer. I believe Russell's Wonderlic test score equates to an IQ of a 114, same as Manning's. Here are Wonderlic's for active Super Bowl winners:
Here are the Wonderlic scores of active Super Bowl winners, with the mean equaling 21 and two IQ points per additional right answer.
Eli Manning, Ole Miss 39 -- 136
Aaron Rodgers, Cal 35 -- 128
Tom Brady, Michigan 33 -- 124
Peyton Manning, Tennessee 28 -- 114
Drew Brees, Purdue 28 -- 114
Joe Flacco, Delaware 27 -- 112
Ben Roethlisberger, Miami (Ohio) 25 -- 108
These guys probably study up for the Wonderlic, which boosts their scores, but still, it seems plausible that a 3-digit-IQ is an advantage for 21st Century NFL quarterbacks.
January 27, 2014
Diversity in the NBA Commissioner's job
From the New York Times:
In a Transition Game, David Stern Is Passing the N.B.A. Commissioner’s Hat to Adam Silver
By HARVEY ARATON
David Stern stepped into a conference room through a side door from his office. He carried a can of soda and a small plate of tortilla chips.
“My lunch,” he said on a recent weekday afternoon as he settled in to be interviewed jointly with Adam Silver, who will succeed him Saturday as N.B.A. commissioner.
... Stern, 71, was, in the 1970s, a rising star at the New York law firm Proskauer Rose, which provided legal counsel to the N.B.A. and created a way inside the sport he followed growing up across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Teaneck, N.J.
Silver, 51, spent much of his youth in Rye, north of New York City, the son of a Proskauer partner. ...
After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Silver seemed to be following in the legal footsteps of his father. “I loved basketball, but I never dreamed about playing in the N.B.A. or certainly working for the N.B.A.,” he said.
The credentials and connections couldn’t have hurt after he wrote a letter to Stern seeking career advice. Silver joined the league in 1992 as Stern’s special assistant and subsequently became chief of staff, the senior vice president of N.B.A. Entertainment, and the deputy commissioner when Russ Granik left that position in 2006.
“We’ve been working intensely close for 22 years,” Stern said. “I’ve been giving him advice and he’s been giving me advice for over two decades. It depended upon the owners ultimately, but I thought he was the logical successor.”
Such is the rebuttal to the social media chatter about the commissioner’s office being too New York-centric, or even too Jewish. Support for Silver, according to league insiders, was widespread. ...
On average, as Bryant Gumbel has suggested, NBA team owners aren't exactly all that different demographically from Stern and his protege Silver.
But when Stern said, “We think alike about a lot of things — not just about basketball, but about life,” he was stressing a more essential point that N.B.A. owners seemed to grasp.
Indeed.
August 27, 2013
David Epstein's "The Sports Gene" reviewed
From my book review in Taki's Magazine:
Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books on human biodiversity in recent years.
Beyond undermining Gladwellian blank-slatism, Epstein extols the sheer pleasure of noticing humanity’s variety for its own sake. On his book’s penultimate page, he writes:
…sports will continue to provide a splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that’s human biological diversity. Amid the pageantry of the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, make sure to look for the extremes of the human physique.…It is breathtaking to think that, in the truest genetic sense, we are all a large family, and that the paths of our ancestors have left us wonderfully distinct.
Epstein, a Sports Illustrated reporter, builds upon the work of journalists such as Jon Entine (Taboo) and me in taking an evenhanded look at the roles of both nature and nurture.
Read the whole thing there.
April 19, 2013
Giant news: Famous basketball player comes out of closet! Oh, wait ...
Sam Borden writes in the New York Times:
One of the most dominant basketball players in recent memory came out as gay Wednesday, casually mentioning the fact in an interview as if it were an afterthought. The news media and the sports world seemed to treat it as such, too, with little mention of the star’s sexuality showing up on social media or on message boards, and virtually no analysis of what the revelation meant for tolerance in society as a whole.
At first glance, it seemed implausible. After all, players, fans, coaches and league executives had been waiting with bated breath for weeks, if not months and years, to see if an active team-sport athlete would come out. So how could this sort of revelation be treated with such nonchalance?
“Because it was a woman,” said Jim Buzinski, a founder of Outsports.com, a Web site about homosexuality and sports. “Can you imagine if it was a man who did the exact same thing? Everyone’s head would have exploded.”
The aftermath of the former Baylor star Brittney Griner’s revelation in several interviews this week was muted, to say the least. Griner, who was chosen with the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. draft Monday, did not treat the issue with any outward hesitation — in fact, she appeared to refer to her coming out in the past tense, as though it had happened before — giving a casual feeling to the entire episode.
It was an odd juxtaposition: as there is increased speculation about whether a male athlete — any male athlete — will come out while still playing a major professional team sport, one of the best female athletes in the history of team sports comes out, and the reaction is roughly equivalent to what one might see when a baseball manager reveals his starting rotation for a three-game series in July. ...
There is, obviously, a more substantial history to female athletes’ coming out and continuing to play. Individual-sport stars like the tennis legend Martina Navratilova and team-sport players like basketball’s Sheryl Swoopes and soccer’s Megan Rapinoe are among the women to continue playing after publicly discussing their sexuality.
But those players generally received a similarly subdued response, with nothing close to the expected surge in attention that figures to follow a male athlete’s coming out. The reaction to Griner’s disclosure, then, was simply the latest example of a disturbing trend, according to some leaders of L.G.B.T. causes.
“We talk a lot in the L.G.B.T. community about how sexism is a big part of what contributes to homophobia,” said Anna Aagenes, the executive director of GO! Athletes, a national network of L.G.B.T. athletes. “It’s disheartening when there are so many great role model female athletes out that we’re so focused on waiting for a male pro athlete to come out in one of the four major sports.”
Context may not be the only factor in the ho-hum public response to Griner’s disclosure. Stereotypes that top female athletes are gay continue to persist, and that probably played a role in how the sports world responded to Griner, said Sherri Murrell, the women’s basketball coach at Portland State and the only openly gay basketball coach in Division I. ...
She continued: “I think we’re always going to be living in that bias. I think it’s getting better, but there is still that tag.”
That persistent stereotype about female athletes does damage on multiple levels, said Patrick Burke, a founder of You Can Play, a prominent advocacy group for L.G.B.T. athletes. While a number of heterosexual male athletes, including the N.F.L. players Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo, have publicly supported the efforts of L.G.B.T. athlete groups, it has been much harder to find straight female athletes to speak out in support, Burke said.
“In sports right now, there are two different stereotypes — that there are no gay male athletes, and every female athlete is a lesbian,” Burke said. “We’ve had tremendous success in getting straight male players to speak to the issue; we’re having a tougher time finding straight female athletes speaking on this issue because they’ve spent their entire careers fighting the perception that they’re a lesbian.”
Maybe the straight female athletes know that the stereotype that female jocks are disproportionately lesbian is true?
And, maybe, male jocks are disproportionately not gay? Could that possibly be?
Everybody treats this like it's a new question because nobody remembers anything. But, Sports Illustrated gave a lot of attention to homosexual athletes around 1975. For example, Former NFL player Dave Kopay came out that year, too. About the same time, 1968 Olympic decathlete Tom Waddell came out. In early 1975 SI's (arguably) top writer Frank Deford ran a two part extract from his biography of 1920s tennis great Bill Tilden. Deford said he wrote a book about Tilden precisely because he was gay ... and that so few top male athletes are gay. (Here are Deford's first article and second article.)
Here's my 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which points out the radical difference in sexual orientation of male and female athletes.
February 2, 2013
Are running quarterbacks more likely to get hurt?
From Slate:
The Running Men
Are mobile quarterbacks like Colin Kaepernick more injury-prone than pocket passers?
By Omar Bashir and Chris Oates
This year’s Super Bowl matchup shows you don’t need a particular type of quarterback to win in the NFL. The Ravens’ Joe Flacco has 38 rushing yards this season. The 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick ran for 56 yards on a single touchdown gallop against the Packers a few weeks ago. But in the long term, when you’re building a franchise, which kind of signal-caller is the better bet?
Conventional wisdom says a runner is more likely to get hurt than a stay-in-the-pocket statue. Just ask Joe Flacco, who told the assembled press on Wednesday that “quarterbacks like [Kaepernick] are eventually going to have to become mostly pocket passers to survive in this league.”
... But is this correct—are mobile quarterbacks like Kaepernick, Michael Vick, and RGIII, more prone to getting hurt than conventional passers such as Flacco, Peyton Manning, and Tom Brady?
... We tried to shed some light on the injury question by collecting quarterback injury data and applying some basic statistical tests.
Finally, we ensured that each of the four total ways of separating “mobile” passers from the rest yielded a reasonable set of names. For instance, when mobility is defined by four or more rushes per start over a regular-season career, nine of 82 players in the dataset qualify: Michael Vick, Robert Griffin III, Vince Young, Daunte Culpepper, David Garrard, Quincy Carter, Colt McCoy, Cam Newton, and Tim Tebow. (Kaepernick would also qualify under the four-rushes-per-start criterion.)
As you’ll see in the chart below, regardless of how we sliced the data, there was no statistically significant difference in injury rates between mobile and conventional quarterbacks. Quarterbacks of both types tend to lose 11 to 14 percent of their starts to injury. Even without counting the thus-far injury-free Kaepernick, three of the four tests produced a lower injury rate for mobile quarterbacks. The gap, though, is small enough that a statistician would call it zero.
A few things:
First: What Flacco says is literally true: "quarterbacks like [Kaepernick] are eventually going to have to become mostly pocket passers to survive in this league.”
Running backs can get stronger into their mid-20s: e.g., Adrian Peterson just had his best year at age 27. But running quarterbacks generally don't succeed by lowering their shoulder and running over linebackers, they succeed through being elusive, like Kaepernick. Elusiveness is mostly a matter of foot speed, cutting ability, and instinct. Most players come into the NFL about as elusive as they'll ever be. Aging and injuries, large and small, take their toll rapidly in the NFL.
Whether or not running quarterbacks suffer more major injuries doesn't really matter. Just about everybody in football except, maybe placekickers, gets progressively dinged up, and thus their elusiveness erodes with age.
If a quarterback comes into the NFL as an outstanding runner, he might be able to be fairly effective as a starting QB immediately even if he hasn't learned how to be an NFL-quality passer. But, if he doesn't learn how to pass, he's not going to be starting in his mid-30s.
Second, there's always a lot of excitement around the idea that running quarterbacks are going to revolutionize the NFL Real Soon Now. They make for great highlight clips and they're the simplest players to win with in football video games. My son told me that when his friends forced him to play Madden, he'd always just pick Michael Vick and have him run around with the ball.
Similarly, the easiest way to win in Pop Warner football for little boys is to snap the ball to the best athlete and let him do whatever he wants with it. One man heroics work less, however, as you ascend the pyramid of training. At the highest level (the NFL), collaboration among specialists tends to produce better results than having an all-around athlete do his own thing.
Third, here's a baseball analogy to a young running quarterback: Say, a very fast first baseman wins Rookie of the Year at age 24 by leading the league with 15 triples (versus only five homers), stealing 60 bases, and getting to grounders in the hole between first and second base better than any other first baseman in the league. (Why is somebody that fast playing first base? Let's say, he can't play other infield positions because he's lefthanded and he can't play the outfield because he's terrible at judging flyballs.)
If your friend says, "He's going to revolutionize the first base position, turn it into a speed position!"
You'd reply: "He was fun as a rookie, but to have a good, long MLB career at first base, he's going to have to develop homerun power, because he's not going to get faster as the years go by. It's not hard to come up with a slow first baseman who hits 25 homers year after year and thus contributes more overall than this guy does, especially in a few years when he's hitting only six triples per year instead of 15."
Exciting young running quarterbacks are kind of like that: they naturally get worse at running, so they'd better get better at passing.
Fourth, as a running quarterback's running skills decline with age, defenses can concentrate more on stopping his passing, so, unless his passing improves, the effectiveness of his passing will also get worse as his rushing declines.
Fifth, all else being equal, it's better for a quarterback to be a good runner than not a good runner, just as all else being equal, it's good for a first baseman to be good at fielding and baserunning. But the Venn diagram intersection of NFL-Quality Passer and NFL-Quality Rusher is not large.
Sixth, all else being equal, the player who gets hit more often is going to get hurt more often. But, things are seldom equal.
Second, there's always a lot of excitement around the idea that running quarterbacks are going to revolutionize the NFL Real Soon Now. They make for great highlight clips and they're the simplest players to win with in football video games. My son told me that when his friends forced him to play Madden, he'd always just pick Michael Vick and have him run around with the ball.
Similarly, the easiest way to win in Pop Warner football for little boys is to snap the ball to the best athlete and let him do whatever he wants with it. One man heroics work less, however, as you ascend the pyramid of training. At the highest level (the NFL), collaboration among specialists tends to produce better results than having an all-around athlete do his own thing.
Third, here's a baseball analogy to a young running quarterback: Say, a very fast first baseman wins Rookie of the Year at age 24 by leading the league with 15 triples (versus only five homers), stealing 60 bases, and getting to grounders in the hole between first and second base better than any other first baseman in the league. (Why is somebody that fast playing first base? Let's say, he can't play other infield positions because he's lefthanded and he can't play the outfield because he's terrible at judging flyballs.)
If your friend says, "He's going to revolutionize the first base position, turn it into a speed position!"
You'd reply: "He was fun as a rookie, but to have a good, long MLB career at first base, he's going to have to develop homerun power, because he's not going to get faster as the years go by. It's not hard to come up with a slow first baseman who hits 25 homers year after year and thus contributes more overall than this guy does, especially in a few years when he's hitting only six triples per year instead of 15."
Exciting young running quarterbacks are kind of like that: they naturally get worse at running, so they'd better get better at passing.
Fourth, as a running quarterback's running skills decline with age, defenses can concentrate more on stopping his passing, so, unless his passing improves, the effectiveness of his passing will also get worse as his rushing declines.
Fifth, all else being equal, it's better for a quarterback to be a good runner than not a good runner, just as all else being equal, it's good for a first baseman to be good at fielding and baserunning. But the Venn diagram intersection of NFL-Quality Passer and NFL-Quality Rusher is not large.
Sixth, all else being equal, the player who gets hit more often is going to get hurt more often. But, things are seldom equal.
Seventh, much of the confusion surrounding this topic is due to it being closely linked to questions of race, which lowers collective IQs by 20 points: "Michael Vick, Robert Griffin III, Vince Young, Daunte Culpepper, David Garrard, Quincy Carter, Colt McCoy, Cam Newton, and Tim Tebow. (Kaepernick would also qualify under the four-rushes-per-start criterion.)"
So, the study shows seven black running QBs, one biracial (Kaepernick), and two whites. I would imagine that pocket passers would be skewed at least as heavily in the opposite racial direction.
Much of the talk about running quarterbacks getting injured more is excuse-making and misdirection for the quarterback position in the NFL remaining white-dominated. (Notice that blacks aren't underrepresented at quarterback in the NFL relative to their share of the national population, they just aren't over-represented like at most other positions. In today's mental climate, black monopolies at cornerback or running back don't need explanation -- that's just the way it is, and, hey, why are you even noticing? -- but white domination at quarterback does require rationalizations.)
Much of the talk about running quarterbacks getting injured more is excuse-making and misdirection for the quarterback position in the NFL remaining white-dominated. (Notice that blacks aren't underrepresented at quarterback in the NFL relative to their share of the national population, they just aren't over-represented like at most other positions. In today's mental climate, black monopolies at cornerback or running back don't need explanation -- that's just the way it is, and, hey, why are you even noticing? -- but white domination at quarterback does require rationalizations.)
What seems to be happening is that, per capita, black quarterbacks are more likely to start in the NFL before they've become NFL quality passers, because their, on average, more dangerous running ability makes them more effective at a young age. But, the percentage of college quarterbacks of any race who mature into elite NFL passers is quite small. So, as young black running QB starters slow down with age, they lose the skill that made them effective without being an NFL quality passer, so they tend to flame out in spectacular fashions.
So, to explain phenomenon such as why Vince Young was on the cover of Madden NFL 08 but is now a backup, the running QBs gets hurt more party line gets propounded.
So, to explain phenomenon such as why Vince Young was on the cover of Madden NFL 08 but is now a backup, the running QBs gets hurt more party line gets propounded.
In contrast, a young slow white quarterback who isn't ready yet to be an NFL pocket passer is more likely stuck on the bench or the taxi squad. And if he fails to develop into an NFL-quality passer, he quickly moves into the rewarding world of insurance sales without much muss or fuss.
October 30, 2012
NBA team accused of discriminating against black basketball players
Business Insider reports:
The Minnesota Timberwolves go into the season with only five black players on their 15-man roster, and some people are calling it a conspiracy.
From Jerry Zgoda and Dennis Brackin of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
"How did we get a roster that resembles the 1955 Lakers?" asked Tyrone Terrell, chairman of St. Paul's African American leadership council. "I think everything is a strategy. Nothing happens by happenstance."
That strategy, Terrell and others in the black community believe, is to sell tickets to the Wolves' fan base, which is overwhelmingly white.
Lou Amundson, JJ Barea, Chase Budinger, Andrei Kirilenko, Kevin Love, Nikola Pekovic, Luke Ridnour, Ricky Rubio, Alexey Shved, and Greg Stiemsma make up 2/3 of the T-Wolves roster, and they are all white.
Minnesota civil rights activist Ron Edwards thinks something is up too, and he told the paper, "It raises some real questions to me about what's really intended. I think, personally, that it was calculated. Is this an attempt to get fans back in the stands? Minnesota, after all, is a pretty white state.''
I don't see much evidence at all that white Americans like foreign whites more than African-Americans, but it might someday happen. More likely, a small market team management might try a strategy of building a whiter team in the hopes of getting better team play interaction effects.
So far, the Timberwolves' Achilles heel (or anterior cruciate ligament, in the case of Ricky Rubio) has been injuries. Rubio, the former Spanish child prodigy point guard, has been out since the middle of last season, and Love, the closest thing to a white American superstar the NBA has at present (at least as measured by his huge points/rebounds numbers -- the rest of his game ...), recently broke his hand. So, we won't see if this strategy, if it is a strategy and not just randomness, works or not until the second half of the season.
One interesting study that I haven't seen done is differences in injury rates between races. I wouldn't be surprised if the prejudice against, say, white running backs in big time football might be based on a greater likelihood of white runners to get too dinged up to be effective.
Back in the 1980s, Bill James did a rare race study comparing white and black pairs of baseball players with similar rookie year number for speed-related stats such as triples, grounded into double plays, defensive range, and percent of time caught stealing. He found a strong tendency for black ballplayers to maintain their speed later into their careers than white players. I can't find James' essay online, but here is Jon Entine's summary of it.
Now, this analysis couldn't distinguish between the differential effects of injuries on speed and the differential effects of aging on speed, but it's still about the best starting point I've heard of.
Now, this analysis couldn't distinguish between the differential effects of injuries on speed and the differential effects of aging on speed, but it's still about the best starting point I've heard of.
For example, on paper, Oakland's Reggie Jackson and Bob Allison, a 1960s Minnesota Twin who was electrifying for a few years, looked equally fast as rookies, but Allison's speed fell off faster, while Reggie stayed fast enough to stay in the league long enough to put up Hall of Fame career numbers. James also cites Davey Lopes's then-amazing 1985 season with the Cubs as a 39 year old part-timer in which he stole 47 bases in 51 attempts.
You might think that somebody would have looked into this more over the quarter of a century since then, but sabermetrics appears pretty allergic to obvious racial analyses. With the gigantic obsession in 21st Century America with fantasy sports leagues, in which hobbyists draft lineups and compete with each other based on their players' subsequent stats, you would think this question would be a big one. Instead, though, stat analysts appear content to let racial stereotypes and hunches, rather than statistically informed analyses, drive fans' decision-making in this regard.
I wouldn't be surprised that black athletes have greater resilience to the wear-and-tear of injuries, but I can think of a couple of other explanations for James' results.
The first is that James' methodology of finding matching pairs might not be that good. Assume that the black bell curve of speed is shifted to the right of the white bell curve, but you have only crude measures of baseball speed. For example, Allison led the league in triples as rookie with 9, which is a good indicator of speed, but it's a small sample size. Some of the other stats, such as defensive range and caught stealing, are confounded by baseball savvy. Maybe white baseball players tend to be savvier as rookies, while blacks tended to be multi-sport athletes who only decided to concentrate upon baseball at a later age? (Certainly Reggie Jackson evolved into one of the more cunning ballplayers by late in his career, but he was a star football player in college.)
So, maybe Bob Allison was never quite the spectacular athlete that Reggie Jackson was, he just happened to have somewhat similar numbers based on not totally reliable measures. For example, James makes a big deal out of both guys being good college football players, but Allison was a fullback while Reggie was a defensive back. Big difference in likely speed. Perhaps white players who appear to be as fast as their matched black counterparts aren't really as fast on average, they're just the best that James' system can come up with. For example, I presume he didn't find any white matches for, say, Ricky Henderson, Willie Wilson, or Vince Coleman.
The second issue with the study is ... juicing. We don't know much about pre-Canseco experiments with steroids, but I'm developing some suspicions.
I saw Reggie Jackson's titanic homer in the 1971 All-Star Game off the light stand on top of the third deck in right field of Tiger Stadium. It was almost unprecedented, but by 30 years later it wasn't so amazing. Barry Bonds hit two similar blasts in the 2002 World Series that the TV cameraman couldn't track.
As he got older, Reggie developed the top-heavy look of a serious lifter that became common in 1990s baseball. California muscle building culture was way ahead of the rest of the country in technical sophistication in the 1960s and 1970s.
As he got older, Reggie developed the top-heavy look of a serious lifter that became common in 1990s baseball. California muscle building culture was way ahead of the rest of the country in technical sophistication in the 1960s and 1970s.
Or consider James's example of Davey Lopes.
I was a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan during their strong 1970s, and I recall being at Dodger Stadium in the late 1970s when all the Dodger sluggers (the 1977 Dodgers was the first team with four 30-homer men) took a pregame jog through the outfield. They were men of average height, but extraordinarily wide.
Lopes was a leadoff man / second baseman whose career high in homeruns through age 31 was 10. Then he started developing more power and at age 34 in 1979 hit 28 homeruns, which seemed a bizarre total for a middle infielder at the time.
(Lopes' development, now that I think about it, had something to do with moving the outfield fences in at Dodger Stadium. In Sandy Koufax's 1960s, centerfield was 410 feet, then they brought it in to 400. The Dodgers had a lot of players who could hit minimal homers just over the outfielder's glove -- Ron Cey drove my Dodger-hating roommate crazy with a lot of cheap home runs that barely made it over the fence.) So, management then made the centerfield fence only 395'. Then MLB set a minimum of 400 in center, so they had to move it out again, but I don't remember the exact years.)
I'm just tossing some evidence out there, mind you, not drawing conclusions.
(Lopes' development, now that I think about it, had something to do with moving the outfield fences in at Dodger Stadium. In Sandy Koufax's 1960s, centerfield was 410 feet, then they brought it in to 400. The Dodgers had a lot of players who could hit minimal homers just over the outfielder's glove -- Ron Cey drove my Dodger-hating roommate crazy with a lot of cheap home runs that barely made it over the fence.) So, management then made the centerfield fence only 395'. Then MLB set a minimum of 400 in center, so they had to move it out again, but I don't remember the exact years.)
I'm just tossing some evidence out there, mind you, not drawing conclusions.
By the way, I only saw about a minute of the World Series, but I was happy to see that the Giants' young superstar catcher Buster Posey seemed to be built more like an old fashioned lithe athlete, in the mold of Roger Federer or Chris Paul, rather than a top-heavy 1990's slugger. Hope (and fandom) springs eternal ...
October 24, 2012
Baseball: Is it too soon to go back in the fan pool?
With the World Series on, I'm reminded that baseball has some exciting young players like 20-year-old Mike Trout, who might win the A.L. MVP despite one of the various Cabreras winning the Triple Crown, and 19-year-old Bryce Harper. But are they too exciting? I mean, Harper has looked like he's 30 years old since he was 16.
Last year, Ryan Braun won the MVP in the N.L., only to immediately get caught for performance enhancing drugs (although he managed to lawyer his way out of the 50 game suspension). This season, the San Francisco Cabrera was leading the N.L. in batting average when he got caught.
Judging by the depressed overall offensive totals, the game is cleaner than it was a 10-15 years ago. But does that just mean that whoever is racking up standout statistics this year is probably just one of the smaller number of juicers?
A vast amount of analytical talent is devoted to thinking about baseball (statistical talent that might more usefully be deployed upon more significant statistical issues, such as, say, figuring out the long-run impact of immigration policies, but never mind for now). But, the sabermetricians, led by the sainted Bill James, tended to be unenthusiastic in the 1990s and early 2000s about thinking about why exactly all the most famous slugging records were suddenly being broken.
Have they caught up? Are there websites that, say, explore how much confidence you can have that if you invest some loyalty in rooting for Player X based upon his impressive numbers, you won't suddenly find it's all been a fraud?
September 10, 2012
Stephen Strasburg
The division-leading Washington Nationals baseball team has gone ahead with their plan and shut their prize young pitcher Stephen Strasburg down for the season. He's coming off Tommy John surgery and team management had decided early to only let him pitch 160 innings, even if they had a chance to go to the postseason with him.
I don't have anything intelligent to say about Strasburg, I just wanted to use this opportunity to post a link to a video I saw on the evening sports news on May 6, 1998. I was sitting on the couch talking to my wife with the TV on but the volume off, so I didn't get any audio hints about what was coming. I vaguely recognized Kerry Wood, the Chicago Cubs' 20-year-old phenom pitcher, and was hardly surprised when they started showing clips of his strikeout pitches from that afternoon's game at Wrigley Field against the hard-hitting Houston Astros (Bagwell & Biggio).
But I became increasingly distracted from my conversation as the strikeout pitch clips kept going on and on, past all reasonable limits, a dozen, a dozen and a half, and still kept piling up. And the pitches weren't just Wood's 98 mph fastball. He was getting bizarre motion on the ball. By the end of the game (the 19th is 3:00 into the video), Wood was throwing what looked like 90+ mph whiffle balls at the befuddled batters. The catcher could barely backhand the 20th and last strikeout pitch, which broke two feet horizontally from right to left. The poor batter would have needed a pool cue to get any wood on the ball.
Was Wood's 20 strikeout one-hitter in batter-friendly Wrigley Field in 1998, the McGwire-Sosa peak of the steroid slugger era, the greatest game ever pitched? Many people think so.
I saw Sandy Koufax pitch at Dodger Stadium when I was five, and have been a big Koufax fan ever since. But Koufax was pitching with a huge vertical strikezone, bottom of the knees to shoulders. So he threw two main pitches: a curve that dropped sharply (but didn't swerve much horizontally like Wood's last pitch) and a rising fastball. A baseball thrown hard enough with enough backspin will tend to sail upward above its natural trajectory and that's what a lot of legendary 1960s pitchers threw. (By rising fastball, I mean one that falls slower than gravity alone would imply.) Pitching 320 innings per year burned out Koufax, who retired in 1966 after going 27-9.
But the leagues and the umpires progressively took the rising fastball away from pitchers after 1968. By the 1990s, the strikezone barely extended above the belt, forcing pitchers into odd contortions to avoid rising fastballs.
After Wood's 20-strikeout game, it suddenly became hugely important to everybody interested in baseball, for reasons that no longer are clear, for Wood to break the record for most strikeouts in two consecutive starts, which he did. And then he had to break the record in three consecutive starts, which he did. A few months later he had Tommy John surgery.
And Wood was never quite the same. He had three operations on his arm, and 14 trips to the disabled list. He retired earlier this season with a career record of 86-75. It was a fine career with two All Star game appearances, but it wasn't what everybody had hoped that May afternoon when he was 20.
August 29, 2012
Federer v. Nicklaus: Most tennis & golf Grand Slam championships
Enough election politics for now. Back to my August sports kick.
Roger Federer comes into the U.S. Open with a record 17 victories in tennis's four annual Grand Slam major championships (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open). The 31-year-old Swissman is trying to open up distance between himself and younger stars Rafael Nadal (11 majors) and Novak Djokovic (5).
To my mind, however, the interesting angle is that he has a shot at tying Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors in the two big country club sports, tennis and golf. (Golf also has four Grand Slam events per year, the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA.) Tiger Woods has been chasing Nicklaus's mark his whole life, but Federer may beat him to it.
Combining the lists of top men's major champions of all time into an apples and oranges table gives a sense, that, yes, this isn't a completely apples and oranges compilation:
| Jack Nicklaus | Golf | 18 |
| Roger Federer | Tennis | 17 |
| Pete Sampras | Tennis | 14 |
| Tiger Woods | Golf | 14 |
| Roy Emerson | Tennis | 12 |
| Björn Borg | Tennis | 11 |
| Rafael Nadal | Tennis | 11 |
| Rod Laver | Tennis | 11 |
| Walter Hagen | Golf | 11 |
| Bill Tilden | Tennis | 10 |
| Ben Hogan | Golf | 9 |
| Gary Player | Golf | 9 |
| Andre Agassi | Tennis | 8 |
| Fred Perry | Tennis | 8 |
| Ivan Lendl | Tennis | 8 |
| Jimmy Connors | Tennis | 8 |
| Ken Rosewall | Tennis | 8 |
| Tom Watson | Golf | 8 |
| Arnold Palmer | Golf | 7 |
| Bobby Jones | Golf | 7 |
| Gene Sarazen | Golf | 7 |
| Harry Vardon | Golf | 7 |
| Henri Cochet | Tennis | 7 |
| John McEnroe | Tennis | 7 |
| John Newcombe | Tennis | 7 |
| Mats Wilander | Tennis | 7 |
| René Lacoste | Tennis | 7 |
| Richard Sears | Tennis | 7 |
| Sam Snead | Golf | 7 |
| William Larned | Tennis | 7 |
| William Renshaw | Tennis | 7 |
| Boris Becker | Tennis | 6 |
| Don Budge | Tennis | 6 |
| Jack Crawford | Tennis | 6 |
| Laurence Doherty | Tennis | 6 |
| Lee Trevino | Golf | 6 |
| Nick Faldo | Golf | 6 |
| Stefan Edberg | Tennis | 6 |
| Tony Wilding | Tennis | 6 |
| Byron Nelson | Golf | 5 |
| Frank Sedgman | Tennis | 5 |
| James Braid | Golf | 5 |
| J.H. Taylor | Golf | 5 |
| Novak Djokovic | Tennis | 5 |
| Peter Thomson | Golf | 5 |
| Seve Ballesteros | Golf | 5 |
| Tony Trabert | Tennis | 5 |
| Golf >= 5 | 18 | |
| Tennis >=5 | 29 |
I'd say that this list suggests that it's a little bit easier to pile up a lot of Grand Slam titles in tennis than in golf, primarily because most people would agree that Tiger Woods (14 majors) is a better golfer than Pete Sampras (14, too) is a tennis player.
In general, the all time great tennis players can win more often at the peak of their careers than the all time great golfers, because tennis is a less random, larger sample size sport. In any given major, the world's best tennis player is usually more likely to win than the world's best golfer. Tennis is kind of like tug-of-war, where the better team ought to win.
On the other hand, golf careers last much longer. Nicklaus won his first major at 22, his 16th and 17th majors at 40 and his 18th at 46 (the famous 1986 Masters). And one of these years somebody really old will win a golf major. Tom Watson missed winning the British Open at 59 in 2009 by inches. In 1974, Sam Snead finished third in the PGA, behind only Trevino and Nicklaus.
In contrast, Federer is considered a miracle of rejuvenation to have won Wimbledon at 30.
The age of first victory in a major is usually lower in tennis, supporting the common sense notion that tennis is a much tougher game physically, while golf may be somewhat tougher mentally.
Put it all together, and it seems pretty reasonable to note that Federer is challenging Nicklaus.
By the way, why are apples and oranges the canonical examples of things that shouldn't be compared? Relative to every other possible pair of things, they seem pretty similar to me.
Sports History Minutia (for sports data methodology aficionados only): It's hard comparing the number of major championships won by golfers and tennis players before 1968, when tennis opened up its Grand Slam events to professionals. Thus, the great Mexican-American tennis player Pancho Gonzales is credited with only two Grand Slam titles because he turned pro and spent about 15 years on the small pro tour. (He won 15 Pro Slam titles). Rod Laver would have 20 major championships, adding together amateur, pro, and open titles. On the other hand, that segregation of talent may overstate this era's combined talent. Before 1968, Laver was never playing against all the top players in the world all at once. Then, again, in 1969, he won all four Grand Slam in open competition, the last time a man has done that. Laver was really good.
Golf has a lesser problem in that it's not clear what to do with the British and U.S. Amateur titles. The term Grand Slam was invented in 1930 when Atlanta amateur golfer Bobby Jones won the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs. Golf historians usually credit him with 13 major championships instead of just the 7 he won in the Opens, as on this list. However, when Jones retired upon achieving his Grand Slam, the prestige of Amateur championships as they slowly turned into merely the premiere events for college golfers. Nicklaus, who idolized Jones, likes to count his two U.S. Amateur titles, giving him 20 major championships (and Woods 17, including his three U.S. Amateurs), but most people just count victories in the four majors currently open to professionals, a foursome stabilized by 1934.
Two golfers have won three professional majors in one calendar year: Ben Hogan in 1953 and Tiger Woods in 2000. Woods winning four straight majors in 2000-2001 is clearly the greatest 12-month feat in golf history, although it still lacks an agreed-upon catchy title like Bobby Jones' Grand Slam. In contrast, tennis players have won three of the four grand slam titles in one calendar year 13 times, seven times since open competition began in 1968.
Americans possess an advantage in golf in that three of golf's majors are played in the U.S., versus only one in tennis.
Golf courses can look radically different, especially the British Open courses, which are always played over gnarly-looking sand dunes next to the windy sea, versus The Masters' Augusta National, which is the prototype of the glossy inland course with trees and water hazards. Tennis courts are always identical in size, differing only in surface. Yet, at this point in history, golfers might be better at adapting to wildly different courses than tennis players are to different surfaces.
Before the introduction of jetliners at the end of the 1950s, it wasn't all that common for golfers and tennis players to think of making it to all four events. Top golfers crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners in the 1920s, but the British Open withered in the 1930s through the 1950s due to Depression, war, and austerity. Arnold Palmer's decision to jet in for the British Open in 1960 revitalized that event.
August 27, 2012
Tennis Arms Race: Roger v. Serena
Here are the first and last pictures (plus captions) in a photo gallery entitled Wimbledon Arms Race in the Toronto Star in 2011:
| Sure he may be the greatest player of all time. But Roger Federer is nowhere near the tops when it comes to arm muscles at Wimbledon this year. There are more impressive specimens to come.... |
| But really, Serena Williams takes the cake. Her arms look more muscled than Roger Federer's thighs. No wonder she has such a powerful serve. |
And, again, here's that article in the New York Times Magazine trying to figure out why tennis fans have never really taken to the Williams Sisters. Is it their race?
Let me ramble a moment about Access Journalism. Anybody can put together snarky photo galleries like The Star did. But, there's no prestige in that. The high end of journalism is doing interviews for profiles, especially with posed photos. People apparently like these beefcake glamour photos of celebrities that magazines put on their covers. But if the interviewer asks unwelcome questions, like, "Serena, why are your arms more muscular than the world's greatest tennis player's thighs?" not only will the interview be over, but, worse, the photo shoot will be off.
Moreover, it often turns out that your access is terminated not only to Serena Williams, but to the 17 other clients of her offended PR manager. Your career could be over. So, don't ask unwelcome questions. Instead, just go with the conventional wisdom about "Aren't these strong women wonderful role models?"
You can tell that the guy writing the NYT Mag article about Serena thinks his assignment is kind of screwy, but he can't come out and say that.
The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird climate we are in where you aren't really supposed to mention that it's nice to see a champion athlete who looks like Federer -- a grown man who, for once, doesn't look like a cartoon character or a mutant. I guess that would be too offensive to all the science project athletes and their fans.
So, what other top athletes out there besides Federer are still built more like, say, Joe DiMaggio in 1941 than like Predator or Alien?
The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird climate we are in where you aren't really supposed to mention that it's nice to see a champion athlete who looks like Federer -- a grown man who, for once, doesn't look like a cartoon character or a mutant. I guess that would be too offensive to all the science project athletes and their fans.
So, what other top athletes out there besides Federer are still built more like, say, Joe DiMaggio in 1941 than like Predator or Alien?
August 25, 2012
What the 21st Century's most accomplished athlete looks like with his shirt off
One of the reasons that sports fans can be so oblivious to how odd looking their ripped heroes can appear is because there is little demand for pictures of non-ripped athletes. So, people start to assume that everybody who works out hard enough will start to look like, say, Serena Williams.
As a counter-example, here is a rare picture of what Swiss tennis player Roger Federer looked like while changing shirts on the way to winning the French Open in 2009, the 14th of his record 17 tennis major championships from 2003 through his victory at Wimbledon this year. He's the top seed in the U.S. Open, and if he wins will tie Jack Nicklaus for the most grand slam championships in the two big country club sports, no doubt much to the dismay of his friend Tiger Woods, who is stuck on 14.
Yet, it turns out that Federer is built more like, say, Sean Connery in 1962 than Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984 or Carmelita Jeter in 2012.
Federer may well be the greatest tennis player who ever lived, but there are relatively few pictures of him online changing shirts, much less posed beefcake pictures of him like the many we see of more ripped athletes without half his success.
As a counter-example, here is a rare picture of what Swiss tennis player Roger Federer looked like while changing shirts on the way to winning the French Open in 2009, the 14th of his record 17 tennis major championships from 2003 through his victory at Wimbledon this year. He's the top seed in the U.S. Open, and if he wins will tie Jack Nicklaus for the most grand slam championships in the two big country club sports, no doubt much to the dismay of his friend Tiger Woods, who is stuck on 14.
Yet, it turns out that Federer is built more like, say, Sean Connery in 1962 than Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984 or Carmelita Jeter in 2012.
Federer may well be the greatest tennis player who ever lived, but there are relatively few pictures of him online changing shirts, much less posed beefcake pictures of him like the many we see of more ripped athletes without half his success.
Tennis is an all-around test of strength, agility, strategy, and endurance, so, at least in theory, it's not surprising that Federer looks like a traditional assumption of what a good athlete would look like, not like the highly specialized specimens we see in various Olympic events, which tend to make narrower demands.
In theory, if you are on the juice, you should want to stay covered up -- the way the rational and suspicious Barry Bonds switched to bulky, long-sleeved uniforms after he started doping in 1999. In practice, however, there seems to be a strong correlation between how much you look like you are doping and how much you want rip your shirt off at center court and strike Mr. Universe poses. It must be the juice doing the thinking for you. And, why not? Nobody much seems to notice. Maybe Skip Bayless will point out on ESPN that there's something a little off about you, but Bayless will just get flooded with online comments calling him a jerk.
Federer, instead, typically wears what tennis fans of a generation ago would have considered a well-fitting shirt, neither skin-tight nor a shapeless cover-up.
I don't know if that's because there doesn't seem to be much demand for pictures of an athlete who merely looks extremely fit by the standards of 1975, but who doesn't look like the living anatomy charts we've come to know so well since. Moreover, pictures of a shirtless Federer on the web often come with comments suggesting that people these days find it kind of creepy that he doesn't shave his chest hair.
Or maybe nobody wants to look at pictures of Federer looking healthy and nonweird because they raise questions about other athletic heroes, and why they look the weird way they do.
In general, I suspect many tennis fans are a little embarrassed by the fact that Federer doesn't look like a GI Joe Action Figure the way other athletes have looked in recent times.. The New York Times Magazine often runs a big article about tennis stars when the U.S. Open in New York rolls around, with heroic cover photos, such as this year's one of the Williams Sisters, with a cover photo lit and framed to emphasize Serena's implausible musculature.
Here's the late David Foster Wallace's appreciation of Federer from 2006 in the NYT Mag. It doesn't come with any beefcake shots, just pictures of a fully clothed Federer playing tennis.
Anyway, this is not to say that Federer must be innocent of any and all doping. Endurance drugs like epo, for example, don't change body shape, so looking at pictures wouldn't help.
My point, though, is that Federer's body raises doubt about the usual explanation you hear when you point out that some sports hero looks like a bodybuilder: "That's because he/she works so hard. If the other players were as dedicated to winning as he/she is, they'd look like him/her too."
But, Roger Federer seems to be awfully dedicated to winning grand slam titles. He's won three more than any other tennis player in history. He's won three more than his friend and rival Tiger Woods. He's playing in what would seem like the toughest era in tennis history, against all that talent from countries that used to be stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
Federer has earned $73 million in winnings, and, at age 31, is back to World #1, and is the favorite entering the U.S. Open. Last year, he was the fifth highest compensated athlete in the world, behind two boxers, Tiger, and LeBron, and ahead of Kobe. In other words, he is extremely good at prioritizing among the trade-offs involved in winning at tennis.
For example, would shaving his chest help him win? He's not a swimmer, so why bother? Sure, the magazine photographers who specialize in shooting the massive, oiled up abs of athletes would insist that he shave his chest. But, he's not going to let somebody oil up his abs, which aren't massive, for a beefcake pictures that he's not going to agree to star in. How is any of that not a distraction from his goal of finishing his career with more major championships in tennis than Tiger will ever win in golf?
Would lifting huge amounts of weights to add mass and definition help Federer win even more? All else being equal, perhaps. But what would he have to give up to to do that? Giant muscles come with an opportunity cost? It's not just the time it takes to lift a lot of weights, it's the recovery times when your muscles are rebuilding and aren't at their best. For example, Barry Bonds won three MVP awards in baseball in 1990-1993 and continue to be one of the very best players in baseball through the McGwire-Sosa season of 1998. But, he wasn't juicing yet, so he couldn't lift weights more than 15 minutes per day during the season without it degrading his day to day game performance. And, despite hitting 46 homers in 1993, he wasn't ripped-looking.
Starting slowly on the juice in 1999, and accelerating in 2000 through 2001 when he broke McGwire's record with 73 homers, Bonds found that drugs helped him recover faster so he could lift more. He set records that are just silly, but clearly re-established that he had been the best player in baseball all through the mid-1990s.
Anyway, the point is that great athletes like Federer and the 1990s Bonds, playing all-around, complicated games like tennis and baseball and playing frequently over long seasons, don't find it in their interests to do the weight room work it takes to look all massive and ripped. (Okay, there may well be other sports where the demands are less broad and less time consuming, such as sprinting, so that it makes sense to peak for the Olympics with a ferocious weight room regimen).
But, lots of other athletes in sports like tennis and baseball do seem to find it in their interest to spend a huge amount of time in the weight room. Is it really because they want to win more than Roger Federer wants to win? Or is it because, for some reason that we aren't privy to, they can lift more weights more often because their muscles recover faster that those of the greatest tennis player of all time?
Anyway, this is not to say that Federer must be innocent of any and all doping. Endurance drugs like epo, for example, don't change body shape, so looking at pictures wouldn't help.
My point, though, is that Federer's body raises doubt about the usual explanation you hear when you point out that some sports hero looks like a bodybuilder: "That's because he/she works so hard. If the other players were as dedicated to winning as he/she is, they'd look like him/her too."
But, Roger Federer seems to be awfully dedicated to winning grand slam titles. He's won three more than any other tennis player in history. He's won three more than his friend and rival Tiger Woods. He's playing in what would seem like the toughest era in tennis history, against all that talent from countries that used to be stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
Federer has earned $73 million in winnings, and, at age 31, is back to World #1, and is the favorite entering the U.S. Open. Last year, he was the fifth highest compensated athlete in the world, behind two boxers, Tiger, and LeBron, and ahead of Kobe. In other words, he is extremely good at prioritizing among the trade-offs involved in winning at tennis.
For example, would shaving his chest help him win? He's not a swimmer, so why bother? Sure, the magazine photographers who specialize in shooting the massive, oiled up abs of athletes would insist that he shave his chest. But, he's not going to let somebody oil up his abs, which aren't massive, for a beefcake pictures that he's not going to agree to star in. How is any of that not a distraction from his goal of finishing his career with more major championships in tennis than Tiger will ever win in golf?
Would lifting huge amounts of weights to add mass and definition help Federer win even more? All else being equal, perhaps. But what would he have to give up to to do that? Giant muscles come with an opportunity cost? It's not just the time it takes to lift a lot of weights, it's the recovery times when your muscles are rebuilding and aren't at their best. For example, Barry Bonds won three MVP awards in baseball in 1990-1993 and continue to be one of the very best players in baseball through the McGwire-Sosa season of 1998. But, he wasn't juicing yet, so he couldn't lift weights more than 15 minutes per day during the season without it degrading his day to day game performance. And, despite hitting 46 homers in 1993, he wasn't ripped-looking.
Starting slowly on the juice in 1999, and accelerating in 2000 through 2001 when he broke McGwire's record with 73 homers, Bonds found that drugs helped him recover faster so he could lift more. He set records that are just silly, but clearly re-established that he had been the best player in baseball all through the mid-1990s.
Anyway, the point is that great athletes like Federer and the 1990s Bonds, playing all-around, complicated games like tennis and baseball and playing frequently over long seasons, don't find it in their interests to do the weight room work it takes to look all massive and ripped. (Okay, there may well be other sports where the demands are less broad and less time consuming, such as sprinting, so that it makes sense to peak for the Olympics with a ferocious weight room regimen).
But, lots of other athletes in sports like tennis and baseball do seem to find it in their interest to spend a huge amount of time in the weight room. Is it really because they want to win more than Roger Federer wants to win? Or is it because, for some reason that we aren't privy to, they can lift more weights more often because their muscles recover faster that those of the greatest tennis player of all time?
The future of high school football
My old high school had a mediocre football team while I was there in 1972-1976, but then hired a brilliant coach a couple of years after I left and has been a powerhouse ever since. This year they have a 6'6" 220 pound quarterback from Claremont, a college town 40 miles away (his parents had to drive 160 miles per day to get him to school) and a tailback who won the California track & field sprint championships for 100 and 200 meters last spring.
Lately, they've been playing a late August game against an out of state power. This year they'll play an Arizona team on August 31 ... in Ireland.
Superstaritis.
In recent years, the Catholic schools and the upscale exurban public schools have dominated high school football. You are starting to see isolated examples of high end prep schools running into trouble getting enough boys to go out for football. I noticed that one wealthy private school that a half decade ago had a football team full of huge fast guys brought in from South Central has dropped down to 8 man football this year. I suspect that schools will increasingly have to choose between going all in or getting out of 11-man football.
In recent years, the Catholic schools and the upscale exurban public schools have dominated high school football. You are starting to see isolated examples of high end prep schools running into trouble getting enough boys to go out for football. I noticed that one wealthy private school that a half decade ago had a football team full of huge fast guys brought in from South Central has dropped down to 8 man football this year. I suspect that schools will increasingly have to choose between going all in or getting out of 11-man football.
August 23, 2012
Photos of athletes: Nobody notices nuthin'
With the news today that Lance Armstrong is surrendering his seven Tour de France cycling titles, I want to return to my rant from last week that nobody seems to notice anything when famous celebrities look a little odd. Here, for example, is a picture of the veteran tennis-playing Williams Sisters from the cover of the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine. Venus, on the left, looks like an enormously tall and extremely athletic woman in the peak of physical shape. As I recall, when Venus emerged as a pro in the 1990s, she set a record for velocity of service speed for a woman. So, Venus is really, really strong. If you want to see what a woman who can hit a tennis ball extremely hard looks like, look at Venus.
In contrast, her younger sister Serena, who won the Olympic gold medal earlier this month, looks like she's weighing in to fight Jake LaMotta in Comiskey Park for the welterweight championship.
Granted, these are sisters, not identical twins like Jose and Ozzie Canseco, back when the former was a slugging MVP and the latter was a skinny minor leaguer. Still, I'm fascinated that the two would agree to be photographed side by side. Obviously, the contrast doesn't seem to strike anybody else as interesting.
Granted, these are sisters, not identical twins like Jose and Ozzie Canseco, back when the former was a slugging MVP and the latter was a skinny minor leaguer. Still, I'm fascinated that the two would agree to be photographed side by side. Obviously, the contrast doesn't seem to strike anybody else as interesting.
Augusta National membership list
Back in 2004, USA Today published a list of the approximately 300 members of the Augusta National Golf Club. The list was probably from about 2002, since some of the members on the list have obituaries from 2003.
I'm not particularly good at recognizing names, but the only Business Titans on the list whose names strikes me off the top of my head as more likely Jewish than not are Sandy Weill of Citi and John L. Weinberg of Goldman Sachs.
Here's Canadian real estate mogul Leo Kolber in his autobiography Leo describing the 1980s:
Two of out of 300 is not terribly representative of the balance of money and power and media influence in a modern America where the Forbes 400 is reportedly 36 percent Jewish.
Here's Canadian real estate mogul Leo Kolber in his autobiography Leo describing the 1980s:
And among the very stupid things I've done personally was to turn down an offer to join Augusta National Golf Club, where I believe I might have been the first Jewish member. ... "I'll never use it, I said, declining with thanks. Of the many things I've regretted in my life, that is near the top of the list. Later, Johnny Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Sandy Weill of Citibank became the first Jews admitted to membership at Augusta National.
Two of out of 300 is not terribly representative of the balance of money and power and media influence in a modern America where the Forbes 400 is reportedly 36 percent Jewish.
For whatever it's worth, in the behind-the-scenes Talk section of Wikipedia, I found:
Does anybody know if Augusta National has any Jewish members? 12.36.128.73 (talk) 19:32, 3 April 2009 (UTC)Otis P. Nixon
In answer to your question, Otis...yes, the Augusta National has several Jewish members. I grew up close to Augusta and lived there for many years, and was occasionally able to borrow tickets from one of the Jewish members because I went to school with one of his daughters. The membership at Augusta National consists of people in two main categories: Long-time businessmen (especially from the east Georgia and west South Carolina areas), whose parents/grandparents joined the club during the first few years of its existence. (Up until the late 1940's it was not as exclusive, nor as prestigious...though the association with Bobby Jones was a big attraction.) Most of the Jewish members are this type, who own and run area businesses started by their fathers and grandfathers, who helped build the club into what it is today. And the other main group of members are the wealthy and important people who first started joining when President Eisenhower became a regular at the club. After that, the membership became rather exclusive and prestigious, and soon there was a large group of members who were invited to join because they were Board Chairmen or CEO's of some of the largest companies in the country. A few more of the Jewish members are in that category, CEO's of large international corporations.
That sounds pretty plausible to me, although it technically contradicts Kolber's surmise that Weill and Weinberg were the first Jews at Augusta National. Anyway, the topic suggests an answer to the question that must be puzzling Augusta National insiders: How to get more sympathetic press coverage?
August 21, 2012
Condi Rice & diversity via sameness
From my Taki's Magazine column:
Read the whole thing there.
Augusta National is to aspirational Gentile corporate executives what Harvard is to ambitious high-school students. …. So why did Augusta National immediately add a black member in 1990 after Shoal Creek, site of that year's PGA Championship, was widely criticized when its founder let it slip that it was all-white? In contrast, why did Augusta National wait 22 more years to let in any women, even shrugging off a frenzied 2002 campaign against it by The New York Times? ...
The contrast is striking because race discrimination was pervasive in American country clubs up through the 1990 Shoal Creek imbroglio...
On the other hand, contrary to all the press accounts presenting Augusta National as a last relic of the Bad Old Days, all-male golf clubs have never been common in the US, and they may even now be increasing in number.
What's the story behind all this?
Read the whole thing there.
August 16, 2012
A rant
I'm reminded of something else I wanted to mention: how fans often don't really notice when there's something odd-looking about some star. Take the example of Dora Ratjen, who came in fourth in the women's high jump in front of (I'm presuming) 80,000 fans in the Berlin Olympics. A couple of years later, a train conductor objected that that the women's world record holder was just a young man in lady's clothing, and so he decided to give up the charade and go by the name Heinrich Ratjen. But it's not like he was hiding out until then.
Or extremely famous people can change their shape radically and it doesn't really come up. For example, Tiger Woods became extremely muscular over a couple of years around age 30 because he was working out like crazy in case he decided to give up golf and enlist in the Navy Seals. Now, that's pretty interesting, but it's not at all clear how many golf fans consciously noticed that the most publicized golfer in history was changing shape from month to month in front of their eyes. When I wrote an article about it in 2009, I did a bunch of Googling and found a lot of pictures, but it just didn't seem to be a topic of written interest to people interested in Tiger Woods.
Or people can be famous for their shapes and it never seems to come up that there's anything doubtful about why they are shaped like that. The craziest example is that in the 2003 California gubernatorial election, the Democrats almost never got around to bringing up the fact that Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger was the world's most famous steroid user and that electing him governor of the largest state in the Union was the highest endorsement possible (Arnold being ineligible for the Presidency) to young people of society's approval of building a career on steroids.
It was hardly a secret -- Arnold admitted to steroid use in his autobiography -- and it wasn't some mistake of his foolish past -- he had just been paid $30 million to star in Terminator 3, which was released just days before he started his campaign. Heck, Arnold did a nude scene in Terminator 3 to show off his regained massiveness. I wrote an article a few months before the election pointing all this out. But the Democratic operatives instead mostly went with the sex scandal stuff that they thought would be electoral dynamite: Hollywood star likes the ladies!
This is not to say that the steroid stuff would have hurt Arnold's run for governor, either. No doubt it wouldn't have. Democratic operative Gary South had brought it up the year before. I don't know why so little attention was drawn to it in 2003, when he was obviously back on the juice for Terminator 3: perhaps it didn't poll well. Or it didn't get much traction in 2002 when South faxed around a scandal sheet of sex and steroid stuff.
What's the explanation for this weird phenomenon? I'm reminded of the scene at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Hunter S. Thompson goes to Circus Circus to buy an ape:
Still, I don't think politeness is the full explanation. Maybe if somebody is presented in a socially approving way, like on TV or in Hitler's Olympic Stadium, people naturally just say to themselves, "Well, of course, that's what people who work out look like. I could probably look like that myself with some exercise."
Also, Hunter S. Thompson was probably onto something with booking first-class seats. He and his pet ape would no doubt get thrown out of coach, but they had a shot in first-class.
Another aspect is access journalism. If you want Tiger Woods on the cover of your magazine ever again, you don't ask him questions about him lifting weights every day ... unless you have a picture of him with a waitress in a parking lot.
Finally, let me come back to my recurrent theme of the inadequacy of tacit understandings. I am constantly being informed that we don't need horrible persons like me pointing out in writing things that we all understand perfectly well on an unspoken level. But it constantly turns out that we don't understand implicit knowledge when framed in a slightly different way. The Obama staffers who can judge what's a safe enough street in gentrifying Washington within a half block just by watching pedestrians stroll by will go back to the office and sue school districts for racial disparities in suspension rates.
The reason I have a relatively good understanding of the impact of PEDs on sports and movies is because in 1996-97 I spent a huge amount of time constructing and analyzing a database of Olympic running results by sex. By the time I was done, this vague hunch I had had that the narrowing of the gender gap after some point in the 1970s was largely due to artificial male hormones having a bigger impact on women was seared into me. I think the media as a whole is slowly catching on to that, finally, but without spelling it out over and over, people don't learn lessons well enough to apply them in slightly novel settings.
Finally, what people do notice are hair cuts. You don't even have to change hair styles, just get a haircut and other people will notice. You can grow a beard for a year, shave it off one evening, then go into work the next day and maybe one person will mention it. But, get your routine haircut, and five people will mention it the next day, even though there's not a lot to be said about it: "Yeah, I uh hadn't gotten a haircut for six or seven weeks, so I uh got one."
Or extremely famous people can change their shape radically and it doesn't really come up. For example, Tiger Woods became extremely muscular over a couple of years around age 30 because he was working out like crazy in case he decided to give up golf and enlist in the Navy Seals. Now, that's pretty interesting, but it's not at all clear how many golf fans consciously noticed that the most publicized golfer in history was changing shape from month to month in front of their eyes. When I wrote an article about it in 2009, I did a bunch of Googling and found a lot of pictures, but it just didn't seem to be a topic of written interest to people interested in Tiger Woods.
Or people can be famous for their shapes and it never seems to come up that there's anything doubtful about why they are shaped like that. The craziest example is that in the 2003 California gubernatorial election, the Democrats almost never got around to bringing up the fact that Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger was the world's most famous steroid user and that electing him governor of the largest state in the Union was the highest endorsement possible (Arnold being ineligible for the Presidency) to young people of society's approval of building a career on steroids.
It was hardly a secret -- Arnold admitted to steroid use in his autobiography -- and it wasn't some mistake of his foolish past -- he had just been paid $30 million to star in Terminator 3, which was released just days before he started his campaign. Heck, Arnold did a nude scene in Terminator 3 to show off his regained massiveness. I wrote an article a few months before the election pointing all this out. But the Democratic operatives instead mostly went with the sex scandal stuff that they thought would be electoral dynamite: Hollywood star likes the ladies!
This is not to say that the steroid stuff would have hurt Arnold's run for governor, either. No doubt it wouldn't have. Democratic operative Gary South had brought it up the year before. I don't know why so little attention was drawn to it in 2003, when he was obviously back on the juice for Terminator 3: perhaps it didn't poll well. Or it didn't get much traction in 2002 when South faxed around a scandal sheet of sex and steroid stuff.
What's the explanation for this weird phenomenon? I'm reminded of the scene at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Hunter S. Thompson goes to Circus Circus to buy an ape:
I found Bruce at the bar, but there was no sign of the ape. "Where is it?" I demanded. "I'm ready to write a check. I want to take the bastard back home on the plane with me. I've already reserved two first-class seats -- R. Duke and Son."
"Take him on the plane?"
"Hell yes," I said. "You think they'd say anything? Call attention to my son's infirmities?"
Still, I don't think politeness is the full explanation. Maybe if somebody is presented in a socially approving way, like on TV or in Hitler's Olympic Stadium, people naturally just say to themselves, "Well, of course, that's what people who work out look like. I could probably look like that myself with some exercise."
Also, Hunter S. Thompson was probably onto something with booking first-class seats. He and his pet ape would no doubt get thrown out of coach, but they had a shot in first-class.
Another aspect is access journalism. If you want Tiger Woods on the cover of your magazine ever again, you don't ask him questions about him lifting weights every day ... unless you have a picture of him with a waitress in a parking lot.
Finally, let me come back to my recurrent theme of the inadequacy of tacit understandings. I am constantly being informed that we don't need horrible persons like me pointing out in writing things that we all understand perfectly well on an unspoken level. But it constantly turns out that we don't understand implicit knowledge when framed in a slightly different way. The Obama staffers who can judge what's a safe enough street in gentrifying Washington within a half block just by watching pedestrians stroll by will go back to the office and sue school districts for racial disparities in suspension rates.
The reason I have a relatively good understanding of the impact of PEDs on sports and movies is because in 1996-97 I spent a huge amount of time constructing and analyzing a database of Olympic running results by sex. By the time I was done, this vague hunch I had had that the narrowing of the gender gap after some point in the 1970s was largely due to artificial male hormones having a bigger impact on women was seared into me. I think the media as a whole is slowly catching on to that, finally, but without spelling it out over and over, people don't learn lessons well enough to apply them in slightly novel settings.
Finally, what people do notice are hair cuts. You don't even have to change hair styles, just get a haircut and other people will notice. You can grow a beard for a year, shave it off one evening, then go into work the next day and maybe one person will mention it. But, get your routine haircut, and five people will mention it the next day, even though there's not a lot to be said about it: "Yeah, I uh hadn't gotten a haircut for six or seven weeks, so I uh got one."
August 15, 2012
A Ryder Cup for basketball?
David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, is dissatisfied with Olympic basketball. Either the U.S. wins, which is pretty boring because it ought to win easily, or it loses.
A reader comments:
By the way, given the closeness of the Spain / US basketball final, a match between an EU all star team (comprised of players from any of the EU countries) against the US team should be organized. There is a very good chance that predominantly white EU all star team would indeed spank the predominantly black US team.
The Ryder Cup in golf is organized that way, with twelve top U.S. players taking on twelve E.U. players every two years. Golf is an individual sport, and the chance to play as a team adds a lot of excitement. The U.S. team usually looks better on paper, but the E.U. is 8-4-1 going back through 1985. A lot of theories have been offered to explain this, such as that the Europeans play better as a team, but none seem conclusive.
Here's a proposal for Stern: A three game tournament of the stars of U.S. v. the stars of Europe (don't restrict it to the E.U., because unlike in golf, good European basketball players can be found in non-E.U. countries like Serbia). Hold it whenever it is in the interests of the NBA, such as a few weeks into training camp.
The first game in Barcelona (or other touristy, basketball-oriented European cities), the second in New York (or Chicago or L.A.), the third game, if necessary, in neutral court Shanghai. Ka-ching!
August 14, 2012
The Last Hurdle
From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
I turned on the TV and saw a new reality show with an intriguing premise: How big of a head start does a white woman need to outrun a black man? While skinny women frantically raced toward the finish line, a muscular black youth sportingly spotted them a 30-meter lead, then accelerated effortlessly and overtook all but the most desperately striding Russian woman.
But this turned out to be the Olympic 800-meter race for women, even though the silver medalist, South Africa’s Caster Semenya, is built like an LSU cornerback.
Read the whole thing there.
By
Steve Sailer
on
8/14/2012
61
comments
Labels:
feminism,
Male delusions,
Olympics,
Sports,
Why lesbians aren't gay
August 13, 2012
Vijay Amritraj on Indians and sports
The role of role models in a country's sports success is a curious one. For example, it is regularly explained that Korean lady golfer Se Ri Pak's victory in the U.S. Women's Open in 1998 at Blackwolf Run set off South Korean dominance in women's golf. Presumably, that's true, but the thought, "I hope I grow up to be just like Se Ri Pak" doesn't strike me as hugely galvanizing. But I guess I'm missing something.
On the other hand, there are the role models without followers. When tennis on TV suddenly became wildly popular in the early 1970s, one of the prominent names was dashing Indian sportsman Vijay Amritraj. He never won a Grand Slam tournament, but he won some tour events, and he played many a hard-fought match in the Grand Slam against legends like Laver, Rosewall, Borg, Connors, and McEnroe. (Here are video highlights of his five set victory over Bjorn Borg in the 1974 U.S. Open.)
He had a long, fun career as captain of India's not-bad Davis Cup team, and was a regular on the international celebrity circuit, even appearing in a James Bond movie. He generally gave the impression that he was having a blast. I presumed there would be more like him in the future. Obviously, most Indians are too poor for sports, but the top 2 or 3 percent in India are as numerous as the entire population of Australia, so it hardly seemed unlikely 39 years ago that there would be more well-known Indian tennis players following Amritraj and his brother.
He had a long, fun career as captain of India's not-bad Davis Cup team, and was a regular on the international celebrity circuit, even appearing in a James Bond movie. He generally gave the impression that he was having a blast. I presumed there would be more like him in the future. Obviously, most Indians are too poor for sports, but the top 2 or 3 percent in India are as numerous as the entire population of Australia, so it hardly seemed unlikely 39 years ago that there would be more well-known Indian tennis players following Amritraj and his brother.
Recently, Amritraj said ESPN on why there aren't many prominent Indian athletes four decades after he made his mark: "Indians mature late physically and early mentally while people in the West mature early physically and late mentally."
I don't know how true that is, but it does fit with the career of Vijay Singh, the Indian golfer from Fiji, who pushed Tiger Woods out of #1 in 2004-2005, when in his 40s. Singh won more PGA tournaments after his 40th birthday than Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus combined.
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