sports

October 7, 2021

Book 304: Inside Edge

“Nearing the end, Boitano passed by the red hockey circle at center ice, which was a landmark to look for to make sure he was on the right path for the final triple axel. He began to hear strange noises in his lead. Please God, please God. They were getting faster and louder until he could barely stand it. As he launched himself into the air, he hoped that all those years of training would come through for him. Muscle memory, they call it. Only when that tiny blade swooped down, reached for the ice, found it, and held him upright did he know he was okay.”

Dates read: March 19-23, 2019

Rating: 5/10

The first team I remember loving is the Red Wings. They went on their Stanley Cup championship runs when I was like 10-11 years old, which are really the best time to hook a kid. I can still name the Russian Five without thinking twice. I love hockey, it’s a great sport. But the second sport I remember loving is figure skating. The drama of the Lipinski/Kwan rivalry got me into it, and I’ve watched it off and on over the years ever since. The intrigue, the competition…and the skating itself, of course, have kept me interested and invested.

Growing up on a lake, I learned how to skate forwards competently enough, but I never took lessons or figured out anything else. I have never been especially well coordinated, so an activity involving razor-sharp blades attached to the bottom of my feet was probably a wise thing for me to skip out on. But some kids do have their skating dreams come true, and Christine Brennan’s Inside Edge chronicles a year (specifically, the 94-95 season) on the figure skating circuit for all parts of the skating world: judges, coaches, and of course the skaters themselves. Everyone invests so much time and money and blood and sweat and tears into a sport where the tiniest slip of a blade can be the difference between that glowing moment in the spotlight or the breakdown backstage.

Though there are multiple perspectives wound into her narrative, Brennan does have several connecting throughlines, following particular skaters through the process of the season. There’s precocious youngster Michelle Kwan, already poised and assured at only 15. And also talented-but-uncontrolled Nicole Bobek, who could win it all if she could stop sneaking out at night to hang out with boys. There’s Rudy Galindo, toiling away and dreaming of reaching the heights of his one-time pairs partner Kristi Yamaguchi. Jenni Tew is an up-and-comer, dreaming of a spot at Nationals. And there are cameos from Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano, Katerina Witt, and Torvill and Dean for perspective from more established skaters.

It’s been well over two decades since the book was published, years in which Christine Brennan has become a respected voice in coverage of the sport. Back then, however, she was fairly new to it, and that newness does show. The drama feels artificially heightened, there’s an almost breathless/scandalized quality to it that reads more like gossip than actual reporting. Despite taking some time with a judge and getting information about the amount of (uncompensated!) time it takes to serve as a judge and the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities, there’s a lot of aspersions cast at the judging system as a whole, with veiled and not-so-veiled insinuations that judges collude on the basis of nationality and engage in machinations to game the system in favor of particular skaters, no matter what happens on the ice. This was well before the judging scandal of the Salt Lake City Olympics that changed the entire way scoring works in the sport, so it was interesting to get some background on how the system used to be before I started paying more active attention to it.

But it’s hard to not take that information, and all the rest of it, with a grain of salt. The tell-all tone, the obvious favoritism towards particular skaters…it doesn’t make a case for itself to be taken seriously. If you grew up in the Michelle Kwan era, though, and remember these skaters as some of the first ones you watched, it’s an interesting read. It’s a portrait, albeit a flawed one, of a time and place, and an environment that has changed so fundamentally that it’s impossible to compare to the same world as it exists now. But of course, la plus ca change, and right now there are kids strapping on their skates and getting ready for practice, hoping to make it out there on the ice. I’d say this is a solid read for figure-skating fans, especially if you watched during the time chronicled, but there’s not much to recommend it otherwise.

One year ago, I was reading: Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story

Two years ago, I was reading: The Overstory

Three years ago, I was reading: The Library Book

Four years ago, I was reading: The Royals

Five years ago, I was reading: Sophie’s Choice

January 9, 2020

Book 215: Court Justice

“They put you on TV, brochures, and websites. Your name appears on replica jerseys that sell for over a hundred dollars. And you can’t get a dime from any of it because when you were seventeen years old you somehow waived away your rights, permanently and forever, as a condition of NCAA eligibility and thus a condition of getting a college scholarship and affording school. That’s not ‘amateurism’. That’s exploitation.”

Dates read: March 11-13, 2018

Rating: 3/10

If you dated boys in college in the 2000s, I’d be willing to bet a reasonable amount of money that you sometimes watched them play EA Sports’ NCAA Football (or the equivalent basketball game). We all did, because it seemed like all the boys played it. I worked at a Blockbuster during college, and I still remember how quickly copies of that game would go whenever the new edition came out. People loved to control the destiny of their favorite team and their favorite players…no names were displayed on the jerseys, but if you knew the numbers, it was easy to tell who was supposed to be who.

The last editions of these games came out in 2013, and the enormously popular series may never be renewed. Why? The primary reason is a lawsuit, O’Bannon v. NCAA, in which the courts essentially held that if the NCAA is going to sell and profit from the images of current and former athletes, it needs to compensate them for doing so. But the NCAA’s rules around amateurism bar compensation beyond college scholarships and some cost-of-attendance support, so the games have ceased production. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s basically the situation. And in Court Justice, lead plaintiff Ed O’Bannon tells his side of the story, both in regards to the lawsuit itself, and his life as an athlete.

I am very interested in the lawsuit and the workings of college athletics in generally, but I am not at all interested in Ed O’Bannon (who I’d literally never heard of before I became aware of the lawsuit), so I’d been hoping for an emphasis on the legal part rather than his college and career. That was probably naive on my part…O’Bannon (with co-writer Michael McCann), not a lawyer or other broader expert, is the author, so it’s naturally strongly focused on his experience. And I don’t know if he himself did a lot of the writing or it was an editorial decision to keep the finished product as close to his own words as possible, but either way it doesn’t quite work: the writing quality here is weak.

The entire book is basically framed through a device in which O’Bannon recounts a stage of the lawsuit, then (usually clumsily) segues into an anecdote from his life. This is not particularly effective, as the narratives feel disconnected and neither builds up much momentum. O’Bannon is unfamiliar with the legal system and it shows: he takes things like the NCAA lawyers trying to trip him up in deposition personally, when the reality is that that’s how litigation works. He feels like the higher level federal courts are for “the elite” because they’re in fancier buildings than state courts. His perspective as an outsider adds precious little to an understanding of the mechanics and legally successful arguments of the case.

What it does do well is force one to consider the perspectives of the athletes, and how very real the feelings of exploitation are when you’re barely able to scrape together enough to have the basics while watching coaching salaries explode and facilities become ever-more luxurious. Someone is doing the labor that makes the system profitable, and it’s not the people who are the sole profiteers. When you add in the racial dynamics (an overwhelmingly white athletics administrative and authority structure, with overwhelmingly black athletes in the revenue sports), there’s another dimension to the unfairness. O’Bannon touches on this, but never really develops it and that’s honestly frustrating. There’s a really interesting examination of the issue of compensation for college athletes (I personally support the Olympic model, in which athletes would be able to seek outside endorsements), but this book isn’t it. Unless you’ve got a deep and abiding interest in Ed O’Bannon and a high tolerance for poor-quality prose, I’d avoid it.

One year ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Three years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Four years ago, I was reading: Mr. Splitfoot

August 15, 2019

Book 194: The Games

“Payne and his friends had promised an Olympic Games funded entirely by the private sector: a modernized version of Los Angeles 1984, but with turbocharged levels of sponsorship and television money. As with all neoliberal fantasies, the project actually rested on the massive and multifaceted involvement of every level of the American state, the short-circuiting of institutions of democratic control, the use of force, where necessary, and all on terms unambiguously favorable to a tiny slice of private and already-powerful interests.”

Dates read: December 4-11, 2017

Rating: 7/10

I am not an athlete. Grace, balance, poise…these are not qualities I possess. I have exercise-induced asthma, so even going jogging for a couple miles like I do on the weekends when it’s a reasonable temperature outside is an endeavor. For the most part, I’ve made my peace with this. I still try to be active, so I do jog (after I hit my inhaler), and I enjoy forms of dance that are more about rhythm than grace. But every so often, when I watch something like figure skating, I find myself wishing that sports were a thing I was any good at.

I suffer the worst fits of this desire to be sporty once every two years or so, when the Olympics rolls around. It also tends to turn me from someone who likes discussing the gulf between America’s promise and America’s reality into an intense jingoist whose favorite song is Miley Cyrus’s “Party In The USA”. So in the run-up to the 2018 Pyeongyang Winter Games, I decided to read David Goldblatt’s The Games to get some perspective on the biennial sports fest. This book is a comprehensive overview of the modern Olympics, beginning with the first small-scale variety in 1896 in Athens, going through the lead-up to the grandiose 2016 Rio de Janiero Summer Games.

This book is packed with information, and I learned quite a lot by reading it about how the Olympics have grown and changed from their genesis as the dream of Pierre de Coubertin to display the best in white upper-class male sporting accomplishment to their gradual (and often reluctant) inclusion of women, people of color, and commoners. I was surprised by just how many of things I think of as hallmarks of the Olympics: mascots, the torch-lighting ceremonies, the Winter Games, the offsetting of the schedules between Winter and Summer so there are Olympics every two years, are relatively recent additions. And it’s astonishing how low-budget they used to be until very recently, and how the ways that different governments have approached their infrastructure projects have created very disparate outcomes.

While Goldblatt does good work separating the modern Olympics into eras and providing a brief introductory chapter linking the themes that arched across all the Games in a particular era, there wasn’t as much narrative flow as I tend to prefer in my nonfiction. It’s not that his prose is clunky (indeed, it moves very well considering its fact-intensiveness), it’s that he seems to be someone, at least in the way he wrote this book, who can’t see the forest for the trees. His research was clearly rigorous, and it sometimes feels like he was so enthusiastic about sharing what he uncovered that he lets himself get bogged down by trying to fit in as much as possible. This made for slow reading, because I had a hard time going more than 15-20 pages before I felt like I needed a mental break, and that’s not usually true for me, not even for nonfiction.

But if you’re looking for a deep, well-structured resource for the history of the last 100ish years of the Olympics, this is the book for you. If you’re looking for more information about the winter Games in particular, though, you might be disappointed…they began later and even today seemed to be popularly considered the lesser of the two, but Goldblatt pays them very short shrift indeed…I’d estimate the percentage of this book that deals with them to be 10% or less. Also, if you’re looking for stories about the athletes themselves, by and large this won’t be where you’ll find it. It’s mostly about the structures and logistics and international pressures that have grown and created and challenged the Olympics. If that’s what you’re into, you’ll love it. And while it’s a very competent book at what it’s trying to do, I don’t think I’d recommend it to a wide audience…it’s too dense and specialized to have broad appeal.

Tell me, blog friends…are you a Winter Games person or a Summer Games person (or do you not watch?)

One year ago today, I was reading: The Informant (review to come)

Two years ago today, I was reading: Charity Girl

Three years ago today, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

August 30, 2018

Book 144: Friday Night Lights

“Considering the circumstances of their lives, how could they be expected to accept the harsh reality of studies showing that of the 30 million children taking part in youth sports in the United States, only about 200 go on to become professionals in any given year?”

Dates read: May 5-12, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: The New York Times bestseller

Graduating from law school in 2010, it turns out, was one of the worst things I could have done for myself. There are articles about it and everything. After I moved back to Michigan and took (and passed) the bar, I started carpet-bombing the Ann Arbor area with resumes. Crickets. I came close a few times, getting to second interviews, but it wasn’t until February, a full nine months after I graduated and five months after I passed the bar, that I got a job. Which meant I had a LOT of downtime. I did do useful things, but I also watched the entire run of a TV show that has become a barometer of true excellence in storytelling for me: Friday Night Lights.

I knew there’d been a book, and then a movie, and that the show wasn’t especially closely related to either except in broad strokes. But I’d always harbored a curiosity about the book that had inspired one of my favorite shows of all time, so I picked up H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights to finally experience the source material. In it, Bissinger tells the story of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, in the late 80s. But he doesn’t just tell the story of the team…like the subtitle (“A Town, A Team, And A Dream”) suggests, he places them in context. He tells the story of Odessa, of the boom-and-bust oil economy in Texas with which Odessa lives and dies, the racial tensions that are ever-simmering, and the way that a community needing something to cheer for and feel good about can place so much hope and feeling into a sports team.

That enormity of public emotional investment into the team has real ramifications for the people who make it up: the coach and his family, of course, but also the players. The coach (only very vaguely reminiscent of the beloved Coach Taylor) is at least a well-compensated professional, but the players are just teenagers. You can see the loose outlines of some of the characters who would make up the core of the show: the hot-shot, big-talking running back, the reserved, wary quarterback, the trouble-making, fast-living halfback. But the players themselves are kind of inconsequential: they are merely the bodies inside the uniforms that have such symbolic meaning. It’s Permian that the crowd roots for year after year, even as the names on the jerseys come and go.

Reading this after seeing the show is the opposite of the usual reaction: the screen adaptation is so rich and beautifully realized that the book has a hard time living up to the comparison. Part of that is because they’re telling similar stories in two very different ways. The book is more interested in looking at the broader social picture and the way that team fits into that picture as a whole, and only then in its component parts, while the show takes the opposite storytelling tack and focuses on the people and their relationships making up the team, filling in the charged atmosphere around them but leaving it as mostly background. So by nature the book is more impersonal, more clinical and removed. The show, on the other hand, focused on realistic character development in a way that even many authors I’ve read could benefit from learning from. Of the two versions, I’d recommend that literally everyone watch the show, but the book is good-not-great. If you like stories about football and/or small town life, you’ll likely enjoy it. If not, it’s skippable.

Tell me, blog friends…what are your favorite TV shows?

One year ago, I was reading: The Year of Magical Thinking

Two years ago, I was reading: Life Itself

On the Blog

Join the Listt