How is spectator sports different from other types of entertainment? Dave Revsine (lead studio host for the Big Ten Network and former ESPN anchor) joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss the various sources of appeal, team identification, existing in a sports-filled world as a non-fan, watching vs. playing, human interest stories, sports films, and more.
Some of the articles we looked at to prepare included:
The first two links above were part of a series of 2016 editorials in the Washington Post coinciding with March Madness. As the whole series is definitely worth a look, just follow the links at the bottom of those articles.
How would Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and other famous ballplayers of bygone eras fare if put on the diamond today? Variations on that question tend to come up in conversation among enthusiasts of baseball and its history, and different people bring different kinds of evidence to bear in search of an answer: statistics, eyewitness accounts, analogies between particular historical players and current ones. But the fact remains that none of us have ever actually seen the likes of Ruth, who played his last professional game in 1935, and Gehrig, who did so in 1939, in their prime. But now we can at least get a little closer by watching the film clip above, which shows both of the titanic Yankees at batting practice on April 11, 1931.
What’s more, it shows them moving at real-life speed. “Fox Movietone sound cameras made slow-motion captures of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at batting practice during an exhibition practice in Brooklyn, New York,” writes uploader Guy Jones (whose other baseball videos include Ruth hitting a home run on opening day the same year and Ruth’s last appearance at bat a decade later). “With modern technology, we can witness this footage adjusted to a normal speed which results in a very high framerate.”
In other words, the film shows Ruth and Gehrig not just moving in the very same way they did in real life, but captured with a smoothness uncommon in newsreel footage from the 1930s. For comparison, Jones includes at the end of the video “more footage of the practice (shot at typical fps) and the original un-edited slow-mo captures.”
Unfortunately, what this film reveals doesn’t impress observers of modern baseball. “Ruth and Gehrig in no way look like a modern ballplayer,” writes The Big Lead’s Kyle Koster. “Ruth is off-balance, falling into his swing. Gehrig routinely lifts his back foot off the ground. Again, it’s batting practice so the competitive juices weren’t flowing. But even by that standard, the whole exercise looks sloppy and inefficient.” Cut4’s Jake Mintz gets harsher, as well as more technical: “Tell me Ruth’s cockamamie swing mechanics would enable him to hit a 98-mph heater.” As for the Iron Horse, his “hack is a little better,” but still “absurdly low” by today’s standards. It goes to show, Mintz writes, that “these two legends, while undeniably transcendent in their time, would be good Double‑A hitters at best if they played today.” We evolve, our technologies evolve, and so, it seems, do the games we play.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
This time each summer, as the conclusion of this year’s fortnight-long championship at Wimbledon approaches, even the most private of the tennis enthusiasts in all of our circles make themselves known. Love of that particular game runs down all walks of life, but seems to exist in particularly high concentrations among cultural creators: not just writers like Martin Amis, Geoff Dyer, and David Foster Wallace, all of whose bodies of work contain eloquent thoughts on tennis, but composers of music as well.
Take Arnold Schoenberg, who well into his old age continued not just to create the innovative music for which we remember him, but to spend time on the court as well. Though born in Vienna, Schoenberg eventually landed in the right place to enjoy tennis on the regular: southern California, to which he fled in 1933 after being informed of how inhospitable his homeland would soon become to persons of Jewish heritage. Few famous composers of that time had less in common than Schoenberg and George Gershwin, but their shared enjoyment of tennis made them into fast partners.
According to Howard Pollack’s life of Gershwin, fellow composer Albert Sendrey left a “revealing account” of one of the weekly matches between “the thirty-eight-year-old Gershwin and the sixty-two-year-old Schoenberg, contrasting the alternately ‘nervous’ and ‘nonchalant,’ ‘relentless’ and ‘chivalrous’ Gershwin, ‘playing to an audience,’ with the ‘overly eager’ and ‘choppy’ Schoenberg who ‘has learned to shut his mind against public opinion.’ ” Any parallels between playing style and musical sensibility are, of course, entirely coincidental.
The cerebral nature of Schoenberg’s compositions may not suggest a temperament suited for physical activity of any kind, but even in Austria Schoenberg had been a keen sportsman. And as a fair few tennis-loving writers have explained, the game does possess an intellectual side, and one made more easily analyzable, at least in theory, by a system of Schoenberg’s invention. “Toward the end of his life, Schoenberg — always fascinated by rules, analysis, and invention — would come up with a form of notation to transcribe the tennis matches of his athlete son Ronald,” writes Mark Berry in Arnold Schoenberg. You can see this system laid out on the sheet above, recently posted on Twitter by Henry Gough-Cooper.
The marks look vaguely similar to those of certain dance notation systems, a natural enough resemblance considering the kind of footwork tennis demands. But ideally, Schoenberg’s notation would also have rendered a game of tennis as comprehensible as one of chess — another pursuit to which Schoenberg applied his mind. He came up with “an expanded four-player, ten-square version of the traditional game,” writes Berry, “involving superpowers and lesser powers all compelled to forge alliances, with new pieces such as airplanes, tanks, submarines, and so forth.” Schoenberg’s “coalition chess,” as he called it, seems to have caught on no more than his tennis notation system did. But then, the man who pioneered the twelve-tone technique never did go in for mass acceptance.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Damien Oton, winner of last summer’s Megavalanche, mounted a camera on his helmet and recorded his race down Alpe D’Huez. Buckle in, and enjoy the exhilarating wild ride. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.
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Does your spare tire show no signs of deflating as bikini season looms?
Is the fear of bullies kicking sand in your face beginning to outstrip the horror of transforming into a giant bug overnight?
Do you long to experience lasting health benefits along with an impressively fit appearance?
Friends, we make you this promise: The Amazing Franz Kafka Workout will transform your life along with your physique in just 15 minutes a day.
That’s right, just 15 minutes of daily calisthenics (and some common sense practices with regard to diet, sleep, and hygiene) is all it takes. Even pencil-necked authors walking around with their backs bowed, their shoulders drooping, their hands and arms all over the place, afraid of mirrors because they show an inescapable ugliness, can discover the confidence that eludes them, through improved posture, breathing, and muscle tone.
(Note: the Amazing Franz Kafka Workout will not protect you from the pernicious, eventually fatal effects of tuberculosis.)
The Amazing Franz Kafka Workout is more correctly attributed to fitness guru Jørgen Peter Müller, above, the author of several exercise regimen pamphlets, including the bestselling My System: 15 Minutes’ Exercise a Day for Health’s Sake, which was published in 1904 and then translated into 25 languages.
Kafka was definitely the best known of Müller’s devotees, scrupulously running through the prescribed exercises morning and evening, wearing nothing more than the skin he was born in—another practice Müller heartily endorsed.
The chiseled Mr. Müller was a proponent of regular dental check ups, sensible footwear, and vigorous toweling (or “rubbing”), and an enemy of constrictive woolen underwear, closed windows, and sedentary lifestyles. My System includes some observations that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Kafka novel:
The town office type is often a sad phenomenon prematurely bent, with shoulders and hips awry from his dislocating position on the office stool, pale, with pimply face and pomatumed head, thin neck protruding from a collar that an ordinary man could use as a cuff, and swaggering dress in the latest fashion flapping round the sticks that take the place of arms and legs! At a more advanced age the spectacle is still more pitiable… the eyes are dull, and the general appearance is either still more sunken and shriveled or else fat, flabby, and pallid, and enveloped in an odour of old paper, putrified skin grease, and bad breath.
In an essay on Slate, Sarah Wildman, the descendent of two lean Müller fans, delves into the Müller System’s popularity, particularly amongst 20th-century European Jews.
Just as best-selling fitness experts do today, Müller beefed up his franchise with related titles: My System for Ladies, My System forChildren, and My Sunbathing and Fresh Air System.
The original book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive, where one commenter who has been following the system for nearly seventy years gives it a hearty thumbs-up for its stamina restoring powers.
Even those unlikely to perform so much as a single deep knee bend should get a bang out of the original photo illustrations, which, back in 1904, were as ripe for erotic double duty as the wholesome men’s physique mags of the 50s and 60s.
The 1998 NFL draft was a memorable one. A debate raged around whether the Indianapolis Colts should use their first round pick to select Ryan Leaf or Peyton Manning. Everyone had an opinion about these two quarterbacks, including Hunter S. Thompson. The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels sent a letter to Colts owner Jim Irsay, urging him to select the highly-touted Leaf.
Dear James,
In response to yr addled request for a quick $30M loan to secure the services of the Manning kid — I have to say No, (sic) at this time
But the Leaf boy is another matter. He looks strong & Manning doesn’t — or at least not strong enough to handle that “Welcome to the NFL” business for two years without a world-class offensive line.
How are you fixed at left OT for the next few years, James? Think about it. You don’t want a china (sic) doll back there when that freak [Warren] Sapp comes crashing in.
Okay. Let me know if you need some money for Leaf. I expect to be very rich when this [Johnny] depp (sic) movie comes out.
Yr. faithful consultant,
HUNTER
Twenty years later, we know how things played out. The Colts ultimately picked Manning, who became one of the most productive and celebrated quarterbacks ever. As for Leaf, he played four seasons and exited the sport, considered by some the No. 1 “draft bust” in NFL history. But he’s certainly a good sport. Leaf posted Thompson’s letter (above) on his Twitter stream last month.
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Today, as the 2018 World Cup draws to a close, we’re revisiting a classic Monty Python skit. The scene is the 1972 Munich Olympics. The event is a football/soccer match, pitting German philosophers against Greek philosophers. On the one side, the Germans — Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx and, um, Franz Beckenbauer. On the other side, Archimedes, Socrates, Plato and the rest of the gang. The referee? Confucius. Of course.
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Could it be a case of authorial oversight that all subsequent rules are exclusively concerned with such practical matters as dress and fight duration?
Because doing so might diminish Fight Club’s street cred just a bitsy…
Filmmaker (and popular audiobook narrator) Emily Janice Card has a good deal of fun in Jane Austen’s Fight Club, above, marrying Palahniuk’s tropes to the social mores of England’s Regency period.
“No corsets, no hat pins and no crying,” Tyler Durden stand-in Lizzie instructs the eager young ladies in her circle. Soon, they’re proudly sporting bruises beneath their bonnets and stray blood spots on their tea dresses.
While young women of the fictional Bennet sisters’ social class refrained from brutal fisticuffs, there’s ample evidence of female combatants from the proletarian ranks. They fought for money, and occasionally to settle a disagreement, training hard for weeks in advance.
Their bouts drew spectators to the amphitheater owned by boxing promoter James Figg, and the marvelously named Hockley in the Hole, a seedy establishment whose other attractions included bearbaiting, bullbaiting, and fighting with broadswords and cudgels.
The female fist fighters challenged each other with paid notices in local papers, like this one from “championess and ass-driver” Ann Field of Stoke Newington:
Whereas I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass-driver, well known for my abilities, in boxing in my own defense wherever it happened in my way, having been affronted by Mrs. Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing for 10 pounds, fair rise and fall; and question not but to give her such proofs of my judgment that shall oblige her to acknowledge me Championess of the Stage, to the satisfaction of all my friends.
Mrs. Stokes promptly announced her readiness to come out of retirement:
I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London, have not fought in this way since I fought the famous boxing- woman of Billingsgate 29 minutes, and gained a complete victory (which is six years ago); but as the famous Stoke Newington ass-woman dares me to fight her for the 10 pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than any she ever gave her asses.
Rather than keeping mum on Fight Club, these female pugilists shared Muhammad Ali’s flare for drumming up interest with irresistibly cocky wordplay.
In a chapter devoted to public entertainments, sports and amusements, Alexander Andrews, author of The Eighteenth Century or Illustrations of the Manners and Customs of Our Grandfathers,documents how the Merry Wives of Windsor, a crew comprised of “six old women belonging to Windsor town” took out an ad seeking “any six old women in the universe to outscold them.”
On June 22nd, 1768, a woman called Bruising Peg “beat her antagonist in a terrible manner” to win a new chemise, valued at half a guinea.
In 1722, Hannah Hyfield of Newgate Market, resolved to give her challenger, Elizabeth Wilkinson, “more blows than words,” promising to deliver “a good thumping.” Both parties agreed to hold a half-crown in their fists for the duration of the fight. William B. Boulton, author of 1901’s Amusements of Old London, speculates that this was a practical measure to minimize scratching and hair-pulling.
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