Sports-Industrial Complex

After reading this Jason Whitlock article someone posted on HoyaTalk about ESPN's role in propagating the BCS-Centrism of college football, I turned on SportsCenter, where the 11 am show's anchors Stan Varrett and Josh Elliott "argued" for about 10 minutes about a playoff.  And by "argued," I mean that Elliott came up with a hypothetical playoff system, and Varrett offered stale, falsely equivalent rejoinders supporting the BCS.  The two anchors functioned as metaphors for what I imagine will be the coming debate in college football, particularly if Texas-- 11-1 and victorious over Oklahoma-- gets leapfrogged for the national championship game by Oklahoma.  

On one side, there will be President Barack Obama and, well, most sports fans who understand that playoffs are both a fair and exciting way to determine the best team in a league.  On the other side, there will be ESPN, the Sports-Industrial Complex, who recently purchased the rights to broadcast BCS games.  They need a return on that $500M investment, and if there's no BCS, well, that's just not going to cut it.  Having largely erased the pretense of journalism, I imagine they will use their new and opinion programming to wage a battle against implementing a playoff.  I'll be interested to see if Gregg Easterbrook writes about this in next week's TMQ (as he hinted this past week), but I imagine that he'd come to a similar conclusion.

As always, follow the money.

Playoff Baseball

As much as I love Opening Day and think it should be a national holiday (we need more national holidays), and as much as Opening Day is usually the best day of the year for a fan of a team like the Orioles, as a baseball--and sports--fan, the playoffs are my favorite time.  Game times that battle the fading sunlight and growing shadows of the late afternoon, fans that get no quieter than a steady buzz and roar with a haunting intensity, everyone--not just pitchers--wearing long sleeves: it's hard to beat.  

In basketball and hockey, I would say that the intensity of the game picks up, which then fires up the crowds.  Given the large percentages of teams who make the playoffs in the NBA and the NHL, it makes sense that there's an urgency gap between regular season play and post-season play. In baseball, however, with only 4 spots per league (and yes, I do faintly remember when it was just 2 spots per league) in the playoffs, there is less of a jump-up in intensity in the playoffs.  Rather, it's the fans, understanding the stakes, feeling the cold, cheering in the hopes of perhaps holding on to the last traces of summer, who up their intensity.

D-Fence

Where has the defense gone in the NFL?* Using no statistics and only my limited observations, I feel like every other game is some sort of 41-35 shootout.  This could be the byproduct of rooting for the Broncos, whose defense appears to be holding out for better contracts this season.

*Yesterday's 15-6 war of attrition between the Eagles and the Steelers notwithstanding.

Field of Dreams Live

So far during the "Yankee Stadium finale" broadcast that ESPN is pulling together for the Orioles-Yankees game, there has been a discussion between Joe Morgan and Joe Girardi on the difficulty of retiring from baseball and leaving the game you have played since age 5, an excellent Peter Gammons interview with an ex-Negro League player who hit a home run off of Satchel Paige in Yankee Stadium in the year 1940, a broadcast booth discussion with Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, and the requisite Frank Sinatra tunes taking us in and out of commercial breaks.  The only thing that's missing is a James Earl Jones voiceover about the centrality of baseball to American life and fathers and sons playing catch in the outfield as they turn off the lights.  If Lifetime is "television for women," then this game is "television for men."  

As for "The Stadium" itself closing, well, it didn't have to close, but it sure as heck needed to clean up its insides.  Like most old ballparks, the bowels of the stadium were pretty run down, and not in a charming way.  The concession offerings (at least in the outfield) were mediocre, and--according to those who knew it back then--it lost a lot of its charm following the renovations in the 1970s.  Still, it's a nostalgic night for baseball fans of any rooting persuasion.  There's a lot of history (baseball and non-baseball) that went down in Yankee Stadium, and now that the Boston Red Sox have displaced the Yankees as the Evil Empire of Annoying Fans, I don't have the same visceral disgust for the pinstripes. Until they win their next World Series, that is.   

Over/under on the next Orioles World Series appearance: 7 years.

Muhammad Ali: A Holmesian Bad Man

We're in the midst of discussing legal realism in Section 3, so Oliver Wendell Holmes has been coming up a lot.  Here's a slightly edited version of a post that I wrote for a discussion board of my Legal Justice Seminar linking Ali with Holmes's ideas, among other things.

***

Every time I read the term “bad man,” my thoughts turn to Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) declaring himself a “bad man” after defeating Sonny Liston in their 1964 fight.  In the past, I have agreed with Ali’s self-characterization when considering his career and history: “bad” as a slang term for “incredibly talented,” “bad” as a moral descriptor for the intensely personal and hurtful trash talk he directed at his opponents, “bad” in the context in which he used the term in 1964.  However, it took until today, after having read Holmes’s “The Path of the Law” and having reflected further, that I can now view Ali as a “bad man” in the Holmesian sense.

 

“What does (legal duty) mean to a bad man?” Holmes asks.  “Mainly, and in the first place, a prophecy that if he does certain things he will be subjected to disagreeable consequences by way of imprisonment or compulsory payment of money” (62). To borrow from Legal Practice, the elements of Holmes’ primary definition of the bad man are present in Ali’s refusal to enter the military during the war in Vietnam.  By refusing to report after being drafted (doing a certain thing), Ali was subjected to disagreeable consequences by way of a five-year prison sentence, the revocation of his boxing licenses, and the deprivation of his primary source of income (a tax, of sorts).  Yet from Ali’s point of view, theses were merely the legal consequences of fulfilling his moral duty to resist joining the Army; through his story emerges a clear example of the challenges of separating legal and moral duties (62).

 

 

Now, I do not wish to credit Holmes with the prophetic powers required to create a generic foil for his lecture around the emergence, in 60 years time, of a boxer from Louisville, KY who resisted military service, but like Prof. Luban, I noted with interest Holmes’s prediction regarding the future importance of statistics and economics to the study and application of the law (67).  Indeed, reading this intimation about the importance of statistics brings his fact-oriented dissent in Lochner into greater context; he seems to have a proclivity for a statistical approach to deciding cases. 

 

Focusing on the “statistical” element of this claim, the intellectual context in which Holmes is writing—the era of pragmatism—makes this line of thought even clearer.  As described in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, the late 19^th and early 20^th century gave rise not only to the Progressive Era of politics, whose ends the Realists aim to further through their critique of classical legal thought, but also philosophical pragmatists such as Holmes and William James.  I’d have to re-read the chapters on Holmes to check to see what direct connection there was between Legal Realists and pragmatists, but it stands to reason that there would be a theoretical kinship of sorts between the two groups.

 

This pragmatic influence finds its way, as best as I can tell, into “The Path of the Law”—in particular in a line that seems to at once critique the hegemony of classical legal thought and to safeguard against future adoptions of overarching legal theories.  “We do not realize how large a part of our law is open to reconsideration upon a slight change in the habit of the public mind,” writes Holmes.  Quite true—after all, as Holmesian Bad Man Ali can attest to, his conviction was overturned years later, after public opinion on the war in Vietnam had turned.

 

 

Background on Ali:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070129/southpaw

http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/ali01.html

http://www.ali.com/legend_boxer_controversy.aspx (the official website of Muhammad Ali Enterprises®)