dagblog - Sports

Blue Clay Disappoints

Donal — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:43:55 +0000

Tennis is in the middle of clay court season. Last year Novak Djokovic stunned everyone by continuing his winning streak on Rafael Nadal's best surface—beating Nadal on the red clay of Madrid and Rome. This year, Djokovic has been less dominant, losing to Nadal in Monte Carlo, and losing early in Madrid. So Djokovic should be motivated to defend his points this week at Rome—the Internazionali BNL d'Italia.

Everyone in tennis, except her immediate rivals, was happy when Victoria Azarenka took the number one ranking with a win at the Australian Open. By and large, Azarenka has been a deserving champion, playing well and winning often. Maria Sharapova has been a steady #2 and defeated Azarenka at Stuttgart. I expected Petra Kvitova to contend for #1, but instead Kvitova has dropped to #4, losing to many players, while Agnieska Radwanska has risen to #3, losing only to Azarenka. Samantha Stosur has quietly floated around #5. Despite her promise to come back to #1, Caroline Wozniacki has slipped to #8 and has been losing about a round earlier in many tournaments, and to lower-ranked players like Lucie Safarova, Julia Goerges, Ana Ivanovic and Angelique Kerber.

But if you thought the women's tour was now a settled meritocracy, at Madrid a newly fit #9 Serena Williams just sliced through Sharapova and Azarenka, beating each of them soundly 6-1, 6-3 in matches that weren't even close. I don't think Serena likes blondes, but I'll bet she likes the blue clay.

On the red clay there were three nasty injuries. Andrea Petkovic had just come back from lower back injuries then went down with a serious ankle sprain at Stuttgart. At Monte Carlo, both Juan Monaco and Julien Benneteau were playing well then went down with serious ankle sprains. I saw Benneteau's ankle just fold over like pair of socks while he was sliding for a ball in Monte Carlo. He also injured his wrist as he fell. It hurt just to watch.

While there were no massive ankle sprains on the new, blue clay at Madrid, even being watered twice per set it was both faster and more slippery than players expected. Ion Tiriac seems to run the tournament his own way. Instead of using young players as ball kids, he hired attractive young models. At times the cameramen seemed more intent on following the young women retrieving the balls than the ones hitting them. Instead of terre battue, the famous red clay, he asked for and received permission to experiment with Big Blue on all his courts. "Blue is a better court colour than other colours, better that the green-grey they call clay in the US and that brown stuff they use in India," he said. To accommodate television the tours have switched hardcourts from green to blue, so it does make sense to try the same for clay courts.

But Nadal went out early, to his countryman Verdasco, and Djokovic went out early, to his countryman Tipsarevic, and the final was played between Federer and fast-court player Tomas Berdych. While the ATP insists that the blue clay will eventually play like red clay, Djokovic and Nadal's coach, his uncle Toni, insist they will refuse to play on blue clay next year. As noted in the Heavy Topspin blog, service aces and third-shot winners were far more frequent on the blue clay than in years past on red clay. If you serve well, and the ball comes back weakly, you have a chance to end the point on the third shot. So third-shot winners are also an indication of a fast court.

Roger's victory at Madrid combined with early exits of the top two has temporarily propelled Federer to #2 in the world above Nadal. So earning points on the red clay of Rome becomes more important than expected to Djokovic and Nadal before the seeding for Roland Garros.

Bilateral Breathing

Donal — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:24:20 +0000

I've always admired the grace, efficiency and symmetry of swimmers that breathe to both sides at any pace and distance. Laure Manadou, Rebecca Adlington, Federica Pellegrini and many other elite female swimmers breathe bilaterally while competing, as do many excellent masters swimmers. But, many other women and almost all of the elite male swimmers in the world breathe to one side, or unilaterally, in their races.

Welsh distance swimmer Dave Davies is one of the few male swimmers I have seen consistently breathing bilaterally. World 1500m champion Sun Yang quickly breathes to both sides before and after turning, but mostly breathes to one side. Many male swimmers can sneak a breath to the opposite side to keep an eye on an opponent, but most opt for the additional air available when breathing every other stroke.

Despite the prevalence of unilateral breathing, some coaches recommend bilateral breathing to develop symmetrical body roll to each side and to avoid the lopsided stroke that often comes with same-side breathing. Michael Phelps breathes to one side, but in this training video, his coach, Bob Bowman, recommends learning bilateral breathing:

On CoachesInfo.com, aquatics scientist and masters swimmer Ross Sanders advises that same side breathing can interfere with streamlining:

... 'Twisting' of the upper body during breathing is common and increases resistance. Observation of swimmers indicates that this twisting is more common among swimmers who have a preferred breathing side. I believe swimmers should learn and practice bilateral breathing. Coaches should establish symmetry of action to improve balancing of rotations and streamlining.

Total Immersion founder Terry Laughlin is all about making your breathing motion so streamlined that it doesn't slow you down no matter how often you breathe, but even so he recommends bilateral swimming while training:

One of the most common questions I get from swimmers is whether they should use alternate-side, or bilateral, breathing. The quick answer is yes, you should breathe to both sides. At least in practice. And on some occasions it can be an advantage while racing too.

... The problem with single side breathing is that, over time. it tends to make your stroke lopsided and asymmetrical. And small wonder; in just an hour of swimming, you'll probably roll to your breathing side about 1,000 times, meaning all your torso muscles pull more in that direction and less to the other side. Multiply that by hundreds of hours of swimming and you can see how a lopsided stroke can easily become permanent.

One would think that bilateral breathing should at least be attempted by any serious swimmer, but in an online interview with staunch bilateral breathing advocates at Swim Smooth, Swimming Fastest author and swim coach Ernest Maglischo cautions that teaching bilateral swimming might be a waste of time for some:

I believe bi-lateral breathing is a good way to teach beginners because they will tend to be more rhythmic. But, I am of the opinion that competitors should breathe to only one side when racing. Oxygen consumption should be greater when more breaths are taken during the race. Having said that, swimmers in races should resort to breathing to both sides on occasion in order to check their direction and the position of their competitors. As for using bi-lateral breathing in the training of experienced swimmers, I have found that it is a waste of time. They will swim more symmetrically in training when breathing to both sides, however, they will revert to the same somewhat lopsided stroke when they breathe regularly in competition.

When I used to follow rec.sport.swimming, some posters claimed that asymmetrical stroking, or what they called loping, had less to do with breathing than with arm dominance, aka motor laterality. One doesn't see noticeable asymmetry in backstroke though, where one breathes facing up, or in breaststroke or butterfly, so I did not find such claims convincing. In 2005, Seifert, Chollet and Allard ran a study (PDF) that asked:

... does an asymmetric arm pattern emerge from internal properties (functional pathology, dominance of one arm) or in response to external constraints (breathing)? And what is the direction of causality: Is the asymmetric pattern determined by unilateral breathing? Or, conversely, does an asymmetry due to arm dominance lead to unilateral breathing?

[But their conclusion to the chicken or egg question was ... chicken and egg:]

This confirmed the relationship between unilateral breathing and coordination asymmetry, and suggests that coordination symmetry relates to both motor laterality and breathing laterality.

My bilateral breathing strategy for the last decade has been to breath to the right and left on alternate lengths. I breathe right going out and left coming back. I'm a 5% faster swimmer breathing to the right, though, and even faster when I breathe bilaterally once every three strokes.

So despite some of the cautions, my experiment for this season has been to incorporate one right, one left (1R/1L) bilateral breathing into my long practice swims and all my sprint sets. To retrain my body, I quit same-side breathing altogether. I started by alternating 50m crawl lengths with 50m easy breathing backstroke lengths. On the first few swims, I was desperate for air before and after the flip turns, and gasped as I surfaced in backstroke.

But a few swims later, I was not feeling so bad after the turn, and stroked hard on the backstroke. By about 600m, bilateral breathing was feeling like the right and proper way to swim. Moving to the outside 25m lanes last Sunday, I swam three lengths of crawl for every one of backstroke. Due to a sprained ankle I was doing open turns, which gave me an extra breath, of course, and I felt no air desperation at all. I knew that flip turns would be more challenging.

One day I swam a full 1500m of crawl and 500m of backstroke. I was able to manage flip turns with tentative pushoffs. I found that extra breathing just before the turn tended to mess up my flip timing, and I had to tuck a lot to make the rotation. For about the first half of the swim I stuck with bilateral breathing--one breath every three strokes--but gave myself extra breaths before and after the turns. I even tried breathing on successive strokes, like Sun Yang, but I don't exhale fast enough to be ready for the next inhale. For a few lengths I tried breathing twice to the right and once to the left (2R/1L), and eventually settled into breathing twice to the right and twice to the left (2R/2L), which seemed to be enough air. Both 2R/1L and 2R/2L average four breaths per ten strokes, but the rhythm differs.

After breathing 2R/2L for several weeks the rhythm became routine enough that I could take time to count strokes. I felt like I was taking a lot of strokes, but my Poolmate swim watch had been confusing me. It counts arm strokes on the watch hand to give an average stroke cycle count per length, which should be fairly consistent between swims. But I saw 14, then 7, then 6 in the 25m lane, and 32, then 15 in 50m lane. I was convinced that the watch was going bonkers until I realized the problem.

When I finished a long swim, I was sometimes pushing the start button too briefly, then taking off my goggles, looking at the results, etc. That meant the timer was paused rather than stopped, so the watch would start another session. That second session would only end when I pressed again to switch back to Clock mode. Since there were no strokes in the second session, the watch gave me an average of both sessions (14 + 0) /2 = 7. Or (31 + 0) /2 = 15.

14 left arm strokes should mean 27 or 28 arm strokes, and 11 breaths, but I actually count 25 strokes, so the watch probably interprets balancing arm movements during the flip turn as a stroke or two. Last season I started at 25 and got down to about 18, so now I'm in the Ministry of Silly Swims until I can lengthen out my strokes again.

For now, the 2R/2L pattern is giving me enough air for longer swims. And when I do sets of shorter crawl swims, the 1R/1L pattern feels very smooth and natural. And I have the rest of the summer to see how it works out.

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Alexander Dale Oen

Donal — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:46:29 +0000

At the pool, you often see people swimming a very relaxed style of breaststroke—head out of the water, breathing freely, legs frog-kicking deep down—but swum properly, modern breaststroke is as physically grueling and technically demanding as butterfly, itself an evolution of breaststroke. One would expect a world breaststroke champion to be in fantastic physical condition. Norway's Alexander Dale Oen was 26, almost 27. In Beijing, he had won the Silver medal in 100m Breast behind Kitajima Kosuke, and was in training for the London Olympics.

Champion Swimmer Found Dead in Arizona

At last summer’s world championships in Shanghai, Dale Oen turned in the most emotionally charged performance of the meet. Competing in the 100 breaststroke final three days after 77 people, mostly children, died in the worst massacre in Norway’s history, he won in 58.71 seconds. It was the fastest time recorded by a swimmer not wearing the now-banned polyurethane suits and the fourth fastest in history.

After his time flashed on the scoreboard, Dale Oen pointed to the Norwegian flag on his cap, rose from the water and flexed his biceps in a show of strength to those back home in Norway.

“We need to stay united,” he said after the race. “Everyone back home now is of course paralyzed with what happened, but it was important for me to symbolize that even though I’m here in China, I’m able to feel the same emotions.”

A Faroe Islands blogger I follow is in shock, as are swim fans in Norway. He translated a tribute by a Norwegian blogger, When the hero of your kids dies, part of which follows:

The thoughts swirl: I’m also struggling with the tears. Alexander Dale Oen is the first sports hero that I’ve had together with my wife and children. And the greatest. My daughter wonders why he who was so good could die. I wonder too. She thinks his family must be very sad. They are. She is afraid that the same will happen to her brother, mom, daddy and everyone she loves. I do too. If this hadn’t happened, could he have won Olympic gold. That is not so important. The thoughts swirl and it is difficult to find good answers. Talking gives little comfort.

Swimming World interviewed Dale Oen shortly before his death, embedded below:

Floyd Mayweather, Jr. regularly beats women - Cowardly Sportswriters regularly ignore it

William K. Wolfrum — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:19:52 +0000

: This is the only type of battery sportswriters will mention when it comes to Floyd Mayweather.

As Floyd Mayweather prepares for his fight next week with Miguel Cotto, commentators are quick to point out that he will soon be serving time in jail. What they avoid talking about is why he will be incarcerated: Domestic Battery.

Mayweather - who should bank around $30 million for fighting Cotto - will soon be serving 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to misdemeanor domestic battery charges in order to avoid felony charges. Has this set off a national discussion on athletes who abuse women? Hardly. A quick check of Google News shows these search results:

Mayweather, Cotto: 828 results.

Mayweather, domestic battery: 4 results.

In my search, I was able to find one story about Mayweather's domestic battery: And in it, Mayweather says he isn't guilty and compares himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

Mayweather's domestic battery conviction is no one-time affair, either. In fact, one could strongly make a case that "Money" is an unapologetic serial woman abuser. Via Wikipedia:

In 2002, Mayweather was charged with two counts of domestic violence and one count of misdemeanor battery. He received a 6 month suspended sentence, 2 days of house arrest and was ordered to perform 48 hours of community service.

In 2004, he was given a one year suspended jail sentence, ordered to undergo counseling for "impulse control" and pay a $1000 fine or perform 100 hours of community service after being convicted of two counts of misdemeanor battery against two women.

On September 9, 2010, it was reported that Mayweather was being sought by police for questioning after his former girlfriend, Josie Harris, filed a domestic battery report against him. Harris has accused Mayweather of battery in the past, but those charges were later dropped in July 2005 after Harris testified that she had lied and that Mayweather had not, in fact, assaulted her.

On December 21, 2011, a judge sentenced Mayweather to serve 90 days in the county jail for battery upon his ex-girlfriend in September 2010. Mayweather reached a deal with prosecutors in which he pled guilty to misdemeanor battery in exchange for prosecutors dropping the felony battery charge. Mayweather also pled no contest to two counts of misdemeanor harrasment which stemmed from Mayweather threatening to beat his kids.

Mind you, Wikipedia is no authority on violence against women when it comes to professional athletes. A look at NFL Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown's page doesn't even mention domestic abuse, despite the fact Brown is better known now for his violence against women than his playing or acting career.

Sure, sportswriters and the media are occasionally prone to brief, quickly forgotten moments of navel-gazing as to why the profession ignores violence against women:

“This is in no way meant to diminish Vick’s crime, but it seems fair to wonder why there’s a conspicuous lack of outrage when we hear about athletes torturing women,” wrote Barry Rozner. “And whether a battered woman today matters less than a dog.”

Yes, in the sports writing profession, a dog matters more than a woman. Take yesterday's episode of Friday Night Fights, when the universally acclaimed Rick Reilly interviewed Mike Tyson, and didn't once mention the fact that Tyson is a convicted rapist and well-known abuser of women.

I have written of this subject several times in the past and it is my opinion that American sportswriters either are cowards when it comes to violence against women, or they approve of it. Because Floyd Mayweather is going to jail for battering a woman and all they can talk about is fight predictions. Here's a prediction that will assuredly come true - Floyd Mayweather, Jr. will physically hurt a woman again. And sportswriters around the nation will ignore it again.

Because American athletes better not cheat, or play too aggressively or use performance-enhancing drugs. But beat a woman? Forget about it.

--WKW

Crossposted at William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

Losing Our Marbles

Donal — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:29:36 +0000

During the week between the Indian Wells and Key Biscayne Masters tournaments, the Tennis Channel showed their Greatest 100 Players of all time show. Rankings seem to be partially based on stats and partially on perception. For example, #13 John McEnroe is ranked higher than #18 Ivan Lendl, who was more durable and has one more major title than Mac. I think Mac at his best was slightly better than Lendl, but I also think Serena Williams at her best was better than Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova. Yet Graf and Navratilova were ranked #3 and #4, while Serena was far behind at #12.

I already knew a little something about many of the players, but I learned that #51 Doris Hart won a career Grand Slam and six majors in singles, and twenty-nine major titles in doubles with a right leg that was impaired by childhood osteomyelitis. Even one side of her face looked impaired in the videos, though I don't see it in the still photo.

#58 Alice Marble had quite a life. At fifteen, she was accosted leaving the public courts, and raped. She survived pleurisy and tuberculosis in her twenties. Days after she miscarried their child, her pilot husband was shot down over Germany in WWII. Towards the end of the war, she was asked to spy on a Swiss former lover. She may have been shot in the back (accounts vary).

... she slept with the enemy to find out about treasures Nazis were hoping to smuggle out along with their escape routes during the final months of the war. Like the later pair on television's I Spy, under the cover of tennis exhibition matches, she met her ex, photographed lists in his safe, and bolted out the front door, narrowly escaping.

One reason that #39 Althea Gibson was allowed to play on the tour was due to letters written by Marble.

... Marble was the first to publicly address the sport's segregation practices and challenge the establishment. She wrote her historic July 1, 1950 editorial in American Tennis Magazine. Marble denounced the all-white U.S. Lawn Tennis Association's policy of excluding African-Americans from competition. She exhorted, "Miss Gibson is over a very cunningly wrought barrel, and I can only hope to loosen a few of its staves with one lone opinion. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts."

Flash forward fifty years and that hypocrisy is still only thinly veiled. Serena and Venus Williams were not exactly welcomed onto the tennis tour. It didn't help that Richard Williams largely kept them off the junior circuit, or that they didn't even attempt to adapt to tennis culture. They wore beads in their hair and unusual outfits. Detractors claimed that Richard had fixed the matches between the sisters, and that they were arrogant. They clearly were defensive and suspicious. After Venus withdrew just before a match against Serena in 2001, the Williams family claimed that the crowd was hurling racial epithets while booing Serena. Despite it being a mandatory event, they have refused to play Indian Wells ever since.

While Venus eventually seemed to mellow, and become somewhat popular, Serena stayed angry. She was later fined after threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 US Open, “I swear I will take this fucking ball and throw it down your fucking throat, I swear to God.” The lineswoman had called a foot fault against Serena on match point against her, which is unusual. Serena later made light of the incident in a commercial.

People remain frustrated with the Williamses for not playing a full schedule, for having side interests like Venus' design ambitions and Serena's acting ambitions, and even for the ways in which they get injured.

A talented French journeyman player named Michael Llodra did play at Indian Wells. Llodra was playing against another talented journeyman, the Latvian Ernests Gulbis. Tennis journeymen don't win many titles, and don't go far into the majors, but they do make a living.

Llodra was leading Gulbis but wasn't happy. One would think he had heard about the Jeremy Lin controversy, but he singled out an Asian woman in the stands. She was in a group that was rooting for Gulbis—"C'mon Gulbis"—but not taunting Llodra. Nevertheless, Llodra called her a "putain Chinoise," a Chinese whore, and several other choice words:

“He was looking directly at me,” said Barlow, who is Korean-American. “He didn’t yell it particularly loudly. He was turned toward the baseline, toward us, and he looked right at me and said this comment.”

Llodra directed his anger toward Barlow’s section again moments later, after her cluster of pro-Gulbis fans sighed in disappointment when Gulbis hit a double fault.

“You’re crying now are you? Well, you should be crying,” Barlow quoted Llodra as saying. Llodra later called Barlow a Chinese, adding a profane adjective for emphasis.

Llodra seemed oblivious to charges of racism:

Llodra did not make matters better for himself during an interview with a reporter from the Chinese news Web site SINA.com, in which the Frenchman attempted to apologize for his remarks.

“My words were not aimed at China,” Llodra began.

“I love Chinese — I can totally make love with a Chinese girl,”

I told that story to my French African colleague, and he laughed and said, "Only a Frenchman would say that."

Anyway, tonight in Baltimore is a multigroup rally for Trayvon Martin. It starts at McKeldin Plaza—long since clear of the Occupy camp—and ends at City Hall. I didn't bring my hoodie, but I'll march along with them.

Between Forehands

Donal — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:54:53 +0000

In Spring are two American tennis tournaments, each of which likes to be known as the fifth major. Both include both the men's and women's tours at the same time, which does give them the feel of a major, but they have 96 player fields instead of 128, and offer 1000 ranking points to the winners instead of 2000. Still, they're big tournaments.

The Indian Wells Masters, now officially called the BNP Paribas Open, was the Pacific Life Open (with lots of whale ads) from 2002 to 2008, and has had almost a dozen names over the last 38 years. I associate Banque Nationale de Paris and BNP Paribas with the French Open at Roland Garros, but BNP Paribas is now the largest bank in the world, so I guess they can sponsor a tournament anywhere. The Miami Masters, or Sony Ericsson Open, started out many names ago as the Lipton, and is often just called Key Biscayne. Larry Ellis of Oracle now owns the Indian Wells event, and former top ten player Butch Buchholz started the Key Biscayne event.

Indian Wells started last week. Tennis Channel announcers said there was a bout of flu going through the draw, and there have been several withdrawals and a few upsets already, but first lets talk about Dubai. New #1 Victoria Azarenka is undefeated this year, 18-0, or something, but pulled out of the Dubai Duty Free Championships early with an injury. I thought that might be the start of #4 Caroline Wozniacki's promised march back to the number one ranking, but #15 Julia Görges took her out in the semis. The Tennis Channel spelled it Goerges, but I called her Gorgeous Julia just to annoy my wife. The rather plain #5 Agnieszka Radwańska then beat Görges in the final.

A week later at the men's tournament in Dubai, #4 Andy Murray beat #1 Novak Djokovic in the semis, and lost a close final to #3 Roger Federer. Even though Murray lost to Fed, Ivan Lendl's coaching seemed to have imbued him with a new resolve and a more dangerous forehand.

So at Indian Wells, Murray came out, and lost his first match 6-4, 6-2 to #92 Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, a former #25 who is no slouch, but who he was expected to beat. “There obviously was a reason behind why I didn’t play well, and I’ll find that reason and address it,” Murray said to interviewers, but I thought the reason was obvious.

Murray had been hitting the open forehand, in which you pivot your weight to generate the power behind the stroke, but Lendl is teaching Murray a new power forehand:

"If you watch what it was like before and what it is like now, it is pretty major," the 24-year-old Scot said. "It's not a major change but when you look at it, it's very different in terms of the way that I am moving my feet. "This week I have been hitting it really, really well and hopefully I can keep that up. It makes a big difference, especially going into the clay court season because it's probably one of the most important shots on clay. "I never used to make that many mistakes on my forehand, it's just a bigger weapon now than it was before and that's important, to keep developing weapons in different ways to win points and shorten points as well ... the more free points you can get, the less toll matches are going to take on your body."

It isn't easy to change a groundstroke, though. Whatever worked well against Djokovic wasn't there when he struggled against Garcia-Lopez. In one quote, Murray complained about choosing between his safe loopy forehand and his new powerful forehand—during the match. Murray can't be thinking about that on a conscious level. He has to know what sort of forehand he's going to hit as soon as he has some idea where the next ball will be going.

The Tennis Channel's popcorn special featured #3 Petra Kvitova against #35, 19 y.o. American Christina McHale. Kvitova just pounded through McHale in the first set, 6-2. Then Kvitova started missing and McHale had the tall woman on the run. I was wondering if it was a mental lapse, until they showed Kvitova sucking on an inhaler. Petra had contracted a stomach virus in Doha, and dropped out of the Qatar Open and Dubai. McHale won 2-6, 6-2, 6-3. Kvitova has never done well in the states, so she probably wasn't defending many points, but she didn't defend her Paris Indoors title this year, either. So she may drop from #3. And to top it off she pulled out of the doubles with the Indian Wells flu.

#8 Mardy Fish lost to journeyman Matthew Ebden 6-3, 6-4. Fish lost a key point after shouting "C'Mon!" before his opponent had actually hit the ball, and came off a bit whiny as he argued for a let instead of a penalty. This was his tenth loss in fourteen matches, and he hasn't beaten anyone impressive in 2012; I wonder if his run is over.

#31 Andy Roddick pulled out the second set, but lost to Thomas Berdych in three. As the commenters noted, Roddick has only one finishing shot against Berdych—his serve. Once the point was in play, Berdych was generally in control. Roddick also came off a bit whiny as he argued that he had indicated he wanted a replay by sort of pointing up.

Indian Wells wraps up this Sunday, and Key Biscayne starts the day after.

Nixing Racism: Jeremy Lin Gives Us a Teaching Moment, Along With Lots of Great Balling

Articleman — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:24:32 +0000

I love basketball, so I love Jeremy Lin. He's awesome. I also love to write about basketball, so I was waiting until I had seen more of Lin's play to write a blog about his fascinating rise to celebrity status and into the upper echelon of NBA guards. I was not waiting to blog about Lin until idiots thought it was cool to use the ugly and out-of-bounds racial slur "chink" in prepared text to refer to him. Nonetheless, we have been exposed this week to ESPN making wordplay with this racist slur, and to boxer Floyd Mayweather and even columnist Jason Whitlock joining the racist foot-in-mouth comment club. So before we get back to enjoying the Linsanity where it belongs, on the hardwood (where Lin scored 28 and dished out 14 assists in a nationally televised Knick win over the Mavericks today), let's recognize the teaching moment our culture suddenly finds itself in about the not widely paused upon subject of antiAsian racism.

By way of background, in case you have been unconscious or perhaps visiting the new Gingrich moon colony for the last three weeks, you have certainly heard by now of the meteoric rise of Jeremy Lin, a second year NBA player, into being the first Asian-American basketball star in American history. Lin was an end-of-the-bencher for a listless and 8-15 New York Knicks team, when coach Mike D'Antoni, himself on the brink of being fired, took this inexperienced guard and gave him extended minutes. Linsanity followed, as the Knicks won seven straight games with Lin leading them in scoring and assists over the stretch, hitting a game winner at the end of one road game, and scoring more in his first six NBA starts than any player in the league's 66 year history. New York responded with a lot of love, as did NBA nation. Lin was an underdog and a surprise several times over -- undrafted, he played his college ball for Harvard, having never received a single college basketball scholarship offer, and he had been sent to the NBA's minor league repeatedly. And it is surely part of the Lin story that there had never been an Asian-American player in the modern NBA, which, rolled together will all of those underdog facts I just listed, and Lin's joyful, positive disposition, made his rise a unique and upbeat sports story. People like rooting for the underdog, for the nice guy made good, for the novelty of someone being the first to do something, and Jeremy Lin is all of that. (Although he's too good to be the underdog forever, but hey, let's enjoy the liftoff here.)

Unfortunately, one of the distinctive things about Lin being race (the only other Asian-American player in NBA history was Wat Misaka, who played three games, also for the Knicks, in 1947), there was an opening for stupidity to creep into the discussion. Sure enough, there was a scuffle about race and speech about Lin earlier in the week, when hater Floyd Mayweather, Jr., a convicted serial batterer of women and a boxing champion, tweeted that Jeremy Lin is a good player but that he only receives hype because he's Asian, and that black players do every night what he does. Mayweather had previously been caught on video saying of rival champion boxer, Filipino Manny Pacquiao, "We're going to cook that little yellow chump…. Once I stomp the midget, I'll make that motherfucker make me a sushi roll and cook me some rice." By this standard of racist speech, Mayweather's latest comments sound almost scholarly in tone. It's true that Lin being Asian is a positive part of why people pay attention to him (he's as novel as Tiger at Augusta, and arguably more so than the Williams sisters, all of whom inspired a lot of love), and to that degree only, Mayweather almost had a point. But in having to make it about black versus Asian (a leitmotif on display in Mayweather's diseased rant against Pacquiao), he went off the deep end. It was nice to hear the First Knick Fan, Spike Lee himself, tweet back that Mayweather sounded like Rush Limbaugh making those comments. Spike was right. What Lin did in his first set of starts had never been done by a white, black, or Asian player. Which is part of why it is cool, and raciaizing sour grapes over Lin's attention is bad news.

I was surprised while researching this to see that a figure in sports I actually like -- columnist Jason Whitlock -- had gotten into the act. Mayweather is the kind of violent idiot jock who our culture elevates improperly onto a soapbox through Twitter and media coverage. But Whitlock is a good and often thoughtful sports columnist. And he tweeted the other night that after another good performance in New York by Lin, "Some lucky lady in NYC is going to feel a couple inches of pain tonight." Get it? The joke or stereotype about Asian men and their genitalia. Nice. Jason apologized, and was not suspended. Yecch. Whitlock considers the joke "inappropriate" and "immature." He didn't call it "racist," which means he hasn't accepted responsibility, a failure even more evident in his whinily criticizing the sincerity of those criticizing him. He'd rather walk around in little circles pretending to be some racial truth-teller when he should just say he screwed up and give supposed racial insight a rest for the week. That his employer Fox has not suspended or punished him remains more pathetic and unacceptable than what he said in the first place, as it amounts to tacit endorsement.

Speaking of Spike Lee, as we did two paragraphs above, ESPN provides a generally praiseworthy contrast to Fox in how you do the right thing. As the virus of racist cracks spread through the intertubes, ESPN employees twice this week made racist "chink" wordplay in text about Lin. Friday night, ESPN ran the racist headline "Chink in the Armor" to explain the Knicks' first loss with Lin starting. Someone had the presence of mind to pull it down within 35 minutes, but thankfully not before the screen-shot of ugliness went viral, and called the question as to whether this was ok. Saturday morning, as HuffPo and others focused attention on the headline, we learned that ESPN had done the same thing two days earlier when anchor Max Bretos asked in this video whether there was a "chink in the armor -- where can Lin improve his game?" Remarkably, ESPN had already come under criticism for using "Chink in the Armor" as a headline to refer to a USA Basketball loss in China. Anyone knows that this continuing conjunction of China with the slur "chink" was not accidental. Sadly, fans taunted Lin with "chink" even while he played college ball in the Ivy League.

Happily, ESPN stepped up and recognized at least the rough equivalency of the slur in its headline with the N-word, which America learned you don't get to use as an epithet at someone decades ago. It fired the headline writer, and suspended Bretos for 30 days. (And it pointed out that someone broadcasting over ESPN Radio who is not an ESPN employee, thus beyond its disciplinary reach, who turns out to be Knicks radio voice Spero Dedes, had used the same "chink in the armor" language in his live broadcast of Friday's game -- audio here.) There is a good argument for firing Bretos, but I am betting that he showed great contrition (he tweeted that his wife is Asian and that he would never intentionally disparage the Asian community) and that he may have been ad libbing on air, though one would tend to assume otherwise. In Bretos' defense, it says something about American acceptance of casual antiAsian racism that nothing happened as a general cultural backlash after his comment for two days. Only when the headline two days later raised the issue to critical mass was ESPN was forced to confront what appeared to be its third racist use of "chink in the armor." The delay, the indifference from Bretos' point A Wednesday to the headline's point B Friday cannot be laid at the doorstep of ESPN, but instead at the doorstep of how America still sometimes fails when it talks about race.

In that continuing American conversation about race, one thing that shone through to me is that even though this antiAsian C-word stands in rough parallel to the antiblack N-word, as a totem of hate and disparagement and dehumanization, we haven't evolved rules as clear about antiAsian disparagement, partly because there was no Asian counterpart to the African-American civil rights movement of the 1960s. We have had many more Al Campanis moments in our popular culture than Jason Whitlock or Floyd Mayweather moments. I know one great illustration from my own youth of the disparity between how clear our cultural prohibitions have been against using overtly antiblack language, compared to our softer prohibitions against overtly antiAsian slurs. As a teen, I had a girlfriend in Pekin, Illinois, so named because someone stupid thought that if you burrowed through to the opposite side of the earth, you'd be in Peking. I say someone stupid because Pekin and Peking are both in the northern hemisphere. (I guess if you want to imagine that you can connect any two points on a sphere through the center, all towns in the world could be named Pekin. But I digress.)

Having made some acquaintances in Pekin, I was shocked back in 1984 to learn that Pekin's high school nickname until 1980 -- far into the post-MLK world -- had been the Chinks. This was their logo. You cannot imagine a sports team with a comparably disparaging ethnic nickname (ok, the "Washington Redskins" comes close and persists) existing in 1980. By then, America had too evolved of a consensus against the N-word to permit its use in such a casual and authoritative way as in nicknaming a school. Yet when the school in all-white Pekin (a town with longstanding Klan ties) resolved to change its nickname from Chink to Dragon in 1980, there was a protest in which students stayed home en masse. Fortunately, the school stood its ground and there were mass suspensions and discipline, greatly to the displeasure of the disciplined. Remarkably, even after Pekin retired the disgraceful nickname, Pekin still had a roller rink called "Chink Rink," which had outside it a cartoon logo caricature of an Asian man in a long robe, with slant-line eyes, a coolie hat, an idiotic grin, and roller skates sticking out from under his robe. Thankfully, I cannot find an image of it to paste here. The rink name passed around 1985, as I recall.

The story of casual racism this week has an interesting parallel with the purging of Pekin's offensive mascot and nickname. By 1975, the nearby Peoria Journal-Star, which was the primary newspaper in the area, resolved that it would never use "Chink" in covering Pekin's teams even while the nickname persisted, to avoid offending readers. The Journal-Star's decision helped start the push to put the slur out of bounds. You can see the discussion of that in this interesting history of the Pekin nickname controversy, at pages 55-56. And when ESPN issued a full-throated apology, with heads rolling today, it helped draw the line more clearly, as we drew it long ago on the N-word, against this very ugly disparagement. Thank you to the worldwide leader (as it calls itself) for the moral clarity Fox, Jason Whitlock, and Floyd Mayweather lack. I have confidence we're going to move forward from this week as a teaching moment that helped, and that we all benefit from that, not just kids like my half-Asian son who asked me this morning during a Lin discussion how he would have been treated during Old South segregation.

So with that confidence in where we're headed, I'm going to put this angle aside, and get back to enjoying Jeremy Lin's game. If you missed today's Knicks victory over the Mavericks, you missed something special. The defending champion Mavs were up in the second half in a loud Garden. Bringing them back, Lin knifed through the lane twice for tough layups, absorbing hits and finishing one as an and-one. He got teammate Steve Novak raining threes from the outside by drawing the defense and making the smart pass. After Novak hit two threes in the fourth quarter to put the Knicks up six, with the shot clock running out, Lin coldly nailed a long three over a long defender to make it nine. And after the Mavs clawed back to 100-97 down in the last minute, Novak batted a long rebound of a Mavs miss to Lin, who casually tossed a perfect 50 foot pass upcourt to J.R. Smith, who had released early, for the layup that proved decisive. Playing the best field-goal defense in the NBA, the Mavs yielded over 100 to Lin's Knicks, who are 8-1 with him starting. Cheering on Lin's eyepopping 28 points, 14 assists, and 5 steals, the First Knick, a man whose films have improved our conversation about race, was wearing a long, baggy Harvard jersey, with Lin's name and college number 4 on the back. Think I'll be getting one of those myself. God help me, I'm starting to like the New York Knicks. Peace out.

Endurance Topspin

Donal — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:35:39 +0000

The promoters of the Australian Open should be awfully pleased. Often—too often—the women's final in a major is a dud. Usually the semis are better matches, and one player freezes up to play a bad match in the final. But even though the 2012 women's final was a 6-3, 6-0 rout, a new Number One was crowned, and the match wasn't completely awful. Maria Sharapova wasn't dumping serves into the net, was returning well, and hit a few winners—she was simply led into a boatload of errors. The NY Times' Straight Sets blog offered the theory that Victoria Azarenka won mostly because she hit with more topspin than Sharapova. Even though she obviously does hit with topspin, Sharapova is considered a flat hitter in the modern game. My feeling was that Azarenka covered the court a lot better than Sharapova, while hitting the ball just as powerfully (and shrieking just as loudly).

The men's semifinals were excellent, and the final may be one for the ages. The Atlantic speculates that this final may portend the new look of men's tennis: as an endurance sport. Even given that both Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal took a lot of time between points, the match took almost six hours, and many of the points involved over twenty shots, even thirty shots. A popular tennis coach once noted that, statistically speaking, for the average player the point will end on the next shot. For these guys, it seems that no matter how well they hit the ball, the point will go on at least another six shots. Part of that is because the tennis authorities have slowed down the courts, and part of that is because these guys are very fast and very fit, and part is because they are hitting with extremely exaggerated topspin.

Topspin is not even close to being new. One of the first tennis books I read was Don Budge's Tennis Memoir, in which he extolled the virtues of hitting with topspin instead of slicing with backspin. His idol, Ellsworth Vines, had hit with topspin. Bill Tilden hit with all sorts of spins. Rod Laver hit his backhand with pronounced topspin while Ken Rosewall hit his with pronounced slice, but both men had their share of success.

When I first started playing, we were supposed to emulate the clean strokes of Stan Smith, who hit with moderate topspin off of both sides. What we saw on TV, though, was that Jimmy Connors was known for hitting flat while Bjorn Borg hit with heavy topspin. Connors didn't put much spin on the ball; he didn't seem to lift up the racquet as he struck the ball. Borg whipped the racquet from low to high like a hockey stick and his high arcing balls seemed to be pulled down inbounds at the last minute by an unseen force. Which they were. And Borg soon owned Connors. And then we saw that Ivan Lendl dominated McEnroe once Lendl replaced his slice backhand with a dipping topspin shot. In other words, topspin ruled, and the more the better. But how to get it?

In 1987, Howard Brody, author of Tennis Science for Tennis Players, considered 1000 rpm (16 rps, actually) to be moderate topspin—and I'd guess that Budge and Smith were moderate—and 2,000 rpm to be extreme topspin—and I'd guess that Borg and Lendl were extreme. I am guessing because I don't know whether accurate measurements of tennis ball rpm were widely taken back then. One tennis article I found on paper at a club listed these measurements of more recent players:

3331 rpm Sergi Bruguera
2882 rpm Tomas Muster
2647 rpm Marcelos Rios
2527 rpm Jim Courier
2334 rpm Michael Chang
1842 rpm Pete Sampras
1718 rpm Andre Agassi
1659 rpm Todd Martin

2154 rpm Venus Williams
1941 rpm Mary Pierce
1916 rpm Arantxa Sanchez
1713 rpm Anna Kournikova
1673 rpm Jana Novotna
1346 rpm Lindsay Davenport
1215 rpm Monica Seles
1147 rpm Martina Hingis

A more recent list shows that current players' topspin has become more than extreme:
2,500 - 2700 rpm Roger Federer
3,200 - 5000 rpm Rafael Nadal

There have always been spin artists, but spin alone means nothing. Anyone can spin the ball a lot with a whippy forehand, but the ball might not go past the net. Sergi Bruguera is cited as generating 3,331 rpm—but Sergi's shots weren't hit all that fast and he was most successful on slow clay. Fed and Rafa hit with spin and pace and usually good depth. The increase in rpm from Sampras and Agassi to Federer and Nadal may have to do with polymer string technology, or a combination/evolution of those strings, racquets and court speed.

Agassi used kevlar strings, and most of today's professionals use polymer. Both kevlar and polymer feel deadened, and are often called dead strings. Newer polymer strings are also very slippery, behaving a bit like the spaghetti stringing patterns that were banned in 1978, and like spaghetti stringing, that slipperiness increases spin on the ball—by ten or twenty percent. (But those dead strings are also very hard on your arms and shoulders. Djokovic's shoulder problems at the end of last season may well be due to his strings.)

When a sliced ball bounces, it catches on the court and then spins forward with very moderate topspin. After a ball of moderate topspin bounces, it spins with more topspin. After balls with extreme or more than extreme topspin bounce, they seem to leap forward and down. You can't simply block such a ball back. You have to stroke it with authority or it will fly off your racquet. I found that out playing the Borg wannabes in tennis leagues.

When you strike a heavily spun ball, you have to use part of your contact time—a split second—to stop that spin, then you can impart the spin you want. If you are late to the ball, you may not have time to impose your spin on the ball. As a result, much of what really happens in these long rallies is invisible unless you can read how fast the ball is spinning.

Say Sharapova hits with 1000 rpm, which bounces at 2000 rpm. Azarenka runs to the ball, sets up, and hits with enough spin-effort to reverse that spin to 2000 rpm and places it far from Sharapova. The ball bounces and spins up to 2500 rpm. Sharapova gets to the ball, but can only manage an abbreviated swing, and imparts less spin or pace or both than she needs to trouble Azarenka. Azarenka sees an almost flat ball or a very short ball coming back and creams it. You can see when Sharapova hits short, but it is a lot harder to tell when she hits a deep, low-spin ball that is easier for her opponent to handle.

Simply hitting deep used to be a safe play, but now you also need spin, pace or perfect placement to avoid a crushing reply. And if your opponent is fast, you need to hit three crushing replies to finish the point.

So in the modern baseline game, strategy is not just about attacking your opponent's weakness, but about maneuvering your opponent into eventually playing into your strengths—then still being strong enough to take advantage. Straight Sets also theorizes that Federer stubbornly repeats a key tactical error by hitting into the open court against Nadal. Nadal, you see, is protecting his backhand, so hitting into the "open" court means that you are giving Rafa the chance and the angle to unload with his forehand—if he can cover the open court—which he often can. Djokovic, though, seems to take a longer term strategy against Rafa, hitting early and stealing time on every shot, and waiting patiently until Rafa (finally) gives him an attackable ball. He can do that because he hits with as much topspin as Nadal, while standing in closer.

And don't even start talking about sidespin.

Dogfight Down Under

Donal — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:50:40 +0000

Yesterday, the New York Times' Straight Sets blog raved about the intensity of the Nadal-Federer semifinal, but this morning's match between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray was a dogfight. I woke up at 4:30AM to a score of Djokovic leading 6-3, 3-5, but Novak fell behind on serve and was broken to lose the second set. All even.

The third set was very tight. The first game, Djokovic serving, took over ten minutes. Murray was serving crisply and controlling the baseline rallies with tightly-angled forehands. Reportedly suffering from a "stuffy nose," Djokovic looked tired and far less confident than usual. He wasn't serving that well, and repeatedly had to fight back to hold his own service games. Nole did well to reach a tiebreak, but couldn't hold off Murray. Andy only needed to keep going and take the fourth set. Crikey, even Ivan Lendl cracked a smile.

The Djokovic run ended late last fall, but I expected he would defend many, though not all, of the titles he won last year. Murray seemed poised to take away the first major. If I was still a lad I would have taken the morning off, but I headed to work wondering if Murray had any shot against Nadal.

Arriving at work, I walked in the back door as my tennis buddy opened the front door. He looked at his smartphone and said, "It's on serve 3-2." I thought he meant the fourth set. Actually, Djokovic had run away with the fourth set 6-1 and was already up 5-2 in the fifth. "It's over," I thought, and started checking my email. I took a business call, returned an email with a color question, and checked the web again. Murray was serving at 4-5. I tuned into to AO radio.

Murray held to 5-5 and had all sorts of chances to break, but Djokovic kept digging out to hold for 6-5. Murray was spent, and Novak quickly broke for 7-5, the set and the match. Live-blog at the Daily Mail, where they still love the Scotsman.

N.Djokovic(1) d A.Murray(4)
6-3 3-6 6-7(7) 6-1 7-5

Djokovic will certainly have another tough, physical match against Nadal, but can rest and recover until Sunday evening.

New #1 After Australian Final

Donal — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:06 +0000

Women's tennis will have a new #1 next week, and the current top-ranked player, Caroline Wozniacki, will drop to #4 in the WTA rankings. A lot of scenarios were possible before the semis, but now that third seed Victoria Azarenka and fourth seed Maria Sharapova are to play the finals, the winner will also secure the #1 ranking.

According to a contributor at Yahoo, if Azarenka wins, the points will stand at:
1. Victoria Azarenka 8585
2. Petra Kvitova 7690
3. Maria Sharapova 7560
4. Caroline Wozniacki 7085

... giving Azarenka almost a thousand point lead over Kvitova. If Sharapova wins, she'll have only a 175 point lead over Azarenka:
1. Maria Sharapova 8160
2. Victoria Azarenka 7985
3. Petra Kvitova 7690
4. Caroline Wozniacki 7085

After losing in the quarters to Clijsters, Wozniacki confidently told reporters that she would be number one again, and she may be correct. Unless Azarenka, Kvitova or Sharapova step up and start playing well week in and week out—winning the smaller tournaments, and winning on clay—there are plenty of points available for a steady player like Wozniacki to regain her ranking.

Martina Navratilova has had a lot to say during this tournament.

She felt that no one considered Wozniacki to be a real number one, and blamed the WTA decision to remove quality points from the ranking system in 2006. Quality points make wins against higher-ranked players more important than the routine wins that feed Wozniacki's ranking. But tournament organizers like a ranking system that has the top players punching the time clock every week—showing up at smaller tournaments that need big name attractions.

Navratilova obviously cheers for fellow Czech Kvitova, who could be #1 under a quality point system, and clarified that she was not criticizing Wozniacki personally for being #1. But she also advised that Wozniacki must step in and start hitting hard with the power players if she ever wants to win a major title.

Navratilova spoke out against Margaret Court's religious condemnation of gays, calling her views "outdated," but did not refuse to play her legends double match on Margaret Court Arena. She expressed her views there by wearing rainbow trim on her shirt as she and Nicole Bradtke defeated Iva Majoli and the other Martina ... Hingis.