A Miracle on the Pitch?

They probably didn't deserve to be in the semifinal in the first place. And no one would have given them a chance against the number one team in the world, the current Euro champion and a team with a 35 match unbeaten streak. But somehow, the United States beat Spain, 2-0, in the Confederations Cup.

ESPN broadcast the match live, and the above headline captures the unexpected quality of the win. Of course, the "Do you believe in miracles?" line--a direct reference to the famous Al Michaels call of the U.S. 1980 Olympic men's hockey victory over the Soviet Union--is a bit much. To the extent that the United States was a considerable underdog in a sport that is not a traditional strength, the two victories are comparable. But the Confederations Cup is just a nice little showcase tournament. The hockey victory, meanwhile, came in the sport's most prestigious international tournament. For any parallel to make sense, the United States needs a comparably big upset during next year's World Cup.

It's unlikely, of course, that the U.S. will overcome multiple elite teams to survive deep into the World Cup finals. But perhaps today's victory, and not last week's embarassing losses to Italy and Brazil, portends good things to come. Either way, we should probably enjoy it for now. After all, another (likely) date with Brazil awaits the Americans in the final.

Dear ESPN, Or, I Really Know Stuff About Baseball

Driving home from class tonight, I heard Bob Valvano (filling in for Brian Kenny) talking about steroids in baseball. He answered a listener's question about the public's apparent indifference to steroids in football. His response was fair enough, but it nevertheless prompted the following reply:


Dear Bob Valvano,

I caught the end of your show, filling in for Brian Kenny, late on Monday evening. Nice shout out for soccer, by the way. I love the game, but the U.S. is more than lucky to be in the semifinals of the Confederations Cup. I'm frankly worried about their impending match with Spain.

Anyway, just before the soccer segment, you answered some questions from listeners, one of which asked you to speculate about why the NFL receives far less scrutiny than MLB when it comes to steroids. Your reply--a combination of lack of big names and the NFL's quicker response to the issue when it emerged years ago--made sense. Yet, I think there's more to say on the matter and I'm hoping you might be willing to extend the conversation about this subject a bit.

First, you should know that I love baseball. Second, you should know that I'm a Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm a scholar of rhetoric, and I study the relationship between sports and politics. My book, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror, will be published next year by the University of Alabama Press. All of which is to say that my scholarship is specifically about baseball's relevance to American culture.

From my position, I'd argue that the public outcry about steroids in baseball is a product of the mythology we've collectively invested in the "national pastime"--a mythology that claims the game is about childhood and innocence and purity. Baseball depends on images of the countryside, of "pastoral sanctuaries," and boys becoming men. In other words, it symbolizes a kind of moral order that other sports do not. Football, in particular, depends on images of machines and warfare. Neither of those metaphors seek to preserve the purity of players' bodies; by contrast, they rely on quite the opposite. Football players must turn themselves into implements of destruction for our spectatorship; baseball players must maintain the sanctity of a history perceived to embody our noblest shared values.

I'm guessing you won't get this kind of interpretation from John Kruk or Steve Phillips. Hell, even Peter Gammons might think it's nuts. Nevertheless, given how frequently this question is raised in the sports media and among fans, it might be worth offering as a different kind of interpretation. My comments here really only scratch the surface. As a summary, consider that in 2005 during the congressional hearings that featured McGwire, Palmeiro, and Sosa, then-Senator Joe Biden said, "This is about who we are as a nation." Baseball may no longer be the nation's most popular sport, but it's the only sport that would be the subject of such a declaration.

At minimum, I hope you find these observations interesting. Of course, I'd be more than happy to discuss it with you, or anyone else at ESPN, should you choose. You can contact me at the address below. Thanks for reading.


I'll keep you posted should I hear anything...

A Protest Paradox

Americans often react with profound discomfort when U.S. athletes use sport to make political statements. But we sure do celebrate such outbursts from others, especially when they appear to confirm our suspicions that beneath the veils of theocratic authority live good people "just like us" who simply want a more democratic way of life. I'm talking in this case about the members of the Iranian soccer team who, in a World Cup qualifying match against South Korea, wore green wristbands as a show of support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of Iran's opposition party to current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The protest lasted only one half, with the players returning from halftime without the wristbands. Nevertheless, the story has received widespread attention from the Western media (see here, or here, or here), most likely because it gives the American press yet another opportunity to trumpet freedom of expression without having to interrogate its own practices. Moreover, it plays nicely alongside the broader condemnations against Ahmadinejad that are common among U.S. politicians and media.

Don't get me wrong. There is little question that Ahmadinejad is no friend of democracy, and it appears just as certain that the Iranian election was a sham. More importantly, I do think the Iranian athletes have demonstrated courage and admirable conviction. I just can't help but bristle at the irony of Americans celebrating the democratic expression of athletes overseas, while ridiculing its equivalent at home.

From Just Hero to GOAT?

Yesterday, Roger Federer at last captured the most elusive title of his career: the French Open. His 6-1, 7-6, 6-4 victory over Robin Soderling came with deceptive ease (picture from the official site of Roland Garros), for the dominant performance stood in contrast to the difficult path Federer traveled just to reach his fourth consecutive French final. The previous three trips, of course, yielded bitter disappointment as he lost to Rafael Nadal by increasingly decisive margins. Thus, the obvious storyline in this long-awaited victory was Federer's completion of the so-called career Grand Slam--i.e., titles at the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.

Yet the larger story was also about Federer's place in tennis history. With this latest championship, he now has won 14 career Grand Slam titles, equalling Pete Sampras' mark for the most ever in men's tennis. This prompted, of course, immediate conversation in the sports media about whether or not Roger Federer should now be considered the GOAT: Greatest of All Time. I don't dispute the general premise of the debate. It is, after all, the kind of thing sports encourage. Moreover, I happen to think that Federer is the greatest singles player in men's history, even if I don't have the personal experience of having seen a player like Rod Laver play.

What is interesting to me here is that Federer's all-time greatness is presumed to pivot around yesterday's result. In other words, the mere accumulation of titles is viewed as the baseline (pun intended) by which we can compare players. This neglects several factors, of course, not least of which is that it fails to account for the depth of talent in the game at a given time and it does not include the consistency displayed by a player across tournaments, surfaces, and quality of competition. Let me illustrate by focusing on the most common comparison now made: Federer vs. Sampras.

They each have won 14 Grand Slam titles, and both are commonly associated with their dominance at Wimbledon. Sampras won 7 times at the All-England Club; thus far, Federer has won 5 times. An interesting footnote, of course, is that the only time the two played each other, Federer dethroned Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001, winning in a 5-set classic. Overall, Sampras won 64 career titles; thus far, Federer has 59. It is a very safe bet that he will surpass that mark.

Perhaps Sampras' greatest achievement in terms of consistency was that he finished every year from 1993 to 1998 as the number one ranked player in the world. Even Federer has not done that (he finished number one for four straight years, from 2004 to 2007). Yet Federer might counter with the astonishing feat of having reached 20 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals. That is a level of consistency, especially in this era of incredible depth, that is likely never to be duplicated.

All this said so far, one would be hard-pressed to make a claim that one player was better than the other. Thus, the tennis experts agreed, the difference is the French Open. The French was the nemesis of both men, they insisted, an unreachable goal that left each of their careers slightly incomplete. And here's where I (finally) get to the point of my analysis: that our relentless focus on victories and championships blinds us from more nuanced understandings of athletic achievement. For if you truly wish to use the French to compare Federer and Sampras, then it ends up being no contest at all.

Federer has now played in 11 French Open tournaments. Although he lost his debut to Patrick Rafter in 1999, he has since had considerable success at Roland Garros. After a 4-set loss to Nadal in the 2005 semifinal, Federer reached the final from 2006 to 2008 (again, each time losing to Nadal). All in all, prior to his 2009 title, Federer advanced to one quarterfinal, one semifinal, and three finals. Meanwhile, he has won multiple clay-court tournaments, including Masters Series events (the next level down from Grand Slams) at Hamburg, Madrid, Monte Carlo, and Rome. By any measure, this is a hugely successful history.

Sampras' clay-court history is decidedly less impressive. At his peak, he won a handful of clay-court tournaments, including Masters Series titles. Yet at the French, he never advanced beyond the semifinal. In 13 appearances, he reached three quarterfinals and just the one semifinal. Moreover, he lost in the first or second round eight times. In short, his accomplishments at Roland Garros are dwarfed by Federer's.

The point isn't to diminish Sampras' achievements. Rather, it is to spotlight how foolish it is to use Federer's victory yesterday as the determining factor in evaluating the difference between the two players. An athlete's career should be about more than simply counting the number of trophies (consider the current discussion about Kobe Bryant's place in NBA history based on whether or not he wins a title without Shaquille O' Neal as a similar conversation). Especially when evaluating a player of Federer's considerable stature, we should be able to appreciate the depth of his accomplishments.

So, is Roger Federer the GOAT? I think he is. I just don't think we needed yesterday's victory to prove it. Of course, before we reach any definitive conclusions, we may want to wait until we know more about Rafael Nadal's career...

An Old Tiger's Last Roar

When Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in Baltimore in 1992, it sparked a boom of stadium development projects in major league baseball (and other sports). In the past 17 years, new baseball parks have been constructed in Arlington (TX), Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The culmination of this explosion, of course, was the dual opening of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field in New York earlier this year. Some of these new stadiums are spectacular venues for baseball, with my personal favorite being Pittsburgh's PNC Park. As I've noted before, there is aesthetic pleasure to be found in baseball architecture, even if the price tags for these ballparks has grown increasingly excessive (see here or here).

But this is not about the high cost of stadium construction or the politics of urban development. It is about the politics of preservation. For in the wake of the ballpark building boom, many of the aforementioned cities have also demolished old and, in many cases, unattractive stadiums. Using Pittsburgh as an example again, there weren't many efforts to save Three Rivers Stadium when it was blown up in 2001 (thanks to SteelersFever.com for the image). By contrast, there has been a decades-long struggle to save Tiger Stadium in Detroit. A struggle, it appears, that is about to come to an end.

Earlier this week, the Detroit Economic Development Corporation voted to demolish what remains of the venerable old park. Originally named Navin Field, Tiger Stadium opened in 1912 and hosted baseball games until 1999. Throughout those eight decades, the Detroit Tigers were a largely successful franchise (4 World Series wins ain't the Yankees, but to this Cubs fan it sounds like a lot). After the newly built Comerica Park opened in 2000, part of the old stadium was destroyed, leaving only the structure from dugout to dugout to remain. Several groups--most notably The Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy--have tried to save what is left from demolition. But a lack of funds has led to the decision that the time has come for Tiger Stadium to fall.

I'm not in favor of saving the old park just for the sake of it (though I do like the idea, favored by broadcasting legend Ernie Harwell, of using the existing structure for multiple commercial purposes). But perhaps it's that I now live in this region that has been so devastated by the decline of our industrial economy that I am saddened by this news. Detroit, and Michigan more broadly, has been ravaged by the economic downturn, and thus it is appropriate, I think, to consider the loss of Tiger Stadium as a metaphor for the city's general condition (much more appropriate than the superficiality of the Michigan State Spartans Final Four run as a metaphor of hope).

With that idea in mind, I invite you to consider this photo essay from the Detroit Free Press. The opening image, shown here, juxtaposes the decaying structure in the background with the human anguish in the foreground. I find it heartbreaking. The subsequent images are equally sobering, for they each provide a glimpse of greatness once possessed. With the imminent destruction of Tiger Stadium, it appears those days really are gone for good.