Suits, Sponsors, Speed, and Skates

Long before the International Olympic Committee official permitted the participation of professionals,  following the 1988 games, in what had been, more or less a traditionally amateur sports event, de facto professionalization had greatly advanced. And, indeed, no wonder. World-level athletes must engaged in the sports full time. Long before professionalism took firm root, athletes had achieved a sports-related income  linked to sponsorships and such. And purists like us had seen that; by the time the IOC acted, we’d already stopped having fits out of sheer exhaustion.

To give this some dimension, in 2013, according to the website opendorse, $1.1 billion was spent on athletic endorsements (link).

Professionalization, of course, means commercialization. Significant “visibility” invariably attracts money; and where money is available, professionalization also means ever more spending on technology. The athletes’ prowess is taken for granted. So where shall we get that extra edge? From modern science and the technology that it can spin.

The current controversy over skating suits—worn by the U.S. speed skating complement—is an interesting illustration. The U.S. team, failing to win medals (thus far—team pursuit is still ahead) abandoned new suits made for them by Under Armour, INC, a major $2.3 billion sports-wear corporation. It’s not the athletes, it’s the technology.

In the Vancouver games four years ago, the U.S. team managed to get four medals out of the total of 36 available (1 gold, 2 silver, and 1 bronze). That was 11.1 percent of the medals. Only men won medals. In those games 177 athletes participated. The U.S. fielded 18. Thus with 10.2 percent of the participants, we got 11.1 percent of the medals—which isn’t bad. Thus far, no such luck.

According to USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, Under Armour is the chief sponsor of speed skating as well. Last Friday, the company’s stock fell by 2.4 percent. Visibility, of course, is a two-edged sword. And what is clear from this particular episode is that world-class sport is much, much more than sport. It is a kind of nexus which extends all through the economy and society. Such strange and, from a distance, barely recognizable but very firm combinations wrought by money and the media proliferate virtually everywhere. We cannot see them until something unravels; and doing something about it collectively is about as possible as influencing climate change.

Other Sports

We’re now on the eve, almost, of the nation’s biggest sports event, the Superbowl. By tradition we number these in the Roman style—hence once a year I have to spend five minutes figuring out what structures like XLVIII mean. That comes to 48. (Maddening, really, these traditional ways of doing things. Logically XL should either mean 500 or 60—not 40, but I digress.)

The other day some announcement alerted us to the growing popularity of soccer among American women and girls, and we got to talking about the “other sports.” This then led to wondering what the big traditional sports of India and China might once have been. And had they survived? These days getting a quick look at such things is easy. What became clear is that among individual sports for males, wrestling is universal, for females dancing in some form certainly is. Among team sports what we call soccer had as big a footprint in China in ancient times as it now has in the Western world; the U.S. is the only major country that treats “football” with benign neglect. The Chinese cuju goes back to the second or third centuries BC—so that is pretty old. After a while we also remembered that Native Americans had also had a sport; it was (and is) played with a ball moved about by using a basket mounted on the end of a stick. I describe the game that way because, for the life of us, we couldn’t think of the sport’s name.

We couldn’t think of it despite the fact that the sport is played in Spring and Fall almost daily at the two middle-schools we routinely drive past—by girls as well as boys. Off I went to discover the name; as I was returning, Brigitte was calling ahead. Her memory had produced it: Lacrosse. “No wonder we couldn’t think of it,” I said. “It has a French name.” Yes. Canadians named the game, jeu de la crosse, crosse here meaning “a crooked stick.” The Ojibwa called it baaga’adowe…

Well, today—here is that vast weather of endless associations swirling in the collective mental air—came a story in the Wall Street Journal titled “Team Sports Don’t Make The Cut With American Kids.” The upshot of this story is that of six popular sports played by youths up to age 18, four have lost participation between 2008 and 2012: tackle football, soccer, baseball, and basketball; basketball is the biggest loser, having lost 8.3 percent of participation. Two sports have gained following: ice hockey, 64 percent, and lacrosse—a stunning 158.3 percent.

Will such shifts in popularity have any impact on the Superbowl? Of course not. Or, come to think of it, maybe. Superbowl Sunday is also undergoing transformations. Every year it has less and less to do with football and is more and more becoming the greatest religious holiday of Modernity, the Day of Advertising.

My images come from Wikipedia here and here. The first shows a Chinese drawing from the fifteenth century, the second the 2005 NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championship.

New Archetype in Sports

Humble beginnings. Breakthrough into the Big Leagues. Early Anointment as Comer. Young Starhood. Explosive Improvement in Performance. Celebrity Nickname. First Denials of Taking Performance-Enhancing Drugs. Denial of Having Used Drugs with Attitude. Sometimes Before Congressional Panel. Falling Silent. In Cloud of Suspicion. Hall of Fame-Not. Conversion. Public Confession Before Oprah. And beyond? Perhaps Hollywood Star. Perhaps Running for Governor. Perhaps even, you know, running for… [This with ht to a New York Times story about someone called A-Rod.]

The Sports-Dope Nexus

Perhaps the strongest “dope” used in the world of sports is not any kind of chemical substance but simply money: the commercialization of sports. Professionalization is just one step in that direction. Within already recognized professional sports, over-arching performance, which leads to larger contracts, temps individuals to enhance their bodies chemically—so that we have three levels in this activity: amateur, professional, and doped-professional. The last is still not sanctioned.  The variations here are complicated. The amateur who sells his or her name to a sponsor is one. In some sports prizes take the form of cash. The subject has interested me almost since childhood.

In my year of my birth Jesse Owens starred in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—and I learned, in childhood already, about Owens’ difficulties after  that event. Owens’ career began in 1933 when he obtained a track-and-field scholarship at Ohio State University (OSU)—and scholarships are, are they not, a kind of payment in kind? Another variant? In 1935 already, he fell afoul of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for having his travel expenses reimbursed by OSU disguised as payment for work in the Ohio State Legislature; this cost him a prestigious award. After the Olympics, Owens turned professional—but found that interest in him immediately waned. He had lost his continuous visibility. He said, mournfully, “A fellow desires something for himself.”

Owens came from a humble background. His story, therefore, throws light on the vaunted “amateur” status of the then typical Olympian. These amateurs were of the upper classes—their avocations subsidized by family wealth. Is that yet another variant? Professionalism, since 1936, has completely triumphed in the Olympics. The invasion of the chemicals is still a battle in progress. Will chemicalization eventually triumph too? For the moment the outcome is still in the air. In recent days we’ve seen the exposure of Lance Armstrong’s uses. Today, in the New York Times, comes the story of a small-timer, one Christian Hesch, a runner. Small-timer? Yes. He earned $40,000 in prizes over two years in road races and came out of the closet to admit using a hormone that stimulates red cell production—which in turn increases the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. On and on it goes, big name, small name, all kinds of sports. It might be likened to a pressure, an irresistible pressure on sports the practice of which at visible levels requires the non-chemical dope.

Assuming things proceed as they do—give it a decade or four—chemicalization will also be accepted. What follows after that? Well, genetic engineering promises a wealth of innovations. The ambitious parents may, perhaps even before conception, already predetermine the athletic future of their children. And sports in that strange future will be like watching weird aliens competing—with bodies bred for baseball, basketball, football, and on and on. And just wait until athletically ambitious big countries put their massive resources into the battle.

The incoherence of our culture is shown by the fact that chemical doping of athletes’ bodies is abhorred—while a woman’s right to her’s is holy writ. I suppose that sex is not yet officially a sport.

Victory Convulsions

We noticed it first in tennis (such things start with elites)—the gradual appearance of victory convulsions. For us the first big name in tennis was Jack Kramer. He played in days when players wore long white pants. However fierce the competition, players were on their best behavior; they controlled their gestures and facial expressions—they also kept their mouths shut. No huge outcry with each serve or smash. At games’ end came a civilized handshake. Umpires never saw an ugly look—never mind having to endure tirades. It took a while before the victory convulsion came to be the routine marker of hard-won victories. Nowadays we see it so much the young easily learn it by imitation. Back in our days one had to work at it. There was the shout to practice, ideally the roar. Then the pumping of the arms—as if you intended to hit the sky with both fists balled. To that, if you could pull it off, was added a similar, repeated up-thrust of the hips, executed with the knees half-bent. Then the appropriate facial expression, which, to be effective, had to be the perfect fusion between rage and triumph. It doesn’t come naturally to all. It is rather pathetic to see some players, especially women (and the worst offenders tend to be ladies), trying to give an imitation of “nature in the raw” and utterly failing—because some still present stain of modesty prevents them doing so properly, giving it all the gusto. But perhaps I am wrong in calling it “nature in the raw.” Animals are quite incapable of it. Yesss! You have to have that something extra, that mysterious quality only humans have.

Baseball

A posting on sports is a great rarity on this blog—this one is the first I think. The reason for this is because any kind of active involvement on our part (speaking narrowly for Brigitte and me) only arises when either the Detroit Tigers or the Minnesota Twins are in some significant manner prominently featured, thus in the post-season. Well, this year, both teams were front and center in a hard-fought tie-breaker for the American League Central Division title, and the two of us were up well past our bedtime as the Twins, in the bottom of the twelfth, at last, settled the game at 6 to 5 in their own favor.

This was an odd experience for us. We used to be fervent Twins fans when we lived in Minneapolis and have become Tiger fans here in recent years as the team has taken on a genuine character under General Manager Dave Dombrowski and Coach Jim Leyland. The usual emotional registers don’t work properly when, during a tense and hard-fought, indeed a very exciting, game the victory of either team is pleasing, one for sentimental reasons and the other because it is “our” team. In truth we were a little sad that Detroit got shouldered out. When you don’t closely follow a team—and we no longer follow the Twins—the players become strangers, especially for very occasional fans like us. Our own here, however, are like members of the family, and when Granderson or Inge or Ordonez or Polanco are up—or perform some feat in the in- or out-field, it feels to us, at our age, as if we’re watching our own children play.

Dressage

My father was a soldier, indeed the child of a soldier. He began his military career at age 14 by entering Hungary’s foremost military academy, known as Ludovika. The year was 1921, thus he just barely missed being part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s military elite by three years. That union fell apart in 1918. But what are three years in a tradition-bound institution like the military? Father’s education began with learning to speak German because, at Ludovika then, and for quite a while after, the old habits lingered and the ghost of Austria took a while to fade away.

He remained a military person in fact for some 25 years—until Patton’s army released him from the P.O.W. camp where World War II had ended for him. He was then a man of 39, an ex-major, and an ex-professor of the institute where his career had begun, the Ludovika Akademia, as Hungarians render it. In the interim he had commanded a horse-artillery company, later a battalion, had fought against the Russian army, and in the process, not very far from Lodz, in Poland, where Brigitte grew up as part of a German family, he lost his left arm in a mine explosion. A military man in fact for a quarter of a century, but a military man in spirit for as long as he lived. He closed his eyes in 1981 in Kansas City.

But Father’s passion and life-long preoccupation was dressage, the equestrian sport. Here too his place and time of birth had a bearing—the rest was talent and inclination—because Austria then, and indeed since 1565, has been the home of the Spanish Riding School. It is still there and, so all agree, the last and perhaps final bastion of l’haute école where training methods as they were practiced in the eighteenth century still remain largely unchanged. With this part of the culture, and, in those days, equestrian sports being largely practiced by the military, Father became interested in the sport and advanced in it rapidly enough so that, before the war changed everything, he had risen to a national stature in the sport, once won a bronze in a national competition, and hoped soon to be ready for the next Olympics. I was born as the 1936 Olympics were being held in Berlin. Father anticipated participating, cross-your fingers, in the 1940 event—but it never took place. It was to have been held in Tokyo, alas. By then we were living in another world.

Dressage is the art of training pure-blooded horses a variety of intricate gates and leaps you do not see horses performing in the wild. It is a sport in which horse-and-human become a single performer—truly an art where, despite an endless preoccupation with technique, the ultimate performance is one of feel and interaction between two living entities, and the beauty of the thing is also perceived—and truly appreciated only—by the trained and prepared mind.

Horses and equitation, not surprisingly, were part of my childhood. I heard words like collection, pesade, levade, courbette, and mezair almost daily. Collection refers to an intensified form during all standard gaits; the other words refer to so-called school-jumps and airs above the ground. What I mostly saw, however, when I watched my father train his or others’ horses, was the animal, unsaddled, making endless circles around my father, standing at the center of the circle, and communicating with the animal by gestures, sounds—and sometimes it seemed only by facial expressions—re-teaching the gifted horse how to do the basics right—the walk, the trot, the canter—and, above all, how to come to a stop in a state of perfect collection.

It should not surprise you, really, that our very first acquisition in America, something like a month after our arrival, was a horse. Her name was Lady, a nice Palomino mare. To reach her we had to catch two bus lines, both to their terminal points. After that a third bus, I think it was Greyhound, got us far enough out into the country to reach Lady in her sylvan haunts. And I, in my middle teens, had the honors of carrying the saddle on each and every bus, and then lug it further on the long walk to the far off farm where Lady lived. I learned in this process that I can overcome all embarrassment and stare it right down—and if pretty girls were on the bus I also learned the power of a wink to conquer all.

My father rode horses and trained people in horsemanship right up to the point where, suddenly, he changed from a slender, active, hardy man, into his seventies by then, by the onset of stumbling, loss of balance, into an invalid. He was diagnosed with cancer. It took him off rapidly. If there is dressage in heaven, I’ll know where to go to see my father. I expect to find him there, patient, inscrutable, making strange noises with his mouth, waving an arm, snapping a finger, as some young Pegasus learns his piaffe.
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The picture, courtesy of Wikipedia, depicts the croupade. Other pictures, showing airs, are available at that site here. Those inclined to go deeper, herewith the web page of the United States Dressage Federation and here the web page of the Spanish Riding School; you can select English as a language there.