Fringe Sports Central

"In America we ask Yakov to save tennis. In Soviet Russia, we have no Yakov. HAHAHA!"

2006-08-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

An open letter to Yakov Smirnoff

Dear Mr. Smirnoff,

I hope that this letter finds you well. I know that the summer months are a little slower for you, as you only do 8 pm shows. With any luck, that means you’re well rested and looking forward to the fall as you add more shows, building up to your huge Christmas season. I haven’t been able to make it down to Branson, but I hope to soon.

I am writing with regard to the Springfield Lasers. I’ve written before about this important topic, asking you to be a celebrity fan for World Team Tennis. I asked you to be a fan to save the game and to show support for the local team. Now I’m asking you to be a Lasers fan to help save America.

The message your show gives to audience members is desperately needed in this country. Patriotic wonder, emotional motivation, inner happiness, a celebration of the spirit of life, and Russian kick dancers are in short supply but great demand throughout the country. Not enough people have access to your show and insight. What a country to be without necessary Yakov access.

By becoming a celebrity fan, you would invite more people to listen to you, to hear your message and lessons. It would start small, with ESPN attention. That would launch a fit of nostalgia, reminiscent of what ALF received when he started doing commercials again. That nostalgia and ESPN’s relationship with ABC and Disney could launch you into a more varied media presentation of your show. More people could hear you, laugh with you and learn from you.

I think that this is potentially the next great step in your already great career. I know you’ve had a wonderful life in Branson. But I think the time has come to re-emerge on the national stage. Help out America, support the Springfield Lasers and re-enter the American consciousness. Please contact me, as I am available to help with this important project.

Fondest wishes,
John Weaver
Fringe Sports Central

FSC Announces Letter Writing Campaign to Save World Team Tennis

2006-08-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

World Team Tennis is in trouble. Not from financial ruin – it’s been in continual existence for 20 years and clearly its business model works. No, WTT is in trouble because of obscurity. As in the league is firmly nestled in it. Every major tennis player in the last decades has passed through WTT, and yet no one seems to know or care about it, even tennis fans. What’s frustrating is that WTT is much more approachable for the common sports fan. The sport is based on franchises. Unlike straight-up tennis, there are hometown teams to root for.

FSC is big into celebrity fans. We have previously written to Yakov Smirnoff asking him to buy season tickets to the Springfield Lasers, his local WTT franchise, a mere 40 miles from his home in Branson, Missouri. Yakov supporting the Lasers could be mutually beneficial to both the celebrity and the team. You can’t tell me that ESPN wouldn’t love to show footage of Yakov courtside for a WTT match, particularly with him supporting the local team. This pairing makes so much sense.

Now Fringe Sports Central is getting more ambitious. We’re calling on everyone to write to Yakov or other celebrities, asking them to support World Team Tennis. Be creative. Be convincing. Be persistent. I recommend B-level or below. See if ALF is doing anything. Maybe Eugene Levy. As an enticement, any email that is sent to a celebrity and is also cced to FSC will be published in this space, possibly with some editorial comments.

As part of this campaign, FSC is pledging to write at least one letter to Yakov every other week, imploring him to become the most visible Springfield Lasers fan. Those letters will be published right here, as will any news regarding his status as a WTT fan. Happy letter writing.

So Good It Threatens to Put Us Out of Business

2006-08-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

I like what FSC does. I think we add something to the larger conversation, whether it’s overanalysis of random, obscure and unknown sports or humor or a closer look at communities of fringe sports fans. However, if you’re looking for raw information on minor or smaller pro leagues then you need look no further than Our Sports Central. No site or person anywhere pays greater attention and respect to those leagues than OSC.

It’s almost embarrassing how much detailed coverage OSC gives to minor and smaller pro leagues. Seriously, I’m almost scared to write about the site because people might stop coming here. It’s that good. FSC has been using it as a resource for quite some time.

I can’t emphasize enough how much raw information they keep track of and make available to visitors. Look at the main page. In successive order, there are articles from local newspapers on teams, team press releases, the newest teams in minor and smaller pro leagues, the most popular team websites, and a scarily complete list of every minor and smaller pro league in North America: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, and other. That last one is basically National Pro Fastpitch (pro softball) and World Team Tennis.

If you have any interest in minor leagues or smaller pro leagues, check out OSC. It’s the best. But please come back here after, if only because they don’t write about cornhole and unicycling.

arenafootball2 Playoffs Continue, Media Turns to Meaningless NFL Exhibition Games

2006-08-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

As every sports fan in America ignores rising pennant races in baseball to watch NFL exhibition games played largely by guys from second tier Division I-A schools, Fringe Sports Central wants to call your attention to arenafootball2 playoff games played largely by guys from second tier Division II and III schools. The schedule has been out for a while, and FSC now brings you its overanalysis of those match-ups. Basically, this is a misguided effort at predicting the games.

Friday
Memphis (e)Xplorers at Green Bay Blizzard – Memphis is ranked higher on scoring offense than Green Bay (4th v. 11th) and defense (1st v. 4th). The defense is almost a laughable comparison. That axiom “Defense wins championships” is as applicable to games in the af2 as Leviticus is to the common law in Tehran. Offense wins everything in the af2. Memphis takes this, 44-38.

Saturday
Manchester Wolves at Florida Firecats – I’ve used a very detailed statistical overanalysis to determine the outcome of this game: one team is from New Hampshire, another is from Florida (you have no idea how many man hours of research got outsourced to India finding that information). Wolves win, 52-40.

Arkansas Twisters at Tulsa Talons – In the af2, when in doubt, bet on the team that rushes less. Tulsa rushed for 25.2 yards a game, which sounds bad until you find out that Arkansas rushed for (and I’m not making this up) 7.4 yards a game. They literally rushed the ball less than 5 times a game on average. I bet their RBs cry themselves to sleep at night. Arkansas, 38-30.

Bakersfield Blitz at Spokane Shock – I like Spokane a lot in this game. Their turnover margin was almost 3 times greater than Bakersfield’s in the regular season. Spokane, 49-35.

A couple things to look for:

Let’s all hope that Arkansas doesn’t attempt a single rush. Not one. And I want plenty of pictures from local media of their running backs looking despondent.
Second or third tier celebrity sightings. This is my new thing in all sports. I want every sport – now matter how fringe – to get celebrity fans. And there should be rules. The more fringe the sport, the more obscure the celebrity. I think af2 and Doug E. Doug are a great match.

Play Airhockey Against Kazakhstan’s Best

2006-08-09T22:43:00.000-07:00

Engadget recently featured the coolest thing to happen to fringe sports in a while: Airhockey Over a Distance. Admittedly, the name sucks, no way around that. But it’s fixable. It’s the technology that’s cool. This device let’s you play airhockey against someone on the other side of the planet.

With the technology, you play on half an airhockey table, facing a large television screen showing your opponent in Kazakhstan (or wherever), who is playing on an identical table with a screen showing you. As Mental_Floss describes it, the table is “hooked up with sensors and a fancy puck ejecting system that can track how fast you and your opponent are slapping the puck, and at what angles, to simulate face-to-face play.” This turns every internet cafe or T1 line into Silicon Valley’s version of ESPNZone’s game area.

Normally I find souped up pucks highly suspicious (anyone remember FoxTrax?), but this sounds too cool not to be a good thing. Think of the game potential. Airhockey leagues could sprout up all over the world without any regard for geographic lines, like a league based on people who like to play while drinking beer (ok, that’s a pretty big league). Its members could populate every pub on earth. The game would no longer be confined to buddies who get together at the local bar or arcade. Anyone can play against anyone else. We might be able to answer that timeless question: who really is the best airhockey player in the world? Admit it – you’ve always wanted to know.

I also like the odds of a pro league sprouting up because of this. Why? First, everyone knows and likes airhockey already. This isn’t a hard sport to sell on first impression. Second, and more importantly, no travel costs. Everyone just plays down the street. It’s basically got the ABA’s business model: low travel costs mean that you don’t actually have to make that much money in each home game/event.

Not particularly relevant but entirely worth mentioning: Engadget’s coverage of video games that pit you against your hamster shows that the future of fringe sports could involve one-on-one man v. pet events. Word to the wise – if a rodent can beat you at Halo 2, you need to find a new hobby because you suck at your current one.

FSC Toots Its Own Horn and Then Brags About Web Mentions

2006-08-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

FSC has started to gather quite a following in the last few weeks, largely because of references from other sites and publications, all of which, I promise you, are of high quality. In an effort to share the love, here are the sites that have been kind enough to help us along (as well as smart enough to know quality overanalysis of under-reported sports when they see them):

Fark
Deadspin
Mental_Floss
The Sports Frog
Free Darko
LaxPower
Dave’s Football Blog
World Finger Jousting Association
Pate LIVE!
Sports Column Blog

To all the above mentioned organizations of intelligence and breeding, we thank you. If there are any that FSC missed, please let us know.

Fringe Sports Central Wins Mental_Floss Magazine’s “Most Ridiculous Sports Contest”

2006-08-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

Describing it as being explained “to an almost frightening degree,” Mental_Floss Magazine named FSC’s Team Bobbing the winner of its “Most Ridiculous Sports Contest.” All we ask is that amateur team bobbing leagues pop up all over the country. And if Mark Cuban or Donald Trump want to fund our professional team bobbing league… well, you know where to find us.

Gentlemen, Please Let Go of Your Eels: Conger Cuddling Banned

2006-08-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

A little piece of my soul just died. For more than 30 years spectators have come to Lyme Regis, a small English fishing village, this time of year, every year, to watch two teams of fishermen stand on wooden platforms in the harbor and engage in a true test of sportsmanship. Standing tall and strong, like Finnian heroes of yore (except English), these pillars of humanity have flung a dead giant eel at one another, attempting to knock the other team off. It's a sport they call conger cuddling. But this year, no eel shall be tossed.

Why, you might ask? An animal rights activist has threatened to bring negative publicity to the event, which has been a boon to local tourism and usually raises about $5,600 for Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboat crews (I’m not making that up). I’m all for animal rights. Inhumane treatment of animals is cruel. I always demand my money back if I see a movie that doesn’t inform me that no animals were harmed in the making of that movie (ok, that I made up).

But the eel is DEAD! It’s like that old Robin Williams routine: “Why are you acting like an asshole trying to decide whether to get the red wine or white wine with the fish? The fish is dead, it doesn’t care!” The eel is dead. Let the fishermen toss it. As local resident, and spokesman for Lyme Regis lifeboat crews, Andrew Kaye put it: “It’s a dead conger [eel], for Pete’s sake. I shouldn’t think the conger could care one way or another.”

It’s a shame, really. This has all the telltale signs of a great fringe sport. Its fans are very devoted and have formed a tightly knit community. And the name can't be beat - conger cuddling is fantastic, and its the double entendre possibilities leave me speechless. The rules are fairly simple – two teams try to knock one another off wooden platforms by swinging a 25-pound eel. But that’s where the sport sucks you in – simple to learn, hard to master. Check out Mental_Floss for a great picture.

The irony, of course, is that the banning of this sport has been great publicity for the town and the event. If they rescheduled it for next week they’d draw twice the spectators they've had in the past. The town should do just that, animal rights activists be damned. That’s what I hope for anyway. Until then, my soul mourns.

Grab Your Crotch and Point Your Lance – Unicycling News and Results

2006-08-08T05:12:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Floyd Landis ruining two-wheeled biking for everyone else comes the final results of Unicon XIII, the thirteenth World Unicycling Championship. FSC has reported on a few of the events in the past, but until the other day the results from some of the most important events had been missing. Among those were the results from unicycle hockey, which was won by the Swiss Power Team (good name for a gold medal team), and unicycle basketball, which was won – again – by the Swiss Power Team (which apparently is quite the power team indeed).

But the unicycling event that everyone cares the most about, FSC included, is the mountain unicycling downhill event (Muni). Honestly, I was a little disappointed that John Foss – the greatest American unicyclist and arguably the best in the world too – didn’t win. He didn’t do badly, by any means. He finished third, about 5 and a half seconds out of first. The winner? Roger Davies, from the UK, who had a ridiculously good Unicon, not only winning the Muni but also the marathon as well. And yes, by marathon I mean 26+ miles (the unicycle one is technically a little longer than the standard marathon). Davies managed to finish it in 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Really, though, the marathon results are somewhat diminished by the fact that very few Kenyans own unicycles. Come back in ten years and the top rider is from Nairobi, winning the race in less time than it takes to listen to an old Toto album.

Even though Unicon XIII is over, that doesn’t mean you can’t take the lessons of Unicon with you the whole year through. It’s like Christmas – you just need to remember the Unicon spirit and live it each and everyday. A few recommendations:

A video featuring some cool Muni moves and some cooler Muni falls. Check out the way a lot of riders appear to grab their crotches. It’s unclear to me if they’re actually grabbing the unicycle seat in an effort to improve their balance or if they are legitimately attempting to shield their cojones from a Muni-induced accident.
A gallery of unicycle jousting pictures. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Fair enough. But look at these pictures and tell me you’re not a little interested in trying it out. You can’t tell me that. And if nothing else, check out the last picture in the gallery – nothing like a unicycle lance to the groin for some cheap, guaranteed laughs.
Seriously, you’ve got to check out the Unicyclist Forum. It’s filled with the friendliest people in the world, all of whom are incredibly dedicated to their sport and are more than happy to answer questions, help out and attract new fans. Ideally, every fringe sport community would be like the unicycling community there.

The Hooker’s Extra Tooth

2006-08-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

It should be pointed out that fringe sports are not for the feint of heart. They might be random and obscure, but they can also beat the hell out of participants. If you don’t believe me, take a look at some of these stories and studies.

Although its credibility as a sport is highly suspect, juggling has a surprisingly high rate of injury. Over 70% of jugglers are injured doing it. This, to me, is amazing. Do you think that old jugglers walk with a limp or noticeable lack of mobility, like old NFL players? Maybe the guys who juggle really big things – like bowling balls or moose skulls – end up with a lot of concussions. Can you imagine trying to hold a conversation with an overly concussed, octogenarian retired juggler? That’s gotta be somewhere around the 5th or 6th level of hell.

Not as surprising, however, is the fear of injuries in competitive eating. Some doctors hypothesize that too much eating could lead to a torn esophagus. Food could leak out of the tear and cause infection. This, however, is predicated on the assumption that over eating competitively could lead to vomiting eventually. Competitive eaters, however, insist vomiting is rare. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, though, admitted to having to make numerous trips to the bathroom after devouring 11 pounds of cheesecake in 10 minutes. But come on, seriously – after consuming 11 pounds of cheesecake in any time frame shorter than a year and a half, bathroom breaks are the least of your worries.

Rugby, though, easily wins the award (fictitious, though it may be) for most dangerous, injury prone fringe sport. Rugby produces some messed up players, and it produces a lot of them. However, my favorite is the hooker with the extra tooth. Shane Millard, a hooker (it’s a rugby position, pervert) for the Widnes Vikings, had an opponent’s broken tooth stuck in his head after a game. Doctors had to douse it with saline solution in order to remove it.

Millard’s injury, believe it or not, is not unique, nor even the most severe example of players depositing teeth into the bank of another player’s skin. Jaime Ainscough found St. Helens center Martin Gleeson’s tooth embedded in his arm several weeks after a game. By that point it was so badly infected he was in danger of losing the arm. However, because rugby players are tougher than any other human beings on the planet, he returned to play by the end of the season. In Spanish that’s called “cajones muy grandes.”

Some Players Actually Choose Playing in the af2 Playoffs Over the NFL. Seriously.

2006-08-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

I love a sport where throwing 7 touchdowns needs to be prefaced with “the QB had a slow start,” but in which there aren’t enough rushing yards to warrant a mention in any newspaper. Ladies and gentlemen – the first round of the af2 playoffs. There were a couple upsets, but fortunately none of them involved the home team in New Hampshire.

FSC predicted wins for the Manchester Wolves, Central Valley Coyotes, Memphis (e)Xplorers, and Oklahoma City Yard Dawgz. How’d I do? 2 and 2.

The Wolves did indeed defeat the Wilke-Barre/Sranton Pioneers (possibly the most geographically confused team in sports since the Montreal Expos played 20 of their home games in San Juan, Puerto Rico), 55-47. The owner of the aforementioned slow start was Manchester’s QB, Steve Bellisari, who still managed to pass for 7 touchdowns. He is, though, 5-0 as the starter. Are we about to see a Brady-esque waltz for a New England football team through the playoffs? I hope so. By the way, let’s hear it for Tony Stallings, a recently cut CFL guy who signed on with the Wolves two games ago. His agent told him that there would be NFL teams interested, but he ignored that advice to play in Manchester… wow. That’s like graduating from Georgetown University and choosing to work as a subway artist at Subway instead of taking that job offer at the White House. Way to become the poster child for bad career decisions, Tony.

The Coyotes, however, fell to the sixth seeded Bakersfield Blitz, 45-37. The culprit? According to one release, it was Central Valley quarterback Scott Rislov, who only passed for 4 touchdowns after setting an AFL and af2 single season record of 106 touchdown passes. However, I’d like to believe it was the unique strategy of the Bakersfield fans who traveled to the game. They decided to confuse the Coyotes by chanting “Beat Fresno!” Either that or no one told them that the Coyotes are actually from Central Valley.

I was dead on with my prediction of the (e)Xplorers-Louisville Fire game being the bore of the weekend. The final score was 83-61, setting new af2 postseason records for most points by a team and combined points. The sparkplug for the victory was eight (EIGHT?!) touchdowns by a 5’8’’, 155-pound receiver Kevin Prentiss. Another reason to love af2 – it’s a full contact sport in which a guy whose bulked up, media guide numbers (I got money that says Prentiss is only 155-pound soaking wet with a pocket full of quarters) make him no bigger than the average 10-grader.

In the best game of the first round, the Arkansas Twisters bounced the Dawgz (ugh, stupid name) 47-43. It came down to one play.

This sets up the second round of the playoffs next weekend. FSC will have more predictions and overanalysis later in the week. By the way, kudos to all the local media in all the markets playing this weekend. It was very thorough. Further, GREAT job to Our Sports Central, a fantastic resource for all things minor league. I’ll have more about them later in the week too.

Talk About Rugby and Leagues… and Sometimes Sex and Politics

2006-08-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Returning to my roots of fringe sports media, here’s a listing of three prominent rugby sites and blogs that provide a wide variety of coverage and conversation on the sport. You’ll notice that the number of contributors for a couple of these is fairly large. That’s what happens when a fringe sport in this country is a center sport in other countries. Just imagine what NFL fans feel like in Bulgaria.

World Rugby Forum: A relatively new site (I think it was started just a year ago or so), it’s got some lively rugby debates, particularly concerning the south Pacific. Small compared to others.

Planet Rugby Forum: The forum for the Planet Rugby news and information site. Rich, detailed discussions about all manner of rugby. And more, actually. There are frequently political posts (check out this discussion about the US invading Cuba) and while I’ve never seen it, I suspect that a discussion of sex would probably be well received (neither quote me nor test that theory). In a lot of ways, this is what an online fan community should be, ideally: possessed of a shared mission and vision, openly communicative about almost all topics, and close knit. FSC highly recommends this one.

The Rugby Forum: Very well organized discussion of rugby, with a lot of focus on Tri-Nations. It’s easy to find what you want, as the division of conversations is smartly done along topical and geographical lines. Smaller than Planet Rugby, but much larger than World Rugby. Particularly good if you want to compare hemisphere action. The fans are just as passionate here as in Planet Rugby but the conversation isn’t quite as broad reaching.

These are the three that FSC has found most helpful, but I’d love to hear about some that I’ve missed. Any sites where fans bond together over a common purpose, that’s what I’m looking for.

How to Impress Women: Finger Jousting

2006-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

It’s always exciting when FSC gets to expose its audience to a brand new sport, one that is either so young or so confined to its home geography that the population at large hasn’t discovered it yet. Today, FSC presents a sport all but guaranteed to make friends and impress women. I’m talking about the sport of finger jousting.

Finger jousting, according to the Pseudo History on the homepage of the World Finger Jousting Federation (WFJF), was started by the ancient Israelites. The WFJF actually claims that Moses himself played (I’m not making this up) and that finger jousting is the chosen sport of the chosen people. The WFJF also claims the existence of a text called the Book of Phalanges (I’m still not making this up) that the First Council of Nicaea almost used while writing the Nicene Creed. Can you imagine Christianity today if a pillar of its philosophy had been based on poking each other with your index finger?

The sport actually has a fairly detailed code of conduct, philosophy and set of rules. I won’t get into the details here (although I’d like to revisit them in a future column), but check them out on the Basics page. The general premise is that two jousters attempt to earn points by poking each other with their index fingers. Depending on the version you play, there might be different points for different parts of the body.

Currently the sport is spreading slowly. Its “hotbed” is the metropolis of LaGrange, Georgia. Besides the Cinco de Mayo Leisure Jousting Social Event, there do not seem to have been many official events this year, nor do any appear to be planned. The lack of organized events is probably attributable to the youth of the WFJF, which just celebrated its first anniversary, according to Julian Glick, the “Lord of the Joust” (i.e., president of the WFJF). You can fix this, though. Start your own finger jousting clubs and plan your own events.

The sport is starting to attract some media attention. Its inherent goofy athleticism (as embodied by the fact that most competitors are part of the “gaming sub-culture”) has sparked the curiosity of radio, blogs and Yahoo’s The 9 video show. WFJF’s media page has links to all of it. I recommend you check them out.

And you’re probably asking yourself “How does this attract women?” Here’s how – start poking a girl, finger jousting with her. It doesn’t matter if she plays or even knows what it is, in fact this works better if she neither plays nor knows about finger jousting. Start poking her. Finger joust the hell out of her. I promise you’ll get a strong reaction.

FSC’s Entry In Mental Floss Magazine’s Ridiculous Sport Contest

2006-08-04T01:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the exciting world of Team Bobbing. Combining the athleticism of bobbing for apples with the aesthetic appeal of Double Dare, this sport can be played by professionals as well as amateurs, and I’m going to detail both levels of play. Pay particular attention to the amateur level, it’s easy to set up at home for you and your friends.

Amateur Level of Play

Here’s what you need: a kiddie pool, enough of some liquid to fill it (I recommend something dark and goopy), a dozen or more small objects of your choosing (I recommend something random like harmonicas), possibly goggles.

The players: two or more teams of two or more people.

The set up: Fill the kiddie pool with the liquid. Then drop in the small objects, stirring the liquid so that the objects are evenly disbursed throughout the pool. Each player chooses a spot to kneel by the pool.

The play: There is a count down from 3 to 1, at which point the referee yells “Bob!” When the ref yells that, all players dunk their heads and hands into the pool looking for the dozen or more small objects. This continues for 5 minutes or until all the small objects are collected from the pool. Repeat this set up and play 5 times. The team with the most objects at the end wins.

Comments: This game allows players to get dirty, compete against each other, and recreate the fun of bobbing for apples. Because the players get to choose the liquid and objects, the combinations are endless: beer coasters in beer, McDonald’s toys in McDonald’s orange drink, etc. And if you don’t think that this will burn calories, try holding your breath five times in a row for intervals of five minutes each while dunking your head and scrambling around with your arms. You’ll work up a sweat, but you probably won’t notice it because you’re covered in Kool Aid, etc.

Pro Level of Play: Pro Team Bobbing League (PTBL)

What will be used: 10 large tanks, 10 different kinds of liquid, ten sets of two dozen different small objects. Possibly goggles.

The players: Two teams of ten people each.

The set up: Each tank is filled with a different liquid and seeded with a different object. One player from each team is sent into each tank.

The play: Each tank is used once during the game, and each pairing of opponents in a tank is called a match. At the beginning of each match, the ref yells “1, 2, 3 BOB!” When the ref yells this, each player begins dunking himself or herself in the liquid and attempts to gather as many of the objects as possible in ten minutes, or until all the objects are gone. The player that finds the most objects wins the match; in the case of a tie, the match is replayed. The team that wins the most matches wins the game. If there is a tie, the team with the most objects overall wins. In the case of a tied number of objects, there will be another match between one player from each team chosen by the opposing team. Twenty-three of the last objects used will be put into the last tank used with the last liquid used. The winner of this match is the winner of the game.

Logistics: The home team constructs the tanks, but the visiting team selects which matches are played in which tanks. The home team gets to determine the liquid in each tank, but the visiting team gets to chose objects that will be found.

Franchises: I picture a league that is spread out over the original major league baseball territory, i.e., the north east. No teams south of the Potomac or west of the Mississippi. So we’re looking at two divisions with five teams in each. In the Sticky Division will have teams in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Pittsburgh. The Slippery Division will have teams in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit.

Schedule: All of the teams play each other twice during the regular season – games will be played on Tuesday and Thursday nights during the summer – and two teams from each division make the playoffs. The two teams from each division play each other, and then the winners play against one another for the PTBL Cup.

Arenas: I envision smallish arenas, 1000-2000 people each.

Commentary: This is sport is going to storm the nation. It will be messy, exciting and capitalizes on existing geographic rivalries. Plus there’s a low start up cost, relative to other pro sports, and is ready made for TV. If you’re interested in getting in on the ground floor of this exciting professional sporting opportunity, contact me at fringesportscentral@yahoo.com. Be the owner of a pro sports franchise in an up and coming league.

Home of Tomorrow’s Mediocre NFL Players

2006-08-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

The players who will compose future NFL practice squads and one day serve as the league’s injury necessitated peons take the field this weekend in the minor league to the NFL’s minor league. Starting Friday, the Arena Football Two playoffs begin in unpopular towns across the country. Central Valley, California; Memphis, Tennessee; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Manchester, New Hampshire (not unpopular, simply undiscovered) all boast home teams in the wildcard round of the AF2 playoffs. Waiting in the wings are teams from Green Bay, Wisconsin; Estero, Florida (seriously); Spokane, Washington; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, who all won their divisions and received first round byes.

Here are the official FSC predictions for the first round of the AF2 playoffs before I list some things to look for.

Friday Games:

Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Pioneers @ Manchester Wolves (7:30 pm EST) – Obviously, this New Hampshire boy is picking the Wolves. The question is by how much. How about this, I’m just going to give the Wolves’ average points for and points against. Final score: 54-48, Wolves. Ooo… but look at that Ms. Pioneer Contest. It’s even held at the Oyster Bar. That’s got to count for something. Ok – final score, 52-50. It’s going to be a good game in Manchester.
Bakersfield Blitz @ Central Valley Coyotes (11:00 pm EST) – This, to me, is the hardest pick of the weekend. Both teams are 9-7, but more important, both the Blitz Dancers and the Coyote Girls have spectacular stripper names. In the end though, the Coyote Girls have far superior stripper poses in their team photos. Well, there’s that and the Coyote offense scored 8 points more per game this season than the Blitz. Final score: 48-38, Coyotes.

Saturday Games:

Louisville Fire @ Memphis Xplorers (8:00 pm EST) – Ugh. The stinker of the weekend. Memphis is much better, despite the idiotic X in their name. I hate teams that put X in their name for no good reason; that’s mainstream idiotic not fringe sports. Memphis wins in a walk, 49-23.
Arkansas Twisters @ Oklahoma City Yard Dawgz (8:00 pm EST) – This one is another dog of a game, although not quite as bad as the Memphis game. The Dawgz outscored the Twisters by more than 10 points per game during the regular season. Dawgz win 54-38. (And by the way, I hate extraneous use of Z in place of S at the end of words, too. It’s just dumb.)

Come back next week for predictions for the games involving the Green Bay Blizzard, Florida Firecats, Tulsa Talons, and Spokane Shock. First, though, things to look for this weekend:

Will any running back rush for as many as… 40 yards? You think I’m kidding. Oh no. Look at the season stats. The Blizzard led the league in rushing and averaged less than 40 yards a game. Needless to say, the next great NFL back-up RB will not be coming out of AF2.
Speaking of rushing, keep an eye on Oklahoma City’s defense. They allowed an impressive 12.6 yards rushing per game. There’s an off chance that the complete extent of the Twister’s rushing offense will be when they run onto the field at the beginning of the game.
Louisville allowed the most points of any team in the league, 854. The fewest? 655, by the Memphis Explorers (suck it, Memphis). In contrast, the most points allowed by any team in the NFL was 431 by the Houston Texans. Now, there are mitigating circumstances; Arena Football rules are pretty different than NFL rules. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that NFL scouts look at those stats and think “I’d rather watch the defensive line at Temple,” which no football prospect wants to hear. Come NFL guys – give Arena Football some love.

Create the Next Extreme Ironing: Ridiculous Sports Contest

2006-08-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

Building on YesButNoButYes’s fantastic Top Ten Obscure sports list, Mental Floss magazine has come up with the logical next step: Now that we’ve identified the most obscure existing sports, it’s time to expand the list. In order to do that, Mental Floss has announced a contest to create the most ridiculous sport. The winner gets a copy of Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets. Personally, I would have preferred that the magazine actually create a tournament for the winner’s sport, but I can understand how the Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets are easier. So be it.

The rules are pretty straight forward:

The sport must be so new it’s never been played on earth (but apparently if you picked it up during your study abroad semester on Mars, that’s cool)
The sport must be consistent with the laws of physics (which is disappointing and limits the imagination, but fair enough)
The sport must be relatively cheap to play, with equipment that can easily be obtained by anyone (no fair demanding tennis rackets strung with unicorn hair, or some crap like that)
The sport must be an actual physical sport involving at least two players (board games need not apply)

I thoroughly recommend that everyone participate. This is a great idea – so great, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it first. No matter, I can at least revel in it. I say go nuts. Come up with something truly bizarre, like flaming olive tossing or some kind of long distance race involving a trashcan. But try to use normal objects everyone has. We don’t remember this now, but many of the most popular sports in this country and the world started that way. Basketball started when James Naismith used a common peach basket. Lacrosse was played with rocks at first because that’s what was lying around. A century from now, your sport using ordinary items could be the next basketball

I’m formulating my own sport as I type. I’m going to work out a few kinks and then write about it here after I submit it. Stay tuned.

Embryos Can’t Ride Unicycles: Why Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis Are Lesser Men

2006-08-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Following up on FSC’s initial coverage of Unicon XIII (the Unicycle World Championship), there sadly are still no reported results from the downhill event (although check out this video for a rough idea of the inherent coolness that is Mountain biking on one wheel). However, that doesn’t mean that nothing has happened in other events.

In the obstacle course (this is a bad picture of someone about to race an obstacle course), John Foss won the gold. Foss, for those who aren’t in the one-wheeled know, is one of the world’s most renowned unicyclists. Although Europe seems to have embraced unicycling more than Americans, Foss is perhaps not only the best unicyclist in America but also the world. Doubt it? Check out his some of his greatest hits.

A tradition of unicycling – whether for competition or hobby – is the slow backward. This is so traditional that anyone of a woman born is eligible, age zero on up. Embryos, sadly, need not apply. Depending on what side of the abortion debate you land on, you might believe that life begins at conception, but unicycling doesn’t begin till birth. The results are indicative of the competition’s extreme popularity. In fact, there are so many results, I can’t tell who won any age or gender group. So congrats to everyone, I guess. Check the results for yourself. Get back to me if you can make heads or tails of them. Some of it is actually in German.

Check out Foss’s website as well as the results from the slow backward event. They show what kind of community unicycling has fostered as a sport… quite frankly it’s a little bizarre and has got more than its fair share of freaks. But it’s passionate. Every sport should be so lucky. Find some videos on the web; Youtube has plenty (including my favorite, Unicycle Jousting). You might be impressed (or at least highly amused) and inspired to keep watching or even riding.

Remember: real men only need one wheel. What does that mean in the grand scheme of things? Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong are pussies. Long live Unicon.

Tennis Needs Yakov Smirnoff to Save the Sport

2006-08-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Yakov Smirnoff:

Dear Mr. Smirnoff,

You probably didn’t notice my plea in a previous article, begging you to attend the Springfield Lasers’ wildcard match against the Newport Beach Breakers. And you probably didn’t notice the disappointment expressed in a subsequent piece when you didn’t go to the match. That’s ok. You can make up for it now and next season. I need you to save tennis. Tennis needs you to save tennis. We all need you to save tennis.

The popularity of the sport is waning. There are fewer big names and it receives less and less attention from center media. It is in danger of becoming an elitist fringe sport, the worst kind of fringe sport. Fringe sports should be populist so that the fan base can be inclusive as well as passionate. It’s important to the wellbeing of the fan community.

Tennis, though, if it sinks beneath the SportsCenter/Sports Illustrated radar, will have none of that. It will have a high entrance fee and few opportunities to grow. We could some day look at tennis the way we look at crocket – pretty ridiculous and rich people like it. Tennis deserves better than that. The last thing we need is a generation of sports fans pointing at tennis players and exclaiming (possibly in a thick Russian accent) “What a country club sport! HAHAHAHA!”

This is where you come in. World Team Tennis has the potential to be hugely popular in this country and the world. It combines team sports elements with the individual matchups that make tennis narratives so compelling. But World Team Tennis has a hard time marketing itself. I don’t know why, but after 26 years of continual existence it has yet to make an impact in the US. And there’s a team down the road from your adopted hometown of Branson, Missouri.

Become a season ticket holder for the Springfield Lasers. Be vocal about your support of the team. Go to all their games, be front and center court. I guarantee TV cameras will find you and the WTT. Local news stations across the country will pick up on the fact that Yakov Smirnoff has adopted a team in this quirky league and will start to explore why he likes it so much. Sure there will be the inevitable lines like “In America, TV cameras film stars watching tennis matches. In Soviet Russia, TV cameras film everyone getting interrogated by KGB. HAHAHAHA!” But they’ll ask you about the league, and you can spread the good word about tennis. You can be its ambassador.

As your paintings demonstrate, you have thoroughly embraced America and Americana. Your Branson show and theater are testaments to that. But take the next step – become a ridiculously dedicated American sports fan… even better – a ridiculously dedicated celebrity American sports fan. Like Jack Nicholson to the Lakers and Ashley Judd to the University of Kentucky, be the celebrity fan to the Lasers. Save the world, Mr. Smirnoff. Save tennis. I am available to consult on this important project.

Fondest wishes,
John Weaver
Fringe Sports Central

If Bode Miller Does Something Cool But It's Not On the Internet 5 Minutes Later, Did It Really Happen?

2006-07-31T15:46:00.000-07:00

As announced in a number of sources, Bode Miller did indeed play for the Nashua Pride this weekend in front of a capacity crowd at Holman Stadium in Nashua, New Hampshire. He apparently hits like your grandmother, but can that man field! He made a spectacular - dare I say alpine - catch in left field to rob Mike Scanzano of an extra base hit and end the second inning. If there's a manager out there who's willing to use the designated hitter rule on a gimpy-batted left fielder, Bode may have a future in this sport.

And I would love to show you a clip of this catch, but for the life of me I can't find it. Youtube has failed me. Anyone got some Bode-catch for me?

Pete Sampras: The Scottie Pippen of Tennis

2006-07-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

What if Scottie Pippen, instead of sitting out the last 1.8 seconds against the Knicks in that playoff series, simply decided not to play in that game at all. What if he said “Screw it, Dude, let’s go bowling,” and never stepped on the court. Neither sitting out of the last 1.8 seconds of a playoff game nor blowing off an entire playoff game is acceptable in sports – not to real athletes and not to fan communities – but sitting out the last 1.8 seconds can be written off as being hotheaded and stupid. Not playing the game at all is just pathetic and shows a lack of cajones. Scottie Pippen did the former. Pete Sampras just did the latter.

Pete Sampras screwed over the Newport Beach Breakers in the World Team Tennis championship match this weekend. After helping the Breakers beat the Springfield Lasers in the wildcard match, Sampras played hooky from the Breakers’ semi-final match against the Sacramento Capitals. He dodged a bullet there, as the Breakers snuck past the Caps, 19-18. Unfortunately, that bullet was apparently shot from a book depository, as it came back and knocked the Breakers out in the championship match. The Philadelphia Freedoms beat the Breakers, 21-14 on Sunday. Sampras didn’t step on the court once.

I don’t know if Sampras’ presence would have been the difference between winning and losing, but at least he should have shown up. What he did shows a complete lack of balls, and I don’t mean the male-only kind. I mean the kind that any competitor has when he or she genuinely wants to be the best and is going all out for it. Whatever stones Sampras had back in his Wimbledon days, well, he must have dropped them on his trip to the WTT. He’s gone Scottie Pippen on us, and the Breakers and the Breakers’ fans are screwed over because of it.

Smirnoff and Sampras - Initial Results from World Team Tennis Championship Weekend

2006-07-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

There will be more information and overanalysis of WTT's Championship Weekend in the next couple days, but here are the results from the first two matches (the semi-final between the Philadelphia Freedoms and New York Sportimes is on going):

The Newport Beach Breakers defeated the Missouri Lasers, 22-17 in overtime in the wildcard match on Thursday.
Today the Breakers built on that success by defeating the regular season Western Conference champs, the Sacramento Capitals, 19-18, to advance to the finals.

The Breakers are poised to win the King Cup for the second time in the last three seasons. However, I've gotta wonder about Pete Sampras, who played in the wildcard match, but not in the semi-final game. The Breakers lost Sampras's big event - men's singles - 5-4, and that nearly proved to be a fatal loss in the closely contested match. How much commitment could he possibly have to the league if he's nowhere to be found in his team's biggest match of the year? This is another reason why WTT isn't more popular than it is - even the stars don't care. I'll be curious to see if he plays tomorrow.

And Yakov Smirnoff was a no-show to support his Springfield Lasers. The more I think about it, the more I think Yakov and WTT need each other. This is getting a full column later.

North American 4 Tournament Update - Calling Out 6 Nations and Tri-Nations

2006-07-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on the North American 4 Tournament, where the Falcons and Canada East have secured berths in Saturday's championship game. The Hawks and Canada West are playing the same day for 3rd place... and perhaps their manhoods, although I'm not entirely sure that's in the tournament bylaws. And if you think that Hawks, Falcons, and two Canadian compass points do not add up to four nations, well me too.

Things to look for in Saturday's games:

Blood, teeth and possibly a severed head. This is rugby, live it up.
Bill Simmons bothers as much as entertains me, but, like him, I grew up watching wrestling. And I really want one of the 6 Nations or Tri-Nations teams to show up after the championship game and (assuming the Falcons win) start an impromptu intertournament game. I want the announcer to exclaim "Oh my God! It's, it's, it's.... it's the English national rugby team's music!" Let's make it a rivalry. I want to get into heated yellfests with some rugby fans from a country that doesn't have a leaf on their flag. England, New Zealand, France... somebody want to make my day? I know you'd beat our asses at first, but I also bet we'd catch up in a few years.

World Team Tennis Wildcard Match - Like NFL Wildcard Weekend, but Everyone Wears Dorky Shorts

2006-07-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 7 pm the World Team Tennis's Championship Weekend begins in Newport Beach, as the Wildcard round of World Team Tennis takes place between the Newport Beach Breakers and the Springfield Lasers. By the way, that's Springfield, Missouri. If you're wondering what the hell Springfield, Missouri is doing with a professional anything, never mind tennis, you're not alone. The winner gets to battle the Sacramento Capitals, the regular season Western Conference champs, on the 29th. The winner goes up against the victor from the match between the Philadelphia Freedoms and the New York Sportimes (Sportimes? That's the worst sports team name I've ever heard, like naming a baseball team "The New York Baseball Players") for supremacy of WTT.

I'd watch the Breakers-Lasers match, but OLN decided that Hunting Adventures, Dream Hunts, Best and Worst of Tred Barta, and Expedition Safari would generate higher ratings. That's a damning indictment of WTT. But it's undeserved. And you can find out how undeserved (at least little) by keeping track of tonight's match through WTT's Livescoring. Some things to watch for:

Will the eyebrows of Pete Sampras (who plays for the Breakers) finally conquer the Marginot Line of skin in between them and converge?
Is Anastassia Rodionova attractive or not? I can't find a decent picture. Check her out on the Breaker's players page. There's potential, but will she fulfill it? Or as a 24-year Russian female, has she already begun the quick descent from smoking hot young blond to embittered and craggly old babushka?
Will Yakov Smirnoff show up courtside? Yakov now owns and performs in his own theater in nearby Branson, Missouri (only 40 miles away) and it would be great to see him travel to support the local team. "In World Team Tennis, tennis players hit the ball. In Soviet Russia, tennis players leave country to escape below average living conditions! HAHAHAHA!"

FSC will keep you updated.

Real Men Only Need One Wheel

2006-07-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Unicycling Hockey being named the #2 Obscure Sport by YesButNoButYes, I was thrilled to discover that Unicon XIII, the world championship of unicycling, is happening in Switzerland as I type. From now until August 2nd, you can follow all the events from the tournament’s results page. Check out the schedule so you know when your favorite events are set to begin, including basketball, relay races and (of course) hockey.

If you don’t have a favorite, I recommend the always entertaining downhill competitions. Oh yeah, you read that correctly – down hill unicycling. Check out this video for an idea of what I’m talking about and this site for useful information on the event, as well as some hysterically unironic posed pictures. There are two skill groups – easy and mountain unicycling. I readily acknowledge that the riders in mountain unicycling are more skilled (check out that video), but the easy group has to be a better spectator sport. Just imagine the near fatal accidents waiting to happen. There is a legitimate chance of seeing decapitation, impalement or disembowelment by unicycle. Maybe all three. Name me another sport that can boast that potential. You can’t do it.

Come back to FSC over the next week, as I’m sure there will be plenty of results and information from this fringe sport spectacular.

Pepsi Pro Summer League: The Premature Ejaculation of the Summer Leagues

2006-07-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

As the shortest of the four major summer leagues (along with Vegas, Southern California and Rocky Mountain Revue), the Pepsi Pro Summer League has a bit of a premature ejaculatory feeling to it. Like all the fans are just starting to get into it when they collectively say “Wait, that’s it?”

None the less, there is some legitimate basketball talent here. Adam Morrison came to play, as did Marcus Williams (and do NOT come pissing to me about those links going to team stats and not individual stats; this is a problem with the Pepsi Pro that I’ll get to in a minute). Both first round picks came to play, as evidenced by Morrison’s 24.6 points a game and Williams’ 8 assists per game.

(Honestly, that last number is pretty impressive. I can’t wait to see this kid come off the bench for Kidd. Just by giving them a more than competent back-up point guard, he could dramatically improve this team: Kidd’s fresh for the whole year, and even when he doesn’t play the drop off isn’t astronomical. Of course like the Vegas league, these numbers don’t mean anything. Still, I’m excited.)

Before getting into my criticisms, here are a few observations:

The Heat played almost all rookies. Of the 15 guys on the roster, 11 were rookies. One of the “veterans” had 2 years experience, but came straight from high school, making him the youngest player on the team. I guess it’s hard to get the motivation to play in July when you’re still drunk off last month’s championship.
The Pacers’ team featured Damone Brown from Syracuse and Taylor Coppenrath from Vermont… leading me to hope briefly that they had played against each other in the 2005 NCAA game in which Vermont upset Syracuse, the Big East Champs that year. Alas, Brown graduated in 2001. I bet that would have been an awkward introduction. “Don’t we know each other…?”
James Augustine’s Summer League Blog is surprisingly endearing. It doesn’t have the literary or self-indulgent flair of Paul Shirley’s, but it reads like a letter home from camp. Worth checking out.

Now back to the overanalysis.

The big problem here is that the whole league is over so damn fast. Six teams with five games each in five days, that’s it. Don’t get a sandwich during a game, you’ll come back and the whole league will be gone. Poof! If you want to work at Borders Books, you’re orientation is longer than that. Legitimately. I have it on good information that Borders training takes 10 days. I’m not arguing that one should be longer than the other, but what kind of league consumes less time than cashier training?

The whole thing is anticlimactic. There are no money shots, no chances to really appreciate the total experience because there is no total experience. The first and second team listings feel rushed and without excitement. There’s no champion. There’s no MVP. The games are only 40 minutes. And the stats sheets for each team scream half-assed. There wasn’t even enough time or effort to create a simple statistics page for each player. Over too soon and no one seemed to care while it was going on. Good combination for a summer league, fellas.

The Pepsi Pro is a fine establishment, and I like the idea of having some NBA caliber guys playing in a more informal environment, but let’s ditch the pretension. It’s not a league. It’s a camp. The Magic (who organize the event) should play that up. They look a little stupid trying to put a half assed league together while never taking the time and effort for a money shot.

Billie Jean King's Vanity League Playoffs

2006-07-25T05:32:00.000-07:00

As we come to the end of July, we also come to one of the most anticipated times of the sports calendar. For the last 26 years - Has it really been that long? I didn't even notice - this time of year has gripped our imaginations and inspired the inner child in each of us. We're reminded of our athlete-heroes growing up, the superstars we looked up to, whose posters decorated our walls, and whose every play we marveled at. I'm of course talking about the World Team Tennis playoffs.

I know what you're thinking - "What the hell are you talking about?" This is a fair question. For a professional league that has been around since 1974 (and without interruption since 1981), the WTT has had surprisingly little impact on our national sport consciousness. But it's been there, in a variety of permutations, attracting some astonishing names. Almost every recognizable tennis player in the last 26 years has played in or been involved with the WTT - Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, Martina Hingis, Anna Kournikova (I said recognizable, not good), and Martina Navra..., um, Navra..., eh... Nagonnaworkhereanymore. Plus many more who aren't current players and don't have profiles on the league's website.

The rules are fairly straight forward. Every team has about 5-7 players (I couldn't nail this number down), men and women. Each match between WTT teams consists of five sets where the teams play to 4 points. The sets are men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles and mixed doubles. Substitutions are allowed by the coaches.

Given how famous but unknown tennis is to many people and how long this league has been around, WTT is fascinating. It gets some TV coverage (mostly from Outdoor Life, although the history section claims ESPN2), and you gotta wonder if there's a die-hard WTT fanbase. What kind of ratings does this sport get? Newspaper coverage? How do the matches themselves break down? Are they entertaining or merely gender-neutral?

FSC will have more about all this as the playoffs start (beginning on July 27), but I think it's hysterical that Billie Jean King is the majority owner of the league and the title cup is the "King Cup." That'd be like David Stern renaming the NBA trophy the Stern Cup, or perhaps redesigning it as a huge pair of gilded cajones and calling them the Stern Balls. Although come to think of it, Stern doesn't own the NBA, so maybe a more accurate analogy is to imagine Isiah Thomas taking the CBA championship, back when he owned the league but before he destroyed it, and renaming it the Zeke Cup.

My point is that this seems like an exercise in vanity on King's part. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the reasons the league is still largely unknown. Who wants to watch self-indulgdent tennis?

North America Proves Europe Counts Better

2006-07-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Let's establish one thing - Rugby makes any major American sport look as masculine as My Little Pony. American football players would be winded, bleeding and crying by the end of a normal match. Basketball players would be broken in half. Baseball players would swallow their chew. Rugby players don't go for phantom fouls, flopping, or acting like they're hurt. Unless appendages are actually ripped off - and even then, it depends on the appendage - they're going to play and not delay the game. Long story short: don't mess with rugby players.

And Europe for years has had a near monopoly on rugby. Sure, rugby is popular on American college campuses. But there is no level of rugby in the US to rival the 6 Nations Tournament, in which England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France and Italy put their toughest SOBs on the field each year and pummel each other... while occassionally moving a ball around. The tournament itself dates back to 1871, when it was only played between England and Scotland; the other four were added over the next 80 years. To say it's passionate is an understatement. Rugby fans in those 6 countries during the tournament each year make soccerites look like tepid Arizona Cardinal enthusiasts.

Now, America and Canada are trying to capture that... although in a rather embarrassing way. As mentioned in Recent Fringe Sports Results, the North American Four Tournament is in high gear, with one more day of games before the medal round. And this is great - I'm all for taking cool sports from other countries, adopting them, and then dominating those other countries in what was once their own sport because our pharmaceutical companies can create better illegal performance enhancing drugs than their pharmaceutical companies. It's sports imperialism.

What bothers me is more of a semantics problem. With a name like North American Four, you'd think the tournament would have, you know, four countries, like the US, Canada, Mexico and the Iroquois. But no. The North American Four is really the North American Two. Canada and the US divided their national teams into two teams to make four, with clever names like Canada East and the US Hawks. That seems a little pathetic to me. Like they were desperate to have a bigger tournament, but Mexico and the Iroquois had better things to do, so the Yankees and Canucks decided to shadow box for a while and call it a heavy weight bout.

Seriously, guys - call a spade a spade. Canada + America = 2 nations, not 4. American kids score badly enough in math without broadcasting that fact to the fans whose sport we'll dominate and whose will we'll crush in a few years.

Recent Fringe Sports Results - Join the Exciting Life of Pro Putt-Putt

2006-07-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

This is the first in what will be a regular FSC feature, chronicling the outcomes of recent fringe sports events. You'll notice that some of this stuff is a little more dated than the sports results we're used to getting from ESPN. To this I say "Suck it up and quit your pansy whining." The people covering these sports aren't exactly getting paid big bucks from Sports Illustrated. We're lucky they write at all. You'll take your scores when they come in and you'll like it.

Professional Putters Association's Virginia Open - On July 16, 2006, Greg Newport defeated Gilbert Sharpe in a playoff to win the 22nd annual Professional Putters Association's Virginia Open. I'm not sure what's more ridiculous - that they've been doing that putt-putt tournament for 22 years, that it needed to be settled in a freaking playoff, or that the players putt through 108 holes of regulation mini-golf in it. Newport won $300 for first place. Admit it - you're looking at those 3 Benjamins like easy money, aren't you? Go join the tour.

California Rodeo Salinas - Over this past weekend, the fourth stop on the Wrangler Pro Rodeo Summer Tour took place in Salinas, California and apparently one of the prerequisites for winning anything was to be named Chad. Who knew? And if someone wants to explain barrel racing to me, please do so. Why is a 16.16 score better than a 16.23? Someone? Anyone?

North America Four Tournament - The US Falcons earned an improbable come from behind victory against Canada East, 25-24. Wing Brian Barnhard finished an 80 metre try that saw multiple phases spring him free to secure the come back. I didn't understand a damn thing I just wrote.

Make Cornhole America’s Game

2006-07-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

Cincinnati is poised to take its place among the great cities of the world. Granted, it already boasts two major sports teams and a Hofbrauhaus, but now it is about to become the home of America’s game, the next great fringe sport to storm the nation – Cornhole. Never heard of it? That’s ok, you’re about to. By the time you finish reading this you’re going to want to thrust yourself into Cornhole with great vigor.

According to legend – and the American Cornhole Association – Cornhole possibly started as early as the 14th century in Germany (that’s odd, I though the Greeks played it too) and was rediscovered about 100 years ago in the hills of Kentucky (although that part makes sense). Currently, it’s very popular on the west side of Cincinnati, although east siders have recently attempted to insert themselves into Cornhole, quite frankly with shitty results.

The ACA is making some solid attempts at organizing Cornhole enthusiasts and fulfilling its purpose of making Cornhole “America’s Game.” It hosts a forum to discuss the sport, offers free membership (which I recommend, I’m a member and it feels good), maintains player rankings, and keeps track of tournaments. The association also maintains an interesting news archive of Cornhole stories, including ones about how the sport is growing around NASCAR races and another one about how the sport has raised money for a family in need of aid. Cornhole to the rescue.

The Cornhole World Championship will be played in Ohio next month, and even though FSC will be unable to attend, I promise you that FSC will penetrate the action and bring all the warm, Cornhole goodness to you.

And the rules, how could I have forgotten. In Cornhole, it’s all about the Cornhole. It’s how you score the most points, but because Cornhole is a little like horseshoes (and some people actually refer to it as soft horseshoes) close counts too. Even if you miss the hole and wipe out on the side, you can still pick up a point. The game is played on a horseshoe pitch, with two teams of two lining up on either side of each other. They toss bean bags filled with corn at inclined boards with a six-inch hole on it, which is obviously where the sport gets its name. If the bag goes in the hole, that’s 3 points. If the bag misses the hole but lands on the board, that’s one point. If the bag doesn’t land on the board or go in the hole, that’s zero points. First team to 21 points wins. See the ACA official rule page for more details.

Cornhole is easy to start and the world championship is just around the corner. Check back here for more details. In the meantime, I recommend that you get one of your friends and start practicing going in the cornhole. Cincinnati’s favorite sport will be spreading soon. You don’t want to miss out on America’s Game.

Musings on Bermuda and the World: Overanalysis of the World Lacrosse Championships

2006-07-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

My initial reaction upon compiling the final rankings from the World Lacrosse Championships was that the sixth place team (Japan) should not be 1-6 when the ninth place team (Finland) is 6-1. The analogy that keeps coming to mind is if David Stern forced the Knicks into the playoffs over the Grizzlies. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but it sure looks that way based purely on record.

However, this is the natural result of grouping the best six teams into one division at the outset of the tournament. It’d be like if the NFL regrouped every year so that the final four teams played in the same division the next season. Now THAT would enforce parity: put the best four teams into NFL Division 1, the next best four teams into NFL Division 2, etc. Seriously, who would win the NFLD1 this season - Pittsburgh, Seattle, Washington, or Denver? Who would have won it last season – New England, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or Atlanta? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Tags.

In the World Lacrosse Championships, though, it creates the not-incorrect impression that it’s the US and Canada playing for the title; Australia, the Iroquois and England competing for the bronze; Japan basically guaranteed the sixth spot by virtue of being square in the middle of the world powers and everyone else; and everyone else beating each other up for placement. The Japanese can’t beat the first or second tier powers but they can’t be beaten by anyone else. Check out Pointstreak for their very complete final division standings (reflecting the placing and medal games as well) and the revealing points scored, etc. stats.

Before getting into the rather shocking US loss, let me first address my two favorite teams: Bermuda and the Iroquois.

Although the team started out as little more than a ready made punch- and headline, a little research revealed that there is a very good reason why Bermuda (let’s be honest) sucks at lacrosse: they only started playing three years ago. As of January 2005, there were only 30 players in the island’s organized lacrosse club. One LaxPower forum contributor points out that the sport was brought to the island by North American expats, and another sport from British expats, rugby, grew rapidly in the small country; Bermuda now hosts one of the most competitive rugby tournaments in the world and has a pretty solid team. Look for this team to improve in the 2010 championships.

In contrast, the Iroquois have played lacrosse for hundred of years. They have to be disappointed with their finish this year. Fourth place is not an unrealistic final place for them, or even a bad one, but they were in a position to medal. More than that, going in to the tournament, I bet they thought they could sneak by at least one of the US-Canada double-headed monster. A silver or even gold medal was a reach, but still possible. Unfortunately, as lacrosse grows in popularity internationally, it will be harder and harder for the Iroquois to field teams that are internationally strong. They have a total population of about 75,000 people. Statistically they have fewer world class athletes to draw on from their population than countries like Australia (20 million people) and England (50 million) where lacrosse is becoming more widely played.

Granted, the Iroquois love lacrosse like the English love soccer and Australia loves beating the shit out of people, er, I mean Aussie Rules Football. Even though there are fewer world class athletes, more of them want to play lacrosse. For the time being and for the near future, that should off set the disparity in population. But if lacrosse continues to become more popular across the world, that balancing agent will become moot. After 2010, the Iroquois may be hard pressed to rank as high as 4th again.

Onto the championship game. For the first time in almost three decades, the US lost a match, and it was to the same country they lost the last time – Canada. What does this mean for American lacrosse and the game internationally? Well, contrary to what some people on LaxPower have been insisting, it doesn’t mean that the entire US program needs to be overhauled. The team was great until the very last game… when they played against a very good team on its home turf. And Canadians care about lacrosse too. They cheered and supported the home team the way they should have. They influenced the game and to lose to the Canucks under those circumstances doesn’t require an overhaul of the whole system. This is not USA Basketball circa 2002.

And in fact, this is very good for the sport internationally. The US has been dominant in the World Championships for years, not losing a game since 1978. Competition is good. This result will certainly help lacrosse in Canada, and the idea that the dominant power in the world is vulnerable will help the sport in other countries too. With the championships over and the rankings final, each team has someone to gun for: the US wants to take down Canada, Australia and Iroquois want to move into silver or gold contention, Ireland would love to displace England as the dominant British Isles team, and Bermuda is hoping to beat somebody…. ANYBODY.

Look for this sport to move closer to the center in the next few years and to actually get some major screen time on ESPN in 2010. People should take notice now so they can make fun of the band wagon jumpers in four years. Trust me – it makes you feel smarter than you actually are.

Bermuda Takes One for the World: Final Rankings from World Lacrosse Championships

2006-07-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

1. Canada (7-1)
2. US (6-1)
3. Australia (4-4)
4. Iroquois (4-4)
5. England (3-4)
6. Japan (1-6)
7. Ireland (5-2)
8. Germany (4-3)
9. Finland (6-1)
10. Italy (4-3)
11. Scotland (4-2)
12. Netherlands
13. Wales (4-3)
14. Latvia (4-3)
15. Czech Republic (4-3)
16. Denmark (3-4)
17. Spain (3-4)
18. South Korea (1-5)
19. New Zealand (2-4)
20. Hong Kong (0-6)
21. Bermuda (o-5)

Guaranteed Bermuda Free: Final Scores from World Lacrosse Championships

2006-07-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

19th Place
New Zealand 9, Hong Kong 6

17th Place
Spain 17, South Korea 14

15th Place
Czech Republic 18, Denmark 1

13th Place
Wales 18, Latvia 2

11th Place
Scotland 15, Netherlands 3

9th Place
Finland 19, Italy 9

7th Place
Ireland 13, Germany 5

5th Place
England 12, Japan 7

Bronze Medal
Australia 21, Iroquois 8 (check the Aussies for Roids!)

Gold Medal
Canada 15, US 10 (Wow, more on this later)

Bermuda Triumphant in Effort for Last Place: Day 7 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

New Zealand 19, Bermuda 6
England 19, Germany 4
Italy 10, Scotland 7
Latvia 5, Denmark 3
Spain 4, Hong Kong 2
United States 13, Australia 10
Finland 10, Netherlands 8
Czech Republic 9, Wales 8 (OT)
Japan 11, Ireland 9
Canada 16, Iroquois 6 (dammit)

See the LaxPower Forum for more details. Come back tomorrow for final scores from the placing games, medal games, and some final comments on the tournament.

Bermuda Receives Pity-Bye for Winless Streak: Day 6 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

Australia 21, Irish 5
Wales 17, Spain 9
Netherlands 10, Latvia 4
Iroquois 14, Germany 6
Italy 14, Czech Republic 6
Denmark 9, South Korea 5
Canada 27, Finland 2

Thursday July 20:
Semi-Finals
TD Waterhouse Stadium
USA vs. Australia, 4 p.m.
Canada vs. Iroquois 7:30 p.m.

Placing Games
TD Waterhouse Stadium
Germany vs. England, 12:30 p.m.

North London Athletic Fields
New Zealand vs. Bermuda, 9 a.m.
Spain vs. Hong Kong, 12:30 p.m.
Latvia vs. Denmark, 12:30 p.m.
Scotland vs. Italy, 12:30 p.m.
Japan vs. Ireland, 4 p.m.
Finland vs. Netherlands, 4 p.m.
Czech Republic vs. Wales, 4 p.m

See the LaxPower Forum for more details.

Top Ten Obscure Sports in the World

2006-07-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

There is actually a difference between obscure and fringe, but for the purposes of this column they're close enough. Thanks to YesButNoButYes for compiling the list and Deadspin for pointing me in the right direction. Consider all of these ripe for future columns.

10. World Highland Games - Scots throwing big sticks and rocks.

9. Professional Putt-Putt Tour - I need to get involved in this organization.

8. Surf Lifesaving - Moving closer and close to my idea of paying lifeguards by commission, thereby saving beaches money and improving life guard performance.

7. American Cribbage Congress - Finally, the sport of champion Grandmas.

6. Dog Sledding - FSC covered this while with Sports Media Watch.

6a. BrewSkee-Ball - They stole my idea!

5. World Footbag Association - Competing with Ultimate Frisbee to be the official sport of people who smell like patchouli.

4. Rock Paper Scissors League - One of FSC's friends from college was big into this. He knew about its Korean roots. Seriously. And he probably would have been even more into it had he known about the girls of Rock Paper Scissors.

3. World Adult Kickball Association - For adults who like sports but can't do sports... the grown up game for kids who were picked last in gym class.

2. Unicycle Hockey World Championships - Perhaps the most beautiful thing I've ever heard of.

1. Extreme Ironing World Champsionships - I don't know. It's cool, but there's such a thing as trying too hard.

Mark Cuban Wants You to Exploit Children and Get Rich

2006-07-19T18:35:00.000-07:00

I know you think I'm kidding, but read this and get back to me. I'll wait.

SEE!

For those of you who were too lazy to actually click on the link, Mark Cuban is giving advice on how to get into the minor league basketball game (as an owner; as a player you're on your own - if you're reading this site I'd aim for the lowest possible league). He wants you to own a basketball team and be rich. He also wants you to sign high school kids, "practice the shit" out of them, and then sell their rights to other teams.

Now, I don't mean he wants you to sign 18-year olds. I mean he wants you to sign 14-year olds. Possibly even 10-year olds. As we all know, kids that age are perfectly capable of making rational business decisions. In fact, what with their hormones, this is the height of their rational thinking.

As awful as this sounds, he's got some strong evidence from foreign leagues, where this is the norm, like in France. And as we all know, Americans are lining up to be like France.

I'm a huge proponent of minor league basketball, and even tried to organize my readers into buying an ABA team with me. I would love to see more teams pop up in some of the smallest markets. In fact, consider FSC a resource for getting your own team:

Want to reserve an ABA market? Try here.
Care to contact the CBA office about organizing a team? Go to this page.
Click here for the financial details of owning a USBL team and doing business as a USBL team owner.
Check out this site for a how-to guide for owning an IBL team.

I'm not saying they're giving away these teams, but for 20 bucks, a book of stamps and one year's subscription to Maxim I can get you the rights to the Glendive, Montana market for minor league basketball.

At the same time there has to be some happy middle between setting up Mark Cuban's roundball sweatshop and owning a team that loses money. And of course, I have a recommendation.

As an owner, don't sign 14-year olds. Just DON'T. Not only should no one invest money in a person whose pituitary gland hasn't woken up yet, but it's morally corrupt, and you know that. But establish relationships with parents. Find talented areas for youth basketball and become a community member as you start your team. Make the basketball team like a large family operation. Bring the town and area around the team. Let the kids and families see the games for little to no money, be active in the community, and foster their love of basketball. When you know the kids and the families, THEN start talking with the talented ones about playing pro ball for you.

The kids will be more likely to sign with you, the parents will trust you, and since you know the kids you'll take better care of them than if they were just young punks you signed to a player's contract. They're going to be your punks with a player's contract. And you can take that contract and sell it to larger teams who want your players (like Cuban suggests), but everyone involved will be better off.

Don't take the Cuban Sell Your Soul Approach to making money from minor league ownership. Take the FSC Community Service Approach to making money from minor league ownership.

Bermuda Remasculates Latvia: Day 5 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-19T05:06:00.000-07:00

USA 21, Japan 2
Czech Republic 19, Netherlands 10
Finland 14, Denmark 4
Ireland 12, Wales 10
Iroquois 12, Australia 10
Scotland 21, Hong Kong 3
South Korea 8, New Zealand 7
Latvia 9, Bermuda 3

For full standings heading into the tournament playoffs, check out Pointstreak. Here's the playoff schedule courtesy of LaxPower:

Wednesday July 19

TD Waterhouse Stadium
Australia vs. Ireland, 12:30 p.m.
Iroquois Nation vs. Germany, 4 p.m.
Canada vs. Finland, 7:30 p.m. (CBC Country Canada)

North London Athletic Fields
Wales vs. Spain, 12:30 p.m.
Latvia vs. Netherlands, 12:30 p.m.
Czech Republic vs. Italy, 4 p.m.
Denmark vs. South Korea, 4 p.m.

Thursday July 20
Semifinals - TD Waterhouse Stadium
USA vs. Winner Australia/Ireland, TBC (4 or 7:30 p.m.)
Winner Canada/Finland vs. Winner Iroquois/Germany Winner (4 or 7:30 p.m.)
If Canada plays, they will play at 7:30 p.m.

Placing Games

TD Waterhouse Stadium
Loser Iroquois/Germany vs. England, 12:30 p.m.

North London Athletic Fields
New Zealand vs. Bermuda, 9 a.m. (I got a good feeling about this one.)
Loser Wales/Spain vs. Hong Kong, 12:30 p.m.
Loser Latvia/Netherlands vs. Winner Denmark/Korea, 12:30 p.m.
Scotland vs. Winner Czech Republic/Italy, 12:30 p.m.
Japan vs. Loser Australia/Ireland, 4 p.m.
Loser Canada/Finland vs. Winner Latvia/Netherlands, 4 p.m.
Loser Czech Republic/Italy vs. Winner Wales/Spain, 4 p.m.

Number 1 Photographic Reason Why Wrestling is a Fringe Sport

2006-07-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

Honestly, there's just no way this looks good on TV. How does a sport grow where this seems to happen in every third match? And it's not like this is a recent phenomenon. Check out this picture from 1955:

Tell me this doesn't look like the 1950's college wrestling equivalent of the Paris Hilton sex tape. Go ahead. Say it with a straight face. Still, there's hope for the sport. But I'll get to that in another column. For now, enjoy the unintentional comedy these pictures represent.

Bermuda Masters Playing Dead: Day 4 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

Canada 12, Australia 9
US 21, Iroquois 13 (I'm a little torn)
England 9, Japan 8
Italy 20, Wales 7
Netherlands 15, New Zealand 4
Latvia 7, Denmark 3
Spain 13, Bermuda 9
Ireland 16, Scotland 9
Germany 12, Czech Republic 5

Learn to Speak Japanese with the FSC Diary of the Softball World Cup Championship

2006-07-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the FSC Diary of the Softball World Cup Championship between Japan and the US in Oklahoma City. Japan upset the US last year in the championship game. I expect the announcers to talk that up more than a little. As a long time Red Sox fan I expect nothing less. Now let’s go to the tape.

9:01 – First shot of Jennie Finch… way to hold off on the big guns, fellas. She’s not even playing tonight.

9:02 – I guess someone at Frosted Flakes couldn’t find anything else to sponsor.

9:02 – What the hell is that announcer’s name supposed to be? Ko-Ni-Su-Noo-Gai? Is that right? Did someone in the cultural sensitivity department mess up? Damn, I was so distracted by that I didn’t catch their names. Eh. I didn’t care that much anyway.

9:03 – Cat Osterman is pitching. She was the losing pitcher in last year’s final. She’s got good numbers this year, and she looked pretty pissed at being asked about last year’s loss for the 100th time. Not a good combination for the Japanese.

9:05 – Holy shnikies! I just looked up Osterman’s bio. She’s 6’3’’. She’s like the Randy Johnson of softball. All she needs to do is start looking like a carnie.

9:07 – The Japanese 5 hitter, Mishina, is hitting .462. Not bad.

9:08 – Announcers (“Ko-Ni-Eye-Land-Daug?”) just said that the US team has lost to this Japanese team in the last two international finals in which they’ve met. Why is it that the Red Sox and 1918 have inspired an entire genre of sports announcing?

9:10 – Osterman just threw a Rise ball. Did the announcer just make that up? I’ve never heard of that. Are they going to start naming her mistakes? “That’s her Throw the Ball Fifty Feet Away From the Catcher with a Runner on Third pitch. It’s a psychological weapon meant to artificially boost the other team’s moral and self-esteem.”

9:14 – Three up, three down. US up at bat.

9:18 – Caitlin Lowe, lead off hitter, batting .588 with an on-base percentage of .611 Damn. She’s on base with a single.

9:23 – Just to give you an idea of the offensive juggernaut that is the USA softball team - Natasha Watley, the number 2 hitter has 3 triples in 5 World Cup games and gets to base on pitcher’s error. The next batter, Jessica Mendoza, has almost as many RBIs as the whole Japanese team. Six batters in the starting line up are hitting .500 or better, and the team as a whole is hitting .485. Again - Damn.

9:26 – End of the first inning, US 2, Japan 0. The Japanese look like they’re capable of playing some nice defense; Emi Naitoh, their short stop, had a nice juke step to freeze US runners on a ground ball. But they’re making a lot of stupid errors, picking up two in that inning.

9:30 – I’m impressed. I made it to the second inning without thinking of Japanese school girl outfits. The smart bet was before the first pitch was thrown.

9:34 – Middle of the second. Six batters, five strike outs for Osterman. She-Johnson is chucking like 1999 Pedro.

9:41 – End of the 2nd, US 2, Japan 0.

9:44 – Announcers (Koo-koo-mung-ga?) bring up Jennie Finch’s maternity leave. Just thought I’d mention it as randomly as they did.

9:47 – I will say this – the Japanese players yell better than we do. I couldn’t understand them, but it was piercing.

9:51 – She-Johnson struck out the side for the second consecutive inning. Eight total strikeouts, the last seven in a row. I might never be as good at anything as Osterman is at striking out batters in this game.

9:53 – I think the Japanese manager imported her teeth from England.

9:56 – Announcer Koo-whatever: “[Third baseman Crystl] Bustos has the most power in her hands of anyone on the planet.” Somewhere Isiah Thomas is thinking of signing her as a shot blocker to come in off the bench, but not for less than $30 million over 4 years.

9:57 – End of the third. The Japanese pitcher, Yukiko Ueno, is starting to work it. She’s gone scoreless in the last two innings, only allowing one runner on.

10:03 – Announcer Not Koo-whatever: “Cat’s gotta be careful not to be too careful.” What? You can’t do that to the English language and get away with it.

10:04 – She-Johnson just let her first runner on base.

10:05 – Runner on first tried to steal second and got picked off by catcher Stacey Nuveman. Three and a half innings down.

10:10 – Nuveman’s got the first homerun of the game, her first of the World Cup. Nothing like a 220 foot moonshot (that’s the actual distance from plate to wall in the park).

10:15 – Lovieanne Jung has another homerun. US 4, Japan 0. Chicks dig the (sorta) long ball.

10:21 – I meant it about the screaming. You can hear some of the Japanese players over EVERYTHING. I gotta figure there are some 4-year olds in the crowd crying over this.

10:24 – And Naitoh at short might be the loudest of them all.

10:26 – My favorite part of these announcers: Not Koo-whatever translating the supportive screams from the Japanese players. She plays in the Japanese professional softball league (presumably run by the Japanese David Stern) and has picked up enough to know how to get psyched-out.

10:35 – She-Johnson retired the side again, third time in four innings. She must have been wicked pissed off at the Japanese after losing last year. Do you think she gets like this after being cut off in traffic? You know that friend everyone has who becomes a maniac on the road after some mom in a minivan accidentally jumps in front of them on the highway because the four kids in the back are throwing fudgsicles at each other and she didn’t quite realize what she was doing, but now that friend is plotting vehicular vengeance? I bet she’s like that. Think of it this way – would you cut off Randy Johnson in traffic? Same with Osterman.

10:38 – The Japanese pulled Ueno (that sounds like a medical conditioned, a pulled Ueno) and put in Yuko Endo.

10:48 – Sachiko Ito just hit a ball off her foot and didn’t even blink. If A-Rod had done that he’d be limping around, milking it. If A-Rod got into an ultimate death match with any of the girls playing tonight, I’d bet money on the softball player.

10:49 – She-Johnson just walked her first batter, top of the sixth. Still 4-0, USA.

10:54 – Nuveman lets a ball get past her and Japan scores its first run, 4-1, USA. But She-Johnson gets the next batter out on the first pitch. Middle of the 6th.

10:57 – I haven’t mentioned this enough, but these announcers are playing the “We used to be the best until last year, and now we’re back for our crown” angle like crazy all game. If it were a closer game (now 5-1, after a solo homer to start this half of the inning by Andrea Duran), I’m sure they’d be mentioning this a lot more, as in “Can they handle the pressure? Can they get this monkey off their backs?” Do they teach this in sports journalism school? Or maybe it’s a correspondence course.

11:02 – I just learned that first base is “hee-to-choo” in Japanese. Thanks, fellas, I appreciate the insight into the game.

11:03 – I like this Naitoh player – good screamer, lots of intensity and she’s Iceman freezing runners on the bases. She would have made the All-Star team in the NL this year easy.

11:06 – Not Koo-whatever actually just translated English to English from a Japanese player. Just because she has an accent doesn’t mean we can’t understand her when she says “Two outs.”

11:08 – Between the 6th and 7th innings, 5-1, USA. Three outs left for Japan. She-Johnson coming in to finish her work.

11:10 – Wow – this is truly impressive. Two hours in before we see gratuitous shots of half naked frat guys with USA painted on their chests. Way to show restraint ESPN. FSC salutes you.

11:13 – I’m going to hear Naitoh in my sleep tonight.

11:17 – Freaking bizarre ending – bad base running. The last Japanese hitter got to first on an error and then tried to take second, but got caught running. Final score – USA 5, Japan 2.

The USA finished the World Cup 6-0, outscoring their opponents 56-3. Nothing like parity. Congrats to the US Women, and to She-Johnson – Cat Osterman – who pitched a complete game and struck out 11. And congratulations to you, for finishing what became a much longer diary than I ever imagined. I can’t believe I watched an entire softball game when the Sox were playing.

Live Free or Die, Bitches: New Hampshire Sports v. Perceptions of New Hampshire Sports

2006-07-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

This just in from Deadspin: Sports are over for the year in New Hampshire. Thanks for the update, fellas. Last one out has to turn off the “Massachusetts Drivers Suck” neon sign.

What? They’re over? It’s July! Just because this week’s NASCAR race at New Hampshire International Speedway is over doesn’t mean that sports in New Hampshire are over.

In as high an opinion as I have of Deadspin, they have just committed a classic sports faux paus, ignoring the sports happenings in the fringes. New Hampshire is like any other fringe market: even though it spends most of the year – i.e., whenever there isn’t a NASCAR race – out of the centers of sports media, there’s still a lot of sports to be had there.

What’s your pleasure? What’s your drug of choice? Football? Baseball? Basketball? Hockey? New Hampshire can fill any prescription.

Football

Manchester is home to the Wolves, the Granite State’s entry into Arena Football 2 and the 2005 Eastern Division champs. I love arena football, and how can you not? It’s essentially full contact Single A baseball. All the sport you love about football combined with all the camp you love about minor league baseball. And any sport with a small venue and a dance team gets an automatic leg up (no pun intended). Seriously, come up and see a Wolves game. I guarantee it’ll be more entertaining than Detroit versus anybody in the NFL this year.

And like every other state in the Union, New Hampshire boasts a lively high school football tournament. How lively? Well, not only is it full of all the pride and purity of great youth sports, but last year my home town’s starting QB got arrested – without probably cause as it turned out – for drunk driving and possession of marijuana HOURS BEFORE A PLAYOFF GAME! If that happened to Carson Palmer or Marcus Vick, we’d still be talking about it. Wait, didn't that happen to Marcus Vick?

Baseball

There are two quality minor league baseball teams in New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Fishercats in Manchester and the Pride of Nashua. Both have won league championships in the last few years, although the Pride have since left the Atlantic League due to financial mismanagement. They’ve moved to the smaller Can-Am League, and are actually playing well. So well in fact that Bode Miller, who couldn’t be bothered to give a rat’s ass in the Olympics, has decided to grace the franchise with his presence. Tell me that’s not worth the $6 for admission?

The Fishercats can’t boast such celebrities… they just get future major league All-Stars by virtue of being the Blue Jays AA team in the Eastern League, possibly the best minor league in the country. A few years ago you could swing by MerchantsAuto.com Stadium (I hate that name… of all the stupid dot com stadiums that survived, why did one of them have to be in my home state?) and see Jonathan Papelbon when the Portland Seadogs (the Red Sox AA team) were in town. Any good players that the Blue Jays accidentally produce in the next few years will play in Manchester, NH before they play in any MLB stadium. And a Fischercats game is way cheaper than the big leagues.

Basketball

Ok, there’s not much basketball in New Hampshire, although I once tried to get an ABA team there. The state high school tournament is quite good, but it doesn’t inspire the same amount of passion as the football playoffs (except with my dad, who loves any and all high school sports). The inherent problem is that the Granite State produces a lot of shortish white guys with no game (mirror, I’m looking in your direction). It’s ok, though, because I’m setting up for the big finish…

Hockey

Hockey is big in New Hampshire. Not the NHL, but where hockey is still fun and affordable – the minors and college. The LA Kings’ AHL affiliate, the Monarchs, play in Manchester. Does anyone remember when hockey was really cool to go to in person? The NHL hasn’t had that in a long time, but the AHL has got more of it than Paris Hilton has bedpost notches. Back when the NHL went on strike, the AHL kept playing. Hockey fans in Boston, New York, Chicago and other big media centers had to suck it up while hockey fans in fringe markets like New Hampshire could continue to enjoy their favorite sport.

But even more than the minors, college hockey is the real deal. I’ve written numerous articles on the merits of college hockey – I firmly believe it’s an up and coming sport. In New Hampshire, the UNH Wildcats are the biggest show in town and on ice, both the men and the women. In college, the game is a little slower, you can see all the plays develop and the arenas are smaller so you’re closer to the ice. Plus, the players are legitimately likeable and the sport comes packaged with lots of college rivalries, just as intense as college football or basketball. If you’re lucky enough to get tickets to a Black Bears-Wildcats game, come prepared to yell awful things at a bunch of kids from Maine.

So there’s plenty of sports in New Hampshire year round, and plenty of legitimate fringe sports media like WMUR, the Union Leader and the Nashua Telegraph to cover all of it. Don’t go hating Live-Free-or-Diers. But if none of this floats your boat, if you still think the sports in the fringes of New Hampshire suck, just remember this: there’s another NASCAR race there in September.

Bermuda Generously Boosts Finnish Self-Esteem: Day 3 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-17T05:40:00.000-07:00

US 13, Canada 12
Australia 16, England 3
Iroquois 13, Japan 11
Italy 20, Hong Kong 0
Latvia 11, Spain 9
Germany 15, Netherlands 9
Scotland 7, Wales 3
Finland 16, Bermuda 3
Czech Republic 20, South Korea 2

See the LaxPower Forum for more details.

Softball to Expand Beyond Jennie Finch Being Hot

2006-07-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm kidding, I'm kidding… but admit it, that’s what most people know about softball, Jennie Finch showing up in Page 2’s “Hottest Female Athletes” section.

Last year USA Softball started organizing the World Cup of Softball, to be held every year, to promote the growth of the sport. In some ways, it seems like a desperate attempt to convince the International Olympic Committee to reinstate softball as a legit sport, particularly when you look at the list of competing nations in this year’s World Cup. It’s pretty limited and completely dominated by the US, which always goes over well internationally, they love us.

However, the International Softball Federation (it exists… everything has an international federation – you probably do too, you just don’t know it) paints a slightly different picture. The ISF has a pretty full calendar with lots of events around the world. With all those events, the popularity of the sport might grow, particularly in regions where baseball already has a following, like Asia, South America and the Caribbean.

For example, the ISF is sponsoring their eleventh World Championships in Beijing next month. Other events include the second World University Softball Championship this month (notice the bilingualness of the site), the twentieth Central American and Caribbean Sports Games (note the malfunctionness of the site), and the fifteenth Asian Games (because Qatar is lovely in December).

The sport definitely has some plans to grow in the future, and those plans seem healthy for a fringe sport. Softball is trying to expand its base of fans and isn’t overreaching. A danger for any fringe sport is growing so fast that it can’t develop lasting interest among its recent fans. Fans need to connect with the sport, and if it looks like the sport is barely paying attention to recent fans as it looks for new ones, the recent ones are going to say “This sucks” and go watch something like lacrosse.

Speaking of which, why oh WHY would two fringe sports schedule major events against each other?! It’s hard enough for sports like lacrosse and softball – sports whose popularity is solid among a small portion of fans, but has potential to grow given the circumstances – to reach more fans. It’s even harder to do so when ESPN 2 or 8 or whatever bastard, red-headed ESPN knockoff has to choose to televise one sport or the other. The World Cup of Softball gets air time on ESPN 2 (thank you Jennie Finch’s breasts) but the World Lacrosse Championships is only aired on Canadian Sports TV.

But I digress.

For softball to grow internationally it will have to rise above games in which one team scores ten runs in the first inning, like the US did against China last night, and above one team pasting its first four opponents by a combined score of 43-1, again, like the US has done in this tournament. Look at basketball – as other countries got more competitive, basketball and the NBA got more popular abroad. A major step was taken toward that last year when Japan upset the US in the finals, 3-1.

For softball to grow in this country, a lively international game in which we have the potential to dominate might be necessary. If you look at other female sports that have achieved some popularity in this country – basketball and soccer being the best examples – that was the setting that promoted their growth. Americans love to win and we love to feel like we’ve earned it… which is why victory in World War II felt way more worth it than in the Spanish American War. Maybe legitimate moral justice had something to do with it also, but earning the W ranked up there too.

Of course, sex sells. If the sport wants to grow without an international field of competitors, maybe Jennie Finch and friends should sponsor a car wash. In the meantime, check out the US-Japan rematch on ESPN at 1 pm today in a battle of 4-0 teams.

Bermuda Undefeated in a Bye: Day 2 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

USA 25, England 5
Canada 12, Iroquois 8 (NOOOO!!!!!)
Australia 18, Japan 1
Wales 15, Hong Kong 0
Denmark 16, Spain 11
Czech Republic 23, New Zealand 4
Germany 14, South Korea 4
Ireland 15, Italy 8
Finland 9, Latvia 3

See the LaxPower Forum for more details.

Vegas Summer League: What happens there stays there

2006-07-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of people out there who have insisted for years that Vegas needs a pro sports team. The combination of sports, athletes, parties, gambling and strippers make it Eden for professional athletes, their entourages and their fans. Not to mention those people supporting their socially acceptable gambling problems with sports bets.

But for an abbreviated season, Las Vegas is home to professional basketball. It’s not exactly a minor league and it’s not exactly the NBA, it’s the NBA Vegas Summer League. It’s one of several summer leagues the NBA runs that FSC will be reviewing and features an interesting mix of legit NBA players, high draft picks and “Hey, I can beat that guy in HORSE!” guys.

Among the legit players trying to work on their games this summer are Sebastian Telfair, who wants to make a good impression with the Celtics now that Portland has traded him, and Shaun Livingston, who’s probably trying to replicate playing in college. The great thing about these guys is that they are alternately mailing it in and putting up legit numbers. Against some questionable talent (we’ll get there in a minute) Livingston has put up 4 in one game and 17 in another. Telfair can drop 5 or 26, depending on what he had for lunch in Caesar’s or what kind of day he had at the craps table. In the NBA this is understandable. Guys have off nights. In the summer league? That’s crap.

The highly touted rookies aren’t even hit or miss, they’re just “Eh.” Andrea Bargnani, the first pick in the draft, looks pretty good, averaging about 13 points and 4 rebounds. But other than a lanky, 7’ (wink wink, nudge nudge), kinda awkward 20-year old from Italy (is it too early for the nickname “Principessa?”) simply getting some playing time in America, is the Vegas League any good for him? Is it providing him a legit-NBA simulation? Do we learn anything about him as a big league player in Vegas?

And it’s the last group of players – my favorite group – that leads me to conclude that no, we learn nothing about players in the Vegas Summer League. What they do in Vegas doesn’t travel with them to the NBA.

The guys playing at the Y last week, the guys you were beating in shoot arounds… they make the Vegas League entertaining and fun, but they don’t make it a good NBA litmus test. There are guys like Casey Jacobsen, who in the NBA didn’t manage 6 points a game, but is averaging almost three times that in Vegas, solidifying Vegas’s well-earned reputation for keeping the things that happen there. There are also players like Rodney Billups, whose fantastic role as the brother of Chauncey Billups guaranteed his Vegas roster spot. Don’t worry, though, he’s earning it: 1.7 points in 9.3 minutes a game. Hmm, on second thought, that stat line will absolutely follow him to the NBA from Vegas… if he ever makes the big show.

But my favorite dude is Paul Shirley, a forward putting up “Better than that guy at the gym” numbers with the Timberwolves. He has an incredibly self-indulgent basketball diary with ESPN, and you can read all about his Vegas League experience here, here, here, and here. And you should read his past exploits running through the minor leagues of pro basketball. It’s worth it. It’s not that he’s a bad guy, he’s just so thoroughly miserable in a way that’s all his own fault.

The Vegas league is entertaining and rightfully has its proponents. It’s not the same caliber as the NBA, but there’s more talent than minor leagues like the ABA and the D-League. And there are more compelling subplots too. Nobody’s in the ABA because they’re someone’s brother. But don’t expect interesting back stories and talent to translate from Vegas to the NBA. What happens in the Vegas Summer League frequently curls up and dies there, or at least camps out at the craps table.

Bermuda Will Rise Again: Day 1 World Lacrosse Championship Scores

2006-07-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

Iroquois 13, England 10
Netherlands 12, South Korea 4
Ireland 19, Hong Kong 4
Finland 16, Spain 11
US 20, Australia 8
Canada 18, Japan 7
Scotland 13, Italy 12 (OT)
Germany 18, New Zealand 3
Denmark 10, Bermuda 6

The LaxPower forum has some more information.

The Religious Experience of Iroquois Lacrosse

2006-07-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

Writing about Native Americans and lacrosse… so much potential for litigation inducing humor – libel, slander, political incorrectness, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc. I’ll try to keep the law suits to a bare minimum.

But I can’t resist writing about the Iroquois (that's their flag in the upper left hand corner). I’m falling in love with this team. Seriously, anyone who isn’t rooting for them in any event – lacrosse, land wars, casinos, etc. – has no sense of justice.

The Iroquois won their first game, 13-10, against the British in this year’s World Lacrosse Championships. Talk about historic irony – the European power that did the most to bring down the Iroquois’s dominance in North America losing to the Iroquois. But that’s the way it should be. The Iroquois invented this game and if there’s any justice they’ll be playing the US (the sport’s dominant power) in the finals. Then get ready for a second helping of historic irony.

The Iroquois – also known as the Six Nations, after the nations that formed the Iroquois Confederacy – call themselves “Haudenosaunee,” or “People of the Longhouse.” I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what the Longhouse is, but I’m sure it kicks ass. (Just kidding – it’s symbolizes how the Six Nations live together as if in one house, a Native American version of “Can’t we all just get along.”) They largely occupied northern New York and Quebec, meaning that lacrosse saved them from being the first baseball fans to ignore the Expos and root for the Mets over the Yankees in order to spite New York City.

The Iroquois have a fascinating history in international sports, the only North American tribe that even competes in international games. The NCAA originally requested that the Iroquois put together a team for exhibition games against Canadian and American national champions. The Iroquois got pasted early on, but rebounded and eventually did so well that in 1990 the International Lacrosse Federation accepted them as a full member nation. Since then they have regularly been in the top five teams in the world. Suck on THAT, England and Spain!

Considering how violent lacrosse can be, it’s surprising that the Iroquois believe that it came to them from the Creator as a way of healing. The game is supposed to restore harmony between the people and the natural world, making it a holistic way of healing the body. Originally the field was very flexible – maybe 100 yards long, maybe 2 miles long. I guess it depended on how your legs were feeling that day. My favorite part, though, is that the game could be played with anywhere between 5 and a thousand players on each side.

One thousand players running around with sticks, knocking each other around over 2 miles? That’s not so much a sport as it is a minor war, right? Wasn’t this the fourth world war Albert Einstein predicted – “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Damn, the Iroquois completely redefined prescient.

The point of this is that playing against the Iroquois in lacrosse is like playing against Catholics in Eucharist. This is religion to them. This is important. We use fringe sports like lacrosse to build community, but in many ways the Iroquois are using lacrosse to rebuild community. It’s clear that they view with great pride their participation as a separate nation in the World Lacrosse Championships, as well they should. It represents their sovereignty and their unity as a people. Lacrosse – a fringe sport to center media but not to them – gives them that.

So it’s only right that they beat the crap out of England. And we should look out, they might be doing the same thing to the United States. But before then, they play Canada on Saturday, and we should all cheer them on to victory against Soviet Canuckistan.

American Sticks and Balls v. Everyone Else’s

2006-07-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Major League Lacrosse All-Star game was held in Boston last week and I was fortunate enough to have tickets. Under different circumstances that “fortunate” would have been more than a little sarcastic, but this game was damn near sold out. The announced crowd at Nickerson Field was 9,234 people, about capacity for the stadium and the largest crowd there ever.

Of course, let’s take this with a grain of salt. Nickerson Field –where MLL’s Boston Cannons play – was once the home of the Boston University football team. I say once the home because BU axed its football program back in 1997. So a crowd of 9,200 people probably represents a larger crowd than the last five seasons of BU football combined.

Still, let’s not quibble – 9,200 people for a pro lacrosse game is very cool. And while the crowd wasn’t that enthusiastic, it was knowledgeable. Everyone knew lacrosse. The kid behind me was no more than 13 and what does he want to do when he grows up? Be a lacrosse coach. Would that have happened – ever – just a few years ago? And he knew his stuff too – he was explaining the difference between the two point shot in the pros and the lack thereof in the college and high school games. Dude was fringe sports badass.

And it didn’t bother me that the crowd wasn’t that into it – this was an all-star game. Does anyone really get up for an all-star game?

In this case, the pretenses of it being anything but an exhibition game were dropped, as the game pitted the MLL all-stars against the US National team, which is prepping for the World Lacrosse Championships, starting today in London, Canada. I’m gonna discuss that in a little bit, but first I want to say a few things about the all-star game:

Most of the US team came from MLL ranks, making this All-Star game more like a “Best v. 2nd Best” game. Predictably, the Best dominated the 2nd Best, taking the game 18-10.
Mike Powell from the US team won the freestyle competition, basically a trick shot contest, with a wicked cool move. He did a jump-rope maneuver over his stick, held it behind his back as he flipped forward and then slingshotted the ball into goal. I tried finding a video of it on-line to no avail. If someone’s got it, let me know. In the meantime, Powell’s goal was a little like this kid, except Powell looked less like a tool.
I liked that MLL wanted to support breast cancer research, keep it up. But never again in pink helmets. Seriously. Just don’t. It looks dumb.
If you’re looking for a diary of the game, check out this one by Andy Corno and Charlie Lonergan.

Ok, having gotten that out of my system, here’s a quick preview of the Lacrosse World Championships.

For starters, in every way that the US does not dominate in soccer, we kick the shit out of nations in lacrosse. Seriously, check it out. We haven’t lost a game in the championships since 1978. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few close calls, though. Canada has gotten a little uppity, trying to expand on their hockey and curling dominance. The 1998 final between the two nations was decided by one goal in overtime.

The set up is similar to the World Cup – nations are assigned into divisions and play for position in the tournament. The big differences are that every team moves into the tournament (ranking is based on your division play) and even after teams lose, they keep playing. Every day of the tournament – even the last day – has a full schedule of games.

Other than the US, I recommend rooting for the Iroquois. They invented the game, calling it a medicinal and a “holistic process.” I can’t imagine what the average lifespan of an ordinary Iroquois was back in the day, but if getting beaten with lacrosse sticks is considered medicinal, it probably wasn’t that long. But credit where credit is due – they came up with a fantastic sport. Good going, fellas. Sorry about pillaging your land and people. How about we settle this on the field?

Really, though, I’m hoping for a Bermuda-Iroquois final… if only because that would rank as one of the strangest sports match-ups of all time.

However, that’s probably not going to happen. The tournament is set up so that the winner of the Blue Division – the division with powerhouses Canada and the US – gets a bye, with the second place blue team not having to face that team again until the finals. So unless there’s an upset (Come on Iroquois!), we’re looking at another Canada-US final. I’ll have more on this tournament in future posts, along with analysis of how the Lacrosse World Championships fit into fringe sports.

“The Can’t Quite Watch the WNBA All-Star Game” Diary of the WNBA All-Star Game

2006-07-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

Ok, I tried to tune in on time at the beginning, and I’ve tried paying attention, but it’s hard. The WNBA All-Star game is not exactly “my” game. I am clearly not in the target audience for this event, neither being nor having a daughter between the ages of 10 and 15. It’s easier to get up for other all star events, like Major League Lacrosse’s game or Nathan’s Famous.

Plus some aspects of this sport are just mean. Every time the announcer says “Pass by Bird” or “Shot by Bird” I find myself instinctively looking at the TV and thinking “Larry…?” But no, it’s Sue. It’s all a cruel joke.

I think part of the problem I’m having is that this is the tenth anniversary of the league, and I know nothing about it. This is a trend in fringe sports across the board – an effort to build credibility by trumpeting their own longevity to new fans. “The WNBA is ten years old… Nathan’s Famous has long been the premier eating event of competitive eating.” Like by bathing themselves in tradition of questionable worth, these sports will keep the casual fan coming back for more. I’m not sure that’s the best approach. Appealing to people’s desire to get in on the ground floor of something cool might be a better idea. That’s how fringe sports usually grow.

And crap, the first quarter’s over already. 28-27 East, which apparently is a big deal because they’re 0-6 in this game. Rise above the apathy, John.

Beginning of the second quarter, quote John Whisenant, the western coach: “All these players are nice.” Admittedly, that beats “All these players are out on bail,” which the Trailblazers’ coach ends up saying at least once a season.

This game isn’t that interesting. I’m sorry, I’m really trying here.

It’s halfway through the 2nd quarter and I just figured out the East is wearing white jerseys. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

It’s well known that the WNBA continues to exist because the NBA (and particularly David Stern) wills it alive, kind of like Dr. Frankenstein (“Frankenshteen!”) forcing the breath of life into a collection of corpse parts. I heard on the radio that the NBA helps the WNBA to the tune of $12 million a year. Wikipedia has a little more on the league’s finances, including the goal of profitability by 2007. Hmm… that’d be a big turn around in one year.

30 seconds in the half, 9-point East lead…same at half time, 49-40.

All-Decade team presentation at half time. I feel like they’re just trying to build credibility in a slightly artificial way. At the same time, they have been around for ten years. Even with the NBA propping them up, that’s pretty impressive. If tomorrow the NBA built a league around me it wouldn’t be around in two years, never mind ten. And the commemorative glass plates look nice. They’re not guaranteed to increase in value, but all the previous ones have.

Ok, I’m done making fun. I’m also done watching for the most part, but I’ll check back later.

Despite what this article may have indicated to this point, I’m actually in favor of the WNBA, so long as I don’t have to watch it… because someone wants to watch it and should. I was quite serious when I wrote I’m not in the target audience. The WNBA doesn’t exist for me. It exists for my little cousin Lauren (if she didn’t have the Weaver gene she might have been a more appropriate basketball height, but as things are she plays lacrosse) and my friends’ young daughters and possibly my future daughters.

Girls need sports. Every where they turn away from sports there are TV shows, magazines and movies showing them what they should look like, and more often than not what they don’t look like. Girls need sports to show them what they can do, not just what they can look like.

David Stern is a smart guy. Maybe he can turn the WNBA into a profitable entity in the next calendar year. I doubt it. But he is dead on about the importance of the WNBA. It might be the most socially important fringe sport there is.

Last 30 seconds of the game - worst-of-dunking contest. Lotta jumping, not a lotta hops. With the East set to win 98-82, the West begins having a shoot around, seeing who can dunk. Not pretty. Eventually, with 6 seconds left, Michelle Snow manages one – finger tips barely on the rim – becoming the second player in league history to dunk (Lisa Leslie was the first).

I know the dunking should be cool (sort of), but I would rather see the East break triple digits (or better yet, a triple over time game in the NBDL finals). Oh well, I guess chicks dig the dunk-ball.

FSC’s Belated Coverage of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

2006-07-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Although the way ESPN has been replaying the event you’d think they were MTV and Nathan’s was some sort of music award show featuring Jessica Alba making out with the Pussy Cat Dolls, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, Rhiannon and (just for good measure) the mom from “There’s Something About Raymond.” I gotta admit, though, I’m impressed by the sheer amount of screen time Bristol is devoting to the great tubed meat sport. The International Federation of Competitive Eating must be pretty thrilled. I can’t wait for the almost inevitable television coverage of Philadelphia’s Wing Bowl.

My favorite part of the event? The ridiculous hyperbolic announcing. My top three:

Kobayashi was called the second coming of Babe Ruth and also compared quite favorably to the Celtics and Yankees dynasties
Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas is – and I’m not making this up – “the Gloria Steinem of the hot dog eating galaxy.” (I don’t even know what that means.)

And my personal favorite,

“If [Joey] Chestnut can win this thing, it will change this nation.”

If you didn’t know any of those factoids, well, chances are you’re in the majority. But consider yourself educated now… or re-educated, as the sports Maoists like to say.

But there was more to love than announcers who just learned what the word “superlative” means. The introductions of the eaters were fantastic – part wrestling, part All-Star game, everyone got a little love from the commentators and crowd (speaking of which – with an announced 15,000 people attending, there were 60% more people there than at the Major League Lacrosse All Star game in Boston last week). I got to hear about all the records:

Asparagus: 6.25 pounds in 10 minutes, Joey Chestnut
Tamales: 41 tamales in 12 minutes, ChipBurger Simpson
Baked Beans, long course (huh?): 8.4 pounds in 2 minutes, Sonya Thomas
Buffet: 5.5 pounds of buffet food (nice detail, fellas) in 12 minutes, Crazy Legs Conti

Ok, enough with the making fun. Let’s shower the respect.

To its credit, ESPN actually did what I always slap sports media around for not doing – treating a fringe sport like a sport. The effort to connect Kobayashi to the greats of other sports was clearly an attempt to elevate competitive eating to the same level as more traditional and popular sports. The announcers were informative, clearly explaining the rules and past competitions to newer viewers. And although they said ridiculous over the top things… well, have you heard a sports broadcast recently? They’re all over the top. Hell, all media is over the top, but that’s another column for another site.

And I think I figured ESPN’s coverage of fringe sports that double as mild freak shows (World’s Strongest Man Competition and Highland Games, I’m looking in your direction): sports with inexpensive TV rights; cheap announcers that are happy to get screen time; massive efforts by those announcers to educate viewers, hoping they will come back to watch more; terrific exaggerated descriptions of the contestants and what they do; and lots of weird camera angles to highlight the weirdness of the sport. Seriously, rewatch Nathan’s Famous any one of the many times it’s rerun and you’ll see all of these facets. Then compare it a strong man airing at 2 am on ESPN 2 and the similarities are eerie.

From ESPN’s point of view, it makes a lot of sense: cheap content that might take off, spawning a large audience for little investment. It’s not the best way for fringe sports to gain a following, but it might work. Look at poker.

Oh, but can we please call a spade a spade – Kobyashi did NOT set a new record with 53.75 dogs eaten in 12 minutes. You don’t eat partial dogs. You eat whole dogs. That 3/4 crap was just to appease the crowd and give the folks watching at home a thrill. This sport is getting too corporate.

Eat This Fringe Media!

2006-07-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on April 24, 2006.)

Welcome to the zenith of this column, welcome to the height of fringe sports media. When I started this column, in the back of my mind, I think I always knew it would come to this. All of the sports media I’ve written about thus far have been media about legitimate sports. Not many people nationally are paying attention to basketball in Glendive, Montana or hockey in Bemidji, Minnesota, but no one denies that those are, indeed, sports. I’m taking this column to the next level. Today’s column looks at the media coverage of an event that some refer to as “The fastest growing sport in the country” while others refer to it as “Waiting for idiots to choke.” I’m talking about competitive eating.

Let’s begin with the existential question: is it a sport or isn’t it? A quick visit to dictionary.com reveals these possible definitions of “sport” as we want to use it:

1) Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively

2) An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively

3) An active pastime; recreation

I’m forced to think of it as a sport. It is a physical activity, otherwise how do you explain eating 7 quarter-pound butter sticks in FIVE MINUTES and some of the other records, the International Federation of Competitive Eating keeps track of. (Oh yeah, there’s an organized group. I’ll get to that in a minute). There are rules in the form of mandates and safety standards. As for competition… well, they don’t call it the International Federation of No-One’s-Keeping-Score Eating, do they?

More importantly, media looks at it as a sport, or at least such a highly entertaining contest that media will mimic sports coverage for it. The IFOCE sets media up to do that by maintaining its website like a legitimate sporting organization. They keep track of records, rankings, results, and even have numerous sponsors for their events, the same as golf tournaments and NASCAR races. The site also keeps track of news in the sport, including an overtime match to start off the Nathan’s Famous Circuit in Florida on the fifteenth of April. Crazy Legs Conti, the winner of that match, supposedly left shortly after his victory – and I’m not making this up – to run in the Boston Marathon. Stunning.

This self-inflicted credibility as a sport has paid off to a certain extent. During the height of IFOCE’s season – the summer, around the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on the fourth of July – a lot of media outlets cover the sport. Last year’s winner, Takeru Kobayashi, made Sportscenter and showed up on Page 2 at ESPN.com, as Brian Murphy called him the more dominant in his sport than either Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods. Really, though, Kobayashi’s greatest media exposure on ESPN was probably the Sportscenter commercial he appeared in last year in which he devoured an entire lunch at the ESPN cafeteria in less than a 30 second commercial.

The sport has also managed to make the big papers. The Washington Post took a look at the science of competitive eating, including one promoter’s witticism “Vomiting is a healthy way [for the body] to say you’ve gone over your limit.” Indeed. And last year at Thanksgiving, the New York Times ran an article, part of which looked at the Thanksgiving Invitational.

The Times also published a review last year of a documentary on Crazy Legs Conti, he of the eating and Boston Marathon fame. The documentary played in Manhattan art houses and was also seen on A&E. While chronicling Conti’s career in competitive eating (“A cross-discipline athlete is what everyone wants to be” he says while practicing butter eating in his apartment), the film also looks at the subculture of IFOCE.

And let’s not forget marketing the athlete, both by the sport does it and the athletes themselves. IFOCE has profiles for all of its top eaters, including Kobayashi, Conti, and Joey Chestnut, the rookie who roared onto the scene last year by placing third in the Nathan’s annual contest and coming in second in a Krystal hamburger qualifier. The winner of that qualifier was Sonya Thomas, the top ranked American eater. She cultivates her nickname, the Black Widow, by using it as part of her website and her signature. It’s an image, a brand, and she’s selling it. It implies a killer instinct, which she seems to have proven by the 27 world titles her site proclaims.

Don’t forget Kobayashi, either, who has branded and marketed himself more thoroughly by dominating the high profile hot dog eating contest (which drew around 10,000 fans last year) and appearing on ESPN. Jon Stewart even knew who he was the other night on the Daily Show.

In fact, the sport of competitive eating made an appearance this week on the Daily Show in the form of Ryan Nerz, author of Eat this Book, a look at a year on the competitive eating circuit. I would be lying if I said that Nerz and Stewart discussed the sport with any level of seriousness, but then again it’s the Daily Show. Having said that, you should take a look at the video on Comedy Central’s Motherload, it’s hysterical. Nerz, to his credit, though, was very knowledgeable and pushed, as much as anyone can on a fictional news show, for the sports credibility as a sport. He brought up and explained why little guys in the sport have an easier time than larger eaters (big guts restrict stomach expansion in the heat of eating battle).

So when you think about and compare coverage, center media takes competitive eating about as seriously as a sport as it does the Iditarod, giving it a fair dose of human interest attention with a smidge of legit coverage. Does this elevate competitive eating to the Iditarod’s level? No, of course not. There’s a huge difference between eating 11 pounds of cheesecake in 9 minutes and traveling more than 1,000 miles by dogsled in less than 2 weeks. But it’s interesting that in center media fringe sports that are so different can get equal attention.

Fringe Sports: Live in a Cubicle Near You!

2006-07-04T21:48:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on April 13, 2006.)

While reviewing the media coverage of Eastern League teams last week, I was struck by how many of them offer streaming online game broadcasts. Given how much revenue and exposure this has meant to center sports like the MLB and the NCAA basketball tournament, this could have huge implications in the long run for minor league teams and other fringe sports.

Two blog entries from a year ago introduce the possibilities: What’s On Tonight’s piece on the Ontario Hockey League’s streaming video offer from last spring (still available) and a piece by Thomas Hawke at Digital Connection that looks at how demand for minor league sports could make online broadcasting of them a thriving industry. Hawke’s piece is particularly instructive – although he sadly misremembers Dodgeball when he claims the championship game was broadcast on ESPN 6 and not ESPN 8, the Ocho. Even though Hawke seems to be unsure as to whether he’s writing about traditional broadcast television or streaming video, his argument that people who want to watch minor league baseball games have a much stronger urge to do so makes the industry of broadcasting fringe sports very promising.

As advertising and broadcasting – and really the entire population – become more niche oriented, that opens up a lot of broadcast possibilities for minor league sports teams and other fringe sports like lacrosse. Those small and specific audiences will find the programming they want; they won’t be satisfied with whatever center sports are on ESPN or MLBAM. Television may provide some of those possibilities, but online broadcasting seems to make more sense: there’s a lower start up cost, easier to arrange a portal for consumers to get the product, and teams (at least in theory) retain greater control.

The OHL streaming video offer that What’s On Tonight wrote about is a good example of this. According to the initial press release, OHL is partnering with Interactive Netcasting Systems through 2008 to broadcast online more than 2,000 OHL games. While the package was free during the end of last year’s regular season, 2005 playoff games were $8.95 a game and viewing packages were available for this season. Although it’s a little unclear on the website, regular season games are still free this season, but playoff prices have changed. Single games are $6.95, archived games (even regular season ones) are $3.95, a playoff series is $16.95, and the entire playoffs for $99.95.

Lacrosse is trying to do something similar with LaXcast, although the effort only started during last year’s collegiate championships and is still in its infancy. The LaXcast effort is much more ambitious than OHL’s league wide online broadcast package. OHL is composed of 20 teams, each with a schedule the league creates. LaXcast wants to cover three divisions of college lacrosse play, not to mention professional lacrosse. Currently, the online broadcasts and podcasts are relatively limited to weekly shows and occasional interviews. What will be interesting is how their game coverage picks up again when college tournaments start.

What the OHL does and LaXcast is attempting to do – organize a central location for online broadcasting and viewing – is the opposite of minor league baseball online broadcasting. Huge shock – professional baseball not centrally organizing well. Call 60 Minutes.

That doesn’t mean that the decentralized broadcasting isn’t good. Even a team like the Connecticut Defenders – in a town with no television stations – has an online radio broadcast contract with SportsJuice.com. SportsJuice is an interesting operation, a testament to fringe sports in online broadcasting. The website carries an extensive array of minor league, collegiate, and even amateur sports radio broadcasts. And some of these teams and leagues are OBSCURE. I write about fringe sports and live in New England, but I’ve never even heard of the New England Football League (“New England’s Premier Semi Pro Football League”), yet it appears to be thriving. Or at least it’s thriving enough to have A, AA, and AAA levels. Nonetheless, during the season, SportsJuice broadcasts the games of one of their teams, the Monadnock Marauders. They’re even from New Hampshire.

And it also shouldn’t be suggested that there aren’t some very solid efforts at centralizing the internet broadcasting of minor league baseball games. An offshoot of mlb.com, minorleaguebaseball.com, makes a very solid attempt at organizing information on all affiliated minor league teams and leagues: line ups, schedules, statistics, etc. The site also has an impressive array of online broadcasts of minor league games, including all AAA teams. The broadcasts include streaming video and streaming audio. Given the ties to MLB, I would imagine that those broadcasts are empowered by MLBAM, although that seems to be a well kept secret.

The NCAA has close ties with ESPN and CBS, but even it’s trying to get further into the online broadcasting game. The first example is obviously the online portal for viewing the NCAA basketball tournament this year. But the NCAA wants broadcasters to have the option of buying rights to other sports too. There is a form with guidelines that helps broadcasters get permission for internet broadcasts. The form also doubles as their radio permission request form. It will be interesting to see whether those two properties – traditional radio broadcast and online audio feed – are separated in the future.

But the really interesting part will be how these internet broadcasting venues funnel revenue to their respective sports and allow them to grow. In particular, I want to keep an eye on how LaXcast does in the next few years. Lacrosse is one of the fastest growing sports in the country and LaXcast has the potential to be very lucrative as well as influential in spreading lacrosse fandom. Fringe sports may have found a new way to grow that bucks the tradition of slow regional growth.

Naming Our Silences at Duke

2006-07-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on April 11, 2006.)

When an event or issue breaks in the national media, you have to ask yourself if it’s new or if it’s the culmination of something older. If it’s new, then the media coverage is well timed and deserving. If it’s old, then the media coverage is long overdue and there’s a sense of media trying to make up for lost time. When we read about Duke lacrosse and see television’s coverage of the alleged rape by the players, apparently refuted by the newly-released DNA evidence, we have to ask ourselves: is this new? Or did the camel’s back finally break?

What that camel is depends on your perspective and what you’re reading or watching. Is the camel relations between predominantly white colleges and predominantly African American towns? Gender issues? Socio-economic issues of unchallenged privilege? Each one has various champions in the media.

The Washington Post has chartered a course down the middle, alluding to each potential camel, but for the most part points to Duke’s ongoing struggle to exist in Durham, NC as the largest issue of contention. While the university has gone to great lengths to improve “town gown” relations, major disagreements and resentment continues. University expansion, cost of tuition, and socio-economic differences that result in many students “living in a cocoon” perpetuate the problems. Perhaps when the school’s tuition is $3,000 more than Durham’s mean household income it is almost impossible for relations not to be strained.

Jason Whitlock, in contrast, put the onus squarely on gender issues. He even went to great lengths to dismiss the idea that race is the issue, attempting to put to rest the notion that “Somebody would have been arrested” if the races of the alleged victim and rapists had been reversed. “Men behaving badly in groups… cuts across all social, economic and racial demographics.” He’d like to see Duke and other universities combat these attitudes by incorporating anti-sexual harassment and sexual discrimination into its core curriculum.

Greg Garber focuses on socio-economic issues, but does so through other issues like race and town gown concerns. He compares impressions of the lacrosse players to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe’s novel about unchecked privilege on college campuses. Wolfe writes that this privilege “was a Master Card that gave you carte blanche to assert yourself.” God knows that ESPN and Sportscenter have played this card as well, but through mostly the prism of race.

So amidst articles and stories that discuss broad societal problems playing themselves out at Duke, the smaller, more intimate stories are not being covered. Although that’s probably because the people involved – the students, players and the woman accusing them – don’t want to speak to the media. Sadly, that means that topics like Duke’s Final Four run not getting as much attention as it should and Duke’s reputation getting hurt receive column inches and air time. Given what’s at stake in this case – the players’ future, potential justice for one young woman – discussions of whether a very rich school continues to get rich are embarrassing.

Sites that cater to lacrosse experts and fans are treating the Duke story like any other. Laxpower has kept track of the university’s statements and news developments in a simple and direct webpage. E-lacrosse goes a step further and has a page dedicated to cataloging media coverage, including the nightly news in Durham. [Editor’s note: The John Weaver who owns E-lacrosse and the John Weaver who wrote this article are two different people.] Because of their directness, the coverage these sites provide is surprisingly effective, particularly compared to the sensationalist coverage of national sports media.

Given the amount of attention this story is receiving, it’s surprising the things that aren’t being said. No one is asking about Duke’s lacrosse recruiting class, which now former coach Mike Pressler announced two months ago, and which is still posted on Laxpower. What are those kids going to do? And what about the kids that are currently in the program? Now that the DNA evidence has come out and appears to support the lacrosse players, what do they do now? And what about the poor woman who’s accusing them? What about her kids? These are topics that have barely been broached, or not at all, and need to be discussed. They’re at the heart of the matter here. Perhaps people in the news are respecting the wishes of the students involved, but I doubt it.

E-lacrosse had a link to an editorial from the News & Observer, a paper covering Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham. It recounted what ministers at Duke’s chapel had to say recently in their sermons about what's happened on campus; it’s frequently forgotten that Duke was originally founded by Methodists and Quakers in the 1830s and 40s, and that influence still sits with the school. In a recent sermon, Dr. Samuel Wells, the dean of the chapel, called the recent past a time for “naming our silences.” When an event like this occurs and incites such anger on both sides, there are a lot silences to be named. This didn’t happen in a vacuum; this was not a new problem. This was the culmination of years of silent resentment and the camel’s back is finally broken.

It should be media’s job to help us name those silences so that we can identify them in our own communities and lives. This is no less true of sports media than any other. Sometimes that means media has to play catch up, showing all the leads and information that was available and could have pointed to this problem. But then media has to start reporting on how things can and should change.

By and large, this is exactly what happened with steroids in baseball. There was an identifiable problem that was missed en masse by national sports media, but when the story eventually broke sports media did its own version of soul searching and connected the pieces it should have over the years. Better later than never. Now, sports media has turned to talk of stiffer testing and legitimacy of steroid induced records for future generations.

I don’t get the impression that the same analysis is happening in this case. Sports media is focusing its attention on Duke, the lacrosse players, and how this situation represents something larger in America that is problematic. Race based town gown issues, gender issues and socio-economic issues similar to those in Durham are in many towns and schools in America. Through Duke, sports media is looking at these.

But that’s all that it’s doing. At this point sports media is essentially saying “This happened at Duke, here’s how. These issues are in other places too.” What does that mean? Where’s the conversation about how this can be prevented? Jason Whitlock started it by arguing for stronger anti-sexual harassment education in colleges, but that’s a lackluster response. Where are the broad ranging discussions about an educational system with such disparities between the people who have the keys to the ivory tower and those who do not? Where’s the talk about doing something for the kids living in Durham who might want to go to that school even though tuition is $3,000 more than their families make in a year?

Every great discussion needs a discussion leader. In these situations, for these types of cases, we look to media to name our silences and lead our discussions. But listing the problems as they exist now is only half of naming silences; the other half is how we fix them in the future. Otherwise those silences remain silent.

Top Twelve Minor League Media Coverage

2006-07-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on April 5, 2006.)

As the Red Sox and all that is good in the major leagues – as well as the Yankees and all that is bad – start to work out their spring training kinks in games that actually count, the next great players are doing it in smaller parks and on more buses. Minor league baseball, that great American fringe sports tradition, has started again. Since one of the strongest minor leagues in the country, the Eastern League, has a team in my beloved Granite State, I wanted to take a quick tour of the league, looking at what kind of media love each of the twelve gets.

Some of the results – like the closer a minor league team is to a major league team, the less media attention it gets – are obvious. Others – like at what point teams slip through media attention altogether – are not.

The Eastern League is one of the more venerable minor leagues around, having been founded in 1923. It’s an AA league, and all of its teams are affiliated with clubs in the majors, mostly from the AL and NL East. Hall of fame players that have come out of the Eastern League include Carlton Fisk, Warren Spahn, Nolan Ryan, Whitey Ford and Wade Boggs’ moustache (which nicely let Wade come along for the ride). Current players Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Roger Clemens (hey, who knows, maybe he is currently playing) are Eastern League alumni too. Young man, if you can play well in this league, you have a chance to be very good, indeed.

As such, it makes sense that it attracts a fair amount of attention from papers and television stations in the areas where they play. This is particularly true of teams – like the New Hampshire Fisher Cats – that play pretty far away from media centers and are given the chance to own the fringe sports media around them. But even in areas where Eastern League teams are not the main show in town, they manage a fair share of coverage. Generally. Here’s the best to worst of media coverage in the Eastern League:

1. Portland Seadogs

A beloved part of the Red Sox farm system, the Seadogs are covered very faithfully by the Portland Press Herald. The Herald provides the most satisfying coverage of any Eastern League team. Within the Seadogs section, there are stories about the depth of the Red Sox farm system and how it relates to the Seadogs, returning players that have a good shot of the big show this year, player and staff profiles, fan contests, and a kids page. In many ways, this is exactly what fringe sports coverage should do: commit resources to serious and passionate coverage of the local team, provide detailed information for fans, and allow them to connect with the team on multiple layers.

The Seadogs benefit from being in the fringes of Boston and the Red Sox in this situation. The affect of a minor league team that is too close to its major league club will be discussed later (see the Akron Aeros), but the Seadogs are far enough away from the Sox not to suffer from that problem. Instead, Portland is awash in the same general baseball fandom that all of New England experiences because Red Sox adoration is rampant among sports fans and sports media alike, regardless of how far from Boston they are. That passion rubs off on the media in Portland; that the team is connected to the Red Sox doesn’t hurt either.

2. New Britain Rock Cats

The media coverage of the Rock Cats, Double-A team of the Minnesota Twins, seems to be an anomaly. By virtue of being in the geographical No Man’s Land of baseball’s fiercest rivalry, New Britain gets inundated with Yankees and Red Sox coverage. But by being in the state that most readily supports the WNBA, the town also gets lots of women’s basketball coverage too. Despite that added competition, the Rock Cats get great media support. In addition to plenty of TV and radio coverage, The Herald of New Britain devotes plenty of column inches to the Rock Cats, even sending a correspondent to cover them in spring training in Fort Myers, Florida. The articles he wrote cover topics like how player movement in the Twins system benefits the Cats, how new players are adjusting, and how much the reporter – Ken Lipshez – enjoys spring training with the Cats. I think that could be part of the reason the Cats receive so much attention from The Herald – Lipshez enjoys writing about them. Probably, the fact that they won the Eastern League Championship recently helps, too.

3. Harrisburg Senators

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, it’s an obvious trend that minor league teams that are not close to major leagues cities receive better media coverage in their areas than teams that are close to major league cities. The Senators, affiliated with the Washington Nationals, benefit from this trend. I don’t think it’s possible to be further away from major league baseball while still in Pennsylvania than by being in Harrisburg. As a result, the coverage that the Patriot News dotes on the Senators is fantastic. The team receives its own section from the paper, listing all of the games and scores, as well as articles from the paper and even the webcast schedule. Devotion to the team has even led obscure items like the team’s new uniforms and the maintenance of Commerce Bank Park, where the Senators play, getting attention and column inches, in addition to pieces on the team’s actual games.

4. Trenton Thunder

Affiliated with the Yankees, the coverage of that the Trenton Times is similar to that of the Senators. The depth of coverage is the same – with the Times providing an article on players who have played well enough to be promoted yet haven’t, another on the depth of the team for the time being, and also webcasts – and online they appear to even use the same HTML design sheet.

Geographically, compared with cities like Portland, Maine and Glendive, Montana, Trenton doesn’t appear to be in the fringes. It’s too close to Philadelphia and New York. But New Jersey might be an ideological fringe. Fans, media and people in general from New Jersey have such a strong identity as part of Jersey, they create their own fringe. The Thunder appear to get a lot of media coverage as papers and TV stations attempt to tap into that identity.

5. New Hampshire Fisher Cats

The Fisher Cats, affiliated with the Blue Jays and winners of the 2004 Eastern League championship, are not the only game in town in New Hampshire in the summers. For such a small state, there’s a lively minor and college summer league presence, another indication of how popular baseball is in the region thanks to the Red Sox. Since their arrival in 2004, though, the Fisher Cats have dominated the New Hampshire baseball scene. The Union Leader provides the team with its own section and publishes legitimate analysis of the team, including the battle to be the ace of the club and how the new manager is adjusting to his personnel and surroundings.

6. Erie Seawolves

Like the Harrisburg Senators, the Erie Seawolves (Seriously, guys – you’re on a lake, not a sea; it’s possible to be too cute with your mascot name.) benefit from being no where near a major league city. The Erie Times-News provides decent coverage, but Erie also seems to receive slightly better television coverage than other teams in the Eastern League. However, that could largely be due to the genuine fear during the last off-season that the Seawolves would move. The local NBC affiliate covered the story and discussed the $4 million dollar bond the city passed for improvements the Wolves’ park and the potential that the Tigers, the club’s parent team, might want the team closer to Detroit.

7. Altoona Curve

I think the Curve just barely escapes being too close to is parent club. Affiliated with the Pittsburgh Pirates, the team is almost 100 miles away from Pittsburgh and is probably just far enough away to be in the geographic fringe of that media market. As such they get to own the fringe media around them. The Altoona Mirror has a number of excellent articles covering the Curve, leading up to opening day. Those pieces included a look at a rising star pitcher coming out of Single-A, a discussion of this year’s and last year’s opening day pitcher, and late changes in the roster due to shifts in the teams further up in the system.

8. Binghamton Mets

The Binghamton Mets don’t have to worry any major league baseball interfering with their media coverage. They’re in the middle of New York – safely away from their MLB team, the Mets (I know, clever, right?) – competing only with other Binghamton minor league teams. Their coverage reflects a town that is attached to the team and cares about them as a team in and of themselves, not in relation to the Mets. One article in the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin discusses the team’s bright new season. Another happily lists facts from team history in preparation for this year’s opening game. That the team sits in eighth place out of twelve says more about the media coverage of the teams above it than the media coverage it receives.

9. Connecticut Defenders

The Defenders – located in Norwich, Connecticut and affiliated with the San Francisco Giants – face some problems pretty unique to Connecticut media, the same ones that I thought should flummox the New Britain Rock Cats. Unfortunately, the Defenders have not been able to rally local media support the way the Cats have. In the last week, the Norwich Bulletin has published more stories about women’s basketball than the Defenders’ new season. Part of that could be due to the Defenders’ lackluster ticket sales, which were the lowest last season among all the Eastern League teams, when the team was known as the Norwich Navigators. According to the paper, though, team management is hopeful that the rebranding of the club as “Connecticut’s hometown team” will boost attendance and interest. Seems pretty doubtful to me, but we’ll see.

10. Reading Phillies

Three guesses as to which club the Phillies are affiliated with, and the first two don’t count. The team is covered by the Reading Eagle, which seems to be a little too close to Philadelphia. Most of the baseball coverage is devoted to the Phillies, the big league team, not the minor league one. There’s some coverage of the Reading Phillies, but I get the impression that the resources of the paper are spread pretty thin. Much of their coverage for all sports is purchased from the AP. Reading appears to be in the position of having to cover local sports while competing against nearby major league teams, but doesn’t have a large enough readership to devote more resources to its local sports coverage. The area also supports several minor league hockey teams, and I would be curious to come back next winter during the hockey season to see what the paper’s coverage of those teams is like. Maybe baseball is simply a second tier sport in the area.

11. Akron Aeros

The Aeros suffer the most from proximity to a major league team, the Indians, which is also the team they’re affiliated with. In some ways, this probably adds to the problem of proximity. Any minor league team, particularly one in a MLB farm system, deals with the problem of being the pre-game show.

A good portion of the fans that follow minor league teams do so in order to find out how good their favorite major league team will be in a few years. This is only exacerbated when the minor and major league teams are so close geographically, because fans can easily follow the players as they progress through the system. As a result, they root for the system and major league club more than the minor league team. Media in the area, feeding into what fans are looking for, treats the minor league team that way too.

In contrast, a minor league team that’s located on the other side of the country from their major league parent club is more likely to attract fans that follow the minor league team, not the major league team. Media responds to that and provides coverage accordingly. A case in point is the Manchester Monarchs, the AHL affiliate of the LA Kings. The Monarchs have their own fans and media coverage that are independent of the Kings. That would be less true if their players got called up to Boston, although the Bruins couldn’t skate their way out of a paper bag this year, so maybe not.

Anyway, the Aeros’ media coverage perfectly illustrates this point. The Akron Beacon Journal is the paper of record in Akron, and I’m sure it does a fine job of reporting current events in the area. But for sports, it spends much more time and energy covering the Indians than the Aeros, as is made obvious by its Aeros page. This is particularly true given that the stations covering Akron, are predominantly Cleveland stations, like WKYC. WKYC managed to report on the Aeros getting a new manager, but it was clearly in the context of how it would affect the Indians organization, not the Aeros.

12. Bowie Baysox

Poor Bowie Baysox. They play in a town that is very concerned about local affairs, with a weekly newspaper, the Bowie Blade(I dare you to find a cleverer name for a local paper) providing community updates. There’s also a daily, The Bowie Star whose sports section does an amazing job chronicling the local high school teams. It even does a great job with university sports. But the paper is hardly attached at all to its minor league baseball team, providing scant resources for its coverage.

It seems like the town is just big enough to have a minor league baseball team, but just a little too small to turn away from high school and college sports to pay much attention to it. Further complicating this is Bowie’s proximity to both Washington and Baltimore, whose pro sports teams steal a lot of the fans that might otherwise have gone to the Baysox. In particular the Baysox seem to suffer from the same problem as the Aeros, as the Bowie’s parent club, the Orioles, are just up the road. Strangely, I think the best coverage of the team comes from the Washington Freaking Post, which seems to have almost accidentally included the team in its sports pages.

The media coverage of the Eastern League indicates a few things that are important for future minor league teams and fringe media to take note of. First, teams in markets with fewer pro teams – minor or big league – receive more media coverage. That means that future teams shouldn’t shy away from markets that are away from media centers. The fringes can support teams too.

Second, areas that have an innate passion for the sport better support teams in that sport. Even though New Hampshire and Maine are small markets, particularly compared to the other places that have Eastern League teams, the Seadogs and the Fisher Cats get lots of press because New England loves baseball. Minor league teams would do well to remember those two fringe media rules.

And while this isn't a fringe media rule, I wouldn't mind seeing media for the other eleven teams ride the Trenton Thunder pretty hard. I have no doubt that the players and coaches are nice guys who play the game right. But some of them will eventually wear Yankees uniforms. Yes, the Yankees. When Jesus hates you, I'm not sure that even the fringe media can help.

Minor League Coverage from Thin Air

2006-07-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on March 29, 2006.)

The NBA is attempting to do something very hard: create a minor league system out of thin air. Since 2001, the NBA Developmental League (stuck with the unfortunate nickname, “the D-League”) has acted as a training ground for NBA talent… sort of. Right now it’s more of a neo-minor league, with the potential to be an outright farm system in the future. But if there’s one thing that’s harder than creating a minor league out of thin air, it’s creating media coverage for a minor league out of thin air. If the D-League (can you bring your A-game to the D-League?) is going to succeed, it will need local media coverage.

First, some background on the D-League. Although initially it was just a straight up minor league run by the NBA, following the last collective bargaining agreement, the D-League adopted an interesting set up that mirrors minor league baseball in some ways. There are eight teams, and each team is affiliated with three or four NBA clubs. Any club may assign any player to play in the D-League as long as the player has zero or one year of service at the time of assignment. No player may be given more than three assignments during any season, but there is no minimum or maximum assignment length. No team can assign more than two players at one time.

Some, like George Karl, think the D-League is a great idea; rookies should get broken in to professional basketball by playing in 5,000-seat gyms and traveling by bus. Others worry about sending their young players to teams over which they exercise no control, which is a legitimate concern. Unlike minor league baseball, NBA teams do not have extensive control over D-League teams. Major League teams are able to exercise system wide control over their farm teams; players in the Red Sox’s system are taught with an eye on what it’s like to play with the Green Monster.

D-League coaches are sensitive to this. Sam Vincent, coach of the first place Fort Worth Flyers, said at the beginning of the season that he intended to visit each team the Flyers are affiliated with and learn their systems so that he can teach it to their players. That’s fine, but it’s not the same as controlling the strategy for an entire system of teams or even the playing time of particular players, as is done in Major League Baseball. That can only be accomplished if there is one D-League team for every NBA team, which NBA Commissioner David Stern foresees long term.

However, that’s an NBA strategy argument and this is a fringe media column. I’m more interested in how the D-League is received and covered in the small markets where teams are located.

Let’s take a look at the Flyers. The team is new this season, and when the Fort Worth Business Press announced its creation last August, it proudly trumpeted the fact that when play began, Fort Worth would be the home of three minor league teams in three different sports. The article also pointed out that tickets are as low as $8 a person, meaning that a family of four can go to a game for $60 with concessions, although that seems like a somewhat dishonestly low figure. Still it’s a lot cheaper than the comparable package at an NBA game.

However now, during the regular season, the newspaper coverage seems a little thin. The Star-Telegram, reporting on the Fort Worth area since 1906, doesn’t give the team much attention. True, this week they had a nice human interest story on a Dallas Mavericks player who had been sent down after not adjusting well after coming to the NBA from Russia. Also, a recent wire report noted that Flyers’ Ime Udoka had been named to the 2005-06 D-League first team. But beyond that the coverage is sparse. In contrast, the paper has an entire section devoted to the Brahmas, the local minor league hockey team. Welcome to Fort Worth, Texas – the only Canadian sports city in America.

In fairness to the Star-Telegram, the Flyers are new, and given the D-League’s volatility since its inception (teams have shifted around and folded, as the number of teams has hovered between 6 and 8) the paper may have decided to wait a season or two before investing in its coverage. That being said, the team would do better with more local coverage.

But Fort Worth is awfully close to Dallas (seventh largest media market in the nation, according to Nielsen), so maybe we should look at another market to see how fringe media really responds to the D-League. Let’s try Fayetteville, North Carolina, relatively close to Raleigh-Durham, the 29th largest media market, and home to the Fayetteville Patriots. The Patriots should make an interesting comparison to the Flyers because not only are they in a much smaller market, but they’re also on the opposite end of the standings: eighth and last in the D-League.

Despite that they receive much better coverage than the Flyers from local press. Fayetteville Online (an online version of the Fayetteville Observer) gives the team a lot of attention. Almost every game warrants a story, regardless of whether it’s a win or a loss. That’s the kind of coverage that fringe sports need from fringe media in order to grow.

Fringe sports also benefit from local ownership with ties to that area. Most minor league sports realize this to one degree or another, and that’s one way minor league teams are able to survive in the fringes. The Continental Basketball Association operated this way for decades. To its credit, the NBA seems to recognize this, as it owns only two of the eight teams and is trying to sell those as well.

Those numbers are a little suspect, though. Four of those teams – Fort Worth, Albuquerque, Austin and Tulsa – are owned by David Kahn, former general manager of the Indiana Pacers, and his Southwest Basketball, LLC. Granted, the company is based in Austin and seems well rooted in that area (although Albuquerque sticks out), but it doesn’t seem healthy for the sport if one company owns half the league. That doesn’t promote the fans in each area to feel more connected to its team and management.

But if you’re looking for a public face to Southwest Basketball, LLC, look no further than Andre Agassi, who joined the ownership group last August. Of course, he lives in Las Vegas, so I don’t think that helps fans in Texas or New Mexico.

Perhaps partly because of the ownership issues, the online community’s attention has been duly noted but not even close to passionate. There are some blogs and discussion boards related to the league, usually related to how the D-League affects universities and NBA teams. But the writing is perfunctory; there’s none of the passion that you find in college hockey fan forums or lacrosse fan blogs.

That doesn’t bother me that much right now. The league is still pretty young and definitely still settling in. It will take several years of being in the same place for D-League teams to develop fan followings willing to devote hours of passion to watching, detailing and bemoaning the status of their teams. In the mean time, though, the league has at least been getting some decent attention from national publications like the New York Times, which it wouldn’t have gotten had it not been affiliated with the NBA.

The success of the D-League, however, will not depend on media outlets like the Times paying attention to it. Local media outfits like the Fort Worth Business Press, Star-Telegram and Fayatteville Online will have to cover the teams in their cities, and fans will have to feel connected to the institutions, players, and management of those teams. The D-League is like any other minor league – it needs to be truly connected to the fringes where it plays in order to be successful. When that happens, minor league teams thrive and sports fans in the fringes reap the benefits.

And right now, the D-League and other basketball minor leagues like the CBA, USBL and ABA are providing a quality product to sports fans away from media centers. Look at the D-League scoreboard and the points-per-game that D-League teams are putting up. These guys break 100 points regularly. The NBA frequently isn’t that entertaining.

There’s talent too, as evidenced by the number of first round picks that have played or are playing there, like Marcus Fizer (selected by the Bulls) and Julius Hodge (selected by Denver). Players are moving back and forth between the D-League and the NBA regularly now, which the NBA charts religiously in order to push its promotional vision for the D-League that “The NBA Dream starts here.” To a certain degree that’s true. Some of the guys you watch at a D-League game could be playing with the big boys in a couple weeks… or at least keeping the 12th seat on the bench warm for a NBA team in a couple weeks. So it’s an NBA dream of sorts.

Admittedly, this relationship with the NBA gives the D-League a leg up on its minor league competitors. But in general, D-League teams aren’t in the same cities as teams from the other minor leagues and so don’t compete with them directly. Some may argue that money is an issue, as the D-League can rely on the NBA to bail it out of financial trouble. But remember, these teams are privately owned or will be soon, even if en masse. Andre Agassi is a smart guy. If his four D-League teams are losing him money he’ll dump them faster than Brooke Shields. D-League teams still have to respect the fact that they’re in smaller markets and must connect with those fans. That some of their players may go to a team 1,000 miles away tomorrow doesn’t change that. Just ask any successful minor league basketball team.

For a moment, though, let’s appreciate the brilliance of David Stern. The NBA is a solid national sports commodity; it’s not the NFL, but it does well. However, Stern stopped focusing on that level years ago. He’s thinking bigger, globally, where basketball is topped only by soccer for international popularity. He openly talks about expansion into Europe and possibly beyond, while at the same time slowly expanding into smaller fringe markets in the United States. In twenty years, the NBA could have a larger international presence than the United Nations, but we’d be able to plug into that network by walking down the street to our local 5,000 seat gym for a D-League game.

Fringe media that covers a local team in that network, by extension, could potentially cover the entire network, linking fringe media with national and international media in a way that’s never happened before. That would give fringe media a lot to write about and hopefully inspire some passionate D-League fans. Hopefully, though, by that point some writer in Fayatteville or Fort Worth or somewhere will have come up with a better name than the D-League. Seriously, David, for a smart guy, you get an F for naming.

Seriously - Don't Mess with the NCAAs

2006-07-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on March 24, 2006.)

Last Friday I was in the Sports Depot in Boston, watching the Georgetown Hoyas sneak past Northern Iowa. Of the seventy-two plasma televisions in the bar, not a single one was tuned in to the Boston College-Boston University NCAA hockey match. Not one. Arguably the most heated rivalry in college hockey, played that night in Boston’s Garden, with the Hockey East title and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament on the line… and it’s not on a single TV in a Boston sports bar. And that’s when it occurred to me – I can fix college hockey, and a lot of other fringe sports as well.

In some ways, the lack of television time is understandable: the bar was full of basketball fans from schools of all pedigrees and reputations. What do they care about NCAA hockey? But come on! There had to be somebody in that place (besides me) who cared about that game, which BU eventually won. This was the height of NCAA hockey championship weekend. Hockey East is one of the major conferences, arguably the most talented in the nation and certainly on the east coast. This game was a big deal. And no one in that bar cared?

I don't think that's what it was. Rather, I think it speaks to a bigger problem that NCAA hockey and other fringe sports have: competition from center sports. And here’s my friendly advice to those sports: don’t mess with the NCAA tournament. Or the World Series. Or the All-Star game. Or the Super Bowl… for the love of God, don’t mess with the Super Bowl. You’re only going to get yourself hurt.

This is just a numerical fact. If you want your sport to grow, you need to attract new fans. And the best time to attract new fans is when there’s nothing else to distract them. This was a problem that a number of people noticed in the World Baseball Classic. Sure it was scheduled during a portion of the calendar year when it wouldn’t interfere with baseball's regular season, but in doing so it ran smack into the pick n’ roll of the NCAAs, severely decreasing its potential media exposure (of course maybe this was part of conspiracy to blame any initial failures on local media outlets…).

College hockey does the same thing, except it does it every mother-loving year. And honestly, the NCAA hockey tournament is only hurting itself by going head to head against the NCAA basketball tournament.

How much is it hurting itself? Well, I don’t have an exact answer for that, but there are a few ways to guestimate. First, let’s look at the internet. Try googling “ncaa basketball tournament” (it’s ok I’ve already done it for you). There are over 1.7 million results. Now try googling “ncaa hockey tournament” (again, I’ve taken care of it). There are over 17,000 results. That means that by a factor of one hundred there is greater web coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament than there is of the NCAA hockey tournament.

What about television? Well, NCAA basketball is doing just fine. It attracted 10.78 million viewers nation wide last week during the first night (8-11 pm) of tournament coverage, and last year over 45 million people watched all or part of the championship game between UNC and Illinois. In contrast, the NCAA hockey Frozen Four achieved its highest rating ever in 2002 when it 3.27 million people watched. Of course, that was the total for 3 games over 2 days.

The lesson here? When people are spending all their time writing on the internet about another sport or watching another sport on TV, it’s very hard for them to squeeze your sport in. Give them time to care.

It also helps if people have more time and options to gamble on your sport. Go google “ncaa hockey gambling” and “ncaa basketball gambling”. I didn’t think any internet search with word gambling in it could return fewer than 100 hits, but I was wrong. “NCAA hockey gambling” brings in 58. Fifty-freaking-eight. “NCAA basketball gambling”? Thirty thousand eight hundred. I’m not saying that arranging for more convenient gambling would guarantee a greater fan following for college hockey, but it couldn’t hurt.

That’s because a key problem of all fringe sports, to one extent or another, is access to a larger audience. Geographic fringe sports have the hardest time getting to a larger audience. It’s hard for sports in Bemidji, Minnesota to get New York City’s attention. But topical fringe sports like college hockey can make some scheduling adjustments to appeal to a broader audience.

Media abhors a vacuum and can be manipulated accordingly. If college hockey wanted to increase its audience and start to straddle the line between fringe and center media, it should move its schedule forward one month, starting their exhibition season in September instead of October and their regular season in October instead of November.

How does this help or fix college hockey? The sport still has to face college basketball, and now competes with the entirety of the college football season, not to mention the World Series and the Super Bowl. How could this possibly be a good thing?

Here’s how. College hockey already competes against college football, the Super Bowl and college basketball. Adding the World Series isn’t great, but it’s doable. What this schedule avoids is going head to head against the NCAA tournament, the number one impediment (besides, well, being hockey) to increasing its popularity. Those other sports don’t compete with college hockey directly, just in the round about way that sports compete with each other.

The NCAA basketball tournament and conference championships are different. Right when college hockey is getting ramped up, right when rivalries are becoming heated again, right when the home-and-homes matter that much more, right when NCAA hockey bracketology should be most popular… college basketball comes in and shoots its iced brother in the foot. By moving one month sooner in the calendar, the heart of college hockey hits the slump of college basketball, the end of the regular season. I like this match up.

This year the college hockey’s championship game is scheduled on Saturday, April 8th; it probably would have been on the 1st, but that competes with the Final Four, so the Frozen Four weekend will be given a momentum killing two-week break in between the tournament’s first weekend and Frozen Four championship weekend. If this year’s Frozen Four had been played on my schedule, the championship game would have been held on March 4th, and its stiffest television competition would have been #10 Illinois at #23 Michigan State.

Don’t get me wrong – that’s still a big hill to climb for a fringe sport. But it’s a lot better than trying to compete with the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, which is what college hockey does this weekend. As it is, this year’s championship game is during MLB's opening weekend. If they’re still playing, BC and BU will be ignored in Boston and around the country as the Red Sox and the other 29 teams prepare to take the field.

Media abhors a vacuum. By scheduling itself around more popular sports, college hockey can take advantage of that. Had that happened this year, we probably would have heard more about everyone’s favorite mid-major hockey team, Bemidji State University, which won the first automatic bid in this year’s tournament by besting Niagra for the College Hockey America conference championship. The tournament only takes 16 teams, and according to US College Hockey Online Bemidji is only ranked 28th, the weakest of the field. As such they’ll face the top seed, Wisconsin. That’s the equal of any story on Wichita State or George Mason.

And I would love to see my UNH Wildcats get some more national love. At the beginning of March, they were left for dead, but stormed through the month and much of Hockey East to show up as an at-large bid in the tournament. Had that happened throughout February instead of March, they would have been on Sports Center.

Fringe sports need all the help they can get if they want to grow. Sure, some of the tournament games will be played on ESPN's bastard red headed step children and the championship game will air on ESPN Proper, but that’s basically throwing a bone to college hockey. College hockey has all the support it needs from fringe media to make the jump to center media, it just needs to schedule itself better. That way the next pivotal BC-BU game won’t go unnoticed in Boston. Seriously, fellas – leave the NCAA tournament alone.

World Baseball Conspiracy Theory

2006-07-04T21:06:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on March 17, 2006.)

So how do you prefer your conspiracy theories – light (David Stern freezing the Knicks’ lottery envelopes so they get Patrick Ewing) or dark (LBJ expediting JFK’s earthly exit)? I enjoy mine international and sporty – like the World Baseball Classic. Don’t get me wrong, the WBC is a huge deal. In 23 years this is going to be a major event in center media and across the world. But today, in this country, we are watching a fringe media event in center media clothing.

How do I know this? Let’s begin by looking at the staff. My mom is a teacher, and she knows that any facility is only as good as the staff, the custodians and secretaries. In a baseball game, that equals the umpires – they’re not going to be noticed until something goes horribly wrong and then they’re everywhere. Even before the WBC got started, umpiring was an issue, as the Washington Post put it: “While many of the best players are getting ready for the first World Baseball Classic, it appears the top umpires won’t be calling the tournament.”

This was made official when it was announced that the umpire crews would be mostly minor league officials. That still allowed for 11 of the 16 countries to be represented by umpires in the tournament, in the interest of fairness (although try telling that to Japan). Nonetheless, is it possible to have big time baseball without big time officials to call the games. Would the tag-off call during the US-Japan game – the call that decided the game – have been different had there been major league refs? Who knows, but if the umpiring had been treated as a major event and not something that could be pawned off to the second string we wouldn’t be asking that question. And I’m not the only one who noticed.

On top of that, there is far too much back-patting and congratulating going on for my taste. The people who are speaking and writing about the WBC are so on-message it’s like Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee decided to freelance for MLB.

Sure, Bud Selig is all aglow, which makes sense as this was his brain child. But he also tried to spin an All-Star game that ended in a tie as a good thing, so his opinion can’t be accepted as impartial (and come on, he’s Bud Selig). ESPN’s columnists have their marching orders too. Eric Neal is plugging it. So is Wayne Drehs. And Jayson Starks. Even the players are raving about it. “It’s the best baseball experience of my life,” crowed Chipper Jones. No event is as good as they make it out to be in its first go round. This has to be a conspiracy.

Particularly since one of MLB’s partners bailed before the games even began. FOX seemingly took one look at the games and decided it wanted no part of them, leaving the entire package to ESPN and her bastard red headed step children. ESPN and ESPN 2 will air 16 games live, but ESPN Deportes is airing all 39 games. Granted, the strength and popularity of the Latin teams among Spanish speaking audiences in the US validates ESPN’s decision to air all the games in Spanish. But showing only 16 games on the mainstays of ESPN indicates that the powers that be in Bristol clearly realize the fringe nature of this programming.

And speaking of programming, why did ESPN arrange the rampant sale of syndication rights? In addition to the ESPN family of channels, the World Baseball Classic will be broadcast on 52 (fifty-two!) independent televisions stations and local cable providers. Now we’re getting into some mighty strange fringe sports media terrain.

Even stranger, those stations are picking up the ESPN feed, they’re not providing their own announcers. And some stations like KPHO in Phoenix are airing the games live while ESPN is airing them on tape delay. ESPN is basically feeding content to their ma-and-pa competitors and letting them show it first. It’s like Wal-Mart selling limited edition toys – toys that were only going to sold at Wal-Mart – and agreeing to divert shipments as needed to local toy stores in the area before the local Wal-Mart puts them on shelves.

What gives? Bristol must have gotten a really good price, right?

Maybe, it’s hard to say. According to Rod Hall, the general manager of KQUP in Spokane, Washington, ESPN used the airing rights to barter. That’s right, in this era of credit cards, PayPal and on-line banking, ESPN resorted to a form of commerce whose hey day passed some 400-500 years ago. In return for the airing rights to the WBC, ESPN received half of the ad time during each game’s broadcast.

Was this a good deal for ESPN? I wouldn’t think so, as it greatly diminishes Bristol’s broadcast monopoly during the tournament. This is particularly relevant when you actually look at some of the stations and markets where ESPN sold syndication rights and their spots in the Nielsen list of media markets: KNWS/KLDT and KTRK in Houston (the 10th largest media market), KGO-DT and KBWB in San Francisco (6th), WPHL in Philadelphia (4th), WWOR in New York City (1st), not to mention Verizon Cable, which operates in Washington, DC (8th), Dallas-Fort Worth (7th), Boston (5th), and Los Angeles (2nd).

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 8 of the 10 largest media markets in the country, accounting for almost a quarter of the people in America. And that’s not counting the other 45 stations and cable providers, many of which operate in sizeable cities like Phoenix (14th) and Denver (18th).

Before going any further, it’s important to remember the local stations that are getting these syndication rights and the people watching on them. I think this arrangement works out great for them, assuming the syndication deals are similar to KQUP’s in Spokane. So many sports that we follow passionately are, for all intents and purposes, at the whim of a national organization and media: the NFL, MLB, the NBA, etc. Even minor league baseball and hockey teams are frequently associated with pro teams that have those national ties. Putting more sports on local television stations empowers local sports fans and places them closer to the teams and sports they care so much about. This should be encouraged.

This arrangement is beneficial for fringe media in general, never mind just sports media. A lot of these stations are struggling or recovering UPN affiliates in fringe or smaller markets. KQUP is just such a station. According to Hall, there were only about 6 UPN shows that did well in their time slots, and with UPN’s upcoming change, the station decided to drop its association with the network early. It’s now gathering a stable of syndicated sports broadcasting rights and hoping to rebuild that way. In addition to the WBC – which Hall expects to do very well, although he has not yet seen official ratings – KQUP holds the rights to the Seattle Sonics and the Spokane Shock of Arena Football 2. The WBC helps stations like KQUP a lot by providing them reasonably priced but popular content. Anything that helps out local stations that way can't be all bad.

But we’re still left to wonder why ESPN and the World Baseball Classic are airing the games this way. Maybe there’s a legitimate financial interest in doing it this way. Maybe ESPN makes more money selling off the syndication rights than maintaining their monopoly. That’s possible. That probably means Bristol will do the same thing with Monday Night Football in the fall, right?

Of course not, that would be stupid. Breathtakingly dumb, actually. Which is why it also escapes logic that they would do it for the WBC.

There's a counter argument that goes ESPN was worried about losing money on these games and so they farmed out the broadcast rights in order to minimize their loss potential (although given the super ESPN 2 ratings, that probably isn't a concern anymore). However, that leads to the conclusion that ESPN was really worried about this tournament and wanted to hedge its bets.

And here’s the conspiracy, I think. The WBC has been a fringe media event wrapped in the trappings of center media because Bud Selig, ESPN and MLB didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. There was a good chance these games could have failed if some things had broken badly for them: the stars had stayed off the teams, fans didn’t show up, the match ups weren’t compelling, there were no interesting story lines, etc.

And if things had gone really badly, Bud and company would have needed a scapegoat. Enter fringe media.

By putting these games on as if they were a fringe event, there was an automatic shield from criticism that they were failures: “No major league umps? Who cares, we’ll get minor league umps. This is just the first World Baseball Classic. Look, we sold the rights to these games for a song to local stations, you can’t expect the tournament coverage to run smoothly yet. The folks up in Fargo didn't do the tournament right. Don’t worry, we’ll do better in 2009.”

At the same time, they wanted this to be a success, desperately. Hence ESPN broadcasting the games (although a network like FOX would have been nice), the on-message crowing from Selig, Bristol’s talking heads and the players. But if the tournament didn’t work out, that’s ok too – there was already someone to blame, the local stations carrying the games.

Fringe media and local television stations have a hard enough time competing with national media outlets without getting set up by national media outlets. I’m thrilled that the WBC has been so successful for the sport and the local stations carrying the games. I think that will continue even though the US has been eliminated. And I hope that in 2009 when MLB knows that this will be a popular center event, they’ll still sell the syndication rights to local stations. But I doubt it. They’ll have served their purpose by then.

I Did Her, Rod: An Alaskan Adventure

2006-07-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on March 9, 2006.)

I challenge you to find a name with more double entendre potential than the Iditarod. You can’t do it. “I did her, Rod.” “I did her rod.” So wonderful. As is the Iditarod, which is as quirky an event as this column has ever covered. It’s part fringe sports uber event, part bizarre Alaskan spectacle. But that’s not unlike center media sports events: the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Daytona 500, etc. They all get consumed by media, either fringe or center.

Before beginning in earnest, here’s a quick Iditarod primer, courtesy of the official site. The essentials are this: teams of 12-16 dogs with a musher travel from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska over 10 to 17 days, a distance of 1150 miles. This version of the race has been run since 1973, when it was begun as a commemoration of the fortitude of earlier Alaskan as they traveled inland on dogsleds. Only a hardy people could survive commuting to work every day in conditions reminiscent of Bud Selig’s personality.

Not surprisingly, when airplanes showed up, dog sledding got real old real fast.

Sledding is still used to a limited extent in Alaska, but it’s been co-opted by much of the state as a legitimate and popular sport. There are numerous dog sledding associations running races in places like Fairbanks, and even “little league” events like the Junior Iditarod. The Iditarod is this fringe sport’s one flare a year – simultaneously the epitome of the sport to the outside world and also a misrepresentation that it’s all of the sport. Like the world suddenly turns to Anchorage to say “Wo, those dogs and that guy in the fur coat are intense!”

CNNSI.com opened its coverage with a cute piece on the dogs wanting to race, but followed that with articles from the first, second and third days of the race that legitimately discussed the actual results from the trail. Unfortunately, all of their articles are merely from the AP. So their coverage is almost exactly the same as ESPN.com’s, the Washington Post’s, and the New York Times’.

And even the AP has slowly gotten tired of covering the sport as… well, a sport. Its article from March 9th focuses far too much attention on the teams basking in the tender loving care provided by the fifty residents of Takotna. Takotnans felt a certain amount of joy as they “greeted arriving mushers and shoveled dog waste and straw.”

I’d call that a human interest story, except I’m not even sure it qualifies. Don’t humans have to be interested in a story for it to be a human interest story?

Contrast this with the depth and passion of the coverage in Alaska. And I don’t just mean the Iditarod, but dogsled racing in general. The Anchorage Daily News ran a story on a 12-year old musher and what he had to overcome to participate in the mushing competition of the Artic Winter Games. Granted, it’s a human interest story (and one without any dog shit), but it’s representative of a larger commitment to the sport of dogsledding.

It’s true that the Daily News contains their fair share of the same AP articles that CNNSI, ESPN, et al. use; I’ve become very well acquainted with Jeannette J. Lee’s writing style. But the Daily News shows that even when the center media is merely buying someone else’s articles, it half-asses coverage of fringe events. Lee has written far more on the Iditarod than CNNSI, ESPN, the Washington Post or the New York Times has published. For example, while all of those four published this article, the Anchorage Daily News published that article and this article.

What’s the difference? To be honest, I had a hard time telling. In as near as I could determine, the article that all five carried was almost entirely about Day 4 of the race, while the article that only the Daily News published was about both Days 3 and 4. Doesn’t sound like much of a difference, does it? But think about the way newspapers of media centers cover their professional sports teams. There are always numerous articles on overlapping aspects of the game from the night before. The Daily News’ willingness to do the same thing for the Iditarod shows their commitment to the sport as a sport.

This is reinforced by articles like the one on Karen Ramstead, which is essentially a player profile and has aspects of both sports analysis and behind the athlete human interest story (again, though, no dog shit). The Boston Globe publishes similar articles on Patriots players during the football season, Red Sox players during the baseball season, Celtics players during the basketball season, and Bruins players during… well, whenever the Celtics have the night off.

The Juneau Empire, the epitome of quality fringe media sports coverage, comes off as sub par when their coverage expands from the Juneau area to all of Alaska. The paper essentially publishes the same AP articles that every other media source does, for which Jeanette Lee thanks them kindly, I’m sure.

However, with regard to the Arctic Games, the sports section contained an article on local athletes who had done well there. While the article was not on dogsledding, it demonstrated a commitment to arctic outdoor sports, of which dogsledding is an example, by the paper that is completely lacking in center media.

The Nome Nugget, billed as Alaska’s oldest newspaper, is a small local newspaper, but still managed to find coverage for the Junior Iditarod, the little league World Series of dogsledding, except the likelihood of death due to exposure is 100 times more likely. The article even lists the final standings. This makes sense, since Nome is arguably the true home of the Iditarod, as that’s where the race traditionally ends.

Josh Rogers, a former Nome resident, maintains a cleverly named blog on the race. He not only maintains it, he maintains it with passion. His coverage is far and away better than what is available through more traditional media sources, going into detail about back of the pack competition – who is moving in and out of the top ten, who is making a dramatic rise from out of nowhere to the leader’s board, etc. He also has some interesting comments on media coverage of the event, like this posting from earlier this week on Rachael Scordis, who last year attracted a lot of center media attention by being the only blind participant.

His coverage reminds me of NASCAR coverage when done well. If you watch NASCAR on a major network that doesn’t know what it’s doing, the announcers pay attention to the lead, maybe the top five cars. But if you watch it on a well informed network, the announcers focus on the most interesting elements of the race: who is moving around, which positions are really heated, who has moved from 21st to 10th place, etc. Those intrarace dramas are important to the informed fan, and the educated network knows this.

Josh Rogers does this for the Iditarod. Rogers isn’t the only blogger covering the Iditarod, and certainly not the only one doing it well, he just does it the best.

However, his coverage isn’t the gold standard of Iditarod coverage. That title belongs to Cabela’s Iditarod Race Coverage. Echoing media-sports ownership arrangements that Matt Gaventa’s Daily Digest column criticizes, Cabela’s is an outdoor sports and hunting gear supplier, providing the most in depth coverage of the Iditarod. The site boasts bios of mushers, extensive pre-race analysis, and lots of relevant extras regarding the day to day goings on of the race.

But what can we make of coverage that is potentially biased because of a conflict of economic interests? What happens if Cabela’s is providing gear to a musher who loses a close race? Does that affect its coverage on its site? Given recent precedent – the Boston Globe’s coverage of the Red Sox, ESPN’s lack of attention regarding the new major league baseball television contract – my guess is yes, very much. There isn’t enough evidence in Iditarod coverage, nor a wide enough sample base, for me to comment further, but it is worth noting and looking for.

The binge coverage of the Iditarod is almost the reverse of what happens with big events in center sports. In those events, like the Super Bowl, the media of the center goes NUTS, lavishing attention on all aspects of the event and sport; the actual competition and the human interest stories drown themselves in writers’ ink and flash bulbs. And while fringe media pays greater attention than it does normally, it general doesn’t go as nuts.

In the Iditarod, the center media is paying more attention to the race than it normally does to dogsled racing – ie, none – but it isn’t the same level of exposure that Alaskan papers and bloggers commit. Alaskan papers, each in their own way, treat the Iditarod like a major event that should be tracked carefully because the fans reading want to know.

Even a small paper like the Nome Nugget spends some of its limited resources giving its readers coverage. And while a paper like the Juneau Empire doesn’t saturate the event with major league coverage the way the Anchorage Daily News does, it still covers the type of sport in general.

Perhaps bloggers best show that the name of the game for all media sources is limited resources. Center media doesn’t purchase as many AP articles on Iditarod as it could because of it, Alaskan fringe media doesn’t commit as many reporters as it could despite fan support because of it. But bloggers don’t have the same constraints. They can cover whatever sports they’re passionate about, even sports that aren’t traditionally defined as sports.

As I read fringe sports media, I sometimes worry about the future of fringe media. As media centers extend their influence through cable and online publications, fringe media has less and less of a chance to compete. Local sports that used to receive lots of attention from their local papers and were allowed to grow no longer have the same privilege.

It’s possible, though, that bloggers represent the future of fringe media. They’re passionate about their unique, local and sometimes bizarre sports the way good fringe sports media should be. At the same time they don’t have to worry about publication and financial resources. I don’t know if this is good or bad. But I bet that they’ll be a lot more likely to write about the double entendres of the sports world than either fringe or center media.

Sports Media in the Last Frontier

2006-07-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on March 3, 2006.)

Given that tomorrow marks the first day of the Iditarod – or the Inuit Indy 500, as I like to call it – this week seemed like a good time to turn to the fringe of Alaska. Iditarod coverage seemed like a natural choice for an article on fringe sports media, and maybe we'll get to that next week. For now, let me tell you: the Empire, the paper of record in Juneau, Alaska, has the best fringe sports media in the country.

Juneau is the 207th largest media market according to Nielsen’s. Or rather, it’s the fourth smallest one they recognize, followed only by Alpena, Michigan, North Platte, Nebraska, and Glendive, Montana. Unlike those other markets, though, Juneau is incredibly isolated. Even Glendive, which on a map looks as far away from one media center as you can get without getting closer to another, is more connected to the world around it than Juneau.

There is no easy way to get to Juneau; it’s on an island and is the only state capital in the US with no roads into or out of it. It’s possible to fly in to town, but to travel the way the locals do, you should take the Alaska Marine Highway. It provides the surest way of getting cars and trucks to the city and services ports in Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state.

That sense of being on their own is apparent in the Empire’s sports coverage. It is everything that fringe sports media should be. It addresses a broad range of sports, many of which are not recognized as being worthy of sports coverage in media centers or even larger fringe markets. Sports media in the fringes, ideally, should find the sports about which people in the fringes are passionate. Sports media in Juneau, as exemplified in the Empire, does just that.

The Empire’s sports priorities are established by their menu on the left hand side of the screen under the Sports heading: Local Sports, Empire Outdoors, Juneau Softball, Gold Medal 2005, and Golf News and Scores. Ignore that last one, I don’t know why it’s there; maybe Juneau lives out warm weather fantasies through golfing enthusiasm. Focus on the first four subheadings, because each one represents a unique aspect of solid fringe media sports coverage.

Prominently displayed on the front page of their on-line sports section for the last few months has been a selection of articles on the girls’ swimming and diving team of Juneau Douglas High School, which won its first state championship in 22 years last November. There are articles on the team’s perfect season, the individual members, and the results of the state meet that led to the championship. It’s a remarkable show of pride in a local team for it to appear on the sports page for so long. Even among fringe media, that exhibits rare support and coverage.

However, I’ll be honest – I was a lot more impressed with that victory before I found out that they swam in pools. When I thought that those girls were swimming outside in November… THAT was impressive. It made me wonder if the ice was cleared off the pond before the tournament or if that was part of the sport. What a great idea for a high school sport: polar bear ice chipping and 200 meter free style swim meets.

Really, though, Juneau seems to be blessed with a lot of good school teams. JDHS is home to the top ranked girls’ basketball team in the state, according to the Alaska sportswriters’ poll. That might change, though, since they lost recently to the Lynx of Dimond, the second ranked team in the state. Last weekend the wrestling team from Floyd Dryden Middle School won the state tournament. Did I say win? I meant the wrestling team ran through the competition like the Germans to the French in the Franco-Prussian War… and most other wars since.

The Empire Outdoors section features articles on local hiking, giving updates on trails that have evolved to provide views of bears and birds. Fishing also receives its due. The on-line version also has a “Best of” section, allowing readers to go back several years to find out about the best skiing in the area, local shooting ranges, and even Ultimate Frisbee.

I will be the first to admit that some of these read more like human interest stories, or even novelty articles on a local curiosity. But this is the crux of the fringes: they are interested in things the centers and even other fringes are not. Events that look bizarre or boring to people in media centers are actually exciting and time honored by people in the fringes.

And fringe media should respect that. In an area like Juneau, where the weather and outdoors dominates their surroundings, it is perfectly sensible that hiking, Nordic skiing and shooting would emerge as favorite local sports. I am thrilled that the Empire respects local tastes and provides sports media that honors that.

That point is driven home even more in the next two sections. Just coming off the Olympics, I think most readers will be flexible when it comes to definitions of sports. Riflery might not look so strange after the biathlon. But how many papers out there cover sports that aren’t even played by legitimate or student athletes? How many papers are so concerned with covering local sports that they cover the amateur adult leagues in the area?

My bet: none. Or close to none. But you know who does? That’s right – the Empire and the good sports fans of Juneau.

The Empire gives some decent coverage to the Juneau Sports Association’s adult softball league. They have complete rankings for all men’s, women’s and coed teams. The league, not surprisingly, is a summer league, so only the schedules and rankings for the last week are available, but I’m curious to see what the coverage is like in the middle of the season. I bet it’s pretty good.

The coverage of the Gold Medal adult basketball tournament is even more impressive. It will begin again later this month, but the Empire has records and columns on its website going back to 2000. Why so much coverage? Because it’s a local sports institution that goes back 55 years, with several generations of players, many of them interconnected through rivalries and families. And the coverage shows how serious this is.

Want to read about the emerging dynasty of Huna Totem in division C? It’s here. Or about how Hydaburg ended its division B title drought? That’s here too. The Empire and Juneau sports fans take this tournament and its coverage incredibly seriously. I can’t stress this enough. I know people for whom their first child is less serious.

Which is what’s great about the Empire’s coverage of Juneau sports. This is a town that knows it’s in the fringes; certainly geography has reinforced that. Juneau has it’s own sports, it’s own traditions and it wants to read about those. The Empire provides that.

You know what I like the most about the Empire’s sports section? Take one more look at it. What’s missing? Major, professional sports. The paper almost flagrantly disregards them. It has a full sports section with lots of coverage, and yet no professional sports. Considering the depth and variety of its sports coverage, that’s very impressive.

If I had an annual award for the best local sports coverage (which isn’t that bad an idea), the Empire would be the clear front runner. It is the purest example I’ve found of sports media accepting and embracing its role in the fringes.

Curl Girls: When Fringe Goes Center

2006-07-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on February 23, 2006.)

So how many people love the Olympics because it’s the only time their favorite sport bobsledding gets its due? Or the biathlon? Or the skeleton? Speak up, I can’t hear you over the crickets. That’s what I thought. The Olympics are a very special time when fringe media darlings take center stage in the media of the center. My favorite example? The US Women’s Curling team.

I don’t think I’m revealing any state secrets by mentioning that the team – Cassie Johnson, Jamie Johnson, Jessica Schultz, Maureen Brunt and Courtney George – has attracted its fair share of male admirers. No doubt, some of their media attention can be attributed to that. This also makes sense since most non-Olympic curling coverage focuses on the sport as a human interest story and not as a sports story.

Take the coverage from central New York’s News 10. If you type in curling into their site’s search engine, you get two entries. One is on the National Wheelchair Curling Championships. The other is on tryouts for the US wheelchair curling team in the 2006 Paralympics. That is not to suggest that the people who curl out of a wheel chair are not athletes, nor that curling from a wheelchair is not a sport.

But the coverage doesn’t focus on sport, the coverage focuses on novelty. The article on the national championships begins with a cutesy parody of a drink recipe and ends with a variation on “we’re all winners.” The second article is somewhat better, describing the competition at the try outs, but it still comes off like the description of a church barbeque, and not a sport. Both pieces make reference to the rich history curling has as a sport in central New York, but neither respects that.

In 2004, the Boston Globe had an interesting article on the sport, that began as a human interest piece on senior citizen world championship curling and morphed into a look at the sport in the New England region. The piece acknowledges that curling has a tiny following, but insists that in the Boston media market the constituency is dedicated. What the paper fails to mention is that that constituency – like in Nashua, NH – is in the fringe of the Boston media market.

And the center of curling into the United States is also a fringe – Bemidji, Minnesota. Faithful readers will recognize Bemidji as a favorite of this column, having been featured in columns about college hockey and Super Bowl coverage. But the town also includes the Bemidji Curling Club, which boasts 18 national champion and 50 Minnesota champion teams. Bemidji also is the home of both the US men’s and women’s Olympic teams, as 3 members of the women’s team and 2 members of the men’s team are from there.

Not surprisingly, the Bemidji Pioneer, the town's paper of record, takes curling fairly seriously as a sport. In 2005, for example, the paper printed 30 articles on curling and covered the World Championships last April. Even in a year that doesn’t lead to the Olympics, like 2004, curling generated 14 articles. Bemidji residents clearly understand and love their sport.

Beyond curling fringe media areas like Bemidji, the sport receives the most attention from – honestly, this is just gonna shock you – the Curling News and the United State Curling Association. I’m sneaking the Curling News into this column, as it’s a Canadian magazine and this is typically devoted to US sports media. However, given the crossover of all things Canadian to the land of the free and all things American to the land of the almost American, I think it’s inclusion is ok.

To its credit, the USCA is very organized, with links from its website to college curling, arena curling, junior curling, wheelchair curling, and its newsletter. The organization also has a strategic plan to increase curling’s popularity. I’ll be honest, though, there are government agencies that are less organized than the USCA. We need to make sure they’re using their powers for good. Maybe the Justice Department can tap their phones while everyone’s away at the Olympics.

For the Olympics, though, it’s like curling has been given a temporary pass into the mainstream media, which, I suppose, is exactly what’s happened. Ladies of the US team – welcome to the center… for the time being.

Oh sure, there are still human interest stories. There’s no point in having the Olympics if there isn’t an opportunity to find out the benign and bizarre about all the competitors. The Washington Post had a delightful article on the tight relationship between the Johnson sisters on and off the ice. The New York Times published an article on the British team that won gold in 2004 (don’t bother clicking on that link unless you have an account with the Times).

NBCOlympics.com featured a virtual tour of “the unofficial US curling capital” Bemidji. The site also features a profile of the team that links to much more specific profiles of each member, so if you need to know what Jamie Johnson’s fiancé looks like or that Maureen Brunt’s favorite book is The Da Vinci Code, you know where to turn.

But the competition and the sport receive a lot of attention as well. The Boston Globe had a full listing of all the results between women’s teams in the Olympics. The Post wrote extensively on the actual matches. NBC’s television coverage detailed all the US women’s results as did NBCOlympics.com, which means that espn.com also covered the games since they were just linking to NBC.

And in a true display of resisting the urge to cover the NFL draft, major media sources - NBC, CNNSI, the Post, the Times – covered the finals of women’s curling even though the Americans were out of it. NBC even had a box score. Strangely, while NBC, the Times and CNNSI all used the Associated Press, but NBC’s was different.

The problem with all of this detailed coverage is that few people (myself included) understand the sport of curling. Most people watch the game or read the box scores and have no idea what it all means. Every time I watch it, I’m reminded of that penguin darts game that was popular a few years ago.

Despite lacking comprehension of the game, columnists/talking heads are discussing the game too, which makes sense since not understanding a game has never stopped them before. CNNSI’s Adam Hofstadter wrote not one but two columns on the US women’s team. Granted, he has nothing good to say about curling or its fans in the first column, calling the sport a game and not a sport. However, after an invitation to the Ardsley Curling Club, Hofstadter had changed his tune and was almost ready to subscribe to the Curling News.

Despite the USCA’s best efforts – and the truest wishes of the US Curl Girls at the Olympics – curling will almost certainly fade back into the fringes in this country after the Olympics. Support isn’t widely spread enough to inspire the Washington Post, New York Times, ESPN, et al. to devote serious main stream media resources to it.

The first step toward doing that would be to capture the attention of the centers of media markets and not just the fringes. Based on the Boston Globe article from 2004, the chance to make a beachhead into a major market may present itself this year, as Lowell, Massachusetts – an extension of the center of the Boston market – hosts the men’s curling world championship.

For now, though, curling will have to be satisfied getting saturated with center media once every four years while the fringes give it what attention they can afford during the off seasons. Really, though, that’s the best place for a sport to grow. If a sport ends up in national media before viewers and readers know or understand the sport, it would fail. All we’d get are human interest stories, and quite frankly curling’s had enough of that.

College Hockey: Outdoors and Out of Control

2006-07-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on February 16, 2006.)

We just passed a big weekend in the fringes. College hockey had several seminal events in its calendar: Michigan Tech University’s Winter Carnival, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Big Red Freakout, an outdoor game at Lambeau Field between Wisconsin and Ohio State, and Boston’s own Beanpot Tournament. I bet you missed it. This is what happens in the fringes, there's not enough hype leading up to an event and not enough coverage once it happens. But as we used to say in college: better late to the party than never at the keg at all.

I know what you’re thinking: Boston isn’t the fringe of a media center; Boston is the center, jackass. Why, yes, my donkey-loving readers, you’re right. But there is also fringe media in media centers. That’s topical fringe media, covering what the mainstream of the media ignores. College hockey coverage in a media center like Boston qualifies as topical fringe sports media.

With that out of the way, let’s begin with Michigan Tech’s Winter Carnival, a celebration of all things chilly and greek in Houghton, MI, just about the northern most point of Upper Peninsula. A two-weekend long festival of competing fraternities, sororities and campus groups, events include the queen’s coronation, curling, human sled dog races, ice bowling and broomball, ice fishing and beard competition (which sadly has no pictures). And according to the Detroit News, students there claim to have broken the world records for largest snowball, largest snowball fight and most snow angels.

This past weekend was the second weekend. That meant consecutive nights of ferocious hockey action. On Friday, the Huskies faced off against number 1 in the nation Minnesota, coming up short 7-4.

MTU got some revenge of sorts against the Gophers the next night. Right before the closing torchlight parade that concluded with fireworks and a snow ball fight, the Winter Carnival climaxed with the second game against Minnesota that weekend. The final score was 2-2, giving the Huskies a moral victory over the top rated team in the country.

In Troy, New York, RPI held its annual Big Red Freakout, a chance for students and alumni – particularly hockey alumni – to show some pride. The weekend included an alumni game, a buffet dinner for all Engineer fans, a meet and greet with the players and coaches, and a school spirit boosting session of face painting. The highlight, of course, was the game which the RPI hockey team handily won, 4-2 over Brown, extending their record in Big Red Freakouts to 18-7-4.

The biggest common denominator between these two events – besides being great events for the schools and the hockey teams – is the pittance of news coverage devoted to them. During this weekend – a big weekend in college hockey, like rivalry weekend in college football – the topical fringe sports media in geographic fringe sports media let the sport down.

I found three items on Winter Carnival, none of it local. The Detroit News wrote about the snow records, the Duluth News Tribune wrote about the first game (happy that it helped the Gophers), and the Grand Forks Herald wrote about the second game (happy that the tie hurt the Gophers and helped their rival, the Fighting Sioux of the University of North Dakota).

Troy wasn’t quite as bad, as the Troy Record covered the game, and reports on RPI hockey in general. What was disappointing about the coverage, though, was that there was no lead up. The Big Red Freakout was the biggest sporting event in Troy this weekend, and other than a write up on the game’s result, it was hardly mentioned in the paper. RPI deserves better.

Moving onto the frozen tund… er, ice… the frozen ice of Lambeau Field. The men’s hockey game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Ohio State Buckeyes represent, to me, one of the most exciting developments in college hockey: outdoor games. In 2001, Michigan and Michigan State opened their seasons by restarting their in state rivalry – dubbed “The Cold War” – by playing one another where MSU normally plays football, Spartan Stadium. Almost 75,000 people turned out for the match, which ended in a 3-3 tie.

Last Saturday, Wisconsin got a solid win, 4-2, over Ohio State in front of more than 40,000 fans. The players and coaches raved about the game and the pastoral charm of playing outside. No one was playing on a pond, the way the Canadians meant us to play their pucking game, but it’s a lot closer than playing in frost covered basketball arenas.

I personally love the idea and would pay good money to see the UNH Wildcats take the ice outside, either on a temporary rink in Cowell Stadium – where the football team normally plays – or in a permanent outdoor facility. Unfortunately, neither are in the works. In Boston, however, there are plans for Boston College to play a game in Fenway Park next year.

By the way, that link would have been to the Boston Globe and not ESPN.com, but apparently the Globe makes you pay for articles less than a week after they’re first published. It can be tough following fringe media in a media center.

As I mentioned in an earlier article, I think college hockey is going to emerge from fringe media into mainstream media in a big way. I think it has the potential to be the next Next Big Thing, and making it an outdoor game only promotes that. Can you imagine the television spectacle that college hockey would be in the middle of a snow storm? You couldn’t put enough seats in stadiums; they’d all be taken up by insane frat boys who want to wear thongs and body paint while supporting their schools and catching hypothermia. And the TV ratings would go through the roof!

What bothers me about the coverage of Saturday’s Lambeau Field game and the Cold War game from 2001 is that it has all focused on the games as spectacles. The idea that this could be a legitimate long term vision for the sport has never seriously been entertained, not by ESPN, not by USA Today, not even by the NCAA News.

If I’m Ann Weaver (good name) Hart, the president of the University of New Hampshire, I’m making long term plans to make my hockey program an outdoors program. By doing that I immediately become the most talked about and recognizable school in the sport while also becoming the leader as the sport emerges into the big time.

Which brings me to the final event of college hockey’s big weekend: the Beanpot Tournament. The Beanpot is the annual show down between Boston’s four college hockey teams: Boston University, Boston College, Harvard and Northeastern. To be honest, it usually comes down to BC and BU, with BU typically winning. This year was no exception.

And I have a confession: the Beanpot Tournament doesn’t exist on the fringes of sports media, neither geographically nor topically. In Boston, the Beanpot is a big deal. People care. And Boston TV stations and newspapers cover it like people care. The tournament doesn’t exist on fringes of sports media, last weekend it was the biggest sports show in town.

Why is this tournament here, then? Why put a mainstream media event of a major media center in a column about the fringes of both? Because this is what I think college hockey can become. College hockey can become big and popular, and not just in Boston. Once fringe media provides more comprehensive coverage of the sport and the mainstream media takes innovations like outside games seriously, the coverage the Beanpot receives could be the wave of the future for college hockey.

Fringe Media Super Bowl Orgy

2006-07-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on February 10, 2006.)

Even among fringe media, the Super Bowl is by and large the biggest day in American sports media. As I wrote my column last week, I noticed that the York Daily Record had enough Super Bowl coverage to beat up a referee from Pittsburgh. That makes sense – not only is it the freaking Super Bowl, but York is also in the greater Steelers fan base area. But it got me thinking – what about some of the other papers that have appeared in my column over the last few months? What types of stories did they run about the Super Bowl?

Let’s begin right where we are, in York, Pennsylvania. Obviously, Both the York Daily Record and the York Dispatch were giddy like school girls in Justin Timberlake’s underwear drawer over the victory.

The Daily Record even reports that people who couldn’t watch the game because of cable problems were even happy, as happened to the Faith Gang Youth Fellowship at Hellam United Methodist Church. The kids there had a “Soup-er Bowl of Caring” football party to help a local food pantry. The turnout was already expected to be low given how many of the would-be participants were Steelers fans, but the group still hoped “to raise funds for their cause and enjoy the evening playing board games and possibly listen to the Super Bowl on a radio.” Forty-five cans of food and $34 were collected, and the Steelers won, so of course the evening was a complete success.

Before the Super Bowl, the York Dispatch ran a story of a most unfortunate man, a die hard Eagles fan, who bet a coworker that if the Steelers beat the Colts, he would come to work in full Pittsburgh regalia. Obviously, he lost the bet and hated every minute of that day at work. For the Super Bowl he decided to bet on emasculation: if the Steelers won, he had to go to work in a Steelers cheerleader outfit. Sadly, there was no follow up story on his losing bet, but thankfully that also meant there were no pictures.

Moving to my beloved New Hampshire, with the Union Leader. Super Bowl Sunday, the paper had a feature on Dan Kreider, a former standout on the University of New Hampshire’s football team and currently the starting fullback for the Steelers. The article was ostensibly about Kreider having the chance to be only the second UNH alum to win a Super Bowl, but other than the first paragraph it was entirely about the first UNH alum to win the Super Bowl, Bruce Huther, who won with Dallas in 1978. Huther now lives on a sprawling ranch in the Dallas area and runs his own aquatic toxicology business, which I believe means he cleans pools and aquariums.

Huther seems like a nice guy and the article was a decent if not stellar human interest story on him, but it seems ironic that during the most media saturated week of Dan Kreider’s life the Union Leader couldn’t manage an interview with him. Instead they had to turn to a guy who hasn't put on a UNH uniform in 30 years.

The Nashua Telegraph ran a snarky piece by columnist Tom King on Sunday, in which he wonders out loud how this could be the Super Bowl if the New England Patriots aren’t in it. I don’t disagree – and both Bill Belichik and Tom Brady did show up for the game – but that’s the reason fans of other teams hate us.

Of course, not all New Englanders like the Pats, as the Telegraph’s article on local bookies makes clear. One of the article’s odds-based businessmen said that “everyone around here loves the Patriots… Unfortunately for us, the Patriots were winning and (the bookies) were getting killed.” Let us now observe a moment of silence for New England bookies… ok, that’s enough.

Not all of the papers that have appeared in this column get into the Super Bowl spirit, though. Take the Bemidji Pioneer, the stalwart publication of Bemidji, Minnesota, which features a picture of the Bemidji State University curling team on its main page this week. The sports page of the Pioneer has zero stories on the Super Bowl. Instead, it features an article on the Bemidji High Lumberjack swim team’s first winning season, the high school boys’ hockey team losing 7-1 against Thief River Falls, and the Lumberjack boys basketball team defeating Thief River Falls 63-51.

A search for “super bowl” on the paper’s website brings up one – ONE – article on the Super Bowl, and I can’t even read that because you have to be a paid subscriber. But according to the search engine's blurb, there apparently is a world renowned pianist that performed on Sunday and offered people a diversion from the Super Bowl.

Other papers in other areas use pounds of ink to glorify the Super Bowl. The Pioneer offers tips to avoid the Super Bowl. They live a little differently in the fringes of Minnesota.

Similarly, the Glendive Ranger from Glendive, Montana saw little need to write about the game. Instead they focused on the Dawson County High School girl’s basketball team defeating the Colstrip Fillies 47-20 and on which high school wrestlers who qualified for the state tournament. Included in the group is sophomore Aaron Ladd, who last year was literally a 98-pound weakling, except for the weakling part; I’m sure he could kick my ass. In 2005, he qualified as a freshman in the 98-pound category, but had bulked up to 112 this year.

Still – no mention of the Super Bowl. How does the biggest American sports media event of the year go completely unnoticed by two forms of sports media, even in the fringes of markets?

I’m sure no one will be shocked when I say that the amount of Super Bowl coverage depends on the markets in which they are the fringes. Take York, for example. It’s essentially the fringe of the Harrisburg media market, number 41 according to the good people at Nielsen. This market, technically, doesn’t have a football team.

But look at the two bigger markets it sits between: Philadelphia (#4) and Pittsburgh (#22). And both of those are professional football obsessed markets; that rubs off on the rest of the state. There is so much NFL fervor in that exact area, that according to the Common Census Sports Map NFL fandom around York breaks rather evenly for the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Baltimore Ravens, and the Washington Redskins. That’s backed up by the side bar at the York Dispatch’s sports page, which lists information for all those teams. The Harrisburg market may have no NFL team of its own, but even in its fringes it feels the power of major media markets competing.

New Hampshire is similar. As the fringe of the Boston (#5) media market, we get inundated with Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Bruins – all the Boston teams. With the Pats’ recent success, it’s only natural that New Hampshire papers would care about football in general.

Bemidji is a completely different story. Sure, it’s in Minnesota which has the Vikings, but the Vikings play in Minneapolis. Bemidji is closer to North Dakota than to Minneapolis. They’re much more interested in college hockey than professional football. Same goes for Glendive, Montana, which isn’t any where near anywhere. That’s why it’s the smallest recognized media market.

All sports, in the end, is local. The Super Bowl is the biggest American sports day – and sports media day – of the year. As a result, even in the fringes, people can notice and care. But there needs to be some local connection. It might come from local players who are in the big game, the pull of the center’s interest, or the pull of competing markets around them. There just has to be something for the fringes to care about, otherwise their media won’t care either.

Is There Creationist Sports Coverage?

2006-07-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on February 2, 2006.)

On the eve of the Super Bowl, and just following the State of the Union Address, it seems like a good idea to examine what it means to be an American sports fan at a basic level. How do sports, fans and media interact? There’s a town out there that has had more than its fair share of news stories in the last year and a half. Most of them didn’t contribute to the image the town wants to present to the outside world. And it reminds me a lot of my hometown.

Anyone remember that Pennsylvania town whose school board tried to install Of Pandas and People, a testamentary publication in the intelligent design movement, as the high school biology textbook? And before you click to a new page, be aware that this is in fact a sports column. But I’m serious, does anyone remember that school board or that town? Well I’ll tell you – it was Dover, Pennsylvania, located in the fringe of the Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York media market, 41st largest according to the good people at Nielsen. And here’s what I’m wondering - what kind of sports and media live in a hotbed of the battle between evolution and creationism?

First, a bit of background on Dover and Kitzmiller v. Dover. Dover is a small town of about 1,800 people. In 2004, the town’s school board brought in Of Pandas and People as a text book and required high school biology teachers to read a statement to students, advising them that evolution is – at best – a theory and possibly – at worst – complete nonsense. Shortly there after parents and the ACLU filed a law suit against the school board, which was decided toward the end of 2005 by Judge John Jones, an appointee of George W. Bush, of the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Marveling at the “breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision,” Jones decided that the policy was unconstitutional because it effectively broke the Constitutional separation of church and state. The decision was somewhat moot by that point, as every member of the school board that had supported the decision was voted off the island in the last election. There are more details on Wikipedia, and the really adventurous can read Judge Jones’s full 139 page opinion here, but those are enough basics for this column.

I read about this case and this town and I couldn’t help but wonder about the sports there. Without this law suit, Dover stays a sleepy town in the fringe of a midsized media market, completely unnoticed by the evening news and random people like me. It’s like thousands of other towns. What kind of sports coverage do these guys have?

Not surprisingly, it’s pretty standard. Almost quaint, actually.

The area around Dover is primarily served by two newspapers, the York Dispatch and the York Daily Record, the latter of which claims to have served York county (where Dover is located) for over 200 years. At first I had to double check to make sure they were actually two different papers – not only were the front page stories similar but each front page featured the same exact heating repair ad, a company that fittingly claims to be a York institution. God, I love small town newspapers – that would never happen on the Washington Post and Washington Times.

And I love small town sports, which appear to be growing in York. According to the Daily Record, York could be getting a baseball team soon. According to the story, the Atlantic League is in need of a new team because – and talk about a small freaking world – the Pride from Nashua, New Hampshire are changing leagues because of much smaller crowds than the other Atlantic League teams. Investor in York are looking to build a stadium in order to gain an expansion team by 2007.

By the way, for long time readers, York is looking to take the place of the same Nashua Pride that I wrote about in my first column, the same team that won the Atlantic League championship in 2000. And if you want an hysterical headline, check out this one: “Widger is World Champion! Former Rivershark and White Sox Sweep Astros.” Apparently a former Atlantic League player won the World Series and the White Sox came along for the ride. It was nice of him to do that; the Sox suffered a long time before he came along.

The Daily Record also covers the Hershey Bears, the local AHL franchise, affiliated with the Washington Capitals, featuring the typically biased home town coverage. Even more typical are the articles on Dover High student athletes, both current and former. Steve Navaroli published a story on the busy life of Jess Walker, a varsity basketball player who also plays trumpet in the Dover High marching band, which Navaroli gushes about.

But that pales in comparison to Steve Patterson’s article on John Kuhn, a former Dover High football player who is going to the Super Bowl as a practice squad player for the Steelers. Everyone loves a local-kid-makes-good story, but when goes bananas for a local-kid-makes-good-with-the-local-NFL-franchise story.

What’s funny is that Kuhn won’t even play in the game or get close to the field; as a practice squad player he’ll probably watch it from a sky box. But he’s a local boy, and he’s there, so it’s a good story.

The York Dispatch covers the AHL as well, but not with the depth that the Daily Record does; there’s only a listing of league standings and upcoming games. If I hadn’t read the Daily Record first I would have had no idea that there was a team in the league nearby.

In fact, when it comes to local sports, the Dispatch is highly disappointing. The paper is flooded with stories on Penn State, Pitt, the Eagles, the Steelers, the Ravens, and even the Redskins. But when it comes to sports about local minor league hockey, local high schools, and the potential for minor league baseball, the Dispatch has almost nothing.

By contrast on that last point, the Daily Record’s website actually has a side bar dedicated to local minor league baseball. As a reader or user, that puts it up with some fairly important topics: “Politics and Government… Health and Environment… War on Terror… Baseball in York.” I’m not arguing that York baseball should be in such company, but it shows an obvious concern for local sports by the paper.

That concern just isn’t there in the Dispatch. Even a general for “Dover sports” on its website was lackluster. Included in it were obituaries, birth notices and plenty of stories about Kitzmiller v. Dover, but really nothing on Dover high sports.

This is somewhat surprising, given that the Dispatch had an entire section, with its own sidebar on the main page, devoted to Dover’s court case. Maybe this shows an eye more focused on controversy than on the real nitty gritty details of local media coverage. Either way I was disappointed. When it comes to local sports, the Daily Record is clearly superior to the Dispatch. It has more coverage and it has it with the completely biased and supportive tone that I want from local coverage.

So what does this have to do with intelligent design or the court case or America or sports or media? Dover is a normal town. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it eerily reminds me of my own home town; not only did they steal my minor league team’s spot in the league, their minor league hockey team plays mine. The coverage by the Daily Record mimics the coverage of the Manchester Union Leader and the Nashua Telegraph.

But that’s not all: in 1994 the Christian Coalition took control of the school board in my hometown, Merrimack. In-school prayer was instituted, disguised as a moment of silence. Discussion of homosexuality was prohibited, even regarding historical figures who were in fact gay. Merrimack showed up on an ABC News Special because of it. It was two years before the town, by overwhelming numbers, threw them out of office.

I disagree with intelligent design being taught in American science classes and I dislike the Christian Coalition’s agenda in general. Nonetheless, they were in my school as I grew up, even though few people wanted them there, as witnessed by the huge voter turnout a year or two later.

Fringe media both supports and subverts the American goals that have been presented in the State of the Union Address and that will be marketed to hundreds of millions in the Super Bowl. Fringe media perpetuates the idea that small town America is completely within the bounds of normal. As long as minor league hockey, minor league baseball and high school sports happen, the country and our neighborhoods are fine.

But when those neighborhoods are seized by organizations and forces that work against American ideals and interests, our fringe sports media hurts us. It reinforces a sense of normalcy that prevents us from clearly seeing the danger of groups that would hurt our schools and towns.

Respect local sports coverage; appreciate its loyalty and charm. But don’t let it distract you from the serious job of protecting your hometown from people and groups that would bring it in front of the national media, that would introduce wrong and hurtful ideas. A true American sports fan is loyal to his local area, but distrustful of sports smokescreens.

The Nation Isn't Ready for this Stick and Ball

2006-07-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

(This article was orginally published by Sports Media Watch on January 25, 2006.)

One of the pure joys of writing this column is the potential for the random and bizarre. For example, did you know that the Rams from Dickinson High School of Wilmington, Delaware are ranked 2,290th and last in the nation among high school boys lacrosse teams? I’ll bet you didn’t. And if you’re like me, you didn’t even realize there were 2,290 high school boys lacrosse teams. Think about it – that’s a ton of stick wielding, ball chucking, would-be miscreants organizing together.

It’s so many teams, I don’t actually think the good people at LaxPower - a website devoted to tracking and reporting all things lacrosse - could actually have seen every game. Lacrosse is very popular among the fringes of sports media, as testified to by the sheer number of high school teams. There’s even a fledgling professional league. Mark my words: in a few years, the college game will be widely seen on ESPN and Major League Lacrosse will show up on Fox Sports and ESPN2. In fact, ESPN2 already televises the NCAA championship game. The fringes know what’s up before the centers do.

Having said that, though, LaxPower cannot possibly have the organization and manpower to accurately rate and rank 2,290 high school boys teams, not to mention all 1,767 high school girls teams and three divisions worth of college men’s and women’s teams. It makes me wonder if maybe the Dickinson Rams aren’t getting a raw deal.

Ok, it’s true – they finished last season 0-14. That’s not good. And granted they were outscored 23-243; also not good. But after getting shut out of 5 of their first 9 games, they didn’t go scoreless in one of their final five games. That’s progress! They should be proud of and rewarded for that!

And can they really be worse than the other teams clustered around the bottom ten (five of which are from Delaware, by the way)? Or other teams further up the rankings? Take Rockville High School, in Vernon, Connecticut, for example. According to LaxPower, the boys team went 0-16 last year, two worse than Dickinson High. Yet the Rockville Rams are ranked 2,268th in the country, a full 22 spots ahead of the boys from Delaware. Where’s the justice?

By the way, I find it very fishy that both of these Ram-avatared teams had reverse perfect seasons during the same year. I don’t know what it means, I’m just pointing it out. Someone should look into this.

Perhaps the biggest injustice to Dickinson and Rockville, though, is Wilmington High School, from Wilmington, Massachusetts. The Rams on both teams played hard, gave every game their best shot and, unfortunately, came out on the losing end of every game. But they played a full season. They proved their worth if only in effort. The Wildcats of Wilmington, however, couldn’t even manage that. And yet they’re still the highest ranked team in the country, 680th, with 0 victories.

I admit, the Wildcats have fewer losses than either wooly team, but Wilmington only played ONE game! Seriously, check it out. They played one game. Was the entire team one kid who really really loved lacrosse and broke his leg in that one game and so they had to cancel the rest of the season? Maybe his little brother is moving into 9th grade this year and will be the goalie. I can see the local paper’s headline: “Wildcats to Add Second Player; Coach: ‘It Can’t Hurt.’”

Really, this speaks to the fact that in some ways, LaxPower is making this up as they go. Sure, if you look at their team pages, there is clearly some system in place. From what I can tell, they use goals scored, strength of schedule, goal differential, etc. to determine overall ranking. Compared to the BCS system, it’s seems kind of benign, actually.

However, the system is never explained. And there’s no explanation of how they get information for the system either. I assumed local papers, but that didn’t pan out. A few casual searches of local papers around those schools indicated that lacrosse – surprise surprise – is not heavily covered. Even around Delaware, in the Mid-Atlantic region, where Lacrosse is most popular, the papers only had game capsules, not information as detailed as LaxPower’s. So who knows how LaxPower makes their rankings.

And even if they have a remarkably comprehensive investigating, reporting, and compiling system for team data, there are 2,290 high school boys lacrosse teams! The margin for error is astounding. NASA is more likely to successfully land one of those teams on an asteroid than LaxPower is to track and rank all those teams successfully, nevermind the high school girls teams and college teams.

LaxPower is admirable in its intent: be a comprehensive source for the ins and outs of lacrosse at every level. Lacrosse is a rapidly growing sport; I stand my prediction from the beginning of this column. In a few years, this site will be much more relevant that it seems today, when it appears to be more of a fringe love affair with an obscure sport.

The problem is that fringe media coverage of this obscure sport has not caught up with this fringe love affair with this obscure sport. Fringe media coverage of sports is infrastructure. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and all other forms of national media can’t exist without the lower levels doing some of the heavy lifting and interest generating for them.

Think way back to your American history class sophomore or junior year in high school. I’ll give you a minute.

No, not that one. That’s Canada. The one below it. There you go.

The vehicle the United States rode to international prominence was economic development: manufacturing, agricultural advances, internal trade, international trade, etc. Ask any good Marxist, they’ll tell you all about it.

But before we could grow economically, we had to build our infrastructure first. We needed roads, railroads, telegraph wires, canals (quaint man-made rivers, for those of us still trying to remember the last time we had an American history course) and later electricity, highways, phone systems, and internet capabilities. To make the big bucks, you gotta have the big infrastructure.

That’s what fringe and local media is for national media, particularly for sports. All of the most popular sports in the country today started as smaller regional favorites. Baseball was concentrated in the northeast, college football was big at large state schools in the southeast, professional football was huge in the industrial Midwest, basketball was isolated to very urban and (paradoxically) very rural areas.

Local papers covered those sports and helped to solidify their popularity, then mediums like television and radio spread their appeal beyond their traditional geographic borders until they became nationally popular sports. The transnational sports media empires we see today are the end result of fringe media efforts for the last one hundred years.

LaxPower is ahead of itself. When local newspapers, radio stations and TV networks are covering lacrosse at a greater level than they currently are, LaxPower will have more information to work with and a larger audience. I love fringe sports darlings going national, but there is a time and a place for everything. For the moment, lacrosse belongs to the random and bizarre of the fringes.

Sports, Sex, & Small Towns: It's Scandalous!

2006-07-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on January 19, 2006.)

The media loves a good teacher/student sex scandal. Whenever teachers and students, like the proverbial lions and lambs, lay down together in peace and harmony, local papers, blogs, even major media outlets flock to these stories with some combination of horror, tragedy, and comedy. So what happens when it's a scandal -- any kind -- (Marcus Vick, are you listening?) -- that involves young athletes? Strange as it may seem, we take our sports much more seriously than our sex.

Two years ago, in Colonie, New York – a suburb of Albany and part of the 55th largest media market – Sandra Geisel had sex with a 16-year old student at Christian Brothers Academy. Geisel herself taught English at a Catholic high school, at least until she had sex with one of her 17-year old students. In 2004, Debra Lafave, a middle school reading teacher on the outskirts of the Tampa Bay media market (12th largest),was arrested for having sex with a 14-year old. Last July, she entered a plea of insanity as her lawyer compared putting Lafave in prison is like putting raw meat in with lions.

And in August, on the fringe of the 30th largest media market, Nashville, Pamela Rogers, a former elementary school teacher and coach, was sentenced to 270 days in a county jail after having an affair with a 13-year old star athlete. Her husband was the county high school basketball coach (they have since divorced) and her father is a state championship high school basketball coach in a nearby county.

Of course, the best known teacher-student sex scandal in recent memory is Mary Kay Letourneau, who last year wedded the student she once bedded. That’s damn near a miracle given not only their age, but also the fact that she was prohibited from seeing her future husband upon release from prison in 2004. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer comments: “What they both called love the law clearly defines as child rape.”

These stories all come across surprisingly tongue in cheek. An understated theme of the stories from the Lefave and Rogers stories was “Holy shit! She’s hot, married and having sex with a little kid!” This is particularly true once you read some of the blog entries devoted to Rogers or even glance at the internet coverage of Lefave. The more recent stories of Mary Kay Letourneau all carry a tone of “All’s well that end’s well;” strange, when you consider that her marriage began as molestation.

Chances are, had the sexes of the minors and adults been reversed in these cases, the news would have contained more outrage. A female teacher who beds a teenage boy is a means by which he becomes a man; a male teacher who beds a teenage girl is a dead man walking.

That observation, however, is for another column and another website. This one is about sports and how we watch them. If you want more teacher-student sex van field trips, check out Lafave’s Wikipedia article.

Scandals involving youths and sports, unlike sex scandal involving youth and adults, feature surprisingly little tongue-in-cheekedness. That would take away too much time from the moral outrage that dominates most of the coverage.

Let’s begin with the most infamous youth and sports scandal of the last five years: Danny Almonte. We all remember Danny Almonte, right? Little 12-year old guy, pitched a perfect game going through the Little League World Series back in 2001. Everyone in the country marveled at his 70 mph fastball. How could a 12 year old do that?

Turns out – 12 year olds can’t, but 14 year olds can. In 2001, instead of smoking preteen batters from the pitchers mound, he should have been stealing their lunch money and teaching them valuable lessons about bullying. Both sides quickly tried to assume the moral high ground in the media.

“Anyone who would knowingly undermine the trust in Little League is guilty of doing serious harm to children,” said Stephen Keener, the president of the organization.

Rolando Paulino, whose All-Stars Danny played for, said “Every time a Hispanic team, even though the majority of [the players] were born here, triumphs, people will look for whatever way to take away what they’ve done…Most of those people are bad losers, bad sports.”

Others also pointed to race as a factor. ESPN Page 2 even named it the 6th (SIXTH?!) worst sports scandal ever, ahead of the University of Minnesota basketball team's academic cheating conspiracy and Florida State football players free clothes scandal from the early 90’s.

In none of the articles was there a line like “What Danny and his family call his unaging, gestation period, Little League calls the first two years of life,” reminiscent of what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote regarding Letourneau. Even in articles written in the last year, Danny is known for the scandal and not for being a legit pitching prospect.

In an earlier column, I wrote about Damien Tacito, a high school quarterback from my home town who was pulled over and charged with drunk driving and possession of marijuana. The town was outraged and disappointed, as he had to sit out a winnable playoff game the next day. What never got as much notice from either the Union Leader or the Nashua Telegraph was that the judge who heard Damien’s case dismissed the charges. The police illegally stopped and searched his car.

Granted, that doesn’t excuse his behavior at all, but the local papers didn’t seem to give much thought to correcting the impression of a youth sports scandal. We take it too seriously.

Sometimes these stories should be taken seriously. The New York Magazine published an excellent article on members of a Long Island high school football team who were accused of sexual assault. The writer, Robert Kolker, appreciated how awful the crime was, and how horribly and darkly comic the anger of the town’s residents was. Because according to Kolker’s guess, only half the town was angry at the possible truth of the accusations; the other half was outraged that the football season was canceled.

What Kolker brings to his article that all the preceding stories lacked was perspective. Danny Almonte and his family cheating on his age to gain a baseball advantage is bad, but should not be treated with greater moral indignity than a teacher who abuses her position with a student.

And Damien Tacito messed up, but if he is going to be exonerated to one degree or another, that exoneration should generate as much news as his arrest. That, of course, is in stark contrast to Mary Kay Letourneau, whose “All’s well that ends well” story received so much press that it might be on the verge of becoming a Lifetime movie of the week, for all we know.

Small towns, where most of these scandals seem to take place, are small enough as it is. By giving people there and outside of them something juicy to talk about, they become almost claustrophobic. Media that doesn’t treat these topics with the right sense of appropriateness exasperates the problem; just because a teacher’s tongue was in her student’s cheek, does not mean the story must be written tongue in cheek.

Own Your Own Team. Seriously.

2006-07-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on December 16, 2005.)

Major disclaimer for this article: Vermont sucks. I understand they have Ben and Jerry's, which is fine. You should go on the tour and then get the hell out of the state. Everything Vermont has, New Hampshire has, and New Hampshire has it better. Having gotten that out of my system, the Green Mountain state is getting professional basketball, and I’m a big fan.

The American Basketball Association should be well known to many a basketball follower, legitimate or passing. Julius “Dr. J” Irving and the red, white and blue ball are known to even casual fans. The league played an up-tempo game from 1967 to 1976, eventually being folded into the NBA. The New York Nets, Indiana Pacers, Denver Nuggets, and San Antonio Spurs were absorbed into the league.

Fast forward to 1999, when a new American Basketball Association formed. This ABA was not trying to compete with the NBA like the old league. This ABA was a minor league with a business model so innovative it was almost quaint: create a league with a low entry fee and controlled costs so that team owners can run their franchises with as less than 2,000 people a game.

You know what areas this type of pro league appeals to? That’s right, boys and girls, this league appeals to the fringes of sports and media. And this gives me a great idea: you and me, we're going to be co-owners of a basketball team.

Hold on. I'll get there.

So this Sports Illustrated writer, Alexander Wolff, has bought the rights to the Vermont ABA franchise, according to the Boston Globe and his own article in SI, and is going to be running a team in Barre, Vermont and writing about it for SI. Cool idea. And he’s got a cool name: the Vermont Frost Heaves. Even better, he seems to really understand the potential for greatness within the new modeled ABA. He talks of running the team and then turning it over to its community as a public trust after a few years. He even wants to sell locally-grown Vermont food at the games.

The Time Argus is the paper of record for Montpelier and Barre, Vermont. Not surprisingly, it was pretty enthusiastic about the team. Between the Time Argus and Sports Illustrated, the Frost Heaves are going to get more media attention than any minor league franchise since Michael Jordan struck out in front of TV cameras from 22 countries. It should also make for an interesting dynamic: the tension of a small newspaper writing favorably objective articles about the team confronting the critically partisan articles of a national sports magazine. I’m curious to see how this plays out in the woodlands of Vermont.

I’m ignoring the impulse to write that every time you buy a product from Vermont an angel dies, or that you are better off buying maple syrup from New Hampshire and cheese from Wisconsin or New York because those observations aren’t relevant to the column. And anyway, you all know this.

Wolff mentions that the idea behind the ABA is to get a team in every market that will support a team and then cluster those teams together geographically in divisions in order to cut down on transportation costs. So far, there are eight divisions, with as many as seven and as few as three teams in them.

To look at the standings, you’d think that teams spring up from nowhere and begin play just like any team that was around at the beginning of the season. That seems to be the only way to explain how the Inglewood Cobras could lead the Spencer Haywood Division at 1-0 while the SoCal Legends are in second place at 10-1. There’s a wide diversity of teams, though, with clubs ranging from Montreal, to Tijuana, to Beijing.

How you can be based out of Beijing and still keep travel costs down, I don’t know. (Actually, I do – you play your games in Maywood, CA… but that’s neither here nor there) But the idea is great – theoretically, the ABA could have 20 different divisions with four or six or however many teams in each. The possibilities are endless. The only goal is to make travel for games reasonable for owners’ expenses.

The entry fee isn’t that bad: $10,000. Granted, Wolff got fleeced by paying $10K for the rights to the Vermont market, and I don’t have that kind of money lying in the change jar on my desk. But if I had some co-owners to help me out...

Here's the pitch: I want a team. Obviously, I don’t have $10,000. We, though, have way more than $10,000. I want everyone reading this column to write me at john@sportsmediawatch.com or write in at the Sports Media Watch forum and pledge some money. Pledge a lot. Seriously – if we get 100 people pledging $100, we’ve got the $10,000 entry fee; 50 people at $200… well, you get the idea. We’ve bought ourselves a market. Wolff writes that labor costs are capped at $120,000, which is still more money than I’ve ever seen, but if we choose our venue and marketing correctly, we should be able to cover that and more. We’ll make a small profit and split it fairly.

I don’t even have to be the general manager. If one of you really, really wants the job, it’s yours. I want to own a team, if only partially. But I also want to see how media interacts with teams it owns and is connected to. We all know that small local papers cover small local teams favorably. I’m sure the Time Argus is no exception.

But what about media outlets that own the team? In some ways, this is what SI is testing, and at least they’re up front about it. Other such relationships try to stay in smoky backrooms (Boston Globe, Red Sox, I’m looking in your direction). How would Sports Media Watch cover our team? How would I? One hundred to two hundred bucks could buy each of us access to a side of sports we don’t see or read much about. And we can even make a little money on the side.

And if we can’t, oh well, each of us has lost $100-200 for something that is far cooler than what we would have done with it otherwise. If I don’t buy this team, I’ll blow it on women and booze, despite my grandfather’s best warnings. Think of the stories years from now: “I remember back in aught-six, I owned a minor league basketball team…” Or put it on your resume: “Minority Owner, Professional Basketball team.” This is worth your investment.

As a prudent investor, I’m sure you have a few questions. First and foremost, I bet you want to know what market we’ll be scooping up. If you’ve read this column faithfully, you know there can only be one answer from me: New Hampshire. I want to play in the same division as the Vermont Frost Heaves and beat them hard. I want to be the Yankees to their Red Sox, the Cowboys to their Bills, the Bulls to their Knicks. Plus, as the Fishercats, Monarchs and Wolves prove, New Hampshire can support minor league teams like no one’s business. We’ll call ourselves the Granite State Livefreeordies.

Alright, that’s just my first choice. Make me a better offer. Look at the team listings; there are plenty of other markets available. Atlantic City is free. So is DC. Glendive, Montana can be had for $10K, as can Bemidji, Minnesota. Where are you from? I bet there isn’t a team there. Why don’t we work together to put one there.

Having said that, New Hampshire is still my first choice. It’ll be like printing our own money in very small denominations. And I can guarantee that we’ll get great coverage from the Manchester Union Leader.

But if you don’t like my pitch and you’ve got the money, buy your own team. I would if I could. This is a great opportunity. The ABA and your fringe market need you to provide professional, community-based sports entertainment. Help the league put a team on every corner, and live the fantasy of having your own franchise. And while you're doing it, write a blog about the experience. It'd be a great read. You know you want to. All you have to do is fill out the form... and pony up the money.

This Season, Hockey is the New Black

2006-07-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on December 9, 2005.)

I’m gonna let you in on a secret. The fringes of sports media are what Seattle was for music in the late 80’s. They’re the barrio in Los Angeles where the first kid wore his baseball hat sideways. They’re Liverpool for the Beatles, Springfield for basketball, and Studio 54 for STDs. The fringes of media are where the next big thing in sports is hiding out, developing, and getting ready to explode onto your sports radar. And in the fringes these days, college hockey is sexy.

Maybe not Jessica Simpson sexy, but exciting sexy. Sexy like indie rock, back when REM was getting popular and dominating college radio or when Radiohead was getting big. College hockey is exciting and developing like indie rock was back when it was possible to be a mid-major record label. And it’s all happening in the fringes of sports media.

Let’s begin by glancing at some of the schools and places represented in the USA Today men’s ice hockey national rankings: (3) Vermont, (4) North Dakota, (9) New Hampshire (Go Wildcats!) (10) Maine (boo), (12) Colgate, (14) St. Lawrence. If you go by Inside College Hockey’s top 20 the list expands to include (18) Lake Superior State, (20) Bemidji State and a team that just fell out of the top 20 – Alaska Fairbanks. Those schools don’t exactly represent the upper crust of the Nielsen media markets. Honestly, before I started writing this I thought Bemidji was a dog.

College hockey is slowly building a following, like college basketball in the 70s. In the next twenty years, this sport is going to be big, with fans in the major markets who are passionate about it. For now, though, it exists only in the periphery of the important media markets, but on center stage in the fringes. Let’s take a look at a particularly obscure school in a particularly fringe area, Bemidji (is not a) State, and a school I like, the University of New Hampshire. Let’s look at how some newspapers from their areas and see how the fringes cover their own rising star of a sport.

Bemidji State University is a dog school, training loveable mutts for family films and television series… just kidding. No, Bemidji State is public university located in Bemidji, Minnesota, was founded in 1919, and currently has about 5,000 students from almost every state in the country and 40 foreign countries. Their hockey team is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, and is doing so with a solid season, sitting atop the College Hockey America conference at 4-2-0, and 9-3-0 overall.

The paper of record is the Bemidji Pioneer, with a circulation of 9,691. Their front page features several rotating pictures of local events, including the construction of the new ice hockey arena. This was a light sports week, as the men’s team had most of the week off. And while the women’s team had two games against Wisconsin, the Pioneer’s sports section inexplicably led with a picture from their November 11th game against Mercyhurst, the seventh best team in the country according to USA Today’s women’s college rankings, which ended in a tie.

The top story, however, was that the local "high school age" boys hockey team, the Bemidji Lumberjacks, suffered a defeat at the hands of the Moorhead Spuds to the tune of 8-4. I say "high school age" team instead of just high school because while the Bemidji Youth Hockey Association has information on the “high school” team (their term) the actual high school, Bemidji High School, seems to want no connection, at least according to their athletics department. Moorhead doesn’t seem to be that way, as Moorhead High lists boys hockey on the school’s website. Interesting quirk of this part of the fringe. Needless to say, the Pioneer’s coverage of the boys is very positive and speaks well of their effort in the loss.

Moving on to UNH, I can speak from experience that most of the state of New Hampshire puts down their maple syrup acoutrements and shovels to support the Wildcats. While the recent and unexpected rise to prominence of its division I-AA football team has excited the state – although don’t get me started about the team getting unceremoniously dumped from the playoffs (this was their year) – the university’s bread and butter of sports success is hockey, both the consistently dominating men's and women’s teams. Both teams are almost always at the top of the Hockey East conference, make the playoffs every year, and the women’s team won the first national championship for women’s hockey in 1998.

UNH has an advantage over Bemidji State – it’s the big show in the state. Bemidji has to compete with the University of Minnesota in addition to other big college hockey centers of influence. In terms of media coverage, they are at best a loveable underdog (pun intended). UNH gets tons of local love.

The Manchester Union Leader gives both hockey teams plenty of coverage, writing of them everyday in the paper’s UNH Notebook section. Big games – against rivals Maine and Boston College, as well as Boston University – get coverage that is the equal of any big SEC football game. And it’s just as fair and balanced.

And I think that’s the comparison that I like the most: college football. For years, college football was not a major sport. There were centers of high popularity, where it was treated as the biggest show on earth and where the media covered it with a fan’s devotion. Out of this, a unique and interesting postseason emerged – the bowl system that haunts the game to this day. It wasn’t until decades after its formation and after numerous rules changes that college football began to assemble the popularity it enjoys today.

College hockey is in the same position now that college football was 80 or more years ago. It isn’t a major sports, existing mostly in the fringe markets or in the fringes of major media markets. In those areas where it is popular, it is extremely popular, with fans and media following it with great devotion. Out of this – and fledgling TV contracts – an entertaining post season ritual has developed – the Frozen Four. Half NCAA basketball tournament, half NHL playoffs, it combines the best of both.

And it’ll be on ESPN or ESPN2 this spring. You should look for it, and check out what the next big thing of sports is. Don’t you wish you could have heard REM at a college bar in Athens during the early 80s? This is your chance to watch and care about the indie rock of sports while it still only exists in the fringes.

Young Irvin Gets the Varsity Blues

2006-07-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on December 2, 2005.)

Hours before he was supposed to lead my hometown's high school into the playoffs, their first appearance in a decade, the team's QB got arrested for drunk driving and possession of marijuana. There’s a Michael Irvin joke in here somewhere, although I guarantee you this player wasn’t smiling in his mug shot. A lot of people were pissed at him, and from what little I know about the kid, he was in that group too.

I went to high school at the public high school in Merrimack, NH. My dad was always a big fan of local sports, and so even before I was a student there I went with him to football games. I was in Concord, NH, in 1987, in frigid, ice bowl, like temperatures when Merrimack finished a 10-0 season to take the state championship. It was so cold that they didn’t even sell hot chocolate. That sucks when you’re 9.

In 1995, the Merrimack Tomahawks football team went to the state championship game again, having dramatically beaten state powerhouse Pinkerton Academy in the first round of the playoffs, to face Manchester Central. This time I was 16 and in the marching band (insert appropriate “This one time at band camp…” joke here), old enough to care more about losing the game than not having hot chocolate.

This was the first year since then that Merrimack was in the playoffs, and according to my dad (who, for the purposes of this column, has apparently become a media outlet in and of himself) the aforementioned QB, Damien Tacito, was their leader. A starter since his sophomore year, he had worked hard to get the team the third seed in the post season. This was his team. They had a good coach in Rick Urda, a strong defense, and Tacito at quarterback. On November 12, Tacito was going to lead them into Eustis Field at Exeter High School, as the number three seed in the playoffs. Exeter was favored, but Merrimack had a good shot at pulling off an upset to face Bishop Guertin in the Division II championship.

At least, until Tacito stopped his car clock at 4:20 and declared happy hour in his shaggin’ wagon.

The local papers have handled the news very matter of factly. The Union Leader article was written by staff reporters – as if trying to remove any human subjective element from the reporting of the story – and had the tone of a police blotter. They contacted Urda, who only responded with a “no comment.” “No comment” was also echoed by Tacito’s mother, who was contacted by the Merrimack Journal following her son’s arrest. In some ways, this is quite a scoop for the Journal, as it’s so small it doesn’t even have a sports section.

But if nothing else, the Journal’s coverage of the arrest was better than the Nashua Telegraph’s, which didn’t cover the story at all. What else was more important that weekend? How about an article entitled “Skunks Create Stinky Pet Situation.” God bless fringe media.

Tacito was suspended for the game and Merrimack got spanked, 43-22 – a score, I’m told, that makes the game look far closer than it actually was. The Union Leader’s article on the game quoted Urda as saying that it was “an opportunity for kids who’ve played a backup role all year.” Yeah, cause that’s usually the way coaches view playoff games.

I’m not entirely sure how to take the coverage of this. Granted, even among the non-media centers of New Hampshire, Merrimack is a non-media center. The readers of the Union Leader and Nashua Telegraph certainly don’t care as much about what happens in my hometown as their hometowns. But the arrest of the quarterback of a playoff bound football team from a local high school hours before the game on charges of drunk driving and pot possession seems like it should be more newsworthy.

Shouldn’t a story like this invite questions about high school sports, teenagers as student athletes, and responsibility among youth? Or maybe a column explaining that kids who do stupid things shouldn’t be crucified for them, or even if they should be how they won’t always make stupid decisions. This is like a bizarre hypothetical situation you read in a philosophy textbook, one that invites all sorts of random questions about culture and growing up.

Having said that, though, maybe these papers are actually performing a civic duty by not writing about Damien, or at least performing a compassionate act. He probably feels terrible as it is. He probably hears at least once a day from his friends and family how badly he screwed up and how much he let the team down. The last thing he needs now is the paper telling him he let the school and town down as well.

And if that’s what those papers are doing, then fine. But they should say so. “We don’t feel it’s appropriate for this matter to drag out in front of our readers. We are choosing to give this teenager some privacy in order for him to sort his problems on his own.” That is mature and responsible journalism.

But they have to say it. Otherwise, they aren’t commenting on a fairly important local story. I would feel this way if it were the quarterback of an even smaller school from an even smaller town in the area. The kid worked for a long time to accomplish a sports goal with his team – that others in the school and town looked to with anticipation – and right before reaching that goal he self destructs. To me, that’s worth more than a passing reference in the paper. That type of story should be what local/fringe media covers.

And for those of you who are interested, Bishop Guertin went on to beat Exeter 28-7 to win the Division II state championship, and Pinkerton Academy beat Salem High 7-0. The Union Leader focused largely on Pinkerton in its articles, one about the couch and another about a linebacker/running back (Hooray for two-way football) who got a concussion in the game and came back. The Nashua Telegraph focused a great deal on BG’s victory and also the school’s chances of repeating next year.

Would these championship articles have been different if Tacito had played? Honestly, probably not. Exeter had already beaten Merrimack once this year, and the school’s team was really good. But I wish the Merrimack Tomahawks could have tried with a full arsenal. And I wish none of this had happened to Damien Tacito, if only for his sake.

And Coming in 210th...

2006-07-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally publish by Sports Media Watch on November, 11, 2005.)

VH1 and ESPN Classic have made a cottage industry out of turning lists into televised entertainment: Top 40 Fabulous Lives, Top 20 Game Ending Plays, etc. They’re good conversation fodder because of their arbitrariness. How is Doug Flutie's pass that low? Britney Spears is skanky and trashy, how is her life that fabulous?

Likewise, I wonder about the arbitrariness of the Nielsen list of media markets. New York is number one, Los Angeles is number two and all of the top markets make sense because they have the most people. That’s easy. But at what point do you stop listing markets? Do you stop after Macon, Georgia (#120, with .209% of the American population)? Do you stop after Bangor, Maine (#151, with .130% of the American population)? Or maybe you stop at a nice round number like 200: Mankato, Minnesota, which represents .046% of the American population?

Nope.

If you’re Nielsen, you go a little bit further. You stop at #210: Glendive, Montanta, containing just a shade over 5,000 television-owning households and representing .005% of the United States.

Sure, Glendive gets its own media market listing, but is it really a media market? Couldn’t it just as easily been rolled into one of the nearby media markets? The answer depends on your sense of distance.

Glendive is almost 196 miles from the center of the nearest media market: the mighty Minot-Bismarck-Dickinson market (#160) of North Dakota. After that, the nearest market is 222 miles away in Billings, Montana (#171). Even out west, TV signals can only travel so far and newspaper circulations can only spread so wide. This leaves Glendive in a strange situation.

Glendive isn’t as large as any of the other media markets Nielsen lists, but it can’t get media from any of the “nearby” media markets either. And really, you can’t be in a media market without getting some of the media from that market; it defeats the purpose. So for want of a better alternative, Glendive has become the smallest media market in the US. But let’s be honest, for practical purposes, it’s still in the fringes.

And this fascinates me. The fringe of a media market having to become its own market. They’re so far from media markets that they don’t even get lumped together with the big boys for convenience, like New Hampshire, which means that they make their own TV news and newspaper. That’s great, they should. But what do they cover? What sports do they cover?

Never mind Billings and the three-headed monster of Minot-Bismarck-Dickinson, those aren’t exactly sports meccas as it is. What about college sports? Grand Forks, North Dakota – home of the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux, one of the best college hockey programs in the country and a constant thorn in the side of the UNH Wildcats – is more than 465 miles away. Boise State University in Boise, Idaho – where the nationally prominent Broncos football team plays on Smurf Turf – lies almost 850 miles away.

And professional sports? Forget it. Glendive is over 620 miles from Minneapolis, over 700 miles from Denver, over 780 miles from Salt Lake City, and a whopping 1040 miles from Seattle. Largely due to these distances, the Common Census Sports Map Project reports that Glendive has no particular favorite NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or Division I-A college football team. So again I ask – What sports do they cover?

Ok, I hope no one is thinking too hard on that question, it was rhetorical. This column is all about how the edges of markets cover their teams. I wouldn't have anything to say about Glendive if it weren't covering it's own teams.

The Glendive Ranger is the paper of record in Glendive, Montana. The paper is published twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. It’s available for home delivery in Glendive, Forest Park and Highland Park. The on-line version – a collection of the week’s top stories – is published once a week, usually on Thursdays.

This week’s top sports story in the Ranger is the Dawson County High School Lady Red Devils volleyball team. For the first time since 1998 – and only the second time ever – the Lady Red Devils are going to the state tournament. The team secured their spot in states by winning four of six matches in the conference tournament last weekend. The Lady Red Devils beat every team they came up against, except number one seed Hardin, which beat DCHS twice in the dual elimination tournament, once in the second round and again in the conference finals.

What is striking about this particular story is that it’s not just one article on the Ranger’s site. Most of the sports section is devoted, match by match, to describing how this team’s success and playoff berth unfolded. There’s a sense of pride; the hometown team – our kids – have played really well and they get to compete for the state championship representing us. That it’s high school girls’ volleyball, a sport hardly given much thought outside Glendive, doesn’t matter. Those are their kids and the town is proud.

The other big stores coming out of Glendive this week are all college sports. Not Division I-A sports like the Boise State Broncos or I-AA sports like the UNH football team. No, the big college sports stories coming out of Glendive this week are more community oriented. As in community college.

The men’s basketball team at Dawson Community College began their season by going 1-1. The Bucs lost their first game, 83-78, against the Bears of Rocky Mountain College. The team rebounded by blowing out Montana Tech Junior Varsity by 81-62, a score that made the game look closer than it actually was given that DCC led by as many as 30. Last year Bucs basketball had a very successful season, making it to the Region IX championship game of the National Junior College Athletic Association.

Unfortunately, the DCC women’s basketball team got destroyed over the weekend in a tournament in Sheridan, Wyoming, losing their three games by scores of 62-85, 49-82, and 33-84. Not surprisingly, the Ranger gives the team a favorable article despite the losses. The story focuses on how the team played fairly well in one game’s first half and actually was tied with another team at the end of another first half. The Ranger covered all three sports stories with equal glow, but the soft treatment was most glaring for the DCC Lady Bucs.

I would also like to point out that Dawson Community College has a rodeo team. They won the national championship in 1981. I’m just throwing that out there.

Even for someone from New Hampshire, Glendive’s sports media seems bucolic, to be generous. But it’s theirs. And the Glendive Ranger helps them assert their ownership over those teams, strengthening the community’s ties to the schools and the teams. I love my New Hampshire teams, but anyone from New York or Los Angeles or wherever would almost certainly laugh at their smallness.

Fine. Let ‘em. They’re my teams, and I don’t care what people outside of my fringe area think of them. I’m sure Glendive is the same way. Their sports coverage reflects that. The town may be a Nielsen media market only by necessity, but they live up to it: no pro sports coverage because there aren't any, no far off college sports coverage, only local sports coverage.

In a media market like New York, that usually means the Knicks, the Jets, the Giants, and the Rangers (which is only a hop, skip and a jump away from the relevance of girls' high school volleyball). But in Glendive, that means Dawson County High School and Dawson Community College.

So at least Glendive looks the part of a media market. That’s more than I can say for the fabulous life of Britney Spears. She still looks trashy.

Mapping the Fringes

2006-07-02T15:24:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on November 4, 2005.)

Any map freaks out there? Anyone looking for a sports map of the US you can play Risk on? You want a fascinating look at sports allegiances in the fringes of this country? Check out the maps of sports fandom.

Begun this past September, the Common Census Map Project is an attempt to define the US by geographic and cultural allegiances. From the main page you can alert the project to your hometown, the city closest to your hometown, and the big city nearest that city. It’s like a Wikipedia-census, an open source account of where people are in America and where they consider themselves “from.”

The map doesn’t adjust itself, though, with each respondent. Instead, the archivists wait until certain response thresholds have been met. It makes fascinating reading, though, as visitors to the site can see what the census map looked like after 4,000 responses, 8,000 responses, 16,000 responses, and the current one which represents 24,000 responses. The next version will be published after 32,000 votes, which should happen shortly after this article publishes.

And as I mentioned in the teaser paragraph, the project also charts the sports allegiances of respondents. The site has maps for the fan bases of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NCAA I-A football. And for whatever reason, these maps are updated far more frequently than the main project’s map. Obviously, these maps have some serious flaws, most notably the lack of representative data from across the country. Currently, the votes are skewed heavily toward the northeast, as witnessed by the fact that, as of this writing, Boston College football has more votes of allegiance than the University of Miami and Florida State combined.

I need a stand-alone sentence to emphasize how stupid that is.

Nonetheless, these maps offer a pretty cool look at regional loyalties. Each one allows users to look closely, within a fifty mile diameter, at what allegiances people in particular areas hold.

On the college football map, for example, the plurality of respondents in New Hampshire support Boston College, but Notre Dame is close behind. Make’s sense: Notre Dame’s the most famous Catholic school in the country. And New Hampshire is largely Catholic, having gotten populated and papaled by French Canadians and Boston Irish.

Sure BC, is Catholic too, but Notre Dame is far more famous and prestigious. Heck, thirty years ago BC was on the verge of financial ruin; the University of Massachusetts was planning on buying its campus for UMass-Boston. And geographically, you’d think BC would leave Notre Dame in the dust, but seriously – how long has BC had football? Pretty much since Doug Flutie. Sure there was football before at BC, but it doesn’t count. Kind of like all those guys who went to the USFL and then went to the NFL; no one cares that Jim Kelly passed for over 5200 yards with the Houston Gamblers in 1984. And so BC wins out in the fringes of its own market, but only barely.

Anomalies like this assert themselves in every sport and all over the country. On the NFL map, the Packers are most popular around Green Bay: Wisconsin, the upper peninsula of Michigan, and western Iowa. Beyond that, according to the map they receive the most ardent support from pockets of rural Mississippi. This looks asinine to anyone who doesn’t pay attention to the NFL, but those fans among us realize that those rural Mississippians are cheering for one of their own – Brett Favre, Gulfport's favorite son.

In the fringes of sports fandom, without a major sports team nearby to hook our loyalties, other factors become dominant. To whose farm system does our local minor league team belong? What team drafted our favorite player from the state university’s basketball team that unexpectedly went 20-6 last year? What team does that local guy play for? Where geographic proximity is the strongest pull of teams in the middle of major markets, idiosyncratic randomness is often the strongest pull of teams for people in the fringes.

Now look at the baseball map. New York state is dominated by the Yankees, with pockets of resisting Mets fans (give Steinbrenner time, though – eventually Selig will let him liquidate those holdouts). But the middle of the state is largely Red Sox fans. Why? How did so many Red Sox fans end up in the Middle of Nowhere, NY?

The answer: college. Red Sox allegiance dominates central New York because there are a ton of liberal arts schools there that kids in New England fall over themselves applying to. Every year, Syracuse, Hamilton, Colgate and others attract thousands of young, die hard Red Sox fans to their campuses. This shifts the balance of fandom.

This particular issue – and actually, the Common Census Map Project in general – brings up several key questions: What defines a media market? Who populates those markets? What are the allegiances of those people and -- last but certainly not least -- Where do markets end?

According to Nielsen’s Listing of Media Markets, central New York essentially falls under two different media markets: Syracuse (#76) and Utica (#166). But according to the project’s main map, that area is pretty evenly divided between cultural ties to New York City and Syracuse. Does that mean that the heart of the Syracuse market is bleeding into the New York suburbs? Or is Syracuse simply a media market in name only, and actually functions as a very organized fringe to New York City?

And Utica is actually smaller than Manchester, New Hampshire, yet receives its own media market while Manch Vegas is officially tied to Boston. Is that to make Boston feel better? Does Boston need to stuff a potato down its population pants to compensate for a smaller than expected viewing audience? Or is Utica the one being humored? (Which would, of course, bring up the question: “Of whom does Utica have naked pictures that it warrants being humored?”)

And what kind of market is it, anyway, when most of those people don’t feel any loyalty to that market? Boston could be said to have that problem too, as the city attracts more college kids than almost anywhere, but manages to counteract that by browbeating most of those students into cheering for our sports teams, particularly the Red Sox. That clearly doesn’t happen in central New York. Does that make it a typical or atypical example of how things can be weird on the fringes of media markets?

Market fringes aren’t easy to describe because they’re different everywhere. What defines Mississippians’ loyalty to the Packers does not define central New York’s loyalty to the Red Sox. In the center of media markets, sports are easier to describe – Denver roots for the Broncos because they’re right there. Same for Seattle and the Mariners. And Long Island and the Islanders.

I admit that I’m going to be writing more about New Hampshire and Boston than about the fringes in other media markets. But every once in a while I intend to return to the fringes of other markets and sports fandom in general, just to see how others live there. The sports maps on the Common Census Map Project are a good tool to do that, and since they’re updated so frequently I might return sometimes to review how they’re progressing. They hint at the complexities of sports fans in the outlands of TV, radio and newspapers. The project shows apparent randomness, that frequently doesn’t make sense, but at least it’s got cool maps to play with.

New Hampshire High School Football is NOT a Red Herring!

2006-07-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on October 26, 2005.)

My dad informed me this weekend that the hunt for the granite championship of glory is already on, with the playoffs starting in a few weeks. And for the first time since I was in 10th grade, my high school is in it. That year we made it all the way to the state championship, so I’m very hopeful. But I'm also curious – how are local papers treating the playoffs?

Merrimack isn’t large enough to have its own daily. There’s a weekly freebie, called the Merrimack Journal, but that mostly carries stories about local bake sales and employees of the week. It’s put out by a small publishing company that creates freebies for towns all over southern New Hampshire. For the most part, we rely on the Manchester Union Leader, the Nashua Telegraph, and the Boston Globe (which of course couldn’t give a damn about New Hampshire sports).

But how impartial are those papers? Let’s find out.

But first, I should point out that New Hampshire, like every other state, groups its schools by size for sports. The largest schools are in Division I; the smallest schools are in Division V. Honestly, the only two divisions I care about are I and II, so those are the only two divisions I’ll be writing about. Merrimack High School – my school – plays in Division II and used to play in Division I. In each division, the top four teams advance to the playoffs. Now on to the papers.

The Union Leader is an interesting quirk of New Hampshire. Widely considered to be New Hampshire’s paper of record, it has a long history of radical conservatism. The late publisher William Loeb insisted on that principle, and guided it as such for decades. Some stellar examples of what his editorial board produced:

The lead editorial from one day’s edition in 1947 was a ringing endorsement of the Taft-Hartley act and was followed by an attack on the metric system, calling it a “communist-inspired plot” designed for the purpose of weakening capitalism and carried out by Pinko trade unions that wanted to topple the US government.
Loeb wrote that the Roots mini series was part of a communist conspiracy.
In 1964, the paper described the civil rights movement as directed from the Kremlin.

The paper has mellowed quite a bit in the last few years, if only because there really aren’t any more communists to watch out for. Well, that combined with Loeb’s death in 1981 and the death of his equally conservative wife Nackey who became publisher after him. It now has a strident libertarian bent, as befits a New Hampshire paper, and can be relied on for solid local coverage.

Since Manchester is the biggest city in the state and supports four Division I schools, it should come as no surprise that the paper focuses much of its attention of that division and the Manchester schools in it.

The lead high school football story focuses on the competition between five Division I teams for the last three playoff spots going into the final two weeks of the season. Pinkerton – a long time powerhouse in New Hampshire football – has clinched a playoff spot with a 7-1 record. Salem (6-1), Concord (5-2), Nashua North (5-3), Manchester West (4-3) and Manchester Central (4-3) are all in the scrum for the final spot. Nashua North – a brand new school last year, built to separate Nashua’s single mammoth high school that is now Nashua South – is probably starting to feel a little desperate, as it opened the season with five straight wins but has now dropped three in a row.

The Union Leader goes on to talk about Division II, beginning with how dominant Bishop Guertin is, currently 7-0 and riding a 20 game win streak. It’ll have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Exeter (7-1) – who BG beat this past Saturday 10-7, with a field goal as time expired – has tied up the number two spot. My 6-2 Merrimack Tomahawks (we’re wicked PC) clinched third place this weekend when Dover beat Timberlane; John Habib, the writer, even calls the Merrimack team “physical.” Winnacunnet (4-3) currently holds the last playoff spot, but has to beat Portsmouth (2-5) and Spaulding (3-4) to do it.

All things considered, the paper is pretty even handed. There’s more space devoted to Division I schools, but given that The Union Leader is based out of Manchester, the city that is home to 40% of Division I schools in the state, it makes sense. Quite frankly, Habib said nice things about my school, so I’m cool with him.

I’d like to say the Nashua Telegraph has a similarly interesting history, filled with hair-brained accusations and conspiracy theories of the left or right wing varieties. Sadly, The Telegraph is just a solid, sometimes thoughtful, local paper without any history of idiot and insulting ideas. Pity.

Gary Fitz, the Telegraph’s high school football beat writer, manages to scoop Habib, at least in terms of math. Fitz looks at the records and upcoming schedules in Division I and figures out that Salem has already clinched a playoff spot in Division I. I have no doubt that Fitz yelled out “Suck it Habib!” when he realized he’d scooped his rival. Do sports reporters have to take some sports math course in college? Byzantine Playoff Algebra 101? Did Habib fail?

However, Fitz’s coverage is very Nashua-centric. And he isn’t even trying to be otherwise: “Locally we all want to know Nashua North’s chances.” Hey! Merrimack is next door! We’re not local? We don’t care about Nashua North!

In addition to Nashua North, the paper focuses on BG, which makes sense given that the parochial school is in Nashua. There is scant attention paid to the Division II playoff race that BG leads, as compared to Division I playoff race that Nashua North is participating in. It does make sense, though, given the closeness of the Division I race.

I appreciate Fitz’s insight into Salem’s playoff chances. That was some careful quadratic sports reporting. But he had hardly anything to say about Merrimack. I bet a third of the Telegraph’s readers are from Merrimack. It would have killed him to throw a little love our way?

Given my options, for New Hampshire high school football coverage, I’m going with that bastion of communist hysteria, the Union Leader. They give me high school football the way I like: complimentary of the Merrimack Tomahawks and Red-free.

Postcards from the Edge of the 5th Media Market

2006-07-01T05:20:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published by Sports Media Watch on October 19, 2005.)

I’m from New Hampshire. I don’t like Vermont. I honestly believe in the mutual exclusivity of living free or dying. I can parallel park, but it ain’t pretty, and that’s because it wasn’t on my New Hampshire driving test. I love Lake Winnipesaukee, not because it’s a tourist trap, but because I’ve been going for so long I remember when I didn’t know it was a tourist trap. When I’m at a bar, I want Smuttynose beer, preferably the IPA. Massachusetts drivers are the worst.

However, I’m also from New Hampshire. I get mistaken for a Vermonter. I get mocked and ridiculed for my license plate. I need a spot the size of a Hummer to parallel park my Corolla. I’m sick of all those Boston attorneys and MBA types buying the houses on Lake Winnipesaukee. More often than not, the bar I’m at doesn’t have Smuttynose and I have to settle for a Sam Adams. And worst of all, I’m a suburb of Massachusetts and their horrible drivers.

Such are the joys of living on the fringes of a major media market. If you look at Nielsen’s listing of media markets in descending order of population, you’ll note that the number five spot is officially listed as “Boston (Manchester).” That’s crap.

Boston is the media market. Manchester is thrown in there for context, as if to say “It ends up there…somewhere.” When TV types talk about the “Boston media market,” they mean Boston. They don’t mean Manchester or New Hampshire. And there’s the assumption on the part of large media outlets to clump New Hampshire with the center of the media market to which it has been assigned.

We’re assumed to vote for John Kerry because, hey, he’s practically from here. Shows that are based in Boston – Cheers, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, etc. – are expected to fare just as well in New Hampshire as in Massachusetts. New Hampshire should love Boston sports teams as much as Bostonians because they don’t have anyone else to root for.

That these assumptions appear to be true make it all the more annoying that they’re asserted in the first place. Frequently the results may appear to be the same, but the way New Hampshire got there is far different from how Boston and the bulk of the Boston media market arrived at the same conclusion.

Boston and Massachusetts voted for John Kerry because George W. Bush is too conservative (religiously); New Hampshire voted for John Kerry because George W. Bush isn’t conservative (fiscally) enough. Boston and Massachusetts watch shows based in Boston because they are invested in those shows; New Hampshire watches those shows because we’re too cheap to pay for HBO. Boston and Massachusetts cheer for Boston sports teams because they’re awesome sports teams; New Hampshire cheers for Boston sports teams because they’re awesome sports teams, but out here on the fringes we have other sporting passions that the major markets miss.

New Hampshire is like a lot of fringes on a lot of media markets. We pay more attention to schools and the minors because that’s what we have ownership over. High school sports are big. I haven’t attended class at my New Hampshire high school in over eight years, but my father still devotedly attends every football game and most baseball games, basketball games, and track meets too. He tells me how they do, too. And I care. Despite myself, I care.

Is that unusual? No. Lots of people from everywhere still care about their high schools. But out here on the fringes, these allegiances matter more to us. If all politics are local, then all sports are too. I care about the Red Sox and the Patriots, the Celtics and the Bruins, sure; but I literally grew up with my high school team, and I’m still swayed by my allegiance to it.

And I never went to the University of New Hampshire, but God, I love Wildcats hockey. The NHL sucks (the Bruins are a slight exception), but I care about college hockey. I want UNH to beat Michigan, BC, North Dakota and especially Maine. I hate Maine. I have friends who have a young daughter. Her father’s greatest hope for her is to see her hair streaming out from the back of her UNH hockey helmet. If he has a son, he wants his son’s mullet streaming out from the back of a UNH hockey helmet. There are a lot of people who feel the same way up here.

From school hockey to minor league hockey: the Manchester Monarchs. They’re only five years old, but the whole state was excited about having them play in front of us. Manchester built the Verizon Wireless Arena, a giant facility for them. So big it hosted Britney Spears in concert. I don’t know what that distinction means, exactly, but there’s got to be a lot of teeny-bopper girls, college guys, and dirty old men in the greater Manchester area. So a Britney Spears concert has got to hold a lot of people.

But I digress. New Hampshire digs hockey; when the LA Kings gave us their newest affiliate for safe keeping, we took it very seriously. We made sure we cheered them on as they compiled the best record last year in the American Hockey League.

But as much as New Hampshire likes hockey, we’re Americans. We love football. But what’s a state to do that can’t support a NFL team but wants professional football? That’s right, they get an Arena Football League team. But what’s a state to do that can’t support an AFL team but wants professional football? That’s right, they get an Arena Football League 2 team.

(Wait, anything smaller? Is the XFL still around? What about the USFL? No? Ok. AFL2 it is.)

When the Manchester Wolves moved into the Verizon Wireless Arena a couple years ago, to play during the Monarchs off-season, there was a palpable pulse in the air of the Granite State. What was that Frank Zappa quote about needing a football team and a beer to be a real nation? I think states are like that too. Well, New Hampshire has Smuttynose and the Wolves, who I might add won the East division in the AFL2’s American Conference.

Before minor league hockey and minorest league football, though, New Hampshire had minor league baseball. For years, Nashua and southern New Hampshire rooted for the Nashua Dodgers, an affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Months after signing Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn’s top affiliate in Montreal, Dodger GM Branch Rickey further broke baseball’s color barrier by signing Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to play for in the Class B New England League. They played for future Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston, with Campanella winning the League MVP in 1946 and Newcombe being a 19-game winner in 1947. Sadly, within a few years, the Nashua Dodgers had been folded by the big team and professional baseball disappeared from New Hampshire for decades.

In the past five years, though, professional baseball has coming roaring back and won two championships. The Nashua Pride won the Atlantic League Championship in 2000, and the New Hampshire Fisher Cats won the Eastern League Championship in 2004. We rule! With their major league affiliation and brand new stadium, the Fisher Cats in particular were a big deal. The Pride play in an unaffiliated league, but the Cats are AA affiliates of the Toronto Blue Jays. A major league team, eh? With the Fisher Cats, some of the players we cheer for are going to the big show someday.

It’s strange when you think of it in those terms – we cheer for the team whose players are more likely to leave us for something better. It’s like we’re consciously thinking “They could do better, and they know it, but at least we get them for a while.” Is that sad or pathetic somehow? I don’t know. But that’s the flow in media markets – from the fringes to the center.

A lot of New Hampshire’s identity is consumed with swimming upstream from that flow. We don’t want to be Boston North, despite what the good folks at Nielson’s say. We might agree with conclusions from the big market, but we want to do it in our own way. We might root for their sports team, and care about their sports teams, but we’ve got our own that the centers don’t understand. It’s not like they’re a secret; we would be more than happy to sell $50 million in Monarchs merchandise. The centers don’t understand because they don’t bother to look. In media markets, the flow is from the fringes in. Few people swim upstream to the edge. This is a postcard from those fringes, from the edge:

“We’re having a great time out here where you’re not paying attention! Hope you start to follow traffic laws and stop buying waterfront property in New Hampshire! Go Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, Bruins, Tomahawks, Wildcats, Monarchs, Wolves, Pride, and Fishercats! Love, John”

Granite Fringes Has a New Home

2006-06-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

In October of 2005, I started writing a column for Sports Media Watch called Granite Fringes. The idea was to chronicle and analyze how media covers sports that don't get a lot of media attention. I called these sports fringe sports, as in sports away from media centers. Large media outlets in large media markets pay them little attention, but smaller newspapers, blogs, TV and radio stations cover them and do so very well. My column tried to find those fringe sports and that fringe media covering them. On my better days, my columns were a little funny and had something worth reading in them.

After Sports Media Watch stopped publishing in April, I figured I'd just drop the column. But I actually missed writing the stupid thing. So in order to find a new forum to keep exploring fringe sports, Granite Fringes has moved and changed its name to Fringe Sports Central, or FSC.

We build communities around sports. The Green Bay Packers are communally owned by the people who live in Green Bay. Red Sox fans know that they have a friend in every city in the country because they belong to Red Sox Nation. Sports are a way for us to connect with other people.

This is particularly true among fringe sports. Small towns come together over fringe sports like high school football and minor league baseball, basketball and hockey. Fringe sports like lacrosse and college hockey create intense loyalty among their fans. Check out the camaraderie electric football - freaking electric football - has created. Fringe sports matter because they have the power to tie us to the people around us. They bring us together.

They can also be weird as hell and damn funny. And that's going to be a big part of this column too, along with what these fringe sports are, how they're trying to connect with their fans and grow, how the media covers them, and how their fans build communities around them.

I'm going to republish all of my Granite Fringes columns here, and then start writing new material. Among the topics that I'll be covering:

Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition
Major League Lacrosse All-Star Game
Follow-ups to my column on LaxPower and my review of media coverage of the Eastern League
College hockey preview
More coverage of minor league and high school sports
Plenty of other weird sports junk I haven't found yet

So keep checking back here, there'll be lots of overanalysis of the random, obscure and unknown in sports.