Search Results for: sports

How Should a German Be?

Rasande Tyskar, Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

A number of countries, like the United States, have been multiethnic and multireligious since their founding. In the Hapsburg Empire or the Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire, different cultures coexisted under the rule of a tolerant monarch, yet people mostly ate, lived, and married among those of the same ilk. What much of Europe is currently attempting is historically unique. Never before has a democracy that defined itself by its ethnic or religious homogeneity managed to broaden its self-conception and recognize millions of immigrants as members of the nation. No precedent suggests that it can be done.

Germany has become the most important test site in this grand experiment. For decades, the conditions for membership in the German nation were clear and rigid. A true German was a descendant of those brave warriors who roamed the Teutonic woods and intimidated Julius Caesar’s legions — or somebody who could at least pass for one.

There are some signs of change. Immigrants and their children, mostly invisible in the public sphere a few decades ago, are starting to find success in business, sports, music, journalism, and even politics. In the most mixed neighborhoods of the country’s biggest cities, it is starting to seem obvious that a true German might be Asian or African.

In Harper’s, German-born Yascha Mounk details the ways recent Islamic immigration has not only given rise to vocal anti-migrant factions, but challenges many Germans’ core idea of their national identity.

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The Swan (Mascot) that Would Not Be Tamed

Photo by Swanseajack4life (CC BY-SA 3.0)

At Howler Magazine, Jeff Maysh tells the story of Cyril the Swan, the misbehaving mascot of Welsh football club Swansea City. It’s a story about the fading, post-industrial city that embraced the swan’s antics as a symbol of local identity. But it’s also the story of club groundskeeper Eddie Donne, the man inside the costume, and the making (and unmaking) of ultra-local heroes. In a particularly surreal scene, Maysh recounts a disciplinary hearing between league officials and the mascot — who appeared in full swan regalia.

Neil McClure hired Britain’s most famous sports attorney, Maurice Watkins, to defend Cyril. In 1995, Watkins had represented Manchester United star Eric Cantona after he kung fu kicked a spectator. He wanted Cyril kept away from the hearing because, Watkins told me via e-mail, he was “unpredictable to say the least.” This, he said, almost caused Lewis to “have apoplexy as the interest in the case had already generated huge sales of Cyril memorabilia, and [Lewis] had just commissioned the purchase of thousands of Cyril statuettes.” Donne avoided the TV crews and fans out front by sneaking in a back door and carrying Cyril in a bag. When Donne poked Cyril’s head out of a window, the mob went wild and began chanting, “Save our swan!”

Welsh FA chairman Alun Evans and two officials were sitting behind a long table in a barren conference room when they called for the defendant.

“They wanted to see what my vision was like,” Donne says. Cyril kicked the doors open and staggered inside. “I was falling over on purpose,” he says. “There was a plate of biscuits, so I pecked them, knocked the plate over.” As the biscuits went flying, the FA officials looked on in disbelief.
When Lewis explained that Cyril was a mute swan, the chairman instructed him to act as a translator.

“Ask Cyril, Mike, can he see a football at his feet when he is wearing his costume?” said Evans.

The swan shook his head: no.

“Ask Cyril, Mike, did he intentionally kick the ball in the direction of a Millwall player?”

Again, the answer was no.

“Mr. Watkins,” the chairman barked, turning to the lawyer, “were you aware that Cyril patted an official on the head shortly after Swansea had scored their third goal … after encroachment on the field of play?”

“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Watkins said. “Cyril thought that he had seen a coin thrown at the linesman and went over to console him.”

Brilliant, Maurice, brilliant, Lewis recalls thinking.

Cyril was dismissed from the room. As he was leaving, Donne saw referee Steve Dunn sitting in a chair in the corridor.

“I dipped my beak in his coffee,” he says.

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ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They’re Not Really Into It

Longreads Pick

No matter how innovative or cutting-edge ESPN makes itself, the cable money is just too lucrative, and the costs of licensing live sports are just too great, to finally cut the cord and offer itself as a standalone internet subscription service the way HBO did with HBO Now.

Published: Apr 1, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,473 words)

Why ESPN Still Can’t Quit Cable

As a casual sports fan, I periodically check in with myself: Do I enjoy watching live sports enough to pay for cable?

The answer for the last few years has been: No thanks, I’ll just check out these GIFs on Twitter.

ESPN is having the exact opposite problem, as Ira Boudway and Max Chafkin explain in their latest Bloomberg Businessweek cover story. No matter how innovative or cutting-edge the sports giant makes itself, the cable money is just too lucrative, and the costs of licensing live sports are just too great, to finally cut the cord and offer itself as a standalone internet subscription service the way HBO did with HBO NOW. Boudway and Chafkin do the math:

Other media companies, most notably HBO, have confronted cord cutting by offering their programming “over the top,” which is TV-speak for “on the internet.” More than 2 million people pay $15 a month for access to the HBO Now app, but that strategy doesn’t translate to ESPN. The network’s programming costs are far greater than those of HBO—the budget for an entire season of Game of Thrones costs around $100 million, or less than what ESPN pays for the rights to air a single Monday Night Football game—and ESPN’s customers are accustomed to getting the network at no additional charge as part of their cable package. If ESPN were to charge $15 a month for a standalone streaming channel, it would need more than 43 million subscribers to match the money it collects from cable carriers. HBO has about 35 million total subscribers in the U.S., including cable and over the top.

Now, I’m obviously just one person, but I’m pretty sure I would subscribe to a service that just offers an endless loop of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America. Just a thought for the folks over in Bristol.

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Revisiting the History of the Oakland Raiders Courtesy of Hunter S. Thompson

Credit: NFL/Twitter

The Oakland Raiders have been a thorn in the NFL’s side for decades. From pugnacious owner Al Davis to the team’s raucously rowdy fans and years of mediocrity, the Raiders reveled in being the league’s black sheep. And on the rare occasion when the team was competitive, like during the late 1970s and early ’80s when the franchise won three Super Bowls, the Silver and Black still seemed to thumb its collective nose at the league’s Brooks Brothers-outfitted executives on NYC’s Park Avenue.

Well, those execs enacted their own form of revenge: thanks to a league vote this week, the Raiders will leave the Bay Area for Las Vegas. Much like the neutering of Cleveland’s Dawg Pound (when the Cleveland Browns left for Baltimore in the late 1990s), the vote was put to the NFL owners, and only one—the Miami Dolphins—voted against the move, marking the third team in the past 14 months to relocate. While the Raiders’ new stadium won’t be ready until 2019 (at the earliest), the Raiders will have a two-year memorial for the city that loved them like no other.

It’s worth revisiting when the Raiders were weird and good. In 1973, Rolling Stone sent Hunter S. Thompson to embed with the AFC West team. Thompson was deep into gonzo journalism by this point, and as an avid football fan, he desperately wanted to chronicle a season with what was arguably the NFL’s strangest team. Trouble was, Davis didn’t entirely trust Thompson, and neither did the Raider players, who the Rolling Stone writer plied with cocaine in order for them to open up (according to Robert Draper’s history of the groundbreaking magazine, Thompson then tried to write the coke off as a business expense).

What follows is Thompson’s first interaction with Davis as reported in Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl: No Rest for the Wretched:

…the other was a small wiry man in a tan golf jacket with a greasy duck-tail haircut who paced along the sidelines of both fields with a speedy kind of intensity that I never really noticed until he suddenly appeared very close to me and I heard him ask a sportswriter from the San Francisco Chronicle who I was and I was doing there…

The conversation took place within 10 yards of me, and I heard most of it.

“Who’s the big guy over there with the ball in his hand?” asked the man with the DA.

“His name’s Thompson,” replied Chronicle sportswriter Jack Smith. “He’s a writer for Rolling Stone.”

“The Rolling Stones? Jesus Christ! What’s he doing here? Did you bring him?”

“No, he’s writing a big article. Rolling Stone is a magazine, Al. It’s different from the Rolling Stones; they’re a rock music group… Thompson’s a buddy of George Plimpton’s, I think… and he’s also a friend of Dave Burgin’s-you remember Burgin?”

“Holy shit! Burgin! We ran him out of here with a cattle prod!”

I saw Smith laugh at this point, then he was talking again: “Don’t worry, Al. Thompson’s okay. He wrote a good book about Las Vegas.”

Good god! I thought. That’s it… If they read that book I’m finished. By this time I’d realized that this strange-looking bugger named “Al,” who looked like a pimp or a track-tout, was in fact the infamous Al Davis-general manager and de facto owner (pending settlement of a nasty lawsuit scheduled for court-action early this year) of the whole Oakland Raider operation.

Davis glanced over his shoulder at me, then spoke back to Smith: “Get the bastard out of here. I don’t trust him.”

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Remembering Jerry Krause, Architect Behind the Greatest NBA Team Ever Assembled

Credit: AP Photo/Bill Kostroun

There is dichotomy that naturally comes with any sort of memorialization for Jerry Krause, the general manager of the Chicago Bulls for nearly 20 years and who died earlier this week. Krause didn’t draft Michael Jordan, but it was primarily through his efforts that the Bulls won six NBA titles, dominating the 1990s with players like Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, and Toni Kukoc, among others; Krause was the architect behind the signing and drafting of those players, and without his efforts, who knows if we would even consider Jordan the GOAT. Read more…

The Midwestern Birthplace of March Madness

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but the NCAA wasn’t trying to be coy when it first used the phrase “March Madness” to describe the organization’s annual postseason tournament.

We now associate “madness” with all things brackets and Cinderellas, but for much of the tournament’s early years, it was already seen as the unworthy cousin to the NIT, the postseason tournament which draws more teams and has a larger national profile.

When the NCAA tournament first launched at the end of the 1938-39 season, it flopped, losing more than $2,000 despite the promotional draw of Oregon’s Tall Firs, the nickname for the squad’s front court. (The team won the first-ever title.) At this point, the nation’s only March Madness was the Illinois High School Association’s tournament. The association had hosted the state’s high school tourney since 1908, and its directors liked to tout a 1939 article in the Illinois Interscholastic magazine that read, “A little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel.”

The NCAA tourney grew, supplanting the NIT. Unfortunately for the IHSA, trademark proceedings for “March Madness” didn’t begin until 1991, more than a decade after the NCAA first began to see the phrase’s true marketing potential. Legendary announcer Brent Musburger began to use it on-air, and by 1989, when CBS and the NCAA signed a $1 billion deal to broadcast the tournament, March Madness had become big business. The NCAA and IHSA met in court in the mid-90s to hash out their disagreement, and the phrase became a “dual-use term.”

While the NCAA was late to adopt the language by which its tournament is known worldwide, it didn’t make the same mistake with the phrases, “Elite Eight,” “Final Four,” and “And Then There Were Four,” which were all trademarked. Interestingly, the term “Sweet Sixteen,” which applies to the tournament’s last sixteen remaining teams, also didn’t originate with the NCAA, starting with the Kentucky High School Athletic Association (which licenses it to the NCAA).

This season’s tournament will be its 78th, and it’s interesting to look back when the NCAA tournament was a still growing tournament instead of a multi-billion juggernaut.

In some circles, the NCAA championship game was a big deal very early on. Horace “Bones” McKinney, who played for a UNC team that lost in the final, 43-40 to Oklahoma State in 1946 at Madison Square Garden, said, “Maybe the final four hadn’t come of age back then, but it couldn’t have been bigger for us. That old Garden was packed with 19,000, and the smoke was so thick I couldn’t even see the upper deck. It was New York, and we were big stuff.”

Big stuff, indeed. That 1946 game was the first title game televised, broadcast to about 500,000 viewers in the New York area over CBS. The first nationally televised final came in 1954—the broadcast rights sold for $7,500—gathered a respectable audience, and the championship game remained a reliable high-ratings Saturday staple for almost two decades.

On January 20, 1968, the sports world was startled to learn just how popular college basketball could be. All of the sudden, it seemed, college basketball was an Event that would fill huge arenas.

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A March Madness Reading List, with Music By Céline Dion

Jim Valvano
North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano, shown after his basketball team defeated Houston to win NCAA championship at Albuquerque, N.M., April 4, 1983. (AP Photo)

The idea started last July. Everybody loves buzzer beaters in college basketball—but what if someone were to publicize just those moments on a Twitter feed, and then remix them with a 20-year-old hit Céline Dion song? That, my friends, is a recipe for viral magic. Read more…

The Restless Ghosts of Baiersdorf

The new entrance gate to the Jewish cemetery in the center of Baiersdorf, a small town in Bavaria. (All photos by Sabine Heinlein unless otherwise noted.)

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | March 2017 | 25 minutes (6,248 words)

 

David Birnbaum got off the train in Baiersdorf. The Bavarian village 12 miles north of Nuremberg as the crow flies made a pleasant, pastoral impression. Green fields surrounded the railroad station, and men in leather trousers stood in front of traditional timbered houses.

In 2000, Birnbaum, a corporate business development manager, had come all the way from Rechovot, Israel. He had never heard of Baiersdorf until he looked at one of his family trees. His great-great-grandfather, the renowned numismatist Abraham Merzbacher, was born there in 1812, as was another famous relative, the mountaineer and explorer Gottfried Merzbacher. In the first half of the 19th century, the era in which the two men were born, almost one third of Baiersdorf’s 1,400 residents was Jewish.

David Birnbaum’s relatives had left Baiersdorf for various reasons and in all directions. Abraham Merzbacher went to study in Munich. He became a banker and collected one of the largest private Jewish libraries in the world. Gottfried Merzbacher caught wanderlust. He went to explore Central Asia’s Tian Shan mountains, indulging in nature’s “wondrously sweet, flowery alpine valleys… wild gorges… rock chains of unprecedented boldness.” Later, a glacial lake there was named after him. In his expedition “sketches” (available only in German) Merzbacher also wrote that in the magic of this “unworldly solitude (…) the struggles and passions caused by the contrast of people’s real or perceived interests appeared surreal, like phantoms.”

David Birnbaum knocked at the town hall in Baiersdorf’s neat main square. He expected to unearth information about his family by looking at 300- or 400-year-old tax records at the town’s archive, as he had done in other places in Germany. A clerk said that the archive was a complete mess; no way that he’d find anything there. Normally, the clerk disclosed, they don’t even let people go to the Jewish cemetery unescorted. But since Birnbaum had come all the way from Israel and only had a few hours, he could take the big iron key and go to the cemetery which was, unlike other Jewish cemeteries, located right in the center of town. Read more…

‘I Am Not a Role Model’ and the Resurgence of Athlete Activism

Extending gloved hands skyward in racial protest, U.S. athletes Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos stare downward during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner after Smith received the gold and Carlos the bronze for the 200 meter run at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City on Oct. 16, 1968. (AP Photo)

“Republicans buy sneakers too.”

That’s what Michael Jordan reportedly said when, in 1990, he was asked to endorse Harvey Gantt, a black politician who was running against Jesse Helms, a racist and divisive senator, in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina. Arthur Ashe was one of those who had reached out to Jordan, hoping to convince the then-ascendant GOAT to take a political stand, to use his position for something that mattered off the court. Jordan’s reputed answer wasn’t unusual—it was just three years later that Charles Barkley, a future NBA Hall of Famer, infamously proclaimed that he was “not a role model.” Read more…