The best sports journalism from around the web, featuring Alex Ferguson, Norman Mailer, baseball apologetics and NFL brains
Thanks for all your comments and suggestions on our last blog.
1) The best of all games
Arguing about which sports are better than others is a bit silly, but when one of the greatest minds of the last century has a stab at picking the best of all games, we should probably listen. John Rawls, who set out a system for creating a fair society in his remarkable book A Theory of Justice, thought that baseball is the fairest of them all – and, naturally enough, he had his reasons.
According to Rawls, the rules of baseball have remained constant and have not not required tinkering over time; the game does not discriminate against certain body types; it requires players to use their whole anatomy; spectators and referees can see every action on the field, making the sport fairer and more engaging; scoring is done without the ball, so viewers can concentrate on two different pieces of the action at once; and, like tennis, time never runs out in baseball, so there is always the possibility of a comeback. Aaron Gordon of The Classical respects Rawls as a political philosopher and an intellectual genius, but he disagrees with almost all of his sporting analysis, which makes this article superb.
2) Fergie Time
When Sir Alex Ferguson released his autobiography last October, a plethora of reviews were published. The speed with which they were written suggested that most of the reviewers had skipped the book's 416 pages and jumped into the index to find the big names: Keane, Roy; Beckham, David; Rooney, Wayne; Gibraltar, Rock of; and so on.
David Runciman, who has reviewed the autobiography for the London Review of Books does not fall into the trap of looking for controversy. He has read the whole thing and written a fully formed impression of the text, without being seduced by newsworthy squabbles.
Not that he enjoyed every page: "My Autobiography is not an easy read. It is a hectoring, petty, repetitive book. Ferguson returns again and again to the things that nag him: players who let him down, deals that came unstuck, people who should have known better. He will take up a subject, drop it, then come back to it a page later, not because he has anything to add, but simply because it's still bugging him. It's like being stuck in a room with the man himself as his mind whirrs away through its grudges and grievances and no one else gets a chance to put a word in."
Runciman was not transfixed by the style of the book, but he writes persuasively about the man who wrote it. He notes that Ferguson was obsessed by control, but never turned into a control freak; he trusted his instincts but never forgot the importance of luck; and, unlike Arsène Wenger, whose professorial manner, background and linguistic ability make him seem more cultivated than he is, Ferguson has a wide range of interests away from football. If you're not sick of reading about Ferguson already, this review is the place to go.
3) What makes a football player smart?
Roy Keane liked the mantra "fail to prepare; prepare to fail". Knute Rockne, the legendary University of Notre Dame football coach, put it differently: "I never ask if a player has the will to win; I ask if he has to the will to prepare." The point is the same: sportsmen may be rewarded for what they do on the pitch, but their success is secured long before they take to the field.
The need to prepare is obvious enough, but less is written about the intelligence needed to prepare well. The best footballers in the NFL all have a natural aptitude for patterns, shapes, sequences and logic, and the very best quarterbacks are masters of detail. As Nicholas Dawidoff puts it in this piece for the New Yorker, quarterbacks have to weigh up a multitude of options in a few seconds "while staring at 11 large people eager to break your face". In short, they're smarter than they look.
4) Norman Mailer, sportswriter
When the Observer compiled a list of the greatest sports books ever written in 2005, The Fight by Norman Mailer came second (to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch). As Allen Barra points out in this Atlantic article, Mailer was never convinced by the book. He looked back and wondered if spending six months on a sports biography had been a waste of time.
Mailer lived his life fully – he went to Harvard aged 16, won two Pulitzer Prizes, co-founded the Village Voice magazine, married six women and fathered nine children – but he didn't write about sport enough. Mailer loved baseball and was an early supporter of Bill James, the sabermetrics pioneer made famous in the Moneyball boom, but he never wrote an article about the sport. The same goes for American football and bullfighting, which he followed dearly. Fiction's gain was sport's loss.
5) Three by three
When the Olympics reach Tokyo in 2020, there may be a new sport on show: 3x3 basketball. The International Basketball Federation think the sport is "an exciting and spectacular discipline which offers a unique cocktail of sports and urban culture and would perfectly fit within the Olympic Games". Alexander Wolff has researched the new sport, and its chances of making a show in Tokyo, for Sports Illustrated.
6) Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself
In this short note on his website, Clive Davis considers the loneliness of the tennis player. More than any other athletes, tennis players are on their own. They compete for hours, with only a few short breaks with their kitbags, Robinsons drinks and bananas to break up the long stretches on the court. No wonder they start talking to themselves. And umpires.
7) Football is too risky for footballers
It's difficult to muster much sympathy for professional footballers, but according to this intriguing piece of research by Ouriel Daskal in Soccer Issue, their work is fairly perilous. Football is 1,000 times riskier than your average "high risk" career, which might explain why a quarter of Premier League players are currently injured. Still, it could be worse...
8) Dutch prostitutes seek same tax deal as footballers
... On the topic of young people who do dangerous physical work over short careers that can be very rewarding financially, here is Peter Cluskey of the Irish Times writing about the pension rights of Dutch professionals.
9) The best of football writing in 2013
We tip our hats and raise our glasses to A Football Report, whose compilation of the best football writing from 2013 goes above and beyond anything this column managed at the turn of the year. We went on holiday for two weeks and they provided the best list of the year. Go get lost in it.
10) Insane street football skills
Nutmegging people on the street looks like great fun.
US sports
Baseball
Sir Alex Ferguson
Manchester United
NFL
Tennis
Basketball
Muhammad Ali
Paul Campbell
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds