The SportsThink Review #102
Thursday February 29: Big strong folks; Usher was pretty good!
Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading and related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!
Howdy folks, hope you’re well. Happy Leap Day to all who celebrate!
Weekend Action: Arnold Festival and Formula 1
I just arrived in Columbus for the Arnold Sports Festival, where I’ll once again be hanging out with the (literal) strongest men and women in the world for the Arnold Strongman/Strongwoman classic. Really a dream come true for a kid who came of age with late night ESPN2, watching larger than life men do larger than life things (if you know, you know). The Arnold is an absolutely massive event, especially for sports on the margins, with everything from foosball to weightlifting to my personal favorite, medieval fighting (picture your accountant in homemade chainmail). Some of the Arnold action is easy to mock, but it’s really a spectacular space to consider the pursuits that make us all too human. Seriously. Last year was my first trip, and I really enjoyed writing this piece trying to make sense of it all.
Rogue Fitness runs an excellent broadcast of the Strongman/woman events, which you can watch here (starts Friday).
Bodybuilding and related physique contests remain the heart of the festival, and you can catch a lot of that action here.
This weekend also marks the return of Formula 1, which has become the most consistently watched sport in my household. As usual, there’s drama and intrigue as the season kicks off. In major (major!) recent news, Lewis Hamilton will be joining Ferrari next season after a couple disappointing years behind the wheel at Mercedes. Of course, Hamilton is tied for the record in all-time championships (7), all won with Mercedes. So this naturally sets up a very interesting year for that team. I imagine Lewis and Mercedes are still very much trying to win, but we may see more resources and strategic optimization going toward his teammate, George Russell. Meanwhile, Red Bull boss Christian Horner—a super unlovable and near-perfect heel—just survived an investigation into allegations of workplace hostility and generally uncouth behavior. After two seasons of near-total domination, it will be interesting to see what—if any—effect this has on Red Bull.
If you’ve never gotten into F1, Netflix’s Drive to Survive remains the best entry point. The current season of the show is a great recap of last year’s action and drama and you definitely have time to binge the whole thing before Sunday’s race in Bahrain. And if you’d prefer to read, here’s a solid season preview. My advice is to make time to watch the qualifying heats on Saturday morning as well. These are often almost as entertaining as the races themselves and a great way to learn a lot about the sport and the big narratives each weekend. I’m still an amateur when it comes to motorsport, so no predictions from me, but here’s what I’m hoping for this season:
A Hamilton championship. This would really be something on the eve of the Ferrari move. This all depends on what Mercedes has done with the car, which has sorta sucked for the last two years.
Williams competing for the top spot in the mid-field teams. The legendary team has long suffered, but showed a lot of promise under new boss James Vowles last year. Plus, they’ve got Logan Sargeant, the only American driver on the track. USA! USA!
A good year for Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz. Again, I’m not the most F1 literate, but I’ve never really understood why Charles Leclerc is the consensus top guy at Ferrari. Everyone assumes that Hamilton will be taking Sainz’s seat, so I expect he’ll be extra motivated to kick some ass and land on a good team next year.
Something—anything—positive for Daniel Ricciardo. The only driver who regularly wears Longhorn gear and a seemingly good-vibes dude, he got greedy and made some moves that torpedoed his career over the last few seasons. Major redemption arc potential here.
Sports and Innovation
In major personal news, I’m beyond thrilled to announce that I’ll be co-hosting a symposium on Sports, Technology, and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemeson Center this October. Sport academic and industry folks who are interested in presenting (and getting expenses paid!), here’s the call for papers. This will be free and open to the public, so I’ll share more details as he date approaches. Would love to see some of you in DC on October 21-22.
This event connects with a new class I’m teaching on the same subject. It’s my first time teaching a brand new class in forever and while it’s been a lot of work, it’s also been an absolute blast to consider the role of innovation in making sports better, more interesting, safer, more accessible, and so forth. In a recent class, we explored the history and significance of the sports bra, which gave me an opportunity to revisit David Davis’ fantastic (and drama-filled) history of the original JogBra. It’s a bit hard for my fellow dudes to appreciate just how big of a deal the development of a seemingly simple undergarment was and it’s very well contextualized in Jaime Schultz’s excellent history of women’s sport, Qualifying Times.
Earlier this week, we covered the rise of analytics, which is the type of topic that makes me suddenly feel old. I was an undergrad myself when “moneyball” entered the sports lexicon; my students have never known sports without the influence of big data. In attempt to trace the trajectory of the statistical revolution in sports, I drew on Eric Hintz’s lovely, “Sports Analytics Before Moneyball,” which is a really great overview of the early days of analytics. Eric is the acting deputy director of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center and also happens to be my co-organizer for the aforementioned symposium.
Super Bowl Halftime Redux
I spilled a lot of ink on the Super Bowl and the halftime show in the previous edition of the newsletter; I think we got a pretty good game and a pretty good show! I thought Usher was about all you can hope for in a halftime performance. He played the hits, he looked great, his moves were on point. The roller skating part was excellent! We got the standard “surprise” guests, with Ludacris in a Rollerball inspired getup and Alicia Keys playing what I can only describe as Barbarella’s piano.
As for that previous piece, I must admit to an error and some lazy research. Here’s what I wrote: In 1992, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, CBS (the Super Bowl broadcast network) signed off on “Winter Magic, a Salute to the 1992 Winter Olympics.” Which makes sense timing-wise, but the Albertville games were on a rival network, NBC. Perhaps more confusing is the pairing of Gloria Estefan with winter athletes, including Brian Boitano, Dorothy Hamill, and the 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey team. I don’t know about you, but when I think of winter sports, my next thought is rarely “the Latin-Funk stylings of the Miami Sound Machine.”
In the comments, Jonathan Wells appeared to set the record straight and make everything make a lot more sense. I’ve recently shared some of his work and trust him to be meticulous on the details. Here’s his comment:
The 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville were actually broadcast on CBS, which makes that 1992 Super Bowl halftime show more logical. I know I watched Super Bowls XXV and XXVI but I have absolutely no memory of watching either halftime show. I was nine in early 1992 and had just started becoming a sports nut in the year or two before that, and the 1992 Olympics were the first games that I was old enough pay attention to. CBS had broadcast the Olympics at several points, but by the late 1980s NBC became the traditional network for the Summer Games and ABC broadcast the 1988 Winter games. CBS got the broadcast rights for the Winter games in 1992, 1994, and 1998, while NBC broadcast every Summer games during that period, and since 1998 NBC has broadcast every Olympic games, both winter and summer. When CBS had the winter games they used a different theme than the familiar John Williams-penned fanfare so prominently used in NBC's coverage. Tamara Kline composed the CBS Olympic theme, and I became familiar with it before I ever had a conscious memory of hearing the far better John Williams Olympic fanfare. It's pretty good, but also sounds like it was created by a CBS Sports music theme generator. You can hear it here:
So, my bad! And thank you to Jonathan for taking time to set the record straight and share his memories here. I’ll be amending the original newsletter soon, with due credit.
A few recent reads worth your time
The Moral Risks of Fandom (Jake Woytowicz and Alfred Archer, Aeon)
A nice piece on a challenging subject: our relationships with our teams and how should we react and what should we do when our teams make real-world decisions that conflict with our values. Not the strategic or tactical decisions that piss us off, but decisions with a human toll. The case study here is Mason Greenwood’s controversial return to Manchester United, but it’s a situation many of us have dealt with with our own teams.
Nick Saban Made Alabama Too Big Too Fail (Alex Kirshner, The Ringer)
For those of you suffering from post-football-withdrawl-syndrome. Kirshner is solid as usual. On the impact of and life after the reign of the greatest living college football coach.
The Five (Man That’s Ugly) (Michael Weinreb, Throwbacks)
“How sports uniforms went from countercultural to corporate.” I spend a lot of time bemoaning the overall decline of sports merch, so this hits home. (I also bemoan that folks in the past were smaller…it’s hard to find good vintage gear that fits a 2024 XXL frame.) Weinreb is consistently great; he writes with economy and a keen eye toward history. Read this, but also subscribe to Throwbacks, it’s always a welcome arrival in my inbox.
As always, thanks for reading. Please keep sharing the newsletter and sending me the interesting things that you stumble upon.
Until next time,
Tolga