AB Newswire - Athletic Business

Thursday, October 29, 2009

We Will, We Will Bore You!

Michael Popke

It's official: The most popular songs played at professional sporting events also are the ones you least need to hear again. Is anyone surprised that Queen's iconic 1977 hit "We Will Rock You" was the most-aired song at National Football League, National Hockey League and Major League Baseball games last season? After all, it's propelled by that energetic "stomp, stomp, clap" that's a surefire way to rile up fans. In fact, in middle school, my friends and I would work ourselves into a frenzy recreating that sound on the back of school bus seats. But now I could go without hearing "We Will Rock You" for the rest of my life.

The list, released yesterday by Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which licenses more than half the music played in America, also includes these ditties:
2. "Pump It!" - The Black Eyed Peas
3. "Twilight Zone" - 2 Unlimited
4. "Song 2" - Blur
5. "Rock & Roll, Pts. 1 & 2" - Gary Glitter
6. "Black Betty" - Ram Jam
7. "Cowboys From Hell" - Pantera
8. "Stronger" - Kanye West
9. "Let It Rock" - Kevin Rudolf
10. "Put On" - Young Jeezy

Really? Rankings like these make me wish that more stadiums and arenas — and the athletes who play in them — would get a little more creative. Take Trevor Hoffman of the Milwaukee Brewers. When the San Diego Padres released the All-Star closer after the 2008 season, they also let go of AC/DC's "Hells Bells," Hoffman's rousing entrance song that he has used for more than a decade.

Regardless of what you think of the band or the lyrics, "Hells Bells" has the power to transform a baseball game into a rock concert. I got goose bumps the first time I heard those ominous introductory bells ring out loud and clear and better than expected through the sound system at Milwaukee's Miller Park as the 42-year-old trotted from the bullpen to the pitcher's mound. And the crowd goes nuts every time Hoffman takes the field.

This list needs more memorable anthems like "Hells Bells"; it's effective, timeless and classic — just like "We Will Rock You." But way better.

Posted At 3:00 PM • Comments (0)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Plodding Along

Cathy Liewen

Last week, The New York Times ran an article, "Plodders Have a Place, but Is It in a Marathon?" As marathons and long-distance events become more ubiquitous, finishing times are getting slower, which has sparked a debate in the running community as to whether slower runners and walkers, known as plodders, should be able to compete in marathons. The elite runners resent the 11-minute-per-mile joggers clogging the streets, using up resources and sharing a piece of the glory.

I bet some of these plodders are the players in school who were relegated to watching the game from the sidelines while their coach played the star athletes. Now, years later into adulthood, they find the same childish politics at work: only the strongest and fittest get to play. Sure, from a logistics standpoint there needs to be cutoff times to allow for aid stations, support staff and road closures, but the two-percent-body-fat speedsters need to remember one thing: The slower and less-gifted athletes are what makes the sport great.

In just about every endurance event I've seen, the last runner to cross the finish line receives as much, if not more, crowd support than the winner. Many of these slower athletes complete the race despite having physical limitations and inspire others to get off the couch and lead a healthier lifestyle. They are good for the sport and good for society.

So plodders, lace up, unite and rejoice! What you lack in speed, grace and finesse, you exceed in spirit and determination.

Posted At 2:55 PM • Comments (1)

Monday, October 26, 2009

How Much for Good Seats?

Paul Steinbach

Some of my best days as a kid were spent in Milwaukee County Stadium's section 13, row 12, seats 1 through 8 — the corporate season tickets frequently secured by my neighbor's dad. One of my greatest regrets as an adult was not securing actual seats once they tore County Stadium down in 2002. Not necessarily those exact seats. Sentimental value notwithstanding, they were in the lower grandstand and constructed of plastic. You had to get into the far reaches of the upper deck to find the old-timers — their wooden slats bearing engraved seat numbers and the chipped relief of numerous coats of green paint applied over the years. These seats had seen not only the Brewers' short-lived success in the stadium, but the Milwaukee Braves' and Green Bay Packers' heydays, too.

So I read with interest news last week that New York Yankees fans had filed a class-action lawsuit over seats salvaged from last year's demolition of old Yankee Stadium. Lead plaintiff John Lefkus, for one, spent more than $2,000 to purchase the exact pair of seats he had occupied as a 23-year season-ticket-holder. But Lefkus isn't buying their authenticity. He bases his claim that stadium seats were dismantled and reassembled using random parts on the evidence that his own seats were put together using new and old hardware and different armrests, and then repainted in the wrong color. One even featured the wrong seat number. You've heard of Norm Abram's "New Yankee Workshop"? This sounds like Old Yankee Chop Shop. The class seeks more than $5 million in damages from the Yankees, Steiner Sports Memorabilia, Steiner Sports Marketing and Yankee-Steiner Collectibles, alleging false advertising, deceptive practices and breach of warranty, according to Courthouse News Service.

Mil County fs & riser.JPG

It has come to be expected that before a stadium comes down, just about everything in it — from hot dog rollers to trough-style urinals — will be put up for sale. Still, few items give fans more nostalgic comfort than seating. On ebay, fans can shop for seats from a number of defunct stadiums (Shea, Busch II) and even one still in operation (Dodger). A winning bid of $249 claimed a single rickety-looking box seat from Detroit's Tiger Stadium last night, while another seller sought $3,000 for a rare triple — three seats from Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium. A former college professor of mine once received a seat from Cleveland Stadium, the longtime home of his beloved Indians and Browns, as a wedding gift (talk about getting lucky). The romantic gift-giver, a fellow native Ohioan, initially tried to sneak into the demolition site and simply steal one, but the work crew threw him out.

I can't recall what County Stadium's seats were being sold for originally, but I do remember hearing about a guy who tried to wrench one loose during the final home stand, and how he wound up paying more in fines than had he simply waited and purchased a seat on the up and up. Today's prices can vary greatly. This weekend I tracked down the true County Stadium relics, just as I remembered them, for sale online through a specialty dealer at between $350 and $499 per seat. Another outlet sells singles for $199 and doubles for $399.

Now that's more in my ballpark.

Posted At 9:42 AM • Comments (0)

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Tangled Up In Blue

Paul Steinbach

They say the best compliment a baseball umpire can get is if neither team can name who called their game. So far in this Major League Baseball postseason, umpires are stealing headlines.

"Does Baseball Need Umpires?" asked Jonah Kuri in his Oct. 14 Wall Street Journal column, days after Phil Cuzzi called foul a fly ball off the bat of Minnesota's Joe Mauer that actually fell a foot inside the leftfield line during Game 2 of the American League Division Series. Kuri couldn't have predicted the sorry spectacle that was Game 4 of the American League Championship Series six days later. In the span of 11 batters, umpires Dale Scott and Tim McClelland botched three calls so badly that Sports Illustrated baseball writer Tom Verducci, who worked a 2007 spring training game as its first-base umpire, called for the creation of a review board — not to grade umps, but to examine everything from individual mechanics to crew dynamics.

There are others championing expanded use of instant replay, currently employed only to confirm the accuracy of home run calls, but MLB commissioner Bud Selig hasn't budged. Meanwhile, respondents to an MLB Fanhouse online poll favor replay expansion by a 6-to-1 ratio. As it stands, high-definition replays of ball-and-strike calls and tag plays from multiple angles serve only to vividly and repeatedly parade the embarrassments of human error before a television audience. No doubt, "Kill the ump!" (or something less quaint) was uttered in more than a few Minneapolis households as the Twins fell behind two games to the heavily favored Yankees, even though one can debate whether Cuzzi's miscue played a truly decisive role in New York's eventual series sweep.

"Unless you umpire, you can't possibly understand," Cuzzi told the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger after Game 2. "It happens. It happens at the worst possible time. And it happened to me."

I think I can understand, on some level, because I've umpired youth, high school and men's league baseball, and it happened to me, too. I recall working the plate for one particular late-summer men's game during which I, for reasons I can't explain, had a strike zone roughly half the width of a toothpick. I was squeezing the home team's ace pitcher in particular, but I was powerless to correct my own tunnel vision. It made for a long afternoon, and it would lead to my leaving the officiating fraternity for good after that 1988 season — my love of baseball greatly eroded for having experienced firsthand the on-field confrontations and bleacher catcalls. Attending a Milwaukee Brewers game wasn't even the same for a time, having as I did a better idea than most fans of the pressures those ideally anonymous men in blue were enduring.

It took only one game in the crosshairs to give Verducci a renewed respect for umpires and the umpiring profession. "My loose definition of 'greatness' is making the difficult look easy," Verducci wrote in March 2007. "You may love to vent your frustrations at them, but umpires are great at what they do."

To his credit, McClelland, like Cuzzi, owned up to his shortcomings, stating after Game 4, "I'm just out there trying to do my job, and I'm doing the best that I can."

I hear you, brother.

Posted At 12:10 PM • Comments (0)

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Running Scared?

Cathy Liewen

Last Sunday, Jon Fenlon, Daniel Langdon and Rick Brown, ages 26, 36 and 65, all collapsed and died while running a half-marathon in Detroit. What made these deaths unusual was that they all happened within 16 minutes of each other during the last two miles of the 13.1-mile race. While the autopsies are still pending, the deaths were most likely caused by heart failure. Add these deaths to the list of fatalities during recent endurance events (half-marathons claimed two lives in San Jose, Calif., earlier this month and another in Virginia Beach, Va., in September), and it's enough to make even avowed couch potatoes break a sweat.

But after you weed through the hysteria about the increased risk of death associated with participating in such endurance events, the benefits of training and participation still outweigh the risks — if you don't have an underlying medical condition. Minneapolis cardiologist Kevin Harris presented a study this year at the American College of Cardiology's 58th Annual Scientific Session showing the death rate for marathons was 0.8 per 100,000 participants.

runners

Roughly 9,000 runners were registered for Detroit's half-marathon, while another 4,500 ran in the full marathon — both figures representing participation increases from a year ago. As participation increases, so does the number of deaths. It's purely statistics. The more cars on the road, the more accidents. And speaking of car accidents, you're more likely to die in a car crash than from running a marathon. According to the National Safety Council, the one-year odds of dying in a car accident are about one in 6,500.

The media should be more alarmed from deaths caused by smoking, overeating and being sedentary. According to the U.S. National Center on Health Statistics, being overweight or physically inactive each account for one out of every 10 deaths in America. That said, participants in these events still need to accept some personal responsibility. Running a marathon or even a half-marathon requires adequate training and preparation. I've been a runner most of my adult life and a triathlete for 12 years, but it took me more than five years to work up to a marathon and eventually triathlon and Ironman events. While some coaches may disagree, I just don't think you can train your body to go that distance in less than a year.

Race organizers still need to be vigilant about providing adequate aid stations and medical support, but in these times, they also have to make sure participants understand the risks and sign the appropriate waivers. As for screening would-be participants further, AB asked Kris Hinrichs, race director of Milwaukee's Lakefront Marathon, if endurance-race participation had run amok after a man with a pre-existing heart condition died during the 2007 Chicago Marathon. "I hate to say that," Hinrichs, herself a participant in nearly 70 races, told senior editor Paul Steinbach, "because 15 years ago, I maybe wouldn't have been welcome at a marathon."

If the news of another running death is freaking you out, I'd suggest you turn off the TV, shut down your computer and go for a run to clear your mind. You'll feel much better.

Posted At 4:04 PM • Comments (0)

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Still, They'll Be Limited to One 3-Ounce Container of Hair Oil

Andrew Cohen

The Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit has announced that Sikhs will be permitted to carry ceremonial daggers less than 7.5 inches in length to the Winter Games. The dagger, called a kirpan, is one of the articles of faith that all observant Sikhs must wear, which include uncut hair, a wooden comb to secure the hair (worn in combination with a turban), an iron bracelet and a cotton singlet.

A 2006 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada was responsible for allowing kirpans to be worn in all public places in that country. The case was filed by a 17-year-old high school student in Montreal who had been forced to leave the public school system. Noting that in the 100 years that Sikhs had worn kirpans in Canadian schools not a single act of violence had been tied to the daggers, the court ruled that kirpans were likely less dangerous than pairs of scissors or baseball bats, both of which could be commonly found in schools.

Palbinder Shergill, legal counsel for the World Sikh Organization, called the move "a very positive step towards ensuring that VANOC's security needs are protected, but also ensuring that we accommodate the needs of different minorities."

Posted At 9:43 AM • Comments (0)

Friday, October 09, 2009

A Progressive School Sees Progress on the Recreation Front

Andrew Cohen

I was on the mound, and had just retired the first Deerfield batter in the bottom of the fifth, when the Deerfield coach went ballistic. Time was called, and he came out to argue with the umpire that my "uniform" — a long, black-and-white nightshirt that hung loosely over my patched jeans — was interfering with his hitters' ability to see my pitches. That was a laugh. I didn't throw hard enough to dent bread, but here I was on Deerfield's perfectly manicured field, ahead big in a game that we'd win 10-3, surrounded by similarly clothed teammates (Chris, our first baseman, who'd keyed a rally by sprinting to first on a walk and stealing second on the play, like one of his heroes, Pete Rose, was wearing a multicolored satin disco shirt and yellow pinstriped pants) and the opponents were getting desperate. This was sports at The Putney School in the spring of 1979. A high school senior, I was the toast of the school for that week, having thrown the surprise complete-game win. The following week, I earned a second start, this time at home, and lost 10-0 to a no-hitter.

Our home diamond was the sports-field equivalent of patched jeans. Located on one side of a lawn used mostly as a soccer pitch, it had no skinned infield or pitcher's mound, just a pitching rubber staked into the grass. The same was true for other sports: Basketball, for example, was played upstairs in the barn, next to stacks of hay bales. The lack of uniforms was a point of pride in this arty, farm-oriented community, and when the soccer team decided to purchase uniforms a couple years after I graduated, it was treated as if the school had lost its collective soul.

This is all brought to mind as the 75-year-old Vermont school this weekend gets set to dedicate its first sports facility, a $7 million, net-zero-energy field house that is aiming for LEED Platinum status. It's an austere building, with one larger open space for court sports, a cross-country ski waxing room, a climbing wall, a fitness/group-exercise room and locker rooms — and it isn't yet fully paid for, which is sort of the Putney I remember, too. But it's going to elevate recreation and movement — sports movement, not dance movement — to the level of the school's other, more popular arts, and it's going to help them beat schools like Deerfield, occasionally, in student recruitment. As a symbol of two seldomly linked movements in this country over the past 30 years — sports and sustainability — the Putney field house is pretty much unparalleled.

Posted At 10:33 AM • Comments (0)

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Also Banned: ACME Rocket-Powered Roller Skates

Paul Steinbach

Marathon organizers have enough to worry about with participants bent on taking performance-enhancing drugs, time-reducing shortcuts or life-saving precautions in extreme heat. But none of those factors led to the disqualification of Jennifer Goebel from last weekend's Lakefront Marathon in Milwaukee. Goebel's offense? She used an iPod to lend a little kick to her stretch run.

Goebel, the second woman to cross the finish line, wasn't the first DQ in Milwaukee on Oct. 4 (Cassie Peller, the apparent winner, was stripped of her title for taking water from a friend outside an official aid station). And hers wasn't the only apparatus to come under marathon organizers' scrutiny that day. During mile 21 of the Twin Cities Marathon in Minnesota, 81-year-old Jerry Johncock benefited from the bladder-unburdoning powers of a bystander's spare catheter (you can't make this stuff up), only to learn that his successful defense of last year's age-group victory (in which Johncock became the first octogenarian American to cover the 26-plus miles in less than four hours) was facing potential review by USA Track and Field.

Johncock called the possibility of being disqualified "a crazy idea" (he was later cleared of any wrongdoing by race organizers — to his ultimate relief), while posts on a runners' forum in Milwaukee termed the rules enforcement that took place there "draconian." According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USATF has relaxed rules against the use of iPods and similar music devices except in cases involving top contenders and when prize money is at stake. Third-place finisher and eventual Lakefront women's champion Corina Canitz donated her $500 prize to charity, while Johncock pocketed $225 for besting the Twin Cities 80-84 field.

iPod image.jpg

You could tell me Springsteen was about to stage a private concert on a mountain of purse money and I still couldn't finish a 5K. So I turned to AB's resident repeat triathlete, creative director Cathy Liewen (who completed the Ford Ironman Madison in September), for some rules perspective. "Ironman events and triathlons in general are even stricter than marathons. You can't have spectators pace you or give you anything," Liewen says (in fact, "outside assistance" is listed third among USA Triathlon's 2009 Most Commonly Violated Rules & Penalties; headphones eighth). "I have run a few marathons and seen people wear iPods, and the officials didn't enforce the rules. In my opinion, they should be banned and it should be enforced. The point of such an endurance event is to accomplish it on your own, without help from others. That is the challenge of the event. Plus, there are safety issues associated with blaring music in your ears!"

Less than thrilled with the controversy surround this year's outcome, Lakefront Marathon organizers nonetheless turned a deaf ear to pleas of rules ignorance by Peller and Goebel, whose respective times of 3:02:09 and 3:02:50 have been scrubbed from the record. Hopefully, the runners got the message loud and clear. "I've told both women that I was sick at the thought they put themselves in the position of being disqualified," race director Kris Hinrichs told the Journal Sentinel. "It is about their conduct."

Adds Liewen, "Whether you are a pro competing for prize money or an age-grouper competing for personal glory, it's your responsibility to know the rules and abide by them."

Posted At 2:42 PM • Comments (0)

Friday, October 02, 2009

Chicago Goes First, Is Out First

Andrew Cohen

It's definitely better to give the last presentation, isn't it? The Chicago Olympic bid committee went first today in Denmark, fielding questions from 106 IOC delegates, including a particularly pointed one from a Pakistani delegate about foreign athletes' ability to enter the United States freely. But even the star power of the President and First Lady were unable to sway the 97 eligible first-round voters, as the Windy City was eliminated in the first round.

Tokyo was voted out in round two, setting up an interesting final matchup with the vote just minutes away: Rio, which along with Chicago was a favorite, against Madrid, which has bid for the last three Olympics but faces the daunting task of convincing delegates that Europe should get the 2016 Games right after London hosts 2012.

There's sure to be criticism back here at home in the coming weeks about the Chicago bid's being long on emotion and short on details, but what about Madrid's? Their presentation wrapped up with former IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch asking the old-boy network to grant his home country the Olympics before he dies. “Dear colleagues, I know I’m very near the end of my time, I’m 89 years old” — say what you will, but personal pleas don't get much more naked than that.

Posted At 10:38 AM • Comments (1)