The article is titled I Say Forbidden Things About Sports, and he does! Here are the six actual benefits:

1. To promote physical fitness and healthy living
2. To celebrate the values of sportsmanship and fair play—because these will make athletes better human beings, better citizens, and better participants in their communities.
3. To teach the benefits of unselfish teamwork and counter the intense promotion of selfish individual behavior in society.
4. To show youngsters how to deal with defeat and setbacks (as well as winning)—because they will face these again and again in life.
5. To bond together a community—both among fans and between opponents by the goodwill created via fair competitions.
6. To instill valuable life habits of discipline, hard work, courage, and persistence.

Instead, notes Gioia, the young athletes are taught that:

• Winning is more important than anything.
• There’s no value in losing. Losers get the ridicule and mockery they deserve.
• Maybe you need to play on a team, but rewards will depend on your success and fame as an individual—so always look out for your own selfish interests.
• Healthy living is okay, but don’t let it keep you from clubbing and late-night partying—because those are the perks of the athlete’s life.
• Cheating will enhance all these beneifts (sic!) — just don’t get caught.

How very true. To take NBA, an American sport with which I am the most familiar, you can see it in the large swings in score when the losing team snaps and realizes they can’t win the game and therefore they don’t even try.

Do read the whole thing.

🏀 The Wizards' season home opener against the Celtics was a bust, but that wasn’t a surprise. I’m actually more hopeful after this game than I’ve been after the last season’s home win against the Grizzlies. A dignified(-ish) loss against a great team versus an eked out win against a bad one.

Black, white, mixed, and Yugoslavian

File under “headlines of note”, from Scott Sumner.

On a semi-related note, the NBA season is starting tonight and I look forward to the Wizards’ home game tomorrow night, even if it ends up being the devastating loss from the Celtics that everyone expects will happen.

🏀 And we’re back!

🏀 With the Nuggets and the Knicks both knocked out of the playoffs on the same day, my basketball-watching season is officially over. Let’s see what 2024/25 brings to everyone, the Wizards in particular.

🏀 The craziest end to a half-time in a long long time happened last night in Minnesota and even if you are not a basketball fan I am sure you will appreciate the cinematic quality of the scene starting at 1:17. But do watch the whole thing, it is only 90 seconds long.

Two long-ish articles for the weekend before I board the plane back home:

• NYT: Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better.
• FT: Jürgen Klopp and the leading of Liverpool

Both are gift links! And if the one about Cass Elliot has whet your appetite, make sure to see this SNL skit featuring one of the best performances by a guest host ever from Emma Stone.

Congratulations to Nikola Jokić on his third NBA MVP award! So, so, so well-deserved, and Rick Reilly had a good write-up of the reasons why.

🏀 Speaking of sports, this happened last night, and I was there to see it with a couple of friends.

Both Ben Thompson and Jason Snell had reservations about Apple’s only immersive video to come out since Vision Pro came out. It is a 5-minute highlight reel of the Major League Soccer Cup and after seeing it myself I kind of disagree with both of them. The video is fine!

There are some limitations of the technology: you can’t have the camera panning around the pitch so you have to be in a fixed position, and a soccer pitch is so vast that there is no way to watch a game from the same spot while being close to the action, while at the same time being close to the action is the whole point of immersion. So, to square that circle Apple, or whomever they chose to produce the video, opted to cut to the most interesting bits of action from the most interesting spots.

I don’t know how much soccer Snell, Thompson and other Apple commentators have seen in their lives but I would wager that it’s not a lot. I am far from being a super-fan, but I’ve seen enough games to know where to look and the cuts in the video were fine — for those who know the game. Moving from spot to spot was logical and it was clear which games you were watching.

But what did Apple intend with this? To have an immersive video for the fans? Or was it a tech demo? Or maybe a vehicle to get more Apple whales — and let’s face it if you own an AVP you are an Apple whale no matter what you tell yourself — to get into MLS? They’re three different things with different tradeoffs and it seems like they went for the fans here first, but how many of them are there who also have a Vision Pro?

Now with basketball you actually can be close to the action and have a good overview of the game, and this is where everyone, fan or not, would probably prefer a single court-side position over quick cuts. So I hope Adam Silver is working on that. I don’t know or watch baseball, but I assume it’s somewhere in between basketball and soccer. At the only baseball game I ever watched I could clearly see every part of the field, I just didn’t know what was going on or where I should look.

The optimal version for every sport would of course be to have a choice between several spots around the court, pitch or field and I do hope we’ll get that for some of the upcoming NBA playoff games. I already have a League Pass and would happily pay extra for the experience.