Tag: sports

A WTF? Moment

Ah, March. That time of year when even those who don’t know the difference between a blocking foul and a backcourt violation pretend to be interested in college basketball so that they can fill out a bracket and join the office pool—which almost inevitably ends up being won by Suzie from Accounting who picked her winners based on their uniform colors.

For a nerd, I have an almost unseemly interest in sports, one I suspect that most of my readers do not share. But don’t worry, this post isn’t actually about the basketball tournament. Instead, it’s about a press conference at the tournament, nearly 10 years ago now. Sports press conferences in general are even more boringly predictable than political press conferences. In fact, they tend to be so predictable that recently a number of sportscasters admitted that, if they can’t manage to interview the coach before they go on the air, they just make up what he said—and nine times out of ten, they’re probably right.

But every now and then, you get something interesting out of them. Such was the case during this press conference on March 21, 2015. A number of players for the Wisconsin Badgers, including one named Nigel Hayes, had been made available to the media for questions. And this happened:

Question: Nigel…you’ve taken quite a leap in 3-point shooting…. Can you describe…the steps you took…to raise those parts of your game?

Nigel: Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia, and antidisestablishmentarianism. Now, back to your question, it was just a lot of hard work, teammates giving you great confidence….

Those clearly were not the words that anyone was expecting, and led to a bit of confusion as everyone tried to mentally rewrite their predetermined narratives to account for them. The original questioner asked for clarification, and Nigel explained that his words were directed towards the stenographer:

Nigel: She does an amazing job of typing words, but sometimes if words are not in her dictionary, maybe if I say soliloquy right now, she may have to work a little bit harder to type that word. Or quandary, zephyr, or xylophone, things like that make her job really interesting.

It turned out that, the night before, after their game, Nigel and some of his teammates had been wandering around the tournament site, and they ran into the stenographer. They were interested in what she was doing, and she showed them how her machine worked, how she had shortcuts for pretty much all the standard words that she expected them to say, allowing her to keep up with their speech. But what if they said something she didn’t have a short cut for? Well, she would have to type that manually. So Nigel decided to do a bit of affectionate trolling at his next opportunity and find out how good she really was.

Tying this back to the point of the blog, I’ve been thinking about this story recently and why it is that it still sticks in my mind after nearly a decade. I’ve decided that there are two reasons.

First, there’s the sheer WTFery of the moment. As I said above, sport press conferences are predictable. And this one started out that way, then went straight off into left field…and then came back to the expected place. Nigel’s answer about his three-point shooting is one of those answers that the reporter could easily have written without ever actually asking Nigel about it. There was just that one moment that was so weird, one moment so brief you might almost wonder if you’d imagined it.

The other reason, though, was the fact that this story is in fact a story. There is an interesting explanation for Nigel’s weird comment, and it leads into a discussion about how players experience the tournament when they aren’t playing, some of the people involved in the production that you might not have thought about, and what happened when those people meet up.

The lesson is that I take from this is that WTF? moments can be extremely effective, but in order to make them so, you need both of the things I mentioned above. First, you need to make sure that your reader recognizes them as WTF? moments. If something went horribly…well, cattywampus…in your fantasy ritual, but the reader doesn’t know what the ritual was supposed to be like, it will fall flat. The other thing you need is an explanation: after you make the reader go, “Wait, what?” you have to give him a context in which this all makes sense. Without that explanation, it’s just a random thing that happened, and random things don’t stick in the mind the way that stories do.

Simon Biles and Difficulty vs. Execution

The gymnastics world was in an uproar this weekend over Simon Biles and her performance of the “Double Pike Yurchenko,” an extremely difficult vault on the edge of what’s possible to do. Biles is the first woman to land it in competition.

On Twitter, everyone was debating whether Biles is superhuman or whether she was just absent on the day that they taught the laws of gravity and thus just doesn’t know that they apply to her. Well, almost everyone. There was That One Guy who had to point out, “She didn’t stick the landing.”

That One Guy was being obnoxious, but he was also right: Biles didn’t stick the landing. She over-rotated, stumbled backwards, and had to take a huge step in order to keep her balance. Her vault was amazing, incredible, and spectacular…but it wasn’t perfect. Back in the day, when gymnasts were all chasing the perfect 10.0, Biles doing this vault would have been a serious mistake; she should have done an easier vault that she could execute better.

Fortunately for Biles, this isn’t “back in the day.” Modern gymnastics gives two scores: one is the traditional “how close to perfect” score that approaches 10, while the second is a difficulty score for every successfully executed element. The two parts are added together for the final score. It’s a recognition that there can’t really be a “best” score; if I do a triple flip perfectly, that’s awesome, but what if someone does a quadruple flip perfectly? Or a triple flip with a half-twist? Why should we all get the same score?

At any rate, this new vault was given a preliminary difficulty of 6.6, meaning that even though Biles had the step on the landing, she still got a 16.1 total, a very high score. So her big gamble paid off…maybe. A score over 16 is a big deal, but Biles’s own eponymous vault is a 6.4 difficulty. If she had done that one, could she have stuck the landing, gotten a better execution score, and done even better at the total?

From what I’ve heard about Biles, I don’t know if she cares. My amateur psychologist reading of her says that even if she knew for certain that doing the easier vault would have gotten her a 16.2 or a 16.3, she’d have gone for the double pike. It seems that the appeal of pushing herself as far as she could and doing something no one else had done before would matter to her more than the extra tenths would. And that’s admirable in a way. But it occurs to me that it’s also admirable to pursue perfection. To do one thing over and over again until you can do every aspect of it so well that there is literally nothing anyone can complain about.

Thinking about it, I think I share the philosophy that I’m assuming Biles has. I don’t have the patience to work on the details over and over again. The challenge of doing something new would appeal to me more. But that doesn’t mean that I think it’s the right choice. In mathematics, a proof that isn’t perfect isn’t a proof. And in writing, I enjoy creating new novels, but I would love it if just one of the novels I write could actually be the novel in my head.

So difficulty or execution? Is it better to push one’s limits, or become the best possible within them? If you had to choose, which would you master?

What’s Up With West Virginia?

Happy Super Bowl Monday! For those of you who aren’t fans of American Football, this is the day when those of us who are wake up slightly hung over, look in our trash cans, and say, “I ate how many chicken wings last night? Nope, it’s not possible.” There’s a lot of hashing back and forth about how the winning team is the greatest ever, the losing team wasn’t ever really that great to begin with, and all in all, football fans enjoy one last session of talk about the game before enduring the long darkness of basketball and baseball seasons. I’m going to do that too (I’ll get back to my discussion of novel planning next week), but rather than talk about whether the chiefs choked or whether Tom Brady is the greatest football player or simply the greatest athlete period, I want to talk about the biggest mystery of the game. I’m talking about West Virginia.

For those of you saying, “Huh? What does West Virginia have to do with a game between Tampa Bay and Kansas City?” that’s kind of my point. My question comes from this map:

The map gives the team that, in each state, the majority of people were rooting for. As can be seen, most of the country, 33 states, preferred Kansas City. This makes sense, given that the Kansas City coach, Andy Reid, is often considered one of the perpetual underdogs of the NFL; people like him and like to see him win. The Kansas City quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, is also generally well-liked (except by me) and considered to be one of the great stars of the future. On the other side of the ball, we have Tom Brady as the QB of Tampa Bay, who’s considered by many to be one of the villains of the NFL; most people are only sort of kidding when they suggest that Brady sold his soul to a crossroads demon.

So most places were for Kansas City, but there were seventeen exceptions. And these exceptions also make sense:

Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina: This would be where the actual fans of Tampa Bay are located.

Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada: These are the fan bases for the Denver Broncos and the Las Vegas Raiders, the two traditional rivals of Kansas City. They wouldn’t root for KC if they were actually playing against Satan as opposed to someone who had merely made a deal with him.

Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey: These are the fan base of Tom Brady’s old team, the New England Patriots. I’m a little surprised that the number of fans still loyal to Brady (and some of his teammates that went with him) is greater than the number who are furious with him, but while surprising, this is still explicable.

Michigan: Tom Brady attended school at the University of Michigan, so there’s still probably some loyalty there.

Thus sixteen out of the seventeen states who were for Tampa Bay make sense. But then there’s West Virginia, and try as I might, I can’t come up with any reason why West Virginia would go against the rest of the country here. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between West Virginia and any of the major Tampa Bay players or coaches. Searching for “West Virginia” on the Tampa Bay team website produces no results more recent than 2014, when they drafted a West Virginia running back in the third round.

So I don’t know what’s going on with West Virginia. A love of pirate-themed teams, maybe? Just an inclination to be contrary? But whatever it is, it’s going to bug me. Not seriously, but just enough to tickle my brain at idle moments.

Why am I bothering to write about this? Well, aside from the fact that this is my blog and I can write about whatever I feel like, I see two writing lessons that have come out of here.

One is taking a series of facts and constructing a story out of them, the way I managed to explain sixteen of the seventeen states. A story is more than a series of events; it’s the explanation for them and the journey from one to another. The story might not always be right, as I suspect mine isn’t necessarily. A football expert reading my story about the map above could probably poke any number of holes in it. Sometimes, though, it’s less important to make sure that your story is hole-proof than it is to have a story to poke holes in.

Two is the fact that the inexplicable makes a good place to look for story ideas. By “inexplicable” here, I don’t necessarily mean something along the lines of, “The bread floated across the room by itself, it could only be ghosts or aliens or telekinesis!” I mean the things that just don’t have an obvious explanation. Things like the car parked horizontally blocking two garage doors. Things like the tennis court in the middle of an empty field with no obvious subdivision attached to it. Things like why West Virginia is bucking the trends in the rest of the country. Things that tickle your brain and make you wonder. These things can be the basis of the story, as “I wonder…” turns into “Well, maybe…” turns into a tale.