Yes, I know it is February and normally the peak of winter, but this year winter seems to have made a guest appearance. There is practically no snow on the ground this year.  The temperatures have been in the thirties.  It feels more like we are already in an early spring.  Not that I am complaining, especially after last year’s Snowmageddons.

But this weather means, among other things, that the pond ice must not be too thick.  The backyard pond freezes over every winter; the ice is thick enough to walk on, and I have always wondered if it is thick enough to drive a car on.  I suspect it would be, but in six years of living here, though, I haven’t even walked on the pond in winter, let alone drive a car on it.

This winter though, there have been very few days of  subzero temperatures, and for the past week or more, the temperatures have been in the thirties.  I thought that was perhaps not cold enough for thick ice to form.  Yet the neighbor has bravely decided to build a hockey rink in the backyard.

When we say “hockey” in these parts, we mean ice hockey, of course.  When Sarah Palin called herself a “Hockey Mom”, she did not mean the game that Dhyan Chand played.  That would be”Field hockey”, a sport that very few people play.  I suspect we will have to explain the game to  people in this country as ice hockey played on astroturf. To my mind, though, calling ice hockey as hockey (or NFL football as football) is like calling table tennis as tennis.

Ice hockey is a deceptively violent and dangerous game. It’s  not just that players use the hockey puck as an assault weapon, but these games are played on ice. Even with helmets and protective gear, falls on ice cause concussions and other injuries. Players have even died of on-ice injuries. (Look at this list of ice hockey player deaths on wikipedia – quite a few on-ice deaths since 1990 alone.  And this list is only pro ice hockey, and does not include high school and college teams).

What this means is that even if you are playing ice hockey in your backyard, you still need to don helmets and other protective gear. If anything, it might be slightly more dangerous as the ice will not be as smooth as in a rink.

This year, there is another danger, with the warmer temperatures – the risk of melting ice.

When I saw the neighbor carving out the rink with a shovel, I worried he would fall through the ice.  I was excited at the idea of watching an impromptu game of ice hockey, but didn’t think it would happen.  After all, there is field hockey and ice hockey, but there is no such thing as pond hockey.

Then, finally, it happened today evening.  No ice hockey, just broomball.  We got an invitation to join too, but then that would involve babysitters and so on.

The pond ice, we were told, was 10 inches thick.

On one side, there is FIFA, sticking rigidly to its stand that hijabs can cause “choking injuries” and are thus unsafe to wear.  On the other side, you have the Iranian sports authorities who had at least a year to protest to FIFA if they did not like the redesigned caps that FIFA proposed to address this very issue in 2010.  The caps apparently don’t cover the entire neck (which makes them not the same as a hijab), but surely the Iranians knew this before?

Iranian women footballers Pic: Yahoo Sports

Let’s take FIFA’s stand first.  Is the hijab really a choking hazard?  From the picture above, I cannot see how anyone can accidentally choke on a hihab.  It does not have loose ends floating around, so you cannot trip on it, or have anyone get tangled it in it, or accidentally pull it.

But if someone were to grab the headscarf from behind, in the nape area, yes, you could choke.  But such a grab would have to be deliberate, and is not only illegal as per football rules, trying to choke someone deliberately would be illegal in any country.  There is no reason why you would want to grab someone’s neck to stop them when you are playing football.

So I cannot understand FIFA’s logic – are they saying that they want to prevent a set of players from playing because someone could potentially illegally grab them by the neck?  Is that the substance of their objection to the hijab?  If it is, it doesn’t make any sense.  One even starts to wonder if this is the real reason.  After all, banning hijabs in public seems to be the current fashion in Europe.

It also looks like Iran was not the only team facing the headscarf issue. Jordanian players had the same problem, but the team resolved this by not picking those women who were unwilling to play without headscarves. In even more conservative Iran, this would not have been an option.

And now the Iranian delegation is accusing the Bahrainian referree of being politically motivated in his decision to stop Iranians from playing.  (Bahrain and Iran have not been on the best of terms of late, and Bahrain believes Iran has been supporting the anti-government protestors in Bahrain).

In this whole imbroglio, those women footballers have been caught in the middle of other people playing politics and the religion card. All those women want to do is play football, and they must have overcome enormous social pressure to get to where they are.  I am sure they don’t find it comfortable to run around in the hot sun in track pants, long sleeves and a hijab.  But that’s the only way they can play at all, so they don’t have much of a choice.  It is a victory in itself that Iran still has a women’s football team and that it is allowed to play regular football at the highest level.  I cannot imagine this happening in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia -  after all,  Saudi women weren’t even allowed inside stadiums to watch football until a few years back.

The Iranian team also seems to be a pretty good one – they are ranked 51 in the world (India, in comparison, is at 54).  So they have every reason to presume that they would have qualified for the Olympics if not for this whole needless  hijab controversy.

At the end of the day, I blame FIFA for not looking at the bigger picture.  Their objections are so minor compared to the pressures the players are facing.  Why does FIFA have to stick to its ridiculous stand if it means disqualifying a whole country’s players?  Is this really the spirit of the Olympics ?  Shouldn’t they rather be encouraging these brave women who are battling so much to be able to play football?

I watched the questions get tougher and tougher through the final rounds, and soon you had reached a stage where knowing the rules of etymology no longer had any benefit.  There were words from Turkish, Arabic and Tagalog, and every world language you could think of.  You could not guess the spelling from a Greek or Latin root, you had to Know the word.  You could see the clear difference in the quality of participants between the preliminary rounds and the finalists.  The finalists were so good that the organizers had to throw tougher and tougher words at them in a desperate attempt to get them to stumble and have the field reduced to one or two.

Sukanya Roy wins the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee (Pic: Washington Post)

You wonder how many hours these finalists would have devoted to learning spellings, as compared to the hours those other kids who had aced their Districts and failed in the preliminary rounds.  You wonder what the kids get out of all the stupendous hard work they have put in.

Sure, they learn discipline and hard work, perseverance, etymology, an amazing vocabulary, a very good command of English, and the ability to perform under pressure.  But all this is common to anyone who gets even to the preliminary rounds.  What rewards do those extra-ordinary semi-finalists and finalists get?  After all, while the winner gets around $37,500 in cash and bonds, and $2,600 worth of books, and some of the other finalists get attractive prizes, all that most of the participants (including semi-finalists) would get is a small gift card and a chance to visit Washington D.C.  The gift card would not even compensate them for their expenses in staying in D.C. for the competition, so it would be meaningless.

The organizers, on the other hand, are probably raking in the profits.  Starting from tickets to the event (at $40 per head for 2000 people) to sale of Spelling Bee memorabilia, to the TV rights, not just in the US but elsewhere too.  I’m sure the Spelling Bee is telecast in Canada (we did have a Canadian runner up and other Canadian participants) and possibly in the Caribbean.  This year, I noticed that ESPN telecast the Spelling Bee semifinals and finals  live in India, and I wonder where else they did so – Pakistan? Sri Lanka?   Does Sky telecast it in the UK?

You can certainly make a case for increasing the prize money for all participants, given how fast this competition is growing and the profits this show must surely be making.

But what I worry more is not that the participants are not benefiting monetarily, my worry is that the emphasis on the TV ratings may potentially change the nature of the competition.  As it is, many of these desi winners are not good at providing soundbytes  that the organizers would like.  You can see the disappointment in the face of the organizers who try to coax out a few words from the stunned, suddenly shy child.  Do the kids jump up in joy,  pump their fists, kneel on the stage and kiss the ground, or cry or show any emotion at all?  Not really, they just suddenly become speechless, and even look a little stupid.  It is bad enough to have robotic answers during the competition, but to continue to remain robotic after winning does not make for good TV.

There are the occasional crowd favorites, like Surjo Bandyopadhyay this year and Samir Patel in previous years, who are showmen, making for great TV. But most of the other kids just stick to an almost robotic manner of  behavior – asking the same predictable questions, answering unemotionally.  It’s not just the desi kids who do this, but with so many desi kids in the competition, one cannot help but wonder if this is a common attribute among all the desi kids.

I wonder whether, as the competition grows (which would be presumably more internationally as  more world TV audiences are drawn in), whether the organizers would not feel more pressure to make the competition more TV friendly.  I’m not sure what form this would take, and whether it would somehow confer any subtle advantage on the showman-style kids.  But on the whole, I don’t see it as a very good development for the participating kids.

To sum up, I don’t believe the kids are reaping the benefits of the show’s increase in popularity as much as the organizers are.  What’s worse is whether they are likely to get adversely affected by its continuing increase in popularity.

I have gone on record in the past saying that I am glad Wimbledon has a “no 5th set tie-break” policy.  After watching the match between Frenchman Nicolas Mahut and American John Isner,  I wonder whether it is time to rewrite the rule.

My objection to deciding the fifth set with a tie-break was that it would mean that both players could hold their own serves, all through the tie-break, and one player could win the set and match by virtue of winning just a couple extra tie-break points.  In other words, each player could hold their serve, no one breaks the other’s serve and just a couple of tie-break points decide who wins the match.  Imagine a championship being decided like that.

But consider the drama that has been happening in Wimbledon for the last three days.  Mahut and Isner have been engaging in a epic battle in a first-round match (the kind that sometimes get decided as 6-4,6-3,6-1).  At the end of the second day of play, the score read 4-6,6-3,7-6,6-7, 59-59 (or 6-4,3-6,6-7,7-6, 59-59).   Wimbledon’s scoreboard gave up after 47-47, the website reset to 0-0 after 50-50.   The match has lasted 10 hours so far, and it’s still not over.   At over 7 hours, the 5th set alone is longer than any match in history.  When the players come on court today, they will have been playing for 3 days.

No physios were called, no one suffered a cramp,  no curses were uttered, nobody argued with the umpires.  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a match from decades ago.

John Isner during the Mahut-Isner epic battle. Look at the scoreboard! Pic courtesy: AELTC/Wimbledon.org

I am going to be very sorry when this match ends today.  It is certainly not fair to whoever loses this match.  Not that the winner is going to be much better off – having played the equivalent of three games in three days, he is going to be at a disadvantage to whoever he meets next.

But here is the clincher – in that mammoth 5th set, where each has won 59 games, they have still won those games by holding their serve.  They have not traded breaks.  So in the end, when this match does come to a close, it will be decided by the result of  a single game, which seems a small thing when you consider that 120+ games would have been played in the 5th set alone.

When I think about it, that’s not very different from winning a set after winning a couple of tie break points.  Rather, given how these two have battled, it seems a rather unfortunate end.

So maybe we do need to have a 5th set tie break in Wimbledon, like we have in every other Grand Slam the US Open (as an alert reader has pointed out, only the US Open has a 5th set tie-break rule).  But I still don’t think it should come into effect at 6-6.  The players should be given a chance to battle it out, otherwise would be ever have games like this, which truly show the spirit of human persistence/ endurance and determination?

So maybe a tie-break should come into effect after the players are tied 12-12 in the fifth set?  (or maybe 25-25?)

We gaped at him. He said “football” which could only mean NFL.  Surely he meant “soccer”?

R told him about how Japan lost to Netherlands and went on to describe the Ghana – Australia game. I chipped in about the red card and the equalizing goal.

The post office employee seemed to regret he couldn’t watch the game.  “I missed it”, he said again and again.

Suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Ghana won?”

I turned around to see a woman in full African headgear who had just entered the post office.

Football or Soccer ball? Suddenly red hot?

The post office incident is not unique; I have been having many similar conversations of late.  A lot more people in the US seem to be interested in the World Cup this time around.  We do seem to have come a long way from the 1994 FIFA World Cup which played to empty stadiums here.

Surely it cannot be just because the networks are telecasting every match live ? Or that the games are being played during daytime in the US?

Is it because there are many more immigrants in the US than in 1994?  I can see that all of Africa seems to be supporting Ghana (possibly even more so now with Cameroon crashing out of the World Cup).

There are obviously millions more Hispanics than in 1994, and that is another football-loving demographic.

But there seems a lot of interest even among  fourth and fifth generation white Americans (i.e. the ones who don’t consider themselves immigrants).  What could explain this?

I don’t think Americans have suddenly decided to embrace the popular sports of the world.  There is still hardly any interest for cricket (not even the 20-20 kind).  But one could argue that football is a much bigger sport internationally than cricket is.

But still, the number of people who play football/ soccer in the US is probably the same amount as those who play lacrosse.

So why the sudden interest in football?  Any thoughts?

Anamika Veeramani (Pic courtesy AP)

Actually, most of the kids I saw at the competition were quiet and reserved.  That’s because they were focused on spelling words, not on showing off for the TV coverage. That’s not what the TV presenters want.  Erin Andrews was determined to squeeze out every last drop of feel-good human interest; she was desperately hunting for good sound bytes.  There’s only so much you can show viewers about finalists’ interests and favorite heroes.  If you can’t get people to faint every time, you at least need them to dance or jump or sing.

When the Spelling Bee gets covered on TV, it becomes just another form of entertainment, and the competition itself becomes secondary.

The TV coverage on the Spelling Bee has many advantages – it will inspire a much larger audience to start participating in Spelling Bees and learning to spell words correctly (a much-needed change in a country where most people don’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your”).  It will help dispel the dorky image that participants in these contests face. TV coverage brings with it a bigger pot of money, which hopefully will result in more participants getting prizes.   And finally,  people like me who are really interested in the competition get to watch at least a part of it.

But how much TV is good?  It is bad enough when they keep cutting to commercial breaks (as Anamika mentioned) but what happens when TV coverage begins to infringe on the competition itself?  Consider what happened today at the Bee :

Concerned that there wouldn’t be enough spellers left to fill the two-hour slot on ABC, organizers stopped the semifinals in the middle of a round Friday afternoon — and declared that the 10 spellers onstage would advance to the prime-time broadcast, including six who didn’t have to spell a word in the interrupted round. Essentially, the alphabetical order of the U.S. states helped determine which spellers got to move on the marquee event.

“I would rather have five finalists, than five who didn’t deserve it,” said Elizabeth, the finalist from Missouri and one of the four spellers who spelled a word correctly before the round was stopped. “I think it was unfair.”

More here.

We are talking about kids who have worked really hard for years to be where they are. For some of them, it’s the last shot they have at the prize (or the last time they get to participate in the Bee).  It’s almost become a way of life for some of them – starting each year aiming for the National finals.  Do we really need to play games with these kids in the name of  filling TV time slots?

I am all for more TV coverage, but I think we need to set limits on what organizers can do.  If this is the kind of thing that is going to happen every year, I’d rather not have the competition on ABC, or any other channel that has no issues disrupting the competition.  I would be just as happy to watch it on ESPN2 or cable or some other channel with less viewership. Or even online (on say ESPN360.com).

Please, ABC, if you think the format of this competition doesn’t fit your prime-time needs, don’t bother airing it next year. I’m sure someone else will do a better job.

Landis has now clearly decided that if he is going down, he might as well take down ex-teammate Lance Armstrong too.  So he talks about how Armstrong also practiced blood doping. Sure, Lance Armstrong has denied it. Obviously, he has not been infected with Landis’s sudden frankness and spirit of complete disclosure. But did Landis really think Armstrong would admit it so easily?  He has been cycling through years of doping allegations, consistently denying them.  He (Armstrong) hasn’t been caught, yet.

Now that he is back to cycling and has his legacy to think of ..  we will probably never know. Unless, in a few years, he retires and gets a million dollar book deal to tell all.

Pic courtesy The Onion

It’s not just cycling, there have been allegations of doping in so many sports this last decade. There is baseball, football, rugby, ice hockey and any number of Olympic events.  Wikipedia lists pages and pages of banned sportspersons.

If there are so many sportspersons who have been caught, I’m sure there are many more who have managed to evade being caught by staying one jump ahead of the progress in testing. I’m sure coaches and physiologists are endlessly inventive.

There have been doping allegations in cricket too – in the last IPL, for instance, and a few cricketers (Shoaib Akthar, Shane Warne) have also tested positive for banned substances.

Let’s assume that future tests find many more cricket players testing positive.  Given the exorbitant IPL ticket prices (Rs 2000?  Rs 5000?  Who even pays Rs 15,000?) I was wondering what audience expectations would be from these games.

I’m curious – would people’s enjoyment of a game change if they knew the athlete/player was on drugs? How much would you pay to watch a doped athlete ?

(There is, of course, the even more cynical view that the game is fixed anyway and players’ doping is irrelevant).

What do you think?

: conduct (as fairness, respect for one’s opponent, and graciousness in winning or losing) becoming to one participating in a sport

Graciousness ? Respect ?  Are these the chief attributes we  admire in our sportspersons these days?  Not if you ask the New York Times.

The Times has a long and adulatory, almost adoring article on Bart Scott, a linebacker for the New York Jets.   A linebacker in NFL football is supposed to stop the opposing team  from scoring points mainly by tackling the runningback and stopping his run, and by stopping the quarterback from passing the ball by “sacking” him.

Is Bart Scott good at any of this? Has he made any big plays?  Does he have any notable achievements on the field?

The article doesn’t say, and perhaps the author thinks such questions are irrelevant.  What makes Bart Scott special, as the New York Times tells you breathlessly, is that he is the last word in trash talking. (Trash talking, as you can imagine, is the equivalent of sledging in cricket).

The NYT article is entirely about Bart Scott’s wonderful ability to trash talk.  It tries, in all of 2 pages, to answer the all-important question – “What makes Bart Scott such a good trash talker?”

Scott uses a three-step trash-talk template. He starts with research. He scours ESPN, Google and scouting reports, which include pictures. He wants to understand the opponents he will talk to, understand what angers them, what makes them tick. He looks for police incidents, problems with wives or girlfriends, expanding stomachs, funny faces.

In next week’s paper, I’m hoping to see an admiring article on Serena Williams’ ability to threaten bodily harm to line judges.  We might find out, for instance, whether she bones up on abuses in French and Aussie slang.

But R is not a happy golfer. He frets over how rusty his game is, and how his handicap is too high. He worries about his swing, he worries about his grip. He worries that he thinks too much about his shots.

R, in other words, is on his way to becoming a goof. A “goof”, as defined by the Oldest Member in P.G. Wodehouse’s “The Heart of a Goof”. is, you see, “one of those unfortunate beings who have allowed this noblest of sports to get too great a grip upon them, who have permitted it to eat into their souls, like some malignant growth. The goof, you must understand, is not like you and me. He broods. He becomes morbid. His goofery unfits him for the battles of life.”

R is not there yet, but I can see him becoming a bit more of a goof each passing day.

But there’s worse – R is not only part goof, he is also a geek. Now what does a geek do when he tries to learn golf?

He follows the laws of Geekodynamics. The First Law of Geekodynamics, as everyone knows, is that “Geeks like to read.” So R reads a book on golf. Or twenty.

The library is full of books on golf that no one else seems to ever borrow. So we have borrowed all the books on golf that the local library has. We plan to visit a few more suburbs to mop up all their books too.

Some of these books have lots of pictures of people playing golf and sentences like “Golf is a game that is played over a course of 18 holes.” and “Golf balls come in various colors, but most of them are white.” These books are clearly aimed at toddlers, or anyone with the same IQ level. (And no, I don’t think they are saying most of the colors are white).

Photo courtesy chispita_666

After toddlers, dummies apparently form an important category of golfers. So there is the “Golf for Dummies”, then there is the “Golf Essentials for Dummies” (just the essentials, presumably for those dummies who think “Golf for Dummies” is too complicated) and the “Golf Rules and Etiquette for Dummies”. There is also the “Golf’s Short Game for Dummies”. Surprisingly, there is no “Golf’s Long Game for Dummies”. I wonder why. Perhaps the Long Game is considered way too complicated for dummies.

Then there are the books which promise to lower your handicap in 10 days, cure all your golfing errors, give you an “immaculate” swing and generally change you into some combination of Tiger Woods and the Virgin Mary.

But these are not the books geeks love. The Second Law of Geekodynamics says that “Geeks read books that have charts and graphs, and where at least one word in every sentence is either a jargon or an abbreviation.”

So what do geeky golfers read?

They read “The 7 Laws of the Golf Swing”, which says things like “Torque 1 – creating biomechanical efficiency at address”, “bring your swing speed ratios closer together” and “Law 3 – how your midsection holds orbit.”

If you thought golf was not rocket science, reading this book might leave you seriously confused. I, for one, wonder whether the part about mid-sections in orbit was written for rocket scientists or belly dancers.

But the true geek does not stop at mere jargon. It’s all very well to talk about torques and orbits, but where, he asks, are the tables and charts? Where are the trigonometric equations? Where indeed is the calculus?

Enter “The Physics of Golf“, written by a physicist after 20 years of research. Only a geek knows what geeks like to read. This book has charts – it has charts on downswing angles, calculations of angular velocity and angular acceleration. It has computer simulations of swing speed and Stroboscopic photographs of the golf club in motion. It has probability charts, diagrams, and data tables.

The book talks about the effects of lift and drag on the ball, tilting the spin axis and how dimples on the ball increase turbulence in boundary layers.

There are appendices filled with everything from trigonometric equations to Lagrangian differential equations.

Obviously, this is the book for the true geek golfer.

Sometimes I wonder whether one would get better at golf by reading this. Does knowing how Bernoulli’s Principle affects the spinning of the golf ball improve your ability to drive? Should you calculate wind drag and change in velocity when deciding how hard to hit the ball?

But there is something that puzzles me even more. Take me, for instance – I am not playing golf every alternate day. I don’t want to improve my golf, and I certainly did not borrow any books on golf.

Then why am I reading “The Physics of Golf”?