As mentioned Pete and I just returned from London. The hottest news on the TV was the upcoming World Cup in Soccer and whether or not one of Britain's star players would be healthy enough to play. This got more air time and page space in the news than the meeting between Blair and Bush, or the daily bombings in Iraq.
Let me be clear I am not complaining about this. Sports are both great teachers of life lessons (to the young) and great distractions from the troubles of life (to the old). Sports are in this sense a sanctuary that much of the world turns to. I don't share the love of soccer that is evident throughout the world, but I do appreciate how the World Cup will be the preoccupation of millions over the next few weeks.
My college tennis team just won their conference championship for the 16th year in a row and my college tennis coach continues to amass a record that is among the elite of NCAA coaches. Congratulations to Coach Joe Walters.
On the tennis front, the French Open is currently taking place and will be followed in 6 weeks with Wimbeldon and then roughly two months after that the US Open. So this is one of the great times of the year to be a tennis fan.
My AAU/YBOA basketball team has been playing in tournaments since March. We have had the opportunity to play against some very strong teams (e.g., DC Assault, and Boo Williams) and hopefully it has been a great experience for the boys. We play this weekend in the Virginia state championships for YBOA and enter the tournament ranked 4th in the state. If we hold to our seeding we will qualify for the YBOA National Championships in Florida at the end of June. But we will have several players missing due to conflicts with school. And of course there is always the problem in tournament play of stringing together 4 or 5 good games in a row. We will see.
The NBA playoffs are coming down to the wire. Miami Heat look very strong at the moment.
Not only do I enjoy sports as a fan and as a participant, but also an intellectual exercise. Malcolm Gladwell has some recent columns addressing the statistical analysis of sports. Following the Moneyball phenomena, various individuals have sought to come up with statistical measures that assess the value of athletes in a different way than the conventional wisdom and in a way that would actually help teams win games when those conventional measures would mislead. Now Moneyball actually did raise a puzzle and provide an answer --- how could a small market team like the Oakland A's compete with big market teams like the Yankees? The answer was to be found in finding undervalued athletes. And conventional baseball statistics overlook certain key categories of performance on the field that lead to winning games and yet since they are not captured in these traditional statistics lead to undervaluing them.
In basketball, great coaches such as Dean Smith of UNC, developed elaborate statistical measures to caputre these intangibles long along in developing systems to measure player efficiency. One of the most striking non-captured statistic is the pass that leads to the assist. Another is deflected passes. Yet another is boxing out that might not result in your rebound, but an easier rebound for your teammate. And finally there is of course the ability to set hard picks that free up teammates. Basketball is a team game played by individuals and as such it is full of both individual sacrifice for the good of the team, and individual brilliance. Obviously the conventional wisdom of triple doubles might lead us astray in assessing the value of any one player, but the various intangibles have always been looked at by the great coaches from Claire Bee to Bobby Knight, or Adolf Ruff to Mike Krzyzewski.
Michael Novak should be best known as the man who attempted a merger of Austrian economics and social thought with Catholic doctrine on the common good. He also wrote a book The Joy of Sports.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V62I4P87-1.htm
James Mitchener also did a good book on sport.
Posted by: Rafe Champion | May 31, 2006 at 06:57 PM
Pete, I appreciate your point but to say that "whether or not one of Britain's star players would be healthy enough to play ... got more air time and page space in the news than the meeting between Blair and Bush, or the daily bombings in Iraq" is a rather large exaggeration. The furore over Wayne Rooney's metatarsal has died down and has been overtaken by stories of scandal in the UK government - such as foreign criminals being released, the Deputy PM's sex life, cash for peerages, and a recent spate of knife attacks. Having said that, let's hope Rooney is fit for the largest and most watched sports event (including the Olympics) in the world!
Posted by: Nick | June 01, 2006 at 10:16 AM
Actually it is Michener and the book is Sports in America. One of the Amazon reviews provides a summary of the contents.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0449214508?v=glance
This is a review of Free Persons and the Common Good which Novak published in 1989.
http://pub19.bravenet.com/forum/1573050381/fetch/19427/5
Extracts.
One of the most exciting insights of modern liberal scholarship concerns the mutual dependence of morals and markets. This is emphasised by Herbert Giersch in The Ethics of Economic Freedom (CIS Occasional Papers No. 24) and by Hayek in The Fatal Conceit. Novak is also working on this theme and his latest book has been hailed as signalling 'a new era in classical liberal scholarship' because it merges the Aristotelian and Thomist idea of the common good with individualism and the theory of 'unplanned order' from the Austrian school of economics. It also draws attention to the way that the constitution and other factors in the American experience provided fertile soil to promote both civic virtues and material progress.
Novak, in his capacity as builder of bridges, calls for an integration of the worthwhile elements of the Catholic, conservative and liberal traditions, inspired by the modest, non-utopian urge to make the world a little better whenever we have the chance to do so. This programme calls for market liberals and conservatives to join forces in the campaign for limited government, deregulation and free trade, while in the moral and cultural arena they would combine to resist the tendencies to moral relativism that are rampant in the arts and the soft social sciences.
His account of the common good derives inspiration from the work of von Mises and Hayek in the Austrian tradition, and its blend of individualism and institutionalism is totally convincing. Of course the notion that there is anything identifiable as the common (collectivist) good is correctly regarded as a nonsense in liberal circles but the kind of 'common good' that Novak identifies is not of the collectivist variety. It is a framework of institutions and traditions which maximises the opportunities for all individuals to enjoy liberty, peace and prosperity. In other words, the common good is promoted by the extended order of morals and markets, provided that the markets and the more consciously designed principles of the legal and political order are in good shape.
There has been an unfortunate division of labour with regard to the challenge and the responsibility. Liberals of the classical and left-leaning kind have tended to take on the tasks of change while conservatives have shouldered the responsibility for maintenance. And the hope of progress, which provided so much inspiration for liberals of all kinds, has been corrupted by theories of inevitability which undermine personal responsibility and by utopian fantasies that have prompted appalling episodes of fanaticism. Conservatism for its part has been debilitated by elements of obscurantism which Hayek identified in his classical piece 'Why I am not a conservative'.
Posted by: Rafe | June 05, 2006 at 02:43 AM