Tourney time is February’s Maine event

#SPROTS: Richard Sherman is an absolute delight

If you’ve made even a minimal attempt to follow football over the past couple of weeks, you’re probably sick of hearing about Richard Sherman. In fact, the noise about Sherman has been so deafening that this may not be the first piece you’ve read beginning with that sentence.
In case you’ve tuned out, here’s the SparkNotes version: Sherman is one of the best defensive players in the NFL, and he’ll be the first to tell you so. A couple weeks ago, Sherman clinched a Super Bowl berth for his Seattle Seahawks in the NFC Championship Game by breaking up a last-minute pass intended for one of his many rivals, San Francisco wide receiver Michael Crabtree. Sherman taunted Crabtree after the play, which was pretty standard behavior for perhaps the league’s biggest loudmouth.
But the real dram’ came after the final whistle. In a live postgame interview with FOX’s Erin Andrews, Sherman looked directly into the souls of viewers at home and shouted that Crabtree was a “sorry receiver.” He also yelled, “Don’t you open your mouth about the best, or I’ma shut it for you real quick,” which, of course, is a dope thing to yell on live television.

#SPROTS: Hot takes and paragraph breaks: mocking the worst of sports writing

LeBron James is everything that’s wrong with basketball. Derek Jeter is everything that’s right with baseball. Athletes who hold out for bigger contracts are selfish crybabies, and billionaire sports franchise owners aren’t. The most valuable players are gutsy and gritty, not naturally-talented and flashy.
Any given sports fan has spent hours of their life sifting through opinions like these. There’s something that drives certain sport writers to offer moralizing, sanctimonious takes at every possible opportunity. “Good” athletes are tough guys who make the most of their talent. They’re leaders and they never stop hustling. “Bad” athletes are showboating malcontents. When things start to go south for the team, these guys only look out for themselves.
None of this is wrong, in and of itself, it’s just that these attributes are assigned quite arbitrarily. That’s the fallacy of it all: For whatever reason, short, overachieving white guys are often more celebrated than their superstar teammates that win games.
Fortunately, there have long-existed people who call out these “hot takes,” as they’re now known.
In 2005, a group of baseball-obsessed friends started FireJoeMorgan.com, a blog with the tagline “Where Bad Sports Journalists Come to Die.” Using pseudonyms, the writers of FJM hilariously skewered sports media members who put forth obnoxious arguments without facts to back them up. The site was so influential that bloggers today still partake in “FJMing”—that is, destroying bad columns in FJM’s signature style. The site went dark in 2008.
Fear not, though. Today’s internet is better than ever at calling out bad sports writing of all kinds. @PFTCommenter, a Twitter personality and writer at NFL humor website KissingSuzyKolber.com, is an elaborate satire of the toughness-obsessed, lib-hating goons that wage war in internet comment sections.
A @PFTCommenter tweet from March 4 regarding 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s contract negotiations should give you an idea of his shtick: “only thing more backwords then Crapernicks contract demands is his hat folks,” he wrote. While @PFTCommenter’s signature misspellings and race baiting are often laugh-out-loud funny, his outlandish diatribes are scarily similar to those of many NFL superfans.
On the other end of the hot take spectrum is Gregg Easterbrook, a well-credentialed writer who writes a weekly ESPN column during the NFL season. Easterbrook is something of a snob, and he’s quick to proclaim his intellectual and moral superiority over, well, anyone who isn’t him.
Deadspin’s Drew Magary pokes fun at Easterbrook in his weekly NFL feature in a segment called “Gregg Easterbrook is a Haughty Dipshit.” Easterbrook is an easy target—his writing begs to be mocked and he’s not exactly strapped for cash—but I asked Magary if he ever felt bad for the relentless teasing, anyway.
“Oh sure, sometimes,” Magary told me in an email. “I try my best to balance the karma by ripping myself and leaving myself open for goofing. I’ve gone too far in the past and I do my best now to rein it in so I don’t become utterly repellent. People tend to have good moral radars and will let you know if you’ve overstepped your bounds.”
Today’s most prominent purveyor of tongue-in-cheek hot takes is Grantland’s Andrew Sharp, whose parodic #HotSportsTakes column reads like a hacky sports writer’s greatest hits. He first wrote the column—then called Troll Tuesdays—for SB Nation in 2012.
“We saw a lot of columns that were clearly just thrown out there to get people all pissed off,” Sharp told me in an email. “So one day my editor, Spencer Hall, came up with the idea that we’d start writing stuff that was openly trolling readers, just to see what happens. He asked me to write the first one, and for some reason I decided to write it in the voice of a ’70s sports writer, so then that became part of the series, too. And it just sort of took off from there.”
Sharp’s Troll Tuesday columns celebrated Notre Dame football and Lance Armstrong, and derided March Madness Cinderellas and even Santa Claus. Since he moved to Grantland last year, Sharp’s #HotSportsTakes have questioned whether Richard Sherman should’ve been allowed to play in the Super Bowl and suggested that the Broncos dump Peyton Manning.
One particularly smoldering take that praised Duke University’s much slobbered-over head coach Mike Krzyzewski was so convincing that it got posted to Coach K’s official Facebook page. Oops.
I asked Sharp for a sure-fire formula that would produce only the hottest of takes.
“Some feigned concern for the future of America and sports fans, that would be number one,” he wrote. “Horrible puns and jokes are key. Some completely tone deaf celebration of scrappy athletes as icons, and most importantly, some dehumanizing commentary on star athletes who screw up.
“Like if guys make a mistake or lose a big game or do anything controversial, the hot take move is to question the entire character or soul, and then tie it to some generational decline and get all paternalistic, lecturing grown men about values.”
I’d add that hot takes usually include a few scorching, single-sentence paragraphs.
Such takedowns of bad writing are now so ubiquitous that some are wondering if they’re becoming more common than the pieces they mock.
“I think that most sports writers are so primed now for the backlash to their HOT SPROTS TAKES that they don’t even bother to write the hot take to begin with,” Magary wrote on Deadspin a few weeks back. “We’re basically writing Richard Sherman columns in response to a backlash that never actually arrives.... The strong take well is drying up.”
“Drew and I actually talked about that a few months ago,” Sharp told me. “I definitely think we’ve seen a drop-off, at least at the national level. At this point, I’m parodying columns that don’t totally exist anymore, but it’s too fun to come up with awful puns, so I’ll keep it going a little longer.”
Now that Twitter and blogs have been in the mainstream public consciousness for years, it’s certainly possible that writers are listening to internet criticism. Pardon the usage of a quintessential hot take phrase, but it begs the question: Have the internet crusades against bad sports writing successfully eliminated their target?
“To a certain extent it probably has helped shitty sports writers be more aware of their shittiness. I dunno that it stops them,” said Magary. “It’s really more for personal entertainment. I can’t justify it as a civil service, honestly.”
“Whether it’s improved sports writing by shaming people? I don’t think so, but it’s been fun to screw around,” said Sharp. “The only reason I have kept doing it is because it’s fun.
“I will say it’s improved my sports writing, because I’m more conscious of not being a lazy hack with things. Regardless, sports writing in 2014 is great or horrible depending on who you read, and I’m pretty sure that’s always been true.”

#SPROTS

Tourney time is February’s Maine event

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Sam Chase

Columnist

February 14, 2014

Bowdoin students from out of state like to talk about Maine in romantic, if sometimes condescending, terms. Maine is eccentric, idiosyncratic, and off the beaten path. Maine is quaint, Maine has its own little traditions.

They’re not wrong, of course. My hometown of Orono has an annual tradition of using a lottery system to select a single citizen to be stoned in the town square. Great fun is had by each and every unaffected family.

That’s just us, though. Maine’s best traditions are those that bring folks together from all corners of the state. My personals favorites are the boys’ and girls’ high school basketball tournaments, which are now starting in Bangor, Augusta and Portland.

High school hoops is an oddly big deal in Maine. Even in relation to its small population, the state produces very few D-I basketball players. A small percentage of the states’ best players, however, go on to become excellent D-II and D-III players. At smaller schools, plenty of kids who wouldn’t see court time almost anywhere else in the country can play significant roles on playoff-bound teams.

Take me, for example. Despite being a turnover machine who shot about 25 percent from three, I went into my junior season ready to take on a starting role after my team lost some key players from the previous year. Nonetheless, in anticipation of a possible playoff appearance, I convinced my youth group—one for cool teenz, not lame ones, I promise—to reschedule our service trip so it wouldn’t coincide with the tournament.

We went 2-16 that season.

But, for some reason, our fans kept showing up to games. And it wasn’t just our parents. It was middle-schoolers, local families and awesome old guys that gave me rides when they saw me walking to games. From what I can tell, that’s how it is all over the state. Keegan Pieri ’15, a forward for the Bowdoin men, won two state championships at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport.

“A local bank bought tickets for everyone at our school, so everyone went to the finals game for free,” said Pieri, one of several Bowdoin basketball players I spoke with who seemed stoked to talk Maine hoops. “On Main Street, every store would have signs up in support for us. It’s a unique experience, having an entire town rally behind you.”

Megan Phelps ’15, a captain for the Bowdoin women, grew up on Mount Desert Island and remembers well the pilgrimage that MDI fans made to the now-replaced Bangor Auditorium—also known as The Mecca—to watch their Trojans compete.

“Anytime either the boys or girls team would travel for a tournament game, someone would hang this giant plywood sign by the entrance to the island on the bridge that said ‘Last one off the island: turn off the lights,’” she said.

For non-ballin’ high school students, tourney time is a chance to paint their bodies, support their friends and yell obnoxious things in a crowded setting. That’s as good as high school gets, right there. Since the tournament is also one of the few Maine sporting events broadcast on television, these games can be rare opportunities for Maine kids to be on TV.

“It was a big thing to sit on the wooden bleachers at the end of the Augusta Civic Center because at halftime you could get on TV,” said sharp-shooting Polar Bear Selena Lorrey ’16, who attended Traip Academy in Kittery. “That was a huge thing for them,” she added, laughing.

Even folks with no team allegiance whatsoever flock to the nearest tournament site to buy day passes and camp out in the bleachers with a bucket of popcorn. So what is it that makes Maine high school basketball, a product that is, frankly, not awesome, an event that captivates many in the middle of February each year? I think the answer is simply that Mainers love basketball. They talk about it year-round, whether in regard to their local JV girls or the Boston Celtics. Hell, you can’t go to a Maine State Fair for five minutes without seeing a Larry Bird graphic tee. Of course, sometimes high school hoops win out by nature of being the only game in town.

“In the winter, it’s just somewhere for people to go,” said Lorrey.

So if you find yourself coming down with the sports apathy that often goes around Bowdoin this time of year, find a radio and scan for a tourney game. You’ll know you’ve found one when you hear a hoarse announcer being drowned out by screaming tweens, moms and randos.

Comments are permanently closed.