Assuming you’ve ever cared about sports, is there anything about sports that you like better than when you were a kid?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’ll go with the availability of soccer on television.
And being able to watch in HD. The crappy, small screens of (our) my youth made following the action really hard.
Now that you can watch the bend on the ball, your (my) appreciation for the game has soared.
Same goes for hockey and golf. I would not like to go back to pre-HDTV.
We don’t have cable, but English PL is now available on broadcast TV on Sat mornings. It’s great. I also now understand the game much better than before I became a certified ref.
The NBA is better. The 3-point shot, the alley-oop, insanely fast point guards, and lots of foreign players all add to the game for me.
Yes. Basketball is better.
There were some things about the old ABA that I think would make the NBA better, notably the ole 2 to make 1 and 3 to make 2 foul shot rule when a team was in the bonus. I hate how a team that deserves to lose can foul their way back into a game. The ABA bonus rule would disincentivize that and make a team have to play actual defense to get back into the game.
Sorry. Completely disagree. If you can’t understand the officiating, you can’t enjoy the game. And you can’t change the rules while simultaneously pretending not to have changed the rules. I have been treated to box seats at NBA games by certain vendors and pharmaceutical sales reps and I have to say, I always leave early because the games are so boring.
Baseball uniforms.
Hockey. More than six teams. More international players and generally much higher overall skills. Less fighting. More premium put on speed, movement and passing. Much better tv coverage of the entire league.
The internet. Don’t care about following along on twitter but streaming video allows viewing of out of town games and niche sports like rally racing and sports cars and it is possible to get real time stats, scores and in motorsports timing and scoring and team radio communications.
A hometown hockey team that has won the Stanley Cup.
Football is a lot more exciting now than before the 1978 rule changes opening up the passing game. Viewing any sport is better due to video technology – if you watch any classic game it’s amazing just how difficult it was sometimes to see what was happening. Not to mention the ability to see replays of games not broadcast in your area. Before ESPN you would tune into Monday Night Football just to hope to catch a few seconds of replay from the Sunday games during half time.
Officiating is better in every sport, sometimes much better. I caught a partial replay of the 1978 world cup final and was struck by how much crap went on then – and futbol is one of the few sports not to be much better for officiating. Tennis is the best, with the ability to check any line call immediately and correct it.
Speaking of tennis, to my mind this is the sport that has improved the best. For a while there we weren’t sure that the new racket technology was an improvement as initially it showed up in dominant serves. In 1991, perhaps the low point, the Wimbledon champion Stich actually won a match there without getting a single service break. However, as rackets continued to improve players developed great return games which effectively ended the serve-and-volley dominance of the game, then the intentional slowing of court surfaces starting in the early 2000s (which is why its now common for men to be winners on all surfaces) did the rest. (Wimbledon uses different grass than they used to – the surface speed is now closer to clay than to the original grass.)
I recently rewatched the classic 4th set tiebreak and last few games of the 5th set between Borg and McEnroe in 1980. McEnroe was using a first generation metal racket, Borg wood. Both rackets had very small sweet spots, as all did back then. If you didn’t hit the ball in the exact center it went off the racket without power or good direction. Both were playing amazing tennis – but points ended very quickly because just missing the sweet spot once opened up a clear winner for the opponent. McEnroe was also obviously fighting for breath the whole time – he was known even then as someone who didn’t put a lot of workout time into his preparation and it showed. Today someone in his physical condition probably couldn’t even get into the grand slam draw, regardless of talent level.
But perhaps the best part about tennis today is the emergence of the women’s game. Still not as popular as the men’s game, though that may yet happen, but the top players are all outstanding athletes. McEnroe infamously made the comment years ago that the #100 man could beat the #1 woman. I’m not sure that wasn’t true, nor that it wouldn’t be true today, but any of the top women today would cream any man not on the men’s tour. That wouldn’t have been the case when I was growing up.
The problem with tennis now versus then is the need to show it live every where. Thus, the French Open begins at 4 a.m. on the west coast. There is no way I am going to get up at 4 a.m. to watch a tennis game. Now, a few times, I have caught it because I was going to bed at 4 a.m. and had it on while I got ready for bed. Don’t even mention the Australia Open; and, Wimbledon is way too early, too. I used to never miss a match. Now, I just read about tennis.
The big screens have made every sport better. And, the Seahawks have made football so great in the Pacific Northwest–an area that had no major league team in any sports when I was growing up. When I was in college we got our first major league sport with the Seattle Supersonics. So, cool. And, P.S., BOO OKC for stealing our team.
I played tennis in HS during the very end of the serve and volley era. My coaches were always ways pushing me to do it but I always had a natural preference for returns. Wish I had grown up in a time I wasn’t pushed to be a square peg in a round hole.
Tennis is probably the sport that has declined the most. There is virtually zero serve-and-volley now, with both players inhabiting the baseline and hitting every shot with topspin. With the noble exception of Federer, male players’ styles are nearly indistinguishable. Women players’ styles are entirely indistinguishable.
It is monotonous and awful.
Tennis is definitely worse now. The Borg-Connors-McEnroe era was the best.
I blame technology. Tennis players should be given wooden racquets the size of spatulas the way tennis used to be played. Same with golf — wooden woods. Baseball has it rights keeping the bat old school.
You two are welcome to your opinion. As I said, I loved the late 70s era, but you really have to watch the replays to see how the game has changed.
I go to a lot of junior tennis tournaments these days, as my youngest plays. Every now and again they’ll be showing the tennis channel and there will be a replay of a 1970s match. The kids are struck by how simple the games were then. Yes, rackets are much better now, but so are the techniques and the training. The most commonly used methods of gripping the tennis racket today didn’t exist back then. Modern coaches also teach different (better) forms for stroking the ball and much more complicated strategies and tactics than used to exist.
The serve-and-volley method worked because at the time a hard serve almost guaranteed a weak, unaimed return that could be easily put away for a winner with a volley. For some people, that’s exciting tennis. Today that won’t work – players will respond to an opponent moving to the net after a serve with a passing shot. Yes, partly that’s due to better rackets, but it is also very much due to better techniques and better coaching. Remember that serve-and-volley survived through the Sampras era, long after better rackets had been introduced. It ALSO took the evolution of better tennis coaching to make it work.
Yes, it’s all better. Everyone uses the western grip, everyone uses the two-handed backhand, everyone stay away from the net, no one hits approach shots or drop shots. All of the inefficiencies have been removed.
Of course, so has all the beauty and drama. But who wouldn’t rather see two optimized tennis units play Pong instead of Sampras vs. Agassi? It’s just better.
NO.
OH, I thought you meant the SPORT itself. When I was a yungin, there weren’t DRUGS in sport; Racism YES, Drugs NO!
I KNOW Baseball’s Best period was between Jackie Robinson, AND the first expansion in 1960. EVERYBODY
was allowed to play, on FEWER teams, which had greater depth of natural talent than today!
I am NOT opinionated! LOL
I won’t try to change your unopinionated opinions, but there were drugs in baseball in the 1950s and 60s. It’s just the drugs were dispensed by the teams (e.g., “greenies”).
Agreed. But everyone had an Equal opportunity then to get the SAME greenies his and the other teams were passing out to players! LOL
Not opinionated, but I don’t think the Greenies could have as much influence that steroids, which users Have to look for, were as performance enhancing.
Okay, but now, as the old joke goes, we’re just haggling over the price. Once you start arguing, in effect, that the problem with greenies was they weren’t performance-enhancing enough, you’ve kinda lost the argument for the purity of baseball back in the day.
availability on internets esp youtube; can actually catch up on things I miss[ed]
I didn’t like sports as a kid so everything.
Tv coverage in the major sports plus soccer. Ferchrissakes, I don’t recall the US networks broadcasting a World Cup until probably the 1980s. Before that, we got 20 seconds of highlights on the evening news, or maybe if you lived in a big city one of the foreign language channels on the UHF dial might have it, assuming you could pick up the signal.
One MLB or NBA game a week — network’s choice. That was it apart from your home teams games.
At one point in the 1970s, when CBS owned the broadcast rights, they showed NBA playoff games late late at night — 11:30 pm pst. Ratings they said.
In basketball, far more clever ball handlers today, and far more players can go to their left easily. Women’s basketball is no longer an embarrassment.
>>One MLB or NBA game a week — network’s choice. That was it apart from your home teams games.
this. and damn few home team games either. I remember baseball on TV on weekends only, the game of the week on saturday, and the Dodgers on sunday if they were at home.
more PROFESSIONAL sports on TV has been a good thing IMO; on the other hand the fact that pretty much every college football game is televised now has been a fucking terrible thing for those of us who go to the games because we don’t know when game time is until the Monday before.
The fact that all my teams have won championships in the last decade?
That and the fact that the racist shitheel Yawkeys no longer own the Red Sox.
The players for the major sports get paid much more closely to their market values. Better organized players’ unions, under challenging organizing circumstances, gained this.
Here’s some stats for major league baseball players, for example:
Year- Minimum Salary- Average Salary
1970- $12,000- $29,303
1975- $16,000- $44,676
1980- $30,000- $143,756
1985- $60,000- $371,571
1990- $100,000- $578,930
1995- $109,000- $1,071,029
2000- $200,000- $1,998,034
2002- $300,000
2005- $316,000- $2,632,655
2006- $327,000
2007- $380,000- $2,699,292
2008- $390,000
2009- $400,000- $2,996,106
2011- $414,000
2012- $480,000
Also, sabermetrics initiated a revolution in statistical analysis of major sports, helping us fans gain better ways to understand the true value of player performances.
Learning that a .200 hitter could have a much greater overall offensive value than a .300 hitter was a big discovery. This discovery can translate to a deeper understanding of the value of people in all ways:
Bill James’ Baseball Abstract opened my eyes.
If only we could do the same for teachers…
Just an appreciation for seeing the best of the best at their craft, even when it’s the “bad guys” doing it, instead of my childhood passionate insane loyalty to the home team.
18-hole coverage of golf tournaments. Coverage of the European tour.
Well, yes, I have to say I was fortunate to have been in Germany in summer 2010 while the soccer, um, should I say futbol championships were underway. The Germans were jubilant their team made it so far and under the guidance of Turkish immigrants working in the hospitality industry I gained some understanding of the game and grudgingly had to admit the Spanish team was better and earned the final victory. And along the way I also came to understand that Koenig Ludwig Weissbier is the finest drink in the world.
Women’s figure skating. I just stopped caring at one point, and I spent 2 decades obsessed with it.
Curling. Definitely like curling better.
I don’t have to stay up until midnight to watch the NBA playoffs.
One word: Curling
Hockey on HD. Being able to watch premier league and La Liga. Soccer went from an afterthought to me to my co-favorite sport (along with Hockey…)
24 straight years of appearing in the playoffs. In my youth the Red Wings weren’t all that terribly good, but they were still MY team. They are still MY team. They always will be MY team.
I remember when they were called the Dead Wings.
I liked daytime World Series games.
More organizations working to find second careers for retired racehorses. A growing number of racetracks instituting policies to discourage sending has-beens to the kill buyers. Some of them actually enforcing those policies and kicking out trainers who violate them.
For example:
http://www.trfinc.org/
http://www.canterusa.org/
It isn’t easy to make the tracks’ anti-slaughter-sale policies work, but there has been progress:
http://www.drf.com/news/anti-slaughter-policies-proving-tough-enforce