Your Mother Must Be Very Proud
Steelers/Emil Steiner Edition

I'm not a football fan. It's a game with many obvious virtues, but I've only got time for approximately one sport in my life, and, well, I went to Carolina. On a more objective note, one of the reasons I've never been crazy about football is that this kind of idiotic attitude has always seemed to me to be a bit more prevalent in that world than in baseball or basketball. (Though, of course, baseball players and coaches are notorious for having raised cheating to both art and science.)

Presumably this is one of those cases in which there's no need to dignify the piece with a response. But that usually doesn't stop me. Two seconds of objective thought would reveal, for example, that his central theoretical thesis is bullshit:

In football, as in all sports, it's not a foul unless you get caught.

Um, no. Not even close. There's no more plausibility to this claim than there is to the claim that an action is not a crime unless you get convicted, nor to the claim that you haven't committed a logical fallacy unless someone busts you on it. Mr. Steiner is apparently thinking of some kind of Calvin-Ball-esque sport in which there are no rules, but the officials call fouls whimsically, based on no criteria or antecedent understanding or description of which actions are permissible in the game. Such a sport is fairly hard to imagine, but one could be called for anything--e.g. for wearing a uniform, for breathing, for metabolizing, for existing, for having been born on Earth, for having an even number of hairs on your head, for bearing no resemblance to Abraham Lincoln--while, say, a brutal chainsaw murder in the middle of the court need not be called or even noted.


However, in all actual sports--including football--there are things which are normally called "rules" which specify what is and is not to count as a foul. What the officials do is try to apply the rules to actual games, just like judges try to apply laws to actual situations. But, though there is some blurriness at the edges, there's a clear enough difference between making a law and applying it.

In basketball, for example, if you throw an elbow in order to hit another player, it's a foul--whether it's called or not,[1] as is grabbing the jersey of an opposing player or setting a moving screen. This, for example, is a foul. As is this.

Though this is a rather obviously absurd view, it's a view held by some folks who are allegedly paid to think. Some PoMo-y academicians have apparently claimed similar things--that, e.g., nothing is a strike unless it's called a strike. But, again, we see the absurdity of the view by thinking of clear cases first: the pitcher winds up and throws the ball. It sails fifteen feet wide and thirty feet high of the strike zone. This is a ball, regardless of how it is called. There's a difference between being an umpire and being a poet.

Anyway, more wit and wisdom from Mr. Steiner:

What's wrong with a team being dirty?

...a team should push the rules to the limit and, when advantageous, break them. There is no trophy for being a good loser.

First, winning is not the point of sports.

If you watch sports primarily in order to see your team win, then you are an idiot. I cannot stress this point enough.

If you are really watching for the winning, then you should be willing to watch Canasta or synchronized swimming for the winning. You ought to be watching because you enjoy the particular sport in question. If it's for the winning, which sport it is should not matter to you. It doesn't even have to be a sport.

Of course some people do actually seem to watch for the winning in some sense. They get some kind of affirmation when the sports team from their area defeats the sports team from another area. That's a sad thing. Don't be like that. It's kind of pathetic.

Second, Mr. Steiner's view is about one notch above:

If you think you can get away with it, go ahead and steal kindly old Mrs. Smith's social security check.

I mean, it's not a crime if you don't get caught, right? Nobody's going to give you Miss Congeniality in this world. He who dies with the most toys wins. Etc., etc.

Nauseating. Sports--which often brings out the best in players--seems inevitably to bring out the worst in fans. Why some guy sitting on his pasty ass downing "lite" beers and Doritos thinks he has any right to scream for the blood of actual players is baffling to me in the extreme.

Anyway, I won't be watching the Superbowl. It's always boring, and the glitz and corporate disgustingness of professional sports are wound up to maximum RPMs. But because of Mr. Steiner's ridiculous post, some small part of me will be rooting for the Cardinals.[2]



[1] Sophists will try the old who's-to-say? ploy here, in this guise: "who's to say Smith threw the elbow in order to hit Jones? We can never know someone else's intentions". False. We know the intentions of others all the time--if you didn't you'd die fairly quickly. And it's fairly easy to tell the difference between an intentionally-thrown elbow and contact during the normal course of the game in most cases. There are some cases in which an observer can't tell for sure, of course, but that's irrelevant. Problems are caused in cases like this because people eager to be contrarian will sometimes endorse inferences of the form sometimes x therefore always x. But nobody ever endorses such an argument when they're being serious about a question.

[2] Though you know why professional sports sucks? Because it's all just a business. The Cardinals, of course, used to be in St. Louis. But, as Jerry Seinfeld has noted, players switch teams, teams switch cities...in the end, you're rooting for the clothes...[3]

[3] Though you know why college sports sucks. It's a corrupting influence on the university. At least professional sports is what it is. It's pretty up-front about its corporate grossness. College sports pretends to be something it isn't, and drags the university down with it.[4]

[4] Though, I should say, not all teams. That's why I love Carolina hoops. It's one of the good teams. Still, it participates in and helps to sustain a corrupt and corrupting system. If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate all big-time college sports, I would choke back a tear and do so.