It is important to note a shift that has taken place in the evolution of sport media, which reflects a corresponding shift from a Baudrillardian second order of simulacra (production) to a third order of simulacra (simulation). Only a short time ago television was the driving force behind sport videogame innovation, which led to the introduction in videogames of play-by-play and colour commentary, multiple camera angles in a 3-D game field, instant replay, and picture-in-picture showing runners on base.

Recently, however, videogames have begun to surpass television and are now the driving force behind sport media innovation. The simulation capacity of videogames has led, for example, to the 1st & 10 line in football, a virtual line "painted" on the field to show how far the offensive team needs to go for a first down.

The 1st & 10 line: a high-tech entertainment technology that has won two Emmy Awards, and which is born of higher-tech U.S. defence technology. This reminds one of the military C3I that Donna Haraway refers to in her Cyborg Manifesto: command, control, communications and intelligence. Which reminds one that the cyborg is semiurgic in nature, ie. of code.

Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

We may thus reconsider the old military-industrial complex as the new military-communications-entertainment complex — that is, a military-post-industrial complex of warfare technology that may also be leveraged in the production and consumption of hyperreal spectacles.

Continues Haraway: "Michel Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field."

ESPN.com elaborates on the process behind the new Ali vs. Ali commercial by adidas:

"We had to remove the people who were already in the frame," says Fred Raimondi, visual effects supervisor for Digital Domain, and chief tech wizard on last year's dazzling "23 vs. 39" Michael Jordan Gatorade ads. "In the original footage of the opening of the Williams fight, for example, the referee and the opponent's entourage were in the center of the ring."

Layering various angles and images, and digitally producing canvas, ropes, and members of the ringside audience, Raimondi's team painstakingly erased the extras crowding up the screen.

Next came new live-action sequences of Laila climbing through the ropes and shrugging off her robe. The costumes are borrowed from Will Smith's "Ali." The cameras in reporters' hands are vintage.

"That's the most challenging thing," Bullock says. "To get the authentic footage to match the new footage; to make it seem as though the two places are one."

1. To submit or present, as for consideration, approval, or payment: render a bill.
2. Computer Science. To convert (graphics) from a file into visual form, as on a video display.
3. To reduce, convert, or melt down (fat) by heating.

[Middle English rendren, from Old French rendre, to give back, from Vulgar Latin *rendere, alteration of Latin reddere. ... etc.]

Source: The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Copyright ? 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

An ESPN.com update on Barry Bonds as he reports to training camp with the shadow of BALCO Labs looming over his head:

While the Giants have indicated they will be better about enforcing a two-year-old directive by the commissioner's office that limits who can enter the clubhouse, Bonds thinks his other trainer, Harvey Shields, will still be there. Shields stretches out Bonds before games.

"I believe Harvey will always be with me," Bonds said. "That's stretching. I have to get ready for games. People have to realize our body is our machine."

I ask myself: Is the Iron Curtain of Hyperreality the same thing as the Chrysalis Digitalis?

Artificial turf: an innovation that changed the face of professional sport by further divorcing our sporting selves from nature. AstroTurf, the first artificial playing field surface, was created in 1966, when it was used to carpet the Astrodome, inspiring the AstroTurf brand name.

AstroTurf-maker Southwest Recreational Industries Inc. has filed for bankruptcy protection and is going out of business. SRI, which entered into the artificial turf business in 1989, initially bought AstroTurf Industries Inc. from St. Louis-based Balsam Corp., when it had filed for bankruptcy in 1994.

The irony? Long after the companies themselves become extinct, the artificial fields they have spawned live on to remind us of their existence.

Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks: "I told George Steinbrenner that he is getting an outstanding baseball player and an outstanding human being in Alex Rodriguez."

Are these mutually exclusive entities? Is this the cyborg athlete that we have referred to so often?

How well did the marketing work? Here are the starting line-ups for the NBA All-Star Game, broken down by shoe sponsor:

Nike: 4 (VC, Yao, J.O'Neal, Kobe*)

adidas: 3 (T-Mac, Garnett, Duncan)

Reebok: 2 (Iverson, Francis)

And1: 1 (Wallace)

* - recently dropped over pending trial

Interestingly enough, the two biggest question marks in terms of deserving starting status belong to two Nike endorsers, Vince Carter and Yao Ming. They first met in China two years ago while Carter was on an Asian tour for Nike. Yao apparently benefited from votes cast over the Internet by native Chinese — this from the country that has a notorious Red Firewall. Could it be that Vince has benefited from the same voters? If so, great move by Nike to penetrate the Chinese market.

Thoughts on the new adidas campaign:

Impossible is nothing (with the help of CGI).

Nike has already been here, though.

And so has Gatorade.

"Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up" — no matter what gender they are.

Talk about some sort of weird resolution of father-daughter psychoanalytical issues: whale on dad's virtual self for a while.

Remember this guy? "I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me." — Ali Senior has been radically depoliticized over the past few decades, hasn't he?

VirtuAli does not have Parkinson's disease — and he never will.

Rumble, young girl, rumble.

Paul DePodesta, Assistant GM of the Oakland A's, talks about the transformation of the organization:

(Update: DePodesta has just been named the GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers.)

I was on a quest to find relevant relationships. Usually it wasn't as simple as "if X then Y." I was looking for probabilistic relationships. I christened the new model in the front office: "be the house." Every season we play 162 games. Individual players amass over 600 plate appearances. Starting pitchers face 1,000 hitters. We have plenty of sample size. I encouraged everyone to think of the house advantage in everything we did. We may not always be right but we'd be right a lot more often than we'd be wrong. In baseball, if you win about 60% of your games, you're probably in the playoffs.

One of the other problems is that the traditional metrics and stats used in baseball are muddied with so much noise that just didn't matter that I was having a tough time distilling all the information. I decided to throw it all out and start all over with no assumptions. I built a Markov model, or actuarial table, for the last five or ten years that recorded what had actually happened in the course of every major league baseball game.

From that research I was able to figure out that a man on first with nobody out is worth "X" runs and a man on second with two outs is worth "Y" runs. From there I was able to jump to understanding what it means to have someone who can hit a lot of doubles. What was the value of that event and others? I went a step further and asked who the people were who could add these value?enhancing skills to our team. Finally I was able to figure out what the cost of each of those activities was and what the margins were. This was process versus outcome. I just didn't believe the outcomes that the traditional stats were giving us.

Once the research was complete, debated and stress?tested (which took years) we had considerable new knowledge, and a lot of it was pretty startling. Now remember that we hadn't really invented anything. We had only discovered relationships that were already there. Fortunately for us, most of them were contrary to popular opinion. These discoveries ranged from broad philosophical ideas, such as the fact that 90% of the player population in major league baseball is replaceable by someone who makes less to the very minute detail, such as pitch counts or control of the strike zone. What I ended up doing was creating a whole new set of metrics around this objective core. When I was done we had stats but not in the traditional sense. It was an entirely new operating system. It wasn't an upgrade from Subjective 1.0 to Subjective 2.0. It was more like "Winning Baseball 1.0."

There is now a push to bring the same type of statistical analysis to football, basketball, soccer and hockey. Though it may prove useful in football, I don't really see it having the same type of impact on the latter three sports that Sabermetrics has had on baseball, simply due to the lower cyborg ratio inherent in those sports.

From Ray Ratto's update on the Balco Labs investigation:

But the real debate will burn out, through this scandal and on to the next, and the one after that. There are those who want their sports to be a moral and honorable pursuit, and those who want their sports, and damn the presentation.

The problem is that sport is a reflection of the society in which it exists. I am not (necessarily) implying that North American society is amoral, though I am saying that we live in an Aspirin-swallowing, Viagra-taking, Sudafed-inhaling, Botox-injecting, Alka-Seltzer-fizzling, Creatine-drinking culture — whatever the perceived deficiency, there is a chemical that will treat it. Why are athletes supposed to be treated differently? Why should they be exempted from the hysterical western philosophy of 'I can be better than the person I was born as', or 'I can cheat death just a little bit longer'? It seems unfair to single out athletes as amoral in light of what is happening in the rest of society.

Regarding a futurist's first attempt at the next golden age of professional sport:

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this third golden age would be the Anti-Olympics (aka Global Village Basketball). Over the past century we have noticed a shift in the Modern Olympics from a nationalist-in-a-multinational-sense sporting event to an ideological-nationalist-in-a-globalized-sense sporting event. Now that new technologies (predominantly communication-oriented) are shifting the geographic focus to becoming more glo-localized, sport forms must adapt to reflect this reality.

Said in the context of McLuhan's Laws of Media, as the Modern Olympics accelerate beyond their useful existence, they will obsolesce and reverse into an anti-Olympic environment. In this case, I am proposing that we will see the networked meta-event of Global Village Basketball.

An excellent piece by Jon Azpiri at Salon.com:

Today's video game producers pride themselves on their games' verisimilitude, but there are some critical differences between sports video gaming and the real thing. As anyone who has sat through the fourth quarter of a 30-point blowout can tell you, real sporting events can often be anything but entertaining. Video games can't afford the luxury of garbage time and must tweak reality to hold your attention better than many real sporting events. "It's picking the most exciting elements and trying to make them happen a little more often," says "NBA Live" producer Todd Batty, from his office at the EA Studio in Vancouver, British Columbia.

. . .

Video games can give a user a skewed perspective of an athlete's real performance, especially for those who don't follow the sport closely. Football fans got to watch precious little of Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Michael Vick this season because he missed 11 games with a broken leg. For players of "Madden 2004," however, Vick is one of the best video football players of the last decade. Even gamers who follow sports closely can have an altered view of athletes. While most fans spent last season watching Vick on the sidelines in street clothes, "Madden 2004" players got regular reminders of Vick's offensive brilliance.

This points to a reminder from Walter Benjamin: "One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." In this case, the aura of the live sporting act withers in the service of a produced hyperreality, that of the videogame.

We are at the point where not even the unborn are immune from the Spectacle. From the moment of their first ultrasound, fetuses are being groomed for careers as future athletes (or other entertainers) by preparing them to live under the harsh gaze of the camera. The life/choice question today seems to be less one of sentience and more one of when we can first get a photo.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, storms … while earlier tribal cultures made sense of these phenomena by inventing a story about the actions of some sort of angered deity, today we measure them for study in the name of science and then nickname a professional sports franchise after them.

Cleaning out some of my recent notes, I found a pre-Super Bowl article by ESPN's Ray Ratto on Rod Smart of the Carolina Panthers. This weblog has previously discussed the XFL's unusual practice of allowing any name on the back of the uniform, and it is by this measure that you may be more familiar with Smart: he was the infamous He Hate Me of the now-defunct XFL.

But never mind Smart, really. And never mind that the real reason the XFL failed is that it was perceived as a threat to the ingrained notions of modern team sport as arbiter of Truth. The entire purpose of the Ratto article is to take shots at WWE honcho and XFL founder Vince McMahon for the XFL's demise.

In the short excerpt I have included below, Ratto mentions McMahon 4 times by name as well as calling him a "nutbar". NBC, McMahon's partner in the venture, doesn't get mentioned at all in the excerpt. For the record, NBC does get mentioned once at the beginning of the piece, while Vince totals 10 mentions by name as well as various other slurs.

The special teamer with the gift of pure self-promotion became the star of the day, and in doing so, reminded us all of Vince McMahon's worst idea ever.

And so it shall be. When you see Smart and Cooper mugging it up with the unfortunate Pick Man of Nickelodeon fame, you'll think of Vince. When you see the latest retelling of the Smart story Sunday morning on ESPN, then again Sunday afternoon on CBS, you'll think of Vince.

And if he busts a return to help the Panthers beat the New England Patriots in one of the great upsets of recent Super Bowl history, you'll think of Vince.

As in, "Oh, yeah. That's the guy who played in that league the nutbar wrestling guy started."

Ratto goes on to ask if being the butt of jokes on the biggest sports day of the year can possibly be good "for a business already going through a down cycle".

Well, let's look at that assertion a little more closely. While advertising revenues may indeed still be soft in a weak spending economy, the decline certainly hasn't hurt the WWE share price at all. The downward slope at the tip-end of the 1-year curve below hadn't begun at the time this article was written, and even if it had just begun, it is hardly worth calling a "down cycle". In fact, Disney — ESPN's (and ABC's) parent company — seems to be trending the same way that the WWE has — with the exception that they have plateaued far more significantly than the latter since Christmas. Maybe Ratto was looking in the mirror as he wrote … ?

Given the evidence, this attack on McMahon seems to hold little water. While on the surface it is spun as an attempt to kick Vince McMahon around a little for a failed venture, it seems to me to be just as much about disinformation to help the parent company in an entertainment battle, and a no-look potshot at rival NBC Sports coming into an Olympic year. Let's at least call it for what it is.

ENHANCES -increases technological hybridity of the athlete-[1] -command-and-control military-[2] -intensifies violence -increases gambling on games -acceleration of the players		REVERSES -digitizes into videogames-[1] -into World Wrestling Entertainment-[2]
-technique to enhance Roman legionnaires' bodies (Ellul)-[1] -chess-[2] -war games of the Roman Colosseum RETRIEVES		-the "real" death of the spectacle -soccer (which has become art form)-[2] OBSOLESCES

Update: I have begun to identify certain common ground elements:

[1] nature of the athletic body

[2] form of the sport

"For the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug and I wanted to protect my 'ready-mades' against such a contamination" (Marcel Duchamp, emphasis in original).

The fitness club is entering its third distinct phase: first was a strict production orientation, which consisted of the manufacture of ideal bodies; next came a reversal into a service orientation, which featured fitness trainers offering workout programs and nutritional counseling to achieve desired results more quickly — in short, a more efficient form of production; finally, there is a reversal into the experience orientation, which places the consumer into a hyperreality of circulating sexuality and subsumes ideal-body production into its overarching ethos.

A reminder to myself: if the Internet and other electronic media "amputate" our entire nervous systems, as McLuhan suggests, then by association they must also amputate the muscular systems that allow for body movement. Our post-industrial shift to sedentary desk work, our desire to sit on the couch and watch mediated athletes instead of exercising, and our resulting waistline bulges would seem to indicate this is in fact the case.