An update on how the NBA is policing the new dress code, via ESPN:

To police what its players are wearing when they enter and exit arenas on game nights, at least one league-appointed observer is stationed at every game and supported by an in-house review of televised game coverage and still photography.

Clearly, this works in the enclosed space of the sports stadium, which may be thought of as analogous to the other sites of Foucauldian discipline: the prison, the barracks, the factory, the school. But here's the question I'm interested in: To borrow the language of network society, is the panoptic gaze scalable?

Celtic legend Bill Russell, from his autobiography Second Wind:

Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it would became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics but also the players on the other team, and even the referees. To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks. … It never started with a hot streak by a single player, or with a breakdown of one team's defense. It usually began when three or four of the 10 guys on the floor would heat up; they would be the catalysts, and they were almost always the stars in the league. … The feeling would spread to the other guys, and we'd all levitate. Then the game would just take off, and there'd be a natural ebb and flow that reminded you of how rhythmic and musical basketball is supposed to be. I'd find myself thinking, 'This is it. I want this to keep going,' and I'd actually be rooting for the other team. When their players made spectacular moves, I wanted their shots to go into the bucket; that's how pumped up I'd be. I'd be out there talking to the other Celtics, encouraging them and pushing myself harder, but at the same time part of me would be pulling for the other players too.

I hereby declare Mr. Russell to be an Honourary Founding Spirit of Global Village Basketball.

(via Eric Neel/ESPN)

Gizmodo reports that Nike has unveiled new space-age kiosks for prosumers to design their own shoes as part of the NikeID mass customization initiative.

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, pp.99-100:

In fact, I have the habit when I'm driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it's striking when you hear the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions…

…And when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It's as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and if they don't have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures…And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow…

Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is put their minds to other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff…So what's left?

…And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves society in general: it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.

(via EllipticBlog)

From Darren Rovell's blog (which I won't link to since it is pay-per-view, though I will link to the free snippet made available in today's Daily Dime):

You might recall that a couple of years ago, Rasheed Wallace was reportedly getting offers from companies to tattoo their logo into his skin. At the time, the league didn't have a rule that would have explicitly prevented this, but it was just a matter of time. If a player consummated a tattoo deal this season, he would be fined for it.

At the beginning of the year, NBA teams received a memo that stated that "no player can wear any commercial, promotional or charitable name, mark, logo or other identification during any game, including, but not limited to, on his body, in his hair or otherwise." Based on this rule, Ron Artest was asked to shave his head when he came out last month with his record label "Tru Warier" etched in his head. Cavaliers guard Larry Hughes has an And1 tattoo on his forearm, but he is paid to wear Nikes. No word on whether he was grandfathered in.

Related: Tattoos, Hygiene and the Carceral; Ambushing The Meme

Last year I took my first trip to Woodbine Racetrack and posted my observations about it afterwards. As part of that post I wanted to scan a few pages of the daily racing form that is available for a couple of bucks at the track. Now that I have my new scanner and a few free minutes, I can!

(click on the image for a full-size PDF file)

Resample:

Woodbine derives neither its power nor its profits from the capital that is concentrated in the racegrounds proper. Rather it is through the control of information that Woodbine asserts itself: it is flatly impossible to do a decent job of wagering on the horses without the sophisticated information contained in the daily racing form; it is equally assured that the majority of track goers do not want to share their programs — and their scribbled meta-analyses of the information contained therein — so that they may retain as much of an edge as possible against the betting odds.

I think that a glance at the racing form lends support to this analysis. That this is an extremely sophisticated piece of information technology is perhaps patently obvious (to understand better, see the legend here and here). But if one visualizes each piece of information contained therein as a cell in a database, one begins to have a greater appreciation for the vast tidal flows of information that must circulate in order to create the form in the first place on a daily basis — and what kind of power the vectoralist possesses by controlling it.

By the way, my scantly "scribbled meta-analysis" didn't win me a damn red cent.

"How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense in the game?"

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, has a fantastic piece in the New York Times about another innovator in sports who is rapidly overturning conventional wisdom, this time in football. Mike Leach, head coach at Texas Tech, has assembled the most devastating offence in the NCAA by rethinking the basic structures of the game. A fantastic read, and I wanted to highlight a few samples (boldface emphasis mine):

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart - on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots. "The offensive line splits - you look at them, and you're just shocked," Schwartz said. "It scares people to see splits that are that wide."

The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable - some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers - but he wasn't. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly. Leach spread out his receivers and backs too. The look was more flag than tackle football: a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them.

This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.

Once again, Lewis chronicles what is basically a challenge to the Foucauldian (constructed) authority figure of the athletic talent scout.

The first play Leach called against Texas A.&M. was the first play on Cody Hodges's wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent's 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays. "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand." Texas Tech's offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges's wrist and Mike Leach's back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.

My basketball coach at Acadia was clever enough to do something similar — a couple of different offensive formations, and then a number of set plays out of those formations that were essentially the same, except that the different original formation gave slightly different looks to the defence and thus opened up slightly different possibilities for scoring.

Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's a ton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play."

Unfortunately, he wasn't as good at giving authority to the players and making them thinking subjects out on the floor. As good as he was at understanding the spatiotemporal element of the game, he missed out at times on the humanistic element that can make players and teams so dangerous.

Finally, A.&M. brought a few more players to the line of scrimmage. Hodges looked over and noted Jarrett Hicks all alone with a cornerback and threw Tech's first touchdown pass to him. The entire Texas Tech possession lasted just 2 minutes 42 seconds. Two minutes later, Tech got the ball back, and this time it was only four plays and 47 seconds before the tailback, Taurean Henderson ran, barely touched, for 18 yards into the end zone. An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 - and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game. And because the clock stops after first downs, touchdowns and incompletions, Texas Tech's games are among the longest in college football. Less than six minutes into game time but nearly 30 into real time, Tech led, 14-0.

I think this is fascinating. The way that time is constructed and experienced is rapidly changing — not least of all by increasing speed — and needs to be examined in greater depth.

From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense, developed by Bill Walsh during his time as a coach for Stanford University and then the San Francisco 49ers. Now widely imitated, it emphasizes controlling the game with lots of short passes. Still, football's mixed feelings toward passing are ingrained. Bob Carroll, a leading football historian, summarizes the attitude of the game's rule makers to the forward pass: "We're going to allow it because we know it makes the game safer. But we're going to make it difficult for you, because we don't approve of it." A whisper of the old antipass bigotry can be heard in football's conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can't pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to "control the clock"; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.

Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach's view, doesn't come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball. "Our notion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." (The Indianapolis Colts last season became only the fourth team in N.F.L. history to have three receivers gain more than 1,000 yards in a single season.) The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is that they clump players together on the field - by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot with the ball. "I've thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play," Leach says, only half-joking. To a team that gains as many yards as Texas Tech, the usual boring, penny-ante yard-eating tactics - punts, penalties - are trivial. Field position is simply a thing to improve. Cody Hodges, who has spent the last four years marveling at Leach's in-game refusal to accept that his offense might have to be so conservative as to punt, says, "There's been lots of times I'm on the sidelines, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, we're going for it!' We went for it on fourth and 5 on our own 23 - in the first quarter. We went for it once on fourth and 18 - and we were ahead." E. J. Whitley, an offensive lineman, says: "If you're on this offense, you expect to score. Most offenses on fourth down are coming off the field. On fourth down we expect a play to be called. Because we haven't scored yet."

Can we describe this as radical decentralization in football — at least insofar as the nature of the game allows it? Lewis probably asks more questions with this article than he answers, but it is a great read, and credit him with seeking out the stories of innovation in a field as entrenched with tradition as modern sport.

"They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things because that's the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!"

(Let's ignore the redundancy of the title, okay? Because fantasy sports are real…)

As if this wasn't just about statistical bits of data floating around cyberspace:

1. I will almost always play my biggest stars at their "natural" position — rather than a generic G, F, or Util position — so as not to hurt their fragile egos and jinx their production.
2. There are some guys I just WON'T put on my team, because I don't like their personality or don't think they would fit in "chemistry-wise".
3. And then I expect others in the league to also put personality or reputation ahead of production when I put out feelers for trades.
4. Any time one of my guys notches any stat whatsoever while I am watching the game on TV, I remark smugly to nobody in particular, "I've got him on my fantasy team."

In the most recent issue of Flow magazine, Jim McGuigan points out that in Baudrillard's opinion, "talking about politics is for the political class, not for the masses. It is 'the evil genius of the masses' to demonstrate their contempt for that remote discourse by being interested in and talking about something else that is much more entertaining." In this case, Baudrillard was referring to the French and their love of football (and disdain for politics).

It appears that Gilles Duceppe's campaign strategists have been reading their French philosophy.

Their brilliant move last week was to recognize this "evil genius", and bring political discourse to the sporting arena. Not just by slipping a clever sporting reference into a speech (no "Win one for the Giller, eh?" to be found here), but by actively using sport (metaphorically) as the site for the first clash of (sovereigntist) political rhetoric. How? By suggesting in the Bloc Quebecois party platform that Quebec would field its own hockey team for international competitions.

Predictably, the nation was apoplectic. It became a major story on the three sports networks in Canada — TSN, Sportsnet and The Score; Bob Nicholson, the president of Hockey Canada, immediately responded that Quebecois players were "proud" to play for their country; even Paul Martin, the Prime Minister, dismissed Duceppe's proposal.

But the suggestion makes sense, politically-speaking. Look at what André Boisclair was able to achieve at the Quebec provincial level with sovereigntist rhetoric. If speculation that the federal Conservative party can't carry Ontario ends up holding true, and if they end up winning a minority government, and if Duceppe can tap into the same voter sentiment at the federal level that Boisclair did at the provincial level, then he and the Bloc hold a big stick similar to what Jack Layton and the NDP held with the Liberals at the beginning of the last minority government.

And what is the easiest way to inflame that sovereigntist passion in Canada? Hockey. Divide the national team. Evil genius, really.

(And because everyone loves a simulation, Chris Young at JABS sims a Team Canada vs. Team Quebec matchup. Quebec whips the Nats, 5-1.)

The official launch of FIFA's "smartball" has been delayed until further notice.

(It was very tempting to use the word "retarded" here instead of "delayed", as it would have made for a nice play of words on the obviously not-smart-enough "smartball", but you know how we are about language these days, so I decided not to.)

"We are still developing the tracking system and when we are convinced it is 100 percent bullet-proof, 100 percent perfect, then that will be the time for it to be used."

Hmmm….maybe they know something I don't about the possibility of perfect systems.

It contains a microchip — around 1.5-cm in size — which sends out a radio signal when the ball crosses the touchline, as if it had touched an electric fence.

That signal is relayed by up to 12 antennae positioned in the corners of the pitch to a computer which then sends a message to a watch worn on the referee's wrist in less than one second.

Bullet-proof? Electric fence? Are these the metaphors we use to describe innovations in the (carceral) sportscape?

A neat poem I came across by Parry Maguire:

Baudrillard

Some French winger
Clever tricky
Hard to pin down
Said that everything is
A copy of a copy of a copy
No such thing as reality
But when I watch Pele
I know I am watching
The original that no one could
Copy

Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, p.74: "The disappearing body fast dissolves into relational networks."

I received the following email not long ago on the Raptors Insider mailing list. Since I had posted critically earlier, I felt it was appropriate to publish the official response.

Dear Sean,

At Wednesday's Raptors game against the Philadelphia 76ers an incident took place where two fans were escorted from Air Canada Centre. Some media reports allege these two were ejected because they were displaying a sign that was critical of our general manger[sic].

That was not the case. Had they been ejected because of their sign, their removal would have occurred in the first minute rather than in the 46th minute of the game.

The NBA has a Code of Conduct in place in all 30 arenas. These two gentleman were approached twice by NBA security personnel and informed that their conduct was interfering with the rights of other fans to enjoy the game. The second time they were warned for their misbehaviour, they were presented with a "Yellow Card" as stipulated by the NBA's code of Conduct.

Security personnel continued to observe the pair and upon receiving further complaints from fans about their behaviour, escorted them from the arena with two minutes remaining in the game.

These individuals were in clear violation of the following rules:

• Guests will enjoy the basketball experience free from disruptive behavior, including foul or abusive language or obscene gestures.
• Guests will sit only in their ticketed seats and show their tickets when requested.

People have the right say and express their point of view so long as it does not disrupt the fans around them. Security cameras in the building captured the entire incident and confirmed our belief at the time that NBA security acted professionally and appropriately.

Fan are always encouraged to express their point of view. However, they are reminded that in doing so the game experience must remain an enjoyable one for all.

Thanks and we hope to see you at Air Canada Centre,

Robert J. Hunter
Executive Vice President & General Manager
Air Canada Centre