My Life in Sports, Part III

I have a theory that states, "if you want to get a young person to know something about a sport, give them a sports board game to play." For example, if you watch the opening scene of Crooklyn, if you look very carefully you'll see two Brooklyn kids on a stoop playing APBA baseball, rolling the dice and simulating a game.

I had simulated games before. I had kept records and played out these dice and card games faithfully. For some reason, I had decided to give Statis Pro Basketball a try. I had played Statis Pro Baseball and I had enjoyed it so there was no reason to conclude that my experiences would be different.

My problem was that I still didn't know much about basketball other than "put ball in basket = two points". I didn't know how many fouls there were to a quarter. I didn't know if you got to take free throws after every defensive foul, or if the "plus one free throw" rule applied to fouls on 3-point shots. In the 1980s-1990s, this information wasn't easy to find. You needed to look up a sports reference book, or you could just ask a fan. The problem was that for some supposed fans their knowledge of the rules of the game wasn't much better than yours.

In the past, I had simulated either a) teams that I liked (like the Cincinnati Reds) or b) teams chosen at random. For the first time, I decided to choose a historically bad team and to see if I could do better. The team I chose was the 1987-88 Golden State Warriors.

So what about that team? I can only name a handful of names from 1980s basketball - Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley - but I could probably name more names from that 1987-88 Warriors team, even till today.

Winston Garland
Chris Mullin
Ralph Sampson
Joe Barry Carroll
Rod Higgins
Terry Teagle

This team finished 20-62 in real life. I had no schedule to work with and I had to make up my own. There were injury values on the cards, so injuries were determined at random. A player would theoretically miss as many games over an 82-game season as he missed in real life.

However, I got lucky. Ralph Sampson was not the injury-prone person he was in real life in my universe. Somehow, he dodged the bullets and stayed healthy. With a healthy Sampson, I managed to steer the Warriors to a 40-42 season, a #7 seed in the Western Conference where they fell 3-1 in the first round to the Dallas Mavericks.

(* * *)

So what was the point of all that? The first point was that even twenty years later I remember those names. Do you want to teach kids to love the WNBA? Then make a WNBA board game (or computer game) that they'll enjoy. Trust me, if it's a good game they'll remember those names even if they don't follow the WNBA.

The second point was that this was the first time I got slightly serious about a simulation. It was very frustrating not to be able to find information when I needed it, or to have to rely on secondhand information of dubious veracity. You can't imagine how frustrating it was before the internet, you youngsters. If your library didn't have it, then you didn't have it, and the autodidacts of that era would keep a well-stocked reference library of their own which included a good set of encyclopedias.

After "A League of Their Own" came out, I was inspired to create a women's baseball league card game. Since this was the pre-internet era, I had to do this all by myself. I managed to complete a 40-game season in a horribly frustrating experience. I had to create all the player cards (using Statis Pro Baseball rules) and figure out some way to generate them, as well as to play all the games. I don't recommend this to anyone. There had to be some better way.

(* * *)

Everything came together in the late 1990s. I had the internet, which meant that if I wanted to find out the facts about something, all I needed to do was to do a web search. If I wanted to write online, I could write and find likeminded people. And if I wanted to play games, I could purchase them at the local Try-N-Save.

In the late 90s, I managed to come across a game called "Baseball Mogul". This game promised on the box that it could deliver the entire experience of being the owner of a baseball team. (Actually, it only delivered the experience of being a GM of a baseball team, but that's still a hell of a lot.) It supposedly had all of one's favorite players. It promised that you could make trades just like a big league owner/GM.

Most of the sports games at the time were what I call "emulators". (The version of NBA Live 09 I have for the Wii is an "emulator".) An "emulator" is a game that has you play the role of a person, sort of like a "first person shooter" game. If it's a baseball game, you punch the button and the guy swings his bat. If it's a basketball, you make the little fellow dunk the ball by going up-down-left-right-control-A. If it's football, you aim the up-down-joystick-whatever in the direction of the receiver.

This was more like a text based game. You didn't actually watch the game at all - but the boxscore was generated with realistic results. Yes, you could trade players. You could negotiate with players and they would either accept or reject your offers.

What I was getting was something very close to what I had tried with that "League of Their Own" game. It couldn't offer everything, of course. But it could offer a hell of a lot, a quantum leap over what could have been offered by card games. For once, I was in control of my own universe, my little Yahweh.

I spent a good nine years or so with this game. I loved it. As time passed, the versions of the game got better and better with each passing year. You could generate fictional players. You could create your own teams in your own cities, changing and altering the configuration of the league itself, and the computer controlled teams in this league would trade with each other. You could run everything or just run a small part of the universe.

Since I enjoyed writing as a hobby, I was all over the internet. I wrote science fiction. I wrote fan fiction. And now, I could write sports fiction. One of the Baseball Mogul message boards was devoted to "Dynasties". Dynasty threads were threads devoted to players recounting the tales of their fictional universes, complete with posted game files one could load to see what was going on in some fellow's universe. (I never encountered a female poster.)

My dynasty was based on a scenario where the Boston Braves did not move to Milwaukee.

I wrote it for three years. It's still out there on the Baseball Mogul boards.

Writing a dynasty thread - and being believable - required that you truly research your sport. For example, in my fictional universe, when Ford Frick left as baseball commissioner I replaced him with Pete Rozelle. This required some understanding of who Pete Rozelle was and how he would have handled the issues of 1960s baseball. I became a maven of baseball history, reading Bill James, who combined my love of mathematics with a love of the game's history.

So what does all of this mean?

1) By now, I knew how to write a compelling story.
2) I was familiar with sports on something deeper than a surface level.
3) I had a real interest in history.

I probably would have keep writing this dynasty and kept writing fan fiction if not for two circumstances.

The first was simply burnout. The dynasty required a lot of background work to make it believable, and I began to truly dread writing new chapters of it. Therefore, I stopped active work on the baseball dynasty.

The second circumstance was that I had turned away from writing fan fiction. This left me with a big hole in my free time which demanded that something fill it.

It was May 2008. I heard that the WNBA was starting a team in Atlanta. The team would be called the Atlanta Dream.

I found this very interesting, for lots of reasons. The first reason was that I was looking for a team of some kind to support, hell, of any kind. I had been to a few Braves games at Turner Field (and when I lived in Florida, I watched Marlins games and I followed the Nashville Sound when I lived in Nashville). I found watching games enjoyable for the most part, but I didn't like the jock culture that followed baseball. I realize that for many men, sports is a support for masculinity (there's a whole essay coming about this) but I found such behavior annoying. Just read, oh, Bleacher Report and YardBarker for a few minutes. You'll see what I'm talking about, it's as if sports fandom is just an excuse for loutish behavior. I didn't want to be sitting with a bunch of drunks watching a Falcons or Hawks game. My family had drunks in it; I didn't like drunks or drinking. That wasn't my idea of a good time.

The second was that I believed in supporting the home team. My rule is that you support the home team unless you have a compelling reason not to. I supported the Mets in New York. (Never the Yankees, I hated them since 1976 when the Reds swept them.) I supported the Marlins in New York, the Sound in Nashville (and the parent club at the time, the Pittsburgh Pirates) and the Braves in Atlanta. If the WNBA had a team in Atlanta, I would support it.

The third reason was that there was a low barrier of entry. The best way to explain this is by a story about Dr. Joyce Brothers who would appear on the popular 1950s quiz show The $64,000 Question. The premise of the show was that you faced off answering questions against a panel of experts. You had to be an expert in something, and Brothers was told that she couldn't get on the show unless she was an expert in something unexpected, to play against type - like a short order cook who was an expert in opera, for example.

Brothers, being a smart woman, had to figure out something to become an expert in. It couldn't be something like opera, which has over 200 years of history. She chose boxing for a simple reason - boxing hadn't been around that long and pretty much all of its facts from the late 1800s on could be summarized in a twenty-volume set of books which Brothers virtually memorized. The sponsors hated Brothers and designed obscure questions to try to get her off the show.

They failed. She had become smarter than the experts in a short time.

To become a baseball fan or a basketball fan or a football fan is intimidating - you almost have to grow into it as a child. The history is so ridiciously long that you're always going to come up short. There's going to be someone who knows more than you, and will probably be glad to rub it in.

The WNBA, however, had only been around for 11 years. If you sat down one afternoon, you could probably not only memorize every WNBA champion year for year, but also every conference finalist. Since there were only 14 teams with 13 players each, that was 182 players. Football or baseball or men's basketball would have required getting to know over 300 players. A dedicated person could learn all there was to know about the WNBA in a much shorter time and not have to put in many years understanding the sport.

Everything about the WNBA was relatively new. All it required was a willingness to learn and an eagerness to dive in. Granted, I would have to learn about basketball - what the rules were, how it was played, what were the optimal strategies, and how to recognize what was going on in a live game. However, it seemed that a lot of so-called fans didn't even know the rules of their own sports. Certainly, I could bring myself up to speed.

This was May 2008. It is now one day short of a year since I started following the WNBA. I know I have a lot to catch up on...but in a lot of ways, I feel like I've come home.



(*) - I am still waiting for that text-based emulator basketball game out there that focuses more on trading and acquiring like a real GM and less on getting the guy on the screen to do a 360-degree stadium-shattering dunk. Hope springs eternal.

Signs and Portents

This is a true story.

This evening I was walking along with my wife outside in our little suburban enclave. The houses are generally set back on hills and the area is relatively quiet.

As we walked, we saw a red looking object rolling towards us. At first, I thought it was a kickball, but it turned out to be a basketball. It rolled all the way down the road from about 100 yards away, and it stopped.

I retrieved the basketball. Someone came running by and I thought "Aha! The owner of the basketball!" But as it turns out, he was an ordinary jogger who denied ownership.

Surely someone must have lost this basketball. It was well worn but it looked in good condition. My wife and I stood around for five minutes, but there wasn't a soul in sight.

I didn't want to abandon the basketball. I simply picked it up as claimed property, and as of now, I own a basketball. This is the only basketball I have ever owned. It must be a sign of something, even if the only sign is "maybe you ought to try playing some basketball."

My Life in Sports, Part II

When I was growing up, my general sports awareness expanded with the ascendance of the Cincinnati Reds. These were the Bench-Rose-Sparky Anderson-Ken Griffey Sr.-George Foster Reds. In 1975, they played a thrilling World Series against the Boston Red Sox that everyone in Kentucky must have watched. In 1976, the Reds swept the New York Yankees for back to back championships.

Cultural osmosis worked its magic. All that anyone could talk about at school were the Cincinnati Reds. Slurpee (or Slushie, I can't tell the difference) had a promotion where there slushie drinks would be sold in plastic replica baseball caps, one for each team. I rode my bike 20 minutes a day to the store where the caps were sold, and slushie by slushie I had the entire collection. I purchased a plastic replica Cincinnati Reds batting helmet. (My best friend at the time, inexplicably, became a Dodgers fan in the late 1970s. Maybe it wasn't inexplicable after all.)

I had always wanted to play baseball, but this was the first time I understood that there was a whole culture and history behind the game.

It was also then that I purchased my first sports-based game. It was Ethan Allen's All-Star Baseball. For those unfamiliar with it, the game consisted of circular cardboard disks. At the perimeter of each disk was a set of numbers. "1" stood for a Home Run. "10" stood for a strikeout. The disks were inserted into a disk holder, upon which was mounted a spinner. You spun the arrow and when the arrow stopped spinning, the arrow to which the number pointed indicated the result.

I was obsessed with this game. I played two entire seasons with it, making up my own schedules. Of course, I played the Cincinnati Reds. That's 328 games of All-Star Baseball. I only recorded the inning by inning scores. Batting stats were not included. I began to pick up copies of the Baseball Digest and read on my own.

Somehow, I learned about a game called Statis Pro Baseball. This game was a little more complicated. In the Ethan Allen game, there was no pitching component of the game - it was entirely offense driven, and you wanted pitchers with hitting stats since their pitching abilities would never enter the game. (Don Drysdale was highly valued.) Statis Pro, however, had Fast Action Cards that switched the action between a pitcher and a hitter, depending on how good (or bad) a pitcher was. There was a complicated chart involving rainouts, fights, and other ephemera.

I didn't really understand the rules of baseball very well, so my enjoyment of the game was limited. However, I appreciated the game's complexity.

When I was 15 years old, I rediscovered comic books. I had collected comics - sporadically - from the ages of 6 to 12. DC Comics only of course, the ones with Superman and Batman. I met someone at high school who would become my new best friend, who happened to be a much more serious comic collector. This was way back when Chris Claremont and John Byrne were writing the X-Men, introducing new compelling characters like Wolverine and writing the Dark Phoenix saga. Any interest I had in sports or sports gaming simply disappeared for a few years, smothered in my interest in comic books. I don't think I was interested in sports much from between the middle of high school to the end of my college years. Except for an attempt to try out for high school football, I was definitely not a sports kind of guy. And as for basketball, it was off the map completely.

Let's move on to graduate school. I found graduate school frustrating, because there was no way I could obtain the sheer white hot singularity of focus it took to succeed (my graduate major was mathematics). My attention not only started to wander, but I enjoyed myself more when it wandered, which was a bad sign. I began to look for diversions that would relieve the incredible tedium of grad school.

I was still following baseball, if but from a distance. I remember sitting in a dorm lounge where a friend and I mocked Kirk Gibson hobbling up to the plate during that Dodgers-A's World Series, and then sitting silently when Gibson hit the home run off Dennis Eckersley that won Game One for the Dodgers. My interest in baseball had picked up again, and around this time - my memory of when is unclear - I began to look for a new baseball game.

I found it in APBA. APBA is a card-based game not unlike Statis Pro Baseball. APBA, however, had a more devoted following. I played through another APBA season of games with the Cincinnati Reds of 1990.

I was also looking for other sports gaming diversions. Avalon Hill - a wargaming company owned all of the Statis Pro sports games - had a boxing game which I tried for a while. Then, while at a comic book/gaming store, I found a game with an intriguing title.

Statis Pro Basketball. More on that later in Part III.

My Life in Sports, Part I

I'm sure that like many basketball fans out there, I have never played basketball. Aside from required instances in junior high and high school where a basketball was thrust into our clumsy hands and we were split into teams and told to "play basketball" by a gym teacher, I have never played basketball at any competitive level.

Part of the excuse for this is that I grew up in a rural, unpaved area in Kentucky. One of the old stereotypes is that the suburban, midwestern players who play basketball at the pro level are great long-range shooters. This is supposedly because the bulk of their lonely existence was taking shots at a basket all day from long range because there was no one else to play with.

However, I didn't even have that much. The lone basketball hoop that I knew of must have been at least 15 feet high, up on a barn, next to rocky, gravelly terrain that would have made dribbling impossible. Basketballs were flimsy devices, willing to deflate on rough play - you needed both the basketball and the pump. We didn't have enough people where I lived for real teams. Even playing softball (never baseball) was impossible because you couldn't get the requisite number of players together. There was no supervision, there were no experienced players and there was no knowledge as to how to improve our skills. Most of my sports were whatever ball I happened to pick up at the time. Kickball and Nerf Football were quite popular.

If I could have played a sport growing up, it would have been Little League baseball. I asked more than one year for the privilege to play. Each time, I was turned down. There was just not enough money in the household budget for travel, equipment, fees, etc. This was the fifth Congressional district of Kentucky, a notoriously poor place.

Furthermore, there was no sports maven at home, ready to indoctrinate me. My father had few dislikes, but one of them was sports. It wasn't that he objected to me playing sports. It wasn't that he was a tie-dyed hippy, either, wanting to spare my tender mind from the evils of the competitive capitalist system. Quite the contrary. My father was tough in just about every sense of the term, a humorously obstinate battler that brooked no opposition. (Honestly, people were afraid of him.) And he decided, somewhere along his life path, that sports were for idiots. ("Did you know that 'fan' is short for 'fanatic'? That's what they are - a bunch a fanatics!") With only one television in the house and only three channels - NBC, CBS, and public television - he was the man who controlled the remote control and the chances were in the low one percents that he would sit down to watch televised sports, or to allow me and my mother to watch them as long as there was "something good on".

Since I was an odd duckling from day one, I wasn't the kind of guy they'd pick first for kickball at school. Anything I learned about sports would have to be learned through cultural osmosis.

At the time, only three adult sports crossed my horizon. The first was football. I was aware of it. We had a professional team - if it could be called that - in Cincinnati, the closest pro town to where I lived. They were called the "Bengals", or better, the "BENGALS" because the name BENGALS was spelled out on the side of their helmets. I also remember that they weren't very good.

Aside from whatever television I could pick up when Dad was working outside, there were two sources of information where I grew up in the 1970s. The first was the local newspaper. Local meaning "weekly", and most of the news was that from farm reports, what was going on at the local schools, some hard-right editorializing, etc. The other was the Lexington Herald-Leader. Both of those papers would write occasionally about the Bengals. Sometimes, the older men would mention them in passing. I don't remember what they said, but the jist of the matter was that the Bengals were not very good and no one should spend much time thinking about the state of the Bengals.

There was only one sport in Kentucky, and that was basketball. The head coach at the time was Joe B. Hall, an assistant under the legendary Adolph Rupp. There was a lot said about Joe B. that was quite uncomplimenary, the complaint being that he did not measure up to his legendary predecessor Adolph Rupp. Kentucky men's college basketball (there was no women's college basketball to speak of) was a big time sport, and already the Big Blue Nation was stoking its sense of entitlement. There was the expectation that we should win the national championship every year, or at least be in the final four.

Joe B. was a runner up to UCLA in 1975, and the Wildcats won a NIT title in 1976, back in the days when an NIT title really meant something. People were still unhappy. He won the whole thing with the Kyle Macy-era Wildcats back in 1978. However, everyone still demanded that Adolph Rupp rise from the grave. (*)

Fate - which mocks us all - was beckoning, although I couldn't hear its call. In 1975, the Kentucky High School Athletic Association reactivated the girls' state championship. My local high school's girls team turned out to be quite good. One day, in junior high school, the entire school was driven on a long bus ride to the Girls' Sweet Sixteen.

Kentucky is one of only three states - Delaware and Hawaii are the other two - that do not have a system separating the tiny schools from the big schools. It was possible for even the smallest schools to ride a run of luck to the tournament. Our county had four high schools up until 1970, and then these four schools were consolidated into one mega school with 1500 students. This brought a lot of basketball talent in one place. One of the smaller schools - Hazel Green - won the Boys' State Championship in 1940; basketball was not foreign to everyone where I grew up.

We had a coach by the name of Roy Bowling who would lead our high school team to at least 70 consecutive wins in girls' basketball. I didn't understand much more about basketball then aside from the obvious, namely that if you put the ball in the hoop you scored two points. We would win the second of three consecutive state championships in girls' basketball. During the 1979-80 season our winning streak was snapped and we failed to make it to the finals. However, the county team would win two more basketball championships before we were "de-consolidated" from a large school into two medium high schools in the 1990s.

This experience meant that the idea of women playing interesting basketball was not foreign to me. If women's basketball basketball wasn't any good, then why was the arena filled to capacity with screaming fans watching a girls basketball game? They couldn't have all been relatives and friends. And this was 1970s basketball. The game was still undeveloped from what it would become, and even I knew that what I was seeing was good basketball. I didn't know that this would set me up for the WNBA years later, and I'm sure that a lot of young women on those championship teams wished it was around then, too.


(*) I have followed the state of Kentucky men's basketball ever since without being a serious fan. Eddie Sutton stayed for four years and almost brought the Wildcats to the NCAA death penalty through his lack of control of the program. (His name is still a dirty word in some Kentucky households.) Rick Pitino brought his carpetbag to Kentucky, and won us a national title before convincing himself that he was a genius in pro ball as well as college ball. (He wasn't.) Tubby Smith was run out of town partly for being black (my take) and partly because he only won one NCAA championship. The Wildcats found their answer in Billy Gillispie, and in my opinion the Big Blue Nation paid for the sin of exiling Tubby.