Crazy Parallels

“When are the finals already? Or did the NBA decide to do the November Nine thing, too?”

Tweeted that last night while waiting out yet another off day until the NBA Finals finally gets started tomorrow following a seven-day gap since the end of the last round.

Really does feel like a WSOP Main Event-style delay, with all the banged-up players getting a chance to recover before the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors finally get on the court.

Today I saw ESPN explaining how the two teams’ best players -- Stephen Curry and LeBron James -- were in fact born in the same hospital in Akron, Ohio, about three years and three months apart. It’s true!

Speaking of crazy parallels, Tuan Le’s victory in the $10K 2-7 Triple Draw event yesterday (Event No. 7) was kind of nuts, given that he’d won the same event a year ago.

Earlier this week Robert Mizrachi also won another bracelet after winning one a year ago, taking down the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo (Event No. 3). That’s his third bracelet and 35th WSOP cash. Was listening to the latest Two Plus Two Pokercast where they pointed out only one other person has exactly three bracelets and 35 cashes -- Michael Mizrachi.

Of course that’s nothing compared to what happened tonight at the conclusion of the $565 Colossus (Event No. 5). Out of 22,374 entries, two guys rooming together in Las Vegas this summer made the final table -- and they nearly made it to heads-up.

Ray Henson started today ninth of nine, but climbed all of the way back into the chip lead for a time before falling in third. Then his roomie Cord Garcia won the sucker. (That is Garcia on the left above with Henson on the right just after the latter busted.)

Both are from Houston and have known each other for 10 years and are rooming together, which seems too wild to be true.

But it is true. All of it. No shinola!

Ever Heard of the “Silent Bowl”?

Was reading an article over at the newly-designed ESPN site this afternoon about the NBA playoffs in which there was a reference to LeBron James’s practice of watching recorded games with the sound down. In the article his teammate Kyrie Irving noted how he’s picked up the habit, too.

“One of the things I took from Bron is putting the games on mute and just listen to music while you watch the game,” Irving is quoted as saying. “No disrespect to the announcers or halftime show, but you want to be in silence. Watch good basketball, high-intensity basketball, just watch the game.”

I love watching basketball, and indeed sometimes will have games on with the sound down as it is eminently easy to follow nearly everything without the commentators. More often than not I’ll keep the sound up, but it’s not a problem at all knowing where things stand at any moment after hitting that mute button.

The story reminded me of an NFL game from way back in 1980 aired on NBC, a late-season contest between the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins that came to be known as the “Silent Bowl.” In an effort to boost ratings for a meaningless regular season game between a couple of mediocre teams, Don Ohlmeyer (then the executive producer of the network’s sports division) came up with the experiment.

A quick search about that game took me to a feature about it from a few years back on the ESPN site. There a few more details about the broadcast are shared, including how NBC used more graphics than usual while also having the stadium’s public address announcer make more descriptive comments to help viewers track the action.

They didn’t have the score on screen at all times, though, nor an inset showing the clock. In fact, those didn’t become regular features for televised football until 1994 (later than I would have guessed).

Ratings were higher for the game than would have been expected without the gimmick, and apparently response to the broadcast was more favorable than not, although no one ever thought for a moment that announcerless games would ever become the norm. From the perspective of three decades later, Ohlmeyer sounds like he kinda sorta regrets being remembered for the stunt, but I think it was an interesting idea to have tried.

While not perfectly analogous, televised poker seems as though it cannot do without commentators (even though some live streams -- including at the WSOP -- have tried to do without). That said, I spend a fair share of time watching online poker tournaments which though not necessarily nail-biting are nonetheless easy enough to follow given all of the detailed information available -- including “instant replay,” even.

Now that I think about it, I turn the sound down for that and listen to music, too.

Humility and Hubris

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times how over the last several months I’ve gotten hooked on The Dan Le Batard Show. It originates each weekday afternoon from Miami where they have an hour just for the locals, then three more hours syndicated nationally.

The show was especially fun to follow during the latter half of the NBA regular season, playoffs, and the post-Finals drama involving LeBron James that ended with his decision to leave the Miami Heat after four years to return to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

James, you’ll recall, made that announcement via a letter published in Sports Illustrated. The general response to the move was much more positive than had been the case four years ago when James decided to leave for Miami, with “The Decision” still earning him derision as a poorly-conceived bit of PR. Here, though, James saying “I’m coming home” played a lot more favorably among most observers (outside of Miami, anyway), and it does set up an intriguing storyline for the NBA next year.

They’ve predictably spent a lot of time discussing both James’s departure and the future of the Heat on Le Batard’s show. Also capturing the attention of folks in Miami was how James conspicuously failed to thank the Heat fans in his letter. He refers to Miami as a “second home” and thanks his teammates and Miami management, but doesn’t specifically thank Heat fans.

Today there is a big “Welcome Home LeBron” event happening in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. As a prank, the Le Batard show bought up several billboards telling James “You’re Welcome” from the Miami fans, humorously drawing attention to the omission in the letter.

Regular listeners of the show knew all about the billboards as well as the fact that the show was readying a “multi-pronged attack” involving some more hijinks today. They also know that Le Batard himself is much more interested in having fun than anything else, and his buying up the billboards to deliver a message genuinely felt by some Miami fans was mainly just a goof to fill some downtime in the sports calendar (and drum up publicity for his show).

The ESPN folks didn’t find the billboards as funny or harmless, though, actually suspending Le Batard and knocking his show off the air for two days in response. Saying the “stunt does not reflect ESPN’s standards and brand,” the network weirdly claims they “were not made aware of his plans in advance” despite the fact that the idea was discussed repeatedly on the show beforehand.

ESPN’s reaction is silly, although it kind of helps promote even further that sense of “fun anarchy” surrounding the episode (to use Le Batard’s phrase describing the “stunt”). In any case, the story made me think about how sports fans relatively value humility and hubris, a topic that comes up in poker sometimes, too.

James’s move to Miami was overtly cloaked in hubris, with his infamous prediction of multiple championships (“not one, not two, not three...”) still being endlessly quoted as a mark against him. He scored points for humility, though, with his SI letter, explicitly saying “I’m not promising a championship” and “I know how hard that is to deliver.”

The jokey, indirect complaint about James failing to thank the Heat fans, though, refers again to a lack of humility -- something most missed when reading the letter initially.

We see this in poker sometimes, such as in the reaction to Ryan Riess saying after winning the WSOP Main Event last fall that “I just think I’m the best player in the world.” Or Daniel Colman stirring things up by proclaiming after winning this year’s “Big One for One Drop” that “I don’t owe poker a single thing.”

We like competitors to express confidence, but I think we like hearing expressions of humility a lot more. Perhaps in poker it is different, where the element of luck is more conspicuous than in basketball or in other sports (where it exists, too), thus making it appear even more unseemly not to acknowledge that one isn’t actually invincible.

In any case, will be interesting to hear Le Batard when he returns, including where he will position himself on the humility-to-hubris spectrum regarding ESPN’s humorless action.

(EDIT [added 8/11/14]: For more regarding Le Batard’s suspension -- which sounds as though it was more for some planned-for hijinks than for the billboards alone -- read his column over at ESPN.)

On Mental Toughness

Well, I guess that finish to Game 1 of the Miami Heat-San Antonio Spurs NBA Finals last night tended to support that point I was making yesterday about luck mattering in sports, wouldn’t you say? Sure, the Spurs might well have won even without LeBron James’s going down as he did in the fourth quarter, but it certainly appeared as though his cramping and being unable to continue had a lot to do with Miami suddenly being unable to guard anyone.

Watching that game play out, I was reminded of my own basketball days, including having on several occasions experienced leg cramps which would usually occur right at the very end of a game (or after a long period of play). Often they’d happen when I would be physically exerting myself, jumping one... last... time for a ball, then suddenly being cut down.

Cramps can be utterly debilitating, and while the pain usually subsides quickly (at least in my experience), those initial moments can be full of panicky fright. “Seize” is the verb that seems most appropriate to describe what happens, the wince required to say the word altogether fitting.

Reactions to James’s end-of-game distress have ranged from laughable to lamentable, with those wanting to use the occasion to question his “manhood” making spectacles of themselves by their demonstrations of inanity. Not only is it a silly observation, but it includes an assumption about masculinity and professional sports that while shaped by many years of cultural influence is itself misguided.

Such thoughts stem from the mistaken idea that James might have defied medical science somehow and willed himself to play through injury. Commentator Mark Jackson’s cliché-filled coachspeak late in the game when it appeared James might have to sit down -- “The great ones have a way of willing themselves past their bodies... they tell their bodies ‘No, no, not now... I’ll talk to you tomorrow, but not now’” -- serves as an emblem for such absurdity, and probably encouraged a lot the commentators, too.

The mistake a lot of James’s critics are making has to do with interpreting a physical injury as though it were a mental one. Sports commentators love to advance such psychobabbling analyses -- this is something I’ve complained about here before -- and so the talk is about James’s mind breaking down, not his body (or the AT&T Center’s air conditioning).

I think of how poker -- a game that also has a significant legacy of reinforcing gender-related stereotypes -- constantly provides occasions in which players’ mental toughness is genuinely challenged. The fortitude required, say, to run a bluff or suss out the willful misdirections of an opponent, is significant. And real. And (it might well be added) sometimes the way players handle such challenges gets connected to those same ideas of “manliness” or toughness that have been handed down to some extent by the legacy of poker’s past.

Assessing something like “mental toughness” is hard enough to do in a game like poker where it is so obviously being tested at every turn (and flop and river). I’d venture that performing such assessments is harder to do in sports like basketball, yet so many seem so willing to try anyway.