Category Archives: Blog

Being a Sports Fan B.C.–Before Cable

The operation of my ‘51 inch plasma TV requires the use of six remote controls. They operate two DVD players (one for recording and one that plays discs from any region in the world), a Blu-ray disc player, the stereo, the digital cable box, and the TV itself. Cable and the internet have become indispensable. Without them, I would not have access to ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN3, ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic, the 20-plus stations that comprise the Fox Sports Network, the East and West Coast feeds of the major networks, the various Superstations, and oodles of channels dedicated, believe it or not, to soccer. My childhood dream has come good: I have access to virtually every game I want to see.

Such choices simply didn’t exist before cable came along in the late seventies. I had access to the following while growing up in South Florida: every Miami Dolphin’s road game (the home games were always blacked out until 1973), a few Miami Hurricanes road games, whatever the three major networks offered on weekends, and the occasional Atlanta Braves’ game broadcast on UHF. That’s it. Aside from Monday Night Football and special events like the Olympics, sports was not a viewing option at night or during the week.

Obviously cable TV has had a metamorphic effect on what it means to be a fan. I wonder what it would be like to grow up now, free to select from among all these alternatives. An hour of SportsCenter instead of four minutes of sports on the local affiliate; Major League Baseball’s Extra Innings package instead of Curt Gowdy doing the Game of the Week; the availability of 50 college football games on Saturday instead of one or two; and ESPN3, which gives us access to even the most obscure sports and leagues.

This is not meant to suggest that I didn’t pay attention to sports at night or during the week. I did, but my outlets were a lot more limited. I listened to Baltimore Orioles (who held spring training in South Florida) and Miami Floridians’ broadcasts, coveted the brief highlights on the local news, and tried to learn more about sports from radio call-in shows. The majority of time on these shows was spent conjecturing about the Dolphins, the other local teams, and the NFL. The latter was a fit subject for discussion because there were four games on TV every weekend. You were lucky to see more than one game a week in the other major sports. My point is this: we didn’t talk about anything besides our hometown teams and pro football, because we were not well-informed enough to carry on a decent discussion. Our interest in sports had no choice but to revolve around the fates of our local teams.

I rooted for the Dolphins, the Hurricanes, the Floridians, and the Orioles, period. If I had grown up with cable, I may not have fallen in love with these teams.

I listened to almost every one of the Floridians games despite the fact that they were one of the worst teams in the American Basketball Association. They were so bad that they once got away with claiming that thousands of fans had attended a game because there were only a few dozen people (and no members of the press) who could have disputed the figure. If I could have watched, say, the Knicks regularly, with Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, and Willis Reed, I would have dumped thr Floridians in a heartbeat. Luckily, I had no such choice. They did not have to compete for my loyalty with any other teams. It was either them or no basketball at all.

That would not be the case if I grew up today. The local team would have to be really good every year to keep me from watching Kevin Durant. I grew up with a lot of kids who rooted for Notre Dame even though they were not Irish or Catholic. Why? Because Channel Seven showed an hour-long replay of every game on Sunday morning. Notre Dame was on TV far more often than the Hurricanes, or the Pope. Familiarity did breed a lot of contempt for them, but it also bred a lot of loyalty. Nowadays such sentiments are much harder to cultivate and tend to be far more fickle.

This is a sad, unintended side-effect of having access to everything all the time.

~ Ken Pendleton

The Genius of Coaching Less

On a recent podcast of Radiolab, Secrets of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of:

argued that a key ingredient in becoming genius—the difference between being Michael Jordan rather than merely, say, Ray Allen—is having an almost romantic passion for whatever you are doing. The point is that putting in 10,000 hours into a pursuit is a necessary but not sufficient condition. There cannot be art without extraordinary craft, but craft does not guarantee the imagination required to produce masterpieces.

What made Wayne Gretzky seemingly the greatest hockey player ever was not the fact that he worked on stick handling and skating from the time he was a toddler; it was the fact that he was obsessed with the sport. According to Gladwell, at the age of two he would cry when a hockey game he was watching on TV ended. By the time he was an adult, having put in those 10,000 hours, he was ready to invent the sport not just master it. He would score goals and set up teammates in ways that had never been conceived.

So what can a parent or coach do to encourage genius? The answer, in my view, is to refrain from overcoaching. If a coach pushes a player too hard, they risk turning work into labor. Play should naturally evolve into work, as one becomes more conscious of the ends that she or he is trying to achieve. But it can easily degenerate into chore-like labor if the player is doing it for some extrinsic reason, like gaining the approval of an authority figure.

Coaches also need to create more space to players to experiment during practice and games. Bobby Orr revolutionized hockey by showing that a defender could be an integral part of a team’s attack, but his swashbuckling style has never been imitated. Whenever a defender would start carrying the puck up the ice, his coach would invariably say something like, “You’re no Bobby Orr, stay in your position.” The coach was probably right almost every time, most players are not going to end up being that good. But we will never know how many potential geniuses were stifled because they were not allowed to explore their own limitations.

Gretzky and Orr grew up playing more pick-up games than kids do nowadays and this allowed them to experiment without prying, judging eyes of supervision. Coaches love drills and planning, and control, but they need to nurture rather than discipline. They need to create a space where kids can just play freely. If you can encourage a kid to love a sport when he is young, he will want to work on perfecting his craft. He will become obsessed with it, like Gretzky and Orr did. You cannot force someone to love any activity; it has to evolve naturally.

~ Ken Pendleton

Adult Education and Sports

Most critics and defenders of sports share the assumption that the worth of sports should be measured by the extent to which it has a civilizing effect on the performers and spectators. George Orwell, to cite just one example, excoriates what he terms “serious sports” because it “has nothing to do with fair play,” while Kenny Moore, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, maintains that sports uplifts us gently and “nudges a great part of our society from the savage to the humane.” Even though they disagree about whether athletic competition fosters goodwill and sportsmanship, they do agree that it should not be bound up with such qualities as “hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.”

In an important sense, this view is completely mistaken. If the players and fans lived up to these ideals, sports would not only be much more boring, it would be far less educational.

Imagine if we judged movies by the extent to which they promote fairness and other commendable kinds of behavior. None of the characters would be allowed to exhibit the kinds of qualities that Orwell criticizes: no hatred, no jealousy, no disregard of all rules, no sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. No behavior that doesn’t rise to the level of fair play. I can’t think of a single movie that has ever lived up to these lofty standards, and it would be a sad day if one did. Since a film like The Godfather would never pass muster, we would all be deprived of a moving portrait of immigration, family, and the American Dream. And not only would films be less engrossing, they would have little or no educational value. Without problematic behavior, they couldn’t express anything very meaningful about the human condition. The same goes for sports. I am not suggesting that athletes and fans should be encouraged to behave badly — quite the opposite — but the fact that they inevitably do so has taught me an awful lot.

On April 8th, 1974, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record by hitting his 715th home run. This event meant a great deal to me. Aaron was my favorite player. I didn’t care much for his team, the Atlanta Braves, but I listened to a lot of their games solely because of him. I coveted his baseball cards and would have gladly traded all of my other Baseball Trading Cups, which came with the purchase of a Slurpee at a 7/11, for his. My sister and I celebrated his record-breaking homer with balloons and other party favors. Although she didn’t care about sports, his achievement captured her attention because it was of transcendent importance. All of America was rooting for Hammerin’ Hank, or at least that’s what I naively believed.

It turned out that his life during the chase was a living hell. He received bundles of racist letters, had his life threatened on numerous occasions, and the FBI uncovered an attempt to kidnap his daughter. He was forced into seclusion and still lives a very guarded, many would say paranoid, life. As he put it, “It should have been the happiest time of my life, . . . but it was the worst year. . . So many bad things happened. . . Things I’m still trying to get over, and maybe never will.” He still worries that people will drug his drinks, never sits with his back to the door at a restaurant, watches approaching drivers suspiciously, never lets down his guard with strangers, and, above all, avoids ballparks.

As a child, his achievement taught me about racism. The lesson then was relatively simple: blacks were more than capable of competing with whites. All that stuff about blacks being inferior, which I had heard over and over growing up in the South (well, Miami), was nonsense. I don’t want to make too much of this, but Mr. Aaron helped teach me that everyone should be judged by what they do and not by their skin color or any other irrelevant factors. As an adult, what he has gone through has helped me understand racism on a more subtle level. As he admits, a lot of the public treated him very positively. Nonetheless, he still feels bitter. He rarely discusses the record-breaking homer, because “It brings back too many unpleasant memories.” The racism he was subjected to eventually reached a critical mass, to the point where he could no longer enjoy what might very well be the most important record in American sports, and to the point where it’s understandable that he distrusts even the most innocent, well-meaning people.

The lesson he taught me as a child had to do with the best ideals associated with sports. He changed my attitudes towards race and really did help civilize me. The lessons he taught me as an adult, through his bitter account of the events that unfolded during his chase of Ruth’s record, are based on the sad fact that sports often has little to do with fair play. Like films, sports often expresses the most about the human condition precisely because people sometimes manifestly fail to live up to our society’s ideals.

~ Ken Pendleton

Dreams of a Better Athlete?

When I was growing up, nothing thrilled me more than long summer days and the promise of getting the neighborhood kids together for wiffle ball; or pick-up basketball; or touch football; or…you get the point. I’ve often thought that some of my best and most enjoyable moments in sport were during these times. There were no adults around – and we had kids ranging from elementary to middle school age. Yet we were somehow miraculously able to formulate our own teams and rules; solve any disputes or arguments ourselves; and keep the games going until either daylight became scarce, or someone called us for dinner. We refereed our own games – provided our own snacks (probably more accurately, the trips to 7-11 did); and generally made sure that the competition remained safe, fair, and fun.

All of which leads me to the question of what the “arms race” to build a better athlete is coming to? Maybe I’m wrong, but since the sports industry, and professional sports has gradually morphed from big business – into mega, mega big business and entertainment – the idea of playing for fun has dropped further down the list of driving reasons to play sports. When I was young being a professional athlete was definitely a dream of mine. I’m sure I knew that my sport heroes made “good money”. But since then, zeroes have been added to the end of the average salaries in sports – and for the top athletes in the top paying sports, multiple zeroes have been added. What used to be shocking was to see a $1 million dollar contract – whereas now we don’t blink at the notion of a $100 million dollar contract. And somewhere along the lines, the financial distinction between “us” and “them” in sports; changed from “us – the fans” and “them – the owners” – to “us – the fans” and “them – the athletes”. Somewhere along the lines, sports became a financial means to an end.

When sports started to become a financial means to an end, it changed the way we thought about athletics. It’s becoming abundantly clear, that impact has trickled down to youth sports – and has had an impact on the idea of kids just getting together to play sports “for fun”. What’s somewhat alarming, is the increase in the amount of times I hear youth sports and it’s importance in a child’s life tied to the idea of financal gain. It’s not uncommon to hear the reasoning for putting a child into year-round sports training, and specialized programs – as ultimately gaining a college scholarship, or to possibly become a professional athlete. Whereas we used to see this type of specialized training and emphasis beginning in the early teens – it’s now common for kids as young as 1st and 2nd grades! It’s often shown emphatically in how youth teams are formed – and often classmates are left behind by the group as early as 2nd or 3rd grade; for simply not choosing to start participating in a certain sport until the ripe-old age of 7 years old. This leads to the pervasive viewpoint that children need to start playing advanced organized sports; and receive some form of specialized training for these sports at an early age. Or risk the consequences of being left behind. The myth is, that you can never “catch up”.

The unfortunate side-effect, is that as the more adults intervene in sports at an earlier age – the less it becomes about fun. It leads to the idea that sports are only worth playing when “the lights are on”, and when it “matters”. That’s not to take away the critical role that adult coaches play in taking time to teach kids the game – and for parents to teach their kids the sports they know and love as kids grow up. But, there’s also important lessons kids learn when they “just play for fun” among themselves. Besides all the physical health benefits, it teaches kids to resolve disputes and problems among themselves – and about making the game fair. If they don’t, kids leave -and the game ends. There’s nothing wrong with being driven and wanting to excel in a sport you love. But at what age? And at what cost? We firmly believe in the idea, that kids should play any and every sport they can. Meaning – that as you grow up, you get exposed to multiple sports; multiple teams; multiple opponents; multiple coaches and role models; and multple teammates. As you specialize your sport and your training at a younger age – you also close off the door to other experiences; and keep the door for others to join more tightly closed.

The idea that sports will go back to the “way it was”, is not a realistic one. As sport and entertainment becomes more and more entwined, the opportunity for money and big business just increases. But, it is important that we keep that separated from the youth sports world as much as possible. The “arms race” to build a better athlete, can already be felt on a national scale when kids reach high school – and if you need any evidence watch the recruiting rankings. Or turn on ESPN as they show a high school football or basketball game of “national relevance”. I hope that’s as young as it goes. Because the less kids just play sports “for fun”; and organize sports experiences amongst themselves “for fun” – the less fun sports become for all kids, and ultimately my belief is that less kids will play as they get older. It’s not a bad thing for a kid to dream about one day becoming a professional athlete. Just make sure it’s their dream, and not yours.

Why Hasn’t Soccer Arrived?

Soccer has arrived. Soccer is one the verge of arriving. Or soccer will never arrive. That’s the debate that resurfaces every time the sport captures headlines in the US. The subject first surfaced when NBC’s broadcast of the ’66 World Cup final drew high TV ratings. It occurred when Pele joined the Cosmos, when the US hosted the ’94 World Cup, when the women won the World Cup in ’99, when David Beckham joined the Galaxy, and this past week after the US’s stirring comeback against Brazil.

The debate is as silly as it is inevitable. There are no magic bullets. There is never going to be one moment that catapults soccer on to center stage, alongside baseball, basketball, and football.

None of the Big Three (note that hockey is not a major sport here) have ever had a magic bullet either. The NFL loves to tout the impact of the ’58 title game between the Colts and the Giants, the so-called Greatest Game Ever, but pro football had been growing steadily since the end of World War II. College Basketball supposedly came of age in 1979 when Magic Johnson’s Michigan State played Larry Bird’s Indiana State in the NCAA final. The game, which was a bit anticlimactic, did draw the highest ratings in college basketball history, but NBC had been televising the final live in primetime for six years.

There are no magic bullets, just quantum leaps. The NBA grew in fits & starts because of the Celtics dynasty and Wilt Chamberlain, the Knicks’ teams in the early 70s, the arrival of Magic and Bird, and Michael Jordan a short time later. Baseball may have been saved by Babe Ruth after the Black Sox Scandal, but Ruth just had to restore faith in what was already our National Pastime.

By contrast, Pele was asked to do more than a Ruthian job when he signed with the Cosmos in ’75; he was asked to pull soccer up by its own bootstraps. The professional league, the NASL was floundering; kids were just beginning to take up the sport in large numbers; old folks, especially journalists, were taught to despise what they did not understand; and soccer-mad immigrant communities constituted a small minority.

Despite these obstacles, he put soccer on the map. The networks started showing matches, the Cosmos drew more than 47,000 fans a game, the year after he retired, and several other NASL franchises flourished for half a decade. Make no mistake, the credibility he brought made it possible for the US to successfully bid to host the ’94 World Cup.

So where does the sport stand now?

Despite the fact that Major League Soccer has never had a Pele (sorry Becks, I saw Pele and you’re no Pele) or nearly as many stars as the NASL, it is a lot more stable. The kids who played the sport have grown into adults and more kids than ever play. Most of the old, hostile journalists have died. Marketers cater to the large immigrant communities. And, bonus, women seem to like the sport better than any of the Big Three.

Yet soccer is not close to joining the holy sporting trinity. Why? Because the US has not produced a single superstar, or even a star (with the possible exception of a goalkeeper or two). We produce B- players, more than ever, mind you, but not enough to form the backbone of a domestic league, and most of those players move abroad to line their wallets and further their education.

The fact that they have to play elsewhere to acquire soccer nous is a huge problem. The younger journalists may not hate soccer, but they are not exactly well versed either. Generations of kids may have been taught to kick a ball, but they were often coached by know-little-or-nothing adults. Virtually every major match is on TV, at least on niche channels, but the quality of the commentary—note how the announcers’ thoughts wander unless a scoring chance is imminent—is really quite awful. The bottom line is that that the US has a very low soccer IQ.

So when will soccer fully arrive? When we produce enough stars and B- players to man a first-tier league. When we will start producing enough of those players? When the quality of the coaching, commentary, and TV coverage is high enough to morph into a culture, like football, basketball, and baseball already enjoy.

MLS has made great strides in this regard. A thriving fan culture is developing and Beckham’s arrival, despite all the problems that have occurred, still may end up representing a quantum leap in credibility. But the problem, with all due respect to Spice Boy’s underwear billboards, is that there is still not nearly enough beef. 37,000 fans may turn out to watch each Seattle Sounders’ match, but they are not going to tune in to watch Houston play San Jose unless the quality of the soccer improves a hell of a lot. The thrust of the solution does not lie with packaging players like Beckham, it requires transforming our youth system and educating the public to appreciate the subtleties of the game.

~ Ken Pendleton

Promotion and Relegation: The Greed of American Exceptionalism

Today, stories surfaced that foreign owners, including many American ones, are keen to abolish relegation and promotion from the English Premier League. This silly idea has to be taken somewhat seriously since half of the EPL owners are foreigners who appear to be more concerned with profits than tradition.

Put differently, they want the right to run their teams like the Los Angeles Clippers, secure in the knowledge that they can rake in TV revenue regardless of how much they tank on the field.

In case you don’t know, in most of the world’s soccer leagues, every season the worst teams in the top division get relegated to the next lowest league and the best teams from the lower division get promoted to the top flight. This means that Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling would have had to open his wallet or face the prospect of struggling in some minor league.

In the late 60s, it would have meant that the New York Yankees would have been relegated. Believe it or not, this actually happened to Manchester United—the Yankees of English soccer—who suffered what is called the Drop after finishing near the bottom of the 1st Division (since renamed the EPL just to upset purists like me) in ’74.

We need to ask a basic question: should the primary purpose of sports be to make money, by treating the sport like a product and the fans like consumers; or should it be run like a non-profit organization that first and foremost respects the integrity of sport, its traditions, and the fans who turn up year after year?

This may be hard for most Americans to get their heads around, but for most of its history soccer has largely been committed to the latter. The goal has been to win trophies, not make money, and the owners were usually local businessman who felt some responsibility to their community. In fact, the English Football Association, put limits on how much owners could profit and relocating a franchise was unthinkable.

In the US, we got it wrong, right from the beginning in 1876, when the National League was formed. Owners declared that they were free to do more or less what they wanted, including move their teams to different cities. And was it good for baseball when the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn? Did the Mexican-American residents of Chavez Ravine benefit from being displaced to make way for Dodger Stadium?

The answers are obvious, but it sure is a great deal if you are lucky enough to be an owner (The .1%). You get to have a team in a league that enjoys a monopoly, your territorial rights are mostly insured, and you are free to bring in the moving vans if city leaders are foolish enough to divert tax money from stadium construction to education or law enforcement.

Why do city leaders cave? Because there is a big difference between having a major league team and a minor league one. But that difference would be greatly minimized if American leagues would adopt promotion and relegation.

That’s not about to happen, but I sure hope that soccer fans around the world organize to resist what amounts to American Exceptionalism.

~ Ken Pendleton

Whereas Fans Are Fed Up

Whereas the National Hockey League can lock out players and thus jeopardize the whole season for the second time in a decade;

Whereas the owner of Manchester United can plunge one of the richest clubs in the world into massive debt by acquiring it through a leveraged buyout;

Whereas cities are cornered into spending hundreds of millions of dollars on stadiums to hold on to major league franchises while park and recreation departments get their budgets slashed;

Whereas beer costs eight dollars a pint and your typical college or pro football game is marred by nearly an hour of commercial interruptions;

Whereas players act as though we are the ones who should be grateful;

Whereas Newcastle United, which is located in one of the most depressed parts of England, signed a shirt sponsorship deal with a payday loan company;

Whereas college football and men’s basketball coaches make millions a year while tuition costs rise dramatically and classroom sizes increase;

Whereas stadia are named after corporations rather than civic leaders or war vets, and you don’t know what half of them are named anymore;

Whereas players don’t give their all in the regular season despite the fact that fans spend a fortune on tickets and concessions;

Whereas corporations get to write off the cost of their luxury boxes while the national debt increases;

Whereas Oklahoma State and Florida State scheduled a college football game against a team, Savannah State, that had no hope of scoring, let alone competing;

Whereas, in sum, owners, players, coaches, agents, TV networks and numerous others get to make a fortune, literally, at the expense of fans,

We hereby decline to purchase any merchandise produced by our favorite college or professional teams. No more shirts, jackets, pennants, coffee mugs, or build-a-bears (which my daughter recently suckered her grandfather into buying at AT&T Park). We can’t stop watching our favorite teams (or refrain from spending $8 on pints)—that’s the core of being a fan—but we can stop lining the pockets of all the people who are exploiting our loyalty.

~ Ken Pendleton

The Competitive Edge Blog

The Competitive Edge

Strategic insights for sports leaders transforming conflict into competitive advantage

The Sports Conflict Institute blog delivers evidence-based frameworks for leaders throughout sport in navigating negotiation, conflict resolution, and organizational excellence. From hidden performance strains to strategic negotiation systems, we provide actionable insights tested and trusted in elite competitive environments.