Coaching and Clowning Around

"If you want entertainment, go and watch downs."

This quote comes to me from a book by Nick Hornby (an Englishman with a predilection for the Arsenal soccer club of north London) called Fever Pitch, a wonderful autobiography about a life of following one's favorite sport with the life-and-death passion of a trapeze artist.

[If you've ever had trouble articulating your enthusiasm for a team or a sport to a significant other or an otherwise bemused friend or relative, find yourself a copy of this witty account. Names of English soccer players and clubs may fly over your head, but the book's emotional content is richer than a pint of Haagen-Dazs, and it makes for a wonderfully funny read in any dialect.]

And it was Alan Durban, manager of Stoke City in the English First Division, who served up this tasty little remark to the assembled postgame press after attempting to play for a boring 0-0 draw away to Arsenal (losing only to two late goals) during the 1980-81 season.

Coaching an inferior team inside a hostile stadium. Durban figured that he was better off playing conservatively, even boringly, if that would give his side the best chance of a favorable result at the end of the day. And if you remember the 1990 World Cup, this doctrine was the rule rather than the exception in Italy, where a team like Argentina could reach the finals by playing to win penalty shootouts at the end of 0-0 or 1-1 draws, as happened twice.

But this is a symptom of sport, not just soccer. Roger Neilson nearly led the expansion and relatively talent-barren Florida Panthers to the NHL playoffs last year by emphasizing the clutch-and-grab tactics of the neutral zone trap and banking on good goal-tending (i.e. John Vanbiesbrouck) to save them when the trap failed.

The NFL spent an off-season of soul-searching and rule-changing after the "Year of the Kicker," as generally mundane offenses settled into field goal contests to decide their defensive battles. (Didn't we have an 18-12 scoreline last year? Those numbers bring Napoleon and Russia or Tchaikovsky to mind, not excitement on the gridiron.)

Basketball? See Pete Carrill's Princeton. They pass, they look, they pass, they pass again, they back-door somebody in the paint for a layup and win by averaging barely 60 points a game--all the excitement of watching brain surgery performed, and without even any of the blood.

These types of games have all the figurative mud and slime of Verdun or Passchendacle, and two types of fans hate them to the pith of their marrow--the neutrals and the purists. Very often, those groups are one in the same, which is just a coincidence...or is it?

"Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear--it misses the point somehow," writes Hornby. You want entertainment? Go to the circus, or the theater, or the symphony.

But don't waste your time complaining about tactics designed with but one purpose: success. Even at the college level, coaches are paid their salaries for two reason, A) for running a clean, honest program, and B) for giving their teams the best chance to win every time out. And you can have both elements and bore the country to death with your style of play (connoisseurs of the option aside. I give you Tom Osborne's Nebraska football team), and your alumni will love you forever.

I happen to be more impressed with Harvard's defense last weekend against Cornell than I am with its 39, 23 and 27-point outputs in games one, two and three. I also consider myself a purist in most things, but if my beloved Braves were to win a World Series in which new records for fielding errors and strikeouts were set, would I care the less?

No, because I'm a committed fan to a short list of "my" teams. Give me any matchup between two teams not on that list, I root for a good story-line. Otherwise, lay off.

As Hornby (who sometimes seems as if he should be committed) himself concludes this section of his book. "For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle: you presume it happens, but you're not in a position to appreciate it.

"Sports journalists and armchair [purists] are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do--but in another way they know much, much less."

This erstwhile sports journalist couldn't put it much better than that.