It’s deep August

I speak, of course, of the Tillamook (Oregon) County Fair’s legendary Pig ‘n’ Ford races. Dating back to 1925, the Pig ‘n’ Ford involves … well, hell. I can do no better than to quote the Wikipedia entry (which does, indeed, exist):

“Drivers use stripped Model T Fords with stock mechanicals … When the starter pistol fires, the drivers run to the opposite side of the front straight, grab a live 20-pound pig from a bin, then must hand-crank their car and drive it one lap. They then stop, kill the engine, get a different pig, and race another lap. The first driver to complete three laps in this manner without losing their pig is the winner.”

Did you, uh, catch that? These guys (and we will assume, based on crude gender profile, that they are all guys) race cars not so much “vintage” as ancient. And they race them while carrying live 20-pound pigs in their arms. No disrespect to the swell European gentlemen of Formula 1 or Nascar’s famous  heroes, but those so-called professionals do not race with live 20-pound pigs in their arms. And I’m not trying to be prejudicial against any sport, but I hereby declare myself permanently uninterested in any form of auto racing in which competitors fail to bear live 20-pound pigs in their arms

Watch, and you shall be converted.

Photo by Bob Reed, via the Tilamook County Fair.

My tenure as Into the Good Wide Open correspondent is coming to an end. The rules of the Weird Sports Writers Guild require that I file at least one story about roller derby. Fortunately, the roller derby world is just about to cruise into the most exciting part of its season: win or go home time.

First off, a little primer. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association is the player-owned and player-controlled federation of city leagues in the revived—and completely awesome—sport of roller derby. I documented WFTDA’s first true national championship tournament back in 2007. Since then, the WFTDA championship process has become better organized and more elaborate. Just this week, the Association announced the 40 teams that will vie for a shot at the most amazingly named national championship trophy in all of American sports, The Hydra.

First, in mid-September, qualified teams will battle for regional supremacy in the first four of the WFTDA’s so-called Big Five tournaments. In the Midwestern Thunda of the Tundra Chicago’s highly experienced Windy City Rollers stand out from a pack that includes Detroit’s squad and the host team, Milwaukee’s Brew City Bruisers. Out west, last year’s upset champions, Olympia’s OlyRollers, are up against my homegirls from Portland, Seattle’s super-skilled Rat City Rollergirls and Tucson’s Saddletramps, one of derby’s traditional powerhouses.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Amber Waves of Pain tournament features some of derby’s most fearsome teams in the form of 2007 champions Kansas City Roller Warriors (come cold weather, I rock my red-and-black Roller Warriors scarf with pride) and the Texas Roller Girls. The Texans are essentially derby’s equivalent of the Green Bay Packers or New York Yankees, but haven’t won national honors since 2006. The eastern region is a veritable hornet’s nest of ancient inter-city sporting rivalries, with New York, Boston, Philly, Pittsburgh and DC all representing. The bilingual attack of Montreal Roller Derby adds some international intrigue.

This regional series leads to November’s Uproar on the Lakeshore, the national title tournament hosted by Chicago. The roller derby renaissance gets a lot of attention, but often for fairly superficial reasons. This is a hotly competitive, brutal, and sometimes brilliant sport, and possibly the most triumphant story of the American sports underground. And this is its championship season.

Image: Valtron 3000 by Minette Layne

As I lazed my way through the behind-the-scenes clip, executive producer Ally Musika caught my attention, saying: “We’re trying to bring the whole ping-pong revolution.”

The ping pong revolution? Is there a ping pong revolution taking place? One no one bothered to tell me about? A handy Google search later, it turns out the buzz (the “pop,” perhaps?) around everyone’s favorite garage game is real. A new paddle design has people talking about a new golden age of pong, and the sport even has its own putative sex symbol in Serbia’s Biba Golic (pictured in the thumbnail).

The current epicenter of this “ping pong revolution” seems to be London, where England’s national table tennis association has installed 100 public tables around the city for a month-long summer pong blitz. The tables are available for free pick-up games, as well as scheduled classes with ping-pong aces. This inspiring, government-supported move has been described as an attempt to “increase sustainable mass participation” in sports. Sounds good to me. Perhaps “more ping-pong” is the public-policy slogan our fractured republic needs.

Onward to the revolution!

Image via

If the dearly

If you’re like me, you may well have played some croquet this summer. Just last Friday, I won a sweet set of fuzzy wristbands in a tournament held at my in-laws’ place, wherein players were required to keep one hand on their drinks at all times. Win or lose, I love me some croquet.

Suffice it to say, however, that the MacRobertson Shield has almost nothing to do with that kind of patio-sport nonsense. When the United States national croquet team (again: yes!) faces off against Great Britain this week, the game will feature six hoops, a huge field and strategic challenges worthy of Bobby Fischer. Our Boys face a daunting mental, emotional and competitive challenge—the United States has never finished ahead of Great Britain in the “MacRob.” Australia and New Zealand will be out for blood, as well.

To get more insight on this pan-Anglospheric (sorry, Canada) croquet kumite, I called Jim Bast. The Austin resident and Team USA member has been playing competitive croquet for nearly 30 years, and played an important role in qualifying the U.S. for the MacRob for the first time in 1993. On the eve of the biggest tournament of his life, Bast explained serious croquet.

GOOD: How is the croquet you play different from the croquet I played, half-drunkenly, at my sister- and brother-in-law’s place this weekend?

Jim Bast: Well, I always try not to come off as a snob about backyard croquet, which is the nine-hoop game with the little coat-hanger-style wire hoops and the mallets that always break. All of us, in America, started out playing that game, and I have a lot of affection for it. But the analogy that I always use is playing Major League Baseball versus playing T-ball. It’s a related concept, but as far as the details of the game, the execution and the strategy, it’s completely different.

GOOD: What are some of the factors that elevate the degree of difficulty so radically?

JB: We play on a huge court—105 feet by 85 feet—and the grass is typically mown down like a putting green. It’s extremely flat. In Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, they actually take a perverse pleasure in allowing the grass to go brown and the soil to become hard. Last time I played in New Zealand, it was pretty much like playing on an asphalt parking lot. They like their croquet as fast as possible, and those conditions are just extraordinarily difficult.

G: And we (meaning, of course, you) don’t play this way in the US?

JB: In America, our penchant tends to be for nice esthetics. And our championship-class croquet courts tend to be at fancy resorts. So, of course, they want lush, green grass. In England and Down Under, the facilities all tend to be dedicated croquet clubs. They have their own fields, their own locker rooms, their own bars. They can do whatever they want with their fields. Adjusting to that is one of our biggest challenges, and we expect the courts for the MacRobertson Shield to be exceptionally hard and fast.

G:  That brings us to the MacRobertson Shield. Uh, what is it?

JB: Historically, it’s the premier championship event in the croquet world. It’s held only every three or four years. And until 1993, only Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to field teams. In 1993, it was decided that the U.S. had enough good players that we could be expected to field a strong team of six for every tournament. For a lot of croquet players, being selected to play for our country in the MacRob is the pinnacle of the sport. I played in eight major tournaments just to make myself eligible for selection.

G: And, as I understand it, you can’t even practice in your hometown.

JB: That’s right. There’s no championship-caliber croquet court in Austin, which is kind of strange. So I have to drive to Houston, which is about three hours. But I do it. You have to understand, this is like our Davis Cup or Ryder Cup.

G: How does it work?

JB: Each of the four nations plays one match against all the others, meaning that each team plays three times. There are six players on a team. Each player plays two singles matches, against opponents determined by an order the teams choose—the Number One and Number Two players from each side play each other, and so on. Then, each player is part of a doubles team, and all the doubles teams play each other. The team that wins the most games over the course of a match—which takes several days—wins the match.

G: If this is croquet’s world championship, why is it limited to four countries?

JB: It’s tough, because there are countries that have quality players, of course. Ireland has good players. South Africa has good players. The issue is, will they be able to put together six players worthy of the Shield, every single time? That’s the standard. Now, this time, for the first time, they’ve added additional countries to the overall event. They’re calling the Shield “tier one,” but there are also “tier two” and “tier three” competitions, and the whole thing is being called the World Team Championship. So there’s a bit of flux going on there, but really there’s not much question about the top four countries.

G: I think a question on everyone’s mind vis a vis competitive croquet might be—well, how hard can it be?

JB: Several things are very appealing about croquet. One is, you can play at the highest level if you have the talent and dedication, but you can also go out with the exact same equipment and rules and just have a beer game. It can be intense, or it can be social. The barriers to entry aren’t really physical—we have top players who are teenagers, and top players in their seventies. Gender doesn’t really matter that much. What croquet is, at the elite level, is a game of strategy. I call it chess on grass. I can go into my turn and know, provided that I execute all my shots, exactly where my ball will be 15 or 20 strokes from now. I can tell you where the other balls are likely to be 50 strokes from now. It is a very challenging and engaging mental puzzle. A serious game is exhausting and emotionally draining—you can be out there for hours, under constant pressure.

G: Can you give me a little preview of the Shield?

JB: Great Britain is always the favorite. Right now, they have a group of players that’s just amazing—a generation of about a dozen really good players who are almost interchangeable. So they are definitely the team to beat. At the same time, I think we can do it. The United States has never placed better than third in the MacRobertson Shield, but this is by far the best team we’ve ever had. We have great chemistry. We are going there to win, that’s the way I look at it.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Spaktography

Oh, Kamchatka Project

As a college kid, I burned many hours trying to etch Russian verb conjugation and the language’s fiendish dative case into my brain. All that survives is a two-year-old’s rudimentary vocabulary in what Vladimir Nabokov dismissed as “How are you? / I am fine” Russian. As a youthful traveler, I made it as far as Moscow, which is super-rad. But the Kamchatka Project seriously got its Russia on, making first-time source-to-sea treks down some of the world’s wildest, most salmon-rich rivers, in one of its most remote and unspoiled places.

As a Gary Snyder fan, I’m totally into the whole Pacific Rim ecology thing. Here in Oregon, our wild salmon runs teeter perpetually on the brink of extinction. Kamchatka spawning grounds, meanwhile, produce between one-sixth and one-fourth of the remaining wild salmon in the world. The remote peninsula is also home to a population of brown bears so dense that the place must be Stephen Colbert’s worst nightmare.

The lucky people on the Kamchatka Project expedition got to see it all. En route, they produced a bumper crop of audio updates and stunning photos, they dodged bears and generally made good on a daunting logistical challenge. On a meta-level, the Kamchatka Project provides a fascinating glimpse at the life of a modern-day, media-savvy, high-tech explorer.

It’s inspiring to know that even in the hyper-connected 21st Century, there are still places worth exploring. Just, please—take me next time?

(We should note here that Keen Footwear, the sponsor of Into the Good Wide Open, helped the Project out by hosting a James Bond-themed fundraisier.) 

Photo courtesy of the Kamchatka Project

Among the many things

Well, here’s to you, Joe DiMaggio—but with all due respect, I recently made the vicarious acquaintance of the guy who owns the most amazing streak in sports. (As well as the most amazing face: Please go look at this man.) Rainer Hertrich has skied for more than 2,400 days in a row—that’s time on the slopes, somewhere in the world, every single day for over six and a half years.

Hertrich blew away the Guinness Book record about 2,100 powder days ago. Four long years ago, he told Outside that he had come close to packing it in (for at least a day) about 25 times. And yet Rainer Hertrich—a happy wanderer, unencumbered by familial ties, by the sound of it—keeps going, informed by an admirably low-key approach to his own legendary, ever-building accomplishment, as you can see in this video.

Hertrich maintains an intercontinental “schedule.” If I understand his method correctly, he is probably up on the slopes of Mt. Hood even now, as I sit here typing in downtown Portland, Oregon. Come fall, he’ll jet off to South America. To keep the streak alive on travel days, he apparently sometimes puts in a pre-dawn run on Mt. Hood before heading to Chile.

Forget Roger Federer’s 24 straight finals victories or the Boston Celtics’ eight consecutive NBA titles. I hereby proclaim Rainer Hertrich the Lord of the Streak. Unless, of course, he didn’t ski today for some reason.

Photo courtesy of Lisa Wyatt via Portland Monthly.

No concept

Throw in some bears, some rogue moose, a gushing mountain river, a two-day hike that must be completed within six hours and a fierce rivalry between two iron-willed competitors, and you really transcend my comprehension. But that was the scene at last weekend’s Crow Pass Crossing marathon in Alaska. This event may not even qualify as an “ultramarathon”—the course runs a mere 28 miles—but it traverses some seriously hostile, seriously Alaskan terrain. And Crow Pass attracts some of the finest (read: most insanely dedicated to self-punishment) endurance athletes around.

When you consider that Crow Pass contestants must ford a river that forces ordinary people to hold hands and move very slowly—and do so alone and at racing speed—you get some inkling. The highlights from the entry form (“this is a risk-filled and dangerous race… bad things can and usually do happen…someone has been injured or imperiled each year… there are very real hazards and little chance for immediate medical aid...”) are enough to chill the marrow.

Not surprisingly, this year’s running yielded high-altitude drama. Eric Strabel, a renaissance athlete with a fantastic robber-baron mustache, took on Geoff Roes, a runner who has never lost a 100-mile race. The two runners battled it out in to the final miles of last year’s race, with Roes taking first.

This year, both Strabel and Roes had to navigate a beast-infested trail. (Roes: “No sooner were things going smooth and suddenly a huge bull moose runs onto the trail in front of me and refuses to leave…”) Strabel set the early pace. But Roes came into Crow Pass fresh from setting a course record at the Western States 100, a race that takes participants from icy snow fields to 100-degree heat:

Perhaps due to the sheer number of hellish experiences he has subjected himself to, Roes is a man who projects an amazing calm in the face of physical torment:

And so Strabel’s early lead evaporated, and Roes ambled to the finish line first, in the impressive and terrifying time of 2 hours, 54 minutes, and 44.49 seconds. (Maybe with effort, he can shave that extra half-second off his time next year.)

Whatever motivates the men and women of Crow Pass, we mere mortals must salute them. In an age of sanitized sport, they take competition back to its most elemental and mythic roots. And, no doubt, they feel absolutely horrible afterward.

Photo from Marc Lester/ Anchorage Daily News

Ah, to climb

This weekend, some of the world’s most intrepid (and speedy) pro tree doctors gather in Lisle, Illinois for the International Tree-Climbing Championship. This is no childhood idyll, but rather a highly technical, physically demanding test of professional skill, on-the-fly problem solving, and aerial courage. Frankly, it freaks me out. So I called up two-time world champion Mark Chisholm, who runs a family-owned tree firm in Jackson, New Jersey, to learn more.

In addition to kicking major wads of arboreal ass, Mark turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever talked to on the phone. (He’s also a spokesman for a spokesman for Stihl chainsaws, which might be the coolest athletic endorsement deal on the planet.) So, naturally, I hope he sets some world records this weekend. I hope even more fervently that he doesn’t plummet to his doom, which is what I always assumed I was about to do every time I climbed a tree.

GOOD: How does this competition work?

MARK CHISHOLM: Well, in a round-about-way of speaking, it’s a three-day thing, but the first is really just gear inspection and all that jazz. The second day, competition really begins. We’ll have about 50 competitors from about 18 countries, I think—all professional arborists who won their regional competitions, for men and women.

The first day is the preliminary round, which consists of five different events that are all scored differently and weighted slightly differently. Two of them are pure speed-climb: There’s the belayed speed climb, which would be kind of familiar to anyone who knows about rock climbing. You’re top-roped into a tree, and you climb to a station at the top that’s outfitted with a bell and an electronic timer. Fastest wins, so that’s pretty simple. The second is called the secured footlock, and you just climb 15 meters up a rope without touching the tree at all—it looks like a giant inchworm going up the rope, basically. That one, I gotta say, is one of my favorites: Number one, because it’s very physical and demanding; and number two, because I really focus on it. I hold the world record, so I guess I keep it kind of close to my heart.

G: Well, of course. What else, on day one?

MC: There’s a safety event called the aerial rescue—and this event is important, because it’s basically the reason the whole competition started back in the 1970s. There’s a simulated emergency situation up in the tree, and you have to survey and control the situation, go up and secure the “victim” and get the victim down. The originator of the competition started it because he wanted to help his crews think about rescue techniques and procedures—that was the seed of the event.

G: That’s interesting—that a whole competitive discipline, basically, grew out of arborists’ work skills.

MC: Yeah, everything in these events mimics the work environment. The fourth preliminary competition is in throwline, which is basically a simulation of how you install a climbing line and consists of launching a line weighted with a bean bag up into the tree. And the final part of the preliminary is the work climb, where you start at the top of the tree and work down through a bunch of different stations, doing different tasks at each one. The scores for all five events are combined, and the top finishers advance to the second day.

G: Which is when it gets serious.

MC: Yeah—the finals. The day starts with a head-to-head footlock race, in heats of two, side-by-side. And that’s really good for spectators, because it’s a direct competition. The fastest overall time wins a cash prize, usually like $500 or $1,000. But then comes the main event, the Master’s Challenge. That’s basically a combined skills competition that is a culmination of all the previous events. There are four stations in the tree, and you can do them in any order you want. You have 25 minutes to set up your gear, and then you go. And it’s a subjective scoring system—judges decide who fulfills the challenge the best. So we get a lot of drama and controversy out of that.

G: Your own career stats seem fairly impressive. So how are you hoping to do this time?

MC: Well, this is my 21st year competing at some level or another. At the state level, I’ve won the championship 18 times. I’ve been in the world’s top five 16 times and I’ve won two world championships. I set the 15-meter footlock record in 2007, and I held the record in the old distance, which was 40 feet, before they retired that category. So, yeah. At the same time, I’m 39, and I separated a shoulder in a hockey game fairly recently, and then I tore an MCL climbing. I’m just coming back from all that, so while I’m hoping I’m competitive, I don't think I’ll be setting any records this time.

G: What’s the importance of this competition to you—and other arborists, for that matter, in your work life?

MC: You honestly can’t stress it enough. As a professional, this competition gives you a window to see the cutting-edge technology and techniques for safety, and that’s really the main point. You learn the stuff fast, too, and with a lot of motivation, because if you show up at the competition with the wrong gear or wrong technique, they’ll just disqualify you. It also fosters a great feeling of camaraderie amongst the business—people sharing ideas, looking at equipment, talking about their work experiences. It’s great. And for spectators, it helps them see what an arborist does, what he or she looks like, how they talk, all that.

G: Why do you keep competing after all these years?

MC: In the beginning, when I was just a young kid, the state competition was a chance to see how I stacked up against the guys who were my mentors. Then, when I started to win, competing basically became my chance for free vacations. Now, it’s what makes me part of this close-knit community of other arborists, people who I maybe only see once a year but who are close friends. And, you know, last year I lost the world championship on a tiebreaker, so that keeps me motivated. And the guy I lost to [Jared Abrojena, United States], I consider him almost like a brother. His family is like my family. My parents like his parents. So part of me was as excited for him as I was disappointed for myself. It’s just a unique feeling.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Mark Chisolm, who won the 2010 championship.

Photo via the International Society of Arboriculture

"There is an unspoken bond between two cyclist who pass each other on the road," says Engelbrecht. "If you choose to ride a bicycle instead of driving a car or using public transport in South Africa, you make a conscious decision to live outside the norm and put yourself in physical danger of getting robbed or mauled by a taxi every day. These fellow South African commuters are my people, and the Bicycle Portraits project is their voice. We get each other."

"I'm experiencing the project much like a ride on a bicycle, it is a journey," adds Grobler. "We see and learn things along the way. We make new friends and we have fun while doing it. To me the project is about people. It is not just about those we are photographing, but also about the audience of the project. The bicycle is facilitating conversation."

GOOD is proud to present a selection of images from the ongoing Bicycle Portraits project. If you're interested, you should check out some videos or donate to the campaign—a $50 contribution will reserve a copy of the book for you.
 

This was a Kafka-esque saga all the way around. A half-millennium-old tribal nation attempts to send a team to the championships of a sport that it invented, only to be turned away because modern nation-states refuse to recognize tribal passports for security reasons. But aside from the puzzling and maddening details, the story’s most startling yield was simply this: the Iroquois Confederacy has a national lacrosse team.

As it turns out, the Iroquois Nationals are the only internationally recognized Native American team in any sport, and they are no novelty act. They are ranked fourth by the Federation of International Lacrosse, particularly impressive given the Confederacy’s enrolled population of just 125,000. The Nationals's indoor side finished second in the 2007 world championship.

Sadly, international lacrosse’s premier event is now unfolding without the Iroquois. The mind-bogglingly complex tournament bracket will crown a global champion on July 24—a result that this weird controversy over the sport’s most distinctive team is bound to overshadow. The most we casual observers can do is try to reserve a tiny corner of our sporting consciousness for this unique facet of international athletic culture, and wait four years.

Photo via the Nationals website.

Last Sunday,

The neo-Medieval nature of the jousting Slater writes about creates some strange contrasts. As two men in armor earnestly attempt to do one another harm in the name of competitive excellence, campy Renaissance Faire antics surround them on all sides. Behold:

“The knights have received their lances!” It’s certainly not going to replace “play ball!” any time soon. However, jousting’s underlying formula—two competitors; weapons; vehicles; mayhem—obviously retains its trans-epochal appeal. Just yesterday, I happened to learn about an annual bike-jousting competition with pies instead of lances that is held by a Seattle tavern, which looks like fun, or something close to it:

And that discovery led me to this amazing footage of Toyota RAV4 jousting, which sadly appears to be an advertisement rather than a preview of a Mad Max-meets-Camelot future:

For that, I guess you have to watch Segway jousting, which at least discovers a use for those things:

And for a less-self-conscious, more middle-American take on the concept, there’s lawnmower jousting:

The moral of the story—if, indeed, there is one—is that as long as human beings use fast, large conveyances to get around, they will devise ways to knock one another from them. While I have nothing against jousting’s modern-day knights, I must admit that the phenomenon makes me think of Red Fang’s fantastic (in more ways than one) “Prehistoric Dog” video.

Photo (CC licensed) by Flickr user Jeff Kubina

In sports-evolution terms, polo is moving at warp speed. In my new book on independent sports, I observed that the scrappy bike polo scene I found during my research looked like “traveling back in time to the 1840s, before sports standardized and rationalized.” But that dates me a couple years already. Since then, polo’s big tournaments have made radical strides in size, scope, and polish, and now attract inter-city (and international) “superteams.” Footage from a major polo-world event, like this year’s Greif Masters in Germany, now looks just about as good as footage from any sporting event.

This weekend, the bike polo world goes into serious overdrive, as the North American and European championship tournaments unfold simultaneously in Madison, Wisconsin, and Geneva, Switzerland. While these continental tourneys serve as a mere prelude to August’s World Championships in Berlin, the synchronicity marks a good time to learn what’s it's all about.

I caught up with North American organizers Jonny Hunter and Kevin Walsh, who runs League of Bike Polo, the pivotal North American polo website.

GOOD: Give me an idea of the Madison tournament’s scope and a competition preview.

Kevin Walsh: We’re going to have 68 teams, with players from something like 44 different cities, playing three to a team. There are about a dozen teams that everyone would probably describe as being pretty good, and about four or five serious podium contenders. There’s a team that includes one guy from New York, one guy from Philly, and one guy from Richmond, and they will be very strong. Smile, a team from Seattle, won both the North American and World tournaments last year, and they’ll be back. A team from Milwaukee will be strong.

Jonny Hunter: I think a couple of things are worth noting about the Madison tournament: First, this will be the largest hardcourt bike polo tournament in history. Second, it will probably—almost definitely—be the last tournament of its kind, the last one where any team from anywhere can register, show up and play. In the future, there will be qualifiers for all continental tournaments, and probably for the regional tournaments as well.

G: Why?

JH: Because there are such different tiers of quality, and players who are at the top tier don’t want to play tier-three teams anymore. And at the same time, tier-three teams don’t want to get beaten 18-0 any more. That doesn’t make any sense.

G: How stable are these high-quality teams? Are you seeing dynasties?

KW: Teams switch around a lot, and I think we’re seeing a little more of that. People who have chemistry want to play together, so you’re starting to see these super-teams of players from different cities coming together for major tournaments.

JH: There was a whole generation of top-tier teams that all got knocked off in the last year or two. So that’s why you’re seeing all these players shifting around. I think what will happen is, top players will hook up to form teams that will last for six months or a year, and then shift around again.

KW: At same time, the most recent major tournament, in New York, from the quarterfinals on the quality of play was out of control. And there was only one so-called “super-team” there—the rest were teams of players from one city. But I think, in general, we still have a huge curve of talent. And I think that’s a good thing, because it means there’s a long future of growth in the sport. We see the best teams evolving and getting better, but we also see new teams coming in and learning very quickly.

G: Let’s talk about the growth. Kevin, you register new city clubs on League of Bike Polo. What are you seeing?

KW: Three or four new local clubs register every week. We just had Moscow register—and I just looked at their club logo, and it is amazing.

JH: We had 48 teams playing in the Midwest Championships, 48 teams playing in the Eastern Championships. Internationally, you’re starting to see teams in Latin America—Santiago has a club, Buenos Aires has a club, there’s bike polo in Colombia now. That’s really exciting, because it means you can go anywhere and play. And, obviously, it’s exciting for the future of the competitive game.

G: How will the Madison tournament compare to the European Championships in Geneva?

KW: I think the European tournament will be more balanced, because they actually had city playoffs to determine who was eligible, and they shaved it down to 48 teams. The weakest teams have already been eliminated. But overall, North American teams are still better, and I think will do better at the Worlds. They need to come over here more. We need to go over there more. I guess the tournament in Berlin will redress that a little bit.

G: It seems to me that bike polo is somewhere on the path that leads, if not to professional teams, then at least to tournaments that guarantee that the best players are playing.

KW: That’s kind of something that will have to emerge out of the future. The winners of this tournament get their plane tickets to Berlin covered, but that’s about it—and that’s just three players of the 55 or so North American players who are going. People are still on the hook for their own expenses. There’s still no money involved, so the atmosphere around the game is pretty much the same as it’s ever been.

G: Have these larger tournaments standardized the game at all? When I started researching polo, different cities were using different rules.

KW: We’ve had a lot of institutional change—we’re experimenting with ways to make our refereeing more consistent. At the same time, we recognize that there needs to be an openness that allows people to experiment. There were some different rules used at the New York tournament that everyone seemed to like. We need to let stuff like that happen.

G: So where do you see the sport going?

JH: Well, there are definitely some barriers. One is, the equipment needs are very individual and specific. The mechanic at your local bike shop isn’t going to know how to work on a polo bike. There have been a couple of bikes manufactured specifically for bike polo—the Fleet Velo Joust and Milwaukee Bike’s Bruiser—but the sales, so far, are low. So I don’t see it becoming commercialized.

On the other hand, we have a major sponsor involved in this tournament, Trek, and that has been fantastic. We have an organizing body now, and I think that within the community we have enough organizing talent and potential to steer the sport in the direction we, as players and fans, want it to go.

G: And I understand that you guys are both playing in the tournament—on the same team, even. What are you hoping for?

KW: We were sixth in Worlds last year. I’ll be upset if we’re not in the top 10. But I’m definitely not expecting to win this one.

Photo (CC) by Flickr user NealeA

I have mixed feelings

This ambivalence didn’t stop me from enjoying A. L. Kennedy’s agreeably weird book On Bullfighting, or, indeed, anything by Hemingway. So imagine my excitement when I discovered that we can attend actual bullfights right here in America; specifically, in rural California, where it seems that the existential drama of the bull ring has transformed into something of a team sport. The Cali bullfights are “bloodless," the bulls wear a velcro patch that into which the matadors stick their velcro-tipped javelins. So even if PETA wouldn’t exactly approve of this season’s rustic, West Coast take on Portuguese tradition, at least no spectators have to see a big, beautiful beast slaughtered before their eyes.

In any case, I dare you not to be enthralled by these snippets from this summer’s California toreador scene:

Kind of makes your softball team look pathetic, doesn’t it?

The radical Dutch teams of the 1970s blew the soccer world’s collective mind, but lost two finals. Spain is the soccer equivalent of the Chicago Cubs—an elegant icon of the game, yet more closely associated with epic meltdowns than triumph. This time, Spain is the flashy favorite that has yet to find its best form. The Dutch are now cast as gritty, sometimes ruthless, sometimes thrilling professionals—a gang of aging hard-cases, pulled together to do one last job, plus a couple crafty assassins in their prime. 

Clearly, there’s a lot to learn. With the soccer blogosphere at full maturity and the traditional media revved up to suck every last eyeball or pageview out of the event, this World Cup has seen an amazing profusion of sharp (or not-so-sharp) commentary. So, if you’re looking to get schooled fast in the many subtleties of this Sunday’s huge game, consider this a haphazard (but fun) place to start.

If you actually want to understand what these two teams are trying to do when they take the field, check out Sports Illustrated’s Jonathan Wilson. In his analysis of Spain, he looks at what makes the country’s signature “tiki-taka” style of short passes and relentless movement so effective—and, occasionally, so annoying. His look at the Netherlands diagnoses how this team became the only unbeaten, untied team in this World Cup (so far) by ratcheting down up its defense and whipping forward deadly counterattacks. American game reports seldom provide this kind of insight into the complicated inner workings of soccer, and a little tactical understanding goes a long way to making the game more intelligible and entertaining to watch.

There has probably never been a more formidable assembly of American soccer nerd-dom than The New Republic’s Goal Post blog. Franklin Foer wrote the well-received book How Soccer Explains the World. The novelist (and soccer fanatic) Aleksandar Hemon is, well, merely a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. The all-star roster continues from there. On the final’s eve, the best Goal Post work touches on both teams. Stefan Fatsis examines the historic tension between the Netherlands’ artsy soccer tradition and the current team’s perceived git ’er done pragmatism. Foer looks at how much Spain relies on players from linguistically, culturally, and politically distinct Catalonia. Eve Fairbanks checks in with a short-but-amusing report on how quickly South Africans jumped on the Dutch bandwagon. Tracking back a game or two, you’ve got to read Hemon’s vituperative take on Argentina’s legendary (but not for being a coach) coach Diego Maradona. Beyond its own writers, the Goal Post overflows with good links.

But if you really want an embarrassment of riches, check out Pitch Invasion. This Chicago-based uber-blog’s World Cup coverage frankly overwhelmed my Google Reader; there were weeks when I just gave up. But lately, it’s mandatory reading. From hard-hitting commentary on backstage FIFA shenanigans to deep-dive coverage of the event’s cultural impact with South Africa, Pitch Invasion generally offers a politically aware and engaged take on this absurdly huge entertainment spectacle.

Run of Play—largely, but not exclusively, the work of Slate contributor Brian Phillips—has a more cerebral thing going on. In fact, I have been known to read a Run of Play piece, quietly close my laptop, and take a meditative walk around the block as I consider another line of work. Mostly, though, RoP serves as my go-to source for provocative, even avant-garde analysis and probing questions. Should you really root for underdogs? Why did that now-infamous Uruguayan handball prompt such a moral panic? And will any of this mean anything in 10 years?

Run of Play can serve as an introduction to the brainy soccer blogosphere—a thriving crowd, and kind of a tough one, too. The Indian writer Supriya Nair recently sliced up a New York Times columnist on her superbly named Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils. The politically minded From A Left Wing contributed my favorite comparative analysis of the tournament: the World Cup as Moby Dick. (Maradona is Captain Ahab.) And for those who are new to soccer thanks to this World Cup, 200 Percent combines great analysis of the tournament with reminders that there is far, far more to the sport, finding time amid the action in South Africa to cover minor-division clubs in England.

If you really want to give this thing the old college try by smashing an unfeasible reading binge into a caffeine-fuelled, last-hours frenzy, I have two books to recommend. David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football will let you in on the intricate cultural history behind The Netherlands’s team—specifically, how life in a tiny, largely man-made country gave Dutch players a unique understanding of space and a democratic, cooperative ethic. To delve into the Spanish game, I recommend cherry-picking from David Goldblatt’s monumental world soccer history The Ball is Round. 

The Ball is Round is about all soccer, in all countries. But Goldblatt is particularly intriguing on the subject of the endless rivalry between Spain’s two biggest clubs, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. During the Franco dictatorship, Real Madrid ruled European soccer, while Barcelona served as pretty much the only legal expression of Catalan identity. The latter then redefined the Spanish game when it hooked up with Dutch (twist!) superstar Johan Cruyff. Today, these two giant clubs—think Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers, respectively—are still the polar opposites of Spanish soccer. Together, they will supply almost all of Spain’s starting line-up on Sunday.

Weird, right? That’s soccer for you. Now get going—you’ve got a lot of reading to do before Sunday.

Photos by Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images (the Netherlands) and Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images (Spain.)

The recent simultaneous

There are many paths to DIY athletic glory (or something similar). I recently slapped down a passionate (and, just possibly, ridiculous) plea for homespun croquet leagues, which provide an excellent means to acquire grass stains and a judicious prosecco buzz. Today, however, I come to praise a different populist pastime that deserves to break big: cornhole.

As the game’s proponents like to say with a knowing nudge-nudge leer: “It’s not what you think.” The above footage is from a new documentary that bears the amazing title Brotherhood of Bags—evidence, if any was needed, that a simple game built on a hazy combination of horseshoe rules and childhood bean-bag toss is on the verge of becoming an underground sports phenomenon.

There are at least a couple national cornhole “sanctioning bodies,” one of which even crowns a “King of Cornhole” via its nascent (as in, six events) professional tour. In its brief existence as an organized sport, cornhole seems to have even spawned a living legend: dynastic champion Matt Guy.

You’ve got to love a game that comes out of nowhere to bestow a tiny particle of immortality on some random dude from Kentucky. But even as cornhole attempts to become a “real sport,” it retains a lovable, barbecue-friendly scruffiness. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine built his own cornhole sets, spending about $50 on materials. By virtue of his membership in the American Cornhole Association, he’s certified to host competitive tournaments in his driveway. This sport is yours to conquer. You won't know if you’re the next Matt Guy unless you give it a shot.

Photo (CC) via Flickr user thetorpedodog

And yet octopush is for real—played around the country and around the world. We have national teams for men and women. The University of Florida’s club allegedly hosted a national championship tournament just last weekend—not that the results of said tournament are posted anywhere on the internet or anything. But that’s cool. A sport this entrancingly cool-looking doesn’t need to give me any actual insight into wins and losses. Dig:

The flippers. The little blade-like sticks. The snorkel masks. The tangled limbs and disorienting, three-dimensional flow of slithering bodies. It’s hard to tell if this is a sport, or a particularly sexy scene from a David Lynch movie.

Octopush may not be a stadium spectacle, but the sport creates surreal subaquatic tableaux, hypnotic and otherworldly.

Competitive results? Who needs them? I’m content to let octopush haunt my dreams forever.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The breathtaking images of Jake Stangel's ongoing photography project "The Pacific" provide a stunning look at surfing in Oregon. "It's cold," says Stangel, an East-Coast transplant who started photographing surfers in the area after a hike through the nearby forest lead him to Indian Head beach, "and thick westuits are mandatory."

"The surfers are used to the cold," he adds, "but I feel like I'm still getting used to the rugged lushness of the ocean and mountains of Oregon. I'm constantly surprised by its beauty."

What follows is a selection from Jake Stangel's ongoing project "The Pacific."

It’s a beautiful season

The Deathly Hallows, of course, is the walloping and highly un-fun finale of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part wizarding epic. The one that starts with a heavy-duty quote from Aeschylus; the one where cutesy antics in the Gryffindor common room end and the straight-up slaying of dark wizards begins. For example, Deathly Hallows completely lacks Quidditch, Rowling’s twee but gravity-defying contribution to the imaginary sports world. Even though the Hallows movie adaptation comes in two huge installments, the golden age of cinematic Quidditch is over.

Fortunately, there is hope.

Yes, the Muggles have taken to Quidditch. In one of the most inspiring sports-world developments since Webb Ellis allegedly picked up the ball at Rugby School in 1824, American college and high school kids have adapted Rowling’s magical game to non-magical life. Founded in 2007, the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association now stages a major (well, okay—elaborate) “World Cup” tournament every year. The game is spreading among the nation’s athletic but unselfconscious youth.

While rules that require a broom between the legs at all times and allow for vicious bludger use may make this a physically risky endeavor, I personally hope terrestrial Quidditch enjoys long-term success. After all, the development of a few more sharp-eyed Seekers can only help our economy and national security.

Let’s go, you Chudley Cannons! Bless the Children, give them triumph now!