More Haye v Klitschko

Posted on by David Wright

I’ve been thinking some more about this from the perspective of motivation and achievement.

For Haye, the last round showed how he could have won it. He had real desperation and put Wlad ‘on the back foot’. He fought with fire.

I think this is the only the strategy for beating Wlad and I think Haye knew it. You have to be a psychological and physical wrecking ball like Mike Tyson at age 21 or so.

Here are some examples of a psychological wrecking ball:

“How dare these boxers challenge me with their primitive skills? It makes me angry. They’re just as good as dead.”

“My power is discombobulatingly devastating I could feel is muscle tissues collapse under my force. It’s ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm.”

“I just want them to keep bringing guys on and I’m going to strip them of their health. I bring pain, a lot of pain.”

This is a person that could get to Wlad. And you can’t just say these things, you have to back them up with performance to build a reputation.

At the beginning of the whole mess, Haye had a chance to be something like that guy. But I think that after a few face-to-face encounters with Haye, Wlad realized David is more class clown than terrifying maniac. Haye never had a psychological edge.

And I really think David was looking past the fight, a gigantic no-no at the championship level of any sport. Can a boxer that spends his time thinking and talking about retirement after this ‘one last fight’ really be as prepared as a young kid with nothing to lose?

Let’s put it this way: Tyson-21 didn’t spend any time talking about retirement. He wanted to devastate opponents for years and years.

Does a 30-year-old celebrity worried about his long term health (why else retire so early?) and looking for a payday deserve to be champ?

Nope.

As a Haye fan, is it frustrating? Absolutely.

If he had Tyson-21 mentality, every round would have looked like R12 and someone would have gotten knocked out. I’d say probably Wlad, but I’m biased.

At the least you can say it was a fight that Wlad COULD have lost, as opposed to ‘his kind of fight’ in which he beats anyone in history, probably.

Do Goaltenders Age Better?

Posted on by David Wright

I bet the average age of ice hockey goaltenders is the highest of any position in any sport outside of NFL field goal kicker. And if you adjust for some kind of ‘importance measure’ (say, share of team salary), they surely blow everyone else away.

Now, they don’t break ‘oldest athlete’ records and so have a smaller absolute range of ages than other sports, but the best seem (to me) to hit the performance wall much later.

I put together a spreadsheet of the ages of playoff goaltenders. Average age?

29 1/4 years old!

Median is a year younger.

Wow. Surely the highest.

Data is here. I did ages as days /365. Not perfectly accurate but I’m hardly about to start effing around with leap years.

I’m watching the game forchrissakes!

Short Soccer Players

Posted on by David Wright

Enjoyed watching the champions league final this afternoon. Yay Barca.

One unoriginal observation I made was that the Barca players were shorter than the Man U players. A bit of googling shows that this question has had a healthy examination before.

So I figured I’d calculate, in a back-of-the-envelope way, what the average heights were of the teams:

Man U Mean: 1.79

Man U Median: 1.76

Barcelona Mean: 1.75

Barcelona Median: 1.73

I haven’t adjusted these figures for round-number bias as per the Freakonomics link and I’ve used the wikipedia ‘starting lineup’, which has a different number of players for each team.  And I’ve excluded Keepers. Not really soccer players, anyway.

That said, I’m not surprised at the result and it jives with the observation of the Spanish team being short, too.

Funny, though, isn’t it.

Life is About Virtuous Routines

Posted on by David Wright

I haven’t linked to Barker in a while. Today’s study resonated with me:

We suggest that shifting focus from the impact of major life changes on well-being to the impact of seemingly minor repeated behaviors is crucial for understanding how best to improve well-being.

The specific examples investigated are church attendance and physical exercise. I don’t go to church, but the exercise thing makes sense.

My wife looks upon my physical exercise routine with a mixture of bemusement and mild irritation. I’ve had the tough guy cycle down pat for years now, so I spend about as much time rehabbing injuries as I do actually exercising and playing sports.

I am undaunted, however, and today Barker teaches me why. Exercise probably has health benefits over some long time horizon, but I don’t believe people people think in long time horizons. I do these things to achieve something small and distract me from the other parts of my life. Physical therapy works just as well as power cleans or soccer games.

Perhaps relatedly, my old man always said he loved playing squash and boxing because they forced you to be completely in the moment.

I agree with that, too.

Striking Even Bullshitters Dumb

Posted on by David Wright

I’ve tried and failed to find an old favourite article of mine; it listed occupations in descending order of BS intensity. There were the usual politicians, lawyers, etc,  but the top spot when to sportwriters.

Drew a chuckle from me, at least.

Anyway, this morning I was reading up on the Final Four games and found a “Breakdown of the Matchups” and the writer was actually at a loss of how to rate the VCU/Butler game. The downside of each team was “their luck has to end somewhere”. It was literally almost the same analysis for both teams.

In Cinderella v Cinderella, midnight is not a factor.

Know What They Say About Big Wrists…

Posted on by David Wright

One of the enduring puzzles in boxing is how some guys are able to shoot up through the weight divisions and stay competitive, while others can’t “carry” the extra weight and struggle with stamina and power as they move up.

Bad Left Hook has a fascinating analysis of this very topic, focusing on Manny Pacquiao, since he’s taken titles in no fewer than eight weight division. He’s won the lineal title in four. Amazing stuff.

How does he do it? Well, Manny has huge wrists.

You see, wrist size is associated with overall skeletal mass. So someone who has large wrists probably also has a large skeleton and, all things equal, probably weighs more than average.

Manny’s 8-inch wrists dwarf the expected 6-something wrists of the ‘average’ fighter his height.

The thing that’s amazing, then, isn’t how high up he can go in weight (Manny’s calculated ‘optimal’ weight is 150lbs), but rather how low he started! He must have been emaciated at 109lbs when he started out.

In other news, I found out what happens when you overtax your calves running in your fancy new ‘shoes’: you damage your Achilles tendon. I stopped running a week ago and did a quick 4k this morning. Still have pain.

I am furious with myself. This is destroying my training schedule.

Spectators Want Speed?

Posted on by David Wright

I remember the first time I ever watched myself on video playing football. I was horrified at how slow the game moved. It was like everyone was trapped in glue.

Of course, I’m used to watching the NFL on TV. Bit of a difference.

I’m watching a lot of college basketball right now and I think that the games at the highest levels of the NCAA play just as fast as NBA games. Honestly, I think they can sometimes play even faster. But the best NCAA teams would get crushed by any NBA team because they’re so much smaller.

The NFL and NHL are a more balanced upgrade of both. A sport like soccer or tennis would be entirely about the players doing what lower level players do, but at 1.x the pace.

I’d say the speed of a given level of sport relative to the highest level is a pretty good predictor of how much I’m going to enjoy watching it. It’s certainly why I don’t enjoy womens’ sports much.

What about baseball? I don’t really care. This ain’t science, kids, it’s sportswriting.