Marc Stier at Large

As some of you have seen, Since Giannis’s post-game interview the other day, I’ve been looking at how we talk about sports in a new light. One of the necessary fictions of life is that success and failure in our lives are at least to some extent under our control. It’s a necessary fiction because if we don’t believe that to some extent, we will be discouraged, downhearted, despondent, and at the very least not put forward the effort we need to succeed. Or we wouldn’t be able to face the injustice of a world in which some people grow up in deep poverty and others grow up wealthy. Or we wouldn’t be able to deal with knowing that some of us are going to die young from an accident or disease, and others won’t. But it is a fiction because so much of our lives are not under our… Continue reading

“James Harden sucks.” We’ve heard a lot of that in the week after he scored a career-high 45 points in a playoff game. I have some thoughts on that accusation. Those who don’t do work that involves some kind of public performance—or who do it but are not honest with themselves—don’t realize how varied our performance can be from one day or even one moment to another. Bill Russell wrote about this in his wonderful (second) auto-biography, Second Wind, which I read in my early twenties and has influenced me in many ways since. Russell said that after every game he gave himself a grade based on how well he performed, and reviewed things he did well and did not do well. IIRC he said that he averaged about a B. When I started teaching, I did the same thing. My teaching was almost done in a seminar format. if… Continue reading