SPORTS FREAK: Some Modest Proposals

"Hockey doesn’t leave enough room behind the goal for cool lacrosse-style passes to charging forwards—it should knock out a few rows of seats at each end of the rink and make room."

By Michael Nelson

Here’s a bad idea: play a game for two hours or more and then, if it’s tied, decide who wins by playing a different game. Imagine the seventh game of the World Series going scoreless for 12 innings, only to be settled by five minutes of home run derby (or running bases, for that matter). Or imagine—well, no need to imagine, because it happened last Sunday—the biggest contest in all of sport, the final game of soccer’s World Cup, being called to a halt after 120 minutes of 1-1 play, only to be decided by something called a penalty-kick shootout. The way to fix soccer is to keep playing until a team wins, not to settle one game by playing another. Other sports cry out for other remedies to their chronic ills.

Soccer, known everywhere on Earth except the United States as football, actually provides a remedy for what plagues American football: the seemingly endless length of its game. What football should do is what soccer does: never stop the clock for anything. If injuries bring play to a halt for a few minutes, just tack a few minutes on to the end of the game. But everything else—incomplete passes, runs out of bounds, first-down measurements, whatever—should happen on the clock.

Football has another problem that shouldn’t be too hard to solve. Athletically speaking, place kickers are a breed apart from all the other players on the field, yet the points they put on the board by kicking PAT’s and field goals usually exceed the points scored by even the best backs and receivers and often decide the outcome of a game. What football needs to do is abolish the kicked extra point (make 'em run or pass for it) and reduce the point value of a field goal from three to two.

Baseball suffers from one of the same problems as football—games have become way too long—but requires a different remedy because it’s played off the clock. Happily, the remedy lies in our past—that is, the past of our own youth. Remember the seven-inning games? Did they seem at the time to lack completeness? No. Were they over soon enough that you didn’t have to miss a meal or phone in sick the next day if you stayed for the whole game? Yes.

As for basketball, what’s worse than the last two minutes of a close game, which between timeouts and intentional fouls invariably last a half hour or longer. Why not reduce the total number of timeouts by one for each team and abolish them altogether during the last five minutes of each half?

Lacrosse and hockey are great games that each could benefit from borrowing a feature from the other. Lacrosse is one period too long—it should go to three periods like hockey. Hockey doesn’t leave enough room behind the goal for cool lacrosse-style passes to charging forwards—it should knock out a few rows of seats at each end of the rink and make room. (While you’re at it, hockey, get some pucks a person can see, maybe even white ones against ice that’s dyed midnight blue.)

Golf needs to learn something about noise from every other sport. At golf tournaments, a rule of silence prevails that even monks abandoned years ago. The result is that the tiniest noise—a camera click, a child whose foot has been stepped on, a modest burp—can turn a 300-yard drive into a shank.

Golf needs to learn that it’s the tininess of the noise, not noise itself, that is the problem. When the slightest snap, crackle, or pop breaks a silence, it breaks an athlete’s concentration as well. But loud and continuous noises, the kind that crowds make at other sporting events, don’t distract athletes at all because the noise is general, a buzz or a roar. Can you imagine Roger Clemens stepping off the mound or Kobe Bryant refusing to take a free throw because it’s too loud?

Whoop it up, golf fans. And when there’s a tie, don’t break it by playing putt-putt.

Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a former editor of Washington Monthly.