Diana Nyads Blog

Diana Nyad’s Blog for Week of Nov. 24       Come Embrace the Chaos with Me

Along with many of you, the addition of sketchy new sports to the Olympic agenda has been a sore point with me over recent years. Let’s rag on Rhythmic Gymnastics for a moment. We already had the long-standing sport of classic women’s gymnastics, full of incredibly difficult demands of skill, coordination, and strength. The extreme difficulty of the mere 4-inch wide balance beam. The athletic challenge of the uneven bars. So why did we need to add Rhythmic Gymnastics as an Olympic medal sport? It’s pretty. It’s enjoyable to watch women twirling ribbons but the skill set is ridiculously below classic gymnastics, to the point that it is laughable that Rhythmic Gymnastics deigns to be on the same Olympic program with the standard sport.

And there are constant questionable additions to the Olympic agenda and other suggestions of sports to be considered. Do you know that Beijing actually entertained the idea of adding both chess and bridge to their Games? Come on! Chess is a centuries-old, grand game of the mind, a game to be respected and followed in the proper milieu. But are we really straying so far from the ancient Greek Olympic credo of  ”swifter, higher, stronger” to think of two individuals sitting passively at a board game as an Olympic sport?

Well, ballroom dancing has been lobbying the International Olympic Committee for inclusion for about a decade now and I must say I used to be quite the naysayer about the idea and I’ve changed my mind. At the Sydney, Australia Games in 2000, ballroom was given a spot as an exhibition sport. It was a popular venue for a couple of nights but the consensus among Australian and International Olympic officials both was that ballroom dancing did not entirely fit the bill of Olympic sport. And I was in agreement at that time.

I’ve just finished watching the seventh season of Dancing with the Stars. And I actually started watching professional ballroom dancing when my mom took it up in a passionate way. And I do believe this is a sport that fulfills the “swifter, higher, faster” credo. The athleticism required is undeniable. The quickness, the footwork, the lifts, the coordination, the strength, the endurance. All of it qualifies as credible, respectable sport.

When you hear Super Bowl, All-Pro NFL player Warren Sapp state that Dancing with the Stars was the greatest experience of his life, you take that as instant credibility for the dance process. On Dancing with the Stars, even moreso than the final performances each week, what was so eye-opening and impressive was the footage from the practice studios. The work, the hard work, the physicality, is beyond question. Those are the moves of athletes. It’s directly comparable to ice dancing in the Winter Olympics. Those are world-class ice skaters who do their sport in tandem. Exact same thing for ballroom dancing. A short eight years ago, I laughed at the idea of ballroom dancing in the Olympic Games. Now I’d not only vote for it, if I had a vote, but I’d watch it and applaud it eagerly, along with swimming and track and firld.

Diana’s Blog for Week of Nov 17. Come Embrace the Chaos with me.

The NFL does it right. They have settled through the years on The Perfect Season, except perhaps those four exhibition games in August. The drama starts with the first week’s kick-off and has no trouble maintaining that high-octane surge, week-end by week-end for the 16-game regular season and the post season. The set-up gives the fan plenty to chew on but doesn’t overstay its welcome, as is the case in just about every other sport, every other League today.

The NBA drags out over eight long months. Can you really take these early November games seriously, when the Championship won’t be played until June? Except for rivalry games, I find many of the NBA starters this time of year phone in the first three quarters. We don’t see the full fire of Dirk Nowitsky, the intense slash and dish of Steve Nash, or the inside guts of Ray Allen until about February. Flashes of all their brilliance come in during these early games. But not sustained brilliance. In the NFL, no player can afford to give anything less than their brilliance on any given Sunday.

Baseball’s season is nearly as long as pro basketball’s and it’s about to get longer. This year’s World Series was diluted by game interruptions and postponements due to lousy late-October weather in a Northeastern city. Well, next year the season is going to extended even further and if the Series goes seven games, we’ll be playing baseball on Nov 7. What are the chances that a Northern or Midwestern team with November tricky weather will be involved? Good, the chances are good. Can’t we possibly shorten the regular season and have the Fall Classic in early October, with the first lilt of autumn in the air, beautiful crisp cool nights at the ball park, but far enough from winter that we can literally mean it when we call it the Fall Classic? I don’t know about you, but I could easily skip a few of the series between Inter-League teams who play each other so very many times over the long season.

Golf and tennis have lost their virtual minds. We just this week finished the tennis season. In mid-November! And did you tune in to Shanghai to see the round robin they call the Master’s Cup? I doubt it. Even if you love Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and track the best players in the world through those epic two-week marathons, I bet you can’t hang with the sport all the way through November. I know I can’t and I’m a verifiable tennis fanatic. After the U.S. Open wraps and Labor Day comes and goes, I’ve had my summer fill and want to get excited for the Australian Open come The New Year. But the players are weary and injured by this time of year. They’re uninspired. Same with golf. The FedExCup which goes into the fall is an ill-conceived event whereby the winner doesn’t even have to show up for all the tournaments of the Cup if he has so many points banked that he can stay home and watch his mates on television. The Lorena Ochoa Open just played in Mexico this past week-end. I liked following the men’s and women’s Majors through the spring and summer. Augusta, Pebble Beach, Shinnecock, Royal Andrews. Right now, mid-November, I’m watching football. How can I care about world-class golfers every week of the year? Give me a more concentrated season and I’ll care a lot more.

College football does run its regular season just about like the NFL. One anticipated drama per week. But, as we all know too well, the college post season is a long slog of mostly meaningless Bowl Games. The money coffers ring and shake and green flows through the NCAA but we fans are left without a playoff system that proves to us who is in fact the best in the gridiron land. It’s empty. It’s ridiculous. And no matter how much Barack Obama and the rest of us lobby for a change to an 8-team playoff, the smell of money is far too strong for this insane Bowl system to change.

But the NFL? I wait for it thirstily every year. Those four exhibition games in August are tiresome, especially when injuries result. But I do understand that coaches need to observe rookies and trade players in game action. And players need to play their way into game shape. But once the first regular season game gets under way, it’s a Perfect Season. 16 Games. Just enough to let you study and follow all 32 teams, watch them build or fizzle. You start to know the character of the teams. You know which defense can rise to the moment when they have to. You know which back-up quarterback can come off the bench and lead with calm and skill. You want more when that 16th game comes. And you just can’t say that about any other sport. The post season in the NFL is like magic. It unfolds from West to East, North to South, culling out the weaknesses, fairly allowing the undeniable two best to the Super Bowl.

The parity in the NFL is exciting. The cast of superbly athletic characters is spread beautifully across the league. Teams like Tennessee show superlative well-balanced skills that no pundit predicted before the season. Teams like New England find their character and overcome even a loss as crushing as Tom Brady. It’s a Perfect Season, I tell you, just Perfect.

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