I don't know if any of you caught the following interesting discussion during the Super Bowl between Troy Aikman and Joe Buck about the Patriots' successful challenge that the Giants had 12 men on the field:
BUCK: . . . [T]he point remains that a sport doesn’t actually need a “hard and fast” rule in cases like this. More specifically, you have to agree that in hockey, there’s no way the Giants would get such a damaging penalty in such a crucial situation on grounds as flimsy as these. And maybe that’s a better way of doing things in the end, instead of allowing for rigid regulatory minutiae that are inconsequential for the immediate play but potentially game-deciding nonetheless.
AIKMAN: Look, Joe, I hear you. I said this was a tough break. But you remember what Wittgenstein said in aphorism 88 of Philosophical Investigations?
BUCK: I do.
AIKMAN: Well, for the folks at home, let’s put up the Wittgenstein graphic. If we could get number 88 on the screen? Thanks very much, guys.
The entire transcript, which is a refreshing departure from the usual drivel spouted by these two, is posted in a comment to this post to avoid tying up the front page.
BUCK: . . . [T]he point remains that a sport doesn’t actually need a “hard and fast” rule in cases like this. More specifically, you have to agree that in hockey, there’s no way the Giants would get such a damaging penalty in such a crucial situation on grounds as flimsy as these. And maybe that’s a better way of doing things in the end, instead of allowing for rigid regulatory minutiae that are inconsequential for the immediate play but potentially game-deciding nonetheless.
AIKMAN: Look, Joe, I hear you. I said this was a tough break. But you remember what Wittgenstein said in aphorism 88 of Philosophical Investigations?
BUCK: I do.
AIKMAN: Well, for the folks at home, let’s put up the Wittgenstein graphic. If we could get number 88 on the screen? Thanks very much, guys.
The entire transcript, which is a refreshing departure from the usual drivel spouted by these two, is posted in a comment to this post to avoid tying up the front page.
3 comments:
BUCK: There’s a call that won’t make Giants fans very happy.
AIKMAN: No, but the rule clearly states that the player must be completely off the field before the ball was snapped, and it’s also pretty clear that Blackburn was just short. It’s a tough break for the Giants, but still, it was the right call.
BUCK: Sure, but he was sprinting to the sideline, and nearly made it. It’s not as if he was standing out there on the field trying to be some kind of unnoticed extra blocker on the coverage.
AIKMAN: Fair enough, but the rule doesn’t recognize those niceties. You’re either on the field or you’re off, and the only ambiguity, so far as I can see, is whether you can be off the field if you’re in the air but still hovering briefly within the field of play.
BUCK: But Troy, aren’t you reading the letter of the rule at the expense of its spirit? There’s no sense in which Blackburn was part of the play. His being a step shy of the sideline had no material effect whatsoever on the punt or its return.
AIKMAN: Joe, I gotta disagree with you on principle here. The letter of the rule just is its spirit. You’re either on the field or you’re not. We don’t want to open this up to infinitely-nuanced judgment calls from the officiating staff as to whether a player who belatedly realizes he needs to get off the field has removed himself sufficiently from the play in what you call a “material” sense. You need a clear-cut rule for things like this or the sport just won’t work.
BUCK: Begging your pardon, Troy, but that’s just not true. In professional hockey, where player substitutions happen on a far more frequent and fluid basis as players skate shifts of 30 to 40 seconds, everyone understands perfectly well that a player can be “off the ice” even if he is not completely off the ice. As long as a player is leaving the ice, is within five feet of the bench, and not involved in the play, he’s OK. Rule 17 clearly—to use your term—states that “players may be changed at any time from the players’ bench provided that the player or players leaving the ice shall be within five feet (5’) of his players’ bench and out of the play before the change is made” and that
[i]f in the course of making a substitution, either the player entering the game or the player retiring from the ice surface plays the puck with his stick, skates or hands or who checks or makes any physical contact with an opposing player while either the player entering the game or the retiring player is actually on the ice, then the infraction of “too many men on the ice” will be called.
If in the course of a substitution either the player entering the play or the player retiring is struck by the puck accidentally, the play will not be stopped and no penalty will be called.
AIKMAN: Well, that’s exactly why hockey is un-American, Joe. It’s pettifogging nonsense like that. And the fighting, as well. That kind of violence in sports is just uncouth.
BUCK: Granted. But the point remains that a sport doesn’t actually need a “hard and fast” rule in cases like this. More specifically, you have to agree that in hockey, there’s no way the Giants would get such a damaging penalty in such a crucial situation on grounds as flimsy as these. And maybe that’s a better way of doing things in the end, instead of allowing for rigid regulatory minutiae that are inconsequential for the immediate play but potentially game-deciding nonetheless.
AIKMAN: Look, Joe, I hear you. I said this was a tough break. But you remember what Wittgenstein said in aphorism 88 of Philosophical Investigations?
BUCK: I do.
AIKMAN: Well, for the folks at home, let’s put up the Wittgenstein graphic. If we could get number 88 on the screen? Thanks very much, guys.
If I tell someone “Stand roughly here”—may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too?
But isn’t it an inexact explanation? -Yes; why shouldn’t we call it “inexact”? Only let us understand what “inexact” means. For it does not mean “unusable”.
And let us consider what we call an “exact” explanation in contrast with this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn’t the engine idling?
And remember too that we have not yet defined what is to count as overstepping this exact boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be established. And so on.
OK, so you see my point. We have to define what is to count as overstepping this exact boundary, and how, with what instruments, it is to be established. That’s what Wittgenstein says we should do.
BUCK: Troy, I just don’t see how you get there. I mean, that’s a complete misreading of aphorism 88—it’s like when Vinny Testaverde tried to argue that there was something fascist in the work of John Stuart Mill. Wittgenstein’s whole point is that we do not need that degree of exactness in order to play a game properly. That’s why, toward the end of 88, he says, “No single ideal of exactness has been laid down; we do not know what we should be supposed to imagine under this head.”
AIKMAN: Wow, Joe, that Testaverde shot was a low blow. But I’ll let it pass. Because the person doing the misreading here is you. Wittgenstein is saying that there are various degrees of exactness that pertain to various language-games, so that when we say “You should come to dinner more punctually; you know it begins at one o’clock exactly” we don’t require people to consult an atomic clock, and when we say “stand roughly there” we don’t actually draw them a chalk line. But that’s in ordinary language, right? For the rules of football you can’t let the engine idle, Joe. The chalk line has breadth. That’s why we call it a touchdown when the ball breaks the plane of the front edge of the goal line. It’s a game of inches and half-inches and quarter-inches, Joe, and, as aphorism 88 says, “what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more exact.”
BUCK: Yes, and then aphorism 88 goes on to ask, “Am I inexact when I do not give our distance from the sun to the nearest foot, or tell a joiner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of an inch?” Let’s be serious, Troy. Blackburn was, for all intents and purposes, out of the play. And as for the definition of “touchdown,” well, that line-breadth plane-breaking thing really is a problem. I think Michael Bérubé has it right, in the end—hockey really is a structurally superior sport in every way. In hockey, you’ll recall, every portion of the puck has to cross the goal line; if any part of the puck remains on any part of the line, even if seven-eighths of the puck is in the net, it’s no goal. Which makes a lot more sense, in the end.
AIKMAN: So you’re saying you prefer hockey because it’s more ambiguous than football with regard to player substitutions and less ambiguous with regard to goals?
BUCK: Exactly, for all available meanings of “exact.” After all, as Wittgenstein says, right after saying “what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more exact”: “the point here is what we call ‘the goal.’” I just think it makes sense to be more stringent and less ambiguous about goals and touchdowns, where points are actually scored and the ‘goal’ of the game is actually achieved, than about player substitutions that have no bearing on the course of play. And I’ll add that when hockey did experiment with a hard-and-fast rule, the so-called “crease rule” that disallowed a goal even if an attacking player had a skate lace in the crease but had no effect whatsoever on the play, the result was a disaster, and the NHL abandoned the rule after the infamous Buffalo-Dallas “no goal” debacle of 1999.
AIKMAN: Interesting point. But you’re still wrong about Wittgenstein, and I’m going to ask Howie Long what he thinks after the game.
BUCK: You go right ahead and do that. Howie’s got my back on this one.
This transcript courtesy of Michael Berube, a professor at Penn State, and, apparently, a very funny man. http://crookedtimber.org/
I cried. I peed. Thanks!
Man, I watched the game but totally missed that whole exchange.
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