Tag: sports

Clown school works

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Today I missed ~8 serves in a row. This fact became comic fodder for my then-opponent and later-teammate Rocky. The rest of my game was good. My team lost 4-11, a respectable score for only having one server. It equates, approximately, to 8-11 if both teammates could serve. It probably equates to slightly higher, since my missing every serve hurts my team’s momentum. Somehow, through the whole experience, I laughed. The other players – despite being annoyed that my serve was failing – clearly enjoyed the experience more than they otherwise would. (Rocky made jokes; my partner Daphne kindly suggested adjustments; my opponent-whose-name-escapes-me offered suggestions after the game.) 

I wonder if today’s missing serves comes from today being a particularly heavy gym day.  Or the fact that today I didn’t eat much between the gym and pickleball. Or the caffeine-esque concoction I had today (I don’t usually have caffeine; today was an exception). 

There’s something nice about feeling incredibly nervous and uncomfortable, yet feeling a calm sense of humor underneath. At no point was my inability to serve frustrating. Sure, it was bad. Yes, my teammate and the opponents assumed I lacked skill. (One guy called out that a serve that hits the kitchen line is short. I replied that I knew it was short: my confusion was whether the ball had hit that line or the side line. My teammate also took a bunch of middle shots with her backhand, a bad team strategy that’s clearly compensation for expecting a bad teammate.) Amusingly, the rest of my game was excellent: I just couldn’t do the simple bit! 

When you can’t do the most important part of the game properly, people assume you can’t do the other parts of the game well. 

After game 3, my serve came back. My shoulder felt loosened up. I bet it’s the gym. I rose from the ~sixth-best player on the courts (still true despite my bad serve, lol) to the second or third. 

All the while, I enjoyed. 

Nice! 

Heart > Hard

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At the pickleball courts today, a boy of around 10 years old approached me to play. I asked for a moment to wrap up my phone call, then we began to dink. His paddle: cheap and shoddy. His shoes: poorly gripping. His name: Arturo. 

We dinked for five-or-so minutes, then shifted into a singles game. He tracked the score with the vigor of a boy who cares about winning. I won the first game 11-4. We switched sides. He adjusted very little to my play. I won the second game 11-2. We approached the net. I asked what he’d like to do: drill, play another game, etc. He wanted a rematch. I won 11-1. 

We left the court to grab water. The foursome on our neighboring court had just disbanded. One had gone home; the remaining three were looking for a fourth. They asked me to join. I asked if they needed one or two. They needed one. 

We played one game. I ran less than I had with Arturo. I also, tellingly, enjoyed the game less. Arturo’s big heart overshadowed his lacking skill. In this one doubles game, we played maybe one good point. One of the guys hit a lob and was shocked I could run back to return it. I jokingly called it a “senior passing shot”. He didn’t find it funny. 

After the game, I mentioned wanting to grab water. Then, at the benches, I asked Arturo if he wanted to play more singles. He did. 

We played another two games of singles (11-2 and 11-1, or perhaps one of those was 11-0; I don’t recall). Then Arturo asked if we should try to join the other pair practicing down at the end: turn it into a doubles game. 

We did. They agreed. 

This game was fun. Not a good game, but a good time. Arturo wanted to win. Skyler and Nick played their best. But Nick has played fewer than 5 hours of pickleball in his life. He rapidly became the target. 

The game was worse, but the play was still much better. 

We laughed. I called out Skyler for “Unfair surprisery!” when he served a ball that my partner Nick missed. Skyler retorted that Nick had asked him not to go easy. Nick replied that the ball had been too easy: that’s why he missed it. 

I’d rather play with a heartfelt crew than a group that takes it too seriously. 

It’s a game that shares its name with a silly vegetable. Games are fundamentally silly. Be silly. Have fun.

Culture beats strategy

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One of the players at the Riverside Park pickleball courts denigrates his teammates. He shouts “Come on!” when they miss a shot. He tells them how to improve. He’s the second-best player. No one wants to play with him. 

After my final match today, I hung back to chat with two of the players. Quickly, their comments changed to how awful it is to play with him. He’s good when he’s on. But what about those comments! And his complaints about the sun being in his eyes? Sure, it’s hard on lobs from the north side. But half of the shots he missed were groundstrokes! 

I laughed and listened and cracked a few jokes. I didn’t add to the opinions – gossiping about that player doesn’t help. 

One skill that clown school taught me: complicité. The ability to play with someone like they’re your best friend. The ability to know who’s minor (something like “follower”) and who’s major (leader). The ability to find joy and pleasure underneath suffering and failure and pain. 

This guy doesn’t have that. He’s not giving comments from a place of love. He’s not kind and gentle and light. His teammates suffer. 

His teammates don’t just suffer cognitively. They play worse. 

Pickleball is a team game. And it’s not one where a good player can cover their partner’s mistakes: The losing team is generally whichever team has the worst player. If you speak in a manner that makes your teammate worse, your team performs worse. 

There’s also an element of safety. Not only does your teammate perform mechanically worse when they’re self-conscious; they also perform worse as a teammate. There are plenty of circumstances where you and your teammate need to feel voids, fill space, and cover each other’s weaknesses. You also need to make macro-level shifts (if your partner doesn’t have a third-shot drop, you can’t close the distance to the kitchen). All of these improve when a player calmly observes the game. All of them suffer when a player feels nervous with their partner. 

Right before I joined this game, I felt nervous. After a few years off from pickleball, the rust was still coming off of my serve. I knew that I might miss some serves, which is a terrible sin (it’s a free win for the opponents!). But I also knew that I could make sure my peers enjoy the game. And in that case, even if I shank a serve or two, they’ll still want to play with me. Plus they’ll have a better time. Duh. 

My team won every game. 

You know how I said he was the second-best player? 

I’m the best.

Return to the brine

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Today I played pickleball for the first time in years.
My serve is rusty (and always was the weakest part of my game).
My reflexes are strong.
My touch is precise. 

At the beginning, I joined a middling game: a few people who think of themselves as rated at a 3.5 skill level. (Pickleball is the sort of game where everyone says they’re 3.5). 

The first game, I shanked 4/6 serves. I just didn’t have the mind-body connection. No idea what to do or how to do it. My team lost 11-9. 

The second game, I served 3 of 4 successfully. My team went down 11-3. (The opposing team hit every ball to my teammate, targeting the weaker player.) 

The third game, I served 8/9 successfully. My team won 11-5. I almost grabbed one shot on a rolling dive. When I’m playing a game, I’m completely in it. 

After the third game, I watched the remaining players. Only one game has players even close to my level. I’m certainly in the top 5 players out today, quite possibly top 2 or 3. Once I have my serve back, I’ll return to competitive. 

My serve has always been weak since I have no interest in practicing it. Every other part of the game, you can improve while playing. The serve requires drilling. (Why would I want to do that?) 

I watched for a bit, then headed home. I didn’t want to overdo it. I want to see how my knee feels tomorrow (after both the pickleball and the dive). 

I watched a few YouTube videos on serving. It’s amusing that I play so well but have such a poor serve. If I improve this one part, I level up drastically. (Turns out, that’s why.)

Maybe soon I’ll return to this park for more pickleball. It feels like running into a long-lost love that never broke up, simply petered out. It’s nice to see her, to touch her, to hold her hand in mine. The world is brighter when we’re together. The sounds quiet*, and the birds watch while together we dance. 

*dink, dink, dink… 

Professional doubles tennis is broken

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And the solutions are making it worse.

Wednesday night at the US Open, the mixed doubles semifinals started warming up at 7pm; each match lasted around 1hr20min, so with breaks between the matches we finished around 11:45pm. Two semifinals and a final in a single evening. Muchová and Menšík took it 6-3, 1-6, 10-6.

That compression is the entire point of the new format. People don’t like doubles tennis as much. Instead of making it better, they’re trying to make less of it. I think there are better moves. 

Tennis is a subdivided game. 4 points win a game, 6 games win a set, 2 (or 3) sets win a match. Why the subdivisions? Why win by two?

Because tennis crushes your soul. You spend ten minutes crunching point after point toward winning a game, only for all that work to be valueless when you lose that game. The same applies to sets: I don’t care how much work you put into the set, 1-6 or 5-7 both count as the same loss.

The subdivisions create the drama. They also create enthusiasm. Game points matter more than normal points. Set points matter even more. Deuce returns the game to an active stall: two jousters on idling motorcycles rich sparking with potential energy. Advantage is better still: one player a point from victory, the other a point from losing everything they just built.

The attempts to “improve” the game make it shorter and worse. Doubles removed advantage. 40-40 is still called “deuce”, but it’s now next point wins, rather than win by two. This change isn’t new:  the ATP has run no-ad doubles since 2006, which means the ratchet has been turning for twenty years. I’m writing now because it’s accelerating. 

This year, the US Open shortened the set too. In the mixed doubles championship, every match except the final is first to 4 games instead of first to 6. And they’ve replaced the third set entirely (final included): instead of playing games, it’s a “match tiebreak”, first to ten points.

That’s how you fit the semifinals and the final into one night.

The problem? Less-engaging games. If you have a bad game, the solution is not making it shorter. This is the classic mistake a promoter makes when they note “people have short attention spans these days”.

Don’t make it shorter. Make it better. Tennis lives on the drama. The excitement. The possibility. The heartbreak. Don’t give me less of that. Give me more.

Look elsewhere

Tennis has multiple levels: a match consists of sets which contain games which contain points. The US Open is making alterations at the set level. That’s the wrong level. The problem isn’t that doubles points come in sixes instead of fours. The problem is the points.

Only around ⅛ of doubles points are engaging (e.g. involving an impressive show of athleticism, or great strategy/tactics, or a large swing in likelihood of who wins the point). Compare that to ~⅓ in singles. And in singles between strong competitors, even when one player serves ace after ace, the mental game makes up for the disappointing physical game. Doubles has no such cover.

So make the point more interesting.

To do that, restrict the ability to hit winners. The first time a point goes hard-serve → barely-successful-return → smash, it’s cool. By the third time, it’s repetitive. By the thirtieth, you’re on your phone. (People actually left the tournament audience between the semifinals and the finals!) 

How to limit winners? Mandate that the ball’s second bounce be within some designated line arena. The game goes from pound-pound-pound to much more finesse.

It’s also a change tennis players could easily adjust to. You’re not moving the lines (they have years of muscle memory hitting exactly those places) and you’re not adding new restrictions on which shots are legal (eg pickleball’s no-volley zone). You’re limiting the players’ targeting and power, which is already in their wheelhouse. Tennis doesn’t become a fundamentally different sport: you just basically make one version of killshot illegal. 

(A worse idea, for contrast: scrap the finish line entirely and make every game win-by-two from zero. Every point matters. You don’t get the comebacks from 0-40, but you give every point more potential energy. I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think it’s still better than simply making the match shorter.)

The US Open has pumped money into the mixed doubles championship and restructured the seeding to encourage big names to play it. It worked, for two nights. But none of it makes the game better. I like watching tennis. Yet after viewing the mixed doubles at this tournament, I have no interest in watching Serena WIlliams and Carlos Alcaraz play mixed doubles just as I have no interest in watching them do laundry. Even if someone were drawn once by the famous names, they’d be unlikely to return due to the unenjoyable structure. Pumping money into a bad structure is like adding fuel to an unstable fire: you create a flash in the pan. 

You improve the game long-term by actually improving the game. Stop experimenting at the meta-structure and actually make the points fun.

Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping

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Playing the ref just makes sport less fun. 

Soccer sucks. It mainly sucks because of its relationship to fouls: too many key moments of the game feel like a child overreacting in front of their parent so the parent will punish their sibling.

It could be my American sensibilities, but I don’t respect a game where so much is influenced by the authority figures. Yes, American football stops the clock. But we stop the clock in accordance with a very specific set of rules, and we review every touchdown to ensure the rules were followed. Over the three soccer games I watched this World Cup, however, I recall four or five spots where the announcers noted that a call was incorrect. (Most often these were questions of who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds — an easily answerable question via video review.)

So, back to flopping vs drawing a foul:

  • Flopping is pretending that someone else did something that they did not actually do (and from which you are mortally wounded).
  • Drawing a foul is behaving in such a way that the opponent actually does something to violate the rules of the game.

Flopping is, at least to my American ethics, anathema to sport. Sport is about strength, determination, and courage. It is a battlefield where iron sharpens iron, where the best of my group challenges the best of your group for honor and glory. It is, as Orwell said, “war minus the shooting.” (Orwell meant that as an indictment. I mean it as a compliment.)

We look up to athletes as the epitome of physical prowess. And athletic performance, as separated from theatrical performance, is real. Physical. Not subject to judgment calls — or as nearly not as humans can manage.

The difference between flopping and drawing a foul is the difference between truth and lies. In a flop, nothing happened. In a drawn foul, a rule really was violated.

While watching a soccer game with Partner’s sister last weekend, I asked how long it would be until all soccer plays are reviewed by video. She scoffed and said she was against using AI in this case.

Two thoughts:

  1. I hadn’t mentioned AI; I had mentioned video review (lol)
  2. When it comes to sport, shouldn’t we be in favor of every activity that makes the rules more accurately enforced? If a sport is merely the implementation of those rules accurately and universally, shouldn’t we all support their accurate and universal implementation?

If the rules truly are the rules, any hesitancy toward enforcing them is either 1) an argument against those rules actually being the rules, or 2) corruption. (I’ve argued before that the rules of a game are never quite the rules. FIFA is not making that argument.)

FIFA takes upwards of three minutes to video-review its plays. American football’s reviews stop the game too — but they’ve structured the game to make this experience dramatic and fair (every touchdown automatically reviewed, a fixed list of reviewable calls, coaches with a limited budget of challenges). The rules for reviewing the rules are themselves rules.

From the president of FIFA celebrating Argentina’s victory (I assume because Messi is the biggest economic draw for the tournament) to the FIFA draws happening in a notoriously riggable way, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this sport in which players appeal so frequently and vigorously to the authority figures is also the sport where the authority figures use their power so corruptly.

Americans don’t like government. We rebel against authority. Maybe that’s why a game of cowering and groveling and performing in front of the king will never quite sit right with us. The last time we petitioned a king for fairer enforcement of the rules, it ended in war plus the shooting.

The Secret Soccer Structure

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To keep 90 minutes interesting, you need an arc. To get an arc without structure, you need a conductor.

Maybe soccer has a secret rhythm.

In today’s Argentina/England World Cup Semifinal, the players came out swinging. Only three minutes into the game, an Argentine player whacked an Englishman in the back of the head. I immediately shouted, “Red card!”, much to Partner’s dismay as her ear was near my mouth.

And then, the refs… just… didn’t?

They awarded a free kick to England. At any previous point in the tournament, merely stepping on a guy’s foot has been enough to receive a card. But an unprovoked whack to the back of the head?

Just after the hydration break, one of the announcers said something like, “That’s probably the last foul they’re going to get away with like that before the ref starts handing out yellow cards.”

He was right. Shortly after, the first yellow card came out.

Wait… What?

A player can do the exact same thing in the beginning of a match and it’s a mere free kick, but later in the match it receives a card?

Do soccer fans like a specific emotional arc? It wouldn’t surprise me if all enjoyable sports share a common one (I’m looking at you, Freytag’s pyramid). But soccer is a relatively random-tension game. Tennis has tension management built into its structure: “game points” and side switches that increase and release tension. Soccer has no such machinery. So the refs supply the dramaturgy by hand — swallow the whistle in the first act, tighten as the plot demands, save the cards for the climax. The announcer wasn’t guessing. He’d read the script.

One of my biggest gripes about soccer during this World Cup has been the importance of the referees. But the game may actually need them. Soccer is the simplest major sport. (Its history can be traced back to the first time a child said, “Look, ma: no hands!”) That simplicity leads to games of unpredictable quality. The England/Mexico game was one of the greatest sporting events I’ve watched. Today’s Argentina/England was decently enjoyable. The remaining 6 games I’ve watched were terrible disappointments.

To fit an appropriate emotional arc, the game may require better structure. Update fouls and substitutions. Change the rules around contact. Start the game with 3 penalty kicks per side. Award corner kicks or penalty kicks at various times throughout. Something to make this game less universally flat.

Perhaps most of all: tell us how much time remains. (Yes, I know about the fourth official’s board. A minimum is not a clock; the actual end still arrives at the referee’s whim.) I’ll grant that the ambiguity creates drama — for the initiated. For the newbie, it creates only confusion. And a real clock needn’t kill your “play until an appropriately calm stopping point”: Rugby 7s has a clock, but the game only ends after it goes off and the ball next goes dead.

It might be true that avid soccer fans can feel the right energy of a game and thereby determine when a foul is a yellow card rather than a mere free kick. But the rules of a game should be comprehensible to a newbie, lest you end up with arbitrary authoritarian rulings.

You know, like ending the Argentina/England game when you did — ball still in play, within range of the Argentine goal.

Pickford’s Getting Jumpy

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A high-quality game is one in which arbitrary referee decisions do not determine the outcome. Therefore, FIFA soccer is not a high-quality game. 

Today, in the England versus Norway World Cup game, about 20 minutes before the end of regular time, I said to Partner: “Pickford’s getting jumpy. It’s time to take advantage of him.”

Pickford is the English goalie, and it’s understandable that he’s jumpy: in his regular occupation, he does not play for a particularly high-level team. But his jumpiness is still notable: to win in a sporting competition, it is often advantageous to note one’s opponents’ weaknesses. And Pickford being jumpy is very good for the Norwegian team.

The game was tied at the end of regulation time, so: extra time. In extra time with only a few minutes left, England led by 2-1 when Norway succeeded in bringing the ball all the way toward the English goal. Pickford punched it away… and ran into his own teammate. He fell to the ground, doubled over. The refs stopped the game. 

The Norwegian players were irate. The announcers had to justify this decision. They said: it’s not very sporting to play the game with a goalie who’s doubled over on the ground.

That’s insane, and it’s what’s wrong with soccer. What is sporting is to follow the rules — not to make arbitrary referee decisions which have vast, overwhelming influences on the game. What’s not sporting is stopping the game when one team has made a giant mistake. 

WHAT SPORTING ACTUALLY MEANS

Sporting as in “be a good sport” and “play with sportsmanship”: what does it mean? The clearest example that comes to my mind is one of an image associated with hunting animals “for sport”. It is not very “sporting” to tie up an animal and then just shoot it when it can’t get away. There’s a famous story about Teddy Roosevelt choosing not to do just this, in part owing to his belief in the morals and ethics of being a sportsman. Sportsmen have honor, fight fairly, and accept their defeats. A sportsman is not a cheat, nor are they a wimp. 

In that definition, you might say it’s not very sporting to shoot the ball at the goal while the opposing goalie is down. And that’s perhaps a fair point… if the game of soccer were at all a sporting game… 

FLOPPING, THE ANTITHESIS

But soccer is a game in which players fall on the ground, clutching themselves, pretending to be terribly injured, upwards of a dozen times per game. These are fully-grown, professional athletes who receive massive paychecks. And we want them flopping on the ground pretending injury? 

I can think of no less-sporting (dishonorable, wimpy) activity than pretending injury in this deplorably weak way. What is sporting is to give the opportunity for success. 

So when the opposing team makes a mistake, the only reasonable response is 1) assume he is faking (because more than 90% of the time, soccer players are faking), and 2) kick the ball in the goal. 

YOU CAN’T FOUL YOUR OWN TEAM

When I was six or seven years old, my soccer coach stopped the scrimmage we were playing because one player had fouled another. He called the first player over and demanded that he apologize. Then, after demanding the apology, the coach said something like: Wait — you guys are on the same team. Never mind. He called off the apology and continued the scrimmage.

In a very real, fundamental way, it is impossible for a player to foul a member of their own team. The reasons behind this should be obvious. Most simply, a foul is a violation of the rules wherein one team harms another. 

For over 20 minutes, I had been telling Partner that the English goalie was acting jumpy. This was the moment I had been predicting. Sure, I had expected him to make a mistake against his opponents, but running into your own teammate definitely qualifies as an outcome of someone’s jumpiness. He made his bed: now is his time to lie in it. 

EVERY SIGNIFICANT EVENT MATTERS

Soccer games contain very few goals, and most moments of soccer do not lead to goals. Near the end of regulation time, an overlay appeared on the screen: each team had taken ten shots, of which four had been shots on goal. Eight shots on goal in a total of 90 minutes equates to fewer than one every 11 minutes. 

The goalie being down for the count while the ball is near the goal matters. Stopping the game at the point where Pickford is on the ground — by his own doing, having made his own mistake, colliding with his own teammate — is unfair, both to the Norwegian team and any unaligned fans (such as myself) who simply want to watch a good match. 

BAD INCENTIVES MADE WORSE 

Flopping is already a scourge: when one player touches an opponent, you’ll often see both players fall to the floor, clutching their bodies in anguish disproportionate to the actual injury. And now you’re going to encourage players to do it in response to interactions with their own team? Not only will you encourage more flopping; you’ll also give even more power to the referees to make judgment calls based on theatrical performance. 

Further, what about the concept of psychological warfare? In sport in general, it is a completely legitimate strategy to play in such a manner that causes one’s player to make mistakes. In soccer, if a player develops the skill of causing his opponents to run into each other, are you really suggesting we outlaw that skill? 

SOCCER STILL SUCKS

Would Norway have scored? Probably not – most soccer shots miss, which is part of why it’s such a terribly boring game best seen in four-minute post-game highlight videos – but that doesn’t matter. This question is one of fairness, and stopping the game was unacceptably unfair. 

“Who won?” you may be asking. Does it even matter, if the game is a sham? 

P.S. My problem is not with soccer itself:  the game “put the ball into the opponent’s net without using your hands” is a beautiful game. My gripe is with the current implementation as run by FIFA, including the poor power structure and abysmal incentives. 

Win by heart attack 

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To win, let the goalie fail. To let him fail, kick the ball at the damn goal. 

If you play professional soccer and you miss a shootout penalty kick high or wide, you deserve to be shot.

Penalty kicks are important. In a tied game in the World Cup elimination stage, they determine the fate of your entire nation. 

If you miss wide or high, you lose. Over. No opportunity to win. No ability for the goalie to make a mistake.

If you roll the ball toward the goal, one foot per second, as slow as a 4-year-old kicking with maximum power, you could win! The goalie could have a heart attack! Isn’t that great?

When I played middle school soccer, I played goalie. A remarkably low-skilled goalie, I might add. I still remember one moment from a game two decades ago. My team’s best player fouled the opposing team’s best player in the box, prompting a penalty kick. My coach caught my attention and gestured to me with his finger on his lip, pointing left. I immediately thought “I understand what you’re implying: I should go left. But our soccer skills are much worse than you think. Professional goalies choose a side and pray. Middle schoolers kick slow enough that we can choose after the kick.”

The opposing team’s star shot… 

And he missed! He shanked it wide! I won! Purely by being there! Did I go left? Did I wait-and-see? Doesn’t matter! I won! 

I was not a good soccer player. Don’t let people like me win. Today in the Australia vs Egypt World Cup game shootout, one of the Egyptian players kicked the ball straight down the middle… directly at the goalie… and it still went in! The goalie had chosen a side, and the ball came straight down the pipe! The guy who shot it – Egypt’s captain – even said afterwards, “If anyone was going to Panenka [chip a shot down the middle], it was going to be me!” Egypt won because Australia shot two penalty kicks high. 

Shoot. Your. Penalty. Kicks. On. Goal! 

Also, an unrelated suggestion: start every soccer game with 3 penalty kicks per side. Makes the game more interesting for one team to be up 2-1 when it starts. 

And a non-serious suggestion: if the game ends tied, add a new ball every 10 minutes. Eventually, someone will score. 

The $20 Locker

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Even when this city smacks me, I still see its beauty. 

I love New York’s reasonableness. 

Today I visited a Yankees game. The metal detector dinged on me when I passed. The bag inspector told me I can’t take a laptop inside. He summoned his teammate. His teammate pointed me to a business across the street. He said, “There’s lockers right across the street. They’re not affiliated with us but people use them all the time. When you come back, tell the security and they’ll let you skip the line.” I asked his name. He said Anthony.

The security guards moved the barriers as I shortcutted back through the zigzagging line. I sped across the street. Inside, the worker charged me $20 and ushered me to the back where the lockers live. I placed my laptop inside, pocketed the key, and told him “okay” when he said the locker rental ends 30 minutes after the game. I asked him his name. His coworker said “Ahmed”. He repeated “Ahmed.”

I spent $25 on the Yankees ticket. On one hand, $20 is expensive. On the other hand, the policies are reasonable at every step of the way. Can policy easily distinguish between a laptop and a recording device? Perhaps not. Is this policy public on their website? Yes. Did I check? No, but I could have and that’s my fault. Is there a reasonable solution to this problem? Yes, and it’s not $100 when it very well could be.

When I returned, I told the security guards that I had visited the lockers and Anthony told me to skip the line. My ticket buzzed in, and I retrieved my limited-edition Yankees soccer jersey. For which I paid an additional $10 over the cost of normal tickets. Not because I care about the jersey, but because my father was in town, and he’s always wanted to visit Yankee Stadium. 

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy the ingredients.