Who Would Win a Fight between Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee?

The Sports Fan's Book of Answers

Nicholas Hobbes

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857895301
• Print ISBN:
  9781843547556

Nicholas Hobbes tackles the sports-related questions that thousands of people have debated in front of the TV and in the pub, but for which they have never found a definitive answer. These include: Why do female tennis players grunt? Are English footballers really thicker than foreign players? Why do cyclists shave their legs? Can one swimming pool be 'faster' than another? Who would win a fight between Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee? Drawing on studies by statisticians and scientists, doctors and philosophers, Nicholas Hobbes explains the whys, whats and hows, so you don't have to.

Could a human pyramid in the goalmouth defend a 1-0 lead?

Imagine that in the dying seconds of injury time at the Euro 2008 Final, the scoreline between England and Portugal stands at nil-nil. Aaron Lennon begins England’s last attack with a high ball lofted into the Portuguese box as Peter Crouch makes his run. Crouch has been planning for this moment for two years, and he puts his weight training to good use as he picks Michael Owen up by the waist and lifts his strike partner clear of the opposing defence. Owen heads the winning goal of the competition with ease, and the linesman is altogether too startled to raise his flag. Wearing their victors’ medals, the pair repeat their stunt for the photographers at the hoisting of the cup, and a new dance craze leads to broken collarbones across the nation…

Well, why not? At first sight, there appears to be nothing in the rules of football against picking up a teammate, just as there is nothing in the rules of rugby union against giving another player an ‘assist’ during a line-out. But, according to the Professional Game Match Officials organization, Peter Crouch should receive a yellow card for ‘ungentlemanly conduct’ from the referee. There are many similar wheezes that sportsmen and -women never attempt despite the urging of lay observers at big tournaments. Sometimes the rulebook brings a swift end to the discussion. Why can’t a player’s teammates link arms and form a barrier around him as he dribbles towards goal? Because obstructing opponents is not allowed. Why can’t a tennis player ‘catch’ a lobbed ball on his racquet, then stroll up to the net and drop it over the other side? Because that would be construed as hitting the ball twice, which again is not allowed. But more often than not, the reason why there is no law against a manoeuvre is that there is no need for one – because it cannot be done.

Consider the practicality of Crouch and Owen’s last-minute goal. In rugby, players are allowed to handle the ball, which is thrown carefully from a short distance away. Footballers, by contrast, typically have to cover more ground to connect with a cross, and the problem is that neither the lifter nor the liftee will be especially mobile in this arrangement. Faced with a jostling defence and a fast-moving ball played in from the wing, Crouch and Owen would be more likely to topple over and add to the injury list than make successful contact with the ball.

But what of the favourite question asked by the uninitiated when a football team surrenders a 1-0 lead in the ninetieth minute: why on earth didn’t they just form a human pyramid covering their goalmouth? The fact is that you would need more than eleven players to form a big enough pyramid. With half the team standing on the other half’s shoulders, most of the target would be undefended, so they would have to position themselves side by side. According to FA regulations, the goalposts must be 7.32 metres (8 yards) apart, measured from their inner edges. Assuming that each player in the ‘shield wall’ covers 50 cm, that still leaves almost two metres of space to shoot at from close range, not counting mishaps and nutmegs through their legs.

A larger player like Bill ‘Fatty’ Foulke, the 24-stone giant who kept goal for Sheffield United, Chelsea, Bradford and England in the 1890s and 1900s, might stretch more generously to, say, 75 cm. An entire team composed of such behemoths might almost have the width covered, but one doubts whether they would have much luck jumping to head away the high balls. The crossbar must be 2.44 metres (8 feet) from the ground, and as Fatty stands 191 cm in his studs, that still leaves a slot of over half a metre above his head. Perhaps the team could make up the deficit by taking to the field with afro hairstyles heavily gelled into shot-stopping hardness, but none of this would help their chances of going 1-0 up in the first place. Neither could they hope to play for a scoreless draw. They would soon buckle under the hail of shots, some destined for their faces and groins, while the inevitable handballs would lead to penalty kicks. The tactic would, of course, render the offside rule useless for the defending team, so shots could be taken from point-blank range. Eventually, someone would have the far better idea of hoofing the ball up the field.

Have the Olympic Games ever made a profit?

After Montreal won the bidding to host the 1976 Olympic Games, Mayor Jean Drapeau said: ‘The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby.’ Costs were estimated initially at US$310 million, and Monsieur Drapeau was confident that the public finances would turn a significant profit. But due to irresponsible management, industrial action, political corruption and an increase in security costs after terrorism disrupted the 1972 Munich Games, the bill escalated to over US$2 billion. Taxpayers only managed to pay off the final instalment in December 2006, thirty years after an event that lasted only two weeks. The Canadians did not win even a single gold medal for their trouble.

History seemed to be repeating itself in 2007, when London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone promised that the latest increase in the bill for the 2012 Games would only cost each household ‘less than the price of a Walnut Whip every week’. On the other side of the Atlantic, Patrick Ryan, the leader of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games, was insisting that every summer Olympics in the last three decades had made a profit. He tried to allay local taxpayers’ fears by projecting a $525 million surplus and joking that to make a loss ‘we would have to be the first really incompetents’.²⁵ The latter prediction would seem to be the strongest based on Mr Ryan’s grasp of the figures. He had looked only at the budgets of local organizing committees and ignored the costs of building new infrastructure.

It was spending on infrastructure for the 2004 Games that sank the taxpayers of Athens by devouring 5 per cent of the entire nation’s GDP. Many of the specially built venues have lain empty since the closing ceremony, among them a $144 million sailing facility, yet together they require $100 million a year to be spent on their upkeep. Serafim Kotrotsos, the head of communications for the organizing committee, explained: ‘It’s like we built a brand new house, held a great party, then closed it and now have no guests.’²⁶ Expenditure on the Games quadrupled from the original estimate to almost £9 billion ($18 billion), resulting in a 6 per cent budget deficit for Greece, which thereby breached the Eurozone’s economic stability pact. The Sydney Games of 2000 only overran by £75 million ($150 million) on an initial £1.4 billion ($2.8billion), but this figure will be rising into the future with the multi-million-pound cost of maintaining dozens of white elephants. These include the £200 million ($400 million) Olympic Stadium itself, which remains heavily in debt and is usually silent. As New South Wales assemblyman Chris Hartcher put it, ‘It is now clear that the post-Olympic plan was largely rhetoric. The huge capital investment in the Olympics will leave state finances haemorrhaging for years to come.’²⁷ Neither have Greece or Australia enjoyed a sustained increase in tourism resulting from the Games.

Bidding teams seem to make a habit of underestimating costs. For example, Atlanta’s technology budget in 1996 was $10 million, but the final bill came to $400 million. This seems to have been simple human error – those responsible had taken their original figure from Barcelona’s projection for the 1992 event, which itself turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Other instances have involved more cynical motives. As the German sports economist Holger Preuss explained, ‘During the bidding competition, you need to convince the IOC and your population that the bid is a good thing, so you cannot make it too expensive. After you win, you adjust.’²⁸

London’s team has been adjusting furiously since 2005 when they won the right to host the 2012 Games. Tessa Jowell, the government minister responsible, was confident at the time that £2.375 billion ($4.74 billion) was a realistic costing. Two years later, she was forced to admit that the final bill would be closer to £9.35 billion. Only £2.2 billion of this will come from private investment. A fifth of the National Lottery budget for good causes up until 2013 has been sequestered to make up the shortfall, and arts funding across the country has already been cut by a third. This is after London’s council tax payers have already been tapped for £625 million. In 2006, Ms Jowell announced a somewhat creative solution to the problem of the budget overrun: a group of consultants would be charged with ensuring that costs did not rise further and that the infrastructure would be built on schedule. For performing this service, CLM will be paid an additional £400 million not included in the original budget estimate. As London Assembly member Philip Davies said at the time, ‘You couldn’t make this up.’ In November 2006, CLM were already behind schedule. The most popular explanation for the debacle among cynics and supporters alike is that the original estimate was not rigorous because it did not have to be, as no one thought that London’s bid had a chance of winning.

The only Games in recent decades to boast a clear profit were Los Angeles in 1984 and Atlanta in 1996. LA cleared $200 million, partly from successful corporate sponsorship, but largely because, like Atlanta, the authorities built virtually nothing to order. Instead, events were hosted in existing venues and athletes were billeted in student halls. The 1948 London Games made a profit of £10,000 after competitors were housed in army and RAF camps in lieu of an Olympic village. History thus proves that a profitable Olympics is possible, so long as the organizers do not do anything as rash as constructing an entire town for the purpose. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the 2012 team plans to do.

According to Private Eye magazine, the March 2007 estimate for the price of the 2012 Games means that it will cost more to stage than the annual gross domestic product of the following (sixty-six) competing countries: Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Eritrea, Fiji, Gabon, the Gambia, Georgia, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Iceland, Jamaica, Kiribati, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Namibia, Netherlands Antilles, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Samoa, São Tomé and Principe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenadines, Suriname, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Vanuatu and Zambia.²⁹

How does reverse swing work?

According to one of its greatest exponents, the Pakistani all-rounder Imran Khan, the phenomenon of reverse swing is too complex for ordinary minds to grasp. In fact, those who have not benefited from a first-rate education are apt to mistake it for a form of cheating. As he told India Today magazine in June 1994, ‘Look at people who have taken a rational stand on this. Tony Lewis, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Derek Pringle. They are educated Oxbridge types. Look at the others: Lamb, Botham and Trueman. Class and upbringing makes a difference.’ Botham’s response was: ‘If an Oxford education tells you that it’s alright to cheat, then give me Buckler’s Mead Secondary Modern School any time.’³⁰

So what is reverse swing? And why is it so contentious? Conventional swing is when the ball moves sideways in the air as it approaches the batsman, in the direction the seam is pointing. As one would expect, reverse swing is when the ball moves away from the seam instead. Reverse swing may have been achieved by accident early in cricket’s history, but it was Pakistan’s Sarfraz Nawaz who first employed it by design. In 1979, he bewildered Australia’s batting order in the Melbourne Test, taking nine wickets in one innings, including a spell of seven wickets for just one run. His technique reached the popular consciousness when it was used by his countrymen Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram to torment England in the summer of 1992. Because English bowlers could not replicate what they were seeing, it was thought that the Pakistani tourists must be breaking the rules somehow. However, it is not necessary to understand the theory behind reverse swing in order to put it into practice. This is just as well, because only fairly recently has anyone been able to provide a properly authoritative account of how it works. Several bogus explanations have gathered momentum over the years, including putting the effect down to humidity or to one hemisphere of the ball becoming wet and therefore heavier.

Conventional swing was investigated in a 1983 paper in Nature, science’s most prestigious journal.³¹ A team led by Rabindra Mehta, a professor of aerodynamics and school friend of Imran Khan’s, found that for optimum swing the ball should be delivered at 35–70 mph with the seam angled at 20 degrees and with a backspin of eleven revolutions per second. Swing is produced by a difference in air pressure between the left and right sides of the ball. As the ball travels forwards, a thin ‘boundary layer’ of air forms at its leading face, flows around its sides and eventually separates in the way that water will flow around a rock in a stream. The layer will separate early if the surface of the ball is very smooth, allowing a smooth flow of air. However, if the seam is off-centre from the direction of the ball’s flight, then the leading edge will trip the boundary layer on that side into a turbulent state, which allows it to cling to the ball for longer. This means that this side will be subject to lower air pressure, thereby pushing the ball in that direction.

The leading hemisphere should be kept as smooth as possible to ensure an even, rapid flow of air on that side. Methods of maintaining the required sheen have been legion. Only sweat and saliva may be applied to the ball legally, but the use of many other substances has been alleged and sometimes proven. Lip balm and Brylcreem are the usual suspects. India’s Rahul Dravid forfeited half his match fee after he was spotted rubbing a throat lozenge on a ball during a one-day game against Zimbabwe in 2004. During the 2005 Ashes series, England were rumoured to have used ‘magic mints’ that infused their saliva with sugar to give it better polishing properties. It was never proven, but Mike Selvey joked that ‘it is a wonder that a number of England players still have their own teeth’.³²

Different rules apply at speeds over 70 mph, as the boundary layer on the smooth side also starts to become turbulent, reducing the pressure differential between the two sides. Eighty mph is a dead zone for swing. England’s Matthew Hoggard produces swing reliably by bowling at 80 mph or thereabouts, but the ball has slowed to 70–75 mph by the time it pitches, thereby swinging late. But at speeds greater than 85 mph, the ball can suddenly swing the ‘wrong’ way. Professor Mehta was sceptical of such reports at first, but his experiments subsequently showed that at very high speeds the boundary layer becomes turbulent before it even gets to the seam.³³ However, when it does, the seam actually reduces the effect of the turbulence on that side by causing the boundary layer to break away sooner than it does on the smooth side of the ball. Swing is thereby reversed. Very few bowlers are capable of delivering the ball at over 85 mph, but lesser arms can also achieve a degree of reverse swing if they lead with the rough side of the ball. The rougher the surface, the lower the speed required to produce swing.

Although the condition of a ball deteriorates the longer it is used, the process does not happen quickly enough for most bowlers. Younis and Wasim were accused of ‘gouging’ the ball with long fingernails and bottle tops, and the Pakistan team has been dogged by allegations of ball-tampering ever since. They are not the only suspects. In a pre-season friendly against Nottinghamshire in 2007, the Kent captain Robert Key was even caught using sandpaper on the ball, though it was not an ECB fixture ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• What makes something a sport rather than a pastime?
• Why do cyclists shave their legs?
• Who are the biggest cheats in world football?
• Can white men run?
• Are sumo wrestlers fat but fit – or just plain fat?
• Why do female tennis players grunt?
• Is ‘form’ an illusion?
• Do gloves make boxing more dangerous?
• Could a human pyramid in the goalmouth defend a 1-0 lead?
• Have the Olympic Games ever made a profit?
• How does reverse swing work?
• Can women ever compete with men in sport?
• In motor racing, is the car or the driver more important?
• Is marathon running bad for your health?
• Which sport has the fittest participants?
• Was soccer hooliganism ever the English disease?
• Why do they geld racehorses?
• Should performance-enhancing drugs be allowed in sport?
• Why is a duck the most common cricket score?
• Do some darts players actually need to drink alcohol?
• Why are there two rugby codes?
• Can transsexuals compete as women in the Olympics?
• Are English footballers really thicker than foreign players?
• Who would win a fight between Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee?
• What is the most dangerous sport?
• Why does sport favour left-handers?
• Why do female tennis players earn more than the men?
• Does the jockey matter?
• Why is baseball’s World Series so named when only North American teams take part?
• Do teams wearing red really do better?
• Why does the England football team underachieve?
• Why are Scorpios better at rugby than Leos?
• Can one swimming pool be ‘faster’ than another?
• Is pregnancy a performance enhancer?
• Is there such a thing as a super-sub?
• How do the dimples on a golf ball work?
• What are the upper limits of sporting performance?
• Why has Formula One got safer?
• Can you buy success in football?
• How disabled do you have to be to qualify for the Paralympics?
• Why do some female athletes stop menstruating?
• What accounts for home advantage?
• Could a rugby player make it in the NFL?
• Why do Americans hate football?
• Could performance-enhancing drugs turn an ordinary mortal into a top athlete?
• Why are there so few Asian footballers in Britain?
• How inbred are thoroughbred racehorses?
• Are fascists better at sport?
• Do rugby players really abide by the rules more than other sportsmen?
• Which nation is the best at sport?
• References