Category: Sports

In many golf circles, it was (and still is) customary for the lucky golfer to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse after landing a hole-in-one. This often resulted in prohibitively expensive bar tabs.

And an industry sprouted up to protect these golfers.

A newspaper archive analysis by The Hustle revealed that hole-in-one insurance firms sprouted up as early as 1933.

Under this model, golfers could pay a fee — say, $1.50 (about $35 today) — to cover a $25 (~$550) bar tab. And as one paper noted in 1937: “The way some of the boys have been bagging the dodos, it might not be a bad idea.”

Though the concept largely faded away in the US, it became a big business in Japan, where golfers who landed a hole-in-one were expected to throw parties “comparable to a small wedding,” including live music, food, drinks, and commemorative tree plantings.

By the 1990s, the hole-in-one insurance industry had a total market value of $220m. An estimated 30% of all Japanese golfers shelled out $50-$70/year to insure themselves against up to $3.5k in expenses.

Here is the full story, via Mathan.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

With the basketball playoffs starting this week, it is worth asking what can be learned from the NBA’s more recent history. This year the NBA story is one of talent — extreme talent. Talent so plentiful that even the middling teams are full of strong players. The broader lessons for the world economy are very optimistic.

Consider the three players competing for the Most Valuable Player award — Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Their play and statistics have been stratospheric. Embiid, for instance, led the league scoring, is a leading rebounder and defender, and his team is in contention for an NBA title. Yet he is not favored to win the award because the other contenders are (at least in my eyes) better yet. My pick is Jokic, who is the first NBA player with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists in a season.

Other top players, such as Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic and Ja Morant, might in other years be obvious MVP winners. But this year they don’t stand a chance. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Stephen Curry — the best players from the recent past — are still amazing but are practically also-rans.

And:

The lessons and implications for the broader economy and society are insanely bullish. If the NBA can do this, other parts of the world can, too. Just imagine business and science (and maybe politics?) all improving at the rate of professional basketball. The most important form of wealth today is human capital. As the world moves further from a brute-force economy, human capital is also the major force driving productivity.

The NBA shows that it is possible, over time, to do a much better job of both finding and mobilizing talent. Granted, most parts of the world are not as well-run as the NBA, so the process will be slower than it ought to be. But it is underway.

The implications are staggering. Yes, global problems are piling up at an alarming rate.  On the other hand, global talent is more accessible than ever. Which phenomenon is likely to turn out to be of greater consequence? As the co-author of a forthcoming book on the importance of talent, I suspect you can guess my view.

And I am still picking the Milwaukee Bucks to win the NBA title this year.

In recent years, excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players have been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and the players are highly motivated; on the other hand, stronger teams have higher incomes and therefore afford better players leading to an even stronger appearance in tournaments that can make the game more imbalanced and hence predictable. To quantify and document this observation, in this work, we take a minimalist network science approach to measure the predictability of football over 26 years in major European leagues. We show that over time, the games in major leagues have indeed become more predictable. We provide further support for this observation by showing that inequality between teams has increased and the home-field advantage has been vanishing ubiquitously. We do not include any direct analysis on the effects of monetization on football’s predictability or therefore, lack of excitement; however, we propose several hypotheses which could be tested in future analyses.

Here is the full article by Victor Martins Maimone and Taha Yasseri.  Via Michelle Dawson.

One fan with a helpful perspective on the Wizards is Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at nearby George Mason University. He says that even he was surprised they were able to move Wall and then Westbrook’s contracts so effectively. But what’s more interesting to him about the Wizards these days is what’s happening on the court. “They have quite a few players who are ‘good enough’ shooters,” Cowen said in an email. “When everyone on the floor is a ‘good enough’ shooter, the good enough shooters are better than you might think.”

This is a useful way of thinking about the entire team. In a league where the ultimate goal is greatness, the Wizards are showing the power of pretty good. It’s the sort of progress that precedes success.

“Their ceiling still might be pretty low,” Cowen said. “But for the time being, we can enjoy the ride.”

Here is more from Ben Cohen at the Wall Street Journal.