{"id":573898276,"date":"2025-09-18T20:09:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T00:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573898276"},"modified":"2025-09-28T01:47:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T05:47:00","slug":"the-goal-is-the-goal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2025\/09\/18\/the-goal-is-the-goal\/","title":{"rendered":"The goal is the goal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was a busy day on campus. In my Criticism class we watched a documentary about the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. It&#8217;s titled &#8220;Fists of Freedom.&#8221; You can find it in a few places online, including on the HBO app, but here&#8217;s a little tease from the night the doc won a Peabody. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XSOwnaWEw1E?si=W-7dCfPpJOio-yV1\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Watching it took the full class. Tuesday we&#8217;ll talk about it, both the story they told, but also the craft of documentaries. We&#8217;ll watch a lot of documentaries in this class, and for these first two we&#8217;ll talk a tiny bit about the filmmaking as a format of criticism, too. I have worked diligently to create a wildly varied menu of documentaries. This one is historical and about track and field. (Good as it is, Bob Beamon&#8217;s world record long jump is my favorite part of that film.) The next one is contemporary and about tennis. We&#8217;ll look at an unconventional documentary centering on a diver after that.<\/p>\n<p>In org comm today we discussed the overarching concept of the uniqueness of sport communication. Anyone that comes back next week will get to laugh at a lot of commercials as we talk about branding. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/blog\/banners\/bannership.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>My godniece-in-law (just go with it) is a high school senior and playing some of her last field hockey games. So we went to see one of them this evening. Her little sister, my other godniece-in-law (again, go with it) played in a JV game, so we got to see both. <\/p>\n<p>Now, I&#8217;d hoped to take a few photos of the senior, thinking maybe I could get one or two of her to share with her. The problem is I know nothing about field hockey. I&#8217;ve been to, I think, three or four games, and it&#8217;s still largely inscrutable to me. Fortunately, one of my students is a field hockey star. She gave me some tips today. <\/p>\n<p>So we went to the games, I followed the suggestions of my field hockey folk hero. The game is played on the school&#8217;s football field, which serves quadruple duty as football field, soccer pitch, field hockey pitch and some of their field events for track. The field has a play turf surface, which feels like it&#8217;d be fun to run on. <\/p>\n<p>I can say that because I set up shot behind the cage, which sits under the mobile soccer goal, which rests under the football field goal. The game is getting underway, I sneak back there. Sneak by walking at a normal pace. And as I&#8217;m fiddling with the settings on my camera, my godniece-in-law scores a goal. Missed it. <\/p>\n<p>At the start of the second half the two teams swapped sides, so I walked over to stand behind the other goal. And back there, was this, which covers the high jump pad. For some reason, they&#8217;re really quite serious about staying away from this cover, which is just all kinds of dangerous.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/sept25\/sept45.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Soon after, a gentleman walked over and told me to leave. So I walked back over to the stands, properly chagrined. It was the first time I&#8217;ve gotten in not-trouble at a high school in decades. Such a rule breaker am I. <\/p>\n<p>Leaning against the post of the soccer goal felt comfortable. I haven&#8217;t done that since I was 20 or so. And, from back there, watching the game come toward me, I understood what was going on much better than the side-view you get from the bleachers. I have been assured by the people I&#8217;ve asked &#8212; including a chat tonight with my godniece-in-law&#8217;s grandfather, who is my godfather-in-law (just go with it) &#8212; that there many rules about what you can and can&#8217;t do in field hockey. They mysterious and inscrutable rules to us mere fans, but grounded in safety. He was a field hockey coach for 20 years. He&#8217;d know the rules, right? He did not tell me all of the rules. I&#8217;ve come to conclude they&#8217;re meant to be secret.<\/p>\n<p>Most importantly, the home team won both games. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was a busy day on campus. In my Criticism class we watched a documentary about the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. It&#8217;s titled &#8220;Fists of Freedom.&#8221; You can find it in a few places online, including on the HBO app, but here&#8217;s a little tease from the night the doc won a Peabody. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,32,10,101,15,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573898276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-history","category-photo","category-rowan","category-thursday","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573898276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573898277,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898276\/revisions\/573898277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573898276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573898276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573898276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}