The new “30 for 30” documentary, Last Days of Knight, gambles on three levels:
It’s being shown exclusively on ESPN+, the company’s new pay service, a good way to draw attention to it but not the best way to get this film the wide audience that many previous 30 for 30 entries have found.
It tells the story of a journalist, CNN’s Robert Abbott, who pursued the story for months. As an Awful Announcing review says, the film attempts to tell Abbott’s story and Knight’s, and it sometimes falls between the two stools.
A lot of people still maintain loyalty to Bobby Knight after all these years.
Others can debate No. 1. The questions here are No. 2 and No. 3, and the disappointment of Last Days of Knight is that we get too much of No. 2 and not enough exploration of No. 3.
Like all 30 for 30 films, LDON is a slick presentation. And the story is compelling, even with the unusual focus on Abbott. CNN’s reporting became part of the story itself, for better or for worse, and you don’t have to be a journalism junkie to appreciate the insights on how everyone involved interacted with the media — Knight as one of several bullies, players and staffers afraid to speak, administrators being weasels, etc. Abbott’s reflections and the nitty-gritty at CNN, including some clumsy threats by people working on Knight’s behalf, provide a new angle to an old story.
But that story bogs down with an extended, guilt-ridden take on the post-scandal life and death of Neil Reed, the player Knight assaulted in a video that hastened his downfall. It’s a sad and yet sweet story of someone who reclaimed his own life and was clearly loved before his untimely death from a heart attack, but its placement in this film is odd, as if it’s suggesting Reed’s death was somehow collateral damage from Knight’s antics and/or the media coverage. Abbott regrets making Reed uncomfortable in his pursuit of the story, but it seems a bit much for him to interpose himself in the family’s mourning process.
And we’re left wanting something more. Abbott and some of his colleagues are seeing the old story in a new light. Anyone else?
Perhaps it’s me — I wrote about irrational mobs in my review of Jesus Christ Superstar — but I really wanted to see some reflection from the people who defended Knight when he was quite clearly indefensible. Knight, predictably, wasn’t interested in participating. But what about the students? Former players? Now that the heat has died down, what would they do differently?
But even if we don’t see such reflection on camera, we have to hope it’s happening elsewhere. It’s not happening in this dismissive review from The Daily Hoosier.
The value of a story like Knight’s is that it holds up a mirror to us. How much are we willing to excuse if a guy wins some basketball games? Can a man impart military-style discipline and behavioral values if he doesn’t live up to it himself or hold himself accountable?
We see hints of these questions in Last Days of Knight. Just not quite enough.
A quick interlude in my youth soccer work to reiterate some things that, based on discussions I’m seeing, need reiterating:
1. Before MLS, the USA had two substantial pro men’s leagues. The ASL of the 1920s and early 30s was successful for several years and provided the bulk of the players who helped the USA take third in the 1930 World Cup (don’t get too excited — only 13 countries entered) before falling apart in a series of stubborn arguments with national and international federations. (Sound familiar?) The NASL started in the late 60s and peaked in the late 70s before collapsing in the mid-80s, having done little to put down solid roots. In the rest of those decades — 40s, 50s, most of the 60s, late 80s, early 90s — U.S. pro soccer was a wasteland.
2. At times, the USA has been outright hostile to soccer, even if Jack Kemp walked back his complaint that the sport is “socialist.” Sort of. Newspapers often refused to cover it seriously. Academics have spilled boatloads of ink explaining why soccer faced an uphill cultural battle in this country until a few things changed the scene (say — 1994, 1999, 2002, etc.)
3. If big events on TV were any indicator of interest in regular professional competition, the highest-rated shows would be the NWSL and the Diamond League. (I’m betting a lot of you are opening a new tab and Googling “Diamond League.”)
4. Since 2001, MLS has grown substantially by every metric except TV ratings, which is indeed an issue and may be explained by any mix of three factors: substandard games, substandard TV production, the growth of EPL and other leagues on U.S. TV. Every other metric — number of teams, number of teams doing well at the gate, overall attendance, number of committed ownership groups, investment in facilities, investment in youth academies — is trending strongly upward.
5. MLS is not part of a conspiracy to keep soccer from getting as big as the NFL. There’s no record of MLS turning away substantial investment aside from the vaporware media rights “offer” Riccardo Silva made, knowing MLS couldn’t accept. Indeed, several MLS owners today — Stan Kroenke, City Football Group, Jason Levien — also have ownership stakes overseas, so they directly profit from the EPL and MLS chipping away at the U.S. sports marketplace. And if Anschutz, Hunt and Kraft wanted soccer to fail, they would’ve let MLS fail in 2001 instead of digging far deeper into their pockets to keep it going.
6. While the USSF Pro League Standards have some criteria worth arguing, U.S. Soccer is not unique in having standards. Check out what you need to be in the Football League in England — 2,000 seats under cover, a closed-circuit surveillance system, an external boundary wall of 2.2 meters, individual seats with back rests (sorry, no high school stadia with bleacher seating), a computerized turnstile monitoring system, directors’ boxes with guest rooms, press seating with 20 desktops and 10 power points, etc.
7. Plenty of soccer clubs in the USA have meticulously chosen their level — amateur summer leagues, amateur fall-spring leagues, USL, etc. — and don’t want to change.
8. If you subscribe to the notion that the U.S. men’s national team has gotten worse (not that the competition has gotten better), you have to account for the fact that more players in the old days were produced through pay-to-play clubs and college soccer.
9. The NASL (the new one) made its own bed and now, thanks to constant turnover and the quiet disappearance of a lot of big-talking backers, lacks the institutional knowledge to remember that it did so.
10. Just as the NY Cosmos argued that their investment was based on retaining Division 2 status, a lot of investment in academies and infrastructure over the past 20-plus years has been predicated on retaining Division 1 status.
11. The USA is huge. Like, really huge. Yes, Russia’s bigger, but the area hosting the 2018 World Cup is smaller than the USA, even including that little hop over Belarus to Kalinigrad, and the Premier League just has the occasional team from the Pacific Coast. (Besides, do we want to copy Russia?) Ensuring a national footprint is a worthwhile goal.
12. You can make a good case for promotion/relegation (or, at the very least, for other reforms) in U.S. soccer without denying the truths listed above and accusing the people who remind you of those truths of being paid shills setting up Twitterbots on behalf of the MLS illuminati. So why not give it a try?
Preseason coaches’ meeting. It’s always more of a lecture than a “meeting.” There’s absolutely no reason an email wouldn’t suffice. The in-person “meeting” would be much better reserved for a training session with a lot of small breakout groups.
But anyway …
The Important Person In Charge (IPIC, as in “I pick what we’re doing”) reminds us of the importance of “development” instead of “winning.”
In U19 recreational soccer.
I would’ve asked what we were “developing” these players for at this point, but I didn’t want to prolong the meeting. So I’ll ask here …
What are the developmental goals of recreational soccer for kids who are never going to play at a higher level?
These kids aren’t going to make their high school teams — most of the travel kids won’t make the high school teams. Simple math. This year, I’ve seen a lot of kids from “A” teams who don’t make the JVs at their local high schools. The sweet spot for high school play in our region is the level immediately below the Development Academy — and bear in mind that a lot of kids may ditch the DA their senior years to get in that one season of playing with their classmates.
(Quick aside: I’d love to see youth clubs list the players from their clubs who make local high school teams. Or I’d love to see parents crowd-source it so we can see which clubs really are getting kids to their high school teams. Let’s fact-check the coaches who insist their players can go play wherever they want. We’ll get back to that.)
At U14, rec kids can still make the transition to travel. They might even be raw talents who play a lot of pickup soccer and can still “develop.” It’s rare at this age, but it can happen.
By U19? Aren’t we basically “developing” the next generation of adult rec players?
They may turn into parent coaches one day. They might even sign up to be referees. Great. Let’s keep them in the game.
But the next level as a player is basically adult league and/or college intramurals, where I really wish I’d seen the matchup of Christian Pu-LAW-sic vs. Game of Throw-Ins.
So why aren’t we letting high school kids do the same thing? Why are we running high school rec soccer through parent commissioners and coaches who oversee practices at which they might get 3-4 players on a given night? Why are we trying to “balance” these teams instead of letting a group of friends play together and figure out which level to enter?
If some of those friends want to practice once or twice a week and have a coach, fine. They can enter the “Open A” division and play only with or against people who are just as interested in soccer as they are. That’s frankly a better option at that age than lower-level “travel.”
The kids playing U19 rec soccer have survived a decade or more of adults telling them what to do. Why not give them a little reward and let them make a fun transition to adult soccer instead of treating them like U9s?
Not as a soccer writer, though they agreed to let me write a weekly column online. That’s how the site went in those days — a lot of us would spend 30-40 hours a week doing the nuts-and-bolts work of posting and maintaining content, then 10-20 hours a week doing the fun stuff that made the site unique.
I was hired as a community content developer. At first, my primary job was to moderate message boards.
Which was hell. I had to kick people off the boards (though one of my Facebook friends today is someone I kicked off the boards twice, so there’s a certain amount of respect built up over time in some cases), and I spent my 30th birthday exchanging email with Rush Limbaugh, whose lobbying to host Monday Night Football was crashing our servers.
But I still believe message boards and similar forums can be useful. It all depends on the context and the people involved. The reader comments at Deadspin are usually better than the stories. Bloody Elbow has painstakingly cultivated a lively but mostly reasonable community of readers and commenters. BigSoccer is hit or miss — some arguments in the indoor soccer forum have been ongoing since maybe 2001, but there’s some useful information exchanged. And if you’ve been kicked off BigSoccer, you probably deserved. (That’s why all the slander specialists are on Twitter, still griping about how they got kicked off BigSoccer.)
Anonymous message boards should be a valuable source of information for youth soccer parents. You can share candid information without fear of reprisal from coaches and clubs. But you can also share unsubstantiated accusations. Maybe little Johnny isn’t quite good enough for the megaclub’s A team, so the parent goes on the board to tell everyone the coach is clueless or corrupt or whatever.
The worst boards are the ones that aren’t just anonymous but require no sign-on. The conversation generally runs like this:
Anonymous: We’re thinking of moving my 9-year-old son from FC United to United FC. Any thoughts?
Anonymous: Oh, you’re probably one of those moms who thinks your kid is the next Messi.
Anonymous: United FC is falling apart. All the coaches are terrible, and the board members are rec-league parents who want their kids to be on the A teams.
Anonymous: We get it, you’re upset that you were fired from United FC.
Anonymous: Oh, shut up. You’re on the board, aren’t you? You’re the one whose kid made the U10 A team in 2010.
Anonymous: Um … I don’t think anyone’s been on the board that long.
Anonymous: You’re not fooling anyone. You’re the same person.
Anonymous: The same person as who?
Anonymous: We KNOW who you are.
Anonymous: Yeah, you’re mad because your kid had to go to another club in 2012 because none of the parents liked you.
That could be 10 people. It could be two.
I’ve been on one such board for a while, and I’ve finally started using a unique sign-on. I’m RantingSoccerDad. So it’s pretty easy to put two and two together and figure out who I am. That means I’m not going to share much information about my sons’ clubs, but that’s a fair trade to me. And I’m hoping to start a movement where people create unique sign-ons so we can actually see how many people are in these conversations.
Flawed as they are, these message boards can be helpful. I like Georgia Soccer Forum, where I’ve learned a bit about a potential “Champions League” and reminisced about the Athens Applejacks.
All facts need to be checked elsewhere, of course. But it’s nice to get some impressions from people on the ground. On the whole, we probably need more of these boards. Maybe multiple boards in one area, so we can promote and relegate them.
If you have any favorites anywhere in the USA, please share.
The state of my youth! It’s changed quite a bit. For one thing, Atlanta seems to have gone supernova and swallowed up most of the state’s soccer community.
This was originally a password-protected page for Patreon patrons only, but now it’s open to all.
It’s a futsal/grassroots doubleheader! After a brief intro (no full rant this week), you’ll hear from Leslie Hamer, who works with futsal at every level from the grassroots to the pros. She has been getting futsal into New York City public schools and now into colleges.
Next up: Jason Longshore, whom you may know as a commentator on Atlanta United games but has spent much of the last 12 years working with Soccer in the Streets, an organization that brings soccer (or futsal — whichever makes sense for the available facilities) to underserved communities and schools. You may know them from their effort to put a small soccer field at a MARTA (local transit) station.
You’ll find a few differences and a few similarities in their stories. They work with other organizations from municipal governments to soccer clubs to the U.S. Soccer Foundation. (Reminder: The Foundation is not the Federation, though the Fed does nominate some board members.) Both programs are fundamentally geared toward providing healthy and productive activities for underserved areas, but you’ll sometimes see players move into elite levels, including pro academies.
The bell sound is from SoundBible.com. Every other musical note and sound effect was scratched out by me in GarageBand or through GarageBand.
Want to go a step farther than Title IX? How about this: Title 9 3/4. And a boycott by players — mostly male — until each team in your league either plays mixed-gender games or fields an equivalent women’s team?
That’s the story I wrote for The Guardian today.
And here it is: 'It doesn't seem fair to me': Ultimate players strike for gender equality https://t.co/dFxBX6ZR2b
The theme music of the promotion/relegation debate should probably be Carmina Burana. The part we all know from hundreds of pop culture references (“OOOOOOO FORTUNA” — if you ever want to be creeped out, check out the scene from The Doors set to that music) is at the beginning and the end of the composition, suggesting a wheel of fortune in which every spin comes up bankrupt.
And the lyrics translate roughly to “Fate. Monstrous and empty. You whirling wheel. You are malevolent. Well-being is vain and always fades to nothing. And you go home and you cry and you want to die.”
(OK, so I added a line from the Smiths. Did you even notice?)
But despite listening to such depressing music in college, even as we all wondered if we would be drafted into Gulf War I, I’m optimistic. Like this New York Times writer suggesting social media is worth salvaging even as various platforms inevitably descend abuse and cynical data-mining, I think something is worth saving in the pro/rel discussion.
We’ll need, as the NYT writer suggests, a reset button.
So imagine (to cite a more hopeful piece of music) if the pro/rel debate started this year …
Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? MLS is pretty well established, with facilities and academies built up in several cities. But it could use something to get to the next level.
Meanwhile, the lower divisions are changing. In the past, a lot of D2 and D3 teams eagerly “self-relegated” to the amateur ranks, where they could play short seasons with unpaid players. A lot of teams will be happy to stay there. But we may have a critical mass of parties interested in moving up.
We could all kick around ideas. A English-style ladder, with 20-24 teams in each of the top five tiers, doesn’t make much sense in a country of this size. We should have more of a pyramid, with regional play in the lower divisions so we’re not asking an amateur club in Spokane that got promoted to D3 to fly to Miami for a league game.
We could take into account all the things that make the USA different — the generations of cultural antipathy and hostility that left us far behind on infrastructure, the fact that soccer still isn’t and may never be the No. 1 team sport in this country, and the fact that soccer from the youth level upward is in the hands of many different organizations. (In Germany, as the NSCAA presenter from the DFB reminded everyone, it’s one.)
So we could have a reasonable discussion, right?
The problem is the baggage. We call pro/rel the “third rail” of U.S. soccer for a reason.
That’s unfair to well-intentioned newbies. We have a generation of soccer fans who grew up with unlimited choice of soccer broadcasts, and they wonder why the USA doesn’t have a league to rival the Premier League or La Liga. Some of them do some research and begin to sketch out ways to build a club at the grass roots.
Unfortunately, when they turn to Twitter or any other medium, they encounter two groups that have been long ago gave up any semblance of trust or honesty …
The “pro/rel” crowd, whose arguments were pretty flimsy when the USA was desperate for anyone to run a professional soccer team, resorted to lies and slander 10-15 years ago.
The “anti-pro/rel” crowd is sick of hearing it, and whenever they hear someone talking about pro/rel, they assume they’re ignorant haters who are beyond reason.
So we have this cycle:
Newbie starts asking why we don’t have an “open system.”
Newbie gets an overly hostile history lesson from people who are used to dealing with full-time Twitter trolls.
Newbie gets sympathy from the “pro/rel” long-timers.
Newbie starts to believe what the “pro/rel” long-timers say.
That means the newbie is exposed to a whole bunch of myths …
Everyone who questions the obvious solution of promotion/relegation to address most of U.S. soccer’s problems must be compromised in some way — either paid by MLS/SUM to discredit the movement or actually a sock puppet/bot, or perhaps a journalist afraid of losing credentials.
I’ve gotten the occasional lecture from various people in power about why something I wrote is the stupidest thing ever, but I still got credentials to cover an Open Cup game involving an MLS team last year and the USSF Annual General Meeting this year. I used to go to MLS pressboxes all the time, and a lot of them credentialed everyone with a laptop.
A lot of journalists have written for MLSSoccer.com over the years. I wrote fantasy columns for its predecessor, MLSNet, before I started writing frequently as part of my duties at USA TODAY. (And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned it — see the seven separate references on Ranting Soccer Dad and Duresport dating back to 2014 and at least 10 times on Twitter. It wasn’t exactly hidden before then — the columns had my name on them. You can’t find them now because MLSNet now exists only on the Wayback Machine, where you might my columns alongside those of Eric Wynalda. It was kind of a fun site.)
If you want to declare everyone who has recently written for MLSSoccer.com “compromised,” OK. I’d point out that the freelance marketplace is in tatters, and a lot of people are just writing wherever they can make money. My experience is that a lot of people are capable of writing a Timbers-Galaxy game story and still making up their own minds about things, but it’s really up to you to weigh everyone’s work on its own merit.
But even given all that, there are hundreds of people writing about soccer who are in no way financially connected to MLS’s quasi-independent sites and never have been. Some are beat writers for what’s left of local newspapers. Some are amateur (but well-informed) bloggers. Check out The Washington Post, The Columbus Dispatch, SB Nation, Howler, The Athletic, FiftyFiveOne, Canadian outlets, ProSoccerUSA, Philly.com, The Oregonian, ESPN, The Guardian (where I write, but usually about non-MLS topics), Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press.
(And yes, some people who write for SB Nation and Howler write for MLSSoccer.com. You may note it didn’t stop Howler from publishing Peter Wilt’s promotion/relegation manifesto, nor did it stop SB Nation from ripping USSF over its lack of outreach to underserved communities. U.S. Soccer is not Sinclair Broadcasting, and these outlets are not local TV stations desperate to please their corporate masters.)
But Deloitte did a study proving U.S. soccer would be better with pro/rel!
As it stands however, US club soccer is not immediately ready for promotion and
relegation – for the topic to move forward several key topics needs to be addressed
including:
Decisions made on the optimum number of teams in the existing leagues;
The continued development and stability of a second tier competition to develop clubscapable in management and football terms of joining the first tier; and
Consideration of the mechanism by which long term league investors have their “equity” protected, at least in the short term, from relegation.
In other words, Deloitte basically said what a lot of the supposed “anti-pro/rel” crowd has been saying for a long, long time.
Pro/rel works in the rest of the world
And yet China, India and tons of other large countries with large economies are worse than Uruguay.
But those countries are DIFFERENT!
Exactly. So is the USA.
If you doubt anything about an open system, you must be perfectly happy with MLS and U.S. Soccer the way they are.
No one’s telling you — well, maybe not no one, but most people — that promotion/relegation is a horrible system that should be done away with in Europe. (Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened — the oligarchs buying soccer clubs could easily break away and tell the respective FAs to deal with it.) Most people are just telling you when you have a weak argument.
MLS isn’t really competitive because of single entity and so forth.
Go into a postgame locker room sometime and see what you think. Or talk with a player who just got cut from a roster. It’s not that simple.
Which leads to …
Promotion/relegation would obviously (A) make our youth development better and (B) lead to massive investment. There’s no downside at all!
Learn the history, not just from one source. Read the books on my soccer bookshelf or anything else you can find.
Build on what’s positive about an open system, especially opportunity and the idea of building a larger footprint for our soccer culture. Quit telling people they’re idiots for not seeing how obvious it supposedly is.
I hear from so many people who insist they’ve distanced themselves from the obnoxious liars and scoundrels of Twitter. Then they repeat mythology that those liars and scoundrels have spouted for years. I still believe you when you say you’ve distanced yourself from them, but the next step is to distance yourself from their skewed take on things.
And then — yeah, you “anti-pro/rel” types. Quit treating everyone like they’re same people who got laughed off BigSoccer 10 years ago and spend half their time whining about it on Twitter.
My position — which, not by design, can never be wrong — is that pro/rel will happen in the USA when we’re ready for it. We’re getting closer. We’re finally starting to see investors who want it to happen. We’re running out of space in a one-tier MLS.
So let’s talk as if the last 15 years of b.s. never happened.
Hi, I’m Beau. I live in Northern Virginia. I like Liverpool, and I’m always going to be biased toward my favorite places from my 2011 Women’s World Cup coverage — Augsburg, Leverkusen and Berlin. And I know a lot of people because I’m old and I’ve been writing about soccer for a while. Nice to meet you.
Sure, it helps to have a lot of snow and ice. And it helps a little to have a social democracy in which the government is happy to help with anything that makes children healthier.
But it also helps to have a “Sport for All” ethos that stresses participation over winning. And no specialization at early ages.
Those are certainly values we can consider in soccer, aren’t they?
In the podcast, I spend about five minutes explaining all that. Then I go on a rant about the generation gap in understanding soccer and why we don’t have a glorious promotion/relegation pyramid just yet. (Plus a few ideas on how to get there. Or how not to.)
Which was hell. I had to kick people off the boards (though one of my Facebook friends today is someone I kicked off the boards twice, so there’s a certain amount of respect built up over time in some cases), and I spent my 30th birthday exchanging email with Rush Limbaugh, whose lobbying to host Monday Night Football was crashing our servers.
Duresport.com 