Category: sports culture

sports culture

Can we separate athletes from their appearance?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Fiona McCade makes the case that the age of social media has been especially cruel to female athletes:

Can it really be true that in the hideously sexist, discrimination-riddled Seventies, it was easier than it is now for a woman to triumph without her looks being an issue? Or was it just because I was so young that I never noticed Martina Navratilova’s FHM underwear shoot?

It’s an interesting question without a simple answer. No, Martina never appeared in an underwear ad or swimsuit issue as far as I can recall — and yes, I was alive then. On the other hand, you can’t deny that Chris Evert built a big fan base in part because she was the blonde peppy alternative to a lot of the top tennis players of her day.

The Seventies just had a different vibe. We didn’t see much leering over female athletes, but we didn’t see many female athletes at all. And everyone was pushing the envelope a little — today, it’s hard to imagine a soccer player, male or female, baring all as the Cosmos’ Shep Messing did. (“You said you wanted exposure!”)

ESPN’s Body Issue is restrained by comparison, notwithstanding the dubious photo selections from the Hope Solo shoot. It’s a celebration of the athletic build. And athletes tend to be attractive — they’re fit, and they usually carry themselves with a charismatic confidence. Walking around the Olympics means walking around with beautiful people. Not that we sportswriters feel self-conscious by comparison. (At least, not at the Winter Games, where we’re all hiding under thick coats and hats, anyway.)

And male athletes get their share of ogling. I’m still scarred from watching Oprah early in the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty era and seeing a female crowd collectively lose its grip as they gazed upon these fine basketball players. Tom Brady’s TV appearances, from Family Guy to Saturday Night Live, are a little embarrassing.

Brady embraces it, with little harm to his career. Female athletes have a tougher choice. Heather Mitts rolled with ESPN’s “Hottest Athlete” tag and helped keep women’s soccer in the news during some lean years for the sport. But when you think of Anna Kournikova these days, do you think about her status as one of the best doubles players in the world for a few years? (Seriously — look it up.)

And McCabe gets into the darker side of modern media:

Social media has a lot to answer for. If people in the past felt that sportswomen weren’t gorgeous enough, they probably said so quietly, over a pint and just to their mates. Now, they can say it in so many globe-traversing ways that the sportswomen themselves can hardly avoid finding out about it.

The Internet undoubtedly requires a thick skin. Any public figure is going to face some share of cruelty. But it seems only fair to remind people to grow up a little bit and think about what they’re tweeting, doesn’t it?

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college sports, sports culture

College sports 2020: A plausible fantasy

Posted on by Beau Dure

Jan. 6, 2020 …

Alabama defeated Montana 35-34 tonight to win its third straight NCAA football championship.

The Crimson Tide’s experience in big games proved to be the difference against Montana, which made the NCAA playoffs for the first time after winning the Western Football League championship.

But the Grizzlies earned plenty of respect for the second-year WFL with their performance. The WFL was founded in 2017 after the Pac-12 and Mountain West conferences stopped organizing football competition.

The championship pairing showed how much has changed since Northwestern University football players won the right to organize as a labor group in 2014. The cost of football became too much for many colleges. Alabama and the SEC continued, with some programs taking direct help from state legislatures willing to do whatever it took to keep beloved traditions alive.

Football and basketball, though, are the only men’s sports the SEC schools play in the wake of a court ruling that all money spent meeting new labor regulations for football players would be considered in all future Title IX proceedings. Georgia now has 22 women’s sports programs, adding teams in synchronized swimming, team handball and roller hockey in an effort to balance the ledger between men’s and women’s teams in proportion to the student body.

At other schools, many of whom were already losing money on football before the Northwestern ruling, the former nonrevenue sports have struggled to take center stage. Notre Dame’s soccer teams moved into the otherwise vacant Notre Dame stadium, never managing to fill more than half of the cavernous structure.

Fearful of other labor movements and a possible downswing in alumni interest, many athletic departments continued wholesale cuts in their sports programs. Only 14 schools competed in Division I wrestling last season.

Many schools attempted to continue in other Division I sports while fielding a Division III football team. The NCAA refused to allow this move for reasons that are still unclear.

Meanwhile, Montana and a handful of other colleges saw an opportunity to make a name for themselves as the rest of the college football structure collapsed. They invested heavily in football, cutting all other men’s sports, even basketball.

The NCAA’s response to the crisis was hindered by its inability to find a new president. The job was offered to Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, but he was critically injured laughing at the news.

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sports culture

‘Friday Night Tykes’: The decline of Western civilization?

Posted on by Beau Dure

This is a guest post from Katie Voss. Please greet her on Twitter! 

Youth football first became an establishment in 1929, and since then has been led by leagues such as the Texas Youth Football Association who, after being followed by cameras for the new reality show Friday Night Tykes, may face some backlash for their intense coaching antics. The primary goal of youth sports leagues, or at least their original intent, was to encourage the development of young athletes into capable leaders, teammates, and driven individuals. However, if Friday Night Tykes is an accurate reflection of what many youth sports programs have become, it looks like the realm of youth football has some re-evaluating to do.

The docu-series, which follows five teams of 8- to 9-year-old rookie players competing in the Texas Youth Football Association (TYFA), has shown not only some rough takedowns and questionably safe activities, but also some frightening advice from coaches and parents alike. One coach is quoted encouraging players to, “Rip their freaking head off and let them bleed.” He then goes on to tell another young athlete, “I want you to stick it in his helmet — I don’t care if he don’t get up.” Only one mother, perhaps shown to placate audiences, is filmed reminding fellow parents that the boys are little more than babies.

The show, set to air on the Esquire Network on January 14 (available from most cable providers, DirectStar TV and from their website), is giving ammo (perhaps unintentionally) to already concerned parents and others regarding the safety of youth football and similar contact sports. From the preview alone, which is being advertised on TYFA’s homepage with pride, it’s clear that these players are participants in some of the worst aspects of athletics: public shaming, being pushed past physical breaking points, and high-risk, injury-causing activities. Someone may have to remind these coaches that their players need to safely make it through elementary, middle, and high school before being given a chance to play for their favorite colleges.

It seems Esquire expected some sort of controversial response, which is no surprise since the dangers regarding concussions from football and similar sports has been filling headlines across the country for the past couple years. As recently as 2012, more than 2,000 NFL players sued the NFL for not educating them on the possible consequences of repeated blows to the head, and the controversy resulted in a PBS documentary: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis. Esquire claims that the show will bring to light important health questions regarding young athletes. Their website claims the show will have “coaches and parents offer insight into why they believe they’re teaching valuable lessons about discipline and dedications, but also grapple with serious questions about parenting, safety, and at what price we’re pushing our kids to win.”

Concussion awareness aside, one of the biggest issues a young athlete will face is the “culture of resistance” found in most competitive sports. Whether it is a potential head injury or other physical pain, athletes are often afraid or discouraged from reporting injuries. Staying on the sidelines, and therefore disappointing mom, dad, and coach during or prior to important games can be more convincing than physical discomfort.

The NFL, which has been trying to reduce head-to-head collisions among players through penalties, fines, and education, has already felt the need to publicly mention that Friday Night Tykes is not a part of their Heads Up Football Program, which seeks to improve player safety in youth football. If even the NFL is skeptical, chances are the show will not highlight the bright side of little league football. In the end, what audiences can only hope for from the show is an understanding of what needs to change in order to improve youth sports.

Much as Teen Mom was aimed toward (and possibly succeeded in) lowering teen pregnancy rates, Friday Night Tykes could help reduce the culture of resistance in youth sports, and educate parents and kids alike on the safety risks, and necessary precautions, that are part of high-contact sports.

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college sports, sports culture

Divert sports funding to arts?

Posted on by Beau Dure

A Gary Gutting piece at the NYT’s philosophy blog starts out reassuring us that the lack of humanities majors isn’t a bad thing (after all, we can’t everyone being like me) then meanders to suggestions for shoring up the “cultural middle class.”

Then it gets interesting:

Fair treatment for writers and artists is an even more difficult matter, which will ultimately require a major change in how we think about support for the arts. Fortunately, however, we already have an excellent model, in our support of athletics. Despite our general preference for capitalism, our support for sports is essentially socialist, with local and state governments providing enormous support for professional teams. To cite just one striking example, the Minnesota State Legislature recently appropriated over $500 million to help build the Vikings a new stadium. At the same time, the Minnesota Orchestra is close to financial disaster because it can’t erase a $6 million deficit. If the Legislature had diverted only 10 percent of its support for football, it would have covered that deficit for the next eight years.

Over all, taxpayer money provides more than a billion dollars annually in tax exemptions and stadium subsidies for N.F.L. teams. Other sports also receive generous support. Even major universities subsidize professional sports through their (mostly money-losing) athletic programs, which provide a continuing influx of professional players. Universities could reduce their efforts to field teams playing at near-professional levels and direct the money saved to artistic activities much closer to their core mission.

Provocative question.

You could easily argue that sports mean more to the typical city than a symphony does. Go to a town like Boston — the music is fantastic, but the sports teams (especially the Red Sox) are a massive presence.

At a college? Hard to say. Even within the arts, you find intriguing budget decisions. I always wondered why my school had a bunch of antique instruments but could barely manage a working set of tympani. But then you move over to the athletics department and find the best possible facilities for nearly every sport. Some college soccer players go “pro” and are stunned to find some travel arrangements and other aspects of pro life don’t measure up to what they had in college.

But as a former college musician, I’m not sure I can complain about that. I have to admit most sports teams at Duke had larger crowds than I saw for our Wind Symphony concerts. Also, it was just a bit easier to make the Marching Band than it was to make the soccer team.

Are the arts really closer to a “core mission” of a college than the sports teams? I don’t know about that. I’m not really sure why I got course credit for Wind Symphony, Percussion Ensemble AND my P.E. courses, but my friends on the volleyball team got no such credit for their sport.

So, again — provocative question.

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college sports, sports culture

Are all scholastic sports a waste of time?

Posted on by Beau Dure

That’s the question raised in this pointed essay from The Atlantic: The Case Against High-School Sports and a follow-up from CollegeSportsScholarships.com.

The examples cited are extreme. The Atlantic found schools that managed to fund its football teams while the science labs rotted. The University of Oregon’s students apparently slipped academically as the football team got better. That’s not good. But it’s one school — not a huge sample size.

That said, these are legitimate questions that fly in the face of some sacred cows. We’ve been programmed to think athletes (particularly female athletes in Title IX arguments) are more likely to stay in school and succeed. But that’s not always true, and we all know it. Especially not in college. There’s a reason the NCAA started tracking graduation rates so obsessively.

Another issue here, especially for the soccer crowd: Are schools a better place for sports than clubs are? From a school budget point of view, maybe clubs are better. From a family perspective, maybe the schools are better. You can’t tell me a kid is better off hopping in a car a couple of times a week to go practice with a club somewhere else when there’s probably a perfectly good field or gym right there at the school.

Football is the easiest target when schools need to cut back. That’s a lot of money to spend. But it’s hard to cut football out of a school’s social calendar. And unlike soccer, basketball, tennis, golf and several other sports, football doesn’t offer a lot of non-school options.

I was raised with the old ideal that kids needed to develop mind and body (and spirit, in my YMCA days). My tiny high school had a full athletic program, and roughly 90 percent of us played something. I admire that ideal, but I understand the expense argument.

So here’s a heretical idea: How about having more intramurals and less travel?

Maybe you could have tournaments within each school. From those tournaments, pick All-Star teams that compete against a couple of big rivals and then into state tournaments.

This would get many more people involved at big schools. I can already tells you how many players in youth soccer have no chance of making a school’s varsity or junior varsity with only two teams per school. Why not spread things out a bit?

1
college sports, sports culture

When the sports police lose the plot …

Posted on by Beau Dure

ESPN and Sports Illustrated surely didn’t coordinate their stories on the NCAA and other investigations in sports. But taken together, the pieces show troubling issues for those who try to keep sports fair.

The main Sports Illustrated piece isn’t available online as far as I know, at least not yet. It’s an investigation about an investigation, in which Pete Thamel and Alexander Wolff show how the NCAA’s probe into the University of Miami went horribly awry. Thamel followed up online with a look at turnover on the enforcement staff and general NCAA dysfunction. Wolff goes a different direction and reports on Nevin Shapiro, the Miami whistleblower. (He apparently made a lot of money betting that the Hurricanes wouldn’t cover the spread against Duke. I’m tempted to take that as flattery, but I probably can’t.)

ESPN’s Chris Jones has a column on Georgia’s Kolton Houston, who at one point was banned for life as a repeat drug offender until the Bulldogs produced proof that his body has residual norandrolone from a doctor’s mistake in high school. Those who follow Olympic sports, particularly cases like Torri Edwards’ and Alain Baxter’s, may recognize the pitfalls of “zero tolerance” applied by people who aren’t paying attention to details.

Then we have the saddest case, indirectly involving the NCAA. College football coach Todd Hoffner lost his job through overzealous overreaction in the post-Jerry Sandusky era. Worse, he was branded a child pornographer. His mistake? His kids asked him to shoot a video, the kids (toddler/early elementary age) dropped their clothes, and he didn’t immediately erase the video. The people who prosecuted Hoffner, both within Minnesota State-Mankato and in court, would be hard pressed to say their actions were in the best interests of his children.

The Hoffner case is a classic overreaction and should be a cautionary tale. The Houston case is a reminder to all anti-doping authorities to get all the facts, not just what a lab result tells them.

Can anything be done about the NCAA? Perhaps simplifying would be better. Rather than having layers of compliance protocols that make the U.S. tax code look like the rules for the first Ultimate Fighting Championship “there are no rules!” event, maybe focus on two things:

1. Schools can’t pay athletes.

2. Student-athletes must be students in good standing.

So much else the NCAA oversees is just so much hair-splitting and bureaucracy. Do we really care if someone gave an athlete a ride home? Or if athletes in Olympic sports have sponsors? Or about any of the procedural hoops USL, NPSL and WPSL teams have to clear so they can have college athletes on their teams?

Drop a lot of the overregulation, and maybe they’ll do a better job with the actual cheating.

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sports culture

NCAAmageddon and the numbers

Posted on by Beau Dure

The NCAA has released updated numbers on how much money is being flushed down the pipes at your local athletic department, and Sports Law Blog relates it to the sure-to-be-landmark O’Bannon vs. NCAA case.

I think O’Bannon has a case that shouldn’t hinge on such things. The initial argument was whether O’Bannon was entitled to money from his likeness being used in a video game. You’d think a judge could simply say yes, giving athletes a small but substantial victory.

But no, as this SI piece says, a judge instead interpreted “profiting off likeness” to include televised games. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that if they win, TV news broadcasts would suddenly be responsible for paying everyone who appears on camera. Welcome back to the age of radio.

Perhaps common sense will prevail, and everyone will make a deal allowing athletes to be paid if their images are being used to sell video games and T-shirts. Or not.

In the meantime, the NCAA numbers once again feed all sorts of arguments, particularly Title IX.

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sports culture

Sharpest Title IX comment in a while

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m a little uneasy with Sally Jenkins’ comments since her co-author Lance Armstrong’s downfall, and I do think Title IX enforcement is getting counterproductive in spots.

But Jenkins has a lively wit, and when she’s right, she’s a joy to read. Like so:

Ooooh! Title IX baiting! Yeah, Title IX is still necessary because the instant it wasn’t there any more, Geno Auriemma would be be back coaching out of a unheated attic in an auxillary gym, and women would be sewing on their own numerals, in order to cut the budget so more ivory could be inlaid in the coffee table in Nick Saban’s office.

via One Of Our Favorite Sports Columnists, Sally Jenkins, Is Here To Take Your Questions.

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sports culture

A perfunctory Duke lacrosse legal update

Posted on by Beau Dure

Remember April 2011, when I took a peek at the latest developments in the Duke lacrosse players’ legal action (filed by the players who were NOT wrongly accused of rape) against the school? And then a bunch of people flooded my comments and insisted that the ruling at the time was a Really Bad Thing for Duke because everyone from a possibly crooked nurse to the guy who plays the carillon would have to step up in court and be grilled under oath?

This week, the major remaining lawsuit was quietly settled. Another one remains. Says KC Johnson, the professor/blogger who turned a quest for justice into a crusade against all things Duke: “The McFadyen lawsuit, for the three plaintiffs represented by Bob Ekstrand, remains alive. This news nonetheless means that chances of Duke being held accountable in court for its mistreatment of its students are very slim indeed.”

You may recall that I’ve always seen a certain irony in Johnson’s blog and his followers. It started as a just response to “groupthink,” which was leading angry mobs to judge the players prematurely. Then it became “groupthink,” with people buying into every wacky conspiracy theory about Duke’s actions in the case.

Johnson has moved on to “Minding the Campus,” another effort at fighting academic “groupthink” excesses (a legitimate cause) that links to Instapundit and the National Review (but not, say, The Washington Post’s education coverage) in the name of “intellectual pluralism.”

But this is too harsh on Johnson, who has written some thoughtful pieces on Penn State. And he has been criticized on his blog for it.

The lesson: Groupthink is a bad thing. Rushes to judgment are bad. Angry mobs are bad.

And at some point, you have to say enough’s enough and move on. I hope the three wrongly accused men are faring well in their careers. Meanwhile, the truly evil actors in this case (the accuser, the prosecutor) are the only ones who haven’t carried on with their lives. And that’s how it should be.

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sports culture

The race to be “first” claims another victim

Posted on by Beau Dure

Cross-posting at Mostly Modern Media

Today, we hear Robert Griffin III will have surgery on one ligament and possibly another, but he’s likely to be back next season.

That’s not what we heard earlier in the week from WRIC News 8 in Richmond, Va., which said RGIII had torn his ACL and PCL and would be out at least 14-18 months. (Wouldn’t that be just “at least 14 months”?)

If you’re thinking it’s a little strange that a TV station 124 miles from FedEx Field would have such a major exclusive, good. And as an hour or so passed with no other confirmation, it got a little fishier.

Then that story disappeared.

Then things broke loose on Twitter:

Deadspin and D.C. Sports Bog have plausibly traced back the rumor to former Redskins player Fred Smoot’s comments on a local radio station.

News 8 came back to Twitter to offer up an apology and clarification:

Follow the link, and you’ll learn “the erroneous information was not posted by our Sports Dept.”

Which probably means an inexperienced staffer posted it, and the Sports people are angry and fearful for their credibility. I’ve seen it happen at plenty of news organizations.

But I have no sources to confirm that.

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