The John Terry Affair (why we should, and shouldn't care)

John Terry's found himself in the news for all the wrong reasons - cheating on his wife with the girlfriend of a teammate. The Final Third defends the defender - pointing out the inevitability of Terry's public disgrace, coming as it does after months being built up as a media darling. 
 
The grandstanding over Terry's affair is a lot of stuff and nonsense. Most of these players have been raised by football itself, which is, especially in England, a deeply regressive patriarchal space that can't imagine women as anything but ornamentation, things look at and to use. The media is perhaps the worst culprit on this issue. Such rhetoric masks the degree to which it in fact embraces and celebrates sexism and machismo in football, and reproduces the assumption that football can't in fact survive without it.  Terry is sacrificed here, in a seasonal rite washing an entire culture of its responsibility in making the world worse.

Let's put such media attention to Terry in perspective by glancing quickly at a few of cases in which women athletes have been disciplined for their behavior.

Darnellia Russell was a nationally ranked high school basketball player when she sued her state athletic association so that she could play with her team during her last year, the year when she would be scouted to play NCAA ball. Why had they barred her from the court? Because she had a baby. She won the suit (ever heard of a male athlete banned from a sport for the same reason?). The whole process was such a scandal to athletics organizations, however, she never got that college scholarship. No school would touch her – although she took her team to a state championship and played even better post-pregnancy than before. (A male player of her caliber might have been drafted right into the NBA – the rules for female athletes & the WNBA on this point are different.) Her story is profiled in the wonderful documentary, Heart of the Game.

In January, 1995, the BBC aired a documentary about the Doncaster Belles, the dominant women’s team in the country and also the longest continuously running women’s club in the UK. After the documentary aired, the FA kicked a number of their players off the national team and removed the captaincy from Gill Coultard. Why? Because these working class footballers, uhm, were shown going to their local pub – DRINKING, and SWEARING! Not behavior suitable for a “ladies team.” (Let’s bear in mind that none of these women received any money ever for playing football.) The FA's chief executive wrote that the documentary was

regrettable in its content and timing, unacceptable for its language and behavior and a disincentive to parents and teachers.  (See Pete Davies's I Lost My Heart to the Belles.)

After that, the team was afraid to be interviewed or filmed.
 
Hope Solo was banned from the US lineup for months, and pilloried for speaking out after a WC match about her confidence that she could have played better than her teammate had in a crucial match (Brianna Scurry had been placed in goal, although Solo had been performing brilliantly – Scurry gave up 3 – or was it 4?). She wasn’t allowed into even the stands to support her teammates in the 3rd place match, she was made to fly home on a different plane, and scapegoated in the press.

Women athletes are expected to play in an airless space. They are supposed to be so grateful for the mere opportunity to play, that they are required to play along. They are expected to be virtuous in all regards. They are expected to be polite, and humble; heterosexual but not too sexual; chaste and self-effacing.  This is why so much marketing around women's sports is so repulsive - as if guided by a conduct book for girls, written in the 1850s.

I wish for more peccadillos for all athletes! Regardless of the genders of either the athlete, the spouse, or the lover!