tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61657804389297975772024-03-13T07:56:17.221-07:00From A Left Wingsoccer, sports polemicsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger279125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-89013757927080572872013-10-12T16:10:00.004-07:002013-10-12T16:12:47.743-07:00From a Left Wing has retired, Long Live The Sport SpectacleI wrote <i>From a Left Wing</i> from December 2007 until July 2013. For much of that time, I averaged one post a week; some years I wrote more than that. In that time my interests have changed, and much as I love <i>From a Left Wing</i> as a writing-space and as a community of readers, I decided to retire this blog and start a different project, <a href="http://thesportspectacle.com/" target="_blank">The Sport Spectacle</a>.<br />
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How can I possibly express my gratitude to the people who've supported From a Left Wing by reading, engaging, sometimes correcting and arguing with me?<br />
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Thank you, and I hope you like the new blog.<br />
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Find me at the new site, which alternates between image-heavy and text-heavy posts.<br />
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@FromaLeftWing still tweets.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-44911036050760222162013-06-19T12:30:00.002-07:002013-06-19T20:32:26.823-07:00All in One Rhythm: Brazil Rejects the Pure SpectacleThe people taking to the streets in Brazil are demonstrating the only right and true response to the militarized boondoggle of international sports festivals like FIFA's World Cup and the Olympics. These are serial spectacles - a rotating cast and set acting out the same story over and over again - a massive fiction about fairness and a "level playing field." It is fiction in the sense of the lie, the scam. The complicity of any government with the production of these spectacles is a scandal.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTF9Z0z4X16bXyTmINSyMp4EJmeZ8nmhQHn2VUm2_oIB9OOXIim5ceFYthNXyavODy6uxaIaRzXVF-fbSXifn-3r44TZPgwlA87vzNMphvvDOPsB0ksgVSHnozF5Z2BQnCDHed2pgxddjO/s1600/maracana+is+a+pure+spectacle.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTF9Z0z4X16bXyTmINSyMp4EJmeZ8nmhQHn2VUm2_oIB9OOXIim5ceFYthNXyavODy6uxaIaRzXVF-fbSXifn-3r44TZPgwlA87vzNMphvvDOPsB0ksgVSHnozF5Z2BQnCDHed2pgxddjO/s320/maracana+is+a+pure+spectacle.jpeg" width="201" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from Christopher Gaffney's <a href="http://www.geostadia.com/" target="_blank">Geostadia</a></td></tr>
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The level field of the pure spectacle is flattened by bulldozers, helicopters and police. The formal image of the World Cup: a green rectangle of the best grass for the best game - a painted-on Imperial green that registers nicely in HD and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the fields that the world's people actually play on. Our own lived experience of the game is mediated through it. The beautiful game is turned into a game of deficits - the distance between that artificial image of the perfect conditions and the actual conditions in which we live, work, play - that distance itself is captured, packaged and sold to us as a form of global longing - a shared spectator experience that we indulge every four years and from which we turn away, like uncertain addicts - disgusted with ourselves and with the things we want. (This is why<i> </i><a href="http://youtu.be/ZApBgNQgKPU" target="_blank">I am not going to the World Cup</a>.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.theworld.org/2013/05/the-struggle-for-female-soccer-equality-in-brazil/" target="_blank">It may seem a strange moment for me to remind you of Brazil's women's team</a>. The CBF has never done right by the women's team. They are still here nevertheless as embodiments of everything FIFA resents. The impure spectacle, the spectacle of intense skill and joy that takes us all by surprise every time we see it because we consume it through a system determined to forget every sick pass, every goal or supernatural save. A system that can't hold onto her joy - for that kid of joy is a poison to its system. So a women's club will win its national title before an all but empty stadium. A player might grow her hair long and indulge a manager's impulse to put her in a uniform so tight it doesn't allow her to move her arms. But she knows it won't work. She remains an irritant to the apparatus. A grain of sand, a splinter.<br />
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Perhaps this is why <a href="http://equalizersoccer.com/2013/03/22/wambach-world-cup-not-the-place-for-artificial-turf/" target="_blank">FIFA wants women to play their World Cup on plastic</a>. Or why <a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer/womensworldcup/story/history-of-womens-game-wwc-germany-2011-recovering-from-soccer-divorce-070711" target="_blank">we forget that people have organized international tournaments for women</a> (e.g Mexico, 1970) - at a time when supposedly nobody cared - and these games drew massive audiences (e.g. <a href="http://www.rsssf.com/tablesm/mundo-women71.html" target="_blank">Estadio Azteca, 110,000</a>). I can hardly get myself wound up about the "failure" of women's soccer. I like to think of the dogged failure of the women's game to <i>attract</i> as a sign. It is an unspectacular spectacle, an impure spectacle of the lowest order.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4mahzjYUFM6qg42RnppTgoTkzTMcuAGopTyTSzQ4XHx3PfhQfnxATVH3qjzBI_SLrdxmHIanjRw_c2FaUdK21Hmfwtb8RMo7E60pSWgrBIIpga3AJtpb_nJfR01x4gCCxBmL_zSAwETzq/s1600/Picture+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4mahzjYUFM6qg42RnppTgoTkzTMcuAGopTyTSzQ4XHx3PfhQfnxATVH3qjzBI_SLrdxmHIanjRw_c2FaUdK21Hmfwtb8RMo7E60pSWgrBIIpga3AJtpb_nJfR01x4gCCxBmL_zSAwETzq/s400/Picture+1.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From a PRI story, <a href="http://www.theworld.org/2013/05/the-struggle-for-female-soccer-equality-in-brazil/" target="_blank">"The Struggle for Equality in Brazil" </a></td></tr>
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Given that the men's world cup is in essence Moloch's game, I find it hard to root for "equity" for the women's. Instead, I like to remember <a href="http://guerreirasproject.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">the activist and egalitarian spirit of the women's game</a> as a counterpoint. FIFA hates women, FIFA hates feminists - and in this simple fact we see that it actually hates the grassroots it purports to nurture - the same grassroots spirit it appropriates as a marketing strategy - the favela fantasy, the favela as the soul of the game - the "slum," the "street" rendered in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TopdsMhMAz4" target="_blank">one commercial</a> after another <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAX1UCpLBoA" target="_blank">(teeming with life and with talent)</a> from an actual community into <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOqZFloWfnY" target="_blank">the commodity's patina</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/06/201361821494340354.html" target="_blank">Demonstrators in Brazil</a> are telling us what we already know: we need to hate these systems back - properly, and in numbers. It is not enough to want a "better" World Cup, just as it not enough to want the state to be more efficient in the ways that it strips our educational, health care and transportation systems for parts, to build higher fences and thicker walls. </div>
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There is a lot of good writing about what is happening in Brazil right now. I recommend Christopher Gaffney's blog <a href="http://www.geostadia.com/" target="_blank">Geostadia</a>, from which I pulled the photo at the top of this post. It's a smart starting place for the English-language reader. Check out <a href="http://www.socialtextjournal.org/blog/2013/06/kicking-off-in-brazil.php" target="_blank">this post on Social Text too</a>. </div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-81724822569901754252013-06-14T13:02:00.001-07:002013-06-19T12:31:14.272-07:00Are the Doncaster Belles being punished for their history? Or for the history of women's football? <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOOr4NXMoCGI1uV4xhn_e7Y2x48yqnMurcGB-dHrkNSjuhydGsDDIbwfNls8iXBEcxCXsTwFai8LMoUFxaO-ThPLtatAeuwX6DDlLkvf4JXnn6-mIJKIeDLHp2SYvofze4EAOudrKFFRVv/s1600/John&PreciousCopyrightMoiraLovell2008.CommissedByPavilion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOOr4NXMoCGI1uV4xhn_e7Y2x48yqnMurcGB-dHrkNSjuhydGsDDIbwfNls8iXBEcxCXsTwFai8LMoUFxaO-ThPLtatAeuwX6DDlLkvf4JXnn6-mIJKIeDLHp2SYvofze4EAOudrKFFRVv/s400/John&PreciousCopyrightMoiraLovell2008.CommissedByPavilion.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Moira Lovell, "John and Precious" from <a href="http://www.moiralovell.com/photo/3/3.html" target="_blank">Stand Your Ground</a><br />
Doncaster Rover Belles players and their coach</td></tr>
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The unfairness of discrimination can be so lacerating, so outrageous that you hesitate to speak directly to the experience of it. Once you start, you are sucked into a tornado of totally justified and completely disabling paranoid thinking. Who wants to count the ways in which the game is fixed, ruined at the outset? That's the pall that the English FA is casting over the women's game it claims to want to develop.<br />
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At the start of this season, <a href="http://www.fawsl.com/news/fa_selects_clubs_for_wsl_licences.html" target="_blank">the FA announced its plans to relegate the Doncaster Belles from its "Super League" no matter how well they perform</a>.* This is so that they can make room for Man City's women's club, which finished 4th in the "Premier League" (the 2nd tier league in the women's system). Man City is to be promoted no matter how poorly they do.<br />
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To say that this would not happen to a men's side is to say the obvious. That complaint doesn't say much. It is perhaps more accurate to say that this decision represents an attempt to map the lack of integrity of the men's game onto the women's game in the name of the latter's "development" - as if one could squeeze grassroots football out the women's game overnight and replace it with the hollow commercialism of the men's game.<br />
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The FA believes that Man City is a better product than the Doncaster Belles, and that fans are satisfied with the fact <i>that </i>women play, and so it doesn't matter who plays on what team or how well.<br />
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The Doncaster Belles have played in the top division in women's football for 22 years. They are founding members of the National League (the FA's first women's national division), and completed the 1991-1992 inaugural season without conceding a single game. Why did the Doncaster Belles enter the first season of FA-sponsored women's football as the overwhelmingly dominant club? Because they'd been playing since 1969: they were founded before the FA <i>allowed</i> women to play. They are, in fact, England's longest continuously operating women's club. (For a good portrait of the club, read The Popular Stand's <a href="http://popularstand.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/the-belles-toll-on-the-fas-relegation-of-the-doncaster-belles/" target="_blank">The Belles Toll</a>.)<br />
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The Doncaster Belles are a model organization: In 2009, they established <a href="http://www.doncasterroversbelles.co.uk/community.html" target="_blank">"The Belles for the Community"</a> initiative, integrating the women's club into "community, social, health and educational services." They are (according to their website) the first women's club in Britain to do so - in doing so, they honor the roots of the women's game as not only grassroots, but communitarian.<br />
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In early years of the women's game in England (1919-1921), clubs raised money for the community - for injured and unemployed veterans, for war widows, and eventually in some cases for striking workers. People knew that in turning out to watch women's football, they were supporting each other - so they turned out in huge numbers and raised an astonishing amount of money from communities with few resources to spare. Barbara Jacobs, in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dick-Kerrs-Ladies-Barbara-Jacobs/dp/1841198285" target="_blank">her must-read history of the women's game</a>, speculates that the communitarian orientation of women's game was one of the reasons behind FA's 1921 ban. She writes:<br />
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For the FA, the psychological reason was that women's football was something they were powerless to control. It has sprung up as the spontaneous expression of free-spiritedness by the lower orders, in a totally different way from that in which men's football had developed. Men's football had initially been a game for gentlemen which had only later, after its control by the FA, turned into a rough-house performed for the working classes by the working classes, which they and they alone paid to see while the owners and investors pocketed the proceeds....But in women's football there were very few rich men, just a lot of common factory women. There was no League structure, no hierarchy,no fees paid to accountants, no skimming off dividends, no affiliation to a professional body. Women's football was random and organic.... It was out of control, and it was a bad example to set the nation as a whole, which was already rebelling against the old power structures. </blockquote>
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If women's football, which had shifted slightly from its factory roots and begun to establish itself as a sporting means for raising huge sums of money for charity,were to continue, how long would it be before the man in the street...started to ask - where does the money raised in men's football go to? (Jacobs, <i>The Dick, Kerr's Ladies</i>, 166)</blockquote>
Jacobs's analysis of this history is important. Sexism does not stand alone. The FA did what it could to kill the women's game in the 1920s not because women weren't suited to football (that's the official reason they gave), and not because the women's game was corrupt (ironically, that's another reason they gave). The FA did what it did because the women's game was organized differently. It represented a different cultural possibility. This was expressed in the game's material structure - in particular in the way that the people organizing the women's game approached the money. Money, in the women's game in those years, was meant to circulate - it was not to be gathered by a single owner or set of investors. The women's game was a means for taking care of each other.<br />
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I see the echo of this moment in the FA's current behavior towards the Doncaster Belles - otherwise why single out the most stable club, with the best playing grounds and with the most articulated relationship to its community for this treatment?<br />
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I've resisted thinking about this (I'm writing this months after the FA announced its intentions) because the idea of it is just so painful. As one fan put it to a<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/relegation-scandal-takes-toll-on-doncaster-rovers-belles-8650856.html" target="_blank"> journalist reporting the story for The Independent</a>:<br />
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Doncaster have one of the best stadiums in the [Women's Super League]...Arsenal play at Boreham Wood, Birmingham in Stratford-upon-Avon, Liverpool at Widnes. We have a 15,000 seat stadium. We have eight England internationals...we could lose all these players.</blockquote>
The Independent rightly called the story a "relegation scandal." The Doncaster Belles are appealing this decision - the stakes are high. Not just for the Belles, but for every fan of English football. If the FA feels it can go after the integrity of the women's game, perhaps it feels it must, because the integrity of a side like the Doncaster Belles throws the state of the men's game into such stark relief.<br />
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*For US-based readers unfamiliar with the relegation/promotion system that defines this sport: Teams that finish at the top of their division are promoted and teams that finish at the bottom are relegated to the next division down.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-43410691822107424172013-05-09T11:26:00.000-07:002013-05-10T20:39:58.592-07:00The Runner's RunnerI've long wanted to write about Justina Cassavell. My sister has been the cross-country coach at Voorhees High School in New Jersey since the mid 1990s. She is also the head track coach (boys and girls). She announced her resignation yesterday - within minutes it seemed, <a href="http://www.nj.com/hssports/blog/girlstrackandfield/index.ssf/2013/05/justina_cassavell_steps_down_as_track_and_cross-country_coach_at_voorhees.html" target="_blank">the story was posted on NJ.com</a>.<br />
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Under her leadership, <a href="http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/sports/index.ssf/2013/05/justina_cassavell_steps_down_a.html" target="_blank">the girls cross-country team has been one of the best teams in not just the state, but in the northeast</a>. One local paper summed up her accomplishments: "<a href="http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/sports/index.ssf/2009/05/five_questions_voorhees_girls.html" target="_blank">Cassavell is recognized as one of the top coaches of distance runners, male or female, in New Jersey state history</a>." She was inducted into the NJSIAA Athletic Coaches Hall of Fame. Her team has won [thirteen] state sectional titles, nine state titles, and three Meet of Champions (all group) titles (thanks to my brother-in-law for keeping the stats!). In recent years, they've also qualified for national competitions three times (placing first or second in the northeast in 2007, 2010 and 2012). In addition, she's coached individual runners on her teams to national ranking and helped them establish a foundation for their development as college athletes.<br />
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My sister is known for helping runners realize their talent (e.g. gifted athletes like Liz Wort who graduated from Duke in 2007, was a 3-time all-American in the steeplechase and is now head cross-country coach at TCU, and Melanie Thompson, a University of Oregon runner and 2-time All American, also in the steeplechase). But my sister is also known for cultivating the good runner, the life-long runner. Running, I've heard her say again and again, should make you happy. I've also heard her say that she thinks of herself as a coach who really enjoys coaching a team.<br />
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That's a special thing: because that coach takes an interest in the All-American but also in the struggling athlete, the injured, and the ordinary hard-worker. She knows that a good runner can be any and all of these things. Journalists covering high-school sports in the area tend to describe her as <a href="http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/12/post_216.html" target="_blank">a "whisperer"</a> - signaling the degree to which such attentive coaching seems like magic in a world that sells us pretty much one vision of what an effective coach looks like (a man) and does (yells, a lot) in the service of a single aim (win at all cost).<br />
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In his most recent column, Dave Zirin argues that youth <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174254/cesspool-why-youth-sports-stink#" target="_blank">sports culture seems to cultivate aggression</a> of the worst sorts. Increasingly, people experience youth sports as an apparatus that enables the abuse of power and authority. (My experience with AYSO in Los Angeles sadly affirms this.) Even as youth sports operates in American mythology as a kind of idyll - as a place we imagine as innocent and good - the reality is quite different. Zirin asks, "<span style="background-color: white;">Why do 70 percent of kids quit youth sports by age 13? Why do
parents get so unbelievably nasty? Why, and this is the most serious point, can
it turn suddenly violent?" </span>He writes:<br />
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I spoke with Joe Ehrmann, former NFL player, pastor and founder of Coach for America. Ehrmann has devoted his life to fighting this societal tide and making youth sports and coaching a positive for children. He said to me, “My belief is that while youth sports originated to train, nurture and guide children into adulthood many programs/coaches have taken over to meet needs of adults at expense of kids. Sports should be a tool to help children become whole and healthy adults who can build relationships and contribute as citizens, but the social contract between adults protecting and providing for the needs of children [instead of their own needs] is broken.” ([Zirin's] emphasis.)</blockquote>
Those are strong words describing the experiences of a great many parents and kids. Where some aspects of youth sports has been taken over by selfishness, greed, and cruelty, I've had the distinct pleasure of seeing the other side: The world being cultivated by the women who entered sports in the 1980s with a little help from federal legislation (my sister's scholarships were no doubt created by Title IX equity requirements). Those women ran in college and now they coach other young women at high schools, colleges, summer camps. Athletics is a way of life for them. And it's a sustainable way of life. That way of being in sports nurtures competitiveness, because that kind of competition is good for everyone. One person inspires another. A collective feels wonder at what one person among them can do. There is something both humbling and empowering about running alongside someone who is much faster, stronger than you.<br />
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Over the past fifteen+ years, I've loved going to watch the Voorhees girls run. There's something so perfect about a cross-country meet. About being outdoors, about running along the course to cheer. About watching teams <i>try</i>. I love seeing how teams gather together at the end of the race - how the older athletes look after the younger ones. How kids look after teammates with different needs, how they lift each other's spirits. It's so damned nice to be reminded of what youth sports can be.<br />
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As a person coaching teenagers, my sister quite literally coaches her athletes from childhood to adulthood. The high school coach has an incredible responsibility. I think she's really joyed in watching the people on her team mature, take responsibility for themselves and each other. If she likes to coach a team, perhaps that's why - part of being an adult involves learning to understand oneself in relation to, among others. Cross country is just a cool sport when it comes to that balance of the self with others. Nobody can run for you; everybody needs you to run your best.<br />
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While my sister is eloquent on the thing that makes for a great competitor (the insane drive that will make a runner not just want but need to win the race) she has dedicated years of her life to helping young women find balance, to run their best, together.<br />
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When I go home, I run with my sisters (both of whom ran track at Rutgers, my other sister worked with autistic children for years, and is an equally gifted teacher). Justina has taught me to keep myself relaxed, to take hills slowly, to let myself take my time so I can run long (after one session in which she talked about pace, I nearly doubled the amount of time I was able to run). I learned to listen to my body. I learned to notice when I was holding myself back.<br />
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Running with Justina has helped my writing. It's helped me to take notice when I begin to move away from trying. When I think I can't do something, I put on my shoes and run. It seems like an escape, but it's really a kind of meditation. A practice, a way to tune in. The things you learn from having a holistic approach to a sport carry over into other areas of your life. We hear that all the time. But there's something to it: you don't just work out a problem through the mind <i>or</i> the body. You can work something out in one domain and bring the wisdom you found there to the other. Sometimes you need to do both at once, to trust yourself and give it a shot. She's the person that taught me this.<br />
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I wish that when I was in high school I'd had access to coach like her. It's hard to imagine what a difference having a person like this can mean to a teenage girl - having access to a role model in the form of a grown-up woman, a person guiding you in developing a healthy relationship to your body, and doing so in a way that isn't about being pretty or cute or skinny or perfect but is about being strong, healthy and balanced.<br />
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Anyway, all this is just to say I'm fiercely proud of my sister and all that she's accomplished as a coach at Voorhees High School. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-25875893510446510112013-05-01T16:37:00.000-07:002013-05-01T17:33:18.331-07:00Brittney Griner, Jason Collins and the Sex of a Story<br />
The (not-homophobic side of the) sports world has invested a lot of magic in the currently-professional-and-playing-out-gay-male-athlete. It's no wonder, given how elusive that athlete has been.<br />
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Jason Collins comes out decades after Stonewall, he comes out long after Ellen DeGeneres came out while professionally-active-and-on-television and then recovered that career with her talk show, months after Frank Ocean came out about his love for a man. Johnny Weir was never <i>not</i> out. <a href="http://espn.go.com/boxing/story/_/id/8677072/orlando-cruz-how-coming-closet-changed-fighting-espn-magazine-interview-issue" target="_blank">Orlando Cruz - a boxer - came out</a> in October. Transgender athlete Renée Richards entered women's professional tennis in 1977: she had to sue for the right to do so. Hers is a landmark case. NBA, NFL and baseball players have come out before, but in retirement. In 2009, Gareth Thomas, one of the most famous rugby players in the world (captain of the Welsh team) came out while he was still in the game - he told first his coach and then his team. They embraced him. Thomas has been eloquent in his description of what being closeted as such a public figure means. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-21875501" target="_blank">In a recent interview for BBC</a>, Thomas explained, "when you lie every day, you begin to hate yourself." It made him suicidal. Lists of athletes who have come out while they were playing date back quite a bit - take Billie Jean King, for example. Her <a href="http://www.outsports.com/2011/10/2/4051938/moment-3-tennis-great-billie-jean-king-outed" target="_blank">1981 outing was painful, not her choice and a powerful, frightening example</a> - the story became a headline, a scandal and "in 24 hours" she lost all her endorsements. She went on to be an inspirational figure, a leader in the fight for a better game. The list goes on in all sorts of directions. </div>
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Even given the diversity of public figures who have come out over the years, Jason Collins is the first pro in one of the sports that anchors mass sports media in the US to come out while still on the roster. As an active player, his livelihood is dependent on a patriarchal, racist and homophobic machine. It is no surprise that it has taken so long for a man in this particular sports environment to identify himself as a member of that class of people mainstream sports culture defines itself <i>against</i>. Coming out is huge.</div>
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People have been chiming in with a list of other names. People want to remember the women who've been there before. In addition to those mentioned above: Martina Navratilova (who, like King, came out in 1981), Amelie Mauresmo, Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, Missy Giove, Natasha Kai, Megan Rapinoe, Vicky Gallindo, Liz Carmouche. There are a lot more gay women in sports, but the media doesn't quite know how to address them - or their fans. We can see this in how Brittney Griner's "coming out" is presented as a story about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/sports/ncaabasketball/brittney-griner-comes-out-and-sports-world-shrugs.html" target="_blank">how her coming out is not a story</a>. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Garance Franke-Ruta thus opens her <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/why-jason-collinss-coming-out-is-such-a-big-deal/275383/" target="_blank">article for The Atlantic</a> with the following: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Female professional athletes are already gender non-conforming. Male ones are still worshipped as exemplars of traditional masculinity. Extremely sporty women have to fight stereotyping that they are lesbians and ignore all manner of unkind commentary about how they are mannish, while sporty men are seen as participating in a form of the masculine ideal.</blockquote>
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This is given as the context for understanding why Brittney Griner's coming out isn't news. The rhetorical frame here accepts the "either-or," gender segregated structure of mainstream sports culture. It reinforces common sense about what matters, and how. Collins's coming out means more than Griner's. To whom? </div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNL-JtCzWtQdJw0wM-DwslmDstwdNuFzSkWQKfQHYBw5oXN8ZpQk4w7jjlgz1PZdhs5sSKbMxfwFEk0ExyNlNEAWhzzJ4EkQ733cEpHF_7hQ6TDIazOqxUrlf_BtBhG-9O5nTa3icAFXhv/s1600/Griner+headshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNL-JtCzWtQdJw0wM-DwslmDstwdNuFzSkWQKfQHYBw5oXN8ZpQk4w7jjlgz1PZdhs5sSKbMxfwFEk0ExyNlNEAWhzzJ4EkQ733cEpHF_7hQ6TDIazOqxUrlf_BtBhG-9O5nTa3icAFXhv/s320/Griner+headshot.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Griner, responding to Maggie Grey's question about homophobia and sports on SI.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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My mind was properly blown by Griner's so-called coming out. Not because I thought Griner was straight. But because in that interview (for SI.com, because such interviews with women aren't conducted on, say, television) Griner was so damned smooth (her outfit!). It wasn't a "coming out" so much as an "always already been out." (This is also the style of <a href="http://fromaleftwing.blogspot.com/2012/08/all-in-all-out-note-on-amazing-megan.html" target="_blank">Rapinoe's coming out</a>). </div>
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</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">SI Video hos</strong><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">t</strong><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Maggie Gray:</strong> "Another big topic in sports recently is sexuality, especially with the NFL. In football it was rumored that maybe one or more players were going to come out--that would become huge news in the sports world and in general. In female sports, women's sports, in the WNBA, players have already come out, and it's really accepted. Why is there a difference between men and women in that issue?"</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Brittney Griner:</strong> "I really couldn't give an answer on why that's so different. Being one that's out, it's just being who you are. Again, like I said, just be who you are. Don't worry about what other people are going to say, because they're always going to say something, but, if you're just true to yourself, let that shine through. Don't hide who you really are." <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news/20130417/wnba-griner-delle-donne-diggins-sports-sexuality/#ixzz2S4rxe5EU" target="_blank">Griner, Delle Donne, Diggins Discuss Sport and Sexuality on SI</a></blockquote>
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It's a nice conversation. Gray opens the door and Griner walks right through it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Because in her world, it is. </div>
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But Gray opens this interview with a telling observation - an observation that allows us to see why Griner's coming out isn't a story: "It's not often we get to talk to three world class athletes that are also women." It isn't often, in other words, that we get to have this conversation (with women, between women) at all. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Lost in the story about it being "easier" for lesbians in women's sports is the larger apparatus that aggressively marginalizes women athletes. There's a relationship between the relegation of Griner's statement to a web-only platform and the making of Jason Collins's coming out narrative into a Sports Illustrated cover story. Griner's is a women's sports story - and women don't merit headlines, they aren't the lead story, they just don't mean as much - they aren't worth as much. </div>
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Minimized in language about how women athletes are always already gender non-conforming are the stories of butch women athletes who have been kicked off teams, harassed, assaulted - <a href="http://fromaleftwing.blogspot.com/2009/08/girlie-sgenale-nkosi-eudy-simelanes.html" target="_blank">killed, even</a>. Being an out gender non-conforming woman athlete is hard, and in some contexts it is dangerous. And that isn't much of a "story" either. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Mainstream sports culture devotes an enormous amount of energy to keeping things that way. Its commitment to maintaining the delusion that there are no gay men playing in the NBA is a part of the same problematic system that minimizes the whole of women's sports as less interesting, less valuable, less meaningful. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The ecstatic language that greets Collins as the magical figure that will transform sports culture has a weird shadow. Ecstatic: Finally, a man! Weird shadow: Because women can't have that magical effect on a patriarchal space from which they are banned. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Collins's coming out won't make the NBA into a queer space. But it does makes a little more room in the mainstream for gay and lesbian athletes. And that's no small thing. </div>
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<br /></div>
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But it's perhaps not quite as exciting - or as revolutionary - as <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9206043/brittney-griner-quiet-queering-professional-sports" target="_blank">what's happening in women's sports</a>. Which isn't so mainstream. Which is why it is, and isn't news.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-32827060022938211982013-04-29T13:02:00.000-07:002013-04-29T20:27:48.580-07:00Jason Collins Comes Out (and Leans In)NBA center <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/" target="_blank">Jason Collins came out in this week's issue of <i>Sports Illustrated</i></a>. People are celebrating him as the first man in a "major sport" to come out as gay. That is true only if we limit our examples to the US.<br />
<br />
Justin Fashanu was the first athlete to come out as gay while still playing as a pro. The first black footballer to earn a million-pound contract came out to a UK tabloid (<i>The Sun</i>) in 1990. The scholar David DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to describe the terrible and confusing legacy of Fashanu's story - its been relegated to the shadows for good reason. He was an exceptional player; his relationship to the tabloids was exploitative and toxic; his performance as an athlete was alternately promising and depressing; he found God; he was discriminated against; he was exiled from the game (by mutual spirals of injury and scandal); he lingered in the sport's seedy margins. He was accused of raping a minor (a 17-year old boy). He killed himself and was tried in the headlines.<br />
<br />
There is no aspect of Fashanu's story that can be recovered as a positive example. His story is so difficult that few have dared to "go there" and really consider it, even as his name is routinely invoked in anti-homophobia campaigns. Thus DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to name the chest-tightening anxiety one feels in the neighborhood of Fashanu's story. (To learn more about Fashanu see <a href="http://www.wsc.co.uk/reviews/64-Players/8965-justin-fashanu" target="_blank">Jim Read's review of a recent biography in WSC,</a> and <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/05/justin-fashanu-and-politics-memory" target="_blank">Julie Jacques's essay for The New Statesman</a>.)<br />
<br />
Jason Collins's coming out story is a positive counter-narrative. It is not only important because it is a first for an American athlete (male, pro). It is also important as a counter-example to Fashanu's story. Collins is the first athlete to come out and tackle its long shadow. <br />
<br />
Collins's narrative could not be more different than Fashanu's - Collins's family is supportive and loving, his upbringing stable, his history proud. He has a gay uncle in a loving relationship - he grew up with gay role models and mentors. Furthermore, the story published in <i>Sports Illustrated</i> is his story. This is a first-person narrative. It opens:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. (SI: <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/" target="_blank">The Gay Athlete</a>)</blockquote>
<br />
The story he tells is empowering, and the fact that <i>he</i> is telling the story - that he is controlling the narrative, that he is its author - is important. The relationship between any pro athlete and the media is vexed. <i>SI</i> is willing to be the platform for Collins's coming out; it is also part of a media culture that surveils him and every other pro athlete in its view; it is part of a public culture that surveils black men with particular violence. Collins signals this as a worry carried by the people around him.<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My maternal grandmother was apprehensive about my plans to
come out. She grew up in rural Louisiana and witnessed the horrors of
segregation. During the civil rights movement she saw great bravery play out
amid the ugliest aspects of humanity. She worries that I am opening myself up
to prejudice and hatred. I explained to her that in a way, my coming out is
preemptive. I shouldn't have to live under the threat of being outed. The
announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ's. (SI: <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/" target="_blank">The Gay Athlete</a>)</blockquote>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
If his grandmother is apprehensive, it is because she is knowing. Collins explains that he has decided to lean into the problem - later in the interview, he suggests that this is in harmony with his style as a player. He's a "pro's pro" willing to charge, to foul - to play hard. That might reflect a fear of being read as "soft," he writes, and it might also reflect a desire to make room for the impossible.<br />
<br />
It is worth remembering that Justin Fashanu came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In 1990, public discourse on homosexuality was defined by panic, phobia, fear and fascination - it was a generally awful moment even as it also gave us the activist organizations that helped redefine public culture in the US. Think back to 1991 and recall the confusion that shaped the response to <a href="http://laist.com/2011/11/07/video_20_years_ago_today_magic_john.php" target="_blank">Magic Johnson's coming out as HIV positive</a>. How could <i>Magic</i> be HIV positive? Was he gay? What was going to happen to him? The assumption was that he'd retire - not only because (it was assumed) he was sick, but because people were afraid he'd infect others. It's hard to imagine the difficulty of integrating an HIV positive player into the televised sport spectacle in the early 1990s. And then there was the fear was that he'd die, because so many did. (See this <a href="http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200611/magic-johnson-nba-hiv-aids-gq-november-2006-oral-history" target="_blank">GQ oral history of the moment</a>.) A phobic language of infection and disease had been built into public discourse on homosexuality long before the AIDS crisis. That fact is one of the things that made the AIDS crisis so terrible: priests and presidents treated the virus as a judgement from the heavens. And that fact has everything to do with the complacency that some people have towards their own homophobia.<br />
<br />
These are different times. Today, kids have in Magic Johnson an example we could never have imagined possible. He's alive, first of all. (When he got the diagnosis, he was imagined he probably had "a couple of years.") He's a popular public figure and a proud parent to a (<a href="http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/magic-johnsons-openly-gay-son-grateful-dads-support-171017270--abc-news-celebrities.html" target="_blank">particularly fabulous</a>) gay son. (See <a href="http://www.tmz.com/2013/04/04/magic-johnson-gay-son-ej-coming-out-interview-tmz-harvey-levin/" target="_blank">this recent interview with Johnson on TMZ</a>.)<br />
<br />
23 years after Fashanu became a tabloid headline, 22 years after Magic Johnson blew the sports world's collective mind, Jason Collins writes that he wants to participate in a gay pride march as an out and proud black gay man. He can write, in <i>Sports Illustrated</i> no less, that he wants to get married and have kids - and people understand what he means. He doesn't sound like a martian. The desires he expresses are recognizable to a lot of people as normal. Opponents of gay marriage belong to a shrinking - and shrieking - minority. Gay marriage has become so visible a part of the normalization of homosexuality in the US that it's hard to remember how alien the idea has been. And how long it's been that way.<br />
<br />
In 1968, Yayoi Kusama staged a gay wedding in New York as a "Happening." The idea of two men getting hitched was magical and weird, and seemed a direct challenge to dominant ideology regarding the family. She officiated the ceremony as the "High Priestess of Polka Dots." She designed a dress that two men could wear at the same time. They swore their love not on a bible, but on a New York City telephone book. In 1968, gay men in a wedding dress expressed utopian impulses. They were unicorns with the power to change everything. They were the future.<br />
<br />
For a long time, the gay male pro athlete has held a similar magical power over our imaginary. A black gay NBA player? What couldn't this man accomplish for a whole world? What can't he do? The answer to that question is everything.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-60726933988753446832013-04-16T12:30:00.001-07:002013-04-17T00:18:20.263-07:00The Vulnerable Spectacle: Notes on the Bombing of a Marathon<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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The bombing at the Boston Marathon - what is there to say
about such a thing? Already, barely a day into the story the story is on
repeat. Terror, heroism, terror, heroism. How many are dead? Wounds and more wounds. Women & children. <a href="http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/tygrrrr-express/2013/apr/15/bolo-be-look-out-darker-skinned-male-issued/" target="_blank">Look out for a dark skinned man in a hoodie</a>. It's an awful mix. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Violence and the sport spectacle: they are not
exactly strangers to each other (Munich, Hillsborough, the parking lot of Dodgers Stadium). Nevertheless, it is hard to place this event in a sport
context. The obvious point of reference is Eric Rudolph's bombing of a crowd at
the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta (which killed one person, and in which another
died of a heart attack, and in which a great many were injured). If the media
has shown any restraint in naming suspects (<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/the-saudi-marathon-man.html" target="_blank">while giving in to its instinct to visualize that suspect for us</a>), we can thank poor <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/us/30jewell.html" target="_blank">Richard Jewell</a>, a security guard who actually saved people's lives when he spotted Rudolph's backpack. Jewell was falsely accused of the bombing and vilified by, sacrificed to the media gods. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The reasons for Rudolph's attack are confused: it was part of a series of bombings -
the others were attacks on health clinics (which provided abortions)
and a gay bar. Although people assume his actions were part of some kind of homocidal anti-abortion campaign (as if that in and of itself isn't already crazy),<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23bomber.html?_r=1" target="_blank"> investigators reported that people who knew him understood him to be anti-government, a racist, sexist and a homophobe</a> - they
couldn't recall that abortion was his issue. He was, more nearly, full of hate and violence. It seems likely Rudolph was drawn to the Olympics because it
was a national spectacle at which large numbers of people were gathered and
on which cameras were turned.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It feels weird to talk about this bombing as a sports story. This story is atypical - it isn't the spike in domestic violence associated with Superbowl Sunday, it isn't the mob taking-to-the-street after a team's loss or victory, it isn't an explicitly political attack on athletes representing the enemy, it isn't the stadium disaster brought on by indifferent capital, squeezing as many into as poor a space as possible. </div>
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Perhaps this doesn't feel like a sports story because the marathon is a weird sport
spectacle. It's an individual sport that provides the space for the
articulation a specific kind of public. We don't think of the Boston marathon - or any marathon, really - as a nationalist spectacle (even one staged on Patriot's Day). Events won year after year by Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes remain popular, in every sense of the word. (An American man hasn't won the Boston marathon since 1983; an American woman hasn't finished first since 1985.)</div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<o:p>Marathons are occasions for civic hospitality. That is the defining element of the major events staged in the US: the New York, Boston and Los Angeles marathons are city-stories. The metropolis shuts down its streets, interrupts its routines for a festival celebrating one of the simplest of things - running. Running for hours. Running on boulevards you know from your car, from buses, or from the movies. </o:p></div>
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Spectators are right there on the street with the athletes. The spectacle unfolds lazily (for spectators) over hours. Spectators gather not just for the elite - they gather for the ordinary. And spectators are important: runners need their energy, their support and their cheer. There's something just plain generous about the marathon, as an event. It is a mass event - everyone on the sidewalk is part of the event's support team.</div>
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My yoga studio faces Sunset boulevard and has a large store-front window. The Los Angeles marathon went right past us. Our teacher turned the class so that we practiced facing the street. He led as through slightly more than 26 sun salutations so that we might celebrate and thank the runners. So that we might participate in the event with them. Outside, music blared, people cheered and handed out water. </div>
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I hope this bombing doesn't change the culture of the marathon - its openness and generosity, its civic-mindedness, its celebration of the common runner and the commons through which she runs. If this is the thing that makes it vulnerable, it is also the thing that makes it valuable. </div>
<br />
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-7984040900443610772013-04-14T13:43:00.003-07:002013-04-14T13:46:42.775-07:00Lament for the Injured: "I Have No Achilles" It's not every day that I think, of a player like Kobe Bryant, "I know how he feels." A few days ago Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon. He was remarkably composed in the<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=36CQATN6H2g" target="_blank"> interview he gave right after the game</a>. This injury is one of the worst. Few come back from it. He might very well have just played his last game as a professional athlete. Asked what he was thinking right after it happened, he said that he was hoping that the sensation would come back to him. "What sensation?" a reporter asked. "I have no Achilles," he answered. Meaning, he lost the sensation of having an Achilles tendon in that foot.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, Bryant gave us surprising access to his feelings in a now widely circulated lament. (From <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Kobe/posts/10151563315250419" target="_blank">Kobe Bryant's Facebook page</a>.)<br />
<blockquote>
This is such BS! All the training and sacrifice just flew out the window with one step that I've done millions of times! The frustration is unbearable. The anger is rage. Why the hell did this happen ?!? Makes no damn sense. Now I'm supposed to come back from this and be the same player Or better at 35?!? How in the world am I supposed to do that??<br />
I have NO CLUE. Do I have the consistent will to overcome this thing? Maybe I should break out the rocking chair and reminisce on the career that was. Maybe this is how my book ends. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Maybe Father Time has defeated me...Then again maybe not! It's 3:30am, my foot feels like dead weight, my head is spinning from the pain <span class="spellcheck" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">meds</span> and I'm wide awake. Forgive my Venting but what's the purpose of social media if I won't bring it to you Real No Image?? Feels good to vent, let it out. To feel as if THIS is the WORST thing EVER! Because After ALL the venting, a real perspective sets in. There are far greater issues/challenges in the world then a torn <span class="spellcheck" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">achilles</span>. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, find the silver lining and get to work with the same belief, same drive and same conviction as ever. </blockquote>
How we rubber band in our sense of injury - from "this is the worst thing ever" to "this is not the worst thing ever." From "this is hopeless" to "I can fix this." From feeling like you've been robbed - as if all your training and care somehow was supposed to make you invulnerable - to recalling that this is what happens. And maybe that same training will make you "invulnerable" again. Despair and denial. I've been there. Who hasn't? Or won't be?<br />
<br />
Immediately after the injury - an injury Bryant can't blame on anyone or anything - he took two free throws and tied up the game. He must have been filled with dread. He must have been hoping that the feeling of his foot as a "dead weight" might pass, like a mood. He would have been trying to will it to be different - to not be what he knew it was. He would have known exactly what was wrong - each sport has its own terrors. The "pop" of a tendon, a ligament. The slow erosion, the tear and disintegration of cuffs, joints, cartilage. The door through which most exit. There are things you can't see coming but which you know are very real possibilities for you. And there are things you do see coming, but which you can't - won't - think about - as there is nothing on earth you can do to stop it, except stop playing. Who can say what is worse - to have your career ended for you by a ruptured tendon? Or to wear yourself out by playing through the disintegration of (for example) your knees?<br />
<br />
And there is the shock: that this thing that is happening to you isn't just going to take you out of the game. It is going to change your relationship to your own physicality - forever. You can't play basketball, for example, because you can't <i>run</i>.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of former basketball players relating to Bryant. People who loved the game, for whom it was their most reliable source of pleasure. The game was taken from them with a pop and rip. You do not have to play in the NBA to know what that feels like. We have spirit guides in our injury. Athletes through whom we understand our own pain, our own exits. Mine is <a href="http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/soccerusa/id/2180?cc=5901" target="_blank">Stuart Holden</a>, except, of course, he is still playing. I am not.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-25247638315347109202013-04-09T08:39:00.002-07:002013-04-09T08:39:49.295-07:00A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/H-PzQYH6S7U" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">From Jo Strømgren Kompani<span style="font-size: small;"> - <span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/worldstage/artoffootball/" target="_blank">on stage in Toron</a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/worldstage/artoffootball/" target="_blank">to this week</a>. </span></span></span>I must see this. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-13788665135760905012013-04-07T13:40:00.001-07:002013-04-07T14:35:32.614-07:00Big Money Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment!: Notes on Rutgers Basketball <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Rutgers's biggest problem is not Mike Rice. It's politicians digging into the university's infrastructure - taking the ongoing dismantling of affordable public education to the next level (first attack affordability, then attack the scene of education by taking away its working infrastructure, access to institutional memory, sense of community). As that<a href="http://savejersey.com/2012/01/r-i-p-rutgers-camden/" target="_blank"> complex, difficult story</a> unfolds, Rutgers joins the Big 10 - this entry into big money sports <a href="http://deadspin.com/5961870/maryland-and-rutgers-are-joining-the-big-ten-because-they-have-to" target="_blank">is presented to the public as a fix</a>. Because a winning, televised sports program makes a campus rich, right? One story is a cover for the other. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Over the past four or five decades we've witnessed the emergence of a public culture in which one wants the best of everything - for oneself. That culture is centered in the delusion that all you need (to succeed) is to participate in a great competition - like March Madness or American Idol. All you need is a chance to be a winner! On television! But of course you are just fodder for the production of the <i>image</i> of victory. Even the winner is raw material for the actual product: the televised sport spectacle. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Of course Mike Rice hurls insults, kicks and throws basketballs at his players. He's an overseer in a system that places the burden of supporting a state's public education on the backs of young, profoundly disenfranchised men. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Was Mike Rice's behavior abusive? Yes. The whole story is a disaster. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/sports/ncaabasketball/rutgers-officials-long-knew-of-coach-mike-rices-actions.html" target="_blank">Everyone knew. Everyone worried about being sued.</a> And now Eric Murdock (the whistle blower) is <a href="http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/report-fbi-investigating-rutgers-whistle-blower-eric-murdock-142614949--ncaab.html" target="_blank">under investigation for extortion</a>. How can you hold anything you hear against Murdock? If he had problems with Rice's behavior, real problems, as an assistant to Rice he was in an impossible position. Coming forward with those complaints is a career-killer. A permanent career killer. That is even more true for players. More than a few commentators have remarked on how easily the athletes seemed to take Rice's abuse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing about football and basketball culture as practiced
in the NCAA lines up with the way we understand the right to be free from
harassment and abuse. If we understood athletes as having protections similar
to, say, <i>employees,</i> then NCAA athletes would be allowed to unionize. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/" target="_blank">They are not.</a> The NCAA
works very hard, very hard, to render its athletes into children, students, apprentices,
"amateurs" - anything but "professionals" (employees).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What these athletes need - <i>more than this season of head rolling - </i>is the right to organize to stand up for themselves, to improve their working conditions and support their education. They need a much better system, as athletes and as students. They - we - need a better university. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
HEADLINE: Big Time Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment. Players Take It or Walk Away from Career. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is news. And, of course, it is not news. Buried underneath these headlines is a darker, more depressing story about the conversion of a great public education system into a giant system of indentured servitude - and here I don't mean the NCAA's exploitation of student athletes, I mean the generations of people that will spend their entire lives servicing unsecured student loan debt. </div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-50237907336267181032013-03-19T19:13:00.000-07:002013-03-19T19:48:33.697-07:00Blame Patriarchy: Notes on Steubenville and "Jock Culture"<br />
In a recent polemic Dave Zirin asks if <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173387/verdict-steubenville-shows-bond-between-jock-culture-and-rape-culture">"jock
culture" is to be blamed for the </a><a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173387/verdict-steubenville-shows-bond-between-jock-culture-and-rape-culture">Steubenville
case</a>.<br />
<br />
Responding to evidence that adults around these football players
conspired to cover up the shame and the crime of it all, Zirin tackles the
social structure framing the story. "Steubenville," The Nation's headline announced,
"shows the bonds between jock culture and rape culture."<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
To summarize the Steubenville story: a group of football
players raped a young woman and then went on to laugh and joke about it, and to
broadcast the fun they had within their circle. Mass media outlets recently
harmonized their headlines as they moved toward concluding the story cycle,
presenting the case as a personal tragedy - for the men on trial. Cue a
collective groan from <a href="http://jezebel.com/5991018/heres-what-cnn-shouldve-said-about-the-steubenville-rape-case?tag=steubenville">Jezebel</a>,
<a href="http://gawker.com/5991003/cnn-reports-on-the-promising-future-of-the-steubenville-rapists-who-are-very-good-students?tag=steubenville">Gawker</a>,
<a href="http://community.feministing.com/2013/03/18/on-steubenville-and-teaching-young-men-not-to-rape/">Feministing</a>.
I join the chorus here, but instead of thinking from CNN et al, I want to think from Dave Zirin's writing, which has been among the most heart-felt and intense from a sports writer.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The problem (as I'm sure Zirin knows) isn't football or jock culture. The problem is
patriarchy. But "Steubenville shows the bonds between patriarchy and rape
culture" doesn't make for a catchy headline.<br />
<br />
That is part of the problem:
sexism isn't news.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In other words, the problem isn't football, it isn't sports culture, it isn't the
media. It's patriarchy itself. Those institutions are all ideological organs in
a bigger body. Zirin writes, "We need to ask whether there’s something
inherent in the men’s sports of the twenty-first century, which so many lionize
as a force for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement."
We could ask if there isn't something inherent in the military that
creates "a rape culture of violent entitlement." Sexual abuse of men
and women in the military has been described recently as "an
epidemic." A little reading on the subject makes one wonder if the word
"endemic" isn't more appropriate. What do mainstream sport cultures
have in common with the military?<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Patriarchy is such an old-fashioned word. It's so unsexy.
Such a drag. And I feel like a throwback, an old feminist from another time for
naming it. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I throw it out here, however, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> word for naming what the Penn State scandal has to do with
Steubenville (for example) or with the ubiquity of sexual violence within the military and
with the latter's inability to confront the problem. For naming what football
has to do with the media's inability to tell as story about rape without
recuperating men as tragic heroes of a sort. Of course people are sympathetic
to these guys. They are teenagers; their lives are a mess. They are going to jail. Who wants to relate to the person who was too drunk - or drugged - to
remember anything? Who was, in fact, unable to know or feel what was
happening to her body? Who identifies with the person who was made into an abject thing used for collective
entertainment?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Scenes of Instruction</b><br />
<br />
I want to turn to an anecdote that Zirin recounted in another column, also
about Steubenville. Earlier this month he shared a memory of being on a team as
a high school student, of being in the locker room when a teammate made a
rape-joke. The coach, whom Zirin recalled as a very left leaning and sensitive
man, hauled off and slapped the offending player.<br />
<br />
Zirin writes:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In a flash, Coach Dan backhanded Tim across the face. Seeing
a coach or adult authority figure hit a 14-year-old, even a huge one like Tim,
was shocking enough. Seeing Hippie Dan do it was akin to watching the Dalai
Lama stomp someone with his sandals. We all stood there breathless and I’m not
sure if Tim or Dan was shaking more. Coach Dan finally spoke and said, “I’m
sorry but there are some things you don’t joke about.” He then walked out of
the locker room and practice was done. The incident was never mentioned, but Dan
was never quite so positive, Tim stopped making jokes and that was the first
and last locker-room rape joke of the season. (<a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173324/steubenville-and-challenging-rape-culture-sports">Steubenville
and Challenging Rape Culture in Sports</a>)</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That is a complicated moment - it is seared into Zirin's
memory for good reason. But I don't read that slap as a feminist intervention.
It is a classically patriarchal moment: the good father disciplining the bad
boy; a figure of masculine authority intervening in order to protect women. A
fair amount of discourse on the Steubenville case has this shape.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
There's no conversation in Zirin's story. Just the
"understood" of realizing there are some things that one doesn't joke
about - and that these are the same things that one doesn't talk about. Learning that seems to make them men.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It's helpful to look more closely at the story. It's a locker room - it's
all men and boys. It's a scene of instruction and intimacy. The
joke is made when the boys are told that a female member of the coaching staff
at the school is coming in to talk to them. It happens at the threshold of a
gendered and a desegregated social space. The joke arises at the idea that a woman
might enter their (masculine) space. The imagined introduction of her body changes the imagined nature of the
space. It is at that juncture that we find violence and shame, swirling around
each other. A joke, a slap.<br />
<br />
Rape isn't external to patriarchy - it is, in fact, its internal symbolic engine. Sex as violence; sex as dehumanization; sex as the rendering of the other into a thing. This is why the call to teach men "not to rape" is so ineffectual. It is no call to action. It isn't adequate to the imperative: Rape - because it's better than being raped. Rape, because that is, in fact, what makes you <u>not</u> a woman. Rape, dare I add, is something that men also do to each other.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In a feminist space, I imagine not a slap but a difficult, messy conversation - not between men, or between men and
women - but between people negotiating gender and power. A conversation about what that joke was about. About what rhetorical work that young man imagined it would do in the service of his own power and authority - about what anxiety regarding his relationship to his teammates that joke was expressing.<br />
<br />
In the story
Zirin tells, there is no discussion. An action is committed on behalf of that
woman. She doesn't figure in the story; the story isn't about her. It's a story about patriarchal authority (good and
bad).<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wouldn't draw a line from Zirin's anecdote to the
Steubenville thing were it not for the fact Zirin told the story in a story about
Steubenville. Zirin is smart enough about sexism and sports to know that the
world he's writing about (sports) it structured by sexism. Are we, collectively,
feminist enough to know what it means to imagine a sports culture structured by
something else? <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sociality of the sexual violence committed in the
Steubenville case reminds us that these things are not about women: they are
about men's relationship to each other, in which women - as objects of jokes
and objects of violence - are used as props in a competition for power. This power, this authority is built on shame and fear. Teach men not to rape. What does that even mean if we don't make that lesson about how men relate to each other?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I was thinking about this "jock culture"
problem, I found myself
talking to a woman who was asked to write about @SKCboobs - a Twitter
account that solicits women MLS fans to broadcast pictures of their tits. (I
have no idea if the account holder is a man or a woman.) That writer is a
woman, asked by the guys she works with to write a story about this thing
(because she has tits?).<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She called and asked me what I thought of it.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Moralizing
about what women do with their tits is not my idea of feminist sports writing.
The media outlets that will cover Steubenville, or SKC Boobs give nothing to
daily coverage of women's sports. That's what I think.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The media's idea of a women's sports story is a story about
rape. Or a story about sexism. Or it is just a picture of tits presented as a
story. The sports media's idea of a women's sports story does not express an
ongoing commitment to the story of women's sports, it in fact expresses an
ongoing commitment to NOT covering women's sports. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The whole conversation about "jock culture" and "rape
culture" presumes a deeply segregated world in which one can separate men
out from women and give them unique sets of instructions. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Don't rape. Don't get raped.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mainstream sports - football programs, sports networks, media outlets, regulatory bodies like the NCAA, the IOC and FIFA - turn patriarchy's root - the drawing of a line between
man and woman, a line that marks the human and the not human - into the ritual
and rite that we call "jock culture." That doesn't make jock culture the problem. It makes jock culture a tool.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How else to understand the "jocks" who pissed on a
woman, and laughed about it? Who secured their bonds in relation to each other
by joking "you don't sleep through a wang in the butthole" or
"Finally saw a dead body." [<a href="http://www.xojane.com/issues/steubenville-rape-verdict-alexandria-goddard">Tweets
captured as screenshots by blogger Alexandria Goddard</a>.]<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That behavior is not specific to sports. Would that it were
so. Because then we could just get rid of football, and call it
a day. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-39362825874585788062013-03-08T10:43:00.003-08:002013-03-08T10:43:34.801-08:00The Knife: From a Left Wing's favorite band. <div style="text-align: left;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W10F0ezCTIQ" width="560"></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-22141607168519576612012-12-11T08:36:00.002-08:002012-12-11T08:40:04.686-08:00She's a Forward and She's Really Awesome<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oOVFW687GUY" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/11/26/meet_a_9_year_old_girl_quarterback_who_loves_beating_the_boys/" target="_blank">I wrote about Sam Gordon the other week for Salon</a>. Love. Her.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-90786281896516657882012-12-03T15:42:00.002-08:002012-12-05T20:26:02.050-08:00Tough Mudder: The Deskilling of the Cross Country Runner?<!--EndFragment--><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-wDLHybfADO1FyvqwWvx3oheaQgkd_5QVpAoolCqJv7J3VfGNjyKVr2gP6NKfjQD9u3xWAAvx5q6hB1yCwods4tLkoZR4GEPLmhqFF04vOgdDNdB8fzmeMrX4MwpYNS-UiEP2wH_bTj76/s1600/espnw_topshot_11.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-wDLHybfADO1FyvqwWvx3oheaQgkd_5QVpAoolCqJv7J3VfGNjyKVr2gP6NKfjQD9u3xWAAvx5q6hB1yCwods4tLkoZR4GEPLmhqFF04vOgdDNdB8fzmeMrX4MwpYNS-UiEP2wH_bTj76/s320/espnw_topshot_11.jpeg" width="320" /></a>Painted in mud, the best high school cross-country runners
stumbled across the line. The exhausted pack ran their worst times all season. The painfulness of this fact was thrown into stark relief by the boorish slogan suspended across the course finish: "Run
hungry. Taste victory." </div>
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Nike Cross Nationals is run every year in Oregon at the
Portland Meadows Race Track. The December event is one of two cross-country
races presented by corporate sponsors as national championships. Nike's event
is team-centered (though individuals can and do enter). The December 8
Footlocker Cross Country National Championship (held in San Diego) is an
individual competition. (The USA Track and Field Association also runs a
national championship.)</div>
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Nike Cross is the strangest of cross-country meets: the course is not run on one of the region's fabled
cross-country trails. It is staged instead on the infield of a horse race track. The
runners get moguls and slippery avenues of mud. The course is slow: long
stretches of it are covered in puddles of water. Race officials joke about picking shoes out of
the field from races run in past years. The course is optimal when it is
frozen. This is the one race for which the runner prays for frost. Last year
temperatures hovered at 30. The boys' race was won by Futsum Zeinasellaissie in
15:03. This year was balmy: the course was not just muddy, it was gross. Sam
Warton slugged it out for a 17:06 win. </div>
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Runners have to have tetanus shots to run this race. The air is lightly perfumed with
manure. The race is, after all, run on horse pasture.</div>
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At the state-level no high school team would dare host an event with a
course like it. It'd be considered dangerous and weird. Teams do train in
harsh weather and on wet ground (this is the signature of coach Bill Aris's training regime and his girls have won the race seven years in a row no doubt because of their experience with mud). But the fastest runners want to run fast. Some courses are
faster than others, but the idea is that a good race explores the limits of
what is humanly possible on the day that course is run. </div>
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The spirit of the cross-country trail is that it be a trail, not an obstacle course. </div>
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At Nike Cross you see some runners cross the
finish line <i>painted</i> in mud - not
because it has been splashed on them, but because they've fallen into pools of
it. Watching Nike's highlight reel, I was struck by how awful the pack looks. Frontrunners look tough, sure, but the rest of the field looks ruined. </div>
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Of course there is something fun in the idea of making the best runners race against the worst conditions. But that is not how this race is presented to the teenagers running it. It is presented to them as the best team competition in the country. I got the distinct sense that even the winning athletes were disappointed.</div>
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Asked about the course, one athlete after another responded: "We don't run in mud like this in
Virginia/Texas/Colorado/New Mexico/Minnesota." They sounded puzzled. When asked if he had
anything good to say about the course, one wiseass looked up at the sky and said,
"It's sunny." </div>
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Nike's marketing folks assert that this mud is part of
Oregon's "thing." But it isn't. When cross-country runners think of
Oregon, they think of gorgeous trails along the coast, the Steve Prefountaine Memorial Running Trail. The University of Oregon (in Eugene) is one of the country's premier programs. Sure,
a cross-country runner wants to "get her mud on," but even more, she wants her team to run <i>well</i>. </div>
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From an elite runner's perspective, the logic of the event
is a mystery. It is, in fact, something of a mystery when measured against Nike's claim on running, as a sport. It is ironic that the brand associated with the development of a lightweight shoe designed to reduce drag - to make your stride lighter - should sponsor a race in which the athlete's feet are sucked into mud. For much of the course, with each step the runner has to break the mud's suction. Imagine running with someone grasping onto your feet. That's what large parts of the course feel like. </div>
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People seem to think that Nike stages the event this way so as to make cross-country "spectator friendly." The racetrack has covered stands, and it's easy to film the race on these grounds. But cross country spectators will choose to be by the trail - who wants to sit indoors at an outdoor event? The audience for the race was in the mud, with the runners. </div>
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Nike stages this event this way not for people, but for cameras. </div>
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Kids covered in mud make for fantastic photos. Or do they?</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6nr1_gqZOHbE_JHo2OLIWMr_mVWKa2aKc2Xx_wsErJRoM_USA_JKDiZvQMTZ0H5LwqLOCwVCPhXXvbt8YCwCOR5-NKed2r7kXVO0eBDgI5JA3mEj8gsCeaFgYua5tEw7qj-Fq_-191Byw/s1600/366099_Cross_country_173_t600.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6nr1_gqZOHbE_JHo2OLIWMr_mVWKa2aKc2Xx_wsErJRoM_USA_JKDiZvQMTZ0H5LwqLOCwVCPhXXvbt8YCwCOR5-NKed2r7kXVO0eBDgI5JA3mEj8gsCeaFgYua5tEw7qj-Fq_-191Byw/s320/366099_Cross_country_173_t600.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antigone Archer fell early in the race. She picked herself up - with mud in her mouth and her eyes she helped her team to its impressive second place finish. Team Carroll finished (a weird) 140 points behind Manlius. Manlius has won this event seven years in a row. Thank you Antigone for letting me use this photo by <a href="http://www.columbian.com/photos/2012/dec/01/53184/" target="_blank">Zackary Kaufman</a>.</td></tr>
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A little combing of the interweb turned up the above portrait in misery. And this is the expression I saw on much of the pack. A lot of runners looked upset - angry, frustrated, confused. </div>
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Mud runs are a
growing phenomenon - those courses are designed to make runners swim in mud, scale
walls, crawl under barbed wire like G.I. Jane and Joe. They are fun. Crazy. But fun. That is not, however, what these athletes signed up for. </div>
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Nike addressed them as elite runners all weekend. But did Nike stage an elite race? </div>
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You learn a lot about yourself when you lose in good
fashion. A good loss can be as inspiring as it is humbling. For many of these runners, this was their last race as a high school athlete. Some ended their high school career with the worst time they'd posted all season, in a race that felt pointless.</div>
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My sister coached the team that finished dead last. So I have a personal reason for thinking about this event. I've learned a lot from her over the years, and our conversations about this event have been illuminating. (My perspective here, it should be said, is entirely my own.)<br />
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Cross-country is a team sport. An individual might win the race, but a team can't win the race on an individual's performance. Nike's event is perhaps engineered to foreground that fact. This course is designed to handicap each individual runner as if they were horses. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNPbjiSQb8Jm5NBgyuaHVz9BNKC5LYyIRtKOwjVOQaRo_KJnW_i7Lk91MZCBQZ2X0O_YLDBDa6v8hPDUXi8Y7DLioEPVkqBeufk7_rHsfAyYqb3iq7xkKecTnFTfJpZKUJFBIWfneQqFxa/s1600/trophy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNPbjiSQb8Jm5NBgyuaHVz9BNKC5LYyIRtKOwjVOQaRo_KJnW_i7Lk91MZCBQZ2X0O_YLDBDa6v8hPDUXi8Y7DLioEPVkqBeufk7_rHsfAyYqb3iq7xkKecTnFTfJpZKUJFBIWfneQqFxa/s320/trophy.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Second place finishers Carroll celebrate their victory. </td></tr>
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But cross-country is a curious team sport. A great team knows that its accomplishments are all the greater when that team allows each of its members to realize his or her potential to its fullest. I've always thought that this was where you found the spirit of the sport - in this chemistry. </div>
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The production of a national championship as a runner's version of Wipeout is a sporting version of what social theorists describe as "deskilling." A race is here turned into a spectacle, the talent and experience on the field is made secondary to the moving of merchandise - the question is not who won, how or why, but who was entertained and how much they - we - are willing to buy. </div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-1704798301946134562012-08-18T15:31:00.002-07:002012-08-18T16:03:21.589-07:00Kelly Smith: It's Always the Quiet Ones<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnbXTv6xCeVaODu7VfIOWbYuEOyMFBpc3X8v4Hm5EIjpX12i3AyHTUBbwMhHegyWJgz4giwRJxCAfpi34jZfsBRWa4emGcAl0ERXit4k8fnK8zEyT-WfSCPaWGa_ASrN3huWhfpmiaH40q/s1600/Englands-Kelly-Smith-cele-001.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnbXTv6xCeVaODu7VfIOWbYuEOyMFBpc3X8v4Hm5EIjpX12i3AyHTUBbwMhHegyWJgz4giwRJxCAfpi34jZfsBRWa4emGcAl0ERXit4k8fnK8zEyT-WfSCPaWGa_ASrN3huWhfpmiaH40q/s320/Englands-Kelly-Smith-cele-001.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kelly Smith celebrates a goal, her magic foot and the shoe it was in.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When you teach you learn pretty quickly that the very smartest and most interesting students are often quiet. Some are painfully shy and intense listeners. Some only talk when they think they have something valuable to contribute and have a very the bar high when it comes to their sense of value. Some feel like their own interests are so out of step with everyone else they just keep their mouths shut. Some keep their mouths shut because they don't want to stand out.<br />
<br />
When you teach, you meet these students in their writing. It's one of the profession's real pleasures. These students teach me to never accept the surface. To expect deep waters, but also to never assume that I know where those deep waters lie.<br />
<br />
Kelly Smith's memoir is the absolute opposite of Hope Solo's. Some of these differences can be chalked up to those of a keeper and a striker, and others can be read as the differences of American and English attitudes towards self-disclosure. (One is abundant with it, the other refuses it.) But the differences between their books don't end there.<br />
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Hope Solo barely touches on her game in her memoir. The book's focus is on her family, and on the challenging social dynamics of a team living under the spotlight. We know the name of her boyfriend and are given the outline of the development of their relationship. Her friends and the coaches who have supported her get shout-outs. We do get a peek into the USWNT run in the 2011 World Cup, and Solo outlines the physical struggle of her recovery from a shoulder injury that was far worse than most of us realized. But these things are not really at the heart of the narrative. <i>A Memoir of Hope </i>is personality driven. If Solo's memoir is a good read it is because it mirrors the outspoken wild card public persona we already know.<br />
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The title of <i>Footballer: My Story</i> pretty much says it all. Smith's book is 100% centered on her relationship to the sport. Where Solo's book opens with a broad portrait of her home town, her parents, with the landscape in which she grows up, Smith's book opens with an image of one of the world's greatest players as a kid with a ball at her feet. We learn that she would imitate moves that she saw on Match of the Day, and practice them using video tapes of the week's highlights. The narrative sticks with this tight focus of Smith on the ball right to the end. </div>
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<i>Footballer: My Story</i> does chronicle Smith's personal struggles, and they are significant:</div>
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<ul>
<li>When she grew up there was no real women's football culture to speak of in England. This is the source of her often cited complaint that the women's game in England in the 1990s "was a joke."</li>
<li>Like many of the great international players, she played with boys until she was kicked off the team. She grew up being welcomed into the game (invited to play with the boys) and exiled from it.</li>
<li>Like most international players, she had no future in the sport to imagine for herself - she wanted to be a professional footballer, but for English girls this dream was a delusion. The vast majority of English women players lose access to training before they turn 18. Even now the Women's Super League is more semi-pro than pro. And it is significantly more professional than anything anyone had ever heard of just ten years ago. </li>
<li>She was scouted and recruited to play in the US. This was dumb luck. With relatively little awareness of what it would mean, she enrolled at Seton Hall in New Jersey and plunged into deep culture shock. </li>
<li>She suffered from crippling social anxiety which she self-medicated, becoming a full-blown alcoholic in her twenties. </li>
<li>She suffered<i> </i>one serious injury after another. Torn ACL, broken leg, fractured leg - and has come back from each. </li>
<li>Unlike the USWNT, England has been a serious underdog in international competition for years. Under Hope Powell's leadership the team has been climbing a serious mountain. They've suffered some agonizing, cruel defeats on the world stage. When it comes to trophies and medals, they are far more familiar with failure than they are with success. </li>
</ul>
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In short, Kelly Smith has worked hard, suffered, and gotten through it and over it. In spite of the list I've given above, the book is not a litany of complaints. Far from it. Smith is clearly a person with an enormous reservoir of strength. If she shares one quality with Solo, it is a certain stubbornness. A refusal to hear "no." An obstacle is not a roadblock. It's something to be hurdled. </div>
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Her narrative is also not sappy, or sentimental. It's remarkably reticent. We never learn, for example, <i>why</i> Smith was so afraid of speaking in front of people, or <i>why</i> she felt so intensely alone and isolated that she crawled up inside a bottle. This book is no confessional. On this point, it feels remarkably English - she makes absolutely no excuses for herself. Even as we learn of relationships that have sustained her, she never tells their story - Smith comes off as very private. This leaves her somewhat of a mystery as a person. <br />
<br />
Smith's discretion compares interestingly with Solo's openness, as do her struggles with social anxiety. Solo is what the corporate world diagnoses as "non-joiner" - a person not so good at small talk, who prefers time alone to team-building exercises, prefers the company of a handful of people she trusts than that of people she doesn't know and who don't know her. Solo does not lack for confidence - in fact her confidence perhaps grounds her decisions about how she socializes. The Solo we meet in her memoir knows what she needs.<br />
<br />
<i>Footballer: My Story</i> suggests a very different kind of isolation. Smith struggled with profound loneliness and depression. Real despair - and it seems that for a long time this was kept hidden from the people around her. Fortunately, it wasn't hidden for too long: Powell, her teammates and her family helped her get on solid ground. Where Solo and co-author Ann Killian give us detail about her background in order that we understand Solo's lone wolf, controversy-provoking style, Smith and her co-author Lance Hardy draw a careful line around Smith's private life.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
The refusal to disclose much about herself off the pitch makes room in Smith's autobiography for lots of writing about her development as a player and a teammate. This book will teach readers a lot about the England women's team. It will also introduce readers to the basic state of European women's football. You'll also get a fantastic glimpse of Hope Powell's coaching, which is no small thing in and of itself. Smith devotes a full chapter to Powell - the whole book might just be a long thank you to the woman that Smith credits with saving not just her career, but her very soul.<br />
<br />
The book starts of slowly and awkwardly - somehow its writing seems to mirror Smith's battles with social awkwardness, picking up pace as she gets deeper into her career and maturity. The book is most comfortable inside the game: the chapter on England's loss to France in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals is as heart breaking as the match itself.<br />
<br />
When you watch the game as much as some of us do, you really want to know what it feels like to play at that level. Sometimes it is a joyful experience and sometimes it is absolute physical and emotional agony. The game started off with a "bright start" but soon France put the pressure on them and then kept it up. Smith's team scored a goal against the run of play at 58 minutes. The French really piled it on then. "We knew we were in a match," Smith writes. Her ankle had been sore from the start, and the pain mounted with each passing minute.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The longer the game went on, the more pressure the French put on our goal. The pain in my ankle, too, was mounting as time passed. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At one stage I remember looking up at the clock on the scoreboard - I think we were about seventy or seventy-five minutes into the game, and we had the lead - and I thought to myself 'Just get through this.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We were keeping them at bay. We were playing so well defensively that I thought they couldn't score. Our backs were against the wall, admittedly, but I felt so confident in our back line and goalkeeper. But the clock seemed to be going very slowly and as a result our place in the semi-finals seemed so near and yet so far away. The second half seemed to be lasting forever.</blockquote>
Powell made the last of her substitutions. Smith didn't have a chance to signal how much pain she was in. Powell subbed in for defenders on the basis of a miscommunication. With three minutes left France broke through the back line and the game went into extra-time. By this point Smith could scarcely put weight on her foot.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As the French ran around, screaming heir heads off in delight, it struck me there and then that I would now have to play on for another half an hour. </blockquote>
France kept up their attack, dominating possession. England held on for dear life. Smith writes, "I couldn't see us getting a goal. So, without thinking about it, I started to will the game to end. I wanted penalties."<br />
<br />
Penalties they got. Smith took the first and scored. But they went out anyway. This is the kind of story that fans want: How was Smith feeling in the middle of that firestorm? What happened with the penalties? (Few players volunteered, this because a major talking point in the press.) What happened with that substitution?<br />
<br />
Many people wrote after that match that England's women are like the men - and that English players need to practice penalties more than they do. Smith's recollections and thoughts on this whole episode are frank and sobering:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I would like to take this opportunity to say that we practiced penalties after virtually every training session in Germany. I would also like to this: you can practice penalties all day long and it makes no difference to what will happen on the day when it matters.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You can't prepare for the stadium, the crowd, the pressure. How can you plan for who is going to be on the pitch after ninety minutes, or who is going to be fit or injured? It's impossible....</blockquote>
Regarding the comparison with the men's side:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Of course the England men's time have had a torrid time of it in the past, going out of the 1990 World Cup, the 1996 European Championship, the 1998 World Cup, the 2004 European Championship, and the 2006 World Cup on penalties. That is quite a list. By contrast, England's women's team have gone out of tournaments at that stage against Sweden in the European Championship final in 1984, when the team was still not officially recognized by the Football Association, and against China in a competition that didn't really matter to us, the Algarve Cup in 2005. The defeat by France in the 20011 Women's World Cup was only the third occasion. It's hardly an epidemic. </blockquote>
It's a good point. I appreciated hearing this from her. I also appreciated her account of watching the World Cup final with her teammates in Boston, and then what it felt like to see Breakers teammate Aya Sameshina return to the squad with the medal. ("I saw the medal but I couldn't touch it.")<br />
<br />
Soon the Breakers suspend play and the WPS folds. She writes, "With the problems that have occurred over the years, I think it's understandable for me to feel that there will always be some kind of issue with women's football [in the United States] at the highest professional level. Let's just say that I don't think things will ever run smoothly. It's a shame, but that's the way it seems to be."<br />
<br />
It's hard to argue with her on that score. Smith's book gives us a glimpse of the difference that the England makes, as a context for developing the game. The system has strengths and weaknesses. Club training isn't as frequent and developed as it is in the US. But the FA is building its league system slowly and carefully. The FA had better luck with television contracts until recently. The national team's growth ties directly into the league's visibility. The book left me optimistic about women's football in England - and wondering how long it will be before it tops Sweden and Germany as the destination for the world's best.<br />
<br />
There is, of course, a lot more to the book - and to Solo's - than I've been able to describe in these two posts. But of the two, Smith's will tell you a lot more about the experience of the match and the state of the game than will Solo's.<br />
<br />
The tone of Smith's book suggests to me that if you sat next to Smith at a party, you could probably talk with her about the game for <i>hours</i>. She might be quiet at the start. She might not be the most gregarious person at the table, but once she gets rolling she can hold your attention just as well as she can hold the ball. Sorry for that last analogy, but I couldn't resist it. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Footballer-My-Story-Kelly-Smith/dp/0593069331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345328010&sr=8-1&keywords=footballer%3A+my+story+kelly+smith" target="_blank">If you want to buy <i>Footballer: My Story</i>, you can find it on Amazon. And there's a kindle edition. </a></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-73399826684293135972012-08-17T15:37:00.001-07:002012-08-18T16:54:54.776-07:00Hope Solo's Paradox (a book review)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA89383f0TX3ag5bfmo7F5Juoj5clM3V7k3y6ze-vsJwXTuciR4LAeeRFji3O6sCstZcux7npBrVStkUqyrBg1u9Bf-JH-RRi1OP4cZVHQYmft5JR2D67N0m-ce8VApA2ma_LrdkBrfFYc/s1600/440137_ORIG.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA89383f0TX3ag5bfmo7F5Juoj5clM3V7k3y6ze-vsJwXTuciR4LAeeRFji3O6sCstZcux7npBrVStkUqyrBg1u9Bf-JH-RRi1OP4cZVHQYmft5JR2D67N0m-ce8VApA2ma_LrdkBrfFYc/s320/440137_ORIG.jpeg" width="211" /></a></div>
<i>Solo: A Memoir of Hope</i> is the story of a deeply charismatic outsider. She is a lone wolf, but she was also a prom queen. That's the paradox of Solo's persona: she's the outcast in the middle of every drama, the anti-social social phenomenon. Solo might be an independent spirt, but this book is centered on her relationships with other people. <br />
<br />
The book's most compelling writing focuses on her childhood and on the drama which unfolded behind the scenes at the 2007 World Cup. Her father - a drifter and a grifter - is at the center of both stories. He looms large over the whole book, for good reason. He was a natural athlete, a charismatic and attractive man who was much loved by the dozens of kids he coached. As Solo herself acknowledges, her father routinely destroyed his personal relationships - he stole money from his family, and he left Solo's mother dispossessed of their home.<br />
<br />
People in Solo's family stuck by each other though seriously troubled times - her family is full of complicated people who are fiercely loyal to each other. Solo was very close to her father - and he wasn't an easy person to be close to. He died just before the 2007 World Cup - only months after a friend of Solo's had been killed in a car accident. She buried him, and went to China supported by other players with experience dealing with profound grief. The squad seemed tighter than ever until its coach benched Solo for the match that would become the team's most infamous loss.<br />
<br />
Most fans will read the book for its chapter about the 2007 World Cup. Like many watching the tournament, I was shocked to see Solo on the bench. With a different keeper slotted into the defensive system deep into the tournament, everything seemed off. As is now well known, after the match Solo said a few choice words about the selection. She asserted that she'd have made the saves that Briana Scurry didn't.<br />
<br />
After reading Solo's account of the aftermath of this loss, I felt far more sympathetic to her teammates than I expected to. Solo was punished for criticizing the team. She was isolated, forbidden from watching the last match, forced to fly home separately and put through the paces in a way that seems really particular to women's organizations. The team bonded in its criticism of Solo and staged "come to Jesus" sessions whose main function was to be to heap more and more shame and anger upon her. The team was stuck in an emotionally abusive script.<br />
<br />
It's clear now that the team was struggling with the humiliation of that defeat. Although the book does not provide much insight into what that felt like - there is no blow-by-blow account of that match (at least not with the level of detail you'll find in other player memoirs) - it is clear that the entire USWNT organization lost their minds.<br />
<br />
If Solo was grieving her father, the team was grieving the loss of its status. It had been separated from its glorious legacy and it had been separated from that legacy by a team with far, far less institutional support and experience. It was, for a lot of these players, their first experience with this level of failure and public humiliation. Given the team's status as the sport's golden girls, that fall from grace would be a long hard trip.<br />
<br />
That so many of the players framed Solo's behavior as a betrayal of the '99 legacy affirms that everyone was feeling their way through what was, in fact, a structural inevitability. Solo's account of this period reveals a community of women holding very tightly onto their heroines. I think it also shows us how scary it is to take your place in those ranks.<br />
<br />
History has a way of forgetting women - especially women athletes. A lot of us feel protective of our history. We must all remember that the women who won trophy in 1999 were not the first American women to play the sport. They are the first American women whose names were celebrated. I don't think there is any easy way to take your place in a history that is so recent, so tenuous. When Solo complained this summer that Brandi Chastain was too critical in her match commentary, she surfaced the problem in the relationship of one generation to the other - a structure neither of them created and that neither of them can transcend. Chastain's criticism will sound like a mother's. Solo's complaints about that criticism will sound like a daughter's.<br />
<br />
Men can point back generations. They can place themselves in elaborate constellations of teams and players. American women have had just this one team. And they are with us - broadcasting the matches. As they should be. What a burden to carry, though. Ugh.<br />
<br />
When the USWNT lost to Brazil, and when they lost in such a dramatic fashion, they showed everyone that they were not <i>that</i> team. And, perhaps, until then, on some level the team didn't know how to think of themselves as <i>better</i> than that team - each generation needs to work this out.<br />
<br />
It's difficult to grasp what this loss - so laden with its symbolic weight - must have felt like. A different kind of book (written by a neutral party with a more critical eye and poetic touch) would make this into a different kind of story. Who is to say, for example, that Solo's remarks weren't themselves a violent disidentification with Briana Scurry's abjection in that moment - a way to emotionally protect herself from the knowledge that it might easily have been her hung out to dry. She'd put a huge burden on herself - she was playing for her father. What if she let his memory down? What if all that drama was produced by young women carrying complex fears and anxieties about their place in the world? One, in isolation, playing for the memory of her father. A collective, formed in opposition to her, bonded in defense of the memory of their mothers. Each loyal to another generation at the expense of their own.<br />
<br />
That's an awful conflict. And it is not a part of Solo's story. That's me reading into it.<br />
<br />
Solo comes off in this book as supremely confident. She actually doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with fear of failure. Or fear.<br />
<br />
(This brings us to the limits of this genre. As I wrote elsewhere <a href="http://fromaleftwing.blogspot.com/2009/06/confidence-games-thoughts-on-player.html" target="_blank">in a post about Robbie Fowler's autobiography</a>, "there is no story quite so dull...as that of the totally confident person." Usually this makes player memoirs kind of boring. Many of the most famous have never sat with real failure. And those players have done nothing but play football all their lives. And they are young to boot. Not much drama there to work with.)<br />
<br />
It would be nice if there was more of Solo's game in this story. I assume that as this book was put together, someone thought that detailing her team's various campaigns would turn off all but the hard core fans of the sport. I'm sure they were right about that. Thankfully, someone thought that the book should include some discussion of the USWNT win over Brazil in the last World Cup. That chapter is emotionally rewarding.<br />
<br />
The book is a fantastic read - it's a great portrait of a player in context.<br />
<br />
<br />
I conclude with a complaint I couldn't fold anywhere else into this review because it seemed so out of place with the book as a whole. Solo doesn't get into too much detail regarding her love life, but she does confess to making out with a woman while she played for Lyon. She writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One French girl flirted with me for months, asking, </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"How do you know you don't like kissing girls if you've never tried it?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Trust me," I said. "I know I like men."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One night I got drunk and let her kiss me. I'd had gay teammates throughout my career-I thought maybe I should see their side of things. So we made out. Interesting but not life-changing. I was straight.</blockquote>
The references to her relationships with men are more abstract. She dates men, has relationships with men - she does discuss this fact but not in any great detail. So why have the lesbian kiss in the book at all if not to titillate the reader? This is the book's "no homo" moment - invoking homosexual possibility only to contain it. With nothing else to say about the gay teammates she has had throughout her career (and what <i>can</i> she say about them?), I am left wondering what this passage is doing there at all.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-28081797216428998792012-08-16T07:01:00.001-07:002012-08-16T09:08:19.060-07:00Oh the Irony!: Nike's Gold Diggers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhifywaqmX9OP4_nyPeveUTN6UxdToaZAFWR9KrvrvOfro_hZThQgcaTzgSTDo1UfFQOiHeLiAYOjF4kJ9kY6wnxID60Q2h72fOVCVJSukVT_6hrvNIhzEGEY3YC_mZWjfkv6hjjSZAFtXG/s1600/470_2471562.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhifywaqmX9OP4_nyPeveUTN6UxdToaZAFWR9KrvrvOfro_hZThQgcaTzgSTDo1UfFQOiHeLiAYOjF4kJ9kY6wnxID60Q2h72fOVCVJSukVT_6hrvNIhzEGEY3YC_mZWjfkv6hjjSZAFtXG/s1600/470_2471562.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
Can Nike come up with an Olympic motto worse than
"Greatness has been found?" YES!<br />
<br />
Of course, this shirt is only sold in women's sizes. Nike explains itself:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“Nike has consistently supported female athletes and the position
they enjoy as positive role models. The t-shirt uses a phrase in an
ironic way that is relevant given it was released just as the world
focused on the success of female athletes.”</i></blockquote>
Tell me how this is ironic again? Seriously. Oh wait! The joke is on the people who buy it. Nike is lining its coffers at the
expense of the women it purports to support. Ha ha! OMG that's so funny. I get it! Ironic gold digging indeed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-27899312709893078992012-08-12T14:26:00.000-07:002012-08-12T14:26:18.634-07:00The Gender of Second<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDf5ns0TiPzgb80CfEjwGAar8dwO7gVVwcaFCdO2wm74HF0XvyVBx_mkMtty27PHgmuwQCRCPlFsoY9yldkkUh8IgPS9JYTxedSPy5KOIRgXhL2L02VoFDGHTf3I49DoOeQj-70XVoGTlQ/s1600/4193210-3x2-700x467.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDf5ns0TiPzgb80CfEjwGAar8dwO7gVVwcaFCdO2wm74HF0XvyVBx_mkMtty27PHgmuwQCRCPlFsoY9yldkkUh8IgPS9JYTxedSPy5KOIRgXhL2L02VoFDGHTf3I49DoOeQj-70XVoGTlQ/s320/4193210-3x2-700x467.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mariya Savinova and Caster Semenya</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When Caster Semenya raced from last to second in the final stretch of the women's 800 meters, some wondered is she aimed for silver. She has a turbo drive of a kick - if she'd engaged it sooner she might have taken gold. Maybe.<br />
<br />
Second guessing someone who comes in second is a strange thing. This isn't to say that the thought didn't occur to me. It was being fed to us all by BBC commentators who wondered how someone with that much "in the tank" could wait so long to use it. <br />
<br />
Semenya looks different from her competitors. When she switches from running really fast to her full sprint, it's hard to miss her singularity. Her strength and her power make her simply magnificent to watch. <br />
<br />
Like Semenya, Mo Farah spent much of his last race (10,000m) at the back of the pack. As they fought their way forward, he and his training partner (Galen Rupp) had to work hard to avoid being boxed in. The back of the pack is safe in that regard but dangerous in others. You have to know your kick and everyone else's.<br />
<br />
Maybe Semenya was working the same strategy and kicked too late. The 800 is a war of strategy and speed. There isn't time to hide.<br />
<br />
The Olympic final was a very fast race. Mariya Savinova won in 1:56.19. The Russian looked amazing from start to finish. She won with nearly a second to spare. She very nearly wept on the podium when they played her country's anthem. She ran 1:55.87 at the 2011 World Championships.<br />
<br />
The year Semenya became the object of global scrutiny, the year she was sandbagged into what can best be described as a medical rape, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIeI_n-Pf8" target="_blank">she ran 1:55.45</a>. It was the fastest 800 run by any woman in 2009 and the fifth fastest ever. Just over a half a second faster than Savinova's 2011 race. She moved up early, stayed with the leaders and then kicked coming out of the last turn, as one does. <br />
<br />
She won that 2009 race by a huge margin. She stood out. She looked like no one else. It looked <i>easy</i>. <br />
<br />
When Usain Bolt runs, it looks like he is from a different planet. Some place in the Jamaican Galaxy. His stride is noticeably longer than that of
his competitors. He's freakishly tall for a runner. He's different. A
man apart. His exceptionalism
makes him into a god. It is not in conflict with his masculinity. In fact, his is a standard. All men who sprint are measured against him. In fact, all <i>people</i> who sprint measure themselves against him. He is the fastest <i>person</i>. <br />
<br />
One of my nieces has had a poster of Bolt taped to the wall over her bed since the 2008 Olympics. She's a runner.<br />
<br />
When Joan Benoit won the first marathon that women were allowed to run at the Olympics, she broke away from the pack early. She was on her own. She clocked in at 2:24:52. Until 1952, the men's world record was slower than that. If she'd run that time in the 1984 men's Olympic marathon she'd have placed 52nd - about two-thirds of the way back into the pack. But of course, if she'd been running with people faster than her, she'd probably have run faster.<br />
<br />
Unlike celebrated world marathons, men and women are forced to run completely separate races at the Olympics. They run in "women-only" and "men-only" races.<br />
<br />
Not so long ago, the IAAF created a new rule. No times run by women in races that include men count as a women's record unless women are given such a huge
head start that no man could possibly race with them. This new rule would invalidate the world marathon record set by Paula Radcliff. Graciously, the IAAF has let it stand as a record for women running "mixed" marathons.<br />
<br />
In "mixed" marathons, officials now see men as illegal pace-setters. In this view, male "pace-setters" (meaning here, simply other runners who are faster than the fastest woman) give women an unnatural advantage. A woman who runs faster when she runs alongside the fastest runners in the world has betrayed her sex.<br />
<br />
Women must not run raster than women can run.<br />
<br />
Women can't run faster then men.<br />
<br />
A woman who breaks from the pack isn't doping. She's a man.<br />
<br />
Or she is running with men.<br />
<br />
One man can run with longer legs than everyone else. Another can run with prosthetics. But a woman can't run in her own body. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The new IOC gender testing policy mirrors this ideology - defining women by what they must not have or be - by marking testosterone levels as the border it defends against women's exceptional capacities.<br />
<br />
Women, now, will be tested for their testosterone levels. Too much (and what that level might be hasn't actually been clearly identified) and she can't compete.<br />
<br />
A woman's capacity must be limited. It must be fixed by removing whatever excess officials have latched onto. Men in the race. Maleness in her body. She must be produced as castrated.<br />
<br />
In an article for the June 2012 issue of <i><a href="http://www.bioethics.net/" target="_blank">American Journal of Bioethics</a></i>, scholars condemn the new policy on multiple grounds.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The current scientific evidence...does not support the notion that endogenous testosterone levels confer athletic advantage in any straightforward or predictable way. Even if naturally occurring testosterone levels confer athletic advantage, is that advantage unfair? It bears noting that athletes never begin on a fair playing field; if they were not exceptional in one regard or another, they would not have made it to a prestigious international athletic stage. Athletic excellence is the product of a complex entanglement of biological factors and material resources that have the potential to influence athletic advantage. However, the IAAF and IOC target testosterone as the most important factor in contributing to athletic advantage. The policies seek to do the impossible: isolate androgen from other possible biological factors and material resources to determine that the impact that it alone, in the form of testosterone, has on athletic advantage. (<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15265161.2012.680533" target="_blank">"Out of Bounds: A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes"</a>)</blockquote>
They conclude:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Considerations of fairness support an approach that allows all legally recognized females to compete with other females, regardless of their hormonal levels, provided their bodies naturally produce the hormones.</blockquote>
And then proceed to embrace the contradictions that such a policy will bring on. (Different countries define women differently.)<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
When I was a child "women's lib" and the Equal Rights Amendment were much in the news. <a href="http://shirleychisholm.org/" target="_blank">Shirley Chisolm</a> was running for president. My parents hosted National Organization of Women meetings in our living room. I pinned an "ERA NOW!" button to whatever I wore to school.<br />
<br />
This meant that I got into a lot of arguments with my classmates. Almost always with boys who wanted me to admit the men are faster/smarter/stronger than women. That ERA button was a red flag I waved before little bulls. <br />
<br />
I was reminded of this schoolyard training for the junior feminist at a public forum on gender testing in sports. A local radio station invited me to join a panel to talk about the case of Caster Semenya and the recent changes in the IOC's gender testing policy.<br />
<br />
All three of the panelists came from feminist and anti-homophobic perspectives - in principal and in practice all three of us are opposed to gender policing. But there was a moment when I felt baited by the one man on the panel, when he tried to engage me in an argument about how men are faster/stronger than women - how the fastest man is stronger than the fastest woman and therefore men and women's sports must be absolutely distinct from each other.<br />
<br />
Now, he said this after I'd already indicated that I opposed gender policing and gender segregation in sports. If he was goading me I'd certainly offered myself to be goaded.<br />
<br />
But when he put that bit of gendered common sense into play ("the fastest man...") I called him out for baiting me. I couldn't respond to the issue lightly. <br />
<br />
This post is not about what gender is faster.<br />
<br />
This post is about what gender is given to us, over and over again, as second. It is about all the work we do to make sure that women and men can be told apart from each other, to perpetuate the fiction that male and female are "opposites."<br />
<br />
I am protesting a system that produces "female" as a debility.<br />
<br />
That is what a policy forcing exceptional women to take a hormone suppressant is: The production of the fiction that women are quantitatively and qualitatively less than men.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
A policy that negates the accomplishments of a woman runner because she ran alongside a man is ludicrous and offensive. It is ludicrous because every runner except the one in front is being paced.<br />
<br />
It is offensive to deny women the opportunity to be paced by the fastest runners in the world. It is, plain and simple, discrimination. That kind of rule should be against the law.<br />
<br />
Men and women should run the marathon together. They just should. Why not have men and women compete with and against each other, as they do in the best events in the world? Why not embrace the fact that it will make the women run faster?<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Every elite runner runs against the history of running. It's the difference between a race and a game. A race and a routine.<br />
<br />
In their minds, women around the world will run with Usain Bolt and Mo Farah. This takes nothing away from Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Tirunish Dibaba. Surely they run with them too. Surely, as members of an imagined community of athletes, we run with each other.<br />
<br />
Caster Semenya reminds me of Usain Bolt.<br />
<br />
I want Caster Semenya to lope like him across the finish so far ahead of the pack she makes everyone else look like they are standing still. I want her to avenge the idea that what a woman can do should be limited by some notion of what a man is.<br />
<br />
But last night Semenya wasn't our avenging angel. Last night she was Mariya Savinova. She's a ropey figure. More like Farah than Bolt.<br />
<br />
As they played her country's anthem Savinova fought back tears of joy. And Caster Semenya looked just as she did when she crossed the finish line. After nearly a year out of the sport and in the headlines, she seemed relaxed - happy to be on the track and pleased as punch with being second.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-4255503299249609022012-08-10T12:42:00.004-07:002012-08-13T23:29:26.037-07:00Greatness Has Been Found: A Close Reading<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFjEtRG8ko5Z_ICex2Zm2jxrRo4hgtEt2O7KeCfotkMfhInd3MFHJspvTIGor7cERNwbGEmOx9AkPMZa9zLkv1FCPjeaE2QACtxQVGO5VsUVdiT6BfAEp1FX_MV14j8T8_9PApOwkne9z/s1600/USWNT+fans+2011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFjEtRG8ko5Z_ICex2Zm2jxrRo4hgtEt2O7KeCfotkMfhInd3MFHJspvTIGor7cERNwbGEmOx9AkPMZa9zLkv1FCPjeaE2QACtxQVGO5VsUVdiT6BfAEp1FX_MV14j8T8_9PApOwkne9z/s320/USWNT+fans+2011.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Doing it themselves. USWNT fans at the 2011 World Cup semi-final.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
At the end of yesterday's match, most of the USWNT pulled Nike t-shirts over their uniforms. The kit sponsor must move its merchandise. As long as the swoosh is on the team jersey it doesn't much matter than they throw another Nike product on at the designated moment. Except that this shirt is just so awful. Let me count the ways.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Greatness had been found.<br />
<br />
The suggestion is that in the win, the US 'found' a greatness that was absent from not only the team, but from the tournament. This is embarrassing. I love swagger, I really do. But this isn't swagger.<br />
<br />
Greatness has been found. In small letters, under the emblem, "United We Stand."<br />
<br />
The USWNT has been ranked either number 1 or 2 in the women's game for eons. Even if they don't make the road to victory easy on themselves, they are, in fact, not the underdog. They are the team that everyone wants to beat. Their opponents bring full-on heavy metal GAME. Everyone loves to take them down.<br />
<br />
To suggest that this team has had anything but a very long history of "greatness," that this "greatness" (what a shitty word) is anything but their freaking baseline is just ridiculous. Not one fan buys that narrative.<br />
<br />
The closest this team came to being an underdog of any kind was last summer and frankly it was only those of us who actually follow the team who were even aware of this. In fact, most of the mainstream US sports media ignored the team during its struggles. Most of us fans could not watch any form of broadcast of the play-off matches with Italy which would determine IF they were going to the World Cup at all.<br />
<br />
Greatness has been lost? If only the channel was found upon which we could watch it!<br />
<br />
You'll never walk alone? You will in the world of American women's football if you are anything less than freaking invincible.<br />
<br />
The Americans feel like they have to <i>win</i> every tournament just to stay in the headlines. Last year was scary. Placing second in the World Cup in the same year that the home league was floundering must have been absolutely harrowing for everyone on the team. This hit home for me as players talked about how hard that loss was. That wasn't just about being bested by Japan. That was about what not being the best might mean.<br />
<br />
So it's a bullshit slogan because it implies that people have stood by the sport in its darkest hours and now they have been rewarded by the team suddenly happening upon their own greatness. The US women's soccer program is, instead, a fascinating story of a super-dominant team that has to fight for every single scrap of media real estate. They been doing this for, uhm, twenty years.<br />
<br />
Greatness has been found.<br />
<br />
The best you can say is that the team was <i>flirting</i> with slight underdog status for a few months last year. There was a chance they might not make it to the finals. A chance. That, my dears, is not an underdog team. Imagine representing Manchester United or Real Madrid or Spain this way. For, really, that's the level of "greatness" we are talking about, isn't it?<br />
<br />
Now, this slogan has a context. Nike has been working this "greatness" theme in an Olympic campaign celebrating the greatness in the ordinary athlete. But the unveiling of this shirt at the moment the US defeated the World Cup champs reveals the grotesque ideology at work in the multi-national apparel corporation's advertising. These ads are deeply manipulative - they show little kids inhabiting the space of big-time sports competition. Adult voices narrate their story as that of the underdog. It's a recitation of all the times girls and boys are told, "no, you can't just do it." And they do it anyway.<br />
<br />
If you want a glimpse of how much media manipulation goes into such things, just look at the media's love affair with Lolo Jones and its complete disinterest in the three women who actually won the 100m hurdles. I admire Jones - but USA athletes Dawn Harper and Kellie Wells were favored over Jones and took silver and bronze. New Zealand's Sally Pearson took gold and set an Olympic record. The three of them ran a close race. Photo finish. But at the race's end, the media flocked around Jones.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Mexican American Leo Manzano stormed through the pack to take a silver medal in the 1500. That's a huge story for all sorts of reasons, too. But it hasn't gotten the same coverage that as Jones's tears.<br />
<br />
Greatness has been found.<br />
<br />
The media liked the idea of a very beautiful woman who disavows her power. I've always read the media fascination with Jones's virginity as a preference for the self-castrating woman. The pretty, non-threatening underdog. Meaning, if you are woman athlete, please pretend that you don't know the full measure of your power. Please, just <i>be</i> great. But not too great. Not too obvious. Tuck that greatness into the closet. Let someone find it for you. Oh, and please be pretty.<br />
<br />
Oh, what a story it would make for that woman to win! This is the media's work not Jones's - she is right to complain that the excoriating she's received is unfair, and it actually makes the whole situation worse.<br />
<br />
She lost. Sports media (or, I should just say NBC) was left the fact that it picked an underdog who didn't even medal. AWKWARD. Because<i> then</i> the media was left with the looming question as to why it continued to ignore the two <i>American</i> athletes who did. Even a next-day interview turned focus back to Jones as the interviewer (Michelle Beadle) baited Harper and Wells to trash talk. This they did somewhat gleefully.<br />
<br />
Neither Wells nor Harper are self-effacing. They are not prone to apologize for being great. But neither is Usain Bolt. Bolt can boast about being a living legend. He is one. That shirt would make no sense on him. And it makes no sense as a USWNT shirt.<br />
<br />
Bolt is with Puma, as it happens. Puma likes Bolt. Puma also understands how to use real-life grammar.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMz-9rlzKkFmJvRbRTRIwAACdchSlPJvodkh0iDErMWccVDgJSL33VTh7ftrEq5LvrOCXKtz_XK5eOWqllN5ha9LpWO66vpZ46EW1AYYTD7Mgt4s-efEl0mxHQ1B724rlSHv2Pj3rHoKKu/s1600/puma-new-campaign.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMz-9rlzKkFmJvRbRTRIwAACdchSlPJvodkh0iDErMWccVDgJSL33VTh7ftrEq5LvrOCXKtz_XK5eOWqllN5ha9LpWO66vpZ46EW1AYYTD7Mgt4s-efEl0mxHQ1B724rlSHv2Pj3rHoKKu/s320/puma-new-campaign.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Greatness has been found.<br />
<br />
This is not the language of swagger. It is the language of a militarized bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
Where was this greatness? Under the couch? In the back of the closet? Did someone leave it on the bus? Someone actually wrote a slogan in passive voice - and then vaporized whatever trace of the subject might have been implied from both the noun and the verb.<br />
<br />
How was this greatness found? Did it just roll out from under a seat and then it was noticed, generally - by no one in particular?<br />
<br />
Greatness has been found.<br />
<br />
American mythology flips its obsession with winners into the delusion that everyone can be a winner. A winner and an underdog. Everyone always already has won. If this sentence doesn't express the affective miasma of entitlement I don't know what does.<br />
<br />
Greatness has been found.<br />
<br />
You know, one might want a shirt that said something like "2012 Olympic Champions." OH, wait. Adidas is the official apparel company for the Olympics. Nike can't make a reference to the event on the shirt. (How about "The USWNT went to London in 2012 and won this t-shirt"?)<br />
<br />
Finally: The shirt is boring. There is nothing visually interesting about it at all. Not one design element resonates with the game. It could be about anything. Or nothing.<br />
<br />
Far, far better are is the "greatness" found by a bunch of teenage girls armed with a pair of scissors and some face paint. They express a guileless enthusiasm for the game that just can't be bottled, and you know it's the only kind of shirt that does real justice to the players.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-40604469829246350162012-08-10T10:05:00.001-07:002012-08-10T15:45:46.861-07:00Happy Together<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCvWZleC-rfptiI0vj5ETu2KTPxIcl2X11J8xsPF9r2p2ZLpTs1me1GszlSH9AprNSQksCNboUWcntJgoAAGMK7cQUA1brWJpORMaj8Dj3bddljKC6V-cagygZeb96qoO1br0fTUFnAUL/s1600/Images-2012-8-9-syd8474d.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCvWZleC-rfptiI0vj5ETu2KTPxIcl2X11J8xsPF9r2p2ZLpTs1me1GszlSH9AprNSQksCNboUWcntJgoAAGMK7cQUA1brWJpORMaj8Dj3bddljKC6V-cagygZeb96qoO1br0fTUFnAUL/s320/Images-2012-8-9-syd8474d.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
On July 20th, someone tweeting as <a href="https://twitter.com/tjocken" target="_blank">Pia Sundhage</a> - and I do think it might actually <i>be</i> Sundhage - wrote the following:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Happy Players have a tendency to make good decisions on the field - together.
</blockquote>
<br />
Something shifted about 18 months ago. The USWNT looked very shaky. They <i>barely</i> qualified for the World Cup - they lost a game to Mexico (a historic defeat), they had to qualify for the final tournament in a play-off with Italy. In the first round they didn't score a single goal until Alex Morgan struck deep into a complicated injury time extended by the Italian coach's bizarre decision to sub a player (which added at least 30 seconds to match). It should never have come to that.<br />
<br />
They squeezed out wins against much less developed teams. Those matches weren't fun to watch. They were stressful, the team appeared stiff and play was stingy. But then last year they played a thriller of a game against Brazil at the World Cup. Then they fought against the run of play and snatched a win from France. Both of those matches were engaging. Even though the team was fighting - they looked so <i>into</i> it. Last summer something broke open. They seemed happy on the field. Joyful.<br />
<br />
This past march I spoke with some women in Brazil about soccer. We talked about why it is so hard to get women's soccer off the ground - whether you are organizing a recreational or a professional league.<br />
<br />
Instead of talking about sponsorships etc., we started talking about pleasure. About how hard it is for a lot of women to advocate for their own joy. How crazy you can seem when your only reason for doing something is the pleasure it gives you. How often our pleasure is minimized and diminished by others. How we do that to ourselves. Someone hypothesized that the spectacle of women expressing this kind of joy was itself so unsettling in Brazilian culture that this was perhaps one of the game's biggest obstacles. (Which raises the question as to why that joy is so celebrated in other aspects of Brazilian life, but not this one.) I was surprised by that conversation's rapid turn to a certain raw honesty about the thing inside the game. Deep game. Joy, happiness. Happy players play better football.<br />
<br />
To extend Sundhage's axiom: A great football team advocates for the happiness of its players. For a profound and communitarian happiness cultivated in the pursuit of a great game. Thus that word "together." One happy player isn't enough. An individual happiness only works in relation to other happinesses.<br />
<br />
It's the thing that a lot of people miss from the men's side. And even when we see glimpses of it, our pleasure as spectators has been so ruthlessly exploited I think a lot of us feel alienated even when we, say, watch Spain cruise to <i>another</i> elegant victory. Maybe those men are happy - but that happiness comes at a high price. Maybe we enjoy watching them play - but what is our happiness supporting if not the business of it all. It's long been true for me that the joy I might experience watching the men's game has been compromised. It's the sugar in a Coca-Cola. Tastes good, but toxic.<br />
<br />
There were so many matches in this tournament to remind us of the romance that draws fans to the stands. Team GB's win over Brazil was joyful. Brazil has looked distinctly <i>unhappy</i> for a long while now - they've taken on a tragic air. Their game is so obviously rooted in pleasure - without it things just fell apart. Canada's performances across the whole tournament - they have a right to be upset, devestated - this team dialed into each other's game in a way that made them<i> play</i>. Sinclair plays with the dark, slow-burn joy of a great athlete - I want a velvet painting of her post-goal scoring face. At times France seemed more dutiful than joyful in their play. Like they knew what they were supposed to do but couldn't quite feel<i> </i>it.<br />
<br />
Japan's had this pleasure vibe for a long while - they are famously not so showy but the affection they feel for each other and for the game itself is evident in every detail. From the moment they walk on the pitch to the moment they take the medal. They might in fact be setting a standard on this front for the world game.<br />
<br />
All this was happening in the region that invented the ban against women playing the game - a region that cultivated such a deep hostility to the idea of women playing that it isn't at all unusual to find women who've been mocked - even beaten - for playing when they were girls. Season ticket holders for Arsenal or Tottenham, who were told by school teachers that girls weren't "allowed" to play football - because it was <i>true</i>. The joyful spectacle of an exciting women's game in that context does real, very meaningful political work.<br />
<br />
Four years ago I wrote a melancholy, sour post about the final match
between Brazil and the US. I'd grown tired of the exchange of trophies
between USA and Germany. I'd fallen in love with Brazil's technical
skill and attacking game. But then the US shut them down by parking a
bus in front of the goal. And Brazil did the same, but not quite as
well. Carli Lloyd cracked their defense and scored a goal in the opening
minutes of extra time and that was that. 1-0. It wasn't particularly
fun to watch. At least not for me. But in the tournament you could see shadows of another world out there - of girls and women growing up with the ball at their feet, playing pick-up soccer just for the hell of it. Of girls who can seriously freestyle. Four years ago there were glimpses of this joy in sides like Brazil, Nigeria and Japan. And more at the 2011 World Cup. France, Equatorial Guinea. Mexico.<br />
<br />
This has made the whole game better. So much better. Who would have thought that we'd have tournament finals played to win? Exchanges of leads? Breathtaking attacks and defending by the seat of your pants - or, in Solo's case, by the very tips of your gloves.<br />
<br />
It seems like the culture of football cycles from the generous spectacles (full of goals and real drama - bad calls, unlucky breaks) to the miserly (a constipated game producing one lone goal forced out over 90 minutes of a well-executed plan). I'm loving the upswing in this wheel of spectatorial fortune.<br />
<br />
I fell in love with Brazil in 2007 (sacrilege to admit!) because (I now see) I fell in love with the game they played. Full of swagger and bravado. Excess. Drama (which could be in fact quite cynical, but they seem to enjoy their own theatrics). When Brazil plays well it's with improvisational genius. For me - in my limited experience - they were the first international women's side to bring that to the broadcast game. More teams are showing the capacity for that kind of game. More teams are putting their signature on it. Entertaining women's football is not an exception, and it is not a surprise. It is, at least right now, the rule.<br />
<br />
With that, I offer my deepest thanks to the teams who played for us in London. From South Africa, making it's first appearance in the tournament to the USWNT taking its <i>fourth</i> gold medal.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-53605243648821595332012-08-07T16:35:00.001-07:002012-08-08T17:50:54.840-07:00All In, All Out: a note on the amazing Megan Rapinoe<br />
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In two interviews, four years apart, two different USWNT
players casually identified themselves as gay to reporters. Neither did so with
the solemn declaration, "I'm a lesbian." Both players answered a
reporter's question in a way that snuffed out the presumption of
heterosexuality maintained by mass sports media on those rare occasions when it
addresses women athletes, a presumption it maintains in spite of all evidence
to the contrary. </div>
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In 2008, Natasha Kai (remember her?) <a href="http://www.2008.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=979/news/newsid=137438.html" target="_blank">responded to an NBC interviewer's question about her rocky start</a> on the national team squad:</div>
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"It was a hard time," remembered Kai, who saw limited action under former coach Greg Ryan as one of the last three
players added to the 2007 World Cup roster. "I had missed the first camp
[under Sundhage] in early-January because I had bronchitis, and I was going
through a nasty break-up with my girlfriend. Then [Coach Sundhage] told me my
job was on the line." </div>
</blockquote>
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The fact that she's gay was not only subordinate to a story
about her fitness; it was subordinate to the story of relationship trouble. The
"problem" was not that she had a girlfriend, it was that she and her
girlfriend broke up. It was gay drama, but it wasn't drama because it was gay. It
isn't at all clear from that interview that Kai was coming out to anyone but
the reporter, or to the reader who assumed she was straight. Her answer is
structured by the assumption that this is just her life, and anyone who knows
her would know this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which is a
coming out - and it's the kind of coming out that has to be staged over and
over again within a discursive context that prefers not to notice that there
are a lot of gay people in the sports world. Scarcely any
of the media discourse asking "when will it be OK for a soccer player to come out" qualifies the question by pointing out that in fact prominent women athletes have come out, and are a part of our sport. And that this hasn't magically banished homophobia from it.*</div>
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Megan Rapinoe's coming out was even less direct than Kai's. In
May, Jimmy Conrad (former US national team player) interviewed Rapinoe for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/kick" target="_blank">KickTV</a>.
At the end of their conversation (at about 5:20), he observed that she's been supportive of the
gay and lesbian community. By even pointing this out, Conrad identified himself
with that community as at least an ally. When does Bob Costas take notice of
something like that?<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZR6huJy5pg?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe> </div>
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KickTV isn't like mainstream sports media. The Youtube channel is closer to a fan forum. Conrad is very relaxed and familiar with his interview subjects, and his interviews are conducted with a sense of humor. The whole affect of the video is closer to what soccer culture actually feels like (alternately technical, serious, self-deprecating, goofy, bashful). It is much more familiar to me than is anything I've seen from NBC this summer.</div>
<br />
Conrad's question seemed pulled from conversations about the men's game. Things are pretty stark in that world. It is indeed hard to imagine a current EPL player coming out to the media. The question seemed like it was pointing in the direction of the men's game, but this wasn't at all clear.<br />
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In the women's game, things aren't so black and white. There are, in fact, quite a few high profile figures in women's soccer who have spoken publicly as lesbian athletes, usually without making the fact that they are doing so into a headline. Pia Sundhage, Nadine Angerer, Hope Powell - in most of these cases, the fact that these women have placed themselves within the lesbian and gay community isn't news, except to LGBT media. (<a href="http://outsports.com/">Outsports.com</a> keeps a constant eye out for players who take this step, as does <a href="http://www.afterellen.com/" target="_blank">After Ellen</a>.) Mainstream sports media avoids acknowledging the
sexuality of out lesbian players, even as it apparently can't stop itself from
addressing the romantic lives of straight players. (Thank god for Hope Solo,
who forces heterosexist media to wrangle with a loud-mouthed shameless man-eater. HA.)<br />
<br />
In any case, when it comes to naming a player as not only lesbian, but "out," in the women's game we are often discerning between shades of gray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.womenssoccerunited.com/profiles/blog/show?id=3074237%3ABlogPost%3A172412&commentId=3074237%3AComment%3A172218&xg_source=activity" target="_blank">In an interview for a program called Abbey Road, for example, Marta was asked about the impact of her international travel on her relationship with her girlfriend (also a soccer player)</a>. She said that of
her two loves, soccer comes first. Is that a coming out? Can a player be out in
Sweden but not in the US? Seems so. So why, in the US, does the air get sucked out of the room when the word lesbian is put in the same sentence as "Marta"?
Perhaps while she was under contract with the WPS, the desire was that everyone
practice a "don't ask, don't tell" policy? What was the fear,exactly? That lesbians might suddenly start attending soccer matches? </div>
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<br />
In <i>Strong Women, Deep Closets</i> (1998), <a href="http://ittakesateam.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Pat Griffin</a> offers a table of escalating categories of
"outness" to describe how people manage their identity in sports.</div>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Co</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">mpletely Closeted Concealing
lesbian identity from all in athletic context</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Passing as heterosexual Intentionally leading selected
others in athletic context to see self as heterosexual</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Covering lesbian identity Concealing lesbian identity from selected others in athletic
context</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Implicitly out Allowing selected others in ahtletic conext to see self as lesbian
without naming self</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Explicitly out Intentionally revealing lesbian identity to selected others in athletic
context</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Publicly out Revelaing lesbian identity to everyone in athletic context. </span></li>
</ol>
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It's a helpful scale for at least presenting something other than the "closeted" or "out" binary that usually shapes this conversation. A lot of public figures in sports seem to fall somewhere between
4/implicit and 6/public, but of course these would be the athletes that we are mostly likely to notice. </div>
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Even within the top of that range there seems to be room for nuance and gradations,
given the complexity of the media sphere. Today, it isn't like you are coming out to
one of three networks. Instead, you talk about your girlfriend within a very specific media
context that cares and respects you for the player you are. It's not the same interview you'd give to ESPN - it is unlikely
that ESPN would solicit that kind of interview from you. They aren't going to ask you what it's like to have a girlfriend who also plays your sport at the international level. Or if coming out shifted your play at all. Or if there are lesbian athletes who inspired you. (<a href="http://espn.go.com/espnw/" target="_blank">espnW</a>
might, someday.) The remarks you do make on these subjects within the micro-media of (e.g.) women's sports blogs may or may not be picked up by larger media networks. Given the paucity of attention given to the women's game in general it isn't likely to be as big a story as, say, a ponytail pull. </div>
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Anyway, Pia Sundhage has said that for her being a lesbian "is no problem," and that she and her partner were welcomed when they came to the US. (<a href="http://www.sbnation.com/london-olympics-2012/2012/8/7/3224983/pia-sundhage-like-most-gay-and-lesbian-coaches-dont-get-enough-credit" target="_blank">See Patricia Nell Warren's recent article on Sundhage</a>.) </div>
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But it is a problem for plenty of people. As readers of this
blog will know, there's a broad and deep culture of homophobia in and around
women's sports. And if players are pressured to be very, very discrete
about their homosexuality, you can assume that this pushes a lot of women out of
the sport entirely. Gender policing and homophobia push a lot of people out of
sports. No news there.</div>
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Athletes decide to be discrete about their sexuality for lots
of reasons - and I'm not in any place to speak to their experiences. Coming out
to the media is a political act and what that means to the person who does it
is something only they can tell us. But the ramifications of coming out seem to be more complicated than we want to believe - for women have come out, and that doesn't seem to change how women are represented. If anything it just seems to make the commercial organizations that manage sports anxious. </div>
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Conrad's question to Rapinoe:</div>
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You've vocally supported the lesbian
and gay community. What do you think about the absence of out athletes
in sports? Do you think we'll see a high profile soccer player come out
soon?
</div>
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This question
replicates a lot of assumptions - assumptions built on years of not remembering or noticing the women athletes who <i>are</i> out. I mean, her <i>coach</i> is out. And she's one of the most famous people in the sport. How can you ask a woman on the USWNT soccer team that question without erasing the lesbians who are a part of it? </div>
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There was no way for Rapinoe to address that question with a "Yes/No/Maybe" without replicating its assumptions. And there was no way to respond honestly without "outing" herself. Without promoting herself from perhaps level 5 to level 6. So Rapinoe answered:</div>
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Hopefully. I think that <i>obviously we're out there</i>.
It's weird. I guess on the female side, not on the men's side. But it's
accepted within the teams and within the sport. But it seems sports is
that last...institutional homophobia. </div>
</blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.out.com/travel-nightlife/london/2012/07/02/fever-pitch" target="_blank">Welcome to level 6</a>. I love how in getting stuck with explaining a pretty complicated subject she just sends a cross to "institutional homophobia." For that's the right move: if you haven't noticed that quite a few of the most famous women in the sport are out to the media, then that's a symptom of a big problem. </div>
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Rapinoe refused to allow herself to be interpellated as closeted,
and she also refused to allow the question to situate her as somehow in
the dark about the fact that there are, in fact, quite a few out lesbians in
the sports world. Obviously. That is as important as the word "we." Obviously we are out there. </div>
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All of this is to say that there <i>are</i> out women in sports. Pia Sundhage, Hope Powell, Nadine Angerer - that's just a few. None of them are shrinking violets, none of them are in hiding. But there are days when it seems like the <i>media</i> is hiding from <i>them.</i> </div>
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As we all know, Megan Rapinoe has gone on to have a fantastic tournament. Obviously, there's no hiding from <i>that</i>.<br />
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*For bloggers trying to find their way through this thicket, <a href="http://www.glaad.org/reference/" target="_blank">GLAAD</a> offers a media guide for addressing sports and homophobia. You can download it <a href="http://www.glaad.org/files/MediaReferenceGuide2010.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-12145292586532537312012-08-05T13:23:00.004-07:002012-08-05T13:26:57.322-07:00The Poetics of Failure: On NBC's Coverage of Gymnastics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhalc-KgDyp9Chmd-m78rjv_FpIUxDTk8VEBJ8zOi-nbnmWJP1tLYQA1Iil0lmM0VLL_rmm-L1hM3L0csIdrH-49hJ9T8k8c9k5luamWEHXs8pRGVz3F_d7Whs_-cUbMrcLN_KmkGyDAe-0/s1600/923a2_120802055812-us-gold-15-horizontal-gallery.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhalc-KgDyp9Chmd-m78rjv_FpIUxDTk8VEBJ8zOi-nbnmWJP1tLYQA1Iil0lmM0VLL_rmm-L1hM3L0csIdrH-49hJ9T8k8c9k5luamWEHXs8pRGVz3F_d7Whs_-cUbMrcLN_KmkGyDAe-0/s320/923a2_120802055812-us-gold-15-horizontal-gallery.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The network that broadcasts the Olympics mediates the Olympics. That is what media does. NBC has been particularly stingy with the live broadcast of marquee events. By the time the network airs its prime time program, people like myself have already consumed, digested and excreted opinions about not just the day's events, but media coverage of them. This makes evening coverage feel worse than "delayed." NBC's evening broadcast is the night of the living dead of sports coverage.<br />
<br />
The gross jingoism and cynical story-manipulation (always a factor for any Olympics broadcast) amplifies the problem of time difference - the agonizing suspense of watching events like gymnastics is completely destroyed by editorial practices that decide for you what performances are important.<br />
<br />
The exciting thing about live broadcast is that you have no idea what performances will be important. Each one might be. Each failure hits you like a little knife stab. You wince, but some of that wince is pleasurable.<br />
<br />
NBC decided to deny us this experience in the sport that is most defined by it. Watching gymnastics can feel like being tickled. The fan sits through one routine after another, holding her breath in anticipation of some kind of athletic humiliation.<br />
<br />
Sports like gymnastics and figure skating are defined by this poetics of virtuosity and failure. The performance of virtuosity that defines these sports is not same that we seek in something like the perfection of a ballet. When you go to see a ballet you are not waiting for someone to fail. But that is exactly what we wait for as we watch someone flip their bodies over a balance beam. We are afraid the athlete is going to fall - and the sport encourages our souls to hover over that likelihood. We know it's coming - but from where? When? Who?<br />
<br />
There is an exquisite thrill to watching people defy spectatorship's death-drive - in doing so, they flirt with the part of us that wants someone to release us from the agony of anticipation. The audience's groan at a gymnast's fall can thus sound like the release of a pressure valve. The joy expressed in response to the perfect routine is that of pleasure extended beyond what you thought was possible.<br />
<br />
The importance of failure to these events is what makes them <i>sports</i>. If these sports theatricalize perfection, it is by playing its difficulty out before our eyes.<br />
<br />
Gymnastics is a theater of failure - this is what makes live broadcasts of gymnastics so popular with people who don't even follow the sport. Its athletes are brutally <i>judged.</i> Scored. One. At. A. Time. Every flaw is on full view.<br />
<br />
The network's attempt to override and take control over this aspect of gymnastics left its coverage of the women's team feeling particularly distorted and out of focus. The consistent marginalization of Gabby Douglas's accomplishments; the association of her presence with Jordyn Weiber's absence in the all-around finals - this was enabled by the void created by the network's failure to cover the full competition. (<a href="http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/update-gabby-douglas-leads-team-usa-to-the-gold/" target="_blank">The Crunk Feminist Collective is the go-to source for reading of Gabby Douglas's accomplishments and how they've been handled by the media</a>.)<br />
<br />
It's as if NBC had no idea that spectators are drawn to the sport's brutality, to its unforgiving attention to the body and to its most retrograde articulation of femininity. It's as if NBC forgot that the thrill of gymnastics is found in its violent juxtaposition of the denial of gravity and the staging of the evaluation of young women, publicly and individually. NBC had bet on its favorite story - the underdog destined to win (Weiber), but miscast the role. You got the sense that its coverage was shaped well before the event even happened. That it plugged whatever happened into an old script. Thus going into the all-around competition Douglas's presence became the story of Weiber's absence.<br />
<br />
So the network was slow in responding to the story that was already in place before the games started. The one in which Douglas was fighting to be the first African American to win an individual gold medal in this sport, ever.<br />
<br />
That context renders Gabby Douglas's triumph within the sport's elaborate theater all the more meaningful. She becomes visible within this context as a refusal of failure, in a triumph over the sport's economy of humiliation. It's a brutal form of perfection, and its full measure can only be taken in relation to all the others on that day who tried and failed to get there.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-17577137460088694892012-07-30T12:11:00.001-07:002012-07-31T13:55:42.672-07:00The Weight of History: Great Britain & Brazil play at WembleyAccording to the FIFA preview for this event, Team GB's game against Brazil will be the first women's football match ever played at Wembley.*<br />
<br />
I'm a big supporter of Team GB. They have great players - just the midfield features Jill Scott, Rachel Yankey, Fara Williams, Anita Asante. There's Kelly Smith, Ellen White, Alex Scott - all fantastic and very experienced players. England (Team GB is England w/ a few players from Scotland) beat Japan 2-0 in the World Cup. They beat the US in a friendly a few months before that. They lost to France in the quarterfinals on penalties. (That left us with a lot to talk about as manager Hope Powell complained to the press that too few of the players wanted to take the penalty shots. The media storm created by <i>that</i> was perhaps even worse than that created recently by Solo. There was talk of Powell's retirement from the England team.)<br />
<br />
Team GB is a legacy team. If within the men's game there is a romance to playing for the countries that "invented" football, the women who take the field at Wembley tomorrow honor a far more heroic past. For fifty years of women were banned from football pitches. Where at the end of WWI, people turned out in huge numbers (far exceeding attendance at women's league matches in England and the US) by the 1970s (when the game was decriminalized) it was a nearly universal object for derision.<br />
<br />
But off the grid, behind that history of prohibition and hostility women played on. If the FA banned women's football and created a culture in which the idea of women playing the game seemed ridiculous, they also created a football underground. The ban produced a punk-rock oppositional zone for gender non-conforming girls and women to find each other. By this I don't mean that women footballers circa 1970 were gay punks and labor organizers. But rather that the history of women's football is that of a counter-culture - far more powerfully than is true of the men's game, even given its working class roots. How many men are bullied and harassed off of football pitches, for being men? (Histories of women's teams through the 70s and 80s can include stories of women being physically assaulted for taking pitches - telling men to get off the field you've paid for could be dangerous.)<br />
<br />
I just love the women of those generations and the legacy they've given us - a legacy of outspoken, pig-headed, delusional figures like Hope Powell - who fought her way through circumspect and hostile boys, proved herself amongst them, played for women's teams through years when doing so was seen as a ridiculous waste of time, then slugged it out with the FA. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jun/12/women-football-hope-powell-interview" target="_blank">As she put it in an interview, "I will not be bullied."</a><br />
<br />
And she won't take anything less than that level of determination from her squad.<br />
<br />
Brazil<br />
<br />
My emotional attachment to this team is complicated. They have contributed some of the most exciting matches to the recent history of the women's game. It has been generally true that you can count on Brazil for entertaining football - technical skill, theatrics, gamesmanship, emotion and drama. The women's team has everything the men's team is famous for. Except money and institutional backing.<br />
<br />
It was easy to root for them when they played Germany - when they were the underdog, the talented side proving themselves to an indifferent CBF (the organization managing the sport in Brazil). They have pleaded for help from the CBF for years.<a href="http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/the-brazilian-women-demand-more-support/#more-250" target="_blank"> In 2007, while at the Women's World Cup, the team's players wrote and signed a letter of complaint to the federation.</a> They complained that not only was the team under-supported, the CBF routinely failed to direct awards money to the team. There was no clarity regarding financial support for players, and no consistency in material support for the team's training.<br />
<br />
They thought things would improve when they won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics. They gave the heavily favored USWNT a run for the money (Abby Wambach who put the game away in its waning minutes). Given their outstanding performance there, the Brazilian thought maybe things would get better for them. But their future success would only highlight the potential that was going to waste. Year after year.<br />
<br />
At the 2011 World Cup, the team went into competition wearing the uniform for the men's side. That's as big a symbolic statement as a federation can make - they do not order team kits specific to the women's side (and so their shirts had stars for all the World Cup trophies won by the men). The women complained publicly about these problems in 2007. Little has changed. Lost in reports regarding the profound corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian football is the impact of this lack of professionalism must have on the women's team. It's dire.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlneI5OGzvL2Dv78tex_jftpz4hg-0hCK_1VMeHv43oM6g442YdtiWG2xSulrHH_Uys45pPnwS19xBiwwm5xwxr4RjnRy3URKK1Qk1LOATeYBKvjFl5qDW6gFabITlheEufbJuzpIOtyom/s1600/vid6-20071002174503.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlneI5OGzvL2Dv78tex_jftpz4hg-0hCK_1VMeHv43oM6g442YdtiWG2xSulrHH_Uys45pPnwS19xBiwwm5xwxr4RjnRy3URKK1Qk1LOATeYBKvjFl5qDW6gFabITlheEufbJuzpIOtyom/s1600/vid6-20071002174503.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brazil's women ask their federation for support, holding up a banner at the 2007 Women's World Cup award ceremony.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Imagine you compete against the US and Germany, year after year you show that you have the ability to conquer teams with far better training.<br />
<br />
The team's semifinal win (4-1) against Germany in the 2008 Olympics remains one of my favorite viewing experiences. In that match they <i>broke</i> Germany's defense. Better teams (including the US) had tried and failed. It was a very physical game, but it was a game that also featured fantastic technical ability and a certain ruthlessness. Both teams tried to knock their opponent out of rhythm. Brazil played like a real team. Their first goal was a telepathic collaboration between three of the game's absolute best: Formiga, Marta and Cristiane. They never connected like that in the final, though. The USWNT took all the wind out of their sails, and took the trophy with one goal scored in extra-time.<br />
<br />
Imagine that over and over again you find yourself inches from a trophy. You have not just one of the best players in the world on your squad (Marta), but two (Cristiane) - and a host of others who are absolute all-stars (Formiga - playing in her fifth Olympics). But you never get to the winner's circle - after so many years, maybe you stop thinking that you can. Because the grim reality of it all soaks in: the world is full of talented players. You need more.<br />
<br />
Cut to last year's World Cup tournament. The team's performance in the game against the USWNT was heartbreaking. As much as I was rooting for the American women, I was rooting for a great performance from Brazil. Yes, they almost knocked the US out of the tournament. They were so close. But they played angry.<br />
<br />
They didn't play with the kind of focused anger Wambach used to avenge herself against Colombia's Lady Andrade. Last year, Brazil played like they were angry at the world - like the USWNT had everything that they have been fighting for and have been denied. Like they were frustrated and like they were very tired of being frustrated. It looks to me like the battle with the CBF is breaking them. I guess they were just playing by the 'by any means necessary' playbook. Infamously, at about 115 minutes Erika plopped herself down on the field and just lay there, faking injury and eating up nearly four minutes of the game. After watching that, I wondered if I could ever want to see them win anything again, ever.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4H4bFJ9h2AM" width="420"></iframe>
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<br />
I still can't believe that happened.<br />
<br />
In this tournament, Brazil has yet to be tested. Five unanswered goals against Cameroon isn't really a game. To score only one against New Zealand - late in the match, too - it doesn't bode well.<br />
<br />
Whatever the outcome, Team GB and Brazil are both heading to the quarterfinals. They are playing to avoid moving on to face the second place finisher in group F: right now, that's likely to be the reigning World Cup champions. If it's not, then it's formidable <strike>Sweden</strike> Canada. The winner of this match, however, will move on to face Canada or North Korea. That's where both will want to be.<br />
<br />
<br />
*I never trust this kind of information, as people have a tendency to frame every big women's event as a "first," even when history says otherwise. (The launch for the FA Women's Super League was staged at Wembley, but no matches have been played there.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-63190253190712646052012-07-29T13:55:00.001-07:002012-07-30T08:00:52.080-07:00The Ladies of Old TraffordAs the USWNT moves from Glasgow to Manchester, and as players gear up for the thrill of playing at Old Trafford, I thought this might be a good moment to reflect on the place of women's football at Manchester United. My aim isn't to be a total killjoy (this story is depressing) but rather to signal how far things have come and to suggest that all the women playing at Old Trafford should feel the support of generations of players who could never imagine playing in "the theater of dreams."<br />
<br />
Manchester United's women's team
formed in the late 1970s as "Manchester United Supporters Club Ladies" and became founding members of the North West Women's
Regional Football
League in 1989. They enjoyed increasingly competitive seasons at varying
levels until 2001, when they were brought into an official relationship with Manchester United. Manchester United had been running
schools for girls through its community development programs. Some of
the women players had come up through this system. The women's side was then disbanded in 2005. The
team had played over twenty years outside the club's administrative umbrella, and in four years Manchester United FC killed it. <br />
<br />
Manchester United's
involvement in the women's game is best described as reluctant. This hardly makes the club unique. If they could have had it their way, they'd probably never have adopted that team.<br />
<br />
Although the FA lifted its ban against
women's football in 1971, it was quite a few years before they started to pay
attention to it. Towards the end of the 1980s, FIFA took an interest in the women's game and required women's programs to affiliate with their men's FA in order participate in FIFA sanctioned competition. The whole question of England's national women's program thus became the FA's business and they took over administration of the Women's FA in 1991.<br />
<br />
English clubs were soon required to offer training for girls in order to run a school
for boys. At the time, people were eager to try and professionalize the women's game, and saw a quick answer in the affiliation of existing women's sides with professional men's club. So, in 2001 Manchester United took over management of Manchester United Supporters Club Ladies. And killed it four yeas later.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://menmedia.co.uk/salfordadvertiser/news/s/448486_united_gave_us_a_water_bottle_and_then_they_dumped_us" target="_blank">Tony Howard's 2005 Salford Advisor </a>article about the disbanding of the team suggests that the club's investment in the women's program was never honest: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
MANCHESTER United are booting their ladies team into touch and
out of their Salford home - leaving the players with only water
bottles as souvenirs of their time with the 'worlds biggest
football club'. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
United expected the women to play in ill-fitting hand-me-down
kits, gave them water bottles as an end of season gift and have now
told them they're surplus to requirements despite it costing less
than one week of Wayne Rooney's wages to run the team for a whole
year. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The ladies, who train at the Cliff in Broughton, were notified
by letter that they will be disbanded at the end of the season and
must look for another team - leaving United as the only club in
England's top two divisions without a female side. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Some of the players were used as models to help sell the kit,
but United say they're no longer wanted because they don't benefit
the 'core business'. All this at a time when ladies' football is
apparently on the up and Manchester is set to host the high-profile
women's European Championships this summer. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hayley Bates from Old Lane, Little Hulton was one of the models
United were happy to use in their advertising campaign for the
current strip. She said: "I've loved Manchester United all my life
but after the way they've treated us and seeing how things are run
behind the scenes I now feel animosity towards them. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Even though we modelled the new kit we had to wear the old one
for months. Then when the new one arrived it didn't fit. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We've had one training kit in the six years I've been involved
and it's really tatty but they wouldn't replace it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We have to rummage in the academy team's kit bags to find
shorts to wear and make do with hand-me-down gear. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We were pulled into the office last year and told it was an end
of season presentation where they gave us a water bottle as a gift.
Then they don't even tell us to our faces that we're no longer
needed. It's insulting." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hayley, 18, added: "Everyone talks about how much United make
but they can't spare the £60,000 it would cost to run the team for
a season including travel to and from games. All this from the
so-called biggest club in the world - it's a joke. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The likes of Arsenal are on television every week, while we're
left trying to find new teams to play for." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
By law United are obliged to allow girls to train at the club up
to the age of 16 in order to be permitted to have a boys
academy. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
United say it was never their 'intention to become involved in
women's football at a high level'. A spokesman said: "We have
always made it clear the ladies' and girls' section was about
community partnership and education rather than establishing a
centre of excellence. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Ultimately the hope is the boys will progress to the first
team. So naturally more resources are put into that area because it
is our core business." </blockquote>
<div>
In other words, women's soccer was only as good as a side show.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
The letter sent to players informing them that
the team was disbanded also told them that they could not play together
under any name. </div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
According to a May 2005 MUFC shareholder's newsletter, Bates (the player quoted above) saw the dismantling of the
team as the final expression of "a pattern of a lack of respect for the
women and sexual discrimination since the inception of the women's
department."</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Things have changed since I wrote my original article on this subject in 2007. Manchester City's women's side competes in the Women's English Premiership, and Liverpool plays for the professional Women's Super League. <a href="http://www.fc-utd.co.uk/story.php?story_id=4200" target="_blank">FC United of Manchester, founded by fans who felt betrayed by MUFC's corporate turn, announced that it's first women's team will take the field this season</a>. As far as I can tell, the <a href="http://www.mufoundation.org/en/FootballInTheCommunity/GirlsFootball.aspx" target="_blank">Manchester United Foundation </a>supports youth teams for girls but still no women's side. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In any case, I'm curious to know when women have played football at Old Trafford prior to these Olympics. I imagine that even with this history of ambivalence haunting its stands, it'd have been a great thrill.<br />
<br />
[The above is an edited and expanded re-post of one of From a Left Wing's first articles.] <br />
<br />
[Update - the plot THICKENS:<br />
<br />
So far, I've only found one reference to a women's match at Old Trafford. The Wikipedia entry for the FA Women's Cup lists Old Trafford as the location for the 1989 final between Leasowe Pacific (which merged with Everton) and Friends of Fulham Ladies FC. Leasowe won 3-2.<br />
<br />
Attendance is listed there as 941 - this is the lowest attendance figure given in that Wikipedia entry for any final, by a significant amount. Several years before and after are missing information on grounds and attendance, however. And there is no source given for this information - so it is totally unreliable.<br />
<br />
Even more mysteriously, "baseball grounds" are listed as the location for the 1990 final [[comment below clarifies]]. I can't see how the Women's Cup Final went from Old Trafford to a baseball field. Except, of course, I can. Gosh if anyone knows this story I'd love to hear it. Meanwhile, I'm digging through my library. Sadly I left my copes of Jean Williams's books on history of the women's game at the office!]</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6165780438929797577.post-7073349448804656292012-07-28T14:30:00.002-07:002012-07-28T14:42:21.254-07:00Solo thoughtzIf you aren't following <a href="https://twitter.com/hopesolo" target="_blank">Hope Solo's twitter feed</a>, do. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQMuytivKtbkpnyDgJVE1yRmjkZ_DFnCBwp6pNlqY2PtWdvxnqOyZE_U0WKud-fCt0Z3DdIiTPkggANozrdxiPUSWWbCeut9XYcnvho8W511B7FVAIaxb-OnCe9QxC0kC9jpwSIHSV4DR/s1600/Picture+18.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQMuytivKtbkpnyDgJVE1yRmjkZ_DFnCBwp6pNlqY2PtWdvxnqOyZE_U0WKud-fCt0Z3DdIiTPkggANozrdxiPUSWWbCeut9XYcnvho8W511B7FVAIaxb-OnCe9QxC0kC9jpwSIHSV4DR/s640/Picture+18.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Today's tweets were in response to Brandi Chastain's remarks during the US game against Colombia. At about 18 minutes, Chastain disparaged defender Rachel Buehler's ball control. She said that Buehler gives the ball away too much, and "needs to work on an improve on" her trapping skills. The problem is not exactly what she said. What defender <i>doesn't</i> need to work on, improve on her game? The problem is the way Chastain said it - these remarks were part of a constant stream of negative commentary about the US's game. There was, in fact, so much criticism of the USWNT that there was hardly any real discussion of their opponent. A commentator is supposed to offer criticism of the match - Chastain is not being paid to be a cheerleader for the team (this is where Solo is wrong). But criticism should be even handed. What did we learn today about Colombia? Not nearly enough.<br />
<br />
I've been hesitant to criticize Chastain - like a lot of people, I admire what she's done for the game in this country. (She was delightful in an interview I did with her a couple years ago.) I also like having a defender's perspective in the mix. Personally, I always want more attention to the game's dark arts. <br />
<br />
For me, the real problem with Chastain's commentary is that it is humorless. That's why the criticism she doles out for 90 minutes can feel so grating. She sounds irritated with the game. She sounds annoyed. It just is not fun to listen to.<br />
<br />
Supporting the sport doesn't mean going easy on teams - quite the
opposite. Informed, detailed, animated analysis of the game makes
everyone watching it smarter. Passionate narration of the
action gets everyone more involved in the broadcast. In an interview about his earliest memories of soccer, Zidane recalled not the action, but the commentator's voice - he remembered being pulled to the television by his voice. The sound of a person totally interested in and excited by a game. <br />
<br />
The shocking thing here is not that Solo had something to say about how Chastain calls matches. It's that she let loose about an NBC commentator and former US national team player on Twitter, right after a game. Someone wound her up. This leaves us with some interesting questions:<br />
<ul>
<li>How did she find out about that segment of the broadcast? (These tweets were sent right after the match finished.)</li>
<li>Who let her have a phone? (She's infamous for what she's capable of saying right after a match finishes.)</li>
<li>What was it about that remark about Buehler that got Solo mad, with so many other similar moments to choose from? </li>
</ul>
Anyway, I love that we have players who are not totally controlled by the team's handlers. Or maybe they are. Maybe this is all about stirring the pot, keeping the women in the news, and using the ancient trope of the cat fight to do so.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7