From A Left Wing

Tell Us Why: Notes from the UC Front

2012-01-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy White

On Thursday, January 19 I spent a good part of the afternoon as a member of thecrowd protesting outside the UC Regents meeting. I stood with students I'dtaught, students I knew from their work with campus organizations, and studentsI've seen at other demonstrations. I stood with faculty, staff, Occupyactivists from the region, and students from other campuses.

I stood right behind a barricade formed from placardspainted after the cover of books used in our classrooms. This book-barricadewas both a visual intervention (asserting knowledge as our choice of defense)and something that helped us to maintain our shape as a crowd.

In the two hours I was behind that barricade, we didn't moveforward or back. We just stood there, chanting, talking, expressing our anger.The crowd got bigger and louder, but its peaceful character didn't change. Thecrowd successfully used Occupy Movement practices to control itself.Nevertheless, toward the end of the Regent's meeting, a UCPD officer declaredthrough a bullhorn that our gathering was "an unlawful assembly."

The crowd chanted, "Tell us why! Tell us why! Tell uswhy!" It was an honest request.

No one on the other side made even the slightest gesture torespond to our question. And no administrator made even the slightest gesturetowards negotiating with us. To do so would have been to admit that the UCRegents were trapped inside the building. To do so would have been to admitthat the University of California Regents had grossly underestimated UCRiverside when it chose the campus for its meeting.

Our campus is "docile" by some standards. We don'thave Berkeley or UCLA's history of activism. A lot of our students commute,which means that our campus environment is less condensed, less volatile.

UC Riverside is an open campus - perhaps the most open inthe University of California system. Parking is relatively cheap and easy. Ourstudents are so diverse it's hard to imagine what person would think,"this campus doesn't represent me." If Berkeley and UCLA are oftenthe sites of large protests it is partly because those campuses represent thesystem - participating in an action there has a unique symbolic function asthose campuses are "flagship" campuses.

Our campus represents something else. Our campus is richwith transfers from the community college system, rich with returning students,veterans, parents, kids who are the first in their families to graduate fromcollege. Dreamers.

In the University of California system, our campus has oneof the most organic relationships with its region. This makes for good press,but it also means that of the UC campuses we are the most reliant on statefunds. We are the most vulnerable, our life as a public university feels quiteprecarious.

On some level, the people planning this meeting banked onthat precarity. They banked on the notion that our students are too busyworking to pay their tuition (and/or their parents' mortgages) to get involvedwith a protest.

The people coordinating the Regents meeting seemed to havebeen surprised by the size of the crowd, and by its persistence. The UCPD andthe administration's confusion struck a lot of us as dangerous.

When the UCPD declared our demonstration an "unlawfulassembly" it implicitly announced its intention to use force to break upthe crowd without seeking another way to address the situation: negotiation ofan exit for the Regents. With a negotiated exit the Regents risked not violence,but the embarrassment of being shunned.

The only instruction given to us was to not advance. In twohours, there'd been no motion from the crowd indicating that we would do so.There was discussion about moving forward and also if we should back up, sincemany of us were crowded on stairs and if the UCPD advanced on us there, we'dlikely be hurt. But we did neither. We held our ground. The barricade formed atthe front helped us to do that.

Word got out that the Regents were trying to leave via theback of the building (protesters were also there, but in smaller numbers). Thecrowd at the front broke up as we tried to reform at the building's serviceentrance.

When we got to the back of the student center, those formingthe book barricade tried to take their protective stance at the front of thecrowd. Someone took one of the metal barricades and pulled them towards theprotesters, as we'd been doing all afternoon at various points around thebuilding. No one had previously interfered with this.

The UCPD found their chance, though - as the crowd regroupedat the back of the Hub, they used force to prevent the formation of anotherblockade. Later, they would describe the attempt to form a barricade asviolent. When the protesters went to move barricades (again, as they'd beendoing all day with no interference), it was not an act of violence. There wasnothing threatening about it - the threat was that the activists were going tosuccessfully block the street. At this point, people were shoved to the ground,dragged across the pavement and plastic pellets were shot at the crowd. I sawwounds left by these pellets on students I've seen in my own classrooms. Thereis ample video out there showing this.

The UCPD threw people to the ground, the UCPD shot their newpellet guns into the crowd, the UCPD used force on us. BY this point, I should add, people had been protesting for hours - at any point the UCPD or the campus administration might have sought another path by engaging the protesters in dialogue. Honestly, I think that the people running security at the Regents meeting got romanced by the thrill of a military-style escape plan.

The next day: UC administrators organized an Orwelliancampaign to represent the violence of that incident as caused not by the UCPDbut by the protesters. Even more bizarre was the eagerness for theadministration to blame not students, but the public - as if the two should bedistinguished from each other. In weekly letter to the campus community theChancellor White claimed that "the disturbance of a few individuals"ruined the demonstration, and that they did not represent the "non-violentstudents and community members engaged in peaceful protest and exercising theirright to free speech." But the people beaten and shot at by the UCPD areour students; they are our colleagues. And they are our neighbors. We were allin it together. They are the public, and the public is us.

Tell us why, Chancellor White. Why you stopped seeing yourself inus.

Illegal Use of Hypnosis in Wrestling

2012-01-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

Just because.

Soccer by Searchlight: looking for the future in the past

2011-12-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;iframes&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

It's a little known fact that the earliest night matches were women's games. Amazing how far we've moved in the wrong direction. In 1920 enough people were excited by the idea of watching women play that they packed the terraces. The media thought the match was important enough to cover it in print and as a cinematic news reel. Even if press from this period approached the women's game as a novelty, it broadcast information about teams and events and made celebrities of its amateur players.

Today, fans of the women's game are so sick and tired of having to cajole, beg, whine, yell and snipe about the lack of coverage - we've become bored with the whole situation. When it comes to the media blackout on coverage of women's sports, most of us have just thrown up our hands with a "whatever."

Of course we need the media to support nascent leagues. We need media to pay enough attention to league organization and team management so that those running the women's game are celebrated for their successes and held accountable for their failures. We need coverage of actual matches, week in, week out. It's ludicrous that people in the US have only ever heard of Abby Wambach and Hope Solo - and most who know these names haven't actually watched them play and and they certainly don't follow their club careers.

We need a media from another era - a media that takes an interest in new things, in things that aren't guaranteed successes. We need a media interested in a sport that is professional in the ways that working people are professional. Why not take an interest in a sport that is not making a few people rich, but that is just trying to sustain itself?

What happened to make media interest so synonymous with "profitable" that we can't imagine wanting to watch something unless there is an abstract sum of money in play between a handful of people - none of whom are on the field?

We have one clue in the 1920 ban on the women's game - The English Football Association only killed the women's game when its success in modeling a sustainable game played for the benefit of all began to suggest a different future for the game than the one we've been stuck with. Barbara Jacobs writes:

From their formation until the FA announcement [of the ban against the women's game], Dick, Kerr's Ladies [the most celebrated club] had raised over £60,000 for charity, and the same amount had been raised by all the other women's clubs combined. That's, in a total for the years 1918 to 1921, £120,000, or, in today's reckoning, 24 million pounds. And the FA? I think we can safely call the scoreline 24 million to nil. [Jacobs, The Dick, Kerr's Ladies, p. 164]

Jacobs quite reasonably points out that given the identification of women's football with highly successful community support, it was inevitable that working people filling the stands for men's matches would begin to ask where their hard-earned money was going.

The FA's 1920 decision to kill interest in the women's game left us with the "common sense" dished out as an explanation for why the women's game isn't worth watching: "There's no money in it." If working people living in the desolation of post WWI Europe could raise £120,000 from women's matches, then surely the problem has never been money itself, but rather where the money in the women's game went.

People complain all the time that you can't market the women's game as a "charity" - that there is nothing that will kill a sports-buzz quicker than the spirit of "good works." I've felt this myself.

Meanwhile corporate speculation has sucked the soul from the men's game. Who believes that the season championship is something that a team earns? What honor is there in a trophy that's been bought? Or in watching a play-off between two or three teams that have sold their economic souls in order to have the right to be in the running?

Sure, as a spectator I won't turn my back on a big match - but the pleasures of the game feel no more and no less thrilling than the pleasures of a great product, designed for easy consumption. If it feels good, this is because it asks so very little of me.

Most of us actually want more than this. Few of us, however, are old enough to remember what that "more" might actually be. We live with a vague sense that our desire for something different is impractical, unrealizable. "There's no money in that."

And so we turn to history not out of nostalgia but out of curiosity: the past doesn't teach us that "yes, there is money in that." It shows us an entirely different relationship to money. The women's game allowed those with a little to give to those with even less. The team's management and players took only what they needed to keep playing. No one was set to get rich off of it. And this made the fans love the enterprise even more. Imagine!

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;iframes&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;" class="goog-spellcheck-word"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Interlude

2011-12-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

Slava Mogutin, from "Brosephines" for Vice (October 2011)

I might as well just say it: I've been busy with work. I've been avoiding watching soccer matches on TV and following sports media - because these things provoke me. Plus - and this the biggie - I'm injured and alienated from the local scene which is my muse. I'll be back soon.

Until the black helicopter rants return, however, I'll share images and video like a normal blogger.

The above photo by the artist Slava Mogutin - he has a deep appreciation for the athlete in all his (per)version. This image is one of the more demure of his work in this genre.

Silent Majority: On UC Davis and the War on Students

2011-11-21T17:31:00.000-08:00

Depressingly, few of us who work at the University of California were surprised by the fact thatdemonstrating students would be treated with such violence. A squad ofcolleagues affirmed that it was business as usual when they stood passive whileOfficer Pike calmly went about his task. UC Davis's Chancellor and its PoliceChief both reacted as if this were an unpleasant routine, until it became anews item.

The University of California's leaders have been a wagingwar on students for years. This scene is repeated with increasing forcedirected at protesters who have sought ever more dramatic ways of demonstratingtheir "non-violence." Shouting? Too violent. Standing? Violent.Sitting down and chanting? Still violent. Finally, our students are on thefloor with their mouths shut.

We have also witnessed Orwellian twists in the system'sefforts to quash dissent. When demonstrating students aren't bludgeoned andsprayed, they are marked with antiquated labels like "disrespectful,""intolerant" and "uncivil" in a prelude to"discipline" and disenfranchisement. In a February 2010 memoominously titled "Intolerance on Campus," UC President Mark G. Yudoflumped organized student activists together with racists when he compared theIrvine 11 to the students who thought hanging a noose in the UC San Diego library wasfunny. Both, he wrote, showed a lack of "tolerance."

The comparison (which Yudof has made more than once) ischilling. It draws a line of equivalence
between a loud but non-violent protest against violence, and an action that is itself shorthand for aquite specific history of terrifying violence. Students protesting systemic,state-sanctioned violence were equated with students casually citing lynching.The political and historical acrobatics required to draw that equation aredizzying.

For crying out during a presentation by Israel's ambassadorto the United States, the Irvine 11 wound up in the middle of a criminalprosecution. The Muslim Student Union was banned from Irvine's campus for sixmonths - an extraordinary disciplinary measure I haven't seen duplicated exceptin cases of violence at frat parties. In fact, I've seen the latter treatedmore generously.

One administrative response to "the Irvine 11" hasgone completely unnoticed in commentary about the case, perhaps because it isso utterly banal. The Office of Student Conduct forced the three UC Riversidestudents who participated in that protest to write essays about the FirstAmendment.

Let me repeat that: UC Riverside's Office of Student Conductforced three students to write aboutfreedom of expression, as a form of punishment. (In his memo on "campusintolerance" Mark Yudof identifies himself as "a scholar of the FirstAmendment.")

No UCR faculty member was involved in creating, reading orevaluating that assignment. What self-respecting scholar could bear such athing? I can think of no surer way of alienating a student from his or herauthorial voice that to tell them what to say, and then force them to say it.(Incredibly, these punitive essays are routinely assigned across the UCsystem.)

There is violence embedded in that kind of"discipline." It is not the kind that goes viral. It is the kind ofthing that feeds on a system like a slow-growing cancer - empowering policeofficers to wield their weapons as educational tools.

In setting up camps, by so visibly occupying their schools, students acknowledge that they are at riskof being disposed of their education if they don't insist on the campus'sresponsibility to their presence.That University of California leadership has produced a situation in which the most effective protest has been silence should give us all pause. Studentsshould not have to sit down and shut up in order not to be read as a threat.

That is one reason why the UC Davis action was so shaming -such a demand is grotesquely odds with our mission, but it is exactly what the system has been askingstudents to do for years. In literalizing that demand, however, UC Davis'sstudents also powerfully asserted their connection with and allegiance to theever increasing numbers of people whose mereexistence poses a problem to those who have taken so much from them.

[Obviously, it's hard for me to care much about the Galaxy winning the MLS Cup with this stuff going on.]

Footballers on the Dancefloor: from Hollywood to Bollywood, Solo, Savage and God Himself

2011-11-20T09:47:00.001-08:00

I'm in denial. Hope Solo was voted off Dancing with the Stars. She and Maksim were ROBBED by the judges. The Argentine Tango is a perfect framework for the two strong and combative personalities. Their performance was interesting, ambitious and fun to watch. Nevertheless, Solo and Maksim were given quite low scores. (Their Paso Doble was awesome from a head-banger's perspective but perhaps not so ballroom. Their Cha Cha was OK, but in the "relay" format you can really the qualitative difference between Martinez, Lake and the rest (how Kardashian won that segment is beyond my understanding). Anyway, here's the Tango:

Bravo to Solo for bringing it.

This seems like a good moment to survey performances by a few other footballers. For example, Robbie Savage is on this season's Strictly Come Dancing.

That performance needs no comment from me. Bless him.

Diligent readers of FaLW will know that I'm a fan of Baichung Bhutia, who won India's Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa in 2009. Bhutia played for Kolkata clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal - two of the most stories clubs in Asia. His career has largely been built around long-term ambitions for soccer in India, and he is one of the founders of the country's first player's union. Without a doubt, he participated in India's version of Dancing with the Stars in order to raise awareness of Indian soccer. Nevertheless, Mohun Bagan questioned his commitment to the sport when his succesful run on the dance show caused him to miss a practice and exhibition match. The club took a ridiculous, short-sighted stand and Bhutia left them for East Bengal.

He retired from play this year, but owns United Sikkim and is a key figure for the future of the sport in Asia. Bhutia's the kind of person many of us would love to see head FIFA. The guy has a soul. And that shows in all of his performances. (Jhalak Dikkhla Jaa is fun to watch because the dances are hybrids - part ballroom, part Bollywood. They are very theatrical and often quite athletic.)

The most fascinating turn in this genre comes from Italy's Ballando con le Stelle. God himself appeared on its dance floor in 2005. He withdrew from the show after four weeks - he'd been flying back and forth between Buenos Aires and Italy, shortly after undergoing surgery to control his weight problems. Around this time, however, Italian tax authorities tried to collect his earnings from the program, in order to cover debt dating back to his days as a player. I'm grateful for the three weeks he gave us - everytime I watch this, my brain goes: "No, is that really...wow." And then it short circuits.

If you need more after that, I recommend Bleacher Report's survey of footballers who should be on DWTS. Given that this Bleacher Report researcher confined herself to the men's game, she missed one, most obvious candidate. For of all the dancing footballers surveyed by Bleacher Report, none actually incorporate dance into their play. For them, it's a post-goal scoring celebration. For Marta Vieira da Silva, the samba is a cruel taunt embedded into play - an announcement of her opponent's imminent humiliation (see, especially the move that starts around min 3:35):

Hope Solo would be the first to observe, however, that had she been in goal in 2007, Marta would have had much less to Samba about.

More Notes on a Scandal: Cultures of Compliance (the Penn State/Berkeley comparison)

2011-11-12T08:04:00.001-08:00

The other week, my university's Chancellor sent out a message encouraging people to respect each other's differences - be they cultural,political, religious, academic, etc.

It's the kind of thing administrators generate to look likethey are doing the right thing. It's also the kind of thing that makes 'doing theright thing' look easy. As if difference - being different, feelingdifferently, living differently - was reducible to a matter of taste. The actual aim of that message was to discourage students from raising their voices. The memo's central purpose, in other words, is to minimize conflict.

That same week, at Berkeley, campus police wedged their batonsinto student bellies. Some show of respect.

Dave Zirin said something a lot of us were thinking when he contrasted Penn State students with Berkeley's - one set rioting at the firing of a coach who failed his community by burying accusations of childabuse, the other peacefully asserting their right to demonstrate in support ofthe #Occupy movement - and beaten by the campus police for doing so. (Penn State students also "rioted" at the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death - so, this seems to be their default mode.)

Sneering at jarhead Penn State fans is a little too easy. It'sclose to the flipside of the knee-jerk, smug righteousness of the fansthemselves - who decry the defilement of the abused in the same gesture theyflip a news van and set it on fire. These things feel related to me - the macho posturing that wraps itself around the idea of protecting innocent children, coming from the last people one would actually trust to know what it means to support a healthy sexual culture.

In any case, both situations express a crisis in the integrity ofuniversity culture. And it does feel like this problem goes coast to coast.

There is a growing gap between what students want from theiruniversities and what those campuses are giving them. They want an education.They are being given lessons in compliance - comply with the corporate culture or get beaten for resisting it.

It's a miracle that California students haven't startedburning down their schools. The entire system has been raped and pillaged bythe selfish class. It's that simple. Administrations collaborate, making dealswith the "1%" by selling bad debt - what is the difference between ashady mortgage on an overpriced home sold at the edge of a bubble, and dramaticrises in tuition that can only be paid with loans that will enslave studentswith outrageous "unsecured" debt for most of their adult, underemployed lives?

The brutal realities of this are perhaps nowhere moreevident that in the Golden State, which once boasted the best public education systemin the world, but now can't afford to give its students desks and textbooks.Tuition escalates beyond a working person's reach. Families lose their homesand kids are caught between paying for school, or helping mom and dad with themortgage. Everybody is losing.

Students should occupytheir campuses - they need to unitein their grief and outrage, and they'll find plenty of staff and facultywilling to pitch their tents alongside them. But it's their campus. We work for them.

Turning to Penn State: I can't fathom making a martyr out ofJoe Paterno, and there's no crowd that makes me more uncomfortable, feel more "unsafe" than collegefootball fans.

But: I can imaginebeing very suspicious of Penn State's public sacrifice of itsfather-figure.

The atmosphere at Penn State has been described to me as"cult-like." That intense attachment to the campus, secured throughits football program and its symbolic Father, is what most universities areaiming for: Rather than build the campus up from the ground with good teaching,resources for research, support for student learning - they are trying tocreate a corporate brand, administrations want students to have not aneducation but an "experience."

The myth here is that this nostalgia for "the college experience" will fund public education. For a handful of colleges it might, but at what cost to them, and to the rest of the system?

University executives now want former students to look back on their educationwith uncritical nostalgia, with the same set of feelings they might have fortheir first pair of Nikes.

If I send a check to Rutgers, it isn't because I think back onmy "college experience" and feel wistful. I think about how theeducation I received - which was pleasurable, challenging andsometimes soul-rattling - changed my life. Enabling that in the classroom ishard work. It isn't pretty. It is a hard sell.

The Penn State students who rioted clearly drank the campusKool-Aid. But I can imagine beinga student there, and seeing the big round of dismissals as a hollow gesture. Givenhow long this abuse is supposed to have gone on, given how many years peoplecontinued to work with and support Sandusky after they learned about the nowinfamous shower incident, who doesn'tbear responsibility to the alleged victims here? Ushering these guys off the stage with the directive "don't talk about anything" doesn't feel satisfactory. But what would? Something is rotten in thesystem.

But what system? How is it rotten?

As I wrote in an op-ed piece for The Guardian this week,it's more, and more complicated, than football and big-time sports.

I remember the sex scandal that rocked Princeton in the late1980s, when a distinguished male professor in the English Department was accused ofrape by a male graduate student. (See the NYT Magazine article, "Arms and the Man: A Sex Scandal Rocks Princeton.")

The story was awful - the professor's behavior before andafter the incident was disturbing. Those who came forward were treated badly bythe university. They were feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic scholars tired of the climate cultivated by the Princetonadministration's passivity vis a visdiscrimination and harassment. Confronted with a university thatdealt with a credible rape accusation by offering the accused professor agolden parachute, four left - including Emory Elliott, a distinguished American Literature scholar who was my seniorcolleague at U.C. Riverside.

At my own campus, three women came forward in the 1990s andfiled a complaint about systemic harassment and discrimination in the HistoryDepartment. The pattern of behavior was jaw-dropping - ranging from overtdiscrimination against women faculty with children to a rape charge filed by afemale student against a male professor. It was bad enough to become a scandalwithin the academy. (The story was reported in a May 1999 story for The Chronicle of Higher Education: "A History Department Implodes Over Sex-Bias Charges and a Suicide.")

The women who came forward on my campus paid a heavy pricefor doing the right thing. If that department is now a good place to work, wecan thank those scholars. But even now, I see little sympathy from seniorcolleagues about the crap they went through and how that might have impactednot only their scholarship, but their relationship to the institution.

I recall these stories to point out something easilyforgotten: academic administration contains more than a few atavistic holdoversfrom the days when universities were run by and for white men.

An English Department, a History Department will (hopefully) have been forced to work through this stuff by virtue of the integration of women andfeminist scholars into their ranks - the Humanities are ahead of the ball onthis point.

Athletic Departments like Penn State's are nursingfantasies of the gold old days when men were men and women knew their place,and nobody rocked to boat or talked about anything.

The bizarre thing about this is that athletic departmentsare actually forced to confront the matter of gender equity much more directly than academic departments. It is (apparently) hard to force a Physics department tohire as many women as it does men - but it isn't hard to force a campus to atleast try to offer equal opportunity to women athletes.

That should meanthat there is a greater awareness in athletic departments about all the issuesthat come with sex/gender equity - but instead we see a national pattern offootball programs especially endorsing rape culture, women's sports programsengaging in shitty forms of gender policing (Penn State was sued by a femalebasketball player who was harassed by her coach over her 'unfeminine'appearance), a total passivity about homophobic behavior towards male andfemale athletes, and a resistance to owning up to the responsibilities thatcampus administrations bear in letting this stuff go on, and on, and on.

As we bear witness to this national wave of sympathy for thevictims and at the massive, totally justified outrage at the cover-up, let's entertain the following possibility:

If people felt half this sympathy for the women who've beenraped by football players in the past forty years, or half the outrageregarding the systemic cover-up of those assaults - perhaps we wouldn't be in quitethis situation. Perhaps the guys at Penn State would have been raised to do the right thing, even if that thing was really hard.

To circle back to my opening paragraph - If I'm uneasy about comparisons of the Penn State student riot with the Berkeley student protest, even as a study of contrasts, it's because campus administrators don't see a difference. They see both as crowds to be controlled, and send them both the same memo.

What we want on our campuses is an environment in which people canspeak hard truths - truths with consequences. We want students to be able to express themselves when they are angry and confused. We want an environment in which people will at least beheard. Whether they utter their truth as a shout, or a whisper.

Penn State's manual for receiving reports of harassment (more notes on a scandal)

2011-11-12T04:15:00.001-08:00

College campuses are obliged to have policies regarding sexual harassment/sex discrimination. These very broad overlapping categories include sexual assault and the systemic cover-up of abusive behavior within a department. These kinds of a matters are handled by Penn State's Affirmative Action Office. Each area of the university is also expected to have staff members trained in handling harassment complaints - including the Athletic Department. They are the college's front line - the people to whom staff and students are directed when they need help. The people who are supposed to tell you what to do, for example, if you see a guy raping someone in the showers.

As far as I can tell, Penn State's athletic department has two such staff members - a man and a woman whose names have not come up in reporting on the scandal (neither are part of the football program). [That said, it's possible this particular system wasn't in place in 2002, when witnesses at Penn State reported Sandusky's behavior to their superiors - the Affirmative Action office was certainly in place, however, and identified as the office to which one reports such things.] No one in the football program followed the rule book on this one.

There is a reason institutions have offices for handling allegations of sex/gender harassment. Prejudice, shame and fear can be overwhelming in these cases. Victims find their experiences minimized, people who come forward expect retaliation. Charging a senior staff member with something like this is frightening. For many, coming forward feels like you are putting your personal and professional lives on the line. So - to acknowledge the specific difficulty of this whole category of experience, campuses have offices which specifically handle sex/gender harassment in all its forms.

Unfortunately, lots of university employees sneer at that office - at my own campus, I've heard it described as "a joke" and worse by a senior male colleague, in a university meeting (not in my department). Such attitudes abound - and the more masculnist and patriarchal the organization, the worse these attitudes will be.

People working in such spaces - sexist, homophobic and more - are ill equipped to handle their own feelings about child abuse - never mind child abuse enacted by a straight man (with whom they've worked closely) on young boys.

Penn State's football program has cult-like status - clearly no one wanted to acknowledge to themselves that such a man might actually fit right into the fold. What does that mean? What does that say? I can imagine everyone in that community feels shamed by this.

There is a community of people at Penn State to whom they might turn: feminist and LGBIT scholars and staff members who work regularly with subjects like sexual abuse - with the architectures of shame that make coming forward as a victim feel, for many, life-threatening. But it's naive to think the Penn State football program would be interested in turning to its feminist colleagues for help.

I'm really interested in knowing why the Penn State staff trained in handling these matters were kept so far from it all. (Am I right on this?) The only reason I can imagine for not going to the affirmative action office is that even those reporting what they saw and heard didn't want it to get out - they wanted to "keep it in the family." As is the case with many abusive scenarios.

It's probable that the university administration tried to use the non-student status of the victims to rationalize its decisions. Though all administrators have the training (and common sense) to know better, in this case, they may have wanted to believe it wasn't their responsibility - their sole responsibility in their minds may have been to students and staff - or, more nearly, to the institution itself (by which I mean Penn State football). Again, this is conjecture.

SO, here it is - an excerpt from Penn State's manual for "Recognizing and Responding to Sexual Harassment" - an overview of the things that didn't happen.

III. RESPONDING TO A COMPLAINT

A. Concerns of Complainants
• Many complainants may show hesitation or even fear about coming forward with concerns or complaints of sexual harassment.
• A complainant may need to be assured that she/he will be treated fairly and protected from retaliation.
• Complainants are often concerned about who will learn about the details of their experience.
• Assure the person that only those people that “need to know” to resolve the issues will be informed.
• In cases of sexual assault, stalking or other forms of criminal sexual conduct, inform the
person of their option to file a report with the police, then contact AAO (the Affirmative Action Office).

B. The Initial Interview
• Have a copy of the policy, brochure, and other appropriate information available. Provide copies to the complainant.
• Listen and take the complaint seriously.
• Avoid making judgment and remain neutral and supportive.
• Determine if the harassment has stopped.
• Help the person regain a sense of control by explaining the process and what happens next.
• Determine if the complainant and others are at immediate risk.
• Take factual notes during the conversation for accuracy of recall.

C. What to Say When Receiving a Complaint
• Explain briefly the University’s Policy AD41.
• Indicate that the University takes complaints of sexual harassment very seriously.
• Advise that the University will take prompt action.
• Communicate that although complete confidentiality cannot be guaranteed, the facts will be protected as much as possible including, when possible, the identity of the complainant.
• Explain that the University will protect a complainant in every possible way, including protection against retaliation for filing a complaint or participating in a complaint.
• Explain that your role is to make sure the complainant knows and understands all available options and to help explore these options.
• Stress that the complainant may also go directly to the Affirmative Action Office for consultation and advice.
• Ask what happened.

D. Information to Secure from Complainant
Ask the person reporting the behavior or making a complaint the following:
• What was (or is) the offensive behavior?
• Where did the behavior occur?
• Who is the person doing the offensive behavior? Obtain name, employment status, phone number and description of the person complained about.
• When and where did the behavior occur? Obtain this information for each instance of offensive behavior.
• Who else was present that witnessed the behavior? Obtain name and phone numbers.
• Were there any others who have had the same or similar offensive behavior directed at them?
• Did the complainant tell anyone else about what happened?
• How long has this been going on? Did the complainant keep a journal or notes about what happened?
• Did the complainant indicate that the behavior was unwelcome? If yes, what was that person’s reaction to what the complainant said or did?
• What was the effect of the behavior on the complainant?
• What does the complainant want as the outcome?

E. During the Initial Interview
• Ask only open ended questions - “why” questions put people on the defensive.
• Remain neutral - voicing opinions or reaching conclusions prematurely is inappropriate.
• Don’t make promises or guarantee any particular results.
• Don’t ask leading questions or multiple-choice questions.
• Avoid making assumptions.
• Complete confidentiality can not be promised (you can not resolve the complaint if you can not talk to anyone about it); indicate that only people with a “need to know” will be consulted.
• Don’t reveal information which would violate the privacy of the person accused (i.e. “this is not the first time I’ve heard a complaint about this person.”)
• Summarize what the person has told you.
• Make sure that the person knows she or he will be kept informed.
• Explain the next step. Ask for complainant’s contact information.
• Indicate that she/he can call you to provide additional information or for an update.
• If the issue does not appear to be sexual harassment, refer the person to the appropriate resources.
• Complete your notes, keeping them factual.

IV. WHAT TO DO NEXT

A. Review the Information Received

Call the Affirmative Action Office for advice and assistance after gathering the preliminary information and before conducting further interviews, if possible. Consider the following:

• Do you need to take immediate action?
• Is the person potentially in physical danger?
- Has the complainant expressed fear or concern about ongoing behavior?
- Do the parties need to be separated while an investigation is conducted?
• Is the person’s employment or education status in jeopardy due to the situation?
• Who needs to be involved to resolve the situation?

B. Follow-up with Complainant - Explain/Discuss Appropriate Options

Discuss strategies the complainant might want to use in responding to a sexual harassment situation.

It may be helpful for the victim to inform the harasser directly that the conduct is unwelcome and must stop. However, this is not required and in some circumstances it is not the appropriate approach.

• Describe direct action the person can take:
- Let the offender know that their behavior is unwelcome and it must stop
- Verbally
- In writing - by sending an email or a letter by certified mail to the harasser.
(See more information and sample letters at the end of this booklet)

• Describe informal actions the institution can take:
- Have conversation with the alleged harasser to discuss the behavior and review the Policy.
- Send administrative letter addressing adherence to the Policy to unit/office.
- Provide an educational program on sexual harassment prevention to the unit.
- Place a copy of the University policy in offender’s mailbox.
- Suggest other types of assistance.

• Describe formal actions the institution can take:
- Administrator or supervisor speak with alleged harasser about the behavior and
require that behavior stop.
- Refer to the Affirmative Action Office.
- Conduct a formal investigation that could possibly result in appropriate disciplinary action.

Reflections on Penn State: A Brief Look Back, to Colorado

2011-11-11T11:16:00.001-08:00

As we read one editorial after another expressing outrage at Penn State's failure to respond to complaints regarding Sandusky, and try to wrap our minds around the consequences of this "scandal," we should step back and remember that U.S. universities have a long history of failing victims of sexual assault. That was the general point of an editorial I wrote for The Guardian yesterday. I thought I'd follow that editorial up with some more focused "unpacking" of the issues that this story raises.

My first impulse regarding the Penn State story is to look back at that long-problematic football program - The University of Colorado, Boulder - and the legal precedents it created via its "deliberate indifference" to the behavior of its players.

The University of Colorado football program has spent the past two decades up to its neck in trouble - so many women have accused its football players of rape that it became hard not to think of the program as the living embodiment of a "rape culture."

In 2007, the university settled a complaint filed by two students who were raped by football players. The students had been encouraged to invite four players over one evening. 20 players and recruits turned up - they raped both women, and a third later that evening. Other women also reported being harassed at the same party.

The students chose not to file a complaint within the university. Instead, they filed a federal lawsuit against the campus. (Given how poorly such complaints are handled, one can hardly blame them.)

The complaint argued that the players had been told to expect sex; that the football program knew that sending the players to their apartment might put those women at risk. They accused the university of deliberate indifference to the environment of harassment and sexual abuse they created through their football program.

That case was initially dismissed because the students did not use the university's procedures for filing Title IX complaints. The students appealed the district court's decision. The court of appeals reinstated the case.

In its decision reinstating the lawsuit, the court found that there was evidence that the football program had a policy of showing recruits a 'good time,' that the sexual assaults happened because the campus failed to supervise its players and the recruits they were entertaining, and that it was reasonable to expect that such misconduct would result from these conditions - in failing to supervise its players, the administration showed "deliberate indifference" to the problem. For that reason, the women could press their case. The National Council of Higher Education Risk Management describes the results economically:

By the time of the assaults on Ms. Simpson, Ms. Gilmore, and others, the CU football coach had general knowledge of the serious risk of sexual assault during college football recruiting efforts and that the need for more or different training of players and hosts was so obvious that the failure to respond was clearly “deliberate indifference” to the need. The court found:

1. The head football coach had general knowledge of the serious risk of sexual harassment and assault during college football recruiting visits;

2. The coach knew that sexual assaults had occurred during prior recruiting visits;

3. Even with this knowledge, the coach continued to maintain an unsupervised player‐host recruiting program designed to show recruits “a good time”; and

4. The head football coach was aware of prior incidents of sexual assault both because of incidents reported to him as well as the fact that he refused to work toward changing the culture regarding recruiting visits.

Thanks to these bravery of these two students - who made their case not only about the individuals who raped them, but the institution which basically facilitated the assaults - we have this legal standard of "deliberate indifference" by which a campus can be held responsible for its passivity.

Next: The Problem of the Compliant

Picturing Hope Solo

2011-10-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

Hope Solo survived her fifth week on Dancing with the Stars. I'm glad: she is a smart, outspoken athlete and the challenge of that program requires that she confront the different ways by which her image, as a woman, is regulated. I, for one, am glad she's willing to do so publicly.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, some USWNT fans hate the way DWTS treats Solo: Judges complained for weeks about how unfeminine her movements are, and every week they cite her physical strength as a weakness. I've explained why I don't think that is necessarily wrong. (It's a gendered performance, Solo seems uncomfortable in heels and also unsure of how one executes a routine without powering through it.)

It is worth pausing, however, to remember why fans of women's sports can get very defensive: we've been abused. We've been abused by the media blackout on women's sports, which is interrupted only occasionally by stories of exceptional victories (in lieu of regularly coverage of a season, for example) or by portraits of female monsters.So we flinch when we see the media turn its eye towards us. It's a conditioned reflex.

Add to that the paternalistic attitude with which administrators and even (sometimes especially) supporters of women's sports treat women athletes.Leagues have banned players for getting pregnant out of wedlock (imagine doing that to men! in this case, the athlete filed a suit so she could play, she won but the controversy ended her promising career); fans tsk tsk when they see players off the court who pile on make up or wear a short skirt. National Federations compel athletes to grow long hair, and prefer that those women keep their opinions to themselves. (Look feminine! But not too much! Play hard! But not like a boy! Or too much like a girl!)

Most of us don't know where to start when talking about the image of the female athlete, because every step seems to take us in a bad direction. So when in 2009 ESPN Magazinefirst produced "The Body Issue," featuring portraits of naked men and women athletes, fans of women's sports started sharpening their knives.

It turns out that a lot of the portraits directly challenge conventions regarding the feminization and sexualization of the female athlete - this is particularly true for the image of Solo used as one of the magazine's covers.

Practical matters make photographing nude women tougher than photographing men: Women are obliged to pose in ways that covers their chests. This means that the poses are more static and defensive.Solo's cover photo is an exception. The pose reveals much about her body while also refusing, aggressively, to capitulate to conventions regarding the female nude. She is in motion, moving forward toward the viewer - her curves (and she does have them) are not hidden so much as engaged, put to work.

I think this must by why a Washington Post writer recently described Solo as androgynous. Hope Solo is as far from being androgynous as one can be: When you look at Solo, you do not wonder if she's a boy. Not even close. If she were androgynous, she couldn't have played the broad shouldered, big haired 80s Bon Jovi bitch so perfectly on this week's episode. (She landed in 4th, her best finish to date.)

But the photographs of Solo treat her body in a way that is very close to gender-neutral. It's not Solo that's androgynous, but the composition of the portraits - it's the way she is being looked at. It the way she is not being looked at.

"The Body Issue" gives us a lot to think about. Those portraits are cool, but when you look at the rest of the issue you'll see a TOTAL absence of coverage of women's sports. The only place women figure in this issue is in the nude portraits. So, the project of "The Body Issue" seems to be completely independent of any effort on the magazine's part to move towards parity in terms of its coverage. The truly sad fact is that the editors of the magazine probably think putting that wonderful portrait of Solo on the cover "counts" as coverage of women's sports. Not in my book. And, I suspect, not in Solo's either.

Lament for the Injured, Pt. 2

2011-10-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

Riyas Komu, from exhibit "Safe to Fight" (Azad Art Gallery, Tehran, 2010)

Fear of ACL injury has replaced fear of intimacy as my number one issue. Plenty of people come back from an ACL tear and still play in leagues and pick-up games. But plenty also leave the sport forever.

If I turn a cold eye on my fear, I see that I am less afraid of never playing soccer than I am of the rehabilitation that it would take to go from a torn ACL to playing again. It isn't the tear that scares me, but being off my feet, not being able to run - sinking into depression and giving up. Not having the emotional strength and discipline to take on something like that.

I called my HMO the morning after my injury and pushed to see someone that day - I was clear: "I am afraid I tore my ACL." I was determined confront my fear - or rather, I should say, my knee insisted.

I said the magic word to describe my pain ("acute") and soon gained entry to orthopedics (I had asked for Sports Medicine, but was re-routed). I am not a difficult patient, but I have something to say about what's going on with my body. Unfortunately, this doesn't always make one's journey as a patient smoother.

A detour through past medical trauma

In 1984, I was hospitalized for eight days. A couple days before I found myself in an ambulance, I had gone to the student health clinic at Rutgers College because I was afraid I had a kidney infection.

A good friend of mine became deathly ill from this when we were first-year students. I knew the symptoms, and mine were identical to hers.

An affable young male doctor saw me. He didn't seem to take my concerns seriously. I had constant, deep pain in my lower back - off to one side exactly where the kidney is located. I had a low-grade fever, symptoms of a UTI, I was starting to feel like I had a flu or something. I could feel that this back pain wasn't muscular - it was deep, and constant.

He asked if I lifted heavy things - maybe I sprained my back. I worked in a kitchen and lifted heavy things all the time - but didn't recall hurting myself. "And how would that explain the fever, anyway?" I asked.

He told me to take extra-strength Tylenol. I said I wanted to be sure I didn't have a kidney infection. Would he please run a test? Could I please pee in a cup so we could just be sure - I was really concerned because kidney infections are really serious, and if you get to the point were you need to be hospitalized, the recovery is slow. As a working student, I couldn't afford to be out of commission for a month.I peed in a cup and went home. I took the Tylenol and felt better, but the symptoms kept returning as the pills wore off.

The next day I called the clinic to ask about the test results - they said: "The test came back negative." I bought nice food for myself because I hadn't eaten a decent meal in days. I took more Tylenol - I ate cheese and crackers, some fruit, and went to bed.

That night I was violently ill. There was a reason I had no appetite: my body couldn't handle food. I soaked the sheets with sweat. My fever kept climbing, dipping, and climbing again. By the morning I couldn't keep down water. It was the last week of the semester, and I couldn't imagine not going to my feminist political theory seminar. Being young and delirious, I went to class.

I sat on the floor in the hallway with the other students and waited for the professor. My classmates (an intense collection of college activists) insisted I go directly to the nearest university health clinic (attached to the women's college, different from the one I used). I must have been a sight - gray and sweaty. Having trouble staying vertical, and having little will of my own by this point, I went. It was about three blocks away, and I remember walking there being really hard.

I more or less collapsed when I walked in the door. My fever was 104. I remember telling the staff taht I'd been to the other clinic about fearing I had a kidney infection, and that this clinic said I was fine. The doctor on duty at the women's college clinic was soon yelling into the telephone, swearing. She shouted "You did what?!" and said "What fucking assholes," or something like that when she hung up. She then ranted to her colleagues.

I later learned that the doctor I'd seen (a resident) had decided that Iw as trying to manipulate him into giving me a pregnancy test, on the assumption that I was too ashamed to ask for one. So, when I called about my test results, I had gotten the result of a pregnancy test I had not asked for. This is bad enough. But when I went to that first clinic, I had told the resident who treated me that I had my period.

The picture I should have presented to that doctor was that of an articulate young woman, who was quite frank about what was going on with her body, and who was worried that she had a kidney infection. The doctor, I guess, saw me as a dumb slut trying to manipulate him. I don't think that's too harsh a way of reading his actions.

As I was being rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance, as the school worked on locating my family, I was far too sick to care.

I only learned the full story about what happened from a nurse, just before I graduated, when for some reason I had to go back that clinic. She saw my name and pulled me into an office to give me the full breakdown on what had happened. (Until then, I thought it had been a lab error, or something like that.)

The residency program at Rutgers was overhauled as a direct result of this incident: residents were not allowed to see especially women patients without supervision. If that nurse hadn't told me what happened, I'd never have known why what happened to me happened, or that the university had cared enough to prevent it from happening again.

The whole experience left me with one rule: Never let a resident talk to you without a doctor in the room. Never trust a doctor to really understand what you are saying about your body - they have their own feelings about the body you are in, and you can't control that. You have to help them see where those feelings interfere with their ability to see and hear you, just as they are there to do the same for you.

The only branch of medicine where I've found this to be less true - where careful listening to the patient is pretty much a base-line from which the doctor works, is, as it happens, Sports Medicine.

Sadly, that wasn't where I found myself the morning after I heard that tearing sound from my right knee. I was at Orthopedics. In a room with a resident.

Flat footed Solo!

2011-10-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

I would love to know how often DWTS women are allowed to wear flats.

Solo was much lighter on her feet. In fact, she seemed to enjoy the performance - she was playful. The team is moving up the ranks even as the competition gets tougher.

Note that rehearsal footage shows Solo in heels. Someone made a decision. I feel heard.

Lament for the Injured, Pt. 1

2011-10-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, The Death of a Former Giant (watercolor on paper, 2009)

For most of my life, I've had very specific flying dreams. Mysleeping self unlocks gravity with a perfect physical coordination. I'll berunning, or dancing, and then somehow both at once - suddenly I feel weightless.The struggle is not how to leave the ground, but how to find it again.

The nightmare version of this: I am running, and I feelsomething pull my feet out from underneath me - I fall down while my feet are being pulledbackwards, and wake just before my face hits the dirt.

My athletic unconscious orbits around the scene of physicalfreedom - its gift, its loss, its recovery.

Last spring, I played a game with that dream-like weightlessness. There was no will, no thought - just the pure physicalexpression of intention.

I scored, assisted, played great defense. My body knew where the ball was, all the time. Iplayed out of my socks, and felt, for the first time, that I knew what that phrase meant.

I loved every second of that night - months later, I canrecall the game in flashes, a residual sense of a perfect (for me) economy of movement.

But the morning after, I woke up with a swollen knee - Idon't remember hurting it. This was not something I'd seen before. I did thethings athletes do, wrapping, icing, etc. I stayed away from the field for afew while. After three or four weeks I was back in the game - but it didn'tfeel right. More months off the field - a glorious summer devoted tocross-country running - and my legs felt great. Then I tried playing.

My first week back, my knee felt wrong. Easing into a game,I took up a defensive position in relation to player attacking down the rightwing - he faked this way and that. I tried to go with him as he cut to my left.As I pushed off with my right foot - nothing unusual - I heard a crunch, and myknee immediately went funny.

This was a loudcrunch - very different from the crackles that knee has made since I was in my 20s.

The knee didn't swell up immediately (one of the bigindicators of a torn ACL), and I could put a bit of weight on it. But it hurt,and it felt so wrong - like I'd tangled up all the cords.

A sense of dread washedover me.

Walking off the pitch was really tough. I hoped that I was being stoic.But, really, I was numb with dread.

In my heart of hearts I knew that my leg hadn't been normal in months: wheremy age has generally manifested itself as me needing more and more time to warmup in the game, here, it was showing in a different way.

Since that amazing night in May, my right leg would actuallyget worse as the game wore on. It would get weaker. My knee would beunpredictable. I couldn't tell where my right foot was when receiving a pass onthe floor. My right leg below the knee would feel increasingly wooden over thecourse of a match. It wasn't tiredness,it was something completely different - something mechanical.

That night I stood on the sideline and watched the guys play for a while. This only made me feel more sad, more alone.

I was staring at thefield but I wasn't watching the game. I was trying to look like I wasn'ttotally freaked out.

The guys in that game are my friends, but our friendship lives there, on that field: What is our connection to the people we play with, when we can't play with them anymore? Even those attachments which extend beyond the field are transformed by not being practiced on it.

It is not easy to maintain a connection built in the game beyond your ability to play it. Making that transition is not much easier than it is to maintain the intimacy of lovers, once one has declared to the other: "Let's just be friends." I know this, if only for having played in different generations of games - Saturday morning collectives dissolve and then people you've known for a decade disappear from your life.

I limped to my car and went home.

Actually, I went to a neighbor's for ibuprofen and sobbed ather kitchen table.

Hope Solo Makes Sexy Face

2011-10-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

There is no getting around the subject of Hope Solo's song choice. This week the contestants were supposed to dance to a song that meant something to them personally. She chose Enrique Iglesias's "Tonight," which she described the "team's song."

Really? Because, if true, that is AWESOME.

No wonder she made a (wonderfully) dorky 'sexy-face' through practically the whole number. It's the kind of face that any of us might pull under a disco ball, after a couple of shots of tequila and especially if the Ludacris version of that Enrique Iglesias tune was on deck.

Anyway, Solo looked fantastic. But the competition is really tough.

My fellow critics of the sexist industrial complex will unite in making their pleas to the judges: "Can you just stop telling her she isn't feminine enough, that she's too strong yadda yadda?"

Good luck with that. Dancing with the Stars is all about routine, routine. So I don't expect to see them depart from the script unless Solo wins the whole thing - in which case her victory will be all about her triumph over her own strength.

As my last post indicated, I'm less circumspect about the gender politics of Dancing With the Stars than I am about the gender politics of, well, just about everything else. DWTS is, to repeat myself, a drag show. So, I get interested in the technical information the judges share with us regarding what it takes to walk like a girl. Because shy of Ru Paul, the information the judges offer on this point is as good as you'll get.

Bruno Tonioli, for example, usefully observed that Solo needs to walk much more on the balls of her feet. As anyone who has really worn high heels knows, the heel itself doesn't carry you in a proper "walk." That's why your grandmother, who was probably forced to wear them to work, has crazy bunions - that joint was flexed, and her weight was shoved right into the heart of it. Anyway, landing on the balls of your feet rather than your heels is a tip right out of runway walking 101.

Regarding Solo's performance: Solo doesn't lift from her center - the judges are right to observe that her walk is kindof heavy - there really is a big difference between how she moves and how the other women move.

Also - I noticed that the more successful women dancers do a lot of posing.


Chynna makes pretty lines out of herself. At the moment when she switches from moving away from her partner, to moving toward him, she strikes a pose, asserting "Look at me! I'm pretty!"

Hope Solo, at more more less the same point. Rather than strike a pose, she dives into the next move, thinking, no doubt, "I am SO going to nail this."

Chynna looks like she has a string pulling her body up from the floor. Her weight is more or less just on that right foot, but you can hardly tell.

Solo is doing a different dance, of course, one with a more carnal vibe. But her back is hunched, and you can see her weight is resting in her hip. More barroom than ballroom.

More ethereal posing from Chynna.

Hope Solo does not pose. Hope Solo is on this show because she likes to ~~party~~ dance. And, this week, the judges appreciated that. So did our friend Abby.

One of these days I will get back to soccer. I promise.

Hope Solo, on her toes

2011-09-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

Could they please just let her dance in flats? That's what I thought as I watched Hope Solo fight her way through a jive in high-heeled converse sneakers. Letting Solo dance in flats would make this whole Dancing With the Stars thing less anxiety provoking. Who isn't worried about her turning her ankle? Those joints are of national importance!

I have been so preoccupied by her feet I've scarcely noticed this season's gender drama.

A few bloggers have already critiqued the big deal the program makes about Solo's strength and her struggle to get what reads as feminine grace into her movement. One judge couldn't help himself, and declared that Solo has "thighs that could crack a walnut." He basically called her a ball-breaker. Before we make a federal case of this, let's remember: This is Dancing with the Stars.

Everybody on that show is in drag. All contestants whose personae are at odds with ballroom comportment appear to be at sixes and sevens with their own bodies. This is especially true for certain kinds of athletes - those for whom appearing to float, for example, might go against everything they know about their bodies. Exit Metta (formerly known as Ron Artest).

Although this season features entertainment royalty transman Chaz Bono and the Queerest Eye for the Straight Guy Carson Kressley (whom we all hoped would be allowed to dance with a man), the most explicit gender panic has fallen on Hope Solo's magnificent shoulders.

Solo, stepping over her partner.

Much is made of Solo's musculature and power. There are lots of jokes about who is stronger, Solo or her sleek bear of a partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy. He quite visibly thrills at being so near to a woman who can top him. This was the explicit content of their last dance number, in which he basically plays her water-boy. The number opens with her shoving Maksim to the ground and then stepping over him with those high-heeled shoes.

Hope Solo must surely be up there with Anna Kournikova, now, as the woman guys would most like to lose to. Steve Nash, for example, is on board for the ride.

EA knows that we like watching women beat men. They seem to know, in fact, that men like watching men be dominated by women. In very contained forums.

Dancing with the Stars is an interesting case, for although men and women compete directly against each other, that competition is mediated by their partners - and also by the fact that they are all competing as intensely unnatural, stylized versions of really specific embodiments of femininity and masculinity. It makes interesting television.

What makes Solo's presence interesting television is the fact that her physical power and ability allows for the pleasures of the spectacle of female domination to be played out with her dance partner in particular ways. Is this the week when Solo plays it like a Bond girl? Is this the week she elbows Maksim Chmerkovsky in the face? Or is this the week she does both?

Solo can move, she makes nice lines out of herself, and she is tireless. She partners well with Maksim: they both have a physical style, and it will be interesting to see how they explore their collaboration. Watching them dance, it is hard to see who leads. She seems to push him back - and I suspect their choreography will work best when they go with that tension. Even if they are awkward, they are a genuinely sexy couple precisely because they seem to be constantly negotiating who is leading whom.

Theatrical play with the idea of female domination is a staple of Dancing with the Stars choreography. Over and over again, a dance arcs from combat to submission, as one seduces the other. As the producers of the show make a big deal out of Solo's athleticism and physicality, they help create the script for her performance - a context for reading this pair's dynamic.

The judges help us to understand, too, that a successful performance of one's gendered role here is an intensely regulated physical performance.

People who play this particular game straight don't do well. This is especially true for the male dancers, who are always at risk of becoming little more than props. Chaz (son to Cher, the world's most famous Drag Queen) and Carson (pioneer gender coach) both know this, and thus have the sense of the showmanship required for the male dancer to be even visible when paired with a woman dressed like a trashy Tinkerbell.

An athlete like Solo will have such a different relation to her body than most of the women who appear on the program. Her movement is rooted in years of practice - it has a physical economy. How she knows where her center of gravity is, how she turns a foot, or claims the space around her - this is all developed through a body keyed to a purpose - that purpose being the opposite of feminine comportment. She is agile - a goalkeeper is usually the most athletic, most agile player on a team. But she is solid: she is not a bowl of cream, a cloud, a feather - to cite the language used by the judges to describe those dancers who successfully perform ballroom grace. But she will also understand her movement, her bearing as technical - the rehearsal footage is interesting, for the ways that she and Maksim talk to each other. (M: "What are you looking at, when you have your head down like that?" H:"The ball at my opponent's feet.")

I can roll with the gender drama played out around Solo. But I also can't help but wonder if what we are seeing is a general working-though of the nervousness people feel when confronted by a woman whose unnerving confidence is not anchored by her spectacular beauty.

I don't see Solo as compromising herself by playing with what she can do in this media format. I would rather the show play her strength and athleticism up than play it down.

Her appearance on Dancing with the Stars seems to be of a piece with a multi-platform attack on the public consciousness, in which USWNT players appear in contexts that embrace their athleticism - that, in fact, treat them as athletes without, however, losing sight of the interest-value that attends to almost all female athletes. By which I don't mean their femininity - but rather the way that the image of the female athletes surfaces gender itself as a thing.

Sports Center has been producing amusing ads around the USWNT. These bits play with soccer and gender drama. Take this video, in which a pre-haircut Abby Wambach responds to a hallway "dive."

Part of its humor is her cold indifference to his shouts of pain. He's the wuss here, and it's a woman who is calling him out on it. (Abby Wambach's importance to the team also means that the team can't be represented only by its more girlish players - much as the media would love to edit boyish players from the picture, they can't - and the public doesn't want them to.)

In another "This is Sports Center" spot, Solo and Alex Morgan play keepie-uppie with the Miami Dolphins mascot. Their vibe is ruined by anchor Stuart Scott, who plays the part of that guy:

The problem here is the man who thinks he can keep up with the women and the dolphin. Which is to say that gender isn't the main problem: it's the sense of authority that a sports anchor has in relation to the game - a sense of authority that he loses the minute he tries to enter into it. One can't help but wonder if he feels entitled to enter into this conversation because he underestimates the skill required by it. Gender might have something to do with that - not because the players are women, but because the sportscaster's sense of entitlement is rooted in little more than his masculinity. The joke, in other words, is on patriarchy. And there is a real pleasure to watching Scott participate in making that joke.

Gender enters into the story of Dancing with the Stars because the competition is only a few degrees shy of RuPaul's Drag Race: It is completely fair for the producers and the judges to underscore the ways in which various performers struggle to channel the light footed nobility of Fred Astaire and easy grace of Ginger Rogers, and to use a language of masculinity and femininity in offering their critiques.

It would be nice, however, if dancers had the option of playing their part in a cute pair of ballet slippers.

Heads Up Academics - Call for Papers: The Athletic Issue

2011-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Call for Proposals, Special Issue of GLQ: The Athletic Issue

Jennifer Locke, Black/White (2009)

This issue aims to collate interdisciplinary queer scholarship on sports and physical culture. This work should engage major issues in contemporary criticism – e.g. discourse on nationalism, autonomy and escape; neoliberalism esp. in relation to global economic and media flows; new media/art practices, creative and activist.

We are interested in topics like the following:

*The complicated legacy of the US’s Title IX (which impacts both sports studies and the gendered space of the academy more broadly)
*Discourses of race/sex/gender provoked by the public figure of the athlete
*The dizzying array of systems that manage the obvious homoerotics of sports culture (for good and ill)
*Transgender matters in sports/physical culture
*Disruptions of gender segregation, intersexuality and the athletic body
*Movement-based scholarship attending to sex/gender in relation to sport/physical culture
*Situated analysis of queer sporting communities
*Studies that speak to anti-homophobic activism in sports
*The athletic as a domain of queer performance

Also welcome are essays that center on athletes and athletic performances themselves.

These suggestions are meant to indicate the general scope of this special issue, and should not be taken as describing the limit of our interests. The aim of this issue is to explore how queer criticism expands our sense of what "sports studies" might be.

Authors should send two-page proposals (single space is OK) to Jennifer Doyle, at jennifer.doyle@ucr.edu before December 1, 2011.

Completed essays should be no longer than 8,000 words (including notes). Essays solicited from proposals will be submitted to peer-review.

Another Reason to Love Pia Sundhage

2011-08-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

I wish I could take credit for finding this video of Pia Sundhage playing the guitar and singing a Swedish Joan Armatrading-ish track. My archive isn't that deep, however. So we owe a big thank you to Jen O'Neil of She Kicks (via twitter @SheKicksdotnet) and also @DandalBs, who explained that this is a "happy revolutionary song from the 1970s" and shared the following translation (of the title? lyrics?): "we are the legends for those who come after us." Indeed.

How I wound up being "special to Fox"

2011-07-22T04:52:00.000-07:00

Finally, someone reading my articles on Fox Soccer asked the big question: RealMD posted the following comment yesterday:

Why Fox Sports would partner with the author of this essay is obvious. Why she would partner with Fox Sports is the question.

Go up to the top masthead on this website and click on Fox Sports. It brings you to their main web page. Run your cursor across the subsections with their dropdown menus. It goes something like this: NFL, MLB, Nascar, etc. Pause on "Soccer", and one subsection says Women's World Cup. Then keep going one by one, all the way to the last one, which says "More" Under More you will find the other two subsections that have anything to do with women, NCAA WBK, and Babes. Professor Doyle, is this the right partner?

So, to reassure FaLW writers who might be concerned about the wild compromise implied by my being "special to Fox" (as the site declares), I thought I'd answer the question by telling the story of how I came to have this strange bedfellow.

Shortly before the start of the Women's World Cup, I was surprised by an email from Richard Farley, Fox Soccer's new website editor. We are familiar with each other's work, but had never met.

He asked if I would consider contributing to a section on the Women's World Cup. He frankly admitted that when he came in, there had been no plan at Fox Soccer to cover the tournament. Unlike a lot of newspapers and mainstream sports sites, he wanted to commit to detailed reporting on the tournament from the first game out.

I have been complaining for years about the lack of attention to the women's game and to the harder issues within it. Recently, in a personal effort to do my part, I have begun to project my perspectives into media spaces - I co-hosted podcasts for KPFK throughout the men's World Cup, and have contributed one story on India's women's program to the New York Times Global Edition, and two sports-related "comments" to The Guardian.

I tried pitching a series of newspaper articles on the Women's World Cup in keeping with this work. All liberal papers. None were interested. This is partly because I do not have personal contacts in sports departments (the one editor I knew was laid off), and also because a pitch from a minnow like me - about women's sports, written from a feminist angle? Well, it doesn't fit any existing 'demand.' Most of the things I write about aren't 'stories' from a mainstream media perspective. (But a ponytail pull is??)

Sometimes I think that sports editors can't handle feminist or anti-homophobic writing about women's sports unless it's from a guy, with an established "guy" voice. Dave Zirin is one of the few sports writers able to make strong, even radical arguments about gender and sports - and I am not sure he'd have the visibility that he does if he were a woman, who wrote at least half her material about women's sports and always had. (I am guessing he would support this point, being the feminist that he is.)

Anyway, this is just to say that the more I've been writing about sports, the more I've noticed that the complex structures that maintain the sexism and homophobia in the sports world regulate not only what gets said, but who gets to say it - how, and where. And I've thought - I shouldn't assume the worst - until I try to put my own work out there, I won't know what is really possible, and what isn't.

As a tenured professor with a healthy and stable career (as much as that is possible in this economy), I feel a certain call - if I can't "risk" putting myself and my writing out there, who can? Lead by example - I really believe that.

In any case, if it were Fox News, I would not have taken the request to write seriously - I would not have replied. It wasn't Fox News, but Fox Soccer - I actually watch that network, as do a lot of fans.

Jenna Pel and Jeff Kassouf were already board with Farley's WWC project: I respect both very much for their sustained, reasonable coverage of the women's game. All White Kit and The Equalizer are must-reads for people looking for concrete information and informed perspectives. If I'd been asked to compile a site featuring WWC coverage by my top bloggers, they'd be there - along with Cross Conference.

Given that Fox seemed to have so little invested in the women's game, I don't think any of us felt like there was a "Fox line" for us to tow.

I made no compromises vis a vis my politics - even more incredibly, I wasn't asked to do that, nor was I asked to simplify my writing. I was amazed at how prominently the women's game was featured on Fox Soccer's main page - from the start of the tournament to days beyond its finish. That is huge.

Anyway - to address RealMD's question regarding the "babes" section of the site. Never checked it out. All the "babes" I ever wanted to see were featured prominently in the match reports.

2011 Women's World Cup: Reflecting on the USWNT run

2011-07-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

I write this from the train, on the return journey that marks the conclusion of my experience with the 2011 Women’s World Cup. There are sleeping Japanese fans scattered throughout the cars – I imagine they went directly from celebrations to the station.

The USWNT players are flying home. We’ll be in our own beds tonight, back to normal.

It’s been an emotional ride.

It is hard to argue with the fact that the women’s game is more generous than the men’s. Remember last year’s final in South Africa? It was an awful, cynical display. Spain won not a football match but a bar fight. The world gathered in unison to watch that? All I felt at the end of that game was a faint disgust with myself for having spent so much time covering the tournament.

The USWNT and Japan, in contrast, gave us a game. I come away from that match – from the whole tournament – wanting more.

Sure, there is room for criticism of both team’s performances. But the domain of that criticism is pure football: Strategy, technique. Who doesn’t love to talk about these things?

Fans in the stands were furious with Japan’s tendency to delay the game – they were slow with their goal kicks in particular, and were often content to pass the ball around the back. Quite a few of us found it alarming for what it implied: they were waiting for us to tire ourselves out.

Yes, the USWNT needs a more clinical finish, especially under the kind of pressure applied by the Japanese National Team last night. Wambach in particular seemed to play much of the game in the middle of an accordion, opening and closing around her. She got space in the midfield, but the more she closed in on the goal, the tighter the Japanese grip.

It was thrilling to see how Wambach responded to this. She cut and ran, she charged and bullied, she took players on, and she shot. It was an erie reproduction of Necib’s performance against the US, though frankly Wambach played with much more gusto, aggression and creativity and didn’t flag though I can only imagine she had wrung every bit of energy out of herself by the game’s end.

But as was the case with Necib and Bompastor (who is probably Wambach's closest international analog in terms of bad-ass prowess), the more energy the US strikers poured into the game, the more this energy sent shots too high, too far.

Sometimes, the harder you try the harder it gets.

But to focus on this would be to miss the two wonderful goals the USWNT did score. Morgan and Wambach, both, by doing exactly what they do best – powering in front of the back line and beating the goalie one-on-one (Morgan), and by throwing herself to meet the ball in the air (Wambach) with a clinical finish no one can dispute, never mind touch.

Rapinoe was as exciting to watch as Wambach: She reads the game brilliantly. Again and again, “Pinoe” (pronounced like the wine) pulled the ball away from Japan and turned the run of play around. She is quite literally a game-changer.

The first of Japan’s goals was a gift from the US defense. An exceptional moment, as through most of the game, the back line really worked. Buehler, in particular, was tough as nails.

I don’t want to think about that first goal from Japan – it was a lowlight for the USWNT, and Miyama showed great control by capitalizing on it. (The US had these chances, too, but did not profit from them.)

Those goals are the opposite of set-pieces. They are struck by players who have no right to imagine that ball would be in front of them. They take composure, and the ability to think very quickly and act as if by reflex. Japan watches for these kinds of openings, these cracks in the wall and slips right through them.

Japan’s second goal from Sawa was class. It was the kind of goal that makes one sigh with the elegance and strength of it. She wings into the danger zone as if called down by the gods to sort things out. This is what sent us into penalties.

The rest is history. Again, it was not the USWNT’s finest moment. We had all come to expect better.

And here is where I felt the arc of the tournament narrative most.

This was the World Cup championship match, and it was a great game. We had everything but refereeing scandals (we even saw a red card issued in the closing minutes of play). We had great goals and opportunistic goals. Terrific saves from both goalkeepers, and shots that by all rights should have gone in (Wambach, in particular, was robbed of a goal by an unlucky bounce off the crossbar.)

The US played a ferocious game against Brazil, and unlike some fans, I really liked the game they played against France. They played the best team in the tournament and lost to them – but they weren’t walloped, they weren’t dominated. Far from it. For long stretches, the players played the best game they’ve played all year. It really looked like they could win it all.

But throughout the year, we watched the USWNT squeak through. Losing to an increasingly strong Mexican side, they forced themselves into a playoff with Italy (not exactly a women’s football powerhouse). Then they scared us in the first leg of that exchange with an underwhelming match rescued by an impossibly late goal from Alex Morgan who scored in injury time. They won at home in a solid game, played before a small crowd. They lost a friendly to England.

They struggled, and at times it seemed like few cared. Sometimes I wondered if the USSF was relieved – as if the strength of the USWNT were not as a source of pride, but an embarrassment.

The match that would decide if the no. 1 ranked team in the world would go to Germany was not even broadcast on television. ESPN webcast the game, but only to its subscribers. Fans were worried about the team, and about the USWNT program more broadly.

The women’s national team program has seemed moribund – plagued by the same problems that hold the men back: US athletes grow up playing a very regimented game, one that can stifle creativity. They only play against people their own age, and so don’t develop the improvisational guile that one hones in situations when outmatched. And so on.

We spent a lot of time lowering our expectations.

Why does Alex Morgan always come on so late? Why doesn’t Pia mix up her starting 11? Why is LePeilbet playing out of position? The physical game isn’t enough! Defense isn’t enough when that defense isn’t perfect! Just about the only person we never complained about was Hope Solo. Even Wambach took flack.

Alexi Lalas loves the USWNT (photo from his twitter feed)

Add to this the USSF’s horrific publicity campaign for the team – forever holding on to 1999, anxious about the “attractiveness” of the team (the WWC player video portraits used at the start of matches show all the players with their hair down, ‘blown out’ into gentle waves), unsure of how to redress the team’s visibility problem (e.g. 2007’s Nike slogan for the USWNT: ‘the best team you’ve never heard of’), totally ignorant regarding the team’s fan base. The USSF commissioned a kit designed to be “feminine but not cutesy” (their words) - and produced nothing whatsoever that a male fan might wear to identify himself as a fan of the women’s team.

The USSF and Nike put far more energy into the men’s team’s Gold Cup campaign than into the women’s World Cup appearances. Far more.

These administrative problems sting. They are insulting to fans, to the athletes and to the communities who have damned well heard of the team. We find in the USSF’s desire to feminize the team’s image the kind of thinking which, taken to an extreme, leads to environments from which gender non-conformity itself is banned, as is the case with the Nigerian squad.

For what is that “feminine but not cutesy” design mandate if not some sort of apology for Wambach’s power and her broad shouldered, confident swagger? You can imagine the boardroom conversations. The sighs of relief that express not gratitude for Solo and Morgan’s talent, but rather for their physiques and long flowing locks. (Which is insulting to them.)

US fans are over it. We really and truly are.

And if the USSF thinks that the team’s image needs feminization more than it needs, say, grassroots outreach – well, it makes me anxious for the sport’s future.

Last night, I was reminded of how effectively a great match can blow that bullshit out of the water. The love for the game (in all its elegance and cruelty) was on full display.

And I was part of a crowd celebrating that: 48,000 people all focused on the actions of twenty-two women. No distractions. Just game, and the pulse of all the people who love it.

Scarcely anyone left the stadium before the players – we couldn't stand to be parted from either team. It was mesmerizing.

2011 Women's World Cup: Quick Thoughts on USWNT and Japan

2011-07-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

Japan turned the narrative tables: This time it was not the USWNT winning against the run of play. They attacked relentlessly for much of the match, and came awfully close to scoring over and over again. Japan forced the USWNT to bring the game to them. Every now and again, they let up their breaks. They exploited a defensive mistake, and scored a fantastic goal from a corner. And got more of their penalty shots than did the US.

It was a hard fought game. Abby Wambach was tireless. That must have been one of her best performances in this tournament. It was inspiring to watch. She is just a flat out heroic athlete. The full range of her skill was on display, which is incredible given how intensely she was being marked.

Rapinoe was also a star - she had some million dollar moves in this game, and many of them were defensive. She scooped passes off the ground, swept in to intercept passes, and plucked balls out of the air with her toes. Buehler was fantastic - her determination on the back line stopped more attacks than I could count. I could run down the roster, so many players turned themselves inside out tonight.

Sawa. What can you say about her? She is a very smart and skillful player. She has a sixth sense about where to be on the field and is so fast, it often seems as if she can teleport herself from one end of the pitch to the other.

The penalties were hard to watch. The last ten minutes of play were so chaotic, so frantic. It was plain to see that the US players were rattled, and their performance in front of the goal showed it. Japan were more steady, just.

My heart breaks for the USWNT players. That is a hard way to lose a match. Because they came so damned close. But it was a noble loss to a deserving team.

The stadium atmosphere was outstanding. Except for the sixty-plus VIP seats that sat empty from start to finish.

Today I was told (anecdotally) by a Fifa official that 80% of Fifa staff had never seen a women's match. I believe it, because if those assholes can't be bothered to attend a World Cup final, what women's match will they go to, exactly?

Let me conclude these thoughts on a positive note: Sepp Blatter was booed mercilessly during the closing ceremony.

Seriously, though, the US players threw their whole being into this match - I've never been more proud to be a USWNT fan. And if we had to lose to anyone, at least it was to the best team in the tournament!

Against the Run of Play: on USA's win over France

2011-07-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

From some perspectives (including that of players on the field), it looks like France outplayed the USWNT in the World Cup semifinal. But France lost. [Necib, in today's edition of L'Equipe: "The worst is that we were better than them." 14 June]

It has been said, too, of France’s game against England, that they dominated possession, played the better game. But they only won on penalties. Many felt that Brazil played a better game against the US in the Olympics, some might say they played a better game (in a few ways at least) than the USWNT last week – but Brazil lost the Olympic and the World Cup matches.

Defensive work from the whole team provided the architecture of the USWNT’s recent wins - from Solo, Sauerbrunn, LePeilbet, Rampone, Rapinoe, Lloyd, Kreiger, and more. Even pressure from Alex Morgan contributes to this side of the USWNT game: I never understood why the striker was brought on so late in match after march until I saw her entry into the game with my own eyes.

The minute she took to the field, she began harassing the keeper and France’s back line – when they had the ball.

For long stretches against a ‘technical’ opponent like Brazil or France, it looks like the USWNT isn’t playing pretty football. Those teams love to hold the ball. They play a possession game.

The media trains us to look at the game through the logic of attack. When we do so, we act as if a team only plays when they have the ball. But of course this is just not true.

Be wary of sports talk about possession and the “run of play.” Possession is not nine-tenths of the law in the game.

Think of Italy. The team’s style polarizes the football world for its ungenerous play, but the record speaks for itself. That kind of team is expert in weathering attack. It’s siege-mentality football, in which one lets the opponent do a certain kind of work – in which one lets them spend and spend and spend energy and imagination. Eventually, they pass a tipping point. One pass too many, one moment of hesitation, and you can see frustration settle in. Attack that much over an hour without success and the last thirty minutes become desperate.

Flashes of counterattack exploit the cracks that have developed under the dynamic stress of the possession game. [That is when Morgon comes in.]

The USWNT isn’t playing as cynically as Italy at its most notorious. But some of the same principals are clearly in play, and have worked.

I still don’t understand Japan’s game. They look more “total” – end-to-end, there is something jaw-droppingly complete about the way the team plays. Personally, I am thrilled they beat Sweden and are in the final. They are the most exciting team in the tournament, and lord knows, there is a global sense of good will for the team.

Whatever happens, Sunday’s match is going to be fantastic.

A View from the Stands: On USA v France

2011-07-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

After the pathos of the win over Brazil, today’s match was a relief.

My sense of relief pales, however, compared with that of the people watching the semifinal with me.

I write this from the “family bus” – as luck would have it, I attended the France-USA match with the family of Lori Lindsey. The USSF has a “family program” – a package tour that allows a player’s friends and family to spend game day together and sit en masse - many in full USA regalia.

I can see the attraction of it. Fans have one relationship to the game, players another. A player’s circle has yet another way of relating to things.

The morning ride from Frankfurt to Monchengladbach was subdued. Lunch was quiet, mellow. Families of substitutes (like Lindsey) hoped their player would get time, they worried about the day’s result – but hardly dared speak about it. We tended to talk about other things - anything, really, but what was staring us in the face.

As much as they want their player to play, everyone wants the team to win, more.

Spending game day with moms, dads, partners and friends of the team was grounding.

Pundits and fans talk a lot about what they think is going to happen. What we present as givens are usually enormous assumptions. Until a few days ago, a lot of us talked as if the teams were competing for a chance to lose to Germany.

The only people who probably didn’t think like this were those around the team itself. Partners and brothers, dads and aunts. Moms. They thought more about what they hoped would happen, and avoided thoughts that made any of presumption of victory. Superstition.

Back to the match itself

Although this was destined to be one of the most lively matches of the tournament (in strictly footballing terms), attendance topped out at 25,000. (The stadium holds 40,000.) Our side of the stadium was pretty full. Opposite us were rows of empty VIP seats. This was probably most of what the televisual audience saw of the crowd.

US fans were present in numbers, however. You have to credit American soccer fans – they (we!) were visible, and loud. The best were a large mysterious tribe of girls in handmade t-shirts, painted faces – painted bodies in fact. They wore not one scrap of FIFA or Nike produced regalia. Everything was improvised with the sloppy enthusiasm of a real fan. They ruled their section of the stadium – and fed a steady drip of hysteria into the somewhat anemic stadium.

French soccer fans really missed something – and frankly, their team needed them. I’d say I was surprised by how few of them were there, but having spent the past three weeks in France I know there is very little awareness, very little outreach on behalf of Les Bleues. Photo-spreads in Sunday magazines do not put warm bodies in the seats. The FFF has to work a lot harder.

Les Bleues needed just a little bit more wind in their sails. Their skill on the ball is incredible; their passing is elegant; they exploit their opponent’s errors ruthlessly. For most of the match, we were just plain anxious. But Les Bleues also appeared to be seized by waves of nervousness. Every now and again they’d hesitate with a shot, make one pass too many – a chance would come and go. But as soon as that fear was beaten back, they seemed invincible.

But they weren't. The last thirty minutes of the match were so incredible. I am not sure the USWNT has played a better game this tournament. You all will have to tell me what it looked like on TV.

All I know, is the view from the stands, where I sat surrounded by the people who love the team the most.

Bon Courage! a note on Les Bleues

2011-07-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

This week's cover of France Football is a first for the squad - the headline "On Vous Aime!" has a lovely double resonance. It means "We love you!" and it's used by football fans - I have a Marseille scarf with this exact thing written on it. (Who writes that on a football scarf but the French!)

Used with regard the women's team it has a special meaning to at least this reader. It's a formal "we love you." I've been told that this can be very seductive when used in the right setting. The "vous" between people who would normally use "tu" with each other is a sign of affection and respect. Being on the receiving end of that statement is a real pleasure.

Of course, this love may be fleeting - I am not sure what national press pays sustained attention to its women's national football team outside of the World Cup. But this week, Les Bleues are basking in an attention they have never received, ever. And some of that attention is even going to they way they play.

But a lot of that attention is going to how they give French football fans a way to enjoy watching the national team, after last year's awful World Cup and subsequent months unpacking the racist, anti-immigrant attitudes of FFF executives. This team, as many women's teams do, represents a more wholesome and honest game.

It's a great year for Les Bleues, and the women really deserve it.

I haven't written much about them on this blog - but I've probably seen half the squad play (more?) attending Montpellier matches (including two against Lyon), and also at WPS games: Camille Abily is one of the smartest and most interesting players in the world. She is intense on the pitch. When she played for the LA Sol, she was as effective as Marta in putting points on the board.

Soon I'm jumping on the bandwagon to Monchengladbach to see them take on the USWNT, and when I'm there, I'll be thinking of the first time I saw many of them play, in Villeneuve-les-Maguelones, at Montpellier's wind-swept practice stadium not a mile in from the Mediterranean coast. Women's matches there are free, and the little stadium usually has a small but enthusiastic crowd. Teens, families and lots of old men sick of the men's game. They'll say things like, "Les nanas, elles savent jouer" and then launch into tirades about the crappy refereeing.

It's a really nice scene, and it is a world away from where these players are today.

I'm proud of the way the USWNT played against Brazil, and I'm really excited to see them take on Les Bleues. Beware!

Si on les aime, c'est parce-qu'elles aiment jouer!

Beauty and the Beast: on USA v Brazil

2011-07-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Brazilian scholars Sebastião Votre and Ludmilla Mourão observe that there are “two faces” to media representations of the women’s game, “skill and sensuality.” These two qualities are divided, as the media uses one player to represent beauty, another to represent skill – and pits the two against each other, as bitter rivals. In sports media, being beautiful and skillful are understood as at odds with each other. It’s a displacement of the larger problem, in which being a woman is understood as at odds with being an athlete.

The relationship between the USWNT and Brazil is at risk of being cast in these terms. I open with the above academic point as a caution against playing into such narratives.

That said, tonight’s match absolutely was beauty and the beast. The game was both, at once – a tornado of the awful and the amazing.

Take the first goal: It was a pretty play but an own goal. A forced error. The second, more ugliness: Buehler with a professional foul in the box (from what I'm seeing, the red card was not controversial outside the US). But then Solo blocked a penalty from Cristiane. It was beautiful. A real stunner of a save.

And it was waved off. Do over.

A defender (I hear) came into the box early. But at the time, announcers said the referee called Solo for coming off her line (she hadn't). I still don't know why the referee awarded the do-over. Or the yellow to Solo, for that matter.

Marta took that second try. (How is that allowable?) And that was that.

Beautiful shot, shitty goal.

The USWNT looked very organized and brutal through much of the game. By brutal, I mean physical, powerful, aggressive.

But Brazil was throwing red flags in front of the bull. Again and again players would attempt to take the ball through a defensive hive, looking as much for the foul as the pass. Fouls came (and were or were not called), but so did passes – including a marvelous one from Maurine tipped into the goal with a freakishly acrobatic strike from Marta. Maybe Maurine was offside – journalists tweeted the photo and it’s a close call. So Brazil went up. Either way, the goal was pure genius.

After this point, everything is a haze. The refereeing was atrocious. Monstrous.

Brazil did everything it could to wind down the clock, hoping to guard its lead by lying down on the field. Ericka, in fact, did just that. After some minor scrap, the play moved away from her – she moved from near to far post, looked around to see who was watching her – and just lay down in front of the goal. Ugly.

The USWNT did not lose their focus. In the last minutes of the game, they seemed to get back a strange rhythm – as if they’d been playing on a really shitty field and suddenly knew all its kinks.

Ericka’s acting most certainly contributed to the awarding of three minutes of injury time. This is about when Rapinoe delivered an incredible ball into the danger zone and one of the world’s most dangerous players ran in for it. Abby Wambach scored a beautiful goal – the game’s first, really, and it was the equalizer.

Penalties – again. Karmic law dictated that Solo would save another penalty kick –that it would be off the foot of Daiane, who’d scored Brazil’s own goal earlier, and any doubts about what Solo might have saved in 2007 were laid to rest by what she saved in 2011.

Once again, the team with possession somehow did not dominate the game. Which is, of course, what happens to Brazil, over and over again. Which is why so many of us want to see them break though. But not by lying down on the field!

The USWNT played a woman down for the last 20 minutes of regulation time, and another 30 minutes on top of that. Marta and company get under the team’s skin – it was clear. But the USWNT was never completely rattled. They’ve seen it before.

The US women squared their shoulders to the contradictions within the game, and kept playing – it was a terrific performance under extremely trying conditions. A hard earned, classic USA win.

All that stuff about women not diving, not engaging in cynical gamesmanship? It’s complete bullshit, and everyone who has actually played with women knows it. Can we put that myth to rest? We play beautiful football, we play beastly football. And as the level of the game improves, it will only create more torque as one force pulls on the other. Often within the same team, and the same player. Marta.

Fortunately, Hope Solo seems to keep her beast confined to her tweets.

ref: "Women's Football in Brazil: Progress and Problems" in Soccer and Society, volume 4, issue 2-3 (2003), pp. 254-267.

Marta, before "that goal"

2011-07-10T03:19:00.000-07:00

On the eve of the showdown between Brazil and the US, I thought readers might enjoy looking at a couple early profiles of Marta - material produced before "that goal" (scored against the US in the 2007 World Cup).

John Turnbull's 2006 profile of the player is one of the best out there:

'Tis the season for tears: The extraordinary, untold story of Marta Viera da Silva (The Global Game)

Almost everything on Marta tells the same story and was no doubt shaped by her press kit. Leave it to Turnbull to do something meaningful, years before the American press paid her any attention. (I'd forgotten about the problems with Umeå not releasing her to play in the 2006 U20 World Cup finals - after she'd scored 14 goals helping Brazil qualify.)

In his article Turnbull refers to Marta - Pelé's Cousin, a 2005 Swedish television profile. This is also worth looking at, even if you don't understand Portuguese or Swedish. Watching Marta play, horse around with teammates in Sweden and visit her home town is rewarding enough - but it also includes footage of her scoring for Umeå and glimpses of her playing as a young girl. It's thoroughly enjoyable, especially when you remembers how young she was when this profile was filmed.

Already my heart is in my throat, waiting for today's game.

(This is the first of three parts on Youtube.)

Marta & Hope Solo (Two Photos)

2011-07-10T02:48:00.000-07:00

[For my report on the incredible Brazil-USA match, read Beauty and the Beast.]

Two of my favorite off-the-field photos:

Totally used w/o permission: Joao Kehl / CIA DE FOTO for Newsweek

Again - pulled without asking first from Jason Nocito (thanks you Patrick Romero for the tip)

Well, scratch that last headline: Japan beats Germany at its own game.

2011-07-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

What can I say about this match that hasn't already been said? Japan defeats the home team, and forces all of us to throw away the basic structure of our narratives about this world cup, in which everyone was supposed to be fighting for the chance to lose to Germany.

Japan played a perfect defensive game. Where most teams challenging Germany seem to do so by breaking up Germany's play, somehow Japan figured out how to play Germany's game, better. And they scored, with about twelve minutes of extra-time left. Japan played smart and physical, smashing all narratives about Germany's height advantage.

Sawa's pass to Miruyama (who'd subbed in) was perfect, Miruyama's goal itself was extraordinary - a sly shot from a very tight angle slipped over a tackling defender and Nadine Angerer's reach. It was a flash in which everything came together.

Japan's keeper Aymu Kaihori had a great match tonight. What can I say but this is just great. Probably awful for ratings. But very exciting news for us fans!

La Vie en Rose: England and France play match of the tournament

2011-07-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

It’s not the possession. It’s what you do with it.

France had the ball for so much of this match that its players seemed to forget what to do when they didn’t. In minute 59, Jill Scott slipped past a sleeping back line with a nonchalant fake, a turn and a cracker of a shot. Les Bleues went from dream to nightmare.

Although France still dominated possession, they began to do so without dominating the game.

France tried again and again. Over 30 shots on goal by the end of the match. Different players, from different parts of the field. They tried the same play over and over again. Thomis must have taken the ball down the right wing, and tried the same shot across the goal a dozen times. The match callers were despondent. Frappe! Frappe! Frappe! C’est pas possible! Strike after strike wound up in the hands of Karen Bardsley.

One carefully constructed series of plays after another.

Alex Kingston, as Iceni warrior Queen Boudicca

In the end, an ugly jumbled defensive scrum brought the French their equalizer. The ball popped out to the top of the box in minute 87, where it met Bussaglia’s right foot. Bang – the ball hit the top corner and ricocheted hard across and into the goal. Boudicca, finally defeated. Nothing she could have done - it was a terrific goal. And so we went into extra-time.

Thomis was still cursed: shots blocked, shots wide or high, or she just made no shot at all, held the ball until someone kindly took it away from her. Play seemed hesitant: The stupor of extra-time started to settle in – a kind of death-rattle, in which the intensity of our fear of the penalty shoot-out conjures it into the world.

Players fell to the ground, turning ankles, cramping, just falling apart. Bompastore blew a corner at the last second.

As the women gather the last scrap of their energy and dignity together, one of the Eurosport commentators says, “Chez les filles, one doesn’t like penalty shoot outs.” Because chez les hommes – we just love having the game resolved with this horrible ritual, in which all that had been accomplished in the previous 120 minutes of play is sacrificed, one player at a time.

When Camille Abily stepped up to the spot to take the first shot, I swear she looked like she was going to cry. It seemed to take ages for the ref to blow her whistle. Bardsley saved it. Kelly Smith stepped up to whistles and jeers from the stadium and NAILED it, and raised her arms to the crowd. I hate to put the rest of it in words. Rafferty and Faye White missed their shots. France won.

The Eurosport commentators had the nerve to say “c’est merité.” I'm sorry. I don't care if the team had the ball for most of the game. England played out of their socks. But I'm biased: I felt it as soon as I saw them take the field. I just love the Lionesses, I really do. This game killed me.

I cried.

Karen Bardsley is my player of the match.

2011 Women's World Cup: looking back to THAT game (USA/Brazil, 2007)

2011-07-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

As much as the USWNT 1999 World Cup win over China meant to me, as a fan of the sport I was more impacted by the team's loss to Brazil four years ago.

I watched that match from a bar in France - the same way I've been watching the games this tournament. That afternoon, I can't say as I was that excited. The US had been doing so well, it just didn't seem possible that they would lose. I dutifully went to the bar to bear witness to another victory.

That match completely changed my relationship to the women's game. It drew me closer to the sport, and closer to the USWNT than I had ever been - even as it made me also love Brazil.

There were very few people at the bar that day. Two bartenders. Two women, and a table of four old men. This bar had a medium-sized television up in a back corner. They graciously turned up the sound.

We all know the story. The absolutely bizarre decision to bench Solo, who'd been playing brilliantly all tournament. There was an own goal. A foul - well, really, a dive from Cristiane (biased memory?) - and a second yellow card to Shannon Boxx at the tail end of the first half. The US played with ten women through the entire second half. Marta did samba moves. Not samba-like moves, but the most deliberate taunting of a defender I've ever seen. Everyone on Brazil's team was having a good time. They were beautiful, and nasty. I loved watching them play like that, but I couldn't stop thinking how much I would have hated playing them.

And then Marta scored that goal. By that point all of the nine or so people in the bar were on their feet. The men shouted "Maradona! Maradona! Maradona!" over and over again. The woman on TV calling the match broke out into a cry - I never head anything like it before, or since: "C'est pas juste!" and "If she were a man, she would be making millions and everyone would know her name."

I cried. It was only the second time a soccer match did that to me - the first was 1999, when I turned on the TV and saw the crowd.

In both cases, they were tears of unexpected joy.

Sure, I was totally demoralized by what was happening to the US women. It was so unfair. Solo seething from the bench (quite rightly), Scurry trying to do her best in a ridiculous situation. That own-goal. The totally ludicrous card.

But the way Brazil played...

Until then, I had such a narrow view of the women's game. I'd only ever seen women play a "European" game. The way Brazil manipulated the ball, mind and soul of that game was incredible. And typically Brazilian. Brazil made me want to see more than what the media gives us. It made me look for Latin women's leagues in LA, women's football in Spain, England, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. It opened my eyes to something. Until then, in my heart of hearts, I found much women's soccer kind of boring. I realized, however, that I had seen only a small slice of the way the game is practiced. If I wasn't floored, entranced, in awe - it was because I hadn't really been watching in the first place. So, now I watch the game more carefully, at home and abroad.

I write this blog because when I felt the earth move when I saw Marta score that last goal. So, now, I do usually root for Brazil. The way Marta, Cristiane, Formiga and Rosana play impacts so many women around the world - more, I think, than any team right now.

Brazil plays the USWNT this weekend - this will be the biggest game of the tournament, in terms of the emotional stakes. I want Brazil to win, and I want the USWNT to win. I can't choose.

I want a different game than that we had in 2007: one not marred by terrible coaching decisions, one free from freak goals and irresponsible refereeing decisions. I want a beautiful game from both squads - so we can see who, at least on that day, is the better team.

Most of the people I know who follow the game closely feel the US has the edge. They just have better support, better experience. You can see the team work, figure the game out. They are "all in."

Brazil has looked disorganized for significant periods of time during their matches. But Brazil also plays like Brazil. Doing a certain kind of minimum sometimes, where you don't think they've showed up to the game, and then suddenly their opponent is up against it. Done for.

Don't believe anyone who tells you that they know how this game is going to go.

2011 Women's World Cup: File under "More Crap Marketing"

2011-07-05T03:41:00.000-07:00

So, this morning I wanted to read "tout sur les Bleues," in preparation for this much anticipated match against Germany.

I was so absorbed in the football, it took me a few minutes before I noticed the leg action on the right and left margins. This appears to be part of a publicity campaign for the team - "These legs know how evade one's marker." Or, as we would say in English, "These legs know how to stay open."

The double entendre in English is the opposite of what it means in French. In French, it means more properly how to avoid being trapped or cornered. Anyway, just one more detail in the weird FFF marketing of "les desmoiselles de Clairefontaine" - cartoony lady legs in high heels. Legs - not players, mind you, but legs are the "queen of the pitch." Sigh.

The carving up of the female body into parts is a foundation of advertising, turning those female body parts into product hardly discernible from that being sold to you. You want not the shoes, but the legs. French photographer Guy Bourdin pushed that practice to its limit - I leave you with one of his older photographs (1970s?) advertising pantyhose? Shoes? Who can tell!?

Guy Bourdin - provocative French fashion photographer (known largely for his work with Charles Jourdan shoes).

Nigeria's Game

2011-07-01T01:33:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with the Super Falcons during the 2008 Olympics, watching them slug out the ultimate group-of-death: Germany, Brazil, Nigeria and North Korea. None of the games in that tournament were as exciting as those Nigeria played in this group.

Nevertheless, Nigeria didn't make it past that stage. Similarly, last night's performance against Germany will likely go down as one of the best in the tournament. It had everything: skill, stamina, speed and controversy.

Basically, the Super Falcons have so much pace, and play so aggressively that it was as if Germany's formation had been put though a blender. Nigeria is that fearsome team which does not allow others to play their game. The first twenty minutes in Nigeria's game are particularly chaotic. This does not mean they are without tactic: quite the opposite. It's the mobile, fluid tactic of a game constantly adjusting itself to the other team's strategies.

It was hard to reconcile last night's performance with the match against France: It seems likely they underestimated les Bleus, or is it that France read Nigeria better than did Germany?

It might also be possible that unlike last night's game, the match with France was actually refereed. Poor refereeing absolutely favors Nigeria - thus some the match's controversy.

In spite of their tremendous effort, Nigeria had scarcely any shots at goal. I asked former FC Indiana coach Shek Borkowsky (via Twitter) why Germany won, even though it was clearly a brutal game for them. (His comments are edited, to translate tweets into sentences.)

The way Nigeria performed yesterday no other team in this competition would beat them. Nigeria's aggression and commitment level was three times of that they showed against France. Still, Germany limited Nigeria to one shot on goal. It was the most combative match, ever.

I asked him why, given the intensity of Nigeria's performance which genuinely seemed to rattle Germany, the host team still came out on top. His reply:

Because Laudher and Kulig are so good at what they do. Nigeria's strikers rarely have midfield support, and with limited options available for them, Bartusiak and Krahn's job is easier. The only time Germany had problems in their 3rd is when they gave away the ball.

Despite poor passing and strong Nigeria performance, Germany was never going to lose that match. That's how strong they are. You can kick Germany, you can foul them, you can take them off their game and still they win. Frightening! [FF @ShekBorkowsky]

Call me an optimist, but the USWNT has some of Germany's mental toughness - the ability to keep it together under pressure, which comes from experience. (But do we have the depth of talent - I mean, Alexandra Popp and Inka Grings - two of the world's best players - came off Germany's bench!)

I am really excited to see France and Germany play each other: Olympique Lyon beat Potsdam in this year's European club championship, and there are ten of these club champions on France's squad (Germany's squad is more diverse than this). France are playing like a finely tuned unit (is someone trying to create a Barça-like synergy with the national team for Lyon?). We'll see that organization and talent tested as these two go head to head, playing for placement. Not exactly the highest stakes, but hopefully it will be enough for us to take the full measure of France's depth and mettle.

I've held my comments regarding the mess in the Super Falcons camp for last. It's important to foreground the players in all this, to divorce (as much as is possible) these women from the Nigerian FA, and their homophobic coach. It was awful hearing boos and whistles - at the start of the match this was clearly directed at the Nigerian officials. It is hard imagine how these athletes felt, taking to the field in that atmosphere. It didn't feel like support to me.

How do we properly support these women? Because to single out Uche as if she alone were the problem is just wrong. She was hired by the FA, and thrown on the front line to represent a "new look" for the team. It is also wrong to single out her homophobia as somehow an anomaly: - as if it looked nothing like, say the German FA's behavior - according to a story published in The Local,

In 1995, the DFB prohibited national team players from participating inthe European Gay and Lesbian Sport Championships in Frankfurt. Several players had expressed interest in participating, but none wanted to risk being dropped from the national squad before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.("Women's Football Confronts Gay Taboos")

What I dread about the way the Nigeria story is being handled: it is too easy for this turn into a smug celebration of European liberalism as if Europe's own attitudes, histories and practices had nothing to do with any of this. Let's remember - the original ban against women's involvement in football (which was adopted in Germany) came from the English FA, and was very much a response to the (accurate) perception that there were a lot of "unladylike" women on the pitch, having a great time together, in front of large crowds of people who thought this was a great thing. If a game like last night's - an epic match played before a packed stadium of people deeply involved with the drama unfolding before them - if something like that feels rare, it's not because of anything the Nigerian FA did a few months ago, but because of the systemic suppression of women's involvement with such spectacles since at least 1921.

We'd do well to keep this long view in mind, otherwise it's as if the Super Falcon's elimination from the World Cup has somehow solved the problem. Which, of course, it hasn't.

2011 Women's World Cup: perspective on Equatorial Guinea's "controversies"

2011-06-30T05:58:00.000-07:00

When sports journalists describe Equatorial Guinea as an unknown quantity, I wonder if that's just their way of saying they haven't wanted to look too closely at the team and the country's football association.

Since they upset Nigeria in the 2008 African Women's Championship, they haven't been much of a mystery to followers of African women's football. Everyone who follows African soccer knows they are on the rise - if they are underdogs, it is not for lack of talent but experience.

Equatorial Guinea is a controversial team, though, there's no two ways about that. It has a large number of naturalized players (like the team's coach, who is Brazilian): The team has been accused of "buying" players (the country has the resources to do so) but team's manager has defended his selection. The Associated Press reports:

Among Equatorial Guinea's half dozen players with Brazilian ancestry are standout goalkeeper Miriam and defender Carolina. Frigerio said buying players from other nations reflects the realities of a small country in a big world, and money is not a problem in a land rich in oil and gas.

"The players all have roots in Equatorial Guinea," he said. "Either their parents or grandparents come from there." (AP, "West Africans Making Headlines at the World Cup")

Jade Boho (in red) at the 2010 AWC

Jade Boho, the team's top striker was disqualified from competition for not having changed her FIFA affiliation when she should have (she was born and plays in Spain; she played for the Spanish U19 squad). So far, it looks like the FA mishandled the process.

That the team scouts in Spain or Brazil should be no more controversial than the fact that Mexico scouts in California's Central Valley.

[The story ought to be not why Jade Boho was playing for Equatorial Guinea, but why she isn't playing for Spain - she plays in the Spanish Super Liga, and played for Spain's U19 squad, who were European champions. Spain's senior squad is in such shambles that its best players steer clear of it. Now, that's a scandal, and the subject of a rant that should be up on Fox Soccer any day now.]

African teams have complained about Equatorial Guinea since at least the 2008 Africa Women’s Championship. They won the title in a terrific upset when they took the crown from the Super Falcons. According to a 2008 editorial in the Nigerian Observer, visiting teams complained about a lot of things.The tournament had been hosted by Equatorial Guinea, and in the wake of the big upset, Nigerian press accused the hosts of not only poor hospitality and organization, but outright cheating. Visiting teams complained about scandalously poor officiating (e.g. a referee allowed a player in one match to retake a penalty she had originally sent wide). Journalists complained about the absence of media centers and the refusal accredit journalists until the tournament was half over. Coaches complained about abusively noisy hotels and the lack of water given to teams during practice sessions. Of course, from what I can tell, tournaments can be full of this sort of shade - its why when teams show up to a World Cup and are treated well, they often express pleasant surprise.

The real problem, many argued, was the Confederation of African Football’s poor stewardship. To whom can one turn to resolve such complaints? CAF has a long history of ignoring complaints regarding corruption and mismanagement in the game, a situation as true of the women's game as it is of the men's. This hardly makes the regional governing body different from any other.

High on the list of complaints made regarding Equatorial Guinea in 2008 was the accusation that the squad had fielded as many as three men. The more sensitive journalists have translated these kinds of accusations into the only slightly less awful charge, in which the players are “accused” not of being men, but of being hermaphrodites. Three players on Equatorial Guinea squad were tagged with this accusation, and two have been removed from the roster prior to their World Cup games. (A third, who plays in Germany, defended herself against these absurd claims, with the full support of her club.)

Equatorial Guinea is not the only country to field players who are accused of not being women. One African Female Player of the year (from another country) was accused of being a man, and Nigeria has lost a couple players over the years when they were disqualified for hermaphrodism, after their gender had been questioned. As Nigeria has been at the forefront of the complaints about Equatorian Guinea, plenty of fans of the latter team saw this turn regarding the disqualification of intersexed Nigerian players as karmic.

This is not only an African problem. Spanish and Indian track athletes have been (wrongly) stripped of medals, by officials who hardly know that they are doing. Can you imagine? And we all know more about Caster Semenya than we have any right to. Heck, I've heard women on my own teams wonder about opposing players, never seriously. But just casual whinging about the mannishness of a player makes me queasy.

Even given the fact of the intersexed athlete, this kind of charge floats around in women’s sports as a haunt, embodying the sports world's most intense conflicts regarding gender and it impacts all of us. For what does it mean to say a team is fielding men? It means the press gets an interesting headline, and it means that one body gets to be vehicle through the sports world conducts an exorcism, in the service of the maintenance of the fantasy that gender difference is absolute.

It means that a team is fielding women who challenge received notions about femininity. It can be a player with broad shoulders, a flat chest and short hair. It can be a player with those attributes, who is also strong, fast, and plays aggressively. In the past, these accusations have led to horrifying groping sessions as referees sort them out in the locker room.

That the most public of these accusations fall again and again on African women athletes should be a red flag signaling the violence with which the body of the African athlete is policed.

SO, note to journalists reporting on the team: the charge of being men hasn't only been leveled against Equatorial Guinea - it's been around in the women's game - indeed, women's sports - for years, and is used as a horrifying form of gender policing. It is casually used to 'out' women as lesbians, as not 'real women,' as 'unnatural' 'freaks' etc.

Because the effects of these accusations can be so devastating, people involved with the game have been asking FIFA to take the issue up, at least to prevent the reckless charges that teams have made against each other on this point.

At the end of May, FIFA instituted its first “Gender Verification Regulations.” This was surely done in advance of the 2011 World Cup with the hopes of warding off trouble regarding the complaints made against Equatorial Guinea.

Basically, FIFA asserts that each national association is responsible for providing documentation regarding a player’s gender:

It lies with each participating member association to prior to the nomination of its national team ensure the correct gender of all players by actively investigating any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics and keeping complete documentation of the findings. Should a player’s gender be called into question, then, the FA has the responsibility of demonstrating that this player is, indeed, female.

There are now strict procedures regulating who can call for a test (the individual concerned, an FA, or appointed FIFA medical officers), and there is also the possibility that “unfounded or irresponsible” accusations will bring on disciplinary action. Sanctions regarding gender-non-conforming players can only be imposed by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee – and, interestingly, the 2011 World Cup has its own specialist, hired to consult on these matters. A first.

On the surface, all of this looks enlightened – and it certainly is a step forward from what was in place before this – which was nothing, which produced intensely humiliating scenes as referees resorted to groping and looking into an accused player’s shorts.

But how will national associations "ensure the correct gender of all players"? What does "actively investigating any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics" mean? One might imagine a lot of the football associations in the world just going for feminine looking athletes, so they don't have to bother with this mess. Frankly, more than a few of them already do.

So today, the two players most frequently invoked in these complaints have been dropped from the roster. FIFA can pat itself on the back, no?

This is not a happy outcome: at minimum, we have two players exiled from the game and no explanation as to why, and no sense that we haven't just witnessed a very stark act of discrimination, in which mannish women are chased out the game so that we can maintain the illusion that the line between male and female is absolute.

How, I ask, is that any better than, any different from Nigeria's homophobic "witch hunt"?

2011 Women's World Cup: Thoughts on Team USA/North Korea

2011-06-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

What to say about yesterday's game? A first half to make you want to give up on life, a second which chastised you for all that cynicism and negativity.

It isn't that the second half was so glorious that it made you forget the first. It was pretty scrappy (though not nearly as scrappy as Mexico v England).

It was more "American" that that - by which I mean the following: US teams are often celebrated internationally for their fitness level and attitude, for their work ethic. Yesterday's match was hard work. North Korea are fast and, as few people have much of a sense of their tactics (I assume because the don't play that many international matches and don't make DVDs of their performances available?), opponents have to learn how to play them on the fly. Which is another kind of work.

The first half was strange - two teams with obvious skill struggled to connect (US) and finish (North Korea). To me, it looked like few players had a good touch - no doubt a sign of nerves, and also of the pace at which they were playing. Shek Borkoski described the game as "[lacking] imagination and fluidity." That's about right.

The USWNT came into the second half with a plan they were able to actually execute. They played more thoughtfully (as much as is possible playing a team with North Korea's pace), they were more dogged and, as their work paid off (with better though not ideal possession), they became more confident. You felt like the players were visualizing where they wanted the game to go - and then going there. To me, it felt like they ready to slug it out - meaning, work their asses off for the all important win.

With this effort (and changes in formation and strategy), the team won two goals - thanks to Lauren Cheney and Rachel Buehler, both of whom play for the Boston Breakers in the WPS.

That performance was the kind of thing that reminds us how much work it takes to win a game. It's not so glamorous, but it is the kind of win I associate with the US squads.

A question to readers: Are any of the networks broadcasting the match providing stats on the distance players run, as is commonly done for the men's game? I would love to know this.

A recommendation: For excellent analysis of the USWNT's performance, see All White Kit's "Buzzwords for the USWNT/North Korea Game" and FF @jenna_awk for match commentary on Twitter. Women's football bloggers unite!

And, just bizarre: North Korea's coach blamed his team's loss on a lightening strike. Incredible, whether or not its true.

Allez les Nudes

2011-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Here's, the FFF-produced video for the French women's national team:

Yikes. I mean, parts of it are cute, I guess. But not so much the parts where individual members of the team lip sync.

Members of the national team also posed nude in 2009, for an FFF campaign with the lovely slogan, "Do we have to show up like this, in order for you to come see us play?"

Yikes again. See four years of my writing on this blog, for my perspective on this sort of thing.

One Nation, Divisible After All

2011-06-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

I was going to maintain "radio silence" about the men's game but then I heard about Tim Howard's rant regarding the Gold Cup ceremony. Hosted by Univision's Fernando Fiore, the trophy award was conducted in Spanish except for that portion honoring the US team.

Such a thing should be relatively uncontroversial: Los Angeles is a multi-lingual city and the vast majority of people in the stands understand Spanish. It was being broadcast to Spanish speaking households across the region. In California, la vida futbolistica is conducted largely en español. The Gold Cup final is an international event, and if French is the lengua franca of sporting events in Europe, Spanish is it for the Americas. Anglo players and fans who don't speak Spanish will understand enough to get the gist: Howard certainly knows this, and was clearly displacing his frustration about the loss into this pseudo-self-righteous and reactionary rant about proper procedure.

Mind you, if Howard was a female player, he'd likely lose his place on the squad for more than a little while - FAs are particularly intolerant of the malcriada. (Ask Hope Solo.) But, no, instead Howard's rant becomes a focal point for nationalist identification. So, you know, the men's scene can look more and more like the worst aspects of the European game. Because this seems to be what the USSF and its corporate partners want.

There are finer points to this discussion: about the way ticket sales are managed, about the marginalization of fans of the USMNT in those processes (see, e.g. Alex Labidou's polemic for Goal.com). There seems to be no process that saves some tickets from being sold until the finalists are announced. That said - everyone in LA knows this and bought tickets well in advance of knowing who would be in the final. There is no reason that USMNT fans couldn't do the same. The one good thing about the current system is that it shows the sheer quantity of Latino fans of the game - fans far too committed to the sport to wait to see if their team made it all the way.

Fact is, if the final had been between Costa Rica and Ecuador, you'd still have a sold out stadium and a great atmosphere.

For the record: the United States does not have an official language. Every effort to make English the legal law of the land has failed: this is something every American can be proud of. This makes all kinds of things easier, it makes life richer and more interesting, and public space much more generous (in contrast, for example, with countries that refuse to produce official signs, documents in different languages to support the diversity of the language communities that live within that country).

Howard's rant will get lots of play because the issue of language is the preferred field for working out national panic about American identity. And that's of course, what's at stake.

What does need examining is the US Soccer Federation's cool relationship with Latino fans of the sport. I can imagine that for USMNT it must be depressing to never have a home advantage. (That "indivisible" motto now seems particularly ill-fated.) Surely the must be a better answer than digging in one's heals and stewing in rage.

But, hey, at least the US men's team has a crowd in the stands. And the USMNT gets the red carpet from the USSF, the hype from Nike. And all the press.

Wish I'd seen that kind of support for the women as they slogged they way through the World Cup qualifiers. Maybe we'd see better play from them if they saw better support from us.

So, to Tim Howard: Suck it up.

And to USMNT fans: You aren't real fans of the national team until that support extends to the program's better half. Ideally with all the passion but none of the xenophobia. Indivisible? Show us what that word really means.

The intimate connections between the US and Mexico, by the way, will be on full display when El Tri takes on England today - a few of squad's best players are from California.

Team USA plays North Korea tomorrow. If the headlines are still about Howard's rant, well, then we'll know how far this so-called support for the game here extends.

2011 World Cup: France & Nigeria

2011-06-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm not in Germany. I know this because even though the country I'm in (France) has a good team in the World Cup, and even though that team was on the cover of more than a few of the weekend papers and Sunday magazines, no one cares that they scored the tournament's first goal in a win over Nigeria.

For those who don't know yet, France won with a sweet team goal: Necib sent the ball into box where Thiney moved it quickly to Delie, who controlled and scored. Lanky and graceful, Delie reminds me a little of Berbatov.

Nigeria came out at a hundred and ten miles an hour, but were generally much stronger on defense than on attack. Desire Oparanozie broke past Sonia Bompastor and France's back line with a first class run only to blow her chance by sending the ball wide under pressure from GK Sapowitz. What is Oparanozie? 18? Yes, she is.

In a pre-match interview, Nigeria manager Uche declared she replaced her "old" players with "younger" players. I can't help but wonder what she means by "old," as one of the women she left off the squad was Cynthia Uwak, who is all of 24. (In talking about replacing "old" players with young players, she is papering over her purge of lesbian players and/or players who couldn't truck with her prayer sessions, etc.)

Anyway, when Oparanozie sent that ball wide, I couldn't help but think: a) I don't see Uwak doing that and b) if Uwak was on the field with her, Oparanozie might have had another option.

We'll see how this "pray the gay away" coaching strategy works out for Nigeria. I hardly know what to say, as I used to be a Super Falcons fan, and now I have to root against them, because I can't stomach success under these conditions. Basically, the whole story has made it nearly impossible to watch the team's matches and really "see" their game - I'm having trouble getting outside the framework of my anger.

Maybe Eurosport feels the same way. Because during halftime the network played video highlights, with no commentary. Maybe I missed something. Maybe the television I was watching somehow filtered all but the ambient noise of the match in those replays. But given the level of pre-match commentary, I perhaps should be grateful. Sometimes nothing IS better than something: Before the game started, we were given shots of the players stretching on the field. A commentator (female, very pretty) said "Oh my, they are not so flexible, are they?" Then there was an AWFUL video publicizing the team, in which the players were lip syncing to some French pop song. (I promise to find a copy of this!)

They looked so intensely uncomfortable. I have never seen anything quite so painful.

At least they were wearing clothes.

France played like France. The big difference between this team and the men is that we actually have expectations of them. (The men are famous for lowering our expectations of them.) I thought the women were so French they played like Arsenal in the attacking half. They were better at connecting than converting.

We'll see. I'm glad they won this one. They had to, to have any chance of getting out of this group.

I have only this to say about Germany: a few bloggers noted that Germany seemed rattled when they gave up a goal. This is how Brazil got them in the Olympics. You have to break them early - and then exploit that right away. It's true of course in general (score! score again!).

Germany, Nigeria and Brazil were in the same group in the 2008 Olympics - of all of Germany's opponents in that tournament, Nigeria and Brazil played the best games against Germany of all of their opponents, and were heavy on the attack. (If you are really hard core: my old match reports are to your left.)

Germany's Playboy Players & the "Butch Cliché"

2011-06-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

As many readers of this blog will know, some German women who play competitive football posed for Playboy. These are not members of the national team, but they are women who play high level football in the country.

March Presentation of 2011 WWC kit

Titus Chalk from When Saturday Comes does a nice job with this story. Chalk explains that these are not rogue players: the German press has been itching for a story like this, and the national federation gave this "project" a green light, as did Steffi Jones, president of the World Cup organizing committee.

This photo spread is in keeping, in fact, with early publicity for the 2011 Germany team. When Adidas premiered the World Cup kit, they sent a woman in body paint down the runway. Steffi Jones and other officials from the 2011 World Cup team were in attendance, smiling cooperative smiles.

The Playboy players present the world with what German officials think the women's game needs. Tits.

As those familiar with my scholarship already know: I don't have a problem with public nudity, in and of itself. But, as I've written over and over again: this is not a good marketing strategy - as sports media scholar Mary Kane has demonstrated in her research, fans are turned off by this stuff. Someone who wants to see a great rack goes not to a soccer match, but a strip club. Fans are insulted. It confirms the attitudes of those already not interested in women's sports and alienates the rest of us.

Maybe these Playboy girls are more interested in modeling than they are in playing soccer. Lord knows there's more money in the former than in the latter. So, who can blame them for using the World Cup to advance their careers off the pitch.

What is offensive to me: the issuing of this photo spread as "proof" that female players are "beautiful" (against the assumption they aren't) and that women soccer players aren't butch (as if butches weren't beautiful!). Chalk quotes one of these women as explaining "We want to disprove [our sport’s] butch women cliché."

Oh dear.

I'm going to let my imagination run a little wild here: Maybe in German soccer, butches are so dominant, so overwhelming in their presence, so celebrated and privileged that coaches look at a ponytail and think "She's nowhere near butch enough to be any good."

Maybe femmes feel oppressed by the roughhousing tomboys, by the transmen, by the intensity of the female masculinity in German soccer. Maybe this Playboy spread is a femme manifesto of sorts - declaring for all who look at women's soccer and only see hard, fab butches in short hair and broad shoulders: "Hey, femmes are here too!"

Would that were the case. No - look at publicity and you'll see an intensely manicured vision of women's soccer.

The butchness of female athletes is treated by national federations (and the corporations that launder their money through them) as a constant source of shame and embarrassment. This can be brutally explicit as butch athletes might be called out onto the field in front of their teammates and humiliated as "bad examples" of womanhood - their short hair, musculature, mannerisms - all might be called out as something to be suppressed, hidden or eliminated. (See the stories about what's going on in Nigeria's camp, for example - but this is hardly a rare phenomenon confined to that country!) Long haired, feminine looking women might be pointed to as paragons of virtue.

Every female soccer player in the World Cup who shaves her head, opts for super short hair, or a shag makes a statement, whether she means to or not. And she didn't need to take off her sports bra to do it.

Field Insecurity (Soccer in the City of Angles, Part VI)

2011-06-23T02:27:00.000-07:00

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, from the male bonding series (2009)

[Note: this is the 6th installment in a memoir regarding my adventures in AYSO - read from the start if you are new to this blog - articles can be found in the sidebar on the right.]

David Lynch might have scripted some of the scenes in our experiment with the American Youth Soccer Organization. Some days, things would be that baroque, that strange. This was especially true when it came to the security guard hired by AYSO to monitor the field. (I refer to him here as "C.")

In the beginning, we got along well enough. But as our season progressed, he became a bigger and bigger problem. He was so volatile, paranoid and irrational that a lot of players assumed he was on meth, or perhaps in recovery.

The artificial turf field has a few rules. One can’t bring pets onto the field or onto school grounds. No food or drink (except water), no gum and no smoking. Pretty basic stuff. Aside from enforcing these rules, there really wasn’t much at all for C. to do.

Perhaps because of this, when someone did break the rules and C happened to catch it, he got excited.

He would swagger over to the offending parties and bellow a rapid-fire series of blustery commands, embedded in a rant about how people didn’t take him seriously, were disrespecting him, and breaking the rules on purpose. More often than not, kids were the target of his diatribes.

C was a big, heavy guy in a uniform. He made many kids nervous. If I saw him give a child direction in a positive, non-confrontational way, I also saw him bully kids and pick fights with adults. He was very unpredictable. You couldn’t tell what would draw his ire. Seeing people sitting on top of the picnic tables would send him into a weird rage, for example, though there was no clear reason as to why. Most of the days I was there, however, something would send him into outer orbit.

He was exactly the wrong kind of person to be working security. He made people feel more nervous than "safe." He made people feel like they were doing something wrong, just by virtue of their presence on the grounds. And when people challenged him on his generally hysterical manner, he got even more crazy. He was generally looking for an argument, and although he was not likely to throw a punch, he was very likely to draw one out.

So, when I pulled up to the field one afternoon and saw him in a full-on argument with a woman, I wasn’t surprised.

This argument was extremely heated. As I approached, it seemed to escalate. Her boyfriend appeared and jumped in to defend her. He had just finished playing and was a real hothead who’d been ejected from at least one of our matches. They started to square off.

I put myself between them, turned to the player and herded him out of the fight, explaining that he was making things worse, that C was not going to back down. If the player didn’t, there was no telling where this would go. “Please,” I remember saying to him – guessing he was the more reasonable of the two men, and the most likely to disengage. These situations require a Cesar Milano-style zen, in which one radiates a calm authority, a total confidence that the situation will not convert into violence. Most of the time, this works.

The player knew this ritual. He continued to gripe about the security guard, but he backed away from the situation and left with his girlfriend.

What was this fight about?

A puppy.

His girlfriend had come to the game with a new, barely weaned puppy. This tiny thing was barely bigger than her hand.

The conflict had been brewing for nearly two hours. When she and her boyfriend showed up, she brought the puppy with her on the field. C yelled at her, and said that not only could she not have the puppy on the field, she couldn’t have it at the school at all.

She took offense at the way he was talking to her, and at the idea that this puppy posed such a problem that it, and she, would have to leave.

One of the league organizers suggested a compromise – she could sit in the picnic area, still on school grounds but at least off the field. She could watch the match there, in peace. Next week, she would leave the puppy at home. This seemed perfectly reasonable – we weren’t talking about an adult animal. This thing couldn’t even walk, really. It was a wiggly little ball of cuteness. It could fit in a pocket.

C felt “disrespected” by the compromise – for him, the insult was manifold. He took offense towards the woman’s attitude (she quite rightly was offended by the way he spoke to her, and - less rightly - she mirrored his attitude right back to him), and he took offense to the compromise, which he experienced as undermining his authority.

Rather than leave her alone where she sat watching the game, C would drift over and re-engage her in a fight not about the puppy, now, but her attitude.

I should add, the entire time he was arguing with this woman, he was on the phone with his wife, via a Bluetooth permanently attached to his head. Thus the scene's David Lynch-like weirdness.

So, this is what I saw, as I approached the field:

C and this woman making chicken-head like moves at each other, yelling at the top of their lungs about who was disrespecting who. As this shouting match unfolded, C would make running commentary about what was going on to his wife, via the Bluetooth tucked into his ear. ("This bitch is disrespecting me!") Then he would yell at the young woman about how she was disrespecting him “in front of” his wife. It was really a crazy scene.

But not quite the craziest thing going on at that moment.

Looking around, I was struck by how most of the people on the field were ignoring the puppy controversy. I now understand that this was because the argument had been going on for so long that it’d become part of the day’s routine.

Something else leaped out at me – something far stranger than C fighting with one of our spectators over the threat posed by a puppy.

An elderly Asian woman was wandering around the edge of the pitch. It was late in the afternoon, very sunny and hot. On a hot day, the field was far from pleasant. It made no sense that an elderly person would be out there, circling the football field over and over again.

She occasionally wandered into the field of play. Players or bystanders would correct her trajectory, and she’d resume her strange walk under the sun. Again, everyone was acting like this was totally normal.

So, the whole time I was trying to figure out the nature of the confrontation between C and this woman (and diffuse it), I had my eye on a different problem.

The woman with the puppy interrupted her argument with C to explain what was going on:

The elderly woman was Korean and spoke not a word of English or Spanish. She’d been on the field since the start of our day’s games, apparently alone. At one point, she picked up someone’s sunblock and tried to drink it.

On hearing this, my priorities shifted dramatically. The puppy controversy was nothing compared with the possibility that a disoriented elderly woman might actually, you know, die or something.

I assumed she was grossly dehydrated. Why else would someone try to drink a bottle of sunblock? She was certainly senile or an Alzheimer’s patient. She must have wandered from her home and was lost. There were probably people looking for her – and I guessed that whoever they were, they’d been spending the day in a real panic. The neighborhood is not the best, and this woman was the picture of vulnerability. (When I tried to talk to her, she smiled, complimented my purse in Korean, and continued her laps.)

I called the police, they sent out a patrol car. When they arrived, C was pacing up and down the sidewalk, shouting at his wife (via the Bluetooth in his ear) about how I’d “disrespected” him: "Who does this bitch think she is? This is MY field! I'm in charge!" He sustained this rant for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, I explained the situation regarding the woman on the field to the police officers.

He overheard me talking to the cops, and leaned into his car, pulled out a bottle of sunblock, and handed it to them. He’d seen the woman drinking it, and somehow wound up taking it from her. But he didn’t think to do anything else – like call for help. He had too busy arguing with the puppy-lady, and ranting to his wife about his bruised ego.

The cops talked to the woman, called her family (using her medi-alert bracelet), and soon her son was there, looking mightily stressed out but relieved to see his mother in one piece. By this point, it was 5:00pm. She’d gone missing around 10:00am, and was seen on the field somewhere around 11:00am.

From then on, C hated me with a white-hot passion, and took every chance he got to let me know this. Whenever I was around, he’d rant to the heavens about how I “didn’t own this field,” about how I “didn’t belong,” how he was the “boss,” etc. He’d issue these rants sometimes as song, sung as I walked past him (as I often had to do). His antagonism of our players and their friends escalated, his bullying of kids accelerated.

This got worse when I saw him try to keep a man and his eight year old son off the grounds (there was a large practice space, perfect for kicking a ball around with kids). They lived in one of the large apartment blocks across the street and had no access to green space, it was totally normal for our neighbors to use the field when it was open.

I intervened whenever I saw C try to keep people out: I couldn’t watch someone cut people off from their own backyard. Of course, he didn’t appreciate this at all – there was little he could do, however, because usually he couldn’t make himself understood to the people he was trying to police.

You see, this security guard hired by AYSO to work in a neighborhood of recent immigrants hated immigrants. He would say so, loudly and proudly. He didn’t speak Spanish and felt no obligation to learn it. A friend of his would sometimes work in his stead was similarly open about his dislike for Latinos. (e.g. “I don’t like Hispanics.” “Don’t you think they should speak English?”) C. was only slightly less explicit. I should add - just so you can picture the DEEP complexity of this scene, C was African American - and the guy helping him out with security was, I think, Armenian. I'm white, and most of the people involved in our league were Latino. The first thing I'd look for in a security guard, beyond a calm demeanor, would be the ability to speak Spanish and show respect for the community within which he was working.

I guess I'd also be looking to weed out the creeps.

That same summer, I volunteered at an AYSO-sponsored youth camp in Watts and encountered another security guard hired by the same AYSO crew. He was far scarier than C, as he was constantly soliciting attention from the 12-15 year old girls at the camp. I saw him ask one girl to sit in his lap.

Heart in my throat, I casually motioned her over to me and promptly started up some drills for the girls who kept drifting out of the activities being organized by the all-male coaching staff (who seemed completely and utterly puzzled by teen girl dynamics). Other girls and staff noticed this guy was throwing off creepy vibes, and we discretely engineered things to keep him away from us all.

At one point, he showed one of the other volunteers the guns he kept in the trunk of his car. Like this was cool. To remind you of the context - this was at a middle school, and he was there at the behest of the American Youth Soccer Organization.

To return to C and our league: it took me a while to wake up to how bad things were for, personally.

One evening, C. made some young kids cry. They’d bought ice cream from a street vendor, and had run onto the field, forgetting about the no-food policy. He screamed at them. The parents were really upset by C’s behavior towards their kids – the father of one child teared up when he talked about seeing his daughter bullied by a grown-up like that. It had hit a deep parental nerve, seeing is child so intimidated and scared. They went over to talk to C., and soon they were shouting at each other.

Feeling that his authority was being challenged (again), C. ran onto the field and demanded that the game be stopped. It was bizarre.

The players and the referee all looked at me, because I was the league representative – I took their money, coordinated with the ref’s, helped with the rosters, etc. I calmly explained that C. had no authority to stop the match like that, that this decision was up to the referee.

C responded to this by shouting at me. He all said the things he often said to me – at the top of his lungs, though, in front of two teams, the referees and all the spectators. I walked away from the field, knowing that the referee might be able to diffuse the situation whereas my presence was going to make things worse.

The referee got him off the field. The game started up again. C. left the school – shouting, muttering, ranting about how he was the boss. He did so without turning on the lights – he took the keys to everything with him, and then told the AYSO people who hired him that he wasn’t going to give the keys back.

It was a nightmare. I can’t remember how that was resolved – someone tracked him down and got the keys off him. They had to – otherwise the school would have lost tens of thousands of dollars changing all the locks.

This was the first time a large swath of the league saw first hand what I’d been dealing with since day one.

So many people came up to me to ask if I was “OK.” People were genuinely concerned about me, as a person. “How could he talk to you that way?” There was so much hate for me in C’s behavior and in his speech, it must have been hard to watch.

I was not a controversial presence for the players and their families – far from it. I always felt welcomed, and most people seemed to really appreciate all the work we put into the league. That night, I felt like I had forty brothers and sisters, people concerned about my welfare in the same way I’d been concerned about theirs. Because of that moment, I would run a league again - just not with AYSO.

Because when it came to the AYSO people associated with the field (the schedulers, the administrators, and the security guard), I did not feel this sense of community. I had instead grown used to feeling harassed, berated, ignored, yelled at, diminished.

That was the beginning of the end for me. I realized I couldn’t keep working there if C. was on duty. It was toxic. Even after he left the field - after interrupting the game, making children cry, making racist statements about the people using the field, screaming insults at me, running off with the keys - AYSO still continued to use him.

I wrote a letter to the AYSO region, explaining the problems we’d been having, so that at least it'd be on the record somewhere. But he was soon back, sitting in his car and talking to his wife via that Bluetooth.

Reading the stories about Jack Warner, Sepp Blatter, et al I have to wonder if this kind of thing isn’t the one of the bigger barriers to a more honest practice. People surrounding the game, managing the game are so often so awful, that a lot of people walk away.

The crap I saw in one incredibly minor corner of the football world is a small instance of a larger pattern, in which petty thieves and power mongers collaborate to expand their control over a territory, with no concern whatsoever for the community inhabiting it.

C. did his job perfectly – he was never there to help us. He was doing AYSO’s version of “cleaning up” the favela. Over time I gleaned that the AYSO folks who thought we “didn’t belong” basically bent C's ear, poisoned him so that he was ready to see me and my collaborators as "the enemy." He was eager to help his friends by making my life so unpleasant I would go away.

Which is what I did.

Soon after all this, our league had been exiled to the outfield of a baseball diamond - maybe to facilitate the double-dealing on the school permit (this what we all feared had been going on all along), or maybe just so that a few people could enjoy the libidinal thrill of ruining a good game.

Now that I've got that epic out of my system, I can turn my attention to the Women's World Cup.

Foucault Explodes in His Grave (On Weiner's Resignation)

2011-06-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

The French philosopher argued that as our public discourse tightens its grip on sex, mining it for more and more information about the body, the mind and the soul, it turns “sex” turns into a rhetorical black hole – a vortex sucking energy in, radiating pure affect. Making less and less sense.

Journalists (?) heckling Anthony Weiner – launching barbs about the size of his dick as they might shout “fag” at a baseball game – prove Foucault’s point: the more discourse we produce about sexual health, sexual behavior, sexual being and sexual practice – the more discourse on sex becomes a powerful mechanism of policing and control; a shit-storm of rhetorical violence.

Nevermind that, these days, it is less “forward” of a guy to put a picture of his dick in an e-mail (or a Craigslist ad), than it is to buy a stranger a drink in a bar. The circulation of sexy pics of our body parts is a banal fact of our fully mediated, broadcasted life. The banality of this practice doesn’t make it less erotic, or feel less personal. It’s a form of exhibitionist correspondence organic to what Lauren Berlant described as an “intimate public.” It is not in the least bit surprising that a public figure might have an erotic relationship to publicity.

Even knowing this, men and women unite behind “Bye Bye PERVERT!” They lean back, content in their own morality - as if they have never looked at a nude picture of a dick, or tits, or whatever. As if they haven’t combed the web looking for Weiner’s body and chuckling over the embarrassing fact that he has one, that he has an erotic relationship to it, and an erotic relationship to our broadcast culture. Shame on him??

Maybe in a few years, this sort of thing will be no big deal. Not because we think that what’s in those briefs is meaningful, but because maybe by then, we’ll have seen so much political crotch that these images will come to nothing.

(All puns intended.)

Soccer in the City of Angels Part V: The Handsome Sailor

2011-06-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

Terrance Stamp, as Billy Budd

In the opening pages of Billy Budd, Herman Melville comments on the unique charm of a type of man he called the “Handsome Sailor”:

A superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky, cheerily hallooing to the strenuous file along the spar.

With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.

The title character of the novel is just such a man. A man other men adore. When he was pressed into military service - Budd was found working on a merchant ship - his civilian captain begged the naval commander to allow him to keep his treasured Budd:

Before I shipped that young fellow, my forecastle was a rat-pit of quarrels. It was black times, I tell you, aboard the Rights here. I was worried to that degree my pipe had no comfort for me. But Billy came; and it was like a Catholic priest striking peace in an Irish shindy. Not that he preached to them or said or did anything in particular; but a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones. They took to him like hornets to treacle....

This is a man of ease and grace, natural ability and humility. Melville’s Handsome Sailor is not an attention-seeker. The Handsome Sailor of Billy Budd is slightly shy. He’s the kind of men other men admire, but his humility, the grace with which he carries his gifts, is such that other men want to be around him. He’s the kind of guy who makes other guys happy.
We had at least one of these guys in the league. He was, in my view, easily the league's best all-around player. He really loves the game, and doesn’t hold back. He plays a skilled game – the kind that is beautiful to play with, inspiring to play against, and amazing to watch.

When this player couldn’t make a game, or was running late, the guys on his team would glance wistfully towards the parking lot, and ask each other “Isn’t X playing today?” They wouldn’t say much, but the disappointment was all over their faces. No irritation that this person couldn’t be there – instead, the guys would just sigh. Like they were lucky he played with them at all. And they were.

Not every team has one. Not every team needs one – but those who do count the Handsome Sailor among their ranks have a special magic: the equilibrium of a system in full cooperation with itself. When all goes well, this person is not a captain but a kind of talisman.

If you've read the novel, you'll know that not everyone on a team is OK with their Billy Budd. Disaster looms for those unable to live in the company of this sort of charismatic talent. Messi is a Handsome Sailor, and Barcelona is a team that knows how to play with him.

Marta is a Handsome Sailor, for sure. And when she was playing, so was Mia Hamm.

Soccer in the City of Angels Part IV: at home with being out of place

2011-06-09T20:21:00.000-07:00


Michael Wells, from a series of portraits of games in Lafayette Park, published in Municipal de Fútbol

Many of my recollections of this experimental league could be shaped like a scene from Crash, minus the sentimental recuperation of collisions between racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. Other memories tap into a very different experience of Los Angeles. An LA not in a state of constant battle. A place of movement and collaboration. Today's installment in this series focuses on that, in an effort to think - or write, or feel - "positive."

For those readers who have never spent time in the city, let me paint you a picture of our field’s beauty.

Los Angeles is much hillier than people outside the region tend to realize. The Hollywood Hills are not the only hills in the city – far from it. Downtown LA sits on land that ripples and then slopes gently toward the ocean. The field at 7^th & Union rests on that coastal decline. Standing on the turf, facing 7^th St., the downtown skyline rises up to your left. At night, that portion of the sky is lit up by high-rises. Space opens up to your right. On a clear day the westward vista takes on the aspect of “big sky” and you can feel the Pacific on the wind. It’s the kind of place in California that feels “continental” in a geological sense. You can feel that you are standing on one of the planet’s great tectonic plates. The whole world is in motion.

Some of the biggest complexes of fields in this part of LA county are built next to its freeways – the Ferraro fields in Griffith Park are so close to the 5 and the 134 you can hardly hear your teammates over the traffic (no exaggeration). The Glendale complex is nicer, perched in the hills above the 2. It is so high up in those hills that it feels like a kind of heaven – but it’s so isolated those with no relationship to the sport have no idea it’s there.

The field at 7^th and Union is unusual in that it’s a full field (appropriate for 11 on 11) in the middle of a dense neighborhood. Just east of downtown, it is easily accessed by the city’s major freeways (110 & 101). But it isn’t so close that you worry about your lungs sucking in the fine particulate matter sprayed around the neighborhoods that edge those roads. And, as I’ve indicated in other posts, the field is in a real neighborhood – it’s not tucked into a large park or hidden up in the hills. If you don’t live in the neighborhood, you can take a bus, or the metro, or – as did a lot of the guys on my team – you can ride your bike.

It’s the sort of location that could host a small soccer-specific stadium. If there were a meaningful city-wide league in Los Angeles, you would have no problem filling seats for matches staged here.

This field, however, is part of a middle-school. As much money as went into it, no one seemed to think of putting in seating. There’s room for it. I can imagine reasons for not doing so: there’s cost, and LAUSD is grotesquely under-funded – it barely teaches our students the minimum of anything. Arts and sports programming must seem like so much “extra,” as if these two huge areas of our lives were mere trimming.There is a broad allergy by those managing the neighborhood's property and resources - they get itchy at the mere idea of public gatherings of people in this part of town.

Such an enterprise would break with all habit: Imagine a public field that served the middle school during the day and hosted high school and adult competition at night – a field with stands, free admission for students and their families, and very low-cost tickets for the public, with concessions run by local businesses – tacos, pupusas, agua fresca, decent churros. Why can’t we have something like that in Pico Union? An LAUSD field that would perhaps generate a revenue, provide income for local businesses on a small but sustainable scale...

Anyway, back to the scene that is there: Two blocks behind us, on 6^th street, you’ll find one of the busiest pedestrian scenes in the western U.S. Swap meets line the strip with small Guatemalan, Hondoran and El Salvadoran storefront restaurants, carnicerias and bodegas. There are also more soccer shops. There’s a large supermarket and drug store. At night, people sell all kinds of things from blankets spread on the sidewalk.

At one of our night games, however, one hardly noticed all this is going on just two blocks away. That scene pulls life to it, draining pedestrian traffic off adjacent streets. Shops on 7th close up around 8:00pm. Who would have a night business on 7^th and compete with the 6^th St.’s massive vibe? Why walk down 7^th when you can soak in the energy of 6^th?

These are the things that I would think about driving to and from our field. There is just so much going on – out in the streets. It feels like a city to me in way that most of Los Angeles does not. For me, 6^th St, Alvarado along MacArthur Park - these blocks recall 1970s New York (I grew up in New Jersey).

The pleasures I associate with the fútbol scene in Pico Union took me by surprise. A few years ago, I would never have imagined that a field and a sports scene would matter so much to me.

Of course I stand out – along lines of gender, race, class and age. But there are others in these spaces who are similarly “out of place,” and more whose "out of placeness" is less visible. I am not “out of place” alone. In fact, given the high density of recent immigrants in the neighborhood, the feeling of being “out of place” is likely one of the things that most people have in common with each other.

It's no accident that one of the best queer bars in the city is in that part of town (see Wu Tsang's forthcoming documentary Wildness) - it's the kind of place that welcomes people living in exile from everywhere else.

Our fútbol scene was distinctly cosmopolitan – much more so than the spaces one usually links with that term (cafés, galleries, etc - which are rarely integrated in terms of class especially). Our game included set designers, musicians, students, truck drivers, museum staff, artists, restaurant and factory workers. The labor, creative, and professional class was on the field (management? not so much).

If you learn about a person's job in this setting, however, it's usually by accident. You might know a person through this sport for years before discovering how they make their living. All sorts of details comes up in the details that spill out of us while we are lacing up our shoes. Sometimes it's where we are from, who is visiting us, our struggles with injuries, griping about FIFA or MLS or last week's game - and sometimes it has something to do with work. But the latter is not as common as the other stuff.

Pickup soccer and basketball share the ability to create a collective experience from a minimum of networked connection. A good game can form around people who are linked by nothing more than an awareness of the fact that there is a game at a certain place and time. They might have learned this by looking at a window, walking down a street, or by striking up a conversation at a bar.

So, I'll try to honor this side of my experience with the league, and recall some of the truly glorious players I got to know - and whom I also don't know at all, really. So before I recount a tale involving an African American security guard, an elderly Korean woman and a bottle of sunblock (told you this stuff sounds like the script for Crash - or Falling Down?), let's turn our gaze to more pleasant vistas.

Next up: Manly Love - when a whole team crushes out on the same guy, for good reason.

FIFA makes things worse: Iran's women's team, FIFA & the Olympics

2011-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Few media outlets take the time to consider the particular way that FIFA makes things worse for women.

A few months ago, I reported on the slowly unfolding consequences of the decision of one xenophobic referee working in a youth tournament in Quebec (FIFA Makes its Islamophobia Official). This referee refused to allow an 11 year old girl play while wearing a headscarf, as per the practices of her religious community. Her team supported her, as did others in the tournament. An appeal was launched, and the IFAB (the board governing the official rule book) waffled by allowing each national association to set its own rules vis a vis its women's game.

The consequences of this problematic decision are unfolding in increasingly complex ways - most recently in relation to Iran's national women's team.

Athletic hijab is basic head covering worn by Muslim athletes all over the world, at every level of competition - including in the Olympics. It varies - some athletes will cover their skin head-to-toe, some with loose fitting track suits, some with form fitted bodysuits (worn underneath basic gear), some women wear athletic versions of headscarves.

The International Olympics Committee does not ban hijab. And it was at the Olympics that many of us were introduced to the idea of athletic hijab as we watched Bahrain's Ruqaya Al Ghasara (for example) compete on the track in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. She is not alone.

So it is ironic that the Iranian national women's team is at risk of not being able to participate in Olympic qualifying matches because FIFA is incapable of showing real leadership on this issue.

Sadly, FIFA runs the soccer part of the Olympics. The Iranian FA requires that its athletes compete in hijab. The team withdrew from their latest match against Jordan when an official declared that their uniforms (which had been the subject of negotiation previously, with FIFA eventually agreeing to allow the team to compete in a regional tournament only after much drama on both sides). (Read around the blogosphere and you'll see some credible hypotheses which suggest that this official's decision may have been motivated by a desire to see the Iranian team eliminated from competition.) Anyway, Iran has filed a complaint. To be clear: the women are between a rock and a hard place - Fifa's incoherent ruling, and the Iranian association's grandstanding (as it won't agree with the headcovering that Fifa has approved). One can hardly imagine the nightmare this induces for athletes and managers trying to work in the women's game in Iran.

In any case, this is another indication of FIFA's poor stewardship of the women's game. As I wrote in one of the comments for my original post on this issue, when you find yourself almost rooting for Iran's national association you know that something has gone horribly wrong.

Stories on this:

CNN Wire: World soccer officials defend hijab ban after Iranian team forfeits match

The Guardian: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasts Fifa 'dictators' as Iranian ban anger rises

Payvand News: Iran, FIFA Clash Over Hijab

NYT Goal Blog: Iran Protests Hijab Ban

Note: Before readers send me comments taking the moral high ground vis a vis Iran's national government (the pundit's equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel), and before readers send me rants which equate the whole of global sexism to the question of the "veil" - be warned, I won't publish most of that stuff. I rarely make this kind of warning in posts, but something about "the veil" makes people particularly reactionary. This post is - furthermore - ultimately - about the women athletes who are being put in this position, not only by Iran's state government (which requires full body coverage) but by FIFA and the IFAB's politicization of the participation of Muslim women athletes in the game.

The Case of the Runaway Referee (Soccer in the City of Angels, Part III)

2011-06-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

Keith Hackett and Paul Trevillion, You Are the Ref (Lionel Messi, 2010)

It was our league's first season and one of our first really competitive matches.

A linesman walked off the field in the middle of play. He threw aside his yellow flag and muttered "Working this game isn't worth risking my life."

Amen to that, but....Was his life ever actually in danger? What on earth had made him think that it was?

The life-threatening situation involved a team called "Nikys," sponsored by a soccer shop across the street from our field.

They were an intimidating side. They had speed, stamina and intelligence. Each player seemed to know where the ball and everyone on the team was going. Nikys played a tight, fast and hard game.

They played like they owned field and were not above using theatrics and emotional manipulation to dispossess their opponents. They were aggressive, they never believed calls made against them, but they paid their dues, showed up and played a good game.

They started their season with us by destroying one team after another. Nevertheless, we really wanted them in the league. We knew that other sides would eventually catch up with them (and they did). But if Nikys didn't stick around, those teams would not benefit from the challenge of playing against them.

Given that they were sponsored by the shop across the street, we needed them, and they knew it. We wanted them to have a good experience with the league. I at least found myself wanting their games in particular to be well-run.

So, when I saw the referee walk off the field in the middle of play, I was upset. All I knew was that the ref felt threatened. I wanted Nikys in the league, but I wanted our referees to have a good experience of the league, too.

I was confused: the Nikys guys played hard, but they were one of the least problematic teams in the league, in terms of their organization and general conduct. I couldn't reconcile what I knew about the team with the referee's claim that his life had been threatened.

Refereeing is hard. A league needs to be experienced by players as fair - that fairness is the result of the referee's work. Referees need to feel secure in their authority in order to produce that fairness - on some level, that sense of security comes from within themselves, but it is also the product of the space. They need to feel that they have the respect of the league itself.

I wouldn't get the full story about what had actually happened until the day was over.

Nikys gave up a goal. The defenders complained to the linesman that it had been scored from an offside position (from where I stood, it had looked good).

It was a nasty goal. Their defense hadn't read the attack properly. They'd been caught sleeping. It was kind of goal scored when possession and the run-of-play make it seem like you are dominating the match, so you let down your guard. And with that loss of focus, your defense breaks down. It's an error born of complacency. The players (in my view) masked their error by reacting as if the goal had been offside. From where I stood (and according to players from both teams), their complaints were well within a game's normal theatrical range.

A good linesman does not engage this kind of whining. On television, we see a stone-faced indifference to player histrionics. This linesman, however, responded by goading the defenders. According to witnesses (from both teams), the linesman said something like "that's what happens when your defense is shit."

Of course, one of those defenders said something back - and it wasn't nice. It might indeed have been menacing. The linesman then called to the center referee,and demanded that he throw the offending player out. He issued this demand as an ultimatum: "You either throw this guy out of the game, or I leave."

The very experienced and professional center ref supported the linesman's call vis a vis the goal, but did not give in to the ultimatum. Having given himself no other option, the linesman packed up his gear and went home. He was visibly angry, and told everyone who would listen that he felt his life was on the line.

It was definitely one for "You Are the Ref."

Someone volunteered in his stead, and the match was finished without incident. I'm not sure that was by the rulebook, but it was in the interest of a good game - which is what we had.

As I spoke to the remaining referees and to players from both teams, it became painfully clear that the linesman and a number of the players and spectators were nervous about playing in that neighborhood. Some of this nervousness seemed to express itself around Nikys, as the neighborhood team and the "scariest" team in the league. (By "scary," I mean that you knew, going in, that the game would be hard, and you'd probably lose.) I can imagine that driving across town to play in our league, only to have your ass handed to you by the "locals" was not fun. ("Locals" is in scare quotes because the Nikys guys weren't all based in the neighborhood.)

Nikys weren't the easiest squad to referee - but they were easier than the LAPD team. For some, however, the team looked like they've been called in from Central Casting to give face to the nameless ranks of TV Latinos - who still appear on the screen too often as criminals and crime victims.


LAPD forcing protesters out of MacArthur Park with rubber bullets and tear gas in 2007. Here, they are walking across the park's (then dirt) soccer field.

The linesman's nerves might have been triggered by the neighborhood rather than by the people on the field. Whether you call it Rampart or Pico Union or Westlake, this part of LA makes headlines - and not in a good way.

It is true that it is not the "safest" part of LA. In the months we played on this field, a beloved street vendor was shot and killed, a child was injured by a stray bullet, and an indigenous migrant was shot and killed by an LAPD officer. That's just three incidents - all of which happened within two blocks of us.

None of those bad things happened, however, while we were playing our games. Violent crime is down in Los Angeles. Studies show, too, that things like soccer leagues suppress incidents of violent crime by bringing more people outdoors on a regular basis. People get to know each other, they look out for one another and for the neighborhood.

Same spot in MacArthur Park as photographed by The Original Winger (2010).

It is in the city's interest to encourage community use of LAUSD fields - and adult leagues benefit the neighborhood as much as youth leagues do. Adult leagues bring not only families with children, they bring out young people and their friends. Soccer has a way of activating a space - a trip to MacArthur Park will show you just how good a scene can be when it has an organic relationship to the space, when it's relatively informal and open - when it encourages both participation and spectatorship.

To return to the linesman: I don't know what happened, really, or why he felt so at risk. It's possible he just had a horrible week and was not in the mood for arguing with people. I've never seen people yell at each as much as they do at a soccer match. It can be stressful. Add feeling like you don't belong there, feeling like an outsider on the defensive - he may have just hit a wall. Not everyone is up for having a match turn into a consciousness raising session.

The center referee set an ideal example. He kept the game going and minimized the drama - he didn't draw any more attention to what had happened. He shrugged it off as one more thing that happened. The whole incident passed very quickly, and was soon eclipsed by a really good game.

We adjusted: our referee assigner was very committed to supporting the league - this incident demonstrated that the referees needed to have a sense of what the environment was like, and be comfortable with it. They needed to be sure enough of their own expertise and authority to run the game, even if they were (like me) out of place.

We eventually had a stable team of referees of diverse backgrounds. They expressed a range of ability and experience - but they all cared about the work, and seemed to enjoy the challenging of refereeing well-played games, even when they got heated. I wish I could say they were treated well by all the teams, but that would be a lie.

Even so, by our second and last full season, the referees were using our games regularly for assessment - that was a real compliment to us.

The referees were one of the better sides of this story - even the guy who left, fearing for his life, had something to teach us.

Soccer in the City of Angels, Part II: "You don't belong here"

2011-05-31T21:30:00.000-07:00

Michael Wells, Lafayette Park (2008)

"You don't belong here!"

It was a surprising turn in the argument.

We were standing on the sideline. I was in a heated discussion with an AYSO parent/volunteer who played in our league. (We were arguing about field 'security' - the subject of a forthcoming post in this series.) We were both angry. Apropos of nothing, he shouted "You don't belong here!"And then he shouted it again, and again. It was like a smack across the face.

I nearly lost my composure. Meaning: I thought I was going to cry, right there in front of the two teams, their supporters and the referees. I probably did, in fact. That was definitely one of my worst days with the league.

My interlocutor was, like me, a member of the professional class. I'm a professor, he's a lawyer. We are both in our 40s (am guessing on his account). Neither of us are very good players, not relative to the skill level of the league's best teams. His team - composed entirely of AYSO parents - was slaughtered in competition, week after week. (They got a lot of credit in my book, as they usually played with a good spirit and improved over the season.)

Yelling "you don't belong here" at me was clearly an unconscious projection: for he didn't "belong" on that field any more than I did.

It's funny, but the folks who live around the field never said anything like that to me or to my co-organizers. They never needed to - that I "didn't belong," that I was a guest, was patently obvious.

But I heard "you don't belong here" regularly from AYSO people. Mostly from white men who were visibly uncomfortable with the whole situation: A mixed league in a Latino part of town, run by three anglos who were supporters of the neighborhood's existing fútbol culture, but who had no obvious link to it. (Not obvious was that one of us grew up in LA, played AYSO and has strong connections to the neighborhood; I played pickup in the neighborhood for two years and joined a local team there before becoming involved with the AYSO experiment; the third participant had a good history of working with AYSO - our version of adult AYSO was really his brainchild.)

The first time an AYSO person shouted "You don't belong here" at us I thought he was joking.

One day, I saw an AYSO administrator standing on the outside of the chain-link fence framing the field, yelling at my collaborators and a couple supporters. I walked over to see what was going on. This dude was having some sort of nuclear melt-down, sparked by someone who had set their folding chair down on the turf - which one shouldn't do if its corners are sharp, as it can damage the surface. Not a crisis. One just tells that person not to use that chair, or to put it on top of a blanket. People are happy to fix the problem, especially when you ask them nicely.

For some reason, this man responded to an extremely minor problem by sputtering nonsense about the people participating in our league, whom he described as "dirty" (and he didn't mean their tactics). The stuff he was saying was so insane ("You people are dirty! You don't belong here!"), I honestly thought he was kidding around.

I accidentally made things worse by laughing the guy off and telling my collaborators not to take him seriously. "He's kidding," I said, looking at him and expecting an exchange of jokey recognition. It was right out of a Seinfeld episode, in which a character's behavior is so bizarre that at first everyone imagines it is all an act. I had to walk away: my unintentional dismissal of his lunacy only made him more lunatic.

Nearly two years later, I was doing it again: walking away from a white man about my age, maybe a little older, who was heaping pounds of rage on me (in response to my anger about the above mentioned 'security' problem). Whatever our problems might have been, for him, they were explained by the simple observation: "You don't belong here!"

I'd become so used to moments like this that it was starting to feel normal. I turned my back on him and walked away, like a good referee might.

It was exhausting. In my work with this league, I was confronted again and again by angry men who resented my involvement, or resented the league itself and found me to be a non-threatening target for expression of that resentment - because I'm female? Because I wasn't playing as much as the guys, so I was available for being yelled at? To them, maybe at first glance I register as "some woman," or "somebody's girlfriend." I don't really know what was in their heads when they dished this kind of anger out, but I think it was easier to launch in my direction, because the consequences of doing so were minimal. That's what it felt like.

If I'm turning the focus of my writing to myself, it's because that sentence "you don't belong here" made me think a lot about where I was supposed to belong, according to those guys, and why my presence was so provocative as to produce this constant reminder of my status as interloper - from people who were much bigger interlopers in that particular setting than me. (At least I had a history as a player in the neighborhood, an awareness of the existent fútbol landscape.)

It took me a while to absorb that I really didn't 'belong' there (working with AYSO), and that my departure was inevitable.

At best, I was at risk of allowing myself to be deployed like some sort of proto-colonial missionary, facilitating enough contact with the "population" so that the space could be properly "administered." (Again, that's what it felt like for me.)

My affinities are for pick-up scenes and neighborhood leagues. I liked being a part of that scene. I never wondered where I belonged in those games. Until the police or park officials or whoever asked you to leave, nobody owned that space - whatever that space was, it was created in the game.

As an organizer of a league, as the woman collecting cash, holding the checks and the clipboard, I was not an outsider - I was the host of a conflicted space over which, for a range of reasons, I had no actual authority.

Given the mission statement of AYSO and the national organization's open structure, I thought it would provide a great point of access to a valuable resource - I thought we could get one of the best competitive leagues in the city going in that spot. But there was always something going on there that I didn't understand - trying to run a league there was like trying to play soccer in a hall of mirrors. Telling the story of what we did there is hard, because so much of what we experienced was just bizarre - like that guy screaming at us about how we were dirty.

"You don't belong here" could have been a way of disavowing the awareness "we don't belong here," or, it was just a command: "Get out." Which is what I did, eventually, for a hundred reasons - at the top of those reasons, though, was that I was tired of trying to get a good league going on a field from which the league would be regularly ejected, locked out, and undermined. By the end, we were playing in the outfield of a turf baseball field in an entirely different location. Even though we had as much right to the field at 7th & Union as anyone.

Organizations of all sorts are hollowed out from within by well-meaning people seduced by a sense of entitlement, by those attracted by the desire to control space and people (as if this were a form of "community service"), by the quick high of the power trip, and also, of course, by people who give in to the urge to make a quick buck from their own access to resources. A collective passivity allows this to go on, more or less in the open. In a way, such things are often mistaken for "professionalization" of the game.

One could say this about a youth league, or FIFA. Hell, these words could describe the administration at my university.

The above is a big statement, out of proportion with the incident I describe here - it was just a guy losing his temper at me. But hearing "you don't belong here" shouted at me for the umpteenth time in a setting in which such moments had become completely routine reconciled me to the likelihood that these guys were right, and that whatever "service" this league was providing to the neighborhood, it wasn't one I could be a part of. I'd definitely become a problem, in and of myself.

Next Up: The Runaway Ref

Soccer in the City of Angels, Part I: Usage Agreements

2011-05-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

One of Pico Union's many murals (intersection of 7th and Westlake)

A couple years ago, I helped establish an adult men's soccer league in a neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles. Our league was affiliated with the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) and only lasted two years. It has taken me a little time to gain some distance on what was both an incredible and depressing experience.

Soccer (like most sports) is a bit of a red-light district. For all its beauty, it also draws a lot of shady characters - hucksters, geniuses, crazy people. It attracts people looking to run their game and, more often than is reasonable, that game is not football.

Before getting into this story, let me just put this on the record: The American Youth Soccer Organization is a fantastic model for community-run sports. Founded in Los Angeles in 1964, its core principles are egalitarian and anti-corporate. It is close to a 100% volunteer organization. A small staff runs a huge system. According to its website, AYSO has over 600,000 registered players and a quarter of a million volunteers (yes, you read that right). Parents volunteer their time as coaches and referees, as treasurers, registrars, and league managers. Kids can referee age groups below theirs, they get involved with coaching, and learn how the organization of the game works on the daily level: it is not only an important access point for athletes, it is often the first place Americans get experience with the work of management.

The cost of participation is very low, and it is organized to maximize exposure. "Everybody plays." Everybody also contributes to the game's infrastructure - to its housekeeping. This aspect of AYSO fights against the gravitational pull of the consumer-mentality of commercialized sports. It is an important contrast to the prohibitively expensive and overly regimented club soccer system that is, sadly, the foundation of the development system for US soccer.

If there is an organization which demonstrates that the world can support a sports culture without requiring that the sport be capitalized for economic gain, it is AYSO. Rhizomic, fluid, anti-commercial and egalitarian, AYSO is, at its best, the absolute opposite of FIFA.

A system this open can be non-elitist, welcoming of difference, and flexible. It's what makes for a good scene. But it is also open to exploitation - it can be colonized by all sorts (the ambitious, the controlling, the crazy, Herbalife).

AYSO's openness is how I found myself spending Sunday afternoons on the field at the corner of 7th Street and Union Ave.

At the end of 2008, a couple friends asked if I wanted to help them start up a men's league on a fantastic new field a few minute's walk from MacArthur Park. I had been playing pick-up in the neighborhood, and had also played in a 6 aside league. There are not many full size fields in that area, but there is a lot of game.

The neighborhood is one of the densest in the city; it is also one of the most policed - this aspect of the Ramparts district figures often in this blog as the fútbol scene here has given me some of my happiest experiences in Los Angeles, as well as direct contact with the dramatic inequity of the city's distribution of its resources.

2010 street protest following LAPD shooting of Manuel Jamines. He was killed a block from our field.

AYSO has a relatively new program designed to create play for the adults in its community. Our idea was to use that platform to give guys aging out of the youth leagues in the neighborhood a place to play 11 on 11, on this extraordinary (turf) field at Leichty Middle School.

Many (if not most) of the best fields in Los Angeles are owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District. There is no accessible, transparent system at LAUSD administering use of its fields by the city's diverse communities.

The field at this particular location was built via a partnership between LAUSD and AYSO. In the words of a 2007 memo regarding construction projects in the school district:

A joint use partnership...established the first AYSO program in the Pico-Union community. As part of their contribution, AYSO agreed to offer youth soccer programming to the students of John H. Leichty MS and the surrounding feeder schools for five years. LAUSD matched AYSO’s programmatic contribution with funding to install artificial turf on the school’s main field to facilitate year-round community programming. (See this 2007 memo from LAUSD on new construction.)

If I understand the nature of this agreement correctly (and I may not), AYSO did not contribute money to the construction of the field (it is not a rich organization), but instead promised volunteers. LAUSD built the field; AYSO members administer the field and run leagues when it is not being used by the school itself. As the above statement indicates, this resulted in the first AYSO program in that part of Los Angeles.

In learning about this usage agreement, I began to have my first questions.

The above language from the LAUSD sidesteps the following: There are leagues in that neighborhood, and they have been there for years. Thousands of people play in those leagues. Many are low-cost (if not free), some work with the LA 84 foundation (funded by the last Olympics to actually bring money into a host city), and some work through community centers and with local businesses. Some work entirely outside of grant structures; many have relationships with larger and national youth soccer organizations (like Cal South or the California Youth Soccer Association).

This is a big part of LA life - in this neighborhood, which is something like 85% Latino, fútbol is woven tightly into the fabric of its social life. It's not a forth sport here, it's not an underground scene or a subculture. It's the dominant and most visible sports scene and a defining part of the neighborhood's character.

Many of the neighborhood's leagues are, like AYSO, volunteer operations - one such league offers a women's division that fields more teams (at the youth and adult level) than does the Los Angeles Municipal Soccer League. These are "Latin" or "independent" leagues - the two terms are used almost interchangeably in California to describe the loose, disconnected network of leagues across the region where Spanish is the lengua franca, and the majority of players and spectators come from the city's immigrant communities. The soccer scene in this location is strong enough that El Salvador is sending its association's scouts there on June 2, 3 and 6th for a series of open try-outs for the women's U17, U19 and U23 squads.

Having played in a league affiliated with a community center in the same neighborhood (which also offered tutoring, arts classes and academic counseling), I was surprised to see LAUSD hand administration of the field to an organization that had little to no existing relationship to the location. Why would the LAUSD do this?

On the surface, this agreement seems to serve AYSO more than the neighborhood. Their interests are not necessarily opposed, of course. But the five-year usage agreement prevents existing leagues in the neighborhood from using one of the best fields in the city. Those leagues do play on other fields - but those fields are smaller, and at least one organizer can't get enough field time to offer its program's women 90 minute games. In order to meet demand, their matches are compressed to 60 minutes. This problem has only grown more complex, as the city strikes more and more such deals with AYSO. So, at the very least, when it comes to field access, the interests of AYSO are opposed to those of the existing non-profit leagues in the neighborhood. [Youth soccer organizations in LA's under-served communities include HOLA; Anahuak; Y.E.S.S. (Youth Empowerment through Sports and Scholastics); Compton United Soccer Club.]

AYSO provides a great point of entry into the game, and kids in that neighborhood need support. So do adults. (See this LA Times profile of the neighborhood's socioeconomic profile.) But, again, there are existing local collectives with much more articulated relationships to the community - why not work with them?

The "independent" leagues are mostly Spanish-speaking (bear in mind the vast majority of kids are fully bilingual); AYSO is not - it is not totally white, but it is a lot whiter and more middle-class than are the leagues which were already there. The median household income for residents in Pico Union is just over $26,000. The median household income for my neighborhood is just over $54,000 - about average for the city. My neighborhood has no single ethnic majority, but the largest group is Latino, at nearly 42%. AYSO has a stronger presence in Los Angeles in neighborhoods like mine, if not neighborhoods that are even better off. But they are working hard to change that - with programs like that in Pico Union, and in Watts (South Central is also home to some amazing leagues and talented youth players).

If you have the energy and drive, you can do a lot through AYSO. Although the AYSO adult program was not imagined as a host for the kind competitive play we wanted to promote, there was nothing in the institution's structure that said it couldn't be used for this purpose. And so we decided to try and get something going at this location. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was a colonial project, that my whiteness & class privilege were facilitating my access, but I also wanted access to this field.

A day in the brief life of the Union Football League

The field at 7th and Union is dreamy. The school offers benches and tables off the field where players often gathered for their pre-game meeting. Bathrooms, floodlights, covered parking - the facilities are perfect for a recreational league. That stretch of 7th Street is lined with 'Mom and Pop' stores - a panaderia, a café, a gym, a Pentecostal church, and Nikys Sports - an excellent soccer shop which fielded the strongest team in our first season.

It's nice to play right in the heart of things. In the evenings, music radiates out of the church. Pedestrians stop to watch matches from the sidewalk and often fetch wayward balls. People bring their families to games. Street vendors sell tacos, make passes with ice cream. Kids are everywhere. A fairly typical LA fútbol scene.

Union Football League played its first matches in February 2009 . We were immediately beset with problems. Some normal, as far as soccer goes, others less so.

Next in Soccer in the City of Angels: "You Don't Belong Here."

The Hangover: Soccer in the City of Angels, an Introduction

2011-05-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, we indulge in the pleasures of the beautiful game. On Sunday, we wake up with a global headache.

A collective romance with fair play grounds the entertainment value of sporting events. We love the idea of a level playing field, stories in which the best competitor wins, or in which the well-played match is its own reward. We love our team even when they don't bring home a trophy. But, oh, when they do! Messi is a gift from the heavens. His team is a family. Més que un club. Ferguson says "No one has given United a hiding like Barcelona did." Guardiola declares "This is the way we want to play." The world wraps itself in a cozy blanket, the story of the perfect game.

But even casual participation in sports forces a break with this illusion - racism, sexism and homophobia; economic manipulation of a team's "brand" and "value" at the expense of the team and its fans; the hyper-leveraging of club assets; doping, mismanagement, cronyism and bribery. What name is now on Barcelona's shirt?

What sport is "clean," really? Being a sports fan is a lesson in bi-polarity. Manic highs, paranoid frenzy, and then you throw out your television and hide from the game ruining your life.

Over the next couple weeks, I'll publish a series of articles describing my involvement with a local league here in Los Angeles. These articles are inspired by FIFA's shocking (and yet not surprising) decision to proceed with its election of a single candidate whom everyone knows is a corrupt, sexist and homophobic bastard. (At the moment, he is accused of condoning heavy bribery in the bidding process for future World Cups.) At today's press conference FIFA's Secretary General and Official Cynic (Jerome Valcke) said that this decision was made in the interest of the organization's stability. Of course it is.

We are all wondering how long this can go on - how long the international stewardship of the game will rest in the hands of liars and thieves.

FIFA's corruption unfolds alongside complaint and ethics charges. Our collective relationship to it looks a lot like what Slavoj Žižek calls "interpassivity," in which "we are active all the time in order to make sure nothing will happen, that nothing will really change." ("A Plea for Aggressive Passivity") We tweet, update our statuses, we sign petitions and complain - but we turn on the TV, we buy our tickets, we go to sports bars and cheer.

How long can FIFA sell itself to the world using a language of social good, of unity and community? When will the world wake up to the fact that it's been playing a shell game? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the shell game is what we want, after all.

As we ask for the king's head on a stick, we must also look closer to home and consider the game we say want, versus the game we actually play - the game we buy into, and sell out. That's the charge I've issued to myself....

Next: Usage Agreement

The Depression of a Super Falcons Fan

2011-05-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

Cary Leibowitz, Misery Pennants (1989)

By the end of the summer, I was in a dark place in relation to the men's game: unable to care about who wins what international tournament or league's season, because who cares what a bunch of spoiled brats do in the service of hyper-leveraged clubs that look more and more like individuated versions of the real estate bubble. You know what I did after the World Cup? I gave away my television.

I thought following the women's game would reconnect me with the pleasures of fandom, but I am afraid it's having the opposite effect. At the moment I am demoralized by the media's apathy regarding the fact that the Nigerian national team coach conducted an anti-lesbian purge. (She gave a talk about this at a Nigerian conference on women's football, this was reported in Nigerian media, but has yet to raise interest from the football community at large.)

FIFA recently featured the team on the front page for its website for the 2011 Women's World Cup. In that article the coach made statements regarding the "fitness" of notable players absent from her squad. Who can believe such statements? Isn't it wrong for FIFA to feature that kind of discourse from someone who has so obviously discriminated against her athletes? What does "fitness" mean in that context? This kind of "press" is not just irresponsible, it actually collaborates with the original discrimination. (Latest from Nigera: The team just failed to qualify for the All-Africa tournament. This does not bode well for the summer.)

Why isn't overt discrimination news when it's practiced in the women's game? Why aren't we talking about the impact of homophobia on the women's game? Perhaps because it would require sports media to confront its own homophobia.

Anti-homophobia activists in football seem primarily concerned with the men's game. One could argue, however, that homophobia has a much more global impact on the women's game. I mean "global" here in every sense - internationally, and holistically - from the lowest levels of the game to its highest, as the media and FIFA maintain a scrupulously polite silence about the fact that some of the most gifted athletes in the game identify as lesbian - some have girlfriends, some resist gender normativity in body and attitude (muscled, boyish, mannish, aggro, full of bravado), and these women have huge impacts on fans through what they achieve and represent.

For every story we encounter about a female athlete's marriage, or a baby born within a straight couple, there are more stories regarding momentous events in the lives of gay players that are not represented, because the mainstream media considers such stories unrepresentable. This is old news in women's sports - fans are fluent in reading the silence, the biographical editing which mediates their relationships to the players they cheer from the stands. NEVER seen a reference to a player's life beyond, say, her experiences playing as a kid with the boys? Well... A gay man in the sports world lives with a powerful, awful pressure demanding that he stay in the closet. A lesbian can live freely and relatively openly and we can trust the media do the closeting for her, on "our" behalf.

This leaves the marketing of women's soccer in the US particularly ineffective - claustrophobic and "old" or childish (and so "old" in its conceptualization of the consumer's relationship to childhood). It has yet to rise about the closeted mentality of another age. I just don't get it.

My mood is perhaps lifted by recent excellent coverage of homophobia in men's sports - most recently via the coming out of Rick Welts, owner of the Phoenix Suns. This is such a good story, a real chance to educate people.

The sexism of the world of sports is related to its homophobia; the feminism of women's sports spaces is related to the queerness of those space - which, given the sexism and homophopia of mainstream sports spaces, leaves little room for representing the specificity of the athletes in women's sports at all.

High time for change all around.

Cary Leibowitz, Homo State (1989)

Brutal Attacks on Black Lesbians in South Africa Continue, Three Years After Simelane's Murder

2011-04-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

I am re-posting a message I received this morning from the Forum for the Empowerment of Women in Johannesburg. Noxolo Nogwaza was raped and murdered this week, three years after the outcry over Eudy Simelane's murder should have brought these assaults to an end. Every few weeks, it seems, another woman is killed: Nokuthula Radebe, just 20 years old, was killed a month ago.

Ekurhuleni Pride Organizing Committee (EPOC) and the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL) call on all supporters for equality and dignity for all, to join us in specific actions calling for justice for slain lesbian, Noxolo Nogwaza and all the other LGBT people who have lost their dignity and lives on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity in South Africa.

Background

The body of Noxolo Nogwaza, a 24 year old lesbian, was found lying in an alley in Kwa-Thema at about 9am on Sunday, April 24 2011. Noxolo’s head was completely deformed, her eyes out of the sockets, her brain spilt, teeth scattered all around and face crashed beyond recognition. Police and other witnesses at the crime scene say that an empty beer bottle and used condoms were pushed up her genitals. Parts of her body had been stabbed with glass. A large pavement brick that is believed to have been used to crash her head was found by her side.

Noxolo was raped and murdered in a similar manner as that in which another member of EPOC was murdered, 3 years ago today. Eudy Simelane’s body was also found in an open field in Kwa-Thema. She had been raped and murdered, crimes that the perpetrators confessed to. Just last year, a gay man in the same township was attacked by eight men, who attempted to rape him. Luckily, he escaped the “vultures”. The men, as they attempted to rape him, were heard saying, “We are determined to kill all gay people in this area and we will do it.”

Noxolo will be laid to rest at a cemetery in Kwa-Thema on Saturday, April 30, 2011. EPOC and CAL call on all your support in this time of grief and shock. Please come and stand with us.

What can you do?

1. Come and join us as we lay Noxolo Nogwaza to rest. The funeral will take place in Kwa-Thema on Saturday, April 30, 2011. For those outside Gauteng and South Africa, you may send condolence messages that will be read out at the funeral to endhate@cal.co.za and wreaths/ flowers can be purchased online at www.netflorist.co.za for pick up on Saturday morning. Have them labeled EPOC for Noxolo and we will pick them up. For those around Gauteng, there will be a taxi to transport mourners to and from Constitutional Hill in Braamfotein and at the Baragwanath Taxi Rank, Soweto. Please be at your station by 7:30am on Saturday. Also confirm your attendance with Surprise@cal.org.za / 0733711556. The address of the home where the funeral will be held is 19206 JAQISA Str, Ext 6 in Kwa-Thema (behind BP Garage, Duduza Rank).

2. Call, fax or email Tsakane Police Station and demand for a speedy and thorough investigation into the rape and murder of Noxolo Nogwaza. The reference number of the case is 635/04/2011.
Tel: +27 11 363 5347/8/9
Fax: +27 11 363 3454
Email: Tsakane-saps@saps.org.za

3. Call, fax and/or email the South African Government and demand that they openly speak out and take action against the increasing violence towards LGBT people in South Africa. The contacts of the officials to contact are below;
His Excellency Jacob Zuma
President of the Republic of South Africa
Tel: +27 12 300 5200
Fax: +27 12 323 8246
Email: delsey@po.gov.za
His Excellency Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe
Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa
Tel: +27 12 300 0501/+27 21 464 2128
Fax: +27 12 323 3114
Email: malebo@po.gov.za
Mr. Jeffrey Thamsanqa Radebe
Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development
Tel: +27 12 357 8212/8217
Fax: +27 12 315 1749
Email: minprivatesec@justice.gov.za
Mr. Nathi Mthethwa
Minister of Police
Tel: +27 12 393 2810/2811
Fax: +27 12 939 2812
Gen. Bheki Cele
National Commissioner of Police
Tel: +27 12 393 2874
Fax: +27 12 393 1530
Email: mbathan@saps.gov.za

4. Hold demonstrations at South African Embassies in your countries demanding that they speak out against the increasing violence against LGBT people in South Africa. There will be national demonstrations held in South Africa before and on the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), come May 17, 2011 and we encourage that you hold a demonstration at the embassy around the same period.
For more information please contact:
1. Ntsupe
Chairperson, EPOC
Tel: +27 732 263 287
Email: ntsupe@mighty.co.za
---------------------------------------------------

2. Bontle
PRO, EPOC
Tel: +27 732 270 026
Email: bontle.khalo@yahoo.com
---------------------------------------------------

3. Victor Mukasa
Project Coordinator, Human Rights Defenders project
Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL)
Tel: +27 784 363 635
Email: victor@cal.org.za

US Soccer Fans: Actually, You Are Quite Divisible

2011-04-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

As the fanfare surrounding the launch of a new uniform for the US Men's National Team died down, Nike quietly released the new uniform for the US Women's National Team - Is this the outfit the women will wear to Germany as they fight for the 2011 World Cup championship?

A USWNT shirt can always be distinguished from the USMNT shirt by the two stars that the women's shirt prominently displays over the USSF badge - one star for each World Cup trophy they've won (1991, 1999). That difference is not enough for Nike and the USSF. They want you to know, for sure, that this is a not a man's shirt. So the FIFA #1 ranked women's team will go to the Germany in a nurse's uniform.

This is quite simply the ugliest women's football jersey I have ever seen. It's central problem is the line someone has drawn down middle of the shirt - a purely decorous gesture meant to create the impression that the USSF would like its women to play in an open necked blouse.

The uniform is an expression an ongoing effort to divorce the "branding" of the men's team from the legacy of the USWNT circa 1999 (when they last won the World Cup). In doing so, they create a host of problems for those of us who are USWNT and USMNT fans.

For example, women fans are supposed to buy separate shirts to show support for the men's team and for the women's team. Fine - I like those two stars, and I also support the men's team with or without those stars. But men who support both? Unless they want to look like a female jock dressed like a nurse, and they happen to also be small enough to fit in the limited sizes on offer, guys who support the USWNT won't have an option. Which is just as well - because Nike doesn't deserve money from us, for this and a thousand other reasons.

Very few countries offer totally different "looks" for the national uniforms for their men and their women's teams. Part of this is because very few care enough about their women's teams to even consider this. But perhaps it is also because women playing for Brazil (for example) represent that country's futebol tradition, and their style is as much a testament to the legacy of players like Pele, Garrincha, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho as it is to their triumph over the sexism of the country's futebol structures. It's a reminder that one ought not divide the women from the men, as if they play different sports - as if they don't admire and inspire each other on and off the pitch.

Germany and Adidas have gone down the same road as the USSF and Nike, and launched a new "look" for the Frauen:

Germany Men's Team, Away

Germany Women's Team, Away

I can't see why one would want to back away from the bad-ass look of the men's away kit, except in order to "feminize" the women's shirt. As is the case for fans of the USWNT, there is no man's option for fans of the Frauen - as a guy, you either wear that black shirt (for the men), or you wear a shirt cut for a slightly curvy woman. I should say, a lot of women fans don't particularly like these feminized designs: there is something fundamentally irritating about them.

It is one thing to build a shirt to be more comfortable for a woman (women fans who want such shirts can buy them to show their support for men's teams). It is quite another to design a shirt whose primary design function seems to be not the declaration "We are our country's national team," but the anxious apology "We are not the men's team." There is no real purpose to the difference in look other than the re-enforcement of gender division - as if the difference between three and two stars (Germany) and zero and two (the US) were not enough. And this all has really crappy implications regarding male fans of national women's teams, who are completely ignored as active participants in the women's game - the implication is that being a fan of the women's game is basically a form of cross-dressing. Which, in a way (the way of gender and sports politics), I guess it is.

But at least Germany's kit still looks like a football jersey. This is not something I can say about the USWNT uniform.

Maybe we can recover our relationship to that look by imagining it as "heads up" to the competition: By the time the USWNT get through with them, they'll be calling for an ambulance. Not quite the spirit I associate with the squad - Abby Wambach, perhaps, excepted.

One Nation, Indivisible?: Rebranding American History (#redallover)

2011-03-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

The United States Soccer Federation has revealed a new uniform and a new motto to go with it: "Indivisible." The single world slogan is the product of a "crowd sourcing" campaign, in which fans were encouraged to submit their ideas to team-sponsor Nike. Dubbed "Red All Over," the project created a lot of buzz and raised a big question: Why would the USSF want to replace the old motto, "Don't Tread on Me"?

Grant Wahl suggested (via Twitter) that the Red All Over re-branding was provoked by The Tea Party's appropriation of the colonial image of a coiled rattlesnake and "Don't Tread on Me" as its official emblem. (He also explained that "Yes we can" - another popular suggestion - is similarly partisan.) I can imagine a number of factors prompted this campaign, but this suggestion stands to reason and Wahl is as good authority on this matter as any.

Perhaps I just want to believe that the USSF is purposefully taking a step to disassociate itself with what the Tea Party represents.

The need to refuse any identification with the increasingly fascistic character of the anti-immigrant far right is particularly important for US soccer fans, given the political and social diversity of its community of players and fans. The sport has long been identified as an immigrant sport (which masks the very high profile of immigrant families in other sports, like baseball), it is played and watched by women (and this is a distinctive aspect of soccer culture in the US), and it is the one major sport in the US that is not isolationist - our participation in football culture expresses a desire for a relationship with the rest of the world, and we enter into that playing field not as a powerhouse, but as a respected, and hard-working side. (This is slightly different for the women, but more and more, the women's team is one good team among other good teams - a fact that fans celebrate.)

Before looking more closely at what that word "Indivisible" represents, let's consider the emblem the USSF has put to bed. As most readers well know, that emblem has a long and rich history - which is exactly why the Tea Party is drawn to it.

There are two separate aspects to the core image for this emblem - the image of the rattlesnake, and the motto. The conjunction of the two in a flag dates to 1775: the "Gadsden Flag" was flown on the flagship for the newly formed "Continental Navy" and found on revolutionary Marine corp drums - this image in fact still functions as an emblem for the U.S. Marine Corp.

Gadsden Flag, as we know it today.

Rattlesnakes appear all over colonial culture: on coins, flags, and in writing about American identity. They are paired with different slogans: In an 1751 political cartoon authored by Benjamin Franklin, "Join, or Die" captioned the image of a snake cut into pieces - a reference to the need for the colonies to band together in opposition to colonial power. In other images (e.g. the flag for the Culpeper Minutemen) the snake is coupled with the stark declaration: "Liberty or Death."

Benjamin Franklin's 1751 political cartoo

The venomous rattler is native to the Americas: this is the primary reason they emerge as a symbol of opposition and independence. Benjamin Franklin helped its career along with an essay, "The Rattlesnake as a Symbol of America" (1775). His observations in that essay help explain why it is still a compelling symbol for certain kinds of political formations - but they also suggest that its appropriateness as a symbol for the US soccer team is perhaps mixed, at best. In his view, it is an elegantly defensive reptile: "ever vigilant," "she never begins an attack," he observed, "nor, once engaged, ever surrenders." The snake, as he characterizes her, is wholly defensive - the rattles are there to warn "stay away," what poisons others is necessary to her survival. This makes a lot of sense as a military emblem (even if it conflicts with the US's post WWII "preemptive strike" ethos). The image is both nativist (in the right wing-sense) and isolationist.

In 1751, however, he used the same snake in an entirely different kind of polemic. Responding the practice of shipping felons to the New England colonies, Franklin suggested sending rattlesnakes across the Atlantic as a fair exchange: "this exporting of felons to the colonies, may be considered as a trade, as well as in the light of a favor. Now all commerce implies returns: justice requires them: there can be no trade without them. And rattle-snakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by out mother country." He goes on to say that England gets the better half of the trade, for at least the snake gives a warning before it strikes. Here the rattlesnake does not represent the colonists - it represents in fact a toxic element that endangers colonial health. Unfortunately, today we see Franklin's polemic cited by anti-immigrant groups - who are always on the hunt for bits of American history which they might re-purpose in order to legitimize reactionary politics.

Complicating this story is another national emblem involving a snake:

Mexico's coat of arms has its own complicated history - it is an appropriation of an image embodying the founding myth of Tenochtitlan - Mexico City. The cactus represents the island on which the city was built, and the eagle stands for the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. Within that tradition, the snake signals Coatlicue - who is something like "mother earth." From what I can tell (and I am far from an expert on Mesoamerican icons), the image of the snake being devoured is a colonial hybrid - a transposition of Judeo-Christian mythology onto a Tenochtitlan origin story. This may be why the Mexican football federation emblem does not feature said snake. El Tri may want to recuperate the hybrid image, however, as a nod to its border rivalry. Or not.

In any case, the rattlesnake is not much of a team player, it has a shady history, and it appears on the Mexico's flag, caught in Huitzilopochtli's beak. Not a place the USSF wants to be, really. But I digress: By losing the snake, the USSF is disassociating itself from Tea Party politics, and in choosing this word "Indivisible," it is also trying to disentangle itself from the generally hateful nature of nationalist rhetoric.

"Indivisible" is not an uncomplicated choice, however. The word is a clear reference to the pledge of allegiance - written in the 1890s by Francis Bellamy, a Socialist minister. (Yes, you read that right.) The original pledge went roughly like this:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

It was first read to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage, and it was written - of course - in a wave of nationalist panic, formed in reaction to immigration patterns and the changing demographics of the U.S. That pledge was used in schools until the 1920s, when it was revised slightly to read:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

The phrase "one nation under God" was inserted in 1954. Incredibly, given the name for Nike's campaign (Red All Over), this was during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, and was done as a way to distinguish the U.S. from "godless communists."

Adding to yet another layer of complexity and ambivalence to this story: the word "indivisible" is a clear reference to the Civil War: It is an assertion of the triumph of "union" over secession - but, as is the way of such things, in asserting the indivisibility of the nation, the pledge of allegiance raises the specter of disunion as a latent possibility.

Which brings us back around to the current state of affairs. The assertion of "Indivisible" as the national team's motto could not be more apt, for, in signaling the team's unity as its strength, the USSF is doing so precisely in reaction against the culture of hate and fear propagated by the far right, in a campaign provoked by that movement's theft of the team's motto.

"Indivisible" is quite literally the least divisive (or do I mean divisible?) of the proposed slogans entertained seriously by Nike and the US Soccer Federation. That said, no slogan or motto for a national team will ever banish the sinister shadow of nationalism's enterprise.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (1989-90)

FALW Women's World Ranking

2011-03-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

FIFA's latest ranking of women's national teams has just been released. As I can't figure out how the hell FIFA ranks the US Women's National Team #1 and places Nigeria below, say, Scotland, I figured I should post my own purely intuitive ranking.

My top 15:

     1           Germany

     2           Canada

     3           Brazil

     4           USA

     5           Nigeria

     6           Japan

     7           South Korea

     8           England

     9           Sweden

     10         Mexico

     11         Australia

     12         France

     13         Colombia

     14         Norway

     15        North Korea

Mind you, this is pure polemics. But I do actually think Canada looks stronger than the US. Mexico surely looks stronger than Iceland. To my fellow bloggers: I await your rankings - they will surely be more informative than the crap statistics that FIFA puts out.

In the Game: Documentary on impact of Title IX needs our support!

2011-03-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

I'm really excited by In the Game. This film by the producers of Hoop Dreams looks the realities of the highest levels of professional women's sports and the daily grind of girls fighting for access to training and facilities at especially urban high schools. From a leader in the WNBA, "Our biggest challenge is media coverage." Good segment at about 9 minutes in this clip on unbelievably sexist attitudes which define sports media. But this story is centered not on that shitty fact, but on the people who play, coach and manage women's sports. Watch this!

Ball & Chain: Notes on Anne Hathaway, James Franco & the Oscars

2011-03-06T08:10:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with soccer. I wrote this rant last weekend and posted on my facebook page. Some readers asked that I post it here. I'll be back to soccer stories as soon as I put the manuscript I'm finishing in the mail!

Anne Hathaway's performance as an Oscars co-host was heroic. When one focuses on her performance, the whole ceremony takes on a surreal aspect. Take the ULTRA real dynamic of soporific Franco and hysterical Hathaway: This was a rather extraordinary performance of a high-energy female/femme dragging the sad-dog-weight of her man behind her. It is the flipside of sexist narratives about the “ball-and-chain” in which women hold men back, rather than prop them up (as is, well, more usually the case).

My favorite study on sexism and the academy: according to an analysis of gender and faculty promotion at the University of California, the people most likely to advance are men with wives. Then men without wives, then women without husbands, then women with husbands. I could not see from this study if they accounted for same sex couples, or the ways in which being gay/lesbian might impede one’s progress in such a hetero-dynamic system. In any case, I think we can all agree that, according to such studies, one is “better off” having and not being the wife.

Anne Hathaway showed us how true this is - the mere presence of that man standing next to her impedes our ability to value her work. And it was pretty clear to me, at least, that her performance itself was commenting on this.

On Her Own

For example: In a deeply ironic moment she took the stage in a tux to sing “On My Own.” The song choice, she explained, was a reference to her all-too brief appearance on stage with Hugh Jackman in another Oscar ceremony – she had been plucked from the audience to sing a duet, in which they adopted the identities of Frost and Nixon. There was a hell of a queer subtext to that performance, given the take on Jackman and his having just belted out some fabulous gay-positive, out-loud-and-proud lyrics about Milk. Hathaway said she’d hoped the actor would perform with her this year, but he’d bailed at the last minute. She might well have been talking about Franco: Franco's non-performance was by this point in the broadcast clear to everyone in the audience.

Franco gave us plenty of warnings, including his recent discussion of "bad acting" and performance - a line of thought/fascination I pursued in my work own on Andy Warhol, esp in the introduction to Pop Out (co-authored with José Muñoz and Jonathan Flatley). As we worked on that project we talked explicitly about Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix et al in relation to the performances in Warhol's films.

Eventually, I felt that in my own work I could not talk about the performances of Joe Dallesandro etc without acknowledging the hyper-active energy that is produced by the women around those underperforming men. At times last night I felt like I was watching "Bike Boy" - in one infamous scene Warhol instructed Joe Spencer (Bike Boy) to ignore Ingrid Superstar, she tries for a minute to get his attention and then just fills the rest of the time with nearly diassociated babble while he stares off into space and strokes his manly arms every now and again. It took me a while to understand that the film is not about Bike Boy at all, but about the gay men and women around Bike Boy. Bike Boy is a void. Reeves and Phoenix in their own way played with that dynamic in their films - and in a queer setting one can. But in the straight-jacketed public sphere, it just reads as so much more heterosexuality. As women basically doing all the work, and getting none of the recognition.

Which brings me back to Hathaway. Taking the stage as if one's been left at the altar is an old gag: The performer sets herself up as abandoned, standing before her audience if she’d been left there alone and unloved. She proceeds to seduce an entire theater. This kind of performance toggles back and forth between “nobody loves me” and “love me or else." The genre has been remastered by diverse figures - Judy Garland and daughter Liza, but also Sandra Bernhard (e.g. “Without You I’m Nothing”). That dynamic shapes some of the most compelling queer performance, in which the artist emerges as both intensely vulnerable and invincible. (eg Franko B's "I Miss You!" or just about everything from Dynasty Handbag.)

THIS, I think, is why when Franco walked out in drag, it seemed like such a failure: not just because he was styled in a jokey sort of drag more apropos of a Judd Apatow movie than a drag club, but because "showy" Hathaway was always already working drag territory.

It would have been amazing if they’d found a way to give Franco the same kind of elegance that Hathaway has in a lady-tux – but that would have perhaps been too risky for the Oscars, as it’d have required making him look both gay and hot. Given who we are talking about here, that should have been easy. Instead, he looked like the next chapter of Hollywood's drag devolution (Jack Lemmon to Robin Williams to James Franco, each one being a worse version of his drag-as-gag predecessor). A more visionary look would surely have brought Franco's appearance in drag closer to Kalup Linzy's zone, and it might have allowed us to see Franco's look in relation to Hathaway's. For Linzy’s "bad drag" looks nothing like what Franco did last night. Linzy's version of drag is queer assemblage of signs. He doesn’t look any more “natural” or “realistic” in drag than did Franco – but he inhabits drag, fully, in a dialogue that makes sex and gender and race come alive, and feel both real and unsettled. That is no easy thing to do. And it is way more than a matter of his outfit.

The fact of the matter is that in last night’s performance the person on stage closest to Kalup Linzy’s universe was Anne Hathaway – producing a theatrical, desperate and frankly scary version of feminine performance, not just alone, but in compensation for someone else's failure - as if, if she worked hard enough, nobody would feel Franco's absence. As if, if she worked hard enough, it would feel like her presence mattered. As if, to matter, her performance must anchor his.

She was not being the person who could care less, but the person who cares too much. The less Franco put out, the more she had to make up for it. The worse his performance became, the more it obliterated hers. Because when we wake up in the morning, who is the press talking about? Not the show's "wife", but the show's drag - the sad-dog manchild bringing everybody down. Fine, that's what the media does.

The whole point of performance studies for me is not that it enables actors to expand their practice into the artworld. Although that’s an interesting effect, actors never needed the discipline of performance studies to do that (a few names at random: Andy Kauffman, Sandra Bernhard, Ann Magnuson). Performance studies, however, does give us a few tools for considering the political dimensions of moments like these, and resisting mass media's flow.

Female actors with comic sensibilities and wit are particularly hard for Hollywood to accommodate these days. Things on this point have not gotten better but worse. At least we have Tina Fey, and why isn't she hosting or better, writing - the show?

Hathaway’s performances (as, for example, The Brown Duck) were eye-opening. They gestured to a Hollywood legacy otherwise completely ignored by last night’s nostalgic gestures to its own past. Comic geniuses like Lucile Ball and Carol Burnett never hosted the Oscars alone (Ball never hosted at all). Many women have taken the stage as hosts, but nearly all were required to share it.*

Few have been allowed to be on her own. Perhaps in singing that song, Hathaway was trying to tell us something.

There are plenty of goofy, smart, chatty showboats out there in ballgowns. Not only does Anne Hathaway not need a straight man to make her audience laugh, that straight man is the very thing that’s holding her back.

*Note: For the record, many women have worked as co-hosts: Thelma Ritter in 1954; Claudette Colbert in 1955; Celeste Holme in 1957; Helen Hayesin 1972; Carol Burnett in 1973; Diana Ross in 1973; Shirley MacLain in 1974; Goldie Hawn in 1975; Ellen Burstyn and Jane Fonda in 1976; Lina Minelli in 1982; Jane Fonda in 1985; Goldie Hawn in 1986. (Thanks Wikipedia.) To date, Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopie Goldberg are the only women to have hosted alone, in the show's entire history. Goldberg hosted the show a rather miraculous four times.

Barely related to sport: Queer Fantasy Football Meeting

2011-02-19T13:06:00.000-08:00

Here's one for the art + music + football archives. Johan Renck's video for The Knife's "Pass This On" (2003). Concept: Annual meeting for the local football club has the best entertainment ever. The guy flirting with the singer and the woman sitting at the table are the electronic duo's brother and sister Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson.

A little information about Ultras fan clubs in Egypt

2011-02-01T09:55:00.000-08:00

Egypt's football fan clubs are figuring prominently in stories about the current uprising. For readers wanting to learn more about the Ultras in Egypt and their role in the uprising, here are a few links:

James M. Dorsey, "Soccer Fans Play Key Role in Egyptian Protests" (readers of this blog will not be surprised, as this is a fairly consistent topic in writing about the sport and politics).

The Football Scholars Forum posted a link to that story and to this BBC interview with David Goldblatt (of The Ball is Round): The Secret Policeman's Football.

In 2007, Tom Dunmore posted a series of articles on Pitch Invasion about "Ultras" - a genre of football fan club, characterized by intense organization, often somewhat militaristic structures and overtly political ideologies. The series includes this photo essay from one of the founders of Egypt's first Ultras group - Ultras Ahlawy.

An interesting 2009 Al Jazeera article about football and nationalism, The Politics of Sporting Rivalry, written by the author of The Angry Arab News Service.

I will post more articles when I find them.

There are lots of videos of the Ultras Ahlawy on youtube, highlighting their actions at matches. I've included a few turned up by a simple search.

The USSF announced its cancellation of the men's friendly match in Egypt (scheduled for Feb 9) in a very neutral press release.

Do You Get Rape-y Comments Too?: On Sexism & Sports Media

2011-01-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

So the "story" of sexism in football culture finally "broke." We have ample footage of Sky Sports commentators Richard Keys and Andy Gray indulging in sexist "banter." From their recent remarks about Sian Massey, to jokes about "smashing it", and a video of the two of them breaking out into giggles (on camera) while reporting on the 1998 women's FA Cup final, we have a veritable archive of evidence demonstrating that sexism animates the way they think, talk and behave.

Anyone who has spent time with football knows full well how sexism and homophobia are seamlessly integrated into sports culture. The banter in which Grey and Keys engaged, a lighthearted exchange of insults to women (or gay men), helps them cement their relationship to each other. It's the sexist handshake - one of the most banal rituals through which members of the boys club identify themselves to each other. (Hi, are you a sexist? Yes! Great! Let's get to work!) This sort of thing forces everyone around them to adopt one of three positions: be complicit and go along with it, leave the room (a passive form of complicity), or protest at the risk of losing one's job and becoming the punch-line of another joke.

As a fan, a player, as a ref or an administrator we are bombarded with statements that are so outrageously sexist they wouldn't be tolerated in any other sphere. How many times have we heard "nobody really likes women's football" or "women can't play in goal"? These are "polite" versions of the Grey and Keys routine leaked by Sky Sports staff. People take the abjection of women's sports as such a given that the declaration that "women's football is boring" is totally uncontroversial - though when you stop and think about it, that statement actually does as much to replicate sexist structures of thought and power as the remarks about "smashing it."

If people think women's football is boring, it's because it's played by amateur athletes who do not have the benefit of the training offered men. It's because when people watch the rare match broadcast on television, there is hardly anyone in the stands - why go, if you've already decided you'll be bored? In the U.S. most local papers do not publish match times or match results for women's games (even those played at the highest level). Traditional sports media is so hostile to the women's game that the US pro league and its fans rely ENTIRELY on new media forms of micro-broadcasting (e.g. Twitter) for information about the season. These are our most reliable sources of information about our teams.

We would be burying our heads in the sand if we didn't see these egregiously sexist remarks as on a continuum with the sports media's black-out on covering women's sports - both are structured by sexist "common sense."

As has been reported by The Guardian, the Sky incidents were not exceptional, but typical of the work environment at the network. And that working environment is not an exception, but rather a mirror of media representations of sports culture as an all-male universe - played by men, watched by men, managed by men.

Strangely enough, when that story broke I was working on a blog post about the sexist insults I've received since I started writing about this sport. The whole topic got me so down, I put the article aside. This Sky Sports debacle pushed me to return to it:

"Do you get rape-y comments too?"

I often ask this question of fellow female sports bloggers. We then swap stories - our experiences with sexist and homophobic vitriol is connected to our commitments to our blogs as spaces to which sports fans can turn when they want or need something less violently sexist than mainstream spaces. We seem more likely to receive comments laced with a rhetoric of sexual violence when readers experience our writing as feminist - and it doesn't take that much for some to reach that trigger point. Sometimes, just knowing our gender is enough.

When I first started this blog in 2007, I cross-posted a few articles with Soccer Lens. (Warning: I can't write this without recycling obscene and offensive language.) I admit my first post was a full-on feminist polemic, in which I questioned media dismay at the baldy sexist and abusive behavior of Man U players at what became known as the team's "Christmas Rape Party" (thank you British Tabloid culture). It's a patriarchal organization, I wrote - just look at how they treated their women's team (abysmally) - and I went on to suggest that the "rape party" incident was just the worst example of a much bigger, and deeper problem in British football culture. (Is that point really controversial?)

It was one of the most "aggressive" things I've written. The comments posted to Soccer Lens nevertheless rattled me. I expected insults and criticism. But more than one comment was sexually violent in its language - I recall one that mapped out a rape fantasy (involving a female soccer player). Anal rape seemed to be a preoccupation with posters.

More upsetting than these comments was the fact that I had to point out that these comments were offensive - the blog was moderated, and someone at Soccer Lens had approved them for publication. The site's editor was sincerely apologetic.

But the fact that I had to explain that those comments were offensive was so demoralizing I made a decision to stay away from mosh pits like Soccer Lens and Big Soccer. Life is too short, and there is a bigger need, in my view, for abuse-free zones like this blog. I now sometimes cross post with Pitch Invasion, and I share my articles with Women Talk Sports.

Last year, a Pitch Invasion reader posted a zinger in response to my article there on The Damned United (the site's editor deleted the remark):

"Just a silly stupid little split arse tart spouting about something it knows nothing about. Go back to playing with your Barbie dolls dumb arse fucker"

There is nothing about Pitch Invasion that would have encouraged this reader to think such a remark was acceptable. What really shocked me was his use of "it" instead of "she" - I'd never heard this, except as spoken by the psycho in Silence of the Lambs ("it puts the lotion on its skin"), and then recently as spoken by Richard Keys.

Fortunately, From a Left Wing readers really don't write stuff like that. I do get surprising comments from wayward readers intent on demonstrating to me that men are "better" than women (faster, stronger, more interesting). I delete a fair amount of those. Nothing makes me happier than knowing I am doing my small part to confine such thoughts to oblivion.

Jeff Pearlman, a columnist for Sports Illustrated has written an article for CNN about the internet "trolls" - the people who jump into public forums and call people "fucking retards" and worse. He tracked down a couple recent offenders, and was surprised to discover they were decent guys - sports fans who turn up the volume on their comments because they don't feel like anyone is really listening anyway (or that this is the only way to be "heard" - by which I assume they mean "noticed").

I couldn't really relate to his article. Because the guy who called me a "split arse tart" is probably a "nice guy". That's the thing about sexism, homophobia and racism. It's not the exclusive property of assholes. Most of the people who engage in these cultures of hate and discrimination are not obvious monsters. They are normal people.

The worst offenders are probably "great guys" AND sexist pigs. Richard and Andy meant no harm with their sexist banter, and Sky didn't take the culture of its workplace seriously because it's just boys being boys. And maybe the fact that these boys are doing it with a smile and no deliberate malice makes it worse.

The racist equivalent of this stuff is generally seen as "worse" in sports culture. And I guess that makes sense. Where most sports cultures have had to take on their racist administrators, fans, and athletes they have yet to confront their sexism. Men of color are at least seen as athletes. Of course in a broader racist culture determined to lock men into their bodies this becomes another turn in racist discourse. But in sports culture, women are not only not seen as athletes - they are not even really seen as people. As my previous post points out, women are quite literally treated as a different species in sports culture. In this sense, sexism is the new racism.

Sexism and homophobia are both openly expressed within the most professional halls of sports culture - by Sepp Blatter on down. Blatter asserts that gay people planning to attend the World Cup in Qatar just shouldn't have sex, and he giggles on saying this. And then reporters giggle. Because, you, know, there's so much to find funny in Blatter's homophobia and in the deep history of homophobia in football culture (as a few have pointed out, the last time the World Cup was in England, homosexuality was criminalized in that country).

In the US Brett Favre is in a shitstorm of trouble (finally) over his harassment of any woman, it seems, who dared to cross his path in a professional capacity. That situation was created by the Jets and by the NFL - however - as neither organization seems to have respected the most basic EEOC guidelines regarding discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Ines Sainz gracefully put up with the offensive behavior of Jets players, because you have to if you are going to work in sports media, and you have the misfortune of having tits. Female sports reporters "lucky" enough to get a job have to wait for the lack of professionalism with which they are treated to get caught on camera - and for someone else to leak that "story" - before anyone steps in to moderate the bastards.

The only thing that bothers me more than the story of Andy Grey, Richard Keys and the sexist handshake is the hypocrisy of the media that acts as if has nothing to do with creating the world within which such behavior is not only tolerated, but imagined as defining sports culture itself.

It is not incidental that this was provoked by the spectacle of a woman working in football. For, really, this - the image of a woman participating in the sport is the real problem. We see all too few of those images - because a sexist common sense makes such images seem ridiculous too all too many people.

When I see The Guardian, Sky Sports and the BBC reporting on the hard stories in women's sports (such as the mismanagement and corruption that limits international development of the women's game, or the struggles attending to the professionalization of women's soccer, or the impact of the sexist attitudes on the management and development of the women's game, or the accusations of harassment directed at national team managers in a range of sports) I'll believe that there actually has been a crisis of conscience in sports media, and that the times are actually changing.

Note to espnW: a woman is not a horse

2010-12-31T17:14:00.000-08:00

Zenyatta: "Am I not a woman and a horse?"

ESPN recently launched a website for women sports fans, espnW. Today the site listed its top ten stories in women's sports. In cooking up this list, ESPN adopted a flexible definition of the category "woman" by including Zenyatta, the horse, as #4.

Setting aside the rather large problem regarding the network's confusion regarding the category "woman," the list is a rather bland summary of accomplishments. The biggest stories are not always the ones we want to hear - a real list of the biggest stories for women in sports would include a mix of the good and the bad. I've approached this from a journalism standpoint, and have forwarded a few of the stories that I think are most important. This is quite different from listing accomplishments of female athletes.

Mary Kom wins 5^th women’s world boxing championship. Indian women dominate the sport and are poised to bring the first Olympic gold medal to the country in the London Olympics.
Two South African players charge national women's team coach with sexual harassment – accuse coach of prowling dormitory at night and dropping players from the squad who reject his advances.
U Conn claims record for longest winning streak in basketball – Stanford claims honor of breaking 90 game run. Meanwhile the accomplishments of the individual athletes (most notably Maya Moore) are ignored in end-of-the-year awards for athletes.
FC Gold Pride - possibly the best women's club team ever assembled - wins season, and folds: WPS is the most competitive professional women’s soccer league in the world, but struggles to win sponsors and is overwhelmed by media blackout.
Nigerian women’s soccer team become first African [women's] team ~~of either gender~~ to play in a World Cup Final – as the national association is swamped in scandal, their remarkable achievement goes unnoticed.
Mexico beats the US women's national soccer team in a crucial World Cup qualifying match. Sends the latter to a desperate play-off with Italy, and initiates what fans hope will be an extension of the infamous border rivalry in the men's game to the women's game.
Ines Sainz harrassed by New York Jets, international coverage of story revives sexist attitudes about women journalists and sports coverage. Brett Favre sends explicit pictures and texts to hostess working for Jets, given a slap on the wrist fine by the NFL.
Serena Williams wins 4th Wimbleton singles trophy, breaks tournament record with 89 aces across her career. 13th title puts her 6th in list of grand slam champions.
ESPN names horse as a top story in women's sports. We LIKE horses. That doesn't MAKE us horses.

[Since publishing this, I wrote a mildly satirical post for The Guardian's "Comment is Free" page: ESPN makes mare's nest of women in sport. I think I do my best work in the comments section.]

BBC story on Mary Kom, 5 time Women's World Boxing Championship, from Manipur, India

Dancing with India's Football Star

2010-12-29T14:01:00.000-08:00

In the interest of keeping things light, here are some highlights from the 2009 season of India's Dancing with the Stars. The winner that year was Baichung Bhutia, the country's most accomplished footballer. Bhutia is responsible for forming a player's union in India and is a public figure in the best sense - using his celebrity to raise money for good causes, taking stands on issues that matter to him (like Tibetan independence), and devoting much time and energy to the development of resources for Indian soccer players. Bhutia was just named captain for his team's Asia Cup campaign.

The challenges of Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa are really fun to watch. Celebrities are paired with renown Bollywood choreographers who are stars in their own right. The judges are hilarious and make me wish I understood Hindi. The 2009 season was also notable for featuring Hard Kaur, India's first female hip hop star.

Bhutia appears at about 3:30 min.

Bhutia appears at about 3:50, and is totally charming as he takes ribbing for his lack of facial expressions.

Holiday Cheer: a football music mix

2010-12-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

In the interest of spreading holiday cheer, a mix of the amusing, the interesting & the sublime:

New Order, The World In Motion. Produced for England's 1990 World Cup campaign, it features John Barnes singing along and rapping at about 2:30. (He's not bad!) Is it my imagination, or were footballers goofier circa 1990?

Richy Pitch f. M.anifest, Blackstar. I've posted references to Football Jama before - one of my absolute favorite football-inspired songs. This track is only tangentially related to football. Pitch spent two years in Ghana, absorbing the scene into his music practice. It's a sweet video, and a great song. Ghana, I think, has produced more songs inspired by its national team than any other country - aside from Brazil, that is.

On the subject of Brazil: Elis Regina, Meio de Campo. This would be what I meant by sublime:

TWO players collaborated on this gem. Basile Boli and Chris Waddle both played at Olympique de Marseille and apparently bonded over a love of pop music. You can see the latter commenting for ESPN.

Neeraj Shrindhar, Ishq Ka Kalma. This is from the 2007 Bollywood film Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal. I do not know where to start. I love everything about it, especially the backup dancers - women in football kits. Not sexed up costumes, but football kits. Minus the shoes - because you really can't dance like that in football boots. Note the number of hits this video has had: 1.1 million at last check. (See this clip, of Billo Rani from the same film - actually, just see the film - you can watch it instantly on Netflix.)

Last and certainly least: Football and Music pointed me to Alleluia, a 1986 Italian Christmas charity record featuring "The Football Stars" - all players active in the Italian league, including Ruud Gullit and Michel Platini. I would describe the recording as plodding, and labored. Seems to have been inspired by "We Are the World" (which was recorded in 1985). Some lovely football nut recorded this off Italian TV, but could only take 4:17 of it - the video cuts out before the song's no doubt awful conclusion.

Buon Natale!

Good Intentions: notes on the WPS as cause & business

2010-12-22T23:20:00.000-08:00

Stuff you won't see on TV (Brazil v Canada)
Photo by Sereias da Vila

It's been a harrowing month for fans of women's soccer. This year's WPS champions, FC Gold Pride, folded. The team is thought to be one of the best assembled, but the club's backers were not prepared to weather more years of financial loss. The Chicago Red Stars - which has a strong fan base - announced that they were suspending operations for the upcoming season. No one expected to break even in the league's first few years, but few expected to lose the money they are losing - the league has yet to recover from the impact of global economic disaster. I think lots of us can relate to that. Other teams will come into the league but the upcoming season only features six sides, all on the east coast. That said, there may be two teams from California entering the league in two years and there are rumors of Santos supporting a US-based sister team. And much of the news on the international level is good: better competition (e.g. Brazil and Canada's recent performances in São Paolo) will make for an exciting World Cup.

As all this unfolds, sports journalists quite rightly turn their attention to the Women's Professional Soccer league and offer up their diagnoses for its rocky start. There are a lot of good takes on the league's struggles, and the more we have, the better. (All White Kit is my go-to blog for all thing women's soccer.) Of course, I'd trade those grim end-of-the-season stories for regular, consistent coverage of women's soccer throughout the season.

In the reporting on the WPS that we do have, there is one kind of observation I could do without. Noah Davis, in his mostly on-point diagnosis of the state of women's soccer in the US, points to a tweet from a Washington Post journalist:

Steve Goff...noted, "WPS is becoming a cause instead of a business. Can't sustain a pro sports league on good intentions." His thoughts echo those of many who cover the sport.

I've lost track of how many times I've read or heard some version of this statement in discussions of women's soccer, and witnessed these nods of recognition and agreement.

From Puma/WPS 2010 ad campaign

I would like to ask where this sense of "cause" is coming from, and why it feels like such a burden to these folks. The WPS marketing budget is so miniscule that one can hardly assert that any fan of women's soccer has been overwhelmed by its message. That message has, in my experience, tried in fact to stay as far from "cause" as possible. (This ad is my favorite.) But of course, the "cause" is always there in women's sports. Whether it's spoken or not.

Being a fan of women's soccer - hell, nearly any women's sport - means that some part of what you do becomes feminist, whether you identify yourself with that word or not. I don't have a problem with feeling like the WPS is a cause. Fans actually connect around "cause" more than "business" - the cause is what gets us to the game, the business is what makes us complain about the price of the ticket.

And there is something obnoxious about the statement "Can't sustain a pro sports league on good intentions." It is just a tweet, but it does seem to capture a broader "common sense." Let's look at the NFL as a model for what happens when you throw out "good intentions" and embrace the logic of "business." We could look at Liverpool, or any number of severely leveraged clubs. We could look at stadium development. Or FIFA. Actually - why stick to sports? We could talk global warming and the environment. Or mortgages and the housing market.

I would rather see the WPS fail than become like the NFL. I do not need women's soccer to be like the English Premier League, or like any business that makes a few people wealthy and the rest of the world poor. If we can find a way to build a league that allows women to play soccer, develop their game, and not have to work full-time in order to do that, a lot of us would be happy. Sustainable business is a cause, shaped by "good intentions" and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

If that's a killjoy for people who want to worship at the altar of the absolute corruption and greed of big time sports, well, they have plenty of other leagues that will be all too happy to make it their business to lift the burden of "cause" from their shoulders.

[See also Tanya Keith's "Can Women's Soccer Survive? Is the Wrong Question" on her blog "Soccer...Family Style."]

U Conn's Winning Streak: are they freaks, frauds, or the best women's basketball team ever?

2010-12-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

Geno Auriemma, U Conn's head coach, dared to say out loud what is a given: sports media is only paying attention to their record because the Huskies are about to break a men's record. The media barely made note of the moment they surpassed the longest winning streak in women's basketball. He ALSO speculated that some fans of the men's game are "pissed off" to see women break a men's record. This, he implies, is the reason many feel the need to knock down his team's accomplishments.

ESPN: Jemele Hill and Skip Bayless talk over Auriemma's post-game polemic

The Huskies have a home game against Florida State tomorrow (Tuesday, December 2) at 7:00pm ET (4:00pm Pacific). The game - which is sold out - will be broadcast NATIONALLY, on ESPN2. Imagine that! The BIG game, however, will be at Stanford - one of their stronger rivals. That show-down is on December 28th, 7:00pm Pacific/10:00pm ET. I can't tell how that game will be broadcast outside of Connecticut (where you can watch it on CPTV).

To the people who piss on their accomplishments: If women's basketball is so lame, how come this team is so awesome? Are they space aliens? Robots? Are all these other women's college basketball programs disasters? There are two labels that get mapped onto female winners - that they are freaks, or that they are frauds. Marta, for example, is a "freak" - a total anomaly - the Huskies are "frauds" - who aren't the best team, but the least worst of teams playing not "real" basketball. That is not only an insult to the Huskies, but a really profound insult to Baylor, Duke, Xavier, Tennessee, West Virginia, Texas A&M, Stanford, UCLA, UNC, Kentucky, Michigan State, Ohio State...

Go Huskies - everyone but Florida wants you to take that record and destroy it. And "go!" to every team looking to take them down - because perhaps the only thing as awesome as holding a record like that, is being the team that breaks the streak.

For those of you who want to know more about women's college basketball, I recommend watching This Is a Game, Ladies, about C. Vivian Stringer and the Rutgers University women's basketball team. It's a GREAT documentary and available on netflix!