The Runner's Runner

I've long wanted to write about Justina Cassavell. My sister has been the cross-country coach at Voorhees High School in New Jersey since the mid 1990s. She is also the head track coach (boys and girls). She announced her resignation yesterday - within minutes it seemed, the story was posted on NJ.com.

Under her leadership, the girls cross-country team has been one of the best teams in not just the state, but in the northeast. One local paper summed up her accomplishments: "Cassavell is recognized as one of the top coaches of distance runners, male or female, in New Jersey state history." She was inducted into the NJSIAA Athletic Coaches Hall of Fame. Her team has won [thirteen] state sectional titles, nine state titles, and three Meet of Champions (all group) titles (thanks to my brother-in-law for keeping the stats!). In recent years, they've also qualified for national competitions three times (placing first or second in the northeast in 2007, 2010 and 2012). In addition, she's coached individual runners on her teams to national ranking and helped them establish a foundation for their development as college athletes.

My sister is known for helping runners realize their talent (e.g. gifted athletes like Liz Wort who graduated from Duke in 2007, was a 3-time all-American in the steeplechase and is now head cross-country coach at TCU, and Melanie Thompson, a University of Oregon runner and 2-time All American, also in the steeplechase). But my sister is also known for cultivating the good runner, the life-long runner. Running, I've heard her say again and again, should make you happy. I've also heard her say that she thinks of herself as a coach who really enjoys coaching a team.

That's a special thing: because that coach takes an interest in the All-American but also in the struggling athlete, the injured, and the ordinary hard-worker. She knows that a good runner can be any and all of these things. Journalists covering high-school sports in the area tend to describe her as a "whisperer" - signaling the degree to which such attentive coaching seems like magic in a world that sells us pretty much one vision of what an effective coach looks like (a man) and does (yells, a lot) in the service of a single aim (win at all cost).

In his most recent column, Dave Zirin argues that youth sports culture seems to cultivate aggression of the worst sorts. Increasingly, people experience youth sports as an apparatus that enables the abuse of power and authority. (My experience with AYSO in Los Angeles sadly affirms this.) Even as youth sports operates in American mythology as a kind of idyll - as a place we imagine as innocent and good - the reality is quite different. Zirin asks, "Why do 70 percent of kids quit youth sports by age 13? Why do parents get so unbelievably nasty? Why, and this is the most serious point, can it turn suddenly violent?" He writes:

I spoke with Joe Ehrmann, former NFL player, pastor and founder of Coach for America. Ehrmann has devoted his life to fighting this societal tide and making youth sports and coaching a positive for children. He said to me, “My belief is that while youth sports originated to train, nurture and guide children into adulthood many programs/coaches have taken over to meet needs of adults at expense of kids. Sports should be a tool to help children become whole and healthy adults who can build relationships and contribute as citizens, but the social contract between adults protecting and providing for the needs of children [instead of their own needs] is broken.” ([Zirin's] emphasis.)

Those are strong words describing the experiences of a great many parents and kids. Where some aspects of youth sports has been taken over by selfishness, greed, and cruelty, I've had the distinct pleasure of seeing the other side: The world being cultivated by the women who entered sports in the 1980s with a little help from federal legislation (my sister's scholarships were no doubt created by Title IX equity requirements). Those women ran in college and now they coach other young women at high schools, colleges, summer camps. Athletics is a way of life for them. And it's a sustainable way of life. That way of being in sports nurtures competitiveness, because that kind of competition is good for everyone. One person inspires another. A collective feels wonder at what one person among them can do. There is something both humbling and empowering about running alongside someone who is much faster, stronger than you.

Over the past fifteen+ years, I've loved going to watch the Voorhees girls run. There's something so perfect about a cross-country meet. About being outdoors, about running along the course to cheer. About watching teams try. I love seeing how teams gather together at the end of the race - how the older athletes look after the younger ones. How kids look after teammates with different needs, how they lift each other's spirits. It's so damned nice to be reminded of what youth sports can be.

As a person coaching teenagers, my sister quite literally coaches her athletes from childhood to adulthood. The high school coach has an incredible responsibility. I think she's really joyed in watching the people on her team mature, take responsibility for themselves and each other. If she likes to coach a team, perhaps that's why - part of being an adult involves learning to understand oneself in relation to, among others. Cross country is just a cool sport when it comes to that balance of the self with others. Nobody can run for you; everybody needs you to run your best.

While my sister is eloquent on the thing that makes for a great competitor (the insane drive that will make a runner not just want but need to win the race) she has dedicated years of her life to helping young women find balance, to run their best, together.

When I go home, I run with my sisters (both of whom ran track at Rutgers, my other sister worked with autistic children for years, and is an equally gifted teacher). Justina has taught me to keep myself relaxed, to take hills slowly, to let myself take my time so I can run long (after one session in which she talked about pace, I nearly doubled the amount of time I was able to run). I learned to listen to my body. I learned to notice when I was holding myself back.

Running with Justina has helped my writing. It's helped me to take notice when I begin to move away from trying. When I think I can't do something, I put on my shoes and run. It seems like an escape, but it's really a kind of meditation. A practice, a way to tune in. The things you learn from having a holistic approach to a sport carry over into other areas of your life. We hear that all the time. But there's something to it: you don't just work out a problem through the mind or the body. You can work something out in one domain and bring the wisdom you found there to the other. Sometimes you need to do both at once, to trust yourself and give it a shot. She's the person that taught me this.

I wish that when I was in high school I'd had access to coach like her. It's hard to imagine what a difference having a person like this can mean to a teenage girl - having access to a role model in the form of a grown-up woman, a person guiding you in developing a healthy relationship to your body, and doing so in a way that isn't about being pretty or cute or skinny or perfect but is about being strong, healthy and balanced.

Anyway, all this is just to say I'm fiercely proud of my sister and all that she's accomplished as a coach at Voorhees High School.

Brittney Griner, Jason Collins and the Sex of a Story

The (not-homophobic side of the) sports world has invested a lot of magic in the currently-professional-and-playing-out-gay-male-athlete. It's no wonder, given how elusive that athlete has been.

Jason Collins comes out decades after Stonewall, he comes out long after Ellen DeGeneres came out while professionally-active-and-on-television and then recovered that career with her talk show, months after Frank Ocean came out about his love for a man. Johnny Weir was never not out. Orlando Cruz - a boxer - came out in October. Transgender athlete Renée Richards entered women's professional tennis in 1977: she had to sue for the right to do so. Hers is a landmark case. NBA, NFL and baseball players have come out before, but in retirement. In 2009, Gareth Thomas, one of the most famous rugby players in the world (captain of the Welsh team) came out while he was still in the game - he told first his coach and then his team. They embraced him. Thomas has been eloquent in his description of what being closeted as such a public figure means. In a recent interview for BBC, Thomas explained, "when you lie every day, you begin to hate yourself." It made him suicidal. Lists of athletes who have come out while they were playing date back quite a bit - take Billie Jean King, for example. Her 1981 outing was painful, not her choice and a powerful, frightening example - the story became a headline, a scandal and "in 24 hours" she lost all her endorsements. She went on to be an inspirational figure, a leader in the fight for a better game. The list goes on in all sorts of directions. 

Even given the diversity of public figures who have come out over the years, Jason Collins is the first pro in one of the sports that anchors mass sports media in the US to come out while still on the roster. As an active player, his livelihood is dependent on a patriarchal, racist and homophobic machine. It is no surprise that it has taken so long for a man in this particular sports environment to identify himself as a member of that class of people mainstream sports culture defines itself against. Coming out is huge.

People have been chiming in with a list of other names. People want to remember the women who've been there before. In addition to those mentioned above: Martina Navratilova (who, like King, came out in 1981), Amelie Mauresmo, Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, Missy Giove, Natasha Kai, Megan Rapinoe, Vicky Gallindo, Liz Carmouche. There are a lot more gay women in sports, but the media doesn't quite know how to address them - or their fans. We can see this in how Brittney Griner's "coming out" is presented as a story about how her coming out is not a story. 

Garance Franke-Ruta thus opens her article for The Atlantic with the following: 

Female professional athletes are already gender non-conforming. Male ones are still worshipped as exemplars of traditional masculinity. Extremely sporty women have to fight stereotyping that they are lesbians and ignore all manner of unkind commentary about how they are mannish, while sporty men are seen as participating in a form of the masculine ideal.

This is given as the context for understanding why Brittney Griner's coming out isn't news. The rhetorical frame here accepts the "either-or," gender segregated structure of mainstream sports culture. It reinforces common sense about what matters, and how. Collins's coming out means more than Griner's. To whom? 

Griner, responding to Maggie Grey's question about homophobia and sports on SI.com

My mind was properly blown by Griner's so-called coming out. Not because I thought Griner was straight. But because in that interview (for SI.com, because such interviews with women aren't conducted on, say, television) Griner was so damned smooth (her outfit!). It wasn't a "coming out" so much as an "always already been out." (This is also the style of Rapinoe's coming out). 

SI Video host Maggie Gray: "Another big topic in sports recently is sexuality, especially with the NFL. In football it was rumored that maybe one or more players were going to come out--that would become huge news in the sports world and in general. In female sports, women's sports, in the WNBA, players have already come out, and it's really accepted. Why is there a difference between men and women in that issue?"

Brittney Griner: "I really couldn't give an answer on why that's so different. Being one that's out, it's just being who you are. Again, like I said, just be who you are. Don't worry about what other people are going to say, because they're always going to say something, but, if you're just true to yourself, let that shine through. Don't hide who you really are." Griner, Delle Donne, Diggins Discuss Sport and Sexuality on SI

It's a nice conversation. Gray opens the door and Griner walks right through it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Because in her world, it is. 

But Gray opens this interview with a telling observation - an observation that allows us to see why Griner's coming out isn't a story: "It's not often we get to talk to three world class athletes that are also women." It isn't often, in other words, that we get to have this conversation (with women, between women) at all. 

Lost in the story about it being "easier" for lesbians in women's sports is the larger apparatus that aggressively marginalizes women athletes. There's a relationship between the relegation of Griner's statement to a web-only platform and the making of Jason Collins's coming out narrative into a Sports Illustrated cover story. Griner's is a women's sports story - and women don't merit headlines, they aren't the lead story, they just don't mean as much - they aren't worth as much. 

Minimized in language about how women athletes are always already gender non-conforming are the stories of butch women athletes who have been kicked off teams, harassed, assaulted - killed, even. Being an out gender non-conforming woman athlete is hard, and in some contexts it is dangerous. And that isn't much of a "story" either. 

Mainstream sports culture devotes an enormous amount of energy to keeping things that way. Its commitment to maintaining the delusion that there are no gay men playing in the NBA is a part of the same problematic system that minimizes the whole of women's sports as less interesting, less valuable, less meaningful. 

The ecstatic language that greets Collins as the magical figure that will transform sports culture has a weird shadow. Ecstatic: Finally, a man! Weird shadow: Because women can't have that magical effect on a patriarchal space from which they are banned. 

Collins's coming out won't make the NBA into a queer space. But it does makes a little more room in the mainstream for gay and lesbian athletes. And that's no small thing. 

But it's perhaps not quite as exciting - or as revolutionary - as what's happening in women's sports. Which isn't so mainstream. Which is why it is, and isn't news.

Jason Collins Comes Out (and Leans In)

NBA center Jason Collins came out in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated. People are celebrating him as the first man in a "major sport" to come out as gay. That is true only if we limit our examples to the US.

Justin Fashanu was the first athlete to come out as gay while still playing as a pro. The first black footballer to earn a million-pound contract came out to a UK tabloid (The Sun) in 1990. The scholar David DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to describe the terrible and confusing legacy of Fashanu's story - its been relegated to the shadows for good reason. He was an exceptional player; his relationship to the tabloids was exploitative and toxic; his performance as an athlete was alternately promising and depressing; he found God; he was discriminated against; he was exiled from the game (by mutual spirals of injury and scandal); he lingered in the sport's seedy margins. He was accused of raping a minor (a 17-year old boy). He killed himself and was tried in the headlines.

There is no aspect of Fashanu's story that can be recovered as a positive example. His story is so difficult that few have dared to "go there" and really consider it, even as his name is routinely invoked in anti-homophobia campaigns. Thus DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to name the chest-tightening anxiety one feels in the neighborhood of Fashanu's story. (To learn more about Fashanu see Jim Read's review of a recent biography in WSC, and Julie Jacques's essay for The New Statesman.)

Jason Collins's coming out story is a positive counter-narrative. It is not only important because it is a first for an American athlete (male, pro). It is also important as a counter-example to Fashanu's story.  Collins is the first athlete to come out and tackle its long shadow.

Collins's narrative could not be more different than Fashanu's - Collins's family is supportive and loving, his upbringing stable, his history proud. He has a gay uncle in a loving relationship - he grew up with gay role models and mentors. Furthermore, the story published in Sports Illustrated is his story. This is a first-person narrative. It opens:

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. 

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. (SI: The Gay Athlete)

The story he tells is empowering, and the fact that he is telling the story - that he is controlling the narrative, that he is its author - is important. The relationship between any pro athlete and the media is vexed. SI is willing to be the platform for Collins's coming out; it is also part of a media culture that surveils him and every other pro athlete in its view; it is part of a public culture that surveils black men with particular violence. Collins signals this as a worry carried by the people around him.

My maternal grandmother was apprehensive about my plans to come out. She grew up in rural Louisiana and witnessed the horrors of segregation. During the civil rights movement she saw great bravery play out amid the ugliest aspects of humanity. She worries that I am opening myself up to prejudice and hatred. I explained to her that in a way, my coming out is preemptive. I shouldn't have to live under the threat of being outed. The announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ's. (SI: The Gay Athlete)

If his grandmother is apprehensive, it is because she is knowing. Collins explains that he has decided to lean into the problem - later in the interview, he suggests that this is in harmony with his style as a player. He's a "pro's pro" willing to charge, to foul - to play hard. That might reflect a fear of being read as "soft," he writes, and it might also reflect a desire to make room for the impossible.

It is worth remembering that Justin Fashanu came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In 1990, public discourse on homosexuality was defined by panic, phobia, fear and fascination - it was a generally awful moment even as it also gave us the activist organizations that helped redefine public culture in the US. Think back to 1991 and recall the confusion that shaped the response to Magic Johnson's coming out as HIV positive. How could Magic be HIV positive? Was he gay? What was going to happen to him? The assumption was that he'd retire - not only because (it was assumed) he was sick, but because people were afraid he'd infect others. It's hard to imagine the difficulty of integrating an HIV positive player into the televised sport spectacle in the early 1990s. And then there was the fear was that he'd die, because so many did. (See this GQ oral history of the moment.) A phobic language of infection and disease had been built into public discourse on homosexuality long before the AIDS crisis. That fact is one of the things that made the AIDS crisis so terrible: priests and presidents treated the virus as a judgement from the heavens. And that fact has everything to do with the complacency that some people have towards their own homophobia.

These are different times. Today, kids have in Magic Johnson an example we could never have imagined possible. He's alive, first of all. (When he got the diagnosis, he was imagined he probably had "a couple of years.") He's a popular public figure and a proud parent to a (particularly fabulous) gay son. (See this recent interview with Johnson on TMZ.)

23 years after Fashanu became a tabloid headline, 22 years after Magic Johnson blew the sports world's collective mind, Jason Collins writes that he wants to participate in a gay pride march as an out and proud black gay man. He can write, in Sports Illustrated no less, that he wants to get married and have kids - and people understand what he means. He doesn't sound like a martian. The desires he expresses are recognizable to a lot of people as normal. Opponents of gay marriage belong to a shrinking - and shrieking - minority. Gay marriage has become so visible a part of the normalization of homosexuality in the US that it's hard to remember how alien the idea has been.  And how long it's been that way.

In 1968, Yayoi Kusama staged a gay wedding in New York as a "Happening." The idea of two men getting hitched was magical and weird, and seemed a direct challenge to dominant ideology regarding the family. She officiated the ceremony as the "High Priestess of Polka Dots." She designed a dress that two men could wear at the same time. They swore their love not on a bible, but on a New York City telephone book. In 1968, gay men in a wedding dress expressed utopian impulses. They were unicorns with the power to change everything. They were the future.

For a long time, the gay male pro athlete has held a similar magical power over our imaginary. A black gay NBA player? What couldn't this man accomplish for a whole world? What can't he do? The answer to that question is everything.

The Vulnerable Spectacle: Notes on the Bombing of a Marathon

The bombing at the Boston Marathon - what is there to say about such a thing? Already, barely a day into the story the story is on repeat. Terror, heroism, terror, heroism. How many are dead? Wounds and more wounds. Women & children. Look out for a dark skinned man in a hoodie. It's an awful mix.

Violence and the sport spectacle: they are not exactly strangers to each other (Munich, Hillsborough, the parking lot of Dodgers Stadium). Nevertheless, it is hard to place this event in a sport context. The obvious point of reference is Eric Rudolph's bombing of a crowd at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta (which killed one person, and in which another died of a heart attack, and in which a great many were injured). If the media has shown any restraint in naming suspects (while giving in to its instinct to visualize that suspect for us), we can thank poor Richard Jewell, a security guard who actually saved people's lives when he spotted Rudolph's backpack. Jewell was falsely accused of the bombing and vilified by, sacrificed to the media gods. 

The reasons for Rudolph's attack are confused: it was part of a series of bombings - the others were attacks on health clinics (which provided abortions) and a gay bar. Although people assume his actions were part of some kind of homocidal anti-abortion campaign (as if that in and of itself isn't already crazy), investigators reported that people who knew him understood him to be anti-government, a racist, sexist and a homophobe - they couldn't recall that abortion was his issue. He was, more nearly, full of hate and violence. It seems likely Rudolph was drawn to the Olympics because it was a national spectacle at which large numbers of people were gathered and on which cameras were turned.

It feels weird to talk about this bombing as a sports story. This story is atypical - it isn't the spike in domestic violence associated with Superbowl Sunday, it isn't the mob taking-to-the-street after a team's loss or victory, it isn't an explicitly political attack on athletes representing the enemy, it isn't the stadium disaster brought on by indifferent capital, squeezing as many into as poor a space as possible. 

Perhaps this doesn't feel like a sports story because the marathon is a weird sport spectacle. It's an individual sport that provides the space for the articulation a specific kind of public. We don't think of the Boston marathon - or any marathon, really - as a nationalist spectacle (even one staged on Patriot's Day). Events won year after year by Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes remain popular, in every sense of the word. (An American man hasn't won the Boston marathon since 1983; an American woman hasn't finished first since 1985.)

Marathons are occasions for civic hospitality. That is the defining element of the major events staged in the US: the New York, Boston and Los Angeles marathons are city-stories. The metropolis shuts down its streets, interrupts its routines for a festival celebrating one of the simplest of things - running. Running for hours. Running on boulevards you know from your car, from buses, or from the movies.  

Spectators are right there on the street with the athletes. The spectacle unfolds lazily (for spectators) over hours. Spectators gather not just for the elite - they gather for the ordinary. And spectators are important: runners need their energy, their support and their cheer. There's something just plain generous about the marathon, as an event. It is a mass event - everyone on the sidewalk is part of the event's support team.

My yoga studio faces Sunset boulevard and has a large store-front window. The Los Angeles marathon went right past us. Our teacher turned the class so that we practiced facing the street. He led as through slightly more than 26 sun salutations so that we might celebrate and thank the runners. So that we might participate in the event with them. Outside, music blared, people cheered and handed out water. 

I hope this bombing doesn't change the culture of the marathon - its openness and generosity, its civic-mindedness, its celebration of the common runner and the commons through which she runs. If this is the thing that makes it vulnerable, it is also the thing that makes it valuable.  

Lament for the Injured: "I Have No Achilles"

It's not every day that I think, of a player like Kobe Bryant, "I know how he feels." A few days ago Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon. He was remarkably composed in the interview he gave right after the game. This injury is one of the worst. Few come back from it. He might very well have just played his last game as a professional athlete. Asked what he was thinking right after it happened, he said that he was hoping that the sensation would come back to him. "What sensation?" a reporter asked. "I have no Achilles," he answered. Meaning, he lost the sensation of having an Achilles tendon in that foot.

Shortly afterwards, Bryant gave us surprising access to his feelings in a now widely circulated lament. (From Kobe Bryant's Facebook page.)

This is such BS! All the training and sacrifice just flew out the window with one step that I've done millions of times! The frustration is unbearable. The anger is rage. Why the hell did this happen ?!? Makes no damn sense. Now I'm supposed to come back from this and be the same player Or better at 35?!? How in the world am I supposed to do that??
I have NO CLUE. Do I have the consistent will to overcome this thing? Maybe I should break out the rocking chair and reminisce on the career that was. Maybe this is how my book ends. 

Maybe Father Time has defeated me...Then again maybe not! It's 3:30am, my foot feels like dead weight, my head is spinning from the pain meds and I'm wide awake. Forgive my Venting but what's the purpose of social media if I won't bring it to you Real No Image?? Feels good to vent, let it out. To feel as if THIS is the WORST thing EVER! Because After ALL the venting, a real perspective sets in. There are far greater issues/challenges in the world then a torn achilles. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, find the silver lining and get to work with the same belief, same drive and same conviction as ever. 

How we rubber band in our sense of injury - from "this is the worst thing ever" to "this is not the worst thing ever." From "this is hopeless" to "I can fix this." From feeling like you've been robbed - as if all your training and care somehow was supposed to make you invulnerable - to recalling that this is what happens. And maybe that same training will make you "invulnerable" again. Despair and denial. I've been there. Who hasn't? Or won't be?

Immediately after the injury - an injury Bryant can't blame on anyone or anything - he took two free throws and tied up the game. He must have been filled with dread. He must have been hoping that the feeling of his foot as a "dead weight" might pass, like a mood. He would have been trying to will it to be different - to not be what he knew it was. He would have known exactly what was wrong - each sport has its own terrors. The "pop" of a tendon, a ligament. The slow erosion, the tear and disintegration of cuffs, joints, cartilage. The door through which most exit. There are things you can't see coming but which you know are very real possibilities for you. And there are things you do see coming, but which you can't - won't - think about - as there is nothing on earth you can do to stop it, except stop playing. Who can say what is worse - to have your career ended for you by a ruptured tendon? Or to wear yourself out by playing through the disintegration of (for example) your knees?

And there is the shock: that this thing that is happening to you isn't just going to take you out of the game. It is going to change your relationship to your own physicality - forever. You can't play basketball, for example, because you can't run.

There are a lot of former basketball players relating to Bryant. People who loved the game, for whom it was their most reliable source of pleasure. The game was taken from them with a pop and rip. You do not have to play in the NBA to know what that feels like. We have spirit guides in our injury. Athletes through whom we understand our own pain, our own exits. Mine is Stuart Holden, except, of course, he is still playing. I am not.

A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football

From Jo Strømgren Kompani - on stage in Toronto this week. I must see this.  

Big Money Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment!: Notes on Rutgers Basketball

Rutgers's biggest problem is not Mike Rice. It's politicians digging into the university's infrastructure - taking the ongoing dismantling of affordable public education to the next level (first attack affordability, then attack the scene of education by taking away its working infrastructure, access to institutional memory, sense of community). As that complex, difficult story unfolds, Rutgers joins the Big 10 - this entry into big money sports is presented to the public as a fix. Because a winning, televised sports program makes a campus rich, right? One story is a cover for the other. 

Over the past four or five decades we've witnessed the emergence of a public culture in which one wants the best of everything - for oneself. That culture is centered in the delusion that all you need (to succeed) is to participate in a great competition - like March Madness or American Idol. All you need is a chance to be a winner! On television! But of course you are just fodder for the production of the image of victory. Even the winner is raw material for the actual product: the televised sport spectacle.  

Of course Mike Rice hurls insults, kicks and throws basketballs at his players. He's an overseer in a system that places the burden of supporting a state's public education on the backs of young, profoundly disenfranchised men. 

Was Mike Rice's behavior abusive? Yes. The whole story is a disaster. Everyone knew. Everyone worried about being sued. And now Eric Murdock (the whistle blower) is under investigation for extortion. How can you hold anything you hear against Murdock? If he had problems with Rice's behavior, real problems, as an assistant to Rice he was in an impossible position. Coming forward with those complaints is a career-killer. A permanent career killer. That is even more true for players. More than a few commentators have remarked on how easily the athletes seemed to take Rice's abuse.

Nothing about football and basketball culture as practiced in the NCAA lines up with the way we understand the right to be free from harassment and abuse. If we understood athletes as having protections similar to, say, employees, then NCAA athletes would be allowed to unionize. They are not. The NCAA works very hard, very hard, to render its athletes into children, students, apprentices, "amateurs" - anything but "professionals" (employees).

What these athletes need - more than this season of head rolling - is the right to organize to stand up for themselves, to improve their working conditions and support their education. They need a much better system, as athletes and as students. They - we - need a better university. 

HEADLINE: Big Time Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment. Players Take It or Walk Away from Career. 

It is news. And, of course, it is not news. Buried underneath these headlines is a darker, more depressing story about the conversion of a great public education system into a giant system of indentured servitude - and here I don't mean the NCAA's exploitation of student athletes, I mean the generations of people that will spend their entire lives servicing unsecured student loan debt. 

Blame Patriarchy: Notes on Steubenville and "Jock Culture"

In a recent polemic Dave Zirin asks if "jock culture" is to be blamed for the Steubenville case.

Responding to evidence that adults around these football players conspired to cover up the shame and the crime of it all, Zirin tackles the social structure framing the story. "Steubenville," The Nation's headline announced, "shows the bonds between jock culture and rape culture."

To summarize the Steubenville story: a group of football players raped a young woman and then went on to laugh and joke about it, and to broadcast the fun they had within their circle. Mass media outlets recently harmonized their headlines as they moved toward concluding the story cycle, presenting the case as a personal tragedy - for the men on trial. Cue a collective groan from Jezebel, Gawker, Feministing. I join the chorus here, but instead of thinking from CNN et al, I want to think from Dave Zirin's writing, which has been among the most heart-felt and intense from a sports writer.

The problem (as I'm sure Zirin knows) isn't football or jock culture. The problem is patriarchy. But "Steubenville shows the bonds between patriarchy and rape culture" doesn't make for a catchy headline.

That is part of the problem: sexism isn't news.

In other words, the problem isn't football, it isn't sports culture, it isn't the media. It's patriarchy itself. Those institutions are all ideological organs in a bigger body. Zirin writes, "We need to ask whether there’s something inherent in the men’s sports of the twenty-first century, which so many lionize as a force for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement." We could ask if there isn't something inherent in the military that creates "a rape culture of violent entitlement." Sexual abuse of men and women in the military has been described recently as "an epidemic." A little reading on the subject makes one wonder if the word "endemic" isn't more appropriate. What do mainstream sport cultures have in common with the military?

Patriarchy is such an old-fashioned word. It's so unsexy. Such a drag. And I feel like a throwback, an old feminist from another time for naming it.

I throw it out here, however, as the word for naming what the Penn State scandal has to do with Steubenville (for example) or with the ubiquity of sexual violence within the military and with the latter's inability to confront the problem. For naming what football has to do with the media's inability to tell as story about rape without recuperating men as tragic heroes of a sort. Of course people are sympathetic to these guys. They are teenagers; their lives are a mess. They are going to jail. Who wants to relate to the person who was too drunk - or drugged - to remember anything? Who was, in fact, unable to know or feel what was happening to her body? Who identifies with the person who was made into an abject thing used for collective entertainment?

Scenes of Instruction

I want to turn to an anecdote that Zirin recounted in another column, also about Steubenville. Earlier this month he shared a memory of being on a team as a high school student, of being in the locker room when a teammate made a rape-joke. The coach, whom Zirin recalled as a very left leaning and sensitive man, hauled off and slapped the offending player.

Zirin writes:

In a flash, Coach Dan backhanded Tim across the face. Seeing a coach or adult authority figure hit a 14-year-old, even a huge one like Tim, was shocking enough. Seeing Hippie Dan do it was akin to watching the Dalai Lama stomp someone with his sandals. We all stood there breathless and I’m not sure if Tim or Dan was shaking more. Coach Dan finally spoke and said, “I’m sorry but there are some things you don’t joke about.” He then walked out of the locker room and practice was done. The incident was never mentioned, but Dan was never quite so positive, Tim stopped making jokes and that was the first and last locker-room rape joke of the season. (Steubenville and Challenging Rape Culture in Sports)

That is a complicated moment - it is seared into Zirin's memory for good reason. But I don't read that slap as a feminist intervention. It is a classically patriarchal moment: the good father disciplining the bad boy; a figure of masculine authority intervening in order to protect women. A fair amount of discourse on the Steubenville case has this shape.

There's no conversation in Zirin's story. Just the "understood" of realizing there are some things that one doesn't joke about - and that these are the same things that one doesn't talk about. Learning that seems to make them men.

It's helpful to look more closely at the story. It's a locker room - it's all men and boys. It's a scene of instruction and intimacy. The joke is made when the boys are told that a female member of the coaching staff at the school is coming in to talk to them. It happens at the threshold of a gendered and a desegregated social space. The joke arises at the idea that a woman might enter their (masculine) space. The imagined introduction of her body changes the imagined nature of the space. It is at that juncture that we find violence and shame, swirling around each other. A joke, a slap.

Rape isn't external to patriarchy - it is, in fact, its internal symbolic engine. Sex as violence; sex as dehumanization; sex as the rendering of the other into a thing. This is why the call to teach men "not to rape" is so ineffectual. It is no call to action. It isn't adequate to the imperative: Rape - because it's better than being raped. Rape, because that is, in fact, what makes you not a woman. Rape, dare I add, is something that men also do to each other.

In a feminist space, I imagine not a slap but a difficult, messy conversation - not between men, or between men and women - but between people negotiating gender and power. A conversation about what that joke was about. About what rhetorical work that young man imagined it would do in the service of his own power and authority - about what anxiety regarding his relationship to his teammates that joke was expressing.

In the story Zirin tells, there is no discussion. An action is committed on behalf of that woman. She doesn't figure in the story; the story isn't about her. It's a story about patriarchal authority (good and bad).

I wouldn't draw a line from Zirin's anecdote to the Steubenville thing were it not for the fact Zirin told the story in a story about Steubenville. Zirin is smart enough about sexism and sports to know that the world he's writing about (sports) it structured by sexism. Are we, collectively, feminist enough to know what it means to imagine a sports culture structured by something else?

The sociality of the sexual violence committed in the Steubenville case reminds us that these things are not about women: they are about men's relationship to each other, in which women - as objects of jokes and objects of violence - are used as props in a competition for power. This power, this authority is built on shame and fear. Teach men not to rape. What does that even mean if we don't make that lesson about how men relate to each other?

As I was thinking about this "jock culture" problem, I found myself talking to a woman who was asked to write about @SKCboobs - a Twitter account that solicits women MLS fans to broadcast pictures of their tits. (I have no idea if the account holder is a man or a woman.) That writer is a woman, asked by the guys she works with to write a story about this thing (because she has tits?).

She called and asked me what I thought of it.

Moralizing about what women do with their tits is not my idea of feminist sports writing. The media outlets that will cover Steubenville, or SKC Boobs give nothing to daily coverage of women's sports. That's what I think.

The media's idea of a women's sports story is a story about rape. Or a story about sexism. Or it is just a picture of tits presented as a story. The sports media's idea of a women's sports story does not express an ongoing commitment to the story of women's sports, it in fact expresses an ongoing commitment to NOT covering women's sports.

The whole conversation about "jock culture" and "rape culture" presumes a deeply segregated world in which one can separate men out from women and give them unique sets of instructions. 

Don't rape. Don't get raped.

Mainstream sports - football programs, sports networks, media outlets, regulatory bodies like the NCAA, the IOC and FIFA - turn patriarchy's root - the drawing of a line between man and woman, a line that marks the human and the not human - into the ritual and rite that we call "jock culture." That doesn't make jock culture the problem. It makes jock culture a tool.

How else to understand the "jocks" who pissed on a woman, and laughed about it? Who secured their bonds in relation to each other by joking "you don't sleep through a wang in the butthole" or "Finally saw a dead body." [Tweets captured as screenshots by blogger Alexandria Goddard.]

That behavior is not specific to sports. Would that it were so. Because then we could just get rid of football, and call it a day. 

The Knife: From a Left Wing's favorite band.

She's a Forward and She's Really Awesome

I wrote about Sam Gordon the other week for Salon. Love. Her.

Tough Mudder: The Deskilling of the Cross Country Runner?

Painted in mud, the best high school cross-country runners stumbled across the line. The exhausted pack ran their worst times all season. The painfulness of this fact was thrown into stark relief by the boorish slogan suspended across the course finish: "Run hungry. Taste victory."

Nike Cross Nationals is run every year in Oregon at the Portland Meadows Race Track. The December event is one of two cross-country races presented by corporate sponsors as national championships. Nike's event is team-centered (though individuals can and do enter). The December 8 Footlocker Cross Country National Championship (held in San Diego) is an individual competition. (The USA Track and Field Association also runs a national championship.)

Nike Cross is the strangest of cross-country meets: the course is not run on one of the region's fabled cross-country trails. It is staged instead on the infield of a horse race track. The runners get moguls and slippery avenues of mud. The course is slow: long stretches of it are covered in puddles of water. Race officials joke about picking shoes out of the field from races run in past years. The course is optimal when it is frozen. This is the one race for which the runner prays for frost. Last year temperatures hovered at 30. The boys' race was won by Futsum Zeinasellaissie in 15:03. This year was balmy: the course was not just muddy, it was gross. Sam Warton slugged it out for a 17:06 win.

Runners have to have tetanus shots to run this race. The air is lightly perfumed with manure. The race is, after all, run on horse pasture.

At the state-level no high school team would dare host an event with a course like it. It'd be considered dangerous and weird. Teams do train in harsh weather and on wet ground (this is the signature of coach Bill Aris's training regime and his girls have won the race seven years in a row no doubt because of their experience with mud). But the fastest runners want to run fast. Some courses are faster than others, but the idea is that a good race explores the limits of what is humanly possible on the day that course is run. 

The spirit of the cross-country trail is that it be a trail, not an obstacle course.  

At Nike Cross you see some runners cross the finish line painted in mud - not because it has been splashed on them, but because they've fallen into pools of it. Watching Nike's highlight reel, I was struck by how awful the pack looks. Frontrunners look tough, sure, but the rest of the field looks ruined. 

Of course there is something fun in the idea of making the best runners race against the worst conditions. But that is not how this race is presented to the teenagers running it. It is presented to them as the best team competition in the country. I got the distinct sense that even the winning athletes were disappointed.

Asked about the course, one athlete after another responded: "We don't run in mud like this in Virginia/Texas/Colorado/New Mexico/Minnesota." They sounded puzzled. When asked if he had anything good to say about the course, one wiseass looked up at the sky and said, "It's sunny." 

Nike's marketing folks assert that this mud is part of Oregon's "thing." But it isn't. When cross-country runners think of Oregon, they think of gorgeous trails along the coast, the Steve Prefountaine Memorial Running Trail. The University of Oregon (in Eugene) is one of the country's premier programs. Sure, a cross-country runner wants to "get her mud on," but even more, she wants her team to run well. 

From an elite runner's perspective, the logic of the event is a mystery. It is, in fact, something of a mystery when measured against Nike's claim on running, as a sport. It is ironic that the brand associated with the development of a lightweight shoe designed to reduce drag - to make your stride lighter - should sponsor a race in which the athlete's feet are sucked into mud. For much of the course, with each step the runner has to break the mud's suction. Imagine running with someone grasping onto your feet. That's what large parts of the course feel like. 

People seem to think that Nike stages the event this way so as to make cross-country "spectator friendly." The racetrack has covered stands, and it's easy to film the race on these grounds. But cross country spectators will choose to be by the trail - who wants to sit indoors at an outdoor event? The audience for the race was in the mud, with the runners. 

Nike stages this event this way not for people, but for cameras. 

Kids covered in mud make for fantastic photos. Or do they?

Antigone Archer fell early in the race. She picked herself up - with mud in her mouth and her eyes she helped her team to its impressive second place finish. Team Carroll finished (a weird) 140 points behind Manlius. Manlius has won this event seven years in a row. Thank you Antigone for letting me use this photo by Zackary Kaufman.

A little combing of the interweb turned up the above portrait in misery. And this is the expression I saw on much of the pack. A lot of runners looked upset - angry, frustrated, confused. 

Mud runs are a growing phenomenon - those courses are designed to make runners swim in mud, scale walls, crawl under barbed wire like G.I. Jane and Joe. They are fun. Crazy. But fun. That is not, however, what these athletes signed up for. 

Nike addressed them as elite runners all weekend. But did Nike stage an elite race? 

You learn a lot about yourself when you lose in good fashion. A good loss can be as inspiring as it is humbling. For many of these runners, this was their last race as a high school athlete. Some ended their high school career with the worst time they'd posted all season, in a race that felt pointless.

My sister coached the team that finished dead last. So I have a personal reason for thinking about this event. I've learned a lot from her over the years, and our conversations about this event have been illuminating. (My perspective here, it should be said, is entirely my own.)

Cross-country is a team sport. An individual might win the race, but a team can't win the race on an individual's performance. Nike's event is perhaps engineered to foreground that fact. This course is designed to handicap each individual runner as if they were horses. 

Second place finishers Carroll celebrate their victory. 

But cross-country is a curious team sport. A great team knows that its accomplishments are all the greater when that team allows each of its members to realize his or her potential to its fullest. I've always thought that this was where you found the spirit of the sport - in this chemistry. 

The production of a national championship as a runner's version of Wipeout is a sporting version of what social theorists describe as "deskilling." A race is here turned into a spectacle, the talent and experience on the field is made secondary to the moving of merchandise - the question is not who won, how or why, but who was entertained and how much they - we - are willing to buy. 

Kelly Smith: It's Always the Quiet Ones

Kelly Smith celebrates a goal, her magic foot and the shoe it was in.

When you teach you learn pretty quickly that the very smartest and most interesting students are often quiet. Some are painfully shy and intense listeners. Some only talk when they think they have something valuable to contribute and have a very the bar high when it comes to their sense of value. Some feel like their own interests are so out of step with everyone else they just keep their mouths shut. Some keep their mouths shut because they don't want to stand out.

When you teach, you meet these students in their writing. It's one of the profession's real pleasures. These students teach me to never accept the surface. To expect deep waters, but also to never assume that I know where those deep waters lie.

Kelly Smith's memoir is the absolute opposite of Hope Solo's. Some of these differences can be chalked up to those of a keeper and a striker, and others can be read as the differences of American and English attitudes towards self-disclosure. (One is abundant with it, the other refuses it.) But the differences between their books don't end there.

Hope Solo barely touches on her game in her memoir. The book's focus is on her family, and on the challenging social dynamics of a team living under the spotlight. We know the name of her boyfriend and are given the outline of the development of their relationship. Her friends and the coaches who have supported her get shout-outs. We do get a peek into the USWNT run in the 2011 World Cup, and Solo outlines the physical struggle of her recovery from a shoulder injury that was far worse than most of us realized. But these things are not really at the heart of the narrative. A Memoir of Hope is personality driven. If Solo's memoir is a good read it is because it mirrors the outspoken wild card public persona we already know.

The title of Footballer: My Story pretty much says it all. Smith's book is 100% centered on her relationship to the sport. Where Solo's book opens with a broad portrait of her home town, her parents, with the landscape in which she grows up, Smith's book opens with an image of one of the world's greatest players as a kid with a ball at her feet. We learn that she would imitate moves that she saw on Match of the Day, and practice them using video tapes of the week's highlights.  The narrative sticks with this tight focus of Smith on the ball right to the end. 

Footballer: My Story does chronicle Smith's personal struggles, and they are significant:

• When she grew up there was no real women's football culture to speak of in England. This is the source of her often cited complaint that the women's game in England in the 1990s "was a joke."
• Like many of the great international players, she played with boys until she was kicked off the team. She grew up being welcomed into the game (invited to play with the boys) and exiled from it.
• Like most international players, she had no future in the sport to imagine for herself - she wanted to be a professional footballer, but for English girls this dream was a delusion. The vast majority of English women players lose access to training before they turn 18. Even now the Women's Super League is more semi-pro than pro. And it is significantly more professional than anything anyone had ever heard of just ten years ago. 
• She was scouted and recruited to play in the US. This was dumb luck. With relatively little awareness of what it would mean, she enrolled at Seton Hall in New Jersey and plunged into deep culture shock. 
• She suffered from crippling social anxiety which she self-medicated, becoming a full-blown alcoholic in her twenties. 
• She suffered one serious injury after another. Torn ACL, broken leg, fractured leg - and has come back from each. 
• Unlike the USWNT, England has been a serious underdog in international competition for years. Under Hope Powell's leadership the team has been climbing a serious mountain. They've suffered some agonizing, cruel defeats on the world stage. When it comes to trophies and medals, they are far more familiar with failure than they are with success. 

In short, Kelly Smith has worked hard, suffered, and gotten through it and over it. In spite of the list I've given above, the book is not a litany of complaints. Far from it. Smith is clearly a person with an enormous reservoir of strength. If she shares one quality with Solo, it is a certain stubbornness. A refusal to hear "no." An obstacle is not a roadblock. It's something to be hurdled. 

Her narrative is also not sappy, or sentimental. It's remarkably reticent. We never learn, for example, why Smith was so afraid of speaking in front of people, or why she felt so intensely alone and isolated that she crawled up inside a bottle. This book is no confessional. On this point, it feels remarkably English - she makes absolutely no excuses for herself. Even as we learn of relationships that have sustained her, she never tells their story - Smith comes off as very private. This leaves her somewhat of a mystery as a person.

Smith's discretion compares interestingly with Solo's openness, as do her struggles with social anxiety.  Solo is what the corporate world diagnoses  as "non-joiner" - a person not so good at small talk, who prefers time alone to team-building exercises, prefers the company of a handful of people she trusts than that of people she doesn't know and who don't know her. Solo does not lack for confidence - in fact her  confidence perhaps grounds her decisions about how she socializes.  The Solo we meet in her memoir knows what she needs.

Footballer: My Story suggests a very different kind of isolation. Smith struggled with profound loneliness and depression. Real despair - and it seems that for a long time this was kept hidden from the people around her. Fortunately, it wasn't hidden for too long: Powell, her teammates and her family helped her get on solid ground. Where Solo and co-author Ann Killian give us detail about her background in order that we understand Solo's lone wolf, controversy-provoking style, Smith and her co-author Lance Hardy draw a careful line around Smith's private life.

The refusal to disclose much about herself off the pitch makes room in Smith's autobiography for lots of writing about her development as a player and a teammate. This book will teach readers a lot about the England women's team. It will also introduce readers to the basic state of European women's football. You'll also get a fantastic glimpse of Hope Powell's coaching, which is no small thing in and of itself. Smith devotes a full chapter to Powell - the whole book might just be a long thank you to the woman that Smith credits with saving not just her career, but her very soul.

The book starts of slowly and awkwardly - somehow its writing seems to mirror Smith's battles with social awkwardness, picking up pace as she gets deeper into her career and maturity. The book is most comfortable inside the game: the chapter on England's loss to France in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals is as heart breaking as the match itself.

When you watch the game as much as some of  us do, you really want to know what it feels like to play at that level. Sometimes it is a joyful experience and sometimes it is absolute physical and emotional agony. The game started off with a "bright start" but soon France put the pressure on them and then kept it up. Smith's team scored a goal against the run of play at 58 minutes. The French really piled it on then. "We knew we were in a match," Smith writes. Her ankle had been sore from the start, and the pain mounted with each passing minute.

The longer the game went on, the more pressure the French put on our goal. The pain in my ankle, too, was mounting as time passed. 

At one stage I remember looking up at the clock on the scoreboard - I think we were about seventy or seventy-five minutes into the game, and we had the lead - and I thought to myself 'Just get through this.' 

We were keeping them at bay. We were playing so well defensively that I thought they couldn't score. Our backs were against the wall, admittedly, but I felt so confident in our back line and goalkeeper. But the clock seemed to be going very slowly and as a result our place in the semi-finals seemed so near and yet so far away. The second half seemed to be lasting forever.

Powell made the last of her substitutions. Smith didn't have a chance to signal how much pain she was in. Powell subbed in for defenders on the basis of a miscommunication. With three minutes left France broke through the back line and the game went into extra-time. By this point Smith could scarcely put weight on her foot.

As the French ran around, screaming heir heads off in delight, it struck me there and then that I would now have to play on for another half an hour. 

France kept up their attack, dominating possession. England held on for dear life. Smith writes, "I couldn't see us getting a goal. So, without thinking about it, I started to will the game to end. I wanted penalties."

Penalties they got. Smith took the first and scored. But they went out anyway. This is the kind of story that fans want: How was Smith feeling in the middle of that firestorm? What happened with the penalties? (Few players volunteered, this because a major talking point in the press.) What happened with that substitution?

Many people wrote after that match that England's women are like the men - and that English players need to practice penalties more than they do.  Smith's recollections and thoughts on this whole episode are frank and sobering:

I would like to take this opportunity to say that we practiced penalties after virtually every training session in Germany. I would also like to this: you can practice penalties all day long and it makes no difference to what will happen on the day when it matters.

You can't prepare for the stadium, the crowd, the pressure. How can you plan for who is going to be on the pitch after ninety minutes, or who is going to be fit or injured? It's impossible....

Regarding the comparison with the men's side:

Of course the England men's time have had a torrid time of it in the past, going out of the 1990 World Cup, the 1996 European Championship, the 1998 World Cup, the 2004 European Championship, and the 2006 World Cup on penalties. That is quite a list. By contrast, England's women's team have gone out of tournaments at that stage against Sweden in the European Championship final in 1984, when the team was still not officially recognized by the Football Association, and against China in a competition that didn't really matter to us, the Algarve Cup in 2005. The defeat by France in the 20011 Women's World Cup was only the third occasion. It's hardly an epidemic.  

It's a good point. I appreciated hearing this from her. I also appreciated her account of watching the World Cup final with her teammates in Boston, and then what it felt like to see Breakers teammate Aya Sameshina return to the squad with the medal. ("I saw the medal but I couldn't touch it.")

Soon the Breakers suspend play and the WPS folds. She writes, "With the problems that have occurred over the years, I think it's understandable for me to feel that there will always be some kind of issue with women's football [in the United States] at the highest professional level. Let's just say that I don't think things will ever run smoothly. It's a shame, but that's the way it seems to be."

It's hard to argue with her on that score. Smith's book gives us a glimpse of the difference that the England makes, as a context for developing the game. The system has strengths and weaknesses. Club training isn't as frequent and developed as it is in the US. But the FA is building its league system slowly and carefully. The FA had better luck with television contracts until recently. The national team's growth ties directly into the league's visibility. The book left me optimistic about women's football in England - and wondering how long it will be before it tops Sweden and Germany as the destination for the world's best.

There is, of course, a lot more to the book - and to Solo's - than I've been able to describe in these two posts. But of the two, Smith's will tell you a lot more about the experience of the match and the state of the game than will Solo's.

The tone of Smith's book suggests to me that if you sat next to Smith at a party, you could probably talk with her about the game for hours. She might be quiet at the start. She might not be the most gregarious person at the table, but once she gets rolling she can hold your attention just as well as she can hold the ball. Sorry for that last analogy, but I couldn't resist it. If you want to buy Footballer: My Story, you can find it on Amazon. And there's a kindle edition.