Sportswriters and numbers: An oil-and-vinegar reprise

June 11, 2013 – 11:38 am

I concluded yesterday’s post with an observation that old media and new media seem hopelessly divided on the subject of steroids in sports.

The same could be said, to some degree, about the subject of analytics, especially in baseball. While a number of high-profile sports journalists (Joe Posnanski, Bill Simmons) immediately come to mind as those who’ve embraced numbers beyond traditional boxscores, others have not. Still others, like me, remain in the math-challenged netherworld in between: Not dismissive, but not yet having plunged deeply into the realm that Bill James created.

billjames_new_logo(Perhaps before diving into his abstracts and historical doorstoppers, I might want to try this: “How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball.” The reviews are mixed, but given my need to be guided by traditional narrative, it may be the perfect gentle entry.)

As numbers mavens are on the rise, the refuseniks are spitting out their venom with greater vengeance. Mitch Albom’s bone-headed tripe last winter over the American League MVP race earned him plenty of derision (including perhaps Deadspin’s most glorious takedown of anyone, ever), although he knew damn well what was coming when he wrote that there’s a “divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.”

Bleacher Report made an attempt to broker a truce in all this, ultimately paraphrasing Rodney King: “So then…Can everyone get along?”

Well, no. It’s far easier for the sabermetricians to bash away at the bashable Albom, who has plenty of company in the entrenched foxholes of newspaper hacks.

The latest example: Mac Engel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who has parlayed his ink-stained wretchiness into a blog designed to troll, and I would imagine with the desired page view results.

Last week he outdid even Albom, fearing the spread of numbers numbskullery beyond the national pastime:

This absurd baseball math obsession is now spilling over into basketball, hockey and football; in a few months, this trend will turn your child’s dodgeball game into a series of where is the best place to put little Jimmy so as to ensure his greatest chances of being able to dip, dive, duck and dodge.

Again, these words are designed to inflame, and they did. While Engel is genuinely unimpressed with the obsession over pitch counts, he was only too happy to follow up by linking to his bashers. The substance of what he writes may be old-school newspaper hacktastic, but he seems to have mastered the new-school approach of eliciting reaction (typically outraged) above all else. Indeed, Engel seems to be comfortable with his feet in both worlds when he writes:

I reached out to Tim to do something I’ve never done before: Engage in a discussion with a reader about a column. He was nice enough to agree.

What a brilliant pose: Coming down from a walled-off, print-centric mountain to make contact with an actual reader, natch, somebody with a different view.

It’s all smug, ginned-up wise-assery, in spite of a rather candid conversation. Instead of using his unlimited blog space to ask someone to help him better understand the numbers, Engel perpetuates an enduring persona of the doofus sportswriter.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in baseball, sports journalism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Catching steroids ‘cheaters’ — by any means necessary

June 10, 2013 – 8:45 am

At the risk of sounding like a condescending scold — in other words, becoming like those I like to scold — I offer up a post from January written on the heels of media excuse-making about Baseball Hall of Fame voting (and in one case, the willful abstinence from casting a ballot).

The reason was the presence of suspected steroids users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, among others, on the ballot. I’ll insert the second paragraph from that post at the end of the second paragraph of this post, since it’s particularly noteworthy given the news this week about major steroids-related suspensions about to come down in Major League Baseball. I wrote then:

This absolutism has at times been a disservice to the game, because it tends to whitewash or distort history. While historical interpretation is a largely subjective endeavor, the burden of placing the accomplishments of its greatest players in a proper, fair and accurate historical context has become an increasingly troublesome one.

The report at ESPN.com that MLB investigators were coming down especially harshly on reputed steroids distributor Tony Bosch — mainly by threatening him with crippling legal action — hasn’t generated much in the way of a full-throated endorsement of what would be severe suspensions to Ryan Braun, Alex Rodriguez and nearly two dozen other players.

The reported punishments are just that for now, not yet announced by MLB. Yet baseball’s pursuit in this case is already under close scrutiny in some media circles. Coming down the hardest is Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth, who makes the usual connections to the War on Drugs, and how sports entities, despite stricter and stricter testing, can’t really make a dent unless they get the assistance of, or use methods approaching those in the law enforcement community.

steroids gameHe extensively quotes Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, a noted sports doping expert and author of “The Steroids Game,” published in 1998, about the time anti-doping institutions were being created. Fifteen years later, he says that while athletes aren’t particularly skilled at “evading aggressive law enforcement,” testing may never be fully effective:

“What would work? Aggressive, undercover police sting operations. I’m talking handcuffs. Put it on ‘Cops.’ But are you willing to do that against Penn State, USC, the Baltimore Ravens, the Los Angeles Lakers, on a sustained basis?”

This is especially alarming to think about given how MLB is considered to have the toughest anti-steroids provisions of any professional sports league in North America.

The Biogenesis case could very well be a tipping point in escalating police-style investigation of suspected steroids users. But Yesalis thinks overly aggressive probes stand to backfire with a sports-loving public that hasn’t shown the same zeal to get rid of “cheaters” as sports league and agencies thirsting after good public relations.

The demonizing of steroids that the scolds think is coming from rank-and-file sports lovers is rather the handiwork of zealots, especially in the media, who can’t bear to have the “purity” of the games as they have known them tainted in any way.

Yesalis concludes that the onus really is on the fans, and that may be the biggest problem of all:

“Look, the best way to deal with [drugs in sports] is for all fans to boycott. It would be cleaned up almost instantaneously. But nobody gives a damn. In fact, these drugs make the product better for viewing and enjoyment. Do you want to watch a beauty contest where everyone is overweight and wearing no makeup?”

So where are some of these scolds now? Eerily quiet, or approaching the subject from a different perspective. Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, author of “Juicing the Game” and who sent in a blank Hall of Fame ballot, opted to pursue the labor angle, saying long-term suspensions would upset a hard-won peace stemming from the 1994 strike.

Surprisingly, Bryant is rather even-handed here, something I didn’t think possible on the subject: JuicingTheGame

The real issue is baseball’s attempt to suspend players for their association with a wellness clinic, without actual positive-test violations of the league’s drug policy. Melky Cabrera the one player linked to Biogenesis who has tested positive, already served his 50-game suspension. Unless documentation shows –assuming Bosch’s documentation is better, say, than Brian McNamee’s decade-old syringes and gauze in a Coke can — that Cabrera was still using PEDs after his suspension last season, it seems inconceivable that baseball would be able to suspend him again for essentially discovering the source of the original offense.

As I said, it’s all tied to serious labor strife Bryant predicts would surface if MLB wields a heavy hammer. It’s good to see at least a tiny bit of tacit acknowledgement that accused dopers do indeed have rights, a benefit of the doubt he wouldn’t confer upon them for Hall of Fame purposes. Bryant goes on:

The public is fatigued by the steroid era, and there was an expectation that players, especially star players such as Braun and Rodriguez, would act more responsibly.

But it seems the better option, or at least an accompanying one, would be to encourage player cooperation to glean information about how the Biogenesis 20 beat their tests (if they were in fact tested at all during the proper time frames).

Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, another A List doping scold, calls Bosch’s cooperation “a major breakthrough” for MLB, but otherwise is strangely muted.

Then there’s Bob Ford of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who uses the “cheating” word (and hails from a household with another sportswriter doping scold of the Lance Armstrong variety) as he offers up pure milquetoast:

Baseball has been the most successful – or perhaps the most willing – in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs. Maybe that is the result of the bad burn suffered by the sport when it giddily accepted the popularity boost during the record-destroying Steroid Era.

How has the sport been “burned?” Ford doesn’t elaborate. When it comes to the scolds making such declarations, you’re expected to take them at their word.

Even if their words appear to be falling on more and more deaf ears.

The Schoolmarm might be the oblivious of all, not even bothering to examine the process of the MLB investigation of Biogenesis, much less the sordid prospect of baseball climbing into bed with the likes of Bosch. Why? Because of the children:

Parents with teenagers in sports, boys and girls who studies show are already trying PEDs to play better, should be thankful that their kids will see the news of more athletes being disgraced by doping.

The next day she visited the subject again, citing how the public turned against Lance Armstrong “almost overnight after he admitted to using PEDs in January.” But it’s more likely the public was disturbed by shameful stories of his treatment of associates, team members and others in his circle who finally outed him as a jerk above all. Bosch is mentioned only in passing, since the worst offenders here are the “cheaters” — whether they’ve been found guilty of doping or not.

In linking to Tim Marchman’s scorching evisceration of the Biogenesis probe on Deadspin, Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab may have had the most prescient comment on this when he Tweeted on Thursday:

Is there any topic in which the trad media/new media divide is stronger than PEDs?


By Wendy Parker | Posted in steroids | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Weekend arts: An ode to a baseball poem — or two

June 7, 2013 – 1:24 pm

Given a previous rant here about baseball poets — most notably those who come out of hibernation in the spring — I may not be temperamentally suited to write about the most recent commemorations of “Casey at the Bat,” which turned 125 years old this week.

(Is a centenary and a quarter even a noteworthy milestone? Don’t think we did this for the Civil War to this extent, but that’s a topic for another time.)

CaseyAtBatLrg_4Thankfully Luke Epplin has placed the poem in a broader context at The Atlantic, detailing the literary and cultural history of an iconic slice of sports art. Drawing generously from John Evangelist Walsh’s 2007 book on the subject, Epplin unpacks the story of Edward Thayer’s 56-line verse from its publication in 1888 to its overly dramatic 1906 reading by William DeWolf Hopper (video recording at the bottom) and to several film adaptations after that.

(If you care to listen to Frank Deford’s Hopperesque recent reading on NPR, be my guest.)

What’s the appeal of “Casey at the Bat,” if there’s any, beyond nostalgia? Is there really something deeper that makes sense in contemporary American culture? Here’s Epplin’s conclusion:

Casey’s downfall illustrates the enduring sports dictum that arrogance, both on and off the playing field, should never go unpunished. That truism is why many NBA fans turned against LeBron James when he took his talents to South Beach, and then felt vindicated when his Miami Heat were trounced in the Finals the next season by the Dallas Mavericks. It’s also why it is more gratifying for some to watch Alex Rodriguez go down on strikes than blast another pitch into Yankee Stadium’s short right-field porch.

Personally, I think the derision over James and A-Rod is a bit more complicated than that, but there are a few grains of truth there.

Schadenfreude may have given Hopper the dramatic impetus for his flourishing delivery, as Epplin suggests, but at the risk of offering a superficial interpretation, I think references to a more pastoral-seeming world might also help to explain why current audiences lap up the story of mighty Casey striking out. As well as the more florid language of another time.

For Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra, baseball poetry doesn’t get any better than Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto,” relegating “Casey at the Bat” to runner-up status. The Beat poet’s reading of his own work is “just another example of baseball — an inherently conservative institution — serving as a vehicle for change. Or, at the very least, a reflection of it:”

And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks
and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
“Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!”
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don’t come back at all,
and flees around the bases
like he’s escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he’s beating out usury,
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in baseball, sports culture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Sports history files: Remembering Deacon Jones

June 6, 2013 – 12:02 pm

The iconic figure of the Los Angeles Rams’ magnificent Fearsome Foursome may come to symbolize more than a truly roughneck era of the contemporary National Football League.

It wasn’t long after the death of Deacon Jones this week at the age of 74 that at least one of his peers wondered aloud if the violent game he embodied claimed him as a victim.

“It’s a shame that he’s gone,” former Detroit Lions quarterback Lem Barney told USA TODAY. “I’m sure it’s due to the head injuries.

“He was still the Deacon, but you could see some things being lost.”

Upon hearing the news of Jones’ death, Rosey Grier, the lone surviving member of the Fearsome Foursome, wept. (He speaks about him here with Rich Eisen of the NFL Network.)

The initial reason for death is listed as national causes.

headslap

"“Each time I rushed the quarterback, I tried to tear his head off. I hated quarterbacks."

The man credited with the coining the term “sack” and whose patented — and now illegal — use of his hands to assault opponents in the helmet became the title of his 1996 autobiography wasn’t known to be vocal about possible brain damage he may have received, or any medical treatment he may have sought.

As William Rhoden remembers in The New York Times:

Jones was part of an era in football in which everything was legal: Horse-collar tackles, clothesline tackles, below-the-knees crackback blocks. Defenseless receivers were a sight for sore eyes.

Peter Schrager rounds up a collection of quotes from Jones that probably would earn him plenty of fines today in Roger Goodell’s NFL. A sample:

“When I see guys huddling up after the game, to pray, that’s what scares me about the game. I’m a Baptist, but I’m also a quarterback killer, and I ain’t praying with you. But I will give you 30 seconds to ask your Lord and master to keep me from killing you.”

But Jones, who grew up in segregated Florida and was a 14th-round draft pick out of Mississippi Valley State (which later produced Jerry Rice), was quite a different soul off the field. He protested against segregation at South Carolina State, where he originally enrolled and which expelled him after getting arrested in the early 1960s. He wasn’t the only member of the Fearsome Foursome to get into acting after his football career, and he established a foundation in Los Angeles to work with troubled youth.

As Mike Tanier writes in Sports On Earth:

Deacon Jones represents an era when football came into focus, when America at large began to recognize the huge, ornery, scary men for who they really were: flesh-and-blood young people who amounted to much more than their race or the sum of their on-field actions. While Joe Namath was introducing pro football to Madison Avenue, the Fearsome Foursome infiltrated movies and television. There were so many ironies: The Fearsome Foursome was hardly fearsome in real life, the mud-caked marauders were located in the glamor capital of the universe, men who modeled their careers on pillaging warriors counted needlepoint among their hobbies and became football ambassadors to Middle America.

Michael Weinreb also has a nice tribute at Grantland:

I don’t know if Deacon Jones ever actually hated any of the offensive linemen he slapped into submission. I imagine he enjoyed playing a stylized version of himself in the media, as a generation of athletes have done in his wake. But no one in the history of professional football will ever be better at what defensive football is, at its heart, because no one will ever knock people on their asses quite like Deacon Jones did.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in pro football, sports history | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Midweek books: American Pastimes and the pastime

June 5, 2013 – 9:34 am

On Wednesday I highlight a few noteworthy new sports books, with links to reviews, interviews and other information about the subject and/or author.

All this week at The Stacks, Deadspin’s new classic sportswriting blog, Alex Belth is featuring the work of Red Smith in honor of the recent release of “American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith.”

While not limited to baseball, the Library of America collection is perfect for fans easing into midsummer and the heart of the season.

American PastimesTo introduce this week’s feature on The Stacks, Belth offers this Smith gem from Jerome Holtzman’s “No Cheering in the Press Box.” Smith talks about sports, the craft of writing and his own life, with roots in Green Bay and Notre Dame and eventually the East Coast newspaper world, culminating with his tenure at The New York Times:

I won’t deny that the heavy majority of sportswriters, myself included, have been and still are guilty of puffing up the people they write about. I remember one time when Stanley Woodward, my beloved leader, was on the point of sending me a wire during spring training, saying, “Will you stop Godding up those ball players?” I didn’t realize what I had been doing. I thought I had been writing pleasant little spring training columns about ball players.

If we’ve made heroes out of them, and we have, then we must also lay a whole set of false values at the doorsteps of historians and biographers. Not only has the athlete been blown up larger than life, but so have the politicians and celebrities in all fields, including rock singers and movie stars.

“American Pastimes,” which includes an introduction by baseball historian and former Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent, leads off with some of Smith’s most memorable baseball work, including “Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff.”

But there’s plenty of boxing, horse racing, Olympics and outdoors sports, sometimes collected in decade-by-decade clusters that are a real treat for serendipitous readers.

Jonathan Yardley reviews the book for The Washington Post; and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a synopsis included with other books by Wisconsin authors.

Terence Smith, a noted journalist in his own right, has this retrospective of his father:

The column was his contract with life. As long as he was writing it, he felt he was in the center of things, that he still mattered. That’s why he kept at it until the week he died. As long as he was writing, he was part of the world he had lived and loved. Newspapermen were not just his colleagues, they were the best of his friends, the people he chose to spend time with, on and off the beat.

Also newly released

• Tom Clavin’s “The DiMaggios” goes beyond baseball to illustrate how the trio of brothers symbolized a generation of immigrant sons. the dimaggios

In The Boston Globe, Bill Littlefield writes that Dom DiMaggio may be the star of the family:

The contrast to Joe’s haughty isolation is dramatic, and Tom Clavin’s admiration for Dominic DiMaggio as a ballplayer and, more significantly, as a man, is palpable.

An excerpt here on that very subject; and another review from Baseball America.

• Mickey Mantle, who succeeded Joe DiMaggio as the Yankees icon, is the subject of numerous biographies. Allen Barra explores his relationship with another New York baseball legend in “Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age.”

Unlike the DiMaggio brothers, Barra illustrates the friendships and similarities of two men from very different backgrounds.

Former Mets outfielder Ron Swoboda reviews the book for The New York Times.

Barra has an excerpt at The Atlantic.

• When did the Chicago Cubs become baseball darlings beyond the Windy City? In “Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs during the Jazz Age,” Roberts Ehrgott dates it to the 1920s, when a talented club started breaking hearts in earnest.

At that time, the Cubs — with a young Bill Veeck as a rising executive — were less than 20 years removed from their last World Series victory. With Hack Wilson and Rogers Hornsby on the roster, among others, this was a team built for glory but ultimately fated to perpetuate what’s become more than a century of failure.

An interview with Ehrgott here by Littlefield on Only a Game; NPR’s Scott Simon, a Chicago native, pens a review for The Chicago Tribune; Bob D’Angelo of The Tampa Tribune says the author’s writing style stands out as much as the story:

Ehrgott’s use of the transcript of a meeting between baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Hornsby, Bush, English, Pat Malone and Charley O’Leary might be the most complete version ever published about the Rajah’s gambling debts. The drama that unfolds is fascinating.

By the time the Jazz Age ended and the Great Depression settled in, the Cubs “were more like Everymen, friends and neighbors who went out each day and did the best they could — ‘old neighborhood’ guys who weren’t above picking up their own groceries,” Erghott writes.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in baseball, sports books | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

A slow news relic passes: Pro Football Weekly, RIP

June 4, 2013 – 1:51 pm

When you click onto the Pro Football Weekly website nothing seems amiss. Scouting reports, analysis of draft picks and off-season personnel moves dominate the home page, as you might expect for the late spring/early summer months.

But if you glance to the “top stories” index at the top right of the page and click onto the first link, you’ll read more about why PFW is no longer publishing. Publisher Hub Arkush, son of the man who founded the magazine in 1967, delivered the bad news last week:

I would love to tell you all about the future if I could, but I’m as curious as anyone to see what’s next. Pro Football Weekly’s NFL Preview 2013 magazine and the Fantasy Football Guide 2013 will be available at your local newsstands on June 11 and June 25, respectively. The rights to publish and distribute those magazines were sold to help raise money for the “assignment for the benefit of the creditors,” and most of the old PFW staff and I wrote and edited them, so I believe you will find them to be equal to the old PFW standards. Beyond that the trustee is now accepting bids on all of the Pro Football Weekly assets, and it is my greatest hope that someone with the necessary resources will come along and attempt to revive PFW. I will continue to do anything and everything I can to assist in making that happen, but I’m afraid it is largely out of my control.

pro-football-weekly-xlvAnd with that, another venerable entity of a slowly-dying sporting press has gone away, not long after the print demise of The Sporting News.

Developments like this naturally tend to prompt nostalgiac retrospectives, which can become maudlin. Mike Tanier of Sports On Earth avoids this in offering a fond farewell to PFW, assessing its impact but also why this reality came to be:

The seeds of Pro Football Weekly’s demise were sown right in the publication’s name. Pro Football Weekly. In Internet terms, that might as well be Pro Football Never.

And this:

Maybe we were happier then. What’s important is not so much what we have gained, or what we lost, but simply what has changed. We now demand Pro Football Daily, Pro Football Hourly, Pro Football on a second-by-second basis on Twitter. Waiting until the end of the week for some perspective is like waiting until Friday afternoon to breathe. It is hard to remember how different things were, not too long ago.

And finally:

This business needs more outlets of record. The writers need more employers. The readers need more, better, smarter voices. PFW had fallen on hard times content-wise, but the magazine and website did not die because Nolan Nawrocki was not as good as [early draft guru Joel] Buchsbaum or because whispers now proceed directly from players to fans in the form of tweets. It died of velocity poisoning. Those of us who loved it most helped kill it.

Lance Zierlein of the Houston Chronicle especially remembers Buchsbaum, who prefigured Mel Kiper and others by more than a decade:

I asked my dad who he was talking about and he said that he was reading his scouting report on Jason Fabini and that Buchsbaum had him pegged just as he had Kevin Mawai pegged when my dad coached him at LSU and a variety of other offensive linemen over the years whom my dad had watched during film studies of other teams.

Bill Belichick thought enough of Buchsbaum to try and hire him away to the Cleveland Browns, but Joel wouldn’t budge. When you thought of Buchsbaum, you thought of Pro Football Weekly and when you thought of Pro Football Weekly, you thought of Joel Buchsbaum.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in sports media | Tagged | Comments (0)

The surprising odyssey of putting women in charge

June 3, 2013 – 12:19 pm

The future of Julie Hermann as the Rutgers athletic director — specifically, if she is to have a future at the New Jersey school — may be determined soon, with reports that she’ll be on campus this week ahead of her official June 17 start date.

One of the most most important components of this saga is hiding in plain sight, to a certain degree, but it’s not a new twist for those familiar with the history of women and leadership in intercollegiate athletics.

Not long after The Newark Star-Ledger reported that Hermann was the subject of complaints of verbal abuse by her players as Tennessee’s volleyball coach, the head of the professional organization devoted to advancing the careers of women athletic administrators issued a statement of full support for Hermann.

In a decade and a half as a high-ranking administrator in the Louisville athletic department, Hermann had been regarded as a rising star in her profession, and not just because of her gender.

So the news that the entire Tennessee team had issued a letter of protest about Hermann’s treatment — resulting in her removal as coach — must have come as a shock to the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators.

Yet what was missing from its statement was any acknowledgement of concern about the players’ complaints from the mid-1990s.

“These allegations are unfathomable,” Angela Bassett, who served with Hermann on the NACWAA executive committee, said in the statement. In a bizarre statement, a high-ranking Rutgers official is essentially blaming Hermann’s accusers.

But multiple members of Hermann’s last Tennessee team have stood by their claims.

This is where the delicate subject of women as athletic directors clashes with the even touchier subject of how female athletes are regarded by female authority figures, and there’s an intriguing dynamic here that doesn’t get much media attention at all.

From the very beginnings of organized women’s collegiate athletics, this dynamic has been present in spite of common assertions by women’s sports advocates that young females need strong female role models to lead and inspire them.

playing nice and losingOne of the few books to treat this subject with any critical scrutiny is “Playing Nice and Losing,” adapted from a doctoral dissertation by Ying Wushanley and published in 2004. I came across it serendipitously while researching my e-book from last summer, “Beyond Title IX.” His history of the governance of women’s college athletics focuses on the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which existed from 1971-1982 and was operated by women administrators who came largely from the physical education profession.

In probing through the AIAW papers and speaking with former leaders, Wushanley discovered plenty of internal conflict to conclude that the AIAW “became more a political agency for the women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women’s athletics.”

Wushanley, who now teaches at Millersville University, points out that it was the AIAW hierarchy, steadfastly opposed to the “male” commercial model of athletics of the NCAA, that prompted the first sports-related Title IX lawsuit. It was filed by female college tennis players and their coaches in 1973, a year after the law’s passage, and against the AIAW, which denied athletic scholarships for women.

An out-of-court settlement resulted in the AIAW allowing for some scholarship aid, but Wushanley notes that the organization spent much more money for the rest of its history on legal expenses than sponsoring sports for women. Indeed, the AIAW burned through a hefty chunk of that money in its final three years trying to stave off advances from the NCAA.

By then, claims by some AIAW leaders that women athletes are best served by women coaches and administrators were being disputed by other women leaders who believed the NCAA could better accommodate the growth of women’s sports brought about by Title IX. (One of those dissenters, former AIAW president and now-retired UCLA administrator Judith Holland, was called a “co-conspirator” for testifying on behalf of the NCAA in the AIAW’s failed antitrust suit.)

The reason you don’t hear much about these conflicts now isn’t just because they — along with Hermann’s coaching tenure at Tennessee — may be viewed as ancient history in our media culture. Wushanley’s findings reveal battles that women’s sports advocates have conveniently tried to airbrush in their more contemporary drive for greater female inclusion in athletics, and especially in the administrative ranks.

That’s why the NACWAA’s statement about Hermann, while disappointing, wasn’t surprising. It’s understandable there would be a swift response, given that there are only two other female athletic directors at BCS schools — Sandy Barbour at Cal-Berkeley and Debbie Yow at N.C. State.

Yet the NACWAA hasn’t come back with any clarification in light of the responses by Hermann’s former Tennessee players. Like the Title IX suit against the AIAW 40 years ago, the agenda of women careerists and the interests of female athletes are seemingly at odds.

What’s also emerging is another storyline that doesn’t help the cause of female athletic administrators: Kate Sweeney, the co-chairwoman of the Rutgers search committee and a former Scarlet Knights basketball player during the AIAW era, was especially eager to see a woman get the job.

Interestingly, several leading female sportswriters have teed off rather harshly on the whole Rutgers mess (including an alumna), femaleness be damned. Colunnist Tara Sullivan of The Record wrote that Sweeney’s advocacy prevented the school from identifying the best possible candidate. Instead, it hired someone with an alleged history of abusive behavior to oversee a department roiled by the abusive tenure of former men’s basketball coach Mike Rice. Concluded Sullivan:

Hiring a woman wasn’t the problem. Hiring the wrong woman is.

Regardless of Hermann’s ultimate fate – and her selected memory of her Tennessee tenure isn’t helping her case at all –  it’s a point that her biggest supporters remain oblivious to understanding. They ought to read — and fully absorb — this response published Sunday from former Tennessee volleyball player Jodee Scott:

Coaches are neither good or bad. It’s not that simple when human beings are involved; there are usually shades of grey. Coaches should be allowed to admit mistakes, say they’ve learned from them and move on without being ridiculed. Maybe then there would be fewer cover-up scandals in athletics. Maybe not.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in college athletics | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Friday arts: Plimpton at his creative best

May 31, 2013 – 12:30 pm

The new documentary about the life of George Plimpton won’t be in wide national release as it’s slowly rolled out this summer, so many of us will be reading more about the film and the man.

Playing at the Film Society at Lincoln Center through next Thursday, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton As Himself doesn’t appear to be a standard biographic profile (although there is a standard Gray Lady review).

Then again, Plimpton’s unique brand of participatory journalism redefined what had been stodgy old boundaries and has not been replicated.

Although the founder and longtime editor of The Paris Review, Plimpton rose to greater fame largely through his sports exploits, including the 1966 publication of “Paper Lion,” based on his brief quarterbacking stint with the Detroit Lions.

plimpton movie_posterAs Leo Braudy wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the “highbrow populist” was eager for plenty more:

While it wasn’t quite Hemingway at Pamplona, Plimpton took the lumps as well as the glory, as he would again some 10 years later (again for Sports Illustrated) trading punches with Archie Moore, an interesting showboat in his own right, who had been Light Heavyweight Champion of the World.

With Paper Lion Plimpton became not just a person but also an eponymous noun, joining the ranks of Captain Boycott, the Earl of Sandwich, and many others. As Plimpton! records in loving detail, he consulted with Woody Allen and then tried standup comedy, swung on the trapeze at the Ringling Brothers circus, sat in as goalie for the Boston Bruins, played basketball with the Celtics, and inserted himself into a host of other experiences, always the inept but game participant, eventually becoming a guest on The Simpsons. In the meantime he made TV advertisements for Intellivision, Mattel’s early game console, and popped up in the movies as well, most memorably in Howard Hawks’s last film Rio Lobo, where, as the credited “4th Gunman,” he is shot by John Wayne before hardly saying a word. A TV special called Plimpton! Shoot-Out at Rio Lobo quickly followed.

Plimpton’s ease moving between these worlds, even as a happy dilettante, confounded some within those separate spheres. As Luke Poling, a writer/producer/director for the Plimpton film, told NPR:

Those who write and appreciate great literature perhaps don’t appreciate sport as much, and vice versa. And so George was kind of stuck in this between world where both sides admire him to an extent, but maybe don’t fully grasp the greatness of what he was able to do.

He did have some literary admirers. Plimpton’s first sports book, “Out of My League,” published in 1961, cultivated his omnivorous appetite for experience, even after his dismal outing pitching against Major League All-Stars. Ernest Hemingway called the book “beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, his account of a self-imposed ordeal that has the chilling quality of a true nightmare.”

In writing about his 1959 “bout” with Moore for Sports Illustrated, Plimpton described his predeliction as “sympathetic response.”

As The New York Times noted upon Plimpton’s death in 2003: Paper Lion

As a “participatory journalist,” Mr. Plimpton believed that it was not enough for writers of nonfiction to simply observe; they needed to immerse themselves in whatever they were covering to understand fully what was involved. For example, he believed that football huddles and conversations on the bench constituted a “secret world, and if you’re a voyeur, you want to be down there, getting it firsthand.”

And he didn’t always fall on his face.

But there were some Plimpton admirers who thought he took his approach too far, especially when it came to shilling products on television commercials. What they don’t mention is that he plowed the money earned from that work back into The Paris Review.

The film also has prompted some in the literary community to reassess what’s been called Plimpton’s “apolitical legacy.” At The Awl, Brendan O’Connor seems frustrated that Plimpton’s heirs at The Paris Review in fact relish that legacy: “Distance from the politics of the day enforces those politics.”

At least he relents long enough to let Sadie Stein, the magazine’s deputy editor, sum up the enduring appeal of Plimpton:

“He liked people, he liked learning, and he liked to share what he learned. That’s a guiding spirit that motivates the site far more than any political agenda.”

Last summer, as the Plimpton film made its world premiere, The Paris Review examined how it was put together.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in sports culture | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Sports history files: Grappling with an uncertain fate

May 30, 2013 – 12:16 pm

For all of the conflicts between them — currently and over many decades — the United States and Russia have come together in recent months without hesitation over a single, perhaps surprising matter:

Preserving wrestling in the Olympics.

For the Americans, the strange bedfellow association extends to Iran, another powerhouse nation in a sport that the International Olympic Committee decided earlier this year to demote from its roster.

Wrestlers1But those collaborations, among others, have helped to give wrestling a fighting chance to stay in the picture. On Wednesday the IOC gave initial approval to reinstating wrestling for the 2020 Games.

A final decision won’t come until the fall, but efforts to reverse the IOC’s initial decision have included strong references to the sport’s venerable history, and not just in the Olympics.

The IOC’s initial action sent shock waves beyond the sport’s most avid advocates, for wrestling — both the freestyle and Greco-Roman varieties — has been on the Olympic roster since the inaugural games in Athens in 1896.

Dating back to early B.C. and the stuff of Homeric legend, wrestling represents one of man’s primal instincts. American sports journalists, some of them wrestlers in their youth who benefitted from the modern-day discipline of the sport, referenced this quite often in recent months.

With the IOC adding non-traditional sports like golf and keeping another Olympic original, modern pentathlon, that doesn’t come close to enjoying wrestling’s popularity, the criticism and scrutiny have increased.

Another former wrestler, novelist John Irving, has been one of the foremost voices making a cultural argument on behalf of the sport. In February, the inductee of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame took to the pages of The New York Times and couldn’t hide his bitterness:

In the ancient Games — as early as 708 B.C. — they were wrestling. Granted, some of those early wrestling matches were settled by brutal means; many matches ended in death. Think what matches ending in death might do for wrestling’s TV ratings. Death would beat the ball draw, or the clinch; almost everyone can understand death.

This was in a bit of jest, of course, but Irving’s passion for the sport has long spread to his literary work. About his latest novel, “In One Person,” Jon Michaud wrote on The New Yorker website that “wrestling has rarely served Irving better than it does in this book,” and highlights this paragraph: in one person

The sport’s sudden, sweaty reversals—its flips, pins, escapes, and submissions—are all metaphorically made for a novel that evangelizes in favor of people’s potential versatility.

The support to keep wrestling also has broadened to include the involvement of women, a fairly recent Olympic wrestling addition, and Olympic swimming icon Mark Spitz.

They all are a bit happier and more optimistic today, although guardedly so.

As American Greco-Roman Olympic gold medalist Rulon Gardner told the Des Moines Register:

“This was the board that basically gave us the death penalty, so to speak. So the same people that voted us out had to vote us back in. . . . I’d say 60 we’re in, 40 we’re out now. But we’re building so much momentum.”

By Wendy Parker | Posted in olympics, sports history | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Midweek books: Baseball summer reading list

May 29, 2013 – 8:51 am

On Wednesday I highlight a few noteworthy new sports books, with links to reviews, interviews and other information about the subject and/or author.

The official start of summer in America has arrived with the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which is a good time to finally plow into a growing stack of mostly new baseball books I’ve acquired to accompany the season.

Remembering the two Major Leaguers who died in World War II takes up a brief, but very moving, chapter in Robert Weintraub’s newly released “The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball’s Golden Age.”

That excerpt was reprinted Sunday in The New York Times, and outlines the brief baseball careers and short lives of Elmer Gedeon, who played five games for the Washington Senators in 1939, and Harry O’Neill, who caught two innings of one game for the Philadelphia A’s in the same year.

thevictoryseasonThey were multi-sport stars in college — Gedeon at Michigan, O’Neill at Gettysburg — who had seen plenty of military action before being killed. Gedeon’s bomber plane was shot down by the Germans over France; O’Neill was shot in the throat by a Japanese sniper on Iwo Jima.

It’s a sobering component to drop into the earliest sections of the 407-page narrative, which Weintbraub devotes to the return of baseball’s biggest names from wartime duty and the 1946 season that ended with the World Series between Ted Williams’ Boston Red Sox and Stan Musial’s St. Louis Cardinals.

Couched around the story of Gedeon and O’Neill is the relatively luxurious experience of Joe DiMaggio, who reluctantly signed up for the Army Air Corps and spent most of the war stationed in Hawaii. While he never was sent into action, DiMaggio muttered about the Yankees pay days he was missing while playing glorified sandlot ball on base. As Weintraub writes:

He told his buddies he was going to stick it to the owners for the time he missed and hold out for a $25,000 raise. “Cost me three years,” he’d grumble. “They’re gonna pay for it.” It was as if Joe was planning to send an invoice straight to Hirohito.”

This is as far as I’ve gotten, and thus far it’s got something of “The Best Years of Our Lives” feel to it. Weintraub explains how they reacquainted themselves with major league life, feeling the pinch of age and miffed that baseball owners weren’t prepared to better honor their stardom — as well as their military service, however superficial.

Weintraub describes these players as complicated humans — without the searingly painful revelations of other works, especially those about Williams and DiMaggio — against a backdrop of post-war America grappling with dramatic changes. The year before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, Major League Baseball had a memorable season that signalled what the author asserts were the coming baseball labor wars culminating in the 1970s.

If you enjoyed Weintraub’s “The House That Ruth Built,” you’ll find his moderately paced, clear writing style and anecdote-rich detail evident here as well.

Other reviews for “The Victory Season” come from The Washington Post, The Oregonian, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Weintraub is interviewed here by Atlanta Magazine; he lives in nearby Decatur, the venue for the area’s biggest book festival every Labor Day weekend, and where he has been a featured speaker.

The book also is included in a recent piece on The Daily Beast, “The Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Baseball Book.” As the title suggests, it’s not particularly generous to any of the books it mentions.

A Southern watershed

While Weintraub has written about baseball at the very start of the so-called Baby Boom, Larry Colton has taken a slice out of the last year of that wave to weave together a story of baseball and race during the Civil Rights movement.

Last week he visited The Carter Center here in Atlanta to give a talk about “Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race.” It’s the story of the 1964 Birmingham Barons, which defied that city’s grim Jim Crow reality to field its first integrated team featuring future major leaguers Blue Moon Odom, Bert Campaneris and Tommie Reynolds.

How they fared with their white teammates, coaches and owners and endured entrenched racism — notorious Birmingham segregrationist Bull Connor was a Barons radio announcer — is the focus of the book. Colton, who played for the Macon Peaches, also of the Southern League, in 1966, and played one game in the majors for the Phillies two years later, has interviewed most of the surviving players and some widows. southernleague

Colton spoke in detail during his Carter Center talk about his friendship with Odom that developed as he wrote the book. Odom, a starting pitcher on Oakland’s World Series title teams from 1972-1974, fell into drug abuse and alcoholism after his baseball career ended. Colton said he debated whether to include that part of Odom’s life.

“I was worried about Blue Moon’s reaction to the book,” Colton said. “He didn’t want it [included], but I put it in there anyway. He said to me, ‘I did those things, and it’s okay.’ ”

Last month, those players were honored as the Barons christened a new ballpark. During their visit to Birmingham, Colton and Odom played a round of golf together, and the author noted how the player thought that a little remarkable, given the city’s fairly recent past.

The other thing I thought noteworthy from Colton’s talk is how he never sought out to write a baseball book despite his background. He grew up in Los Angeles and played baseball at Cal-Berkeley before embarking on a professional playing career.

“I didn’t want to be known as a sportswriter,” he said.

Yet two of his previous four books are about other sports. Perhaps his best-known title, “Counting Coup,” is part of a healthy supply of books chronicling basketball on Native American reservations, although like others of that topic, it ventures far beyond the game. He also wrote “Idol Time,” about Bill Walton and the 1977 NBA champion Portland Trail Blazers, a book he says was rushed.

Colton has long lived in Portland, Ore., and is a founder of Wordstock, that city’s book festival.

Here’s a Q & A with Colton with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (paywall); review here from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I figure these two books should get me to the All-Star break; what would you recommend I read between then and the start of the playoffs? I blogged recently about some possibilities; Let me know what’s on your summer baseball bookshelf.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in baseball, sports books, sports history | Tagged , , | Comments (0)