Extracurriculars

Leander Schaerlaeckens assesses the improving quality of play in the Bundesliga and the fiscal restraints imposed by the league and figures it might be the best soccer product around. It’s certainly in the best financial health in all of Europe:

“Not only do you get competitive matches, you don’t have to put a major dent in your wallet to support your favorite team. Because fans have a controlling ownership of their clubs, they can keep ticket prices affordable — about $28 on average, roughly the same as an MLS ticket and less than half of admission to an EPL game.”

Bravo to ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil for this well-reported piece on the complicated backdrop of college athletes and domestic violence and how some universities are trying to address the problem.

In particular, she was careful to point out that the case of George Huguely, a University of Virginia lacrosse player charged this spring with the murder of a member of the women’s lacrosse team, reflects a campus culture that goes far beyond the game and the cloistered world of sports:

“After Huguely, the blame was placed at the foot of lacrosse. The sport, sullied before by the Duke scandal, was attacked again, with critics arguing that the typically moneyed and privileged lacrosse player would be more apt to condone Huguely’s behavior.

“And in the ensuing mayhem, of lacrosse fans screaming in defense of their sport and detractors insisting it was nothing more than a bastion of testosterone-fueled trouble, the real problem was lost.

“It wasn’t about lacrosse.

“It’s about a college climate, where young men and women still experimenting with adulthood try to survive the land mines in front of them. Emotions, too often fueled by alcohol, bubble and burst without Mom and Dad to help bring them back to a calm simmer. People struggle with doing the right thing versus testing the limits of their coveted friendships.”

Suggesting even the possibility of such human complexity a decade or so ago was a virtually taboo notion in the mainstream media, which was taken instead by the toxic pronouncements of Mariah Burton Nelson — channeling the even more egregious Catherine MacKinnon — that the “male sports culture” is inherently misogynistic.

Yet there is more recent media hysteria over the above-mentioned Duke lacrosse scandal as well as the Virginia tragedy that I called out as the typical journalistic rush to judgment.

It’s still tempting to search for easy labels to explain this behavior when there really are none. Crime is about the actions of individuals as individuals — and not as members of a group.

The time to stop condemning all male athletes for the actions of a few is long overdue, and O’Neil provides a rare, ideology-free perspective with a healthy understanding of what’s at stake.

John Campanelli of The Cleveland Plain Dealer writes about John Barr, a Connecticut warehouse worker with no ties to the northeast Ohio city but who moved there recently after quitting his job, so he could more easily cheer for the Browns:

“In East Hartford, the 33-year-old had a job, with full benefits. He had family. He had furniture.

“Now sleeping on the floor of his basement apartment in Berea, Barr has none of that: no job, no family, no furniture. His health insurance runs out at the end of the month.

“Yes, ladies, he’s single.

“But before we mock the guy, there is something kinda wonderful about him.”

His passion for the Browns comes up against a supreme test today, with Colt McCoy slated to start against the Steelers.

From earlier this week, Patrick Hruby pens a smart piece on the need to take a deep breath over the hysteria over steroids in sports and address the issue like adults:

“What if we’re too ignorant to judge the severity of the performance-enhancing drug problem in sports?

“What if the madness makes us ignorant, and the single greatest side effect of our ongoing War on ‘Roids is that we don’t even know what we don’t know?”

Then again, with headlines like this, don’t hold your breath. Dick Pound’s successor, take it away:

“If, after that, we still find people who are cheating, they’ve got to sit back and say, ‘What do we do now?’ ”

Licking my chops about Victor Conte coming before the WADA moralists, but he sounds too humble here.

In The New York Times, Katie Thomas details the lawsuit retired police officer Lana Lawless has filed against the LPGA for banning potential competitors like her who are not born female.

Among the other targets of her legal action — and I’m not making any of this up, including her name — are the Long Drivers of America and Dick’s Sporting Goods, which are among the sponsors of this weekend’s LPGA event in California.

God forbid what the frat boy sports sites are going to do with all that, but I doubt it will be no more edifying than the latest Brett Favre brouhaha.

Thomas offers some interesting perspective from Renee Richards, who doesn’t agree with this claim by Lawless that goes to the heart of the transgender identity:

“There is no such thing as born female. Either you’re female, or you’re not.”

I appreciate the principles that people like Lawless are fighting for, but that declaration also goes to to the heart of what animates those who assert that gender is not fixed biologically but rather is a “social construct.”

I won’t wade into those troublesome waters here, and I haven’t been able yet to pore through this study on how to address the concerns of transgender athletes into high school and competitive sports.

Where this may fit into the larger spectrum of women and sports presents another quandary. How much time and energy should the women’s sports movement spend fighting for the rights of transgender athletes when there are so many pressing issues? I simply don’t know.

What I do know is that this is not what the LPGA had in mind when it was seeking greater mainstream media attention.

The hottest sport in India these days is cricket, with plenty of flash, dazzle and allegations of scandal that befits the modern sporting age.

Not that many years ago, however, India was a field hockey powerhouse with the legendary Dhyan Chand, who’s being missed in his homeland now as it plays host to the Commonwealth Games:

“With each new disappointment, fans cite him as a symbol of everything that was right about Indian hockey: elegance, efficiency, and above all, skill.”

As Nicolas Brulliard writes in The Wall Street Journal, the game passed India by when it abandoned grass for a fast artificial surface. Catching up has been an enormous psychological as well as logistical obstacle.

By the time I covered an India vs. Pakistan match at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the quality of the hockey had faded badly between the two eternal enemies. The national animosities had not, but the match played out without incident before a near-full house of 15,000 spectators. I don’t have complete attendance numbers, but as I recall the crowd was close to the gold medal match won by The Netherlands.

But catching even a glimpse a once-great sporting rivalry was a treat for these untrained American eyes.

Update: India pulled off a rather big upset Saturday, knocking off Pakistan to reach the semifinals.

I’ll refrain from making the obvious “Leaves of Grass” references to ESPN The Magazine’s annual body issue since that’s been done here and here from the ESPN executive heading a new women’s initiative I wrote about last week.

The Bard endures!

Instead, I’ll let Hartford Courant columnist Jeff Jacobs slam dunk the reaction in some prudish, feminist corners about the decision of basketball star Diana Taurasi to bare it all:

“Anybody who has a problem with Taurasi’s pictures ought to move from 21st century to 17th century New England and take up residence in the Puritan village next to Hester Prynne’s house. That’s no Scarlet Letter on Di’s hip, Bunky. That’s a tattoo. Either that or it’s a lingering bruise from hip-checking Tennessee out of the Final Four three years in a row.”

I have taken issue with the self-appointed arbiters of female athletic imagery. They also like to be very bossy about declaring who’s a feminist and who’s not.

My first reaction upon seeing Taurasi, whom I first met as a high school senior a decade ago and covered throughout her UConn career, was this: “Gee, I’ve never seen her hair like that.” There was absolutely nothing distasteful about this shot, and it would behoove the fusspots to go back into Jacobs’ column and read what Geno Auriemma’s daughter has to say. Women of that generation are definitely not bothered by all this. Bravo!

But some folks can’t get past what we like to describe down South as “nekkidness.” As if there’s something dirty and unwholesome about taking what nature gave us and sculpting it into fabulous shape, and daring to show it to the world.

Sadly, sports feminism hasn’t evolved much in the past decade in its quandary with the female athletic body, because what Taurasi is hearing is not all that different than what Brandi Chastain endured from The Sisterhood.

How absurd is it to talk down to full-grown, professional women as if they’re grade school girls who flashed their underpants in front of the boys’ room? How maternalistic is it for women clearly uncomfortable with the expression of any notion of sex appeal to determine for an entire gender what is appropriate? That is the double standard here, not when women disrobe.

To paraphrase Chastain, Taurasi played her ass off for that body, and has won just about everything a basketball player could ever hope to win. At 28, she’s far from finished. She should reserve the right to display her body and what it symbolizes to her any way she wishes.

But my hunch is that with a new NBA season on the horizon Amar’e Stoudemire might endure more grief than any of the women.

There have been plenty of headlines about this week’s retreat of top women’s sports leaders by ESPN, which has designs on creating a separate espnW brand to appeal to a very different demographic than what tunes into the Family of Networks.

This was an all-invitation shindig near San Diego, so those of us not part of the In Crowd will be eager to hear the details in forthcoming days.

But there’s been plenty of squawking in the women’s sports blogosphere from those who think it’s patronizing to women who like to watch sports. A pink ghetto, if you will.

I can understand this point of view, since I’m in that small, but passionate, minority. This passionate:

“Men and women are not different species, but as a female sports fan, you sometimes can’t help but wonder if marketers think they are. Sports marketing tells men it’s ok to be loud, obnoxious, proud fans of their sport. Marketing tells women… not a whole lot. Marketing can often miss the boat, too – assuming that simply because they design something that is pink or sparkly, that women will want to buy it, or buy into it.”

Except that when it comes to sports, men and women are different viewing species. This is about creating a business model — and an audience — at a scale that a major corporate entity can make work.

I’ve never been part of that target audience, but I think it’s worth another shot at reaching the non-traditional female sports fan. Previous women’s sports magazines had similar aims — to appeal to fitness-oriented women by using prominent female athletes as models of inspiration. The heavy costs of print, among other factors, doomed most of those efforts.

With corporations already actively chasing the disposable incomes of young female athletes, this market is too hard to ignore. And let’s be clear about espnW’s objective: It’s about creating an identifiable corporate brand with enough potential consumers to make it last, and to make it grow.

It’s not unlike Deportes, ESPN’s Spanish-language outlet. Its programming goes heavy on sports that are popular in the Latin world — soccer, baseball and boxing. There’s little attention paid to college sports, which is an American anomaly. And there’s virtually no coverage of women’s sports, except for a tennis Grand Slam event.

I understand the criticisms about some of the activities at the espnW retreat — the pedicures, the sunrise yoga, the girly-girly things, etc. There was a Navy Seal boot camp too, which would have rendered me straight to the sidelines.

Before waxing indignant about “stereotypes,” keep in mind that companies and marketers aim directly at what a large swath of desired demographic groups like to do in order to attract their business. Whether you like it or not, ESPN and every other successful corporate entity knows it has to cater to market-researched general interests and buying habits.

They may not be what I like to do, but I also believe there’s an untapped market for women who are serious spectator fans of sports played by both men and women. It’s a much smaller niche, and it may not be one a major media company will approach in the near future, if at all. It may be up to innovative women media entrepreneurs similar to those behind the WomenTalkSports blog network to which I’ve belonged (and who were in attendance at the retreat) to experiment with a variety of startup ideas.

I’m not a business person, and I’m just rambling off the top of my head here. But I’m thinking that if the initial ideas behind espnW can take off, then perhaps that audience can be expanded to the likes of, well, me.

Who don’t do sunrise anything, much less yoga.