SI, swimsuits and the cause of women’s sports

February 19, 2013 – 4:07 pm

It’s mid-to-late February. The Super Bowl is over, conference play in college basketball is heating up, and pitchers and catchers have reported.

Which means it’s time for the annual flogging of Sports Illustrated for its popular and highly lucrative swimsuit issue, now hitting the stands with Kate Upton leaving little to the imagination.

But instead of the usual sports feminist scolds doing the complaining, we have two middle-aged male sportswriters echoing similar concerns, and in some cases employing buzzwords found in a NOW press release.

I like both of these writers — Ed Sherman, formerly of The Chicago Tribune and now running an eponymous sports media site, and Michael Bradley, who’s written for ESPN The Magazine, among many outlets.

In the span of a week, they have both written that they think it’s hypocritical for SI to roll out this annual paean to red-blooded male leering not long after the magazine dedicated a special issue to the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

Sherman also was concerned that too many of the models were wearing only half of their bikinis, and conducted empirical research — by counting, apparently — to reach this conclusion:

And Vegas, here’s your winning total: 39. And that’s give or take a few I might have missed. Either way, the number seems rather excessive, or as my wife would say, “outrageous.”

Again, what’s the point other than to titillate and sell a bunch of ads? And one more question: How long before SI goes full frontal topless? No arms strategically placed, etc…

But titillating and selling a bunch of ads has always been the point, as much as I wish it weren’t so.

At least Sherman ran his thoughts by an actual woman — his wife — before writing his post. Bradley, writing on the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center website this morning, just ripped off standard feminist boilerplate in adding to Sherman’s point about the SI Title IX issue:

You can’t be an advocate for women’s rights and contribute to their objectification.

As I wrote in response to Bradley’s post, we live in a society in which women’s athletic developments are celebrated and embraced, unlike my pre-Title IX youth sports days.

Bully for that.

We saw this on display last night in a stirring women’s college basketball game between No. 1 Baylor, the defending national champion, and No. 3 UConn, which has seven NCAA titles to its name.

But we also live in a society in which drop-dead gorgeous women are still regarded as something to behold.

And bully for that too.

These are contradictory and “incongruent” things only to those who fall for simplistic, antiquated feminist rhetoric that’s still stuck in the 1970s. There’s really nothing to reconcile.

To suggest that women’s continued progress in sports must necessitate the eradication of supposedly sexist portrayals of women in general is as unlikely as it is absurd.

SI makes a lot of money with the swimsuit issue. A lot of money. It also is one of the Time Inc. titles up for sale in a panicked decision that media guru Michael Wolff has savaged.

Even if the magazine were in better commercial shape to ditch the swimsuit issue, why should it? Bradley provocatively asks, “At some point, Sports Illustrated’s publishers have to decide that they stand for something beyond profit.”

What troubles me is something else being implied here: That because SI has done good some journalism about women’s sports — this 1973 piece still rates highly in my book — then it somehow should be about advancing the cause of women’s sports.

Bradley’s is a valid question, one that many of us who have been in print media have muttered as we took newspaper and magazine buyouts or dealt with layoffs and early retirements.

During its early years, as it strived to fill a niche and develop an identity, SI lost money, a lot of money, according to “The Franchise,” Michael MacCambridge’s 1997 history of the magazine. It eventually became a gold mine before the advent of the swimsuit issue, on the strength of stylish writing, hard-nosed investigations and spectacular photography. Those have been its causes.

There’s a troubling notion at work here that women’s political, educational and legal gains, including Title IX and sports, are being undermined by photos of supermodels in fishnet bikini tops.

Those who follow this line of thought are serving up a set of false choices.

The American feminist establishment relentlessly projects the ideal woman as well-educated, in a successful, high-achieving, white-collar career in which she fights for, and ultimately gains, power and social status that men have long enjoyed. Sports feminists have crafted a similar variation of an “empowered” female athlete, with a healthy body image unrelated to how she looks.

These are all noble things, and I support removing barriers for women who want to pursue those avenues.

But there’s little room in this narrative for the expression of sex, or traditional feminine sexuality, since that plays to male erotic desires which cannot be tolerated in this egalitarian vision.

Even women who choose to pose — and Lindsey Vonn donned a swimsuit for SI right before winning Olympic gold in Vancouver — are regarded as complicit in their own objectification.

While SI’s Title IX issue had some terrific components — including its Top 40 female athletes list — it largely ignored the concerns of those like me, who are critics of how the law is being enforced.

Still, SI displayed a lot more journalistic rigor than espnW, which truly went over the top in uncritical Title IX adulation to mark the 40th anniversary. That espnW has designated the activist Women’s Sports Foundation as its official charity has not generated one paragraph of scrutiny from any sports media party that I know of, nor from ESPN’s ombudsman.

There aren’t swimsuit babes on espnW, which ought to please Sherman and Bradley. I do get their weariness at seeing these displays in a supposedly more enlightened time. Indeed, among the upcoming ESPN/espnW “30 for 30″ documentaries includes “Branded,” which focuses on Anna Kournikova. From the promo:

This film explores the double standard placed on women athletes to be the best players on the field and the sexiest off them. Branded explores the question: can women’s sports ever gain an equal footing with their male counterparts or will sex always override achievement?

Because a “double standard” is presumed, I already know what the filmmakers’ answer is going to be.

If anyone wants to see a powerful media outlet taking on the cause of women and sports, and doing it badly, I give them the latest from featured espnW columnist Kate Fagan, who trafficks in women-as-perpetual-victims-of-a-sexist-sports-culture on a regular basis.

She takes a stupid, infantile comment from one NBA player known for saying and doing many stupid things, and spins it into a broad indictment of American culture:

Some people might shrug and say this type of gender-bashing is bound to happen in a male-dominated environment. But, of course, we know there’s more to it than that: It’s a microcosm of how women are too often disregarded across society.

This is truly lamentable stuff, and it does the cause of female sports advancement no more favors than a topless Kate Upton or a winless Anna Kournikova ever could.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in women's sports | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

When the ball was red, white and blue

February 18, 2013 – 11:04 am

The lackluster NBA Slam Dunk Contest had me mourning what once had been a fine art involving the best masters of the form.

While many present-day fans were chiding the sorry state of dunkology in the context of Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday, I was thinking about my forever champ — Dr. J — and David Thompson.

During the final season of the American Basketball Association, they dueled in the first-ever showcase dunking tournament in either pro circuit.

Before the weekend began, University of Michigan literature professor Yago Colas, who teaches a “Cultures of Basketball” course, dusted off an old post about the ABA, lamenting its seemingly forgotten legacy.

But for any of us who dribbled a red, white and blue basketball, listened at night to Kentucky Colonels games on WHAS or wondered how big Darnell Hillman’s Afro could possibly get, these are memories that remain resplendent with the pure love for a thing that was never bound to last. As Colas observes:

The best thing about the old ABA, for me is its resistance to narrative.

Loose BallsThis  had me digging out my old copy of “Loose Balls,” Terry Pluto’s rollicking oral history of the ABA, which Colas describes as:

. . . just a garbage can full of awesome quotations from participants, arranged in chronological order, and prefaced with a dizzying table that chronicles the emergence and disappearance of franchises like so many bubbles on the surface of a pot of boiling water.

What a romp this was to thumb through, randomly, as Terrence Ross finally was crowned the latest dunking champion. The first sentences of Pluto’s prologue are about what began as a novelty act in 1976:

The first Slam Dunk Contest was like most things in the ABA — an act of desperation designed to get a few more fans to walk through the doors. Sports Illustrated called it “the best halftime invention since the rest room.” There were five contestants — Julius Erving, Larry Kenon, Artis Gilmore, David Thompson and George Gervin. Erving asked coach Kevin Loughery if it might not be a bad idea for a white player to be in the dunking contest; Loughery agreed, but neither Loughery nor Erving could come up with a white guy whose dunking was worthy of display. There was a sellout of 15,021 on hand at McNichols Arena to see a pregame show of Glen Campbell and Charlie Rich, the dunkers, and, oh yes, the league’s All-Star Game.

Four hundred and thirty-seven pages later, you don’t want this to end. But the ABA did, not many months after the spectacle in Denver, the league’s aim all along being a merger with the NBA.

The ABA didn’t quite get that, as the NBA accepted only four franchises — the Indiana Pacers, New York Nets, San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets.

Compared to our present-day corporatized world of big-time sports entertainment, the ABA seems even more archaic now, a far greater lost cause of the sheer joy of basketball exuberance and slung-from-the-hip promotions than it probably ever was.

Colas is a faithful keeper of the old ABA flame, and his passion for basketball and culture earned him a panelist’s gig at the South by Southwest festival last year. On The Classical, he is the subject of this Q & A with Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko fame.

Colas also keeps the ABA love flowing here, and directed my attention to a 1997 HBO documentary about the league, “Long Shots,” that’s available in six segments on You Tube. Don’t blink your eyes during the Rick Barry segment in Part 1 of the film, and especially his choice of neckwear. Part 4 starts with the arrival of Dr. J, and after all these years he’s still the best who ever dunked.

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

The eternal lure and brutal eloquence of football

February 2, 2013 – 3:54 pm

“Football is a celebration of a not innocent and not rational and not liberal human condition. That is its attraction.” — Michael Novak, “The Joy of Sports”

* * * * * * * *

There is a young man who grew up in an upscale suburb of Atlanta, located not far from me, and where his professional-class parents held out for him the aspirations of an excellent education and bright career prospects that are common for their peers in the community.

He did excel in high school, academically and athletically, good enough at both to earn a football scholarship from an elite university with an outstanding, BCS-level sports program.

Most recently, he starred in a major bowl game victory in his last college game and has a reasonable shot at being selected in the NFL draft this spring. The current mock drafts I’ve seen don’t have him going in the first round, but being taken in the second or third rounds is a distinct possibility.

If football doesn’t work out for him, he’ll hold a degree from an institution of higher learning that confers more advantages to its graduates than most.

In every way, this young man is the embodiment of an American ideal that has vexed cultural critics of the game he loves like never before.

What isn’t written about him that much is the ferocity of his competitive beast. He also played lacrosse, which like soccer has become popular for suburban boys as an alternative to the innate violence of football. Both of these sports are rough and physical too, and concerns over concussions and other injuries, while not on the same scale as football, do exist.

He became aggressive enough in lacrosse for the state high school sports association to assign extra referee monitors at some of his games.

For his senior season, he was persuaded to stick to football, where his savage instincts were at least placed on a longer leash.

* * * * * * * *

When President Obama remarked recently that he’d be reluctant to let a son of his play football, I instantly thought of this young man. Obama, a noted Chicago Bears fan, has no son, of course, but two daughters. It’s easy to make such a comment when it’s unlikely to affect you.

We all know that the president does enjoy the occasional pick-up basketball game that has been known to get hyper-competitive. His former aide, Reggie Love, played basketball and football at Duke. His brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, is the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State. These were not casual encounters around the backyard basket.

There’s even a photo taken during the 2008 presidential race of Obama, campaigning in North Carolina, hooping it up with the Tar Heels during a practice. The aspiring commander-in-chief was taking it to the rack against then-UNC All-American Tyler Hansbrough, nicknamed “Psycho T” for very good reason, and the photo reflected this.

Hansbrough, in temperament and upbringing, is not all that different from my hometown guy. Thankfully for Hansbrough, his sport of choice, while being a physical, contact sport, doesn’t come with the rash of hand-wringing that is currently suffocating our national discussion about football.

Obama’s remarks, made during the run-up to Sunday’s Super Bowl, reflect a consternation that isn’t new, in the sense that football has been the subject of rules changes, reforms and organizational imperatives since its rise to prominence in the late 1800s. Another emphatic football fan and commander-in-chief, Teddy Roosevelt, called the leaders of college football to the White House in 1905 to address deadly violence in the sport.

The result was the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and while concerns over violent play weren’t eliminated, college football eventually rivaled baseball in popularity for many decades after that.

That it took the NCAA more than a century to create a sports science center to study the effects of injuries on college athletes is one of many points brought up by those alarmed by football violence and the toll it takes on the human body. In his interview with The New Republic, Obama expressed greater concern for the fate of college football players. But like many statements issued by perceptive politicians, his broader comments reflect the cultural anxiety of his times:

And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.

* * * * * * * *

The National Football League is drawing all the heat over football violence, and the possible concussion-related suicides of celebrated former players, most recently Junior Seau. The NFL, where unionized, well-compensated players, as Obama mentioned, is under considerable scrutiny — and media outrage — for not doing enough.

Or in the case of the New Orleans Saints and the bounty-hunting incident, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is accused of doing too much of the wrong thing for the sake of public relations. And getting savaged for it, in true Big Easy style.

At his Friday state-of-the-league address, Goodell says he’s committed to player safety, which didn’t satisfy many among the media horde as being honest or original. The NFL is facing years, if not decades, of litigation from former players, or their families.

One columnist in New Orleans made sure to paraphrase, in the second paragraph, a Baltimore Ravens player suggesting that enacting further preventative measures “would leave fans discontented, their hunger for carnage and thirst for blood going unsatisfied.”

The same columnist, in his own words, asked a question that has been posed many times before, and will again:

So, can we really watch Sunday with a clear head? Sure, just as long as we also watch with open eyes.

He’s suggesting that we’re not really doing much of the latter, I think. This is a common inference from our sports media establishment: We insist on being blind to this.

But are we really?

There are many valid concerns about the damage that football is doing to the best players in the game, and the lack of a forthright response from the NFL. Especially as the professional game is being played today, with bigger, stronger, faster and more athletic players than ever, and who are layered with more dangerous equipment than ever, the helmets and padding designed to protect them from violence.

As I wrote near the start of the season, existential explorations of the nature of the game have been prompted in part by these latest headlines. As Rich Cohen wrote — also in The New Republic, and I highlighted at the time:

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel: not because football is different, nor because the injuries have gotten so much worse, but because we’ve become increasingly careful as our society has become increasingly safe; we’ve lost our tolerance for risk. Football is the perfect game for the country America used to be.

Former NFL agent and current New York University professor Robert Boland more recently picked up on the same theme:

This is the first time in 70 years, since the end of World War II, when the majority of the men who are consumers of the game of football, at the NFL, collegiate or high school levels, have never played in a competitive tackle game at any level. Changes in population, where new Americans come from and the availability of the game have changed it from a sport many have played to one merely watched by many.

Among President Obama’s Oval Office predecessors, Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan all played the game in college. There is even a photo of a frail, thin John F. Kennedy, whose youth was beset by physical ailments, in a JV uniform at Harvard. But our public life has fewer examples of that kind of commitment to the game as a source of vigor and learning and negative examples abound. This, so far, has not diminished fan avidity or the popularity of the NFL. But separating the former player, who has direct experience of the many great qualities of the game, from the fan who sees it merely as a mode of association is a threat.

* * * * * * * *

So where does this leave my hometown football hero, with his sights set on playing in the very same NFL that’s under siege from lawyers and whose demise is being projected by journalists — and not for the first time? He’s from a white, upper-middle class family, and has found football to be, in Boland’s words, “a source of vigor and learning.”

He grew up in the same community as I did. In it is a popular public park where most days youngsters are pedaling around on bicycles, helmets tightly fastened around their tiny heads. Some of the bikes have training wheels, and sometimes these kids are tooling around gently on tricycles. Because the flat bike path doubles as a walking/jogging trail, none of these kids are motoring very fast. But I’ve seen a parent occasionally labor to place protective headgear on a querulous child who just wants to ride, to be free at play without meddlesome intrusions, even if they’re for his, or her, own good.

Maybe this was the budding football star I’ve been referring to, some years ago.

So what do we tell this now grown-up young man to do? Should we tell him to loosen his football chin strap for good and put on a tailored suit and play it safe? Should he heed the warnings of Bob Costas, channeling fellow baseball geek George Will, that football may be impossible to reform?

What would that “reform” look like? And why are baseball pontificators most eager to spring forth with dystopian portrayals of football? Because their “pastime” — while still in a very healthy financial state and enjoying the majesty of a history that football does not share — doesn’t hold the same cultural cachet that the NFL does today?

I write this as someone who as a fan prefers baseball over football without hesitation.

You don’t have to subscribe to the old nostrums about football, or any sport, building character and camaraderie and teamwork and blah blah blah to realize that there’s a magnificent denial at work here.

In all the fulminating over violence, concussions, brain damage, suicides, lawsuits, bloodlust, carnage and bounty-hunting, what’s missing is an acknowledgement of an aspect of human nature that draws young men to the game, including my hometown standout, and always will.

It is, as the Michael Novak quote at the top of this post suggests, largely ungovernable and absolutely eternal. In his book “The Joy of Sports,” referenced here often, he gets to a point that has been completely ignored amid the tens of thousands of present-day words of commentary. The “ritualized, well-controlled” violence of football is deeply archaic, he argues, for player and spectator alike:

One of the game’s greatest satisfactions is that it violates the illusion of the enlightened, educated person that violence has been, or will be exorcised from human life.  .  .  .

While girls were being good, boys were beating the shit out of each other. Women lack direct access to part of their own natures. Their rage is no less real; many have been educated away from it.

Since Novak wrote that more than three decades ago, America has become a society in which current generations of young males are being strongly “educated away” from such expressions, while girls, through the changes brought about by Title IX, are being steered explicitly toward them.

We applaud these developments as necessary for females to have access to the full range of options in our society. Female athletes are now being fed a litany of blah blah blah character-building nonsense, taught that sports are a gateway not only to an education and good health, but also to exciting professions and the corridors of high power. If believe too much of this, you might be inclined to think that girls who don’t play sports are just losers.

Meanwhile, the primitive urges of young men remain unreconciled and very strongly discouraged.

They are as unreconciled as they were nearly four decades ago, when in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” Hunter S. Thompson revealed what he had in common with Richard M. Nixon.

Coming out of the 1960s, when some former NFL players turned not only on the culture of football but also on the nature of the game, Thompson’s undoubtedly mescaline-laced confessional love of the game punctured the heart of everything the Lombardi-loathing, anti-authoritarian critics were saying.

Nixon met his political demise and the NFL roared into full splendor in the early 1970s, but without seriously addressing the unspoken essence of the attraction of the game.

Thompson blew his brains out in early 2005, three months after George W. Bush was re-elected and three weeks after the New England Patriots won another Super Bowl. At the top of his suicide note, Thompson scrawled “Football Season is Over.”

Gonzo-obsessives still argue about what he might have meant in the final piece of writing in his life.

And we still can’t turn away from the game while we profess to be horrified by what it has wrought.

* * * * * * * *

All this week I’ve had a browser tab on my iPad opened to The New York Times obituary for John Mackey, the Hall of Fame tight end for the Baltimore Colts who later helped usher in free agency as the head of the NFL Players Association.

(I was surfing for something else and came across this link and haven’t been able to look away from it as I prepared to write what has become an overly long and rambling discourse. My aim is to write tightly and get to the point, but my thoughts have been scattershot and the writing flabby as a result. I thank you for your patience if you’ve read this far.)

Mackey was 69 when he died in July 2011, and the story mentions high up that his wife thinks his dementia was caused by concussions from playing football.

He was a physical marvel of his time, a big and powerful, but rangy and speedy tight end who could catch a deep pass and do something with it. As Richard Goldstein writes:

His most memorable play came in the 1971 Super Bowl, when a pass by Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas went off the fingertips of a Baltimore receiver and a Dallas Cowboy defender into his hands. Mackey ran to the end zone, completing a 75-yard play. The Colts defeated the Cowboys, 16-13, on a field goal in the final seconds.

At the top of the story is a big photo from another game, of Mackey grasping a pass, with two Buffalo Bills defenders several steps behind. In the distance is the fuzzy figure of Unitas, already having gone through his throwing motion, watching downfield.

This was a thing of beauty, a classic split-second of splendor that I think is the real draw of football to its fans and players more than the violence. At least I know this is what really makes me watch, even the Super Bowl, which has become a cloyingly corporate hot mess of pop culture, military homage and inane chatter about television advertisements and how much they cost.

Just give me the game, any game, well-played, aesthetically rewarding and dramatic. Not all games can be this way, of course, so we keep watching. We can’t get enough, and it really isn’t just about the violence.

It is hard to reconcile the many football pleasures created by Mackey with the lifetime of pain and illness that he suffered afterward, and that many NFL veterans have endured. Some have found their lives so unbearable that they ended them.

But in our zeal to make football a kinder, gentler sport — including quite a bit of attention paid to the subject of homophobia in the game — we refuse to acknowledge another reality Novak understood long ago, and that remains unreformable. It’s one that my local football star probably understands without having to read something like this, and what will continue to magnetize so many young males like him:

So long as rationalists dominate the public symbols of society, football will have the added delicious taste of necessary counterbalance: the taste of forbidden fruit.

By Wendy Parker | Posted in pro football | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

More Lance Armstrong media schadenfreude to come

January 15, 2013 – 6:38 am

I’ve never been all that conflicted about doping in sports.

This probably makes me an amoral, if not evil, American to some.

As I have watched Tour de France cyclists pedal high into the Alps over the years, I have thought to myself more than once: “If they’re not taking something, they’re crazy.”

Before there were anabolic steroids, riders downed all kinds of substances to gain a competitive boost, if not an advantage. Including strychnine.

But later this week, these historical realities will be drowned out by a new round of outrage that one of America’s greatest sporting heroes was a “cheater.”

As I write this, Lance Armstrong is taping his interview with Oprah Winfrey, supposedly confessing to doping months after America’s taxpayer-funded anti-doping agency dropped its load of documents, and as has he continued years of denials. Until now.

While the interview with the queen of America’s confessional culture won’t air until Thursday, there’s already plenty of media pontification that figures to go over the top later in the week.

Former Armstrong defender Buzz Bissinger “came clean” in his Monday column in The Daily Beast, alleging he was duped.

I also anticipate the interview will include plenty of “contrived contrition” — the speculation is Armstrong is doing this to earn U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reinstatement to compete in sanctioned Ironman competitions — but I’m not buying that Bissinger or anyone who feels betrayed by him was “played.”

As I have been blogging here for some time, so many cycling fans, Americans and yes, media representatives, have chosen to look the other way, failed to understand the history of the sport or exist in a state of denial about what’s been known in the cycling community for decades.

Bissinger, Rick Reilly and others played themselves, easily taken by a great American storyline: Ambitious young athlete battles cancer, wins seven Tour de France titles in a sport dominated by Europeans, serves as an inspiration to other cancer patients and young athletes, etc., etc.

The purity of this storyline, we now fret, was just too good to be true. That Armstrong is alleged to have bullied, threatened and intimidated others makes this fresh reality even uglier. It’s easy to complain about being lied to now.

But it is precisely because of our Puritanical culture — where the redemptive forum furnished by Oprah Winfrey culminates the spectacle of a desperate, fallen celebrity begging for another chance, if not forgiveness — that we have arrived at this point.

When Congress criminalized anabolic steroids in the wake of the Ben Johnson revelations and opened another wasteful front on the War on Drugs, demonizing the use of these substances became particularly necessary for those pushing for “clean” sports. But as I noted regarding the Baseball Hall of Fame voting last week, some of the giant figures of the game’s Golden Age were less-than-secret pill-poppers, a fact conveniently ignored by absolutists who couldn’t summon a vote for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others.

This stance of zero tolerance has increased over the past 20 or so years, as the Lords of Baseball have been shamed into enforcing anti-doping measures. Last week’s announcement about HGH testing came of their own accord. Whether this is a PR move or something more substantive is a topic for another post, as is the depth of the fever pitch over Armstrong’s doping.

The latter says something about our society beyond feeling “duped” by Armstrong. I suspect it’s our inability, or unwillingness, to have a healthy, adult conversation about steroids that isn’t as black-and-white as the anti-doping zealots, and their true believers in the press, want us to believe.

Now Armstrong is going to be the perpetual butt of jokes, and blamed for bringing down a sport he once helped give unprecedented stature. I don’t mean to be flip about any of this; he’s in a hell of a lot of serious legal and financial trouble (Dave Zirin rounds this up very well) from which he may never fully recover. It would be too easy to say that if we didn’t make steroids use to be such a reprehensible crime (which it isn’t even in its strict legal sense now) none of this would have happened. There would have been nothing to lie, or bully others, about.

But as long as influential journalists remain fully taken by tales of ethically pure athletes, driven only by the love of competition, the desire to extinguish the culture of “dirty” athletes and their dastardly deeds will never be quenched.

The most insufferable, self-righteous examplar of this, Irish journalist David Walsh, is milking Armstrong’s comedown especially hard. He’s been the media’s Elliott Ness figure all along, and gives himself much of the credit for what’s come to pass. Walsh (more on him tomorrow) and his editors couldn’t resist reprinting one of his triumphal it’s really all about me columns over the weekend, as he positions himself to profit — literally — from the media schadenfreude over Lance Armstrong that isn’t going away anytime soon.

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

Sports as the antidote to mere entertainment

January 14, 2013 – 12:29 pm

Were this weekend’s NFL divisional playoff games entertaining, in the most generic sense of the word?

Absolutely, whether or not you had a particular rooting interest. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay writes that it’s hard to beat the NFL’s entertainment value, despite that many problems plaguing the league and the sport and that will continue to trouble them both.

But if you did have a team involved — raising my hand here — then you understand that these matters were about much more than entertainment. A final, inexplicable, moment of joy, aborting what figured to be a long, gloomy winter, could never, ever be scripted the way it turned out, no matter how much time the Falcons and Seahawks spent practicing just such a scenario.

Picture 1Nick Hornby years ago delved deep into the fan’s soul to illustrate, as well as any writer ever has, why for so many this can never be mere entertainment:

One thing I know about a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary . . . But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us as the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not in a watery version of the team’s fun . . .

The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is to be consumed must realise this above all things.

Hours after Tony Gonzalez admitted that “I was on the ground crying, like a little baby,” one of many celebrity award shows was underway, summoning all kinds of social media snark, sass and empty banter that is no stranger to conversation about sports, except for this important point: Nobody was really commenting on how the TV programs, or movies, affected them.

But there was plenty of commentary about the dresses and fashions and hairstyles of the stars and Jodie Foster’s coming-out speech.

Was “Argo” a terrific movie? Certainly, to those who had seen it and raved about it. Was Daniel Day-Lewis superb in “Lincoln?” I think so, but it’s first film I’ve seen in the theatre in some time.

But there weren’t the disquisitions about why these excelled as movies, or as individual performances, since the context wasn’t about examining them as pieces of cinematic art.

The Joy of SportsIn moments like these, I turn, as I usually do, to the early pages of “The Joy of Sports,” where many years ago, as the sports television age was rounding into the dominant position it continues to hold, Michael Novak offered the ultimate rejoinder of resistance.

Novak was taking aim at a 1960s-influenced generation of sports journalists who looked at their subjects through the prism of politics and social issues, instead of only sports, and tried to trivialize them as a result.

I have referred to some of these passages before but they are essential to the approach I’m taking with this blog, and they perfectly sum up a game that still has me trembling with emotion like few ever have in my many years of watching all kinds of sports:

The motive for regarding sports as entertainment is to take the magic, mystification, and falsehood out of sports.

Sports are far more serious than the dramatic arts, much closer to primal symbols, metaphors, and acts, much more ancient and more frightening.

Those who think that sports are merely entertainment have been bemused by an entertainment culture. . . I don’t watch football to pass the time. The outcome of the game affects me. I care. Afterward, the emotion I have lived through continues to affect me. Football is not entertainment. It is far more important than that.

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

Saturday Sports Reader: Discovering the Atlanta Falcons

January 12, 2013 – 6:45 am

All of this national media attention being foisted on my hometown team, after a regular season of obsessing over the Giants, Jets, Redskins, Cowboys, 49ers, Eagles and Packers — and more or less in that order — is making me very, very nervous.

The Atlanta Falcons have home field advantage in the NFC playoffs, which is anxiety-producing enough. Now the team known more for its litany of losing and the sordid Vick-Petrino saga is in the crosshairs of a sporting press that’s fixated on a singular theme — why success has eluded the Falcons recently.

Yes, the Falcons haven’t won a playoff game under current coach Mike Smith (0-3), who became the franchise’s winningest coach during the regular season.

And so the headlines have gone like this:

• “Falcons hope for something different, a playoff win” — Gee thanks, Atlanta-based CNN and Terence Moore, my former AJC colleague

• “Russell Wilson tops Matt Ryan in playoff trustworthiness” — Adam Schein, NFL.com, trollin’ trollin’ trollin’

• “Falcons primed to rewrite history” — Ashley Fox, ESPN.com, who didn’t go back far enough in time

But hey, no pressure. None at all. Not for a franchise that didn’t even appear in a playoff game until its 13th season of existence. The following week, after that first, glorious, one-point victory, came an especially painful moment, a loss to Dallas in the divisional playoffs. My season-ticket-holding father was hopeful we were fated for better things.

We were, but it took another 20 years.

The elation was off the charts when the Falcons reached the Super Bowl after the 1998 season. John Elway was very, very good in a Broncos rout, but in Atlanta we couldn’t get past the prostitution-related arrest of Falcons cornerback Eugene Robinson the night before the game.

This is how it has gone for the Falcons — from purely awful to rare moments of splendor followed by humiliating, utter devastation, typically coming away from the field.

The absolute lowest moment — lower than drafting Aundray Bruce No. 1 or trading away Brett Favre — was Michael Vick heading off to federal prison after pleading guilty to dogfighting charges in 2007, two years after a glittering ride to the NFC finals and a $130 million contract extension. The Face of the Franchise, in handcuffs, bound for Leavenworth.

The day after that, and after promising Falcons owner Arthur Blank he was staying put, Petrino bugged out for the Ozarks, seen on a midnight “SportsCenter” calling the Hogs.

We all know what eventually happened to Petrino, which is to say he isn’t mourned around here.

Picture 4My friend Ray Glier, co-author of a new Falcons fans-oriented book, recently told an Atlanta TV station:

“The Falcons, frankly, for 42 years or so didn’t have a lot of big moments. Now they’ve got a lot in the last five years with Mike Smith and how things have gone out there. So, you pick the big moments and you immediately pick the biggest stage they’ve been on and it’s the Super Bowl and that’s number one in there.”

While those aspirations are certainly in the air once again, so is an abnormal amount of unusual tension. Of having to live up to expectations, of all things.

For Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, the playoff drought is even more pronounced, since he never won a post-season game during all those years with the Chiefs. Former Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski writes about the future Pro Football Hall of Famer this way:

People keep asking Tony G. if he will REALLY retire after this season, and he keeps saying that he’s 95 percent sure that he will. Why 95 percent? Well, I think he can’t help but wait to see what happens in Sunday’s playoff game at home against Seattle. Gonzalez wants it. He needs it. He keeps saying this is the best team he has ever been on, and they are at home, and, yes, he needs that victory. He wants to retire, of course. He doesn’t even want to think about the pain if he loses in the playoffs again.

Of course, no pressure. None at all. Especially when you’ve been written off by Nate Silver.

Actually, there’s also spirit of celebration here, given the city’s deep rudders of defeat, its historically warm embrace of the college game, nearly two decades of the Braves’ renaissance and the fact that we’re bloody surrounded by neighbors, co-workers and fellow parishioners from somewhere, anywhere, else, whose allegiances are to teams in towns they’ve permanently left behind.

Jason Kirk of SB Nation explains why perceptions of Atlanta as a bad sports town are all wrong.

Atlanta-based Sports Illustrated writer Thomas Lake has professed his Falcons addiction, shared with his brother, in a story apparently fit only for print.

A Falcons fan message board reprints it here:

Maybe we’ll fall short again this year. The experts have already written us off. We have 46 years of losing behind us.

This better not be a back-door jinx.

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

The sports magazine art of Richard Ben Cramer

January 11, 2013 – 12:32 pm

The writer known best for his mountainous study of the 1988 presidential race, “What It Takes,” was remembered just as much this week for his equally memorable magazine work.

Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was 62 when he died Monday from lung cancer, was especially hailed by fellow authors and journalists for his 1986 Esquire magazine article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

Picture 2It was like so much of Cramer’s best work: unflinching, drawing out the visceral, honest truth about a man. Williams’ career drew to a close in 1960 — marked by the last home run he hit in his last at-bat that John Updike famously wrote about for The New Yorker — and Cramer describes the aftermath:

And what was Ted left with? Well, there was pride. He’d done, he felt, the hardest thing in sport: by God, he hit the ball. And there was pride in his new life: he had his name on more rods and reels, hunting guns, tackle boxes, jackets, boots, and bats than any man in the world. He studied fishing like no other man, and lent to it his fame and grace, his discerning eye. He had his tournament wins and trophies, a fishing book and fishing movies, and he got his thousand of the Big Three. Jimmy Albright says to this day: “Best all around, the best is Ted.” But soon there were scores of boats on the bay, and not so many fish. And even the Miramichi had no pools with salmon wall to wall. And Ted walked away from the tournaments. There wasn’t the feeling of sport in them, or respect for the fish anymore. Somehow it had changed. Or maybe it was Ted.

Tom Junod called this “the greatest magazine profile ever written,” and recalled the impression it made on him before his own journalism career was underway:

It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard, before or since, and in that sound was freedom… freedom to sound like yourself, freedom to sound like your subject, freedom to do what it takes to make both a subject’s experience and the experience of a subject come alive. Sure, there were plenty of sound effects and exclamation points, but it wasn’t Wolfean — it was Bellovian, the work of a first-class noticer who knows that writing “like an angel,” or however it is that writers are supposed to write, is a small thing next to writing, well, like a mensch.

Alex Belth uses the same word in his homage, calling Cramer “a mensch of the highest order, a good man, as well as a wonderful storyteller,” and linking to plenty more, including an acclaimed profile of Jerry Lee Lewis. Here’s another Esquire sports piece from 1987, “Fore Play,” that Belth posted Friday, and he has another remembrance from David Hirshey, Cramer’s editor at the magazine, on what happened when the Williams piece he submitted was far too long.

Joe Posnanski cites Cramer’s 1995 story for Sports Illustrated on Cal Ripken Jr. surpassing Lou Gehrig as his discovery point for a writer who later became a friend:

After I read that piece about Cal Ripken — which includes the magical word “fotobooger” and ends with a seemingly simple story of Ripken signing autographs that gets to the heart of why he mattered so much to people — I had to read everything Richard had ever written. It was only then that I read the Esquire Ted Williams story, which I had heard about and copied but had never really read. Of course, the story was more than great. It was life altering.

ESPN The Magazine writer Ryan McGee recalls how Cramer had done his homework — on him — before their collaboration on a NASCAR-produced documentary about Dale Earnhardt Jr.:

“Now, Ryan McGee, there’s something you need to know about me that you can’t learn by reading the inside of that book jacket. And it’s the one thing you don’t want to hear.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about NASCAR, and I surely do not know a damn thing about Dale Earnhardt.”

Picture 3Cramer’s 2001 biography, “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” was more than 500 pages in length, and it received mixed reviews. While many of Cramer’s friends and admirers praised it, others were taken aback by the author’s searing investigation of another lionized, but flawed, baseball legend, especially DiMaggio’s shortcomings as a father and ill treatment of others.

As Ian Jackman wrote for the London Review of Books:

Cramer isn’t someone you’d want picking through the debris of your life . . . He tells these stories straight and unsanctimoniously. He does not catalogue DiMaggio’s misdeeds just to run up the score against him.

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

Sports history files: Baseball’s dwindling Romantics

January 10, 2013 – 3:48 pm

The burden of history falls upon baseball like perhaps no other sport in North America. The idealism, desire for moral purity and poetic meanderings of some of the game’s most zealous gatekeepers (most of them self-identified, rather than actual) has hardly diminished after more than a century.

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.

This was the dilemma faced by many writers given Baseball Hall of Fame ballots last year. The results were announced yesterday, and for the first time since 1996, the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who voted approved no living players for induction.

The lengthy list of names on the ballot made it difficult enough for any player to reach the threshold of being voted on 75 percent of the ballots cast. That some of those names have been associated with steroids use has ushered in what is considered a “new” era on the matter of reaching Cooperstown.

JuicingTheGameI would agree with that argument, up to a point. This was the first year of eligibility for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the players most hounded by the federal government for doping allegations. We’re not many years removed from the absurdity of Jeff Novitzky, an anti-steroids IRS agent, sifting through a dumpster at the BALCO lab, and the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted to prosecute Bonds and trot Clemens before Congress to get them to confess to their “crimes.”

A number of writers have explained why for them even being connected to or suspected of steroids use crosses the line of “Rule 5,” the Hall of Fame voting provision that goes to a player’s character.

Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, as prominent a steroids scold as there is in the media and author of the 2005 book, “Juicing the Game,” wrote Wednesday that he sent in a blank ballot “because the damages to the game were real:”

I understand that we live in a pharmacological age. There is a pill for everything, whether it is Viagra, Lipitor or Adderall. I understand that we will never get clarity about who used and who didn’t or about how much drugs helped the numbers or hurt them. What will always baffle me, however, is that even in an age of intense cynicism, the lying and deceit don’t matter to some. Why are people who were offended by these years of dishonesty being cast now as outdated charlatans, soapbox preachers or the “moral police”? I wonder why there is so little outrage toward the liars and cheaters who for years used their clout with the fans, their enormous wealth, their fame and their influence in the game to deceive the public.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, the historical holes in his column are vast. First of all, anyone who routinely uses the word “cheaters” in this discussion tends to be an absolutist in expressing an intolerance for steroids. The same goes for “lying and deceit.” This verbiage is commonly employed by writers engaging in far too much schadenfreude regarding Lance Armstrong, for example.

After taking a beating from commenters on the column, Bryant poorly defended himself on Twitter Thursday with about the most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen from a sportswriter (and that’s saying a lot):

BBWAA is nothing but a mop.MLB, players sit back as HOF voters get pummeled for their mess. They punted Steroid Era to us+this is the price

Unlike those now turning their wrath against Armstrong and (alleged) baseball dopers after years of looking the other way, Bryant can’t be accused of being inconsistent about steroids. But he is terribly remiss in ignoring the fact that Cooperstown includes a rogues’ gallery of less-than-earnest human beings who cheated their way through life, if not necessarily on the diamond.

In Thursday’s SB Nation Longform feature, the father-son tandem of Michael and Colin MacDonald contend that absolutists waxing indignant now — and Bob Costas is singled out here — have no one but themselves to blame:

We do not think that steroid use is good or laudable. We wish the game were free from them. We wish steroids never had been used in baseball. But we also recognize reality. When the genie escaped the bottle, it forced players to choose between using and gaining a competitive advantage, and not using and suffering a competitive disadvantage. Using also endangers the player’s health and imposes the same choice on other players. Not using risks losing games and jobs (and the 1989 World Series). Some players will cheat at every opportunity and others will honor all rules no matter the temptation. But many players will play within the rules as the guardians of the game define and enforce them. But if the enforcement of the rules signals a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, the blame originates with those sending the signal.

CooperstownConfidentialPrior to the publication of his 2009 book, “Cooperstown Confidential,” author Zev Chafets answered the absolutists as forthrightly as anyone ever has, pointing out the many unhealthy commodities consumed by players, Hall of Famers and otherwise, during the long history of the game:

Since the dawn of baseball, players have used whatever substances they believed would help them perform better, heal faster or relax during a long and stressful season. As far back as 1889, the pitcher Pud Galvin ingested monkey testosterone. During Prohibition, Grover Cleveland Alexander, also a pitcher, calmed his nerves with federally banned alcohol, and no less an expert than Bill Veeck, who owned several major-league teams, said that Alexander was a better pitcher drunk than sober.

In 1961, during his home run race with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle developed a sudden abscess that kept him on the bench. It came from an infected needle used by Max Jacobson, a quack who injected Mantle with a home-brew containing steroids and speed. In his autobiography, Hank Aaron admitted once taking an amphetamine tablet during a game. The Pirates’ John Milner testified at a drug dealer’s trial that his teammate, Willie Mays, kept “red juice,” a liquid form of speed, in his locker. (Mays denied it.) After he retired, Sandy Koufax admitted the he was often “half high” on the mound from the drugs he took for his ailing left arm.

These arguments are gaining more traction in the mainstream media, including with some Hall of Fame voters, who are responding forcefully to the puritans. Another early chronicler of steroids in baseball, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, wrote this week why he won’t cross the same line as Bryant. So some voters who couldn’t check off Bonds or Clemens also excluded Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza by extension, which riled up Richard Justice of MLB.com:

Oh, Lord, scoop out my eyes with a plastic spoon. There are few things sportswriters enjoy more than preaching about right and wrong.

Ditto for baseball business writer Maury Brown, who doesn’t have a Hall of Fame vote but ought to:

People are not all “rainbows and unicorns.”…. Cheating in baseball began long before steroids were the lightening rod they are today… The HOF isn’t Church, so don’t vote like it is…. Those that are not filling out their ballots as a form of protest are weak, making the story about them, and need to get in the trenches, deal with it or step aside. Your vote is a privilege, not a right. Deal with the complexities of it all.

(Similarly smart views here from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin Modesti of the Pasadena Star-News and Jayson Stark of ESPN.com.)

As the Hall of Fame votes were being finalized, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns anointed himself as Savonarola of Swat in rather churlish comments to the Hollywood Reporter that have ricocheted around the sports media world:

We know some pitchers extended their playing careers, we know some people hit the ball farther, but nobody hit .406, nobody had a 56-game hitting streak, no pitcher won 30 games, no pitcher won 35 games, no pitcher won 25 games. Maybe that helps you make it less onerous, but at the same time, those motherf—ers should suffer for a while.

Burns — who gave Costas, Bryant and Verducci unquestioned face time about steroids in his “Baseball” film — is among the last of the baseball Romantics, and it is a sad state of affairs. There’s a sense of desperation, if not moral outrage to their rhetoric, rife with the notion that the game’s robber barons of today aren’t owners who purloin public money for their playhouses but pumped-up sluggers who give fans the long ball they constantly crave.

But to denounce the absolutism of the Romantics is not to endorse the use of steroids, or to say that they are a good thing. It is to acknowledge the human flaws of many of those already in the Hall of Fame, and to understand the full historical range of so-called “cheating” behavior that predates the “steroid era” by decades. This is a nuanced topic that some wish to banish from discussion with a hardline sense of retroactive justice.

I wonder if Verducci missed this 1969 Sports Illustrated article about drug use in sports, with some prescient quotes at the top from Denny McLain.

The black-and-white persistence of the Romantics is fading away, but not because of any perceived moral relativism by a younger generation of writers or players who may shrug their shoulders at “juicing.” There is a heavy dose of realism and probity that is entering the discussion, a strong counter to those who wish to oversimplify.

What we are in now is the tail end of the Romantic era, for better or for worse. Some marginal candidates tied to steroids use may never get in, but with 14 years remaining on the ballot, Bonds and Clemens figure to gain induction. Their careers were well-established long before Major League Baseball began drawing a line against doping.

In blistering the zeal to sanitize the vote, Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports provides one of the few perspectives that puts the historical dereliction of duty by some Hall of Fame balloters in its rightful context:

This wasn’t just a referendum on steroids. It was one on the writers and their failure to recognize as long as they want the privilege of creating history, they must in doing so protect the worthy institution that finds them fit for the task. And considering the backlash following Wednesday’s revelation that it wasn’t just Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who didn’t pass muster but Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza and so many others, the 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America with Hall of Fame votes seem not to care about the damage they’re doing.

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

Midweek books: Change agents, loners and menschen

January 9, 2013 – 6:07 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 story of Mississippi State’s 1963 NCAA tournament game against Loyola of Chicago is a very familiar one, and not just to college basketball fans. Kyle Veazey, a sports reporter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, has expanded the tale into a full-length ChampionsforChangebook, “Champions for Change,” chronicling how the Bulldogs ignored state laws against integrated competition months after James Meredith made history at Ole Miss.

Babe McCarthy’s team lost to Loyola, which later claimed the national championship. But it won so much more, including the full support of the school administration and the Starkville community. While upsetting segregationists like Gov. Ross Barnett, McCarthy’s defiant stand helped pave the way for eventual integration in Mississippi, and SEC athletics.

Veazey, formerly with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and who was a Mississippi State beat writer, talks to his old newspaper about how the book came to fruition.

• Goalkeepers are the odd ducks of soccer, semi-stationary hands-on specialists in a game filled with free-range aces of foot-curled wonder balls. Jonathan Wilson, the lauded soccer correspondent for The Guardian, examines the psychology of the men in the nets in “The Outsider.” Ranging far beyond the box of conventional labels TheOutsiderabout keepers as eccentric philosophers (think Camus) with occasionally bizarre stunts on the field (Rene Higuita’s scorpion kick), Wilson, according to The Independent:

” . . .explores the psychological pressures of being cast in the role of scapegoat, taking the blame for other defenders’ errors or forwards’ inability to score, and takes an in-depth look at the theories behind penalty-taking and saving, concluding that it is the one situation in which the keeper cannot lose – if he keeps the ball out, he is a hero; if he doesn’t, it was only to be expected.”

Wilson chatted recently with SB Nation’s Roker Report blog, admitting that he finds goalkeepers more interesting to interview: “They seem as though this real sense of tragedy follows them around.”

More reviews from The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph.

• The jokes, puns and kosher analogies have abounded since the October publication of “Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame,” edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy of The New Republic.

“It’s hard to imagine two words less likely to appear in the same sentence than ‘Jewish’ and ‘jocks,’ ” began a review in The New York Times, referencing a line in the satirical movie “Airplane” before pronouncing “that times have changed.”

JewishJocksThe 50-essay anthology includes portraits of Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman, Dolph Schayes, Al Rosen, Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, Mark Spitz, Nancy Lieberman, Kerri Strug and Corey Pavin, among athletes and coaches. Also profiled are media figures Howard Cosell, Shirley Povich and Robert Lipsyte, owners Al Davis and Mark Cuban, baseball union leader Marvin Miller, chessmaster Bobby Fischer and Arnold Rothstein, the organized crime impresario behind the Black Sox scandal.

Foer, in an interview with Slate, proclaims: “This book has no anxieties!”

The Washington Post says the book is “full of tasty appetizers — a piece of gefilte fish, a slice of pickled herring. But there’s no chicken in the pot.”

More reviews from The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tablet, which kvetches in the headline: “Enough already with Koufax.”

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

The rare art of running from the sports media herd

January 8, 2013 – 6:22 am

I know of only a small handful of people who are so innately independent-minded, so stubbornly (in a good way) committed to the clarity of vision for their work that no institution can contain them.

One of those people is my father, now a retired home builder who left the world of working for cookie-cutter contracting companies by striking out with a partner when my siblings and I were small children. I can remember Sunday drives in our suburban community where Dad would bemoan the “ugly” houses he spotted (and there were many), suggesting a litany of improvements along the way.

Ultimately my father went totally on his own, with only the help of a part-time bookkeeper and referrals from satisfied customers to make a good living designing and building quality, custom-made homes that lived up to his high ideals.

Perhaps the only other individual who comes close to this kind of independence in my experience is fellow basketball writer Kyle Whelliston, a former colleague at Basketball Times. He made a name for himself by creating The Mid-Majority blog long before American sports fans fell in love with George Mason, Butler and VCU at Final Four time.

Sports Bubble BluesWhelliston parlayed that early success into a freelancing stint at ESPN.com, where he unfortunately couldn’t ride out the recession, and then his fortunes took an even more difficult turn. At the time, I was newly out of work after taking a newspaper buyout and contributed to one of his sites, Basketball State, that’s a college hoops numbers geek’s delight. I appreciated the chance he gave me to take a different stab at freelancing after many years of cranking out institutional journalism. It wasn’t particularly strong work on my part — it was rather mediocre, actually — but I reflect on them now as baby steps toward a bolder, more creative pursuit of work I’ve always had in mind.

What I didn’t realize until I read Whelliston’s self-published book “Sports Bubble Blues” was how fiercely devoted he was to his unique perspective on college basketball, and much more than that. The book is a collection of posts from The Mid-Majority for the 2008-09 season, just as I first came into contact with him. In “Sportsguy,” he takes aim at the empire Bill Simmons has created at ESPN (and which now includes NBA studio analysis):

Being the Sports Guy means constructing theories and definitions for others to view the world through, submitted for acceptance or rejection. It means writing things to elicit reaction, not broaden understanding. It means telling people what they already think they know.

. . . . . .

“Sports Guy” is a prison, as much of a ironclad cubbyhole as “Utility Infielder,” “Middle Linebacker” or “Small Forward.” While a master at any of these positions can find fame and success and great riches, I prefer a different road. I choose independence, anonymity and relative poverty. I choose freedom.

While this may sound harsh and unsparing, it’s not the Simmons-bashing that’s prevalent on, say, Deadspin. This is a critique of the substance of one of sports media’s first digital-age superstars, who took on established sportswriters (sometimes brutally) to forge his own path to prominence.

Now Simmons has become one of those figures at the top, getting his corporate employer to subsidize the Grantland site and the lauded (and deservedly so) “30 for 30″ sports documentary series. In the namesake post of his book, published in early 2009 as he was appealing to readers for donations, Whelliston wrote a paragraph that resonates for me as strongly now as it did at the time:

I’ve been living off the Sports Bubble for so long that I’ve lost touch with the actual value of what I do, and I have no tangible idea if this operation would survive with a lessened subsidy. Nobody asked me to start covering mid-majors this way, nobody demanded it at any point, and the market didn’t require a smartass traveling reporter who talks as much about losing as winning, who posts more about philosophy than basketball. It seemed like the right way to do it, so that’s the way I do it.

Even before prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan’s recent declaration of independence, I’ve been thinking about this constantly. Whelliston is off the road these days, with The Mid-Majority the work of readers across the country offering up their game reports. Grantland has prompted a number of stylistic competitors, most of them also corporate-owned. While there is good work being done in all of these places, my concerns about the viability of go-it-alone sites are growing, frankly.

It is the dearth of those singular voices, unafraid to run away from the herd and create something bracingly honest and not just for the sake of effect, that’s been noticeable. Where is the Andrew Sullivan of sports? Or Nate Silver, who in a recent interview underscored that not just his approach but his personality is “to really enjoy the work you are doing and not cheapen yourself.”

I hope I’m fretting far too much about this, and that it will not obstruct my aims of taking this blog in a more dynamic direction. There’s plenty of inspired work and good examples to draw from, but at times they seem like they’re a little to hard to find.

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