Dave Zirin | The Nation
Steubenville and Challenging Rape Culture in Sports
A protest at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Steubenville, Ohio, January 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Steubenville Herald-Star, Michael D. McElwain)
When I was a 14-year-old with healthy knees and an obtuse overestimation of my own athleticism, I played for a basketball club team in New York City. One moment from that season looms above all others. We were in the locker room after practice, joking around and half-naked, when Coach Dan came in through the door. Coach Dan wasn’t much of a coach but he made up for it with relentless, flower-power positively. He was a hippie living in the wrong era, with a ponytail that went down his back, and a pocket of trail mix that would dribble out of his mouth like chewing tobacco. Dan never allowed any roughhousing, did “vibe checks” and spoke to us about pacifism while we stifled smirks. He knew we were laughing at him but didn’t really care.
On this day, Dan told us with his typical camp counselor enthusiasm to get our clothes on because one of the girl’s coaches, a woman I just remember as Coach Deb, was about to come in and speak with us. We groaned but still reached for our pants. Everyone, that is, but Tim. All I remember about Tim was that he was string-bean tall, painfully awkward and masked some deep insecurities by cracking jokes at Rodney Dangerfield speed. Tim saw this as a moment for humor and said, “Let’s keep our pants off because then we can rape her!”
I wish I could tell you whether laughter followed, but we didn’t even get the chance to react. In a flash, Coach Dan backhanded Tim across the face. Seeing a coach or adult authority figure hit a 14-year-old, even a huge one like Tim, was shocking enough. Seeing Hippie Dan do it was akin to watching the Dalai Lama stomp someone with his sandals. We all stood there breathless and I’m not sure if Tim or Dan was shaking more. Coach Dan finally spoke and said, “I’m sorry but there are some things you don’t joke about.” He then walked out of the locker room and practice was done. The incident was never mentioned, but Dan was never quite so positive, Tim stopped making jokes and that was the first and last locker-room rape joke of the season.
This seared itself into my memory because my brain seems to regurgitate it every time men’s sports lurks in the background of a sexual assault. Earlier this year, it was seeing Notre Dame players who had been implicated in two sexual assaults, take the field without uproar in their national championship game, led by a coach who thought the accusations were cause for humor. This week the trial opens in Steubenville, Ohio, where two members of the storied high school football team are facing youth prison until the age of 21 for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. The defense has described the young woman as “a drunk out-of-town football groupie.”
The fact is that rape culture—conversation, jokes and actions that normalize rape—are a part of sports. Far too many athletes feel far too empowered to see women as the spoils of jock culture. The young woman in Steubenville was carried like a piece of meat, with the brutality documented like it was spring break in Daytona Beach. It was so normalized that dozens of people saw what was happening and did nothing.
Why would the players feel so entitled to not only act this way but also document their own behavior? Why would their peers watch and do nothing? It starts with understanding Steubenville, a small city not so different from many others in the former Rust Belt. This is a damaged postindustrial town where there is little hope and excitement beyond the dynastic “Big Red” high school football program. As one local resident said to Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports, “We have 16,000 people in Steubenville and a 10,000-seat stadium. That says it all.” The team’s website even says that Big Red football is “keeping Steubenville on the map.”
Because high school football is at the center of the social, psychological and even economic life of Steubenville, youth are treated like demigods, with the adults acting like sentries guarding the sacred program. Whatever the results of the trial, it speaks volumes that the young woman is in lockdown in her own home under armed guards because of death threats.
A tone for this attitude toward the accuser was set by the team’s legendary football coach of thirty years, Reno Saccoccia, whose first response upon hearing the charges was to take no action against either the accused players or those on the team who were present and did nothing. When a female reporter asked him why, Coach Reno went “nose to nose” with her and said, “You’re going to get yours. And if you don’t get yours, somebody close to you will.”
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I don’t believe that rape culture is an endemic part of men’s sports. I do believe that rape culture is an endemic part of teenage boys being treated like gods by adults for their ability to play games. I also believe that rape culture in locker rooms can be destroyed with the active intervention of coaches who take violence against women seriously. We shouldn’t have to ask them to hit their players to get this message across. As Zerlina Maxwell might say, these young men can be taught not to rape.
Reno Saccoccia is an icon. I have no idea what happened to my own Coach Dan, but I know who I’d rather have coaching my kids. Rape culture is a part of Coach Reno’s locker room, but it sure as hell wasn’t a part of mine, for which I’m forever grateful. Hopefully Tim is out there, finally grown into his six-foot-five frame, and a part of him is grateful too.
Rape is not inevitable. Jessica Valenti explains why.
Israel: Where Soccer Fans Boo Their Own Players When They Score
Supporters of Beitar Jerusalem hold a banner reading “Beitar will always remain pure.” (Reuters/Stringer)
“It’s not racism. They just shouldn’t be here.”
Not even in the earliest days of Jackie Robinson’s 1947 historic debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers did Brooklyn’s white fans walk out after number 42 stole a base or hit a home run. The Brooklyn faithful’s love of “Dem Bums” trumped any racism that simmered in the stands. What does it say that sixty-six years later, Israeli fans of the soccer club Beitar Jerusalem have not evolved to postwar-Brooklyn standards of human decency?
Earlier this season, Beitar Jersulam broke their own version of the “color line” by signing the first two Muslim players in team history: Zaur Sadayev and Dzhabrail Kadiyev. Predictably, Beitar’s supporters were madder than the NRA in a school zone. Boos have rained down on Sadayev and Kadiyev every time they’ve taken the field or touched the ball. Several members of a team fan club flew a banner that read, “Beitar is pure forever.” Two others attempted to burn down the team offices. This pales, however, next to what happened when Sadayev scored his first goal for the team last week. After the striker found glory, hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem fans simply stood up and walked out. Even by soccer standards, where racism on the pitch is a continual plague, this organized nature of the action was shocking.
As one 19-year-old fan told The Independent, “The reaction to the Muslim players being here is not racist. But the club’s existence is under threat. Beitar is a symbol for the whole country.” Another said, “It’s not racism, they just shouldn’t be here…. Beitar Jerusalem has always been a clean club, but now it’s being destroyed—many of the other players are thinking of leaving because of the Muslim players being here,”
Moshe Zimmermann, a sports historian at Hebrew University, told The New York Times that he sees something darker at work in the soccer stands than just hooligans taking fandom too far: “People in Israel usually try to locate Beitar Jerusalem as some kind of the more extreme fringe; this is a way to overcome the embarrassment. The fact is that the Israeli society on the whole is getting more racist, or at least more ethnocentric, and this is an expression.”
If we accept Zimmerman’s statement as true, that Beitar holds a mirror up to the entire country, then its actions in recent years become all the more frightening. Last March after a game, hundreds of Beitar supporters flooded a shopping mall in West Jerusalem, brutally assaulting a group of Palestinian custodians while chanting “Death to the Arabs.” Mohammed Yusef, one of the cleaners who was part of cleaning service, described it as “a mass lynching attempt.” The next day’s headline in Haaretz says as much: “Hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem fans beat up Arab workers in mall; no arrests.”
While Beitar has been given a great deal of leeway by authorities when carrying out acts of intimidation, it has also become somewhat of an international embarrassment. Last year, Dan Ephron of Newsweek wrote about the team with the sub-headline, “Jerusalem’s favorite football team has hiring policies reminiscent of Apartheid and Jim Crow.” The article, which has nary a quote from any Palestinians, does cite an Israeli soccer writer named Yoav Borowitz. Ephron writes:
Borowitz likens Beitar to the white-only rugby teams of South Africa during the apartheid era, a comparison most Israelis would find repugnant. In a recent blog post, Borowitz vowed to no longer cover Beitar and called on other journalists to do the same. “A soccer club that’s unwilling to sign Arabs belongs in the trash bin of history,” he wrote. “I myself have written more than a few articles about Beitar.… I won’t do it anymore.”
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The international news of Beitar fans now shunning their own goal-scoring players also comes at a very unwelcome time for Israeli soccer. Israel is the host of the 2013 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Under-21 Championship this June. The decision, however, has already been subject to constant protest including the occupation of UEFA’s offices, Palestinian-rights protesters storming the pitch during games and the formation of an organization called “Red Card Israeli Racism.”
Israel’s repression of the Palestinian national soccer team, including the imprisonment and assassination of players and the shelling of the team’s office in last fall’s bombing of Gaza, has also stirred not only activists but players and even FIFA to action. In 2010, even UEFA President Michel Platini threatened Israel with expulsion from FIFA if it continued to undermine soccer in Palestine. Platini said, “Israel must choose between allowing Palestinian sport to continue and prosper or be forced to face the consequences for their behaviour.” What maddens people is that by holding the Under-21s in Israel, it actually seems like the country is being rewarded.
The great power of sport historically is that it has provided space for marginalized people to find a voice, as well as a setting for all of us to discover our common humanity through play. What does it say about Israel in the twenty-first century that a team like Beitar Jerusalem can not only survive but thrive? What does it say that Israel still gets to host the UEFA Under-21 championships despite interfering with Palestinian efforts to field a team? What does it say that sports are now enmeshed in the political conflicts in the region? If nothing else, it tells us that not even sports can provide escape, respite or a safe haven from the pressures of occupation. It also tells us that seeking justice on the playing field and in the soccer stands in Israel is also about seeking justice for the Palestinian people and no cultural arena can be exempt from this process. I know what side Jackie Robinson would be on, and it wouldn’t be with the so-called fans who hate the ethnicity of a player more than they love a goal for their team.
What does a Cornell science development have to do with the Israeli occupation? Read Adam Hudson’s take.
Why Major League Baseball Owners Will Cheer the Death of Hugo Chavez
Kids playing baseball in Caracas, Venezuela. (Flickr/Fora do Eixo)
The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez will mean unseemly celebration on the right and unending debate on the left. Both reflect the towering legacy of Chavismo and how it challenged the global free market orthodoxy of the Washington consensus.
Less discussed will be that the passing of Hugo Chávez will also provoke unbridled joy in the corridors of power of Major League Baseball.
Historically, Venezuela has trailed only the Domincan Republic in the global race to provide a cheap source of Major League Baseball talent. In 2012, fifty-eight players on MLB rosters were born in Venezuela, second only to the DR’s sixty-four.
For decades, teams had set up unregulated “baseball academies” in both countries where children as young as 15 could be signed for a pittance, and then, for 97 percent of major league hopefuls, casually disposed without any future prospects. A Mother Jones article published this week exposed in excruciating detail the DR baseball “sweatshops” and the preventable death of young Washington Nationals teenage prospect Yewri Guillen. They describe the academies as a deadly breeding ground for tragedy defined by “corruption and youth exploitation.”
This is exactly what Chávez, a baseball fanatic himself, was aiming to challenge. Venezuela is the birthplace of towering talents such as the 2012 Triple Crown Winner Miguel Cabrera, “King” Félix Hernández and World Series MVP Pablo Sandoval. In the last twenty years, 200 Venezuelans have played in the Major Leagues, with more than 1,000 in the minors.
But the academies also left a wreckage of young lives behind, a status quo Chávez sought to challenge. He told MLB that they would have to institute employee and player benefits and job protections. He wanted education and job training, subsidized by MLB, to be a part of the academies. He also insisted that teams pay out 10 percent of players’ signing bonuses to the government. Chávez effectively wanted to tax MLB for the human capital they blithely take from the country.
As the CS Monitor put it, “The threat of expropriations and onerous foreign exchange controls make teams wary of doing business in Venezuela.”
Sure enough over the last decade, the number of teams with “academies” in Venezuela has dwindled from twenty-one to five. The threats of kidnapping and violence are often cited by teams as the primary reason for this move, but the facts say otherwise. As one major league executive said anonymously to the LA Times, “Teams have left Venezuela because of issues with the government and security that have made it more difficult to do business there. Absent those problems, there would be a lot more teams here using academies.”
Major League Baseball has never been shy in their rage that Chávez wasn’t “rolling out the red carpet” for them “like they do in the Dominican Republic.” Lou Meléndez, senior adviser to the MLB’s international relations department, said in 2007, “We don’t pay federations money for signing players anywhere in the world, and we don’t expect to do so. It’s certainly not a way to conduct business…. When you see certain industries that are being nationalized, you begin to wonder if they are going to nationalize the baseball industry in Venezuela.”
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But despite the academy closures, baseball never stopped strip-mining Venezuela’s baseball hopefuls. Instead, they now sign Venezuelan children and whisk them off to the Dominican Republic to be trained, miles and an ocean apart from their families. Rather than be more humane in response to Chávez, MLB was just more brutal.
I spoke with Illinois history professor and author of Playing America’s Game, Adrian Burgos Jr. He said it in perfect, albeit wrenching, fashion:
The irony is palpable. On the same day Mother Jones publishes an article on Yewri Guillen’s death and the Washington Nationals’ lack of having a certified medical official on staff at its Dominican academy, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez dies. Certainly, Chávez’s demise makes MLB officials excited at the prospect of re-establishing their own blueprint for a baseball academy system being put into place in Venezuela, an effort that Chávez had forestalled. I still wonder who is/are the Latino representative(s) within the Commissioner’s Office speaking for Latinos. Do we need any more teenagers [like] Yewri Guillen, MLB prospect, dying for a lack of access to proper medical care due to a lack of health insurance and funds in the DR or Venezuela—health care that ought to have been, would have been, provided for such a signed prospect in the US? Dead prospects and dead president—I am weary of the road ahead in Venezuela and on its baseball diamonds.
Another class of immigrants—fast food workers with guest visas—went on strike today at McDonald’s. Read Josh Eidelson’s report.
A Football Stadium Becomes Ground Zero in the Fight Against the New Jim Crow
Florida Atlantic University's campus in Boca Raton, Florida. (en.wikipedia/KnightLago)
A sit-in at the university president’s office; calls for their resignation; a packed, campus-wide meeting that resolves nothing and opens the door to further conflict. Such actions are notable enough on their own, but we’ve never seen a protest movement quite like what’s happening at Florida Atlantic University. For the first time on record, hundreds of students are raising their voices against the renaming of their school’s football stadium. FAU decided to sell the stadium’s naming rights to GEO Group, a notorious private prison corporation, and students are saying, “Hell no.” Their efforts signal something even more significant than pushing back against the inviolate prerogatives of a school’s football program. It’s a high-profile sign of the growing movement against our system of mass incarceration otherwise known as “the New Jim Crow.”
GEO Group will pay $6 million over twelve years to rebrand the football stadium, home of the FAU Owls. Protesters have now also rebranded the stadium, calling it “Owlcatraz.”
Students marched and occupied President Mary Jane Saunders’s office last week, submitting a letter that read, “We are protesting because we believe that institutions of higher learning like FAU have the responsibility to stand up to the systemic racism, corruption and human rights violations that define the prison-for-profit system, and advocate instead for the equality and human rights.”
The students are, of course, correct. Private prisons are immoral, Orwellian institutions. To combat any trend against growing levels of incarceration, they spend millions on political lobbying to make sure that provably racist institutions like “the War on Drugs”, “three strikes” laws and, their latest ripe plum, the incarceration of undocumented immigrants, remain the rule of the land. But if private prisons are diseases, then GEO Group is the Ebola virus. Describing one of their juvenile jails in Mississippi, a judge called GEO Group’s facilities “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.”
Throwing more gasoline on the fire, President Saunders’s initial response to GEO Group’s offer was pure, uncritical glee, calling it “delightful” and saying without a sprig of irony, “This gift is a true representation of The GEO Group’s incredible generosity to FAU and the community it serves.”
When people at a packed meeting of 250 students raised concerns about the way Geo Group “serves the community”, she pointed out that GEO Group’s chairman, George Zoley, has a “love” of the school because he is a proud alumnus. This led philosophy professor Simon Glynn to say, tartly, “We don’t seem to be doing our jobs adequately because it appears we may be graduating people from the university who are ethically challenged.”
It also raises the question, in these cash-strapped times, where President Saunders would draw the line if not at GEO Group. Would she have considered an offer to rename the field “Jerry Sandusky Stadium” if offered $7 million? If Larry Flynt had pledged $8 million to call it “Hustler Arena,” does she take a meeting? For many students, the deeply personal disrespect embodied in the taking of GEO Group’s money is no less intense.
A number of FAU students are the children of immigrants. GEO Group, as I’ve written elsewhere, is currently bidding to be the state’s private prison of choice, aiming to warehouse the state’s 3 million undocumented immigrants. Incipient immigration reform, it is believed in the industry, will create a massive demand for private detention facilities. It’s viewed that GEO Group’s effort to be the shiny name on the side of the stadium is a form of corporate “sin-washing” that smoothes the transition to GEO Group’s taking on this incredibly expansive role in jailing the undocumented.
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As students packed the rafters and demanded answers, Saunders didn’t backtrack from her earlier praise of GEO Group but also actually said that she was simply unfamiliar with their record and history. She also described the $6 million payoff as a “closed book,” saying that the papers have been signed and it’s a done deal. Student protest leader Gonzalo Vizcardo said, “The board of trustees should have done due diligence on GEO before they signed that agreement. What (Saunders) said about GEO being a wonderful company was outrageous.”
This movement isn’t stopping despite President Saunders’s most fervent wishes. By, at best, not doing her due diligence or, at worst, valuing the money over any attendant moral or ethical concerns, Saunders has turned the school into a national punch-line. By standing up to this synthesis of football and prison, and GEO Group’s uniquely American horror story, the students are trying to map a different way forward for the university. If it’s remembered as a place where a campus movement was finally launched against the private prison industry and the New Jim Crow, that will be a far prouder legacy than the place that sold their soul for the dirty money of a for-profit gulag.
TAKE ACTION: NFL Bosses to Players: Who Are You Shtupping?
An NFL trailer at the New Meadowlands Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Reuters/Mike Segar)
If you harbor the quaint notion that whom you sleep with is your own business, you might want to forgo dreams of playing in the National Football League.
According to NBC’s Mike Florio, NFL teams are asking in interviews with prospect Manti Te’o whether the Notre Dame All-American is gay. They think, in Florio’s words, that they are a “unique business” and if they are going to invest money in the scandal-plagued star, they have the right to know where he goes and whom he knows in the privacy of his home. As one former NFL executive said to me in a statement that speaks volumes, “We feel like we have the right to look under the hood.”
This line of questioning also reaches far beyond Manti Te’o and his unique story of fake girlfriends and real hoaxes. Prospect Nick Kasa, speaking at the NFL’s combine this week, broke the seal of silence on the interview process for prospective rookies. He said to ESPN Radio in Denver, “They ask you like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Do you like girls?’ Those kinds of things, and you know it was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether.”
In some respect this is no more “weird” that the entire combine process where players stand on cement blocks while they are poked, measured and squeezed like GMs are looking for fresh cassavas. But these questions are worse than “weird”. They’re actually illegal. I received word about the matter from NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith. He said to me, “I know that the NFL agrees that these types of questions violate the law, our CBA [collective bargaining agreement] and player rights. I hope that they will seek out information as to what teams have engaged in this type of discrimination and we should then discuss appropriate discipline.”
This line of questioning also runs deeper than a few over-zealous general managers in an image-conscious league. It is, according Wade Davis, a longstanding practice. Davis should certainly know. The ex-player went through four different NFL training camps. When practice was over, he would go to strip clubs with teammates in an effort to fit in. After retiring in 2006, he became one of the few former players to publicly come out of the closet. He is now a speaker and activist who sits on the board of You Can Play, an organization devoted to combating homophobia in sports. He said to me, “Regardless of the reason, [these questions are] a completely inappropriate and illegal practice that has been going on since I was playing. In addition, this line of questioning offers players a no-win situation because there can only be one ‘acceptable’ answer to questions around someone’s sexuality. The questioning further reinforces stereotypes around what type of player or players the NFL wants.”
This reinforcement of stereotypes is more than illegal. It’s immoral. Hudson Taylor was one of the all-time great NCAA wrestlers before starting the organization Athlete Ally, dedicated to “educating, encouraging and empowering straight athlete allies to combat homophobia and transphobia in sports.” As Taylor said to me, “A person is not going to come out until he or she feels comfortable doing so. It’s a personal choice, and putting athletes on the spot is a sure fire way of pressuring them to deny their sexual orientations. These questions can result in lifelong struggles for an athlete.”
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The most common justification for these kinds of questions, almost always made anonymously, is that management has an obligation to team chemistry, and bringing in a player who might be gay would disrupt that the delicate ecosystem that is an NFL clubhouse. It’s worth noting that these were the exact reasons given by Major League Baseball for the slow pace in signing African-American players after Jackie Robinson broke the “color line” in 1947. These reasons were nonsense then and they’re nonsense now. Anyone who has played team sports knows that people in authority set the tone in a locker room. If management, coaches and star players stand up and say, “Anti-gay bigotry has no place here,” then that would be the law of the land. When then–Knicks coach Isiah Thomas was asked if it would be an issue if he had a gay player on his team, he said, “I can’t speak for somebody else’s locker room, but if it’s in mine, we won’t have a problem. I’ll make damn sure there’s no problem…. We’re a diverse society and [on this team] we preach acceptance.”
It’s difficult not to see the connection between this line of questioning from the highest echelons of power and the NFL’s other off-season embarrassment. Teams did not hire a single person of color despite fifteen open head coaching and front office positions. Together, this all shows just how the NFL’s antediluvian, old boy institutions continue to hold sway. It also shows that without some kind of open struggle, this isn’t going to change. Smith is correct that such questions are illegal. What’s disturbing is how many of these execs consider themselves above the law.
Intruding on employees’ health and nutritional habits is, unlike interrogating them on their sex lives, legal. Read Steve Early’s take on corporate “wellness” programs.
The Sports Interview Non–Sports Fans Have to Read: My Talk With NBA Player Royce White
Royce White throws it down for Iowa State. (Flickr/Reese Strickland)
Royce White is an NBA player with a cause. The first round draft pick of the Houston Rockets sat out the first half of the season in protest of the ways the team handled issues related to his mental health. Now he is back, playing for the team’s D-League team, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, but he hasn’t stopped speaking out about the NBA, mental health issues and the way capitalism impacts our world. Yes, you read that last part correctly. I interviewed Royce White for my radio show, Edge of Sports, on Sirius/XM. Read an edited version of our interview below. I’ve edited some of my questions for clarity purposes and cut some questions and answers for brevity’s sake but Mr. White’s answers below are verbatim exactly as given. People can hear the full audio of our interview at this link. Royce White considers himself a “humanist” and as you will see, his humanity shines through.
Dave Zirin: Talk about what it’s like to be an athlete who is also not afraid to take political stands.
Royce White: The greatest thing that I ever got from sports was camaraderie and teamwork. And it was the teamwork piece that will allow me in the future to make an impact on this world because I understand cohesiveness and I understand chemistry and a group of people getting together and having the same goal and how to sacrifice so that your teammate can be the best them. But, number two is that sports—especially professional sports—is a microcosm of capitalism. And capitalism is, in my opinion, in its form as it stands today, one of the things that stands in human welfare’s way. And, the reason being is because it’s just a by-default sense of selfishness; I have to one-up the person next to me at some point to get ahead. And I’m always striving to get ahead. The person next to me becomes expendable, and those are things that I just don’t believe in. Not to say that I don’t believe in capitalism. I believe that capitalism is a great system and it gives us all something to strive for and it allows us to dream. But it needs to be reformed. And, the way it stands today is very human-welfare-unfriendly.
You’ve spoken about capitalism and the deterioration of our collective mental health in the past.
Here’s the deal, we all understand the dynamic of the few having control of most of the resources and the money and power and it’s a brilliant system that they set up. And I take my hat off from an intellectual standpoint; the system in itself is so brilliant. But the reality is that for 98 percent, the quality of life that we endure is so tumultuous, and it’s so drama-filled, and the messages we receive are so drama-filled and so tumultuous that it’s no surprise to anybody in the medical world why it is that we’re experiencing what I believe to be a mental health epidemic. And, not to say that it’s just starting now, because it’s been in effect for a long time we just now are finding words to call it [what it is]. But it’s in full effect and it will continue to grow until we start to care for one another. I think that mental health represents one of the greatest examples of the need for obligation, because with mental health, you don’t just stay in your lane. Somebody else’s issues become your issues and you have to be more conscious of how you interact with someone else, as opposed to just thinking about yourself.
How do you feel about the way the media has treated your struggle over the last six months?
There’s almost a sense of how dare I speak about politics as an athlete? Or how dare I speak about politics at 21? And I think that that offers a lot of friction between myself and the media and how they perceive what it is that I’m saying and how it comes across and all those sorts of things. You know, there’s an even more subtle underlying reason that, that I believe is because we all know how big of a business media is—another microcosm of capitalism. And human welfare isn’t on the same side of the street as media, at least the way media is today. I’m talking in general terms, not everybody in the media.
I was stunned when I read in one interview you said that you would be willing to put your life on the line to make sure that there was universal mental health coverage in this country and, in one of the media analyses, one of the most prominent sports writers in the country [Bill Simmons] said, “The thing I get out of this interview is that I don’t think Royce White really likes to play basketball.” What do you say to that?
I mean, we become so consumed with what we do. We become so in our lane, and we wake up every day and we discuss these issues—military issues and economic issues and health issues—and we tell ourselves, “That’s the way it is.” It gives us comfort and the next day we participate in that same system that we criticize. And, it doesn’t escape anybody; it doesn’t escape a Bill Simmons. He’s a sportswriter and a sports journalist, that’s all he’s thinking. When I say human welfare it’s almost like it goes in one ear and out the other because he’s not willing to take a stand for human welfare. He’s not willing to put his sports affiliation or job on the line for human welfare or what he really believes in. Because if we sat down, I’m sure he would believe in some of the same things that I do—almost, if not all of them. And, you know, there are just some people who are willing to actually stand for what they believe in against all odds, and some people who just won’t. And that’s fine too; it’s not a bad thing. It’s just alarming, like you said.
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What do you think NBA Commissioner David Stern and his heir apparent Adam Silver are thinking about you right now? What do you think they think about a player who has the skill set to thrive in this league, but who’s also a critic of capitalism? I mean this is the league that Michael Jordan built. What do you think they think about that in their quiet times?
I think that they think and I think that they know that I’m an issue. And I’ll continue to be an issue, because what I believe in, they don’t have anything to offer me that will make me step off that square. And I think that they view me as a threat—and I am. When we talk about…somebody who comes along and is willing to say the honest thing, or address the elephant in the room, it makes people uncomfortable. But, at the same time, I think that they’ll see over the years that my intention is not to bad-mouth the NBA, I think that the NBA offers great things for our society. But, again, nobody escapes the umbrella of reform. Nobody escapes the umbrella of needing to progress. Definitely no one escapes the umbrella of needing to prioritze human welfare. So those things I think will come to fruition, hopefully with the cooperation of myself and my team and anybody I come into contact with—whether it be the NBA or the music industry or the movie industry or the fashion industry—and I always stand for what I stand for. No matter what I do.
Last question: Off the top of your head, if you could have one hour with anybody in the history of sports, living or dead, just to sit down with them, pick their brain, talk to them, hear what they have to say, and learn from them, who would that be?
I think I’d have to go with Muhammad Ali, just because I’m such a big fan of Muhammad. And I really admire the things that he was able to muster up the courage to stand for in his time. He’s a lot different and I don’t try to mimic my own persona after Muhammad. He was a little more loud and boisterous than me, but he was incredible. I would love to be able to sit down and talk with him, especially in his prime when he was really quick and snappy. A close second would be Arthur Ashe.
Read Patricia Williams’s column on the psychological impact of the “war on drugs” on children.
Oscar Pistorius and the Global System of Deadly Misogyny
Oscar Pistorius stands in the dock during a break in court proceedings over the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. (Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko)
A professional athlete; a home with an arsenal of firearms; a dead young woman involved in a long-term relationship with her killer. In November, her name was Kasanda Perkins and the man who shot her was Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher. Now her name is Reeva Steenkamp, killed by Olympic sprinter and double amputee Oscar “the Blade Runner” Pistorius. We don’t know whether Pistorius is guilty of murdering a woman he claims to have deeply loved or is guilty merely of being an unbelievably irresponsible gun owner, firing four bullets into the door of his bathroom in an effort to hit an imagined burglar. We do know that this is either an all-too-familiar story of a man and the woman he dated and then killed, or it’s the story of a man who thought a burglar had penetrated the electrified fence that surrounded his gated community to break into his house and use his toilet.
Just as with Belcher and Perkins, we will learn more than we ever wanted or needed to know in the weeks to come about the nature of Pistorius and Steenkamp’s relationship. We will learn about the “allegations of a domestic nature” that had brought police to his home in the past. We will learn about Pistorius’s previous allegedly violent relationships with women. We will learn about the variety of guns he kept at close hand. We will surely discuss male athletes and violence against women: the sort of all-too-common story that can create commonality between a football player from Long Island and a sprinter from Johannesburg. We might even ponder the way these gated communities, one of which was also the site of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s murder a year ago, become throbbing pods of paranoia and parabellums. We will learn about everything except what actually matters: there is a global epidemic of violence against women, and South Africa is at its epicenter.
Two days before Steenkamp’s death, there were protests outside of the South African parliament about the failures of the state to adjudicate the unsolved rapes and murders of women across the country. As the executive director of the Rape Crisis Centre Kathleen Dey said on February 12, “There are no overnight cures to the scourge of rape that is affecting South Africa. We have the highest instance of rape in the world and we cannot continue in this way.” The official statistics are shocking. Every seventeen seconds a woman is raped in South Africa yet just one out of nine women report it and only 14 percent of perpetrators are convicted. The Rape Crisis Centre and other organizations are starved for funds, with the demand for social services, counseling and even HIV tests far outstripping their capacity.
There have also had to be demonstrations against what the Women’s League of the African National Congress has termed “femicide.” In this country of 50 million people, three women a day are killed by their partners. When news of Steenkamp’s death became front-page news across the country, it pushed out ongoing headlines of the February 2 Western Cape gang rape and mutilation of a 17-year-old girl named Anene Booysen. Before her death, Booysen identified one of her perpetrators: it was someone she both trusted and knew.
This is hardly a South African problem, of course. We are confronting nothing less than a global system of brutal misogyny. Too many men across the world see too many women as repositories of their rage, frustration, narcissism or simply their will to enact violence. The World Health Organization’s reports that depending on the country, anywhere from “15% (Japan) to 71% (Ethiopia) of women report physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.” Like in South Africa, every statistic on this issue must be viewed with skepticism because of the transnational stigmas and shame that silence women who have survived.
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In the United States, rape culture and the rape it produces have been normalized to the point where Notre Dame athletes accused of rape can take the field for a national championship football game without a peep from the sports pages. It’s a country where Fox News host Bob Beckel can ask incredulously, “When’s the last time you heard about rape on a college campus?” It’s a country, and a world, where people are now saying enough is enough.
It’s a global problem that will get solved only with a global response if we want to even dream of a world where violence against women is a relic of history. That’s the sentiment behind initiatives like “One Billion Rising to End Violence Against Women and Girls,” and this kind of brave solidarity and support is extremely welcome. This very solidarity was displayed by Reeva Steenkamp herself just before her death. Distraught over the murder of Anene Booysen, Steenkamp sent out an instragam message. It read, “I woke up in a happy safe home this morning. Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen.” Short of a billion of us rising, happy and safe homes will not be a reality for the women of the world. It should be. We have to act now unless we want to keep telling the stories of Kasandra Perkins, Anene Booysen and Reeva Steenkamp over and over again, only with different names.
Read Jessica Valenti's take on the media's double-standard for Pistorius and Steenkamp.
Citizen Mike: Michael Jordan at 50
Michael Jordan pauses during his induction to the North Carolina Sport Hall of Fame. (Reuters/Chris Keane)
“The thing is that, when you are a popular athlete, and you accept he money and the fame, and you become a front person for those who have the power, and they say ‘be like this guy,’ and kids that are coming up say, ‘well, be like him, I won’t protest against anything, I’ll accept everything, I’ll just try to be a great athlete and make a lot of money.’ So a culture dies when you do that. You’re doing a great injustice to young kids that are coming up, and I never wanted to be a representation of less than a man and have young kids coming up emulating me.”
—Jim Brown
When Michael Jeffrey Jordan turned 50 years old on Sunday, a series of articles were published about the basketball legend whose athletic greatness was surpassed only by his commercial prowess. From a distance, Jordan’s existence must resemble fantasy: the athlete who accumulated enough wealth to make the ultimate transition from NBA player to NBA owner.
Yet there is little to admire about Michael Jordan at 50. If anything, the more you learn, the more you recoil. We all know the story of the pro athlete who ends up bankrupt. But what happens to the athlete who gains the world yet still stews in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction? This is Jordan. He’s no longer the smiling, gravity-defying movie star from Space Jam. Instead, he’s more like the glowering recluse from Citizen Kane. Jordan’s days are spent managing a Charlotte Bobcats team going nowhere and, just as in his playing days, mining the media for criticism, nursing every slight like precious oxygen, vital for keeping his competitive embers from going cold.
When not surveying sports articles for new enemies, he finds himself mired in nostalgia for the person he was, opening old boxes and shouting at the help in cavernous hallways in search of misplaced championship rings. Jordan still earns $80 million a year in endorsements, and it’s hard not to imagine it piled up in stacks, balancing precariously on a mountain of unopened Nike boxes inside his own personal Xanadu. The same Jordan who everyone wanted to get near, the same Jordan who used his 2009 Hall of Fame induction speech to roast everyone in the room—minus the humor—finds himself more and more alone, leading to this brutal Onion headline. (One can only assume that The Onion is now on the enemies list.)
As an NBA player in the age before the Internet, the worst aspects of Jordan’s personality were always hidden from public view. We didn’t know it, but Jordan represented some of the darkest impulses in sports. Everything that drives young people from play can be found in Michael Jordan’s approach to his teammates. He was the hectoring bully who would “moo” when heavyset general manager Jerry Krause would enter the room. He was the locker room homophobe, who would repeatedly call teenage rookie Kwame Brown a “flaming f—got” as a tool of “motivation.” He punched teammate Steve Kerr, for goodness sake, which must be the hoops equivalent of kicking a puppy. These character deficits, when mentioned at all, were often lauded because of the championships they produced, the end justifying the means. They don’t wear well on a failing 50-year-old team executive.
This same competitive fire is also what served him so well in the corridors of corporate America. The billion-dollar “Jordan Brand” became the savior of corporations like Nike, Hanes, Gatorade and McDonalds, to name just a few. He was the first athlete whose public persona was entirely constructed by commercials, and his influential gospel was that the ultimate aspiration of any athlete should be to become a brand. This marked a Reagan-era break in the tradition of athletes—particularly African-American athletes—to use their platform, influence and power for the greater good.
There are many who argue that this highly racialized political critique of Jordan is unfair. They’ll argue that just by being a successful African-American businessman, he is being a powerful role model. They argue that people like New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, who said that Jordan had “abdicated his responsibility [to the African-American community] with an apathy that borders on treason,” are asking too much. He is a “post–civil rights” athlete and should be allowed to be “just an athlete.” Let’s leave aside that a country where racism persists in jobs, hiring, voting rights and the system of mass-incarceration is not “post-anything.” Certainly, if Michael Jordan doesn’t want to speak about and support community uplift, that’s his business. But at some point, it has to be recognized that these choices to do nothing are, in fact, political choices all the same. We also need to recognize that this wasn’t just a political choice. Bluntly, Michael Jordan profited massively from his silence. By being the Seinfeld-era superstar—standing for “nothing”—Jordan was able to shill for everything, no matter the company, no matter how controversial their labor practices.
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Given the heights he commanded, it’s difficult to think of anyone in the history of American cultural life who did less with more. Jordan at the height of his powers could have made a real difference in the practices of the corporations that begged for his presence. This is especially the case with Nike, devotee of the workplace known as the “sweatshop.” When once confronted by anti-Nike sweatshop activists, he said he’d “look at the problem.” That never happened. Instead he signed a statement defending Nike and criticizing Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push for investigating Nike’s labor practices.
At some point, Michael Jordan must have pondered his incalculable cultural capital and surely asked himself if there was some cause, some mission, some idea greater than himself that demanded his attention. Even his old rival Karl Malone sits on the board of the National Rifle Association. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, say what you want about Malone, at least he has an ethos. Jordan instead has competitive tapeworm, always thirsting to beat others for no reason other than that the alternative would be unbearable. “It’s consumed me so much,” he says. “I’m my own worst enemy. I drove myself so much that I’m still living with some of those drives. I’m living with that. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if I could.” It’s almost as if having become a “brand,” he yearns to be human again but has no roadmap to make his return to the land of the living. He has no “rosebud” other than the game he still yearns to play, the very game that swallowed him whole.
Homophobia in sports is, surely if very slowly, beginning to get old. Watch Dave Zirin talk about his new book, Game Over.
NBA Player Royce White: Mental Health Revolutionary
Royce White slams it down for Iowa State. (Flickr/Reese Strickland)
This week, the most famous NBA player yet to play in the NBA finally took the court. Royce White, rookie forward for the Houston Rockets, suited up for their D-League team, the esteemed Rio Grande Valley Vipers. In eighteen minutes, he had seven points, eight rebounds and four assists.
But the bigger story was that White played at all. For months, the 21-year-old has been sitting out the season in protest: a rebel with a cause. White has been battling the Rockets over how they would deal with issues surrounding his mental health. The first-round draft-pick has an anxiety disorder that affects how he handles everything from flying to practices. He has made it clear amidst an avalanche of criticism that his mental health is more important than his contract or career. Throughout this difficult fall, White has become a crusader for change, calling out not just the NBA for disregarding mental illness and treating him like “a commodity” but also the fans that have sent him “hundreds” of violent and especially homophobic threats. White isn’t gay, but apparently, for some, caring about your mental health is the equivalent.
Until a recent interview however, it wasn’t clear just how politically thoughtful, serious and even revolutionary an athlete we have in Royce White. For White, this isn’t just about his struggle or changing how NBA teams treat mental illness. It’s about something far greater. In his interview on the ESPN spin-off site Grantland with journalist Chuck Klosterman, White said that the question we are scared to ask in the United States is, “How many people don’t have a mental illness?” Klosterman responded, “Why wouldn’t we want to talk about that?”
White’s reply is one for the ages:
Because that would mean the majority is mentally ill, and that we should base all our policies around the idea of supporting the mentally ill because they’re the majority of people. But if we keep thinking of them as a minority, we can say, “You stay over there and deal with your problems over there”.… [T]he problem is growing, and it’s growing because there’s a subtle war—in America, and in the world—between business and health. It’s no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions.*
As if this wasn’t enough for one interview, White also said that he wants to use basketball as a platform to fight for universal mental health coverage with clinics in every community. He claimed that he is willing to “die for this.”
When an athlete uses their hyper-exalted position to fight for something greater than themselves they are, consciously or not, laying claim to a powerful tradition. It’s a tradition marked by people like Billie Jean King, Bill Russell and, of course, Muhammad Ali. In listening to White, I was reminded of something Ali once said: “All of my boxing, all of my running around, all of my publicity, was just the start of my life. Now my life is starting—fighting injustice, fighting racism, fighting crime, fighting indecency, fighting poverty. Using this face that the world knows through fame and going out and representing truth.”
White as well is that rare person who wants to use his fame to represent truth. There is of course an ocean of difference between Royce White and Muhammad Ali in terms of athletic accomplishment and cultural capital. But there’s a subtler difference as well. Ali at his political apex was part of a massive antiwar wave. Even though the boxing establishment and much of the media despised him, he had an army of supporters. Contrast that to today. There is no wave of people standing up for the rights of the mentally ill. There is no one in mainstream politics talking about the mental health crisis that pulses beneath daily life in this country. There is no one on Capitol Hill pointing out what’s in plain sight every day.
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Think about all the massive attention we are paying to gun violence and the absence of attention to what makes people crack and become violent in the first place. Think about the tragic shootings in Chicago and the absence of discussion about the poverty and racism that define the parts of that city where the murders are taking place. Think about the mental stress that precedes so much of the violence in communities around the country. This is the discussion Royce White wants us to have, and the 21-year-old seems like the only person in public life who wants to have it. In other words, if Ali, like no one else, brilliantly rode the rapids of a tumultuous era, Royce White is attempting something far more daunting. He’s trying to change the direction of the whole damn river.
___
* If people want to read a trenchant critique of how Klosterman conducted his interview with Royce White, I recommend this terrific article by Nathan Kalman-Lamb on the LeftHookJournal blog.
Redskins: The Clock Is Now Ticking on Changing the Name
(Flickr/Keith Allison)
It’s an awkward fact of life in Washington, DC, that we are home to both the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Washington Redskins. One attempts to preserve the Native American cultures that weren’t eradicated by conquest; the other is both a symbol and result of the same eradication. These two worlds collided this past week when the museum hosted a day-long symposium about Native American sports nicknames. In a packed auditorium, panelists and audience members took the local team to task, calling their name “ugly,” “offensive” and “a racist slur.” Former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the only Native American senator in US history, said from the stage, ”If you want [your mascot] to be a savage—use your own picture.” Not one person either in the audience or the crowd defended the use of "Redskin,” because, as one fan of the team said to me, “it really is defending the indefensible.”
Despite repeated requests from the museum, the Redskins refused to send anyone to make the case publicly that the name is anything other than a self-evident slur. Like their owner, the ham-fisted, rabbit-eared Dan Snyder, they celebrate the moniker only when no one is present to challenge them. Since purchasing the franchise in 1999, Snyder has maintained that the name "Redskins” was a “tribute,” as former team Vice President Karl Swanson said, “derived from the Native American tradition for warriors to daub their bodies with red clay before battle.” This is not an argument they felt confident making at the Smithsonian because the laughter would have cracked the Capitol dome. The team name was the brainchild not of an anthropologist who advised on the fierce honor of the “red-clay warriors” but of team founder, segregationist and Dixiecrat George Preston Marshall.
Senator Campbell said that he asks people, “How would you feel if the team was called the Washington Darkies?” George Preston Marshall would have felt euphoric because he adored minstrel shows and fetishized the confederacy. As Thomas G. Smith wrote in his book Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins, when Marshall proposed marriage to his future wife Corrine, he did so “amidst fragrant honeysuckle while a group of African American performers [dressed like house-slave extras from Gone with the Wind] sang ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,’” a song that speaks lovingly of how slaves love to see affection between their “Massa and Missus.” The Redskins were named for the minstrelsy Marshall adored and, as the southernmost team in the league at the time, to appeal to Dixie. They were also, surprise, the last team in the NFL to integrate.
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If you know this background, it’s risible to hear NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell say, “I think Dan Snyder and the organization have made it very clear that they are proud of that name and that heritage, and I think the fans are, too.” There is nothing to be proud of in this “heritage,” unless your tastes tend toward the antebellum South. In a league that’s 70 percent African-American yet couldn’t seem to find any coaches or executives of color to hire this off-season, the Redskins are also a reminder, as William Faulkner wrote, that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Despite this awful, seemingly entrenched history, there is change on the immediate horizon in the face and play of the team’s star quarterback, Robert Griffin III. RGIII hasn’t said a word about the team’s name but his very presence represents the greatest threat to Marshall’s legacy. Griffin is recovering from knee surgery after the finest statistical season of any rookie quarterback in the history of the game. The team won their division and, with the mercury-quick Griffin under center, also became must-see TV. Beyond just the swooning local sports writers, DC figures like Maureen Dowd, Marco Rubio, and President Obama all giggled with glee in RGIII’s glow. If the 23-year-old wonder said tomorrow that the team should be called the Washington Cuddly Snuggles, it would happen. But even if RGIII never says a thing, the better this team gets and the closer they come to the Super Bowl, the more this name goes from a quietly uttered embarrassment to a full blown national conversation. Do you think the NFL and Roger Goodell, on top of answering questions about concussions, lawsuits and the dwindling number of black coaches, want to talk about anti-Native racism?
Even if Dan Snyder doesn’t want it to happen, it’s going to happen. As former Redskin Tre Johnson said, “It’s an ethnically insensitive moniker that offends an entire race of displaced people. That should be reason enough to change it.” It should be, but if you know Dan Snyder, you know it will take more. Maybe an RGIII shall lead us. Or maybe, as Curtis Mayfield advised about the very civil rights movement George Preston Marshall so vehemently opposed, we’re just going to have to “keep on pushin.” Either way, you might want to put your new RGIII jersey in mothballs because in the future the only place you’ll find Redskins gear will be behind glass; maybe at an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian.
Read Aura Bogado's report on the ongoing threat to Native voting rights.
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