Dear Sports Fan

The sports, they are a-changin’.

Today we bring you four stories about how the sports world is changing to adjust to the wider cultural changes of 2014. From the long-pending acceptance of families with same-sex parents into mainstream sports culture to the inevitable dissolution of the NCAA’s hypocrisy to the generational shift away from football to less brain-injury inducing sports, to the simultaneous banning and normalization of the N-word, the world is shifting and sports is adjusting to fit in.

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week:

This article tells the story of a family remarkable in its formation and makeup but exemplary in its core of love and support. The sports connection is the son in the family, Max Lenox, who is in his senior year at West Point where he plays point guard for their basketball team.

Max Lenox’s amazing journey to much-admired Army hoops captain

by S. L. Price for Sports Illustrated

It was strange, really, how the fear just leaked away. The first days and months Dave and Nathan kept an eye out for any effect of Corrine’s drug abuse on Max, but within a year his tensing had stopped. He grew up moving so hard and fast, and he picked up sports — gymnastics, swimming, soccer, tennis — so easily. Yes, Max was diagnosed with ADHD, but intelligence tests found him average to above, and besides, half of suburbia seemed to be popping Adderall.

He emerged as a rising talent in the D.C. area, an AAU star known for unselfishness and for twists that would soon grow into dreadlocks. Neither Dave nor Nathan had a sports background; one Christmas, Max gave Nathan Basketball for Dummies. And nothing, Dave and Nathan say, taught them how not to parent more than the rabid, backbiting AAU scene. Of course, few AAU parents had seen a family like theirs, either. Double takes, puzzled looks — Max’s teammates loved to see the nickel drop. Black kid, two white men: What the … ?

What follows here is my favorite part of the article. This is how sports can operate as a progressive force in society. Within a sport, if someone is honest about themselves, every cultural belief they have should be secondary to observations of performance and conduct within the field of play. Good for teachers and coaches like Fletcher Arritt who put their own beliefs secondary to their responsibility to the students or players.

A Woodson connection provided an option: Fork Union Military Academy, a Baptist boarding school in rural Virginia. Never mind that coach Fletcher Arritt had spent more than 40 years at FUMA reshaping more than 200 egocentric, unhappy or plain underbaked prospects into Division I freshmen. FUMA prohibited homosexual acts, mandated thrice-weekly chapel attendance and didn’t allow what Arritt calls the Five P’s — press, parents, posse, perfume (girls) and penguins (bad refs). Cellphones were banned. It seemed the worst match for someone like Max.

When Carter, Max’s AAU coach, called the then 70-year-old Arritt to give him a scouting report, he said, “Coach, I want to be honest with you: He has two dads.”

“What does that mean?” Arritt said.

“They’re gay,” Carter said, thinking, Here it comes.

“I don’t care,” Arritt replied. “Is he a good kid?”

The Washington Post has a long history of taking down seemingly invincible institutions… ask Richard Nixon. So when they and their respected sports editor Sally Jenkins set aim at the NCAA, I sit up and take notice.

It’s not that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s doing; it’s that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing

by Sally Jenkins for the Washington Post

The need to dissolve the NCAA and put its Indianapolis headquarters into foreclosure has been fully demonstrated in the past weeks. Repeatedly, the NCAA exceeds its authority in petty matters or intrudes in large matters where it has none, while completely failing in its one real responsibility: education.

Before any talk about how to “fix” the NCAA comes the question of what it is needed for at all. To establish rules? It has no means of enforcing them — short of extortion tactics. To negotiate TV contracts? All the big conferences can do that for themselves and are establishing their own networks. To stage championships? The biggest event of all, the $440 million College Football Playoff, isn’t even run by the NCAA, but instead by the five power conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision, who hoard the revenue.

The NCAA has proven incapable of reforming itself, or anything else.

Wright Thompson specializes in cultural description sports articles that make me want to read everything he writes AND take a road-trip with him. In this article, he gives his readers a glimpse into  the true Texas football culture of today. Not everything is Friday Night Lights anymore but if you go on this trip with him, you may meet some familiar faces. The selection I chose was from Thompson’s profile of country musician and former football player Charlie Robison.

9 Exits on America’s Football Highway

by Wright Thompson for ESPN

He lights another Marlboro Red, checking football highlights on the television. His knee aches when the bus rumbles along the highway, town after town, year after year. Vicodin helps him out of bed in the morning, 16 surgeries total on his knees. After so many concussions, he sometimes finds himself in the grocery store without a clue why he’s there. His 11-year-old son, Gus, is a star athlete who refuses to play football; he says watching his dad get out of bed cured him of that temptation. Charlie needed football, to sort out who he was and to become who he wanted to be, living in rough-and-tumble Bandera, a place still fighting for itself. His son, living in a moneyed enclave near San Antonio, doesn’t ask those questions. Football is something from his family’s past he wants to avoid.

Baseball is Gus’ sport, and Charlie coaches his team. Instead of pushing his son to remake his mistakes — which his hard-driving father, also a coach, pushed him to make in the first place — Charlie celebrates Gus’ decision, even brags about it, understanding on some level that it makes all the pain that football caused him somehow mean something. A cycle has been broken.

The NFL has been a popular cultural target this fall. They’ve been behind the curve on domestic abuse and child abuse. They have been seen as being arrogant and unyielding in the face of criticism while simultaneously pandering to public opinion without pause. On the subject of this next article, the N-word, it’s less clear where the NFL lands. Are they out in front, leading the charge or are they reactionaries, holding on to cultural history that’s no longer relevant. I suppose, it depends who you ask.

Redefining the Word

by Dave Sheinin and Krissah Thompson for the Washington Post

There are some who would say that debating the merits of the n-word is missing the bigger picture. The problem isn’t the n-word. The problem is racism. But it’s easier to fight a word than a complex, institutionalized system of oppression.

If life were as simple as the National Football League would like us to believe, the United States could simply police the word with yellow penalty flags, as if everyone were referees. A yellow flag on the hip-hop artist with the egregious lyrics. Another flag on the white kids at the mall, dropping the word on one another with no thought to its history. Another, if you wish, on the NFL for trying to ban in the first place a word used largely by African American players to other African American players.