culture Archives - Page 7 of 11

Opening minds and eyes with sports

As we often explore on Dear Sports Fan, sports can be a reflection of social change or a harbinger of social change. Sports has its own culture, with progressive and traditional elements. Then there are the sports games themselves; the tactics of sports that evolve competitively. This week, three stories popped up that examine change within sports.

This fall has been a tense time for gender issues within sports. I think it’s also been a productive season for gender issues in sports. One challenge, examined in this article, is that only so much progress can be made while key echo chambers are so dominated by a single gender.

Why Are All My Twitter Followers Men?

by Wendy Thurm for Think Progress

I’m a sports fan and a baseball writer and I love the idea that American women care about sports nearly as much as American men do. But there are other numbers that tell us that while women might identify as fans of a particular sport or team, they don’t always engage with that team or that sport with the same level of energy we see from men.

For all the advances for women to play sports, there’s been very little change in the landscape for women covering sports… most sports shows still feature white male non-athlete reporters coupled with former players.

Which brings us back to social media. Despite the idea that new platforms have opened all sorts of discussions, including those about sports, to new audiences and participants, the divide between women and men looks remarkably similar to the one in traditional media… This is important because Twitter isn’t just part of the national sports discussion. It often drives the national sports discussion.

Here’s something I’ve long wondered. Why are positions so fixed in football? Why not put two quarterbacks on the field at once? Or, as Hawaii has done, a punter who can punt with either foot, throw, or run with the ball?

Meet Hawaii’s Scott Harding, the Most Interesting Man in College Football

by Michael Weinreb for Grantland

He was born in Australia, and he played Australian rules football for six years, five of them with his hometown Brisbane Lions. He grew up with the National Football League on his television set, a faraway curiosity that many Australians adore but most only partially comprehend. Watching the NFL and recognizing its broad outlines, Harding thought to himself, I have that kind of skill set.

Harding is a natural righty, but says he’s equally comfortable kicking with either foot, in part because the Australian game requires that sort of ambidexterity. Depending on the side of the field and the hashmark Hawaii finds itself on during a fourth down, Harding can either roll to his left and boot it left-footed, or move to his right and kick it right-footed. There is also the constant threat of a fake, because, in addition to executing pre-planned fakes off certain sets, Harding is adept enough as a runner that Demarest gives him a constant green light to take off. Because Harding is not averse to contact — the hits he takes almost feel muted, he says, after all of those years playing Australian football without pads — he winds up holding the ball until the last possible second so the kick coverage team can get downfield. He’s yet to have a punt blocked. His gross average is 41.8 yards and his net average is 41.1; opponents have managed a total of 30 punt return yards against him the entire season, a measly .41 yards per punt.

Every so often you hear about a sports team that poses naked to raise money. This is always fun because, who better to pose naked than fit, strong athletes? Plus there’s enjoyment in seeing some of the conventions of ultra-masculine (women’s teams have more nuanced stereotypes) groups of men getting naked with each other. One rowing team in England took things a step farther in awesomeness, when, after finding out that their calendars were mostly popular with gay men, decided to create a LGBT charity and donate a portion of their earnings from their calendar to it.

Team Calendar Makes A Splash To Fight Homophobia

by Ron Dicker for the Huffington Post

The U.K. squad has been producing a nude datebook fundraiser since 2009. When it discovered that much of its audience was gay, the team figured it should direct its charity toward the LGBT community, according to a video released to promote the new calendar. So the team has helped established a charity called Sport Allies, “a programme to reach out to young people challenged by bullying, homophobia or low self-esteem,” per the Warwick Rowers website.

An Adrian Peterson Update

I’m often hesitant to write about controversial sports stories on Dear Sports Fan. This is for a few reasons. The core goal of this site is to close the gap between sports fans and non-sports fans, and controversial sports stories are often divisive and insular. They’re most interesting to people already invested in sports and explaining them won’t often make anyone be more open to sports culture. I’m also just not that into them. I would much rather spend an hour watching two junior high-school teams play lacrosse than an hour reading or talking about most sports controversies. Sometimes a story is big enough that ignoring would not be being honest with myself or with you.

The story of Adrian Peterson is one of those controversies big enough that it should be thought about. This September, Adrian Peterson, a star NFL running back, was indicted by a Texas Grand Jury for “reckless or negligent injury to a child.” He had beaten his four-year-old son badly enough that the son was brought to the hospital. TMZ found and printed images of the child’s injury. The NFL, already awash in the Ray Rice domestic abuse story, found a loophole in their rules and bylaws that allowed them to effectively remove Peterson from public view without having to suspend him and therefore initiate a potential appeals process with the NFL Players Association. About a week ago, Peterson struck a deal with Texas prosecutors that allowed him to avoid jail time and any felony charges, pleading guilty only to a misdemeanor. Just today, the NFL announced that Peterson would be suspended without pay for the rest of the 2014 season and possibly beyond that. Peterson plans to appeal.

Action on the part of the legal system forced the NFL’s hand and the NFL’s action has brought this story back into the public eye. Now that some time has passed from the initial story, especially TMZ’s coverage, I hear more and more arguments creeping back into the sports opinion-o-sphere contending that Peterson’s actions are being misunderstood because physically disciplining children is a “cultural thing” that Southern/Black (I’ve heard both arguments) people do commonly but the Northern/White people in charge of the NFL/Media do not understand. Let’s be clear about this.

This isn’t a cultural thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that there is and should be a cultural debate about the acceptability of physically disciplining children. I’m interested in that conversation. I was raised to believe that physically disciplining children was wrong but that there was some truth to the principle of “spare the rod, spoil the child.” It’s a curious dichotomy. Let’s, by all means, have that conversation in our communities and on parenting blogs. But please, please, please, let’s leave Adrian Peterson out of it. You see, what Peterson did to his son cannot reasonably be included in any conversation about discipline. Just because banks lend money to people doesn’t mean robbing a bank is okay. Just because lots of consenting adults enjoy sex doesn’t mean rape is okay. Just because people spank their children doesn’t mean whipping a four-year old so severely that he’s hospitalized is okay. It’s not. Robbery is not a form of borrowing. Rape is not a form of sex. Adrian Peterson’s abuse of his son is not a form of discipline.

There are, of course, lots of other intriguing facets to this story. You can place it within the larger story of the NFL’s inconsistent, confusing, and generally out of control pattern of player discipline. You may point out the hypocrisy of the NFL’s new-found harshness in dealing with violent offenders compared to their past record of leniency. It would be altogether understandable to point out that there’s something problematic about the NFL’s power over football players who truly do not have any other reasonable recourse to make a living playing football. The NFL is a sanctioned monopoly and has special tax-exempt status which should and probably will be taken away from them in the next couple years but it is still a private organization and it shouldn’t be required to guarantee employment to anyone for any reason. What about the dynamic between the NFL and its teams? The NFL has taken the lead on this case but in recent years, it’s allowed the teams to be the main actors in terms of player fines and suspensions. Which is better for the players? Which is better for the league?

There are so many questions and interesting avenues to pursue in this horribly unsavory story. The cultural conversation around physical punishment is not one of those. Let’s all be annoyingly firm on that point if people try to pull that argument on us at work or at a bar or on the internet. It’s worth it to take a little flak for something that is right.

As the world turns: evolution of sports culture

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.

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.

The benefit of learning toughness from sports

You have to be tough to play sports. That’s a central message of most sports cultures that gets hammered into athletes brains from a very young age. Sports culture is fairly unyielding on this principal. “Walk it off.” “There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured.” “Rub some dirt on it.” These common phrases are just some of the ways that parents, coaches, and peers all reinforce that core tenant of sports, playing through pain. We also honor professional athletes who play through pain. Michael Jordan’s flu game, where he scored 38 points despite being visibly ill is legendary. Willis Reed coming out to play in game seven of the 1970 NBA finals despite having a torn thigh muscle is equally famous. In baseball, Kirk Gibson’s hobbled home run in the 1988 World Series remains one of the most famous plays ever. Football players make playing through injury so routine that you needn’t look farther back than a few weeks ago when quarterback Tony Romo broke two bones in his lower back and came back to finish the game. No sport lives its injury ethos more diligently than hockey. In the 2013 playoffs, Gregory Campbell broke his leg during a penalty kill and played on it for more than a minute before getting to the bench. In that same playoffs, Campbell’s teammate Patrice Bergeron played through broken ribs, torn cartilage around the ribs, a punctured lung, and a separated shoulder. Just this season, Olli Maata, played with a cancerous throat tumor. He played until his scheduled surgery, which doctors think was successful, and is now back skating, ahead of schedule to return for his team. Not only does hockey culture demand this of its players, but it demands that they play through injury immediately (thus the phrase, “player A [suffered this injury] and didn’t miss a shift”) but without complaint.

Playing through pain isn’t always a good thing. We now know that ignoring the effects of brain injuries is a very, very bad thing to do. The culture is slowly shifting to be more permissive of players who voluntarily report injuries or who choose to sit out a game or two to get healthy. This is almost definitely for the best but it’s easy, when in the midst of a cultural shift, to forget the benefits of the element of the culture that is changing. There are real benefits to the principals of toughness that sports instills in its participants. Most of us who play sports don’t become professional athletes. We’ll never need to play basketball while unable to properly walk or hockey while in intense pain but all of us are people who, at some point in our lives, will face intense challenges. Whether it’s fighting through a flu to watch your child perform in something important to them or suffering from a disease or handling the anguish of a loved one’s death or giving birth, no one makes it through life without being faced with a painful situation. The benefit of learning toughness from sports is that it’s there when you need it.

Nowhere is the benefit of having learned toughness from sports more clear than in the amazing story of Mikey Nichols. Brought to us by Steve Politi of NJ.com, this is a truly inspiring story. Nichols was playing hockey for his high school team from Monroe, NJ, when he suffered an injury to his spine which left him paralyzed:

He was chasing a puck in the corner when he was checked from behind. “I remember sliding into the boards and thinking, ‘Oh (shoot), I’m going to get a concussion. I don’t want to miss a shift.’ And then I hit the boards.”

He knew something was very wrong.

“Mikey, you good?” his best friend asked.

“I’m fine, bro. I just can’t move anything.”

Hockey culture informs its players that they should respond to all injuries with casual indifference. Yes, he’s fine. He just can’t feel his body. But he’s fine. Viewed from afar, the fact that the sport Nichols loves might have informed how he responded to a catastrophic injury he suffered while playing the sport may seem like not nearly enough to balance the scales in favor of hockey and sports culture. But when you read Politi’s article, you get a sense for how amazing Nichols is and how having grown up a hockey fan and player doesn’t just inform the moments after the injury, that it’s going to be a part of who he is forever, no matter what challenges he faces, then you start to think about things differently.

“To play in the NHL, of course,” is what Mikey will say when you ask him his goals. But then he’ll get serious. He’ll talk about his parents and the sacrifices they’ve made. “I want to be able to do everything I used to take for granted, and now I wished I had back.”

Maybe it’s The Big Idea that’ll give him that. Maybe it’ll be some other promising research. But, after spending the past 10 months meeting other people with spinal-cord injuries and benefitting from their help, he hasn’t lost hope.

“I want everyone who’s ever had to be in a wheelchair to walk again,” he said. “And to get a second chance.”

Getting paralyzed during a sporting event is horrible and I wish it never happened. There are some common-sense things hockey could change to avoid more of these injuries and they should absolutely do them. They are rare though. Nichols is one of the small percentage of people who suffer a life-changing injury playing sports but his attitude is an inspiring reminder that the lessons taught in sports can help all of us overcome (the hopefully smaller) the challenges that life presents to us. Just remember, if Nichols can figuratively say of himself, “hockey player becomes a paraplegic, doesn’t miss a shift” we can do it too.

The lesson of Randy Moss

Rand University, the latest in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series of documentary films about sports, premiered last night. The film was directed by Marquis Daisy and produced by Bomani Jones. The film tells the story of Randy Moss, one of the greatest wide receivers in football history, specifically his growth from a middle schooler in Rand, West Virginia, to being drafted in the first round of the NFL draft by the Minnesota Vikings. Rand University is simultaneously a familiar, almost cliched story, and one that doesn’t get told nearly enough.

Randy Moss grew up in poor, predominantly black, rural West Virginia, in a town called Rand. He was a multi sport athlete, excelling at everything he tried his hand at: baseball, basketball, track, and football. Moss was raised in a church going family by a strong mother. His father was not in his life. Rand was a small enough community that it sent its children to nearby DuPont High School which was 98% white. Even (or maybe especially) as a star athlete at the school, Moss felt the racial tension acutely. He says in the film that he got into one racial fight every year at high school. In his senior year, Moss supported a fellow black student in a fight against a white classmate who had written “All niggers must die” on his desk. The white student was beaten badly and suffered, among other injuries, a lacerated spleen. The law was brought in and Moss plead guilty to assault charges and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. This conviction caused Notre Dame, the college Moss had his heart set on playing football for, to drop him from their team. Notre Dame helped Moss arrange attending Florida State a similarly strong college football team but with a well-known propensity for working with players with convictions in their past. One of the conditions of the arrangement was that Moss would redshirt (practice but not play) during his freshman year. Moss went along with this program, even though that can be a difficult thing for a young player to accept.

His freshman year went by smoothly but back in West Virginia, during the summer afterwards, Moss ran into more trouble. He was caught smoking weed which broke his probation and he was thrown back in jail. While there, he learned that Florida State wouldn’t take him back for his sophomore year. In interviews with Moss from prison and in footage from his subsequent trial, Moss sounds coached but sincere. It seems strange now, but in the context of mid-nineties fear/hatred towards black athletes following the OJ Simpson trial and a generally much more moralistic atmosphere (see congressional hearings about Eminem’s lyrics, the Clinton sex scandal, etc.) Moss came very close to losing his athletic future. As with almost everything, there was a more local context that may have effected his situation too. Moss claims that he was treated harshly by the legal system because he ignored the University of West Virginia while choosing a college. In retrospect, this seems totally reasonable given what we know from the Jameis Winston story at Florida State about the insidious influence of big-time college football programs in law enforcement. Moss had also fathered a child with a white woman while in high-school; not a popular move in mid-90s West Virginia (or almost ever in U.S. history.)

Moss found his one-last-shot at nearby Marshall University, a second tier college football program. This university provided Moss an opportunity that others couldn’t — because it was slated to play one more season in 1-AA before moving up to the top level 1-A college football league, Moss would not need to sit out a year because of his transfer. He could do what he wanted to do, what he lived to do: play football. And play he did. Moss played astoundingly well. He basically could not be stopped. Marshall’s coach Bob Pruitt said of Moss, “We had a simple package. If there was one guy out there guarding him, we threw him the ball.” Moss set all sorts of records that year and then, against tougher competition the following year, he did it again. He won the Fred Biletnikoff award given to the best wide receiver in the country and was a finalist for the Heisman trophy.

The message of the film is just how fragile the path to success is for even the most talented poor kids. The story of Moss’ friend and teammate, Sam Singleton Jr., was a sad reminder that just a smidge less talent and a few more misteps can easily tip the scales and consign someone to the tragic almost-inevitability of poverty. The term Rand University, which Moss sometimes claimed in NFL introductions when not repping Marshall University, was a long-lived sad, joking truism of their home town. A resident of Rand in the film explains that Rand University meant hanging out next to the 7-11 instead of going to play college or professional sports. It meant being in jail or arrested for drugs. It meant that something would go wrong and you wouldn’t be able to take the next step. No single image could make this point more poignant than the image of Randy Moss at his assault trial wearing ankle shackles. To really understand this image, you need to know how sports fans think about Moss. Grantland’s Andrew Sharp wrote an article about Moss to accompany the film. Here’s how he described Moss:

There may have been better players than Moss, but nobody ever made football look easier. He could run through defenses designed to break him in half, and run 10 yards past coverage designed to keep him from going over the top. He was faster than anyone in the league, but he never looked like he was going full speed. He could catch anything, outjump anyone, and when he was pissed, he played better.

The image of Randy Moss, who could not be stopped on a football field, literally shackled at the ankles is a bitter reminder of how tenuous the path out of poverty can be.

Rand University tells its story through one athlete’s. Michael Lewis’ book, The Blind Side, tells a similar story about Michael Oher, an offensive lineman. Lewis, an economist, more explicitly uses Oher’s tale to make a cultural point. He asks rhetorically how much raw talent could be harnessed if we, as a society, could make the path out of poverty more secure for young, poor, often black, kids? That’s exactly what U.S. Soccer is trying to do. In a wonderful article that coincidentally came out on the same day as Rand University, Stanley Kay examines the U.S. Soccer’s outreach program for Sports Illustrated. Youth soccer, as exists today, often overlooks poorer, often non-white children, because of the cost of playing on teams and maintaining soccer fields. These under-served populations end up playing more informal or street soccer. One of the interesting messages of Kay’s article is that not just are we missing out on a percentage of athletes who could become international soccer stars, because we don’t find ways to develop kids who grew up playing in street soccer games, we miss out on the creativity and ball-handling skills that informal soccer develops. Doug Andreassen, an important figure in the article, is the Chairman of U.S. Soccer’s Diversity Task Force tells Kay about:

The chemistry between Dempsey and fellow Seattle Sounders forward Obafemi Martins, who grew up playing street soccer in Nigeria. “You see this magic they have between them as forwards. It’s no-look passes, back-heel passes, stopping and starting the ball. You just don’t see that in players who come from structured backgrounds,” he says with admiration. “You can’t teach that.”

It’s inspiring to read about Andreassen and other people working to systematically harness the power of our entire country for their sport while at the same time working to make our country a better place, at least for athletic children of all colors and backgrounds. If they need any more inspiration, they should watch Rand University. Sure, Randy Moss grew up playing organized sports from a young age, but he credited some of his play to the informal game, razzle-dazzle, that he spent hours and hours playing as a kid in Rand, West Virginia. Moss had the talent to escape, he had the discipline and competitive drive to escape, but to make things easier for the next Randy Mosses, we need people like Marquis Daisy, Bomani Jones, Michael Lewis, and Stanley Kay telling their stories and people like Doug Andreassen working full-time to make our society a better place.

Rand University, the 30 for 30 documentary will re-air Saturday, November 15, at 7:30 a.m. ET on ESPN2 and Saturday, November 22, at 3 a.m. ET on ESPNU. Set your DVRs.

You can't always get what you need in sports

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 some of the articles this week that inspired me. We think of sports as a meritocracy where the best athletes rise to the top, where the best franchises flourish, and where the rewards are mostly commensurate to the risks. That’s not always the case. This week, I chose four stories about elements of the sports world that didn’t quite work out the way they were intended.

Marcus Lattimore was a star among stars in the world of college football. As a running back at South Carolina, he ran around and over the competition like few can. That all stopped after his second catastrophic knee injury. Despite his medical history, he was drafted into the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers who felt his talent was worth the risk that he might never recover. This past week, Lattimore decided to retire at the age of 23 because of chronic knee pain he could not rehabilitate his way through.

The Martyrdom of Marcus Lattimore

by Michael Baumann for Grantland

Lattimore directly contributed 3,444 yards from scrimmage and 41 touchdowns to the cause, at the cost of countless hours of work and the unimaginable physical agony that comes with being the title character in a game of Kill the Man With the Ball. His efforts led to the Gamecocks’ first SEC East title, first two 11-win seasons, and first two top-10 finishes in the AP poll. They also led to a boost in recruiting3 that helped make that success sustainable.

So what did Lattimore get for his contributions? A scholarship that paid for most of three years of college and prevented him from seeing a dime from the sale of merchandise that bore his number and the sale of tickets and television carriage fees bought by people who wanted to see him play. The promise that his time would come when he cashed in with the NFL. And the knee injuries that left him physically unable to cash in once that time finally came.

When a person like Lattimore suffers a career-ending injury while serving his school for no pay, making him whole shouldn’t be an act of kindness or compassion, as it is here. It should be the norm. It should be required.

Chivas USA was one of the more interesting experiments in the U.S. professional soccer league, Major League Soccer (MLS). Chivas is the nickname of a Mexican league soccer team — officially called Club Deportivo Guadalajara. The owner of the Mexican team bought the MLS team to use as an American outpost and minor league version of his main team. The experiment didn’t go well and the team has now been bought and sold and part of that sale is an agreement to shut the team down for a year or two and then reopen it with a new name, brand, and location in downtown L.A.

The Once And Future End Of Chivas USA

by Connor Huchton for The Classical

Many bad decisions must be made for failure to arrive this spectacularly. These are some of the required ingredients, in short — a shared stadium and the second-fiddle perspective produced; an unclear identity; discrimination lawsuits and HBO investigative reports, league misstep after misstep; a few unremarkable teams. Eventually what’s left is desperate marketing ploys and cries of “Free tickets!” A good amount must go badly for a growing league to produce a team so haunted and solitary, and here, it did.

Some of the best Chivas games were two-goal losses, games when Wilmer Cabrera and his players hardly feared embarrassing final scores or the BigSoccer forum jokes that would follow. These were free-floating performances, runaway trains built from spare piston parts, heading for the cliff at high speed — because if you can’t beat them, then fuck it, still don’t join them – just play soccer of a more unhinged metaphorical sort. This identity wasn’t the troubled one Jorge Vergara and Don Garber had in mind, but somehow, it makes a lot more sense than any rebrand ever could.

One of the appealing things about sports is how clear its goals are. Winning is an objective thing. Statistics can be kept. This means it acts more like a true meritocracy than almost any other activity. Which is not to say that discrimination hasn’t and isn’t a part of sports. Black athletes in the United States were restricted from competing in the white professional leagues for decades and remnants of that discrimination continue today. What is usually the case with sports though, is that if a minority can get into a game, the game itself should be able to help prove their point about equality. One enormous exception to this rule has been transgender athletes, who continue to be barred from competition in many places. This article places a current legal battle in Minnesota in its historical context.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Myths: The battle for the rights of transgender athletes

by Parker Marie Molloy for Vice Sports

The reality is that even today, nearly four decades after Reneé Richards won the right to compete, trans people remain largely unwelcome in the athletic world—a world that is already well behind when it comes to LGBT inclusion. The NFL still hasn’t had an openly gay athlete on a regular season active roster. The NBA just recently had their first. Baseball and hockey remain a refuge for straight individuals.

Trans athletes strong enough to brave this harsh world are pioneers. Richards to Allums, Fox to Jönsson; unfortunately, they are sometimes also martyrs. As Leva and her ilk look to hamper competition, we should aspire to a world in which all athletes can perform free of hormone testing, “gender testing,” or the pseudo-scientific ramblings of the world’s Joe Rogans; a world in which all are welcome to compete.

Every profession has its unsung heroes. Carli Lloyd, a player on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is one of those heroes. This profile of her brushes the surface of why that might be but instead of getting caught up in that, it instead celebrates Lloyd for who she is, what she has done, and what she will do.

A Star (Still) in the Making

by Jeff Kassouf for NBC SportsWorld

Lloyd is a two-time Olympic hero, scoring the gold-medal winning goal for the U.S. women at both the 2008 and 2012 Games. She is the only player in history – male or female – to score in back-to-back Olympic finals. She wears the 10 shirt for the national team (customarily given to the top field player on the team). And yet, despite her heroics, she is hardly the face of U.S. Soccer.

Lloyd isn’t shy about telling you that she trains harder than anyone, and she’s frank about her quest to be the best player in the world. She forever carries a chip on her shoulder, fueled by a crowd of naysayers whom Lloyd doesn’t specify, yet acknowledges their existence. Lloyd said she doesn’t play for accolades, but she’s only human. She sees marketing and advertisements that don’t involve her. In 2013 she was left off the NWSL all-league first and second teams, and didn’t make the first team in 2014 after carrying her struggling Western New York Flash club through the season. But Lloyd was traded to the Houston Dash in October. Two weeks later she won the Golden Ball as the best player of the qualifying tournament.

Her attitude is classic if not cliché New Jersey: Work harder, always. And Lloyd is proud of that, calling herself a “Jersey girl for life.” She lives a few towns over from where she grew up.

Is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team?

Dear Sports Fan,

This may be out of your wheelhouse, but … ever since Randy Cohen retired, I can’t bring myself to email the Ethicist.

I loved watching football last year, even though I didn’t understand a thing. It’s been suggested to me that in order to really learn what’s happening, I join a Fantasy Football league. So, I have. My friend is helping me and our first-round draft pick is Adrian Peterson… Yeah. So, assuming he eventually plays again this season — what do I do? Is it ethical to keep him on my team?

From,
Erica

P.S. If it helps you decide, I stopped watching the WWE mainly out of ethical concerns. Am I just done with sports?

— — —

Dear Erica,

You are facing an ethical quandary.

For those who don’t know, Adrian Peterson has been accused of child abuse. Peterson left deep cuts on his son’s legs after beating him with a switch (thin tree branch). His son is four years old. The facts in this case are undisputed because Peterson readily admits what he did. In an article from the local CBS in Houston, near where this happened, reporter Nick Wright describes Peterson as “very matter-of-fact and calm about the incident, appearing to believe he had done nothing wrong and reiterating how much he cared about his son and only used “whoopings” or “spankings” as a last resort.” Like in the Ray Rice domestic abuse case, this story is augmented by visual evidence. In this case, photos of a four-year-old’s wounded legs. They’re readily available online but the child’s mother is apparently asking for them to be taken down, so I won’t even link to them. I’ve seen them and they’re fairly deep, long cuts around the thighs. They’re bad, and they reinforce Amy Davidson’s brilliant argument in the New Yorker that this case should not be a part of the cultural conversation about the appropriateness of corporal punishment. About that conversation, she writes:

This is a valuable, crucial conversation, and Carter is an important voice. It’s not, though, what we’re really talking about in the Peterson case. This preschooler wasn’t paddled or, as Peterson put it to police, “swatted”; he was whipped with a stick and left with open wounds on his body.

When this news broke, Peterson’s team the Vikings deactivated him from their roster. Since then he was briefly activated and then, perhaps after some serious meetings on the part of team management, re-deactivated. That’s where we stand now.

To return to your question — is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team? It’s an interesting and complicated question. First of all, let’s establish that it is a reasonable question to ask. As I wrote in my post about why fantasy football drafts are so exciting, fantasy owners do sometimes make (one-directional) emotional connections with the football players on their fantasy teams. Your success becomes linked with their success, so as you root for yourself, you root for them. Once you know that’s likely to happen, you do think about whether or not you’ll want to root for a player when you choose to have him on your team. In the past, players like Ben Roethlisberger (accused of sexual assault,) or Riley Cooper (filmed using the racial epithet aimed at black people during a country music show) would give fantasy owners pause during their drafts. In this case, when you chose Adrian Peterson, his record was clear and clean. You certainly were not acting unethically when you drafted him.

Now that you know what you know, is it unethical to keep him on your team? Being on your fantasy team doesn’t help Adrian Peterson in any material way. I suppose you could make the argument that the more fantasy teams he’s on, the more popular he is, and the more popular he is, the more likely it is for companies to sign him to endorsement deals. Rest easy, he’s not going to be getting any endorsement deals any time soon. Playing fantasy football absolutely supports the National Football League, and I could see an argument for not playing fantasy football as part of a larger boycott of the NFL, but that’s not what you’re suggesting here. Likewise, dropping him is not going to punish him in any way. While athletes are often very concerned with their video-game alter egos’ skill ratings, very few seem to care about their fantasy instantiations.

When you play in a fantasy league, there’s another set of people you should think of when it comes to ethics: your friends who you’re playing fantasy football with and against. You owe them some ethical consideration too. Here, the ethics are clear — dropping a player who you think has more value based on the rules of your fantasy league than the player you’re replacing him with is unethical. It’s unethical because it means you’re intentionally not abiding by the spirit of the group activity you agreed to participate in. You’re throwing the competitive balance of the league off. If your league, like many, plays for money, this ethical consideration is reinforced. In fact, with a star like Peterson, you often cannot drop him. Fantasy sites maintain lists of “undroppable players” that protect leagues against unscrupulous fantasy owners who may decide that if they can’t win, they just want to mess it up for everyone. Peterson has been on that list for years but was just taken off either because of people asking your question or because his suspension makes dropping him defensible from a competitive standpoint.

Ethics don’t require you to drop Peterson but they don’t mandate that you can’t either. You may be so angry or upset from reading about this story or seeing the photos that you just flat-out don’t want to see his name near yours. That’s fine, I support you in that decision. If you do decide to drop Peterson for non-competitive reasons, you should email your league first, let them know what you’re doing and why, and give people a chance to chime in. Perhaps they will simply agree to let him sit, unclaimed on the waiver wire, as if he has been put in time-out, which, come to think of it, is a strategy he might benefit from learning about.

Thanks for the question, let us know what you decide to do,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-9-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 7

Ray Rice Released — TMZ.com released video of NFL player Ray Rice assaulting his then fiancee in an elevator. The emotional (and PR) power of the video led to Rice being immediately released by his team and suspended indefinitely by the league. A full summary and my take on this can be found here.
Line: Ray Rice was unequivocally in the wrong since the minute he struck his fiancee but the law and the NFL didn’t have to be. Their inappropriate response now puts them at the center of this story.
U.S. Open Winner — Marin Cilic defeated Kei Nishikori in the men’s finals of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open is the last of the four major tournaments of the year, so, although tennis season officially continues, casual coverage of it basically stops until next Spring. As pointed out by Kyle Jurczak on Fancred, Cilic won in three straight sets, all six games to three, which was the same score Serena Williams won her straight set final in. Weird! Also from Kyle, this means that 2014 saw eight different people win the eight (four men’s, four women’s) available major tournaments. Weird!
Line: Did you know [insert one of Kyle’s cool stats here.]
The last two NFL games (until Thursday) — I’m not sure why but for some reason the NFL always starts with two Monday night football games on the first weekend of the professional football season. Maybe it’s shock treatment to get used to having football back in our lives? The earlier game between the Giants and the Lions was a yawn, as predicted by it being featured in our Do Not Watch This Game column, but the second game was a close one that came down to the last few minutes. The Arizona Cardinals just squeaked by the San Diego Chargers, 18 to 17.
Line: It’s too soon to make any real conclusions from week one. The Cardinals and Chargers might both be really good or both be pretty mediocre. The Lions could be great or the Giants could be so terrible that they made them look great.

Retired NBA center Yao Ming saves elephants

There’s a cliche in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What people mean by that is no matter how much practice and coaching and hard work a basketball player puts into his or her craft, if they’re not tall, there’s only so good they can get. The flip side of this, of course, is that if you are very, very tall, there’s a place for you in basketball as long as you are coordinated enough to run. As a consequence, NBA centers, the tallest of the tall, are often very interesting people. As a group they tend to be less single-mindedly obsessed with basketball. They may not have needed to be that obsessed to have successful NBA careers. If you follow sports, you get the sense that some of them might not even like basketball very much.

Yao Ming towered over his NBA counterparts but his biggest contribution may be off the court

Retired NBA center Yao Ming is very, very tall. He’s seven and a half feet tall or, as they would best understand it in his native China, 2.29 meters. He’s absolutely not of the type that did not like basketball, on the contrary, I think he loved it, but he is a well-rounded person. I’ll always remember his comment in response to media concerns that he would be devastated if forced to retire because of foot injuries:

“I haven’t died,” he said. “Right now I’m drinking a beer and eating fried chicken. What were you expecting, a funeral?”

Recently Yao Ming’s name popped up in the news for his role in an effort to save Africa’s “dwindling elephant population.” Simon Denyer brings us this story in an article in the Washington Post and it is well worth a read. I was impressed to find out that Yao Ming’s effort to save elephants from poaching by reducing Chinese demand for illegal ivory has a precedent for success. He’s done the same for sharks by “pressing the Chinese people to give up shark fin soup.” In fact, after his campaign against shark fin soup, “prices and sales of shark fins in China [went] down by 50 to 70 percent.”

I wish Yao Ming success in his new drive against ivory sales and elephant poaching. Saving animals in Africa from extinction is a worthy cause for everyone who loves the earth but especially for retired NBA centers. Why? Because as Yao Ming jokes, he loves Africa because in Africa, many animals are even bigger than him!

When American sports go abroad

Gilas Blatche — From Brooklyn to the Philippines — Andray Blatche

In the spirit of one last Summer vacation before the season is over, I’m excited to bring you two wonderful stories about American sports going abroad. One story explores the recent and rapid adoption of American Football in Poland while the other profiles the National Basketball Team of the Philippines and their newest countryman, Andray Blatche, who was born in New York and has played his whole life in the United States.

“What happened in the championship of the Polish American Football League” sounds like the first line of a pre-political correctness ethnic joke but actually it’s a legitimate question for the tens of thousands of people who follow American Football in Poland. Rick Lyman of the New York Times brings us a gripping story about how Poland has embraced American football. It’s a wonderful window into how another culture views the game of football, free from some of the cultural implications and the pressure of billions of dollars that weigh down the conversation in the United States. Some of my favorite parts were the description of how family oriented the live experience of the games are:

At the game against the Goats, besides a bouncy castle, there was an inflatable sliding board, a giant dinosaur, a Starbucks tent, a bubble tea concession, a very popular burger van, a kielbasa grill, a small beer garden beyond the end zone and a “Zibi & Steczki” (steak and potatoes) stand run by the Harley guys.

“We also encourage picnicking,” Mr. Steszewski said. “Of course, we are not up to the standards of American tailgating.”

and a brief look into the one all-women’s team in the league, the aptly named Warsaw Sirens:

“Our colors are pink and black,” said Kamila Glowacz, 29, the team’s president. “You know, because we’re girls.”

The team got started when some of the women visited America and happened to see a game. “Many men told us we should go to the kitchen, not to the field,” she said. “But women, you know, we do what we want to do.”

It’s a wonderful article and is well worth reading to the final, hysterical line. I’ve definitely taken note of Lyman as a writer to follow and I’d love to watch some Polish football if it were ever on TV.

The second story about what happens when American sports go abroad is about the successful recruitment of American Andray Blatche by the Filipino National Basketball team and the process of introducing him to the team. Written by Rafe Bartholomew for Grantland.com, this article is a fun look into a wacky basketball player in a completely curious situation.

International basketball allows for one naturalized citizen to play for each country’s national team. This often means that American college players who either couldn’t make an NBA team or who have tried and failed in the NBA get recruited to play for another country. Recruitment in sports isn’t unusual, it happens at every level, but it is notable when signing up means not just signing a contract but becoming a citizen of a foreign country. In this case, Andray Blatche had to be the subject of a law that passed through the Philippines congress and signed by their president before he could begin playing with the Filipino team.

Once Bartholomew ably tells the tale of how Blatche was courted and signed, he moves on to the important question of how a talented but unreliable 6’11” NBA American center will fit into a team of undersized relatively lesser skilled Filipinos. The answer seems to be, “Pretty well.” The Filipino coach, team, and fans are refreshingly (for our stats obsessed sports landscape) focused on playing with heart and passion. For whatever else you can say about Blatche, he’s got both of those in droves. I loved the parts of the piece when Bartholomew focused on Blatche’s growing relationship with his Filipino teammates and staff. Here’s one choice bit:

Blatche even seemed to develop a genuine closeness with Gilas ball boy Bong Tulabot — and not just because Bong spent the 15 minutes before every practice massaging weapons-grade menthol liniment into Blatche’s calf muscles. “Where’s my guy?” were often the first words out of Blatche’s mouth when he’d enter the gym, and he’d jockey with Alapag for Bong’s attention. The unlikely bond between Blatche, the 28-year-old, 6-foot-11 NBA center, and Bong, the 48-year-old, 5-foot-6 Filipino team handyman who used to sell rice porridge in the street, was consummated when a morning practice ended with a visiting SBP official placing $200 at half court and inviting everyone in the gym to shoot for it. Blatche launched his half-court attempt, and when the ball rattled through the rim Bong leaped in celebration.

“DAT’S MY MAN! DAT’S MY MAN!” Bong shouted in a peculiar falsetto as he ran in circles around the gym. Blatche melted to the floor in laughter, then got up to meet Bong for a running, jumping chest bump, although their height disparity made the maneuver look more like Bong delivering a flying head butt to Blatche’s waist. Nevertheless, the moment was enough to make “DAT’S MY MAN!” the team catchphrase for the rest of its time in Miami.

So far, so good in Blatche’s time with the Filipino national team. The true test comes over the next week when the Philippines will try to upset the world and qualify for the knock out round of the FIBA Basketball World Cup. We’ll be running an article on how that tournament works later today, so keep your eyes to the grindstone.