After Atalanta

Sh*t's getting real in Russia. Every day I see a new set of news articles, blog posts, and various other forms of commentary and updates about how Russia's anti-gay propaganda laws will affect the upcoming Olympic Games. As I wrote about already, the IOC isn't exerting a whole lot of pressure. And, at the time of my last post about this issue, I was leaning toward boycott--or at least bringing it up as a possibility to encourage some more meaningful discussion. But I read a very thoughtful article about how a boycott would serve, in part, to closet some openly gay athletes who would not be given a chance to compete in Sochi. I was compelled by New Zealand speed skater Blake Skjellerup's comments in particular. Skjellerup asserted last week that he would go to Sochi and "speak out rather than sit out."  The IOC had said that no one visiting Sochi for the games in February (athlete, coach, fan, media, etc.) would be subject to the laws. But the Russian sport...

The writing has been on the wall for a long time now in terms of the geopolitical direction Russia is headed in. I mean, they were not exactly a model of cooperation at the most recent G8 when it came to Syria. But what is on everyone's radar screen right now, of course, is whether Vladimir Putin will let American leaker Edward Snowden stay in his country. (Apparently residence in an aiport is fine.) I am sure the behind-the-scenes wrangling must be quite charged by now. Is Russia just going to do what Russia wants to do? Or will the United States and its (reluctant?) allies exert enough pressure on Russia to get Snowden back where they would like him? As much as I probably should, I don't really care about the Snowden thing. I do care, however, about all the political capital the US and other nations might be using in negotiating Snowden's extradition. Why? Because I think more attention--and more capital--needs to be put toward dealing with the legal institutionalizati...

...a male commentator makes a sexist remark. Someone needs to start a blog or Tumblr or something entitled "Commentators Say the Darnedest Things"--and by darnedest I meant racist, homophobic, sexist. Last winter the BCS Championship was marred by a one-sided game and the comments of broadcaster Brent Musburger who spent some of the game's downtime talking about the quarterback's pageant girlfriend. At this year's Wimbledon, the comments focused on an actual participant in the event. BBC commentator John Inverdale noted, before the women's final on Saturday, that soon-to-be champion Marion Bartoli was not pretty. He surmised that Bartoli's father, who--like his daughter--has been considered somewhat of an oddity in the tennis world because of his style, told his daughter that she would have to work harder because she was never going to be a looker like Maria Sharapova. The comments caused discord immediately and Inverdale apologized before the broadca...

...for the Scoreboard for Equality Tumblr, but it is awesome. Thank you thank you thank you to whomever is compiling all this data. We in the world of sport and gender studies are grateful. UPDATE: It's done by a woman named Molly Arenberg. You can follow her on Twitter too: @Molly_Arenberg

No, this is not about the former men's basketball coach at Rutgers. 'Cause really what else is there to say about that that wasn't covered in the fabulous SNL parody with Melissa McCarthy. This time the offending coach is a young softball coach at Seton Hall . Her players finally had had enough with her unreasonable demands (skip classes, forgo educational opportunities) and retribution when her orders were not followed. They have detailed many specific incidents (including calling her players aborted fetuses) which have reached the local newspaper likely because players' parents felt the administration was not listening to their concerns and had not delineated any kind of process for the investigation. Deliberate indifference and lack of policies/procedures is never a good position for a university to be in these days, but administrators contend that they do have a process and policies that they follow when complaints are made. Other than that, they would not comment ...

[Warning: this post is more crude than my usual just-plain-sarcastic language. I am not proud of this. But I'm a little enraged.] Jimmy Connors was constantly checking in on his man-parts when he was an active professional tennis player. He touched his crotch after every point. So he clearly is well aware of the status of his balls. And now the rest of us are as well. In his autobiography Connors tells the world that his ex-girlfriend and former professional tennis player Chris Evert, had an abortion while they were together. And he remains upset that he was consulted about her decision to not proceed with the pregnancy because, he says, he would have been there to support the child. Very little evidence to back up that claim given that he complained about Evert's emotional neediness after bad matches. Slate offers a very good commentary about Connor's reveal and the politics of sport, pregnancy, and patriarchy. The whole thing is just...icky or creepy or smarmy. Wh...

Last week several people told me I must listen to Frank Deford's weekly piece on NPR's Morning Edition. I finally listened to it this morning. I have not read any other opinions about it--or even looked to see if they exist. I have seen many opinions, however, on the hot new non-fiction book, Lean In , by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. I have not read the book yet. I am on the Kindle wait list at my library. I don't really want to read it. I am a little irked by the whole thing. Sandberg is pretty darned privileged. She owns $1 billion of FB stock . She is white, married to a man, and a mother of two. Who is she appealing to? I have heard the thoughts about the book and its message from non-white, non-middle-class, non-married women and they all offer legitimate criticisms. But I shall wait until I actually read it before launching into a full-scale critique. But since I have heard Deford's piece, I won't hold back. I have heard this rant before. It came from Nanc...

I really, really, really though Cal was going to take down the Cardinals last night. And I was rooting hard for that to happen. Sure Cal's trip to the Final Four didn't help my bracket any. But I was deeply distraught that Baylor was beaten by Louisville and I felt so bad for Brittany Griner and all the elbows she took during that game. But the more I observed Cal and heard pieces of their story, the more my cheers were about them winning and less about vindication for Baylor and Griner. Because, admittedly, I was a reluctant Baylor fan. I have always like Griner but not so much the Lady (gag) Bears as an organization. But who else could beat UConn consistently? It was Machiavellian really. But Griner is graduating and I can move on. And I have moved on to Cal. Because I looked at the members of that team and I looked at their coach and I knew exactly what kind of atmosphere is fostered on that team. Clarendon hugs Coach Gottlieb, pic from San Francisco Examiner I have...

There has been a lot of media focus on the demise--or the changes to--the Big East. I mean even It's Only a Game has aired several pieces on it. But little has been said about the effects of the conference shuffling on women's basketball. The Big East is representing down in New Orleans this weekend. What will next year look like? T he New York Times discussed these issues .

It was a pretty gay-focused week in sports. Here's what happened:  Rutgers fired head men's basketball coach, Tim Rice, after ESPN got hold of a video--which then went viral--of Coach Rice engaged in conduct unbecoming of a coach, and that was according to New Jersey governor Chris Christie. In addition to physical abuse, Rice dished out a heavy dose of emotional abuse in the form of homonegative and misogynistic slurs. The Outside the Lines story can be found here . Glad this made news but a few ahem moments that were the topic of discussion in boot camp this morning in between pop squats, long-strider jumping jacks and rainbow deadlifts. First, Rutgers knew about this behavior last fall when they fined and gave Rice a three-game suspension. The power of a viral video...We tell young people--especially intercollegiate athletes to be careful about social media; maybe college athletics administrators should take their own advice. Oh my, I just learned that Rutgers AD is no...

I caught Outside the Lines on Monday afternoon. Wait, since when am I home on a Monday afternoon with the TV on? Oh yeah, since I finished writing my dissertation! Whoop whoop! Hopefully posts will be more frequent. Monday's episode was called Charity Conundrum. A video segment along with the podcast of the show can be found here . It was an investigation into athletes' charities and began with Lamar Odom's Cathy's Kids, which was used throughout the episode as an example of a bad charity: deceptive in its purpose, high administrative costs, mismanagement, lack of oversight. Attempted interviews with Odom did not go well either. He doesn't seem to know where the money goes (not to underprivileged children but to kids on two elite AAU teams) and is quite defensive when questioned about where the money is going. He kept saying "it's my money, it's my money" as if 1) he doesn't have to answer questions about it and 2) oh, yeah, it doesn't...

I remember a couple of years ago I was a regular reader of a fellow grad student's blog. When she got down to writing her dissertation, she took a blog hiatus. I thought then "well, come on. You must have time to blog even if you are writing your dissertation." Ok, so I get it now. Diss writing is in the (knock on wood) final stages, so blog writing--as you may have noticed--has become sporadic, at best. But I was recently encouraged by DrSportPsych to blog about the recent emergence at ESPN.com of a bracket to determine the best athlete EVER. We can start with the obvious: there are no women in the running. Perhaps ESPN is waiting until a month from now when we are in the midst of Women's History Month to bring out their women's bracket so they continue to tell us how much they value and respect women's sports and female athletes. But if they do I surmise it will be as compensation for this quite obvious absence. There is nothing on the page that notes...

OK. OK. I lied. I bullied you into reading this post and expressed a mistruth. This post is indeed about Lance Armstrong. Judge me as you see fit. But it's not some moral diatribe about ethics and truth and sportsmanship, blah, blah, blah. I didn't have any sort of urge to comment on this story. I mean, come on, I study sport and gender. This is not surprising. I am somewhat bemused by my cyclist friends who are just so sad about the whole thing. And I have felt that my ardent cynicism has been completely validated this week. But the people who are still holding on because Lance has done so much for cancer...really? Because we need Lance to enlighten those last few people who aren't aware of cancer? Still wearing your Live Strong bracelets because you like the mantra? Go ahead. Sure a duplicitous man used his ill-gotten fame and spearheaded a charity/movement that raised money for cancer. It's not as if cancer charities are operating in especially transparent ways th...

I was compelled by the lure of being in the NYT to think critically about the comments play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger made about the girlfriend of Alabama QB AJ McCarron during the BCS Championship earlier this week. But since my comments didn't quite make the cut, I shall them--and more!--here. I didn't watch the game, didn't hear about the comments until I got queried by a reporter. (And admittedly did not know Musbuger by name--I did recognize his voice though.) I think the reporter wanted me to make some kind of direct link to the status of women's sports and female athletes. And I couldn't do that. Because there isn't really one that can be made. All I could say was the somewhat derivative "well, it's all the same patriarchy." When Musbuger encouraged little boys in Alabama to be throwing the football around with dad so that they too could land a beauty queen like Katherine Webb, he wasn't saying anything new rather he was simpl...

One of my favorite college administrators had a lot of interesting axioms, which those of us who worked with her believed were largely of her own creation. But now I realize, they were just old. Like nineteenth century old in the case of one of my (and I believe her) favorites: a tub on its own bottom. The exact phrase is "every tub on its own bottom" and is apparently used all the time at Harvard (of course). It means a decentralized economic system and is employed up by university administrators to describe the way each unit is in charge (for better or worse) of its own finances--its own success, and arguably its own demise. She used it in reference to the athletic department at my undergraduate DI school. I have, being the good marxist feminist (kind of) that I am, taken a cultural interpretation of the phrase as well, and translated it to mean a unit of the university that is so financially different than others that it has its own, exclusive culture. And this is certa...

After a hefty amount of silence about the investigation into the abuse claims against Hall of Famer Bob Hewitt, the tennis powers that be have indefinitely suspended Hewitt from the hall. That seems like the same thing as being kicked out, given that his "legacy has been stripped from the institution." The 72-year old Australian is living in South Africa currently. He was also recently removed from the South African Sport and Arts Hall of Fame.

It's never great to be outed. It's probably worse to be outed because you have been arrested for aggravated assault against your ex-girlfriend. That is the situation former WNBA and Tennessee Vols player Chamique Holdsclaw finds herself in this week. An arrest warrant was issued for Holdsclaw who turned herself in today. She allegedly fired a shot into the backseat of Jennifer Lacy's SUV which may or may not have had gasoline in it. Lacy is a current player for the Tulsa Shock. Nike never said anything about whether letting girls play sports would decrease their risk of becoming abusers. What else is going to happen this week?

For the record, I don't hold female athletes up to any kind of gender-specific standard regarding role model suitability, general public presence, altruism, or good decision-making ability. In general, I don't understand why professional athletes are default role models. Because they are in the public eye? That seems to negate all the other reasons that might make them unsuitable: unhealthy focus on winning which leads to illegal behaviors; rigid schedules that mandate time away from family (for the family values folks); lack of real-life, everyday skills; a somewhat necessary solipsism required for success (especially in individual sports). So my post yesterday was not at all about how disappointed I was in Hope Solo as a role model for all the children I don't have. I was mostly just sad for her. Sad for her positioning in this sociocultural moment in which a highly talented elite-level athlete is defending someone who seems to be a bad guy and then marrying him. Maybe ...

I'm pretty sure there was something I was supposed to blog about in the wake of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) annual meeting in New Orleans last night. But I can't remember what it is. So instead thanks to one of my NOLA roomies, Dr. Pants, I will blog about Hope Solo instead. Dr. Pants is a big fan of Hope Solo; she even read her auto(ish)biography Solo: A Memoir of Hope. I personally am not a Solo fan and though I considered reading the memoir for scholarly purposes, I couldn't get past the title. I might be interested in some version of a sequel, however, given the latest news about Solo that I received from Dr. Pants. Hope Solo is married! She also hosted a party of a small group of friends a few days ago which resulted in the arrest of her then-fiance Jerramy Stevens. There was some alcohol, there was fighting (apparently over where the happy couple was to live), there was pushing and shoving and maybe some hitting. There was blood...

Here's a bold move in this era of big-time sports: Spelman College is eliminating its intercollegiate athletics program at the end of the year. The all-female HBCU, lead by President Beverly Daniel Tatum, will take the $1 million annual budget for athletics and use to establish fitness programs to be available to the entire 2,000-women student body. Spelman will keep its PE requirement but will expand opportunities for activities  like yoga and aerobics. The emphasis, according to Tatum, will be placed on life-long health: “We want them to live long and healthy lives so they can get the return on that investment they’ve made in higher education…. We really see this as a life-saving activity that we are engaging in.” The emphasis on mind and body is refreshing especially in light of the population. Black women are at greater risk for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and various cancers than their white peers--even when accounting for economic status and education. ...