After Atalanta

I hesitated to write this post because I did not want to be part of the continuing media coverage of the BYU/UNM soccer game in which rough play all around and particularly that of defender Elizabeth Lambert has gotten a lot of negative and other suspect attention. But this article, not a big one in the grand scheme of media coverage, set me off and lead to the above mentioned ponytail epiphany. It's not what was in it, as it was not adding anything particularly new; it was the title: "On the Lambert scandal." Scandal? It's a scandal now? Christian politicians living in communal environments in DC and sleeping with mistresses on the side engender scandals. Hiding information about alleged threats of terrorism from elected officials and the general public is a scandal. A collegiate soccer player engaged in on-field acts of violent behavior is not a scandal. So once again I was forced to ask myself, "What the heck is up with this story?" Seriously, when I was ...

I was going to add a postscript to "10 lesbians walk into a bar" (I have to say I am just dying to see how that phrase affects my hits) based on the recent Graham Hays (of ESPN online) column about Elizabeth Lambert's actions last weekend. But I thought it was a good enough piece to stand alone as a post. (And possibly because I am feeling a little lazy this morning.) Hays is right on when he writes: This is how it so often goes for women's sports....Roll tape, ignore the context and let the criticism and mocking commence. And he is soooo right--unfortunately--that this conference playoff game will get far more attention from the likes of ESPN and other sports networks than the actual NCAA championship game. And he is right that the outrage reflects the belief that women's sports remain an inferior and less physical version of men's sports. [Please don't take away my feminist blogger's license for all this agreeing with a mainstream source.] But what w...

...and naturally frivolity ensues. (You thought I was going to make a joke, right? Nope; just getting your attention.) And then when we see the sports network covering women's soccer on the plasma televisions scattered around the bar, our heads snap up eagerly. Because we like women's soccer and we like it when sports shows cover it. And then we see the coverage is of University of New Mexico player Elizabeth Lambert and the egregious fouls she committed in a recent game against BYU. And we sigh because this is, after all, a group of critical, feminist sport scholars at a conference on sport and sociology. But because we have been thinking and critiquing for days, and because the segment ends quickly, we go back to our fun and games. Alas here I am back in the real world and these are things I think about. Said conference was in Canada, but I imagine American media covered this story as well complete with the repeated shots of Lambert's actions in which she 1) elbowed a pla...