After Atalanta

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. ...

This week on NPR I heard a review of the new book about Thomas Jefferson and the evidence the author presents about the pretty much unequivocal hypocrisy of the founding father. And not just the now well-known relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings, but how he was encouraged by his peers to free his slaves, but wouldn't. So continuing on the social justice and the personal-is-political theme, a poem by Natasha Trethewey from her book, Thrall . The poem can be found here. Enlightenment In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs      at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination— a lit bulb—the rest of his face in shadow,      darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,      he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint ...

Summer lovin', happened too fast. Christine Brennan has declared the Summer of Women (in sports) over. And, today, she and I are on the same page. Eternal pessimist that I am, I suspected--as it was happening--that the surge of interest in women's sports that was ignited primarily by the Olympics but also by the concurrent news and (mostly) praise of Title IX during its 40th anniversary year, would dissipate. It's a roller coaster ride. Luckily we only have to go down screeching down that big hill of disappointment once every 4 years (and down a smaller hill of disappointment after the winter Olympics end). Brennan was brought back to her reality after hearing UConn women's basketball coach, Geno Auriemma, discuss his stance on lowering the rim in women's basketball to make it a more popular sport that people (i.e. men) want to watch. People who don't like women's sports are not going to watch them. And inferiorizing the sport only provides the haters mo...

This poem by Alicia Ostriker is from the current issue of Massachusetts Review. It was posted at Poetry Daily recently. I've been doing a lot of talking in my classes about more complex understandings of race, so this fits in quite well. They Speak of Race Honey I am one gorgeous permanent wave of dunebeige yellowgold coalblack European Asian African force funneled through centuries of ejaculating ancestors right here to me said the impure old woman Absolutely true science informs us we hybrids are the ones that survive the endless brutalities of storm and drought and the rivalry of our peers said the naturally selected magnificent red tulip Any tribe keep doing the same thing with the same folks they gonna die out soon so procreate like me with strangers go mix it up mongrel is powerful said the dog

A few weeks ago, I neglected, among other things, to post about this amazing column by wrestling coach Hudson Taylor that was posted at HuffPo. Hudson, since he was a student-athlete, has been an ally of LGBT athletes and works to end homophobia in sport. Taylor demonstrates a very keen awareness of the way in which homophobia and sexism are intertwined. It is not a coincidence the sport has a history of sexism and homophobia. They reinforce each other. How different is it really when a male athlete is referred to as a "girl" or as a "fag"? Both are meant to question his masculinity and inspire a man-up moment. What about the ways that the lesbian stigma in women's sports is connected to its inferior status? So, good job Hudson Taylor. And much awe and respect to Pat Griffin for her column this week posted at Opposing Views. The day I read it I was teaching in my class two articles: a piece called "Patriarchy" by sociologist Allan Johnson and Pe...

I foresee a future dissertation on the topic of women's arm wrestling. I mean if it's good enough for NPR to cover , some grad student should be snapping it up. I have to admit, the topic seems a bit unusual. The story, which aired on All Things Considered, notes the similarity to roller derby and wrestling (the theatrical aspects of it). But, based on the story's main source, it seems to tip more towards that than athletics. I suspect the same issues will arise regarding self-sexification as a seeming requirement for participation; the empowerment potential of the performance; subcultural aspects; and how the sport will be presented to the general public. Already participants are referred to, at least by NPR (tsk tsk), as "lady arm wrestlers."

I'm not the only one trying to get back on course (sorry for the lack of blogging). Professional skiers start their competitive season soon. And American skier Lindsey Vonn, the it girl (much to Julia Mancuso's dismay) of the last winter Olympics, is looking to compete against the men in the first race of the season. It does not seem that people are opposed to the coed competition. Skiers--both male and female--are encouraging Vonn's attempt to test herself. The issue is that the men's competition is on the same course the women's race will be held at the following week; a race that Vonn wants to compete in as well. But she--or any other racer--is not allowed to race the course beforehand. Various committees and powers-that-be are looking into the whole thing. I think if Vonn gets permission we will see a lot more men versus women talk. Interesting and irksome is how the FIS World Cup is divided. Under the gender pull-down menu on the calendar page is "me...

I started reading this column with a little hesitation. The end of the Kournikova era? Really? Are not female athletes, including the columnist's celebrated Alex Morgan, still stripping down to promote their bodies, um, er, their sport, um...? Yes, it's still happening. It's still problematic. What's different, as the columnist points out, is that in the Kournikova era there seemed to be no space to which to have a discussion of women's sports. We were polarized. We had to talk about the sexualization of female athletes (or if you were outside of the critical discourse you discussed their hotness factor) and it made it difficult to talk about actual women's sports. But why did the Kournikova era end? What was it about that historical moment that pushed this woman (then girl) to be the most googled, searched for, downloaded entity? What was the sexual tenor of the country (of the western world?) in those years? Or was it just Kournikova? Did she just happen ...