A feel good story:: Billie Jean KIng graduates from college

I'm going to outsource this one entirely to another Greatest Of All Time, Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

“Shut up and dribble!” The phrase is so ubiquitous these days, and it seems like I’ve heard it said so many times, it’s hard to believe it’s been around for just eight years. That’s right, it was in February 2018 when Fox News personality Laura Ingraham first said those words which, as a basketball player who has always spoken his mind, I found so repugnant. Ingraham prefaced her “witticism” (“witlessism”?) by saying, “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” This, after LeBron James had the nerve to criticize President Donald Trump as “someone who doesn’t understand the people,” and whose recent comments were “laughable and scary.” Hardly a controversial take: anyone who doesn’t get their information from the so-called news channel that employs Ingraham had no doubt reached the same conclusion long before LeBron put it into words. In point of fact, athletes are just as likely to have something worthwhile to say about politics and contemporary society as Fox News talking heads, or the ten men who could buy the world—or certain Presidents of the United States.

This comes to mind now because Billie Jean King, one of the greatest tennis players of all time as well as one of the sports world’s greatest and most outspoken humanitarians, earned her college diploma earlier this week, at the tender age of 82… 65 years after first enrolling at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles). She originally left in 1964 after three years to focus on her burgeoning tennis career and returned last year to complete her class work and get her bachelor’s degree in history as well as serve as commencement speaker.

It’s not every day someone older than I am graduates from college, and it’s even more rare when that person was winning professional sports championships in my same era. Over the course of her career, King won 12 major singles titles, including six at Wimbledon and a career Grand Slam. (She also won 16 majors in doubles and 11 in mixed doubles.) In 1972, she won the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, and became the first woman to win what was previously known as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, sharing that year’s honor with one of my greatest personal heroes, my UCLA coach John Wooden. (I won my second NBA MVP Award that year and scored a career best 34.8 points a game; I was probably wondering what you had to do to win a Sportsman of the Year Award!)

But for all Billie Jean King did on the tennis court, her impact may have been even greater off the court. She led the push for equal pay at Grand Slam tournaments, and her threat to boycott the 1973 US Open led to that tournament becoming the first major where men and women earned the same prize money. That same year, she became the founding president of a new women’s player’s union, the Women’s Tennis Association, or WTA. She also helped found the first women’s professional tennis tour (the Virginia Slims) and World Team Tennis, offering many female players their first true opportunity to earn a living wage. And on top of all that, she defeated the former men’s Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in the legendary Battle of the Sexes tennis match. Granted, Riggs was 55 years old to King’s 29, but Riggs had just destroyed the great Margaret Court in a similar match by the score of 6-1, 6-2, and the very idea of equal prize money was being called into question as a result. King embarrassed the self-proclaimed male chauvinist Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in front of more than 30,000 people at the Houston Astrodome, while an estimated 90 million watched on TV worldwide.

Outside of the tennis world, she was one of a brave group of women who allowed Ms. magazine to report that they’d undergone abortions in 1972, before Roe v. Wade made the procedure legal nationwide. In 1981, she became the first female athlete to come out as a lesbian at a time when discrimination and ostracization were all too common for anyone even suspected of being gay. As it happened, she came out unwillingly, when a former partner sued her for palimony; but the fact that she revealed her orientation rather than submitting to an extortionate settlement before the lawsuit was filed showed that she would face public opprobrium rather than be bullied or shamed into silence.

She was great friends with her fellow tennis champion and social justice warrior Arthur Ashe, and guarded the secret of his AIDS diagnosis for years before he went public. After his death, she remained a staunch advocate for people with AIDS. In 1999, she won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, and their names will be always be linked in the tennis world: the grounds where the US Open tennis tournament is played is called the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, while its showcase court where all its biggest matches are played is in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

As an athlete who always wanted to do something greater for my community and the rest of the world, Billie Jean King is someone I’ve looked to as a model for athletic activism. I don’t know what the tennis equivalent of “shut up and dribble” is—“shut up and serve” perhaps?—but you can bet that if Billie Jean ever heard those words, she would have ignored them.

Congratulations, Billie Jean, you’ve made all Americans proud!

I don't know of many male athletes who have responded to great women athletes with this kind of generosity and respect. There may be guys I've missed ... But Kareem not only affirms King's greatness here, but demonstrates his own.

Not simple and not going away

Sportswriters -- the good ones -- are different from other journalists. Well, maybe theater critics are also different in a similar way. Their job and craft is to describe the practice and art of people and collective groups who seek to demonstrate the excellence and delightful potential of our troubled species.

This calling sometimes makes sports journalists unexpectedly blunt commentators on our accompanying societal follies. The existence of athletes who break gender categories can bring out the best of them.

Ann Killion writes about sports and athletes amid the fading embers of the daily San Francisco Chronicle. And she calls bullshit on the current round of obfuscation from the International Olympic Committee about transwomen athletes.

Olympic ban of transgender women an overly simplistic decision with vast consequences

This past week the International Olympic Committee did the easy, simple thing. IOC President Kirsty Coventry announced that transgender women would be banned from all Olympic events, starting in Los Angeles 2028 and going forward. 

... It was simple — and simplistic — because it conveniently ignores the science that indicates that this issue is far more complicated and nuanced. But, hey, we live in a time where global warming is ignored, once-eradicated lethal diseases are making a comeback and scientists are mocked for their knowledge, so why not throw one more complex issue on the bonfire of human research and intelligence?

The IOC’s decision was simple because it flaccidly capitulated to the Trump administration, ceding territory to the loudest, meanest and basest elements, and ignoring the objections of scientists and advocates. ...

Killion goes on to explain the uncertain science that exists about the correlations between simple gender markers and athletic performance. The scientist who discovered the genetic variation which the IOC uses to define sex is not a fan of the current determination.

The IOC ban will require every female athlete who wants to compete in the Olympics to do a one-time gene test, either by drawing blood or having a cheek swabbed, to prove they are indeed female athletes. 

The test is designed to determine the presence or absence of the SRY gene, found on the male Y chromosome. Forget how this conjures up the long history of discrimination against female athletes and perceptions that if you’re good at sports you must not truly be feminine. The basic science behind this test is controversial. 

Andrew Sinclair, the Australian researcher who discovered the SRY gene in 1990, wrote an article last year after World Athletics — the governing body for track and field — adopted the same standard the IOC will implement. He decried the decision.

... Sinclair noted that biological sex is complex with a variety of physiological factors coming into play, and the SRY test only indicates whether the gene is present, not how it is functioning or whether testosterone is being produced. ...

We, both the scientists and the rest of us, know so little about what's "real" and what's meaningful about sex and gender in our species that we easily default to prejudice and bigotry when our preconceptions are challenged. Some people just don't fit. People who don't fit aren't going away. 

What's novel is that we live in a time when gender-complex people refuse to be erased. Get used to it.

I recommend again 800 meter runner Caster Semenya's The Race to Be Myself for a peek into what it is like to live inside these contradictions. 

U.S. Olympians get to be real Americans

And our Orange Toddler of a president, doesn't like that.

Some days the only bit of day to day media coverage I can stomach are the offerings from the sports writers. The San Francisco Chronicle's Ann Killion brings smarts and empathy to reporting on the antics of our Winter Olympians. She argues "why none of us should 'stick to sports.'"

That was a rough couple of weeks for the “Stick to Sports” folks, who — at best — always sound a bit naive about how the sports world works, as though athletic endeavors happen in a remote silo off in the distance and are not a reflection of society at large.

The wildly popular Milan Cortina Winter Olympics — the highest rated in 12 years — were a perfect illustration of how sports always has and always will intersect with society and the issues of the times.

...As the [U.S.A. hockey team] men celebrated their stunning overtime win over Canada and FBI Director Kash Patel — already under fire for using an FBI plane for personal travels at taxpayer expense — chugged beer and acted like he had scored the winning goal, a congratulatory call came in from the president of the United States. Not unusual. 

What was unusual was that Donald Trump, after inviting the men to the State of the Union address and the White House, took the moment to be divisive and belittling to other American gold medalists: “And we have to — I must tell you — we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. If I don’t do that I probably would be impeached.”

Click to enlarge.

The women’s team also won gold, also beating Canada, on Thursday. For some reason, they did not receive a congratulatory phone call from the president of the United States. Citing scheduling — the players finished the Olympics last week and are back to the PWHL and college this week — they politely declined Trump’s half-baked invitation.

... The disdain for women’s sports, the lack of care over the hard work put in and the ongoing discrimination that females athletes face is real, and it was on full display in that phone call. 

Killion reminds that these are very young people, obviously committed to and engulfed by the demands of being the very best at their sports.

The U.S. men took a rash of grief for laughing at the president’s remark. I give them some grace because they were jacked up on adrenaline and beer and most Americans have been trained to smile at powerful men’s awkward, cringey attempts at humor. In truth you can hear one player clearly say “Absolutely” that the women should be invited and a few others call out “Two for two.” The two programs are close and generally supportive of one another.

... During the Games, American athletes were asked questions about things happening in their country and answered honestly and were attacked for those answers. Trump called one young American athlete, freestyle skier Hunter Hess, “a real loser.” Athletes from Minnesota and elsewhere felt strongly about what they were seeing on the streets of American cities and spoke their minds, and they were condemned for doing so.

... [Richmond, California's Alysa] Liu, whose father fled China in 1989 after participating in the student protests in Tiananmen Square, found herself being embraced by the conservative right in recent days, and the phrase “Be an Alysa Liu” caught fire on social media.

That’s a bit of a funny spot for the “alt” kid from the East Bay who defies convention and other people’s opinions. At the same time that “Be an Alysa Liu” was trending, also going viral was an interview with Liu, who said: “I think it is really important to notice the faults in our own government. Things are a little rough. There’s so many protests that are going on and I’ve attended. Coming from a family of immigrants, I think immigrants deserve rights.” ...

After all, these young folks are Americans. Since we are by and large untutored in their sports, the focus they attract redounds on us as well as on them. Our cheers for them are not only for their individual wizardry, but also because they demonstrate the country can produce skill and flair in arenas where most of us could never win entry. And that's good thing for them and for the country. 

... The athletes who wear the flag have grandparents or great-grandparents who fought fascism.They have parents who fled repressive regimes that allowed no freedom of speech or a right to protest. They know they have the right to speak their mind, to make their own choices, to stand up for what they believe is just, to demand respectful treatment, to insist on equality. 

If all this honesty and self-reflection makes the U.S. Olympic team “Team Woke,” a lot of us are here for it. And it’s just more proof that there’s no “sticking to sports.” Sports and social issues can’t be separated. 

Why can't the girls play?

Another video --this one of my world champion women's Nordic combined courtesy niece making a pitch for inclusion of her specialty in the 2030 games. Why not include the women? They compete on the World Cup circuit. She's got help from a lot of other Olympic skiers and the lieutenant governor of Vermont. 

Donald: world class loser

As an honest to goodness fan of American football, I have to admit this year's Super Bowl was a snoozer. The best teams this year all were in the NFC, so the intra-conference championship, which is what the SB is, didn't pit the true top teams --and it showed.

But the buzz around Bad Bunny, a performer whose existence is a thumb in the eye to MAGA, was fun. And outside in Santa Clara, northern Californians got their digs in.

 As Joe Garofoli explained in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Donald Trump lost the Super Bowl. 

He didn’t even show up. Said it was “too far.” The guy who complains that pro football has gotten “too soft” was afraid to face the tsunami of boos that would have power-washed his fake tan.

Instead, he ceded the stage on America’s unofficial national holiday to performers like Green Day, whose lead singer told ICE agents to quit their jobs at a show earlier in the week and changed the lyrics of their song “American Idiot” to assert that “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”  Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, was outside the stadium (which is in his district) with activists to demand no new funding for ICE.

Longtime LGBTQ activist Brandi Carlile sang a lovely version of  “America the Beautiful” pre-game. The halftime show featured cameos from other LGBTQ-positive performers in Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga. Activists passed out 25,000 towels outside the stadium that read “ICE OUT.”...

It's nice to see that Trump is also losing the Winter Olympics before a world audience. JDVance caught the boos.

Americans brought in their own opinions:

While Italians in the host country had plenty to say:

We better get used to being a pariah nation. Erase Donald and MAGA!

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

A different kind of woman

Caster Semenya knows who she is. She's had it with authorities, especially white and European ones, telling her they know her better than she does herself. She tells it like it is for her in The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir.

I love this book. I recommend it unreservedly, especially in the audio version, some of which Semenya performs herself.

She sets up her story like this:

I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am one of the greatest track and field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance. I've won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships ...

... I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the generic conditions where an embryo in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs. To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus. ... I can't biologically contribute to making new life.

I did not know any of this about my body until soon after August 2009, when I won the gold medal in the 800-m race at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. I was only eighteen years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day. ...

... I am a tall, dark-skinned, African woman with well-defined muscles, a deep voice, and not a lot up on top. I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I'm not a man. ... I'm a different kind of woman, I know. But I'm still a woman. ...

I accept and love myself just the way I am. I always have and I always will. God made me. I am fortunate to have had a family who never tried to change me, and a country that wrapped its arms around me and fought for my right to run. ...

... I am a proud South African woman born in a tiny village to people who loved me.They have survived more humiliations than I could possibly know. It is from them that I know about maintaining dignity in the face of oppression. It is my hope that by telling my truth, I inspire others to be unafraid, to love and accept themselves. May this story contribute to a more tolerant world for us all.

Semenya's birth village is in Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa. Though the nation boasts gleaming modern cities like Cape Town and Pretoria, agricultural villages in the countryside -- African villages in the racial frame of that nation -- don't even show up on Google maps. It was a long time before Semenya was pulled into the multi-racial, multi-class modernity of South Africa upon leaving the hinterland to take up an athletic scholarship to the University of Pretoria.

It wasn't until she started winning international races that the International Amateur Athletic Federation (now World Athletics) began to get hot and bothered about her gender. And it seems fair to say, then the shit hit the fan. She was tested and barred from competition unless she took testosterone blocking drugs that made her ill. The basis in science for requiring the drug regimen was poorly documented and eventually tossed out by courts. Meanwhile, she strove to stay sane and train hard amidst the dissonance of strangers questioning who she knew herself to be.

... Gender is a simple thing in my part of the world. Mostly people are born boys, or they are born girls. There is also what in our Pedi language we call lahara matana -- a person born with two genders, meaning they are born with both a penis and a vagina. In my culture, these people are not assigned a gender. They are allowed to live their lives and decide which gender is dominant in their soul. They go about their business and everyone is supposed to mind theirs. I have heard that in rich countries doctors can "fix" a child born like this. But how can you "fix" something if you don't know what a child will want to be? We don't believe in surgical intervention on infants for such a thing.

No one ever told me specifically about lahara matanas. I just knew there were people like this when I was growing up. And I wasn't one of them. I was born a girl, and I have never felt confused by that because there is nothing confusing about having a vagina, even if my mannerisms and interests were considered boyish. ...

I knew growing up there were other girls like me, meaning girls who didn't sprout breasts, who had deep voices, or girls who were not into girl things. I grew up with some of them, played soccer with them. They were around, just like I was around. ...

... My family accepted me the way I was, but it didn't mean they didn't deal with comments about my looks and behavior. But my actual gender has never been a thing to be questioned, much less tested. That's the thing people didn't seem to understand -- it was one thing to talk about how I behaved, how I looked on the outside -- my clothes, my voice, my musculature -- but questioning someone's gender, discussing it in public ... that was unheard of in my culture. ...

The gender issue became a difficult one for the politicians in my country. Everyone seemed to support me and my right to run. They saw me as an innocent Black child caught in a terrible situation. For us, it became more than about gender, it became about race. It became about White people coming and telling us Africans what we were and what we were not based on our looks -- the same categorizations and violations of human rights that were happening during apartheid. I became a symbol of how Black people had been violated and exploited throughout history. Would this be happening to a White European teenage girl? When did "rumors" become an official accusation that had to be investigated? My blood and urine had been tested dozens of times by ASA [Athletics South Africa] and the IAAF [International Amateur Athletic Federation] ...

Mostly Semenya's attitude in this book is simple amazement at the stupidity of people questioning her gender -- and proud fury as she asserts herself. She has no time for other women competitors who she thinks don't have it in them to work as hard as she does.

I remember reading how women were barred from running in the early days of organized sports because men thought their body parts would fall out and that it was "unseemly" for women to sweat in public. Well, look closely at professional women's races. Most of us run, cross the line, congratulate each other, and go on with the rest of our business. ... If you are an elite athlete and you really can't breathe and you fall down when you're done with a race, train harder.

I read this book from a stance of awareness that all world class athletes are freaks of nature.  It's just that sometimes we can't see quite how. Human diversity is enormous and a very few people can turn their biological divergence from the mean into athletic success -- such success only comes if they train to their limits and beyond. The best are disciplined freaks. The Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has some of the largest hands you'll ever see. Brock Purdy apparently has a preternatural ability to see around him and remain decisive when facing being beat to a pulp. They are different, but they wouldn't achieve the athletic successes they have without brutal hard work.

I love the dedication of Caster Semenya's memoir. It seems about right to me:

For those who are born different
and feel they don't belong in this world,
it is because you were brought here
to help create a new one.

Thanks, Mokgadi Caster Semenya!

What unifies Americans: Free Brittney!

I was in a laundromat in Reno the other day. The place is a little seedy; the neighborhood is solid working class, but in a slightly decayed sort of way. Mostly white, as far as I could tell. Women were diligently washing and drying mountains of laundry. The place seemed a sort of community gathering center. Retired white men clustered in the corner, talking animatedly.

"It's a terrible thing, what they are doing! They are locking her up for nine years; she didn't do anything. ... She was just trying to do what she does for a living ... we should get her free ..."

I realized they were talking about Russia's imprisonment of Britteny Griner, the WNBA star, tatooed, dreadlocked, Black, married lesbian beauty. 

I could have taken them for likely Trump voters -- in this knife-edge state, there's a good chance I might be right. But they're behind "that gal."

• • •

Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, puts Brittney Griner's situation into the international context:

Griner was arrested just days before the invasion of Ukraine, which is to say that she was grabbed after Putin and his circle had almost certainly made the decision to go to war. She was perfect for the part that the Russians wanted her to play as a possible bargaining chip. She is a prominent American, but not too prominent. She is gay, Black, and covered in tattoos, the kind of defendant for whom the average Russian will have no sympathy. Detaining her for a minor drug charge must have been an easy call for the Russian intelligence services.

Better yet for the Kremlin, the American determination to get her back home serves a Russian-propaganda purpose. Russia does not value all its citizens equally; some Russians matter and others vanish without trace. The efforts to spring Griner, however, almost certainly feed into a Russian narrative that America, too, does not care about all of its citizens equally and that we value racial or sexual minorities disproportionately—exactly the case that anti-Western hysterics like Putin have been making for years. ...

Unionized sports leaders are keeping keeping the heat on the Biden administration to get her out of there. Sign on with them at Free Brittney!

Time for some different Senators

In case you missed this, don't. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr reacts to the Texas school massacre.

"Any basketball questions don't matter. ... there's 50 Senators who refuse to vote on a [gun purchase] background check measure ... and the reason they won't vote on it is to hold onto power."

The times they are changin' ... changing but not without pain

A lengthy article in the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle has haunted me for the last couple of weeks. Three young male University of San Francisco baseball players, recruited athletes all, have filed a class action lawsuit accusing longtime head coach Nino Giarratano and former associate head coach Troy Nakamura of creating an “intolerable sexualized environment.”

The coaches' behavior seems to have been quite unapologetically piggish.

They [the students] described an atmosphere in which [associate head coach Troy] Nakamura routinely used sexually graphic language in front of the team; flipped one player into a handstand and pretended to eat spaghetti out of his crotch area during a pre-practice skit; and once crawled onto the field naked, swinging his penis in plain view. Head coach Nino] Giarratano witnessed these incidents, according to John Doe 1, and kissed his cross and looked skyward when Nakamura crawled onto the field naked. 

... Nakamura identified a dinner style — barbecue, luau, fast-food — and then went around the circle asking players what they would bring to this pretend meal. He always found a way to make the exercise sexual, according to the lawsuit, and encouraged players to do the same. For instance, the lawsuit said, Nakamura referred to women’s body parts he wanted to eat and bodily fluids he wanted to drink ... “Coach Naks would make those comments and he would see us roll our eyes,” John Doe 1 said. “He would see us isolate ourselves from the group or walk away. He could see we were visibly uncomfortable, and then things started to pick up.” 

 ... “It was kind of crazy,” he said. “Did I just see Coach Naks naked on the field? What prompted that? I didn’t know. Most of these situations, he came out of nowhere being sexual and I didn’t understand why.”

The players bringing the lawsuit described being shocked and confused by what they felt was completely improper behavior by persons with authority over them. They were afraid of losing their scholarships, though eventually found the situation so unbearable that they looked to transfer to other baseball schools.

The description of these events in the Chron doesn't go into the question of what the other members of the team may have felt. Did they like this toxic masculine atmosphere or were they just going along to get along? Were they convinced that this sort of thing was what it took to build a cohesive, tough team?

 The athletes bringing the suit clearly had been raised -- by parents? in high school? in organized sports? -- to expect respect in dealings with coaches and others. They seem to have had supportive parents with whom they could share their pain. Let's hope they land somewhere that will work better for them.

• • •

A recent Washington Post article explored at length the efforts of a Bellevue, Nebraska police official, Chief Ken Clary, to reduce use of force incidents by his officers.

[While attending] the National Institute of Justice LEADS Scholars Program in Washington, ... he was introduced to a wealth of academic research indicating female officers excel at de-escalation and use force less frequently than male officers." 

... Between classes, Clary struck up friendships with Ivonne Roman, a Newark police officer who would go on to be a finalist for New York City police chief earlier this year, and Maureen McGough, an attorney who is chief of staff for the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law. Roman shared with Clary many of the obstacles she faced rising through the ranks in Newark. In a later conversation over lunch, Clary shared with McGough a dawning realization. 

“He looked at me and, out of nowhere, he said, ‘Mo', we have got to figure out how to get the toxic masculinity out of policing,’ ” she recalled. ...

So far, Cleary's two-year experiment with hiring women officers, especially women officers of color, has reduced use-of-force incidents.

And he's run into exactly the sort of resistance that might be expected. "You are lowering standards," he is told. Time will tell whether the culture of toxic masculinity can be tamped down by fiat from authority in a police context ...

• • •

Feminist writer Jill Filipovic examined the underlying context in which these two seemingly so different events are playing out,

The whole Democratic Party message is “we’re all in this together, and we will make life better for everyone.” What happens, though, when a significant chunk of the electorate doesn’t want to be in it together, and doesn’t want life to become better for everyone? ... The complaint that America has grown “too soft,” coupled with what we know about conservative voters’ desires for inequality and hierarchy, is at heart a complaint that life in America is too easy for too many people. [Nuts!]

... If a subset of conservative voters want less equality and less equal opportunity, and more inequity and hardship, then what? If those voters who say that America is too soft want life in America to be harder and more hierarchical and less forgiving, there is no rhetoric or message discipline Democrats can employ to win their votes. And what’s scary is that it seems that as more Americans who have traditionally been cut out of power and privilege do ascend to higher levels — many white women, some men of color — many of them respond with greater hostility to their fellow citizens. Some of them also seem to believe that identity-based hierarchies are justified, that a fairer playing field is not actually the goal, that life in America should be tougher and more brutal for more people.

She concludes:

 ... I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re in a period of broad social cruelty following four years of an intentionally cruel presidency and the rising power of a party that seems to believe strength is defined by dominance and abuse. 

If the public can move in a more callous direction, though, it can also move in a more compassionate one. I believe that’s a harder task to accomplish — it’s always easier to appeal to one’s devils than one’s better angels. But progressives can try. We do it by not backing away from our core values — the belief that all human beings have basic rights; a desire for a more fair, compassionate, and equal society — both in the policies we put forward and in how we behave toward others. ... we should be playing the long game here.

The struggles within the University of San Francisco baseball team and in the Bellevue, Nebraska police department seem to me evidence of new cultural constructs of empathy and equality having a difficult birth. The sooner, the better ...

Cosplay meets limits

What wouldn't Donald Trump give to be the recipient of that shit-eating grin? 

The photo is lifted from a tough article by a tough man, National Hockey League Hall of Famer Ken Dryden. In the 1970s, Dryden was THE MAN in Canadian hockey for the Montreal Canadiens who won the Stanley Cup (hockey's Super Bowl) five times with him in goal. 

He writes:

Putin also seems not to understand about hockey something that might relate to this moment: The tough are initiators, they deliver hard, devastating hits, but the really tough take those hits … and keep going, to win in the end. Just like in Leningrad. Obliterating the Ukrainian city of Mariupol doesn’t make you tough.

I'm no fan of this masculine chest bumping, but Dryden sure is more authentic than Vlad.

In some ways the most interesting thing about Dryden was that he took a year off hockey during his peak playing days to complete a law degree, interning for one of Ralph Nader's offshoots, the Ontario Public Interest Research Group. He was later a Liberal Party politician with only moderate success -- that places him with current Premier Justin Trudeau, perhaps a progressive Democrat if he were in the States.

By the way, the picture is from a 2021 exhibition in Sochi, Russia. Putin is looking at the referee who is likely determined not to let anything bad happen to his ruler.

How to make an impression on a rogue state

Some of the sources I read, notably economic historian Adam Tooze, are doubtful that the massive financial sanctions that Europe, the United States, and various friends have slapped on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine will make much of a dent in Putin's resolve. Well, unless these countries really bite the bullet and stop buying Russian fossil fuels ...

I'm no judge of that -- but my life experience does tell me that the very widespread expulsion of Russian teams and athletes from international sports will make an impression. Working on struggle newspapers in apartheid South Africa in 1990, we saw that the international sports boycott was what really seemed to grate on white citizens, underlining that their country was an international racist parish. Sure, consumer products could sometimes be smuggled in -- but their teams could not show their stuff on the world stage and that bit deep.

Sports sanctions are hell on the athletes since the Russian invasion isn't their fault, but it might get the attention of a population likely hoping to just keep heads down.

The list of sports sanctions over the Ukraine invasion is long:

• Russian and Belorussian figure skaters won't be allowed to compete at the International Skating Union world championship March 21 in Montpellier, France.

• FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, broke with its usual lumbering, corrupt pattern, quickly kicking all Russian club and national teams out of international competition. Russia is out of the 2022 World Cup. The European Soccer League pulled it's upcoming championship out of St. Petersburg.

• The Paralympic Winter Games were about to begin in Beijing on Friday. They go on without Russian competitors. 

• The International Ice Hockey Federation banned Russian and Belarusian teams.

• Formula 1 canceled the Grand Prix of Russia that was to be held in Sochi, trying to stay in front of furious drivers who were threatening not to attend.

• The World Curling Federation began the process of removing the Russian Federation’s entries from the World Championships.

• World Taekwondo said they were stripping Putin of an honorary black belt, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine goes against the sport’s motto: “Peace is more precious than triumph”.

• The International Judo Federation (IJF) suspended Russian President Vladimir Putin as its honorary president.

One more way for world civil society to concentrate Putin's attention ...

Beijing Winter Olympics in the 'hood

Somebody's got it in for China and the upcoming extravaganza. Here an ice hockey enforcer takes down a barefoot monk.

Ubiquitous surveillance cameras make a kind of mogul.

How about some coronavirus curling? 

These posters have turned up on random Mission District phone polls. Don't disagree with the sentiments behind the first two here, but mostly I'm just reminded that Olympics equate with noxious nationalisms. 

UPDATE: the posters were created by Australia-based Chinese artist Badiucao. An oft-censored critic of the Chinese government, Badiucao’s series satirized the Beijing Olympics and China’s human rights record.

A terrible courage, craven greed and women's solidarity

Here's a headline I wish I'd written, but didn't quote when I excerpted from the article's content: Overthrowing Democracy Requires Overthrowing Feminism? This came back to me watching the fate of #MeToo-proclaiming Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai -- isn't her brave declaration and the subsequent behavior of the people and institutions around her a succinct demonstration of where much boldness for freedom can be found?

Look at the scenario and cast of characters:

• Peng tells the world she was sexually imposed upon by a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party leader.

• Within 30 minutes, Peng's social media post is disappeared by the government censorship apparatus.

• Next Peng herself is disappeared.

• The international Women's Tennis Association (WTA), the governing body of her sport, demands Peng's freedom and expresses willingness to forgo playing in China, a huge market for their sport, if Peng is not freed. That would be 10 tournaments down the drain next year.

• The Chinese government issues a transparently false email and some images claiming that Peng is A-Okay.

• Prominent international women tennis stars like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams speak out about Peng. The current world No. 1 male tennis star Novak Djokovic chimes in as well.

• Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, participates in a strained video call with Peng. He reports "she prefers to spend her time with friends and family right now." He comes away assuring the world that nothing will get in the way of his organization's lucrative Winter Olympics in China in February. All's well as far the IOC is concerned.

• All is not well as far as the WTA is concerned. The WTA said the recent videos "don't alleviate or address the WTA's concern about her wellbeing and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion," per the BBC.

• Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics, chimes in to support the IOC's brush off of Peng. Male sports moguls stick together.

Sadly, it's unlikely any of this ends well for Peng.  But it's sure a clear cut demonstration of who in sport is all about money and who cares about justice for women. The Chinese government and male sports bosses appear very much in sync with each other. As usual, the athletes, most especially the women, are just products to merchandise and stoke bureaucratic egos on the way to the bank.

The women are athletes!

Let's start with a tribute to a woman who helped make high caliber competitive long distance running possible: Dr. Joan Ullyot. The pioneering running doctor died in June at age 80.

She helped bring women into the 1970s running boom. Like so many women, she didn't want to get fat as she came into mid-adulthood, so she took up jogging when she had a young family -- and proved to have a minor talent. In 1976, she published Women's Running to refute myths such as that the activity would cause our uteruses to collapse and make us infertile. The book is long out of print; I just looked it up on Amazon and found it used for about $35. Apparently I have a classic on my shelf. It's fair to say I took up running through her influence and enjoyed watching her charge off into the distance in local races in the late '70s.

Ullyot helped make equality for women in long distance running a political cause, lending her professional prestige to ending discrimination. 

As a member of the International Runners’ Committee, an advocacy group formed in 1979 to lobby for the inclusion of women’s long-distance races in international competition, Dr. Ullyot used her research in presentations that the group made to the I.O.C. in the run-up to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Then as now, the Olympic Committee was a bunch of corrupt old fossils, but an international pressure campaign won the first women's marathon in 1984. It took several more Olympics before these men were forced to add other distances beyond the sprints. 

• • •

My favorite sports reporter, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, teed off today on a report that finds the NCAA treats the annual college women's tournament shoddily -- and then lies about it. Out of ignorant sexism, leaders of the athletic association claim that women's basketball is a money loser, squashing opportunities for growth and even profit.

The report states that the women’s basketball tournament ranks among ESPN’s highest-rated programs — with viewership comparable to the NBA Finals, college football conference title games, MLB postseason and Grand Slam tennis finals. Championship ratings for the women have risen by 32 percent since 2015, at a time when almost every other major sport has declined. Women’s sports are soaring opportunities in a stale market. An independent media consultant labels the women’s tournament “one of the most valuable U.S. sports media properties” with the potential for utterly explosive growth on multiple platforms.

But, no -- the NCAA doesn't want to give women a chance for equal billing. Jenkins quotes another of my favorite leaders in women's sports. 

“It just feels like more than neglect,” Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer said after reading the report. “It feels willful. It feels purposeful.”

• • •

I suppose I should say something about the Tokyo Olympics, but I just can't. They seem cursed. The irresponsibility of holding an international superspreader event in the middle of a pandemic, against the wishes of the people of the host city, in order to satisfy the advertisers unhinges my mind -- and spoils my delighted appreciation of the work and accomplishments of the athletes. Let this be over with as little further human damage as possible!

She's a winner

click to enlarge

Look at that determination! In Nizhny Tagil, Russia, our courtesy niece, Tara Geraghty-Moats -- the world's best Women's Nordic Combined competitor -- just won the final Continental Cup event of a difficult year. Competing around Europe in this pandemic year hasn't been a picnic. 

I've written before about what it takes to make a world class athlete.

After the competition, she's a picture of grace -- which is what it takes to stay sane at that level.

Pure joy!

Today our courtesy niece Tara Geraghty-Moats (#6) won the first ever Women's Nordic Combined World Cup competition in Ramsau am Dachstein, Austria. 

For decades women were excluded from the Scandianian-origin sport which starts with a ski jump and concludes with a cross country race.

"Today here in Ramsau was a dream come true, it was something that I was thinking about since I was 10 years old," said the 27-year-old.

"I just kept telling myself I could do it... huge thanks to my team and the FIS (International Ski Federation) for finally inviting the women to the big leagues."...

Women will also compete in the discipline at this year's Nordic World Ski Championships, which are being held in Oberstdorf, Germany, between February 23 and March 7.

However the sport's World Cup season could be very short, as after a series of cancellations due to the coronavirus pandemic, Friday's event was the only one left scheduled. (Story via France24)

 Way to go Tara!

Do we need the national anthem at sports events?

San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Bruce Jenkins makes a suggestion that might have been taboo without a pandemic and a racial reckoning. He reports what he has seen:

It’s time to stop playing the national anthem at every sporting event

... Nobody’s more aware of the anthem and its fading relevance than those who have covered baseball on a daily basis for eight months. Scanning the press box and field-level seats in pre-pandemic times, you might see a few people singing, or pressing a hand to the heart. Mostly you see those who are merely tolerating the exercise. Cynical types take note of a performance lasting way too long, or perhaps they just head to the bathroom — anything but stand there and endure what usually amounts to a mediocre rendition.

I once heard someone mutter, “We know what damn country we’re in. Get on with it.”

Exactly. Jenkins informs me that the song wasn't officially adopted until 1931, though the lyrics derive from the War of 1812 -- a war that actually was a losing martial enterprise. In that conflict, the U.S. lucked out that the Brits got busy fighting Napoleon and didn't finish punishing their former colony.

Fortunately, the combination of playing in quarantine bubbles and George Floyd's murder has freed up the Black athletes without whom most professional sports wouldn't exist to express themselves -- and the hell with what their "owners" and Donald Trump might like.

Personally, I've avoided standing for the anthem since the Vietnam war. Recurrent military adventures have disconnected what patriotic impulses I feel from flag or armed forces, while the worst of our impulses have been appropriated to imperial projects.

Mass singing will probably be discouraged for a long time in response to the coronavirus. If we have to have a national song, how about substituting America the Beautiful? It's author, Katharine Lee Bates, was one of those 19th century independent women whose affectionate relationships might later have been called either lesbian or bi-sexual, so that pleases me. Her lyric and her identity feel a good antidote the martial masculine appropriation of love of country.

Happy New Year!

Following our usual practice, we greeted the new year asleep, only vaguely aware that celebrants were setting off fire works outside.

And now for a satisfying day of watching big men beat each other up on football fields.

For something more edifying, enjoy these women who want into the big game. The ladies are coming and don't doubt it!

Saturday special with fund appeal

Our courtesy niece -- the world best Women's Nordic Combined athlete (ski jumping followed by cross-country racing) -- will be with us this weekend. TARA WON EVERY SINGLE RACE LAST WINTER!!

Because of stupid priorities that aren't good for women in highly technical, expensive, sports, US athletic organizations don't fully fund this Wonder Woman! Tara is looking to win a medal for the USA at the first ever World Championships this winter. Can you help her do it? Be part of supporting a true champion! Click here: Road to Oberstdorf 2021.