First, a programming note: I plan to write more about the ongoing January 6 hearings after tomorrow’s installment. Also, I continue to be pleased by the response to this here project so far. Welcome to the most recent subscribers and please do spread the word, if you’re so inclined.
OK, on to the show. As I said when I launched this substack, in addition to my interest in politics, I’ve long been interested in writing about sports as a means to analyze some of the critical issues of the day.
I first started blogging about sports in 2006, on an old AOL platform that no longer exists (as far as I know). Since then, and off and on for many years, a significant focus of my sports commentary has focused on sports media, specifically how discussions there provide a distinctive window into essentially all of the major issues of the day, including race, gender and sexuality, class and political influence. That’s what I was interested in talking about on that old AOL blog and a subsequent blog, Sports Media Review (the archives are here, for anyone who’s interested). After writing there for a few months, I was approached by D.K. Wilson and Michael Tillery to join a new group blogging project they were launching, The Starting Five. That was an amazing experience, in part because of the vision and intelligence of D.K. and Mike. And also because of the incredibly engaged readership, at a time when blogging really produced extraordinarily edifying conversations between writers and their audience in what felt like a particularly small-d, democratic space (you can access the archives here).
After a years long hiatus, I launched another solo blog, also focused on sports media, THEESPNWATCH (Archives here).
Below are samplings from two longer posts, to provide a flavor of how I approach some of these issues.
1) The first is from 2007. It’s a long post, but the crux is me taking to task Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, long the hosts of the most watched morning sports show on television, Mike and Mike, which aired on ESPN for almost two decades. The two blasted Stephon Marbury, then an NBA star playing for the New York Knicks, as a spoiled, coddled athlete who had had everything handed to him on a silver platter since he was young, just because he could play basketball. As the excerpt below notes, Marbury appears in The Last Shot, by Darcy Frey, one of the best sports book ever written. Frey spent a year with a group of high school kids who grew up in Coney Island in the late 1980s, amidst desperate poverty and violence and for whom basketball was their only way out. Marbury, as it happens, was the one who made it. Some of his older teammates didn’t live to see their 30th birthdays. But because Marbury refused to answer a reporters’s question about why he was doing a radio show during the season, Greenie and Golic went on a extended harangue about “kids today.”
Ok. All the italicized below is excerpted from the 2007 post:
Let's start with whether Stephon Marbury is a good person. Golic says no. Why? Well, mainly, it appears, because Marbury doesn't think he needs to tell a reporter why he's doing a mid-season talk show. Like many sports commentators, Golic proceeds from the premise that employers. such as sports owners, are paying employees, including athletes, out of the goodness of their own hearts and, as a consequence, that these ingrate athletes should all genuflect before those wealthy enough to own franchises and other big businesses. Because, lord knows, Marbury's boss, the esteemed [Knicks owner] James Dolan worked awfully hard to be the son of Charles Dolan [who founded cablevision and from whom James inherited his fortune]…
Golic has articulated one standard for judging whether someone is good - does he talk respectfully to the media. Another standard might be to judge somebody by, oh, I don't know, the things they do for people who are actually in need …
Here, is what the highly respected Sports Business News, in its round-up of the NBA in 2006, has to say:
Stephon Marbury isn’t a marquee NBA player in the rarefied air Bryant and Wade belong to, but what Marbury contributed to the game in 2006 may be the true lasting legacy one NBA player left the sports industry.
He has been named to The Sporting News list of “Good Guys in Sports” three times. He was one of the highest donors to the NBA Player Associations Katrina Relief effort, donating $1 million dollars to the effort. He currently has 7 barbers on hire in Coney Island giving free haircuts to neighborhood children. But it’s his Starbury Ones basketball shoes that represent what one day might become Marbury’s lasting legacy to basketball, to tens of thousands of children and their families – affordable shoes and basketball apparel for the community.[Starbury Ones were retailing for $15 when other sneaks were selling for $100 or more].
Stephon Marbury said at the time of the release: "Kids shouldn't have to feel the pressure to spend so much to feel good about the way they look. I'm blessed to be in a position to do something about it, to help change the world. I couldn't find a better partner to create the Starbury Collection with than Steve & Barry's. For 20 years, their entire business has been about selling great quality clothes for much less than people expect they should cost."
…..
Man, what an asshole!
….
Then there's the notion, expressed most forcefully by Greenie, that this generation of athletes has been spoiled and pampered from an early age, which leads in a straight line to their catastrophic refusal to explain themselves to reporters. Is Greenie suggesting, therefore, that he wishes he could have had Stephon Marbury's childhood? A childhood in which Marbury was one of seven kids growing up in an urban hell, as depicted in Darcy Frey's The Last Shot? Greenie himself grew up in New York City, the son of a lawyer. Did he really not hear himself suggest this morning that Stephon Marbury had had everything handed to him since he was eleven years old by contrast with, we are to assume, guys like Greenie, who had to scratch and claw his way through a brutal middle class childhood?
2) And here’s some of what I wrote in 2016, just after it was first reported that Colin Kaepernick had taken a knee and his initial explanation for doing so.
[L]et’s try to dispense quickly with some of the sillier complaints about what Kap did and how he explained it:
…
there’s been a strong current of America-love-it-or-leave-it in many of the attacks. In one variant, Kap is an ingrate. He’s making $19 million a year, so what does he have to complain about? (A corrollary: how could America be a bad place for black people if a few hundred black pro athletes are getting rich?) Kap made quite clear Friday night that he’s not speaking specifically to his own life circumstances. He’s lamenting a larger societal problem. The correlation between those now criticizing Kaepernick and those who think athletes are overpaid, selfish pricks is probably close to 100%. So, naturally, they’ll try – convoluted though the effort is – to reduce Kaepernick’s statements to the kind of selfishishness that fits their view of athletes generally. But it doesn’t actually hold up here. Former QB and current ESPN commentator Matt Hasselback said this weekend that continuing to refuse to stand for the anthem was the surest way to ensure Kaepernick doesn’t win back his starting job. That may be true. But if that’s so, then he’s potentially forfeiting a lot of future earnings (and endorsements). Say what you will, but that’s a sacrifice that most people – including very rich people – are not willing to make.
Another variant – many have argued that if America is such a terrible place, maybe Kaepernick ought to forfeit all the money he makes since it must be, ipso [facto], blood money. I am not aware of the constitutional provision that requires individuals to forego their paychecks in order to exercise their rights. Apparently, though, many of his critics believe it exists. In an interview Saturday with NFL Player’s Association leader DeMaurice Smith, Dave Zirin noted that episodes like this one reveal a longstanding presumption among many sports fans and commentators: that athletes aren’t workers who *earn* their paychecks. Instead, they owe their stations in life solely to the good fortune that sports fans have bestowed upon them. That’s wrong, of course. Pro athletes make the money they do because they are extraordinarily highly skilled in what happens to be an exceptionally competitive labor market in a highly lucrative industry. That’s what many people call the “free market.” If you don’t like it, maybe you should consider leaving the country.
there have been lots of invocations of Muhammad Ali this weekend by those critical of Kaepernick. This speaks directly to the depressingly Disneyfied version of Ali that [has] emerged in recent decades. Just as supreme cynics have invoked Martin Luther King, Jr. as an anodyne advocate for a kumbaya version of the civil rights movement, as opposed to the provocative and much-maligned critic of America that he was, so too [have] Ali’s bitter and trenchant criticisms of America and its…institutions been largely whitewashed. Kaepernick is 28 years old. When Ali was his age, he was in the midst of a three year banishment [from] boxing because he’d been convicted of draft evasion. Indulging myself a little game of historical teleportation, there is little doubt that the vast majority of those who now invoke Ali to criticize Kap would have *hated* the actual Ali of the 1960s and 1970s.
As I said, that’s a little taste and gives you an idea, at least, of how I’ll write about sports today when I do, in fact, write about sports today.
Til next time….