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Keith Strudler
4/8/09: Jordan's Kid
So Monday was a big day for the Jordan family. You probably heard about dad, Michael Jordan. He was enshrined in the basketball hall of fame, a process with about as much suspense as a New York City parking court trial. But on flip side of the career ladder, youngest son Marcus Jordan also made an entrance, announcing his verbal commitment to play basketball for the University of Central Florida next fall. So even though he hasn't played a single professional game, he can already say he's going to Disney World, or at least somewhere around 10 miles from there.
Dad seemed pleased by the decision, much like he was pleased when Marcus lead his high school team to an Illinois state basketball title a couple of weeks ago. That makes the second of Michael's kids to earn a college basketball scholarship, older brother Jeff playing essentially a backup role for the University of Illinois.
Marcus will play for a lower profile program than his older sibling, and an elevator ride down from his dad's Alma matter the University of North Carolina, who on Monday revisited the magic of the Jordan years in winning yet another national championship. At UCF, simply making the NCAA tournament would be a notable accomplishment. Apparently, Marcus had a choice of relatively mid-majors, including Davidson, Toledo, and Iowa. Davidson obviously likes the risk of underestimated paternal royalty, parlaying Dell Curry's stick figured son Stephen Curry into last year's Elite Eight. Marcus said UCF made him feel comfortable and seemed to want him for more than his name. It's hard to quantify the value of the Jordan name when you're selling basketball, but it's obviously not strong enough to buy a trip to Kentucky or Kansas, or any other the other schools that might sell jerseys alongside dad's shoes. At the very least, UCF administrators must dream about the Jordan School of Business somewhere down the line.
Even as Marcus signs an athletic scholarship, I'm guessing that most basketball fans are quietly wondering if that's all for Marcus. More to the point, why isn't Marcus a little, well, better? Marcus is an excellent baller, good enough to lead his high school team to a state title. But he's hardly the best guy on his own team, much less the entire planet, like his dad. Sometimes, it makes you wonder why he'd even try.
But Marcus isn't unique in following in the footsteps, or cleats, or high tops of athletic deity. There's Luke Walton, and the Barry Boys, and Jose Cruse Jr., and Kyle Clemens, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. And in almost all cases like this, the apple falls ever so slightly from the tree. Elvin Hays Jr. went to my high school, and he barely started for the varsity basketball team.
It doesn't take a genealogist to figure out why. Being the best of the best is like winning the lottery. Doing it twice in a row, even with all the natural talent that comes with being a Jordan or Walton, well, that's just clean living. Maybe the fact so many offspring even come close, as Jordan's boys may, is a strong testament to the power of family.
It's also probably a fairly strong reminder that Jordans and Waltons and Ernharts live lives more public than their accomplishments warrant. For example, do you know anyone else who earned a basketball scholarship to UCF this year? Of course not. That's surely more burden than thrill.
When guys like Marcus take athletic scholarships, it used to upset me just a bit, since I always figured they don't need them, and probably some other kid who's also pretty good at hoops really does. Jordan's kids could always walk on and pay full tuition, and then some. I started to change my mind when I heard about Marcus winning the Illinois state basketball title, and his dad shedding tears at the game. It reminded me that even though Marcus might be Michael's kid, he's not Michael. He never got to cut down nets and have shoes named after him, and have everyone in the world vote you most likely to succeed. Marcus has UCF and a state title, and that's not bad. And he should have all the sense of joy and accomplishment that comes from his own hoop dreams, even if they fall far short of the Hall of Fame, or the NBA, or even the University of North Carolina. And even if he doesn't need the scholarship he signed, at least not the way some kids do.
But really, Marcus did need it, just like we all need our own sense of self worth. He got that on Monday, which in fact was a very big day for the Jordan family.
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4/1/09:
As we speak, thousands upon thousands of tortured high school seniors are waiting on letters from colleges and universities. Parents are waiting on letters, too. Only these don't come from the admissions office. They come from financial aid, and most all of the look like they've got at least one zero too many. A parent I talked to recently said sending his kid to college is like buying a new Mercedes every year, and driving it off a bridge.
But imagine if there were no cars at all. That's the magic of a college scholarship, a word that reads like pornography to most cash strapped guardians. That's even more true given the abysmal state of most 529's, that went from Ivy League to night school in about three months, less time than it takes most undergrads to change majors from pre-med to anything that doesn't require chemistry.
Winning a scholarship, academic, athletic, geographic, whatever it's for, it's pretty much like winning the lottery if lotteries paid out in chances to sleep in large lecture halls and make Facebook friends. It opens heavy doors and lets kids and parents finish college without a second mortgage. So the one thing you'd never expect a college student on full scholarship to do is to offer to give it back.
But that's exactly what the University of Oklahoma's star basketball player Courtney Paris has offered. Trying to get her top five ranked Sooners up for the tournament, Paris announced she would repay her four year full athletic scholarship if the team fell short of winning a national championship. That's in the neighborhood of $100,000, give or take a few textbooks.
So far, the risk has paid dividends, with the Sooners advancing to the Final Four last night with a win over Purdue. Unfortunately, remaining financially solvent most likely means beating an unbeaten and largely unchallenged UConn team in the finals. Even the most optimistic financial planner would call that a bad investment. That means barring a massive upset, Courtney Paris would leave St. Louis with more than memories and a t-shirt, but also an appointment with bursar's office.
No one at the University has drafted any paperwork yet. And even though University President David Borin believes Courtney is quite serious, only sports columnists see anything binding in her pregame declaration. Even if Courtney does follow through on her financial commitment if in fact they do lose, it's still a donation, not a loan.
Critics have lined up on both sides of the ledger. Courtney's supporters cite the rare accountability of a college athlete that cares deeply about the opportunity afforded her. Perhaps that stands in contrast to pre-professional men's programs riddled in recruiting scandals and me-first mentality. Fans of the women's game are thrilled to see any female athlete get attention for anything besides sex appeal, the historic means by which women draw the gaze of fans and sponsors alike. If nothing else, Courtney's fund drive has commanded attention, if only for lurid fascination.
On the other side, naysayers denounce Courtney's willingness to tie scholarships to performance, reinforcing the unsavory prospect that college athletes should lose their academic funding because they lost a game. At best, it further shifts the balance of power from the library to the gym.
Of the two perspectives, I tend to agree more with the latter, with all due respect to Courtney Paris, who at worst is guilty of overexhuberance and a bit of naivety. It's nice to generate more interest in women's sports, but maybe for something more to do with the game itself. And since Courtney Paris is the daughter of an NFL veteran and stands to make some, and only some money playing in Europe after graduation, she can probably afford to follow through on her declaration. Most other kids can't.
But what's really impressive is how public the sideshow of college sports have become, even for the lesser watched women's game. It's in no way uncommon for athletes to make ridiculous claims to their teammates or even classmates before a game, like how they'll shell out 100 grand if they don't win a national title. Those idle threats used to stay in the locker room, or at least on campus. Now, it's broadcast on four channels before you're back to the dorms, making any retreat embarrassing at best, impossible at worst. At that leads us to Courtney Paris playing what amounts to a $100,000 ball game, not exactly the amateur ethos the NCAA preaches.
As was the case last night against Purdue, Courtney's dad will likely be in the stands next week in St. Louis for Oklahoma's semifinal matchup against Louisville. And like a whole lot of parents around the country, he'll be waiting on some very important financial information about college.
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7/9/08: Slippery Suits
Sports Illustrated can finally feel vindicated. For years they've been critiqued for their obsessive attention to swim wear in their yearly swimsuit edition, under the premise that this was more soft porn that athletics. But anyone watching this year's US Olympic Swimming trials can attest that swimming is all about the swimsuit, something that's stirred a lively an at times ugly debate in the swimming world.
At the heart of the controversy is a new swimsuit by Speedo called the LZR. Despite it's 2008 release, the suit has already been worn for some 40 world records, a number that will undoubtedly increase throughout the remainder of the US trials. The NASA inspired LRZ is slippery and compresses the already physiqued elite swimmer body in a way that improves both dynamics and muscle response. In other words, it's reduced a swimmer's two biggest enemies - water resistances and muscle fatigue. What the suit doesn't do is provide flotation or propulsion, like say a wet suit or fins. That's according to FINA, the international swimming federation in charge of measuring such things, who will allow the LZR and other suits like it in the 2008 Olympic Games. The problem is, there aren't a whole lot of other suits like the LZR. That's the argument of none other than Arena, one of Speedo's primary competitors, who are petitioning FINA to ban the LZR because their high tech new suit, the Powerskin, is just a tad less slippery. This would be like McDonald's suing Burger King because the Whopper was too tasty. TYR, another suit manufactured, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against USA Swimming for promoting Speedo's LZR over their water parting Tracer Rise model. Add to this inroads made by upstart swim company Blue Seventy, whose Nero suit probably should be illegal, and you've got enough academic case studies to start a new major.
While this might seem like virgin territory, most sports already deal with what an Italian swimming official called "doping on a hangar," which is exactly how you'd store a bathing suit that costs $500. Cycling long ago standardized the frame geometry allowed on competition bikes. Triathlon has placed rather loose boundaries on everything from handle bars to water temperature. And the very non-Olympic sport of NASCAR essentially took all the creativity out of corporate car design by mandating the standardized car of tomorrow, making things like Ford and Toyota nothing more than a nameplate.
It's just that swimming was always assumed so minimalistic, archaic even, that these kinds of technological advancements felt impossible. What could be faster than a freshly shaved body and a Speedo small enough to warrant a PG-13 rating? Apparently highly compressed polyurethane, that's what. Which now brings America's favorite leisure activity into the same technological debate of biking and tennis and even running, where spring loaded sneakers once risked making track and field look like a moon walk.
In the end, there are two core debates at play, and neither have an easy answer. First, what are the acceptable limits of technology in the world of elite athletics, where performances are based largely in context to those that came before it. It's an argument of wooden tennis rackets vs. carbon lighting rods, or where golf courses have to buy more real estate to accommodate Tiger Woods and his titanium rocket launcher. And like it or not, the line in the sand will always lie somewhere in the middle, where sporting bodies ambiguously try to understand where the true essence of sport is compromised.
Second comes a question of fairness, where technology creates an ongoing field of haves and have-nots as poorer nations bring knives to a gun fight. As important as this discussion is, especially in reference to the Olympics, having it over a $500 swimsuit is pointless given the exorbitant costs of too many other Olympic sports. Think a Speedo is expensive? Try jumping horses.
But the reality is that this negotiated decision of space age swimming will not be based on athletic integrity or fairness, but rather on corporate compromise. There's big money in swimming - maybe not NASCAR money, but big enough, especially when it comes to chiseled Olympians swimming faster than anyone ever has before. As soon as TYR and Arena figure out the right formula for fast, this anti-technologist bent will be a footnote in aquatic history. And the fight won't be in the Olympic court of appeals, but rather in the local sporting goods store, where you and I might pick up something snazzy for an afternoon by the pool. And that's probably a good time to catch up on reading Sports Illustrated, where I hear they've been talking about the sport of swim suits for quite some time.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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8/29/07: Matt Murphy's Baseball
I’ve never caught a baseball at a major league park, either a foul ball or a home run. I’ve never caught one at a minor league game either. Once I grabbed a t-shirt at an NBA game, but that came from a mascot with a rocket launcher, not the actual field of play.
So I can’t say I know what it feels like to be Matt Murphy, the 21-year old who’s about to turn a $100 baseball ticket into a whole lot more. During a layover in San Francisco on the way to Australia, the kid from Queens paid 100 bucks for a $12 bleacher seat at AT&T Park. Normally, that’s like spending ten bucks on a cup of coffee, which strangely doesn’t sound that odd now-a-days. But on August 7th, it was about the best deal going when Murphy emerged from a rough pile of bleacher bums into the waiting arms of the San Francisco Police Department. He was bloody, disheveled, and about to be escorted from his $100 seat for the rest of the game. And it may just have been the best day of Matt Murphy’s life.
See, in Murphy’s pocket, under protection of two armed officers, was Barry Bonds’s 756th home run ball, the ball that inched him ahead of Henry Aaron and into sole possession of major league baseball’s career home run record. And just like that, Matt Murphy went from part time college student to memorabilia mega star. He now owned something either very good, very bad, or very ugly, depending on your level of suspended disbelief. No matter your perspective, Murphy is now poised to be somewhat wealthy, at least by the standards of someone who still lives with his mom to save on rent.
It seems that Bonds’s ball, or Murphy’s ball, I suppose, will fetch somewhere near $500,000, enough to pay for college and an apartment and a whole lot more $100 bleacher tickets. And before you demonize Matt Murphy for his crass exploitation of baseball history, know that he would get taxed for the value of the ball whether he sold it or not. So if you’re going to be enough of a jerk to dive through bodies for a fly ball, you better be enough of a jerk to sell it, too.
No matter your opinion of an opportunist like Murphy, he’s really only a bit part in this larger social condition. I suppose what’s strange to me isn’t that someone wants to sell Barry Bonds’s notorious baseball for an easy half million. What’s strange to me is that someone wants to buy it.
The construct of sports memorabilia, heck, even the term has come a long way from the days of storing old baseball cards in shoe boxes. Now it seems even the shoe boxes have letters of authenticity. Getting an athlete’s signature used to happen at the supermarket or at a restaurant or anywhere else you might find an unsuspecting superstar. And it usually came on a napkin or the shirt you had on at the time, even if it was a brand new button-down for school. Most moms never fully appreciated that. Now it happens on eBay or $50 card shows, where two dimensional has-beens turn the high of star worship into some kind of assembly line transaction. It’s the kind of buzz kill only Larry Craig and Pee Wee Herman would understand.
So it seems that the surreal economy of pro sports doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Along with disproportionate salaries and criminal ticket prices also comes the unsavory depersonalization of landmark baseballs, autographs, photos, and pretty much anything else that can achieve representative worth in dollars and cents, not the chill you get from touching the tools of the gods.
And maybe that’s how a baseball hit by someone who should be locked up for illicit drug use and lying under oath instead of given the keys to all of San Francisco, jail cells and all, that’s how his ball became some kind of investment property. Think of Matt Murphy’s ball as the sports world’s version of a bear market. People make money even in the worst of times.
I guess all of that makes me a bit sad, or at the very least disenfranchised. Watching Matt Murphy sell a $500,000 baseball, and worse, watching someone buy it, it makes me feel like Gore voter in Florida. It makes me wonder why I spend my time and money to go to games in the first place, since I hardly catch the sports chill that I imagined I used to. Then again, unlike Matt Murphy, I never have been good at catching anything much of value at the ballpark.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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8/22/07: The World's Newest Sports Fan
Last Friday morning at 11:23 a.m., Sloan Robert Strudler entered this wonderful world. It’s still hard to tell, but I think Sloan’s a huge Cornell Hockey fan. He also likes University of Florida basketball, the Houston Rockets, and pretty much anything related to track and field. He’s an all around sports fan, and, as far as I can tell, a pretty good athlete in his own right.
And if it isn’t obvious, Sloan Robert is also my son, my first kid at that. And thus, the cycle of the sporting life has begun. Right now, Sloan isn’t watching much tennis, or baseball, or anything for that matter. For the time being, Sloan is most content sleeping or peeing, or sucking on his mom’s breast. I guess Sloan’s pretty much attached to his mom, at the nipple, if you will. I’m not much more than moving furniture, and probably rank below that swing he seems to like. And, to be honest, that’s okay by me, especially at two in the morning when my wife’s getting up for Sloan’s third feeding of the night. Let’s just hope I’m out of the game before they learn how to engorge a male breast.
But in a couple of years, after Sloan’s made the transition from breast milk to Wheaties, that’s when I move center stage. That’s when I can start teaching Sloan about sports.
I’ll probably start with college basketball, maybe show him how to fill out brackets for the NCAA tourney. We’ll talk about upsets and definitely talk about Cinderellas – and I mean a 12 seed making the Sweet 16, not that Disney fairy tale. Maybe a couple of years later we’ll get passes to the US Open, and I can teach him about history, like when Jimmy Connors made the semis at 39 in 1991. And before you know it, we’ll be driving up to Barton Hall in Ithaca to watch the Heps.
Of course, we won’t just watch sports. I can already see him in some soccer cleats, or maybe a cross country slinglet like his dad. If he can throw a football as far as he can pee, then I don’t need to save for college.
I already know of two successful athletes named Sloan. Sloan Thomas lasted two years in the NFL, and someone named Sloan Smith plays lacrosse for Notre Dame. So even though the name Sloan isn’t Tiger or Michael, at least there is a precedent.
I’m sure this might come off as patriarchal, or gender biased to some, and maybe it is. I’m sure if Sloan were about to have a baby naming instead of a bris, I’d feel the same way, getting ready for softball games and watching the Williams sisters. But there’s something about fathers and sons and sports. It’s something I felt in a hospital elevator when another new dad started talking about playing catch with his boy. It’s something my old students seemed to get when they wrote to me after Sloan’s birth announcement. One of them said, “Please don’t raise him to be a Yankees fan.” And trust me, I won’t.
Maybe it all means so much to me because just last year, I lost my closest sports fan when my dad passed away. That made last March March Madness almost unbearable, with out dad being there to celebrate the Florida Gators winning a second straight title. And now, behold the miracle of Sloan. God does work in mysterious ways. You don’t have to love the ‘72 Steelers to see that. So I guess that means we’ll have at least two Gator fans this March, one cheering from the deep orange and blue skies of heaven, and another in his orange and blue onesey. With that kind of support, don’t be surprised by a Gator threepeat.
Of course, down deep, I want much more for Sloan than a good left arm and box seats at the Garden. I want him to be healthy and smart. I want him to sing and laugh and marvel at the hills and trees of the Hudson Valley. I want all his dreams to come true, but I want him to care about others more than he ever cares about himself. I guess I want Sloan to become the man I always wish I was. And if he happens to turn out a Cornell hockey fan as well, I won’t complain.
Maybe I’m a little ahead of myself. For now, Sloan’s a little more interested in his mom than his dad and some crazy sports fantasies. I guess all those games can wait. But knowing the kind of sports fan Sloan is, I don’t think I’ll have to wait too long.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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8/8/07: The Never Ending Tour
I can imagine after cycling some 22 hundred miles over three weeks, you’d probably say, I’m glad that’s over. That’s what I’d imagine in the heads of the nearly 150 riders who survived the Tour de France.
As a fairly avid cycling fan by American standards, I wait for the Tour each year like Lindsay Lohan waits for a drink. That is, with mouthwatering anticipation. And after watching more bike riding than a school crossing guard, I can oddly say, I’m glad that’s over.
For those who didn’t follow this year’s soap opera on wheels, the event could best be called a disaster. At times you felt less like you were watching a bike race and more like repeats of the movie Trainspoting. With each wheel turn, Tour officials announced another drug scandal, which given stricter drug enforcement laws in France, often were punctuated by police escorts from the starting line to a squad car. It would be like the San Francisco PD waiting for Barry Bonds at home plate.
As this scene played out, the Tour lost several star riders, making the race leaderboard something of a working document. The event’s greatest blow came when race leader Michael Rasmussen was expunged for skipping mandatory drug tests during pre-event training, costing him the immortality of victory and costing us fans even the slightest pretext of truth. In Rasmussen’s sudden absence, Spanish rider Alberto Contador carried the yellow victory jersey into Paris. Of course, Contador was banned from last year’s tour for involvement with a Madrid drug clinic offering more comprehensive blood work than most trauma centers. And lest anyone forget, we still don’t know who won LAST year’s Tour, that result pending a court decision on Floyd Landis.
So that’s why cycling fans felt a bit more relief as riders raced up and down the Champs Elysees, instead of the normal post partum of the events final podium. We could finally close the books on this year’s science experiment and look towards that light at the end of the tunnel. But as they say, let’s just hope it’s not a train.
For professional cycling, the vile is either half full or half empty. On one hand, the sport must now confront the idea that virtually every successful rider of the past, dare I say, decades, has been cheating. Enough retired champions have come clean in the past few months to give the sport the feel of an AA meeting. And for those who cling to the chaste notion of Lance Armstrong, as enticing as that may be, just realize how implausible the concept – one clean athlete dominates scores of chemically enhanced robots, and for seven straight years. It’s like Breaking Away if it were written by the producers of Rocky IV, only less believable. So from that perspective, it’s hard to see cycling’s bright future.
On the other hand, cycling optimists assert that perhaps the sport is finally confronting its demons, something most popular American sports have yet to do. Imagine if baseball players were subject to the same scrutiny and penalty as Tour riders – we’d have to pull up little leaguers just to fill a lineup card. Unlike baseball and even football, cycling has a plan to clean up its act, even if the process seems a bit self destructive.
While both of these perspectives are likely true, there is a larger issue at hand. That issue – Is there any real way out? Right now, a couple of social machines drive this sporting culture of mad science. One, the exponentially high stakes of success and the equally strong rebuke of failure creates a literal culture of fear, where drugs seem the only way to keep up with the Joneses, or perhaps the Bonds and McGuires and Armstrongs. Try telling a struggling 22 year old pro cyclist not to use some innocuous testosterone cream, even if it means trading a million dollar yellow spandex jersey for a work shirt at the factory.
Second, today’s invasive media culture has turned modern sports journalism into a sort of feeding frenzy. Reading the sports news has become a bit like watching a horror movie. We just can’t wait for the next gruesome discovery, whether that be mutilated body parts, or, in the case of the Tour de France, syringes in the trunk of a team station wagon. It’s a formula that works, at least in the unstable world of investigative journalism, leaving us all with the same disquieting thought after each sordid report. The same thought I had after this year’s Tour de France. That is, I’m sure glad that’s over.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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8/1/07: The Admissions Game at South Carolina
The average SAT score for incoming freshmen last year at the University of South Carolina was 1176. Average GPA was around an A-. All in all, quite competitive for a comprehensive state school. I’m guessing more than a few high school seniors dreamed of SC but just didn’t make the cut. And two of them, it seems, also wanted to play football.
That’s what we found out this week when Gamecock head football coach Steve Spurrier announced his displeasure with university admissions practices. Two of this year’s 31 star recruits got more than a full scholarship as promised by the coaching staff. Safety Arkee Smith and wide receiver Michael Bowman also got a rejection letter, making all financial rewards null and void. While Coach Spurrier’s 93% acceptance rate blows the shoulder pads off the general student body, that didn’t appease the old ball coach, who had recruited the nation’s sixth best freshman class.
That’s not to say that future Gamecocks didn’t get a pretty good deal, compared to the average SC applicant. In fact, over half of the Spurrier’s signees were accepted by South Carolina’s Special Admissions Committee, a group led by the University’s NCAA faculty rep Bill Bearden, at worst a strong advocate. This committee considers candidates who probably wouldn’t get in through regular admissions. In today’s generation of high dollar college sports, that largely means football and basketball players, the best of whom were fawned over like law students at Yale.
To provide some glass floor to the downward spiral of athletic recruiting, the NCAA long ago created minimum standards for student athletes, a combination of GPA and standardized test scores guaranteeing some base academic competency before entering college as a hired gun. Right now, those numbers are a 2.5 GPA and an 850 SAT score, more or less based on a sliding scale. Not Ivy League exactly, but enough to keep the phrase student athlete from becoming a punch line. On a more pragmatic level, it gives schools a more realistic chance of graduating student athletes, something that historically had become a rarity at certain Division I powers. In fact, the NCAA’s newest policy punishes athletic departments with chronically low graduation rates. So in essence, South Carolina’s most basal academic standards should help Steve Spurrier in the long run. Or as professor Bowen put it, “Every student that’s NCAA qualified is not necessarily going to succeed and shouldn’t be accepted.” I suppose a key issue would be Bowen’s definition of success.
But really, the key issue at hand isn’t the lower admissions standards for star football and basketball players at virtually every Division I-A school, and that includes Northwestern and Duke and a bunch of other sanctimonious elite universities. And it isn’t the hypocrisy of scrutinized graduation rates amidst an environment of win at all costs, where students practice into nightfall and coaches lose their jobs after winning seasons.
These might be important issues, but in the end they’re only issues of fairness, a topic that’s yesterday’s news when it comes to college enrollment. Just check out the student parking lots at Amherst or Dartmouth, and you’ll realize that little’s fair when it comes to getting into college.
The problem isn’t that Steve Spurrier wants his future workforce to get into USC. That’s a no brainier. The problem is that Spurrier already assured his recruits that they would be. In essence, Spurrier’s belligerence strikes at the most basic machinery of higher education, where extracurricular activities like football should remain an organic outgrowth of a well rounded educational process. If it were up to Spurrier, like it is to most million dollar college coaches, the university administration would simply serve as support staff to the athletic department. It’s a philosophy at the heart of most maladies in college sports, from sexual abuse by athletes to high school feeder schools that prioritize athletic gains over basic reading skills. In fact, Arkee Smith’s high school coach Marty Lee said, after his star’s college rejection, that he doesn’t see a problem with South Carolina coaches or with Smith’s academic record, but he does have a problem with the schools admissions program.
Of course, who can blame coach Smith when schools like Miami accept athletes with criminal records longer than any book they read in high school. It’s the end game of the cart forgetting what the horse was for in the first place. All that makes South Carolina’s 1172 look better and better all the time.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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7/25/07: Gambling on the NBA
At a press conference yesterday, NBA commissioner David Stern referred to the league’s burgeoning gambling scandal as “the worst that could happen to a professional sports league.” At about the same time, officials from the Tour de France announced that favorite Alexandre Vinokourov failed a blood doping test and his entire Astana team would withdraw from the Tour. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was following a known criminal en route to the nations most important sports record while the NFL prepares for its most marketable superstar to be incarcerated for animal cruelty.
So with all deference to commissioner Stern, there are worse things that can happen to a pro sports league. That said, these are ominous times for the NBA.
For the uniformed, the FBI is investigating NBA ref Tim Donaghy for betting on league games throughout the past two seasons. That includes games in which he officiated, raising obvious concerns about fixed outcomes and games reminiscent of pro wrestling. From the vantage point of fans reliant on the veracity of winners and losers, this strikes at the core of their devotions. Perhaps for all these months, they’ve celebrated the wrong team. Perhaps a city of losers should be the showcase of champions. Maybe the Suns, not the Spurs, are the real dynasty after all. That ambiguity will turn away fans faster than any dissonant steroid debate.
See we all naturally believe that refs cheat, it’s part of the conspiracy theorist inbred in every obsessive sports fan. Has anyone ever left a game and said what a fair job the refs did? But none of us want believe that athletes might do similarly deconstructive acts to the game, like blood dope and take steroids, even facing OJ like scientific evidence. Athletes, they’re heroes, but those refs that share the floor, well they’re just incompetent ninnies inevitably costing our team its shot at the title.
So perhaps from that perspective, Stern is right – this is as bad as it gets.
For the NBA, the issue of primary concern is damage control. That means assuring us that such incidents are isolated and had no impact on that Miami Heat championship jersey we all spent 30 bucks on. It also means a very public lecture on the procedures and safeguards in becoming an NBA official. If Stern has his way, we’ll all believe getting through ref school is harder than joining the Supreme Court, which may actually be true. Whether games are fixed, well, that’s obviously important. But whether fans THINK games are fixed – that’s how baby gets a new pair of shoes, Air Jordans at that.
But before we turn this into a story of one dirty ref and a solid PR campaign, like it were an episode of CSI, it’s worth looking further into the relationship between the NBA and gambling. And contrary to Stern’s reverent public assurances, this relationship is far more friendly than he’d allow us to believe. At best, I’d call it symbiotic. At worst, incestuous.
The league thrives on overs, unders, parlays, spreads, and all the other things that bankroll both Vegas and the far more lucrative illegal gambling industry. Stern knows that his high scoring affairs and the gambling perversions that follow are as much a part of organized crime as drugs and firearms. So even if the league would never publicly condone such activity, they certainly don’t mind its aftershocks, most notably higher ratings and sold out arenas. But until now, that undercurrent of cash flow has always been kept at bay. That Tim Donaghy might serve as a liaison to the steamy underworld, well, that more than anything is the worst thing that can happen to sports. Any politician will tell you there’s nothing worse than finally being able to connect the dots.
Clearly, this story doesn’t end here. For example, the league might want to explain further holding its all star game in Vegas. Or why it allows its Connecticut WNBA franchise to play home games at Mohegan Sun. Or even why the league has never taken a public stance against gambling, at least until the CFO had to get involved. These are all questions the league will have to answer as this story gets its legs. Maybe those answers will tell us more about why David Stern thinks this affair is so putrid. Until we know that, we can never really know how bad things can get.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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7/11/07: Bud Selig and Barry Bonds
Between a rock and a hard place. Doesn’t sound like the best seat in the stadium, especially in today’s age of luxury stadium seating. But that’s exactly where Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig finds himself right now, as the leagues great mistake bulldozes his way to history and, as some might say, eternal infamy.
In what could be a week, or more or less, Barry Bonds will hit home run number 756, giving him the most significant record in a league dictated by the minutiae of such. And arguments about New York’s Alex Rodriguez aside, this record could last for a generation or more, just as it has for current placeholder Hank Aaron and his predecessor Babe Ruth. Like it or not, and most of us don’t, a well known cheater will now reign over baseball’s most storied clubhouse. This would be like having the Really Rottens actually win the Laugh Olympics.
This could have been prevented, of course. The league could have instituted more comprehensive drug tests and levied more stringent punishment. They could have acted on volumes of anecdotal evidence, like when Mark McGuire turned into Lou Ferrigno or when mediocre athletes started knocking down 50 home runs a year. But instead, baseball management, spearheaded by Bud Selig, did nothing, enjoying the success of the sport’s chemical brutality. They would blame this power surge on kids in Haiti wrapping balls too tight, or some other equally inane story. Anything to ignore the implausibility of what must be more than a statistical anomaly. Like it or not, that makes Bud Selig a pretty good definition of the term complicit.
With Bonds looking to round home just five more times, fans and critics are searching for some sort of accountability in this game altering affair, and for good reason Bud Selig is where that search often begins. When other sports like football and track exploited their cheaters though upgraded testing technologies, Bud Selig largely turned the other way, spending far more energy on a retired gambler than the criminal misdoings of his current employees. He worked on adding new playoff games and changing the all-star game, neither imperatives to the baseball traditionalist. He talked about expansion and contraction and a whole bunch of other things that don’t really matter all that much, not in comparison to the scourge of drug use.
So now, as bad turns to worse in the permanent rewriting of baseball’s bible, people have started looking for Bud. Interestingly enough, Bud might end up nowhere to be found. Selig has repeatedly told the press he’s unsure if he will attend Bond’s historic home run performance, but his decision would be made in baseball’s best interest. Seems like an odd time to start that line of thought.
Many sports fans, including myself, are increasingly disgusted with the heavy hands of drug induced records not only in baseball, but in all statistic laden athletics. In fact, I was watching an international track meet last weekend, and when the women’s 100 meter dash was about to begin, I thought about the impossibility of Flo Jo’s chemically enhanced record and the way that our own ignorance has virtually ruined one of the sport’s prized events. To think, we’ll now watch decades of Olympic Games without the prospect of a new world’s best in the 100. Sad, isn’t it.
To be honest, I don’t really care if Bud Selig shows up in San Francisco to watch Barry steal Hank Aaron’s pedestal. And I’ll still watch the Olympics and even the Tour de France, even with the lingering stench of free flowing testosterone. But maybe as a fan, just once I’d like someone to take some accountability. Someone to say, this is my fault. Certainly the owners are at fault, and the players union, the players, even us fans, way too many of whom offered Barry Bonds a standing ovation at last night’s all star game, which is kind of like throwing a parade for Drago at the end of Rocky IV.
And maybe more than anyone, Bud Selig is certainly at fault, sitting watch over a sporting world gone mad. So maybe I would actually like to see Bud in San Francisco, or wherever it is when Bonds breaks the record. Maybe I’d like to see him take public responsibility and act like an adult in a game for boys. Maybe, just for once, I’d like to see someone take a very difficult seat, one that falls directly between a rock and a hard place.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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3/21/07: Marist Women's Basketball Team
The women's basketball team from Marist College, the school where I teach, has gotten a lot of attention the past few days. Not just attention like any small Division I basketball team might get when they're the only game in town. I'm talking about national attention, like being the lead story on ESPN's Sports Center or getting your photo on the front page of the USA Today's sports section.
That's because the Marist Red Foxes on Monday night earned their way into the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament, one of 16 teams left from the original field of 64. They did so by first beating the nation's seventh ranked Ohio State, then Monday upending Middle Tennessee State and their 27 game win streak. Marist was the unequivocal underdog in both games, earning them the cliché Cinderella title. For their efforts, on Sunday Marist gets to play Tennessee, a team that's won six national championships and has 10 former players in the pros. The Volunteers have a million dollar a year coach and average over 15,000 fans at home games. To put that into perspective, Marist plays in a gym that only holds 3200 - and they only need about half of them. And Marist coach Brian Giorgis was a high school basketball coach in Poughkeepsie only a few years ago.
Of the teams remaining in the tournament, all other 15 have much more familiar names, like North Carolina, and UConn, and Georgia and Purdue. Schools with more money and more talent, schools that basketball fans don't have Google to figure out what state they're in. I work at Marist, and I know we're not even the most recognized college in Poughkeepsie. And yet now, our school's name and logo are plastered all over sports publications from coast to coast.
All of that has made our campus buzz just a bit over the past 24 hours. There were TV trucks and welcome home parties and reporters all around. Anyone at Marist working in athletic administration or PR has either been on the road or on the phone for the better part of the past few days. A bunch of our students seem pretty excited - some might even head out to Dayton, Ohio, for Sunday's game.
And with all the excitement around, I couldn't help but wonder one thing. What would campus have been like if it were the men's basketball team going to the Sweet 16. See, only a couple of weeks ago, our men's team seemed poised to make a similar stab at the improbable. They had won their conference championship and entered the conference tournament as clear favorites. And for just a brief moment, I thought this campus might implode from the weight of excited anticipation.
Then with one upset loss to Siena in the conference tournament, the air simply screamed out of the basketball. There would be no men's NCAA tournament, no chance for the big upset, no dream of the Sweet 16. So even as our women's team equaled the highest seeded team to ever make the final 16, some basketball fans on campus treated the tournament like they were sitting Shiva. Yesterday, I asked my students how many would head to Dayton for Marist's game against Tennessee. A few raised their hands. Then I asked how many would do the same if it were the men's team, and virtually every hand shot up in unison.
For whatever it's worth, I probably secretly felt a little of the same, even though I'd never fully admit it. Women's sports and especially women's basketball have come a long way toward their deserved place of equity with men's games. They get occasional billing on national television. They have more fans and sell more seats then they used to. They get equal facilities in colleges and growing budgets to satisfy Title IX mandates.
But the next step, the fight for equal consideration in the obsessive minds of sports fans, is a battle of sociology, not one of law. And that battle might take a bit longer. See, while we all know that this accomplishment of the Marist women's team is every bit as impressive and unlikely as a similar one from the men, the heart and mind often work at a slightly different pace. But as we age and as new sports fans come into this world, eventually, perhaps, there will be a time without the preconceptions and biases and expectations that we all seem to hold when we turn on ESPN, a mental schema that too often envisions men taking the first shot at a basket meant for everyone.
So that's why right now our campus is cautiously enthusiastic about a team making history. And why in the years to come, that faint buzz you hear on campus should only grow louder and louder.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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3/14/07: Job Security in Big Time College Basketball
Long Beach State head men's basketball coach Larry Reynolds has had quite a year. He's already secured the team's most successful season since 1973 when Jerry Tarkanian coached the team to two NCAA Tournament wins. Reynolds and his 49'ers won both the Big West regular season and conference tournament titles, and now are getting ready to play Tennessee in the first round of the Big Dance. Some even have the Niners penned as a smart upset pick over the more talented Volunteers. All in all, not bad for a small conference school with an athletic department budget smaller than Tennessee's yearly travel allowance.
And for that, Larry Reynolds is just hoping to keep his job. Not a promotion, or company car, or one of those big bonuses even the most average of corporate executives seems to negotiate. After several sleepless nights of game prep and travel and press conferences and all that goes into being a Division I basketball coach, Larry Reynolds just wants to keep on doing more of the same.
Larry Reynolds isn't the only NCAA Tournament bound coach praying for another year. Arkansas's Stan Heath had at least one Air Jordan out the door when the Razorbacks snuck into the field of 65 after a late run through the SEC Conference Tournament. Rumor was that Arkansas athletic boosters had already arranged a million dollar buyout of Heath's contract before selection Sunday. And given the high expectations for Arkansas basketball, I'm sure no one's torn up that check just yet.
If Reynolds and Heath do get pink slips, they'll have plenty of company in what's got to be the world's best dressed unemployment office. Already 27 of the more than 330 Division I basketball coaches have their walking papers. A few did so by choice. Most did not. That includes Anthony Solomon of St. Bonaventure, who inherited a basketball program fresh off a 2003 recruiting scandal that cost the head coach, the athletic director, and the university president their jobs. Solomon restored order to a program so afoul it was punished by the NCAA for lack of institutional control. That's like Brittany Spears punishing her kid for staying out too late. But college basketball isn't rehab, so St. Bonaventure President Sister Margaret Carney thanked coach Soloman for his integrity, then started looking for someone who can win a few games at any cost.
Also pounding the pavement is Harvard's Frank Sullivan, who may have produced an academic all-American this year, but didn't produce an Ivy League title in any his 16 years. Of course, Harvard's never won an Ivy League title. Ever, in the history of the league. Still Harvard AD Bob Scalise said his next coach should help them consistently compete for an Ivy championship.
See, while the college basketball season sets to reach its apex, the human relations game is already in full court press. Every year around this time, every head coach with a losing record - which is about half of them - and a few with winning records start tightening up their resume. Some don't even make it this far. Like Dan Monson of Minnesota, who lasted all of seven games into the season when the buzzer sounded.
And the coaching carousel, as it's called, knows few boundaries, from brainy Harvard to the brawny University of Colorado to the God fearing administration at Liberty, who just fired head coach Randy Dundon. I guess Hell knows no fury like a losing record.
There's nothing really new about this story. It's kind of like talking about traffic or bad weather. But just because it happens all the time doesn't make it any less salient. To us, bracket mania means just another year of losing the office pool. To these guys, it means selling your house and finding another new school for your kids. That is, assuming you can find another job, one with requisite 16 hour work days, weekly travel, and an industry underbelly so dirty it makes the Vegas Strip seem like Vatican City.
It's a job description that reads like a Christmas wish list, where your job and your future lies squarely in the hands of 19 year old kids who may or may not belong in college in the first place.
And you thought your job was tough.
I know the counterargument. These guys can make a lot of money. And they're doing what they love, which is more than most people can ever say about their career choice. But maybe, when your watching Tennessee beat Long Beach or USC rout Arkansas this week, remember it's more than lines on a bracket sheet. And it's not just over privileged athletes and overzealous college presidents. Sometimes, it's just guys like Larry Reynolds and Stan Heath, guys that are about to lose their dream job because they only did a pretty good job. And at least in the unsettled world of Division I men's college basketball, a pretty good job can mean no job at all.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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3/7/07: Cross Country Championships in Kenya
Anyone who qualified for the world cross country championships held later this month in Kenya can run pretty fast. That might be more important this year than others. And not just because it will take a superhuman effort to stay with the Kenyan national team runners, who will contest the world championships on their home soil for the first time in the meet's 35 year history. And it's not because the only other team to win since 1986 is neighboring rival Ethiopia, who should be familiar with Mombasa's rugged cliff side course; nor is because athletes might need to steer clear of mosquitoes and the threat of Malaria.
What athletes at this year's world cross country championships might need to sharpen their spikes for is the very real and public threat of a terrorist attack on the event and its participants. According to a release from the US Embassy in Kenya, the event could be the target of an extremist terrorist group, part of a larger uprising from the minority Kenyan Muslim population, who has already publicly stated their intentions to disrupt the event through wide scale demonstrations and protests. The US Embassy has also warned American visitors of violent crime and inadequate police protection. To summarize, you will not have to resort to Ebay for your world cross country ticket needs.
The Kenyan police authorities and the Mombasa planning committee have assured participants and fans alike that only an act of God could impede the meet or its swift moving pack of runners. Of course, God stands to be a major player in this passion play, the foundation of Kenya's national rifts and the underpinnings of the meet's terror watch. At least in Kenya, let's hope God is a fan of cross country.
Executing a seamless, or at least bloodless event is an overwhelming priority for the nation and to some degree the entire African continent. Despite its remarkable dominance in distance running and its pervasiveness in Kenyan society, Kenya has never hosted an international running event of this magnitude. In fact, no place in Africa has been granted such an honor, most counties deemed either too poor, too unsafe, or perhaps even too politically extreme to meet the taxing fiscal needs of international athletic competition. South Africa is poised to break uncharted waters in 2010 when it hosts the World Cup - and already international soccer authorities have threatened to rescind its invitation due to South Africa's tardiness in building preparations. So Kenya hosting a world championship, even something as seeming marginal to US tastes as the cross country championships, certainly is a big deal in the hopeful economic evolution of the African continent. It's progress that Kenyan and African leaders don't want to see slowed by the very public and emotional roadblock of terrorism.
But beyond the real impact this could have on African politics and economics, there the other obvious and more generalizable issue of sporting events as potential terror targets. This isn't a new story, not to anyone who remembers the heart stopping hours of the 1972 Olympic Games. More recently, the Athens Olympics spent well over a billion dollars protecting its properties from attack. And getting a handbag into Madison Square Garden for a basketball game nowadays is harder than getting Isaiah Washington's phone number into John Amici's Blackberry. So we long recognize sports festivals, especially those with international appear, as venues for political bloodshed.
I guess the more intriguing question, is why sporting events. Is it simply a crime of opportunity, a large gathering with the assurance of live television coverage? Or is sports itself part of the appeal of the offering, more so than perhaps a television awards show or a state fair or even a night at the opera? Sport and international sport is more than simply athleticism. It also holds something of a philosophy, a place of excellence and convergence, where political empires battle for supremacy in a largely apolitical environment. It is a place of leisure and wealth and even freedom - three things that most Kenyans and Africans must aspire to in the hopeful future of the 21st century. Whether intentional or not, athletic terrorism, if that is even a term, threatens more than just a human gathering and human lives. In at least one way of thinking, it threatens the essence of human life.
Hopefully, this month's world cross country championships in Kenya will go off seamlessly, making this simply an exercise in creative thought. But just in case, participants and spectators alike should be prepared to run especially fast.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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10/11/06: The Avon Walk for Breast Cancer
The line between sport and activity is a blurry on at best. I suppose one key distinction is physical exertion, or the amount of blood and sweat that goes into it.
And if that’s the case, then I saw a few thousand athletes all across New York City last weekend, the vast majority of them women. And none of them earned a penny for their efforts or harbored the slightest thought of winning or losing.
Last weekend was New York’s Avon Walk to raise money for breast cancer. And they did just that, with some 4000 walkers raising 9.6 million dollars. The weekend’s schedule was physically daunting – most walkers covered 26 miles on Saturday and 13 more on Sunday after camping out on Randall’s Island. That’s 39 miles on foot without the standard luxury fare enjoyed by most Division III college teams. It’s the kind of conditions even minor league baseball players would scoff at.
Most of the weekend’s participants didn’t fit the standard athletic profile. A whole bunch looked more AARP than gym class hero. And very few looked like the chiseled physical specimens we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on ESPN. Most of the walkers looked a whole lot like the rest of us, like our neighbors and coworkers, only by Sunday afternoon a little more battered and blistered. In fact, watching walkers parade across the Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday afternoon looked like a scene from Saving Private Ryan. I’ve seen fewer bandages on an episode of Mash. Anyone without a noticeable limp seemed almost out of place.
My wife was one of the weekend walkers. Like everyone else, she raised at least $1800 and went two days without the guarantee of hot running water. Unlike most other walkers, she hadn’t yet been personally touched by breast cancer. That made her one of the lucky ones. It seemed like everyone else was walking in honor or in memory of someone. Some walkers wore signs to that effect. The most gut wrenching talked about walking in memory of a sister or mother or daughter. The most poignant simply read, “I walk for myself.”
In fact, some of the survivor stories were beyond imagination. I talked to family who had traveled from Florida to watch their mother walk. Mon had been planning and training for over a year, the first formal athletic endeavor of her 60 years. Just months before the event, she was surprisingly diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery only weeks ago. And defying doctor’s reservations, she walked and camped alongside the other thousands. I don’t know if mom is technically an athlete, but she’s certainly a hero.
Since I spent the weekend driving around the city, by default I spent a lot of time listening to sports radio and talk about the faltering New York Yankees. Most of what I heard came from obsessive and outraged Yanks fans who talked about their playoff loss like it was a sin to humanity, since 11 straight years in the playoffs just wasn’t enough. Most called Joe Torre a bum or Alex Rodriguez a bum, and demanded that at least one of them lose their job. And they talked about how this loss really affected their lives, like the Yankees winning or losing a game somehow controls the balance of our universe. They sulked and complained about the physical accomplishments of coddled multimillionaires.
Normally, this kind of narcissistic rhetoric makes me angry, turning the beloved institution of sports into something that it isn’t. But this time, it just made me a little sad.
It made me sad that so many people seemed to lose track of the true power of athletics, the spirit of physical exertion. That in the end, sports are really just a game, and the most important things we can do with our bodies have little to do with finishing first, but a whole lot to do how hard we work just to get to the finish line.
Last weekend at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, I saw a whole lot of people work really hard to get there. And what they got at the finish was worth a whole lot more than a series win over Detroit. Was last weekend’s walk a sporting event? I don’t know. But unlike the Yankees and too many of their obsessive fans, everyone who walked last weekend was without question the most inspirational kind of winner.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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10/4/06: The Legacy of Peter Norman
This week, the world lost perhaps its most well identified historical footnote. Australian sprinter Peter Norman passed away on Tuesday at the age of 64. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re probably not alone. In fact, even a good look at Norman’s face or a detailed photo might not flip a switch. That is, unless you look at THE photo. Perhaps the most famous photograph in modern sports history, and certainly the most value laden. It’s the picture of Peter Norman standing on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympic Games besides Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos. And yes, Norman was the white guy, something we couldn’t ignore as the awards ceremony transpired.
Norman finished second in the Olympic 200, setting an Australian sprint record that still stands today. As he prepared for a medal ceremony that would place him next to Americans Smith and Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists, the two African-American sprinters made Norman aware of their plan to raise glove clad fists into the air and bow their heads in protest of American civil rights policies. They would make the most pointed political statement in Olympic history, something that would earn them immediate expulsion from the US sporting world and years of public scorn and regular death threats. And this would all happen during Norman’s finest Olympic moment, the odd culmination of his life’s obsession. Peter Norman, perhaps the world’s second fastest man, was now something of an accidental tourist in Mexico City.
Taking this all in remarkable stride, Norman quietly conspired with Smith and Carlos by wearing a human rights badge during the ceremony and publicly supporting the American protest movement. This has been Norman’s tack throughout his Olympic afterlife, offering subtle support while shying from the spotlight that has evermore followed Smith and Carlos. The three remained friendly throughout the years, but Norman declined to be included in the bronze statue of the ’68 medalists erected last year at San Jose State University. For his part in the ceremony, Norman suffered public disgrace from an unsympathetic and confused Australian public, a society that has struggled with its own racist past in recent years. While Smith and Carlos would eventually be praised as brave revolutionaries, Norman lived his life with relative anonymity, known more generally and less politically correctly as the white guy in the photo. And for better or worse, that will be Peter Norman’s most lasting legacy to the general sports world.
But Peter Norman is more than simply a place holder in Olympic lore. Peter Norman is an example of one of sports’ most unique cultural constructs. The unsuspecting hero. Unlike most public institutions, sports sometimes places unordinary people in remarkably pivotal circumstances. Usually these moments happen on the field of play, where an athlete has the chance to lift a city or a nation through spectacular play. Things like the 1980 Miracle on Ice or Willis Reed playing hurt in the Garden in 1970. Events like this are usually tagged heroic, but I’m not sure that’s a fair title.
Events like these are remarkable. They’re awe inspiring. Superhuman even. But that’s what star athletes have been training to do their whole physical and emotional lives. The movements are physical, relegated to the comforting field of play. These are important moments in sports to be sure, perhaps what sports is all about as they say. But the place of Peter Norman is different.
Peter Norman was asked to make a decision that went beyond running and jumping, things he was obviously very good at. Sports may have brought him to that moment, but conviction would lead the way from that point on. And faced with a life changing dilemma, Peter Norman chose to do the righteous thing, choosing humanity over his own well deserved moment of fame and glory. It’s a decision that seems lost on the more self-serving Olympic athletes of more recent years, like the 1992 American men’s basketball team, the original dream team, a group of Nike millionaires who draped themselves in an American flag to cover the villainous Reebok logo during their medal ceremony.
So with that, we say goodbye to Peter Norman, goodbye to the other guy on the medal stand in 1968. Goodbye to a very decent human being and a remarkable athlete, in that order. Goodbye to someone that should always be remembered as more than just an Olympic footnote.
Keith Strudler is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marist College, specializing in sports communication. His current interests are the role of sports in society, with a particular focus on the role of media in sports. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal, and an avid tri-athlete and guitarist in a rock band.
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