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Keith Strudler
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
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. Back to the Top
9/27/06: U2 and Green Day in New Orleans
Last Monday night, perhaps the world’s two biggest rock and roll acts found themselves sharing a stage in the birthplace of jazz. It was U2 and Green Day in New Orleans, playing the pregame show to Monday Night Football in the NFL’s first visit to the Superdome since it became a makeshift hurricane shelter.
Bono and Billy Joe played to a sold out crowd of 68,000 and countless millions on TV that might not typically tune in to ESPN on Monday night.
The event marked a christening of sorts, reopening the battered facility after 182 million dollars of repairs on a building whose scaring was more emotional than it was physical. In many ways, the Superdome is a lot like New Orleans itself. So much still lies deep beyond the surface.
And that’s why Monday night’s game between the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons was presented as such a momentous occasion. It was the NFL’s return to the scene of our nation’s most egregious national crime, where we collectively forget our poor and our huddled masses. The city’s beloved Saints would serve as reminder of New Orleans’s rebirth. They would tell us that the monsters of the gridiron haven’t abandoned the crescent city, so neither should you. And maybe they’d give the city’s battered residents something to feel good about other than hard won FEMA trailers and the occasional restaurant reopening.
Yes, Monday night was far more than a game. At least that’s what ESPN told us. And so that’s how the world’s two biggest and most socially relevant rock and roll acts found themselves sharing a stage at mid-field, something that might only happen in the post-Janet world of Super Bowl halftime shows.
Throughout Monday night’s event coverage that seemed to last longer than the entire run of Shogun, we heard repeated how much of the city still remained in waterlogged shambles, as if the storm had hit only last week, not last year. That the pristine athletic facility we now saw was a far cry from the thousands of homes without running water or even roofs. ESPN reminded us, to the point of nausea even, that this illusion of rebirth would only be a drop in a lake’s worth of sweat equity.
Yes, it was the most discussed sporting event since the Red Sox won the World Series. Or to paraphrase from an old U2 concert album, there’s been a lot of talk about Monday night’s football game. Maybe a little too much talk.
Personally, I’m not sure how I felt about Monday night’s game, a game played in a building I originally hoped would be leveled to the ground. The NFL and ESPN and the city of New Orleans reminded us that sports is inherently tied to geopolitical entities in a way that few other institutions in this world still are. Maybe even more than GM to Detroit or Enron to Houston, a professional sports franchise represents the place from which they emanate. For the New Orleans Saints, that quickly came to mean far more than it did for the 31 other teams in the league. The Saints became the Mets and the Yankees if those teams had played in lower Manhattan.
Like it or not, the Saints must now stand for the city of New Orleans, and even more trying, they must stand for a building that once wreaked of human waste and decaying flesh because our government didn’t seem to care. Not much of home field advantage.
When the Saints and U2 and Green Day reopened that scarred facility, they may have reinforced American cultural ideals that were shattered last year in New Orleans. Things like resilience and determination, unity and civic pride. And at least for a small window of time, we all felt a little better about a city called New Orleans as they moved one small step closer to normalcy, a word born out of post 9-11 logic.
Whether that small step is the beginning of a marathon still remains to be seen. Yes, the Superdome is now open for business, and Saints owner Tom Benson came home instead of fleeing for the greener pastures of San Antonio or Los Angeles.
Was Monday night really more than just a football game? At the very least, it was also a pretty amazing rock concert. Anything beyond that probably has more to do with government policy than any football players or even any mega rock bands, even if they are U2 and Green Day. But at the very least, Monday night was, as U2 might say, one very beautiful day.
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. Back to the Top
9/20/06: Connecticut High School Football
There’s a saying that things can always get worse. And it did for me when I was in the 6th grade playing goalie for my Houston JCC soccer team. We played in a church league, and our official team function was to boost team morale for every one else.
Somewhere in the middle of our winless season, we found ourselves losing 10-0 to a group of guys that seemed old enough to drive and vote. And that’s when things got worse. With only a few minutes left and the ball deep in our territory, one of our players kicked the ball past me, into our own goal. When I asked him why, he said, “It was going to happen anyway.” He was right, since we ended up losing an impressive 14-0, a blowout in football much less youth soccer.
So I guess in some small way, I know how the kids at Connecticut’s Bassic High feel. Last week, Bassic’s school football team dropped their season opener to Bridgeport Central 56-0. Bridgeport led by 35 after the first quarter and scored only seven points in the second half, which mercifully sped by thanks to a running clock. By all accounts, the kids at Bridgeport did everything right, as confirmed by Bassic head coach George Loughrey. The Connecticut Interscholastic School Conference didn’t share Loughrey’s admiration. In line with new rules created to end years of blowout high school football games, the conference investigated the 56 point blowout to decide if they should suspend Bridgeport coach Dave Cadelina for one game.
Connecticut school administrators are hoping to prevent scores like the 90-0 beat down that happened last year at the hands of New London. This new rule allows administrators to suspend any coach whose team wins by more than 50, as Bridgeport Central did last week. By all accounts, this rule would help coaches reinforce sportsmanship and deemphasize winning, two assumed goals of interscholastic athletics.
After an initial suspension, the Connecticut board overturned its decision and will allow Cadelina to coach this weekend against a more formidable Trumbull High. So I suppose everyone’s learned an important lesson about due process and respect for rules and regulations, which might be the most commonly reinforced constructs of high school sports. But in the aftermath of this ruling, I have to wonder if any of this really makes sense. Should Cadelina have been punished for his actions? Did he do anything wrong, allowing his second and third string athletes to do what they’ve been trained to do everyday in practice? And should we have this rule in the first place, especially in a sport where total and physical domination is the core of all intentions? For better or for worse, football is a lot like war. You fight for territory using brute strength. And every coach would rather have Grenada than Iraq. So to suspend a high school coach for his execution of strategy seems just a bit counterintuitive. Perhaps it’s time to hate the game, not the player.
Blowout football games shouldn’t be rewarded, or even accepted on some level. I survived my 14-0 shellacking just fine, but I’m guessing public high schools shouldn’t be in business of public humiliation. But the root of the problem probably lies less with game day coaching decisions, which this new rule is clearly set to punish, and more with the entire machinery of high school sports. In high schools around the country, young gladiators are drilled on the functionalist art of dominance. It’s prodded and dangled like a carrot, something that might earn them celebrity status and perhaps even a coveted college athletic scholarship. Kids learn to run through walls and fight for inches of real estate, like it was the beaches of Normandy. We get them ready for the all important battle that happens only 10 Friday nights per year, where the game can be played at only one speed. And then we expect them to do something that’s never been part of practice, never listed in a playbook. We expect them to stop trying.
No, there’s nothing good about a 56-0 high school football game, just like there’s nothing good about a 14 goal loss in youth soccer. And as it stands, there’s very little good about the hardfast rules of the Connecticut Interscholastic School Conference. I guess right now, things aren’t so good in Connecticut high school football. But then again, maybe they aren’t so bad. See, as I learned a long time ago in youth soccer, things can always get worse.
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. Back to the Top
8/23/06: The World's Greatest Mets Fan
Everyone needs sports heroes. I found one last week in 18 year old Ryan Leli. Ryan hasn’t won a championship. He doesn’t hold any records, and I doubt he can even dunk a basketball. In fact, I don’t even know if he plays sports, at least any better than the rest of us. And to top it all off, Ryan Leli might spend the next several years in prison, which nowadays isn’t all that surprising when it comes to sports heroes.
Last week, the Long Island teenager was arrested for impersonating an NBC journalist to sneak into a game between his beloved New York Mets and the San Diego Padres. There, he chatted with Met players and former Met players like Mike Piazza. Leli was caught only when he attempted to try it a second time against Colorado.
For his efforts, the lifelong baseball fan was charged with impersonating a journalist, which doesn’t seem like all that serious a charge given the state of American broadcast journalism, and a host of other offenses ranging from falsifying business records to criminal trespass. If all works against the teenager from Long Island, the world’s most ambitious Mets fan could spend the next seven years in a New York prison. I’m guessing his Queens criminal court might cut him some slack, this being his first time pretending to work in TV news and all. Let’s face it, Bill O’Reily does it every night, and no one’s thrown the book at him.
Ryan’s not the first kid to get busted for breaking into a stadium. One of the more notorious was a 16 year old from Boston, who in 1995 stole a Celtics banner from the ceiling of the Boston Garden. He would have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn’t bragged to his friends at school the next day. In the old Vet stadium in Philadelphia, officials ran a working court and jail inside the building to punish fans who may have legally entered the stadium but run afoul of the law on the inside. Usually it was something like fighting or pubic urination. Nothing as egregious and morally corrupt as pretending to be a journalist. Even Eagles fans know where to draw the line.
Ryan Leli’s stadium follies also bring back haunting memories of Detroit in 2004, when Ron Artest flew into the stands to brawl with unsuspecting fans. For his efforts, Artest was sentenced to 60 hours of community service, not seven years behind bars. But of course, the pen is mightier than the sword, even if Ryan never did write a single word during his pseudo journalistic crime spree.
Perhaps in today’s day and age of flammable hair gel and human time bombs, impersonating a reporter and sneaking into a ballpark go from harmless prank to potential terrorist plot. Especially when it involves famous athletes and a stadium full of people. And so I guess we shouldn’t be all that surprised to see Ryan Leli take the full brunt of our paranoid disposition. But if you’ll indulge my naivety for just the moment, I can’t help but see Ryan as some kind of noble insurgent, even if he didn’t plan it that way.
Ryan Leli is an unwavering fan of the New York Mets, a team that asks us – demands us even – to like them very much. They’ve asked us to fund their new television network and build their new stadium. They create heroes and charge us dearly for everything from parking to tickets to t-shirts. A kid like Ryan Leli has done just what the Mets asked him to do. He loved them very, very much. And you know, sometimes love can make you do crazy things.
Sure, this kid broke the law, and it’s probably my mistake to glorify his disregard for common sense. But the way I see it, Ryan did what a whole lot of us have always wanted to do, if not at Shea Stadium than somewhere else. The only difference was that Ryan actually figured out a way to do it.
Ryan Leli’s criminal offense, a crime that might cost him seven years in the state pen, boils down to wanting to get closer to his own sports heroes. And let’s face it, everyone needs sports heroes.
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. Back to the Top
8/16/06: ESPN and Monday Night Football
Some 5.4 million people watched the NFL preseason’s first Monday Night Football game this week, 40 percent less than watched opening night last year. Or maybe it was 25 percent more, depending how you look at it. In this all important athletic ratings war, perspective can make all the difference.
See, this week marked Monday Night Football’s official debut on ESPN, moving up the dial from broadcast TV to cable. It’s the end of a 36 year run on ABC, the network that turned professional football into a prime time block party, the original must-see-TV before NBC coined the phrase. Even though the property did stay in the Disney Empire, it’s still a notable strategic shift, keeping the company’s flagship brand open for sitcoms and reality television. Meanwhile, sports fans would hardly know the difference, since ESPN has long been their default setting, even on Monday nights for pre and post-game analysis. These new Monday night ratings, although lower than the ABC of old, are significantly higher than last year’s ESPN Thursday night NFL broadcast.
Like most things in sports today, this shift to cable had everything to do with business. Buying TV rights to the NFL is an expensive proposition. In this case, 1.1 billion dollars over eight years for ESPN. It’s by no means the most expensive cable sports deal in history, not with the NBA’s saturation of pay TV, but it’s pretty expensive real estate for a product that only broadcasts once a week and includes little post season exposure. And unlike the NBA that uses a wide net broadcast philosophy, where content is endless and audience building is the name of the game, Monday Night Football has to pull in big numbers to maintain even the façade of fiscal accountability. Even a loss leader like the NFL has to please its stock holders.
For ABC, this losing proposition no longer made sense, spending literally billions of dollars on a potentially risky product. And in today’s age of bargain basement programming, where an open mike or an old house with hidden cameras can win the ratings war, expensive prime time sports makes less sense than ever. Broadcast network executives are feeling a squeeze like never before. On one side is cable, with endless choices and targeted taste cultures, and on the other is reality TV, where a few thousand dollars might buy you the next cultural currency.
But thanks to the wonders of corporate conglomerates, all is not lost for ABC. In fact, they can have their cake an eat it too, allowing ESPN to broadcast Monday night’s weekly battle while big brother ABC stays in the all important Super Bowl rotation along with Fox and CBS. That leaves ABC plenty of time to create the next great ratings bonanza for pennies on the dollar. And even if the self-proclaimed sports leader ESPN gets lower ratings than ABC used to, the cable network more than makes up for it with exorbitant subscription fees and advertising friendly demographics.
It does all seem like a winning proposition for the media giant Disney, and it probably is. In fact, the only one who really loses on the deal is us. Sure, we can still watch Monday Night Football, since nearly 90 percent of Americans pay for their TV. It probably even gives us more viewing choices, since ABC used to waste its Monday nights airing reruns of ice dancing, the network equivalent of unconditional surrender.
But in the long term, moving Monday Night Football to ESPN is just another example of conditioning us to pay for what we want, what we used to get for free. It the same basic model used by the Yankees and later the Mets, who both started their own cable networks, blackmailing New York baseball fans and their service providers into higher subscription fees for the simple privilege of supporting their home teams.
This idea is something sports organizations have gotten pretty good at – using communal adoration to raise more and more collective dollars. They’ve used it to fund new stadiums, they’ve used it to raise ticket prices, and they use it to raise cable rates. And when ESPN renegotiates with Cablevision and DirecTV and the like, don’t be surprised if the high dollar network reaches even loftier heights of the cable stratosphere, approaching air only known by premium channels like HBO and Showtime.
From that perspective, this somewhat historic Monday night maneuver isn’t such a great thing. And in the world of sports television, sometimes perspective can make all the difference.
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. Back to the Top
8/9/06: Cathlolic University and the Dirty Dozen
If someone starts talking about lacrosse, college, and exotic dancers, you’ll probably assume they’re talking about Duke. And in this case, you’d be wrong.
Instead, think Catholic University lacrosse. That’s Catholic University women’s lacrosse, a team that’s gotten more attention than any Division III women’s program since Toni Smith of Manhattanville turned her back on the American flag.
Catholic University of Washington DC just this week announced it would forfeit three lacrosse games from last season and place the entire women’s team on probation for the upcoming school year. All of this stems from a hazing incident from last year, when team members threw a party complete with drinking, crude costumes, and one increasingly famous male stripper.
All of this might have gone undetected by campus administrators if someone on the team hadn’t posted photos from the gathering on the web, all of which finally ended up in the oddly voyeuristic badjocks.com web site, a pseudo watchdog group that chronicles the poor behaviors of wayward athletes. In fact, the Catholic University women’s lacrosse team was accomplished enough to make badjocks’s “dirty dozen,” a hall of shame of sorts for campus hazing incidents. Also included in this prestigious lot was the Northwestern women’s soccer team, who soon thereafter replaced its head coach.
Incidents like these are probably more commonplace than anyone would believe. Only maybe not at Catholic U, a school whose value statement is fairly well embedded in its name. Catholic University is to colleges like Hebrew National is to hot dogs. They answer to a higher authority, something its women’s lacrosse players probably should have considered before inviting male dancers to their team mixers.
But in the wake of what will eventually be written off as harmless fun, and probably launch an industry of PR specialists for college athletic programs, a whole lot of interesting questions are raised about college sports, voyeurism, and gender.
Maybe the first question is why these pictures went from private photo albums to ESPN’s front page. The lacrosse team at Catholic U made it easy by posting photos in an easily accessible web forum. But web sites like badjocks.com were created to satisfy our guilty pleasures, not as some important vigilante police force, as we may want to convince ourselves. Badjocks recently removed the illicit photos when they said they have proved their point. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what that point is.
A second question is whether the transgressions at Catholic University or any of the dirty dozen are really sports issues. Did lacrosse influence the social dynamic of the women in question? It’s largely been assumed that the toxins of fame might drive the most elite of men’s football and basketball, where pampered young men can easily lose sight of their social responsibilities given the throngs of adoring fans. But Division III women’s lacrosse? That hardly seems the place of misguided ambition.
But perhaps most interesting question in this tale of sexual debauchery is the role of gender, an assumed genesis of so many athletic discretions. When Duke men’s lacrosse stood guilty of hiring strippers to their off-campus party, we naturally assumed this was testosterone gone mad, a clear case of sexual violence and domination. It was the ill effect of letting boys be boys. But what about when a women’s lacrosse team is guilty of a similar offense? Certainly, we can’t blame womanhood in any similar fashion. Have we overstated the importance of gender, and maybe understated the influence of social norming and peer pressure? Could this be an unfortunate aftershock from Title IX, where all athletes, men and women, are given free reign over moral discretion. This prospect, although certainly disquieting to feminist ideologies, must be an important consideration in the ever present process of athletic reform.
But of course, I’d assume reform will now be a commonly used phrase at Catholic University, maybe one of the few assumptions about lacrosse we know will be true.
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. Back to the Top
8/2/06: Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin
Justin Gatlin always planned on making us wait. Yes, he is the world’s fastest man, a title he shares with Asafa Powell. But when it comes to scheduling a showdown with his fleet footed rival, Justin Powell can take things painfully slow.
After equaling Powell’s world record of 9.77 seconds for 100 meters, the Olympic track gold medalist has done everything possible to postpone a coveted race between the two co-record holders. Even when they did compete at the same meet earlier this year, they ran in different events. It was if they were an acrimoniously divorced couple stuck at the same wedding.
The reasoning behind this evasive behavior was simple – keep fan interest high by creating a scarcity of product. Gatlin’s agent has promised one or maybe two head to head meetings this year between the sprint champions – and then, only if the price is right.
But now, it seems track fans might have to wait a bit longer than expected. In fact, maybe forever. Last week, Justin Gatlin announced that he had tested positive for high levels of testosterone. Subsequent testing of Gatlin’s “B” sample would be done to confirm these results. Any confirmation of these initial results would likely result in a lifelong ban from track and field for Gatlin, part of the sport’s tough love approach to performance enhancing drugs. That would mean that two of the past three 100 meter record holders were exiled for drug use. At the very least, it does at least give the appearance of noble intentions, something baseball could certainly use right about now.
Of course as we know, Justin Gatlin’s positive drug test didn’t happen without considerable context. In fact, it was just days earlier that cyclist Floyd Landis also tested positive for high levels of testosterone, placing his historic ride up the Alps both in considerable context and considerable jeopardy. Probably because of this, Gatlin’s test results came off more as a syndicated repeat than a hot news flash. When the story broke, we almost seemed to say, “Please tell me something I don’t already know.”
In all fairness, the public has treated these two most recent drug scandals somewhat differently. So far, Landis has been given far greater latitude to make his own case, and we as a public have been more interested in his side of the story. Perhaps it’s his severely damaged hip, or maybe it’s the Lance Armstrong effect, or maybe it’s just Landis’s strict Amish roots, but when it came to Floyd Landis, we all at least wanted to believe him – even if in the end, we can’t. So far, Gatlin has gotten little of that same latitude. That said, any long winded comparison of the two is a misguided diversion from the larger issues at hand.
When Justin Gatlin tested positive – and let’s for now assume this was not a false positive result – Gatlin reminded us that superhuman performance is often just that – superhuman. We’ve all gotten pretty adept at ignoring the fairly obvious, like a 73 home run season or a car like bike ride up the Alps. The human species evolves fairly slowly. Our records have moved more like an eight year old at Disneyland. And if you think Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery and Ben Johnson are the only 100 meter record holders who cheated, unfortunately, you’re almost certainly wrong. They’re just the only ones who got caught. Track is littered with records that probably never should have been set by people who never should have been there. Remember Flo-Jo? And now years after the fact, it’s safe to say we’ll never know the truth about the past, something we’re having a hard enough time dealing with right now in the present.
Beyond the finger pointing and the disillusion that we’ve all perfected in recent days, we as fans also need to reevaluate our hopes and expectations. We may not like or approve of illicit drug use by star athletes, but we certainly do like the side effects. And when a sport like track and field doesn’t continuously press that human envelope with quicker times and higher jumps, it becomes a distant memory in the fickle American sports psyche.
With our tastes for superlatives and our conflicting dislike for cheating, it might be some time until elite athletics can find the needed balance between morality and miraculous. But thanks to Justin Gatlin and Floyd Landis and a host of others, waiting is something us sports fans are now getting used to.
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. Back to the Top
7/26/06: American Basketball Dreams
For the first time in a long time, last weekend it felt pretty good to be an American.
And for this we have two people to thank – Tiger Woods, and Floyd Landis. A mega-star golfer and a long distance cyclist. Two men who crossed the Atlantic and conquered both man and fierce geography in perhaps our finest European invasion since D-Day. On Sunday, Woods secured his 11th major golf tournament, winning the British Open for the second straight time, his first tournament win since losing his father. That same day, Floyd Landis reached Paris on the last leg of the Tour de France, protecting his minute lead over the field. Following the Lance Armstrong era, that makes eight straight American tour victories. Even if a lot of the world hates us right about now, I guess we’ll always have Paris.
Both of these athletes, Woods and Landis, may have come in as favorites, but they both also came in with big mountains to climb – for Landis, that’s literally. Tiger was still mourning the death of his father and an extensive layoff from the sport, evident in last month’s US Open. And Landis rode the tour with no less than a decaying hip, making just getting onto his bike a grueling experience, never mind the 125 or so miles that usually proceeded it. Now that victory is complete, Landis will undergo a hip replacement surgery that only Bo Jackson could understand.
This past weekend was one for Lee Greenwood and Chevy Trucks. It was good old fashioned American grit at its finest, even if most of us have long disbanded this kind of sacrificial work ethic for the fast food lifestyle of the American super highway. In fact, Landis, who was raised in the Spartan Mennonite tradition, said the greatest lessons he learned from his parents were to work hard and be patient. It almost sounds quaint.
And all that American rah-rah just made life a little more difficult for one Coach Mike Krzyzewski. The legendary Duke head basketball coach is, as we speak, preparing America’s tallest for battle against the world. This conquest will climax in late August at the World Basketball Championships held this year in Japan. It’s there that the US will try to do what they haven’t since the 2000 Olympic Games, something that Tiger Woods and Floyd Landis did last weekend. They want to once again beat the world.
Not long ago, this kind of American dominance in world basketball was simply assumed, kind of like the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones. This dates back to 1992 and the original Dream Team, when opponents were so overwhelmed they would ask for autographs before the game even started.
Since those heady days of Magic and Bird and MJ, USA basketball has followed a steady decline to 2002, when we couldn’t finish higher than 6th at the World Championships, even as it was played in Indianapolis, on American hardwood. Meanwhile, players from other countries have gotten better. They’ve gained experience on our college teams. Some even play in the NBA. They’ve taken those newfound skills back home to lead teams of players that actually think this international basketball stuff is important. And our American grown athletes, it seems that they’ve gotten a bit too rich and way too comfortable. In fact, too many of them skip international championships altogether.
That is, until this year, when patriotic Coach Krzyzewski has rallied the troops of sorts, gathering America’s best and convincing them that beating Lithuania is a worthwhile venture. Even if it doesn’t pay well. Guys who at least say they want to bring the title of the basketball world back to the US, where it belongs. Back to where the game was created.
Maybe it’s just the way the world is right now, or maybe it’s got something to do with three dollar gallons of gas. But from the outside, this us-against-the-world maneuver seems like it might work. We’ll know more next week when they start their exhibition tour schedule. For the record, they do enter the World Championships as the number one ranked team, ahead of Serbia & Montenegro and Argentina. But even if the US basketball team does go down in flames, thanks to Floyd Landis, the US and its fans will always have Paris.
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. Back to the Top
7/19/06: Auburn Football
If you want to find some happy college football fans right now, look no further than Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama and their beloved Crimson Tide. This summertime joy doesn’t come from new recruits or a coaching shift or any preseason rankings. In fact, it doesn’t even come from Tuscaloosa, but instead from down the road in Auburn, where the hated Auburn Tigers play. To put this rivalry in perspective, their yearly Iron Bowl game was cancelled from 1907 to 1948 due to animus amongst fans and administrators. In Alabama, state pride takes a distant back seat to team allegiance.
So nothing could bring the people of Tuscaloosa greater joy than the scandal now unraveling in the shadows of Jordan Hare Stadium. While the dust is far from settled, it seems that many Auburn football players have been easing their way through college credits by taking questionable direct reading courses, an unstructured independent study of sorts that’s supposed to allow students the flexibility to tailor their own degrees. Unfortunately, at Auburn these classes have been used to give dozens of football players an easy out for many required classes, in this case all in the sociology department, an oversubscribed major for competitive college football players nationwide.
According to Professor James Gundlach of the Auburn sociology department, football players usually do little more than skim a single book and write a short paper for each of these classes, often never meeting with the professor of record for the course. Even for those dreaded topics like statistics and research methods. To make matters worse, all these customized classes at Auburn were taught by a single professor, Thomas Petee, who took on hundreds of independent readings per semester and rarely gave less than an A. He’s the kind of guy we all would have liked to know in college, along with the one that made fake ID’s in his dorm room.
This home schooling of sorts has been quite a boon for an Auburn football team sporting a C+ average and a disappointing 48 percent graduation rate. In fact, Professor Petee’s GPA spike has helped the Tigers rise into the top ten in the NCAA’s academic progress rate, amongst the likes of Duke, Navy, and Stanford. This certainly is an odd placement for an athletic department that blazes the trail for academic violations. Or as Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Dee said of Auburn’s ranking, “It was a little surprising.”
But all this fixation on Auburn shouldn’t divert our gaze from broader questions being raised about academics in major college sports. Like how can we expect Division I-A college football players to carry the mental and psychological weight of a full academic load given the excessive athletic load of sold out stadiums and 24 hour sports networks, where games are scheduled around our leisure time, not the sociology department? And given the lessened admission standards for many of these high dollar football teams, can we now reasonably demand football players to perform academically at the same level of their more qualified peers? That would be like making chemistry majors bench press 300 lbs. to graduate instead of just taking a couple semesters of phys ed, which is now usually something like bowling or darts.
And before everyone within the Ivory Tower points a smug finger down at the gymnasium, like some sort of payback for all of junior high school, let’s not forget the academic contrition in this whole sordid affair. Assuming Professor Petee is simply incapable of any good judgment, how did this man assume the role he now has, in academia of all places, the home of an often self-righteous form of self-governance? And should the sociology department itself be more protective of its curricular standards, even if that means failing a future all-star here and there?
Perhaps this is a simplification of what is still largely a simple, albeit unsolvable problem. The problem of running professional sports teams under the branding of colleges and universities, in this case the very marketable label of Auburn. And until we can finally address this quandary, no one – not the NCAA, not aspiring football stars, and not the Auburn sociology department – no one will be particularly happy.
That is, except those fans down the road in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Auburn’s trouble has brought a very special kind of summertime joy.
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. Back to the Top
7/12/06: Football, Title IX and the Bottom Line
American colleges and universities may have found a solution to their widening gender gap, a way to get more young men interested in American higher education. And that answer might be none other than football.
An article recently published in the New York Times discussed the growing number of colleges that have added football teams, largely in the hopes of attracting more male students to their campuses and slowing the movement that might soon earn men minority status at many schools. This athletic growth engine isn’t happening at our largest or most athletically competitive schools, but rather in smaller, private colleges, schools that rely heavily on tuition dollars over endowments and must compete for students much like Chevy and Ford fight for consumers.
These new football teams play in Division III or the NAIA, where student athletes pay full tuition and the only media coverage is campus owned. None of these athletes will ever play a down of professional sport, and many of them failed to start for their own high school teams. And while every new football team costs money, the price tag of these new programs is a tiny fraction of the budget of even the smallest Division I-A squad, where the salary of a single coach could fund an entire academic department. As much as can be assumed, these new football teams are more investment than anything else, not unlike building new dorms or upgrading campus dining facilities.
Still, unlike dining halls and campus town homes, college football teams have a staunchly sociological dimension, something that hasn’t slipped past academics and activists that fought many years for gender equity on the field of play. Most of these folks are none too pleased to see their statistical gains lost simply because men have lost interest in reading and writing. And certainly, adding 100 or so male athletes to any college athletic department feels counterintuitive in our Title IX world. Even if it is done in the name preserving a different kind of gender equity in the classroom, which allegedly is what higher education is all about anyway.
But this issue of adding football teams to stabilize enrollment brings us back to a fairly central issue of gender and sport, one that’s long stood at the core of athletic quandaries like Title IX and pay scales at Wimbledon. It’s the question of gendered sport. Or more bluntly, do men like sports more than women? And if so, is that difference simply a product of a sexist society, something that colleges have an obligation to overcome by doing things like, say, not adding football teams simply because, as one athletic director said in the New York Times article, “those boys just want to play”?
And therein lies the great debate. Provide the athletic opportunities that boys seem to want, or embrace the gender equity that has become the cornerstone of Title IX enforcement, even if these ideals haven’t necessarily played out in the post-collegiate world of professional sports, a world that still struggles to maintain a single successful women’s sports league. For the time being, we seem altogether incapable of doing both.
But gender wars aside, there is one thing this debate over small time college football reconfirms. And that is, one way or another, our athletic passions are still ever so strongly tied to the bottom line. Win, lose, or tie – it doesn’t matter, as long we can balance the books, in this case by getting 100 or so extra men to pay full private college tuition – and maybe attract a few more who might like the idea of something fun to watch on Saturday afternoons.
See, right now, financially struggling and even solvent small colleges don’t always have the luxury of solving all of society’s problems. That’s especially true when it comes to their athletic departments, which have sometimes been given the responsibility of training the mind more than even the English and history departments. Perhaps we should remember that no matter how popular, sports are not some great panacea.
But it does seem, at least when it comes to the quandary of the vanishing male college student, athletics and football may be the one place where we can find an answer.
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. Back to the Top
7/12/06: Football, Title IX and the Bottom Line
American colleges and universities may have found a solution to their widening gender gap, a way to get more young men interested in American higher education. And that answer might be none other than football.
An article recently published in the New York Times discussed the growing number of colleges that have added football teams, largely in the hopes of attracting more male students to their campuses and slowing the movement that might soon earn men minority status at many schools. This athletic growth engine isn’t happening at our largest or most athletically competitive schools, but rather in smaller, private colleges, schools that rely heavily on tuition dollars over endowments and must compete for students much like Chevy and Ford fight for consumers.
These new football teams play in Division III or the NAIA, where student athletes pay full tuition and the only media coverage is campus owned. None of these athletes will ever play a down of professional sport, and many of them failed to start for their own high school teams. And while every new football team costs money, the price tag of these new programs is a tiny fraction of the budget of even the smallest Division I-A squad, where the salary of a single coach could fund an entire academic department. As much as can be assumed, these new football teams are more investment than anything else, not unlike building new dorms or upgrading campus dining facilities.
Still, unlike dining halls and campus town homes, college football teams have a staunchly sociological dimension, something that hasn’t slipped past academics and activists that fought many years for gender equity on the field of play. Most of these folks are none too pleased to see their statistical gains lost simply because men have lost interest in reading and writing. And certainly, adding 100 or so male athletes to any college athletic department feels counterintuitive in our Title IX world. Even if it is done in the name preserving a different kind of gender equity in the classroom, which allegedly is what higher education is all about anyway.
But this issue of adding football teams to stabilize enrollment brings us back to a fairly central issue of gender and sport, one that’s long stood at the core of athletic quandaries like Title IX and pay scales at Wimbledon. It’s the question of gendered sport. Or more bluntly, do men like sports more than women? And if so, is that difference simply a product of a sexist society, something that colleges have an obligation to overcome by doing things like, say, not adding football teams simply because, as one athletic director said in the New York Times article, “those boys just want to play”?
And therein lies the great debate. Provide the athletic opportunities that boys seem to want, or embrace the gender equity that has become the cornerstone of Title IX enforcement, even if these ideals haven’t necessarily played out in the post-collegiate world of professional sports, a world that still struggles to maintain a single successful women’s sports league. For the time being, we seem altogether incapable of doing both.
But gender wars aside, there is one thing this debate over small time college football reconfirms. And that is, one way or another, our athletic passions are still ever so strongly tied to the bottom line. Win, lose, or tie – it doesn’t matter, as long we can balance the books, in this case by getting 100 or so extra men to pay full private college tuition – and maybe attract a few more who might like the idea of something fun to watch on Saturday afternoons.
See, right now, financially struggling and even solvent small colleges don’t always have the luxury of solving all of society’s problems. That’s especially true when it comes to their athletic departments, which have sometimes been given the responsibility of training the mind more than even the English and history departments. Perhaps we should remember that no matter how popular, sports are not some great panacea.
But it does seem, at least when it comes to the quandary of the vanishing male college student, athletics and football may be the one place where we can find an answer.
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. Back to the Top
7/5/06: Tour de France
During its 2000 or so mile run, the Tour de France loses dozens of riders on the road to Paris. Some fall victim to accidents and injuries, others to the general fatigue that comes with 21 days of riding over two giant mountain fronts, and others simply because they fell too far behind the torrid pace of the race leaders. Just finishing the Tour proves your toughness in a sport where pain and suffering should be recorded as a statistic.
But this year, the field had thinned before a single disk wheel rolled off the starting block. In the final hours leading to last week’s prologue stage, 13 riders were banned from the tour because of drug and blood doping allegations that came after a raid by the Spanish police of several Spanish laboratories. According to the report offered to the International Cycling Union, these athletic factories offered a buffet of illicit evidence, including blood samples and creatively coded records, tying some 55 cyclists to the kind of scandalous behavior that might make even Mark McGuire blush.
In rapid response to this convincing evidence, the 21 teams in the tour agreed to ban all tour riders tied to this scandal. Amongst them are Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, the two most accomplished riders in this year’s tour and, between the two, odds on favorites to reach Paris in the yellow jersey. The first tour in the post-Lance era has been voluntarily stripped of its biggest remaining stars. To put this in perspective, this would be like firing Shaquille O’Neil and Kevin Garnett the year after Michael Jordan retired. In other words, unthinkable.
Despite the last minute change, the Tour is still on its way, something that must be difficult for American sports fans to comprehend – sports fans that pretty much changed the channel now that Lance Armstrong is enjoying his early retirement. 176 riders, all of them allegedly drug free, are pedaling through the northern flatlands as they circle around towards the daunting Pyrenees.
In the fresh wake of this international drug scandal, a lot of folks here in the US have sort of laughingly pointed fingers across the ocean, belittling a sport and a country that we don’t particularly understand and, to be honest, don’t particularly like. The Tour is an easy target, especially since the walls crumbled just after our own star exited the sport, letting us maintain the all important air of moral superiority, a critical cultural currency in the value laden world of international sports spectatorship. Adorned with our yellow Livestrong bracelets, we can smirk at European sports and still cheer for Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield as they help the Yankees to yet another playoff run.
And if that’s all we take from this Spanish science experiment, than we deserve just the kind of chemically enhanced sports that we’ve grown to accept. The Tour de France has decided to ban its star athletes without the true smoking gun – that is, a positive drug test, the holy grail of the enforcement world. They worked on more circumstantial evidence – things like records, samples, testimony and the like. You know, the same kind of stuff we’ve heard about Barry Bonds and Marion Jones for a couple of years now. I don’t what lab was invaded in Spain, but I would be interested in a Spanish translation of the word Balco. But instead of banning our star athletes, like they did in Spain and France, we hold congressional inquiries and beg people to offer more honest testimony. Perhaps in America, we offer a more democratic brand of justice. Or maybe, just maybe, we like to have our cake and eat it too; especially when that cake wins gold medals or hits 73 home runs a year.
Yes, this year’s Tour de France has become a disaster of sorts, thanks to an eager Spanish police force and a group of professional sports teams that actually takes this kind of evidence seriously. Unfortunately for American sports fans, that’s not something we’re in any place to laugh about.
But of course, this is any idea that might get lost amidst all the news of drugs and lists and congress, and all the other things that seem to get in the way of integrity in professional sports. Then again, I guess in sports, like in the Tour de France, things and people tend to get lost along the way.
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. Back to the Top
6/28/06: The Game Goes On
Twelve days ago, Tiger Woods missed the cut at the U.S. Open golf tournament, the first time Woods failed to qualify at a major tournament, ending his streak at 39 events. This lackluster performance didn’t come as a complete surprise to many, since Tiger was competing for the first time in some nine weeks, a long sabbatical even for an illusive and selective entrant like Tiger. Woods spent the nine weeks prior to the Open coping with the illness and eventual passing of his father, Earl Woods, the man who Tiger credits for his remarkable successes both on and off the course.
When Earl Woods became increasingly weakened from cancer, Tiger cleared his calendar to stay at his father’s California home. And when Earl did succumb to his disease in early May, Tiger struggled to return to work, a rare concession from superman to his own human condition.
When he returned to play in the U.S. Open, many of us hoped, even expected Tiger to post an emotional victory on what would have been Father’s Day. But whether his shortcomings were physical or emotional, the Tiger of old would have to wait for another place at another time, as he played some of the worst golf in his brilliant career.
Tiger Woods is by no means the first athlete to play under the painful duress of loss. Most of these performances go largely unnoticed, as is the case for most personal loss and suffering in the world. And not surprisingly, most athletes fair poorly when carrying an increased emotional burden in the already mentally taxing world of elite athletics. A few have defied the odds. Brett Favre played maybe his finest game only days after he lost his father in 2003. And Pete Sampras won a gut wrenching, five set match over Alex Corretja en route to the 1996 US Open title, collapsing in tears at match point over the loss of his coach Tim Gullikson to brain cancer. Sometimes, spirit is stronger than the mind or the body. For the vast majority of athletes, including Tiger Woods, the mandates of psychology and physiology are not so easily bypassed.
Despite my relative disinterest in golf, I thought a lot about Tiger Woods during his struggles at the U.S. Open. It was just at that same time that my own grandmother passed away. I was in Florida along with a lot of other family during her final illness, and we followed the Open as a diversion from our more emotionally taxing thoughts. Watching Tiger struggle though what should have been routine made think about the relationship between sport and death and grief. And while I could never understand the high stressed sports life of someone like Tiger Woods, I tried to think about my own life and the sports that I do as a recreational triathlete.
Some might say that grief and loss give people a new perspective on life, making it difficult for star athletes to give sport the irrational importance it takes to be a star. And that’s why grief stricken athletes falter in their return. Personally, I don’t think this the case for most, especially people like Tiger who viewed his family as a source of inspiration. What I found over the last couple of weeks, especially as I tried to train for an upcoming triathlon, is the true physical toll of grief. I found it as I cramped quickly during bike rides, or when I unnaturally lost my breath during training runs. And I found it when I couldn’t find the energy to head to the pool, much less get in. And as much as I try to find inspiration from my own grandmother, who was always one of my biggest fans as a college athlete and beyond, no amount of heart and soul can make me overcome my own physical boundaries. Yes, grief is exhausting. And so is sports, making the confluence of the two more than most can take.
That’s true even for someone as strong as Tiger Woods. Tiger reminded us through the errors of his own recent play, that he truly is only human, flesh and blood that, like his father Earl, has physical boundaries. And because of that, his performance this year at the U.S. Open, even as he missed the cut, was in many ways the brightest of his otherwise brilliant career.
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. Back to the Top
6/14/06: Soccer and Football
I first played soccer when I was in the 3rd grade, in a league where every team was named after a team from the NASL – or National American Soccer League. My team was named The Rowdies, a Tampa Bay franchise that long went the way of every other team in the NASL.
I kept playing until 7th grade, when I finally ran out of youth leagues to play in. And from that time in 3rd grade, through 7th grade, really up to this very day, I’ve heard one steady refrain from soccer fans in America. And that is that soccer will be America’s next big sport.
This argument always came with supporting evidence. It was all anecdotal, of course. Like how every eight year old in America plays soccer, way more than play football or baseball, games that would assuredly fall by the wayside when these kids grew up. Or maybe how foreign immigration would change the sports flavor of America’s melting pot. And now that the World Cup has once again begun its fervent run, these soccer loyalists have kick started their rhetoric, this time citing ESPN’s game coverage and a NIKE commercial campaign featuring the US squad as they take on the soccer playing world.
It all sounds very convincing, just like it did in 1980. Convincing, but simply wrong. Soccer, an amazing game and the focus of the sports world, is no closer now to our hearts and minds than it was 20 years ago. In all likelihood, this defining cultural characteristic is more truism than trend.
There are several reasons Americans support sports like football and basketball over the simpler and cleaner game of soccer. Some may have to do with our short attention spans and our thirst for high scores. Why else would we give six points for a touchdown? We have shot clocks and free throws and mandatory time outs. In America we like our sports as we like our food – quick and plentiful. Soccer is neither. Just labor over a zero/zero tie for two hours to confirm that. Just last weekend, Trinidad and Tobago shocked Sweden with a scoreless draw. Elated, Trinidad’s captain said that this was what football and dreams are all about. In America, we had a baseball all star game end in a tie two years ago, and that almost caused a congressional inquiry.
But our indifference towards the game is more than an indictment of American tastes, which do lean towards the quick and done. Hey, we love NASCAR, which is about as exciting as a rolling billboard on I-95. More than any issue of substance comes the American issue of ownership. Football, baseball, basketball, even lacrosse – these games are made in America. And when we play, we play against ourselves, minus the rare Canadian franchise. And after we play amongst ourselves, we eventually crown what we’ll call The World Champion. Who cares about Europe and South America and all that. Our fervor stays right here in the Continental 48. Look, it took Lance Armstrong for us even to notice the world’s greatest cycling race. You want us to watch soccer. Then get Lance on the field.
The US World Cup soccer team just lost its opener to the Czech Republic, and honestly, no one here really cares, not even all those kids who used to play soccer in 5th grade. In two weeks, the US team will play Ghana. I don’t think most Americans known what continent that’s in.
Heck, we can’t even call the sport by its proper name.
And so soccer will likely remain what its been for many years here in the US – a niche spectator sport for everyone besides 8 year old kids and their encouraging parents, maybe even a nice way to earn a college scholarship in the Northeast. But America’s next big sport? Can soccer win over America? Sound more like a dream to me. At best, I think soccer would be thrilled with a tie. But isn’t that what soccer and dreams are all about anyway?
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. Back to the Top
5/31/06: An American in Paris
Word is that Paris is lovely in the springtime. American tennis star Andy Roddick would hardly know. That because for the second consecutive year and the third time in six tries, Roddick ended his stay at the French Open in the first round. He’s never gone past the third round of this major, joining the long list of frustrated Americans who wilt on the slow, red clay of Roland Garros. In fact, most of America’s great tennis products have failed to master the French, including Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, neither of whom won a French Open title.
This year is shaping up much like the past several for the Stars and Stripes. After only the first round, America’s only distant hopes lie with 8th seeded James Blake. In all likelihood, American tennis fans will once again have no rooting interests during the tournament’s decisive second week. At the French Open, American tennis players are kind of like the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Kansas City Royals. They might start with high hopes, but no one’s buying playoff tickets anytime soon.
For Andy Roddick, this recurrent Parisian nightmare must be especially disturbing. Roddick at 24 has lived his life in speed play. He peaked at number one in the world in 2003 after winning the US Open, then experienced a steady decline towards his current and tenuous number five spot, where the rear view mirror may be more telling than the distant stars ahead. In fact, while Roddick pinpointed his efforts on beating the effortless Roger Federer, other Europeans have moved through Roddick’s vast blind spot. Stars like Rafael Nadal and David Nalbandian, both who have all of Roddick’s youth, but also much more complete tennis games – making the slow and revealing red clay less threatening to their dominance.
During his short comet ride, Roddick has brushed shoulders with more than a few American superstars, living a life that might make George Clooney jealous. He’s dated Mandy Moore, he’s endorsed every product from Rolex to American Express, and he was named one of People Magazine’s sexiest. He even hosted Saturday Night Live, a reward usually only granted to athletes named Jordan and Brady, not tennis players with a single Grand Slam victory. All of these great rewards likely make Paris that much harder to forget.
To improve his seemingly stagnant game, Roddick has started changing coaches about as often as Spinal Tap changed drummers. Right now, he’s working with his older brother, a former all-American at the University of Georgia. For the sake of family relations, we can only hope that blood is thicker than Bordeaux. The Roddick family and most American tennis fans are hoping the world’s hardest server returns to form with the more comforting grass and hard court seasons to come, where the game plays more like ping pong on ice.
But what if it doesn’t? What if Roddick never returns to his brilliant but brief days of old? What if the glory days stay just that, a common experience in the fragile world of world supremacy? What if Andy Roddick is more Michael Chang than Pete Sampras, a one time star with an unending anti-climax?
And therein is the true challenge of the professional athlete. Not just to be great for the moment, a solar eclipse of sorts, but to hold that rare stature over time. To hold it even as your life and your mind and your body continuously change, as a host of young and younger stars focus on your unwavering bulls eye.
Andy Roddick may again dominate tennis, even if he does never win the French Open. But then again, he may not, a reality that most courtside sports fans could never truly fathom in their own line of work. The bright life of a star athlete can be just as short as it is brilliant.
And unfortunately for Andy Roddick, short stays, like his at this year’s French Open, is something he’s become somewhat used to.
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. Back to the Top
5/24/06: Barbaro
I’m wearing two hats as I read this commentary about the race horse Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner who suffered a life threatening injury at last weekend’s Preakness Stakes. On the one hand, I’m an avid sports fan, someone who’s bet a few bucks on the occasional horse race. I even made it to the Preakness several years back, although Black-Eyed Susan’s and an infield that best resembled a frat house seem to cloud any memories of horse racing that day.
On the other hand, I’m a long time vegetarian who doesn’t wear leather. I have a dog and tend to think that we don’t treat animals the way a humane society should. I may not be an animal rights activist, but I often agree with those that are.
Now these two separate viewpoints can create some inconvenient dissonance when it comes to the games we like to watch and play. We throw around the pigskin in football. And baseballs were covered in horsehide before shifting to cowhide in the 1970’s. I even have a tough time finding a bike seat that’s not made from some time of animal skin.
For the most part, I’m able to ignore these inconsistencies in my own cognition. I can ig | |
