Episode 132: Mary Cain & Nike, an interview w/ Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz, and Matildas & Equal Pay
This week, Lindsay, Shireen, and Jessica talk about the Nationals visiting the White House [6:19] before diving in on runner Mary Cain’s New York Times op-ed about Nike, abuse, and gender. [23:05] Then Jessica interviews Diana Moskovitz, the investigative journalist (and BIAD patron!), who until very recently, worked at Deadspin. They talk about Diana’s career, how she ended up there, and the death of Deadspin, including the final day when Moskovitz was the last blogger standing. [41:33] Finally, the gang talks about the Matildas, the Australian Women’s Soccer/Football National Team, and equal pay. [52:42]
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [1:03:14] the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Oregon Women’s Basketball, [1:05:58] and what is good in our worlds.
Links
Like it or not, the Nationals knew what they were in for at the White House: https://theundefeated.com/features/like-it-or-not-the-nationals-knew-what-they-were-in-for-at-the-white-house/
I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/nike-running-mary-cain.html
Full Transcript: Mary Cain Slams Nike and Alberto Salazar For Her Treatment While Part of The Nike Oregon Project: https://www.letsrun.com/news/2019/11/full-transcript-mary-cain-slams-nike-and-alberto-salazar-for-her-treatment-while-part-of-the-nike-oregon-project/
Cain’s Abuse Allegations Against Salazar Cause More Upheaval in Track World: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/sports/mary-cain-nike-alberto-salazar.html
Sign up to Lindsay’s newsletter Power Plays! How Nike's abuse of female athletes was exposed
Elizabeth Weil, who wrote the NYT Mag piece Cain talks about in the video, tweeted a thread about red flags while working on the piece.
Shalane Flanagan Was Not Surprised by Alberto Salazar’s Ban: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/sports/shalane-flanagan-alberto-salazar.html
For Salazar Whistle-Blowers, a Long Wait for a Satisfying Outcome: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/sports/salazar-doping-nike-oregon-project.html
From June 2018(!) ‘It cannot be ignored’: Runners spread awareness about eating disorders in their sport: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/it-cannot-be-ignored-runners-spread-awareness-about-eating-disorders-in-their-sport/2018/06/04/1b80dfe8-5de5-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html
Australian Women and Men’s Soccer Teams Reach Deal to Close Pay Gap: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/sports/soccer/australia-soccer-matildas-equal-pay.html
Matildas’ equal pay deal is part of a global shift recognising value of women in sport: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/nov/06/matildas-equal-pay-deal-is-part-of-a-global-shift-recognising-value-of-women-in-sport
Athlete in sexual assault case picked to coach women: https://gatehousenews.com/youngstown/
Don Cherry sparks online backlash for comments on immigrants, Remembrance Day: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl/don-cherry-sparks-online-backlash-1.5354835
Coloradan Gazella Bensreiti Wants Change After Hijab Discrimination At Pepsi Center: https://denver.cbslocal.com/2019/11/13/gazella-bensreiti-hijab-discrimination/
Blazers’ Enes Kanter calls on Nuggets to “take control of your fans”: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/05/02/enes-kanter-nuggets-control-fans/
Rutgers softball players say they were physically, emotionally abused by wife-husband coaching team and school did nothing: https://www.nj.com/rutgers/2019/10/rutgers-softball-players-say-they-were-physically-emotionally-abused-by-wife-husband-coaching-team-and-school-did-nothing.html
NWSL approves $300,000 per team in allocation money, raises salaries league-wide: https://equalizersoccer.com/2019/11/01/nwsl-approves-300000-per-team-in-allocation-money-raises-salaries-league-minimum-maximum-cap-housing-standards/
236,000 cricket fans in Australia watched Ellyse Perry and Alyssa Healy record 199 run stand with the Sydney Sixers against the Melbourne Stars, ratings up 25% this year: https://au.sports.yahoo.com/wbbl-stand-alone-early-winner-ca-163237344--spt.html
Record crowd sees England's women beaten by Germany at Wembley: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/09/football/football-england-germany-record-crowd-spt-intl/index.html
15-year-old Olivia Smith makes history as youngest to play for Canadian women's soccer team: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/soccer/olivia-smith-china-four-nations-tournament-youngest-player-1.5351417
Puma keeps helping Israel sports-wash its human rights abuses: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/puma-helping-israel-sports-wash-human-rights-abuses-191025123042055.html
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Jessica Luther, freelance journalist and author in Austin, Texas. On today’s show I’m joined by Shireen Ahmed, a writer, public speaker – TEDx speaker in fact, sports activist and our favorite foodie. She’s in Toronto. And Lindsay Gibbs, reporter, author and the brilliant mind behind behind the gender and sports newsletter Power Plays. Sign up at powerplays.news. Before we dive into our content, we want to thank our patrons whose support this podcast through our ongoing Patreon campaign make Burn It All Down possible. Thank you. If you’d like to become a patron it’s easy: go to patreon.com/burnitalldown. For as little as $2 per month you can access exclusives like extra Patreon-only segments or our monthly behind the scenes vlog.
On today’s show we’re going to talk about running, abuse, Nike, and gender, among other things after this week’s powerful New York Times op ed by runner Mary Cain. Then I interview a favorite of the show and, as you’ll hear, a patron! Journalist Diana Moskovitz who was at Deadspin until G/O Media tanked the site. We talk about Diana’s career at Deadspin and how it all ended. And a note: this is a severely condensed version of our chat! The full length interview will be posted later this week on our Patreon. Finally, we’re going to dive into something more positive: the Matildas, the Australian women’s soccer team getting their equal due. We’ll cap off today’s show by burning things that deserve to be burned, doing shoutouts to women who deserve shoutouts, and telling you what is good in our world.
But first, we had yet another White House visit by a sports team this week, and I think it’s a fair assessment to say it wasn’t great. So, the Nationals visited Trump, and it was gross. I’m not even sure where to begin with this…I thought Clinton Yates did a good write up at The Undefeated and one of the things that he noted was how the Nats have red hats, and so does Trump, and so it just kind of looked like a big Trump rally. Just even that basic fact is so, ew. What did you guys think about what you saw?
Shireen: I’m mad at Kurt Suzuki. I’m just gonna start there.
Jessica: The catcher.
Shireen: I just, he’s like…
Lindsay: He had a Titanic moment with the president…
Shireen: Yes! And he’s basically…
Lindsay: The “I’m the king of the world” moment.
Jessica: Oh my gosh.
Shireen: I mean, in Clinton’s article he quotes Suzuki saying, “Everybody makes everything political. It was about our team winning the World Series.” You’re at the fucking White House, like what do you mean it’s not political?
Jessica: What was he wearing? What was Kurt Suzuki wearing on his fucking head?
Shireen: He was wearing a MAGA hat. A red MAGA hat.
Jessica: It is political, Kurt!
Shireen: Yes. The thing is…
Jessica: And then Trump hugged him from behind while Suzuki threw his arms out wide-
Shireen: Gross.
Jessica: -as Lindsay was saying. It’s gross, yeah.
Lindsay: And then [Trump] cupped him, a little bit?
Shireen. Gross. Oh my god. Optics I do not need. I wanted to just sort of-
Jessica: I cant believe you just said cupped!
Lindsay: I’m sorry, but I guess for the breast, like in the breast area…
Jessica: Shireen, sorry.
Shireen: No, I wanted to just draw attention to something that our friends Saucy Rockets, who have this great podcast actually, pointed out they are of East Asian descent and talked about that conflict with Kurt Suzuki being of Asian descent from Hawaii, just talked about how sad it was that this was the case, and this is something in communities of immigrant descent that we see, that you get this professional economic stability and then you sort of dismiss and ignore issues in those communities, and it’s disheartening to see because those people are used as shields from white supremacists, and they uphold white supremacy.
Jessica: Literally. Yeah.
Shireen: And they just say like “Well, this guy thought it was okay and he’s a person of color so there you go.” It doesn’t work like that. Ugh.
Jessica: Lindsay, as our resident DC-er…I don’t even know what you call DC people. DCer is what I’m going with right now?
Shireen: Washingtoners?
Lindsay: I don’t wanna have this conversation. No, but you know it’s something you were saying about the hats because it’s an ongoing joke, I guess…
Jessica: That you can’t pick them out of a crowd?
Lindsay: When you’re walking around DC you see all these red hats and you don’t know if it’s a Nats fan or a Trump fan and, of course, as they were going through their playoff series run I kept seeing more and more red hats in DC…Which, you don’t see many of them in DC actually, you don’t see many MAGA hats in DC because DC is very, very anti-Trump. And so the hat thing is real.
I think that it’s just disappointing like the Nats team had so much goodwill, the fans had booed Trump when he showed up at the game, and just for them to so brazenly embrace this moment and cozy up to power in this way was disgusting. And I just want to give a shoutout to Sean Doolittle and the other Nats who didn’t go because I’m grateful for that, especially Doolittle who’s very thoughtful in the stand that he took.
Jessica: Yeah. That’s what I was gonna say too was that there was a handful of them, and I just want to name some of them here: Anthony Rendon, Javy Guerra, Joe Ross, Wander Suero, Wilmer Difo, Michael A Taylor, Victor Robles, Roenis Elías, Raudy Read and Tres Barrera. And of course Doolittle for how vocal he was about this. Okay well, now that we’ve started on a high note let’s move onto the show.
Alright Lindsay, do you want to get us started on Mary Cain, Nike’s Oregon Project and abuse in sport?
Lindsay: Whew. Sure.
Jessica: Yeah, I know.
Lindsay: A little light subject for this morning. So, Mary Cain seemed to be a once in a generation talent, just smashing records as a teenager, and when she was seventeen she decided to go pro and move to Oregon to work with Nike’s Oregon Project which is one of the most prominent running training groups in the world. And earlier this week, in the New York Times, Cain came forward with an op ed titled I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike. This was a really devastating look at how her career was destroyed by Nike’s Oregon Project which was not just a male-dominated system but as she says in the piece, it was a system created by men, for men. One of the quotes from the video says “I joined Nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete ever. Instead I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed coach Alberto Salazar and endorsed by Nike. When she first arrived at Nike’s Oregon Project, Salazar and his team, completely full of men, told her that in order to be faster she had to get thinner and thinner and thinner.
The program didn’t have a certified sports psychologist, it didn’t have a certified nutritionist, it just had these men picking an arbitrary number and telling her that if she didn’t meet that number on the scale she was a failure. She deprived herself of nutrients so much in order to try to hit that number on the scale that she didn’t have her period for three years. Her bones became brittle due to lack of estrogen and she broke five bones. She had suicidal thoughts, she openly cut herself, nobody stepped in to help, and Salazar would just continue to berate her in public about her poor performances and weight. The quote I’ll think about for a while is her saying, “I wasn’t even trying to make the Olympics anymore. I was just trying to survive.”
So, this is what this Oregon Project did to a generational female athlete and it’s been really harrowing to read other female runners come forward with their stories that are very similar. I did a little bit of stuff behind the scenes and how the story came to be that I want to touch on in a minute, but I think first let’s just start…What did you guys think about this story when it came out, what was your reaction?
Jessica: Yeah, I mean it’s very sad and I think it’s interesting that Nike— sorry, the New York Times chose a video op ed, because you can really hear her voice and you see her saying these things. One of the things that really struck me about this is arbitrary it is, I think that’s a word that she even uses, arbitrary weight, they’re just kind of guessing, and they ruin her life over this?
I also kept thinking about the idea of what is healthy in sport, and how we are often looking at elite athletes and the people who coach them as experts on health, and I don’t feel that most elites athletes are ‘healthy’ in the way we’re imagining that word, defining that word. They do all kinds of terrible things to their bodies in order to be the best, that’s something that they do. And how all of that gets used then against athletes and so in this case, in this abuse system run by Salazar, this was obviously used against Cain in a really terrible way. I don’t know. I don’t have a good formulated thought there but it’s something I keep coming back to. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, I mean one of the things that I read was that, I was in tears actually when I saw the video, was just that it reminded me of what we talked about on the show before, we talked about Lindsey Horan being criticized so fiercely when she was in France at PSG, Paris Saint-Germain, she was playing there and how she was criticized for her body weight and I think the thing that’s really important for men to understand is women’s bodies don’t always look the same! And what is required for that athlete is such an individual thing. I was really struck while reading this that they didn’t have a holistic nutritionist, a nutritionist or dieticians working with them. How is this a top level program if you don’t have these things that literally are needed?
This is just an aside but about ten years ago I got a trainer to help me in the gym, and she by training was a holistic nutritionist and completely understood what I needed because what I needed wasn’t the same as the next person she was working with. This is so imperative, and I’m sitting here, they’re expected to compete at elite levels but not given the support system, and this particular program has so many holes in it that it was just appalling to me. And I thought about her psychological torture, of what she endured, and being isolated from her family. I was so happy later in the piece where she told her parents, who had no idea, and were like, “You’re on the first flight home.” Basically get the fuck out of there. And how she was isolated from them and the shame that’s being berated in public, it’s literally enduring torture and abuse. I just…She was so young.
Jessica: Yeah.
Shireen: It just was so hard for me. And even if she wasn’t young, the response was…And we posted this while we were prepping for this, Amy Yoder Begley replied to Mary Cain and I’ll quote this, this was a tweet: “After placing 6th in the 10,000m at the 2011 USATF championships, I was kicked out of the Oregon Project. I was told I was too fat and ‘had the biggest butt on the starting line.’ This brings those painful memories back.”
How is this acceptable? How is this okay? It just puts such a hole in my heart. And how many of these happen all over sports in different places? How many young people are being subject to this type of abuse?
Jessica: Yeah. And I did want to mention, there was a runner named Kara Goucher, she was a marathoner in Team USA in London 2012. She actually blew the whistle in 2011, so these things are longstanding, the knowledge about what was going on. She went to the FBI and the USADA way back then, and she was someone who had already whistleblown at that point. So people knew that this was going on and Nike tried to respond…Their response was to play dumb, to act like, “Well, Mary never told us any of this, so this is brand new to us.” And it wasn’t brand new to anyone that was close is what it looks like from everything we know.
Lindsay, you mentioned I think it was Friday’s Power Plays, again, Powerplays.news. Sign up everybody. And you talked to the woman behind the New York Times op ed of Mary Cain, can you tell us a little bit about behind the scenes?
Lindsay: Yeah, so one of the things that really struck me when I was watching this was it did seem like this story was right in front of everyone’s face. This was a very, very prominent runner, right? I know the running community can be an obscurity but Mary Cain was not, right? And then she joined the most covered, most well known in the United States running program, and then disappeared, right? And didn’t have any of the results to back it up, and I kind of just kept thinking about why are we just hearing about this now, and that really stuck with me.
So I reached out to Lindsay Crouse who’s a New York Times journalist, who I’ve got to say, she works for the New York Times opinion desk but she works for their op ed docs series, so this isn’t ever her job, but she is an avid runner and a phenomenal marathoner, I think she’s close to like a three hour marathon. I can’t even…Go Lindsay, go Lindsay. But I noticed her name because she had been the author and producer that the New York Times did earlier on maternity rights and running. So when Allyson Felix came forward and talked about how Nike’s contract was so horrible for pregnancy and for women, that was Lindsay’s work as well.
So I reached out to her and it was so powerful to hear her talk and it’s a big lesson on why it’s important to have diversity in media. That sounds like oversimplifying things, but she’s a female runner herself who works in sports journalism and she kept listening to these interviews with Alysia Montaño and Allyson Felix and she said she would hear what she called ‘coded words’ for when they would talk about their comebacks or pregnancy that alluded to the fact that Nike was not very supportive but didn’t come right out and say it, but it was like they were almost asking for someone to ask the question. And so she did it, she called up Alysia Montaño who is the woman who we would all see…She competed at eight months pregnant and was lifted up as this hero of what the female body is capable of, but of course there’s more to that story and Lindsay’s reporting and producing found out that the reason she was doing that was because she was so afraid she was going to lose sponsors right? It was for her contracts, it wasn’t just to inspire people, that there was a real ugliness behind that powerful image.
So that came out, and after Alysia’s piece came out Allyson Felix decided to come out with her story, and Lindsay told me that Allyson had actually been an anonymous source on her piece about Alysia, and then once that got a good reception Allyson came forward. And then it was Mary Cain seeing Allyson’s story reach out to Lindsay to come forward. It just becomes this domino effect and it just started because one woman, a reporter, asked a question that was right in front of the faces of everybody but nobody else thought to ask. And one of the most powerful quotes, and I know Jess, you were bringing this up because this impacts a lot of our work, but I just want to read you this quote from Lindsay Crouse who said, “I think what’s really important to note about all these stories is that nothing is illegal. Nothing is actually fundamentally wrong, nobody is breaking any rules because the rules are set up to not support the women they are hurting.” So if you’re just looking for what’s illegal, you’re going to miss the fact that these systems are set up to punish women.
Shireen: Yeah. That’s a good point.
Jessica: Shireen?
Shireen: That’s what struck me, Linds, in your newsletter, the one that struck me the most is that it’s the fucking systems that are built up this way and I just really want to take a second to piggyback off what you were saying about Lindsay Crouse, I saw people thanking her and saying thank you for creating this place to talk about this where it’s virtually nonexistent in this field, in this area of sport. And that really stuck with me, that the work that women and nonbinary folk do, that people of color do in sports media, and I know I harp on this always and I will always harp on this, that that’s why these people are needed to do this work. Because traditional sports mainstream media just doesn’t do it. So hijab tip to Lindsay Crouse because that was so poignant.
Jessica: The last thing I want to talk about was, there’s one other abuse dynamic that I just want to bring out. So Nike responded to Cain’s video, and one of the things they chose to say in that response was that Mary Cain had reached out to try to join back to Oregon Project as late as April of this year, which when I first saw that I thought it was a really mean point to make. And Mary took to Twitter and she did a thread responding directly to that one sentence in the Nike statement and she said, “I wanted closure, wanted an apology for never helping me when I was cutting, and in my own, sad, never-fully healed heart, wanted Alberto to still take me back. I still loved him. Because when we let people emotionally break us, we crave more than anything their very approval.” She goes on in the thread to say that he wasn’t very receptive to her, and then when the USADA report finally revealed to her that this was not her, this was something bigger than her and that the system itself was not okay. I just want to point out how shitty it is for victims to have to answer for the choices they make in these abusive systems that give them no good choices and that make all of their choices look bad. And that Nike chose in this moment to pick on that particular point in order to try to continue to cover up a thing that everyone has known about for almost a decade, I just thought that that was…I just wanted to draw attention to that because it was terrible. Lindsay, do you want to finish us off here?
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean that was disgusting, it was a victim blaming statement and it showed that Nike, who as we’ve discussed likes to make these empowering commercials about female athletes, behind the scenes is not practicing what they preach. It’s important to note that the Nike Oregon Project has been kind of dismantled due to anti-doping allegations. Salazar has been suspended for four years, but none of this has to do with Mary Cain’s story, which wasn’t about the doping violations, it’s about the abuse. And Mary Cain in the video, she looked at the camera and she said I’m really afraid that what they’re going to do is they’re going to basically keep all of Salazar’s cohorts in place, rebrand this a little bit, and bring it back without any systemic changes.
And at the end of the day everything needs to change, and she said we need more women in power. They’re not acknowledging that this is a systemic crisis in women’s sports and at Nike in which young girls’ bodies are being ruined by an emotionally and physically abusive system that needs to change. And Lindsay Crouse, when I spoke to her, she said about what needs to change- I think this is Lindsay Crouse’s quote, “I think the people charged with telling our stories need to change, because they’re the ones that are shaping national dynamics and the national dialogue. I was a history major at college and one of the best lessons they told you is that so much of history is subjective. You’re told what was important by the people who decided it was important. I think sports or anything in journalism is exactly the same.
Jessica: Up next, my interview with journalist Diana Moskovitz. And a reminder, this is just one part of our longer chat. The full interview will be up later this week via our Patreon.
Hello flamethrowers, Jessica here. Today I’m thrilled to be joined by the one and only, one of my journalism heroes, Diana Moskovitz, whose last journalism home was Deadspin, rest in peace, where she spent I believe five years editing and writing incisive and necessary investigative cultural and commentary pieces about sports. Thanks for being here, Diana.
Diana: Thank you for having me! Also, as a Patreon, I feel like I have to say please be a patron! No one has any excuses if I am, just saying, listeners! You can do it for as little as a dollar a month, I believe. You should do it.
Jessica: Yes! Listen to Diana Moskovitz. We’re so happy you’re here! So, I want to start where I like to start, which is at your beginning, before jumping into the story at hand. So, what is your background in journalism before you actually went to Deadspin?
Diana: Yeah, so my background in journalism is nothing like Deadspin. I always tell people I could not have envisioned working at Deadspin when I graduated college because it did not even exist. I graduated in 2003, University of Florida, and thought I was going to do like what all my professors said you were supposed to do: you got a job at a little newspaper, and then you got a job at a medium newspaper, and if you were one of the really really lucky ones you got a job at one of the biggest newspapers. Right?
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: I thought that’s what I was going to do. That’s what they all told me you were supposed to do. So when I graduated I got a job at the newspapers, that are still there although the name has since changed, because they were sold, as happens in this industry!
Jessica: Of course.
Diana: At the time it was Scripp’s Treasure Coast Newspapers. I was covering the St. Lucie County Commission. For the sports people out there, you probably know Port St. Lucie, it’s where the Mets do spring training, a little farther north of Vero Beach where the Dodgers have spring training. That neck of the woods. I was there for about a year, wrote a lot about growth, development. Two hurricanes hit that area, it was 2004, Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne. Then, again just doing what you’re supposed to do, went to the Miami Herald. I love that paper, grew up in south Florida. When I got there I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life there. Because why wouldn’t you? It was the Miami Herald!
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: I ended up being there for about seven and a half years, five covering Broward County, another two, two and a half down in Miami-Dade, mostly doing police reporting, courts, crime. Lots of stories about the worst days of people’s lives is kind of the best way I can put it. More mothers in mourning than probably a person should…frankly, I look back and I wonder about my mental health sometimes if I’m being honest.
Yeah, so I did that and really burned out. The Herald had been bought by McClatchy, layoff after layoff after layoff, and I was starting to apply for journalism jobs again. And two places actually got back to me, one was LA Weekly, under its previous ownership. This was back…
Jessica: Also rest in peace, isn’t it?
Diana: Right! Oh. So they offered me a freelance assignment but I couldn’t do it at the time because it conflicted with some tutoring I was doing with students. And then NFL Media, shoutout to my old boss Justin Hathaway.
Jessica: Oh that’s right, I forgot about that!
Diana: He took a flyer on me. Yeah, I always have to shout out Justin Hathaway. He swears, he’s like “It was so obvious I should’ve hired you,” but I think he took a flyer on me. I had a very different background than most people at NFL Media, you know.
Jessica: And so what were you doing, what did you do at NFL Media?
Diana: My official title was that I was an online producer, basically.
Jessica: Okay.
Diana: So our job was, there were folks who were writing the copy and my job was to grab it and to copy edit it, to punch up the headline, make it more SEO-friendly, add art, add video.
Jessica: And then it would go up at NFL.com?
Diana: Yes. It also morphed a little bit because I realize that I ended up doing some things that not necessarily all of the other online producers would do, because of my background. So I did help out a lot with the reporting aspect, because I found out later that part of the reason I got brought on was when players got in trouble or when owners got in trouble, I was there when Jim Irsay got arrested. They’re in a really tough spot because they’re essentially reporting on themselves, right?
Jessica: Right.
Diana: They have to be very careful, very diligent and because of my background doing police reporting I really knew how to do that type of reporting. Do it in a way where…it’s going to be buttoned up in a certain way.
Jessica: And so when did you make the jump to Deadspin? And how did you end up there?
Diana: I had to leave NFL Media because I was a seasonal employee and if I’d stayed any longer my understanding was that they’d have to give me health insurance.
Jessica: Oh no!
Diana: I know! I always tell people after working with this kind of NFL mentality of treating people like they’re disposable, it wasn’t just for the players!
Jessica: Yeah, yeah.
Diana: It permeates that institution. Sure. And so I applied for a full time job there, didn’t get it, they said I could come back as a seasonal employee again, but some time had to pass because again, Obamacare, health insurance. So I was at home, I was unemployed and doing what I like to say every good unemployed journalist does which is read Romenesko…
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: It doesn’t exist anymore! But it was a website where all the journalism news was. And someone at the time, I don’t remember who, but it was a woman and she ran a Tumblr. And every, I think it was every day or every other day, she would call out an organization that did not have any women on its masthead. This kept her very busy, as you can imagine.
Jessica: Uh huh. Sure.
Diana: Right! And so one day she did Deadspin and then it got written up somewhere, and then that link made it to Romenesko, and I’m reading it, and I just got so mad. They’re giving all their “reasons” quote unquote why, and I just remember thinking why haven’t you asked me? Where’s my invitation!
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: Where’s my tryout, Tommy Craggs!
Jessica: Yeah!
Diana: And I got really mad! I was really upset with them because I actually tried to pitch them at one point. I was really really mad. And so I just wrote an email, and I still remember the subject line, it was “Female writer/editor over here!” Exclamation point.
Jessica: That’s amazing.
Diana: I really cut to the chase about my qualifications! I still have it. I pull it up probably pull it up once or twice a year because people think I’m kidding. Oh no, I knew what my qualifications were.
Jessica: Wow. Wow! So that’s how you got the job there?
Diana: Yeah! And you know, it’s funny because on the one hand I was so mad at Tommy Craggs, but then to Tommy Craggs’ credit he receives this email from me which is, shall we say, bold. I just attached my resume. I’m like “Here’s everything I can do. This is why should hire me. Resume attached.” To his credit, he got back to me and he was like “Okay, yeah, let’s talk.” He asked me to write a memo about Deadspin, he was like “This will be confidential. Just read the site, tell me what you think we’re doing great, tell me what you think we’re bad at, tell me what you think we should be doing.” So I did. From there, yeah, we talked. He had me do a couple…this was back when just about everyone did these for Gawker media, I did a tryout. I think I did a Sunday shift, and then I did a night shift, and then they basically just had me around for a monthlong trial, Monday though Friday. And at the end,
Jessica: You passed.
Diana: I did. I passed.
Jessica: So you come in, you’re the only woman, as you just said that’s how you got in the door. And Deadspin is so famous…one of the things that people have been lamenting as part of the death of Deadspin is the voice that is going to be lost, right? And so you not only came into this atmosphere, or this environment, where you’re the only woman in sort of a bro-y space, but also adopting the voice of Deadspin, what was that transition like for you?
Diana: You know, in some ways I got lucky in that I actually…It’s kind of a weird thing, I was the only woman who was quote unquote “full time staff” but there was was another woman there!
Jessica: Okay.
Diana: Jolie Kerr, because she was doing Ask A Clean Person, and I always have to shout her out because she was like my life raft, honestly.
Jessica: Sure.
Diana: Because sometimes you just want to talk about your bra!
Jessica: Yeah. Yes.
Diana: She definitely helped me out at first and I just remember thinking, “I have to become her friend. We have to form an alliance somehow!”
Jessica: Yeah! Yeah, of course.
Diana: And also, you are so cool! She had a book coming out and I just thought she was the coolest person, you know. And she’s also turned out to be an amazing friend. So that was really really helpful. But it was still…again, we’re talking about like, two. Not exactly…
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: You know. And that means that at any given moment either one of us could be like, the only one on Slack, or both of us are busy with other things, there’s like no women there.
Jessica: Yeah.
Diana: You know what’s funny is…So when I got hired, Tommy Craggs and Tim Marchman, they only really gave me one mandate. And first of all it was funny, because I was very self-conscious about the fact that I was not able to blog as much or as fast as Barry and Samer, Tom Ley…
Jessica: Sure.
Diana: Early on Tommy Craggs told me “Don’t try to keep up with them, it’s a fool’s errand.” But also, he’s like that’s not why I hired you. That’s not what you’re going to be best at. All he wanted from me was to do every single FOIA request, like find them, think of them…If someone else thought of one they’d actually just give it to me to do. I basically did most of the site’s FOIA requests for probably about a year or two.
Jessica: Okay.
Diana: Because they really wanted to break news but also realized that we don’t have budget or resources like the New York Times or the Washington Post. I always called them the low hanging fruit, most sports reporters weren’t doing nearly the FOIA requests that they probably should be doing, because they aren’t trained to think in that way, maybe they don’t have the time, or they still have to write all those gamers. So it was kind of low hanging fruit to break news on the site. So that was my big mission, FOIA everything. From the beginning I was just doing blogs that I thought were blogs and I don’t know how else to explain it except they so clearly seemed like news to me. You know? Where it was like, duh, this is a blog. Duh duh duh. And then I would usually reach out to someone else to be like hey, is there a way to do this…just to make sure it’s in the Deadspin tone of things.
Jessica: Oh, okay.
Diana: They would say oh, yeah of course. To their credit no one ever told me that’s not a Deadspin blog. And so that’s the thing, people think I had this plan but I was just no, these are blogs that are worth doing, and I’m just going to do them. And again to the credit of the leadership there, no one told me to stop.
Jessica: And let’s talk about the end, because that’s probably what a lot of people are here for. So one of the things about the end of Deadspin as we know it: you turned in your two weeks notice to Deadspin before everything actually blew up, and so why did you decide even before Barry got fired and sort of all the stuff that happened after that, why did you decide to leave?
Diana: Because things were just getting so bad, honestly.
Jessica: Like you could tell? You were a crystal ball.
Diana: Yeah, like the writing was on the wall and I think that was something that we’re all still talking about because…And I think that’s come out in the press coverage, which is good because you worry that people were gonna see what happened and just be like, “Oh, they’re just being spoiled brats.” But I think people have been perceptive enough that they realize, “No, things were getting bad for a while…”
Jessica: So one of the things that happened was you gave your two weeks notice, so you ended up the last one in the end, you still had the keys to the place on the final Friday whereas everyone else quit! And they were gone, and so the last bit of real stuff on Deadspin was you, in the end. What was that last day like for you?
Diana: So on Friday I just woke up, just starting doing it. I was…
Jessica: At what point did you figure out they were not gonna let you…I mean, you were worried that they were going to remove your access.
Diana: At first I thought I had all day! I was just like la la la la la…They hadn’t been messing with anyone’s blogs on Wednesday or Thursday. And even though there’s clearly blogs from Wednesday and Thursday that if you read them it’s people talking about…like, not veiled what’s going on. So I thought I’d be fine. And then about, I started…Actually again shoutout to Jolie Kerr who let me crash with her at the last minute, because I started out at Deadspin becoming her friend and here she is at the end putting a roof over my head. So I started out at her place, and she had work to do so I just went to a Starbucks that was down the corner and like, la la la la la! You know, doo too doo too doo [singing]. I saw, this is my word that I’ve been using for it, which is I’ve basically been calling it the scab content, which is someone who was…
Jessica: Right.
Diana: And I could see that in the system and I was like, ohhhh no. I was like, shoot. So then I was like “I have to get things up a lot faster” because there’s no point of having this, and then having that…Samer pointed out, he’s like “You’ve got to do it all now because otherwise it’s not going to work.” I was like shoot, that’s right. So I just started going a lot faster. Especially after I published the McKenna blog, that was one where I thought “I am not long for this Kinja world.” The others are kind of funny, like are you really going to get that mad at A Bear Friday For The Road? But with McKenna, I thought “I am not long for this world. And I can see that coming.” Yeah, that just cut my Kinja access. OKAY! I just closed my laptop and went for a walk.
Jessica: So one day someone’s going to write a book about this moment in journalism, sports journalism, maybe out Deadspin in particular, I don’t know. Where do you see…Where does Deadspin fit in sports media, or journalism in general, what was its role that it played, do you think? When you’re looking back on it.
Diana: You know, I feel like I was always a huge believer in that tagline…It’s funny how true and perfect it ended up being, even if it was probably written with very little thought, which was ‘Sports news without access, favor or discretion.’ To me, I always thought that was the secret sauce. I remember, every time if I had a big story people would ask me about the blowback, and I would say, “What blowback? What are the Cowboys gonna do, take away my non-existent Cowboys press credential?”
Jessica: Yeah! Yes.
Diana: You know? What’s the IOC gonna do, take away my non-existent Olympic credentials?
Jessica: Right, there’s no risk in that way.
Diana: Right!
Jessica: Which is so freeing, which is so freeing. Sports media is so access journalism, in so many ways.
Diana: You know, what was also special at least for me was that it was a place where, I think, you could…Even with those first blogs where I was just like, “I don’t know, they look like blogs to me.” To the credit of Deadspin, how many places just let you say like, “Hm, looks like news to me!” and go “Okay!”
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah.
Diana: It really let people pursue what they wanted to pursue, even if it was strange or different, or weird or sad, in my case. I don’t know, at it’s best I feel like it was about punching up and distrusting authority. And this is something that someone else said that I’m gonna steal, where the ethos was the boss sucks.
Jessica: Yeah, I think last week we talked about ‘fuck the bosses.’ That Deadspin was very…
Diana: Yeah! It was very…
Jessica: You don’t want to be the boss, you were like fuck the bosses. But I do feel like one thing we are gonna lose, of the many things that we will lose, one thing will be the media watchdog-
Diana: Yeah…
Jessica: -that you guys did that was so important. Because it really did push the media in a certain direction. And it would be like the media watchdog stuff, and then you would back that up by doing really good reporting, like you were doing, right?
Diana: Yeah! And it’s funny because there’s of course your ego, where you’re like “Oh, I did that first! Where’s my credit!” And, “Where’s my check for a million dollars!” For many reasons, where are all our checks for a million dollars.
Jessica: Yes.
Diana: But the example I give is the recent news with what’s going on with the NCAA, the #1 draft picks potentially in the NBA and NFL drafts are now both facing trouble from the NCAA for just the usual stupid reasons. And everyone’s yelling and screaming and saying this is ridiculous, and calling for death to the NCAA, and so I feel like this shows it works. You know? These ideas that started out on Deadspin seeming kind of weird and strange and niche-y are now mainstream. I try to think about the difference it made because that to me, in some weird way, almost makes it feel immortal to me.
Jessica: Well let me ask one final question, what is next for you?
Diana: Oh my god. I have no idea. I have not even answered all my emails yet. Really sorry to people who’ve emailed me nice things, because I normally really try to get back to people who write nice things but it’s just because that happened, and so…
Jessica: So first is answer emails.
Diana: Right. So first is answer all these emails, then I don’t know. I still like, I still think I’ve got a couple…Part of me wants to be like “I’ve still got this!” I can still do reporting, but I don’t know. I certainly can’t make a decision now because I haven’t decompressed and processed everything that has happened to me in the last two weeks.
Jessica: Yeah, of course.
Diana: I have no idea. My life goal right now is to get through the holidays. I’m going home in a couple of weeks for Thanksgiving!
Jessica: Fair, fair. Yeah.
Diana: I’m just figuring it out.
Jessica: Any place that gets you will be lucky to scoop you up, Diana. Thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down. Thank you so much for all the work you have done, and we will all be watching to see where you land next.
Diana: Oh, thank you! And thank you to the whole crew of Burn It All Down! I’m a patron, did I mention that guys? You should be a patron!
Jessica: Thank you Diana!
Diana: Thank you.
Jessica: Shireen. Tell us about the Matildas.
Shireen: Would love to. So, really happy. For those of you who have not heard, the Matildas are the Australian women’s football team, that’s their name. And they actually had negotiated with the Football Federation of Australia, and they’ve agreed to equal pay. Now, they will be paid on the same scale, okay? So that doesn’t necessarily mean equal pay exactly. Because the men will continue to earn more due to greater prize money, typically, in their tournaments. So I think that’s important to say, they will not be getting equal amounts of money, but they will be paid on the same scale. So there’s just that difference.
This is a huge thing, and I think it’s really, it’s positive in many ways because currently in the entire world there’s only two other countries, New Zealand and Norway, that do place male and female players on the same pay scale. And we know that this is something that the US women’s team is fighting for, and that because of this activism, this type of work that’s being done by the athletes and the conversations that are happening. Now this is not an easy thing. You would think that like “the rise of women’s football…” but I don’t think it’s this ‘rise’ of women’s football, I think women’s football has always been there but it’s this suppression of it.
So now the numbers are in, over a billion people watched the Women’s World Cup. We see this, there is a place for this, and in Australia particularly there’s a huge amount of support of the Australian women’s national team. And we see this. We see their domestic league, one of their greatest players Sam Kerr with the Chicago Red Stars who were runners up in the NWSL Championship, they lost to the North Carolina Courage. They’re very vocal about this and I think that this is something that other countries and federations should pay attention to and learn from.
While, and this bears repeating, they won’t get equal amounts of money, they have an opportunity now to earn more and top female players of that country will see a huge boost in their actual paychecks. So it’s something, and I think this is in Australian dollars, the information I’m getting is from a BBC article on this. They can see a significant boost, which is about $100,000 AUD. That is significant. It’s the difference between some of these players having second jobs which is what a lot of professional players do on the national level.
These are ramifications of many things, this is also outside their opportunity to be sponsored or be sponsored from corporations that really want to have them as role models and the face of marketing. I think this is a really good thing. And I know you all are thinking, well wait a minute, Australia didn’t do that great in the Women’s World Cup. No they didn’t, however it was a transitional year for their team, their coach was out, there was a lot of discord in the FFA. And I think the fact that the team is still pushing and moving forward is a really positive thing. I’m not the kind of person that things the results of a team should reflect what they’re paid because if you don’t invest in something it cannot get better. This is a very simple thing to understand, that if you don’t invest in something…
Jessica: So you say!
Shireen: Well, for me it’s a simple thing. But I’m glad it’s happening, it shows opportunities for progress for the women. Respect to all the women that came before them, Moya Dodd has been very vocal, she’s been one of the women that’s been advocating, not just in Australia but in the AFC and to FIFA about the importance of this. So I’m so happy that this is coming back. And you know, cheers to the Matildas.
Jessica: Yeah. I love all these stories, to have a nice thing to read about. And Australia is the same sort of story that we see anywhere, I mean the team went on a strike in 2015. They’ve been advocating for themselves and loudly so. When they did that strike in 2015 I think they were going to do a friendly with the USA which was going to be a big deal, and it had to be cancelled because they were not going to participate. And at the time they were advocating for equal pay.
And it matters to me in sort of the larger cultural scale; there was a Guardian piece from 2019, so just a couple of months ago, about how the national gender pay gap in Australia is stable at 14%, with men making $41 more per week than women throughout the country, right. And so I know that the soccer team getting more money doesn’t mean necessarily that other women are getting more money, but just the fact that they’re leading in their society…We have so many parallels with here in the US, and we’ve talked on this program just over and over again about women around the world, especially in soccer. I keep thinking about the Chilean women that Brenda is always telling us about, and the work that they’re doing; the Nigerian women continue to protest and sit in, in order to get their paychecks. And we’re just seeing it in so many places and it’s thrilling. Lindsay, I think you were going to tell us a little more about the US women and where they are in their equal pay fight?
Lindsay: Yeah, so good news this week, they got granted class-action status, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to win the whole thing, but it does cite that the judge is “skeptically” looking at some of US Soccer’s arguments, I believe. Which is, we can say, the right way to approach that…Not that I am biased in any way. But yeah, I think that it’s had some significant developments this week. You’ve also had the US men’s national team rep come out and say that basically the women deserve more than the men in their CBA, and just kind of blasting US Soccer for how they only care about money, that they don’t care about soccer in this country. That’s their number one priority. And it’s been good to see the men’s national team embracing this fight with the women. Of course, I think a skeptical way to look at it would be that the men are struggling so much right now that they might benefit from an equal pay structure! Because if you’re not winning anything, you’re not getting much money…But that’s just the cynic in me.
Jessica. Ouch.
Lindsay: You know, I think we can get more in the weeds in the future as this fight continues, I think the court date is set for May for this to go to trial. Once again, as we lead into the Olympics, US Soccer has decided to just drag this out and force these women to continue to fight because they truly believe that this is the hill they’re going to die on, that this is their high horse and they’re not getting off. Which is just a wonderful look. But to me, looking at what happens to the Matildas, looking at what we’re seeing in US Soccer, it just ties together for me what we’re talking about all the time which is just that women have to fight for literally everything and the only way forward for women’s sports is through collective action and solidarity. And I truly believe that. I actually did…God, I’m gonna plug Power Plays again, sorry, but-
Jessica: Do it. Do it.
Lindsay: This week I looked back at the WTA because women’s tennis had had this record $4.42 million payday for Ash Barty after the WTA finals, and I looked at how they got from these one dollar contracts to this, and it started with collective action, with solidarity, right? That’s how their journey started, and I think what we’re seeing now, especially globally in soccer and then in basketball as well, this is what people are embracing and it’s creating change. Unfortunately women have to drag all of these power structures kicking and screaming into equality, or anything resembling equality. But they’re doing it. And it’s inspiring. And congratulations Matildas. Way to fight.
Jessica: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, thanks just one quick thing. I wanted to draw attention to the writing of Samantha Lewis, who is a Guardian reporter in Australia about this. She wrote a really cool piece about how Indigenous women have actually really helped draw attention to this, and I think this is really important, when we’re talking specifically about Australia I think it’s really key to note that these are communities that often get neglected in this. And props to Samantha, I love her work. It also ties back to what we were talking about in the previous segment, the need for people to tell these stories. And how important they are.
One of the other things that we have to keep in mind is Australia’s part of the Asian Football Federation which…We know misogyny in football is literally a global problem, but it’s not as active a federation in supporting women’s teams, so the fact that they’re doing this under that umbrella is really really key, and I hope will draw attention and start shaking it up. As Lindsay was saying, collective is really important but we’re also talking about some places in the world where that’s not necessarily as possible or plausible in some of the countries. I think that that’s why for me, the Matildas doing this and the Socceroos…I mean I haven’t seen a lot about the Socceroos, who are the men’s team, saying anything about it yet, but maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places.
Lindsay: They have been supportive as far as I’ve seen.
Shireen: There’s been nothing outspoken to the degree that like…a huge rally, and in this we also see the importance of allies. We need that. I don’t think anyone’s objected, but I haven’t seen this outpour, I haven’t seen it anyway. And rightfully so, for writers not to focus on that. Just talking about this is key, about where they are geographically located. We really need to look at that picture of what this means for women’s football in Australia moving forward, and how they will inspire others.
Jessica: Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite segment that we like to call the Burn Pile where we pile up all the things we’ve hated this week in sports and set them aflame. I’m going to go first. This past week Kenny Jacoby, whose work I’ve used before to burn things on the Burn Pile, published a piece at Gatehouse Media about Youngstown State University. Kenny uncovered that Youngstown, in 2016, found three male athletes responsible for sexual assault, suspending them all for different amounts of time – I think expelling one of them. One of them was Bassem El Mekawi. The school found that in El Mekawi’s apartment he had sexually assaulted a fellow student by “non-consensually fondling” her. He was suspended from the school for six months and had to complete an online training module called ‘Think About It’ which was supposed to educate him about alcohol use, relationships and consent, according to Jacoby’s reporting.
After his suspension was over, El Mekawi reapplied to YSU. He was accepted, and he played on the school’s tennis team from 2017 to 2018, competing in 35 matches. And then he got a gig as an unpaid assistant coach of the men’s tennis team in the fall of 2018, and then, and this is the part where you just have to wonder how this even happens and why, in the spring of 2019 he became an assistant coach on the women’s tennis team. In response to Jacoby’s reporting YSU started scrubbing any mention of El Mekawi’s association with the women’s team off the internet, which…I’ve seen this before at other universities. Gatehouse has the screenshots though, we’ll be linking to this so you can go see, and a spokesperson for the school felt it was necessary to point out that it was ‘only the one’ instance of sexual assault.
For the record, El Mekawi graduated this year and accord to the university is no longer affiliated with the school. In the end YSU responded to the reporting by saying, “The university is reviewing the need to develop additional processes to ensure that the campus activities of students readmitted to the university are appropriate, given the nature of their code violation.” That is such interesting wording, isn’t it. “Reviewing the need” to develop. So there is a space for second chances and we, as a society, need to figure out how we move forward after someone is found responsible for harming someone else. But those decisions have to be thoughtful, and deliberate, and made with great care, and nothing about what YSU did here with regards to El Mekawi’s position as an assistant coach meets even that basic standard.
There was, I thought, one silver lining in all of this in the original piece that Kenny wrote, this line was included, quote: “GateHouse Media obtained the information while researching the broader issue of NCAA athletes continuing their playing careers after being investigated and found responsible for sexual assault.” I am looking forward to what he uncovers and what patterns he finds, but I also know that that means that there’s a good chance that Kenny’s work will fuel this Burn Pile again in the future. For now I just want to burn everything that went down at Youngstown State, so, burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Alright. Shireen, what are you torching today?
Shireen: I am so mad. I am so mad. I was mad earlier because of what happened with Mario Balotelli in Verona and everything about Serie A which we know is garbage, and I’m mad about a woman attending a Denver Nuggets game and being harassed by a Pepsi Center employee…Anyway. There’s a lot of stuff for me to be mad about, but this morning when I woke up, Don fucking Cherry, of Hockey Night in Canada, went on an anti-immigrant rant. He has a segment called Coach’s Corner, his sidekick is Ron Maclean, who basically enabled this horrible, xenophobic rant.
He was talking about Remembrance Day, this weekend is Remembrance Day, there’s celebrations and remembrance ceremonies all over the country. Now, Remembrance Day is to honor the vets and those in World War I and II who gave their lives, and those who are currently serving. I actually do not wear a poppy. I do not wear a poppy, but if I did ever choose to wear a poppy it would be a beaded poppy to recognize Indigenous vets and how they were literally tossed aside, not allowed to vote after they came back from service, and literally were given no social supports or economic supports. So that is another thing. Don Cherry specifically said this: “You people love our way of life, love our milk and honey, at least you could pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada.”
So as he said this, Ron Maclean just nodded and gave a thumbs up to him. Now, let me explain something, Don Cherry. We’re all settlers on stolen land, which is Turtle Island. You didn’t pay for anyone’s fucking way. Do you understand how the military-industrial complex works? I’m so mad about this, I cannot even tell you, I’ve been ranting about this since 6am on Twitter Sunday morning. Thank God for Kawhi Leonard saying nice things about Toronto to calm me down. This is not acceptable. I’ve decided that I’m going to support the hashtag #FireDonCherry because I don’t want Boomer Night in Canada to be my hockey commentary, which is exactly what’s happening. I have no time for this. He’s literally taking pieces away from people who have a right to enjoy the sport and then going on to say it’s not political. Wearing a poppy is political. If I choose to support young kids that are in air cadets or whatever, they stand at the grocery store and I’ll put money in their tins because I support them.
The bodies of Black and brown people were used on the front lines of these wars and they were given no support, which is why I refuse to be performative in my support of those vets. And I have unlearned so much about how I’ve felt about this. When somebody I know came to me over in a Facebook group and said to me, “Shireen, your stance on being anti-war is so classist. I had to get out of abject poverty by enlisting in the US military or my family would starve. So please understand.” I will never forget that conversation and it changed the way that I look at myself and how I look at how these wars are being played out by rich, white, powerful men who use these bodies on the front lines so fuck you Don Cherry, stay out of hockey for me and don’t tell me not to politicize something ever again. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Burn. You sounded…Your Canadian accent really came out there! Lindsay, what are you burning this week?
Lindsay: I literally never hear about Don Cherry until he’s on the Burn Pile! How is this man still…
Jessica: What does he add to anything!
Lindsay: Also I learned about poppies, which I didn’t know anything about, so lots of lessons today. But I’m going to burn, I know this is going to shock people, hold on! Hopefully you’re sitting down! But I’m going to burn the NCAA.
This week in what I’d like to call the Friday evening news dump for the ages, for the ages! Within a couple of hours the NCAA announced that both the potential #1 draft pick in the 2020 NFL draft, Chase Young, and the projected #1 draft in the 2020 NBA draft, James Wiseman, were both being suspended and ruled ineligible. So Wiseman, a basketball player at Memphis…Apparently Penny Hardaway, before he was the coach of the team, gave Wiseman a loan to help his family relocate to Memphis, once again, this was before he was a coach. So [Wiseman] is in danger of being ruled ineligible for the entire year. And then you have Chase Young, a star defensive end at OSU who is dealing with a four game suspension for accepting a loan for a family friend, a loan that has been completely paid back already, that he used just to fly his girlfriend in to the Rose Bowl. Again, I don’t have the numbers in front of me but I’m sure the Rose Bowl made the NCAA quite a lot of money. So we’ve also had a lot of questionable at best transfer decisions for the NCAA, which means that when players transfer between schools they are ruling that they are ineligible to play immediately because they are not…They’re arbitrary decisions that make no sense. And all of this is just…The NCAA does not care about athletes, they just care about controlling athletes at all costs. That’s what this is all about, and especially right now as there’s talk about figuring out some sort of model where they’re trying to pretend that they’re being progressive a little bit in thinking about these compensation models or ways for athletes to benefit from their likeness. I just didn’t think there was anything coincidental about the fact that right after that became public, which of course as we’ve dissected, was not all that that statement was said to be, but that they’re not bringing down the hammer on some of the most prominent athletes in the NCAA. This is a fledgeling organization that is terrified about the power that it is losing and it is taking innocent young people down with it. Someone on Twitter replied to me saying “Now we’re just getting mad at the NCAA for enforcing rules?” and my answer is yes. That is one hundred percent what we’re doing. These rules do not deserve an ounce of respect. So burn, burn, burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: After all that burning, it’s time to celebrate some remarkable women in sports this week with our Badass Woman of the Week segment. First up, our honorable mentions.
Cheers to NWSL players as the league owners have approved an additional $300,000 per team to play top end players more with a new maximum salary of $150,000. This appeared to be a rule put in place to keep talent like Sam Kerr in the States; it didn’t work in Kerr’s case but it’s great whenever salaries go up for players.
One more shoutout to the Matildas, Australia’s women’s soccer team, on their equal pay. And more good news from down under, as 236,000 cricket fans in Australia watched Ellyse Perry and Alyssa Healy as they recorded a 199 run stand with the Sydney Sixers against the Melbourne Stars. Ratings are up 25% this year. That’s a huge amount of people supporting women’s cricket, and we are here for it.
And speaking of big crowds for women’s sports, close 78,000 to people showed up over the weekend to watch the Lionesses, England’s women's national soccer team, take on Germany at Wembley stadium. This set a record for attendance, crushing the previous one in 2014 when just over 45,000 showed up to Wembley for the same matchup. That’s a 30,000+ increase in 5 years time.
Canadian soccer legend Christine Sinclair, Shireen’s Prime Minister, is one goal away from matching Abby Wambach's record of 184 international goals after scoring in a friendly against New Zealand this weekend. Sinclair will have a chance to beat this record at the end of January with Canadian women’s national team during Olympic qualifying at the CONCACAF tournament.
On the other side of the age roster, Canadian soccer player Olivia Smith is the youngest player to ever make the national women’s team roster. Smith is 15 and made her debut at the Four Nations tournament in China last week.
Shoutout to Aya Khattab, a defender with the Palestinian women’s football team who wrote a poignant piece for Al Jazeera about the PUMA boycott.
And congratulations to France, who defeated Australia in the Fed Cup, that’s tennis, 3-2. Can I get a drumroll please?
Our badass women of the week are the Oregon women’s basketball team, led by Sabrina Ionescu who had 30 points. They beat the USA women’s national team on Saturday night. The number-one ranked Ducks beat Team USA 93 - 86, becoming only the second college team ever to beat Team USA and the first since 1999, a full twenty years ago. It’s going to be a fun basketball season.
Okay. Let’s talk about what is good in our worlds. I’m going to start, and it’s so simple for me this week, I have been enjoying a BBC show that we watch over here on this side of the pond on PBS called Grantchester, and I’m just going to describe it. It takes place in post-World War II Britain, mainly in Cambridge, and it follows a vicar. And I know that Hot Priest is out there in Fleabag, but like, this is the hottest vicar. He’s played by this guy named James Norton and he’s hot in the way that like, he has demons. He drinks and he has sex and he goes dancing, he listens to jazz. But the premise is that this very hot vicar teams up with a detective and they solve murders together. So, of course. It’s lovely and I love it and it has made me very happy this week. So Shireen, what is good in your world?
Shireen: My daughter is going to semifinals in ROPSSAA, which is the regional semifinals. I’m really excited for her. It’s tomorrow. I’m going to go and, I know this is shocking, I’m going to be loud in the stands. I’m gonna make a sign. By the time this episode airs the result will have already been out, but I’m really hoping for them to go forward. She’s in her senior year in high school, so this would be a really big deal.
I’m going to Kingston, Ontario this week to Queen’s University to do a panel called Muslim Femininities in Sport, which is being organized by Courtney Szto, who’s been on our show. I’m going to be speaking with Sarah Abood who has started a modest sportswear line that features really cool turbans and hijabs. And with my friend Amina Mohamed. So I’m really excited about that. I have some other trips coming up, I’m going to see Brenda next month in Princeton, which is really exciting.
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Jessica: Look at you guys!
Shireen: Yeah. And then I’m going to Pakistan which is not something I’ve done for five years. I’m going to see my family and I’m really, really excited about that. So that plan is just coming into play. And of course, as you know Sonny Bill Williams is coming to Toronto, to the Toronto Wolfpack for rugby. So Shireen is very excited.
Jessica: I literally know that that’s happening because of your Twitter account. That’s how I understand the context of that.
Lindsay: My what’s good is when Shireen goes third person.
Jessica: Yes, yes.
Lindsay: That’s how you know it’s a big deal.
Jessica: What else is good in your world, Lindsay?
Lindsay: Other than that, well, today is Sunday, and I am about to go see my first women’s college basketball game of the year, Maryland versus South Carolina.
Jessica: Oh my gosh.
Lindsay: I know. So excited for that. And yeah, the newsletter continues to chug along, week two was slightly less anxiety-inducing than week one. So looking forward to week three, I’m actually going…Another what’s good is I’m doing a quick 24-hour jaunt to New York City for the Athlete Ally Action Awards. So I will be covering that, and there’s gonna be a lot of inspirational people honored for their work in the LGBTQ community in athletics, including Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger. I’m trying to get a few minutes with them, I’ll keep you posted. But yeah, I’m super excited.
One of the most fun things about now being fully self-employed is that I get to be more flexible about taking these trips and making it more of a priority to get to these events and get to more women’s sporting events. That’s if this all works out financially, but I’m so excited that I can do things like this on kind of a last-minute basis as opposed to being glued to my computer, waiting for the next Trump tweets. I’m excited.
Jessica: That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you all for joining us. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. For more information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You can also email us from the site to give us feedback, we love hearing from you all. If you enjoyed this week’s show, do me a favor and share it with two people in your life who you think would be interested in Burn It All Down. Also, please rate the show at whatever place you listen to it, the ratings really do help us reach new listeners who need this feminist sports podcast but don’t yet know it exists.
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That’s it for Burn It All Down. Until next week, burn on, not out.