Episode: 135: Nepotism and Sport, Holiday Traditions, and Equity in Soccer w/Maggie Murphy of Lewes FC

This week, Brenda Elsey, Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs and Jessica Luther have a hearty laugh at Coach K’s final play in the Duke vs. Stephen F. Austin game. Then, they move on to discuss nepotism in sport and the way in which it limits diversity [5:19], Shireen interviews Maggie Murphy the general manager at Lewes FC, the only club in the world with pay equity [20:00] Finally, they turn to holiday traditions and sport. [43:30]

Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [55:58] the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Liga Mexicana Femenil [1:07:07] and what is good in our worlds.

Links

The funniest part of Duke losing to Stephen F Austin was Coach K’s game-losing play call: https://www.sbnation.com/college-basketball/2019/11/27/20985388/coach-k-duke-basketball-stephen-f-austin-upset-play-jokes-memes-mike-krzyzewski

American Meritocracy Is Killing Youth Sports: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/income-inequality-explains-decline-youth-sports/574975/

La dictadura Cuéllar: https://espndeportes.espn.com/futbol/mexico/nota/_/id/2611195/la-dictadura-cuellar

The NFL's push for more black coaches is hurt by nepotism and white boardrooms: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/jan/04/nfl-rooney-rule-minority-coahes

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to this week’s episode of Burn It All Down. It’s not the feminist sports podcast you want, but it’s the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Brenda Elsey, associate professor of history at Hofstra University in New York, and this week I get to steer the ship. I’m joined by the brilliant Jessica Luther, independent journalist, weightlifter, PHD candidate and baker in Austin, Texas. The indomitable wordsmith Lindsay Gibbs, who has launched the amazing new sports newsletter Power Plays, which you should all subscribe to; she’s in DC. And the fierce Shireen Ahmed, freelancer, activist, and the world’s snuggliest person, in Toronto, Canada. I’m not even exaggerating.

On this week’s show we’re going to talk nepotism in sports, just in time for all your family garbage during the holidays. Shireen speaks with Maggie Murphy about women’s football in the UK, and the only club that pays men and women equally, Lewes FC. And finally, we’ll talk  holiday traditions in sports. But before all that, let’s talk about somebody who has frequented our burn pile before: the mentee of the terrible Bobby Knight, Coach K, who led his team to an 85-53 loss to the much lower ranked Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks. But before people get all sad about me bullying college employees, Coach K will make over $7 million this year. So, did anyone see that amazing play that he constructed?

Jessica: That was the first thing I saw, before I ever knew that Duke had lost, was I saw the picture of the play that he drew up because it was like, correct me if I’m wrong, it was tied in overtime and Duke had, what, like four, five seconds last possession. And so he drew up a play, and I was looking at…SB Nation has a roundup of people’s tweets about this because it’s really hard to explain, being on a podcast, explaining what it looks like so that people who haven’t seen it, and I honestly don’t know how to describe it. You should go look at it. A lot of people called it like a bird, or a turkey, specifically. My favorite one, there was a lady named JuliaKate E. Culpepper and she described it as “a ghost fishing for other ghosts.” Which is what it looks like! It’s a mess. It’s just a beautiful mess that turned into a mess on the court. 

Lindsay: It was a disaster. The play was…I’m a UNC fan, I’m a Tar Heel fan, so Duke losing makes me extra duper happy, and the final whole last play looked…Honestly, they kind of did it exactly as drawn! It was like, the ball got stuck, there was a turnover, and then like…There were all these crowds of people. Honestly, I think they did exactly what he told them to do. And then Stephen F. Austin stole it and got an easy layup at the end. But it was great because the guy who got the layup at the end, he had a Gofundme that I think was…Before, everyone freaks out, the compliance office did approve it, but it was to get his family help after the hurricane in the Bahamas, and so after he made that game winning layup obviously that got a lot of attention, and they got a lot of money to help his family. Of course, it’s sad that we need Gofundmes for things like that, and that it takes moments like that, but that was a nice thing that came from Coach K’s play.

Shireen: I have no artistic talent whatsoever, and I felt like wow, a well-recognized coach that can draw like me! It was the worst thing I have ever seen. I was like, what is he doing! It did, it reminded me of literally the way that I draw. You know the ghosts from Pac Man? The video game? That’s what it looked like to me. So bizarre.

Brenda: But I couldn’t figure out…For people that haven’t seen it, we’ll put it in the show notes, but I couldn’t figure out where the people were. Like…
Jessica: Me either! 

Lindsay: Neither could they!

Shireen: Lindsay, I’m dying here.

Brenda: It looked like a turkey! But I couldn’t figure out who…where were the players! I don’t know. I mean, he’s an educator, so I guess…Afterwards, I guess, in the press conference, he was gracious enough to say that they were outplayed, or perhaps the better word was outcoached, and then he’s since said something about being off and just that he wasn’t good those couple of days which, you know, probably the most humane thing I’ve ever heard him say. So there’s that.

Alright, so, the holidays bring up a lot of feelings about families. A lot of family time, a lot of gratitude, maybe a little bit of friction. And so it seemed like the perfect time to talk about nepotism in sports! Shireen, you wanna lead us into the conversation?

Shireen: Sure, thanks Brenda. We all know that nepotism is a structure that works among the privileged. Those who are in power in this country, this continent rather, and even around the world, bring their own into the fold. I thought about this when I found out that Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew gets $90,700 a year as a “sports liaison” for the White House. His job is just to coordinate professional athletes to come visit Trump. $90,700. And he golfs. Which really puts him on the top of his game. He golfs. So I was thinking about this, and I was like, this is ridiculous. The entire structure, politically in power in the White House, is all about nepotism anyway. We see that. The daughter, Ivanka, is at meetings that she shouldn’t be allowed to. Like, I’m not even allowed into my dad’s study! And she’s everywhere.

This really hits me at certain levels, and I’ll just bring this quick anecdote into it, because when I was at university I wanted to apply for a job, and my father worked at the CBC which is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. The broadcast center is beautiful, for those that’s been there. And I applied to the gift shop, I had all the qualifications, I was multilingual, I did speak French and English fluently, people person, really keen, it worked with my hours. It was just a perfect fit. When my father found out, he actually nixed my application, and he said that if people found out that I got that job, then they would assume that he gave me that job. And he said no, you have to earn your stripes yourself. So I’m forever sad about that, because I really wanted to work in that gift shop, because it was just a really cool place and I wanted to be surrounded by that environment. So that’s just always stuck with me.

So moving forward twenty years, I’ve come to the realization, unabashedly as a woman of color, that I will do everything in my fucking power to help my kids out, and those diverse, racialized communities. If you want to call that nepotism…I guess that’s just me sharing my perspective, because I’m one of those people who had parents that tried so hard to have too much integrity. And then we see this. So when it comes to sports…There’s another really cool article that we’ll link that’s called American Meritocracy Is Killing Youth Sports. It was with The Atlantic and it really struck me about this, literally the way that youth coaches, just as an example, but their children on their teams when they don’t deserve to be there, and how they pass over other children absolutely all the time.

This pay to play system can be really damaging, and it creates a whole bunch of psychological struggle for these youth athletes, who can’t really say anything to their coach but their coaches have an absolute bias towards some players. I’m talking at grassroots levels, I’m talking at very senior levels, and I just wanted to know what you think. And eventually I will get over myself about the CBC job.

Jessica: Yeah. That’s amazing about Rudy Giuliani’s son. Oh my gosh.

Lindsay: Can I just say, he looks exactly like how you’d think Giuliani’s son looks. 

Jessica: That is very true. That is very true. When I was thinking about this nepotism in sports, it’s interesting because you see it all the time, these sort of family dynasties, especially with coaching or even players whose dads or moms even played in that sport, or another sport on a professional level. It makes sense on some level that when you grow up in it that you would be good at it, and that you’d have a knowledge that maybe other people wouldn’t have, and that would translate…

I mean, this happens all the time in lots of different ways in places other than sports, but at the same time, thinking of it as nepotism or thinking of nepotism, it just gets at this thing we talk about a lot on the show, is the idea that sports are a meritocracy and that you rise to the top simply because you are good, or the best, and this idea that there aren’t these structures in place that cause certain people to rise to the top above other people. I don’t know. Shireen, that article in The Atlantic and the way that this even works on a youth level, there’s something distressing when you start thinking about that.

Brenda: Before moving on to those very serious and important issues, personally I just want to take one more jab at Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew. Which, I don’t know if you know that he had a lawsuit when he was cut from the Duke football team..

Shireen: No!?

Lindsay: Literally nothing in that sentence…I could have predicted that sentence, even though I didn’t know. Every single part of that sentence.

Brenda: Talking about privilege and the idea of what you deserve, Andrew Giuliani was aspiring to be a professional golfer, and he went to Duke and he was on sort of the golf team.

Jessica: What do you mean “sort of?”

Brenda: He was cut! Like, I think they let him play around…

Lindsay: He was like a walk-on.

Brenda: Yeah. Definitely not recruited. 

Jessica: Famous father…

Brenda: When the coach cut him, he filed a lawsuit, this was in 2008, suing Duke because-

Shireen: Because he was bad?

Brenda: -his golf coach made up accusations to justify kicking him off the team. I mean, right? He’s manufacturing accusations that he sucks. And anyway, I’m a terrible golfer but he sued them, and it was dismissed. I just think that’s an important part of the whole nepotism case, the power that you wield. Like what coach would also want to deal with that kind of static in their decision making. So it brings with it not only kind of “this is the way I can schmooze my way on,” but also your ability to threaten people and influence their decisions. Linz?

Lindsay: Yeah, I see this so much in…I hate this term, but the ownership of the teams, you look at kind of the worst people managing sports, like the James Dolans or something, and it’s all nepotism, right? It’s all family money and these businesses being handed down. Of course sports isn’t the only place you see this, but it just makes me so mad because we talk about, of course here at Burn It All Down we bust this notion a lot, but there’s all this talk about sports being kind of the ultimate meritocracy, and yet you have people at the top who are the ultimate signs of family money, family wealth, and look, you see this in all aspects, right? You see this right now with Jeanie Buss and the Lakers, you know what I mean? It’s not just Dolan by any means. You see it in football, you see it all over the place. And I think that’s really frustrating because these children inherit these programs and they have a lot of people’s lives under their helm. You know? A lot of people’s livelihoods and the success of their careers and their future right now, they’re partially in charge of it. All because of where they were born and what family they were born into. There are very few examples of a child taking over a team from a parent and that going well.

Brenda: Shireen?

Shireen: Yeah, I just wanted to say there was another really good article in The Guardian from last January, almost a year ago, talking about the difficulty that Black coaches have in the NFL and it’s literally, it’s white boardrooms, and nepotism plays a big part in this which is what I was alluding to and talking about meritocracy and things like that. It’s a struggle because even with the Rooney Rule in place, and that’s with regards to the NFL specifically, it’s still a struggle to get them because on the other side there’s not that push to mentor and create opportunities for young coaches to get there because, very often at that age, you find those owners or their family friends giving those opportunities to people they know so it’s really not based on that kind of thing.

And I will always come back to that conversation that I had with a coach, who’s now coaching in the Caribbean, the West Indies, and John said to me, we were at this conference in Austin and he’s talking about the FA, the football association in the UK, he’s just like “There’s no place for me.” They really made him feel like there was no place so he ended up, being of Jamaican descent, he left Europe to coach internationally there. Although I will always feel frustrated for that, you’re really made to feel like there’s no place for you and that’s why we have a problem, is that when you look at the demographics of sport and who makes up the sport, coaching isn’t reflected at all across the board, either in the NCAA or professional sports. It makes us wonder where this is going and what actually can be done and it comes up to decision makers…I realize it’s more difficult in the NFL when there’s literally owners of those teams, which always makes me super uncomfortable. That just is weird to me. But you know, what can be done?

Brenda: Well, it’s interesting. I also just wanna say…And Amira’s not here, so we can also reference Steve Belichick as assistant coach for the Patriots, that seems like one of those Rooney Rule things, like you’re telling me that this assistant coaching position was actually open? And minorities were encouraged to apply? Seems dubious. I would just like to say that for women’s soccer or women’s sports, this also can be really thorny because the same level of scrutiny isn’t put on those, at least on national teams, as it is otherwise. So for example, the women’s national team who was coached by former national team player Leonardo Cuéllar, Cuéllar was kind of a superstar player himself in the way that he was charismatic and he coached the team for 18 years, and they did terribly. There was retribution of players and all of this other stuff, and one of the things he did was hire his US-born son Christopher Cuéllar to do the women’s youth leagues, who has now just taken over as head coach of the national women’s team.

So it’s incredibly frustrating, it’s not clear to me that there’s any evidence…And then to get all the cookies, FIFA puts out this circular, like “look at this dynasty of men that care about women’s soccer.” Like, oh my god. It’s so infuriating. He has a terrible record, no Mexican men’s coach would’ve lasted five years with that record. They’re in CONCACAF and they couldn’t qualify for the 2019 World Cup. Come on! You know? All the props to teams like Jamaica, but they weren’t even given food!

Lindsay: God, this is depressing.

Brenda: Like, seriously! So anyway, I just want to throw out that anytime we see this in men’s sports it feels like it’s extra aggravated with women’s. Lindsay?

Lindsay: Yeah, I completely agree. I cover a team, the Washington Mystics, where the head coach’s son is the associate head coach. And Eric Thibault is phenomenal, the players love him and he’s going to be a head coach, I believe, sooner rather than later. He’s come up the system and I think both Mike and Eric Thibault are phenomenal people but it’s worth noting when it’s something I’m around, and I think they’re an example of the good way it happens, but it’s still happening, right? It’s still a form of nepotism. I feel like businesses are just messy anyways.

I have family businesses on both sides, businesses on my mom’s side and my dad’s side that great-grandfathers have started and have been passed through families and it gets messy! On all levels. I don’t know, I wish there was some other way but I don’t know what the answer is, because people are going to gravitate towards their families and if it’s done right it can be okay, like I said, the Mystics are a very good example, and head coach Mike Thibault looks for former players who he can give coaching opportunities to, and does a really good job mentoring them. I think that he’s doing a good job for women and players opportunities as well. But I don’t know. We see it all the time, right? These family ties that become defining characteristics of people and I think that’s a problem.

Brenda: Yeah. Well, we’ll say that until we have future BIAD posts for our family!

Now, Shireen speaks with Maggie Murphy.

Shireen: Hello, flamethrowers! I’m so happy to have my friend, and someone I admire greatly, on the show today. I’m so glad to welcome Maggie Murphy of Lewes FC. Maggie is the general manager at the world’s only club to distribute revenue equally between its male and female teams. Maggie has a background in anti-money laundering, anti-corruption and human rights, all things we support on Burn It All Down.

Until recently she was director of public policy and sport integrity at the Sport Integrity Global alliance, before which she held a senior advocacy role at Transparency International, the world’s largest anti-corruption organization. She’s also held rules in Amnesty International, Minority Rights International, and became a BBC Expert Woman in 2017.

In 2018 she helped organize Equal Playing Field’s climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – We had actually Monica González for that on this show – and with a team of 30 women from over 20 countries. They lead a full-sized football pitch and played a 90-minute FIFA regulation match, successfully setting a brand new Guinness World Record for the highest altitude football match ever played. Maggie continues to be a part of the Equal Playing Field leadership, team, and set another world record in 2018 for the lowest altitude football match ever played, and is now waiting for confirmation of two new Guinness world records for matches held during the Women’s World Cup in France.

Maggie’s lived and worked and played football in the UK, Germany, the French West Indies, the Netherlands, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania. She hold a BA from Oxford University where she captained the university team, and an MSC from the London School of Economics. Hello, Maggie!

Maggie: Hey, Shireen! Wow, that was long. 

Shireen: That was long! But I forgot to add the most important thing: you make an absolutely phenomenal banana bread. Which is critical. 

Maggie: It’s pretty good. It’s the reason that I buy bananas and then I don’t actually eat them. I wait until they go soft and gooey, and then I’m like “Oh! I forgot to eat the bananas! Now I better make banana bread.” That’s my tactic, generally. 

Shireen: Okay, this is an important question: do you put walnuts or pecans in it? 

Maggie: Neither. I like it to be fresh and clean and pure, as a banana bread should be.

Shireen: Okay.

Maggie: From time to time I experiment with putting a bit of peanut butter in the mix.

Shireen: Oh! Okay. I like your position on banana bread and the purity thereof, I appreciate that. Let’s talk a little bit of football. I’m really excited to see, it was 2018 I believe, that I saw the news the Lewes FC in the UK was going to pay men and women the same amount, and it kind of floored me, I wasn’t sure if I read correctly. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Maggie: Yeah sure. So it was in 2017 in July, just before the season kicked off. Like you, I was nothing to do with Lewes, and I remember looking at it, seeing it online and thinking, YES! Finally! There’s a football club that actually is putting its money where its mouth is. We talk a lot about equality and treating women the same, but actually I found it astounding that the club was doing it. And this little club, it’s a small club in Sussex, in the south of England, not too far from Brighton, had just decided to do just that. So I immediately, back then, I became an owner. So anybody can become an owner of the football club, it’s 100% fan-owned. I don’t know what it would be, fifty US dollars a year, perhaps? So I just paid up, and was like, “Great, I’ll probably never go there but good on them for doing it, I love it.” I had a tiny bit of history in the fact that I played against Lewes twenty years ago when I was a teenager, so I was like wow, there’s that club that I remember playing, in the cold and wet and rainy English winter, look what they’re doing! It’s possible to be a small, tiny club and do something incredible. But it’s, in some ways, it’s a revolutionary act, but it shouldn’t be revolutionary. And yet it has been revolutionary. So Lewes is now in the 2nd tier, we punch way above our weight. Those household names like Aston Villa and Crystal Palace and Leicester City…Lewes FC, which I’m sure the majority of your listeners have never heard of, is playing in that league.

Shireen: Wow. 

Maggie: We play Chelsea…A couple of weeks ago we lost just 2-1 to them. 

Shireen: Yeah!

Maggie: Pretty well.

Shireen: Pretty damn good.

Maggie: Yeah! And that’s despite the fact that we’re the best club you’ve never heard of. The decision to do the pay parity thing, a lot of people really focus on the pay parity, the men’s and women’s teams have the same playing budget essentially, but it’s a little bit deeper than that. I think what they decided to do was value women and men the same, so it wasn’t just about, “Okay, here’s a pay budget, do what you can.” It was okay, we treat you equally so we will split the revenue that we generate as a club in two, between the men’s side and the women’s side. And so that means that we have the same marketing budget, it means that we play on the same pitch. We don’t have this tortured conversation about ‘will we ever get to play in the men’s stadium’ because the men’s stadium is our stadium and our stadium is the men’s stadium. What’s happened has been huge. Crowd attendance has quadruped in those two years.

Shireen: Wow.

Maggie: That’s despite the fact that we’ve actually increased ticket prices by 160%. 

Shireen: Wow.

Maggie: You know, when you think about all those conversations that are taking place about, ‘we have to give away free tickets and then people will come,’ it’s rubbish. All you have to do is value your women’s team, put your money where your mouth is in terms of the marketing and the pay, and people will come. I think at the end of last season we came 8th in the country for attendances for women’s football.

Shireen: Wow.

Maggie: From nothing! Go back a couple of years and it really was parents and family members of the players who were coming to watch, and now we had 2000 people come to watch us play Manchester United last season.

Shireen: Right. My obvious questions to you about this start with, did anything break, did the world of football crumble when you started to value women footballers? No, clearly it did not. But just a logistic question, when you share a stadium with the men, are there scheduling conflicts? People make it sound like it’s a really big deal to share training facilities and stadiums…You make it sound like it’s really not that big a deal.

Maggie: So, number one, taking the decision to make the pay parity, it’s not easy. So it some ways it is easy because, like you said, the world hasn’t fallen apart and the women’s team is doing really well. By the way, the men’s team got promoted the first season that we did it. So it’s not like we take from one and give to the other. What you see is it’s still difficult in people’s mindsets. 

Shireen: Okay.

Maggie: So what I’ve noticed, and this is something I wasn’t expecting…Honestly, it’s fascinating, Shireen, if you could take a look at my emails sometimes. Every time something kind of goes wrong, like the men lose three games in a row or…There was a web link on our website that wasn’t working, and there was something else like that, it doesn’t really matter what it is. I get emails saying, “Hey, you talk about equality BUT your web link isn’t working!” Or, “You talk about equality BUT the men’s team is doing really badly.” Whatever it might be. There’s people that will always, they’re looking for it to fail. I wasn’t expecting that. Even within the club. Honestly, our fans are incredible. 95% of people are like this is brilliant, it’s the best thing ever, the town is so behind it.

I remember meeting this old boy in the pub and he’s there watching the England men’s team and he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know I worked for the club, and he suddenly said, “Tomorrow I’m gonna go down and watch those girls play, I’ve heard they’re alright! I’ve heard they’re pretty good!” And he had stopped going to men’s football about fifteen years ago, but now he was gonna come back to The Dripping Pan, which is our stadium. And he was gonna come back and watch the women play. That’s the kind of small things that are happening in this town, that we don’t have time to track, but these real conversations are taking place, and because it’s happened now for a couple of years, because the town is like, “Wow, we’ve got Chelsea coming to play! What?! When was Chelsea last at The Dripping Pan?”

Shireen: Yeah!

Maggie: So there is a little quiet revolution taking place in people’s minds in the town. There’s this fierce pride, which is fantastic. But like I said, there’s people that are still waiting for it to fail. Maybe that’s just the way it is. 

Shireen: So based on that, that you get those types of messages and emails, and trust me, Burn It All Down and our flamethrowers are very familiar with this type of attitude, what do you feel is helping-

[Shireen’s audio cut out]

I’m so happy the town is behind you and all that kind of stuff, and you see the benefits. Do you think that what Lewes FC has done, do you think it can pick up and go to the bigger clubs? Because I think that we look at the bigger clubs and say you should be accountable for this and this, and we’ve seen some. We saw Juve have their women’s side play in bigger stadiums, we’ve seen Real Madrid have a women’s side for the first time, and in Premier League, as you mentioned, we’ve seen Tottenham Spurs finally start having the women play in the men’s stadium. Do you think it’s picking up and generating more momentum?

Maggie: Yeah for sure. Credit where credit’s due, some of the big clubs are starting to…I wanna say increase their value- yeah. They are starting to understand that women’s football is a thing, they are starting to invest more. I still think it’s pennies, the amount that they’re investing compared to the amount of revenue that they are able to generate. I think they’re missing a trick, a lot of them, you know, the amount of money that they could…I still feel like women’s football is at a point where you could buy a league. If you wanted to, you would invest X amount of money and you would probably revolutionize the team, the squad, and you would give them the best healthcare and medical care, and you would just win the league. Obviously that’s not where we wanna be, we want it to be more organic.

The clubs are doing their bit, but a lot of this drive has been because of the Football Association and certain specific individuals like Kelly Simmons, for example, who has done a great job in the time that she’s been head of women’s football at the Football Association. The thing is, one of the challenges I think for women’s football, is that we tend to get so over-focused on Premiership football, especially in the UK. We’re so focused on that that we forget that there’s a huge amount of other football in the UK. Like grassroots and non-league and small clubs like Lewes FC, the men’s team are in 7th division. It’s still competitive, you still get hundreds of people that go out to watch those teams every week, and sometimes I feel like our football strategies only focus on Premiership teams. “Premiership teams should have a women’s team. It should be successful.”

But hang on a sec, why shouldn’t smaller teams have successful women’s teams? Lewes, 7th tier, has just put in equal resources in the women's team. There’s hundreds of clubs like Lewes in this country, yet we’re the only one in the country, we’re the only one as far as we’re aware, that’s doing this. So I get a little bit concerned that the tactic for women’s football is, “Hey, tap into your men’s team, try to get money from them.” I think we should be tapping into money from other sponsors or from other people that get behind this vision and these principles.

Shireen: And who believe in it. 

Maggie: The other thing that I mentioned about us being this small club, because we have these principles and values we have people that support us from around the world. We’ve got these owners in 26 different countries. It’s astounding that we are revolutionary enough that we’ve got people in 26 countries who wanna give us that $50 a year to keep us going. But there’s no one else doing it. So yeah, I don’t know, I’m quite mixed. There’s obviously progress, it’s brilliant what is happening, I just don’t want to be made to feel grateful for it. That’s something that I feel. 

Shireen: Yeah, and that’s something that we’ve talked on the show about before, the sense that women in any kind of sport need to be very grateful for what’s being handed to us, and you’re right, that’s super problematic in its essence. That we should be happy for the handouts, so to speak. Whereas really investing and believing in this is the way to go, and speaking of which, I wanted to ask you a little bit about Equal Playing Field initiative.

I found out about it before you went to Kilimanjaro, which is amazing, and we did, like I said in the intro, we had Monica González come on the show and tell us about that experience which was unbelievably moving for her, and she talked about how much she learned from that and met footballers, and what was really beautiful about it is that you really made a genuine effort to connect with footballers from all around the world. It wasn’t American-centered, it wasn’t UK-centered, it was truly…Like my friend Hajra Khan, the captain of the Pakistan women’s football team was there, Yasmeen Shabsough was there in Jordan, the Dead Sea match. There’s people from all over the place and from places that…particularly from places that it is often forgotten that women play and love football. So tell me a little bit, how did that come to you? How did this even happen?

Maggie: Yeah, so completely by chance, most of that group got together through word of mouth, and this is how powerful women in sport can be, because we talk a lot, right? We talk a lot about some of the challenges that we face and it’s always on our minds somewhere. I think that it was the right time for me, because at that time I was kind of early thirties and stopped playing, myself, I never played at a proper professional level but I was always competing. Suddenly I was about thirty or so and I was just kind of looking back and I was like, why do we make that so difficult? Why do we make playing football, the most popular sport in the world, why do we make it so difficult for women and girls?

And it turns out that there was a lot of other people having these conversations, whether in the UK or, like you said, we had players from Mexico, Canada, the US, from Tanzania, from Jordan, from Saudi Arabia. Hajra from Afghanistan wasn’t able to come in the end, but she’s been a massive ally and friend since then. Girls from Nepal and Australia. It’s a kind of crazy way that it all came about. In many ways, all of us got together through word of mouth, so as you know, women in sport, we like to talk. And when these things come up, you can’t really not think about it anymore when you see these kinds of injustices or frustrations.

I myself was in my early thirties at the time, and looking back at having played for such a long time and thinking, you know, why do we make it so difficult for women and girls to play football, the most popular sport in the world. And it turns out that there was some other people that were thinking the same, and it didn’t matter what country they were in. And it also didn’t matter what level they were playing at. You mentioned Monica, but we also had Lori Lindsey playing, but we also had complete grassroots players as well, people that had never had even that level of opportunity.

In the end, what we realized was when we were climbing was that it didn’t matter where you were from or what level you played at or what religion you were, it all came down to opportunity, equality and respect. And each of us in our particular countries, in our particular situations, our particular level, we were each struggling with access to those three things. Those were the origins of how it came about, and we did things like fundraise for each other to be able to get us up the mountain, because we didn’t want it to be a bunch of white Europeans or Americans climbing a mountain and saying, “Hey, yeah, we did it!” It was important that it was a global thing, that it recognized the situations that women were in around the world, and that we started on the solidarity path right from the beginning. 

Shireen: Well that’s amazing. I love it, I’ve been following that since the beginning. So what do the Guinness World Records do? Do they help in terms of marketing or acknowledgment or or recognition or amplification, or is it all those things?

Maggie: Yeah well, I think the first one, it had to be something pretty special, and I think that one thing that a lot of us spoke about was this feeling that we had to do so much more to be respected, or to be allowed to experience respect. It’s classic…All your listeners know that women have to work harder and achieve more and be perfect in order to be a mediocre male. I think that it was something that kind of wanted to put to bed, like how about we do something that’s absolutely spectacular? Something that is extraordinary, something that no one has ever done before, and something that nobody can take away from us as being this B-version of what men do. So climbing a mountain and putting a full-sized pitch down with the goals, and playing 90 minutes with FIFA referees. I mean, that’s pretty spectacular. And it was also important because it did generate respect and it did generate attention. We were proud of ourselves, it was something that united us all. We kind of thought at the time that it was going to be a one-off, but as we climbed the mountain, it was a very intense moment…You had to switch off your mobile phones, there was nothing up there, there was no network, it was absolute one on one time with each other for the whole climb and I think we realized then this was the start of something and not the end. So apart from the Guinness World Records, they tie us together, so we’re able to do that big thing and grow the voice, grow the momentum, draw more people in. But actually it’s all the stuff that we’re doing outside of the record that we’re doing, we’re talking to each other quite a lot. We help each other out. There might be problems with a football association, or players are in trouble, or players just want a better nutritional plan, because they’re a coach and they’ve got an under-16s team and they’re doing pretty well. So there’s actually just that solidarity, again, and the connections that we have with each other. Some of those connections can only be borne through having done something pretty intense. But it opens you up to so much more. And we all understand each other’s contexts a lot more as well, as a result.

Shireen: Definitely. I was gonna also ask that the first two matches were women only, but the one in- correct me if I’m wrong- France, the third one you had, was for the longest match ever played, and it also included men folk and…Is that correct? Do I have that right?

Maggie: Yeah, the biggest ever game. So it did end up lasting…I can’t remember exactly, it was like three days or so. Nonstop through the night, during the day, and it was the biggest-ever five side game. We also wanted to recognize male allies, I think that’s really important, we’ve had male allies support us throughout. Prince Ali of Jordan was a massive ally of ours when we held our second Guinness World Record in Jordan. 

Shireen: Right.

Maggie: He has been a big ally for women’s football in the region as well, and so we wanted to recognize that. I think there’s a place for…It’s one of those themes, like we need to create a female space where we feel empowered and we’re able to do what we want to do, and at the same time we still want to have the door open for people to be like yeah, we’re part of this as well. So it was important for us to do that. We’ll see what happens in the future. We’re all pretty exhausted as well because it’s full on, doing the world records. They put you through the mill a bit. 

Shireen: For sure. And it was really interesting to watch and to see how that was developing and where you’re going with this. You have a lot of fans around the world, and I remember when it started out it was a much smaller organization to grow into something, and there’s always something really wonderful about that. So now that we’re heading towards the holidays, to change directions a little bit, is there anything you’re looking forward to most for the holidays? 

Maggie: So apart from all my radical stuff at work, or stuff that seems radical, this is completely not radical. I’ll be heading home. I have a huge family, I’m one of five and my parents are both one of seven, and so there’s usually a lot of people around. In fact the family’s just grown, because my little sister and little brother have both become parents in the last few months, so we’ll have two tiny little ones with us. Two little girls that are gonna join the movement! So I’m just quite excited to fight with them as to who actually gets the spare room and who’s on the sofa and who has to go elsewhere.

It’ll be quite quiet, I’m looking forward to being able to switch off a little bit, try to get some perspective, because I think you will know this, and all your listeners will know this, I think sometimes we run ourselves a bit ragged and it’s good to just switch off.

Shireen: Oh yeah, yeah. 

Maggie: Try and take a moment and sort yourself out, sort your mind out. I’d like to clear my mind out as well. That’ll be helpful for me, I think. 

Shireen: Definitely, and last question is: what are your self care practices?

Maggie: Oh, self care. I just always thought that I was organized, but some people think that I’m maybe ridiculously strict with my Excel spreadsheets and my lists and things like that. For me that’s actually a form of self care. Okay, it sounds a little bit weird but I need clarity and focus, so I’m able to just sort my thinking out and sort out my priorities, that’s a huge thing. Aside from that I still play football, I love it. I love it so much. So I’m still playing on Friday nights, mainly with a bunch of guys in the Lewes FC vet’s team. 

Shireen: Nice.

Maggie: So I’m still doing that, and also Lewes is in the most beautiful part of the English countryside, so I’ve just bought a pair of trail trainers, so I’m trying to go out running on The Downs as well, they’re beautiful. So those are the things that I do to try and keep me a bit grounded. 

Shireen: That’s beautiful, that’s amazing. And thank you so much for-

Maggie: And making banana bread as well. 

Shireen: Making banana bread, yes. I wanted to say thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down. Where can our listeners find your work? 

Maggie: So Twitter’s the main one for me, so it’s @MaggieMrphy without a ‘u’ in Murphy, you should be able to find us. And just Lewes FC as well, check out our website. It’s really important that you follow the story of Lewes FC as a club and see what we’re doing, it would be great to have more people come and find us there. That would be fantastic. 

Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. So Lewes is, for all of our listeners, is L-E-W-E-S FC, so please check them all out. Maggie, again, thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down and for making the strides and encouraging everybody else to do the same. Thanks so much.

Maggie: Thank you. Thank you guys. 

Brenda: Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Holidays upon us, we did want to have a little bit of a fun discussion about holiday traditions and sports. Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, so Thursday this past week, I was at a Thanksgiving eating party, it was lovely. Thank you to my friends that had me. And on the TV was football, and I very rarely watch football anymore these days, which…We can talk about that at some point on this podcast, but I still found myself watching the Chicago Bears eke out a win the win on the road over Detroit.

Brenda: Ugh.

Jessica: And the Buffalo Bills crushed the Dallas Cowboys in Dallas. And the Lions have been hosting a Thanksgiving NFL game since 1934, the Cowboys since ’66. The NFL added a third game, which this year was between the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons; they added that in 2006. When I was thinking back on that, I think I watched football on Thanksgiving every single year that I’ve been alive. That’s like this longstanding tradition that I just can’t help, and so like Brenda said, this got us thinking about holiday sports traditions and so like the NFL Thanksgiving, you’ve got the NBA on Christmas, the Rose Bowl is played every year on New Year’s Day. I read that in England on boxing day, the day after Christmas, there’s always a slate of football games, the rugby league starts up. I’m sure there’s lots of amazing holiday sports traditions around the world, and if you celebrate one please tweet it at us or post a Facebook comment about it! We’d really love to hear about what people are doing around sports and holidays.

But there’s two separate things that I was thinking about when I was prepping for this. So the first was my own holiday sports traditions, and I really feel that for the longest time it was Thanksgiving weekend and rivalry matchups in college football, and it was always football football football this time of year for me. Yesterday Aaron and I were reminiscing about our days at Florida State, and they always played Florida, they played yesterday. This time of year we were like, remembering that time we froze our toes off in the stadium watching. But I actually don’t think I have a sports holiday tradition at this point, the closest I think I have is July 4th with Wimbledon, or maybe the Labor Day with US Open, like now it’s all tennis-based!

And the other thing that I was thinking about too, and maybe this is me making it not as fun as it should be, but also the way that sports and holidays seem to seamlessly go together…And it did seem like really good background for a group of people, like friendly strangers that didn’t know a lot about each other, and I can imagine if you’re in the middle of a family reunion and it was tension-filled, that having football on is an easy thing to turn to. And then of course I was like, biting my tongue as we were watching, because I’m a Debbie Downer about football, but it’s not my idea of a relaxing holiday to fight with people I don’t know about sports, so I was just quiet about it. Aaron was giving my looks like, “Keep it down, keep it together!”

Do you guys have holiday traditions around sports, and Shireen, I wanted to ask you specifically, are there Canadian things that us Americans wouldn’t know about?

Shireen: Well, our Thanksgiving is, I was gonna say, as it should be, in October. No judgement there, no. I’m already planning to be able to watch the Raptors play the Celtics on Christmas Day. A lot of my history of Christmas Day, because I don’t actually celebrate, but it doesn’t mean that other communities don’t get together during that time because all of us are off, and it’s usually the one day that everyone in the family or extended family is not working. So we get together, definitely NBA playing. I personally watch The Sound of Music because it’s always on, but I think there’s a lot of other ways, and I love what you said about whether it’s hockey or sports being a buffer when you’re at family gatherings, because then as long as nobody talks about the politics of those things you’re usually okay.

Jessica. Right.

Shireen: But it’s a really great way to do it. And there are, in the summertime, summertime parties, there’s always WNBA happening. I know that there was some picnics and this one…It was really nice to see, I was at a park picnic and one parent, he was so obsessed with a game that was happening, I think it was the Mystics, he had a radio and I don’t know where he found the feed on the radio of a WNBA game, but I remember him trying to struggle with it to get it. So, the good thing with technology is we can take it wherever we go. Everywhere I was in the summer I had had TSN downloaded on my phone, I could watch a Women’s World Cup game everywhere.

So not specific to traditions, but there’s ways for us to take that stuff with us wherever we go now, which I think is incredibly helpful. So with this past weekend I know there’s a lot of football happening for you folks in the US, I always associate American Thanksgiving with football and Black Friday, like, shopping, and the videos of people going wild and things. So that’s what it is. And then we’ll see as well, New Year’s Day there’s hockey, I’ll be watching hockey on New Year’s Day for sure, at some point.

Brenda: So, just to expand a little bit on the Lions, I grew up and it was always on, but like a lot of working class families our TV was always on, period. It was like this thing, I don’t know. Maybe other classes did it too, I don’t know. But I always associate it with like a midwestern kind of…Like the TV’s just never shut off, people just sleep with it, everything. And so the Lions were always something that we planned the timing of dinner around. And so that was always a really big deal. Really, the Lions have played since 1934 which, actually, just to say is part of trying to get the Lions to Detroit. That was the year that they moved to Detroit from Ohio. It was moved by this guy, some radio guy I can’t…Richards? George Richards or something. Super colonial name, anyway. He had some pull, and the Chicago Bears were really good, and he thought if they got them in there they could make it into a big ticket game, because people didn’t have much to do.

So they sold out for the first time during Thanksgiving, and it’s funny because I always just remember…They have a losing record, I think it’s 34-47 or something, of all time, I can’t really remember. But they normally lose, period, so it’s one of those games where people don’t even seem to get upset about it, like they’re just in some sort of food holiday coma or something! And so that’s the one thing that I think about, it’s such a tradition that people don’t get upset about.

And we should just say, the history of Thanksgiving as a celebration of colonialism in such a way that hides the violence, genocide of Indigenous peoples, is already problematic, and then on top of that, to think about early football and the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania and all of that, it is enough to give you heartburn. Linz?

Lindsay: Yeah, I was going to say, I’ve gotten to love NBA Christmas basketball for that reason, because NBA is a fun conversation piece, you know, more so than football. So I’ve enjoyed having those games. I feel like just in the past few years, having those games on in the background. I think you’re right, Jess, sports is so much of the air we breathe, right? Like the culture we just soak in that it’s kind of fitting to have it on in the background at these big events. For me personally, it’s not the big holidays that I associate with sports, it’s more of the smaller moments like Father’s Days are usually during the US Open, the golf US Open, and I always remember growing up and watching the final round with my dad on Father’s Day is a memory I will always associate…Tennis is always around, usually Memorial Day or Labor Day or during tennis Grand Slams, and so kind of having those Mondays off and watching all day tennis is kind of part of the culture. Yeah, I don’t know. I do love the merging of marking your calendar by the sports calendar, which is something that we all do.

But I do wish that women’s sports fit better into these moments. Over the weekend, and this is a precursor to my burn pile, but women’s basketball are doing these Thanksgiving tournaments too, and they’re not getting anywhere near the coverage that men’s tournaments are getting. A lot of that’s because the men’s tournaments have these traditions, and they have these spots on TV already established, and I think women’s sports sometimes need to be more creative about picking their spots to do these things, because ultimately it’s hard to crack through. I always think the WNBA needs to do more on July 4th. WNBA takes July 4th off now, like what if the WNBA made that a big day of games instead, because there’s not much else going on in the sporting calendar.

But I do want to give a shout to one of my favorite sports-related traditions, which is Cam Newton’s Thanksgiving holiday, he does this big giveaway to, I think, 1300 kids in Charlotte every year, does a Thanksgiving jam, so he feeds them all a full Thanksgiving meal and then gives them all a Thanksgiving meal to take home. He always has all these volunteers, he’s always really front and center. I mean, if you ever see Cam Newton interact with children, there’s nothing more pure in this world.

Jessica: Yeah.

Lindsay: It is just so pure, and I miss Cam Newton so much because he’s injured this year, and there are talks that he might not be back in Carolina, which…Oh, man, I would have some feelings about. But it was great to see him being himself and enjoying himself and giving back to the community, and it’s one of the more fun Thanksgiving traditions because he really puts his face and his personality into it, unlike a lot of the charity things we see.

Brenda: Aww. Shireen?

Shireen: Yeah, just to wrap up this beautiful thing, and I appreciate you, Linz. I love that idea of, we see the generosity of the players out there and so many of them do these things and don’t get a lot publicity, like there’s so many players that go out and do really really cool stuff, and all our respect to them.

One of the last things I was just gonna say was that seeing also the traditions of athletes in sports and seeing what they do around sports and community on these holidays, I just wanted to add that Colin Kaepernick was at Alcatraz, and he was being very, very clear that we was on Indigenous land and which land that was, and he talked about this history of this day and what it meant, and the genocide of the Native peoples. I just think about that, because we think about the reach that he has, to these sports fans and within sports, it was really impactful. So, so much respect and solidarity to those out there actually doing that work. 

Just lastly, Ava Duvernay tweeted about this really cool website, it’s native-land.ca You can go there and you just enter your location, it will tell you what land you stand on. I saw a lot of athletes doing this, and I thought this is amazing…I didn’t think I would ever see this. It’s just really powerful, and we’re talking about a holiday with a very brutal history. I think it would be really helpful. Colin Kaepernick is a great reminder of that. 

Brenda: Now it’s time for everybody’s favorite segment, the burn pile, where we take everything that we’ve hated in sports this week and throw it on a flaming incinerator. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, so this is a continuation of what I was talking about, but there was so much great women’s college basketball over the weekend, this long weekend, and I got to see absolutely zero of it because of the way it was set up! Now, I pay for a big ten network subscription because of Maryland, I like to keep an eye on Maryland, and I pay for the beefed-up cable sports package, which is all a lot of extra stuff a month, and I pretty much expect and usually can watch, either through streaming or on TV itself, all the games I need to watch. Well, not anymore.

So this big Thanksgiving tournament for women’s college basketball was only available on this service that I really didn’t know about, called FlowSports, and they were advertising it as a $12.99 per month fee, but that was only if you paid for the full year at once.

Shireen: Oh my god.

Lindsay: To get to watch these games cost $30 for a one month subscription.

Jessica: Whoa.

Brenda: Okay…

Lindsay: Thirty dollars! That is so much money. To kind of exacerbate this, I tried to watch some ACC games, and found out that Xfinity, the cable network, doesn’t offer the ACC network, and so I couldn’t get some soccer games, I was trying to watch the NCAA soccer tournament and couldn’t watch those games because I couldn’t get the ACC network. And then I also don’t get SEC Network because I’m not in the SEC area, so I was trying to watch women’s sports, I was trying to have them on in the background when I was working on newsletter stuff this weekend, and completely struck out. I couldn’t get them, or at least not the ones I wanted, the marquee games. And I ended up missing out on a lot of great stuff. It makes me so furious and hopefully, by the time you’re listening to this, the newsletter will be out, Powerplays, you can read more about my rage, but I just wanted to throw my inability to watch women’s sports and these constant barriers to entry on the burn pile.

Group: Burn.

Brenda: Jessica.

Jessica: Yeah, so before Michigan played Michigan State in football a couple of weekends ago, a fraternity at Michigan had one of those shitty bedsheet banners, you know what I’m talking about? Hanging outside their house, that read, quote: “YOU CAN’T TOUCH US, LARRY NASSAR.” Which of course, if you listen to Burn It All Down, you know references the former Michigan State sports doctor who sexually abused hundreds of athletes, mainly gymnasts, while working for the school. Based on everything I know about bedsheet banners and fraternity houses, this was, I guess, supposed to be a joke. Though what exactly about this is funny is hard to pin down.

Aria Gerson, a sports editor at the Michigan Daily, wrote a piece about this last week for the paper, titled Their scandal is not your rivalry and her lede is about that banner. Also, a disclosure, she interviewed me for the piece and quotes me in it. Gerson writes, “In weaponizing these scandals — these failures that hurt hundreds of people — people minimize them.” And that’s just it, right? That this kind of taunting turns violence, institutional failure, and trauma into a punchline to be used at a stupid sports game to taunt a rival. They strip away the reality of the harm and repackage it for their own ends, they repackage it all so it fits on a boy-made banner that will get a fraternity highlighted on a Barstool Sports Twitter post and high fives from other dude bros.

As I told Aria and as she writes in the piece, no place is immune from this gendered violence, or failing survivors who come forward. Not the University of Michigan, no matter what they want to think about it, and certainly not fraternities anywhere. And the thing is, this week reminded us that same fandom that often so easily mocks gendered violence, is also deeply antagonistic to any criticism of how a school handles reports of that violence.

Brenda Tracy, who I interviewed on Episode 67 of Burn It All Down, is a survivor who was gang-raped by multiple football players years ago. She’s now an advocate who runs an organization called #SetTheExpectation, whose mission is, quote: "to combat sexual and physical violence, to raise awareness, giving back, education and direct engagement with coaches, young men, and boys in high school collegiate and professional athletic programs.” She speaks to athletes all over the country on the regular and hopes to change the sports culture that actively minimizes gendered violence.

Last week, someone sent a letter to Tracy’s house that said, and just warning, there’s really upsetting language here: “It’s time to die, cunt. If this anthrax doesn’t kill you, my AR will.” She wrote on Twitter, that “When I looked at my hands there was a white powdery substance on them. I called 911 immediately and they instructed my family and I to go outside, so we went out in 30-ish degree weather, underdressed while police, fire, medical and hazmat responded to my home. I was literally standing in the middle of the street not allowed to touch anyone or anything in case I was contaminated. Yellow tape blocked the streets and my neighbors all stood around watching as I stood there wondering if I was contaminated or god forbid my family was. After a couple hours the hazmat team determined it wasn’t anthrax, but the FBI and police are taking this as a credible threat on my life and there is now an open FBI and police investigation.”

I don’t know if anyone knows if this was an angry football fan, but it seems that the odds are high. Tracy is trolled hard and constantly by fans of athletic programs that she criticizes, and she seems to assume that the odds are high that it’s a fan, tweeting that even after a threat like this she will continue her work. Some people responded to this by calling her a liar. So sure, maybe it’s a dumb banner made my dumb boys, but that’s part of the same continuum that includes an advocate receiving a death threat in her own home, and so this week I just want to burn all of this together. So, burn. 

Group: Burn.
Brenda: Shireen?

Shireen: I’m just going to be metaphorically burning some truly, truly awful parents and students of the Almont Raiders, which also includes the marching band, because they can be toxic as fuck. So, the Denby high school players, who went to play against the Almont Raiders, decided to take a knee during the anthem. This is what set off a terrible chain of events which included Denby high school players being spit on and pelted with garbage, all at a high school in the Detroit area. These youth who were very conscious about what they wanted to do, and intentional, were treated so badly.

It’s not that I give, ever, high school kids a pass to be racist and horrible, but what upset me more in addition to that was the parents. I’m just gonna read a little bit from the article, which we’ll attach in the show notes just to give you an idea, it’s from the Metro Times. It said that, quote: “Officials halted the game against Almont High School with three minutes left because of excessive personal foul penalties. The ugliness began when parents took issue with Denby players taking a knee during the national anthem before the game.” And Denby coach Deon Godfrey told The Detroit Free Press this, he said, “Our cameraman is white and was filming near some Almont fans, and during the national anthem, he overheard them saying: 'Look at these N-words taking a knee and they don't even know why they're doing it,' and they kept going.”

And the language in this is really awful, so just a bit of a trigger warning, a content warning for what’s coming next. Godfrey said Denby’s coaches were called “wiggers” and that “grown men and women started spitting on our kids as they walked up the ramp. They were throwing food, cups, and whatever.” Godfrey added: “They called my student trainer a little monkey and they were saying: ‘Who let them off their leashes? They need to be on a leash. They never should have been here in the first place.’” This is extremely upsetting, it’s so horribly barbaric in the language, and these are adults, these are grown ass parents. And then we wonder where this racism comes from. It’s a learned behavior.

I’m so bothered by this. And the restraint of these kids to hear this, to be pelted with garbage, in almost 2020. For me, I had all these questions. I contacted a friend of mine who’s a lawyer in Michigan, like “Is that assault!?” If there’s thrown garbage…She’s like, it depends what happened and where, there’s contextual issues. But I’m like, this is absolute racialized assault. These are kids at a high school football game, and the marching band was vicious. I didn’t know you could be vicious with a trombone, but apparently you can. And were complicit in this type of verbal violence. I want to burn the whole fucking thing down. Burn.

Group: Burn.

Brenda: Well, my burn feels very small this week in comparison. I am going to burn the hypocrisy of expecting players to be loyal when you treat them like garbage. I don’t feel particularly sorry for Patriots kicker Nick Folk, like I’m not up at night or anything. But I’d just like to point out that this past week he had emergency appendectomy surgery on Thursday, and the following day was released from his team, the Patriots. Yeah! He was fired the next day because he couldn’t play Sunday. Or released. I don’t know what you call it. And you all know that I don't mess with US football. I don’t know crap about it, right? But I do know that, like other sports, there’s a continual complaint about us living in a player-centered world and our players, how they need to be loyal to their clubs, and that romantic idea. So I just wanna use the case of Nick Folk, who apparently can be resigned if he recovers and is able to kick soon, enough, again? I don’t know everything about the rules in regard to that. But it’s just one of the many, many, many, many, many cases. I hope his appendectomy went well, but again, in which you see this huge hypocrisy between expecting players to be loyal and treating them like garbage. So, I just wanna burn that.

Group: Burn.

Brenda: Alright. Now after all that burning we’d like to celebrate some of the amazing accomplishments of women in sport this week. Before we do, we would like to acknowledge the passing of Ethel Johnson, nee Wingo. This legendary Black wrestler was one of three sisters of the golden ages of wrestling. She was famous and traveled in the South, where she was subjected to severe racism. Although she was only 5”5’ and smaller than most of her opponents, she was known as a hurricane: quick and powerful. She retired when she was 41, married and had a family. She passed at 83. Rest in power, Ethel.

Honorable mentions this week go to Mariko Yugeta who ran 2:59:15 at the Shimonoseki Kaikyo Marathon on November 3rd, 45 seconds under 3:00 hours, and a full three minutes and 35 seconds faster than the previous record set by Claudine Marchadier of France in 2007.

Congratulations to Former Chicago Bandits All NPF Catcher Rachel Folden who was hired by the Chicago Cubs as their lead minor league hitting lab tech, that’s a very specific job, for Rookie League Mesa.

The first all-girls tackle football team will begin thanks to the Ottawa Panthers who will begin a program dedicated to the development of girl athletes. 

Justine Siegal - legendary girls’ and women’s baseball coach will become the first woman on a coaching staff of the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico - which is an important men’s baseball league in Mexico. She’ll be coaching for Naranjeros in Hermosillo. 

Congrats to USA hurdler Dalilah Muhammad, Olympic and World champion who was named Nike athlete of the year, along with Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge.

Can I get a drum roll please?

The winners are: the Mexican Women’s League, Liga Mexicana Femenil, whose final between Rayadas and Tigres Femenil brought in 41,615 spectators and this after beginning the season with a very troubled series of contract negotiations, basic reticent support, accusations of harassment, everything, like it was going to be an impossible season to finish. So congratulations to the professional soccer women in Mexico.

Okay. Well, what is good in everybody’s worlds? Let’s start with Shireen.

Shireen: Okay, so I know that this is gonna come as a shock to all our flamethrowers, but undoubtedly my episode with Gurinder Chadha is the best thing to ever happen in my life.

Brenda: Yay!

Shireen: It was so wonderful to be able do it, I was really nervous whether it would record okay, I’d never recorded an interview on a digital recorder before that way. It was really awesome, and thank you guys so much. Thank you, flamethrowers, for being as excited as me, because a lot of you were really excited and I really appreciated that. My son bought me fuzzy plaid pajamas, which I am wearing at the moment, so thank you Saif for those, because it is cold and freezing rain here.

Two more quick things: today I am hosting the first annual board game family day with my family, there will be fifteen people. And we’re taking it really seriously. Sallahuddin, my son, is creating a draft, and the teams and stuff…We’re very, very serious about our board games. So we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what relationships will be broken by the end of this day. That’s the way board games work. I’m most excited as well about going to Princeton and seeing Brenda next week.

Brenda: Woo!

Shireen: And maybe Amira, she might drive down if the weather permits. But just really excited to also hang out with Steph and Meg. Steph Yang and Meg Linehan. Brenda and I forced them into a Christmas present exchange, so excited about that.

Brenda: Alright. Jessica!

Jessica: Yeah, well I’ve been gone for the last few weeks so I feel like I’ve saved up my stuff. I was gone a couple of weeks ago because it was my birthday and I took the weekend off.

Brenda: Yay!

Jessica: So that was fun. And the my family went to Los Angeles for a few days and spent two of those days at Disneyland, and I just had a lot of fun. It was just a bunch of fun and I never…I’m from central Florida so I have been to the Magic Kingdom many times in my life but Disneyland was new. I put an Instagram post up with all my faces on all the rides where they take your picture of your face because it looks ridiculous, and so I put up a little collage of those. And then of course I got to eat a bunch of great food this last few days: I made some yeast rolls, I made some shortbread cookies, and I made these things called pecan tassies, which are like mini pecan pies, you do them in a muffin pan, so they’re like, bite-sized. And my favorite thing, he’s gonna kill me if he…He never listens, he won’t know. Aaron was trying to remember the name of them the other day and he called them pecan pasties, and I’ve just been laughing about that for days now. It’s a whole new thing. 

And last thing, I read an amazing romance novel that just gave me so much happiness, I cried so hard at the end in the best way. It’s called Lady Derring Takes A Lover, it’s by Julie Anne Long, one of my favorite authors. I’m reading the second book in the series now. It made me glow, I was so happy after I read it. That’s Lady Derring Takes A Lover, highly recommend.

Brenda: Aw, great. Well, I’m super excited about the Princeton soccer conference, which is going to be held December 7th and 8th at Princeton University. And I’ll get to hang out with Shireen, and Peter Alegi and Laurent Dubois, who are friends of the show. As well as Steph Yang and Meg, that’s gonna be really fun. I expect too to learn about a lot of people’s work, so you can check out the whole conference. We’ve been tweeting about it, there’s been football for good and development and also academic talks; the panel that we’re also on is called More Than Exports, about the state of soccer in the global South. Yes, I’m still a little disappointed that we’ve been unable to convince them to call it football instead of soccer, but I understand. Not surprised.

The other thing is it's really awesome not to travel on Thanksgiving too. It’s been a great catchup week of grading and whatnot, and I miss my family. I love doing it, but it’s also kind of nice to avoid it. Lindsay, what’s good with you?
Lindsay: What’s good with me is Dwayne Wade and his family, Gabrielle Union…I am just obsessed with them. A couple of things happened this week that just made my love for them grow. First of all, in ridiculously horrible injustice, Gabrielle Union was fired from the set of America’s Got Talent because she spoke out against racism and sexism on set. Another woman, Julianne Hough, who’s white, her contract wasn’t renewed either. And so, behind the scenes and in public, Gabrielle Union is fighting the good fight.

So Gabrielle Union posted on Instagram a photo of her and Dwayne Wade and their daughter and their son, Zion, who is twelve. And Zion has…Earlier this year they posted about being at the Pride parade in Miami, supporting Zion, and in this photo Zion is wearing a crop top and he’s got his nails done and, of course, people freaked out. There were a lot of comments on Twitter and on Instagram about Dwayne Wade not being a good father, and Dwayne Wade’s response was incredible. He said, “As a parent my only goal is that my kids feel that I see them, love them and support them. I’ve seen some post-thanksgiving hate on social about my family photo. Stupidity is apart of this world we live in—so i get it. But here’s the thing—I’ve been chosen to lead my family not y’all. So we will continue to be us and support each other with pride, love & a smile! ✌🏾”

What a phenomenal role model. That type of love, and to see that coming from this NBA player, NBA star, who’s kind of the stereotype of machismo, to see that type of love for his family is incredible and it just makes my heart warm.

Brenda: That’s it for this week’s Burn It All Down. Though we’re done for now, you can always burn all day and night with our fabulous array of merchandise, including mugs, pillows, tees, hoodies and bags. What better way to crush toxic patriarchy in sports. And holidays, hint hint. Also, before we leave, I would like to thank our patrons for their generous support, and to remind our new flamethrowers about the Patreon campaign. You pledge a certain amount monthly to become an official patron of the podcast, and in exchange you get access to special content and rewards. We just really, deeply thank our Patreon community and appreciate how much we’ve been able to continue and develop this podcast because of your support.

Also, Burn It All Down lives in Soundcloud, but can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. We appreciate your reviews and feedback, so please do subscribe and rate, and let us know what we did well and how we can improve. Ratings are super important in terms of leading and directing new listeners to our podcast so we appreciate it. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com, in which case you’ll get a very polite answer from Shireen. Check out our website at burnitalldownpod.com, where you’ll find previous episodes, transcripts, show notes, and a link the the Patreon.

I would just like to say, on behalf of myself, Lindsay Gibbs, Shireen Ahmed and Jessica Luther: Keep burning on, but not out. 

Shelby Weldon