Episode 140: D.J. Durkin's return, David Stern's legacy, and USWNT star Jessica McDonald
In this episode, Lindsay and Jessica open things up by talking about the USWNT's royal wedding (4:00). Then, they dive into Lane Kiffin's hiring of D.J. Durkin at Ole Miss, and all the ways that is infuriating (7:40).
Amira interviews World Cup and NWSL champion Jessica McDonald (21:16), then Lindsay and Jess talk about David Stern's legacy (36:10).
Finally, there's the Burn Pile (54:10), BAWOTW (1:01:25), and What's Good (1:04:41).
Links
D.J. Durkin doesn't deserve a second chance in college football: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/01/dj-durkin
Maryland’s decision to reinstate DJ Durkin is indefensible: https://thinkprogress.org/maryland-football-coach-return-indefensible-d61842acf824
Don’t Forget Jordan McNair: https://www.theringer.com/2019/1/10/18175709/jordan-mcnair-maryland-terrapins
The rise and fall of Lane Kiffin's coaching career, in 11 steps: https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/9/30/4785034/lane-kiffin-fired-coaching-timeline
Nick Saban started the Durkin rehabilitation: https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/nick-saban-explains-presence-of-ex-maryland-coach-dj-durkin-at-alabama-ahead-of-playoff
David Stern believed in women’s professional basketball: https://www.swishappeal.com/wnba/2020/1/3/21046872/wnba-david-stern-womens-professional-basketball-sports-gender-influence
Without David Stern, There Wouldn't Be a WNBA: https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardmegdal/2020/01/02/without-david-stern-there-wouldnt-be-a-wnba
How David Stern Navigated Race in the N.B.A.: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/sports/basketball/david-stern-nba
This Intersex Runner Had Surgery to Compete. It Has Not Gone Well: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/sports/intersex-runner-surgery-track-and-field
Fallon Sherrock pulls out of women’s BDO world darts after prize money is cut: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/31/fallon-sherrock-withdraws-bdo-world-darts
Bangladesh’s first body-building contest for women: http://www.dailynews.lk/2020/01/01/sports/207174/cover-bangladesh%E2%80%99s-first-body-building-contest
Caroline Ouellette awarded Order of Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/order-of-canada-full-list-2019
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello everyone and welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Welcome to our first new edition of 2020, the new decade! I know some people don’t think it’s the new decade, but the AP says it’s the new decade and that’s what I’m going with. I follow AP Style in all aspects of my life, unfortunately. This is Lindsay Gibbs, I am the author of the newsletter Power Plays, which I would love you all to subscribe to because I want to start 2020 off with a bunch of new subscribers. So let’s start with a self-promo! Go to powerplays.news, it is a newsletter all about women in sports. I guarantee if you love Burn It All Down you will love Power Plays.
Alright, that’s enough self-promo. Joining me today for Burn It All Down, it’s the one and only Jessica Luther, freelance reporter and author, and PhD candidate…?
Jessica: Yeah! Candidate, candidate.
Lindsay: PhD Candidate in Austin, Texas. Jess, it is just you and I for this first new edition. The team has handed the keys over to us, so I’m excited. How are you doing?
Jessica: Me too. Happy new year! I’m great, happy to be here.
Lindsay: You know what, we’ve got to be optimistic and Tom Brady threw a pick-6 to end a playoff game, and Amira’s not here so we can really, really enjoy it.
Jessica: In Foxborough and everything.
Lindsay: Huh?
Jessica: In Foxborough.
Lindsay: In Foxborough!
Jessica: Oof.
Lindsay: Yeah, so I just feel like…Reality, we know what’s going on in the real world, 2020 is not off to a good start, but I’m just savoring that for right now.
Jessica: Yeah, we’ll take it.
Lindsay: Alright, so today’s episode we are going to talk all about the fact that DJ Durkin, former Maryland coach, is back in the coaching ring. He’s been hired at Ole Miss, Jess and I have some feelings about that. Amira interviews Jess McDonald about her forthcoming podcast and what it’s like to be a professional athlete and mom. Of course, Jess McDonald had quite the 2019 winning both the World Cup and the National Women’s Soccer League Championship with the North Carolina Courage. I’m so excited to hear that, I haven’t listened yet. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about David Stern’s death and takeaways from his legacy, particularly as they pertain to women’s sports and the WNBA.
Before we get into all that, one more big plug for our Patreon. We are starting our third year of the podcast-
Jessica: Wow.
Lindsay: Which is mind-boggling. We’ll hit our third anniversary in about May, I believe. The only way we can keep doing this completely independent, ad-free, intersectional feminist sports podcast every single week is because you all support us through our Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/burnitalldown, each month there’ll be an extra segment from us, a Patreon-only segment. There are also some behind-the-scenes videos so you can get to know us a little bit better, and we have some merch giveaways, things like that, lots of exciting things going on in the Patreon. But really the Patreon helps us just not have to spend anything out of pocket, and 2020 is going to be the year we hire a producer, I’m putting it out there, and you all are going to help us get over that hump. So thank you in advance, as little as $2 a month will get you some of these big perks and really help us thrive in this new year, because I think we’re going to be needed.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Okay. Now for real, before we get going, there are a lot of things we could’ve talked about at the top of the show today, but Jess, did you see any of our royal wedding? And by our royal wedding I of course mean the wedding of Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger.
Jessica: Well, yes. Because my favorite of the social medias is Instagram, and I feel like this was Instagram-able.
Lindsay: It was an Instagram wedding, yeah. Very Instagram-able.
Jessica: Yeah. I just have to say, they looked amazing. There’s this picture…So, People had the exclusive, I think, on images. I was looking last night and Ali was in this form-fitting white gown, with the veil, and Ashlyn was in a tux, but it was like beaded and fringed…They’re so beautiful.
Lindsay: I just loved looking at them.
Jessica: Yeah. It gave me a lot of joy. Rapinoe in a suit.
Lindsay: Rapinoe looked GREAT.
Jessica: It was the same designer who made her tux that made Ashlyn’s. I read that Sydney Leroux, who also looked amazing, she did a reading at the wedding of the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality.
Lindsay: She was the official! She married them, which is so cool.
Jessica: She married them! I missed that!
Lindsay: She married them!
Jessica: Ohh…Wow.
Lindsay: She was the officiant.
Jessica: They had one of those rainbow cakes, where when you cut into it it’s six layers, and it’s a rainbow. How sweet is that?
Lindsay: Yeah!
Jessica: Everything about it.
Lindsay: All of their tables were dedicated-
Jessica: Oh, that’s right!
Lindsay: -to a trailblazer for human rights, particularly LGBTQ rights, which I thought was amazing. I actually talked to them a little bit about their upcoming wedding when I was interviewing them at Athlete Ally when they were getting an award, this was a couple of months ago. One of the things they told me was that they were really trying to make sure that all of the decisions for their wedding were very purposeful and ethical and everybody they worked with for their wedding really believed what they believed, and tried to make it personal in that way, which I thought was really beautiful. Only working with vendors and with artists, run the gamut, that support the causes they believe in.
It seems like it was really, truly a celebration of love, and I think that there has been a lot of progress over the last couple of years it’s easy to overlook how significant this is: two women on the US women’s national team just got married and it was everywhere!
Jessica: There were pictures in People! Yeah.
Lindsay: People was covering it, it was Instagrammed everywhere. It was a really beautiful celebration of love and I don’t want to overlook it. That’s a big…It’s an important moment and…They’re so pretty.
Jessica: They really are, and can I just say, so Ali’s brother Kyle made a speech and I just wanted to quote part of what he said to them. He said, quote: “Your love is a beacon of hope for so many gay young people who don’t always get to see happy endings reflected back to us. You are our happy ending.”
Lindsay: That’s so good. I also have to say, shoutout to Adrianna Franch, the US women’s national team goalie. She also got married to her girlfriend last month.
Jessica: They looked beautiful, too!
Lindsay: They looked beautiful. She had on…She looked phenomenal in this, this suit she was wearing. And she also graduated from college last month!
Jessica: Oh my god.
Lindsay: So big month for Adrianna, wanted to give her a shoutout. I pretty much spent all last month watching Hallmark movies in bed, so…
Jessica: Just a normal continuation out in the real world.
Lindsay: Alright, let’s do this.
Okay, so over the break last week news came out that Ole Miss had hired DJ Durkin. Jess, why is that problematic? Get us going here.
Jessica: Yeah, why is that problematic. Such an easy question with such a huge answer. I want to mention that the new Ole Miss coach is Lane Kiffin, who was a failure of a coach at USC, the Oakland Raiders, and Tennessee, before he was hired away from Florida Atlantic to be the coach at Ole Miss. His story alone is work unpacking I think, but we’re going to focus on the fact that DJ Durkin was hired by Kiffin last week. Durkin, we’ve talked about his tenure at Maryland multiple times over on this podcast before because, on May 29th 2018, 19-year-old Jordan McNair, defensive lineman for the Terps, collapsed after a particularly grueling workout with the team.
McNair eventually died in the hospital from heatstroke, but his death was preventable and no one under Durkin that day did a damn thing to help McNair. According to McNair’s family, an hour went by between McNair having a seizure and anyone calling 911. In the wake of damning journalism from ESPN later that summer following McNair’s death about the toxic culture of the football program under Durkin, Durkin was placed on paid administrative leave and the school launched an investigation. Even though the investigation found that same toxic culture, Durkin was reinstated briefly before public pressure finally led to his firing. At the time of his reinstatement Jordan’s father said, quote: “I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach and somebody spit in my face.”
Also at that time, because I feel like this matters to understanding college football generally, Will Muschamp, currently the head coach at South Carolina but who was Durkin’s boss when Muschamp was the head coach at Florida, he was asked about the line between coaching and abuse. He took no time at all to remember Jordan McNair, the young man who died. Instead, Muschamp did a full-throated defense of Durkin, saying Durkin is, quote, “an outstanding football coach, but he’s also an outstanding husband and a father, and he treats people with respect.”
Then Nick Saban hired Durkin as a consultant for Alabama. When that became public news, Saban claimed instead that Durkin was just doing some “professional development” with the team. But maybe some listeners will remember Brenda’s inspired burn from episode 137 a few weeks back when she torched Saban’s quote unquote “internship program” to help fired coaches get all the money they can from their previous places of employment. Saban is in the business of saying little generally and doing much to prop up the careers of other coaches, even ones like Durkin. And now Durkin has a brand new job in charge of teenage football players all over again. That’s unconscionable. I believe I’ve said it on this program before but he should have to get a different job now. He should no longer be able to coach. He’s not even that good at it.
The athletic director of Ole Miss, Keith Carter, put out a statement saying exactly what all these mofos say when they hire someone controversial, quote: “The university conducted a thorough background check on coach Durkin, and we connected with several highly respected college football coaches, administrators and school officials, about their experiences with him.” Carter goes on to say that everyone loves Durkin and cites Durkin’s apparently, quote, “strong character and work ethic,” and if you can fucking believe it, “his positive impact on the communities and institutions where he was previously employed.”
Jordan McNair died a preventable death in a toxic program that Durkin oversaw. That should be enough. I feel like there’s so many things here. Okay, so we have Durkin’s horrific history, college football caring very little about players who actually play the sport, Lane Kiffin’s continued failure upward, the way college football coaches and administrators constantly rehabilitate the reputations of people who don’t deserve it, that Ole Miss itself is a mess of a space, anyway. Anyone remember Hugh Freeze? We have talked about him on here before…
Lindsay: Oh, geez.
Jessica: Lindsay, where do you wanna start with this?
Lindsay: I wanna start by going in a little bit more about what Durkin did at University of Maryland because, first of all, this is the tiniest piece here. But he didn’t win that many football games!
Jessica: No. He’s not that good.
Lindsay: I just do feel like it’s worth mentioning, even though it shouldn’t matter in this context, but like there’s not even a fallback that he wasn’t a successful football coach? No! Maryland wasn’t that good at football. They’d be better without him.
Jessica: No. I think ten and fifteen, and then they’ve been better since he left.
Lindsay: Yeah. So you know, put that to the side but it’s worth holding because a lot of times…
Jessica: But what is the justification if it’s not even that?
Lindsay: Because what’s the justification, exactly. That’s not even the justification. One of the things that got me was when Jordan McNair’s parents told reporters that DJ Durkin, the head coach, during recruiting he did that thing we see in movies and hear about where he went and sat in their living room to recruit Jordan McNair, and assured the parents that he would treat Jordan as if Jordan was one of his kids and make sure that nothing happens to him. That’s what Tanya Wilson, McNair’s mother, told HBO Sports. But her 19-year-old son died two weeks after suffering heat stroke during a practice on May 29th. So he didn’t take care of him.
Jordan McNair showed signs of heat stroke. If his heat stroke had been taken seriously, if his pain as a young Black man had been taken seriously, he would still be alive today. But the coaching staff that reported directly to DJ Durkin didn’t take that pain seriously, they didn’t follow any proper protocols, and a death that was easily preventable happened, it occurred. So the report that Maryland did, the Maryland Board of Regents did on McNair’s death, clearly showed as Jess mentioned a toxic culture in the Maryland football program.
So Court, the strength and conditioning coach, was actually in charge of practice, so he was the one who…But he directly reported to Durkin. So in this report that was done, Durkin admitted that he would often hear Court using the…I don’t even want to say it, “pussy” and “bitch” and f-words and homophobic slurs at the players, but he let it go because he didn’t hear that language directed at ‘specific individuals.’ Durkin also acknowledged that he heard about the incident where Court took a box of food out of a player’s hands and threw it against the wall. But Durkin did not believe that Court crossed any lines.
So Durkin’s program specifically ran through fear and intimidation, bullying on and off the field. At one point in the report, which is what really sticks out to me, this culture included showing videos of serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals during breakfast, as a way “to motivate and entertain” players, that’s what Durkin said. He said that these horror movies were sometimes shown at breakfast to motivate and entertain players!
Jessica: What is college football? Like, what is it that you’re upholding here?
Lindsay: What is any of this?
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: I don’t know how you can’t see a direct correlation between that culture and one where McNair was pushed well beyond his limits during practice, his anguish was not taken seriously, he was afraid to complain because he didn’t want to be seen as weak, and his humanity was completely overlooked and he died. There’s just a direct correlation there and there is absolutely no way that Durkin should be able to coach again, especially since he’s not shown any true remorse, taken any true responsibility, done anything that says he’s actually learned from any of this.
None of these statements that we’ve been hearing have been about how DJ Durkin has changed as a coach as a result of McNair’s death, and once again these investigations that Ole Miss has done remind me so much of, let’s say, the investigation that Tampa Bay did into Jameis Winston, the investigation that we see so many do where it’s to get their own confirmation…It’s to confirm what they want to hear. It doesn’t seem like they went to Jordan McNair’s parents and talked to them. It doesn’t seem like they went to many of the disgruntled players on the Maryland team, who did exist.
Friend of the show Nicole Auerbach did a big report last year talking about a lot of the disgruntled parents and players on the Maryland team who are so upset with Durkin. Some of them walked out of a meeting with him. One parent told Nicole, “We are worried that this narcissistic sociopath is going to come back.” That narcissistic sociopath was Durkin! So they didn’t go to any of them. They went to people who would tell them what they wanted to hear because, as I’ve seen many people say on social media, these coaches want to protect their own fraternity. They want to protect their own and they care far more about that than they do any of the players.
Jessica: Yeah, and I think that wanting to protect their own, there’s something particularly damning in that way. You know when, around #MeToo, when there was stuff coming out about sexual harassment and people were like, “Well if THAT’S sexual harassment then we’ve ALL been sexual harassers!” And people are like, yes, that’s sexual harassment. It feels the same way, like “If THAT’S bad behavior and a toxic culture then we’ve all done bad things and we all have toxic cultures” and it’s like, yeah. You do. And you should all be held accountable! I just…Oh, man. That parent’s worry that that narcissistic sociopath was going to get hired again was the correct one, obviously. And there was a reason they were worried for it, because we know that this is how it works.
And I just wanted to mention, I know that I have pretty set patterns of beats that I hit when we talk about this stuff, but I just feel like it’s always work repeating: there’s something in our culture that we need to constantly investigate around the way that we imagine people who become coaches are good people, like because they want to be coaches therefore they are good, in the way that we imagine that about teachers or doctors or something like that. So when then they’re found to be doing bad things, making harmful choices, it’s so much harder for us in society to imagine them that way, right? Because they start from a position on a pedestal, and we have to bring them down to a normal level to even begin an interrogation of the choices that they’re making and the cultures they’re producing, and I feel like that’s at play here.
Keith Carter, the AD at Ole Miss, can release this kind of boilerplate statement about Durkin with all the same language we always hear because it works, because it taps into an exact narrative that we are all used to consuming, and the one that makes us feel okay about watching. Ole Miss fans want to hear that so that next season they can feel okay as they’re watching football. I mean, Ole Miss, y’all have lots of things to reckon with starting with your mascot and so much of your history that you must have to feel okay about as you’re consuming…
Another thing I wanted to mention that just gets me every time is that these coaches are willing every single time to take credit when things are good. Every time when their team does anything well, their players are good people who make good choices, when they win coaches are willing to take all of that credit! “I have made, I have moulded that person that he is. I have created the culture of this team that is a winning culture.” All of that stuff. As soon as it goes negative, as soon as anything bad happens, it’s like oh, that’s that other guy’s problem. Right? You will see it. You’ll see it from die-hard Maryland fans, I’m seeing it from Ole Miss people now on social media now like, “This wasn’t Durkin’s thing, this was Rick Court’s thing,” that the responsibility only goes in one direction, right? Anytime it’s negative it’s never the coach’s fault.
This was at Baylor, right? That Art Briles apparently created a whole system where he didn’t know when things were bad, right? Or Rick Pitino at Louisville, right, there’s a list of the ways that these people talk about it so they’re never in trouble when the bad things happen but Lord God they’re gonna take those million dollar paychecks when things go well. There’s something about that that is so disgusting. College football just…There’s something about the sport that is so bad. I feel like Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss hiring DJ Durkin is just the perfect microcosm of so much of that.
Lindsay: Alright. Next we have Amira’s interview with Jess McDonald.
Amira: Y’all, I’m fangirling a little bit because it is now my immense pleasure to chat with the one and only Jessica McDonald, member of the US women’s national team, World Cup champion and an NWSL champion. She’s had an amazing year and done it all while parenting her super adorable son, and that’s part of what we’re gonna chat about today. What is it like to be a professional athlete and mom? And we’re also going to discuss the launch of her forthcoming podcast that’s going to center on a discussion about athlete moms. So Jess, welcome to Burn It All Down.
Jess: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to have this little chit chat.
Amira: Alright! Let’s start with the launch of your podcast. You have a forthcoming podcast and it’s set to launch soon, right?
Jess: Yes, and I’m so excited about it.
Amira: Well I’m excited to listen. Can you give us all some insight? What is it going to explore? What’s the motivation behind doing the podcast and what can we look forward to?
Jess: Yeah, so something that the outside world doesn’t normally see is how us female athletes who are moms out there, how our lives are, you know, around the clock. Because we put our bodies through so much and then not only that, we don’t just have our career but the next job we have is going home to our kids and taking care of them and playing the mom role. I just want to show the world sort of the separation between the moms out there who are active in comparison to those who are not moms who are active, because…I can go on for days, sort of my experiences as a female footballer and a mom as well.
Just a small example is I’ll go to training and then we do recovery things and we have to do things, obviously, to take care of our bodies, and then I go home to my kid and so my day is not done. Whereas if I talk to one of my teammates like, “Hey! What’d you do yesterday?” “Oh my gosh, after training I was so tired. I took like a four hour nap and then got up, had a bowl of cereal, binge-watched Netflix…” Just hearing these things I’m like, oh my gosh, I would kill for a nap. That sounds so lovely. Little things like that where it sounds very intriguing for people out there, like our parents sort of see what we go through as parents, and it would just be really cool for the world to hear us out and know the things that we go through, just being a parent. Like, you’re never a perfect parent and it’s okay if things go wrong, you know, just talk about problems that we have and positive things that we also have, as both athletes and as parents as well.
Amira: Yeah, one of the things I find most striking about that conversation is that we’ve certainly had portions about this conversation about the second shift that mothers do in other arenas, like I was in graduate school parenting with kids and similar to what you’re saying, I used to go home from the library or whatnot and then be nursing and changing diapers and thinking, you know, what would I do with time?
Jess: Exactly.
Amira: One of the things I find so compelling about the conversation around athletic motherhood is so much of what you carry in terms of your profession is really your body. I could be pregnant and still writing a paper, but that changes a little bit when so much of your job is wrapped up in your ability to go out and physically perform to the best of your physical ability. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that aspect of athletic motherhood, just walk us through the physicality of it, what are the limitations, what are the tensions, what are the requirements of your body, in this conversation?
Jess: Yeah, absolutely. We put our bodies through a lot and it takes a lot of discipline, obviously, to have longevity in your career if you want that, and so when I was pregnant with my kid I didn’t stop training, actually. I was still training every day until I pretty much was really close to birth, and so those are just the things that the world doesn’t see us doing. We still train, it’s still very possible to do so while pregnant. And so everything was still high intensity, I still did everything that I possibly could to stay in shape and not fall out of shape too much post-giving birth.
So just being able to try and get my body back into tiptop shape was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever gone through. Just trying to continue the training after having my kid, it’s been kind of a long road but obviously every day, blood sweat and tears trying to get my body back, trying to stay sane as a parent, you know? You have a newborn and you’re trying to get the proper nutrition, you’re trying to do everything right. I just had to discipline myself to be able to do so and yeah, it’s been quite a journey.
So when I had my trainer after I had my kid, just getting back into shape he had me use my son at the time when he was a baby as my weight! He was always with me at my workouts anyway. I used him as my weight and I did squats with him, jump squats, you know babies, they like to be thrown up in the air and so I would squat and throw him up as a full body workout. My trainer was really good at being able to incorporate my son into my workouts as well, because he was always by my side, obviously being my firstborn, and so just to have him be part of the start of my journey as an athlete and as a mom was kind of an incredible thing to go through. It was hard though, because babies aren’t that light, you know? You’re working with between 20 and 40 pounds here, you know, just trying to toss him up in the air and catch him, little things like that, that was kind of an incredible thing to do.
Amira: Yeah. I appreciate your candor there, and I think we’ve started to see glimpses of this. We saw it with Serena Williams’ documentary, her fight to return to form after having a baby, but also we’ve seen Syd Leroux post pictures of her playing and training at five months pregnant; friend of the pod and Olympic bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor posted recently a badass video of her doing squats, and so I think we’re starting to see glimpses of it. But also because we aren’t used to these images we’re seeing the mentions of both of those women that I’ve just mentioned, all those people who think they’re doctors yelling and women for training when they’re pregnant. So I think we have a ways to go there.
Jess: Absolutely.
Amira: So much of this recent conversation around athletic motherhood has been advanced by yourself and Serena Williams and Allyson Felix, and I’m particularly interested in the fact that it seems to be Black women athletes who have really ushered in or more prominently brought the conversation into the forefront around athletic motherhood. Do you have the same read on this moment?
Jess: Yeah definitely, I feel like there’s been so many more lately and it’s a really beautiful thing to see, to be able to relate to them. Because obviously we all know it’s not easy, it’s not easy being a mother in general. But to be able to see female Black athletes just kind of crushing it in their careers and being successful and also just setting a really good example for all the Black moms out there. Because we know it’s not easy. It’s just a really incredible thing to see them be successful and be able to do the things that they’re able to do – WE are able to do! Excuse me. I don’t know why I’m excluding myself here.
It’s an incredibly dynamic to be a part of because this is something historic. This is something that people just don’t see very often but being able to step into ourselves as moms and being able to succeed at the same time, that’s a very beautiful thing and I’m very blessed and grateful to be able to show that, to show moms that look, if there’s anything you want to do or be in the future, you’re a mom and you think that because you’re a mom you’re gonna have to change career field? Absolutely not! Go after what you want. Is it possible that it’s gonna be hard, heck yeah. But it’s very possible and we’re talking testaments of that.
Amira: And to shift the conversation a little bit, I saw a tweet that you responded to once where you said how many times you almost came close to retiring from the NWSL, and someone said why, and you said well, I can’t survive and feed my kid off of that salary. And so in this moment as we are getting ready for the 2020 draft and there’s discussion of expansion and we’re thinking about the state of the league, if somebody made you NWSL commissioner tomorrow what changes would you implement? What policies might be put in place to help those in your position and for people in the future coming up behind you?
Jess: Yeah, so I think overall we’re lacking a lot of female athletes in our league and it’s because of the pay. Not only that but obviously a lot of the girls, they want to be moms. If you’re a mom and you’re trying to survive on that salary it seems almost impossible. I still don’t even know…It was all a blur for me with the season sort of scraping by. With the salary, overall I believe that 1) childcare is very very expensive and if you’re gonna pay us, at least pay for that. I think that should just be a thing that the NWSL should be responsible for.
And 2) if we’re traveling with our child we should have our own hotel room, and 3) if we are on the road, pay for us to have a nanny for the game. You know, just little things like that it’s hard for us to afford. I believe just having our backs as moms in this league would be really helpful, because there could be more moms in this league and I think that the competition would be incredible. We’d be able to see all these moms who are dominating on the soccer field, and we have very few – I could count on one hand all the moms we have in our league.
It’s sad to see because my friends want to be moms but they’re holding off on being a mom because the salary’s not good, you wanna make the national team, you have this goal. But because of our salaries and the way that we’re treated right now with how our league is going, it’s kind of making things impossible. So I think just taking care of childcare, own room on the road, and hire a nanny to watch our kids during games. Simple as that. I think that those of us who are moms in the league can sort of speak up and out about that and try and put our feet down in order to do so, especially for the future moms that are gonna be in our league.
Amira: Yes, talk about retaining talent. There’s a number of people who retire when faced with that choice.
Jess: Yes, absolutely.
Amira: You certainly had a hell of year, and your son was along for the ride the whole time. Heartwarming videos and pictures coming out of France when you won the World Cup, and then again when the Courage won the NWSL championship. What was your favorite moment, what was your brightest moment of this past year?
Jess: Oh my gosh, I think, man, for me just sharing that moment with him. Because he’s been on this journey with me since day one. Literally. I was a professional soccer player for one year before I had my son, I had him at a very young age as well. I was 24 years old and just got right back into being a professional athlete once he was born, and so for him to just be on this entire journey with me since the day he was born and to share that moment at the World Cup was almost like a big relief for me. It just got very emotional because he’s seven years old and I’m just happy that he’s at an age where he can remember all of this.
He doesn’t understand the magnitude and he understands that like, yeah mommy plays soccer that’s really cool, but he just doesn’t understand the magnitude yet. When he does one day I just hope and pray that it’s going to inspire him to be great or to do well at whatever it is that he wants to do, whatever it is that he wants to be when he’s a man. And so I think just sharing that moment after winning the World Cup with my son was probably one of the most memorable moments, for me at least. And I’m just happy that he’s also gonna remember it, but that was a truly emotional but happy…Just an amazing moment for the two of us. In that moment I was just like, oh my gosh, buddy, we did it. I laid back and he just sprayed me with confetti and I was like oh my gosh, this is actually incredible. Just sharing that moment after winning the World Cup with my son is definitely cherry on top for sure.
Amira: Amazing. So, it’s a new year, you have January camp coming up, you’re training with the national team looking towards Tokyo, and of course we have the launch of your podcast. What else can we look for from Jess McDonald for 2020?
Jess: Yeah, I’ll continue doing speaking engagements as well, I love doing motivational speaking because I believe that my life story, my “why” is very relatable to a lot of people out there and I think just sharing my story is gonna help others as well to be inspired and do things with their life. I want to inspire the youth and inspire anyone who comes across me. My goal for 2020 is to sort of hop around to universities, to high schools, to elementary schools to come and speak some light into them, just sort of relate to them. That’s just one thing that I absolutely love doing is public speaking and trying to motivate the youth.
Amira: Well Jess, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to chat with me and coming on Burn It All Down. It’s a pleasure to talk with you. We’re excited about your podcast, and best wishes for a happy new year.
Jess: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me, first and foremost. It’s always incredible to show people how badass moms are so yeah, just thank you so much for this opportunity.
Lindsay: Last week David Stern, who was the commissioner for the NBA from 1984 through 2014, passed away at the age of 77, a few weeks after suffering from a brain hemorrhage. Too young, 77, I believe! It was a devastating loss to the entire sports world and you could really see through social media and through writing how even though Stern was a controversial figure at times, he was very well-respected and very well-loved, because he really loved the sport that he dedicated his life to.
There’s a lot of places we can go when talking about David Stern’s legacy and I do think that we’re gonna touch a little bit on all of them. There’s how he navigated race in the NBA: when he took over a lot of white fans were not wanting to watch the sport and there’s also how he handled Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis announcement, how he supported a gay executive in the NBA…But I really want to start with talking about his impact in women’s sports, because without David Stern it’s very unlikely that there would be a WNBA.
In the early ‘90s he started working and championing Val Ackerman, a former women’s basketball player, who is now the Big East commissioner. He got to start working with her on creating a women’s professional league and after the success of the 1996 women’s dream team winning gold in Atlanta there was enough momentum and he believed that the timing was right. Of course, it helped that there was the ABL which had launched in ‘97, I believe, and was signing some of the best players in the world. I think that David Stern felt a little pressure by that to get the WNBA off the ground – competition’s never hurt anything.
So he did, and you know, now we have the longest running women’s team sports league in the United States, and one of the most successful and sustainable that we’ve seen. And he really did champion it. Now, we can talk about some of the controversial decisions he made, we can talk about some of the ways that it would be great if the NBA did push it more, but the truth is that it takes men in positions of power like that backing women’s sports in order to push things forward. And that’s all we ask for, that’s what we’re asking for right now from higher ups in, let’s say, the NHL, in US Soccer, and that’s what we’re so often not getting, their response and enthusiasm back.
And in the mid-90s he did that for the WNBA. It was Lindsay Whalen who said, “Thanks for changing my life by creating the WNBA.” That’s what she tweeted, and I think he’s changed a lot of lives by championing the WNBA. Jess, what stood out to you about Stern’s legacy?
Jessica: Yeah, I wanna thank Lindsay for having us talk about this today because I actually didn’t know very much before I started reading all the things that she sent me in preparation for talking about this today. I was really struck reading one of those pieces by M.A. Voepel written in 2014 about how Stern was the mastermind behind the WNBA. I think what I found so fascinating about David Stern and his take on the WNBA was how pragmatic it was. People use that word a lot with him and I feel like so much of the ways women’s sports is handled is not so pragmatic.
So one of the things she wrote about was that they actually came up with a financial blueprint for the WNBA early in the 1990s and then Stern waited, and he waited for the moment he thought it would launch, and in 1996 he was like this is it, we’re gonna do it. And then like you said, the ABL happened, but he was more pragmatic in the end about how to market these women and how to market the league and how to put them out there. Obviously they won, the WNBA has been around now twenty more years than the ABL lasted. It’s interesting because everything I’ve read shows that Stern got that this was socially significant, and he clearly had that part of his life, right? He cared very much about issues of race – again, there were controversial moments with that like you mentioned.
There’s this great piece you sent me about Rick Welts, a gay executive under David Stern, and how supported Rick Welts felt by Stern and how much he pushed to make sure that Magic Johnson could play in the 1992 Olympics even though he was out as HIV positive. It’s just so interesting to me that Stern was able to balance between saying this matters that girls get to see women playing basketball, but also this is a business opportunity and we’re going to go after this in the way that we go after anything. He was, if nothing, so great at building and expanding brands, right? That will forever be his great legacy.
There was just something about reading it over and over again where I was like, I feel like that’s what we’re still missing, that part of women’s sports. We talked about it this summer with the ‘Dare to Shine’ at the Women’s World Cup and it’s like, dude. We are so far past this. How are you people so behind? And it feels like, reading about Stern and starting the WNBA, that he was always in front. He wasn’t ever operating from that kind of position where it feels like most male executives who are in charge of women’s sports, they fail at the pragmatic part of it. They don’t see the business in it, the potential there.
Lindsay: Yeah, he was a really tough negotiator. Last year, or I guess now two years ago, I did a piece for ThinkProgress on the history of the WNBA union, player’s association, and I talked to Pamela Wheeler who was one of the first executive directors of the player’s association – the first, I believe. I was asking her about this negotiation in 2003 that I was reading about in which David Stern had threatened to shut down the WNBA if a deal wasn’t reached and the quote she gave me was: “David was always threatening to shut down the WNBA.” He was still very much a hardline negotiator! I think that for some that leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
I think when you look at David Stern and how he handled the WNBA…I think so much to the launch of the WNBA and how well the players were marketed at the beginning and how good the attendance was at the beginning, and I think a lot of that was David Stern. Because he really kind of revolutionized the marketing of NBA players and took them from an era where they were high up on the celebrity list to the dream team. He was big behind the marketing of the dream team. He really did know how to treat these players as brands. I think of the fact that I did not grow up watching women’s basketball, I did not grow up in a family that watched a lot of women’s sports, period. But I knew who Rebecca Lobo was and who Sheryl Swoopes was and who Dawn Staley was, you know? They were part of pop culture in a way that we don’t see anymore.
I do think, when I was reading back through it I was like, wow, I bet David Stern was behind a lot of that. I do think that he underestimated though how prevalent sexism was and how hard it was going to be to sustain. So I think the business side of him and probably pressure from the owners and things like that…NBA owners still own 50% of the WNBA today. I think ultimately that made him fall more on the pragmatic side, and maybe that was the only way to survive, to keep pushing through at the time. We don’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes but I wish that the WNBA could’ve received fifteen years of the marketing push that they received at the beginning, you know? That David Stern marketing push. I wish that that energy had come through the league, and that sort of patience.
Instead I think because they gave so much and he championed so much at the beginning that when there was a drawback it almost became pragmatic in a self-defeating sense. But also at the same time I can say all of this and have all of these critiques, at the same time realize the WNBA is still here. There’s a long, long way to go but it’s survived through a lot of iterations and maybe if it wasn’t for David Stern maybe we wouldn’t have Diana Taurasi becoming the highest scoring woman in the WNBA, becoming this legend, and Sue Bird becoming this legend. Maybe they are only on national teams and they literally are for every other month of the year overseas. Maybe we don’t…I don’t know. Could the ABL have survived if it wasn’t for the WNBA? Some say yes, but the whole history of women’s sports shows that probably not.
Jessica: Probably not. Yeah. And one other thing that I learned that I thought was interesting…Again there are moments, like I sent a note to Lindsay last night like “How did I not know this stuff!?” It’s kind of amazing. So Adam Silver was handpicked by Stern to take over and one of the things that Adam Silver did was he was one of those creators of the WNBA. He was one of the people planning the WNBA’s structure and how it would all work. That seems significant to me, that of all the people that were picked to replace David Stern one of these things was this person had a direct hand in the creation of the WNBA. I dunno.
Maybe the legacy for Stern is they need to get back to what they were doing in 1997. Go back and re-embrace the way that they were handling…Like, Lisa Leslie had a McDonalds commercial, I want to say, around that time. She was everything to me. I wrote about in 1996, seeing those women play in Atlanta as a tall, really awkward fifteen year old, and what they meant to me. So maybe the legacy…That should be how they carry it on is let’s go back to that and let’s re-invest in these women the way that Stern initially did and got the league off the ground. It is all so primed right now. Can someone remind Adam Silver of all of that?
Lindsay: Yeah.
Jessica: Because he definitely cared enough, right? That was something that he was invested in. I don’t know. That would be amazing, and it was really cool to learn all this about David Stern and to see, like Lindsay said, a man with a lot of power and with a lot of influence direct it in that way, take women’s sport seriously, both in the social way but also in the business way, and really launch these women. Man, this is the year. 2020 man, let’s do this.
Lindsay: And that’s the thing, another Olympic year. Let’s do this. Here’s the deal: when I think back to when he put the same marketing push or a very similar marketing pushes towards the Magic Johnsons and Larry Birds or Michael Jordans and the Lisa Leslies and Rebecca Lobos, when he did that he was adding fuel to a fire that was already ready to burn. The NBA, even though it wasn’t the behemoth it was now, there was steady base there, right? There were fanbases, there was infrastructure, there were legacies, there was history. A base had already been built up so high so when you’re adding that marketing push to it there’s a base that can sustain it, right? Whereas in women’s sports you didn’t have that base-
Jessica: Right, right.
Lindsay: -for the WNBA. And now maybe 24 years later, I’m not saying it’s the same base that maybe the NBA was 24 years ago but it’s much more similar, right? At least you have established markets, you have history, you have fanbases, and you have more awareness of women’s sports and what it takes. I just think that that marketing push could be so much more effective in the long term now, because it almost seems like they’re much more ready for it, the league is much more ready for it. I hope that we do get there, I mean, I hope that that’s what 2020 will bring.
We’re eagerly awaiting – and we might, who knows, by the time this publishes maybe we’ll know, but we’re waiting on the new CBA. The WNBA collective bargaining agreement. We’re waiting for that to come out, the new deadline is January 15th. There is a commissioner now, Cathy Engelbert seems to have a lot more power than the presidents who came before her. So let’s keep our fingers crossed, let’s keep holding people accountable. Jess, is there anything else that you want to mention about Stern besides women’s sports and the WNBA?
Jessica: Yeah, I really want people to go read this article that the AP wrote, ‘Rick Welts will be forever grateful to David Stern.’ I was really touched by the story of Rick Welts. When he worked for David Stern in the mid-90s Welts was very closeted, but his partner died of an AIDS-related issue and he put a little obit in the Seattle newspaper and then flew home. In the ad he asked people to donate money to a new scholarship fund at the University of Washington and he felt like he had done a really good job of being closeted in his work and – this gets me every time – he went to the post office, picked up the envelopes from people who had sent checks in his partner’s memory. He opened them on the plane ride back to New York and one of them was from Scarsdale, New York and contained a $10,000 check from David and Diane Stern. He doesn’t know to this day how David Stern knew that about his life, found that information and then donated that money in his partner’s memory. I just think that’s such a beautiful story about David Stern and there’s just a lot in that piece that I really loved.
Lindsay: I agree. And Rick Welts is now the president of the Golden State Warriors, he is still very much a behemoth in the NBA. I actually got to talk to him at the Athlete Ally awards also, and that was phenomenal. I really didn’t know much about his story before I went into that interview, kind of wish I could do it again! One of those. And I also wanted to shout out a New York Times article about how Stern navigated race in the NBA – I think that’s literally the title, ‘How David Stern Navigated Race in the N.B.A.’
There were definitely some controversial decisions, such as putting together the dress code for NBA players, the Malice at the Palace, and the way he oversaw things. A lot of his things such as the dress code, even the Black players themselves have very mixed feelings on them. It was seen as a direct response to hip hop culture and race when it was implemented, and as a way to make the players more…
Jessica: Palatable?
Lindsay: Acceptable, palatable to the majority white fan base? And that’s icky, to say the least. At the same time David Aldridge of The Athletic was talking about how a lot of players now, they see their pocketbooks and they see how much more money the league has and they have a respect for the decision. They’ve learned to show their style in different ways that have them ranking as fashion icons and they recognize that more as a business decision and one that has been ultimately good for their bottom line – which is obviously uncomfortable, because that directly relates to how racist capitalism can be.
But it’s interesting. There’s so much to look back at, at his legacy. We’ll put some links in the show notes so that we can all kind of…There’s a lot to hold together at once, and here at Burn It All Down we want to hold everything together at once. We don’t like one to outweigh the other.
Alright Jess, it’s burn pile time. I know we have some burns stored up from the holidays, so can you get us started?
Jessica: Yeah, so last month Geneva Abdul had a story at the New York Times about a 800m runner Annet Negesa. Negesa’s a woman from Uganda and is a woman with naturally high testosterone levels. In 2012, according to the article, a doctor for the IAAF, the world’s governing body, which is now called World Athletics, apparently, told Negesa that she could not compete. Negesa was a world-class athlete at the time and a star in her home country. According to Abdul, Negesa, quote, “is an intersex athlete. She identifies as female and was born with external female genitalia, but also with internal male genitalia that produce levels of testosterone that men do.” That’s a complicated sentence. According to sports officials, that gave her an unfair advantage over most women in some events.
So we’ve talked about this repeatedly on the podcast because of Caster Semenya, the 800m South African runner who has been the target of much of World Athletic’s bans on women with naturally high testosterone levels. If you want to know more about this please go back and listen to Brenda’s interview with Dr. Katrina Karkazis on episode 105.
Negesa, like Semenya, has naturally high testosterone levels, as I mentioned, but Negesa’s story took a different track because she underwent surgery to change her body to meet the regulations demanded by World Athletics. Again, let me quote Abdul’s reporting. Negesa, quote, “said a World Athletics physician, Dr. Stephane Bermon, told her she needed to undergo medical treatment and was given surgery as her first option: a gonadectomy to remove her internal testes.” World Athletics denies that Bermon ever met with Negesa or did the surgery, and Bermon declined to give the New York Times a statement. But, quote, “Negesa’s medical records from the Women's Hospital International and Fertility Centre in Kampala was reviewed by the New York Times and they confirmed that World Athletics, then known as IAAF, recommended a thorough medical examination citing the high levels of testosterone in her body.”
The report states that after her testing in Nice she had a gonadectomy in Kampala. The document states that her surgeon in Kampala, Dr. Edward Tamale Sali, did not start her on hormone therapy because he was awaiting further discussion with Dr. Bermon. Negesa says that since the surgery she has had persistent headaches and achy joints. She did not receive post-operative hormone treatment that might’ve helped her body adjust. She has yet to run competitively again. She’s also unable to go home to Uganda where LGBT+ people, including intersex people, face persecution, possible imprisonment, and sometimes death. She applied for asylum in Germany, was granted it, and now lives in Berlin. Dr. Bermon is now the director of World Athletic’s health and science department. The French minister of sports and minister of health opened a joint investigation into Negesa’s claims. She’s told New York Times that she might file a lawsuit.
I’m just not sure what there’s left to say here except this is not what sports should be. Is this the so-called “fair” that people are talking about? They demand the athletes alter their bodies in order to compete? Are these really the lengths that someone should have to go to level the playing field for others? And I know that I already wrote this on Twitter but I’m just gonna repeat it here: sport and all of its rules, especially at the expense of Black women and/or women from the global south, and at the hands of mostly white governing bodies and doctors in the global north, most of them men, can be incredibly cruel.
The need to uphold the gender binary and punish women and/or nonbinary people who threaten it in any way is something sport is going to have to reckon with in a meaningful way. It just has to. This is devastating. I am so sorry for all of these people who suffer in its wake. So today I want to burn what has happened to Negesa and the continued brutality of these regulations and the people who oversee them. Burn.
Lindsay: Burn. God, whew. Just gonna sit with that one for a sec. So for my burn I just want to talk a little bit about another example about how we treat women’s sports vs how we treat men’s sports. So the IIHF under-18 women’s world championships happened over the past couple of weeks, in hockey. They happen at the same time that men’s world juniors were taking place in hockey. While men’s world juniors were broadcast live on TSN, the big television network in Canada, on multiple channels, the women’s was relegated to a stream online with no commentators.
The first couple of days of this stream it was literally one static fisheye lens. It looked like the players were skating downhill. You couldn’t tell who was who and watching it would make you seasick.
Jessica: Oh my gosh.
Lindsay: There was a lot of complaints over this and they did improve the quality of the stream. The IIHF said that they had not been able to check the quality of the stream before the tournament, which seems like probably a really bad oversight. So they did improve the medal round and you could at least see the players a little bit better but there was still no commentary. There was still errors in the graphics and such, the team names were sometimes wrong on the scoreboard. It was pathetic, and it was such a stark reminder of how women’s sports are treated vs how men’s sports are treated. Friend of the show Courtney Szto wrote about how the men’s tournament, thanks to the IIHF and TSN, has become a must-see event and it’s become a destination viewing.
But that’s because they put the effort into the production, that didn’t happen automatically. Women’s sports meanwhile, nobody sees it worth it to do that. Despite all of that more than 10,000 people tuned in to watch the stream of the gold medal game where USA beat Canada. It was a thrilling game and I think the fact that 10,000 people went searching for a stream online of an event that was given no marketing push and no production push proves that there is an audience for this and that it needs to be tapped into, and that we especially need federations and governing bodies to be treating the women with much more respect. It is 2020! We want to leave the fisheye streams in the last decade. Burn!
Alright, it is time to talk about our badass women of the week, the holiday season, whatever you wanna call it. I don’t have dates written down. We want to start out with some honorable mentions :
Fallon Sherrock became the first woman to beat a man in the PDC world darts championship before beating the number 11 seed and going all the way to the third round. If you haven’t seen the videos of her winning these-
Jessica: Go find them. They’re incredible.
Lindsay: I now really need to go see darts?
Jessica: Me too! Let’s go!
Lindsay: We need to go, especially like in Scotland because oh my god, they are having so much fun.
Awhona Rahman, who is 19, won Bangladesh’s first women’s bodybuilding championship. Congratulations, that is amazing.
Serena Williams was named AP Female Athlete of the Decade, no complaints here!
Like we said at the beginning of the episode, we wanna congratulate Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris for getting married! So did Adriana Franch. And Andi Sullivan, another US Women’s National Team player who wasn’t on the World Cup squad but is a member of the team. She also got married, she’s also a Washington Spirit player. So, we love love!
Caroline Ouellette won the Order of Canada for, as the CBC described it, “her contributions to sport in Canada as a decorated athlete, national team leader and ambassador for women's hockey.”
Pakistani cricket player, Sana Mir, love her, was named the captain of Wisden women’s team of the decade.
Wendie Renard, another podcast favorite, was named the French player of the year in 2019.
And of course Sabrina Ionescu, the Oregon Duck guard, continues to rack up triple-doubles. She got her 21st and counting.
Jess, can I get a drumroll please?
Jessica: That’s a heavy duty by yourself!
Lindsay: That was good! So I wanted to give a shoutout to Kayla Harrison, who started the new year with the Professional Fighter League title and the $1 million prize. So, anytime a woman in sports gets $1 million we like to shout it out! As I wrote in Power Plays, I want women to get jaded about the amount of money they’re getting in sports. I want us to start saying, “I think they’re losing touch with reality! It’s a little too much.”
Harrison is two time Olympic gold medalist in judo and she won the PFL women’s lightweight championship on New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden. She easily defeated Larissa Pacheco from Brazil in the championship fight. It was televised on ESPN and this pushed her pro MMA record 7 to nothing. I’m going to ignore the last sentence of this article because it mentions Mike Tyson…
Jessica: Oh, goodness…
Lindsay: We’re gonna just say congratulations, Kayla Harrison, and I’m so glad you got a million dollars!
Okay Jess, what’s good? I think I know what’s good.
Jessica: I’ve been waiting, I’ve been waiting for this part! Well actually, I’m gonna build to it. So I’m really excited because I did a 12-week straight challenge at my gym, you know I talk about my gym all the time, and so at the end of the 12 weeks, at the end of March, they’re gonna do a thing called push-pull competition where we’ll bench press and deadlift. It’ll be a mock meet, just to see how it goes. So I’m working really hard on my bench press and my deadlift for the next 12 weeks and I actually hope after that to start doing the clean and jerk and snatch, like I’m gonna try stuff over my head. But we’ll see how this strength challenge goes.
That sort of folds into: I just got a Fitbit for Christmas and I’m pretty obsessed with this thing. I don’t feel the need to get the 10,000 steps one way or the other but it just reminds me all the time to move and I kind of just enjoy that part of it. But I have actually been reaching my 10,00 steps because the week before Christmas we started a trial with a rescue dog named Ralph! If you’ve been on my Instagram at all…I actually tweeted about him as well. We are so excited about Ralph. We’ve now formally adopted him. He passed the trial period, he’s perfect, he is all black with these dark brown eyes. He’s a labradoodle, plus a terrier, we think all three of those are in there. He was paralyzed in a ditch, someone found him, they brought him to a vet who had to fuse his hip back together. And he’s doing great! He can walk on all four legs, he wants to run. Our vet thinks he’s over a year old so we are doing the work right now to build up all the muscle he lost in his back legs because of being paralyzed and also having the surgery. But he wants to go, he really loves walking so he and I have been going on these long walks. I got him a hair cut this week because he has this curly hair and some of it was matted, so we shaved it all down to match his hair around his hip scar and he has just been so energetic ever since! He is just bouncing around, he’s so good that we’re able to take him places – our other dog had a lot of anxiety and she was very territorial. We deeply miss Bailey but the chill that comes with Ralph has been nice. Yesterday we went to a coffee shop, he went to a restaurant with us, it’s just been really fun and it’s been great for our family. One of my favorite things in the whole world is that Aaron bought Ralph a bed and it’s dark blue, almost black. At night when we’re watching TV and Ralph is on the bed you can’t see him! I’m like, is there a dog here?
Lindsay: Aww!
Jessica: Because he just blends so well, he’s so still.
Lindsay: Oh my god.
Jessica: He has just been…It was a really hard few months in our family, we lost our dog in August and our cat before Thanksgiving and we’d had them both for a really long time and that was really hard, and Ralph has just come in and filled that hole in our family, and it’s been lovely. So that’s what’s good! I’ve boiled it down to that.
Lindsay: That’s amazing. So me, I actually haven’t watched much NFL this season, the main reason is Cam Newton, I’ve talked a lot about that. I was really busy with the WNBA playoffs and by the time I was ready to turn on the NFL and dedicate my Sundays to that Cam Newton was hurt, the Panthers were in a free fall, and it’s so hard to find their games. I have to go to a bar or find a stream here in DC to watch it so I just…didn’t. It’s been the first year in a while but, look I know how horrible it is, we’ve talked about it here, but NFL was the first sport I really got into and so I turned on the playoffs yesterday in excitement and it was such a good game of playoff football!
So we’re recording this on Sunday morning and I haven’t watched the Sunday games yet but Saturday the wildcard game between the Texans and the Bills was the most ridiculous, entertaining football I have ever seen! Deshaun Watson is a walking miracle and Josh Allen is a walking hot mess and I love both of them. So it was kind of fun to remember that sports can be fun, you know? A little bit?
Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Lindsay: Even when they’re terrible. I don’t know, for some reason that was kind of an affirming day remembering why I loved the sport. Also I wanna share this tweet from Simona Halep that really made me happy, but also because I wanna say we’re thinking about everybody in Australia with all the fires that are going on. And of course Jess and I are big tennis fans and it’s the Australia part of the tennis season leading up to the Australian open which starts in two weeks, oh my god.
So, a lot of players have been announcing that they will donate, say, $200 for every ace they hit in a tournament to wildfire relief in Australia, but Simona Halep tweets, “Well guys, you know I love Australia, but you also know I don't hit too many aces. Sooo I want to help and my pledge is this... every time I give @darren_cahill” (her coach) “a hard time in my box during all my matches in Aus, I will donate $200. This way I will raise a lot more money.”
Jessica: That’s really cute.
Lindsay: So I just thought that was lovely. And then Alize Cornet, another tennis player, tweeted back and said “This gave me great ideas, I’ll donate $200 for every drop shot.” I love to see these players donate to charity and helping out wildfires, and we just want to say we are thinking of all of you.
Jess’s fitness goals are reminding me that I’m going to get to orangetheory fitness this week three times, that is my goal. I did not get off to a good start for the year, so we can start again. I’m feeling motivated and excited for this year, especially for Power Plays. I’ve got a few trips planned, in fact hopefully by the time I talk to y’all next week I will have been on one of them. It’s just not official yet so I don’t wanna say. Yeah, I’m excited. We’re gonna make some good things out of this year that’s gonna be rough in a lot of ways.
Thank you all so much for listening to Burn It All Down. As I mentioned at the top of the show, please support our Patreon: patreon.com/burnitalldown. You can also follow us on Facebook at /burnitalldown, on Twitter @burnitdownpod, our website is burnitalldownpod.com. If you go to Apple Podcasts you can rate and review, and that also will really help us in 2020 and that’s completely free. So thank you from all of us, even our missing co-hosts, Dr. Brenda Elsey, Dr. Amira Rose Davis, and Shireen Ahmed. This is Jessica Luther and I’m Lindsay Gibbs and burn on, but not out. I think that’s what Brenda usually says.