Episode 144: Reckoning with the Life and Death of Kobe Bryant (TW)
For this very important episode Amira, Jessica, Brenda, Lindsay and Shireen talk about the untimely deaths of nine passengers in a helicopter crash which included Kobe Brant and his daughter Gigi. The BIAD crew speaks of how the news affected them and how they reflected on it. [17:28] For the second segment, the team talks about the legacies and possibilities of women's basketball, and the memories of Gianna, Peyton and Alyssa. They discuss where we go from here, and what we can do for youth and women's sports. [32:46] Finally, the gang talks about the media treatment (the good and the horrible) of these deaths, how the media speaks about survivors of rape, and how it polices Black grief. [54:52]
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [1:07:51] the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring the incredible Captain of the Canadian Women's National Team Christine Sinclair, [1:09:58] and what is good in our worlds.
Links
Remembering the nine victims in the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/01/27/victims-calabasas-helicopter-crash
Lindsay on Hang Up and Listen: https://slate.com/transcripts/OHZ0WjZGeWUvNy9NTnlUOU9uMlB6dUpUZ3MrdXNCZ2xRSjcxZzlKR2N1UT0
Amira’s A Legacy of Incoherence: https://newrepublic.com/article/156398/legacy-incoherence/
Kobe Bryant’s evolution into a #girldad is the missing part of his story: https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/ny-kobe-bryant-girl-dad-elle-duncan-20200129-3a5zs5bvgjbkhlf243dawq7hzi-story
Why the W.N.B.A. Loved Kobe Bryant: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/kobe-bryant-women-basketball
How Media Outlets Are Acknowledging (and Not Acknowledging) Kobe Bryant’s Rape Case: https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/kobe-bryant-media-handling-rape-allegation
My Culture Is Not Super Bowl Entertainment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/opinion/super-bowl-chiefs-native-american
Bala Devi: Rangers' new signing is India's first female professional footballer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/amp/football/51298687
Após 86 anos, Campeonato Chileno teve mulher na arbitragem pela 1ª vez: https://dibradoras.blogosfera.uol.com.br/2020/01/29/apos-86-anos-campeonato-chileno-teve-mulher-na-arbitragem-pela-1a-vez/
Transcript
Brenda: Welcome to this week of Burn It All Down. It’s the feminist sports podcast that you and a whole lot of other people need. I’m Brenda Elsey, associate professor of history at Hofstra University, and I’m joined by all of my co-hosts this week: Shireen Ahmed, freelance writer and sports activist in Toronto, Canada; the brilliant Dr. Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University; Jessica Luther, author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape in Austin, Texas; and the whip-smart Lindsay Gibbs, sports reporter and founder of the amazing newsletter on women’s sports, Power Plays.
We’d like to issue a trigger warning before beginning this episode, because we will be discussing death and sexual assault. On this episode we’re gonna try our best to grapple with the tragic deaths of Gianna and Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on January 26th, along with John Altobelli, his wife Keri, their daughter Alyssa, Sarah Chester, her daughter Payton, and Christina Mauser, and Ara Zobayan.
Kobe Bryant played 20 seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers. He won lot of titles and a lot of games. He’s the NBA’s fourth all-time leading scorer, and won five titles with the Lakers. In 2003, Bryant sexually assaulted a 19 year old young woman in Colorado, who was outed and ultimately settled in a civil suit. In the years that followed Bryant went on to have four girls, rehabilitate his image, and finish his career as an icon of Los Angeles. He became very active in his daughter Gianna’s basketball team and a regular attendee of women’s sporting events. The outpouring of grief from fellow athletes and the public at large has reinforced that Bryant has meant many things, many different things, to many people.
This week my co-hosts reacted in a whole lot of ways, and so we’re gonna structure this discussion in three different parts, but the first thing that I wanted to start with was asking each of your your reactions, and also to mention things that you’ve written or thought about or reflected on over the past week. Amira, can I start with you?
Amira: Um, yes…Sorry, I’m already crying. It’s really hard to see images of Gianna still. My initial reactions were, I think like many, was just this kind of disbelief. It really felt very similar to the day Michael Jackson died, the way that everybody stopped and was trying to curate information that was really horribly reported on, and we can talk about the mess of the actual breaking of news, but after that kind of washed away then there was an outpouring of tributes and the hagiography machine set in, and there was a lot of feelings around survivors and all of these things. For me it really jumbled together and I’ve spent the last week really thinking through that and trying to process what it looks like to grieve and to be angry and to have unanswered questions and ambivalent feelings around somebody in life, and what happens to that in death. That was just my initial…That’s what the last week has been for me.
Brenda: I just want to mention that Amira had a beautiful piece in The New Republic titled A Legacy of Incoherence, and so Amira did throughout the week pour that into something that I think is really beautiful and worth reading. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, I just will echo a lot of what Amira said. I was deeply confused at first, I was not on my phone, I was watching a live show when the news broke, so at intermission I looked at my phone and I had something like 45 text messages – 40 of them were from y’all, but still. It was just out of context stuff that I just didn’t understand. It was just shocking. He was only 41, he died with his daughter. I’m with Amira when I think about the three young girls that were on the helicopter, I feel very sad. But I knew instantly, once it had been confirmed, when what’s-his-name from ESPN, Woj, had confirmed that Bryant had died, I knew that it was going to be messy.
I will say I never had an emotional connection to Kobe the basketball player. I didn’t understand what an impact he had within the league, I didn’t understand what he meant to Los Angeles. All of that was kind of surprising to me, the level of it, and I know that it’s all heightened by the tragedy of his death and dying with his daughter, but still. The crowds at Staples for a couple of days were surprising to me, but I did know instantly that we were about to have a really messy and difficult conversation around how to think about him. I will say for me personally, and I think this is true for y’all as well, people contacting me mainly wanted to…It was mainly sexual assault survivors who wanted to emote in some direction that they thought was safe. So that was the first stuff that I had to sort of really react to, were those people reaching out to me for support in that moment. But then on Sunday night I think I spent just like an hour looking at pictures of him with his daughters and feeling deeply sad, because they all clearly loved each other very much and that’s as true as anything else.
Brenda: Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah, so I was in Connecticut last Sunday. In the morning I was at a USA Basketball practice for the USA women’s team. That ended around noon, maybe 1, so as I was going back to the hotel after having interviews with Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird and all these people who were pretty close to Kobe, as I was on my way back to the hotel that’s when the news started to come and I didn’t really understand what was happening until I actually heard the news while I was watching a Maryland women’s game, that’s kind of how I got it confirmed, the announcers said it on the stream. I was in Connecticut to see the UConn vs USA women’s basketball game, which was on Monday night. It was overwhelming. I think every part of those few days and…If it was overwhelming for me, I can’t imagine how it was for people who actually knew him.
I had written, when he retired in 2016, a piece for ThinkProgress called The Legacy of the Kobe Bryant Rape Case. That piece has become a cornerstone for me as I’ve written about other sexual assault and domestic violence cases in sports, and looking back at that blueprint. I did a lot of research for that piece and talked to a lot of people and I really recently revisited that time. Because I’d written that piece and that piece started to be spread around in the wake of his death, a lot of people I’m sure were reading it for the first time. We’ve talked about Kobe, we’ve grappled with some of these issues in this podcast, but I think a lot of people were thinking about these things for the first time, and so it was a lot. My DMs have been flooded for a week now with stories from survivors and the diversity of experiences…There’s been a lot of men survivors, the only thing that connects everyone who’s been in my inbox has been survivors, grief, and confusion over how to feel. So I was kind of dealing with that and weighing these stories that I feel honored and blessed that people trust me with.
I was also at women’s basketball and as we’ve discussed on this podcast, mainly because of Gianna, Kobe has become such an advocate for women’s basketball and he’s become a friend of the game. I would often view that through a skeptical lens: his support of the game really felt performative to me, I often felt very bitter about the way that the media would cover his comments on the game but not the game itself. It was hard for me and I wrestled with it. But I was at the UConn-USA women’s basketball game and Gianna had wanted to go to UConn and she wanted to be a WNBA star, and I wrote this in Power Plays a little bit, about how there are all these memorials for them going on around the world, but this one felt different because this was…A lot of the memorials were about what Kobe had accomplished, and about the what had already been, but this was so much the future that both of them never got to have.
The more people I talked with and the more tributes that flooded Instagram from women’s basketball players, the more I realized how important Kobe’s advocacy and support for the game had been, and how genuine these legends thought it was. Both Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi told me Kobe doesn’t fake anything, like none of this was just for show. It meant so much. Renee Montgomery gave a great statement about how much he put the women’s game on his back and that she felt like this was a loss for all of women’s basketball. I really did a lot, through that, I did a lot of sorting through my feelings and it’s complicated, because it would’ve been easier almost if it was fake and phony and all for show, but the more I realized how genuine it was the more complicated my feelings became and the thing I keep coming back to…I know Amira wrote her piece as well, and Imani McGee-Stafford, a WNBA player, also wrote a piece for Power Plays, the more I realized it’s coming to terms with the fact that there’s no way to balance all of this, there’s no way that one cancels out the other, it just all is. All feelings are valid and I keep reminding myself of that and try to keep reminding others of that, because it’s been tough.
Brenda: Shireen?
Shireen: Thank you. I think, like a lot of people said, like everybody’s said here, there’s a lot of shock. The immediate “no, I can’t believe it” kind of thing, that was very much what I felt. Now, it’s coupled with a lot of things, and I’m glad I’m going after Lindsay because I certainly echo a lot of the stuff she says, in that I’m angry at Kobe. I’m still angry. I’m angry because I felt that loving women’s sport was part of his redemption arc, and that made me mad. I felt that it was disingenuous. That being said, to see that juxtaposed with the pictures of his family was very hard for me. There’s other personal reasons that I have issues with Kobe in terms of…I’ll be quite honest, working through family issues, working through very personal marital issues despite what had happened, and me having…I’ll just lay it out, that I wasn’t able to do that, so there’s a lens that I look at it also, as a human, and as a failed person, like someone who’s flawed…Then there’s also me as a sports fan, who loved Kobe when he was 24, before Colorado. I used to love his threes, I used to want my children to play basketball like him. Then that whole thing happened and I was furious and I knew the way the media would spin it. I also was very angry with media and that continues to this day and we’ll talk about this more.
Another thing that came up with me is I have a daughter who’s a teenager who grew up watching him play, to a degree, and watching clips and montages. My daughter was actually interviewed for a CBC Kids news piece and talked about how hard because…As an athlete who often is in places where fathers aren’t supportive as much as they could be, to see that really affected her and then me working through my feelings, and my children know very well about the work I do, and I wrote a piece that actually made it into Best Canadian Sportswriting 2017, being very critical of the way media people were all about Kobe when he was hired and how he was immortalized and this massive erasure of what had happened. So that’s something that was very important for me, and something that I’ve said before, I will die on this hill about the way that media glosses over things like this. I’ve written about Ronaldo, and there was a lot happening.
To get back to my kid, also watching her mourn, and her mourn for different reasons and me having to say…It took me a couple of days to realize that I can be angry, I could be really devastated by the deaths of these people, I could be so wholly saddened, and I could be confused and I could be all in those places at the same time. That took me days, I was a mess last week. Thank you to my co-hosts, particularly Amira, for talking me through this, and other friends I leaned on. I didn’t know him personally but I’m still surprised at how much his death affected me.
Brenda: I would just say for myself, briefly, because I also didn’t have a personal connection with Kobe or LA, but I do think there’s something about such a sudden and tragic death of an athlete, one that seems so infallible and was younger than me, and it just really reminds you of your mortality and keeping people close and appreciating the time that you have because some things like that just remind you that it’s a thin thread, a very thin line between here and there. It’s also just something very human anyway, regardless of the way that I felt, or didn’t feel about him. And then there’s also this deep and genuine connection between…And it’s not the only kind that parents and children have, but certainly parental connections around sports probably just like music or dance or whatever, there’s something really physical and freeing, especially in this moment of digital stuff and trying to yank your kid’s phone out of their hand. Something physical in playing with them as teenagers – I have a 13 year old, my daughter’s the same age as Gianna, and there’s something just really special about that that’s touching and impossible not to see, no matter how much quite honestly I felt conflicted about Kobe Bryant.
Okay, so for the next segment or segway, we’ve already touched on this a little but we did want to focus more specifically on Gianna and her teammates, youth basketball girls, WNBA. We’ve already done a little bit but I wanted to have a fuller discussion where we focus on them. Shireen, do you wanna talk about that/
Shireen: Thank you. One of the things I did in the latter part of the week when I was able to pull myself together in some ways, it was very therapeutic for me to do this big mom energy, I started reaching out to players I know…It’s no surprise to anyone who listens to us that I’m a UConn Huskies fan. I consider myself, very generously, to be friends with some of the players on the team. I got to know them when I went there, but I reached out to a couple of them, and when I saw that Gianna loved Gabby as a player the most, that hit a lot. Because Gabby’s one of the most awesome athletes I’ve ever known, her drive but also her sensitivity, her humor, her Twitter feed is “political” so to speak, in those terms. She’s a wonderful person. And a really good friend of mine, Batouly Camara, plays for UConn, that connection, to see how they were doing, and to see how they were feeling because they were extended families to this young player. They mentioned in a lot of their tweets and Instagram messages, they mentioned all the girls and I think that was really important that were so intentional. It was ‘Gianna, Alyssa, and Payton.’ It wasn’t just Gianna, it wasn’t just Gigi. That was really tender and beautiful and sincere.
I see how hard this is, watching Sabrina Ionescu bawl her eyes out, you want to just wrap her in a hug because she’s so clearly grieving and there’s no way for these athletes to grieve privately anymore. They can’t. Social media can be great but it can also be a lot. I’m just praying for them, and as far as the girls go…Being a mom myself, I don’t know. I’m thinking about Vanessa Bryant a lot this week. A lot. Because I can’t imagine…We’ll talk about this later, but just from the kids’ perspectives, that’s something that my daughter and I talked about is my daughter being 18…She goes to a game every week, twice a week she goes to practice, and the idea of going and coming home safely is such a blessing. There’s so many young athletes who do this and saw themselves reflected in those young girls. They go, they travel, they put their bodies out there, their passion. My daughter had a showcase yesterday at a university and she had to drive to get there and I just kept checking in, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” because she had a bit of trepidation and hesitation about going, it’s winter, etc, etc. I know that was coming up for her, how much so many young girls were seeing themselves reflected in those athletes. It’s a lot.
Brenda: Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah. So Katie Lou Samuelson, another former UConn player who was also on Team USA, talking with her after that game on Monday night was probably time I broke down…I didn’t let myself break down until I got back to the hotel. She broke down, and I wanted to read what she told me about getting to know Gigi personally. First I will say there was a beautiful tribute to Gigi at the UConn game. They left a spot on their bench, they put her #2 on a UConn jersey and her name, there were flowers on the bench and it was a beautiful tribute to someone who dreamed of playing at UConn. But this is what Katie told me about Gigi, she said, “She was shy the first time we met her, and slowly, each time, she was more and more outgoing. On the court, she was a different person. She was a monster. She was mean. She had an attitude just like [Kobe] did.” She kind of laughed when she said that but she was crying. She just said, “She was just a beautiful soul and a beautiful person that I was lucky enough to meet.”
So it’s clear that Gigi’s energy, Gigi’s presence just had such an impact on everyone that she met. Geno Auriemma, the head coach of UConn, told this wonderful story about how they would come, Kobe and Gianna would come to UConn and all of the UConn players were starstruck over Kobe, and then Gianna was starstruck over the UConn players. Geno would be like, “You dad is Kobe Bryant! You can meet anyone you want! You meet celebrities all the time, and yet you’re starstruck by these female college athletes.” I just loved that so much, because that really goes to show how passionate she was about the game, and Geno said Kobe would ask him for coaching tips and stuff for coaching the daughters, he really got into coaching. As Diana Taurasi said, Kobe didn’t do anything halfway. If he was gonna do something, he was gonna do it.
So I really love hearing more about Gigi, and of course it was devastating. Just the fact that they were all on the way to a game, a game they never got to play, and as I grapple with all of this, and I wrote about this on Power Plays, but I just said I think that the best way going forward to honor Kobe and Gigi is to honor women’s sports, and women’s basketball in particular, and maybe that sounds self-serving because we know I love the sport, but honestly this was the next part of their legacy, this was what was cut short. Kobe’s NBA accomplishments will live on forever, his playing days, those were so important. But we don’t know what could’ve been in women’s basketball for Kobe and Gigi. I think everyone owes it to kind of keep that going, no matter how you feel. Do it for Gigi.
Brenda: Amira?
Amira: Yeah. One of the things I was struck by, I found it really irresponsible that people were putting cameras and microphones into these kids’ faces at the Mamba Sports Academy, frankly ridiculous. But one of the things I found really powerful in that moment was a lot of the little girls who were in shock kept saying “We looked up to both of them so much.” In her short time already Gianna had such an impact on even girls coming up behind her, who looked up at that team and at her as a source of inspiration and I really held onto that in thinking about what it means to not only have an investment in the women’s game and women’s basketball. One of the things that really impressed me about the work that they were doing through youth academies was investment in youth sports, particularly to defer the cost of participation when necessary. I think that youth sports is a really fraught terrain that sometimes gets overlooked but in this moment I was able to see that there was a real kind of deep investment in the growth of the game and how impactful that is for a little girl there to not even be looking all the way to the top at someone like Taurasi, but at someone like Gianna, and how even that small act spreads the game and spreads opportunity and spreads visibility significantly.
That’s what I kept returning to, and I really wanted to also take a moment to talk about Alyssa and Payton. Their teammates were present at the Staples Center on Friday night when the Lakers did a big tribute. They were there courtside, and I’m thinking just what it means for a team to lose three players, they were all very close and their assistant coach Christina Mauser was by all accounts very tenacious. They said they called her the queen of defense, and they said that Kobe didn’t know how to play his own defense because he’d never had to play it! And so when he started coaching the team he had no idea how to coach them, basically. And so Mauser’s husband gave this really heartwarming talk where he talked about this story and said that they, the two of them, the husband and wife used to coach the team at the school and she was really the better coach, and so once Kobe met her and realized how good she was in defense he was like, I have to have you, and he hired her. The fact that they were going to a game just stuck with me. I think about all three girls, and I think about their coach and I think about just how much impact they had in a small amount of time, and what was cut short for all three of them. It’s a really tremendous loss for the basketball community, but I echo what Lindsay says, I think it’s instructive about investment and the possibilities of making visible what’s possible in the women’s game from a young level.
Brenda: Jess?
Jessica: Yeah. As you were talking I was thinking about how I learned to play basketball. I was 11, and my dad taught me, and I played for my middle school team for a few years…Sorry, give me a second…When I interviewed Layshia Clarendon for this podcast and we talked about periods, I think I said on there, it was one of the first real discussions I’ve had about my period was with my basketball teammates in 7th grade, and it feels really weird to be crying about this, talking about this right now! Just thinking how important those girls were to me at that age and how close we were. We were just a shitty middle school basketball team, I mean, I can’t imagine what these girls are going through. It’s so sad. It’s so sad.
I will just say, if I had my way, that I really really wish that a thing that could come out of this, as Lindsay said, is that their legacy would be that people care about this sport and these athletes the way that Kobe and Gianna did. I was really struck by how many female basketball players had pictures and videos with Gigi. I was reading about all of the games that Kobe went to, that he wasn’t just showing up for the finals, they were genuine fans of the game and they showed up all the time. It would be really great if that was a thing that could come out of this tragedy.
Brenda: So just to touch on that a little bit, there’s a really beautiful story that came out of Brazil this week. There’s been a lot written about Kobe Bryant’s relationship with Latino LA, which was a really important aspect of his representation of that city to a lot of people, but also all around Latin America he was seen as not so much a provincial US star, because of his time in Italy and his appreciation for Messi, which might be the only thing that we share, and in Brazil there's a game with animals and the #24 is a little deer, and none of the men’s players for, I don't know, all time immemorial will wear #24 because of homophobia, because the word is also a slur about gay men. It was really amazing this week because of all this emotional mobilization and recognition of his importance in Latin American, the Brazilian team from Bahia decided that they would have #24, which has never been worn so far as I know in a men’s professional game in a top division Brazilian team. To use that to fight homophobia. It’s kind of mind-blowing, to be quite honest with you. I should say women have always had #24 and that’s something else, but it’s really mobilized a whole bunch of people to take the love that they have for him, or appreciation, and put it into this soccer moment like okay, you know what, 24, okay, let’s do something with that. And I thought it was really beautiful.
Okay, now I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk one more aspect of this. Of course there’s many many more, but I did want to ask my co-hosts about their reaction to the media treatment of this great tragedy. I wonder if things have gotten any better in terms of integrating these complicated life histories, sexual assault, policing of Black grief, I don’t know, whatever you all sort of came away with from the media coverage. I’d like to hear your thoughts about that. Shireen, could you start?
Shireen: I’m mad at the media for many things and this part about media will be more so on the constant fuckups this week. I was really affected by…I had a low-key crush on Rick Fox for a long time, not really low-key because you know nothing about me is lowkey, but he was falsely declared dead by the media prematurely, and his family found out and called him. He said in an interview that one of his children’s fear is to find out that their parent had died through social media, and so they talked on the phone, he took the time. He had a son who died and even finding out that TMZ reported on the deaths in the crash before the families were fully notified, I mean…There was a family on the helicopter whose children are the only ones that are left. I think that, imagine how often teenagers are on their phone, and to find out would be shattering. We all know media and reporting is a tough business, it’s cutthroat, but this whole push being the first one to announce this is so ruthless and irresponsible. There’s constant reminders for journalists to be thorough, make sure you have your information down pat, and that was a really big thing for me.
I was really upset seeing that unfold, and as someone in sports media to watch that, I tend to be extra cautious…And this is from my own era, I’ve retweeted stuff in the past, nothing this profound, that wasn’t reported accurately. I hold accountability for that, like listen, I was wrong, it’s really quick to press RT but think about it, hold your thumbs, think about it. The other thing I’ve been really really livid about was the BBC. They had a montage…I thought about putting this in the burn pile but I thought we could weave it in, the BBC had a montage about Kobe Bryant, in which they replaced him with Lebron James! And I saw my friend Morgan Campbell tweeting about this, I’m like…What’s happening!? And Morgan’s comment, he quote-tweeted it like “Because they all look the same.” THEY HAVE THEIR NAMES ON THEIR JERSEYS! How hard is it?
Jessica: They don’t even look the same…
Lindsay: They don’t look the same at all!
Shireen: There’s nothing! Like…Ugh. I can’t even talk, I’m so mad. Many Black sports journalists were tweeting this, look at the clear lack of melanin in your newsrooms. This is a mistake that is so obviously done by people who are not of color, not Black, whatever. It’s so embarrassing, it’s so embarrassing. So my relationship with the media is rough, and thank you so much Amira, your piece made me cry several times, it was gorgeous. And Lindsay – I’m gonna flex a little, we get behind-the-scenes in Power Plays because of our relationship with Lindsay, and the work you put in and the conversations you’ve been having this week with Imani that have made up for…We’ll talk about this further but I was really, really pissed off this week at two different points.
Brenda: Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so my reaction to a lot of this was to avoid most of the media coverage of it because I assumed that it wasn’t going to handle the stuff around his sexual assault very well. I will say that, as Shireen just said, Lindsay’s Power Plays this week were very good, Amira’s piece is amazing in The New Republic, Lindsay was on Hang Up and Listen on Monday, it’s a podcast. I loved that whole episode. Joel Anderson and Gene Demby from NPR, and Stefan and Josh, I thought it was one of the best all-around discussions of Kobe both as a player and this legacy he’s leaving. I appreciated that Gene was wiling to say he didn’t like Kobe as a basketball player, in that moment. It’s just a really good discussion, and then Lindsay was on one of my most favorite podcasts, Today Explained, along Zito Madu, talking about all of that stuff. Those are all the things I listened to and I thought those things were done well, but I picked them on purpose because I knew based on the people involved…
I think all I really wanna say…I could talk about this a long time, but the biggest thing for me, there’s so many ways that that case from 2003 represents the way that we as a society don’t handle these things well, that it really is such a good example of what we call rape culture. I feel that this is another moment where it becomes this microcosm, this perfect example of how we deal with this is bad. Because we fail so spectacularly at public accountability around these issues, because our societal reaction is to constantly ask for two things: either we ignore it, or push it down the road when it comes to a head, and it is terrible. It’s a festering wound that boils over and I was angry in the moment when people were saying “We shouldn’t be talking about this today” because my initial reaction just based on all the work I’ve done was, well we weren’t allowed to talk about it yesterday either. And we weren’t allowed to talk about it in 2016. And we weren’t allowed to talk about it in 2005. We weren’t allowed to talk about it in 2003. And it was so hard, because it’s such a tragic loss, and he died with his daughter, and that is what it is and will always be.
But it is once again, and I cannot say this enough, and sadly so, it just became such a good example of what happens when we just don’t deal with this stuff. I’m sorry, I’m going on, but the last thing I will say that makes this all very complicated is that his whole persona, this nickname ‘Black Mamba’ was a direct reaction from Kobe to the rape case itself, that this was how he was going to publicly move forward after everything that came out in 2003. And very few people I saw really acknowledged that. It was all Mamba, Mamba, Mamba, and every time I hear that, that is one of the things that I think about, where that came from. I just think we’re not good at this, and once again we weren’t that good at it. We’re better, like there were places I could go, and I knew where to look for them, and I’m thankful that that exists now.
Brenda: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, exactly what Jess said. No, it’s so true though. I tried to write about that about Mamba there, especially when I wrote my piece because for the reasons that Jess said, but also it’s always been curious to me that what started out as Black Mamba as a way to separate his on the court presence from his off the court rape case. I don’t know if people remember, a lot of his sponsors left in the wake of the case but Nike did actually what they did with Colin Kaepernick which was just put him on the bench, so they never actually severed their contract. When sponsors started to return after a few more championships, that Black Mamba really became de-racialized and branded and as we know now it’s Mamba, and there was shoes, a sports academy, memberships with Nike had a Mamba sports league, the ‘Mamba Mentality’ then ‘Train hard,’ ‘Love the process,’ ‘Be ferocious.’ I couldn’t, as Jess said, disentangle. Every time I saw a picture of the girls wearing Mamba jerseys it was this reminder. I wrote in my piece, the kind of cruel irony of people who say “Leave it in the past, we've all moved on” while saying “#MambaForever” and not even realizing, not even knowing, not caring that very thing they were insisting on leaving in the past they were carrying with them all the time. It’s that sort of glimpses into the places that rape culture have muted the conversation so much that we lose sight of the reverberations, and there are many. I think that that’s something that was certainly fully on display this past week.
Brenda: Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah I think first of all, as Jess said, there were places to go to get nuanced coverage but it’s important to remember that the main places – ESPN, CNN, main stations – that wasn’t a part of their main coverage of this. I’m not saying it should’ve or shouldn’t have been, but I’m saying it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of these reactions on social media or in these more nuanced podcast discussions were kind of a reaction to it being left out. Or included in some of the first reactions I heard is “that Colorado stuff” or just being very euphemistically dismissed. It was a tough week on social media and among the pretty curated Twitter list of people I really respect in this industry, there was a lot of disagreement among people I love about who can talk about what, when. It’s something I grappled with a lot, and I don’t know that I did anything right about it, but I saw two ends of the spectrum. I saw people who were so focused on the rape case that they felt that should be the first thing, right, that that should be the main thing everyone was talking about and kind of question the grief of others, and I found that off-putting to say the least, and performative, I think.
Then on the other side there were people I love and respect who were saying that this is absolutely not the time to bring up the rape case and if you’re bringing it up in any way you have an agenda and you’re policing our grief and this is unacceptable. I also felt that was wrong, because listen, as someone who’s written about this before I’ve been told every time I’ve written or brought it up that it’s not the right time, you know? There's never a right time. Part of the reason why this was so hard to grapple with his past is because we never grappled with it while he was alive. The media moved on, there wasn’t a reckoning, and this is it. It’s been really hard, and I saw a lot of white women completely dismissing the pain of a lot of the Black community, and that was horrible. At the same time I saw a lot of people say that if any survivor brought it up then they were being racist, and that's not true either. So I think there’s this middle ground, and the way I decided to go with it was to make sure that I was never ever saying…Because I was grieving, I’ve been grieving all week, to make it clear in this conversation that there’s room to talk about the sexual assault, that it was the whole conversation, that it was the beginning and the end and nobody had a right to be upset…
I’m always very aware that I’m a white woman talking about a Black man, and this week somebody asked me how do I not take it personally when I’m getting the death threats and everything this week, and I just say I understand our country’s history. I try to do this in a responsible way, but I understand why people don’t want me to talk about this and, like I said, this obviously hasn’t shut me up but I try to do this in a respectful way. It’s complicated and there are times I think I shouldn’t and…I don’t know. I’m rambling now. It’s been a weird, tough week for everyone, I think. Imani McGee-Stafford said in her piece which she wrote that there has to somehow be space for everything, you know? You have to let everyone grieve in their own way, and for some people they’ll be more focused on the sexual assault case and for some it’s more focused on the NBA, for some it’s on Gianna, and everybody’s gonna grieve in different ways. The only thing I had a hard time with this week was people saying other people’s grieving was completely wrong, and I saw that coming from both sides. It was tough.
Brenda: Shireen.
Shireen: Just to say offside, I did not write about Kobe this week, and as somebody who’s a freelancer and who likes getting work and who needs work, I decided that I wasn’t the right person to talk about it. I just went back and I read other people. For me it was the right decision because I had to put my mental health first too, and there were so many other things that I didn’t expect to be dealing with and I was, in terms of my own reactions to this. The whole point of this is there’s no right answer, you have to try to do what’s best for you.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: Yeah, certainly. I think Lindsay hit the nail on the head when she talked about how fraught it was because of the way that people would try to shut down varying grief processes, and I think a great example of that, well, a horrible example but it was the Washington Post, if you recall this week in the wake of the news…What’s Felicia’s last name I just forgot. Felicia Sonmez at the Washington Post tweeted a Daily Beast article about Kobe’s rape case, and she didn’t add any commentary to it, she didn’t quote-tweet it, she just retweeted it.
Lindsay: She shared the link, yeah.
Amira: She just shared the link, and was flooded with what we’ve all become accustomed to, death threats, rape, just awfulness, and she started talking about the awfulness that was coming into her email and her mentions. The powers that be at the Washington Post reprimanded her and moved to suspend her, citing…
Jessica: I was gonna say, what are they citing!
Amira: I think eventually they landed on that she posted an email address?
Jessica: That she posted a screenshot of her inbox. I don’t even think the email address was in there. Anyway…
Amira: Exactly. But it was very clear that it was a cover for what they saw as ill-timed tweets that were damaging to the quote unquote whole institution. Thankfully Felicia’s colleagues at the Washington Post had her back and put out a statement saying this was wholly unacceptable and luckily enough people were able to raise their voices around this, but I think this is such an example of how simply linking to a factual piece could have, especially without further interrogation of the incident, could’ve cost her her job, could’ve cost her pay, and that is a glaring example of how it’s not just muted conversation but institutionally it’s cutting off these discussions. The last thing I want to say is the tributes that…The way this affected Black millennials and Gen X was really powerful to me, to see this collective waves of nostalgia – the Sister, Sister cameos, how much he meant to the younger generation of basketball players. It was this collective moment of Black mourning and it was like when Prince died, or Whitney, it’s this moment which feels like a collective mourning of somebody who, in all their complexities, reflected a lot to a whole generation of Black people growing up in this country. I thought that was powerful for me to see, and something that I was wholly unexpecting.
The early reactions from players that couldn’t even stop crying, and everyone thought the NBA was gonna cancel games, and it was just another reminder of an organization that purports to be “all about family,” etc, etc, but also wanted those ticket sales. As much as it was about the interpersonal dynamics, I was really interested in how institutions played a large role in curating how you could grieve and what forms were acceptable and what performance of mourning looked like.
Brenda: Okay, so on that note I think we’re gonna move on. Now it’s time to throw all the garbage in sports this week onto a metaphorical burn pile and set it aflame. Unlike the New York Times’ “all that’s fit to print” we’re angling for all that’s fit to burn. Shireen?
Shireen: It is Black History Month, and I’m mad. Not at Black History Month! But I am mad at media, because media is ridiculous. A lot of places have their tweets ready to performatively celebrate Black athletes, and TSN is no exception. TSN, the sports outlet in Canada. I am mad, TSN. Basically they had a tweet about Black History Month of these phenomenal Black Canadian hockey players, basketball players and whatnot. The only thing that they forgot to add were women! There was no women at all. Because y’all know there’s no women athletes in Canada who happen to be Black. What? Ugh.
Anyways, Meghan McPeak is a sports journalist and called them out so much that they re-did the tweet. But do we really need Black women to be doing that labor to remind you that you are ridiculous? Is that how it’s gonna play out in 2020? Really? It’s not as if you didn’t have 11 months since last Black History Month to prepare this tweet! I just…Angela James is one of the foremost incredible people, Black women hockey player that this country has had and we’re so lucky…You really, really didn’t have Angela James? Really? Anyways, I wanna take that and that reflection of who’s in our newsrooms and who’s not in our newsrooms, I wanna metaphorically take all of that and throw it on the burn pile. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Brenda: Linz.
Lindsay: So in good news it’s been the Australian Open, and it’s been very fun to watch, and a young American, Sofia Kenin, won the women’s tournament and she’s 21 years old and she’s been around the tennis world forever, I don’t know how they got her into all these events, but there are all these clips of her being 5, 6, 7 and around all these star tennis players and one of the photos are with her and Anna Kournikova. Darren Rovell, the sports-business-gambling reporter, whatever he is, mainly just a tool online, decided to tweet a photo of Kournikova and Kenin when Kenin was a little girl, and a photo of Kenin as Australian Open champion, and here’s his tweet, he said, “The girl on the right made millions for her good looks on the tennis court. She was never able to win a major in singles. The girl on the left, some 16 years after the photo was taken, accomplished what Anna Kournikova never did. Sofia Kenin is your Australian Open champ.” What in the world is this sexist garbage!?
A) You’re pitting these two women players against each other, B) Anna Kournikova made a lot of money on her looks but she was also a good tennis player and made millions from playing tennis! She was in the top 10! It’s not like she was ranked 300 in the world and that was it, she earned money playing tennis too. Injuries cut her career short and obviously she made a lot of money from modeling as well. But like, why! Why is this necessary! This is such crap. He deleted the tweet but he defended it staunchly online. He said he only deleted it “because it was Super Bowl weekend and he didn’t want to have to deal with trolls.” So that’s the only reason why he deleted it? But he completely stood by it, it wasn’t a bad tweet, it was a true tweet, it wasn't sexist, and he’s going to go to his grave saying that. So just burn that bullshit! Burn.
Group: Burn.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: So this week leading up to a UFC fight Joanna Jędrzejczyk, who is a Polish UFC fighter, posted on Instagram the fight poster for her upcoming match against reigning strawweight champion Weili Zhang, also known as Magnum. She’s the first Chinese UFC champion. So her competition took this image of this fight poster to put on Instagram, but edited it to add a gas mask and a few emojis, in reference to the Wuhan virus currently killing people, affecting large parts of China and places all around the world. Zhang, who is the first Chinese UFC champion, responded to this, “To make fun of tragedy is a true sign of one’s character. People are dying – someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s child. Say what you want about me if it makes you feel stronger but do not joke about what’s happening here. I wish you good health until March 7th. I will see you soon.” Joanna’s response was “I’m sorry, it’s just a meme, I’ll still fight you on the 7th, don’t get too emotional about it.”
I just think it’s such trash. 1) It’s super racist and I think that one of the things that happens, we saw this with ebola for instance, is that we racialize disease outbreaks and this is an example of that. Altering a photo and thinking it was just a meme, it’s so blatantly racist, and also glib as Zhang said herself, for people who a losing their lives and scared about the outbreak. I wish there was a way we could work to help disease outbreaks and not racialize them or pathologies them or stigmatize. This is awful. And for your competition to turn that into a meme because you’re from China…Ooh, I hope she kicks your ass in March. But until then I’m gonna burn it down.
Group: Burn.
Brenda: Jess.
Jessica: So by the time you all hear this Super Bowl LIV will have been over for days and either the San Francisco 49ers or the Kansas City Chiefs will be the latest NFL champions. I’m just gonna start by quoting our own Amira Rose Davis from episode, 89, quote: “we’ve done a few episodes on indigeneity but because they’re so baked into our sporting culture, it’s just like you forget that the Chiefs are playing at Arrowhead Stadium with tomahawk chops and head gear until you see them on primetime and then it’s like we’re doing this for real? Yes. The answer is yes. We’re still doing this and nobody cares.”
I’m not gonna rehash what’s wrong with Native mascots, we talked about mascotry extensively not that long ago on episode 128. Lindsay interviewed Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation and an activist against the Washington, DC NFL team’s use of a racial slur back on episode 33 if you wanna hear it directly from an expert. Also, there was a great op-ed in the New York Times just this past week by Tara Houska titled My Culture Is Not Super Bowl Entertainment. But I do wanna point out that this particular Super Bowl hurts beyond the Chiefs and the tomahawk chant. Because of the way in which this country teaches itself its history, the white men who stole Indigenous land as they pushed west have been written as heroes. James Rawls, a historian, said this to PBS’s American Experience: “Most people are not aware that California was the most diversely populated region within Native North America. Nowhere else was there a greater number or variety of cultures as there was here in California before the Spanish, and certainly before the coming of the Gold Rush.” The Gold Rush, of course, is where we get the nickname 49ers.
The History Channel has a piece about the impact of Gold Rush on Native peoples, and it is titled California’s Little-Known Genocide. According to this article, “in just 20 years, 80 percent of California’s Native Americans were wiped out. And though some died because of the seizure of their land or diseases caught from new settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood—the victims of a policy of genocide sponsored by the state of California and gleefully assisted by its newest citizens.” Our collective celebration of those men erases this history, and so for the 49ers to face off against the caricatured Chiefs in a sports game watched by something like 100 million people is shit, honestly. The Super Bowl hasn't aired yet as I’m saying all of this, but I’m guessing that none of this will be acknowledged and instead in its place we will have our violent white nationalist president wrapping himself in the so-called patriotism of this event. It’s disgusting if you spend any time thinking about it.
Finally, I’ll just point out that the Super Bowl was played in a place called Miami. The area was originally inhabited by the Tequesta people, whose way of life was massively disrupted by the arrival of the Spanish in the late 16th century. In 1763 there were only 80 families left, having been killed by disease, slavery, and violence with the Spaniards and other Native peoples whose resources and land were significantly reduced by European colonization. I’m feeling confident that none of this will be addressed on Fox later today when the game is played, so I want to burn the way the NFL and US culture in general continues to erase and even mock Native people, even as it uses them. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Brenda: I have the special privilege of getting to burn the New York Knicks’ Marcus Morris’s comments following his team’s 127 to 106 loss to the Grizzlies at home at Madison Square Garden. In it, Grizzly Jae Crowder made a late 3-point shot and was pushed really hard by Elfrid Payton. When asked about the brawl, Morris said of Crowder, “He’s got a lot of female tendencies on the court, flopping and throwing his head back. He’s soft, very womanlike.” This is the classic using-women-as-an-insult, it’s both homophobic and sexist. Players like Liz Cambage of the Las Vegas Aces expressed their disgust with the comments. Cambage tweeted at Morris, “FEMALE TENDENCIES WINS GAMES THOUGH” – a reference to the fact that the New York Knicks also suck. In addition to all of this Morris apologized, of course, after being fined $35,000 from the NBA, and said “I really don’t have a choice.” So you can tell that his apology is deeply felt. Then of course, if you doubted his apology, since he doesn’t have a daughter I guess, I’m not really sure about that but I’m surprised he didn’t say ‘I have a daughter.’ He said: “I’m a big, huge supporter of the WNBA…I have relationships with a few female players in the WNBA. If I offended any of them I deeply, deeply apologize.” You deeply, deeply offend everyone!
Jessica: That’s a new version of the “I know a woman.”
Brenda: Right! It’s a new version. This is becoming more and more common that we see the WNBA as a screen for “I can’t be sexist because I love them!” Barf. You didn’t just offend them, you offend all of us, anyone who recognizes the way in which this is both homophobic and also misogynistic. So I wanna burn Morris’s comments, the persistent and pernicious mindset that being a woman is being weak, that femininity is detrimental in pressure situations, and also the way in which misogyny and homophobia are always wrapped in together, and I wanna burn your lame ass apologies and flippant use of the awesome WNBA as a shield.
Group: Burn.
Brenda: After all that burning let’s celebrate some amazing accomplishments of women in sports this week.
Katie Sowers, former guest on the pod, has become the first woman and openly gay person to coach in an NFL Super Bowl. Yay.
21 year old Sophia Kenin won the Australian Open.
Team Iran won the CAFA U19 girl’s futsal championship. Congratulations to Maral Torkaman of team Iran for being voted Most Valuable Player at the tournament.
Bala Devi is the first Indian women to be signed in a professional European women's league. The Ranger, a Scottish team, have signed the Indian phenom on an 18 month contract. She has 52 goals in 58 caps and also scored more than 100 goals in a domestic league. Whew.
Cindy Nahuelcoy became the first woman to referee a Chilean men’s first division game in history, Unión Española vs Iquique.
Sabrina Ionescu extended her NCAA all-time record with career triple-double no. 23.
Can I get a drumroll?
Canada’s Christine Sinclair has broken the former record holder Abby Wambach’s super record of 184 international goals with 185 international goals, a record in global football. Shireen would like me to acknowledge her as the prime minister of Canada, and any other really amazing sort of accolade that we could find for her. She is amazing, and her humility in the face of winning this record was all the more touching.
In dark times it’s always nice to reflect on what’s keeping us going this week. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, so as different as my trip to Connecticut ended up being, it's good to see USA Basketball and UConn compete. Every time I go out to a women’s sporting event it gives me a little bit of life, and I had a little meetup and got to meet ten Power Plays readers, most of them were Burn It All Down listeners, so I wanna say hi to all of you, you really made my day/week/everything, because when you work from home it’s so nice to connect to people who are listening or reading, because it often feels like there’s such a divide, there’s so little interaction. That really made my week, and everyone who’s been supportive this week especially…The first people when I heard the news about Kobe that I reached out to was this podcast group, and having you all in my life is just such a blessing.
Brenda: Shireen.
Shireen: My what’s good is so fun. On Friday night I went out with a couple friends of mine, and I actually went to my first Bollywood drag show, which was amazing, and walked around. It was my birthday last week, and they got me this beautiful book called Miss Mary Reporting, it’s the true story of sportswriter Mary Garber. Now, I love children’s books, and this is a really beautiful story about a gay woman who reports on sports in the 1940s, so that’s really special to me. I’ve also been enjoying family, I have a lot of family stuff this weekend and a busy week coming up, I’m just really excited about it. Hot Docs is coming up in Toronto, I’m gonna be attending some things there with my friend Sabrina, I’m really excited about that. I’m doing a workshop on Life Without Basketball, the film by Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, with a bunch of high school students on Tuesday and this episode will be out by then, but I’m also very very very grateful for my Burn It All Down co-hosts, I love them very very much and this week would’ve been absolutely insurmountable if it wasn’t for you. So I just wanted to say that.
Brenda: Jessica.
Jessica: Yeah, so I totally agree, you guys are what’s good for me this last week, and I feel a little awkward at this point since I just did my burn but I’m going to a Super Bowl party today! And I haven’t been baking recently, I just haven’t had time, but I baked for this party today – I made a chocolate cake and these fun confetti cookies, they didn’t taste quite as good as I wanted them to but they’re really fun to look at, so that was nice to bake a little bit. I’ve been reading a lot, and I’ve just been loving that. Aaron and I finally started watching the second season of Sex Education, and I just love Eric so much, that character on that show, he brings me endless joy. Just endless joy. Eric, bless you, you are so wonderful. So that’s what’s good.
Brenda: I’m just gonna go next because I’m also on the second season of Sex Education, thank you Amira for giving me a nudge! I love Eric, but I also love Maeve, because she’s so much like me in high school, it’s so funny to revisit. So cute. And problematic. And interesting to watch the whole cast, really. Also I’m appreciative for leaning on friends this week, not to belittle Kobe at all but that wasn’t it so much as a whole lot of other stuff, and everybody’s showed up for me. Whenever I text anyone or need anything I feel like people have totally just 100% been on. I also wanna celebrate the fact that my kids after so many years have decided that they’re willing to eat school lunch sometimes. You have no idea how meaningful this is for me, like I’m sort of weepy because three meals a day for their whole lives…I’m so tired of making school lunches, I can’t tell you. And in the summer it doesn’t change, because the camps don’t do it and they won’t eat camp lunch. It’s so nice sometimes on Fridays like ooh, do you wanna buy..? And if someone says yes I’m like, yes! I get another cup of coffee and get to just sit down for a bit. So that’s good. Amira, take it away.
Amira: Yes. Well I echo what you talked about, my what’s good this week is about friendship and I really didn’t realize how affected I would be by that stuff, plus it was overlaid with personal things going on, but it just was one of these weeks that revealed to me what a kickass group I have around me, my co-hosts are fucking amazing, they’re encouraging, they’re inspirational. I have really dope colleagues – I’ve been doing interviews for graduate school with prospective students, two full days of just sitting in a room doing that, and I had a great ass time because my colleagues are great, and that doesn’t always happen. It was a week where I was immensely grateful for all the people in my life who I adore. Also, shoutout to my editor Katie at The New Republic, her unwavering belief in my ability to find some coherence through so many days of ‘I don’t know what I’m saying’ was just phenomenal.
Also, I’m recording this from a hotel room in New York, me and Samari came in to see Dear Evan Hansen for her birthday, we’re seeing it with Jordan Fisher – if you know anything about me you know how much I ride for the melanated people on Disney Channel, and Jordan Fisher was in that once Circle of Life commercial years ago, I’ve been following his career, and it just so happens that this weekend was his first weekend stepping into the title role of Evan, becoming the first Black Evan in this production. So me and Mari were there and I saw him and he was fantastic – not exactly like the uplifting show to see at the end of an emotional week, but it was really spectacular. And me and Mari did the stage door thing, so we got to meet a lot of the cast after, we had a really good time. And after we record this we’re gonna go to an escape room.
Lindsay: Of course you are.
Amira: Exactly. And we’re just gonna have a good time taking on New York together. So that’s what’s good for me.
Brenda: That’s it for this week in Burn It All Down. Though we’re done for now, remember you can always burn all day and all night with our fabulous array of merchandise. What better way to crush toxic patriarchy in sports and sports media than by getting a mug with our enraged faces on it? You can check it out at https://teespring.com/stores/burn-it-all-down. I’d also like to send out a huge thank you to our patrons for their generous support, and to remind people about our Patreon campaign. If you become an official patron of the podcast, in exchange for your contribution you get access to special content and rewards and we are just so grateful for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you. Burn It All Down lives on Soundcloud but can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, and TuneIn. We always appreciate your reviews and feedback, so please subscribe and rate. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, and on Twitter @burnitdownpod.
As always, try to burn on, and not out.