Episode 153: WNBA Leadership, Youth Football and Public Health

This week, we talk about leadership in the WNBA [6:23]. Then, Amira interviews Dr. Kathleen Bachynski about the public health crisis of youth football [25:45].

Of course you’ll hear the Burn Pile [47:38], our Bad Ass Woman of the Week [1:00:43], and what is good in our worlds [1:04:06.]

Links

Petition: Hold These Senators Accountable: Profiting off of a Pandemic https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/investigate-these-senators-profiting-off-of-a-pandemic

Sen. Kelly Loeffler sold at least $18 million more in stocks before the coronavirus crash than previously reported: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2020/4/1/21202900/kelly-loeffler-stock-sales-coronavirus-pandemic

FAQ: The Penny Toler lawsuit against the Sparks: https://highposthoops.com/2020/04/02/biggest-questions-from-the-penny-toler-lawsuit-against-the-sparks/

Making sense of Penny Toler’s explosive lawsuit against the Sparks: https://theathletic.com/1698218/2020/03/25/making-sense-of-penny-tolers-explosive-lawsuit-against-the-sparks/

As the coronavirus pandemic deepens, Idaho’s governor signs 2 anti-trans bills into law: https://www.vox.com/2020/3/18/21184941/idaho-coronavirus-anti-trans-bills-birth-certificate

NFL is planning for a full season with full stadiums: https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/03/31/nfl-is-planning-for-a-full-season-with-full-stadiums/

British Boxing Board suspends Billy Joe Saunders' license after insensitive social media post: https://www.cbssports.com/boxing/news/british-boxing-board-suspends-billy-joe-saunders-license-after-insensitive-social-media-post/

Rangers prospect K'Andre Miller subjected to racist abuse in open Zoom call with fans: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/04/kandre-miller-new-york-rangers-racist-abuse-zoom-call

Transcript

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Jessica Luther, freelance journalist and author of the forthcoming book, Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back. I’m at home in Austin, Texas. On today’s show I’m joined by Dr. Amira Rose Davis, an assistant of history and African American studies at Penn State University, who is in her house; Shireen Ahmed, a writer, public speaker, and sports activist in Toronto, physically distancing at home; Lindsay Gibbs, the creator of Power Plays, a no-bullshit newsletter about sexism in sport that arrives right in your inbox 3 days a week – she’s in DC, in her apartment; and Dr. Brenda Elsey, an associate professor of history at Hofstra, co-author of the book Futbolera – she’s on Long Island, coming to us from her house.

First things first, our thoughts and thanks go out to all the people who are on the front lines of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic: the doctors, nurses, hospital staff, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, warehouse employees, factory workers, those who have fallen ill, people caring for their sick loved ones, those trying to keep their family members home…the list goes on. We are keeping all of you in our thoughts.

As always, thank you to our patrons whose support of this podcast through our ongoing Patreon campaign make Burn It All Down possible. We are forever and always grateful. If you would like to become a patron, it’s easy: go to patreon.com/burnitalldown. For as little as $2/month you can access exclusives like extra Patreon-only segments or our monthly behind-the-scenes vlog. On today’s show we’re gonna talk about problems with WNBA leadership, and Amira interviews Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. They talk about her book and what it’s like to research and teach sports and public health in the time of COVID. We’ll cap off today’s show by burning things that deserve to be burned, doing shoutouts to women who deserve shoutouts, and telling you what is good in our worlds.

But first, before we get into all of that, let’s for a minute imagine post-pandemic, whenever that will be. This week it was announced that Wimbledon was cancelled this year, and while that felt inevitable I was still really sad about it. I’ve been watching Wimbledon since I was in high school which was a very long time ago now. It’s the tennis event that got me into tennis, I just love it. I feel like I mark my summer by it. So it’s fair to say that of all he sports that I’m missing right now, I’ll be most excited to watch tennis again whenever we get to the point that it is safe enough to hold tournaments, but this makes me wonder what sports you all will be most excited to watch once we again can watch sports? Brenda, what about you? I imagine I know what it is…I imagine it’s one person in particular.

Brenda: [laughing] It’s not one person in particular, it’s every person! Yeah, I mean, soccer. I’m most upset because the Eliminatorias are cancelled – those are the qualifiers for the 2022, and that’s men’s soccer and that’s what’s on in South America right now. So, there are 10 teams in South American soccer, it’s probably the hardest qualifying competition. And that means every team plays each other once at home, and I was really excited. I was supposed to be there March 27th, also coordinating the monitoring for Fare for homophobia and racism and gender violence, and I was so excited. So, yeah.

Jessica: Aw. How about you Shireen? I assume it’s similar.

Brenda: [crying noises]

Shireen: It is, I’m missing football obviously, and many episodes ago Brenda had talked about the app Forza, and I got a new phone, and I was like, I’m gonna download this! But there’s no point in downloading an app that talks about global football because there’s no global football! Except for the men’s final in Tajikistan, so I’m not really Tajikistanian football, so I’m just gonna let that be. But yeah, I dunno. I was really geared up to watch the WNBA, I wanted to go see…I don’t know. I’m just sad about it all.

Jessica: Yeah. Lindsay?

Lindsay: Yeah, for me Wimbledon is gutting. But so much of my life revolves around women’s basketball now that honestly having the fact that I wasn’t at Final Four this weekend has just been so hard.

Jessica: Oh, that’s right!

Shireen: Oh, yeah.

Jessica: Oh my god. Ohh.

Lindsay: [imitating sad trombone wah wah wah sound] And then you know, the fact that the WNBA season’s now being postponed and I don’t have much hope that we’re gonna have it at all, that’s just kind of where I am right now mentally with all this.

Shireen: Really, not at all? Oh…

Jessica: Yeah. I doubt it too.

Lindsay: Yeah. I really doubt we’ll see sports for…honestly, 2020, it’s gonna be surprising. Amira, this is supposed to be my happy place! [sad laughter] But anyways, for me it’s the W. I can’t wait to see women’s basketball again. I am so ready to see some women’s basketball again.

Jessica: How about you, Amira?

Amira: Yeah, as much as I’m hyper-critical of the Olympics I also fucking love the Olympics, and so Olympic years make me incredibly happy and I love the new technology that even when the Olympics are in different time zones it just live-streams all the events, and for insomniacs like me it’s ideal–

Jessica: Yes!

Amira: –because it means I’m up at 3 in the morning watching live fencing or judo or whatever, it’s around the clock sports. I get so into random things every four years, and so I’m missing that.

Jessica: Right. So July 2021. Okay!

Amira: July 23rd, 2021! It may or may not be on my calendar. 

Jessica: Ohh. Well, one day we will get there. One day. Alright, and now onto the show. Lindsay, talk to us about problems with WNBA leadership.

Lindsay: Yeah, so there’s a few stories–

Shireen: She laughs…

Jessica: I like the laugh!

Lindsay: –happening in the news right now. The first one I wanted to talk about happened actually in early March but I can’t imagine why it didn’t register much in the news…Probably because everyone’s brains are completely broken. Maybe irreparably broken. But anyways, earlier in March, really explosive allegations came out of a Los Angeles court that the former and longtime general manager of the Los Angeles Sparks, Penny Toler, filed a ten count civil lawsuit against the Sparks, former team president Christine Simmons, and 50 other unnamed individuals. I wanna shoutout Kelsey Trainor of High Post Hoops because most of the summary I’m giving of the case stems directly from her.

The last we heard from Toler was when she was fired in October 2019 pretty abruptly for allegedly using a racial slur at her players. Now, Penny Toler is a Black woman, to be clear. But she has now come back with this lawsuit and she’s alleging her firing was a result of gender discrimination and retaliation for speaking out against an extramarital relationship between the former team president Christine Simmons and team managing partner and governor Eric Holoman. She also said that…Well, this head coach was not named in the suit, he was anonymous, it said he was the head coach from 2015-2018, but that means–

Jessica: So, not anonymous!

Lindsay: –it was Dallas Wings head coach Brian Agler, because it’s pretty easy to figure out who head coaches are! So, the lawsuit says he used offensive language and engaged in a relationship with a player, and there was sexual harassment involved and some players were so uncomfortable that they left, and have since returned to the team now that Brian Agler is gone. So, this is a lot. I mean, the crux of the lawsuit is around money. Toler said that her contract began in April 2017 was set to expire in March 2020, and that there were only 3 clauses that allowed her to be fired and none of them were…Just because they kind of felt like it. She doesn’t think that her firing was for cause, so she’s trying to get 6 more months of pay from them. But obviously there’s a lot more to this suit including some sexually inappropriate things from people that are still working in the WNBA, and it’s troubling all around. I think this is hard to talk about, and I also think we need to talk about it. I’m curious to know what you all think.

Jessica: Yeah. As I was reading up on what Kelsey Trainor wrote and then what Erica Ayala wrote at The Athletic, everything in the Toler case seems totally plausible to me. None of this seems out of the realm of possibility, certainly. I don’t know enough about Agler – I just kind of know his coaching bona fides, but I don’t really know him as a person or anything about him, but that all sounds totally possible to me. The journalist in me hopes that the lawsuit makes it to discovery: this is the point in the process where both sides have to turn over a ton of documentation or do depositions, right? So we would maybe get to hear from the players that she’s talking about that left and came back, that we might get a lot more concrete information about what went down in LA. I would like to know all that stuff, especially because Agler is still there. I think Holoman is still with the Sparks. But yeah, I don’t know. It all makes sense to me. Lindsay?

Lindsay: I agree. I want this to go forward, I think it’s important to talk about. Penny Toler is a legend. I think what’s clear is there’s a lot of messiness behind the scenes in the Sparks; this is something we need to talk about. But there’s a lot of messiness behind the scenes in all pro sports and that includes women’s sports, right? There’s a lot of corruption, a lot of scandal behind the scenes. Women’s sports are not exempt from that, right? Just because–

Jessica: Can I ask you about that? Why isn’t it bigger news? Is it because of COVID, it’s not big enough news to sort of break through or something else?

Lindsay: I think it’s really tough, I think it’s a combination of things. Number one, it’s uncomfortable to talk about, right? There’s a lot of explosive allegations in here that don’t necessarily seem like they tie directly…And you do this when you file a lawsuit, right? You throw a bunch of stuff kind of against the wall to see what will stick for reasoning, you know? It’s the stuff she’s alleging about workplace misconduct, it isn’t the main point of her suit. So I think that makes it difficult to talk about. It also involves legends of the game. I mean, Candace Parker…A lot of this she’s saying is retaliation, because she was trying to trade Candace Parker at one point, and Candace Parker is really close friends with Christine Simmons, who of course is the one having an extramarital affair, so it’s just a lot. I think it’s tough.

Brian Agler is respected, for the most part, I think. There also seemed to be…Inappropriate relationships between coaches and players in women’s sports is not a new allegation, right? Whether it be men or women in positions of power, this happens. And nobody’s figured out how to talk about it. So I just think there’s so much here. And of course, Toler was fired in part for saying the n-word. Players came out, players did talk anonymously, that said that that did make them feel uncomfortable and there were legitimate complaints about that. Although we of course know the dynamics are very different as to if it was said by a white person. So it's a lot, I think that’s part of it. Also, the suit did break the week that the NBA was cancelled and that COVID really took over everything, so that’s another reason and it’s why I thought it was important to revisit this.

So, another thing going on is Kelly Loeffler, who was my burn pile nominee a few weeks ago – she’s back! But this time…Basically she’s the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, and she was appointed as the new Republican sent tor from Georgia last year. It’s a little bit complicated but basically they had someone step down, so there will be a special election for her the fall. But she hasn’t actually been elected, she was appointed by the governor to be a senator. She’s the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream and recently it’s come out – a lot of this is from another friend of the show Katelyn Burns at Vox, that Kelly Loeffler benefited from stock trades worth millions of dollars shortly before the general public was alerted to the severity of the COVID-19 crisis, from selling off shares in industries that had been adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic and buying shares in companies that had benefited, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She sits on the senate health committee [laughs] and she first began selling stocks on January 24th which was the same day that the committee held a private all-members session on COVID-19.

Jessica: Coincidence? Coincidence, totally.

Lindsay: Coincidence! And she continued making trades into late February, early March. According to her latest financial disclosure, her largest transaction involved a sale of $18.7 million in Intercontinental Exchange stock in 3 separate deals, and since Loeffler has made her sale the stock has fallen by 16% so these are fairly serious allegations and the reporting on them is ongoing and the reason though that we are talking about it this week is because none of the Dream players have spoken out against her. We can get into all the dynamics there, but Angel McCoughtry, who was with the Dream for 10 years, she was drafted there and was the face of the franchise for 10 years and then left this offseason in free agency to go to the Las Vegas Aces. So, this is what Angel wrote on Twitter, “My quote to the papers” – which I just love! – “on Kelly Leoffler: I love Kelly Loeffler. She has done nothing but give give give!! She has helped us women continue to maintain a job even when she has made nothing in return. Kelly has always had my back when I needed her and she would have yours too. I will never judge a person on their political views. That’s what makes the world unique. We get so caught up on what’s going wrong. I remember the million things Kelly has done right.” So that is Angel’s quote, and I just thought we should, uh, talk about it! I think you all might have some thoughts. [laughing]

Jessica: Shireen, do you have any thoughts?

Shireen: I had a really hard time getting past that part of the tweet where she said “that’s what makes the world unique.” What the fuck?! Like, “I will never judge a person on their political views.” What!? I’m so mad, I feel like this is a gentle segue into a burn pile, but I think for me, “she’s a good person” or “she was nice to me” is not a fucking defense. This woman has literally committed a crime, the most heinous type of white collar crime in the US which she will probably remain unpunished. But then again, I feel really bad saying this because I’m a big fan of Martha and Snoop, but Martha Stewart went to jail for doing much less in terms of money, and it was equally egregious. It’s terrible here, and this is a woman that’s being lauded for supporting women in sports. First of all, she’s a fucking xenophobe, a homophobe, and a Trump supporter! I just find it so disappointing. I don’t expect women athletes to have the same opinion as me on anything, I will never expect that, but it’s so disappointing, and a stab to the heart when I see stuff like this. I have a bunch of feelings and I know you all have thoughts too, I just mortified and so deeply disappointed by Angel’s reply.

Jessica: Yeah, it was interesting because she posted this and then all these people responded immediately about the insider trading and she then tweeted “tell me more about this” which is such an indication that she didn’t even understand the basic context of why “the papers” were asking her–

Lindsay: The papers! I’m sorry…[laughing]

Jessica: –and I felt like that was just so interesting to me because it was a reminder on some level that a lot of people don’t live on Twitter and don’t follow the news that closely.

Shireen: Yeah.

Jessica: This is a little different to me, because she was literally being asked for something, she should’ve at least asked for the context to this, but it was a reminder that that’s true in a lot of ways. Then I also kind of feel like…We talk about this a lot on the show, but female athletes in particular are just always grateful for anyone helping them out that that’s sort of the framework with which–

Amira: Right.

Jessica: –they approach stuff, and it felt like that to me as well. Amira?

Amira: Yeah, I think piggybacking off that point, I really appreciate this conversation, I appreciate the work you do, especially on these topics, Lindsay. One of the reasons why I feel like it’s so hard for critical conversations around the W to get traction sometimes, why we don’t see it and people are so protective of it, is because we’re dealing with two particular complications: one, the league has very much positioned itself and leaned into woke branding. We’ve talked about this before on the show, the ways in which the positionally of the league has obscured the ways in which there’s power dynamic issues or issues that we’re hyper-critical of in any other space, or at the same time that they’re really saying…A video that’s applauding activism, who they’re choosing to partner with, shows a kind of limited vision of that. So the branding here really belied some of the other very familiar tensions and critical issues about ownership and labor concerns that sometimes get lost behind that messaging.

And the other thing of course is that the vultures are always circling – you cannot even post a single thing about the WNBA without all of the flood of kitchen comments or “no one cares” etc, etc. And it’s engaged in history when we talk about Black women who’ve historically downplayed the sexual abuse in particular otherwise treatment they receive at the hands of Black men. Historians use the term “culture of dissemblance” where they’re saying they keep it in so as not to contribute to existing stereotypes or existing harm that could befall Black men, so they always kind of comport themselves to be the shields of that, and I feel like sometimes we who care about women’s basketball tend to do that around the WNBA as well because we’re so hyper-aware of the vultures circling. And so what it results in is that we do have these conversations but with each other, or a little less publicly, or if publicly it very quickly turns into a defense, because even if you post a critical thing the next person’s gonna say “oh, who cares” or whatever. And I saw frickin…what’s his awful name? He’s so awful…Jason Whitlock, there you go.

Jessica: [laughs] I was like, there’s so many, Amira!

Lindsay: Which one!

Shireen: There’s so much I was thinking…

Amira: Yeah, he’s particularly awful, though. Jason tweeted about the WNBA holding its draft and he was like “Are we gonna talk about this? You guys say nothing about this, but the NFL…” like, clearly just a straw man set up to shit on the WNBA both by him and in the comments, but it also points to the fact that people doing the work and people are caring are already having these conversations but it seems like it exists completely out of these other larger discussions. So I think that’s one of the things that’s really tricky about these conversations, but they’re so necessary.

Jessica: Thanks Amira. Brenda?

Brenda: Yeah, this is also, I think, reflective of this ongoing tension between women’s sports and having hopes for feminism and representation. There’s this real tension that always exists in these situations where women know that inclusion changes conversations and images and does something. So, you know it’s important to include women – that’s not the same as including a feminist agenda. To have a woman owner of a WNBA team, there wasn’t any doubt that Loeffler was progressive or feminist, she’s anti-feminist. And so there’s this tension where women are part of the very same patriarchy as men and they do a lot to uphold it, we’ve talked a lot about that on this show, and I think that’s always gonna be a tension. And then those are the very thing that men like…What’s his stupid ass’s name?

Lindsay: Whitlock?

Brenda: Whatever!

Jessica: Are we still at Whitlock?

Brenda: Okay, people like that will jump on that in a very, as Amira said, straw man argument, and also just basic, because there is that tension. We all know it, we all acknowledge it. But it makes the conversation really difficult because it is important to have women owners, it is important to have women coaches, but Toler, her suit is not only about a male coach but about the behavior of another woman, and that becomes really difficult. It’s like navigating that who’s a feminist and who’s an inclusive woman representing, and those are just often not the same things, and we want them to be, and it’s hard.

Jessica: Yeah, such a good point. Lindsay?

Lindsay: It’s really hard – to take it another step further, Christine Simmons and Penny Toler were two of the most powerful Black women in the WNBA, you know? So that’s another layer to this, because we know there aren’t nearly enough Black women in positions of power in the WNBA, despite the fact that the majority of players are Black women. I think it’s all tough to talk about, but I do think it’s crucial that spaces like this and with all of our work that we continue to look critically and police our communities in a way, you know? And make sure that…Power corrupts everyone, right? Power and money and these systems can corrupt everyone, and pretty much nobody’s completely immune to it. I just think it’s so important to keep shining a light on these problems because this is a place where the power structures within women’s sports deserve the same scrutiny that the power structures within men’s sports do, because we need to root out corruption everywhere and ultimately it’s not in the best interests of the players. I feel for players on the Sparks and Dream right now, I understand why nobody is speaking out, and I’m not mad at any of them for not speaking out, but I do think that as journalists, as voices in this community, it’s up to us to speak out about these things and not just plug our ears and pretend they’re not happening.

Jessica: Up next: Amira interviews Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis.

Amira: Hey flamethrowers, and welcome to the latest scholar spotlight! I am so thrilled to be joined by Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, from Muhlenberg College right here in Pennsylvania right near me. She is the assistant professor at the public health program there, and I was thrilled to call her up and chat with her about her new book No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. Welcome to the show!

Kathleen: Thank you so much for having me.

Amira: I’m so thrilled, I was so excited to get my hands on your book and I have all these questions. First and foremost congratulations on the book coming out, and immediately I was like, oh, so you mean all these debates and all of these moments we’ve seen in the last few years with people lamenting the softening of manhood and the country by pointing at new rules and anxieties around youth football is not actually new? So I wanted to start there. You give a very compelling history of these debates around youth football. How did you come to this topic?

Kathleen: It was a long process, but the short version is I used to play soccer, and I ripped my ACL doing that, which was a big knee injury, so when I went into public health I was fascinated by studying the history of injuries, the social context of injuries, how we think about this. When it came time to come up with topics for my dissertation I thought, well, if I’m going to do something related to brain injuries, if it’s going to be a big project, it’s gonna have to be football, because it is so socially and culturally important in the United States, one of our most prominent sports. It also is incredibly common at the youth level: it’s still the most popular sport for high school boys, which means from a public health point of view there’s a very significant population at risk. There’s millions of boys who play every year. So at the time, when I first started working on this, there was a lot more attention at the NFL level, which makes sense because there was the NFL concussion lawsuit, there were prominent NFL players in the news who had passed away and been diagnosed with CTE after death, which is chronic traumatic encephalopathy. There was a lot of attention on the NFL level, but I thought if I’m looking at a public health history then I really wanna look at the kids, I think that’s where it’s at, because way more kids play football than adults, it’s really a child’s sport. I would in fact say in the realm of 95-98% of football players in the United States are children. The vast majority don’t make it to play in college and the NFL, and we don’t have leagues of 40 and 50 year olds tackling one another.

I wanted to understand where this all came from and, just as you said, I found that these debates are actually old. From the very inception of the sport there were people who took a look at it and said, this is really dangerous! And in fact I took the title from the journal of The Journal of the American Medical Association because back in 1907 the doctors who wrote for that journal wrote an editorial in which they said, well, you know, at the college level, they’re adults, maybe they can make their own decisions and we know that the NCAA is gonna try to make things safer – it wasn’t called the NCAA at the time, but the new association that had just been founded which we now know as the NCAA that oversees college sports – it was founded in large part to try to address injuries in football. So the doctors said, we might be okay with college football but there need be no such hesitation in saying this is no game for boys to play. That just really struck me that over 100 years ago one of our most prominent medical journals was saying kids should not be playing this sport. Needless to say, they largely got ignored, and instead more kids started playing the sport and it became this incredibly popular sport for children, and I wanted to understand how that came about.

Amira: Yeah, it’s so compelling, and I really appreciate the focus on youth sport here because it’s one of the under-studied and under-covered phenomenons in this country. You have this really compelling line in the book where you describe millions of boys colliding on the gridiron, and you say “Every hit also reveals social and cultural values. Each collision says something about what Americans expect of their sons and what they hope they will become.” Certainly a large part of this and a large part of your work also deals with gendered notions embedded in the sport of football, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that, about why we’re so infatuated with football and what are those things that people think boys are gaining on the field?

Kathleen: That’s such a good question, and it’s a really fascination history, because I think throughout its history tackle football has been seen as the domain or the province of men, and in many ways it was sort of a way of saying like, even as girls and women are getting additional rights and access to other parts of American life, here is a sport that can be violent for men and boys. In the late 19th century there was the beginnings obviously of the suffrage movement that ultimately led to women gaining the right to vote in 1920 and other advances in women’s access to public life, and that’s where football got it start. It also is very deeply associated with the military when it got its start: it was seen as in many ways an alternative to military training for boys, so there was a movement in the United States, and the Spanish-American War certainly highlighted this, an effort to make the United States a more global power at the end of the 19th and into the 20th centuries, and people became very closely tied to military and educational leaders who said that this will be a really great way to train up boys to teach them discipline and toughness and other qualities that we think they’ll need as potential future soldiers, future military leaders, or even potential leaders. So it got tied to this whole set of values, and I think we still see those military associations today.

But it’s worth highlighting, for example, President Eisenhower played football at West Point when he was a cadet at West Point. Many other prominent American generals and politicians and leaders ended up playing football, and it was in many ways most prominent at that time at Harvard and Yale, so it was a way of sort of training up what were seen as the elite of the elite at that time, which were largely at the time white Anglo-Saxon Protestant affluent men who could afford to attend a college like Harvard or Yale, and football was sort of seen as a proving ground for them. So what ends up happening, and this is obviously many years of history I’m condensing into a short time, but what ends up happening is football moves away from Harvard and Yale down to many other colleges and high schools. It gets treated as “this is a way to impart very desirable social values” – the phrase “character building” which has all kinds of notions, gendered and otherwise, into it: discipline, teamwork, all those values kind of get put onto football. In many ways the idea of toughness and being able to “play through it,” to play through pain is very much a part of that as well, so football was seen as a way of teaching boys – and this is a direct quote from a 1950s article, that “it does not hurt to get hurt” – that it actually in some sense is a good thing to experience a certain amount of pain and learn to play through an injury. So I think those ideas were tied to football from its origin.

Amira: Wow. Yeah, and one of the things you touched on is the way race is bound up within this. I was particularly interested in the part of the book where you talked about how, particularly for Black boys, football offers them a place where they can play in a sanctioned supervised way that perhaps reduces occurrences like, say, Tamir Rice, or the threat of Black boys at play in unsupervised spaces, but also that it works to solidify and amplify these stereotypes of male aggressiveness, which is acceptable on the field. I was really interested about what you think happens when they transition off the field. One of the things that’s always stuck out to me was…We were at this function with Michael Bennett, and he said “We’re taught to be ruthless and physical and agressive on the fields so much that nobody ever teaches us how to turn it off when we go home.” I’m particularly interested in that piece the conversation and, certainly, moving fast forward into our contemporary times, just looking at the racial politics of the league and the disproportionate labor force who’s playing. I think these conversations are heightened when people like Andrew Luck walk away from the game and those players who are disproportionately left within the sport, at least on the professional level, the collegiate level, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, on the youth level as well, there’s racial disproportions in terms of who’s playing and who’s coaching and who’s owning these spaces.

Kathleen: Those are all such good questions. I guess to start off, I would definitely say one of the threads I saw running throughout is that because football was treated as in many ways these are the ultimate American male values, for those men particularly of races that were marginalized or discriminated against, football kind of became a way to prove “I’m an American man too” and I think we really see a big change after the 1950s and 60s when schools integrated. There was a much bigger influx of African-American players, certainly beginning in the 70s and 80s as compared with the 50s and 60s because they began to have access to be able to play on college teams and ultimately in the NFL as well in a way they didn’t before that. I think you’re spot on about the idea of obviously many sports are, in some sense, a kind of socially sanctioned violence, but I think we really see that with football given that it is a collision sport with repeated hits. And what ends up happening because of social stereotypes and discrimination and beliefs based on race, is that you start to see Black players disproportionately represented in those positions that deliver and receive the most hits, whereas positions such as quarterback or kicker which are positions in football that tend to experience fewer kicks – or fewer hits, excuse me. The kicker is obviously much less likely to be in a collision and there are actually many rules that specifically protect the quarterback. Those positions are disproportionately occupied by white players.

You see even the specific public health risk in the sport becomes racialized and the players who are in many senses taking on the most intense physical risk are increasingly African American players. And then he point about this being socially sanctioned violence is especially important for African American boys and men because, as I had alluded to in the book, there have been horrible instances in both past and much more recent US history of Black boys and men being viewed with intense suspicion and suffering intense violence – Tamir Rice being one example of a young boy playing alone in a park, and it really struck me…Tamir Rice was just playing with a toy gun alone, but was perceived as a threat. On the other hand, had he been in a football uniform colliding with other players he would not have been seen as a threat in the same way because he would be seen as having participated in a form of violence that’s seen as appropriate and culturally approved.

I think it’s a way that, very understandably, many parents who are concerned about what opportunities or options are available to their children might say. Sure, we know that football carries significant risk, but my son is safer in many ways socially and physically playing football than perhaps he might be playing in the park on his own. I think we see now, and it’s absolutely across all levels of football, although we don’t have as good data on the younger age group, but we certainly have good data at the college and NFL level, increasing disproportionate representation of Black men on NCAA teams as well as in the NFL, and so I also think that that has very profound implications about how we think about the risks of football. The physical risks, certainly, the risks to the brain as well as the other kinds of bodily injuries players can suffer, and who’s experiencing those risks versus who’s benefiting or profiting from them. It seems clear to me that Black players are disproportionately experiencing the physical risks of the sport and disproportionately white owners and coaches of the teams are disproportionately benefiting financially from it.

Amira: Yeah, wow. So where are we now with discussions of football, particularly youth football and public health and CTE? What is the latest space that you see these conversations occurring in? What are the consequences?

Kathleen: I think I see developing now roughly two main schools of thought, and one I think is driven in many ways by the NFL, coaches, other people involved in the sport, certainly a recognition that there are brain injuries and long term risks such as CTE that need to be addressed, but the idea seems to be that we can just tweak parts of the sport to address those concerns but not make any fundamental changes. So what I mean by that is that a lot of the attention has been on changing things like helmet design or tweaking some of the rules or tweaking the tackling technique, things of that nature. So not fundamentally changing the nature of the sport but saying, okay, we’re conceding that we know there are these significant concussion risks, the way we’re gonna address that is by building a new and better helmet, or otherwise tweaking the technology or the rules.

The other school of thought which is certainly the school of thought that I adhere to is that repeated full body collisions just carry fundamental risks to the human brain and we don’t have any kind of helmet or tackling technique that can minimize to a significant extent those risks. The laws of physics I think unfortunately just mean that there really is no safe way to repeatedly collide with another person and not put your brain at risk of repeated trauma. So that school of thought is basically that because there are these fundamental inherent risks, at a minimum, young children should not be exposed to those risks and that we should be non-collision alternatives. So, that could be flag football, that could be a different sport, but some kind of version of football that doesn’t involve tackling.

So I think we’re at a very interesting crossroads right now, and I think there’s a tension between those two perspectives of is it possible for in many ways our national pastime to be able to continue on without much change, or are we gonna have to make fundamental changes to the sport or at least decisions about at what age you can start playing the sport in the name of public health. I think we certainly have resolved that, and I think it’s going to depend not just on the science – although that’s certainly very important, the new imaging and scientific advancements made in studying the brain – I think it’s also going to depend just as much if not more on our attitudes towards gender and manhood and whether or not football is necessary for turning boys into men, whether tackling is an essential part of that, all these profound social and cultural attitudes that I think are going to be very important in determining the future of the sport. 

Amira: Yes, indeed. Now, I would be remiss to not ask you a question about the current moment that we’re seeing given that you’re a scholar that focuses on both sports and public health…I don’t even know how to articulate the world that COVID-19 has created, and I didn’t know if you had any particular thoughts about this public health crisis’s impact on the sports world or otherwise?

Kathleen: Absolutely. Well, my first thought is, a lot of gratitude to the NBA. I think they were real leaders in many ways on this. You may remember that the NBA was one of the first professional leagues, and this feels like months ago now, but it was only a couple of weeks ago to say, actually, we’re gonna have to suspend games right now, and I think that came at a very important moment that started to spur other sports leagues to take this seriously. Obviously now as we speak only a couple of days ago it was announced that they Olympics were gonna be postponed, and I think that’s all unfortunate as it is for us who love watching sports, I think that is the necessary and right call in the name of public health. Not to just to protect the fans, but to protect the players themselves. I have a number of students who play college sports and there was a moment, and you may remember this as well, where there was a thought of, well, perhaps we can have some games where there are the players playing but no audience there, as one sort of effort at having some compromise situation.

But I think the nature of this virus and how it spreads means that in order to protect the athletes they themselves should not be traveling and playing either. I’m speaking about that with my students, many of whom are in their late teens and early twenties, and obviously many of them may be thinking, well, I’m at a lower risk for complications from the virus – even if you are in a younger age group you still are at risk for the virus and more so the concern is we want to protect our health system’s capacity and that means if you have any kind of medical issue, and there are obviously lots of medical issues you can have playing sports, reasons you might need to go to the emergency room, injuries that can happen, we need to protect our emergency room capacity right now for our healthcare providers and first responders to be devoting their time, their energy, the personal protective equipment, all their resources to addressing COVID-19. So as unfortunate as it is, I think it really was the right call. Again, I’m so grateful to the NBA for sort of modeling this and I’m grateful that the NCAA and the IOC and other organizations have been following suit in saying we have to postpone right now.

Amira: Certainly. Well, we thank you in the midst of all this for joining us at Burn It All Down. Flamethrowers, please go check out the book No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis available at UNC Press which right now is having a 40% off sale on its recent American history catalogue which includes this book. Go stock up on reading materials for your isolation and your social distancing. The book is also widely available so you can also support local bookstores that might have it in stock when you’re looking for it. Again, thank you so much for joining us here at Burn It All Down.

Kathleen: Thanks so much, it was an absolute pleasure.

Jessica: Now we’re onto everyone’s favorite segment, the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we’ve hated this week in sports and we set them aflame. Brenda, what is on your burn pile?

Brenda: I am representing I think most of us and several episodes’ worth of building when I want to burn the two anti-trans bills that passed, they were singed into law by Governor Little, this moment very aptly named. The two bills are HB500 and HB509 – those mean 1) no changes to birth certificates to change one’s gender, and a second to ban trans girls from competing in girls’ sports. Lindsay has discussed this extensively on last week’s episode so I don’t think I need to get into it too deeply, but to say friend of the show Katelyn Burns also wrote about this for Vox and did a whole breakdown of trends that have been happening. There are eight states right now that have different anti-trans bills that are there, they’re in the process and they’re introduced, and they’re such things as like, making it a felony for any medical professional to treat youth with gender dysphoria. Again, choosing this moment, a pandemic, to pick on the most vulnerable of the population. There’s a lot to be said of why it’s even girls’ sports and how even if you’re sexist and misogynist that’s just one step further even, because what does that mean? They can’t even imagine that trans boys would compete in boys’ sports? –anyway, whatever. There’s a whole ton to work out there, but I think it’s worth just burning it. Burning that he passed it in there just knowing that it’ll be an expensive lawsuit and knowing that you are making the world a worse place, a more bigoted place. So, burn.

All: Burn.

Jessica: So on March 31st, which feels like six years ago, but was in fact last Tuesday I’m told, Mike Florio wrote a piece for ProFootballTalk titled “NFL is planning for a full season with full stadiums.” In the piece, Florio writes, “During a conference call with reporters held on Tuesday, NFL general counsel Jeff Pash said the league is planning for a full season.” Pash also believes apparently that the season will start on time and that games will be played in front of full stadiums of fans. I just…What…? So, the NFL season is supposed to start on September 10th, that’s after weeks of preseason games and months of camps. The IOC, which swore up and down on everyone’s grave that they would hold the Olympics in July and August this summer, has moved that to July of 2021. At this point it’s not clear if we’ll get any more NBA or part of the WNBA season, there’s no indication when tennis will return, or hockey. There’s just so much that is unsettled and we still know so little about the virus that is tearing its way through so much of the world right now. It seems premature to say the least to be out there saying so assuredly that anything will be happening on September 10th, especially gatherings of tens of thousands of people in the same place. But you know how I really know that it’s a dumb idea for the NFL to be putting out there? Amira mentioned this at the top of the show. I know this because on Saturday Donald Trump, who has been wrong about everything to do with COVID-19, said he believes the NFL season should start on time in September and he hopes to have stadiums and arenas full of fans by late summer.

Shireen: Oh, god.

Jessica: Trump is like opposite day personified: whatever he says, think or do the opposite and you’ll be on firmer, more correct ground. Sorry NFL. So anyways, as Brenda said on the show a few weeks back, it doesn’t really matter what the people who run these leagues want, it ultimately won’t matter what Trump says either, it’ll be mayors and governors deciding for their local jurisdictions, and they might very well keep teams from playing, and certainly fans from congregating. The virus, our ability to test people, something that is still not happening with the speed officials want it to, and a possible vaccination or treatment for it will determine the schedule. There’s just something so cavalier and arrogant in this moment, especially here in the United States as all the numbers continue to rise, about someone in the NFL getting on a call with reporters and claiming full stadiums in September when so many people are just literally trying to survive right now. So I want to burn it. Burn.

All: Burn.

Jessica: Lindsay, what are you burning? 

Lindsay: I’m burning any single news report about the Hall of Fame inductions that we’ll mention in our badass women of the week but does not mention Tamika Catchings in the headline or the lede or whatever! Obviously there’s other big names: Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett, but Tamika Catchings deserves to be right there with Kobe and Tim, absolutely, no question about it. And for so many headlines I see she is an afterthought, she is the other, she is the “et cetera” in the conversation. It’s just a reminder of how few women are even in not only the Basketball Hall of Fame but in any of these big sports hall of fames, and how their inclusion is so often treated as an act of generosity and not as an earned…Let’s just go over Tamika Catchings’ bio very quickly: 15 years in the WNBA all with the Indiana Fever, a WNBA championship, most valuable player award, finals MVP award, 5 WNBA defensive player of the year awards, 4 Olympic gold medals, and the WNBA rookie of the year award. 12 all WNBA teams, 10 WNBA All Star teams, 12 all defensive teams, yeah. Tamika Catchings: put her in your damn headline! Burn.

All: Burn.

Jessica: Amira, what do you wanna torch?

Amira: Yeah, I’m really mad about this. I wanna talk about boxer Billy Joe Saunders, who is awful. So, this week he decided to make a video that features him and a punching bag. He says, you know, folks, this is a video that I wanna make for you; because of coronavirus you’re at home and if your old woman or your girlfriend is giving you too much lip and getting on your…is giving you mouth, he says, and getting on your nerves, this is what you should do. So, he uses the punching bag to demonstrate what you should do if she’s coming at you and using her mouth and getting annoying – and then he hits the bag, and he’s a boxer, he hits the bag very hard. “You hit her right there on the chin.” He goes on in this video to say then you might give her this combination, whatever. He’s literally making a how-to-domestic-violence video. This is egregious anytime, but especially now in a moment when we’re sheltering at home, we’re in place, we’re staying at home, but not everybody is safe at home. We’ve seen a spike in domestic abuse in China as people have been sheltering, we’re seeing it on the rise here as children and people are home in houses that have underlying tensions, that have histories of abuse.

I do wanna pause my burn right here just to say and remind everybody who’s listening that there’s 24/7 access to domestic violence advocates at the national hotline, that’s 1-800-799-SAFE. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing you can also call the national deaf video phone at 855-812-1001. There’s advocates there, people there to help, anybody can get resources they need. They also have a live chat service because sometimes it’s really hard to make those calls – we’ve actually seen calls to the hotline plummet since it’s harder for people to make calls when everybody’s in the home. So this is the moment that he determined it was right to put out this stupid ass video. Now, the British Boxing Federation, thankfully the Board of Control suspended his license. People like Claressa Shields retweeted his video and said actually this is dumb, let me make a video to show you what to do to survive abuse, she made a video for women in abusive relationships. But the last part of this is his apology, of course, because this is something we’re all familiar with. He apologized in a way too long tweet that didn't actually offer an apology at all.

Lindsay: Shocking.

Amira: It talked about hate mail he got and he said, “listen, this is a joke and I didn’t realize people wouldn’t find it funny. Also, I have a daughter and if anyone did that to my daughter I would hurt them, bad. I didn’t mean for anyone to get upset about it. People are dying all around the world with coronavirus and I was just trying to take the heat off that a little bit and provide a laugh.” – He’s British – “It clearly hasn’t done. My sense of humor is not everyone’s cup of tea.” What asinine bullshit. There was nothing funny about it, and the amount of men defending him was repulsive. This was just bare bones “here’s how to abuse people.” It was stupid, it was harmful, your apology was insufficient, not even close to being acceptable, all of it is trash, burn it down.

All: Burn.

Jessica: Alright Shireen, bring us home.

Shireen: Yeah, so I saw something, I tried to take a couple of minutes to lose myself in Jane Austen films – Pride & Prejudice and whatnot. And I was off Twitter for maybe an hour and a half while, goddamn, did the world just keep burning in a towering inferno of racism. K'Andre Miller is a 20 year old New York Rangers prospect, he’s an amazing young hockey player so he, out of the goodness of his heart, particularly in this time, decided to do a Q&A on Zoom live with somebody from the organization asking questions about his career, what he’s looking forward to, etc, etc. This was when what the phenomenon we know as “Zoom bombing” happened to him, and it was peppered with the n-word and a slew of racialized insults as this young man is talking. Now, there’s a couple of tiers to this burn. Of course, first and foremost, I’m so furious. I’m so angry that this happened. I’m so concerned for him and hope he has the supports he needs to navigate this, he looked quite shocked. There's a video of him…That’s another part, there's a video of someone circulating on Twitter that’s showing that screen scroll through, and this is where it’s jarring for people to see that word being shared again and again and again. Friend of the show Renee Hess over at Black Girl Hockey Club tweeted out, like, stop sharing that! Because it retraumatizes people.

That’s another layer of this burn which was really frustrating for me, to see was the slew of people who are white who are complimenting him on the “classy” way he handled it. First of all, you don’t fucking get to decide how a racialized person handles it and you don’t give them an evaluation on what you think is “classy.” To me he looked numb. He looked really shocked. He decided in that moment to ignore that and kept going with so much…It was so courageous of him just to keep talking and to normalize the situation, and the woman interviewing him…It’s almost like she didn’t realize it was happening. Another layer of this bullshit: it took the New York Rangers 3 hours to tweet and comment about this. THREE HOURS. I’m sorry, Rangers, not a whole lot of hockey happening right now, what the fuck were you doing for that long?! The NHL followed and immediately you had JT Brown the Minnesota Wild hockey player come out and talk about how it’s garbage, but I think there’s so many ways in which people still refuse to use the word “racism.” It’s so hard for organizations to say “racism” and people are still so concerned with not being labelled as complicit in racism that they’re more worried about that than the actual system of oppression. I want to burn all of this, all of it, because it’s unacceptable, it’s infuriating, and it’s triggering for so many people out there. So just burn.

All: Burn.

Jessica: After all that burning it’s time to celebrate some remarkable women in sports this week with our badass women of the week segment. First up, our honorable mentions: Imani McGee-Stafford, former Burn It All Down guest and a center for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, announced this week that she is is taking a two year hiatus from the WNBA to go to law school. Congrats, Attorney McGee-Stafford.

Ingrid Engen, VFL Wolfsburg Star and Norwegian national team player, has asked that 10% of her salary be donated to helping those affected by the pandemic. It's part of a #socialresponsibility campaign.

We want to give a shoutout to the athletes on the Forbes 2020 30 under 30 Asia list including Nor “Phoenix” Diana, Malaysia’s first hijab-wearing female pro wrestler; Hiyori Kon, a professional Sumo wrestler banned from the sport because she is a woman. Kon is featured in the documentary Little Miss Sumo which you can find on Netflix. Ash Barty, the Indigenous-Australian tennis player who won the French Open last year; and Se-yeon Kim, the South Korean Overwatch legend. 

Telegraph Women's Sport have been awarded the Reporting Diversity Award and Supplement of the Year by the Society of Editors in the UK. Congrats to Anna Kessel and her team at the Telegraph.

No surprise here, Sabrina Ionescu is the Naismith Player of the Year. Also, shoutouts to the other finalists: Lauren Cox at Baylor, Tyesha Harris at South Carolina, and Rhyne Howard at Kentucky. Lex’s old roommate, Amira’s girl, DiDi Richards was named the defensive player of the year beating out the other talented finalists: Aliyah Boston at South Carolina, Aari McDonald at Arizona, and and Kylee Shook at Louisville.

And lastly, Dawn Staley matches her AP Coach of the Year honor from last week with the Naismith Coach of the Year award this week. She makes history, becoming the first person to win the coach award after also winning the Naismith Player of the Year award, which she won as a star in Virginia in 1991 and 1992. Shoutout tot he other coaching finalists: Kelly Graves, who of course had a tremendous year with Oregon, and Adia Barnes from Arizona who helmed a special team this year. Our special episode that dropped last week features an interview with Arizona player Amari Carter who details more about their special season.

And finally, the Naismith memorial basketball Hall of Fame announced their class of 2020, including our 3x NCAA national championship coach at Baylor, Kim Mulkey, and 5x Division II national coach of the year Barbara Stevens. Can I get a drumroll please?

[drumroll]

Our badass woman of the week is Tamika Catchings, the only female basketball player to be a part of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020. Lindsay already gave you a pretty good rundown of Catchings’ career, I’m just gonna mention a few things: again, 10-time WNBA All-Star, named to the All-WNBA team 12 times in her career, 4-time Olympic gold medalist. She was the 2011 WNBA MVP and led the Indiana Fever to the 2012 WNBA Championship, earning Finals MVP honors that year. While at the University of Tennessee, she won a national championship. She is currently the vice president of basketball operations and general manager of the Indiana Fever. Catchings absolutely deserves a spot among the greats and we are so happy that she got it. Congratulations, Tamika Catchings, our Bad Ass Woman of the Week.

Okay, what’s good y’all? Brenda, what’s good with you?

Brenda: My middle daughter is turning 11, Luna–

Jessica: Aww. Happy birthday, Luna!

Brenda: Yeah. And my birthday is the day after and I just couldn’t imagine a better birthday present. When you have a girl this good…COVID is…Can she not having a roller skating party? Okay, that kind of sucks, but the appreciation I have for her and the fact that we’re healthy and the fact that we can be together is monumental, so it’s really cheering me up right now to plan little surprises. 20 of her friends are going to socially distance on the lawn and sign her happy birthday, as a surprise, so shh! [laughs] And doing things like finding the right stuff for a cake and stuff like that has kept me busy in a positive way. Also, the check-ins can be fatiguing but the check-ins are life sustaining right now, so thanking all my friends and family and BIAD in particular, co-hosts who are keeping me sane and happy-ish.

Jessica: I agree. I was gonna say, Burn It All Down, you all are making this much better than it otherwise would be. The other thing I was gonna mention this time: my trainer Amalia at GrassIron…As I’ve said, I deeply miss going there to the gym, that’s been personally one of the hardest things for me. It’s so important for my mental health as well as my physical, and so this week Amalia and the other trainers there had started doing virtual training. So I had to clear out all this space in the living room, I had to put Ralph in a room because if you saw the Patreon video that I did he will sit on me if I’m anywhere near the ground, so I had to put him in another room and we FaceTimed and for an hour we worked out, we did a body weight workout. I’m sore today but it’s just really lovely to have that time to chat with Amalia which I’m really used to, she’s like my bartender/therapist or something, but also to actually just do that physical work again was really lovely and I’m glad that that’s an option and something that I get to do in this moment. Lindsay?

Lindsay: Yeah, just every person in my life who checks in and is supportive and loving and I’d like to just thank everyone giving anybody else some grace and some empathy and…Give everybody a little slack right now! I’ve gotten some from a lot of people I know and love. I had a customer service representative and I really talked myself out of going nuts and just let it happen. The flowers for my mom’s birthday were delivered 5 days late and it was fine. You know what I mean? Just everyone doing the best they can right now. So I just wanna thank everyone who’s giving grace, and last night I had a really nice time – usually my family, my mom and my aunt and my cousin and his daughter, they do a Friday night dinner every week and whenever I’m in Greensboro I will join, but when I’m in DC I can’t go but obviously nobody’s doing the dinners now because of social distancing but last night we all got on Zoom and my little 5 year old cousin gave us all a fancy dinner party, like, they brought out their nice china and then they played a board game via Zoom, and I won! [laughs]

Shireen: Aww!

Lindsay: But anyways, it was one of those things where it was like, yes, everything’s horrible right now, I don’t really believe in silver linings but I did appreciate that a night like that probably wouldn’t have happened, I wouldn’t have been creative and thought to Zoom in for the dinner under normal circumstances, so I think that was good.

Jessica: That’s nice. Amira.

Amira: I echo a lot of what Lindsay said but in this week I particularly wanna shout out Courtney Cox, friend of the show, we’ve had her on before, who’s also my accountability partner and we have lovely check-ins and happy hours, especially because I’m trying to hit a place where I’m orienting back to figure out how to write a book or finish a book, and she’s been really key helping me recenter and refocus on work, so I wanna shout her out. And I'm also really really really excited because Shireen has agreed to let me shepherd her throgu a rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender. [Shireen laughing] This is so essential. I can’t wait. In preparation I may have watched half of the first season already. I watch reaction videos, because I love people watching it for the first time – I’m just so thrilled! Anyways, that will commence very shortly. Also, of course, I wanted to send a happy pre-birthday almost-birthday shoutout to our own Brenda because it’s your birthday week and it’s exciting and as much love as you’re giving to Luna we wanna give to you. So happy happy happy birthday, Brenda.

Jessica: Yay! And Shireen?

Shireen: Well, we did Houseparty – for those of you, that’s our social media. We actually all downloaded the app Houseparty and Amira led us through trivia and she’s amazing good, no surprise, I’m sure he has trophies – self-bought, obviously! I do wanna add that Brenda tied with her for one–

Brenda: Thank you.

Shireen: And I won at Pictionary. So I just wanna get that out there. And we’re prepping for when all this is over, god willing, we will meet and I have portable tablets for Pictionary that I’m going to bring and we’ll play, so I just wanted to get them warmed up. That whole online checking in with people is great. I just wanna send some love to those that get exhausted by that. I’m not one of those people but there are those out there that want that time and I see you, I hear you. It’s been a challenging week for me – my kids are with their father and so it’s just been me trying to occupy myself. I watched Tiger King and I hate everything about it, I couldn’t stop watching. Dr. Courtney Szto, friend of the show, and Dr. Shobhana Xavier both really were encouraging me to watch it. I’m like, I hate it. It’s what Trevor Noah said, when white people don’t have Black friends, that’s what Tiger King is. I just couldn’t stop laughing when I heard that. [Lindsay laughing] Lastly, I wanna say happy happy happy pre-birthday to Brenda, to Luna. April 8th is a very important day, it’s the day that Dr. Brenda Elsey came into the world. Bren, you are a joy and a blessing and I love you so so dearly and wish you so much happiness. I wish I could come and visit you but the borders are closed and I can’t. Also: COVID. So I just hope you…I know you don’t love your birthday but I want you to understand that I desperately love your birthday because it means that you’re here.

Amira: Exactly. [silence] …She’s so uncomfortable! [laughter]

Brenda: No I’m not, no! No, I’m coming around. I’m coming around. If it makes you happy it’s gonna make me happy too.

Amira: Oh my god, look what we’ve done in three years.

Jessica: Wow…

Shireen: I know, I know!

Lindsay: It only took a global pandemic.

Brenda: 153 episodes is what it took! 153 episodes. 

Jessica: I’m just gonna mention one other thing for people: if you haven’t seen Jake Gyllenhaal do a handstand to put on a t-shirt I just want you to stop and Google that, that’ll make you happy. 

Lindsay: Why can we not start with with? What–?

Jessica: Sorry, sorry. I don’t know. That’s it for this week’s episode, thank you all for joining us. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. If you subscribe you’ll never miss an episode or any extra content like our athlete-focused interview about the coronavirus that dropped last week. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode check out our website: burnitalldownpod.com. And remember, the experts say to be physically distant, not socially distant – get in touch with us! You can email us from out website, we love hearing from you all. You can also find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you enjoyed this week’s show, do me a favor and share it with two people in your life whom you think would be interested in the program. Also, please rate the show at whichever place you listen to it, you’ll have plenty of time to do this right now. The ratings really do help us reach new listeners who need this feminist sports podcast but don’t yet know it exists. If you’re interested in Burn It All Down merchandise – hoodies, pillows, t-shirts, tote bags, those kind of things – check out our Teespring store. Now might be a good time to curl up with a Burn It All Down blanket. Once more, thank you to our patrons, we could not do this without you. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown. That’s it for Burn It All Down, we hope you have a safe and healthy week. Burn on, not out.

Shelby Weldon