Episode 156: An Interview about Haley Shapley's "Strong Like Her" and Explaining Sports Phenomenons
This week, Brenda, Amira, Lindsay, and Shireen first discuss the future of women's professional hockey in Canada [2:05]. Then, they try to explain to each other sports phenomenons they don't understand [8:45]. After that, Jessica interviews journalist Haley Shapley about her new book "Strong Like Her" [32:00].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [47:19], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Ann Muffet McGraw and Sana Mir [1:00:39], and what is good in our worlds [1:03:03].
Links
NWHL players react to Toronto expansion: https://www.theicegarden.com/2020/4/27/21238167/nwhl-players-react-to-toronto-expansion-mallory-rushton-shannon-doyle-taylor-accursi
NFL draft pick Justin Rohrwasser’s far right tattoo: https://deadspin.com/this-is-why-supporting-heavily-armed-militias-is-danger-1843205460
ESPN apologizes for graphic in Tee Higgins' NFL draft bio: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/draft/2020/04/27/espn-apologizes-nfl-draft-graphic-tee-higgins-bio-mom/3032396001/
Sana Mir retires from cricket: https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/29097664/a-true-stalwart-pakistan-cricket-catalyst-women-game
Muffet McGraw retires from Notre Dame: https://sports.yahoo.com/muffet-mcgraw-retires-notre-dame-192346220.html
Susie Maxwell Berning, four-time major champion, rounds out World Golf Hall of Fame Class of 2021: https://www.golfdigest.com/story/susie-maxwell-berning-four-time-major-champion-rounds-out-world-golf-hall-of-fame-class-of-2021
Figure skater Joannie Rochette gets medical degree, will help in CHSLDs: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/figure-skater-joannie-rochette-gets-medical-degree-will-help-in-chslds/
Transcript
Brenda: This week, Burn It All Down would like to offer our condolences to the families and communities and 22 victims of the Nova Scotia shooting, the largest mass killing in Canadian history. Nova Scotia is home to one of our co-hosts and our hearts broke for everyone impacted by this terror. We know that this attack began with domestic assault, domestic violence, domestic abuse, as it often does. If you need support or help during this global pandemic, in USA please call: 1-800-799-7233 or 1-800-787-3224; or in Canada: 1-866-863-0511.
Welcome to this week of Burn It All Down – it’s the feminist sports podcast you need. Our heartfelt wishes of health and safety go out to the world right now facing the COVID-19 pandemic. We are thinking a lot about those in precarious economic positions who can’t afford to distance, to stay home, or to access healthcare. I’m Brenda Elsey, associate professor of history at Hofstra University, and I’m joined by my cohosts: the brilliant Shireen Ahmed, freelance writer and sports activist in Toronto, Canada; the whip-smart Lindsay Gibbs, sports reporter and founder of the amazing newsletter on women’s sports Power Plays, in DC; and Dr. Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University. On this week’s show we ask one another to explain sports things that we don’t understand and want to! Also, Jess interviews journalist Haley Shapley about Shapley’s new book Strong Like Her. They talk about female strength, the use of photographs in the book, and some athletes across history that Shapley writes about.
Before all that…Shireen, I heard there’s gonna be an NWHL team joining your Raptors in Toronto. I can’t help but just start out with the fact that I also saw you were unimpressed with some of the commentary by men such as CBC’s Gerry Dee. Do you wanna talk about that?
Shireen: Bleugh…Okay, just to respond, first and foremost, to them joining the Raptors: they’re not technically gonna be with MLSE. The Toronto Furies who were the former C-dub team were part of MLSE, the organization that has the Blue Jays and the Raps, TFC, the Maple Leafs. What I’m excited about is women’s hockey expanding. I will always feel of that opinion. I was obviously a C-dub fan…You can be a cross-border fan, no problem. But my point is is that I think women’s hockey just growing generally is a great thing. I am undoubtedly a PWHPA fan/supporter, I love a lot of the players, I’m friends with a lot of the players. But what that means is that my support of their movement doesn’t stop, but I will be at N-dub games, there’s no question. If a team comes here I will absolutely, absolutely support it, go and check it out.
I have a lot of questions about things, but I think that the way it’s being run, the way that things are happening, there’s questions about that. I mean, Digit Murphy’s been appointed to head and she’s had quite a solid reputation. What I’m looking for is stability. Stability is not something that we saw previously and it’s something that I’m looking for. I want this to be sustainable, I want these players to get what they need. I also want a reply along with PWHPA and knowing that those two visions are so different from the different leagues and the different players…Or, one former league, want to keep continuing with what they want. I don’t feel that if players feel like they wanna join the N-dub they should have to. I know personally after being a fan of this league and this game most of my adult life, I don’t feel like they should have to join the NWHL, and they clearly don’t want to. But I still wanna support the idea of them getting what they feel they deserve.
Brenda: Linz, what’s your reaction?
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, similar to Shireen. I’m excited. I think that this is gonna be good news and it’s gonna give a lot of players the opportunity to keep playing professional hockey and keep working towards a dream, and I think that it’s especially good to get it into Canada. It’s not just expansion, it’s expansion into Canada where we know is a crucial part of…IS women’s hockey, really, when you think of Canada. But I hope that there’s a future for women’s hockey that involves more than just waiting on the NHL to step up, you know?
Shireen: Yeah, yeah.
Lindsay: I respect so much what the P-dub is doing, which is the PWHPA, the players who are boycotting professional hockey until there is a league that meets there standards, and I respect them so much and respect the labor movements that they’ve been a part of and respect how they’ve pushed things forward. And I also respect the work that a lot of people within the NWHL have done, including…Wanna give a shoutout to Anya Packer, who is a friend of the show and kind of the head of the players association of the NWHL and has done a lot of important work to move things forward for the NWHL. At the end of the day there’s a lot of amazing women working really hard to give a future for professional women’s hockey and I think it's exciting. It’s exciting. [laughing]
Brenda: It sounds very messy!
Shireen: I think Lindsay and I are being very diplomatic and professional. I mean, some of the stuff, the commentary going back and forth, and I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, that I had felt that if Canada and the US went to war it would be over women’s hockey. I haven’t seen this kind of shade in a long time being thrown back and forth. And quite honestly, it stems from somewhere, and I don’t think there’s the meaningful conversations that I would love to see happening, intra-players, necessarily. As Lindsay said, the PWHPA is actually made up of a lot of former CWHL players, it’s mostly who they are. While I didn’t see this type of banter, I’m gonna call it “banter,” not bicker, banter!
Lindsay: [laughing] Banter is one word…
Shireen: It’s a good word. I’m being very careful with my words right now, because Courtney Szto will hear this and just be head-desking the whole time! There wasn’t this type of discussion as openly, let’s just say, while the two leagues were both in session. And just to get back to, Brenda, your initial question: Gerry Dee can just shut the fuck up. I will never ever turn to men for an opinion on women’s hockey, never. Especially when he showed up in literally the third period, basically in overtime, showed up in C-dub and suddenly the league shutters a week later. He was at the All Star game, and I will forever be irritated by him because you don’t get to show up when you think it’s going well and then have it fall down and pretend you’re an advocate. Where the fuck were you many many years ago when it was needed? This sport has grown out off the backs and the skates of women, make no mistake about that. So I’m never gonna wait for men to come and…Fuck. It ends with…Fuck men is what it ends with.
Lindsay: [sighs] This is so much better than us being very politically correct. [laughter]
Brenda: I don’t know if this has devolved, or if it’s…
Lindsay: Now I feel like we’ve regained our mojo a little bit!
Shireen: Seriously, tip-toeing is hard for me, Lindsay. You know that!
Lindsay: I know, I know. But I feel like we’ve been good. We’re not giving out any cookies at the start of this episode, which is good because Shireen’s been giving out cookies lately and that’s been weird, so I feel like we’re back. [laughing] Shireen’s back!
Brenda: Alright! On that note…
Okay, so this week we wanted to do a segment that Amira had originally thought of, called “Explain this to me.” We ask each other a sporting question that we genuinely have and hope that one of our co-hosts could elaborate upon. Lindsay, did you want to start?
Lindsay: Shireen–
Shireen: Hello.
Lindsay: [laughing] Please explain cricket lingo and cricket in general to me. [Shireen laughing]
Amira: And to me.
Brenda: You actually both had that question.
Lindsay: We both had the question! Shireen, please explain to myself and to Amira.
Shireen: Yeah, I can’t say this question is a shock to me. I knew that it would come up. We’ve talked about cricket and, Lindsay, one of your recent Power Plays was beautiful about your work into just understanding what was happening in Australia and filling the stadium–
Lindsay: I can talk about systemic issues in cricket–
Shireen: Sure.
Lindsay: But the cricket itself…
Shireen: The good cricket itself. And I appreciate this, because I just appreciate this segment totally. Amira, thank you for being its brain child. So, let’s talk cricket. Cricket is played with two teams, everybody. 11 players are on the field at a time. Cricket teams can run up to 30 players but at the time of play there’s 11 players on each team. Now, each team takes turns batting, just like in baseball, and fielding. So the batter – there’s a batter – is called the batsman. And the pitcher is called the bowler. So you’ve got the bowler, and they wear lovely white outfits, like, this is a huge nod to colonialism. They literally wear very proper…Where it’s not like in football there’s kits and athletic-looking…They look like they’re going for high tea in some cases. Well, it depends where you go for your high tea. Why did I say that? That's so extra. Okay, so–
Lindsay: Because you’re…Because Shireen is back! [laughing]
Shireen: So, like…Oh my god. Who the fuck goes to high tea? [Lindsay laughing] Two batsmen are on the pitch at the same time, okay? So let’s talk about scoring, because scoring is imperative. You can hit a 6 or a 4, which are runs. Now, if you’ll notice on the outside of the oval there’s rings that circle and circle the oval. Now, if the batter hits the ball out and it goes beyond one of those rings it can be a 4, or a 6, it’s called “out on a fly.” It’s 6 runs, okay? So the actual point…Let’s talk about what is the point. What is the point of this?
Lindsay: Yes, thank you.
Shireen: The point is: at each bat, each time someone’s at bat is called an over. Each over would kind of be like an inning, I guess you could say. There’s no more than 6 bowls per batsman, you can’t bowl more than 6 times. So the whole point is to literally hit the little wickets. You know that little stand there they have, that the batsman stands in front of? The point is to disrupt that. That’s literally the point. So what happens is that the fielding team must retire or dismiss 10 batsmen to end the innings – it’s always called innings, it’s not “one inning,” it’s innings even if you’re talking about one. So that’s basically the point. Elimination games are…I mean, there’s different types of games. There’s world cup matches which can go on for days, and then a T20 which is just a one day match, which we’ve talked about on this show. Basically you’re just trying to get the batters out and hit the wicket. The way that’s done is if the batter hits the ball and you field it and you throw it back and you can disrupt the wicket, that little stand thing there. That’s a very very simplistic, very simplistic explanation of what cricket is. It can be very slow, but the T20 matches which are literally much much faster are really exciting and thrilling. It can be really fun because it’s a combination of sprinting, it’s a combination of just really intense concentration as well, and I think that’s something that gets overlooked with cricket. It’s pretty fun. The batsman also tries to prevent the bowler from hitting the wicket, by hitting the ball. So yeah, there’s a defensive element here to this game as well, so I think that’s just very exciting. It’s very exciting.
Amira: My cricket question…So, I read and teach Beyond a Boundary, so I always read about cricket a lot. My question about cricket is very specific: mainly, these matches that go on for days. I always wonder what people do, like, does everybody say, “Oh, there’s still four wickets standing, clearly we need to continue this tomorrow, let’s break for high tea and meet back here and resume the game.” Or is it like, “Hey, we’re really tired, it’s 4 in the morning and we’re still aiming for these wickets…”
Shireen: Okay, so for the world cup, those types of long tournaments that they have, there’s only a maximum amount of play that can happen in a day, so they’re not gonna play til 4am.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s like 8 hours right?
Shireen: Yeah, it’s 8 hours. 8 or 9, I think it’s 8. So what happens is that they call it, they’re expecting it. Don’t forget, much of…And I’m gonna talk about the global south and countries which have been colonized that have taken up…Like, the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, now even Afghanistan has a really good team that made it to the world cup last time. And even with the women you’ve seen Bangladesh, we’ve seen Thailand recently at the T20 World Cup. These countries are so used to this that in a way the society comes to a standstill. I remember being in Pakistan for a World Cup – nobody was doing anything! It’s like the world cup of football in any other place in the world. Things just keep going, they kind of heartbeat on their own. People are just so invested into this. So the players go home, they shower, they eat, they change, they meet, they strategize, but they know that this goes on. I think for people that aren’t familiar with cricket it’s hard to understand when you don’t have a set amount of play time, like, how does this work? You know in football you have 90 minutes and you will have extra time. You know, right? It’s the same thing kind of we saw in tennis with that famous match, or game, or…That’s my actual question, whatever you call it. It goes on and on and on, but they know that it’s the end result that they’re going for. The outcome isn’t time-based, it’s event-based. So however long that takes, they’re psychologically prepared for it.
Brenda: Thank you, Shireen. I am going to ask Amira, and anyone else feel free to jump in, but I wanna start with Amira. In soccer/football often there’s a psychological profile and a meaning that comes with each position. Those might be debated, but they’re generally parameters of discussion. And I know that in football, North American football, it happens too. And I wonder about…You know, most obviously with the quarterback. But what the hell with the safety? [Shireen laughing] What does that look like? Why should I care about that position? If I’m drafting what do I think about that?
Amira: Yeah, it’s actually one of my favorite positions in the game
Brenda: [laughs] It would be!
Amira: So, when I played soccer we played a lot of formations but one of the formations we played most heavily was some combination of a 5-3-2. And in that 5-3-2 formation we had 1 girl, Mikayla, Mikayla Smith, who was the center back. She was the furthest back center back, right in front of the keeper. She was considered to be the last line of defense. She was the person who marshaled the defense at the end of the game and was really the last person who was like the ultimate defender. For me, when I think about the position of safety in American football, I generally think about Mikayla Smith. I think about that center back position, because in many ways the safety is like the defensive quarterback in many senses about it. There’s two types: there’s a free safety and a strong safety. The free safety is obviously a little bit more free to roam and they’re usually tasked with specifically keeping eyes on the quarterback and guessing and reading their eyes and seeing if they’re gonna throw one way or another, and they lend themselves to wherever the extra defense needs to be. So one of the things that happens with them is as the pass game is expanded in the NFL they needed to be quicker, they need to be hard-hitters, right?
It’s actually a really difficult position to play because they need to always be on guard, they need to think so fast, because the quarterbacks often try to look off the safety, which means…They fake throw it one way and then throw it the other way, they try to make sure that safety bites on one side so that they have an open receiver down field. When that happens you just see a big pass play where somebody’s open or somebody’s beating one on one coverage. When it doesn’t happen, right, the safety’s hoping to force an interception, right? Where they dupe the quarterback or they follow the quarterback’s signs and they’re able to read it and cut over to the field where the ball’s gonna be played and now suddenly that receiver that looked open is being covered by a safety who’s coming in fast, coming in hard, about to lay them out or intercept the ball. And so that’s…Occasionally you can also send the safety to blitz, right? Because they are this kind of X factor. So the game, I think, now we’ve seen safeties take on enormous responsibility because of how much passing happens in the game now. The other thing with safeties is they can be converted up and play up into a cornerback; they kind of have to be Swiss Army knife defenders. So, free safeties in the game: Devin McCourty on the Pats, I adore. He’s one of my favorites.
But then strong safety, they’re built a little bit different. They have less…They don’t really stick the quarterback, they’re used to help cover, help defend on the “strong side” of the offensive line. So if somebody’s doing a run package or has a big full back or it looks like they’re kind of stacking the line in one area, that might be a place where a strong safety would be there to kind of pitch over and help the line, fortify, help the defensive on that side. They don’t play as far back, they tend to be less roam-y, less concerned with what the quarterback is doing. Those folks tend to be a little bit more bulky. Sean Taylor, right, was a really great safety who could play both ways. But I think that the psychology or mentality of the safety really is this kind of hawk, I think of it like a defensive hawk who is also just one of the most insane people on the field because they’re literally in a split second determining where they’re running and then coming in so hot, flying around, hitting some of the hardest-hitting people in the game. And so I kind of think of them as the people who are a little bit hot headed in the sense that they have to make a completely split-second decision and then go 100% all in on that decision. And I think that’s really difficult to do. So that’s kind of how I consider a safety and the people who may be a little hot headed, may be a little prone to quick decision making and 100% commitment to that decision, you know? People with great instincts make good safeties, but I think you might have to be a little bit off to excel at that position.
Brenda: I think it’s now my favorite position. Thank you. [Amira laughs]
Lindsay: I’m just dying because when I saw this on the outline I literally thought you were talking about the safety score, like when the quarterback is sacked in the end zone. [laughing]
Brenda: Oh, no….
Lindsay: And then I realized, oh my gosh, football is so weird, because that’s a position, and then a completely different score. It didn’t even occur to me that you were asking about the position.
Shireen: Wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s a separate score? I just understood what Amira said because she parlayed it to soccer, so I get what she’s talking about, basically, a safety is like a center back in terms of role. They have their own score?!
Amira: No, no. So there’s a score play in American football that’s called a safety, that’s not attached to the position at all. That’s completely separate.
Shireen: Ohh, a play. Okay okay okay.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Shireen: I was like, oh my gosh, we gotta watch more football, Amira, because I don’t know what’s happening right now. Okay, okay.
Amira: Yeah, so if you tackle the quarterback in the end zone, like, in their end zone, then your team gets 2 points and you get the ball. And that’s called a safety.
Shireen: Okay. Okay.
Brenda: [laughs] It’s like an onion. You peel back one and there’s another one…
Lindsay: So many layers.
Brenda: So many layers. Alright, I think there was a tennis question?
Shireen: I have a tennis question, Lindsay, if you could tell me. Love – and I specifically wrote this down – what is love? And not as a song by Haddaway. But the tennis scorekeeping term. 🎶Baby don’t hurt me 🎶
Lindsay: Everyone, give Shireen a lot of credit for that!
Shireen: 🎶Don’t hurt me no more! 🎶
Brenda: Nooo!
Lindsay: I thought we might not start singing it, I thought we might not!
Brenda: How could you think that! How could you think that!
Lindsay: Do not give Shireen any credit!
Shireen: 🎶 Duh-duh duh duh-duh 🎶
Amira: [laughing]
Lindsay: Wow. We’re still going.
Shireen: I’m fasting, okay! Oh my god. [Lindsay laughing]
Lindsay: Okay. Is your question about scoring in tennis in general, or just about the love thing?
Shireen: Like, why do they call it love? What is that? Why don’t they just say zero like everybody else?
Lindsay: It’s always been the way…I mean, tennis scoring, my theory is that it was completely made up out of nowhere and then people have since gone back and justified reasons for it, like, tried to find clues in history to justify it. But there’s probably, I’m sure, historians…Maybe some on our podcast right now rolling their eyes at me for saying that! But basically a lot of the tennis scoring, the 15-30-40-deuce scoring is believed to be medieval French related and one of those is the zero looks like an egg which is, I believe…What is it, l’oeuf, so the zero was the egg, and that was kind of translated to “love” in tennis. Then the explanation I’ve heard for the 15-30-40 stuff is that it had to do with using clock faces to keep score on court.
Shireen: Ohh. Okay…
Lindsay: Because when you got to 60 the game is over, but they wanted to make sure that the game couldn’t be won by a 1 point difference, so they wanted to differentiate between once you got, like…So that’s why they went to 40 instead of 45. So instead of going 15-30-45-60 they go 15-30-40, and then when you get the advantage…So, when you get to 40, you have to get 2 points in order to win the game, 2 points in a row in order to win the game. It’ll go advantage and then the game will be won if you win the 2nd point in a row, or it’ll go back to 40. The theory is they changed that to 40, and then on the clock face they could make it go to 50 for the advantage and then back to 40 if they lost the next point or all the way to 60 if they won the point. So I think that kind of makes sense if you think about it in that way, but like I said there’s also a lot of debate over it. But yeah, you know, just a weird game. It’s kind of like anything – once you start to explain sports they sound real dumb. [laughing]
Shireen: Yeah, totally. On tennis still…Now, within tennis, there’s games, there’s sets, there’s matches. Which one’s which?
Lindsay: Okay, so this is a very good question. So you have to win…The points are the 15-30-40-advantage, those are points, right? You win a point and you go up 15-love. And then when you get to 60, whenever the metaphorical 60 is, right, when you get enough points in the game, that is a game, okay? So you win the game, you go up 1-0 in the set. The first person to get to 6 in a set wins the set, but again you have to go by two. You can’t win the set 6 games to 5 games, right?
Shireen: You have to win by two, ohh…I didn’t know that. Okay.
Lindsay: You have to win by two, so if it goes…That’s why you’ll sometimes see 7-6 because the rule is now when you get to 6-6 then there’s a tiebreaker. Usually it’s a best to 7 points tiebreaker, and so that’s why you’ll see some scores that are 7-6, right? Set scores. Then the match is either best of 3 or best of 5, that’s best of 3 sets or best of 5 sets, which means obviously you either have to win 2/3 sets or 3/5 sets to win the match.
Brenda: There ya go.
Shireen: Okay, so it's a game, tennis game.
Lindsay: That’s the point, right? You win the points to win the game, that’s the set scores.
Shireen: Oh! Okay okay okay. So…Okay, alright.
Lindsay: So you win a set 7 games to 6, or 6 games to 4, or 6 games to love, you know?
Amira: I always think about it, Shireen, as hearing “game set match” in that order. So game, that was the game, you win the points, set, took the set, and match, because it’s over, because you got the most sets. So that’s the order. Game set match.
Shireen: Okay. [bad British accent] Thanks love, that was brilliant.
Brenda: [laughs] I knew it was coming! The British accent! Before we wrap up this segment, I don’t think we should leave without a soccer question. Somebody hit me up.
Shireen: Brenda, why red cards? Why yellow cards? Why cards at all? It’s so formal. Were they inscribed with an invitation? Why a card? [Amira laughs] Why can you just be like, “Get off the field!” You know what I mean?
Lindsay: The invitation is to high tea. [laughing]
Brenda: It’s so patronizing and annoying. I actually love the fact that in soccer/football someone’s ejected and you play on without a substitute. So I actually love the red card as a concept, which is the player’s now ejected and the other team plays on. You can get a red card for a bunch of nebulous reasons, and that’s also hilarious about soccer, when people are like, “It’s not clear!” Of course it’s not clear. The rest of the world loves this drama, but people in the US are like, “This is subjective!” And you’re like, NO! Of course it is. You can get a red card from two yellows. So if you’re a little naughty twice you can get a red card, and that’s a little frustrating because sometimes yellow cards are giving for almost apparently nothing.
And so that can be really frustrating…Okay, so here’s the thing about that: red cards are fairly recent to the game of football. They actually were first introduced in 1966. They were made up by a guy named Ken Aston who…There’s an accent on the “ass” in this case. Ken Ass-ton, essentially, decided he lost control of a world cup match in 1962 between Chile and Italy. It was the last world cup match that he ever reffed. And then he got on FIFA’s council and the story goes that he was at a stoplight, and this inspired him to think of green, yellow, red. [laughs] Literally the most childish thing I’ve ever heard for a game that was already a hundred years old and really interesting. And then to explain it to his wife – because apparently this was the most paternalistic man I’ve ever heard of – he had to…And I could just imagine his wife being like, “I really don’t need this.” He got construction paper–
Shireen: [gasps] Oh my gosh.
Brenda: –and tried to imitate a traffic light, and then he was like, wait a minute, I can do this all the time. So he got construction paper and he cut out a red and yellow card and then he tried it out. It came into play about 1967 and ironically I think it was the Chilean Carlos Caszely who received the first world cup red card in 1974, but I’d have to check that. But yeah, it comes from Ken Ass-ton and it really is super patronizing when you sit down and you think about it, but I’m also really used to it. So…that’s it. [Amira laughs] Well, this has been very enlightening. Thank you for all of this knowledge, people. Now: Jessica interviews journalist Haley Shapley about her new book Strong Like Her.
Jessica: Hello flamethrowers, Jessica here. I’m joined today by journalist and author Haley Shapley. Haley has a new book out called Strong Like Her, a celebration of rule-breakers, history-makers, and unstoppable athletes. I really think the audience for Burn It All Down will be into this visually stunning and interesting history about female strength. Haley is here to talk to us about this book. Welcome to Burn It All Down, Haley.
Haley: Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to be here.
Jessica: I wanted to start with you personally – are you yourself an athlete?
Haley: Sure, I’ll say that. [laughs] Like, a lot of the women featured in my book are professional athletes and I’m certainly not on that level, but I’ve played sports pretty much my entire life from the time I was small and that’s what’s always been important to me, to have some aspect of exercise or fitness or movement in my life. So yeah, I think that’s a kind of athlete by that definition. But I’ve found in my adult life that I missed having those organized sports or having those goals that I had when I was growing up related to athletics. I started doing something where I would set a different goal approximately every year and I’d work towards that. So one of the things I did was run a marathon even though I hadn’t even run a half marathon up until that point.
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Haley: I trained for that, I also rode in a bicycle ride called the STP which stands for Seattle to Portland, and that was 206 miles. So double century bike ride, and I trained for a bodybuilding show, which was sort of when I got the idea for this book because I was noticing a lot of things about strong women, making a lot of cultural observations that gave me the idea that there was something here to explore. I kind of choose something different to tackle and I’m not sure exactly what it’ll be next, but I kind of CrossFit as my base level of physical fitness for right now and then whenever I choose what I wanna do next I’ll sort of at least have my conditioning to go into it.
Jessica: That is fascinating. So tell us a little bit about Strong Like Her, what is your elevator pitch to people about what this book is about?
Haley: Yeah, so Strong Like Her is a cultural history and it takes a deep dive into the world of women and physical strength specifically. It starts in ancient Greece and it goes all the way through present day making a lot of interesting stops along the way, including on the pedestrian tracks of the 1870s and the circus rings of the early 1900s, the sands of Muscle Beach in Santa Monica in the 1930s, the marathon courses that were not particularly welcoming to women of the 60s, the weight rooms that were heavily dominated by men in the 70s, and then up through today on the soccer fields and gymnasiums where women are showing just how powerful they really are.
Jessica: Part of what is so wonderful about this book, and it’s so hard to get this across with audio but I just wanna be really clear about this, are these beautiful photographs by Sophy Holland in your book. They’re portraits of athletes. How did you end up deciding to do something so photograph- or image-heavy? Why did you end up choosing that format for this to go alongside this cultural history that you’ve written?
Haley: That idea actually came from my editor. When she was interested in the proposal for the book she set up a call and asked how I would feel about having photos to go with it, and I said that I would feel amazing about that, that would be great! It can be hard to get a photo budget for a book.
Jessica: [laughs] Yes, incredibly hard!
Haley: Especially a book like this that is a full-length narrative. She had that vision from the beginning, and I loved that. Then we kind of worked together to identify the right photographer and Sophy Holland, who you mentioned, ended up being the perfect choice. Her photos…She’s really experienced with shooting movement, and the photos really each tell a story about the athlete that just complements the information that is the story about the athletes so well. And her work is very beautiful. So yeah, we brought her on board and she understood the vision right away. It’s always exciting when somebody understands what’s kind of in your head and can translate that in their medium of choice. So it was a dream collaborating with her. It was challenging, it was kind of like putting a puzzle together. I started with a very long list of sports or athletic endeavors that I really wanted to portray and it was important to me to have some underrepresented sports in there, for instance like strongwomen. I think that’s an amazing sport and a lot of those athletes aren’t know outside of the strongwomen world, so I really wanted the strength sports to be represented along with, as you mentioned, some of these other complementary things like fencing and ice swimming and other sports that we don’t think about as much. And then you’ll see a basketball player and some more traditional sports that people grew up playing. So I have this long list, and then I had a list of people within each of these disciplines, and I just started contacting them and seeing what I could schedule. At first I didn’t have anything to give them at that time, I only had my idea and the promise that this book was going to be a thing one day. I just was hoping that people would buy into this idea of celebrating women and physical strength, and I was very fortunate to get the collection of 23 women that we feature in the book.
Jessica: That’s so cool. So, the subtitle is, “A celebration of rule-breakers, history-makers and unstoppable athletes.” I’m struck by and I really enjoy that you have what I consider an expansive definition of athlete. There are ballet dancers, someone that’s a “flexibility enthusiast,” an ice swimmer, there’s a martial artist included – these are people that you’ve photographed for the book. How did you land on your definition of athlete that you use in this book?
Haley: Well I think there isn’t only one way to be strong or one way to be an athlete. One of the ideas I talk about in the book is this concept of being ladylike and how women were so constrained by that. So I’m all for definitions that are more expansive and more inclusive. One of the definitions of “ladylike” is actually “lacking in strength, force, or virility.” So when people who ascribe to this line of thinking are presented with a woman who is obviously strong they either denigrate her accomplishments or denigrate her womanhood and we see that with someone like Serena Williams who is so obviously a talented athlete, that people go after the way she hits the ball, calling it “manly,” or the tennis dresses she wears, or whatever, in some sort of effort to discredit her ladyhood. So back to your question of this idea of what is an athlete, I just wanted to be…I don’t wanna have such a constraining definition of it. I think it can be a lot of different things.
Jessica: I would like to also hear a little bit more about your writing and the book, I thought it would be fun if you could tell is about 2 or 3 of the athletes. I know you wrote about so many, but 2 or 3 athletes you wrote about in the book, what kind of stories are readers gonna read about when they pick up Strong Like Her?
Haley: Yeah, there are a ton of different stories. There are stories about athletes both historical and modern day, as we’ve been talking about, these 23 portraits each come with a bio of the athletes. So I think historically one of the interesting athletes that people might not be familiar with is named Ada Anderson, and she a pedestrian in the 1870s and 1880s. Pedestrianism is a sport that we don't talk a lot about today but back in the day it was America’s first spectator sport. What it involved was walking a really long distance, and this could either take place from Point A to Point B, so from Chicago to New York City, or it could take place around a track. Sometimes these walkers would be head to head against someone, or sometimes they would be alone just trying to get to a particular goal. So Ada was one of the best, and she had a kind of come up in the UK through the ranks there and had accomplished all of these amazing feats there and wanted to break into the US pedestrianism market. But when she came over here she had a goal of walking 2700 quarter miles in 2700 quarter hours, which is about 685 miles, I think, in the span of about a little under a month. What is remarkable about this is when she finished walking the quarter mile within 15 minutes, which is not a difficult thing to do, she had the rest of that 15 minute walk to rest or eat or whatever, but that was it for almost a month. So every time she slept it was in those little chunks, just a few minutes at a time.
Jessica: …Wow.
Haley: That took an incredible amount of training. You definitely have to be a polyphasic sleeper to be able to succeed at this sport–
Jessica: Oh my gosh.
Haley: –which is when you can get your rest in little small chunks, as opposed to bigger stretches like most of us need.
Jessica: Wow. Yeah, I would fail miserably at that. [laughs]
Haley: Oh, it sounds awful, right?
Jessica: It does sound awful!
Haley: Think about the shoes back then too, they were not what we have today. And so the blisters that she got were horrible.
Jessica: Was she wearing a dress?
Haley: Yeah, she usually was, but she actually…Yeah, she was wearing a dress but sometimes she showed her knees, which she was known for.
Jessica: Oh. Oh my.
Haley: It was quite scandalous. And I like her, she had a lot of spunk and she didn’t care–
Jessica: Did she do it? Did she do the month-long thing?
Haley: You’re gonna have to read the book to find out!
Jessica: Ahh, that’s a good one! Good one, Haley. Okay. Alright.
Haley: [laughs] So then yeah, she really wasn’t afraid of breaking those cultural norms, so I enjoyed her. I also interviewed Kathrine Switzer for the book, kind of fast forwarding a little bit in history–
Jessica: Oh! Nice.
Haley: –to the 1960s and 70s. For those who don’t know, Kathrine was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with numbers on her, as an official participant. There’s a series of iconic photos of the race director there trying to pull her off the course, and she finished anyway. It was kind of a traumatic experience, she didn’t realize that it was going to cause this much controversy. But Kathrine really took on a role of getting distance running to be accepted for women. At the time, the amateur athletic union only allowed women to run an official race distance of 1.5 miles, so…And this is in the late 1960s, which is wild. She was on the front lines of promoting running among women and then eventually getting the marathon distance added to the Olympics for women, which happened in 1984. What’s cool is that she continues today to promote access to athletes around the world. She has a foundation and works to kind of connect women through running. So I really enjoyed speaking with her, and she’s someone who's accomplished so much, so it was really a honor to have a chance to chat with her.
Jessica: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, if you haven’t seen the pictures you should go see them, you probably have. Didn’t she have…Her boyfriend was running with her and he, like, bodychecks the guy? The race director?
Haley: Exactly, yeah. He was a hammer thrower, so he was a big guy.
Jessica: He was a big dude. Yeah, good for him.
Haley: Then she was afraid while she was running that he had really hurt this race director because when you get slammed by a 235-pound guy bad things could happen! So there were a lot of conflicting emotions running through that whole situation but the fact that she turned it into a positive force is, I think, and example that we can all learn from.
Jessica: Yeah, that’s great. What do you hope that readers take away from your book?
Haley: I hope that it gets people to think about strength in a different way. It’s not just a luxury for people that have time to go to the gym, but it’s really a fundamental right. I hope they learn something new about the connections between physical strength and the other aspects of our lives, which is something I go into in the book, how it affects our wellbeing from a holistic perspective. And I hope they learn something about the female trailblazers who’ve come before us, because this was just kind of a little snippet of the fascinating stories that they have.
Jessica: That’s great. Where can our listeners find your book?
Haley: It is available wherever books are sold. Right now is a great time to buy from an indie bookstore, and many of them are offering free shipping, they’re still shipping from their warehouses, so I recommend people buy from their favorite indie bookshop.
Jessica: Perfect. Where on the internet can our listeners find you?
Haley: I am at haleyshapley.com and I’m on Instagram @haleyshapley and Twitter at the same. If you go on my Instagram you can see some of the outtakes from the photoshoots we did.
Jessica: Oh, cool.
Haley: We had so many beautiful photos that there’s an extra photo of each athlete, and I’ll also be posting some behind the scenes shots from the photoshoots, kind of just a little extra bonus material there for you.
Jessica: Oh, that’s great. Thank you again, Haley, for being on Burn It All Down.
Haley: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.
Jessica: Alright everyone, go get Strong Like Her.
Brenda: Now it’s time for everybody’s favorite segment, the burn pile, where we take all the things that have happened around, not in sports right now, and throw them on a giant metaphorical incinerator and just let them burn. Shireen, do you wanna start?
Shireen: Oh, yes. So I’m mad this week at a former Montreal Canadiens player, because he’s horrible, and we know that I don’t have loyalty to teams when their people are garbage. Brandon Prust is no exception. Brandon Prust, I’m burning him metaphorically for being a ragey racist mansplainer, being a misogynistic troll on Twitter. What happened was there is a very formidable and really interesting, brilliant person on Twitter, and her name is Kelly Wickham Hurst, and she had a tweet and it was retweeted by Judd Apatow – lots of followers Judd Apatow has, clearly. So now what ended up happening was her tweet was basically calling out white folks for being racist, so what Brandon Prust decides to do is go at her. Brandon Prust, just so you know who he is, he’s retweets Barstool all the time, that’s kind of where he gets his information from, to let you know the level of debauchery he follows as news. So what ended up happening is Kelly blocked him, but then he literally went to another platform to find her. He went to Instagram, he went to other places just to try to message her because he was so angry she wouldn’t reply.
Now, this story gets even more ridiculous. Friend of the show Jashvina Shah, who we’ve had on before, she tweeted at him as well, and he literally replies to her – this is something I’m never going to recover from – he replies to her and he goes, “She was racist.” He accused Kelly Wickham Hurst of being racist. Now, you wanna clap at this man and say, “Reverse racism doesn’t exist!” But he still thinks it does and, in his defense when Jashvina was bantering…Not bantering, she was literally going at him, he says, “Well, I watched Hidden Figures and I cry every time.” So this is a man who thinks that because he watched Hidden Figures…I just want Janelle Monáe to go at him, is really what I want. Like, can you imagine, this man thinking that because he watched Hidden Figures he’s an ally to Black people? He’s horrible. [Lindsay laughing] I will never recover from that. It was the most ridiculous exchange I’ve ever seen. So thank you on the one hand, Brandon Prust, for being so pathetically racist that you made me laugh, it was a very difficult week. But secondly, you’re terrible, and because you watch movies…You don’t deserve Octavia Spencer. Keep Hidden Figures out of your mouth. Also, reverse racism is not a thing. Also, my gosh, I just…Ugh. I’m so upset that he talked about Hidden Figures. I’m also very angry he thinks reverse racism is a thing. Unlearn your shit, because you are shit. Just wanna put him in the burn pile.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Lindsay.
Lindsay: Yeah, well, speaking of bad men saying dumb things…which is the alternative title to every burn pile I feel like! [laughing] Subhead…
Shireen: Yeah. [laughs]
Lindsay: Adam Schefter, ESPN’s NFL reporter…It is the night of the NFL draft, this is last Thursday, and Schefter, once again, who reports on the NFL on ESPN, which is gonna be very important in a moment, tweets: “For the first time in what feels like forever, a real live sporting event.” Now, some of you might know that just six days prior on the very network that Adam Schefter works for, that cuts his paycheck, the WNBA draft was held! On the exact same network – you didn’t even have to switch channels! [laughs] Produced by a lot of the same people that were producing the NFL draft! So obviously there were people pointing this out to him, that there had actually been a live sporting event, if that’s what we consider any draft, you know, just a few days ago. He decided to “apologize” but his tweet said, “My apooigies” – so, he forgot the ‘l’ in apologies, and I just have to give a shoutout to friend Kurtis Zimmerman who said, “This is what I will be referring to all shitty apologies as from now on, apooigies.” [laughing]
So his tweet said, “My apooigies to anyone who was offended, was caught up in the moment of the NFL draft and forgot about the WNBA draft from last Friday night. Sorry.” That is not a good…That’s not even a good apooigy. [Shireen laughing] That is shit, literal shit, because what you’re saying is, “I was caught up so much in this thing that matters to me that I forgot that women’s sports exist and count as professional sports.” You know, the reason this is so frustrating is because it’s emblematic of the way a lot of people feel. Adam Schefter has a huge platform and people like Adam Schefter treating the WNBA with even the most basic of respect could go a long way, and instead he decides to completely forget its existence. It’s disrespectful to the network he works for, it’s disrespectful to his colleagues, and it’s disrespectful to women as a whole. I do not accept his apooigy, and I would like to burn that shit. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: Yeah, so speaking of the draft, the draft was very much an opportunity for ESPN to kind of double down on what they love to do during drafts anyways, which is tell stories that fit ideas about poor, broken Black players who are saved by football or overcame all of this tragedy to make it to football. That’s not to say people didn’t overcome a lot, that is certainly true – Yetur Metos from Penn State just got drafted, he has a lot of tragedy that he overcame, but that is not all of the story for a lot of people, especially when you have four bullet points to say anything about their background in the process of drafting them. It’s like when the Olympics try to do these little video packages, but if they were half-assed and completely without context.
This is how we get to my burn. When Tee Higgins was drafted, Clemson wide receiver, as he was being drafted to the Eagles they threw up a graphic. Four points. Home town: Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Finalist for Mr. Basketball in Tennessee, got offers to play basketball from 3 schools. His sister played basketball for Middle Tennessee state. The fourth thing that was super important for them to include on this graphic: “Mom, Camilla, fought drug addiction for 16 years.” Like, have some damn sense. It’s very clear to me…There’s an interview he did earlier this year where he talks about how inspirational it was watching his mom overcome her addiction – she’s been clean for a while now, 12 years clean. He credits her with why he plays football and how she kept on insisting on him staying focused on football and how he wants to help her live her best life, and is excited to do that by the resources he’s getting at the next level.
I understand how that feels like one of these packaged stories you want to tell, but the problem is you actually have to commit to fucking telling it and not, devoid of context in a 2-minute clip, a 2-minute moment, put up a graphic about his mother’s drug addiction! And the most important context of that was A) the inspiration, but B) that she’s been clean for 12 years! So you don’t put up a fucking graphic that says, oh, she’s battled this addiction for 16 years. It’s disgusting, but it’s completely typical. My favorite meme that came out of the draft was that meme of people throwing off their headsets and grimacing, and it’s like, “When ESPN producers find out that somebody grew up in a loving home with two parents,” right? Because it almost feels at this point like they’re fishing around for inspiration porn.
And it’s just ridiculous, because that doesn’t actually make you quality TV, it doesn’t actually give depth to your program to be able to offer these packages. I know that you’re trying to follow this model that NBC put out, I know that you’re trying to do thing and trying to fill time. But this is also what happens when you stretch out a draft for so long. When you compare that with the fact that the WNBA was squeezed and condensed so you barely got any stories at all, and then you see that with more time for the NFL draft, what do they decide to do with their more time? Put up shitty ass graphics like this to try to continue to pathologize Black players coming into the league. It’s on brand, and that brand is disgusting. Burn it down.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Speaking of bad brands…
Amira: You like how I teed that up for you? [laughs]
Brenda: Thank you! My burn off this week is someone else who was drafted now, the Patriot’s new kicker, Justin Rohrwasser.
Amira: I don’t want him. Throw him back.
Brenda: Yeah, you don’t want him, Amira!? I wonder why!
Lindsay: Is this the one the dog picked, when Belichick’s dog was just sitting there? [laughing]
Amira: If only we could blame the dog for this pick.
Lindsay: I tried.
Brenda: It’s a real head-scratcher. So almost right away after the draft, it was pointed out that Rohrwasser has a tattoo on his left arm that is a symbol for the Three Percenters. The Three Percenters, for those of you that are lucky enough not to know, is a very far right militia group. The Three Percenters have been identified as an anti-government organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, so it’s not just like a sort of guess. When asked about it, Rohrwasser said, “I got that tattoo when I was a teenager and I have a lot of family in the military.” So, dumb fuck, the Three Percenters are an anti-government militia group that would fight the military! [Shireen giggles] Okay? So, you’re dumb and you’re racist…
Amira: And you know exactly what it fucking means.
Brenda: Of course, of course!
Amira: Like, don’t…That’s bullshit.
Brenda: And the worst is when the media calls it “controversial” – it’s not controversial! [Lindsay laughing] It’s a racist hate group! IT’S A RACIST HATE GROUP. That’s not controversial! That’s terrifying. It’s terrifying. And you permanently put it on your body! Not because you didn’t know…Of course you knew! And I don’t like that he says “when I was a teenager.” It’s like…That was like two years ago, okay? So whatever, that’s recent! And then on top of it, this is just a last thing and it makes me so angry, he says, “It will be covered.” It will be covered, okay. Take it off. Take it off! There are these things called tattoo removals, and now that you’re gonna make a lot of money, if you were really sorry you would stop evading the fact that you did something that racist and hateful shit, and then on top of it you would get it off your body, young man! I mean, Jesus…
Amira: It’s not gonna happen! He literally just gave a lecture about Jordan Peterson, he’s like, “I can’t wait to do this more.” He’s the most…He worships Ayn Rand. I just really feel for the Black people in that locker room.
Lindsay: And he’s a kicker!
Amira: I really hope they fuck him up, sorry.
Brenda: Me too. All I could think of was like, the season can’t start fast enough to put him out! Please, don’t let anybody forget this. I know that’s terrible to say, but there is this part of me that’s just like, ugh…So, I wanna burn this real bad. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: After all that burning it’s time to celebrate our badass women of the week. I would like to note that we are recording on April 26th, which is Lesbian Visibility Day. We’d like to shout out all you that have inspired us and that we love and that make sport a better place.
Honorable mentions go to Niele Ivey, who was named head coach of Notre Dame and has already landed her first high profile recruit, Olivia Miles, who is the #2 ranked recruit in the class of 2021.
The first woman NFL executive to announce an NFL draft pick, Dawn Aponte.
Susie Maxwell Berning, one of six women to capture the US women’s open at least three times, was elected to the World Gold Hall of Fame.
Basketball player, the WNBA Mystic’s Natasha Cloud, when Twitter trolls and a silly journalist said that the WNBA as a pro sport is not in the same league, and then she challenged him to come and play her. [Shireen laughs]
Canadian figure skater, Joannie Rochette, who won the bronze medal in Vancouver in 2010, just days after her mother died from a heart attack, has received her medical degree from McGill University and will start working on the front lines of COVID-19, and she has requested to work with geriatric patients in long-term care centers.
Now, can I have a drumroll please? A really big one, because we have two!
[drumroll]
Our badass women of the week go to both Ann Muffet McGraw and Sana Mir! Muffet McGraw, the Notre Dame coach who served as the head of their women’s basketball program from 1987 to 2020, had compiled a 905-272 record. Wow! And we say goodbye to the career of Pakistani cricket legend Sana Mir. A 15-year international career, she announced her retirement. We are super excited to see what’s next for both of these women, so congratulations.
In very dark times, we like to focus a little bit on what’s good in our worlds. Linz?
Lindsay: So, I know I’m not the only one who wants to talk about this. [laughter] But…I actually have not been watching many of these Instagram live streams, I usually, like, when I’m not working I want to be completely zoned out from everything. But last night I decided it was Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird interviewing Diana Taurasi on their Instagram live show, I decided to watch it. And then I watched four hours of it. And Penny Taylor joined, and it was the most phenomenal, joyous, entertaining four hours of quarantine I’ve had. I felt rejuvenated and…I’m a little tired. Thank god Penny finally ended it. Megan got so drunk that someone on Live said she was talking in cursive, which is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It was very true, she totally could not hang. She went and…She got hiccups, which was really embarrassing, and then she passed out with still an hour to go, and it was finally Penny who was like, “We have a child that is gonna wake up at 5:30 in the morning, we have to stop this.” And I think we were all a little bit glad for Penny, because I think it would’ve gone…Sue and Diana were like, oh, what!?
Amira: But it was so funny because even when Penny said that, both D and Sue were like, does that mean I have to say bye? I don’t understand, are we saying bye? Penny has to be explicitly like, YES, GOODNIGHT.
Lindsay: Yeah. You had the feeling that was not the first time Penny has done that. But it was joyous, it was very gay, and loving–
Amira: Speaking about lesbian visibility!
Lindsay: There were plenty of hot takes and, yes, as Amira pointed out it's the lesbian day of visibility, and what a way to kick it off.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: Yeah, my favorite part…I think that I said on the show when I started watching their IG series A Touch More, what really roped me in was Sue telling the story about her and Megan’s first trip together to Hawaii where they vacationed with Penny and Diana Taurasi, and she tells the story of how that’s where they learned that Megan can’t drink with UConn players and could not hold her own. She told this story over and over again where she said, “She’s just little, guys! She’s just little!” And so by hour 3-ish of this IG live where it was very clear that Megan was slurring and could not hang, and Sue was completely chill still. They were like, “Oh god, it’s like Hawaii all over again!” [laughter]
Lindsay: It was so good. It was ridiculous!
Amira: It was so funny. Also, just the range of the chat. They went from talking about playing overseas to going deep on political stuff, like diagnosing what’s wrong with Democrats. My favorite part was Diana Taurasi’s “What’s wrong with Democrats!? They’re just little bitches! They’re punks!” It was glorious. And then they evaluated this year’s draft class. Sue Bird said Chennedy Carter would be the best player that came out of this, they shouted out Satou, it was really great. They talked about shoes…It was just so wide-ranging. They said multiple times this is what they do at restaurants, they would shut down restaurants, and I literally…I kid you not, to have happiness in my life maybe two days ago was doing the thing where I’m like, “I wanna see people interact!” and I literally, like…Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, because I love when they do interviews together, it’s magical to watch a friendship that has evolved over so many years. I just looked up…I could never have imagined this would be as glorious as it was. They both talked about what it was gonna be like to transition out of basketball and how much they A) hate that question, but Diana Taurasi was like, “I want to own a team.” Like, fuck this, I don’t want to be a coach! I wanna own it! I encourage you all to watch it, it’ll be up on Sue’s IG for 24 hours if you want to watch 4 hours live. But what else is there? So yeah, that’s totally my what’s good. Oh, and Outer Banks on Netflix, because.
Brenda: Okay, now I feel bad for sleeping last night, but sleeping is also what’s good. I’ve been sleeping like crap, so I’m really grateful the last couple of nights have been okay. I know this sounds really weird because I have real problems with Hope Solo, but somehow her having twins made me really happy.
Lindsay: I want Hope to have happiness, that’s fine.
Brenda: Yeah. I don’t know, her little cute baby pictures…Anyway, also I think I’m getting a cat.
Shireen: What! What!?
Brenda: Yeah, I was approved for cat adoption, which I can’t tell you how proud of myself I was that my references came through. I know those of you that don’t know me might not understand this but I might not have been a shoo-in. [laughter] But it turns out I passed, so really excited. Now I’m looking a lot at cat pictures as every middle-aged divorcee cliche is, but I’m into it. I’m embracing it. My kids are always good, they’ve been doing a lot of karaoke, which means they’re sort of mining 80s music and I’m loving that, because they also like to dress up and do it, so all the eye makeup of Scandal and Warriors and stuff like that.
Shireen: Oh, wow.
Brenda: So it’s very theatrical and fun. Shireen, what's good for you?
Shireen: Well, Ramadan has started and it’s been really fun. It’s been a rough week in terms of what happened in Nova Scotia, that was really rough. There was a beautiful concert online and a tribute, and online vigil I guess you could say, but the way that maritimers share their grief is through music, so it was really beautiful. Natalie MacMaster, if any of you are familiar with the east coast you know who Natalie MacMaster is, she actually found a video of one of the victims who was playing this tune on her fiddle and she played that clip and played along with her. It was probably one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever seen in a tribute. So that was incredible. Just shoutout to everybody out there, just trying to make it through the week – forget the week, make it day by day. On that note, the community that I’m a part of called Rabata which is like a Muslim women’s organization that really seeks to amplify Muslim women’s scholarship, they’re doing online iftars, which is really fun to be part of that community. It’s been really great. There’s a woman named Angelica Lindsey-Ali, and I’m taking a class with her every Saturday in the month of Ramadan. She’s a scholar as well, she’s a Black Muslim woman and she’s so smart, she’s a sexual health educator. She calls herself the Orgasm Oracle, and I’m like, that enough is making me take your class! She’s fantastic, I suggest people check her out.
Last but not least, Jessica did tweet about this – I came really late to the Schitt’s Creek party which is embarrassing for me because I think Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara are prophets of Canadian comedy, they’re hilarious. I have been loving this show, I have cried pretty much every episode, it is one of the most beautiful things, so beautifully done. There’s small jokes in there, references to Canada, but it’s so heartwarming and loving about small community and benefits of that and acceptance and love and so many things. I’m on season 6 now and I’m literally texting the BIAD group going, oh my goodness, this has happened, this has happened! I don’t wanna spoil it but when Patrick and David went on the hike I didn’t realize what was happening and then I realized what was happening, and I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I was like, oh my goodness! So I’m trying to balance my worship for Ramadan while binge watching Schitt’s Creek. I love all of it, all of it.
Brenda: Whew. So that’s it for this week in Burn It All Down. Though we’re done for now, remember you can always quarantine with our fabulous array of merchandise including mugs, pillows, tees, hoodies, and bags. What better way to crush toxic patriarchy in sport and sports media than by getting something with our enraged faces on it. You can check it out at teespring.com/stores/burn-it-all-down. Burn It All Down lives on Soundcloud but can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. We really really do appreciate your reviews and feedback. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You can find previous episodes, links and transcripts, and a link to our Patreon which I would like to not forget to thank profusely all of our patrons for their generous support and remind new listeners about the Patreon campaign. You can pledge a certain amount and you get extra rewards content, as Shireen says, vee-logs, and other things. We’re so grateful for your support. I’m Brenda Elsey, on behalf of all of my cohosts: burn on, not out.