Episode 176: Fairness in Sports
This week, Brenda, Lindsay, and Jessica talk about fairness in sports, including (but not limited to) doping, coaching in tennis, cheating, salary caps, flopping, amateurism, Maradona's Hand of God, and Lance Armstrong's career. [3:24] And, as always, the Burn Pile [31:52], Torchbearers, starring Meghan Duggan [39:42], and what is good in our worlds [41:13].
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.
Links
Why UT’s Administration Is Digging in Its Heels on ‘The Eyes of Texas’ https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-eyes-of-texas-song-ut-football
Me too: los archivos secretos del fútbol femenino en Chile: https://www.ciperchile.cl/2020/10/11/me-too-los-archivos-secretos-del-futbol-femenino-en-chile
Former University of Utah officer who showed off explicit photos of Lauren McCluskey won’t face charges: https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2020/10/15/former-university-utah
Lakers' Jeanie Buss becomes first female controlling owner to win championship: https://sports.yahoo.com/lakers-championship-jeanie-buss-first-woman-to-win-controlling-owner-190251187
U.S. women’s hockey captain Meghan Duggan announces retirement: https://www.sportsnet.ca/article/u-s-womens-hockey-captain-meghan-duggan-announces-retirement
Transcript
Brenda: Hey flamethrowers, how are you? It’s Brenda here, and I get to drive the bus this week, joined by Jessica and Lindsay. On this week’s show we’re gonna be talking about what’s fair. They say all’s fair in love and war, but what about the intense desire to police the boundaries of fairness in sport?
Jessica: Anytime you start poking at this at all it becomes way more arbitrary, like, what counts as doping? Who decides that? For what reason? And who gets punished, which is a huge one, right?
Brenda: Before we get to our show this week I wanna ask my co-hosts: what is getting you through this shit? What kind of distraction in these dark times are you finding solace in? Lindsay.
Lindsay: As usual it is my reality TV. Married At First Sight has become my new obsession. I love Amelia Bennett…And if you would like to talk with me about them, please do reach out! My DMs are open. Also, The Bachelorette has restarted, so, you know what? Life isn’t all bad.
Jessica: The season that it all blows up.
Lindsay: Yep.
Jessica: I don’t know anything about it except I’ve seen a lot of commercials for The Bachelorette.
Lindsay: I’m very excited to see it blow up!
Jessica: Yeah.
Brenda: Jessica, what about you?
Jessica: [laughs] In my family I’m famous for this, I really enjoy watching Jane Austin adaptations whenever I’m stressed or sad or anything like that, so I recently watched the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility which has the best scene at the end – anyone who’s seen it knows what I mean. Then my very controversial take here is that Kiera Knightley’s Pride & Prejudice is the best one, and I have watched that one so much in my life that everyone in my family knows when to not talk to me based on what scene is on the screen. So, I’m still doing that a lot.
Brenda: I have finally taken the bold move of paying for the New York Times crossword puzzle on my phone, and the spelling bee, and the mini. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad but my brain just stops to think about that stuff, and it’s kind of wonderful. I’d like to introduce the relationship between sports and our bigger ideas of fairness and justice. We imagine – and I’m saying ‘we’ as fans and players and spectators and even passing people – we think about sports as a place where things might be more fair than in other aspects of life, and we talk so much on this show about how unfair sports can be. But I still think there’s something undeniable about the fact that someone like Simone Biles for example can’t just be marginalized in sports, or at least not very easily, because there are measurables, there are spectators, expectations, and because people who understand and love the excellence, they just aren’t gonna be denied that type of talent. So I wanna think about what’s fair, what keeps us watching and talking about sports and how it becomes a metaphor for larger issues in life. I don’t think that it’s surprising or accidental that we talk about things like fair ball or fair game, that we use sports metaphors when we’re talking about other things. So I wanna open up with a general question to my co-hosts: what are kind of issues or cases of fairness that have fascinated you in your sports life? Jessica.
Jessica: Yeah, well, everyone knows I live in Austin, Texas, and it’s the home of Lance Armstrong, so I went on that entire journey – which was really a journey, like, we as a city had to deal with that. In the book that I just wrote, Loving Sports, I set up the doping chapter around something like 40,000 people going downtown to celebrate his sixth tour victory. We had all the stuff named after him, then as a city we had to figure out what to do with him once all that stuff came out, so that was a huge one. Then of course tennis is my favorite, and the 2004 US Open is super famous. In the quarterfinals Jennifer Capriati beat Serena Williams but they end up apologizing to Serena because of how many mistakes, errors were made, that essentially cost her that. It’s the reason that tennis now has Hawk-Eye, like, Serena getting all these terrible calls is the reason that this technology exists within the sport. So, I remember that very clearly as a moment of what is ‘fair’ here.
Brenda: And how do you rectify something like that? Once the unfairness is done, the injustice has occurred, it becomes a whole other conversation, you know? What do you do with all the people that competed against Lance Armstrong? How do you…
Jessica: Well, they were all doping too! [Brenda laughing] So, that’s part…
Brenda: Fair enough.
Jessica: Honestly, most of them were doping. So that’s part of the discussion, like, did he have to dope in order for it to be fair? That’s its own unwinding spool of thought, right, how you get through that.
Brenda: Linz?
Lindsay: Staying on the tennis stage, one of the things is always the on-court vs off-court coaching debate in tennis. In no other sports do we see athletes as weak because the coach has to call a time out and actually do their job and coach during games, but somehow in tennis it’s this really frowned upon thing for players to get any sort of direction or advisement during the match. It’s seen as like it takes away the purity of the sport for some people. Of course there was a famous, you know, with Serena and Patrick Mouratoglou, her coach, giving her signals – that she wasn’t even asking for! You know, while he was in the stands during her match, and then Serena being penalized for that. Of course the WTA does allow during most of their tour events on-court coaching and allow that to be mic’d up, but that’s not allowed at the slams, and a lot of people don’t like it because they think it makes the women look weak compared to the men. I think it’s entertaining though! [laughs] I just don’t see coaching as this horrific impurity, but the debate rages on.
Brenda: For me what’s always been the kind of seminal moment of thinking about fairness is Diego Maradona’s Hand of God, which occurred in a soccer match between England and Argentina. When Diego Maradona cheats in the quarterfinals in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico he punches a goal in that counts and advances Argentina. Maradona said after the match that the goal was scored with a little bit of his head and a little bit of the hand of God. So, it infuriates me on many levels, and my feelings about Maradona are not secret. However, England had just waged a very unfair war against Argentina and historically taken advantage of them economically at every turn in the 20th century, and had themselves dubiously won the 1966 World Cup because of notorious ref calls against Brazil and the rest of the South American sides. So, “fair,” I mean…On some level if there’s a big picture of fairness…It’s gross to see it, it’s gross to see the way he could just lie and he knows that he did it and he just seamlessly is just like, “This is great,” you know? You’re watching it and you’re just like, ugh…But at the same time, is it fair that England advanced? Erghh…I’m just not sure.
I wanna kind of think of some of the categories of fairness and cheating, and I wanna start with something that fascinates us here at Burn It All Down: doping. Our resident inquisitor on this issue, Jessica, how do you think about doping and fairness?
Jessica: Yeah, well, I used to think about it in a super righteous way that you either doped or you didn’t and it’s clear and you are either guilty or not, you’re cheating or not. One of the things over the last few years that you guys have had to contend with is the fact that I have learned that anytime you start poking at this at all it becomes way more arbitrary, like, what counts as doping? Who decides that? For what reason? And who gets punished, which is a huge one, right? We see it used against people in many ways that are bad. But the one that really sticks with me, and sort of how even as fans we have really particular ways in which we think about doping…I think about BALCO, which is the famous steroids case out of the Bay Area and, for me, I always think of baseball. Those are baseball players who got in trouble, but when doing research for the book I learned that there were a ton of football players who were also doping. That’s in the news, like, it’s not as if it was unreported, but what we picked up as a culture and cared about were the baseball players, because it is all tied to our idea of purity and the game; baseball has all this shit tied to it. In football we’re just kind of into the brutality so we have a different way that we measure which one is bad and which one is good, even though they’re both doing the same thing. So that was really clear to me, that this wasn’t just what people are ingesting and what they’re using, it’s the context in which that's happening.
Brenda: Yeah, and I think there’s something about expecting football players to aspire to a certain size.
Jessica: Absolutely.
Brenda: And when you see changes with the body, like Barry Bonds…So, the ideal body for each sport certainly plays into that, we know it’s racialized.
Jessica: Absolutely.
Brenda: So, Linz?
Lindsay: I mean, I always think about the Sharapova case which to me was one of the most interesting…You know, she took this drug called meldonium, which had been legal for about a decade while she was taking it. Then it was banned at the end of 2015 in tennis. She didn’t kind of open the necessary attachment that told people about the new updated drug bans in tennis, and so she didn’t know and she took it at the Australian Open, and she tested positive because she wasn’t trying to hide it. She thought it was still legal. Of course she ended up being suspended for two years, and when she came back, you know, she was already on the decline. Her shoulder was held together, literally, by tape, by the end of her career.
But it was always an interesting case because I think meldonium did help athletes and it was taken a lot in Russia, and it also was prescribed for heart conditions, and it also had been legal for 10 years. So something being okay to take one day and then literally illegal and worthy of a ban the next day is really also fascinating to me. Like, where do we draw that line? It was literally the switchover from 2015 to 2016 in the tennis world, so, just how things can change and how really when it comes to things like doping, intention is pretty irrelevant. There are people who will always see Maria Sharapova now as a doper, they think of her entire decade using meldonium as using a performance enhancing drug, and there are some people that see her as a victim of the system. I think it ultimately comes down to however you saw Maria Sharapova before, it's just exacerbated by this.
Brenda: And so much of this is about having an advantage, that the idea is that there should be this fair playing field, everybody should start at the same point, and so this reaction, the bitterness, the anger, also comes from advantages, and there’s a question about cheating, straight up. So, to transition from doping to individual cheating and individual style, I mean, what is an advantage when it comes to parts of the game that have just been developed, collectively, to have an advantage? Linz, what about flopping?
Lindsay: [laughs] This is my favorite because, you know, there are these rules, we have referees and rules on contact and everything, and of course soccer and basketball…We mostly talk about it in soccer, but also in basketball as well, and a little bit in American football, in the NFL, you know? Players learn to exploit rules to their advantage, and there are a lot of them that are very open about it. Megan Rapinoe is very open about the fact that she is the expert flopper, you know? It’s like, is that a character flaw? Or is that just her being smart? [laughs] And learning how to use the rules to her advantage? I come down somewhere in the middle. I think it depends on the situation, for what I think. But players learn to draw contact, learn to get whistles from refs, learn to play the game in a way that will draw the most attention. I don’t know if anyone saw in the WNBA this year there was a big play where I think it was Courtney Vandersloot called for a foul against Diana Taurasi, and you looked at it…It literally looks like a wind, you know a gust of wind has just blown over Diana Taurasi, like she just threw herself back and ended up getting three free throw points. But I always think that’s fascinating, and fans get very heated about flopping and about drawing contact and about all of these things, and I don’t have a really strong opinion about it. I think if the rules exist, if you can trick it, then why not? That’s part of the game too.
Brenda: Yeah. It’s part of a repertoire. A lot of people are sort of like, you know, “Leo Messi, wow, he’s so much better than Suarez because he doesn’t flop around and he doesn’t draw contact in the same way,” and you think about it and you’re like, that is simply because his game and his center of gravity would be thrown off if he tried to do that. [Lindsay laughs] This is not, like, a moral reflection. He’s not sitting there and thinking, you know, “I would draw contact right here but you know what? I love the spirit of moral, gentleman’s soccer. So, you know what? I’m gonna just plow through.” It’s like, no, it would be absolutely antithetical to his style of play. There are players that have put that in their repertoire, right? And that is what they do. So I find that whole conversation fascinating, and having an advantage as a team often results in huge debates about fairness and some of those include, like, illegal scouting, recruiting, you know? That idea that the whole team does something to try to get an advantage over another team – you know, deflating balls and whatnot. So it’s not always the player but it could be the entire organization. What about those cheats, Linz?
Lindsay: This is another thing where the lines that we draw can sometimes be so arbitrary, and we might talk a minute about drafts and stuff. What if you were drafted to a team, you have the same talent as another player but you’re drafted to a team that uses every single possible thing it can to its advantage, you know? It has more resources and you end up having more career success because of that. I mean, recruiting is sketchy, scouting can be sketchy. But also I don’t know how you don’t do it. Sports are so competitive, there’s so much on the line that within rules that are set I think you should kind of exploit any advantage that you have. I wish Amira was here, the whole Patriots stuff – illegally filming the practices of other teams when you’re not supposed to be in there, like, that gets a little bit of…I think we’re crossing some lines there. But I don’t know. For me, why would you not want to work as hard as you can to get every advantage you possibly could? Is that cheating, or is that just being smart?
Brenda: Yeah, is it doing your job if you’re a coach to kind of press up against those boundaries?
Lindsay: Right.
Brenda: I mean, Marcelo Bielsa held an entire press conference when he was caught in the Premier League sort of looking at other teams and having people there filming, he had a whole press conference with a breakdown of why it was wrong what he did and how he was sorry. But what you learned is that everybody’s doing it, but then you go like one inch more, and it’s too far. And it was too far. So it’s kind of fascinating. Then you have issues of how do you make leagues competitive through fairness? So, salary caps and drafting itself, there’s a way in which these teams are already trying to game the game. How are you gonna make things more fair? It used to be that salary caps were part of it, but in global soccer the response has been let’s then make an individual contract that is so tough that this person can’t leave. So I don’t know how fair that is for players at the end of the day as well. I mean, you both work more on the US side – NWSL, WNBA salary caps and drafts – are they sort of meant to level that playing field as a league and make it more competitive?
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where obviously I’m incredibly pro-labor but hearing people…Since becoming more in this world I hear so many people talk about drafts and salary caps as being anti-labor, and those are the ones that I have the hardest time really grasping as being completely anti-labor and I think it’s because I just grew up with them being existing, like, the sports I watched the most have salary caps and have drafts and that’s kind of, you know…How you’re raised matters and everything. I do understand, like, if you want parity, part of that makes sense to me, that the top players would get to go to some of the teams that are struggling the most, and that should help turn it around. Of course it doesn’t always work like that in practice, and that can be incredibly unfair to players because a lot of times these teams are really poor because of institutional failure. So you have some of the best talent and players who have maximized their potential in this way now get stuck in an organization or a franchise that doesn’t know where it’s going or what it’s doing, and there’s not always that magical turnaround. Sometimes you’re just kind of stuck in sports purgatory.
Also salary caps, I mean, I think you have a little bit of the same thing. On the one hand I love going through the numbers, I love trying to figure out how different teams and how these different puzzle pieces are gonna fit, but I understand ultimately you’re probably hurting the top top top players because their pay is probably getting arbitrarily capped in order to make room for the rest of their team, but at the same time, they need teammates, right? [laughs] To play! You know, we say these are star-driven leagues, like…I know Roger Federer would always say in tennis, like, yeah, you might say everyone’s paying their ticket to go see Roger Federer so more money should go to him but at the end of the day he doesn’t exist if there’s not this huge tour around him, so he has to subsidize that in some way in order to be who he is.
Jessica: It’s so interesting to think about that sports are artificial, we make them up and that part of what the artificial does is allow you to create structures that are more fair, right? To make sure things are more fair in the way that Lindsay was just talking about, but then I also think…It makes me think about the way that in college sports one of the arguments around maintaining amateurism as a model is that it’s “fair,” that if we open it back up and we start paying players that then the schools that have more money will just pay more money for most of the good players and they’ll all just be grouped into one place and that will somehow make the playing field un-level. But you can already tell that it’s not! It’s such an artificial argument, but they’ve created this entire argument to keep it in place, right? Which is all about money and power and all that stuff.
But we already know what the powerhouses are in college football, within college basketball. Players are already going there for a whole host of reasons – some of them might be money, but we’re not allowed to talk about that – but all these other things that are in place, the money is still there, it just is going into paying coaches who can get them into the NFL, it’s paying for these giant locker rooms, for all of these amenities, for all those sorts of things. So it’s not as if these things are already level, but that’s the argument, right? That that is the emotional argument for keeping amateurism, that we have to maintain this idea of fairness that’s lost when money is introduced. But as Lindsay was just talking about, on the professional level there’s already all these artificial things that are in place to try to keep things fair. It’s so interesting, the way that that gets moved around. The goalposts are moving all the time, right?
Brenda: And they move so much when it has to do with race and with sports and the way in which we have players that are racialized and what's fair for them and what’s not fair for them, and that brings me to the subject of unwritten rules. I just can’t help…I mean, it’s not only Tatís and the recent admonishment and punishment of him for his home run when they were already winning by so much, but the whole subject of bat-tossing, mercy rules, ways in which you're supposed to tiptoe around the idea that things have to be kept a certain amount of fair, that you can’t win by too much because it somehow offends the sensibility and that is so often used in baseball to especially, I think, punish both Black players and Latinx players. It’s so often racialized language about “showboating” – and we know that’s a racist term that’s steeped in these sorts of performances and trying to reign them in because they can only be so good because if it’s a national pastime it must be somehow preserved by white people, particularly white men.
So, I think those unwritten rules have just been…And they still come out, and it feels so antiquated and 19th century. But people are still out there making 21 year olds apologize for being good at their job. This just brings it back, and I think just to wrap up a little bit on this, there’s also just determining fairness as a playing field in general, and it makes me think of global sports as well, in regions…And the way in which, for example, African teams can’t get past the quarterfinals of World Cups even when they’re supplying all the talent for the professional leagues in Europe! It shows you there that conditions matter and what's available. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, and I think a lot about the way that fairness or cheating, that the way that those things get defined, it often operates to exclude marginalized groups. I’ll just say, I feel like the most obvious examples – Caster Semenya, non-binary…Anyone who doesn’t fit the perfect binary of sport – really get punished. It’s easy to punish them, right? Because then we're able to tap into…Again, I think it's a real emotional word, this idea of fairness, and when they don’t fit these things we’re able to say, well, it's “unfair.” Which is so, just…What does that even mean? But it’s then easy to apply it in ways that are racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic and all these sorts of things, and people will just kind of nod along, like, “Ugh, it’s not fair. Of course we have to do this.” And we really have to take those moments and unpack them and really be clear about what's actually happening there.
Brenda: So, just rapid-fire I just wanna ask you both: what are the aspects…With technology, so much is changing in terms of judging, cheating, fairness, etc – what do you love and hate about this moment of fairness in your sport? Jessica.
Jessica: Yeah, I love Hawk-Eye in tennis. I understand that it's not the most perfect thing, but I think it’s really great and I also think it’s great as a fan. It’s fun to watch it as you see where the ball actually landed. But it does make it feel fair, to me. So that’s mine.
Brenda: Okay. My least popular opinion is that I like VAR. I hate red cards, I find it infantilizing and silly that you need to flop up a red card or a yellow card, you could just be like, “You're out.” That said, I'd probably miss the fanfare and the spectacle of the ref puling out the card in some dramatic fashion and all the players running up and arguing. Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah, I think it’s funny we’re all bringing up technology because that’s where sports are, where how much technology can be used, because these rules were not created with technology in mind. But I love challenges, I love coaches’ challenges, I love having a limited amount of them so that kind of adds a game within the game, you know? A lot of people think they should be unlimited but I do think there should be kind of a cap on or maybe a time limit for how reviews should last, especially within basketball games – they can get very very very boring and dragged on. But I like using technology to as much advantage as possible, but I also think it’s important to keep in mind that this is entertainment, that we do want a lot of this to fit within TV windows, and we do wanna keep things moving, so kind of use the rules to balance those two and make using technology an advantage but also a little bit more of gameplay. I think that is fun and adds another level of excitement to the game.
Brenda: A reminder that we are now coming to you twice a week at Burn It All Down because interviews will be standalone and drop on Thursdays. Our amazing guests just really needed more space – and speaking of amazing guests, this week Jessica talks with Latria Graham about being Black, loving the outdoors, and racism she’s experienced because of it. They talk about Graham’s favorite place to visit outside and the response she’s gotten to writing about her experiences so publicly, as well as some of the organizations that are connecting and helping explorers of color.
Latria Graham: I very much was not really embarrassed by this but hesitant about this, for my face to take up a whole page in a magazine! [laughs] Because I’m this slightly shy, reclusive writer. I’m just kind of like, “Noooo!” But it mattered to people to see my big nose, my thick lips and cornrows, you know? All that stuff, standing in this field. I realized that my body and the imagery that goes around these things that I had to say matters.
Brenda: And now it’s time for everybody’s favorite segment: the burn pile. We’re gonna take everything we have hated in sports this week and form a giant garbage incinerator. Jessica?
Jessica: So, last week I burned the fact that the governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, said fans could pack stadiums again, which was followed almost immediately by the head coach at the University of Florida’s football team, Dan Mullen, saying he wanted 90,000 fans in the stands this weekend when the school was supposed to host LSU. Well, the game against LSU didn’t happen and has been postponed until December. Do you wanna guess why? You are correct – there was a massive outbreak on the team this week, and by Wednesday the game had been delayed. Yesterday, Saturday [October 17th] we found out that Mullen himself has COVID. What a totally predictable set of events. Onto this week’s burn…Earlier this summer in mid-June the football players at the University of Texas – where I am a student and currently pay tuition – demanded changes from the university, and they threatened to no longer participate in recruiting unless those changed happened. They wanted money donated to organizations that are working toward racial justice, renaming a part of the stadium for the first Black man to play for the team, Julius Whittier; renaming buildings that were named in honor of white supremacists; and they wanted the school to stop using the song The Eyes of Texas as its school song.
In short, ‘The Eyes of Texas’ is a phrase that William Prather, the university president at the turn of the 19th and into the 20th century, paraphrased from ‘the eyes of the south are upon you,’ which was Robert E Lee’s favorite saying when he was president of Washington College in Virginia where Prather went to law school. Then when the phrase was made into a song, crafted by two students, it debuted in 1803 at an annual campus minstrel show. Its entire creation is racist. In July the president of the university – my university – announced some changes like renaming the field after Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams – two Longhorns, the only two Longhorns to ever win the Heisman, both Black men. Whittier’s gonna get a statue and some buildings are gonna be renamed, but The Eyes of Texas will remain. Earlier this month the president told everyone he was of course creating a committee to example the racist history of the song. My dude, just read an article.
This has all bubbled up recently because the team has not been staying on the field to stand with their hands up in the traditional Longhorns symbol at the end of the games. But last weekend they lost in 4-overtime near comeback against their arch rivals, the Sooners, at the Cotton Bowl – which has its own racist name there, but whatever. One single Longhorn, the quarterback Sam Ehlinger, he stayed on the field for the song. The pictures circulated after the game; the coach, Tom Herman, he told the media he respects that the players don't wanna stay on the field. But then days later the athletic director Chris Del Conte sent out his weekly email to fans in which he wrote, “I have had many conversations with our head coaches outlining my expectations that our teams show appreciation for our University, fans, and supporters by standing together as a unified group for ‘The Eyes,’ while we work through this issue.”
Are the players part of Del Conte’s imagined university, and is working through the issues just attending a committee meeting? The Eyes of Texas is a song swimming in racism and I believe that a lot of people probably didn't know this before the players drew attention to it this summer, though this is not the first time that this has been addressed publicly. But let’s just give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I’m feeling good today. Let’s just say they didn’t know. But they know now. We all now know about the song’s roots, and you can’t claim ignorance about it anymore, and yet these white men in charge have shown that they just don’t care that this song is racist and Black students are uncomfortable with the school’s continued embrace of it. They know now and they don’t care. It’s terrible, it’s bullshit, I wanna burn it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: A new investigative report on the state of women’s football in Chile was released this week by CIPER – and appreciation due to the three authors, students of journalism. It details really harrowing cases. They begin with four kinesiologists at a top-tier club that sexually abused dozens of players. A former coach of the women’s national team who was dismissed for abuse is now working at the under-16 section of a top flight club. A former coach of Copa Libertadores Femenina sexually harassed minors. The national professional league in Chile which is called the ANFP has been sitting on this for years and the women’s union, Anjuff, a really brave organization, has been fighting so hard to have some structural response to this, some real governance. In July they met with the ministers of sport, labor and gender equity – I know because I was there – and demanded that there was some sort of investigation into this. Basically nothing has been done. And I know that Chile is not the center of world sports but they have done so much to spark Latin American women’s football. We saw it in the 2019 World Cup, they’ve been examples and models of feminism. The ANFP need to be disciplined by CONMEBOL, by FIFA, and by the Chilean government. Most of all these women need our solidarity and I wanna burn the fact that absolutely nothing has been done to help the women who are suffering under these predators and to discipline the organization that lets it go on. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Lindsay.
Lindsay: Yeah, this is a big one. A trigger warning to survivors of domestic abuse; this might be triggering. I don’t know how many of you remember the Lauren McCluskey case. Lauren McCluskey was a track star at the University of Utah who warned police officers six times in the ten days before she died about concerns about an ex-boyfriend and her safety. None of that mattered because he murdered her in 2018. Well, a recent investigation – I have to give a shoutout to Courtney Tanner of the Salt Lake City Tribune, whose work and investigation into this has been phenomenal. But days before McCluskey was killed a University of Utah police officer, one who was supposed to be investigating her and keeping her safe, instead was showing off explicit photos that McCluskey had taken of herself to at least three of his male coworkers.
One staffer recalled that this officer, Miguel Deras, commented specifically about getting to look at these photos whenever he wanted. Utah, the state, did a report that confirmed the Tribune’s original reporting, and those findings were released earlier this year. However, this week the Salt Lake County district attorney, Sam Gill, said that that officer will not face criminal charges for showing off those explicit photos. He believes that the officer’s actions were reckless but said, “There is no Utah law for addressing this type of police misconduct. We realized there was no real statute we could use for this case. We’re incensed like everyone else by the behavior. It was inappropriate. But if there’s not a statute, there’s nothing we can do.” There was a chance that maybe they could use revenge porn law in Utah, however that statute requires proof that the person in the image was harmed; McCluskey, however, is dead, so that is impossible, and members of the person’s family being hurt, McCluskey’s parents, doesn’t count. So I want to burn all of that shit directly into the ground.
All: Burn.
Brenda: After all that burning and terribleness, let’s switch gears a little bit to celebrate some of the good things happening in sports that are being done by some real champions. So for this week’s fire lord, who is it, Jessica?
Jessica: The Los Angeles Lakers, under Jeanie Buss, are the first female-controlled ownership to win an NBA championship.
Brenda: And I get the sparklers of the week. After nearly a year of inactivity and dissolution of their league the Colombian women’s professional league will resume play starting next week in the Dimayor league. This has come only as a result of persistent media campaigns, political lobbying and tremendous solidarity. Check out our interview with Vanessa Córdoba to talk about how the Colombian women have tackled this. Can I get a drumroll?
[drumroll]
Lindsay, who is the torchbearer of this week?
Lindsay: Yes, USA Hockey’s Meghan Duggan retired after 14 years with the national team. That included 7 world championships, 3 Olympic medals – 2 silvers and 1 historic gold. She’s also one of the leaders of the fight for equity in hockey. We’re really excited to see what comes next for Meghan.
Brenda: And in dark times what's good in our worlds is even more important than ever. So, what have we got that’s good for you? Linz.
Lindsay: We’re going real basic here, real simple, but some of you know I’m still in Greensboro, North Carolina, from DC. I only brought like one bag of clothes from DC to Greensboro and I’m now going on nearly a month here, so I treated myself to some brand new oversized flannel yesterday, and it is so warm and cosy and big and I love it so much and I might just wear it everyday. I also have to say, we did our fireside chat with our patrons on Friday night and that was incredible. So thank you all who were able to join us. If you wanna become our patrons so you can participate in that stuff, patreon.com/burnitalldown. But we’re just so so grateful for all of you and seeing some of your faces and getting to hear your voices really made my entire week.
Brenda: For me it is Fare Network’s Football People Weeks. It is a small grant program and all around the world there are some amazing activities going on, even in the face of COVID. There are, for example, football tournaments that are happening with people with disabilities in Peru, in Trujillo, trying to get people moving and connected in a safe way, and I admire all of them. It’s been beautiful to see. And Burn It All Down is also participating in the Football People Weeks conference that’s coming this week, so check it out, and we’ll have a thread about it. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, so, I voted this week. [Lindsay and Brenda cheer] I was very excited. Not only do I live in a state that is famous for its voter suppression, so it always kind of feels like a radical act to be able to cast your vote, but the county that I live in, they announced this week that they registered 97% of the people who were eligible to vote this year, so that just feels like I’m part of something. That feels good. We’ll see, but that was a nice feeling. Then this week I made another spoon cake, I feel like that's an important update. I have made some scones and last night I made some brownies. Maybe that’s what I should have said at the top of the show. [laughter] I’m just really…Baked goods are getting me through.
Brenda: Baking and Jane Austen. I feel like they so often go togehter.
Jessica: Yes.
Brenda: It’s really like a regular part of survival.
Lindsay: We’re all cliches and I’m here for it. I’m here for it.
Brenda: And those good things are also helping us get though what is a kind of lull in some of the sports action, but we are gonna be watching the World Series and also sadly I will be tuning in for Barcelona vs Madrid in men's football because I haven’t yet finished therapy. Also, the UEFA women’s tournament is going on, so that’s pretty cool. That's it for the episode of Burn It All Down. On behalf of all of us here, especially more in October: burn on and not out.
This episode was produced by the wizard, Martin Kessler, and Shelby Weldon the extraordinaire does our website and social media. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher – anyplace where you get your podcasts. We’re also on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, we’re on Twitter @burnitdownpod. Check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com for previous episodes, transcripts and links to show notes. From there you can email us directly or go shopping at our Teespring store, and it has links to our Patreon. As always we wanna give a huge shoutout and emotive feelings towards our patrons. It is only because of you that we can keep going. Ever, evergreen thank you.