Episode 190: Cheating, Lying, Stealing: Corruption in Sports
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “corruption” in government and in sports. And with mega events like the Olympics and the World Cup coming up, the problem is here to stay. So this week, Amira, Jessica, and Brenda delve into corruption in sports. They ask why corruption is so rarely reported on, and they explain how you can’t fully understand racism and sexism in sports without following the money. You’ll also hear this week’s Burn Pile and meet our latest Torchbearers, featuring a remembrance of Henry Aaron. And you’ll learn what’s good in their lives.
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
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Links
U.S. Says FIFA Officials Were Bribed to Award World Cups to Russia and Qatar: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/sports/soccer/qatar-and-russia-bribery-world-cup-fifa
Corruption in sport initiative: https://www.transparency.org/en/news/sport-integrity
A'ja Wilson says unveiling of statue at South Carolina on MLK Day shows 'how you just plant seeds' for change: https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/30738990/aja-wilson-says-unveiling-statue-south-carolina-mlk-day
Mónica Vergara named head coach of Mexico women’s national team: https://equalizersoccer.com/2021/01/20/monica-vergara-named-head-coach-of-mexico-womens-national-team
He Had a Hammer: Henry Aaron Presente https://www.thenation.com/article/society/hank-aaron-obituary-politics
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Amira, and I’m leading the ship today, along with Jessica and Brenda. We will be diving into corruption in sports, in light of what seems like endless corruption in mega sporting events, upcoming and recently passed. We will dive into questions around corruption in sports – why it lingers, and what can be done about it, and really even what it is in the first place.
Jessica: Part of why it’s not sexy is because it’s labor issues, and as we’ve talked endlessly on this podcast, that’s an unsexy topic. People don’t really know how to respond to it. They don’t get up in arms in the ways that we wish they would.
Amira: In addition to that, of course, we’ll be burning some things and highlighting some torchbearers of the week, and of course we will tell you what’s good. But before we dive into that, I have to know, y’all…We are now living under a new administration, [Jessica and Brenda cheering] which means we had an inauguration, despite the odds. [laughter] I have to ask…One of the things that came out of inauguration were the memes, the TikToks, all the things. What was your favorite inauguration social media response?
Jessica: Well, I loved the Bernie meme, which I feel like I should explain because I found out this morning that Aaron had never seen it! [laughter]
Amira: I love the rock he lives under.
Jessica: I know. For people who don’t live on the internet like we do, before the inauguration ceremony began Bernie Sanders was sitting…He had his famous coat on, his big parka coat, he’s sitting with his arms crossed in this folding chair…Were his legs crossed? And he had these mittens on, he’s got his mask on his face, and he just looks like he doesn’t really wanna be there, [laughs] which I feel like everyone relates to on some level – we’ve all been at an event where we’re just getting through. But it was against a white concrete background, so it was easy to photoshop it, right? So, it was everywhere. I can’t over-emphasize how it was everywhere, and I loved all of them. I was that person. I just enjoyed the meme in general.
So, my favorite thing was someone eventually was smart enough to make a video, a gif, of the famous scene of I Love Lucy where she’s in the chocolate factory and she's trying to pull the chocolates off the conveyor belt, it’s some of the best physical comedy ever in the world, and it gets too fast and she’s shoveling some of them in her mouth and she doesn’t know what to do with them all, and someone replaced all the chocolate with Bernie Sanders sitting in this chair. [laughs] It’s just the smartest commentary on how this meme went everywhere, and it just made me very happy.
Amira: Literally everywhere, from that picture of all the men on the New York high rise in black and white–
Jessica: Oh, I didn’t even see that one! [laughs]
Amira: Somebody tweeted it and said, “Y’all play too much get Bernie down from there!” [laughter]
Jessica: Did you see Janet Jackson’s?
Amira: Yes! Where he’s covering Janet’s nipples?
Jessica: Yes!
Amira: Then of course he was added to the iconic photo of Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe courtside at a game. So yeah, I’m actually kind of disappointed in flamethrowers that nobody has sent us a meme adding Bernie to our live shows…
Jessica: That’s true!
Amira: I was listening! I was like, uh, hello! Where's it at? Where's it at?
Jessica: Yeah, there’s that great picture of the five of us that Michael took, we could just slip Bernie right in there. Someone get on that!
Photographer: Michael Davis
Amira: Exactly! Alright, Brenda, what was yours?
Brenda: Mine was Rihanna’s tweet with the garbage bags. [laughs]
Amira: Ugh, so good.
Brenda: And her sweatshirt that says, “End racism by any means necessary.” Then she’s got, I don't know, some underwear, some tights, you know? Her regular work outfit. [laughter] Some great pink heels and she’s just taking out these nasty garbage bags. She just tweeted out, “I’m just here to help. #wediditJoe” So, I don’t know. That made me smile, it made me laugh. I pictured Donald Trump in one of those garbage bags. [laughs]
Amira: Somebody edited it so that one of her gorgeous little heels was on the neck of Trump as she was walking to the garbage.
Brenda: Yeah!
Jessica: Nice.
Brenda: I mean, she’s just so perfect. So, it was great to picture him in the garbage bags. It made me happy.
Amira: Yeah. Put it in the Louvre. Gorgeous. Mine was… [laughs] I don’t even know who did it, I wish I could give proper credit. This guy did voiceovers of the interactions, like, made voices for what the conversations were about, which I found so funny because they felt like they really fit, and a lot of them were about the size of Lady Gaga’s bird. At one point you just see Nancy Pelosi leaving and the voiceover saying, “Bringing fucking birds to the inauguration! Did they pat the bird down for a gun?” [laughs] So, I think that that voiceover clip was by far my favorite.
So, confirming what many have known and talked about for the last few years, US officials officially say that FIFA officials were bribed to award World Cups to Russia and Qatar. This was first reported in April; it was updated in October, and it's still ongoing. I was thinking about this story because I was hearing the word corruption a lot in the last few weeks: corruption in sports, corruption in government, corruption, corruption, corruption. I had offline conversations with Brenda trying to figure out and wrap my head around corruption in sport away just from the word. What is it really?
So what we’re going to do today is dive into corruption. We’re gonna try to define it, we’re gonna try to parse it out, we’re gonna get to some murky grey areas, and then we’re gonna ultimately think about how the language around corruption can actually erase the opportunity for accountability and reform. So, to start, Brenda, I wanna ask you and Jessica…When we talk about corruption in sports, what are we really talking about? There’s three big things that are considered “corruption.” What is the first one, Bren?
Brenda: Hosting is usually seen as the most obvious, and recently the most amount of money changing hands. So, in terms of the contracts alone for Qatar it’s upwards of $800 million that have been not changed hands, have been slushed out between private and public firms to construct stadiums and private security forces and all of these other sorts of things that they have to hire. As part of that it usually involves things like using state regulations or city regulations – because the World Cup for example is always a country, and the IOC is a city and the Olympics take place there – in order to find ways to milk more money out of local governments, and usually to suspend things like any workers rights that might be in place, and unionization.So, we know about the deaths of the workers already in Qatar, that they tend to be migrants often from places like Nepal with very little rights in Qatar.
So, the hosting is a big deal. The matches themselves are not most of the revenue, it’s actually television and broadcasting rights, and that becomes sold third party to third party to third party so that it’s almost impossible to keep up with. You can’t even follow that kind of money, and that’s where you see starting in the 1970s really that being a major source of corruption.
Amira: Yeah, I can see even in your explanation of it how so much is done out of the watching eyes, because even listening to you talk about it I was like, there’s so many places within that explanation for this corruption to kind of root down and happen. Then, Jessica, what is kind of one of the other main places we see corruption – which I know is one of your favorite topics.
Jessica: I know. This is like my hat that I put on all the time here. Doping! We have such an obvious clear example of how this works, thank you Russia. We’ve talked about this on the show before but for the Sochi 2014 Olympics there was a team assembled by Russia’s Sports Ministry, so we're talking an actual thing within the government, to tamper with tons of urine samples to conceal evidence of top athletes’ steroid use throughout the course of that competition. They did it in the dark of night, it was this really kind of madcap scheme. It’s almost amazing how they managed it!
But WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, found that between 2011 and 2015 the Russian Ministry of Sport erased a minimum of 312 positive doping tests. The nation’s deputy prime minister was Russia’s top sports official during those games and was directly implicated by Grigory Rodchenkov, the lab’s director and main whistleblower. All the Russians winning medals at Sochi had a direct impact on Putin’s approval ratings, like, you can just see how this is all tied in to the nation state and there’s no other word for it, right, than corruption.
Amira: Yeah, absolutely. Then the third kind of facet of corruption in sports, I’ll shoot it back to you, Bren.
Brenda: Match-fixing. Match-fixing is really interesting because it also depends on the sport in how easy or difficult it is to match fix, right? So, for example in China right now the reason match-fixing is so prevalent is because of betting, and the ways in which gambling works. That’s the same in Italy in the 1970s, 80s, 90s – and with direct ties to the state because, look, Berlusconi, who would go on to be their longtime right wing prime minister in the 2000s, owned Milan AC. He also owned the main television station. So it’s all connected. But match-fixing depends on the sport. I mean, football’s kind of easy. Why? You have handball. A handball, [snaps fingers] easy. And VAR is supposed to help that.
Jessica: You mean like it’s easy in that someone can easily touch the ball with their hand and change the course of the game? Is that what you mean?
Brenda: The ref can easily call it.
Jessica: Oh! Okay. I got you.
Brenda: Or used to be able to easily call it. It was like, “Oh, handball!” Boom, right?
Amira: Because it goes so fast?
Jessica: So that’s what VAR can now say, that wasn’t handball?
Brenda: Right.
Jessica: Got it, got it.
Brenda: Right. So, that’s supposed to help with match-fixing but in the domestic league level…[groans] How often is that gonna happen? It doesn’t happen obviously that much in women’s, but also there’s a great – great, terrible, whatever, fascinating – story out of South Africa about cricket match-fixing, which has to be wild because those matches go on for days, like, you could go and figure out match-fixing overnight and then come back with it.
Jessica: Ahh!
Brenda: So, depending on the sport that’s pretty interesting.
Amira: Yeah. No, and I think this is so interesting when you talk about sports-dependent, one of the things that I’ve been kind of watching the rise of is e-sports where we talk about the impact of the pandemic on sports and e-sports has really doubled in participation. They’re a little bit pandemic-proof because it’s virtual, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its shades of corruption. In fact, they’ve set up an integrity board, the E-Sports Integrity Commission, the ESIC, because they’re trying to head off early seeds of corruption within the industry. Now you’re thinking, well, we’ve just laid it out – hosting, match-fixing and doping – how does this apply to e-sports? Well, it's applying in very interesting ways.
First of all, hosting: e-sports takes place virtually across multiple domains and across multiple municipalities that are supposed to be directing this, so there’s a lot of fighting and opportunities to change A) what platforms are hosting: most of this is on Twitch, now it’s starting to be in different places, but who’s owning the virtual space, the digital space where this is taking place, and what benefits do they get has opened up this kind of, like Brenda talked about, all the possibilities for corruption within hosting sites, it's there as well.
Match-fixing in e-sports is probably the easiest thing to wrap your head around, it has to do with a lot of illegal bets, throwing the game. As you can see, Brenda just mentioned how handballs were easy to call because it's so fast and furious, now you can only imagine that with gaming! Like, how do you know if somebody is pressing the buttons to their full power, etc, etc. But then I was like, how is doping happening in the world of e-sports? Adderall is the answer.
Jessica: Yeah, you think about people's ability to stay awake and stay alert…All those kind of things.
Amira: Exactly. So it’s really interesting for me to see…We’ve talked about this of course with soccer, with global football, we’ve talked about corruption in baseball and things like that, but having our eyes on e-sports as a really emerging industry and seeing the ways that almost from the offset of them kind of having this gigantic rise is pairing right step for step with also the rise of these three different ways that corruption is also trying to come into the industry as well.
Jessica: That’s fascinating too, Amira, just to think they’re starting from basically scratch so we can see how these things are made in real time, or how it happens in real time.
Amira: Absolutely. I think the thing about e-sports that draws me to it is because there’s also been…So, if we have the sport itself emerging and corruption, the other thing we have emerging with e-sports is conversations around equity and access within them, around diversity of the e-sports governing board, around women's representation in the sport, and it had me thinking about all three of these things developing together overlapping, intersecting, intertwining. Brenda had brought this point up to us before, and I really wanna ask you, Bren, to kind of think through it now, which is what are the other ways that corruption is connected to these inequities? In ways that, like we just said, it’s not that e-sports is growing and then corruption is growing and then inequities are growing on these three separate pathways – they’re overlapping and intersecting. So, what happens if we parse that out?
Brenda: It’s always fascinated me, Amira, how the coverage of things like racial abuse and sexism in sport is completely and entirely separated from a conversation about corruption. I’ve said this to both of you: if I think about the case in point that’s most obvious to me, it’s Cristiano Ronaldo, the football player, soccer player, now for Juventus, who was a long time Real Madrid player. For me what’s fascinating about it is it’s not that Juventus is particularly sexist, it’s not that Italian football is particularly sexist, but it is particularly corrupt, and I think that that connection is actually more important than we ever talk about. Just for example…It just brings in, I mean, the word “intersectional,” you really can’t underline it enough in this case.
Think about it: you’ve got the Italian league, the dirtiest league in the world probably in the early 2000s, prime minister owning and not divesting himself of a particular club. I mean, that’s like a national thing. Right there, owns a club, the prime minister! Oh my god. Then you’ve got 2004-2005, Juventus wins the title; 2006 it turns out that they match-fixed with everybody, it’s all bribing, it’s all money going X, Y, Z. They have to return their title. The entire league between 2004-2006 is totally suspect at this very same moment. Then essentially nobody suffers, and the club Juventus is owned by Fiat, right? So, this becomes really important because Fiat runs Turin, it owns those police and it owns everything else.
You’ve got Cristiano Ronaldo, right? Just bear with me. 2018, they want Cristiano Ronaldo, the Italian league is sinking in importance. Juventus gets him. They’re in the middle of contract negotiations at Fiat with actual workers who make actual automobiles, and they decide to take the money from that contract and instead pay it to Cristiano Ronaldo. So, those workers start striking because their contract negotiations are stalled because they can't fucking believe that you would take their salaries, the basis of the entire thing…And now this club has lost untold amounts of money from bribing and match-fixing and having to give back, whatever. They’re just showing up for work every day, but noooo, that contract has to stop for Ronaldo.
Then he comes with all this baggage of a terrible rape case that he’s able to not even be served papers for as it comes up a second time because Juventus sends a motorcade to follow him everywhere he goes 24 hours a day and have the police in his pocket so he’s never ever ever able to be served papers until the Las Vegas attorney general just drops it. I just don’t know a better…So, thank you for going down that rabbit hole with me, but that for me is perfect. You won’t get justice, you won’t get accountability for the survivor in this case because Fiat’s corruption with Juventus.
Jessica: I think that’s so interesting because obviously we’ve followed this case and I understand that around Ronaldo’s sexual assault case out of Vegas, but you putting all those things together for me, Bren…This is literally the only place that I hear that story, that I see all of that together. Thinking as a journalist who does this work all the time I can see that that’s too complicated, that people can’t ingest that kind of…I don’t know, complication. My brain’s not working but just…That’s really hard to sell, that narrative, that story – which is unfair!
Brenda: Like, what's the lede!?
Jessica: Yeah!
Brenda: What’s even the lede? When we did this story with Jen Doyle we called it, “Rapacious capitalists and sexist pigs.”
Jessica: But that’s so interesting, because part of why it’s not sexy is because it’s labor issues, and as we’ve talked endlessly on this podcast, that’s an unsexy topic, people don’t really know how to respond to it, they don’t get up in arms in the ways that we wish that they would. Then you layer sexual assault onto it…I don’t know. I was listening to you and I was like, man, I wouldn’t even know how to sell this story, even though everything you said just made me so mad.
Amira: But isn’t that also pointing to one of the reasons why it’s so hard to actually address corruption?
Jessica: Yes!
Amira: Because out of everything, I think doping of course gets…Like, that’s the simple story. This person did this, right? Match-fixing is kind of like that as well, but especially when we get into hosting and we get into some of these ways that things intersect, you can see how it becomes much harder to follow and keep track of and why people just kind of give up.
Jessica: Yeah.
Amira: I think that brings us to this question of what to make of this scales of this, right? Like, when we consider corruption, is it the individual or the system? I’m thinking of Bridgerton fans, and when Will Mondrich throws the final boxing match [Jessica laughs] is he corrupt? Is boxing itself corrupt, you know? And I think about this especially when we talk about doping, where that can be an individual with an individual story that captures media attention, but what happens when we try to shift the scale and what does it mean? Jess.
Jessica: Yeah, this is so interesting because it makes me think a lot about BALCO, which is that San Francisco clinic or company or whatever that was selling performance-enhancing drugs, PEDs, to all kinds of professional athletes – baseball players, football players, track athletes, all kinds of people. It became very much…And I talked about this when I was writing the book, I went into learning about BALCO thinking, oh, this is a couple of baseball players. As soon as I actually started reading the journalism – which was incredible journalism! – around this, I was like, this is super complicated! And there’s so many people, and we only told a story about baseball because of the things we think about baseball and purity and blah blah blah blah blah. But this was actually an incredibly complicated story, and I don't know what to make of the fact that…I guess a question I do have for you Brenda, because you wrote about this corruption stuff way more than I ever have, I have to say.
Prepping for this really made me think about how I don't think about things as “corruption.” So, when I’m thinking about BALCO or doping in general, so much of what we do is tell stories of individual athletes, right? We can talk about Marion Jones or Alex Rodriguez or Lance Armstrong, right? So, are those people practicing corruption? Because I think BALCO…I feel like we could all be, “That’s obviously corruption! Russia’s obviously corruption…” But I don’t know what to make of these individuals. But I understand that we wanna tell that story. Like, now that we’re in this conversation I’m like, “That’s the easy story.”
Brenda: I mean, I don’t know how much sense it ever makes just at the individual level, but placing the individual within this sort of community of athletes. I think that almost always the person doping is going to be the person that’s most vulnerable, whether psychologically in terms of racism and kind of heightened expectations…You know, I think about Canseco, I think about these people that I find vulnerable in their own way to being corrupted.
Jessica: “Being corrupted” – yes! Right.
Brenda: And so I feel that they were corrupted, and yes, then a corrupting influence on baseball. But you have to all agree on the rules for things to be cheating, right?
Jessica: And so someone setting rules…
Brenda: So, someone setting rules, and I feel like it’s always important to remember that, what that purity of baseball – what was that supposed to mean for Alex Rodriguez as he’s getting shuttled back and forth from the Dominican Republic to the Bronx, and as he’s already sort of objectified…And I know, like, who’s gonna feel bad for him? But…
Amira: But then also disciplining the individual, it’s putting a bandaid on a gaping wound, right?
Brenda: Right, right.
Amira: So if you then pretend that you care about these rules that are quite arbitrary, right, and you decided that this one individual has worked against these rules and therefore an example needs to be made, and you throw the book at them or all of these things, but you’re just placing a bandaid, you’re not even addressing…And actually for the layperson, they can’t even see you’re actually shielding and completely moving that person into a spotlight that then shields and casts shadows on the rest of what’s happening that has even got us to that place in the first place.
Jessica: This is interesting to me because I think about match-fixing in tennis, which is a huge problem, but it really is only a problem in lower…Like, in doubles matches and with players who are ranked in the 200s. As a public we don't really care because it has nothing to do with Serena Williams or Andy Murray or a name that we all know, right? But it is all tied into how fucked up tennis is as a system, that the individuals that are participating are just trying to make money enough to travel to the next tournament. So, Andy Murray doesn’t need to fix a match because he doesn’t need that kind of money. But then other than tennis journalists who cover this, no one cares that this is a things that happens in the sport. We all just are kind of like, “Oh yeah, that’s a thing…”
Brenda: Well, they also need access. Whistleblowing is dangerous! I’m not gonna say that I didn’t get my 2015 nor 2019 Women’s World Cup credentials even with Sports Illustrated and the Guardian because they knew exactly what I was gonna write about, but let’s say it’s definitely a question that one has! And there’s a lot of people with similar stories.
Jessica: Yeah. Dan and I joke all the time that we’ll never be allowed to go to anything at Baylor ever again for the rest of our lives.
Brenda: Yeah, right? [laughter]
Jessica: Like, we’re on a list somewhere! We recognize that that was…And when we were publishing that story, we’ve talked about this, we took it to Texas Monthly because Dan had a connection there, but also it wasn’t a sports outlet and we were less worried that they would not publish it because of their access to the team which, at the time if everyone remembers, was slated to win the national championship. Like, it was a big deal, yeah. So, definitely access, but it’s interesting…This is just bringing up so much for me about how we tell these stories and how complicated this actually is: corruption, and putting it on the individual. But then when you get individuals like in tennis that no one cares about then it’s not a story at all.
Amira: I like the way you frame that, Jessica, about how we tell these stories, because I also really have a question about the language that we use around corruption and the language that people who are enacting corruption use themselves. I think about the NCAA a lot with this, and I think definitely especially now a lot of people are looking at the NCAA and being like, “Y’all are so corrupt!” But it becomes a blanket statement that kind of obscures in what ways is that actually working. At the same time that the NCAA is giving themselves the badge of arbitrators of what is actually corrupt, and they are doing all of these regulations to try to root out corruption, and this is why they can regulate how long you can talk on the phone with a recruiter or what your per diem is or if you can transfer, all of that because they're supposedly deputized to be the people who are watching the corruption and making sure the sport stays with integrity. But we know that that is just not what’s happening! If we take this even a step further, is that when we actually have documented proof of their own corruption, we don’t give a shit! Do we, Jess?
Jessica: No, we really don’t. I don’t if listeners will remember this, but we've talked about this a little on the show. But this jogged my memory that it was 2017-2019 that there was a huge corruption trial that the FBI was involved in around the idea that there was a scheme to bribe college basketball coaches so that their players would then sign with these agents afterwards. This is funny, when I was looking this up I read....This is the lede from a May 9th 2019 Andy Staples piece for SI: “The verdicts came down Wednesday in the second college basketball corruption trial in federal court in New York. Oh, you missed that? Don’t worry. Nearly everyone else did, too.” Like, no one cared! I think part of this is that the media knew that this was bullshit, right? [laughs] I don’t know what you do with any of that, like, I think a lot of people in the media were like, “This is a weird thing to call corruption when we know the whole thing is corrupt,” but then they keep reporting on it all the time as if it's normal.
Amira, you talking about the idea of the NCAA telling us what is corruption and what is not and sort of placing them there, ties me back to…I was thinking, as Brenda was unraveling the Fiat-Ronaldo-Juventus corruption stuff, it makes me think about the work that I do where I literally wrote a book about how sexual assault is very much tied into the overall exploitation and corruption within the NCAA, so it's like the collateral damage of it, right? But that’s a really complicated story to tell, and people always want more evidence, like, “I want more evidence of this thing that you’re telling me about.” And it’s like, well, I wrote a fucking book! I don’t know how else to…But I had to write a book! Like, it's so complicated and hard.
And so, it’s interesting that those kinds of things get sloughed to the side, and then there’s an actual corruption trial and nobody cares because they already know the NCAA is corrupt and they think this is garbage and…Oh, man. I don’t even know where to put all my thoughts.
Amira: Yeah, but that’s just it, right? When I was thinking about the language around corruption, even when I asked you guys to define it and Brenda and Jess, you were really great about breaking it down into hosting, match-fixing and doping, but I also think about how even understanding corruption through these three lenses obscures other things that I find very morally and ethically corrupt. I think about this a lot when I return to Jackie Robinson West, which was of course the meteoric rise of a little league baseball team out of Chicago that then had their 2014 little league world series title stripped because another team that they had beaten went on a scavenger hunt to find and prove that a few of the boys on the team lived outside the geographic jurisdiction of that team, and so it was stripped and it was all this stuff about fraud and they fraudulently were using birth certificates and they were skirting these rules that had been put in place, going back to the rules that Brenda said.
The whole time that I watched this entire thing unfold – that’s still by the way being litigated, the last time it was in court was just four months ago – but the whole time I was like, how is what’s corrupt this idea about ZIP codes and not the fact that redlining and segregated housing and stuff in Chicago is so segregated and the disparities are so vast, right? That to me, the housing politics of Chicago and the redlining in Chicago, that’s fucking corrupt! Don’t give me that bullshit about some damn 14 year old! But we don’t even get to have that conversation because everybody gets on a pedestal talking about the sanctity of a fucking little league game. I just…I don’t know. Bren?
Brenda: That’s a transnational thing with baseball too, because the Dominican Republic…And again, I hate to put myself in a situation where I’m defending A-Rod at any point, but this system in the Dominican Republic that is set up by the farm teams, by MLB, is exactly and precisely about exploiting youth players and diminishing their worth when they can find a birth certificate impropriety, and then the argument they have is “We want to protect children from child labor.” It’s like, the shoes on their feet are made by children! What even is that! You know? Your Nike contracts, for real? Okay…So, I just think the little league thing for me just triggered everything about Major League Baseball and its treatment of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in particular and their exploitation of looser labor laws, their exploitation of the whole idea of getting immigration into the US and what that means for these kids.
Amira: Absolutely. Now, I think as you can all see, that these are questions that we’re still wrestling with and I think that the way that Jessica framed it as what stories are we able to tell, and Brenda’s genius breakdown of so many of these issues points to the fact that maybe what we’ll try to do as we move forward is figure out ways to tell these stories and to have all these considerations and to start a conversation that hopefully is ongoing. I want to leave this section by, Bren, I’m gonna toss it to you to wrap it up. We’ve talked a lot about how it’s working…I don’t think any of us have all the answers, but I’m wondering if you could point to something that we could maybe chew on or keep our eye on moving forward. What does it look like to think about accountability in terms of this corruption that we’re seeing?
Brenda: So, there’s a lot written…There are whole NGOs that work on this, and I think they have great ideas and they should be written more about, things like that. But there’s a couple of easy things, and one is that every sports federation needs to be separated from its professional league. I’m looking at you, MLS! That’s the most obvious. They should not have the type of financial relationship where the US Soccer Federation is paying the salaries within the NWSL. No, I don’t want them to take their salaries away, so don’t get me wrong. But they need to have some independence from one another, in my opinion.
Then I mean, just think about hosting – the fact that each nation gets one vote is preposterous, you know? They need rights and responsibilities, otherwise you have $5 million going to Trinidad and Tobago to vote for a World Cup that they will never ever have any hope of participating in. What does that mean? It means why do they care – they have no vested interest in that. Jack Warner’s just gonna do that. So, it exploits the vulnerabilities of the smaller nations instead of getting them that power that it supposedly has. Instead it makes it easy. There should be representative democracy…I guess it’s kind of like the US Senate for me.
Amira: [laughs] There you have it. Alright, on Thursday of this week Jessica’s going to talk with JayCee Cooper, a trans woman who’s suing USA Powerlifting over their blanket ban on trans lifters. They chat about JayCee’s love of lifting, why they’re suing, and the support she has gotten from the powerlifting community.
JayCee Cooper: The feeling of just like the stress and restriction and pushing against that and really being in your own body and encapsulating that power and pushing against something that really wants to get you down…It’s much like being a trans person in our society, and for trans people it even takes on more meaning because you’re intentionally being in your body and physically doing an activity that requires strength, requires power. It requires this ownership of the activity that you’re doing.
Amira: That is, again, dropping on Thursday. Please check it out. Alright y’all, it’s time for everyone’s favorite segment: the burn pile. Brenda, I’m gonna let you light the first match.
Brenda: My burn – and this is really strange – is also one of my what’s good for this week. [laughter] On the cover of GQ the Chelsea soccer player Christian Pulisic is…I don’t even know how to describe it! It’s so weird and beefcake-y and cheesy and 1970s and it makes me so uncomfortable, but go check it out if you haven’t. But the headline on it says, “America finally has a global soccer star.” I think it’s a really quick and obvious burn. Hi, Megan Rapinoe! Hi, Abby Wambach! What do you mean? There’s lots of global soccer stars that have happened. So, I just find it fucking annoying and lazy, and on top of it people keep just knowing nothing about soccer but wanting to be sure that we all say how exciting it is before 2026.
So, one of the things they say, and I’ll just read you a little quote from the article: “His determination to stay upright is a rare quality in soccer, a sport in which some of the greatest players—Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar—are vilified for their toddlerish histrionics, writhing in agony at the slightest contact.” Really, GQ writers? Are you sure? Yes, people make fun of Neymar but actually I’ve never heard Cristiano Ronaldo criticized for that point by a valid sportswriter. So, I mean, you’re just making it up at this point, and if you’re gonna make it up then I’m gonna put it on the burn pile for being sexist and stupid, but also hilarious because the photoshoot is so bad. So, please check it out, make yourself happy. It’s almost as good as the Bernie meme. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: I’ll go next, which is kind of a quick update burn, something that’s already kind of been simmering. Last week Jessica burned Urban Meyer’s hiring into the NFL and at the end mentioned that this also is especially annoying at a time when it seems impossible to hire a Black head coach in the NFL. This is just an update to say that we're seeing more and kind of remarkable mental gymnastics to avoid hiring Eric Bieniemy, for instance, or other qualified Black head coaches. The Texans have announced for instance that they want to interview former QB Josh McCown for the coaching position with the idea that they would surround him by people who’ve actually coached before and then hope that he’ll [laughs] work it out. The Eagles’ position was also filled by a fairly new junior coach, 39 year old Nick Sirianni, and 6/7 open vacant coaching positions have been filled – not a Black coach among them, although special shoutouts to the Jets for hiring the first Muslim coach in Robert Saleh.
But I just…In the last three coaching cycles there’s been 20 vacancies and two of them have gone to Black head coaches. The more and more you sit with this and grapple with it the more egregious it becomes, honestly. We know that the disparity between coaching and GMs in a league that’s 70% Black is atrocious, and this is just becoming…It’s a mockery of the Rooney Rule, it’s disheartening, it's frustrating, and watching each new hire be justified…I mean, I don’t know if anybody saw the press conference of the new head coach for the Detroit Lions–
Jessica: Ugh, burn! [laughs]
Amira: Yes, that alone…Just hired on a 6 year deal to coach the Lions and then gave what we can only describe as a bizarre welcome press conference where he talked about eating people’s kneecaps…
Dan Campbell: We’re gonna kick you in the teeth, and when you punch us back we’re gonna smile at you, and when you knock us down we’re going to get up, and on the way, we’re going to bite a kneecap off. We’re going to stand up, and it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. And on the way up, we’re going to take your other kneecap, and we’re going to get up, and it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna hunk out of you. Before long we're gonna be the last one standing, alright? That’s gonna be the mentality.
Amira: I think that Mike Freeman the sportswriter put this well. He was like, “No Black coach could EVER, EVER, EVER hold their opening press conference and talk about cannibalism and eating people’s kneecaps!” Like, it just couldn’t happen!
But one of the most striking things about this hiring cycle is there's no way in hell, and I mean no way ever, a Black coach could talk like that, particularly as a candidate looking for a head coaching position, and still get a job.
I think that the same way that Trevor Noah had this great quote about this or maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates did about needing to be president to be president – like, Obama had to come out of the best institutions to do the picture of perfection, and Trump just had to be rich and white. The double standards there, I think you can start seeing that map on to football.
Some of these head coach hires, they have to be young and look like they have this great future and using this idea of who has football knowledge, who is the face of the team, who’s the face of your franchise, has really constrained the ability for Black applicants to even get a foot in the door, and at this point it’s glaring. Anything that happens just underscores how awful the situation is and I guess we’ll have to just wait another year because Black coaches are constantly being told, “Wait til next year.” And next year never comes. Burn. Alright, Jessica, bring us home please.
Jessica: I’m so ready for this. Okay. Madison Cawthorn is a US House representative from North Carolina. He’s 25, white, has one of those boxy rectangular faces, his blond hair never moves. He’s also disabled from a car accident and so he uses a wheelchair. You might’ve heard of him from some of his greatest hits, including – and I really had to shorten this list, it’s a long one – on Instagram he posted a photo of himself visiting a vacation home in Germany used by Hitler, whom Cawthorn called “the Fuhrer” in his caption, and he said, “This visit has been on my bucket list for a while.” During his campaign a website run by Cawthorn’s campaign described Senator Cory Booker, a Black man, as someone who “aims to ruin white males running for office.” In December he went after Burn It All Down favorite Raphael Warnock, saying, “You see this Warnock fellow who’s coming down here and disguising himself as some moderate pastor from the South.” He spoke at the rally on January 6th before the insurrection and then afterward voted against certifying the election results.
There’s more – I could go on and on. But let’s focus right now on a specific thing. This week, Sara Luterman wrote a piece for The Nation about how Cawthorn has misled the public repeatedly about training for the Paralympics. Apparently one of Cawthorn’s talking points during his campaign was that he was training for the Games. Luterman writes that the most specific thing she found out about it was that Cawthorn said he was training for the 400m dash, and the only evidence that he was “training” was him saying so. Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College for one semester and they didn’t have a disabled sports program. He never competed in qualifying events, and he is not on the public list of disabled athletes who have been internationally classified – which is a requirement to compete in the Paralympics.
The article really drives home how much Cawthorn lied about his athletic abilities: “There is one real, identifiable race Cawthorn namedrops on Instagram: The Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta, which he described as 'the biggest 10K in the world, which I anticipated to win.’ It does bill itself as the world’s largest 10K, but Cawthorn was not likely to win. Multiple elite racers were slated to compete, including Daniel Romanchuk, who holds the world record for fastest wheelchair marathon in history.” I want to burn all this shit around Cawthorn and throw Cawthorn metaphorically onto the burn pile, but Luterman ends the piece with an important point about the media that I don’t want to leave out. “Multiple athletes expressed frustration, not just with Cawthorn but with the general ignorance of disability and athletics. If Cawthorn had claimed to be preparing for the 400 meters in the Summer Olympics, the press would have ridiculed him, but no one in media questioned his claims of training for the Paralympics.”
So, this is a story about a lying liar – these are my words! – who happens to be disabled, but also a story about a media ill-equipped to suss out those lies because of its own ableism. Luterman, who describes herself as a disabled disability writer, wrote on Twitter, “There are more stories like this one — Stories about disabled people getting away with nonsense because as soon as you say the word ‘disability’ non-disabled people’s eyes glaze over with inspiration and/or pity. Hire disabled journalists. Your outlet will be better for it.” Hear hear. Burn all of this. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning it’s time to highlight some torchbearers of the week. So, Jessica, who is our Statue of the Week?
Jessica: So, on Monday last week it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the University of South Carolina dedicated a new statue to the current WNBA MVP, A’ja Wilson, and it's a great statue too. It’s Wilson in motion, her ponytail is flying behind her, her left leg is bent at the knee as she pushes off the ground with her right foot, the basketball in her left hand being guided by the right one as she goes to put the basketball in the hoop. It’s just beautiful. Wilson told the media, “This is the day we recognize the great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.]. My grandmother couldn't even walk on this campus; she had to walk around [it]. If she was here today to see her granddaughter has a statue where she once could not walk...It goes to show how you just plant seeds, and that's what it's all about.”
Amira: I’ll go next. We have two coaches of the week to highlight. I will start with shouting out Jen King! The Washington Football Team will promote King to a full-time offensive assistant, making her the first Black woman to be a full-time coach in the NFL, but certainly not the last. Bren, who’s our other coach of the week?
Brenda: Mónica Vergara has been named Head Coach of the women's Mexican national team – this is soccer – and she is a longtime national and youth coach; she was a defender for the Mexican women’s team. It is just so exciting to see that team get a real coach that really cares about women's football.
Amira: Hear hear. And now, a drumroll please!
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer of the week could be no other than Henry Aaron, a titan, a torchbearer for so much of his career, who sadly passed away this week at the age of 86. You may remember Henry for many reasons. You might remember his name as Hank Aaron, although he didn’t like that – like “Jackie” it was a name given to him to make him more palatable to white audiences. But Henry Aaron, who held the home run title with 755 home runs for decades, who had 25 all star selections in his life, who has so many stats that we could unpack, but really beyond the field is where his legacy really lies. He was kind, he was generous, he was brave.
You might see reports this week of how he “transcended racism” – that’s not true. He lived with it, he felt it very heavily, he dealt with it. He didn’t ignore it. He contended with it and he played amongst it. He also was a product of the Negro Leagues, he played for the Indianapolis Clowns before leaving; Toni Stone replaced him at second base. He used that next season, he actually played down in Puerto Rico, the Criollos, out of Caguas in Puerto Rico, and that’s where they shifted him from second base to outfield, and the rest of the story you know from there.
He kind of seemed like he would live forever, honestly, to me. You saw him out advocating in this last Georgia Senate race. He was out there. He said once, “Am I a hero? I suppose I am, to some people. If I am, I hope it’s not only for my home runs…I hope it’s also for my beliefs, my stands, my opinions. Still, I’m not at ease being a hero.” I just have to say, Mr. Aaron, for so many of us you are, you were, and you remain absolutely a hero. You were a living legend and you are our torchbearer of the week. Rest in peace.
So, what’s good? What’s good in your world? Let me start with Jess, because Brenda never knows what’s good in her life. [laughs]
Jessica: So, on Hulu you can watch the reboot of Supermarket Sweep that Leslie Jones hosts, and I just want to tell people if you want to feel good, just go watch that. Leslie Jones is the most amazing host. I know people have a lot of affinity for the past versions of the show and certainly there’s nostalgia there, but she is just so invested in these people in a way that is really nice. Like, she’s not objective about it! She’s as much a part of the show as anyone else, and it has just made me very happy this week. I’ve also watched a couple of good movies that I would recommend to people: One Night in Miami, Regina King’s feature directorial debut–
Amira: Yes!
Jessica: It’s on Amazon. I just loved it. Leslie Odom Jr singing, he plays Sam Cooke – that was wonderful. I just…Ah. I liked it a lot. Then I rented Promising Young Woman, and there’s so many trigger warnings and content notes to make about that movie and I know that there are people who do not like it so I would definitely, especially if you’re possibly triggered by sexual assault, go read something about it before you watch it. But I really liked it. Carey Mulligan is unbelievable in that movie. So, Promising Young Woman was a highlight for me.
Amira: What’s good for me…Samari. I’m gonna have a teenager, yeah. I don’t know if it’s what’s good, but it's what’s happening! [laughter] Samari is going to be 13 on January 30th, and that’s wild to me. I don’t even know…It’s hard to even formulate words, right?
Brenda: I’m so sorry.
Amira: I know. First of all, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, I’ll just say that. But I just feel like it was literally yesterday I was like 18 and a freshman in college and finding out I was gonna have a daughter and it’s wild. She’s been on a wild ride with me from college classrooms to graduate school to being a professor, like, all of it. She’s my favorite travel buddy–
Jessica: I thought you were gonna say favorite child! [laughter]
Amira: No, Zachary is definitely my favorite child.
Jessica: Oh, okay! [laughter]
Amira: Just so we’re clear.
Brenda: Aww – Jackson!
Amira: Well, I mean, I love Jackson too but Zach…I mean, it changes minute to minute! But Zachary has just been holding it down for months, so…[laughs] But I think if you know anything about us you know that usually we would be heading into New York for a few Broadway shows for her birthday, and we do escape rooms together. Obviously none of that’s happening, but she’s a pretty cool kid, even if she’s an angsty teenager, and I just can’t believe that she’s gonna be 13. So, that’s absolutely my biggest, biggest what’s good. Bren, do you have something?
Jessica: You can do it. You got it, Bren.
Brenda: I have a treadmill–
Amira: Yes!
Jessica: Yay!
Brenda: I’m happy about my treadmill because it’s been really cold this week, and that’s been wonderful and I’m grateful. It was Shireen’s birthday…
Jessica: That’s right.
Brenda: Happy birthday, Shireen.
Amira: Happy birthday!
Brenda: Happy birthday. So, I’m glad Shireen was born. I’m just super late to this, but Jessica Luther demeaned that I watch The 40 Year Old Version with her constant pumping up of that movie–
Jessica: So good!
Brenda: So good.
Jessica: On Netflix! Everyone go watch it.
Brenda: So good. So yeah, there’s good stuff all the time, you know. It’s good.
Amira: I know, I have to watch that still. It’s on my list. But you know, I’m just still…
Jessica: Watching Bridgerton?
Amira: Exactly. [laughs] Just reading the books at this point, again.
Jessica: I did enjoy your pop culture reference to the Bridgertons during this segment.
Amira: Thank you. That was just for you.
Jessica: I felt that.
Amira: [laughs] I will have to add that classes have started here at Penn State, although not in person. I’m teaching for the first time in a year and a half, it’s a journey. It’s exhausting. I’m already very, very over it, secretly! But I’m very excited because I am teaching Jessica’s book.
Jessica: Yay!
Amira: It’s always fun, and I’ll teach articles from Brenda and both of them will definitely be talking in my class. It’s just gonna happen. So, it’s always fun when I get to gush over the brilliance of my co-hosts with college kids.
So, I wanna tell you things that we’re watching this week. We have still lots of global football action, for instance if you care at all about the FA Cup we have an upcoming good match with Leeds and Leicester. Also, Barcelona will be taking on Bilbao in the next week if you want to check out La Liga. The NWHL is back in the bubble for two weeks only – 🎶 two weeks only! That’s a Dreamgirls reference, although it’s One Night Only...Anyways, whatever. They will be back in the bubble for two weeks only. They started on Saturday the 23rd, they will be going through February 5th. All of their matches are available on Twitch and the final will be on NBA Sports Network.
That's it for this week’s episode of Burn It All Down. Burn It All Down you can find anywhere you get podcasts: Spotify, Google Play, Apple store. Find it wherever you listen. Please rate, review, share. You can find us on Twitter @burnitdownpod and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, Facebook the same thing. You can also go to our website, burnitalldownpod.com. There you’ll find show notes and transcripts and links to our Patreon. Check out our Patreon – for as low as $2/month you get extra content and access to us and behind the scenes videos and all this good stuff, plus opportunities to sit down with us for fireside chats.
I do wanna hold here and say a note about our merchandise: in light of ongoing issues with Teespring being able to make sure that they’re not selling white supremacist content on their site, we have made the decision to move Burn It All Down’s merchandise site to a different platform. We will be keeping our Teespring store up until the end of January, and so you have until the end of the month to place your final Teespring orders. The new site will have many of the same favorites that you love on Teespring in terms of your merch needs, but maybe not all of them. So, if you want to get anything you have another week to get what you want off of Teespring, and we’ll be sure to update you very shortly on where you can get more BIAD merch moving forward.
That’s it. I’m Amira, today of course I was joined by Jessica and Brenda. This episode was obviously produced by our wonderful producers Martin Kessler and Tressa Versteeg. Shoutout to Shelby for all of our social media content and graphics. That’s it from us. Until next week: burn on, not out, and we’ll see you around, flamethrowers.