Episode 191: The Covid Super Bowl
On this week’s show: Super Bowl LV. Brenda, Amira, and Lindsay discuss how the event became a spectacle, who they’re rooting for, and whether the representation of African Americans and women can change their view of the event. They’ll also share this week’s Burn Pile and Torchbearers -- starring Layshia Clarendon -- and tell you 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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Transcript
Brenda: Hey! Welcome to this week of Burn It All Down. It’s the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Brenda, and I’m joined by co-hosts Dr. Amira Rose Davis and Lindsay Gibbs. On this week’s show we’re gonna be talking about Super Bowl LV, or 55, discussing how the event became a spectacle par excellence, who we’re rooting for, and if the representation of African Americans and women can change our jaded view of it. Then we’ll burn all the garbage in sports for this week and celebrate people trying to change it all.
Lindsay: Naomi Osaka, tennis star and now part owner of the North Carolina Courage NWSL team…
Brenda: So, staying on the Super Bowl theme, I wanted to ask you two what your favorite halftime show performance is. Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I would have to say it is Beyoncé’s second appearance when she appeared with Bruno Mars, because the night before she had dropped Formation which was shot in New Orleans, you know, with the drowning New Orleans PD car, and it was a very Black track. Everybody was going wild about it, but also there’s no way she's gonna perform this at the Super Bowl tomorrow, right? Like, we know what the Super Bowl is and is not. Then not only did she perform it, but she came out and her dancers were dressed like inspired by the Black Panthers. That spawned SNL to do that very funny skit, like, "The day people found out Beyoncé was Black.”
Amira: I think it really represents a corporate shift, a calculated shift in her image, but I think that was my favorite moment because the performance was tremendous but also it was just fun to watch white people be that shook. [laughter]
Brenda: What about you, Linz?
Lindsay: So, the right answer is Prince, I feel like. I loved that one, don't get me wrong. But I also loved the TRL mashup, like, Super Bowl shows that we used to have, with Britney Spears, Aerosmith and Shania Twain, things like that. [laughter] I just miss those days. I was looking up a few of them because I was trying to remember if they were just as wild as I remembered, and it was. In 2001: Aerosmith, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Mary J Blige, and Nelly. That’s just like a TRL show. And Vulture ranked that one fourth, by the way! Then ’04 which is famous for bad reasons, for Justin Timberlake–
Amira: Throwing Janet Jackson under the bus.
Lindsay: Throwing Janet Jackson under the bus, and also for the Panthers losing the Super Bowl, to a team we don’t talk about–
Amira: To who? To who! To who!
Lindsay: We don’t talk about it! We don’t talk about it. [Amira laughs] But that was Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Jessica Simpson, Kid Rock, Nelly, and P-Diddy. Like…! [laughter] What?! People were drunk. And listen, both of those rate in the top 10 for Vulture, so there’s just something to be said about picking names out of a hat.
Brenda: [laughs] I mean, I think my favorite is more of an appearance than a full performance, which was last year’s Bad Bunny, just his little quick bit with Shakira and J-Lo. I just felt happy that it was enough to put the genius in front of some audience that he didn’t have. He was great, my kids and I were happy as well, and his glam shots with J-Lo after were just absolutely hilarious and beautiful because he obviously had a poster of her on his wall as a kid.
Lindsay: Oh, I found the one that might win – Shania Twain, No Doubt, and Sting, 2003. [laughter]
Brenda: Okay, so, as we mentioned at the top of the show, the 55th Super Bowl will be played between Tampa Bay and Kansas City on February 7th in Tampa, Florida. The Super Bowl began as a rather lackluster affair between the top NFL team and the rival league champions from the AFL. The first game didn’t sell out; it was played in 1967 at the LA Coliseum between the Packers and Kansas City, actually. So from the beginning there were a lot of critics, as there always have been, of football in general for the violence of the sport, and even Hunter S Thompson’s piece in Rolling Stone in the early 70s were already sort of tearing at the commercialization of the sport and the way in which he thought it encouraged violence in a very violent society. Amira, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about it, how it went from a relatively simple affair to the grand spectacle it is today.
Amira: Yeah, I mean, violence is definitely the way into this, particularly militarism, and we can see this creeping up in many different ways. Very early on at the fourth Super Bowl in New Orleans for example, this was in 1970; they re-enacted the Battle of New Orleans from the War of 1812.
Brenda: No one even knows that battle! That is just so intense. Ugh.
Amira: Well, exactly! And they also blasted off cannons and there was so much smoke going through the stadium that half the people couldn't even see the people who were pretending to be dead on the football fields. So, quickly, the next year they started using air force jets to do a flyover, but that one they came late…And so, it wasn’t a perfected wedding of patriotism, but it certainly pointed to a way that militarism and football were kind of being tied together. You could kind of see that in the language, right? You could see that when they talked about a ground game or an air attack or a blitz – these militaristic terms were already in the game. But if you go through the 80s and you start thinking about when we have conflicts in the country, you also can see a correlation with the rise of football and how it gets tied together. So, when you get to the end of the 80s, you go into the early 90s, you have the Gulf War. This is where you really see the volume get turned all the way up on this kind of partnership. So, you have the NFL saying, “Look, we’re in a war, but the show’s gonna go on.”
So, you can’t bring anything like a camera, you can’t have a radio because we’re in war times, but what you can bring is a flag. They handed out flags and all of a sudden they wanted to paint the entire stadium with American flags. The commissioner of the NFL at the time said, “We’ve become the winter version of the Fourth of July celebration.” It was a conscious effort on the part to bring patriotism into the Super Bowl, according to Pete Rozelle, former NFL commissioner. And they did. They had flags, they airlifted somebody into the game, and it was to much fanfare and much success. I think that you can see that really…And to a sold-out stadium.
You see this same thing happen of course after September 11th and the Patriots, Bob Kraft, they win that Super Bowl saying, “We’re all patriots now.” You can see how it's tied together, and certainly it went beyond kind of spectacle when the Pentagon and the Department of Defense paid millions of dollars, $6.8 million, for patriotic displays during games in a paid patriotism scheme that paid teams to do the troop reunions and to unveil the American flag that went the length of the football field and all of these things were paid for by the state department.
So, I think that we can't divorce the marriage of the military and militaristic language and spectacle from the growth of the spectacle of the Super Bowl itself because it was literally envisioned as this “hyper-patriotic rah rah Americana carnivalesque Fourth of July in the winter” and I think that we can see how we still see elements of that today.
Brenda: And we all pay for it, don’t we? We pay for the police, we pay for the security. Every taxpayer pays for all of that going on. We pay for the stadium, in may ways. We pay for the parking structures in many municipal senses. So, it's interesting to think about it that way too, and through the Department of Defense we’re also paying for more recruitment into the military because they always had those commercials on and they always used it as a recruitment tool.
Amira: Absolutely, and it’s not a coincidence that it's been a tradition for presidents to appear at the Super Bowl, whether they’re flipping a coin or giving a halftime show talk or doing a quick little interview, you know? I think that it not only ties it together but there are people who are like, “America’s favorite holiday is the Super Bowl,” and you can see how it has become ingrained in American culture by being a kind of propaganda arm of the state in many ways, but very subtly, because also people like football. Of course they like to gather. But the fact that it has been increased in visibility and had all this production around it, we definitely can’t separate it from our tax dollars at work in ways that many of us aren’t comfortable with.
Brenda: And of course the Super Bowl is also famous for having some of the most pricey airtime for commercials, and that is central to it. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, so, it was fun to kind of look at this history, because I didn’t really know how the Super Bowl had become this advertising giant. We kind of take it for granted, and actually when talking about…Going with what Amira was just talking about, I think you all will see it's a weird kind of marriage here, but it all basically started in 1984 when Steve Jobs was unveiling the Macintosh, and he decided he wanted a really really big splashy way to announce the Mac to the world, and in a Wall Street Journal piece someone suggested that he should do an ad at the Super Bowl, and Jobs said that he didn’t know anyone that watched the Super Bowl. [laughs] So he was very hesitant to do it, but ended up going forward and in true rich person style really went through it. This ad, this 60 second ad, was directed by Ridley Scott. I’m gonna read a description of it.
It says, “The commercial begins in gray, with an army of drones marching into an assembly as a Big Brother figure harangues them from a towering screen: Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. The scene is intercut with shots of a blond woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts on the run, carrying a mallet, pursued by storm troopers. She bursts into the assembly and flings the mallet at the screen, unleashing an explosion and a blast of fresh air, as a voice-over reads the text of a product launch scheduled for two days hence: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” [laughter]
Brenda: Oh my god. Wow. Wow.
Lindsay: I wish you could see everyone’s faces right now in the Zoom chat. [laughs] So, basically this changed the advertising game, like, from this point on it kind of got everyone to think creatively. But that commercial is still…You know, the Wall Street Journal said it’s still the best commercial, nobody else has ever gotten close to that level of ridiculousness. Of course we’ve seen ads take lots of different forms since then. There was a period in the 2000s especially where it was the over-sexualization of every single ad, right? Every single ad was like, softcore. We’ve gotten a little past that. Now it’s in vogue to do social issues in ads and everything. I do think now we can see them all online beforehand. It used to be really fun…Like, I did used to enjoy when you had to make sure everyone you were watching with was quiet during the commercials because you might miss an ad that you wouldn’t be able to see again. So, that’s part of the Super Bowl. But just the fact that it began with this violent 1984 ad for Macs…
Amira: It’s also so interesting, Lindsay, how you said that about the ads, because it points out tech has shifted so much where so many of us, we watch streaming, we don't watch TV, right?
Lindsay: Yeah.
Amira: So, over the years, thinking about how the football commercial has had to evolve or why they’re online first or what even is the utility, because maybe the Super Bowl is the only time you’re actually watching. Like, I know sports for me are the only time when I’m actually watching something live, but the idea that commercials themselves have become almost antiquated in that way… [laughs]
Lindsay: And that’s why it's worth it for these people to pay $5 million for 30 seconds or whatever it is, because it is one of the only times all year that advertising is a thing, you know? In this way.
Amira: I would just say…And we’re gonna switch from getting you all hyped up on how awful and militaristic all of this is! So, I’ve been to a Super Bowl, and one of the things I noticed is there’s all these ads that we can't see. Like, every part of the experience is branded. It’s wild when you’re picking up, like, “chapstick by so-and-so” and it’s like, literally everything. It was so weird to see it up close in person. But also they draw you in, because like, “Reach under your seats and pick up the flashlights sponsored by so-and-so!” and we were like, part of Madonna’s halftime show waving the lights…
Lindsay: What Super Bowl were you at?
Amira: The Patriots’ second loss to the Giants at Indianapolis.
Lindsay: Oh wow. [laughs]
Amira: Yeah.
Lindsay: No wonder you hadn’t brought that up before! [laughs]
Amira: You know what, it was actually a really great weekend. It was when I stopped learning to care as much, because I almost fought this guy who was like, “Oh, so sad, you came all the way from Massachusetts to see them lose!” I said, “ACTUALLY I TOOK A TRAIN FROM BALTIMORE, BITCH!” Then I was like, that wasn’t the point, I’m sorry.
Brenda: Okay!
Lindsay: Can we get that on a shirt…? [laughs]
Brenda: Fighting spirit. Fighting spirit.
Lindsay: But you know what’s scary, is that this is Amira caring less. [Amira laughs] That means that the Amira we know now is the Amira that doesn’t care as much! [laughter]
Brenda: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never saw such a breakdown as the tennis match that we saw together. It was absolutely amazing. Alright, well, switching gears…So, this season has been unlike any other season leading up to the Super Bowl, with the global pandemic. Trying to imagine why this season even happened at all, why it had to happen, and looking back, what are your thoughts about this? Lindsay, what are you thinking when you look back at this season? Do you think it was worth the risks that they took to get here?
Lindsay: No, but I don’t think any of this has been worth it. I mean, I just think it’s a really hard thing for me to justify, as someone who covers sports and who loves sports and who does enjoy sports and even now can get lost in games, but ultimately things like as a society everything should have stopped much more so than it did, and especially I think the…No, I don’t think it was worth it. But it exists, and it’s happening, and I think they did get through it relatively– I don’t even want to use the….But if they were doing the irresponsible thing, they got through it, knowing it was already irresponsible. But for me a lot of what gets me the most and what really makes me feel the ickiest is the pandering and while we’re in a pandemic, while we’re kind of really encouraging people to gather, while we’re putting bodies at risk and resources at risk, then doing the pandering to the healthcare workers and pretending like trying to get the goodwill of that. So, that’s what’s really the hardest to stomach for me.
Brenda: So, you’re referring to that there’s 22,000 people that will be in attendance, and they supposedly gave 7,500 tickets to healthcare workers?
Lindsay: Yeah, vaccinated healthcare workers, to say thanks for their service. So, this is Roger Goodell’s statement on NFL.com: “These dedicated healthcare workers continue to put their own lives at risk to serve others, and we owe them our ongoing gratitude. We hope in a small way that this initiative will inspire our country and recognize these true American heroes. This is also an opportunity to promote the importance of vaccination and appropriate health practices, including wearing masks in public settings.” And you know what? You know what the Super Bowl is gonna do while they’re lauding these healthcare workers? It’s gonna make people come together for parties, right? I mean, we just know. People are gonna come together indoors for parties.
Brenda: Yep, yep.
Lindsay: Indoors, at bars, they’re gonna find a way, because it’s cold in most of the country, to get indoors and to gather, and to let their guard down. I’m sure there are gonna be ridiculous watch parties, and I’m sure whoever wins there’s gonna be celebrating on the streets.
Amira: Well, especially because Tampa Bay is the first team to play a Super Bowl in their home stadium
Lindsay: Oh, right.
Amira: And guess where it’s not cold? Tampa Bay!
Lindsay: Right, yeah.
Amira: So I think that you’re absolutely right, Lindsay, that there’s all these ripple effects and consequences to what the NFL has decided to do, and just to be clear – this also required enormous infrastructure and lots of money, to the tune of $100 million, in order to get this done.
Brenda: Yeah. Yeah.
Amira: 954,000 tests, right? And this is a season that started when they knew they couldn’t do a bubble in the way that we saw with the W or the NBA or hockey, and so they just kind of charged ahead and in the first few weeks of the season you might remember them being like, “Look, it’s going great, we have these fancy little trackers that beep if you get too close to each other,” and this, that, and the other thing. Then a few weeks in the virus worked its way through the NFL. There was 5 games rescheduled, 10 games postponed. They cancelled zero games. There was certain weeks that were so absurd because you had football on Tuesday, you had football at 3:30 on a random afternoon.
You had many people who opted out of the season, and I think that it was absolute chaos coming down the stretch here, and I know that the NFL is patting themselves on the back for having a much lower test positive rate than the general public, I know they’re patting themselves on the back for getting through this very strange season, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the cost of that – actual dollars and cents, but also as Lindsay pointed to the ripple effects, because there’s multiple teams that allowed fans in, in particular the Dallas Cowboys had a great deal of fans that they let in game to game, and we don’t track those people when they go home to know if they were okay.
Brenda: There’s a way in which it normalizes those types of activities, like at the high school level, at the college level. So, I find that particularly infuriating and irresponsible. I struggle to try to figure out…Could I even stomach this? But there's a way in which, you know, you wanna connect with everybody. At the same time, you’re watching people that do get joy out of it. I do hate to sort of kill everybody’s buzz [laughs] all the time about it, but yeah…Amira?
Amira: It’s probably a good time to say: don’t go gather in person to watch this. And if you want to gather with us virtually, [laughs] we would be happy to host a Super Bowl watch party! This is coming out when? After the Super Bowl? No…Before!
Brenda: Before!
Amira: We’ll be happy to host a Super Bowl watch party! So you can commiserate with all of us, but still feel connected!
Brenda: Yeah! Yeah. That sounds good to me. That’s a great idea, and I hope more of that happens. So, I struggled personally trying to figure out, because I have no particular connection to either of these teams…So, I looked up the mayors – this is the way I work! [laughs]
Amira: Oh, Brenda.
Lindsay: [laughing] I’m sorry.
Brenda: I know. They’re laughing because it’s true. I know. They’re laughing because they know it’s true. I started looking at the mayors, and I came up with a draw. Tampa Bay mayor Jane Castor is pretty cool – the first openly gay mayor, she mandated masks outdoors, she switched from being a Republican to a Democrat in 2015. She’s had all of this flack and backlash for trying to make people actually be responsible, so I don’t really know how she’s gonna deal with this particular event. Then Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, African American and super involved in trying to get people in Missouri to wear a mask, had a whole petition to remove him from office for that. So, I like them both so I came up with nothing. I hate both the team names. Anybody wanna comment on Kansas City? I can tell you that Buccaneers, you know, making money off trading slaves in the Spanish Caribbean is not a great feel for me.
Amira: Yeah, certainly, and we know the Kansas City name is just another name that needs to fall. We’ve seen the Washington football name change, to many of our surprises, but if you tune in to the Super Bowl you’ll see Kansas City and you’ll see them doing the tomahawk chop and you’ll see them still using Indigenous symbols and rhetoric that sort of caricatures and dehumanizes Native Americans in ways that are very harmful, and that’s continuing there with that team. So, yeah, [laughs] it’s not a great matchup for team names that are, you know…
Brenda: Yeah. Coming from Detroit, the only thing we had were colors, really, lovely colors. We didn’t have wins or talent. Well, Barry Sanders! But I didn’t come up with anything–
Amira: Who I sat behind at the Super Bowl that I went to!
Brenda: Please don’t, please, I’ll be so jealous. I don’t think I could continue recording. So, I really struggled to come up with any kind of colors or themes, even players. But Lindsay, I feel like you’ve already got somebody you’re pulling for?
Lindsay: I don’t even know if it’s as much pulling for as it is…First of all, you all know I can’t quit the Carolina Panthers and they’re in a division with Tampa Bay, so I automatically just hate Tampa Bay, that’s a given, you hate your division rivals, right? The of course when you add Tom Brady to the mix, you know…Tom Brady has had enough. We’ve had enough! I’m just so done. So, I think that for me it's pretty easy to root for Kansas City even though the name and some of their players who have committed domestic violence and are getting redemption narratives and all that. There’s a lot of ickiness. But within this, look, I do like Patrick Mahomes, and of course we talked on the show before about how he helped pay to make the arena in Kansas City – which name I can’t even say, really. [laughs] Everything’s so problematic. But a polling location on election day, split the cost with Kansas City which, again, the team should’ve just paid for all of that, whatever.
But Mahomes has been good at speaking up and it’s good to see a new generation of Black quarterbacks who are comfortable confronting the NFL on Black Lives Matter, on Kaepernick. Of course, I don’t know that getting the NFL to admit anything is really useful in the overall conversation, but I guess it's better than ignoring it completely, right? We also can here say that Patrick Mahomes’ wife, Brittany is her name…Actually, I think she’s his fiancée, sorry. I don’t think they’re married yet. But she’s pregnant and they’ve been together forever. But she’s a part owner of the new Kansas City NWSL team, and so we love to see that. So those are two reasons, Mahomes’ political activism and then his wife being an owner in the NWSL, that make me like…And that it’s not Tom Brady! [laughter] But I’m dying to know Amira, for you, obviously big Patriots fan, longtime Tom Brady lover–
Amira: Well, I don’t think I was ever on team Tom Brady…
Lindsay: [laughs] That’s why I’m putting it on you. [Amira laughs] I’m making you own that! [laughter] How does it feel to have the Patriots not have a good season, and then here’s Tom Brady in the Super Bowl with Rob Gronkowski and all this stuff? How does it feel for you?
Amira: Well, it’s so funny…We’ve talked about this on the show before, like, I never really liked Tom Brady. I love the Patriots’ defense. So, I’m not mortally wounded like some of these people who, like, pledge allegiance to him. And also, I didn't watch any pandemic football. I think I watched Cam’s first game or something and then once Cam got COVID I was like, I can’t do this. So, I’ve been so checked out from this season. I was kind of like, “Oh, it’s still happening,” and, “Oh, he’s still playing.”
So, I would say that I’m fairly indifferent, but my mom is absolutely over the moon for two reasons. One, she has followed Tom to Tampa Bay. She doesn’t care much about that but she loves watching him and Gronk, and so she’s been rooting for them every Sunday and watching it, and also she grew up Danville, Illinois, where much of their rooting interest is actually the Kansas City team because of proximity. So, she is in love with Patrick Mahomes. She loves Kansas City, and so all season she’s been calling her sister and they’ve been watching the Kansas City games together. This is one of my adopted moms – she’s 83 y’all, okay? She’s sitting in front of the TV watching at least six hours of football every week to watch her two boys play. It’s been a rough few months with her; she had a pacemaker put in and is taking it easy, and the one thing that gets her out of bed is watching football on Sundays, watching these two teams.
So, last week when both of them made the Super Bowl she was over the moon. So, now most of my feelings about the Super Bowl have been replaced because I just feel like this is her Super Bowl – and she certainly is treating it like it’s personally a game made just for her! [Brenda laughs] And is just so overwhelmed. She’s like, “Can they both just win?” So, I think it’s really interesting to see how people have been reacting to it both ways. But at least for her, having Brady back in the Super Bowl I think she feels is like a continuation of the journey they had together.
Brenda: Aw!
Lindsay: Aww.
Amira: And then Mahomes certainly is like the future, and I think she never thought she would see Kansas City thrive like this, so that’s been exciting and a way to connect with her sister. Which brings me back to what I said when Brady left and my mom called, which is that these are the ways it’s emotional and our rooting interests are so often tied up in the community that we form around them and/or are born into, and just those connections. To me that's what football has always represented and I see that for my mom at least that’s still something that’s really pure.
Brenda: Aw. So, it’s a win-win in some ways. Alright, so, I think we’d be remiss to not mention something that’s been in the media a lot, which is the diversity of coaching staff in this Super Bowl, particularly Tampa Bay with four Black coordinating coaches and two full-time women. For me it’s always sort of a research question how and when representation changes the structure of the field in which it’s happening. I struggle with the limits of representational politics, thinking about, you know, what has Clarence Thomas done for African Americans on the Supreme Court? What does representation mean, and when? Is football salvageable anyway? At the same time, you know it’s really important to have those people on the field. Lindsay, what was your reaction this week to the diverse coaching staff?
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, look – there’s obviously the fact that we’ve gone through this whole head coaching cycle and I think out of seven jobs one Black head coach got hired, and so we’re seeing more Black assistant coaches which is great, and Black coordinators, which is great, but it’s frustrating to say the least because the pipeline’s getting deeper but it’s still clogged up at the top. Amira’s gonna talk a little bit more about that. I get jaded sometimes about the representation stuff too. I get jaded in how it’s framed, a lot of times it’s uncritically framed, right? You talk about “the first woman to do this” or something without really acknowledging all the barriers that they had to face and the systemic barriers, right? It’s framed as this great feat of moral superiority when in actuality beating the systems is just…I don’t know. It’s sometimes frustrating.
But, on the other hand, I can’t deny that representation is important and that it does pursue progress. Last year I talked with Jen Welter who was the first woman hired to be a coach of any kind in the NFL back in about 2015, and Welter was already working in a lower kind of semi-pro football league, so she was already on that path. This was when Sarah Thomas, who will be reffing this game – first woman to ref a Super Bowl – became the first full-time female referee in NFL history. So, after that historic hiring a reporter asked Bruce Arians, who’s the coach at Tampa Bay but was then the coach of the Arizona Cardinals. A reporter asked him during a press conference if there would ever be a female coach in the NFL and Arians responded and says that the second a woman proves that she can make these guys better she’ll be hired.
Welter heard that interview and heard that press conference, and that’s what gave her the idea to basically cold-call Bruce Arians and pitched herself as a coach. She called and pretended to be an assistant of her coach for the Revolution, which was the team, and she kind of niggled her way in there. Of course she had the credentials, but I just love that story that it was the first female referee that got the reporter to ask the question, right? Then hearing the answer to that question is what gave Jen Welter the idea to kind of pitch herself.
So, look, it does matter, and it's good to see…Sam Rapoport is a Canadian – shoutout to Shireen – who has been doing lots of work on the grassroots level in the NFL to try to get more women involved in the game. Bruce Arians too hired two full-time women at Tampa Bay; that’s the first time that’s ever happened. He really has I think the most diverse coaching staff there is. So, it matters, but the conversation can’t stop there.
Amira: Absolutely. We just have to want more. That doesn’t mean we can’t fight the very real barriers systemically within this system, but as we’ve just outlined the system is not always worth saving itself. I think that that’s on display now. You can revisit my burn from last week, Jess’s burn from a week before about the really ridiculous number of Black coaches who didn’t get considered really, or hired into head coaching positions. When I burned it last week there was still one head coaching position open that has now been filled, and not by Eric Bieniemy and other qualified Black coordinators. So, as we celebrate the Black coordinators that will be on the field for the Super Bowl, of which there are many, it’s hard to celebrate them without seeing a ceiling over their heads.
You can even go back and revisit my conversation with coach Mickey Grace who’s a scouting apprentice to the LA Rams, a Black woman from Philly. I really enjoyed talking with Mickey because I think that you can see that it's not just about representation but the new ideas that they’re bringing with them into the system. So, often what happens is it’s like the conversation about cops who wanna reform or something like that, is that you come in at such a low level that it requires you to put your head down and really be a part of the system to rise to a place within it where you can enact change, and I think so often…There’s a saying that “tenure doesn’t make you brave,” right? A head coach is not gonna make you brave if you weren’t brave on the way up. I think that sometimes this is the tension. This is the complication when we’re talking about systemic change vs individual representation.
So as Lindsay pointed to, there’s definitely ripple effects for individual representation, it does matter. You get people flooded into this business, but I think what we’re waiting for is to see the ways in which the other ripple effects, ones that are perhaps more radical or more upending, that question some of these hard ingrained things or these military connections or these flaunts of public health whether it’s from CTE to COVID in sports, whatever. Who’s gonna be within the system that might be bringing different ideas to the fore that have been locked out of the conversation because they can’t get a foot in the door? So, I’m all for doors opening, I’m all for taking steps through them. But I think we have to ask for more, and demand more, and want more, and not…Like Lindsay said, the representation is not the mountaintop. It can’t be. It just can’t be.
Brenda: On this Thursday’s interview, Lindsay talks with Lindsay Jones, senior NFL writer at the Athletic, about a Super Bowl like no other.
Lindsay Jones: It’s gonna be the COVID Super Bowl – a third capacity, it’s going to be very weird. I’m going to Tampa in a couple of days, not really sure what to expect other than it’s going to be the weirdest football game I’ve ever been at.
Brenda: Now it’s time for the burn pile, where we take all the garbage in sports this week and set it metaphorically on fire. This week I’m handing my burn to Shireen – it’s a gift – to talk about the debacle in women’s hockey.
Shireen: Thank you for giving me your burn, Brenda. Flamethrowers, it can be of no surprise what I intend to torch this week, incinerate, put out forever with the hottest and highest of flames. It is the absolute dumpster fire that imploded in women’s hockey this week, specifically at the NWHL bubble, otherwise known as the n-dubble. It started with Erika Nardini, the CEO of Barstool Sports, who put out a video basically wondering why sports journalists – specific ones including friend of the show Marisa Ingemi – were critical of Barstool because isn’t it a bastion of upholding everything that’s good? No. There has been very well documented pieces, including one from our very own Lindsay Gibbs for ThinkProgress, that absolutely did the research and the reports on how Barstool had a culture of harassment of women, including a terrible history…They’re known for being racist. The Asshole in Chief…What’s his name? Dave Whatever, Portnoy, has repeatedly used the n-word, and it’s just unacceptable.
In this video Erika Nardini basically led her followers and all the legions of Barstool fans to the social media handles of those people who were then inundated, including a very specific social media manager of one of the teams who was completely inundated and therefore had to again lock down her private account and her work account because of the hate that she was getting. This is a huge problem. The Metropolitan Riveters have a player named Saroya Tinker who replied to this video by Erika Nardini and Saroya Tinker being an amazing, very very wonderful Black player, was the first to speak out and say we don’t want you, we don’t want your money, we don’t need your money. Just keep it.
So, Saroya bravely said this and was then hit with a deluge of critique and whatnot. But she was backed by Anya Packer and Madison Packer – Madison being the captain and Anya being the head of the NWHLPA, which is important because your team has to back you. Unfortunately not all of Saroya’s teammates backed her. Kelly Babstock did not, and neither did Katie Burt, who went public and said they think being with Barstool is a great idea. Now, the problem is that we’re looking for people at this point who've been talking the talk to actually walk the walk. Where are the allies? Where are they? Who’s coming forward to agree and support, not just what Saroya says? To which Erika was so sad, because people were mean to her and she was ratio’d on that tweet.
So, Dave Portnoy released a video in which he made some wild accusations and called for the jailing of Saroya Tinker, which is so offensive on so many levels, and absolutely blatantly racist. They’re unapologetic, they don’t understand their own problems, and decided to create a hockey league, the Nardini hockey club, or what the sweatshirts say that they’re now selling. This is garbage, it's terrible, and the worst part about this for me…You know, I expect this stupidity and this carelessness and this recklessness from Barstool. I’m disappointed that no allies have come forward. Where is the PWHPA? Where are the players, the captains of the national teams? Where are they? Why are they not stepping up and being very firm and saying that we're not going to accept this? I hate all of it.
Thanks to Hemal Jhaveri for her incredible reporting. Thank you to Natalie Weiner, who’s one of the few who actually reported on this. This has to be different and women’s hockey must be protected at all costs. Most importantly, Black women must be protected at all costs. I wanna take this all and burn it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: I have two kind of twin burns today. The thread is that Black women deserve better, Black girls deserve better. The first is Ethan Fornier who’s a deputy who works at Florida’s Liberty high school. He’s also the football coach at that school. News broke this week when multiple students filmed him body-slamming a Black girl student to the ground, knocking her unconscious. Students said they no longer feel safe at this school. I don’t know if you’ve seen this video; I don’t recommend you watch it, but you see students kind of gathering and then this officer slams this girl to the ground, her heads hits the ground and she goes unconscious. The fact that he is not only a deputy, which obviously points to the need to get police out of the schools, but also a football coach, so he’s entrusted in molding, “making men.” It’s disgusting to see.
She’s currently suffering memory loss and headaches, and if that wasn't enough we also learned this week of Seattle Seahawks offensive tackle Chad Wheeler who’s technically a free agent, so the Seahawks are trying to distance themselves from him. But reports came out this week that he had domestically abused his girlfriend, choked her out. When he saw that she was talking later he said, “Oh, you’re still alive?” Bloodied her face. It’s bad, it’s not great. It’s just disheartening to see these men in and around this game that have been just body-slamming Black girls or choking out Black women. We see the Seahawks are certainly now trying to distance themselves from Chad Wheeler. We’ll see what happens in either of these cases. We have documentation and videos which we know is literally the bare minimum you need to even have people give a damn.
So, we’ll be watching both of these conversations to see where they go, and this is kind of an open-ended burn. I’m starting to light the match, I don’t know how long this flame will be burning, but my guess is a long time. But I just wanna take this space to say we stand with Black women and Black girls who are too often the victims of both domestic violence as well as state-sanctioned violence at the hands of police, but don’t get nearly enough time, as the WNBA showed us with the Say Her Name campaign this summer. It really is important to highlight the stories of Black girls and women who face this kind of violence, whether it’s at the hands of a partner or the hands of the state. I just want to send my love out to both of those women involved in these incidents and burn the whole thing down.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Lindsay.
Lindsay: Yeah. It’s time to circle back to one of our regulars: USA Gymnastics. There’s a couple of things USA Gymnastics has done that have come out this week. First of all, it’s come out that USA Gymnastics in the last two years since it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, it has rung up at least $13.6 million in legal fees, according to the Southern California News Group. Maggie Nichols said of USA Gymnastics, “They continue to fail us. It’s been six years and there’s really been no progress, just attorneys doing the wrong thing getting paid a lot of money.” There’s still not a settlement with the gymnasts, and bankruptcy really puts a forcefield on everything else as attorney John Nichols has said. Discovery for lawsuits is completely frozen, insurance stuff is frozen, and it just puts a roadblock to rebuilding the USAG. The USOC took moves to decertify USA Gymnastics but the bankruptcy froze that even.
So, the bankruptcy freezes everything while lawyers get millions upon millions of dollars during this time and nothing goes to the athletes. It’s really disgusting. There was one anecdote in the OC Register story about how Maggie Nichols was…One of her complains was how she was abused by how they limited how much food she could have during competitions, how USA Gymnastics would just feed her nothing. Meanwhile there was a $23,000 bill for these lawyers’ food for three days. Just the dichotomy of that is disgusting, and also meanwhile USA Gymnastics spent just $900 on SafeSport in February of 2020. So, when you just compare that it’s just absolutely mind-boggling.
So, there’s another thing going on that’s not quite done. USA Gymnastics has also signed a contract with FloGymnastics to be a five year partnership with FloSports so that FloSports will have access to a lot of their competitions which will be streamed behind a paywall – which of course makes it less accessible. But the big problem here is that in 2014 Olympic and World Champion McKayla Maroney was one of many celebrities who had her iCloud hacked and explicit photos of her were posted on the internet and FloGymnastics posted an article about the hack which included a link to the explicit photos. This is back in 2014. So, USA Gymnastics only revoked FloGymnastics’ credentials for a year and now they’re partnering with them for five years. They’re partnering with a group that exploited one of its athletes! It’s absolutely disgusting and just…You’re back, and this won’t be the last time, USA Gymnastics. You need to get your shit together. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: So, after all that burning now we’re gonna turn towards a more positive theme: the wonderful people trying to change all of the things that we just tried to burn. In memoriam this week, Amira, who do we have?
Amira: I want to say rest in peace to coach John Chaney, titan in American college basketball, obviously from my beloved Temple University where he coached from ’82 to 2006. Fun fact: watching his Temple teams play the UMass Minutemen in the Mullins Center as a kid is what made me want to go to Temple. I was determined to be an Owl, and that’s where I ended up. I really want to say that the best thing that you will read on this is by my friend, Tyler Ricky Tynes, over at The Ringer. Please go read his article called The Gospel of John Chaney. It really captures what Chaney meant to Philadelphia, specifically North Philly; what he meant to Temple, how he embodied a place that is so rich and has given me so much.
Tyler, I’m just gonna quote from his article here to give you a taste of this. He said, “He made the entire country believe in the excellence of Black boys forgotten by major universities, industries, cities, and the rest of the world, reminding them that there was promise pent up in their bones and talent stored in their bodies, enough to dominate a game of basketball, enough to be something to the world he so yearned to be better. […] He was one of us. Hell, he was us. He lived and died as a god walking on broken concrete under cherry banners down North Broad Street, begging the world to crack him in the jaw just so he could see the blood run from his nose and laugh because he was alive.”
I think that just embodies John Chaney so much in what he gave to North Philly, what he gave to Temple, and just personally for me I’m Texas-born, Mass raised, but definitely Temple made, and Coach Chaney is the embodiment of so much I and so many people love of the resiliency of that area and that space that he put on his back. So, happy trails, rest well, and sleep well, coach.
Brenda: Lindsay, who’s the fire engine of the week?
Lindsay: Naomi Osaka, tennis star and now part owner of the North Carolina Courage NWSL team! As I told people, look, you can’t deny! I moved to North Carolina and then weeks later Naomi Osaka buys into the team. I am not, you know…You can’t say it’s not related, right? [laughter]
Brenda: Clearly.
Lindsay: You just can’t. So, I’m so excited about this. I just love the development of women in sports supporting other women in sports, literally, financially in ownership. More of this, please.
Brenda: And our fire lord of the week is Sarah Thomas, who will be the first woman to officiate a Super Bowl. She began reffing high school varsity games in her native Mississippi, went on to be the first woman to officiate a major college game in 2007, and has joined the NFL in 2015. So, we’ll be excited to see her. Amira, who’s the inferno of the week?
Amira: Yeah, hall of famer Ken Griffey Jr. has been named Senior Advisor to the Commissioner. He will consult with Major League Baseball on a number of issues, with special emphasis on baseball operations & youth baseball development, and will serve as an ambassador at youth initiatives and at special events. Congrats to you, Ken Griffey Jr.
Brenda: Can I get a drumroll?
[drumroll]
Brenda: Linz, who is the torchbearer of this week?
Lindsay: New York Liberty star and WNBA Players Association vice president Layshia Clarendon, who shared on social media this week that they had had top surgery at the beginning of the year. I’m just going to read from Layshia’s post. “It’s hard to put into words the feeling of seeing my chest for the first time free of breasts, seeing my chest the way I’ve always seen it, and feeling a sense of gender euphoria as opposed to gender dysphoria. Freedom...Freedom at last. I’m usually not scared to share news publicly but the amount of hate, myths and ignorance surrounding Trans and Non Binary people’s existence actually had me debating sharing this joy. I want Trans people to know and see that we’ve always existed & no one can erase us! I want people to remember that my freedom is your freedom because none of us are free until we are all free!!!”
The WNBA Players Association, the WNBA commissioner, and New York Liberty all released statements of support for Layshia, and Layshia said online that they were very scared of how their peers in the WNBA would react bu they’ve just been flooded with support. So, congratulations Layshia for your euphoria!
Brenda: It is late January. Ew, ew, ew! In dark times, what’s good that is keeping you afloat? Lindsay.
Lindsay: What’s good is WNBA free agency, it’s a chaotic mess and I love every second of it. Just to share, January is a month that I thought would be a very productive month for me. I had a lot of hope for this month because my move was done-ish and I was in one place, but instead it was a month where everything caught up with me and where my mental health really really really took a dive and showed that progress is not linear, by any means! And that sometimes your body and mind can have delayed reactions to traumas and to things. But what’s good for me is not that of course, but is finding coping mechanisms and trusting in people and trusting in myself to get out of this and to get back to being myself, and I've been doing that and I have a lot of hope and I’m so grateful for the Burn It All Down fam for helping be a part of that. And my mom gets a second dose of the vaccine this week!
Brenda: Yay!
Lindsay: After a very very chaotic period, and as many of you know she’s in a nursing home and so is especially susceptible to things right now. So, that is definitely what’s good. Oh, oh! My cousin had TWINS! My cousin had twins! This is my second cousin to have twins in like a year, which is bizarre, because twins don’t run in our family. So, congratulations Irene and Thomas! I cannot wait to meet Gene and Walter.
Brenda: Yay. Amira?
Amira: Yeah, so, we’re recording this podcast today on January 31st which is Jackie Robinson’s birthday. He was born January 31st, 1919. And that’s apt, because my what’s good is that a book that I contributed to called 42 Today: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy is coming out next week. This is edited by Michael Long, it features a forward by Ken Burns and Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Kevin Merida writes the afterword, and me and Howard Bryant and Yohuru Williams and a bunch of other people have pieces in it thinking about the legacy of Jackie Robinson today. It’s dedicated to Rachel, of course, and I have a chapter in there about Jackie’s complicated support of Black women in sports, and I’m really excited to see this baby out in the world where people can pick it up and read it. So, 42 Today, out now. Yay!
Brenda: Yay! Everybody buy it. Buy two. Buy three! [laughs] My what’s good was the final of the Copa Libertadores which is the South American club championship. It was between Palmeiras and Santos, and it would not be an exaggeration to say it was one of the most boring, choppy, and violent games that I’ve seen in a very long time. But, true to the history of the tournament, it was amazing at the end – a hundredth minute goal! Which was just kind of a quick screamer to end it. The drama at the end is that the ball went out, one of the Palmeiras players went to go grab it, and the coach of Santos inhibited his picking it up, picked it up himself, played a little keep-away, and got a red card. Cuca, who is the coach, and was wearing a Virgin Mary and baby Jesus shirt, then promptly threw himself without a mask into the crowd. He is terrible. That was a terrible idea. But it was still some Libertadores drama, and I appreciated it. So, that was really what was good recently. Good fun, it never fails.
What we’re watching this week now that the Libertadores is over: the NWHL semi-finals and finals will be on NBC Sports on February 4th and 5th. It is the first time that the NWHL has been on broadcast television, so tune in in support. The Australian Open starts next week, and it is a big week for women’s college basketball. Thursday starting at 8pm you have Tennessee vs Mississippi State. Sunday, 4pm, Texas A&M vs Tennessee, and then a big big Monday on the 5th between #10 Arizona and #11 Oregon, and then #4 South Carolina vs #3 Connecticut.
That’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down. Especially now more than ever, burn on and not out. This episode was produced by the wizard, Martin Kessler, and Shelby Weldon extraordinaire does our website and social media. This is the last regular episode produced by Martin and we’re eternally grateful for his help and guidance, energy and friendship over the past six months. We’ll miss you, Martin! You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down wherever 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 in the show notes. From there you can email us directly or go shopping at our Teespring store, and there’s links to the Patreon. A special thank you to our patrons for your support, always, always.