Episode 214: Gratitude, Loyalty and Do Athletes Owe Anything to Anyone?

Sparked by the conversation around football legend Lionel Messi leaving FC Barcelona after 21 years, Brenda Elsey, Shireen Ahmed and Lindsay Gibbs talk about gratitude, loyalty and the idea that athletes should owe anything to coaches, teams, organizations or fans. They discuss how the media demonizes athletes who leave teams and how often these stories are gendered and racialized. They also discuss player unions and labor organizing, how loyalty between an athlete and a team is not a two-way street and their favorite sports "fairytales" about loyalty.

Then, Shireen previews her interview with Diana Matheson, Canadian Women’s National Soccer Team stalwart. They discuss her recent retirement, the building of this program and a possible Canadian league and if, in fact, history was made right at the Olympics. 

Next, they burn all the garbage in sports this week on the Burn Pile. Then they celebrate those shining light and changing sports for the good, including Torchbearer's of the Week: Jewell Loyd, Sue Bird, and Breanna Stewart who won gold with Team USA in Tokyo on Saturday night, and then just 4 days later helped lead the Seattle Storm win the first-ever WNBA Commissioner’s Cup Championship. They wrap up the show with what's good in their lives and what they are watching in sports this week.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Links

The “Field of Dreams” game fails to appeal to a wider audience https://www.pinstripealley.com/2020/11/24/21612297/yankees-mlb-field-of-dreams-game-rescheduled-criticism-representation

Wildcat Strike: Sports Show the Possibilities of Collective Action https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/wildcat-labor-strike-sports-possibilities

12-year-old girl banned from playing in Sask. town over dressing room dispute on co-ed team: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/girl-banned-sask-hockey-1.6132201

‘He made me hate soccer’: Players say they left NWSL’s Spirit over coach’s verbal abuse https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/08/11/richie-burke-nwsl-spirit-verbal-abuse

Commentary: ‘Rape is not an NCAA violation’: How clearing Baylor puts women at risk https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2021-08-15/rape-not-ncaa-violation-how-baylor-ruling-puts-women-at-risk

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to this episode of Burn It All Down. It's the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Brenda Elsey, and I'm joined by my fabulous co-hosts, Shireen Ahmed and Lindsay Gibbs. We are going to talk about what athletes owe to their teams and to their fans. We're going to take out the collective garbage in sports this week and burn it, and we're going to celebrate the people trying to change all that. But before we do: this week, Major League Baseball organized a White Sox versus Yankee game in Iowa, that they dubbed the “Field of Dreams” game. CC Sabathia responded this way…

CC Sabathia: What are your thoughts on it?

Speaker: I don't know much about it. I ain't seen the movie or nothing. [laughs]

CC Sabathia: That's what I keep telling these motherfuckers. Black people don't give a fuck about Field of Dreams, planting no fucking corn…We don't care about none of that shit, bro. Like, at all.

Brenda: Thoughts? Shireen.

Shireen: Okay. So, I saw Field of Dreams, but wasn't really into the baseball, like, right now in care about the baseball because of the Toronto Blue Jays. But I never…I like corn. I don't know if that helps, but like, just in terms of like Field of Dreams, they mean this pivotal moment associated with baseball. I'm kind of like, I don't really get that. And there's other pivotal moments and readings and pieces of history that I associate…Like, A League of Their Own is more relevant, maybe, for a conversation about baseball, even though it's all white people and there's very little about Black women's contributions to baseball. So yeah. I don't know. Not feeling that, not feeling it. It's also maybe brown people don't care about it either. So…

Brenda: Yeah. The nostalgia for corn just reminds me of Children of the Corn and–

Lindsay: Oh, I hate that movie so much!

Brenda: Like, I don't understand thinking of that as like a happy place. Lindsay?

Lindsay: Oh my god. It's the only scary movie that's ever given me nightmares. [laughter] Just…Oh my god. Why would you do that? 

Brenda: So bad. I’m sorry. I had no idea, because I share your trauma. It's awful. 

Lindsay: I have a confession. I mean, I've never seen Field of Dreams either. I've done most, very, very white things in my very, very white upbringing, but I did not see Field of Dreams. I missed that. And I'm okay with it. I grew up watching the really cheesy baseball movies, like Rookie of the Year and Angels in the Outfield were like my favorites with my neighbors. [laughs] So like, we watched those all the time. So those are my baseball movies. And if they could actually get, you know, real life angels, or find a way to like rig players so they could actually fly, now that could be some nostalgia I could really, really get into. 

Shireen: The only thing I forgot to mention was I had one tweet about this that made me really happy. Alex Wong, friend of the show, tweeted, “If baseball can have a Field of Dreams game then the Raptors should be allowed to play regular season inside Pacific Mall.” Which is an east Asian famous mall in Markham. And if you're from Toronto you get this reference, and I love it.

Brenda: Wow. That’s that. [laughter] After a full year of speculation, Lionel Messi announced through tears that he was leaving Barcelona FC after 21 years, this week. Within a few days, it followed that he'd be playing for Paris Saint Germain, PSG, and Barcelona even pretty quickly painted over the mural of Messi in Camp Nou. This is just a year after Barcelona had refused to release Messi and put a nearly $900 million transfer fee on him. They forced him out this time around due to club financial mismanagement. But regardless of that fact, so many in the media were quick to blame Messi's quote unquote “exorbitant” $30 million a year salary, and suggested if he really cared about the club, he would play for free.

So, I'd like to have a conversation about these ideas, “greedy” athletes and what they deserve and what they don't deserve. In the end, the truth is that Spanish law wouldn't have allowed Messi to play for free. In fact, he would have had to take 50% of his salary from the year before, so that employers don't manipulate labor and the amount that they pay labor. So, Barcelona couldn't even come up with that. And remember that Messi jerseys make Barcelona more than that salary every year – just his jersey makes an estimated $40 million profit for Barcelona. Now, he had the most appearances of any Barça player in history. The rest of the nine are Spanish, of the top 10. 408 more goals than the next leading scorer for Barcelona in their history. The next player who tries to be the top scorer in Barcelona will need 400 more than him. I can't even…I know for US audiences, it's really hard to even translate how incredible that is. Even Suárez, who you might know, he scored 500 more goals than Luis Suárez.

So, why do we fall for this? Why do journalists fall for it? Why do clubs keep peddling this bait and switch, that somehow the reasons for financial difficulties of a club fall on the players, and that they're greedy? And how can we get out of this paradigm of portraying them as ultimately responsible for the failure of what just is a corrupt, capitalist business? Linz?

Lindsay: [laughs] Sorry, it's just…It’s quite a big question, Brenda. Jesus. [laughter]

Brenda: I want you to answer it. I think if anyone can answer these questions, it’sBurn It All Down, with our intersectional analysis. [laughs]

Lindsay: I agree. Like you said, Brenda – fans, the media, they fall for it every single time. And as we know in sports, this concept of loyalty is often treated as a one way street, you know? But I just keep thinking about the importance of players unions and the importance of player rights, and the importance of making sure that players are able to, when their needs are not being met by a club anymore, when they're not being taken care of either financially or emotionally, or, you know, insert reason here, that there are mechanisms in place so that they can find situations that are better for them, just like we know owners will find players that better fit their system or better fit their needs in an instant, without really caring about the well-being of the players who have been there.

So, I just did a piece on Spinsters about the WNBA union and the kind of the forming of it, and it took til their second contract for them to earn free agency. And so that was 2003. So the fact that even as recently as 20 years ago that was being withheld from WNBA players…And I talked to the first union leader, Pamela Wheeler, who said that was the holy grail for her, like, you know, fighting and earning that. That strikes me that they're looking for ways for players to have the ability to pick where they want to go and play for the teams and the cities and the owners that they want to play with, and not the ones that drafted them or chose them when they were 13 years old – like what happens in European football. So, when unions are fighting for it, that always says something to me when that's the most important thing that they're fighting for. [laughter]

Brenda: I mean, yeah. You bring up the comparison with Europe and it’s amazing to me. And I know I go on about this, but the fact that a 14 year old could be in Spain and as a worker could, as a full-time worker at that point, be prohibited from playing in any other country. Not only like he couldn't even go and play for Argentina again, unless the Argentine Federation could come up with $900 million, which is like never possible. So you're right. Free agency is really important. And not focusing on the individual, you know, unions really help that narrative to be like, hey, it's not Marta’s fault that the women's soccer league collapsed because she took 10,000 extra dollars. Because capital doesn't pay workers more than what they're worth voluntarily. That's just a fundamental truth of capitalism that we keep getting told isn't true, that workers are somehow stealing away…Anyway. Shireen? 

Shireen: Well, just on that point as well about Marta. People forget that when Neymar Jr asked for his salary, he shut down an entire women's team! So the argument is not only capitalistic, it's also incredibly sexist. Like, I did hear some critique – mainly from this show as well as from Brenda about it. So, it's not as if there was an absence of that criticism, but I'm just saying, even the way that we gauge and we interrogate that generally is unfair by many standards. And there's many layers of complexity here.

Brenda: Do you remember how Fiat took money from its workers in order to pay Ronaldo's salary at Juventus?

Shireen: Yep, absolutely. Like again, for the superstars, we don't see the same critique. We don't see the same approach, when in fact it's terrible, actually shaving off wages to give more money to a bazillionaire. It's just terrible. I don't even have a…Like, the only thing I can think of is like everybody pay 50 cents more for Amazon shipping so Jeff Bezos can have another dick-shaped spaceship. [Brenda laughs] I don't even understand. That’s the only reference I have off the top of my head. But just to go off what Lindsay was talking about – and her episode was amazing with Spinsters, you really need to check it out – one of the things that made me think about this is Amira actually had written a lot on labor solidarity and Black athletes, and there's this really cool piece she has in Bitch Media from last year just sort of talking about the ways in which the WNBA are stalwarts for this type of collaborative and collective action and how the wildcat strike of 2020, which was also compounded by trauma in Black communities and in racialized communities.

And I think that's things that we also can separate, was the effect of this in racialized communities as well. And one of the things is – I’m quoting Amira on this – “the recent sporting strike reminds us that athletes are workers and that labor resistance is a key tool for Black liberation.” The whole thing is great, but that really struck out for me, and how collective action is a tool of resistance and we need to keep that in mind as well.

Brenda: And how I think, you know, you take something like athletes and their platform is big and it is important when we have these narratives like, oh, this person's greedy, this person's greedy. It's not the club. It's not the team. It's not, you know…That that does shape the way we look at relations between labor and capitalism and bosses and workers more generally. Sports is a metaphor for so many things. So, it shapes the way we see labor relations beyond sports, I think. So, why does the media continue to blame individual players? And I want to talk a little bit about instances where we've seen this really affect players. Lindsay?

Lindsay: You know, sometimes the media needs to be smacked over the head with the fact that loyalty doesn't actually get players what they think it does, right. That loyalty isn't the be all end all for players, and that they don't have the control within this system. And I think, you know, it's a little bit different because this isn't like club play, but you know, what we saw happen with Nneka Ogwumike and USA Basketball this summer, you know, speaking of loyalty, USA Basketball had started this year round program to help prepare and drum up excitement for this Olympic games. Nneka had dedicated herself to that. She had been to every single USA Basketball camp, even when everyone else was taking time off or going overseas. She had played in Serbia during in the world championships. She was the MVP of that tournament. When lots of elite stars were sitting out and not going, she was the one showing up for USA Basketball time and time again. And she was left off the Olympic squad for the third time in a row. This was the third time.

She's been very open about the devastation she felt and still feels, you know, and how betrayed she feels. And if there's anyone who's been loyal to the women's game and the United States, like it’s Nneka Ogwumike. I mean, she's the president of the player's association. She leads the way for everyone. I saw M.A. Voepel of ESPN has really been going hard about how unjust this is, and a lot of reporters just going in, and I think it's just an example of how, you know, I mean, especially for Black women: loyalty isn't the answer always. Like, that doesn't solve all the problems. It's not this one size fits all guarantee for success. And it's just stating how Nneka was treated, and…I don't know, I just want to send my love to her. 

Shireen: Lindsay, did Nneka end up playing for Nigeria during the Olympics as well?

Lindsay: No, FIBA did not allow her eligibility, which is also just bullshit. USA Basketball did release her from USA Basketball and, you know, supported her claim to go play for Nigeria. It was FIBA. I mean, she has Nigerian citizenship and you see players from Nigeria or who have connections to Nigeria playing on teams all over the globe. And then, you know, to talk about how much you want to grow the women's game and grow the sport globally, and then thwart something that would have been so huge for Nigerian basketball, like, is another conversation.

Brenda: But it's a good example of how rarely is it that clubs get the same kind of flack that players do in regards to loyalty, right? Because there's this kind of veil between owners and management and fans, which players don't have. I mean, I was pretty disgusted by the glee over…I don't know if you all saw, Dennis Schröder, the LA Lakers player, who was offered mid-season a bigger contract, and then he kind of gambled and said, no, I'm not going to take that. I'm going to try to get something more. He ended up with a one-year deal with the Celtics for $5 million. And everyone was like, ha ha, you greedy person trying to get more. And it's like, wow. Okay. Like, so what? [Lindsay laughs] Like, yay, Lakers? Who wins there? We win because we feel like we saw somebody get less money? Gross. Like, even Shaquille O’Neal and other players were like, ha ha ha. And it's like, okay, that's a really sick tendency to kind of have glee in that. Like, whose side are you on? Shireen, I know you have somebody too, you feel like maybe at a similar rough go. 

Shireen: I do. This one hits close to home. And of course I went through a period of a love affair with the Montreal Canadiens the season, albeit briefly, because they did a real good job of breaking that down and reminding me how terrible they are as an organization. When PK Subban was traded to the Nashville Predators, it was truly a shock to Montreal Canadiens fans because PK Subban is a Black hockey player and one of the few. In over 700, there's less than 30 who play in the NHL. And he is an athlete who has actually donated the most money in the city to Victoria Hospital. It really did leave fans heartbroken. He was like an enthusiastic, exuberant defender. He played really well. His stats were really good. He was beloved. He was actually really good friends with Elise Béliveau, who is the widow of Jean Béliveau, one of the most storied players in Montreal Canadiens history. You know the Habs, you know who Jean Béliveau is

 So it was heartbreaking, but also the elements of racism at play here…PK Subban was accused of having a “bad attitude” or being “flamboyant” in his celebration, or “aggressive,” which are not actual things. They're just not things. But it's okay for the Montreal Canadiens to draft someone who's been convicted of sex crimes in Sweden? Like, that's okay? Hi, Logan, Mailloux. Like, what? So, I mean, again, the bar at which things are compared…So, PK Subban was great about it, was like, thank you. He's now at the New Jersey Devils. But he had an opportunity to be loved and be beloved, and I mean, he was sad about it. Like, Montreal was his home. He's also originally from Toronto, so Montreal is closer to home. He made the best of his time at Nashville, did really, really well, went to the Stanley Cup playoffs with that team.

But like, I still think that's one for me. There's a sort of a conundrum of what the player wants and feels the fan wants. And then again, we see the separation, not of church and state, but like of team and reality. And what team really means here, like, owners and organizations, and in this case Jeff Molson, who's terrible as a person generally.

Lindsay: Yeah. And I mean, the optics or whatever of this, often most of these owners are old white men, the vast vast majority of them. And you know, player movement has been kind of the most prevalent in the NBA, which is predominantly Black. And of course the media is predominantly white. So you have a lot of white people complaining about and shitting on Black players for agency, and it just goes back to what Amira has written about, about how important labor solidarity and labor movements are to Black athletes and the Black community in general. And I mean, we saw recently…I don't even know if this was a dogwhistle. It was the loudest dogwhistle I've heard. But Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards and Washington Mystics, gave a press conference, and he talked about how Russell Westbrook had just been traded to Los Angeles, to the Lakers.

And Leonsis said, “We had a superstar player with the Wizards. He had an opportunity, he wanted to be traded, and I was dealing with that as we were announcing Alex Ovechkin,” – the star for the Capitals – “I couldn't help, but self-reflect on what a difference it is. Here's a great player in Russell Westbrook, played in OKC, wanted to be traded. Went to Houston, wanted to be traded. Came to DC, wanted to be traded. And is now in LA. He's an unbelievably great person and an unbelievably great player. But that's the difference between the NBA and the NHL, I suppose.” Hmmm. Difference between the NBA and NHL. Hmm! Wonder what he could be talking about now.

I mean, this is just incredibly rich coming from Ted. First of all, they have the most quote unquote “loyal” player in the league, Bradley Beal, who has stayed on that team despite the team giving them nothing. And then just a year ago they traded away John Wall, another player who just was the pillar of the DC community and the DC team. And once again, that loyalty, it's not a two-way street, we see. And it just should be said that Russell Westbrook, from all reports, he went to the front office. He wanted to play in his home town, and he went to the front office and said, can we work out something, a trade with the Lakers, that is positive for both teams? And the Wizards came away with a huge haul in this! Like, the Wizards got off great in this trade, everyone will say. From all accounts, Russell Westbrook did this in the most quote-unquote “respectful,” by the book – you know what I mean – way. So, I don't know. Mini burn pile here for Ted Leonsis. 

Brenda: [laughs] And we know they will fire him when they don't want him. I want to pivot a little to the question of fans. I think over the last year because of social media there's a lot of false sense of intimacy with players. In the women's game, it's built up some good following and some good momentum, and it's been good for activism in a number of ways. But it's also been kind of scary to watch the amount of racism, sexism, of course transphobia, being thrown at these athletes through social media. And at the same time, coming with a kind of like scary sense of intimacy that they feel with the athletes that isn't really the case. Shireen?

Shireen: So, it took like decades for me to realize this particular situation I'm going to speak of. Wayne Gretzky had more to do with us than I thought. So, I was a young child, cute little Shireen in the 80s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, loves the Edmonton Oilers, and they win the Stanley Cup, and just off the heels of their Stanley Cup win, which we enjoyed, and there was reverberations of happiness through the hockey world – Wayne Gretzky is traded to the LA Kings. What!? Where? LA? Like, they have hockey there? What?! So, there's a sense of betrayal. There's a sense of, how could this happen? How is this even possible? Then I went on to do the next thing that I was socially conditioned to do, which is blame his partner, model and actress Janet Jones, who I thought lured him to LA. I was quite precocious as a child and I made up this whole story that she was the reason he left.

But it was really actually about Peter Pocklington, owner of the Edmonton Oilers. You want to talk about what Pocklington came away with and what the Oilers got? They actually came away with $15 million at that time. They came up with three first round draft picks, like, it was unbelievable. And I mean, there were after effects of that trade – and we'll put this in the show notes – Sporting News sort of had like the trade chain of what happened from Oilers to Kinds and where everybody went after that. But it's really phenomenal. That's one of the most poignant things I remember of my fandom years, of that trade having an emotional effect on me. 

Brenda: Yeah. And you definitely weren't the only person, Shireen, that felt as though Gretzky was being led by the nose. It's, you know, the Yoko Ono syndrome. We're just going to blame the woman partner in it for anything so that we can keep valorizing this hero. Linz? 

Lindsay: One thing I would just want to mention is that sometimes I think athletes don't handle things the best, and I understand why, but on the other end of the spectrum, I remember like, I didn't love how everything went down with Anthony Davis and the New Orleans Pelicans. I think he wore a shirt on his last day that said something like “That's all, folks!” after, you know...And I know there was a lot of contention with ownership, and I totally understand that, but yeah. I don't know. Something I'm wrestling with is like, it's also okay to be like, I didn't love…He had the right to do that, but I didn't love the way he did it.

Brenda: Right. There are some times, I mean…What you're bringing up is important too. I mean, there are some times when athletes behave like regularly flawed human beings [laughter] and we don't really need to feel that sorry for them when they do things that are like purposefully rude to fans or whatever. I don't think any of us thought, even as much as we love LeBron today, I don't think anybody would go out there and say the decision announcement to bring his talents to Miami or whatever is something that really looks good, even from afar at this point. 

Shireen: Tacky as fuck. That was tacky. 

Brenda: Yeah. And so…But without weaponizing it, as Shireen put it, I think we should end on some maybe sweet note. Are there fairytale stories of athletes and their clubs or the cities that they're in? If we could just quickly…What comes to mind, Linz?

Lindsay: I mean, Giannis, Giannis, Giannis, right?

Shireen: [laughs] Aww.

Lindsay: Giannis stayed with Milwaukee and then didn't go elsewhere to build a super team. He said he wanted to do it in Milwaukee. Milwaukee did go and get him important pieces, which is something that most ownership groups don't actually fulfill doing. But I loved getting to see Giannis win it for Milwaukee. I mean, that was just awesome. It was incredible. And you know, so I have to a little bit in my brain justify, like, why did I love it quite that much? You know? [laughs] But I think it goes back to I loved that story because it was authentic and because it worked out and because that's great. But you can also realize that that situation with Giannis, that situation is just special, and just appreciate that specialness when it does come. And yeah. Not attack players when they seek out better situations too. 

Brenda: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And it reminded me very much of LeBron kind of winning in 2016. It was just wonderful. And kind of, you know, erased all of that terrible announcement decision yuckiness. A palate cleanser, if you will, for all time. And for me it was Steve Yzerman that had such a fairytale relationship with Detroit. And I was trying to think of an example from women's sports, and because of the instability of the leagues, because of the lack of funding and infrastructure, it's really hard to try to find such a legacy, of course, like Sue Bird, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, for me, it was. Steve Yzerman. He played all 22 seasons – beating Messi with his 21 – in Detroit. He signed all the autographs for us when we were kids. He of course has won gold for Canada. As far as I know, has not sexually harassed or racially abused anyone, which for an athlete in the Midwest of white origin, [laughs] it should be an expectation, but often isn’t.

Lindsay: Knock on wood. Knock on wood. [laughs]

Brenda: Yeah, exactly. So we love to, you know, it felt good to be able to sort of love him without any of this contract, greedy, you know, anything like that. Shireen?

Shireen: For me, there’s no other fairytale than my beloved 2019 NBA champions, the Toronto Raptors, and Kawhi Leonard, Kawhi, Kawhi, Kawhi coming from San Antonio, having the guidance of the amount of Manu Ginóbili and Tim Duncan, who we love on this show. Coach Pop, Greg Popovich. But Kawhi winning in Toronto and then deciding to leave to the LA Clippers where he has just resigned a four year contract for millions of dollars…I wasn't sad about that. I mean, I can cry into my championship ring. Kawhi had to do who – who, I also refer to him as my son – he had to do what he had to do. He had to go and make the best decision for his family. And listeners can't see this, but Brenda's wiping away fake tears. Of happiness! We can have tears of happiness and joy.

I mean, if we had lost the championship, this particular segment of my contribution may have been different, but we won. And that is the fairytale, that it is something that I know I mention very modestly on the show and have in the past, but we did win the championship that year. And we're the longest reigning champions, maybe because of a pandemic. [Lindsay laughs] But the point is that it was a wonderful moment in sports. So, I love it for me. I love it for you. I love it for sports. Thank you, Kawhi Leonard. Love you. Will always love you.

Lindsay: I don't know how to transition from that. So I'm just going to bull right ahead. I'm just going to bull right ahead! [laughs] I just want to say one thing that bothers me about these conversations, and I think we saw it with Messi because, you know, he had been with Barca for so long, right? Since they were a kid. And they talk about how they treated his, him and his family, and treated him when he was young. And with Giannis, a lot of the conversation around Giannis has been, you know, what the Bucks would do for him. You know, they would have random staff members staying up late at night with him when he didn't want to be alone, staying in his place. And there's this sense that because of actions of kindness and generosity, that loyalty for the athletes then has to be like forever and never ending.

And I just want to say, like, those actions from teams are not just a pure acts of kindness. [laughs] They are to get performances on the court, ultimately. And that doesn't mean that kindness isn't a part of it, right? But ultimately, this is still a business. They wanted Giannis to feel comfortable so that he would stay in Milwaukee and develop as a player and be better on the court. And they realized that taking care of him off the court was a part of that. So, Giannis had already repaid that loyalty a long time ago, right? By just developing into who he is. Same with Messi, right? Any “loyalty” quote-unquote Messi owed, like, it's been repaid one trillion times over. So I just want to say, these acts of niceness, A) aren’t just pure of heart, and B) loyalty isn't a promise for life! [laughs]

Brenda: For this week's interview, Shireen talks soccer with Canadian women's national soccer team stalwart, Diana Matheson, on her recent retirement, the building of this program, and if in fact history was made right at the Olympics.

Diana Matheson: And we can build with, you know, 20 years plus knowledge of women's sports, of lived experience in clubs and professional environments, and we can, you know, soak in all the knowledge we have across this country and build something really cool from scratch. So, it could be actually a really unique and innovative experience, and we could end up with a league that's built for the players and the fans in a way that no one else around the world has done yet, and that could be pretty cool.

Brenda: Now it's time for everybody's part of the show where we take all the proverbial garbage in sports for this week, throw it on a giant pile and burn it. Shireen. 

Shireen: This week was bad. This week was really, really bad. Like I actually mentioned to somebody, I think it was friend of the show Bonnie Tsui, see that we probably need a volcano. I don't think a burn pile will suffice. [Brenda laughs] But this particular…And thank you for this being sent to me by a flame thrower on Twitter. Sexism and hockey is alive and well, and even attacking 12 year old girls. Berkeley Trayhorne, a 12 year old hockey player in Saskatchewan, was released from her minor club because they cannot accommodate the new co-ed rules and give her a dressing room. So, she essentially has to stop playing hockey.

This is horrible. She's from a very small town called Dalmeny in Saskatchewan, about 25 kilometers southwest of Saskatoon, has less than 2000 people. And this actual issue has caused a huge rift in the community. And it's really hard. And she's used to playing co-ed teams all the time. There is another girl's hockey team about an hour away, but she preferred playing in her own community. So what this has left is that there's a lawsuits flying back and forth from her parents against volunteer board members. It's legal action rather, a human rights complaint. Board resignations, allegations of misogyny, vulgar language and inappropriate behavior, people walking in on her as she's changing. It's been a problem. And at the center of this is this 12 year old player.

And to quote from the CBC article that we'll have in the show notes, “It just makes me sad,” said Berkeley, who's been on the ice for half of her life. She's not an elite athlete. She just wants to play hockey with her friends. Then she says, “Sometimes it makes me angry.” I do also want to say, excellent reporting by Bonnie Allen for this, because these stories actually matter. And unless there is some type of appeal, this type of systemic sexism in hockey in particular will not change. I want to take this and I want to burn it. Burn.

All: Burn.

Brenda: Oof. Linz.

Lindsay: Whew. Like Shireen said, it's been quite the week. So on Tuesday in the NWSL, the Washington Spirit announced that head coach Richie Burke had stepped down from the head coaching job, citing health concerns. The team said in the official announcement that he would be reassigned to the Spirit front office. Well, there was more to that story. The very next day, the Spirit announced that he had been suspended, pending an investigation. Why? Well, the Washington Post, with kudos to Molly Hensley-Clancy for her reporting on this, alleged abusive behavior by Burke towards current and former players. Four players interviewed for the Washington Post said that Burke, there was a pattern of emotional and verbal abuse. He regularly berated the players, and also there was a pattern of racially insensitive behavior.

One player went on the record – that was Kaiya McCullough – who described an incident in which Burke used the n-word at a team dinner. A quote from McCullough said, “I was 100% in a situation where I was being emotionally abused. He created this environment where I knew I wasn't playing as well, because I was so, so scared to mess up and be yelled at. It crippled my performance and it made me super anxious. He made me hate soccer.”

This is devastating for so many reasons. I had interviewed Kaiya soon after she started with the Spirit, I think before even at training camp, and she's very politically active, very into activism, and was so excited about coming to DC and starting her career and getting a chance to be in a place like DC. And so it's just thinking how quickly that turned is just devastating, thinking that this was allowed to go on, thinking that the Spirit tried to cover this up, and then, you know, it goes back to the fact that Richie Burke is who we knew he was. Shortly after Burke was hired in 2018, two former youth players called him emotionally abusive and said he was using homophobic slurs. But Burke, who was in with majority owner of the Spirit, Steve Baldwin, got hired anyways, and all was swept under the rug.

According to reporting by Meg Linehan and Steph Yang over The Athletic, apparently something similar happened last year when Spirit assistant coach Tom Torres left the club, according to the club to pursue other interests. But now multiple sources are saying that he was actually left due to concerning behavior, where he was intoxicated and making inappropriate comments to players. So I want to burn the extent we will go to, to excuse abuse of coaching. I want to burn coaches who think that abuse is teaching, who stripped the love of soccer from these players, especially from women and Black women.

I want to burn the NWSL for not having the correct policies in place and for allowing this to go on unfazed. How did Richie Burke with all we knew about him coming in, how were you not paying attention to that situation so so so closely? I will never, ever understand. Kudos and Kaiya McCullough, Molly Hensley-Clancy, and the other players who came forward. Burn, burn, burn.

All: Burn.

Brenda: Here's a quick and blazing. This past week, Andrew Marchard reported for the New York Post that Major League Baseball was in quote-unquote “significant negotiations” with the sports website Barstool about hosting MLB sponsored gambling on the site and hosting games. I think everyone who's listening this far into the show is well aware of why this is exactly part of a toxic sports culture that needs to go. The fact that MLB wants to build what it calls “new viewership for baseball,” you know, then a team in the Dominican Republic. Do something constructive. Get your heads out of this disgusting website. I mean, Barfstool is the worst. It promotes the worst kind of toxicity, racism, sexism. They’re disgusting. I don't need to say anything more. Burn.

All: Burn.

Brenda: And finally, though she's not on the show this week, we didn't want to let this raging volcanic burn pile go without allowing our own Jessica Luther, who's been such a part of bringing this story to the public again and again, to talk about Baylor.. 

Jessica: On Wednesday last week, the NCAA finally announced sanctions against Baylor in regards to the school's athletic department failing to handle reports of gendered violence appropriately. This was nearly six years to the day since Dan Solomon and I first broke the story of a Baylor football player on trial for sexual assault. The NCAA's committee on infractions, in their report about Baylor, wrote that our article questioned Baylor's handling of the matter and we “suggested the existence of cultural issues and a pattern of obfuscation within Baylor's football program.”

The article blew up, went viral, and so the school responded by hiring an outside law firm to look into the matter. In the spring of 2016, that law firm announced its findings. Specific failings in the athletic department and the football program are found, “including a failure to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player, to take action in response to reports of sexual assault by multiple football players, and to take action in response to a report of dating violence.” Lots of reporting by ESPN’s Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach corroborated this.

The NCAA’s own report, the one released last week, said as much too. And yet the NCAA's committee on infractions did not punish Baylor for its failures around gendered violence in their athletic department. The committee did find some other issues, some impermissible benefits, so Baylor got some minor recruitment and – this bit gets me – a whopping $5,000 fine. I had a piece at the LA Times over the weekend where I wrote a lot about this non-finding when it comes to Baylor's failure around gendered violence. The short of it is, the NCAA’s committee could not punish Baylor because there are no NCAA rules to break around gendered violence, because the NCAA has never made any. That's what the committee says.

That's what I've been saying for almost eight years now, when I stumbled onto this fact while doing some reporting. I wrote about it in my book that was published five years ago. The NCAA has long been aware of this, and has only ever done lip service on this issue. So I wasn't surprised last week by the NCAA's decision, but I was disappointed, and I was deeply sad. I think for a lot of people, these cases exist in some abstract space. Like, you might know some details, you might even remember some names. Plenty of things I read about in the news are like that for me, if not less. We can all only hold so much. But for these cases that I work on, there are very specific people whose names and faces come to mind when I think about them.

On Wednesday, I opened the page on the NCAA site and read the first sentence, quote, “A division one committee on infractions hearing panel could not conclude that Baylor violated NCAA rules when it failed to report allegations of and address sexual interpersonal violence committed on its campus.” I started crying immediately – kind of surprised myself, actually – before I even got to the second sentence. Amira can attest to this; we were on a meeting together, and I had to get off for a minute or two to compose myself. Because when I read that sentence, the very first thing I thought about were all the survivors and specifically the survivors who were Baylor athletes – I know of at least a soccer player, a volleyball player, and multiple equestrian athletes.

There’s a lot to say here, and I'll probably be stewing on it for a long time, but what I want to concentrate on in this moment and what I want you all to take away is that the NCAA has no rules around gendered violence, and that means they refuse to even pretend to care about survivors who are athletes, who are athletes harmed by other athletes. I don't think the NCAA would necessarily do a great job with those rules if they existed, but they don't get to abdicate that responsibility. And so today and every day, really, that's what I want to burn. Burn.

All: Burn.

Brenda: It is time to celebrate the wonderful people making good in sport and doing wonderful and amazing accomplishing things. And so our honorable mentions of the week go to trailblazers, literal torchbearers, two Olympians who won their country's first medal: Polina Guryeva, who won silver in weightlifting for Turkmenistan, and Alessandra Pirelli, who won bronze in the women's trap competition for San Marino. Yes. Country population: 34,000. Shireen?

Shireen: Our sparklers of the week are Chivas Femenil. They opened a youth academy, the first of its kind for girls, and hoping to develop into professionals in Mexico. Shout out to you. Very exciting. Also, sluggers of the week: the Houston Astros RBI defended their world series softball crown. Team captain Turiya Coleman led the team with a 5-3 victory over the Atlanta Braves RBI. This is amazing.

Brenda: And can I get a drum roll, please? Lindsay, who are our torchbearers?

Lindsay: Jewell Loyd, Sue Bird, and Breanna Stewart, who won gold with Team USA in women's basketball in Tokyo – the seventh straight gold for Team USA, I should say – on Saturday night, US time, Sunday, Tokyo time, and then just days later helped lead the Seattle Storm, you know, that cross country flight celebration [laughter] only a few days passed, and then helped lead the Seattle Storm to the first ever WNBA commissioner's cup championship with a dominating win over the Connecticut Sun, earning $30,000 each per player. This is extra bonus money for players. So, we love to see that. But I am still recovering from just staying up late at night watching the Olympics. I have absolutely zero clue how Jewell Loyd, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart managed to do this. And so all I can do is say [laughs] you’re our torchbearers of the week. Congratulations! [laughter]

Brenda: In dark times, we like to discuss what's good in our world. Lindsay?

Lindsay: While I haven't started reading it yet, I did finally get our friend of the show Mirin Fader's new book on Giannis, and I cannot wait to read that. So that's what's good. Love seeing…I don't know, love seeing writers succeed, love seeing success. And this week I went to a…If you're on Twitter, Instagram, I talked about this because it was the most exciting thing that's happened in my life. But I took my dog Mo to a dog bar, an actual...No, it's not a bar that allows dogs. That's not what this is. This is a dog park that allows humans to drink. And it is incredible! [Brenda laughs] So there’s this play area and I've been wanting to take him because it's so close to my place, but I've been a little bit nervous, like, about how he'd act, and I didn't want him to ruin it. But we finally went. He wore himself out. He only got in trouble for humping three times, which as someone said on Twitter, is better than most men at bars. And then I just died laughing. [laughter]

But he had so much fun. And I don't know, it's just this the greatest thing. You can buy drinks, alcoholic, non-alcoholic, a $25 pass for the whole month allows you just to take your dog whenever. And so I can just on really hot days instead of walking him an hour, I can work out inside and then take him to the dog park in the evening and have a drink. I'm so excited! [laughs]

Brenda: I love this for you and Mo very, very much.

Lindsay: Life changing. Life changing.

Brenda: That is life changing. For me, this is really the start of my sabbatical. [Lindsay gasps] I know. So you won't hear me complaining about grading. That's going to go to Shireen for this year. But maybe you'll hear me complain/celebrate writing. So, I started writing a new book, which is under contract from University of North Carolina, called Losing to Win, which is about sports and politics in Latin America. Of course. Because what else? And yeah, I'm pretty psyched about it. I got to get back into the writing group. So, I'm happy. That's what's good. That's what's good. Shireen? 

Shireen: Okay. So, Brenda has spilled my happiest secrets. Just want to say thank you to Burn It All Down for holding space for me. I think I was less insufferable than you all thought I would be about Canada winning gold. [Brenda laughs] This is the first time I've been back on the show since, so of course I'm going to name it. I'm going to talk about it. It's still bringing me tremendous amounts of joy. I wrote a piece on TSN about it and the importance of this team that I love so much. Also, I did win a Peloton bike. I actually have not had a chance to use it yet because I'm in the east coast of Canada and Prince Edward Island, otherwise known as heaven on earth, and I'm obsessed with it. And it's my happy place as I go through personal crunch time for submitting my thesis and then defending it to wrap up my grad program.

So Peloton, yes, I will be insufferable again, but this time with Amira. I'm very excited. I've been using the app infrequently, but I'm very excited. I never win anything, and as Brenda said, last week, I actually don’t. And it was incredibly generous. The piece that Amir wrote to put in my nomination just made me cry. It just made me cry, because it was unbelievably touching and very telltale of Amira to want wonderful things for other people as well. So I'm excited about that. I mentioned I'm in PEI. I love this place to pieces. It's the red earth. It's the blue ocean. The Atlantic is my oldest friend in the world, and I am so happy to be here.

I would also just like to say, I have some fun news, is that I have been hired to instruct reporting sports class at X University, otherwise known as Ryerson University, but I call it X University in solidarity with Indigenous communities. I will be teaching so I will be complaining, and no, I won't be throwing the papers down the stairs and the furthest one gets the A, which is always what I advise Brenda to do, which she doesn't do. I'm really excited about this. I'm very nervous. I check my class, sort of the list, every day. There’s 36 students, so they're going to have to hear me every Thursday from 6 to 9.

I will be obviously using the work of my co-hosts, clearly, to teach, because I think that Burn It All Down has informed the way that I want to practice journalism and the way that I'm going to teach it. They don't know this, but my co-hosts will also be guest speakers in my class. [Lindsay laughs] I think they already agreed to that, kind of. So this is really a big deal for me, and I'm very appreciative of the good vibes you want to send my way. And if any of you instructors, professors have teaching tips, please send them to me. 

Lindsay: Those are some lucky students, Shireen. I am so excited for you. I'm so excited for you, and for them. 

Brenda: Yeah. I'm so excited you get to do the teaching this semester [laughs] and I can just do writing. Okay. So, this week a lot is going on. But look for the buildup, and we are also going to be doing a preview of the Paralympics, which start August 24th. There's also WNBA action, as we've mentioned. NWSL, European football is right back on. So the schedule is pretty full right now.

That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link to our merch at our Bonfire store. And thank you, thank you to our patrons. Your support means everything. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. I'm Brenda Elsey, on behalf of my co-hosts Lindsay Gibbs and Shireen Ahmed: burn on, but not out.