Episode 222: Myths of Morality and Inspiration
In this episode, Jessica Luther and Amira Rose Davis are together -- in person! -- to breakdown two (of countless) harmful myths in sport. First: that all coaches are altruistic, good and have a strong moral compass (using Urban Meyer as a perfect example of how this is not true). Second, that women's sports exist only to be inspirational.
Following this discussion is a preview of Shireen Ahmed's interview with Jashvina Shah and Evan Moore about their book, "Game Misconduct: Hockey's Toxic Culture and How to Fix It." Then, they burn some of the garbage in sports this week on the Burn Pile. Next, they celebrate those shining light in sports, including Torchbearer of the Week pioneering journalist, Claire Smith, who will be the new co-director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media at Temple University. They wrap up the show with what's good in their worlds and what they are watching in sports this week.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg, with production help from Kelly Jones. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica, and I'm here with Amira.
Amira: Hello!
Jessica: This week, we’re going to talk about two myths in sports that are on our minds: the idea that coaches are morally good because they are coaches, and that women's sports exist in large part to be inspirational. Obviously that means we will be talking about the NWSL, but we're also going to be talking about Urban Meyer.
Amira: Urban Fucking Meyer.
Jessica: And we'll burn things that deserve to be burned, highlight the torchbearers who are giving us hope during this dark time, let you know what's good in our world, and tell you what we're watching this week. But first, before we get into all of that, Amira, we're sitting in the same room right now!
Amira: We are sitting right now together. I find it actually quite honestly hilarious. As you know, I moved to Austin in July, and I live six minutes from one Jessica Luther, and so for almost three months – two months, some amount of months – we have been living that close to each other–
Jessica: And seeing each other!
Amira: And seeing each other all the time. And yet we had to go to Houston, two and a half hours south of us, to actually get in a room and record together. So we are here in Houston. We're actually at the 28th floor of a hotel downtown. So, we have a beautiful view of the skyline.
Jessica: I'm actually looking at Minute Maid Park.
Amira: They have the roof open.
Jessica: And the Astros just won their second…baseball division…game.
Amira: Yes, Astros are up 2-0 in the ALDS. [Jessica laughs] So, we are here, doing very exciting reporting on stuff that is soon to come. We were right across the street during the Astros game. Also, did you see the Red Sox won?
Jessica: Okay, we’re talking about–
Amira: Distracted by the excellence, I know. [Jessica laughs] Anyways. Yes, we are all together, and it was very exciting because we've never – besides our live show with all of our co-hosts – this is the first time that we are doing a regular episode in the same room. So, we’ll see how it goes.
Jessica: Yeah. Let’s do it. So, this week we want to talk about some myths in sports that have been bothering us, that have to do with what's going on in the sports world. And the first one, we want to talk about Urban Meyer and specifically this idea that coaches are moral. So, he got in trouble–
Amira: But before we do that, I think we should explain to the folks who Urban Meyer is. So, if you're in the world of college football or the NFL.
Jessica: He’s now the head coach of… [laughs]
Amira: He’s now a professional football coach. You might be familiar with Urban Meyer, but if you're not, and you're just logging in and every so often see his name trending and wondering what is much to do about this shady Urban Meyer character, let us give you a quick hits of all the ways Urban Meyer's terrible. I don't even know where to start, Florida?
Jessica: Florida. So, lots of players got in trouble when he was the head coach at Florida. The most famous probably is Aaron Hernandez, but there was like a litany of them. And what we know from Aaron Hernandez’s story is that he personally intervened in order to…
Amira: Shield them from consequences.
Jessica: And as we all know, Hernandez then…Well, maybe we don't all know, but Hernandez was on trial, convicted…Was he convicted for murder? And then died by suicide in prison. But also at Florida, what was it? He left Florida because he retired, because he was sick.
Amira: He was sick. He retired.
Jessica: But that was sort of on the heels of all of this bad press.
Amira: On the heels. And then he found himself at Ohio State.
Jessica: Yes. Which is kind of like his goal. And…
Amira: There you saw another litany of things. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. And the most famous was…
Amira: His handling of Courtney Smith's abuse at the hands of her husband, a coach who worked for him–
Jessica: At Florida! And Ohio State.
Amira: At Florida, and he brought to Ohio, was kind of like a mentee of his, Zach Smith, who was abusive to his wife, Courtney. There’s text messages between Shelley, Urban's wife, Shelley Meyer.
Jessica: And they knew in Florida.
Amira: They knew in Florida. And it continued when they were in Ohio State. I suggest everybody go read Courtney's Story. When did it come out?
Jessica: A couple of weeks ago, Diana Moskovitz at Defector–
Amira: –wrote a beautiful, brilliant piece that documented this much better than I can recap. And so I recommend it again, to all those listening. But one of the things that really stood out of course in that piece was Courtney begging him, you know, she's in her hotel room watching his presser, begging him to do what's right and to tell the truth. And instead he did not.
Jessica: He lied.
Amira: He lied. He protected Zach Smith. He…
Jessica: Protected Ohio State football.
Amira: Protected Ohio State football, which is, you know, a pattern of behavior.
Jessica: He also then retired from Ohio State because of health. [laughs]
Amira: Only to pop up in the NFL and head coach!
Jessica: And he did commentating for a while, right? He was a talking head, and now is the head coach of the–
Amira: Jacksonville Jaguars. And so this week, a video went around of him…
Jessica: He’s sitting a bar in Ohio. He went to some Ohio State thing.
Amira: And there's a woman grinding up on him.
Jessica: A young, blonde woman, yeah?
Amira: His hand is in a dubious position. Hand disappears, don't know where it goes exactly. This woman, it should be said, is not Shelley Meyer. Now, I don't really give a damn about this, but apparently this is the straw that has broken the camel's back!
Jessica: Yeah. Apparently there's closed door discussions about, “Did he break the morality clause?”
Amira: The morality clause in his contract. Now we're getting statements from the Jacksonville Jaguars organization that has reprimanded him. His players, who already didn't like dude, are mad because he canceled practice instead of showing up to face his players, because he doesn't understand anything about personal accountability – even though I don't really understand what the accountability aspect of it is. He became the butt of a joke in his locker room, finally addressed it, but it's so wild to watch the moral outrage come because he was spotted with somebody who was not his wife doing a weird dance.
Jessica: When we already know all this other stuff about him!
Amira: When all this other crap has been out there!
Jessica: And they hired him knowing all of that. Like, I mean, Diana's reporting is recent and the deepest reporting on Courtney Smith and Zach Smith, but the bones of it existed. We had a sense of like what Urban had done badly, that I would say is not “moral,” at Ohio State.
Amira: Right. But this…
Jessica: This is the thing.
Amira: This is the thing. And so that made us want to think about these, you know…When Jess was like, “he violated a morality clause,” Jessica was like, why is there a morality clause anyways?
Jessica: I mean, like on some level I get it, right? Like, I'm trying to remember exactly, but I think Ohio State created a morality clause in their coaches’ contracts following Zach Smith's behavior at Ohio State. So there's a reason, right? Like, you need a reason, something, so you can get rid of these guys when they make you…Look bad? I mean, whether or not they actually care about the morality of it, right? And so like, I get the idea of it, but then you get this kind of subjective discussion on like what is moral and what is not, and what do we actually care about?
And I think my problem with all of this and thinking about these myths that we build – as Amira said, these Urban myths [Amira laughs] aha! – that we build around coaches in particular. And I've written about this before because it bothers the hell out of me, is that we have this idea that they must be moral because they are coaches, like, as if moral people go into coaching. And absolutely it matters that Urban Meyer looks like every white dude ever, like, put together. And he has that going for him. Because none of it sticks to him. But I do think part of why it's not sticking is because we just have this cultural idea that he must be good. Like, even if he's slipped up in the past, somehow you get to go back to this non neutral idea that you are good because you were coaching “boys into men.”
Amira: Mm-hmm. And it infuses you with your position of power to be that moral barometer, right? Like, you're going into these spaces, especially in the collegiate space, and you're saying you must go to class, and this is how you'll become a man, and X, Y, and Z, and so on and so forth. And yet we've seen time after time when coaches and coaching staff has fell woefully short of that expectation. We've heard from players. You know, I talk to college athletes about this all the time where they're like, oh, I didn't know that. Or they're whispering about a coach's behavior that is never talked about. And actually a lot of the time the disillusionment that comes with players and coaches is because they are looking at hypocrisy they're never addressed.
Jessica: Yeah, they’re seeing it. And like, we've talked about endlessly on the show that the system itself is exploitative, right? So, we can even…When we look at it in like a big umbrella way, where like anyone who enters into the system is in some way entering into an amoral system? So the idea of like building morality around that…But I think about this, this comes up a lot for me in my work around sexual violence and coaches in particular, because I feel like when I publish something and it's about a coach, like, part of what you're working against is people's idea that he must be good.
Amira: Right.
Jessica: So when you're like, well, here is evidence of things that have gone wrong, even though everyone will be like, “The system is bad,” somehow there's this way that they can’t–
Amira: They can’t place them within it.
Jessica: Yeah. Then it's not just that you're trying to say something about sexual violence, which people don't want to hear that to begin with. You're saying it about these people who they've imagined to be “good.”
Amira: And Jessica, I want to ask you, because this kind of will relate to our next myth that we're up against. Do you think that it's even tougher when we're thinking about men who coach in women's sports, because it's seen as such a…Like, you have to be really good.
Jessica: Yeah. Or you're like really sacrificing something.
Amira: You’re really sacrificing if you're coaching women.
Jessica: Yeah. That's a great point. And of course we're thinking about this a lot around the NWSL right now. People should go check out Brenda and Shireen’s hot take that dropped last week on this for way more information on the NWSL. But you know, multiple coaches who have now been reported for being abusive in all different kinds of ways – sexually, but also just sexist, racist, all kinds of abuse. And yeah, that's interesting to think, like, do they even get a bigger pass? Because it's like, “How nice of them to come down to the women's level,” right? It's like they're giving up the prestige, and so they must be doing it for good.
Amira: Yeah.
Jessica: Which, obviously not. And we've talked a lot about using it as a step to men’s, the “legitimate.” But yeah, I think one of the things I wanted to talk to you about with the NWSL is a thing I've been thinking a lot about around that narrative, is this idea, this myth or however you want to put it, that women's sports exists as inspiration.
Amira: Right. Inspiration porn.
Jessica: Like that's the main reason, is so that little girls can be “inspired.” I think we've seen how dangerous this is, because we've heard from so many soccer players that you can't come forward about bad things.
Amira: Which is so interesting, Jessica. And I think you're right on about this. And actually, you know, and I've talked about this before. If you look at the huge marketing force to drive girls into sports in the early 90s…Now, the early 90s is really pivotal, because it was like the first kind of generation that had come up with Title IX. And they had all these studies that girls were leaving sports around puberty – which they still are. But there was a concentrated effort by a number of corporate sponsors and leagues to get girls in sports. Now, some of y'all who are familiar, old enough, might remember the if you let me play advertisement, then you’ll see what I'm thinking of here.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely.
Amira: That was a series of girls saying the following statements into a camera while swinging on a swing set or running on a field. Also, they had a corresponding poster with all of these lines as well, that would say…
If you let me play…
You let me play sports…
I will like myself more.
I'll have more self confidence.
If you let me play sports.
If you let me play…
If you let me play, I’ll be 60% less likely to get breast cancer.
I will suffer less depression.
If you let me play sports…
I will be more likely to leave a man that beats me.
If you let me play…
I’ll be less likely to get pregnant before I want to.
I will learn.
I will learn what it means to be strong.
To be strong.
If you let me play…
Play sports.
If you let me play sports.
Amira: And it's so interesting because that same logic is actually preventing, you know…I’m thinking about that little girl who might be on a carousel saying, what if the ad said, “If you let me play, I'll be more likely to leave a coach who's abusive”? Well, actually you'll be more likely to stay with them because of the way the apparatus is set up. And I think about that a lot, because this idea about inspiration is not just this kind of like myth that simply structures how their leagues are advertised, right? Or how people are marketed or what endorsements they can get. But it's really set up in this nefarious way that anything that you do that steps outside of the box, you're told that it's putting the entire enterprise in jeopardy.
So it’s not just about you as an individual, but if you're doing that you could be the reason that the NWSL fails, and this is the third go around we've had on professional soccer. You and your behavior could be the reason that the WNBA fails, that there will cease to be sporting opportunities in basketball for little girls. Like, this is what the messaging is, and oftentimes it's not just benign messaging. It's actually institutionalized in programs, in ways that teams think about contract. Like, you talked about morality clauses. I mean like, think about this apparatus is like disciplining, you know? And it's really tricky because now you have, with the NWSL, players saying you have to shut up and play because everything, you know…The constant fear is the precarity of it.
Jessica: Yeah. Which is its own myth on some level, the fragility of women's sports. Like, all women’s sports does constantly, especially in this day and age, is prove that it has a market and it has a fandom. But we also hear that constantly, because the people in charge of media don't really care about women in sports and they buy into this idea that it's always on the edge of failure. But that is so…Yeah, these players have told us a lot now, like, going back to the beginning of the NWSL, that there were abusive coaches that they didn't want to talk about because they didn't want to be the person who was going to ruin the new league. It just makes me sad, Amira, because it's like, it's on these people to take the abuse in order to sustain the league, versus saying you don't get to abuse, and that's how we sustain the league, right?
Amira: Yeah.
Jessica: Like, that the problem is to just be quiet rather than to get rid of. And it's like, I'm trying to think…As you were talking, I was like, do we do this with men's sports? And I think on some level, yeah. Like, all sports are inspirational in some way, but I don't think that's the bedrock on which it rests. But I do think it is for women, the idea that it must inspire is foundational.
Amira: But I think in men’s sports, the way that I see it, is with like Black athletes in terms of individual kind of rhetoric, right? Like, you're only at this university because you're doing this, right? So it becomes more individualized, but college football will still be there, right? Whether you are there or not as the other story.
Jessica: And even if you speak up, you're not going to do anything to it.
Amira: Right.
Jessica: You literally can not do anything. [laughs]
Amira: That institution is not moving, right?
Jessica: You literally can’t do anything.
Amira: Exactly. So I think that that's much more individual disposability, but I think what we're talking about in women's sports is twofold, because it's an individual disposability, certainly. I mean, people who've come forward, a lot of times, you know, it did affect their careers, you know? And so there is an individual disposability here. But it also is this much larger thing that actually the entire state of women's sports is also tied up in the individual actions. And I think about this when I think about some of the things we've seen over the last two years of people speaking up and why it feels so impactful. And I think a lot about Dell Loy Hansen out in Utah, and that people had known he had these moments of racism, you know?
You had talked about these labor conditions, but it took a rookie, it took Tziarra to come in there and say this is really problematic. It took this like awakening that people are having to create this place in which he would tell the team, you know what I mean? And it was because people knew, but the premise was like, who else is going to buy and invest in a team? So you just keep it. And it's interesting, because I think about what happened with the Clippers, right? When Doc and the players said they weren't going to play for an owner that was being racist.
Jessica: He said something racist.
Amira: Yeah.
Jessica: Even though he had decades of documented actual racism in his business.
Amira: Housing, yeah. But they weren't going to play. But with that, there was never this sense that if you got him out, there would be nobody to buy the Clippers. You know what I mean?
Jessica: Right. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like tied to…I mean, of course it's tied to money and our idea of how this works. But it's just wild, because everything's been fine. They got rid of him and the team went to another place and everything continued on. So, I don't know what we do about the myths. Obviously we just keep doing the work and we keep saying it over and over again. Like, I will keep reporting on college football coaches who make bad choices and harm people, but I don't feel like…Is that even…
Amira: But I think there's power in even how you frame this segment, to name them as myths. Because I think part of what we wanted to do and why we wanted to have this conversation is because so often how prevalent these sporting myths are, right? They're circulating in all of these things so that when we hear a story it just goes onto the scheme of what we already know, without leaving those foundational myths interrogated. And they're just kind of swimming along. And we're already working from the premise of, like, of course there's a morality clause, or of course, there’s this, or of course there are these assumptions. And if we can ever just pause every so often to say, what is this incident? What is this moment? What is this viral moment telling us about these foundational sporting myths?
And when we're talking here about burning down and reconstructing new sporting futures and new sporting possibilities, right? Then I think that it really is important to think about these kind of myths that underpins the games that we watch and the conditions that people labor in, because then we can think about A) disrupting them further, but also like, what things do we build in their place? And I think we saw this week examples of how some of those myths that we tell about sports and people who play them and work in them and own them and consume them are really harmful, and they continue to be perpetuating things that make toxic workplace environments, that facilitate harm, that turn their back on real harm and instead go for superficial bullshit, because that somehow is more offensive than lying when you've witnessed harm and have done nothing about it.
And so here we are. Like, this is what's finally going to get Urban Meyer in trouble. It’s ridiculous, but I think calling it out and naming it for what it is and naming the myths that sustain it go a long way to eventually upending them.
Jessica: For interview later this week, Shireen talks to Jashvina Shah and Evan F. Moore about their new book, Game Misconduct: Hockey's Toxic Culture and How to Fix It.
Evan F. Moore: And I always tell people, you don't necessarily have to be a hockey fan to understand it, because these things permeate education and law enforcement and any vocation you can think of. But we're talking about hockey, and that seems to be more insidious within the sport.
Jessica: You know, that's going to be an extended burn pile, and I am here for it. Check that out on Thursday. Now it's time for everyone's favorite segment that we like to call the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we've hated this week in sports and set them aflame – that doesn't feel right this week, [laughter] I felt like there were like 80 things. So we're going to do two of them. Amira, what do you want to torch?
Amira: Okay. I have to talk about Sage. So, Sage Steele went on Jay Cutler’s…
Jessica: Podcast?
Amira: Podcast?
Jessica: There was a video, I don't know.
Amira: There was a video. Talking Time? I don't know what it was.
Jessica: [laughs] “Jay Cutler’s Talking Time.”
Amira: [laughs] To say a bunch of bullshit about a number of things. A lot of people on Black Twitter of course were coming for her, because she was going after president Obama for his calling himself Black, and saying, well, he didn't have a relationship with his Black father, so he's not Black. But also there's other nuggets in there that I want to direct your attention to, such as, you know, when the topic of female journalists talking about harassment came up, she said, “Well, when you dress like that, I'm not saying you deserve gross comments, but you know what you're doing when you put that outfit on.” She also…
Jessica: Said that while wearing a sleeveless top.
Amira: Huh. See what she's wearing! [laughs]
Jessica: Just sayin’.
Amira: But then also, well, it was funny because when Black Twitter was talking about what she was saying about Obama, somebody tweeted, “I stopped listening to her when she let that white man touch her hair on TV.” I saw that clip. It was so cringy, and I just had to stop watching everything about her. But the other thing of course that she said was about the COVID vaccine and ESPN. But the other part of that that I'm really kind of irritated about, in terms of this whole debacle, was the way that ESPN treated her comments about former president Obama and the policy versus how they treated Jemele Hill’s. In particular, when they released a statement about Jemele's comments about the president a few years ago, it was “they're inappropriate, they’re abhorrent, we don't stand by it,” et cetera, et cetera.
And yet the statement they released out for Sage was, “We foster and encourage diverse opinions and viewpoints, and we affirm her ability to do this,” yada, yada yada. And it was just like, where was that same energy you had? Like, it really is so interesting when all these people like (Clay Travis) [laughter] get on the radio and say – I didn’t wanna say his name! – get on the radio and say, oh, there's like all these liberal slants. And it's like, this is what censorship…This is so clear and so annoying. And of course now she may or may not have been put on suspension from ESPN for the COVID thing, but she also may or may not have COVID? It's very unclear. Who knows.
But what we do know is because ESPN came for her over COVID and not because of this arbitrary bar they set about, you know, political engagement and what you can and cannot say, that they seem only to enforce when people were calling out police brutality and white supremacy. And so none of it is surprising. It's all actually way too predictable. But that doesn't make it any less infuriating, especially when she has gone out of her way to be the Black person that these folks can point to, to help admonish and come after Black athletes who use their platforms to speak up. And she is like the Black friend, right? Who, when somebody says, “That's not racist because I have a Black friend who said it wasn’t,” she's that. That's Sage.
And it's just really disheartening to see…Her individual actions are what they are. But when the company props them up and sustains that while they've made other people disposable for calling out racism, it's really frustrating to know all of that's happening while we just came off of like the sports media diversity report card that is also saying that that same company is basically the only reason we ever see Black women in sports television in the first place. And like, that in and of itself is what I find is so entirely frustrating about the whole debacle. Burn it down.
Jessica: Burn. So, my burn is pretty straightforward this week, I will say. So earlier this week, the Associated Press had a very short report that, “a growing number of school districts in the US are using federal pandemic funding on athletics projects.” Some of the more egregious examples that they included is a school district in Iowa that's spending $100,000 on the renovations for a weight room, and a Wisconsin school district that is spending a cool $1.6 million on new synthetic turf fields. That is so much money. The schools say it's okay to spend this kind of money from pandemic relief on sports, because sports supports students’ physical and mental health, and that's, you know, not wrong per se. We've talked a lot on the show about why sports are good, especially youth sports. But we are in a pandemic still, and lots of children have missed a lot of school or had major educational disruptions and learning loss over the last 20 months or so.
And one concrete example that I was thinking of is special education services, which 7 million children in this country use, which is a similar number to how many children play high school sports in this country. It has been hit so hard during the pandemic. Many special education services were stopped or were severely curtailed, and it's not clear when they're actually going to resume to their previous levels. It's been incredibly devastating for some of the most marginalized people, students, children in our country. So it's just so hard to hear that schools are prioritizing sports over and above fixing major structural issues that the pandemic has exacerbated, when using the money that they've received from the federal government to do just that. And so I don't even…It’s like I don't even know what to do with this. I got so angry about it earlier this week. So I was like, it's going to go on the burn pile, and we're just going to metaphorically burn this shit. So, burn.
Amira: Burn.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports culture. First up in our honorable mentions is Bubba Wallace, who had his first NASCAR victory last week. [Amira cheers] He won at Talladega. That makes him the first Black driver to win at the top level of NASCAR since Wendell Scott in 1963. Amira?
Amira: Modern Fertility will provide hormone tests and fertility support to all WNBA players as part of an arrangement organized by Nneka Ogwumike, LA Sparks player and the president of the WNBPA. Double shoutouts to Nneka who also won the 2021 Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award, becoming the only player to win this award three years in a row. Congrats, Nneka.
Jessica: Her legacy in the league is going to be incredible.
Amira: It’s unmatched. It’s unmatched. Nefertiti Walker, Dr. Nef, tweeted this week that she is absolutely in the conversation for one of the most influential sporting civil rights people of the 21st century, between what we saw last year with the W, what we've seen with even the vaccination rates in the league. And now this. It's just unparalleled.
Jessica: Incredible. The other major WNBA awards this year: Sylvia Fowles for defensive player, Brionna Jones for most improved, Kelsey Plum for sixth woman, Michaela Onyenwere for rookie of the year.
Amira: Yeah. We also want to shout out Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel for helping and working with local Indigenous activists up in Massachusetts to get the Boston Marathon to include a land acknowledgement for the first time when it's run on Indigenous Peoples Day this week.
Jessica: They were our torchbearers last week, but we once again want to acknowledge the work the players of the NWSL are doing to hold their league and teams accountable for systemic abuse. When they restarted play this week on Wednesday night, at the six minute mark in each game, they paused and all gathered in a circle to draw attention to the six years it took between the time that Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly first reported what Paul Riley did to them, and the league actually doing something about it. The NWSLPA has also released a series of blistering statements with specific demands for the league. What these players are doing is extraordinary. Can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Amita, tell us who the torchbearer of the week is!
Amira: The great pioneering journalist Claire Smith, who will be the new co-director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media at Temple University. Smith herself, like me, is a Temple graduate – class of 1979. And in 1982, she started at the Hartford Courant as their New York Yankees beat writer, a move that made her the first woman to receive a full-time assignment to cover baseball. And now, in honor of Claire Smith, you have to put up with me singing the Temple University fight song. 🎶 We will fight, fight, fight, for the cherry and white! For the cherry and white! We will fight, fight, fight! 🎶 Congrats, Claire. You are our torchbearer of the week.
Jessica: All right, Amira. What's good?
Amira: Well, it's really good to be with you in a room, Jessica.
Jessica: I know. That is very good.
Amira: It's nice to be in Houston. I got a Cajun baked potato last night which is, for those who don't know, Cajun baked potato is like a big ass potato stuff with crawfish and sausage – Andouille sausage – and shrimp and broccoli, because you need a little green! And a spicy cheese sauce and some Creole seasoning. And it's really filling, and that is what I had at midnight. So, I'm happy about that. [laughter]
Jessica: Is that it?
Amira: Ted Lasso finale, it was a journey. I also watched Only Murders in the Building–
Jessica: Yay!
Amira: –on Jessica's maybe recommendation. I'm gonna give you credit for it.
Jessica: Thanks, I’ll take it.
Amira: I don't know if it was you. But me and Mari watched it in a day – only to find out there's still two more episodes that haven't been released! And I'm so mad I got suckered into starting a show that wasn't all out. That's not good, but the show itself is in my what’s good, because it's wonderful. And Selena Gomez, I've been a fan of her since Wizards of Waverly Place. So, it’s fun to see her act against, you know, titans like Martin Short and Steve Martin. And there's a lot of Martins in that. [Jessica laughs] Shoutout to my favorite Martin though – that’s for Martin Kessler. [laughs]
Jessica: Aww.
Amira: So anyways, yeah, that’s what's good for me. I'm trying to think if I forgot anything, because I feel like I really did forget something, but I'll just tell you guys next week if I did.
Jessica: So, one of my what's good is that our friend Kelly made us biscuits – Ted Lasso biscuits!
Amira: Oh, that should’ve been in my what’s good! They were so good.
Jessica: They're so good, everybody. They're just incredible. So that's absolutely something that was good this week. So, I had a lot of stuff this week that it felt good to have it out. As a freelancer, often projects build and all of a sudden you'll have like this avalanche, and it felt like an avalanche week. I was on Spinsters the basketball podcast – we've had Haley and Jordan, the hosts, on the show before. I talked about the NBA and gendered violence, I got to talk to very smart people about it. I enjoyed that. On Wednesday, I published a piece about my favorite niche topic, which is girls and women in baseball. I talked to people in the US and Canada and Australia and Japan, emailed with the president of Venezuela baseball. And so that's at Global Sport Matters. It was nice to like have that out, again. And then I have this big investigative piece that I feel like, cross your fingers, is really close to being out in the world and getting towards the end of that just always feels really nice. And I've done work on my dissertation!
Amira: Oh my gosh.
Jessica: Which, everyone, I'm still doing that! [laughs] I don’t feel like I talk about it a lot.
Amira: That is a week! That is absolutely a prolific week.
Jessica: Yeah. It was productive, as I would say in therapy. [laughs] So it feels good.
Amira: Yes. I forgot about my one little production thing that was not even like…I did it so long ago. But the fourth episode of Level Playing Field is out now on HBO, and if you watch the fourth episode you'll see not one but two BIAD co-hosts in it. So look for me and look for Lindsay Gibbs–
Jessica: We saw Lindsay!
Amira: And we saw Lindsay! [Jessica laughs] Speaking of Lindsay Gibbs!
Jessica: Let’s end our what’s good on seeing Lindsay Gibbs.
Amira: We’ll end our what’s good with the opportunity to catch up and grab a drink with Lindsay Gibbs. So, three out of five of us were together again, and that is a win on any day. So, that is certainly what's good in our worlds.
Jessica: What we are watching: the NWSL season continues! Please support these players when they're actually out on the pitch. Baseball playoffs are in the divisional series. Up next is the pennant races. Indian Wells, which is basically just below the grand slams in terms of importance within the tennis calendar, that's happening through October 17th. And the WNBA finals, everyone! Phoenix versus the Chicago Sky. Phoenix Mercury-Chicago Sky. It will have already started by the time you hear this. Game two, though, is Wednesday night at 9:00pm Eastern on ESPN; game three on Friday at 9:00pm Eastern on ESPN2. And game four, if needed, which I imagine…I can't see this being a sweep. I think we will need game four. It will be next Sunday at 3:00pm Eastern on ESPN.
That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg, with some in-person help from Kelly Jones. 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 to our patrons as always. Your support means the world. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. Burn on, and not out.