Episode 240: How Bad Owners Ruin Sports
**Trigger Warning for suicide and mental health struggles**
Burn It All Down offers our condolences to the family and community of Katie Meyer, a goal keeper of Stanford’s women’s soccer team. Katie was part of the Cardinal’s 2019 NCAA title winning team and wowed the country with her tenacity and her spirit. She died one week ago. We hold space and share in the heartbreak with with the Meyers family, Stanford community and all young athletes who are grieving and devastated at this time. The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the USA is 1-800-273-TALK (8255); and in Canada is 1-833-456-4566.
In this episode Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs and Brenda Elsey talk all about owners of sports teams and leadership. But first, they share their favorite fangirl moments to celebrate International Women's Day. Then, they dive into the (mostly) bad apples of sports ownership. Sparked by the ongoing owner imposed lockout in MLB, they discuss they ways greed, capitalism and racism by owners ruin the sports we love, the different ways that owners have been held accountable by fans and alternative models to single-person ownership of teams.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Lindsay's interview with Howard Megdal on all things WNBA and women's college basketball. Next, they burn the worst of sports this week on the Burn Pile. Then, they celebrate those making sports better including Torchbearers of the Week, the first Black and Indigenous owners of a team in the Premier Hockey Federation, including Anthony Stewart, Angela James, Bernice Carnegie and Ted Nolan. They wrap up the show with What's Good in their in their lives and What We're 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
Opinion: MLB owners add new chapter to their selfish history https://www.concordmonitor.com/Baseball-s-history-of-selfish-shortsighted-owners-adds-another-sorry-chapter-45335494
Breaking down the WNBA's new ownership landscape after sale of Atlanta Dream https://www.axios.com/wnba-owners-atlanta-dream-1a109779-06c1-474b-9714-b330f0ed1ba0
How Airplanes Became the WNBA’s Biggest Scandal https://www.si.com/wnba/2022/03/01/charter-flights-violation-new-york-liberty-joe-tsai-daily-cover/
ESPN archives: who are the greediest owners in sports? https://www.espn.com/page2/s/list/owners/greediest.html/
The 15 Worst Owners in Sports https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-lists/the-15-worst-owners-in-sports-144598
Transcript
Shireen: This is a trigger warning for suicide and mental health struggles. Burn It All Down would like to take a moment to offer our condolences to the family and community of Katie Meyer, a 22 year old goalkeeper of Stanford women's soccer team. Katie was a part of the Cardinals’ 2019 NCAA title-winning team and wowed the country with her tenacity and her spirit. She died one week ago. We are holding space and share in the heartbreak with the Meyers family, the Stanford community, and all the young athletes who are grieving and devastated at this time. The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the USA is 1-800-273-8255, and in Canada it is 1-833-456-4566.
Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Shireen here, and I'm joined by Lindsay and Brenda. But today I am the conductor at this beautiful orchestra of brilliance and sports discussion. Today on the show, we talk about owners of sports teams, leadership, bad apples? And we dive into different ways they operate within these team. Before we get started, happy International Women's Day. Tell me about a time that you were starstruck upon meeting a woman you absolutely respect and admire, like fangirl stories, please. Lindsay, you go first.
Lindsay: Okay. I am sure that there have been times in my life that this has happened, but I just cannot think of any. I really think it's like the vast majority of my life that I've met people it's been in a work context, and I just have to put up a certain armor, do you know what I mean? Like around that. I mean, asking Venus Williams questions in a press conference very early on in my career, like, I was freaking out, but I didn't totally fangirl, right? You have to put up like a different mentality, I think. So I'm going to go a little bit different with this, and this is actually embarrassing. This is going to sound a little bit like I'm objectifying her and I don't mean to, but I will say that when I saw Sylvia Fowles in person, when I walked into the Minnesota Lynx locker room one time and saw her cheekbones and eyes like right next to me, right up close, I was actually speechless for a minute. Like, I was flustered, because those eyes, they just like pierce through you. And she's just like the most wonderful person ever. So she makes you not feel starstruck around her because she's just very, very, very kind.
Shireen: Yeah. I thought for sure, Lindsay, because it's also coming up to the three-year anniversary of the five of us meeting in person in New York City. It was International Women's Day that we all met. So I figured that you would talk about how we all cried together in the lobby of the hotel in Long Island. That didn't actually happen. That happened in my head. But I was elated.
Lindsay: Oh, do you know what it was? It was when I met Shireen. [Shireen laughs] That was the fangirl moment for me. It's because I blacked out [laughter] out of like fangirl-ness. That's why I didn't bring it up. So, yes. [laughter] Thank you for that memory.
Shireen: Not that I was fishing for that particular answer, but yes. [laughs]
Lindsay: Oh, no, not at all. No fishing.
Shireen: [laughs] So, I kind of wear my excitement on my sleeve. I try to be composed. I mean, there's certain instances, like I've interviewed Christine Sinclair at a presser. I've interviewed Julie Chu, Marie-Philip Poulin. And you're right, Lindsay is absolutely right. You have to have this veneer of professionalism, and then inside you're very excited. Except there was two times that I had absolutely zero chill. One of them was Hilary Knight because I don't actually cover the US women's hockey team per se. So I was like, it's okay for me to get a little bit excited here. I was very excited. Hilary Knight is very worth getting excited about.
But the other one where I was absolutely…And y'all won't probably believe this. I was speechless and I couldn't move. I literally didn't have words to formulate. And that's when I met Naomi Klein. I'm a huge, longtime admirer of her work. I think she's probably one of Canada's most brilliant thinkers. She's incredible. So I was at a very small event and she was there and I had just had ACL surgery in 2014 and I was on crutches and I had to keep my leg elevated – we were in a very small restaurant in Toronto. And my brother happened to be at this event. And he went over and got her and said, my sister can't even make her way over to you and she loves you so much. And she sat down with me. And in the best of Shireen, I talked about my cat with her for 35 minutes, and she told me about her baby, because when you sit down with Naomi Klein, you talk about your cat. And she was lovely and she was brilliant. There's a photo of it somewhere. And I just remember trembling. And then she followed me on Twitter, and I think I screamed for an hour. It's like Billie Jean King levels of excitement. Bren?
Brenda: I also have a cute picture of me and Naomi Klein, and can attest to the fact that she is lovely.
Lindsay: I love that.
Brenda: Though I did not charm her enough with my cat stories. [Shireen laughs] I should have. I didn't have the cat then.
Shireen: There's always the next time.
Brenda: So, fangirling, this was totally premeditated because the great thing about being an academic is that all of your heroes are not famous at all. [Shireen laughs] No one cares and no one reads our books. And so it's great. Every single…I have hundreds of my favorite books, literally, that are signed by the author because I'm the only one who asked them to do that. [laughs] So it's great. So I knew I was going to meet Camilla Townsend, who's a distinguished professor at Rutgers, who went and learned Nahuatl so that she could write about the pre-Columbian conquest of the Aztecs, who is one of the most fantastic writers on Indigenous women in history, both Latin American and North American.
She is a noted introvert, and I saw her at a conference and she was sitting by herself because, like I said, we're not famous. We don't even have our pictures on our book jackets, so we don't know what each other looks like. But we have badges. So I saw her badge. I was like, [whispers] “I think that’s her! I looked her up on YouTube.” And then I was very gushy and overflowing about how much my students loved her and how wonderful she was writing, both about women and about Indigenous peoples. And yeah, I just basically lost my shit, and she was super gracious, as one would expect from Dr. Townsend. So that was my fangirl. Yeah. I still use her YouTube videos. Look her up if you're ever interested in the real story of Pocahontas. That is your historian right there.
Shireen: On to shitty, selfish owners. [laughter] So what we're talking about today is not just selfish in a capitalist scenario. This is also in general bad owners, and we're trying to highlight different overarching ways that these ownership models and owners in particular suck. Brenda, can you give us a little history?
Brenda: Yeah. I mean, sports for a long time have been professional. If you think about paying players or, you know, ancient wrestling in Rome or something like that. So, it's not that professionalism was new, but in the 19th century, particularly in Europe, there was the idea of the white male club. So, starting the cricket club and the football club – and this is really tied with imperialism and ways in which they're going to export “civilization” and “morality,” you know, from the British empire, from the French empire to Africa, to Asia, to South America in a neocolonial way. And so these clubs both domestically and internationally became really important to the idea of morality in sport. And basically, ownership happens when they start to agree about not allowing players to trade.
So the very idea that like I'm Sudbury football club and you’re Leeds football club and we don't want our players to be going back and forth so we try to make deals and we try to do things like buy certain rights or own certain rights, whether it's the stadium or whether it's players’ contracts. Really, the foundation of it is athletic labor. Then that builds to leagues, right? Then we have this community league, et cetera, et cetera. This is like the 1860s. So, FIFA is not even invented yet until, you know, the beginning of the 20th century. And more and more in great Britain you have individual owners that buy these teams and monopolize labor. And it's really football first – soccer – that is the first kind of private ownership that you see.
And then in the US as you get to professional leagues beyond college with football, with North American football, you know, [laughs] and baseball. Those became really popular for individual kind of elite men. And the idea too a lot of times was that they owned factories or they owned agricultural ventures, farms and that this team that they would start, that they would essentially own from the get-go would keep workers busy, would give them something to do, would create this voluntary, lovely relationship between owner and player, boss and worker. And very often it didn't work that way and they became kind of hotbeds for unions.
And the other alternative model in global history is the one in South America, and the one exception that we have in the US which is the Green Bay Packers, which is a mutually owned “non-for-profit” – even though they're profitable, not for profit for one owner kind of model, right? There’s like thousands of owners of the Packers. In 1923, they allowed you to buy in. I think it was like five bucks or something like that, wasn't that cheap back then. And people own a share, and then you elect the board of directors that run it. And so we have the Packers. But what happens, and I'll just wrap up with this, what happens very quickly in the United States and in Europe is that leagues like the NFL bar that ownership. They don't want that. They want individual owners.
So the NFL actually has one of its first and foremost rules is that they want singular owners of teams. The Green Bay Packers has a grandfathered exception into that. So, this isn't something that…You know, private owners fight against this model all the time because they see it as very messy to deal with. They're used to dealing with their own, you know, fellow greedy crusty white dudes in the boardroom. They don't want this kind of more democratic [laughs] ownership that messes with their contract. So anyway, here we are, you know? Tons of tax breaks for these guys and they keep on making billions of dollars in this way.
Shireen: I mean, that's mind boggling. So does that mean we should all go buy shares of Green Bay Packers?
Brenda: Well, they're not for sale necessarily, but you know, I think the last time was like 10 years ago or something when they had to like redo the stadium and the sound system or stuff. But yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for Aaron Rodgers’ recent activity, we should generally all support the Green Bay Packers.
Shireen: [laughs] I love that. Lindsay, there's some big news this week in terms of ownership and leagues. Can you give us a little bit of insight into that?
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a couple of big stories. The first…And look, I'm not a baseball expert by any means. But I have been following a little bit what's been going on in Major League Baseball because the lockout that the owners implemented at the end of last season in order to stall the collective bargaining negotiations, it's ongoing. And it's gotten to the point where the first two series of the regular season have been canceled by the owners. And it's really important to keep saying that this is not a strike by the players. This is a lockout by the owners. It is the billionaire owners who are doing this. And I mean, essentially the players are trying to convince the owners to invest in their product and invest in the health of the sport as a whole. And the owners – who seem to care much more about their property and, you know, owning the stadium and building things than they do about actually the sport of baseball – are refusing to budge.
And it's really sad to watch, because I think the sport of baseball is barely recovered from the last big stoppage of play they had in the 90s. And I gotta say, I'm very proud of the MLB players union. I think the conversation around this has been focused on the owners and on these billionaires who are falsely saying that they're losing money when most clubs make money even before games are played, and that's the problem. These owners don't necessarily have to sell tickets. They don't necessarily have to invest in putting a good product on the field because they make money without it. I just think it's so fucking sad that it's gotten to this point where the people who were kind of the shepherds of the sport, because they control the purse strings, are refusing to invest in it, refusing to give more money to the players at the bottom end of the rung.
Whether we're talking minor leagues…I mean, most baseball players don’t, I think it was like 40% make under $1 million a year and their careers are very short in the majors, right? So, it's just the power imbalance here is staggering. Kudos to the players association for not giving in, not taking a shit sandwich of a deal, which is what ESPN reporter Jeff Passan called what the owners were proposing last. But I also, in talking to the baseball people in my life, like, there's just this sadness over this. The owners just don't seem to care that their sport is not being played. Like, we all know this is a business, but you're supposed to love the sport, right? [laughs] Like, this passion for this sport and love for the game is supposed to be what ties everything together.
Brenda: Well, yeah, I mean, I had a question for Lindsay, and thinking about ownership more broadly in women's sports as well. Do you think that that's the thing, that the ability to have a losing team and still make money, you know, the fact that the Mets is like, I don't know, the second most valuable franchise, is that part of the problem? That they're willing to carry losses and speculate these teams, whether it's tax breaks or something else?
Lindsay: Yeah, look, it's tough, right? It's a tough bind because the thing you always hear about women's sports, you know, that the business isn't solid enough, right? Whereas then you've got these men's sports that have been around forever and the business aspects of things is really healthy, right? And yet you're seeing…I can't say a similar lack of investment because there was no comparison between the two. But I just think it's just really fucked up. And if you look at the baseball rules, like, there's so many loopholes and ways for these owners to count the number of starts or the number of times a player has been on the roster or is called up, and to manipulate these things in bad faith so that the players get less money, right? Or not call up, not focus on developing players because they don't want to spend more money.
And it's really staggering. I mean, these owners are literally saying that they aren't making money, that the pandemic hit them so hard. But it's just trying to get them to run their business in good faith for the overall good of the sport. And this is overall not much money to them. And I just don’t understand. To me, it's just with all these negotiations, it's power, right? They just want more control over exactly what decisions and exactly how much they can manipulate their books, they can manipulate their players, they can manipulate everything in their domain. Whereas the players are trying to make rules that force them to invest more and help fuel the entire ecosystem, right? If you look at lots of sports, the minor leagues, the development leagues, whatever you call it, right? Somebody has to fuel these, because you need these to make the upper echelons of the sport healthy.
Players need ways to come up. The sports world needs developmental leagues. Who should be paying for those, right? Because it's not going to always be the gate tickets that are bringing it in. They're not going to be getting the big television contracts. It should be the billionaire owners! [laughs] That's what should be paying for it. The people making the most money off of the sport are the ones who should be paying for those lower leagues, because those lower leagues benefit every one at the end of the day.
Brenda: Well, owners will happily drive a good thing into the ground. [Shireen laughs] I mean, all this shit about capitalism being efficient, it's such bullshit. It's so stupid. Like, what? We can't even get tests when there's high COVID rates, like, whatever about capitalism being efficient. And like, this is a perfect example. Take a look at what UEFA’s Champions League clubs are trying to do. Like, they already make a zillion dollars on it. And now whether it's the Super League or they're trying to expand it from 32 to 36 to, I don't know, 188. I mean, the Champions League will just never stop playing because it's just like, oh, maybe it will be like the NBA and we'll just have 140 billion games a year, [Shireen laughs] and it's just fucking stupid.
So, I just also want to say, owners, I think we give them credit often for making good decisions too sometimes, when it's just like, no, just greed will steer them directly into a place where they can ruin a good thing, whether it's a particular tournament…And it shows a total misunderstanding of the sport itself. Like, you cannot make soccer like basketball. It is fundamentally different, you know what I mean? And so whenever they're like, basketball, eyeing how the Champions League is working…And they're always reporters that, you know, can't even say UEFA, by the way, you know? I heard “U-E-F-A” this past weekend from a reporter, and I was just shocked.
Shireen: That's offensive. I think that’s Islamophobic. It’s terrible.
Brenda: I mean, anyway, I just also want to say, to Lindsay's point, the greed is so apparent when you look at some of the illogical decisions that they're willing to make, even when contrary to reason.
Shireen: I appreciate this. And I think it's important, as we talk about owners, and Lindsay mentioned that this as important part of development, to actually grow it. So, Lindsay, let's talk about growing pains.
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, on kind of the other end of the spectrum as the MLB – but it’s the same spectrum, right? We say other end of the spectrum, but the spectrum, you know, there's a lot of linkage. You've got what's going on in the WNBA right now. And Howard Megdal, who I'm gonna interview, he will be on the show on Thursday’s interview. So we'll go deep into his big feature for Sports Illustrated which came out last week. And in the feature, one of the things he reported among many was that last season, Joseph and Clara Tsai, who are the owners of the New York Liberty and the Brooklyn Nets, they chartered flights for their team throughout the second half of the season. And this was against the CBA, because in the CBA the player signed in 2000, it specified for competitive advantage that everyone was going to fly commercial still, you know, it's against the rules for one owner to be providing this for his team.
Anyways, the WNBA ended up fining the team $500,000 for this. Obviously this created a lot of uproar for a league fining a team owner for treating his players too well, right? [laughs] Like, it's just not something we typically see and seems like a very, very bizarre scandal. But I think a lot of it just goes back to once again power struggles and ownership struggles and an unclear picture of where the league is headed and what it possibly could be. It’s growing pains. Since 2019, you've had four really, really high profile owners coming in to take over in Brooklyn, Minnesota, Atlanta and Vegas. And Mark Davis for one, the owner in Vegas, has been very open about how unhappy he is with how little he's allowed to pay his players and the limits on how well he's supposed to treat the players.
But at the same time, you run into problems because there is a collective bargaining agreement for a reason. And a lot of the owners elsewhere in the W have been around for a long time and shepherded the league through tumultuous, tumultuous seasons of life. And which way is the league going to go now? Is it going to let these owners invest in the team and maybe threaten a little bit the competitive balance or force ownership groups that don't have as much money to, you know, either raise that money or bring in other investors or do some of the things we've seen in the NWSL, right? We've seen the NWSL bringing in big investorship kind of fundraising types of groups for specific owners. Do we need to see more of that in the W so that everyone can kind of keep up?
I don't know, but I think it's very, very interesting. And I wrote about this in Power Plays, that as frustrating as Howard's report was, it’s all really good problems to have, right? Like, growing is uncomfortable. Growing is hard. I don't care whether it's a teenager going through puberty, like, we know that shit isn't easy, right? Whether we're trying to grow personally, or in our business, any type of change and growth is uncomfortable. I think the W is going through a very uncomfortable period right now, but it's very necessary. And it's really good to have owners who want to invest more, aren’t afraid to talk about wanting to invest more. And I think it really puts the fire on other owners. My question is, like, can the league get enough owners willing to do this to make it uniform? And also, how do you prevent it from turning into an MLB situation where you've just got all these billionaires in there who don't give a shit? [laughs]
Shireen: I mean, then we can get into the topic of owners who aren’t...It’s not part of growing pains. They're just pains. When I say pains, I'm talking about blatant racism, whether it's homophobia, transphobia, all these horrible things that do play a part, because I mean, you know, that happens with owners and individual owners in particular, like Kelly Loeffler, former owner of the Atlanta Dream, WNBA. Fortunately it was sold to Renee Montgomery, Larry Gottesdiener and Suzanne Abair in February 2021. But we've chronicled how terrible Kelly Loeffler was, and so did much of American media in that, you know, it was so much that the players rose up to support her opponent who's running for political office, Reverend Raphael Warnock, who ended up winning that election. So I think that's really interesting.
But also, she was bad. And when we talk about bad apples – that's a rotten to the core apple! But fortunately, you know, the ownership model changed and we love to see Black women owning shit. So like, literally, Renee Montgomery owning this, being part owner of this team is really important. I mean, there's other examples. There’s many examples of racist owners. Another one that comes to mind, Donald Sterling, former LA Clippers owner who ended up selling it to Steve Ballmer after Sterling was found to be a racist asshole. He was banned from the NBA and faced a $2.5 million fine for a vulgar diatribe, which was actually caught on tape. I don't know if people remember that, but it's like, for me, one of the foremost examples.
Also, the Ricketts family – I don't do baseball either, except for when it comes to the Blue Jays, because I look really good in that color of blue. But the Ricketts family, owners of the Chicago Cubs and actually other teams, they're famous for their Islamophobia. I remember Joe Ricketts, his Facebook was posted, like, screenshots of his Facebook with really horrible, xenophobic, anti-Muslim sentiment. They still own it though. I mean, then you think about how tough it is to actually get owners out, unless there is like this kind of movement against it. But right now the Ricketts family is still being rich and, as far as I know, allegedly being Islamophobic.
Which kind of leads us to something else I wanted to get into, is different ways of holding the owners accountable, whether it's fans, public outcry. Like right now, Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club in the UK, in England, is in the process of selling the club. It’s in trust right now to the foundation because of the fact that he's Russian and has ties to Putin and has decided and really sustain them last week, saying this was in the best interest of the club. He invested billions of dollars, including taking on debt when he took over the club, but has said that he’s sad to have to part ways, but he feels this is in the best interest of the club. I don't know if that's supposed to jerk a tear or something there. I wasn't feeling really sad. He can go cry into his bag of millions of dollars. Brenda, talk to me about different ways of holding owners accountable.
Brenda: Well, it's interesting, right? Because we look at businesses all the time with owners and we don't demand that they're good people. So it's kind of a fascinating thing, how in sports we're able to, because they have such a public face, it actually gives us a window into what corporate anything looks like. And I mean, there's something about it that feels like fans are more than consumers, right? And so we've seen a lot with supporters groups that are able to really do things like boycott buying season tickets, find ways to protest within the stadiums that have been really interesting.
And that's one of the exciting things that I think about soccer in the US right now, is what those fans are doing. So, the Portland Thorns and Timbers have been responding to what happened in the toxic, sexist culture of those teams by trying to hold Merritt Paulson, the owner, accountable. And he's actually met with them – and I'm not giving him too many props, I'm actually giving their kind of constant pressure a lot of props, that he's met with the fans. Can you imagine? [laughs] Can you actually imagine that Donald Sterling really being concerned back then, or the Ford family?
Shireen: [laughs] Let’s have a town hall meeting!
Brenda: And Merritt Paulson isn't like more virtuous. This is just a matter of soccer culture and the way that fans are organized. So, that's been pretty exciting to see, and I think, you know, that's something that hopefully more sports can start to get on that bandwagon of let's organize fans in such a way that they're able to pressure owners.
Shireen: Yeah, I love that. And also, you know, we can incorporate alternative models of ownership, like for example – and I will be transparent about this – Dr. Brenda Elsey and Shireen Ahmed are invested in Lewes FC football club. So, it is a community-based, community-owned football club in the UK. So, I just wanted to be clear about that. But they’re an alternative model to ownership where it is literally you can own this and there's a sense of accountability and ownership and investment and importance. And I mean, I'm not saying it elevates it. I’m not going to be mad at the Montreal Canadiens more if I owned a part of them. But my point is, is that there's a connection. And connection is important.
Also, there's a couple of…The Peterborough Petes hockey team is one of the oldest hockey teams in the Ontario Hockey League. They're also a community based ownership. And I think that's really interesting, because in hockey that's not common. And they're in the minors, yes, but I think it sets a really interesting precedent on how involved the community is in those things, whether it's events or whether there's a discussion about the culture of that game. Bren, what about other ones?
Brenda: Well, I mean, like I said, almost all of the top South American teams…And actually just today, this week, Man City's ownership group is trying to buy Atlético Mineiro in Brazil. And so there's an active struggle going on in these places where privatized individual owners are trying to convince the boards of directors and the fans to accept this private ownership model. So, yeah, these exist all over, and there's hybrids as well in South America. Not so much like the Mexican league, but I'm talking, you know, Boca Juniors, Flamengo, Fluminense, Colo-Colo is in a struggle in Chile. Like, there are all these clubs that for a hundred and twenty years have been mutually owned and have become such big business, is that people are like, “How could it be that a non-for-profit can run like this? We must have the efficiency…”
And this is why I argue again of like an individual Merritt Paulson, [laughs] you know what I mean? So, that's the model that's really a common there. And just to emphasize once more, and I know we've had other shows about this, but whatever, I'm just going to keep saying it. Just because it's not for profit doesn't mean it's not profitable. These are incredibly profitable clubs. It's not like they're, you know, struggling for existence in Boca Juniors.
Shireen: [laughs] Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, you know, the big one that we've talked about a lot is Athletes Unlimited, which has got two kind of owners/investors at the helm, but they have these short seasons of different sports; there’s in softball, volleyball, and lacrosse, and then most recently basketball. And the teams don't have owners or even coaches. Players are empowered to kind of run things for themselves. They get a portion of the profits. I think they're kind of…I’m not sure exactly how it works, with them kind of being part owners with so many players and so many different leagues, but I know that they are involved on that level. They're involved in all of the decision making processes. And the way Athletes Unlimited works is the teams change every week.
So, the players are captains, they get individual points and points from team wins, and there's a leaderboard for the individual athletes, and it shuffles after every week. After every week, a new player becomes captain and picks the teams. So, teams change every week so there can't be an owner, right? [laughs] And it just really mixes things up. And I've been skeptical about it, but it’s really cool. And it's still going. And I think I'm really excited to see how it grows, because it's such a streamlined model compared to, you know, a WNBA or something. And it also…This is what made me get it. The seasons it holds are about six weeks long, so it doesn't have to compete with the other leagues. But Athletes Unlimited’s model, by being more streamlined, can help push the entire sport forward.
Shireen: Yeah. And one of the things I think about here is leadership and what that looks like in different leagues and different teams. And I'm just gonna wrap this up with a really important quote: “The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation, and that is with other folks counting on me. It is so easy to be motivated.” And that's from Jeff Bezos.
[silence]
Lindsay: I don't know what to say. I don't know.
Shireen: [laughing] This is a joke. This is the actual quote…Don’t worry. But I just wanted to see your faces. Thank you. Now, the actual quote: “Fight for the things that you care about and do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” And that's from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This week on our interview, which drops on Thursday, Lindsay chats with Howard Megdal about all things women's basketball, including his explosive feature in Sports Illustrated on the fractured state of WNBA ownership, and what drama women's college basketball is bringing to March.
Howard Megdal: And we experience this every day, every day in the women's sports world, of like, do we celebrate the win, even though it's belated and it's limited and it seems begrudging? [laughs] Or we talk about how much more there is to go? And this is always the balance to strike.
Lindsay: And the answer is yes. [laughs] The answer is always we do both.
Howard Megdal: That's right.
Shireen: Let's move on to everyone's favorite segment, the burn pile. Lindsay, what are you torching?
Lindsay: Yeah, a regular in this thing is US Soccer, but it's a little bit different this time. So, we did just have US Soccer elections for the president. This past weekend, Cindy Parlow Cone did win reelection, so we are very happy for Cindy. She will serve another term as the president of the US Soccer Federation. However, Carlos Cordeiro, the former president and Cone’s predecessor, who was basically forced to resign after his incredibly sexist and demeaning strategy for fighting the women's equal pay lawsuit came to light in 2020. He ran against her, and she only won 52.9% of the weighted vote from the national council. That means Carlos Cordeiro almost won. [laughs] This was the closest final ballot in US Soccer history.
Among other things, he got the endorsement of the youth council, and I think that's very disturbing. He oversaw US Soccer during a period where inequities were heightened and abuse was enabled, and it's scary to think how close he was to winning reelection. I also want to burn the fact that there was a proposal up for a vote that the president of US Soccer become a paying job with a salary. It is right now a volunteer position. You might think, Lindsay, why do you want rich people to get richer? No, no. I just want people paid for doing jobs, because that helps weed out corruption and it helps widen the amount of people who can apply for said job.
Just like internships are very exploitative to people trying to break into fields, having these incredibly powerful positions be volunteer positions also takes a bunch of people out of the running. This proposal got voted down, and people said they wanted to keep the “purity” of the position. Any time people are arguing for purity, you know that's bullshit, and it usually is a euphemism for corruption and “I want to keep this power imbalance in play.” So I just want to burn Carlos Cordeiro almost getting elected again and the fact that US Soccer isn't a paid position. I'm not saying the soccer president should get paid millions, but I just think it's a full-time job. Like, let's let it be a full-time job. It's an important job. [laughs] So, burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: I'm going to go next. This news was really worrisome, and I'm going to start with saying that it was reported that Brittany Griner was actually detained in Russia while trying to return to the United States. She plays in Russia in the offseason, as many athletes do play abroad. But what ended up happening is she was allegedly detained in Russia while trying to exit the country because she had vape cartridges with substances that are legal in Russia. Now, that it was further reported on that she's actually been there for three weeks. There's concern about this for many different reasons. There's concern that she could potentially be used as a political pawn because she's quite a star. Like, huge star. Secondly, she's a queer Black woman who's gender non-conforming and there's concerns for her safety, obviously.
Adrienne Lawrence just had a really great Twitter thread breaking this down and why she is uncomfortable with the way things are rolling out because she feels that, you know, Brittany Griner usually travels back at the same time, that she was expected by the Russian authorities. So it's a really interesting thread to read and to ponder over. I mean, of course, first and foremost, we're concerned about Brittney Griner safety and that she get back to her team. But also, the WNBA and Phoenix Mercury released statements over the weekend that they are aware and they're in contact with authorities that they need to be in contact with to ensure her safety. And that's of paramount importance.
But I want to take this…Because if there's even a sliver of a chance that a Black queer athlete is being used as a political pawn – which all sounds scary and dangerous with everybody involved in this. I can't help but note, why does she have to play abroad in the first place? Like, give her the money so athletes don't have to do that in the offseason. I'm sorry. No, I'm not sorry. That's where my mind goes. I hate all of this. I'm concerned for her safety and I’m obviously thinking about her family and her teammates at this time, who must be very concerned. And we'll keep you updated with what's happening. And I want to take all of these systems that put athletes, particularly those from racialized and marginalized communities, into vulnerable situations. Fucking hate all of it. I want to take it and want to burn it all down.
All: Burn.
Shireen: Bren?
Brenda: Okay, well, this is good. This is on a related note. I want to burn…Well, it's like a complicated burn, I guess. But death threats to players, children, and family members that are Russian – Alex Ovechkin in particular, the NHL player for the Washington Capitals has received tons, according to his agent, Daniel Milstein, who's actually a Ukrainian Jew, [laughs] and working with him, and has said please stop this, this is terrifying. We've had to get extra security for him. It's not just him. The Capitals have four Russian players, lots of teams have any number of them. And evidently it's just been so bad, the threats to the actual clubs. The Washington Post ran a story on it. Some other places have. And it's really distressing. Now, that said, Ovechkin has over the years expressed his very hardy support for Putin. So, I understand that he is subject and should be subject to, you know, whatever people want to say. You've enabled this dictator, war criminal, however you want to frame it.
People have a right to hold him accountable. But I mean, I don't know about you all’s family and you all’s parents, but with all respect to my parents, I'm really glad that I'm not responsible for everything they've done. Can we please stop sending any kind of like…Are there lighthearted death threats to children? I mean, no. [laughs] So, can you just stop? Any of it should just be absolutely stopped. And it was really heartbreaking to read all of the different kinds of posts that are out there on social media. So, I want to burn people's reaction, as much as I'm disgusted I guess by his support for Putin. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: Now let's move on to some light. Let's hold up some incredible people this week. I’m going to start with Paralympians, and there are so many we can't name in this segment, but I wanted to highlight a few. First of all, Oksana Masters won the first gold for the US in the women's biathlon 6k sitting, six months after two golds in Tokyo in cycling. Masters was born in Ukraine and was adopted to the US as a child. She had been posting on social media about Ukraine often in these Games, saying she is racing for two countries that make me whole. Two Olympics within six months? That's wild.
Cécile Hernandez of France and Brenna Huckaby of the USA are the snowboarders who almost didn't get to compete because they were “too disabled.” They competed in the snowboard cross LL-2 classification and both medaled. Hernandez won gold, and Huckaby won bronze. Oksana Shyshkova, one of the many Ukrainians to win gold in the first days of the Paralympics – she has two! She took gold to the women's biathlon sprint, as well as a long distance vision impaired race. She said, “Medals mean nothing compared to the lives and relatives of people who have suffered already through war.” Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah. Shoutout to Ukrainian tennis champion Elina Svitolina, who defeated Russia’s Anastasia Potapova at the Monterrey Open, March 1st. She pledged to donate her prize money to Ukraine's military resistance and said, “I was on a mission for my country.”
Shireen: Linz, who’s next?
Lindsay: Tianna Hawkins, the inaugural Athletes Unlimited basketball champion. Hawkins finished the season was 6,836 points, sealing her Athletes Unlimited championship with a thrilling triple overtime win for her team. Love seeing Tianna Hawkins thrive. Love her.
Shireen: Speaking of thriving, who’s next? Brenda.
Brenda: Leylah Fernandez, Canadian tennis player who won the Monterrey Classic. The teenager rallied from 4-1 down in the third set to win her second WTA title.
Lindsay: Awesome. Linz?
Lindsay: Charli Turner Thorne, the head coach of Arizona state women's basketball team, announced her retirement after an incredible 25 years at the helm. We'll miss her and are happy for her.
Shireen: Can I get a drumroll, please? I always want to say, “Can I get what what?” Because that's what I think of, but that's not what I need. I need a drumroll. Could I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Congratulations to the first Black, Indigenous owners of a team in the Premier Hockey Federation. Among the owners are former NHLer Anthony Stewart, Hockey Hall of Famer Angela James, Bernice Carnegie, and former NHL coach Ted Nolan. The full list of co-owners will actually be released when the sale is complete, but we love to see racialized players on the ice, also as officials, as fans, and certainly in the front offices and owner suites as excellent owners. Friends, what is good? Lindsay, let's start with you.
Lindsay: Yeah. Over the weekend, I was super lucky. I got to go to Maryland and Airbnb with two of my closest college friends, and they are my favorite people to do nothing with. [laughs] We just kind of hung out in the cabin and ate and drank and let our dogs run around and watch Love Is Blind, which…I have a lot of thoughts on Love Is Blind season two. Please, if you would like to discuss it, I'm here. It's all I want to talk about.
Shireen: I'm going to go next. I actually just got back from my first in-person tournament as volleyball mom! Very excited. It's been two years since I've watched my son Sallahuddin play. He's a senior in high school, so we're making big decisions. He's making big decisions. And I'm trying to not cry at all the possibilities he's choosing for himself. I love watching him play. I get a lot of excitement out of it. I didn't grow up playing volleyball. Like, I enjoy it. It's actually not a sport that I thought was super calming for my anxiety, because every set and every play is nerve-wracking. But he's wonderful and he's really good at it, and his team is playing in premier division, which is really exciting. We didn't do as well as we hoped, but we still have a couple of tournaments left, and fingers crossed that we do well in those.
This particular tournament that I went to an Ottawa where I saw my friend, Keith Bennett from my program. He came to be a volleyball mom with me. He's wonderful. And my friend, Claire Hanna, who've had on the show before, we hung out in Ottawa. This particular tournament was actually canceled because of the convoy that was taking over the city of Ottawa a couple of weeks ago. So, it's nice that that has been, you know, sort of. less there. I’m not going to say they're all cleared out because they're not, but anyways, the city is no longer under this type of siege.
And so I'm happy about that. I also wanted to shout out X University, formerly known as Ryerson. I got a chance to guest lecture in my friend Dan Robson's class last week. We were co-instructors in the first semester. I'm not teaching this semester. But my class was exclusively online, and I got a chance to see them in person and I recognized all their faces, even with their masks on. And it was lovely to see them. I absolutely love the students. I've made some decisions about what I want for my future based on the experience teaching them. So you know, reporting sports section three, I love you all. And thank you for being engaged and having me sit there and talk about stuff. Sometimes you get into things you don't think you're going to get into, and it really inspires you. I get a lot of energy and excitement and inspiration from these students. So, I'm a big, big fan.
Just one last thing. I did my first video essay for CBC sports for International Women's Day which is coming out. And I'm very excited about it because there are some things that I want to do and work on skills, and doing video essays was definitely one of them. And just a quick shoutout to Sarah Jenkins and Steve Tzemis who were the producers on it. I'm excited for y'all to see it. Brenda, you want to bring us home?
Brenda: So first, I am ridiculous and didn't realize I could switch my Twitter to see just tweets in order of when they were coming in, that somehow Twitter had switched me to the algorithm where I see like the most promoted. And so I switched that back with that little button on the top right. And thank fucking god, because all of a sudden I went from being annoyed all day to being like, oh, look! They published that book, and they published this arcane thought! And they were all really good and wonderful. And I remembered why there is a bunch of people that I followed, because I really respected and was interested in what they said, but I hadn't seen anything from them in three months or whenever Twitter screwed me over. So I was really thrilled by that.
Oh, the vet. I took my cat Leo to the vet. She's really nice. She told me how good looking he was. So we just sat there and talked about that for like 10 minutes and I was really excited. She's probably lying. She probably says that to everyone. It’s fine. But I believed it to be true in the moment. So that was really fun. And also there's a new book by Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. You can look her up if you're ever interested. She originally wrote much easier – in the sense of less time consuming – novel called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and I'm sure that was on my what’s good. I am sure.
I guess you would call her an eco feminist novelist. And she's just fucking great. And she has this new book called The Books of Jacob, which is like 700 pages, which means I get to keep her with me for a very long time. And she's amazing. If you're a middle-aged woman… [Shireen laughs] I don't know how many of our fans are out there in like their forties or whatever, because I think I'm the oldest of the crew, but go and fucking read that book. I mean, it's about that transition and being ignored and how really evil you can be as a middle-aged woman without anyone noticing.
Shireen: Brenda, if you had like a BookTok account on TikTok, I would a hundred percent subscribe and pay for that content. [Brenda laughs] What are we watching? We will be watching the Paralympic Games, which are on CBC Sports and also on NBC Peacock. So we will also be watching the PHF on Twitch and on certain televised editions too. PWHPA has upcoming showcases as well. So I'm very excited about that. There was just one in DC, and an upcoming one soon to be announced.
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 a 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, 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.