Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson on their book, 'Loving Sports When They Don't Love Your Back'
It's Jessica's publishing day!! In this episode, Lindsay Gibbs celebrates by interviewing Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson on their new book, "Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Sports Fan."
The three discuss how this book came to be, how they feel about doping, and whether recent events -- from Black Lives Matter strikes in the NBA and WNBA, to racist and sexist NWSL and MLS owner Dell Loy Hansen being shamed into selling his shares -- give them any hope about the future of sports.
You can find out where to buy the book here: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781477313138
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello everyone, welcome to Burn It All Down. Lindsay Gibbs here. First of all, so excited to be talking to you all. It is September now; as some of you might know, we took the month of August off here at Burn It All Down. We’re back today, but with a special episode, because co-host Jessica Luther has her new out, today!
Jessica: Today!
Lindsay: Today, today! [laughs] So I have with me Jessica Luther who you all know, freelance sports reporter and co-host of this podcast, in Austin, Texas; as well as Kavitha Davidson, who’s a co-author of this book, and Kavitha is the host of The Athletic’s wonderful daily podcast The Lead. I believe she's back in New York, New York. So, welcome!
Kavitha: I am! Thank you, thank you so much for having us, Lindsay.
Lindsay: So excited to be looking at your faces here on Zoom and to have just finished reading this book that I’ve been hearing about for years. The name of the book, I guess I should say – I’m doing so great here today – the name of the book is Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan. I wanna start with asking both of you how you fell in love with sports and when was the first time you realized that sports were…problematic? [laughs] When was the first time you felt a bit conflicted about this? Kavitha.
Kavitha: The kind of short version of how I fell in love with sports…You know, my parents are immigrants from India, they moved to New York in 1981. Not really terribly big sports fans, but my mom fell in love with boxing and the Knicks; she loved Bernard King and eventually loved Patrick Ewing. So, I remember having Knicks games on in the background when I was very young, in the early 90s. Really, the moment that I fell in love with sports was…And we couldn’t really afford to go to games even though they’re so, especially in the 90s in New York, there was so much to go see. But the first time I ever went to a live baseball game, the first time I ever set foot in old Yankee Stadium was a class trip in second grade to the home opener against the Kansas City Royals – and it was Andy Pettitte bobblehead day, and I still have that bobblehead. I’d never experienced anything like it, I fell in love with that feeling that when you’re in a ballpark specifically and 57,000 other people are cheering at the same time and you can feel that sound in your chest…You know what I mean? [laughter]
Jessica: Yes!
Kavitha: That feeling was so addictive. I just never felt anything like that before. I was 100% that person who went in like, “What’s this baseball thing?” And if I could’ve I would’ve come out with like a foam finger and decked out in pinstripes, right? I’ve been just chasing that feeling ever since. The mid to late 90s was a really good time to chase that feeling by being a Yankees fan. So yeah, I just always…It was really beautiful. Yankee Stadium in the south Bronx is such a microcosm of what makes New York Great – of people speaking every language and people of every skin color and every age group just kind of unified around this one thing. I found that really beautiful. So yeah, that’s how I became a sports fan.
I couldn’t tell you the first time I realized sports were problematic. I think professionally it’s probably been a more concerted understanding. When I really first became a sportswriter it was about half a year before Ray Rice, the Ray Rice accusation. I think that we just saw everything kind of come to a head in 2014 about athletes being accused of things; the NFL covering up its concussion scandal, like, a lot of things happened in the span of a year that kind of brought up all of these conflicting things that we have and all of the ways our sports and our ethics and our politics intersects. But I do tell people, one of the first times it’ll always be seared into my memory about “sports really isn’t a thing that’s for me, I’m not supposed to be in this space” was…I wrote a column about Derek Jeter a day after his very last game and a lot of what I wrote was a lot of what I just told you about falling in love with the Yankees and kind of what Derek Jeter meant to me. It was the least controversial column I have ever written, it was literally just “Derek Jeter is good. Thank you for playing baseball for so long.” Nothing political, nothing about women’s issues or domestic violence or anything.
And one of the comments that I got was…Because I mentioned that my parents are immigrants and they’re cricket fans and not really baseball fans and that kind of thing, one of the comments that I got was, “Kavitha, now I realize why I disagree with everything that you say. You’re 25,” – I was 25 at the time – “and you’re an Indian immigrant, and you only know cricket. How did you get a job writing about American sports other than affirmative action?” That was kind of the first time I was like, okay, yeah, people don’t think I’m American enough to be a sports fan, you know? That brings up so many emotions from other people about just literally my existing in this space. So I think that Jessica and I have both experienced being othered – obviously you have as well, Lindsay. I think that I’ll always remember that comment for kind of keeping me going, but also just as a reminder that what we do rubs people the wrong way for a lot of reasons.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Absolutely, yeah. It’s so funny, now that I’m thinking about it I think the three of us really kind of came onto the writing scene at a very similar time.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Because it was around…I think the Ray Rice stuff was when I started branching out of just doing tennis writing, because I had just been doing tennis writing before that. That’s wild to think it’s been six years now. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. Jameis Winston was seven years ago this year.
Lindsay: Wow.
Jessica: Yeah. Which was mine.
Lindsay: I was about to say, yeah. [laughs]
Jessica: My…When I started writing critically about sport, I guess. But I have the sort of cliche story where I grew up with a dad who loved football, a whole lot. He was a huge FSU fan and a huge Cowboys fan. We had one television – this was the 80s – there was one TV and on the weekends you watched what he was watching, and he taught me all about football and I loved it deeply. I think that sort of branched into loving sports in general. I played basketball when I was in middle school; I’m tall, I was a center. I probably wasn’t yet 6’ but I was taller than everybody else. My dad taught me to play basketball in our driveway. So I have that kind of story, and then, I say this all the time, but I only applied to go to Florida State. That was the only place I wanted to go to college because I wanted to watch Florida State football, and I did. Bless my husband’s heart, Aaron is like this side character in my podcast life, but he didn’t care anything about sports and he went with me to New Orleans to the Superdome to watch FSU win the national championship when we were in college. I’m trying to think when I first started to think critically, because at that point in my life I did not. I wrote about this in my first book, like, Peter Warrick…We had issues with that Florida State team that I was willing to bend over backwards to explain away as a fan, and I can remember that feeling a lot. So to go from that to sort of how I approach sports now, I want to say it was probably tennis, like, watching Serena and Venus in tennis is probably a good guess on it. One of the first big pieces I ever wrote on my own blog that blew up was about Serena and whether or not she was a costume – it was when Caroline Wozniacki made fun of her, which I know Serena was okay with – but I wrote a blog post about how Serena Williams is not a costume, and that was the first big thing I ever wrote that went around the internet. I had never experienced that before. So, that’s my gut feeling about it. But I don't know, how did I get like this is a good question [laughter] that I don’t think I can answer.
Kavitha: That’s actually…We’ve done so many of these interviews and this is the first time, me hearing you say that, I realize that I think the first time that I wrote on my stupid little blog that nobody read when I was 20 years old and had a Blogspot, you know what I mean? I wrote a post about Serena, the way that the media was attacking Serena after her blowup at the 2009 US Open, and basically I wrote about how she’s being portrayed as an angry Black woman, you know, all the things that we talk about whenever this happens and nobody ever criticizes with Djokovic or whatever. I think that might've been the first time that I wrote something that obviously only I read, but something along those lines. It doesn’t surprise me that it would be Serena Williams to bring all of those issues to the surface for us.
Jessica: Well, I can remember…I think it was 2007, and maybe Lindsay remembers this better, but Serena went away for a little bit and then she came back and she won the Australian open and she was a little bit heavier than she had been when she went away, and she came back unranked, I wanna say – is this right?
Lindsay: Mm-hmm.
Jessica: Then she just tore through that tournament and won the grand slam. I will never forget. I do remember this really well; every single time she stepped on court they had to talk about how much she weighed and that she wasn’t fit and couldn’t do it again. I just remember talking to the TV because I was so pissed at how they were talking about her. So, I definitely have been that kind of fan that talks back to the TV and I definitely remember feeling so angry on her behalf because I’m like, “She’s now in the semi-finals!” At what point is this conversation over!? Which it wasn’t, until she actually won the whole thing. It wasn’t even over then, let’s be honest.
Lindsay: And then we just have that same conversation every year until she retires. [laughter]
Jessica: Yeah.
Kavitha: Jeez.
Lindsay: It’s still going. So, the book is a series of 14 or 15 essays, chapters, delving into different issues within sports that, if you are a progressive-thinking fan of any sort, give you pause at times and make you kind of question. So, listeners to this podcast are people who deal with these quandaries a lot, like, you’ve probably done a lot of interviews with some audiences where these were some new ideas, but that’s probably not our listeners. So I wanted to ask: how did you come to this idea for a book, and why did you decide to organize it this way? I think people would be interested in a little bit behind the scenes of how this came together. Jess, do you wanna start?
Jessica: Yeah, so I had a friend, years ago now, mention that he would like to see me write about a problems-in-sports kind of book, and that was just sitting in my brain. Then, Kavitha, I don’t know if you remember…I can’t remember the specific moment, but she and I were joking about those “How to talk about sports with your boyfriend when he loves them when you don’t,” or like, whatever, you know? [Lindsay laughing]
Kavitha: “How to fake it at a Super Bowl party,” or something like that.
Jessica: Yeah. So the initial idea was almost a joke response, like, “How to talk to your boyfriend when he doesn’t understand basketball,” or that kind of feeling. It’s so hard to pinpoint how all of this changed. I mean, we’ve been doing this for years; books take a really long time. So we took it to UT Press and we have this brilliant editor, Casey – credit to him forever – he probably was the one that steered us to think about how we wanted to structure the book and what topics we wanted to do. Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, every chapter title has something similar…I wish I had the book in front of me, I don’t even have the chapter titles!
Kavitha: I do! [laughter]
Jessica: There it is. [laughs] I’m actually looking at the book across the room from me.
Lindsay: “Forgiving the doper you love.” “Cheering for a team with a racist mascot.” You’re right, it has a little of that how-to in the titles.
Jessica: Yeah. It was originally called “How to love sports when they don’t love you back.” But how is hard. How is a really hard thing to answer when you’re talking about systemic issues and you’re speaking to individuals and everyone’s drawing their own lines. So we didn’t wanna repeat in every chapter “The way to do it is for every individual to figure out for themselves…” like, that was a repetitive thing. So I would guess that it was probably Casey as a good editor steering us once we brought this pretty general idea to him. I think we picked the topics based on things we either cared about or thought were interesting or were things we knew were specifically things we could really hone in on through sports. Kavitha, what’s your memory of this?
Kavitha: Yeah, I mean, we didn’t write anything in sequence. We didn’t have a sequence, frankly. [laughs] Now that we’ve had a little bit of time to reflect, even though it’s been a wild year already, the book evolved so much in the process of making the book, right? Because as Jessica says, it started as this kind of…We were just fed up, frankly, and pissed off. We were like, we should just write a snarky book about, you know, men who know nothing about sports and treat women this way and all of that, but it evolved so much from that. It was originally a how-to, and then we also realized that it’s really hard to prescribe solutions for these things, because as Jessica said they’re systemic things, but also on the individual level the way that these issues affect us and the ways we react to them is so varied. There isn’t almost one prescription, one solution for that. But yeah, it was definitely Casey who figured out chapter transition and what should go where, what made sense to put where and everything like that. I don’t think that I had…I had no expertise or say in that. [laughs] You know, how do you decide that kind of thing? You have a good editor.
Lindsay: That’s great.
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, one of the last things that happened with the book was we put the chapters in order.
Lindsay: Oh, wow.
Jessica: So, we had a different order…Because this is a university press, it actually went out to anonymous readers, and we got feedback. We had to do it that way, because the press…Some board of university professors…? I actually don’t even know! They have to approve it?
Kavitha: It’s peer-reviewed.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. So they do a peer-review and then these people that are associated with he university actually approve it after that. So we had a totally different order for the chapters at peer review point, and then Casey was like, this isn’t flowing right, we need to fix this. So that’s actually one of the last things that happened with the book, was getting that flow right from topic to topic.
Lindsay: That’s amazing. You know, it’s funny…So, I loved the book, everyone, I know I’m biased. [laughs] But I honestly didn’t expect to learn that much because…And that’s no insult to either of you, but it’s just because I…
Jessica: This is your space.
Lindsay: Yeah, this is my space. [laughs] But I did, and I think it just really…It wasn’t even just learning, it was the putting the things back to back, and I think it made it so clear that sometimes it seems like all these problems are different but there’s a root of all of this that's the same, you know? [laughs] My dog has just popped up and Kavitha is very excited to see Mo. Jess is over it because Jess sees Mo all the time. [laughs]
Jessica: I was like, oh, there’s Mo! One of the other last things that we did in the copy edit process was we had to do the work of saying…As we talked about in chapter four, we had to someone who read it and say, hey, this is connected to this chapter and this is over here and this is over here, so we could tell the reader, we could signpost for people reading, like, yeah, and this is tied to this other thing and this is tied to this other thing because so much of what we talk about is, like you said, it’s the same shit in sports, right? [laughs] It manifests in different ways. So that was part of the work right at the end, too, was making sure we’re making those connections really obvious.
Lindsay: Yeah, and I think you did a really good job with this. I think it’s the perfect mix of being accessible to people who don’t spend too much time thinking about these issues [laughter] like the three of us.
Kavitha: Well Lindsay, when you said you learned something–
Jessica: That actually felt really… [laughs]
Kavitha: –that means so much.
Jessica: Yes.
Kavitha: Because obviously this is your space. But also I think one of the challenges in writing a book like this and one of the challenges just in sports media in general is that what we do and cover and watch is so jargon-y and can be extremely alienating to just a casual fan or just someone who’s interested in these issues and might not even consider themselves a sports fan. This is something that I deal with in my show, you know, it’s a daily show and we focus on sports storytelling, but at what point do you have to explain things for a more mass audience, and at what point are you alienating a hardcore sports fans, right? So for this book I think that I have definitely thought about if we have friends like Lindsay, you know, multiple friends that we have in the industry, would they get value out of this? Because I do think that if you spend every day of your life – as Lindsay, you do, and Jessica and I do – covering these things, you know, it is hard to put something in a new way because it’s the same old shit that we’re dealing with, right? So that meant a lot, thank you.
Lindsay: I was disappointed that you didn’t give me all of the answers, though. [laughter] I was hoping that you had both just been really holding out on me and that it would be…
Jessica: Man, think of the money we would make if that was true, though.
Kavitha: Can you imagine if we had those secrets and we were like, “You’re just gonna have to wait until the book comes out, and then we’ll fix sports.” [laughs]
Lindsay: You mentioned in the intro that this isn’t gonna have all the answers, and I was like, grr!
Jessica: Slam that book closed, throw it across the room!
Lindsay: So, I could talk in depth about all the chapters, but we won’t do that. But there are a couple of chapters that are topics that I have thought a lot about that I kinda wanted to discuss, and one of them is doping. And I know Jess will be thrilled–
Jessica: Yessss. [laughs]
Lindsay: –because Jess always wants to talk more about doping on Burn It All Down. [laughs]
Jessica: This is like the behind the burn information here. Which is, like, directly related to writing this book. I became obsessed with how we think about doping because I was working on this book and that chapter.
Lindsay: So, I’ve always had this thing where of all the issues that…You know, as someone who wrote freelance for a while on the intersection of sports and social justice and then was full time at that beat for ThinkProgress, all the things that I felt like in this space that I should really care about, I did, d’you know what I mean? Like, gender equity, LGBTQ+ rights, taking money away from the owners, no public investment in stadiums. But the one thing I could never get up in arms about or never seem to care about was doping. It’s just never done it for me. [laughs] Like, it’s never been something I’ve ever been able to pearl-clutch about. I guess, first off, maybe I’ll start with Jess just because I know she wants to talk about this so much, but Kavitha as well…There’s some really interesting stuff about the history of how people started using performance enhancing drugs in sports and kind of the military ties there, which I thought were fascinating, and just kind of the origin of this moral panic. I think our readers would be really interested to know more about what you found when researching the history of this.
Jessica: And, like, what did I find. [laughs] This is the hard part of doing the media for this book. It’s funny, because Kavitha and I read this thing four different times in the spring in order to get all the edits done. Yeah, doping is so fascinating. I will say, I used to be real self-righteous about it, and I think part of that was living here in Austin because…The chapter is framed around Lance Armstrong because he is so famous for this and for holding out for so long and for himself being so righteous about it. But I lived in a place that felt deflated when it became clear that he had lied, and, like, why? What is it?
I used to go to a 24-hour fitness here in Austin that was Lance Armstrong 24-Hour Fitness and all the pictures on the wall were Lance Armstrong and that was like your motivation, and they had to take all of that down! So, you know, I used to be that person, and now I’m the other side, like, it doesn’t do it for me, Lindsay. But yeah, the one thing I will say about doping is it does matter when it’s literally harming or killing people, right? That’s the one that makes sense to me when they want to regulate that. So a lot of the history of doping is people doing really wild stuff and then just dying in bike races, right? That’s my memory.
Kavitha: Yeah.
Jessica: Lindsay, I feel like you know it better at this point than I do.
Lindsay: Yeah. But also to get like, more out of soldiers and stuff. It was governments, and I thought that made so much sense when I read about it.
Jessica: So, after World War II, right? There was all this work around it. Being a soldier is incredibly hard, your adrenaline is pumping, you have to go go go, you don't sleep very much. A lot of the same kind of stuff, especially for endurance athletes…So it makes sense on some level that it went from that to athletics. Then of course we went from World War II and into the Cold War where athletics and doping and all these sorts of things took on this nationalistic Cold War where they were using athletics to fight that. So doping became a moral issue wrapped in nationalistic ideology and I think we still can’t quite unpack those things that really…When you say ‘doping,’ I think of East Germany. I was born in 1980, y’all are younger than me, but that’s sort of what I think of. Even now with Russia and everything that happened with Sochi – which is, again, systemic cheating within sport. I’m not like, “They should be allowed to do that.” [laughs] That’s not my argument here. But there’s a way that, yeah, it’s wild when you think about it going from military into the Cold War and then even now with whatever kind of Cold War we have now it’s still manifesting and doping is playing this really critical role in all of that.
Lindsay: Yeah. I know you, Kavitha, as a big baseball fan. I was wondering what your thoughts on this are, because of course I think the first time I heard about it was steroids in baseball. I mean, I’m not a big baseball fan. I didn’t grow up…North Carolina’s just not a big baseball place. But I was glued to the television with my dad, you know, the summer of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. I’ve never watched that much baseball in my life, never watched so much since. [laughs]
Kavitha: Right! I mean, baseball has the added element of being so steeped in its own tradition and history, right?
Jessica: And purity.
Kavitha: And purity.
Jessica: That’s so important to doping.
Kavitha: The purity in baseball is often overstated. Baseball loves to prop up its own mythology and its own history and traditions and positioning itself as the national past-time, right? So I’m with you, Lindsay – it just never moved me enough to care, to be as mad about it as I know a lot of people are. But at the same time maybe this is because I don't have the generations of baseball fandom behind me, right? But I remember talking with a very good friend of mine, he’s very progressive, and he’s from Louisville, so, baseball’s kind of a big deal down there. He played baseball in college, and he basically said that he doesn’t watch it anymore because he feels like he was betrayed by people doping and by the league allowing this to happen, which is also a very fair thing there. I can’t argue with that, right? I can’t tell him even if I don’t personally feel that way I can’t tell him that he’s being self-righteous or something.
But I do think that in baseball we have to acknowledge that baseball has never actually been as pure as we think and that’s what’s been really difficult for people to let go of in the PED and steroid conversation. Even if we’re not talking about performance enhancing drugs, which there is just a long history of greenies and amphetamines and all sorts of substances being used in every era of baseball, but we’re also talking about a sport that obviously didn’t integrate until 60 years ago. We’re also talking about a sport that has entire early eras called the dead-ball era, you know? Then the home run surge after that where spit-balls were just a thing. Gaylord Perry is in the hall of fame and his most famous pitch was an illegal pitch.
So I think that it’s just really hard for people to let go of the notions that hearken back to nostalgia, you know, the same way that it’s difficult for people of a certain generation to criticize America during World War II, at a time when we were upholding ourselves as the righteous part of the world and obviously fighting on the side of good in that particular war, but the same way that it’s difficult to criticize America under those pretenses, it’s really difficult for people to admit that this thing that they claim to have been pure for its entire existence really has never been pure. So, you know, if Barry Bonds is not in the hall of fame but Gaylord Perry is, for example, that’s an inconsistency.
Jessica: Yeah. I will just say, one thing I learned doing the doping stuff was around BALCO, which was a laboratory/clinic in the Bay Area that…I just assumed it was all baseball players, that was my memory of it, because probably of how the media reported it. But there were so many football players and just another example of where we care and where we don’t, and that really is arbitrary in a lot of ways that I think we have to reckon with. If someone wants to be self-righteous about doping there are things like that that they really need to come to terms with if they’re gonna feel that way about it.
Lindsay: Yeah, and I think to me it always just comes back to this concept of fairness in sports and how…I do understand, I have friends – or not really friends, but people I’ve gotten to know through this work, you know – who competed against Russians in the Olympics when they were doping and who are now in these clean sports committees, you know, everything like that. I understand that. I understand feeling jilted by that and, I mean, that program they had in Sochi with the cutting the hole in the lab…[laughs] Like, that’s just one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever read about in my entire life.
Jessica: What was it, Icarus…?
Lindsay: It was, yeah.
Jessica: Where they do the great graphics of that. If you haven’t watched Icarus, just to see the graphics of how they moved the pee samples or whatever they were through the building was fantastic.
Lindsay: It’s very good, and it starts with the concept of this guy, I mean…He’s a good athlete, but a regular kind of good athlete being like, “How much can doping help me?” [laughs]
Jessica: He dopes, yeah!
Lindsay: He’s just purposely doping! Which I loved, because it didn’t start from that sanctimonious place.
Jessica: Yeah, yeah.
Lindsay: It just kind of started with, like, “Let’s see what this is all about.” [laughter] I kind of love that but I do want to say, yes, obviously we should say: safety first. There’s a thing of course with steroids and you see with, like, wrestlers and everything…
Kavitha: I don’t think that anybody, you know…None of us are pro-doping, right?
Lindsay: Yeah. [laughs]
Kavitha: None of us are like, yeah, that’s just a really great element to add to our sports. I think that we all want to strive for fairness in sports, we all want to strive for no cheating, whether that’s performance enhancing drugs or banging a trash can. But I think that just because we want to strive for fairness and no cheating, that doesn’t mean that we can’t forgive the people who have cheated, or we can’t somehow get over that, right?
Jessica: I mean, I kind of buy Lance Armstrong’s point that everyone was doing it. Because they were all doing it! [laughs]
Lindsay: Like with Alex Rodriguez too, I’m just like…Yeah.
Jessica: I don’t know if I’m very “Yay, you cheated,” but at the same time I kind of buy that argument, and I don’t know where to put that as a fan. But I do think that that’s something if we’re gonna be fans that we have to think through, right?
Kavitha: Well, I think that’s one of those issues that…We talk about a lot of issues in the book where we expose how unfair we are to individual athletes instead of the systems in which they exist and instead of the teams and the leagues, and frankly I think that most of our anger is directed towards individual baseball players and not MLB. MLB knew this was happening and it was good for the games.
Jessica: Right, right.
Kavitha: I think that these are the kinds of questions that we’re asking fans to think about.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s very complex and very interesting. So, we always talk about sports as this distraction, right, from the real world. A lot of people like to use it as a distraction. But at the same time it also gives everyone a common frame of reference to talk about issues or to study issues or to raise awareness of issues that people don’t like to talk about. One of those was in one of your early chapters about concussions. We’re talking about how, like, the research about concussions that is done for football players and for the NFL, how much that has helped people who are in car accidents and in all these others things that can’t raise money for research, right? They can’t get that intention, and I’ve just been thinking about that a lot for the past couple of days about how there’s just this dichotomy of when we care about things and when we don’t. Kavitha, why do you think sports…Even though we say a lot of people say a lot of people don’t want us to talk about those things in sports, at the same time it does give us an in, it does give you maybe a common language or passion to address tough topics at times.
Kavitha: Well, sports have always reflected where we are in a cultural or societal moment, where we are in our history. It’s not a coincidence that baseball integrated 5-10 years before the civil rights movement really gained steam. But I also think that sports are supposed to be such a pure meritocracy that it allows you to kind of navigate through all of the more complex topics because the actual playing of the sport is very straightforward – there’s a winner and a loser, there’s a higher score and a lower score, it's very tangible in that way. I’m always kind of…Sorry, I love your dog so much! [laughter]
Jessica: He's the star.
Lindsay: He’s very mad at me right now for not being outside with him. [laughs]
Kavitha: But I think also what you said is, sports are also a way for us to engage with people that we wouldn’t normally engage with if we weren’t all fans of the same team, right? I have plenty of sports fan friends, I have plenty of friends who are fans of the teams that I root for, that…We didn’t go to the same colleges and we didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood; we probably wouldn’t be friends if it weren’t for these things. So it allows us to start those conversations with people that we definitely wouldn’t be having those heavy level of conversations with.
Lindsay: Yeah. Do you have anything to add to that, Jess?
Jessica: Yeah. This is gonna sound weird when I say it, especially to this group, but it’s almost easier to have some of these conversations when we talk about them through sports, even though we know how hard it can be to still have those conversations when you do it through sport. But, like you said, I’m thinking about what you just said about brain trauma after car crashes to NFL players, and while we probably all know people who’ve been in car crashes or we’ve been in car crashes, how many people do we really know who had brain trauma associated with it? Versus we all watch…Well, not all, but a lot of us watch the NFL and we understand how to have a conversation around brain trauma in that space just from all viewing the same thing at the same time. I mean, now is even different because we have social media so there will be a horrible hit and it’ll just be everything everyone’s talking about on my timeline for the next 30 minutes until they move on to the next thing. But still, there’s a conversation about it. We’re not having that around brain trauma in other parts of our society, right?
The one thing I’ll add about that…I’m really sure we used Lindsay’s work at ThinkProgress in this part of the chapter, but that it’s gendered then, right? So, we do have all this work around brain trauma, and it's mainly around men because we mainly do it around the NFL and soldiers and we leave out domestic violence victims and female athletes and all sorts of women who struggle with brain trauma. So that’s the downside of where we put our attention, but I do think there’s something easier about it in sports – which feels strange to say out loud. [laughs]
Kavitha: But even that inequality, Jess, highlights the inequality that exists in brain trauma research overall. I’ve thought about this a lot, especially after reading and working on that part of that chapter. My mother is a neuropathologist and we talked very recently about something we had never really talked about before, which is how when she was coming up getting her PhD she was only learning anatomy on male cadavers, she was only taught male biology as the standard, basically. My mother studies neuropathology, she studies the brains. So that dissonance is something that we discuss when it comes to male athletes vs female athletes, but that absolutely exists when it comes to medicine, women being studied, and just biology.
Lindsay: I gotta say, you did use my work there, and it feels good to have a piece that maybe 500 people read, if I remember the Chartbeat stats… [laughters] Because I remember working very hard on that piece, and it disappeared from Chartbeat immediately [Jess groans] and was at the bottom of the things.
Jessica: It’s very good. It’s very good.
Lindsay: To have it come back…It was very good! I was impressed with myself. [Jess laughs] Five years later…Oh, that’s so funny. So, let’s kind of tie this all into what we’re seeing now with the athlete protests and what we’ve seen this past week. First of all, everyone should go check out the hot take that Jessica did with Amira Rose Davis and her other academia friends who are amazing about the athlete strikes that we’ve seen in this past week. But to me it makes so much sense that we’re seeing athletes recognize their power as we reckon with race in the country in one of the most real ways we have in a while, and because racism is so much the root of so many of these inequities that we deal with within sports. You all really focus on athletes’ rights during your chapter about the NCAA and March Madness, and I just wanted to know for both of you, do you see what we’ve seen this summer in the NBA and the WNBA with players deciding to sit out for games after the police shot Jacob Blake and demanding more attention to that…We’re starting to see NFL teams cancel practice, to have discussions over this and talk about what they can do as organizations.
Do you see that entering the college base and do you think that’s going to impact what we’re seeing in college athletics? And of course this all ties into coronavirus too because we’ve seen more organization from athletes – Kavitha, I know you’ve talked about this on your podcast. We’ve seen more organization from college athletes, especially college football players, because of the lack of COVID protocols and everything this summer. It just seems like young athletes are really recognizing their power. Kavitha?
Kavitha: Yeah. I mean, absolutely we’re seeing that change and that shift among the younger generations. Jessica always brings this up and this might be the only thing that I’m more optimistic on than she, but Jessica always brings up rightfully that the problem with movements and college sports is that there’s so much turnover – you’re done after 3 or 4 years and then you just get a new crop of kids and athletes in there. But I also think that the way that we see 14 year old gun control activists and climate change activists right now, every successive generation for the most part becomes more politically aware, becomes more progressive and all of that, and I think that we are definitely bear fruit in the NCAA. We’re also seeing the support on the legislative level, obviously – the NIL rights bill, originally introduced by California governor Gavin Newsom, that’s spreading across the country, that kind of thing. That just reflects how public sentiment has also changed. If you look at any poll from just five years ago the majority of Americans did not think that players deserve to be compensated in any way, and now that has shifted.
But we’ve also gone through an entire summer where these athletes, professional and college, have been told for five now going on six months just how much they’re worth to us, how much money these leagues and these teams set to lose on these broadcasting deals, how many jobs are dependent on them taking the field. So even when that happens on the college space you now have a bunch of 18, 19 and 20 year olds who have been told for five months that they are monetarily valuable to their universities. I think we all obviously knew that, but now they’re like, okay, if these systems and these universities and institutions are acknowledging that to us let’s turn that into actual material gains. We’re obviously seeing that with the push for college athletes to unionize, we’re seeing that in calls for better healthcare and better safety protocols on campus and everything, but we also saw that on an individual level across campuses demanding statues come down, demanding racial justice. There was a player from Ole Miss who said that he was gonna sit out the season if Mississippi didn’t change its state flag–
Jessica: And they did! It worked.
Kavitha: –and they did! A really incredible thing. I don’t think that it’s overstating it to say how much of a role he played in that. So yeah, I do think that the genie’s kind of out of the bottle when it comes to this. I can’t imagine college athletes regressing, taking two steps back from the steps that they've taken forward just this year.
Jessica: I’m interested…Whether or not it’s fair, I do think college football sort of is a good benchmark for what’s going to happen, right? I will say, I saw that on Thursday Mississippi State boycotted their practice and it made Mike Leach of all people have to come out and say that he supports them missing practice in order for them to raise awareness for racial injustice. Do I think that Mike Leach suddenly feels deeply about these issues? I mean, I don’t know. I guess we can all make our own decisions about that! But I do think, thinking about if this affects college football recruitment, if college football coaches have to figure out how to navigate their way through this in order to continue to recruit the best Black players around the country, those are ways that could lead to real material change, right? Because those coaches have big pocketbooks and they care very deeply for them.
So there is a part of me…I am cynical, I do worry about, like Kavitha, said, the fact that they’re only there for so long. It’s a huge risk – they don’t have any rights, really, as athletes in college. So especially if they’re trying to get to the next level they’re really risking a lot, and it’s hard to ask 19 year olds to do that. Then they’re gone, right? You’re always starting over in that space. But man, the idea that Mike Leach is just out here talking about the importance of racial justice is…You know, how did we get here? I don’t know! It seemed to happen very fast and if that can happen, I don’t know, maybe one day we’ll get Dabo saying something and then I’ll just have to go lay down on the floor, I dunno. [Lindsay laughing] But it does seem possible at this point, and if they have to do it in order to recruit these players, they’re gonna do it. That might really matter as far as the sustaining of this kind of stuff, of this movement we're seeing.
Kavitha: Well, and that’s exactly right. Every reporter that I have talked to has said, listen, we can sit here and talk about whether or not these coaches actually believe what they’re saying, but at the end of the day…I have a sports business background; if the action is there, I kind of don’t really care about the motivations, you know? I don’t think that Nike suddenly woke up and decided that Black lives matter – Nike recognized what was good for their business, to embrace this movement. Which is fine, honestly. [laughs] We have heard from a lot of reporters that the ability to continue to recruit top level Black talent, as Jessica said, is a huge concern here. What’s also I think going to think keep this movement building is we are seeing real changes, particularly from the NBA putting huge investment in their G League and actually positioning the G League to supersede college for high school athletes who want to end up in the pros. That’s very much in its nascency, but it’s going to be interesting to see what effect that has. But at the very least, it keeps the pressure on the NCAA to continue to evolve.
Lindsay: Yeah, I completely…I hope the coronavirus doesn’t really ruin what the G League has going because I know there’s already questions about when the G League will be able to come back. But talking with a bunch of WNBA players, you know, they’re saying that yeah, if they were being recruited right now, the recruits they’re talking to right now are paying attention to what these college coaches are saying.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely.
Lindsay: And they’re flocking to programs that have a lot of Black female…Well, not a lot, a lot is a big exaggeration. But I think it was something like 4 of the 5 most prominent openings in women’s college basketball this season, like, in the big schools, were filled by Black female former players. That is huge, and it’s helped them a lot in recruiting. You’re gonna see more and more of these young athletes wanting to go to schools where they’re coached by someone who understands the trauma they’re experiencing and supports them in using their voice. I think that's gonna be a game changer. To kind of wrap things up, lets talk a little bit about how this goes into ownership and all that stuff, because you wrote a big chapter about dealing with all this stuff when you don’t love your owner.
This last week, to make things a little current, we’ve gotten a lot more information about Kelly Loeffler and how before she got into politics nobody saw this side of her, right? That she was really into basketball. I think the reporting this week has just made it more and more transparent how much she’s just using this, right? How much she’s using her team in order to gain power. It almost makes it ickier for me that these aren’t her true beliefs. [laughs] It just makes it ickier, you know? Then of course we have Dell Loy Hansen, the owner of the Utah Royals and…
Kavitha: Salt Lake.
Lindsay: Yes, Utah Salt Lake in MLS.
Jessica: Wherever those men are. [laughter]
Lindsay: The Athletic did great reporting on his racist history–
Kavitha: Shoutout to Meg Linehan and our whole soccer team.
Lindsay: Amazing. I mean, he just announced today that he’s – we’re recording this on Sunday – he’s releasing his share. We’ve had more reporting on how bad Dan Snyder is and he finally announced the name change. Do you think this tipping point that we’re seeing as head coaches give athletes more power, do we think this is going to change the demands on ownership groups and maybe change models going forward? Kavitha?
Kavitha: I hope so. [Lindsay laughs] This is where that slight flash of optimism goes right out the window. [laughs] I hope so, but when have we ever seen billionaires reform, right? Our system’s just not built for it, our politics aren’t built for it. I think that the most you can hope for is slight steps forward, and I think that what the Milwaukee Bucks have started, to have NBA players demand from their owners, is a way that we can get actual change. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the Bucks, who are owned by Marc Lasry – a longtime Clinton donor and supporter, so among the more progressive politically owners that exist in professional sports. But at the same time, you know, what is he doing with his money to help these social causes, right? I always think about the fact that Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, gave the Milwaukee Bucks owners $400 million to build their new area. They clearly wield enough political influence – all owners do, because we have a whole stadium subsidy chapter as well.
But if you can wield enough political influence to get hundreds of millions of dollars in stadium subsidies from your government, you wield enough political influence to enact police reform. You just can’t tell me that that’s not a thing. So I think that players using their voice to force those kinds of changes from owners is where I would be more optimistic about seeing that happen. Because, frankly, Dan Snyder still owns a team. [laughs] We have Dell Loy Hansen kind of going the Donald Sterling route, but we’ve got plenty of other owners in professional sports who are problematic and who don’t actually go that route. So, I mean, I hope we continue to see the power of being held accountable, but we don’t have that at the highest levels of power in our country right now, so I don’t know why we would expect that out of our sports teams.
Lindsay: Yeah. It’s only gonna come if these athletes push it, unfortunately; that’s what we’ve seen this week. I just keep thinking about how the DeVos family owns the Orlando Magic [laughs] and it’s just like…You know? There really are like 50 of these rich people who all know each other and they can all influence each other
Kavitha: Tilman Fertitta and the Houston Rockets…Jerry Jones.
Lindsay: Yeah. It’s ridiculous.
Lindsay: Jess?
Jessica: I don’t know if I have anything to add to that. I will say…I’ll just do a Burn It All Down plug. We did talk about ownership in the last episode we actually recorded, episode 169, and I just keep thinking about how the US does it differently. It’s not that there aren’t owners in other parts of the world, but in a lot of different places they don’t have this kind of hierarchy and structure to their professional organizations. I don’t know…That seems far away and hard, like, how do we ever get there, because you’re going against governments who like their sports. But I do just keep thinking there are other ways…
Kavitha: It’s corporate welfare.
Jessica: I do just keep thinking there are other ways, right? There are other ways to do this that are better. I will say one thing: in the final chapter which is all about athlete activism there’s a section in that chapter about how the government loves sports for propaganda, these rich people love sports for propaganda. That's a platform for Donald Trump to walk out before the college football championship game and let everyone cheer for him – god, he loved that so much, it was so gross – and you could see exactly how sports works in that way, that platform, that way too. So it is hard to imagine how this changes because of the amount of money and because sports is a conservative space and it likes to be the same all the time, it’s always trying to be the same all the time. I don’t know…I feel cynical about that one. But I am really happy about what’s happening in Utah. JJ Watt was out on Twitter today defending women’s sports as a good thing in the world–
Kavitha: Offering to be an investor!
Jessica: Yeah. Like, okay! Let’s do this, let’s do this. [laughs] I don’t know. We’ll see, we’ll see.
Lindsay: It’s what we need, and I’ve got a Q&A on Power Plays this week with Ginny Gilder, one of the owners of the Seattle Storm. One of the things she talks about is can we do this differently in women’s sports? Do you know what I mean? Like, in women’s sports is there an opportunity to not get stuck in the same–
Jessica: Yes!
Lindsay: –owner vs player mentality. She talked a lot about it in CBA negotiations and not wanting to be so owner vs player because they’re all on the same page and most WNBA owners are not billionaires.
Jessica: Yeah, it’s not the same kind of money.
Lindsay: Right, it’s not the same kind of money.
Jessica: Huh. That is super interesting. I said this before when we talked about Loeffler on another thing but there is something just…Loeffler in particular is so shocking because it just seems like people who support women’s sports tend to lean to the left. Just being a women’s sports fan and supporter tends to be a progressive move because that’s not the normal in sports. So the conservative thing is to not want women to be in sports. Jen Doyle wrote that piece about Caster Semenya that is so brilliant, and she talks in that piece about how women’s sports is where we break all the rules. This is the place where things get rewritten and we can think differently, and that’s part of what’s so upsetting about everything around Caster. But I think about that a lot, because there is this power around women’s sports, that it’s just fundamentally different, just its existence. So yeah, the idea that you don’t need all that money to be running women’s sports because it’s just not the same thing.
Kavitha: I mean, I’ll never say that the WNBA doesn’t want to be making the same kind of money that the NBA is making right now, right? But there is absolutely something about being able to be a disrupter in your space because you are not beholden to the same financial circumstances, right? There’s just more room to break shit, which is like a favorite phrase in Silicon Valley, but there is. If you think about how radical what the Milwaukee Bucks did and what NBA players are doing right now – Maya Moore sat out 2 seasons of a hall of fame career to do this. I think people did commend her but it didn’t seem as radical a thing as when the Milwaukee Bucks walk out of a playoff game because of the money and the attention and the eyeballs involved. But at the same time she sets that stage. We don’t have the Bucks happening without a Maya Moore happening, and Maya Moore probably isn’t able to do that if she’s making 7x more money or if the television contracts are as big as they are in the NBA. So, yeah, I mean, like Jessica said, it is wild to me that someone who exists within that paradigm thinks the way that Kelly Loeffler does.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s wild. We’re seeing this weekend with Athletes Unlimited getting launched and a new women’s sports league where it’s a completely different ownership model where players are kind of involved; there are no really team owners. Yeah, we’ll just have to see. I think that it’s the one space I think that gives me hope for the future of sports in general. [laughs] Although of course I’m excited about the future of women’s sports too. Alright, I’m gonna give you both the last word just on what the book means to you and why people should go grab it. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, it does feel like…What does it mean to me? It’s really fun to see it all together because it all these different things that I work on a lot. I mean, it does feel in a lot of ways like Burn It All Down in a book. It’s these things that we care a lot about and talk about a lot on this show. The fact that I was doing the show while working on the book was good; the book is better because I was on this show talking to you all every single week and thinking through these issues. I just hope that people, especially people that are listening to this podcast, listening to Burn It All Down, I hope when you all read it that you just feel seen, that you’re like, “Ugh, yes! There are other people who love sports like I do, and you can still be critical of it and love it.” That being critical is a part of love and that…I don’t know. Kavitha and I just really love sports, and I hope that all that comes through.
Kavitha: Yeah. I mean, exactly that. We really love sports, we want to be able to enjoy them in the same way that everyone else seems to be able to, right? But exactly what Jessica just said. I hope readers realize they’re not the only ones to go through this, and I also hope that…One of the things in writing this book that I learned was just to be kinder to myself about having these dilemmas but still turning the television on, you know? We don’t wanna be preachy, we don’t wanna make fans feel bad about themselves, we don’t wanna tell you that you’re bad people because you recognize that some of these bad things exist but you still can’t completely boycott, for lack of a better way to put it. So I just hope that people find community in it, that people find some comfort in it, and I hope that some shit actually changes, [laughs] maybe. Jessica’s always saying, you know, we could fix sports if they would just listen to us. [laughter]
Jessica: If you would just listen!
Kavitha: Yeah, right? But yeah, we really really really do love sports and I hope that that comes through as well.
Lindsay: It does, and just congratulations to both of you. I know how hard you worked on this, it’s so exciting to see it all together. I think it’s something that will be used as a guidebook for sports fans going forward. I really really do, because of the way it lays out all these different issues, and I think this is how we get progress, right? I hate when people say you can’t be critical unless you have all the answers, and that’s just not how progress works. [laughs]
Jessica: Right. Yeah.
Lindsay: That’s not how anything has ever ever worked!
Kavitha: There’s also just never been a singular methodology towards progress, right? The civil rights movement has 20 different strains of how to go about this even if the end result and the desired result isn’t the same.
Lindsay: Yeah. I always think of Katie Nolan, I think in one of her videos a while back, being like, “They want me to turn off the NFL, but I want to stay in it and be critical of it because I love it,” you know? I wanna stay tuned in because I love it and I don’t think they deserve to be able to kick me out, right? Like, no. I’m gonna stay here and keep holding you accountable for these things.
Kavitha: Well the only way that the status quo actually changes is to have people like us in the industry doing that work because frankly the only reason that sports and any industry is allowed to maintain its terrible practices for as long as they do is because the same people have been in charge. So, yeah.
Lindsay: I think we’re starting to see different voices are being heard and the younger generation gives me hope. Alright, flamethrowers, thanks so much for listening. We will be back next Tuesday, we’ll be back recording regular episodes and we’re excited to have the whole group back together – actually, I probably won’t be on that episode! [laughs] But we’ll all be together soon, I promise! We hope you’ve enjoyed the special episodes throughout the month of August; we’ve had so many wonderful guest interviews and been able to showcase so many guest podcasts and kicking this month of September off with Jess and Kavitha is the perfect way. So hope you’re all hanging in there, hope you had a good August, and we will talk to you next week. Bye!