Women’s perspectives on sports, the Missouri football protest, soccer hipsters (and George Best)
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This week on the blog I honed in on some issues involving women and sports, starting off with the scarcity of epic women’s sports rivalries, in individual as well as team sports.
I didn’t mention Ronda Rousey, who may never have a serious rival in the UFC ring, and I also set aside the Serena-Venus Williams rivalry, which has its own dynamic. It’s a sister thing that’s worthy of a post all its own.
I also wrote about Joyce Carol Oates and Diane Roberts, who are equally rare females writing about boxing and American college football. And at the end of the week, I did some thinking out loud about “women’s perspectives” in sports and wondered why there aren’t more diverse views on dicey, gender-related topics.
Baseball Hall balloting underway
The end of the World Series means more than the start of the hot stove league. It’s also when Baseball Hall of Fame ballots go out, and in recent years it’s become very contentious with the eligibility of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others suspected of steroids use.
Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated thinks that only Ken Griffey Jr., who's on the ballot for the first time, appears to be a lock for the class of 2016. He also examines substantial changes to the voting process made by the Baseball Writers Association of American that might affect who gets in, and who doesn’t.
Baseball historian Graham Womack (creator of the excellent Baseball Past and Present site) writes about the eternal debate over Jack Morris and Cooperstown at The Sporting News, where he’s also a contributor.
The Missouri football protests and the NCAA
Joe Nocera’s column in The New York Times has moved from the op-ed page to the sports section, and he started by writing off the threatened Missouri football boycott and the untapped power of minority athletes. (His anti-NCAA book, “Identured,” will be published in February.)
Another prominent non-sportswriter who’s also been heavily critical of the NCAA chimed in off the Missouri story. At The Atlantic, Taylor Branch (author of “The Cartel”), analyzed the latest developments to reform college athletics, which he said are bolstered by calls for “moral clarity.”
While I’m not surprised by these and many other commentaries this week, I’m not sold on some of the conclusions. (I think John Walters of Newsweek summed up the events in Columbia the best.)
There is a long history of black player protests in college football. Like those efforts that preceded them, the Missouri athletes were bringing light to racial, social and cultural issues, not their own status as amateurs under the auspices of the NCAA.
There’s a lot of hopefulness that this might spur on future actions along these lines, given the Northwestern football players’ efforts to unionize and other developments.
But the NCAA, despite some legal setbacks and facing numerous other threats, isn’t going to give up its defense of the amateur model easily. And it's not certain that college athletes of any race will risk losing something more substantial than a game or two in a season on the rocks, as the Missouri football team is experiencing now.
Too soccer hip to be square Since this kind of pandering is all the media rage, The Guardian scoured the globe to profile six sets of hipster soccer fans and their clubs. They range from the fashionably grungy followers of FC Pauli in Hamburg and the faux-woodsy fanatics of the Portland Timbers, who munch on “barbecued-tofu sandwiches, spinach salads and chocolate-covered bacon.” No, really.
They’ve got nothing on the style and devotion inspired by George Best, the sport's truly original and authentic "mod." A 1971 German art film about Best, “Football As Never Before,” has been discovered by composer Matthew Nolan. His new score of that film will debut in London later this month.
L’Equipe interviews longtime Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger about the game, his natty sartorial style and the sideline anxiety he's cultivated in nearly two decades in charge of the North London Club.
The British magazine FourFourTwo profiles Archibald Leitch, “the man who invented the football stadium.”
Other great reads of the week
Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated writes about what swimming legend Michael Phelps faces following rehab and ahead of the Rio Olympics;
Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times talks to Keith Jackson, now 87 and retired from the college football announcing booth for a decade. Says Mrs. Jackson of her husband: “His voice is almost like singing;”
Jon Hotten has lovely piece in Cricket Monthly, “The river of cricket,” about his lifetime of being obsessed with the sport;
The Paris Review has an NBA columnist (you read that right), Rowan Ricardo Phillips, who’s an award-winning poet and a Guggenheim fellow.
New sports books potpourri
Newly released: The paperback version of Peter Golenbock’s latest, “The Mickey Mantle Novel,” and a tale of Barack Obama and basketball, “The Audacity of Hoop,” by Alexander Wolff.
Newly reviewed: “Cheated,” about the athletic academic scandal at the University of North Carolina, at the U.S. Sport History blog;
Interviewed: Travis Vogan, about his new book about the business of ESPN, at the Allrounder; and Dan Raley, author of a new book on the history of pro sports in Seattle.
Recommended: “Gridiron Classics” by the staff of Men’s Journal.
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