We heard it often through the first half of 2010: “The World Cup will transform Africa.” “It will bring South Africa together.” “It makes us proud in South Africa.” “The World Cup will boost the South African economy and everyone will benefit.”
But for the people of South Africa, and certainly the rest of the continent, the 2010 Men’s World Cup did not provide adequate shelter, bring heat into homes, or put food on their tables. Nor did it reduce unemployment, provide support to underemployed day laborers in segregated townships, boost salaries of workers to meet the basic needs of their families, or reduce the socio-economic inequality that erodes the foundation of the young South African democracy.
For a few, mostly wealthy and well-connected South Africans, he flow of capital generated by the 2010 World Cup brought additional material advantage and political power. It also provided an opportunity to promote neoliberal ideas about the importance of individual responsibility as the way to solve pressing problems. At the same time, the pride and spirit created by hosting the Men’s World Cup were palpable to those consuming media representations of the event. But it didn’t take long for these feelings to be replaced by the desperation that was suppressed and repressed during Cup matches and festivities.
In this sense, there’s nothing so over as a World Cup—or the Olympic Games. Like other mega-events, the Cup leaves a combination of memories, exhaustion, and debt. People were sold the myth that everyone benefits from hosting the World Cup, but they quickly discovered that the event brought only a few of them temporary jobs and left their country with massive cost overruns and few resources to maintain social programs. The legacy that they expected was displaced by the harsh realities of layoffs and the absence of a social safety net.
Overall, the World Cup did little more than increase economic disparities in the population as a whole. Efforts to attract capital did not lead to programs and opportunities for underserved populations. When billions of dollars are at stake, people with power and influence position themselves to benefit from the flow of capital into a host city and region. However, the vast majority of people do not have access to that capital nor do they enjoy its benefits.
As unemployment has reached 33-percent generally, and over 50-percent for 15-34 year old blacks, conditions for have worsened for most South Africans. Public employees went on strike as they face job insecurity and anticipated cuts in public programs for the most socially and economically vulnerable South Africans. At the same time, factory workers making far less than the $57 per week minimum wage have struggled to keep their jobs in the face of industrial decline.
The desperation caused by worsening poverty is not softened by the presence of new stadiums or memories of vuvuzelas. This is a hard lesson to learn after having been seduced by the emotions that come with hosting such an event. Unfortunately, these seductions continue around the world with nation after nation learning that spending billions of public money to host major sport events is neither the best way to maintain democracy nor stiumlate overall economic growth.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
For those who may have read the following in the NYT:
Weber, Bruce, and Juliet Macur. 2010. A champion against cancer, under siege. The New York Times (August 21), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/sports/cycling/22armstrong.html
Jay Coakley
Hi _____,
Here's my official response--going to the authors of the article and others who are contacting me and forcing me to respond to maintain a 30-year reputation as a good scholar and careful thinker.
Jay Coakley, Ph.D.,
Professor Emeritus
Sociology Department
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
[start]
Wow! I'd forgotten about that interview—an hour-long call that took me out of my brother’s room at a cancer treatment center where he deals with the ravages of late-stage melanoma, the same cancer that killed my 32-year old son 10 years ago. It was a call from Bruce Weber, a New York Times writer with whom I'd never talked. I didn't know him, but I looked him up later. He’s done obituaries for years (good ones, by the way), and also did a feature article on Armstrong back in 2005.We had a nice long talk, partly about cancer-related issues. My goal when talking with journalists, which I do dozens of times each year, is to help them see their story in a larger perspective informed by what might be called a sociological imagination—that is, an ability to connect the biographies of individuals with larger social and cultural factors when making sense of what people do.
I see my conversations with journalists as reciprocal teaching and learning opportunities, and nearly always, that is what they’ve been. That’s why I took nearly an hour away from my brother to talk with Weber. Too bad, he didn’t listen very carefully or chose not to represent the spirit of my comments when he attributed comments and quotes to me.
First, and most important, Weber writes, "[Coakley] said that he had no doubt that Mr. Armstrong was guilty of doping, but that it did not matter. For athletes, [Coakley] said, the line between performance enhancement and medical treatment has become so fuzzy that it is impossible to discern." What I did say to Weber was that I had no doubt that Armstrong, like all elite cyclists who are contenders in the Tour d' France and other major road races, is taking some substances, legal or otherwise, that enable him to recuperate and consistently perform at a high level in a grueling schedule of training and racing. I made a point of saying that he may not be taking anything that is banned by the cycling federation and that he probably knew more about the physiology of training and performance and the effects of performance enhancing substances, including various chemical compounds that are not officially classified as drugs, than most top athletes in history, due to his treatment experience when he had cancer. I noted that he undoubtedly used that knowledge to assist him when participating in 21-day 2100-mile races up and down mountains.
I also explained that in elite sports today, the line between using medicine to treat injuries and using it to maximize training effects and performance is all but gone. Today, I explained, many people in sport medicine are focused more on performance than treatment—or they make no significant distinction between the two.
The "morality comment" attributed to me is taken out of the context of our long conversation (I never considered it an "interview"). I said to Weber that in the current culture of elite sports, athletes use many different and often new and even experimentally untested technologies to train and perform at a high level, and that the use of various substances that aid training and performance is not viewed in moral terms in this culture. I did note that athletes don’t see this increasingly normal part of their training as a moral issue. Instead, they see it as what they must do to maintain their identity as an elite athlete, honor the sport to which they are dedicated without qualification, and meet the expectations of all those who depend on them to perform well, including their families, teammates, support staff, and sponsors. I emphasized that the athletes who take these substances often are the ones who work the hardest, even to the point of literally wearing out parts of their bodies.
Finally, I did not so flippantly say that if Armstrong had told the truth, he'd be gone along with all the money he's raised for cancer research. Again, I put my comments in the context of elite sports and said that we in American society have created unrealistic norms that lead us to demonize athletes who use performance enhancing substances, many of which are now regularly prescribed to 50+ year olds who use them, like athletes use them, to maintain their edge (and their identities) in business, medicine, law, other occupations, and even in the bedroom. In the face of these unreasonable and morally self-righteous expectations, athletes are forced to deny part of what they must do to maintain their bodies and perform as is expected by all those who want to be entertained by their superhuman feats. In this context, if Armstrong had told the truth about what he was taking at any point in time, even if it wasn't on the banned substance list (as Mark McGuire did with androstendione, which wasn’t on MLB’s banned list when he took it), his career would have been over—and this would have destroyed his ability to raise money for cancer research.
Finally, I even sent to Weber material on deviant overconformity as it is meticulously explained in my book, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (10th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2010). Additionally, I told him that research published in Europe (in French) shows that many of the substances traditionally and currently taken by athletes have been developed by researchers working for national defense departments and the military in various nations in an effort to maximize the performance of soldiers expected to push human limits in the course of performing their duties. I even made the case that athletes have been socialized to see themselves in terms very similar to how soldiers see themselves—representing their communities, schools, nations and families as they do what they have committed themselves to do. Unwisely, perhaps, I disclosed to Weber that I take a substance that prevents debilitating fatigue caused by multiple sclerosis.
My point was that this drug is banned for athletes (Marion Jones lied about taking it, among other things, and went to jail), but it was developed by researchers seeking to find a drug that would enable soldiers to maintain alertness during tedious hours of piloting long range bombers and jet fighters or enduring long stretches of guard duty for which alertness is a matter of life or death. I went so far as to say that if I was on a 20 hour trans-Pacific flight I hoped my pilot would take the same drug when experiencing severe drowsiness, or if I was rushed to the hospital for heart surgery in the middle of the night I hoped my surgeon would use the drug if he or she was dead tired.
Please note this is the first time I’ve been misrepresented by a journalist for the New York Times, a publication that has excellent sports journalists. When I’ve talked with them many times in the past, they’ve always been sensitive to the spirit and context in which my comments are made and then represented them very accurately. I learned the hard way many years ago that talking to journalists who only want provocative sound bites is never a good idea.
Weber, Bruce, and Juliet Macur. 2010. A champion against cancer, under siege. The New York Times (August 21), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/sports/cycling/22armstrong.html
Jay Coakley
Hi _____,
Here's my official response--going to the authors of the article and others who are contacting me and forcing me to respond to maintain a 30-year reputation as a good scholar and careful thinker.
Jay Coakley, Ph.D.,
Professor Emeritus
Sociology Department
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
[start]
Wow! I'd forgotten about that interview—an hour-long call that took me out of my brother’s room at a cancer treatment center where he deals with the ravages of late-stage melanoma, the same cancer that killed my 32-year old son 10 years ago. It was a call from Bruce Weber, a New York Times writer with whom I'd never talked. I didn't know him, but I looked him up later. He’s done obituaries for years (good ones, by the way), and also did a feature article on Armstrong back in 2005.We had a nice long talk, partly about cancer-related issues. My goal when talking with journalists, which I do dozens of times each year, is to help them see their story in a larger perspective informed by what might be called a sociological imagination—that is, an ability to connect the biographies of individuals with larger social and cultural factors when making sense of what people do.
I see my conversations with journalists as reciprocal teaching and learning opportunities, and nearly always, that is what they’ve been. That’s why I took nearly an hour away from my brother to talk with Weber. Too bad, he didn’t listen very carefully or chose not to represent the spirit of my comments when he attributed comments and quotes to me.
First, and most important, Weber writes, "[Coakley] said that he had no doubt that Mr. Armstrong was guilty of doping, but that it did not matter. For athletes, [Coakley] said, the line between performance enhancement and medical treatment has become so fuzzy that it is impossible to discern." What I did say to Weber was that I had no doubt that Armstrong, like all elite cyclists who are contenders in the Tour d' France and other major road races, is taking some substances, legal or otherwise, that enable him to recuperate and consistently perform at a high level in a grueling schedule of training and racing. I made a point of saying that he may not be taking anything that is banned by the cycling federation and that he probably knew more about the physiology of training and performance and the effects of performance enhancing substances, including various chemical compounds that are not officially classified as drugs, than most top athletes in history, due to his treatment experience when he had cancer. I noted that he undoubtedly used that knowledge to assist him when participating in 21-day 2100-mile races up and down mountains.
I also explained that in elite sports today, the line between using medicine to treat injuries and using it to maximize training effects and performance is all but gone. Today, I explained, many people in sport medicine are focused more on performance than treatment—or they make no significant distinction between the two.
The "morality comment" attributed to me is taken out of the context of our long conversation (I never considered it an "interview"). I said to Weber that in the current culture of elite sports, athletes use many different and often new and even experimentally untested technologies to train and perform at a high level, and that the use of various substances that aid training and performance is not viewed in moral terms in this culture. I did note that athletes don’t see this increasingly normal part of their training as a moral issue. Instead, they see it as what they must do to maintain their identity as an elite athlete, honor the sport to which they are dedicated without qualification, and meet the expectations of all those who depend on them to perform well, including their families, teammates, support staff, and sponsors. I emphasized that the athletes who take these substances often are the ones who work the hardest, even to the point of literally wearing out parts of their bodies.
Finally, I did not so flippantly say that if Armstrong had told the truth, he'd be gone along with all the money he's raised for cancer research. Again, I put my comments in the context of elite sports and said that we in American society have created unrealistic norms that lead us to demonize athletes who use performance enhancing substances, many of which are now regularly prescribed to 50+ year olds who use them, like athletes use them, to maintain their edge (and their identities) in business, medicine, law, other occupations, and even in the bedroom. In the face of these unreasonable and morally self-righteous expectations, athletes are forced to deny part of what they must do to maintain their bodies and perform as is expected by all those who want to be entertained by their superhuman feats. In this context, if Armstrong had told the truth about what he was taking at any point in time, even if it wasn't on the banned substance list (as Mark McGuire did with androstendione, which wasn’t on MLB’s banned list when he took it), his career would have been over—and this would have destroyed his ability to raise money for cancer research.
Finally, I even sent to Weber material on deviant overconformity as it is meticulously explained in my book, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (10th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2010). Additionally, I told him that research published in Europe (in French) shows that many of the substances traditionally and currently taken by athletes have been developed by researchers working for national defense departments and the military in various nations in an effort to maximize the performance of soldiers expected to push human limits in the course of performing their duties. I even made the case that athletes have been socialized to see themselves in terms very similar to how soldiers see themselves—representing their communities, schools, nations and families as they do what they have committed themselves to do. Unwisely, perhaps, I disclosed to Weber that I take a substance that prevents debilitating fatigue caused by multiple sclerosis.
My point was that this drug is banned for athletes (Marion Jones lied about taking it, among other things, and went to jail), but it was developed by researchers seeking to find a drug that would enable soldiers to maintain alertness during tedious hours of piloting long range bombers and jet fighters or enduring long stretches of guard duty for which alertness is a matter of life or death. I went so far as to say that if I was on a 20 hour trans-Pacific flight I hoped my pilot would take the same drug when experiencing severe drowsiness, or if I was rushed to the hospital for heart surgery in the middle of the night I hoped my surgeon would use the drug if he or she was dead tired.
Please note this is the first time I’ve been misrepresented by a journalist for the New York Times, a publication that has excellent sports journalists. When I’ve talked with them many times in the past, they’ve always been sensitive to the spirit and context in which my comments are made and then represented them very accurately. I learned the hard way many years ago that talking to journalists who only want provocative sound bites is never a good idea.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
The NFL’s BACK TO FOOTBALL FRIDAY: The latest corporate con job
A quick trip to http://www.nflrush.com/ brings you to this message: Learn how you could win a $10,000 grant and a visit from an NFL player for your school! As your classes resume in the fall, the NFL goes Back to Football. Your class or school can celebrate by showcasing your NFL team pride on Friday, September 10, 2010.
This NFL social influence campaign is a masterful response to the changing media landscape and its impact on sport media sponsorship patterns; it also is consistent with longterm trends that may eventually lead to an NFL network as the dominant channel through which people will consume NFL football in the US and possibly the world.
Marketing people have known for decades that their success requires that they develop a commitment to their brands as early in a consumer’s life as possible. Some corporations have tried to do this through the schools, but there is growing parental and teacher resistence to this strategy as manifested by drink machines in hallways, logos on buses and school walls, and branded fast food in cafeterias.
At the same time, Pepsi, a longtime Super Bowl sponsor, decided that they would not buy their customary ad spots for the 2010 Super Bowl; instead, they used the $20+ million dollars to develop a new media campaign to link Pepsi with local service projects created primarily by younger people whose beverage decisions are essential to Pepsi’s domestic market share and profits.
This move by Pepsi is among the factors that led the NFL to develop alternative strategies to link its brand with young consumers. Using the local network social influence framework refined by Obama’s campaign team in 2007 and mimicked by Pepsi and others more recently, this new NFLRush “celebrate your team pride” campaign is the NFL’s attempt to create supportive, peer driven networks among younger fans and their significant others. The total “awards” given to schools in this particular campaign cost the NFL about one-tenth of the income the league receives for one 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. But the potential payoff is mind boggling in Gramscian terms: establishing peer maintined message “outposts” in the heads of elementary school children nationwide. If it works, it will be the latest coup by pro sports to boost profits by coopting space in the public sphere.
The campaign appeal to parents is consistent with neoliberal definitions of parental moral worth; as the parents’ page for the campaign states: Let your child's teacher, school administrator or PTO/PTA leader know about this program so you can be a super parent [emphasis added] and your child's school can have a chance to be an NFL PLAY 60 Super School! (http://www.nflrush.com/footballfriday/ ). Similarly, as school budgets have been decimated by neoliberal policy approaches to public education, desperate teachers may be eager to join the NFL RUSH.
This campaign takes the cynical but effective announcement, “Let’s hear it for your (sic) Denver Broncos” to new and more lofty heights. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist who wrote from a jail when fascits controlled Italy in cell in fascist Italy (1928-1937): “It’s difficult to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head”—or the heads of your children and students.
This NFL social influence campaign is a masterful response to the changing media landscape and its impact on sport media sponsorship patterns; it also is consistent with longterm trends that may eventually lead to an NFL network as the dominant channel through which people will consume NFL football in the US and possibly the world.
Marketing people have known for decades that their success requires that they develop a commitment to their brands as early in a consumer’s life as possible. Some corporations have tried to do this through the schools, but there is growing parental and teacher resistence to this strategy as manifested by drink machines in hallways, logos on buses and school walls, and branded fast food in cafeterias.
At the same time, Pepsi, a longtime Super Bowl sponsor, decided that they would not buy their customary ad spots for the 2010 Super Bowl; instead, they used the $20+ million dollars to develop a new media campaign to link Pepsi with local service projects created primarily by younger people whose beverage decisions are essential to Pepsi’s domestic market share and profits.
This move by Pepsi is among the factors that led the NFL to develop alternative strategies to link its brand with young consumers. Using the local network social influence framework refined by Obama’s campaign team in 2007 and mimicked by Pepsi and others more recently, this new NFLRush “celebrate your team pride” campaign is the NFL’s attempt to create supportive, peer driven networks among younger fans and their significant others. The total “awards” given to schools in this particular campaign cost the NFL about one-tenth of the income the league receives for one 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. But the potential payoff is mind boggling in Gramscian terms: establishing peer maintined message “outposts” in the heads of elementary school children nationwide. If it works, it will be the latest coup by pro sports to boost profits by coopting space in the public sphere.
The campaign appeal to parents is consistent with neoliberal definitions of parental moral worth; as the parents’ page for the campaign states: Let your child's teacher, school administrator or PTO/PTA leader know about this program so you can be a super parent [emphasis added] and your child's school can have a chance to be an NFL PLAY 60 Super School! (http://www.nflrush.com/footballfriday/ ). Similarly, as school budgets have been decimated by neoliberal policy approaches to public education, desperate teachers may be eager to join the NFL RUSH.
This campaign takes the cynical but effective announcement, “Let’s hear it for your (sic) Denver Broncos” to new and more lofty heights. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist who wrote from a jail when fascits controlled Italy in cell in fascist Italy (1928-1937): “It’s difficult to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head”—or the heads of your children and students.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Youth Sports: A Manifesto
There’s always a need to regularly remind parents, coaches and other adults of the “do’s” and “don’ts” of youth sports. Here are six recommendations based on youth sport research over the past half century:
Don't: Use adult sports as models for organizing youth sports.
Do: Encourage children to play informal games, and facilitate informal games by providing children with time, safe spaces, and various indirect forms of guidance.
Don't: Use coaches of elite adult teams as models for organizing your own coaching. Bela Karolyi and Bobby Knight may be heroes to many for their ability to keep young athletes totally dependent and dedicated, but they are not good models for how to socialize children when it comes to anything that I would call positive character development.
Do: Use child-oriented teaching methods grounded in the realization that children are not little adults, and should not be treated as such.
Don't: Use an "Obedience Model" of coaching - based on:
-Providing constant and pervasive supervision
-Using established and non-negotiable rules for athletes on and off the field
-The use of sanctions to produce compliance with rules
-Encouraging athletes to look to authority figures for approval
-Emphasizing the consequences of failure to obey and follow rules
Do: Use a "Responsibility Model" of coaching - based on:
-Providing information for decision-making
-Enabling athletes to develop individual and team rules for on and off field
-Focusing on consequences of decisions and learning from mistakes
-Encouraging athletes to be responsible for their decisions
-Emphasizing an awareness of how decisions impact others and the overall context
Don't: Make underage children sign contracts committing themselves to long-term goals. Remember, it takes informed consent to sign a contract, and children cannot give informed consent no matter how talented they are in a sport!
Do: Help children take control of their own lives so they will be able to set realistic goals when they are ready to do so.
Don't: Use dominance over others as the measure of excellence.
Do: Use personal progress in the development of physical competence as an indicator of excellence. The goal should be to create achievement motivation, not the desire to feel compelled to beat others to feel good about self.
Don't: Emphasize external rewards as a source of motivation.
Do: Emphasize internal rewards associated with participation and competence as a source of motivation. Many young people today have never developed a deep love for the sports they play apart from all the perks that come with them. Such love is grounded in joy combined with a sense of personal achievement.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Where are the good men?
The actions of Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor, and George Huguely (the University of Viginia lacrosse player charged with murdering a female student), suggest that we ignore important issues when we focus only on why these individuals do what they do.
Individualism is a celebrated value in U.S. culture, and our explanations of success and failure often focus exclusively on the character of individuals. But in the case of sexual exploitation, abuse, and assault perpetrated by male athletes, we must also focus critical attention on the context in which some men learn that it is acceptable to demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women.And why do other men permit this learning to occur without actively disrupting it and defining it as unacceptable, if not unthinkable?
Asking this question is difficult because it forces all men to take responsibility for changing the contexts in which they party, drink, and play sports. It’s easy to ask why individuals do what they do, because the answers focus on character rather than context and lead simply to condemnations of the actions of a few bad apples. But as assault cases mount, we can no longer dismiss these actions as representative of a few bad apples.
The evidence now suggests that particular group cultures created and maintained by men are in need of critical assessment. Certain types of all-male groups generally have higher rates of assault against women than the average, and they include certain sports teams, fraternities, military units, and other groups where there is an emphasis on superiority, exclusion, and unquestioned bonding. It is in these groups that women are most often demeaned and portrayed as undeserving the respect accorded to one’s “brothers”—unless those brothers have the good sense and courage to disrupt misogynous discourse and define it as offensive.
What norms keep good men silent or even lead them to passively lionize the exploitive comments and actions of Woods, Roethlisberger, Taylor, and Huguely? Men who do not see or treat women as these men do must disrupt the discourses that demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women generally or any woman in particular, whether they occur in bars, locker rooms, at parties, or in everyday situations.
The men on the PGA tour saw cuts in their prize money when Woods’s actions forced him off the course. Roethlisberger’s teammates and coaches on the Steelers now are distracted by questions about their quarterback’s suitability as a team leader. The NFL Hall of Fame players now must share their status with a man that pays to have sex with an underage, physically abused woman. And the male lacrosse players at the University of Virginia now face a Duke redux framing them as privileged and perverted. So why do these men not create cultures in which it is clearly offensive to demeane, depersonalize, and dehumanize women? Why didn’t the male coaches and teammates of George Huguely intervene before he destroyed two young lives, and why aren’t they now standing side-by-side with the female lacrosse team to collectively express their grief and outrage?
I was called by a number of male sports journalists and asked to explain the significance of the University of New Mexico hair pulling incident in women’s soccer and the punch thrown by a member of the Baylor University Women’s basketball team. But none of them sought from me an explanation of why there isn’t unified outrage coming from men in the sport cultures where there is passive acceptance, if not lionizing fellow athletes and coaches who dehumanize women. Instead they wanted to know how long it would take the American public and sport fans to forgive Woods and Roelisberger so these men could regain their hero status?
Only Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post (5/8/10, D1) asked questions infering that male coaches, teammates, and even university administrators and team officials must critically assess and transform the group cultures they reaffirm on a daily basis. As she insightfully concludes: “The truth is, women can't do anything about this problem. Men are the only ones who can change it -- by taking responsibility for their locker room culture, and the behavior and language of their teammates. Nothing will change until the biggest stars in the clubhouse are mortally offended, until their grief and remorse over an assault trumps their solidarity.”
Individualism is a celebrated value in U.S. culture, and our explanations of success and failure often focus exclusively on the character of individuals. But in the case of sexual exploitation, abuse, and assault perpetrated by male athletes, we must also focus critical attention on the context in which some men learn that it is acceptable to demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women.And why do other men permit this learning to occur without actively disrupting it and defining it as unacceptable, if not unthinkable?
Asking this question is difficult because it forces all men to take responsibility for changing the contexts in which they party, drink, and play sports. It’s easy to ask why individuals do what they do, because the answers focus on character rather than context and lead simply to condemnations of the actions of a few bad apples. But as assault cases mount, we can no longer dismiss these actions as representative of a few bad apples.
The evidence now suggests that particular group cultures created and maintained by men are in need of critical assessment. Certain types of all-male groups generally have higher rates of assault against women than the average, and they include certain sports teams, fraternities, military units, and other groups where there is an emphasis on superiority, exclusion, and unquestioned bonding. It is in these groups that women are most often demeaned and portrayed as undeserving the respect accorded to one’s “brothers”—unless those brothers have the good sense and courage to disrupt misogynous discourse and define it as offensive.
What norms keep good men silent or even lead them to passively lionize the exploitive comments and actions of Woods, Roethlisberger, Taylor, and Huguely? Men who do not see or treat women as these men do must disrupt the discourses that demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women generally or any woman in particular, whether they occur in bars, locker rooms, at parties, or in everyday situations.
The men on the PGA tour saw cuts in their prize money when Woods’s actions forced him off the course. Roethlisberger’s teammates and coaches on the Steelers now are distracted by questions about their quarterback’s suitability as a team leader. The NFL Hall of Fame players now must share their status with a man that pays to have sex with an underage, physically abused woman. And the male lacrosse players at the University of Virginia now face a Duke redux framing them as privileged and perverted. So why do these men not create cultures in which it is clearly offensive to demeane, depersonalize, and dehumanize women? Why didn’t the male coaches and teammates of George Huguely intervene before he destroyed two young lives, and why aren’t they now standing side-by-side with the female lacrosse team to collectively express their grief and outrage?
I was called by a number of male sports journalists and asked to explain the significance of the University of New Mexico hair pulling incident in women’s soccer and the punch thrown by a member of the Baylor University Women’s basketball team. But none of them sought from me an explanation of why there isn’t unified outrage coming from men in the sport cultures where there is passive acceptance, if not lionizing fellow athletes and coaches who dehumanize women. Instead they wanted to know how long it would take the American public and sport fans to forgive Woods and Roelisberger so these men could regain their hero status?
Only Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post (5/8/10, D1) asked questions infering that male coaches, teammates, and even university administrators and team officials must critically assess and transform the group cultures they reaffirm on a daily basis. As she insightfully concludes: “The truth is, women can't do anything about this problem. Men are the only ones who can change it -- by taking responsibility for their locker room culture, and the behavior and language of their teammates. Nothing will change until the biggest stars in the clubhouse are mortally offended, until their grief and remorse over an assault trumps their solidarity.”
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Woods blows comeback: Compromises his brand
Tiger Woods missed a golden opportunity to gain support and restore his tarnished brand. After not taking the women in his life seriously, he chose to resume his gilded golf career at Augusta National, a club that excludes women. At a time when golf desperately needs to attract women fans and golfers, and when women executives strive to crack old boy networks that make deals at the club, Woods could have told Augusta National that he would begin his comeback at the Masters if they opened their doors to women members.
Could they have refused his demand? Only if the guys at Augusta were willing to miss hosting the most highly publicized sport event of the decade. If they granted his demand, Tiger could have altered his reputation as a politically insensitive money machine and endeared himself to women, many of whom see him as a philandering snake. If they refused, he could have made his comeback at the next major tournament, defused critical attention focused on his return, gained new fans, and joined an esteemed group of athletes who are known for doing the right thing and bringing about progressive change.
In either case, his mother and wife would have taken notice and been proud of him. Even the harsh words of his former bedmates would have been muted. But instead, Woods chose to shelter himself in the male-only confines of Augusta National with guarantees of restricted media coverage.
He took the easy way back into his golf career, but he blew his comeback.
Could they have refused his demand? Only if the guys at Augusta were willing to miss hosting the most highly publicized sport event of the decade. If they granted his demand, Tiger could have altered his reputation as a politically insensitive money machine and endeared himself to women, many of whom see him as a philandering snake. If they refused, he could have made his comeback at the next major tournament, defused critical attention focused on his return, gained new fans, and joined an esteemed group of athletes who are known for doing the right thing and bringing about progressive change.
In either case, his mother and wife would have taken notice and been proud of him. Even the harsh words of his former bedmates would have been muted. But instead, Woods chose to shelter himself in the male-only confines of Augusta National with guarantees of restricted media coverage.
He took the easy way back into his golf career, but he blew his comeback.
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