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17, No. 3
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Comedy and sports . . . What is it about Adam Sandler? The actor-producer has starred in the two highest- grossing sports films of all-time: "The Waterboy" (1998), with $161.5 million (domestic), and the remake of "The Longest Yard" (2005), with $158.1 million (domestic). The latest contender — the NASCAR-based comedy "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," starring Will Ferrell — probably will fall short of Sandler's grosses. Of course, producers of the next Rocky sequel have high hopes that this fall's release of "Rocky Balboa," the sixth film in the series, will top all of them. "Rocky IV" (1985) is the highest-grossing film of the series, at $127.9 million. Add films . . . No surprise, but two of the best-reviewed sports films of the year are documentaries. "Once in a Lifetime," co-directed by John Dower and Paul Crowder, focused on the high-flying New York Cosmos, who for a brief period attracted sell-out crowds and rock-star attention in the now defunct North American Soccer League. The film aired on ESPN2 in September. "The Heart of the Game," directed by Ward Serrill, followed the fortunes of a girls' high-school basketball team in Seattle. So far, the two docs have grossed less than $1 million. State of soccer . . . The United States women's soccer program is battling an image problem. The U.S. team finished fourth at the just-concluded Under-20 world championships in Moscow, the first time in 10 previous FIFA women's championships that the U.S. finished off the podium. The under-21 team finished second to Germany in the Nordic Cup, the top international tournament for that age group. And, the senior national team failed to win the Algarve Cup for the first time in four years, falling to Germany in the final. These results reinforce the perception that women's soccer has been in a free fall since the 1999 Women's World Cup. In the finals of that tournament, before over 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl and an unprecedented television soccer audience, the U.S. defeated China on penalty kicks. Since then, attendance at international matches has plummeted, the first generation of superstars (Mia Hamm, et al.) has retired and the attempt to start a professional league failed. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune's Mark Zeigler: "A series of events . . . have conspired to bump the women's national team from a blimp-sized blip on the American sports radar to practically off it." Add soccer. . . Zeigler quotes University of Southern California sports business expert David Carter, who argues that the high expectations created in 1999 hurt the sport: "Rather than saying, 'Gosh, what went wrong?' you say, 'Maybe the [1999] Women's World Cup was an anomaly and trying to replicate it is very unfair . . . A women's league in this country will be embraced. You just have to set reasonable expectations of how to define success. Then you won't be disappointed." One possible solution: stronger support from the U.S. Soccer Federation. As Zeigler points out, the federation "scheduled only five domestic matches last year after the team played 43 over the previous three years." That might explain the team's lack of visibility. Add soccer . . . The bad news notwithstanding, women's soccer is far from dead as a spectator sport. The gold medal match at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games between the U.S. and Brazil attracted a peak audience of 10 million viewers on a Thursday afternoon. The U.S. won the gold medal in overtime. Last soccer . . . Of course, concern about second-, second- and fourth-place finishes in major international tournaments simply highlights how strong the U.S. women are compared to the U.S. men in international soccer. In truth, since 1999, the American women have won gold and silver Olympic medals, four Algarve Cups, seven Nordic Cups and finished third in the 2003 Women's World Cup. If American men's teams could achieve those results, it would be hailed as a major breakthrough. Designing the Games. . . With the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games less than two years away, the design aspects of the Games are generating publicity. The proposed Olympic Stadium and the National Aquatics Center are dazzling, ground-breaking examples of sports architecture for the 21st Century. And, organizers have just released the designs for the Olympic pictograms, the graphic symbols that identify each Olympic sport. The concept started at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. Pictograms now are used in advertising and marketing campaigns, on television broadcasts, and for souvenirs and collectibles. Add design . . . The pictograms for the 35 Olympic sports and disciplines were inspired by an ancient style of Chinese calligraphy that formed the basis of modern Chinese characters. The 2008 symbols, according to the Beijing organizers, "integrate the pictographic charm of inscriptions on bones and bronze objects in ancient China with simplified embodiment of modern graphics, making them recognizable, rememberable and easy to use . . . [T]he Pictograms of the Beijing Olympic Games display distinct motion character, graceful aesthetic perception of movement and rich cultural connotations, thus arriving at the harmony and unity of form with conception." All we know is that they are very cool. Last design . . . The logo for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa — which depicts a soccer player executing a bicycle kick over the continent of Africa — has not met with the same critical acclaim. When the logo was unveiled at the recent FIFA World Cup in Germany, one wag commented that it looked like "a frog jumping over a pork chop." Olympic bidding for 2016. . . The United States Olympic Committee recently narrowed its list of potential bid cities for the 2016 Olympic Games to three: Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Los Angeles has hosted the Olympic Games twice (1932 and 1984), one of only four cities to do so. The others are Athens, Paris and London, which will become the first three-time host city in 2012. While San Francisco has never hosted the Games, nearby Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto was the site of nine Olympic soccer matches in 1984, drawing an average of 52,000 a game. The semifinal between Italy and France took place before a near-capacity crowd of 83,642. (Stanford Stadium was rebuilt in 2006 and now seats just 50,000.) Add bidding . . . Chicago is not new to the bidding business. Chicago was the original choice of the International Olympic Committee to host the 1904 Olympic Games, but got out-maneuvered by St. Louis. As planning for the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 moved forward, St. Louis civic leaders, interested in creating attractions at the exposition, pressured Chicago organizers to move the event to St. Louis, going so far as threatening to organize a competing sports program for the fair. In the end, fearing that a Chicago Games would be undermined, International Olympic Committee President Pierre de Coubertin reluctantly moved the Games to St. Louis. Eating it all. . . The International Federation of Competitive Eating has lobbied the IOC for Olympic status - to no avail. In "Eat This Book," a recently published book about the "sport" of competitive eating, author Ryan Nerz noted that IFOCE leaders took their beef with the IOC to the streets in 2004, with a SPAM-torch run from New York City to Austin, Texas, home of the SPAMARAMA festival. According to Nerz, "dozens of runners from the Northeast to the Southeast participated in the first ever meat-based torch run, spreading a spirit of goodwill across the American heartland." The launch of two new peer reviewed online academic journals underscores the continuing scholarly interest in sport and recreation. The International Journal of Motorcycle Studies examines all aspects of cycling culture, from the wind-in-your-hair experience of riding 'em without a helmet to motorcyclists in the movies and on the race track. As the journal's website puts it, the motorcycle "embodies many of our social and cultural concerns: Its essence is speed in a world in which time itself seems to have increased its velocity. In riding, the motorcyclist becomes one with her machine, an image of a cyborgian unity that can only become more central to our daily existence as we walk about with machines embedded in our bodies, from pacemakers to insulin dispensers. It's an economical internal combustion machine, embodying the contradiction between our love of engines and the recognition that our profligate use of them is destroying the planet." No word yet as to whether Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has signed up for a subscription. Add publications . . . Meanwhile, the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports publishes articles that use, um, quantitative methods to analyze topics in sports. The current issue includes "A Variance Decomposition of Individual Offensive Baseball Performance" and "A Simple and Flexible Rating Method for Predicting Success in the NCAA Basketball Tournament." The latter proposes a method "based on ordinal logistic regression and expectation (the OLRE method) that is designed to predict success for those teams selected to participate in the NCAA tournament . . . [I]t should be strongly considered as an alternative to other rating methods currently used to assign seeds and regions for the teams selected to play in the tournament." Last publications . . . One of the most venerable sports publications — the 120-year-old Sporting News — was sold recently for the second time in six years. In 2000, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought the magazine for more than $100 million from Times Mirror (then publisher of the Los Angeles Times). Now, American City Business Journals, the parent company of SportsBusiness Daily and SportsBusiness Journal, has purchased Sporting News and its radio and book-publishing divisions from Allen for an undisclosed price. "Sporting News is a strong brand that we believe has considerable upside in print, online and on-air platforms," said ACBJ Chairman and CEO Ray Shaw.
Amphetamine and the Four-Minute Mile. John Hoberman. Sport in History. 26(2) 2006. British runner Roger Bannister, in 1954, became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. In the next three years, 12 runners broke the four-minute barrier 18 times. In 1957, the New York Times reported on its front page that a public health physician, Dr. Herbert Berger, had told a medical conference in New York that amphetamine use might have enabled so many athletes to break four minutes in such a short time. Several of the sub-four-minute milers categorically denied the charge as did many coaches and administrators. Bannister, a physician himself, claimed that he had "'heard nothing about the use of stimulants' by runners." Despite Bannister professed lack of awareness, however, doping in sport had been a topic of discussion in the British press since 1953, following the 1952 establishment of the British Association of Medicine and Sport. The most prominent British sports medicine expert of the era was Sir Adolphe Abrahams, brother of Harold Abrahams, who was immortalized in the film "Chariots of Fire." Sir Adolphe, beginning in 1953, wrote a series of commentaries that "combined concern about the medical effects of doping with an open mind towards their use for the purpose of breaking records." Amphetamine drugs were common in the 1950s in Britain, and associating them "with athletic performance was common in advertising … in both lay and medical publications." Bannister "could not possibly have remained unaware of Abrahams" and it "is hard to imagine that he did not at some point think about amphetamine." The amphetamine era which preceded the age of steroids reminds us that "the history of modern doping has been a continuous development rather than an abrupt fall into hormone doping." Attacking the NCAA's Anti-Transfer Rules as Covenants Not to Compete. Ray Yasser and Clay Fees. Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law. 15(2) 2005. The NCAA enforces complex anti-transfer laws that require certain Division I athletes who leave one school and enroll at another to sit out a year before participating in athletics. These rules are so "preposterous" that placing them "in any other collegiate context reveals their absurdity." Imagine telling a theater student at Harvard that transferring to Yale would disqualify her from taking part in Yale theatrical productions for a year. The "current anti-transfer rules are illegal covenants not to compete." The best solution would be to simply treat athletes as other students are treated. The courts, however, might accept a "less restrictive set of anti-transfer rules … as reasonable restrictive covenants." "Let's Just Say It Works for Me": Rafael Palmeiro, Major League Baseball, and the Marketing of Viagra. Roberta Newman. Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture. 14(2) 2006. Pfizer pharmaceuticals selected Texas Rangers first baseman Rafael Palmeiro as a pitchman for its impotence drug, Viagra. Why did Pfizer choose this strategy and what was the outcome of the campaign? The selection of Palmeiro was part of a multifaceted campaign to sell Viagra. A critical issue for Pfizer was devising a way to publicly discuss impotence. Pfizer therefore coupled the launch of Viagra with an effort to give impotence "an acceptable name." Working with its advertising agency, Pfizer promoted the use of "ED," the initials for "erectile dysfunction, a medical-sounding name," to combat the "connotation of powerlessness, of loss of manhood, of psychological castration" suggested by "impotence." Pfizer's first pitchman was former Senator Bob Dole. Dole, however, represented a limited demographic of older white men. "To expand its target demographic," Pfizer had to "change the image of Viagra from that of an old man's panacea to something a younger man might take, not only without shame but with aplomb." Baseball, less warlike than football and not a "showcase for showboating teenagers" like basketball, was an attractive choice. Baseball offers the "perfect" symbolism of ED being "vanquished by a product being pitched by a man wielding a very large bat." Palmeiro was the "ideal Viagra spokesman." As a tall, handsome Latino athlete, Palmeiro's appeal extended beyond the Dole demographic. Palmeiro's role in selling Viagra enabled consumers to associate the product with youth and vitality, and made it possible, as he put it, "'to change the perception of what macho is.'" Pfizer through its Viagra campaign "made a drug meant to treat the once unmentionable and even shameful now downright acceptable" while generating $1.6 billion in sales between 1998 and 2003.
WILLIAM RHODEN
In his book review in the Washington Post, David Leonard, an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, wrote that Rhoden "rightly challenges the conventional American notion of sports as a model of integration and meritocracy, where talent and athleticism trump bigotry. . . . Through each historic step, forward and back, Rhoden argues that black athletes, like blacks in general, have always been 'largely feared and despised, relegated to the 'periphery of true power' despite their talents and contributions to sporting life in America." Part memoir, part historical narrative and part polemic, "Forty Million Dollar Slaves" is controversial and provocative. Just what Rhoden intended. — David Davis SportsLetter spoke with Rhoden via phone from his apartment in Harlem. SportsLetter: You write that today's black athletes are "lost." How did contemporary black athletes lose their way? William Rhoden: I just think it was circumstance. Going back in time, in the '50s, the '40s, the '30s, the '20s — the situation with African-Americans in this country was quantifiably drastic. There was no Voting Rights Act. There was open brutality. The racism was so open and so raw that everybody — whether you were an athlete or an entertainer or a teacher — was in the same boat. It didn't matter how much money you made or your educational level. White society generally treated all black people the same. So, I think there was a great mission among African-Americans — including athletes, teachers, journalists — because everybody was locked out. And that defined our mission. Beginning with integration, our community began to splinter. A certain few got opportunities, which led to greater educational opportunities and more money, and you began to see a division. And that's where I think the mission was lost because you had a significant number of people who, in their minds, had reached the promised land, with great salaries, great jobs. For athletes, it meant going from Jackie Robinson being the only one to, all of a sudden, the NBA now being 80 percent black and colleges in the South that used to not recruit you and have quotas now being overwhelmingly black. I think what that did is obscure the focus of the mission — there was no national mission. And, I think athletes are the metaphor for that because I think a couple of generations later, they have separated from the history. They say, "What struggle? How can I be struggling with $40 million contracts?" For the majority, the sense of mission has been obscured, and no leader has emerged — like a [Muhammad] Ali or a Jim Brown — to say, "Listen, this is 2006. This is what we need to do today." SL: Black jockeys dominated horse racing in the late 19th Century, but then after the white establishment changed the rules these jockeys disappeared. Do you foresee what you describe as "the jockey syndrome" happening in today's NBA or the NFL? WR: Yeah, well, that's why I wrote it. In the NBA, it's what I call the process of globalization, where you begin to dilute the black presence by bringing in more and more foreign athletes and gradually replacing all but the very, very best black athletes. The way it used to be in the '50s — you'd have maybe four blacks on a college team, but they'd all be starting. The entire bench would be white because blacks weren't going to be role players. It might be a goal for some in the NBA to actually have a league that's 50-50 — fifty percent black and 50 percent other. I think that's why people were so suspicious of all of the propositions — like Prop. 48 and Prop. 42 — all those things that made it difficult for a lot of black athletes to qualify [for school]. You raise the standards and raise the standards and make it more difficult to meet the criteria. That flows into educational opportunities: all school systems are not created equally. I think that where there's a will there's a way. If you want to make it so that the starting team at Georgia, on offense and defense, is not 90 percent black, you can gradually do that by attacking the high-school system and having the recruitment pool change. It's just a longer process than basketball and baseball. SL: What lessons do you take from the demise of the Negro Leagues and the integration of Major League Baseball? WR: First, it's important for any group of people to define their own path, their own mission. You can't have things defined for you. We were so eager to be "integrated" that we didn't think about what integration might mean for black businesses and institutions. The lesson is that you need strong institutions to provide jobs for your people and to provide opportunity. You know, there's been a historic relationship in our country between the people we call whites and those we call blacks. It's been a relationship that's been very difficult — there's been progress — but it's still one group dominating and another group being dominated. So, you need your own institutions. You can't rely on someone who's been dominating you to provide you with the education — the tools, the weapons — that you need to shake free of that domination. I never realized how deeply entrenched racism was in the fabric of our nation. I just didn't realize it. What that means is, your group has to begin to define its own path. SL: You write that Rube Foster is, in some ways, "an even more significant figure than [Jackie] Robinson," and yet most baseball fans have never heard of Foster. Why was he so significant? WR: Rube was a visionary. He created a league, and it wasn't just a league for black ballplayers. There were black executives, owners, journalists, umpires, advertisers in newspapers — it was a whole eco-structure. His vision was to be self-sufficient, self-sustaining, with the idea that, one day, when integration came, we would be able to integrate not just one player but maybe a team or a franchise. And, if that happened, then maybe today there would be much more of an integration at all levels of baseball, in the executive and ownership and management levels. Rube was important because he was important to black culture in an economic and business way. Jackie Robinson was important in a symbolic way, in an integrative way, but also in a way that would greatly empower the white infrastructure of Major League Baseball. SL: Branch Rickey is perceived as the chief integrator of baseball, but you describe him as "a barracuda." What could African-American owners and players have done at that point to retain some power when the Major Leagues integrated? WR: In an ideal world, Jackie Robinson could have said, "I appreciate it, Mr. Rickey, but that's going to kill our league." There's a quote from [journalist] Wendell Smith that I use as an epigram at the beginning of one of the chapters, where he wrote, "Organized Negro baseball is a million-dollar business. To kill it would be criminal, and that's just what the entry of their players into the American and National Leagues would do." So, maybe the owners could have gotten together and used the court of law to fight the Majors. But they were split: some of the owners wanted to sell some players, others didn't. In retrospect, they probably had no choice because Major League Baseball was going to crush them. But maybe they could have had more unity, been more resolute in sticking together. SL: There's been a lot written about how black baseball players now make up only about nine percent of Major League Baseball. Do you think that trend can be reversed? WR: It could be if Major League Baseball really wanted to pour money to fund great little leagues in economically challenged neighborhoods. They've tried to do something like that in Compton, with the Baseball Academy. And if they get, like, 80 baseball institutes, all over the country, a lot of players probably would go to them because in baseball you see the money quicker, right out of high school. SL: You write about your experience playing football at Morgan State College. How has integration affected the sports programs at predominantly black colleges? WR: That led to a simple weakening of the talent pool, and that weakened their ability to attract all the great players. The people who would go to Grambling now go to LSU or Southern Louisiana. And, that weakened the number of people you see going to the NFL. And, I think the same thing has probably happened with students — a number of students are going to other places — but the schools aren't as keen on the students as they are on the athletes. SL: You write that, under the guise of integration, the white owners and coaches who control sports' power structure "exploit black muscle and talent." Why hasn't integration delivered true equality? What must change for that to happen? WR: I don't know if integration ever was designed to do that. I think it was designed to take the best and enrich the power structure. I think the attitude was, "Don't worry — they're not going to ever have power. We're just going to use the muscle. They're not going to become coaches at Alabama or athletic directors or head coaches. They're going to be doing the same things they've been doing on the plantation. They were tilling the land and bailing the hay, and they never participated in the economic fruits of their work and they're not going to do that here either." So, I don't know if sharing was ever part of the equation. Athletes — and all African-Americans in the sports industry — must use their presence for leverage. You can't ask. You have to demand it. You've got some leverage. You're the people that journalists want to do stories about and interviews and documentaries and that advertising firms want to use. So, we need to have some black people doing this. I think this has to be very cohesive and unified and aggressive and militant. SL: The generation of black athletes from the 1960s — people like Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Curt Flood — were not afraid to speak out about sports and other social issues. Why are today's athletes so apolitical? WR: I was just on a panel with [Washington Wizards center] Etan Thomas, and he's not apolitical at all. I think a lot of guys are not. It's just that the guys you hear about are. And, I actually don't think that they're apolitical. I don't really think [Michael] Jordan is apolitical. I think that, during his career, he chose a stance of neutrality because I think he felt that was a way to increase his market share. Also, with Jim Brown and those guys in the 1960s, I don't know how big a part agents and lawyers played in their lives. Today, you've got a lot of people around the players telling them, "Well, that's not good for your image. That's not a good thing to do. Just don't rock the boat." I think you have much more of that than you ever did. SL: Jordan is generally perceived as the prime example of the icon who deliberately eschewed controversy. How does that affect his legacy? WR: I live in Harlem, and there's a guy named Jonathan who stopped me to talk a few weeks ago. And, he was upset because he's a Jordan lover. He said, "Mr. Rhoden, why isn't anybody talking about Michael Jordan anymore? You know, they're talking about LeBron and this player and that player. Why aren't they talking about Jordan?" I thought about the question. You look at a guy like Jackie Robinson. He died in 1972 and played his last baseball game in '56, right before Brooklyn moved. But we're still talking about him. Muhammad Ali fought his last [championship] fight against Larry Holmes in '80. Yet we're still talking about him. So, why is that we're talking about some people and some people we don't really talk about them anymore? I think that speaks to legacy because what [Robinson and Ali] did was so far out of sports. It was for principle, it was for standing up and making a stand. The ironic thing is, had Jordan taken stands and taken heat, he would've gained respect. People respect that, particularly in this country, which was formed on revolution. People respect the rebel, they respect the person who is little bit of a renegade. So, I think his legacy will be [seen as] great ballplayer, one in a series. SL: Most of the book concentrates on male athletes, but you also cover women's sports through the story of Delta State basketball star Lusia Harris. What unique challenges do black women athletes face? WR: To me, they've got a steeper mountain to climb than anybody. And what's disappointing to me, in terms of the feminist movement, is how the movement has adapted some of the same racial and racist patterns as their male counterparts. If you look at Title IX, black women have been largely left behind. Title IX has basically benefited white women. If you look at the hierarchy in women's athletics, in college and the WNBA, it's the same power structure as the men's: it's white people. And, I thought that was a disappointment. I thought women would be in a position to create a new model, a new paradigm. Black women just have a double dose because black men ignore them and white women marginalize them. I think Lucy Harris is a good example of this. The WNBA should make sure that this woman is taken care of, that everybody knows who she is. A statue should be built for this woman. You know, she's got medical problems and she's struggling, and she shouldn't have to. SL: Does Robert Johnson and his ownership of the Charlotte Bobcats symbolize progress for blacks in sports? WR: At the very least it symbolizes progress. We hope there's more than that. What s | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
