Let us take a moment to celebrate something about last week’s Super Bowl halftime show. In some small way, I took it as a confirmation of some meaningful cultural progress. At the end of the 1980s, as hip-hop entered mainstream consciousness, adults (especially white adults) across the country were in a state of moral panic: their innocent young children were going to be corrupted and gangsterized by groups like NWA. There was an unexpected connection to the NFL: with LA rappers proudly repping their teams, items like Raiders hats and jerseys became hot commodities for kids across the country. By the early 1990s, as some readers will likely remember, schools across the country rushed to ban the Raiders logo (and a few other teams logos as well, but mostly the Raiders). The NFL announced a symposium with rappers like MC Hammer and KRS-One to address gang violence. As far as I can tell, it never happened. Predictably, the demand for the merchandise soared. Today, these bans are still in place in many school districts across the country. I imagine they’ve just stayed on the books for 30 years, but you’ll find them in unexpected places, like rural Wyoming (I’m not making this up).

So, in about three decades, we’ve gone from moral panic surrounding an artform and its associations to celebrating the same art form on one of America’s biggest stages. Snoop Dogg even crip-walked a bit. During the Super Bowl! On some level, this is hard to deny as cultural progress. But in the context of the NFL’s continued issues and failures on race (from Colin Kaepernick to the current Brian Flores lawsuit), it all feels a bit shallow. Or maybe we just need to contextualize the NFL within the broader US, where black cultural products and signifiers are no longer marginalized, but much of the black population still is.

All of that noted, I kinda hated the show.

From my less-than-rigorous research, it seems that most people really liked the hip hop performances on display during the halftime show. A small, but vocal minority on the American right disagreed, lamenting that these hoodlums shouldn’t be celebrated. This latter view is, scientifically speaking, stupid. But I also don’t agree with the former either. I thought it was super cheesy. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I just cringe at performances by artists whose entire thing was youthful, rebellious aggression trotting out decades old songs as they approach AARP eligibility. I think what really killed it for me was Dre “playing” the fake sound board. But I guess he couldn’t just stand around?

Yes, this makes me sound like a gatekeeping, crusty old fart. Fair, I guess. Super Bowl halftime shows are ridiculous anyway, so we should probably reserve them for grandiose performers like Prince and Lady Gaga. The last 3 decades have rightfully legitimized rap in the mainstream and we didn’t really gain much culturally from this performance. No one said, “ah, finally, rap has arrived.” If anything, we’ve kicked off mid-life crises for millennials who now realize that the vital music of their youth is canonical and safe for the sponsors, while giving the NFL another pass.

Before last night, if you had told me that a figure skater in an Olympic final was going to perform to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges, I wouldn’t have believed you. (More on the song choice below.) If you had further told me that that same figure skater would win silver and then burst into a teary, screaming tirade seemingly directed at her coach, but also maybe her teammate, and also maybe the entire sport of figure skating, well……

But of course, both of these things happened. Alexandra Trusova put together an impressive, athletic, and powerful routine, only to be upstaged by an even better performance by her teammate, gold medal winner Anna Shcherbakova. They had competed back to back, followed by a third teammate, Kamila Valieva, who was the gold medal favorite leading up to the games. During the team competition–a seemingly distant week ago– American commentator (and former gold medalist) Tara Lipinski had called Valieva the greatest athlete the sport had ever seen. But Valieva faltered in the final routine of the night. As her score came up, the ensuing moments were absolutely surreal. Valieva in tears, receiving something in between support and consternation from her coach. A few feet away, Trusova, screaming in Russian, with American Johnny Weir admirably attempting to translate on the US broadcast. Apart from her teammates, poor Scherbakova, alone in her moment of Olympic glory, seemingly unsure of what she was supposed to do. Kaori Sakamoto, the bronze medalist from Japan, overwhelmed by the emotion of her fine performance and unexpected place on the podium. All of this played out over several minutes, made somewhat more weird by the blaring sounds of Adele and Kelly Clarkson still being pumped into a mostly empty arena.

We need some context here, of course. 10 days ago, most of us had never heard of Valieva, a young woman who will, at best, now be synonymous with the dark side of the Olympics for years to come. After an insane performance in the team event, the 15 year old found herself the heart of a scandal for a positive doping test dating back to December. She’s allegedly tested positive for an angina medication that could offer her advantages in blood-flow, endurance, that sort of thing. She’s suggested that she accidentally took her grandfather’s medication, which seems…unlikely. If you haven’t been keeping up with the situation, Juliet Macur summarizes things very nicely in her recap of the final and the events leading up to it for the New York Times.

Doping, of course, is an ethical issue. (Here’s something I previously wrote on the subject) But doping is also a matter of sport governance and this moment has really highlighted just how absurd international sport governance can be. At the heart of the controversy is that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) allowed Valieva to keep skating while her appeal is under review, despite opposition from the IOC, the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) and FISA (the international skating federation). I tend to hold off on my comments until matters such as this one are fully resolved, but here are a few thoughts.

1. I see this is a wonderful demonstration of the self-legitimizing international sport governance apparatus. We have the CAS and WADA (amongst other bodies) who are nominally “independent” organizations. Without getting too mired in structural details, I would argue that it is fair to think of these as arms of the IOC. Their existence simply doesn’t make sense without the IOC. Thus, moments such as this one, where these organizations are at odds should not be taken as a demonstration of the legitimacy or independence of the CAS, but rather a quasi-serious performance for the public and sports world. By allowing for some tension, we can buy in to the idea that these organizations operate on actual principles, rather than a coordinated effort to manage world sport in a pretend-democratic manner. They need these occasions to point to, to say: hey, see, we disagree, we’re not just a puppet para-global regime. Much like the occasional lowering of the hammer by the NCAA that serves to remind us that “amateurism,” etc. actually matter, this is mostly a charade, with some actual consequences that the system can tolerate. If this makes me sound like I’m writing with a tin-foil hat on, so be it.
   
2. Do I think Valieva is guilty of doping? I’ll go 25/75 here. 25% bad test or contamination, 75% doping, although I’d 100% believe that she could have been unaware of it. The possibility of coaches, team doctors, etc. giving her banned substances as part of a dietary or “supplement” regimen is extremely high here. She is an amazing athlete and I am heartbroken for her. No matter what the appeals process and investigations find, she will forever be a tainted name in the sport. Horrible.
   
3. #2 is particularly galling, and not just because we’re talking about a literal child. Valieva, nor any of the Russian athletes, should not be competing at all. Only the Rube Goldberg device that is global sport governance (see above) could come up with a scenario like the one we’ve been in for the last two Olympics: banning “Russia” for state sponsored doping, while allowing athletes to compete as the “Russian Olympic Committee,” conveniently coached, supported, and managed, by…Russia. I understand the emotional impulse that banning athletes punishes them unfairly for the actions of their state or Olympic committee, but here we are. It would be unfair to the athletes, but maybe in that unfairness, the athletes and citizens of a banned country would demand meaningful change and accountability? That sounds more like the Olympic spirit than whatever we have going on here.
   
4. Speaking of Russian coaching, the aforementioned coach, Eteri Tutberidze is a villainous figure straight out of the American Cold War imagination. She could have served in Ivan Drago’s corner. Here’s a good article on her troubled history and, more broadly, some of the major issues plaguing modern figure skating.
   
5. I’m an American and you can fairly say I’m presenting a biased perspective. So, let’s just openly acknowledge that American athletes and teams are no strangers to doping scandals. If we appear to be more clean as a sporting “nation” that’s in part because the USOC and our sporting federations are not embedded in our government. Without getting too mired in the details, this is relatively unique; while Olympic committees and federations in the rest of the world are *technically* independent of their governments, it’s effectively an open secret that they are often not. Finally, we almost have to remember that our views on doping and governance are culturally conditioned. There are plenty of people in the world who believe some combination of the following: that the US controls and pressures the various bodies that run world sport, that American doping is too technologically advanced for current testing protocols, and/or that doping is maybe not so bad and might even be a requirement in the pursuit of human potential. These views are not without some merit.
   
6. Alright, so what about “I Wanna Be Your Dog”??? Technically, the version used in the performance wasn’t the Stooges’, but a cover from the Cruella soundtrack. But it’s a faithful rendition Trusova’s routine was loosely Cruella-themed and included another song from the soundtrack. Sonically, I actually thought it was a great choice that aligned with her aggressive, attacking style on the ice. The one-note piano “riff” throughout the song is so insistent, so urgent, so menacing, much like Trusova’s skating. But it was still shocking to hear the fuzzed-out, proto-punk song featured in the sport. And maybe, lyrically at least, a song that touches on drug use and the submissive side of S&M is maybe a little too on-the-nose for a Russian figure skater?

Editor’s note: I am proud to share this excellent piece, on the global fallout and sport-governance implications of tennis star Peng Shuai’s accusations against China’s former Vice Premier, Zhang Gaoli. The author who wishes to remain anonymous. I can vouch 100% for the author’s expertise on the subject.–Tolga

 

*Habitually for Chinese names, the family name precedes the given name, and they are written as such in this article. For example, for Peng Shuai, Peng is the family name, and Shuai is the given name.

**ATP = Association of Tennis Players (men’s professional circuit); WTA = Women’s Tennis Association (women’s professional circuit); ITF = International Tennis Federation (international governing body of tennis, organizer of Grand Slams, Olympic/Regional Games tennis events, and low-tier professional events, and enforcer of anti-doping rules); IOC = International Olympic Committee.

Chapter I Peng Shuai and the Rise of China’s Women’s Tennis

On the world stage, Chinese tennis has always effectively been Chinese women’s tennis. Compared to the men from the world’s most populated country, none of whom has broken into the top 100 in ATP ranking, Chinese women have won, on top of numerous WTA tour-level trophies, 2 singles titles (Li Na, ’11 Roland Garros & ’14 Australian Open), 6 women’s doubles titles (Zheng Jie & Yan Zi, ’06 Australian Open & Wimbledon; Peng Shuai, ’13 Wimbledon & ’14 Roland Garros; Zhang Shuai, ’19 Australian Open & ’21 U.S. Open), and 1 Mixed Doubles title (Sun Tiantian, ’08 Australian Open) at Grand Slam events. The takeoff of Chinese women’s tennis, however, was not linear; rather, it was Peng Shuai’s – and Li Na’s – “trouble-making” in 2005 that led to the loosening of the state’s complete control over tennis players and expedited these women’s historic ascent.

When Sun Tiantian and Li Ting surprisingly won the women’s doubles gold medal at the Athens Olympic Games and when Li Na won a Chinese players’ first ever WTA tour-level singles title, both in 2004, the managerial approach that the Chinese Tennis Association and the Chinese National Team employed with elite tennis players was hardly different from how the weightlifters or the archers were managed. The country’s best players competed in the professional circuit but were hardly professionals: they had little freedom in tournament selection, had to skip Grand Slam and other events to compete in the National Games, were required to turn in all prize money, and could not choose their own coaching staff. In all fairness, it was a much freer system than its 1980s rendition, which was centered on Asian Games performances (tennis was not reinstated in the Olympic Games until 1988) and famously led to the defection of Hu Na in 1983 (which triggered a drastic cooldown of arguably the first honeymoon period of the U.S.-P.R.C. relations); but it was outdated, unincentivizing, and failing the country’s talents.

In 2005, both Peng and Li (unless specified, Li hereafter stands for Li Na) spoke out—quite vehemently—about the limitations of said sport management model on their professional pursuits. That year, all China’s elite women were forced to skip Wimbledon to play for their provincial teams at the National Games, but both Peng (representing Tianjin) and Li (representing Hubei) lost to Zheng Jie (representing Sichuan) in different events. They yearned to “fly solo”—that is, to have sufficient autonomy over their career paths and to become a real professional player. However, what they faced was a Soviet-style system that had been operating with few changes over decades, one that emphasized preparing to fight for national glory at the Olympic Games, and crushed any attempt to break free (Yao Ming’s joining the Houston Rockets in 2002 both was and was not an exception). The clash between Peng (and Li) and the state sport officials led to a loaded quote from Sun Jinfang, then Director of the Tennis Management Center of General Administration of Sport of China and former captain of China’s Asian Games volleyball champion team: Does she (Peng) think she is (Maria) Sharapova?… I will let her fly solo as soon as she signs a pledge to win the gold medal (at the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games)! At the same time, like many other rising young talents, Peng did not have the mightiest mental power on court, as demonstrated by many upsets and comebacks against her, which along with Sun’s criticism and untimely injuries, tanked her 2006 season.

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There’s some consternation over the NFL’s recent decision to keep journalists out of the locker room for a second straight year. Ostensibly a pandemic safety measure, critics argue that the move hurts objective coverage of the league and grants the league and teams greater control of media narratives via official channels. There is fear that this move will become permanent post-pandemic. But is this really a big deal?

On the one hand: yes, we should generally be concerned when journalistic access (to anything) is restricted in a democracy. On the other: what percentage of big-time sports coverage is truly independent, anyway? Do we really accept that journalists from media conglomerates who broadcast the league (and related) content are giving us the objective dirt? (And yes, not all journalists covering the league are paid by these outlets; fair is fair.) Even before the consolidation of media, the transparency of sports reporting has a dubious history. Go back to the days of Babe Ruth and you’ve got newspapermen embedded on the team Pullman car, cutting deals to ignore athletes’ bad behavior and indiscretions in exchange for access. Add to this a generation of sports fans raised in the direct access, social media era and I’m not buying that the average fan is losing much sleep over this decision.

Finally, let’s not ignore that it has always been a bit weird to have media in the locker room anyway. As if an athlete in a towel is somehow more candid than the same athlete in street clothes at a press conference an hour later. I’m all for transparency and access, but I’m unconvinced at this point that we’re losing anything of great importance here.

Well, this was a long time coming. My article, “Critical Mass: Oral History, Innovation Theory, and the Fitness Legacy of the Muscle Beach Scene,” was just published by the International Journal of the History of Sport. This paper began its life as part of my dissertation, which was submitted in 2014. I’d wager the initial research began in 2011 or so, so this is a sporadic decade’s work. I think it’s pretty good. 50 free copies via this link, but email me if you miss out on one of those and need a copy.

We’ve got a big event next week, folks! I have spent the last six months co-organizing Playing the Long Game with Jim Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Rooney Consulting. Presented by Rooney Consulting, the Sport Management program at UT, and the HJ Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, Playing the Long Game is dedicated to meaningful conversations on the future of the sports industry.

We’ve got an absolutely killer lineup, starting with a keynote address on April 12th featuring former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, one of the most influential figures in the history of American sports. We’ll then move on to four panel discussions, two each on April 13th and 15th. Topics include sports after COVID, innovation and the long term future of the industry, diversity, and culture and ethics in the workplace. Some panelists of note:

• Swin Cash-Canal, former NCAA,WNBA, and Olympic champion, current VP of Basketball Operations for the New Orleans Pelicans
  
• Paxton K. Baker, minority owner of the Washington Nationals and a long-time business leader in media and entertainment
  
• Jeff Miller, NFL Executive Vice President for Communications, Public Affairs, and Policy
  
• Larry Miller, Chairman of the Jordan Brand Advisory Board (Nike), former President of Jordan Brand, former President of the Portland Trailblazers
  
• Sam Rapoport, NFL Senior Director of Diversity and Inclusion
  
• And many, many more thought leaders from across the sports industry and academia. Click here for a full list of panelists and their bios.

Head to our website to register for the event, it’s free and open to the public, via Zoom. Our vision is to make this annual event, one that will be live and in-person in Austin starting next year. While focused on the pressing issues that face students entering the sports industry in uncertain times, I trust that anyone interested in the business and future of sports will come away with much to think about. Finally, we plan to “play the long game” beyond the big event, building a community rooted in our vision of long term success and meaningful impact, in sports and beyond. Conference registrants will receive a monthly newsletter, featuring the latest from our panelists and hosts, unique content, networking opportunities and more.

I hope you’ll join us in Playing Long!

Some recent items of note.

1. North Korea is out of the Olympics. As the article notes, there’s a twofold explanation: covid-exposure fears and a rebuke of the opportunity for diplomatic conversations, sending a message to both Seoul and DC. This is decidedly a step backwards after the seeming progress at the previous winter games and in-line with the state’s recent weapons tests.
   
   
2. The US is mulling a 2022 Olympic Boycott. Here’s my in-depth analysis: not happening.
   
   
3. After a year-long delay due to the pandemic, the NBA’s Basketball Africa League will launch next month. This is a big and logical step for the league, a way to extend the global brand and step up talent development efforts on the continent. Given the lingering friction with China over the Daryl Morey-Hong Kong “scandal”, I expect more of these diverse global efforts from the league. Update 4/9/21: Xinjiang cotton production may be at the center of the next China-NBA rift.
   
   
4. Xi Jinping has his sights set on soccer. Despite several attempts over the years, China has never really ascended on the global soccer stage. With a strong foothold in Olympic sports, gaining relevance in world soccer is an obvious step for China, but of course it’s easier said than done. But things can change if the Chinese government follows to through on the vision to throw big money and big efforts into the sport. Competitive success is complicated, but hosting a World Cup and taking a bigger role in FIFA seem inevitable.

A note from the editor: I’m tremendously excited to share this guest post by Scott Jedlicka, a dear friend and sport management professor at Washington State University. I find it challenging and thought-provoking in all the right ways. And it’s timely, coming not just when most of us surely thought the pandemic would be a memory, but also on the eve of the Final Four, when most of us will be engaging in just the sort of sports consumption (and, for some, the internal conflict) that Scott expounds on here. I hope you’ll read it, maybe a couple times, and let us know what you think. This is exactly the sort of work I had hoped to share when I started this site a year ago and I’m so thankful to Scott for the time, thought, and effort he put into this work. Finally, a special thank you to Andrew Hao, Alec Hurley, and George Kioussis for their insightful and prompt comments and suggestions on Scott’s early draft.–Tolga

In the June 2020 issue of The Atlantic, George Packer’s bluntly titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” recounts the United States’ woefully inept response to COVID-19. While much of Packer’s withering criticism is leveled specifically at the Trump administration and its utter inability (or refusal) to deal with the unfolding crisis, he also artfully captures the social, cultural, and economic environment that exacerbated these failures of leadership:

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

All of this is accurate and not very optimistic, of course, but the final clause is what really gives Packer’s description a dire tone: “no vision of a shared identity or future.” Packer is describing an empire on its last legs, a riven populace bereft of solidarity and unable to imagine a departure from the status quo. He is describing a culture in decline.

Insofar as it is an indicator of “normal” life, sport plays a revealing role in this denouement. The approaching end of the pandemic is unlikely to reverse the trajectory on which America finds itself. At the same time, the resumption of major sporting events, the familiar cycle of ritualized celebrations reliably marking the passage of time, will no doubt be heralded by many as a positive and welcome development. The critics and reformers will continue to stridently draw attention to sport’s shortcomings, of course, but—as was the case before the pandemic—the lion’s share of this criticism will either be filtered through various identity-based lenses or reduce sport to just another battlefront in the war of labor against capital. While these approaches are not without value, they tend to share the same contradictory and self-defeating endpoint.

For those concerned with issues of social equity, sport’s value lies primarily in its status as a visible platform for raising awareness. Consequently, sport is considered to be a distinct realm of public life only to the extent that it engages an audience that might otherwise reject considerations (or be wholly ignorant) of social justice. When professional or college athletes engage in various forms of protest, or when injustices occur in sport itself, it is meaningful precisely because it demands the attention of those who would prefer to look away. In this view, the dialogues, conversations, et al. that are ostensibly initiated or advanced through athletes refusing to “shut up and dribble” will necessarily lead in the direction of broader social critique: of the factors underpinning racism, misogyny, state violence, exploitation and abuse, and so on. It is at this point, unfortunately, that this critical approach to sport tends to go off the rails. Those whose politics position them in opposition to the causes championed by athletes will inevitably conclude that sport is being “politicized,” the response to which is typically to point out that sport—as a social practice—is an unavoidably politicized activity. This is a largely irreconcilable stalemate, as the two competing claims are generated from dissimilar premises; the “keep politics out of sport” crowd believes (however disingenuously) that there is something about sport that makes it essentially different from other spheres of social life, while its opponents decidedly do not.

Unfortunately, by denying that sport is anything other than a mirror of society, even those sympathetic to the causes associated with “politicized” sport reach a similar impasse. If one acknowledges the existence of intractable problems that are manifested in sport and in society (the latter of which, again, are often emphasized in sport through athlete activism), they are faced with two general paths to resolution. The first, common to many reform efforts in sport, is the “bad apples” diagnosis: that the problems of sport and society can be largely attributed to the negligent or malfeasant behavior of individuals. At the end of this path lies an easily implemented but rarely effective set of solutions that typically involves some combination of education, awareness-raising, and selecting the “right” leaders. The second path points in the direction of structural change, but the solutions on offer here are less obvious and (for most) emphatically less palatable. Those who pursue this line of critique must, at some point, confront the reality that if sport is a socially constructed activity (political in the way that all realms of social life are political), and if the causes of the problems with which they are concerned are rooted in the structures of society itself, then true reform will necessarily require fundamental changes to sport. In other words, the conditions that make sport a useful arena for social advocacy are also very likely the conditions that create the issues that require advocacy in the first place. Many who champion sport’s utility as a platform for awareness raising are less enthusiastic about setting fire to the stage.

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A not-too-scientific, but potentially interesting addendum to Tuesday’s NCAA post.

When I watch college sports, I like to pull up the team rosters to see where everyone hails from, learn interesting trivia, etc. As I’ve been doing this during the basketball tournaments, I started noticing some things on women’s rosters that I think are positive indicators of the overall growth and investment in women’s sports:

1. Rosters are less local. Historically, colleges tended to recruit from their local base. Football and basketball powerhouses were the exception, but even they relied heavily on in-state talent. Women’s teams also tended to be overwhelmingly local. Not the case anymore: these teams are built from all across the country and, in another positive sign, across the world.
   
2. Transfers, transfers everywhere, as far as the eye can see. This trend has been accelerated by the rule-changes allowing graduate transfers immediate eligibility, but also to a lesser extent by greater case-by-case flexibility on undergrad transfer eligibility.
   

I’ve noticed this across many of the rosters I pulled up as I watched games, but Arizona’s Final Four squad serves as a good example. Of the 14 players on the team, eight are Americans, but only one hails from Arizona. The six internationals come from Canada, Spain (x2), Australia, Latvia, and Turkey (woot woot!). Four are transfers.

So what does this all mean? Again, this isn’t a particularly rigorous analysis, but I think the diversity here says much about the increasing seriousness of women’s sports, both in the US and abroad. To develop this level of talent requires investment, as does recruiting on the national and global scale. To be sure, the internet has made scouring the globe that much easier, but you still need dedicated staff to conduct research and get players on board. Interpreting the transfer tend is a bit hazier, but again, it takes resources to pull off and that players are keen to continue their careers suggests that they find value in the opportunity to keep playing with the potential of WNBA or foreign professional prospects.

I may be overthinking this, but I think there’s something here.