Who's In?

This press release made me just about want to work for the State Department. At least it made me hopeful that our country may be undertaking outreach other than the kind with weapons in hand.

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) SportsUnited office, in partnership with Global Sports Partners/Sport4Peace, the University of Tennessee and the National Basketball Association, is hosting a delegation of basketball-playing girls and their coaches from Iraq. They are visiting Washington, DC and Knoxville, Tennessee from June 3-18 to experience women's basketball in the United States. The ten girls, ages 14-16, and two female coaches are from Sulaymaniya, Erbil, and Baghdad.

This Sports Visitor program is designed to teach the girls new basketball skills and introduce them to sports in America, through visits and clinics at high schools, clubs, and universities. In addition, the program will provide guidance about nutrition, strength and conditioning, and team building. The girls will have the opportunity to learn about the development of women’s sports, including Title IX. In Washington they will attend a Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) game, the Washington Mystics vs. the Atlanta Dream, featuring the best women basketball players from America and around the world. Basketball is the fastest growing sport in the Middle East, and this group is committed to learning more about the game and taking that knowledge back to their teammates in Iraq.

After their time in Washington, the girls and their coaches will visit the basketball camps of the all-time winningest basketball coach in NCAA history, Pat Summitt, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. They will have the opportunity to interact with girls their own age, learn about basketball, and experience life in Tennessee, including hiking in the Smoky Mountains.

I wanna go myself! It's hard to tell how long SportsUnited has been around, but the ECA bureau dates back to 1961. I have to think, however, that the State Department career page's tagline that says, "I will show the world a side of America it has never seen" is a post-January 21, 2009, edit (cool Papyrus font and all).

Time to give some props to Ashoka for organizing a UNICEF-supported sports-as-development competition. (Incidentally, I gave some props to Ashoka in 2001, as project manager on an editorial team that honored 100 organizations (including Ashoka) for innovation—so I’m glad to see the group is still going strong.) Ashoka bills itself as an association of “social entrepreneurs.” Hats off to UNICEF too. And OK, Nike, which gave money. Honestly, I can’t figure out the exact relationship between these organizations and this effort, and it appears the Women’s Sports Foundation is involved some way too; but anyway, I applaud them all!

According to UNICEF, this year’s competition, “GameChangers: Change the Game for Women in Sport,” aimed to bring together the next wave of innovators eager to catalyze change for women and girls through sport – and to bring real solutions to troubling, gender-specific social problems.

That’s a fancy mouthful to describe a dynamic I’ve been thinking is essential for some time. That is, the transforming effect sport can have on people, especially girls. The more beleaguered and oppressed the population, the more they may benefit from the freedom and empowerment athletic endeavors provide. Obviously, not every individual loves sports or physical activities at all, but everyone should have the opportunity to try them out. Which implies too they should have the requisite peace in their neighborhood and food in their bellies to make that possible.

The Game-Changers winners that Ashoka/UNICEF announced last month are:

3 Sisters Adventure Trekking This organization was started by three Nepalese sisters who saw a need for women guides to serve women trekkers, and dared to break out of traditional roles to offer this service. Now 3 Sisters recruits additional trekking guides from within the country, offering educational and employment opportunities never before known by rural Nepalese women.

Moving the Goalposts This organization in Kenya uses soccer to instill confidence, strength, and decision-making capabilities in girls; to expose them to safe and positive social interactions; to provide health education, and training in organization and management as they learn to run the program as well as play the game.

Team-Up for Youth This U.S. program works to expand after-school sports opportunities for low-income children, encouraging college-age women to volunteer as coaches and role models.

My friend of the great basketball blog writes:

So I'm in line at the bank just now, two behind a guy who's so frustrated at the numbing slowness that, I'm thinking, it's a good thing he didn't read Tobias Wolff's short story, "Bullet in the Brain". Anyway, a third teller who looks like something Donoghue's dog Riley might have buried three years ago and who, just moments before, dug her way out, moves toward a window, but before opening her window  (really, why speed up?) says to another teller, a sister Neanderthal, but so everyone can hear, "Did you see Obama's speech is delaying the start of the World Series a half-hour?" To which I shout (maybe eight people in line now), "No it isn't it!"

And she says, spitting grass and dirt, "Yes, it is, it's supposed to start at eight o'clock; he's really messing things up for himself in a hurry."

And I shout, louder yet, "The game never starts till 8:30pm. Eight o'clock is just a pre-game show. It never starts till eight thirty. That stuff about him delaying the game is just more Republican lies." (I hear people behind me laugh.) "What's more important, the pre-game or the  election?"

To which she replies, grubs and ticks and slimiest of worms calling her head home, "The World Series." I end the discussion with "There's the problem isn't it?"

Check out friend Mary's blog, 50 Eggs. She posts about the recent New York Times article on the Chinese rowing program (China is going full-tilt after sports that offer multiple medals). Featured prominently is Igor Grinko, a former Soviet, then former U.S. sculling coach now a head coach in China. Many of my former rowing teammates rowed under him when he was coaching U.S. national team sculling prospects in Occoquan, Virginia, starting a couple of years before the 1992 Olympiad. It was a somewhat uncomfortable fit all round, but he was a coach with proven success, and there were high hopes here.

Mary has some personal experience with Igor. And she respectfully pulls no punches. He replies! Fascinating! 

What do you think? Is China doping its athletes? Did the Easties do it back in the day?  

As Americans debate whether a woman is our best choice to run the country, male professional sports teams may become the final frontier for women's leadership.

Very interesting piece in The Boston Globe about women in top management posts in major league sports. Here's an interesting pack of statistics the story presents:

An analysis of staff directories from the 122 franchises comprising Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, National Football League, and National Hockey League revealed 10.8 percent of vice president positions or higher were filled by females. Subtract the women in non-revenue-producing departments (media/community relations, special events, human resources, and legal), which typically do not make decisions affecting the team, and the number plummets to 6.2 percent. Women like Ng and Yankees vice president and assistant general manager Jean Afterman, and Phoenix Suns vice president Ann Meyers Drysdale fill only 2.1 percent of team management positions. By comparison, women occupy 16.4 percent of corporate officer positions - vice president or higher - in Fortune 500 companies.

Ng refers to Kim Ng, VP and assistant general manager (GM) of the LA Dodgers. She was passed over for the GM position in 2005 after eight years as an assistant GM for the NY Yankees and the Dodgers, during which time she helped assemble teams that made five playoff bids and won three World Series titles. The job went to a guy who had been assistant GM with the San Fransisco Giants. (She's with Paul DePodesta, Dodgers' GM from 2004 to 2005 at spring training in the photo.)

Well, I guess it's still only 35 years after Title IX enactment... Even though the first women who grew up under Title IX are now of an age appropriate for corporate vice presidents and such, perhaps the boys that grew up with Title IX haven't reached an age appropriate to being the ones who are hiring these qualified women execs.

The story quotes Wellesley psychology professor Linda Carli: "There's lingering doubt about a woman's ability to do [the job], but it's not like you have a gene for understanding who makes a good baseball player. That's ridiculous."

Since the season of cheer is here, I will complain about it. Not the season, no. The cheering. And not actually the cheering, it's the dancing.

We lucked into going to the Boston Celtics' opening home game at the Garden on Nov. 3. Great seats, great spirit in the place, great local celebrity spotting, great playing by the rejuvenated Cs, great time. The one blot on the whole thing is the Celtics Dancers (I think they're called). I'm sure they're probably earnest young women seeking a career in entertainment. Maybe it's their big break. But a) ugh, they're not very good and b) do we have to sexualize everything? and c) when we sexualize everything, does it have to be in an irrelevant, robotic, stamped-from-a-press kind of way? I would have less of an issue with real cheerleaders, leaders of cheers who toss in some acrobatics to keep it interesting. But the Jumbotron and electronics now lead the masses in cheers. We get women in a narrow range of skin tones, with long hair ironed flat, slim but without muscle definition in their polyester briefs, posturing in suggestive ways to some mostly quite old tunes.

If we spectators are such cretins that we need to be visually entertained every minute, let's rely more on "Lucky" the fully human mascot who is surprisingly charismatic and gymnastical. Or show some replays on the big screen. Or troop out again the various local kids' talent acts that seem to make an appearance at every game. Or get some guys to dance too, c'mon, equal opportunity exploitation.

I find the dancers' presence embarrassing for everyone. I suppose maybe some people like watching them bounce out and shimmy unathletically. There's got to be some bottom line (pardon bad pun) reason the franchise would undertake it. Do they think it's gonna sell more tickets? Now that they have a powerful team of players, I think not.

Most embarrassing is how, on opening night, the organization dedicated the parquet to the late great Red Auerbach, and not long after that the dancers were out in the first of their five costume changes. You notice dancers are a recent thing with the Celtics--since just before Auerbach's death. That's partly because he reportedly had said, in regard to team dancers, "Over my dead body."

Completely nonironically, that is where those dancers are now, skipping about the Red Auerbach parquet.

I tip my hat, conversely, to Russell Crowe. He's a part owner of a rugby team in Australia, where he has sacked the dancing cheerleaders. He told ESPN, "We examined game day and wanted to contemporize and make the focus [on] football." A team of percussionists will replace the cheerleaders, the club announced last February. The club's website invited drummers to audition.

 

Last year a pal I play hoops with cajoled me into joining his fantasy NFL league. It was fun to study the rosters. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s names. Somehow football players’ names are particularly fascinating, maybe because they’re so prominently displayed on the gigantic billboards that are their backs.

So naturally, knowing very little about the current crop of individual players, I chose a team based entirely on the players’ names. I could have made a whole league of such teams. An entire team of Toms playing an entire team of Cedrics and Derricks? An entire team of people with last names that are professions (Miller, Baker, Cook, Porter, etc.) versus an entire team of people with names longer than 10 letters? Or a team of all players with sexually ambiguous names (Marion, Lesley, Randy, etc.) I wonder who would win? Well, despite all the fun I could have had, I created one team with players who had tough names. Rough tough names. Like Mack Strong. Or Alge Crumpler.

I actually did all right for awhile. And way under the salary cap, I might add. Until I, uh, took my eye off the ball and several of my players were out for weeks with injuries unbeknownst to me. I played a few weeks with no quarterback, I think.

But I can see how the fantasy league concept is a fun one. Especially for the attentive.

And there's a league for everyone. You can play fantasy Congress too. Fantasy Congress: Where people play politics. I haven't played, mainly because returning from reality after fiddling around in a land of fantasy politics would be just too devastating. But if you want to play, you have until Thanksgiving to draft for the fall season!

Instructions are simple:

• Draft your team of Members of Congress (MCs).
• Earn points as your MCs legislate effectively.
• Manage by trading, benching, or picking up free MCs.
• Win by getting the most points by the end of the season and go down in political history.

Good concept! The site encourages teachers to use it, which seems like a good way to get kids involved in thinking about what's going on in the halls of the legislature beyond the posturing and speechifying we see most of. (What am I saying, "kids," really for anyone to get past the weapons of mass distraction constantly used against us.) Good luck!

I really don't approve of athletes taking drugs. It's cheating. It throws the whole thing into disarray and chaos and removes the beauty.

But I do think it's better to finally fess up, even if it takes a while, than to persist in bug-eyed denial. Sometimes the lessons from one who's erred or fallen can be stronger than all the lecturing in the world from the virtuous.

Hopefully, Marion Jones will say succinctly, it just isn't worth it. 

Marion Jones in more innocent times, 1994. (Getty)

Marion Jones said she was sorry. And that she had behaved stupidly and was ashamed. I almost like her even more now.

It is more than so many others in her shoes have done.

I really didn’t want to believe that she had artificial help in achieving her amazing athletic goals. I loved her apparent joy in the process and like everyone, her apparently genuinely nice persona. She was beautiful to watch compete and you knew, drugs or not, she trained wicked hard. Plus she had braces as an adult at the same time I did.

The waste of her career, and her genuine efforts, that came from that little extra edge she got from outside rather than inside herself, is tragic in the classical sense: Hero brought low by one fatal flaw.

Marion Jones in the spring prior to the contentious Olympics. (Sports Illustrated)

She takes full accountability herself, which I admire. But you can’t overlook the pressures on her. Not only from her coach or whomever, but from all of us as well, wanting her to win, wanting a superchampion, and the corporate world rewarding that mightily with cash.

There’s a tunnel-visioned aspect of elite competition which gives it a certain beauty but also a potentially inaccurate accounting of reality. I remember it from years striving toward world championships on the U.S. rowing team. I believe American rowing, at least back in the day, was clean. The most unspoken-of drug I ever witnessed any U.S. rowers take was Ex-Lax. But we had the single-mindedness of purpose, the deep desire, and a sense of the self’s virtue that comes with incredibly hard work toward a respected goal. If “supplements” had been dangled in front of any of us (and if (a big hypothetical if) there had been any significant money to be made by winning rowing competitions), would we have remained so pure, albeit irregular? You can always make an exception for yourself, it seems. I suspect these little things (and I would posit that given all the issues across the globe, these are little things) don’t seem a crime when up close and personal.

An unrelated radio story today on All Things Considered discussed a very similar tale in the world of business. It was much shadier to begin with, a guy making millions off of inflated stock trading. But the key thing was that the guy, Jordan Belfort, who spent 22 months in prison on fraudulent trading charges, said that in the thick of his greed being positively reinforced, he stopped seeing certain actions as wrong or criminal. Actions which now, and well before his trading days, he would have thought were completely unacceptable. He too, like Jones, is contrite.

We inheritors of the Puritan tradition love contrition, I think. It makes a good story (which Scorcese has optioned the rights to, incidentally, in Belfort‘s case). And good stories often contain redemption.

The redemption in Jones’s case will come from her acquiescence to be brought so low. Ron Rappaport wrote in the L.A. Times (good article; he wrote a book about her) that she has thrown out her chance to go on to be a respected spokesperson or even announcer for her sport or advocate for women’s sports generally. I disagree. Puritan proclivities aside, I think we (as in We, the People) are pretty good at forgiving in some cases. (Or am I just being cynical about the seriousness with which the country views doping, all lamentations about disappointing role models to the contrary? (Though ESPN’s Jemele Hill might say gullible rather than cynical.)) Especially in cases where a personally appealing individual is truly remorseful, we want to forgive. (I’m not sure people would re-embrace a fallen Barry Bonds as enthusiastically, for example.) I hope Marion does not disappear after her expected six month prison sentence, though about now I bet she would like to. I think she could still have a lot to offer. I am still rooting for her.