Episode 154: WNBA Draft, Dr. Jean Williams and "The English Game", and Sports TV Entity Madness

On this week’s show, Shireen, Amira, Lindsay, Brenda, and Jessica first talk about how the sports entities are continuing their attempt at getting sports on TV [7:00]. Then Brenda and Shireen interview Dr. Jean Williams about "The English Game" [26:39]. Finally, we discuss the upcoming WNBA draft [46:23].

Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [1:01:17], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Nikki McCray-Penson [1:14:30], and what is good in our worlds [1:16:46].

Links

Bursting the Bubble: Why Sports Aren't Coming Back Soon: https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon

Taiwan bucks virus sports cancellations with new baseball season: https://www.france24.com/en/20200412-taiwan-bucks-virus-sports-cancellations-with-new-baseball-season

Sporting activities ready to be resumed in Vanuatu: https://oceaniafootballcenter.home.blog/2020/04/10/sporting-activities-ready-to-be-resumed-in-vanuatu/

MLB, union discuss playing all games in Arizona: https://apnews.com/43ddd669b1caabd5ebdef2481d85e17f

‘We’re not guinea pigs’ – Drogba and Eto’o condemn Covid-19 test trials on Africans: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/were-not-guinea-pigs-drogba-and-etoo-condemn-covid-19-test-trials-on-africans

Mississippi State football coach Mike Leach apologizes for 'offensive' Twitter post: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2020/04/02/mike-leach-deletes-apologizes-tweet-mississippi-state/5117152002/

'Baptism of fire': meet two female footballers working in hospitals: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/apr/08/female-footballers-working-in-hospitals-portsmouth-rosie-mcdonnell-london-bees-hayley-west

Four Wales Women rugby internationals join NHS frontline fight against coronavirus: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/rugby/rugby-news/four-wales-women-rugby-internationals-18064391

Florence Schelling named first female GM of top-level men's pro hockey team: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29011147/florence-schelling-named-first-female-gm-top-level-men-pro-team

Mississippi State hires coach Nikki McCray-Penson: https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/29019288/mississippi-state-hire-odu-coach-nikki-mccray-penson

Transcript

Lindsay: Hello hello hello, welcome to Burn It All Down. The quarantine continues! We are the feminist sports podcast you need. My name is Lindsay Gibbs, I am the author of the Power Plays newsletter, and joining me – because nobody has any excuse to miss podcast recordings anymore – [laughing] is the entire team. We have Dr. Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State: hi, Amira!

Amira: Hello hello hello hello hello…Hello hello.

Lindsay: [laughing] Jessica Luther, the co-author of the forthcoming book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back; she is in Austin, Texas. Hey, Jess.

Jessica: Hey Linz, hey everyone.

Lindsay: Dr. Brenda Elsey, the associate professor of history at Hofstra in New York. Hey, Bren.

Brenda: Hi.

Lindsay: And of course the freelance sports reporter extraordinaire, Shireen Ahmed in Toronto, Canada. Hi, Shireen.

Shireen: Good morning, happy Easter!

Lindsay: Yes! Happy holiday if you are celebrating anything – lots of quarantine holidays going around. So this week we’ve actually got plenty of stuff to discuss. We continue to wonder what we’re gonna talk about and the sports world just fills us with things. We’re gonna talk about some of the desperate moves that sports entities are taking in order to get any sports off in the year 2020. Yes, we will be discussing…Fight Island is real. We also have an interview: Brenda and Shireen chat with Dr. Jean Williams about The English Game, the complete erasure of the women’s game from the period piece, and where the game is now. And we’re gonna talk WNBA draft, which is happening this coming Friday live visually on ESPN. Really excited to get into it.

Of course we want to thank our patrons: for as little as $2/month at patreon.com/burnitalldown you can support this podcast and make sure that it gets to continue – rain, shine, quarantine or not, we’re so appreciative of your support. First of all, we’re gonna play the game that everyone’s playing, and then I would like to say that this game gets to be cancelled after this! Nobody else gets to play this game! Because if one more person asks me to pick a room of who I want to be trapped with in quarantine, I might explode. Anyways, I’m in a great mood. If you can pick two athletes to quarantine with (please, women and gender minorities only) who would they be? If you need to go to four you can go to four, because I know Shireen wanted four. Okay, let’s go. Shireen, you start us off.

Shireen: Okay, so first of all I’m gonna quickly talk about the tragedy that was not recognizing women’s hockey players in the ESPN athlete one, so my response to that was HILARY KNIGHT! I realize she’s not Canadian, but she played for Les Canadiennes. Also, Tobin Heath. I know you’re like, what, you’re not picking Christine Sinclair?! Because I feel like Tobin and I have a connection. She doesn’t know this yet but I feel like this is important to say. But above all two choices: Nadia Nadim, I love her so much. She’s also a physician, or like, in training, she’s a medical student, which would be handy during this pandemic. And Maya Moore, because I could just learn from her, soak it all up. Also: cats. As many as possible.

Lindsay: That sounds lively. That sounds fun. Brenda?

Brenda: Okay, this was kind of a no-brainer for me. Christiane Endler, because I wanna score on her, and if we were quarantined I’d have had 40,000 chances, so I could say, look! There! It’s a bird! And she would look away, and I would do that and I would tape it and then I would look really awesome. Formiga, because I wanna get to know her, because, obviously. And Ashlyn Harris – how did you all not pick Ashlyn Harris? She’s gonna have all the booze–

Lindsay: I haven’t gone yet! Of course I’m picking her! [laughter]

Brenda: Okay! She’s gonna have all the booze, all the fun, all the cool Zoom parties, and if I get more: Sue Bird, just to sort of follow her around.

Lindsay: That sounds amazing. Yeah, Ashlyn Harris is on my list too, because booze, and she’s so attractive, she’s so pretty! [laughs] Her cheekbones, oh my goodness. I definitely have a crush. And Venus Williams, because she’s my favorite athlete, period, so I would wanna be around her, and also she’s doing such a great job – did you see her public service she did about getting Grigor Dimitrov to show his abs?

Jessica: Yes, yes I did.

Lindsay: When they were doing this workout video together they were doing a dual…She forced him. So I feel like she would make sure that there is enough eye candy to go around, you know? They would probably both make me work out and I need someone to yell at me to work out, so that would be good. Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, mine are Serena and Venus, because even if I wasn’t included I would just like to watch them. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the two of them are together, and I just feel like that alone would be very fun in isolation, so yeah. I feel like that’s a super obvious pick for me but…

Lindsay: But it’s very good. Amira?

Amira: Yeah, I just picked really easy, basic things with Sue and Rapinoe, just because I feel like I’m quarantined with them because I watch all their IG Lives, which they do on a weekly basis. They’ve got ginger beer which they’ve flown in from this great mom and pop shop back in Washington and their stories, particularly as Megan gets increasingly drunk, are the funniest things. I really appreciated the one…Early on in their relationship they went to Hawaii together, it was the first time that Megan was really hanging out with Diana Taurasi and Penny and Sue, and she got way too drunk and kept throwing up and passing out, and Sue turned to Diana and Penny saying, “She’s little, it’s okay. She’s just little!” And she followed it up by saying, “You can’t ever drink with UConn players, it’s just what it is.” So, yeah.

Lindsay: Yeah, that was my favorite too. The theme of all these is that Megan cannot hold her alcohol nearly as well as Sue Bird, because Sue is pretty much the same the whole time!

Amira: And Megan gets to the point where she’s telling, like, the mom who’s like, “Oh, my daughter loves you!” And Megan was like, “She might be gay!” [laughter] And Sue’s like, “Megan!!”

Shireen: That was so good.

Lindsay: Oh, gosh. Alright, that game is officially ended. We won. Alright, well desperate times call for desperate measures, according to many in the sports world. Jess, what are the primarily men in charge of sports saying these days about when sports can return? And how?

Jessica: Yeah, well any minute now is what they all want us to believe. So I wanna start this by actual sports that are returning. We’re recording of course on Sunday during the day, by the time you listen to this this will have already aired, but ESPN is doing its first live sports in many weeks here, what they are calling the NBA HORSE Tournament, even though it is the NBA and WNBA HORSE Tournament, thank you very much. For those that don’t know, HORSE is a game where a person starts and they do whatever shot from whatever place and the next person has to do the same shot; if you miss, you get an H, and then an O, and then an R, until you spell HORSE and you lose. So, first round matchups are Trae Young vs Chauncey Billups, Tamika Catchings (woop woop!) against Mike Conley Jr, Zach Lavine vs Paul Pierce, and Chris Paul vs Allie Quigley. My money is on Quigley. The semifinals and finals will air on Thursday, April 16th, on ESPN. So that is how desperate ESPN has gotten – they’re gonna air a HORSE tournament, but I’m pretty jazzed they’re doing it.

Lindsay: [laughs] Yeah.

Jessica: My understanding is everyone will be in an isolated place…I don’t know if ESPN will send a camera crew there. It’ll be interesting to see the quality of how this all works. But anyway, sports around the world are trying to get back on track. One thing I wanted to mention is that in Taiwan the baseball season is starting up and it’s gonna be played without real life human fans in the stands, but according to the AFP, “On Saturday, Rakuten Monkeys unveiled robotic mannequins and cardboard cut-outs of fans dressed in home colours and caps at their stadium in northern Taoyuan county. Some of the robots even banged on drums from the empty stands.”

Amira: Oh my god.

Jessica: So that’s what they’re doing for fans now. But of course a lot of these ideas are not great, and also super vague. Like, Adam Schefter, who seems to exist just to serve as a mouthpiece for powerful people in football, this week he tweeted, “Speaking to people in and around college football this week, there is “strong conviction” there will be college football this season. Uncertainty about when - multiple scenarios being debated - but they sound certain there still will be college football this season.” It’s so dumb. Are these people public health officials or infectious disease specialists? Because just wanting football to exist doesn’t make it safe or smart or good. We’ll be talking about this more in a little bit, but Major League Baseball really wants to be the first league back and they’re proposing some wild stuff including creating basically a giant bubble in Arizona where everyone will be constantly monitored and tested – I guess the players will live apart from their families, they’re not really sure, but they’ll do this for months so they can have a season. So everyone, I guess, enjoy playing baseball in 100 degree heat, I dunno. I just wanna say before I pass this on, the reality is that sports are not coming back anytime soon, and everyone needs to chill the fuck out. I know that that sucks, but it just is.

Shireen: Yeah.

Jessica: Stephanie Apstein at Sports Illustrated spoke to multiple medical experts about the return of sports, and it’s grim, y’all. One expert she spoke with said that sports will return when we get a vaccine. And that’s 12-18 months away. He pointed out that quarantined sports leagues are nearly impossible to maintain and as soon as one person in any bubble tests positive they’ll have to stop everything for 14 days at least. But still people think they’re gonna do this. I guess. So, I don’t know. Amira, what desperate sports story have you been paying attention to?

Amira: Yeah, you know I talked a little bit before about the Big Three/Big Brother mashup in quarantine, and so I thought that might be the most ridiculous thing, but Dana White said hold my beer…[Lindsay laughing] And this is an ongoing saga – we’ve been covering this on Burn It All Down for about four weeks now – if you remember on episode 150 I talked about while all the other sports closed in mid-March, this was like March 15th, we talked about how Dana White was still like, “I’ve spoken directly to Trump and Pence and they’ve assured me I can keep going.” Particularly around UFC249, and then a few weeks ago on episode 152 Shireen also torched Dana White for his continued assurance that this fight was going to happen, and then this week he kept saying that this had now been moved three times…His latest place for having it was in a casino that was on tribal land, so it was a sovereign space–

Jessica: Jesus.

Amira: –that wasn’t gonna be able to…So, California basically couldn’t shut them down because it was on sovereign space, but they were like, how are you gonna even claim that operating a casino to have a fight is essential? You’re so dumb. So because he was worried that they were gonna find a way to shut him down, he said he was close to a deal, finalizing a deal that would buy a private island to have…[laughing] This is “Fight Island.” I…I can’t even.

Lindsay: [laughing] Fight Island is real!

Amira: Fight Island! He literally was gonna buy a private island! Like, it’s not enough that you’re moving to sovereign tribal land as a way to circumvent US law, it’s just like…All of it is disgusting. This is just like sporting colonialism, like, “how can I buy up land and occupy this space to hold something that’s going to get people sick, that’s not well-advised as all.” The levels of…He’s so preposterous. But what’s wild is that at the beginning of this week, despite the fact that he was going on with this while he had fighters pulling out because they had deaths in their family due to COVID. This is where we were. But luckily adults in the room finally stood up and told him to stand down, and when this was first announced he basically said, “It’s out of my hands, it’s going to be cancelled.” And it was very clear that somebody had pulled the plug on it. We didn’t know who, but now we know that he got the call from, he said, “the highest level you can go at Disney, the highest level at ESPN.” And basically they said don’t do this next week. They’ve now finally postponed all of the other UFC events indefinitely. The fact that it had to take this amount of time, basically four weeks of him doing all sorts of things – moving the fight to sovereign land, buying a damn private island – to try to get this on before people were able to say sit down, shut the fuck up, it’s not happening. And so luckily it’s not happening here, but just because we know how wild he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see another preposterous idea coming out of Dana White and the UFC to continue to truck along in some way.

Lindsay: Yeah, he’s not going to be deterred. He’s willing to spend so much money to try and make some money, and I just keep being like, why don’t you spend that money on the athletes that can’t get paid right now, right?

Jessica: Yeah.

Lindsay: Like, just make them secure for a while. Calm the fuck down. But of course, that’s not a money making venture in the short term for him, so that’s out the window, you know? It’s a lot like this baseball stuff in Arizona. I was listening to the ESPN Daily podcast with Mina Kimes earlier this week and they did an episode on it, which was really good but the ESPN reporter she was talking with was like, very gung-ho about the idea, and very much like, the players are excited about it, this is how they can make money right now. The players want to make money, nobody wants to lose a season, and it just all seems so shortsighted, right? And so selfish. Because if you think about this Arizona bubble, not only is it a logistical nightmare for the players, I mean, some of them have wives that are pregnant this summer, could give birth, and they keep all the kids there, how do they do all that? Also think of all the people you have, do you make all of their hotel staff quarantine with them, right? So the hotel staff can’t see their family? The drivers can’t see their family? The television people can’t see their families? You have to have entire ecosystems quarantined.

And there’s this other idea now being floated from MLB which…They call ‘trial balloons,’ where these rumors spark up and then they see how the public reacts to them. So, the newest one is that they might do everything at the team spring training sites in Florida and Arizona: make two basically completely new conferences based on who’s in Florida and who’s in Arizona for the typical spring training, and do the games there. But they’re not in a complete bubble there because you’re still traveling all around Florida, and we know that Florida is taking this very seriously, sooo…[laughter] There’s no lapses in the Florida preparation around COVID-19, so it’s just a mess. And it makes me so sad, because I wish we could spend all of this money and all of these resources and all of this power towards helping society as a whole. While I want sports back and I want these athletes to get paid, there’s gotta be a better way to do this. Shireen?

Shireen: I’m obviously gonna talk a little bit about soccer and global football, and I did mention this a couple of weeks ago – I think last week’s episode…what is time, though? – about what we’re looking forward to, and I did mention very briefly that soccer leagues in Tajikistan were starting again. And everyone’s like…I wasn’t actually kidding about that. Tajikistan is a central Asian country and one of the few countries in the world where there’s no current case of COVID-19 right now. I mean, these figures and stats change probably daily, but there’s not a lot of inflow and outflow into Tajikistan, so I think it’s important to keep that in mind. Now, what’s happening is not only Tajikistan: Belarus also is starting again, Burundi, and Nicaragua. But just to focus on Tajikistan, they’ve started training already and with three matches which will begin today. It’s their domestic league and it will be done behind closed doors despite probably many other football federations around the world suspending their play.

Now, in addition to that, that’s not the most shocking to me. What was was Bundesliga. Now, Bundesliga is, for those listeners that don’t know, the premier football league in Germany. They’ve already started to try to figure out how they’re gonna do this. They’re looking back to begin and resume in May, and what this would require would be as Lindsay just mentioned about the support staff: camera people, trainers, med staff…This, for Germany, would take about 200 people per team, and this is without fans. What would happen is they would test them regularly, they would also be living in isolation – and this is from a piece by Tariq Panja at the New York Times. Even though they’re ahead of their curve and their medical systems seem to be handling the case, this is a huge risk. I get it that it comes down to money, obviously I get that. But to isolate in this way…It’s so reckless to me that people are being so careful while grocery shopping, you’re going to engage and allow a contact sport in this way? It’s really frustrating.

It’s the 1 and 2 top divisions in Bundesliga that have already returned to the practice field. They say they’re observing health protocols but that also shifts as we know more about what the disease is, we’re still getting new information. Initially when it came out it was reported to only affect senior citizens – that’s absolutely not true. We’ve seen so many victims globally who are young with no underlying health issues anyway. I find this to be very very upsetting on many, many different levels. So that’s happening. Premier League in England is unlikely to return, and if it does it’ll be in July. The women’s Champions League is not restarting, and we know that women and women’s football leagues globally are also considered as second class citizens, players, women generally. So we’re not looking to that, which in a way is terrible to say, I’m glad at least the women get protected from this nonsense.

Lindsay: Yeah. Bren?

Brenda: Well, I sort of have an odd out comment which is just about another league which is restarting which is Vanuatu, which is an archipelago nation in the south Pacific that was colonized by France. They have just under 300,000 people, they have had no confirmed cases and have shut down and isolated entirely. So they’ve waited, I think, about 3 weeks or something like that and this isn’t to make light of all the concerns that everyone has obviously expressed and I agree with wholeheartedly, but I am going to watch this league because I am so desperate.

Shireen: Oh, Bren!

Brenda: I have this really wonderful feeling, I have this little tiny flicker of hope that there’s going to be some amazing Vanuatu player out there right now and this is going to be the descent of every elite scout, agent, obsessive football fan – a lot of eyes are gonna be on this country that just has recovered from a cyclone, whose entire national football team died in a plane crash last year…

Jessica: Oh my god.

Brenda: I kind of am rooting for this to work out for them, because it seems like they’ve actually been really responsible about it. Again, I don’t have total details but if anyone wants to watch it with me I’m hoping that fubo has it and if not they’ve said that they’re gonna stream it on their Facebook page and I just have this amazing hope that everyone’s gonna be descending on this football federation and I’m just waiting for somebody to get…I don’t know, that amazing contract. And they have a women’s league too! So I’m gonna watch both basically, if I can find it, as much as I can.

Lindsay: That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s funny, I wrote earlier this week for Power Plays, I was trying to think about how disproportionately this is going to impact women’s sports and how in the race to get everything back I can already see women’s sports being just trampled all over, right? And completely forgotten about. So my makeshift solution was whenever it is completely safe to start sports back, women should get a monthlong head start – there should be a magic month where it’s just women’s sports. I know there’s some logistical challenges depending on what league, but just thinking about what a month where all this desperate energy to watch sports, right? And to have sports back and to have sports journalism and for ESPN to be able to talk about things, if all of that energy could be focused just on women’s sports for a few weeks, how much good that could do for women's sports as a whole, right? I got really excited thinking about that. That’s kind of along the same lines of what you were saying with this…Although obviously in a much more practical way, with this small island, just kind of thinking about how…And they have done things safely it seems like, and it seems like they’re not being too rash, and so maybe they can then capitalize, because we all are incredibly hungry for sports.

I think one of my hardest things is that when we’re talking about the NCAA and NCAA sports, I think all of this is just reiterating something that we talk about on the show all the time, which is just the disproportionate amount of money and power that these college football head coaches get, and it really turns them into these god-like figures – and they drink all of that Kool Aid, they believe that they are that powerful. So you have these men who are the highest paid public employees in the state coming out and saying that football just will be back, that there’s no way that it won’t be back. It’s just very clear, and I know Amira’s gonna talk about Mike Gundy later so I’ll leave that to her, but it's just very clear that these are not medical people and these are not experts on infectious disease. It would do me very much a lot of good if people would stop asking their opinion on the coronavirus!

Jessica: Yes.

Lindsay: Because I have enough rage bubbling up over people who are supposed to know about coronavirus every day! I don’t need fresh reminders of how much I hate all these people. But Jim Harbaugh is the latest example that I feel like we have to end on to just think about. These are not the people that should be making these decisions. So, Jim Harbaugh, Michigan football head coach, was on the National Review podcast which…Yeah, that’s just a lot already. And his quote was, “Even now, as we all go through what we're going through with COVID-19, I see people more concerned about others. More prayerful. As I said, God has virtually stopped the world from spinning. I don't think it's coincidence — my personal feeling, living a faith-based life, this is a message or this is something that should be a time where we grow on our faith for reverence and respect for God. You see people taking more of a view of sanctity of life. And I hope that can continue. I hope that continues and not just in this time of crisis or pandemic.” You might be thinking, okay, he’s Christian, he’s religious, he’s just reflecting on religion right now. That’s okay. But then he says, “And lastly, abortion, we talk about sanctity of life, yet we live in a society that aborts babies. There can't be anything more horrendous.”

Jessica: Ugh…

Lindsay: So, we went from coronavirus to abortion in about 3-4 sentences. 

Amira: And sadly Harbaugh is not the only player that’s been on this particular kick – Benjamin Watson, tight end, posted this image that was like, the number of deaths due to coronavirus and then it was like the number of aborted babies each year, like, “which one are we mourning?”

Jessica: Ugh!

Amira: And people rightfully were like, oh my goodness, and Ben Watson was like, oh, 230,000 dead babies! So I feel like this is sadly a current that’s running through some people of faith who are currently politically oriented towards abortion politics.

Lindsay: It just…Yeah. I wish we could end on a more upbeat note, but that’s what it is.

Jessica: I just wanted to end with a quote from a man named Zach Binney, he’s a PhD in epidemiology, he wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and he now teaches at Emory. He spoke to Stephanie Apstein for that Sports Illustrated article that I talked about, and this is what he said to her: “If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall. You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people.” So I think that’s what we’re really talking about here. For all the laughing at these men making these choices, these are really real choices with intense and big consequences for them.

Lindsay: Alright. Next, Brenda and Shireen talk with Dr. Jean Williams. 

Shireen: Hello flamethrowers! So excited today to have friend of the show and the amazing Dr. Jean Williams. She’s the author of 3 books on football starting with A Game For Rough Girls by Routledge in 2003. Dr. Williams is a professor of sport at the University of Wolverhampton and a non-executive director of the Silverstone Motor Sport Experience. Dr. Williams is currently completing Britain’s Olympic Women, again with Routledge, and looks forward to meeting the first female president of FIFA soon. Welcome, Dr. Williams.

Jean: Thank you very much. I’m honored to be part of Burn It All Down, so that’s really exciting. Thank you for inviting me.

Brenda: So, okay, I guess I should preface this by saying that Jean and I were on a call organized by the Football Scholars Forum with many many people who have seen the new Netflix series The English Game. Professor Williams was very gracious on said call! I wanted to start by saying…So, The English Game supposedly takes place right around 1879 and as a historian it immediately called to mind your work on the beginnings of women’s football which stretch back at least until 1881 which you’ve documented, and I think it’s fair to say we can imagine women did play football before that. I wanted to ask you, Jean, what do you think it would’ve looked like if they’d actually read your work and integrated it?

Jean: I can admit that I think the series is a pile of old pants. [Shireen laughing] It’s just abysmal and if they had read my work or any of the other academic work on it, because the guy’s not an academic or historian, and I don’t think we should be snobbish about that, but we do take pains to get things right. There are a number of problems with its historical accuracy – the depiction of women characters which is appalling even for a melodrama, and just its overall appreciation of early football history.

Shireen: I just wanted to ask, was there nothing about it that you liked at all?

Jean: The reviews in the UK were that this was gonna be Downton Abbey for boys, and it certainly wasn't even Downton Abbey for people who like football. I spoke a little bit about that with Brenda, because in terms of my other background, I started out as an English major. I actually thought I was gonna be a Toni Morrison scholar. What interests me is that if they’re not going for historical accuracy and authenticity, what is the narrative arc of this series, having said that it’s a melodrama, a TV series, it’s not film. What is the narrative arc and why have they therefore used the characters in the way that they have?

Brenda: And for people who haven’t seen it, we might want to just mention basically the narrative arc has to do with the struggle between the very elite men that had started and created the FA and kind of working class factory workers in different parts of England, and it gives the Scottish game its due credit. I think that’s the fastest I can say. Then it involves personal love and romance with women who are obsessed with maternity and, um…Very Victorian, I guess, in our stereotype of whatever that means. More than probably what it really embodies. So just really quickly then, one of the things that strikes me is that a lot of the conversation around The English Game has been obsessed with the origins of football and who gets credit for it, and who doesn’t. And being a Latin Americanist, I feel just fine saying it might’ve been invented in [x] and it was perfected in South America. But I sensed a real need to establish that. I wanted to ask you, Jean, what is that about? Is that about British masculinity, is that about regionalism, or nationhood?

Shireen: Is that about colonialism? [laughs]

Brenda: Yeah! What is the thing where there’s this…thing?

Jean: Yeah, we get this an awful lot in what I do professionally which is that we deconstruct myths of origin. You will know this yourself from the myths of the invention of baseball and so on and so forth, Field of Dreams and all of that. There are lots of these myths of origin within British sport. There is still a statue of, for instance, at a rugby school which is not too far away from where I live, saying that a young boy picked up the ball and ran with it and thereby invented rugby. We know that not to be true, but nevertheless this school still does tours in which they retell this myth. It’s an origin myth. People need a kind of simple, clear answer as to when things started and people generally don’t like complexity, I think, in our both US, Canada, and UK contexts that we can see in our recent elections that politicians mistrust experts until there’s a pandemic, and then they can’t wait to trail out the experts and say that they’re looking at the evidence. So one of the things that I think about The English Game is that it’s a Brexit Britain series, it’s about saying “this is something that we gave the world.” And yet it won’t surprise you that the historian that they used on this was Scottish, so there’s a strongly Scottish story. The British may have invented various rules, but the game as it’s truly played in the logic of this series was given by the Scottish professors.

We do know that obviously there’s a strong history of the Anglos coming down from Scotland and being paid to play within the UK context, but that’s again a very simplistic characterization because the work of Peter Swain, Graham Curry, and a number of other academics have shown that actually if you think of that switchover between folk football, which is the kind of riotous game that everybody knows, was played in the UK before the rules were developed in Sheffield, Cambridge, the FA rules in a number of other places…There were lots and lots of games like football, they may have been amalgams of football and rugby that were played by the masses. So again, this idea that football was a game for aristocrats, they gave it rules and laws, and then it was somehow taken by the working class to be their own, the whole premise of the series is problematic.

Shireen: I have a question, and I really love this juxtaposition you’re talking about, this depiction that football was bastardized and taken over by the working class. This series also attempts to touch on this class struggle that was clearly happening, but like you said, in a very simplistic way. In terms of simplifying all these narratives within football, what was happening, Jean, for those that do not know or listeners who aren’t familiar with women’s football history, what was happening in the 1870s with women in football in England?

Jean: Well, the earliest games that we’ve got recorded are in 1881, and again, I’m currently engaged in very interesting conversations with local historians, again mainly based based in Scotland, who were trying to demonstrate that these games were sort of invented by the Scottish. The historians that are looking into this have sometimes also claimed that the names like Lilith Sinclair, who was one of the first goals, is similar to an actress of that name who was touring locally, and he has said that these games had been acted out rather than proper football matches. Now we know if we’ve ever tried to rehearse a football match, and it’s one thing that makes it really challenging to depict onscreen is that football is spontaneous and it’s really difficult to rehearse. So I think that that’s a kind of misreading of the evidence, but we do know that there were women’s football matches around this time because it was actually Blackburn Olympic who beat Old Etonians in 1883, so one of the things the series has done is compacted time. Of course, Fergie Suter never played for Olympic, he played for Rovers, so they’re playing fast and loose with the details.

One of the things that I would point out though, quite aside from how much women’s football was, the 1870s were pretty assertive for women generally in sports. So, more and more women owning cycles, you get early tennis and certainly croquet competitions. Sport and the outdoor life was really fashionable, and again particularly amongst the women of the upper classes who would be riding to hounds and those kinds of activities, taking part in bloodsports.

Shireen: And that wasn’t depicted anywhere in this series, there was no outdoor life other than…Well, nothing really. I can’t remember them showing anything of that nature in the series, so that’s really interesting and that’s what I want our listeners to hear from you, what was actually happening at this time. Because we have no idea, other than like Brenda very specifically said there was class struggle, and we see that conflict and women involved in that, particularly Fergus Suter’s love interest, the fictional Martha, and how she’s involved in class struggle and stuff like that. But other than that there’s no depiction of women’s athleticism anywhere.

Jean: No, and I mean, interestingly they’ve chosen to situate it amongst cotton factories because obviously women and children indeed would be very much part of that workforce, so it’s very interesting to choose the cotton industry because there was more equality in that industry, men and women working alongside one another and whole families brining in money – rather than some industries, for example the mining, and so choosing to reinterpret the cotton industries in those stereotypical ways…I mean, for god’s sake! Martha is blonde, so she’s trouble, right? [Shireen laughing] You know? If anybody’s gonna have a child out of wedlock it’s gonna be that blonde woman who men just cannot keep their hands off, right? And yet if we look at Suter’s own life, the guy who was the historian for the series hints that Suter may have had a child out of wedlock in Darwin which might be why he’s so keen to move to Blackburn as the child is born. So he’s not quite the noble figure within the context of the series maybe that we think.

The particularly spiteful thing for your listeners to look at is the characterization of Kinnaird’s wife, Mary Alma, more often known as Alma, who in the early scenes is pretty chippy, you know? She’s having a go at him over dinner, and she’s saying, oh, Arthur, why do you have to play football? Shouldn’t you be mature and start to be a father? Well, in real life he already was a father, they’d got a daughter, and they had a son in the timeframe that this series covers. So to have her be chippy about his football and then miscarry seems to me to be such an invention of spitefulness on behalf of the writers, that she actually only matures across this series when she stops talking to him about his football and lets him go and do that. That’s what I said in my previous conversation with Brenda, that men in this series are concerned with their virility, women are concerned with their fertility, and it’s very subtle characterization.

Brenda: Jean, I wanted to go back a little bit about the class romance that happens between Fergie and Arthur Kinnaird. So for me watching it, it seems like Kinnaird comes off as this true gentleman that really embodies all of this spirit…And the way I remember him is as president of the FA banning women from playing.

Jean: Yeah.

Brenda: So I was sort of taken aback by the portrayal of him as this sort of friend of the working man. I wanted to ask you…And certainly not a friend of the working woman who wanted to play football. But I just wanted to ask you what you thought about that, portraying him in that light.

Jean: So for me again, I think this series wants to be Chariots of Fire. It’s resplendent, it adores nostalgia. This is really about the loss of innocence of poor old Arthur Kinnaird. Nevermind that he’s a banker, that he’s Eton/Cambridge educated. The poor man gets distracted from his football by his wife having a miscarriage! [Shireen laughing] We see his journey, because inevitably he’s got to have a journey across six parts, and his journey is that he becomes a much more compassionate individual. He has compassion for the working man and helps them out, and he uses his position to do so, and that’s reflected in his football. There’s kind of no evidence for that whatsoever. As bromances go, maybe they are a bit of an odd couple, Kinnaird and Suter, but this series does everything it can to polarize them. So Kinnaird looks like a Greek god, he’s completely beautiful and blond; Suter is short and dark. Again, it’s not very subtle characterization. The criticism of the upper classes that it seeks to foreground, it actually doesn’t do any of that. It’s nostalgic for those upper classes and what they have lost.

Shireen: I actually wonder, and I should check this out because this information is available – how many on the writing team were women? I don’t even know. I’m not sure. Because you’re right, now that I’m hearing you speaking, I knew this would happen, but I really hate that series more than I did when I started! This is why I’m so happy you’re on Burn It All Down because this is exactly the analysis that we desperately need. Bren, did you wanna..?

Brenda: I guess a last question – I was appalled by, given that they played fast and loose with history, that imperialism is mentioned nowhere. There’s not even a gesture to the fact that…You know, Britain/Africa/India…Okay. What I heard was that this was gonna become a new series about different places in the world that the English game has spread to. And I just wanted to ask both of you, I guess, where would you like to see it go next if we are gonna see it done right?

Jean: Well yeah, I think South America is the place to go. I think that is the strongest academic literature resisting this narrative that the British invent things and the French…Well, the British to some extent diffuse their own sports along the line of their engineers and their scholars and along the lines of trade, and the French internationalize things. Because I think particularly in South America there are scholars that are saying actually there’s an extent to which the English brought these games but certainly didn't want to play against anybody else, and certainly not against the working classes. So therefore that haughtiness, that isolation that characterizes British football right until we go into the fourth World Cup actually in 1950 that gives other countries a huge opportunity to invent their own versions of the game. So the extent to which one set of rules internationalizes football is I think highly dubious as a thesis.

Shireen: Bren, my thoughts on the whole imperialist history of football is really interesting, because nowhere when they gave a sort of epilogue, right, did they talk about the effects of colonization. During this time…Brenda and I chatted about this before, Jean, that while this series is depicted as happening, Britain was in its heyday of colonialism all over the world, and there’s no mention of that and how football was spread through the world. Do you know what I mean? How it became the global game. It’s still only referencing football in an English spotlight. I think that’s bizarre on many levels and, like you said, it’s sort of this erasure of the continued history of what football actually was. This wasn’t about football, this was a romantic story that these particular filmmakers wanted to tell. As someone who sort of takes in football and analyzes it in a global context, it really missed the mark for me, the shots went way wide. Bren?

Brenda: Do I wanna see it? I mean, I wanna see someone else write about it for South America, but I would love it, obviously, and I think Jean makes a wonderful point that there’s a lot to lean on in terms of the literature that’s out there about the very early days: 1870s, 1880s…I’ve written about Chile, but there’s dozens of other people who have done this, so I 100% agree. I think it would be fabulous as long as they admit that women were playing from the start.

Jean: Just to go back on that, I think there were some women involved in the production. I don’t recognize the names. So yeah, we don’t want it to be a tale of the upper and lower classes, because we know…If I could put it, the psychic ownership of football has always been with the people, and so the idea of the upper classes “gifting” it to them a little bit like the Easter bunny (we’re recording this on Easter Friday) is a complete nonsense. And I also didn’t like the language, that’s the other thing, just to link in with imperialism. The language and the way they spoke about the game, although the Scots were known for more of a passing game, it was man to man passing, it wasn’t space-ball player in the way that it was spoken about in the series. So much more to link in with Brenda’s and your point Shireen about imperialism and invasion, actually they could’ve done quite a lot more about it as an invasion game. But the language and the way that football was spoken about wasn’t entirely accurate from the series.

Shireen: Amazing. Jean, you are welcome anytime on Burn It All Down. This conversation was amazing, and I think it’s so important, thank you so much. If you ever wanna come on and trounce the way men depict football, you are always welcome.

Jean: Thank you very much Shireen, and Brenda.

Lindsay: Alright, well, after all that bashing people going to ridiculous lengths to get sports back, we’re now gonna talk about the WNBA which is pretending that things might go on as planned this summer and holding the WNBA draft on Friday April 17th on ESPN. Amira, what’s going on? How are they doing this?

Amira: Yeah, well we’ll see how they’re doing this! [laughter] So, the WNBA is holding their draft on Friday, April 17th. If you remember, they were initially going to air this on ESPN2 and everybody was like, uhhhh…Sorry, you re-run of some obscure thing is more pressing than an actual live draft? And they realized that was dumb, and it will be airing on ESPN on Friday, April 17th at 7pm Eastern. It’s going to be interesting to see how they do this. The plan is to hold the virtual draft with, quote…This is my favorite thing – when Commissioner Cathy Engelbert made the statement about how they were gonna do it, the literal quote was like, “I’ll be somewhere in New Jersey announcing the draft picks live.” And then the plan is to let draftees either pop in or virtually go to them with their families for their moment still, so it’ll be very interesting to see how this thing unfolds.

Again, there’s a lot of questions here. We don’t know if there’s gonna be a season, right? We might be drafting people who aren’t gonna step on a court til 2021. We don’t know much about a lot of things that have to do with this, and this is a big draft. Not only is it stacked, but this is gonna be the first year that they’re playing under the new CBA. And there’s a lot of talent here. So almost the only thing that we do know what to expect is that Sabrina’s gonna be the top pick and she’s going to the New York Liberty. That pretty much we can lock in as a definite, and then after that we’re just…It will be an adventure for all of us, but we do have some really exciting prospective draftees in the draft, and I would love to chat with you guys about who you’re watching, what you’re watching for, and some of the thoughts about what this draft could mean moving forward for the league?

Lindsay: Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, so as Amira just said, Ionescu will go first, but I’m really interested in her teammate Satou Sabally. She’s an athletic forward who’s only a junior this year and she left school early to go into the W. She’ll most likely follow Sabrina, she’ll go 2nd overall, drafted by the Dallas Wings. Sabally is amazing – she’s 6’4” and this last year she averaged 16.2 points and 6.9 rebounds per game, she hit 45 3-pointers during the season, and during her time at Oregon she shot 39% from the 3-point line. This last season she had 2.3 assists per game, so she’s a hell of a player. I feel almost…Everyone’s using the word versatile, and that’s super true, but also it almost feels like it undersells her in some way. So if she goes as projected to the Wings she’d be a great addition there alongside Arike Ogunbowale. The idea of the two of them running the court together is such an exciting one, and the Wings, they’ll be looking for some offense after losing their longtime point guard Skylar Diggins-Smith – she’s now with Phoenix.

And they’ll now no longer have Glory Johnson, Azurá Stevens, or Imani McGee-Stafford. You know, the Wings are interesting. They’ll still have Allisha Gray, Kayla Thornton, Arike, Isabelle Harrison, Kaela Davis, all of these people started at least 16 games last season. But Dallas, going into this draft, they actually have the #2 pick, the #5, #7 and #9, all in the first round. And then they actually have two picks in the second round at 15 and 21. So the CEO of the Wings, his name is Greg Bibb, he actually talked to M.A. Voepel over at ESPN, and he said, “It is a reset for us. We're going to be young; there will be some growing pains, but as we told our players, the opportunity to create the culture and set the legacy is in their hands.” And it does to me feel like they have a real chance here with this draft to do that. It’s really interesting and fun to think of Sabally being their new longterm anchor on this team alongside Arike.

Lindsay: I completely agree. I’m having so much fun thinking about all these different players and just seeing where they land. It seems pretty likely that the first 3 picks will be Sabrina to the Liberty, Satou to the Dallas Wings, and then Lauren Cox to the Indiana Fever. But there’s a lot of question marks after that. Where is Tyasha Harris gonna land? UConn’s Megan Walker and Crystal Dangerfield, Bella Alarie from Princeton who, obviously because she was at Princeton, didn’t get as much national attention, but people are saying she could be like the Jonquel Jones-like steal of this draft.

Shireen: Oh, wow.

Lindsay: Recruiters are just so high on her. Kiah Gillespie is another player who I loved watching at Florida State, she could be in the first round. Beatrice Mompremier who was at Miami and didn’t have as good of a senior season, but her junior season was so good. There’s just so many fun players…I’m looking up and down to see personally, because I covered Maryland a lot, I’m really curious to see where Kaila Charles will land. It seems like she might fall into the second round, some places even have her falling into the third round which, I think, she thinks of herself as a first-rounder but we’ll have to see. Also Blair Watson, I think she could sneak into the draft from Maryland. Just in case you guys haven’t been paying attention to the news because there’s so much else going on, the players who decided to stay in school for their senior year who could’ve gone were Aari McDonald from Arizona, and Arella Guirantes from Rutgers, they did not declare. And then Destiny Slocum also decided not to declare for the draft, but she did enter the transfer portal to leave Oregon State, which was a surprise, because she already left Maryland after her freshman year. But one of the players who did declare is one of my favorites…Amira, you wanna talk about my favorite?

Amira: Yeah, so Chennedy Carter from Texas A&M. I’m very excited, I’ve been able to watch Chennedy play since she was really a middle schooler and high schooler because she’s a Texas girl who played with my cousin, and they were both at McDonald’s All American together, I’ve had years of watching Chennedy play. You might remember Chennedy for her emphatic game-winning shot a few years ago. That really I think is her style, she’s such a…this is another use of the term flamethrower, she has a quick shot and she takes a lot of them, and she’s had such a standout career at Texas A&M, really put the program on her back. She averaged over 20 points, she was the first player in program history to get all these SEC accolades, All American accolades. One of the most ridiculous stats about her really illustrates how she rises to the moment in big games: she’s averaged over 30 points per game in her first 6 NCAA tournament games, which is the 3rd of all time.

Jessica: Wow.

Amira: Which I think illustrates the fact that this is a girl where you put the ball in her hands, you tell her to go shoot and go score and she’ll be all over the court heaving up shots. It’s not terribly efficient, so she averages these big numbers, she takes 45+ attempts, but I think that it’s really great because her game is so…She can develop, she has so much growth ahead of her. She’s somebody with the skill level already to come off the bench in the projected place of…Say she goes to the Dream, coming off the bench as the 6th person who comes in there and really can get hot and get you a lot of points. I think that’s a really great position for her to be in as she enters the league and can continue to develop her game, especially for the first time really in her career, if she doesn’t have to carry the team, if she doesn’t have to be checking up all of these shots, if she doesn’t have to be putting everybody on her back, it really opens up a lot opportunity for her to develop as a defender, as a passer, and I can’t wait to see where she lands and what’s next for her.

Lindsay: Same! Shireen, who do you have your eyes on? I bet I can guess.

Shireen: Well of course, knowing that I stan UConn in the way that I do, I just wanted to say that I think that this…Megan Walker is someone from the UConn class who’s actually decided to forgo her senior year of eligibility, her last year at UConn. She’s the first player in the program to leave after only 3 seasons. The only two that I know that left UConn with eligibility, because I don’t know why anyone would ever leave, is Azurá Stevens who we did have on the show before and Morgan Tuck. Morgan left in 2016 and Azurá was 2018. It’s just really interesting for me to see this. I don’t know where Megan Walker, who’s a junior forward, will land within the class. But it’ll be really interesting to see that. I’ll be wearing a New York Liberty jersey on April 17th just to support the online draft, but it’s really interesting for me to see because a lot of UConn players have actually ended up together. I mean, a whole whack of them at Chicago Sky, which is fabulous, but it’s just really interesting to see. I’m very obsessed with the culture at UConn and seeing what happens, although there’s all this other interesting stuff happening. For people like me that are almost…Not limited, but just a bit focused on one particular college program, it’s really interesting to see how the rest gets into the melange of this.

Lindsay: Totally. Bren?

Brenda: When I was going through various articles on the draft and predictions and things like that, I was really struck by how many Oregon had, and I just wanted to ask those of you who are a little bit more knowledgeable about this, what are some of the programs that are producing this? How has that happened over the last few years that you just see this explosion?

Shireen: That’s a great question.

Lindsay: I think the great thing about women’s college basketball and the way it’s developed is the Pac-12 being so so strong.

Amira: Yeah.

Lindsay: The Big 10 has gotten better. I really do think that Maryland has helped bring up the level of the entire Big 10 and a lot of coaches have talked about that, because Maryland used to be in the ACC. It’s all over. There’s not one place, it’s no longer a draft full of just UConn players. You can get these draft picks, they’re all over the board. Amira?

Amira: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. We know that traditional powerhouses like UConn, and back in the day it was really Tennessee heavy as well. We’re going to be A) getting really top recruits because of the storied history of those programs and also because of their dominance will be more represented in the draft, but also what we’ve seen is an immense amount of parity that has really always existed in women’s college basketball, but now has been very visible, right? You get the Gamecocks, or Oregon, and like Lindsay said one of the biggest developments has been conference by conference. So the Pac-12 being strong has influenced all of the teams in the Pac-12; the Big 10 being strong has meant that Rutgers needs to go recruit harder and get better. It means all of these ripple effects from that. I think we’re starting to see that each year, the parity is also coming to the draft more often than not. So coming off big years like Oregon is, you’re gonna see them represented, but generally the depth of the draft points to just the growth of the game.

Lindsay: So exciting! Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, I think all that is spot on. I also think, and I feel like I mentioned this on the show before, I think it matters that the W has so much more attention on it. The idea used to be like, college ball for women was the end goal, even though the W existed, all the attention was on college ball and playing for Connecticut or Tennessee or one of these storied places, but now there’s another level. You can go to Oregon and have a career there and then imagine yourself in the W and having an amazing career post-college in a way that just even 5-7 years go wasn’t how we thought about women’s ball. The W itself growing in the way that it has has also pushed players into other programs that they wouldn’t necessarily have gone to before.

Lindsay: Amira?

Amira: I think that last point is the last question I’ll pose to you – with this being on ESPN and not much else going on, and because of the new chapter that the W is going into, do you think this moves the needle? What are your predictions about coverage or reaction to the draft? Is the virtualness of it gonna be a shit show or is it gonna be something that actually might work for the league?

Lindsay: I think yes, I’m personally very excited for all the at-home styling we’re gonna see from all these players! [laughs] Because I think there’s gonna be some fashion dos and don’ts and I always love the fashion. But I think yeah, I think that there’s some things will go wrong, there are gonna be technical glitches, but that overall a bunch of more people will pay attention than probably would have if this was in the midst of getting ready for the NBA playoffs, etc. But I also really don’t have a lot of hope that there’s gonna be a WNBA season, so I’m a little bit torn on this. Shireen?

Shireen: I sort of wanted to add…We’re talking about the draft and we’re talking about the draft being live, which I think was a huge step, but I also think that has a lot to do, if we look at it, with Sabrina Ionescu and the excitement and the hype around her. I think the W is going in a direction where it’s capitalizing where it should, and I think that’s really important. All the hype about her especially in the aftermath of the loss of Kobe Bryant and how he bigged her up, he was her hype man essentially, and how she’s drawing a lot of attention. When I interviewed Kia Nurse a couple of weeks ago it was one of the questions that, Lindsay, you wanted me to ask her, and I did, about what does it mean. Kia was great, she’s like, she’s bringing a new future, right? To the game, and a lot of attention to it, which is really really important.

One of the things that’s so important to see with these players and, as Amira just stated, the excitement about the CBA and about the future that the WNBA can now hold for people and for players in a legitimate way to make it sustainable for them living, and that’s really important. I agree with you Linz, I don’t know if the season will actually happen and I’m sad about that, but to try to keep the momentum is a really really smart move on the part of the W. I will be wearing my jersey and I encourage all listeners out there to wear your jersey on April 17th, and we’ll do a thread, it’ll be great, just to let them know that we’re still out there supporting them and we see them; whether or not they’ll touch a court this year, we don’t know.

Lindsay: Alright. It is time for everyone’s favorite segment, the burn pile. Brenda, do you wanna get us started?

Brenda: Sure. This week after 23 years of substantive journalism, Sports Illustrated fired writer and friend of this show Grant Wahl. They fired him without notice or severance, and I think it’s important to say that Grant was a pioneer covering women’s soccer; very inspirational for many of us that love women’s soccer. He 20 yeas ago was doing really in-depth interviews, he was getting to all the games, working with coaches in terms of getting better access to players and giving them the spotlight. He also covered basketball and a lot more, and over the years he opened spaces for women who played internationally like Melissa Ortiz who was on the Colombian national team and fighting and struggling against her federation.

Beyond this disrespectful termination, Sports Illustrated went further and published an aggressive and offensive letter which basically made known Grant’s salary, claimed he wrote “infrequently” and implied that his work lacked “gravitas.” This is patently sexist. This is patently sexist! It’s not coincidental that this is the marquee writer on women’s soccer for their magazine, right? To say what he’s writing isn’t important is a feminist issue. Then they claimed that he refused to take a 30% pay cut going forward. The union tweeted a letter in solidarity with Grant. I want to burn the decision to terminate Grant Wahl who had written eloquently on women athletes for over 2 decades, I want to burn the fact that they attempted to squelch public outcry by positioning Grant as pampered – look for these techniques from rapacious capitalists across the board in every industry!

Shireen: Amen.

Brenda: These are people that will break solidarity among workers with personal attacks, trying to pose some writers as elite, and basically don’t be fooled. All that does is try to defuse claims that are very real about ongoing cuts. Essential workers in journalism rooms are writers. Those are essential to these process of journalism. There are some people who will make more and there are some people who will make less. But this is a technique that will be used again and again going forward. So I wanna burn Sports Illustrated’s termination of Grant Wahl and the way in which they did it, which is an attack on all workers.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: We stand with you, Grant. Jess?

Jessica: Okay, so we talked about this a little at the top of the show, but just in case you haven’t been on social media, you might’ve missed the COVID meme where you get groups of different people and you choose which group you’d be most willing to be isolated with. So, for example there was one, Tennis Channel did it with only tennis players…Of course you’re all invited to quarantine at the Burn It All Down house. [laughter] Well, ESPN did their version of this and they posted it on Monday evening last week. The phrase “House 1” – because all the athletes were divided into houses – was trending, because so many people were responding to this meme. House 1 had LeBron, Alex Ovechkin, Mike Trout, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods. You can understand people’s interest in it. The way the tweet went out though in the preview image before you clicked on the whole thing, you can only see the people in House 1 and House 4. It looked innocuous, basically. After I saw it go past on my Twitter timeline roughly, I don’t know, 100 times, I finally clicked through to read all the houses and I was instantly angry. Like, I’m mad even talking about this right now. House 5 had the amazing Sue Bird…I don’t know why they did this to her, but it had the amazing Sue Bird and Tom Brady and Steph Curry followed by, I shit you not, Floyd Mayweather and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Brenda: Ugh.

Jessica: House 6 included Conor McGregor. Mayweather has a long history of domestic abuse for which he has both pleaded guilty multiple times and been convicted. Cristiano Ronaldo, as we’ve talked about repeatedly on this show – I’m gonna point you to episode 74, 75, and 76 in particular if you’d like to know more – and Conor McGregor, who Shireen metaphorically burned on episode 98, both have been reported more than once for violence against women; McGregor is also an Islamophobe and racist. Perhaps in the avalanche of news you’ve missed that one of the crises around the world right now is domestic violence, specifically because people are trapped in their homes with their abusers during an incredibly stressful time.

According to a New York Times piece that came out earlier on the same day that ESPN posted their fun little choose-if-you’ll-isolate-with-an-abuser tweet, “As quarantines take effect around the world, that kind of “intimate terrorism” — a term many experts prefer for domestic violence — is flourishing.” The United Nations has called on countries around the world to actively deal with the related public health crisis of domestic violence. There’s evidence worldwide of calls to domestic helplines increasing exponentially. Put in any city name and the phrase ‘domestic violence coronavirus’ into Google and it will come up with a recent article about this. This is a problem everywhere. This is also a public health crisis ongoing right now. And this is yet another reminder of who is forgotten in these moments, especially within the sports world, and who is forgiven and glorified. I don’t know how many people participated in making this image over at ESPN or deciding to put it up on their Twitter account, but it’s disgusting on so many levels. Everyone involved should be deeply ashamed. Burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Amira.

Amira: Yeah, so I wanna go back to what Lindsay was saying about college football coaches in particular. I wanna talk about Mike Gundy, football coach at Oklahoma State, who made a statement earlier this week where he said that the NCAA, presidents of universities, Power 5 Conference commissioners and athletic directors need to be meeting right now and coming up with answers. He went on to say that we need to bring players back. He goes, “They’re 18, 19, 20 years old, they’re healthy, they have the ability to fight this virus off. That’s true. We need to sequester them and we need to start playing, because we need to continue to run money though the state of Oklahoma.” He’s since put out a statement that I won’t even dignify by calling it an apology, it’s just word salad, where he said “I know that some people were offended and I apologize if they were offended” and all that kind of familiar bullshit. We’ve already seen some parents of players on the team rush to defend him even while they say that, no, they would not like their specific 19 year old to be fodder for this. And what Gundy’s really doing is saying the quiet part out loud. He’s basically just pointing to the fact that the system is built on the backs of unpaid labor by student athletes.

These 18, 19, 20 year olds are not your disposable fodder. Just because they’re fit, just because they’re young, doesn’t mean they get to go be your shield to bring sports back and run money through your state. Although I get why you think they are – the whole system has taught you that. They bruise their brains, they shortchange their education, they gladiate themselves for your amusement and profit, of course you think they’re disposable workhorses. That’s how you treat them without a global pandemic! And I get it, look…I live in a college town where the economy is so wound up in its football team. We’re a town that gets nearly $1.4 million to local businesses just on spring Blue and White weekend alone when they’re playing themselves. It’s an open practice. That’s cancelled, that’s gone. That along with graduation…Businesses in my town are already closing. One restaurant owner who had to close permanently said he was just trying to hold on to see if they had Blue and White because that could’ve sustained him until the fall when students come back. So I get it.

But this impact just reveals the full extent of what is borne on the back of these kids – mostly Black and brown, all unpaid. The profits and the impact go beyond the schools themselves or the media that covers the game, right? And while we can support local places feeling the pain of this, the solution is not to rebuild and replicate the same system that make men like Gundy openly say that 18 and 19 year olds are disposable and need to get back to work to save the school, the state, the coaches, make the coaches money and administrators and everybody else rich but themselves. Everybody is nodding silently in agreement because he said what everybody is thinking in this system. But it’s not enough to replicate and save it. COVID is not a sign to rebuild it in the same way, it’s clearly a clarity and call to burn that system the fuck down. So, burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Whew. I don’t know how to follow that, but I’ll follow it up with more incidents of racism because…that’s how sports works. This time I’m talking about Cam Newton who, if you listen to this podcast, you know how much I love Cam Newton. He’s of course in free agency right now and has not signed with a team, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t still talking about him. CBS Sports network this week, Adam Schein, in a segment called Time to Schein, said this: “Matt Rhule,” who’s Carolina’s new coach, “did exactly what we said he was gonna do in Carolina. Matt Rhule is all about ball, all the time. And Cam Newton? He’s about Instagram and what scarf he’s gonna wear after a certain ball game and certain defeat.” Cam Newton’s had to deal with these racist and, might I add, glam-shaming attacks for his entire career.

It is completely bullshit for any single entity to imply that Cam Newton does not care about football, does not work his ass off, is not a great teammate and a great leader. There’s just no evidence of it! There’s just no evidence of it. The attacks against him have always been rooted in racism and often just outright plain racist, and I’m very excited that The Ringer with the great Tyler Tynes is doing a documentary series delving deep into Cam Newton. Tyler’s one of the greatest writers about race in sports that we have, and I know he will actually give the subject the deep dive that it so desperately deserves. I just can’t believe that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and people are still playing the ‘Cam Newton doesn’t care about football, he’s not a football guy’ card. Burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Shireen, finish us up.

Shireen: What I’m burning is actually adjacent to sport but important nonetheless. A trigger warning for brutal colonialism. A friend of the show and a former guest, Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French academic, tweeted something that went wildly viral, for the wrong reasons. It was two French doctors; one, professor Jean-Paul Mira, who’s head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris, and he was speaking online with professor Camille Locht who’s a research director at Inserm, talking about vaccines for COVID-19. They both said, professor Jean-Paul Mira said, “If I can be proactive, shouldn’t we do this study in Africa where there are no masks, no treatment, no resuscitation?” To which Camille Locht replied, “You’re right, we’re currently thinking in parallel about a study to make sure the same of approach with BCG.” Just so you know, BCG is the vaccine treatment that’s used for tuberculosis. They’re talking about using people in the continent of Africa to test out…Now, for those of you that are already aware, the stats are in the United States that the incidences for Black communities are significantly higher. Lack of access to everything from tests to treatment to PPE equipment, everything…This is unacceptable.

Now, what ended up happening, the part where sport plays in, is two of my favorite footballers. One is Didier Drogba from the Côte d’Ivoire, he replied and so did Samuel Eto of Cameroon – retired footballers now, but very very angry. Didier Drogba, we call him the King, he replied very succinctly that this is absolutely unacceptable, it’s inconceivable that they can do this, Africa isn’t a testing lab. To which Samuel Eto very very eloquently said, “n’êtes que de la MERDE” which means “you are shit.” Which I think is very appropriate in response to this. Now just for all the athletes out there that are talking about staying safe and doing wonderful work, I wanna recognize racialized athletes out there who, in addition to doing this with everyone else in solidarity, constantly fighting this type of antiblackness and racism. This is unacceptable and so upsetting on so many fronts. I wanna take those attitudes, that antiblackness, that brutal colonialism, and I want to burn it all down. Burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: After all that burning and what I think is one of the most powerful burn piles we’ve ever done…Our burns, turns out they don’t need sports to be happening to be powerful, there’s enough going on to keep us…Well, let’s lift up some of the badasses of this week. I wanna first give a shoutout…There are a lot of female athletes who work multiple jobs, we know, and a lot of them are now working their jobs on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. I specifically wanna shout out some ones I read about this week: soccer players Rosie McDonnell of Portsmouth and Hayley West of London Bees, as well as Wales rugby players Abbie Fleming, Paige Randall, Megan Webb and Angharad De Smet, who are all working as either nurses, or nurses’ assistants, nurse techs, in hospitals and helping those with coronavirus. We are so grateful.

Florence Schelling, who was just named the general manager of SC Bern of the National League in Switzerland. At 31, she is the first female GM in top-level men’s professional hockey. Super exciting.

UCLA softball, which was the unanimous choice as the No. 1 team in the country in the final ESPN/USA Softball Top 25 poll released this week…Of course it was a shortened season, but that #1 is still something to celebrate. And, can I get a drumroll please?

[drumroll]

Woo! Alright. Our badass of the week is Nikki McCray-Penson, who was hired to replace Vic Schaefer as the women’s basketball coach at Mississippi State. McCray-Penson was a standout player at Tennessee under Pat Summitt, and went on to win two gold medals with Team USA and play in the ABL and WNBA. She was a long-time assistant coach for Dawn Staley at South Carolina, and then spent the past three seasons as the head coach at Old Dominion, where she was Conference USA coach of the year this season. In the SEC right now, Southeastern Conference of women’s basketball, six of the 14 head coaches are black women, and 10 of 14 are women, period. These are numbers that every single conference should be striving for. So, that is amazing. Congratulations Nikki!

Alright. Can we find anything good in this world right now? Who wants to get us started? Brenda?

Brenda: [laughs] It’s so funny you would ask me, I’m always the most reticent on the ‘what’s good’ but I love it so much. Alright, this is what I can tell you: I’m happy to report that my oldest daughter Maya is officially taller than me.

All: Awww!

Brenda: This has caused no small amount of joy in our household. For those of you that don’t know me personally, my stature is not overwhelming. [laughter] That’s not to say she’s the next WNBA draft pick, but to say A) I’m very happy for her because she did want to be taller as many people do, and B) very happy for me because I need people to reach cupboards. [Amira chuckling] Other things is that I am happy that my students actually want Zoom classes – I really don’t! And I’m exhausted. And I’m teaching four of them. So that would be complete hell if it wasn’t for the fact that my students have been absolutely rock solid and consistent in terms  of showing up, even when they can’t get their work done, even when they can’t concentrate. They want to keep going, it gives them a sense of purpose. So those that are able to have had just the best attitude.

Then the last thing I wanna say about what’s good in the world – I would like to share with fellow global football maven Shireen, which is earlier today [Shireen laughing] we had a historic moment: Sunday, April 12th, 2020, it was announced that Neymar now has a new stepfather. That stepfather is 22 year old TikTok-er…[laughter] When I first saw the photo of Neymar posing with his stepfather, I thought that Neymar had come out!

Amira: [laughing] I did too!

Brenda: I was so blown away, like…We are gonna have a year.

Lindsay: Yeah…

Brenda: And then as I read down, I realized that no, this is his mother’s new partner. So congratulations to both Neymar and his mother for this new family member – and please do check out his TikTok which Aaron West has featured on his Twitter feed. Because if you need a good laugh at some real mediocre dancing it’s there. Shireen, maybe you wanna take that offer.

Lindsay: That’s amazing.

Brenda: He’s literally…The tongue sticking out, the cross dangly earring, I mean…How is he even Brazilian? Alright, okay.

Lindsay: Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, so this week I finished my book edits, which is a big deal, it was really hard for me to get through.

Lindsay: Yay! [clapping]

Amira: Woo hoo!

Jessica: It’s hard to focus now, so reading the book again, doing edits again, it felt like a real thing. But we’re done with the edits now, so I think we’re just aiming for September 1st to actually have the book come out. I wanted to let everyone know in case you didn’t hear that Doubletree posted their cookie recipe–

Amira: OH MY GOD, REALLY!?

Lindsay: …What?

Jessica: So go find that, because those are magical cookies. 

Amira: THOSE ARE MAGICAL COOKIES.

Jessica: They’re so great. I don’t have all the ingredients in my house, so my goal this week is to get them. But I don’t need them right now because my son and I yesterday finished decorating a 3-tier chocolate cake that we made this week. So we have this giant cake that the three of us will now make our way through during quarantine. Then last week I mentioned that Jake Gyllenhaal did the handstand challenge without a shirt on, and that was wonderful. This week I want to point you to Simone Biles’ Instagram account.

Amira: Oh, yes.

Jessica: This woman does the handstand challenge, except of course she ups it. She’s wearing a pair of sweatpants and she takes them off while in a handstand. So that was what was good for me. It’s ridiculous.

Lindsay: Amira?

Amira: Jess, can you just send me the cookies you make? 

Jessica: Sure, sure.

Shireen: Yeah, I was thinking that too… 

Amira: Okay. I’m holding you to that, k. [laughs] So, Trolls World Tour came out on Friday, and this was supposed to be in theaters, so they did this available on demand, they let you rent it for $20…Which was egregious, but my kids have been waiting for it, so I gave in because it’s less than I would pay in a movie theater, I guess. Anyways, I was not gonna pay attention to this movie, and I really enjoyed it actually. The soundtrack is really great and they actually have this whole throughline about appropriation, particularly…You can read the kind of racial overtones, the appropriation of other forms of music by pop trolls, and I really like that. I also loved the K-pop trolls and the reggaetón trolls. They have real groups, so like, Red Velvet voiced them, and J Balvin, so it was fun. We had fun doing it.

We also did a lot of Houseparties. My quarantine Houseparty people of the week that I want to shout out were my college friends – we had a really good time reminiscing about college. And then also Insecure is back tonight, and I’m really excited. It’s one of the only shows that I watch live, like, real time. Because Black Twitter is so funny when that show is on. [Shireen giggling] And it used to be the Sunday thing when you would collectively watch Game of Thrones with everybody on Twitter, and Black Twitter would siphon off and collectively watch Insecure. So I’m really excited tonight to have that experience again. 

Lindsay: That sounds amazing. I am currently getting joy out of…My extended family is trying to have an Easter Zoom right now – they didn’t let me know in time, so we’re already recording. But the text message chain is currently “We are now gonna try Chip’s laptop.” “Okay, we can’t hear you mom.” “Your dad is trying.” “Why don’t you try joining on your phone?” “Try it on my laptop.” So the text messages of everyone in my family trying to figure out Zoom is what’s bringing me joy right now. [laughing] They were supposed to start this 30 minutes ago, and they’re still texting! Nobody can figure out Zoom.

Jessica: You won’t be late! You’ll be right on time.

Lindsay: I’m very glad I’m not there because you all know I would be lost a long time ago, so this is good for everyone. I also figured out how to make a mask, so I’m not…I cannot sew, and I did not have any masks, so I’ve been kind of avoiding that whole thing. Because you can’t order it, it takes weeks to get any delivered, and it’s a mess. They did have a very easy one, the CDC, where you basically cut a t-shirt and it becomes a mask, so I have the ugliest mask just from a white t-shirt, but it worked so I can get groceries. Because you can’t go grocery shopping anymore without a mask. So I was allowed to go grocery shopping, that was joyous. And on Tuesday I pick up a prescription, which means I get to go to CVS, so I’m very excited for that outing! [laughter] That’s pretty much all that’s good in my life right now, it’s been a rough week. Shireen?

Shireen: Yeah. Thank you Brenda for lightening my life with Neymar Jr’s stepfather, I’m never gonna get over that. I also have been practicing my British accent, as my Burn It All Down family knows. Not very successfully, but I just wanted to say that. I haven’t seen my kids in two weeks because they’ve been at their dad’s, they get home tonight. I can’t believe I made it. Two weeks is a very long time, and I did it. I did a lot of contained fashion shows; I’m upping my game – I did one in the grocery store, one with my cat last night…Still not speaking with me. And just sort of trying to enjoy…I got a bike last week, which is a really big deal. I bought a bicycle because even walking was getting me a little anxious. The bike paths are pretty clear around where I live.

I did get face masks for me and my kids – shoutout to the hijab and sports turban company Thawrih in Ottawa, Canada. And to Sara Abood, because as soon as she put that up…They make sports hijabs, and they use newcomer and refugee women to do their work and pay them fairly. They take the scrap leftovers from what their pieces are and they turn them into masks. They’re…What’s the word…? Micro-something, micro material. They’re washable, they’re reusable, and I got mine. So I’m feeling a lot better. I don’t go out very often, but if I have to that’s what that is. I’m also a little trigger-happy with the online shopping and I don’t know why, because it’s not like I’m ever gonna wear pants again in my life. [laughter] I just don’t think it’s gonna happen, pants with a zipper. I bought sports bras, because on special days when I feel like the girls need to be held up I’m gonna get a sports bra. So that’s where I am at this point, and I’m just very grateful. Getting back quickly to what I said about my kids, for all those people that are in that situation, single parents or caregivers, and you don’t get to be with your family: I feel you, I hear you, I see you, reach out. If you just wanna send an email to Burn It All Down I’d be happy to send you back some Bend It Like Beckham clips. So love to everybody.

Lindsay: Thank you all so much for joining us here on Burn It All Down. As you might notice, our episodes get a little bit longer throughout the quarantine and that’s because we just need to talk to one another and we just need the company, and I hope you all appreciate it as well. We literally could not do this without you. Once again, patreon.com/burnitalldown if you wanna support us financially. If you wanna support us just in general you can always tweet about the show: @burnitdownpod is our Twitter. Facebook, we’re @burnitalldown. You can send us an email, burnitalldownpod@gmail.com. We just love hearing from you. Apple Podcasts reviews are much appreciated, that really helps this podcast find new ears. We hope above all else that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy and that you are taking care of yourself. Remember: put your face mask on first during these troubling times.

Shelby Weldon