Episode 247: The Tricky Storytelling of Adapting Sports to the Screen
In this episode, Amira Rose Davis, Lindsay Gibbs and Jessica Luther discuss TV and film adaptations of sports stories. But first, Amira shares an urgent message of concern about Melissa Lucio, a mother in Texas on death row. To learn how to help, visit the Innocence Project.
The team starts the show with a chuckle about the NBA playoffs. Then, inspired by chatter around HBO's Winning Time, the team dives into the way sports stories are adapted to "inspired by a true story" versions on TV and film. They discuss Winning Time, Wilma, King Richard, Battle of the Sexes, Friday Night Lights and Lindsay's historical fiction novel, Titanic: the Tennis Story.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Jessica's interview with legendary ice skater Adam Rippon. Next, they burn the worst of sports this week on the Burn Pile. Then, they celebrate those making sports better including Torchbearer of the Week, Hyo Joon Kim, who won her fifth LPGA Tour title at the Lotte Championship. They wrap up the show with What's Good in their in their lives and What We're Watching in sports this week.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Hi flamethrowers, Amira here. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to talk about a very important issue that's very time sensitive. On Wednesday, April 27th, the state of Texas is set to execute Melissa Lucio. Melissa has been on death row for a number of years, although there are multiple, multiple concerns around her case, starting with police coercion. Also, the crime probably didn't happen at all. More than enough evidence to at least not kill her. And all of her children are asking for the stay of execution. The Innocence Project, many activist groups, bipartisan groups in Texas, which tells you something. And so I'm asking you to check out MelissaLucio.org to learn more about this case. If you live in the state of Texas, you can also find a script there to call both the DA and Governor Abbott to register concern over the handling of this case and to attempt to stop the execution. If you are in the state of Texas and you want to give the governor a call, you can do so at the number 956-446-2866. That goes straight to voicemail, you can leave a message. You can also call the DA at 956-300-3881. If you live outside of the state of Texas, please use Twitter, your platforms wherever you are, to raise awareness about this case. We have about 24 hours from the time you're hearing this to get a stay. So, Melissa Lucio, we're fighting for her freedom and to stop her execution that is incredibly unjust. So, for more information, you can check in our show notes for a link to more resources around this case.
Welcome to this week of Burn It All Down, the sports podcasts you absolutely need in your life. It's me, Amira, and today I am joined once again by Jessica and Lindsay. We had so much fun last week, we decided to run it back again. But this week we will be talking about sports movies and shows and depictions on the silver screen, and if they meet up with our understanding of sports in real life. All the drama about making sports series. Before we get into that however, I do want to talk about basketball a little bit. Now we're a little bit more into the series. Most of what's happening is the Celtics winning, it's glorious. But part of that is that Kevin Durant looks not Kevin Durant-ish, and our good friend Haley had a hilarious notes thread about what could be wrong with him, including that “he did barre and is sore, but doesn't want to tell anybody.” [laughter]
Jessica: Barre is hard.
Amira: Barre is hard. Yeah. “Somebody's mad at him and he's a Libra so that really affects him.” [Lindsay laughs] It was hilarious. And so I wanted to know if either of you had ideas or opinions on what was wrong A) with him, or Ben Simmons, who has somehow once again decided not to play basketball. He woke up with back soreness and will not be available for game four as the Nets try to avoid the sweep on Monday night. So, what is going on with these players?
Lindsay: [laughs] I was listening to the ESPN Daily podcast that came out on Monday with Pablo Torre and Nick Friedell I think is his name, the beat reporter for the Nets. And it was so funny because Pablo I think describes the Nets as like the student-led liberal arts college of the NBA. [laughter] Where Kyrie is like, I’m a coach, KD’s a coach; Steve, the actual coach, he’s a coach! Like, everybody's a coach!
Amira: It’s very egalitarian.
Lindsay: And very ridiculous. You know, I think that KD, I have a feeling like he read something and is just having a hard time forgetting it. Maybe he's like really immersed in a novel and can't put it down, so he's like staying up too late, you know? We’ve all been there.
Amira: Yeah, we’ve all been there.
Lindsay: And he actually said in his press conference “I'm thinking too much during the series.” Like, I'm just thinking too much. [Amira laughs] And I do also have to point out, first of all, if I were Ben Simmons, I would not want to play in this clusterfuck of a playoffs either.
Amira: True.
Jessica: Yes, yes.
Lindsay: I would be like, yeah, no, you guys, I'm not going to come in just so I can be the excuse, like, you can blame the sweep on me. Like, nope.
Jessica: Exactly.
Lindsay: Also, my favorite thing in media was Kyrie going on and on about how long the Boston Celtics have had to gel and how–
Amira: Yes! [laughs]
Lindsay: Never once having the self-awareness to be like, “This is all my fault because I wouldn't take the damn vaccine, and so that's why we haven't had any time to gel.”
Amira: What did he say? He was like, “You can't make up all these months.”
Lindsay: Yeah, everyone’s like, exactly! [laughter]
Amira: It's been quite comical.
Lindsay: Oh, it’s so good.
Amira: I’m enjoying this a lot more since we're winning, to be honest. But all of it's like a cherry on top because of that. Jess, are you going to watch basketball now?
Jessica: Uh, probably a little bit. Like, I have seen a little bit. I haven't seen any of that series. I did watch a little bit.
Amira: You did watch 20 minutes at my house before the Austin FC game.
Jessica: I did. Was I there for that?
Amira: You were there, and I made you watch the Red Sox, the Celtics, and then Austin FC.
Jessica: That’s what happens and you go to Amira's house on Saturday, everybody. [laughs]
Amira: Exactly. Saturday night, how we live it up.
Jessica: I did watch some of the Memphis-Timberwolves. I think the one where Memphis came back. So I was like, oh, this game is over. But it was not. But no, I probably will just watch like towards the end. I mean, honestly listening to the ESPN Daily of the Nets and the Celtics didn't make me want to watch game four. [laughter] Like, it doesn’t sound like the basketball is anything worth watching. It sounds like the press conferences are where it's at.
Amira: Speaking of drama and things that people are watching is a perfect way to start the segment that we are going to be talking about today: sports on the screen. There is right now a lot of chatter about Winning Time, a new show on HBO that is depicting the 1980s Lakers. Literally last week Jerry West sued this show for the depiction of him in it. This is based on a book by Jeff Pearlman documenting this kind of same team. And I did want to talk about not Winning Time exactly, but adapting sports stories to the screen – the best way it's been done, the ethical considerations. So I will admit that I tried to watch Winning Time in preparation for this, and I just kept falling asleep. Maybe I'm just really tired. Jessica? You got at least one episode in.
Jessica: I made it one whole episode and I was like, this show was not made for Jessica Luther. [laughs] I didn't like all the talking to the screen. Like, that's just probably the aesthetic choice, of all these characters talking at me. I will say, the Jerry West thing is so interesting. I only watched the one episode. I have no idea what happens after that. Yeah, it did make me think about…Like, he's an asshole in this episode. He is a real shitty guy. I was like, maybe he really was this person. Maybe this is an accurate portrayal. At the same time, I can't imagine playing someone who is still alive and acting like that, especially when it's something…I’m sorry, it's not like he's like a war criminal or that there's some huge thing. He was a GM of a basketball team. [Amira laughs] And I'm just like, what is the point of…I would just feel so bad, I guess, even if he was a jerk to people. So I'm not surprised that Jerry West is very upset about his portrayal, just based on the one episode that I watched.
Amira: And part of this is that almost everybody depicted in this is also talking about their depiction. They’re right here and they're, you know, rehashing it, they are counter-suing, they're being very mad, right? And so there's this very interesting kind of tertiary discussion. It's like, the book, the movie, and then everybody weighing in on how they feel they're represented, which is, you know, not unusual for movies or things that come out while subjects are still alive. But I think that it's really interesting to watch something be so sensationalized. I mean, they just did an episode that weighs into like kind of drug abuse that you see, and they center on Spencer Haywood, who's an NBA luminary and whose lawsuit changed the face of the NBA. Howard Bryant just reminded me, like, thinking about how awkward it would be to watch a portrayal of yourself that feels less than savory, and have the medium to interact with people who are interacting with that depiction of you. It's getting very meta, but it's not necessarily the first time that we've ran into these considerations. And so I really wanted to ask you if you can think of movies that have been done sports well – fictionalized or dramatized movies – based on people who are still alive. Obviously we just kind of talked about this a few months ago with King Richard, but Jess, you also had this kind of opinion over Battle of the Sexes.
Jessica: Yeah, I mean, when you ask about like a good depiction, I'm not even necessarily sure how we know that it is. I find this stuff very difficult, because on some level people reacting negatively to Winning Time might just be because they don't like the reflection of themselves that they are seeing, whether or not that's accurate and a good depiction. It's hard to say. And the same thing with Battle of the Sexes, which is of course about the 1973 matchup between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome. And Billie Jean was clearly very involved. I read a bunch of interviews and Emma Stone was saying how she on purpose didn't interact a bunch with Billie Jean before playing her, you know, mainly watched old footage. She didn't want to be, I guess, clouded by Billie Jean now. But they do a ton of media together afterwards. Like, Billie clearly put her seal of approval on it. She was consulted by the scriptwriter as he was writing the thing. So, she obviously had a heavy hand in it, and on some level I do think that’s good. Like, who else was there and can tell us what happened? At the same time, what does that mean for like the accuracy? Who's deciding what is accurate here? But it was really good tennis. I will say, Battle of the Sexes had excellent on-screen tennis, and that was very important to me as a tennis fan. So, kudos to them for that. But yeah, as far as what is good and accurate, I don't know, but I feel like ethically, involving the people who are still alive on some level feels better to me?
Amira: Yeah. Well, it's interesting what you just said about like the tennis being really good, because that's like another layer of these sports movies. We were just talking about this when Howard was in town, because he hates like when baseball movies happen and they’re batting the wrong way or something like that. Either every bat you’re striking out or hitting a home run, right? Because the mundaneness of shooting baseball. And then with Winning Time, a lot of the critique that people have been lobbying is there was hardly any basketball at all. Lots of locker room drama, lots of press conference drama and backroom meetings, et cetera, and very little basketball at all. And so thinking again about how the sport itself is represented, and we talked about this during King Richard, which…Everybody’s there and alive, and obviously in many ways that was the point, in trying to capture this story for Venus and Serena while their father was still here to receive it. But we also talked about how the tennis felt really good in it and felt very much correctly attributed to each sister and things like that. And so I think that's another level of like what makes a good sports story as it comes onto the screen, is the sports actually believable part of that. Linz?
Lindsay: This is going to sound really condescending, and I'm sorry. But I don't think that people have the best idea of who they are and how others perceive them and how their actions influence everyone, right? We deal with this a lot in women's sports, where athletes want more coverage, they want more depictions, right? And then the second anything is a little bit negative or a little bit like beyond the perfect, inspirational, you know, “this is so wonderful,” they get really defensive. And I get it. Like, I am super sensitive, and I would hate to watch any depiction of myself. But I also think it's kind of important to have some sort of distance from them. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't always think it's the best when athletes have – or any historical figure, right? – has full control over the portrayal of themselves in a movie and a documentary or in a narrative film, right? And I mean, it can be done well. King Richard, like, they did include some negative things about Richard Williams in there, right? It made me feel like the rest of the film was more accurate and better. It made me believe it, because we know this stuff about Richard Williams, right? This is stuff that's out in the media, and so pretending that it doesn't exist is tough. So, I do think it can be done well, but overall, like when a guy comes out and says they're portraying me too mean and I'm suing… [Amira laughs]
Jessica: It's hard. It's hard! Yeah.
Lindsay: You probably were just an asshole, right? And sometimes I hate myself for how I feel about this and for wanting this distance. But I think it's important to have a little bit of a distance between the subject and the storyteller in order for there to be some sort of realism.
Jessica: I guess it's just hard for me because I do think this isn't journalism, and HBO has made a whole point of having a disclaimer at the beginning of the show letting you know that it's fictionalized and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because they probably thought they were going to get sued. [laughs] It's for Hollywood too. So I'm like, do I trust the drama that they've created here? But I would believe that Jerry West was a total dick to everyone. Like, I totally believe that that is really possible and he really hates this depiction of himself. So all these things are possible at the same time. And it's just like, when you talk about film and TV, it's like, well, I can see why they're pushing it in a certain direction. I don't know. What do you do with it?
Amira: No, but I mean, I think that's exactly right, right? It's like, what is entertaining? What is accurate? What is the overlap? Because sometimes it's not that something's inaccurate, but it might just not be entertaining – or at least not able to be molded by Hollywood in ways that they think sells, right? And here I'm thinking a lot about Wilma Rudolph, who is a historical figure who I study, but also wrote a memoir that then became a made for TV movie with a young Denzel Washington, a young Cicely Tyson. It's one of my favorite made for TV movies of all time, right? I just watched it all the time when I was a kid. And then when I got older and I read her memoir over and over and over again, what really struck me is that as much as that made for TV movie said “Based on the memoir by Wilma Rudolph,” it was really the beginning of the memoir. Like, the movie makes choices, right? The sports movie choices that we've kind of talked about before, where the big drama is gonna be her polio. They do put in her pregnancy, but it is about her father and her relationship to her father. And it just kinda ends with her winning and her father kind of holding her baby and they accomplished it together.
The back two thirds of her memoir that this is based off of is her being very political, very hypercritical of capitalism, hypercritical of racism, hypercritical of women's liberation and the racism within that. Like, the back two thirds of this thing it’s based off of! And so with that made for TV movie, it’s not that it's an accurate, right? The emphasis is just different than the whole, right? Like, it's not a whole, hey, we're taking this whole thing. It's like, we're just using that as source material, which is interesting, right? When we think about these multitudes of source materials. And I think we've seen this before, when you consider something like Friday Night Lights, right? Which was a book turned into a movie turned into a show. And so you had multiple kinds of strains of source material, and it's not saying exactly that it's a true story, but you know somewhere in there are kernels of a story that started somewhere around the approximation of truth.
Jessica: Right. It was a book based on actual events, you know, interpreted by Bissinger and then made into a movie based on the book. So the movie's supposed to be based on this true story through Bissinger's eyes. And then you got a TV show that was basically inspired by the book and the movie and what we all understand about high school Texas football and small Texas towns, and is not necessarily…There was not an Eric Taylor, right? There was on a Tami Taylor. And the one thing that I always think about with Friday Night Lights, I loved the TV show immensely. But it was very interesting for me when Dan and I were reporting on Baylor, because up until that point, Art Briles was basically synonymous with Eric Taylor. Like, he was the real life version that people thought of, of like the ‘aw shucks’ good guy. He brought us tiny football towns, Stephenville, Texas, just like outside of Dallas and Fort Worth, and he made them state champions. And it was like he was that guy. As soon as you research, you're like, oh, there was a ton of chatter about steroids and all sorts of stuff when he was there. But like, that wasn't the story that we knew up until that point.
And it almost made it more difficult to report about him because people had the sense of him as Eric Taylor and like all the goodwill. Like, I have so much goodwill towards Eric Taylor. Maybe…I haven't rewatched the show in many, many years, so who knows how I'd feel today. But it is interesting, the way that those things blended together. So I think if you Google “Eric Taylor Art Briles,” someone wrote an article about this in the fallout to Baylor because it was such a huge thing. And it is interesting just to think about how that pop culture, that idea of Texas small town football and the coach of that team really did affect how people read this real life man when they were trying to decide if he was quote-unquote “good” or “bad.”
Amira: For sure. And you know, it's so interesting analyzing Boobie Miles and how his character changes over these iterations of Friday Night Lights, where he is a central person focused on in the book, and then of course, Derek Luke plays him in the movie. But he becomes Smash in the show, which is really an aggregation. He's not strictly Boobie, even though he's going to have a very similar arc, right? He's going to be the star Black player who gets injured and has to deal with his football future being kind of taken away. And that is like the main…As long as you have that archetype, that becomes an archetype for Boobie Miles, even if it's kind of detached from the original kind of source material. And so you and Sam Sheppard in her book Sporting Blackness really kind of tracks this reiteration. She takes it a step further to then circle back and say, well, where's the real Boobie Miles? She talks about his incarceration and she talks about how he become like a cultural manifestation, like, in Big K.R.I.T. songs and stuff like that. But to your point, it's interesting. Like, at what point do these “inspired by,” “based on,” you know…These are little words, but in them create a realm of possibilities in how you tell these stories.
Lindsay: I just love Friday Night Lights, so I think the Friday Night Lights discussion I have is probably maybe for a Patreon episode or something like that. [laughter]
Amira: We can do a rewatch.
Jessica: I feel like we should do that at some point. I should rewatch…I just feel so happy thinking about it.
Lindsay: Although, will it ruin it? [laughs]
Amira: We'll see. We’ll see in our rewatch. But of course, like, movies and show aren't the only kind of contested pieces of storytelling here. Lindsay, how do we see this working in terms of like documentaries?
Lindsay: Well, I'm thinking about The Last Dance, right? Like, Scottie Pippen is apparently not talking to Michael Jordan anymore because of the depiction of himself in The Last Dance – which I didn’t even think was that negative! [laughs] You know, it accurately portrayed his contract. But I think Scottie was just mad that the focus was more on MJ, but MJ is a bigger figure than Scottie Pippen. And you know, competitive people will always have problems with that, right? I mean, there's a project I'm working on where we’re kind of constantly dealing with how the athletes perceive themselves. And the truth is, like, they're these super competitive people and that's what made them so good and it also kind of sometimes prevents them from seeing full reality a little bit. But making anything, writing your own memoir, you make choices about what to include and what not to include. Writing articles, you're making choices. All writing is making choices, whether that's in a memoir where you have full control, whether that’s trying to figure out, like, we need to fit all this into two hours for a film, right? There is no way we can fit this all to two hours, so what choices are we going to make that's going to try and be as devoted to the source material as possible, is devoted to the reality.
But sometimes choices have to be made, and it's tough, but it's storytelling. It's part of storytelling. And I definitely don't want to act like I'm saying every time these choices are made the right choices are made. No. There's definitely wrong choices. And I think people have the right to be really upset sometimes. But I also think I always have a little bit of sympathy for the people who are making the choices because in documentaries and in fictionalized “based on a true story” events, there's always going to be controversy and there's always gonna be people feeling like things are left out – because they are left out. It's not ideal, but I also don't know necessarily what the other options are.
Jessica: The Last Dance is such an interesting thing to bring up too, because MJ obviously was a producer and had a heavy hand in the creation of it, right? Famously so. But we never would've had it if he didn’t. That was a choice made, was to let him have his heavy hand and us get to watch The Last Dance. If not, we never would have had all those viral moments of Michael Jordan saying all the wild stuff that Michael Jordan says. But that's also why his wife does not appear anywhere. We talked about this on…It was a Patreon segment and we did on The Last Dance, right? There's a reason his ex-wife doesn't show up there.
Amira: Look, we're all doing narrative podcasting and have had to make these decisions about how we tell a story or how we fit a story into a 45 minute episode. People who were part of the story don't get time, just so that we can get most of the story told. I think we do this historically as well with oral histories. I think about this a lot based on who survives. I write about three Black women who played baseball, and two of them died in ’96. And so one of them has had many years to shape and control a narrative about all three of them, because she was the one alive to give interviews and to do it. And it’s very interesting to watch a lot of the ESPN packaging around Mamie. Not because Mamie wasn't worthy of it, of course, but because in the scheme of things, when she was playing, her signing and her media attention was so much less than somebody like Tony Stone's. And so it was really interesting to see what happens and the kind of afterlife of these moments as they're being resuscitated and then repackaged for consumption.
Now I think about that as I do oral history with like the Tigerbelles, and I have quite a good relationship with Wyomia Tyus, she's been on this show. We were just talking, and she has a very particular vision and understanding of her time at Tennessee State. And she even told me like a month ago, not every Tigerbelle feels like this. Like, we all feel something different, and they're having their own internal dialogues about what was the meaning of their program and their relationship to their coach and who he really was. We already get the depiction of him in Wilma's made for TV movie, you know, that is a kind of positive, loving depiction. And I think some people agree with that and some people wouldn't. And so it's about storytelling at its core, and the decisions you make when you tell a story. I'm wondering, Lindsay, when you tried storytelling that a lot of people don't know about, and I'm wondering if you either want to take some space to talk about historical fiction-wise about sports.
Lindsay: Yeah, so I, 10 years ago, wrote a historical fiction novel, Titanic: The Tennis Story, based on a true story of two Hall of Fame tennis players who both were on the Titanic, both survived the Titanic sinking, and then they met onboard the rescue ship Carpathia, and then ended up meeting at what was the US nationals – it’s now the US Open – the quarterfinals, two years later.
Jessica: What! That doesn't sound real. [laughs]
Lindsay: Yeah. And so I got this assignment from an editor, right? You know, my job laid out was to make this into a novel with dialogue and with character arcs based on this true story. And so I did so much research for this project. A couple of family members provided some resources for us, went to the Tennis Hall of Fame, read diaries from these people. I do know how hard I work to make figure out, oh, well, if they were in the gym, what would the gym have looked like? What equipment would they have been using? You know what I mean? But, at the same time, I don't really know if they were ever in the gym. You know, I put that into the story, because I knew they were competitive tennis players, and we try to, in the back of the book, put very clearly what was definitely fact. Like, we knew these two men on board the rescue ship, you know? So we put together a scene of dialogue of them meeting. But while we did have contact with family members who were aware of the project and supportive of it, there were also family members who were very, very, very upset that we put words into their mouths and fictionalized it in this way. And I certainly understood that.
At the same time, the story, the true story got to a lot of people because of the way it was fictionalized. So, a lot of what we're talking about comes down to media literacy, right? It's important to watch The Last Dance through the lens that MJ had final say over everything, right? Like, these are important things to know. It was important for me to say what I definitely knew for sure about the book I was writing versus what was fictionalized. It's just important to keep in mind that choices are being made and who is making the choices. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy things, but it just needs to be kept in context. I think the problem is, a lot of times, that context is lost.
Amira: I think that's exactly right. Please tweet us, let us know if you're watching Winning Time, what your opinion is. We're going to move this conversation over to Patreon, where we're going to discuss the stories we wish were being made into dramatized, lovely packages and TV series. So, for more of this conversation, check out our Patreon where Jessica, me, Lindsay [dog barking in the background] and Scooby apparently will be breaking down stories that we hope will be perhaps the next HBO series.
For this week's interview, Jessica talks to Olympic figure skater and Dancing with the Stars champion Adam Rippon about queerness and figure skating, everything that happened with Russian skaters at the Winter Olympics, the difficulty of leaving behind performing and competing, and what inspired his costume design when he was on the ice.
Adam Rippon: So, who made my costumes was a friend of mine, and I always said that I wanted them to be as tight as possible, and kind of slutty. And I wanted them to be kind of slutty because I was always sort of like, this is a little dangerous.
Amira: It is now time for everyone's favorite segment, the burn pile. Lindsay, Jess, do you have your matches ready?
Lindsay: Yes.
Jessica: Yes.
Amira: All right. Linz, kick us off.
Lindsay: Let’s get into the PHF, Premier Hockey Federation, which is of course the women's pro hockey league. So, On Her Turf – kudos to Alex Azzi – did an interview this week with the board of governors chairman John Boyton. And there's a couple of little tangents I want to go on here that are all related. First of all, last week we found out that Anya Packer, who'd been the general manager of the Metropolitan Riveters and done a ton of phenomenal things with that organization, was not renewing her contract. This coincided with this report at The Ice Garden saying that Digit Murphy, who is a big figure in the women's sports world, but who has a history of supporting transphobic policies and cultivating a toxic work environment…But The Ice Garden reported that Digit Murphy was going to be named the president of the Riveters. That announcement came right before Anya Packer announced that she wasn't renewing her contract. And over at The IX, Anne Tokarski reported that these two announcements are probably related, and that numerous other Riveters volunteers and employees have recently departed the organization, that it's a direct result of Murphy's appointment.
So that's one thing that's going on that was a result of this conversation. We also have the fact, that Alex Azzi of On Her Turf also supported, that John Boynton made his money as the chairman of Yandex, which is Russia’s largest tech company, which has reportedly played a role in suppressing factual information and promoting propaganda related to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. Boynton declined to comment in this interview about his role as chairman of Yandex, however he did talk about other things, including the fact that BTM Partners, which is his group, owns three of the six Premier Hockey Federation teams and thus has three of the six seats on the board of governors. So, it's essentially this one organization that is running women's hockey. They were in charge of bringing Digit Murphy to the Riveters, and of course now have an outsized say in the hiring of the new commissioner and in seemingly every aspect of the league at this point.
When Alex pushed him on the ethics of some of this, he said, “Show me another group who plans to invest $25 million in their players. Show me another group of investors who spent more than $15 million building a league. We are working as hard as we can, so I don't know why the ill will. Are we perfect? Of course not. But we're doing our best, and it's a little bit unsettling when we have certain journalists who just tend to be consistently negative and seem to be unable to see the positive in what we're doing.” Uh, hey, John, just because you're donating money to women's sports does not mean you're beyond accountability, does not mean that any transgressions should be overlooked. We are not accepting tainted crumbs at this point. Like, women's sports can figure out how to go forward without you. And I'm very upset that this is the person who has such an outsized influence on a hockey league that players have pushed so hard to make better. So, John Boynton and his defensiveness and his bullshittery, onto the burn pile. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Okay, I'll go next. I’ll take you to Mississippi, a powerlifting competition where a junior, Diamond Campbell, was preparing for her second lift, and was told that in order to compete she had to take all the beads out of her hair. She was told you have to take them out, or they're going to disqualify you and they're going to take your first lift away. Short on time to do that, Campbell found herself surrounded by girls, many who she was competing against, who rapidly were pulling the beads out of her hair so that she could compete. While local newspapers and some national ones wrote this up as a feel-good story – “look at all of these people setting aside differences in competition” and “ultimate sportsmanship,” “coming together to take beads of the hair” – this is not a feel good story. Why is there a rule about beads? It just feels like every year we are right back here. It immediately brings me back to Serena and Venus, of course, that moment where beads come out of Venus's hair and she gets called a fault for it and she's visibly upset because our beads are our hair adornments in our culture that are used frequently.
They have amended rules just last year specifying what kind of head gear was prohibited from lifting, and what they added in the last year were bandanas, beads, hair clips – things that Campbell's coach called out as being targeted towards African-Americans, all things that are very common in African-American haircare. And when one of the people asked her competitor why did you help take her beads out of her hair, they were like, we didn't want her to miss her lift. They said, we were just trying to give her the opportunity to still compete, because it's not fair to have her not have that opportunity because of something so small. And so they successfully pushed all the beads out of her hair. She did her lift. Campbell said she used it as motivation to get to the weight, so they couldn’t “pick out any other things wrong with me other than my hair.” She ended up recording a personal best in the deadlift and finished fourth in her weight class.
They have indicated that they are going to review the rule banning beads, but it has left such a sour taste in my mouth to think about once again Black children being penalized because of their hair, being forced to modify their hair at the last minute to continue to compete, to be laboring and playing and competing under these very targeted rules. Leave our babies alone. Leave their fucking hair alone. Let them be great. It's a high school powerlifting competition. Her fucking beads were not hurting anybody. You just don't want her to be fly and great at the same time, but guess what? Diamond Campbell, you are both of those things. Please, please keep your head up. Congratulations on your PR. And as for the rest of this bullshit, burn it all down.
All: Burn.
Amira: All right, Jessica, bring us home.
Jessica: So, last week our torchbearers were the champs of the NCAA gymnastics finals. There's been a lot of discussion around the growing spotlight on collegiate gymnastics now that the loosening of the NCAA's rules around name, image, and likeness allow Olympic gymnasts to compete in college without having to worry about giving up all the deals they garner from being Olympic gymnasts. Suni Lee competing for Auburn this year is the first time ever, I believe, that a gold medalist all-around Olympic champion has competed in college. That's a big deal. Plus, as we've talked about on American Prodigies episode 6, college gymnastics has long been offering a different, more interesting, more Black version of the sport that draws its own attention for that reason.
So, it's a perfect storm of things this year, right? This shouldn't though have surprised anyone who was paying any kind of attention to collegiate gymnastics. But, as we've talked about on this show repeatedly and most recently around women's college basketball, sports organizations, including those in the media, often make bad decisions around women's sports because their ingrained sexism makes them believe above all else that women's sports cannot be as popular or more popular than men’s sports, and certainly women in college doing sports cannot be more popular than men playing professional sports. Well, guess what I'm about to tell you? Hat tip for this goes to Rachel Bachman, who tweeted out a piece from Sports Media Watch last week, and Rachel's tweet about it reads, “The NCAA women’s gymnastics championship was moved to an earlier window to accommodate ABC’s new Saturday afternoon NHL package. Then it outdrew that NHL package by 29% in ratings and 15% in viewership.”
922,000 people watched the women do gymnastics compared to the 786,000 that watched the men play hockey. Let me just say that again. ABC decided to put the women's collegiate gymnastics final earlier in the day on a Saturday to make sure they could air their regular NHL Saturday afternoon coverage, but even with a less desirable spot in the schedule, the women pulled more eyeballs anyway. I'm so tired. I'm tired of talking about these comparisons because it just feels so futile. Like, this is obvious shit. And we say that we're all about markets and we say that we're all about capitalism, but like, what are we supposed to do with the fact that the people in sports making these kinds of decisions do not care about this obvious stuff because they can't see it through their sexism? I guess this is why we have the burn pile, so we can throw the shit on the burn pile and yell “burn” about it. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning, it's time to lift up some torchbearers of the week. First, a very special in memoriam to Guy LaFleur. The Flower, of course, was a superstar for Habs fans, played for the Canadiens, five time Stanley Cup champion, passed away this past week at the age of 70. For all of his accolades and every kind of winning moment he gave to Montreal, the top thing of course was that he was Shireen's mom's favorite player.
Tahira: Guy Lafleur was my heartthrob. He was a gentle Canadian who was from Thurso, Quebec. He just played beautiful, smooth, skated fast. And I said, whoa! And I said to my husband, that's my favorite. He's going to be my favorite player. So, whenever Guy Lafleur scored, I was just on top of the world.
Amira: Jessica, can you get us going with our honorable mentions of the week?
Jessica: Yes. The Afghanistan women's soccer team played its first match since 30 players and coaches evacuated Afghanistan and relocated to Australia. They are playing under the banner of the Melbourne Victory in the A-League this year. They played to a 0-0 draw in Victoria senior women's competition.
Amira: Awesome. Lindsay, who else we got?
Lindsay: The Fijiana Drua won the Super W rugby title, which capped off an unbeaten debut season. They beat the dominant NSW Waratahs in a 32-26 comeback victory.
Amira: And we got a few people to shout out from the Boston marathon that happened this past week. Jessica?
Jessica: Yes. Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir won the Boston marathon by sprinting to beat Ethiopia's Ababel Yeshaneh. They traded places eight times in the final mile. Jepchirchir ran the historic 26.2 mile route in 2 hours, 21 minutes and 1 second, beating Yeshaneh, her best friend, by four seconds.
Amira: Lindsay, who else we got from marathon Monday?
Lindsay: Daniel Romanchuk and Manuela Schär won the wheelchair titles at Boston. According to Runner's World, Schär led the women's race wire to wire, a victory that was made all the more impressive given that she came down with COVID during her training buildup. Wow.
Amira: And can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Hyo Joo Kim won her fifth LPGA tour title at the Lotte championship in Hawaii. She's one of only a handful of players who have competed at this particular tournament every time that it's been offered and finally, in her 10th try, won that championship. She's just 26 years old with a very bright future ahead of her. Congratulations to you, you are our torchbearer of the week.
Okay, okay! What is good in your worlds? I want to know, Lindsay, what is good?
Lindsay: It's pretty weather, and that is very good for my mood and my mental health. And I'm really sad because I had something specific during the week where I was like, I need to do this. And I didn’t write down so I can't remember what it was. [laughter] So, I will come back. But that is what's good.
Amira: Jessica?
Jessica: I turned in my dissertation proposal last week, [Amira cheering clapping] which is just the first step, but it was two years in the making and it's like two years overdue. So, to have that in just feels nice. Got to erase it from my whiteboard where I keep all my long-term stuff. And my whiteboard is currently empty, which is also its own what's good, because that has been many years since I've had any kind of real break like that. And also what's good is that I have made Amira join my romance novel book club here in Austin, and she went to her first romance novel book club thing last night, which was actually very cool because we went to this place where one of the women works and we made these reproductive health kits that they mail out within the state of Texas to people. So they had condoms and lube and emergency contraception–
Amira: The cutest looking condoms!
Jessica: [laughs] Little cute graphics on them. Like, they had a wiener dog and a Coke. [laughs]
Amira: Yeah. Or one that says, “Wrap it up, buttercup,” with a buttercup. 🌼
Jessica: So I'm really…That is what's good for me.
Amira: That's lovely. It's so funny that usually we're like, oh, it's beautiful weather. And Lindsay is like, it's good weather and that's what's happy. And it’s storming here in Austin. You might even hear it on this podcast, like, being very loud, thundering, and it's raining quite loud and our dogs are having adverse reactions. [laughs]
Jessica: Ralph is sitting here, staring into my eyes very intensively right now. [laughs]
Amira: Yeah. That's why Scooby keeps barking. But despite the weather, good things are happening. Got to see Jessica a lot this week. She came over and brought me peanut butter and chocolate cookies, which were delicious. And then we watched sports together on Saturday night, which was wonderful.
Jessica: It was funny, because Amira had another mom who was there, who is not necessarily a sports person. And when the Austin FC game started, I had to like physically move to sit next to Amira. I was like, I'm sorry, this is just what I'm like. [laughter]
Amira: It was wonderful. And it tells you just how busy Jessica and I usually are, like, we live five minutes from each other and we have since last July, but that was really like the first time in a year that we've had the time to sit, just drink wine and watch sports. And it was really lovely. Our kids were at a dance. They have very different opinions on the dance, but they did go to the same dance. [laughs] Should you want to know. But it was a good weekend, and it was definitely a weekend on the heels of like checking off a lot of the to-do list. So it's also one of those where you're like, oh, this is what time and relaxation can feel like. You know what they say about April showers – they bring May flowers. And we are almost into May, somehow, some way.
Jessica: [laughs] I love it. You felt like a kindergarten teacher.
Lindsay: [laughs] What podcast did I just…!?
Amira: Just because you had to let it build, because we were talking about the storm, and I was saying it's April showers bring May flowers, and May also brings my mayhem.
Jessica: You got it, you got it.
Amira: So, what we are watching this week is the mayhem of May, which features more NBA postseason, WNBA season is going to be kicking off, we’re finishing up the Challenge Cup, we have the NBA draft. There is just sporting mayhem on your watching devices. From me, Jessica, Lindsay, this episode was produced of course by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon on our socials. You can listen, rate, review wherever you get your podcasts. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For show links and transcripts, please check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link to our merch at our Bonfire store. And thank you to our patrons. You continue to mean the world to us. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. It has been an absolute pleasure to share this space with you once again. Burn on, not out, and we will see you next week, flamethrowers.