Episode 265: Live from Notre Dame on Protecting Labor in Sport
In this episode, Jessica Luther, Amira Rose Davis, Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs, and Brenda Elsey are live at the University of Notre Dame. First they share their favorite Notre Dame trivia.
Then, they discuss protecting -- or not -- the labor of athletes, starting off with the the recent Sally Yates report about sexual and racial abuse in the NWSL by former coaches Paul Riley, Christie Holly, and Rory Dames, and the lack of accountability by US soccer federation and Safe Sport, and CONCACAF. They also talk about how the myth women's sports being in peril is used as shield to defend actions of abuse and mistreatment; lack of physical and mental health protection for athletes, gendered violence, the importance of labor unions in sport.
Following this discussion, they preview of Shireen's interview with endurance athlete and activist Alison Mariella Désir on her new book Running While Black.
Next, they burn some of the worst in sports on the Burn Pile. Then, they celebrate those shining light, including Torchbearer of the Week, handball player Lucas Krzikalla, who became the first out gay man actively playing in a professional German sport.
They wrap up the show with What's Good and What We're Watching In Sports this week.
Following this discussion, they have a Q&A with the audience, which is available on Patreon.
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.
Links
U.S. Soccer releases full findings and recommendations of Sally Q. Yates’ independent investigation: https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2022/10/sally-q-yates-investigation-findings
Merritt Paulson Must Go: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/merritt-paulson-portland-thorns-nwsl
NWSL Players Call for Owner to Sell Chicago Franchise: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/nwsl-players-call-for-owner-to-sell-chicago-franchise/3004048
New U.S. Soccer CBAs feature equal pay, FIFA prize money for USMNT, USWNT: https://theathletic.com/news/us-soccer-cba-equal-pay/DtcfQQNAqHlP
The New NFL CBA Will Change How the NFL Operates—We Just Don’t Know How Yet: https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2020/3/15/21180831/nfl-collective-bargaining-agreement-extra-games
NFL, NFLPA reach agreement to modify concussion protocol: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/football/nfl/nfl-make-changes-to-concussion-protocols-updated-1.6611173
Baseball's new CBA is already failing the spirit of competition: https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2317601
The Canadian Hockey League Desperately Needs A Union: https://readpassage.com/the-canadian-hockey-league-has-never-needed-a-labour-union-more
Transcript
Jessica: I've never been the lead on the live. [laughter] This is like a whole other energy. All right. Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. We are recording in front of a live audience at the University of Notre Dame. [applause] We wanna start off by reminding everyone that WNBA star Brittney Griner has now been wrongfully detained by the Russian government for 236 days. We would like her home now. I'm Jessica Luther, an investigative journalist out of Austin, Texas. And today I'm joined by Lindsay Gibbs, a sports journalist from North Carolina and the creator of the newsletter Power Plays – yay! [applause] Dr. Brenda Elsey, professor of history at Hofstra University in New York. [applause] [Jessica laughs] Dr. Amira Rose Davis, a historian and assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. [applause] And last but never, ever least, Shireen Ahmed, a sports journalist and instructor of sports media based in Toronto, Canada. [applause]
Before we get going today, we wanna thank the Minor in Sport, Media and Culture, the College of Arts and Letters, and especially Dr. Annie Coleman for bringing us to campus. [applause] We have a lot of recent content on our Patreon. You don't wanna miss it. This week it will feature our Q&A from the Notre Dame event. Thank you so much to our patrons for your support of the show. If you'd like to become a sustaining donor, we are at patreon.com/burnitalldown.
Today on the show, we're gonna talk about protecting – or not – the labor of athletes, using the recent Sally Yates report about the abuse in the NWSL as our jumping off point. Then we'll burn things that deserve to be burned, highlight the torchbearers who are giving us hope in sports, let you know what's good in our world, and tell you what we're watching this week. But first, at the top of the show, we wanted to do something Notre Dame specific. So I would like each of my co-hosts to give me your favorite notable Notre Dame alum or fact. Shireen?
Shireen: So, I've watched Rudy a lot, so he deserves an honorable mention. But–
Jessica: That's such an easy one.
Shireen: That's an easy one. But favorite alum: fictional president Josiah Bartlet. [cheering, laughter]
Amira: That's what I was gonna say! [laughter] That literally is! I was like, I was gonna say Jed Bartlet too, but I guess I'll just tell everybody who's American Studies Major. [applause, cheering]
Lindsay: Annie spoiling over here. [laughter]
Jessica: She's excited.
Amira: You gotta claim em. Absolutely.
Jessica: I do too. You good? All right. Brenda?
Brenda: Mine’s not an alum, but a faculty member. Yeah. Roberto DaMatta. I don't know if any of you cross paths with him? He is Professor emeritus of anthropology and he is one of the first scholars to really seriously study sport in Latin America. He wrote a book called Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma, which is just absolutely fundamental. So yay!
Jessica: That's awesome. [applause] Thanks Bren. My fun(?) fact: Notre Dame didn't allow women until 1972. That is truly wild to me. But actually my answer to this question is, it appears…I think it's like my favorite answer to most fun questions on this podcast, which is Arike Ogunbowale. [cheering]
Lindsay: Big fan, big fan.
Jessica: Arike Ogunbowale! [applause] Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I'll stay in basketball, and I'll say Coquese Washington, who is now the head coach at Rutgers, but was at Penn State when I taught at Penn State. She's very cool. She played basketball here from ’89 to ’93 and then actually is a double alum because she got her JD from the Notre Dame Law School here as well before going on to play professionally, and then also being a trailblazer in coaching.
Lindsay: And starting the players union!
Amira: And starting the players union! Yes.
Lindsay: That law degree! She created the WNBA players union. Yeah.
Amira: So, definitely Coquese. Yeah.
Jessica: That's awesome. And Lindsay?
Lindsay: My grandfather went to Notre Dame. [applause] Yes! So, Joseph L. Berry, class of '43. He had to leave early because of that whole war thing. Went over to the Naval Academy. But yeah, whole family's big Notre Dame fans because of it. In ’96, he won the Dr. Thomas A. Dooley Award, which is for Notre Dame alumnus who have exhibited outstanding service to humankind. So we're very proud of him. [laughs] [applause]
Jessica: All right, here we go. Let's get into the meat of this episode. So, we're gonna talk about protecting labor in sport, or perhaps more specifically the lack of protections for labor in sport. The most current egregious example of failure came last week when former acting attorney general of the United States, Sally Yates, dropped a 173 page report about systemic abuse in the National Women's Soccer League, the NWSL. It was a doozy of a report – damning might be maybe the best word. US Soccer commissioned the independent report last October, basically a year ago, in the wake of a piece by Meg Linehan at The Athletic about former NWSL head coach Paul Riley’s sexual abuse of players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly when he was head coach of the Portland Thorns.
It's important to note that this is just the first of two major investigations. The second is a joint investigation between the NWSL and the NWSLPA, and will be out next month, so there is more to come on this. The Yates investigation, which included 200 interviews and a review of 89,000 documents, found that abuse was baked into the very fabric of the NWSL, and had been since day one, and that dozens of people – dozens of people! – failed to take the necessary steps to protect the players. Linz, the report focused mainly on three specific coaches. Can you walk us through what it said about Paul Riley, Christy Holly, and Rory Dames?
Lindsay: Yes. So, just focus really hard for a few minutes, because I'm about to dump a lot of bad information at you. I'm sorry. We will get to the more commentary side of this, but I just kind of wanna get us all on the same page. So, Paul Riley, who is the head coach of the Portland Thorns in 2015, and then later the Western New York Flash, and then the North Carolina Courage up until 2021; the report was instigated by his abusive behavior, and the report did confirm that, in 2015, Mana Shim emailed the Portland Thorns front office and the NWSL Commissioner about repeated unwanted advances by Riley towards her, and his retaliation against her when she refused said advances. The Thorns in 2015 launched an investigation. It did find that Riley sent an inappropriate text, served alcohol to players, invited a player to his hotel room, and danced and touched a player while doing so, among many, many other things.
The Thorns fired Riley, so they did take action, but they did not publicly disclose the reason why. And he went on to be hired by the Western New York Flash and the North Carolina Courage, and led his teams to multiple championships, and received lots of praise, lots of Coach of the Year awards. The report corroborated all of the allegations and found evidence that Shim and Farrelly – I keep wanting to say Farley – Shim and Farrelly were not alone. And also that his sexual misconduct was an open secret in the NWSL. Most jarring to me is this statement: “The issue of Riley's sexual misconduct was brought to the attention of individuals in the league and/or the US Soccer Federation every year from 2015 to 2021. And yet he remained as head coach in the league until he was terminated last fall after The Athletic investigation.”
The report also looked at Christy Holly, who was the head coach at Sky Blue FC in 2016 and 2017, and then Racing Louisville FC in 2021. The report opens with a horrific account of him sexually abusing a player. On April 21st, 2021, a year and a half ago, he sexually abused player in a film session. He was also known to be verbally abusive to players and having inappropriate relationships. It was actually why he was fired from Sky Blue FC. Maybe you're sensing a pattern here. The third coach that the report focused on was Rory Dames, who's been the head coach of the Chicago Red Stars, 2011 through 2021. Players reported that he was abusive, made official reports in 2014, 2015, and 2018. They said that he created “a culture of fear” and was emotionally and verbally abusive to players and staff.
But the owner of the Red Stars, Arnim Whisler, said that the national team players – it was Christen Press who made a lot of the allegations, and was punished for them severely, because people didn't understand why she wasn't playing and taking the field for the Red Stars back in 2014. And the owner said that the national team players just wanted the league shut down, they just had an ax to grind, and that all of this was just Rory being Rory. He was not fired until last year when the Washington Post reported on his abuse. So, just another note before we get into this: the Thorns, Racing Louisville and the Chicago Red Stars all didn't fully cooperate with this investigation. So, they found out all this information without their full cooperation, which I think is–
Amira: And the Thorns actually impeded.
Lindsay: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] That’s my summary of it. [laughter]
Jessica: Yeah. They got in the way. Thanks, Linz. So overall, the report found that those in charge failed to adequately address reports and evidence of misconduct, failed to inform others of coaches’ misconduct when it was found, allowing abusive coaches to move from team to team, and that these failures to adequately respond to reports and evidence of misconduct put additional players at risk and created a toxic tone from the top. Amira, what else did the report have in it?
Amira: Yeah. A shitload of racism.
Lindsay: Surprise! [laughs]
Amira: The report takes care to note the severe lack of diversity in the National Women's Soccer League, as well as implicating the pipelines to playing professional soccer. Multiple players reported frustration with the league for failing to adequately address racism and racially insensitive remarks. They reported witnessing use of racist slurs and routinely encountering racism on the job and microaggressions. Players of color reported feeling stress and overall lack of support, and this is important for a few reasons. One, because in the discussion of this report, we focus a lot on the gendered violence and the sexual harassment and the harm, and racism is almost treated as separate. But if we look closely at it, we see just how intertwined it is. Lindsay already mentioned Christen Press being one of the voices who were out on front of this, and the way that she was marginalized and treated horribly was absolutely racially coded as well.
You can look at people like Kaiya McCullough, who was a standout at UCLA and then was one of many players leading the charge to get Richie Burke's allegations to the forefront in the Washington Spirit. And he actually lost his job over these allegations. And Kaiya writing in the Post said, “My short tenure with the Washington Spirit, less than a single season, was plenty enough to show me that I was not in a safe environment conducive to my success as a young Black soccer player. The men who made up so much of team leadership used fear and bullying to maintain control of the club. Racist and degrading nicknames came from the front office.” One incident, for instance, that McCullough recalls, is at the time the Washington Spirit were kneeling, they were taking a kneeling picture, and Richie Burke came up and took a practice dummy, knelt on the practice dummy in the same manner that George Floyd lost his life, and said, “Why don't we do this for the picture?” We also see…Yes?
Lindsay: Sorry, what?!
Amira: Yes. Yes. And so when we're talking about these remarks and these environments, it's compounded. Kaiya was feeling it as both her identity as a Black person and as a woman. We saw this with Zee King over in Utah, who was a lone voice – in her rookie season! – to talk and try to bring accountability to racism coming out of the front office. And out of those efforts and the efforts of people like Midge Purce and Crystal Dunn, the Black Women's Player Collective has emerged to help these pipelines. But it's another example of players needing to step in and not only be the clarity voices here, but also build institutions themselves to support themselves when nobody else is doing it.
And I really wanna bring this to attention because so many of the names that have brought these allegations to light had to say it, be maligned. And even now as we're having these recaps – there's an E60 documentary on it. Racism is a footnote to that. But if we clean house and only address sexual abuse and gendered violence in these spaces, they still remain hostile to Black and brown women. And I've seen comments on Twitter saying, well, now's not the time, or we're dealing with the more major or more serious issues. But it is not and cannot be separated, especially not when you're experiencing it, not when you voice is discounted and the entirety of your experience as a Black woman or woman of color is being ignored. And so that part of the report is just as important, and is something that remains on the forefront of our minds as well.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Amen. [applause]
Jessica: Thank you, Dr. Davis. So, Shireen, can we talk a little bit about accountability here? So the Chicago Red Stars Board of Directors voted to remove Arnim Whisler as chairman, and the players have demanded that he sell the team. But for now, he remains the owner. The Portland Thorns fired the president of soccer, Gavin Wilkinson, and the President of Business, Mike Golub. Both implicated in the Thorns’ failures around Riley. The Thorns’ owner, Merritt Paulson, has removed himself as CEO of the team, but like Whisler, he still owns it. So, is this enough accountability? I know the answer, but I'm gonna ask – is this enough accountability? [laughter]
Shireen: Ah, accountability. [laughter] Merritt Paulson has refused to sell, so he has stepped away, but is still the owner. And despite being specifically mentioned in the Yates report, alongside club exec Mike Golub and Timbers' former exec and former GM Gavin Wilkinson, who were subsequently fired. Orlando Pride fired Amanda Cromwell and assistant coach Sam Greene. But the walkaway, what does that tell us? The leaving the scene after you've created and been complicit in a disaster. You have done harm to people. What does that look like after your exit? Paulson continues to be the owners of the Thorns and the Timbers. But Becky Sauerbrunn, US women's national team captain and Thorns star, said, “Every owner and executive US soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players should be gone.” It takes a tremendous amount of courage, not only to come forward, but to continue to talk about this at the same time as competing in the highest echelon of sport.
Now, soccer has seen mobilization from supporters groups, including The Coopers, the Louisville City FC group, who remained silent in the first half of the men's game at home against Detroit, and wore teal colored clothing to support survivors of sexualized violence. In preparation for this show, I reached out to the 107 Independent Supporters Trust, a local supporters group in Portland, Oregon, and the Soccer City Accountability Now (SCAN) group have been active in lifting tifos, posters, and give buttons that say “YOU KNEW.” And one of the organizers told me that generational supporters have given up their season tickets, people recognizing the patterns of behaviors from the front office and didn't wanna support the owners. Also, many of the supporters are survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, and showing other survivors that will not be tolerated is imperative.
That accountability is critical because of the community that thrives there. They have traveled all over the world to watch these teams, and the north end of the stadium is often called “going to church.” People have been married there. They have tattoos of the supporter groups, they have Facebook groups. They support scholarships for community members and those in need. There are expectations of the supporters, and rightly so. And former Canadian women's national team goalkeeper, Karina LeBlanc, is actually the general manager. And from that perspective, the expectations are high. LeBlanc is a former player and one of Thorns captain Christine Sinclair's close friends, and she will have to report to Paulson. And although Paulson has “stepped away” from any involvement in team related issues, he's still the fucking owner.
And just this morning it was reported that Chicago players are calling for Arnim Whisler to sell his stake in the team. The players on the team are doing this. And owners can't be forced to sell teams in the NWSL, yet. So, a few things here. Should there be policy enforcing selling by problematic owners? And what kind of owners would want to remain at the hem while supporters are outside chanting for their removal instead of cheering for their teams?
Jessica: Thanks, Shireen. One thing I wanted to bring up from the report, there was an organization that actually kept coming up in it, which was SafeSport. And this is the organization that was created to respond to reports of sexual misconduct and abuse in sports that fall under the umbrella of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. You've probably heard about them in some form, especially with gymnastics. So it comes up with the NWSL because coaches are supposed to be licensed by US Soccer, and so US Soccer has some jurisdiction here, meaning SafeSport does too. But it turns out, like every time that SafeSport has jurisdiction somewhere, it was found wanting – and badly so. Sally Yates dedicates actually a fair amount of space. It gets its own little headline and there's a whole section explaining how bad SafeSport is at its job, both around the issue with NWSL, but just in general. Every single organization in this report is a disappointment. Brenda, I know that you have an idea for what US Soccer should maybe do now.
Lindsay: I'm so excited. I love…Brenda talking about institutions is like my favorite nerding out thing. [laughs]
Brenda: The US Soccer Federation should be suspended. It should be absolutely suspended by the FIFA Ethics Committee. This is dozens…I work for an NGO called Fare. We presented MLS, NWSL, US Soccer Federation three years ago, with a report on the racism, the misogyny, the homophobia present throughout the league. We were told, hey, we get this report from Richard Lapchick and his institution, and we got an A+ for diversity and an A+ for the working environment. [Lindsay laughs] Don Garber, the commissioner of MLS, said that it wasn't really important with me that he got an A+. So, they have been told, not only by players, by outside organizations. So what does this mean? It means look, FIFA's not perfect. Sometimes you have to use– [laughter]
Jessica: Whoa, whoa! [laughter]
Lindsay: Don't go wild now. [laughter]
Brenda: Sometimes though, you have to use one dirty organization against another.
Jessica: That’s fair. That’s fair, Bren. [laughter]
Brenda: This is one of those situations where you have to go all the way to CAS, which is so busy trying to keep trans women out of–
Jessica: What is CAS?
Brenda: Oh yeah, the Court for the Arbitration of Sport. Do you know this? In Switzerland? Okay. No? Okay, so real quick–
Lindsay: I'm very jealous if you don’t. [laughter]
Brenda: Real quick. You have these teams, right? You have NWSL, MLS. Yes? You're with me? Yeah. Okay–
Lindsay: Leagues, not teams. Yeah.
Brenda: Or leagues, Sorry. You have teams that belong to these leagues. Then you have the federation that goes underneath the confederation – CONCACAF in this case – and then you have FIFA, right? So that's all those things. They're all bad, they're terrible. [Amira laughs] So the best you could do is try to use one against the other. And it's been particularly painful. I just wanna make the point that Karina LeBlanc, who is now general manager over there, was the president of CONCACAF. That was seen as a really important hire. Cindy Parlow Cone as US Soccer Federation…I mean, it's been very upsetting to see women that we had really hoped would be advocates for other women and for anti-racism–
Amira: And said they would.
Brenda: Yes. And women of color, that came out and showed us the limits of representation. Not just anybody is gonna come in and clean this house. So, my idea, suspend them.
Jessica: Get rid of ‘em.
Brenda: Suspend the federation right before the World Cup, if you cared, but they don’t.
Jessica: Brenda just knocking things down. Burning things down.
Amira: Burn. [laughter]
Jessica: Burn, yeah. So, this NWSL report is one good specific example of the way that sports and sporting organizations fail players, fail to protect the labor of athletes. But we'd like to go broader now and think about other ways or places that we see protections or the lack of them for players laboring within sports. Player safety can be about so many different areas. We could talk about mental health, or letting athletes cover while playing, or the need to create anti-racist and anti-homophobic spaces. Like, there's just so many ways that we can go at this. So we're just gonna give it a little bit of a shot here. Lindsay, you wanna get us started? Wanna go abroad for us?
Lindsay: Yes. Well, I don't know how broad I'm gonna be, but this is something I talk about. I'm gonna focus in on still women's sports right now, but I think there are lessons that can apply everywhere. I don't know, has anyone ever been in therapy? You don't have to raise your hand, but like, [laughter] there’s this self concept work, right? Where it's like, you need to think that you're deserving of good things. Do you know what I mean? Like, you're deserving of love, you're deserving of safety, right? Well, there's this myth that I like to say that a lot of these sports or women's sports organizations operate on – I write about this in my Power Plays newsletter a lot – that is women's sports are in peril, women's sports are hanging by a thread, women's sports are just barely eking by. And that's it.
And this myth ends up influencing a lot of decisions that get made, and then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, right? And so I say, you know, one of the big things that it helps kind of maintain this patriarchal status quo and provides those in charge even of women's sports leagues with their sense of power, authority, comfort, and control. But there's more to it. And I think this report gets into a lot of the dirtier things. It's not just kind of a way to kind of quell the potential. And in this report, I think it's really important that it talks about how the NWSL and US Soccer…So, US Soccer really got the NWSL off the ground. Two women's soccer leagues had failed. They had lasted for three years. Both shut down. At the 2011 World Cup, I think the US, they didn't win, but they got silver, and it was a big…Like, I remember watching that one, because there was a big–
Amira: Brazil game.
Lindsay: The Brazil game. There was a big…They got a lot of attention. And the players talked, they're almost treated like they won when they returned to the States, it got a lot of attention. And then in 2012, they won gold at the Olympics, and there was a lot of attention. And there was this panic within US Soccer of like, well, there's all this excitement for women's soccer, and we don't have anything to do with it. And so what they did is they just were like, this is the very last chance to get a women's soccer team – which, it's not the last chance! But you know what I mean. But like, we have to get this off the ground now. And because of this, they just rushed through it and put in no standards.
So, these are a few excerpts from the report. It says the federation conducted “limited financial due diligence” on the new league's prospective owners, and did not put in place infrastructure to support the league for the long haul. The result was that some owners oppose the imposition of any standards that would increase their operating costs, and the federation felt as though it could only push owners so far, or risk them pulling their teams from the league completely. So, there were no policies in place to protect players, and they were afraid to implement any, because oh, they're already supporting women's sports, we can't ask them to support it safely! That’s asking too much! [laughter]
Amira: It’s a bridge too far. [laughter]
Lindsay: That's too much because women's sports, they barely deserve anything at all, right? Because this is “the last chance.” And you know, it says that most teams struggled operationally and financially, and the ownership was essentially allowed to just empower and invest however little they wanted to into facilities, just zero standards across the board. So, this self perpetuating myth that women's sports are in peril, it doesn't just help protect the power and egos. It ultimately sets up those who do work in women's sports and are putting any modicum into it as these saviors and heroes, and it keeps athletes stuck in this state of fear, and ultimately enables a cycle of abuse. Alex Morgan in The Athletic article to Meg Linehan, you know, she said, “There definitely has been this shared idea that because two leagues folded in the past, that this is the last hope for women's soccer. And because of that, I feel there's this idea that we should be grateful for what we have and we shouldn't raise important questions or ask questions at all.”
Shireen: I just have one quick correction to make, because we love Homare Sawa in this room, former captain of Japan's team, they won in 2011, and I just wanted to make that correction. It was not Brazil.
Amira: No, we didn't say Brazil won, we said–
Brenda: She was talking about the Brazil game.
Lindsay: The Brazil game.
Amira: The US-Brazil game. We know who won, girl!
Shireen: I know, because I was like, wait a minute! [laughter] Okay.
Jessica: I was wondering was was going on down there..
Lindsay: There was a game that went to penalty kicks and it was very…
Amira: It was the semifinals.
Brenda: Very intense.
Lindsay: It was a big thing. It was very intense.
Jessica: Real time fact check. Okay. [laughter] Dr. Elsey?
Brenda: Well, just one more. You know, not to let…I don't think MLS can be let off the hook here. They had a financial relationship with US Soccer Federation at the time as their advertising arm. That's like, how are you going to govern an organization that controls you partially? And that's the same with the NWSL. Many of the owners agreed on X, Y, Z. And even now, the contracts of players like Patrick Mahomes might indicate that they get X amount of shares. And so these men's and women sports are more connected too.
Amira: And in a way that we're seeing right now, like Jessica makes this point, we're trying to bring an NWSL team to Austin, and one of the discussion points was like, well, do we really want it with all this abuse? And it's like, they own MLS teams too.
Jessica: Yeah.
Amira: Like, it's something to watch. And I think we see it also in the NBA and the WNBA. We have a recent episode that was wonderful that y'all did on Robert Sarver over in Phoenix. And I think that myth that Lindsay's talking about is really important, because not only does it perpetuate this cycle, but it also casts folks in this benevolent role that allows them to use their ownership of women's teams as shields. And so one of the things you have is like Robert Sarver saying is this excuse of like, “How could I possibly be doing this? I own a women's basketball team. What do you mean?”
Lindsay: [laughs] “I can't be sexist, I own a women's basketball team.”
Amira: Right, right. It's “My best friend is Black” for rich owners. [laughter]
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Brenda: “I have a daughter.” [Jessica laughs]
Lindsay: It's so true!
Shireen: “I’m a husband!” [Jessica laughs]
Amira: “I'm a son of the mother.” [laughter]
Shireen: “I am a husband to a woman.” [laughter]
Amira: Yes.
Lindsay: Yeah. Yeah, and we do see that, like time and time again. Like, Merritt Paulson, you know, the owner of the Thorns and Timbers, I mean, he was for a long time lauded because that was one of the organizations that did invest in women's soccer, and they had a big, huge fan base in Portland. I mean, Shireen talked about how important that fan base has been and how much they're hurting right now. And this is one of his quotes. He said, “It's devastating to me that my goal of creating this shining example of what a women's sports team could be has now become synonymous with abhorrent and predatory behavior.” Oh, like you didn't have anything to do with that. [laughs]
Brenda: You cut those checks!
Jessica: Yeah. You could have made different choices, Merritt. [Shireen laughs]
Lindsay: You could have made different choices, but you thought you were just like this hero because you supported women's sports and that like absolved you from anything else. Actually, US Soccer would threaten, in all these equal pay lawsuits, they would literally say, like, we can't pay you more because we support the NWSL. And like, how dare you ask for more money when we're helping support the NWSL? I mean, it was a very non-veiled threat of like, “nice league there, would be shame if something happened to it.” As if US Soccer hasn't benefited completely from the NWSL! [laughs]
Jessica: Of course. Yeah. We're thinking broadly about protecting athletes. Like, I always come back to gendered violence because of the work that I do. I could talk about this forever. I won’t. That wasn't a threat. [laughter] But I mean, obviously we've talked a lot about, you know, that gendered violence is a problem at the highest level in women's professional sports. But I just wanted to point out that we saw last year and last year or so with the Chicago NHL team, where an athlete reported that he was assaulted and the team sat on it so as not to interfere with their championship run. That was that report. That professional men sports are guilty of not protecting their athletes too. I've covered this extensively on the collegiate level, but it's a problem in grade schools as well when it comes to sports. But if you Googled hazing in high school and football, you're gonna come up with some terrible stuff. And it's not hazing, it's assault.
This is a problem internationally. If you look for it, somewhere in sports, you're gonna find it. And gendered violence is obviously a pervasive problem throughout all parts of society. It's not like sports is some kind of horrific outlier, which is sad in its own way. But often sports teams, orgs, athletic departments, on and on, they act as if and they function as tight-knit communities. They'll say that they are families. I mean, Shireen was getting at this, where the health of the collective is prioritized over the safety of individuals. That's a really useful frame when you don't actually wanna protect the individuals. The fact that we're constantly learning about people within sports who fail to take gendered violence seriously, especially when it involves harm done to athletes, and no matter how often it is pointed out that sports orgs are set up on purpose to lessen accountability for those who fail to take it seriously. It's continually disappointing. Linz, you had a point about this?
Lindsay: Yeah, I just wanna say, to the point there, it's on the youth level, it's all the way up, where a lot of athletes don't even know, can't even like recognize abuse. Like, they're not taught what safe environments are. And that's part of the problem. The Yates report – sorry I keep going back to that, but I read all 173 pages twice, so I need to keep bringing it up to make it worth it. [laughter] Because that was depressing. But it noted that in 2021, the Chicago Red Stars retained a sports psychologist to interview each player anonymously and compile a report on the team environment. And the psychologist observed that 70% of the players interviewed, including most starting players, reported emotionally abusive behaviors, but many players failed to recognize those behaviors as abusive because they were so ubiquitous in women's soccer. And this is report on women's soccer, but it's not just women's soccer. And it's not just women's sports. It's across the board.
Jessica: Yeah. Amira?
Amira: Yeah. In the interest of thinking across the board, I want to talk broadly about mental and physical health and wellness. And I think we all had a little bit of a national conversation about this two weeks ago, when Tua Tagovailoa, the quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, in week four had a hit that left him stumbling on the field, wobbly, and then like back on the field to keep playing. And then on a short week – because Thursday night games bring lots of profits to the NFL – on a short week, went and played in week five, in which he sustained another hit. And we all–
Jessica: Four days!
Amira: Four days later. I mean, he shouldn't have gone back in the first game, and then four days later was playing again, received another hit, that if you saw the horrific video, you saw him have a neurological reaction to that. Even though we were being told, oh, it's his back. It's like, your back injury isn't making you have a neurological reaction. He's still, by the way, as of this point, not cleared to return to football activities. And the doctor who handled that case has been relieved of duties. But I think that that's a very important kind of national conversation that occurred around concussion protocol. There's a few things around concussion where we can see how all of these ways that we ignore or mistreat or put laboring bodies, athletic bodies in harm's way, are connected.
And so next week, there's a court case in LA going to trial, pre-trial, brought by Alana Gee versus the NCAA. And this is very important. Gee is the widow of a former linebacker who played football at USC in ’88 through ’92. He died very young, in 2018, and after his death had his brain examined, and revealed a lot of CTE. And Alana is bringing this suit alleging wrongful death and negligence, and saying that NCAA failed to educate Matt Gee – that was her late husband – on the dangers of concussions, and they were well aware of this fact that they were hiding this fact, and failed to protect Gee from sustaining and continuing to sustain concussions. This is really important because we've seen court cases around head injuries do a few different things.
It's a great time to remind you that the whole reason we even have the idea, the language around “student athlete” is about liability. It is to prevent workers' compensation claims from laboring collegiate athletes who were bringing lawsuits like the Gees’ lawsuit here for people who had been injured, who had been killed playing college sports. And it was a term that the NCAA ran with because the lawyer said, hey, you put student before athlete, we can have a liability cover here for injuries that they sustain in the work that they do as laborers. And the work is there because it is work. It's just in their eyes work, right? And I think this is important though, why we always have to read race and read gender and read these systems into it, is because we know that even after lawsuits – and we saw this with the NFL's huge concussion suit, right? Things are not equitable.
So there’s the lawsuit in the NFL that was settled with a bunch of NFL players, for CTE, for head trauma, also engaged in a practice of race norming. And race norming is a very racist policy that assumes cognitive inferiority by Black people, and was used by the NFL to deny payment claims by former NFL players who were Black. They actually just won last year, 10 months ago, the ability to do away with race norming, which has allowed 2400 more players to be eligible for this lawsuit, right? And so thinking about how racism even was going to continue to exploit, you know, players who sustained these injuries. And so I think head trauma is a conversation that has been going on for a while. We're seeing it continue to be there around CTE. It's located in football, but by far we know that's not the only sport.
Women's sports like soccer where there's a lot of head trauma are severely understudied. There's not a lot of technology and labs set up to looking at head trauma in those areas. And along with this physical kind of culture of disposable bodies, we see mental health and wellness really being a part of the conversation that has had an uptick but is nowhere near as prevalent as it needs to be, especially on the heels, in the last calendar year, of recent deaths by suicide of female student athletes, including Katie Meyer, Sarah Shulze and Lauren Bernett, who all were...Literally two of them were like named player of the week in the same week they took their lives. So, a conversation around mental health and wellness is really necessary. More players have become vocal about their own journey, like Kevin Love.
Shireen: DeMar DeRozan
Amira: Yes. And who else?
Lindsay: Kyle Lowry?
Amira: Yeah. And one of the things that I think is important with all of these things is that it’s compounded by these abusive environments that we're talking about. So oftentimes they're saying, my mental health was exacerbated by an abusive coach, or exacerbated by these injuries that I had to deny, or, you know, forget about to keep going back in the game. And the physical and mental interplay between them is something that we're seeing. So, addressing one without the other is not gonna help anything. And we can see how it's exacerbated by the exploitation that's existing at the collegiate and professional level, and at the youth level as well.
Jessica: Thanks, Amira. We're gonna do like a very non Burn It All Down thing now and be positive a little bit. Shireen?
Shireen: That’s me. [Jessica laughs] They don’t call me Shireen “Glass Half Full” Ahmed for nothing.
Jessica: Yeah, so Shireen, there's, in part, there are places where we see good stuff happening around protecting athletes, I got that right?
Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. Can I talk about good things and unions and why they're important for protecting bodies, wellness generally, the athletes, the laborers here. And there's a couple things. This may sound a little detail oriented. CBAs for sports teams that include protection of the laborer. There are criticisms, but the MLB CBA was set in March, 2022 with a minimum salary for players on 40 man rosters. The minimum is 700,000. But it's a significant increase for players under their second major league contract with at least one day of major league service time. More free agency. They can negotiate higher salaries. Now this is until 2026. Now, one that you may have heard of May, 2022, the US women's national team and US men's national team ratified a new CBA which received equal pay. [cheering, applause]
Jessica: We like that.
Shireen: And equal rate of pay as well for both teams. All competitions will offer equal compensation, including FIFA prize money. In addition, there is a new revenue sharing model for both senior national teams that includes merchandise sales. The two teams get equal rate for all match tickets run by USSF. And these two CBAs will expire in 2028. Another one that I really wanted to point out was the WNBA's historic CBA that was ratified in 2020. Cathy Engelbert at the time said it was the player-first agenda when they went to the table, and this is really important. In addition to 53% of total cash compensation, we saw discussions about parenting, full salary for parental leave. The language of this CBA was very important. Supporting childcare fees, and family planning benefits, which is something, you know, that wasn't previously thought of.
I interviewed Terri Jackson for something at the time, about a year and a half ago, and she talked about the things that weren't even recognized sometimes in the WNBA, in the stadium – there were no change tables for babies. And when we have a women's league. There’s arguably going to be either children or families attending. Where would you change the babies? So, these are things that I think we don't think of, but it helps to the general, you know, understanding and environment for those players and the communities that come to watch them. Again, offseason opportunities for jobs, augmented holistic, domestic and intimate partner violence programs that includes education and counseling. Now, this one is really important. It's not a spoiler, but just remember that. Nutrition counseling as well. So these are all things that are just so important when we think about a CBA. It's not just money.
One thing...Can’t be Burn It All Down without mentioning this. There is still some leagues out there that really do need this kind of agreement, that need CBAs, that need representation, and that need to be advocated for. And one of them is minor hockey leagues, including the Canadian Hockey League, the CHL with its member organizations, the Ontario Hockey League, Western Hockey League, Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. And Abdul Malik said this, and we'll include this in the show notes, was that it's some of the most exploitative in professional sport in these provinces in Canada. Some of these players don't make minimum wage. And this is something that, you know, I know everything is important, but if they don't even make a living wage this way...And this is something I think because it's not the big leagues, quote unquote, it's something that we need to think about. But you know, we can go back to the W to be happy again.
Lindsay: Well, I just wanna say, it's not a coincidence that all this reckoning in women's soccer has happened as they've really formed their players association and fought for their first CBA, right?
Amira: Unions matter.
Lindsay: Unions matter. And that labor solidarity has led directly to this reckoning.
Jessica: All right, Brenda? Unions matter. Bring us home.
Brenda: Well, I'm glass never full. [laughter] If you don't listen to the show, I'm the worst. I hope we're at the onset of a renewed renaissance of the labor movement in this country, led by young people that will understand the intersection of social justice causes, like the Amazon workers on Staten Island, led by young people of color who don't buy the slogan that, you know, you pick yourself up only by the bootstraps, but instead have rejected that model. I think sports can really be a key way for people to rethink and reengage with the labor movement in this country, because their labor is so evident. We see it, we love it, we like it in our lives, and we, you know, appreciate it every day.
Right now in most countries though, it's difficult to organize women into unions that are athletes because they're not full-time workers. So it's a real chicken and the egg sort of problem, right? You can't really be unionized. We tried it in Chile, it didn't really work. And so you make it an association, which is actually what the US women have. And you can have some kind of benefits from that. But it's really important, I think, in a globalized gig economy, to think about what union protections really mean and the contradictions that come with them. How many people play FIFA, the video game? Okay, so you fund the players union, FIFPRO. That's where that goes.
Lindsay: Good job. [laughs]
Jessica: So I should be playing it.
Brenda: When you’re playing you're actually a social justice warrior. [Amira laughs]
Jessica: Wow, that's good news. Good job, everyone.
Shireen: After midterm season. Play next week.
Lindsay: Pat yourself on the back, yeah. [laughter]
Brenda: But the problem is that you can opt out, that lots of teams you won't see represented there, that lots of players won't be. And in most places, it's only a union not an association that forces employers to negotiate legally. That's why right to work states – and I wanna make sure I read this so I get it right, because you're in one of those states – right to work states have really made things difficult, such as Indiana's 2012 decision to opt out of some major provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. It hasn't proven to raise wages, it hasn't proven to create more jobs in Indiana, or offer protections for workers. We need to have more, not less, of those types of protections.
Jessica: Yay. That was pretty positive, right?
Brenda: That was positive?
Jessica: I mean, there was a call to action.
Shireen: Call to action, yeah.
Brenda: And gaming. Gaming in action. [laughs]
Amira: Yeah!
Jessica: On Tuesday, Shireen interviewed longtime friend of the show, Alison Désir, about her new book Running While Black, that comes out on October 18th. They discussed Alison's process and intentionality, harrowing moments from the book, who and what has created spaces for Black folks in running, and the glorious moments from her journey. Check it out in your feed now.
Jessica: All right, team. We're gonna keep it tight.
Amira: Yeah, let's go.
Shireen: Let's go. [laughs]
Amira: Little stretch. [laughter]
Jessica: Now it's time for everyone's favorite segment that we'd like to call the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we've hated this week in sports, and we set them aflame. Lindsay, what are you burning?
Lindsay: So, Florida. [laughter] Let's start in Florida. So, for 20 years, the Florida High School Athletics Association, they've given out these questionnaires, pre-participation physical evaluation forms for all high school athletes. Nothing really unusual about that. But in Florida, all these schools turn over all of that information to the school. So, this long questionnaire. Whereas in most states, you just kind of get a physician signature, and that's it.
Jessica: Okay.
Lindsay: So, the schools have all this. Why is that a big problem? Well, there's a lot of questions for what they call the female athletes about their periods, and about when was your last period, how many periods? There's like six questions about your period on this form. And it says optional in like really tiny letters. This became an even bigger problem because, starting this year, all of these forms are digitized. And, okay, you know where I'm going with this. [laughs] So, all a lot of schools in Florida have moved to a health data program called Aktivate with a “k” because it's a startup thing. Aktivate! [laughter] Which is founded by former AOL CEO and News Corp executive Jon Miller. So, really great guy. [laughs] This is a huge problem in the post Roe v Wade world.
There is, of course, I think a lot of very legitimate reasons for your coaches and trainers to be educated about menstruation and talk to you one on one, and know things and to track that. But you do not want this state of Florida to have that data. You do not. We are already seeing abortions, the digital receipts being used against people in these anti-abortion laws. In Nebraska, there was just a case where Facebook messages were subpoenaed and were given to help convict someone for an illegal abortion. And so that case is pending, and the digital trail was used. And all of these forms, even just the paper ones, in Florida, paper and digital are subject to subpoenas. Florida, I think it's a 15 week abortion ban right now. And they are also going all out, Ron DeSantis, to attack trans kids and particularly trans athletes. This information could also be used.
Jessica: This is probably not HIPAA protected.
Lindsay: No. This information could also be used to go of course to target trans kids and to target people about abortions, about birth control, about all these things. And Jon Miller says it's secure, but I don't know if I would believe the News Corp exec. So, this is terrifying. And I want to burn it.
All: Burn!
Jessica: Brenda, what is on your burn pile?
Brenda: On October 4th, former center-left president of Brazil, Lula, faced off against the proto fascist current president Jair Bolsonaro. And this election's really important right now. And Brazilian soccer players living abroad in general have supported Bolsonaro. He is racist, homophobic, said things like he would rather his son were dead than be gay. Told a survivor of assault who was a congresswoman that she was “not attractive enough to have been raped.” In Congress. In that place.
Lindsay: A gasp was appropriate, whoever did that.
Brenda: Yeah. And so a lot of people were really disappointed when Neymar, who you might know, decided to support Bolsonaro. And so I wanna of course burn his decision – don't say burn yet, because I have a second part. [laughter] Because it sucks! He also received $80 million in tax obligations being dismissed from the late 2010s and early–
Jessica: Neymar?
Brenda: Yeah. $80 million that Jair Bolsonaro made sure that he doesn't have to pay in taxes to Brazil, which would go to things like roads and water, et cetera, for people like Neymar. And then – this is the second part of the burn – it's the way that people talked about it. “What an idiot. How sad that soccer players are dumb.” Very racially coded, very classist. He's not dumb. He made $80 million off of that. Call it evil. Call it manipulative. But don't call it stupid, because he identifies as Afro Brazilian. Call it what it is. It's corruption. It's gross. And I wanna burn it.
All: Burn!
Jessica: That's really good. I like that. All right, here we go. A week ago, 21 year old Asia Womack was shot to death in a South Dallas neighborhood. She was walking home from the park after playing some basketball. She had been, as a local Dallas news outlet described her, “a wiz at basketball,” playing her high school days at Madison High. Her family says she was killed by a man she knew, a man she had been playing basketball against earlier that evening, a man she had beat on the court. According to local news, her family says the man took his kids and brother home, and then went back to the park purposely to shoot Asia. Her aunt said, “We're taking it kind of hard because it was senseless. I just don't understand why you kill somebody over a basketball game.” The family's pastor said, “This is so senseless. You become embarrassed basically because a female beat you in basketball.” I will say here that this is all we know at this point, but the family gave multiple interviews, and they seem convinced over who killed her and why. She was a woman who was too good at basketball, and she hurt the feelings of a man that she beat.
It's always easy to dismiss trolls who won't shut up about how women shouldn't be playing basketball, that they should instead be in the kitchen. It's simple to put out of your mind the men who respond to literally any and all social media posts or articles about women in sports with some line about how no one cares about women playing sports, when obviously those people care enough to comment. It’s fine for most people to not think about the hate mail that women get for reporting on sports, or for playing them. It's easy to dismiss the sexism directed at women in sports as one off, as a bad apple of a person being a jerk, but it's never just that. These things don't actually exist in isolation from each other. Asia's murder is the absolute worst end of the spectrum of violent misogyny, but that misogyny is present in all kinds of forms that surround female athletes all the time. That's why intervention when it's small and tiny is the most critical, when it is in fact easiest to do something about it. I am so sad for Asia, for her family, her community. And I want to burn and burn and burn the misogyny that led to her death.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Shireen, what are you burning?
Shireen: I am just offering a trigger warning for sexualized violence and mental health crises. Hockey…
Jessica: Burn.
Shireen: Yeah. Yeah. Got more. It's been a very difficult week to be a hockey fan. I was first gonna burn a Toronto Sun columnist writing a bullshit article that week that pitted Black players Akim Aliu and Wayne Simmonds against each other. Both players then spoke publicly in support of one another. But then I was gonna burn everything in the ongoing horrific saga of Hockey Canada and Scott Smith, the current…Well, was the board chair, stepped down, the CEO. And there will be an interim committee to navigate the next part. Instead, I will ask you to follow the work of TSN's Rick Westhead and The Athletic’s Katie Strang. I call them the Federer and Nadal of investigative hockey reporting. I can only describe what once was Canada's most beloved NSO as a complete fucking raging dumpster fire.
But, in that same vein, I will be burning the constant violent misogyny in hockey. Ian Cole, a player for the Tampa Bay Lightning, was accused of grooming and then sexually abusing a minor. The survivor, calling herself Emily Smith, said, “I have decided to speak out anonymously because sadly I feel this is the only way I can be fully transparent without harassment and retaliation.” She alleges that he was coercive, violent, and manipulative while she was in high school and, in one instance, she was asked to go to a hotel with her school uniform on. She also said that he did it to other girls.
Cole was immediately suspended by Tampa Bay Lightning, and the NHL will do their own investigation. ESPN's Emily Kaplan reported that Jared Maples will interview Cole on Wednesday, October 12th. But the problem with all of this – there's there's many problems [laughter] – is that the NHL doesn't actually have a domestic violence policy. So, how can it investigate something when it doesn't have the basic foundation of understanding interpersonal violence, or hold its own players accountable? In her tweet, Emily Smith said how Ian cold bragged to his teammates that he sexually assaulted a minor – because one of those former players told her – and so they knew what was happening and they chose to stay silent.
She stated that, “Ian felt emboldened to emotionally and sexually abuse me and other women because the NHL fosters a culture of misogyny.” Emily Smith says she's proud of herself for having the courage to come forward and tell the truth. And I'm grateful she did, but I'm angry that she had to. I wanna burn the fact that this hockey player felt he could act with impunity, that the teammates said nothing, and burn a league policy that actually doesn't exist. And finally, I wanna burn the fact that so many people are doing such tremendous work, but this space feels so awful, so often.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Amira, what do you wanna torch?
Amira: Yeah. Last month, a group of players from the University of Texas Permian Basin women's soccer team wrote an anonymous letter to the school and to the NCAA, alleging that their coach, Carla Tejas, engaged in a number of inappropriate actions. Now, these actions are many to name. I'll talk about some of them. They range from the ridiculous, such as getting kicked off of the game for her behavior on the sidelines, then getting in disguise, sneaking back into the game with a walkie talkie… [Lindsay laughs]
Jessica: Like even a mustache on, or? Unclear?
Amira: Like a hat? Snuck back into the game with a walkie talkie to continue to yell at them from the sidelines through the walkie talkie. [Jessica laughs] And they also go to very concerning things, like pervasive emotional and verbal abuse. This letter was triggered after, on September 11th, Tejas got a DUI. She got a DUI and then asked her players to bail her out of jail.
Lindsay: Oh my god.
Amira: Some gave her money, because there was already a system in place in which she was very clear about her favorite players, and you could work your way into being her favorite player–
Lindsay: If you bailed her out.
Amira: If you bail her outta jail. [laughs] Among a number of other things. So after this DUI, the players were concerned because the university and the NCAA both lacked a DUI policy, and she was permitted to carry on coaching after her arrest. Worried that these actions would be swept under the rug, they wrote this letter. And they sent it to the university, to the NCAA, and the Lone Star Conference. They talked about the suffering of emotional trauma at her hand to the point of self-harm from players on the team, how she's kissed members of the men's soccer team in public and talked to them about it, how she has served alcohol to minors, requesting money from them, including her bail fund.
And since this letter and news of her arrest went public, members of previous institutions she coached at, including Louisiana Christian University and Belhaven University have come forward. One of the players Tejas coached at Belhaven for two years as a graduate student informed the reporters covering this that Tejas had made her consider suicide, her abuse was so pervasive. Another student noted not only that the abuse brought her to self harm, but actually one day after telling her, “Everybody hates you. Nobody wants you on the team,” she actually went and attempted suicide. I bring up these reports that are coming out because when the school, Permian Basin, hired Tejas this year, they tracked her meteoric rise through all these institutions as a star who turns it around. It is very clear that what she left in her wake was also a pattern of harm and abuse.
These are the exact harmful, abusive environments that put mental health concerns and exploitative labor practices that we've been talking about all show. This is not elite or popular players. It's players whose names we might not ever know. It's not a DI school, it's a DII school, but it is indicative of how pervasive these patterns are in youth sports on up. And so, yes, I wanna burn the actions of Tejas, because what? Girl, doing way too much. It's ridiculous.
Lindsay: [laughs] You're doing too much!
Jessica: Yeah, Yeah.
Amira: But I also wanna burn all the coaches and administrators who behave this way, the institutions that aid and abet them, that shuffle them along like we've seen with NWSL coaches, what we've seen with Tejas, who are able to just jump from institution to institution to continue to harm because they notch enough wins in the win column. That is not, and nor will ever be, enough reason to subject players, athletes, and communities to this type of harm. I am frankly over it. We all are, which is why we burn things. We don't have to take sporting spaces dripping with this type of abusive culture, this harm, this stuff that doesn't even feel like abuse because you've been experiencing it since you were seven, at all levels of the game, many locker rooms with many different coaches.
It’s that pervasive that it took an anonymous letter for other schools and other students to speak out with this information that was so clearly one of these open secrets that we've seen documented now in this major report. I bring up Tejas like we bring up every other example to say it is widespread, it’s everywhere. If you go looking for it, you will find it. And that very fact alone makes me wanna burn shit down. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Well done y'all. Well done.
Lindsay: Whew, that was a big burn pile.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports culture. First, we want to acknowledge the passing of Tiffany Jackson, a former University of Texas and WNBA player, who died last week at the age of 37 from breast cancer. She had a stellar career at all levels of the sport and had moved into coaching, recently working as an assistant coach for the Longhorns. Rest in peace, Tiffany, Our thoughts are with her friends, teammates, and family. Now, our honorable mentions this week. Linz?
Lindsay: We got some broken records! Okay. We're switching tones here, right? [laughter] All right. Tonal shift. Okay. The opening match of the Rugby Union World Cup – need to plug, if you have not yet listened to Jess's rugby interviews last week on the feed, go listen to them now. They're fantastic. So, the Rugby Union World Cup, played at Eden Park in New Zealand last week was a sold out affair and the largest ever attendance at a standalone women's sports event in New Zealand. And also, in women's soccer, 76,893 people showed up to watch England beat the United States in a friendly, making it the largest attendance for a friendly in US women's team history. People like watching women play sports? Who could have guessed? [laughter]
Jessica: Amira?
Amira: Yeah. I wanna shout out friend of the show and founder of Black Rosie Media, Erica Ayala, who called games at the 2022 Amerigol International Hockey Association LATAM – is that like a word that…How do you say it?
Brenda: Lat-am. [laughter]
Amira: At the LATAM Cup in Florida last month. That makes her the first woman and second Latine broadcaster to ever call games during that annual tournament. Wepa, go Erica!
Jessica: Love Erica. Brenda?
Brenda: Alianza Lima won the Liga Feminina 2022 in front of a crowd of 30,000. Okay, it's not Wembley, but the support for the Peruvian women was incredible. Star player Sandy Dorador helped the club to win the women's Championship over Manucchi who come from Trujillo. So congratulations to Alianza Lima.
Lindsay: Woo!
Jessica: Olympic champion, and the champion of Shireen's heart, Stephanie Labbé, has been named the GM of women's soccer for the Vancouver Whitecaps. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, cheers to nine time LPGA to her winner and major champion Na Yeon Choi, who will retire from golf after the BMW Ladies' championship this month. She won the 2012 US Women's Open, and in her retirement statement, she wrote, “I think this is the right moment for me to make this big decision, because I know that I will be leaving with no regrets in my career, which has been filled with my sweat and blood.” Whew.
Jessica: It's an incredible quote. Incredible.
Lindsay: Yeah. [laughs]
Jessica: All right. Can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Shireen, who is our torchbearer this week?
Shireen: Phil Collins all around.
Amira: Not…Phil Collins is not our torchbearer. [laughter]
Brenda: No, no, no. Stop.
Lindsay: Almost got through the show without a Phil Collins reference. [laughter]
Shireen: Love Phil Collins. Torchbearer of the week: in handball, SC DHfK Leipzig's Lucas Krzikalla became the first out gay player who is active in a professional German sport, saying, “For me, this was the right step. I feel very, very comfortable with it. Maybe it will also encourage one or two others to be more open about it.”
Jessica: Yay.
Shireen: We love you Lucas. [applause]
Brenda: Yeah. We do.
Jessica: Okay. It's time for what's good, and we're going to let Shireen speak for all of us. Shireen, what is good?
Shireen: This is! [cheering, applause]
Jessica: All right. We're almost there, everybody. So, there is plenty to watch this week in sports. Both the NWSL and the MLS are in their playoff stage. MLB is also in the postseason. I hope I got this right. The wildcard games are over, and it's the division series right now. The Rugby World Cup is taking place in New Zealand. The Champs League is ongoing. And in the world of college sports, which maybe some of you know something about, we have soccer and volleyball, as well as field hockey, cross country, and of course football taking place. Lots to watch right now. All right. Here we go. That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. [cheering, applause] Thank you again to the Minor in Sport, Media and Culture, the College of Arts and Letters, and Dr. Annie Coleman for bringing us to Notre Dame, and to you all, our amazing live audience for being here. [cheering, applause]
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn it All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, all the places. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link to our merch at our Bonfire store. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. Burn on, and not out. [cheering, applause]
Lindsay: Yay!
Jessica: We did it!
Brenda: Lo hicimos!