"No more water, the fire next time!"

Sports Media Review's latest blog entry is a searing critique of comments ESPN's Mike & Mike made about New York Knick Stephon Marbury. (This is the NBA point guard who you might know better by his two nicknames "Starbury" and "Bad Teammate.")

Essentially, Marbury responded to an inquiry made by NY Times journalist Harvey Araton by responding, matter-of-factly, that “I don’t answer to nobody." Needless to say, the Mike & Mike boys got a bit daffy about this comment.

Amongst other things, "Greeny" offered that, "These guys have been stars on some level from the time they were little kids. They’ve been told, you can do whatever you want, and there will be no consequences." This, apparently, explains why Marbury responded to the NY Times journalist as he did.

Sports Media Review's sane take on this lunatic statement

Then there's the notion, expressed most forcefully by Greenie, that this generation of athletes has been spoiled and pampered from an early age, which leads in a straight line to their catastrophic refusal to explain themselves to reporters. Is Greenie suggesting, therefore, that he wishes he could have had Stephon Marbury's childhood? A child hood in which Marbury was one of seven kids growing up in an urban hell, as depicted in Darcy Frey's The Last Shot? Greenie himself grew up in New York City, the son of a lawyer. Did he really not hear himself suggest this morning that Stephon Marbury had had everything handed to him since he was eleven years old by contrast with, we are to assume, guys like Greenie, who had to scratch and claw his way through a brutal middle class child hood.

(SMR's also discusses the crazy tendency of (generally coddled) sports reporters to idealize the spoiled youth of "problem" athletes in his take on Bobby Knight's motivational techniques.)

I want to add to SMR's critique (which I whole-heartedly endorse.)

I'm going to begin with an assumption. (Yes, as a student of sociology I know I shouldn't make assumptions, but I'll begin with one anyway.) The assumption is simple & this : growing up, many children are told & come to believe that they can achieve whatever they want - if they develop their talents & work hard, America will take care of the rest.

Now, Greeny isn't complaining that Starbury was taught this. What he is complaining about is that the point guard was taught a derivative of this : Marbury, given his talents, deserves the money and fame that he received (& receives) & has a right to demand to be allowed to do whatever he wants with it & there will be no consequences. In this case, what Marbury wants is to start a talk show, which other, more prominant athletes & coaches on superior teams already have. Apparently, such an act ought to have considerable consequences, at least for Marbury.

(Speaking of no consequences : the sports mediamouths are judge & jury for athletes. Who, besides a few critical bloggers, is judge & jury for the mediamouths? Mike & Mike get away with making all sorts of unsubstantiated remarks & they're always back on the radio / tv the next day.)

The reason I'm writing is this : I can't speak for Mike Greenberg, nor for Stephon Marbury. I have no clue how intensely each was socialized into the "American dream." I don't know if Greenberg's father, mother, teacher, etc., ever actually told him that he could accomplish anything he wanted. I don't know if anyone ever told him what his white skin did for him. I don't know if Marbury was ever told similar things, or if he ever sensed that there was some role the color of his skin played in what people thought he could achieve.

Speaking as a person with white skin, I was ignorant of any link between that color, my ability to achieve, & social expectations of my achievement.

Contrast that with the devastating look that James Baldwin's father showed him :

"The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized I believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when once of us was ill..." (The Fire Next Time)

Greeny might not intend for his comments to say this, but a message they speak, in addition to what SMR pointed out, is this : "you, Stephon Marbury, don't deserve what you have / (you never did). In fact, you should never have been taught to expect what you've got / (it shouldn't have come to you in the first place). " Those comments, in a way, sound a bit like Baldwin's father's voice, just in reserve...

Maybe I'm going too far. If I am, maybe I'm just a little disturbed. If I'm not, I'm very disturbed.

peace love gap
Johnny Hatchett

mic check

Editor's Note : An unretirement is just that. Also, Johnny Hatchet's so-called other blog is stalling for bureaucratic reasons.

I've been reading blogs. Daily, I check The Wages of Win, an NBA alt-stat blog. Terrific. But even better is Sports Media Review, which is something like a one-man wrecking ball of sports media critique.

Given my readings, I'm worried that I'm going to become more, cough, extreme. That is, by filtering my readings to these blogs, especially the latter, I'm going to have the opinion that I began with - notably, sports mediamouths just don't get it, don't know how to properly evaluate athletes, and engage in discourse that reproduce racism. In fact, I've been feeling this extremism lately & I become increasingly upset by sports mediamouth talk.

Why am I worried about becoming more extreme? Well, I'm also reading articles on blogging. Last night, I read :

A 2004 article, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, in which the good Professor worries that the filtering blogs allow for would do what I just described, & threaten democracy

But to the extent [emerging Internet technologies] weaken the power of general-interest intermediaries and increase our ability to wall ourselves off from topics and opinions we would prefer to avoid, they create serious dangers to democracy. (2004:59)

General-interest intermediaries - call them newspapers, old-media, whatever - benefit a democractic society because they impose content - &, thus, "diverse others" - that the audience might not have encountered otherwise. The ability to choose content & develop a personal "echo-chamber" through elobrate internet technologies - search engines, "my favorites" type online-lists, etc - will, ultimately, demolish this potential encounter with "diverse others."

Hmm. I accept that unexpected encounters with content & others are valuable. Very valuable. What I don't accept are two of Sunstein's premises :

(1) Filtering will eliminate unexpected encounters.
(2) Encounters with the "diverse others" of "general-interest intermediaries" serve a democractic function.

(1) Filtering will eliminate unexpected encounters.

"Watchdog"-type blogs & blogs dedicated to cultural criticism, such as the aforementioned Sports Media Review blog, point readers to incredibly diverse sources and articles. Granted, these sources are discussed through the writer's political & cultural lens, but (a) because of links, the reader has quick & immediate access to the "other" source & can evaluate it on his own & (b) many of us already believe that all discussions, narratives, articles, etc. come pre-packaged by the writer's or speaker's social position. Publishing "neutral" articles that "just report the facts" in "general-interest intermediaries" involve decisions about which facts to include & which to emphasize; moreover, given finite human & publishing resources, the decision to run any one article - say a "neutral" article about a certain crime committed by a particular person - requires that any number of "other" articles - say five, ten, fifteen other articles about certain criminal cases reported by all sorts of other people - go un-or-under-reported.

Which leads me to

(2) Encounters with the "diverse others" of "general-interest intermediaries" serve a democratic function.

In "Democracy and Filtering," Professor Sunstein pays lip-service to the "limitations and biases" of the media, writing

For all their problems, and their unmistakable limitations and baises, these intermediaries have performed some important functions.
People who rely on such intermediaries experience a range of chance encounters with diverse others, as well as exposure to material they did not specifically choose.

So what are these limitations and biases doing to the "diverse other" : well, more than one savvy reader of media & culture conclude that diverse others are deflated into stereotype & these stereotypes serve un-democratic ends.

Check : Woe is Us, Part 3,764 (more on that in the next blog entry).
Check : bell hooks' Black Looks, in which, amongst other, equally intense critiques of white culture, hooks describes the effects of encounters with "diverse others" on the selfhood of a young black girl

I was painfully reminded of this fact recently when visiting friends on a once colonized black island. Their little girl is just reaching that stage of preadolescent life where we become obsessed with our image, with how we look and how others see us. Her skin is dark. Her hair chemically straightened. Not only is she fundamentally convinced that straightened hair is more beautiful than curly, kinky, natural hair, she believes that lighter skin makes one more worthy, more valuable in the eyes of others. Despite her parents' efforts to raise their children in an affirming black context, she has internalized white supremacist values and aesthetics, a way of looking and seeing the world that negates her value.

Check : Ask white Americans about crime.

inConclusion, I can only hope that those readers uncomfortable and/or angry, upset, hurt by racism, by representations of race in the "general-interest media," get a little polarized by blogging, become a little more extreme, & develop communities dedicated to combatting these problems...

peace love gap
Johnny Hatchett

the unretirement of Johnny Hatchett

Editor's Note: The semester has started & Johnny Hatchett will be working on a new, unrelated blog. He just has to. Also, he found out that there are already several smartly written & well researched blogs on the topics of sports, sports media, and race. Johnny wants to share those blogs with you.

Sports Media Review
Sports Law Blog
Edge of Sports

peace love gap
Johnny Hatchett

Johnny Hatchett makes up for lost time, part II

Editor's Note: Johnny Hatchett has been playing "Name that Stink" most of today - trying to figure out why his apartment smells like oil. So, in the place of a proper blog, here's an update on a few old ones.

(1) Somewhere, some baseball purist thinks that Albert Pujols is still an asshole.

Yup, Albert Pujols occasionally says things that make him seem like a sore-loser. &, yup, the sports mediasses spend considerably more time yapping about a few stray, spontaneous sentences than ... well, yapping about the following:

Pujols is off to the Dominican Republic on a humanitarian mission & he's staying clear of the celebration that the White House is throwing for the 2006 World Series Champions. Now, Pujols' snubbing of the President is not intentional, but I'm for it nonetheless.

(2) Johnny Hatchett is three weeks behind the times.

Yup, those Nash goggles are real. I hadn't read this article comparing Nash and Brees before writing my entry, but now I offer it as evidence of our loopy, cultural infatuation with these two men.

(3) Marijuana makes the world go round.

Thanks to an anonymous tip, we can now all enjoy the two hilarious abovetheinfluence.com print ads.

Spend some time at the site & witness the zaniness that your tax money pays for!

peace love gap
Johnny Hatchett

Why blog, part II

About a week ago, I read a compelling NYT article on the San Diego Charger L.T.'s familial history. I eagerly took to some blog search engines hoping to find some discussion of the it. Instead, all I got were links back to the original article.

At the time, I wondered what the point of blogging is if, when confronting America's legacy of slavery & the familial traces of it for the current N.F.L. MVP, the best bloggers can do is to redirect traffic back to the New York Times.

Well...

Today, the NYT have an article about a controversial Title IX decision that impacts New York state cheerleaders. Essentially, the decision requires that girl sports be supported by school resources - including cheerleaders - as much as boy sports are.

I did a search for discussion on the article & turned up two terrific blog entries.

For those of you who can't stand a two-page NYT article, Ann Bartow, Associate Professor of Law at U of South Carolina, offers a summation of & some commentary on it.

Zach, of Molten Boron, speculates about some of the motives & inequalities that underlie the reaction of schools, athletes, & cheerleaders to the decision and its subsequent implementation.

Brilliant work, people.

peace love gap,
Johnny Hatchett

The President believes NFL players don't smoke pot. His wife just thinks they're damn sexy.

I love abovetheinfluence.com's print advertisements, which have been running in ESPN The Magazine. I wish they appeared somewhere online, but, alas, I can't find them. Perhaps someone out there in blogland has a scanner...& is willing to do the dirty-work.

Anyway, the advertisements have a goofy, sketched style; they kind of look like a single frame from a crappy Cartoon Network show.

Last week, the print ad showed a bummed out, pothead sprawled across the floor. His dog, wearing a leash & obviously in want of a good, old fashioned, American dog-walking says to the pothead, "You disappoint me." Maybe you just have to be there, with the stoner & his judgemental, talking dog, but that ad cracked me up.

This week, a not-so-cool dude gestures at a little, level-headed boy. Perhaps the boy is the pothead from the last issue's advertisement; now recovered, he's walking his dog. The not-so-cool dude says, "i smoke pot to impress the ladies." The little, level-headed, recovered pothead says, "try football."

The timing of the humor of these ads, even though they're static, print advertisements, is killer. So killer that I now reject Allen Ginsberg's poetry, especially when he writes, "I smoke pot every chance I get."

This issue's advertisment is particularly convincing, since:

- No football player smokes pot.
- No football player uses illegal drugs.
- There are is no correlation between playing football & physical injury.
- According to this blogger, you are considerably more likely to be seriously injured while smoking pot than you are while playing sports, such as basketball or football.
- Organized football is a lifetime sport in which, no matter your age or physical ability, you can participate.
- All young men have an equal chance of earning social prestige by playing football.
- Most young women are impressed by football players.
- According to abovetheinfluence.com, students who smoke pot are more likely to have done poorly in school.
- Many football players are eligible to receive scholar-athlete awards.

stay above the influence, &, as always, remember
peace love gap,
Johnny Hatchett

Take off your Nash goggles & witness our infatuation with Drew Brees.

Editor's Note: Johnny Hatchett should be writing his MA thesis. Instead, he is mumbling to you about Saint Drew Brees. Also, he is drinking tea. Yup, Johnny Hatchett drinks tea.

Sure, Steve Nash is a great point guard. Yup, he dropped 21 dizzying assists on LBJ's Caveliers. & yes, Drew Brees has had a couple of nice seasons as an NFL quarterback. Far be it from me, a novice bloggers with no readers, to trash the abilities & successes of either of these men.

What concerns me is not that these two men - for all the right reasons - are media darlings. By all accounts, Mr. Brees has his priorities straight. He's winning in/for/with & living in & loving the city that wants him.

What does concern me is the level of hyperbole expressed during the love fests held for these two men's performances; both, it seems to me, have been overvalued by pundits, while the contributions of their teammates remain overlooked. This overvalued star / undervalued team is especially troubling considering that both Nash & Brees play "pure" positions.

What I mean is a bit obvious. Yes, both Nash & Brees play important positions for their respective team. Both control the movement of the team's offense; both "manage" the game-play on their respective playing surfaces. At the same time, these are positions for which teams (supposedly) and media mouths (frequently) look to fill with "pure" players. Nash, by all accounts, is a "pure" point guard; he plays that position how it has historically been played - by passing the ball first, shooting second. While we rarely hear the term "pure quarterback" used by media mouths, it exists, of course, in the eternal "pocket passer," who differs from hybrid quarterbacks or running quarterbacks.

Skin color might play a roll in all of this. In case you haven't noticed, Steve Nash is a quite-white basketball player; born in South Africa, raised in Canada, schooled at a public, west coast university, this white man succeeds at playing pure point while equally famous, African-American counterparts - A.I. & Stephon Marbury, being the least "pure" & most notable examples - fail. Brees is also a white man & he just so happens to be one of the few, high profile white men who ran towards New Orleans over the last few years.

SO: both are white men who (purely) play positions that have recently come under media & cultural scrutiny because of the "impurity" of alternative ways of playing them.

(Please keep in mind, dear non-reader, that I'm not claiming that race is a determining factor in these men's successes. They are great athletes. Nor am I even claiming that race is the determining factor in the consensus about their performances. I'm just saying it's there & it's worth thinking about.)

Like Nash, Brees is largely credited with "turning around" a wayward franchise. For example, my non-reader can witness John Levin, of Slate.com, giving all the credit for the Saints' good fortunes to Brees & Coach Payton.

Yes, it's true that Nash & Brees both joined franchises that were going through, to put it mildly, "growing pains." But, by overemphasizing these men's values, we've largely ignored the following:

- Both Nash's & Brees' former teams improved the season after they left. The Mavericks' won six more games in '05 without Nash than they won in '04 with him. The Chargers', of course, are now the finest team in all the land. (To their credit, the Suns' improvement with Nash & the Saints' with Brees was greater than the improvements of their former teams.)

- Both teams added & developed new talent into addition to these players. In '04, the Suns had an NBA-quality point-guard (Starbury) for only 34 games of the season. Amare, after winning R.O.Y. the previous season, played in only 55 games. The team's 5th best scorer was Casey "Who?" Jacobsen. Even Tom Gugliotta logged hundreds of minutes for the '04 version of the Suns. In '05, the team's new point guard (Nash, of course) played 75 games for them, Amare played in 81 (& turned into a scoring monster), &, with the addition of Quentin Richardson & Nash, the Suns cut 1,100 minutes from Jacobsen's playing time. Also, it's worth noting that the Suns' won 44 games in '03. (So, yes, they still won plenty of more games with Nash, but they probably weren't as bad of a team without him as their '04 win total suggests.)

In addition to adding Savior Brees, the Saints' added Coach of the Year Sean Payton & super-rookies Reggie Bush (10th in the NFL in receptions, 2nd in yards after catch) & Marques Colston (11th in the NFC in receptions, 15th in yards after catch). &, thanks to the health of RB Deuce McCallister & Bush's presence, the Saints' scored 19 rushing touchdowns compared to 8 the previous season. On the defensive side of the ball, the Saints' logged 13 more sacks than in 2005, with 6 more forced fumbles, & 1 additional interception.

What this all means : The Suns are a fantastic NBA team with Nash. The Saints are a good NFC team with Brees. BUT, these men have not single-handedly saved their franchises. It is convienent & easy for sports media mouths to heap the credit on these two; by signing with their respective franchises, they were major additions to their teams' rosters. Moreover, both put up monster numbers at glamour positions. But, as usually is the case, the convienent & easy narrative of an individual player's role in a team's successes is partial & largely ignores the important additional additions, developments, & contributions of other players on that team.

Moreover, by speaking so frequently, consistently, & hyperbolically about white athletes who play positions that carry a lot of racial baggage, the sports media mouths do, I think, open themselves to critiques of their intentions. While it is not inherently racist to award Steve Nash the Most Valuable Player award, nor is it to stick Brees' name in the running for NFL MVP, it is also not absurd that some would wonder about the motivations & underlying messages of the praises these men receive.

peace love gap,
Johnny Hatchett