Archive for the 'Sports' Category

Fatherhood and feminism: not a zero-sum game.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 17, 2010
in Men and Masculinity, Parenting and Sports
. 8 Comments

Kathryn Lopez posts a column this week about the immediate aftermath of Super Bowl XLIV: Brees after Super Bowl win was a poster boy for family. K-Lo notes that the winning quarterback for the Saints scooped up his young son in the aftermath of victory, holding him with both love and glee.

It’s an image America needed.

“Given that about one-in-four American boys are living apart from their dads at any one point in time, it is great to see a Super Bowl champion with his wife and son, and to see that this win is all the bigger for him for being shared with his son,” Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project said.

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, isn’t a football follower, but she liked what she saw: “It bespoke an intimacy of real time spent together. Even in a football stadium of screaming fans the toddler boy didn’t look anxious. He knew he was safe. He was with dad.”

I couldn’t agree more that it was a touching moment. I too like the image of a father embracing his son; I like seeing unguarded affection between parents and children. We all agree it’s a lovely thing.

So what’s the problem? The folks K-Lo cites in her piece (and the organizations with which they are affiliated, like the Institute for American Values) are relentless in their insistence that fatherhood has been damaged by feminism. For the cultural right to which folks like Wilcox and Lopez belong, the empowerment of women has led to the inevitable marginalization of men. In the strange math of social conservatives, it’s all a zero-sum game: the greater the freedom of women to divorce, exercise reproductive sovereignty, and earn money outside the home, the less self-worth their male partners will invariably feel.

It’s subtle in this piece, but explicit elsewhere in the writings of the anti-feminist traditional marriage movement: the great lie that male responsibility is contingent on female vulnerability. Only when women defer to men, submit to men, allow men to take the proverbial reins — only then will men “feel” valued, feel needed. According to this tired bit of wisdom, men get confused and alienated when they are denied the opportunity to shoehorn themselves into a traditional masculine role. The notion that gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, the notion that men and women can possess different plumbing but the same skill set — all this is too much for the be-penised to grasp. Fathers have abandoned their families, the lie goes, because they no longer feel needed or valued as men.

I adore my daughter. My worth as her father is not compromised by the fact that my wife earns a good living outside the home. My wife relies on me as I do on her — we rely on each other to be there, to do what we say we’re going to do, to pick up the dry cleaning and the baby food when we say we will, to be faithful. The fact that my wife could be a successful single mother without me doesn’t vitiate my value as a Dad. The fact that the world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket were I to disappear doesn’t mean I don’t feel loved and important. My daughter needs me, and I believe her life is better with me in it. My wife and I love each other and are building a life together. But my manhood — and my status as a father — is not under attack in our culture, unless you buy the myth that insists that a husband’s dignity requires a certain amouht of frailty on the part of his wife.

So here’s to encouraging fathers to be present in the lives of their children. And here’s to recognizing that the greatest obstacle to making that happen on a wider scale is not feminism, or the culture, or the legal system — it’s our outdated notion of masculinity itself.

Rip Van Winkle comes to the Super Bowl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 09, 2010
in Men and Masculinity and Sports
. 5 Comments

Lots of folks are talking in the blogosphere and the mainstream media about the misogynistic tone of so many of the ads during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast. Since my family resisted a television until 1978, my football viewing memory goes back no farther than Super Bowl XIII — but I’ve seen most of the games since that Steelers-Cowboys epic, and agree that this year’s batch of ads were the most consistently sexist that we’ve ever seen.

The good news,of course, is that virtually every news outlet in the country pointed this out. The feminist blogosphere was not alone in decrying the orgy of woman-hating (and the concomitant celebration of the caveman myth) that went on during Sunday’s broadcast. When a staid entity like Time magazine exclaims “Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?”, we’re making real progress. So many of the ads were so unrelentingly puerile, so clumsy in their attempt to suggest that modern American men are just so many latter day pre-nap Rip Van Winkles, that even folks who don’t normally use words like “misogyny” found that that noun came quickly to their lips. To the extent that the overreach of these ads was so astounding that it forced even the mainstream media to criticize the relentless sexism, I think there’s a fairly substantial silver lining to what we saw on Sunday.

It’s also a golden teaching opportunity. Spring semester classes don’t get underway until February 22, and I’m not teaching at the moment, so I don’t have the chance to have a discussion this week about the ads with my students. I did note the sexism of the ads in a Facebook status update, and got a number of comments and messages in response from friends who don’t necessarily share my feminism, but did share my indignation at what we saw during the Super Bowl. For those who insist that sexism isn’t a problem any longer, who think that the feminist case that we live in a world which continues to hate women is whoppingly oversold, Sunday afternoon was a wake-up call. I’m excited about the implications.

I reference Rip Van Winkle for another reason. The story of Rip Van Winkle was written in 1819 by Washington Irving; it featured the basic plot line of half of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials. An amiable man married to a woman who needles and nags him relentlessly, Rip takes a hike in the hills to escape his wife. He runs into an all-male group — the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew, male adventurers who came to America without women. They hand him a Budweiser (well, not quite, their magic liquor) and Rip gets very, very drunk. He falls asleep and wakes to discover that twenty years have passed and his wife has died.

Rip thus gets to be single (and the envy of other henpecked husbands) without ever having to confront his wife. He is rescued from the misery of marriage by bonding with a group of men who embody an ultra-masculine archetype, and that bond is cemented by drinking their special brand of alcohol. While drunk, his problems magically disappear and he reemerges into civilization liberated and free. If that isn’t a hefty part of the plot of most of what we saw two days ago, I don’t know what is.

The absurdity of the story is that Rip Van Winkle was written in an age when coverture was the law of the land — husbands had almost total legal control over their wives. Rip could beat his wife, divorce his wife, and abandon his wife with virtual impunity; his own unwillingness (which he probably falsely imagined as inability) to engage with his spouse is the source of his frustration. Just as so many men still do, Rip blames his unhappiness on what he imagines are the voracious and inexhaustible demands of a perennially dissatisfied woman. Plenty of men run away from intimacy and engagement to seek comfort in booze and masculine cameraderie. None in real life have the magical outcome that we see in Rip’s case. But the power of the story lies in its promise that alcohol and male bonding can make one’s troubles (always personified by a woman, either a wife or a mother) vanish.

Washington Irving ought to sue several Madison Avenue agencies for copyright infringement.

Perfection of the Life and the Work: the tragic hubris of Urban Meyer

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 28, 2009
in Men and Masculinity and Sports
. 7 Comments

If you’re a college football fan, you surely didn’t miss the breathless coverage of the mixed messages sent this weekend by Urban Meyer, the head coach at the University of Florida. Meyer, recently voted the “coach of the decade”, announced Saturday he was stepping down from the position in order to focus on his health and his family; on Sunday, he changed his tune, noting that he was taking only a “leave of absence”, and expected to be back on the sidelines for the two-time national champions soon. The paper of record summarized the most wrenching aspect of the story:

One of the most poignant moments of the Urban Meyer resignation-unresignation as Florida coach came Christmas Day.

After weeks of soul searching, prompted by a trip to a hospital, he told his family that night that he would be leaving his job, Meyer said to The New York Times.

Meyer said that upon hearing the news, his 18-year-old daughter hugged him and said, “I get my daddy back.”

A day later, Meyer was gone again. Not completely gone. He announced Sunday that after a day away to think about things, he had decided to stay put. He is merely taking a leave of absence.

Jeremy Foley, Florida’s athletic director, made it clear — to fans and to recruits — that order had been restored in Gator Nation. “He is the head coach taking a leave of absence,” Foley said.

In 24 hours, we went from the perfect holiday story to a tale about the relentless pull of the coaching profession. The king leaves his throne for his family and then decides — or is convinced — that the throne was not so bad after all and announces that for a time he will be the power behind the throne.

What do we make of this bizarre drama?

The bit about Meyer’s daughter is heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Football coaches occupy a particularly significant niche in the American psyche: as archetypes, if not always in reality, they are the most hyper-masculine of older men. (Meyer is a youthful 45.) In a culture where the young warrior and the youthful athlete are those with the greatest masculine cachet, gruff generals and taciturn football coaches have the unique privilege of claiming unimpeachable toughness even as they soften and age. The demands of both war and coaching tend to be all-consuming, involving long separation from family — and as we all know, the classic masculine archetype is of the man who chooses a world away from women and domesticity. Think of Hector pushing away Andromache before he goes out to die at Achilles’ hand; think of Gary Cooper in “High Noon”, turning away from new bride Grace Kelly to take on a desperado who threatens his town; heck, think of three-quarters of the movies you’ve ever seen. And think of Urban Meyer, torn between his daughter’s tearful longing for her daddy and his own sense of responsibility, not to his family or to his team, but to a masculine ideal of work and sacrifice that has torn apart Western families for millenia.

And it’s hard not to think of Yeats:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Urban Meyer wants, like so many Americans, to imagine that he can have both the perfection of the life and the work; he seems, judging from his mixed messages this weekend, to long to “be there” for his daughter and still be the relentlessly driven coach of the most successful college football team of the past half-decade. Like so many ambitious men, he tells himself “If I just work harder, or pray harder, or learn a new technique, then I can manage to ‘do it all’”. The Greeks knew hubris when they saw it, and the modern manifestation of hubris is the belief so common to so many men that they can live their lives in compartments, keeping everyone happy and winning praise from all. Meyer’s hubris isn’t that different from Tiger’s: both the philandering golfer and the workaholic football coach believed that they could lead double lives with impunity. Tiger’s deception is the more obvious, but Meyer’s — rooted in the tragically mistaken belief that one can serve two masters, ambition and family — is no less destructive to those who love and rely upon him.

I rejoiced when I heard the news on Saturday that Meyer was stepping down: a man putting his health and his relationships ahead of his career, how refreshing! As the father of a daughter, I thought of Meyer’s girls weeping with relief that they were getting their “Dad back”, and I teared up a bit myself. And then came Sunday’s “vanity”, and I thought of his daughters again — and all the rest of us who are the collateral damage of the heroic ideal.

Dreams for Women Calendar

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 08, 2009
in Global Feminism and Sports
. 1 Comment

A quick and worthy commercial plug:

The good folks at Antigone Magazine (a Canadian feminist magazine based at the University of British Columbia, where my littlest sister studied for a year) have put out a calendar honoring some of the North American women athletes competing in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — which get underway in just over two months!

No, it’s not that kind of calendar. The “Dreams for Women” calendar features female athletes from Canada, the USA, and First Nations. Each woman is depicted competing, along with an inspiring snippet of her personal dream. Proceeds benefit the Antigone Foundation, which aims to empower young women (aged 10-35) to become engaged politically. You can check out a PDF here.

Who are hares to condemn tortoises? Responding to the Times critique of slow marathoners

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 23, 2009
in Athletics and Fitness and Sports
. 8 Comments

The New York Times revisited the issue of the “slow marathoner” today. Called by many the “Oprah effect” after the talk-show host walked/jogged through the Portland Marathon more than a decade ago, there’s no question that thousands of slower and less athletically able types have come to the marathoning world in recent years, often spending three times as long out on the course as the winners. Some are disgruntled by these torpid but determined newcomers, and the Times article tends to take the side of the woman quoted here:

“It’s a joke to run a marathon by walking every other mile or by finishing in six, seven, eight hours,” said Adrienne Wald, 54, the women’s cross-country coach at the College of New Rochelle, who ran her first marathon in 1984. “It used to be that running a marathon was worth something — there used to be a pride saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore. Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?’ ”

In September 2006, I posted my defense of slower runners. I’ve run a dozen marathons — and several longer ultra races — and have a lifetime marathon PR of a 3:13 (a 7:24 pace), but not even a frisson of contempt for those who need twice that time to finish. From my 2006 piece:

I’ve spent years and years around very competitive and talented athletes. I’ve worked with cross-country coaches and ultra-marathoners; I have friends who have qualified for the Olympic trials in distance events. To a man and to a woman, I’ve never heard them sneer at the slower recreational athletes who only long to finish. Real runners don’t judge and condemn others. Our reasons for running are myriad, and running to set a personal best time is never the only, or even the best, reason to run. If some folks want to trot and sweat for six hours so that they can say “I ran a marathon because I’ve always wanted to”, how does it diminish my accomplishment in running the same race significantly faster?

Running has brought me tremendous joy and fulfillment. It is a source of incredible pleasure in my life. I judge myself not by my weight, or whether my six-pack is defined, or by my latest time, but by the amount of delight I take in my workouts. I try and bring that peace and happiness home from the roads and the trails, and I try to make it manifest in my relationships with others. Running is like that for many people, whether or not they ever run a marathon, or whether or not they ever break four, five, or even seven hours.

Adrienne Wald, who takes more than four hours herself, ought to know that.

Against instant replay

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 04, 2009
in Sports
. 5 Comments

This is deserving of a longer post, but in the aftermath of the controversial end to last Sunday’s Super Bowl, I wanted to make a quick point about electronic review in sports.

I’m against it. Always. My feeling has always been that referees and judges and umpires are participants in the ebb and flow of an event rather than mere arbiters. The errors they make and the injustices they foist upon players and teams are part and parcel of the game, inextricably bound up with what makes sport so heartbreaking and so exciting. In tennis, American football, international football, boxing, or any other sport, the fallibility of the referee enhances rather than detracts from the beauty of the game.

One of the under-emphasized pleasures of being a sports fan is the strange delight one takes in grumbling, sometimes for years, about a bad call that cost your team the game. There is a strange but unmistakable thrill — in sport if not in the rest of life — about the sensation of being defrauded by caprice or incompetence or fate. I shouted with outrage at the television when the referees allowed Diego Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in the 1986 World Cup against England. I’ve never forgotten the outrageous injustice of it. But there is real pleasure in nurturing that resentment against the referees (and, for that matter, Argentine football). I would rather have the pain of being robbed than endure the dreariness of having beautiful games become subject to pauses and replays and electronic second-guessing from an official’s booth.

When it comes to medicine and finance and marking student papers, I’m all for careful review and the willingness of all involved to see an initial decision overturned. But sport is about emotion and effort and guts and impulse — and I want my referees to do the best they can to the best of their frail human ability. Leave the computers and the video monitors out of their decisions, and give us all a more fluid game and the chance to engage in the wonderfully satisfying practice of whining about bad calls for days, weeks, and years afterwards.

Gay sports update again

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 12, 2008
in GLBTQ and Sports
. 6 Comments

Folks know my theory that legalizing gay marriage is good for winning championships. One of many small disappointments contained within the Great Disappointment which was the narrow defeat for marriage equality in California is what it will mean for California-based sports teams in the year to come. The USC Trojans will not end up playing for the national title in football, and my beloved Cal Golden Bears women’s basketball team will likely not win the NCAA crown. If the California Supreme Court rules Prop 8 unconstitutional, however, there’s still time to reverse these inevitable setbacks.

But hey, Connecticut just legalized gay marriage, and the first weddings were performed today. And guess who has the number #1 team in women’s hoops? Yup, UConn, led by coach Geno Auriemma and super soph Maya Moore. They haven’t won a title in a few years, but I suspect that they’ll collect a sixth in April. They can thank their state supreme court if they do.

More on sports and gay marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 07, 2008
in GLBTQ and Sports
. 7 Comments

It’s always nice to be cited by Dan Savage.

Since we’re talking about the possibility that Rafael Nadal’s dramatic Wimbledon triumph yesterday is linked to the Spanish legalization of gay marriage, let me continue the theme started last week, this time with a tennis angle:

Spain legalized gay marriage in June 2005. Rafael Nadal’s first French Open title? June 2005.

January 30, 2003: Belgium legalizes gay marriage.
May 2003: Justine Henin wins the French Open, her first Grand Slam victory, the first ever for a Belgian player of either sex. It was the first grand slam played after Belgium legalized gay marriage. Henin goes on to win a series of titles, and is soon joined by fellow Belgian Kim Clijsters as a grand slam champion.

The evidence continues to pile up, folks!

On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 07, 2008
in Abortion, Christianity, Faith, Parenting and Sports
. 18 Comments

UPDATED Reminder about comments policy:

This comment thread is open to feminists and those who are feminist-friendly only. Thread-derailing to advance an anti-feminist agenda has no place here. I’ve been remiss in enforcing this recently, but am going to be better about it out now.

On the Fourth of July, KJ Lopez at the National Review Online offered up what she calls “A Good Girl Role Model”. (One assumes, after reading the piece and being familiar with K-Lo’s work, that the adjective “good” modifies “girl” rather than “role model”. Lopez is from that school of social conservatives who wish fervently that there were more “good girls” — in the classic sense — running around. Or, better yet in the right-wing world, not running around.)

Lopez tells us the story of Agata Mroz, a former Polish volleyball star who died of leukemia shortly after giving birth.

When Agata was 17, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a collection of disorders that prevent the bone marrow from producing sufficient blood cells. Some forms of MDS progress to leukemia, and Agata’s did. In the prime of her sports career, Agata needed to take a sabbatical in 2007 to fight the disease. The first part of her treatment involved many blood transfusions. When her fans discovered that she needed blood, they formed a queue to be donors, giving 3,170 pints.

Her condition worsened as she was preparing to marry Jacek Olszewski on June 9, 2007, leaving her too ill to go on a honeymoon. Because of her illness, doctors cautioned her against getting pregnant, but she tried anyway. She was realistic about her slim prospects to beat the disease and, if she were going to die, she at least hoped to be able to give life.

She became pregnant soon after marrying. “The news about the child made me feel lucky again,” she said in a February news interview. “I felt happy that I would know what it is to be a mother and that I would give my husband something good of myself.”

A few weeks later, doctors discovered her cancer had progressed. They told her that she urgently needed a bone marrow transplant, but she opted to wait until after delivery to receive the transplant lest she imperil her child’s life. She clearly knew the risk she was taking, but considered the reward worth the danger, putting her child’s life above her own. She gave premature birth to a daughter, Lilliana, on April 4.

Agata died on June 4.

It’s a bittersweet story. Who among us would question Agata’s decision? She did what she wanted to do, making a conscious choice to get pregnant despite the huge risk and to forego lifesaving treatment in order to ensure her daughter’s well-being. I honor that choice as a good and valid one. I was moved reading the account Lopez shares.

But what is so infuriating is the clear sense that Agata’s decision wasn’t a choice, but a spiritual requirement for any woman who might find herself in a similar tragic predicament. For Lopez — and indeed, for many Catholics, a woman is required to put the life of her unborn child ahead of her own. It isn’t so much a “choice” as a divine mandate. Lopez’s piece concludes:

In his homily, the celebrant of the Mass, Bishop Marian Florczyk, said that Agata’s life is a witness of “love of life, motherhood, the desire to give life and the heroic love of an unborn child.”

It is all that. I’m not raining on Agata’s parade, of course. But Lopez doesn’t entitle her piece “A Mother’s Choice”. She calls it “A Good Girl Role Model”, driving home the point that young women ought to aspire to be as radically selfless as Agata to the point of de-valuing their own lives. Continue reading ‘On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz’

Gay sports update

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 30, 2008
in GLBTQ, Links and Sports
. 0 Comments

I am delighted with all the hits I got as a result of Andrew Sullivan linking today to my post about the causal effect that legalizing gay marriage clearly has on sports championships. Jeff Fecke gets the credit.

I haven’t had over 5000 unique visitors in a single day in a very long time — and the last time was in the midst of the whole Full Frontal Feminism argument that tore up the feminist blogosphere!

Sullivan also notes something I forgot, which was that Denmark legalized same-sex unions (without using the term marriage) way back in 1989 — and promptly won the next European championship in 1992.

The evidence grows stronger.

Gay marriage: good for winning championships?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 29, 2008
in GLBTQ and Sports
. 20 Comments

I got home from working out in time to watch the Spain-Germany European Cup final from Vienna. I’m not inclined to patriotism in any form, but I’ll be darned if I, the son of an Austrian-born war refugee, was going to root for the Germans to win anything in the city of his birth. Spain won a deserved victory. A.S. Byatt has, not surprisingly, the best write-up of the whole tournament.

This leads me to my observation: legalizing gay marriage is good for sports teams. Spain did it a few years back, and wham, they win the Euro for the first time since 1964. Canada did it just before the 2006 Winter Olympics, and bingo, they had their best-ever medal haul. South Africa legalized gay marriage in 2006, and won the Rugby World Cup the following year. Massachusetts gave same-sex couples the right to wed a few years ago — and ask Red Sox and Celtic fans about how nicely things have gone for their teams since. For all those folks who insist that God’s punishment for gay marriage will be obvious, so far the evidence is, um, lacking. The evidence for the opposite is growing.

If California upholds gay marriage at the ballot box in November, I predict championships for USC football, UCLA basketball, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Anaheim Angels — all within short order.

Knees, feminism, and young warriors: the relief of Michael Sokolove’s new book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 03, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Books, Sports and Youth
. 2 Comments

Back on May 8, I wrote about The Uneven Playing Field, a long article by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the New York Times magazine. The piece was excerpted from his then-forthcoming book, Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. The book has been published; my copy came last week and I finished it this morning, just moments ago.

I was anxious to read the book, particularly because I was more than a bit troubled by the title. Historically, when a man talks about the need to “protect our daughters”, you know trouble’s coming. “We’ve got to protect our daughters from the lesbian menace, boys!” “We’ve got to protect our daughters from abortion-promoting, Wicca practicing, bra-less, unshaven, radical feminists!” Though I know some paternalistic language creeps into my own writing, I do make a conscious effort to avoid obvious tropes like the need to “protect daughters”, recognizing that very phrase has been associated with everything from homophobia to the lynching of young black men. One wishes Sokolove had chosen a different subtitle for what ends up being a terrific, pro-feminist book. (I suspect, but have no evidence, that it was his publishing house who came up with the “protecting our daughters” line as a marketing ploy. Nothing sells like anxiety, after all.)

I love women’s sports. I’m married to a former high school soccer star who, like many of the women profiled in Sokolove’s book, suffered a career-ending knee injury. In my wife’s case, that knee injury cost her what had been the promise of a division-one scholarship. I’m particularly passionate about soccer — for its purity, its deceptive simplicity, its abhorrence of timeouts, and its endless capacity to surprise. Sokolove’s book is mainly about soccer, the sport that more American girls play than any other, and about the epidemic of knee injuries that has brought so much pain and devastation.

In my May 8 post and the Times excerpt, you can read about some of the research that explores both why young women suffer more frequent catastrophic knee injuries than men, as well as about the many proposed solutions to the problem. I’m happy to say, after reading the book cover-to-cover, that Sokolove repudiates the idea that girls are less interested in or less able to play sports than boys. The troglodytes seeking to repeal Title IX will find no comfort within the pages of “Warrior Girls.” Sokolove, whose previous books have all been about male athletes, including a much-admired sociological study of baseball and young black men, writes as someone passionately committed to athletic competition — but even more passionately committed to the well-being of the athletes themselves. Continue reading ‘Knees, feminism, and young warriors: the relief of Michael Sokolove’s new book’

On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 08, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Sports, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 13 Comments

The New York Times has a preview up today of a long article coming out on Sunday in their magazine: The Uneven Playing Field. It’s by Michael Sokolove, and based on his forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (I’ve pre-ordered the book, and will review it this summer when it comes out.)

In this lengthy adaptation on the Times website, Sokolove writes about what he sees as the extraordinary number of knee (ACL) injuries that are being sustained by female athletes, soccer players in particular. His thesis:

(the epidemic is) part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

The rate (of ACL injury) for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

At this point, my heart was sinking. Was this going to be anti-feminist ideology dressed up as professed concern for the health of young women? Was Sokolove trying to scare parents into pulling their daughters out of competitive sports? I even wondered if Sokolove was some sort of shill for the anti-Title IX crowd, trying a new tactic in their never-ending crusade to roll back a policy of equal funding for women’s sports. As a passionate sports fan, married to a former club soccer star, I have a deep and abiding commitment to women’s athletics — particularly the “beautiful game” of what the rest of the world calls football.

Happily, reading the article to the end (it is ten pages long) makes it at least fairly apparent that Sokolove is committed to women’s sports. Rather than imploring parents to pull their daughters off soccer teams, he writes sensibly and knowledgeably about the causes of what is undeniably a common problem: catastrophic ACL injuries among young female soccer players. The chief culprits have nothing to do with inherent feminine weakness. Rather, they are two-fold: poor bio-mechanics and the exhausting “club” system in high school and college that leaves many talented girls playing a demanding sport literally year-round. Continue reading ‘On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article’

The sheer delight of injustice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 01, 2008
in Sports
. 4 Comments

I like many sports, but if forced to watch but one for the rest of my life, it would be what the rest of the world knows as football. I follow several teams in England as best I can, rooting in particular for Newcastle in the Premiership and Exeter City in a much-lower division.

I also enjoy good sportswriting, and reading this tonight, I gave a shout of recognition. Writing in the Times of London, the splendid Rod Liddle notes:

Chronic and preferably cruel injustice is a much underestimated attraction in football.

Yup.

The gloomy Golden Bear redux: celebrating mediocrity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 21, 2007
in Sports
. 0 Comments

My wife, a loyal USC alumna, always accompanies me to Cal-UCLA football games. She’s happy to make my Golden Bears her second favorite team each autumn, and I try and return the favor. (We avoid each other entirely on the day of the California-USC game.) We enjoyed each other’s company yesterday (celebrating five years since we started dating) at the debacle in the Rose Bowl.

Two quick notes: far too many of the Cal students in our section left the stadium before our band could play the alma mater. Today’s Cal students are spoiled; they’ve never known a losing season, and they take bowl games and wins over Stanford for granted. As they walked away disconsolately after a painful loss, I gently berated a few for bailing out on the band and the traditional post-game “Hail to Califonia.”

As we left, some UCLA fans chanted “Over-rated” at us; I yelled back, cheerfully and in the same sing-song voice, “you’re soooo right!” As an Old Blue, there’s something familiar, even soothing, about a slide back into the mediocrity from which we seemed on the verge of finally emerging.

I love my Golden Bears, win or lose. And you know, I think I love them more when they’re losing.