NYCweboy

Is This The Part Where We Say It Gets Better?

I'm often fascinated by sports stories that drift into the news pages - especially in this weird, backlash-y moment where gender divisions seem somehow reduced, yet stark. Certainly the Penn State/child molesting scandal, or say Lance Armstrong. There's something in this extreme media environment of 24 semi-news that's made news out of stories that used to languish on the back pages and inner sections of papers; it's also true that there's a certain way of comprehending the world of straight men that can't happen without admitting the role of professional sports in those men's lives.

Not being one of those men, I kind of feel I have an odd perspective watching the Miami Dolphins bullying story play out - I think one has to care more about the socializing in a locker room than I ever do (homo-eroticism is not reality) to give these events a lot of thought. It's a thing about guys and team sports that generally, and genuinely, mystifies me: what would be remotely appealing about spending that much time with that many men? Maybe it's just groups - I'm not a joiner. But hanging out, gabbing with a bunch of women has always captured my interest more than just men.

Still, it's been fascinating to watch the  discomfort, and dismay, of football fans trying to deal with the story that's dribbling out over Richie Incognito's behavior towards Jonathan Martin, and  team dynamics generally where hazing, rites of passage, and bullying coalesce and converge. There's been that odd moment where the embarrassed sportsman submits to an uncomfortable, living room interview in ill-fitting dress clothes (it's not a great look on Incognito, that's for sure); there's been the still odder moment of listening to otherwise enlightened feminists (especially women of color) try to balance their feminist instincts against the tension of liking male-dominated sports. And there's the professional sprts industry, trying its best to shove the dirty laundry back into the closet before anyone looks too closely.

All of which, really, is about as instructive an object lesson about the realities of bullying, and how we often fail to confront it, in our culture as one could expect. What's so stunning, as someone among those who experience it, is how reports of bullying make people uncomfortable - so uncomfortable that rather than deal with it, we sort of turn away from it, and try to explain it away. "That's what the locker room is like." "It's different when we're talking about team sprts, especially at the level of professional football." And then there's "maybe he needed to be toughened up" which sounds like the bullied variation of "they were asking for it."

(By the way - yes, those are generally, if not verbatim, quotes of things I've actually heard the past few days)

Of course, the Dolphins have suspended Incognito, and launched an investigation, so officially, someone does seem to get that there's a problem here. But the larger question is really how we got here - how football got to a point where one player's career was apparently wrecked by mistreatment at the hands of his teammmates, to the point of a breakdown, and how was that remotely going on unnoticed or not addressed?

We're here, in part, because the NFL has been on a fairly relentless, very public, campaign to "enlarge its brand." In these modern media times where everything is a marketing campaign, sports branding, at a corporate level, has become the reason for everything. The NFL is trying to  position itself versus Baseball here in the US, and internationally, against the juggernaut of soccer and teams like Manchester United. TV ratings have soared for professional football, now dominating Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights. The hottest teams have become even more dominant franchises. And star players are central to celebrity culture in a way that hasn't been seen in a good 30 years or so.

All of that attention has been carefully created and tended by professionals, but there's a point where all that attention leads to questions. For football, it started with reasonable, but difficult questions about padding and player safety (players are opting, mostly for optics, not to wear much more than shoulder and thigh pads, despite threat of injury). Those questions, in turn, led to revelations about long term head injuries and brain damage that football still can't shake. And the obscene amounts of profits have led to questions about team ownership, sweetheart deals, and a runaway discussion about money in college sports that's yet another can of worms. And now, into the morass of difficut press comes a messy discussion of player and locker room culture (and that, arguably, on top of loathsome behavior by players off the field).

One positive outcome to this may be that sports reporting - and treatment of sports coverage - is in some ways growing up. It's not enough, at this point, to simply throw these stories over to overgrown fanboys and cheerleaders from the sidelines. Sports reporting is, haltingly, trying to face up to the hard questions, and to at least try and fill in context around the good and the bad of these "brands." But in nearly every case, these stories have raced ahead of the sports departments, forcing many to play catch up. This bulying story is a good example of many sports reporters getting caught off guard about the public revelation of behavior they've seen for a long time. And what follows is a struggle to explain, mixed with a desire to explain away.

Like fraternity hazing, the worst of locker room culture is unlikely to survive public scrutiny. The familiar excuses of "boys will be boys" and qualifiers about how "it's so different when..." don't stand up well to stories of truly brutal, truly indefensible words and deeds. Some, including a number of admirable ex-players in the NFL, have pointed out that the sports world is our culture's last gasp of macho male behavior... and up to a point, I'll buy the idea that weekend sports watching serves as a sort of outlet. But like the other attempts to explain, this is really no answer at all. I don't think the fun in football is about blood sport, a new gladiator class we watch  battle to the death (though there's a class element there that has a point). Competition, a game well played... these things do not have to leave the competitors maimed, damaged physically and psychically. If that's how to do it... we're doing it wrong.

Then, too, there's a flip side to the hand-wringing about bullying that's also key here, a lesson again about the turning away and the impotence of trying to "combat" bullying with reason and sense. I'm one of the gay men exasperated by the "It Gets Better" campaign (we are more than a few) because it has so little to do with the lived experience of bullying and surviving it. I'm not sure It Gets Better... what I'm sure of is I Got Better. Emotionally I got more resiliient. I learned not to tolerate or accept mistreatement. I foudn others who shared my sense of things. If Jonatahan Martin is struggling, I hope he can tap into that inner strength. Football may not get better.... but he can.

In all of this, I always wonder "where are the grown ups?" My personal experience of bullying at its worst - when I genuinely feared for my personal safety - was addressed by a caring, responsible adult who confronted the bully and took responsibility for making hiim stop. That's what it means, I still believe, to have authority and use it properly. What's worst about the times we live in, just now, is how we fail to have the common decency to protect those who need protecting, our empathy for the suffering, our responsibility to defend the defenseless. It will get better when we get better. And God knows, we're better than this.

Related articles

Dolphins' Story Is About Race And Bullying, But Not The Way You Think - NPR (blog)

Miami Dolphins owner to meet with Jonathan Martin

NFL Bullying Allegations Part 2: With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies?

'I'M NOT A RACIST'Incognito breaks silence about bullying allegations

... Including And, And The

I'm less interested in Lance Armstrong "coming clean" about his doping habits than I am about the sense that it was appropriate, or necessary, for him to take his confessional to Oprah, and why Oprah seems to think of herself as national obsolver of celebrity sin. Armstrong's behavior, and his lying about it, strikes me as fairly clear well before he admitted it on television; and Oprah showed, yet again, why this role of confessor is hardly her strongest suit. She got few if any specifics about his doping practices, rarely challenged his (debatable) accounting of past events, and was hardly probing nor suggested the kind of familiarity with cycling or the medical issues around doping to quiz him in any thoughtful way.

That's hardly new; along with the casual assumption of her role as celebrity confessor comes a docile media rarely willing to hold Oprah up to her own past, challenge any aspect of her (even still, however limited) popularity, apparently awed, still, by her (even somewhat reduced) wealth and clout. Oprah's strength in daytime talk television was never particularly related to her strengths as an interviewer (I'll maintain Donahue was way better, forever), but more her ability to empathize and speak for a segment (a surprisingly large segment, in retrospect) of the audience who shared her sense of struggle over personal issues and sense of empowerment from within. OWN has lately, with some desperation, been programmed with significant amounts of old "Oprah Show" broadcasts, and they are, often as not, fairly illuminating just in terms of the host's own transition from charming neophyte to polished celebrity sob sister. The sobbing didn't change... but she did.

Armstrong's fall was, in its way, mostly inevitable; our society lauds athletes in weird ways, and leaves them few options as their athletic prowess fades. It doesn't diminish the talents of those who can run faster, kick harder, jump higher to point out that those physical skills are temporary, at best, and no proof of overall personal greatness. You don't have to be a good person to be a great athlete, and too often we grant too much of the former and, in a sense, take the latter too much for granted. It's why, after so many years of watching, I find Olympic athletes, especially the stars, more sympathetic than laudable. Outside of those grand arenas, out in the real world, I'm not sure those unicorns really have a place in the world.

"Doping" is a curious scandal, one that I'm not prepared, as some are, to call a hanging offense. How much of Lance Armstrong's success was the extra kick of steroids and EPO and blood replacement will be hard, if ever, to sort out, and in the end, hardly matters. He shouldn't have done it. But we can't, I think, confidently claim to know what would have happened if he never had. Perhaps the really sad story is that, without drugs, Lance Armstrong could have achieved many remarkable things, and those things, the true things, are the ones we'll never know.

Instead, we are left with Lance Armstrong, the man who lied and lied and lied again, who lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth, and who, most likely, hardly knows enough to know how to tell the truth, fully, at this late date. It's okay, though, because Oprah says so. I mean, it is... right?

(The title of this post comes from Mary McCarthy's memorable line about Lillian Hellman during their decades long feud, mostly about Hellman's "memoirs" that put herself central to the major developments of major events. "Every word she says is a lie," McCarthy said. "including 'and' and 'the'.")

Related articles

Lance Armstrong's Confession to Oprah - Watch Now!

Lance Armstrong's Oprah PR disaster: polls show confessing is for losers | Harry J Enten

I was a drugs cheat: Lance Armstrong confesses to Oprah Winfrey in explosive interview

Lance Armstrong Confesses to Oprah: "Yes," I Used Performance-Enhancing Drugs

Friday Evening Flying College Dudes

jinb

The Place You Come From

My own sense of things is that if liberals want to complain about the conservative rejoicing about the Olympics... it would help if you actually a) like the Olympics and b) are the sort of "America first" person who thinks we deserve everything just because we're us.

In the short term, I think the decision by President Obama to go and try and cajole the IOC to choose Chicago will do deserved political damage - it was an overconfident, mistaken choice, and the failure to close the deal reflects on him personally - but in the long run, there won't be a story come 2016 about Chicago... but there will be plenty of discussion of the wasteful expense of the Olympics in Rio, and the devastating poverty which remains in Brazil.

The Olympic story used to be a remarkable, one world vision of how we could all get along; that started to fall apart in the eighties, partly due to the Cold War gamesmanship of the US skipping Moscow in 1980 and Russia skipping LA in 1984... but it's also a tale of the rise of corporate interests, the killing of "amateur" sport, and excessive media hype. The idea of an Olympics in Chicago - and we should remember, Bloomberg tried to sell the idea of proposing New York for similar reasons - was not, necessarily, about the idea of universal brotherhood through sport; it was a crass collection of dubious notions that a large scale event of that sort could jump start an economy, create jobs, and make Chicago a world class city (moreso than now). The most compelling alternative all along - Rio di Janeiro - always had the more emotional, reasonable story: the Olympics have never been held in South America, Rio is alrady the kind of city that has broad international appeal, and their economy might, actually, get some long term benefits.

That the Chicago folks - and the White House - willfully ignored those realities, speaks volumes.

I've Missed You...

... damn these cheap rifles
... and you'd think, with a tire iron...
... where's my lariat?!
... most haven't
... but my lawyer says it could still mean prison time
... there must be a hole in this net
... many many times in the past
... and please send my regrets to your twin
... stand up
... stand still!
... Dorothy's House won't.
... but the ravages of time have not.
... but then, as you say, I throw like a ...
... and now *sigh* Grandma's in a wheelchair
... which isn't so bad, but my henchmen have too, and they shouldn't have. Not at these prices.
... the hair on the belly under my nipples isn't gray.

...wait... let me try again

I missed ewe... have you?

- weboy and j in b, together again

Gone Fishin'...

As previously announced, the NYC Weboy will be on a hiatus from blogging here for the rest of August. Please scroll down, as it's likely that J in Baltimore and RedStar may fill in the gaps with musings, links and photos of their own. You may also find me blogging some critical things over at newcritics. I will not be checking this blog on any kind of a regular basis, but I can be reached via e-mail (nycweboy at nycweboy dot com)... and I do welcome correspondence. I will resume blogging the Tuesday after Labor Day. Yes, that means I will not blog about the Democratic Convention... but just assume I liked Hillary's speech, that the VP selection is not my favorite choice, and I wasn't all that impressed with Obama's speech.

Have a great summer. Enjoy.

...Or, We Could Also Worry About Those Winged Pterodactyls On Skull Island, I Suppose...

You may have noticed I'm taking it a bit easy today; the political weekend wore me out a bit (not mention what felt like a long spate of working at the 'bucks). I'm going to work on a few lighter things, and leave the heavy politicking for later.

In the meantime, if you're dying for a fix:

• The Obama thing: Oh I don't know... try here or here or here or here or here or here... It seems to me we're talking this thing to ever-lovin' death. Since I already said my peace, I have little to add - except this: I don't think "the media" is the problem here, really I don't. Obama said something that was a mistake, and he's being, fairly I think, taken to task for a set of assumptions that deserve a challenge; however, I think the problem is that "the problem with what Obama said" is poorly defined, and too much of it has become "Easy Reader Elitism" that isn't the real issue here.
• As Ana Marie Cox says, yes, I read that Chris Matthews thing.  And so should you.
• Torch Song Trilogy: Count me among those who didn't realize that the Olympic Torch protests around China's poor Human Rights record (especially in relation to Tibet) would make such a splash. Then there's the whole Leni Riefenstahl-Berlin-1936 thing about the Torch Relay generally... and hey, you've got a weeks' worth of discomfort right there.
• Save The Robots: Apparently, the geek love affair with talking about the robot menace just will not go away. I already played, too. This is serious stuff people. Don't say you weren't warned. :)

Wild Card Status... That's A Good Thing, Right?

Yea, we're like, wild! That's totally good, right?

Yes, Red, I know... just rub it in...