[November 12th
marked the
125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional
football player, William
“Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking
professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]
Two individual
and one collective way to AmericanStudy our recent crop of soccer superstars.
1)
Megan Rapinoe:
For complicated reasons related to narratives and images of masculinity and
femininity, among many other things too extended and nuanced to delve into in a
sentence or two, women’s
sports have consistently featured openly gay athletes and connections to the LGBTQ community in a
way that men’s sports have only recently (and still
hesitantly) begun to. In relation to that longstanding and ongoing trend,
the 2012
coming out of US Women’s Soccer star forward Megan Rapinoe was an important
but representative event, one in a
series of such pivotal LGBT women’s sports moments. But this past
September, Rapinoe became part of the news for a different and more singular
reason: she knelt
during the national anthem before a match for her team the Seattle Reign,
connecting to and honoring (as she did even more fully in her postgame
comments) Colin
Kaepernick’s ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protest. In many ways Rapinoe’s
personal sexuality and her political solidarity with Kaepernick seem radically
distinct, but I would argue the case differently: that, as Rapinoe
herself noted in her comments, the two are connected through experiences of
oppression and resistance, and through the complicated but crucial
intersections of identity and sports.
2)
Hope Solo: Solo
is one of Rapinoe’s teammates on the Seattle Reign, as well as perhaps the most
talented goalkeeper in women’s soccer history (she’s certainly in the
conversation). But on the personal and identity side, Solo’s story is far
darker and less inspiring than Rapinoe’s. There are, for example, her multiple
arrests and ongoing
charges for domestic violence, complicated family situations and dynamics
that I won’t pretend to have all figured out but that certainly seem to have
involved aggressive and hostile behavior from Solo toward numerous figures (not
limited to those family members). And along those latter lines, there are Solo’s
controversial and troubling comments after a 2016 Olympic match against
Sweden, comments that led to a six-month
suspension from the US Women’s National Team. I don’t want to suggest for a
moment that the problems of either aggression in general or (especially) domestic
violence in particular are parallel (much less identical) in women’s sports
to what they are in men’s—but at the same time, Solo’s cases and story make
clear that such problems are a significant part of the sports world on every
level, and working to understand and address them for women as well as men can
only help us engage with these social and political issues more fully as a
result.
3)
The Pay Gap: As important and inspiring as
individual activisms like Rapinoe’s can be, I’m even more inspired by
collective action, and this past March the US Women’s National Team took
precisely such collective
action in response to a substantial gap in what US Soccer pays its male and
female athletes. Such gendered pay gaps have been part of our sports debates
for many years, dating back at least to similar (and eventually effective)
protests raised by women’s tennis players over the prizes awarded by
tournaments such as Wimbledon. But the US WNT players moved the needle on the
debate significantly, not only by making it a more collective action (rather
than those prior, more individual protests) but also and especially by filing a
complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for
redress. Too often, we dismiss sports as purely entertainment or
distraction—while in reality (as I hope all of my Sports posts
here have illustrated) sports can not only mirror and extend, but even
influence and change, broader conversations and issues in our society and
culture. As we continue to debate the gendered
wage gap in 2017 America, the USWNT have once again proven that vital role
for sports.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
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