February 3, 2016: Football Debates: Deflategate

[For each of the last few years, I’ve used Super Bowl week to AmericanStudy some football and/or sports topics. This week, I’ll focus on five football debates I haven’t already covered in those series, leading up to a special post on a few Super Bowl L storylines!]

On how to AmericanStudy an over-covered story, and what we might talk about instead.

In late 2015, Google announced the word/phrase that each state had Googled more frequently than any other state over the course of the preceding year. For New Hampshire, the winner was “Deflategate,” and I can only hope that it was as part of such searches as “How can I ensure I will never hear about Deflategate again?” and “Why am I still hearing about Deflategate in December?!” and “ARGH, Deflategate! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!” Because I believe I speak for every New Englander, and perhaps every US citizen, when I note that if we never again hear about Tom Brady’s balls, we will all be infinitely happier as a result. (Although that hyperlinked YouTube video just might make the whole Year o’ Deflategate worth it.) I’m no New England Patriots fan, so am not disgruntled about the scandal or the ensuing punishment—just sick to death of the whole affair.

So why am I writing a blog post on Deflategate, you might (very reasonably) ask? Well for one thing, it’s important to consider how we can approach and analyze a topic that feels talked and played out—as much as I try to focus in this space (and in my work more generally) on under-remembered histories and topics, there’s something to be said for the ability to engage with those that are already familiar and find ways to add to the conversations nonetheless. In this case, two of the most significant aspects of the story seem to be the interconnected issues of investigations and journalism in the digital age—as much as Deflategate originated with questions about events that took place on a football field, it quickly morphed into questions of whom Tom Brady had texted and how many times, what had happened to Brady’s cell phone, whether there was video surveillance footage of a Patriots ballboy and what had happened in the few seconds he was not covered by video cameras, and many similar digital and technological issues. There have been sports scandals since there have been sports, but Deflategate feels like one of the first truly 21^st century scandals—a trend that’s only likely to be amplified in the coming years.

Digital details (from a victim’s text messages to a suspect’s home security videos and, yes, another destroyed cell phone) were just as crucial to the investigations into and reporting on another recent Patriots and NFL scandal: the Aaron Hernandez murder trial. Yet as soon as Hernandez was released by the Patriots, long before his conviction and jail sentence, the story was consistently treated as entirely separate from the team or league. I’m not suggesting that the Patriots had any specific information about Hernandez’s criminal activities, nor that they’re in any way responsible for his actions. Instead, I’m simply noting that many of the elements of the Hernandez case—a tendency toward macho aggressiveness and violence, a culture of guns, a willingness to use brutal force to exercise one’s will—seem endemic of professional football’s culture, if not indeed purposefully cultivated among its players (perhaps not the gun culture one, but the others at least). If we’re going to spend a full year obsessing about NFL scandals, I’d suggest those as particularly good topics on which to focus.

Next debate tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

February 2, 2016: Football Debates: Adrian Peterson

[For each of the last few years, I’ve used Super Bowl week to AmericanStudy some football and/or sports topics. This week, I’ll focus on five football debates I haven’t already covered in those series, leading up to a special post on a few Super Bowl L storylines!]

On what’s not surprising about the Peterson debate, and what we must remember nonetheless.

One of the biggest stories of this past NFL season was the return to the field, and to the upper echelon of the league’s players, of Minnesota Vikings running back and former league MVP Adrian Peterson. Peterson was suspended for almost the entire 2014 season after details came to light in early September 2014 of his violent (some, including this AmericanStudier, would argue abusive and criminal, and as that hyperlinked story indicates Peterson did accept a plea deal for those child abuse charges) treatment of his 4 year old son while disciplining him in May 2014. It wasn’t just that Peterson returned, nor that he once again led the league in rushing and led the Vikings to the playoffs; it was that many voices in the sports media, including a controversial Sports Illustrated cover story and a number of commentators on ESPN, went out of their way to defend Peterson and reframe the abuse story in the process.

Even though I disagree entirely with those defenses of Peterson (for reasons I’ll get to in a moment), I will admit to not being very surprised by them. Facebook posts are of course a highly anecdotal way of gathering evidence, but over the last few years one of the most consistent threads I’ve seen in such posts are laments for the absence of corporal punishment in today’s society, complemented by apparent nostalgia for the beatings the posters used to take from their own parents (a perspective voiced by Mike Ditka in the above hyperlinked ESPN story). Most of those I’ve seen posting such sentiments are themselves parents, meaning either that they wish they could discipline their children more physically or (and I suspect this to be the case most of the time) they would not do so yet still are participating in the creation of this myth-making about a corporal punishment-filled past. Myth-making, it’s worth adding, that is part of a larger, just as sweeping and mythic, narrative about kids today being too spoiled and coddled and thus disrespectful and entitled and so on.

So it’s hard to separate debates about corporal punishment from those larger societal narratives—and, I should add, it’s also hard to argue about the Peterson case without recognizing that different parents discipline their children in very different ways, and that such differences are often based on cultural as well as other factors. Yet we can recognize and include all those elements in the debate and still return to this: Peterson stuffed his son’s mouth full of leaves, in order (he himself admits) to silence the child’s cries of pain and protest. As someone who believes strongly in the power of an individual’s voice, and who sees his job first and foremost as helping young people develop and strengthen their own voices, this act of silencing is perhaps the most brutal and abusive part of Peterson’s actions. And as a divorced father for whom, half the time, his son’s voices on the telephone are his daily connections to them, the image of Peterson taking away his child’s voice in this horrible moment in order (I can only assume) to smooth the process for the abuser is one I can’t and won’t forget. Indeed, whatever else we believe and argue in this debate, I believe none of us should forget it.

Next debate tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

February 1, 2016: Football Debates: The Redskins

[For each of the last few years, I’ve used Super Bowl week to AmericanStudy some football and/or sports topics. This week, I’ll focus on five football debates I haven’t already covered in those series, leading up to a special post on a few Super Bowl L storylines!]

On what’s not complicated, and what is, about name and mascot debates.

I grew up a die-hard Washington Redskins fan (that 35-point 2^nd Quarter in the 1987 Super Bowl remains one of my favorite sports memories of all time, and not just because we were watching with a family friend who had already started gloating about his Broncos), and my lifelong best friend Steve remains such a fan (Dan Snyder has long since pushed me away). So I’d be the first admit that the defenses of the team’s name aren’t hard to understand: when you’re a fan of a team, particularly the kind of die-hard fan whose identity has been caught up with that team for years and years (if not decades and decades), the thought of changing any fundamental aspect of that team’s identity is a pretty unnerving one. It’s not an exact analogy by any means, but all those fans who swore off the Brooklyn Dodgers when they moved West to Los Angeles were participating in a similar kind of angry reaction to change, and demonstrating the power of fan passion even when (as in the Redskins case) it’s entirely divorced from the rest of reality.

Because let’s face it, the overwhelming arguments for changing the team’s name aren’t the slightest bit complicated either. I don’t care how many faux-Native Americans Snyder trots out to support his cause, the simple truth is that the word “Redskins” is a longstanding, historical, undebated racial slur, a derogatory term for a community of fellow Americans. That’d be more than enough to merit a change on its own terms (as many commentators have argued, we would never permit a team to be known as the “Spics” or “Chinks” here in 21^st century America), but the team’s history adds another layer of racism into the mix: the founding owner George Preston Marshall was himself an inveterate racist, and almost certainly chose the name as part of that worldview and perspective. However tough it might be for die-hard Redskins fans to get used to a new name, those emotions and responses can’t possibly measure up to how destructive it is (not just for Native Americans, but for all of us) to have a professional sports franchise bear such a hateful name and history.

Far more complicated, at least from my admittedly removed vantage point, is the question of all the other franchises that bear less overtly racist or negative Native American names. In the NFL alone we’ve got the Kansas City Chiefs; in baseball we’ve got the Cleveland Indians (and their most definitely overtly racist logo/mascot, which needs to be changed just as quickly as does the Redskins name) and the Atlanta Braves (my other childhood and lifelong favorite team; hmm, I think I’ve got something else to bring to my AmericanStudiesTherapist); in hockey the Chicago Blackhawks; and then there are all those college and high school teams. I’m not in any way suggesting that changing the Redskins name would have to be a slippery slope to debating all these other names as well—different situations can and should produce different responses, and in any case the possibility of distinct future debates is in no way an argument in a present one. But at the same time, it seems clear to me that our national tendency to name teams after Native Americans reflects, at the very least, our collective narratives of those cultures and communities as a vanished part of our past, rather than a very much alive and vital part of our present and future. So it’s probably long past time we considered what all these names have to tell us, and where we go from there.

Next debate tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?