Kavitha Davidson - Power Of Sport

you don't have to be a sports fan to care about sports care about the kinds of things that i like to cover or police to feel their impact in some way today and take your presents the power of sports and kate mcintyre five years the university of kansas and only use the center has sponsored a conversation about sports race and gender sportswriter kavitha davidson gave the keynote address at the fifth annual power of sport held february twenty first two thousand nineteen actually used bird union davidson writes for espn and bloomberg news she's also currently writing about for fans and now we have a family and the power of sports i can even exist begin to express how excited and honored i am to be here considering the titans of the industry that you had in this position before the siren who's a good friend of mine dr edwards the two living legends bill rhoden unclear smith who i consider icons am complete role models in what i

do it you're probably things yourself seriously and who is this chick right and that's where i live by what have the same thought i'm not gonna lie the prospect of standing here higher in this place previously occupied by those names has been awesome to think about but also really daunting and it's an incredible privilege most of all and i hope all will do my best to do it justice i'm so fiercely who is this chick as you can imagine i get asked this all the time how did you get into sports writing and it's a question i get asked as a woman it's a question i get asked as a brown one man armed and as you can imagine i'd answered that question in probably more words than are necessary time and again if you'll indulge me for a minute i'll talk about my personal history and a little bit with that i'm mostly because timmy sports are so personal and intimately connected to who i am i'm a comic book narrative dc but marbles fine

and i like to call at my origin story and like most origin stories this one starts with my parents i'm for background my mom's a scientist my dad works and criminal justice reform so my politics probably shouldn't be any surprise to anybody my parents immigrated to america from india in nineteen eighty one i'm the only member of my family who was born in this country so my mom could pursue her post doctoral fellowship american sports really weren't in their purview but upon landing in new york my parents and particularly my mom got really into boxing in nineteen eighty one if you've ever met my mom he would ask a question that i did how did this happen to seize this five foot nothing shall tell you she's five but once she's actually not indian women scientists who actually avert her eyes anytime a fight scene or violence comes on the tv and yet she fell in love with combat sports in the early eighties i naturally had some questions she told me that her uncle back in

india had been a boxer and he was a huge fan of muhammad ali is one of the who was at the time still known as cash as clay beat sonny liston in nineteen sixty four she remembers her uncle running into the house the next day with a newspaper with the headline in a newspaper being the only way that people in india the time could follow ali's fights and together they listen to a song that i didn't know existed that she still remembers the lyrics are from the seventies called black superman if any of our older members of the audience remember this song if not its own spotlight guys but the lyrics include float like a butterfly sting like a bee and they would sing it again for this song in nineteen eighty five it depicts riley's defeated george foreman in the rumble in the jungle this song was played throughout the streets of chennai which is a city a city in south india which is where both of my parents are from in nineteen eighty one ali actually visited india he visited for cities and china was the last of them armed to find edward bisch the fight

against another great american boxer jimmy ellis it was before for city tore that he did that was part of his campaign to convince other countries to join the us has boycotted the nineteen eighty olympics in moscow thousands of people showed up to the airport and nina bottom and field near a stadium to wash algae to watch him fight alice as part of the program he also follow local boxers which if you've ever seen any photos or preschool team trying to play at a college team it's not just a different it's a weak difference nobody really had any chance there but one of those local indian boxers was a twenty one year old named rocky brass that was his stage name his real name was rochester cloves i can't figure out which one actually should have been staged am everything about that's amazing after their fight which predictably didn't last too long ali spoke to local media and he prays rocky in a few

words he said he was a promising young boxer which was a generous way to describe him i think that as a result of that interview ravi got a very low level job working at a local railway he started as a dockworker and over the next four decades almost worked his way up to be an express train guard retiring in twenty seventeen after thirty seven years with the same company all that goes to show you how to transcend it both orally and the nature of sports are in general that someone like rocky could get a job based on a few words of appreciation from someone like muhammad ali and keep that job for forty years is really incredible that someone like my mother who never had the opportunity to watch an early fight until she came to this country still felt the social impact of this larger than life figure a world class athlete whose legacy extends far beyond the confines of the boxing ring shows the power of sports a cross cultural and international borders while bridging the gaps in

between boxing laid the foundation for my mom sports fan in america basketball is what cemented it in nineteen eighties new york bernard was carrying before passing that manslaughter patrick and though the knicks are struggling what else is you know it's impossible to overstate how much basketball men's and still means despite it all to the cultural fabric of new york as my mother puts it my answer about this recently basketball was a way for her to relate to her new hometown her new home country and to forge an identity as a new yorker and by extension as an american it's a good thing she told me that story because frankly would've held against her for the rest of my life or making an expanded on its been twenty years of long suffering at this point and it's all your fault mom my mom's a story that resonates with me and with many others for whom sports have helped shape their identity and our place in american society

basketball was my first loaf i remember the heartbreak of that ninety four finals watching aquino iii with patrick with a split screen of an orgy cheese next to it if anybody remembers that incredible day june fourth nineteen ninety five two seventh nineteen ninety four but while i have my mom to blame for my next and it was pretty much impossible to be a kid growing up in new york in the mid to late nineties and not get sucked into local sports we were very good at the time my care of my parents my family we have a lot of money growing up and the idea going to a game of the garden going to watch sports live seemed like this luxury and that you had to be kind of special to actually experience we never really considered am so what then until a school trip that i got to experience the joy of live sports it was a trip that forever changed my life baseball had always been somewhere in

the back of my mind i'm from a neighborhood in northern manhattan called washington heights it's a poor very heavily dominican neighborhood where manny ramirez is from he is the prodigal son of the heights and you can still see kids playing baseball the streets one of the few places in new york especially manhattan that still feels like a neighborhood it's also walking distance from yankee stadium that's walking distance from where the old polo grounds was and it was home to hold top park which was the yankees first stadium after they move from baltimore before they became the yankees and were known as the highlanders so all the makings of culturally and specious way of baseball fan them where they are for me but you know my parents are from india so all they knew was cricket which i'm sure is a great sport i still don't understand it if someone would want to explain that to me i'm here for that but i kind of needed this push from the outside to get straight to the diamond so enjoy my school specifically our principal who was a rabbit

yankees fan and planet this class trip and virginia connery or somewhere out there you've created a monster it was the home opener at yankee stadium in nineteen ninety six against your kansas city royals i remember that day really vividly it was snowing it was andy pettitte started it was an ipad a bottle a day actually and i still have that bubble and believe it or not it's the hanging on my bar in my apartment all my classmates showed up and jerseys and caps and they'd they were talking to each other about these players in these stats and that was a whole other language to me i didn't really understand that but from the moment we got to the stadium something in the airway is just magical it was unlike anything i'd ever experienced before thousands of fans waiting for that waiting at the gate to get in to see if his stripes chanting let's go yankees and then something not so magical happened

but something very new york a pigeon poop dog i hadn't noticed at the time i was waiting to get on get in i was also surrender thousands of people and probably a little bit of sensory overload but a classmate behind me was in knots artful language informed me that this happened and i believe him i thought he was teasing me you know i was the outsider a baseball game and any took the holiday from my body and swung around and the look of horror on my face yeah i'm so that happens everyone else of course was over the moon because that's supposed to be good luck and they were literally saying this new sort of a win against it rained we did actually win back in i'm seventy three and once i got over the earlier trauma and found a trash can for my sweatshirt at hit me the magic of baseball the smells the sights the sounds the old yankee stadium how does sound that new yankee stadium just not ours and you could feel it in the pit of your

stomach it was a physical visceral sound it all added up to that too that feeling and i still get that feeling every time i walk into certain ballparks i hate to say it certainly is one of them wrigley is definitely another one of them i haven't been to the stadium here but as i said i'm planning to come back in what'd you that way but looking back on it it was the sheer spectacle of it all it was the communal almost tribal nature of being a part of this thing that's here on this snowy afternoon in the south bronx you were surrounded by fifty seven thousand people already says teaches gender is different languages people in jerseys people in suits all rooting for this one singular thing and it was so utterly beautifully american to me i won't bore you with the rest of my history as a sports fan the

nineties were pretty good to maisie he's very armed by the time i got to high school two thousand to i knew i wanted to be a sportswriter but honestly it was the graduate level class in college that i had to petition to take and i had to take a moment to commend professor alexander because if i had classes like these are readily available to me in college i would have taken them biting him a full and it would've even further set me down this path but this class it was called the socio historical foundations of american sport and they provided me with an academic background to better view this thing that i thought was just sports you know i like to go to games any popcorn and watch my team win more often than not and instead it gave me this foundation to view sports as a vehicle to examine broader topics history economics urban planning i was an urban planning major that clearly worked out sociology gender of course race too we study things

how at the turn of the century italian irish immigrants the ethnic whites use baseball to assimilate into american society how those avenues were obviously closed off to black americans the parallels between the american labor movement and the rise of sports unions and the fact that probably the strongest human that still exists in this country is a major league baseball players association and see how that goes when there's a lockout a couple of years the role the athletes like all the champion of the it gets in tommy smith john carlos played in furthering civil rights the rise of time online and calls for equal opportunities for women athletes alongside the rise of second wave feminism the increased practice the stadium subsidies which still happens obviously on local political sweetheart deals as a new form of corporate welfare it was with all of this has contacts that i've tried to cover sports with an eye toward the bigger picture and i like to see that you

don't have to be a sports fan to care about sports to care about the kinds of things that i like to cover or at least to feel their impact in some way if you're a taxpayer support affects you if you're a woman fighting for equal pay in your industry you might be interested to see how those arguments are being made by athletes like venus williams american latino if you're black hair and trying to explain to your son why he can't walk down the street nobody calling outbreak is bound to come up in the conversation it's precisely this history in these dynamics that belied the notion that sports has ever not been political that the phenomenon of athletes using their platforms to elevate social causes as somehow something new perhaps some players and fans have always been able to just stick to sports to experience enjoy sports as surely an escape from a troubling world beyond and that's perfectly fine but the reality for many of us and i suspect many in the room today is

that sports has much as much as we love sports hasn't always been a place that has included us and that in that way is still a perfect reflection of that world beyond from which we can't actually escape so the reality is that athletes using sports to further social justice hasn't changed from decades past what has changed is their methods and their reach this in itself is the double edged sword of contact rights movement and i promised myself i wasn't going to talk about how panic as much because not because he's not incredibly important a because i think what more can we add to this conversation and any sign the settlements and then they would just seemed ridiculous to ignore what's actually going on right now in the conversations that people are having capra nick started out doing a quiet gesture a quiet individual gesture before pre season games that frankly nobody noticed remember initially sat for two games and nobody paid any attention there was no media coverage nobody else joined day and there was no house

taxi and with cap no backlash alongside it until the third preseason game but what started as the silent individual gesture against police brutality and the realities of being black in america ballooned into a sports wide movement and a national conversation about the nature of protest and purpose and patriotism patriotism is a funny thing it means so many things to so many different people just like what it means to be an american there's no singular correct definition of this and at this particular moment in our history some have taken it upon themselves to question other people's american this including people like our critic who remind us that each of our american experience is different based on where we were born how we were raised in what we look like the protests has always been patriotic the spirit of protest is fundamental to our country's founding the freedom to do so

peacefully is a core tenet of our ideology questioning america's greatness does not mean you love her any less that means we love her so much her promise and her potential that we want her to live up to both the same thing can be said about sports a frequent can i get when i write about problems in sports particularly football but all sports is wow you must really hate football re or you secretly hate sports doping i promise you i'm not stand you know under i get under each age and that has you know i have a dedicated my career to covering something that i promise you that that's not the case but it's our job as a journalist to keep our institutions and shaq and to force them to do better that applies as much to covering sports as it does to covering the white house but i also believe it's my duty as a fan it's not necessarily anybody else's duty as a fan i personally believe it's my duty as a fan to straight to treat sports in the same critical way that i do the country that i love sports so much that i want them to

be better going back to catherine and suddenly people started noticing what he was doing and we talked for a second about the actual issues that he wanted to cover but it didn't really take long for the conversation around systemic racism to shift to people calling him that anti police anti military anti football all of which are really to say he was anti american this isn't anything new when it comes to denigrating civil rights leaders and obscuring their message a week before he was killed by harrah's polls a harris poll showed that seventy five percent of americans disapproved of dr king and by that point you'd have all for a much more incremental approach to societal change to a revolutionary reimagining of what american society could be for black and whites white americans responded with a refrain now familiar that he was trying to divide not unite us we've historically since seen this in sports as well my former colleague the great howard bryant has written a book called the heritage

about the history about the protests among black american athletes the tradition of social protest and he tells the story of paul robeson musician and actor who was first known as a first team all american football player and would be leading voices civil rights activism he was an early advocate for the integration of baseball he called for boycotts of yankee stadium in the polo grounds and in nineteen forty nine the very beginning of the civil war robes and gave a speech in france or in the paris peace accords denouncing the conflict between the us and the soviet union his point was simply that another world war so soon after the second was entirely avoidable and that many americans were actually against it but before he spoke his speech was misquoted and transcribed and distributed to american media outlets by the time american media outlets published what was not his actual speech politician had politicians had branded him as an american inaccurately saying that he implied black americans would

refuse to fight in a war against the soviets which also falls perfectly in line with the history of this country the nine black americans their military service they called him names like blackstone and voice of the kremlin he was called before the house and american activities committee where they convinced a very reluctant jackie robinson to publicly denounce recent comments as not representing all black americans but in the same testimony and this doesn't ever get covered unless you dig a little bit deeper jackie also said the facts not because it is a communist he denounces injustice in the courts building police brutality and wincing when it happens doesn't change the truth of his charges the strategy on the other side here was to position robes and as this radical anti american communist against the more subdued and frankly white friendly robinson integrated baseball still racism was clearly over ray of course

we now know that that was a very sanitized version of jackie's activism and believes the story spun in seoul to make the idea of integration more palatable to white americans at the time and in his nineteen seventy two autobiography i never had it made jackie wrote about how difficult those years actually were for him how he still felt like an outsider in his own game in his own country describing his first world series game he wrote there i was the black grandson of a slave the son of a black sharecropper part of historic occasion the symbolic hero to my people here was sparkling to some it was warm the band struck up the national anthem and the flag billowed in the wind and should have been a glorious moment for me as the stern words of the national anthem word from the stands perhaps it wise but then again perhaps the anthem should be called a theme song for a drama called the noble experiment today i look back on that opening game of my first world series i must tell you that it was mr ricky's trauma and that i was only a principal

actor as i write this twenty years later i cannot stand and sing the anthem i cannot salute the flag i know that i'm a black man in a white world in nineteen seventy two and nineteen forty seven and my birth in nineteen nineteen i know that i never had a name that's jackie robinson baseball legend military veteran american hero and we would never dare to call him anti american rain fast forward to today and that's exactly what we continue to see athletes refusing to stay in their lane and having their citizenry questions because of that if you don't like it don't play is the neil if you don't like it leave the country whether it's happening to a bronze to reunite eric reed malcolm jenkins the bennett brothers the minnesota lynx the entire debbie when ba here i'm going to take a moment to acknowledge in jesus episode very well for me those activists who never actually get proper credit for being at the four freight at the forefront of civil rights movements black women

before they resent the kneeling there were black live matters and and i can't breathe t shirts w nba teams like the wings los angeles sparks the indiana fever or the first in any league to organize team why demonstrations this was long before the president called out the nfl long before nfl owners like jerry jones decided it might be a good pr move to start dealing with their parent that they're players similarly surreal williams has been speaking out against police brutality as far back as twenty fifteen she re surfaced and cried when she won wimbledon to tie steffi graf for the all time major wins record mirror and tommie smith and john carlos when she's written or talked about these issues more recently she's been accused of trying to capitalize on topics movement the contributions of black women have long been ignored in the active a space whether it's civil rights women's rights gay rights trans rights so let's not ignore that anymore so i promised myself i wouldn't spend this full time talking about contact renee but in

thinking about this event and about cat and about my own personal relationship to sports i kept coming matches question of what it means to be an american an of what role sports may claim that many of the things we talk about in sports today are incredibly divisive nobody seems to have a moderate union on athlete protest or how much money players deserve to make or whether we should pay college athletes but i also truly believe in the power of sports to unite us there we come from different places and root for different teams that we disagree on how sport should work and the society they should reflect we also fall under the common identity of sports fan the varying ways we experience and express our phantom has always fascinated me growing up in new york city and going to the schools but i did i never truly understood the high school or college sports scene look my high school was named after peter stuyvesant or football teams called peg legs actually i'm if you've ever seen spider man homecoming

the science school that he went he was modeled after one of the schools that i went to and that it's really accurate representations are trophy case was full of math team in robotics club in speech debate trophies and not a single athletic trainer and then i went to columbia and listen there's not a lot tailgating for korean fencing so i haven't it's it's a completely different cultural experience as a sports fan the most successful athletes to come out of my college for marcellus wiley and lou gehrig in a while so it's really been great for me to have the opportunity to travel to schools like a u for my job to experience that she worried he and excitement of college ball through all of your eyes every campus has a different sports culture and no one is more balance and the other that different experience of sports fan them is something that i'm exploring in the book i'm writing with a good friend of mine jessica luther she's a freelance journalist who first broke the baylor story four years ago and basically we're exploring

the serious moral dilemmas of sports fan and how different fans deal with than you know like i said some fans are able to just completely put those issues out of their mind there's nothing wrong with that and there are many other mechanisms that we use to navigate some of those murky your water is recovering everything from domestic violence one of the players on your team to watch a nascar in their confederate flag still flying in the stands to more fun topics like how to lead your team when you take your older and again and the next dam what we found so far is there isn't one method here but those of us who can't shut off our brains as some of us has some can i wanted to see how we managed to say if fans and it's definitely difficult a lot of fans i talked to said that they actually have been plenty of black fans i know have stopped watching nfl games because of the league's treatment of copper and i talked to one fan of the washington football game who refuses to watch his team and get any more money to dan snyder until the name of the

local changes but still for many of us we look at sports is say i just can't quit you we justified as a lot of ways to go through them all buy the book things but the one thing that every fan i've talked to has said is basically i can quit my team because it's a part of me it's a part of my hometown and it's a part of my identity and that's amy is the most american thing of all if we have fifty states of sports fan or still you know aided by a single game of course sports is in the fire isn't a uniquely american thing the impact of muhammad ali's stretching all the way to my mother in india shows that my favorite example of this is nelson mandela and the south african national rugby teams you guys know this story so that night south african national rugby team called the spring box in nineteen ninety five the year after apartheid ended and mandela was elected president of south africa was in utter turmoil a threat of terrorism from far away to resented their first black president was very real the country

was still very fractured between those whites with loss their singular grip on power and the black majority that suffered so much of their hands mandela made it his mission to somehow build a new south africa on a foundation of racial unity and trust he saw an opportunity in the upcoming rugby world cup hosted by south africa robbie had been one of many sports to boycott the country under apartheid in south africa had been excluded from the previous two world cups invited the captain of the spring box a white blonde afrikaner a sign of apartheid to his house for tea and convinced him to join the effort to unite the country mandela face a legal challenge in convincing his black supporters who actually booed him when he first spoke about supporting the team can you imagine doing mandela in south africa but they sell rugby in the spring boxers as a symbol of apartheid with segregated stadiums in teams despite this history of exclusion mandela wanted to spread the message that

the springbok belong to all of us now the team took up the motto one team one country the players all of them white except for one where the lyrics to an old song of black resistance that was the country's new national anthem and saying it before each game of the world cup black south africans responded in kind in with an incredible capacity for forgiveness cheering the spring bulbs tree each victory all the way to the world cup final before the championship game mandela walked on to the pitch to greet the players wearing matching green springbok shirt that had for so long been a visual representation of oppression there was a slight moment of silence the audience didn't really know what to do with that and then everyone started cheering and chanting his name in unison ninety five percent of the spectators were white and somehow they were all united in the singular caucus instead of let's go chant let's go yankees the chant was nelson now south africa went on to win that world cup it was that two

miracles that happened that day because they were playing the very heavily favored new zealand national team at that time just goes to show you why sports can do with the power that sports can have and how not any one of our experiences of sports it anymore ballot and the other it also goes to show you how for mohamed to jackie to call too jess seed serena and now clapper neck history has always advanced these bees figures histories always been on their side in fifty years i very much believe that the athletes are using their platforms right now will be viewed in a much more positive light then were giving them now so i want to end on another mandela story and this is a a personal favorite of mine i'm in nineteen ninety eight was the year that mandela had been freed from jail twenty seven years that he spent in jail and was four years after the actual end of apartheid

four years after he was elected president he did have three dates for a vineyard say that included on the speech at riverside church which is in harlan says historic beautiful church that we have in the city and i'm a parade a ticker tape parade down the canyon of heroes canyon of heroes has hosted over two hundred crates over the years they've you know ranged from that returning military veterans to celebrate and you know various sports championships as a side note in two thousand at the giants beat the patriots i skipped class to go to that victory parade and i regret nothing the culmination of that predates war was a visiting the stadium he gave a resounding speech he was greeted by a sold out crowd and he ended the speech thanking new yorkers for being so open and welcoming to him at the end of his greatest hits and then mayor david dinkins who is our last black mayor that we've had put a

yankee cap on his head and the yankee bomber jacket around his shoulders and mandiant i just smiled and said now you know who i am i am a yankee city about boston sports writer david vann speaking at the fifth annual power of supportive and at the university of kansas sponsored by katie is langston hughes center still take questions from the audience right after this from the university of kansas kansas public radio year nine he won five more and ninety one three goldberg junction city on the words public radio support for kate years without public radio comes from a rare light theatre soiree a benefit for musical theater heritage saturday september fourteenth at crown center in kansas city jails and entertainment that empty bases

and from nazi arts council presenting the two thousand nineteen airports that august twenty eight through thirty years artists from across the country will keep on site competing for prizes and selling their large part street performers and more details on a time in nazi arts council facebook page today on cape your present the power of sport a conversation about sports race gender and business this years power of sports event was held february twenty first two thousand eighteen at the university of kansas birch union it featured sportswriter kavitha davidson who now takes questions from the audience what can call in kaepernick do next i feel it started but there's still more to do what what next can he do so i think thats as i appreciate the

question i think it's somewhat unfair ask that of hamlet because like i said he didn't go into this thinking he was gonna launch a movement i think it's a little bit unfair to place the burden of the whole movement on one man's shoulders i think what he's done so far is far and beyond what we could've asked of him and still you have the cabinet supporters i understand where they're coming from wishing he hadn't taken the settlement right because only what about the discovery with the nfl they would've seen what he actually had on them but she also sacrificed his career for two years he sacrificed a paycheck for two years and i think what he can do next is what he's been doing for the last two years which is the silent donating money to all of the causes and maybe once in a while taking a speaking engagement even though he's not rigidly comparable doing that in itself and i think they think he's done given the history of protest by athletes in this country

why do you think it is still so easy for people in general to object to fight and beloved by athletes when they do take a stand because as you alluded to down the road will recognize the contributions of these individuals somewhere along the line muhammad ali was vilified now he's a hero so why do you think it's still so easy for us to build by these individuals i am i tend to take the view that despite the promises of our country were still completely anti labor and especially the black athlete forced is an underappreciated labor force whenever you hear about contracts negotiations and things like that fans tend to take ownership side they tend to say things like this player wants too much money for playing this game and interaction walk around and consider how much money the people paying them are making off of that rain so we've evolved from the fifties

and sixties to this point now where athletes not only have more vocal power they have or monetary power and a lot of people resent that very much and the idea is that they're getting paid to play a game that they're getting paid to provide the products that were all very willing to spend our money on but that they're getting paid to play game and it's this idea that they're not other deserving class of people that make their money i think that when people protest the idea from the people who take upon themselves that they're the ones being protested at the guns even if they're not is will surely be happy with what you already have with the strides even made with where you are right now and then you can actually see how much athletes have gained in the last few decades and maybe come to that conclusion if you're only comparing them against athletes of the past but that's not where the fare comparison is it's really hard to say when if and when will actually get to the point where people will understand and appreciate protest

in the way that we hope that they do is it does tend to be used against blacks who protested was also use against the student protest movement the nineteen sixties and you know it's it's something that is very much ingrained in us as a country that you know we don't we have this radical tradition we are a country built on this radical tradition but culturally we like to add here to this idea of conform of conformity and on and the respect for authority that protest isn't actually meant to overturn but to change so i know i don't really know how we evolved beyond where we are it except to further understand that history and to further understand the dynamics and frankly to keep hearing from people of color who are in the police force an immoral in law enforcement in the military who so tell us from their own mental experiences why why did these protests aren't

anti american that it's very easy for me a standup here is someone who is neither adequate nor veteran intelligence and it's another thing entirely to hear that from someone who occupies but spaces do you think about team send us now does football only gave enough support that's a really complicated question because even within the nfl there were there's a player's coalition that sign off on not it is a beating in protests in exchange for what they thought were concessions from the nfl and then there is an entirely different set of players like malcolm jenkins i was i like the bennett brothers who thought they'd be sold out a little bit i think that other players as genuine as they might have been needed a push needed to see that more support is coming out for cabinet before they actually start to participate on mass that obviously it doesn't apply at all all players teams though i'm very cynical when it comes to this i don't think teams or leagues you anything unless there's a pure motive and

i'm you know the money jones wrote a great piece for the undefeated about happen again he basically said the greatest thing to happen it brought us with bringing jerry jones to one knee and weston jerry doesn't take that me without proper motivation right so i know i don't really think that teams and if they did support their players were jammed genuinely into it and there are a couple of exceptions there are a handful of owners that have bona fides in social justice and handguns and activism but for the most part it's it's all business decision so i'm curt flood zero is issue he lamented the fact that the pete rose is in the willie mays is didn't come to his defense so perhaps in a comparison news later if it the tom brady comes to his defense maybe we see some movement yeah i'm the only player that i can think of aaron rodgers has said a little bit because he is really

good at this game i'm chris long has been the only white player that i can think of that actually been i'm chris cooley who's nom meet anymore because one of the only active player white player and i think that actually shown solidarity hear curt flood sonny i'm i wrote my might make peace this paper in that graduate class aren't on curt flood and free agency and the tragedy there and hopefully this will be the tragedy with kapur neck and wear with his fellow athletes who have shown activism that curt flood never got to reap the benefits of free agency on and now look we're were arguing rightfully so over labor dynamics in baseball after three hundred million dollar contract was signed by that is all part of his legacy that he didn't actually get to see pursley for phil and so continuing to talk about like the fight for it may require the white do you think are some of the unique challenges facing collegiate athletes in the struggle for labor equality and so this is a really fraught issue right

and if anyone watch the game last night scientists brought this straight to the forefront i think if you follow me on twitter you know exactly where i stand tremulous i think athletes deserve compensation in some way i don't quite know what the proper mechanism is there there are a lot of building body used to be a peace to match power five conferences have already figured out awaiting that for their football players' arms but we need to start at least having this conversation and incidentally needs to start being more open to having that conversation i'm hopefully the rise of the chile will create some of that pressure on hopefully you know it really is a mild spring in that science going through we don't have to hold him up as the smarter is i don't believe and mortars to get things caught to get things causes passed on but i do think that there is there is this piece here to probably have a conversation now there's also a cultural dynamic that we

have to overcome if you poll people about support for paying college athletes the yes and the no divides very starkly between white and black responders and that goes back to what we're talking about about having an unpaid an underappreciated labor force i don't have the economic honestly don't have the answers quite for the mechanism there there is an economist named andy schwartz on who is starting a league called the hbo the historic basketball league word he is paying players from htc used to play in a shortened season it doesn't coincide with the instability season and just trying out as a model i'm i think more than anything is hoping that this will force considerably to come to the table with one in some of these conversations and so something that's really frustrated me recently with the nfl is that along with this objection to know social justice protests there is this overwhelming acceptance of players such as karim hunt

who have a history of violence against women on that as a woman in the sports world how do you navigate that that was probably the first challenge that i encounter in my career i started professors were trading for bloomberg in december of twenty thirteen and into neatly twenty fourteen the ray rice video hit re arm and i've covered more of these cases that i would like to have a home they think with the case of cream hunted states it's really difficult to have these conversations because of what i talked about earlier because so many fans don't wanna look at the video doesn't always have to be video also like to see that by the way i am but they also they want to be able to just watch the players they want just be able watch these games about thinking about these things and where the chapters of the book that i'm that i'm working on is precisely how do you find roots for your team when there's a player accused of doing something awful on it it's

it's always it's always about how much the player can still bring how much value the player can still bring i think we saw that with greg hardy i'm going to the cowboys and the interesting thing to me about greg hardy is not only did we have photos in we have a guilty conviction for the first trial on them because of the peeled the appeals process should ensure but not against that on by a team like the cowboys took a chance on and even performance incentives all of that and what ended up happening wise is nature came out he fought with players and coaches on the sidelines he fought with people in practice he was not a good teammate and he probably could have guessed that based on his his previous behavior that's not to say i don't believe in second chances i think one of the tragic not tragedies i think one of the sad parts about the ray rice thing is that he is probably the only athlete who has been through something like this who in my opinion has shown true remorse he's gone

to anger management classes he's really worked with domestic violence groups and he gives talks to players now about that if you hear him talk about you can hear how much he has actually change and that it may have actually been a one time thing it's not for me to say that but if he had been not at the tail end of his career he absolutely at this point would have got another chance re arm at it it's hard for me to navigate those pieces on sexual assault survivor and it's always hard for me to cover these kinds of things but one woman i interviewed for that for the book by said to me that you know world is chapman closer now for the yankees was traded from the red sea the yankees two years ago for absolute nothing because they want to get rid of him he'd shot a gun at his girlfriend in the garage and all time she was hiding in the bushes there is a lot of things there on the yankees ended up training into the carbs and the cubs won the world

series with him as as they're closer we signed him back an arm i've written about how difficult that is for me that is my favorite player of all time was are closer in the nineties mariano rivera and i've completely lost my ninth innings now but the woman i interviewed is the cubs fan and obviously you know the cubs where the world series in you can't not root for your team in the end of waiting and how do you know how you are always competing thoughts that you're having about this and she said i was a messed up rooting for my team i don't stand when he comes in to pitch that's my little form of protest that i can hopefully to justify to myself but she also started a twitter campaign i'm the worst every for every i believe it was for every strike out not every out for every strike out chapman recorded she donated a dollar to have her local domestic violence shelter and that was her really a small way of offsetting the impact that he had on with something that was localized that she thought was taking actual action like i said i don't expect every family her every media

diversity to do something like that we all have to try to figure out on her own how we reconcile that but it's definitely it's difficult and what about first just a second we do talk about these college athletes we have a hand on the august course aspire to be professional we all know that a very small percent of make that what impact he and journalism and media have on their use you all aspire to be you know famous you know the bronze in all these things but you never hear about somebody aspiring to be a broad obama or a george washington carver you know john lennon we never hear about those so what can journalism do to impact that right balance a long time the first thing i'll say is i think we have to make those numbers a lot more prevalent the two percent that actually it won out that actually make it to the pros i think all of us probably know that probably has taken professor alexandra class on the other part of that

statistic that i think really demonstrates how difficult that is is not as the two percent make it to the pros but eighty four percent believe that they will and that disparity is what causes a lot of this identity crisis that you guys were talking about on and did not necessarily being prepared for world beyond sports as journalists i'm you know i think that i understand we're going with that question absolutely i am and you know we need to do a better job of elevating other things i don't think the elevator now is the reason that every little boy aspires to be an athlete i do think that there is a there actual systemic reasons that poor black youths from certain areas of the country can only get college scholarships if they're actually there's a reason that there are more blackett there are more black men playing football in basketball or playing baseball it's not it's not a talent disparity on we

do need to do a better job of highlighting people who have had successful careers after high school and college athletics but that being said there is an unspoken benefit of playing sports at whatever level that you're playing sports one of my favorite things interesting and does it or year is they put out a study on where they survey the c suite women at fortune five hundred companies and ninety four percent of those women have played sports and some awful and that tells you a lot of you know most of those women don't think that they're going to grow but there are benefits to have to have bigger to have playing sports on that extend beyond just the prospect of a pro sports i don't really know what we can do culturally to see you know it's it's just said it's a function of who where the money goes who gets paid frankly i'm but also of stardom right who doesn't wanna be famous i mean most people are pretty famous sitting on a city council for four years until they make it

too you know a little bit broader politics and just like not everybody is that you were primed nobody's getting deeper are crammed with that kind of sideways into my question which is gender equity we talked earlier about end of us over his mls salaries of women professional athletes versus man recently iceland passed a law that said they had to be paid the same professional athletes both men and women and so it'll yet to be ceo seen how that translates but and then it gets kind of a labor question as well so like in this country we have to force change toward legislate change do you think that that's what needs to happen when it comes to equitable pay for women professional athletes can remember her name in here and really exact quote the uk minutes and the head of the uk ministry of sport is a woman she's new season

coming and she recently gave a speech and pass a law to increase funding for women's sports and to mandate that men's teams that have women's teams alongside another model is different over there especially with club soccer on that but the day to vote equal resources to both men and women sports and again i can't remember the exact language around a bit she basically said you were waiting for this moment where women's sports justify having this money for about them they justify them just by existing right arm and the idea that it takes government intervention to help support role unique to women sports and i'm on the soapbox all the time especially talk about the government being absolutely what the end of us saudi women's hockey league see the view each of the end of the reach out and men's sports from its infancy always had government assistance in some way

football have a lot of sweetheart deals in order to have the afl the nfl march on and part of that deal was actually the five o m c six nonprofit status that the league office was able to claim until they gave it up a few years ago the reason they gave upbeat being that and they have to disclose executive pay uh hum baseball is still anti trust exempt is woven into justin's ever since the nineteen twenties the original reason that baseball has that exemption is because even the nineteen twenties the supreme court decided that baseball did not constitute interstate commerce you had you had teams traveling between across state lines you have a radio broadcast of these games so fine it was a nineteen twenties has been challenge the supreme court twice since then most recently in the late eighties i believe it might've in the early nineties and even then there is too much for president today anyway that's all a huge way of saying that there's always been a

government push to help men sports ground and one of the only reasons that we don't have the push for women's sport is one because we're comparing them to men's sports which is unfair it's we can expect the w nba to reach the levels of the nba that's right it's a twenty year old leader that you know look at where the nba was when it was twenty the nba was broadcasting playoff games on tape delay on cbs until nineteen eighty six i am so the idea that we should have some kind of government intervention i am completely in favor but it doesn't mean to necessarily come to that i think it's really encouraging that in the uk they have ministers professing that line but the fact of the matter is there's enough money here in the sport and the sports ownership world it just takes owners who actually care about women's sports i don't know that always means that female owners are female executives that helps it definitely helps but that also means prioritizing the televising of these games

espn is doing a much better job this year than they have in years past of putting the nba games on primetime on espn that hasn't always been the case on if you're not showing fans the product you can't be surprised when fans are consuming the product i'm so i think that there is a confluence of things that can happen here with soccer like we talked about earlier there are a lot more complicated dynamics because of the money issue because of how little money is still in the sport in general i'm and because you know there's a trying to grow soccer as an actual draw as an audience try not just something that you know kids do which it's not right that we still elicit soccer is the biggest game in the world and we still don't have viewership for premier league games in the way that we should so there are a lot of challenges there but i do think the government can play a huge role in this endless than we've had senators in the last few years put forth congressional i statements proclamations about the importance of equal

pay for what for women athletes and you know that's all that really is a statement and that's great for political reasons buying and see what actually turns into some funding please give will roll was forceful speech you've just heard sportswriter for the fed davidson speaking at the fifth annual power of sports and posey and at the university of kansas this event was held february twenty first two thousand nineteen sponsored by kelly hughes langston hughes center i'm j mak entire kbr present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas or has been it