Kavitha Davidson - Power Of Sport - Encore

today's keep your presents was originally broadcast on august twenty five two thousand nineteen you don't have to be a sports fan to care about sports to hear about the kinds of things that i like to cover where police to feel their impact in some way today on cape your presents the power of sports and k mcentire for the past 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 health february twenty first two thousand nineteen eighties byrd union davidson writes for espn and bloomberg news she's also currently writing a book about sports fans and now conceivably the phone 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 thieves iran 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 standing here 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 furiously 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 then i'm going 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 when 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 you 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 armed 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 crime 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 together this song island 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 yesterday 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 i am to fine exhibition fight against another great american boxer jimmy alice 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 oreilly 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 ugly 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 things you tell me that story because frankly it 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 tax rate with a split screen of an orgy cheese next you 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 pair of my parents my family we have a lot of money growing up and the idea of going to a game of the garden going to watch sports live seemed like this luxury 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 ii 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 nic into 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 or of language and forty that this happened and i didn't believe him i thought he was teasing me you know i was the outsider 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 rain we did actually went 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 does not house 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 brinkley 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 love to do that 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 of all races 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 but most of the nineties are pretty good to amazing re arm 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 he 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 and 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 exist 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 in 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 repeal now if you're black hair and trying to explain to your son why he can't walk down the street nobody colin cowherd it is bound to come up in the conversation it's precisely this history in these dynamics that belie the notion that sports has ever not been political that the phenomenon athletes using their platforms to elevate social causes is 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 remix 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 answer this conversation and any sign the settlements and then they would just seemed ridiculous to act or what's actually going on right now in the conversations that people are having taborn it 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 but 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 protesters fundamental to our country's founding

and 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 kept under each teach ins that has you know i have dedicated my career to covering something that i promise you that that's not the case but it's our job is 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 were 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 and harris 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 roots 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 are actually against it a four he spoke his speech was misquoted and transcribed and distributed to american media outlets by the time new 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 on 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 fact that 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 work for him how he still felt like an outsider in his own game in his own country describing his first world series game he rode 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 is trauma and that i was only a principal actor as i write this twenty years later i cannot stand beside me and 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 me 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 them if you don't like it don't play is the neil if you don't like it leave the country whether it's chopper nickel bronze serena 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 indeed just at the cemetery 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 or 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 share with their players similarly surreal williams has been speaking out against police brutality as far back as twenty fifteen she re surfaced in the night 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 how critics movement the contributions of black women have long been ignored in the activist base whether it's

civil rights women's rights gay rights trans rights so let's not ignore them anymore so i promised myself i wouldn't spend this full time talking about colin kaepernick but in thinking about this event and about cap 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 in 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's it's really accurate representation our trophy case was full of math team in robotics club in speaking to be trophies and not a single athletic triumph 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 the surety and excitement of college ball through all of your eyes every campus has a different sports culture and no one is more

valid many other different experience of sports tandem 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 that and 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 or waters we're covering everything from domestic violence and one of the players on your team to watch a nascar in their confederate flag is still flying in the stands to more fun topics like how to lead your team when you take your older and again i'm a knicks fan 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 police treatment of paprika 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 in the local changes but still for many of us we look at sports and say i just can't quit you we justified as a lot of ways to go through them all oh 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 to me is the most american thing of all if we have fifty states of sports fans were still united by a single game and 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 now the south african national rugby team called the spring box in nineteen ninety five the year after apartheid and did an intel was elected president of south africa was in utter turmoil a threat of terrorism from far whites who resented their first black president was very real the country was still very fractured between those whites with lost her 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 springbok three 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 that 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 sport is any more valid than the other it also goes to show you how for mohamed to jackie to the hall to jeff seed serena and now catherine a 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 for years now after he was elected president he did a three dates for a new york city that included a 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 a new various sports championships as i know 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 it has resilience and then mayor david dinkins who was our last black mayor that we've had put a yankee cap on his head and the yankee bomber jacket around his shoulders and mandy and i just smiled and said now you know who i am i am a yankee city about boston that's sportswriter kavitha davidson speaking at the fifth annual hour of sport event at the university of kansas sponsored by katie is langston hughes center so it's a question from the audience right after this