Maintaining Masculinity

Speaking of baseball, as I was in passing below, I want to make a quick observation about sports fandom and the negative work it continues to do to reinforce accepted norms of masculinity and competition.

Around June this year I unexpectedly found myself obsessively following the Phillies again, really for the first time since they lost the World Series in 1993 (after which I had moved just far enough away from home so that I couldn't catch games on tv or radio). In part this meant spending way too much time on fan forums and message boards connected to the Philadelphia newspapers at Philly.com. As a result, I encountered the kind of sports-talk I'd always generally successfully avoided in the past, much of which is, of course, painfully sexist and otherwise retrograde. The most appalling in my view being the feminization of players who were struggling. The focus of this kind of talk was usually pitcher Cole Hamels.

In 2008, at the age of 24, Hamels was the MVP of both the National League Championship Series and the World Series. Much was made of his "Hollywood" good looks, his beautiful wife. He was on top of the world. Then this year he got off to a bad start, hurt his elbow, and never really settled into a decent groove. All season long there was speculation about his mental toughness, his maturity, his ability to not let mistakes, his or his teammates', rattle him, in sharp contrast to his apparently icy demeanor in 2008. Whereas last year he was the hero, this year it wasn't enough that he be merely the goat. On the boards he was now a "princess" or a "queen", a "prima donna". He was "pretty"; when things didn't go well, and he was unable to shake it off, he was a "pussy". Thus feminized in his struggles, it was only a short step to speculations on whether he might be gay, with the kind of mean-spirited certainty and graphic coarseness one encounters so often on the Internet. I probably don't need to spell out the kind of language used in such attacks. The sexism and misogyny and homophobia in these remarks is obvious and unfortunately not terribly surprising. But it is instructive. Thus we have reinforced for us that to be a woman is to be weak, to be unable or unwilling to handle pressure, to not be tough enough. If you are a man and are perceived to not be manly enough or to be otherwise failing in pressure situations, then you may as well be a woman and may quite possibly be gay, both of which are understood to be distinctly negative conditions, both unfortunate deviations from the masculine ideal. The logic is impeccable. The people making such remarks would no doubt claim it's all in good fun. It always is, isn't it? Not everyone says these things, of course, but no one objects or calls anyone else out. The relationship between this and the feminization of the enemy--or, even more important, of any would-be internal opposition (you gotta be "strong" on Iraq, you can't "lose" China)--that happens during a war, or even during ordinary politics, is clear. The norms and limits of masculinity must be and will be maintained.

Harry Kalas: R.I.P.

Sitting on the bus this morning, in a daze, on my way back to work after an extended weekend of brutal sleep training, I noticed over another rider's shoulder the news that Harry Kalas, long-time play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies, had died. Entering Penn Station to await my train to DC, I made a beeline for the newsstand to see if any of the papers had anything on it. The USA Today did; I read the longer-than-expected article and somewhat unexpectedly felt a big lump in my throat, tears behind my eyes. Some of my most pleasant childhood memories involve listening to Harry and the late Richie Ashburn call Phillies games on the radio. Biased I may be, but I never thought anyone did baseball better than they did. They were enthusiastic, fair, knowledgeable, funny; I always felt a certain pride in them. That Kalas was also the voice of NFL Films somehow seemed to confirm for me that that pride was not misplaced. People knew he was good. I've increasingly lost touch with baseball over the years, in particular the Phillies, since I live just far enough away that I don't have much opportunity to catch their games (though I did take a childlike delight in their surprising World Series victory last year). I enjoyed noticing Harry's voice in commercials over the years. I guess, like many others, I felt his voice would always be there. I am saddened by his passing and thankful for the many happy memories.

Barry Bonds

Dave Zirin supplies a little perspective on the coverage of the latest round of the Bonds/steroids flap.

I like that he asked congress why they were talking about steroids when people still don't have heat or clean water in New Orleans. Is it self-serving? Sure, but no more self-serving than the writers who sell papers by assessing the size of his body parts like he's some sort of beast. As for whether or not he took steroids, I still believe in something that may seem quaint in Bush's America called the presumption of innocence. But if it is actually proven that he took steroids, then I think its not Bonds that should be on trial - in the court of public opinion or elsewhere - but Major League Baseball.

He also points to the obvious but unspoken racist component of the discussion (for one thing, people calling for him "to be hung", astonishingly). In that sense, along with the fact that he has never played well with the press (and, ok, seems to be kind of personally unpleasant and tone deaf), Bonds is the perfect patsy.

Also, over at Salon, if you don't mind sitting through the ads, King Kaufman characteristically has written one of the more reasonable articles on the matter I've seen.

To me the most important revelation isn't the laundry list of actual drugs Bonds ingested or his schedule of taking them or the emotional and occasionally physical violence his former girlfriend, Kimberly Bell, says he committed on her.

It's the fact that Conte, Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson and the rest of the BALCO crowd were so indiscreet and yet so safe from both sports and real-world law enforcement.

These guys were practically erecting billboards on the Bayshore Freeway saying, "We provide steroids to professional athletes!" For years. And it took a disgruntled track coach turning in a used syringe for the authorities to even know the drugs they were pushing existed, never mind that BALCO was pushing them.

Anderson bragged to someone wearing a wire that the massive cocktail of illegal substances he was giving Bonds was undetectable, that an athlete could juice up on the day of a test and not worry about a thing.

That's the story here. Not that the most prominent jerk and steroid abuser in baseball really was a jerk and a steroid abuser. But that law enforcement is so comically behind the drug pushers.

The cops are barely even in the game. How could they be? There's no money in law enforcement. The real money's in the cheating. If there's another BALCO somewhere right now -- and why wouldn't there be? -- the drug cops are almost certainly in the dark about it.

It's a joke to worry about whether Bonds' records have damaged the integrity of the game. Bonds is a hard rain, but for all we know the game's integrity is being washed away by a tsunami of cheating.

So, yeah, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this story. Maybe it's because my interest in baseball, and professional sports in general, has been on the wane for years. Bonds was one of the few players keeping my interest on the game at all in recent seasons. I find it a little rich for people to be concerned about the integrity of the game at this late date.

I went to the Washington Post site to see if Thomas Boswell had written about it. He has. I half-expected it to be a piece bashing Bonds. To his credit it's not:

The man at the center of the storm now is Barry Bonds. But the true shame belongs to his entire game, especially those who have controlled the direction of the sport in the last dozen years.

He provides some context, bringing up the canceled World Series of 1994 and how the game was "saved" by homeruns.

[A]s public scrutiny and cyber vituperation rain down on Bonds, we should remember that he is just the symptom, not the cause. When sports fundamentally warp themselves out of greed, we never know until later where the long-term damage will manifest itself. When baseball's owners "took a strike" -- ousting conciliatory commissioner Fay Vincent and installing Bud Selig, then a hardliner, to do the deed -- no one dreamed that the greatest damage to the sport would come years later and in an unexpected form.

The true price of the strike was not in canceled games or wasted revenue or a glaring gap in the list of World Series champions. Instead, the greatest toll was taken from the game's credibility, its integrity, its place in the national consciousness as an institution worthy of high and long-held regard.