Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Issues of Safety in Football


Sadly, the final topic for our blog was obvious due to recent unfortunate events. Junior Seau, former linebacker for The San Diego Chargers committed suicide by gunshot wound to the chest on May 2, 2012. Speculation from several different news broadcasters suggested that his suicide might be caused by brain damage similar to other football players. No suicide note, no previous hints of depression, and the wound site gave hints to the broadcasters that Seau wanted his brain studied.
                According to the Associated Press report published on the US News and World Report website (May 2, 2012), Gina Seau, his ex-wife, said that he had many concussions during his career.  Yet the league and his previous team said that there was no evidence of previous concussions. The article mentions that in October, 2010 after a domestic violence incident involving his girlfriend, he went off a cliff in his SUV. He told authorities that he fell asleep. The May 3, 2012 USA Today article about Seau’s death provides more information about the incident and quotes Shawn Mitchell (San Diego Charger’s Chaplain): “I’m used to people who are close to suicide; (the 2010 incident) wasn’t a suicide attempt.”
                Susan Milligan’s blog in US News and World Report(May 3, 2012) contains a question that needs to be answered. She wonders if all the hits, if all the concussions by professional and college ball players experience have a long term effect. She also mentions that perhaps football has become a more violent game due to the use of painkillers, and extra padding. And yes, she does mention the “bounties” scandal, and suggests stronger penalties on “damaging hits on the field.”
                ESPN.com reported on May 5, 2012 that Junior Seau’s family is no longer affirming that they will allow researchers to examine his brain for concussion damage. The Brain Injury Research institute had requested that the family donate Seau’s brain. Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy did not tell the reporters if they had been in touch with the family. This is a private matter and it should be the family's decision.
                Even without the examination of Seau's brain, the lawsuits between the National Football League and greater than 1,000 former players will bring the issue of concussion to the attention of the public. At issue are the questions of why the NFL did not tell the players about the dangers of cumulative concussions and why treatment is not more comprehensive today.
The NFL and Seau's family aren't the only parties affected over these questions of safety. Parents whose children play football are also beginning to rethink their choice of sport. Kurt Warner said he wanted his children to "find another sport to participate in", and that "the thought of his sons playing football 'scares me.'"[1] But some parents aren't deterred by the evident dangers of football. The article on Rex Ryan’s endorsement of his injured son Seth’s continued football career focuses mainly on Ryan’s wishes rather than Seth’s own decision. Ryan seems to justify his position by invoking masculinity: “It takes ‘somebody special’ to play the game.”[2] The language employed by Ryan suggests that any injuries are the fault of those injured, and those who let a little thing like a concussion stop them from playing football are weak and unmanly. “I love the sport,” says Ryan (emphasis ours), but his son’s opinion, probably informed by his concussion, is not shared.[3] Now that the dangers of playing football are more widely known as a result of Seau's death, we as a country need to have a frank discussion and determine whether the slim possibility of our children's athletic stardom is more noble a goal than protecting them from the very real possibility of serious injury and brain damage.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/jets-rex-ryan-supports-son-playing-football-despite-concussion-injury-concerns-in-sport/2012/05/05/gIQAtBs93T_story.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Disabled Athletes/Star Athletes


Disabled Athletes/Star Athletes

            According to the chapter “Disability and Sport” by Marie Harden in our textbook, disabled athletes competing in mainstream sports is viewed as outside of what sports fan expect to see. We will discuss the ways disabled athletes are changing the playing fields and endeavor to show how the athletes are finding different methods of showcasing their sports activities.



            Wounded warriors make up a growing group of disabled men and women. The Wounded Warrior Project provides help to service members in adjusting to life after their injuries. Besides the sports and fitness program using adaptive equipment and trained instructors, the WWP provides outdoor recreation opportunities. Some of the activities are snowboarding, skiing, bicycling, and rafting[1]. A major activity is the Soldier Ride. This is a four day event utilizing cycling “to overcome physical, mental and emotional wounds.” All bicycles are provided for the participants, from adaptive hand-cycles to regular bicycles.
An inquiry to the resource center at the Wounded Warriors project on April 21, 2012 resulted in this response from Lonni Maddox on April 23, 2012:

In the past, Soldier Ride was a fundraising program, with individuals could register to ride with our Warriors, and that “ride” had a fundraising requirement.  That portion of the program was eliminated.  Soldier Ride is one of our Alumni only programs and has no fundraising requirement.
When WWP does have an event, such as the upcoming WWP8K Runs in Jacksonville and San Antonio that have a fundraising component for participation, our Alumni are not charged to participate nor do they have a fundraising requirement. 
Geico and U-Haul are prominently featured on the webpage.[2]  In an article published in Active Living, the director of Disable Sports USA, Kirk Bauer, said his group provides sports rehabilitation, and does not limit the rehabilitation to veterans. Along with the Wounded Warrior Project, DSUSA established the Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project. In 2007, the groups have held more than 60 events[3].


           An article in The Washington Times (October 3, 2008)[4] talked about Team River Runner. The article covered a joint fundraiser with the Adventure Sports Center International, in McHenry, Maryland, with wounded soldiers, and Olympic kayakers. The fundraising goal was $10,000. The volunteer organization (started in 2004) works with active duty soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, placing them in kayaks with adaptive equipment. There are now approximately 40 chapters.[5] The process starts with the soldiers learning to control a kayak in the pool, before taking them to open water. The article contains a quote that is a perfect lead into the following video. The quote is by Joe Mornini, one of the founders of Team River Runners. “When they are in the water, nobody knows that they are amputees. They are kayakers.” [6]

            Another group working U.S. troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan is the Challenged Athletes Foundation. In the journal Triathlete, the 2008 issue featured an article about the raising of $174,000 to support injured troops. Team Operation Rebound California 70.3 included seven injured troops, including two who ran the entire triathlon, with the remaining five contributing as part of relay teams.On the Challenged Athletes Operation Rebound website there is more detailed information on the program. It is open to American Military personnel, veterans and first responders with permanent physical disabilities. The program provides access to funding for equipment and training, competition expenses, military medical center physical training and sports clinics. [7]

The article on the legality of letting Oscar Pistorius compete with able bodied runners, inspired a search for a Baltimore Sun article on Tatyana McFadden. She went to court in order to compete with able bodied runners in track meets while attending Atholton High School in Columbia, Maryland.[8] Compare Tatyana McFadden, wheelchair athlete to Oscar Pistorius, amputee sprinter, which one will have the best chance to medal in the 2012 Olympics? As of today, Oscar Pistorius still needs one more qualifying 400m below 45:30 before he will know if he will be able to compete in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. He won three gold medals in the 2008 Olympics. Tatyana McFadden has won six medals in the Paralympics and will compete in the marathon and several other races for Team USA. 
When the news media spotlights disabled athletes, the focus more often than not is on said athletes' disabilities rather than their performance, and their victories are used as material for inspirational human interest stories rather than normal sports coverage. In an interview with ESPN, wheelchair rugby player Mark Zupan said
If I can be an inspiration for someone, that's fine, but just don't look down on me. Don't say, "Oh, you're in a wheelchair."[9]
An athlete's disability is usually seen as a disadvantage for them to overcome, but in the case of many of the athletes this post discusses, their disabilities helped them excel in other ways. With this in mind, does our fascination with and love of disabled athletes take on an ableist light? Do we look up to them because of their athletic skill, or does our support of them stem from good intentioned but misguided condescension?




[1] http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/programs/physical-health-wellness.aspx
[2] http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/programs/soldier-ride.aspx
[3] Active Living; Vol. 15, Issue 2, pg26, 28
[5] http://www.teamriverrunner.org/?q=chapter_map
[6] http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=4KB520081003081730000&site=ehost-live
[7] http://www.challengedathletes.org/site/c.4nJHJQPqEiKUE/b.6449449/k.B480/Operation_Rebound.htm
[8] http://www.baltimoresun.com/explore/howard/publications/howard-magazine/bs-exho-tatyana-mcfadden-howard-countys-lady-velocity-20120328,0,7339185,print.story
[9] http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page3/story?page=kamenetzky/murderball/050707



Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Jesse Owens in Riefenstahl's Olympia and the New York Times


Leni Riefenstahl, a Nazi propagandist and sympathizer, is famous for her 1935 documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, The Triumph of the Will. Like Triumph, Riefenstahl's filmed record of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, Olympia, is often considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made—in spite of its politics. A film that would have been another testament to the superiority of the Aryan race became something far more interesting—and for the Nazis, problematic—when Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals.

The film opens with slow pans over Athenian ruins. Perfectly proportioned, white marble statues of gods and athletes are given prominence. The statues eventually give way to living—but similarly white— representations of idealized bodies, throwing discuses and displaying their physiques. Here, Riefenstahl is clearly drawing a link between whiteness, beauty and power: the supposed physical perfection of the Aryan race will lead to its cultural and political dominance for millennia to come.

 This excerpt (the prologue of Olympia) contains nudity.

As Spitulnik points out in his thesis Sports: Unifier or Divider?, the 1936 Olympics were extremely important for two reasons: the "international stage" it gave Hitler to "showcase the Nazi regime" (10) and the feats of Jesse Owens. During the events in which Owens competes (100 and 200 meter dashes, long jump, and 4X100 meter relay), Riefenstahl regularly cuts away to reaction shots of Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering, all of whom are astonished by his performance. It is interesting to note that the only competitors Riefenstahl chose to shoot in slow motion are from Axis Powers—and Jesse Owens.

4x100 Meter Relay
Long jump. Note Riefenstahl's use of slow motion and ignore the YouTube comments.
Owens' victory unintentionally subverted Riefenstahl's portrayal of the German Übermensch. But what was the reaction of American newspapers at the time?

Segregation was apparent in newspapers as well as in society. David K. Wiggins looks at the coverage of the Olympics and Owens’ victory in his book The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin: the Response of America’s Black Press. Most of the newspapers were published weekly. Among the national newspapers were the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier-Journal. Among the beliefs expressed in the black press were that black track and field athletes chosen for the Olympics were not representing traditional black educational institutions. And the reason was due to the lack of proper equipment and training facilities.[i] Another belief stated that the achievements of black athletes in the Olympics should “…be an incentive to black Americans to do everything they could to strive for success in other fields of endeavor”.[ii]

Allen Guttman refers to the proposed boycott of the Olympics led by the Roman Catholics, with American Jews support, in his chapter titled “Berlin 1936: The Most Controversial Olympics”.[iii] The boycott movement failed. Significantly, the black owned Amsterdam News supported the boycott, but most of the other black newspapers (ex.: Pittsburgh Courier-Journal) did not want to keep black athletes from having the opportunity to participate in the Olympics.[iv]

Robert Drake’s study of the white southern press and the 1936 Olympics states that little page space was given to Owens’ achievements. The study primarily uses statistics to show the disparity of the regional newspapers coverage.

Ex: White press coverage of race in the 1936 Olympic Games.[v]
August 1, 1936 through August 17, 1936
# Papers:
Avg. # Pages per Issue
Avg. # Articles per Newspaper-Black Athletes
Avg. # Articles per Newspaper-White Athletes
Avg. # Photos per Newspaper-Black Athletes
Avg. # Photos per Newspaper-White Athletes
Deep South
26
9.92
1.48
4.60
.40
3.08
Other South/Border
27
10.85
5.81
3.96
1.08
4.08
North/West
30
110.03
6.60
4.63
2.70
3.10

In Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression, sportswriter Grantland Rice called the track and field events “a darkland parade”.[vi] Even more disparaging were the comments by Allan Gould, an Associated Press reporter. He called the events “the sepia saga.” The Chicago Tribune, covering Dave Albritton and Cornelius Johnson in the high jump events, called them “colored jumpers on kangaroo legs.” [vii]

Not all reporters wrote about black athletes in this manner. Shirley Povich wrote that success was achieved because blacks and whites competed as equals.[viii] Writing in the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill, a sports editor, said “[America is] a country where a negro woman, washing clothes, could bring up her son and send him off for an education and see him become a winner of four Olympic medals.”

[A new book on this subject, written by Dr. Pamela Laucella, is to be published in January, 2013. The title is An Analysis of Mainstream, Black and Communist Coverage of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The abstract of the article was published by the LA84 foundation in 2006, and suggests that there will be data along with text from writers of the period.
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/NASSH_Proceedings/NP2006/np2006zzq.pdf ]

In a similar fashion the August 15, 1936 national Afro-American, printed several newspaper excerpts covering black athletes in the Olympics:

New York Post: “What would do the world-as well as the more vociferous quacks of the United States-some good would be an honest affirmation of the constitutional guarantee that all men are created free and equal. As one whose ancestors took considerable licking before signing on the line for early ‘teen amendments, I offer to advanced thinkers and peddlers of newspapers the thought that that they should be treated as such abroad as well as at home.” (Hugh Bradley, Sports Columnist)

Norfolk Journal and Guide: “…the scene of greatest triumphs by Negro athletes in Olympic history is in Nazi Germany where the supposed inferiority of non-Aryan peoples is made political capital.”

A letter to the Sports Editor, on August 8, 1936, discusses the press coverage of Owens’ slight by Hitler, as if it was something not tolerated in the United States. He goes on to say that the coverage was hypocritical because there are areas in the United States where Owens would not be allowed to participate in sports, much less be congratulated.

Click link below to see one of Jesse Owens' historic Olympic moments





[i] David K. Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997),. 62
[ii] Ibid. 63
[iii] Alan Tomlinson, Christopher Young, National Identity and Global Sports Events:Culture, Politics and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup, e-book, Albany: State University of New York Press,67
[iv] Ibid, 77
[v] Robert Drake, “Jesse Who? Race, the Southern Press, and the 1936 Olympic Games”, American Journalism, 28:4, 81-110, 2011. 97
[vi] Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression”, p.60
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.


Sources:

The Afro-American. August 15, 1936. http://www.afro.com/afroblackhistoryarchives/google.htm. Web, March 19, 2012.

Drake, Robert. "'Jesse Who? Race, the Southern Press, and the 1936 Olympic Games", American Journalism. 24:4. 2011

Owens Captures Olympic Title, Equals World 100-Meter Record
https://vpn.umbc.edu/,DanaInfo=proquest.umi.com+pqdlink?index=3&did=88685050&SrchMode=1&sid=4&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1332356506&clientId=11430

Spitulnik, Michael. Sports: Unifier or Divider? A study of the response of the white and black media to the integration of African-American athletes into mainstream sports from 1936 to 1968. BA Thesis. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2010. Deep Blue. Web. March 5, 2012.

Tomlinson, Alan and Christopher Young. National Identity and Global Sports Events:Culture, Politics and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup. Albany: State University of New York Press. e-book.

Welky, David. Glory Bound: Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression. University of Illionois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2008.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Who funds the UMBC Athletics Department?

A certain unnamed instructor, unhappy with his collection of parking tickets hinted in class that monies paid in parking fines went to the Athletic Department. Doubting that this could be true, we decided to do some research. Checking with the campus media archive, we found several articles over the years complaining about fees and parking--but nothing to substantiate the rumor instigated by that instructor. A Retriever article dated September 8, 2008 quoted Helen Garland, Parking Services Manager, who stated that there were 12,041 students in Fall 2007 with only 7,021 parking spaces. An e-mail was sent to parking services, and Ms. Garland responded: “Revenue from parking fines go the general fund for UMBC. Meter revenue goes to the budget which covers parking, transportation, parking maintenance and bond payment for parking construction.” The information regarding the revenue from parking fines was confirmed by Mark W. Sparks, Chief of Police, UMBC Police Department.

    So where does UMBC’s Athletic Department get its funding? Some of the money needed is from the University and some is from state resources (www.umbcretrievers.com/info/retrieverclub). Monetary gifts to UMBC Athletics “are managed in accordance with the University of Maryland Foundation's official policies and procedures and approved Athletic Department guidelines.”  The money is used for scholarships, physical facilities upkeep, and academic support for the athletes in addition to enabling UMBC to continue competing in the America East Conference.  

    Both undergraduate and graduate students are accessed student athletic fees at UMBC. Financial statistics for some of the America East Conference teams was found on www.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports web page. Ad-hoc comparisons can be made by utilizing a pull-down menu. Comparing the student fees applied to athletics was interesting.

School
Number of Students
Student Fee Total
University at Albany
17,500
$3,192, 730
Binghampton
14,895
$3,597,227
University of New Hampshire
14,596
$6,913,818
UMBC
13,199
$5,191,591