Sports and the Uncivil Society

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-zirin/sports-and-the-uncivil-so_b_291789.html

Sports and the Uncivil Society
By Dave Zirin

This week, the grand media theme from USA Today to ESPN has been that "we have lost a sense of civility in US society." The examples have ranged from Serena Williams’s expletive-infused outburst at the US Open and Michael Jordan’s brutal basketball Hall of Fame speech to Rep. Joe Wilson bleating “You lie!” and the tea bagger “Up with Racism” parade that plagued my hometown of Washington DC.

The idea that we are all just a bunch of uncivil goons sounds like common sense especially when you toss in the worst of reality television and anything done by Kanye West. But this conventional wisdom is not only wrong-headed, it’s downright dangerous. At the risk of sounding uncivil, the much hyped moments of Serena, Kanye, and Michael Jordan have zero in common with the confederate carnival of hate brewing on the edges of the far right. The efforts of the media to conflate “black people behaving badly” alongside “tea baggers on the march” should be soundly rejected.

I was on ESPN discussing this very subject alongside Juan Williams of Fox News who was bemoaning the “lack of civility” our culture (it’s worth noting that working for Fox and voicing this complaint is like working for Oscar Mayer and preaching that meat is murder.) Juan said the incivility is connected to the presence of “reality television and people behaving badly.”

Somehow I don’t think Rep. Joe Wilson’s been at home viewing The Real World or Flava of Love. Instead he’s reading the political moment and understands that the power in the Republican Party is not invested in civility but the heat on the street. I felt the heat this past weekend and it was a blast furnace. Yes there was nowhere close to the 43 kajillion people tweeted by Michelle Malkin and friends. But even to see 50,000 people with signs like, “We come unarmed THIS time” and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants” was chilling. I saw one placard that read, “I’m not a racist, I’m a patriot” standing right next to someone in black face and I saw groups of them mock and shout down a group of immigrant rights activists. To witness those signs alongside ugly caricatures of Obama with a bone through his nose was to see an open declaration of the attempted hate crimes to come.

Just because the Obama administration, due to political calculus or cowardice, refuses to call this out as racist and dangerous doesn’t mean we should remain silent. But for the media, it is downright irresponsible to try to weave this lunacy into the same fabric as a tennis player misbehaving on the court. Yes, Serena Williams cursed out and threatened a line judge in the US Open semi-finals. Yes, it was inexcusable. But before we reach for the smelling salts (a profane woman! In tennis no less!) let's remember that she is hardly the first athlete to lose their head in the adrenaline-addled world of professional, organized play. Long before reality television, when the Kardashian sisters were even a gleam in someone’s bloodshot eye, Ty Cobb went into the stands to beat up a disabled fan. In 1965, Hall of Fame pitcher Juan Marichal beat catcher John Roseboro with a bat right at home plate. And as long as there has been hockey, there’s been blood on the ice. Violence has always been a part of what thrills and disgusts us about sports. If anything, the Serena case reveals a gender double standard more than any “absence of civility.”

As for Michael Jordan, Rick Reilly of ESPN.com reflected almost the whole of the sports media on the subject when he wrote,

“Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame talk was the Exxon Valdez of speeches. It was, by turns, rude, vindictive and flammable... Nobody was spared, including his high school coach, his high school teammate, his college coach, two of his pro coaches, his college roommate, his pro owner, his pro general manager, the man who was presenting him that evening, even his kids!... Jordan had decided that this was the perfect night to list all the ways everybody sitting in front of him had pissed him off over the past 30 year... It was the only one-man roast in Hall of Fame history. Only very little of it was funny.”

I can’t believe I’m writing this but for the first time in my life I feel sorry for Jordan. The historic critique of His Airness is that he is more a brand than a man. I have been critical of this guy since he first laced up sweatshop hightops. Now on the Hall of Fame stage, he actually removed the veil, and showed us his true self. The sports media has recoiled in horror at discovering that Jordan is exactly who we thought he was: competitive to the point of emotional sclerosis. He’s not the first ex-jock to find himself at a loss once the cheering has stopped. But that’s a far cry from showing up armed to town meetings. It blows up the importance of Jordan and Serena and tamps down the violence being brewed on the right. By saying it’s all the same stew of incivility, we are just giving political cover to an inflamed minority that needs to be peacefully confronted and not coddled.

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .

Serena Williams Wins U.S. Open

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/sports/tennis/08women.html

September 8, 2008
Serena Williams Wins U.S. Open and Returns to No. 1
By KAREN CROUSE

No top-ranked player in women’s tennis has slogged through so desolate a valley between peaks than Serena Williams. After relinquishing the top spot in August 2003, Williams fell so far that she was not within echoing distance of the summit two years ago.

Outside the top 125 at this time in 2006, Williams completed her climb back to No. 1 on Sunday night with a 6-4, 7-5 victory against Jelena Jankovic to claim her third United States Open title.

The 23-year-old Jankovic, who was appearing in her first final in her 21st Grand Slam event, fought gamely to the end, extending points with her dogged defense. Her nerves, which were indiscernible at the start, surfaced in the 19th game, serving at 5-4, when she squandered four set points.

After breaking Jankovic with a forehand passing shot, Williams won 10 of the final 16 points to secure her ninth Grand Slam singles championship. Williams converted her second match point with a backhand that fell as softly as a tissue, then threw her racket in the air and hopped up and down. When she made it to the net, she apologized to Jankovic for getting so excited.

The second-ranked Jankovic, who was No. 1 for a week last month, might have lost the match, but she won over the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd during the award presentation. She started off by thanking everyone and her drivers. While accepting the runner-up trophy, she said: “I lost my No. 1 ranking. It’s not fair.” Then, as Williams was being presented with her $1.5 million check, Jankovic asked, “How much did I get?”

The answer, as she would soon find out, was $750,000.

No other woman has gone as long between stints at the top as Williams, who came into the tournament ranked No. 3 and will overtake Ana Ivanovic, who lost in the second round.

“It is that special because I’ve been working so hard,” said Williams, who did not drop a set in the tournament and lost 40 games.

It was a performance reminiscent of 2002, when Williams did not drop a set and beat her sister Venus. The No. 1 ranking, Williams added, “is just like an added bonus.”

Williams’s place in the pantheon of American luminaries was secure no matter what happened Sunday. That it had been five years since she held the No. 1 ranking did not preclude the two men behind the recent HBO documentary, “The Color List,” from including her in their portraits of 22 of the most fascinating and influential African-Americans.

The 26-year-old Williams joined, among others, the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and the former Secretary of State Colin Powell in pulling back the curtain to reveal the challenges and rewards of black life in the United States.

“I felt honored that they wanted me to speak on it and to be a part of it,” Williams said. “I was so excited to do it.”

Morrison talked about how writing was her only “free place,” an unfiltered outlet for her expression. The tennis court is that place for Williams, an entertainer inexorably drawn to the spotlight. Her flair for drama makes each of her matches an improvisational play in two or three acts.

While Morrison and Williams would appear to have much in common, Williams said she found Powell’s interview the most illuminating. “I was really struck by his story,” she said, “and everything he was saying.”

That is Williams in a sound bite, running around the obvious answer the way her opponents might run around a ball hit to their weak sides. In interview rooms, as on the court, Williams is famous for keeping her antagonists off balance.

When it comes to tennis, Williams has steadfastly adhered to her own script. Along with Venus, she began playing on public courts in Compton, a Southern California community that never will be confused with a tennis hotbed.

She was not a fixture on the junior circuit, and when she and Venus turned professional, as teenagers, they continued to take classes toward fashion degrees, and, in Serena’s case, pursue acting roles.

In 1999, Serena won the Open for the first of 16 Williams family Grand Slam singles titles. From the beginning of 2002 through the end of 2003, Williams won five of the six majors she entered.

Then she went from nearly invincible to almost invisible. Between January 2005 and December 2006, she played 44 matches, 5 fewer than she has in 2008. Williams’s world ranking was inching toward 140 when Chris Evert, an 18-time Grand Slam singles champion, gently took Williams to task in an open letter in Tennis magazine for tarnishing her legacy by not maximizing her extraordinary tennis abilities.

“In the short term you may be happy with the various things going on in your life,” Evert wrote, “but I wonder whether 20 years from now you might reflect on your career and regret not putting 100 percent of yourself into tennis.”

Evert, whose singular devotion to tennis stoked her success, added, “I don’t see how acting and designing clothes can compare with the pride of being the best tennis player in the world.”

Evert watched the final Sunday in the suite of Arlen Kantarian, the United States Tennis Association’s chief executive officer for professional tennis. Before the match, Evert conceded that in the long term the Williamses had proved her wrong.

Noting that former Nos. 1 Justine Henin, Martina Hingis and Kim Clijsters bowed out of tennis because of burnout while the Williamses have been playing as well as ever, Evert said: “Let’s put it this way. It’s opened my eyes not to be judgmental and to each his own. Whatever makes you happy. By having other interests, maybe you won’t get burned out as quickly.”

Williams’s fire once again is burning bright. “Just putting in the effort,” she said, adding, “I’m just enjoying every moment.”