Interrogating inequalities in Sports Media: Examining race representation in Sports Illustrated

            For this entry, I’ve done a quick racial breakdown of every cover of Sports Illustrated from the year 2013. This includes all of their multiple-edition covers that they published for certain events (the MLB season preview, for example). I’ve tried to focus on the athlete(s) that is (are) the “focus” of the cover shot. The swimsuit issue has not been included in this calculation.

            More than half of the covers were individual athletes, and there were an even amount of white and black cover athletes (30). There were four half-white/half-black cover athletes, which were actually the same two athletes used twice each: Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers as well as Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Both of the Latino athletes were baseball players (Mariano Riviera and Alex Rodriguez). Of course, football and basketball were the dominant sports, with baseball being covered fairly extensively as well. Sports like tennis, NASCAR, and soccer are not featured on the cover at all, while hockey gets a few covers around playoff time. 

            These findings demonstrate that SI is helping to market certain stereotypes about sports, namely that the big US sports are dominated by black and white men. There were nine covers that showed more than one black man and nine that showed more than one white man. Combining this with the number from earlier, that’s a total of 78 covers featuring white or black athletes. SI had 102 total covers last year. If you add the multiracial pictures, all of which had some mix of white and black athletes (with a handful of Hispanics), this makes over 90 covers from 102 that feature white or black athletes. This is not at all proportionate to the general population: Asian and Asian-American athletes are completely absent, despite making up around 5% of the United States’ general population. African Americans make up 12%, while whites make up 72%. Yet on SI covers they are 50/50, which demonstrates that race doesn’t matter in sport nearly as much as talent. It also demonstrates how sport performance can become tied to racial identity as black men make the cover of SI and other sports magazines far more often than they make the cover of TIME or other more "serious" news magazines. 

Sports Illustrated covers 2013: a breakdown

Multiple black men: 9

Black man: 30

Multiple white men: 9

White man: 30

Half black/white: 4

Latino: 2

Multiracial: 15

Other: 2

Sources:

Covers can be viewed here: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/photos/1305/si-covers-2013/1/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

Reflecting on the "Shame of College Sports: Should NCAA Div 1 Basketball and Football players get paid?"

Arguments in favor of paying college athletes:
- College sports, especially football and basketball, are already big-time televised events that generate huge amounts of revenue for schools. Furthermore, the biggest football programs already attract the best talent with coaching talent and various amenities, and paying players would change exactly none of that.
-Forcing players to play without getting paid is a form of labor exploitation, pure and simple. Football and basketball players spend much of the year training and practicing, while also being expected to do schoolwork and, in many cases, hold down a job in order to support their own discretionary spending. Forcing athletes into the "broke student" lifestyle makes them into perfect targets for unscrupulous boosters, who in the past have agreed to sponsor an athlete's lifestyle (buying them cars, shoes, etc.) in exchange for a return on the investment once the player goes pro. Allowing the colleges to pay players would, presumably, eliminate this financial mischief.

Arguments against:
- The NCAA asserts that its members cannot afford to pay their athletes, despite paying millions for their coaching staffs. Furthermore, allowing athletes to be paid as though they were professional would corrupt the "amateur spirit of college athletics."

My opinion:
- My solution to this problem is covered in my last blog entry: adopting the European system of sporting development. Instead of a clunky, corruptible and archaic system that attempts to marry sporting development and higher education (which mix about as well as oil and water), we accept the fact that professional sport is its own trade, and that pro teams should develop their own players without exploiting higher education as their own personal minor leagues. Why should a college president be tasked with running a minor-league pro sports team? Higher education can be a great place to nurture the less popular sports, like rowing, gymnastics, swimming, et al, that wouldn't exist without the support of the college system and that have no lucrative professional leagues, but for the big-time glamorous sports, it just doesn't make sense.

The bottom line is that in this country, playing football or basketball can be a  very high-paying job, and the education that prepares one for a career as a professional jock does not need to take place in the same institution where people learn how to be lawyers, businesspeople, doctors, and so on. There is a reason that people have established different trade schools for the culinary arts, learning how to fly planes, engineering, and so forth: because all these arts require very specific fields of expertise and very specialized equipment. So it is with professional athletics. Pro athletes have specialized diet regimens, exercise routines, and access to state of the art equipment and facilities. As it is now, only certain colleges can afford to make similar boasts. This spending distracts colleges from what they should be concerned with: research and education.

Sources:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-02/how-much-should-college-athletes-get-paid#p2
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/2/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

High School Sport

1)  What were the social conditions in which high school sport emerged?
-High school sport emerged shortly after college sports were created in the late 1800's/early 1900's (depending on the sport). They were sanctioned for the same reason as the college game: to build teamwork amongst young people and prepare them to work together on factory floors.

2)  What are the objectives of high school sport?  How successfully are they being met?
-Officially: to promote academic and athletic performance amongst student athletes. In reality: to prepare high school students for the college game, which will then prepare them for the professional game. How successfully these goals are being met depends largely on the school itself, and how much money they have at their disposal. Certain programs are run more like pro football teams with a school attached, while the rest need a greater emphasis on the student side of the student-athlete equation as most NCAA athletes don't usually go on to pro sports.

3)  What is the status of interscholastic sport in America?
-It's in a weird grey area. For the above average or better athletes, the system works pretty well, fast-tracking capable athletes to the pro game with few bumps along the way. For everyone else, it's a mixed bag. The education value of athletics is pretty dubious; then again, so is the education value of America's public school system in general.

4)  What are some of the problems associated with interscholastic sport?
-It can create over-conformity to the sport ethic in athletes who take it very seriously; the big focus on sport also alienates students who have no interest in sport.

5)  Provide one solution to one of these problems.
-Athletes need to be able to live their lives before they get to the pros. If a professional athlete spends 12 months per year training, that's totally fine. They get compensated in actual money for what they do, as opposed to, say, college scholarship money, which does cover major expenses but is far more restrictive. For this reason it's a bit murkier in college, and for high school, that sort of year-long training regiment can actually be harmful (Coakley pg. 497).

My proposed solution: switching to the European system of sporting development. In Europe, collegiate and high school sports are not anywhere near as omnipresent as they are on this side of the pond. This is because athlete prospects are actually contracted to youth divisions of actual pro teams. Each team has their own under-21 team, and under-19, under-17, and so on all the way down to under-11. These young players are given access to quality education, food, housing, financial training, and the potential to play in the pros as soon as they are able without having to wait to reach a certain age or complete a certain number of years of school. Also, they compete against other pro-level youth teams in U-21/U-19/U-17/etc. leagues, giving fans an early look at the future of their favorite teams.

By adopting this model, I am also suggesting that the US would radically overhaul its education system to get our public education on par with the rest of the "First World." This would necessarily involve either getting rid of or greatly reducing the role college athletics play in our society while also giving athletes a more direct path to the pros (while also making it easier for the rest of us to afford college, presumably). These intercollegiate athletic contests are lots of fun to watch, but they have dubious academic value at best, and as evidenced by the huge majority of former NFL and NBA players going broke post-retirement, they are clearly not teaching these athletes skills they can use for their whole lives. An education that stops being useful after age 35 is no education at all.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
-overview of Ajax (Dutch soccer team) youth development

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/american-schools-vs-the-world-expensive-unequal-bad-at-math/281983/
-article about the US and its public education system

[edited for spelling and grammar]

Once the Cheering Stops

Pro athletes have to face many significant issues when they retire. The years of wear and tear on their bodies will typically land them with massive medical bills, and the years of freely-spending on cars, nice restaurants and similar trappings of instant wealth usually leave them with even bigger money problems.

If I decide to hand a check for $500,000 to any random 21-year old college student in the US, the odds are pretty good that the money wouldn't last for more than a year. Why would this be any different with a young, freshly-drafted athlete?

This, in a nutshell, is why pro athletes often go broke post-retirement. Managing a gigantic pile of money is a business, and very few of these athletes have any sort of real business background. For millionaire professional athletes, managing money absolutely is a second job, and many of these young, enthusiastic male athletes lack the maturity and patience to deal with the boring spreadsheets. As a result, they end up living essentially paycheck-to-paycheck, only with much larger paychecks.

If a pro athlete neglects to save money during their career, then the money runs out when the paychecks stop, leaving them in whatever financial situation they were in when their career started, only probably with much more debt.

For athletes like LeBron James, Alex Rodriguez, and other similar megastars, money will likely never become a problem. For "average" players, who make $1-2 million a year (before taxes) while also not playing for as long as the star players, going broke is much, much easier.

The fix seems fairly intuitive: make athletes take more finance classes when they're in school, and encourage them to hire a financial adviser, an accountant, and a lawyer ASAP once they turn pro. 

Sport, Politics, and the Olympics: The1984 Communist boycott

In 1980, the US had led 54counties in boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympics on account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So when the USSR led 15 nations in a boycott against the Los Angeles Olympiad four years later, naturally most Americans assumed it was about getting revenge. The Soviets claimed it was a response to the “anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the US,” essentially claiming that they pulled out for security reasons. Cuba, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were among the Soviet bloc nations who sat out of the 1984 Olympics. President Reagan attempted to convince the Soviets to reverse their boycott, to no avail (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1122084/). This is a pretty clear example of sport being used for political gain, in addition to (probably) revenge. As far as politics in international sport are concerned, the Olympics boycotts are the tip of the iceberg.

Sport has been used as a tool for political gain for thousands of years. The statement "sport is pure and devoid of political interference" is completely absurd and false, impossible to believe for any American familiar with a recent history of the NFL, NBA, or the MLB, all of which have been beset by numerous extremely political relocations sagas (such as the Seattle Sonics moving to Oklahoma, the Cleveland Browns moving to Baltimore, the entire NFL in Los Angeles saga, to name a few). And that’s just domestic sports; international sport is a very different animal, albeit with much of the same (or far worse) corruption.

This is why the soccer-crazed people of Brazil have been protesting the upcoming World Cup- because FIFA is one of the most ridiculously corrupt organizations on Earth, and they are allowing shady politicians and shadier contractors to make millions off this event while pricing out the general public.

If you want a more detailed look at how political US sports have become, I would recommend the documentary Sonicsgate to anyone who hasn’t already seen it. It chronicles the 2008 relocation of the Sonics to OKC, which was heavily tied in with the state politics of Washington (i.e. Olympia’s refusal to pay for a new arena, the popular movement that rose up against stadium subsidies in Seattle, etc.).