Out There, For All the World to Know

Yes, it’s a big deal.

A few hours into the news cycle of Jason Collins’announcement that he is gay, perhaps the most perplexing comments of all seemed to be that this is not news.

I know, I know, reading online comments only brings horror and exasperation, but I was more or less just curious what direction they were taking in the sports world. And I was more or less surprised not to be appalled.

Of course there’s the snark that comes when a journeyman player most have never heard of comes out. Things like “Jason Collins is a gay NBA player? I didn’t know he was still in the NBA.” The jokes seem to be mostly about who Jason Collins is (or isn’t) as a ballplayer than anything else that I’ve seen.

And that’s a good thing.

There are also the comments about this not being so Earth-shattering if it had been a superstar, but Jason Collins himself summed it up by saying someone had to be first and it might as well be him.  Of course it would have been an even bigger deal if it were Kobe Bryant or Kevin Durant, or a superstar in the NFL or Major League Baseball.

And that’s true, but it doesn’t take away the impact of it all.

It’s those who wonder why this is a story at all that make me scratch my head the most. The online commenters have been joined by sports talk radio hosts on that non-topic topic as well. It might not be a big story to you, but guess what? This isn’t about you.

To say this isn’t a big deal, that his sexuality being known is not important, is to assume that Jason Collins is going to be warmly accepted with open arms by every person who hears the news. The same way gay kids are so warmly accepted by everyone they encounter in childhood and beyond. The way some gay employees don’t want to come out at work because they don’t know how they will be received. The way many gay people don’t want to come out to their own families for fear of being disowned or condemned as a sinner.

To say Jason Collins’ announcement isn’t news is a slap in the face to everyone who has been on the receiving end of pain and prejudice throughout their lives. To simply say it’s the media latching on to a good story sells the media short, too. In its most noble form, what the media has always been is a way for people to tell their story. Every newspaper in America fields calls every day from people who feel they have been wronged and want the paper to help. Jason Collins had a story to tell, and found a respectable outlet in Sports Illustrated to convey it where it would have the most impact.

Jason Collins can be told his inside game sucks, or that he never really amounted to much in the NBA.

Just don’t tell him or anyone else that what he did by coming out is insignificant. One day it might be insignificant when a U.S. male pro athlete comes out as being gay. And if that day ever occurs, he'll be able to give a big thanks to Jason Collins.

Sometimes, the Game-Changer Is an Actual Game

Jackie Robinson changed everything when he broke baseball's color line

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It might have been a fair point the guy raised when he wondered about my profession if he himself hadn’t been so utterly lacking in perspective.

It was years ago, when someone asked me what I did for a living and I replied that I was a sportswriter.

“That must be tough,” he said. And before I could answer he continued, “I mean every day you go somewhere and someone wins and someone loses and you tell the same story over and over. It must be tough to stay interested.”

I was dumbfounded because this comment came from a singer-songwriter (admittedly one I never did like) who, conceivably, made a living by singing the same songs over and over.

Such is the life of the sportswriter, putting up with many people’s perceived notions of sports. You’ve heard them all: a waste of time, opiate for the masses, rich men’s game, etc. etc.

Here’s one few bother to mention: Effective tool for social change.

As “42,” the biopic of Jackie Robinson, heads to theaters this weekend, it’s chance again to celebrate the bravery of the man who broke baseball’s color line. Many other upheavals in racial relations followed in the years to come, but it’s hard to imagine any of them happening if change hadn’t first come to baseball.

Yes, sports are fun and games sometimes but they have also been a key factor in civil rights and gender equality in this country. No doubt sports writers in 1947 and beyond realized they were watching much more than baseball; they had to know they were watching history.

And it was a sports writer who had started to beat the drum of equality in baseball a decade before. A man named Lester Rodney is sadly a footnote to history, most likely because he worked at a Communist

Lester Rodney (Ray Rodney photo)

newspaper. But in his columns for the Daily Worker that began in 1936, Rodney championed Negro Leagues ballplayers, took on the powers that be in Major League Baseball by calling for integration and very early on took note of a talented young man named Jackie Robinson before any newspaper written for white folks ever did.

“You go back and you read the great newspapers in the ’30s, you’ll find no editorials saying, ‘What’s going on here? This is America, land of the free and people with the wrong pigmentation of skin can’t play baseball?’ Nothing like that,” Rodney told writer Dave Zirin in 2004, five years before Rodney died at age 98. “No challenges to the league, to the commissioner, to league presidents, no interviewing the managers, no talking about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson who were obviously of superstar caliber.”

A victory off the court, too. (AP)

A similar change came 26 years later when Billie Jean King’s victory meant everything to the women’s movement. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around that now, that a made-for-TV athletic event of a women’s

tennis player at the peak of her career defeating a 50-something former pro men’s player would do in some way for women what Jackie Robinson did for African-Americans. After that people paid attention to women and girls as athletes and the stage was set for implementing Title IX and much that came after.

I have a friend, a feminist who often writes on women’s issues. About 20 years ago, when I was covering women’s athletics, she admitted she knew nothing about sports and didn’t know what Title IX was.

“I’ll teach you,” I said, “because calling yourself a feminist and knowing nothing about sports is like calling yourself a Civil War scholar and knowing nothing about Abraham Lincoln.”

I was in a polyester uniform when sports for girls and women began to change in the 1970s, and courtside as they transformed in the 1980s and 1990s, as were many of my friends. Indeed I enjoyed covering women’s basketball because I had played it and enjoyed the sport, but there was something greater at work. I wasn’t just sitting courtside at basketball games; I had a close-up seat to history.

For many sportswriters who covered this stuff, that was a motivation to do it and to do it well, male or female writers. It wasn’t just the fun and games of it all – though it really was a fun way to make a living – but there was a greater good to it all sometimes. I understand why other women my age might have wanted to cover the NBA or NFL, but I did not. It was too exciting to be part of something that was growing, changing and creating opportunities where once none had been. I’m a history geek and I knew I was seeing it live.

I’m not saying sports writers deserve the credit for the social change that transpired under their watch. The bravery was all on the part of the participants, and I can only wonder what it would have been like for a Jackie Robinson or Billie Jean King in our toxic anonymous media-saturated culture. I wonder if they would have survived with their lives, Robinson in particular.

Now we're at a point where baseball worries about not having enough African-American ballplayers and girls walk around tall and proud in their letter jackets and sweatpants; that says everything about how sports has made a difference in who we are as a nation.

Anyone who thinks differently is just singing the wrong tune.

Everyone's a Critic, But There Was Only One Ebert

Roger Ebert was famous for a thumb's up or a thumb's down, but it was in reading what he wrote that movie-goers could learn about the films they love or hate. (Reuters photo)

If I really wanted to push a Brush With Greatness, I can truthfully say that I was once replaced by Roger Ebert.

Not that he noticed. Or even knew where he was ending up. Or that his life was made any the richer for now being on the pages of the Des Moines Register.

Such are the weird twists and turns my life has taken over the years: When I left Iowa, I had been a film critic for the Register, and have written about movies off and on for the past 15 years. When I left that job, I was replaced with wire-service copy until the paper brought on another reviewer, then stopped having staff-produced reviews altogether.

As many papers opted for the same route, Ebert’s reviews became all the more important to people, certainly those in the Midwest. We’re not Hollywood flash or East Coast superiority; we’re regular folks who are smarter than people think and do not suffer fools.

That’s why Roger was our guy. He was a Midwestern guy who wrote about movies but also looked like a guy you might see down the block with a garden hose in hand. If you couldn’t have someone local writing about this stuff, this guy still seemed to know who you were and what you wanted out of your movies. It was only after papers began cutting back on their local reviewers and the Internet took over the world that some people finally got a chance to read Ebert instead of just watching him on TV. And for all his TV fame, in print is where he truly shined.

In some ways, he made it look easy, which had to have been a blessing and a curse. It was great that he wrote for the average movie-goer as much as the academic, but his facility at that no doubt led to a sense that everyone could do it.

And trust me, it isn’t easy. In any kind of opinion writing you risk offending people. In reviewing movies, something so basic to everyone, you risk offending things that people hold near and dear. If you don’t like something they love, it’s sometimes as if you have wounded them as a human being.

I once had a voicemail message left for me from a guy who was ticked off at me for my review of “Detroit Rock City,” a road/buddy movie about guys going to a KISS concert. I didn’t give it a very good review and this guy, a huge KISS fan, was livid. I won’t go into details about what he thought someone should do to me.

And the thing is, the reason I didn’t like it was because KISS is awesome and deserved a better film than that. I wasn’t reviewing KISS, I was reviewing a film about KISS, yet this guy couldn’t see the difference.

I also gave either a one- or no-star review to an alleged film called “Three Strikes.” It was written and directed by rapper DJ Pooh and co-starred the guy who played Huggy Bear on “Starsky and Hutch,” among others. My contempt for the film sparked an email from a guy called “Snoop” wondering why I hated black people so much and wanted them to fail.

“Sorry, Snoop,” I responded. “I hate a lot of movies that don’t have any black people in them at all.”

It wasn’t all bad. An older gentleman once called me wanting to pick a fight over my positive review about “Magnolia,” a film he and his wife hated so much they left the theater. (Ebert later put it on his list of  "Great Movies.")

“Yeah, I can understand that,” I replied. There was silence on the end of the phone because he did not expect me to agree with him. I told him why I liked the movie (because it is so honest and raw with its family relationships instead of content to give us a fake happily ever after). We ended up having a wonderful conversation about that film and movies in general.

That’s why it’s sort of unfortunate that Roger Ebert (and Gene Siskel) became so known for the thumbs up or thumbs down. Liking or hating something is more nuanced than that, and no doubt those guys knew that. That’s why reading Ebert was such a joy. You knew just why he did or didn’t like a film. It wasn’t necessarily because it reminded him of some Swedish film he’d seen at Cannes in the 1970s, it might have been because it reminded him of something joyful from his childhood.

For me, this all happened in the Internet’s infancy and before the advent of social media. Both no doubt made it easy for people to get in touch with Ebert and agree and disagree, not to mention post their opinions on Amazon.com, their own blog or various other sites and platforms. And he ran with it, using all those platforms for himself as well.

These days, everyone’s a critic. And in some ways -- the good ways -- we have Roger Ebert to thank for that.

Glory, Grief and Real Life

Sometimes, like the Iowa Hawkeyes' C. Vivian Stringer, right, and Laurie Aaron in 1993, you celebrate those moments that life gives you to celebrate.

For athletes and sports fans, the seasons of glory tend to stay in your mind forever. Championships clinched, big games won and the chance to breathe some rarified air are what anyone who loves sports wants to experience.

In Iowa, 1993 was a year with plenty of that rarified air, and I've been thinking about that year -- specifically the 1992-93 basketball season -- a lot lately. Yet in my mind, I don't remember it as a season of glory. It was a season of grief.

Twenty years ago, the Iowa women's basketball team earned its first and only trip to the Final Four and had a team good enough to contend for a national championship. I was The Des Moines Register's beat writer for the Hawkeye women's team, and it was gearing up to be everything a sports writer dreams of covering, only to end up a different story altogether.

On the night before Thanksgiving, the 47-year-old husband of then-coach C. Vivian Stringer died of a heart attack. Her life and the life of her family changed forever. Somehow, in ways I still can't get my head around today, she joined her team six weeks later and continued the season.

In that same two-month period, was the death of Hawkeye men's basketball player Chris Street in a car accident and the deaths of the women's team's former ballgirl and its team physician.

People think sports writers have the easy job, that we cover fun and games. But people forget that those involved in sports -- as players, as coaches, as writers -- experience the same gamut of life as everyone else.

And it was all there in that season in Iowa City.

The national media figured it out, of course. Week by week, they came into Iowa City to tell the story of the team that was rising up from all this adversity to play beautiful basketball. National media were generally kind, but their presence made it all less about the individual games and more about the greater narrative.

And every time, there would be the questions. I would think to myself, "Please don't ask, please don't ask, please don't ask ... " and of course they always would. You could just see the energy drain out of the coaches and players as their moment of joy was interrupted by a reminder of the sadness around them.

These players and coaches were people I had known for years and had come to care about. I got to the point where I felt protective of them and would even just make up questions on the fly at press conferences to change the subject or mood. After months of this, I had begun to hurt for them, too. I'm certain my co-workers who covered the Iowa men's team that season felt much the same way.

Journalists are members of our communities, and what happens to our communities happens to us. We get to know the people on our beats, and life can creep into any beat there is, sometimes when we least expect it.

I recently learned the story of a former colleague, a longtime courts reporter. In 1988, he was at an administrative building looking for a story on a slow news day, and the coroner asked him if he wanted to have lunch with him in his office. My colleague declined and walked away.

Minutes later, a gunman came into the coroner's office and shot him to death. My colleague set aside his horror and grief, called the office of his afternoon paper and asked them to hold the presses. A half-hour later, he had the story written.

Last month, that former colleague died. I got the call on a Sunday evening, assigned a reporter to write his obituary, suggested some people he could call, looked through some photos to choose just the right one and edited the story.

As I closed the story, I closed my eyes. There were tears building, but I sighed, went back to work and kept them from falling.

To paraphrase a movie about baseball, there is no crying in journalism. It's not that we don't feel the need; it's just that if we ever started, we might never stop.

(This post first appeared as an essay in the Wisconsin State Journal and the Des Moines Register.)

Fans for the Ages Made a Difference

When the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series in 1957, it certainly wasn't just men who found it worth celebrating. (Francis Miller, Life magazine)

(A version of this post first appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal)

March Madness brings out all kinds of things.

It’s the time of the year when the malls in cities that host state tournaments are full of kids in letter jackets. It’s the time of the year you turn on the TV and hear all sorts of screaming teenagers. It’s the time of painted faces and oh, so many tears.

And for me, it’s the time of the year when I miss getting yelled at by my mom.

My mom, who died 2 1/2 years ago, always had one big rule you dare not break: You did not call her during the state basketball tournaments.

Problem was, I lived out of state for most of my adult life and in the pre-Internet days didn’t always know exactly when the tournaments were on. So I’d call her to say hello on a Saturday afternoon and the "hello" would be followed with "Don’t you know not to call me when the tournament is on?"

Yes, I knew that. I knew that because my mom was a huge sports fan. She didn’t play sports, she didn’t advocate for them per se but she was part of an important force that is often forgotten when there are discussions of women’s sports equality:

She loved sports, plain and simple.

My mom, who graduated from high school in the 1950s, was not alone in that regard. I have a friend whose mom yells at her if she calls when the Iowa Hawkeyes are playing. I had a college classmate whose mother sent valentines to her favorite college basketball players. One of my favorite work assignments in recent years was spending an afternoon with a fanatic 83-year-old woman who loved her Packers. I have an aunt who broke her wrist a couple years ago when she fell changing a light bulb so she could see the computer better to cast an All-Star vote for the Brewers’ Corey Hart (and as she lay injured, she asked her daughter to please cast the vote for her).

Beyond battles about girls getting to play, women like this made a difference just by loving sports. For every advocate who battled for opportunity on the playing field, there were also women who just loved their sports and made it perfectly fine for their daughters to love them, too. It’s an important part of the women’s sports equation that is often overlooked.

And if you look for them, these women are everywhere. Go to a baseball game sometime – minor-league or major-league – and you’ll see them. Look in a back row somewhere and you’ll see an older woman, scorebook on her lap, keeping track of the Ks and noting a 6-4-3 double play. I chatted with one of these women once at a Milwaukee Brewers game, expressing admiration for her vest that was loaded with buttons of current and former players and she told me all kinds of stories about who was her favorite and why.

My dad loved sports, but my passion for them came from my mom. It was my mom who stood out on the deck one day in 1969 and yelled, "Al Sindor is on TV." I was 8 and didn’t know who this rookie Al Sindor guy was, but if my mom thought it was important to watch, then I’d come inside and check it out. It was the start of my lifelong love of basketball, which included clipping out pictures and articles of Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for a scrapbook.

The passion to watch sports held by my mother’s generation and the generations before them isn't what people normally equate with helping to tear down the walls of sports equality. But it was their love for this stuff that made it OK for little girls of the past to put on a baseball cap and go outside to play with the boys; my first ballcap was a birthday present from my aunt who hurt herself trying to vote for the All-Star. That love of sports is what made them eagerly sign up their daughters when the opportunities to play finally started to come. It’s so routine now; 40 or more years ago it would not have been.

It was this passion that made it OK with these women if their daughters grew up wanting to be sports writers (as I was) or TV sports producers (as my sister is), even if girls seemingly didn’t grow up to do such things. Their fierce love of sports, of just being a passionate, knowledgeable and unashamed spectator, is part of what laid the foundation for what came to pass in later generations in terms of opportunities on and off the field.

I just wish I could call my mom to tell her that. She probably wouldn’t even yell at me.

Fans of all ages show up for the Green Bay Packers' annual women's-only event and enjoy their chance to work out with players, including Jermichael Finley.

Man, This Week Has Been a Joke

Quvenzhané Wallis went from being on the red carpet to being the target of a blue joke. (AFP/Getty Images)

This has been a busy week for outrage.

The Seth MacFarlane-hosted Oscars got some people’s knickers in a twist, a crass Onion comment on Twitter actually resulted in an apology, which is something those offended by a Joan Rivers Holocaust comment are never going to get.

Throw in Swedish meatballs made of horsemeat and, as the week ends, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker being compared to Jeffrey Dahmer, and you've got something to outrage everybody.

Whew, I’m exhausted just typing it. But to me, it’s sort of the confluence of a lot of things in our culture right now – that line of humor that always seems to move a bit, a reactionary culture and people’s sense that they have to express everything they think the moment they think it.

Welcome to 2013.

Let’s start with the Oscars. I wasn’t a big fan of the MacFarlane hosting job, but then again I can’t remember one I’ve actually liked. Few can, so that’s why the outrage about MacFarlane seemed rather odd. It was coupled with some notion that the broadcast was terribly sexist, yet how many people at home were deciding which actresses looked hot and which ones didn’t?

One who looked cute, because she’s too young to be anything else, was 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, a Best Actress nominee. With a puppy purse in hand, she was the epitome of sweetness in the midst of the often-tacky red carpet sideshow. So of course that was the perfect setup for the satirical website/newspaper The Onion to jokingly call her a word that is generally never uttered at a woman unless you want to get slapped or shot.

That was the joke, of course, that she is the opposite of that. But the use of that word aimed at a 9-year-old was something that many (including myself) thought crossed a line. Even so, I was more stunned by the Onion apology than I was the joke. Everything seems fair game these days, even children.

In Rivers’ case, there were those who felt she should apologize because, as a Jew, she should know better than to joke about such matters. Rivers has no plans to back down, and good for her even if I don’t quite agree that jokes about the Holocaust are a way of continuing a conversation about it. But I also don’t agree that there is one group of people who get to designate how others should feel about something that is part of their own history, too. 

Part of the reason much of this is exhausting to me is the humor involved is so lame. We seem to be caught up in a cycle of creating a punch line that involves shock and little else. There’s little nuance, there’s often little thought except the arrogance of “Well, you just are offended too easily.” Rude and funny are not the same thing to everyone. If so, every high school freshman boy in the world would have his own cable special.

I’m no saint. I work in a newsroom, and newsrooms are veritable petri dishes for the formation of the darkest of humor. I’ve often wondered what the outside world would think if they heard the things we say. Let’s just say the Onion isn’t that far removed from the things we wish we could put in the paper sometime. But it all generally involves some thought, commentary or wordplay and doesn't just rely on an obscene word or notion.

I’m old enough to have watched “Saturday Night Live” in its first seasons, when it really broke some ground on the comedy front. But in a world where just about any crude, rude phrase passes as humor, I wonder how many of those sketches would even make it on the air today?

Not everything was brilliant on “SNL” back then, it would take a very selective memory to make that statement. Yet an infamous sketch in which Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor throw every racial epithet at each other works as a commentary on society and not just because of the shock of hearing those words on TV. (The setup was that it was a job interview, and in our clueless world there probably used to be job interviews like this and probably still are.)

People are so dug in now, would they even get the joke? It’s amazing to me that the Onion – which I love – continues to thrive since satire seems all but dead. Two movies that say more about our culture than any I can remember in recent years “Citizen Ruth” and “American Dreamz” utterly tanked at the box office and few people I know have even heard of them. But poking fun at both sides of the abortion debate or lampooning our obsession with talent-reality shows is not a way to earn a lot of love from the people.

To me, all this is just exacerbated by social media, text messaging and call-in radio shows. There is such an abundance of ways to immediately express your thoughts that so many people feel compelled to do this every waking moment. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone; I get twitchy and want to click ‘like’ on someone’s Twitter comment even though that isn’t even possible. But everyone’s inner “edit” button seems to get worn down as the years pass and the results aren’t pretty.

In some ways, it’s a nice problem to have. Complaining about too much freedom is like complaining about too much sunshine. Either way, however, you have to be careful not to get burned.

The words Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor threw at each  other in a comedy sketch shocked, but also offered food for thought. (NBC)

Oscar Stage Not the Only Home of the Brave

The word "brave" is often tossed around to describe Kathryn Bigelow, director of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Hurt Locker."

On Sunday, the parade of speeches at the Oscars will offer up a celebration of courage not unlike a Medal of Honor ceremony.

There will be stories of brave performances and courageous choices, and actors or directors clutching their chests to illustrate how their breath was taken away by the fearlessness and tenacity of someone with whom they worked.

And around the country, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, foster parents and people about to board a plane for their Doctors Without Borders assignment will roll their eyes in unison.

Yet, let’s face it. Bravery is in the eyes of the beholder. By its very definition, bravery is doing something  others would not do. Often those doing something “brave” are people who find something easy that others find so, so difficult.

There are plenty of people who would run into a burning building before they’d get up on a stage or behind a lectern in front of other people. There are some who can’t imagine a world past high school where they are required to write anything that other people might read.

Still, I get a little weary of those who equate creative activity such as writing, acting or performing with the Great Struggles of Our Time.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert recently weighed in on this topic, taking to task one of the literary legends of our time, Philip Roth. Now, I couldn’t get through Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” but on this score she was dead-on. She was reacting to a story that Roth had tried to dissuade a just-published author from continuing on in the business because writing is torture, just awful. Gilbert feels just the opposite.

“I'm going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it's f*cking great,” she wrote on the Bookishwebsite. “You don't have to wear a nametag, and -- unless you are exceptionally clumsy -- you rarely run the risk of cutting off your hand in the machinery. Writing, I tell you, has everything to recommend it over real work.”

Writers aren’t the only ones susceptible to this. I was at an Ani DiFranco concert years ago, not because I’m a big fan but because my friends were and it seemed a fine way to pass the evening. We were down in front and the crowd behind us screamed and screamed for Ani.

“I never wanted this,” she said coyly, over and over again. “Really, I never wanted this."

I wanted to shout, “Well, give me my 20 bucks back and go play in a coffeehouse.”

Courtney Love surmised that Kurt Cobain was a victim of the pressure around him. On the one hand, you think, “Well, why do you become a musician?” but in Cobain’s case he was sort of catapulted into a stratosphere that most wanna-be rock gods would never see coming.

There are elements to what Philip Roth said that aren’t full of hubris and ridiculousness. As an artist, you are driven by a need to create something but at some point you have to let it go. That’s where everyone else’s opinion can come in and that can be the hard part.

Just this week, Dame Maggie Smith said on “60 Minutes” that she’d never watched a minute of “Downton Abbey.” For some people that came off as a pretentious load of crap. But as a journalist who looks at a clock and has to let a story go, I understand. You don’t want to look back, you might not like what you see because all you'll see is what you could have done better. Heck, I edited a local history book that came out two years ago and I have yet to read it because I would weep at something as minor as a misused semicolon. Conversely, something like a blog can be tended to and fixed, weeks after the fact, making this a very emotionally easy way to create.

For most  people, all of life is a one-shot deal. You go through, trying to do what you can and if you mess up you try as hard as you can to do it right the next time.

It isn’t coal mining, it isn’t MedFlight piloting, it isn’t pediatric oncology. But maybe real life is the bravest thing of all.

The fire department in Mount Horeb, Wis., is doubly brave: Members will run into a burning building AND stand in front of 42,000 people to sing the national anthem.