The SportsThink Review #103

April 26, 2024: Back in the Saddle

Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading and related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!

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Howdy, folks. Suffice it to say, the newsletter has taken a back seat to professional obligations these last couple months, but it’s nice to be visiting your inbox again.

I’d like to take a moment to plug the upcoming Sports Technology and Innovation symposium I’m co-hosting at the Smithsonian this October 21st and 22nd. We’re accepting proposal submissions through May 15, so if your academic or professional interests fall in this area, please consider submitting your work. Full details can be found here. And, if you just want to come and be part of the scene, the event is free and open to the public. I’ll share registration details as the date approaches.

Without further ado, let’s get back to the content…three very good articles and some good fun to share this week.

What ‘Cheer’ Led To: How Viral Fame Upended Monica Aldama’s Life (Sarah Hepola, Texas Monthly)

An excellent piece!

In the haze of post-pandemic memory, Netflix’s Cheer faintly lingers as a cultural moment that seemingly came out of nowhere, burned brightly, and then was promptly forgotten about by just about everyone. This isn’t that unusual in the era of the binge: when was the last time you thought of Joe Exotic?

Hepola’s article is a reminder that while we quickly move on from the content, the people who are the content never really escape; whether we feel empathy for them for content-ifying themselves is quietly at the heart of this piece. This is a great profile of Monica Aldama, the former(!) head coach of the Navarro College cheer team featured in the show. As with most good profiles, it’s also much more than that: a nice crash course on the rise of competitive cheer as an industry, a post-mortem for one of the better sports shows in recent memory, and an exploration of the prizes and pitfalls of fame. There are the scandals we heard about and some others that we didn’t, some much murkier than others.

If you watched the show, this is a must-read. If you didn’t, I still recommend it, it’s just damn good journalism.

Could “Mind the Game” Change the Way Sports Are Covered? (Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker)

I’m a Kang fanboy, he’s great as usual here. Ostensibly a discussion of “Mind the Game,” the basketball podcast hosted by JJ Redick and Lebron James, Kang is really shedding light on the future of sports media, on what lies ahead when sportswriters aren’t gatekeepers. (I’ll admit, I don’t really pay any attention to sports podcasts. But I’m inclined to check this one out now.) A short piece, but especially of interest to students and folks studying or working in sports media. And an opening paragraph so good that I just have to share the entire thing:

There comes a time in every sportswriter’s career when they realize they have no idea what they’re talking about. The game they watched as a child, it turns out, is far more complex than it appeared to be on television. The players and coaches speak in impenetrable jargon and the front-office nerds spend their time poring over proprietary spreadsheets that you can’t find on the Internet. Like a child who has brought a beloved action figure to a sleepover only to discover that his new friends, people he idolizes, have long since moved on to video games, the writer realizes that all his beloved sports clichés—about the “will to win,” or whatever else—are embarrassing.

How The Sports Fan Became an Asset Manager (Oliver Bateman, Washington Examiner)

Timely with the NFL Draft going on. I often push students to consider the ways that the sports industry is “weird” and drafts and draft coverage are a prime example of this. Only in the collectively-bargained-quasi-socialist business model of American sports would talent be dispersed in this backwards manner: your team was horrible, please have the first pick of young talent. And the coverage? Millions of people will watch (and have spent months obsessing over) what is effectively a hiring fair. You could read through the list of picks in about 5 minutes, but many will spend hours this weekend glued to the TV, watching teams make selections that are a foregone conclusion 90% of the time. (I don’t mean this to sound judgmental. I’ve retired from draft obsessing, but I once spent an entire weekend in a Vegas cabana glued to the screen while my friends actually enjoyed the pool. It was just that important that I knew who the Lions took in the 4th round or whatever.)

Batemen illuminates a lot with this piece, especially how our sports consumption has shifted from a traditional model of fandom toward an obsession with quantification and performance in which, “The draft serves as a mirror reflecting the best and worst of capitalism in professional sports, the packaged securitization of athletics, a numbers-obsessed meritocracy in which young men are scrutinized in ways that border on the dehumanizing.” And, as Batemen hints at, let us not ignore that this is the time of the year that American men can safely talk about other men’s hands, calves, and butts without a shred of irony or suggestion of the homoerotic. Yes, sports are weird.

Speaking of weird, but in the best way possible, let us celebrate the Drake Relays, where the pole vault competition takes place in a mall….

..and javelins are returned to throwers by cute little remote controlled truck (click the photo to watch the video, Substack and X are still at war)

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As always, thanks for reading. Please share the newsletter with interested folks and share the cool things you read with me.

See you soon,

Tolga