As two-time defending champions, the US is the team to beat in this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup. Long considered one of the best soccer teams in the world, the US Women’s National Team hasn’t always been given its dues. Former captain Julie Foudy joins Edge of Sports for a look back on the evolution of women’s soccer.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
World Cup soccer luminary Julie Foudy, me talking about the legacy of Megan Rapinoe, a sports scholar who is an NCAA Running Champ, Edge of Sports starts now.
Welcome to Edge of Sports TV, only on the Real News Network. This week, we have yet another legend on the program, a two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup Champion, and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist, she played for the United States Women’s National Soccer Team from 1988 to 2004, and served as Captain or Co-captain for 13 of those years, Julie Foudy. Also, a sports historian who has been published everywhere and was also an NCAA championship runner, Professor Victoria Jackson.
Let’s get started with Julie Foudy.
Julie Foudy, thanks so much for joining us on the show.
Julie Foudy:
My pleasure to be here. Congrats on the show.
Dave Zirin:
Thank you so much. I have some deep-dive questions for you, but let’s just wet the palate a little bit by me asking you, who has a chance, the best chance, to topple the United States at this year’s World Cup?
Julie Foudy:
Okay. Best chance, I would say… Can I give two teams?
Dave Zirin:
Absolutely.
Julie Foudy:
I’m going to say England and Germany. The European sides are really good, Dave. They’ve spent a lot of money and invested a lot of money through their clubs and leagues, and so you see a German team that’s excellent, and an English team that just won the Euros, the Women’s Euros, last summer. So, those are probably my top two. France is really good. Spain is really good. So you go down the list of European teams, it’s going to be a tough one this year.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. And the idea of doing a three-peat in the World Cup would be a rather remarkable accomplishment.
Julie Foudy:
No target on the US back at all.
Dave Zirin:
No, not at all. And one more question about this year’s World Cup, just Rapinoe retirement, her legacy in your mind.
Julie Foudy:
Yeah. Well, the thing about Megan Rapinoe, as we know from the soccer world, is we’ve seen all that she’s done on the field: two World Cups back-to-back; she won ’15; ’19, she wins MVP; she wins Golden Ball and Boot, two big awards; and she’s won an Olympics as well.
But the thing I think about when I think about Megan Rapinoe is all the stuff she’s going to do and has done off the field, and that, I think, is going to be her legacy. Beyond being one of the best players to ever play the game, here’s a woman that just caress deeply about issues and is willing to stand up for marginalized communities. She’ll stand up for people who don’t have a platform to do so or a microphone to do so. And she’s bold and brave and cares deeply about equality for everyone. And I just love that about her because she’s taken some heat from it from various constituents, and yet she is so true to who she is and what she cares about and I think it’s just a fantastic representation of all that’s right in this country.
And so she’s going to be missed, but I can’t wait to see what she does in her next chapter because she’s going to crush it just like she has been.
Dave Zirin:
That’s an amazing answer. I’m doing a little monologue later about Megan Rapinoe and her legacy, and you just threw me a slow-pitch softball, so thank you for that.
Look, your career is as storied as any soccer player this country has ever produced. That’s just plain factual stuff here. If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your teenage self when you were just starting out?
Julie Foudy:
I would say to know you’re good enough earlier and believe in that. I mean, it’s so hard at any level, and especially when you get on a national team and you’re playing with these elite players, to feel like you belong. And then when you get in, I got in when I was 16, so Mia Ham was 15, I was 16, Kristine Lily, another player who played a very long time on the National team, was 16. We were the three youngsters on the team. And so it took years and years of self-talk and reaffirmations of, “You’re okay, you’re going to be fine. Take a breath. It’s okay.”
And so I think that, as any teenager who’s stepping into that water probably goes through, I had hoped it would’ve come faster and it never does, but that would probably be what I would tell myself is, “You’re good. You’re fine. Keep breathing.”
Dave Zirin:
You mentioned the great Mia Ham, just I have to know, do you think she ever had any sort of imposter syndrome out there on the pitch?
Julie Foudy:
Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. I think we all go through it. And Mia, with all her greatness, one of the things that made her so great was her imposter syndrome because she would say, “I’m not scoring enough goals. I’m not hitting the ball right,” and so she would think and work and work and work and put in that sweat equity because she felt like, “Okay, I’m not good enough yet. I’m not good enough yet.”
We called it a wholesome discontent in terms of, hey, yeah, we’re hungry for more in a wholesome way. But Mia, for sure, was one that used her fear of failure and her fear of not being enough to drive her to be the ultimate soccer player really, and really put all of us on our shoulders and carry the sport forward.
Dave Zirin:
You mentioned starting at such a young age. If not soccer or coaching, what do you think you would’ve done with your life? Was there a road untraveled?
Julie Foudy:
Well, I was going to be a doctor. Thank God I didn’t do that. That’s a slog. Not to disrespect any doctors, but geez. I was going to med school, got in, deferred, deferred. And then I found journalism and I found reporting and announcing and all of that, and that has become my life. But yeah, I probably would’ve gone down the med school track. And I just knew, thankfully, my mom was a nurse and I knew enough doctors and I asked about 2,000, what did they think of the profession? And they were all like, “Eh, I’d go the other way.”
And so I just knew too, I have too much energy, too much personality to be in a lab or in a hospital all day. I just worried about that being so singular, so I’m glad that I did other things.
Dave Zirin:
I can see it though, Dr. Foudy. I can totally see it.
Julie Foudy:
You can? Okay.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, absolutely.
Julie Foudy:
Because I don’t really see it. I laugh when I think of that. I’m like, “Oh my God, no one would’ve trusted me as a doctor.”
Dave Zirin:
Maybe a surgeon with steady hands.
In your time, of course there’s been a revolution, there’s no other word for it, in the world of women’s soccer. Other than the salary issue, what do you think the greatest change has been?
Julie Foudy:
I just think the investment in the sport. I think that’s always been the thing we’ve begged for, going back to when us old bags were playing is, “Hey, can you just see the potential in this sport? And if you just water the garden a little bit more, we promise you it’s going to bloom. It’s going to blossom.” And yet, you couldn’t get people to buy into that. “No, people don’t care. People aren’t going to watch. There’s not enough people who play.” I mean, it was excuse after excuse after excuse.
And we would say, “Hey, I know we don’t have the data. We have anecdotal evidence, though. You could see there’s a hunger and a thirst for this, and there’s a million kids playing the sport, there’s millions of kids just in the United States playing the sport. So how can you not invest in this on the women’s side?”
So those were all the arguments we gave. Obviously now, it’s a different story. We have equal pay, and most importantly, you have the data now to back it up to say, “Okay, when you do invest in this, the return on investment is really good,” as we’re seeing with NWSL, the women’s pro league, blossoming, as you’re seeing all the numbers and ratings and sponsorship revenue coming in for all of women’s sports.
And so finally, we’ve gotten to a place. It took way too long, Dave, honestly. I thought when we won the World Cup in 1999, people would be like, “Oh, I got it. I see it.” Nope, it took another 20 years. But I do feel like we’re at a great spot for women’s sports, and it’s still we’re just scratching the surface of what the potential is for women’s sports.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Do you remember what it felt like in ’99 to be the toast of the country, to expect this cascade of support in the aftermath and to be like, “Where is it?”
Julie Foudy:
It felt very familiar, but I did feel like that ’99 was such a seminal moment that our whole goal was, “Let’s not make this an anomaly. This should be the standard. This should be how women’s sports events are promoted and put on.”
And so we naively probably thought, “Okay, well, that’s going to change society and culture and our investment in women and our role for women in society at large, not just with sports.” And I do think it definitely had an effect, but we had hoped it would happen much faster than it did. But what you quickly realize is it’s hard changing mindsets and cultures and it takes time. And so I think we had a pivotal moment there, but it wasn’t the spark we had hoped right at that moment. It took another decade.
Dave Zirin:
When the equal pay issue was largely settled, were you just like fist pumping?
Julie Foudy:
Yes, yeah.
Dave Zirin:
That must have been an amazing feeling to feel like that you were part of the movement that brought us to that point.
Julie Foudy:
Yeah. Because that had been a long slog. We had been fighting back in our day for equitable pay and treatment and not quite equal, but when we handed that baton onto the younger kids, we were like, “Look, you’re going to have to run like hell. Just keep running. Sprint, just keep sprinting. This is going to be a fight and you’re going to need that energy.”
So there was an enormous pride. We were just celebrated at the ESPYs with the Arthur Ashe Award, and all of us were on stage from the different generations because the current team, of course, is down in New Zealand, so we were all accepting on their behalf, and there was so much pride in our group to the younger generation saying, “Thank you for getting it over the line,” because that was a slog for them. It was hard. I mean, they basically sued US Soccer three months before the last World Cup and said, “Okay, we’re going to still go to this World Cup together, even though we’re suing you, our employer, and we’re going to still win it.” And they did just that.
And that’s not easy to do as an athlete when you’re asked to put all of your energy into training and playing and being the best version of yourself, and at the same time, you’re also trying to fight for equal pay and fight for things that matter in terms of marketing and support and all these things that we needed in women’s sports. And they did it all and they did it beautifully.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. That that’s so rare, that idea of one generation passing on the values, the politics, the sense of progress to that next generation. That in and of itself, I mean, it reminds me of something Ms. Magazine wrote about US soccer that, “It’s like a social movement that also plays their sport exceptionally.” And it reminds me so much of the stories of Negro League players passing on information to the next generation so they can more ably navigate their circumstances.
How self-aware were you all at the time that this is about progress, this is about women’s rights?
Julie Foudy:
Well, yeah, and to your point, Dave, it wasn’t just our team that had that mentality in terms of we were passing on that information, not just to our younger players and saying, “This is going to be your fight. We’re fighting this for you.” As Billie Jean King used to stay to us all the time, “If you had a blank slate, what does that look like? Not for you, but for the next generation? That’s what you’re fighting for.” It’s not lining your pockets. It’s how do you leave this game in a better place for the group coming behind you?
And with that in mind, we were so cognizant of we’re doing this and we’re going to try and help all these other female athletes. Because as we know, it wasn’t just soccer that was struggling for equal pay with their federation. As we’ve seen in softball and ice hockey, you go down the list, right? Track and field, swimming. I mean, everyone has had their moments. And so we were trying to help other teams, as this current team has helped other teams, as we’ve seen with the Women’s Ice Hockey team and some breakthroughs they’ve made with their contract.
And so we were trying to create a roadmap that hopefully other female athletes, and not just in the States but globally, could follow. And obviously, it’s different country by country, but I think the inspiration of what this current team has done has reverberated clearly globally, and you’re seeing a lot of other teams now and players from other teams saying, “This isn’t good enough. We’re going to fight for some change.”
Dave Zirin:
And there’s been uneven development around the globe, of course, for women’s sports, but as we talked with Professor Brenda Elsey on last week’s show about this and her work examining that development, it’s still happening and it’s still miles away from where it was 20 years ago.
Julie Foudy:
Yeah, it is.
Dave Zirin:
And a lot of that is rooted back in your work. So it’s like a global impact, not just a national impact.
Julie Foudy:
Well, and obviously, we have the benefit of having Title IX. You get a lot of players from other countries who go, “How do we enact Title IX in our legislation? How do we create a law so that we have access and opportunity and ability to go to college and get an education and all the gifts that have been Title IX?”
So because of Title IX, you have millions of women playing in this country. And you go to a lot of other countries… I mean, I call all these US Soccer games, and so I always ask Iceland, for example, who the US tied recently, is a country that’s very small. And I say, “How many registered soccer players do you have?” And they’ll say, “30,000.” And I’ll say, “30,000 in your entire country, registered female soccer players?” They’re like, “Yeah.” And so I’m like, “Wait, we have 30,000 in Orange County where I grew up, and maybe in just one little town you have 30,000.”
So you have millions of kids playing thanks to Title IX and the benefits of that, and you have a lot of other countries who beyond not having Title IX, they have a culture that says that women shouldn’t be playing sports. And so you’re fighting that as well, but they are making great strides. But geez, there’s a lot, still, for these countries to overcome in terms of access and opportunity.
Dave Zirin:
You’ve been so generous with your time. Just two more quick questions, if I could, because you mentioned the name Billie Jean King, and I think a lot of folks, unless they’re like me and watch all the documentaries and whatnot, a lot of folks don’t know the critical intervention that Billie Jean King made in the history of women’s soccer in this country. Can you speak to that please?
Julie Foudy:
Yeah, so I was lucky enough to meet Billie in the ’90s like mid-’90s. And the first time I met her, it was just this day-long symposium with only 10 people around a round table. It was just this gift. And I was like, “How am I at this table?” Sue Enquist, legendary softball coach, player at UCLA, was at the table. It was all these iconic women around the table. And I got invited by the Women’s Sports Foundation, which Billie Jean King founded, to go sit at this table.
And as Billie Jean is telling her story about women’s tennis and them fighting for new contracts and them signing, their round table of eight, signing their $1 contracts to break away from men’s tennis and how scary that moment was, as she’s telling her story, I’m thinking, because going through all these similar things with our federation at the time, “Well, you should…” They would tell us when we would complain about $10 a day in per diem, and that’s all we were getting paid at all, that was it, $10 a day per diem. They’d be like, “You should just be grateful. You have a national team. We have a women’s team,” kind of like, “Shut up and sit down. Just be grateful,” kind of mindset. And we had been fighting and fighting for little things. We couldn’t make any headway.
And so listening to her, I’m like, “Oh my God, her fight is our fight and this is crazy.” And I’m having this epiphany as she’s talking, and afterwards I say to her, “Billie, this is like what we’re dealing with right now with US Soccer. I can’t get them to move. We can’t get them to change.” And she’s like, “Well, what are you doing about it, Foudy? You, you as players? What are you y’all doing?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I mean, we’re asking for help.” She’s like, “You! You go back to the team and you tell them you are not signing this contract. You’re not doing this until you sit down and you’re negotiating something better. It’s a blank canvas. What do you want for the next generation?”
And literally, I was flying that day to join the National team and we were supposed to sign another $10-a-day contract, which we were going to do, and I get in that room and I’m like, “Uh-uh, we ain’t signing this. We are not signing this. I was just with Billie Jean King.” And the great thing about Billie Jean, as we know, is there’s a lot of people who would give you that advice and then be like, “Good luck. It’s really hard,” and then you never hear from them again. She would check in monthly. To this day, I still talk to her all the time, checks in monthly. She would check in and say, “Where are you? How are you? How can I help? Here’s what we did in this moment. This is what we learned.”
And Billie Jean is the thread that runs through all of women’s sports, honestly. You see her impact and her hand and what she’s done and the advocacy she’s done. She changed the trajectory of our women’s soccer program by just saying, “Go. You’re good enough to make change yourself. You, as players, you have that power. Go on, get it done.”
Dave Zirin:
Do you think it’s possible, the way Billie Jean was able to create some sort of common unity or understanding around the importance of equality and access, do you think it’s possible in this day and age to create something similar in women’s sports around the issue of transgender inclusion? Are we ever going to get to a point where we can have a broad sense of agreement about this or is this going to be generationally divisive?
Julie Foudy:
We’re going to need a lot of wine and days for this one, Dave. This is a long one.
I mean, what’s super interesting with that question is right now, you have very iconic female athletes who are on one side of this equation in terms of we need more restrictions at the elite level, let’s be clear, not with kids. They don’t advocate for, obviously, some of the legislation we’re seeing, which bars young kids who are trans from playing sports. But you really have this dichotomy of iconic female, Title IX, pro-Title IX, of course, women who say, “But we do need some reg regulations to create a safe space for women and to make sure it’s a singular space for women. We’ve been carved out because of our differences physiologically with men. If we were all in the same boat training for the same things, then obviously the men would be on top of podiums because of how they’re built. So there’s a reason that women have their own category.”
And then you have others who say there’s not enough trans women who are changing the sport for us to go into full-on, shut down all trans athletes from playing, which is what’s happening in a lot of states sadly. So you do see, actually, the women’s sports space really divided on this, and so I don’t see that coming to a consensus soon. But what I do know is that it is very layered and very nuanced and it takes a lot of people and time. I’ve spent a lot of time researching this myself on what does this mean for the women’s sports space and is it going to change women’s sports forever?
And I come to the mindset that we’re talking about one, two, three athletes and freaking out the entire nation about it when really, and maybe people will say as they do, it could get there though. I’m like, “Yeah, but we’re not there yet and we don’t need to… We should have trans kids playing sports. Why are we keeping keep people out of sports? We need them playing,” because I think lost in all of it is the humanity of it. These people didn’t transition to win medals. They transitioned because this is who they are and that’s the thing I keep coming back to.
Dave Zirin:
Which is why we both got such a joy reading Katie Barnes’s forthcoming book about this issue.
Julie Foudy:
Exactly, yep.
Dave Zirin:
Last question, what makes a good captain? You’re one of the best. For sports-related, and I want my son to listen to this, what makes a good captain?
Julie Foudy:
When you’re a good teammate and you care deeply about the success of the collective and they know that your decision making is based on good intentions for the collective, then you have the support of your group. If you’re setting good habits, you’re disciplined, you’re working hard, you’re not pointing fingers, asking others to do the work when you’re not doing it. It all starts with what you bring to the table.
And I think that was our success with whoever was leading the National team over the years, not just mine, is that you had people who they respected and trusted, and so you could get the team all on the same page easily, and when you get everyone buying in to the we being greater than the me and yet still individualized and honoring who they are as individuals, then I always think good things happen, whether it’s a team, whether it’s your work group, any group you’re a part of, that should be number one part of your culture. I say it should be a t-shirt. See, it should be a bumper sticker. Just be a good human. It’s pretty simple.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, would that it were. Julie, you’re amazing. Thank you so much for being on Edge of Sports TV. Can’t wait to see your World Cup coverage. Thank you so much.
Julie Foudy:
Thank you. Thanks, Dave. Congrats again on the show. You’re doing great stuff.
Dave Zirin:
And now some choice words.
Okay, look, Megan Rapinoe, the most important US Soccer player of the last two decades, is retiring. The 38-year-old with a goal-scoring flare as striking as her kaleidoscopic coif announced that she’ll be saying goodbye after the 2023 World Cup. In telling the world now, Rapinoe has created the possibility of a dramatic sendoff, driving even more interest in what will be a rollicking tournament.
Rapinoe’s two-decade career is nearly peerless. Her 199 career games with the US National team, her 63 international goals, many of them scored in unbearably tense moments, will be remembered for as long as people take the pitch. Her 2019 was particularly epic, as Julie Foudy said. That year, she won the Ballon d’Or as the FIFA Women’s Player of the Year. She scored six goals at the World Cup and won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball for best player.
But Rapinoe became widely known as far more than a soccer player in 2016 when she became the first white athlete to take a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with the protests against racism and police violence staged by Colin Kaepernick. Drawing fire away from the San Francisco 49er’s quarterback, Rapinoe explained why she felt the need to act. She said, “Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties. It was something small that I could do and something that I plan to keep doing in the future and hopefully spark some meaningful conversation around it. It’s important to have white people stand in support of people of color on this. We don’t need to be the leading voice of course, but standing in support of them is something that’s really powerful.”
In 2020, I asked Rapinoe about why she took that knee and I want to read you what she said to me. She said, “I don’t think I was debating it in my mind that much. That 2016 summer was wild, horrific with the viral videos of the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We get past the Olympics, come home and very quickly Colin starts kneeling. I was listening to everything that he was saying and then everything that everyone else was saying in response. Very quickly it was clear that nobody in power was wanting to hear what Colin was saying. That’s why they’re saying all this stuff, conflating patriotism, military, and the flag. I was thinking that we all have a part to play. I feel like I’ve stood up for my own rights, but I’ve also asked people to stand up for my rights. It was my turn.”
Rapinoe also spoke to me about why it’s important for white people to approach anti-racist work with humility and intentionality. She said, “If somebody’s getting arrested, you should get arrested too. That’s your gauge. If somebody’s getting beat up, you should be right there getting beat up too. I think that our role in this is tremendous because we benefit so much and we have benefited so much and there’s yet to be a true national reckoning and acknowledgement and admission to what we did in the past and what we continue to do. Until we have that, and I don’t think we get that without white people being very involved and committing to that, we are going to have unrest.”
Speaking during the Summer of Struggle, after the police murder of George Floyd, she finished her interview with me by saying simply, “This is the uprising that we need.”
Two months after Kaepernick and then Rapinoe first took a knee, Donald Trump was sent to the White House, and instead of retreating into despair, Rapinoe became what she later called, “A walking protest against the President.” She called him sexist, misogynistic, and racist. Amid the 2019 World Cup when the US Women captured the imagination of the country with ratings that squashed every sports, save NFL football, Rapinoe was asked about her team visiting Trump after the tournament and she replied with a hint of annoyance, “I’m not going to the fucking White House.” Her comment sent Trump into a social media tailspin, but what could have been an ugly distraction inspired several of her teammates to have her back and also refuse any possible White House invite, and Rapinoe responded to Trump by scoring goals and striking a pose both defiant and joyful.
Rapinoe is one of those radicals who remind me of Howard Zinn’s description of Eugene Debs, “Fierce in his convictions, kind and compassionate in his personal relations.”
Rapinoe also distinguished herself in recent months by standing proudly with the transgender community in the face of efforts to have them banned from sports and erased from public life. There is a great deal of pressure right now on cisgender women athletes, from a coterie of very prominent cisgender women in the sports world, to call for an exclusion of elite trans athletes from organized athletics. Rapinoe says the opposite. She says, “I’m 100% supportive of trans inclusion. We’re talking about kids, we’re talking about people’s lives. Kids are committing suicide because they’re told that they’re gross and different and evil and sinful and they can’t play sports with their friends that they grew up with, not to mention trying to take away healthcare. I think it’s monstrous. I would also encourage everyone out there who’s afraid someone’s going to have an unfair advantage over their kid to really take a step back and think what we are actually talking about here. We are talking about people’s lives. I’m sorry your kid’s high school volleyball team just isn’t that important. It’s not more important than any one kid’s life.”
That’s Megan Rapinoe’s opinion on this question.
But the crown jewel of what I’m calling the Rapinoe Era is the victory for equal pay in soccer, which women athletes like Julie Foudy had long fought for. While Rapinoe should be seen as a link in the chain, she was an especially strong one, and after her World Cup heroics, she used her newly gained cultural capital as one of the five original plaintiffs in their legal battle.
Rapinoe, of course, isn’t going anywhere. At 38 years old, her journey in many respects is just beginning, and thankfully she brings to that journey a love for life and a passion for social and economic justice. The Rapinoe superpower is that she is restless unless she’s turning anger into action. I can’t predict the future, but I suspect it will involve people inspiring Rapinoe, and then she will again return the favor, inspiring many more to be brave and fearless in the face of injustice.
And now the segment all of you love, Ask a Sports Scholar. This week from Arizona State, the Sun Devils, a one-time NCAA Championship runner who is now one of the sports world’s sharpest critics. Her name? Professor Victoria Jackson.
How are you doing, Professor Jackson?
Victoria Jackson:
I’m doing well. It’s just such an honor to be talking with you, Dave. Thanks.
Dave Zirin:
Oh, this is such a thrill. We’re collecting quite a murderer’s row of sports scholars who’ve been on the show thus far and I love that you’re going to be amongst their ranks.
If we could start, I would just love for my viewers to know your primary area of research in the world of sports.
Victoria Jackson:
Sure. My primary area is American college sports in a global context, and global defined in a couple of ways. I work to not focus on the US in a vacuum, unlike much of our work on big-time college sports, and I also work to show how big-time college sports, with an overemphasis and focus on football and basketball, are much broader than that. They’re related to the broad spectrum of U-23 elite sports in the United States, including women’s sports and Olympic development too.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. I have so many other questions, but I have to ask you just based on what you’re studying, what your thoughts are about name, image and likeness rights for revenue-producing sports. There’s a lawsuit coming up about treating the revenue-producing athletes like workers, salaries, a fight for healthcare, all the rest of that. What are your thoughts about that kind of radical change to NCAA sports?
Victoria Jackson:
Sure. The first about name, image and likeness, what I always say is that name, image and likeness has restored to students who play sports the economic rights of all students, and there’s a lot of contradictions bound up in so-called collegiate amateurism. One of them is this rhetoric that we treat all athletes just like other students and that’s why we can’t pay them, and actually, they’re getting a great deal getting a world-class education, but it was only students who played sports who couldn’t enter into economic contracts with third parties, so what NIL did was remove that hypocritical restriction.
The second part is also related to this kind of ongoing con, like Andy Schwarz likes to call it, of collegiate amateurism, and that is, it’s kind of devolved into an ideology where we pretend all sports operating within the broad umbrella of collegiate athletics are the same, and therefore all athletes participating in those sports are deserving of the same benefits, and that that’s simply not true. College football is the reason why college sports exist. These athletic departments historically were built up around the business of college football. College football is a professional sport and the roles in which it serves, both big-time college athletics, subsidizing the Olympic movement and paying for Olympic dreams of the world’s athletes, but also selling higher education, college football needs to be treated separately.
So one thing I do is I push back against a broad spectrum of women’s sports advocates who are demanding, ironically, that all sports should be the same and that all athletes should be deserving of the same benefits. That’s exploitative and we can work to advocate for and promote women’s college sports in a way that also assists football players in their struggle and their fight to gain economic justice and become professional athletes.
Dave Zirin:
Now, I’d like you to puff up your ego for a second with this question. You are a one-time NCAA Championship runner in the 10,000 meters, just a grueling race, and now you’re a sports scholar. Does your athletic experience give you an edge over other sports scholars in terms of your ability to understand the question of college athletics, and how does it inform your work?
Victoria Jackson:
Well, I would say that if not for my athletics career, it never would’ve occurred to me to focus on sport within the scope of being a historian. I like to joke that I drank the amateurism Kool-Aid and I wanted to be best at both and being best at academics was not doing sports stuff. And within the field of history, things have changed rapidly within the past decade, but it wasn’t so long ago that academics didn’t see the value in using sport to talk about politics, economics, culture, everything happening in broader society.
Dave, I really think your work has helped create change within academia, so I want to thank you for that. I really mean it, and the way in which you’ve been so giving in sharing your spotlight with other scholars and publishing people’s books and just being a champion of taking sports seriously, that really also was an inspiration to me.
And so I think what gives me a leg up as an athlete doing academics is that in addition to all of the sort of cliches we hear about sport and what people get from training in sport and how it’s applicable in other spaces, I think to a certain degree, it’s humility and not taking yourself too seriously. You fail hard. Every successful athlete has failed hard, sometimes in public ways, and I think the more you expose yourself to those uncomfortable situations where the line between success and failure, you have to ride it in order to achieve victory in what you’re doing, I think that is what I’ve been able to pull successfully into just saying yes to things that other academics might not say yes to, and opportunities to do work that leaves the shelter of the Academy and takes the work we’re doing and spreads it to other spaces so that more people have access to what we’re doing as well.
Dave Zirin:
It’s so important.
As an athlete and as a scholar in this space, you of course know that one of the issues roiling the world of women’s sports is the inclusion or lack of inclusion of trans athletes into these spaces. I just spoke to Julie Foudy of course, and asked her if we would ever see any sort of broad consensus in the world of women’s sports about trans inclusion or trans exclusion, and I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that question. Will we ever see consensus on this? How do we make space for trans athletes in a world, in a sports world, built on these sharp gender binaries?
Victoria Jackson:
Yeah, I think we’re going to be fighting this fight for a very long time unfortunately. It is front and center in the culture wars. There are GOP candidates announcing the run for the presidency leading with this fearmongering around transgender athletes competing in the women’s category, and fortunately, we have a lot of great scholars doing work on the long history of the disingenuity around all of the attention and effort in “protecting,” with air quotes around it, the women’s category of competition.
What gives us a leg up in the United States is that elite sport development takes place largely in schools, and fortunately, we have educational civil rights laws in schools in the United States. Those, of course, are under attack as well, but there is a historical legacy and structures that have been in place for 50 years now, if we’re looking at Title IX, and Title IX is part of that package of civil rights legislation passed from the ’60s into the early ’70s. And I think the Biden Administration has been doing a commendable job of understanding the original intent of the law of Title IX to broaden the scope of equal opportunity on the basis of gender to include all gender identities and sexual orientations, that what we’re doing in this space is protecting the most vulnerable to create inclusive sporting spaces.
And we also know, thanks to work of many scholars, that anytime you see attempts to put guards and protections around the women’s category, it’s not just the most vulnerable that are hurt, it’s all women and girls who play in sports because the policies in place to try to kick some people out are inevitably going to have a negative impact on all of those who are playing and creating a broader cultural idea of subordinate status in society, which is damaging for all of us.
Dave Zirin:
It certainly is, and thank you so much for the way you addressed that.
As a runner, I was wondering as well if you could say something about Caster Semenya and what’s the latest with her case?
Victoria Jackson:
Absolutely. Caster Semenya is a multiple-time global champion 800-meter runner from South Africa. She is the pride of South Africa. Every time I’ve met South Africans, they just want to talk about how wonderful and fantastic she is and how she’s inspired so many people in that country to be who they are, to be proud of who they are, and to work to achieve and fight for the rights of others alongside working to be the world’s best at what they do.
Caster Semenya is a woman who has elevated testosterone. She is one of a number of athletes who have a condition that global sports bodies have called “differences of sexual development,” and there are many different ways in which hormones present in bodies so that there are other women who have elevated testosterone, but their bodies might not be able to uptake it and use it. In the case of Semenya and other runners, most of whom have been in the spotlight at a global scale at international championships, come from, it’s a problematic term, but what we call the Global South, so often from Africa and South Asia: Dutee Chand from India and some 400-meter runners at the most recent World Championships and Olympic Games.
Caster Semenya has refused to go on any sort of medical intervention to reduce her testosterone to be eligible to compete in her events in the women’s category, which is a policy that World Athletics, the international federation for track and field, came up with in a patchwork way predicated on problematic science. I like to talk about the long history of bad ideas informing bad science, and this is just another example of that long history. She has said that, in the past, before Dutee Chand had challenged World Athletics policy, she did go on oral contraceptive and she would take birth control pills and they made her feel terrible. And I think a lot of athletes who’ve decided to go that route, they’ve experienced similar things where it affects their mental health, it affects their performance, and so she has said, “No, I’m not doing an unnecessary medical intervention to be eligible for the women’s category of competition.”
So she had been persecuted while continuing to compete in the sport and achieve all of these Olympic Gold Medals and World Championship Gold Medals, until the point where World Athletics successfully got this policy upheld before the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Caster Semenya has not competed in her marquee offense since then. She tried to race in the 5,000 meters in the more recent past, and now World Athletics has said this policy applies to all events in track and field, that if you’re a woman with elevated testosterone, you must go on birth control or have surgery or something to reduce your naturally occurring testosterone to be eligible for the women’s category.
She took her case to the European Court for Human Rights and she was successful. That court did determine that there were a whole slew of human rights violations in World Athletics adopting this policy. The sad thing is so many, so many exceptional athletes who are human rights advocates and warriors, I’m thinking about Jack Johnson, I’m thinking about Muhammad Ali, she has been removed from sport in the prime of her career and the legal battles will continue. The court’s decision here does not mean she can return to competition and “run free,” as she calls it, free from using unnecessary medical interventions to compete in her events in the women’s category. There’s likely going to be multiple, many more years before we get to an end result, and hopefully, she will be successful on this front fighting for the next generation of athletes that are competing now and coming up behind them.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Thank you so much for that articulation. It’s such an important story. It’s such an important history. I’m really glad that we talked about that.
One last question for you. This is for my son who I’m trying to turn into a book reader, even though I respect his athletic acumen. What is a book that everybody should read who’s interested at the very least, in any way, shape or form, in the world of sports?
Victoria Jackson:
Oh my goodness. I have to pick just one?
Dave Zirin:
I mean, you can pick a couple, whatever you think folks should read.
Victoria Jackson:
Okay. Well, your book with Dr. John Carlos, the medal stand. Students adore that every year, so I feel like my responsibility would be to recommend a book that my students adore. And John Carlos, we’ve been fortunate at ASU to have him come and spend time with us. Actually, we even went to Mexico City with John Carlos for the 50th Anniversary of the ’68 Games with Wyomia Tyus and John Carlos, and Chris Kluwe joined us too. That was thanks to our Global Sport Institute and Ken Shropshire.
And John Carlos is just a remarkable person and his book is wonderful. So thank you for your work so that we can share that with a generation that doesn’t know you know much more than the image. There’s so much more to that story beyond the iconic image.
Dave Zirin:
Please, for that book, I was more stenographer than writer. It was just turn on the tape recorder and John telling stories. It was the most fun I’ve ever had because it was the least amount of work.
Victoria Jackson:
You should travel to Mexico City with John.
Dave Zirin:
Believe me, I heard so many things about that story when it happened. I didn’t know there were students along with him though. That’s amazing.
Professor Victoria Jackson, how can people keep up with your work?
Victoria Jackson:
Sure. I’m on Twitter, that interesting place. I’m HistoryRunner, and on Instagram, I’m Victoria L. Jackson.
Dave Zirin:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us on Edge of Sports.
Victoria Jackson:
Thank you so much, Dave.
Dave Zirin:
Well, that’s all the time we have for this week’s show. Thank you so much, Julie Foudy. Thank you so much, Victoria Jackson. Thank you to everybody at the Real News Network.
Yo, this is the end of season one of Edge of Sports TV, so we’re going to sign off for a few weeks and then we’re going to come back for season two. Yes, we’ve been renewed, so hold on to your hats. We got some great guests lined up for season two. I can’t wait.
I’m Dave Zirin, you stay frosty now. We are out of here. Peace.
Announcer:
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity Forever.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
