The Meaning of Football Tough
It also sounds like a false choice, an excuse for bad behavior, for diminishing bullying as hazing, and downplaying the significance of racist language in professional sports (the last a fatuous claim expertly undone by Robert Klemko in an essay for Sports Illustrated’s MMQB.com — and by Shannon Sharpe on CBS’s “NFL Today”).
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The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today’s Families
Nearly 50 million kids play organized sports each year, and each of them has a supportive family that digs deep into its pockets to pay for the essentials-uniforms, equipment, league fees, travel to away games. But the buck doesn’t stop there. With private lessons, elite sports camps, corporate-sponsored tournaments, and all the hotel expenses and […]
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The Myth of Male Decline
Scroll through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge […]
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The N.C.A.A.’s Nod to Reality
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has acknowledged what everyone always knew — that not all college sports programs are the same.
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The NBA Standoff Pits the Elite Vs. the Elite
Kevin Garnett, 35, the Boston Celtics forward who has had a stellar career, was with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2004 when a teammate, Latrell Sprewell, augmented the national stock of unfortunate pronouncements. Dissatisfied with a three-year, $21 million contract extension offer, Sprewell said: “I’ve got my family to feed.”Remembering the ridicule that Sprewell received, Garnett […]
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The NCAA Needs to Let Someone Else Enforce its Rules
A lawyer’s take on how to fix the National College Athletics Association’s broken, capricious system for investigating and punishing schools and student-athletes accused of impropriety
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The Payoff From Winning an Olympic Medal
When Kellogg stamped Gabby Douglas’s hard-to-forget smile on a box of corn flakes, the company kicked off a string of endorsement deals that will likely make her millions. But even without sponsors, the 16-year-old gymnast will leave London with $50,000, which is what pair of gold medals is worth in her home country.
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The Ring and The Rings: Vladimir Putin’s Mafia Olympics
Josef Stalin famously uttered the demonically cynical maxim that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” In other words, he believed that when faced with the choice of focusing on horrors small and tangible or vast and incomprehensible, humanity goes small. It is the political spawn of […]
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The Shame of College Sports
A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and […]
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The Slowest Generation Strikes Back
“Between being president of my honor society, volunteering at the local elementary school, job hunting, staying on top of my course load, being secretary of my sorority and trying to start a personal financial literacy seminar for women, running has become my detox time,” wrote Natasha Mighell, a University of Virginia student.
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The Sports Issue: Views from Left Field
Howard Cosell called it rule number one of the jockocracy—the idea that sports and politics don’t mix. Playing the game, and playing it well, is all that matters. And yet the closer you look, the more it becomes apparent that it’s not sports and politics that “don’t mix.” It’s sports and a certain kind of […]
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The Victims of Larry Nassar Who Dared to Come Forward First
In the summer of 2016, Rachael Denhollander was scrolling through Facebook at her home, in Louisville, Kentucky, when she happened upon the cover story of the day’s Indianapolis Star. It was an investigation into U.S.A. Gymnastics, one of the nation’s most prominent Olympic organizations, concluding that for years the federation’s top officials had mishandled allegations […]
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Those “Guest Worker’ of The NBA and NHL
[…]enough, more than half the team — First there would be a low cap on the number of foreign players allowed into the country each year, one well below what the market demands.
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Title IX at 40: Most Schools Still Aren’t in Compliance
Four decades after Title IX went into place, enormous progress for women and girls has been made. But most schools in America are still not providing men and women with equal opportunities to participate and equal treatment in athletics. There’s work to be done.
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To Define Oneself as Less Able: A Prerequisite for a Paralympian?
Keith Lyons in his column gives a short history of disabled people including Paralympians that also participated in the Olympics all the way back to 1904. Very likely that was news to many given that Pistorius so dominated the coverage the last 4 years. He highlighted two disabled people that were competing in the 2012 […]
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Super Bowl Ad Will Stress Safety
To the usual lineup of beer and car commercials on Super Bowl Sunday, add this: one about player safety. For the first time, the N.F.L., currently the target of more than a dozen lawsuits accusing it of deliberately concealing information about the effects on players of repeated hits to the head, will use one minute […]
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Striving Together: Celebrating Competitiveness in Sport
With the Commonwealth Games taking place in Glasgow in 2014, sport is set to have a prominent profile in Scotland. Competitiveness in sport can draw out the best in people, but can also give rise to other behaviours which may cause concern. This report reflects on the place of competitiveness, based on the principles of […]
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Students with Disabilities Have Right to Play School Sports Obama Administration Tells Schools
When Kareem Dale, now a special advisor to President Barack Obama, was in high school, all he wanted to do was wrestle. But as a student who was partially blind, that wasn’t easy. Dale’s school made it possible for him to participate in the sport by creating a rule that wrestlers always needed to be […]
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Superhip To Supercrip: The ‘Trickle-down’ Effect of the Paralympics
Sport is seen as important for the quality of life, self-esteem, independence and social integration of people with disabilities, and the Paralympics are one expression of this importance. But what effect do they have for the “average” person with a disability?
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Tackling Injuries in the NFL
Football is a violent sport. For the last four years, about three hundred players per year suffered season-ending injuries that put them on the Injured Reserve (IR) list. These players suffer injuries that you can’t tape up and there’s no way to ‘play through the pain’. For the most part, these are serious, career threatening […]
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Teams Face Workers’ Comp Threat
National Football League teams are facing a significant threat to their finances because of a legal option available to nearly every janitor, teacher and cashier in America — workers’ compensation. Playing professional football is inherently dangerous, but the known risks do not prevent players — and former players — from filing workers’ compensation claims against […]
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Television: Inflated Assets
The Super Bowl has always been the high point of the US sports calendar but this year’s game was of a different order. The battle last month of American football’s Green Bay Packers – a team many thought had seen its best years – against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Texas was the most watched, and […]
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That New $2, $3 Fee on Cable Bill? Sports the Culprit
There’s a new wrinkle in the long-running blame game between pay-TV providers and programmers over the rising costs of TV sports. Some consumers now see separate $2-$3 charges, specifically tied to sports, on their monthly TV bills.
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The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes Under the Guise of Amateurism
The National College Players Association (NCPA) and the Drexel University Sport Management Department published a joint study in 2013 showing that FBS football and men’s basketball players would receive an additional $6 billion between 2011-15 if not for the NCAA’s prohibition of a fair market.
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The Awesome Power of Sport
“In 2011 we were working in Uganda with 93 children, most of them former child soldiers and victims of the awful Civil War that has ravaged that region for decades,” said Nick Gates, the founder and CEO of Coaches Across Continents (CAC), an organization that is a global leader in the Sport for Social Impact […]
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The Beautiful Game, a Beautiful Cause: Why I Root for Argentina
No sporting event on earth is more tangled up in politics than the World Cup—so we ought to support a team that epitomizes “the beautiful game” in addition to standing with a beautiful cause. Viva Argentina! Before the start of the World Cup, I broadcast my rooting interest with the obnoxious insistence of a nuclear-powered […]
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The Benefits of Physical Activity
Regular physical activity is one of the most important things you can do for your health. Being physically active can improve your brain health, help manage weight, reduce the risk of disease, strengthen bones and muscles, and improve your ability to do everyday activities.
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The Business of Voluntourism: Do Western Do-gooders Actually Do Harm?
Baby rescue is the ultimate volunteer experience. At Hope of Life International, a Christian mission in rural Guatemala, a rescue team springs into action when news arrives that a baby is dangerously ill in a nearby mountain village. The mission, which hosts hundreds of volunteers from North America every month, sends a caravan of Jeeps, […]
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The Case Against High-School Sports
Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.
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The Charitable-industrial Complex
I had spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his […]
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The Damage Done
Peter Grant ’83 played interhall football for Notre Dame’s Grace Hall. Dave Duerson, a classmate and casual acquaintance of Grant’s from the dorm, was an All-American defensive back and an 11-year NFL veteran who won two Super Bowl rings. Their athletic careers could not have been more different. But Grant and Duerson were alike in […]
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The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours
In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, […]
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The Fall of Jim Tressel
An SI investigation found that Ohio State’s disgraced ex-coach, once viewed as a Model of Probity, led a program rife with alleged rules violations dating back to 2022.
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The Final Four, Travel Teams and Empty Pews: Research on Sports and Religion
The Rev. Stephen Fichter understood just how dominant a role sports has assumed in the culture when a family told him they would be out of town Good Friday to Easter Sunday to attend their child’s volleyball tournament.“It’s truly sports that has become like the religion” for many people, said Fichter, a researcher and the […]
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The Footage The NFL Won’t Show You
Every play during an NFL game is filmed from multiple angles in high definition. But there’s some footage the league keeps hidden as Reed Albergotti explains on Lunch Break.
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Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports
Last winter, champion alpine skier Lindsey Vonn won the downhill gold medal at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the first American woman to achieve gold in this prestigious event. From 2008 to 2010, Vonn also won three consecutive World Cup championships, the first US woman and second woman ever to accomplish such a feat. For her […]
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Should Parents Nix After-school Sports?
High school athletes devote a lot of hours to practice and games. Parents and coaches say playing sports builds character and teamwork. But do sports take too much time away from the classroom? In a recent article for The Atlantic, writer Amanda Ripley makes the case against after-school sports. She joins host Michel Martin, along […]
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Shut Up And Play? Patriotism, Jock Culture, and The Limits of Free Speech
Some athletes have dared to buck the patriotic trend, and in the process have learned a tough lesson about the limits of free speech in the jockocracy. In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the sports world embraced the public eruption of patriotism. From the spontaneous cheers of 40,000 fans in Philly, to amped […]
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Skating League Returns to Huntington Beach
Kick flip, varial kickflip, heel flip, “the variations are endless,” says Darrell Norman, the man behind the microphone, as kids competed during the California Amateur Skateboard League contest in Huntington Beach on Saturday. “We’re saving the world one kid at a time,” said Sonja Catalano, the league’s president.
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Smack Epidemic: How Painkillers Are Turning Young Athletes into Heroin Addicts
It is, by any measure, an epidemic. Heroin is not new or chic, but its use and abuse are spiking. According to data from the CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics, heroin-overdose deaths rose gradually from 2000 to ’10 but then almost tripled in the following three years to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 […]
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Snowmobile Athletes Say Injuries Are Part of the Sport
Snowmobiler Levi LaVallee had seen Caleb Moore land the trick many times. It’s a Superman Indian Air Backflip, one that Moore had done repeatedly before crashing during the X Games in Aspen.
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Soccer and Egypt’s “State of Emergency”
If you want to understand why Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has declared a “state of emergency” or if you want to understand why the country’s defense minister warned Tuesday of “the collapse of the state”, you first need to understand the soccer fan clubs in Egypt—otherwise known as the “ultras”—and the role they played in […]
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Soccer Match Fixing: All the World is Staged
ON THE MORNING of Feb. 20, 2011, a man from Singapore walked into the central police station of Rovaniemi, Finland, a town that sits along the Arctic Circle. The man told officers that another Singaporean, Wilson Raj Perumal, was in Rovaniemi on a false passport. He offered no other information before leaving the station abruptly. […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State Football: (Part 2) — the Academics
Shortly after Les Miles took over as Oklahoma State’s football coach in December 2000, he introduced an exhortation that he would use often at the end of team meetings during his four years in Stillwater. “Academics first,” Miles would say. “Football second.”
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Special Report on Oklahoma State Football: (Part 3) — the Drugs
At around 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2009, Stillwater police executed a search warrant at the off-campus residence of Oklahoma State junior wide receiver Bo Bowling. An ex-girlfriend, whom police officers found inebriated outside Bowling’s home, had told them that Bowling had marijuana in his possession. When they searched his home they found 108.6 grams […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State football: (Part 4) — the Sex
In 2003 one of the nation’s top high school recruits pretzeled his large frame into an airplane seat and embarked on his official recruiting visit to Oklahoma State. Though several big-time schools were pursuing him intensely, the recruit was intrigued by the Cowboys. The previous year they had appeared in the Houston Bowl — their […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State football: (Part 5) – the Fallout
It was a suffocatingly hot July afternoon in Bryan, Texas, and inside a chain restaurant on the North Earl Rudder Freeway, it wasn’t much cooler. An angular African-American waiter in his mid-20s slogged through his four-hour shift, his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn. On top of his $2.13 hourly wage he would earn barely $15 […]
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SPIEGEL Interview with Orlando Cruz ‘I Couldn’t Accept Being Gay Because I Was Too Afraid’
Orlando Cruz is the world’s first professional boxer to come out as gay. In a SPIEGEL interview, he describes the relief he has since felt and his hopes that it would make him a better boxer. He also shows some sympathy for his female admirers.
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Sport Spirituality and Religion: Muscular Christianity in the Modern Age
An overview of the key features of the ways in which the relationship between sport and religion has developed during and since the nineteenth century. In Victorian Britain, long-standing religious values began to permeate and underpin sporting endeavour but these have subsequently been modified in various ways.
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Sporting Masculinity on the gridiron: Construction, Characteristics, and Consequences
This paper draws on interviews with 81 Canadian football players and administrators across junior, university, and professional football, as well as 20 published autobiographies of football players, to examine the development and consequences of sporting masculinity. In this paper, the concept of sporting masculinity is further developed and contrasted with other masculinities, particularly hegemonic masculinity. […]
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Sports Genes
Who has the speed gene, and who doesn’t? How much of performance is genetic? How did early humans become athletes? And can the Perfect Athlete be genetically engineered?
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Sports Medicine’s New Frontiers
Surgeries that were once repairs are now reconstructions, enabling athletes to return to the field sooner and even better. Novel prostheses are allowing maimed soldiers to compete at the elite level of sports. Researchers of motor skills and pain tolerance, who once relied on crude measures, now study brain imagery to analyze neural activity. Many […]
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Stanford Analyzes Athletes’ Concussions
The brains and the brawn at Stanford are teaming up to figure out how concussions are caused. Stanford researchers have turned the school’s football practices into a living laboratory in an effort to understand the mechanics of what happens to the head and neck when a head injury occurs.
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Stick Route
IT’S BEEN A WEEKLY — and sometimes daily — headline in Dallas: Tony Romo Gets Pain-Killing Injection. Ever since he fractured a rib during a Week 2 win over the 49ers, Romo’s pregame shots have been news, mostly because he plays QB for America’s Team and partly because he’s a reality show waiting to happen. […]
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Overcoming ‘Physics Envy’
How scientific are the social sciences? Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
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Pay for play
The mission of Universities is to educate, but college sports is big business, and no one wants young athletes exploited.
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Plaintiffs’ Master Administrative Long-Form Complaint
Master complaint in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia that coalesces the claims from more than 85 lawsuits involving over than 2,000 former NFL players — from negligence and fraud to wrongful death and civil conspiracy — into a single document claiming the NFL withheld information related to head trauma suffered while playing the game.
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Playing With Fire, Barbed Wire and Beer
A year ago, Tough Mudder was a semifinalist in the Harvard Business School’s annual Business Plan Contest. A British student named Will Dean thought he could attract 500 people to run a grueling race through mud and man-made obstacles. Professors generally considered the plan too optimistic.
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Politics and Sports: Strange, Secret Bedfellows
So, are you more Super Bowl or Super Tuesday? No matter how you answer, if you are like most Americans, you probably think the two—sports and politics—are unrelated. You might even object to the suggestion of a tie on principle alone. We’re not so bold as to suggest there aren’t some good reasons for the […]
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Practical Application for Long-term Athletic Development
Developing a comprehensive long-term athletic development program in the United States is critical. The program must start at the youth level. This article will focus on ages 3–14 years. The following information is for coaches, parents, and sport organization directors. To date, little has been done to provide youth coaches with knowledge of how to […]
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Praying for a Super Bowl Win is a Hail Mary
I live in Nashville, where the city hasn’t had a rooting interest in the Super Bowl since 1999, when the Tennessee Titans lost to the St. Louis Rams. So on Sunday I’ll leave the praying-for-victory to fans in Seattle and Denver. But I have certainly called on God’s sports help in the past.
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Private Schools Defining Colorado Prep Sports’ Shift in Power
High school sports, once viewed as a bastion of wholesomeness, is being transformed into a cutthroat business at the highest levels of play, with teenage athletes the prized assets. Colorado private schools — notably upstart Valor Christian, in addition to Regis Jesuit and football power Mullen — have catapulted to recent prominence by capitalizing on […]
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Pro Football’s Violent Toll
Pro football left me with a neck injury. Watching pro football, I mean. At least three of the games that started at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday went thrillingly down to the wire, two of them bleeding into overtime, and as I sat in a sports bar jerking my gaze from the television showing […]
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Probe Target Global Match-fixing in Soccer
Europol said the probe included qualifiers for the sport’s two biggest international tournaments–the FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championship, as well as Europe’s top club competition the UEFA Champions League and top-flight domestic match-ups.
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Protest and Parkour – on The Streets of Gaza
Deutsche Welle reports on a parkour team developing despite harsh conditions in Khan Yunis, a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
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Recruiting Confidential
You are 18 and extremely talented. Your highlights are all over the web. They’re calling you the next Peyton Manning or Joe Mauer or Candace Parker. Famous coaches beg for face time. (Coolest note ever to get from your principal: “Call back Joe Paterno ASAP. You can use my office.”) Soon the offers begin to […]
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Red Nails Black Skates: Gender Cash and Pleasure on and off the Ice
In her forties, Erica Rand bought a pair of figure skates to vary her workout routine. Within a few years, the college professor was immersed in adult figure skating. Here, in short, incisive essays, she describes the pleasures to be found in the rink, as well as the exclusionary practices that make those pleasures less […]
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Redefining the Sexes in Unequal Terms
The good news is that the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body for track and field, have worked hard to come up with a new policy to deal with athletes whose sex development is unusual.
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Religion in the Ring: Death, Concussion: and Brain Bleeds
In an interview for the Catholic Herald (2013, Sept, 16, p. 7), UK heavyweight boxer and Roman Catholic, Tyson Fury, comments on how he prays for his opponents before a fight.
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Richard Sherman Defends his Dirt
The NFL traffics in rank hypocrisy often without consequence. Profess concern about head injuries, while demanding an eighteen-game season? Decry racial slurs while profiting off of a team called the Redskins? Say you are role models while ignoring domestic violence? Profit from publicly funded stadiums while maintaining nonprofit status? This is Roger Goodell’s shield and […]
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Saez & Piketty Income Inequality Update: Top 1% Have Received 121% of Income Gains Since 2009
Just under a year ago, I posted this: “Saez’ 2010 Inequality Update: Incomes of 1% Grew 11.6%, Incomes of 99% “Grew” 0.2%.” We’re now learning that, arguably, the world’s top income inequality expert, UC Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, has updated his work with Thomas Piketty on the evolution of U.S. income inequality through 2011, […]
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Saudi Sports Commentator: `Allah Slaughter Me’ Before Saudi Women Enter Olympics
While a few Americans might find women’s Olympic sports to be a little less exciting than men’s, likely none would take death over watching their country women participate on the international stage. That does not appear to be the case in the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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Scant Evidence That Football’s Popularity is Declining
More football is coming. The football industry allegedly is facing diminishing interest from Americans because of a number of reasons. A President constantly carping about players kneeling during the national anthem presentation which combined with people’s disgust with players kneeling during the national anthem is leading to people turning away from the National Football League. […]
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Schools That Train the Enemy
As NCAA Teams Subsidize World-Class Instruction for Foreign Olympians, Some Cry Foul
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Most NCAA Division I Athletic Departments Take Subsidies
Key Points: 1) All but 23 Division I athletic departments received subsidies, 2) Subsidies for all of Division I athletics rose by nearly %24200 million compared to what they were 2011, 3) For some self-sufficient programs%2C subsidies have remained basically steady or grown in recent years
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NCAA Autonomy Structure Moves Forward After Avoiding Override
Barely more than a third of the required votes to override the NCAA Board of Directors’ August decision to move to restructure Division were filed by Monday’s deadline, meaning that the wealthiest college conferences can move forward with a more autonomous operational plan. The NCAA announced that 27 of 345 Division I members voted to […]
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NCAA had Record $71 Million Surplus In Fiscal 2012
Key Points: 1) NCAA net assets have doubled since 2006, 2) Statement says pending litigation will not have %22 material adverse effect%22 on NCAA, 3) Revenue distributed to Division I schools grew by %2424 million%2C or 5%25%2C from 2011 to 2012
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NCAA Member Revenue, Spending Increase
Key Points: 1) About 10%25 of Division I public schools made enough money to cover athletic expenses last year, 2) Subsidies for Division I athletic operating expenses totaled %242.3 billion in 2012, 3) Scholarship costs rose by nearly 9%25%2C and coach compensation went up by 9.2%25
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NCAA Revenues And Expenses of Division II Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Report Fiscal Years 2004 Through 2011
This report provides summary information concerning revenues and expenses of NCAA Division II athletics programs for the fiscal years 2004 through 2011. It is the result of surveys conducted during the fall of each of those years. Although similar studies have been conducted for the NCAA since 1969, significant changes in data collection and reporting […]
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NCAA Student-athlete Gambling Behaviors and Attitudes: 2004-2012 (Supplementary Tables)
During spring semester 2012, the NCAA conducted its third national survey of student-athlete gambling behaviors and attitudes (2004, 2008, 2012). Approximately 23,000 survey responses were analyzed from the 2012 survey administration and 20,000 each from the 2004 and 2008 administrations. This preliminary report highlights the findings from 2012 and compares them to results from the […]
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NFL and Pain: League Zeros in on One Pain Medication
Toradol, the players’ drug of choice, carries high risks but may soon be banned. During a 13-season NFL career, defensive tackle Warren Sapp cherished those days he was close to pain-free, those games he could race onto the field with nothing but adrenaline pumping through his veins. “I was in the trenches, boss, with contact […]
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NFL Research Yields Possible TBI Breakthrough
Football season is over but Pentagon researchers are still watching the NFL, not for sport but for science. The NFL is very active in one of the same research areas as the Defense Department — brain injuries.
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NFL: Saints Defense Had `Bounty’ Fund
New Orleans Saints players and at least one assistant coach maintained a bounty pool of up to $50,000 the last three seasons to reward game-ending injuries inflicted on opposing players, including Brett Favre and Kurt Warner, the NFL said Friday. “Knockouts” were worth $1,500 and “cart-offs” $1,000, with payments doubled or tripled for the playoffs.
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NFL’s “Magic Potion” Has Risks, Players Like Urlacher Don’t Care
In an intriguing feature included in tonight’s new Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO, 10:oo p.m. ET/PT), Andrea Kremer explores the NFL’s “magic potion” that “masks pain from head to toe.”
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NHL Takes ‘Historic Step’ for LGBT Equality
There is an old expression in social movements that sometimes it takes years to make days worth of progress but sometimes it takes only days to leap ahead years. In the fight for full citizenship for our LGBT friends and family, it certainly seems like every day another year mercifully moves forward. As for the […]
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Niall Ferguson on the End of the American Dream
The United States is where great things are possible.” Those are the words of Elon Musk, whose astonishing career illustrates that the American dream can still come true.
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Nigeria ‘Lesbian Football Ban’ Reports Examined By Fifa
Football’s world governing body Fifa has written to the Nigerian Football Association over claims lesbians are now banned from playing football there. Dilichukwu Onyedinma, chair of the Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL), was quoted as making the statement. “Any player associated with it will be disqualified,” she is quoted as saying. While contravening Fifa’s anti-discrimination […]
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No Pain, No Gain? Not So Fast
The former professional football player is confused. It is difficult for him to pinpoint, after the pads have come off for good, the precise cause of his aching body and his aching soul. He knows that the game did it. But what part of the game? Was it the physical violence? The psychological warfare? The […]
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Nobody Suffers Like Jens Voigt
Want to make someone appreciate baseball? Simple. Show them Mariano Rivera, still dominant and dignified after 17 seasons. Want to build a basketball maniac? Give them 40 inelegant minutes of Dirk Nowitzki—flailing arms, stumbling feet, unshrinking in the clutch.
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Not My Coach, Not My Town, Not Anymore
THE CONVERSATION WASN’T EASY, fun or something that Steve Rockrohr had been particularly looking forward to. But he felt as if he had no choice. Rumors of a mysterious van in his neighborhood, on top of the horrific stories in the news, prompted him and his wife, Mary, to take action. So one night last […]
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Olympic Charter
The Olympic Charter (OC) is the codification of the Fundamental Principles of Olympism, Rules and Bye-Laws adopted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It governs the organisation, action and operation of the Olympic Movement and sets forth the conditions for the celebration of the Olympic Games. In essence, the Olympic Charter serves three main purposes: […]
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Olympics judo: Saudi Arabia Hijab Dispute Resolved
Saudi Arabia judoka Wojdan Shaherkani will compete at the Olympics after a dispute over a hijab was resolved. The International Judo Federation said the 16-year-old must fight without the headscarf for safety reasons, but the Saudis threatened to withdraw Shaherkani. An International Olympic Committee spokesman said: “The judo federation will allow her to wear something […]
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On the Team: Equal Opportunity for Transgender Student Athletes
This groundbreaking publication is the first ever to thoroughly address the complete integration of transgender student athletes within high school and collegiate athletic programs. It provides comprehensive model policies and a framework for athletic leaders to ensure equal access to school athletics for transgender students.
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Take it From a Former Division I Athlete: College Sports Are Like Jim Crow
Now that the bowl season and College Football Playoff have concluded, college sports fans are shifting their attention from football to basketball in anticipation of March Madness. Although I’m a huge sports fan and ran track at school, I won’t be watching any men’s college basketball this spring. Not because I don’t support the athletes. […]
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In Texas, a Legal Battle Over Biblical Banners
In a barrage of recent emails, telephone calls and letters to his office, Kevin Weldon has been called some of the worst things a Christian man in this predominantly Christian town can be called: un-Christian, and even anti-Christian.
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Indiana House OKs Concussion Training
The Indiana House passed a bill today requiring concussion-awareness training for youth and high school football coaches and a 24-hour waiting period for players who suffer concussions. If the bill becomes law, Indiana would become the first state in the nation to require such training. The House passed the measure 95-3. It’s one of dozens […]
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Investigation by ‘Indianapolis Star’ Hailed as Proof of Local Journalism’s Impact
The Indianapolis Star’s investigation into sexual abuse within USA Gymnastics, which culminated with the sentencing Wednesday of former team doctor Larry Nassar for up to 175 years in prison, is a sign that local journalism still matters, say media observers, even as public trust in media remains dismal. The Star, which is owned by Gannett […]
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IOC Regulations on Female Hyperandrogenism: Games of the XXX Olympiad in London, 2012.
The IOC Executive Board, in accordance with Rule 19.3.10 of the Olympic Charter, and pursuant to Rule 44 of the Olympic Charter, hereby issues the following regulations regarding female hyperandrogenism and participation in the 2012 London Olympic Games (hereafter the “Regulations”).
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Is Gordon Gee Serious?
ABOUT 40 MINUTES BEFORE I MET GORDON GEE, I decided to play a joke on him. I entered a Columbus bookstore and bought a bow tie. They’re popular on campus because Gee, Ohio State’s president, famously wears one every day. I was visiting at a touchy time, in the middle of an NCAA investigation, to […]
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Jeremy Lin and ESPN’s “Accidental” Racism
The sports world has no anti-racist mental apparatus for how to talk about an Asian-American player. The spectacular New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin just made more headlines by leading his team to victory over the defending champion Dallas Mavericks, with twenty-eight points and a career-high fourteen assists. But that’s not the only reason […]
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