Southpaw #15: The Art of Lock Picking
For half a game, Becky Hammon became an NBA head coach. What would it take for her to stay there?
Dear Readers,
We hope that you all have a wonderful New Year. Here at Southpaw, we’re split on whether 2021 will bring political progress or stagnation in the sports world, but we know one thing for sure: 2020 certainly went out in a blaze of late-capitalist glory. At the end of an NCAA bowl game on New Year’s Eve, a massive fight broke out after an unsportsmanlike conduct call. Check out the game’s name and sponsorship:
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room! (And also, stick to sports!)
If this year is anything like the last, we’ll have lots to write about. This week, we took a look at the importance of gatekeeping in sports and why sports fans overestimate the importance of flash-in-the-pan victories.
Thanks for reading, as always.
-Ian and Calder
For half a game, Becky Hammon became an NBA head coach. What would it take for her to stay there?
On Wednesday, San Antonio Spurs’ assistant coach Becky Hammon became the first woman to serve as the head coach of an NBA team. Like so much else that happened during 2020, this latest milestone came about without obvious design or divination. After San Antonio’s head coach Gregg Popovich got tossed for arguing a no-foul call in the second quarter of the Spurs game against the Lakers, Popovich pointed to Hammon and said, “You’ve got ‘em.” And just like that, Hammon made history.
Hammon’s temporary promotion marked the third high-profile instance of a woman breaking a long-standing gender barrier in a major sports league in the past two months. In November, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to play in a Power Five football game when she kicked off for the Vanderbilt Commodores during the second half of a game against the University of Missouri. That same month, Kim Ng broke Major League Baseball’s glass ceiling when the Miami Marlins named her as the team’s new general manager, making her the first female GM in any of the four major men’s professional leagues.
There is a deep irony in the fact that two of these three barrier-breaking events were more or less unplanned. Fuller, a goalie for the Vanderbilt women’s soccer team, got the call-up because the Commodores’ starting kicker, together with the majority of its special teams squad, was ineligible to play after being exposed to the coronavirus. Hammon took the reins after an impatient referee got fed up with Popovich, who is not known for his on-court restraint. For years, both the NBA and the NCAA have promised to put women in positions of power while doing the bare minimum to actually reform their male-dominated organizations. In the end, it took the botched handling of a pandemic and the expletive-ladened shouting of an angry white dude to force the leagues to realize those promises.
Of course, to say that Fuller’s and Hammon’s achievements were unplanned is not to say that they were undeserved. Both women worked for years to put themselves in positions to succeed on a stage that was not built for them. Fuller secured a competitive Division I scholarship at a top soccer program, toiled away for three years as a back-up goalie, and then led her team to an SEC championship as the first-string keeper. Hammon spent sixteen seasons as a player in the WNBA and six as an assistant coach under Popovich. In both cases, male gatekeepers also bucked convention to support Hammon and Fuller. After all, Popovich could have chosen one of his other male assistants, and Vanderbilt’s coaches could have called up a player from the men’s soccer team.
Nevertheless, there are important differences between these two cases, which both depended to a certain degree on happenstance, and Ng’s promotion. Ng’s rise to the top of the Marlin’s organization was remarkable in its unremarkableness. Like many of the league’s GMs, Ng spent three decades in various mid- and senior-level front-office jobs, climbing the ranks from an internship with the Chicago White Sox to the assistant director of baseball operations in Chicago to assistant GM position in New York and L.A. The Marlins hired her through the normal channels of promotion after declining to renew Michael Hill’s contract. There was no perfect storm of circumstances—just the typical, bureaucratic machinations of a baseball front office.
Yet, paradoxically, this makes her achievement more impressive, not less. Historically, MLB teams have used their nominally meritocratic hiring practices to stymie women’s rise to positions of power. Ng, an overqualified candidate for any front-office job, had interviewed for GM positions with the Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres, Anaheim Angels, New York Mets, and San Francisco Giants before the Marlins finally did the sensible thing and hired her. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, a non-profit group that studies the professional leagues’ hiring practices, gave MLB’s teams a “C” rating in 2020 for their gender hiring practices, citing the chronically low number of women in front-office jobs. The report found that the number of women in senior administrative positions has actually declined in recent years, with only 25.4 percent of senior administrative roles occupied by women, a decrease of about 1 percent since 2018 and down more than ten percent from 38.5 percent in 2007.
Because it took place within the normal channels of promotion, Ng’s promotion can be more than a symbolic victory for women in sports. In fact, Ng has become something better than a symbol—she’s become a gatekeeper. As the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins wrote, even one woman among baseball’s gatekeeping class radically alters the dynamic within baseball’s labor force. “[W]hen a woman enters a new executive-level, command-decision office, she has not so much shattered a ceiling as picked a lock,” Jenkins wrote. “When the once-locked door is open, she holds the key, allowing others to follow through.” In fact, the league is already seeing evidence of the shift. On Thursday, the Red Sox announced the hiring of Bianca Smith as a coach for the organization’s rookie league team, making her the first Black woman to hold a coaching position in professional baseball. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Smith said she decided to pursue a career in baseball because she dreamed of becoming a general manager.
The greater world of sports is not well suited to acknowledge the quiet radicalism of Ng’s accomplishment. Innumerable feel-good sports movies have trained sports fans to salivate over stories like Hammon’s and Fuller’s, in which a scrappy underdog heroically proves their worth when fate and circumstance conspire to thrust them into the limelight. When Apollo Creed’s opponent bows out with a last-minute injury, Rocky triumphantly rises to the challenge; Rudy begins his rise to college football glory at Notre Dame after landing a groundskeeping job at the team’s stadium (under a boss named “Fortune,” no less). Compared to these made-for-TV moments, Ng’s promotion, announced in a humble press release, seemed kind of . . . boring. Except for Moneyball, not many Hollywood blockbusters feature the daily, unsexy grind of baseball front offices.
Yet Ng’s path to the Miami front office is exciting precisely because it is so mundane. She didn’t get her big break because of some cosmic confluence of events but because she made it impossible for the sport’s gatekeepers to exclude her any longer. Symbolism is important, and we should celebrate every woman who overcomes professional sports’ entrenched sexism to assume a position of power, regardless of how she gets there or how long she holds that position. But at the end of the day, the way to change how organizations operate is to change the people who control the gate. Ng now controls the gate.
Gregg Popovich trusted Becky Hammon enough to coach half a game. The next step is for NBA owners to trust her with a team, an organization, a gate. There are more locks to pick.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the sinister and predictable nature of the Chicago Cubs’ salary dump? “Cubs: You Can’t Criticize Our Salary Dump Until The Prospects Hit Puberty” by Ray Ratto in Defector (December 30, 2020).
. . . a chilling summary of COVID’s effects on college athletes? “Ohio State study: 30% of student athletes have heart damage linked to COVID-19” by Austin Williams in Fox 26 Houston (December 29, 2020).
. . . the police shooting of a Black minor leaguer? “The Black baseball prospect, the police shooting and the club he never wanted to join,” by Barry Svrluga in The Washington Post (December 31, 2020).
. . . a tough year in professional sports and how they can serve us better next year? “After an agonizing year, sport must be a vehicle for change in 2021” by Shireen Ahmed in TSN (December 30, 2020).