Southpaw 46: 'Paw Potpourri
Five short takes on Steve Cohen, "Woke Maniacs," and Abusers at the Olympics
Dear Readers,
As we went back and forth about what to write this week, a handful of stories caught our attention, but we couldn’t land on just one for a deep dive. Instead, we’ve decided to give you something of “Southpaw potpourri”—a melange of takes, if you will. Below are five brief blurbs on a few of the sports-and-politics headlines from the week, in no particular order. Read whichever ones you’re curious about, and let us know if you like (or hate) this format. Enjoy!
-Ian and Calder
Southpaw Potpourri: The Mets’ financial education, the (un)woke USWNT and the end of the Olympics.
Who knows best?
Do any Southpaw readers feel like they could use a little “education” from a prolific financial criminal? No? Nobody? Well, too bad! Last Sunday, the New York Mets became the only team in baseball not to sign their first-round draft pick to a deal. The details of the MLB Draft signing process are excruciatingly convoluted, so we won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty, but the crux of the situation is this: after reviewing the results of the medical examination of their highly-touted pitcher Kumar Rocker, the Mets chose not to spend the relatively little bonus money needed to sign him, opting for a pick in next year’s draft instead.
Rocker’s test results aren’t public info—HIPAA rears its ugly head once again—so maybe his arm really is about to fall off. But barring that, the Mets’ decision makes very little sense (and is quite upsetting on a personal level to one member of this writing partnership).
But make matters even worse, Steve Cohen, the Mets’ new billionaire owner and the richest man in baseball, was apparently unwilling to let the hordes of naysayers go unchecked, so he took to Twitter to straighten things out:
Can we get “tweets likely to be used in an upcoming labor dispute” for $1,000, Alex?
Guys like Cohen believe two things: 1) that their ability to accumulate massive amounts of wealth makes them authorities on any topic under the sun; and 2) that anyone who is outside of their social class can be treated like a number in a spreadsheet. In Rocker’s case, Cohen is more than content to treat him as a depreciating financial asset rather than a supremely talented baseball player. But when you’re dealing with people like Steve Cohen, that’s the type of “return” you can expect to receive.
President Paunch
The Donald is at it again. After the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team lost in the semifinals of the Olympics to Canada and secured the Bronze Medal against Australia, Trump released a truly vintage statement. It began with this:
“If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has.”
We’ll spare you the rest of the former president’s rambling. But as we wrote last week, Trump’s latest bout of USA-bashing falls in line with a broader trend on the American right, which has resorted to a sort of reflexive anti-Americanism in response to the success of athletes who are willing to call them out on their fascistic bullshit.
These days, the former president sounds even more like a figure out of some middling Elizabethan tragedy than ever before: the Mad King, banned from the only place he’s ever truly felt at home (Twitter), firing off increasingly deranged statements from his Floridian exile and complaining to anyone who will listen about a bunch of wildly popular and massively successful female soccer players. Never mind the fact that Canada’s team is full of woke maniacs as well, of course.
Carli Lloyd is a scab
Despite the former president’s griping, not all members of the USWNT seem eager to become “Leftist Maniacs.” Before the team’s bronze medal match on Thursday, USWNT star Carli Lloyd refused to join every single other American player, coach, staff member, and even the referees by taking a knee during a one-minute show of solidarity before kickoff. Lloyd has offered some wishy-washy excuses in the past about why she chooses not to kneel during the National Anthem, but the anthem wasn’t even playing when her fellow players kneeled, so her patriotism wasn’t really on the line. Any way you spin it, Lloyd's decision is a bad look — bad optics, bad politics, and bad sportsmanship.
Ironically enough, when asked in January about her decision to stand during the anthem before an international friendly, Lloyd said, “I think the beauty of this team is that we stand behind each other no matter what.” On Thursday, it was only Lloyd who was standing behind her teammates, and it most certainly wasn’t a show of solidarity.
“X” marks the spot
Following months of hand-wringing over the prospect of disruptive protests at the Olympics, the political tenor of the Tokyo Games has proven to be pretty . . . subdued. The two most notable acts of protest at the Games so far both came last Sunday, when the American shot-putter Raven Saunders held her arms above her head in an X position on the podium, and American fencer Race Imboden accepted a bronze medal with a black circle with an X through it drawn on his hand. As Imboden later explained on Twitter, the “X is a symbol of solidarity” meant to “show solidarity with each other and support the oppressed.”
Imboden also wrote that he wore the X to protest the IOC’s controversial Rule 50, which bans political demonstrations or protests by athletes, and to “draw attention to the hypocrisy of and all of the organizations who profit so immensely off the athletes and have yet to hear their call for change.”
It’s too early to know how the IOC will react to these protests, which are both pretty clear violations of Rule 50. The US Olympic Committee has said it will not punish athletes who protest on the podium, but the IOC still reserves the right to take action. Here’s the good news: on Wednesday, the IOC announced that it had suspended its investigation of Saunders’ protest after the shot-putter announced on Instagram that her mother had passed away shortly after she won the silver medal. At least they have a little bit of compassion left.
And the Gold Goes To . . . a Domestic Assailant?
Last Sunday, Germany’s Alexander Zverev took home Olympic Gold in men’s singles tennis. Although fans around the world may have cheered for Zverev after he eliminated Global Tennis Villain Novak Djokovic, the global tennis community has stayed largely silent on a much more troubling part of Zverev’s background: the outstanding domestic assault allegations made against him by a former girlfriend. In November of 2020, Racquet Magazine (which is an exceptional tennis publication, by the way) published a lengthy interview with Zverev’s ex-girlfriend Olga Sharypova, who described in graphic terms the physical and emotional abuse she endured from Zverev. According to Sharypova, Zverev repeatedly hit her head into the wall, pushed and choked her, and punched her in the face. The abuse became so severe, Sharypova reports, that she once attempted to commit suicide by injecting herself with insulin.
Neither the Olympics nor the ATP Tour—the top-tier men’s tennis circuit in which Zverev plays—have directly addressed the allegations against Zverev, and much of the mainstream coverage of the Olympics has steered clear of the issue as well. The silence surrounding the allegations against Zverev is part of a larger problem in international tennis—in fact, Zverev faced off in the third round of the Olympic Tournament against Nikoloz Basilashvili, another player on the ATP circuit who faces domestic violence allegations—but the IOC’s refusal to acknowledge any of the allegations while Zverev played on the world’s largest stage seems particularly callous.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the sad legacy of the 2020 Olympics? “Tokyo’s Empty Olympics,” by Patrick Parr in The American Prospect (August 5, 2021).
. . . the sad legacy of the 2020 Olympics (again)? “A Covid Surge and Record Heat Have Created a Cursed Olympic Games,” by Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff in The Nation (August 3, 2021).
. . .you guessed it: the sad legacy of the 2020 Olympics? “How Much Longer Can the Olympics Survive?” by Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic (August 7, 2021).
. . . a damning report on the NCAA’s mishandling of women’s sports? “The NCAA’s shameful neglect of women’s basketball has been exposed, and it starts at the top,” by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post (August 5, 2021).
Fun fact: the X on the hand is also part of the straight-edge culture which promotes the abstinence from the consumption of drugs. It originated in the hardcore scene, when underage people who wanted to attend concerts, had to be marked with an X on their hands. That symbolized that they wouldn’t be served alcohol, but could attend the event.
Great job!