Southpaw 47: Jason Kidd Looks Familiar

Plus, a conGRADulations!

Dear Readers,

It’s a momentous day for Southpaw! After a year and a few months delay, Ian has finally graduated from college (or more accurately, he’s walked across the stage to collect a diploma that was already mailed to him in the spring of 2020). I’d like to say a very belated congrats to Ian and all of our subscribers in the Bowdoin Class of 2020—love you all! For the rest of you, while Ian is in Maine doing some combination of recapturing his fleeting youth and being repeatedly forced to explain what he does for a living (Ian says, “What do I do for a living?”), I am back in Brooklyn, slaving away on our newsletter. This week, it’s loosely about toxic masculinity—I hope you all enjoy. 

-Calder

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Jason Kidd is an all too familiar face

My mom once told me about a report card she received from her middle school physical education teacher. Though she was taking dance classes most days after school, that sort of athleticism apparently did not translate to the basketball court, where she was, according to this serious educator, “a danger to herself and others.” 

Fortunately, I was able to half escape this fate myself. I grew up to be fairly tall and very averagely athletic. The sport that I liked the most—baseball—was also the one that I was the best at, mainly because it involved more hand-eye coordination than anything else. Along with baseball, I played soccer and one ill-fated season of basketball as a kid, so I cycled through various coaches, many of whom were just parents of others kids on the team. 

It was all extremely low stakes. Even in those friendly environs, though, there was a certain kind of coach that I always looked out for, always hated, and that eventually got me to quit organized sports entirely. These men were yellers, but more than that, they sniffed out—and picked on—weakness. Their ire often had nothing to do with our performance on the field. Rather, their coaching style was an extended performance of histrionic rage and petty cruelty—maybe for their own benefit, but certainly not for the benefit of their team. Here’s an example: when I played baseball in the ninth grade for my high school team, I sometimes played third base, the closest base to our dugout. I regularly heard both of my coaches snickering, and I found out from a friend on the bench that they were laughing because before the pitcher got into his windup, I’d rest my glove on my left hip. I guess I “looked gay,” something that even at the age of fifteen I knew was a monumentally stupid opinion. Rather than confront them, though, I just decided to stop. They were authority figures, and more to the point, I didn’t want them to think I was one of the weak ones. 

If you played organized sports as a kid—and especially, though certainly not exclusively, boys’ sports—you probably have some kind of similar experience. (Girls’ sports are beset with all kinds of other problems, often more serious, like male coaches abusing female athletes.) This is, we are told, just The Way Things Are. These coaches were “breeding toughness.” If you can’t hack it, you can quit, like I eventually did.

And this, apparently, is why Jason Kidd continues to get head coaching gigs. 

For the uninitiated, Jason Kidd is one of the best NBA point guards ever: a ten-time All-Star, an NBA and Olympic Champion. He also pled guilty to a spousal abuse charge against his wife in 2001, and she’s testified that he “broke her rib and damaged her hearing by smashing her head into the console of a car.” After retiring, he became a head coach of the Brooklyn Nets and then the Milwaukee Bucks. He was fired from Milwaukee in 2018, and this offseason just got another shot with the Dallas Mavericks. 

A newly-released biography of Bucks star Giannis Antetokuonmpo reveals some of Kidd’s coaching style in Milwaukee:

Here’s some more on what Kidd did to the Bucks' Larry Sanders during that Christmas practice: 

All of this is so remarkably beyond the pale. Based on his penchant for violence, Kidd shouldn’t have been given an NBA coaching job in the first place. He is obviously an abuser, in more ways than one. But his behavior in the locker room doesn’t come out of thin air. Kidd might be extreme, but his antics are a high-profile version of what players at all levels deal with during their careers—whether that’s a decades-long career as a professional athlete or a few years on the JV baseball diamond. When some of these players become coaches, they repeat it, because that’s how they were taught. 

It goes without saying that a version of this behavior permeates practically all of our world. One only needs to spend a few days in a masculine-driven industry like finance—or, in many cases, professional newsrooms—to know that every workplace has its own version of the asshole coach who zeros in on his less alpha-male colleagues and berates them for entertainment. The refrain, wherever this figure crops up, is always the same: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. 

This is stupid. But even worse, it privileges a certain kind of personality. The people who respond well to consistently negative motivation are often naturally aggressive themselves. This dynamic creates a self-perpetuating myth: to be an NBA player, you have to be a preternaturally gifted athlete with a work-til-you-drop work ethic; to work in the corporate world, you have to be willing to make spreadsheets until your eyeballs bleed while enduring constant low-level abuse from your supervisors. In neither case do the actual functions of the job require being a “hard charger” (i.e. a jerk), but in practice, you’re doomed if you try to take any other approach. By privileging one kind of “leadership tactic,” we’re lopping off huge swaths of people who could be successful and whose more empathetic personalities might make these industries a little more humane. But hey, Kidds will be Kidds.

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about . . .

. . . newly-reported domestic violence allegations against L.A. Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer? “Dodgers star Trevor Bauer, on leave amid assault probe, was subject of previous protection order,” by Gus Garcia-Roberts and Molly Hensley-Clancy in The Washington Post (August 14, 2021).

. . . Mark Zuckerburg’s hooliganism? “How Facebook Failed to Stem Racist Abuse of England’s Soccer Players,” by Ryan Mac and Tariq Panja (August 11, 2021).

. . . the ongoing labor fight within the Nation Women’s Soccer League? “Sick of side hustles, NWSL players push back in fight for labor rights,” by Candace Bucker in The Washington Post (August 10, 2021).

. . . the latest challenge facing minor league baseball: climate change? “This is going to get worse’: Smoke pollution concerns in Reno bring focus to a growing obstacle for baseball,” by Zach Buchanan in The Athletic (August 13, 2021).