Southpaw 52: One Year Out
A tête-à-tête reflecting on Southpaw's one-year anniversary.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the 52nd issue of Southpaw! As there are 52 weeks in a year, and we’ve been plugging along every week (even on holidays! You’re welcome! Or sorry!) this means that we’ve been churning out weekly issues of Southpaw for a year now.
We’re not sure what our exact expectations were when we started, but we could not have imagined all the great opportunities that have come about thanks to writing this humble newsletter. In addition to the doors it has opened, though, we keep doing this because we like writing with one another and we’re proud of the work we’ve put out. Looking back through our archive for this issue, it’s clear that we’ve improved a lot from this time last year. So, here’s to year two, which we hope is an even better one! And thanks to all of you, from the bottom of our hearts, for supporting us through this year. It really does mean a lot.
This week, we’ve written back and forth to one another about our major takeaways from the past year and our hopes and expectations for the next one.
-Ian and Calder
Southpaw Turns One
Calder McHugh: So, to start this off, I took a look back at some of our old newsletters. There are some clear themes, chief among them being Owners Are Bastards, as are the fine people at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. But what struck me was the diversity of the stories. There’s the European Super League collapse, the NCAA Supreme Court fights, a nominally progressive sports owner launching a Senate campaign, and a glorified cult leader taking charge of the Houston Texans, among a whole lot less. One concern I remember having when we were preparing to launch was whether or not there would be enough juice to write something every week. We seem to have had the opposite issue, where there’s often three or four stories that merit inclusion, so much so that we’ve sometimes had to resort to a ‘paw-potpourri.
I don’t want to navel-gaze or look back too much, but I am curious to know, beyond the obvious (college athletes can now be paid, sort of), what stories from this year do you think were predictive of trends that we’ll continue to see play out? And why?
Ian Ward: I shared your concern, in part because there was so much happening in the sports-and-politics world when we started a year ago: the NBA strike, the battle over the NCAA’s NIL rules, the Atlanta Dream’s intervention in the Georgia election. The intersection between sports and politics was really a hot topic at that point, and I was worried that it couldn’t be sustained. It turns out that it can, I guess.
One of the really interesting and enduring plot lines has been the ways that some issues erase divisions between athletes and some issues magnify them. The year started off with this really incredible display of unity among athletes over the BLM Movement and the NBA strike, so it was easy to assume that, with the exception of some outspokenly conservative athletes, many professional athletes were fundamentally on the same page about the role of sports in society and the responsibility of athletes to use their voices to speak out against injustice and advance political progress. In retrospect, I definitely think I was a bit naive in believing that that consensus would persist despite the very real political and economic differences that exist between athletes. I think we really started to grapple with the implications of those differences in our piece on the minor leagues from November, which showed me how the exploitation of some athletes really does materially help other, more successful athletes. I think we’ve continued to explore these contradictions in our pieces on athletes’ endorsement of SPACs and our one-year retrospective on the NBA strike. I wouldn’t say that we’ve seen a total decay of the pan-athlete solidarity that took hold a year ago, but we’ve definitely been seeing some fault lines start to emerge.
CM: Yeah—I do think one of the reasons this project has been interesting is that while athletes are often dealing with the same issues we see in broader American society, they also come at the world from a unique perspective, have a unique context, and thus the narratives often resist easy characterization. This is something that I think we were struggling through recently, talking about Cam Newton, unionization, and what it means to protect workers.
There’s a difference between a union that represents NFL players and one that represents concession workers, both in terms of power and in terms of goals. And while last year, in particular after the Atlanta Dream ousted Kelly Loeffler, there was this idea that the athletes might save us, this year we’re reminded of factions within professional athletics. This is all made more interesting when you consider what the leagues want—namely, to maintain a status quo as much as possible. The NBA and NFL in particular have walked some very strange political lines in the past 12 months: allowing players to wear jerseys symbolizing their commitment to BLM while restricting their speech on Chinese forced labor, for instance. And big-name players have contributed to this to a degree—you see LeBron James trying to carve out an activist-lite niche while also refusing to touch the issue of Hong Kong’s autonomy with a ten-foot pole.
This gets at the broader issue of branding. Leagues have brands to protect, just like major American companies. You could accuse Coca-Cola or Exxon of much of the same hypocrisy that applies to the NBA. But what’s different in an athlete context is that players have brands to protect as well. A Senior VP at Coca Cola can and does do the equivalent of “shut up and dribble,” because their role is tied completely to their company. But LeBron, and other superstars like him, are entities outside of their leagues, while also relying on their sports to continue to build their own brands.
IW: I remember that one of the questions you asked Dave Zirin in one of our early editions was what athlete activism would look like if Biden won the election, assuming Trump wasn’t around to goad athletes from the White House podium. I think this re-alignment of athletes along economic lines rather than along strictly political lines is part of that process.
A lot of our stories at the beginning of the year were dedicated to these big name activist athletes like LeBron and Naomi Osaka and Megan Rapinoe who got in high-profile spats with Trump. But more recently, I’ve been finding that the most interesting stories have been about athletes who fall lower down on the celebrity totem poll, like MLB minor leaguers or relatively obscure Olympians. For instance, it’s not a coincidence that it was Raven Saunders—a black, queer, female shotputter—who decided to engage in the boldest protest at the Games and not someone like Kevin Durant, who, as you mentioned above, has a huge economic stake in preserving his brand. In the year ahead, I’m looking forward to digging deeper into more stories that explore areas of political conflict between celebrity superstars and normal players—as well as those between players and management and players and the leagues.
To wrap this up, what’s an area you’d like to dig into more in the coming year?
CM: I agree about the minors and more minor athletes, and was trying to shoehorn that into my last response (I eventually gave up). So, I’m glad you took it there, and that’s a place I’d like to start. Thinking bigger, I’ve really enjoyed all three interviews we did this past year, and would like to explore some more of that, maybe with people in these fights rather than just covering them like us. I also think, given that it’s our newsletter, we can expand beyond sports when we want to (I had a lot of fun writing about The Strokes' music video, for example). Most of all, though, I’d like to keep writing with you! A successful collaboration :-)
IW: Well shucks—it certainly has been a lot of fun getting this off the ground. And as always, we love to hear what readers enjoy, so now that we’re at the one year mark, please let us know what you’ve enjoyed, what you’ve hated, and what you want to see more of. Speaking of readers, I’d just like to wrap this up by saying thank you again to everyone who’s stuck with us to this point. See y’all next week with some more typical content.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . U.S. gymnasts’ powerful testimony before Congress? “At a quiet Senate hearing, four U.S. gymnasts made sure the truth was loud and uncomfortable,” by Candace Buckner in The Washington Post (September 16, 2021).
. . . Dave Zirin’s new book on the afterlife of the Kaepernick protests? “Dave Zirin Thinks the Kaepernick Era Is Just Beginning,” by Will Leitch in New York Magazine (September 14, 2021).
. . . the former secretary of defense’s new job fixing the NCAA? “Robert Gates Ran the Pentagon. Can He Help Save the N.C.A.A.?” by Allen Blinder in The New York Times (September 17, 2021).
. . . the rise of Black quarterbacks in the NFL? “Black quarterbacks are taking over the NFL. But there’s still more ground to gain,” by Michael Lee in The Washington Post (September 10, 2021).
. . . a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a minor league player? A More Perfect Union’s “The Major Exploitation of Minor League Baseball Players” (see video below)
Congratulations for providing eye-opening commentary! Looking forward to the next 52.
congratulations, Southpaw! Thank you, Calder and Ian, for 52 weeks of thought provoking commentary. Looking forward to more!