If I Don't Listen to the Talk of the Town ...

I think I’ll start this post with a nice little ditty by Go West.

Now on to the topic at hand …

I generally like the work of Rob Neyer. He seems fairly progressive in his viewpoints. After all, I was applauding his take on Alex Rodriguez and performance-enhancing drugs a few weeks ago. He even gave money to Dennis Kucinich back in 2004. However, I found one of his latest blog posts to be rather un-progressive. In it, he concludes the following about Eri Yoshida, a 17-year-old Japanese knuckleballer who just made her professional debut: “You have to admire her dream and her persistence and her skills (or skill). But you can't play if you don't have the requisite physical tools, too.” This is based on her height and weight of 5’0” and 114 pounds (and, presumably, her gender may have something to do with this as well, even if Neyer isn’t consciously recognizing it). The problem here is that it’s indicative of how sports and athletes are viewed in general. Often, this is represented as a matter of people simply not having the body types or physical characteristics to engage in a sport, at least at its highest levels. For instance, during the Olympics last summer, NBC ran a story about how Michael Phelps’ swimming success could be attributed to a number of physical characteristics that he possesses. (Nope, the ability to relax by smoking pot wasn’t one of them …) That story reflected the sense that most of us wouldn’t be able to do what Phelps does, even if we tried. A similar sentiment is at work in Neyer’s take on Yoshida. He’s already dismissing her based on her physical characteristics, no matter how much she tries.

As James L. Cherney points out in an essay worth reading in the edited volume Case Studies in Sport Communication, one of the problematic aspects of sport is that bodies that are deemed “normal” for sporting activities, especially on their highest levels, are actually usually “abnormal” bodies in that they are not typical of the populations from which they come. Cherney’s analysis focuses on how disability then becomes defined problematically, particularly when applied to athletes such as Casey Martin. Applied beyond how “disability” is defined, Cherney’s analysis offers a useful perspective for understanding the inequities that are already set up in what are and are not deemed appropriate bodies types for sports, while his analysis also offers a useful perspective for understanding how the rules of sports serve to privilege certain body types over others.

Back to Neyer, then, how progressive is the progressive here? Perhaps sports will never completely be void of inequities based on physical characteristics of bodies (it’s possible that it’s inherent once we establish rules for how the games are played), but what good is it to further denigrate efforts that might potentially challenge or address those inequities? If Ishida has found a way to play baseball at a high level with her physical characteristics (and I intentionally do not say “despite” them here, because that’s not the sentiment I intend, as it would further reinforce the inequity, I think), shouldn’t we be much more supportive and certainly not so dismissive? Otherwise, we’re basically establishing a rather non-progressive, anti-democratic system of privilege based on birthright.

Fortunately, judging by the comments that readers have posted in conjunction with this piece by Neyer, many folks are calling Neyer out on similar kinds of grounds. To echo one of the themes of these readers, what has happened to the intelligent writing that many of us have come to associate with Neyer? I think at least part of the answer may be the way that he’s blogging, which very well may make this a consequence of the ESPN opinion-producing machinery (which, then, of course, makes it one more manifestation of how the “free market” of capitalism isn’t the freedom-of-opportunity place that so many people claim it to be). Neyer’s blog with several entries a day do appear to become a bit reactionary at times, sacrificing quality for quantity, perhaps. This may be part of the dilemma that blogging faces as a medium, but I’d like to think it’s a dilemma that can be addressed and overcome. I’d like to think that we can post several times a day and maintain quality even as we increase quantity. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking and maybe it’s wishful thinking for me to have my take on Ishida as well. Maybe I’m being too hard on Rob. I mean, inevitably, don’t we all have times when our performance just isn’t the best?

Hmmm … seems I’ve hit on the theme of another pair of recent posts from Neyer’s blog, one of which discusses evaluation of performance of umpires and the second of which involves Neyer defending his progressiveness when it was called into question by reader based on the first post. Along these lines, Jurgen Habermas has argued for an “ideal” public sphere of civil discourse based in rational argumentation, in which all claims are up for discussion and, thus, must withstand the judgment of rationality in order to hold up. Similar ideas have been evoked more popularly recently by Al Gore, who even writes about the potential of the Internet as a medium that might provide more equitable spaces for discussion. Having read a reasonable enough number of Neyer’s columns, I get the feeling (and maybe I’m wrong) that he’s not in opposition to these kinds of views of discourse and argumentation. They do, I think, suffer at times from the limitations of their modernist philosophical bent (see, for instance, John Durham Peters’ critique of Gore in the book Speaking into the Air), but I think there is something of use in positing a kind of space for discourse like this. (One of the problems, I think, is the use of rationality as the only basis for evaluating arguments. That’s not to say it can’t be a part of the criteria, but that it’s not appropriate to make it the only part.) As I understand this kind of space for discourse, if I do make an argument that does not hold up, I accept it as such, recognize my error, and add that to my storehouse of knowledge for future arguments so that I might do better next time. I am certainly not dismissed from the circle for making a bad argument. I get the feeling that’s at least part of what Neyer is saying about umpires. We’re not going to fire or otherwise discipline folks for every little mistake, but we might remedy consistent problems in performance by this kind of monitoring. I mean, Neyer does have at least some understanding of such surveillance, since his work for his job—i.e., writing pieces that appear online—is open for public judgment where folks like me can call him out when we think he’s wrong.

That all sounds well and good in an idealistic world devoid of power relations. The problem is that we do live within power relations that do affect what happens. So, while, in the modernistic dream, we are able to discuss everything and observe everything openly and honestly, one of the reasons that people can’t be open and honest in our society is because many times their ideas or some aspects of their lives or personhoods might be held against them as the basis to discipline them, at the very least by excluding them from or marginalizing them within conversations and, even more dramatically, by imprisoning them or imposing other actions against their lives, their liberties, and their pursuits of happiness, to adapt a particularly prominent phrase associated with democracy. I think I’m pretty much all for working toward that more ideal space for discourse, as long as we bear in mind the politics of these power relations and we negotiate them accordingly so that individuals and groups are not unfairly excluded, marginalized, and/or disciplined. (Hmmm … I suppose this is the perfect time for one more reading recommendation, this time for one of my favorite books ever: Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault.) I think part of that project is advocating not only an ideal space of discourse, but also an ideal space of thought and action as well. And, thus, we’re back to Ishida. If we dismiss the opportunity and possibility in what she is doing from the get-go, then how, I ask you, have we helped any of this?