And Away We Go!

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Losing My Perspicacity. I’m coming to you from the western Chicago suburbs, where it’s currently sunny and 83 degrees on April 13, for some reason. Global warming aside, I’m thrilled to see you!

How Did It Come to This?

Before we get into the news, I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for taking a moment to check my newsletter out. This will be the last day you’ll be able to access the newsletter without signing up for a premium subscription, and I want to address why. I’m well aware that people (generally) hate paying for content and, anyway, who the hell am I to suggest my writing and opinions are worth $9.99 a month? And don’t think that thought doesn’t keep me awake at night.

But there are a couple of reasons I’m doing it this way. One, the number of jobs available to journalists has shrunk dramatically over the last several years. And with mass layoffs taking place just about every week, the market is flooded with out-of-work journalists competing for the same small number of jobs. Beyond that, as private equity has dug its grubby little claws into media across the board, there seem to be more and more outlets that are focused on “shedding resources” than hiring journalists.

So many job listings these days seek “content creators” rather than reporters or columnists, and so much focus is on bringing in clicks: writing to Google algorithms, turning everything into a slide show, and aggregating news that’s already been reported multiple times elsewhere. I interviewed for one job where I would have been reporting to a “content manager” rather than someone with training and experience in journalism. In the slashing and burning of journalism jobs, editors, you see, were the first to go. Writing for clicks and social media likes is not why anyone I know became a journalist. And in sports journalism, with the death of investigative stalwarts like Real Sports and Outside the Lines, there is almost nowhere to go for journalists who want to practice… well, journalism. So trying to make a go of it on my own seems at least as risky as working for another outlet that may or may not be here a few years down the road. I mean, if Sports Illustrated is teetering, what hope doe the rest of us have?

Finally, if you’ve known me for a while, you know that I’ve been dealing with some pretty toxic online harassment since 2015, and that my trolls are unusually dedicated. They follow me from platform to platform, downvoting and review-bombing every new venture I take up. I suppose if that’s how they want to spend their free time, it’s their decision, but I don’t have the time or the energy to moderate everything in my life. So if they want to insult and harass me in the comments, they’re going to pay $9.99 a month for the privilege.

After today, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid subscription to keep receiving this newsletter, and I hope you’ll consider doing so, though I’ll continue to have free access now and then, I’m just not certain what that will look like. But I did leave Deadspin with a fair amount of open investigations and FOIA requests, and it’s important to me to fill the void of feminist sports coverage. As more and more outlets team up with pro sports leagues, speaking truth to power and calling out leagues on their bullshit is more important than ever. I’m also thrilled that I can write about things outside of the realm of sports, which is something I’ve been hoping to do for the last several years.

So I hope you’ll stick with me while I figure this whole newsletter thing out and we get to know each other. These are dark days indeed, but as Shelby told Miss Clairee, there are still good times to be had!

Here we go.

The Hell is Going on Over at Nike?

First, it was the see-through MLB pants that are still giving us, uh, in-depth knowledge of players in a way we never asked for (no, I’m not linking to anyone’s balls, you can find the pics yourself). Now, Nike has revealed the US Track & Field team’s Olympic gear for Paris, and they are enough to make even the stage manager at Moulin Rouge blush.

If you’re not a woman, you might say, “Hey, these don’t look all that different than the unis women in track usually run in, what’s the big deal?” WELL. Let me explain.

While women in track do typically run in short shorts that I, personally, would be mortified to wear (as I do not have the physique of an Olympic track and field star), the “bun huggers,” as they are sometimes called, are full coverage, coming down lower on the athletes’ hips and thighs. They’re sort of like swimsuit bottoms from the 1940s or 50s. What Nike has proposed here is that US Women run, jump, and hurl themselves through the air at the Olympics in the equivalent of a string bikini. The Nike gear rides up way high on the hips leaving, consequently, very little coverage in the, uh, most important area. I’ve always been baffled at how women wear bottoms with this little coverage while lying on a beach without turning the world into their gynecologist, much less sprinting as fast as they can around a track in front of millions of people. Knees up, ladies! And can you imagine how fraught these are going to be for women who compete in hurdles? The long jump? The high jump?!?!?

I think former US Track Champion Lauren Fleshman said it best: “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display.” Pube Vigilance! But Team USA’s Tara Davis-Woodhall’s comment was right up there, with “My hoo haa is going to be out.”

No, no, no, Nike. I’m sorry. You gotta go back to the drawing board on these, dial down the sexism, and have some women in the room with you. This is the world’s premier athletic event, not Girls Gone Wild. My God.

While We’re on the Topic of Sexism…

Please enjoy ESPN’s MLB broadcasting lineup:

Hard to believe that in the Year of Our Lord 2024, ESPN wasn’t able to find a single woman to include in their broadcast team. Not one. And before the “if you didn’t play the game, you shouldn’t get to cover it” crowd starts up, please, enlighten us all about the stellar MLB careers of Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Chris Russo, and Buster Olney. And by the way, plenty of women grew up playing baseball — even though too many of us got forced into softball at a later age. Softball is a great game, but it’s a different game from baseball and not one that every young girl wants to play.

All that aside, what’s really mindblowing is that someone (probably many people) at ESPN looked at this graphic and decided it was fine. No notes. It should go without saying that there are few, if any, spaces in society that can justify looking like this graphic, especially when you consider the number of women who watch and attend MLB games. This is a wall I bumped up against a lot when working in sports radio. No one was interested in capturing the female audience. The small percentage of the male listeners who bet on games? Well, stations rearranged their entire lineups to try to bring in that crowd. But 50 percent of America? No one cared to even try.

When it comes to appealing to the female fan base, I will admit that MLB has further to go than other sports, but this kind of thing is inexcusable, especially with the number of women covering MLB for a living these days.

What’s Left to Say About OJ?

That’s a hell of a character endorsement from OJ’s former manager. And hey, he probably only killed a couple of people, when he could have killed a lot more! I spent the weekend wondering if I wanted to say anything about OJ. After all, what’s left to say? But, against my better judgment, I checked out some of the responses on Xitter, and I was appalled at the number of users, who sure seemed much too young to have been around in 1994, attempting to shame people for talking about OJ as if he were guilty. After all, he was acquitted by a jury!

It reminds me of the conversation surrounding Kobe Bryant these days, where the Hall of Famer has been recast, not as a man credibly accused of sexual assault, but as a man who was not only acquitted, but whose accuser was “proven” to be a liar in court. None of that, of course, is how Kobe Bryant’s trial and dismissal of his case went down. And Bryant’s letter of apology to his victim is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a confession by a pro athlete. But the narrative has been taken over by young men who don’t want Kobe Bryant to have been credibly charged with rape; therefore, he was not. And God help anyone who says otherwise. Get ready for the complete makeover of OJ’s image.

In the summer of 1994, I was sleeping on the floor of my friend’s college apartment, working at a daycare, and contemplating law school. I watched just about every minute of coverage that summer, and I clearly remember the moment the police declared, on live TV, “OJ Simpson is a fugitive from justice.” Which was kind of like hearing the police today announce on CNN that Peyton Manning was suspected of a double homicide and currently on the run from the law. I wasn’t old enough to have watched OJ’s NFL career, but I, like all of us, saw his handsome face smiling back at me from a host of ads and movies and tv shows in the 80s and early 90s. By the time the trial rolled around, I was interested in law — specifically criminal law — and watching the trial and the late news shows’ analysis of the investigation and trial became part of my routine. I still maintain I learned more about the rules of evidence from that trial than from any class in law school.

The trial, which lasted 9 months, was an absolute shitshow from start to finish for many reasons — Judge Lance Ito’s star-struck deference to the defense, jurors falling asleep during testimony, the prosecution’s inability to explain DNA to a jury (and a country) that didn’t really understand what it meant at the time. And, of course, there were the two horrific decisions by the prosecution: 1) to put racist L.A. cop Mark Fuhrman on the stand, and 2) more infamously, to have OJ try on the smoking gun — a bloody glove. People a lot smarter and more insightful than me have written volumes on the trial, and if you haven’t seen the docuseries “OJ: Made in America,” (streaming on Disney+), I highly recommend it.

What not as many young people know is that, in 1997, OJ was found liable for the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson in a civil trial, and ordered to pay their families somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 million. Turns out that OJ, up until the day he died, did a pretty good job of making sure the Brown and Goldman families never got their hands on much of that money. According to the New York Times, by 2022 OJ had paid the Goldman family only $132,000, having claimed that he didn’t have the income or assets to make good on such a judgment. As of OJ Simpson’s death last week, the amount he still owes the Brown and Goldman families has more than tripled, now standing somewhere around $114 million. Rumors have already started swirling that OJ had secret off-shore accounts where he hoarded his millions to avoid the damages he owed to the families, and he did move to Florida, where one’s home is exempt from seizure to settle a civil judgment. Convenient. Even with OJ dead, it’s doubtful the families will ever see the money the jury awarded them, and that feels like a miscarriage of justice almost as big as the criminal trial.

If the OJ trial were to take place today, I’d like to think that it would end differently. Sure, the accused murderer would still be a beloved athlete, but juries these days have seen so much CSI and NCIS that they expect DNA and crime scene evidence, often much to the prosecution’s chagrin. Not every case has DNA evidence, or the crime caught on camera, but now that copaganda shows have spent 20 years “educating” America on how trace evidence works, I’d like to think OJ’s blood and DNA being all over the crime scene would go a lot further with a jury in 2024. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the OJ criminal trial was the national conversation this country had, briefly, about intimate partner violence, what it looks like, and how good abusers can be at hiding the violent, controlling side of themselves. I hope we’ve moved forward significantly on that topic, but there are plenty of days when I doubt it.

When I think back on the criminal trial, what has stuck with me to this day are the anguished cries of Ron Goldman’s younger sister, Kim, when she realized that OJ was going to get away with murdering her brother. Kim Goldman sat there while the defense attorneys celebrated and slapped OJ on the back, lived through his disingenuous quest to “find the real killer,” who apparently was hiding out on various golf courses across America, and even had to endure OJ’s “If I Did It: Confessions of a Killer,” a book that purported to be OJ’s “hypothetical” re-imagining of the murders. The book’s publisher, Judith Reagan, ended up losing her job over the decision to release it. Today, Kim Goldman is 52 years old and an advocate for victim’s rights in criminal cases. She’s the person I’ve been thinking of most since the news of OJ’s death broke. I hope she finds some peace.

Stuff I Like

Every Monday, I’ll drop a list of what I’m enjoying in the world, be it books, movies, TV shows, albums, etc. Since I lost my job a month ago, I’ve been watching a lot of TV (as one does), and here’s what I’m digging right now:

• Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office: This is airing right now on Masterpiece Theater on PBS on Sunday Nights, and it’s a dramatization of what some have called “the greatest injustice in the history of Great Britain.” Toby Jones (not playing a total weirdo for once) plays Alan Bates, a regular joe who took on the British Post Office and their financial technology after a hoard of innocent people were accused of losing thousands of dollars of the public’s money. It managed to both have the pastoral loveliness we expect from Masterpiece with the added bonus of a real-life David vs. Goliath story.

• The Tourist: This one is streaming on Netflix and stars Jamie Dornan as an Irishman who gets amnesia after crashing his car in the Australian outback, and Danielle McDonald as the kindly but inexperienced local constable who helps him try to figure his (possibly violently criminal?) backstory out. I love a thriller that ties up all the loose ends, and this one does a great job of it. I’ve only seen Season 1, so I reject all responsibility if Season 2 goes off the rails.

• Scoop: Another good one from Netflix about how the BBC got Prince Andrew to agree to an on-camera interview with Emily Maitlis, played brilliantly by Gillian Anderson, after allegations that he slept with underage girls while a guest of Jeffrey Epstein surfaced. Rufus Sewell plays Prince Andrew, and he almost seems like he’s enjoying portraying the fallen royal as a clueless dipshit with no self-awareness whatsoever.

• Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion: If you’re looking for something to depress you further about the state of the world and the environment, look no further than this offering from MAX, which shows you exactly what happens to all those clothes Americans “donate.” To wit, they end up in Ghana, among other places, where discarded clothing from the US, Canada, and Europe cover the coastal shoreline several feet deep. This one will enrage you, but will also make you think about where your clothes come from and where they go.

If you or a loved one is experiencing intimate partner violence, help is available at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)/ TTY 1-800-787-3224.