2013 was not sport’s best year. Marked by tragedy, murder, rape, and a league and a network not yet ready to fully face the damage that playing football does to a person’s brain, 2013 may be remembered, when all is said and done, as a year of change.
It will be the last for college football’s BCS, even as Ed O’Bannon’s suit against the NCAA winds its way through federal court, with the potential of forcing college athletics’ governing body and its member schools to share with players the revenue that the new playoff system generates.
The NFL settled its case with the league’s retired players for a fairly hefty sum of $765 million, though even that might not be enough to end the litigation. Either way, football, as we know it, is changing.
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Marked by tragedy, murder, rape, and a league and a network not yet ready to fully face the damage that playing football does to a person’s brain, 2013 may be remembered, when all is said and done, as a year of change.
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Jason Collins announced he was gay in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Hailed as the first professional athlete in one of the four major domestic sports leagues to come out, he failed to sign with a team during the offseason, technically stripping him of that unofficial title. Still, it is likely he will always be remembered for it and, again, either way, momentum is clearly building to the eventuality that openly gay athletes will soon be competing in the NBA, NHL, and MLB, even, God forfend, the NFL.
UFC saw a changing of the guard this year. Georges St-Pierre chose his health over his wallet and decided to retire before doing more damage to his brain and body. And, at 38, despite protests to the contrary, Anderson Silva’s last match may be behind him after he broke both his tibia and fibula at UFC 168.
The sports world also said goodbye to Mariano Rivera, David Beckham, and Sir Alex Ferguson, all of whom hung it up in 2013, as did the two best linebackers of their generation—Ray Lewis and Brian Urlacher.
So 2014 will likely look very different than 2013. Even as we look forward to it, however, let’s reflect on the worst from last year with the hope that we will never have to see it again.
1) Lord knows what the International Olympic Committee was thinking when they recommended that wrestling be dropped from the Games in 2020. One hopes that, as a number of people were suggesting, they never had any intention of removing perhaps the world’s oldest and most culturally significant sport, but were just trying to send a message to its governing body, FILA, and push it to enact badly needed reforms, including changes to how the sport is scored and insuring that the sport is more welcoming to women athletes. Whatever the motivation, it seems to have worked. New FILA president, Nenad Lalovic, pushed through the necessary rules changes, and added permanent positions in FILA’s leadership for women and events in competition for female wrestlers. The IOC took note and, in September, wrestling was reinstated. At least until 2024.
2) Much of sports’ worst in 2013 took place in a courtroom. The first legal entry on our list involves the guilty verdicts handed down to Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond in the Steubenville rape case. As Chelsea Cristine highlighted in her post here on The Good Men Project, the Steubenville case epitomizes the culture of entitlement that can sometimes pervade successful athletic programs, be it at the high school or college level, feeding behavior on the part of athletes that would never be tolerated in other students.
Photo: Mel Evans, AP
3) As I quipped a couple of weeks ago when writing about Southern Illinois men’s basketball coach Barry Hinson, who pushed his own players under the bus at a press conference after yet another loss, 2013 was a bad year for coaches. None, however, had as bad a year as Rutgers’ Mike Rice, who was fired in March after a video was leaked to ESPN showing Rice physically and mentally abusing his players. What made matters worse was the revelation that school officials had been shown the video the previous November and merely chosen to fine Rice and suspend him for three games, all the while keeping the existence of the video quiet, some speculating so as not to upset negotiations the school was then in to join the Big Ten Conference. As is often the case, however, the cover up was, at least for the school’s administrators, worse than the crime. Athletic director Tim Pernetti wound up following Coach Rice out the door.
4) Boston’s is the oldest continuous marathon in the world. First run in 1897, the year after the sport was introduced at the inaugural modern Olympic Games in Greece, it has grown into an international event that attracts the best runners from around the world. Run on a Monday—Patriot’s Day—every April, the same day the Sox play at home at the unusual hour of 11:05AM, the marathon brings out the best in a city that can often be glum and unwelcoming to visitors. (As a native and lifelong resident, I can admit this.)
On Marathon Monday, though, everyone’s in a good mood. Unfortunately, that mood was rocked when two bombs exploded near the finish line, killing three people and injuring 270 more. The attack was the first by terrorists on American soil since 9/11. To add to the trauma, four days later police would engage in a daylong manhunt for the suspects that brought the entire city to a standstill, as offices and stores were closed and residents were advised to stay indoors. Ambushed by the suspects, a university police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would become the week’s fourth casualty.
5) So much of the news in the sports world this year revolved around my hometown. From the good—the Sox—to the bad—the marathon—to the ugly—Aaron Hernandez’s arrest for the murder of Odin Lloyd. What would possess a young man who, at only 23, had just signed a $42 million contract with one of the most successful franchises in all of professional sports to commit murder? Well, as it turns out, to cover up an earlier murder and, according to Rolling Stone, a whole hell of a lot of angel dust. We can cry for the family of Odin Lloyd and we can shake our heads at the future Aaron Hernandez threw away, but we also must admit that Hernandez’s behavior was part of a pattern that stretched back to his days at the University of Florida, where he had had more than one run-in with the law. But, as with the young men in Steubenville, Hernandez clearly believed that his athletic prowess provided him a shirt of mithril mail that consequences would never be able to penetrate. And so his behavior escalated.
6) International athletic competitions are big money events, fraught with all sorts of political and socioeconomic implications. When they succeed, as the politicians like to claim the Olympics in London did in 2012, it can be easy to forget the dark side of the preparation process—the bribes that are often part of securing the events, the easy eliding of human rights violations of the countries willing to pay, and pay big, to host them, the anxiety around whether host countries will be able to finish the construction of the facilities in time. 2013 fully exposed this dark side.
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Laborers from Nepal were being employed, often at no pay, in 122 degree heat, with little to no water, after having had their passports confiscated so that they couldn’t leave the country. At least 44 workers died. Of course, all of this will be forgotten come kick off time.
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In Brazil, wide spread protests broke out as the country prepares to host, first, this year’s soccer World Cup and then, in 2016, the Summer Olympic Games. As two protestor’s signs read, “We don’t need the World Cup. We need money for hospitals and education.” Then, in November, a construction crane being used to build one of the new stadiums that will host the World Cup collapsed, killing two people, and doing extensive damage to the structure, further delaying preparations for the event.
In Qatar, which is preparing for the 2022 World Cup (yes, you read that right), revelations came to light that what amounts to little more than slave labor was being used to help build the stadiums that will host matches there. Laborers from Nepal were being employed, often at no pay, in 122 degree heat, with little to no water, after having had their passports confiscated so that they couldn’t leave the country. At least 44 workers died. Of course, all of this will be forgotten come kick off time.
7) What can be said about Alex Rodriquez that hasn’t been said before? In what we can only hope is the denouement of a long and, to my mind, sad story, the once great all-star was suspended for 200 games for yet another violation of MLB’s steroid policy. Though he was able to finish out the season, due to a pending appeal, if the suspension is upheld, Rodriquez will be close to 40 by the time he is eligible to play again and it is difficult to imagine that he would be able to step back into a major league line-up and be productive at that age after such a long layoff without the help of performance enhancing drugs. And you can bet, in that case, the league will be watching him as closely as they’ve ever watched any player.
8) There were any number of stories in 2013 surrounding concussions and the NFL. Tony Dorsett revealed he is suffering from symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative disease that afflicts the brain when a person, such as a football player, has suffered too many hits to the head. The NFL settled with him and some 4,500 other retired players for $765 million in the hopes of ending legal action that can be taken against the league for ignoring the issue for far too long. But, unfortunately for the league, it looks like the $765 million is not going to be nearly enough to cover the settlement and, moreover, a number of eligible retirees have decided to exempt themselves from eligibility so as to have continued recourse to legal action. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the settlement completely ignores current players, who will likely also seek redress at some point.
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Whether the league gently reminded the worldwide leader in sports that its games are a signature part of the network’s programming remains a matter of speculation.
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In the middle of all this, a new book and television documentary were released—League of Denial—scrupulously documenting how the NFL had, in fact, like the tobacco companies before them, been ignoring the damage that its product does. At least for the NFL, ESPN backed out of its collaboration with PBS’s Frontline program, which aired the documentary. Whether the league gently reminded the worldwide leader in sports that its games are a signature part of the network’s programming remains a matter of speculation.
9) Bullying is something we associate with kids on a playground. It’s not something we think of in an NFL locker room, especially when the victim weighs more than 300 pounds. But that appears to be the case in Miami, where Jonathan Martin walked off the Dolphins mid-season claiming he had been the focus of an intense and ongoing campaign of hazing by fellow offensive lineman, Richie Incognito. Incognito was suspended from the team in the wake of the allegations and graphic text messages and voice mails subsequently came to light in which Incognito calls Martin, who is bi-racial, a half-n$%$r and threatens to kill him. Incognito claims that this was how he and Martin communicated, that it was all in jest. Right now, we don’t know. What we do know is that the incident brought to the surface an ugly seam of masculine insecurity.
10) The last entry on our list this year returns us to the economics behind the games we watch so intently. This time the subject is the subsidization of stadiums and the habit of franchise owners to hold cities hostage if they don’t get their way. First, there was the announcement that the NBA (thank God David Stern’s retirement is just around the corner) blocked the sale of the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-based group that would have explored moving the team to the Emerald City, which had already been screwed out of its NBA franchise because it refused to pony up for a new stadium. Then, after negotiations that included Sacramento’s mayor, former NBA all-star Kevin Johnson, the league approved sale of the franchise to a Sacramento-based group for $100 million less than what the Seattle group had offered. To ensure the new owners would keep the team in Sacramento, the city chipped in $258 million in incentives to help build a new stadium.
In Atlanta, plans were announced to build a new $1 billion stadium to replace the Georgia Dome, which is only 20 years old and recently underwent a $300 million renovation. Correctly sensing the city had been fleeced, Atlanta’s mayor refused to consider a similar deal for the Atlanta Braves, who came looking for help to build a new baseball stadium, even though the one they currently play in is just 17 years old and has been able to drive for only a year. Thus denied, the Braves took their business to suburban Cobb County, whose Commissioners agreed to fork over $370 million for a new stadium, into which the Braves will move in 2017, this while the Cobb County schools face an $80 million deficit. Go figure. Though I may not always agree with them, local Tea Party activists were absolutely right to come out against the deal. One wonders if they realize how much they have in common with the Brazilian protesters?
Photo: AP/Mike George
See 2012’s Worst Moments in Sports here.