Welcome back! In this issue: some headlines that recently struck my fancy, a new segment called What the Hell is Sports Academia, and an essay called Civilizing the African Sportsman that I wrote for a summer class on propaganda and ideology.

Headlines

MLB players report death threats and other negative interactions with fans as a result of legalized sports betting.

• 78.2% of respondents in the Athletic’s player poll said that sports betting has changed the way fans treat them. Instead of fans cheering when they win, and being angry when they lose, they’ll face hostility when they don’t fulfill the narrow requirements for someone’s parlay to hit. Many players have deleted or privated their social medias entirely as a result.

Tennis players call for identity verification on social media.

• Facing similar abuse online, tennis players have been advocating for systemic change in social media moderation. Katie Boulter, Harriet Dart, and Sonay Kartal all want social media companies to verify people’s identities so that trolls cannot keep creating new accounts after they have been reported. But is this realistic? Social media companies, some which have recently been scaling back moderation, are unlikely to act unless legal requirements force the issue. But sweeping legislation requiring identity verification online brings up valid free speech concerns, especially as the right has been cracking down on political speech.

‘Surviving Ohio State’ HBO documentary.

• In Jeanna Kelly’s coverage of the documentary for SB Nation, she details key takeaways of the harrowing reality that Dr. Richard Strauss, with the complicity of the university which knew of the allegations and did nothing about them, sexually abused and/or blackmailed 2800 students. Read her write-up, or better yet, watch the documentary.

Next year’s (probably) first overall pick in the NHL draft commits to Penn State for a $700k Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deal.

• Gavin McKenna will be earning only a little less than the base salary afforded to NHLers while playing in college. His other option, playing in one of multiple major junior leagues, would’ve seen him living with a billet family with a small stipend for food expenses. Though the catastrophizing around the future of Canadian major junior leagues seems a bit premature, it seems like the NCAA will likely be a much more attractive destination, at least for the highest-ranked prospects.

What the Hell is Sports Academia?

Whenever I tell people that I’ve written an honors thesis about sports politics and have gotten really into reading sports academia, I’m mostly met with puzzled stares and questions of what that actually means. In this segment I’ll be taking a look at pieces of sports academia from across the disciplinary spectrum. This edition: “Knocked Out!: Marketing the Philadelphia Quakers” by Yong Chae Rhee and John Wong.

This article, published in the Journal of Sport History in 2018, looks at the single season of the Philadelphia Quakers’ existence (1930-31) and critiques the team’s marketing strategy. Though, since marketing implies doing market research, catering to demand, and establishing a strong relationship with the customer base, calling their approach a marketing strategy is generous. It’s more accurate to say that the Quakers took a product-based approach to selling tickets by promising the city a winning team, and then utterly failed to deliver said product.

After Henry Townsend, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates (an NHL team at the time), died, his sons sold the team to bootlegger William Dwyer who also owned the New York Americans. Since owning two teams in the NHL was frowned upon, he installed retired boxer Benny Leonard to head the organization and then temporarily moved the already financially struggling team to Philadelphia while a new arena would hopefully be built in Pittsburgh.

Leonard promised a winning team this year, throwing last season’s coach and future Hall of Famer Frank Frederickson under the bus and accusing the players of drinking too much and being out of shape. He brought in 35 new prospects, but when they couldn’t compete, had to buy 3 more players from Ottawa for $35,000. It did not work. The team’s season record was 4 wins, 36 losses, and 4 ties, tied for lowest number of wins in an NHL season to this day. And even if the crowd could have stomached the loss, the arena was nothing to write home about. It was the same one the local minor league team used, only sat 5-6 thousand fans, and had horrible sightline issues.

So if Leonard couldn’t put an appealing product on the ice, had he at least managed to connect with the people of Philadelphia and gotten them to identify with the team? Absolutely not. He put himself in the spotlight as the face of the team, referring to them as “Benny Leonard’s Quakers” in a bid to get the team associated with his athletic prowess. But he was a boxer, not a hockey player. And he was well-known as a New Yorker, not a Philadelphian. The local media thought of Leonard and the rest of management as outsiders, a group of “New York capitalists.“

What was the result of this season? Well the people of Philadelphia didn’t exactly line up in droves to see the Quakers lose. The team earned only a little over $39,000, just barely covering the stadium rental of $38,000. For the next four seasons, the NHL’s Board of Governors voted at the beginning of every year to suspend the team’s operations, hoping that the Pittsburgh arena would someday come to fruition. In 1936, they gave up hope and cancelled the team entirely. Benny Leonard’s business strategy was spectacularly unsuccessful. His product-first approach was undercut by a bad product, and as a loud and proud outsider, he was not able to get local hockey fans to buy into the team’s identity.

Deep Dive: Civilizing the African Sportsman

The International Olympic Committee was founded around the turn of the 20th century by a group of European men who either were nobility or were close friends with noblemen. A significant proportion didn’t believe women should participate in sport at all, and thought that non-white athletes like the Native American Jim Thorpe were simply not capable of understanding gentleman amateurism. As you can imagine, they didn’t have the most enlightened things to say about Africans. Read my thoughts on how the IOC tried to use ‘sporting civilization’ as a way to colonize African athletes in the early/mid 20th centry.

On your way out:

• A new episode of Critical Currents, the podcast I help produce, research, and (usually, but not this time) co-host is out! Listen to Rosecrans Baldwin talk about Los Angeles as a modern city-state.

• Sports Team, a British indie-rock band that I love has released an album. It’s called Boys These Days and is full of catchy hooks, americana, social commentary, and some very sexy saxophone. I know they don’t actually have anything to do with sports, but let me have this.