David Greene talks to William C. Rhoden, who writes for ESPN’s website The Undefeated, about how some basketball fans abuse players, and whether greater protections need to be put in place.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

When you’re a sports fan, there are times when you’re in your living room. It’s just you, your TV and the game. Yell at players – no one hears you. Or you might be in a stadium or an arena where everyone can see and hear you, even the athletes. Things got pretty out of control Monday night at an NBA basketball game in Salt Lake City. A Utah Jazz fan started harassing Russell Westbrook, who plays for Oklahoma City. Westbrook lashed out at the fan and his wife.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RUSSELL WESTBROOK: You think I’m playing. I swear to God. I swear to God. I’ll [expletive] you up. You and your wife. I’ll [expletive] you up.

GREENE: Westbrook said, after the game, he was not going to stand for what he thought was a racial insult.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

WESTBROOK: Young man and his wife in the stands told me to get down on my knees like you used to. And for me, that’s just completely disrespectful to me. I think it’s racial.

GREENE: Now, the fan, Shane Keisel, described things differently to ESPN.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SHANE KEISEL: I just told him – I’m like, just sit down and ice your knees, bro. And he turned to me, and he’s like, that’s heat. That’s heat. And I’m like, well, you’re going to need it.

GREENE: Whatever happened, Westbrook was fined $25,000. The fan was banned permanently by the Utah Jazz. William C. Rhoden writes for ESPN’s The Undefeated, and he told me that fans have long believed a ticket gives them license to become an entirely different person inside that arena.

WILLIAM C. RHODEN: Somebody who’s normally quiet and intelligent becomes a sort of moron, where, you know, you paint your face or you curse or you scream. And you insult things, you say things to athletes that you never would even dream of saying if you met them before. But I think now, particularly with Westbrook being involved in a couple of incidents, we’ve reached either a tipping point or a point at which a combination of stadium management and teams have to really set down new guidelines for what that ticket allows you to say and allows you to do.

GREENE: Do they need to put teeth behind it? I mean, can the NBA or, like, arena officials actually threaten fans and enforce this?

RHODEN: Oh, yeah. People have been ejected, just like in New York with the Knicks, with James Dolan. Somebody just simply said, sell the team, and they kicked this guy out of the stadium.

GREENE: Wow.

RHODEN: So if you could kick a guy out of a stadium for simply telling the owner, sell the team, you could certainly kick fans out of the arena for conduct that crosses the line.

GREENE: What does cross the line? I mean, in this case, it’s – I mean, this fan claims that he didn’t really do anything, even though Westbrook has made some very serious allegations that he was very racist. But, like, where would you draw the line?

RHODEN: Well, I’d draw the line – for example, there’s an instance with Marcus Smart, who now plays for the Boston Celtics. When he was at Oklahoma State, there was a fan who cursed at him and actually, I think, used the N-word. Clearly, that crosses the line.

GREENE: Sure.

RHODEN: Something that crosses your line may not cross my line.

GREENE: You brought the example of saying, sell the team. I, as a sports fan, have probably said things worse, screaming and yelling, that were worse than, sell the team, even though I feel like I’ve never crossed a line.

RHODEN: (Laughter).

GREENE: So I mean, can they go too far in enforcing this?

RHODEN: Well, you know, because it does get into freedom of speech, and it gets into what does that $150 ticket allow you to say? I mean, I’m always stunned with how could somebody – I don’t know, maybe if you and I sit together, and I say, come on, man. You kidding me? (Laughter) You know, but…

GREENE: I mean, I’m an angry, angry Pittsburgh fan. I will use – I hate to admit it to my listeners – but, like, expletives and things that – you know, it never gets personal. But it’s like, when I’m angry, I’m angry.

RHODEN: But let me ask a question. How close are you to the field where Ben Roethlisberger, you know, can actually…

GREENE: Yeah. No, we don’t have – it’s not the intimacy of a basketball arena.

RHODEN: Right. First of all, you’re right; basketball is much more intimate. Maybe we have to have a proximity rule – if you are in shouting distance where the coach can hear you. And maybe we should just say that if the players to whom this is directed are offended, then, you know, you’ve got a problem.

GREENE: Well, can I just step back? Like, you say we’re at a tipping point. Like, has something changed in sports? Like, is this moment in 2019 different than three, five, 10 years ago? Or…

RHODEN: I think the tipping point actually happened with POTUS 45.

GREENE: (Laughter).

RHODEN: When he gets to the…

GREENE: You’re talking about Donald Trump. I guess – I know you don’t – you’re not saying that name, but I should just let our listeners know.

RHODEN: I’m not saying the name. I refuse. But when you get to that point, and he’s in Huntsville, Ala., and he whips up this crowd of white supporters. And this is during the whole – you know, when players were protesting, and that then translates into in-stadium behavior. I think we’re in this period of time where being uncivil has become the new norm. And what better place to totally be uncivil is in these basketball arenas, when, frankly, you have large numbers of white fans and large numbers of young black men and women as the participants.

And that’s always a very combustible relationship, particularly when most white people, I’d say, don’t really have this kind of intimate contact with a lot of young black men, except when they go to these games. And a lot of times, all this sort of racial insensitivity just kind of pours down, you know, in this kind of language, which is why I think this is probably a perfect time, and Westbrook is the perfect person to bring up a new code of conduct.

GREENE: Bill, thanks so much. Really nice talking to you.

RHODEN: Oh, pleasure’s mine.

GREENE: William C. Rhoden, longtime columnist for The New York Times, writer-at-large for ESPN’s The Undefeated.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly talks with Los Angeles Times sports columnist Arash Markazi about LeBron James’ disastrous first season with the Los Angeles Lakers.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For basketball fans, it was the blockbuster move of the season.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

MICHAEL STRAHAN: We’re going to talk about the huge move for LeBron James, the king. He’s taking his talents to Los Angeles.

ADRIAN WOJNAROWSKI: This is a seismic shift in the league.

PAULA FARIS: It is official. LeBron is a Laker.

KELLY: Well, that was then. Now things sound more like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: Some of the bluebirds have come out.

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Booing).

KELLY: Boos there for LeBron James. Since LeBron left to LA last summer, the team has managed to compile what one sportswriter calls, arguably the most disappointing season in Lakers history. Now, that sportswriter is LA Times sports columnist Arash Markazi. And he joins us now from outside the Lakers’ practice facility. Hey there, Arash.

ARASH MARKAZI: Hey. Thanks for having me.

KELLY: So the most disappointing season in Lakers history – really?

MARKAZI: Here’s why. Not that they were supposed to win a championship, but they were supposed to at least make the playoffs. And they were supposed to be competitive, and they were supposed to contend. For this team to be as bad as they are, they’re not going to make the playoffs for the sixth consecutive season. That’s why this is so disappointing.

KELLY: And that is looking like a done deal; they’re not going to make the playoffs?

MARKAZI: No. For all intents and purposes, they are not going to make the playoffs.

KELLY: So what went wrong here, because the expectations were through the roof for LeBron hitting LA?

MARKAZI: It was a variety of things. So LeBron James missed a quarter of the season. When he went down on Christmas Day, the Lakers, at that point, were the fourth seed in the Western Conference, really playing well. When he went down…

KELLY: And remind us what his injury was.

MARKAZI: He hurt his groin on Christmas Day against the Warriors, who are the top team in the league and are expected to win the championship again. They blew them out on Christmas Day, so that’s where they were at that point in time. LeBron goes down. And again, they are not a competitive team. By the time he comes back, they’re not even a playoff team.

And another thing that happened – they tried to make a few trades. And a lot of these young players – all of a sudden, they don’t know if they figure into the long-term plans of this team. So their attachment to the Lakers, their attachment to LeBron kind of goes away. And so this team fell apart again. Guys were not only hurt, but the trust level was broken as well.

KELLY: So all of this, I gather, is giving rise to whispers. I want to play a little bit of tape. This is sportscaster Jeff Van Gundy of ESPN commenting during a game against the Boston Celtics.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JEFF VAN GUNDY: They have to rebuild this roster, right? And to me, I think they need to explore trading LeBron.

KELLY: Trading LeBron – I mean, mind-blowing. How did we get here?

MARKAZI: I mean, it is crazy, I mean, because he’s right. This roster is broken, so something has to be done. You have to surround LeBron with new players or trade LeBron. Now, I don’t think you trade LeBron. I think LeBron is a superstar that they’ve wanted to get. And by the way, he came to Los Angeles because he wants to retire here. He has, you know, plans to do things in Hollywood. So I don’t think he would want to go somewhere else.

The plan, I believe, is to draft players, sign players, trade for players who will be a good fit for LeBron because the fact of the matter is the players that they’ve surrounded LeBron with are not good fits for him.

KELLY: Are fans in LA starting to wonder if this is the beginning of the end of the reign of LeBron?

MARKAZI: I think so. I mean, it was a very unique position for a lot of Laker fans because for the past 20 years, they have been Kobe Bryant fans. And if you’re a Kobe Bryant fan, usually, you are part of the debate that says Kobe is superior to LeBron. And now, there wasn’t this feeling that, can I root for LeBron? So Laker fans are in this unique position.

I’ll give you a perfect example. LeBron James passed Michael Jordan on the all-time scoring list.

KELLY: Yeah.

MARKAZI: You would have thought you were at a golf tournament. It was a very polite clap, but there was no cheering. No one got excited because the fact of the matter is there’s no connection with LeBron. They don’t love him like he’s their own.

KELLY: Although he is still averaging – is it 27 points a game?

MARKAZI: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: I mean, it’s not shabby.

MARKAZI: No, listen; I mean, LeBron is not going to go anywhere. They signed him so they could have that superstar player. That is the one thing that this Lakers franchise has always had. Whether it’s Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, they’ve had a superstar. LeBron is their superstar. Now, the plan for them this summer is to get one more superstar.

KELLY: That is LA Times sports columnist Arash Markazi talking to us from outside the Lakers’ training facility. Thanks so much, Arash.

MARKAZI: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan about a gender discrimination lawsuit the U.S. women’s soccer team has filed against U.S. Soccer.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The U.S. women’s national soccer team is ranked number one in the world. The team won the women’s World Cup three times, and the U.S. women are four-time Olympic champions. The U.S. men’s soccer team – not so much. They’ve never won World Cup or the Olympics. They didn’t even qualify for the 2018 World Cup. But the women players are paid less than the men. And that’s why the U.S. women’s national team filed suit against the U.S. Soccer Federation in federal court on Friday – Women’s Day – charging gender discrimination. USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan has been following the story, and she’s with us now.

Christine Brennan, thank you so much for talking to us.

CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Oh, Michel, my pleasure. Always good to talk with you – especially about a topic like this.

MARTIN: Well, the lawsuit points out that for their success in winning the 2015 Women’s World Cup, the U.S. women were paid less than a third of what the U.S. men were paid for losing in the round of ’16. And I think a lot of people might look at that and say, how is that possible? So how is that possible?

BRENNAN: Well, soccer is – has an old boys’ network to the max, Michel. And actually, the U.S. Soccer Federation is doing a better job than most federations around the world. It truly – the sexism and the anti-women feelings are incredibly strong in the sport of soccer worldwide. And so what we’re seeing here is the U.S. women’s national team – I believe it’s the most famous women’s team on the planet in any sport, and certainly role models for so many other women’s sports and charging away, leading the charge, so to speak, on these kinds of issues. They’ve just said enough is enough.

And here we are, three months away from the next Women’s World Cup, which is coming up in France in June. And they have just – with the confidence that they’ve been given from years of playing sports in our country, Title IX now 46, almost 47 years old – they just are not going to deal with this anymore. And that’s why they did this now. And it really is quite a statement about where women are, not just in sports, but in our culture in 2019.

MARTIN: Tell me about the history of this suit. As I understand it, this started with a complaint that the women filed to the EEOC back in 2016. Is that right?

BRENNAN: That is correct. And they didn’t – that hasn’t gotten anywhere – and five players back then, including Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and a couple of others. But frankly, there have been skirmishes, Michel, going all the way back to the year 2000, when the players actually struck and missed a – one tournament going into the Sydney Olympics.

And it’s interesting because I’m sure many of your listeners remember where they were when they watched Brandi Chastain kick that penalty kick almost 20 years ago now – July 10, 1999. So 1999 was really a watershed moment because they saw the huge stadiums, they saw the popularity, the only story in history, as far as I know, to ever be on the covers of Time, Newsweek, People and Sports Illustrated the same week. That was the U.S. women’s soccer team – the nation falling in love with what it’s created with Title IX.

And so with that, I think that gave them the boost to know they needed to do more. And that has been in their DNA in terms of fighting for equal rights for women and, as I said, leading the charge for all kinds of female athletes around the globe, not just in the U.S. So from ’99 onward, there have been these skirmishes about equal pay. This is really just dropping the mike.

MARTIN: Well, OK. Let me just dig in a little bit deeper. Can direct comparisons of the compensation between the men and women – can those direct comparisons be made? I mean, the New York Times reports that each team has its own collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer and that the men – they say that the men receive higher bonuses when they play for the United States, but they’re paid only when they make the team whereas the women receive guaranteed salaries supplemented by smaller matched bonuses. So…

BRENNAN: You’re right. You’re bringing up a great point. And there is an apples to oranges kind of quality to this. Why is that? Because the men’s teams are – men’s – members the men’s team are employed by professional clubs around the world, and they receive compensation that way because the men’s game is so much more advanced than the women’s game, aside from – especially maybe entirely the United States. The women, the top female players, are under contract with U.S. Soccer, not individual teams.

So that is a little bit of why the comparison is – can be difficult. But the differences in bonuses for the two teams – 2014 World Cup, the men’s World Cup, U.S. Soccer, they lost in the round of ’16, the U.S. men did. They were paid – the bonuses were paid out of a total of 5.375 million – OK, 5.375 million for the men who lost in the round of ’16. A year later, 2015, in, Canada the U.S. women win the World Cup, and they’re paid out of a pool of 1.725 million.

MARTIN: Who makes that decision? I mean, who decides how much bonus money and how it’s divided?

BRENNAN: That’s U.S. Soccer. And you bring up a very interesting point because these are the national governing bodies for the sport. All these sports that you see in the Olympics have a national governing body. They are – they’re not for profit. And their goal simply is to promote the game, the athletes and the sport. So, for example, U.S. Figure Skating years ago decided to pay the men equal to the women on things like bonuses. It’s a little different because it’s not a team, it’s individual athletes. But figure skating made sure to pay the men equally because they wanted to hold that carrot out there to boys and men to become figure skaters because the women are the stars in figure skating. Same with swimming – Katie Ledecky gets the exact same amount of money and a bonus that Michael Phelps did. So those are the comparisons, and that’s why U.S. Soccer doesn’t look obviously so good.

MARTIN: Except that you’re telling us that, say, in figure skating, the governing body figured out that – without having to be sued – that they should pay the male athletes the same even though the women are the stars. What I think I hear you saying is that U.S. Soccer could have done the same and has chosen not to.

BRENNAN: Absolutely. U.S. Soccer could have headed this off at the pass. They have known since the year of 1999, since that World Cup, that things were changing. That was a watershed moment. And when those football stadiums were full for women’s soccer, literally packed to capacity, the Rose Bowl, Soldier Field in Chicago, all around the country these things were happening that summer, that they – someone should have said this is a sea change and we need to start noticing it. They think they did OK by raising them when prodded or when having these disputes. They did do more, they didn’t do enough.

MARTIN: That was sports columnist Christine Brennan of USA Today. Christine, thank you so much for talking with us.

BRENNAN: Michel, my pleasure. Thanks again.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Scott Simon talks with high school wrestler Jaslynn Gallegos of Brighton, Colo. A male wrestler refused to face off against her at a state championship.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A high school wrestler named Brendan Johnston refused to compete against two opponents and forfeited those matches at the Colorado State Wrestling Championship last month. Those two opponents, Angel Rios and Jaslynn Gallegos, are women. Brendan Johnston told reporters he wasn’t comfortable wrestling with women. Jaslynn Gallegos went on to win in fifth place in that tournament. She is a senior at Skyview High School and joins us now from Brighton, Colo. Ms. Gallegos, thanks so much for being with us.

JASLYNN GALLEGOS: Yeah. No problem.

SIMON: First, congratulations.

JASLYNN: Thank you.

SIMON: How did you feel when Brendan Johnston declined to compete against you?

JASLYNN: Well, one of my things is I just want to be a wrestler, not necessarily defined as a girl wrestler. So it kind of hurt me a little bit because, you know, I just want to be this wrestler. And my gender is holding me back.

SIMON: Brendan Johnston told reporters, quote, “I don’t want to treat a young lady like that on the mat or off the mat and not to disrespect the heart or the effort that she’s put in. That’s not what I want to do.” Do you accept that?

JASLYNN: Yeah, I mean, everybody has their own beliefs. But at the same time, it’s not just black and white. Like, you can’t really change what somebody believes. Like, for me, I believe that I’m just a wrestler. And he believes that you’re not just a wrestler. You know, you’re a female wrestler.

SIMON: Now, let me ask. You know what’s going on in this country and around the world. Can you see in this day and age why a young man just may not want to put himself in the position of applying force on a woman or pressing against her even if it’s in a public athletic competition?

JASLYNN: You know, I feel like that whole situation is something that the wrestling community has gone past, especially, like, since I’ve wrestled hundreds of guys. Like, that’s not an issue here, you know? It’s kind of unheard of in the wrestling community for a girl to say something happened during a match.

It’s wrestling, and I think we all understand that it’s a very physical sport. You’re literally fighting someone to put them to their back. It’s – you’re not thinking about anything else at the time because you’re trying to win a match. For me, when I wrestle, it’s literally all muscle memory because I practice my shots and my stand-ups and my sit-outs and my pinning combination so often I don’t even have to think when I wrestle.

SIMON: Anything you’d like to say to boys who might be reluctant to wrestle you?

JASLYNN: You know, just wrestle me. You know, you might get pinned. You might win by one or two points. You might even pin me. But I’m definitely worth giving a match to, you know?

SIMON: And I gather your brothers are wrestlers, too, right?

JASLYNN: Yes. My older brother, he wrestled his whole life, as well – qualified for state. And then my two little brothers, they are currently wrestling.

SIMON: Bet you can beat them.

JASLYNN: Oh, yeah, definitely – both of…

SIMON: (Laughter).

JASLYNN: …Them at the same time.

SIMON: (Laughter) I gather you started wrestling when you were 5.

JASLYNN: Yes. I did.

SIMON: Well, so you’ve been at it a while. Anything you would like to tell young women who want to wrestle?

JASLYNN: You know, just like anything, there’s going to be points where it gets really hard, and you don’t know if you can do it. But, you know, if you push yourself and just keep going, especially if you love it, it’s worth it in the end to just keep on doing it.

SIMON: Jaslynn Gallegos, a wrestler at Skyview High School in Thornton, Colo., thanks so much for being with us.

JASLYNN: Yeah. No problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF VETIVER SONG, “BACKWARDS SLOWLY”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

More girls are taking to the ice — not as figure skaters — but as hockey players. NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with The Wall Street Journal’s Anne Marie Chaker about her report on girls in ice hockey.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

More girls are taking the ice – not as figure skaters, but as hockey players.

JULIETTE CHAKER BRAVIN: It’s fun to skate and to get the puck.

CLEMENTINE PARKER: I like going fast and…

JULIETTE: So do I.

CLEMENTINE: …Chasing the puck.

JULIETTE: So do I.

SHAPIRO: That’s Juliette Chaker Bravin and her teammate Clementine Parker. They are both 8, and you won’t catch either of them on the ice in sparkly leotards.

CLEMENTINE: I don’t want to do figure skating because there’s music involved, and it’s hard to do with music.

JULIETTE: Yeah. You get all distracted.

CLEMENTINE: You don’t wear pads. And if you fall, it will hurt.

JULIETTE: Would you rather play a game or twirl and dance? I would rather play a game.

SHAPIRO: Well, Anne Marie Chaker is hockey coach to Clementine, coach and mom to Juliette, and she’s a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who wrote a piece this week titled, “For Many Girls, Figure Skating Loses Its Edge To Hockey.” Anne Marie, thanks for coming in.

ANNE MARIE CHAKER: Thank you so much.

SHAPIRO: So we should say you are not a neutral party here. You are a former competitive figure skater-turned-hockey coach. So you have a bit of an angle on this.

CHAKER: Yeah. So I grew up just a total rink rat. In the ’80s and ’90s, figure skating was super cool, and I just – I loved the 6 a.m. practices, I loved the music, all of it. And it was very – the lines were very clearly drawn. It was, like, the girls were over at this sheet of ice doing the figure skating, and the boys were over here stinking up the place doing the hockey.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter). And today?

CHAKER: Today, there’s a lot of girls playing hockey. The figure skating ice, there’s maybe two or three girls on the ice, but not much more than that.

SHAPIRO: You dug into the numbers for your Wall Street Journal story. How fast is this growing?

CHAKER: It kind of started to take off 1998, when the women debuted at the Olympics. And then in the early 2000s, the numbers started to really soar. When I looked at the USA hockey data, I was really surprised to see, like, in the last 10 years, the growth has really skyrocketed, like, 50 percent.

SHAPIRO: I think a lot of people think of it as a very violent sport where people get injured. And, like, to take a puck to the face, that doesn’t deter these girls at all.

CHAKER: It doesn’t. And, you know, watching them and coaching them has been so interesting because at the beginning of the season, it’s the boys that dominate everything. There’s, like, 60 to 80 boys on the ice. And the girls, there’s maybe six to 10 of them. They kind of seek each other out.

SHAPIRO: So these are co-ed teams.

CHAKER: They’re co-ed teams. And then something happens. We have this all-girls tournament in February, and it’s the first time that they see other teams of all girls. And it’s, like, the power of seeing other female hockey players just like them, they feel like this belongs to them.

SHAPIRO: How much of this is connected to the success of female role models in ice hockey and the kind of absence of super high-profile figure skaters who are dominating the conversation?

CHAKER: I think it’s huge. You know, when the women’s Olympic ice hockey team won…

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: She has stopped. United States wins gold.

CHAKER: …I mean, Kendall Coyne competed for the first time at the All-Stars in the fastest skater event.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: An outstanding job by Kendall Coyne. Watch the feet move there. The angles are…

CHAKER: Those are eye-opening moments that answer the question, I think, for a lot of girls, like, can we do this? Yes. We can totally do this, and this is what it looks like.

SHAPIRO: This is such a recent trend. Has there been a moment on the ice that has just shocked you, seeing little girls do something that you had not seen them do before?

CHAKER: My girls, I was trying to explain to them the idea of aggression. You know, little girls are taught to be polite, to be good. And I was trying to get them to understand that that all flies out the window in hockey. Do we know what aggressive means? And I was trying to – and when we came back from that tournament, my daughter, who had kind of been afraid of the puck, just turned into this beast. And I was so proud of her.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter).

CHAKER: She had scored her first goal, and there was just, like, a little cocky swagger. Like, it was hers now. It was…

SHAPIRO: Permission to really go for it.

CHAKER: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SHAPIRO: Anne Marie Chaker, thank you so much.

CHAKER: Oh, my God. This was so fun. Thank you.

SHAPIRO: She is life and arts writer for The Wall Street Journal and a hockey mom and coach.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Audie Cornish talks with The Athletic’s Lindsay Jones about Kyler Murray and the evolving viewpoint within the NFL on sizing up NFL quarterbacks.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

The NFL draft may not be till next month, but the debate about who will be picked first is heating up. Oklahoma quarterback and reigning Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray is currently considered the favorite, despite his undersized body frame. Coming in at a slim 5-foot-10, Murray isn’t your typical NFL quarterback. The league is known for prizing height for the QB. And here he is at the NFL combine talking about his size.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KYLER MURRAY: I’ve never been the biggest guy on the field. I’m always the smallest guy in the field. You know, I’ve said it multiple times, you know, I feel like I’m the most impactful guy on the field and the best player on the field at all times.

CORNISH: Here to talk more is Lindsay Jones, writer for the website The Athletic. Welcome to the program.

LINDSAY JONES: Thanks for having me.

CORNISH: So what makes Kyler Murray so intriguing to take with the first pick?

JONES: Well, he is such a dynamic, unique athlete. And like you mentioned in his interview at the NFL combine, he is the best athlete on the field at almost every time. And that’s what we saw his final year at Oklahoma when he won the Heisman is that he is just such a dynamic, unique athlete. And a lot of coaches – the innovative coaches especially – look at him and think that he can do things that no other quarterback in the league could possibly do.

CORNISH: What are the concerns about size?

JONES: With smaller quarterbacks, they just have difficulty with their vision and their sight lines and how they can see around the field when all of the other men are so big. So that’s certainly the concern with the height. And if he had come in at 5-foot-9, even 5-foot-9 and 7/8 as opposed to just over 5-foot-10, that would have been a deal breaker for almost every NFL team, I think.

So the fact that he was 5’10”, while, you know, that quarter half an inch might not seem like a big deal to the rest of us, it’s a very big deal in the NFL. The other concern about his size is that when he was in college, he played at under 200 pounds. And it’s very difficult for a quarterback and the pounding that they take – especially when they’re running and on the move – the hits that they’re going to be taking from defensive linemen who are 250, 275, 300 pounds.

So it’s a big question of, how much weight can he hold comfortably while still being that dynamic athlete – and if he can hold up to the type of pounding that he will take once he’s in the NFL.

CORNISH: Do you get the sense that teams have evolved in their thinking in that they’re willing to take on a guy Murray’s size?

JONES: Some have. I don’t think that is something that is league-wide. There are some coaches and general managers who are very stuck in their ways about what they think a quarterback should look like from a height and weight perspective.

But we are starting to see some of these changes. Baker Mayfield, who was the No. 1 pick in last year’s draft, is only 6-foot-1. And we were having these same sort of discussions about Baker Mayfield’s size. He was tremendously successful as a rookie last year.

And then Russell Wilson, the quarterback from the Seattle Seahawks, who is also 5-foot-10 – he has really changed a lot of the ways that we look at quarterbacks and think about how successful a shorter quarterback can be.

CORNISH: One more thing. Kyler Murray also played baseball, right? Can you talk about his decision to choose going pro with the NFL?

JONES: Yes. This has been a lot of drama over the last several months because even his last year at Oklahoma, he said repeatedly that he was committed to playing pro baseball. He was drafted last year by the Oakland A’s with the assumption that he would play his last year at Oklahoma, and then he would go to play baseball. But he had this tremendous final season where he won the Heisman Trophy.

And this momentum started building that not only could he be a viable NFL quarterback, but he could be a high first round pick. He decided that this is where he wanted to go. You can look short term versus long term, the amount of money, you know.

I think he’s looking at it – I would rather play football. My career earnings over the course of 15 years might not be quite as high as a max baseball contract, but this is certainly something that he wants to do and will be financially viable for him.

CORNISH: That’s Lindsay Jones, NFL writer for the website The Athletic. Lindsay, thanks for the update.

JONES: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Some baseball teams, the Tampa Bay Rays for example, have torn out seats because of a drop in attendance. Teams have explanations for stadium shrinkage, but commentator Mike Pesca has his own ideas.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Attending a major league baseball game is expensive. Bringing the whole family can be almost impossible for some, so many people don’t. Although some teams, like the Yankees, still attract big crowds, the Tampa Bay Rays are acknowledging a new reality. Having priced many fans out of the park, they’ve torn out many of the seats. Commentator Mike Pesca sees a trend.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME”)

MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” was written 101 years ago, and most of the sentiment still stands. You can still buy peanuts and Cracker Jack. It’s still one, two, three strikes, you’re out. The only update might be the line, take me out with the crowd. Sixty-seven million fans attended a regular season baseball game last year, but those numbers were down from the year before. And some of that is, actually, by design, as in the design of ballparks. The seating capacity of stadia across American sports – not just baseball – is shrinking. The Tampa Bay Rays will be playing for about 26,000 fans maximum. That’s 5,000 fewer seats than they have now. The Las Vegas Raiders will soon debut in a stadium that will be among the three most compact in the game. All 16 major league teams that have moved in the past 20 years are playing in tighter confines than they once did.

The reason for this shrinkage, the leagues will tell you, is that televised sport has beaten the live experience. As the TVs got better, the traffic got worse, I guess. And the couch beckoned. I just got back from Disney World. Disney movies are clearly cheaper and easier to get to than the live experience. And yet millions more people flock to the Magic Kingdom than did 10 years ago. There is an “Avatar” ride that had a wait time of – let me check the app. It’s on an app now – three hours, five minutes. But with baseball and football, there is so little attention paid to the experience in the park. How about good Wi-Fi or some milling-about zones and food that challenges our collective delusion that Dodger Dogs aren’t inferior, cylindrical foodstuffs? We have been gaslit about Fenway Franks.

Then there’s the gouging. The New York Jets will charge you 40 to $50 for parking. And when you enter the stadium, you have to watch the New York Jets. Owners can continue to shrink their stadiums and their ambitions or they can start rewarding fans who literally give their teams the home field advantage as something other than chickens to be plucked or geese to be fattened before slaughter. Don’t the fans have enough experience with slaughter, especially when we’re talking about fans of the Jets, Rays and Raiders?

(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY JOEL’S “TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME”)

INSKEEP: (Singing) Take me out…

No, I’m not going to do that. Commentator Mike Pesca hosts the Slate podcast The Gist, which is still very affordable and welcomes new fans. He also wrote the book “Upon Further Review.”

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with renowned British soccer commentator Jon Champion, who is joining ESPN as the new play-by-play voice for Major League Soccer.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

For almost two decades, Jon Champion has called the play-by-play on some of the most watched soccer games in the world.

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JON CHAMPION: Trying to run Georginio, making a great job of it. Solo away. What a fabulous goal lighting up Wembley.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: From the Premier League to FIFA games to the World Cup and Olympic Games. Now Champion is taking his family and moving across the pond to the U.S. to cover Major League Soccer for ESPN and, as he puts it, to live the American dream. Jon Champion, welcome to WEEKEND EDITION and to the United States (laughter).

CHAMPION: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What brings you to our shores?

CHAMPION: I think a challenge and an opportunity to have an adventure, both on a personal and a professional level. So as you rightly pointed out, I’ve been commentating on soccer matches for 34 years now. I started when I was at university as a teenager. But you do get to a stage where you’re recognizing that you’re covering an event or a storyline for the fifth, sixth, seventh, maybe eighth time. And I just got to the stage where, in 2014, ESPN hired me to cover the World Cup in Brazil. And off the back of that, the suggestion was made that maybe I’d like to consider, at some point, coming and making my home here and commentating full time on American soccer rather than European or, specifically, British soccer. And that was the gestation, really, of an idea that took four years to grow into a fully fledged offer to come in and work here full time.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you have to remind yourself to call it soccer, though?

CHAMPION: I do at the moment. I do and…

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) I can just imagine, I’m afraid, you slipping up because, obviously, the rest of the world does not call it soccer.

CHAMPION: No, no, no. It is football around the rest of the world, and I’m in the midst of the penalty or PK debate. What do I call a penalty kick?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

CHAMPION: So I’m somewhere betwixt and between. I’m mid-Atlantic at the moment.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) All right. U.S. soccer is gaining in popularity, but it is definitely not at the level of the Premier League or other leagues around the world. You’ll be calling matches for a sport that is not watched by everyone, as it was back home. How do you feel about that? What is your plan to bring soccer to everyone’s living room?

CHAMPION: Well, I’m not sure…

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You’re responsible for this alone, by the way.

CHAMPION: Personally?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes, absolutely.

CHAMPION: Oh, that is…

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I’m going to put it all on you.

(LAUGHTER)

CHAMPION: I mean, I’m fortunate in that my voice is associated with big, worldwide soccer events. So if my voice becomes associated with big, American soccer events, there is a school of thought that that helps to add a certain validity to the occasion and to the broadcast. Now, whether that’s the case is probably not for me to say, but that is the suggestion and the theory behind this.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But why do you think it hasn’t really caught on here in America the same way? Because kids do it. You have soccer clubs all over the United States. Kids grow up playing soccer. And then, it kind of just stops.

CHAMPION: Yeah. It does at the moment, or it has done up until this point. And it is the most played sport in that age group. For teenagers, soccer is the No. 1 participation event. And, gradually, that is translating into a greater interest in the professional game of soccer in this country. So one of the attractions of this job coming now, for me, is that if you look at the context of league soccer in this country, it began, effectively, in 1996. So this is season number 24 that begins over this weekend. If you translate that into the English game, league soccer there started in 1888. So, in the same terms, we’re in 1911 now, here in America. So…

GARCIA-NAVARRO: We’re a young country in many ways (laughter).

CHAMPION: Yeah. But it means that it is an evolution. And, obviously, the American game is at a very early stage of that evolution. But I think the graph shows that the acceleration in interest in the game – it’s gathering pace. It’s quite attractive to come and be a little part of trying to tell the story of a growth of a sport that’s conquered the world with one exception, and we’re sitting right in the middle of that exception. And I’d love to play a very, very small role and be a close observer of the breakthrough of soccer. I’m not suggesting that it’s going to displace the NFL, but it is capable of nibbling at the heels, perhaps, of baseball and of ice hockey, certainly. It’s very exciting to be at the stage of one’s career where one’s been lucky enough to do most things, but this is an unconquered frontier.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jon Champion, longtime British soccer commentator and now ESPN’s lead announcer for Major League Soccer, thank you very much.

CHAMPION: It’s been a great joy. Thank you.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Michel Martin talks with journalist Soledad O’Brien about her recent reporting on eating disorders among male athletes.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We want to talk now about eating disorders. After years of education by the medical community and advocacy by activists and sufferers, many now understand the threat this disorder poses for young women. But, increasingly, it’s been identified among young men, especially young male athletes. Journalist Soledad O’Brien explored this for the HBO program “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.” It premiered on Tuesday, and Soledad is with us now from our bureau in New York. Soledad O’Brien, thank you so much for joining us.

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So let me play a clip from your conversation with Logan Davis, a hockey player who was obsessed over getting into peak shape. Here it is.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “REAL SPORTS WITH BRYANT GUMBEL”)

LOGAN DAVIS: There were days where I’d eat, like, 500 calories in a day.

O’BRIEN: Did you lose weight?

DAVIS: Close to 30 pounds in a summer.

O’BRIEN: And what was the reaction from your teammates and your coaches?

DAVIS: If anything, it was, like, lauded.

MARTIN: Soledad, you reported that a third of eating disorder patients are men, but we often don’t hear about that. Why is that?

O’BRIEN: I think, first of all, it’s just something that’s not really talked about. And that’s really an estimate, a third, because it’s a disease that people just don’t come clean about, if you will. I think there’s a lot of shame, a lot of stigma about it. And, also, when you look at the definition for many about what an eating disorder is, a lot of the men who suffer and are dealing with their eating disorders would say the first thing that they would see would be, well, step one, usually, you’ll lose your period. So they would say, well, clearly, this is not for me. This is not an issue I have.

Most of them had no idea. It was a complete surprise and shock to them that they, in fact, had an eating disorder, even though I think people outside of them and in their families and their friends would say, well, clearly, you do. We interviewed a young man who traveled with a chicken breast in his pocket to dinners because he was so anxious about a restaurant not having food that he could eat. And I said to him, like, at that point, when you’re pulling a chicken breast out of your pocket, did you think, I clearly have an issue? He said, I thought I was just more dedicated than everybody else.

MARTIN: Your reporting makes the point that some of the very things that make people successful as athletes are the very things that make people successful at maintaining these disorders.

O’BRIEN: Yeah, discipline, wanting it more, being focused and I think also having your coaches and your teammates prodding you, cheering for you, encouraging you along, even though, in many cases, the disordered eating was terrible. They were being cheered because of the results that people would see. And I think society, too, saying, wow, that person is dedicated and more dedicated than everybody else. They want it more.

MARTIN: You know, where society often encourages women to be thin and applauds them for being thin so they see – they sort of get the idea that that’s what the ideal is. But you also make the point that this society sort of encourages boys and men to be muscular and bulked up. So the question that I have is like, how does that work, that these young men are still getting the idea that these really unhealthy eating habits is somehow desirable? Did you get a sense of – like, how did that work?

O’BRIEN: Yeah, I think it’s a pathway, you know? So I think, at first, the idea is that there is an ideal body that is going to make you – all these young men that we’re talking about are elite athletes. They are the best of the best in their sport at the level where they are. And so step one is what you’re doing isn’t enough, that your body could be even better. And it doesn’t actually necessarily even correlate with winning more or being more powerful or swimming faster or being a better cyclist. It’s just there’s an ideal look and ideal shape, and you’re not it yet.

MARTIN: You know, you had a really interesting point in the piece about how the Internet can play into exacerbating these eating disorders. You talked about how some of the experts in the field call this bro science. So the two questions I have is is this more common. Do you think that these eating disorders among men is getting more common in part because people can transmit this information to each other, and it goes viral? Or is it just that we’re more aware of this now?

O’BRIEN: Bro science refers to sort of this fake science. I mean, the people have this philosophy that they turn into – here’s what I use to lose weight. Here’s what I do to build muscle. And it’s not scientific at all, but it ends up being posted on social media.

So I think as, obviously, social media grows and takes off, for young people, it becomes a platform to get information from and access to people who are giving them often really, really bad advice and wrong advice about their bodies. All of the young men we spoke to talked about the power of Instagram and literally wanting to show off their bodies or feeling ashamed of their bodies because how they would look on social media.

MARTIN: I wonder what kind of reaction you’re getting to it so far. It was also really striking to hear just how – even in a culture where you think people should know about this, how many of the young men talked about how coaches, teammates would pinch their bellies and, you know, basically make them feel bad about their weight. And I just wonder what kind of reaction you’re getting. Are you hearing from people like that? Are you wondering if people are thinking about – particularly, people who are in leadership positions are responding to this?

O’BRIEN: Yeah. I think a lot of the people in leadership positions and certainly where Dr. Quatromoni at Boston University, an expert who works with athletes who have eating disorders, would say there’s a lot of thought about how to think about nutrition. I was surprised at how little a lot of these elite athletes understood about nutrition. They were thinking in terms of I’m fat, I’m thin but not in terms of what do I need, nutritionally, to make my body most effective so I win.

That was a big surprise to me. And so a lot of colleges are really rethinking how they deal with their students so that you don’t have to have an issue like an eating disorder either go unnoticed or even just exist at all because a student is being pinched by a coach who thinks they’re being helpful but who ultimately is not.

MARTIN: That’s journalist Soledad O’Brien. Her piece on eating disorders among male athletes aired on “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel,” and it’s available now on HBO. Soledad, thanks so much for talking to us.

O’BRIEN: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.