Plessy v. Ferguson and Sports Organizations in the 2020s

If you’re like Curmie, Gentle Reader, one of the few Supreme Court decisions that was mentioned even in passing in your high school American History class was Plessy v. Ferguson.  Today, this decision, like the Dred Scott case four decades earlier (the only other 19th century SCOTUS ruling the Curmie could name without thinking long and hard), is a reminder of this country’s racist past.  (Yeah, yeah, yeah, racism is still with us, but it sure as hell used to be worse.) 

Plessy affirmed the constitutionality of segregation, provided the facilities, opportunities, etc., were “separate but equal.”  It’s difficult to imagine that anyone actually believed in that “equal” bit in 1896 or at any time after that, but the ruling was allowed to stand for over a half century until finally, in Brown v. Topeka, SCOTUS bothered to notice that equality wasn’t within the same universe as life on the ground for black Americans.

Blacks didn’t have the same rights as whites.  That’s a simple statement of fact, whether we’re talking about employment, educational opportunities, housing, voting rights… even water fountains. “Separate but equal” was always a canard.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that the way Curmie’s mind works is, shall we say, “quirky.”  So it was that he thought of that Supreme Court case from over a century and a quarter ago when he read about the second of two bone-headed decisions by two different organizations controlling two different sports at two different levels.

Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays

The more recent example was Major League Baseball’s absurd decision to include statistics from the Negro Leagues in their official records.  This catapulted Josh Gibson to the top of the lists in batting average, slugging average, and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging average) over Ty Cobb in the first instance and Babe Ruth in the latter two.

MLB is living in the fantasy world of the Plessy decision, because in baseball, as in so many other areas, separate was definitely not equal.  The level of competition in the Negro Leagues was not comparable to that in the major leagues.  It just wasn’t.  That doesn’t mean that Gibson or Satchel Paige wouldn’t have prospered had they been allowed to play for the Yankees or the Cubs or whoever, but the fact is that they didn’t play major league ball.

But even if we buy into the fiction that the leagues were comparable, there’s another problem, not even counting the fact that individual Negro League seasons were much shorter than major league seasons; it’s a lot easier to hit for a high average for 91 games (the longest Negro League season) than for a major league season of 154 or 162 games. 

No, Gentle Reader, it’s worse than that.  Even according to the people who did the search that led to the merging of records, the available statistics cover only about 75% of Negro League games.  That means that all of those alleged statistics have next to literally no validity.  Indeed, it’s a virtual impossibility that they’re accurate.  Perhaps those players did even better than the averages we have for them, but it’s more likely that they didn’t: statistics tend to trend toward the middle over time.

Curiously, no seems to be able to say, at this point at least, that Gibson hit x-number of home runs (over 1000, perhaps?) but we know his slugging percentage (!?!).  In other words, folks like John Labombarda of Elias Sports Bureau don’t know how many at bats he had, or how many total bases, but we can somehow accurately intuit the ratio between those arbitrary fanciful utterly fictitious numbers.  Curmie is no statistician, but he does know how numbers work, and, as the Old Vermonter in the joke would say, you cain’t get there from heah.

Nor is it a valid argument to talk about statistical anomalies accruing from changes in the game: live ball vs. dead ball, height of the pitcher’s mound, ballpark configurations, the introduction of artificial turf, etc.  Cy Young really had all those wins, and Nolan Ryan had all those strikeouts… in major leagues games.  Negro League players could have racked up those statistics had they been allowed to play, but they didn’t.  Ted Williams doesn’t get credit for the homers he would have hit had he not served in the military in both World War II and Korea, either.

It is an admirable impulse to want to honor the Buck O’Neills and the Cool Papa Bells of baseball yore.  They are, of course, in the Hall of Fame, but some additional recognition wouldn’t come amiss.  Put their stats on the website, but don’t intermingle them with those of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth… or of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, for that matter.  It does no one any good to pretend that segregation didn’t exist.  (Curmie would make a 1984 reference here, but he used that allusion last time.)

But this episode also got me thinking about a different decision by a different collection of idiots regarding a different sport at a different level. And here’s one where the fanciful world of “separate but equal” really is true.  Indeed, the two allegedly different worlds were separate but identical in every significant way. 

If you paid attention to the hype in early February, you’d have thought that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was about to become the all-time scoring leader in the history of women’s college basketball as she closed in on the numbers compiled by Washington’s Kelsey Plum. Thing was, that record belonged (and still does) to Pearl Moore, who scored over 4000 points between stints at Anderson Junior College and Francis Marion College. (Clark ultimately finished with 3951 points, more than Moore scored at the senior college level, and there really is a difference in the level of the competition the two women faced.)

Lynette Woodard of the Kansas Jayhawks

In terms of Division I women’s basketball, the career points leader at the time was Lynette Woodard, who totaled 3649 points to Plum’s 3527. Woodard played at Kansas a decade and a half or so before I started grad school there. Needless to say, there were a lot of Jayhawk fans incensed about the NCAA’s snub of Woodard. You see, she played when the governing body of women’s intercollegiate sports was the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women; the NCAA at the time had no interest in women’s sports. 

Woodard played for a major university, played the same kind of schedule against the same level of competition, played according to the same rules (well, except that the 3-point line was introduced roughly concurrently with the NCAA’s takeover, so Woodard didn’t profit from it). But the NCAA seems to believe that they invented women’s college basketball, and most of the major media outlets cheerfully let them get away with it. Woodard’s name doesn’t appear, even as a footnote, on a number of lists of “Top 25 Women’s Division 1 scoring leaders.”

In this case, the competition didn’t change at all, but NCAA arrogance denied Woodard her deserved recognition. This isn’t Caitlin Clark’s fault, or Kelsey Plum’s, but the significant event should have been when Clark passed Woodard in late February, not Plum a couple weeks earlier. Clark has done wonders for fan interest in the game, and she seems to be a genuinely good person, something of a rarity among elite athletes. Nothing in my remarks is intended to take anything away from her accomplishments.

Oh, yeah, the racial element. Something of the reverse of MLB. Moore and Woodard are black, Clark and Plum are white. So all the headlines were about one white athlete passing another, when, depending on your perspective, at least one and possibly two black athletes had put up better numbers. Racism? Woodard thinks so, and whereas I’m disinclined to argue with her, I return to one of my mantras: all racism is stupid, but not all stupidity is racist.

In fact, Curmie suspects a situation akin to one I wrote about several years ago, in which I argued that the shooting of a young white woman by a black man was, contrary to the media hype, about male privilege more than race.  Looked at in this light, the similarities between this spring’s actions of the NCAA and Major League Baseball become clearer.

It’s easy to view the respective decisions as opposites: one organization decided to include statistics compiled outside their purview, and the other did not.  Of course, they both got it wrong: the stats that were legitimately separate but equal were treated as if they weren’t, and the ones that compared apples to oranges were viewed as interchangeable.

What unites the two decisions is a frantic if futile attempt to deny the past.  Black baseball players couldn’t play in the major leagues until after the Second World War, but that embarrasses MLB, so they’ll just pretend otherwise.  The NCAA had no interest in women’s sports until the 1980s, but that sorta makes them look sexist, so they’ll just pretend that anything before then didn’t happen. 

Curmie is no right-winger, but he agrees with conservative pundit Jim Pinkerton that “the truth yearns to be free.”  Denying reality, even indirectly, is never a good idea.  Getting MLB or the NCAA to understand that, however, is about likely as likely as putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

Race and College Basketball. Yes, Again.

There are a lot of important stories out there right now—Tennessee making their case to surpass Florida as the leading national embarrassment, the bizarre threat by Wisconsin Republicans to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court Justice before she even takes office, the Donald Trump trial (Curmie sincerely hopes the case is stronger than it appears to be, or the damage will be significant), the “revelation” of what anyone paying attention has known for decades: that Clarence Thomas is devoid of any moral or ethical sensibility. And plenty more… 

Still, Curmie’s going to concentrate for a moment on college basketball and race. He’s already discussed that with respect to Big 12 coaches on the men’s side; let’s talk about the women’s NCAA tournament. We can begin with the commentary from South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. Her team had entered the NCAA tournament undefeated on the season, but lost in the national semi-final to Iowa, who won behind the heroics of their star guard Caitlin Clark, who registered 41 points, 6 rebounds, and 8 assists. 

But there was a lot of commentary about South Carolina’s style of play. Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said prior to their game with the Gamecocks that going for a rebound against them was “like going to a bar fight.” Earlier in the season, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma described what he perceived as the Gamecocks’ overly physical style and declared himself “sick of it.”

What’s this got to do with race? Well, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley is black; so are most of her players. Indeed, the only two white players on the team totaled a mere 222 minutes for the entire season; that’s less than 3% of the team total. Bluder and the majority of her team, including their star, Clark, are white. 

Auriemma is also white; whereas his team is roughly evenly divided between white and black athletes, most of his complaints about South Carolina were about what he regarded as numerous missed calls involving Huskies forward Lou Lopez Sénéchal, who is Latina and appears white. (It should be noted here that Auriemma’s commentary was generalized to how teams, plural, played Lopez Sénéchal and how referees allowed them to do so; South Carolina was just the most recent example.) 

So, is race a factor? Well, as Curmie was fond of saying when he taught Asian theatre, yes and no. Staley’s defense of her coaching strategy seems to suggest a racial element to the criticism of her team’s physicality, saying among other things that “We're not thugs. We're not monkeys.” This is not only a straw man argument, it’s a craven one, implying without actually saying that her and her team’s critics are engaging in racial stereotypes. No one, at least no opposing coach or player, and no sports commentator of any stature has ever used those terms, at least in public. Over-reaction, then? At the very least. 

Ah, but Gentle Reader, we’re not done. Multiple LSU players accused Clark of “disrespect” when the Iowa star waved off South Carolina guard Raven Johnson rather than run out to guard her late in the first quarter of the national semi-final. That’s just game plan: South Carolina lives and dies in their interior game; it’s perfectly reasonable to leave a 24% three-point shooter open in order to sag inside to make it harder to feed the post. There’s one easy way for Johnson to put an end to that tactic, of course: shoot the wide open three-pointer and make it.

Caitlin Clark-- we can’t see her

Significantly, the media lapped up Clark’s brashness. Cory Woodroof of For the Win, for example, raved about Clark’s “absolutely hilarious disrespect.” Media types also thought Clark’s derision of Hailey Van Lith when the Iowa-Louisville Elite 8 game was clearly going to go the Hawkeyes’ way was absolutely peachy. She got special props for the waving the hand in front of the face gesture. Curmie is told that this frankly stupid-looking display is intended to mean “you can’t see me”; the originator of this taunt was the pseudo-wrestler/pseudo-actor Jon Cena. Cena himself joined in the celebration of Clark, exclaiming on Twitter, “Even if they could see you…they couldn’t guard you!”. 

Ah, but here is where the fun really begins. When LSU defeated Iowa in the national title game, LSU star Angel Reese, who is black, pointed to her ring finger, suggesting that she was about to get a championship ring. I mean… Curmie hadn’t seen that gesture in, hell, a few weeks, when Kansas forward Jalen Wilson made a similar gesture to celebrate clinching the Big 12 men’s regular season championship. (Curmie is certain there are other, even more recent, examples; this was one Curmie, as a Jayhawks fan, saw live on TV.) 

Angel Reese, echoing the sentiment

Not only that, she used precisely the same gesture to Clark that the Iowa star had used in the Louisville game. OMG, the unmitigated gall! Oh, the humanity! Think of the children! Keith Olbermann, for example, declared Reese a “fucking idiot”; five minutes later he added “Mindless, classless, and what kind of coach does this team have?” 

To be fair (sort of), Olbermann apologized (sort of) the next day, with the rather feeble excuse that he doesn’t follow hoops (yeah, right, the guy who spent two decades as a sports journalist and hosted SportsCenter for five years doesn’t follow hoops), so he didn’t know the backstory. As if the backstory really mattered. 

Olbermann, of course, took a lot of heat for his initial response, including from the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal, neither of whom were particularly kind in their criticism. Olbermann wasn’t alone in his hypocrisy, of course, but as the most famous of her detractors, he certainly works as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Curmie cringes at the thought of agreeing with a blowhard like Stephen A. Smith, but he was right in tweeting that “When Caitlin Clark did it...people were celebrating it and talking about nothing but her greatness. BUT the SECOND a sister stepped up and threw it back in her face, everyone is mad. Come on!”  

Reese herself was, to say the least, unapologetic, and certainly didn’t shy away from the racial dimension: “All year, I was critiqued about who I was…. I don’t fit in the box that y’all want me to be in. I’m too hood, I’m too ghetto. You told me that all year. But when other people do it, y’all don't say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me, that want to speak up on what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you…. It was bigger than me tonight.” Of course, 16 of the previous 17 tournament Most Outstanding Players in the tournament were black, so Reese wasn’t exactly breaking new ground. 

Clark, to her credit, downplayed the entire incident, claiming she didn’t see Reese’s gestures, an unlikely proposition… but maybe Reese actually became invisible with the “you can’t see me” gesture? More importantly, she defended Reese: “I don't think Angel should be criticized at all. No matter which way it goes, she should never be criticized for what she did. I'm just one that competes — and she competed…. LSU deserved it; they played so well, and like I said, I’m a big fan of hers.” 

Irrespective of the factors leading to his perspective (age? class? race? something else altogether?), Curmie has never been a fan of trash talk, but accepts it as a fact of life in today’s sporting world. One supposes there are unspoken boundaries, but exactly where they are is difficult to determine. But those limitations, whatever and wherever they are, need to be the same across the board: age, gender, race, etc. cannot be a factor. And, of course, the racial (and perhaps gender-based) overtones to all this are impossible to ignore. But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, Wait! That’s not all! 

First Lady Jill Biden was at the game, and apparently enjoyed it. After the contest, she uttered remarks that were no doubt well-intentioned but rather stupid: “I know we’ll have the champions come to the White House, we always do. So, we hope LSU will come. But, you know, I’m going to tell Joe I think Iowa should come, too, because they played such a good game.” 

The suggestion that any losing team ought to be able to share the spotlight with the winners not only goes against tradition, it’s just dumb. But the implication that inviting LSU is more a matter of custom rather than appropriateness, coupled with the race of the majority of the players on those teams… well, the optics are less than optimal. 

Iowa’s Clark and Bluder both, by the way, said that the White House visit ought to be reserved for LSU. Biden’s minions were quick to “clarify” Dr. Biden’s remarks, but the inevitable damage was done. 

Reese promptly tweeted “A JOKE,” and rejected the (inevitable) apology. Her teammate Alexis Morris tried to wangle an invite from Michelle Obama instead (yeah, like that’s going to happen), and Reese proclaimed that the team was not going to visit the White House, but that “we’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll see Michelle. We’ll see Barack.” 

To be fair, she said that last part apparently in jest. The part that seemed to be serious, though, was that LSU would not accept the White House invitation. Apparently Reese believes she sets policy for the team, now. Curiously enough, the LSU athletics department had other ideas. Go figure. 

Jill Biden, by the way, was apparently to visit both locker rooms before the championship game, but LSU didn’t want her, for the oh-so-very-mature reason that Joe (not Jill) had not included them on his bracket. Sigh. 

OK. So who looks good in all this? If we forgive the trash talk and the narcissistic showmanship, Clark looks pretty good. The same could be said for Reese. On the other hand, she blew everything out of proportion by acting like a pampered 12-year-old. Olbermann should indeed shut up. Jill Biden should apologize in person rather than have her press secretary issue a walk-back. The tournament featured record-breaking performances, shattered attendance records, and some really good basketball. It kinda sucks that it will be remembered primarily for other things. 

Oh, and just because nobody else has mentioned this: much has been made of the black and gold tiger-striped outfit LSU coach Kim Mulkey wore to the final. No one seems to notice that black and gold are Iowa’s colors—Curmie isn’t sure what the visual equivalent of tone-deaf is, but this was it. Sigh.