In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

Jason Collins may be the first man to come out of the closet not just to people in his immediate circle, but to the country as a whole, while still actively pursuing a professional career in Major League Sports, but he wasn’t the first man out in baseball. That was Glenn Burke, who in the seventies was out to both Dodgers management and his teammates, and who came out nationally after his retirement. And apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis and her production company have been trying to get an adaptation of Burke’s autobiography into production, and are hoping the momentum of Collins’ announcement might help them make it happen. As Deadline summarizes the story:

Drafted by the Dodgers and touted as a potential star, Burke got off to a flying start when he became the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series. Burke also took credit for inventing the high-five in 1977. Waiting on-deck at Dodger Stadium, he was first to congratulate teammate Dusty Baker with that up-high slap, after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the season. While his adversity was nothing compared to what Dodger predecessor Jackie Robinson faced when he broke baseball’s color barrier, Burke’s decision to come out of the closet probably hastened his demise. In his autobiography, Burke wrote about how Dodgers GM Al Campanis offered to pay for a pricey honeymoon if Burke would get married in a Rock Hudson-like charade, but the ballplayer wasn’t going along with the sham. Campanis later was fired for appearing on Nightline and making outlandish racist remarks. Burke’s stats show he did not live up to the potential expected of him, but he seemed at peace with his decision to not hide his off the diamond life. “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it,” he said. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died a year later at age 42.

One of the most important things movies can do is get under-acknowledged history to a mass audience. Milk, for example, mattered so much precisely because it introduced a mass audience to the idea that the gay rights movement was, in fact, a long-standing effort, and one that involved heroes and martyrs who fit into conventional narratives about sacrifices for social progress. A biopic of Burke could similarly help combat the idea that sports were a previously heterosexual zone that was somehow colonized by gay people, reminding mass audiences that there have always been gay athletes, even if they didn’t choose to share that fact with fans, or if fans weren’t astute enough to pick up on it.

And I’m also excited about the possibilities of a Burke biopic precisely because the audience would come to it with few assumptions and expectations. One of the things that I found deadening about 42, and what ultimately would have sucked the air out of any Jackie Robinson biopic was how familiar everyone was with the story. It’s mandatory to have set-pieces like Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson or Leo Durocher’s dressing-down of the Dodgers who didn’t want to play with a black man, no matter how well or how human each of those moments has the potential to be. But with a story about Burke, nothing will be mandatory. Everything will be new. And as a result, the movie can be more human and relaxed, less stiffly conscious of history, something that serves good art, as well as humane arguments for equality.

On Friday 42, the big-screen treatment of Jackie Robinson starring Chadwick Boseman as the player who integrated Major League Baseball and Branch Rickey as the man who gave him the contract to do it, hits theaters. Unfortunately, what could have been a nuanced and complex exploration of racism and the role of sports in progressive movements and American life at large is a cliched, hackneyed mess that exists more to lionize Branch Rickey than to explore the real journey to desegregating America’s game. ThinkProgress sports columnist Travis Waldron and I saw 42 together, and discuss the problems with the movie’s treatment of history—as well as with its acting and writing—here:

Hi Travis,

On Wednesday, you and I headed out to see 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic that might be better titled The Oracular Pronouncements Of The Sainted Branch Rickey. I think we both walked out of the theater thinking that it was a terrible movie: there’s no human moment the script can’t resist immediately quashing with cliched oratory, and with a few exceptions, it seems to have some real anxieties about portraying the uglier side of racism.

I want to talk about all of those things, but I thought we should start with the one thing the movie got right: the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. “New York is full of Negro baseball fans,” Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart. I actually wonder if that’s one of the reasons we haven’t seen an out player in professional sports, yet. Unlike with black players and black fans, who were visibly excluded from the game, and who represented a clear pool of both ticket dollars and playing talent that were shut out of sports, it’s not as if there are alternate gay leagues and alternate gay fan bases that are visible to mainstream sports and mainstream executives.

But it’s a story that pretty much gets smothered in sentiment. What did you think? I’m particularly curious what your reaction was to the way 42 presents how Robinson’s teammates came around to his presence on the club.

Cheers,
Alyssa
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Now that we’re in the midst of playoff baseball, there’s been a lot of discussion at ESPNw and Jezebel over the past couple of days about how Major League Baseball’s first season with a dress code for reporters went. And a lot of people, including some of the women to whom it applies, aren’t very happy about it. As Erin Gloria Ryan writes at Jezebel:

The League was cognizant of possible charges of sexism when they put the code together, which is why they included a woman on the panel behind the policy. But just because a vagina was present doesn’t mean that the end product didn’t turn out a little dickish. The new code addresses nearly exclusively wardrobe features found on women’s clothing, banning such non-gender neutral staples as short shorts, sheer fabrics, tank tops, one shoulder tops, and strapless tops and dresses. For women who work in warm weather environments covering a sport that plays right through triple digit temperatures, being barred from going sleeveless often means filling the undersides of sleeves with unladylike pit stains.

The best practical argument against the dress code is heat, and as someone who gets easily bedraggled while sitting in the stands at a baseball game, I sympathize with female sideline reporters who have to stand, doing their jobs, in full sun, for three hours. That’s an issue that seems like it could be in conjunction with both the league and news organizations: if Major League Baseball wants sideline reporters to dress a certain way, perhaps it could also require teams to provide them easy access to break rooms, water, shade in between takes, and it could set standards for how much time the organizations it credential games have to allow its reporters out of the sun or heat on days when the temperature ventures above a certain threshhold.

If MLB is really concerned about the presence of attractive women on the sidelines at games, teams could also just decline to credential sideline reporters of any gender, from any organization, confining interviews to the locker room and dugout, and commentary to the broadcast booth. There are exceptionally good sideline reporters, but there are also an enormous number of substanceless ones, and the league could easily shift patterns of coverage with new credentialing rules. The thought of listening to a few more minutes per game of Joe Buck talking about sports isn’t a prospect I find particularly attractive. But I wouldn’t complain if the networks had to think a bit more carefully and creatively about how to structure their coverage without cheesecake or fluff interviews as an option.

At the end of the day, though MLB should have saved itself a headache and been as clear and detailed about what kind of clothing is professional for men as well as for women. I don’t really think a one-sleeved top in sheer fabric is professional attire. But the fact that Craig Sager’s suits are considered less distracting and unprofessional than the suggestion of a woman’s breasts says a great deal more about us than it does about the people wearing the clothes.

When a group of pre-teen Ugandan baseball players arrived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series early this month, they couldn’t believe what they saw: nice uniforms, brand new cleats, an immaculately-kept field with shiny green grass and a capacity of 40,000. The Ugandans, the second African team to qualify for the World Series and the first to actually make it to Williamsport, played their home games on a dusty field in the central part of the country — they had never played in front of a crowd and sometimes practiced or played barefoot.

That all changed last week in the team’s first game against Panama. The team from Lugazi, Uganda lost, and they would lose again two days later to Mexico, meaning the first team to arrive in Williamsport was one of the first teams eliminated. All wasn’t lost: Uganda became the first African team to win a LLWS game Tuesday, when it beat a team from Oregon in a consolation game. The team’s on-field results, however, will pale in comparison to what it achieved just by making it to Williamsport.

Baseball, long popular in the Americas and East Asia, was a late arrival in Africa. There are no specific participation numbers for the continent’s youth, but six countries have joined the African Baseball League and others have teams in the developmental stages. The game has also been used to help bring awareness to the public health fights that consume swaths of the continent. South Africa and other countries have pushed baseball as a way to fight and prevent AIDS and other health epidemics, attracting young players to the game to “Strike Out AIDS.” In Ugandan schools, baseball is fast encroaching on soccer’s popularity as students flock to the game.

Despite that growth, the challenges facing baseball in Uganda and other African countries are immense. Many children use balls made of paper and improvised bats. Gloves are rare, and games are often played barefoot on dusty fields with little or no grass. Even the Ugandan schools where baseball is popular struggle to find places to play.

Charities and other organizations, however, are working to fix that. Right To Play, a humanitarian organization, raised $100,000 to fund a game between Uganda and Canada earlier this year; some of the money will also go to building a new stadium in the country. Uganda’s appearance in Williamsport will undoubtedly raise the sport’s profile in Africa, and, hopefully, it will bring even more money in to help kids play.

The Ugandan team may not have won the Little League World Series, but just by making it to Williamsport, they made history and progress for their country and their sport. And as one of the players told Al Jazeera English, their dreams don’t stop in Williamsport. “My dream will be to play baseball,” he said. “Major League Baseball, in America.”