Criticism of Silberman's NFL combine efforts misplaced

Lauren Silberman’s pitiful effort during a recent NFL regional scouting combine tryout sparked strong criticism about how Silberman hurt women’s attempts to be taken seriously in football and reignited conversations about how women cannot compete with men in athletics. 

I will tackle each point separately.

Katie Hnida, the first woman to score a point in a Division I football game, told USA Today: “Her performance does not have to do with her gender, it has to do with her experience and her preparation. Unfortunately, what's going to happen now is she's going to be looked at (as inferior) because she was female.” 

Aditi Kinkhabwala of NFL.com called Silberman’s effort “A delusional, haughty, heartbreaking sideshow.”

Silberman did not know how to properly set a football on a kicking tee or how to approach an NFL-style kickoff. 

Why would Silberman be allowed to participate in such an event?

When she did kick, her two attempts traveled a combined 30 yards. Silberman did later withdraw from the combine citing injury. 

Kinkhabwala wrote Silberman “disrespected the 37 other kickers in New Jersey on Sunday who've spent lifetimes honing their craft.”

This is a strong criticism, but the fault does not lie with Silberman, but with the NFL. 

Mike Garafolo’s article in USA Today said, “Though the league reserves the right to deny a registration, it apparently made no attempt to determine whether Silberman had a chance to put forth a good effort. Now, other young women likely will have an even tougher path to gender equality on the football field.”

These sentences appeared about 14 paragraphs in to his article. This should have been placed much higher. The fault lies totally with the NFL, not Silberman.

From all accounts, Silberman showed no skills that would have justified her inclusion into the combine; therefore there is no mystery as to why her tryout was a debacle.

The league allowed an unqualified individual attempt a difficult task, and lo and behold, the unqualified person failed miserably. The only reason Silberman’s terrible showing made national news is because of her gender. Kinkhabwala wrote, “… to be wholly fair, Silberman isn't the only applicant to be outclassed at one of these combines.”

Why have we not heard about the other failures?

Moving to the second part of this post, recall the claim that women cannot compete with men athletically.

This is claim is almost always true if we look at the sports that are touted in the United States – basketball, baseball, hockey and football. Yes, we can extend this to myriad other sports. However, this critique is incomplete.

We have to examine the political factors surrounding sports in general. For brevity’s sake, I will examine the pathway of control.

First, some simple questions: Who created many of today’s visible sports? Men.

Second, if one group creates a system, is it logical to presume that this group would build a system that accentuates the things it does well? Yes.

Building on these premises, it is not fair to place women into men’s ideas of sports. How could they ever succeed when the games are essentially rigged against them?

Why doesn’t anybody ask could men outshine women in sports created by and designed for women? Perhaps this question needs to be asked the next time there are discussions about the athletic abilities of men and women.

-- Steve Bien-Aimé

Radio hosts' rude comments about transgender athlete highlights need for more diversity training

The recent suspension of two hosts of an ESPN Radio affiliate for insensitive comments about a transgender basketball player highlights that the lexicon journalists have needs to be burnished.

It is unknown whether the radio hosts consider themselves journalists, and I will not castigate all sports journalists for the actions of two individuals. However, the column by ESPN’s Christina Kahrl prompted me to tackle this from a different angle.

This post is a request for broadening the diversity training journalists receive. Being a former journalist and a member of different minority advocacy journalism groups, I believe that diversity is often thought of in terms of gender, race and now sexual orientation. While the categories appear varied, the groups in these categories are far from static.

People do not easily fit into the labels society provides. The article USA Today’s Eric Prisbell wrote about Gabrielle Ludwig explains this well. I also freely acknowledge that if I were copy editing Prisbell’s article, I would feel extremely underqualified to edit it without reading additional literature on transgender individuals.

Journalists are not sheltered people. They interact with various members of society, especially in sports where a huge cross-section of society sits. That cross-section is only going to become more diverse in the years to come.

The news media cannot ignore a group of people or act as if they do not exist. If work to broaden diversity training to include transgender athletes is not done soon, journalists will quickly find themselves ill-equipped in an ever-growing sports landscape.

-- Steve Bien-Aimé

What should the discussion be on performance-enhancing drugs?

After reading about how the Twitter-verse was all abuzz Thursday regarding the rumors surrounding New York Yankees star Robinson Cano and performance-enhancing drugs, it would seem appropriate to discuss doping in sport. (USA Today reported that Cano has not failed any drug test. A discussion about Twitter and journalistic ethics will be saved for a future blog post.) 

 

While the Cano rumors are false, the impact of performance-enhancing drugs on sport cannot be ignored. Within the past 30 days, Major League Baseball suspended two prominent players for doping, and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency moved to strip Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France victories.

The use of performance-enhancing drugs at one level can be traced to sport’s place in the global society. It is extremely capitalist in nature – extreme competition where there can be at most a few winners and plenty of losers. The resources (read money) go to the winners. There is a constant push for innovation. Innovation is a positive thing, but it can easily become warped as can be seen with doping in athletics.

The reward for doping seemingly outweighs the substantial health risks for some athletes. Opportunities for scholarships or multi-million dollar contracts provide big temptations that overwhelm a few competitors.

The genie is not going back in the bottle. For those who decry the win-at-all-costs nature of sport, there is too much money behind it to eliminate it from its prominence. The billions of dollars in ticket and merchandise sales, the billions spent on TV commercials, and the media industry created on the backs of the athletes are strong indicators that the capitalist nature of athletics is here to stay.

FOXSports.com ran a strong series of articles analyzing doping from a variety of perspectives: whether testing should even be done, the dangers to youth and society’s hypocrisy when it comes to cheating.

Jen Floyd Engel’s piece on hypocrisy is truly thought-provoking. Why does society place different levels on cheating? Some rule-breaking is OK, but others are not. This sliding scale indicates a society that encourages the bending or breaking of rules or norms to get ahead.

Maybe the discussion needs to shift away from improving PED testing to an honest discussion about why people permit violating some rules and not others.

But are capitalist societies destined to have cheaters because of the potential rewards? Are there any societies that do not have cheaters?

-- Steve Bien-Aime