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Outstanding piece by Sally Jenkins on football, patriotism, racism, and 3 more examples
By Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins, whose work, like the work of the late LA Times sportswriter Jim Murray, far transcends the inadequate description of "sports columnist."
Here are 4 recent examples.
1. Here is her latest piece, on football, Flag Day, war, racism, Civil War and Boston history, real patriotism, and values. This is an exceptional piece, even compared to her usual consistently excellent output. I've posted a 4-paragraph excerpt here, but seriously, take the time to read the whole piece in full to absorb the full richness of this outstanding essay.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/11/civil-war-football-field-weve-been-celebrating-wrong-values/
. . . . American football always has been associated with warrior culture. We have fancied it trained young men to be good leaders, made “field generals” out of them, until it has become associated with what cultural historian Michael Oriard has called “a brand of flag-waving more like superpatriotism.” In truth, just like our statues and monuments, somehow we let the priorities become misplaced.
. . .
Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of American football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. . . Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. . . . Ned Hallowell. . . was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. . .While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.
Why bring any of this up? Because . . . every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that. The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor. . .Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.” Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields. . . . If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people. . . . Nick Saban and his Alabama players probably don’t know that after the war Hallowell helped finance a private school for black students in Calhoun, Ala., with Booker T. Washington.
But most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment. . . . . When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.When our monuments and myths immortalize the wrong people, we degrade the real heroes and the causes for which they fought.
. . .
Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of American football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. . . Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. . . . Ned Hallowell. . . was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. . .While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.
Why bring any of this up? Because . . . every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that. The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor. . .Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.” Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields. . . . If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people. . . . Nick Saban and his Alabama players probably don’t know that after the war Hallowell helped finance a private school for black students in Calhoun, Ala., with Booker T. Washington.
But most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment. . . . . When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.When our monuments and myths immortalize the wrong people, we degrade the real heroes and the causes for which they fought.
2. May 2020, on words and leadership: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/04/30/these-are-hard-times-best-coaches-know-how-get-through-them/
"The right call can swing a game sometimes, but it happens a lot less than you think. The right word, however — that’s infinitely more powerful. The ability to say the right thing at the right time, to lift a team out of a deficit or reach a player who is drowning in insecurity, to restore, rescue even, that’s real coaching. Real leading.The public craving for the right word at this moment is palpable. People need to hear voices of command and reassurance in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. . . Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”. .
"First, each coach stressed the solution over the problem. Any over-promoted failed-upward joker can point out what’s not working. Any ambitious climber can be an empty sloganeer. What these coaches did was offer a lift of the spirit and a hard fix in the same breath. They had an actual philosophical strategy to meet the player’s struggle: They focused on their capability rather than their momentary shortcomings.
Second, each of these coaches speaks with an underlying generosity. It’s not about them. Good leadership is an essentially humbling endeavor, in which you care more about fixing things than getting credit. . . The coach who finds the right word is the one who searches for a way to persuade others of the “great value in going for it and putting yourself in the moment and not fearing the repercussion of the miss or the loss,” he said. Think about the lack of blame or credit in that statement.
"Hear the generous self-effacement in Ellis’s decision to send Lavelle to her teammates to look at physical and psychic scars. In Bruneau’s gentle courtside whisper. And in Kerr’s ability to hand his players credit for just one win a week. They can tell us a lot about whom we want to work for, whom we chose to govern, whom we want our leaders and our problem-solvers to be.”
"First, each coach stressed the solution over the problem. Any over-promoted failed-upward joker can point out what’s not working. Any ambitious climber can be an empty sloganeer. What these coaches did was offer a lift of the spirit and a hard fix in the same breath. They had an actual philosophical strategy to meet the player’s struggle: They focused on their capability rather than their momentary shortcomings.
Second, each of these coaches speaks with an underlying generosity. It’s not about them. Good leadership is an essentially humbling endeavor, in which you care more about fixing things than getting credit. . . The coach who finds the right word is the one who searches for a way to persuade others of the “great value in going for it and putting yourself in the moment and not fearing the repercussion of the miss or the loss,” he said. Think about the lack of blame or credit in that statement.
"Hear the generous self-effacement in Ellis’s decision to send Lavelle to her teammates to look at physical and psychic scars. In Bruneau’s gentle courtside whisper. And in Kerr’s ability to hand his players credit for just one win a week. They can tell us a lot about whom we want to work for, whom we chose to govern, whom we want our leaders and our problem-solvers to be.”
3. May 2020, on patience through the lens of the career of Chris Evert:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/05/18/chris-evert-played-tennis-with-patience-thats-current-demand/
Do yourself a favor during the shutdown and, instead of diving any further into the butter or the bourbon or the presidential bombast, take a lesson in patience from Chris Evert. . . .call up a French Open and just watch her. Watch the narrow squint and the firming of the chin as she refuses to be hurried. Watch her move the ball, use her racket strings to drag her opponents around until she has them where she wants them, and then crack a clean one. Forty years later, in the midst of this trial, her tennis doesn’t just hold up. It’s riveting.
"Lord knows, you need patience right now. Patience with the dime-store elastic biting into your ears from the homemade bandanna mask. Patience with the detergent tang of cleansers in your membranes. What you need to handle all of that is not just patience, but Evert’s particular, stalking brand of it and what it teaches: Patience isn’t complacent. It’s commanding.
“Patience is reflected in your attitude and actions," Evert says by phone after you call her up to ask if you could borrow some of hers. 'Because you have so much time, what do you do with that time?' she asks rhetorically. 'You think. You learn. A person’s qualities as they go through a peak moment like this defines us.” It’s a form of character, is what she’s saying. And character at the moment is sorely lacking in some quarters, you may observe. Patience, after all, is the capacity to cope with trouble with equanimity and to turn events in your favor. It’s seldom talked about among the government power brokers, the ultracompetitive and the hyper-achieving anymore, because it’s not the noisiest quality. . .
. . . Panic and emergency seem all around right now. It’s a time of unforced errors, recklessness, squandered points, botched charts and chaotically bad decisions that seem like blasted balls in the bottom of the net by shortcutters who haven’t done the work and thus lack all composure.. . it’s simply a trial of temperament, and a revealing one. . . .. . You need patience . . . Patience with the arrogantia who walk around with their mouths uncovered because they think nothing bad can happen in a latte line, thus delaying your city’s reopening. Patience with the victory of fiction over science in daily briefings. . . .
"Lord knows, you need patience right now. Patience with the dime-store elastic biting into your ears from the homemade bandanna mask. Patience with the detergent tang of cleansers in your membranes. What you need to handle all of that is not just patience, but Evert’s particular, stalking brand of it and what it teaches: Patience isn’t complacent. It’s commanding.
“Patience is reflected in your attitude and actions," Evert says by phone after you call her up to ask if you could borrow some of hers. 'Because you have so much time, what do you do with that time?' she asks rhetorically. 'You think. You learn. A person’s qualities as they go through a peak moment like this defines us.” It’s a form of character, is what she’s saying. And character at the moment is sorely lacking in some quarters, you may observe. Patience, after all, is the capacity to cope with trouble with equanimity and to turn events in your favor. It’s seldom talked about among the government power brokers, the ultracompetitive and the hyper-achieving anymore, because it’s not the noisiest quality. . .
. . . Panic and emergency seem all around right now. It’s a time of unforced errors, recklessness, squandered points, botched charts and chaotically bad decisions that seem like blasted balls in the bottom of the net by shortcutters who haven’t done the work and thus lack all composure.. . it’s simply a trial of temperament, and a revealing one. . . .. . You need patience . . . Patience with the arrogantia who walk around with their mouths uncovered because they think nothing bad can happen in a latte line, thus delaying your city’s reopening. Patience with the victory of fiction over science in daily briefings. . . .
4. June 2020, on strength, leadership, and #45: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/02/trump-likes-conflate-strength-with-leadership-he-exhibits-neither/
Donald Trump has always sought the legitimate strength that sports confers and failed to acquire it. Instead, he just cheats and flails, because he’s got none of the application with which real athletes acquire their powers. He wants to be strong without doing the things that make you strong. He’s slack.
His obsession with “looking weak” is of course a dead giveaway. It suggests not strength but emotional collapsibility. It’s not really so surprising that the man who serially kicks his golf ball out of the rough and exaggerates his high school baseball talent would, as president of the United States, allow gas and rubber bullets to be turned on peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House for the sake of a photo op.
The essential underlying component of power, as every true athlete knows, is emotional regulation. Great athletes have command of themselves. They acquire this by admitting to the things they aren’t good at, without tantrum, and practicing them. They repeatedly subject themselves to pain without complaint to, as Walt Whitman put it, “habituate ... to a necessary physical stoicism.” They know that only through discomfort and repetitive metabolic stress can they understand and cure their own weakness. If you watch them, really watch them, it’s what you come to respect most. They understand that behind any kind of character is conditioning.. . .
His obsession with “looking weak” is of course a dead giveaway. It suggests not strength but emotional collapsibility. It’s not really so surprising that the man who serially kicks his golf ball out of the rough and exaggerates his high school baseball talent would, as president of the United States, allow gas and rubber bullets to be turned on peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House for the sake of a photo op.
The essential underlying component of power, as every true athlete knows, is emotional regulation. Great athletes have command of themselves. They acquire this by admitting to the things they aren’t good at, without tantrum, and practicing them. They repeatedly subject themselves to pain without complaint to, as Walt Whitman put it, “habituate ... to a necessary physical stoicism.” They know that only through discomfort and repetitive metabolic stress can they understand and cure their own weakness. If you watch them, really watch them, it’s what you come to respect most. They understand that behind any kind of character is conditioning.. . .
