sportswriters
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Of Jocks and Treehuggers
Posted by admin on 22 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Athletes Take Action, PIGskin, Sports Biz, sportswriters
By Andrew Gardner
In all of sport, the greater environment is an unnamed opponent. Bowling to auto racing. Equestrian events to slow-pitch softball. Surfing to rugby. Sport is marked by a variance of control over a world that is carefully bordered out by pavement, ski runs, white lines and targets. From the earliest cave dwelling archers to David Beckham, those with supernatural abilities set the benchmarks of sport. Fans love when teams dominate, love it more when individuals stand out. We’re thrilled when actions are superhuman, never-before-seen, record breaking and epic. Similarly we like big personalities to go with big success, even if the bigger-than-life persona is manufactured. (Witness Michael Phelps on Saturday Night Live – the great swimmer is a goofy guy, regardless of his athletic abilities.) We demand agency over existence. This affects the athletes in how they live.
The average NFL player’s career lasts three years, upping the odds for personal bankruptcy and unemployment beyond the final season. Sustainability is an ethic that could inform professional athletes beyond the interaction between the player and the green.
Fight of the Sportswriter
Posted by admin on 28 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: Sports Biz, sportswriters
I just returned from the illuminating Water of Life conference at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York (see some impressions at the E Mag site here), where the issue was water—how we’ve allowed corporations to pollute and defile it while we looked the other way, and how fast and efficiently we’re going to have to work to protect what’s left. What could have been a depressing experience was made somewhat exciting in the way that an all-or-nothing situation inevitably is. It would be one thing if environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., award-winning biologist Dr. John Todd and funny, rabble-rousing new U.N. water advisor Maude Barlow got up to the podium with the message “We’re doomed. We blew it. And we’ve got no solutions.” But nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve been on a really, really wrong-headed course, yes, and much of the world is in serious water crisis not only from too much use, but also from the privatization of freshwater supplies around the world that are then indiscriminately used as toxic dumping grounds. Regulations have been in short supply under the Bush administration, but the fight for water as a human right is loud and getting louder.
In a discussion that wove through energy policy and American culture and religion and the wilderness, RFK, Jr. mentioned the name of a certain Sports Illustrated writer: Robert H. Boyle, an outdoorsman and contributing editor who’s been writing for them since the 1950s and is still on the masthead. Boyle, a dedicated fly-fisherman and ex-Marine founded the Hudson River-protecting organization Riverkeeper in 1966, together with other blue collar fishermen who decided to challenge the railroad companies and gas and electric companies that were using the river as a dumping ground.
Now, looking into their relationship, it’s perhaps a bittersweet mention on Mr. Kennedy’s part. On June 20, 2000, Boyle and seven members of the Riverkeeper board resigned in an angry split with Kennedy who had brought in a staff scientist, William Wegner. Wegner had spent time in federal prison for smuggling rare birds into the country.