There’s probably no ceremony more indicative of the weird way that North Americans value sports, in which the playoffs’ value outweighs the previous four or five months of the regular season. To touch the Presidents’ Trophy is to value the wrong type of success; everything achieved during a regular season means nothing without victory in the playoffs. It is an obsession foisted on players and teams as a whole: to win in the playoffs is the most important thing – the only thing.

The genealogy makes sense, if you go back far enough. Back in the early 1900s, there were two separate professional baseball leagues of the same prestige – the National League and the American League – and it made sense for the champions of each league to play each other. The teams didn’t play each other at all during the regular season, and only the best team from each league played in the (presumptuously named) World Series, a system that persisted until 1969. Same thing with the NFL’s Super Bowl, which took the champion of the National Football League and the American Football League and pit them in an inter-league championship game. Before that, the leagues determined their own champion by vote or by tie-breaking playoff games. But when both these leagues merged, and the playoffs slowly expanded into what they are now: a collection of the 12 to 16 best teams in a league thrown together. As such, the results may vary. Why the expansion? More playoff teams creates more teams in playoff position throughout the season. This creates sustained interest across the country, as well as more constructively important playoff games, which means more money.

In the rest of the world, playoffs aren’t nearly as much of a thing as they are in the U.S. and Canada. Domestic soccer leagues everywhere else in the world simply anoint the champion of the league after each team has played each other twice. The winner is the team that won the most games over the course of the season. The best team is the most consistent over the entire season – no one game is ever more important than the other. Consistency is a virtue. Over here, the regular season is merely the means of reaching the playoffs, where everything suddenly becomes important. A Players careers is evaluated based on how they perform in a tiny percentage of it – whether they’re able to win ‘the big one.’ When someone doesn’t produce in the playoffs, they’re apt to be labeled a ‘choker’ or ‘soft,’ even if it was simply a stretch of bad luck, or, really, not entirely their fault. Professional leagues with playoff systems are team sports, yet often only one player is blamed for not living up to expectations.

Why the obsession with the playoffs here, then? They are, to many, a way to easily decide the ‘objectively’ best team in a certain sport – whichever team beats the other good teams theoretically must be the best. Of course, the easiest way does not always mean the best way. Playoffs are necessarily a small sample size, and luck often plays a larger role than talent.
A baseball season is 162 games over six months, but only one month of, at most, twenty games for one team decides the championship. Just last month, MLB Kansas City Royals advanced to the World Series after a string of miraculous wins; they were exceptionally lucky and rode that luck all the way to the precipice of a championship. But it would be hard to argue that they were even the second – best team in the MLB – they were just on a hot streak.

The media’s treatment of the playoffs is reductive and lazy, and basically propagates the idea that the team that wins is always better, that the result is always more important than the process. The playoffs have become an artificially constructed marker of importance, a stage in which to judge players or teams under entirely constructed ‘pressure.’ Sure, athletes want to win championships, perhaps more than anything – but this stage has become the means of truly defining an athlete, based off their ability in very specific circumstances, as opposed to the larger picture.

For some reason, there is a distinct dislike for teams or players that perform well over the course of the regular season. Every player seems to have something to prove until they win a championship – there’s almost nothing someone can do to escape the ‘choker’ or ‘soft’ narrative. Roberto Luongo, one of the best goalies in the NHL, is still known as a ‘choker’ because of his performance in the 2011 Stanley Cup final; nevermind the fact that he won a gold medal for Team Canada at the Winter Olympics a year prior after defeating their biggest rival. The playoffs signify, to the media, the time when the games really matter – as opposed to the months before, when the games that needed to be won to even get to the playoffs were somehow slightly less important – and the best teams or players will ‘raise’ their play.

Forget the day-to-day or week-to-week consistency of the regular season; the media (and, by influence, the fans) want the short streak of luck or brilliance during the playoffs. Only the best players or teams can do this, apparently, which leads the media to fawn over average players who got hot at the right time (such as hockey’s Danny Briere and football’s Joe Flacco, to name a few) and castigate the unlucky ones (basketball’s Chris Paul, football’s Matt Ryan, the entire roster of hockey’s San Jose Sharks). A player is questioned and questioned until they win a championship; after that, the player is forever given the benefit of the doubt. The old narrative is completely erased from the discourse. For instance, Peyton Manning was widely derided as a regular season stat-stuffer who choked in the playoffs; however, after a 2006 Super Bowl victory against an overmatched Chicago Bears team, he was suddenly given the media cachet of one of the all-time greats.

This is not to say that the playoffs are bad or not fun to watch, but merely that they are imperfect ways to decide a best team. They are given entirely too much precedent, and this leads to lazy, unfair media narratives. Any playoff system must be appreciated for its variability – over such a small time, unexpected things are bound to happen. Playoffs do not always point out the ‘best,’ as it is often mistaken for, but instead just the luckiest. The playoffs are fun, unpredictable, exciting, wild, stupendous, amazing, dramatic, what have you but they’re often not the best way to actually decide upon a best team in a given year. Perhaps the obsession with playoffs can only be described as a regional thing: it seems distinctly North American to shun consistency and instead reward short, incandescent flashes of brilliance.

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“The students were charged 15 months ago, and, to this date, McGill has taken no action. They have remained on the team despite their disclosure of the event to their coach and are still enrolled as students.”

From the “Petition to Fight Rape Culture at McGill” by McGill’s Union for Gender Empowerment

In November 2013, a Montreal Gazette article revealed that three McGill Redmen football players had been charged with sexual assault in an incident that had reportedly occurred in September 2011. The University itself did not enact any disciplinary measures against the players once it became aware of the charges (far before November 2013). McGill’s Athletics Department also did not punish the players, and neither did their coach. In total, these players missed zero games; their status on the team remained unchanged until they quit the team, shortly after the charges became public. All decided to leave the matter up to the courts, and to wait until a guilty verdict before enacting punishment. When the preliminary hearing began, the three players had already finished their final season on the team.

The event brought into sharp focus McGill Athletics’ policy on athletes in trouble with the law. The current policy requires no disciplinary action against the players until a guilty verdict, unlike many colleges and universities in North America that impart at least small punishments on athletes upon the charge of any crime. Sexual assault, however, has been a problematic charge within athletic communities across North America in the past year, as there exists a bias in favour of the athlete, as opposed to the reporter of sexual assault. At Florida State University, much-lauded quarterback Jameis Winston was investigated for sexual assault, but charges were never filed, somewhat dubiously – Florida State has a policy in place that immediately suspends any player indefinitely if charged with any crime, and the team was on track to play in the national championship game. In communities such as Steubenville, Ohio, survivors of sexual assault by local athletes were pilloried by community members, many of whom sought to protect their local athletes over sexual assault victims.

McGill Athletics’ response was one of inaction. There were no immediate consequences for those accused, privileging their presumed innocence over any type of punitive measure. McGill Athletics’ lack of action also displayed the pressing need for a new athletic disciplinary code.

—Evan Dent

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Today in sports, it has become perfectly acceptable to support a horrible product. I should know; I’m a fan of two teams (the Buffalo Sabres and Chicago Cubs) that are explicitly trying to be as bad as possible. And not just as a casual fan – I’m fully invested in these teams, yet do not care (or am pleased) if they lose.

This phenomenon is known as “tanking,” and it has been around for quite some time, though coverage and acceptance of it has seemingly never been higher than it is today. The basic idea is that the simplest, cheapest way to build a team is through drafting young talent in the prospect draft. The easiest way to draft the best talent is to be the worst team in the league, which in all four major North American sports leagues gives a team the best chance to gain the first overall (or, at least, a top five) draft pick. With enough of these top picks, a team will be able to cheaply and dependably rise out of the basement and back to championship caliber. Tanking has been plausibly compared to the business tactics of Mitt Romney, who took failing businesses, gutted them to lower costs, and then eventually garnered profits off of them. In a way, a fan of a tanking team is being asked to root for Mitt fucking Romney. The fan is the pawn in a strategy that may eventually garner results, as the team guts its own roster Romney-style.

Sports fans are taught to value a win over all else, to live and die to see their team win as much as possible.

In that case, I’m a dupe. I already fantasize about the lineup the Cubs will trot out onto the field in 2016 – with a bunch of top prospects! – and the group of players the Sabres could have by that same year. I fervently want the Sabres to be bad again next year so that they can draft Connor McDavid, a forward prospect so good he’s been nicknamed “McJesus,” presumably for his franchise-redeeming qualities. They’ve got me hook, line, and sinker, dreaming of a not-guaranteed future while currently supporting a deliberately awful product.

For a team to get to get this awful usually involves the trading of any good players whose contracts are expiring (who might jeopardize the tanking, and are leaving soon anyway) and fielding the worst roster possible, often through phantom injuries that shelve good performers at critical times. In essence, the goal of tanking is to go as low as possible in order to gain from parity-promoting draft systems that reward the worst teams every year. What’s pernicious about this strategy is that it takes the typical idea of a fan’s hope for the future and extends it for years. It also fundamentally reverses the way a fan watches the game – a fan is accepting of a bad product because it will eventually create a good one. In that case, a loss is as good as a win.

Watching the Buffalo Sabres this year as a fan has been a radical experience. Sports fans are taught to value a win over all else, to live and die to see their team win as much as possible. In the context of the tank, though, every loss that secures our spot as the worst in the league is seen as good. This effectively creates an ambivalence for every game during the season – winning is fun, but losing is fine, if not better. Because if the Sabres can get the first pick this year or the next, they eventually will have the top-ranked talent necessary to win the Stanley Cup. That is what is being sold to fans – the suffering will all be worth it.

Never mind that similar plans have not always worked out for other teams. One just needs to look at the current Edmonton Oilers or New York Islanders to see teams that bottomed out and have stayed there.

What’s being capitalized on is a fan’s capacity for hope despite everything else. The Chicago Cubs’ haven’t won a World Series since 1908, and yet ownership can sell fans and the media on the fact that the latest round of “rebuilding” (the euphemism du jour for tanking) will eventually bring the long sought-after championship. The media has been complimentary of the plan; Rany Jazayerli, a baseball writer for Grantland, described the Cubs current strategy – outright tanking – as “going well as long as you don’t focus on the Cubs’ win-loss record […] The new front office made the conscious decision not to worry about wins and losses until there’s a chance […for a] playoff spot.” And fans, too, because of the natural predilection to hope against literally more than 100 years of contrary evidence, have mostly bought in.

Teams are allowed to do this because it truly is the best way for a team to get better. Signing free agents on the open market has proven to be risky and cost inefficient; and since draft systems reward the worst teams, why not try to be the worst if you can’t conceivably win the championship? The owners of professional sports teams have a vested interest in keeping a draft system that rewards bad teams, because it keeps the opportunity for fan hope alive – the bad team is always one or two drafts away from becoming a contender. Although some proposed changes for the draft – including, in basketball, a system that would assign every team’s draft picks for the next 30 years – have been floated to remove the incentive to tank, none have gained widespread traction. There’s no reason for owners to accept any other system, because the current system allows them to be aggressively bad for years without a ton of fan discontent. For instance, the Philadelphia 76ers are mired in a 26-game losing streak as of writing this article, tied for the longest in the history of basketball, no one’s been fired, and the fans, while checked out of this season, haven’t shown much widespread ire.

In the end, general managers who create bad teams and fans who support them are not to blame; what’s really to blame is the current system that incentivizes losing. Owners will not get rid of this system without a fight, though, as the current draft system keeps alive the idea of parity, in which any team can conceivably compete for the championship in any year. What’s being played upon at all times is fans’ optimism and hope, the propensity for fans to return en masse year, after year, after year. And now it’s even easier, as we’ve been sold a system that allows us to truly love the losses in order to be happier in some far-off future. After the pain, maybe then I can be happy.

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For some of the corners of the internet that I detest, this was a sign of Peverley’s status as a hockey player – that he had such grit and determination that nothing would stop him from playing. Various memes emerged comparing Peverley to players in other sports, lionizing Peverley in contrast to other ‘soft’ athletes. Hockey especially has this desire to show its toughness – whether it is as simple as losing a couple of  teeth and continuing to play, or as extreme as Boston Bruins forward Brad Marchand playing through game six of the Stanley Cup Finals last year with an assortment of injuries that eventually resulted in a collapsed lung. Barry Petchesky, writing on Deadspin, described this desire to show hockey’s toughness (as a quality of the entire sport) as part of a fan inferiority complex – especially because most of the comparisons use LeBron James, star player for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and perhaps the most famous athlete in North America right now. It’s a desire to show that their athletes are the best because of their overwhelming toughness.

Of course, the viewpoint that makes the most sense to me, at least, is that this commitment to play through anything is ridiculous, and just plain dangerous. The level of competitiveness that leads someone to wake up after being defibrillated and ask to keep playing is not admirable; it’s scary. But the celebration of devotion such as Peverley’s feeds into the burgeoning trend of a near- fetish for athletes to be hyper-competitive and ‘gritty,’ and to love what they do unconditionally.

‘Gritty’ or ‘hard-working’ are meaningless terms that have come to mean far too much, signifying a player (especially in hockey) who just works harder than anyone else. It’s an intangible descriptor that usually refers to anyone who doesn’t have a ton of skill. Synonyms for this include ‘high motor’ and ‘energy guy,’ or whatever bland platitude you desire. Either way, it allows for coaches, the media, and fans to celebrate the seeming passion of a player. With that comes the expectation that every athlete should give everything they have to the game, and that they should love every second of it.

There’s a sort of enmity that comes with much of the support for professional athletes, and it increases the more that they’re paid. Never mind that it’s the owners and organizations themselves that decide how much a player should be paid – if someone is paid so exorbitantly, then they should always be working hard. The “love what you do, do what you love” ethos in work has probably annoyed any college graduate entering the job market. For a professional athlete, it’s expected that you love every aspect of your job and that you give every ounce of effort. Since they play a ‘game’ for a living – something that is the envy of people who grew up playing said games – any sign that they don’t think it’s the best thing to do on Earth is met with scorn.

This, of course, ignores the fact that athletes play physically demanding and damaging sports with long-term effects and the fact that they live under constant scrutiny by the media. It’s not hard to see how you wouldn’t love that, and there have been many athletes who claim they hated what they were doing while still being very good at it. Andre Agassi, the famed tennis player, despised tennis throughout his career, and Benoit Assou-Ekotto, a soccer player in the English Premier League (one of the best – if not the best – soccer league in the world) admitted he had no special passion for the game. Like any other job, it’s a way to make a living, love or no love for it.

Rashard Mendenhall, a former running back for the National Football League’s (NFL) Arizona Cardinals, announced his retirement last week at the age of 26. In an explanation for his early retirement, published in the Huffington Post, Mendenhall somewhat falls into hard work clichés, bemoaning the loss of appreciation for hard-working guys as people now focus on scoring and touchdown dances. He ascribes this grit to the old guard of athletes who really cared about the game, rather than being a celebrity. This idealization of hard work as some throwback to a better age, a nostalgia for when it was all about the game, is ingrained in some of the players themselves, showing its reach. Mendenhall’s column, on the other hand, also displayed why someone might be disillusioned with their job in professional athletics, as he says that he “no longer wish[es] to put [his] body at risk for the sake of entertainment,” and that he would live “without the expectation of representing any league, club, shield or city.” Representing your team in an extremely public sphere means self-limitation of speech and action, and the game itself, especially football, usually leads to long-term post-career injury.

Of course, since grittiness and hard work themselves are almost entirely intangible concepts, deciding who is and who is not working hard enough becomes a rather subjective exercise. As Ryan Lambert on Yahoo! Sports pointed out in a piece on Peverley, ‘grit’ in hockey is almost always assigned to white, North American players, indicating that the issue is at least a bit racialized. Media members with a grudge can start pointing out players who don’t work hard enough for them – usually those players who make the most money – and, cherry-picking certain plays, can make their case that someone is loafing it out there. Once a player is marked as not loving the game, it’s hard to ever come back and prove otherwise (again, because the phrase itself is mostly entirely subjective).

The desire for hard-working, for-the-love-of-the-game players may be well-intentioned, but it has gone to extreme levels where someone can receive praise for doing incredibly dumb things and putting their well-being at risk. How much is enough for us now? Sure, there’s something admirable about it, if you don’t think about it for more than two seconds, but remember that these athletes are people too, people who might hate their job just as much as you.

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Next came a laundry list of worries, including terrorist threats and, finally, about two weeks before athletes were scheduled to arrive, the fact that the Olympic Village wasn’t exactly finished yet. Despite assurances that all would be ready, media arrived in Sochi to hotels still under construction, unclean drinking water, missing shower curtains, roving crews sent to kill stray dogs, and on and on. You probably saw at least some of it: #SochiProblems quickly spread across the internet, with the assorted media tweeting every indignity they faced. What shocked Yahoo! Sports’ Greg Wyshynski the most, however, was that used toilet paper didn’t go into the toilet, but into a bin instead. How strange!

There were legitimate gripes to be had about Sochi’s Olympic Village – an event that has cost $51 billion should probably have clean drinking water, or decent plumbing – but a lot of the problems in Sochi were borne out of Western bias and expectations, and the coverage of the Olympics by many in the media has been filled with misunderstanding, thinly veiled contempt, and hypocrisy. Deadspin columnist Drew Magary, tongue firmly-in-cheek, called Russians people “you can make fun of […] without anyone getting mad!” Sadly, it’s become all too real: Russia’s problems have been a way for the West to feel better about itself, to pat itself on the back without addressing any of its own issues.

That’s right, during a gigantic collection of literally almost every nation in the world, somehow there should be not a peep of politics, somehow these games should exist independent of any political spirit, even as the athletes wear their nation’s flag on their chest and listen to their national anthem when they win a gold medal. 

For a nation that prides itself on the idea of free speech, it was pretty fun to see NBC, as it showed the tape-delayed opening ceremony, cut out the only brave moment of the whole evening. During what is usually a staid speech celebrating the Olympics, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach subtly addressed Russia’s numerous human rights abuses and its anti-gay laws by stating that the Olympics promoted equality for everyone, and that, in the future, it would be possible “to live together under one roof in harmony, with tolerance and without any form of discrimination for whatever reason […].” NBC hasn’t addressed why this was cut from its broadcast; the whole thing was cut down for time, and it’s somehow an accident that the only halfway bold political statement was axed from the broadcast. This is another display of the desire by many, especially broadcasters and advertisers, to remove politics from the Olympics. That’s right, during a gigantic collection of literally almost every nation in the world, somehow there should be not a peep of politics, somehow these games should exist independent of any political spirit, even as the athletes wear their nation’s flag on their chest and listen to their national anthem when they win a gold medal.

Perhaps most glaring is the American media’s harsh condemnation of Russia’s anti-gay laws. This criticism comes from the same place that, after football prospect Michael Sam came out as gay, allowed multiple pro football personnel men to anonymously comment that football wasn’t ready for an openly gay player, that his draft stock would fall, and that he would rip apart a locker room’s chemistry because of his sexuality. “But how will a gay athlete get through Sochi?” they wondered, while allowing people to hate Sam, while they watched as Arizona passed a law that allowed businesses to deny service to anyone based on religious belief (in effect, a business owner could deny service to a gay person due to religious beliefs), and Indiana coming perilously close to passing a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Is it as bad as Russia’s anti-gay laws? Probably not, but when you’re arguing over the degree of how bad you are at something, it’s hard to sit on the high horse.

The same can be said for criticism of Russia’s treatment of protestors, most visibly the arrests and beatings of members of the Pussy Riot band. North America would never have a justice system so corrupt, we say, as its prison-industrial complex grows, and, in places like Montreal, the right to protest is slowly eroded.
As for fear of terrorist attacks, the U.S. media seems to have completely forgotten the fact that the Atlanta games were bombed back in 1998; yet the threat on the Sochi games somehow reveals another Russian shortcoming.

Besides, what will we remember from these games? The social issues that arise every Olympic year eventually fade away in the consciousness. Whether it be the treatment of workers leading up to the game, laws that permit hate, the environmental impact (such as the Beijing controversies in 2008), the ridiculous amounts of money spent by the host nation or the public space wasted by little-used infrastructure (have you looked at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium lately?); these become secondary. The achievements of the athletes are talked about for years to come; the issues that arise from the collection of these athletes in one space are merely topical. After the games, we leave all those problems there.

This is not an attempt to hold up Russia as a paragon of the world that has been slandered by the West – what Russia has done, and is doing, is abhorrent in many ways, and criticism is warranted. But the sense running underneath aspects of the coverage of these games, the predilection to point the finger at Russia’s problems while ignoring our own, is a pernicious trend. Real change at home will take longer if we continue to externalize our issues and assure ourselves that, at the very least, it’s worse elsewhere.

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Yes, I say exploit, because despite what the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) would like the world to believe, college athletes are unpaid employees. The NCAA contends that they are only ‘student-athletes,’ who are compensated by scholarships and room and board. Yet these benefits monetarily pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars that many big athletic programs and the NCAA itself gain from these players through tickets, TV deals, and merchandise. It is in merchandise sales that we see the collegiate system at its most nefarious.

Jay Bilas, an analyst for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), skewered the NCAA’s hypocrisy this summer by posting pictures on his Twitter account that showed the results of certain searches on the NCAA’s online shop. Although the site doesn’t specifically sell the jerseys of individual players (just generic jerseys for each team, with no player names on them), Bilas searched individual player’s names and, amazingly, the results always pointed to that player’s ‘generic’ jersey. For instance, searching for Johnny Manziel, the former quarterback for Texas A&M University, would bring you to all the Texas A&M number 2 jerseys. (Since Bilas’ tweets, the NCAA has stopped selling these ‘generic’ jerseys.) So while the NCAA doesn’t expressly sell Manziel’s uniform, they’ll get the money when you buy that number 2 jersey. Exactly 0 per cent of that sale goes to Manziel. In addition, the NCAA bars players from profiting off of their own fame; Manziel was punished last summer for accepting money in return for autographs. This is twisted logic: the NCAA will unofficially profit off of an athlete, but god forbid an athlete earns money off of their own individual talent.

And, if you’re an athlete who doesn’t become a professional – as is the case for the vast majority of student-athletes – you would never see a cent from your playing days. While some can use their college experience as a springboard to future earnings, there’s a huge class of players who will go into some other profession. These athletes’ packed, nearly year-round schedule, prevents them from having a normal student life or the ability to get a job during school. This leads to many players graduating with a different kind of education than that of a non-athletic student.

Perhaps more troubling is that those who have to stop playing due to injury are often not financially supported for medical costs, and scholarships can often be revoked for minor cause, forcing someone to have to pay their way through the rest of school or leave. All in all, you have a situation where universities draw tons of money from a group with almost no power.

The proposed union would allow these athletes to have a voice in how they’re treated. As it stands, the NCAA can basically do whatever it wants, and challenging its various rules and decisions is very difficult. Just recently, Oklahoma State University basketball star Marcus Smart was suspended for three games when he shoved a fan after a verbal altercation. Smart has no way to challenge the ruling himself; he either complies with the suspension or tries to get the school to appeal on his behalf. While it’s likely small potatoes for Smart, who will still in all likelihood be drafted to the pros, for other players these arbitrary decisions can have far-reaching effects, and at the moment they have no means of personally challenging the system outside of university appeals.

When the plans for the union were announced, many were quick to assume that the union would eventually push for compensation for athletes, although the Northwestern players contend that it is not one of their current goals. Still, it seems that if the union is initially successful, they may eventually push for this.

The debate on whether college athletes should be paid has been hotly contested for the past decade or so, almost to a tired ad infinitum. Proponents see the players as exploited and deserving of some small measure for what they produce for the universities; detractors believe that compensation would be financially unfeasible and would ruin the spirit of ëamateurismí within college sports. Intangible arguments aside, the economic arguments against athlete compensation have been debunked; pretty much every university has enough money to compensate their players (one needs only to look at the exorbitant salaries given to athletic directors and coaches, who are often the highest-paid public employees in their state), and richer schools would not gain more of an advantage than they already have in terms of recruiting players.

Regardless of whether this union succeeds in the short or long run, there is clearly a problem within the American college sports system. Not paying athletes is a nice idea, born out of an era when sports wasn’t the gigantic money machine that it is now. The spirit of ‘amateurism’ made sense when an education was the main point of an athletic scholarship, when playing a sport was not the primary reason for attending a school, and when the games weren’t million dollar enterprises. But today, it’s a mask for exploitation, a way for universities to continually bring in another group of profit machines ready to be disposed of without a second thought.

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The market for 35-year-old players (ancient in professional sports terms) with declining skills is not quite robust these days, which somewhat explains Collins’ absence from an NBA team. Unfortunately, this is not all that has come up: there are fears that the media attention would be a distraction to the team (and there’s nothing more terrifying to teams these days than a media distraction, because athletes apparently can’t handle answering questions about the real world for 20 minutes a day, or something) and that Collins’ presence might disrupt the chemistry of the locker room.

We have yet to see an openly gay male athlete play for any period of time. For some reason, the media has mostly ignored a number of openly gay female athletes, but this is also related to the fact that women’s sports are consistently underreported. Stories on trans* people attempting to ‘cross over’ into their identified gender side of a sport are usually reported on as anomalies; sometimes a tired debate ensues over whether it’s ‘right’ that someone do this. But the main sticking point for the media is an openly gay male athlete, and we’ve reached a tipping point of people waiting for it to happen, especially since it appears that Collins may never get another shot at the NBA.

Speculation about athletes’ sexuality has become common parlance with the advent of 24-hour sports networks, the internet, and Twitter. Just recently, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was the target of rumours claiming that he was gay, leading to an incredibly awkward interview where he had to say that he “really, really like[d] women.” In November 2013, Mike Freeman released a story for Bleacher Report that claimed that two gay, free agent football players were ready to come out this season before the teams interested in them balked, one for money reasons (which some doubt is true) and another fearing the reaction the signing might garner from the media – and possibly negative reaction from fans or players. “Quite simply, teams remain terrified of signing an openly gay player,” Freeman wrote.

We have yet to see an openly gay male athlete play for any period of time.

Further compounding these issues was a recent article published in Deadspin by former Minnesota Vikings (and currently unemployed) punter Chris Kluwe, who claimed that he was cut from the team in 2012 in part because he had publicly spoken out in favour of same-sex marriage. Kluwe alleges that his coach, Leslie Frazier, told him to stop speaking publicly on the issue, while his position coach, Mike Priefer, reportedly made multiple homophobic remarks towards Kluwe. All this, along with Kluwe’s increasing age and somewhat declining statistics, are what Kluwe alleged led to his dismissal from the team.

This left You Can Play and its founder, Patrick Burke, in a rough spot. You Can Play is an organization that seeks to partner with collegiate athletic programs and professional leagues to create a welcoming environment for gay athletes. Burke initially tweeted (then deleted) that Kluwe had been cut for his performance more than anything else; his reasoning for this was that he did not want athletes to think that speaking out for gay rights would get them fired. Clarifying later, Burke told Buzzfeed that “[…]we do not want to see people take this incident and make it seem like you get cut for being gay-friendly in the NFL,” and that Kluwe’s case was “totally unacceptable, horrific, and (we hope) atypical[…].”

Let’s throw yet another log on this fire and discuss the upcoming Sochi Olympics, where further anti ‘gay propaganda’ laws were recently passed. Many people have balked at a boycott of the games, but do want to make some sort of statement at the Olympics in favour of gay rights. Olympic rules specifically prohibit public political demonstrations by athletes, because, for some reason, a giant international competition featuring nearly every country in the world must remain totally apolitical. You Can Play has distributed small pins with their motto written in Cyrillic, but that’s been about the extent of advocacy so far. There seems to be a tangible desire to speak out against the Russian laws, but action so far has been slow, whether from fear of prosecution or athletes’ reticence to publicly speak out.

So, yes, there seems to be anxiety over when gay rights are going to go big in sports (and, again, going big means coming out as an openly gay athlete, or showing support for gay rights). The issues surrounding the first openly active gay male athlete, athlete advocacy, and the media’s desire for one of the biggest sports stories ever – basically, the gay rights version of Jackie Robinson (professional baseball’s first black player) – have now intersected into something fascinating. There is a subtle sense of waiting for the next big story, of breathless anticipation. Projects such as You Can Play have attempted to create an accepting environment among professional organizations, but we haven’t yet seen push come to shove; it remains to be seen what will actually happen when that first openly gay male athlete faces their first unfriendly crowd, their first disparaging comment, and ever more intrusions into their personal lives by a hungry media. At this point, it’s not an if, but a when, and we’re standing at an uneasy precipice.

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Simply put, white players in three of the four main North American sports – baseball, football, and hockey – are given much more latitude in how they can act on and off the playing field. Basketball, a sport where 78 per cent of male players and 69 per cent of female players are black, is noticeably different in this respect, in that it is a sport wherein behaviours are not as scrutinized in general. But in the other three sports, white players are far less scrutinized for their expressions of celebration and anger.

The best example of this came last month, when Dez Bryant, a wide receiver for the National Football League (NFL)’s Dallas Cowboys was spotted by cameras shouting at his teammates on the sidelines. The announcer for the game, Brian Billick, started ripping into Bryant, chastising him for distracting his teammates while also deriding them – even though Billick couldn’t hear a word of what Bryant was saying. Soon after, mic’d up footage of Bryant’s apparent ‘meltdown’ surfaced, wherein it was revealed that Bryant was yelling words of encouragement to his teammates, especially quarterback Tony Romo. “We’re the best in the league at this!” he repeatedly told Romo, a phrase that obviously marked Bryant as a bad teammate. As Deadspin later pointed out in a post titled “You Can Get Away With Acting Like Dez Bryant If You’re Tony Romo,” Romo has regularly chewed out and embarrassed his teammates on the field, and has been given laudatory treatment by announcers for being a fiery and intense leader. When Bryant, a young black man, does it, it’s what Billick calls “a temper tantrum.” When Romo, a white guy, does it, it’s the sign of a great field general.

If you think that difference is there because of a positional difference – quarterbacks are inherently allowed to do that sort of thing, or something, while wide receivers aren’t – then take a look at comparisons between Cam Newton, the Carolina Panthers quarterback, and Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback. Newton, black, has been dogged by accusations that he has a poor attitude since before he was drafted into the NFL, with one scout calling him “immature” among a laundry list of other faults. Since he’s been drafted, his sideline demeanor has been watched feverishly, and he is constantly criticized for poor body language or getting down on his teammates. Brady, on the other hand, is white, and gets cast into the same “fiery leader” archetype when he yells and screams at his teammates. Newton is the petulant one with the attitude problem, while Brady is the guy who just cares too much – all he wants to do is win.

The NFL is also plagued by media figures getting uppity about celebrations, mostly, again, by black players, though some white players have not escaped this scrutiny. The league already has celebration rules in place, so no one can have too much fun on the field, but plenty of media members chastise players when their celebrations go over some imaginary boundary line that’s “too far.”

In hockey, a sport with significantly fewer non-white players, the focus is often shifted onto Europeans. To take one example, Nail Yakupov, a Russian forward for the National Hockey League (NHL)’s Edmonton Oilers, is constantly attacked by the media for his lack of effort – sometimes rightly, oftentimes wrongly. This is mostly because his highly offensive style of play doesn’t always match the North American ideal of hard-working, ‘gritty’ hockey players. But what was most galling was a moment early in last year’s season in which Yakupov scored a crucial, late goal against the defending Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings. The then 19-year-old Yakupov celebrated exuberantly, sprinting down the ice and sliding on his knees. Don Cherry and other assorted old white guys of the media pounced on Yakupov for not acting like “he had been there before,” and making a mockery of the game. While the celebration was out of the ordinary, compared to most hockey celebrations, Yakupov’s actions received particular attention because he’s Russian, and wasn’t playing the game the ‘right’ – read ‘Canadian’ – way. And that’s in addition to the many media members who call Russians or other Europeans “enigmatic” or say that they have “attitude problems.” The few non-whites in the sport are also often heavily scrutinized; P.K. Subban, a black defenceman for the Montreal Canadiens, is often unduly criticized for his “brash” demeanor on and off the ice, even while he acts like most other young hockey players.

Baseball, a sport that has become increasingly filled with Hispanic players at the Major League Baseball (MLB) level, is nearly as bad, though less overtly. Sports journalists and, often, many of the players still cling to the “unwritten rules” of the game, which enforce a strict code of basically not celebrating anything. While not always targeting minorities, the “unwritten rules” – again, mostly referred to as playing the game the “right way” – enforce a strict code on players, reinforcing the staid, conservative ways of the past. This is a form of institutional racism – the codes of the game themselves restrict those who do not fall in with traditional, mostly white behaviours of humility and respect. This sort of stringent focus on the code was seen most in this year’s National League Championship Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Fans and St. Louis media members constantly harped on the Dodgers for not following a perceived code of play. These transgressions included celebrating important plays on the field, admiring a home run, and, in general, being too exuberant. This was even more pronounced due to the fact that the Dodgers are a West Coast team, as opposed to the Cardinals’ conservative, Midwestern home, and the fact that the Cardinals had more ‘hard-working’ white players, while the Dodgers had more young black or Hispanic players who, according to buzzkills everywhere, weren’t ‘acting like they had been there before.’

These problems of racial bias are tied to a couple of factors: the desire for all athletes to be humble and the politics of respectability. Since athletes are in a privileged position in society – they’re often paid millions of dollars to play a game – there is some expectation that they should be humble, and respect their opportunity. While a good idea in theory, in practice, it leads to people chastised for having personality. It enforces a level of sameness – you’re lucky to be here, so just keep your head down and play. More pressingly, for non-whites, the idea of respectability is in play. If they act out in any way that goes against the status quo, or plays into easy stereotypes – think of Dez Bryant as the ‘angry black man’ – then they are rejected. The force is for players to act more like their ‘respectable’ – read ‘white’ – counterparts, who show humility and never make a scene, or so the story goes.

Sports media has a lot of influence over how players are perceived – in fact, they control almost all of that perception. Stories where non-white players are criticized for their attitude, or told to play the game differently, are forms of control and coercion, part of a system that seeks to homogenize non-white athletes into a group more appealing to the conservative world of sports. So it’s up to the fans, and to the media, to reject the lazy, uninformed, and often racist characterizations of players who go against the grain. Who knows, we might get to see more of who these people really are.

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As Deadspin’s Samer Kalaf pointed out in his post “Riley Cooper Hasn’t ‘Been Through’ Anything,” this sort of narrative arc has been applied recently to Riley Cooper, a National Football League (NFL) receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles who was caught on camera this summer, at a concert, shouting a racial epithet and offering to fight any black person there. Controversy ensued, and he had to go to sensitivity training as a result. A couple of weeks ago, he caught three touchdown passes in a game, and, somehow, some were claiming that Cooper had “been through so much” and had just somehow triumphed over his adversity. As Kalaf pointed out, Cooper hasn’t been through anything besides being an asshole.

Somehow, the narrative of redemption has become more about playing well again than actually becoming a better person. As long as the athlete provides canned quotes about how much they’ve learned, and starts producing athletically, the media will immediately jump on the redemption bandwagon.

Tiger Woods’ return from scandal is a particularly good example of this narrative. In 2009, Woods was caught in a very public divorce scandal, and withdrew from all golf competitions for five months. Since then, the main narrative about Woods has been whether he can return to his previous status as golf’s top player. Every time he wins a tournament, the story becomes “Tiger’s back!” There have been countless somber interviews with Woods since his infidelity about how he’s become a better guy, and how his play will soon match that. In essence, once he wins another major, he will have overcome his entirely media-created adversity.

The same goes for LeBron James, the National Basketball Association’s best player. After he chose to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers to join the star-studded Miami Heat, the media and many fans eviscerated him for his perceived dishonesty. After a season where he seemed to embrace being a villain, the narrative the next season was about how James had learned from his mistakes and was now more humble. James’ poor reception by fans became part of this redemptive story, in which he was hated for a year, came back apologetic, and then was able to succeed.

Deadspin’s Kyle Wagner wrote a column entitled “Pot Isn’t Life and Death, and Tyrann Mathieu isn’t a Redemption Story” last Thursday denouncing how Tyrann Mathieu – whose career was in trouble because of marijuana use – has received the same treatment by the media. Mathieu didn’t do anything especially bad – depending on how you view marijuana use – but now that he’s been through rehab, and plays in the NFL, he’s been cast as this inspirational story. All because of moralist objections to marijuana use by young athletes.

The hero narrative is simplistic and boring, and confounding in so many ways. For one, it casts human redemption – one of the richest, and most layered stories someone can tell – as a simple matter of playing sports well. Seriously, there have been long novels written about someone atoning for past misdeeds, but in sports, all it takes is a sorry-sounding interview and improved play for sportswriters across the country to cast the athlete as an inspiring story.

Perhaps worse is how far writers will go to cast anything as adversity. The Onion probably said it best when they released the satirical video “College Basketball Star Heroically Overcomes Tragic Rape He Committed.” Of course, it’s an exaggeration of the truth, but it’s scarily not far from it. Cooper has come back from yelling a racial epithet; last year, Nick Cousins, a hockey prospect, was touted as having overcome the adversity of a sexual assault charge (the charges have since been dropped). It doesn’t matter what kind of adversity you face – whether it is increased media scrutiny, a suspension, what have you – all that matters is that it can be fashioned into a story.

I guess this kind of comes off as “you should do redemption stories this way, not that way.” But there are compelling stories out there, of players who have come back from injury, or a death in the family – a true problem for the player, an outside event, that they overcome personally, that allows them to play at their previous level. Players can recover and truly be changed. I also think that truly great stories are rare, and fleeting, and that the result of change isn’t just canned quotes or good statistics. True change takes time. In the rush for their story of the week, something that will hit readers right in the heart, sportswriters have blanketed the sporting world for anything that they can construct as a redemption story. It’s a comforting story, a way to inject the magic of movies into the everyday sports website.

Recently, the NFL has been overtaken by a conversation about bullying. Jonathan Martin, an offensive guard for the Miami Dolphins, abruptly left the team after being incessantly bullied by his teammates. Richie Incognito, another guard, was singled out as the ringleader, and was subsequently released from the team. I imagine that Martin will come back to the NFL, probably for a different team, and will be the subject of hundreds of puff pieces – and for good reason: he went through something of a psychological hell. If Incognito comes back to the NFL – it’s up in the air at this point – I fear he’ll get the same treatment by some writers, of how he learned his lesson and became a kinder guy, no matter what actually happens. Because it just sounds better.

The post Back, but from what? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Political Science Students’ Association (PSSA) held its first Town Hall debate of the year last Tuesday, on the topic of athletic culture and school spirit at McGill. The attendees discussed the state of athletics at McGill, the reasons for the lack of a strong athletic culture, and the desire to promote athletics in order to foster a pan-university community spirit.

The discussion was meant to continue the debate recently initiated by the student press. Unsurprisingly, reports by the Montreal Gazette that three Redmen football players are facing sexual assault charges were also brought up. The students were charged 15 months ago, but the University has not taken any disciplinary action.

“A lot of people would argue that […] we still have sports teams that allow students to ‘get away with things,’” suggested Lauren Konken, VP Academic of the PSSA, who was moderating the discussion. “In the American context, there’s been a lot of situations where athletes […] engage in criminal behaviour, be it sexual assault or another variety, and yet […] the University doesn’t take any necessary concerted action because they, as an athlete, are considered an asset to the university.”

Yet, many attendees were quick to dismiss concerns of a possible link between the players’ actions and athletic culture at McGill. “You can’t put an emphasis on football in that sense, [the players] hold a different power [than in the United States]; […] it’s no different from someone participating in Model United Nations,” said one attendee.

“It’s not something to do with the football team, it’s [with the players] as individuals. There was a misplaced emphasis on the athletics aspect,” added another.
Reports of homophobic behaviour were also dismissed as isolated incidents. “It’s unfair to point out one event,” said an athlete who was present at the discussion.
Some of the students present suggested that McGill was “alternative” and mostly immune to the negative effects of sports culture. “If we start going to games, […] there’s no way we’re going to let it get to the jocky atmosphere,” one student claimed.

“What is a jock, what comes with sports culture, that’s a whole set of generalizations that I don’t really think applies to athletics at McGill,” concluded Konken.

***

With rare exceptions, the general tone of the Town Hall was that the negative parts of our sports culture are merely outliers, the insignificant ‘other’ in an otherwise welcoming environment. The argument about McGill’s sports culture has become polarized: is it totally exclusionary or is it a force for good? In essence, are we dumb jocks or smart student athletes? In reality, the culture stands in a grey area between these poles, and it’s necessary that the McGill community, and, more importantly, the athletic community, self-reflect and wonder why sports are such a good incubator for misogyny, homophobia, and rape culture. This process allows the opportunity to make sports culture at McGill more inclusive, regardless of whether this creates a stronger sense of school spirit. Yes, these problems exist in the broader society; but they exist in sports and are often perpetuated by sports culture. This is not to say that all athletes are guilty of perpetuating these ills, but there are still some, and some is too many. This is especially when athletes at this school are so heavily promoted – being an athlete is not just like being in the Model United Nations – there aren’t huge posters of Model UN participants around campus.

Misogyny and homophobia are inherent in much of sports – men’s sports, in particular. (An excellent piece by Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan notes that female sports teams noticeably lack exclusive, negative cultures.) This is not a McGill-specific problem. Rather, it is applicable to sports culture generally, and to the broader culture, but that doesn’t erase the fact that it exists within the McGill athletic community. The competition and hypermasculinization of sports – McGill briefly had a “BE A MAN” athletics poster on campus, to name one example – creates an exclusive community based on who fulfills the typical masculine tropes best; one of the byproducts of this is a culture of misogyny (one can see this from the narratives of women at a McGill Rugby team dinner), and, often, of homophobia (since non-heterosexuality is not associated with traditional manliness.) While not specific to McGill, one narrative of growing up gay and trying to fit into sports culture as described in Juan Camilo Velásquez- Buriticá’s article in The Daily last year is indicative of the struggle that many may face, as is McGill Tribune columnist Tyler Michaels’ assertion that a student was called a “fag” at McConnell arena before a game. These are individual events, but they can’t be dismissed as mere exceptions. To say that homophobia and misogyny are outliers at McGill is to externalize the problem instead of facing the ugly truth: that much of sports culture here is exclusionary, and that it’s part of a larger problem.

Rape culture exists within McGill’s sports culture and this, of course, is tied to a culture of misogyny. Athletes all across the world have been traditionally held as the ultimate masculine figure, which creates a sense of entitlement among athletes – think of the cultural trope of the athletes being the king of the community. While this is not as big a problem at McGill, athletes are still in a elevated position at the school – no other extra-curricular participant is as promoted by the University as the athlete. This entitlement leads to some athletes feeling they ‘deserve’ any woman they desire, and fosters the idea that women are the spoils of victory. The valourization by the community often leads to the community being on the athletes’ side when they are charged with crimes. We can see this sort of entitlement and community valourization present in the Steubenville and Maryville rape cases, where prominent athletes in small communities are favoured over the survivors of sexual assault. The sports culture at McGill is not as pronouncedly and obviously bad as those two communities, but it is still far from ideal with respect to perpetuating rape culture.

McGill’s response to the alleged events of September 2011 has been particularly dismaying. While there is something to be said for the idea of innocent until proven guilty, McGill and its Athletics department haven’t given the athletes implicated in the sexual assault charge any sort of punishment. The innocent until proven guilty idea in the context of this case is somewhat troubling, as it falls into the stigmatizing myth of false reporting. While false reporting certainly does happen – the Duke University rape case is a recent example of this in an athletic context – its prevalence is much lower than is believed. England’s Crown Prosecution Services released a study that in England and Wales, over a 17 month span during 2011-12, there were 35 prosecutions of false rape accusations as opposed to 5,651 prosecutions for rape. The American Prosecutors Research Institute claims that 2 to 8 per cent of rape accusations in the U.S. are false, but those numbers are also plagued by inconsistent definitions of ‘false’ that often blame survivors, such as the insistence that rape cannot be committed by a friend. In addition, reporters of sexual assault are questioned intensely by police and put through invasive, oftentimes scarring, procedures to verify the claim – and it is not in the prosecutors’ interest to press charges they don’t think they can win. The fact that charges have been filed is in itself a marker of the seriousness of the claim.

While the McGill Tribune has rightly pointed out that McGill’s disciplinary policies did not allow them to take disciplinary action (which is in itself a failure – why doesn’t McGill have an effective sexual assault policy?), the Athletics department’s failure to act is particularly striking. Some balk at the idea of an indefinite suspension, put into place once the department and coach were made aware of the accusations, one that would keep the players out until the situation was put through court, due to the fact that they may be innocent. But what about even a minor action, even just a slap on the wrist, anything? Plenty of schools in the American collegiate system (to name just two recent examples: Florida University and Oklahoma University) suspend or dismiss athletes for alleged crimes before going through the entire legal process; in enacting something as small as a one to two game suspension – even just that bare minimum of a punishment – McGill Athletics could have shown the inexcusability of being charged with any crime, especially one as heinous as sexual assault. McGill Athletics’ inaction to this point displays an institutional failure – and, at this point, the accused have already finished this season, and are expected to graduate at the end of this year, so effective punishment is limited.

McGill, and McGill Athletics, have done all they can to distance themselves from the actions, allowing rape culture to persist on this campus, and within the athletic community. What’s needed is a serious, introspective look, not at why McGill students are apathetic toward sports, but at how McGill can become an exemplary institution (in respect to smashing rape culture) with an exemplary sports culture, one that truly is an outlier compared to the rest.

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Every week, the major sports media outlets release their “power rankings” of each team in the league, usually for each major sport. Let me go down the line here: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, TSN, CBS Sports, SB Nation, and Bleacher Report (a shudder passes through me as I have to include them among the major media sources, but clicks are clicks) all publish a weekly ranking in nearly every sport. (Deadspin has a somewhat satirical weekly ranking of all 125 teams in college football, but otherwise abstains, along with Sports on Earth and Grantland – all sites that claim to have ‘intelligent’ sports writing.) In a somewhat meta move, Yahoo! Sports has many of its contributors write an analysis of every other site’s power rankings of a certain team. For some sites, the ranking is based on a collaborative ranking by a number of writers; for others, it’s based on one person’s opinions, or ‘advanced’ statistical analysis. Either way, it’s always a numerical ranking of every team, followed by a short, pithy sentence about the team. ‘Listification’ has gone far beyond beyond simple power rankings, too: ESPN has even begun #NBArank, which is basically a power ranking of the 500 best basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA), while Grantland just finished their run of 10-to-25 minute youtube videos that previewed – and ranked – all the teams in the NBA. This is in addition to simple list articles, such as the five best defensemen in hockey or, as was recently posted on ESPN.com, 100 (mostly rhetorical) questions leading up to the Sochi Olympics.

This is not an internet-based phenomenon at its roots, to be sure. College football has been in the rankings business with a media poll since 1934, a coach’s poll since 1973, and a computer based ranking since 1998. Weekly power rankings in newspapers haven’t been uncommon in the last 20 to 30 years. But their explosion into prominence – a front page story every time – is surely linked to the internet, on which every outlet is competing for your precious clicks.

Besides being obscenely easy to write – this team is better than this team, for x reason, where that reason is usually a better record – these lists are so ubiquitous because they get an ungodly amount of web traffic. Your average fan wants to see exactly where their favourite team is on the ranking, and then react to that. It also easily drums up controversy, wherein the site manufactures suspense as to which team will get the coveted number one spot. (And the reward for that spot is, um, validation?) Power rankings, through their very names, also validate the elitist position of writer above everyone else. The creator of the power ranking gets to be judge, jury, and executioner on all the teams in a certain league, and these rankings often are titled with the name of the media organization – so the writer (or writers) decides what, symbolically, the whole organization thinks of a certain team.

Insidiously, power rankings can even be used to create stories. ESPN has an individual writer for every National Football League (NFL) team. Each week, once the NFL power rankings are released, every writer writes a “power rankings reaction” that responds to the ranking of a team, and asks whether it was right or wrong. That’s right – an article responding to an almost always totally arbitrary ranking and whether that arbitrary ranking got it right (in the writer’s eyes). Clicks abound, though. I can’t say I’m innocent – I’ve clicked on and fervently read power rankings before, looking for ‘my’ team and what the writer thinks of them. So why the obsession, for both writer and fan? I’ve already said that lists are easy to write and reinforce the exalted position for the sportswriter, but for the fan, it’s a little more complicated.

For one, many fans feel the need for validation – that their team should be at whatever number in the power rankings, and get the ‘respect’ from the national media. Success alone is not enough – it must be recognized by everyone else to mean something. It’s also a really, really simple way to digest the events of a season – rank every team, and you can easily see who’s doing well and who isn’t, without any nuance at all. Power rankings create an easy narrative to follow for a season; as some teams ‘rise,’ confounding our pre-season expectations, others fall from grace, and others still stay steadily mediocre. Since most people can’t watch every game of every team, it allows the fan to believe that they know what’s going on across the league.

It seems that many fans look toward sports to get the final, definitive result that cannot be found elsewhere in society; every game is a closed narrative with a tidy end, with easy-to-cast heroes and villains. The ending of most sports – where one team gets a win, and sometimes this win is the championship – is the simplest way of showing that one team is better. The end gives them comfort. Or so people desire. The reality is more of a mess, with multiple players all having influence on any single play, these plays adding up to an end result that often doesn’t reflect the true talent of each team. That is, the better team on paper doesn’t always win; there’s luck, there’s anomalies. I find sports compelling for that reason – that the end is often uncertain, that you can lose even if you play better, or win based on pure luck.

I suspect that a lot of people would agree with me – the sentiment that “on any given Sunday,” anything can happen – but the overwhelming popularity of power rankings indicates otherwise: plenty of people just want a tidy narrative to follow. It’s a way of following sports that completely strips away nuance; a comfort instead of something interesting.

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The reports have been denied by the Patriots, in an attempt to distance themselves from Hernandez, but at the very least, they knew, when they drafted him, that he had previously had ìcharacter issuesî (the catch-all phrase used in reference to players who commit crimes or make mistakes in college or high school). At some level, they knew about his erratic behaviour leading up the murder, and didnít do anything to really help him.

The Hernandez story is an extreme example of the norm when it comes to players with ìcharacter issuesî ñ a general disregard for the playerís well-being. Professional athletes with enough talent are given the benefit of the doubt for past mistakes until they become liabilities to the team.

But the idea of ìcharacter issuesî itself is highly racialized, as non-white players are characterized by the media and scouts as ìthugsî or ìgangsters,î whereas white players are seen as kids who have just made a mistake. As a result, the treatment players get can vary dramatically.

Iíll take an example from college football: Tyrann Mathieu, now a cornerback for the Arizona Cardinals, was suspended at the end of his 2011 season at Louisiana State University for breaking team rules. Reports stated that Mathieu had failed a drug test after smoking synthetic marijuana. In 2012, he was again suspended, reportedly for testing positive for marijuana. He later enrolled in drug rehabilitation, and then was caught with marijuana and kicked off the team. He was drafted in the third round (lower than he was projected), and the pick was considered risky for the Cardinals. This is all for a player smoking marijuana, a recreational drug that, though illegal, is hardly likely to make the player a liability.

Compare that to Johnny Manziel, the current quarterback for Texas A&M. There are multiple photos of Manziel drinking alcohol while underage, for which he has never received team punishment. Manziel was also caught up in a ëscandalí this summer after he was caught selling his autograph, a violation of collegiate rules. He was suspended one half of one game by his coach. Both of these players are labeled as having ìcharacter issues,î so whatís the difference? Mathieu is black, and Manziel is white. One guy loses a season for marijuana, the other gets nothing for drinking and a half a game for selling autographs. Manziel is expected to be a first round pick in next yearís draft, even with his ìcharacter issues.î Itís just one example of how non-white athletes are consistently treated more harshly for their mistakes.

In the intensely weird world of draft scouting, when players are put under a microscope by teams and media alike, nothing makes a prospect fall faster than perceived ìcharacter issues.î These are as innocuous as getting caught smoking or drinking while in college (inconceivable!) and illegally making money as a college athlete to more serious crimes such as theft or violence. Either way, if a player makes a mistake at school, they are likely to fall draftwise for it, because franchises mostly want their players to be sportsmachines committed to just playing the game. And some players are dinged a little harder than others.

For players who are talented enough, the label of ìcharacter issuesî means they get drafted later and lose millions of dollars; for many others, it means not getting drafted at all, and facing the uphill battle of making a team after the draft. For instance, in football, Vontaze Burfict was predicted by many to be a top five draft pick in the 2012 National Football League (NFL) draft. While Burfict admitted to the media that he only played ìaverageî football the year before, what damaged him more was his reputation for being ìout of controlî (according to one unnamed scout) off the field. Burfict ended up going completely undrafted before signing with the Cincinnati Bengals. Heís now one of the better linebackers in the league, though people still consider the Bengals signing him a risky move.

For every Burfict that makes it to the professional league, there are many more who bounce around, never finding a stable team situation. Even when players do make it to the league despite their ìcharacter issues,î they are kept on a shorter leash than other players,  basically given a one-strike policy. This is not to say that players should not be supported by their organization, but these organizations are not truly ìsupportingî their players.  Rather, they are holding them to a much stricter standard than anyone else and giving no latitude for their mistakes. Take Dez Bryant, a wide receiver who sat out his final year of college after it was ruled that he was in contact with a sports agent. He was still drafted in the first round ñ a marker of his skill ñ but the team gave him guidelines that bordered on the absurd. Bryant reportedly had a midnight curfew, had to ask for the teamís permission to go out at night, and had a rotating crew of security personnel during his free time. The expectation of formerly ëtroubledí players is that they will never make another mistake again if they want to keep their jobs.

ëTroubledí players are usually cut or traded once a team decides that theyíre not worth the trouble. Instead of dealing with the problem, teams are more likely to simply get rid of the player and let them be someone elseís problem. If the player canít be molded ñ to be committed to the team only ñ then they are usually cut loose. If another team decides that the playerís risk is worth the possible reward, theyíll sign him, usually for far less money. If not, depending on the sport, they must find work elsewhere (in foreign leagues, or minor leagues) or re-enter the non-sports world. There, they donít have even the modest support system of the team, and many are unprepared to find jobs in any other profession ñ usually because they either did not finish college, or never prepared in any way for a life outside sports.

The problem with all this is the lack of action by professional teams to help their players. They knowingly draft players with ìcharacter issuesî ñ oftentimes much lower in the draft than they should be ñ or sign them and if they screw up again, reject them. Itís a system that basically says, ìbe perfect, or get out,î instead of supporting its players without holding them to an impossible standard.

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Today, there are still some great columnists and analysts, and there are still some terrible ones, all amid the new blog-heavy sports media landscape. The worst are the ones who fall into simplified narratives, who mythologize intangible things – ‘heart,’ ‘grittiness,’ ‘toughness,’ ‘clutchness,’ and ‘hard work’ being the most popular – and value them above talent. The worst columnists’ favourite guy on the team was the undersized, usually white player who succeeded through hard work and perseverance, because that was the best story.

At the same time, new writers have found new avenues for looking at the game – and, increasingly, seen that the tropes of the traditional sports writer were wrong. That ‘clutchness’ is more random than an actual ability; that the hardest-working player can sometimes be the worst player on the team. So, inevitably, we’ve reached a point where a ludicrous dichotomy has sprung up: blogger, advanced statistics nerds versus the old guard sportswriters who just know the game better. And it is an insufferable battle.

It seems like every week, without fail, someone will start a debate about ‘advanced’ statistics. It usually comes in the form of a tweet or a column that decries those nerds who use newer statistics and ignore the beloved clichés of ‘heart’ or grittiness. I’ll use a recent example in the hockey world: Gord Miller, of The Sports Network, tweeted Tuesday morning that “[s]ome analyze NHL [National Hockey League] teams using ‘advanced’ stats like Corsi #’s. I prefer the Bill Parcells approach: you are what the standings say you are.”

A little background: Corsi is a stat that counts the number of shot attempts (including blocked shots or shots that miss the net) by either team, with the idea being that if you shoot the puck more than the other team, then you possess the puck more than the other team, and have a better chance of winning. Repeated studies have shown that positive Corsi numbers highly correlate with winning percentages, and that playoff performance is also highly correlated with good possession statistics. Bill Parcells, mentioned in the tweet, was a football coach in the 1990s and 2000s, so Miller’s choice of cross sport comparison is weird. Basically, he’s saying that good old wins and losses are a better indicator of team ability than those newfangled stats.

Miller’s tweet – and, basically, his ideology on what makes a good hockey team – completely ignores the fact that a team can be outplayed and still win through some lucky bounces. It’s a simplified way of looking at the game – team gets win, therefore team is good – and it’s the most reductive way to discuss sports. But these are the kind of people who are making a career off of opposing new statistics.They’ve become the meathead jocks of the journalism world, decrying the ‘nerd’ bloggers who live in their mothers’ basements looking at a spreadsheet instead of the game, or who deny their beloved traits of stick-to-it-ness, their easy narratives.

Another trend of stat-denying is by fans or writers focused on teams that are winning in spite of statistical trends that predict that they should be worse, or that they will eventually fall to Earth. If their team keeps winning in spite of the statistics, these people use that to dismiss stats entirely. It’s a logical fallacy – if one thing is wrong, even one time, then it can never be trusted.

Bill Barnwell, a football writer for Grantland, is one of the most widely read stats-focused writers. For the past two years, he has predicted that certain teams will do worse than the year before because their lucky streaks will end, and statistical benefits for the team will regress toward the average the next year. Barnwell basically becomes public enemy number one for these teams’ fans, who refuse to believe that their team will do worse. This year, Barnwell predicted that the Indianapolis Colts would do worse than last year. The Colts have started the season well, and I’ve seen one Colts fan on Twitter tell Barnwell that this start should make him reconsider the very idea of statistical regression. Again: one prediction is off (and, even then, there’s a whole season left to go, in which the Colts could still regress), so ‘advanced’ statistics are fundamentally wrong.

In hockey, there’s the continuing case of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who made the playoffs last year despite terrible possession numbers, and have started this season well with the same terrible possession numbers. There’s a whole cadre of Toronto media outlets and fans that have vehemently denounced ‘advanced’ statistics just because they say that their team is getting lucky, and will eventually fall to Earth. For instance, on Tuesday, as the Maple Leafs were getting hugely outshot but still holding a slim lead, Globe and Mail columnist David Shoalts tweeted that he could hear “geeks’ heads exploding all over their spreadsheets” and, after that, that the “Actuary Army had [him] in their crosshairs,” providing yet another example of the complete dismissal of advanced statistics based on one event – even before the whole season has played out. The only thing missing from that tweet was the sound of a bespectacled dork being shoved into a locker by your least favourite person from high school.

I can’t help but get the feeling that these are simply reactions to a threat; that statistics are getting better and better at predicting performance and showing us newer and more interesting ways of looking at the game than the old guard can. It’s their innate knowledge being pitted against stats, with the narratives and received knowledge of the traditional crowd under attack by new statistic-driven discoveries. That’s not to say that analysis of sports should only be based on ‘advanced’ statistics – there are certainly things that can’t be measured entirely by statistics – but to deny them outright is just plain dumb, an act of willful ignorance.

As these stats become more and more entrenched, they have become increasingly accepted by the sports fan and journalist community; we can only hope that in a decade or so, we won’t have dumb, influential people plugging their ears to things that can only improve their knowledge of sports.

The post The backlash against knowledge appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In the years since, the rumours of bribery have only increased (and FIFA has launched their own independent investigation on the matter) without any definitive proof. More worrying, however, is FIFA’s blasé attitude towards the process of setting up for the World Cup in their chosen host countries, and the seeming outside resignation to the incompetence and moral corruptness of the organization.

Last week, the Guardian ran a report claiming that Nepalese workers had been brought into into Qatar to work on the new stadiums, highways, and other infrastructure needed for the nation to be World Cup-ready. The accounts of worker abuse in Qatar are stunning: forced labour, withheld pay, stolen passports and identification, and lack of access to drinking water, among others. The rate of worker deaths this summer was one a day. Again: it’s 2013 and there are basically slaves working on stadiums for the World Cup. Only two members of FIFA’s governing board expressed their outrage at the situation before FIFA’s executive committee meeting last week, while the rest waited until after the meeting (where the primary discussion was on whether rescheduling the 2022 event is plausible). After the meeting, FIFA president Sepp Blatter told the press that FIFA could not “change things” and that “workers’ rights will be the responsibility of [Qatar]” but that FIFA could not “turn a blind eye, but it is not an intervention from FIFA that can change things.” These are probably the emptiest words spoken in human history. Sadly, they’re hardly surprising. One only needs to look at the situation in Brazil, which will host the World Cup in 2014.

A recent BBC article alleges that 111 workers were living in poor conditions near a São Paulo airport, which is currently being expanded for the influx of visitors during the World Cup. Again, the word “slave” comes up, this time from Brazil’s own Labour attorney general’s office. In a separate BBC piece, it is reported that construction was halted at a Brazil stadium because of countless worker safety issues – of “being buried, run over and of collision, falling from heights and being hit by construction material, among other serious risks.” In addition, riots have broken out across Brazil in protest of the government’s spending on the World Cup instead of education or health care and the rampant government corruption. This is for the 2014 World Cup – the one that’s happening in less than a year (!), and FIFA has effectively done nothing to halt rampant worker abuse.

Maybe you’re wondering how the process for the 2018 World Cup in Russia process is going – unfortunately, the situation there is just as dire. According to The Russian Reader (an English blog devoted to reading Russian news articles and spreading news of various governmental abuses), the Russian government passed laws that allow anyone in contract with FIFA to hire immigrants and/or “stateless” people. According to the same source, one section of these laws basically “abolishes all regulation and control over the recruitment of foreign nationals and stateless persons as volunteers – that is, it practically and plainly permits employing migrants without remuneration.” At the same time, the government is imprisoning illegal or soon-to-be deported immigrants – many of whom were working on buildings for Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics – around where new stadiums are to be built for the 2018 World Cup. It hasn’t quite happened yet, but the potential link is there: builders working with FIFA have the ability to hire these prisoners for their upcoming projects. If that’s not an open invitation for horrible working conditions and near slavery, I don’t know what is.

In essence, FIFA awards World Cup bids to nations on shaky principles – bribery and corruption is often alleged, and has been discovered in other aspects of FIFA decision making – and then basically allows them to do as they please. They have nothing in place that prevents nations from abusing immigrant or lower class workers on a large scale. And when faced with the news, stern words come out from FIFA leadership, but these abuses continue regardless. FIFA knows they’re happening, but, as Blatter demonstrates, they won’t actually do anything about it. A New York Times piece recently laid out the situation in FIFA from the viewpoint of an independent governance committee (a committee set out to investigate the soundness of their own organization) member, Mark Pieth. Pieth said that “[the committee] underestimated that this is a purely self regulated body. They are a bit like the Vatican. No one can force them to change.” FIFA will continue to do effectively nothing to curb worker abuse, because they cannot be challenged.

That’s precisely the problem: almost every person who’s looked into the situation has accepted that FIFA is a colossal clusterfuck littered with corruption and poor practice. Reaction to the latest news of worker abuse has been vociferous, but also strangely resigned – there have been plenty of tweets and stories that paint this as ‘business as usual,’ or ‘classic FIFA.’ ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor has a column against it, but it’s hardly prominent on their website; SI.com has reported on FIFA’s course of action but without the righteous anger the situation deserves.

FIFA has done so poorly to fairly regulate soccer throughout the world with a basic regard for humanity that people are no longer shocked by it. All we hear is a weak call for action with the knowledge that nothing can be done. It’s a monolithic federation run by incompetents with little regard for humanity, yet they’ve become ingrained in the sports world. Most soccer fans just want to see the World Cup above all else – above directly acting or protesting FIFA and the countries that are working the way they do. Fans are either apathetic, or feel powerless. Worker abuse has become FIFA’s business as usual, and barely anything has been done to stop it.se hosting bids. Immediately after the announcement, the Western press spread rumours that bribery and pressure on FIFA were in part responsible for the unexpected result. FIFA, on the other hand, celebrated its first-ever World Cup in the Middle East, a sign of its commitment to the region.

In the years since, the rumours of bribery have only increased (and FIFA has launched their own independent investigation on the matter) without any definitive proof. More worrying, however, is FIFA’s blasé attitude towards the process of setting up for the World Cup in their chosen host countries, and the seeming outside resignation to the incompetence and moral corruptness of the organization.

Last week, the Guardian ran a report claiming that Nepalese workers had been brought into into Qatar to work on the new stadiums, highways, and other infrastructure needed for the nation to be World Cup-ready. The accounts of worker abuse in Qatar are stunning: forced labour, withheld pay, stolen passports and identification, and lack of access to drinking water, among others. The rate of worker deaths this summer was one a day. Again: it’s 2013 and there are basically slaves working on stadiums for the World Cup. Only two members of FIFA’s governing board expressed their outrage at the situation before FIFA’s executive committee meeting last week, while the rest waited until after the meeting (where the primary discussion was on whether rescheduling the 2022 event is plausible). After the meeting, FIFA president Sepp Blatter told the press that FIFA could not “change things” and that “workers” rights will be the responsibility of [Qatar] but that FIFA could not ìturn a blind eye, but it is not an intervention from FIFA that can change things.î These are probably the emptiest words spoken in human history. Sadly, theyíre hardly surprising. One only needs to look at the situation in Brazil, which will host the World Cup in 2014.

A recent BBC article alleges that 111 workers were living in poor conditions near a S„o Paulo airport, which is currently being expanded for the influx of visitors during the World Cup. Again, the word ìslaveî comes up, this time from Brazilís own Labour attorney generalís office. In a separate BBC piece, it is reported that construction was halted at a Brazil stadium because of countless worker safety issues ñ of ìbeing buried, run over and of collision, falling from heights and being hit by construction material, among other serious risks.î In addition, riots have broken out across Brazil in protest of the governmentís spending on the World Cup instead of education or health care and the rampant government corruption. This is for the 2014 World Cup ñ the one thatís happening in less than a year (!), and FIFA has effectively done nothing to halt rampant worker abuse.

Maybe youíre wondering how the process for the 2018 World Cup in Russia process is going ñ unfortunately, the situation there is just as dire. According to The Russian Reader (an English blog devoted to reading Russian news articles and spreading news of various governmental abuses), the Russian government passed laws that allow anyone in contract with FIFA to hire immigrants and/or ìstatelessî people. According to the same source, one section of these laws basically ìabolishes all regulation and control over the recruitment of foreign nationals and stateless persons as volunteers ñ that is, it practically and plainly permits employing migrants without remuneration.î At the same time, the government is imprisoning illegal or soon-to-be deported immigrants ñ many of whom were working on buildings for Russiaís 2014 Winter Olympics ñ around where new stadiums are to be built for the 2018 World Cup. It hasnít quite happened yet, but the potential link is there: builders working with FIFA have the ability to hire these prisoners for their upcoming projects. If thatís not an open invitation for horrible working conditions and near slavery, I donít know what is.

In essence, FIFA awards World Cup bids to nations on shaky principles ñ bribery and corruption is often alleged, and has been discovered in other aspects of FIFA decision making ñ and then basically allows them to do as they please. They have nothing in place that prevents nations from abusing immigrant or lower class workers on a large scale. And when faced with the news, stern words come out from FIFA leadership, but these abuses continue regardless. FIFA knows theyíre happening, but, as Blatter demonstrates, they wonít actually do anything about it. A New York Times piece recently laid out the situation in FIFA from the viewpoint of an independent governance committee (a committee set out to investigate the soundness of their own organization) member, Mark Pieth. Pieth said that ì[the committee] underestimated that this is a purely self regulated body. They are a bit like the Vatican. No one can force them to change.î FIFA will continue to do effectively nothing to curb worker abuse, because they cannot be challenged.

Thatís precisely the problem: almost every person whoís looked into the situation has accepted that FIFA is a colossal clusterfuck littered with corruption and poor practice. Reaction to the latest news of worker abuse has been vociferous, but also strangely resigned ñ there have been plenty of tweets and stories that paint this as ëbusiness as usual,í or ëclassic FIFA.í ESPN.comís Jeff MacGregor has a column against it, but itís hardly prominent on their website; SI.com has reported on FIFAís course of action but withoutthe righteous anger the situation deserves.

FIFA has done so poorly to fairly regulate soccer throughout the world with a basic regard for humanity that people are no longer shocked by it. All we hear is a weak call for action with the knowledge that nothing can be done. Itís a monolithic federation run by incompetents with little regard for humanity, yet theyíve become ingrained in the sports world. Most soccer fans just want to see the World Cup above all else ñ above directly acting or protesting FIFA and the countries that are working the way they do. Fans are either apathetic, or feel powerless. Worker abuse has become FIFAís business as usual, and barely anything has been done to stop it.

The post The World Cup: built by exploited workers appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I was one of four guides on a 32 day canoe trip this summer, with eight campers. The trip started on the Pipestone River in western Ontario, where we travelled East towards Winisk Lake. From there, we went 250 kilometres (km) North down the Winisk River, which eventually flows into Hudson Bay, far enough North for polar bears to be a legitimate issue. Near the end of the trip, we got a report that a week before, basically right where we were planning to sleep that night, another group had been woken at 2:30 a.m. by a nudge on their tent; it was an adult polar bear (roughly the size of a minivan, and one of the few animals left that eats humans in the wild). The group scared it off and, for some reason, decided to go back to bed. About a half hour later, they woke up to the same bear sticking its head into the vestibule of their tent. They scared it off again and wisely decided to book it to their final destination. Once we heard this news, we did the same and got out of there. Thus began a three-day period of hysteria, as we paddled 80 km in sleet the first day, then 50 km, then bust out 40 km on the last day till the end.

I’ve spent my summers at Camp Pathfinder since I was nine years old. I’ve been staff for five years now, and, beginning last year, a lead guide (headman) on canoe trips. The camp is based in Algonquin Park, Ontario, and this year marked the 100th anniversary of the camp. Because it was the 100th, the camp sent out this trip down the Winisk. It doesn’t sound like a big deal to anyone else, but the Winisk has been played up for me for about 5 years now: when I was 15, about to be a camper on a 25-day canoe trip down the Rupert River (which has since been dammed, RIP), the guides teased us, telling us we were going down the Winisk, just to fuck with us. “Yup, straight up into Polar Bear [Provincial] Park. We’re gonna bring a gun, too.” After that, it was always the go-to joke: “Yup, this year we’re doing the Winisk.” Always a joke, until this year, when our Director of Canoe Tripping led me to a map and told me: “You’re going [on] a canoe trip this year. Up here [he points to the Pipestone River] and then East, then up here, all the way up here [Hudson Bay].” My mind made the link: the Winisk. I was going North.

The Director told me this in the last week of June; we were set to leave on July 9. What followed were two weeks of intense planning and outfitting. I was so excited, and nervous, that I almost cried multiple times just walking around. It’s a lot of responsibility: I was to be one of four staff in charge of eight kids for a month straight, in the middle of nowhere. When people say “the middle of nowhere,” they’re often exaggerating. This was really the middle of nowhere: even the smallest civilization was days away by canoe, and medical help was also far, far away. If we screwed up – whether it was an injury, or a broken boat – it would not be an easy fix.

The packing wasn’t easy either, as we spent days organizing gear and food for 32 days (with some extra, just in case). It was mind-numbing work, and incredibly stressful too, because if you forget just one thing, it can torpedo a part of the trip. Half our food we took with us; the other half was to be shipped by air to a First Nations community halfway through the trip.

The kids were all 15 years old and all Americans. They had all been coming to the camp for a number of years, so they knew what they were getting into. Before the big trip, we took them on a short training trip to a set of rapids so they could hone their whitewater skills. Paddling in whitewater is still kind of a terrifying experience for me, and I could tell some of the kids weren’t totally comfortable either, but over two days they improved enormously.

Anticipation builds until finally, everything’s been packed and we’re off to the train station for an 18 hour ride to Savant Lake, Ontario. There are three trips from our camp going to the same area; one trip is going on the Asheweig, which flows into the end of the Winisk, and the other two are going down the Pipestone and Winisk. The trips are staggered such that none of the three trips will see each other till the end of the trip – and my trip goes last. After the other trips leave, we wait in Savant Lake (the closest thing I’ve seen to a modern day ghost-town) and time stretches on.

Once we finally leave and actually reach the water, we begin with a small rapid immediately; the rest of the day is spent on small, fun rapids that can be run with all the gear in the boat. We get to one set that we have to portage around. I carry my boat to the end and notice that our head guide, James, is walking gingerly and isn’t carrying his boat. “I heard my knee pop. It sounded exactly like the time I tore my ACL the last time.” Shit. The whole trip is nervous and worried, as an evacuation and replacement would take days. Plus, leaving this trip as it starts would be devastating. James decides to gut it out; for about ten days he can’t carry his boat, and he wears a brace, but manages to make it through the whole trip.

The Pipestone, after the first day, turns into burnt-out forest. Massive forest fires ripped through the area in the past couple of years, though they were mostly root fires, so the trees still stand on trunks of ash. On a particularly bad portage where the path is covered in fallen trees, the remaining branches twist over our head, creating a black canopy. On the second day, we reach a campsite on a burnt-out esker next to a huge set of rapids. The ground is covered in ash, and the campsite is littered with burnt trees – it looks like God’s ashtray. (On a related note: a huge forest fire ravaged the Eastmain region in Northern Quebec this summer, and, because the land was First Nations, and much of it unprofitable, the federal government did little to help the region until they absolutely had to).

We’ve reached a point in the trip where ‘brain-rot’ is starting to form. Brain-rot, basically, is the result of spending all of your time with 12 people in the woods, with no external stimuli. There’s no new pop culture to consume, no new jokes to be heard; everything that comes is from inside a warped mind. Over the course of the trip, everyone acquires about seven nicknames based on anything from ‘pokemon names’ to ‘funny pronunciations’ or just weird observations. Anyway, the campers go wild on this campsite, grabbing sticks and ripping down the dead trees, which are exceedingly easy to take down. One camper runs by me, yells “MY LANCE!!!” and goes to town on the trees.

It’s a clear night, so I decide to keep the fly off my tent and stay up to see the stars. This far North, though, the sun doesn’t fully set till about 9:30p.m., and the sky stays light for a while afterwards, obscuring the full night sky. I’m reading to stay awake, getting close to bed, when I decide to look one last time. There’s a green streak across the sky. I yell to James and Mike over in the other tent, “Um, guys, you should check out the sky.”

The sky is dancing for us, shimmering green and sliding across the sky. There are streaks of orange within the green. It’s obscenely buggy outside – mosquitoes swarm my hands every time I try to take a photo – but none of us wants to stop looking.  It’s only day two on the river and we’ve already seen the best Northern Lights we’ve ever witnessed. And we’re only going farther North. It can actually get better.

The cool thing is that the landscape changes every couple of days, from burnt-out forest, into more mature forest, and then off the Pipestone into a large chain of lakes. These days are not as exciting; it’s a string of days of all paddling, with barely any current. The weather cooperates on our biggest lake, and we’re able to rig up a tarp sail to cruise down the lake. On another lake, Chipai, a rainstorm comes in around 2 p.m. and the driving rain continues till midnight. We set up our tents on a small beach in the rain (my tent-mate, Joe, has a terrible idea for setting up the fly of the tent first, which ends with us sleeping in a soaked tent), cook in the rain, and eat in the rain. We go to sleep hoping for the rain to end, though still laughing; the campers have placed their tent too close to the lake and a wave or two hits them in the night. It may sound hackneyed to non-Pathfinder people, but I truly do believe Pathfinder people are not fazed by anything.

In a couple days time – around 14 days into the trip – we get off the chain of lakes, onto the ‘upper’ Winisk and into Winisk lake, the headwaters of the Winisk proper. There’s a small First Nations community, Webequie, where our food for the rest of the trip has been dropped off. We decide to go into town and try to find a local with a place to stay on the lake; instead, the owner of the local grocery store lets us stay on his lawn.

Webequie is accessible only by air or winter roads. It’s a small community with two long dirt roads running through, houses on either side, and a community centre in the middle of the town. Walking through, it’s hard not to recognize our own privilege as white outsiders; the houses are squat and simple, the road unpaved, litter scattered about. Life in these First Nations communities is certainly not easy – employment is limited, and food costs are exorbitant because of the price it takes to ship anything there. We take the campers to the grocery store, where campers and staff alike buy the delicacies they’ve missed these past two weeks – candy, soda, fresh meat, and vegetables. It’s weird though, this sensation of passing through – 12 outsiders spending some money, sleeping on a lawn, then departing the next day. This is vacation for us, life for them.

After a hearty breakfast – doughnuts and Dino Egg oatmeal included – we set out to the Winisk river. For the whole trip, we’ve been going East-Northeast, but now, looking at the maps, we’re going straight North, 250 km or so. The weather, which so far has been mostly sunny with a cold wind, gets colder and colder, even if the sun comes out – my long underwear stays on for about three days straight (gross, I know, but oh so warm).

The Winisk itself features a forest further thinning out, as we start seeing less and less birch trees. There are big rapids at the beginning of the Winisk – it takes careful planning and execution to ‘sneak’ around the bigger features – and we get through mostly unscathed. We’re ahead of schedule, so the days are leisurely – only about 20 km a day – and we spend a couple of rest days on nicer campsites (basically, campsites we didn’t have to create ourselves). The fishing is absurdly good – at points, it’s not even fun, as we pull out eating size walleye and brook trout with ease for our dinner. After about five days though, the rapids abruptly end: we’ve dropped off the Canadian Shield, the geological feature that’s under most of Southeastern Canada. Now the shore is mostly shoals and the forest is made up of scrub bush and small jackpine.

So, the 80 km day. We wake up at 4 a.m., eat a small breakfast of granola, and start paddling the river, which is all flatwater at this point. It’s bitterly cold; at one point, it begins to sleet, though we continue on in hour-long paddling sessions. We’re so rotted at this point that we sing ‘99 K to the Bay’ to the tune of ‘99 bottles of beer’ and, for maybe the first time since I was ten, I finish the whole song.  After another tough day, we have about 40 km left till Peawanuck, our end point. We decide to wake up at 3 a.m. (we had run into one of the other trips, also pushing towards the end, and wanted to beat them) and go for it. It is, again, bitterly cold – four degrees Celsius or so – but, once we get out into the boats, we’re treated to another Northern Lights show, and, after another couple hours of paddling, we reach a limestone gorge. It’s an amazing scene, almost indescribable; I feel tiny beneath these huge, ancient cliffs, through which water has flowed for thousands of years before me, and which will continue after me.

We arrive to Peawanuck, another small First Nations community, just in time for ‘Creefest.’ Creefest is a gathering of people from neighboring communities in the Hudson Bay/James Bay area for community games, music, and food. All three trips have arrived, so 36 outsiders show up to Creefest. Thankfully, they are nothing but kind, offering their food to us (caribou, geese, even swan), playing tug-of-war against us (we lose to the women of the community), and letting us enjoy their live music with a friendship dance, in which every camper finds a local dance partner. Walking back to our campsite – a 2 km walk down a dirt road – we’re again greeted with outrageous Northern Lights. We make jokes about how they’re ‘boring’ now, having seen them so much, but we can’t look away – green and purple ring the sky from all directions.

We arrived in Peawanuck three days early, due to the polar bear scare, and so each trip spends one day going out to Hudson Bay proper. (Peawanuck is 30 to 40 km from Hudson Bay. The old First Nations community, Winisk, closer to the Bay proper, was completely wiped away by a flood in 1986.) We’re last, again, and get rave reviews from the other trips that return – “We saw a polar bear! And a beluga!” – which makes us all the more anxious – what if our trip isn’t as good? We’re driven out in motorboats, for about an hour, to about where the river meets the Bay. The tides and winds aren’t cooperating, so instead of driving out into the Bay, we have to hike on land.

The ground around the Bay looks like a different world; it’s muddy, with small bushes and grass everywhere, interspersed with large swaths of vibrant flowers. Our guide to the Bay brings us to a spot where he points out a white blob on the horizon, indicating a polar bear, though even with binoculars it’s hard to tell. “Do you want to go further?” he asks, and we have to say yes. It’s not good enough yet.

But then, after another hike of 30 minutes or so – and weeks of anticipation – we stop and see five polar bears; two mothers, one with a single cub and another with two. They’re the biggest animals I’ve ever seen outside a zoo. The cubs themselves are the size of black bears. The mom with her two cubs is walking in our direction, and we’re downwind, so they just keep coming, so close that our guide loads his rifle. It’s amazing and slightly terrifying all at once. The mother eventually sees us, but, instead of turning away, turns perpendicular to us. As we walk back to the boats, they walk parallel to us, always in sight. The image burns into my brain.

The next day, we took a flight on Air Creebec back to camp. What follows is the weirdest adjustment period of my life; for a month, I’ve been living in the woods, the real woods, separated from anything but my 12 friends, who I’ve grown to love. My brain was rewired – used to the bush. Getting up, paddling and portaging, eating a fire-cooked meal, seeing the Northern Lights – that all became extremely normal.

As I write this, I feel like I’ve done the trip a disservice. There’s something inexpressible about the experience, about intensely bonding with 12 people, about living out there, about weathering every storm that came our way, everything. All I can say is that I’m extremely thankful I could do this, that I could learn so much, and, I exhort you: it – whatever the word for it is – is out there. Go and get it.

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