Roger Odisio wrote:
>
> Your premise--a media preference for whites--is of course true, but I
> disagree with practically everything you say here.
>
> No question, the media, and more to the point the advertisers who drive the
> media, prefer white heroes to black ones (though they don't entirely ignore
> a Ken Griffey). During the medal ceremoney to which you refer, however, my
> TV showed more crowd shots, instead of Scurry getting her medal. Though, if
> you continued to watch, they soon after showed her on the stand with the
> medal. I remember this because I noticed the slight, or what appeared to be
> one, to Scurry. It was almost as if someone in the control room, or the
> director himself, realized what had been done and anticipated your
> criticism. More to the point, I think that incident was mainly the result
> of, not some clear racism (beyond the underlying intitututional kind), but
> rather just part of the same media coverage that showed crowd shots and
> Clinton in his box while there was action on the filed. To the media, the
> game is a TV show to sell to advertisers (by getting the most audience of
> the right age profile they can), much more than a sporting event to be
> covered as it happens.
You are probably right here. There is also a lot of truth to what rakesh says about media bias against defenders. My claim of prejudice against Scurry was probably overdone.
>
> Mia Hamm has nothing left to prove to you or me. China designed its defense
> to stop her, she still made some terrific passes that weren't finished off,
> and she has a long history of great performances in big games. You don't
> judge a soccer player's performance primarily on some individual stats. Let
> the media, which is interested mainly in making individual stars so thay can
> sell them back to us, do that.
>
That's exactly why I think that, based on her WC99 performance, she's overrated. She did not score a single goal in the games that counted; in fact, she had no hand in any of them, other than taking a dive in the box against Brazil and fooling the ref. No matter; Nike's investment must be protected, she must be made the hero.
> The US team's (read white players) performance was not awful. In fact both
> defenses were superb. The US team's performance did not deteriorate
> noticeably as the tournement went on, the competition got better. The US
> team actually played better in the final than in the semi-final.
I said that the performance of the US forwards was terrible, not the whole team. Not just because of the result, but because of the almost total lack of scoring opportunities in spite of a Chinese defense that didn't look all that solid and gave up balls when pressured, and a Chinese keeper that seemed very vulnerable to high balls and headers. The competition getting tougher had little to do with it, since the US played its best game against Germany, which was (I thought) better than Brazil and at least as good as China, probably better.
BTW,
> Enrique, have you ever played a big game in front of 90,000 people, with
> millions more watching on TV?
>
If I had, I wouldn't mind people trashing me on e-mail lists.
> Scurry didn't win the game by herself. She was beaten in the second half
> for what would have been the game winner for China, only to be saved by one
> of those white girls making a brilliant header save in front of the goal.
> She did come up big in the penalty kicks, which are idiotic and settle
> nothing (I bet you agree with me there).
>
Obviously, saying that she won the tourney by herself is an exaggeration, but she was the best US player by far in the second round. She deserved the whole personality cult, role-mode-litle-kids-inspiring, Nike-add-starring claptrap a hell of a lot more than Hamm, whom (I insist) was a disappointment in the last two games. Incidentally, in the corner kick, she was not exactly beaten; putting a player in each post is standard procedure in corner kicks, so one can reasonably count on them getting those balls (not that it wasn't a great defensive play). By the way, the header was possible thanks to a fuck-up by Hamm.
> Having said all that, we can assume Scurry will not get a big share of the
> post-game endorsements, certainly compared to Hamm and some others. More
> importantly, at the moment soccer is a suburban, white sport for both men
> and women. But the World Cup was a watershed for women's athletics in the
> US, however, and I suspect some little black girls noticed. Soccer can and
> should be a sport of the cities (as it is in other parts of the world) It's
> much cheaper than other major sports. All you really need is a ball and a
> field.
Let's hope so.
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 272 4808 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique