November 18, 2024 • 34 mins
David Berri and Nefertiti Walker join Sarah to talk about their book, "Slaying the Trolls,” and how they’re helping women's sports fans shut down tired, false, and illogical arguments. David and Nefertiti share why they decided to write the book, the challenges of building fandom in new leagues, and why it's important that women's sports investors are emotionally connected to their teams.
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Pick up a copy of Slaying the Trolls here
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're knee
deep in Sangria, croquettas and patatas bravs.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That's right, we're topis over here.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
It's Monday, November eighteenth, and while Alex and I are
getting settled in Spain for the VJK Cup, we're focusing
the show on.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
An interview with the authors of the books.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Slaying the Trolls, Why the Trolls are very very wrong
about women in Sports, the Great Nefert, D Walker, and
David Barry. Before the interview, I want to tread you
the blurb I wrote for this book, and I think
this book might be a very useful tool in the
arsenal of all use slices out there fighting the good fight.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So here you go. I wrote.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
It can be difficult to move on from said ideas,
stereotypes and talking points if we aren't fully educated on
how we arrived at them and how things have changed,
which is why a book like this is so important.
Centuries of societal bias have created heuristics around women's sports
that are not only inaccurate and harmful to female athletes, leagues,
and fans of women's sport, but They also keep people
from making a lot of money off a very viable product.
(00:55):
In no other business do we reject or refuse to
capitalize on multimillion dollar profit and rocket ship growth. We
do that in women's sports, not just due to ignorance,
but because of an unequal and unfair system that was
actually built with intention. The authors recognize all the ways
women's sports have been held back, and they see the
incredible growth and profit that could happen if we actually invested, supported, watched,
(01:17):
and understood the product. This book will not only slay
the trolls, but educate the masses, and Nef and David
will educate us all. Coming up next, it's time for
another group chat where we take the t from the
text and put it on the airwaves.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Joining us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
She's the Deputy VP for Academic Affairs Student Affairs at
Equity for the University of Massachusetts, a tenured full professor
in the Department of Sport Management, and a social scientist
who studies organizational culture. She's a Research Fellow with the
North American Society for Sport Management, signifying the top ten
percent of researchers in her field. A former NCAAD one
basketball player, at Georgia Tech and Stetson and was inducted
(01:59):
into the Stetson UA Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It's Nef for TD Walker. What's up, Nef?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
How are you? Sarah? Good to be here, Thanks for having.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Me, Thanks for coming on joining her.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
He's a professor of economics at Southern Utah University who
has spent the last two decades researching sports and economics.
He's the lead author of the books The Wages of
Wins and Stumbling On Wins, the sole author of Sports Economics,
and a co author of the Economics of the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
He's been part of more than eighty.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Academic papers published on the subject of sports economics, and
has written for a number of popular outlets, including The
New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, dot Com, Forbes, and more.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's David Barry, what's up, David?
Speaker 4 (02:33):
What's up with you? Sarah? Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
You know, living the dream is what I tell myself
every day. It's got to be somebody's dream.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Thank you both for coming on.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
They are the co authors of the books Slaying the
Trolls Why the Trolls Are Very Very Wrong About Women
and Sports, which provides the arguments and the empirical evidence
to demonstrate why responding to women sports news with nobody.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Cares couldn't be further from the truth.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The book gives folks the evidence and in photo back
against outdated sexism and help support the current push for equity,
investment and respect in women's sports. This book is so needed, Unfortunately,
more so every day it feels as women's sports is
going in one direction and the trolls continue to push
in another. So nef tell me how this book came together.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Oh gosh, So First, Dave is a really fast writer.
I am not so much. But the book started because
Dave and I colleagues writing together doing research together, essentially
got tired of going on what was then Twitter now
x and seeing these trolls make really ridiculous comments, not
(03:39):
fact based comments, based on their small opinions about women's sports,
and you know, we would go back and forth and
text about it, we would talk about it when we
saw each other. We're writing papers, we're talking about it,
and we just sort of got fed up and was like, Okay,
what can we do about this. The timing was such
that it was I believe twenty eighteen when we first
(03:59):
began discussing the idea of this book, and then we
started writing. We started, you know, meeting basically weekly and
just talking about what we saw that week on Twitter,
following folks like you and your other colleagues, Jamil Hill
and others, and seeing the ways that you were wasting
a lot of your very valuable time trying to not
(04:19):
only you know, call out the trolls, but also provide
some facts so that you're educating people along the way.
And we just thought to ourselves, why are they, like
they need to be doing the really good work that
they do, Why are they wasting their time with these trolls.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Can we do something to provide some.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Tools for folks to be able to respond to trolls
or at least just have more educated conversations about women's
sports in general. So that's really that was really the
genesis of this book.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, it does feel like such a waste of time.
And then on the other hand, I think what we're
seeing more often now is when research, which is what
you guys focus in, comes up against ignorance, there isn't
a great way for people to fully comprehend or vet
which side is being accurate, right, Like you could go
to someone's bio and see if maybe it tells you
(05:06):
something about their expertise and their background and say, well,
this person probably knows better. But we're also seeing some
pretty disingenuous people in high places who are feeding misinformation
with intent. And that is true of things all the
way up to the presidential race, all the way down
to things that are just entertaining for us or sports
right in the middle there. And if I think part
(05:26):
of that is why you do find folks in my
position or Jamel or many others in the business who say,
somebody has to inform, even if a lot of people
aren't going to pay attention or going to notice, somebody
has to inform with actual facts. And I imagine as
someone whose job is research, it's all the more frustrating
when someone who looks to be or for all intensive
(05:47):
purposes is on equal footing in a space like X
can say something that's absolutely false and there's no repercussions,
there's no accountability, it doesn't really matter. So how did
you decide which things people were saying or which arguments
people most often came with that you wanted to address
in the book.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
So you're exactly right, it's frustrating when you see people
say these things that aren't rooted in parical research are
just sometimes common sense. They say it to infuriate folks
that are deeply involved in women's sports, and it's you know,
it's frustrating. So part of the reason, and I give
all credit to Dave. The reason why we wrote this
(06:26):
book the way we did is because we wanted it
to be interesting to people, but we also wanted it
to be able to be read at essentially a fifth
grade level. If you go to Amazon, it says this
book is you can it's a fifth grade level. Like,
we didn't write it for academics. There's research in there,
but we try to put it in playing terms, and
we wanted it to be as accessible as possible. So
I think that was really sort of our way of
(06:48):
making sure that folks who needed to read this book
and were interested in it could I think, in addition
to your question that you asked to get back to
that it was hard choosing. I mean, you see, the
book is twenty chapters, right, like, it was very difficult
for us to choose which stories to write on. And
I think also because I am a painfully slow writer,
we just it took so long that we kept adding stories, right,
(07:09):
I mean weekly, Dave and I are meeting and Dave's like, oh,
this just happened. We have to put it in the book,
and I'm like, we don't have space, but we do.
So we didn't really cut out a whole lot. We
tried to add all of the stories in there. We
tried to force them in there, but at the end
of the day, it was whatever what was most relevant.
What we saw on X that people were the stories
that people were sharing that were false, that was rooted
(07:31):
in data and empirical research that we had access to.
We prioritize those so that we could tell really good
stories that were interesting, but also stories that were rooted
in literature and research.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, Dave, you've been fighting this fight for quite some time.
You've been alongside me and Jamelle and others on the
Internet attempting to use facts and research to talk back
to people who are trying to spread lies. How difficult
was it to take that mindset of combativeness and marry
it with your professorial research side that is probably wanting
(08:03):
to get more into sort of empirical data. How do
you find that balance, Like NEF just said of like
getting the information to people in a way that they'll
understand it, but also knowing how much it matters to
be able to back that with saying this is facts,
this is true, this is not subjective opinion.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Well, I think the advantage I had as an academic
is when my first book came out, I was asked
to write for places like The New York Times, and
I had editors sit me down and I would write
something and they would say, okay, that nobody knows what
the hell you're talking about. You can't say it that way.
(08:38):
I had a New York Times editor tell me once,
you can't use the word standard deviation. No one knows
what that means.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
We all learned it, do we all remember?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Yeah? No, and so, and you know. I had a
radio host once get very irate because I dare to
use the word econometrics on air. They were very mad
about that. They're like, don't say words like that. Rather
have you swear and have our license revoked, rather than
have you say things and lose all our audience. So
I was taught how to write things by by very
(09:11):
patient editors, and they said, you know, you got it.
You can't write these things like journal articles or not.
People don't read things like that. So you learn to
write things in a way that is accessible. And so
because the objective is what we're trying to do is
we're trying to reach out to the fans of women's
sports who who It just feels when you're on social
(09:32):
media and they're debating with the trolls, like there's this
this level of frustration. It's like, I don't I know
you're wrong, but I don't have the data and I
don't have the research. It says, hey, you're wrong. I
just know you're wrong. And so what NEPH and I
are doing is saying, hey, this is this is how
you say that, This is how you respond to that
(09:52):
they say this, but this is why they're wrong, and
this is how you can respond to them in a
way that other people can under because really, you're probably
not going to convert the trolls. That is unrealistic. We don't.
It's not called the book isn't called converting the trolls.
It's called we don't Convert them. But it's for it's
(10:16):
for the fan of women's sports, and then for the
people who don't really know who's right, and then you
can say, hey, look look at it this way. Now
do you understand why that person is wrong? And that's
kind of where we're going with this.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
That's exactly what I always tell people when they ask
me how I decide to engage on social media. I
often say, I wait until there's a bunch of people
saying the same uninformed thing.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I pick one.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I use them as an example to be able to
shout down whatever they're saying that's wrong headed, with no
intention usually of expecting them to change their opinion. But
for everybody in the middle, who's maybe not even posting anything,
but they're all reading it to see, oh, that's a
great point, that's actually right, that's wrong. And I've had
a lot of people over the years say, I have
to tell you, when you first started at ESPN one thousand,
(11:01):
ten years ago, I thought X and Y. But I
started following you and I read this, and I see this,
and I hear this, and now I get it, and
that's the intent here.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
So you're right, it's not really about converting the trolls
so much.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
As it is about informing the people who know they're
wrong and want to have the facts to back it up.
And also everybody in the middle that maybe doesn't know
and hasn't looked into it, who now gets this information
that helps them potentially be more interested in women's sports
at the very least, not believe the BS stuff that's
coming out of the other side. Now, if I heard
you describe in an interview this book as sas you
said of the trolls, they don't deserve our calm and
(11:33):
welcoming demeanor.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
They deserve a bit of sassiness. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Was it clear from the beginning for both of you
that that's the tone you wanted?
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And how does Nef's.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
SaaS and Dave's sas meet in the middle so that
there's a through line in the actual composing of the book.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
Yeah, that's where the fun happened, right, trying to combine
our sassiness. But really, honestly, the book, if you read it,
and if you know Dave, the book is really right,
and in Dave's voice, right, I mean, we got together
and we began writing together, and you know, sometimes we
would actually literally write as we're meeting. Oftentimes we would
write pieces of the book and then come together put
(12:10):
it together and then sort of talk through it. But
at the end of the day, what we notice is
that my writing was very much so academic focused, and
I had a very difficult time transitioning from the academic
style of writing to writing for a trade book, writing
for a general audience, and writing, you know, essentially at
a fifth grade level. Eventually I got it. But what
(12:31):
we decided is that we needed to write it in
one voice. If we wrote it in both of our voices,
it would be confusing. It was disjointed. So the sassiness.
Dave is sassy if you've met Dave in person, if
you talk to Dave, if you see him on X, he.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Is sassy in general.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
So the sassiness came from that, and then I'm far
less sassy. But these people are so irritating that I
found my inner sassiness and brought it out. So yeah,
at the end of the day, you know, again watching
folks like you and Jamil respond to these people and
many others. Right, I use you into as an example,
but there are many others that are out there just
trying to do their job in the media and waste
(13:08):
in almost all women, wasting their time that could be
spent doing other important things responding to these people and.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Doing it nicely, right, And I'm like, no, we don't
have to be nice. This is in our field. We're
not in the media. It doesn't matter what we say.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
We're academics, you know, we go back to our caves
and right, like, we can be sassy in the public
eye and continue on with our lives.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So why not.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
And again, I don't think these folks deserve our calm
or a welcomness because they're not being genuine in their
responses when they're being trolls.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I think sassy's the perfect word, though, because if you
start to become cruel or dismissive, your message is lost
because it's easier than to fight the attitude you're bringing
instead of the information you're bringing. So the sassiness says, listen,
we're tired of your bullshit and here's the real facts
versus cruelty, which this just then adds to this sort
of schism when nobody seeks to find common ground and
(14:02):
to meet over the information, it's just about pushing the
other side away. So I think SAS's like the perfect word,
and that's what I aim for. I've had plenty of
people reach out to me who are up and coming
in the business and say, should I worry about getting
hired if I clap back occasionally to trolls, And I
always say, as long as you are not cruel and
you are civil and the information that you're providing or
the way you're clapping back is either just funny about
(14:24):
grammar or spelling, because that is always a go to
for me if somebody's coming after me or if it's informed,
you're fine, just don't sync down to their level. We
got to take a quick break more with Neph and
Dave coming up. You know, Dave, you came on my
old podcast. I've been following you for years. I learned
(14:44):
a ton about how to see the women's pro sports
space through an academic lens, in part because of the
research that you would share and the important historical context
that you would bring in. Some of your most compelling
and important work I think is helping folks learn the
realities of men's leagues at their inception, years before many
of us were ever alive. Can you share what might
be some surprising realities around, for instance, the NBA's lean
(15:08):
early years, and how you can use information like that
to help people understand why their opinions on women's sports
are not correct.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Sure, yeah, let's let's start with the NBA. I think
the NBA. Most people don't know the story of the NBA.
It starts in the in the forties. It is college
men's basketball had been around for decades, had been was very,
very popular. It had a huge audience, and naturally people thought, hey,
(15:36):
let's take those same exact athletes, put them on professional teams,
and we'll sell tickets. And they did that, and they
did not there were no tickets to be sold, and
they tried lots of things early in NBA history. They
would they would schedule NBA games after high school games.
(15:57):
You came to watch your kid watch a professional. Bob
Goosey tells the story that when he was originally drafted,
not by the Celtics, he was drafted by the Tri
City Hawks. He's like, I did major geography at holy Cross,
but I knew there was no such thing as a
tri City Well, they couldn't get an audience in one city,
so they put in three cities, and so they all,
(16:17):
maybe if we run around, we'll find some audience. They
had an early memo from the Commission. In the first
you know, five or six years of the NBA, it says, hey,
some of you are telling the media how many people
are actually showing up to these games. Well, don't do that.
You are free to pad the numbers, you know, you
don't have to tell the truth. And so that's where
(16:38):
the NBA starts. And we know from Congressional testimony because
Congress investigated professional sports in the fifties men's professional sports.
The NBA at that point in today's dollars was worth
about fifteen million. So the WNBA is worth hundreds of millions.
They were worth fifteen million. They were incredibly tighty. If
you get up to nineteen seventy seventy two, that's when
(17:02):
the NBA is the same age as the WNBA, same age.
Their revenue in the late sixties early seventies jumps from
one hundred million to two hundred million. The WNBA's revenue
from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three jump from one
hundred million to two hundred million, exactly the same thing.
There was. There is a really big difference. The NBA
(17:24):
at that point was paying Kareem Abdul Jabbar four hundred
thousand dollars a year in nineteen seventy three. Nobody that
of NBA is making four hundred thousand dollars a year now,
So there is a huge difference in wages, but in
terms of revenue, terms of attendance, in terms of how
much people are paying attention to this, the NBA and
the WNBA are following essentially the same path. They are
(17:48):
adding fans just like you'd expect it. It just takes
decades to build a fan base. Most people are born
into their fandom. You don't. You don't become a rabbit
fan of a lot of things as an adult. It's
basically it's an addiction. So the way to think about
it is, imagine all the people you know who at
(18:08):
the age of forty took up smoking cigarettes. That's a
bizarre thing to do, right, That would be bizarre. That's
what a fandom is, right. You know, if you're forty
years old, you're not going to suddenly say, hey, I'm
going to be a fan of this sport I've never
watched before. That's not realistic. You do it as a child,
do you pick it up from your parents and your
friends and your relatives, and it grows gradually as that
(18:31):
network gets bigger and bigger, and so everyone investing in
a women's sports league, whether it's National Women's Soccer League
or the WNBA, should expect this will take decades, but
eventually fans will get addicted and then you'll have the
greatest business ever imaginable, because there is no business like sports.
Sports is a business that you can disappoint your fans
(18:54):
every single year and they never go away. Right, Chicago
Bears fan, you know this, Yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Talked about this before. You use the restaurant example. Being
a Chicago Bears fan is like going to the same
restaurant over and over and they serve you like a
plate of shit, and you're like, thank you, I'll be
back next week.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
Yes, yes, And and then you get convinced of this.
You go to the owner and the owner says, I
understand that this food has been crap for so long.
But here's what I did. I got a new bus boy,
and it's going to change everything. And you would be like,
oh my god, a new bus boy.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Oh I believe I'm it's going to be different now,
Oh it's gonna be I didn't know you got a
new busboy.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Well, I'll be back for sure. And that's exactly how
sports fans are. You know they you know, they draft,
they draft a brand new offensive guard, and every fan
is like, oh, well, that is all the difference that's
gonna change every reason.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And it's so true though, and it's something I've talked
about so much with women's sports, is how do you
recreate things that can't be done organically, like nostalgia and tradition.
So much of what brings us together around sport is
when you go to a game, you know what the
chants are, and you know what everybody always does when
this thing happens. And if that existence hasn't been there
for longer than a couple of years, that's not going
(20:16):
to exist yet. So how do you either be intentional
about creating it or how do you offset that with
other things that make it exciting. One thing I'll point
out about the NBAWNBA comparison is, of course, the WNBA
benefits from an NBA that is financially helping them, that
has existed and created a sort of path and model
that is part of a larger cable and streaming and
(20:37):
massive sports entertainment industrial complex that didn't exist for early NBA,
but it also suffers from that because of comparison. It
also suffers from centuries of patriarchy. It also suffers from
expectations about women and what lane in which they belong.
So it's not in apples to apples comparison, but it
is so useful to look back at some of the
moments that we herald in NBA history and be remind
(21:00):
I did that eight thousand people were there for them, right,
these great players, these moments of scoring, and in our
minds the stadium is full and everyone's watching on TV,
when in fact it was on tape delay and almost.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
No one showed up to watch it. Those are important
things to remember.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Nef I mentioned in your intro you were a Division
one basketball player yourself. You're a talented female athlete who
has lived the life of trying to be given respect,
afforded resources and facilities. How did the negative noise around
athletes when you were hooping inform your perspective now? And
how much have you seen it change?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Man, it absolutely informed who I am, right, I mean,
I think and I say that, But also I kind
of lived in a bubble where I played in a
part of Atlanta where women's basketball was very popular, girls
basketball was very popular. Growing up, I was coached by
a black guy who played college football at a high level,
(21:59):
played some basketball, and he just he had a lot
of daughters. He just did not see the gender barriers
to success in the ways that a lot of other
girls may have experienced it at a young age. I've
told the story before that we played against boys at
a very young age and routinely beat them. So as
a you know, thirteen year old ne f thought she
(22:19):
could beat anybody that was thirteen, right, it wouldn't matter
if you.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Were a girl or a boy.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
And that just, you know, that followed me throughout my career,
both athletically and academically. I do I will say that
when I got to college, you could see the differences, right.
I mean I also went to a high school where
the girls and boys team was treated similarly, but also
the girls team was much more successful winning state championships
than the boys team. So again, it just it was
(22:45):
it didn't occur to me until college that you are
treated the genders are treated differently based on just gender. Right,
Women's and men's basketball are not treated the same. I
got to Georgia, Tech and it was night and day.
The experiences that the men team got versus the women's
team wasn't even comparable. And you know, I say this often,
(23:06):
is it's not just isolated in sports, and I think
we have to acknowledge that. I think this moment right now,
we've seen, you know, two of the most qualified political
candidates in the history run for being women, run for
presidencies and lose. I think we have to acknowledged the
fact that there's always this undercurrent of sexism and hegemonic masculinity.
(23:29):
Not to get too nerdy and theoretical, but these ideas
that there are negative stereotypes about women that are at play,
and it's very easy for leagues and organizations to fall
back into those when they don't want to actually just
share the fact, like the NBA or WNBA that they're
not necessarily valuing women's sports or women's teams or a
(23:50):
whole league, and the way that they have valued and
treated the men's league over time. So that's a very
long way, long winded way of saying I didn't acknowledge
that these gender inequities exist until I was in college,
and then very quickly I began to acknowledge it and
sort of dig into why this is happening.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
I was coaching and training.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Boys, you know, in college. I played with boys my
whole life. So just being a basketball player and playing
in a city where the girls and boys are playing
together pickup games are But you know, all folks, if
you show up and you can play, then you can play.
You're not getting kicked off the court because you're a girl.
In Atlanta and similar in a lot of big cities
(24:30):
right especially for at least my experience is being in
black neighborhoods as well.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's just not happening.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
If you can play, you can play, and then going
to organize basketball at the collegiate level and saying no,
if you're good and if you're better, and if your
team's better than the men's team, it doesn't matter. You're
still not going to get the same resources that they're
getting even though they haven't won a game all year.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, it's something I've talked to mothers and especially women
who coach younger girls, is what is the balance between
telling young girls you can do any thing, believe in yourself,
you're just as great, versus saying just so you know
you're not going to get the same resources, You're not
going to get the same facilities. You're going to have
to demand equality because otherwise you won't get it. Thereby
(25:13):
sort of bursting their bubble too early, but also maybe
creating activists out of younger women before they get to
the collegiate level and start to look around and realize.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Well, this is messed up.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Because I feel the same way, like so many of
us also become so conditioned to that that it isn't
until later in life that we realize that technically, per
Title nine, we could have suit our schools, or we
could have complained about getting less than. But because society
seemed to so endorse the idea that we deserved less than,
it didn't occur to us that we should ask for
anything otherwise until you get to later in life.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
And then it's sort of beyond your control.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So yet, that's a conversation I guess for people with
kids and coaches. You know, there's so many passionate, informed
fans of women's sports, there's so many smart people investing
in women's pro leagues. But there are folks at the
highest levels of brands and networks and media outlets that
are essentially more akin to the trolls that you're speaking to.
They're stuck in the past when it comes to the
(26:04):
economic opportunity offered and the realities of the interest in
women's sports. How do we get the trolls in high
places to be more educated and up to date?
Speaker 4 (26:14):
Dave, Yeah, let me. I'll get that fixed for you
by lunch.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Thank you, thank you, link with lunch, probably martini lunch
a couple hours.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
We're dealing with the trolls of our places.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
When Enough was talking, she said hegemonic masculinity, and I
would point out that book that works do not appear
in our book. The way we say that is the
way we put it is in sports men really love men.
That's that's effectively the same sentiment, but it's said it
a more accessible way because and that's actually true. The
(26:50):
problem is in sports and when you look at these
companies when it comes to sports, men are really in
love with men, and they treat women. And we say
this in the book. Women are treated as if women's
sports are a cardboard factory and all that matters is
the latest financial statement, and men's sports are treated as
(27:13):
if this is my passion, I am living my life
through these men. I don't give a damn how much
my money they spend. I just want to win because
this is everything to me. And the problem is getting
the investors to be as emotionally connected to what they're
investing in. And there are WNBA owners and I think
Mark Davis with the ACE is a good example of this,
(27:35):
who goes to the games. He clearly is emotionally involved.
He wants his team to win. He will break rules
to make his team win. And we don't like that,
but that's a good sign. You want to see people
doing that, that they're so involved that they're willing to
do stuff like that. And that's the problem is. I
think one of the ex that holds back women's sports
(27:56):
is so many people trying to treat this as a
financial statement for this month. And it's not if you're
going to be an investor. It's it's long term. But
also you got to get investors who are passionate about
the actual sport and and you know, but if you
can't get that, I do. I will point this out.
(28:17):
As Neph and I were working on this book, go
back to twenty eighteen where we started, where women's sports
was in twenty eighteen where it is today. You know,
one of the things I said, I think and I
were saying when we were writing this book is is
this book allows us a lot of I told you
those and so as we go through time, neph and
(28:38):
I just go, I told you so. And here's a
fun little stat. W NBA ratings this last year average
a million fans across all platforms on ESPN one point
two million, NBA ratings right now on ESPN one point
six million. The difference is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
(28:59):
And yet the NBA totally ripped off the WNBA in
terms of the media deal. It's a seventy five billion
dollar deal. The NBA gave them ninety seven percent of it.
They're not getting ninety seven percent of the ratings. That's ridiculous.
And so you know the NBA talks about how they
gave so much money to the WNBA. Well you look
at that media deal. They are taking more. They're going
(29:21):
to be taking if you do the math, they're going
to be taking back every loss that they made up,
and the losses I believe are made up. They're going
to take back all the losses they made up. And
more every single year of that deal, every single year
they're going to be getting all that money back, and
so it's a huge The NBA is going to make
billions off the WNBA, billions of dollars off of them.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, let's talk us through this, and we don't have
too much time, but I do. This is something that
always comes up. People will talk about how the WNBA
doesn't make any money, how the WNBA is just relying
and sucking off the teed of the NBA. Meanwhile, we
will have NBA teams that openly claim losses for the
year that will never be you to point to the
product being a problem on the NBA side. So, as
(30:04):
an economist, quickly, if you can walk us through how
that's just a matter of presentation, particularly when it comes
to things like tax write offs and where the money
goes and how it's spent and how it's delivered.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Because to your point, yeah, we do hold up.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Women as this black and white, and then on the
men's side, it's this mirage of how are we reporting
things versus what's actually happening.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
Yeah, So quickly, the NBA, which is the one calling
the shots in the WNBA, has claimed the NBA is
losing money since at least the late nineteen sixties early seventies.
There was senate testimony in the early seventies where they
said we're losing money, and economist Roger and Nole looked
at their financial statements and said, well, depends on how
(30:46):
you look at it. I can look at it this way,
and you're making a ton of money. So it's just
the way you're presenting it. And the NBA has been
doing this, and they do it because every time they
claim they're losing money, players give them concessions and take
less money. So it's a very good labor negotiation strategy.
So WNBA has suffered the same kind of fate. NBA
owners keep claiming it loses money. The amount of money
(31:08):
they claim it's losing is ridiculous compared to the NBA.
It's a very very tiny amount of money that they
even claim. There's no reason to think that what they
claim is true. We don't see the financial statements. We
have too many reporters, especially at the New York Times
New York Post, who report an assertion of losses as
a fact. If somebody tells a reporter, I am doing
(31:31):
something and there's no evidence for that. You don't report
it as a fact. That's not how reporting works. But
the NBA gets that, they get that treatment. They say,
WAA is losing forty million. New York Post writes, WNBA
is losing forty million. You don't know that. You didn't
see any financial statements. How do you know that? So
there's reason to think that they're not telling the truth
because they didn't tell the truth about the NBA for
(31:51):
all those years. The amount of losses we're talking about
are incredibly tiny. They're not significant even if they do exist. Yeah,
going back that media deal, they're going to be taking
billions of dollars from the WNBA. So if you're losing
forty million, well you're going to be getting billions. That
WNBA media deal is it worth probably eight to ten
(32:11):
billion dollars and they're getting two that's eight billion dollars.
So it's tough money they're taking.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And it's really hard because without the transparency of the financials,
you can run with whatever argument you want to make.
And what we end up doing is saying NBA teams
are losing money, but their valuations are billions of dollars, Like,
how does that work every year that you say you've
been losing money for the last fifty plus years, and
yet with each passing year, the investment in owning a
team becomes more and more lucrative, regardless of how you
(32:40):
run it poorly, well, whatever. But we don't afford that
same principle or that same idea to the WNBA side.
I could keep talking to Chill forever. We're out of time, Nef.
Last question, what do you hope folks take away from
this book?
Speaker 5 (32:55):
I hope folks take away and understanding that the way
that the stories have been framed to them about women's
sports is incorrect. I hope they consider our reframing of
women's sports and the context that we provide, in historical
context that we provide to show that women's sports are
doing fine, they're doing great, they're excelling, and understanding the
(33:15):
history and the context of that makes it shows or
paints a much clearer picture for everyone.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, I'm so grateful to y'all for doing the tough
academic research and the actual work to put things down
in print that are actually correct, as opposed to those
who are willing to and face NOO accountability or repercussions
for flinging around misinformation in pursuit of dragging down women
because of their weak, sad little egos. Anyway, this is
(33:43):
a great book Slaying the trolls.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Everyone get it.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
Thanks so much for coming on, Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Got to pay some bills. Stick around slices, Welcome back slices.
Make sure you go out and get the book. And
if you're interested in reading more about what Dave mentioned
regarding the whole NBA handling of the WNBA TV deal,
We're going to put his substack article about.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
It in today's show notes. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Slices.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Good Game Nephen Dave, Good Game Spanish tapis Thank you Trolls.
Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network,
our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive
(34:34):
producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rudder.
Our editors are Emily Rutterer Britney Martinez, Grace Lynch, and
Lindsay Crowdowell. Production assistants from Lucy Jones and I'm Your
Host Sarah Spain.
Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're knee
deep in Sangria, croquettas and patatas bravs.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That's right, we're topis over here.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
It's Monday, November eighteenth, and while Alex and I are
getting settled in Spain for the VJK Cup, we're focusing
the show on.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
An interview with the authors of the books.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Slaying the Trolls, Why the Trolls are very very wrong
about women in Sports, the Great Nefert, D Walker, and
David Barry. Before the interview, I want to tread you
the blurb I wrote for this book, and I think
this book might be a very useful tool in the
arsenal of all use slices out there fighting the good fight.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So here you go. I wrote.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
It can be difficult to move on from said ideas,
stereotypes and talking points if we aren't fully educated on
how we arrived at them and how things have changed,
which is why a book like this is so important.
Centuries of societal bias have created heuristics around women's sports
that are not only inaccurate and harmful to female athletes, leagues,
and fans of women's sport, but They also keep people
from making a lot of money off a very viable product.
(00:55):
In no other business do we reject or refuse to
capitalize on multimillion dollar profit and rocket ship growth. We
do that in women's sports, not just due to ignorance,
but because of an unequal and unfair system that was
actually built with intention. The authors recognize all the ways
women's sports have been held back, and they see the
incredible growth and profit that could happen if we actually invested, supported, watched,
(01:17):
and understood the product. This book will not only slay
the trolls, but educate the masses, and Nef and David
will educate us all. Coming up next, it's time for
another group chat where we take the t from the
text and put it on the airwaves.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Joining us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
She's the Deputy VP for Academic Affairs Student Affairs at
Equity for the University of Massachusetts, a tenured full professor
in the Department of Sport Management, and a social scientist
who studies organizational culture. She's a Research Fellow with the
North American Society for Sport Management, signifying the top ten
percent of researchers in her field. A former NCAAD one
basketball player, at Georgia Tech and Stetson and was inducted
(01:59):
into the Stetson UA Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It's Nef for TD Walker. What's up, Nef?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
How are you? Sarah? Good to be here, Thanks for having.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Me, Thanks for coming on joining her.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
He's a professor of economics at Southern Utah University who
has spent the last two decades researching sports and economics.
He's the lead author of the books The Wages of
Wins and Stumbling On Wins, the sole author of Sports Economics,
and a co author of the Economics of the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
He's been part of more than eighty.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Academic papers published on the subject of sports economics, and
has written for a number of popular outlets, including The
New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, dot Com, Forbes, and more.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's David Barry, what's up, David?
Speaker 4 (02:33):
What's up with you? Sarah? Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
You know, living the dream is what I tell myself
every day. It's got to be somebody's dream.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Thank you both for coming on.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
They are the co authors of the books Slaying the
Trolls Why the Trolls Are Very Very Wrong About Women
and Sports, which provides the arguments and the empirical evidence
to demonstrate why responding to women sports news with nobody.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Cares couldn't be further from the truth.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The book gives folks the evidence and in photo back
against outdated sexism and help support the current push for equity,
investment and respect in women's sports. This book is so needed, Unfortunately,
more so every day it feels as women's sports is
going in one direction and the trolls continue to push
in another. So nef tell me how this book came together.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Oh gosh, So First, Dave is a really fast writer.
I am not so much. But the book started because
Dave and I colleagues writing together doing research together, essentially
got tired of going on what was then Twitter now
x and seeing these trolls make really ridiculous comments, not
(03:39):
fact based comments, based on their small opinions about women's sports,
and you know, we would go back and forth and
text about it, we would talk about it when we
saw each other. We're writing papers, we're talking about it,
and we just sort of got fed up and was like, Okay,
what can we do about this. The timing was such
that it was I believe twenty eighteen when we first
(03:59):
began discussing the idea of this book, and then we
started writing. We started, you know, meeting basically weekly and
just talking about what we saw that week on Twitter,
following folks like you and your other colleagues, Jamil Hill
and others, and seeing the ways that you were wasting
a lot of your very valuable time trying to not
(04:19):
only you know, call out the trolls, but also provide
some facts so that you're educating people along the way.
And we just thought to ourselves, why are they, like
they need to be doing the really good work that
they do, Why are they wasting their time with these trolls.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Can we do something to provide some.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Tools for folks to be able to respond to trolls
or at least just have more educated conversations about women's
sports in general. So that's really that was really the
genesis of this book.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, it does feel like such a waste of time.
And then on the other hand, I think what we're
seeing more often now is when research, which is what
you guys focus in, comes up against ignorance, there isn't
a great way for people to fully comprehend or vet
which side is being accurate, right, Like you could go
to someone's bio and see if maybe it tells you
(05:06):
something about their expertise and their background and say, well,
this person probably knows better. But we're also seeing some
pretty disingenuous people in high places who are feeding misinformation
with intent. And that is true of things all the
way up to the presidential race, all the way down
to things that are just entertaining for us or sports
right in the middle there. And if I think part
(05:26):
of that is why you do find folks in my
position or Jamel or many others in the business who say,
somebody has to inform, even if a lot of people
aren't going to pay attention or going to notice, somebody
has to inform with actual facts. And I imagine as
someone whose job is research, it's all the more frustrating
when someone who looks to be or for all intensive
(05:47):
purposes is on equal footing in a space like X
can say something that's absolutely false and there's no repercussions,
there's no accountability, it doesn't really matter. So how did
you decide which things people were saying or which arguments
people most often came with that you wanted to address
in the book.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
So you're exactly right, it's frustrating when you see people
say these things that aren't rooted in parical research are
just sometimes common sense. They say it to infuriate folks
that are deeply involved in women's sports, and it's you know,
it's frustrating. So part of the reason, and I give
all credit to Dave. The reason why we wrote this
(06:26):
book the way we did is because we wanted it
to be interesting to people, but we also wanted it
to be able to be read at essentially a fifth
grade level. If you go to Amazon, it says this
book is you can it's a fifth grade level. Like,
we didn't write it for academics. There's research in there,
but we try to put it in playing terms, and
we wanted it to be as accessible as possible. So
I think that was really sort of our way of
(06:48):
making sure that folks who needed to read this book
and were interested in it could I think, in addition
to your question that you asked to get back to
that it was hard choosing. I mean, you see, the
book is twenty chapters, right, like, it was very difficult
for us to choose which stories to write on. And
I think also because I am a painfully slow writer,
we just it took so long that we kept adding stories, right,
(07:09):
I mean weekly, Dave and I are meeting and Dave's like, oh,
this just happened. We have to put it in the book,
and I'm like, we don't have space, but we do.
So we didn't really cut out a whole lot. We
tried to add all of the stories in there. We
tried to force them in there, but at the end
of the day, it was whatever what was most relevant.
What we saw on X that people were the stories
that people were sharing that were false, that was rooted
(07:31):
in data and empirical research that we had access to.
We prioritize those so that we could tell really good
stories that were interesting, but also stories that were rooted
in literature and research.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, Dave, you've been fighting this fight for quite some time.
You've been alongside me and Jamelle and others on the
Internet attempting to use facts and research to talk back
to people who are trying to spread lies. How difficult
was it to take that mindset of combativeness and marry
it with your professorial research side that is probably wanting
(08:03):
to get more into sort of empirical data. How do
you find that balance, Like NEF just said of like
getting the information to people in a way that they'll
understand it, but also knowing how much it matters to
be able to back that with saying this is facts,
this is true, this is not subjective opinion.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Well, I think the advantage I had as an academic
is when my first book came out, I was asked
to write for places like The New York Times, and
I had editors sit me down and I would write
something and they would say, okay, that nobody knows what
the hell you're talking about. You can't say it that way.
(08:38):
I had a New York Times editor tell me once,
you can't use the word standard deviation. No one knows
what that means.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
We all learned it, do we all remember?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Yeah? No, and so, and you know. I had a
radio host once get very irate because I dare to
use the word econometrics on air. They were very mad
about that. They're like, don't say words like that. Rather
have you swear and have our license revoked, rather than
have you say things and lose all our audience. So
I was taught how to write things by by very
(09:11):
patient editors, and they said, you know, you got it.
You can't write these things like journal articles or not.
People don't read things like that. So you learn to
write things in a way that is accessible. And so
because the objective is what we're trying to do is
we're trying to reach out to the fans of women's
sports who who It just feels when you're on social
(09:32):
media and they're debating with the trolls, like there's this
this level of frustration. It's like, I don't I know
you're wrong, but I don't have the data and I
don't have the research. It says, hey, you're wrong. I
just know you're wrong. And so what NEPH and I
are doing is saying, hey, this is this is how
you say that, This is how you respond to that
(09:52):
they say this, but this is why they're wrong, and
this is how you can respond to them in a
way that other people can under because really, you're probably
not going to convert the trolls. That is unrealistic. We don't.
It's not called the book isn't called converting the trolls.
It's called we don't Convert them. But it's for it's
(10:16):
for the fan of women's sports, and then for the
people who don't really know who's right, and then you
can say, hey, look look at it this way. Now
do you understand why that person is wrong? And that's
kind of where we're going with this.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
That's exactly what I always tell people when they ask
me how I decide to engage on social media. I
often say, I wait until there's a bunch of people
saying the same uninformed thing.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I pick one.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I use them as an example to be able to
shout down whatever they're saying that's wrong headed, with no
intention usually of expecting them to change their opinion. But
for everybody in the middle, who's maybe not even posting anything,
but they're all reading it to see, oh, that's a
great point, that's actually right, that's wrong. And I've had
a lot of people over the years say, I have
to tell you, when you first started at ESPN one thousand,
(11:01):
ten years ago, I thought X and Y. But I
started following you and I read this, and I see this,
and I hear this, and now I get it, and
that's the intent here.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
So you're right, it's not really about converting the trolls
so much.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
As it is about informing the people who know they're
wrong and want to have the facts to back it up.
And also everybody in the middle that maybe doesn't know
and hasn't looked into it, who now gets this information
that helps them potentially be more interested in women's sports
at the very least, not believe the BS stuff that's
coming out of the other side. Now, if I heard
you describe in an interview this book as sas you
said of the trolls, they don't deserve our calm and
(11:33):
welcoming demeanor.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
They deserve a bit of sassiness. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Was it clear from the beginning for both of you
that that's the tone you wanted?
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And how does Nef's.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
SaaS and Dave's sas meet in the middle so that
there's a through line in the actual composing of the book.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
Yeah, that's where the fun happened, right, trying to combine
our sassiness. But really, honestly, the book, if you read it,
and if you know Dave, the book is really right,
and in Dave's voice, right, I mean, we got together
and we began writing together, and you know, sometimes we
would actually literally write as we're meeting. Oftentimes we would
write pieces of the book and then come together put
(12:10):
it together and then sort of talk through it. But
at the end of the day, what we notice is
that my writing was very much so academic focused, and
I had a very difficult time transitioning from the academic
style of writing to writing for a trade book, writing
for a general audience, and writing, you know, essentially at
a fifth grade level. Eventually I got it. But what
(12:31):
we decided is that we needed to write it in
one voice. If we wrote it in both of our voices,
it would be confusing. It was disjointed. So the sassiness.
Dave is sassy if you've met Dave in person, if
you talk to Dave, if you see him on X, he.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Is sassy in general.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
So the sassiness came from that, and then I'm far
less sassy. But these people are so irritating that I
found my inner sassiness and brought it out. So yeah,
at the end of the day, you know, again watching
folks like you and Jamil respond to these people and
many others. Right, I use you into as an example,
but there are many others that are out there just
trying to do their job in the media and waste
(13:08):
in almost all women, wasting their time that could be
spent doing other important things responding to these people and.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Doing it nicely, right, And I'm like, no, we don't
have to be nice. This is in our field. We're
not in the media. It doesn't matter what we say.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
We're academics, you know, we go back to our caves
and right, like, we can be sassy in the public
eye and continue on with our lives.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So why not.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
And again, I don't think these folks deserve our calm
or a welcomness because they're not being genuine in their
responses when they're being trolls.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I think sassy's the perfect word, though, because if you
start to become cruel or dismissive, your message is lost
because it's easier than to fight the attitude you're bringing
instead of the information you're bringing. So the sassiness says, listen,
we're tired of your bullshit and here's the real facts
versus cruelty, which this just then adds to this sort
of schism when nobody seeks to find common ground and
(14:02):
to meet over the information, it's just about pushing the
other side away. So I think SAS's like the perfect word,
and that's what I aim for. I've had plenty of
people reach out to me who are up and coming
in the business and say, should I worry about getting
hired if I clap back occasionally to trolls, And I
always say, as long as you are not cruel and
you are civil and the information that you're providing or
the way you're clapping back is either just funny about
(14:24):
grammar or spelling, because that is always a go to
for me if somebody's coming after me or if it's informed,
you're fine, just don't sync down to their level. We
got to take a quick break more with Neph and
Dave coming up. You know, Dave, you came on my
old podcast. I've been following you for years. I learned
(14:44):
a ton about how to see the women's pro sports
space through an academic lens, in part because of the
research that you would share and the important historical context
that you would bring in. Some of your most compelling
and important work I think is helping folks learn the
realities of men's leagues at their inception, years before many
of us were ever alive. Can you share what might
be some surprising realities around, for instance, the NBA's lean
(15:08):
early years, and how you can use information like that
to help people understand why their opinions on women's sports
are not correct.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Sure, yeah, let's let's start with the NBA. I think
the NBA. Most people don't know the story of the NBA.
It starts in the in the forties. It is college
men's basketball had been around for decades, had been was very,
very popular. It had a huge audience, and naturally people thought, hey,
(15:36):
let's take those same exact athletes, put them on professional teams,
and we'll sell tickets. And they did that, and they
did not there were no tickets to be sold, and
they tried lots of things early in NBA history. They
would they would schedule NBA games after high school games.
(15:57):
You came to watch your kid watch a professional. Bob
Goosey tells the story that when he was originally drafted,
not by the Celtics, he was drafted by the Tri
City Hawks. He's like, I did major geography at holy Cross,
but I knew there was no such thing as a
tri City Well, they couldn't get an audience in one city,
so they put in three cities, and so they all,
(16:17):
maybe if we run around, we'll find some audience. They
had an early memo from the Commission. In the first
you know, five or six years of the NBA, it says, hey,
some of you are telling the media how many people
are actually showing up to these games. Well, don't do that.
You are free to pad the numbers, you know, you
don't have to tell the truth. And so that's where
(16:38):
the NBA starts. And we know from Congressional testimony because
Congress investigated professional sports in the fifties men's professional sports.
The NBA at that point in today's dollars was worth
about fifteen million. So the WNBA is worth hundreds of millions.
They were worth fifteen million. They were incredibly tighty. If
you get up to nineteen seventy seventy two, that's when
(17:02):
the NBA is the same age as the WNBA, same age.
Their revenue in the late sixties early seventies jumps from
one hundred million to two hundred million. The WNBA's revenue
from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three jump from one
hundred million to two hundred million, exactly the same thing.
There was. There is a really big difference. The NBA
(17:24):
at that point was paying Kareem Abdul Jabbar four hundred
thousand dollars a year in nineteen seventy three. Nobody that
of NBA is making four hundred thousand dollars a year now,
So there is a huge difference in wages, but in
terms of revenue, terms of attendance, in terms of how
much people are paying attention to this, the NBA and
the WNBA are following essentially the same path. They are
(17:48):
adding fans just like you'd expect it. It just takes
decades to build a fan base. Most people are born
into their fandom. You don't. You don't become a rabbit
fan of a lot of things as an adult. It's
basically it's an addiction. So the way to think about
it is, imagine all the people you know who at
(18:08):
the age of forty took up smoking cigarettes. That's a
bizarre thing to do, right, That would be bizarre. That's
what a fandom is, right. You know, if you're forty
years old, you're not going to suddenly say, hey, I'm
going to be a fan of this sport I've never
watched before. That's not realistic. You do it as a child,
do you pick it up from your parents and your
friends and your relatives, and it grows gradually as that
(18:31):
network gets bigger and bigger, and so everyone investing in
a women's sports league, whether it's National Women's Soccer League
or the WNBA, should expect this will take decades, but
eventually fans will get addicted and then you'll have the
greatest business ever imaginable, because there is no business like sports.
Sports is a business that you can disappoint your fans
(18:54):
every single year and they never go away. Right, Chicago
Bears fan, you know this, Yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Talked about this before. You use the restaurant example. Being
a Chicago Bears fan is like going to the same
restaurant over and over and they serve you like a
plate of shit, and you're like, thank you, I'll be
back next week.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
Yes, yes, And and then you get convinced of this.
You go to the owner and the owner says, I
understand that this food has been crap for so long.
But here's what I did. I got a new bus boy,
and it's going to change everything. And you would be like,
oh my god, a new bus boy.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Oh I believe I'm it's going to be different now,
Oh it's gonna be I didn't know you got a
new busboy.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Well, I'll be back for sure. And that's exactly how
sports fans are. You know they you know, they draft,
they draft a brand new offensive guard, and every fan
is like, oh, well, that is all the difference that's
gonna change every reason.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And it's so true though, and it's something I've talked
about so much with women's sports, is how do you
recreate things that can't be done organically, like nostalgia and tradition.
So much of what brings us together around sport is
when you go to a game, you know what the
chants are, and you know what everybody always does when
this thing happens. And if that existence hasn't been there
for longer than a couple of years, that's not going
(20:16):
to exist yet. So how do you either be intentional
about creating it or how do you offset that with
other things that make it exciting. One thing I'll point
out about the NBAWNBA comparison is, of course, the WNBA
benefits from an NBA that is financially helping them, that
has existed and created a sort of path and model
that is part of a larger cable and streaming and
(20:37):
massive sports entertainment industrial complex that didn't exist for early NBA,
but it also suffers from that because of comparison. It
also suffers from centuries of patriarchy. It also suffers from
expectations about women and what lane in which they belong.
So it's not in apples to apples comparison, but it
is so useful to look back at some of the
moments that we herald in NBA history and be remind
(21:00):
I did that eight thousand people were there for them, right,
these great players, these moments of scoring, and in our
minds the stadium is full and everyone's watching on TV,
when in fact it was on tape delay and almost.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
No one showed up to watch it. Those are important
things to remember.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Nef I mentioned in your intro you were a Division
one basketball player yourself. You're a talented female athlete who
has lived the life of trying to be given respect,
afforded resources and facilities. How did the negative noise around
athletes when you were hooping inform your perspective now? And
how much have you seen it change?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Man, it absolutely informed who I am, right, I mean,
I think and I say that, But also I kind
of lived in a bubble where I played in a
part of Atlanta where women's basketball was very popular, girls
basketball was very popular. Growing up, I was coached by
a black guy who played college football at a high level,
(21:59):
played some basketball, and he just he had a lot
of daughters. He just did not see the gender barriers
to success in the ways that a lot of other
girls may have experienced it at a young age. I've
told the story before that we played against boys at
a very young age and routinely beat them. So as
a you know, thirteen year old ne f thought she
(22:19):
could beat anybody that was thirteen, right, it wouldn't matter
if you.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Were a girl or a boy.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
And that just, you know, that followed me throughout my career,
both athletically and academically. I do I will say that
when I got to college, you could see the differences, right.
I mean I also went to a high school where
the girls and boys team was treated similarly, but also
the girls team was much more successful winning state championships
than the boys team. So again, it just it was
(22:45):
it didn't occur to me until college that you are
treated the genders are treated differently based on just gender. Right,
Women's and men's basketball are not treated the same. I
got to Georgia, Tech and it was night and day.
The experiences that the men team got versus the women's
team wasn't even comparable. And you know, I say this often,
(23:06):
is it's not just isolated in sports, and I think
we have to acknowledge that. I think this moment right now,
we've seen, you know, two of the most qualified political
candidates in the history run for being women, run for
presidencies and lose. I think we have to acknowledged the
fact that there's always this undercurrent of sexism and hegemonic masculinity.
(23:29):
Not to get too nerdy and theoretical, but these ideas
that there are negative stereotypes about women that are at play,
and it's very easy for leagues and organizations to fall
back into those when they don't want to actually just
share the fact, like the NBA or WNBA that they're
not necessarily valuing women's sports or women's teams or a
(23:50):
whole league, and the way that they have valued and
treated the men's league over time. So that's a very
long way, long winded way of saying I didn't acknowledge
that these gender inequities exist until I was in college,
and then very quickly I began to acknowledge it and
sort of dig into why this is happening.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
I was coaching and training.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Boys, you know, in college. I played with boys my
whole life. So just being a basketball player and playing
in a city where the girls and boys are playing
together pickup games are But you know, all folks, if
you show up and you can play, then you can play.
You're not getting kicked off the court because you're a girl.
In Atlanta and similar in a lot of big cities
(24:30):
right especially for at least my experience is being in
black neighborhoods as well.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's just not happening.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
If you can play, you can play, and then going
to organize basketball at the collegiate level and saying no,
if you're good and if you're better, and if your
team's better than the men's team, it doesn't matter. You're
still not going to get the same resources that they're
getting even though they haven't won a game all year.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, it's something I've talked to mothers and especially women
who coach younger girls, is what is the balance between
telling young girls you can do any thing, believe in yourself,
you're just as great, versus saying just so you know
you're not going to get the same resources, You're not
going to get the same facilities. You're going to have
to demand equality because otherwise you won't get it. Thereby
(25:13):
sort of bursting their bubble too early, but also maybe
creating activists out of younger women before they get to
the collegiate level and start to look around and realize.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Well, this is messed up.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Because I feel the same way, like so many of
us also become so conditioned to that that it isn't
until later in life that we realize that technically, per
Title nine, we could have suit our schools, or we
could have complained about getting less than. But because society
seemed to so endorse the idea that we deserved less than,
it didn't occur to us that we should ask for
anything otherwise until you get to later in life.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
And then it's sort of beyond your control.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So yet, that's a conversation I guess for people with
kids and coaches. You know, there's so many passionate, informed
fans of women's sports, there's so many smart people investing
in women's pro leagues. But there are folks at the
highest levels of brands and networks and media outlets that
are essentially more akin to the trolls that you're speaking to.
They're stuck in the past when it comes to the
(26:04):
economic opportunity offered and the realities of the interest in
women's sports. How do we get the trolls in high
places to be more educated and up to date?
Speaker 4 (26:14):
Dave, Yeah, let me. I'll get that fixed for you
by lunch.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Thank you, thank you, link with lunch, probably martini lunch
a couple hours.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
We're dealing with the trolls of our places.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
When Enough was talking, she said hegemonic masculinity, and I
would point out that book that works do not appear
in our book. The way we say that is the
way we put it is in sports men really love men.
That's that's effectively the same sentiment, but it's said it
a more accessible way because and that's actually true. The
(26:50):
problem is in sports and when you look at these
companies when it comes to sports, men are really in
love with men, and they treat women. And we say
this in the book. Women are treated as if women's
sports are a cardboard factory and all that matters is
the latest financial statement, and men's sports are treated as
(27:13):
if this is my passion, I am living my life
through these men. I don't give a damn how much
my money they spend. I just want to win because
this is everything to me. And the problem is getting
the investors to be as emotionally connected to what they're
investing in. And there are WNBA owners and I think
Mark Davis with the ACE is a good example of this,
(27:35):
who goes to the games. He clearly is emotionally involved.
He wants his team to win. He will break rules
to make his team win. And we don't like that,
but that's a good sign. You want to see people
doing that, that they're so involved that they're willing to
do stuff like that. And that's the problem is. I
think one of the ex that holds back women's sports
(27:56):
is so many people trying to treat this as a
financial statement for this month. And it's not if you're
going to be an investor. It's it's long term. But
also you got to get investors who are passionate about
the actual sport and and you know, but if you
can't get that, I do. I will point this out.
(28:17):
As Neph and I were working on this book, go
back to twenty eighteen where we started, where women's sports
was in twenty eighteen where it is today. You know,
one of the things I said, I think and I
were saying when we were writing this book is is
this book allows us a lot of I told you
those and so as we go through time, neph and
(28:38):
I just go, I told you so. And here's a
fun little stat. W NBA ratings this last year average
a million fans across all platforms on ESPN one point
two million, NBA ratings right now on ESPN one point
six million. The difference is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
(28:59):
And yet the NBA totally ripped off the WNBA in
terms of the media deal. It's a seventy five billion
dollar deal. The NBA gave them ninety seven percent of it.
They're not getting ninety seven percent of the ratings. That's ridiculous.
And so you know the NBA talks about how they
gave so much money to the WNBA. Well you look
at that media deal. They are taking more. They're going
(29:21):
to be taking if you do the math, they're going
to be taking back every loss that they made up,
and the losses I believe are made up. They're going
to take back all the losses they made up. And
more every single year of that deal, every single year
they're going to be getting all that money back, and
so it's a huge The NBA is going to make
billions off the WNBA, billions of dollars off of them.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, let's talk us through this, and we don't have
too much time, but I do. This is something that
always comes up. People will talk about how the WNBA
doesn't make any money, how the WNBA is just relying
and sucking off the teed of the NBA. Meanwhile, we
will have NBA teams that openly claim losses for the
year that will never be you to point to the
product being a problem on the NBA side. So, as
(30:04):
an economist, quickly, if you can walk us through how
that's just a matter of presentation, particularly when it comes
to things like tax write offs and where the money
goes and how it's spent and how it's delivered.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Because to your point, yeah, we do hold up.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Women as this black and white, and then on the
men's side, it's this mirage of how are we reporting
things versus what's actually happening.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
Yeah, So quickly, the NBA, which is the one calling
the shots in the WNBA, has claimed the NBA is
losing money since at least the late nineteen sixties early seventies.
There was senate testimony in the early seventies where they
said we're losing money, and economist Roger and Nole looked
at their financial statements and said, well, depends on how
(30:46):
you look at it. I can look at it this way,
and you're making a ton of money. So it's just
the way you're presenting it. And the NBA has been
doing this, and they do it because every time they
claim they're losing money, players give them concessions and take
less money. So it's a very good labor negotiation strategy.
So WNBA has suffered the same kind of fate. NBA
owners keep claiming it loses money. The amount of money
(31:08):
they claim it's losing is ridiculous compared to the NBA.
It's a very very tiny amount of money that they
even claim. There's no reason to think that what they
claim is true. We don't see the financial statements. We
have too many reporters, especially at the New York Times
New York Post, who report an assertion of losses as
a fact. If somebody tells a reporter, I am doing
(31:31):
something and there's no evidence for that. You don't report
it as a fact. That's not how reporting works. But
the NBA gets that, they get that treatment. They say,
WAA is losing forty million. New York Post writes, WNBA
is losing forty million. You don't know that. You didn't
see any financial statements. How do you know that? So
there's reason to think that they're not telling the truth
because they didn't tell the truth about the NBA for
(31:51):
all those years. The amount of losses we're talking about
are incredibly tiny. They're not significant even if they do exist. Yeah,
going back that media deal, they're going to be taking
billions of dollars from the WNBA. So if you're losing
forty million, well you're going to be getting billions. That
WNBA media deal is it worth probably eight to ten
(32:11):
billion dollars and they're getting two that's eight billion dollars.
So it's tough money they're taking.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And it's really hard because without the transparency of the financials,
you can run with whatever argument you want to make.
And what we end up doing is saying NBA teams
are losing money, but their valuations are billions of dollars, Like,
how does that work every year that you say you've
been losing money for the last fifty plus years, and
yet with each passing year, the investment in owning a
team becomes more and more lucrative, regardless of how you
(32:40):
run it poorly, well, whatever. But we don't afford that
same principle or that same idea to the WNBA side.
I could keep talking to Chill forever. We're out of time, Nef.
Last question, what do you hope folks take away from
this book?
Speaker 5 (32:55):
I hope folks take away and understanding that the way
that the stories have been framed to them about women's
sports is incorrect. I hope they consider our reframing of
women's sports and the context that we provide, in historical
context that we provide to show that women's sports are
doing fine, they're doing great, they're excelling, and understanding the
(33:15):
history and the context of that makes it shows or
paints a much clearer picture for everyone.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, I'm so grateful to y'all for doing the tough
academic research and the actual work to put things down
in print that are actually correct, as opposed to those
who are willing to and face NOO accountability or repercussions
for flinging around misinformation in pursuit of dragging down women
because of their weak, sad little egos. Anyway, this is
(33:43):
a great book Slaying the trolls.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Everyone get it.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
Thanks so much for coming on, Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Got to pay some bills. Stick around slices, Welcome back slices.
Make sure you go out and get the book. And
if you're interested in reading more about what Dave mentioned
regarding the whole NBA handling of the WNBA TV deal,
We're going to put his substack article about.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
It in today's show notes. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Slices.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Good Game Nephen Dave, Good Game Spanish tapis Thank you Trolls.
Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network,
our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive
(34:34):
producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rudder.
Our editors are Emily Rutterer Britney Martinez, Grace Lynch, and
Lindsay Crowdowell. Production assistants from Lucy Jones and I'm Your
Host Sarah Spain.
Host
Sarah Spain
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