Let's Row Together
Aimed at a football icon, the men's jokes hit women who are the mothers of his children. WNBA plays, as its fans demand broadcasts and its players get legroom and safety. More heat, wind and rain.
When a football icon was “roasted” on what Netflix labels as “comedy,” it was the women in his life who were flayed and cooked.
So it goes, apparently, when football’s men, masquerading as teenage boys who just discovered sex, compete for the loudest, longest laughs on TV. Cheap shots won the day for men whose hard hits – given and taken – spell manliness and with whom misogyny is a natural fallback when, as amateurs comedians, they want a quick score.
Even with the infusion of women into all sports - yes, even in pro football, women are coaching – when it comes to sports humor, we’re stuck in a time warp: nearly 50 years after I spent lots of my time as the rare woman in a sea of baseball’s men, the easiest laughs still come at the expense of women.
Of course, it took two women columnists to wade through the gushing idolatry and speak truth to power about how unfunny the entire occasion actually was. Let’s turn first to Sally Jenkins, sports columnist with The Washington Post, whose fun-spoiling words led many of her thousands of commenters to tell her to find a sense of humor.
“Tom Brady must really need money, or attention, or proof that he’s a bro. He needed it bad enough to do that Netflix roast, in which he gallantly sacrificed the mothers of his children to clumsy third-rate comics, whose hammy punchlines fell like refrigerators hitting sidewalks, splatting Brady’s reputation for intelligence beneath them. By the time the three-hour vulgarian parade was over, there were two conclusions: Football players can’t do funny, only coarse, and Brady wasn’t the one who got roasted — he stuck his exes with that tab.
“Only sycophants blinded by Brady’s seven Super Bowl rings could have found the performance comedic. … There were the usual predictable ‘football funny’ snide homosexual and trans cracks. ‘There’s going to be a lot of jokes about me being gay for Tom,’ former wide receiver Julian Edelman said. ‘Well, let me set the record straight. Those balls weren’t going to deflate themselves.’ Yuk yuk yuk, the pained audience murmured. …
“Brady was as unmoved as a manikin. There was just one instance in the three-hour-plus groanfest when Brady took exception to something, heard an insult uttered that he just couldn’t accept: when Ross embarrassed New England Patriots owner and billionaire Robert Kraft by referring to his incident at a massage parlor. Suddenly Brady rose. ‘Don’t say that s--- again,’ he whispered, chivalrously protecting the billionaire, though not his ex-wife.”
Before I move on to commentary by my longtime, hometown Boston Globe columnist, Joan Vennochi, let me assert that yes, I know that “roasts” are meant to be raunchy and boorish, and are occasionally very funny, when people who actually know how to tell jokes hit on a truth, as Mark Twain observed about genuine humor. (As Jenkins noted in her column, “Mark Twain wrote that ‘humor is the good-natured side of a truth,’ and that ‘genuine humor is replete with wisdom.’")
For a decade Dean Martin put celebrities on skewers and roasted them on TV, but when the insults grew stale, the show went off the air in 1984. To have “roasts” resurface in a time of no-holes bared meanness, rampant incivility, and the stubborn popularity of misogyny is to know, as Netflix surely did, that women would take the heat – even when the man is being roasted.
So, it’s left to women, who thankfully now have a public voice, to clean up the mess.
“Humor is in the eyes and ears of the beholder and it can be cruel. What is notable is Brady’s willingness to go along with cruel gibes about the mothers of his children and a dead teammate but draws a line — even for show — at a joke aimed at the billionaire football team owner who pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor charges of solicitation that were ultimately dropped by prosecutors. With that, Brady seems determined to rebrand from the sensitive and devoted family man who was showcased in the 2018 “Tom vs. Time” documentary to something more marketable in his second career. From that perspective, laughing along with alleged witticisms that came at the expense of Bündchen and Moynahan [the mothers of his children], while distancing himself from a joke about Kraft, is a pure business decision — one that says a lot about what sells with football fans.
“Meanwhile, it’s also notable that Brady felt free to joke about past cheating allegations made against him. At the end of the roast, he had this to say about the scandal known as ‘Deflategate,’ which involved taking air out of footballs and led to his suspension from four games. “The NFL spent $20 million and found it was ‘more probable than not’ that I was ‘generally aware’ that someone may have deflated my footballs,” Brady said. “You could have given me the $20 million and I would have just told you I [expletive] did it,” Brady said.”
Infantile jokes are not whatTwain had in mind when he wrote about humor’s wisdom.
Yes, Women Play Sports, Too
Last night, Boston's Professional Women's Hockey League team won its first semi-final game in the league’s first season, beating Montreal, which had dominated the game, scoring at 14:25 in overtime on the opponent’s ice.
It's exhilarating to be able to root for a hometown professional women's team. Finally! I’m eager to have Boston’s NWSL team, coming soon. In earlier Substacks, I wrote about the thrill of watching women’s collegiate hockey being played at TD Garden in Boston’s Beanpole championship. And I asked my fellow rower Lisa Laskin to give us a season ticket holder’s front-row experience in welcoming the Boston women’s hockey team to Boston.
“My Hometown Team: Boston’s new professional women’s hockey team – I’d give you its name, but it doesn’t have one, yet – played its first game this week. It’s our good fortune that Lisa Laskin, my fellow rower, a hockey goalie’s mom (her daughter), and subscriber to Let’s Row Together, sent me her commentary on this historic game as she experienced it from her season-ticket, second-row seat. Hope you’ll read her words.”
Now Lisa has her own free Substack, Magically Delicious, which I urge all foodies – and everyone else – to read.
Before sharp-eyed Boston sports fans write to tell me that for several years Boston has had a professional women's football team, the Renegades, who are perennial league champions, let me say that I don’t watch men's or women's, college or pro football. Doesn’t matter who is playing the game; it’s too brutal for me, especially when I know the consequences for those on the field.
And speaking of women playing pro sports
The WNBA season kicks off on May 14th.
When preseason games resulted in fans’ hue and cry about wanting to watch their teams play, the league to responded immediately by streaming games.
Speaking of the Sky’s rookie player, Angel Reese, a.k.a. Chi Barbie after being Bayou-Barbie at LSU, she rejoined her team, the Chicago Sky, via private jet whisking her to-and-from the Met Gala, a trip that she squeezed in-between leaving practice early and a game. How else would you expect her to celebrate her 22nd birthday?
Of course, her meme showed off her dual personas.
"So now yall can delete them drafts & tweets saying i shouldn't have gone to the met gala & i can't do both."
Angel Reese on attending Monday night’s Met Gala before scoring 13 points against the New York Liberty on Tuesday on her home court in a game streamed for fans.
And the league came through this week with a promise to spend $50 million on a long-demanded, often dismissed request, by players. The commissioner announced that teams will fly on charter flights (“as soon as we have the planes”) instead of traveling on regularly scheduled flights, as they’ve done for 27 seasons.
Today the WNBA announced it will expand to Toronto.
The Las Vegas Aces did not charter a plane for their White House visit with President Biden, when he congratulated them on their 2023 WNBA championship, their second in a row. Last year, the President was unable to attend their victory ceremony.
Biden displays his jersey to the Aces’ star forward A’ja Wilson
As the WNBA season gets underway, optimism abounds. Just take in these words by WNBA player and ESPN commentator Chinenye "Chiney" Ogwumike, as she spoke of a shining future for a league she loves.
And this week Brittney Griner also published her book, Coming Home. In it, she describes her harrowing 293 days as a prisoner in Russia. She also talks about why her attempt to slide back into basketball last season was especially tough on her, but it did prepare her for this one in which she says she is playing at 100%.
Griner went to Russia due to the WNBA’s extremely low salaries that made even the league’s stars use their off-season to play basketball in countries where they could earn a million dollars. Prison traumatized her as she faced humiliation: "The guards would literally come open up the little peep hole, look in, and then I would hear them laughing, walking down the hallway," she says. Standing six feet, nine inches, Griner would be squished into a small cage for prison transport, bent over in excruciating pain.
Still today, feeling cold rushes jail cell memories back into her mind.
As she told Terry Gross, her daily life was misery: “You have three toilets and one shower to serve 50-plus women. Then there's no hot water. I had a bucket and a ladle. So you would take a kettle like a tea kettle, warm up water out the sink, pour it into the bowl, into the bucket. You take the bucket and the ladle into the shower. You squat down in the shower and you just scoop and pour. And that's how you take a shower and you have about maybe five minutes because you have about ten, 12 other women waiting in the bathroom area to get into that shower.”
Climate Updates:
World had hottest April on record: Last 11 months all broke temperature records.
World has experienced 12 consecutive months of record global average ocean temperatures, triggering mass die offs of sea life. (Inside Climate News)
Warmer weather + warmer oceans = more rainfall = record-breaking flooding; recent rainfall totals - Southern China (17 inches), Dubai (10 inches), Kenya (12 inches), all in less than a week, some in one day. Record rainfalls in Tennessee.
Sea levels are rising rapidly along our Southern coast: “Relative sea level in Charleston has risen by 10 inches since 1950, with an acceleration to 1 inch every 2 years since 2010.” And the Gulf of Mexico has experienced twice the global average rate of sea level rise since 2010.
NOAA gives La Niña a 69% arriving by our hurricane season; if it does, hurricanes will strengthen
Meanwhile, India is in the midst of an extreme heatwave.
The TV studio had air conditioning, but the intense heat outside negated its effectiveness. Without water nearby to sip, Bangla’s blood pressure dropped and she fainted due to the heat.
I just knew we shared a lot in common!
The WNBA: The Affirmative Action of Sports https://shorturl.at/dfvNX