Rough and Tumbly

In the last couple of weeks one of the most interesting secondary stories in sports has been the case of Elizabeth Lambert, the New Mexico soccer player who is seen on video being--what's a good word here--"aggressive" with other players. She punches, kicks, charges, and yanks, among other things. After she was suspended, she apologized and said she got carried away. You can see the video of what she did here or watch it below:





Added bonus: you get to watch Julie Foudy, one of the greatest American soccer players of all time, and probably the funniest (though not in this clip).

In Tuesday's New York Times, there is an interview with her by Jere Longman. Here are a few of her comments, and I'll give my thoughts at the end:

1) "At the same time, she said other moments of aggressive play — in which Lambert elbowed a Brigham Young player in the back, received a yellow card for tripping, seemed to throw a punch at an opponent’s head and made a hard tackle from behind — came during the forceful, insistent play that routinely occurred in women’s soccer but might be misunderstood by casual fans."

2) "And she said she believed that the incident was blown out of proportion because it occurred in a women’s game. "I definitely feel because I am a female it did bring about a lot more attention than if a male were to do it,” Lambert said. “It’s more expected for men to go out there and be rough. The female, we’re still looked at as, Oh, we kick the ball around and score a goal. But it’s not."

First item: Now, as longtime readers of this blog--both of you--know, I'm a big fan of women's soccer. I've been paying attention to the US Women's National Team for at least twenty years. I played with and against girls growing up. I can vouch for the fact that play on the field is often "forceful" and "insistent." I don't have a problem with that. But to try to say that throwing elbows into other players standing in front of you, punching them in the head--I don't believe that was accidental like she says--and yanking ponytails are not routine occurrences in women's soccer. Well, maybe the elbows.

Second item: There is no doubt in my mind that this received so much attention because she's a woman and not a man. Not because it's okay for men to do these things, but because it's so rare for us to see women doing them on the field of play. Female basketball players don't rack up technical fouls yelling at referees like the men do. Softball players don't get ejected from games for arguing balls and strikes with the umpire. There's very little staring down your opponent after a hard tackle in women's soccer. The level of aggressiveness in the game is comparable, but there's just a lot less theatrics about it in the women's game.

An added bonus to women's soccer is that diving is extremely rare. A youtube search for "soccer dives" returns over 2,300 results. It's one of the least attractive parts of watching men's soccer. There's even a mocking wiki page for "How to Dive in Soccer" that tells us:

Things You'll Need

A soccer game
Opposition players
A referee
No sense of fair play

I don't think that Elizabeth Lambert is really that terrible, but what she did on the field is pretty bad, and she should have been thrown out of the game long before she ever got to execute the ponytail takedown. The referees need to control the game, and her coaches need to tell her to cut that stuff out.

For her to claim that people criticizing her don't understand the physical nature of women's soccer is a bit silly. I played soccer for ten years, and throwing punches and pulling hair wasn't part of the game. If you don't want to take my word for it, then listen to Julie Foudy, whose right pinky knows more about soccer than Elizabeth Lambert ever will. If she says there's nothing like this in the women's game, I believe her.

They Call Me . . . "Leader Guy"

One of the projects I've been working on for months is a grave cleaning activity at the Catholic Cemetery in Natchitoches. I'm using it to get material for one of the components of my project thesis. I had a small but energetic turnout of people, and we got a good bit of work done in the process. I was pleasantly surprised.

One of the participants was a writer for the Current Sauce, NSU's student newspaper. A few days after the event, I saw an editorial mentioning the work we had done. Do I, your humble writer, get mentioned in the article? Let's see:

So I would go through the cleaning process a couple of times and would see some improvement, but it didn't really look clean.

At that point the leader guy would come up and simply say, "Come back in a week. Come back in a month. Just wait."

So apparently I am no longer Scotty Williams, but "the leader guy." I guess I could do worse.

It reminded me of the Simpsons episode--"The Joy of Sect"--where Homer joins the Movementarians. Homer is impervious to their conversion efforts, eating dozens of bowls of gruel and singing the "nananananananana BATMAN!" theme song. The Movementarians counter by singing the same tune with "Leader" in place of Batman. I need to come up with a Leader Guy song that will convert people to my cause.

In other news, this was a weird college football weekend in terms of uniforms. Several teams wore custom jerseys in support of the Wounded Warrior Project. Some of the jerseys will be auctioned off. TCU's colors are purple and white, so why were they wearing red stripes on their helmets? Because the Horned Frog squirts blood from its eyes when threatened.

In the Florida/South Carolina game, Gamecock players replaced names on the back of their jerseys with warrior code values: Duty, Honor, Courage, Commitment, Integrity, Country and Service. This led to an interesting call by the CBS announcers doing the game (I paraphrase):

"So there are offsetting personal fouls on the play. In case you're wondering about the names, INTEGRITY just threw a punch at a Florida player."

Saving Sign of the Whale

I have told all of you, I'm sure, the story of how I ended up first going to Sign of the Whale. After a bad day, I talked myself into going to the Thursday Night Out with fellow GW students. The site that night was SOTW. The World's Greatest Waitress took care of me, and a few years and a lot of money later, I had a place I felt I could always, always, always go.

I don't know if I ever told you about almost deciding to avoid going there ever again. In 2006 I started hearing rumors that the place would be sold to a local radio personality who was going to change the name and turn it into an Irish pub--because Lord knows that DC just doesn't have enough of those. For some reason the deal fell through, and the owner of Rhino Bar, Britt Swan, ended up buying it instead. The new manager of Sign of the Whale was Vito.

(Note: the old manager was a guy named Billy, the inspiration for the Billy's Belly Buster brunch menu item: eggs, hash browns, sausage, grits, pancakes, and two slices of melon. One Sunday afternoon an Eagles fan came in and asked if they were showing the Eagles game on any of the TVs. Billy, a Redskins fan, looked right at him, pointed to the door, and said, "Get out.")

Every time I went to SOTW after the sale, Vito was there. I didn't talk to him much until my last few months in DC, but he was always polite and seemed like he had a good handle on running things. When I told him I was moving back home, he said they'd miss me, hoped I came back to see them, and wished me luck. When I was in town over New Year's, I stopped in one afternoon. He saw me and said, "You're back!" I never assume that I'll be remembered when I go back any place (except some places in Natchitoches) so it made me feel pretty good.

I'm writing about Vito because he died. I wasn't really close to him, but the work he did at Sign of the Whale allowed me to have a lot of fun when I thought for a while it would all be taken away. I really like the DC/N.VA area, and I recommend it to a lot of people, but Vito loved the city. I asked him once how long he'd been there, and he said all his life. His parents were Italian immigrants who settled there. The only time in his life he didn't live there was when he was in Vietnam.

So take care, Vito, and I'll raise a couple of glasses to you next time I'm there.