2018 Pauley Interview - Amy Bass and Scott Stempson

Department of History Author

11/12/2018 Added

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Amy Bass and Scott Stempson's interview regarding the 2018 Pauley Lecture

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[00:00:00.630]My name's Scott Stempson, and I teach history of sport
[00:00:02.923]here at the University of Nebraska,
[00:00:04.610]and a few other things, and I'd like to welcome
[00:00:07.040]Dr. Amy Bass here to the university.
[00:00:10.149]She's going to be speaking tonight
[00:00:12.540]at the Pauley Lecturer series, and she teaches
[00:00:15.910]at the College of New Rochelle in New York,
[00:00:18.090]and she has a background in cultural history,
[00:00:22.130]African American history, sports history,
[00:00:24.940]correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:00:25.773]All of which is true.
[00:00:26.606]All of that stuff, okay.
[00:00:27.439]All of that is true.
[00:00:28.277]And I did read somewhere that she's a Boston Red Sox fan,
[00:00:30.870]but I'll forgive her for that, being a Yankee fan.
[00:00:33.120]107 wins.
[00:00:34.654]Yeah, I know. (laughs)
[00:00:36.187]But the ones in October count,
[00:00:37.590]so we'll see what happens there.
[00:00:39.165](laughs)
[00:00:41.270]And she has written a number of books,
[00:00:43.230]I believe four books, and we're gonna discuss
[00:00:46.840]a couple of them today.
[00:00:48.130]One, I believe is your first book?
[00:00:49.483]That is my first book Is that correct?
[00:00:50.423]Yes. That was my dissertation.
[00:00:52.120]Oh, is it really? Yeah, it was.
[00:00:53.504]Well, unbelieve...
[00:00:54.337]Yeah, this is a great book.
[00:00:55.530]It's now viewed as kind of a seminal, I think, work and--
[00:00:59.070]Yeah, it just means I'm old.
[00:01:00.854]Is that it?
[00:01:01.687](laughs) Okay, alright.
[00:01:02.520]Once your book is a classic, you're old.
[00:01:03.600]Well, I enjoyed reading it because
[00:01:05.589]I saw a lot of what I teach-- Thank you.
[00:01:08.920]and I wrote my own textbook for a class,
[00:01:11.980]and so I saw a lot of the same scholarship in there,
[00:01:14.650]so I was like, oh yeah, I remember that.
[00:01:16.876]So it was good to see that again, and I guess what I,
[00:01:22.360]some of the questions I have of you,
[00:01:25.430]I remember when I first started teaching sports history
[00:01:27.940]about 10 years ago and it was kind of
[00:01:30.890]first of all people said, what, is that a thing?
[00:01:33.020]Is that...?
[00:01:33.930]And then so I'd have to explain,
[00:01:35.070]well, yeah, it's...
[00:01:36.537]And I've always sort of explained it as a cultural history,
[00:01:40.300]looking at American culture through the prison of sports.
[00:01:44.010]Yeah, through the window.
[00:01:44.930]Yeah, and so now I don't get that question as much,
[00:01:47.850]I think it's a little more--
[00:01:48.683]That's good to know, I'm glad to hear that.
[00:01:50.110]Little more accepted now, I think,
[00:01:51.640]but from your point of view, what can we learn
[00:01:55.630]from sports history, as a culture in general,
[00:01:59.830]and as, maybe, race relations, and that type of thing?
[00:02:03.620]I think you can learn anything from sports history.
[00:02:05.750]I think it's a profound gateway into immigration history,
[00:02:09.330]labor history, race and identity,
[00:02:11.570]ethnicity, religion, gender, gender, gender.
[00:02:17.510]My first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle,
[00:02:19.350]which is about the '68 Mexico City Olympics
[00:02:22.350]and civil rights movements, and Black Power,
[00:02:26.040]and television, and broadcasting.
[00:02:29.500]There's so many things on the table.
[00:02:33.140]I really saw it when I was writing it,
[00:02:35.560]which was as a dissertation, originally,
[00:02:38.040]as a civil rights book, not as a sports book.
[00:02:41.210]But one of the thing about writing about sports
[00:02:42.730]is you have to get the sports right.
[00:02:44.760]Right, you need to know what a long jump record means,
[00:02:47.880]and you need to get...
[00:02:49.380]It's not just stats.
[00:02:51.710]To make meaning out of sports,
[00:02:52.900]you have to understand the meaning of sports.
[00:02:55.130]So I think that sports history
[00:02:57.200]is really complicated because of that,
[00:02:58.980]but I think that it's been ghettoized,
[00:03:00.921]and I think it still is to a degree.
[00:03:03.770]What do you mean by ghettoized?
[00:03:04.961]Ghettoized, it's sort of this isolated...
[00:03:07.660]I think that with the explosion of cultural studies
[00:03:09.990]and American studies, and cultural history,
[00:03:12.520]film was taken very seriously,
[00:03:14.640]and television, and music,
[00:03:16.840]really amazing works on these things.
[00:03:18.860]And then there was sports.
[00:03:20.590]And sports was sort of over here,
[00:03:21.880]and I didn't understand why, as probably what I would argue,
[00:03:25.290]the most significant culture industry,
[00:03:28.180]not just in the United States, but globally.
[00:03:31.900]Looking at events like World Cup,
[00:03:33.350]and the Olympics, and what have you, why was it over here?
[00:03:36.700]Why isn't it at the table?
[00:03:40.490]And so lots of us have written about that.
[00:03:43.386]I think it got its starts with things
[00:03:47.440]like physical anthropology and physical education,
[00:03:50.480]so I think that there was some snark,
[00:03:53.150]that it wasn't real scholarship,
[00:03:55.610]which really sets aside some of the amazing work
[00:03:58.660]folks were doing in the 1920's and 1930's
[00:04:01.660]in labs, and in gym teachers, and those kinds of folks,
[00:04:06.390]in terms of what they were publishing.
[00:04:07.930]So I think it's been a long, tough road,
[00:04:09.920]but that said, I think the folks who write about sports
[00:04:12.940]in a scholarly manner and have for some period of time,
[00:04:16.030]we've had to do battle, and I think that
[00:04:18.120]that actually makes for a really exciting arena
[00:04:21.530]of scholarship, because I pretty much
[00:04:24.450]don't feel the need to justify what I do anymore.
[00:04:27.830]I think I've sort of achieved that point what,
[00:04:29.910]you know what?
[00:04:30.743]Either take it or leave it because this is my of
[00:04:32.660]and this is who I am.
[00:04:34.410]Yeah, I always felt like I had to apologize,
[00:04:36.280]and then now it's like, I don't...
[00:04:37.632]Or, no, no, no, no, let me tell you what
[00:04:38.880]it's actually about. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:04:41.201]So my first book, very much a civil rights history,
[00:04:43.570]very much an Olympic history,
[00:04:45.040]very much a Black Power history,
[00:04:47.160]and then you flash forward to my current book,
[00:04:48.660]which is about high school soccer
[00:04:50.170]and is a narrative nonfiction piece,
[00:04:52.190]it's not a scholarly work,
[00:04:53.880]but it still has all that stuff embedded.
[00:04:56.460]Immigration, and refugee, and government policy,
[00:04:59.010]and community.
[00:05:00.290]There's just so many things,
[00:05:01.510]and that once you acknowledge that,
[00:05:04.900]what a great way to get people's attention
[00:05:07.750]to study these things.
[00:05:10.520]The sports page is still the most popular page,
[00:05:13.110]if you actually deem to pick up an actual news paper.
[00:05:17.000]It's a great way to have these conversations
[00:05:19.600]and we do have these conversations,
[00:05:21.880]whether it's Serena Williams or Colin Kaepernick.
[00:05:25.500]Absolutely, and that brings me to
[00:05:27.940]that point in my classes.
[00:05:29.290]I'm always trying to sort of link
[00:05:31.620]the past to current events,
[00:05:33.070]and it's becoming...
[00:05:34.880]Easier?
[00:05:35.713]I guess easier, (laughs)
[00:05:36.546]I guess is a word, I don't if easier the word.
[00:05:37.960]Tragically easier?
[00:05:38.950]Yeah, and kids are wanting to, they're like...
[00:05:41.960]I'll talk about the '68 games,
[00:05:43.690]and all of a sudden the plan is,
[00:05:44.990]and then they'll say, oh,
[00:05:45.910]you mean it's like the kneeling thing in NFL,
[00:05:49.600]and I say, well, sorta, I mean, you know, it's...
[00:05:52.600]How do you compare that?
[00:05:54.040]What is the differences and the similarities?
[00:05:58.440]Is there a direct line right from '68 to...?
[00:06:01.022]Think that there is-- What's happening?
[00:06:02.730]a direct line, but it's a nuanced line,
[00:06:04.070]it's a complicated line, and I think that we have
[00:06:05.470]a tendency to, A, want to see things in a vacuum,
[00:06:08.940]no one's ever done this before.
[00:06:10.840]And that's where I think some of the shock comes in
[00:06:13.900]when Kaep takes a knee and people are horrified,
[00:06:16.730]it's ignoring such a long legacy
[00:06:19.680]of using sports to create political positions.
[00:06:22.960]And then I also think that you need to
[00:06:25.570]sort of acknowledge the historical evolution,
[00:06:27.660]and that's really our job,
[00:06:28.830]is to how these things build on each other,
[00:06:30.750]and where the foundations come from.
[00:06:32.940]Historians provide context.
[00:06:34.390]We tell stories, but we tell stories
[00:06:35.920]in a context of time and space,
[00:06:38.080]and I think that that's critical
[00:06:40.260]to having meaningful conversations about the contemporary.
[00:06:44.150]I also think that I always sort of want to caution students
[00:06:46.320]about sort of the then and now format,
[00:06:49.140]because I do think it can oversimplify.
[00:06:52.820]But I do think that way.
[00:06:54.080]When Kaep first took a knee, I'm like,
[00:06:55.650]gosh, it's 2016.
[00:06:58.130]Right?
[00:06:58.963]August of 2016, when he still had a job.
[00:07:03.402]And people were like,
[00:07:04.235]why aren't you writing about Kaepernick?
[00:07:05.530]And I thought, because I already have in so many ways.
[00:07:11.248]And so I think that that doesn't mean that we...
[00:07:14.550]we have to recontextualize it, but yeah,
[00:07:17.060]it's a direct line, because that's the way history works.
[00:07:19.500]It's not necessarily about progress,
[00:07:21.820]because that's ahistorical, but it is about change
[00:07:25.130]and the way it moves.
[00:07:26.940]Do you think that, and to me I kinda link it in a way,
[00:07:33.120]do you think that Smith and Carlos
[00:07:36.780]knew what they were doing,
[00:07:38.940]as far as what the reaction would be,
[00:07:40.710]both immediate and far reaching, as far as,
[00:07:44.880]you talk about carving out a new place for civil rights.
[00:07:50.300]Do you think they knew that,
[00:07:51.360]or do you think this was something...?
[00:07:53.570]And I guess that brings us to Kaepernick, too.
[00:07:54.403]Do you think he knew that there would be
[00:07:56.670]this kind of reaction when he did it?
[00:07:59.648]I think that the consequences of political action
[00:08:02.510]can be predictable and unpredictable.
[00:08:04.980]Tommie and John, Tommie in particular,
[00:08:07.750]were part of a broader movement,
[00:08:09.560]and that movement kind of gets erased by the image,
[00:08:12.620]because it's one of the defining images, right?
[00:08:14.450]The two of them with their black glove fists overhead.
[00:08:17.660]The larger movement behind them gets kind of erased
[00:08:19.870]by the power of that photograph.
[00:08:22.540]But there is a movement behind them,
[00:08:24.380]and I think it's one of the most significant things
[00:08:26.070]to look at in terms of '68.
[00:08:27.940]The Olympic Project for Human Rights had proposed a boycott,
[00:08:32.000]they had declarations of demands,
[00:08:34.840]they were aligning themself with figures like
[00:08:37.710]Louis Lomax, and King, and what have you.
[00:08:40.760]They had a very powerful leader in the young Harry Edwards.
[00:08:44.300]Edwards, yeah.
[00:08:45.133]And you think about Harry Edwards,
[00:08:47.220]who was a graduate student at the time, and yet that--
[00:08:49.500]Right, I didn't realize he was that young.
[00:08:50.976]When I read that, I was thinking,
[00:08:52.031]is he still alive? Yeah, he's
[00:08:52.864]a sociology graduate student, oh yeah.
[00:08:53.752]And I looked, and he's not that old.
[00:08:54.919]No, he's not that old,
[00:08:56.493]and there were consequences for him.
[00:09:00.600]There's consequences for all of them.
[00:09:02.270]Tommie gets kicked out of the ROTC,
[00:09:04.170]you think about their inability to get jobs afterwards,
[00:09:07.260]not getting invited to the White House,
[00:09:09.160]which has become an interesting contemporary issue
[00:09:13.430]for athletes. Exactly, yeah.
[00:09:15.840]I don't think anyone can really know
[00:09:17.390]what the consequences are going to be,
[00:09:19.530]but people like Lee Evans and Tommie Smith
[00:09:22.660]were very much invested in this collective movement,
[00:09:28.130]and the collective part didn't happen, necessarily,
[00:09:32.030]because the boycott didn't happen,
[00:09:33.350]and I think that that's a really interesting thing
[00:09:34.840]for historians to study in terms of
[00:09:36.330]the role of the individual within a movement.
[00:09:39.410]There were guys who were afraid of those consequences,
[00:09:41.560]and they wanted to go, and if you really think about
[00:09:43.370]the way amateur athletes work,
[00:09:45.520]and that's who these guys are,
[00:09:47.400]we don't really know them until they win the medal.
[00:09:49.678]You have to be an Olympic nerd like me
[00:09:52.095](laughs) to know who everybody is
[00:09:53.610]going into an Olympics.
[00:09:55.130]Right, general public doesn't--
[00:09:57.220]No, that 99.9% of everyone who shows up
[00:09:59.960]is gonna walk home empty-handed.
[00:10:01.850]You know, you're giving up that one chance,
[00:10:05.360]and as black men in the 1960's, those chances were rare.
[00:10:10.350]So it wasn't a decision of consequence.
[00:10:13.040]I don't know that anyone can predict
[00:10:17.050]what's gonna happen to them,
[00:10:18.080]but an awful lot of them are very politically invested
[00:10:21.160]in figuring out a way to use the athletic spotlight.
[00:10:25.520]That rare spotlight to fit in with
[00:10:28.450]the other political awakenings
[00:10:29.930]that were going on in that decade.
[00:10:32.080]That kind of brings me to the question about
[00:10:34.660]Edwards sets up the boycott, it doesn't really happen,
[00:10:37.030]he kind of says, alright, well,
[00:10:39.350]we'll make it sort of optional,
[00:10:40.660]and those of you do go,
[00:10:41.630]why don't you show your protest in some way?
[00:10:45.130]How was the reaction between the groups.
[00:10:49.400]Both those that went and didn't go,
[00:10:51.770]and then those who, I always think of George Foreman,
[00:10:54.850]the famous...
[00:10:55.700]Right, waving the flag. With the flag,
[00:10:57.007]waving the flag, and obviously,
[00:10:58.930]he was resented by the other group,
[00:11:01.780]but I think his argument was, hey,
[00:11:06.000]and a lot of people have this argument,
[00:11:07.835]is this is one area where we've
[00:11:10.560]maybe done better than a lot of areas in the culture,
[00:11:13.370]and maybe this isn't the right place for this.
[00:11:15.210]So was that a valid argument?
[00:11:17.410]Did anybody think that that was
[00:11:19.720]a valid argument from the other side,
[00:11:21.040]or were they pretty much--?
[00:11:22.210]No, Harry Edwards is scathing
[00:11:25.960]in terms of folks like Foreman.
[00:11:29.250]Athletes were really split.
[00:11:30.490]You look at the Men's Harvard Crew Team
[00:11:32.680]who supports the OPHR unabashedly,
[00:11:35.740]and then you look at someone like Foreman,
[00:11:38.410]I think that the missing link in terms
[00:11:40.690]of contextualizing all of that is the cold war.
[00:11:43.370]So Foreman beats a Russian opponent,
[00:11:45.950]and so that's that kind of moment
[00:11:47.410]that there's also a long legacy for.
[00:11:49.700]You go back to Joe Louis and Max Schmeling
[00:11:51.770]when Louis gets to be an American,
[00:11:55.870]and I say that very purposefully,
[00:11:57.360]he gets to be an American
[00:11:59.440]because his opponent is German
[00:12:01.520]in that particular time period.
[00:12:03.866]Hitler's golden boy, is it? = Yeah.
[00:12:05.010]So it's democracy versus fascism.
[00:12:07.820]There was more at stake than a black man
[00:12:09.990]beating a white man, and Louis is patriated
[00:12:13.020]for that, for a brief and shining moment.
[00:12:17.010]Where does that get one, I think,
[00:12:19.300]is the question that Harry Edwards
[00:12:20.650]is constantly asking, and John Carlos in particular
[00:12:23.730]has some really brutal statements about that.
[00:12:28.320]They throw us some peanuts and we perform,
[00:12:30.230]I'm paraphrasing.
[00:12:32.326]But then we go home, and what?
[00:12:34.020]We're just another...
[00:12:36.810]And I won't use his language,
[00:12:37.960]but that's so really weighing the consequences of that.
[00:12:41.630]I mean, I think it's the New York Times
[00:12:43.690]when the men's relay team wore black berets in Mexico City.
[00:12:47.580]The headline was not quite the same thing.
[00:12:50.220]How in-your-face with Black Power do you need to be
[00:12:53.910]to stay in the Olympics?
[00:12:56.000]Not get sent home the way Tommie and John were,
[00:12:59.330]but still make your statement.
[00:13:00.870]So it's complicated.
[00:13:03.560]Were they the only two that were sent home?
[00:13:05.220]They were the only two that were sent home.
[00:13:06.156]Okay, that's what I thought.
[00:13:07.200]So Kareem doesn't go, so that's...
[00:13:09.667]He's one of the-- Can you call it a boycott?
[00:13:11.400]There's many reasons given for why
[00:13:13.150]the young Lew Alcindor doesn't go.
[00:13:16.850]Did he need to go, did he...?
[00:13:20.550]Lots of athletes have that.
[00:13:22.160]You see, today, hockey players saying,
[00:13:23.970]no, I'm not gonna go to the Olympics.
[00:13:26.090]The golfers.
[00:13:27.090]Golfers, right. They didn't go to Rio
[00:13:27.923]because they were afraid of mosquitoes.
[00:13:29.297]Exactly.
[00:13:30.290]So.
[00:13:31.123]Yeah, there's always that question.
[00:13:34.690]You talk a lot of, in the book,
[00:13:35.860]about the metamorphosis from negro to black.
[00:13:39.270]Can you explain that, just for the average person,
[00:13:42.187]what that means?
[00:13:43.020]It's a political awakening,
[00:13:44.420]and the word black for the OPHR is a capital B,
[00:13:47.300]and it's a designation that you have to earn,
[00:13:49.570]so Harry Edwards calls Howard Cosell black.
[00:13:51.920]Right, that he's a black sportscaster,
[00:13:53.810]and that's because of the politics
[00:13:55.360]that Cosell is putting out there increasingly.
[00:13:58.710]So black was a designation that you had to earn.
[00:14:02.000]So that, also, sort of gets back
[00:14:04.070]to what we were saying before,
[00:14:05.320]about amongst the ranks of people
[00:14:06.950]who were thinking about boycotting,
[00:14:08.130]were you going to be black, or were you going to be a negro?
[00:14:11.100]Sort of going back to the Uncle Tom imagery.
[00:14:14.320]The closing ranks, the accommodationist
[00:14:17.290]sort of point of view.
[00:14:19.410]So I think that this rise of a black athlete,
[00:14:23.400]Newsweek Magazine calls them the angry black athletes,
[00:14:26.750]so that sort of goes hand-in-hand as a pejorative.
[00:14:29.060]That it's this militant stance.
[00:14:31.320]And the Panthers are still in their early days
[00:14:34.010]of sort of evolving into what kind
[00:14:35.250]of imagery they're going to have,
[00:14:37.960]but I think that the black gloved fists,
[00:14:40.110]and the sunglasses, and the boots, and the berets,
[00:14:41.990]things that the OPHR, things that Harry Edwards adopts,
[00:14:45.430]are very much within sort of offspring of civil rights
[00:14:50.350]that's SNCC and the Panthers.
[00:14:52.630]SNCC is breaking away, eventually,
[00:14:55.600]the sort of white cooperation isn't going to be wanted.
[00:14:58.960]The SCLC is gonna be considered old school.
[00:15:01.680]King is going to be considered old school.
[00:15:05.257]And so you see that kind of change happening,
[00:15:08.140]and this was a different way to be
[00:15:10.520]an African American athlete.
[00:15:12.770]And I think it also has to do, again,
[00:15:14.250]with the collective that in the previous generations,
[00:15:17.240]you had these standouts.
[00:15:18.810]Jesse Owens and Joe Lewis,
[00:15:20.410]and what have you. I was just gonna say,
[00:15:21.243]wasn't Jesse Owens considered an Uncle Tom
[00:15:22.801]by a lot of the--? Yeah, by that time,
[00:15:23.634]and he was in Mexico City telling everybody,
[00:15:25.740]cut their socks.
[00:15:26.573]Don't wear tall black socks to run in, that's stupid.
[00:15:29.287]I thought that was interesting.
[00:15:30.390]From a running standpoint,
[00:15:31.549]from a speed standpoint From a running, right,
[00:15:32.382]he just, listen to your uncle, and he was mocking that.
[00:15:35.710]Mocking his own nickname--
[00:15:37.738]I thought that was interesting.
[00:15:38.571]from them.
[00:15:39.404]But I think that folks like that were individuals.
[00:15:43.970]We had these individual moments,
[00:15:45.270]and this was a collective.
[00:15:46.460]There was no one famous person
[00:15:48.100]until Tommie goes sub 20 in that race.
[00:15:50.870]Most people didn't know who Tommie Smith was.
[00:15:54.450]And so I think that that was really the landmark importance
[00:15:58.860]of the OPHR, was that it was a collective movement
[00:16:01.760]rather than this one athlete who's doing something
[00:16:05.780]that can be read as politically significant.
[00:16:07.990]And certainly Muhammad Ali is critical in this,
[00:16:11.200]because he is both the captain of
[00:16:14.150]the important single athlete team,
[00:16:16.740]and yet he's also an enormous influence
[00:16:18.690]on the OPHR, and in fact, the restoration of his title
[00:16:21.530]is their very first demand.
[00:16:22.870]His title, at this point, has been taken away.
[00:16:25.160]Been taken away. And that's one of
[00:16:26.428]the things that Edwards demands, right?
[00:16:27.850]Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:16:29.230]And Brundidge to be taken out of the equation.
[00:16:30.660]Yeah, Brundidge should be taken out.
[00:16:31.930]There's six demands, but the first
[00:16:34.110]is that Ali gets his title back,
[00:16:36.490]because he didn't lose it.
[00:16:37.740]Right, it was taken away.
[00:16:38.997]And that's offensive, you can look at that politically,
[00:16:42.490]but to a sports fan, that's also offensive.
[00:16:44.593]Right, it is.
[00:16:45.426]Right, to take someone's title away that they won.
[00:16:47.700]Right.
[00:16:48.533]I think that's, just mentioning Brundidge,
[00:16:50.900]I think he always, at least, he proclaimed
[00:16:54.550]that the sports should be above politics, right?
[00:16:56.790]Yeah, the games must go one. And I mean,
[00:16:58.854]even going back to Coubertin, I believe his name was.
[00:17:02.910]The Frenchman who kind of--
[00:17:03.913]Oh, Pierre de Coubertin, yeah.
[00:17:05.125]He revived the whole thing, he was always saying
[00:17:08.300]politics should be out of it, right?
[00:17:09.860]But it's never really been that way
[00:17:11.627]from the beginning. Well, it can't be.
[00:17:12.460]I mean, the Olympics are inherently political.
[00:17:14.570]They were inherently political for the Greeks,
[00:17:16.410]too, in antiquity.
[00:17:17.490]I mean, they were designed to stop war.
[00:17:22.030]No, de Coubertin bringing
[00:17:23.410]the children of the world together.
[00:17:25.470]Sport can't transcend politics
[00:17:28.570]when your entry point is a flag.
[00:17:32.490]From that point on, from the parade of nations.
[00:17:35.270]And they did an interesting thing along the way,
[00:17:37.100]when the closing ceremony.
[00:17:39.730]The flags come in, but the teams come in as one.
[00:17:41.800]They don't come in as individual national delegations,
[00:17:46.530]and that was a later add, that's a 20th century add,
[00:17:50.700]but it's interesting to think that
[00:17:52.840]sort of the message there is that the Olympics
[00:17:55.190]have ended these national separations,
[00:17:58.580]that the athletes come together, and I will say,
[00:17:59.750]I've been on the end field of a closing ceremony.
[00:18:01.360]It is a really good time.
[00:18:04.295]Looks like.
[00:18:05.128]But then they all go home to their countries
[00:18:07.360]and things march on.
[00:18:09.050]One of the arguments was,
[00:18:10.730]why can't they compete without countries?
[00:18:15.190]Initially, that was a no, we can't.
[00:18:17.408]You can't do that, it's gotta be...
[00:18:19.197]And like you said, that sort of
[00:18:20.249]makes it inherently political, if you're gonna be...
[00:18:22.602]Yeah, from the very get go.
[00:18:24.170]And then everything else just gets lobbed on.
[00:18:26.530]Absolutely.
[00:18:27.363]There's a host city, and the politics of the host city.
[00:18:30.290]Mexico City?
[00:18:31.123]Mexico's a mess in '68.
[00:18:32.750]Mexico City's a mess in '68.
[00:18:35.450]The student protests there
[00:18:36.490]are amongst the worst in the world.
[00:18:38.630]The massacre of the students, just days before the games,
[00:18:41.380]by the government, to just try to get rid of them.
[00:18:43.960]But you flash forward to the modern games
[00:18:45.600]and you have the same thing.
[00:18:46.940]Atlanta literally sweeping away its homeless population
[00:18:50.080]before opening ceremony,
[00:18:51.350]and we could talk about Sochi for days.
[00:18:54.090]Right, and Berlin in '36.
[00:18:55.630]Well, and then you got Hitler.
[00:18:57.090]Let's clean that up as much
[00:18:57.923]as we possibly can, right. Then you got Hitler.
[00:18:59.597]Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:00.850]Well, let's shift gears and talk
[00:19:01.833]about your new book, One Goal.
[00:19:03.878]Sure.
[00:19:05.560]I apologize, I have not read it,
[00:19:06.837]I want to read it, though, I plan to.
[00:19:08.899]I appreciate the desire.
[00:19:09.938]It looks like a great story.
[00:19:11.990]Tell me, first of all, how did you...?
[00:19:12.933]Now, this is where you went to college, right?
[00:19:14.489]Same town, is that right?
[00:19:15.322]I went to college in that, yeah, Lewiston, Maine
[00:19:17.240]based college. Is that how you heard about
[00:19:18.413]the story of it? Yes.
[00:19:19.672]So that's what I wrote about the story.
[00:19:21.910]And I wrote about it, I write for Santa,
[00:19:24.700]and then other popular organs, occasionally,
[00:19:28.110]which is a great way, I think,
[00:19:29.090]to sort of take the significance of sports
[00:19:31.670]and get it out to a wider audience.
[00:19:33.494]Right, absolutely.
[00:19:35.240]So I wrote about the Lewiston High School soccer team
[00:19:38.830]in the fall of 2015.
[00:19:41.230]It's a team composed almost entirely of refugees,
[00:19:44.270]mostly from Somalia, which is a big part of the book.
[00:19:47.010]Why does Lewiston, Maine, have a
[00:19:48.360]significant Somali population? That's what I was gonna ask,
[00:19:49.676]why do they?
[00:19:51.509]Why did they go there?
[00:19:52.470]It was by choice.
[00:19:53.610]They found Lewiston, and so this team
[00:19:57.870]won its school's first state championship in soccer,
[00:20:01.130]which is not a spoiler.
[00:20:02.160]You go into the book absolutely knowing
[00:20:03.500]how it's gonna turn out.
[00:20:06.240]But it's fall of 2015 is when the terrorist attacks
[00:20:10.200]in Paris took place, that coordinated series of bombings,
[00:20:13.020]the first of which was at Stade de France
[00:20:15.640]where a friendly was going on between Germany and France,
[00:20:19.300]and there were rumors that were not true,
[00:20:23.450]that that bomber who detonated in
[00:20:26.650]the tunnel of Stade de France had manipulated
[00:20:29.630]a Syrian refugee network to get to Belgium
[00:20:31.900]and then to France, and that brought out this outpouring
[00:20:35.530]of governors in the United States,
[00:20:37.270]declaring that refugees were no longer gonna be allowed
[00:20:39.930]in their states, including Paul LePage, in Maine.
[00:20:44.120]And that struck me in a couple different ways.
[00:20:46.140]First it's just being awful, and second,
[00:20:48.620]I was thinking, constitutionally,
[00:20:50.150]that isn't even something governors can do.
[00:20:53.470]What are they talking about?
[00:20:54.610]You don't really get to decide who does
[00:20:56.910]and doesn't live in your state when someone is here legally.
[00:21:01.570]So I wrote about sort of those three points,
[00:21:03.530]about the US governors, and what had happened in France,
[00:21:05.640]and this refugee team in Lewiston, Maine, of all places.
[00:21:10.840]As soon as I wrote it, I was sort of outlining
[00:21:12.650]a book in my head and thinking,
[00:21:14.990]I don't want this to be an academic book.
[00:21:17.660]I want this to be a book that I
[00:21:19.490]can get into the hands of every person possible.
[00:21:21.530]Which isn't to say that there aren't academics
[00:21:22.990]writing incredibly accessible stuff.
[00:21:24.863]I was sort of at a point in my career
[00:21:26.760]when I wanted to try something different.
[00:21:29.230]So within about 48 hours, I was talking to an editor,
[00:21:32.150]who ended up being an editor on the book at Hochet.
[00:21:35.730]And as it was coming out, things in the United States
[00:21:39.310]were getting increasingly interesting in terms of refugees,
[00:21:43.020]particularly refugees from Muslim majority countries,
[00:21:45.780]which Somalia is.
[00:21:48.300]And immigration, and borders, to the point where
[00:21:51.965]it's been a wild ride and it's been incredibly bittersweet
[00:21:56.410]to be talking about this story in America right now,
[00:21:59.660]but I think it's an important story.
[00:22:01.740]Was the team, primarily, is it almost all Somali?
[00:22:07.193]21 of the 24 varsity roster was African.
[00:22:12.610]The majority of which are Somali.
[00:22:15.380]Maine has an interesting situation
[00:22:16.800]in which the original shift of thousands were from Somalia,
[00:22:22.490]but then asylum seekers started to come,
[00:22:24.420]so Congo, Angola, Sudan, so those seeking political asylum
[00:22:28.150]also found their way to Maine.
[00:22:30.800]That has since ceased, largely,
[00:22:32.800]because asylum seekers aren't coming
[00:22:34.110]to the United States anymore.
[00:22:35.840]And neither are refugees.
[00:22:37.470]But that was how this diverse, soccer loving team
[00:22:43.370]was created in a championship hockey town.
[00:22:45.990]I was gonna say, soccer would not be the normal...
[00:22:48.380]No, it's hockey, football, and church.
[00:22:51.164](laughs) Right, right.
[00:22:52.150]How were they accepted by the other students?
[00:22:56.100]That's really what the book is about.
[00:22:57.470]It's about sport as a connector,
[00:23:00.420]it's about soccer as a connector,
[00:23:01.840]it's about not really a typical immigrant story,
[00:23:04.430]it's not a story of Americanization and assimilation
[00:23:07.070]as much as negotiation amongst different peoples
[00:23:10.410]trying to create community in what is probably
[00:23:14.550]the largest demographic change in
[00:23:17.040]the shortest period of time in modern American history.
[00:23:20.260]To think about a city of 36,000 folks.
[00:23:22.890]I was gonna ask you how large it is.
[00:23:23.723]With a population of about 7,000 Somalis coming in.
[00:23:26.220]Wow.
[00:23:27.053]Yeah.
[00:23:28.017]And then so I would guess,
[00:23:28.850]from a general public standpoint,
[00:23:32.560]there was kind of a reaction to that, too,
[00:23:37.410]of them coming in and--
[00:23:38.250]Absolutely.
[00:23:39.500]There are a lot of fractures in this community,
[00:23:41.080]and then there's coming togethers in this community,
[00:23:43.350]and then you throw in economy in New England mill towns.
[00:23:45.820]Former mill towns in New England which have had a rough ride
[00:23:49.440]for most of the post-war 20th into the 21st century.
[00:23:53.860]And so the impact on the economy,
[00:23:55.440]which has been generally positive
[00:23:58.270]by having folks come in from other places.
[00:24:02.490]Maine is the oldest state in the country,
[00:24:05.430]meaning median age.
[00:24:06.610]It's not Florida, everyone thinks it's Florida, it's Maine.
[00:24:09.630]Second whitest state and hemorrhaging population,
[00:24:12.680]hemorrhaging its young people.
[00:24:14.500]And then a bunch of folks show up who want to lay roots
[00:24:17.300]and raise their families there,
[00:24:18.520]and go to school there, and work there.
[00:24:21.440]It, potentially, could create a turnaround
[00:24:25.390]of some kind of permanence.
[00:24:26.840]And a lot of them are staying.
[00:24:28.290]They are staying.
[00:24:29.123]Staying there, okay.
[00:24:30.050]That's amazing, what...
[00:24:32.680]One thing about Americans, they like winners.
[00:24:35.060]They like to win, and that's one thing you see
[00:24:37.910]not just in sports, but anything,
[00:24:38.880]but when a sports team can win something,
[00:24:42.390]all of a sudden you have a different view of the people.
[00:24:44.680]Yeah, I mean, it might only be for the 90 minutes
[00:24:46.390]of a soccer game, it might be for a season,
[00:24:48.380]it might last longer.
[00:24:50.720]Community's a lot of work, and I think
[00:24:51.990]that that's probably the bottom line of the book,
[00:24:54.010]is learning that community doesn't just happen.
[00:24:56.750]Community is a lot of people putting in a lot of time
[00:24:59.520]in a lot of different ways.
[00:25:00.660]Absolutely.
[00:25:01.493]Yeah, I remember, I'd talk about that in my class.
[00:25:05.160]Everybody hears about the melting pot,
[00:25:06.440]and people coming in, and just everything's great.
[00:25:08.970]Well, that's not really the reality of the history,
[00:25:11.950]but in sports you might get a little of that
[00:25:14.794]to some extent. You might.
[00:25:15.627]Although, again, the very factor of soccer
[00:25:18.120]becoming a marquis sport in Lewiston, Maine?
[00:25:20.580]That's not a melting pot moment.
[00:25:22.320]That's something new. That's something else.
[00:25:24.714]That's something else, yeah.
[00:25:25.760]Amazing.
[00:25:26.593]Well, I can't wait to read it. Thank you.
[00:25:27.426]I really plan to do that. Thank.

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2018 Pauley Interview - Amy Bass and Scott Stempson

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