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Sunday, September 9, 2018

Post #3799 J: The US Open Women's Championship; Sports Entertainment

The Jenkins Op-Ed on the US Open (Tennis) Women's Finale

I have written a number of tweets on the topic:












As a recent digital Washpo subscriber (Trump's attack on Bezos tipped the balance), I really wasn't sampling the sports coverage. Jenkins, a female sports reporter, wrote an astonishingly bad article on the US Open women's finale (which I didn't watch) that trended nationally.

The interested reader can follow my link, but let me save you the bother: Jenkins makes this an ideological feminist diatribe against the male umpire for a gender-based double standard, primarily on Williams' direct rant at the umpire, which led to a game forfeiture. (There were two prior infractions, one about illicit coaching, the other over abusing her racket. I'm sure the clip of Williams' rant must be on Youtube; I saw it posted in a tweet. Williams had lost it; she is particularly incensed at the coaching call, arguing she's not a cheater and personally called the umpire a thief.) Jenkins similarly argues that the umpire overreacted, couldn't handle a strong female athlete pointing at him and understandably venting over things, wouldn't have dared doing the same during a men's final.

My position is that Serena Williams' behavior was unprofessional, that she was responsible for her behavior on the court, and her credentials at a multiple-time champion does not put her above tennis' rules and regulations. The people alleging a double standard seem to go back to the McEnroe era; first, McEnroe retired over 25 years ago; second, McEnroe did not get a blank check for bad boy behavior; just a quick Internet search brought up an incident which got him disqualified from a Grand Slam tournament late in his career, and third, this is not the first time Serena has misbehaved at the US Open. And a lot of Serena's meltdowns involve game officials, not her opponents. All types of unsportsmanlike behavior are intolerable.

I wrote a tweet about a cheating pair of students I caught at UTEP. One can't say much even under recent expansion of Twitter. Now most people might not understand the situation, so let me provide additional context. First, homework was a minor component in the final grade, like 10-15%. Second, I also had a policy of dropping the lowest homework grade. Third, I made it clear in my syllabus that copying answers was not acceptable; each student has to submit his own work. I wasn't going to try to decide whose work was being copied; they both would be engaging in academic fraud.

In the assignment, I asked a giveaway question for them to list all the data in a (relational database) table. I expected a fairly simple answer like: select * from mytable;

Now mytable had something like 20 columns or fields, and technically you could expand the wildcard (*) with all the column names. What these two did was to substitute all 20 column names, in a random order. This made it more time-consuming to grade, because I had to verify every column name appeared in the sequence; it would have been easier if the columns were listed in table definition sequence. I remember thinking how weird that was when I graded that first accused student's paper. Now the cheating students turned in their homework at different times. But several papers later, I noticed the same response to the same question: the same query, with the same "random" sequence. You would have thought they would have at least minimally altered the sequence.

If you have taken traditional accounting auditing as I have, you know what the result of a questionable finding--you expand the scope of the audit. All of the other assignment answers were the same, verbatim. And we're not talking short-answers, but more open-ended questions, where I would expect different responses.

Familiar readers may remember my discussing parts of this story before in past posts. I was fairly anal-retentive about not identifying accused students in public. And after I reminded students of my academic honesty policy and talked about the transgression in general terms, the coed outed herself: "Was it me?"

The next 10 minutes were the most surreal of my college career, both as a student and professor, and I hold 4 college degrees. She had a full meltdown in the middle of class. I told her we needed to discuss this outside of lecture, she refused. I was at a loss on what to do; leave lecture and call campus security? Dismiss the class? Finally a couple of students made it clear they thought KL should discuss the matter outside of class. Initially she resisted peer pressure, but eventually backed down and shut up, glaring and seething at me for rest of lecture.

The rest of lecture was normal, and I had all but forgotten about the outburst going down to my office to drop off my books before going to lunch with faculty friends. I heard my office door slam shut, with a hostile KL invading my office. I had a strict policy of leaving my office door open with coeds in my office. She refused; she then starts shrieking at the top of her voice, "I am not a cheater."  I see colleagues' doors opening up,  looking in the direction of my office. I'm mortified; they're going to think I'm raping this student. I tell the student that she needs to leave and come back later because I have a lunch appointment. She refuses, and I end up abandoning my own office.

There's a lot more to the story, including parts I've never published, but for what might motivated the student's personal attacks on me was an unintentional tip from the Dean of Students. (I have never met a Dean of Students who was not a sleazy, contemptible son of a bitch.) Keep in mind that this bastard never met with me personally--so much for "due process", which doesn't exist in any college I've known. So one day the asshole calls me up. "You better not do it." "What the hell are you talking about?" "Don't play games with me. You know what you did." I have zero patient with this bullshit, and eventually the gullible asshole makes a totally unfounded, slanderous accusation that I had threatened to blacklist her on the job market. That did not have a trace of truth to it; it was a smear. I've never threatened any student. As a first-semester professor, I had ZERO local business/recruiter contacts and no national contacts either. This was the first and only time this student had me in a class. I had never had a personal conversation with the student; I didn't even know she was in the job market. The only time I can remember talking to that student one-on-one before or outside of class was on the day of her meltdown.

What I would eventually discover was this young lady, without my knowledge or consent, had started listing me as a reference on her applications and was in a state of panic over what I would tell recruiters. There was no discussion of this with me. There wasn't much I could tell from a few weeks in a class. I probably would have given her the benefit of a doubt (until KL and AR did the same on a second assignment, which was insane because they knew I would be watching). What was totally unacceptable was her behavior; I don't know a single employer who wouldn't have fired her for cause within 6 months.  Still, in a litigious country replete with lawsuit abuse, I would be very guarded in what I wrote. I got one postcard from Kodak asking about her, and maybe a second. All I wrote was that I knew the student and didn't have anything further to say. I reported the contact and my response to the Dean of Students Office.

The tweets I've seen have probably been 90% supportive of Serena Williams, almost no one repeating the points I've made. Billie Jean King thinks the coaching infraction shouldn't be in the rule book, not that it didn't happen in the finals. Most seem to think that the tennis officials  should not enforce technical infractions in championship matches. I've sometimes heard announcers in football and basketball point out that referees were playing big games somewhat looser in the spirit of competition.

I'll stand by what I said. Serena has no one to blame but herself.

WWE Storylines

Well, they finally took the Universal belt off Lesnar in a "good way"--with Lesnar distracted by "Money in the Bank" prospective challenger Braun Strowman. This had long been rumored with Lesnar wanting another go at UFC. So Roman Reigns finally has the belt.

Still, the scripting is weird:

  • Even though Strowman is the obvious challenger to Reigns, WWE is having him cash in his contract. Usually the pattern is to cash in on an exhausted champion. Strowman, being billed as an invincible monster, probably doesn't need it, but it averts his cashing in on a close loss and a post-match attack on an exhausted Reigns, e.g., by his associates, Ziggler and McIntyre.
  • They put the Raw's women's title on Ronda Rousey. The problem I have with this is that none of the other female athletes on Raw poses a serious challenge to Rousey with her quickness, strike moves, and martial arts skills. The only one I see, beyond rumored additional UFC hires, is maybe Asuka, currently on the Smackdown roster, and I expect they might be saving that one for a future Wrestlemania. Still, they are pushing Rousey as a female force of nature, not afraid of flipping former men's champions like HHH and Kurt Angle or a group of male referees.
  • After months of being treated as Braun Strowman's personal rag doll, Kevin Owens, who had cultivated his own invincible monster image cultivated carefully in NXT, one ruthless enough to dethrone his own best friend, "quit". I have not understood this angle at all; Owens is arguably the most talented man on the roster, especially on the mike. He appeared on a recent Raw as some sort of deranged heel, so I don't know if they are finally trying to rehabilitate his character.
  • It was interesting to turn Becky Lynch heel after "best friend" Charlotte Flair beat Carmella for the Smackdown women's champion in a triple threat match, although they had been telegraphing the fact that Becky was unhappy when they added Charlotte to the match.What I didn't get was why they basically wrote Asuka off the show after having her job to Carmella. There was a hint in the process of setting up a women's only PPV they might start a women's tag team championship. I thought that's where they were headed with the heavy promotion of Bailey and Sasha.
  • They've reinvented the Styles/Samoa Joe rivalry from TNA. I'm not crazy about when they work family storylines into the script. So Joe has been trying to get under Styles' skin by mocking how little he sees his family on the heavy tour schedule (true enough), and he would make a better husband and father to Styles' own family. So champion Styles has a meltdown and gets himself disqualified during a championship match. They haven't done much with Joe since bringing him up except in a heel-for-hire gimmick. Samoa Joe is one of my favorites; Styles has had the belt for a long while. Samoa Joe could have some epic battles if and when they put the belt on him, long overdue, e.g., Nakamura. Of course, right now they are both heels. It's possible they could use the Styles program to turn Joe babyface.

























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