Stanford University Press Blog

How Long is Long Enough?

A guest post by Kenny Jean, marketing intern at Stanford University Press

To me, an avid fan of football and basketball, Rodney Fort and Jason Winfree’s 15^th Sports Myths and Why They’re Wrong offers an interesting and captivating perspective, addressing the popular misconceptions surrounding college and professional sports and identifying the parties that benefit most from the average fan’s misinformed understanding of sports business.

One myth that resonates with me, Owners and General Managers are Inept, explores the popular perception that General Managers are inept because of singular bad decisions made during their tenure. I can confirm both the widespread popularity of this belief throughout the sports community and my personal guilt of getting frustrated with the front office when my team continuously falls short of expectations and my favorite player never seems to have the right supporting cast to be successful.

With those biases in mind, I was impressed and convinced by Fort and Winfree’s patient and thorough dissection of the layered job of GMs. Identifying the marketing interests, long-term visions of sustainable success, and overall difficulty of making accurate predictions, the authors craft an informative explication of why infamous sports choices actually made sense at time, and why GMs are undeserving of emotional criticism that flies their way.

The authors’ analysis is carefully done, but I don’t think enough credit is given to the experiences and perspectives of the devout, informed fans, who do understand the business and that sustainable winning takes time. These fans are more willing to ignore singular decisions that retrospectively stand out as bad due to unforeseen injuries or a player’s subsequent growth elsewhere, but even these fans can only remain so patient in the face of perpetual losses. Eventually, GMs must produce tangible results and be held accountable when unable to stabilize a franchise after decades of woeful play.

The GM has a direct hand in fielding players, drafting talent, and providing a city’s team with the opportunity to win. Despite Fort and Winfree’s assertion that GMs have a number of interests to consider such as sales and having an exciting team, winning should always be the primary goal. A collection of players may not be have the biggest names or be the most fun to watch, but if they play as a team and get the job done on a nightly basis, the real fans will be appreciative, supportive, and dedicated. Increased recognition of the good decisions GMs make are necessary but in the end, everything is resolved when you just win. I recommend this title for both the occasional and the devout sports fan.

Kenny Jean is a marketing intern this summer at Stanford University Press. A rising senior at Williams College, he is majoring in English and pursuing a double concentration in Africana Studies and Legal Studies. He is interested in pursuing a career in Journalism or Entertainment. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Power of Exposure

A guest post by Kenny Jean, marketing intern at Stanford University Press

There is a common saying: People fear what they don’t understand. Once a thriving community, by the late 1980s, 240,000 Jews had emigrated from Morocco. Today, fewer than 4,000 Jews remain. Despite a centuries-long presence, the Jewish narrative in Moroccan history has largely been suppressed through national historical amnesia and a growing dismay over the Palestinian conflict. Whereas an older generation was able to respect difference through the intimate sharing of resources and coexistence with a Jewish community, modern generations struggle to embrace those religious and cultural differences due in part to an oversaturation of stereotypical imagery coupled with a general lack of exposure to a Jewish presence. In a recent podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, author Aomar Boum raised and addressed some of these issues more thoroughly discussed in his upcoming title, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco.  

What resonates strongly with me in this discussion is not only the current state of Moroccan-Jewish relations, but also Boum’s appraisal of education and increased exposure as being the appropriate means to address the universally widened gaps in relations across categories of race, sex, class, gender, etc. My personal experiences have caused me to understand stereotypes as being formed when a constant, linear, provocative image of a community is being presented to individuals who are simultaneously being closed off to members of those communities being depicted. Visual stimulus takes the place of physical, regular interaction. The idea that every person from a given community can be embodied by a single image or representation seems ludicrous on its face, but when that singularity becomes the routine and ordinary representation of a culture without spectators being able to experience other facets of those communities, generalizations are formed and misunderstandings are imminent. 

As Boum acknowledges this inevitability, he points to the role and power of educators as being in a unique position to combat stereotypes and positively shift the recent progression of simplistic understandings of difference. By providing a more extensive depiction of history and how demographics have varied in communal spaces, educators can begin providing younger generations with an increased awareness of different histories and respect for perspectives across race, gender, class, sex, and so on. Educators may have little to no control over demographic landscapes themselves and who people socialize with at a young age, but the classroom can definitely become a space where multi-faceted information is presented, diversifying the intellectual information and stimulus that young generations receive and ultimately allowing them better to understand difference. Because Boum’s work draws attention to issues of subpar interaction and exposure that plagues communities all over the world, more works such as these are necessary to maintain conversations regarding how to better stringent relations that divide people who represent differing communities.

Kenny Jean is a marketing intern this summer at Stanford University Press. A rising senior at Williams College, he is majoring in English and pursuing a double concentration in Africana Studies and Legal Studies. He is interested in pursuing a career in Journalism or Entertainment. He lives in Brooklyn.