Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  MEGHAN DUGGAN DRIVES HARD TO THE FRONT OF THE NET AND HAS A lightning-quick wrist shot; she’s often the player who picks up the rebound and sends it home. She’s what they call a “power forward,” using her strength as well as speed to push through opponents and clear ice space to score, and she uses that same strength defensively. She’s a team player, lauded by her coaches for her leadership ability. Teammates and fans call her “Captain America.”1

  The USA Hockey captain has three Olympic medals (one gold, two silver) and several trophy cases’ worth of honors in international play, college play, and across two fledgling professional leagues. She’s been skating since age three, graduating from pushing a milk crate across the ice to a hockey stick and puck not long after. In her hometown of Danvers, Massachusetts, she explained, youth hockey was a big deal. It was natural that she would follow her older brother into the sport.

  At first it barely occurred to her to care that she was the only girl playing with the boys. “I was a wicked tomboy when I was a kid,” she said. “I never really thought it was different or weird and my parents supported that, as did my teammates.” It was only when she was a little older that she realized that her idols had all been male athletes—specifically when she saw, in 1998, women playing Olympic ice hockey for the first time. Team USA beat Canada for that first gold, and Duggan said, “It was the first time I had seen elite women playing hockey. I didn’t even know that they existed.” Those women went on a media tour after the Games, and she got to meet Gretchen Ulion, who’d scored the very first goal in that gold-medal game. “I got to put her medal around my neck and take a picture and put her jersey on. That is the moment I would say changed my life. I became committed to the dream of captaining Team USA to a gold medal, really, from that young age.”

  She’s since reconnected with Ulion and taken a new photo that includes her own three medals as well. But there were thousands of hours of ice time to be logged in between those moments. Duggan broke her goal down into smaller goals: she’d have to join a girls’ team, and then play college hockey at the Division I level. Competitive girls’ hockey was still a rare thing to find; her best chance was to get into and attend a private high school where there were teams to join. She was able to do that thanks to her family’s support, and was recruited from there to play collegiate hockey at the University of Wisconsin.

  “Even now, when I go speak in schools, the number one thing that student athletes want to hear about is ‘How do you juggle it? How do you maintain it all?’” Duggan competed in Division I hockey while working on a biology degree and then wound up joining the national team while still in college, adding to her jam-packed schedule. “It took a little bit of trial and error to figure out how it worked. My freshman year, I struggled a little bit with the balance of intense elite-level Division I athletics, playing for a team that was trying to win a national championship, and new demands of school, and there is no hand-holding in college. I went to a school with forty thousand undergrads, so they don’t even care if you show up in class,” she laughed. “I always prided myself on being a great student and there is something to be said about balancing your social life to an extent, and having friends and doing things that make you happy outside of hockey and school as well.”

  Duggan had been invited to her first USA Hockey training camp in December 2006, and she made the national team that next spring. “There had been a few other girls in my position. We had grown up together through prep-school hockey and college hockey. A few of us made the national team for the first time together,” she said. “It was my first time playing with the big girls and putting on that US jersey. I can picture what the locker room looked like and the feelings that I felt. To this day, every time I put that jersey on, I always take a moment and take a deep breath. It is a really special thing that you can’t take for granted.” In sports, she noted, injuries and aging mean that you aren’t assured another shot. The only guarantee is that you won’t have it forever. But she also takes that moment to appreciate all the work she’s put in to get there.

  They may not have held her hand at the university, Duggan noted, but there were resources available there that she and the rest of the women’s team would miss after graduating. “I played at a Big 10 school that valued its athletics. We won a lot of national championships and they put a lot of resources into us,” she said. “But upon graduation you are pretty much thrown to the wolves. The pro leagues that had existed and do exist are nowhere near offering what the collegiate experience was like.” Once out of the university, she had to find her own ice time in order to keep in shape, and sometimes practiced at 11:00 at night to fit skating in around a full-time job to pay the bills. The pace was grueling, and there was nothing like the support she’d had from the coaches and trainers that the university paid for. “You are on a bus trip back from Buffalo to Boston at three or four o’clock in the morning. How is your body going to recover from that?”

  The women have nothing that compares to the men’s National Hockey League (NHL) in terms of resources, audience, and most importantly, pay scale. The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) didn’t begin paying players at all until the 2017–2018 season, its eleventh. And those pay rates would range from just $2,000 to $10,000 (Canadian dollars) for the season. The American National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) had launched in 2015 to much fanfare, announcing that it would pay a decent rate, but those salaries ranged from $10,000 to $25,000, still nothing like the men’s league, where even the lowest-paid players make high six figures. Duggan knew going in that it wasn’t going to be like the NHL, that it would be a grind. She knew women were still in a fight to be taken seriously as professional athletes, and that carving out an audience for women’s pro hockey would take time and more work. She knew what it was like to spend hours each day training, on the ice and off it, in the gym, working to build muscle and speed and endurance. In her senior year, she’d won the college game’s highest honor, the Patty Kazmaier Award, granted annually to the top player in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). That was 2011. She figured she could make it all work.2

  But to commit to the game after university required an additional level of effort from the players—it meant Duggan had a commitment to fight for the sport as a whole. It meant doing media appearances (when the teams bothered to promote themselves) and talking to fans no matter how tired she was. It meant finding a job to pay the bills, since pro hockey and USA Hockey didn’t do that. For most of her time on the US team, the athletes were paid a meager stipend, not enough to live on and certainly not enough to cover the costs of training, and only in the months leading up to the Olympics. The CWHL didn’t pay at all when she started there, and when she joined the NWHL, Duggan, one of the league’s highest paid and most marketable stars, made just $22,500 for that first season.

  In order to fund her playing career, Duggan found a position coaching hockey at Clarkson University in upstate New York. That was while she was playing for the CWHL’s Boston Blades. She would spend all week at her coaching job—finding her own training time—then coach their games on the weekend and drive all night to her own game on Sunday, then drive back the same night in order to be at her desk on Monday. Her wife, also a hockey player (for the USA’s archrival Canadian team) supported her through it, as did friends, coworkers, and teammates who understood her commitment. But the travel was exhausting, and in 2018 she left the coaching job in order to focus on training.3

  Within a decade of graduating from the University of Wisconsin, she’d won a title with her CWHL team, a second Olympic silver (the first came while she was still playing college hockey), three international titles, and then the gold in 2018. By then, she’d made playing her full-time focus, and was part of an ongoing fight for recognition for the sport. In that time, too, participation in women’s hockey had grown by 34 percent, with over eighty thousand women and girls playing the game by the 2018–2019 season.4

  The juggling act was more than exha
usting—it was a constant reminder that women’s hockey didn’t get the respect it deserved, even as Duggan and her teammates proved their commitment and skill time and again. “When I think back to that time now,” she said, “I am like, ‘Oh my gosh. How did I even do that?’”

  SPORTS, LIKE ART, IS A NEAR UNIVERSAL HUMAN HABIT THAT HAS BEEN commodified and turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. It is also a lens through which we can see what—and who—we value as a society. Sports tell us much about whose bodies and lives we think matter.

  We still refer to “playing” a sport, though the earliest organized sports were more likely drawn from training for battle than from play. These roots are obvious for boxing and wrestling, as well as for fencing and the hurling of various objects; they are perhaps less so for gymnastics, but still related to the need for physical fitness for war. Other sports come from means of transportation—boating, ice skating, skiing, and long-distance running. Team sports might date back to China, where the sport called “football” by most of the world and “soccer” in the United States was born perhaps two thousand years ago, though it was formalized in England. The ancient Greeks brought us the Olympics, where athletes competed in javelin and discus, footraces and horse-drawn chariot races, wrestling and more.5

  Many of the sports we have professionalized had their debut between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Cricket dates back a little earlier, as does rugby, modified from a Roman game. Monks invented something like tennis in the eleventh century in France. Native people in the Americas played precursors of lacrosse, ritualized games that had a spiritual purpose as well as physical; the colonizers tried to eradicate the games before co-opting them. Golf was invented in Scotland, where it was banned in 1457, along with soccer, when the Scots needed to defend themselves against English invasion. Field hockey and similar games date back centuries, and the Mi’kmaq people of what is now known as Nova Scotia played something we now recognize as ice hockey. But it was the late nineteenth century when sports began to be codified and shaped into competitive leagues, and when the Olympics were revived and turned into an international athletic competition. According to Mark Perryman, author of Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be, the Olympics at that time was “an event for patricians, immersed in the cult of the gentleman-amateur.” Those without the means to train, to travel, and to compete without being paid were left out entirely.6

  Those first modern Olympic Games, in 1896, were held in Athens but founded by a Frenchman. The committee banned women (though one snuck in and ran the marathon anyway), and treated Black athletes as lesser. Countries under the yoke of imperialism competed under the banners of the colonizers. Still, the Games were held with a lofty goal in mind: international cooperation and peace. The Olympic Charter of 1894 included the idea of an “Olympic village,” where all the athletes would live alongside one another; the founders hoped that if they could interact peacefully for a couple of weeks, they’d be less likely to go to war later. (Unfortunately, those patrician founders seem to have forgotten who declares wars in the first place, and their aims for world peace spectacularly failed.)7

  These twin ideas—sports as play, and sports as war—continue to shape our experience of sports to this day. Yet despite their history of entanglement in political wrangling, too many people still have a hard time understanding sports as political, and when athletes remind us that they are so—as Colin Kaepernick did when he took a knee to protest state violence against Black people—they are told to “shut up and play.” Sports as what they have become today—a workplace for the players and team staff, and a multibillion-dollar industry that has made a small number of people incredibly rich, and provided a playground for those even richer to exert power—proves even harder to take seriously. After all, it’s just a game, right?

  Yet sports have been intertwined with global capitalism since those early attempts at professionalization. Despite the gloss of “amateurism,” those early Olympics were connected to trade fairs and “commercial exhibitions”; international trade was flourishing, and friendly competition seemed to be another way to make a little money putting on a spectacle. But in the Victorian era, sports were mostly deemed a waste of time and energy that could be better spent working, for men, and looking decorative while laced into a corset, for women. Those who had leisure time at all were supposed to look elsewhere for entertainments, and those who worked physically grueling jobs all day had little energy for sports when they left work (though the shorter hours movement would slowly change that). The sports that the working class did participate in were considered uncouth by those who thought of themselves as their betters—entertainments like cockfighting or dogfighting or bare-knuckled boxing too brutal to bear. But that opinion began to change with the turn of the century, as social reformers decided sports could be a means of uplift for the workers.8

  Sports, in the minds of the reformers, could teach the working class the value of healthy competition. Such exertions could improve their work ethic, give them a sense of self-discipline, and hone their bodies, the better to work longer. President Theodore Roosevelt, a devotee of all sorts of physical activity himself, argued, “Virile, masterful qualities alone can maintain and defend this very civilization. There is no better way [to develop this] than by encouraging the sports which develop such qualities as courage, resolution, and endurance. No people has ever yet done great and lasting work if its physical type was infirm and weak.” Sports made men out of, presumably, boys. So capital turned to funding organizations through which (some) workers could let out their energies in sporting activities, either through external institutions like the YMCA or directly creating teams for their own employees. Professional teams like the Green Bay Packers reflect this history in their names.9

  As sports became professionalized, there was money and fame for the grabbing for ambitious working-class athletes. It was a risk, of course, but when the alternatives were other forms of back-breaking work, why not see if boxing or football or baseball could buy you a ticket off the assembly line? The ideal of hard work as a path to upward mobility wasn’t going to be true if you stayed at your day job; maybe, just maybe, it could pay off if you put that work into mastering a sport instead. Star boxers, such as Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, way back in 1908, or jockeys, like Isaac Murphy, who rode racehorses to fame and fortune in the late 1800s (until Black riders were quietly pushed out of the sport), provided something to aspire to that was beyond a lifetime of drudgery.10

  The Communist Party’s Lester Rodney understood the potential of sports to reach people politically. As sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote, Rodney believed in “covering sports in a way they had never been covered before—with an eye on their social impact.” He campaigned for baseball to integrate in the 1930s, covered the famous fight between Joe Louis and Hitler’s Aryan hero Max Schmeling, and got union workers engaged in the fight against racism by using sports as a mechanism to explain power and fairness.11

  Sports spread alongside the growth of the mass media, particularly radio. More people could listen in to a game or a boxing match than could possibly attend it personally; radio, moreover, was a thing that one could listen to at work. World War II was played out on many battlegrounds, but one of them was a propaganda war. Hitler’s Germany took advantage of the new technologies to broadcast an image of Aryan superiority to the world. For “Brown Bomber” Joe Louis to knock out a white German champ, for Jesse Owens to win four gold medals at Hitler’s very own Berlin Olympics (where the modern torch relay was invented), was to undermine this idea of racial purity and to remind those watching that Black athletes had been held back not by genetics, but by racism. Louis was both an exceptional star and a symbol of the wasted potential of so many others who’d never been given a chance in white supremacist societies. In this way sports both undermines and underlines the notion of individual genius that the artistic narrative has brought us.12

  The work that celeb
rity Black athletes had to do, then, was doubled. Like Meghan Duggan, they often felt a responsibility not just to personally be their physical best or to be part of the team, but to carry a message beyond their sport to those who looked up to them. That responsibility fell most heavily on the backs of those who broke barriers, like Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play Major League Baseball (MLB), who had to endure being spat upon, opponents throwing balls to injure him, and racist slurs shouted from the stands and whispered on the field, and, like any disciplined civil rights activist sitting in at a lunch counter, never show that it got to him. Robinson did twice the work of anyone else on that field and still managed to be one of the best.13

  While professional sports grew, the United States also was home to a different kind of empire, built on the idea of “amateur” athletics. Like the Olympics, which celebrated amateurism in a way that echoed the values of its wealthy creators—who saw in sports a pastime for the comfortable, rather than a job deserving a wage—college sports would make some people rich while athletes labored unpaid. Following the logic of Teddy Roosevelt and others, the advocates of college sports, and particularly college football, saw sports as a way to toughen up elite students at the country’s poshest schools. The first American football game was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. Other Ivies, including Yale and Harvard, soon took up the tradition. But college football players weren’t aiming for a career in sports; even if they had wanted to, there wasn’t a professional league at the time that would have allowed them to keep playing. Nor was it the goal of these programs: if you were attending Harvard, you were already pointed in the direction of an elite position.14

  Of course, someone was making money from college sports right from the start. The first-ever paid college coach, at Harvard, made nearly twice what a (well-compensated) full professor at the university did. But the amateurism—a word derived directly from the Latin verb meaning “to love”—of the athletes was never questioned, even as the sport sometimes destroyed their bodies. The term “student-athlete” was invented by the founders of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the 1950s in order to deflect claims for workers’ compensation—it was first used, according to historian Taylor Branch, writing in The Atlantic, against the widow of Ray Dennison, a college football player who died of a head injury sustained on the field. “Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a ‘work-related’ accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits?” Branch wrote. In 1957, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in the school’s favor, saying that Dennison’s family was not eligible for benefits, because the college was “not in the football business.” Student-athletes, the court implied, were playing a game for fun and for self-improvement, a narrative that comes back to haunt today’s players of professional and amateur ball alike.15