Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
to be done is teaching men not to rape.
—Kurt Cobain
The world of sports has a sexual assault problem the same way one can say that Miami has a global warming problem. In other words, it’s true, but it’s also an issue that extends well beyond just this one corner of the planet. The sports world is not a hermetically sealed arena, cut off from the real world; it is here in this real world where we need to begin the discussion about understanding humanity’s entrenched culture of gender violence.
The world has a violence-against-women and sexual assault problem. According to the World Health Organization, 35 percent of all women globally are survivors of some form of violence. Then there is the United States. This country has a violence-against-women and sexual assault problem, with numbers just below the global average; the Justice Department estimates that 68 percent of rapes are not reported to law enforcement. Our college campuses have a sexual assault problem.These institutions of higher learning are places where one in five women say that they have faced sexual violence, with 80 percent of all cases not reported. We also know that the issue is handled terribly by too many universities. According to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, at least 183 colleges and universities are currently under federal investigation for mishandling sexual assault claims on their campuses.
We know as well that on many campuses, sports are at the heart of campus life and athletes are deified, entitled campus leaders who have a tremendous amount of influence on their communites. These heroes are more likely to commit and be charged with sexual assault. One study showed that college athletes make up 3.3 percent of male students but 19 percent of those accused of sexual assault. A 2012 Rutgers analysis found something similar and the Boston Globe put it, “It is unclear whether college athletes are more likely to commit sexual crimes than other students. But we see a unique sense of entitlement, sexual and otherwise, among some male college athletes, especially those in high-profile or revenue-producing sports.”
Or, as Jessica Luther wrote on social media, in a post that inspired us to approach her to write this trailblazing book, “The stories about campus administrations or athletic depts. failing to do a damn thing about sexual violence are endless . . . Yesterday I just told someone I couldn’t pursue one because I was already working on three other ones. I have that same conversation at least twice a week at this point.”
The point here is simple: we have a problem that without question exists independently of sports, yet we also have a lot of data that says it’s worse in sports. In recent years colleges like Missouri, Vanderbilt, Florida State, and Tennessee have seen such cases. These stories are chained together by the blaringly obvious yet little-discussed relationship between male jock culture and rape culture. Everyone who either cares about stopping the violence or about the lessons produced by sports has an obligation to educate themselves on the issue and speak out.
It is for all of these reasons that Unsportsmanlike Conduct was a book that needed to be written. Jock culture has morphed into rape culture on too many campuses, and we in the sports media have been silent about it for far too long. Right now, many of the institutions of higher learning discussed in these pages are attempting to grapple with this reality. Yet it often feels like so much flailing: trying to cover gaping wounds with bandages or shoveling sand into the ocean just to be able to say, Hey, we’re trying!
These cases tend to be viewed in isolation from one another: individual instances on different campuses. They are rarely examined systemically—as a symptom of a college sports landscape that exploits so-called student-athletes and then far too often excuses any and all behavior as a method of payment. Now that people are finally talking about this issue, we desperately need to expand this discussion, and Unsportsmanlike Conduct fills the gap. This was a book that needed to be written but could not have been written by anyone other than Jessica Luther, who we knew we could trust to tell this story the way it needed to be told. With a track record going back years, Luther has covered this story with a relentless consistency that no one on the sportswriting landscape can match. She also provides a framework that ensures the reader will not throw up her or his hands with despair or seek out easy scapegoats. This is in fact more than a book; it is a tool to help crack the code of why these assaults keep happening. This will help athletic departments—if they are willing to listen—to cease being examples of what is wrong with university life and help make them the leaders they need to be in the push to stop the violence.
—Dave Zirin, Editor, Edge of Sports Books
Introduction
The Playbook
I.
I was born with garnet and gold blood. Both of my parents graduated from Florida State University (FSU). Growing up, I spent Saturday afternoons in the autumn watching FSU football, either sitting next to my dad in front of a TV or in the stands of Doak Campbell Stadium. When it came time for me to go to college, I only applied to one school. And during the four years I was at Florida State, I went to every home game, sweating in the blistering heat of an early-season eleven a.m. start or freezing cold during mid-November rivalry games against Florida.
I learned early on how to be a fan. There are rules and rituals the fans of a sports team follow and do, a kind of collective performance before and during games that show the love for our school and team. The playbook for fans consists of memorizing chants, wearing the right colors, painting our faces, and always singing along whenever you hear the school’s fight song. The most important play, though, is the one where you give your team your love and devotion, and you trust in the players and coaches even when they play badly and even if you have to ignore what they do when they are off the field and out of uniform. This, the fan playbook prescribes, is what good fans do.
I used to be a really good FSU fan.
On January 4, 2000, in the middle of my sophomore year, I was sitting high in the stands of the Superdome in New Orleans, watching Chris Weinke and Peter Warrick lead FSU to a national championship (they defeated Michael Vick’s Virginia Tech Hokies 46–29). I stayed for the trophy presentation, crawling along the seats until I was positioned in front of the stage where Warrick accepted the Most Valuable Player award. I collected newspapers the next day that had headlines about our championship win, and when I got back to Florida, I painstakingly cut out pictures and articles, combined them with photographs I had taken, and made myself a scrapbook so I would always remember how great that experience was. I’m sure somewhere in my attic is a T-shirt from that year with the words Wire-to-Wire on it (FSU was the only team to start the year No. 1 and keep the ranking all the way through).
I remember, before and during the championship game, justifying to myself and any Virginia Tech fan who would listen that Warrick deserved to be on the field despite having been arrested late in September 1999 for grand theft. In collusion with a store clerk at a Tallahassee Dillard’s, he and FSU wide receiver Laveranues Coles stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise. After they both pleaded down to misdemeanor petty theft, Coles was kicked off the team (he was already on probation for an earlier incident). Warrick, easily the most famous person on the team, an integral part of the offense, and without a prior record, was only suspended two games. I had no problem with any of this, mainly because I paid almost no attention to it. I kept my eyes on the prize of a football championship and my trust in FSU’s coach, Bobby Bowden. But I was also 100 percent sure it was fair that Warrick was playing.[1]
Over the past decade or so, I’ve suffered through the years of mediocre FSU football, always believing my team could do it, then watching sadly as they collapsed once again. Don’t bring up the name Chris Rix around me. I am still sad over the way Xavier Lee’s potential never matched up with his play. And I remember the name Drew Weatherford because I am apparently a masochist who likes to continually cause myself pain by reliving the later 2000s.
But then the 2013 season happened. FSU once again had a defense. And an O-line. And, most famously, we had Jameis Winston at quarterback.
Winston was the No. 1 quarterback recruit in 2012. He redshirted during the 2012–13 season and came out of the gates blazing in 2013.