Bob Costas—a person famous for talking in purple prose about sports—has a problem with ESPN giving it's coveted Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Caitlyn Jenner at next month's ESPY Awards. While Costas goes to great lengths to point out he has no problem whatsoever with Caitlyn Jenner, he feels like giving her the award is a "crass exploitation play." Bob. Bob.The fucking ESPYs are a "crass exploitation play." The ESPYs are a mashup of US Weekly and SportsCenter with a twinkly Tom Rinaldi bit thrown in for balance. The ESPYs are utterly meaningless to anyone who cares about anything real in this world. But it's on TV so people will watch. This is why the show is always on during Major League Baseball's All-Star Break, a week in July that's usually a sports wasteland. So, how to get people to watch ESPN? Invent an award show that is basically the SportsCenter Top Ten and a Justin Timberlake dance routine. Is showing Jim Valvano's emotional speech 24/7 in the run-up to the show not equally crass and exploitative? What am I missing here?
Advertisement
"Some measure of personal courage." To give you an idea of the kind of shit Caitlyn Jenner has had to put up with since revealing herself to the world, I will offer you one, very minor example: people are freaking out that she is getting an ESPY Award. An ESPY award! In the scheme of awards a person—let alone an Olympic fucking hero—can receive, this is the equivalent of a nice note from your second grade teacher in an old yearbook. And people are outraged! Even people with brains who are otherwise kindhearted and thoughtful, like Bob Costas, have a problem with it. I am having so much more trouble understanding the importance of an ESPY award than I am with anything Caitlyn Jenner has said or done.If anything, ESPN should be applauded for this. A good chunk of people are going to be exposed to a slice of life they have never seen before. That can only be good. Sure, the same people who are outraged today will continue to be outraged on July 15th. But forget about them. There will absolutely be people watching that night and they will see Jenner walk out on stage and it will change their whole outlook.And listen, the idea of the Arthur Ashe Award is great. It's never a bad idea to point out and reward the good things good people have done. But treating it, or any award for that matter, as some holy relic passed on to only the most worthy is patently absurd. Lauren Hill was no less heroic because ESPN decided to give the award to Jenner instead of her. Nor is Jenner any better than Hill simply by virtue of being the 2015 honoree. There is always an argument to be made in favor of a more deserving recipient for every award. Yet that doesn't mean the person who ultimately got it didn't also "deserve" it.But this all obscures the real point: no one felt strongly about this award until it was given to someone who bothered them. That's it. People don't like Caitlyn Jenner—or Michael Sam the year before—so they don't think she should get an award. They bend over backwards to find someone else more deserving. They go on a radio show and in the most mealymouthed way possible suggest maybe someone else was more deserving."It strikes me that awarding the Arthur Ashe Award to Caitlyn Jenner is just a crass exploitation play – it's a tabloid play," Costas said. "In the broad world of sports, I'm pretty sure they could've found someone – and this is not anything against Caitlyn Jenner – who was much closer actively involved in sports, who would've been deserving of what that award represents. That's not to say it doesn't take some measure of personal courage to do what Caitlyn Jenner has done."