Culture
BOS Nation, a publicity campaign gone wrong and an apology for the hurt it caused
Tuesday should have been a triumphant night for the NWSL’s latest expansion team, but less than a day after a packed event in downtown Boston to officially launch BOS Nation’s team name and colors, the club issued an apology for the hurt the publicity campaign had caused.
Five hundred fans had RSVP’d for the event at the Dick’s House of Sport store, with Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu, Massachusetts lieutenant governor Kim Driscoll, former USMNT and New England Revolution player Charlie Davies and former USWNT and Boston Breakers players Lauren Holiday and Kristine Lilly in attendance. Former USA Hockey and Boston Blades player Angela Ruggiero also stopped in. Local vendors served food and drinks and muralist Laura DeDonato was there, not just to paint a live mural during the party but also as the person who had originally coined the name “Boston Breakers” during the WUSA era.
But amid a thoughtful launch party, there was a thoughtless element: fans had been reacting negatively not just to the team’s name but to its use of a “Balls Balls Balls” video campaign by local creative ad agency Colossus. The “Balls” ad on its Instagram featured the caption, “Thanks to our brave clients for having the guts to be wildly provocative with this launch.”
The Colossus ad also had comments turned off, unlike other posts, presumably due to the volume of negative reactions. Seattle Reign midfielder Quinn, who is trans and nonbinary, had commented on the team’s Instagram video earlier that day, saying, “Feels transphobic. Yikes.” They later also said in the comments that their original comment had been “hidden by Instagram.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu speaks at the launch event (Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Wu, Davies and team owners made remarks from the stage hailing the team as a community asset, a way to change local children’s lives through sport, and “a nation made up entirely of you, the many stories, the cultures and passions that make up our city,” a protestor stood in the back, holding up a sign that read in bold letters, “NO ROOM FOR TRANSPHOBIA.”
The protestor, who identified themselves as Theo from Dorchester, Mass., later said the sign was a reaction to the team’s “Balls” ad.
“I think there was a lot about the launch that could have been done better, but I think the (Balls) video was really short-sighted,” they said. “I wish they had just asked some people, because it is gender essentialism, talking about balls as men’s genitals. There are men who don’t have balls. There are women who do have balls… It was offensive and hurtful.
“I’ve been waiting for this team since the Breakers folded. I was so excited. I’ve been at every event so far, and it was, as a trans person, extremely hurtful to see how they rolled this out with just senseless transphobia. It didn’t need to happen. It was completely preventable.”
“We fully acknowledge that the content of the campaign did not reflect the safe and welcoming environment we strive to create for all, and we apologize to the LGBTQ+ community and to the trans community in particular for the hurt we caused,” the team said in Wednesday’s statement.
GO DEEPER
Boston NWSL club misses the mark with BOS Nation FC and marketing campaign
As of Wednesday morning, the toomanyballs.com website also appears to be down.
Theo was not the only fan there who found the ad hurtful.
Liam, from Roxbury, Mass., said, “As a transgender person, I’m really disappointed to see the focus on balls as an identification of whether or not you can be a woman. It’s really disappointing to see a team that espouses values of diversity and inclusion go immediately into saying that anyone with balls is not a part of the women’s soccer community.”
The name of the team also evoked strong reactions, as evidenced by the stream of negative comments under every social media post on both Twitter and Instagram that had been rolled out as part of the launch.
“It’s not a name I would pick,” said a fan who identified himself as Anthony from Billerica, Mass. “I don’t think it’s a name that’s really going to resonate with a lot of Boston people, especially seeing the comments on videos and stuff. It definitely could use some work. And I definitely think it could be more democratic with the people of Boston, too. Maybe that would be interesting to do, but it’s not a bad name. It’s not the worst name ever, but it’s not the best.”
“I am not super-comfortable with it,” added Liam. “It’s really easy to draw a nationalism bit… Are we all, as their supporters, ‘the nationalists’? Don’t know if I love that.”
“If it had not been broken by Sandra (Herrera, of CBS Sports), who I really respect as a reporter, I would have thought it was a joke. It’s embarrassing,” said Theo.
The criticism at the event, however, seemed to be coming from a constructive place, rather than an out-and-out attack. Theo was wearing an NWSL Boston hat featuring the team’s placeholder logo, purchased before the team launched its name and ad campaign, and as they had noted, they were eagerly waiting for the return of NWSL to the city as a Breakers fan.
Liam was the same, draped in a team scarf — this was not someone who had come to the event strictly to be angry at the team, but to try to see what could be done moving forward as a long-time Boston soccer fan.
“I’ve been interested in the local soccer community since around 2013, when I first moved here,” he said. “I had a partner at the time who got me into the Revolution (the area’s MLS team), and then from there into the Breakers. So I’ve been kind of on the sidelines of the scene, but now that it’s in my backyard, I really want to get involved.”
Other fans had similar sentiments, even advocating to allow for a little bit of grace in the process.
“I think (the name) could use a little bit of extra love,” said Natasha from Worcester, Mass. “But also, like, people can also understand it goes through stages, and people have to figure it out and, if it doesn’t stick, they can change the name at any time if they want to.”
“The name announcement was kind of interesting. That’s just my real thoughts about it. But I’m always in support of anything Boston, to be honest,” said a fan who identified herself as DJ Whysham, from Dorchester.
“I don’t think it’s too late for the team to reverse course and try something else different, given the immediate negative response from the fanbase,” said Liam.
It was clear that responses at the event were from fans who want BOS Nation to succeed. While the online reaction was overwhelmingly negative, the locals who form the team’s home fanbase were sincere.
There could yet be room for Boston to evolve, in more ways than one.
The fans at the launch party seemed ready to get behind changes for the better, and to have a team of their own to root for.
(Top photo: Steph Yang/The Athletic)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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