[If it’s Super
Bowl week, it’s time for another SportsStudying
series! This time on the fraught and contested, and not the slightest bit
new, intersections between sports and politics. I’d love to hear your thoughts
on any of the week’s posts or any related issues!]
On two NBA
superstars and the evolving intersection of sports and politics.
As the NFL
national anthem protests and their various responses have unfolded over the
last few years, one of the critiques I’ve seen raised most frequently is that
these athletes are unnecessarily bringing politics into the sports world. On
the one hand, as I hope pretty much all of the posts under
my Sports tag here at the blog make clear (as do all of the great posts at
the Sport in American History blog),
that critique misses the ways that sports have always been connected to—indeed,
interconnected with—politics, society, culture, and everything else in our
nation and world. In that sense, Kaepernick and his peers have simply forced us
to examine those interconnections, a process that clearly frustrates and angers
many of our fellow Americans. Yet at the same time, while such ties between
sports and politics have thus always been part of our culture, there seems to
me to be no question that the overt and prominent interconnections between
these realms have become more frequent and more pronounced in this evolving age
of Trump. And the high-profile cases of two of—perhaps the two—biggest
basketball superstars in the world exemplify this striking and complex trend.
Steph
Curry’s purposeful engagement with Trump and the political realm is on the
surface by far the more surprising of these two situations. As he has over the
last handful of seasons become one of the NBA’s most prominent and popular
stars—and the leader of a team that has dominated the league like few others
over that period—Curry has done so in the mold of a young Magic
Johnson: charismatic and charming, seemingly just as popular with opposing
fanbases as with his own, an irresistible ambassador (along with his just-as-likable young
family) for the league and sport. So for a player in that mold to take the
step of expressing
uncertainty about whether he would attend a White House ceremony
celebrating his team’s championship—to, that is, not just intervene in a
political conversation, but express a direct criticism of a political leader,
risking alienating some portion of his fanbase among other potential
effects—was a striking moment, even before Trump did his usual thing and escalated
the situation on Twitter. While of course I agree with Curry’s perspective
and stand, it’s also important just to note the significance of the moment
itself, as a reflection of this new era in American sports and society.
One of the
figures who responded most directly to Trump’s Twitter attack on Curry was LeBron
James, whose Tweet
in response to Trump remains one of the more incendiary (and
popular) social media messages (in any context) offered by an athlete to
date. On the one hand, LeBron’s response seems less surprising than Curry’s
words, both because of LeBron’s
history of activism and because he’s already such a polarizing (and frequently
hated-upon) figure that he had a good deal less to lose in that sense that
did Curry. Yet if we take a step back and compare
LeBron to the basketball great with whom he is most often linked (including
by himself), Michael Jordan, I would still argue that this moment is a
striking and significant one. Jordan was far from likable, and indeed happy to
be hated as much as loved; but he also steadfastly recused himself from the
political realm, both for brand/endorsement
reasons and (it seemed) because of how laser-focused he was on athletic
success and dominance. LeBron has often seemed just as laser-focused throughout
his hugely successful career to date, and of course has garnered quite a few endorsements
of his own along the way. So for him to take on Trump so directly likewise
reflects this new world of sports and society in which we find ourselves.
Last sporting
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports and politics intersections you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment