[November 12th
marked the
125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional
football player, William
“Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Pudge and other
groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to this weekend post on Trump
and sports!]
On two NBA
superstars and the evolving intersection of sports and politics.
As the NFL
national anthem protests and their various responses have continued to
unfold throughout this fall, 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 recent 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 few 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.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on this complex topic, or other athletes you’d highlight?
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