January 31, 2020: Sports and Politics: The Nationals at the White House

[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 different ways to think about a surprising and frustrating moment.

I’m not sure any sequence of events better expressed the yin/yang quality of hope and despair in late 2019 America than did a two-part moment involving the Washington Nationals. On Wednesday October 30^th the Nationals won an epic Game 7 over the Houston Astros to clinch their first World Series title (and the first championship for a Washington baseball team in more than 70 years), bringing a great deal of joy to all us sports aficionados who had become fans of this likeable underdog team throughout their consistently nail-biting postseason run. And less than week later, on Monday November 4^th, many of those Nationals attended a White House ceremony in their honor where some players expressed (to this fan at least) surprisingly enthusiastic support for the most divisive and unpopular president in American history. (To be fair, a number of Nats did not attend the ceremony, including closer Sean Doolittle who articulated his reasons for staying away in an eloquent and inspiring set of comments that exemplified his and his wife’s consistent commitment to social justice.)

Ironically, the most aggressively pro-Trump message came from one of my favorite Nats, Ryan Zimmerman (a favorite both because he attended the University of Virginia and thus had been a favorite of my parents for many years, and because he was literally the first National and was able to contribute to this World Series title 14 years later). Zimmerman said to Trump, “We’d also like to thank you for keeping everyone here safe in our country, and continuing to make America the greatest country to live in the world,” and to be honest I don’t think there’s any way to analyze Zimmerman’s “everyone” and “our country” that doesn’t focus on a white supremacist, exclusionary vision of America and Americans. I’m not suggesting that Zimmerman is an overt white supremacist (I have no idea whether he is or not), but those phrases—particularly suggesting that the president who has lost thousands of immigrant children, inspired hate crimes and mass shootings, called for the jailing and execution of political adversaries, etc. has kept “everyone here safe”—unquestionably depend upon a sense that only certain Americans are truly part of “our country.” It was beyond frustrating to hear a favorite National use such phrases to praise such a president.

The other most surprising and striking moment, when Nationals journeyman catcher Kurt Suzuki donned a MAGA hat and was embraced by Trump, might seem even more frustrating still. Suzuki, who was born in Hawaii to parents of Japanese American heritage, would seem to be one of the players who could most understand the destructive effects of Trump’s (and Zimmerman’s) exclusionary rhetoric. But Suzuki downplayed the moment’s political or divisive sides, repeating at the time, “I love you all” and then adding in an interview afterward that he was “just trying to have some fun.” I think it’s possible to take him at his word, to see an athlete caught up in the continued aftermath of the pinnacle of sporting achievement (on the team level, anyway) and just enjoying the crazy ride (made even crazier, I’m sure, by the fact that it came in his 13^th Major League season). As I hope my weeklong series has illustrated, sports and politics have always been interconnected and will certainly remain so—but that doesn’t mean that every sporting moment is also a political one, or that we can’t still seek and find the joys of sports on their own terms. The story of the Nationals, like so many contemporary stories, features all these contradictory but consistently present layers.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports and politics intersections you’d highlight?

January 30, 2020: Sports and Politics: Curry, LeBron, and Trump

[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?

January 29, 2020: Sports and Politics: Kaepernick in Context

[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 ways the controversial quarterback’s protests extended a historical influence.

Although the presidential election of course sucked much of the oxygen out of any other news stories during the fall of 2016, one of the other most talked-about stories of that season was been San Francisco 49ers backup (although former Super Bowl starting) quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s #BlackLivesMatter-connected national anthem protests. In the course of his season of protesting, Kaepernick inspired similar protests across the league (and other sports leagues), sparred with a Supreme Court Justice (and even changed her perspective in the process, per that hyperlinked story), and produced numerous thinkpieces on whether he was contributing to apparently declining ratings and attendance for the NFL, among many other effects. But too much of the time, then and in the more than years since, journalistic stories on Kaepernick have focused on those 2016 questions and issues, rather than linking him and his protest to what seems to me (and other historians) its perfectly clear historical origin: the 1968 national anthem Black Power protest in Mexico City by U.S. Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

As is so often the case with history (see for example the collective embrace of Martin Luther King Jr., compared to the vitriol and hate he faced in his lifetime), the Mexico City protest has perhaps come to seem less controversial or divisive than was the case in its moment. As Smith and Carlos have amply testified, they were (and have continued to be for nearly four decades) on the receiving end of just as much racist, faux-patriotic nastiness in the aftermath of their protest as Kaepernick has been. Which, to be clear, they very much expected, and indeed was precisely the point of choosing both the Olympic stage overall and the potent symbolic moment of the national anthem specifically as the occasion for their protest. Similarly, Kaepernick has always made clear that he was and remains prepared for the consequences of his own anthem protest, and has—by donating a million dollars to activist organizations in the Bay Area—demonstrated his deep and ongoing commitment to the cultural and political causes for which he’s protesting. In those ways, Kaepernick’s protests can be seen as also paralleling the Black Panther Party—a source of controversy and division, but also an example of thoughtful and committed activism for and contributions to social justice efforts.

While the Mexico City protest and the Black Panther Party had a good deal in common, I would also differentiate them when it comes to audience. That is, the Black Panthers very overtly focused on addressing and engaging with fellow African Americans, while Smith and Carlos were seeking to reach a broader national (and even worldwide) audience with their message. Both kinds of activism are equally important and complement each other, so the difference isn’t a hierarchy in any sense; just another layer to analyzing these respective efforts. I would put Kaepernick’s protests in the “broader audience” category, and I have one particularly clear illustration of his effects on that level: my sons. While I talk about lots of AmericanStudies kinds of topics with the boys, I don’t believe we had yet talked about Kaepernick when, out of the blue, my older son told me that his 5^th-grade chorus was practicing “America the Beautiful,” but that he had chosen not to sing, “just like Colin Kaepernick.” A few days later, he mentioned that he had decided not to say the Pledge of Allegiance during morning announcements; his teacher asked him to do so, but he resisted. For the three years since, both he and his brother have consistently knelt during the Pledge in their respective classrooms. With at least these two thoughtful young Americans, the influence and inspiration of Kaepernick’s historically grounded protests have been tangible and impressive.

Next sporting post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports and politics intersections you’d highlight?