[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 30th 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 4th, 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 13th 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?
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