There’s been something in the air with professional sports and it seems to have coincided with the return of fans to arenas. NBA fans seem to have lost their damn mind. A New York Knicks fan spit at the Atlanta Hawks’ Trae Young. A few Utah Jazz fans earned themselves lifetime bans from the home arena after saying some foul and racist things to the parents of Memphis Grizzlies star player Ja Morant. A Philadelphia 76’s fan (disclaimer: I’m a Sixers fan) poured popcorn on the Washington Wizard’s Russell Westbrook as he left the court due to an injury. Not to be outdone, a Wizards fan ran onto the court a few games later in DC for some never-to-be-known purpose.
Kyrie Irving spent some time playing for the Boston Celtics. This year he found himself playing against the Celtics in the playoffs as a member of the Brooklyn Nets. He made some remarks about returning to Boston as an opposing player, stating that while he understood that there was some animosity toward him from the Boston fanbase, he hoped that they would keep the racist shit to at least a minimum. To this, the (now former) general manager of the Boston Celtics Danny Ainge replied that no one had ever told him about this alleged racism in the city of Boston. Which only confirms that Danny Ainge, like most middle-aged white men, doesn’t have any Black friends.
A Boston fan would go on to throw a bottle at Irving.
In the NFL, the Jacksonville Jaguars signed former quarterback Tim Tebow. They did this despite drafting one of the highest touted quarterback prospects in a generation just last month. They did this even though Tim Tebow is 33 (which is elderly in football years) and the last time he appeared in a professional football game was in 2012 (which is like 40 years ago). They signed Tim Tebow despite him being such a terrible quarterback that they signed him to be a tight end—a position he has only played once in his life.
Oh and Colin Kaepernick, who is also 33 and led his team to a Super Bowl, broke a few NFL records, and last played a game in 2017, and did I mention led his team to a Super Bowl?--still doesn’t have a job in NFL since getting blacklisted for speaking out about police brutality.
Major League Baseball had another recent controversy as Arizona Diamondbacks broadcaster (and former coach) Bob Brenly made a dumb and racist joke about a Black player wearing a du-rag. Brenly’s joke was based on insinuating that recently-deceased Mets pitching great Tom Seaver wouldn’t have worn the du-rag that current Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman was wearing on the mound. Brenly would go on to apologize to Stroman for his comments, but the fact that he had the impulse to make this joke in the first place is important. We will come back to it later.
Professional tennis made the news this week as the world's number two ranked women's player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open citing self-care, as the anxiety of dealing with a critical press was exacerbating her battle with depression. She initially planned to play in the tournament and skip the after-match press conferences, but the French Tennis Federation fined her for the first presser missed and threatened to disqualify her if she missed any more. Now a lot of people supported Naomi’s decision to skip the press conferences, and later her decision to withdraw from the tournament altogether, but many did not. Occasional broadcaster and frequent wet bag of moldy shepherd's pie Piers Morgan called Osaka an “arrogant spoiled brat” and accused her of “weaponizing her mental health” to escape criticism. And while it may be fun to dunk on a fart-propelled racism dispenser like Morgan, feminist tennis icon Billie Jean King tried to ‘'both sides” the situation and ended up producing some top-quality white liberal cringe.
So what is going on here? Well, most Black people and nearly every Black athlete will tell you that this is nothing new. The world of professional sports has always been racist, however, the mode of that racism isn’t always readily apparent (or Danny Ainge would have heard about it by now). Racism in the sports world is actually a very fascinating subject, and while it certainly is based on racial animosity there is an interesting class angle to it as well. To understand it, we have to take a look at the role that sports plays in our society.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a massive sports fan. I grew up in Philadelphia, where rooting for inept and comically unlucky sports teams is practically a clause in the city charter. Philadelphia sports fans share a bond that transcends race and class. I’ve sat in bars with wealthy gun-toting libertarians, former police, and Rush Limbaugh enthusiasts, and we were all united in solidarity against whichever poor referee had just screwed our team. This is the function of sports. It sounds a bit trite to call it an opioid of the masses but that is really what it is. Sports provide an easy foundation around which to foster social bonds. We are united in our love for our home team and our hatred of rival teams.
Professional sports are meant to represent America. It is an inherently nationalistic enterprise. We valorize athletes because they are supposed to embody everything we believe America to be. The American athlete represents hard work, determination, honor, success, and the unquestioned fairness of the meritocratic process. However, what these attributes represent is not America as it actually exists, but rather the mythology of white America. The idea that American greatness was achieved through the virtue and enterprise of white liberal hegemony instead of exploitation and cruelty. The image of the All-American athlete was based on an aesthetic rather than an objective accounting of talent. Being clean-cut, god-fearing, loving one’s country was more a factor in the valorization of athletic achievement than it was counting stats. Those counting stats were cool but if that was what people really loved about sports then the Negro Baseball League would have overtaken Major League Baseball in the hearts and minds of American sports fans.
In its early days, sports was about inculcating and reproducing American culture. Football was used to “civilize” indigenous populations and effectively ethnically cleanse Native American children of their culture. A large part of the reason college athletes go unpaid today is that at its inception collegiate sports was marketed as part of a student's education in work ethic and dedication. Even as those students' labor was generating profits for academic institutions, the consensus was that those athletes should be paying for the privilege of learning how to be an American rather than getting paid for it.
When the color barrier was broken in the sports world it provided an avenue for Black athletes to prove their worthiness to white-dominated society. Those early Black sports stars were important to the cause of Black liberation because they proved that Black people could be just as American as their white counterparts. Even more so, judging by the numbers they were putting up. Those athletes were just as clean-cut, god fearing, and country loving as anybody, they just had a different skin tone. The problems began when those Black athletes began to use their success to shine a light on the inherent contradictions within the American mythos rather than perpetuate it. Muhammed Ali, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos were rebuked in their day because they had used the platforms afforded by athletic success to critique America rather than valorize it.
Things escalated when athletes, especially Black athletes, began leveraging their incredibly specialized labor for more money and power. From 1969 to 1972, Saint Louis Cardinal centerfielder and two-time World Series champion Curtis Flood engaged in a legal battle with Major League Baseball for the right to be a free agent. As late as 1974, professional baseball players had to play for the team they were drafted by until they were either traded, released, or retired. At no point in their career could they choose who they played for. The federal government was particularly invested in Major League Baseball. It was, after all, America’s pastime. But that investment was not on behalf of the players who gave the league value, but rather the team owners. So they granted the MLB an exemption to antitrust laws (a fun fact you may have heard about lately). Curtis Flood lost his case against Major League Baseball in front of the Supreme Court in 1972. Jackie Robinson was one of the few players who openly supported Flood. Most were afraid of reprisals from the owners. But his failed attempt at giving players literal agency in their careers paved the way for the union to negotiate for neutral arbitration which eventually led to players being able to choose where they play baseball.
With free agency came a massive raise for the players and new excitement for the fans who got to see star players choose to sign with their teams. For his trouble, Curtis Flood had his career cut short in 1971 and a bunch of death threats. Flood’s sacrifice enabled other professional leagues to collectively bargain for free agency. Leagues like the NFL had a bastardized version of free agency where the owners still controlled where the best players played. A federal jury ruled this system illegal in 1992 thus creating free agency as we know it today. The NBA established free agency in 1988, the NHL got it in 1995. And thus began the age of player empowerment.
With the ability to choose to play where they wanted American professional athletes also gained the ability to command a larger share of the immense revenue they were generating for sports leagues. The fans and the media began questioning athletes' commitment to the spirit of competition. The players were supposed to be playing for the love of the game, not for the money. In the national consciousness of the sports fan, a player had a fiduciary responsibility to the team they played for. Never mind if the team was underpaying them relative to the profit they generated or simply had been mismanaged to the point of competitive incompetence. The athlete was supposed to give their body and spirit to the sport and only seek the glory and reverence of its patrons as recompense. Sports radio became the home of this discontent and it lives there to this day.
However, despite the unease surrounding players' ability to govern their professional destinies, sports only ever increased in popularity. The relationship between the players and the fans (and the fans’ representatives in the media) developed an almost Hegelian tension. The fans resented the fact that professional athletes no longer served as a perfect reifying reflection of American exceptionalism and yet still desired the libidinal pleasure of neo-gladiatorial competition. The players understood that their salaries, privilege, and relative power came from the support of fans and yet resented the expectation that they are beholden to a bunch of armchair jockeys who would absolutely die if subjected to an offseason training program let alone a full league season.
It’s important to note that this Fan/Player dialectic is not universal among all fans and all players. Professional athletes still represent America, it’s just not the same America that a certain kind of fan wants to see. For all its faults, sports have come to model the reality of America rather than the myth. An America comprised of disparate interests and beliefs. From the poor urban kid suddenly handed millions of dollars, practicing a form of radical Hip Hop capitalism to the traditional clean-cut all-American athlete a la Tim Tebow. Athletes can be social justice activists, domestic abusers, substance abusers, suffering from depression, nationalists, humanitarians, racists, and every intersection in between. For many fans of a median or below median socio-economic status, today's player-empowered athlete is an aspirational figure. A local hero, a representative of marginalized communities and cultures. A realization of the American dream. A lot of fans are more than content to keep their debates around sports centered on the stats and the win column. And indeed I’d argue that today the majority of sports fans fall into this camp.
However, there’s a minority of sports fans and media, driven by the expectations derived from their higher socioeconomic status or their aspirations to achieve a higher socioeconomic status that laments this current age of athlete agency. For them, professional athletes aren’t fully self-conscious human beings but rather avatars of the society they imagine they occupy. When athletes exhibit agency by choosing another team, holding out for money, speaking about social issues, taking time off for mental health, or just wearing a du-rag, they are betraying the implicit promise of sports: that these athletes are there for our entertainment and for glorying the American project. And that betrayal is almost always met with physical or rhetorical violence.
In America, we have a problem with petty tyranny. Counter to the ideals of freedom and humanity we claim to hold, we tend to see the people beneath us on the social pecking order as something less than human. When a customer unloads on a fast-food worker for getting the order wrong or treats the wait staff at a sit-down restaurant like shit, this is petty tyranny. Through the act of consumption, we get to have power over people and it makes us act like assholes. The small but tyrannical power we hold is what we get instead of material security or a functioning democracy.
With sports, that dynamic is twisted. We pay money for our sports entertainment, or at least we generate revenue by watching ads during games, and there is an expectation that these athletes should deliver us exactly what we want in return. For most fans, what they want is to win games. But for some fans (typically fans with disposable income) what they want is not just wins or exciting competition but an aesthetic and attitude that makes them feel like America is still for them. But since professional athletes are materially above most fans and media in the social pecking order, they sometimes say “Nah, bruh.”
This sense of entitlement and its subsequent rejection by the people supposed to fulfill that promise is why Tim Tebow keeps getting second chances despite not being very good at any of the various jobs he’s held. After football, Tebow tried his hand both at baseball and broadcasting and wasn’t too great at either. Tebow’s ongoing sports career belies the promise of objective meritocracy on which sports are based. But Tebow is clean-cut, god-fearing, and most importantly, white. He will always be marketable. It’s why certain NBA fans feel license to attack (mostly Black) players. It’s why Baseball fans and media keep harping about the “way the game should be played,” a style of play that doesn’t include du-rags, or gold chains, or celebrating home runs at the plate, but somehow does include intentionally throwing a 90 mph fastball at a human being if they break the unwritten rules of decorum. It’s why mostly affluent tennis fans feel that Naomi Osaka should prioritize their entertainment over her own mental health.
I don’t have a call to action for this. I don’t really need one. I believe the majority of sports fans are quite capable of seeing the athletes they root for as human beings. We don’t tend to be loudest or have ample representation in the sports media. It's not to say that we don’t hate on certain athletes. I’m not a huge fan of Kyrie Irving. But I also am aware that he is a human being, entitled to a few galaxy-brain takes here and there. And when he says or does something I don’t like, I don’t feel like the sport of basketball is being taken away from me. I don’t feel the need to call him racial epithets or dump popcorn over him. I’m quite content to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching him lose games, which admittedly isn’t often because he’s a good player on a stacked team. And when he inevitably eliminates my Philadelphia 76er’s from the playoffs with a dagger three-pointer in the fourth quarter of game seven, I know I will have plenty of company in my disappointment. That's what sports should be for.
Solidarity forever.
Great article!! I am a sports fan of basketball, baseball, and football... It has been my experience that fans act out when our political system fails black people. When politicians speak ill of certain nationalities, folks come out to justify their racism to degrade and abuse those people... The sad truth is; these cowards perpetuate their racist views in other forms as well... As a woman of color, I experienced what I thought was racist when I was younger performing for the University I was going to out of the Country... I became ill and instead of treating me where I was since they had excellent care... I was flown back to the United States for care... I never mentioned that one of the other students (white) came down with maladies and he was treated there in that country, while the rest of the group came back home... Systemic racism is alive and well around the world and we need to teach tolerance of other people to our children, so the world becomes a better place for all... “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” – Professor Irwin Corey (an American stand-up comic, film actor, and activist)... "Life is not always perfect, but always what you make it. So make it count, make it memorable, and never let anyone steal your happiness." - Dr. Michelle Levynn... We are one... Solidarity forever!!
Beautifully said!