Financial pressure on Washington NFL team finally forces name change.
The stat crunchers and scoreboard watchers have never been comfortable with the concept of moral parameters in sports. Athletic feats and game performances aren’t supposed to be a barometer of societal rights and wrongs.
Despite such concerns, sports have often been a forum for ethical disputes, a space to probe the concepts of integrity and social responsibility. And never have those concepts unfolded so starkly as they are doing right now, in this era without games, at a fascinating intersection of a global health pandemic and a social justice revolution.
On Monday, the NFL team in Washington, D.C., announced it would be changing its nickname, a racial slur of Native Americans that has been under fire for many, many years.
The team’s owner, Daniel
Snyder, has been incalcitrant for more than two decades, insisting — since buying the team in 1999 — that he would never change the name. In 2013, he said, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
That stubbornness was steadfast in the face of lobbying from tribal groups and activists. But it faded quickly at the prospect of losing corporate sponsors and their corresponding dollars.
When both FedEx and Nike put pressure on the team to change its name, in the wake of the reckoning that has taken place following the death of George Floyd on May 25 and subsequent protests, Snyder launched a “thorough review” of his team’s offensive name.
Ten days later, in what one would presume is the last news release issued under the nickname, Washington announced, while managing to use the offensive slur six times in one last outburst, it would change the name.
See, it wasn’t that hard. Even when forced by interests of greed rather than righteousness, change can be made.
At The Chronicle, we already knew that. Many sportswriters around the country had spent years trying to avoid the use of the offensive name in stories — aside from an occasional awkward sentence construct, it is fairly easy — and a few papers had banned its use.
In 2013, colleague Scott Ostler suggested The Chronicle join those other papers in abolishing the nickname, in keeping with our paper’s tradition of recognizing marginalized groups. Thenmanaging editor Audrey Cooper made the style change official, saying, “We have a responsibility to set the tone for civil discourse. That doesn’t mean we set the rules, but it does mean we can lead by example.”
Speaking of leading by example, who had FedEx on their bingo card as a force for social change? FedEx removed its logo on the car driven by NASCAR’s Denny Hamlin and replaced it with the logo of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Now it is forcing change on the team that plays in a stadium that bears the company name.
Ethical decisions can make business sense. Now we’ll see whether other teams like the Cleveland Indians follow suit.
Another moral dilemma is unfolding with more serious ramifications around the country. While sports leagues try to start their seasons, athletes and other “tier one” individuals are being tested for coronavirus several times a week.
Meanwhile, the testing system for the average American continues to completely break down. In states like Florida — where players from MLS, the NBA and WNBA are all sequestered, in order to play their games — positive cases of the virus are skyrocketing. The state recorded 15,300 cases Sunday, the most any state has recorded in a single day and more than the entire continent of Europe recorded on the same day.
In Orlando, residents are waiting in line up to four hours for tests and reporting that they haven’t been getting results for up to a week. In South Florida, test results have taken as long as two weeks.
All over the country, as the virus surges, average Americans are waiting hours to get tests and several days for results. Labs are being strained beyond capacity. Officials are reporting spot shortages around the country of nasal swabs, test kits, machines to process the tests and trained staff. The lag time in results makes it impossible to contain the disease in the way other countries have, by tracing and isolating.
Yet, America’s professional athletes? These nonessential workers are combining to get thousands of tests done, just to see if they can stay sufficiently healthy to play a game in order to make money for their league owners.
Does that make ethical or logical sense?
Sports don’t always provide answers. But they certainly can reveal some moral dilemmas.