POLITICAL ARENA
Sports caught in U.S. mess
Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election will give us the answer to a very serious question: will it be safe to make Donald Trump jokes again?
Oh sure, there are other things it will decide, like, say, the fate of the free world. But those of us prone to the occasional political joke are also anxious to discover whether the odd Trump mention will still cause a torrent of angry reaction in one’s inbox.
Sports fans are often fairly passionate, and so it’s not uncommon to elicit a strong reaction when criticizing this or that player or team. But if I have learned anything in these past few months, it’s that nothing is quite so passionate as a Trump supporter who feels slighted. It says something, I think, about the divisions in the United States — and to a lesser extent, Canada — that even a couple of jokes in the sports pages can elicit long and angry treatises about the global elites and their fraudulent ilk.
It’s also been apparent that even amid the relative harmlessness of the sports pages — journalists often refer to it as the toy department — it doesn’t take much for lines to be drawn in an Us vs. Them political battle, with Trump types placing themselves firmly as outsiders happy to tell the establishment where to go and what to do to itself.
This space has had a couple experiences with that in recent weeks. In a column about NFL television ratings, I wrote skeptically about the suggestion that the decline in viewership was related to Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during The Star Spangled Banner.
It seemed like a fairly innocuous point: why would people who actually like to watch NFL football stop watching due to the silent, brief protest of Kaepernick — and a few others — that takes place before the games even start?
There was no lack of people willing to tell me I was completely wrong, and some were even polite about it. And even though the column was about television ratings and made no mention of Trump (or Clinton), a number of correspondents made the connection between their outrage at Kaepernick, and their apparent refusal to watch NFL football because of it, and their support of the most outlandish presidential candidate in the republic’s existence. (Support in this case being mostly theoretical, as most of the angry writers were Canadian.)
The explanation, as best as I could understand it, was that Kaepernick and his fellow travellers were being offensive to the United States by protesting racial injustice at football games and that people like me who didn’t find it offensive were emblematic of all that is wrong with the United States (and, I guess, Canada?) today.
Support for Kaepernick’s right to protest, or even indifference toward it, was therefore part of the whole global elite/politically correct/soft left conspiracy, and it was only an outsider like Trump who had finally given voice to those who oppose that agenda. As far as making the leap from Kaepernick to Trump, it probably didn’t hurt that the candidate himself had blasted the San Francisco quarterback, telling him to, among other things, “find another country” if he didn’t want to stand for the national anthem.
Implicitly, then, dismissing the Kaepernick controversy as no big deal was seen as a rebuke of Trump. It is apparently a short distance from discussing NFL ratings to hearing about what is truly wrong with America.
I heard similar things from readers when I wrote about the Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo, after visiting Progressive Field during the American League Championship Series. Whatever one’s opinion about the use of Indians as a team nickname and whether it is exploitative or somehow a tribute to Native American culture, it hardly seemed controversial to note that the Wahoo logo, an overtly racist caricature, a red-faced, bucktoothed cartoon, is at the very least an uncomfortable relic. The baseball team’s executives have acknowledged as much, even if they have done very little to ensure that the logo has a reduced presence at baseball games in Cleveland. (It’s everywhere, which was the point of the column.)
Again, though, I heard from readers who were disgusted that I was spouting the usual politically-correct bunkum that had befallen our good countries. Some insisted that the Wahoo logo should be used more, not less. More than a few made a Trump connection again, possibly because the candidate had said the Washington Redskins shouldn’t change their nickname. (As far as I can tell, he hasn’t stated a position on Wahoo, but it wouldn’t be tough to guess.)
It was another story in which the specific controversy, in this case Native American sports nicknames, quickly gave way to the Establishment against the Outsiders, with Trump the proxy for the latter camp.
I wouldn’t claim any special insight into the mind of the American voter based on feedback to some sports columns, other than to say that there are some aggrieved people out there who see in one candidate someone who is also suitably aggrieved.
But it would be nice if, after Tuesday, a sports story won’t immediately be seen as the next front in a culture war.
Stick to sports, those of us in this business are often told angrily. Honestly, it would be kind of nice to do just that.