From ECSTASY to AGONY
Sports heroes used to be athletic gods. Now we celebrate the downtrodden
AS a kid growing up in Nashville, I had three sports posters on my bedroom wall: Michael Jordan in mid-flight dunking from the freethrow line in the 1988 slam-dunk contest, a black-and-white photo of Bo Jackson posing with shoulder pads and a baseball bat across his shoulders, and Eric Davis at bat in his Cincinnati Reds uniform.
I loved all three athletes as a kid. They were everything I hoped I’d grow up to be as an athlete. I wanted to be as electric a basketball player as Air Jordan, as athletic as Jackson in both baseball and football and as effortless at hitting home runs and stealing bases as Davis.
Chances are, if you’re reading this right now, you once had the posters of an athlete on your bedroom walls, too. And if you’re around my age — born between 1975 and 1990 — you’re part of the Michael Jordan generation of sports, a time when accolades were awarded to the very best, regardless of race or gender.
No one starts a game with more points on the scoreboard based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
In sports, the best man or woman wins. Period. Throughout my childhood as a sports fan and into my early young adulthood as I became a sportswriter, radio host and television commentator, sports didn’t divide us — they united us. While the country faced substantial challenges — the first Gulf War, the tech stock implosion, 9/11, the subprime mortgage collapse — sports didn’t exacerbate those tensions or politicize any of them. Instead, Americans looked to sports as a welcome diversion from the challenges we faced as a country.
I don’t remember any of the athletes of my youth making any political statements, and I don’t believe it was because I was a kid. The 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and the early 2010s were an era epitomized by Michael Jordan who reportedly said, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” when he was asked why he didn’t speak out on political issues. Jordan understood that the best way to unite the country was to appeal to everyone, regardless of their personal backgrounds.
And America responded to what Jordan was selling.
The final game Michael Jordan ever played with the Chicago Bulls — Game Six of the 1998 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz — is still the most watched basketball game in American history with 36 million tuning in. What’s more, Jordan’s legacy has remained vibrant even 20 years after that game was played — in 2016 Forbes reported that Jordan had sold more sneakers than than LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, James Harden and every other NBA player combined. But then something changed. The Jordan era of basketball, when sports united everyone regardless of their race, gender, class or religious differences, passed. Why? The rise of social media with its personalized, identity-obsessed world views.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — all these social-media platforms are designed to appeal to many of the worst impulses of American life. And all of them, to a large degree, are predicated on creating tribes of active users convinced their side is good and everyone else is evil.
Social media is a funhouse mirror that artificially distorts reality, cre- ating a roiling mass of tribal passions and anger. Often these tribes self-segregate based on their identities and their identities slowly infect everything, serving daily doses of affirmation designed to buttress whatever existing opinions and prejudices you already had.
Immigrants are taking over the country! Police are killing black people all the time! Terrorism is going to be the death of us all!
Social media, especially Twitter, the media’s drug of choice, is always convinced everything is evil.
It’s no coincidence that in the age of social media both Democrats and
Where once your skill on the court or field was the calling card, now it’s your identity. — author Clay Travis
Republicans nominated the most hated people to ever run for office in 2016. Thanks to social media, we’ve moved from trying to pick the person we hoped the other side would like to picking the person we knew would upset the other side most.
And sports, unfortunately, isn’t immune. It took the same trajectory and became infected, too.
Rather than recognize that Twitter, which only around 20 percent of Americans use, was not remotely representative of the larger Ameri- can marketplace, sports media began to use the platform as a barometer of what people cared about. And Twitter — and other social-media sites — loved nothing more than dividing sports fans by politicizing what had once been apolitical. Awash in a sea of collapsing ratings and cord cutting, ESPN looked to Twitter for its salvation and plunged headlong into the cultural wars by awarding an ESPY to Caitlyn Jenner, who hadn’t been involved in sports for decades, and lionizing Michael Sam, the first openly gay NFL player, as the modern day Jackie Robinson.
Where once your skill on the court or field was the calling card for sports-media attention, now your identity was.
From Caitlyn Jenner and Michael Sam, it was a short leap to Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who was benched for a lack of talent at the beginning of the 2016 season and responded by protesting the national anthem.
While Kaepernick’s protest was mostly nonsensical — he argued that Cuba was freer than America, wore socks depicting police officers as pigs and described cops as modern-day slave catchers — that didn’t matter. He was a cultural flashpoint, another symbol to divide sports fans from arguing about on-field results. The result was NFL cataclysm; ratings declined by nearly 20 percent during the two years Kaepernick protested.
According to a CNN poll, 87 percent of Republicans said players taking a knee during the national anthem were doing the wrong thing, while 72 percent of Democrats said the opposite. Overall, 49 percent of those polled were against the protests.
Most reasonable Americans didn’t care about Kaepernick’s politics no matter how much the media embraced him. Instead, they had a radical idea: Share your political opinions on your own time, not when you’re wearing a uniform at work.
Earlier this month, Nike followed ESPN’s lead off the social-media cliff. Rather than celebrating a once-in-ageneration athlete such as Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods as the face of its new, lucrative, multiyear “Just Do It” campaign, the sports apparel company picked Kaepernick — a quarterback who has never even won a Super Bowl. We’ve gone from “Republicans buy sneakers too” to “We don’t care about Republicans” in the space of a few years.
It’s the wrong decision, and I suspect at some point in time sanity will prevail, but for now, unfortunately, sports is just politics by another name.