The cheapening of sports – Washington Examiner

There comes a time in every thoughtful sports fans life when he gazes at absurdly proportioned men bouncing rubber balls on wooden floors and asks himself: How much does this matter, really? These long, Talmudic inquiries into the meaning of words such as catch or throw or knee, carried live on national television before tens of millions of people, conducted amid fields of impatient millionaires dressed in body armor isnt it all a little much, if were being honest?

And if were being a little more honest, we would decide that no, it isnt all a little much.

There is a sublime unity in a Steph Curry step-back shot that exists almost nowhere else in the work of man or God. Football is its own exalted category of human affairs, the one and only plane where every phase of existence is smashed together in public, in real time. In a memorable episode of the ESPN documentary series 30 for 30, we learn that Pablo Escobar would kill anyone if it meant that the team he supported would win even a single additional soccer game, a sentiment with which even Ottawa Senators fans were once able to identify. We watch sports as a frivolous distraction and also because theyre better than everything else, profound and important unto themselves.

This idea that spectator sports have intrinsic value is under unprecedented attack, mostly from within the sports industry, which now loudly and repeatedly insists that the games dont mean much. The nationwide proliferation of app-based sports betting, a bipartisan policy innovation encouraged by every league and cheered on by ESPN and other leading broadcasters, has been a revolution in many fans relationships with the games themselves, turning them from a source of entertainment or a focus of emotional investment into a weeknight gambling opportunity.

Sports have also been vulgarized by something worse than money, as fans of the football team now called the Washington Commanders have discovered over the past couple of weeks. Look at the controversy that nearly cost defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio his job and its clear sports are now widely treated as a mere subset of the political ephemera theyd once been able to transcend.

On June 8, Del Rio responded to a question at a press conference about his reliably unhinged right-wing tweets, something that most mature adults who dont work in sports media can easily recognize as the eccentricities of a man who has spent much of his life designing blitz packages. Del Rios response was no more debatable, and no less reflective of public opinion, than, say, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerrs widely celebrated postgame sermons about gun control or San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovichs attacks on Columbus Day. Jan. 6 had been a dust-up compared to the dozens of people killed and hundreds of businesses burned, largely in low-income areas, during the racial justice protests of 2020, Del Rio said. Why hadnt that warranted a select committee in Congress, like Jan. 6 had? the coach wondered.

The backlash was swift: Del Rios job was suddenly in danger. A Democratic state senator in Virginia used Dustupgate as a pretext for killing the latest effort to build a publicly funded stadium for the Washington areas NFL team. In a statement issued in the name of head coach Ron Rivera under the rainbow Twitter avatar of the Commanders Pentagon contractorlike logo, the team announced that words have consequences, and [Del Rios] words hurt a lot of people in our community. He was fined $100,000.

A few days later, Rivera assured everyone that he closely reviewed the text of the First Amendment before fining Del Rio, a text that Rivera said he holds sacred and thinks about constantly. This was like the patterned blinking in a hostage video. What Rivera really was saying is that owner Dan Snyder is now under investigation by Congress over claims he embezzled money meant for the other 31 NFL owners and that he was instructed that a prominent coach openly questioning the Jan. 6 committee's very existence during its opening week debut was likely to make the bosss legal situation even more difficult. At least, I think thats what Rivera meant.

NFL teams, and even entire sports leagues, now behave as if theyre in thrall to a larger apparatus, one whose demands are capricious, inconsistent, and very often partisan. Witness the MLBs cancellation of last years All-Star Game in Atlanta over Georgias election law, which was enacted prior to the states record early voting turnout this year. The episode brought on a sadness not for the fans in Atlanta but for the game of baseball itself. Once again, the people who administrate sports at the highest level had demonstrated that the game itself wasn't enough, that some higher purpose than sports needed to be served in order for the games to have any real meaning or legitimacy. Turn off this Tuesday night Pirates-Marlins matchup, the league seemed to say, and watch MSNBC instead.

Sports are political, were now often reminded to deny that sports are but an especially high-profile subsidiary in the struggle for a perfected world is to deny athletes their agency as political actors, akin to demanding that they shut up and dribble. But the sports are political formulation does not empower athletes so much as drag them down to the level of technocratic managerial policymaking types, who are the practical beneficiaries of the ascension of politics to the apex of American life. Titan-like coaches and athletes must participate in the nerdy and annoying political classs self-aggrandizement. Any deviation must be punished. The sports are politics ideology exposes a basic insecurity, a noxious idea that no life should be permitted beyond politics or lived beyond the parameters of what a Washington, D.C., consultant or a Capitol Hill legislative aide might want and care about.

Sports have always shown us that theres another, better way. They presented an image of a public life largely free of factional struggle, where everyones differences of race, of religion, of basic fundamental outlook could be subsumed into a larger goal, such as the defeat of the Philadelphia Eagles. The beliefs of Michael Jordan were famously inscrutable, and the fact that he had cooler and better things to worry about than satisfying someone elses dumb ideological test ended up being crucial to his mystique. Bear Bryant eschewed a career in politics because he knew he had a job much more important than governor of Alabama. Sports were always crucial not as a distraction from politics but as proof that society could sustain a meaningful civic existence in a space beyond politics. Of course, today, that cant be allowed to survive.

Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large forTablet.

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The cheapening of sports - Washington Examiner