Monday night was a game that gives hope for the Cavs’ future
April 6, 2021The 2021-22 Ohio State Buckeyes are expected to be very good in way-too-early rankings
April 7, 2021Major League Baseball decided to move the All-Star Game from the Atlanta area in reaction to Georgia making changes to their voting laws.1 Unsurprisingly, this evoked strong responses from around the country on all sides of our political divides. I have various feelings about the Georgia voting law changes, but I won’t use this platform as a way of hitting you with my views. What this led me to think about over the weekend is just how sports and the real world have been intertwined forever. The Georgia situation is distinctly political, but the major complaint that I hear is that sports should stay being about sports. Sports are supposed to be some escape. At its best, I believe sports are a nice escape, but the more I think about it, there’s never been a wall between sports and real life, including the occasional dust-up over politics. It feels to me like there’s a false narrative that sports and real-life were ever separated.
I could go back before I was born and talk about the color barriers in sports. It was a huge deal when I lived in Boston because the Celtics were trailblazers, having named Bill Russell as the first black head coach and later sending out the first-ever all-black five-player lineup. Meanwhile, the Red Sox were the last Major League team to integrate, holding out until 1959. Boston has a reputation for being a racist city while also being one of America’s most liberal cities. That dichotomy spilled into sports constantly while I was there, but these aren’t the examples that spring to mind. I know about them, but I wasn’t alive for most of them.
Some of my earliest NFL memories are of the NFL player’s strike. My dad had to try and explain to me what it meant for a league to have replacement players. It was the first time in my life that I thought about labor unions and “picket lines” and I remember being so confused about this conceptual idea of “crossing the picket line.” The Browns were led by some QB named Jeff Christensen who was not Bernie Kosar and quit his job as a bartender to play for the Brownies.
When I was 12 years old, Marge Schott was one of the biggest stories in baseball. While not distinctly political, the Reds’ owner was in trouble for allegedly referring to black players as “million-dollar n*****s.” She was alleged to have Nazi memorabilia and biased views against “sneaky g*ddamn Jews.” There was no debate on Schott’s comments’ vile nature, but it was controversial to figure out what to do about it. When I was 14 in 1993, I was already a Howard Stern listener, and Billy West used to do an impression mocking Schott. Harsh language in the clip I’m linking. It is so insane, I decided not to have the video embed on our site. Click through if you want to hear how wild Howard and Robin used to be in caricaturing Schott’s racism.
After listening to this for the first time in a very long time, I’m somewhat in disbelief that I heard this kind of content when I was a teenager—my, how Howard Stern and the culture surrounding him have changed since those days.
A wildly different story, I watched as many minutes of the 1994 World Cup as I could. And I was devastated and confused when Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar was murdered in an assassination after an own goal. The idea that sports could explode off the field and result in a player’s murder was a lot for me to think about and try to wrestle with as a teenager. The thought of a man losing his life at age 27 at the hands of angry soccer fans was almost too much to comprehend.
In 2003, the NFL enacted The Rooney Rule to try and level the playing field of opportunity for minorities in the NFL coaching ranks. It was my first exposure to the concept of affirmative action as it was debated across the sports landscape. And despite that taking place almost two decades ago, we’re still talking about it every single year.
Lastly, and maybe most relevant to what’s happening with MLB and Georgia, the NCAA banned championship events in North Carolina after the state enacted H.B. 2 in 2016. That bill served to preempt any anti-discrimination ordinances passed by local communities, compelling schools and public facilities containing single-gender bathrooms to only allow people of the sex on their birth certificate to enter. The NBA also moved the 2017 All-Star game. Again, I’m not going to debate this actual issue, but trust me, the debates ensued. The NCAA and NBA weren’t the only groups to enact a ban as film projects moved, artists like Bruce Springsteen canceled concerts, and corporations proclaimed to limit unnecessary travel to the state due to the law. The law was eventually replaced under that pressure.
All of this brings us back to Georgia. There’s debate over what this bill actually does and does not do. There’s debate over the media coverage, including charges of scare-mongering. What shouldn’t be surprising to anyone is that there’s a reaction to the new laws in this fraught political environment, including with Major League Baseball. The real fallacy is that this illusory wall between sports and politics and real-life ever existed in the first place. It’s been readily apparent throughout my lifetime and existed long before I was born. While it’s nice to think of sports as an escape, when I really think about it, sports have never been the escape — the respite from the real world — that some want to pretend.
- The game will now be at Coors Field in Colorado. [↩]