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Offense, Defense, And Watching Sports With Your Eyes Open: David Roth's Weak In Review

This was a bad week for people that value the rituals of reverence around sporting events more than they do the conflict that's at the heart of these games. Good.
Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

I will be the first to tell you that I long ago squandered whatever credibility I once had on this particular front. I have told you that various things are sports that are only sports in the most diffuse and generous and abstruse definition of the idea of sports, and are in no way strictly representative of the word's actual definition. A panda doofing around in the snow or a bulldog making terrible decisions or Corgis zealously if distractibly playing tetherball—these are non-sports things that I argued were sports, because the animals involved embodied some deeper sportsiness. There are many more directly sports-adjacent animals—bears fighting humans, kangaroos fighting humans, extremely persistent bears that haunted the World Cup—that seem less aligned with the more generous and elevated aspects of sports than those gamboling pandas and yipping dippy Corgis.

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So let's be clear with that: what I talk about as sports is not strictly speaking actually sports. It's a feeling nearly capacious enough to become a worldview, and definitely capacious enough to include your more committed/enthusiastic animals. What marks these things as sports, what matters most, is that it be expressive and fully-felt, honest and earnest, and headlong in a way that can redeem the inevitable flubs and bloopers that come with anything approached both wholeheartedly and without any guarantee of success. The other stuff, the bigger sports things we treasure—the seamless collective efforts and effortful individual exertions, the strange successes and oblong and imperfect redemptions and dazzling failures—are the residue of those generous fundamentals. None of what we perceive and enjoy as sports—the actual games and players and leagues—would resonate without the more basic and essential virtues inherent in the game. All of which is to say two things: 1) there's levels to this shit and 2) I am indeed sort of winging this worldview.

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But I know sports when I see it, because I recognize the wildness at the heart of it all. It's more than that, but also it is always that—there is a want at the heart of it that is unreasoning and unreasonable, and the little blips of transcendence that sports give us are the result of the dynamic tension between that ungovernable want and the rules and norms and various tiers of ritual and discipline and received wisdom that govern the game. For all the other conflicts in the game, this is the first friction: to take that wild and restless thing and steer it where it needs to go. This is, below the other signature virtuosities that athletes bring to their jobs, the thing that makes a quarterback's fearless presence of mind or a point guard's perspective or a pitcher's metronomic repetition so astounding. In the flow of the game, tossed rudely around by the chaos of chance, athletes must be both absolutely crazy with want and able to still and focus those roiling cores.

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All of which is to say that, while we can and should and do watch sports in something other than gape-mouthed awe at the deeper struggle of it or whatever—while we can and should and do watch these games for fun, and to see people do cool things, and to feel feelings about teams that mean different things to us, and to provide some sort of context to a few hours of day-drinking—sports should not be anyone's idea of a safe space. They can provide a sort of escape, both through letting yourself get a little out of your mind playing the games or in just watching what happens, but they are in no way separate from the broader world.

More than that, the various conflicts that play out in every moment—to be a teammate and an individual at once, to do what you want and also what is required, to be an expressive part and a contributor to a cohesive whole—are precisely the problems that philosophers and sulky teenagers have been wrestling with forever. Because they are played, at the highest level, by physical geniuses who are bigger and stronger and simultaneously more disciplined and more disinhibited than most humans, there is invariably something abstract about them.

But the idea that sports could or should somehow exist in a space outside of the broader world, and innocent of its conflicts, is something more than childish. Kids, after all, dream of being out there and in it. The quietists who spent this last week toggling between kayfabe mourning and pissy dismissal at the tragic intrusion of politics into sports crucially lack that bit of imagination. They just want to be left alone, to watch a TV show that never actually existed.

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One nation, indivisible. Photo by Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

What is making these big sad boys—plummy opinion columnists and failing baseball executives and reactionary governors and down-home college football coaches and soccer bureaucrats—so sad? The short answer is that they do not like getting politics, or more precisely someone else's politics, on their sports. Mostly they are upset with the echo and amplification of Colin Kaepernick's initial protest, which continues to assert itself throughout almost every sport; not so much with the substance of that protest, which is substantial enough that it's uncomfortable to address, but with the rude persistence of it. The substance of this protest has always been clear, and clearly expressed. Athletes like Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall and U.S. Women's National Team star Megan Rapinoe have offered lucid explanations for their protests, and the reasons why the ritual surrounding the national anthem rings false relative to their lived experiences under that flag. This, too, comes back to conflict, and to a brutal disjunction—individuated, as of course it would be—between values professed and values performed.

These statements are not global or definitive, and assert only what they assert about the ways in which what we hold to be universal values have fallen far short of universal application. The facts of other people's lives are a difficult thing to rebut, and the attempts at rebuttals—it's a stunt, it's a betrayal of an imaginary legacy of disruption-free dissent, it's a misunderstanding of history or protest or the nuances of policing—reflect that. The case against politics in sports reveals itself, over and over, as a complaint about other people's politics crowding an imagined consensus, and contradicting an imaginary consent. Puncture one of the exogenous rituals surrounding the game, this critique says, and the entire enterprise collapses into chaos—the intrusion of multiplicities of opinions loudly expressed, the possibility of unintended material consequences, the inconvenient facts of other people's lived realities, the carnage and challenge and thrill of living in this world with your eyes open.

This wild taking of offense doesn't just overstate the importance of these rituals, or expose the calculation behind them—the NFL, for instance, didn't have players on the sidelines during the national anthem until 2009, the year the league began taking millions of dollars from the Department of Defense as part of a recruiting campaign. It does that, too, but mostly it shows who these rituals tend to serve, and the service that they tend to provide, which is the construction and maintenance of a lazily conceived consensus that does not really exist. This is not to say that the national anthem is a lie, or that the values it hymns are false. It's just that we all sit in different seats for these games, and that the song will sound different for some people than for others.

The furious obfuscation and umbrage that has greeted this simple and inarguable fact reflects both how essential that recognition is and how hard the beneficiaries of that imagined consensus will go in the defense of that illusion. On Friday, the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a fanciful history lesson aimed at the high school athletes that have taken up Kaepernick's protest, the stupendous self-importance and self-evident stupidity of which is hard to overstate; imagine Moses coming down from Mount Sinai bearing a tablet with a "Family Circus" cartoon engraved on it and you're getting close. It is a plea not to be inconvenienced by the discomfort of others disguised as an argument for reverence. In that sense, it's pretty much par for the course where Brooks is concerned; if there is one thing to be said for Kaepernick's protest above any other, it is how much truer it sounds than this, and how much more lively and inclusive the conversation he started is than the one that Brooks and his peers would have replace it.

"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much," the Supreme Court justice Henry Jackson wrote in a 1943 opinion upholding the right of Jehovah's Witnesses not to stand during the pledge of allegiance. "That would be a mere shadow of freedom." It may be that the reverent illusions and flattering brand truths of the NFL are what Brooks and them have always sought in sports; it may be that those who embraced sports as a sort of secular church of ritual and signaling found more to love in that performance than in the conflict that breathes life into the broader endeavor. There's more than one way to watch sports, and if it worked for them we might as well wish them good luck with it. It's just hard to imagine why they'd want to watch that when there is something so much ruder and more vital and more human right there on the same channel.

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