Why Sportswriters Shouldn’t "Stick to Sports"

Adrian Wojnarowski is not an activist. He is an NBA journalist best known for breaking news of trades and signings so quickly and accurately that following him on Twitter is like following an oracle. His audience leans left only to the extent that the NBA fanbase writ large leans left. So when he tweeted fond memories of gun control activist James Brady yesterday, his conservative fans naturally told him to stick to sports while making ungrammatical statements about how Brady was rotting in hell now. Their viciousness toward Wojnarowski, Brady, and the English language was so unpleasant that it might make Woj wary of inveighing on politics again. Which is too bad, because now more than ever we need sportswriters who won't stick to sports.

Sports and politics in America are inseparable. The myth of Abner Doubleday—the Union officer who supposedly created baseball in bucolic upstate New York—was created to give America's pastime a noble patriotic sheen. Football required political intervention early in its history to legalize the forward pass and make it less fatal for players. And of course the mid-20th century is filled with examples of sports bleeding into politics, or the other way around: Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, the organizing of the Major League Baseball Players Association. It's fine to attempt to enjoy sports apolitically, but to deny that they have political import is willful ignorance.

Most of the time, the sports world hides political discourse behind a curtain of patriotism. Support our troops! Here's a giant American flag! I'd like to thank the Christian God for blessing my team! Please welcome our guest, former president George W. Bush! If the infusion of God, the military, and aggressive flag-waving bothers some lefties, they have to suck it up—that's just the price of admission to mainstream American activities.

The problem for Republican sports fans is that journalists, who should be skeptics by nature, tend to discount all this rah-rah U-S-A stuff. Many of them aren't shy about expressing their opinions either. When they do, as Wojnarowski did—or as Dan Wetzel did when he wrote about Michael Sam or Michelle Beadle did when she talked about domestic assault—the unsilent minority attacks them in droves. When sportswriters do dip their toes into politics it's almost invariably to express ideas so benign they should be apolitical as the American flag (gay men are OK and should be allowed to play in the NFL, punching women is bad) but they're nevertheless greeted by an outcry from a section of the fan base that's getting louder and dumber all the time.

Which is why sportswriters should continue speaking truth to idiots. "Journalism" is a loaded term, one commonly dissected by people who paid $100,000 to attend grad school at Columbia. But at its best it's a fight against ignorance, which can become very political in 21st-century America. Sabermetrics is nothing more than an attempt to better understand baseball through numbers—a controversial project when numbers themselves are rejected by a political party that believes that climate change is a lie and thought that Mitt Romney had a decent chance to become president. (Is it a coincidence that Nate Silver, one of the stars of baseball's statistical revolution, became a Republican target when his quantitative analysis showed that Obama would probably win in 2012?) Sometimes simply stating facts can be a radical act.

Of course, not all sportswriters have to engage with politics. Chris B. Brown can write honestly about the 3-3-5 defense without citing the Congressional Budget Office. Kirk Goldsberry can make a heat map without quoting Saul Alinsky. But if implicating a political issue occurs naturally to a sportswriter then he (or she, though the embarrassing paucity of female sportswriters is yet another political issue) should not shy away from it.

And that includes issues both in and out of the scope of the sportswriter's job description. Sportswriters should not be afraid to call bullshit when they see some; they should express their beliefs without worrying that people will yell "stick to sports!" If political issues come up while they're reporting on sports, they'd be doing their readers a disservice to ignore those issues. And if they have something burning to say that doesn't have anything to do with sports, they shouldn't feel like they don't have the right to say those things.

Granted, successful writers usually work for media properties that tend to shy away from controversy, and if those writers' political beliefs include a real desire for communist revolution or a conviction that whites are the superior race, OK, those writers should probably stay quiet, at the very least in order to to continue receiving health care. (All the more reason to support universal healthcare—but that's a different 800-word column.) And there's certainly no obligation for writers to shoehorn political issues into a story at every chance. Coach Krzyzewski might be a prick, but the fact that he's a Republican may have nothing to do with his latest offense.

By the same token, however, sportswriters should never be afraid to articulate their political beliefs when they feel obligated to do so. As liberal as most journalists are, the sports establishment is still fundamentally culturally conservative and bent on catering to the God-guns-and-tax-cuts-crowd. So wave your liberal flag high, Adrian Wojnarowski. You won't miss anyone who unfollows you.

Follow Robert Wheel on Twitter.