One Game at a Time. Matt Hern
of players … there is almost nothing about the economics of the professional sporting world that makes any sense, or bears any rational relationship to the everyday lives of everyday people.
Capitalism has grotesquely distorted the sporting world, but what hasn’t it maimed? What cultural quarter hasn’t been reduced to corporate shilling? Think of dance centers named after banks, cigarette companies sponsoring operas, theater awards given out by mining companies, folk singers sponsored by Starbucks, and artists of every stripe controlled and traded as commodities. Professional sports have been wholly jacked by corporatist economics and neoliberal ideologies like everything else, just maybe a little more vibrantly and effusively—in part because sports are so powerful: where else are you going to find 100,000 people every Saturday afternoon?
Similarly, sports are often derided as offering another kind of economic opiate: holding out an impossible carrot to marginalized kids and communities that will ostensibly drag them out of poverty. And that’s correct: really, only a tiny percentage of kids ever make it pro and 99.9% of us end up having to pursue some other ways to make rent. If we’re talking about sports as a potential income generator, it’s a real long shot (although no more so than music or acting or dancing), and there are certainly plenty of occupational hazards. But that’s true of most any job, whether it’s nursing, roofing, driving, doing construction, social working, farming, or firefighting. And many (most?) jobs have other kinds of hazards: physical, psychological, and/or emotional. Is it worse to get your melon dinged up and lose a few neurons than it is to sit in a dehumanizing, alienating, dignity-sapping workplace that costs you hope and imagination and vitality? There are costs and compromises to any occupation, professional or otherwise.
Regardless, I think it is very problematic (and maybe a little paternalistic) to critique sports as simply a poor career choice. People engage in creative pursuits, whether it’s boxing, painting, basketball, singing, judo, dancing, or writing, not to get rich but because we love being creative: the act of individual and collaborative creativity is good in and of itself. A small subset of us get highly skilled at those pursuits, and then a much smaller subset still actively pursues a pro career in hoops, movies, the music business, fighting, or whatever. For most of my youth, I played ball seventeen hours a day and dreamed that I was Downtown Freddie Brown or Dennis Johnson, but was I planning for an NBA career? Well, I guess highly abstractly but not really. Ball wasn’t a career move: it was pleasure, and it wasn’t a failure or wasted effort when I fell far short.
I don’t want to reduce creative expression to instrumentality and assess its value based on potential career earnings. Lives should not be managed like stock portfolios. The problem isn’t that boxing or basketball or musical theater or hiphop or the trombone are not sure-fire routes out of economic marginalization. It’s that long-shot lottery-winning dreams are necessary because, for so many folks, there is so little else to realistically hope for. To blame sports for not being able to fix the failures of capitalism is chasing the wrong squirrel up the wrong tree.
"FOOTBALL IS THE OPEN-AIR KINGDOM OF HUMAN LOYALTY"4
Not long ago I was speaking at the Baltimore Book Festival, giving a talk about ecological urbanism. It’s a terrific and popular event, and our tent was full of people despite the fact that it was approximately 150 degrees outside and the tent smothered whatever little breeze might have been blowing. I was sitting on a panel, and when my turn came ’round, I did what I pretty much always do: I made a joke about sports.
It’s a kind of a platitudinous speaker’s cliché to drop an informal aside before launching into your shtick, but nevertheless I consistently do it, ostensibly to lighten things up a bit, to suggest to the audience that maybe I’m not a humorless twit, and maybe to relax me a little. I also tend to be talking to academic and/or activist audiences and I like to think it throws them off their game a bit. Maybe not so much, but you know.
I started this Baltimore talk by offhandedly chatting about the Ravens. I could feel the sweat rolling down my back like a faucet and I was towelling off every fifteen seconds. I had just come from a bar where I watched a wild Patriots-Bills game and was hoping to catch the Ravens later that afternoon, so it seemed like the right thing to do. Right away, an older African-American guy sitting in the front row scowled expansively and said loudly “Don’t talk about sports!” I looked at him and said, “Why not? It was a great game.” That wasn’t the response he was hoping for apparently because he immediately stormed out.5
I didn’t mind too much: I get people walking out on my talks here and there and figure that if you don’t piss some people off you’re being far too bland. I just carried on my way but as I was talking I could see the man at the back of the audience, listening in, but also waving his arms around and talking to people loudly and passionately. So I was prepared when the mic opened for questions and he barrelled in and proceeded to rip me a new one. He talked at some length about how disrespectful I was to be glib about something as meaningless as sports, that I was being wasteful of everyone’s time when there were so many important issues to talk about and that talking about sports was just callow. He also mentioned that he really wanted to punch me “right in the face.”
A fellow member of the panel was clearly freaked out and tried to diffuse the situation, and the audience visibly tensed up, but I kind of liked it. I mean I’m never thrilled about being so aggressively taken to task in public (or in private really!), but I was genuinely interested, even excited by his point, and took his threat as metaphorical, not actual. I badly wanted to take the argument up, but it didn’t seem like the right place to get into it, so I just said that I respected his opinion, was sorry that he was upset, but that I held to the value of sports and didn’t think it was disrespectful in any way. Then we moved on.
Afterward I was talking with some members of the audience and I could see the guy waiting a row or two back, so I stuck out my hand and asked how he was doing. He was very gracious and apologized, complimented me on my talk, and said he appreciated my approach and analyses. I was friendly in return, thanked him for his apology, and offered my support and solidarity in the face of the outrageous bullshit his neighborhood is facing. It was clear though that we still had a difference of opinion that we didn’t really address.
Baltimore is a majority-black city facing some very serious economic, social, and political challenges. The effects of deindustrialization, the mortgage crisis, suburban flight, crime, poverty, and corruption are readily evident at even half a glance. So it’s highly understandable that a resident might get irritated with some random cocky white dude showing up and dropping blithe banter in the midst of some important and serious conversations. But in many ways this argument is exactly what I’m after: I’m convinced that sports really are worth talking about. Not just for their convivial, small-talky instrumentality. That’s all good in itself, but sports can and should be part of those serious conversations too. Next time I’m in Baltimore, that’s what I want to talk about for sure.
I also think watching and following sports is a worthy activity. It’s common to suggest that playing sports is defensible but spectating is opiatical, passive, mind-numbing, and likely brain—if not soul—damaging.6 I dispute this from beginning to end. It would be crazy-talk to suggest that playing music is alright, but listening to it is a waste of time. Or that acting is good, but going to the theater is passive and consumptive. Or that you are creatively actualized if you make films, but somehow less-than if you watch them. We all know that music, movies, theater, dance, poetry, and all the rest are vibrant and legitimate sites of conversation and contestation for observers and critics as much as creators. Why not sports?
It is really important to understand sports comprehensively (and not as arbitrarily separate) as playing and watching; fanning and participating; pro, high performance, amateur, and everyday. There are obviously critical distinctions between each of those activities (and kinds of activities): they are not the same and carry all kinds of different weights, impacts, reverberations, and effects. But to understand sports we have to encounter them as a nexus of relationships that bind performers