The Mythologies of the Major Leagues
How sports leagues in America craft the narratives that surround them.
In the last century, athletics has become the lingua franca of American culture, a common tongue we seemingly all speak to one degree or another. As sports have become ubiquitous, more and more of the stories we tell ourselves, and are told, are now about sports. But what are these stories? How are they being told — by whom, and why?
Every sports league does not merely sell a sport to its viewers; they also offer a narrative — a way of seeing and interpreting the world — that supplements the entertainment, athletic beauty, and competition on display. The games we watch are not value-free, but loaded with mythologies that reinforce or challenge the ideals of society at large. Sports are therefore used as a way to deliver implicit political messages to its viewers. There is no escaping this situation, as even that which at first glance appears to be apolitical is still necessarily political.
These messages are rarely explicit, often being transmitted in subtle ways that only become apparent by intentionally listening to the rhetoric and examining the iconography that passes by as one watches a game. However, they are so ingrained that, most often, we are hardly aware of them, having become so accustomed to them, wondering how the games we love could be anything else. As we watch, though, these games are telling us something about the players and teams we cheer for, the games themselves, and even our national character that we may find meaningful or useful. Perhaps when we watch the World Series, the NBA Finals, or even an NFL preseason game between the Browns and the Raiders, we are not merely watching a sporting event, but participating in a particular view of reality. While all sports do this, each has their distinct way of supporting or challenging the dominant sociopolitical narratives in our country.
Baseball seems to be losing ground among younger viewers, often seen as an antiquated game with little to say about the world or to offer the casual viewer. A retired professor I knew once told me that he enjoyed watching baseball because it was easy to read or write a few sentences between pitches, which struck me as the furthest thing from an endorsement. These pastoral qualities that endear it to its most ardent fans are the same reason it seems so irrelevant to so many. However, if baseball fails to engage with the modern world, that’s not a failure of the sport itself nor of Major League Baseball — for these fans, it is its most compelling quality. Rather than saying anything compelling about the world outside the baseball diamond, it chooses to act as if that world does not exist. It is not enough to say that baseball traffics in nostalgia; watching it at all is a nostalgic act in itself.
It’s not a coincidence that the highest World Series ratings of the last decade were for the 2016 match-up between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, two teams that had not won a World Series in 108 and sixty-eight years respectively. While the Series was certainly exciting — going seven games, with the climactic seventh game going into extra innings — the ratings seem to indicate that what Major League Baseball is selling is not baseball itself, but the opportunity to enter a past era and engage with a simpler, less fraught world than that which lies outside the well-manicured baseball diamond.
While MLB often chooses to act as if the outside world does not exist, the NFL has a more embattled stance against the world outside the gridiron, promoting ideas about masculinity and violence that would not have been out of place decades ago, but seem radically anachronistic now. With concerns about the inherent violence of the game causing degenerative brain damage to its players, the NFL has tended to either dismiss empirical evidence of this massive problem as unreliable, or promote various rule changes and technological innovations in equipment as sufficient solutions. These are mere stopgaps though for violence cannot be legislated out of the game — it is its inherent vice.
Furthermore, the NFL extols a bunker mentality of sorts for while the problems of the outside world are found within the league, the biggest fear of many coaches and executives is that they will begin to intrude upon the foxhole of the locker room in the form of the amorphous, but nefarious, “distraction.” When Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be drafted in 2013, the euphemistic way of denying him a roster spot was by calling him, over and over again, a “distraction.” Former NFL coach Tony Dungy, who has somehow become branded as the league’s moral compass over the last decade, said that he would not have drafted Sam — not because he believed Sam did not deserve the opportunity to play professional football, but because he “wouldn’t want to deal with all of it.” While there were legitimate concerns regarding Sam’s qualifications as an NFL prospect, those were hardly the sole, or even primary, reason he never played in a regular season game. Rather it was the condescending idea that NFL players must not be forced to consider anything besides their next game, and if forced to address anything in the sociopolitical world, their duties as professional athletes would be compromised.
While it is certain that many powerful figures in the NFL opposed the protests of Colin Kaepernick — various NFL owners collectively donated over six million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee — to say that the refusal to sign Kaepernick is rooted in political disagreement is unacceptable to a league that promotes the idea that it is a meritocracy where the best players have the opportunity to prove themselves. Once again the euphemistic language of distractions is employed. Joe Montana, LeSean McCoy, Joe Thomas, and, again, Tony Dungy have all expressed concern about Kaepernick’s drawbacks as a distraction while attempting to avoid providing comment on the substance of Kaepernick’s critiques of white supremacy. By refusing to engage seriously with alternative viewpoints, attempting to consign them all to the shadowy corners where distractions go to stop distracting, the reflexively conservative hegemony of the NFL’s leadership is therefore assured.
Ostensibly, the NBA is the most progressive of the nation’s major professional sports leagues. Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr, the coaches of the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors respectively, have been — only partially sardonically — beseeched by liberal basketball fans on social media to run as a joint ticket for President in 2020 due to their consistent critiques of Donald Trump, along with the racism and nationalism that is all too present in the United States. These critiques from the league’s coaches are not anomalies as several players have also spoken out in opposition to Trump with the best player in the league casually, and devastatingly, referring to him on Twitter as “U bum.” LeBron James also stood alongside Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo Anthony at the 2016 ESPYs to denounce police violence against black persons and to call for black athletes to partake in the “tradition of activism,” seeing their collective speech as a “call to action for all professional athletes to educate ourselves, explore these issues, speak up, use our influence and renounce all violence.” This is especially meaningful as it comes from some of the most powerful and respected players in the NBA. Indeed, there seems to be a tacit understanding that they have the league’s support.
This apparent progressivism extends to the administrative center of the league as well as several league representatives, including commissioner Adam Silver, rode on a float in 2017’s NYC Pride Parade. Additionally, in response to the 2016 passage of North Carolina’s HB2 legislation, which eliminated several anti-discrimination protections for the LGBTQ community, the NBA stripped Charlotte of the 2017 All Star Game. If the NBA is not necessarily a place where America is “already great,” it is at least a place where imagining its greatness still seems possible.
Of course the NBA’s progressivism is only relative. While the power that the players possess — both individually and collectively — is considerable, they are still treated far too often as disposable labor by the owners. Even the term “owner” has disquieting connotations, especially considering the fact that the majority of NBA players are black. The league also has a long way to go with regards to its handling of off-court issues by players. The laudatory commentary surrounding the recent retirement of Kobe Bryant’s jerseys, an alleged rapist who settled out of court with his accuser, lacked any critical engagement with this sordid side of his legacy. Such praise seemed absurdly out of place in light of the recent #MeToo movement, and the public demand for greater public accountability for perpetrators of sexual misconduct. More recently, Avery Bradley allegedly paid off a woman accusing him of sexual assault and Derrick Rose was found not guilty of rape in a civil trial in August 2016. In spite of the not guilty plea, Rose’s deposition is unsettling and disturbing — in it, he said he was unaware of what consent is— for what it reveals about a culture where sexual assault is not taken seriously. Neither player faced any repercussions from their teams or the league for these alleged assaults.
The MLB, NFL, and NBA all offer distinct ways of viewing our nation and where we stand in relation to it. The games they offer give us the joy of competition along with the beauty of athletic achievement, but this is not all. They show us a way of relating to the world, providing an interpretive framework to view our past and justify the present, while setting parameters for what is desirable in the future. It is not a matter of whether or not these messages are true in any empirical sense, but if they resonate and make sense to the fans that tune in. It is imperative that we, as fans and consumers, consider just what these messages are and whether they aid or prevent our seeking a more just world. There is certainly much to savor as we watch, but there is often just as much to critique. And critique we should, in the hopes that watching a game does not come to feel like a moral compromise.
Micah Wimmer is a senior writer whose primary interests are sports, literature, and popular music. He’s also the host of Grandstand Central’s newest podcast ‘Pros & Prose’ — the book club for sports fans. You can follow him here.
