Seriously, what just happened? In the span of about 48 hours, starting on August 25th, without much warning at all, the world of sports changed irrevocably. Obviously, the story started with the shooting of a Kenosha man named Jacob Blake who was reaching into his car during an arrest, when he was shot seven times by a police officer. The video of the incident went viral, and while we have yet to see the kind of national public protest that followed the death of George Floyd, civil unrest began almost immediately in Wisconsin. The location of this latest abuse of civil rights, in a city just 45 minutes away from Milwaukee, set the stage for the Bucks to do what no American sports team has done in the history of this country — they went on strike for social justice.
And to be clear, it was a strike. That the more palatable language of a boycott was used by the players and the media is immaterial. The labor force declined to provide their service in search of a set of policy changes. This was a historically significant strike: it has never happened before, and the fact that the players secured concessions from NBA ownership means it will happen again. And it would have been historic even if the NBA was alone in its action, but they decidedly were not. The WNBA (whose players, it should be said, has been leading on these issues for months), the MLB, the NFL, the MLS, and the NHL were all forced to postpone games. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity, made possible by a new American majority that has formed in the past 4 months, itself a result of decades of blood, sweat, and tears of civil rights activists within the sports world. In that category, no name looms larger than Colin Kaepernick’s. It is hard not to see this past week’s events as anything but the high water mark of the movement that Kaep started back in 2015, when he was blackballed for kneeling during the anthem. At the time, only 13 players joined him. Now almost all of American sports is following in his footsteps. Kaepernick sent LeBron a note on Friday thanking him for his “solidarity”, an acknowledgement of the common thread here.
Of the pro sports leagues, you would expect the NFL to once again take the crown for poorest handling of these issues, but Roger Goodell must have spent this weekend preparing a handmade edible arrangement for Rob Manfred, baseball’s commissioner. In a delicious cocktail of the Mets organizational incompetence, Manfred’s naivete, and the all-seeing eye of social media, Mets GM Brodie Van Wagenen accidentally exposed (on a mets.com livestream mind you) Manfred’s half-baked solution — to have the Mets and the Marlins come out on the field at 7:15 (their scheduled gametime), walk off, and then return at 8:15 to play the game they protested an hour earlier — on a hot mic. Van Wagenen would later apologize and claim he misspoke, but the damage was done. Manfred was facing toilet-bowl approval ratings before this happened (see: the Houston Astros, the botched restart negotiations, blaming the sport’s best player for the decline of the game, etc.), but now, to use a baseball metaphor, he’s one strike away from being sent back to the dugout. His term as El Jefe has been extended to 2024, but it’s hard to imagine him being asked to stay on if the tripartite crisis of declining popularity, a failing relationship with the player’s union, and an inability to handle issues of race continue on unabated.
Speaking of unpopular management who managed to make themselves even more unpopular: Dan Snyder! What a massive piece of shit, huh? In Hindi we would call him a kutte kamine, and if you see him in the street I highly recommend choosing your own language’s choicest profane insult to yell at him. After what was hyped as the report that would be “the end of the Snyder era in Raljon” landed with a thud, the Post came back for seconds, detailing the allegations of multiple former cheerleaders who said Snyder had them do a half-nude shoot that was ostensibly for promotional purposes, but as it turns out was just for Snyder’s personal porn stash. It remains unclear whether there will be any real traction towards ousting him, but the NFL has launched an independent investigation into the allegations, and decent people everywhere should hope they recommend that his punishment be the closest thing the bylaws of the sport come to “fire him directly into the sun”.
The cherry on top of all of this actually came first in this multiday madness: Messi wants out at Barcelona! It seems smaller in scale compared with these other developments, because in terms of how much it “actually” matters, but it’s hard to overstate how much the tectonic plates of European football shifted when he served notice to Bartomeu and Co., in the process teaching millions of people that a burofax and a fax are *not* the same thing. Rumor has it that his top choice for a new home is with former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, but it remains to see whether Barca will let him leave without a fight.
When we started Unculture, and gave it its name, part of the impetus was that we wanted to use the power of getting our thoughts down on paper to make sense of a world that increasingly didn’t. The hope was that in contemplating the chaos, we would start to see the fractals that exist within the maelstrom. No week has exemplified the righteousness of this mission than the one we just experienced, and while it will take years, not days, to sort out the implications of this week, we’re going to start chipping away. I’m excited to announce that this is the return of Unculture, in the form of a new series, entitled “What the F*ck Just Happened”, that will dig deep into the nuances of these events and what they mean for the individual teams and sports. The first article, by Senior NBA Correspondent Joey Handel, breaks down the Bucks’ strike and the broader implications for the league going forward, so look for that in your inbox and on the home page on our Medium page soon.
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