Sports in These Times
All the news that's fit for people who don't approve of sports
While running errands last night and this morning, I spent a while listening to the latest episode of The Press Box from The Ringer, the first big segment of which was about the odd relationship between the New York Times sports section and The Athletic, which the NYT recently bought for a huge sum of money. A good chunk of this involves host Bryan Curtis pitching a vision for a more “voice” based sports section, with smart columnists checking in frequently on whatever the story of the moment is.
That’s an interesting vision, and if the NYT or some other major publication made a sports section like that, I might in principle want to read it. I’m not really surprised that they haven’t done that, though, because my immediate (and slightly flippant) reponse to the larger question of “Why isn’t the NYT sports section better than it is?” is “Because the core demographic of the New York Times is ‘People Who Don’t Approve of Sports.’”
That is, despite having the name of The City in the masthead, the NYT isn’t really a New York paper the way the NY Post or the Daily News is, with a focus on serving an audience in the five boroughs, Long Island, and bits of CT and NJ. It’s evolved into a national paper, serving a broad swath of highly educated readers from all different parts of the country, and even internationally, few of whom have a strong interest in gamers about the Mets and Yankees. This is an audience whose interest in sports is not in the rising and falling fortunes of particular teams and players, but in sports as culture, and particularly as part of the neverending Culture Wars. They tend to be interested in sports stories only insofar as they provide a platform for commentary on larger societal issues, and illustrate trends that make (or refute) particular political points.
So, while I might like to read the NYT sports pages as envisioned by Bryan Curtis, I don’t think that the median subscriber to the New York Times wants to read that. Which is why that’s not what they’re putting out into the world, which in turn is why the only two times I’ve thought about the NYT sports pages since we dropped our print subscription a decade or more ago is when it’s featured in a segment on The Press Box podcast.
This sports-only-as-culture approach is a stance with regard to sports that I find myself absolutely surrounded by nearly all the time— it’s the dominant perspective in academia, and in the academic/media/political segment that supplies the bulk of my social media feeds. There are exceptions, of course— folks in politics and academia who are passionate if badly misguided fans of various Boston teams, for example—but by and large this is a group who only rarely think about sports at all, and find something faintly unseemly about athletic competitions at the professional or near-professional level. It’s a bit like country music, in that respect— a thing that definitely exists out in the world west and south of the Tappan Zee Bridge, but that rarely impinges on their consciousness unless mediated by some pith-helmeted anthropological reportage.
This makes a lot of the sports conversations that do penetrate this space really frustrating to me. They all too often take the form of thinkpieces in which somebody already predisposed to think poorly of, say, professional basketball, strokes their metaphorical chin at length and then regretfully concludes that the NBA is, in fact, Bad, because {toxic masculinity, white supremacy, economic inequality, *WILD CARD*}. That’s fundamentally just a useless piece of writing, as far as I’m concerned— “I already thought I didn’t like this thing, and guess what?” is the op-ed version of “Dog Bites Man.” But it plays really well with a big crowd of people whose priors are flattered by the conclusion, so it gets shared into my feed a bazillion times.
(And then, of course, there’s a bit of a whiplash effect, as the next biggest chunk of my social media feed is full of people who, for example, work at The Ringer and are passionately invested in sports as fans. It makes my online experience a very strange world.)
This leads to a lot of conversations in the spaces where I spend most of my time that are nominally about sports, but come at the subject from such an incredibly remote and disdainful perspective that they are not really recognizable as being about the same thing that I mean when I say “sports.” Coincidentally, an example of this showed up in my inbox around the same time that Press Box episode hit the top of my playlist, through this newsletter from Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, asking readers about their take on sports. This was prompted, he says, by a response to a previous question that he quotes:
I wonder about the effect on males of zero-sum competition and “hero” worship inherent in organized sports. If it’s impossible for the vast majority of men to be winners, they must either identify as losers or subsume their own value to that of the winner they’ve chosen. That pervasive, hypercompetitive model of being seems fundamentally flawed.
This is, in the immortal terminology of Wolfgang Pauli, “not even wrong.” It’s so alien to my experience playing sports at several different levels of organization, and passionately following teams in several different professional and near-professional leagues that I hardly know where to start. It reads as deeply patronizing toward athletes in general, and men in particular, to a degree that makes it really hard to get past “Oh, go fuck yourself” to write a more thoughtful response (as partly demonstrated by the fact that I’m not going to do that here). (But I might come back to it another time…)
While this is essentially unrecognizable as a description of sports as I know them, it is extremely familiar as the kind of thing I expect to hear other faculty say when the subject comes up. And I think it’s this kind of attitude, in a somewhat diluted form, that is the real answer to the question of why the New York Times sports section isn’t something better than it is.
I had hoped to put something more nuanced about my actual experience of sports in this, but this is a week in which a lot of people want a bit of my time, so I’m hitting schedule constraints that won’t allow it. If you’d like to see whether I ever get around to writing that, here’s a button:
And if you want to take issue with my sweeping generalizations about NYT readers and academics, the comments will be open:
I'll stick with replying here, though I see you have more on this theme up today. The odd thing to me on reading this is "wait, you have to be a fan OR think about something as culture? When did they establish that standard and why didn't I notice?"
If I posted up something that said "Well, you're either a fan of science-fiction or you just think about science-fiction as a type of culture to be studied sociologically and aesthetically from a detached position", I would like to think most people would say, "Wow, excluded middle much?"
Meaning, while I grant that there are people whose fandom for science fiction consciously and violently excludes any thinking about What It All Means or Why Do People Like This Stuff and I grant that there are people who say "I need to put on my lab coat and be an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic and understand why anybody watches 'Star Wars' on Disney +", I don't think that describes most people's consumption of science fiction at all. People who watch it a lot or a little can hold their like (or dislike), their involvement or repulsion, at the same time that they wonder *about* science fiction, about why they themselves like or dislike it, why others do, and about what science fiction as a genre is all about, about what belongs in it, about why it's more popular in 2022 than it was in 1975, and so on.
Same goes for sports: I think your "I hate the sportsball but I must read about it because, sigh, I guess it matters due to those brutes who continually interfere with my cogitation" reader of the NYT is a pretty rare customer. Maybe you run into a higher number of them in academia, I guess, but even there, not so much. On the flip side, I have only met a few sports fans who absolutely do not want to ever talk about What It All Means or do not have views on the relationship between Sports and Society. I had a long talk the other day with a couple of strangers about why finding out that McGwire, Sosa and Bonds were all juiced had such a strong effect on my emotional attachment to baseball and even though everybody in the conversation counted themselves a baseball fan and had some different views on the issue, nobody said "oh shut up and just watch baseball, nerds".
I think if you look at the sports writers that everybody has loved over the years--who add value--you will find that virtually none of them are purely descriptive or just restrict themselves to the question of who ought to be the first-string quarterback this year. The best sports writing is also always about "what makes this sport great or beautiful or troubled or necessary or horrifying at time?" which in turn is also always about bigger issues than the sport itself. Which games are popular with which people and why? Who learns to play which sports in what contexts? I've heard plenty of fans talk ardently about those issues without them interrupting their fandom.
I'm pretty hardcore into traditional "nerd" (video games, programming, etc) circles, and I've actually noticed real improvement on this front in the last ten years ago. It's become far less fashionable to complain about people liking "sportsball" and suchlike.