For the past few months, the sports media has been embroiled in a fight over “stick to sports.” The phrase comes from a common online rebuke directed at sportswriters and pundits and players and coaches and anyone in the world of sports, really, who takes a political stance on anything that doesn’t occur on a field or a court or in a locker room or front office. The dividing line is predictable: Many jocks and traditionalists argue for a separation of church and state; many young fans say that sports, just like everything else, is politics. But as the sports media critic Bryan Curtis has pointed out in The Ringer, the debate is mostly moot now: Trump’s presidency, with its daily explosions, has made it impossible to cover pro sports, even in the simplest box-score ways, without detouring onto the White House lawn. This comes, in part, from the way basic sports coverage works. Reporters ask questions before and after every game, and when the only thing anyone wants to talk about is Trump, some of those questions will be about the president.
…show more content…
The big American leagues, especially the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball, gave every indication of wanting to distance themselves from partisan frictions. They typically prefer to honor troops, fly fighter jets over stadiums and hold moments of silence to honor the victims of tragedies. When they tackle overtly political issues, it’s through selective editing and legacy building. The settled politics of the past, where details can be kept few and the tone nostalgic, are fine. We know, for example, that Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, stole home and wore 42 on his back. Muhammad Ali championed equality and said some funny stuff to Howard Cosell. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. Their lionization reassures us that the stands they took were good — and can now be consigned to bygone
The big American leagues, especially the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball, gave every indication of wanting to distance themselves from partisan frictions. They typically prefer to honor troops, fly fighter jets over stadiums and hold moments of silence to honor the victims of tragedies. When they tackle overtly political issues, it’s through selective editing and legacy building. The settled politics of the past, where details can be kept few and the tone nostalgic, are fine. We know, for example, that Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, stole home and wore 42 on his back. Muhammad Ali championed equality and said some funny stuff to Howard Cosell. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. Their lionization reassures us that the stands they took were good — and can now be consigned to bygone