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Labour + Industry

Sports: A Defence

Big money, bad characters, bloodlust. I know. But don't throw in the towel. A sample of Matt Hern's new book.

Matt Hern 3 Dec 2013TheTyee.ca

This essay is drawn with permission from One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter published by AK Press. Matt Hern is a community organizer, writer and activist based in Vancouver, British Columbia known for his work in radical urbanism, community development, alternative forms of education.

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East Vancouver statue marks 1954 'Miracle Mile' at Empire Stadium, Vancouver, in which Roger Bannister narrowly edged Frank Landy, the first time two runners broke the four-minute mile in the same race. Photo by dons projects in Your BC: The Tyee's Photo Pool.

[Editor's note: This essay is drawn from chapter one of One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter.]

I want to make an argument in favour of sports.

Playing sports for sure, but also watching, following, cheering, fanning, obsessing, dorking out. I want you to care about sports, whether or not you pay any attention to them or even have much interest. I want you to think about the sporting world as a legitimate site for struggle and politics.

Sports consistently give us every reason to revile them. Whether it's the idiot jock homophobe culture, the sexual assaults that seem endemic to athletics, the crazed militarism at pro events, or the heinously named Washington Redskins, it's as if sports are doing their honest best to drive good people away. In the face of all the mouth-breathing scorn jock culture heaps on others, it's hardly surprising that thoughtful people of every predilection aren't terribly impressed with the possibilities of the sports world, and refuse to return the respect that sports has denied them.

The presumption of the essential triviality of sports is visible (in a weirdly self-flagellating twitch) even among sports-nerds. Many of us are simultaneously obsessed and chagrined -- as if sports aren't worthy of our legitimate attention. It's something we hide like the porn history on our computers, something that stains whatever fantasies we might have of being serious adults. Even on rabid sports talk radio, whenever a tragedy occurs commentators trot out an inevitably reflexive cliché: "Makes you think about what really matters..." As if sports don't really matter -- when they clearly, absolutely do.

Big sporting events dominate cities, incite riots, and fill entire newspaper sections with relentless coverage of minutiae and gossip. Sports are the default topic of conversation at parties and bars the world over. Sports keep many families together, gives buddies something to talk about, and provide narrative shape for many of our days. Teams and players inspire devotion vastly beyond reason. There is something very deep here that even the ungodly amounts of garish marketing, ultra-nationalist tendencies, hyper-corporatism, and dislikable athletes with their tricked-out Hummers can't extinguish: so many of us love sports, both participating and spectating, for lots of very good and very valuable reasons.

Consumed by the game

Sometimes it seems totally absurd to be making this argument. Sitting in Rogers Arena watching a tepid mid-season Canucks game surrounded by a-holes in Affliction gear shouting grotesquely sexist/homophobic shit at the ice while getting hammered on $8.50 plastic cups of Coors Light is hardly the place to feel comfortable about the transformative potential of sports.

Between periods I stroll around the concourse, dodging the Red Bull kiosks, the Pepsi girls, and the Stella stalls. I'm looking to milk a little extra value for the $127.50 mid-bowl tickets I've lucked into when a pal left town unexpectedly. It's a roiling river of people, and 87 per cent of them are geared right up in team apparel.

Daunted, I duck into the one of the metastasized merch stores inside the arena and scope out the $299 authentic jerseys, $45 pennants, $50 branded garden gnomes (!), $115 baseball hat display cases (!!), $79 ticket frames and the hundreds of other Canucks-themed ephemera. I buy a pair of shot glasses for my mom's birthday. I'm not sure she's ever gunned a shot in her life, but it seems the right thing to do. I see a vintage Brendan Morrison signed and framed player card propped by the counter so I snag that too. Mom's worth that for sure. She'll love it. The clerk wraps it for me expertly in Canucks-coloured paper and slides it all into a lovely, tastefully-branded little Canucks-themed bag. Very nice.

Post-game, we slip into the sports bar at the corner, watch the highlights of the game we've just come from, and I then review the situation on espn.com before bed. There's scarcely been a moment over the last six hours when I haven't been a zombie-bug wandering in a manically consumptive formicarium.

Most decent people instinctively act with revulsion in the face of this insane, corporatized, spectacular shit-show. And totally justifiably. The micro and macro-economic logics of the pro sports world are crazed and infuriating. Triple-figure tickets, billion-dollar franchises, $3 million Super Bowl ads, $13 million dollars a year for middling pitchers, a quarter billion for A-Rod (twice!), stadium deals in the high hundreds of millions, that freaking $300 jersey, the commodification 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 centres named after banks, cigarette companies sponsoring operas, theatre 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?

Wrong game plan?

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 per cent 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 17 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 theatre or hip-hop 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.

New arenas

Across the ideological, class, cultural, and sporting spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that sports are, at best, distractingly vapid. This retreat by folks who love sports, and folks by revile them, and everything in-between, has turned the sports world into easy prey for hyper-consumptive, violent, militaristic, sexist, and homophobic politics -- and, ultimately, handed over the immense power of sports to some of the worst elements of our society.

Should we then dismiss sports as trivial and irrelevant? My argument here is precisely the opposite: we should all -- whether we watch, obsess, cheer, play, or not at all -- take sports seriously, as worthy of real respect, because if we don't, we will continue allow them to be dominated by some of the most regrettable politics imaginable.

At their best sports challenge the elitist presumptions of intellectuals who elevate mind over body. Sports insist that materialist collisions, body-on-body interactions, are where everyday politics is played out, understood, and contested. Sports is a primary site for apprehending who we are, how we get along with other with people who may be very different from ourselves, and what ethical grounds we ascribe to.

Because sports are so volatile and so powerful, every impact reverberates something fierce. Think of the battles that ensue when a young woman just wants to play on a boys' football team, let alone the shit storm Muhammad Ali caused when he proclaimed his support for Black nationalism and went to jail for refusing to fight in Vietnam. It's said, and I think maybe it's true, that the money shot for queer rights will be when a revered currently-playing athlete in a major sport comes out. Jason Collins probably isn't high-profile enough to fit that bill, but maybe. Magic Johnson might well have been the tipping point that finally undermined HIV/AIDS prejudices.

But leave that aside for a minute. Politics is more than iconic events or star-struck moments. You can't participate in or spectate sports without constantly articulating values, running into difference, talking about what matters and why, and being forced to figure out who you have responsibility for and why. Our core political ideals are always being performed in the gym, rink, ring, field, or track and then tested materially and bodily.

Late capitalism relentlessly reduces everything to commodity. Everyone is market fodder and everywhere is a potential profit centre: nothing really matters so much that it cannot be bought and sold. Resisting neoliberalism requires us to imagine, carve out, and create non-market spaces where social and cultural relationships are animated by incommensurability. I submit that sports can be joyful, powerful, and sweet, but a whole lot more than that too.

I am obviously not defending the entire breadth of the sporting world as it exists now (!): I am arguing for what sports are and could be. To my mind it's not a great leap to think of a time when sports are a profound force for good in our culture. We condescend to those possibilities at our peril.  [Tyee]

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