When did sports become about who you hated more than about who you loved?
My guess is around the time of my childhood. While free agency was introduced to the NFL in the 1940’s, it wasn’t until the 1970’s and 80’s that it reached the MLB and NBA and turned baseball and basketball from local sport to national commerce. Allegiances were born of pocket strings over player strengths, commercial appeal over competitive zeal, Name, Likeness & Image over Wins, Losses & Ties.
In short, Villainy over Heroism.
Not that villainy ruins sport. One of the great pursuits in pro football is an undefeated season, capped with a Super Bowl win. The Perfect Season has happened only once, with the 1972 Miami Dolphins. And watching the enormously wealthy (and politically conservative) New England Patriots lose that bid in the 2012 Super Bowl was to witness one of the greatest upsets in NFL history.
But that is exception, not rule. Most sports today — particularly in a pandemic — hold all the drama of an eBay auction.
So what to make of this year’s World Series, between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros? At best, we have an ugly option: Root for racists or cheaters.
The cheating has been well-established. In 2017, the Astros were found by Major League Baseball to have stolen signs from opposing pitchers and catchers with the team’s centerfield camera, tarnishing their World Series win. Some opposing players have accused them of swiping again to get into this championship, though baseball has provided no evidence of further swindling.
The Braves are a trickier question. Atlanta has long been home to the “Tomahawk Chop,” where fans cheer a guttural war cry while flexing elbows in a chopping motion.
“The tomahawk chop chant will be all over your television screens this week with crowds perpetuating the worst forms of cultural appropriation,” The Toronto Star opined.
The paper is not far off, though I don’t think fans are trying to appropriate anything. They’re trying simply to offend. Where once the cheer was to support a team and mascot, now it supports a political view and mascot.
Like anti-vaxxers and the mask-and-science defiant, the hawkers’ purpose is not to make a statement other than ‘No.’ No to common causes, No to greater goods, No to the browning of America. It is hard to hear the chants out of Georgia and NOT hear the not-so-faint faint echoes of Trumpism in the stands.
It would seem a fool’s folly. Name a single American issue that voters are less liberal on than they were 50 years ago. Name a single business in America not tasked with becoming more diverse. Name a time in the last half century when science got it wrong.
Other than the voting booth, that is.
And those days are numbered: There is no stopping the browning and liberalization of advanced civilizations, only feeble gestures of protest, like cheating and passive aggressive moaning, which is all the Tomahawk Chop really is.
Can we pull for a double disqualification?
