OPINION:
Walk down the entranceway of the Farragut West Metro Station in Washington, D.C., and you’ll see an interesting poster hanging on the wall. Part of an ad campaign for the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority, the poster shows two men at a bowling alley, conversing. One says, “A Metrobus travels 8,260 miles between breakdowns. Didn’t know that, did you?” To which the other replies, “Can’t we just talk about sports?”
The purpose of the poster, of course, is to promote public transportation in the Washington region. However, the poster also does something else: It reinforces the perception that sports are — and always have been — a trivial matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and the first half of 2014, perhaps as convincingly as any period in recent history, proves that sports can spur meaningful discourse, not just frivolous chatter.
Consider the sports stories that have made front-page news so far this year. That’s front page as in the news section, not just front page in the Sports section:
Michael Sam, a defensive end from the University of Missouri, announced weeks before the St. Louis Rams drafted him that he is homosexual. If he makes the team, he would be the first openly homosexual player in the 94-year history of the National Football League.
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling caused a furor over his repugnant comments regarding blacks, a headline grabber that fueled conversation not only about race, but also privacy, because Mr. Sterling made his remarks while being secretly recorded in his girlfriend’s living room.
The name of Washington’s NFL club has launched a debate, which has swelled from a regional story into a national controversy, with media outlets opting to ban the use of the team name “Redskins” from their pages and airwaves. Raise your hand if you would be mulling the treatment of Native Americans if not for this story.
Add the NFL’s consideration of banning the N-word, and Russia’s stance on homosexuality at the Olympics in Sochi, and you have a menu of weighty topics, courtesy of the sports world, that has forced Americans to take a hard look at preconceived ideas about sexual orientation, race and ethnicity.
What entity, other than sports, with its safe and familiar backdrop, has the power to consistently raise societal topics that fuel spirited opinions in living rooms, barbershops, work cubicles, classrooms and eateries around the country?
This is not new. Sports, with their special meaning for all groups of people, have been a conversation-driver in American society at least since the days when Theodore Roosevelt and his larger-than-life presence graced the Oval Office.
Indeed, it was President Roosevelt who, in 1905, used his bully pulpit to rein in the bloody mayhem of college football. In stadiums nationwide, strapping young lads were literally bashing each other’s brains out. Several years earlier, football had been celebrated as a molder of men, but no longer. Appalled by the carnage, Americans demanded that the game be reformed. Roosevelt, too, was outraged, and all but ordered universities to make the sport safer or risk having it outlawed. (They did, and it wasn’t.) In many ways, the national conversation about the bloodletting in football was a conversation about violence and the masculine ideal.
Black athletes’ participation in sports also sparked widespread discussion. The uproar surrounding the controversial boxer Jack Johnson was as much about him winning the heavyweight crown in 1908 as it was about him defying racial mores — most notably cavorting around with and marrying white women. The intense interest shown by black and white Americans in the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling rematch of 1938 was largely a result of the ideological clash between American democracy and Nazism. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color line demonstrated that racial integration in all aspects of society was not just possible, it was morally right. Robinson’s achievement helped lay the psychological groundwork for the desegregation of other important institutions.
The most significant developments in women’s sports were those tied to equality of the sexes. Events related to Title IX, for instance, were the result of officials seeking to level the playing field between male and female athletes. The outcome of such efforts prompted much heated debate. The famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 stirred impassioned feelings not only because it symbolized one of the goals of the women’s liberation movement — living under the same rules as men — but also because it undercut assumptions about the physical, intellectual and emotional weakness of women.
Then there were much-discussed events in which politics transcended the playing of sports. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the Army in 1967 — “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” — reflected the overarching sentiment of the antiwar movement. The slaying of 11 Israeli sportsmen by eight Palestinian radicals at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games underscored in the most tragic way the life-and-death struggle between Israelis and Palestinians — a struggle that recently exploded into open warfare in Gaza. The boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics by the United States and dozens of other nations served as a stark reminder that the world was cleaved along an East-West divide. That point was reaffirmed four years later, when the USSR led a reprisal boycott of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
More recently, the child-abuse sex scandal at Penn State made front-page headlines. Americans expressed a mixture of anger and disgust over the reprehensible nature of the story and apparent cover-up. To say the least, it got people talking about issues they would rather avoid.
If you happen to spy that Metro poster around town, remember one thing: Sports not only sustain a conversation; often, they spark a meaningful one.
Chris Elzey is an assistant professor in the history-art history Department at George Mason University and co-director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure in Society.
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