In the face of conflict, the world of sports is lost
Why PR campaigns aren't working.
Dear readers,
It’s been a monumentally rough week. We are sure that you’ve read/watched/listened to plenty about the conflict in Gaza, and in situations like this, it can feel pointless to add your own voice to the avalanche of content already out there. So, while this week’s Southpaw is related to the war, we thought that we could be most helpful within our area of expertise: sniping at sports leagues. We think they’ve done a fairly dreadful job at figuring out what to say this week — so that’s the topic of our newsletter today. Hope you enjoy.
-Ian and Calder
The condemnations out of SportsWorld came quickly.
On Monday, two days after Hamas militants launched a brutal attack on Israel, Major League Baseball issued a statement condemning the “acts of terrorism committed against the people of Israel.” The NFL, the NHL, the NBA, the WNBA, the MLS and the NWSL quickly followed suit. A handful of individual teams from different sports chimed in with condemnations of their own, including at least 13 teams from the NFL. In more recent days, a handful of individuals from around the sporting world — ranging from NBA superstar LeBron James to NCAA president Charlie Baker — have added their voices to the chorus of condemnations.
And they are, no doubt, right to do so. The violence being committed by Hamas — the murder and kidnapping of Israeli Jews — is horrifying and wrong, and the sporting world is correct to speak out against it. Five years ago, it would have come as somewhat of a shock that every major sports league felt the need to issue a statement about a thorny international crisis. That we now take this sort of thing for granted is progress, of a sort.
And yet, having lived through the past three years — an era that witnessed the birth of an abiding political consciousness in the world of professional sports — we found ourselves wanting more than the canned, two-sentence statements that most of the leagues and teams left us with. The promise of the political upheaval that swept the sporting world in 2020 was not merely that athletes and teams could be participants in the country’s political life; it was that they could be sophisticated participants in the country’s political life, committed to a more equitable and peaceful future. And at least on questions of racial justice and policing, there were some promising signs that leagues and athletes could meet that high bar. Just look at the ways that athletes channeled the grassroots energy of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests into electoral energy around the 2020 election.
SportsWorld’s collective response to the conflict — a situation that cannot be captured in an Instagram post — fell short of that standard.
To be fair to athletes, they are not exactly outliers here. The war in Israel has thrown a massive wrench into the already dysfunctional political and ideological machinery of the American left. (For some broader context on that dysfunction, read Calder’s excellent new profile of Cornel West and his doomed presidential campaign.) To be sure, the left — let alone the Democratic coalition — has never been especially united on the Israel-Palestine issue, but the latest conflict has thrown those divisions into especially stark relief. In one corner of the left, mainstream Democrats have entirely ignored the violence that the Israeli state in general — and Netanyahu’s right-wing government in particular — has committed against Palestinians. In the other corner, leftist groups like DSA have demonstrated a shocking inability to distinguish between acts of resistance and straightforward war crimes.
There have, nevertheless, been left-wing voices of nuance on the issue. In an editorial published last Sunday, Haaretz, Israel's liberal paper of record, condemned Hamas’ atrocities while noting that Israel’s far-right “government of annexation and dispossession” and its foreign policy “openly ignor[ing] the existence and rights of Palestinians” created the conditions for violence. In the United States, meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned Hamas’ attack as “a major setback for any hope of peace and reconciliation in the region – and justice for the Palestinian people.” Sanders added: “For many, it is no secret that Gaza has been an open-air prison, with millions of people struggling to secure basic necessities. Hamas’ terrorism will make it much more difficult to address that tragic reality and will embolden extremists on both sides, continuing the cycle of violence.”
As Haaretz and Sanders both demonstrated, it’s possible — even necessary — for people on the left to acknowledge two realities at the same time: that Israel’s policy toward Palestine is manifestly unjust; and that Hamas’ attack is unconscionable — not just because it entailed the murder of Israeli civilians, but also because it is “completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation,” as New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz put it.
None of this nuance, however, was captured in the hastily crafted statements by athletes, teams, and professional leagues. As on Twitter user succinctly put it:
The situation feels, in many ways, like the distillation of what sports leagues and franchises have learned since we began Southpaw. But the lessons — hire a more active PR team, prioritize anodyne actions like moments of silence, flatten the nuance of complex global situations, don’t let players go off script — are all wrong. We’ve reached the era of the completely corporatized statement, designed to check a box and upset no one. After an outgrowth of player-led activism that engaged complicated political questions, we’re back here. The statement becomes part of the product, the league keeps churning, no one reflects on any of it.
It remains to be seen whether this is SportsWorld’s final word on the conflict. As violence escalates, athletes, teams and sports leagues will, we fear, have plenty more chances to show that they oppose violence against civilians, regardless of who commits it — and plenty more chances to show that they can hold multiple complex ideas in their head at the same time. We’re not feeling particularly hopeful that they can, or want to.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . a strange happening in the Atlanta Braves’ clubhouse? “Reporters Are Allowed to Report” by Tom Ley in Defector (October 13, 2023).
. . . the NHL’s latest self-inflicted wound? “The pushback on the NHL’s ban on Pride tape is already underway as players, teams react,” by Ian Mendez in The Athletic (October 11, 2023).
. . . why college quarterbacks who are now really old? “Top quarterbacks show that college football isn’t just a young man’s game” by Chuck Culpepper in The Washington Post (October 13, 2023).