Southpaw #1: Sports Owners' Bubble, the Emerging Sports Media Consensus, and Lester Rodney

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the first, mega-sized edition of Southpaw Report! We’re so pleased to have you along for the ride.

Before we get to the meaty stuff, a note on format. While the specifics of each newsletter might change from week to week, the overarching format will stay the same. Each edition will feature a short introduction that will include 1) a brief recap of major developments from the week, and 2) any loose ends that we need to tie up from the previous edition (corrections, especially damning comments from readers, etc.). Following that, we’ll have one or two longer pieces of commentary or original reporting written by the two of us or the occasional guest contributor. (This edition has two.) At the bottom of these pieces, we will include links to related pieces to give you a chance to take a deeper dive into the topic. These might be recent news stories, pieces from the archive, book reviews, academic articles, what have you. If one of our stories reminds you of something you’ve read, send us an email and we’ll include it in the next edition.

The last section will always be “Rodney’s Roundup,” a hodgepodge of the best political sports journalism from around the internet. The section’s title is an homage to Lester Rodney, the long-time sports correspondent for The Daily Worker and an early advocate of desegregating the Major Leagues.

We promise to deliver you a newsletter every Sunday that includes the smartest and sharpest journalism on sports, culture, and politics from around the web. We’ve been toying around with the idea behind Southpaw since April of 2019, and we know that it will continue to change (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse). If you have comments, complaints, story pitches, scoops, or other contributions (financial or artistic), please let us know. We’re at caldermchugh@gmail.com (@calder_mchugh on Twitter) and ian.ward.97@gmail.com (@iward29).

Let’s get to it.

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Sports owners live in their own bubble. Can their most valuable employees break them out?

Image c/o Sarisha Kurup

Whether they know it or not—and we suspect that they do—sports franchise owners are in a pitched battle with athletes for control over the future of professional sports. This showdown would be headline-worthy even if you ignored the fact that these owners, by dint of being billionaires who have chosen to spend significant capital to buy a sports team, belong to a particular class of asshole. They are defined first and foremost by their unshakable belief in their superior managerial competence. Even if owners have inherited all of their money from their families, so the thinking goes, they must understand the business and function of sports better than any of the people they employ. After all, how else could they have gotten so rich in the first place?

Under normal circumstances, this managerial hubris manifests itself in the repeated indignities that owners subject their players and employees to, like firing them for becoming pregnant or looking the other way as their lackeys subject female workers to ritualized sexual harassment. On the whole, owners treated their employees—players, management, and staff alike—much like managers at private equity funds treat their analysts: as hapless labor to be exploited, humiliated, and ultimately disregarded. This has mostly worked for them.

Yet unlike aspiring Blackstone analysts (mostly failed Division III lacrosse players whose fathers are members of the boss’s country club), professional athletes don’t grow on trees. Players are beginning to wield their collective power in ways that actually threaten owners’ bottom lines, and the contradictions between players’ economic and political interests and the interests of the ownership class are growing more stark every day. But even more significantly, the recent surge of political action by players has challenged owners’ monopoly on managerial expertise. On every issue—from anti-racist protest to coronavirus health protections—players are proving that, even without the benefits of a Wharton education, they are smarter, savvier, and significantly less morally bankrupt than the management class.

This story begins, as it often does, with the bravery of some of the most financially vulnerable. WNBA players, many of whom are paid around $40,000/year, have for years formed the vanguard of racial justice direct action among professional athletes. In 2016, members of the Indiana Fever, New York Liberty, and Phoenix Mercury incurred $500 in penalties when they violated the league’s uniform code to protest the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police. In August, the Washington Mystics took the court wearing shirts with seven bloody bullet holes painted on the back to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Meanwhile, league officials in the WNBA and the NBA attempted to smuggle asinine performances of solidarity into their otherwise-unchanged daily operations. In the WNBA, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that the remainder of the league’s season would be played “in honor of Breonna Taylor.” In the NBA, the league permitted players to wear pre-approved messages like “Black Lives Matter” or “Equality” on the backs of their jerseys. (The teams then sold these jerseys online at exorbitant mark-ups, lest they forgo a prime opportunity to profit from racial injustice.)

This type of corporate activism springs fully-formed from the contorted crania of the ownership class; it is the concrete manifestation of its perverted logic, which fixates so singularly on maintaining profits margins that it cannot distinguish between action and the mere suggestion of it. Yet there are signs that players are coming to recognize this charade for what it really is. The wild-cat strike launched by the Milwaukee Bucks on August 26 and quickly taken up by players in the WNBA, MLB, and MLS has rightly been hailed as a historic step forward in the history of Black athlete activism, but it also marked a critical salvo in the short-term struggle between the players and the owners. Three elements of the action are likely to have lasting consequences in this fight.

First, the players in the NBA and the WNBA flexed their power outside of conventional organizational structures—either the leagues themselves or the respective players’ associations. Unlike semi-annual conflicts over collective bargaining agreements and salary caps, the strike was not mediated by league officials or labor reps. In the case of the NBA, the players directly violated Section 30.1 of their Collective Bargaining Agreement, which explicitly prohibits strikes and other work stoppages. The strike arose directly from the players’ indignation with both the police killings themselves and with the leagues’ tepid responses; it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that without the players, the league is nothing. Even more consequentially, it showed that the players are willing to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of a broader collective good—an impulse that remains absolutely foreign to the ownership class. 

Second, the strikes exposed the leagues’ attempts at “activism” as the bland PR stunts that they really are. Unlike league officials, the Bucks issued a series of real demands, including a call for the Wisconsin State Legislature to reconvene and bring a police reform bill to the floor. Despite its short duration, the strike succeeded in demonstrating that branding efforts that gesture towards some vague notion of social justice look awfully hollow when they’re compared to direct action.

Finally, the strike threw a wrench in the owners’ financial logic. Until the strike, milquetoast performances of solidarity appeared to be the best way for owners to appease activist-minded players without ruffling the feathers (and wallets) of fans. But the strike inverted this logic. Faced with the threat of a general labor stoppage, owners will be hard pressed to ignore the reality that it is the players, rather than the fans, who pose the greatest threat to their bottom lines.

At the end of the day, the strike shattered the illusion that the ownership class is out to serve anyone but itself. If professional sports can serve in any way as an engine of social and political progress in this country, it will be thanks to the players and the players alone. Unlike the owners, who continue to profit from global catastrophe, the players recognize that America as it exists is deeply unstable. Yes, they are rich—extremely rich—but they are are not sports-franchise-owner-rich. As Justin Timberlake x Sean Parker will tell you, a billion dollars is a lot more than a million:

In this case, that distinction is essential. Professional athletes still live in this world, the world where Black Lives Matter and pandemics kill people and climate change is ravaging the planet. Sports owners are rich enough to make all of that academic, mere dinner party chit-chat for when they’re done gossiping about one another.

If professional athletes can threaten the ownership class enough that they are forced back into the world with the rest of us—if they can hold their feet to the fire and demand what they are owed beyond money—then that will be an important start. 

—Calder McHugh

Go Deeper:

1) For a portrait of the ownership class and its perversities: “Defective Dynasts Sell New York Mets To Prolific Financial Criminal, Fans Rejoice,” By David Roth in Defector.

2) For an analysis of how Black cultural institutions like the NBA bridge Black class divides: “The NBA Wildcat Strike Is How a Revolution Starts,” By Lester Spence in Mother Jones (August 29, 2020).

3) For a background on a racist owner in the National Women’s Soccer League and structural critiques of corporate activism in sports: “Burn It All Down Podcast Episode 170: The Wildcat Strikes and What Comes Next” by Amira Rose Davis, Shireen Ahmed, Brenda Elsey and Jessica Luther (September 9, 2020).

4) For context on the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement and how the strike violated it: “Why the NBA Wildcat Strike Is So Important,” By Edward Ongweso Jr. in Vice (August 27, 2020).

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“Stick to sports” is dead. Now what?

Back in 2017, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis made waves with his 3,500 word article, “Sportswriting Has Become a Liberal Profession—Here’s How It Happened.” Curtis’s argument was that the proliferation of online outlets, the rise of Trumpism, the resurgence of on-field activism, and the general leftward drift of public opinion had converged to transform the sports media, once a haven of the center-right, into a bastion of center-left liberalism. “Today, sportswriting is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code,” Curtis wrote. “…There was a time when filling your column with liberal ideas on race, class, gender, and labor policy got you dubbed a ‘sociologist.’ These days, such views are more likely to get you a job.” Curtis generally applauded this leftward shift, lamenting only that sportswriting lacked “a David Frum or Ross Douthat” to make “wrongheaded-but-interesting arguments about NCAA amateurism.”

The piece precipitated an unusually intense avalanche of responses, even by the high standards of discourse-happy sports fans. Although some voices from the right bemoaned the “arrogance” of the “hegemonic liberalism” that had taken hold in the sports pages, none questioned either its existence or its power. Everyone agreed that liberalism had won the day.

Revisited three years later, Curtis’s piece reads a bit like prophecy. Almost all the trends that he identified in 2017 have accelerated, fueled by the sports media’s new focus on the experiences of female athletes—Curtis’s piece appeared in February of 2017, six months before the #MeToo movement began in earnest—and by the increasingly febrile antics of the Trumpian right. In the past four months, athletes’ participation in the Black Lives Matter Movement has completely obliterated any lingering division between sports and politics, giving sportswriters even more license to wade into the latter.

Today, the question facing left-leaning sportswriters is not whether they will dominate the sports media but how they will choose to exercise their influence. As Curtis put it in 2017, “[T]his is what happens when revolutionary ideas become a ruling philosophy — when the former insurgents get the run of the place.” And since Curtis’s piece, something like a consensus has emerged among the major sports outlets around the appropriate way to balance sports and politics. This consensus can neatly be summarized as the rejection of the infamous “stick to sport” mantra: when politics intervenes directly in the sporting world, either in the form of on-field protests or collective action by athletes, it is not only appropriate but actually imperative to write about it. On-field protests, allegations of workplace harassment in front offices, criminal allegations against athletes, or statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement all deserve their own headline.

Sure, there are a handful of traditionalist holdouts who just want to write about lineup tweaks and transfer deals and leave the politics out of it completely, but they form a quickly-vanishing minority. Further to the right, there has also been a forceful reaction against this new consensus in the form of Barstool Sports, which has managed to rally a sizable audience of disillusioned frat bros behind David Portnoy’s distinctive mix of misogyny and white grievance politics. There is no hope for these people.

But the most formidable impediment to the continued leftward shift of sportswriting arises from within the new consensus itself. Having embraced this new set of rules, the danger is that the sports media will refuse to go beyond them. Rather than doing the difficult work of exposing exploitation, corruption, and discrimination in the sports world, sportswriters will settle into the comfortable groove of writing about tweets and t-shirts and calling it political journalism. They will cover the symbols and gestures of political action without actually confronting their readers with the mechanism of exploitation that allows millionaires to profit from dubiously legal monopolies and universities to rig their admissions practices to favor rich white squash players. The sports pages will become just another place where liberals can go to pat themselves on the back for boycotting the Super Bowl.

This danger is further compounded by the fact that, in 2017, this new style of politicized sports journalism has become broadly popular, if not actually profitable. For the first time ever, a majority of Americans support athletes who speak out on political issues, and there is mounting evidence that their media tastes are reflecting this approval. Defector, the new subscription-based sports and culture blog launched by a cohort of ex-Deadspin writers, has leveraged Deadspin’s old we-won’t-stick-to-sports model into 30,000 subscribers and nearly $2 million in revenue in its first three months. In a recent interview with Harvard’s Niemen Lab, Defector’s Kelsey McKinney explained that the site’s political bent is a major attraction for its readers, saying, “ESPN was saying just a few years ago that they wouldn’t cover politics at all. Now there’s no choice there. It’s been made really clear by the athletes, the people who play the sports, that they don’t want that distinction there themselves. So, who are we to decide that it must be imposed?”

Of course, McKinney is right, but her comments raise a broader question: in the post-“stick-to-sports” era, will the sports media actually embrace its progressive promise, or will it revert to churning out heaps of game coverage peppered with second-rate political journalism? The legendary lefty sportswriter Robert Lipsyte warned of the latter fate in 2017, telling Curtis: “We shouldn’t piss on things that are progress and are good. But how much of it is really any kind of expression of liberalism? How much is times change and we change with it? Maybe we’re just standing in the same place but being carried along by the flow.”

2020 has killed “stick to sports” for good. Now, let’s go find the politics.

—Ian Ward

Go Deeper:

1) For a survey of the current state of sports media and a take-down of the private equity ghouls who ruined your favorite publications: “How We Got Here” by Tom Ley in Defector (September 8, 2020).

2) For Bryan Curtis’s rough draft: “The End of Stick to Sports,” by Bryan Curtis in The Ringer (January 30, 2017).

3) For Defector’s backstory and an appraisal of its prospects: “Is Defector the Future of Media?” by Alex Shephard in The New Republic (September 23, 2020).

4) For a review of VICE TV’s new sports show “Stick to Sports,” hosted by Jemele Hill and Cari Champion: “Jemele Hill and Cari Champion have joined forces to host 'Stick to Sports,' a new show where they don't have to,” by Meredith Cash in Insider (August 17, 2020).

RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about…

Activists demanding structural changes to the NCAA? “Meet the Cal cross country runner who wants to dismantle the NCAA” by Emily Giambalvo in The Washington Post

College presidents, in desperate need of cash, risking the health of their (unpaid) athletes? “For the Big Ten, the Money Was Just Too Tempting” by Jemele Hill in The Atlantic

Years of protest in the WNBA and how President Trump is counting on football being played for his re-election chances? “American Athletes Can Decide This Year's Election” by Robert Lipsyte in The Nation

NBA owners donating massive lumps of cash to the Trump and the Republican Party: “The Political Donations of NBA Owners Are Not So Progressive,” by John Gonzalez in The Ringer

Why the sports media refused to call the NBA’s wildcat strike a strike: “Belabored Podcast #205: Wildcat Sports Strike Wave, with Dave Zirin,” hosted by Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen from Dissent (September 4, 2020).