Southpaw 19: Portnoy’s Complaints
Barstool's Dave Portnoy keeps playing the victim.
Dear readers,
This week saw President Biden begin his attempt to depoliticize sports. While we’re all in favor of the new president not using professional and collegiate athletics as a cudgel against his political opponents like President Trump did, we know that sports were political long before Trump got into office. Moving back to the ways of old, where athletes were constantly pilloried for attempting to make political (or simply socially conscious) statements, would be a shame. If you’re curious about this topic, we discussed it at length in our interview with Dave Zirin.
If you’re more curious about an almost comically bad man and his media organization, this week’s newsletter is about Barstool. Happy reading!
-Calder and Ian
Dave Portnoy is not the victim
Dave Portnoy is sports media’s biggest villain, and this week he laid bare his governing philosophy in all of its ugliness.
For those of you blessed enough not to know who he is, Dave Portnoy is the media titan behind Barstool Sports, the gambling-rag-turned-multi-million-dollar-digital-media company that Portnoy helped found in Boston in 2003. In the past decade, Barstool has blossomed into the most overtly reactionary and unapologetically chauvinistic sports outlet on the market—no small feat. The list of Portnoy’s past misdeeds and transgressions is simply too long to recount here. (For a fuller account, we recommend this profile by Jay Caspian Kang for The New York Times Magazine in 2017). We hope it will suffice to say that Portnoy, who is known as “El Presidente” by devotees of the site, once responded to the self-evident claim that Barstool promoted rape culture by saying, “Though I never condone rape, if you’re a Size 6 and you’re wearing skinny jeans, you kind of deserve to be raped, right?”
You might think that, in 2021, it would be relatively uncontroversial for a person of good faith to shun Portnoy and his company, both of which are built on a mix of frat-bro sexism and revanchist cultural politics. But, alas, you would be wrong—and this week showed you just how much.
The latest Barstool saga began on Monday, when the company’s CEO, Erika Nardini, posted a video to her Twitter account denouncing a handful of journalists and players from the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) who had rightfully questioned the league’s growing affiliation with Barstool. As background, Nardini, who assumed the top job at Barstool in 2016, has been a vocal supporter of the NWHL and recently expressed interest in purchasing an ownership stake in one of the league’s teams. But in her video on Monday, Nardini included screenshots of the names and Twitter handles of specific journalists and players who had questioned her support of the league.
Nardini’s video prompted a response from Tyler Tumminia, the NWHL’s commissioner, who on Monday afternoon issued a statement denouncing Nardini’s video and suggesting that the league would not enter into an ownership deal with her. In the statement, Tumminia said she worried in particular about Nardini’s decision to call out specific journalists and players, given Barstool’s well-documented proclivity for inciting online mobs to harass anyone who speaks ill of the brand. A number of NWHL players, including Saroya Tinker, one of the league's few players of color, issued statements denouncing Barstool and encouraging Nardini to keep her distance. “WE, as a league do not want support from ANY openly racist platform,” wrote Tinker. “Pls keep your money.”
Nardini, though, is not content to keep her money. Following the league’s statement, Barstool launched a digital broadside against the league and its players. On Tuesday, Portnoy, never content to watch from the sidelines, posted a five-minute-long screed on Twitter in which he argued, among other things, that anyone who claims “without proof” that Barstool is racist or white supremacist should be put in jail. (For what it’s worth, there’s ample proof that Tinker is correct.) Portnoy has subsequently posted a handful of similarly rambling videos, and Barstool has been producing a steady stream of drivel across its multiple platforms airing their grievances against the NWHL’s “unfair treatment” of Nardini. On Wednesday, the site rolled out a line of “Nardini Hockey Club” branded apparel on its online shop, including a Vineyard Vines sherpa-lined vest that costs $135.
If this seems to you like a rather stupid and and purposeless online spat for a multi-million dollar media company to engage in, well, you’d be correct. Simply put, picking protracted fights with less powerful figures in the sporting world isn’t an incidental part of Barstool’s coverage—it is the core of their business model. Portnoy started Barstool in 2003 as a nominally anti-establishment rag that claimed to speak for the common sports fan that “elite” outlets like ESPN had left behind. It quickly became clear, though, that Barstool spoke for the same demographic that was already over-represented in existing sports media—i.e. resentful white guys from Boston who spend too much time arguing over their fantasy football leagues. Unable to legitimately claim that he was giving voice to the voiceless, Portnoy decided instead to convince his audience that they were in fact the victims of a massive sports-media conspiracy meant to turn their beloved “apolitical” (read: right-wing) sports coverage into liberal commentary. While Barstool’s packaging has changed since 2003, its product has stayed essentially the same: a constant stream of white grievance politics where the grievances are entirely made up.
Sound familiar? It is. Portnoy, who is a frequent contributor to Fox News, helped to write the new populist playbook well before the Republicans Party adopted it as the foundation of their platform. (Josh Hawley is still really mad that he doesn’t have a book deal anymore, in case you’re wondering.) And like any self-respecting right wing populist, Portnoy has leveraged his for-the-people message into a massive personal fortune. As he likes to remind his followers, he is sitting on what he calls “unlimited money.” (Online estimates put his personal net worth at $120 million.) Valued at a paltry $10 million, Nardini lives in comparative poverty.
It takes a particularly powerful strain of delusion to look at a conflict between a millionaire CEO and a handful of aspiring semi-professional female hockey players and decide that the millionaire CEO is the persecuted party. Unfortunately, this is exactly the strain of delusion that Barstool peddles. Portnoy and his Stoolies (what his devoted fans call themselves) would like you to believe that their fight with the NWHL is a righteous struggle between a well-meaning investor and the crazed, woke mob. But in reality, it’s just another instance of a millionaire throwing a temper-tantrum because a handful of workers told her fuck off. (See, for context, Kelly Loeffler.) Nardini probably genuinely believes in the mission of the NWHL and wants to see it succeed, but her support costs her nothing, save the embarrassment of being rejected. The players, meanwhile, have risked both their careers and their livelihoods to ensure that the league they build reflects the values that they cherish. There is only one courageous party here, and it’s not Nardini.
This latest episode is noteworthy only because it so clearly reveals the truth about Barstool, which is that Portnoy and his posse don’t speak for the common sports fan, and they never have. (Lest you forget, this is the same man who in 2019 publicly threatened to fire any Barstool employee who considered unionizing.) Instead, they speak for the self-important millionaires who think their fortunes give them the right to rule over professional sports as their personal fiefdoms. The rest of Barstool’s schtick—the cultural warrior sabre rattling, the two-dudes-having-a-beer chumminess—is just window dressing. Portnoy and Nardini love playing the victims, but they are actually the bullies.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . Kim Ng and the MLB’s exaggerated narrative of progress? “Hailed as a Trailblazer, Kim Ng Stands Alone,” by James Wagner in The New York Times (January 29, 2021).
. . . the NFL’s non-existent narrative of progress? “The NFL, looking to improve minority hiring, ends cycle with same number of Black coaches,” by Adam Kilgore and Marke Maske in The Washington Post (January 28, 2021).
. . . a WNBA player’s courageous decision to publicize their sex reassignment surgery? “New York Liberty's Layshia Clarendon has successful top surgery,” by Jeff Zillgitt in USA TODAY (January 29, 2021).
. . . a football player’s crusade against Mississippi’s racist flag? “Kylin Hill fought to change the Mississippi flag. Next up: The NFL,” by Michael Lee in The Washington Post (January 30, 2021).