Southpaw 48: Cheerleaders for War
Professional sports leagues threw their weight behind the war in Afghanistan. As the conflict ends, the aftereffects of their support still shape sports.
Dear Readers,
Happy Sunday, folks. The big news this week: America’s fifth major professional sport, Jeopardy!, finally had its own major-league scandal. Permanent-host-for-a-hot-second Mike Richards is mercifully out of his new job after The Ringer published a report detailing his fondness for sexist and misogynistic insults. The whole Richards debacle raises some serious questions about the future of the Jeopardy! franchise—but luckily enough, the answer to all of those questions is “Who is LeVar Burton?”
This week, apropos of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, we’re taking a deep dive into the connection between professional sports leagues and America’s Forever Wars. We hope you enjoy!
-Calder and Ian
Professional sports leagues helped build public support for the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan. They can help us avoid the next doomed conflict.
As post-mortems of the U.S.’s brutal and unsuccessful war in Afghanistan begin hitting the presses, one oft-forgotten participant deserves, at the very least, a lengthy footnote: America’s professional sports leagues.
The role that professional sports leagues played in manufacturing consent for the U.S.’s initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has been well documented. In the months following the 9/11 attacks, American flags became a ubiquitous feature of American sports venues, and renditions of “God Bless America” quickly replaced “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during seventh-inning stretches around the country. Leagues began providing players with camo-print apparel, and Veterans’ Day celebrations assumed a practically sanctified place in the sporting calendar. Pat Tillman, an NFL player turned Army Ranger whose death (by friendly fire, no less) was a centerpiece of Pentagon propaganda, became a household name. (Never mind the evidence that Tilman loathed the U.S.’s meandering wars.) These flag-drenched displays of patriots rarely made explicit reference to America’s entanglement in two overseas conflicts, but they didn’t really need to. It didn’t take Noam Chomsky to realize that when fans stood for the National Anthem, they were implicitly standing in support of the U.S. military’s imperial designs.
Having helped gin up support for the initial invasions, professional sports leagues were more than happy to earn a few more bucks by keeping public opinion firmly behind the Forever Wars. Between 2012 and 2015, professional sports leagues accepted over $6.8 million in Pentagon funds in exchange for conducting “patriotic displays” during games, including endless renditions of “God Bless America,” recruitment events, and various other pro-veteran tributes. The largest portion of the spoils—about $6 million—went to the National Football League. The Department of Defense has since banned such partnerships, but the rituals of patriotism that were once subsidized by taxpayer dollars continue today. The only difference is that now they happen for free.
The political consequences of these partnerships extend far beyond the seventh-inning stretch. Perhaps more than any other facet of public life, professional sports have helped conflate patriotism and jingoism, contributing to a political atmosphere where anything short of total and uncritical support of U.S. military power is roundly criticized as anti-Americanism. In that same atmosphere, any demonstration of political dissent by a professional athlete becomes incontrovertible proof of their hatred of the U.S. military, a disingenuous act of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that the right weaponizes to discredit public protests against racism, sexism, and just about any other political ill.
As the curtain finally comes down on the disastrous U.S. war in Afghanistan—a conflict that killed over 2,000 Americans over 300,000 Afghanis, displaced close to 3.5 million people in Afghanistan, and cost nearly $2.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars—well-meaning sports fans should grapple with this history. The point of this exercise isn’t to allocate blame—although there is plenty of that to go around—so much as it to make sure that the next time the U.S. enters a nihilistic and doomed conflict overseas, athletes and the fans who support them will stand against American militarism and imperialism, not with it.
And there is little doubt that, sooner or later, Uncle Sam will call on his friends in the professional sporting world to stand behind him once again. Of course, the withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests that America’s place in the world of the 2020s will look much different from how it did in the 2000s. For one, the focus of American foreign policy has begun shifting away from counterinsurgency in the Middle East and toward the more nebulous notion of “great power competition,” a loosely-defined framework that foregrounds the growing threat that China (and, to a lesser degree, Russia, North Korea, and Iran) pose to U.S. economic and military hegemony. Yet just like “the War on Terror,” great power competition frames U.S. foreign policy as a Manichean struggle between the “the West” and its adversaries, this time in East Asia. As a consequence, it positions critics of U.S. foreign policy as enemies of America while simultaneously giving the Pentagon broad political license to continue hoovering up cash in pursuit of a not-yet-defined strategic objective. It is not a coincidence that supporters of the great power competition framework often refer to the U.S.’s current geopolitical situation vis-a-vis China as “the new Cold War.”
And just like in the old Cold War, sports are playing an outsized role in the public discussion about this new conflict. One professional league—the NBA—has already taken center stage in the debate surrounding U.S. relations with China. As became clear from the fallout from Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s pro-Hong Kong comments in 2019, the NBA’s position is hardly straightforward. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, China represents an enormous and extremely lucrative market for the NBA, a fact that places the league’s financial interest at odds with the U.S.’s increasingly tough-on-China foreign policy. Just last month, for instance, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver alluded to the political tightrope that the NBA is currently walking, noting that the NBA hopes to play a “productive role” in fostering ties between the U.S. and China but suggesting that it would comply with a more assertively anti-China policy if asked to do so. “I do think it remains important that—particularly when tensions are high between governments—that we foster these sports, educational, cultural relationships,” Silver said. “I’ve said that from the very beginning. It certainly doesn’t mean that we are blessing everything that happens in China by any means. We are at root an American company, and so we follow U.S. government policy.” Silver’s comments came less than a month after a congressional committee asked NBA players to sever commercial ties with Chinese shoe companies that use cotton grown using slave labor in China’s Xinjiang region.
It’s a fool’s errand to try to foretell the precise contours of this next conflict. As the Afghanistan debacle once again demonstrates, both the U.S. government and the American public are fantastically bad at predicting the outcome of U.S. foreign policy decisions. But you can bank on at least one thing: athletes and professional sports leagues will play a significant role in shaping public opinion on the next chapter of U.S. foreign policy. Recent history has shown that left to their own devices, leagues will align themselves with the powers of imperialism, militarism, and greed (who are, not coincidentally, also those with the deepest pockets). Dig a little further deeper into the historical record and you will find plenty of instances of organized sports allying themselves with organized violence. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,” George Orwell wrote in the aftermath of the Second World War. “It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
We remain hopeful, though, that Orwell is wrong, and that sports can become an engine of solidarity rather than a smokescreen for state-sponsored violence. As The Nation’s Dave Zirin has documented, in the early aughts, as the professional leagues dutifully lined up behind the dual U.S. invasions in the Middle East, a vocal group of athletes mobilized in opposition to the wars. Their movement was intentionally broad-based. For instance, they drew attention to the myriad ways that America’s desire for an overseas empire reinforces domestic racism, among other evils. Their mobilization couldn’t overcome the allure of a Pentagon paycheck, but it set a vitally important precedent: that fans and athletes can and must stand against their leagues and their government when those two groups join forces to peddle the latest war. It’s only a matter of time until we will have to follow their example again.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the decline in the number of Black players in MLB? “The Nine,” by The Washington Post Staff in The Washington Post (August 17, 2021).
. . . Billie Jean King’s politics? “Billie Jean King Wants Athletes to Follow the Money,” by Louisa Thomas in The New Yorker (August 15, 2021).
. . . a brief history of NFL team names? “A Historical Guide to Renaming the Washington Football Team,” by Victor Mather in The New York Times (August 15, 2021).
. . . the Mets’ loud-mouthed GM? “Steve: Shut Up, Man,” by Ray Rotto in Defector (August 19, 2021).
. . . why companies want female athletes’ bodies more than their brands? “Brands are taking notice of female college athletes. Now let’s move beyond their sex appeal,” by Candace Bucker in The Washington Post (August 22, 2021).