Southpaw 49: The 2020 NBA Strike, Revisited
This week marked the one-year anniversary of the NBA wildcat strike. One year out, what has its impact been?
Dear Readers,
One of our biggest frustrations when we first began Southpaw was that one of the most consequential sports-and-politics stories in recent memory—the NBA shutting down due to a strike—happened just a few weeks before we were scheduled to launch. All the quality takes were basically taken by the time our production schedule began, so while we did write a bit about the strike—and it has certainly continued to inform our work over the past 11 months—we never got a chance to write it in-depth at the time. This week is the one-year anniversary of that strike, if you can believe it, so we’ve decided to revisit it and discuss its influence one year out. Happy reading!
-Calder and Ian
The 2020 NBA Strike, One Year Out
Back in the not-so-halcyon days of August of 2020, while we were preparing to launch this newsletter, news broke slowly—and then very quickly—that the NBA players cooped up in a bubble in Florida had just gone out on strike to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
The strike quickly spread to other major leagues—the WNBA, MLB, and even MLS—leading to a rash of canceled games. In a moment of acute political crisis, the players, led by the Milwaukee Bucks, recognized their collective power and used it . . . for a second. For a brief and almost intoxicating moment, lefty fans dreamed that the strike would spark a multi-league revolution, transforming the base and superstructure of American sports altogether. Sadly, that fantasy did not come to pass, and the strike ended fairly quickly after the players managed to win a few modest concessions from their leagues, including an agreement to use arenas as polling places during the 2020 election. To the dismay of would-be revolutionaries, the players eventually trundled back to the day-to-day grind of their professional lives.
The consequences of the strike, though, have extended far beyond the brief period when courts and fields went dark. A year later, we have enough distance to draw some lessons from the events of last August.
The Milwaukee Bucks shifted the Overton Window.
Before the strike, the idea that a player-led direct-action campaign could shut an entire league—let alone spread to other professional leagues—seemed unlikely at best and impossible at worst. Since then, the improbable has become routine: the Atlanta Dream played a pivotal role in ousting a sitting U.S. senator, soccer fans in Europe effectively squashed their millionaire and billionaire owners’ plans to create a cabalistic “Super League,” the NBA and WNBA as *leagues* officially endorsed a federal police reform bill, and college athletes won the right to profit from their name, image, and likeness. Now, there’s been a lot of bad stuff in the past year as well, but there’s no question that the NBA strike emboldened athletes to venture directly into organized politics. After you shut down a multi-billion dollar enterprise for a few days, campaigning against a racist Georgian senator doesn’t seem so daunting.
Institutional power recognizes the power of athletes.
As we’ve written about before, the strike played a major role in forcing elected officials—especially those in the Democratic Party—to treat athletes as key partners in their political coalition. Rather than grouse about on-field protest, powerful Congressional Democrats are now courting endorsements from people like Megan Rapinoe and LeBron James, who they believe can actually help them win elections and connect to young people who might lean left but are not inclined to vote. Democrats’ newfound support for activist athletes was motivated in part by Donald Trump’s habit of bullying left-leaning athletes, which in turn triggered a backlash among more moderate Democrats who were inclined to reflexively disagree with whatever the Donald said, even if they didn’t agree with the athletes themselves. But the strike also played a major role, proving that athletes can mobilize as an organized political force rather than just as a few outspoken individuals.
That said, the powers that be still want to keep athletes on the leash.
The strike forced politicians to recognize athletes’ collective power, but it also showed what sort of action powerful political interests are not willing to tolerate. Protesting against Trump and asking for their arenas to serve as polling places is okay, but shutting down a massive system of capital accumulation for extended periods of time, as the Bucks did, is not. In the weeks and after the NBA strike, reporting emerged that former President Barack Obama had counseled LeBron, Chris Paul, and other NBA leaders to encourage them to end the strike and head to the bargaining table instead. The concessions that the players eventually won weren’t insignificant, but they certainly weren’t as transformative as they could have been if the players had held out for longer. The episode underscored the unfortunate reality that while Democrats want athletes in their coalition, they don’t want them leading it. Thanks, Obama.
One big question remains: What do athletes want?
If you’ve kept up with sports news over the past year—or if you’re a loyal reader of the newsletter <3 — probably none of what we’ve discussed so far is particularly surprising. What remains a more interesting puzzle is what exactly athletes want—in both the short and long terms. At the moment, they’re engaged in a slow-burning struggle with their billionaire owners for more power, and they have powerful unions at their fingertips. In this respect, they can provide a model for collective action against richer, more powerful bosses. But take LeBron James: he’s on the side of the players, but he has developed corporate interests of his own. He’s been reluctant to criticize China for enslaving Uighurs or for squashing democracy in Hong Kong, and he just now made a movie that’s essentially an extended advertisement for the Warner Brothers’ library. (I mean, it’s really weird to have the droogs from Clockwork Orange serve as some of the “bad guys” in LeBron’s quest to reunite with his family in Space Jam: A New Legacy.) James is an extreme example, but plenty of super-star players are developing personal brands that place their economic and political interests at odds with the interest of their fellow players and with non-millionaire Americans as a whole. That’s the strange thing about players’ unions as well: it’s often the most powerful players who take on leadership roles in the players’ unions. Can you imagine George Clooney becoming the president of the Screen Actors Guild?
This is all to say that one of the underappreciated elements of last August’s wild-cat strikes was that it gave players with divergent economic and political interests a single issue to rally behind. The strike was an inspiring and impressive show of solidarity on the part of players, but it also papered over enduring contradictions that run through its base of support. In the year since the strike, it’s become less and less clear what professional athletes as a group want—and to what lengths they’re willing to go to achieve it. They’re alternatively rich and (comparatively) poor, workers and “talent,” exploited and exploiting. At the very least, they’ll remain interesting.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . an update on Southpaw Report’s least-favorite MLB pitcher? “As police bring Trevor Bauer probe to prosecutors, MLB extends pitcher’s paid leave,” by Gus Garcia-Roberts in The Washington Post (August 27, 2021).
. . . an update on Southpaw Report’s least-favorite cable news network? “Rachel Nichols Is Out—But ESPN’s Racial Rot Remains,” by Tirhakah Love in The Daily Beast (August 28, 2021).
. . . an update on Southpaw Report’s least-favorite tennis player? “‘Every Day, I Was Crying’: Olga Sharypova says her ex-boyfriend, tennis star Alexander Zverev, abused her. Why hasn’t the tour addressed it?” by Ben Rothenberg in Slate (August 25, 2021).
. . . Roger Federer, corporate darling? “Roger Federer’s Biggest Legacy? It Might Be His Billion-Dollar Brand,” by Christopher Clarey in The New York Times Magazine August 25, 2021).