The Era of "Sportsball" Is Over

The Luka trade and the new era of sports' cultural relevance

Dear readers,

We’ll admit it: our hiatus from the newsletter has lasted a little bit longer than we originally planned. Our jobs as political journalists did not get less busy once Donald Trump was once again elected — who would have thought!

We’re bringing you a quick Southpaw, though, because we still like doing this when we can and because a giant NBA trade got us thinking about sports and politics once again.

We also didn’t want to wait too long to give you some quick housekeeping on the future of the newsletter. Truthfully, between our reporting jobs and various other life responsibilities, it has become untenable to keep producing a newsletter every week. Fortunately for all of you, our 150+ back editions — running straight from September 2020 to May 2024 — remain free to peruse at your leisure. So this is going to turn into a less regular enterprise, but one that (we hope) will continue to hold your attention. We’ll pop in here when we have something to say in the sports/politics space — and maybe occasionally when we have something to say about something else.

Now, on to the main event, courtesy of Calder.

-Ian and Calder

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We have never seen anything like this here at Southpaw HQ. Luka Dončić, the (now former) Dallas Mavericks’ 25-year-old star who just led the team to the NBA Finals, was traded late last night for Anthony Davis, the Lakers’ 31-year-old, all-NBA big along with some other more minor pieces. Davis is a great player, but Dončić is an all-time great entering his prime — the same guy who, again, last year put the Mavs on his back and carried them to an NBA Finals appearance.

The trade is the most shocking — in any professional sport — of our lifetimes, and likely of the lifetimes of people much older than us. So naturally, the app formerly known as Twitter and the rest of social media went crazy.

This, in turn, led to the news “breaking containment” online. Enough people were talking about it that lots of other people, who don’t follow the NBA closely or at all, had it come across their radar, too.

This led, as it always does, to various cringey elder millennials and Gen X’ers posting some version of one of their favorite “jokes”: “Did a sportsball happen?” (Also sometimes spelled “sporpsball,” which is extra cringe.)

Here is an example:

And another one from one of the most washed-up gentlemen we’ve got, Kanye West:

This attitude, which essentially is making fun of people for being too into sports, has never been particularly funny or interesting. But at this point, as sports (not to mention sports betting) super-saturates every part of American culture, these people have been culturally defeated and intellectually discredited. Overwhelmingly, these sorts of posts are now treated with derision. The reaction to the Luka trade is just the latest example.

We at Southpaw are now prepared to declare Total Cultural Victory for sports fans.

So, what does that mean for our politics?

One of the founding premises of this newsletter was that sports are relevant beyond the field of play. It’s an obvious message, but it’s one that the “sportsball” crowd — especially on the left — seems to miss. They understand watching sports as an activity that is, essentially, for dummies who want to turn their brains off.

What they misunderstand are two things. The first is one that we’ve explored ad nauseam in this space: from Muhammad Ali refusing to serve in Vietnam to the WNBA/NBA strikes in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and their aftermath, sports are inherently political.

The second is one that we haven’t discussed as much, but feels increasingly relevant: there is enormous cultural and political power in seemingly apolitical sports content, now more than ever.

Photo by Niklas Du on Unsplash

Stepping back, it’s clear that an increasing number of Americans have decided that they are no longer — or never have been — interested in “politics” as they understand it. They are turning inwards, away from watching hours of cable news and towards various forms of personal wellness and self-improvement content. They are filling their time with things other than explicitly political news.

At the same time, TV ratings might be steady or slightly down for some leagues, but the entire cultural edifice around professional sports is growing in scope and importance. Female athletes are gracing ad campaign billboards and are the faces of wellness product launches; NBA stars are taking over the fashion world; Hollywood big-wigs like Luca Guadagnino are making movies about tennis; Angel Reese is on the cover of Vogue —with accompanying photos of Gabby Thomas and Frances Tiafoe — and an essay that begins “I’ve been sports-pilled.”

And that also means that sports leagues and their stars have more political capital — but of a new and different sort.

We’re the first to admit that sports’ political power looks different than it did even in 2020 when we launched this product. Back then, it was about the overt expression of political positions by athletes — LeBron dealing with Obama to end the NBA strike, or the somewhat ironic “END RACISM” carved into the back of NFL end zones.

But that era is over, and the 2024 election made clear that many Americans are learning political ideas from content that is not itself overtly political. The most obvious example is Joe Rogan. He’s been hailed as a major reason that Trump won, but he’s somewhat misunderstood, in particular by liberal media. Unlike Pod Save America or Tucker Carlson, Rogan appeals to his audience because he actually rarely talks about politics on his podcast. And yet his show is permeated by a kind of vaguely counterculture-y, anti-woke and anti-establishment energy. That energy gelled with the political message that Donald Trump and the Republican Party were selling during the election, so it’s not hard to see why Rogan pushed his huge base of listeners in Trump’s direction.

Or look at the role that U.F.C and Dana White played in the election. The mixed martial arts guru didn’t become overtly political until this last year, but he and his company undoubtedly helped shape the cultural milieu that helped elect Trump. Ditto for WWE and professional wrestling.

A major lesson of the last election cycle is that the parts of American culture that do not immediately read as political are more important than ever, because they sit upstream of actual political ideology. The vast world of sports is a prime example.

And so, if the left is interested in ever winning an election again, a good place to start would be to realize that the era of “sportsball” is over, and that these more cultural spaces are increasingly essential to our politics.