For an individual and society, watching and playing sports can be good. For an individual and society, watching and playing sports can be bad. Arriving at goodness is not easy once we acknowledge the badness. With acknowledgement comes responsibility, especially for the privileged that can so easily bypass, ignore and perpetuate the bad. If conversation is capable of ushering us out from under exploitation, as conversation often illuminates what a single, privileged individual might be missing, then meeting the responsibility hinges on trying to ask and talk through some difficult questions. And if what we talk about, what we write about, determines the nature of what we do, then trying to work through good questions might shed some much needed light on dark corners of the sports world.
One of the many problems encountered along the way is how complex it all becomes. The Olympics is often hailed as “the world coming together.” That might be true. But it is also true that in some ways it makes billions of dollars for those pulling the strings. At the same time, it can be an overall losing venture economically. But what about the environment? What about poorer countries? What about unabated nationalism? What about corruption and cheating and all that gets washed-over and normalized? Is a perception of a cohesive world worth it? It’s hard to say. Ultimately, as we attempt to amalgamate what we learn from conversations about acknowledgement and responsibility in a sport and society context, we find ourselves in the midst of vast complexity. And once the door to complexity is opened, it is difficult to know what to do with the mess in the closet.
Lauren Berlant, literary scholar and cultural theorist, in her 2011 book, Cruel Optimism, riffs on the ensuing complexity and offers some suggestions for what to do about it. For Berlant, because our compulsions and desires—watching and playing games—often come with the best of intentions—health, fun, community—that interrogating the consequences and ensuing societal ills highlight optimism. And for Berlant, that optimism is often quite cruel.
We may have a great time cheering for our team in the Super Bowl at a party with close friends. By attending the party we are engaging in community, we’re looking-up from our phones, and we’re simply having fun. But what do we do with the fact that the party and fun with our friends necessitates irreparable brain damage in the athletes playing the game? What do we do with the fact that NFL owners effectively black balled a US citizen for exercising a constitutional right, nearly six decades after the passing of the Civil Rights Act? Does our Super Bowl party perpetuate racial discrimination? If we desire to curb racial injustice, can we keep watching? Moreover, if corporations are primary culprits in the systematic destruction of community and the environment, and if many of us are tuning in with friends just to watch comedic, expensive commercials paid for by massive corporations, then our optimism starts to look more than suspect. Ultimately, if we value our country, and if the Super Bowl is bad for our country, then what are our options? Should we be laughing and watching while the ship is sinking?
Hua Hsu for The New Yorker distills Berlant’s observations and subsequent suggestions for deriving goodness after acknowledgement of badness:
“No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world, but the latter is just inevitable,” Berlant once wrote in a short essay on her personal credos. “The question is how to develop ways to accentuate those contradictions, to interrupt their banality and to move them somewhere.” We can build worlds out of these small ambitions. We continue to write, even if it occasionally feels as though we were spinning our wheels, and we continue to live, even if it means giving up the certainty that our story is going to end the way we want it to. Writing on her blog a few years ago, Berlant issued what she described as her collective’s secret motto: “We refuse to be worn out.”
By espousing refusal as motto Berlant helps contextualize a central aspect underlying the Sports in Society project. Refusing to be worn out implies an energy dynamic. Somewhere energy is being taken, stored, withheld, expended, etc. We can assume that in such a refusal there is work being done and that the work is worthwhile. We can also assume that it’s not just the work that is zapping energy, but there is some broader force or collective that is not easily moved. Namely, our desires and the objects of our desires, when commodified, branded and consumed, materialize as a massive stalwart. For Berlant, it seems that the forces are tangible and intangible. While we can’t always pinpoint the things pushing and pulling on us, we can feel them, we can take notice. And often, the simple act of noticing is difficult and complicated.
When we look around, what we find are human beings and human beings are messy. In some circles, for example, to speak out against the Super Bowl in any form is not only unthinkable and useless, some might call it unpatriotic. In this way, when we apply Berlant’s thinking to the sports world, it’s often only a short jaunt from sports to nationalism. And nationalism, when packaged so neatly into the box of the Super Bowl, is incredibly difficult to dislodge. If we can’t fully get out from under the contradictions and lack of understanding, if questioning the goodness of a sporting event causes others to lash out, at least there might be goodness in the attempt.
After all, as is often the case, when one gets curious about what’s behind the curtain, one quickly realizes that culpability is nearly impossible to avoid. Not knowing what to do, for the thoughtful sports fan, means adopting a sort of ‘tread softly’ brand of watching. Wendell Berry calls this the way of ignorance. As we meander through compromised existences, the introspection, we hope, can imbue the individual and collective with a dose of integrity.
This is a belief as much as it is a maxim, dictum, or motto. It’s also not comprehensive. But it’s a start. And in the context of sports and ethics—for the individual desiring to play well and for the collective desiring to watch with dignity—deteriorating energy can manifest as a realization: “By watching and playing, by partaking in the sports industrial complex, an especially exploitative industry, I am actually exercising cruel optimism. I am compromised.” And when being compromised starts to feel too heavy we have choices to make.
In the case of Sports in Society, we hope to be like Lauren Berlant, refusing to be worn out. We believe that the work of asking questions about sports in society is worth it. We hope that the conversation can be a shared one. Sports operate within society. Sometimes society pushes on sports, sometimes sports pushes on society. Sports and society are always becoming. We make each. When the ‘we’ is proactively and radically inclusive, responsibility for being and doing better is closer to being met. Central to the endeavor is a simple question. It is a question, though, that catalyzes immense complexity: “Should we be watching this?” Hopefully we agree that fights to the death in the Roman Colosseum were grotesque. While we no longer sanction and pay to watch humans kill each other for entertainment, are there things we do sanction that keep us from being better? Is the badness just better concealed? If our propensity for groupthink remains—a cultural phenomenon that made gladiators possible—then where and how is our collective gaze catalyzing something we might one day call grotesque.
There are many asking these questions in many contexts. Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel; NPR’s Only A Game; ESPNw; Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post; Dave Zirin at the Nation; Jamele Hill at The Atlantic; and in some capacity, outlets like The New Yorker, The Guardian, and others dabble in the realm that Sports in Society aims for. From a broad vantage point, authors and pundits have been hovering along the edges of the industrial complexes of sports since the beginning.
Books about sports cover a far-reaching spectrum. Seminal works like Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, David Remnick’s exceptional reporting on Muhammad Ali, and many other stand-out works of sports literature highlight how powerful sports are for the individual and how our powerful experiences as fans rest on forces so Leviathan-like that they seem entirely out of reach. For example, even as Remnick expertly illuminates with clarity how Muhammad Ali operated in social, political, and economic contexts, it can be difficult to pinpoint why and how all of it played out the way it did. Despite all the clarity, we are left with complexity, and it’s a complexity that if valued and appreciated might bolster attempts to make our watching and partaking a bit more dignified.
Yet, the vast majority of sports information, the type of information that reifies and upholds those making money off of sports, the type of information that normalizes groupthink behavior, this type of sports-knowledge production steers clear of complexity, preferring tidy, neatly packaged reporting absent of challenging story lines. As evidence mounts—despite a recent uptick of petty nationalism—that a deftness with complexity engenders better societies, and as the NFL and other actors in the sports industrial complex amass incredible wealth and power, the need for outlets centering more nuanced conversation is immense. More importantly, and frustratingly, the outlets for discussing the complexities are far outnumbered and overshadowed by the outlets operating in tandem with the powerful.
ESPN, for example, while evolving since its conception, rarely pushes back against the sports establishment. That ESPN unapologetically covers MMA is just one example. Radical voices in the mainstream are present and have grown in recent years. Yet the conversation is ripe for more complexifying as marginalized voices are still marginalized voices. ESPN does not make the majority of its profit from The Undefeated, an outlet dedicated to uplifting voices describing the African American experience in sports. No, ESPN makes it money from massive advertising and television rights contracts.
Just recently, for instance, ESPN reached a 12-year deal to broadcast the remainder of the College Football Playoff system, valued at $470 million a year. It appears that the CTE crisis in football, something ESPN has reported on, is not compelling enough for the executives inking these types of contracts. Either ESPN’s own reporting on CTE has been tapered or the powers that be are comfortable to plow through any dissonance. “If a product sells”—we can imagine board members and executives handing-out permission to self and other—”if it meets desires, then it must be good.”
In another way, returning to Berlant, mainstream sports media leans on and deploys what she calls, sentimental fiction. “In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life.” Highlight videos set to emotive music; biopics of athletes that have overcome personal hardship; video vignettes about sports teams in impoverished communities coming together to win despite the odds; looking for and finding mainstream media narratives that bolster sentimental fictions underlying futile American Dreams in sports is alarmingly easy. Simply turn on the television and watch Fox’s or ESPN’s coverage of a major sporting event. Woven through the broadcast, when one is looking for it, are abounding embodiments of sentimental fictions that, according to Berlant, function as recurring offsets for melancholia induced by unabated cruel optimism.
Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focusing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible.
If we look too closely, ESPN and the advertisers fear, we might notice and question why owners make billions while their employees put their health and well-being on the line for far less. We might wonder why the US Women’s National team makes so much less than the men’s team, a squad the women out-perform a few times over. And if non-mainstream coverage was more readily available, we might look more closely at things like protests in Brazil before the Olympics. We might read about the slave-like conditions besetting immigrant workers building stadiums for the World Cup in Dubai. Because these capitalistic conglomerates need to keep our attention, especially in lieu of efforts to shed light on suspect inner-workings, or nagging collateral damage—CTE—the viewer must feel good about feeling good while watching. The largest outlets for ingesting the sports industrial complex have perfected the recipe.
Viewership ratings make the money. The product has to be compelling. And the most gripping product it seems, is a fan experience bolstered by sentimental fictions that give the viewers a standing ovation as if to say: “Well done, Patriot. Well done. Good watching, you.” Mashups, sports washing, and mindless, emotive montages seem to do just that. Not to mention things like military flyovers and flags big enough to cover the entire playing surface. And when one is applauded for buying a ticket, for buying the supreme viewing cable package, the industrial complex dodges complexity and further entrenches mis-perceptions of simplicity and justice.
Because sports can make us feel so much, because capitalism turns so efficiently when consumers feel good about consumption, the harmful aspects jettisoning from a sports industrial complex are harnessed or concealed only by those controlling the product. And this is at the heart of the conversation, this acceptance that sports do induce feelings. But what is concealed? What am I choosing to avoid? And once I know, can I keep watching?