Recently, I’ve been divided over what to write on Dear Sports Fan. How much space should I give to the various cultural issues around and within the sports world and how much should I stick to writing about the just the games. In my mind, there’s a three-tier setup being created. There’s the core of sports, which remains the games themselves, and then there’s the next layer that consists of all of the non-game stories that directly affect the game, like trade rumors, injuries, free agency, team chemistry. Finally, there’s the outside layer that consists of stories about athletes or other sports figures but not about sports. The core of my enjoyment of sports remains the games but increasingly, the headlines on most publications covering sports seem to be in the third group. Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin.com, wrote a wonderful piece on this for New York Magazine recently. The piece is called, “From Mo’ne Davis to Michael Sam, the Culture Wars Have Invaded the Sports World.” I’m excited to share some of my favorite parts of it here but I suggest you read it in full over at nymag.com.
Leitch begins by talking about how little fun it’s been to cover the Michael Sam story for the past couple months because of how polarizing the response has been:
It isn’t just Sam. He’s just the most prominent symptom of a subtle but undeniable change in modern sports discourse, which is basically, and maddeningly, turning into politics.
He then moves over to sharing his memory of how loving, obsessing over, and covering sports used to be:
The fun of sports debates has always been how, even when they’re spirited and a little rancorous, they’re essentially harmless… Yankees fans and Red Sox fans hate each other, but only theoretically, and only on the surface: Their rancor was real but empty. Sports has allowed us to exercise our tribalist passions in basically trivial ways … and therefore productive and healthy ones… Not anymore. Now sports, like everything else, has been conquered by political tribalism.
I loved reading this article. I hope you do too.