Elites Versus Lunchpails
As a start, Trumpism replaced sports as America's most compelling live entertainment last year because The Donald intuitively knew how to provide what normally makes that field so successful and addictive constant conflict, surprises, unscripted action, and a set of heroes and villains to cheer, jeer, or even feel empathy for, like former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway's family.
Conflict is intrinsic to sports fandom. It's the glue that keeps us in the cult. In sports, conflict is naturally embodied in the games themselves, but also in the relationships among the players, coaches, owners, and especially the fan bases. In New York City, for example, the supposed caste differences between the Yankees (elitist) and the Mets (lunch pail) were always vigorously promoted to sell tickets and newspapers. It made no difference, for instance, that for years the Mets millionaire owner was in bed with Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff.
Then there are the never-ending bar bickers over who was better say, the late Henry Aaron or Willie Mays? And when Tom Brady was the New England Patriots quarterback, who couldn't argue windily about how much of his success was due to his own talents and how much to those of team coach Bill Belichick? Now, of course, with Brady leading a new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, into the Super Bowl, the argument seems not just moot, but far less important than the way Belichick, also a Trump supporter, rejected a Presidential Medal of Freedom after the January 6th assault on the Capitol. That's the news, even for sports fans, these days.
No wonder relatively benign jock chatter couldn't compete in the pandemic election moment with Trump-style conflict; with those breathless, unmasked rallies of his and their undercurrent of sadism; with the president's continual news-making flip-flops in tactics; with the constant fear of hacking, disloyalty, and betrayal; or with a riveting and endlessly revolving and evolving cast of jettisoned officials like Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon, FBI Director Jim Comey, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House Director of Communications (for 10 days) Anthony "the Mooch" Scaramucci, and so on and on and on. We hardly got to hate them before they were gone.
And then, of course, came the Big One. No Super Bowl has ever exceeded expectations the way the terror attack on the Capitol, supported by some members of Congress and urged on by Coach Trump, rattled our sense of security, horrifying, stunning, and (yes) keeping us glued to our screens in a way that no football game ever could.
Hack Teams, Not Countries
In addition, sports lost its role as America's (supposed) moral crucible once the president's transactional ethics overshadowed the values of traditional sportsmanship, however hypocritical and flawed they were. In the age of Trumpism, the 2019 revelation that the 2017 Houston Astros had been electronically stealing pitching signs to win the World Series seemed quaint, if not beside the point, at a time when Russian hackers were suspected of having electronically done the equivalent to try to tip the 2016 election to Trump and possibly alter the history of the world.
A credible case can be made that the transgressions and lies of Trumpism opened the way for a moral moratorium in sports in what would otherwise have been a set of far more headline grabbing scandals, ranging from the Astros-style sign-stealing caper of the Boston Red Sox to the so-called Varsity Blues scandal in which rich parents, including Hollywood actors, bought their children's way into college by pretending they were athletes.
It's hardly as if sports had been an unsullied enterprise before Trump came along. Consider the exploitation of "amateurs," especially in the Olympic Games or those "student-athletes" in college sports; the blind eyes turned toward performance-enhancing drugs, whether self-administered or given out by team doctors; not to speak of pro football's appalling cover-up of the extent of brain trauma among its players.
In all of that, at least, there was a sense of shameful wrongdoing in the cover-ups involved, nothing like the jaw-dropping blatancy of the cases of the pardoned presidential confidant Roger Stone, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and, of course, that classic pardoner Trump himself, unashamed bad guys all.
Compare them with the miscreants of sports: Pete Rose, who secretly bet on games while playing and managing baseball; Barry Bonds, who allegedly abused steroids to become the most productive home-run hitter of all time; and Lance Armstrong, who bullied colleagues as he juiced his way to seven Tour de France victories. Those guys, as reviled as they might have been, simply don't belong in the same league with the White House gang. Unlike the shunned Barry Bonds, denied a place in baseball's Hall of Fame, Trump's crew have already admitted themselves to their own ongoing hall of shame.
The president's two impeachments might have been satisfying to many of us, as would be his Senate conviction (and being barred from future office), even if neither will happen. However, the only meaningful moral punishment Trump seems to have felt deeply was when the very white, old-school Professional Golf Association, or PGA, pulled its championship from his New Jersey golf club in the wake of the January 6th assault on the Capitol. That was the single act that reportedly "gutted" him, the only knockdown punch that truly landed, however trivial it might seem to the rest of us in this anything but sporty season.
Beware the Left Behinds
Finally, Trump's base is too often described and dismissed as a mosh pit of maskless deplorables, violent and brainless as British soccer thugs. I think that's a leftish mistake and that their support for him is a far more complicated phenomenon than a former sports reporter can indeed grasp.
As it happens, I know a few of them, including a couple of friends of long standing, one a sophisticated lawyer who cherishes the sense of belonging to something with an undercurrent of danger. And then, more typically, I suspect, there's the Brooklyn guy who's always felt disregarded by Manhattan elites. Personally, I connect the Trump base to the crowd of 1960s Mets fans I used to cover, Manhattan elite box-seat holders and working-class bleacherites alike, all united in their feeling of victimhood, their fear and envy of Yankee fans (and the World Series championships they always seemed to end up with). Mets fans, when I covered them, were the sports deplorables of that moment, former Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants fans who felt left behind, dropped in the dust, when those two teams suddenly moved to the Golden State of California in 1957.
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