So, what’s your team? Yankees? Dodgers? Kansas City Chiefs? Golden State Warriors?
Whatever the theater of conflict, the taking of sides is basically assumed, and given the season—baseball playoffs commencing, football in full swing, basketball and hockey gearing up—neutrality does not appear to be an option.
Democrat or Republican?
It is a cliché that sports and politics don’t mix (though decades of evidence have debunked that argument). Anyway, to have attended Lilliana Hall Mason’s recent address at Hofstra University on “The Power of Identity in American Elections” was to have been struck by the parallel worlds of sports and politics.
The talk by Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor, was part of a three-day symposium on “Higher Education in an Election Year” and was chock full of we-vs.-they polarization, the thing that characterizes both party partisanship and fandom.
Listen to sports squawk radio—one host’s “hot take” so often is a blanket statement made to dismiss another’s opinion as garbage—and you are likely to hear such declarations as an old insistence by New York radio personality Chris Russo (who marketed himself as “Mad Dog”) that a “real” sports fan is required to “hate” his team’s primary rival.
That is exactly the language Mason used in her finding that Democrats and Republicans often don’t necessarily disagree about a specific policy yet describe a “hate” for the other side. She cited research that in creating any social identity leads directly to a sense of superiority over the others; about how attaching to one group involves insisting that your group to be the best. Tribalism, no?
She graphed how party identity—like team identity—leaked into adopting values of ideology, race and religion, so that any blow to that identity leads to a condemnation of others in every respect. Consider fans’ perception that they somehow are a member of their team—“We” won, etc. And how that identity is not so much a personal relationship to individuals as tribal. If you are a Yankee devotee, and the most hated member of the Boston Red Sox—“they”—suddenly is traded to your team and puts on the pinstripes, that player becomes one of “us.” Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that, though we may have favorite players on our team, we ultimately are not rooting for individuals. We are rooting for laundry. Whoever is in “our” uniform.
Mason’s analyses indicated a growing gap between the political parties regarding racial resentment, regarding women’s roles and patriarchy, based on being “on the other team.” Which resembles the sort of behavior that fans—the worst fans—have been known to direct at star players on the opposing side. Race clearly has been involved in the sometimes skewed comparisons—one is an outside shooter/passer, the other in inside force, totally different roles—of WNBA rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
Mason offered examples in the political world where differences of opinion have gone a step further—dehumanizing the other side, approving physical threats—that can be found in the seamier side of sports. And how those in positions of leadership—in sports, coaches and front-office types—can affect treatment of the other side.
To wit: Then-New Orleans’ head coach Sean Payton and his defensive coordinator Gregg Williams were suspended in 2012 for having offered bonuses to their players for inflicting a game-ending injury on opponents.
Mason pointed to the media enhancing animosity by stereotyping one side or the other, and often playing on friction because of a belief that readers/listeners/viewers are drawn to skirmishes. You want attention? Give the audience a fight, enhanced combativeness. (“If it bleeds, it leads,” went the old saw for sensational reportage.)
When ESPN executive Jason Horowitz was helping develop the network’s sports debate shows years ago, he said that “when we ask people what they’re looking for, the words that pop up are ‘independent,’ ‘original,’ ‘fearless,’ ‘thought-provoking,’ ‘defiant,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘rebellious.’” He said he was looking for people “who make the audience listen.”
A reviewer noticed that none of the words were “trusted,” “authoritative,” “reliable,” “credible,” or “knows what the hell they’re talking about.”
In her Hofstra talk, Mason further submitted that media personalities have more power than people in charge, with a listen-to-me-and-I’ll-tell-you-how-things-are bearing—flavored with too much us/them language. With politics, Mason said, less attention is paid to the so-called “undecided,” those who are not partisan. In sports, the results of which are less consequential, everyone is a partisan.
It’s called being a fan.