Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  American football, then, was initially monetized and professionalized through the massive college sports complex, even if players weren’t deemed workers. Other sports, including soccer and hockey, developed through international competition. The first recorded international soccer match was between England and Scotland in 1872, and shortly after the turn of the century the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded, sparring over the right to control international competition with the International Olympic Committee. The first World Cup was played in Uruguay in 1930. Ice hockey was Canada’s national sport, but the Canadians would play against European teams and learn from one another, and the game was shaped, too, by the children and grandchildren of enslaved Black people who had escaped the United States for Canada and made the game their own. Without the kind of mass media spotlight of other sports, hockey spread through contact between countries, even during the Cold War, where it became a sporting battleground between the Soviet bloc and the United States.16

  Television brought sports to yet another level: the excitement of listening to a radio broadcast paled beside the ability to have the game in your living room, to watch from the comfort of your couch. At first, sports moguls tried to restrict broadcasts in order to keep selling tickets in the stands. But the rapid spread of television sets in the 1950s helped to upend the pecking order of sports, particularly in the United States, where American football seemed made for TV in a way that other sports weren’t. The National Football League became big business in part because of its TV-revenue-sharing model, and individual players could make extra money through sponsorships, commercials, and more.17

  Most pro athletes, though, weren’t getting rich in this period. “A typical athlete in 1967,” Zirin noted, “worked in the off-season.” Their lives were probably more like Meghan Duggan’s than like today’s highly paid athletes, as they slowly built an audience for their sport while picking up extra money with additional jobs. Many athletes spent years of their lives, from childhood onward, practicing, getting injured, and giving up other pursuits to put in unpaid hours, only to peak without ever seeing a dollar. Few became household names. It was this reality that drove athletes to unionize.18

  Before the 1960s, pro athletes were accustomed to believing the story that they were incredibly lucky to get what they got. “This was because they were a workforce basically unschooled in working conditions,” Marvin Miller of the MLB players’ union told Zirin. “They had all undergone a bunch of brainwashing that being allowed to play Major League Baseball was a great favor. That they were the luckiest people in the world. They were accustomed never to think, ‘This stinks. We need to change this.’”19

  But the ferment of the 1960s gave force to the bargaining power of athletes, many of whom were Black and Latinx and had been politicized by the same forces that drove bus boycotts and lunch-counter sit-ins. The baseball players’ union beat the team owners, lawsuits in basketball and baseball won free-agency rights for players that drove up salaries for all, and players won salary minimums for those who wouldn’t command top dollar on the free-agent market. Without union solidarity, perhaps some of the superstars would have broken out and won major gains for themselves as individuals, but the sports world would have become even more stratified and lopsided than it currently is. And the players proved, in baseball and football, that they were willing to endure grueling strikes—during which they were painted as greedy man-children wanting to get rich for playing a game—in order to be treated fairly, to get a slice of what were rapidly becoming, in the 1960s and 1970s, mega-profits.20

  The movements of the 1960s helped athletes and the rest of the world understand the relationship between the people playing the game and the people profiting from it. Whether it be the NCAA (making coaches, the league itself, and even the manufacturers of branded apparel rich, while the players didn’t see a dime), or the owners of NFL teams, somebody was exercising power to make money off the efforts of the athletes. And the racialized nature of these relations made it extra clear to the players that the owners were not just kindly old men giving them a chance to escape poverty and get paid to play a game. The 1960s brought us John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising black-gloved fists in the Mexico City Olympics, a proud vision of Black power that drove officials mad. And most importantly, the decade brought us Muhammad Ali.21

  Ali is perhaps the best argument for the belief that athletes are inherently gifted, carrying natural talent that none of the rest of us could ever hope for. He was simply faster than anyone at his weight class, and when age slowed him down, he turned out to have a near-superhuman ability to take a punch. Yet Ali made history not simply for the beauty of his performance, his graceful brutality, but for his mind and for his appreciation of his own value as a human, and as a Black man. He came to the sport and to public life with an understanding of the world that challenged everyone around him. Ali demanded respect—when opponent Floyd Patterson refused to call him by his chosen name, instead deliberately using Ali’s birth name, Cassius Clay, in the press, Ali pulverized him, shouting all the while, “Come on, America! Come on, white America.… What’s my name? Is my name Clay? What’s my name, fool?”22

  His refusal to go to war in Vietnam, for which he was stripped of his championship titles and sentenced to prison, was polarizing but prescient—Ali spoke up against the war in 1966, well before most Americans, when Johnson was still president and largely popular. He made international news and became a hero of a different kind even as he endured calumny in the United States. His stand took his best boxing years from him, when giving in would have been easy and expected. Ali’s fight reminded everyone that athletes—and Black athletes, in particular—were thinking, breathing humans, not simply bodies to be traded around by their wealthy bosses.23

  The stand of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on that podium is often remarked upon, but we hear less often about the organizing that went on behind the scenes to create that moment. Like Rosa Parks, Carlos and Smith are discussed as if their protest were spontaneous, but it was the result of athletes realizing that their labor power—and potentially the withholding of it—could be a powerful tool. The Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) was formed by amateur Black athletes and at first aimed for a boycott of the 1968 Games. They demanded the removal of the US Olympic Committee’s Avery Brundage, the restoration of Ali’s title, and the banning of apartheid states South Africa and Rhodesia from the Games. When that campaign was unsuccessful—athletes were reluctant to give up their once-every-four-years chance at glory—they determined to find ways to make their protests heard, from the medal stand if possible. Many athletes spoke out, or wore black clothing, but none had the effect—or received the punishment—of Carlos and Smith, who were kicked out of the Olympic Village and stripped of their medals. “Those people should put all their millions of dollars together and make a factory that builds athlete-robots,” Carlos said later. “Athletes are human beings. We have feelings too. How can you ask someone to live in the world, to exist in the world, and not have something to say about injustice?”24

  Women, too, were agitating for inclusion in sports in the 1960s and 1970s. They had been playing some sports longer than others: although in the Victorian era all sorts of ridiculous theories were peddled about the damage that athletic activity could do to women’s supposedly fragile bodies and minds, women still managed to take up some sports, such as bicycling and archery, without fear of their uteruses falling out. Later, industrial leagues for women popped up in the workplace, with women playing softball and basketball on their own teams. Avery Brundage—the same man the Black athletes were protesting in 1968—wanted to push women out of track and field at the Olympics entirely, but he failed.25

  During World War II, with most able-bodied men overseas fighting, a few moguls got the idea for women’s sports to fill in the gap. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which lasted from 1943 to 1954, and was immortalized by the 1992 film A League o
f Their Own, put young working-class women on the diamond to entertain the home front. The women played hard, but were also expected to be feminine off the field—they were sent to charm school, given beauty advice, and admonished to behave and appear as “real All-American girl[s]” at all times. But like most working women, they were sent home not long after the war ended, even though they’d had some nine hundred thousand paying fans in 1948. As the men returned to the game, though, the women’s sport declined, and the league disbanded, the women told to do their “real” job: managing their families. Sports, after all, were a man’s pursuit. Women who did too much physical activity, moreover, have long faced accusations of being masculine—and worse. Josephine D’Angelo had been cut from the Girls League for her “butch” haircut, and “sex testing,” everything from a nude parade to chromosome testing, at the Olympics began in 1968 and continues, in some form, today.26

  The feminist agitation of the late 1960s and 1970s reached the sports world, often inspired by the activism of Black athletes. Most famously, in 1973 Billie Jean King demolished Bobby Riggs on the tennis court, making him eat his taunts and reminding everyone that women were not, in fact, weaker than men in any sense of the word. But King’s fight wasn’t over—she also became a union leader, helping to create the Women’s Tennis Association that same year, and becoming its first president. She’d already called for a strike at the US Open unless the women’s and men’s prize packages were made equal—and won.27

  The United States was forced to pay attention to women’s sports with the passage of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which included the famous Title IX. Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” College sports, under the law, are an educational activity, meaning that women need to have access to sports programs. Anyone who has attended a school with a football program (Tulane, 1998) knows that “equal” is a stretch, but Title IX pushed schools into creating teams for women in such previously unfeminine sports as ice hockey, making Meghan Duggan’s career possible, and laying the groundwork for the possibility of professional women’s team-sports careers in soccer and basketball, as well as swelling international competition as other countries raced to catch up. Women even played American football in the short-lived National Women’s Football League, turning what had been a joke into serious play.28

  Women athletes crack into so many of our stereotypes of femininity. Women are supposed to diminish themselves in service of others, a trait that applies whether they’re paid or unpaid domestic workers, teachers, or interns. Watching women compete in sports, watching them express themselves and want with fervor—How many articles have been written about Serena Williams’s grunts on the tennis court, let alone her physicality?—is striking precisely because such expression, such desire, has been proscribed. Sports, like the arts, were presumed to be for men, to be the result of natural categories. Men are stronger, we hear; we have a hard time understanding women like Serena Williams, Meghan Duggan, and Megan Rapinoe. “Elite athletes have spent their entire lives articulating themselves through moving their bodies. To watch them want something is an exercise in watching desire become a visual, physical force,” wrote journalist Autumn Whitefield-Madrano about the Women’s World Cup, in words that have stuck with me. Women’s bodies being used for something so far from what we are told they are for—for bearing and nursing and attracting others—hold power. And women athletes, more than men, are told that sports should be done for love, not money.29

  As women were making strides in “amateur” sports, though, the very idea of amateurism was coming apart at the seams. It was the 1984 Olympics, Mark Perryman argued, that marked a turning point away from the celebration of athletics for their own sake and toward a high-gloss corporate-sponsored TV extravaganza studded with the most famous—and highest-paid—athletes in the world.30

  From the NCAA to the Olympics, amateurism has often been a cover for exploitation. Commercial interests have long been part of popular sports. But the neoliberal era’s shifts in capitalism and attendant ideological battles meant something new: every part of the game was privatized, branded, and sold as a shiny image, from corporate sponsorship to product placements to multimillion-dollar endorsement deals. And—as I have argued over the course of this book—pitching it to all of us as a new opportunity to find fulfillment on the job has wrought a change in the sports world as well. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics gave President Ronald Reagan a chance to show off his vision of America—brought to you by McDonald’s, the way cleared for it by mass arrests of young Black men in the name of cleaning up the city.31

  But the dissolution of amateur participation in the Olympics was in fact demanded by athletes themselves. Seeing that other people made money on the games, they argued for their own share; more importantly, they argued that in the off-season, they should be allowed to get paid to play, whether that meant keeping prize money from competitions or getting sponsorships that helped pay the bills. As Meghan Duggan told me, keeping oneself in peak condition is not a thing you can do once every four years. It’s a full-time job, and to be the best, they needed to be able to compete. With the demise of the major state-funded athletic programs of the Soviet bloc, privatization was the name of the game, and at least going pro gave the players a way to make a living that didn’t require the faux purity of some imagined amateurism.32

  The neoliberal era’s expansion of the sports industry seems to both reflect and be reflected in its political conversations. Pro athletes are sponsored by companies ranging from Wheaties to Nike to Visa; politicians, meanwhile, use sporting metaphors for everything they possibly can. That sports are not, in fact, anything like real life doesn’t seem to matter. They still demonstrate to us the values that our society has chosen to uplift. Competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, we are told, and therefore competitive sports are the best place to teach us how to operate in a dog-eat-dog world. Yet, as William Davies noted in The Happiness Industry, all this competition leads to depression, in athletes as well as in the broader society—studies found depression higher in participants in intensely competitive sports. Particularly, we might assume, when someone’s entire future is riding on an ability to keep playing a sport. Because, of course, when a few can win—and win big, Michael Jordan or David Beckham–style—we have something to aspire to, but when we don’t win, we’re told it’s our own fault.33

  And who benefits from all this? The sports system as it is, after all, is as unequal as the rest of the world under capitalism. The attention given to athletes’ massive salaries often obscures the fact that the team owners are an order of magnitude richer. They are billionaires like Paul Allen of Microsoft, who owned all or part of three professional teams before his death in 2018, or Stanley Kroenke, married to Ann Walton of Walmart fame, who owns the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, the National Basketball Association’s Denver Nuggets, the US pro soccer team Colorado Rapids, and the English Premier League’s Arsenal team. There are enough of them that an article titled “The 20 Richest Billionaires Who Own Sports Teams, Ranked” can exist and make sense. The United Kingdom’s Labour Party focused on this issue leading up to its 2019 election campaign, targeting Mike Ashley, owner of the Newcastle football team, and noting that the Sports Direct mogul had made his money as a low-wage employer, keeping workers in abysmal conditions. “It’s a vehicle to support wider conversation about inequality in our country,” said Callum Bell, a Labour Party organizer, of the campaign, which, as he put it, drew attention to “this billionaire who doesn’t give a crap about this thing that millions of people love, that lack of control over something that we love.”34

  The inequality is fractal, getting bigger as it goes down. While Alex Rodriguez made over $300 million playing baseball, the Steinbrenner family, which owns the New York Yankees,
is worth over $3 billion. But a minor league baseball player might make less than $8,000 for a season. And a college baseball player won’t be paid at all. A lawsuit from a group of minor leaguers challenged this system, saying their pay rate violated minimum wage and hour standards; in 2019, an appeals court granted them expanded class-action status, but the case drags on. “If they can form a class and win against baseball, that could cause some major changes in how the league operated with regard to its minor leagues,” wrote sports reporter Travis Waldron when the case first emerged.35

  The inequality perhaps reaches its peak when one takes into account Major League Baseball’s other farm system: its baseball “academies” in the Dominican Republic. For a fraction of what it costs to pay a minor leaguer or even invest in a youth baseball team in Los Angeles, teams can have their pick of hungry young would-be stars looking for a ticket to fame and fortune. And they don’t have to obey the same labor laws that are already obscenely bent in their favor: they can sign young players at the age of sixteen, with less training, and certainly less education in the ways of the world, and those players don’t get health-care and other benefits. “When I signed at 16, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing,” Boston Red Sox superstar David Ortiz told a reporter, referring to his experience in the academies. It worked out for him, but for every David Ortiz there are hundreds who never get off the island.36