by Etan Thomas
Me and Chris Hayes after an interview. He always enjoys talking sports and politics with me.
Etan: When the New England Patriots visited the White House on April 19, 2017, after winning the Super Bowl, many athletes chose not to attend. How strong of a message does that send, or do you think this is less about social justice and more about Trump himself?
Hayes: Yeah, I mean in some places, Trump is the polarizing thing. It’s not just sports.
Etan: So it seems like you’re forced to have an opinion about it even if you’re not into politics.
Hayes: Totally, yes. Agreed. But now I’m going to go and walk on the other side and argue against myself.
Etan: Okay, go ahead.
Hayes: The country is increasingly polarized. That’s a brute fact. This is diagnosed in a hundred different ways . . . Like what kind of restaurant you eat at. Like where you live, urban or rural. And the thing that I will say that I like about sports, I do like the fact that I find myself talking to someone who I don’t share political views with, where we can discuss sports.
There’s something amazing in a landscape of America in which people are so polarized. There is this pressure-valve thing . . . I can talk the playoffs or the Cubs or whatever, with anyone, across any political perspective.
And a really interesting moment in the culture right now is whether sports becomes something increasingly like other parts of culture. In terms of that polarization. And I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m just saying that’s a question right now . . . Can sports preserve that in the face of an increasingly polarized America?
Etan: Okay, let’s say you have somebody who is an avid Trump supporter and you’re talking to them about the playoffs. Are you saying that can provide some common ground? In hopes of moving toward some type of growth or something positive?
Hayes: Yeah. In fact, that’s the power that particularly athletes hold: to have the ability to move people. And I’m actually more curious about what you think about this.
Etan: I’m supposed to be interviewing you, Chris (laughing).
Hayes: I know, but unfortunately, I don’t get a chance to talk about this as much as I would like . . . but when you have really high-profile examples of athletes coming out on political issues, I feel like most of the coverage tends to focus on the backlash, right? . . . But I was wondering about the people who aren’t being loudly backlashy. I always wonder if it’s penetrating them. And you’ll see these sort of interesting defenses from people . . . You’ll see someone come and defend Colin Kaepernick and you’ll be like, I am absolutely shocked that you of all people would be a person to defend Colin Kaepernick.
Etan: That’s a good point. Because there was definitely some unexpected support that I saw, though it also worked the opposite way as well. Even with certain members of the Patriots choosing not to go to the White House because of Trump, you saw some people vehemently objecting to that, using words like anti-American and anti-police.
Hayes: So, Kaepernick took a stance that was this really admirably conscientious private gesture. And the response was, “Oh, you’re an attention hog.” And it’s like . . . he was just doing this thing as his expression of conscience. But other people made it this big thing and then obviously it went from there. What’s amazing about it is just the platform. And you were absolutely right when you said it’s like you are invading people’s safe space. You are forcing people, in a part of American life, where they’re not thinking about politics, to think about politics.
Etan: As you know, I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’m looking at some of the Trump rallies, and I’m looking at the same people who I went to school with on Facebook. And they are these avid Trump supporters. Or I think of fans who are filling up the arenas, going to the Oklahoma City Thunder games, then going to the Trump supporters’ rally. So then there’s this dynamic where you think, Okay, it’s not quite transferring. You see me and love me and cheer for me on the court, but as soon as the game is over, you put on your Make America Great Again hat and go talk about building a wall?
Hayes: I think that’s what’s so powerful, right? I mean, the thing that you can’t escape in all this is race and the centrality of it . . . But the racial dynamics of fandom are really complicated. Like the racial dynamics of white fandom. For many white people, the most intense focus and attention they have on a Black person is an athlete. For a lot of people, particularly for men of a certain age. Like if you’re a fifty-five-year-old white man in Oklahoma and you’re a Thunder fan, you’re invested in Russell Westbrook in a way that’s like really, fascinatingly, psychologically fraught.
Etan: No question. So you feel love and admiration toward Russell Westbrook, then Terence Crutcher is murdered in Tulsa and you feel nothing.
Hayes: But even when that happened to Thabo Sefolosha, no one did anything. That’s what’s so fascinating. I was surprised that moment wasn’t bigger for that reason. Where I sort of feel like, even at the pure level of fandom, just apolitical fandom, you broke my dude’s leg. He was going to play for us and you took him out of the playoffs. And I was surprised that was not a bigger thing.
Etan: Why do you think that is?
Hayes: I think because sports coverage is still conditioned to be resistant about letting those issues in. They don’t know how to deal with it and it’s like the police say, “Well, he was being unruly,” or whatever they said about Thabo.
Etan: “Resisting arrest.”
Hayes: “Resisting arrest,” which is just like the first excuse or justification that is always given in any case . . . But it’s like there’s just this fear of wading into the thicket of that. Although that’s changed a little, but it still has a long way to go as we saw with the coverage of Thabo Sefolosha.
Etan: It has a very, very long way to go, but the reason we are seeing any change at all is because of the athletes in particular. It’s like they’re forcing people to talk about it. So before, the CEO of Under Armour came out and supported Trump. Now Steph Curry, Misty Copeland, and the Rock—three of the most high-profile people sponsored by Under Armour—came out and said, “No, we do not support this.” They were very clear about their position and then you saw the CEO completely backtrack on his statement. You know what I mean?
Hayes: That’s power.
Etan: It’s power. So the fact that more athletes, right now, are using that power, I don’t know if we have ever seen this. We can go back to the sixties, but even then, it was a select few.
Hayes: Oh, it’s more than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime . . . There is no question that athletes have been more outspoken, committed, and public on controversial political issues.
Etan: I just hope it continues to grow.
Hayes: Why do you think that’s changed? Because I feel like when you were playing, you were like a real outlier in a way that if I put you on a team right now . . .
Etan: It would almost be the norm—almost.
Hayes: It wouldn’t be the norm, but it would be closer to the norm than when you played. Because when you played it was like, “Whoooaaaa, he’s talking about Iraq? He’s talking about President Bush?” And not just lightly talking about it, but breaking it down to particulars and verbalizing those particulars in a way that I personally had never really heard an athlete do.
Etan: I think people are more aware now. I don’t want to say things have gotten so much worse, but with Trump, you’ve got to say that people are more aware of how bad it is. A lot of that may have to do with social media as well. You had police brutality before, but now everybody is seeing it on video. Then they are seeing cops get away with it. So that is pushing guys to speak out who have never spoken out before. It’s a beautiful thing to see so many young athletes using that power because it forces people to have conversations and deal with things that they don’t want to deal with in their sports arena.
Hayes: Absolutely. That’s 100 percent true.
Etan: So why do you think people don’t want to deal with this so mu
ch in their sports arena?
Hayes: I think there’s two reasons. One is it creates a weird, uncomfortable fan/athlete relationship. If a person’s saying something that you don’t agree with, it instantly complicates the emotional experience of fandom. So for me, my example of this is Jake Arrieta. Jake Arrieta is like stud star pitcher for the Cubs. I’m a huge Cubs fan, I am massively invested in Jake Arrieta’s performance. I always sort of suspected his politics were conservative ’cause he’s like a good ol’ boy, he’s from Texas . . . He tweeted after Trump was elected, “Time for Hollywood to pony up and head for the border #illhelpyoupack #beatit.”
Etan: That ruined it for you.
Hayes: Right! Like all of a sudden, the emotional relationship that I had with this person, who’s a complete stranger to me by the way . . . I just project, which is the experience of fandom, I project all this emotional investment and all of a sudden I was like, Uhhhhhh, what a bummer.
Etan: Right.
Hayes: It’s like the experience of fandom is bizarre, irrational, childlike in its emotional simplicity . . . Then another part of it, particularly when the issues are front and center of race, which I think have been the most kinetic, explosive, dominant in this era . . . I think part of it is just like white resistance to talking about race and dealing with racial inequality and wanting and feeling like, I don’t want to hear about it, or resistance or feeling like they are being attacked or they are being guilt-tripped for all these things, which shows up in other domains but is particularly intense in the very racially fraught experience of white fandom with Black athletes.
So I think it’s those two things together. Which I think applies in different directions. Do I wish Arrieta had not tweeted that? Yes, and then I think there’s a more profound kind of social justice point, the particular nature of white fandom and Black athletes and this sort of pretty messed-up kind of . . . thing that a lot of white fans want, which is like, “I want to root for you but I don’t want to see the larger racial context of your life and your existence. Just shut up about that.”
Etan: Interesting. I also interviewed Craig Hodges, who talked about his experience with the Chicago Bulls after he wrote the letter to the older Bush. A lot of fans turned on him. He was the three-time three-point champion. He had one of the highest three-point percentages in the NBA, but everybody looked at him differently now because they knew what he thought.
Hayes: Right. And in some ways . . . there’s a certain undo-ability to that. Like I can never go back to the world in which I don’t know that Jake Arrieta feels this way. It’s like forever . . . But again, that’s one hundred times more loaded in the context of “white fans, Black athletes” issues of racial justice.
Etan: Keep going with that. Say specifically what you mean by “loaded.”
Hayes: It’s loaded for the athletes in terms of the wrath that they can incur. It’s loaded for the fans because they feel like some part of the edifice they built around their understanding of race is being challenged or they are being guilt-tripped.
Etan: Then you have someone like Trump, who is polarizing on racial issues, but in the opposite direction. That makes people uncomfortable too.
Hayes: Yes, it definitely does. I do think that Trump is definitely polarizing, but also so polarizing in sort of demographically predictable ways. When you’re looking at the New York Knicks, what did Trump get of the share of die-hard New York Knicks folks? Not that much . . . What did he get of the die-hard Chicago Bulls fans? Not that much. Right? . . . I think in a weird way, because he’s so polarizing and because that polarization has been forced into so many parts of life, it’s made it safer for athletes to come out.
Etan: I agree.
Hayes: It’s like, well, everyone’s choosing sides and everyone’s sort of out there about this thing and no one’s going to pretend that this huge polarizing event didn’t happen in American life. So I’m not going to pretend either. And then, also, if I happen to be in a market, I’m not saying that athletes are calculating, because I don’t think they are, but I also think it’s a case of, if you come out against Trump while you’re a starter for the New York Knicks, I don’t think you’ve really hurt yourself.
Etan: Okay, but then you have somebody like Gregg Popovich, who coaches in San Antonio, Texas. He hasn’t really experienced a lot of backlash, but then there’s a different racial dynamic since he’s not Black.
Hayes: Yeah, I totally agree, although I also think it’s like the same thing with Kerr. Like Kerr’s a better example. Curry and Kerr, they’re in the East Bay.
Etan: Right. They’re different, but Popovich is in Texas and Cuban is in Texas and that’s a little bit different, and they’re also white men speaking out.
Hayes: Exactly, and they haven’t gotten that same, “Why does anyone want to hear what you have to say?” Or the, “You’re just an athlete so shut up and play basketball.”
Etan: Let me ask you this, though. If they were both Black—if Popovich was a Black head coach and Mark Cuban was a Black CEO—would the reaction have been different?
Hayes: Hmm, good question. I think it would be. I think it always is . . . I do think the Popovich thing is a fascinating case study ’cause I was kind of blown away that he said that. I was like, Whoa, dude.
Etan: I was too, and I was waiting for the backlash.
Hayes: And I was waiting for the backlash too. I also sort of always assumed coaches are conservatives.
Etan: Especially in the NFL. The NFL is different than the NBA.
Hayes: I would be curious what you think. I also think there’s just a huge difference, to me, in the politics of the leagues.
Etan: The NBA versus the NFL? Completely. Night and day. Not even close.
Hayes: The NBA appears to be a much more liberal league as a whole. There’s a certain raw demographic nature of the fact that the NBA is a Black league. African Americans in America are more liberal than white people, on the whole, on average. Ergo, it’s a more liberal league.
Etan: What are the percentages of Black people in the NFL, though? It’s not a “Black league” but the percentage is pretty high.
Hayes: It’s pretty high. The other thing to think about is that as leagues get less white, how do they manage the politics of that? Because my feeling about the NBA is so defined by these sort of . . . There was the Magic-Bird era, which is this perfect rivalry for the league to promote, both because they’re incredible players but also one’s white, one’s Black.
Etan: And they’re friends.
Hayes: They’re friends. One’s from, you know, one plays out west, one plays in the Northeast. It was so perfect. It was like this perfectly representative thing of what they wanted. Then you get the Jordan era and Jordan achieves this level of apolitical stardom because he chose to be apolitical—that’s incredibly transcendent across racial lines because he chooses to sublimate anything that would threaten that, right?
Etan: Right.
Hayes: The point of politics in the league is the fight in Auburn Hills. The Pacers-Detroit fight.
Etan: Of course, the “Brawl in the Palace.”
Hayes: Which is where all of the ugly subtext about white fandom comes out.
Etan: The fear.
Hayes: The fear. Thugs, all this stuff. The fact that they actually swung at fans. It was just like the worst nightmare from a management perspective. And that’s the point where you see the league in its conception and projection, to me, take a kind of right-wing turn. Like that’s when the dress code comes in . . . the idea of, we need to make these athletes less threatening from a marketing perspective. I remember you writing at length about this topic and you were spot on. There’s also the Latrell Sprewell incident too, which was a Black man choking a white coach; that’s when the league got into this very kind of reactionary Black-lash place, and then I think, for whatever reason, they started to come out of that in the last eight years . . . The league, to me, got less reactionary and more progressive over, say, th
e last eight years.
Etan: As far as what in particular?
Hayes: The messages it’s sending, the tenor of its public service announcements, its relationship to American politics in terms of the outspokenness of its players . . . From 2004 to like 2011, there’s this kind of reactionary turn. Three things happen in that era. There’s [Allen Iverson] and the crazy challenge that A.I. is to the league’s image because he’s . . . so unapologetically Black. Everything about his game, the cornrows, the way he’s perceived, he records a hip-hop album. The Latrell Sprewell coaching incident, the “Brawl in the Palace.” That period . . . you can feel the league feeling a crisis about its management of how it’s selling “Blackness” as nonthreatening to its white fans.