In 1964, New York’s NBC radio affiliate introduced a “talk back” format. The “newest sound” in the city would be “your own voice and your neighbor’s,” the advertisements promised. That March, a broadcaster named Bill Mazer began hosting an afternoon call-in show devoted to sports. Born in Ukraine and reared in Brooklyn, Mazer was famous for his easygoing demeanor and encyclopedic grasp of trivia. Years later, he remembered that the first caller to his show was a “kid” with one pressing question: “Who’s better—Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?”
Radio hosts had invited audience questions and comments in the past, but there was something novel about the freewheeling nature of the talk-back format, and Mazer’s show quickly caught on. To judge by some snippets that survive on YouTube, talking about sports on the radio has hardly changed since then, aside from the fact that “Mr.” once constituted the prevailing form of address. The innovations that followed largely involved tone—at some point, in the seventies, it became acceptable to belittle, rather than humor, an out-of-control caller. In 1987, New York’s WFAN became the nation’s first twenty-four-hour sports-radio station. It seemed a wild gamble. But, within a few years, such stations dominated the coveted twenty- and thirtysomething male demographic, and beginning in the nineties WFAN became one of the top-billing stations in the country. Today, the United States averages roughly a dozen sports-radio stations per state.
I often wonder why I’ve spent so many hours, sometimes in cars that have long since reached their destination, listening to strangers argue about Carmelo Anthony’s defensive effort, or the size of Barry Bonds’s head. Sports talk remains one of America’s last folk traditions, rigid in its regional devotions and hyper-local mythologies. As I’ve grown older, the bro-centric world view has become off-putting, and yet I still listen. I delight in how pedantic and technical these conversations can be, the conviction and force driving a wacky, pie-in-the-sky trade proposal, the way a host surgically pokes and prods at a caller’s logical fallacy. I love how two people try to outfox each other, rephrasing the interlocutor’s positions to make them sound ridiculous. Ultimately, no amount of reason or passion has any effect on the games we watch. The arguments are almost always infinitely regressive, and anyone’s opinion on Mantle vs. Mays is legitimate. What separates the professional talker from the amateur is a kind of ruthlessness, bringing to a conversation the win-at-all-costs ethic of actual sports.
In July, I was listening to “Outkick the Show,” a daily show that Clay Travis broadcasts on Facebook and Periscope from his home, in Nashville. Travis, who is thirty-nine, represents the latest evolution of the sports pundit, a multi-platform star who has flourished both on social media and in traditional media, like books, radio, and television. For “Outkick,” which is a bit coarser than the daily show that he hosts on Fox Sports Radio, it was a slow week, because football and basketball were on hiatus. Travis pontificated about his personal wealth and litigated some recent pop-culture dramas—the World Cup, Mitch McConnell being stalked by “fat losers in Louisville,” a W.N.B.A. player complaining that her salary should be comparable to that of LeBron James.
There’s a gravelly, solemn quality to Travis’s voice which makes his self-deprecating asides all the more effective. At times, it can be hard to tell whether Travis is a sports pundit who knows a bit about politics, or a political adept who knows a bit about sports. Rumors about nominations to fill the latest Supreme Court vacancy were swirling that week, and he talked about them as though forecasting the N.F.L. Draft. He tabbed Brett Kavanaugh, then seen as an underdog, “my guy,” despite the fact that oddsmakers had him at 6–5. He didn’t discount Amy Barrett: “She throws the identity politics on its head.” (Despite his grasp of judicial politics, he continually, somewhat playfully, mispronounced Neil Gorsuch’s name as “Gor-sack.”)
The rise of satellite and cable technology in the nineties created new possibilities for nationally syndicated programs built around feisty, voice-driven pundits. The Internet and podcasting continued to blur the lines between professionals and aspirants, since expertise, in this realm, is only relative. A breakthrough came in the early two-thousands, when the writer Bill Simmons parlayed his conversational, fan-first perspective into a job at ESPN, and then founded his own, Simmons-centric media empire. (It included the Web site Grantland, for which I briefly freelanced.) That he couldn’t possibly be objective about his beloved Red Sox or Celtics was part of his appeal. Suddenly, building a career by simply being a hard-core sports fan no longer seemed far-fetched.
In 2004, Travis was working as a lawyer in the Virgin Islands when he realized that DirecTV did not offer the N.F.L.’s Sunday Ticket package there. He went on a “pudding strike,” eating, he says, nothing but pudding cups for fifty days, in the hope that the stunt would spark a policy change. A blog he maintained during the strike took off. Finding an audience was intoxicating. He eventually moved back to his native Tennessee, writing, guesting on local radio, and building a readership for his Web site.
Like Simmons, Travis pitches himself as both Everyman and outsider. Alongside his riffs on the World Cup and LeBron James’s salary, he spent much of the rest of the afternoon admiring the “big brass balls” of the divers who were rescuing a team of young soccer players trapped in a cave in Thailand (“The masses wish that country was called Thigh-land”). They were “the definition of ‘Don’t be a pussy’ ”—one of his catchphrases. There was a dash of gruff humility, an admission that “fearlessness” impressed him more as he approached middle age. All the other stuff in the show was a table setting for this actual life-and-death incident, where no amount of posturing could help. When the stakes are truly high, Travis said, “bravery is the calling card, as opposed to what race you are, or what religion you are, or what ethnicity you are, or what sexual orientation you are.”
Last September, Travis appeared on CNN to discuss ESPN’s suspension of the “SportsCenter” anchor Jemele Hill, who had tweeted that President Trump was a “white supremacist.” Travis, who describes himself as a “radical moderate,” explained that he believed “in only two things completely: the First Amendment and boobs.” Although Travis had used this line before, it caught Brooke Baldwin, the show’s host, off guard. A new controversy branched from the original one, and Travis says he was banned from CNN.
This moment opens Travis’s new book, “Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports with Politics” (Broadside), an exploration of how he, a longtime Democrat, began to reject what he perceived to be the sports media’s liberal bias. The book is made up of a series of interconnected takes on, among other things, ESPN (“MSESPN”), diversity and political correctness, and the outspoken politics of athletes like LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. What Travis describes as his “red pill” moment happened during a 2015 protest at the University of Missouri. The football team threatened a boycott, joining student activists who were concerned about a string of racist incidents on campus. But Travis was troubled that few in the media had scrutinized the students’ stories. He felt that the students were exaggerating, maybe even making stuff up. Even if these things actually happened, were “a poop swastika” and “an alleged racial slur, with no witnesses, happening off campus” really in the purview of a university president? “This wasn’t about right or wrong,” he writes. “It was about white men being afraid of being publicly branded as racists.”
These “fake racism allegations,” and the media’s defense of the campus’s “little terrorists,” inspired Travis to become a sort of radicalized bro. He began blogging about the “sham nature” of the protests. Some people found his responses glib, if not racist. This initially disturbed him. But, as often happens nowadays, he read these reactions as attempts to “silence” or “scare” him and so as proof that his skepticism was merited. He came to see the First Amendment as representing “a marketplace of ideas” hospitable to all inquiries, no matter how uncomfortable they might make some people feel. In his book, he speaks his mind with a confrontational verve. He wonders why nobody questioned whether a well-publicized incident involving racist graffiti scrawled outside LeBron James’s home actually happened. He suggests that black athletes are a protected class, insulated from media criticism. He also theorizes that the predominantly white sports media vilifies Ryan Lochte and Grayson Allen because they are white and, therefore, safe targets.
None of Travis’s grievances in the book have to do with the games themselves. Rather, he’s incensed by the stories we tell about those games. He’s particularly relentless when it comes to ESPN, and the “far-left-wing liberal” leadership of its former president, John Skipper, who stepped down last December, amid substance-abuse concerns. In the past few years, ESPN has come to be seen as a cautionary tale of what happens when traditional media companies, accustomed to domination, grow complacent. In 2016, with cable subscriptions on a seemingly irreversible decline, the company spent an estimated $7.3 billion on content. While other outlets spent comparable sums to build libraries of on-demand content that could theoretically live forever, much of ESPN’s spending went toward live sporting events, which rarely make for repeat viewing.
Travis’s chapter on broadcast economics offers a cogent gloss on the challenges that changing viewing habits pose for traditional media entities like ESPN. (A belief that the well of cable-subscription dollars would never run dry in turn affected the professional leagues themselves, whose fortunes depend on lucrative broadcast deals.) One of the ways that ESPN has tried to modernize quickly—and adapt to changing demographics—is by building programs around hosts who are often young, charismatic, and nonwhite. There’s a conspiratorial edge to Travis’s criticism of what he sees as the network’s cosmetic makeover, as well as the increasingly politicized outlooks of its on-air talent. It’s open to argument whether ESPN’s occasionally clumsy on-air strategy has slowed or accelerated the network’s over-all decline in viewership. ESPN has always pursued celebrity, whether it was Tim Tebow or the network’s own anchors. But there’s a viral stickiness to Travis’s charge that it was the politics that drove people away, not the larger reality of cord-cutting. In today’s conversational arena, the burden of proving otherwise always rests on the powerful institution, which is held to a different standard than smaller, nimbler, more openly partisan outlets.
The title of Travis’s book comes from a widely circulated anecdote about the basketball superstar Michael Jordan. In 1990, Jordan allegedly refused to endorse a black challenger to the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, because “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Whether Jordan actually said this is beside the point. (The quote has been revised over time by the reporter who claims to have heard it, and Jordan, despite his behind-the-scenes support of liberal politicians and causes, is famously taciturn about his politics.) But it has been repeated enough times to be part of Jordan’s off-court legacy as a superstar who understood his place and his limitations, and whose innovations as a kind of human brand were in the name of bringing different people together.
Travis contrasts Jordan with James, who quarrels directly with the President on Twitter. Muhammad Ali, whose refusal to serve in the Army during the war in Vietnam once inspired government prosecution, is remembered fondly as someone whose grievances were clear, detailed, and issue-focussed, unlike those of Kaepernick, whom Travis regards as a cliché-spouting social-justice opportunist. Plus, times have changed. “If anything,” he writes, referring to affirmative action, “the United States government’s laws discriminate in favor of black people based on their skin color.”
That Travis could work an aside about affirmative action into a book about sports speaks to the strange paradox of his career. He writes that sports once constituted our “national connective tissue, the place we all went to escape the serious things in life. It didn’t matter if you were a neurosurgeon or a janitor; everyone’s opinion on sports was equal. Even better, sports was the one place where we could all go to escape the partisan rancor afflicting our country elsewhere.” Yet while he wants athletes to keep their politics to themselves, and networks to stop treating those views as newsworthy, his career has flourished by doing the opposite. Travis’s vision of the past helps explain why sports, full of hallowed traditions and strict hierarchies, pairs well with politically conservative outlooks. When he laments the present-day media’s role in our “national balkanization,” he’s simply describing a world that is open to a wider, more unpredictable array of voices. Of course, this is a world in which he’s a star, weaving riffs about overpaid point guards and noble linemen, whiny celebrities and showmen politicians, into a story about his America.
As far as unanswerable sports questions go, few make for such good fodder as the what-if: the trade that fell through at the last moment, the fluke error that set off a chain reaction of multigenerational futility. At a different time, critics of Fidel Castro’s Cuba wondered what might have been if the revolutionary leader had followed through on his purported (and perhaps dubious) promise as a baseball player. Nowadays, a similar question applies to Donald Trump. What if he had been welcomed, rather than repeatedly shunned, by the N.F.L.’s snobby ownership clique? He bought a franchise in the competing U.S.F.L. in 1983. When he spearheaded an antitrust lawsuit against the N.F.L., in 1984, it seemed a gaudy, if inventive, way to force a merger with the older, more established league. The U.S.F.L. won the suit but was awarded just three dollars in damages, and the league soon folded. In 1988, he was floated as a possible buyer of the New England Patriots before quietly backing out. His purchase would have required approval from three-quarters of the N.F.L.’s owners—the same group he had sued a few years earlier. He tried hard to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014. He was ultimately outbid, and he took the loss in characteristic stride, firing off a series of tweets poking fun at the team’s new owner, Terry Pegula, and his losing ways, before dismissing the modern-day N.F.L. as “boring” and “soft.”
In 2014, the Times political reporter Mark Leibovich was on his way to interview the Patriots’ superstar quarterback, Tom Brady, when he recalled feeling something unprecedented: he was nervous. The year before, he had published “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital,” a closeup look at Washington’s hubristic excess, and the kind of book that makes you wonder why anyone ever talks to journalists. His professional life requires him to be unfazed by politicians and policymakers, people with true power over our everyday realities. Yet he retained a bit of awe for Brady: “Sports pedestals are funny that way. Athletes often constitute our earliest objects of allegiance. Staying starstruck is an indulgence of our arrested developments, even for jaded middle-aged reporters—sweaty ones, in this case.” Leibovich hoped that he and Brady would hit it off.
Much to Leibovich’s chagrin, they did not become “best friends.” But they got along well enough for Leibovich to profile Brady for the Times Magazine. Despite a long-standing desire to keep football as a “walled-off object of my mental energy—toys to play with on the side of all the serious,” Leibovich found this behind-the-scenes glimpse into the N.F.L. exhilarating. The Brady piece eventually grew into “Big Game: The N.F.L. in Dangerous Times” (Penguin), an exploration of Leibovich’s unease about being a hard-core football fan—someone who knows he should not feel so emotionally beholden to whether the New England Patriots win or lose.
One of the reasons that sports networks invest so much in talking heads—like Stephen A. Smith, of ESPN; Skip Bayless, of Fox Sports 1; or, indeed, Clay Travis—is that they no longer have a monopoly on access. Social media and athlete-driven Web sites have given players more direct and dynamic ways to interact with fans. Often, the players themselves are only incidental to the ancillary dramas of gaming, gambling, or fantasy sports. It’s much easier for networks to hook viewers with voices that are brash and entertaining, perpetual-motion machines of conversation, prognostications, and hot takes. There’s also the partnership between leagues and broadcast networks. ESPN’s president, Jimmy Pitaro, recently acknowledged the “false narrative” that his network had a political agenda. He promised to steer ESPN clear of politics, as well as improve relations with the N.F.L. The aims appeared to be interrelated.
Leibovich seems largely immune to the challenges around access and appeasement that many sports journalists face; he pursues his leads with the freedom of someone who’s embedding in the N.F.L. only temporarily. He writes with a brusque charm, training his eye toward features of the league that many longtime observers might take for granted or condition themselves to ignore: the glad-handing between joyless, high-profile reporters and secretive team intermediaries; the personal assistants who chase after the superstars’ toddlers; the powerful league officials whose names no fans know. At the same time, Leibovich is a fan like the rest of us, given to generic, often specious, and occasionally paranoid defenses of his cherished Patriots. As his book unfolds, though, his onetime ability to compartmentalize football and protect it from the nastiness of real life begins to melt away.
In the end, Travis and Leibovich aren’t all that different, even though Travis would probably regard Leibovich as a “far-left-wing liberal.” Travis shares Leibovich’s view that football is a “clean meritocracy,” and they both lament the shadow that politics casts on their childhood enthusiasms. While all this seems to have pushed Travis toward a reactionary stance, trolling the liberal establishment, Leibovich’s response is more wistful. Returning to his day job and covering the 2016 Presidential campaign, he begins to recognize the resonances between Trump and the N.F.L.’s insulated ownership. Trump exploited Kaepernick’s protest as a campaign issue, mobilizing resentment against the social-justice movement that the quarterback was trying to promote. Eventually, Leibovich’s nostalgia for a more innocent kind of fandom is upended, and football becomes another battleground in the culture wars.
Leibovich just wanted to bond with Tom Brady. But he stuck around long enough to catch a glimpse into the league’s power structure, and it left him a bit queasy. He has a gift for sniffing out where true power lies, and his doggedness brings him to bathroom meetings among N.F.L. owners and sideline chats with the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, whose primary duty, it often seems, is to shield the N.F.L. from an endless string of controversies surrounding the sport’s violence, on and off the field. (In one scene, Goodell, unflappable when it comes to league controversies involving concussions, anthem protests, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, grows annoyed when he can’t get the N.F.L. mobile app to work.) Leibovich ends up reporting on a closed-door meeting in which owners debate whether Kaepernick’s kneeling protest during the national anthem is simply a “media problem” in need of new imaging. They speak “in elevated terms” about their responsibility as owners, invoking Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s march on Selma. As a powerful group of billionaires, well versed in the ins and outs of municipal bonds or antitrust litigation, they readily grasp that sports and politics don’t exist in neatly bounded spheres. They simply want to be able to choose which political legacy they will become a part of. One of them suggests a March on Washington-style show of solidarity, featuring owners and players taking to the streets together.
“Players are like cattle and the owners are ranchers,” the Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm is reported to have said in 1987, and the ranchers “can always get more cattle.” Schramm was cynically pointing out one of the most durable realities of sports. The players are often interchangeable, an assembly line of heroes and villains, symbols of overachievement or wasted talent. Our fandom is deeply irrational, a conduit for all the loose, tribal energies inside us, and where those energies take us can’t possibly map neatly onto party affiliation and ideological preference. Allegiance to a team often runs deeper than its current cast of characters, stretching back across generations and forward to next season, and the one after that. But, at a time when players have never been so free to work where they choose, fans increasingly pledge allegiance to individuals, like LeBron James, or the soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo, following them wherever they go. The scandals and controversies come and go with the news cycle. But there’s one constant that lies just underneath the games we watch, a dynamic that remains fixed no matter who is cheering from the sidelines or complaining on the airwaves. If there is a clear relationship between sports and politics, it might come down to whether you find yourself siding with labor or management: whether you think that a player should remain forever loyal to the first jersey he puts on; whether you view athletes as workers or just as people who should feel lucky to play a child’s game for a living.
Here’s a question. Last December, Commissioner Goodell signed a five-year contract extension worth roughly two hundred million dollars. A couple of months ago, LeBron James joined the Los Angeles Lakers on a four-year contract worth around a hundred and fifty million dollars. Who’s better? ♦
