In a pandemic, none of this matters. But maybe a pandemic is the best time to reconsider what we understand about sports and sports fandom precisely because it doesn’t matter. Its frivolity nakedly apparent, maybe we can deconstruct some of the things about being a fan that we once took so seriously, and be better fans. This site is The Modern Spectator. We should all ask, more than ever: what does that mean?
Truthfully, I don’t know. My thoughts are scattered: it’s baseball’s “Opening Day,” as I write this, and Juan Soto has just tested positive for COVID-19. It is unclear if the first game, between Soto’s Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees, should be played, but it probably will be. (Ed. Note – It was.) The new season teeters, even before it starts. I want to forget everything that’s happening and uncritically enjoy it. I want to do something I rail against under normal circumstances. I want to stick to sports.
For almost four months, there were practically no sports to stick to. That’s one major reason why so many are so desperate to bring them back, even as the pandemic keeps getting worse. When ESPN has no choice but to let the talking heads talk about inequality, what becomes the masses’ opiate? Conversely, what do sports mean when there’s not only a world-shaking epidemiological crisis, but also an aspiring autocrat-in-chief refusing to take the necessary action to minimize it? Alongside a renewed period of racial reckoning and calls for police defunding, demilitarization, and reform?
We can put the athletes in a bubble, or a “wubble,” and make social media stars of the charismatic rookies reporting from them. We can put a runner on second base in extra innings, institute the universal DH, get rid of the football preseason. We can have crowd noise piped in, or even “virtual fans,” and start the games at 9 a.m. to beat the Florida heat. But we’re not reckoning with the existential crisis at the core of the fandemic.
I don’t think I should watch—doing so feels like sipping coffee as the house burns down—but I know I will. I could stop: I stopped watching football—wrote about it for this website—when the guilt of consuming televised mass brain destruction grew too great. Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, and Andre Watters’s ghosts haunted me. Will it take an athlete dying of COVID to stop me and others from watching? What about the deaths of members of the athletes’ families? Of the front office?
Meanwhile, sports are coming back and baseball players are kneeling. (Bruce Maxwell, the only MLB player to kneel during the Kaepernick moment, roils in self-imposed exiled in Mexico.) Whole leagues print “Black Lives Matter” on their pregame warmups, on the coaches’ t-shirts, on the referees’ armbands. The revolution has been commodified. The President’s white supremacists still rage, but much of white America—while they might not be getting gassed or kidnapped by Trump’s secret police—at least wants to look like they care. Athletes who use their platforms to speak out about injustice are no longer especially notable, their statements not that controversial. The Tampa Bay Rays official team account just tweeted: “Today is Opening Day, which means it’s a great day to arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor.” Does meme-ing the message diminish it, or spread it to a wider audience that needs to hear it? When the bases themselves bear “MLB BLM” like some kind of bizarro anagram, will the potency of the message be muzzled by branding?
Speaking of which, two franchises were (re)branded today. The “Seattle Kraken” and the “Washington Football Team.” Their monikers feel frivolous – one GIF-based and cringeworthy, the other spitefully bland (though a big improvement over decades of in-your-face racism). They make me wonder: should we even care about the team-based construct anymore? Can liberated fandom, an appreciation for individual players narratives beyond team success, gain wider acceptance? Would most people be interested in a fandom where tattooing a Green Bay Packers logo on your bicep is hollow or nonsensical? Or maybe teams are just what we need right now, to make us feel community even as we are trapped in our houses. With billionaires profiting from the pandemic, is there room for resistance within corporate team structures? Is ethical fan consumption even possible?
Maybe the thing to do is insist, and remind others, that we have agency over our fandoms. That we don’t have to participate the way we always have, or the way others do. We control the narratives of our fandom. It is up to us to decide what the games are doing for us—what they mean to us. We can change our minds. We can write sports, instead of just reading them.
We should also recognize the fundamental humanity of the athletes. Realize that no sporting outcome is more important than the health and well-being of the people who play them. That the joy we fans get from sports, immensely valuable as it is, is always secondary. We can decenter ourselves, prioritize the athletes, and demand that the capitalist structures of sporting power do the same. Sports can do better, be better. Will they? Probably not. But we should try to make them.
Who knows how long the return of sports will last? I’m inclined to pessimism, but I hope the soccer and basketball bubbles hold and that baseball, against all odds, gets in those 60 games and 16-team playoffs. It’ll be weird, and maybe it’ll be fun. But let’s not pretend it means that everything is ok. And when everything is ok, or ok enough, we shouldn’t go back to the way things used to be.