This is a scene from the "Salute to Service" military appreciation ceremony, held last Sunday before the Tennessee-Kansas City NFL game. This is the way the world works: Expressing support for such a ceremony is not political, but expressing a negative opinion is. Only the latter fan will be told: "Stick to sports!"
Barry Petchesky, former deputy editor of Deadspin, expands on the circumstances surrounding his firing, in an op-ed for The New York Times:
Two weeks ago, I was fired as acting editor in chief of Deadspin, where I'd worked since 2009. The entire staff resigned, following me out the door after we had refused a new company mandate to "stick to sports." Jim Spanfeller, installed as chief executive of G/O Media by the private equity firm that bought the company seven months ago, called me into his office, pointed to some offending stories on our home page and had me escorted from the building. ...
[M]y stance remains the same ... sports don't end when the players head back to the locker room.
We refused to "stick to sports," because we know that sports is everything, and everything is sports: It's the N.B.A. kowtowing to its Chinese business interests; it's pro sports leagues attempting to become shadow justice systems for publicity reasons; it's the opioid epidemic roiling N.F.L. locker rooms at least as hard as anywhere in Appalachia, even as the league refuses to relax its marijuana policy; it's racist fan chants chasing black players off the pitch in Italian soccer matches; it's Washington Nationals catcher Kurt Suzuki wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap at the White House. ...
Reporting sports with integrity requires knowing that there's no way to wall off the games from the world outside. To anyone who knows anything about sports or cares about the world outside the arena, the notion that sports should or even can be covered merely by box scores and transaction wires is absurd. ...
It's hard to understand why Great Hill Partners demanded that we "stick to sports" — especially at a time when the site was driving the conversation in sports coverage and had the highest traffic in its history — until you realize that this was most likely their plan. It's the private equity model: Purchase an asset, strip it of everything of value, then turn around and sell the brand to someone else before they realize that what made the brand valuable in the first place has been lost and can never be recovered ...
In recent years, we've seen the deaths (and to varying degrees, the troubled rebirths) of the likes of Newsweek, The Denver Post, LA Weekly, Playboy and just last month, the granddaddy of all sports media, Sports Illustrated. ...
It's going to keep happening ... Unique voices will be muted, or drowned out altogether. ...
[Deadspin saw] its entire mission statement detonated in an instant by the whims of private equity. ...
Sticking to sports, pretending that sports can take place in a vacuum, would have been profoundly dishonest.
Yep. Private equity. One big casino wrapped in the flag. Except you can't call a rigged system a "game of chance".
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. The "stick to sports" claim is every bit as political, just political of a different stripe.
ReplyDeleteThe mythically reasonable Center is every bit as ideologically driven as anything from the Left or Right.
DeleteMitchell Nathanson, author of the must-read A People's History of Baseball (and who has a book about Jim Bouton coming out next spring):
ReplyDelete"Sticking to Sports" is Not Just Wrong, It's Impossible
[Deadspin is] gone and we're told that it's gone because its editorial staff refused management's mandate to "stick to sports." On the surface, "sticking to sports" might seem like a good idea for a website that, without question, revolved around sports, but ... Sticking to sports is why, until it was replaced in 2008, Jackie Robinson's Hall of Fame plaque didn't contain any mention of the fact that he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. Sticking to sports is why people like Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and Houston Astros owner Jim Crane are permitted to own franchises at all. And, hey, sticking to sports is why there is still, in 2019, a professional sports team that goes by the name "Redskins."
And let's be real – even sticking to sports isn't really sticking to sports. In the midst of the Colin Kaepernick debate, public address announcers across Major League Baseball and other sports began instructing fans to not only stand for the National Anthem, but, if they were veterans, to salute as well. Within the bubble of Sportsworld, such an instruction can very well be seen as politically neutral. Outside of it, the mandate looks like something else altogether. Sports talk radio likewise is “just sports” only if viewed from within the Sportsworld bubble. Outside of it, listeners are subjected to a barrage of middle-aged white guys calling in to complain about Donovan McNabb, Terrell Owens, Jimmy Rollins, Maikel Franco, Joel Embiid – take your pick -- not playing the game "the right way" according to the insular worldview of the pale demographic ... The suspicion that many of these same callers own red hats that don't sport the Phillies logo isn't one I can't easily dismiss. On the surface they're talking about sports. It's the subtext that matters, though. A subtext that can't be broached if we're all herded back into the "stick to sports" lane. ...
In the end, sites like Deadspin didn't have a chance. The funhouse mirror that is Sportsworld always wins. It has too much money, too much power, too much influence not to. But it sure was exhilarating to watch these underdogs not only take on the champ but deliver more than a few staggering blows.
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