Playing Tough: The World of Sports and Politics

Preface and Acknowledgments

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way— so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. [I]t occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. —Noam Chomsky Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence. —George F. Will Sports do not build character. They reveal it. —Heywood Broun [Preface and Acknowledgments] To some, sports are a frivolous diversion. To others, they are the most important component of their lives. To most people, sports are an important part of a full life, along with family, friends, and a job. Sports inspire us and outrage us; they entertain, and, if we are fortunate, they can cause us to be very happy, if not content.Their potential for joy should be a matter of celebration and not censure. The same is true of politics, an essential part of our lives even if we chose not to participate in the franchise and ignore the news as much as humanly possible. In modern society, it is useless to try to avoid running into government , whether driving on the city streets or seeking official approval for your marriage. Politics, and the governments it produces, determines how individuals interact with each other. It can make your life more miserable than a losing baseball team. This book is about the historical relationship between sports and politics, about how each activity has affected the other since the beginning of recorded time. Politics has used sports (and vice versa), sometimes in obvious ways: your favorite sports team likely plays in a stadium or arena built with public funds, and your favorite politician proves he or she is just a “regular guy” by appearing at sporting events and wearing the appropriate team paraphernalia. Occasionally, major sporting events, like the Olympics, offer overt political messages. Just think about the Nazi Olympics of 1936 or the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. Writing about the symbiotic relationship between sports and politics has allowed me to return to my roots in political science and revisit some of the xii Preface and Acknowledgments sacred texts in the field. It has also offered me the opportunity to learn (and share) more stories about sports. I have avoided retelling at length stories I have related in e arlier books, such as the remarkable achievements of Title IX in women’s sports, an obvious example of the nexus between politics and sports. Instead, I have ventured into boxing, soccer, rugby, and Olympic sports, while telling an interesting tale I uncovered from the nineteenth-century days of purely “amateur” baseball and its connection to corrupt urban politics. In this book, I cover a broad swath of the political “experiences”: city bosses and their machines, the establishment of secure political power, the use of sports policies to achieve international legitimacy and advantage, and the use of governmental violence against other political powers and against citizens. Sports will play an essential role in e ach of the stories. Muhammad Ali is a p erfect example. The “Greatest of All Time” became a symbol of resistance and black pride. His courage inside and outside the ring inspired many and infuriated others. At times, sports will be the side story: establishing no-show jobs for avowedly amateur baseball players was not William “Boss” Tweed’s core perfidy in running New York City in the mid-nineteenth century, but it did offer an example of how he carried out his rule. Hitler used the 1936 Olympics to establish international legitimacy for his brutal dictatorship. The boxing matches in 1 936 and 1938 between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis previewed a world at war. Nelson Mandela used sports in the mid-1990s to secure his revolutionary regime in South Africa. The United States would attempt to co-opt the Olympics for overtly political purposes, to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1 980. Foreign policy, the extension of politics on the world stage, frequently has involved sports. At times, a sporting conflict has evolved into violent warfare, as in the “Futbol War” in Central America in 1969. Finally, we will see sports turn the tables and seek public subsidies for private businesses, a generally successful ploy by franchise owners that continues to transfer millions of public dollars into private hands...