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ABSTRACT
‘Sports and politics don’t mix’. This platitude has been a pervasive part of U.S. professional sport culture, but it is vague and most of the versions are untrue since politics have been, and must be, a part of professional sports. Its only plausible meaning is that professional players should not make political statements while they are on-the-job. Players have a constitutional right to make political statements outside the workplace, but this right does not apply in privately owned sport associations. I argue that player political protest has ultimately been moral, not political, in nature and that players’ on-the-job political expression can be justified based on the priority of the moral-legal concept of personhood. I propose player political expression policies that U.S. professional associations should adopt.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Erin Flynn, Sandra Meeuwsen, John Russell, Bill Morgan, Eric Moore, Sanja Ẑarković, Stu Matz, Bob Gillis, Greg Allen (one of the Syracuse 8), Adam North, one of the anonymous JPS reviewers, and especially JPS editor Paul Gaffney for their critical feedback and helpful suggestions on drafts of this article as well as Keith Smith for his recommendation to read Robert Dahl on the nature of the political in the U.S.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2. See Ferris (Citation2014), 222. The first documented instance of playing The Star-Spangled Banner before a sporting event was at a baseball game in New York in 1862 during the Civil War (132). By the mid-1890s, it was played on opening day of the baseball season. After being played at the 1918 World Series during World War I, The Star-Spangled Banner was played throughout the 1930s on opening day, special occasions and during World Series games (133). Partly as a result of public address systems and the installation of organs – all of which obviated the need for a live band – the anthem was played regularly after World War II before almost every baseball game (222). Today, the anthem is always played before NFL, NBA, WNBA and MLB games.
3. For a history of NFL and MLB political contributions, see https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-football-league/summary?toprecipcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000027847&topnumcycle=A and https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/major-league-baseball/summary?toprecipcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000072784&topnumcycle=A.
4. Hegel (Citation1967) argued that the realm of the state (the political) is conceptually distinct from, and logically prior to, the private realm of the family and the public realm of civil society with its voluntary associations, like the economy, religion and other types of civic groups. He stated, ‘the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality and an ethical life’ (156). What Hegel meant is that the freedoms or rights of individuals – as well as their obligations in their various roles as family members, members of voluntary civil society associations, and as citizens – depend on the authority and formal recognition of the political realm, of the state, which makes their roles, rights and responsibilities ‘objective’ or real.
5. The NFL had been a tax exempt 501 (c)(6) business before becoming for-profit in 2015. The NBA has never had tax exempt status. In 2007, MLB gave up its tax exempt status as a 501 (c)(6) business. Professional teams are not tax-exempt.
6. Judith Grant Long, Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities. New York: Routledge, 2013, 17 and 13, respectively. For reported public costs for major league stadiums from 1900–2010, see 19–31. Teams also receive property tax abatements (breaks) that are lost public revenue.
8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/0ca192cf-2e44-40f2-a498-dc39230934ed.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_2. Another example is a 2016 survey in which American adults were asked whether ‘professional sports teams should prohibit athletes from publicly discussing politics’ and whether ‘it is appropriate for athletes to speak publicly about political subjects’ and whether ‘sports and politics should not mix.’ See Thorson and Serazio, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, summer 2018, 401.
9. https://olympics.com/ioc/olympic-charter. The rule was modified for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games to allow during the opening and closing ceremonies expression supporting ‘solidarity, unity and non-discrimination’.
10. See, respectively, the WNBA Player Contract (205) at https://wnbpa.com/cba/; the NFL Player Contract (334) at https://operations.nfl.com/inside-football-ops/players-legends/2020-nfl-nflpa-cba-need-to-know/; and the MLB Uniform Player Contract (404) at https://www.mlbplayers.com/cba.
11. Thanks to Cem Abanaizir for helping me to clarify the different governance climate between U.S. and European domestic sport associations.
12. I also don’t have the space to discuss on-the-field player political expression in U.S. university/college sports. However, I believe my defense is even stronger in an educational context where university missions often make reference to improving society.
14. Adam Silver’s statement on NBA and China | NBA.com.
17. Dave Meggysey, Out of Their League, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 246.
18. David Marc, Leveling the Playing Field: The Story of the Syracuse 8. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022.
19. While the leagues understandably ban steroids and performance enhancing drugs (SPEDS) as well as illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, the NBA and WNBA ban synthetic cannabinoids and marijuana, respectively, which are legal in many states and so reflect a ‘moral’ judgment. The list of banned substances is found in the CBAs.
20. Whereas Abanazir (Citation2022) focuses on the right to free speech that is based on the pre-legal moral right of the expression of conscience, I focus on the most compelling content of what that conscionable speech can be, namely, protesting systematic violations of personhood.
21. Thanks to Sandra Meeuwsen for suggesting the formulation of this point.
22. See McCain and Flake, Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversight Report, Washington, D.C.: United States Senate and Government Publishing Office, 2017. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/250609/tackling-paid-patriotism-oversight-report.pdf.
24. I’m grateful to Erin Flynn for pointing out this potential conflict.
25. In his reaction to an early draft, John Russell argued that it might be a mistake to change sports associations’ policies that prohibit on-the-job athlete political expression since it is most poignant when it remains a form of civil disobedience, which creates a type of theatre that would give more meaning to the expression and bring more public attention to the issues and that, barring a vindictive owner, won’t have serious consequences for athletes. The problem with this provocative argument is that there have been career ending consequences for U.S. players’ on-the-job political expression, such as the NBA players Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and the NFL player Colin Kaepernick.