Consider it strange. As a boy, I couldn't have been more of a sports fan and the Brooklyn Dodgers were my special baseball team. (I could probably still tell you, position by position, the starting lineup of the 1956 Dodgers.) I remained a fervent fan when they left for Los Angeles and, a few years later in 1962, my first year in college, the New York Mets came to town. And yes, I was also a devoted fan of the football New York Giants (and can remember, as a kid, going to one of their games with my dad) and, by my late teens, the basketball New York Knicks.
So, consider it strange that today, so many decades later, I'm a fan of nothing and watch no sports whatsoever (unless I happen to be with my grandson and he's watching a game). Today, I couldn't tell you a single Mets, Knicks, or Giants player. Not one!
I suppose my version of sports, however grim, these days is Donald Trump (though I'm obviously anything but a fan)! Still, if you happen to read the news or watch it on TV, you can't help but follow his every move -- no matter that he's anything but sporting -- the way I once followed Peewee Reese, the Dodgers shortstop, Jackie Robinson, their second baseman, Gil Hodges at first, or Carl ("the Reading Rifle") Furillo in right field. After all, what can't we know about more or less every second of his existence, including that, in China recently, he ate a meal of "lobster in tomato soup, stewed seasonal vegetables, slow-cooked salmon in mustard sauce, pan-fried pork buns, and a pastry described as being shaped like a trumpet shell"?
Of course, I'm no fan, but Forbes estimates that "our" president has a net worth of $6.5 billion. If I had to put him in the sports terms of my youth, I would say that he's the equivalent (for me) of the New York Yankees, the extremely successful local sports team that I distinctly disliked. And with that $6.5 billion, as TomDispatch regular and former New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, points out today, he fits all too well into a world of sports in which the owners of teams, if not all billionaires, tend to have fortunes that couldn't be more grimly used, politically speaking. The Guardian, for instance, reported in 2024 that the owners of North American sports teams had "donated at least $132.1 [million] in federal elections since 2020, with nearly 95% of those contributions going to Republican campaigns."
And with all of that in mind, let Lipsyte take you into a sports world where billionaires and sports have become eerily synonymous. Tom
A Short History of Sportswriting (from Bat Masterson to Shams Charania)
The Clues Are on the Billionaires' Scorecards
When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and columnist Shams Charania. After all, it's in sportswriting, I've come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American coal mine couldn't be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future.
American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early twentieth century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn't fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition. Yes, that Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, became a new sheriff in the emerging industry I've come to call SportsWorld.
Opinionated and self-righteous, he was an early singer of those canary songs that, for the next hundred years, would both forecast and reflect Jock Culture's impact on American life. The words might change, but the melody remained. The billionaires who now own and run sports were the robber barons of Bat's time, and the gambling that helped fuel his Gilded Age is now institutionalized as the proud partner of all the major leagues (whatever the sport may be).
Writing this in the twilight of my own sportswriting career, I find it remarkably easy to trace a path from those early oligarchs to the robber barons who now run American sports, and from the early sports bettors who fixed the 1919 World Series to the FanDuel and DraftKings proposition bettors who are changing the climate of our games -- and even perhaps to the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market gamblers whose wagers on wars may someday (if they haven't already) help start them.
The major sports of Bat's era were fiercely segregated expressions of the Jim Crow backlash that continued to fight a version of the Civil War. Keep in mind, for instance, that baseball, the anointed national pastime, was Whites Only until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Most White sportswriters had then stayed silent on the issue and so supported the racism of the owners who ran their clubs like plantations and of the White players who didn't want any job competition from Negro Leaguers.
Black newspaper sportswriters and Lester "Red" Rodney, who wrote for the Communist Daily Worker and died in 2009 at the age of 98, were then counterpoints to the mainstream. He was one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major league baseball. Early in his life, the focus on sports integration had been boxing, a sport that had gone to great lengths to ensure that a Black boxer would never become the world heavyweight champion (then considered a symbol of all-American manhood). When Jack Johnson took that crown in 1908, sportswriters, including such luminaries as novelist Jack London, called for "white hopes" to reclaim it. If Chinese spies had been on the job then, they would have noted this country's overwhelming racism.
White (and Black) Positions
The National Football League's color barrier was breached in 1946, but it was replaced by pro football's version of Jim Crow, or "positional segregation." Again, sportswriters tended to go along with the establishment dictum that roles like quarterback and center were for leaders and thinking men, and so reserved for Whites only. This delayed the appearance of the first starting Black quarterback until 1968. Meanwhile, Blacks were considered more fitted for the "natural" or "athletic" roles of defensive back and running back. Coaching, of course, is still a White man's prerogative in a league whose rosters are now about 70% Black.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
