media

Excerpt Offensive Lines: Sport State Synergy in an Era of Perpetual War

Samantha King

Sport and War in American Culture

Sport represents a surrogate for war—even as this relationship is repeatedly disavowed in public discourse—that has allowed sport culture in general, and the NFL in particular, to be incorporated into Bush administration policy and public relations efforts and, concomitantly, for the NFL to seek out a marketing partnership with a war-consumed state.

We need to only think of the everyday practice of describing sporting competitions, rivalries, strategies, and plays in the language of military force to understand how sport in the United States, especially football, generates many of the same emotions and investments as war (Jansen & Sabo, 1994): Quarterback heroes throw bombs under the orders of generals who devise game strategies in war rooms; defensive warriors seek to blitz the offensive line; a series of completed passes constitutes an aerial attack; and tied games result in sudden death over- times. For a few weeks following the events of September 11, 2001, however, sport pundits placed a voluntary moratorium on the use of such terminology. Although their decision had the potential to prompt some reflection on the nature of commercial sport culture in the United States, it was articulated very quickly to the narrative of lost innocence and harsh new realities that framed the popular response to the attacks. Prior to the fall of 2001, such words and images had seemed naïve, harmless, and even pure, wrote the numerous commentators who rushed to make note of this shift in newspaper columns across the country. But not any more, they claimed with characteristic historical amnesia. Injury, violence, death, and war were now an authentic part of the American experience and for this reason, if no other, they deserved to be taken seriously

By midseason, military metaphors were back with a vengeance, however, as coaches and journalists blithely peppered their pregame talks and postgame commentaries with liberal sprinklings of death and destruction (Yockey, 2003). This practice continued with the start of the occupation of Iraq, although something of a double standard arose in terms of who could legitimately deploy the language of war. In November 2003, Kellen Winslow, a tight end for the University of Miami, and favorite pick for this year’s NFL draft, had lost his cool in a press conference after a loss to Tennessee, telling a room full of reporters: “It’s war. They’re out to kill you, so I’m out there to kill them. I’m a fucking soldier. Now get away from me or I’ll go off” (Mumper, 2003). Winslow was roundly criticized in the media for his remarks and benched by his coach for the subsequent game. The player apologized the next day in a statement released by the university.

Shortly thereafter, in May 2004, Minnesota Timberwolf Kevin Garnett was castigated for his use of a series of military metaphors to describe an upcoming play-off game with the Sacramento Kings. The series up to that point was marked by trash talking and hard fouls and when asked about the importance of the deciding game. Garnett told reporters:

This is it. It’s all for the marbles. I’m sitting in the house loading up the pump, I’m loading up the Uzis, I’ve got a couple of M-16s, couple of nines, couple of joints with some silencers on them, couple of grenades, got a missile launcher. I’m ready for war. (Lupica, 2004, p. 68)

In an apology the next day that was remarkably similar in content to the statement issued by Winslow a few months earlier, Garnett said:

Sincerely, I apologize for my comments earlier. I didn’t mean to offend anybody. I’m a young man, and I understand when I’m appropriate, and this is totally inappropriate. I was totally thinking about basketball, not reality. I was just metaphorically trying to come up with a way to talk about the enormity of the game. (Murillo, 2004, p. 20)

Although, in both instances, there were a handful of commentators who noted that the American public should probably be more worried about the use of inappropriate sports metaphors among politicians and army generals (Caple, 2004), the overwhelming response was to lambaste Winslow and Garnett as ignorant, spoiled celebrities who play games for a living and who thus have no concept of the harsh reality of war.

The apologies released by the players reinforced this position, in both cases concluding with reference to the fiction of basketball and the reality of war and the players’ respective inability to comprehend a world outside the comfort of professional sport.

The fact that all the major sport institutions in the United States, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Basketball Association, have, to varying extents, harnessed their brand image to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq somehow escapes the same level of scrutiny. This erasure is particularly remarkable given that their marketing campaigns encourage fans to identify with a whitewashed image of military service and of war itself from the comfort of the bleachers or the couch. Perhaps what was ultimately so damaging about Winslow’s and Garnett’s outbursts, then, was that their words—unlike the slightly more abstract language usually deployed by commentators—made so explicit and visceral the conflict, violence, and destruction on which these promotional campaigns ultimately depend.

As numerous researchers have noted, there is also a racial logic that structures the American public’s love–hate relationship with professional Black male athletes and its often self-righteous and duplicitous critique of their supposedly brattish behavior and outlandish lifestyles (Andrews, 1996; Boyd, 2003; Cole & Andrews, 1996; Leonard, 2004; McDonald, 1996). In other words, Winslow and Garnett, who are both Black, were quickly admonished by a predominantly White media whose adoration for celebrity athletes coexists alongside a thinly veiled discourse that constructs these stars as overpaid thugs who are unable to handle the rewards of middle- or upper-class existence and whose lives off the field thus comprise an endless cycle of bar brawls, drug stings, attempted sexual assaults, paternity suits, and domestic violence charges. In this context, it is difficult for this same audience to recognize the key commonalities between professional athletes as a social group and an ideological category and military service personnel as a social group and an ideological category.

Gamal Abdel-Shehid (2002) argues that athletes and soldiers of color (mostly male) play a key role in the reproduction of U.S. hegemony and dominant ideolog- ical values at home and abroad. Black men, in particular, are overrepresented in both the military and professional sport—institutions that are crucial to the assertion and maintenance of the political, cultural, and economic supremacy of the United States. They fight wars on behalf of their leaders, literally in the case of soldiers, and figuratively in the case of athletes whose labor in both domestic and international competition is central to the reproduction of U.S. national identity. Although a select few athletes reap huge financial rewards for their efforts, in both sporting and military institutions, the economic security offered to workers in exchange for their labor is more often than not short term. At the same time, the prominence of men of color in these fields masquerades as evidence of the egalitarian character of U.S. society rather than as an effect of highly limited opportunities for upward mobility in a racialized, capitalist social formation. Any suggestion of figurative equivalence between war and sport, especially when voiced by those whose labor is crucial to the reproduction of these systems of exploitation through statements that make their position as workers explicit, must therefore be swiftly recuperated.