THIS COUNTRY HAS TOO MUCH AT STAKE TO CARE ABOUT SPORTS ENDORSEMENTS
We keep hearing from LeBron and Bosa, and Popovich and Kerr, when in truth, Patrick Mahomes has it correct when he says, “I don't want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate …”
Their political views are disproportionate to 346 million Americans. It’s easy to rave about LeBron James and his ultra-peak NBA performances, weeks before he turns 40, but I don’t care that he’s endorsing Kamala Harris beyond what my next-door neighbor thinks. Simple as it is to applaud Nick Bosa for his sacks, as an All-Pro pass rusher, I don’t care if he interrupts post-game interviews with San Francisco 49ers teammates to flaunt his “Make America Great Again” hat in gold letters.
Wrote James on social media: “What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!”
Said Bosa to reporters: “I’m not going to talk too much about it, but I think it’s an important time. … It’s just a different climate.”
Sport should have learned during the Colin Kaepernick kneeling mission that athletes and coaches are honorary professionals but, in the end, are merely people in a stifling, boisterous audience hours before the presidential election. I care that Donald Trump said of former congresswoman Liz Cheney, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.” I care when Kamala Harris said of Trump, “These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
I care that Trump has a red face and hair that is part silver, part blond-brown. I care when Harris says, “Many of you are still getting to know who I am.” I am not revealing my vote today. As a sports columnist who has worked from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, from Barack Obama and Trump to Joe Biden, my commentary involves this truth: Why are those who happen to play games any more significant than the rest of us? Do I care that James has 213 million followers, most of whom are concerned about whether the Los Angeles Lakers win and how many shots son Bronny misses? Do I care Bosa was seen by millions of football fans?
Do I care if Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, invoked Stephen Curry at the Democratic National Convention and said “night, night” to Trump? No. Do I care if Gregg Popovich, who has joined Kerr as wannabe political ticket members, said this of Trump while coaching the San Antonio Spurs: “He’s a pathetic individual. He’s a small man who has to make everybody around him smaller so he thinks he’s gonna be bigger. And isn’t that the same thing we tell all of our kids in grade school? That’s not how you act. That’s not what you do.”
No, I don’t care.
They want you to vote as they will vote. From James and Bosa to the rest of them, they are egomaniacs taking charge of their jock jams and trying to motivate masses of electorates. Why, gents? Americans who face a critical decision in their lives aren’t listening to athletes. They are determining whether insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe is right or wrong when he said, at a recent Trump rally, that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” Whatever they believe, they’ll vote regardless of what a sports guy thinks.
The sportsman who grasps society is Patrick Mahomes, the most accomplished of the field at the moment. “I don't want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate or do whatever, either way,” said the generational quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champion. “I think my place is to inform people to get registered to vote. It’s to inform people to do their own research and then make their best decision for them and their family. I think every time I'm on this stage and I get asked these questions, I'm going to refer back to that because I think that's what makes America so great.”
Some of my media colleagues will call him a coward and compare him to billionaire newspaper owners — Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times — who have lost ample percentages of readers and staffers because they wouldn’t run a presidential endorsement. It’s a matter of trust for the publishers, who demand circulation loyalty to continue, but athletes simply continue to play and collect big money. The NFL didn’t disappear during Kaepernick’s revolt. The NBA didn’t vanish when the Los Angeles Clippers refused to wear warmups, angry when Donald Sterling was on a racist rant that cost him his ownership role.
The leagues used the episodes to soften political views. Tom Brady hasn’t voiced an opinion as a $375-million network analyst when he was pro-Trump in 2016. Kaepernick was run out of the NFL. The usual folks speak up, including Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who went the opposite way of Taylor Swift and continued to target working women, abortion rights and the gay community. Publicly, Mahomes has stuck by him as a teammate.
“We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government,” Butker says on a political action committee website. “But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great.”
Under Trump and Biden, sports has evolved into an immense entertainment element in this country. The NFL is a bigger live phenomenon, via game-to-game numbers, than movies, music, streaming sites and what’s left of cable. The World Series averaged 15.8 million viewers, up almost 75 percent from 2023 and the most in seven years, and even outdrew “Monday Night Football” this week. The NFL deserves more than the $125.5 billion it receives from media partners. The NBA received a new $76 billion package.
Sports people should play sports. It’s enough to deal with intense civic pressure and cutthroat gamblers. Once, Michael Jordan said he wasn’t supporting a black candidate in his native North Carolina.
“Republicans buy Nikes, too,” he said.
Patrick Mahomes wouldn’t say that. He stays in limbo. In 2024, he remains in cold storage, a condition we appreciate more than his touchdown drives.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.