Saints vs. Spoilsports: A look at what sports mean, the media’s role in it all, and the rise of fan media

What are sports for? As something that came about as a pastime to play, sports have since become a pastime to watch. With that evolution, so too has the role of sports media blossomed from a means to inform fans to a means to antagonize some. Could the rise of fan media help turn the tide back to enjoyment in sports?

Over the years, I’ve taught a sociology class called “American Sports & Leisure.” The point of the class is to teach students to use different modes of sociological analysis to understand the role of sports and leisure in the historical changes in American society. Sports shape our values. Sports reflect our values. Sports challenge our values. And so on. To make a long story short, the Industrial Revolution freed many people from long, arduous hours of manual labor. The extra time could be devoted to education, which further removed generations of people from said manual labor. Eventually, those people found themselves with a surplus of time and resources, which they could devote to leisure activities, including sports. For those people who continued to labor on factory floors, organized sports played a role in establishing the type of solidarity required to unionize and fight for higher pay, better conditions, and more leisure time… AKA “the weekend.” Company-sponsored sports leagues co-opted some of that energy, transforming worker solidarity into a fixation on games, rather than gains, but the story is sometimes quite complicated. 

Up until that period of time, leisure was for the aristocracy. The wealthy owned land and resources and used them, in part, for lawn games. The appetites of working people called for a host of new leisure activities, many of which matched the physicality of their daily experiences on the job. On top of that, the long-standing Protestant aversion to pleasure-seeking was replaced by a newfound ethos of “muscular Christianity,” and the YMCA was founded to train Christian men’s mind, bodies, and spirit. Society was transformed across the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and sports began to expand dramatically in American life.

The moral of this story is that the dramatic changes in American society that unfolded during those pivotal years resulted in a better educated, relatively wealthier, middle class-oriented circumstance for a large part of the population. Participation in sporting activities was expanded thanks to the increase in leisure time, resources, and the decline of the social and religious stigma about physical labor for the purpose of enjoyment. The breakthroughs in media technology brought with them a demand for content, and sports was one of the earliest parts of the cultural sphere to occupy that space. Sports in the newspaper. Sports on radio. Sports on television. Sports on the Internet. And with those evolving circumstances came more and more money.

If you look closely at the various dimensions of that rapid and powerful evolution, you can see several answers to the question, “What are sports for?” Sports are for solidarity. Participating in team activities fosters a sense of belonging, purpose and togetherness. Being a spectator requires a sort of passive identification, where something of our personalities become invested in the efforts, successes and failures of people working on our behalf. Sports are for pleasure. Participating in sports increases health, produces endorphins, provides safe experimentation with the highs and lows of success and failure. Spectators don’t get the health benefits — and maybe quite the opposite — but the rush of excitement is there, as are the emotional highs and lows that tell us something about what it is to be alive. Sports are for profit. In an environment based on supply and demand, top-level athletic talent is in very short supply, and therefore the value of labor in that sphere is very, very high. The demand for more leisure and entertainment has expanded the sports sphere dramatically, and a whole lot of people have made their fortunes in that area. The desire to tap into more leisure and entertainment satisfaction has also provided an economic opportunity for the sale of merchandise, media, and more. Finally, sports reveal something of the sacred and the profane. Sports are for the culture. Sports are full of rules and superstitions. Athletes act as symbolic proxies, through heroic or villainous acts, to show us what we consider virtuous or contemptible. Using performance-enhancing drugs, for instance, allows us to litigate the nature of our relationship to cheating. It allows us to negotiate the purity of our values, and where we may be willing to compromise. It exposes hypocrisies and challenges us to be coherent in our beliefs. Etc…

I ended with an “etc…” there because this is an entire wing of sociology, and the point is not to write an entire piece about these things. This is a piece about what we’re arguing about all the time when we’re rubbed the wrong way by “the media.” This is a piece about Frank Isola and Max Kellerman and others like them. It’s an attempt to understand why they do the things they do, and why many of us find them so grating. The answer is rooted in what we think sports are for.

The first thing to understand is that these media figures approach their communication from the point of view that sports are for profit. They aren’t athletes earning a salary for performing on the field. They aren’t owners raking in profits from underwriting the whole operation. They aren’t media moguls, partnered with said owners. Nor are they the ticket-takers, concessions vendors, t-shirt sellers, or autograph brokers, though they’re much closer to the person selling you a beer and pretzel than they are James Dolan or Marc Cuban. For these individuals, communicating about sports has a dollar value. In fact, it’s the dollar value that keeps their kids fed and clothed, that allows for car leases and home mortgages, and that sort of thing. There’s only so much a person gabbing about sports in the newspaper, on the radio, or on television can expect from their activities, so they need to maximize the potential for that communication to reach an audience AND generate a measurable response. High-minded content doesn’t pay the bills as much as salacious gossip and downright trolling in this day and age. 

At some point, these media personalities fell in love with sports like the rest of us. They played, watched, cheered, and wore their fandom on their sleeves. When it became a job for them, they confronted some harsh realities about the difference between fandom and work. The nuts and bolts of covering sports are like the nuts and bolts of any other job. What people see on the surface is actually the product of a lot of labor behind the curtain, much of which isn’t pretty, exciting, enjoyable, or wholesome. These people were forced to choose between giving up their professions in order to continue enjoying The Matrix, or going down that hole and participating in the sausage-making. Some people are strong enough, talented enough, and optimistic enough to continue seeing and communicating about the part of “what are sports for” that stands apart from profit. Those people are typically artful, articulate, and universally admired, but there’s only so much space for that sort of thing. For the rest, those without the mental or emotional faculties to rise about the grind, the easy way to keep a job and even earn a lot of money is to become more salacious, appealing to the prurient interest, as it were. In the media environment of 2021, that means constant, unrelenting gossip, rumor and, yes, trolling. Engage or die. That’s the new ethos. 

The thing is, that’s a very cynical and narrow view of what’s possible. It’s the product of a race to the bottom where business that have scaled up as far as they can go need to leverage niche areas to continue finding avenues of profitability. It mimics the environmental pitfalls of uninhibited capital, where the mandate for growth has exhausted the resources of the planet requiring boutique avenues to profit, including those avenues that led to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. It’s why blockchains are all the rage and “Top Shots” are a thing. Where are there enough material resources left to leverage into 3% annual growth? Scaled media businesses look for cheap labor. They buy up small operations dedicated to slideshows about made-up trade packages, written by 20-year-old college students hoping to get exposure and break into “the business.” Loud, obnoxious personalities, ex-players and coaches fill the airwaves with gossip, punditry, and speculation. The people who succeed are mostly unconcerned with logical consistency, likability, or “smart shit.” They get by on a litany of sniping, outrageous hot takes, controversial interviews, and the like. The social media presence of these same people fans the flames. Say something on TV, boost the buzz by social media, and you get a week of content for yourself and a bunch of other pundits, aggregators, and hangers-on. 

Sports, for this type of person, is a cynical ploy for profit, and whatever part of themselves that once understood sports for solidarity, pleasure, or the culture is now gone. In fact, if solidarity, pleasure, or culture stand in the way of profit, some of the worst offenders will poison all of them to climb atop the heap of our sporting lives to grab that last blood-soaked dollar. We made this monster by feeding it. There was a price to pay for getting more and more and more of what we wanted so desperately. It was a deal with The Devil, in some sense. In our economy, scaling is the way. There is no eternal path to scaling. Ask the NFL. They now have games on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at different times of the year. Monday Night Football used to be a spectacle, in a simpler time, but now it’s just another ho-hum production in a sea of other content available at our fingertips. 

For the fan, sports are still for solidarity, and pleasure, and for the culture. Almost no one makes a dime off the sporting world, save some collectibles that can be flipped on eBay. We still invest ourselves 24-7-365 in our favorite teams and sports because it brings us closer to other people, lightens the mental and emotional load after long days and weeks of work, and helps us practice our values with one another in a way that’s less high stakes than anything “real,” so to speak. People in “the media” bring us closer to the thing we love, and act a bit like shepherds through the landscape of our cultural life. When we spend time in the little spheres they create we may find ourselves confronted with some kindly neighbor who recognizes why we’ve come knocking or some shady character in a trench coat full of stolen wristwatches. That’s up to the person doing the job. 

If that person recognizes something deeper about the work they perform and the ethical duty they have to the people seeking solidarity, pleasure, and cultural engagement, they may make the choice to remain measured, thoughtful, patient, kind, and relatively objective. If they’re more cynical, or less gifted, or both, that person may just try to get you to entertain your frustrations and anxieties by obsessing over Patrick Ewing being “carded” at the Garden. That can stretch on for a week or more if the negativity is stoked just right. First, you scream and shout about it as if someone spit on a religious artifact. Then, you invite on every recognizable person with a grievance to ask their opinion of this historically important slap in the face. You have on Spike Lee. You have on Charles Oakley. You have on Michael Rapaport. That’s a lot easier than trying to eke out good audience numbers on the back of some analysis of the Knicks’ use of the Spain pick-and-roll. 

In some sense, it’s all very understandable. For over 20 years, the country’s largest market has been disengaged from basketball because its favorite team has been bad on the court and embarrassing off the court. Millions upon millions of people in the potential audience are tuned out by February most years. The tabloids have a daily quota of several articles. The radio people feed off of those articles. The television people absorb from the general contours of that coverage and mimic the cynical strategy of stoking antagonism, anxiety, and pain. Engagement is engagement if you have no moral compass. Gotta maintain if you can’t scale… but if you can scale by way of negativity, no one will stand in your way. Even with the Nets on their way to the NBA Finals, with a historical “big three,” the market isn’t buying enough to simply ignore the Knicks and move on. And therein lies the dilemma.

Many of these people have built their entire brand on trolling the Knicks. There are a few at the top of that list. Max Kellerman, who’s been making news lately with his ongoing pseudo-feud with CP from Knicks Fan TV, has almost staked his entire career at ESPN on trolling Knicks fans as the yang to Stephen A. Smith’s ying. To Kellerman, trolling is a form of currency. It’s the core of his television persona and the fiber of his profitability. He follows in a line of similar media types, like Frank Isola, who translated his waning newspaper career into a circuit of gimmicky ESPN program appearances, including “Around the Horn,” a one time Kellerman vehicle. Kellerman’s television persona is about as authentic as the rap persona he crafted in his earliest attempts at fame. His education is too good for him to be so constantly obtuse. He shouts some version of the same three or four scripted ideas in every conversation about the Knicks. One is about James Dolan. Another is about Oakley. There isn’t much else. It’s a lot of talking over people, affecting a smarmy superiority, and stoking angst.

The good news, and where I’ll leave you today, is that a new brand of sports media has crept out of the fan shadows to occupy a niche. I’m writing for part of that niche right here. In a recent Pod Strickland episode, Shwin spent some time dealing with the very subject of this article and rightly pointed out that the people doing all this junk media are simply fans too. They hide behind the guise of journalism when it suits them, but mostly that’s an affectation, a performance, to help maintain their fragile hold on a very shaky sports media profession. There are fans and former athletes who are much better at this thing than the bulk of the stakeholders in the scaled-up media business. With an incredibly low barrier to entry for these fans, it becomes much easier to produce thoughtful, entertaining, high quality content on an everyday basis that doesn’t cynically cast aside the important dimensions of solidarity, pleasure, and culture for a cheap profit. For one thing, the profit isn’t really there to begin with as the media environment becomes fragmented and diluted. There’s *some* money to be made, but not enough for every single person involved to give up their day jobs. In a sense, that doesn’t matter so much. Creation is part of the fan experience in the 21st century. Visual arts, music, fiction and non-fiction writing, video content… these are all labors of love, which can be performed in the service of those things from which we derive our need to belong, our need to enjoy, and our need to connect to our values. As this growth in fan media comes about, the contrast between what we want and need, and what they have to offer has become a chasm. The best fan media manages to preserve the positivity of our ritual engagement with sports, while remaining smart, relatively objective, and homegrown. In the end, it’s very difficult for the scaled-up folks to compete with that, and when the fans finally reject their cynical ploys for engagement, perhaps we can reclaim the tone and direction of the entire sports media complex. In order to do so, we must never forget that sports are for solidarity, pleasure, and culture before they’re for profit. If we keep those values in mind, the pursuit of profit will always be balanced by the commitment to a happier and healthier sports experience for everyone.