People have used sports as escapism long before gladiator matches two thousand years ago. And politics has often played an outsize role - from Greek City states competing in the early Olympics or gladiator “bread and circuses”. More recently, politics played a role in Olympics in Berlin or Munich, the Black Power 1968 salute or the Maori protest.
The NBA now seems explicitly political. I think it is a positive step, but there are probably calculations around target audiences and athletes too. I was just wondering when the last time was that sports were so politicized?
There are undoubtedly newer examples, but a series which comes to mind:
In 1980, the U.S. led a boycott of that year’s Summer Olympics in Moscow, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. A total of 65 invited countries didn’t attend the Moscow games (though some cited other reasons for not attending). Even among those nations which did attend, 15 did not use their own national flags or anthems during the games as a form of protest.
Most American sports became explicitly political the second they started accepting advertising money from the US Government in order to stage military fly-overs, veteran and enlisted salutes and a dozen other forms of indoctrination in the name of recruiting.
During the early medieval period, the popular politics of the Byzantine Empire was largely dominated by the conflict between the Blues, supporters of the Blue chariot-racing team, and the Greens, supporters of the Green team. Effectively, what had been supporters’ movements evolved into early political parties, and courtiers/public officials attached themselves to one or other group, and sought to become influential over it as a route to attaining and retaining power. This state of affairs lasted until the mid-sixth century, when riots by the two groups (over taxes, and over administrative reforms by the Emperor Justinian designed to reduce their power) broke out at the chariot races and lasted for five days, laying waste large parts of the city and ending only when Justinian successfully played the Blues off against the Greens. After that chariot-racing in the city was discontinued, and within a few years the Blue and Green factions had all but dissolved.
Ive heard people on podcasts claim the Soviet 1984 boycott wasn’t a “response” but rather “justified” due to security concerns over Reagan’s Anti-Communist hysteria.
For whatever reason Wikipedia also doesn’t give a firm answer to the boycott either.
I wouldn’t say explicitly political, but it’s definitely true that the NBA and NASCAR have very clearly defined fan bases with somewhat uniform political views, meaning that putting “Black Lives Matter” at the top of the court isn’t likely to offend the majority of NBA fans, and nor did the presence of all the Confederate flags at NASCAR events until recently.
Meanwhile, sports like MLB and the NFL have a more broad-based appeal, so you don’t see a whole lot of extreme stuff on either side, and you see things like Kaepernick’s kneeling and the follow-on stuff being very divisive as a result.
College sports are heavily influenced by the schools themselves; you can have some schools like UC Berkley, where putting “Black Lives Matter” on the 50 yard line would probably be celebrated, and other schools like the University of Mississippi where their teams are the “Rebels”, and their mascot was a Confederate colonel until 2011, and since then has been rather weird stuff like a bear and a land-shark.
Some European soccer teams’ supporters are very specific in terms of location and socio-economic status, but I’m not sure if that translates into political action or viewpoints or not.