Three Cheers for Jack

I ’ve never seen greater evidence of the political breakup in our culture than when I tuned in to the New Jersey Devils game on Wednesday night.

A few weeks ago, Jack Hughes was the unbelievably young veteran center for the Devils — an all-star in his sport, but relatively unknown to the nation at large. Then last Sunday in a breathtaking gold-medal game against Canada, when half the country was snowed in, he was hit in the teeth during a high-sticking penalty, and then in overtime he scored the game-winning goal with an iconic, piratical bloody smile. He came off the ice and went into a short patriotic soliloquy — “I’m so proud to be American today,” he said — cementing himself as an Olympic and hockey legend in his country’s memory.

Within hours, it seemed like the media was circling in to cancel the joy. FBI Director Kash Patel was seen near the team after their victory. President Trump congratulated the team and made a joke about them having to share the spotlight with the also-gold-medal-winning U.S. women’s hockey team. It was jocular but unserious. The team laughed. The sports media immediately jumped all over them. Then came the White House visit. Jack Hughes made the faux pas of leaning in toward the president and his chair in the Oval Office.

Almost a decade ago, Bryan Curtis, writing at The Ringer, declared, “Today, sportswriting is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code.” Many sportswriters see themselves as priestly figures correcting and condemning the loudmouths who call in to sports radio shows, or who host them.

This divide used to just be an annoying tic. But now it’s a really problematic divide. You can see it in the appeasing tone that thoughtful liberals like Will Leitch have adopted while writing about sports for liberal audiences, essentially asking liberal readers to look past the deviant political opinions of athletes, and to enjoy . . . the athletics.

Leitch’s column highlights what I think has been a real change. Dick Young aside, sportswriters have tended to lean liberal for decades. But there’s been a shift in their views and self-perception. Previous generations of writers clearly admired and (sometimes not so secretly) envied the athletes. They thought the culture of the players was itself attractive or romantic. These writers often were amateur athletes themselves at one point.

Even when writers went after athletes — like Jeff Pearlman’s infamous profile of John Rocker portraying the Atlanta Braves pitcher as a racist lout — there was a touch of human sympathy. Less well remembered is that Pearlman was willing to face Rocker afterward and argued for Rocker getting second chances from Major League Baseball. Pearlman rounded out his portrait of Rocker by looking for ways to compliment Rocker’s generosity with fans.

Somehow, since this time, the culture of sportswriting seems to have been infected from several directions: fantasy sports, a writing culture that prized sports books that were really about business — Moneyball, The Extra 2% — and the self-flattery of nerd culture around analytics, and sportswriters have started overwhelmingly identifying and admiring sports executives more than athletes. The athletes are no longer superheroes in the drama of the games, but stat-generators filling out Excel spreadsheets. Interest in them as human beings is seen as juvenile at best. Something about this transformation has narrowed and nichified sportswriting to the point where it is exiling itself from the very culture of athletics itself.

If you had just read about the Olympic hockey team, or listened to reports about it on NPR, you’d have thought there was massive public controversy. Meanwhile, at Newark’s Prudential Center, Jack Hughes was greeted with a universal enthusiasm rarely seen in public life. The actual ticket-paying hockey fan has little or no contact with the worldview of the sportswriters. The only slightly sour note to Wednesday’s valedictory celebration in New Jersey was the appearance of Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill, who was met with boos from the crowd when her presence was merely meant to honor and magnify that of Hughes.

Somehow in their desire to be important, to fit in among managers and executives, sportswriters are missing the things that make their craft great: narrative, iconic images, story. Interest in human beings themselves.