The Culture Wars in Pro Sports Go On — for Now

T he San Francisco Giants baseball team recently held a Pride Night. As part of the evening’s pageantry, they required players to wear a Giants cap that had been rainbow-fied for the occasion. Two Christian players wrote Bible verses on their caps, pointing to the passage of Genesis in which God makes the rainbow a sign of his covenant with humanity never to destroy the earth with a flood again. MLB and the Giants have warned those players that future violations could result in punishment.

This is far from the first controversy about Pride celebrations and American sports, and probably far from the last. Over a decade ago, the Mets hosted former ballplayer Billy Bean to speak as MLB’s ambassador for inclusion. A NJ.com reporter asked Mets slugger Daniel Murphy about the visit, and Murphy said, “I disagree with his lifestyle.” He reiterated that his Christian faith called on him to love everyone and that he could “invest” in Billy Bean as a person, and that he was open to having a gay teammate. But these caveats and nuances didn’t save him from controversy, which has followed him ever since. His remarks were widely litigated in media. When he was traded to the Cubs, Chicago media made a controversy about the appropriateness of the move given how close it was to Chicago’s own Pride Night. Even some progressive Mets fans complained when Murphy returned to the club as a broadcaster and was assigned a game on June 1, the first day of Pride Month. The controversy mostly subsided as Billy Bean showed Murphy public grace.

Nineteen years ago, the NBA put a huge media campaign together for the coming out of Utah Jazz player John Amaechi, who wrote a book about his experience as a gay player in Utah with notably conservative star players such as John Stockton and Karl Malone. Tim Hardaway, an All-Star guard, said in a radio interview that he “hated” gay people. “I don’t like being around gay people, I am homophobic.” The league immediately removed him from honorary duties at an All-Star game and reportedly told him that unless his attitude changed, he would not work with the league again in any capacity. Hardaway apologized within a day and enrolled himself to be educated by pro-LGBTQ groups. He was the first symbolic signer of a gay-marriage petition in the State of Florida. Still, his induction into the Hall of Fame was delayed more than a decade, and only after he had established himself as a reformed and redeemed person in the eyes of the league.

The background of all these disputes, however, is changing. The major sports leagues are perhaps the last relics of 20th-century American mass culture that have any life in them. That’s why their broadcast rights, unlike those of any other show or activity, continue to go up. There are fights over the values expressed in these arenas precisely because there is an assumption that they reflect shared American values. And it’s the broadcast element that holds together the illusion of a shared culture in pro sports. In fact, the culture that produces athletes and the culture that produces sports writers, marketers, and executives have been diverging and divorcing for a long time.

Now it may be that the tech companies that increasingly buy up and control the broadcast rights to pro sports will continue these conflicts, but I wonder whether market research won’t advise them to do otherwise. I would bet that we’re now closer to the end of this than the beginning.

The internet has done more than anything to dismantle the broadcast and Hollywood culture. Google, Meta, X, and arguably Amazon make a point of giving their customers more of what they want, embedding them deeper into the silos of their choosing. And the culture of athletic achievement has been growing and distinguishing itself from the rest of the culture for years as it builds extensive youth training and tournament facilities. This athlete-centered subculture, while it has its weekend tensions with churchgoing, overlaps significantly with Evangelical and Catholic America.

The broader “culture war” is not about to die. There will still be contestation over legal rights to dissent, and the boundaries of free speech in private workplaces. But digital technology has allowed us to curate our own kind of cultural federalism, one that doesn’t follow state lines, but home Wi-Fi networks.