turner-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/justin-turner-smiling/"></div>Everyone knows the story by now. On Tuesday night, Justin Turner, third baseman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, tested positive for COVID-19 during the deciding game of the World Series and was removed from the contest. Later, he <a href="https://twitter.com/rwesthead/status/1321428036462481408?s=20">returned to celebrate</a> with and even embrace teammates, at times removing his mask.
The takes, unsurprisingly, abound. Probably the best of these comes from <a href="https://t.co/ohNwzVDisA?amp=1">Hemal Jhaveri</a>, who rightly argues that this is an institutional failure. Neoliberalism invites us, always, to blame the individual, but the reason Turner was in that position was the profit-motivated calculation of Major League Baseball that revenue was worth the price of infection.
I was struck by something a little different, though. To me, Turner&#8217;s decisions are a clear distillation of how the general fetishization of “winning” in elite sport leads athletes to subject themselves and others to a range of forms of (later) often deeply regrettable harm. To be clear, no one made Justin Turner participate in the celebration. But his choices only make sense if we recognize that athletes, like all of us, are submerged in ideological and cultural systems that frame and form our desires and dispositions. Turner&#8217;s choice is a function of the way neoliberal capitalism, in lockstep with hegemonic sporting culture, teaches athletes to understand themselves through a logic that (over)values competition and domination, and then, as a consequence, leaves all manner of residual harm in its wake.
When I look at the images of Turner and his teammates, I can&#8217;t stop noticing how happy they seem, even while knowing they are in extreme danger of contracting the virus. The pleasure of winning in that moment (over)compensates for the risk of disease. The political economy of sport is predicated on that emotional calculus — that athletes will consent to literal forms of self-sacrifice to satisfy the voracious desires of both athletic capital and meaning-starved fans. They have learned all too well that they must experience euphoria through competitive spectacle.
In Turner&#8217;s seemingly selfish choice there is a poignant echo of the fact that the chief pleasures of athletic labor — accomplishment in front of adoring fans, the experience of being the receptacle of all that collective meaning — are also a form of harm. These pleasures inevitably end in the post-career identity crisis of withdrawal. Indeed, there is an entanglement of harms at work for the professional athlete: harm to the body in myriad manifestations, and harm to the psycho-emotional self. Both are already present in the moment of victory as its necessary corollary. These physical and psychological harms are the debt triumph accrues.
I know I’m playing at reading Turner&#8217;s mind, ascribing intention, feigning understanding. In the days immediately after the event, he has not yet spoken (beyond a <a href="https://twitter.com/redturn2/status/1321307731869999111?s=20">celebratory tweet</a> on the night in question: “I feel great, no symptoms at all. Just experienced every emotion you can possibly imagine. Can’t believe I couldn’t be out there to celebrate with my guys!”). But his colleagues and others have. If the athlete&#8217;s career must teleologically careen towards its premature end, and if retirement and its attendant harms are always already contained in their labor as its inevitable sequelae, then the post-athletic self that does not (yet) exist may nevertheless — will almost necessarily — parse the harms born in this present with the most authority. The subjectivity most capable of grappling with Turner&#8217;s decision to rejoin his teammates is neither me nor the current Turner, but in fact Turner&#8217;s future post-athletic self.
There is Ryan Kesler, former NHL player, who <a href="https://www.tsn.ca/video/tsn-original-the-problem-of-pain~2040291">proclaimed during his career</a>, &#8220;I&#8217;ll play on one leg, I don&#8217;t care. It&#8217;s all about the team right now… I had to do it for them.&#8221; Yet, immediately after his retirement, his tune changed. Reflecting on his mentality at the time, he said, &#8220;I think it&#8217;s important that the doctors and the trainers sit everybody down and explain the risks. And, you can&#8217;t do it in the middle of a game. Emotions are high. I&#8217;ve done this multiple times. You get injured, you can&#8217;t lift your leg, and you&#8217;re like, &#8216;I don&#8217;t care, just put me back out there, you know, give me the Toradol and let&#8217;s go.'&#8221; Yet, post-career, with a body ravaged by the effects of injury and the medications taken to allow him to cope with that injury, he very much does care: &#8220;I never knew what it could do to me. I never knew the side effects. I feel if I can talk to players about the dangers of it, obviously, it will help everybody.”
There is also Chris Bosh, former NBA star who had to retire from the league because of blood clots. Bosh, like Kesler and Turner, adored the pleasure of athletic triumph. As <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-chris-bosh-wants-to-come-back-to-the-nba-but-why-would-he-risk-his/">he put it</a>, “Those moments where 20,000 people are watching you, and you hit the game-winner? It’s an incredible feeling.” But that feeling, an almost narcotic high, contains also the promise of the inevitable low that will ensue when the career ends. In Bosh’s words: “It’s pretty much like cruising along, going 150 miles an hour in your Porsche — and then you fall into a hole. You’re sitting here feeling like nobody cares about you… You start feeling forgotten. You don’t get as many phone calls. You don’t stay at the forefront of people’s minds… Guys spend all their money trying to capture that feeling again&#8230; There’s this never-ending search for that feeling that you once had, and it can cost you.” It cost Bosh so much that he attempted to fight doctors’ orders and risk death to recapture the sensation.
I think too of the former professional hockey players I interviewed for my book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct#:~:text=In%20Game%20Misconduct%2C%20Nathan%20Kalman,altering%20injuries%20of%20professional%20athletes.&amp;text=Game%20Misconduct%20shines%20the%20flood,corners%20of%20the%20sports%20industry.">Game Misconduct</a>. One described the experience of scoring in front of fans: “Somebody could be dying and you wouldn’t [care], you just felt so good… It was the best feeling in the world.” The feeling of competing in front of fans “made me feel like I was something bigger than what the game was…” And then I think of the one who described what it was like never to play again: “My post-career was terrible because I went into a black hole of drugs and alcohol and almost dying… I was this professional hockey player that had money and everything and all of a sudden it comes to an end. And this is what the problem is with so many players. Where are you going to go? What are you doing? And next thing you know, you lose your marriage, you lose your family, you lose your money, you lose everything, you lose your self-worth. And what you’d rather do is just die. You’re just like, ‘I’m worthless.’”
Turner’s jubilant self is a self already in crisis. That, it seems, is the price of a career in elite sport. We say it is worth it.
I wonder.
&nbsp;
Top image: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/75683070@N00/14331517737" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-v-e1c1f65a="">&#8220;Justin Turner, Los Angeles Dodgers 1, St. Louis Cardinals 0, Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, California&#8221;</a> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/75683070@N00" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-v-e1c1f65a="">Ken Lund</a>, licensed under <a class="photo_license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&amp;atype=rich" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-v-e1c1f65a="">CC BY-SA 2.0.</a>
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Justin Turner is Smiling

unpaid

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/beyond-compensation-student-athlete-ncaa-exploitation/"></div>Approximately one-third of the way through Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Trish Dalton’s HBO documentary Student Athlete, former Baylor walk-on Silas Nacita injures his foot while participating in a scouting combine for the Dream Bowl, an all-star game for non-division one college football players. A physician checks out his appendage and tells him that the tendon has pulled off a little piece of the bone in his foot — he can decided to keep playing, but it might make the injury worse. Silas is shown rushing to a restroom, where he vomits behind a closed stall door.
This scene is an apt metaphor for the experience of watching Student Athlete: the horrors and harms of the NCAA system are so starkly laid bare that it seems impossible for the humane viewer to feel less than utterly nauseated. And yet, perhaps due to the hegemony of &#8220;compensation&#8221; as a frame for grappling with injustice in college sports, the US sports media widely panned the film. <a href="https://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/lebron-james-hbo-movie-student-athlete-ncaa-nick-richards-kentucky-mike-shaw/17hn1polh64u611ikxodfb3lyj" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">Sporting News</a> wrote, “The truth about ‘Student Athlete’ is it lacks a coherent story,” elsewhere adding: “If it’s about exploited college athletes, why are we introduced to players before and after their college careers?” The <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-spt-hbo-college-sports-documentary-greenstein-20180912-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">Chicago Tribune</a> piled on, writing that the film is “trying to make a point but all over the place” because the “exploitation argument is weak” since “major college sports has a layer of scumminess that obscures all the good stuff.” These reviews are right about one thing: the project of Student Athlete is not simply to reveal the economic exploitation of NCAA sport. It’s far more ambitious than that.
The beauty of Student Athlete is in the breadth of its understanding of “exploitation.” Rather than simply rehearse the endless compensation debate (Should we pay college athletes? How much? What about non-revenue sports?), the film takes a far more holistic perspective on harm and benefit. Former USMNT player and Berkeley scholar <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1012690212450218">Derek Van Rheenen</a> has defined exploitation from a moral perspective as “when one party receives unfair and undeserved benefits from its transactions or relationships with others.” In other words, it is an ethical concept denoting unfairness in conditions of labor. This is the frame through which we must examine Student Athlete to adequately take stock of its critique of the NCAA (and beyond).
Given the ubiquity of its place in the current debate, it’s worth touching for a moment on the question of remuneration. Indeed, the insidious genius of the NCAA’s conflation between student and athlete is that it tricks the eye into thinking that when it comes to the business of college sport, there is no there there. That is, if college athletics are framed as part of the academic experience, they must not be work proper, but rather the work of learning how to work. As such, it surely should not be remunerated. (You wouldn&#8217;t compensate an internship, after all, amirite?)
And yet, this is a billion dollar industry. Indeed, economist <a href="https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/sportslaw/vol26/iss2/11/">David Berri</a> has suggested that based on the NBA compensation model, the average payout for a player at an elite high major 2014-2015 college basketball team would be $1.4 million, while those on a low major team would still be entitled to $82,971.
Nevertheless, like Student Athlete, I would argue that compensation alone is a limited vantage point from which to view the accumulated harms proliferating throughout NCAA sport. While athletes should be compensated for their work — they should, in other words, receive a portion of the benefit (revenue) they produce — it is even more imperative that they are protected from harm in the course of their labor. In my book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct</a>, I argued that physical and emotional harm are structural features of professional sport. Quite frankly, compared to the NCAA, that reads like amateur hour.
Student Athlete offers a range of perspectives on the NCAA experience: a prospective basketball player; a recently disqualified football player; and even a former college coach. Each individual’s narrative details elements of the dehumanization rife in the world of college sport.
The most seemingly-privileged athlete featured in the film is future Kentucky-commit Nick Richards. Richards is a McDonald’s All-American, apparently bound for riches and stardom. Yet, as the film traces his path to the NCAA, it reveals the complicity of college basketball in larger systems of exploitation. Disconcertingly echoing the classic story of William Gates and Arthur Agee in Hoop Dreams, Richards’ tale begins with his two-hour two-trains-and-a-bus daily commute from Queens, New York to the St. Patrick School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. While Richards receives a scholarship to the private school, the subsidy does not account for the sacrifice of time and energy for access to a pathway to the NCAA.
Richards’ narrative also reveals the dehumanizing conditions under which young prospects must labor — free of charge — in order to potentially access their dream of professional employment, a path that is routed, by rule rather than choice, directly through the NCAA revenue machine. Although he prefers different shoe brands, Richards is compelled to wear Nikes because his coach has signed a contract with the company. Yet, precisely because of NCAA rules, it is the coach, not Richards, who makes money from the deal. And as the film demonstrates, the prospect of payment for the coach in turn motivates him to demand performance from his players in a manner verging on abusive. As the first half of a disappointing game ends, he can be heard berating them: “You guys are fucking assholes. You know, I’m fucking pissed. That’s our fucking ranking, you assholes. Christ.” Why the reference to ranking,  you might wonder? If the team doesn’t finish in the top fifteen in the country, Nike has told the coach it might end his contract.
Once athletes like Richards arrive in college, they are ostensibly compensated with “free” university education. Or so the NCAA would have it. The reality is that academics is always subordinated to athletics. John Shoop, former offensive coordinator at the University of North Carolina and Purdue University, describes how players are steered through their educational experience:
<blockquote>I think players are being asked to make an either-or decision. Either you’re going to be a big-time football player or you’re going to be a big-time student. I benefited financially from players taking easy courses and then making high GPAs. I didn’t even realize it was in my contract. Then I realized, here’s a bonus for your players having the highest GPA. Really? Okay. Now, when that bonus gets up into the megas, you have zero interest in those guys taking meaningful, challenging class.</blockquote>
If a coveted education is the proposed reward for the labor of college sport, the reality is a cheap facsimile. As former Stanford cornerback Richard Sherman puts it in the film, “You’re not on scholarship for school. And, it sounds crazy when a student-athlete says that, but those are the things that coaches tell them every day.” For nonwhite players, the problem is compounded by the treatment (read: profiling) they receive from white faculty who implicitly assume they don’t belong. Former college football star Michael Bennett puts it this way in his book <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1150-things-that-make-white-people-uncomfortable">Things That Make White People Uncomfortable</a>: “As a Black football player I wasn’t necessarily made to feel welcome in the academic world.”
The other putative benefit for college athletes is the post-career launch they are meant to receive via alumni networking and the skills and education acquired during their degree. Sadly, the reality is often so much different. A half decade out of his degree, former Rutgers football player Shamar Graves is seen sleeping in his car even as he endures an incomprehensibly demanding — yet despicably compensated — work schedule. His days often require him to work five different jobs. Five. They include working as a sales associate at Old Navy, a middle school coach, and a bouncer at a club. While there is nobility in all these forms of work, the trouble is compensation. In the film, it reads as an extension of the thankless labor of the college experience itself.
The deepest injustice, perhaps, is the chasm between the above post-career realities and the promises that lured these young men into college in the first place. Former Illinois and Bradley basketball player Mike Shaw puts puts it this way: “So many kids get it sugar-coated of what it’s really gonna be, ‘cause everybody is telling them they’re going to be the best player in the world right now. You’re the best… You’re gonna be a professional player, you can do this, you can do that.” The pain of this false promise is palpable. Even as he leaves Bradley, his basketball career over due to injury, Shaw believes that there must be a pay-off for his travails: “College is over with. Just like that. I’m ready for whatever’s next. I feel like a scene out of a movie or something, you know, driving to the big city, going back home. I know it won’t be easy, whatever it is, but it’s definitely going to be a reward, you know, it’s gonna be something big, I just feel it.”
Instead, just a year later, the young man has spent time in a psychiatric institution and explicitly links that outcome to the emotional trauma of his broken dreams:
<blockquote>I was going through so much that a lot of people didn’t know about, because it’s like I always kind of tried to deal with things on my own… Before my injury, I thought I would be playing professionally right now somewhere. I thought I would be getting paid to play basketball. I never would have expected to be here.</blockquote>
Richards’ narrative casts in relief how the trauma being lived by Shaw is an extension of a process that began long before college. At the beginning of his journey, even before the NCAA has fully entered the equation, Richards is already subjected to a panoptical degree of surveillance. After a high-profile televised AAU game, his aunt tells him: “The scouts are saying the same thing, the coaches are saying the same thing: we felt like you kinda blanked out during the game. You have to be on all the time, it’s like a celebrity. Beyoncé can’t have a half-assed show, ever.” Then, Richards reflects on the impact of that scrutiny: “Everything that you do gets criticized. If you have a bad game, people will start talking about you. I worry about failing every day. I don’t want that feeling to ever happen, so that’s basically why I come to the gym every day and work.” What is striking here is how he is compared to Beyoncé with one key distinction unremarked upon: he will not be compensated for his efforts. Moreover, the film implicitly cautions that if he does not fulfill his lucrative career aspirations, his prospects are grim.
With the false lures of “priceless pedagogical experience” and “future prosperity,” we continue — quite literally — to sacrifice young people like former University of Maryland player <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2019/1/10/18175709/jordan-mcnair-maryland-terrapins-ncaa-player-deaths">Jordan McNair</a> to the insatiable appetites of college football. <a href="http://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/cte-former-nfl-players/">Given the 91% likelihood of CTE</a> that counts as the price of admission, sacrifice is a nearly universal feature of an <a href="https://twitter.com/DrTaraM/status/1157005528196947968">internship</a> in NCAA football. Graves characterizes it this way:
<blockquote>It’s crazy. I’ve seen D-1A full-ride scholarship guys take loans, and then, instead of just fully being preparing for the NFL or their career after college, they’re worried about getting their body right. Number one for an athlete, getting your body right. As a 22-, 23-year-old young adult, you’re like, “Alright, how do I check my brain, all the concussions I had? How do I check my ligaments in my shoulders? All the stuff that they pushed me through the system, made me take cortisone shots for — I gotta make sure I come up with health insurance to take care of that.</blockquote>
If the prospect of a professional career is akin to winning the lottery, the probability of long-term, debilitating physical harm borders on the inevitable for football players. This is true for basketball players as well, despite the widespread perception that it is a comparably benign game. For Shaw, the accumulated damage he was subjected to while playing college basketball made it impossible for him to hoop ever again. After graduation, he recounts to a physician (who appears horrified at his recollections) what he had to endure: “I had partially torn my patellar tendon before the season. (I didn’t have it repaired.) It was in an immobilizer. It actually got to the point where I was playing hurt all season. And then it got worse and worse. It got to the point where I couldn’t straighten my back out.” This is the level of bodily harm accumulated to remain on a mid-major NCAA basketball team. The pain is so extreme he can neither work nor coach without considerably aggravating it.
Given the deleterious consequences of NCAA labor chronicled throughout the film, it is small wonder that comparisons to the plantation are introduced several times. Indeed, Billy Hawkins referred to college sport as <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230615175">The New Plantation</a> in his book of that name. Shaw’s grandfather powerfully makes this point after hearing one of his family members tell his grandson that “it’s a blessing to get a free degree.” He responds: “It really wasn’t free, though, because people don’t realize the restrictions on an athlete nowadays. The other students go home for holidays and shit. You’re like a slave under the coach. I mean, actually that’s slavery.” Indeed, embedded in this important structural critique is a particularly under-acknowledged element of the college football system: teams that “succeed” by making bowl games must actually spend their time engaging in unpaid overtime work (practice) while other students head home for a month of vacation. Yet, too often we hear this reality reported instead as excess reward when these players take home a little swag after bowl week from a sponsoring brand. Crucially, Graves reminds us that this is a fundamentally racialized process. When his high school friend calls the system “new slavery,” Graves responds: “By the time you get to pro day, bro, you stand there, and they just be like, they be talking like, ‘he be sizing up, look at those legs.’” What he indexes here is the fetishization of the Black athlete’s body. While the labor being exploited by the NCAA is disproportionately Black, it works on behalf of white institutions and audiences to reproduce their identities and class positions.
Above all, Student Athlete makes a vital intervention by demanding we open up the question of exploitation to a more holistic appraisal of harm and the experience of the campus athletic worker. This is not to say that compensation should not remain a necessary facet of the conversation. At one point in the film, as he is clearing out his dorm at Bradley for the last time, Shaw surveys the collection of shoes he has accumulated during his career and defends the collection, telling us that the presence of 15-plus pairs of sneakers sprawling out across the floor (just a fragment of his overall collection) does not imply that he is a hoarder. The film itself lingers over the shoes, inviting us, perhaps, to look askance at the young man and his motivations. But I see something different here: a career’s worth of meagre compensation, tumbled out on the floor. Who could blame him for wanting to hold onto that?
Likewise, Graves, the man with the most distance from the NCAA experience and its indoctrination machine, shows us that this economic exploitation is part of a long-con:
<blockquote>It’s crazy, because you send young kids on a roller coaster. You recruit them and you bring them in. As soon as they sign, you switch up and you’re here for a job. Okay, cool, that’s fine, that’s fine, I’d do that. But then you don’t pay me. Really? If it’s a business, if it’s a job, you should pay him. Don’t come in here and tell me that this is a brotherhood, this is a fraternity. It’s not. This is a business.</blockquote>
As with so much business in the land of ostensible opportunity that is America, the reward for labor in the NCAA is not adequate compensation. It is, rather, the sacrifice of body, mind, and emotional well-being.
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Beyond Compensation: Student Athlete and NCAA Exploitation

Beyond Compensation: Student Athlete and NCAA Exploitation

flying1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/unfreedom-race-capitalist-sport-high-flying-bird/"></div>At the very beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s new Netflix film High Flying Bird, the film’s star, agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland), tells recent signee and number one draft pick Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg): “The league is a business.” A business, it becomes clear, that exploits African American players for the benefit of a largely white ownership class. This matter of fact statement, in the context of a narrative of Black athletic subordination to white capital, sets the tone for a film that appears at first glance to be a call for NBA players — notably Black NBA players — to seize the means of production.
Soderbergh and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCrane imagine a fictional six-month lockout during which players, squeezed by the owners in the pursuit of ever more revenue, come to understand the capitalistically unreproducible nature of their exceptional labor — that they can serve it up direct to fans through digital media as basic as YouTube and reap their just rewards. That’s the key, right? Players like Erick are shut out of most of the league’s revenue, particularly in their initial contracts, and regardless, are less well-off than they appear, given the systemic conditions that perpetually disperse wealth in the aggregate towards (a fragment of) white America and debt to their racialized counterparts. If players can achieve class consciousness and recognize the power of their labor, the dollars will start to flow in a fairer and more equitable direction. Problem solved. The trouble is, that’s not actually what High Flying Bird is about at all.
High Flying Bird is a film about unfreedom and alienation in contemporary US racial capitalism. Put crassly, the problem with capitalism is not just who gets the cash. Rather, it is that human experiences and social relations are distorted and instrumentalized — that is, alienated — according to the logic that all is incidental next to the production of value. This is what Ray actually means in the scene cited above. After Ray makes his claim that the league is a business, Erick responds, “It&#8217;s all business?” And then Ray repeats, “Yes, Erick, business. We are in business.” I don’t think it is reading too much to suggest that the particular syntax and diction here matters. Ray says “we are in business” rather than “this is a business” because he is gesturing to the way in which the business of sport subsumes its participants. Yet, to be “in” also suggests that there is a way out. And that’s what this film is all about.
Ray masterminds a one-on-one game between Erick and teammate Jamero Umber at a charity event for young Black players in the Bronx organized by his old friend Coach Spence (Bill Duke). The game is recorded by the kids and explodes online with more than 20 million views, opening up the possibility that players could profit without the contributions and constraints of meddling and paternalistic owners. And, indeed, Ray organizes a meeting with Netflix, implying that this might actually be his ultimate vision and that of the film.
But, Ray understands that this is just a band-aid solution to the problem of capitalist estrangement for the players he represents. In fact, capitalism and slavery are connected in the film as a broad historical continuum constraining Blackness in America. Freedom and unfreedom are at the core of this film, replete as it is with invocations of slavery, including the requirement of Coach Spence that any time the term is mentioned, the speaker must recite, “I love the Lord and all his Black people.”
Thus, given this frame, whether or not the green finds its way into player pockets without the exploitative mediation of a white capitalist ownership class, the pursuit of profit still shapes the very nature of work and play in dehumanizing ways. As long as profit is centered, regardless of who reaps it, dehumanization is inevitable, for all human activity is reduced to a means to that end. Here is where we have to be attentive to the specific outcome of the one-on-one game between Erick and Jamero, so central to the film’s re-imagination of elite sport: Ray stops the game as a tie. What matters is the pleasure of the game itself, not the instrumental and competitive capitalist logic of winners and losers. Sport can be something different, and Ray knows it. Play for the sake of play and satisfaction in the competitive travesty of a tie are ontological challenges to capitalism as a way of organizing human life.
The great South American anti-imperialist critic Eduardo Galeano wrote in Soccer in Sun and Shadow about how, within capitalist relations, soccer has been perverted into “soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not for play but rather to impede it.” And yet, for Galeano, when play was inserted back into the game, it could also be a recipe for resistance to alienation: “Luckily, on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side… all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”
That is the real radical vision of High Flying Bird: an iteration of sport liberated from the instrumental and technocratic chains of capitalist relations. Ray’s ultimate vision is implied by the persistent references to the unfreedom of American slavery and the gesture to sociologist of sport Harry Edwards at the end of the film. The Revolt of the Black Athlete, the text Ray tells Erick to open when the time is right, is not just a revolt against the owners’ monopoly on the means of production and the profit it yields; the real revolution is against what Edwards called in that book the treatment of the Black player as “an athletic commodity.” Commodification is ultimately objectification, a new form of unfreedom. Coach Spence tells Ray: “Look, there&#8217;s a reason why the NBA started integrating as the Harlem Globetrotters exhibitions started goin&#8217; international. Control. They wanted the control of the game we play, we played better. They invented a game&#8230; on top of a game.” The juxtaposition of the Globetrotters — emblematic of pleasure and play — to the hierarchical, mechanistic, profit-hungry NBA is vital. This is the imposition of whiteness and capitalism “on top of” a liberatory cultural practice. The refrain of “play” and “game” further signifies the corruption of capitalist white supremacy.
The vision afforded by the film, on the contrary, is of subjectification. It is not a rejection of athletic spectacle, but rather a utopian plea for a new relationship between spectator and athlete that liberates both. (We see a glimmer of this possibility with the perpetually dancing kids from Coach Spence’s event, who exult in the one-on-one between Erick and Jamero and remix it into their own form of pleasure and play: meme-able dance videos that elicit the only spontaneously pleasurable response from Ray in the whole film).
I called this vision utopian, but in fact that is wrong. I know, because what the film suggests is a fantastical vanishing point — an alternative form of sport centered around the humane and face-to-face embrace of athlete and spectator that can offer freedom rather than subjugation to Black America — is in fact a recent historical reality. As I discuss in my recent book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport</a>, during the 2011 NBA lockout, which delayed the start of that year’s NBA calendar by one and a half months and shrunk the season by sixteen games (thus compressing the season into an even more instrumental and dehumanizing physical sacrifice than it typically is), games were organized by NBA players in Black communities around the country in small arenas and on playground courts that collapsed the mediated relationship between fan and player. These events were more party than commodified spectacle. As <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2011/8/22/2377341/kevin-durant-capital-punishment-goodman-league-drew-league">Andrew Sharp</a> describes,
<blockquote>Vendors hawked mixtapes and Len Bias t-shirts in the aisles of the grandstand, teenagers sold homemade food on the baseline, and everyone froze every few minutes with the latest jaw-dropping dunk. Security was minimal if not invisible, but it never mattered. Maybe out of respect for Rawls [a local organizer] or just respect for the event itself, nobody abused the privilege that came with being ten feet away from NBA superstars for two hours. Or maybe nobody wanted to risk getting kicked out, missing out on their chance to see the spectacle first hand. In any case, the community event showcased a community that used basketball as an excuse to come out and party together peacefully.</blockquote>
The impact was not just experienced by spectators. For the players, too, these events provided a window into the pleasure and play that could define sport and social relations beyond capitalism. None less than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wizards-insider/post/kevin-durant-stars-at-goodman-league-sets-oct-1-deadline-for-potential-overseas-decision/2011/08/14/gIQAnNgPFJ_blog.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.785be279c4dc">Kevin Durant</a> explained why he was participating: “I just want to hoop… I do it for everybody back here that really don’t get a chance to see me that much. I just want to break the barrier.” Later, after scoring 66 points in a game at Rucker Park, Durant was mobbed by fans. He described the experience: “It was unbelievable, man… Just a great atmosphere, people showed me so much love.”
This is stark contrast to Ray’s cynical appraisal of capitalist sport, that “the league is a business.” Like Galeano, Durant has seen that sport can be something other than — beyond — business. The revolt of the Black athlete demanded by High Flying Bird is the universalization of Durant’s experience. It is not the expropriation of the NBA; it is the abolition of commercial sport and alienated fandom.
Is that a realistic dream to indulge in late capitalist America? For Edwards and Soderbergh alike, the answer may actually be yes. It is precisely the power, influence, and privilege of professional athletes among all proletarians that affords them the platform for meaningful resistance. Of course, that will require sacrifice that cannot be neatly appropriated by a <a href="https://globalnews.ca/video/4428833/believe-in-something-even-if-it-means-sacrificing-everything-colin-kaepernick-in-nike-commercial">Nike ad campaign</a>. Is it worth it? I leave the verdict to Kevin Durant. In his recollection of that Rucker Park game, he ultimately concluded: “It was one of the best moments of my life.” That strikes me as the language of liberation.
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Unfreedom, Race, and Capitalist Sport in High Flying Bird

Unfreedom, Race, and Capitalist Sport in High Flying Bird

magic_lakers09

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/capitalism-sport-health-fandom-royce-white-nathan-kalman-lamb-conversation/"></div>Royce A. White is a former <a href="http://www.espn.com/espn/wire/_/section/ncb/id/7717288">NCAA basketball star</a> at Iowa State University noted for<a href="http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/7505656/iowa-state-royce-white-battle-college-basketball"> speaking about his experiences with anxiety and mental illness</a> and later battling <a href="http://grantland.com/the-triangle/hockumentary-draft-day-with-royce-white/">the NBA</a> on mental health policy. After a two-year hiatus from the game, <a href="https://sports.vice.com/en_ca/article/bm9gwq/royce-white-has-revived-his-basketball-careerin-canada">he returned to play in the National Basketball League of Canada</a>, where he earned a championship trophy and <a href="http://www.lfpress.com/2017/05/12/london-lightning-forward-royce-white-set-league-record-for-triple-doubles-in-mvp-year">league MVP honors</a> in his first year. Nathan Kalman-Lamb is a Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, where he teaches seminars on social inequality and sports. He is the author of the recent book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport</a>. Here, they discuss the recent explosion of mental health issues in the NBA and beyond, in the context of larger questions around injury, health, and professional sport.
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NATHAN KALMAN-LAMB: In <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct</a>, I argue that the emotional and psychological consequences of spectator sport are too often overlooked. The entire business model of professional sport is premised on the fact that the play — or rather, work — of athletes can <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/literature/excerpts/pulling-back-curtain-labor-professional-sport/">produce enough meaning</a> for fans that they are willing to invest hard-earned money in watching. It’s clear, from that standpoint, that there are emotional and psychological dimensions to athletic fandom connected to the alienation and isolation produced by life lived through capitalist social relations. But what about for the athletes themselves, who generate this meaning? Yes, there are serious physical implications that come from athletic labor: concussions and injuries of all sorts are becoming more and more a part of the conversation about professional sport. But there is also an emotional and psychological side of things. How honest was the NBA when you dealt with them about this? Michele Roberts, Executive Director of the NBA Players’ Association, <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2018/2/19/17027238/michele-roberts-interview-lebron-james-nba-all-star-game">has recently suggested</a> that a new mental wellness initiative is underway in the NBA. She said, “We don’t want players to be discouraged from getting help when they need it because they’re concerned that it will get back to the team, or it may affect their play, or it may affect their next contract.” That’s obviously a sea change from what you experienced. Additionally, DeMar DeRozan of the San Antonio Spurs <a href="http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/22582972/demar-derozan-toronto-raptors-depression-fight-all-human">has spoken about</a> his struggles with depression, as have <a href="https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/kevin-love-everyone-is-going-through-something">Kevin Love</a>, <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/wizards/kelly-oubre-jr-depression-anxiety-and-his-own-battles-mental-health">Kelly Oubre</a>, and coach <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/31/tyronn-lue-anxiety-cleveland-cavaliers-nba-finals">Tyronn Lue</a>. I’m curious to hear if you think the NBA is starting to have the conversation you wanted it to and what capitalism has to do with the whole question of mental health and sport.
ROYCE A. WHITE: The NBA is willfully late to the conversation and certainly not engaging it in earnest. We must fight against this unnecessary lag time in all social issues with very viable improvements. Five years ago I suggested that a comprehensive mental health policy was needed. It was, and still is. I’ve offered full transparency into my own condition (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) to provide all of the available data I could to help shape that policy because I believe in honesty as an axiomatic principal, but also I think it’s the fundamental building block to engaging mental health. The league office, the union, and my team all said that a policy wasn’t possible. The higher-ups were afraid of setting a legal precedent. But when you really look at it, what precedent were they afraid to set? Treating mental health as a valid field of science and medicine? That’s appalling. There was a general dismissiveness toward the field of mental health right from the start. In our conversations, those across the table from me kept conflating accommodation with “special treatment.” I cautioned that it may be appropriate to further investigate just how prevalent mental health issues were in the NBA before calling it “special treatment” — it’s becoming clearer now that mental health priority should be the standard treatment, not special. Now they seem to agree, but mostly for the optics.
As far as the plan Michele Roberts has recently shared, it’s exactly what I laid out five years ago — word for word, actually. I’d be surprised if she didn’t use my document. I’m not confident that it’s tenable, though, because it doesn’t seem genuine in spirit. What is clear is the mental health topic in general is energized enough for the league to need a public position on it; that doesn’t equate to acknowledgment or responsibility in my book.
The bottom line is the players are fundamentally discouraged from seeking help out of a valid fear of it affecting their standing with teams. The players know that’s what will happen. Commissioner Adam Silver himself is worried this will happen. It’d be foolish to believe mental health status wouldn’t affect a player’s standing. Players know that once they’re drafted they will be constantly researched, monitored, and judged. I’m not saying teams shouldn’t monitor their players. Maybe we decide that we’re ok with mental health affecting a player’s standing. Physical injuries certainly affect standing, along with basically everything else a player does, from the music he likes to who he’s romantically linked with, or whether he’s willing to speak publicly about social issues. My only suggestion is that we educate ourselves on what mental health is, so if it has to affect a player’s standing, it can be determined by the most accurate scientific information available, not by superstition. That’s a beneficial approach for all parties involved.
I agree with most of that, and that’s why I think we have to talk about capitalism when we’re having this conversation. Let me be blunt. Capitalism cares about one thing only: the production of profit. That is literally the only objective of the system. It isn’t concerned about how profit gets made or who gets hurt. It certainly pays no regard to ethics. In the context of sport, it means that leagues like the NBA are only going to pay attention to mental health if it is an issue that jeopardizes the bottom line. If players can’t perform because of an issue related to mental health, that is going to incentivize an intervention from the league. But, if it is possible to extract production and performance without taking those steps — regardless of the personal toll that takes on players in the long run — then that is exactly what’s going to happen.
Mental health is already jeopardizing and affecting bottom lines for many capitalists. This causes a significant problem for the “capitalists only care if it affects the money” idea. It’s possible NBA ownership genuinely disputes or denies the effects on the bottom line. It’s also possible that they accept them. To me their incompetence on this is the bottom line. A more accurate description would be something like, “Capitalists are often only motivated to accept change to a system when they believe it explicitly benefits the bottom line and if that reform isn’t perceived as exorbitantly inconvenient.” The perception of inconvenience is what we can reshape dramatically. How inconvenient can it possibly be to let mental health professionals take the lead on mental health decisions?
There’s a system that could be employed where we could come much closer to the things we want with respect to mental health. It doesn’t have to be seen as an inconvenience. It might be more convenient in the long run.
Good point! Professional sport seems to be giving people what they want. Players make money. Fans get the pleasure and meaning they desire. Win-win. Yet, if we look at what’s happening a little more carefully, those wins aren’t quite as decisive as they seem. In my estimation — and I don’t think this is an exaggeration — spectator sport as it currently exists demands the sacrifice of players’ bodies. The former professional hockey players I spoke to for my book consistently told me that their bodies have fundamentally changed because of their work in professional sport. For some, this meant that they experienced devastating and repeated head injuries that have altered their cognition, even leading to drug addiction and suicidal thoughts. Others felt the consequences primarily in the fact that their bodies could no longer perform the basic functions required of everyday life, such as lifting up a child or doing a chore. Pain was something they came to take for granted as a basic requirement of existence. When you think about it from that perspective, it starts to feel more like a loss than a win for players. So, let me ask you, from your standpoint, is professional sport work?
I’d invite anybody sincerely asking that question to come work out with me for two hours in the low post. Set up the game so that if they can’t legally stop me from scoring they won’t get a paycheck. Any time you have an employer and an employee, it’s a labor situation. The thing that happens with professional sports is athletes have this huge microscope on their work. The spectacle is their work. And a common sentiment I’ve heard over the years is a resentment that athletes are being paid millions to play a kids’ game. What does the term “kid” in that imply? That professional sports is mostly just fun. It’s leisure, with little resemblance to “real work.” But the common fan has very little idea what goes into being a professional athlete. Actually, it’s the fan’s involvement that is mostly fun. I don’t want to discount the value of the fan, because without the fan there really isn’t a sport. I’ve always said it’s better when you have a community to play for. However, you probably don’t have a truly valid opinion on the nature of a professional sport if your most formal interaction is watching it at Applebee’s while you’re drinking a beer. So when people say things like, “I wish I had that job” or “I wish I could play a game for a living” in this condescending way, it’s kind of like … do you?
I totally agree. Again and again, the athletes I spoke with told me that fans don’t have any idea how hard it is to engage in athletic labor. They don’t understand, when they are screaming at players to play harder, play better, that those players are struggling to endure perpetual pain. They don’t understand that players have the same kinds of personal problems outside of the job that they do, problems that can’t always be compartmentalized. But, perhaps most of all, it seems to me that they fundamentally misunderstand the reality that the players they are watching are simply people doing their work.
<a href="https://www.ncga.state.nc.us/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByArticle/Chapter_95/Article_16.html">State law in North Carolina</a> — not exactly a bastion of Marxism — says that the duty of employers is to “furnish to each of his employees conditions of employment and a place of employment free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious injury or serious physical harm to his employees.” Why doesn’t this apply to professional athletes? It seems to me that a basic occupational requirement of professional sport is the potential for serious injury and serious physical harm. Do you think there’s anything to this? You said yourself that professional sport needs fans because without their money the whole thing breaks down. We understand why the athlete needs the fan&#8230;
And the athlete wants the fan, let’s not sideline that! Vanity is certainly a real dynamic at work.
I don’t think athletes are ignorant of that, generally. The athletes I interviewed consistently understood how essential fans were to the industry they worked for.  But, on the flipside, what does the fan need? Why is the fan spending this money? Because we’re not talking about art here. When you go to an art gallery, you have an aesthetic experience you might get pleasure from. People go to the ballet, they watch it, but there isn’t the same kind of culture built around that. They don’t think they’re part of the ballet troupe! They don’t say “we” about what they just watched. Something else is happening in sport. People are putting themselves in it, as if it means something really fundamental in their lives. By challenging sport in terms of the occupational health and safety related to mental health, you’re pulling back the curtain. How can fans sustain their illusions if you’re going to talk about what the reality of the job is?
People need to accept that their self-made illusions are in danger of being obliterated the more transparent a conversation becomes and the better our collective goals are articulated. Maybe that’s what the NBA and many others are trying so hard to defend against: the mirror. Look at what has happened to football. Imagine all the fans that yelled from the safe space (bleachers) that athletes were overpaid or greedy, projecting a disloyalty narrative on the athletes during contract disputes. I think in hindsight, with the knowledge we now have about concussions and the harm to their bodies, we can agree that was quite ridiculous.
A real question is do we see any value in deconstructing our illusions about labor in profession sports? If given the choice, would we choose the illusion? Clearly, the answer is different for different people. I choose reality, but more and more people are selecting detachment. Sports is fundamentally a mechanism of detachment. Is sports about teamwork? Yes. Is it about hard work? Of course. Is it an example of having common goals? Not so fast. There are a panoply of human agendas playing out through sports, some constructive, some not so much. All under the guise that the propelling force is a desire to win. Some people just want to go to the games and get blasted and yell. Identity, alcohol, gambling, sexual interests, etc. are all on the table. Detachment is certainly a major component of sports. This plays a big role in the nature of the relationship between players, fans, and leagues.
So, given all that, what brought you back to basketball? Why did you decide to play in London, Ontario?
There’s a monster in me. I have a competitive itch that I haven’t found a sufficient replacement for. It was hard to sit back and just watch the game, especially because I know I can play it at such a high level. I still haven’t been able to fill that void. I’m learning that some of that void has to do with my ego. Playing the game at a competitive level is what brought me back, but the feeling of playing in front of a crowd is definitely a part of it. Once you experience that, it’s etched in you — an operating system software that’s downloaded.
It also prompts another intriguing question: what are the psychological implications of 10,000 plus individuals pouring energy into 10 players on a court? Sports aside, I think that is the next ceiling for humanity: consciousness and the collective consciousness. What impact do these massive tribal events have in that context? I don’t have a clue, but it’s exciting territory. I’m very interested in watching the development of our understanding of energy. All those who don’t believe in energy or think of it as some form of mysticism haven’t played sports at the highest level. There’s a saying in basketball, “the ball finds energy.” If you’ve played, you understand that there’s an unexplainable feeling you get when a crowd roars. At least for me, it has had that effect.
I don’t think you’re alone in those feelings. Player after player I spoke with described to me the rush of playing in front of a crowd. It seems to me that it has an almost narcotic effect. How can anyone experience the euphoria of channeling the aspirations of thousands of people and then not feel a sense of loss when it’s gone? How would anyone under those circumstances not want to chase that feeling? That’s the problem with spectator sport for me: it asks too much of athletes — too much pain, too much injury, too much humanity. So, with all this said, where has your activism taken you today?
I’m going to try and change the world for the better as many more times as I can. We changed the mental health conversation for good. Sports can’t ignore that any longer. And it’s not just about the players getting treatment. Professional sports shapes the dogma of youth sports. Sports is one of the primary educators of young people and it’s one of the last pillars of physical interaction in a world where a lot of person-to-person connection is being lost to technology.
I’m the most politically feared athlete of my generation for standing up for this issue. I’ve been blacklisted. The fight continues on that front. At the end of the day, I believe in people. We’ve done wonders, and there’s still much we can achieve. I believe the final frontier for humanity is existential, not extraterrestrial. I leave open the possibility that the two are linked.
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On Capitalism, Sport, Health, and Fandom: Royce A. White and Nathan Kalman-Lamb in Conversation

stadium

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/fandom/"></div>In his 1963 book about cricket Beyond a Boundary, the great Trinidadian thinker C.L.R. James delivered an ode to the aesthetic dimensions of sport: &#8220;Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community.&#8221; He was filled with optimism about the possibility of sport to move and uplift spectators and even the political potential of spectatorship to provoke anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean. Alas, James&#8217;s vision of sports spectatorship was not to define the future of fandom in North America. Rather, the writer most exemplary of the dynamics of North American fandom today is one Bill Simmons, erstwhile ESPN.com columnist and editor-in-chief of its imprint Grantland, and, now, the founder of the sports and entertainment site The Ringer. For at least a prolonged moment, Simmons could safely be referred to as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/magazine/can-bill-simmons-win-the-big-one.html">most popular</a> sports writer in the world. This is noteworthy because his approach was not traditional sports reporting, nor was it commentary based on an insider&#8217;s knowledge of the game. Simmons&#8217; credentials were entirely a function of his ability to speak from the perspective of the fan.
His first site was called The Boston Sports Guy, and the primary objects of his fanaticism at that time were the city’s professional sports franchises, particularly the Red Sox (Major League Baseball), Celtics (National Basketball Association), and Patriots (National Football League). Some of his most representative work appeared in the 2005 collection Now I Can Die in Piece, in which Simmons articulates the logic of contemporary sports fan investment. Central to this logic is the fantasy that through their emotional investment the fan is in some strange and vicarious way an actual member of the team. Thus, after the Patriots win the Super Bowl, Simmons writes, “I just kept thinking to myself, ‘This is my team! This is my team!’” This imaginative leap is part of the quest to find meaning and connection in sport. Ultimately, what Simmons seeks is “a giant group hug, like when Andy and Red greet each other at the end of Shawshank, but multiplied by 10 million people. Does that make sense? And that’s the lure: The giant group hug.” One of Simmons’s readers, cited in the book, echoes this desire: “To me, the opportunity to achieve that feeling of solidarity with my fellow fans, the chance to celebrate wildly, totally, and unabashedly, to feel an intimate connection, a shared sense of accomplishment with millions of strangers IS important.”
If James views sports spectatorship as a means — for cultivating aesthetic appreciation and political awaking — Simmons understands fandom as an end — the central organizing principle of his meaning and purpose. This is a profound and deeply disturbing shift, and it has everything to do with the increasingly dehumanizing conditions of capitalist life over the past 50 years in North America. Isolation, alienation, and anxiety-provoking precarity have become defining features of existence under neoliberal capitalism. In this context, the appeal of fandom becomes clear: it offers a reprieve from the degradation of everyday life. While most capitalist work is alienating, in that it is typically performed for the benefit of someone else, the fantasy of sports fandom suggests that the team and its players function as avatars for the self. Thus, fans imagine themselves to be the team — its triumphs achieved through the labor of others) ultimately appropriate to themselves, while its failures represent a personal undoing. Indeed, for many fans, accustomed to being themselves exploited for labor, this is one of the very few moments when they can, as it were, play the capitalist, reaping the benefits of another’s work. Likewise, while capitalism isolates, producing exchange relations and competitive dynamics between people, fandom seductively offers the promise of collective belonging within the fantastical construct of the “team.”
There has been an absent figure in all this discussion: the athlete. The player is the person charged with laboring to produce the imaginative investments of the fan. Indeed, the political economy of high-performance sport is predicated on the satisfaction of the fan’s desire, for the fan is the market for the commodity of professional sport. If most fans were guided by James’s humane appreciation for what he calls “style,” “decoration,” and “elegance,” this would no doubt be reflected in the working conditions for athletic laborers. Unfortunately, because most fans today expect that sport satisfy their innermost requirements for meaning, purpose, and camaraderie, an exceptional demand is placed upon players to validate those desires. This means both an excess of meaning for players as they play — and accompanying loss when that meaning is yanked away post-career — and also terrible physical consequences given that players must play as if the stakes are life and death (how else can fans genuinely invest in the games unless they take on the guise of something more?). Former National Football League player <a href="https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/jermichael-finley-packers-injury-retirement">Jermichael Finley’s</a> experience testifies to the devastating toll this can take on the athletic laborer.
As I have explored <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-chris-bosh-wants-to-come-back-to-the-nba-but-why-would-he-risk-his/">more fully elsewhere</a>, because professional athletes take on the privilege and burden of serving as the focal point of spectatorial desire and aspiration, they at times experience a form of euphoria during their careers from the excessive adulation of the crowds, much like a narcotic-induced high. The problem, of course, is the necessary withdrawal all players must experience post-career. As Finley puts it, “I missed the adrenaline rush you get from playing the game and all that, but more than anything, I think I just felt abandoned. I played in the NFL for six years, and […] now, all of a sudden, nobody was paying attention. I […] craved that outside validation, and it just wasn’t there. Because nobody was watching anymore. That’s a loneliness that’s tough to describe.”
Similarly, for fandom to serve as a substitute for the meaning and connection denied by capitalism, it must appear to matter in some fundamental sense. Historian Benedict Anderson once wrote of the nation that although it is little more than an invented form of identity — an  imagined community — it nevertheless feels so real that people “willingly […] die for such limited imaginings.” He might well have been speaking of the imagined communities of sports spectatorship, which, while similarly artificial, nevertheless also produce a powerful sense of collective belonging. Yet, for the reification of these fantastical constructs to be possible, they require the athletes into whom meaning is invested as representatives of the team/community to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their bodies — to, in effect, risk death — for the limited imaginings of sports fandom. In other words, players must play in a manner that is in fact nothing like play: it must appear that their very lives are at stake. The inevitable consequence of the sacrifice fans require is, of course, injury. Although fans typically view injury as an inconvenient obstacle to team success, it is in fact brutal to experience for players. Finley describes what it feels like to endure a concussion: “When I stood up, my body felt like it was on fire and everything looked blurry, like I was underwater. I looked to our sideline, and all I could see was my teammates’ yellow pants. No feet, no jerseys, no heads. Just bright yellow pants. It was like everybody had been decapitated. I tried to walk towards them, but I only made it a few steps before I went back to the ground.”
The payments athletes must make for their brief careers only increase after they end. With added context, Finley calls his career “sacrificing everything.” The five total concussions he was subjected to — note how low this number is (one NHL player interviewed for my new book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport</a> guessed that he had endured 75 over the course of his professional career) — and a neck injury take an immediate toll on his post-career life at the young age of 27:
I had already seen my personality start to change after the neck injury, but after I officially retired, it got even worse. I would wake up every morning grumpy and agitated. I became really quiet […] It was like I forgot how to talk to people […] It was like I didn’t quite know myself […] Then one day, I went out to my truck to go for a drive, and I had to go back inside because I forgot my keys. That started happening a lot. It got to the point where sometimes I’d have to go back inside two or three times because I had forgotten my keys, then my phone, then my wallet. Some days, when I’d go to pick my kids up from school, I’d get halfway to their school and have to turn around because I forgot to put the car seat in the car, even after [my wife] had reminded me […] Over time, I grew more isolated and more distant from [my wife] and the kids — from everybody, really.
Professional athletes like Finley are asked to give everything of themselves in order to provide fans with the relief they in turn require from professional sport. The problem, for both groups, is capitalism itself. As long as capitalism produces alienating, isolating, and precarious conditions for human life, there will be a market for a form of professional sport that sacrifices athletes to compensate fans for what is missing from their lives. In this sense, Bill Simmons and his ilk are mere symptoms of the social and economic disease that has destroyed nearly every aspect of our world. In this context, a return to the utopian aestheticism of C. L. R. James is unlikely and, even, illogical.
No, to return to a place where we can again truly take pleasure in the beauty of human achievement, we need first to figure out a way to save humanity from itself.
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Against Fandom

kalman-lamb

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/literature/excerpts/pulling-back-curtain-labor-professional-sport/"></div><h5>The following excerpt is from <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport</a> by Nathan Kalman-Lamb, forthcoming from Fernwood Publishing in May.</h5>
Professional hockey players know that their work produces value and profits for team and league owners. They clearly see their own labor as a commodity (something to be bought and sold). Consequently, they experience many of the hardships associated with work in a capitalist system, notably pressures from the large group of underemployed and unemployed players and lack of control over the conditions of their labor. Yet, athletic labor is not the same as most other work; it is not merely productive labor. It also functions as social reproductive labor — it generates the meaning fans crave and around which they can form community.
It is at this social level that the greatest sacrifices are required of players. Yet, it is clear in their talking about it that they are not totally or always aware of this second kind of exploitation. However, in terms of the business and economics of professional sport, although they may not put it in these terms, players are acutely conscious of the significance of their relationship to fans. The relationship with fans affects both the way that players play and the decisions they make to play through pain and injury. At times players consciously play for fans, knowingly giving them what they need. This is only partly owing to the economic conditions. It is also partly borne of a relationship in which fans invest meaning in players and players mirror that meaning back to them. In this way, players elevate themselves to the status of heroes/symbols and fans to membership in the team. Even as this happens, players are always aware that fans do not understand the extent to which their “play” is arduous work. They realize that fans do not know what they are putting their bodies through and the sacrifices that they are making for them. Athletes labor in order to produce a particular type of product: meaning for fans. This process is alienating, but it is also absorbing and temporarily empowering for athletes. The athlete produces a commodity beyond just entertainment. Athletes produce something that the spectator takes away from the game, something that nourishes and revitalizes them.
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The most disturbing comments on this subject come from Curtis, a former NHL player. He recounts how his body was consumed and then discarded in the business of professional hockey through a narrative of his experience with a grievous knee injury:
NATHAN: So initially they made it seem like it was something that you would absolutely be able to overcome?
CURTIS: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Initially, the injury happened in March and I was told I would be ready for training camp, which happens in September … So they just said, “You know what? We’ll do the surgery, get some rehab going, you know, work out this summer, and you’ll be back for training camp.” They didn’t make it out to be a big deal, so I didn’t make it out to be a big deal. I showed up in September and still could not function and still couldn’t move. Then they said, “Well, you know what, this type of injury really takes about nine months to recover.” So you know, come Christmas time, then it became, “Well, you know what, this injury is really a year-long process.” So they kept extending when I should be ready. So after a year, and I was still having issues with the knee, swelling and pain, then I started [to] become alarmed that something was not right and so then there was follow-up surgeries and everything else and it’s a long story, if you’ve got time I’ll give you the …
I do, absolutely. I’m interested.
[Laughs.] So basically, yeah, they did the surgery … I tore the ACL, the MCL, the LCL [ligaments], and the meniscus with the cartilage. So everything was torn, blown, everything. So they repaired the ligaments. They used what was called a “ligament augmentation device,” a plastic ligament to replace the ACL that had torn. And, what is supposed to happen is that the scar tissue is supposed to surround the lad, the ligament augmentation device. Eventually, that plastic dissolves and then the scar tissue becomes your new ligament, so basically, it’s a process to rebuild the ligament in your knee … And that ligament, after a year, that lad starts to dissolve on its own. And, what was happening was the scar tissue had not adhered to the ligament, so this plastic was floating around in my knee. Okay? But I wasn’t told that, but they knew about it, because they did a scope on my knee a year after surgery. Actually, it was about a year and a half after surgery, because they kept saying I’m okay, just keep going, and I mean, I had massive swelling, I had pain, but they just said, “You know what? It’s just a bad injury.” That’s what they were saying. Well, they did a scope on it and they did find that I had an exposed lad. They didn’t tell me. So they just told me to go back and keep rehabbing and keep going. The reason all this transpired was because … there was a [work stoppage] … So I was injured during the [work stoppage]. I was doing rehab … I read in the newspaper, from [our general manager], there was a quote that said, “Curtis is healthy, we’re going to clear him to play and his paychecks are going to stop at the end of the week.”
That was in the newspaper. And, this was … Christmas-time. So they effectively cleared me to play during the [work stoppage] so that they would stop my paychecks. I come back from the [work stoppage], I can’t play, but now they’re screwed, now they can’t say, “Well, no.” [Laughs.] Now they force me to play. I go down to the minors, and this is where, you know, I’m trying to play and do all these things. I can’t play, they’re shooting it with cortisone, they’re draining it, I’m not practicing. I’m only playing games every third day because I can’t even walk in between. They call me back up to do another scope, they clear it out, this is where they’re draining it and sucking all the plastic out. They make note in the doctor’s notes that there’s an exposed lad which is a problem, because this lad is dissolving, but it, the plastic just keeps floating around. So they’re aware of the issue but they don’t say anything to anybody.
It doesn’t come up until two and a half years later. So two and a half years after my knee injury, I go to see another doctor, a specialist in [another city], because now I can’t even walk, I can’t play. I effectively leave the team because now I know there’s something seriously wrong. I go see [that city’s NHL team] doctor, he wants to do a total knee reconstruction, tells me my career is over. I then get a second opinion from [doctor for a team in a different profession] and the first words out of his mouth are, “They screwed you, didn’t they?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he says, “They knew a year and a half ago that this surgery didn’t work and they were covering up.” I said, “How do you know?” He says, “Right here,” and he points it out. And now, you and I could read medical notes and we wouldn’t make heads or tails of them, it had to be explained to me what an exposed lad means. He says, “Right here in the medical notes, from that surgery, from that scope when they went in and checked it, they found the problem.” And he said, “They knew back then.” And I said, “Okay, well, now what?” He says, “Well, we’ve gotta take it out. We have to take it out, otherwise it’s gonna keep irritating you. Yeah, but your career is over.” And so this is how it all unfolded. It, you know, it really pissed me off, that, basically, I was treated as a piece of meat when they knew that I wasn’t going to recover from this injury. They dropped me and, basically, you know, I was not given any assistance at that moment.
That’s so devastating to hear about. First of all, can you just expand a little bit more about what was going through your mind? It must have been so difficult…
I felt, initially I felt positive because I had a support team around me on the team, the doctors and trainers were supporting me and, you know, working through the process. And then, what happened over time was the trainers and doctors just, basically, left you alone to go and deal with it on your own. They didn’t want to deal with you anymore, the team didn’t want to deal with me anymore. You felt isolated and you didn’t know where to turn. You didn’t want to be that player that became the cancer in the room or upset the cart or anything like that, you try to go along with it as much as you can, but eventually, what happened was, I wasn’t getting the answers I needed from [the team doctors]. They wanted me to keep playing through, they kept forcing me to go down into the minors on these rehab assignments. So these rehab assignments, they last two weeks. So every two weeks, they would reinstate me for another two weeks of rehab assignment and, after a while, even the doctors … on the farm team said, “You know what, you shouldn’t be here. There’s something going on.” [He laughs.] They weren’t aware. But they were the ones draining the knee and, shooting the cortisone. I was told cortisone should last three months, it should take the pain away for three months and, you know, grease the joint, and that should last. Cortisone, for me, lasted three days. Just enough to get through the next game and then as soon as the game is over, I’m on the table, I’m icing it, I’m not practicing the next day, they’re draining fluid out of the knee and, after a while, eventually, you go, “You know what, this isn’t right.” But even back then, my agent was like, “You know what? Just play along,” because I’m in the last year of my contract, now. So there’s a lot of outside factors that go into how you handle the situation. I’m sure if I had a long-term deal, you know, I could have handled it a little bit differently, but here I am, I’m trying to get a contract, I have to play along, and, but eventually, I think it was after the second or third scope I had [at the team medical facility], oh, what they would do is, after a month or so they would call me back up to go see the doctors, I’d get another scope, that’s where they’d clean out the knee again, they’d suck all the plastics out and so on, and then they’d want to re-assign me back to the minors. And, on one of these occasions, I finally said, “No, I’m not going. There’s something wrong. I know there’s something wrong, but I can’t prove it, I’m not a medical guy, I don’t have the history with all the surgeries and everything, I just knew that there was something wrong.” So that’s, that’s when I left the team and, I said, “I’ve gotta go see somebody else.” And, I went home, and it was near the end of another season and it was just a long ordeal to finally get to the truth. When I finally got to the truth, I felt relieved that I finally had another doctor say, “Yes, this, I’ve seen this before, this is what they did to you.” And, I said, “Absolutely, thank you, I’m not going crazy.” That’s basically how I felt at that moment, because it was a positive experience turned real negative and I was really pissed off at the end of everything, and finally there was relief, I finally had somebody understand what was going on and it wasn’t just me, I actually had proof now of this.
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Curtis’s experience screams out about the way in which athletes and their bodies are treated in the realm of professional sport. This is a kind and level of exploitation that is seldom appreciated by those who follow the games from the outside. Curtis feels he was treated like a “piece of meat” as well. The recurrence of this metaphor in the testimony of so many of the players interviewed suggests that is has currency in the locker rooms of professional hockey. Curtis’s story is an extreme study in what it means to be a piece of meat in professional hockey — an athletic laborer. The team and its management demonstrated no regard for his health or well-being as a person. Their only concern was for the production he could provide them on the ice. Likewise, there was no consideration of the long-term implications for his health, even with respect to his capacity to provide labor for the team. Given the wealth of replacement players available, management was not concerned by the possibility that they would overtax his body. Rather, their interest was in squeezing every bit of labor-power they could out of him before his body fully broke down.
This is precisely the advantage that wage-labor provides in capitalism: it is eminently disposable. The capitalist is always most interested in a flexible source of labor. Owing to hard-won gains made through players’ unions, professional sport offers some lengthy contracts that can to an extent limit the rights of management over players’ bodies. Thus, it is little wonder that management seeks to wring all the labor-power it can from a player while he remains under contract in order to provide a maximum return on investment. Curtis’s experience, while extreme, is not exceptional. Curtis was unlucky that team doctors botched his surgery, for clearly it was in their interest to get it right. Once that occurred, however, it was entirely logical within the system for management to do everything it could to avoid paying him (during the work stoppage) and maximize the amount of production he provided them while still under contract. For those players privileged enough to be deemed indispensable by management (as represented by longer-term contracts), the pressure to perform through injury is lessened. For those who play in the minor leagues or at the edge of the NHL, injury is a constant struggle.
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After his long narrative, I asked Curtis to reflect on what had happened:
[Long pause] I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently, because we all did what we thought was best at the time … If I had to go through it again, I don’t know that much would have changed, to be honest with you. Because, I think guys are still going through it today, I think it’s the same thing. You can’t rock the boat, you can’t speak out if you don’t have proof or evidence or something, or if you’re being told something by the trainers and doctors, you just have to follow suit. You’re not a human being, you’re a number, you’re a product, you’re an asset as long as you can perform. If you can’t perform, then you’re a liability and they’ll drop you.
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It is painfully striking to hear someone who loved being a professional athlete — Curtis makes it clear elsewhere in our conversation that it was his dream and something that he loved dearly — speak about being completely dehumanized through the experience. This is the toll taken on most players by the productive processes of athletic labor. At the end of the day, the typical athlete, like other workers in a capitalist system, is “not a human being, you’re a number, you’re a product, you’re an asset as long as you can perform.”
Players endure injury because they feel that their very employment is at stake if they do not. In addition, the pressure to play through injury comes from the non-business, more social, side of professional sport in a couple of ways. First, professional hockey is a particular kind of social institution that encourages players to play through injuries because the sport markets itself as a site of toughness. Indeed, this is how hockey distinguishes itself from many other sports, like soccer for example. Hockey is the sport where players put themselves through anything. Fans come to the games because they identify with this toughness and sacrifice. This is what makes a game seem real and meaningful and important. Thus, the labor and stoicism of the athletes does social reproductive work for the fans by validating and legitimizing their investment in the game, even if players do not directly do it for this reason, but rather because of an employment imperative. Second, even the pressure that players place on one another is connected to this. Years of socialization within the system of high performance hockey have instilled the notion that toughness is an important badge of honor and part of being a good teammate. Yet, this ideology is predicated on an understanding on the part of management that players, especially top players, need to be on the ice in order to satisfy fans and also to demonstrate that playing is important enough that it will not be undermined by pain and discomfort alone.
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Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is author of the new book <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/game-misconduct">Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport</a> (Fernwood Publishing) and co-author of Out of Left Field: Social Inequality and Sports (with Gamal Abdel-Shehid). He is a Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, where he teaches on social inequality and sports. You can find him on Twitter @nkalamb.