Your Designated Sports Break From Trumpalooza

If the overwhelming deluge from the Trumpian firehose of lies, threats, incompetency, illegal actions, and surreality is sweeping you off your feet, driving you to bedridden depression, leaving you passive and breathlessly unable to mount a response, much less resistance, please get into the huddle, take a time-out, and listen up to your Jock Culture coach. (That’s me, of course!)

You need some distraction.

Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports—once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage; speculation; cultish behavior; and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity—has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time.

Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.

We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts.

Number One: How did some high school athletes suddenly get so rich? There are million-dollar quarterbacks lining up at the NIL pay window waiting to start their freshman year in college. In case you don’t already know it, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness—from which sports gear companies, universities, and the college sports ruling body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), have traditionally profited enormously, even though those athletes were prohibited from benefiting commercially. But in 2021, a series of state court judgements led to a unanimous Supreme Court decision that lifted the ban and it was suddenly pay-off time for “student-athletes.”

It all seems fair enough, although the new system is evolving with shady deals in which colleges and their boosters help organize “collectives” to recruit teenage high school athletes with the promise of booty that ranges from extra shoes to millions of dollars.

The top 20 money-making college athletes are bona fide millionaires, while the average starting pay-off for the top 100 is $583,000. University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of the former National Football League star Deion Sanders, leads the list with an estimated $4.7 million.

The Transfer Portal

Boosting the growing transactional nature of “amateur” sports is the newly installed “transfer portal,” a computerized system that makes it easier for college athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a season. Money may well change hands there, too.

So far, the Trumpsters have seemed more than okay with all this, but there could be a future glitch. While the current major beneficiaries are the expectables—football and basketball players—let’s welcome crowd-pleasing gymnast Sam Phillips, the first University of Nebraska athlete to come out as gay, now performing at the University of Illinois. Could this turn out to be a rainbow flag for the homophobic Trumpniks? Will they say nil to NIL (at least if it goes to the “wrong” people)? Stay tuned.

Number Two: Even though they’re a microscopic percentage of the varsity athletic population, transgender jocks have been getting an inordinate amount of attention lately, most of it grimly malevolent.

President Donald Trump’s order barring transgender girls and women from playing on women’s teams at federally funded educational institutions, even if followed, will have little effect on overall sports participation. Symbolically, of course, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin points out,

Diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.

There are certainly reasonable arguments against situations in which trans athletes might physically overwhelm cis-athletes, but the climate is simply too charged right now for a reasonable discussion. This may just have to wait for Trump to be cut from the team.

Number Three: When I started writing about sports in the late 1950s, two of the premier American ones were boxing (the sweet science) and thoroughbred horse racing (the sport of kings). Both were romanticized, distinctly corrupt enterprises run by oligarchs and gangsters on the backs of poor boys and animals. They did well when they produced superstars (Muhammad Ali or Secretariat) but faded in the 21st century. Since then, football and mixed martial arts have provided more reliably entertaining violence, while state lotteries supplanted parimutuel betting as a way to tantalize the desperate with pie-in-the-sky jackpots. Pro wrestling (if you consider it a sport at all) is the only athletic entertainment that comes to mind as more truly Trumpish.

Horse racing is barely hanging on, mostly thanks to influential rich folks (including Arab oligarchs) who own and breed the best horses and the rentable state governments that provide subsidies for the sport. Boxing and horse racing seem to exist mostly to offer some of the saddest sights in sports: punch-drunk former prizefighters without pensions or health coverage and drug-abused horses killed on the track after breaking down in a race. Putting down both sports would be merciful.

The Spread

Number Four: Sixty-odd years ago, at Madison Square Garden, covering my first pro basketball game, I was mystified when the crowd began cheering for the visiting team. At least theoretically, these were, after all, rabid New York Knicks fans.

“Don’t they want their team to win?” I asked the seasoned reporter sitting next to me in the press box.

“It’s the spread,” he replied all too casually.

That was the beginning of the end of whatever innocence I had when it came to big-time commercial sports.

As that seasoned reporter, visibly amused by my naiveté, then explained, the point spread is the predicted margin of victory by the favored team in any given game. If the bookies have established that the favorite is expected to win by, say, 10 points, you could bet on the underdog to lose by less than 10, and be a winner. On the night of my tutorial, those in the audience who bet against the spread could have had a double victory, since the Knicks actually won the game, while their opponents lost by fewer points than predicted and so won the spread.

In those days, except in Las Vegas, sports betting was illegal and considered a threat to the game. Most legitimate newspapers avoided any mention of odds, and the professional leagues they covered inveighed against gambling as an existential danger. In highly publicized examples, they punished players caught betting, even stars, not to mention retired superstars working as greeters for gambling casinos.

At the same time, the sports world constantly flirted with gambling, offering odds disguised as informed predictions and, for a dozen years, a gambler, Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder, was featured on a TV football show until he was fired for claiming that Black athletes excelled because of how they had been bred during slavery (and that the only jobs left for whites in sports were as coaches).

All such hypocritical righteousness seems quaint in these Trumpalooza days as professional leagues, including the National Football League, promote their “official” gambling sites, while betting on games is acknowledged as an intrinsic element of fandom (as, in truth, it always has been). No gambling, no sports. Bet on it!

The Summer Games

Number Five: In March, President Trump established the 2026 FIFA World Cup Task Force, made up of the usual suspects (Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Marco Rubio), perhaps to reassure his followers that the gang will indeed all be there when soccer’s major event is held in the United States, especially should the Trumpunks decide to use a classic soccer match to lure immigrants to an abduction party.

Meanwhile, this country seems like an ever less welcoming place for the rest of the world’s favorite sport. As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has pointed out, the United States may be anything but a safe haven for international athletes (not to speak of so many Americans). After all, should some foreigner get a little too fast or strong, maybe he or she could be checked for drugs, chromosomes, or challenging thoughts, and sent to a maximum security locker room.

And while we’re worrying (all too justifiably) about the World Cup next year, don’t forget that the U.S. will be hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Number Six: The New York Yankees are growing hair. When the team played for owner George Steinbrenner, self-ordained as “The Boss,” a blustering, narcissistic bully and liar who was considered a mentor to the young Donald Trump, no moustaches, beards, or hair below the collar were allowed. The son of a shipping magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner postured as a standard-bearer for masculine American values. Why did working-class guys buy that?

As a New York Times sportswriter covering Steinbrenner, I was bewildered walking on the street with him when construction workers and cabbies hailed him warmly as a man of the people. They loved the way he bossed those jocks around. In retrospect, it was a portent of the authoritarian cultism around Trump—the urge for people who feel weak or marginalized to embrace a tyrant.

George’s son, Hank, a milder man who avoids the spotlight, runs the team now. His decision this year to allow Yankee players to grow hair where they pleased was generally applauded. Still, maybe George wasn’t as bad as I once imagined. After all, he had only one felony conviction compared to his mentoree’s 34. Steinbrenner’s involved illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaign and, yes, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him.

The Draft

Number Seven: The opening of the NFL season is months away, but the recent draft of rookie players cracked through Trump’s curtain of sound for a day or so, reinforcing pro football as America’s 21st-century pastime. The biggest newsflash was that Shadeur Sanders, the $4-million-dollar NIL player, wasn’t taken in the first round. Football executives evidently found him too brash and self-promoting, possibly overrated, and too… dare I say it?… Trumpish.

I’ve never forgotten that the first time I met Donald Trump, as a CBS “Sunday Morning” correspondent in the 1980s, he lied to me about pro football. He owned a pro team back then, the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which played during the NFL’s offseason. Many people thought the USFL was a conspiracy to force the NFL into a merger or to get several of its teams into the league. That would have been important to Trump, then still a minor-league real-estate magnate from Queens, pushing his dream of making it into the major leagues, the New York City market.

When I interviewed him about that, he swore such a merger wasn’t on his mind. Later that week, he emerged as the principal plaintiff in an antitrust suit against the NFL. It was the kind of early lesson that people like me didn’t learn. We were too smart for that buffoon, right?

Number Eight: Maybe the best that can be said about the “manosphere,” that trendy Trumpian hodge-podge of websites, podcasts, online forums, and blogs promoting misogyny and the false masculinity of “bro culture,” is the relatively small role sports seems to play in it. Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.

Early on, the president touted himself as a good high school baseball player, but when his further posturing as a championship superstar was mostly ignored, he seemed to lose interest in promoting his athleticism, except in bed.

The anti-feminism of Trump’s base has always been predicated on the understanding that once women achieved equality, much less equity with men, the game would be over for the mediocre male. And yet current laments about boys and men losing out to women in educational and employment competition obscure the fact that men, particularly white men, still rule the roost. Trumpy attacks on liberals often emphasize their womanly “weakness.” The tough-talking handmaids in the president’s cabinet are borderline cartoonish.

As it turns out, one of the most consistent opponents of Trumpian anti-feminism is 60-year-old former football player and long-time activist Jackson Katz. He’s sounded his particular call to action in a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue.

He recently told Ammar Kalia of The Guardian: “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power. There’s a lot of fear in the face of a right-wing populist government, but we need men to loudly oppose him, otherwise real people will be harmed. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s urgent.”

It’s urgent indeed, and this has been enough of a distraction. So, suit up and get your game face on. Do something. Donald Trump is beatable if you keep your eye on the ball and don’t pull your punches.