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Is Trump the 21st Century's Top Jock?
Donald Trump seems to suck the air out of every arena. Is that why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who?
Apr 18, 2026
Seventy-five years ago, my father and I gazed down from the stands at Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. I was thrilled by the sight of two heroes of my time, but Dad was not impressed. He had seen Babe Ruth.
I think about that now, in a time desperate for such symbolic representatives of our better selves, which we once derived from sports figures like Mickey, Joe, and the Babe. They distracted us from pain and poverty. They gave us hope. I wonder if the answer to “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—that line from Simon and Garfunkel’s famed song “Mrs. Robinson”—is the same as to so many other wrenching questions these days: Donald Trump.
Consider the following: Until he wore himself (and his welcome) out with such excess, he was indeed superb at commanding attention and winning ugly. He was, in short, a loud, vulgar, greedy, self-absorbed cock of the walk who came to epitomize a new gilded age of power and irresponsibility. And yet, he also somehow came to represent citizens who felt oppressed and disdained by the new elite.
No, you’ve got it wrong. I’m not thinking about Donald Trump (not yet anyway). I’m describing Babe Ruth, the first of the Top Jock role models who captured the spirit of an American age. For the next hundred years, the Babe’s spawn strutted through America’s arenas until they petered out in basketball star Michael Jordan’s commercialism. Jordan was, like the rest of them, the best at what he did, while also embodying the zeitgeist of his time with a “greed is good” mantra exemplified by his notorious “Republicans buy sneakers, too” line (which he may never have said seriously).
Now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition.
From Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, with the likes of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Dale Earnhardt, and Tiger Woods (among others) in between, Americans have regularly, if sometimes controversially, used sports figures to represent their aspirations.
Anointing Donald Trump as our current Top Jock figure is neither an attempt to curry favor—do you think I want to be the Minister of Sport?—nor an attempt to denigrate the position. It’s just an effort to better understand why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who.
Where Did the Top Jocks Go?
This effort of mine started to take shape when I suddenly realized that, for the first time (in my memory) since childhood, America now seems to have no Top Jock, no celebrity athlete whose talent and personality captures our moment. Those who might be considered—LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams—somehow seem to lack the sort of charisma Donald Trump does indeed have to reach beyond their hardcore fans to the rest of us.
After almost 70 years of following sports and writing about it professionally, I recently realized that I couldn’t recall another time when I wouldn’t have been able to name an already agreed-upon Top Jock, or at least propose half a dozen candidates. So, what’s up? In this fragmented Trumpian moment of ours, is sports finally losing its hold on us? Have we been losing our love for jocks for the first time in my memory? After all, highly accomplished athletes like Pete Rose and Barry Bonds are now being denied Hall of Fame plaques on moral grounds, while high school and college athletes are becoming teenage millionaires thanks to new laws regarding their ownership of their own images.
It seemed like an appropriate moment for summing up.
Having spent the past 20 years as TomDispatch‘s Jock Culture correspondent, I felt the need for a reckoning. What had I learned from the 50 essays I’d written so far? Was there any kind of personal touchdown I could point to? Had I truly caught the relationship between sports and the larger society—how they do or don’t reflect, direct, or motivate each other? Can I still face the issue of trans athletes or what rules there might be for which kinds of non-athletic transgressions should keep players out of sports halls of fame, or even explain how pro football and basketball have now essentially become Black sports? Must I keep analyzing the symbolism of games rather than just enjoying them? Can I feel comfortable in a world where brain trauma is treated as a reasonable cost of violent entertainment (much as school shootings are a permissible price for gun love)?
And, yes, I came to wonder just where Joe DiMaggio had gone and whether some other charismatic avatar of a fanatical cult might, in fact, have replaced him and all those other jock idols?
More than politicians (even Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy) or entertainers (Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, or the Beatles), sports figures—maybe because of the shooting star nature of their professional lives—had long been designated the avatars of American culture. And that was true even if, with the rarest of exceptions (perhaps Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali), they left little of lasting spiritual value or impact.
And now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition. I suspect that he—or at least the world he represents—is the reason why we have no real sporting heroes anymore. After all, he sucks all the air out of all arenas, while providing an ongoing reality show that seems to fill our days and nights, superseding sports in every way imaginable.
Donald Trump eternally demands to be the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time—while distinctly turning our world into a Trumpian sports event.
Suggesting a Theory
I was surprised to find that, in most of the 50 essays I’d written for TomDispatch, whether they were purportedly about baseball, NASCAR, or the Super Bowl, there was always at least a passing reference to Donald Trump and, in all too many cases, he was the leading character. That led me to wonder whether such a reality just represented this particular writer’s obsession or had Trump truly enveloped our collective consciousness?
And, I wondered as well: Was this inevitable? According to AI, when I tried to use it recently, I’ve described Jock Culture as helping to ingrain “the national psyche… with exclusivity, sexism, homophobia, and winning at any cost… a danger to the common good,” while I evidently predicted that “society will become a darker, more despotic place if it continues unchecked.”
There’s no question that the United States has become a significantly darker, more despotic place since, on January 17, 2017, just-about-to-be-president Donald Trump first appeared in a Jock Culture column of mine (the 17th, if you’re keeping count). The headline was “Football Is Trump Ball Lite” and heralded an authentic call for democracy from an unlikely place, the most Trumpish of sports.
As I wrote then:
Pro football actually helped prepare us for the new president’s upset victory by normalizing a basic tenet of jock culture: Anyone not on the team is an enemy, the Other. And it’s open season on opponents, the fans of opponents, critics, and women (unless they’re cheerleaders or moms). Trash talking is the lingua franca of this Trumpian moment, bullying the default tactic.
Yet pro football has also provided us with the single most vivid image of current American resistance to racism. Last summer, before a pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem as a symbol of his refusal "to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color."
The outcome, however, would prove shocking. Trump, who entered the Oval Office three days after that column of mine appeared, won two of his three matches, while Kaepernick never played again after that 2016-2017 season.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been shocked, though. Maybe the predictors never got the odds right. Maybe they didn’t understand what we wanted from our sports idols—or what their limits were. How about this: Consider the relative paucity of sports figures in the Epstein Files, especially compared to groups like academics, financiers, politicians, and even comedians. Jeffrey Epstein pursued people who could be useful to him as enablers, investors, connectors, or victims. Woody Allen was high on the list, but there was no Lebron James or Tom Brady (although Brady’s long-time owner, billionaire Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots, certainly made the cut).
Was it because celebrity athletes have no need of being set up with playthings or because Epstein didn’t believe they had the kind of clout that could benefit his power network?
Among the more recognizable names that did crop up on his sporting roster, however, were Casey Wasserman, the president of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and several fellow NFL owners alongside the 84-year-old Kraft, who apparently solicited advice from Epstein while facing a 2019 charge for soliciting prostitution. (He beat the rap.)
Another NFL owner in the lineup was Steve Tisch, the 76-year-old part owner of football’s New York Giants. As a Hollywood producer with credits like Forrest Gump and Risky Business, you might think he could have collected playmates on his own. In 2013, however, Epstein emailed Tisch, “I can invite the (Russian) …to meet if you like.” Tisch quickly replied, “Is she fun?”
A few weeks later, concerning a (name redacted) woman, Tisch asked, “Is my present in NYC?” After Epstein replied, “Yes,” Tisch asked, “Can I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?”
Epstein then wrote him: “I am happy to have you as a new but …shared interest friend.”
Trump, of course, was the sports figure—he owned a professional football team in the 1980s—whose mentions in the Epstein Files were most eagerly anticipated. His name, in fact, does come up thousands of times, although so far involving nothing of the existentially horrifying nature that his enemies had been waiting for and his allies presumably fearing.
Commander in Cheat
Trump’s standing in the sports world has never seemed particularly high. Even golfers tend to roll their eyes and agree with Rick Reilly, who wrote his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, about the way the president used to bully and whine his way across the greens.
Trump was spectacularly unsuccessful in his attempts to buy a National Football League team. In the 1980s, he tried to bulldoze his way into the sport as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the new United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring to avoid competition with the NFL.
Trump was a leader in the USFL’s lawsuit to force a merger with the NFL, which resulted in a pyrrhic victory—his side won the case, but the awarded damages came to $3.76 (and no, that is not a typo!). It sounded like a typical tale of Trump buffoonery.
As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”
Trump declared himself a fan of college football (an attempt to show disdain for the pros who had rejected him) and suffered further rejection from various championship teams who rebuffed his invitations to the White House.
Still, his administration clearly does what it wants when it comes to sports. In selling the war against Iran, for instance, it ran a series of video montages juxtaposing military bomb strikes and hard college and pro football hits. One such hit was a punishing block thrown in 2012 by Nebraska receiver Kenny Bell against a Wisconsin defensive back. Bell, a former NFL player as well, told The Washington Post that he was “disgusted” by the montage. “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with images like that.”
Other athletes decried the usage on moral grounds, but there was no immediate complaint from the NFL itself, which is usually quick to protest any infringement of its copyrighted material. Was that supposed repository of our toughest athletes spooked by Trump? Was he, in fact, the Top Jock after all?
“This White House is vindictive and bullying,” commented Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School. “So, if you’re the NFL, why tempt its wrath?”
Why would they even want to? After all, aren’t they on the same Top Jock team?
As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”
And we will know just where.
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The Super Bowl May Stand as the US' Most Visible Symbol of Plutocratic Excess
As corporate executives get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses, average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites.
Feb 09, 2025
About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.
The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.
Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.
Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.”
But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.
Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.
The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.
We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.
By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.
Back in those mid-20th-century years, the United States overall rated as a much equal place than the nation had been during the NFL’s early years in the 1920s. One key reason: The tax rate on income in the top federal tax bracket had jumped from 25% in 1925 to 91%.
Only a relatively few of America’s deep pockets—like the oilmen H.L. Hunt and Bud Adams, another of the AFL’s original franchise owners—could manage to end run those stiff top rates, thanks to generous tax loopholes like the infamous oil-depletion allowance.
But by the early 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution’s onset, the distribution of America’s income and wealth was sliding rapidly back to the top-heavy levels of the 1920s. Tax rates on top-bracket income would bottom out at a mere 28% by Reagan’s last full White House year in 1988, and the United States would soon be experiencing an explosive growth in billionaire fortunes.
The number of U.S. billionaires—only 13 in the first Forbes 400 count in 1982—jumped to 66 in 1990 and 298 in 2000 and then all the way up to 404 in 2010 and 614 in 2020.
All these billionaires desperately needed new high-profile playthings. Many found them in NFL franchises. In quick order, teams that had been selling in the tens of millions began going for hundreds of millions and then billions. In 2018, the hedge funder David Tepper spent $2.2 of those billions buying the Carolina Panthers. Four years later, Robson Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, led an ownership group that shelled out $4.65 billion to take possession of the Denver Broncos.
Do these sorts of outlays amount to just an innocent deep-pocket hobby? Not given the impact on average taxpayers.
Billions of average taxpayer dollars, a CNN analysis has shown, are “subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League.” Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.” Owners have saved billions more by financing stadium construction with tax-free municipal bonds, a tax-runaround “originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.”
U.S. corporate executives, meanwhile, get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses.
Average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites. They essentially don’t get to sit anywhere in NFL stadiums. In the 2024 season, the average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game ran $808.
At Super Bowl time, ticket costs soar considerably higher. The face-value price on a single Super Bowl ticket for this year’s game ranges from $950 to $7,500. But no face-value tickets ever go on sale to the general public. The only way for anyone in that public to see the Super Bowl in person? Buy a seat on the secondary market. For Super Bowl LIX, secondary-market tickets are averaging $8,000 each.
Our Super Bowl may now stand, in effect, as our nation’s most visible symbol of plutocratic excess, or, as the sportswriter Sally Jenkins once put it, a “divorced-from-reality debauch.” We still don’t know, Jenkins added, where the “pain threshold of the average NFL fan” sits.
“Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets,” she observed some years back, “haven’t found the bottom yet.”
Those billionaire owners still haven’t—and their upside remains enormous. Just between 2020 and 2023 alone, MarketWatch noted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108%.
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NFL Embraces Hip-Hop, Despite Its Conflicted History
Super Bowl halftimes have come a long way since Andy Williams and marching bands.
Feb 15, 2022
Sometime in the summer of 2023, the musical genre and lifestyle known as hip-hop will officially hit the half-century mark.
The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
It's hard to believe nearly 50 summers have passed since Clive Campbell, then an 18-year-old Jamaican-born American known as DJ Kool Herc, threw a house party in the South Bronx that changed the course of popular music while also challenging the idea of what constitutes American music.
Even as he thrilled party guests with unprecedented turntable artistry, no one, including Kool Herc himself, could have imagined that isolating and elongating beats using two turntables would become the foundation for an art form that would, within a generation, become the biggest and most profitable musical genre in the world.
DJ Kool Herc, now 66, probably watched Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show in amazement as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and 50 Cent performed the first all-hip-hop show in NFL history.
If he bothered to watch Super Bowl VII in 1973, the sight of Andy Williams performing "Marmalade, Molasses and Honey" and "Happiness Is" backed by the Citrus College Singers and Woody Herman and the Michigan Marching Band is probably still burned into his memory. That's where the NFL thought America was at the time. It was a billion miles away from a house party in the Bronx.
What was so striking about the halftime performance was that a genre that was once considered antithetical to American order and our collective values was being celebrated on the highest holy day of America's civic calendar.
How did a musical genre that has never disguised its skepticism of American institutions become "safe enough" to program on Super Bowl Sunday?
I suspect that the team owners who collude and exercise monopoly powers within the NFL are probably still as conservative as they've always been. The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
A few years ago, the NFL hired the rap icon and music mogul Jay-Z to program its Super Bowl halftime shows for the foreseeable future. The NFL has come a long way since its Andy Williams days, but it decided that tapping someone as widely respected as Jay-Z to help steer them into the future would be a worthwhile investment.
Access to Jay-Z's Rolodex wouldn't come cheap. In exchange for his contacts and good will, the NFL would finally be compelled to bestow its imprimatur on a genre of music it strategically ignored for decades.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the controversies that swirled around Dr. Dre and his band N.W.A. in the late 1980s can't help but be amazed at the deference and respect these same artists are receiving today.
Remember when the FBI sent N.W.A. a letter warning them that they would be subject to arrest if they performed a song from their debut album, "Straight Outta Compton," that was perceived as "anti-cop" by law enforcement?
It was surreal seeing Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, his one time protege, opening halftime with a G-rated performance of "The Next Episode" followed by "California Love" and getting the kind of reception that would've greeted Hall and Oates half a lifetime ago.
Did I dream that period in the early 1990s when Dre and Snoop were harassed by law enforcement for their recording of "Deep Cover," with its promise to do a "1-8-7 on an undercover cop?"
Yet, here they were at SoFi Stadium in broad daylight thrilling a sellout crowd with sanitized versions of songs that used to get them classified as public enemies.
When the spotlight segued to Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson hanging upside-down from a pullup bar in the rafters, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the game had irrevocably changed.
Surrounded by scantily clad dancers, "Fitty" tore into a clean version of his first big hit "In Da Club." Millions who either weren't alive or were very young when he originally recorded it will download the track this week in an attempt to understand what all the fuss was about when he showed up. It's a fitting "happy birthday" for hip-hop, indeed.
There's nothing like the allure of hip-hop nostalgia. Besides being relatable, the music can be endlessly recycled, reconstituted and monetized. Like its older musical siblings soul, country, disco and rock 'n' roll, much of hip-hop is also destined to become grist for elevators once it is rendered anodyne and nonthreatening by corporate ownership and co-option.
The dirty little secret of so much rap and hip-hop is that very few of its practitioners are rebels with--or without--a cause, though there was a time when the music was dominated by MCs and DJs who were so principled it spilled all over their lyrics and music.
Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar is one such rapper. His commitment to saying something worthwhile through the tight but imaginative choreography for "Alright," his anti-police violence anthem, came through even if the line about the "po-po" wasn't audible in the arena or at home.
The best performance of the evening was Mary J. Blige digging deep with uncompromising renditions of "Family Affair" and "No More Drama" that brought down the house with their focused passion and emotional intelligence.
The only avowedly political "statement" of the evening was one I didn't notice until I read about it after the game. When Eminem finished his performance of "Lose Yourself," he took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, according to reports. Eminem just looked tired to me.
There were stories that suggested that Eminem did so in defiance of the NFL's wishes, but that seems doubtful, given that the league realizes how self-defeating the original prohibition was and is no longer enforcing it--especially after the summer of George Floyd protests.
Everything that happened onstage Sunday, including all the acts of lyrical self-censorship and even Eminem's gesture of solidarity protesting police brutality, was choreographed. Wardrobe malfunctions are a thing of the past--and even that was partially staged.
Now, if Dre and his colleagues had managed to bring Mr. Kaepernick out to sing with them during "Still Dre" at the end of the show and kneeled with him as a group, that would have been the single most electrifying event in hip-hop history. It would have been the ultimate usurpation of a once-sacred stage.
Needless to say, that did not happen, and it probably never occurred to anyone involved to make something like that happen. It would have offended the team owners who have agreed to blackball Mr. Kaepernick for speaking out so forcefully against police violence five years ago.
The folks who put together Sunday's halftime show were determined to demonstrate hip-hop's global power and influence. It was not the time to demonstrate its conscience.
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