Beware: In the coming days and weeks, your local stadium or arena may be flooded with political gestures and chants from people who once complained that sports should be politics-free. Consider a recent baseball game at Truist Park, where St. Louis Cardinals slugger Alec Burleson resisted an assassination attempt while hitting a home run by holding one hand to his ear and raising his fist with the other, as if he had just been shot. Some of his teammates in the dugout did the same. Keith Olbermann, a politically-inclined former sportscaster, thought he knew what he saw, and he didn’t like it. He called them “Trump Nazis” and offered them a lifetime release in a Pete Rose-esque vein, adding the words often directed at Olbermann himself during his time at ESPN: “Stick to sports.”
Nah, no, the Cardinals replied. It was an inside joke, a homage to Burleson’s college alter-ego, DJ Burly Biscuits. Let’s just say it was bad timing. Of course, that same day in the Bronx, Tampa Bay Rays’ Taylor Walls reached second base after hitting a fastball down the right-field line and not only pumped his fist, but mouthed “Fight! Fight!” in the vein of Donald Trump, who was injured in Butler, Pennsylvania. Walls insisted it wasn’t an endorsement of the former president, but he didn’t hold back on his inspiration. “To stand up and show strength right away is something that speaks pretty loudly to me,” he later explained, referring to a video of the bloodied candidate onstage. “I feel like I’ve faced those challenges before in baseball, but on a much more subdued level.” Don’t be afraid of the brushback pitch, Barstool Brothers.
Cut to a late-night beer-league hockey game in Monsey, New York. As mist rolls around the rim of the glass, the Dead Rabbits, clad in mismatched red jerseys, try to pull off a third-period comeback against the white-and-yellow Sting. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” a Rabbits wing yells after a goal, waving his arms in syncopation. No one drops his gloves. “I don’t know if you can tell, but I really love Trump,” a wing volunteers for the ensuing faceoff. Soon the Rabbits are on fire, and the wing chant becomes a chorus, growing in intensity with each goal. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Say it loud and fast. Focus on the sport. This is a thing of the past.
In some ways, it’s odd that it took this long. Trump has always been an athlete-politician, with his locker-room talk and refusal to admit defeat. But chants like “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” don’t translate easily into many sports scenarios, and Trump’s frequent dancing on the podium, while popular with the Milwaukee convention crowd, would be hard to replicate in the end zone without a campy overtone and, say, “YMCA” music cue.
Speaking of camp, will this sooner or later veer into irony and become just another meme in a never-ending TikTok cycle? Probably. It reminds me of what George W. Bush said on the tee in 2002: “I call on all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers.” Pause for effect. Nod anxiously. “Thank you. Now, watch this drive.” Many of the fools who opposed the invasion of Iraq or the privatization of Social Security have quoted this line as a laudatory joke.
But another version of this story, as the Paris Olympics loom, begins with the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. (Echoes of that year seem increasingly inevitable.) It’s when black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute on the medal stand while listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They were booed by a crowd that preferred a more straightforward (some might say whiter) patriotism; some called it “divisive.” TimesThe athletes were banished from the Olympic Village for their actions and faced death threats and even literal assassination attempts, but the image of the fist of defiance in Mexico City remains. To this day, the fist can be seen on T-shirts and coffee mugs, sometimes accompanied by the words “Fight the Power.”
And now, almost 60 years later, we’ve gone from “Fight the Power” to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” (The T-shirts exist.) Leave it to Trump, who has inverted the meaning of “fake news” for his own purposes, to absorb the resistance.
