Political Pitch: My Country, 'Tis of Thee

My sincere thanks to Mike and Greg for giving me this opportunity. I hope to use this space to speak casually but directly about discriminatory issues in sports culture.

Tomorrow, I will use a classic example from civil rights jurisprudence to illustrate a general tendency towards discrimination by sports entities. In the next few blogs, I hope to use some recent events to illustrate more particular discriminatory themes. In the final contributions, to enjoy a good experiment, I will limit posts to events over the period of time of these blogs. If I am right, I will not lack material.

To begin, I offer a seemingly benign example of the cultural impact of sports: Vice President Cheney’s throwing of the first pitch at the home opener of the Washington Nationals.

The physical act of pitching a baseball is a sports event. Yet it can also be described scientifically, in terms of velocity, gravity and torque. Even here, the event lives multiple lives.

No less, sports events routinely live double lives as sports competitions and political and cultural moments. The conflicting choruses of cheers and boos that Vice President Cheney encountered at the Nationals’ opener were political after all; I doubt anyone would assert they corresponded to the athletic quality of the pitch itself. Sport is often imbued with this political character. Why else would it be our politicians and not our poets or physicists throwing these pitches? And why else would sport matter quite so much?

In the ancient and modern Olympics, in current events surrounding Iranian soccer—even in the origins of the word “partisan” itself—the political and cultural force of sport traverses political and cultural boundaries like the State. Broadly assessing this interaction of sport and culture is beyond the scope of these entries. Though the cultural force of sport is no peculiar American phenomenon, I hope in the next entries to illustrate the impact of some of the peculiarities of American culture.

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