This analysis explores the deep connections between American sportswriting, national identity, and power structures. It traces the role of sports journalists from the early 20th century, like Bat Masterson and Grantland Rice, in promoting an imperial, often racist narrative that mirrored and reinforced broader societal issues, from Jim Crow segregation to the modern billionaire ownership of sports. The piece argues that sportswriting serves as a canary in the coal mine for America's political and cultural state, revealing enduring patterns of discrimination, corporate influence, and the symbiosis between media, sports leagues, and government.
When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and other sports media.
After all, it's in sportswriting, I've come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American mine couldn't be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future. American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early 20th century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn't fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition.
Yes, Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, became a new sheriff in the emerging industry I've come to call sportswriting. Opinionated and self-righteous, he was an early singer of those canary songs that, for the next hundred years, would both forecast and reflect Jock Culture's impact on American life. The words might change, but the melody remained.
The billionaires who now own and run sports were the robber barons of Bat's time, and the gambling that helped fuel his Gilded Age is now institutionalized as the proud partner of all the major leagues, whatever the sport may be. I find it remarkably easy to trace a path from those early oligarchs to the robber barons who now run American sports, and from the early sports bettors to today's integrated betting ecosystems.
If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing. The major sports of Bat's era were fiercely segregated expressions of the Jim Crow backlash that continued to fight a version of the Civil War.
Keep in mind, for instance, that baseball, the anointed national pastime, was Whites Only until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Most white sportswriters had then stayed silent on the issue and so supported the segregationist policies of the owners who ran their clubs like plantations and of the white players who didn't want any job competition from Black athletes.
Those few sportswriters who challenged the orthodoxy, like Lester Rodney, who wrote for the Communist Daily Worker and died in 2009 at the age of 98, were then counterpoints to the mainstream. He was one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major league baseball.
Early in his life, the focus on sports integration had been boxing, a sport that had gone to great lengths to ensure that a Black boxer would never become the world heavyweight champion, then considered a symbol of all-American manhood. When Jack Johnson took that crown in 1908, sportswriters, including such luminaries as novelist Jack London, called for "white hopes" to reclaim it. If Chinese spies had been on the job then, they would have noted this country's overwhelming racism.
The National Football League's color barrier was breached in 1946, but it was replaced by pro football's version of Jim Crow, or "positional segregation.
" Again, sportswriters tended to go along with the establishment dictum that roles like quarterback and center were for leaders and thinking men, and so reserved for whites only. This delayed the appearance of the first starting Black quarterback until 1968.
Meanwhile, Blacks were considered more fitted for the "natural" or "athletic" roles of defensive back and running back. Coaching, of course, is still a white man's prerogative in a league whose rosters are now about 70% Black. Sportswriters bring this up from time to time, but never in a sustained enough way to effect real change.
And while sportswriters and players might seem like natural allies, they have generally been willing to go along to get along on their separate tracks, especially in shaky times. Sports journalists, of course, tend to work for the corporate media, often the broadcasters of sports events, if not for the media outlets of various sports leagues.
Historically, pointing out discrimination is no road to success, since all the owners of sports teams belong to the same white billionaires' club, ready to boycott activists. Athletes, with their typically short shelf lives, are wary of antagonizing the people who pay their salaries and might help employ them after their games are over. All of that was pretty much set in the days of creation.
Bat Masterson's peers and spawn, the scriveners of the Roaring 20s, were rewarded for "godding up" athletes as commercial celebrities in the booming new sports markets, particularly college football and the Olympic Games. The most famous of the early mythmakers was sports columnist Grantland Rice.
In print, on radio, and by newsreel, he gilded the likes of home-run king Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey, also known as the Manassa Mauler, golfer Bobby Jones, and Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who ironically died in a 1931 plane crash on his way to work on a Hollywood movie
Sports Journalism American Empire Racism In Sports Jock Culture Media History Bat Masterson Grantland Rice Segregation Corporate Sports Sports Betting
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