Take note: in the days and weeks to come, your local playing fields and arenas may be awash in political gesturing and sloganeering from the very people who used to grumble that they prefer their sports free of politics. Consider the recent ballgame at Truist Park, where the St. Louis Cardinals slugger Alec Burleson souped up his home-run trot by raising one hand to an ear—as if it had just been shot?—and extending a raised fist with the other—in defiance of an assassination attempt? Some teammates in the dugout did the same. The politically inclined former sportscaster Keith Olbermann thought he knew what he had seen and didn’t like it one bit. He called them “Trump Nazis” and modestly proposed lifetime cancellation, à la Pete Rose, adding the burn that was often directed at Olbermann himself back in his ESPN days: “Stick to sports.”
No, no, the Cards replied. That was an inside joke, a tribute to DJ Burly Biscuits, Burleson’s collegiate alter ego. Chalk it up to bad timing. Of course, that same day, in the Bronx, Taylor Walls, of the Tampa Bay Rays, arrived at second base after lining a fastball down the right-field line and not only raised his fist but mouthed the words “Fight! Fight!,” like the wounded Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Though Walls insisted it wasn’t an endorsement of the former President, he wasn’t coy about his inspiration. “To immediately stand up and show strength, to me, speaks pretty loudly,” he explained later, alluding to videos of the bloodied candidate onstage. “I feel like I’ve faced those challenges in baseball, but on a much suppressed level.” Fear not the brushback pitch, Barstool Bros.
Cut to late night in Monsey, New York: the beer-league hockey circuit. Fog rims the glass as the Dead Rabbits, clad in mismatched red jerseys, mount a third-period comeback against the white-and-yellow Sting. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” a Rabbit winger exclaims after a goal, pumping his arm in syncopation. Nobody drops any gloves. “I don’t know if you can tell, but I really love Trump,” the winger volunteers at the ensuing face-off. Soon, the Rabbits are on a run, and the winger’s rallying cry becomes a chorus, intensifying with each new goal. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Say it loud, say it fast. Stick to sports: a thing of the past.
In a way, it’s a marvel that it took this long. Trump has forever been a jock’s politician, what with his invocation of locker-room talk and his swaggering refusal to countenance defeat. But chants of “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” don’t easily lend themselves to many athletic scenarios, and Trump’s frequent dancing on the stump, however popular with the Convention crowd in Milwaukee, is tinged with camp and difficult to replicate in the end zone without, say, a soundtrack of “Y.M.C.A.” on cue.
Speaking of camp, might this all shade sooner or later into irony, just another meme in an endless TikTok cycle? Perhaps. One thinks of George W. Bush on the tee box, in 2002: “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers.” Pause for effect. Concerned nod. “Thank you. Now watch this drive.” Plenty a duffer who opposed the invasion of Iraq and the privatization of Social Security has gone on to invoke the line in admiring jest.
But another version of this story—fitting, with the Paris Games upon us—begins at the Olympics in 1968, in Mexico City. (The echoes of that year seem increasingly inescapable.) That’s when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Black sprinters, raised gloved fists on the medal stand in a Black Power salute, while listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They were met with a chorus of boos from an audience that preferred a simpler (some might say a whiter) form of patriotism. “Divisive,” sniffed the Times. Expelled from the Olympic Village for their gestures, the sprinters then faced death threats, if not literal assassination attempts. Yet the image of those fists of resistance in Mexico City endures. You can find it today on T-shirts and coffee mugs, sometimes along with the words “Fight the Power.”
And now here we are, nearly six decades later, from “Fight the Power” to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” (Those T-shirts exist, too.) Leave it to Trump, the man who inverted the meaning of “fake news” for his own purposes, to co-opt the resistance. ♦