It may not have been one of my most important journalistic assignments, but going up to Bristol, Conn., to spend a Sunday afternoon in October 1991 with Chris Berman, Tom Jackson and the rest of ESPN's NFL Prime Time crew still rates among the most enjoyable. I remember how agog I was as they led me into their inner sanctum, a dimly lit conference room with mammoth bowls of chips and popcorn, footballs for tossing around (for mood establishment) and, most impressively (especially for 1991), 15 or so televisions arrayed along one wall so they could watch every game in progress.
At the time I was representing The Village Voice, and though I recall Berman making one gentle crack about the cross-cultural incongruities separating a bohemian newspaper from the National Football League (and as a Brown University graduate, he surely had personal experience with such incongruities), he and everyone else went along with my story in good cheer. Because what was interesting about Prime Time in the first place -- what drew me to want to spend time with its cast and crew and to write about the show -- were the clever nods and winks by which Berman in particular bridged those divides. He would do a quick Howard Cosell imitation, tossing off a phrase associated with the commentator from the 1970s, or mimic John Facenda, the old voice of NFL Films ("the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. . ."), and then turn on a dime and throw in a reference to a Doors lyric. Today we're all too familiar with the stance of laconic irony that that kind of pop-culture farrago has come to represent. But back then it was completely fascinating, especially on a show whose more quotidian raison d'etre was to show football highlights.
NFL Prime Time was, and remains, the purest expression of what ESPN was all about to begin with. It wasn't your father's Oldsmobile. It was a hip, irreverent party, and everyone, from NFL linemen to Alabama fly fishermen to southern California extreme skateboarders to, emphatically, women -- whose athletic achievements ESPN has championed for years -- was invited.
ESPN said to America: Sports belong to everybody.
Not anymore. ESPN recently announced that it is hiring -- not for Prime Time, thank goodness, but for the network's pre-game Sunday show -- Rush Limbaugh. He will represent "the fan," ESPN says. Here's what I say: Rush Limbaugh, arguably the most toxically divisive individual in America (and a multimillionaire to boot), represents your average fan about as well as Yasir Arafat represents peace. And his hiring bespeaks a disgraceful politicizing of a venue that is far better kept free of ideology of any kind -- the kind of venue that democratic societies, uniquely in the history of the world, have kept free of politics.
ESPN Senior Vice President Mark Shapiro said earlier this week that Limbaugh will present "opinions on sports, not politics." Well, no kidding. But even so, the very fact of putting Limbaugh on the air is a political act because Limbaugh is a political person. When he walks into a room, it becomes a political room just by virtue of his presence. On the very day the appointment was made public, Limbaugh's own Web site trumpeted the news, alternating the quote announcing his ESPN deal with two others, one of which said: "No matter what Bush does that disappoints you, you don't want any part of anybody else on the Democratic side. Don't even think about it. It is not acceptable. Don't even flirt with it. It's nowhere near that bad."
So already, in that context, Limbaugh has politicized the announcement. He may not talk politics on ESPN's dime, but does the network really think that on his own radio show he won't find clever ways to blur what ESPN maintains is a clear church-state separation? A network can no more hire Rush Limbaugh and pretend it's not political -- mind you it wouldn't be possible with James Carville, either -- than a person can hang a hammer and a sickle on his front door and pretend it's a statement on behalf of the virtues of agriculture.
Other commentators have already pointed out -- speaking of cross-cultural incongruities -- several of Limbaugh's offensive racial statements as he prepares to enter an arena in which nearly three-quarters of the athletes are black. (Are they hard-shell conservatives, these black men who very likely were raised in Democratic households?) So are several of the show's announcers, chiefly Jackson and Sterling Sharpe. "The NAACP," Limbaugh once said, "should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."
I'll leave it to Sharpe and Jackson -- a complete gentleman when I met him and a man who, it seemed obvious to me as we talked, had interests in life beyond football -- to speak to that issue, which I hope they do privately. Those kinds of arguments have become the standard white-liberal response to incidents like this one, and while they may galvanize people who share our ideological commitments, I know that they can come across to others as yet another case of liberals, with all our abstract compassion, holding ourselves out as morally superior to the rest of America.
So I'll make other arguments. One goal of the right wing in this country is to politicize aspects of life that had not historically been overtly political. It has politicized faith. It has politicized love of country. It has politicized the very geography of the nation by presenting the notion that some parts of America are more "American" than others. It has, through the rhetoric and propaganda of which Limbaugh has been such a vital instrument, sought to attach a political odor to cultural institutions and individual acts -- with the intent of equating liberalism with effeteness and infirmity, and conservatism with manliness and certitude. Drinking wine and going to the symphony are suspicious. Drinking beer and watching football are genuine.
Well, I do drink wine and go to the symphony. But I like beer, too, and I love football. And I know loads of liberal men, and a few women, who do, too. The game belongs to us. And it belongs to conservatives. One fundamentally healthy thing about sports fandom is that, if I'm sitting in a bar cheering for my Browns and they score a touchdown, I can high-five the guy next to me without a thought of how he voted even crossing my mind. We do not, in this country, make allegiance to a political persuasion a prerequisite for loving or participating in sports, and I think I need only type the words "East German gymnasts" to remind you of what kinds of societies do politicize athletic competition.
ESPN's hiring of Limbaugh starts to change all that. It directly associates a sport with an ideology -- in the form of one of the most viciously ideological people in America, at that -- and tacitly tells people of the other ideology (or no ideology at all) that if they should happen to have any anger about this, well, tough, they just need to repress it. If Mark Shapiro doesn't think that's the case, he should poll his liberal friends. And if this can happen in sports, it can happen in other heretofore apolitical venues. From the network whose hallmark was once explicitly to invite everyone in, one expected much, much better than this.
Michael Tomasky will become executive editor of the Prospect in September. His columns appear on Wednesdays at TAP Online.
