Is sports media about to see yet another political battle?
Race and gender politics wrecked the sports media in the 2010s. Two rival commentators may determine whether it can go back to being about the games, or just the chatter.
This week I shift the focus from the social media arena to the cultural sphere of sports and athletics. The 2010s saw the politicization of sports become a major social trend, including the creation of iconic athletes by their political position rather than their on field performance. But while this raised their profile among media figures, it has devastated sports commentary, in particularly ESPN. Now, the people that helped wreck that business model are striking out on their own, hoping to build a sports content company that reflects their progressive left-wing values independent of the Disney-owned cable sports network that they once headlined. In doing so, former on-air personality Dan Le Batard and his ex-boss John Skipper have explicitly drawn swords at a frequent critic, Fox Sports Radio’s Clay Travis and his Outkick the Coverage website. In so doing they hope to prove that no only has leftist politics not ruined sports commentary, but that they can make them a profitable combination.
The glass ceiling of ratings
The Le Batard-Travis rivalry will put a personal face on an already raging question: Can sports remain removed from politics, or is it effectively tethered to it like other entertainment fields. While current events and their political ramifications have always encroached on entertainment and sports, the past ten years have seen a trend unfold where they are all merged as one. Politicians have always desired to socialize and be seen with celebrities, but now entertainers and athletes have taken to branding themselves using political messaging.
Despite all of the efforts to mix the two into an inseparable combination, the result has been the creation of a new class of athlete that is adored by the media and celebrity class, while being largely ignored by the general public. How else can one explain the ubiquitous presence of female soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who was in 2020 included as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People? While the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup final featuring Rapinoe’s US squad had a record audience of 14 million unique viewers, worldwide women’s soccer is a curiosity. The 2018 men’s final was watched by over 1 billion people, whereas the women’s final was watched by only 82 million. Nevertheless the 2019 Women’s World Cup was hailed as a watershed event. This is due to factors that are mostly, but not entirely, tied to other current events rather than soccer.
Women’s sports as a whole show a phenomenon of growing participation juxtaposed with sluggish viewership. Soccer is one of the few team sports with worldwide appeal where the American women’s team (USWNT) is more successful than its male counterpart, winning four World Cup finals since the competition began in 1991 and ranked no. 1 worldwide, whereas the men’s squad (USMNT) is worlds away from competing with the likes of France, Brazil, or Argentina and is ranked no. 22. Moreover, the two latest stars of the squad Rapinoe and before her Abby Wambach are both openly gay and in Rapinoe’s case married to Sue Bird, herself a high achieving basketball player and fellow Olympic gold medalist. So not only does the USWNT have the benefit of successful performance, but its greatest star is a vocal standard bearer for one of the most powerful social movements in the world, the gay rights movement.
But alas, this is only important for the people within the sports media, not the people that are watching it. When fans are brought into the mix, Rapinoe’s popularity is revealed to be artificial.
The USWNT benefited from a tremendous publicity campaign ahead of the 2019 World Cup, including giant Nike billboards in New York and Los Angeles. Like the men’s team, they had the benefit of sponsorship from massive conglomerates like AT&T, Volkswagen, and Anheuser-Busch.
Two Ranker lists for the “Best Female Athlete of All Time” and “Most Famous Athlete in the World Right Now” do not even include Rapinoe. Meanwhile others like tennis player Maria Sharapova, skier Mikaela Shiffrin, and even retired Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbaeva are within the top 20 most famous athletes.
ESPN’s own World Fame 100 rankings also had Rapinoe curiously absent in 2019, the same year that supposedly there was a fever for Women’s World Cup soccer.
How about branding? Were Rapinoe a burgeoning superstar with legions of fans worldwide ready to change sports forever, as ESPN and others would have one believe, her personal store and soccer clinics Rapinoe SC would not have closed this January. She wouldn’t have had to beg for investment into the National Women’s Soccer League, a largely ignored professional venture for which she plays for the franchise in Tacoma, Washington. The example of Megan Rapinoe is important to understanding how deluded media figures are, because they ignore the cliched advice of “don’t believe your own hype”.
Out with the Fun, In with the Old
Just as Rapinoe was a creation of the #woke era of sports entertainment, so are those coalescing around Dan Le Batard who believe that coverage of sports must be inherently athletic. Their opponents believe otherwise: Clay Travis has harped on his own theme that instead politics should be more like sports, meaning that ideas should compete in a marketplace, and not the other way around where athletes are cancelled and disqualified through cancel culture. Another, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, has embraced off colour frat culture in order to become a sports-themed shock jock. Sports commentary radio has always attracted the macho personalities who are able to inject drama and controversy thereby bating callers into overreacting. It is in a sense a media sector where passions can be provoked ironically by ignoring politics.
Le Batard and Skipper are attempting to build the same business as Travis and Portnoy, with the opposite tone and much more clean content. Unfortunately for him, such things have been tried already. As far as blogging is concerned there is Deadspin, part of the G/O Media empire that includes The Root and Gizmodo. They already are obsessed not with actual sports topics, but with the identity politics involved in them. For instance in May one of its columnists upbraided NBC Sports Washington for having an all-female podcast that included only white women. In October 2019 Deadspin’s staff revolted and resigned in objection to orders from G/O Media management to “stick to sports”. Within a few months former Deadspin employees would attempt to relaunch under various different names, including its current iteration Defector. While Deadspin continues to have roughly the same internet audience size as Travis’s Outkick, it languishes financially and recently had to lay off additional staff. Le Batard would know very well about Deadspin, because in 2014 he gave them his vote as a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America for the Baseball Hall of Fame in order to conduct a poll of its readership. The BBWAA in response permanently revoked his voting privileges.
Fail, Rinse, Repeat
Dan Le Batard’s quest to accomplish what Deadspin has failed to do centers on the hype of himself and other ex-ESPN on-air personalities Bomani Jones and Jemele Hill. Could this be because in the past Travis has taken potshots at Le Batard and Jones’ show Highly Questionable for its drooping ratings? Or because Jemele Hill was the subject of Clay Travis’s breakout moment, when Brooke Baldwin booted him from the air for saying he believes in “the 1st Amendment and boobs” as a defense of her freedom of expression?
Not only has the #woke sports model failed with companies that are within the web-only format like Deadspin, which is hemorrhaging revenue, but it also failed in-house at ESPN during the time that Le Batard et al were there. Called The Undefeated, it saw daylight in 2015 as a “black Grantland” in imitation of the Bill Simmons led blogging platform that was wildly successful at the time for mixing sports with cultural and political references.
Ironically at the time Simmons and ESPN were having a falling out and Grantland was shut down after a brief period with a replacement editor. He would go on to found The Ringer, a successful and left-leaning sports website, which is awfully similar to what Le Batard is suggesting is missing. The Undefeated was originally led by ESPN personality Jason Whitlock, who was ineffective at launching the website, so he was replaced by outsider Kevin Merida. After six years, with generous investment from the cable network and a staff studded with some of the most well known names in black sports media like William Rhoden, The Undefeated is an undisputable failure. It ranks more than 20,000 slots behind The Root in traffic engagement, and this is at a time when both are losing readership. Outkick has a relatively stable reader base, but fluctuations are largely pegged to the calendar of its focus sport, college football. Le Batard and Skipper have decided to call their new venture Meadowlark, which like Grantland — named after iconic sport writer Grantland Rice — invokes the name of a long bygone sports figure, Harlem Globetrotter performer Meadowlark Lemon.
Le Batard’s group has thrown down the gauntlet and said they will not “stick to sports”. In fairness, Travis’s show is not one that steers clear of politics either. He has featured on air interviews with politicians like Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Josh Hawley. But listeners still know that they can at least tune in to his show and hear mostly coverage of SEC coaching hires and other sports-related topics. John Skipper has already revealed that in one sense the new venture will not be similar to Outkick: it is not going to be a website hosting articles and audio content. Rather, it will create the content and sell it to third parties. Meadowlark is currently trying to raise $10-15 million in investment cash for this content. Another vulnerability is that like Travis, who frequently focuses on stories relating to his native Tennessee, Le Batard is notorious for being Miami focused and not always in the best way. In 2018 he had former Miami Marlins president David Samson at his 50th birthday bash, where Samson taunted jeering onlookers about how the franchise duped the city out of $1.2 billion in public funds for a stadium.
So if not “stick to sports”, can’t Le Batard at least emphasize it? If he can’t be 100% dedicated to it, how about 95%, 85%? Can Dan Le Batard at least commit that his new venture will be tangentially connected to not just the cultural aspects of sports, but the actual plays happening on the field? I’ve never been a follower of his ESPN Radio program or his his kitschy ¿Highly Questionable? TV show, but there is always room for more in the eternally talk-heavy sports media. Just remember, it should first and foremost be about what happens on the field, or else it’s just a jock version of the E! Network.
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