The NFL finally put St. Louis Rams fans out of their misery last week, bringing an end to a grotesque half-decade-long carnival of avarice, extortion, and abject mendacity with the announcement that the Rams will relocate to Los Angeles ahead of the 2016 season. Because a) this isn’t a Rams blog, and b) the NFL is and long has been a tragicomically corrupt institution governed only by the basest impulses of consumer-capitalist excess and built around an ugly, boring sport whose continued play at collegiate and high school levels constitutes a public health crisis, there’s not much that needs to be said about it here.
But I do want to call your attention to a column written by the Los Angeles Times’ Bill Plaschke just after the news broke. It ran under the headline “The big, bad NFL will have to play by L.A.’s rules,” and it is stuffed from stem to stern with sentences like these:
But, dear football folks, this town doesn’t throw parades for just showing up. … So understand first that you’re here because you want to be here and because you think you can make money here, not because anybody was dying to see you again. Consider yourself lucky to be back on our turf. And while you’re here, you’ll have to play by our three simple rules:
You must win. You must entertain. You must do both with the sort of decency and integrity that makes us feel comfortable enduring long lines of traffic, long lines at bathrooms, and mosh pits in parking lots for a chance to watch you play.
What’s remarkable about Plaschke’s column is not that it is smug and self-righteous and entitled. It’s not that it’s laughably detached from reality, asserting that Los Angeles “didn’t pry open civic pocketbooks…not even close” to bring the Rams back (the Inglewood stadium project will receive up to $180 million in tax breaks) and that it was at the vigilant hand of upstanding Angelenos, and not the whim of Bud Selig, that Frank McCourt was “[run] out of town.” It’s not that it’s lazy pandering masquerading as commentary, a crowd-pleasing hack blowing smoke up his readers’ rear ends about how superior and “sophisticated” and special they are.
The column is all of these things, but none of them are remarkable, because you can find them on every sports page in every city in America. What’s remarkable, from the perspective of a Cardinals fan, is what came in reaction to Plaschke’s ode to the enchanting aroma of L.A.’s farts: nothing. Nada. No frothy caps-locked outrage from Bro Dave Barry. No derisive tweets from Weird Sports Twitter. No ritual name-and-shame from @BestFansLosAngeles. What’s remarkable is that Bill Plaschke and his readers are allowed to be smug, entitled, delusional, and self-congratulatory in a way that, say, Ben Hochman and his readers aren’t.
All over the country, and indeed the world, sportswriters and broadcasters spin tenuous webs of narrative out of the goings-on between the lines and rote remarks in the locker room. Given half a chance they will—whether out of genuine conviction, cynical market savvy, a need to fill airtime and column inches, or a combination of all three—alight upon a set of ideas that their audience always finds enormously attractive: that the team they support is not only great but uniquely great; that fans are not merely passive witnesses to the team’s unique greatness but active participants in the close symbiosis that exists between the team and its community; that, accordingly, the team’s unique greatness is but a reflection of the qualitative superiority of the community and the fans themselves.
Because people never tire of hearing how special they and their family and friends and neighbors are, such narratives are quick to take root and flourish. Occasionally they cohere around a particular label or phrase—America’s Team, Més que un club, The 12s, Best Fans in Baseball—but are more often left purposefully ill-defined and elastic. It’s not even necessary that the team in question be a particularly successful one; Cubs fans have been showered in praise through the years for their loyalty to the Lovable Losers, itself a label that subtly mythologizes their fans as exceptionally steadfast and passionate.
It’s important to note that these exceptionalist narratives are almost never entirely baseless—that beneath all the hype and hyperbole and sentimentality typically lie solid, if comparatively modest, structural truths. The Dallas Cowboys are the most popular NFL franchise in the country. FC Barcelona is a revered symbol of Catalan identity. Soccer clubs in provincial industrial centers like Manchester and Munich are powerfully interdependent with their communities’ working-class characters. A public ownership model makes the Green Bay Packers literally (in an American context) one-of-a-kind. Bill Plaschke is certainly not mistaken in saying that the NFL will face stiffer competition for attention and revenue streams in Los Angeles than it would in many other cities. And, yes, a confluence of historical factors has made St. Louis an anachronistic bastion of enthusiasm for baseball and the Cardinals.
But the peddlers of these narratives inevitably take them one step too far, crossing the line from a materialist reading into an essentialist one. Describing to your readers how their dearly-held loyalties have been shaped by the cold, impersonal forces of history and capital doesn’t sell papers; penning reductive paeans to their inherent virtue does.
And so we’re told not that the Yankees and their success are the natural consequence of operating a baseball franchise in the economic capital of the world, an externality in pinstripes, but that they’re the guardians of a collective and participatory winning tradition, the on-field manifestation of New York superiority. St. Louis, we’re told, is not just a complicated town whose halcyon days as an industrial power came in baseball’s formative decades, forging a bond between city and sport that has only strengthened as the city’s economy has faltered and other pro leagues have left it behind; it’s Baseball Heaven, home to a team that excels because its fans are the “Best.” Los Angeles, writes Bill Plaschke, furnished relatively few public dollars for the Inglewood project not because the reality of L.A.’s market size meant that moving there doubled the Rams’ franchise value overnight, but because Angelenos are, unlike all those unwashed yokels in flyover country, “sophisticated enough to understand that…billionaires shouldn’t need handouts.”
We’re a nation—and probably a species—of exceptionalists, and it’s never long before the arbitrary tribal affiliations that sports fandom assigns us become just another opportunity to carve out an identitarian niche for ourselves. This is bad! It’s usually not a big deal, but it’s definitely bad. It’s fundamentally unhealthy for any society that hopes to be humane and equitable and small-d democratic to tolerate groups of people who believe that they’re inherently, qualitatively superior to others. It’s as incumbent on writers to combat hyperbole and mawkishness and essentialism as it is to explore and affirm the structural realities that underlie them.
“Is everyone from that town incapable of understanding that the Cardinals are just a regular-ass baseball team?” asked Kevin Draper when a nauseating Hochman column earned a place on Deadspin’s list of the worst sportswriting of 2015. The policing of such exceptionalist dross is all fine and good, but when it doesn’t happen consistently—when Hochman’s column is a mortal lock to be ridiculed and Plaschke’s doesn’t draw a second glance—it reveals itself to be far less interested in anti-exceptionalism than in enforcing regionalized class hierarchies in which people from places like Los Angeles are allowed to consider themselves superior and special, and people from places like St. Louis aren’t.
Photo by Neil Kremer