Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker presenting a deal to finance a new Milwaukee Bucks arena with public funds.

Post by Michael Z. Newman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The pending deal to keep the Milwaukee Bucks in Milwaukee is only the most recent instance of local and state governments in the U.S. agreeing to subsidize major league sports facilities. The NBA team’s owners, who are richer than God, bought the team pledging to keep it in town. The league has made clear that the Bucks can’t stay without a new arena, so the owners threatened to move them absent public financing for a portion of the costs. This has followed a standard script in American sports: the politicians who hold the purse strings submit to this extortion lest their constituents blame them for the loss of a beloved team. The elected leaders stage the political theater of touting the economic benefits of new sports facilities to local economies (anyone well informed knows better). Those with an interest in keeping the team–fans serious and casual, civic pride boosters, local media who benefit from having a team to cover–publicly support saving the team.

Others point out the shameless corporate welfare. As it is playing out in Milwaukee, the deal to finance the arena involves the state diverting $4 million annually until 2035 from payments to Milwaukee County to pay construction costs. Milwaukee is one of the poorest and most racially segregated cities in America, with a myriad of problems that several million dollars a year could help address. That money is going instead to a project that will be certain to further enrich the team’s owners and the league, and to return little more economically to Milwaukee than a small number of jobs to last only as long as the building’s construction. Supporters of the deal are excited that the new arena will be part of an urban revitalization, developing currently vacant downtown property. It’s certainly telling that hundreds of millions of public funds for urban revitalization somehow materializes when the economic beneficiaries are out-of-town fat cats threatening to take away your basketball team.

As a matter of economic policy, it’s easy to see that these deals stink. Owners of major league sports teams can afford to build new facilities, but local governments are willing to pay so it would be foolish for owners to pass on that. Governments pony up because of competition among cities: in each league, there are fewer teams than there are cities that could support them. Public funding is a subsidy to a thriving private business that doesn’t need it.

But what if we see these subsidies as a matter of cultural policy? The issue isn’t usually framed that way, maybe because sports doesn’t seem like a culture industry, but these handouts effectively function to promote a form of local culture, and thinking of this is a matter of cultural rather than economic policy might help us appreciate what is at stake in these political debates.

Actually what these lavish handouts promote and protect is the experience of watching a local sports team and following them day by day, season by season. This involves mainly viewing them on TV and talking about it, and participating in the activities of fandom: dressing up in fan apparel, debating with other fans, and sometimes coming together at a public event where the team competes. This event, the game, is where the pricey new arena or stadium comes in: it’s essentially a TV studio with a big paying live audience where the show is produced. Watching the show requires a subscription to a special cable channel (a regional sports network), going to the event requires buying a typically expensive ticket, and participating in this fandom often winds up costing fans some money; it’s a consumer experience, like so much of our cultural life. Live sports is a big reason why many cable subscribers keep paying that monthly bill. That’s what makes sports so powerful: the product has a huge devoted media audience willing to spend its money. All of this is deeply shaped by collective public affect, as fans together experience the highs and lows, the anticipation and disappointment, of the drama of sports. “Save our team” is also “save our show.” It’s “save our culture.”

Cultural policy is usually associated with the arts and with national identity. For instance, Canadian cultural policy protects the Canadian culture industries against competition from American products through quotas, subsidies, and other means. Its logic is to maintain the nation’s distinct identity by representing Canada to Canadians, protecting local cultural industries in the process. To the extent that sports teams are a crucial component of local identities–and talk of Red Sox Nation, Packers Nation, etc., suggest they are very crucial–public support for sports teams protects these identities by supporting the consumer culture at their center. The idea that sports facilities help the economy is a veil of justification giving legitimacy to this cultural agenda. The real importance of the deal is its support for a form of patriotism to a team and investment in allegiance to it. That’s what the people refuse to give up.

As a cultural policy, there are some things to cheer and others to jeer about local sports teams getting huge handouts from the public. On the positive side of the ledger, sports really is central to a great many people’s identities and to the identities of modern places. It would be a loss to see the basketball team depart. No one is ushering them out. But this is a thin reed on which to hang such massive investment, and there is a downside too.

If hundreds of millions in state funding is going to support a cultural policy during this age of austerity, when there is plenty of need to go around, when schools are underfunded and poverty limits so many people’s opportunities, we ought to consider pretty carefully what kind of culture the public should support. Major league sports is lots of fun to watch and follow as a fan, but it’s also deeply flawed ideologically. Spectator sports of the kind that draws big ratings week after week has many appeals, and one appeal central to its values and meanings is hegemonic masculinity.

There is an audience for women’s sports, but the fact that ordinary usage modifies any sports played by women as women’s sports speaks loudly about the gender politics involved. In a society of changing gender roles and continual crises of masculinity, sports is a bastion of traditional gender performance in which men are celebrated for their physical strength, endurance, agility, and skill, their stoicism and toughness, their adherence to a blue-collar code of hard work. Major league sports is one of the last institutions in society in which overt gender segregation goes totally unquestioned. All of the culture surrounding sports, from the conventions of media coverage to the sanctioned activities of fandom, are masculinized. In major league sports in America, women are seldom even permitted to narrate the action as play-by-play voices or sit behind the desk on a pre-game or halftime broadcast trading observations. Women participate in major league fandom but on terms set by men. The value of sports as a media genre, and thus as an economic juggernaut, is largely its ability to command men’s attention, though leagues have recognized that appealing to women helps them as well.

I’m not so naive as to imagine a public deliberation about the cultural policy of supporting sports teams in which hegemonic masculinity is the key term. What seems more possible is that by recognizing these subsidies as following a cultural rather than an economic logic, the people and their elected representatives might weigh the real benefits of supporting such expenditures against the enormous, and I would say unacceptable, costs. I doubt it, though. “Save our team” investments may be too deeply affective, and too much tied up in matters of identity, to be a subject for rational debate.

Michael Z. Newman has lived in Milwaukee for 13 years and has yet to attend a Bucks game, but enjoys the occasional summer afternoon at the publicly-financed Miller Park.

Sports writer Bomani Jones captured Heat fans leaving Tuesday’s game early.

During the game’s commercial breaks, I browsed cable news coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, America’s most recent instance of centuries of systemic racism distilled into one man doing a very dumb thing with a gun, then cowering beneath the defense of the even dumber Florida law made possible by the dumbest amendment in our Constitution. One pundit decried Zimmerman’s defense attorneys for articulating something akin to an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer logic in their pursuit of jurors unbiased by media coverage of the shooting last year. “What is going on in Florida tonight?”, the pundit asked incredulously. I then caught snippets of The Daily Show’s coverage of recent immigration reform debates, in which John Oliver lambasted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and current Florida Senator Cottonmouth for deciding it might be politically expedient to curry the favor of Latino voters in order to re-color Florida red for 2014 and beyond.

I lived in Florida this past year as a visiting assistant professor at Rollins College, a liberal arts school tucked away in a tony suburb of Orlando far removed from central Florida’s exurban theme park sprawl, yet intimately bound up with it economically and culturally. As such, I’ve developed a deeply ambivalent relationship with the state’s perceived wackiness so taken for granted in American media. On the one hand, I’ve been eager to disabuse visitors of the notion that Florida is all beaches and bath salt-huffing loonies, that it has all the same amenities and experiences necessary to sustain the habitus of “enlightened” academic-types. On the other hand, I’ve often been just as eager to join the chorus of pshaws whenever something from the Florida Man Twitter feed makes its way into national news.

More than anything, though, I’ve come to embrace this ambivalence and admire Florida’s totemic hold over the American psyche. Most of us have some version of a love-hate relationship with the place we’re from or where we live, but few outside our respective hometowns have strongly held opinions about these places in the same way non-Floridians do about Florida. It has been strange to absorb outsiders’ misguided conceptions of Florida from within it this year, one that began for me with the state again playing a contested role in the Presidential election and ending with the run up to what will likely be the highest profile American court case since that of O.J. Simpson. But it has been even more heartening to see the extent to which Floridians take outsiders’ diagnoses of their home state in stride.

Florida is such a loaded signifier that any mediated discourse about goings-on within its borders is quickly sloughed off as misrepresentative of a more serious, flattering, or authentic American experience. Zimmerman’s trial thus becomes an opportunity not to examine the country’s continued racial tensions and gun culture, but to excoriate a disturbed vigilante in some lawless backwater. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush courting Florida Latinos affords us not the occasion to consider the increasingly heterogeneous cultural identities of American immigrants, but the chance to speculate wildly about the 2016 Presidential election and wonder who’ll win the state. And those leaving Tuesday’s game early are not exhausted basketball fans just hoping to sleep six hours before work in the morning, but fairweather scenesters eager to party on South Beach. As I leave Florida next week, I’ll do so with a renewed skepticism of these and so many other snap judgements about the state, knowing that there might not be a more accurate microcosm of what American culture is right now–for better, for worse, and everything in between–and what it is becoming.

The National Basketball Association’s lockout began July 1 and reached a provisional end on the day after Thanksgiving, but even if you’re the most casual of sports fans, chances are, you knew this.  And even if you’re the most casual of casual sports fans, chances are, ESPN played no small role in informing you about the work stoppage, introducing you along the way to vaguely noxious MBA-speak like “basketball related income” and “amnesty clause.”  All the while, non-ESPN media squawked about the lockout simply being a squabble between the rich and the super-rich; about how basketball isn’t football; even about how boring ESPN’s coverage of it all was.  I won’t deign to tell you WHAT IT WAS REALLY ALL ABOUT, though I tend to agree with Charles Pierce that by focusing so intently on money, we tend to miss the bigger picture.  Accordingly, I’d like to consider briefly not the content of the various back-and-forths among players, owners, and sports pundits, but the broader implications of ESPN’s mediation of this dialogue for televised sports.

If there is a takeaway point from Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s eminently skimmable (and purposely, polemically gender-biased) oral history of ESPN, it’s that the network fancies itself to be lifestyle television.  This manifests both in all the most banal ways you think it does (incessant talk of “the brand” and other Disney-fied corporate logics) and in more insidious ones that seek to make “ESPN” and “sports” as interchangeable as possible in viewers’ heads.  ESPN has a mixed, sometimes hilariously bad history of extending its own brand beyond the viewing moment, so its most valuable commodities are often the personalities on display in its programming.  Pardon the hacky Bill Simmons-ism, but if ESPN is Bravo, then at the present moment, the NBA is its Real Housewives, Top Chef, and Andy Cohen all rolled into one.  (The comments section is yours to work out the Housewives equivalents of the Miami Heat’s big three.)

This is not to ignore the significance of ESPN’s relationships with the other two major American professional sports leagues, but crucial differences exist between them and the NBA.  The NFL–the indisputable televised sports juggernaut of the recent past and forseeable future–contracts with three out of the four major broadcast networks and a number of cable (including the prized Monday Night Football franchise on ESPN) and satellite outlets.  Television is the NFL’s cash cow, and viewers seem to enjoy watching it.  MLB’s television interests are similarly spread among several broadcast and cable outlets, with myriad regional sports networks picking up the slack.  But baseball–with its 81+ home games per team per season, summer weather, and Tony LaRussas giving fans multiple opportunities for trips to the concession stand–prizes gate and gameday revenues much more than football does.

While it has long thrived on elements from both models, the NBA has become a decidedly more television friendly league, with ESPN leading the way.  In fact, the league’s only broadcast presence is with the also-Disney-owned ABC.  (TNT provides the other significant chunk of NBA coverage, but the netlet is more interested in using basketball as a promotional vehicle for Rizzoli & Isles than it is in building a brand identity around it.)  The outlets fortuitously renewed their deals with the NBA after a poorly rated Finals series in 2007, and it seems fair to say that ESPN was getting an undervalued property.  A change to the hand-checking rule the year before catalyzed a surge in league-wide scoring, and the LeBron-led class of stars would be entering their prime (and free agency years) over the course of the following decade.  Part of the pact also afforded ESPN wide-ranging use of the NBA’s digital content, an element commissioner David Stern saw as key in spurring the league’s global growth (and one that stands in stark contrast to other sports’ digital policies).  For ESPN, the NBA was fast becoming the most fertile land upon which to plant its flag as “The Worldwide Leader In Sports.”

It goes without saying, then, that ESPN had much riding on the resolution of the NBA lockout, not so much that it might be accused of anything unethical, but certainly enough to be guilty of belaboring viewer interest in the minutiae of labor.  Its lockout coverage arguably started in earnest with last summer’s “The Decision” special on the free-agent status of LeBron James, a stunt aimed just as much at stimulating interest in non-NBA fans as it was at narcotizing the resentment of NBA die-hards about the upcoming work stoppage.  Or, it’s the other way around.  I don’t know.  Either way, ESPN’s NBA coverage since “The Decision” has been not about uncovering the real issues behind the lockout or picking sides between players vs. owners or Dirk vs. LeBron.  Instead, its goal has been to breathlessly, relentlessly fuel the idea that discovering that truth or picking a side matters.  If you care not for such things, if you like your displays of athletic competition virtuous and untouched by the tentacles of capitalism, well, there’s always the college game.