Sports and the American City

Sports and the Soul of The City

In May 1957 the Dodgers announced that they would depart Brooklyn for Los Angeles at the season’s end. More than a financial decision made by a savvy owner. The decision tore the borough’s most beloved civic institution from the community that defined itself in relation to its team. A publication of the Catholic Archdiocese of Brooklyn, The Tablet, recently asked lifelong Brooklyn residents to recount how the move impacted them. One fan put it this way: “It was like the loss of a family member. I felt very sad and abandoned as a boy. These guys are my heroes and these guys are now leaving me. My heroes are going west.” This was how another fan remembered it: “Brooklyn was never the same after the Dodgers left. It was a terrible, terrible time when they left. As a boy, it was probably my first experience of genuine grief.”

Late in the night on February 1st this year, the world of American sports witnessed another shockwave. The NBA’s Dallas Mavericks traded their beloved star, Luka Doncic, to the Los Angeles Lakers. No, Dallas is not losing its basketball team, in a technical sense. Yes, star players are traded often. This was not just an unpopular business transaction, though. News of the trade broke late Saturday night and by Sunday afternoon a tidal wave of anger, confusion, hurt, and bitterness swept across both the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex and the internet. This story matters beyond north Texas. It is the latest evidence that American sports have become so dominated by a short sighted drive toward commodification that it risks its place at the heart of American cultural life. It is not only fans who were hurt by this trade. Doncic himself was blindsided by the trade. During his introductory press conference in Los Angeles, Doncic was asked if he had wanted out of Dallas. He replied: “I thought I was going to spend my whole career there. Because loyalty is a big word for me.” Not only did Nico Harrison, the Mavericks’ general manager inform Doncic of the trade by a text message, but the move is certain to cost Doncic over $100 million over the next few years, because of the way the NBA salary cap is structured regarding players traded from their original teams. After the trade, the Mavericks’ front office leaked their frustration with Doncic’s conditioning and the way he related to the team. These reports were quickly and publicly disputed by many of his teammates.

The Hero’s Journey

Why did Luka (he is almost exclusively referred to by his first name among basketball fans and north Texans alike) strike such a chord with this particular community? He has made the first team all NBA list (the best five players in a given year) five times in his first six years. In 2022 he led a collection of mediocre teammates to the conference finals. Last year he led the team to the NBA finals. It was not only his level of play that connected with fans. His style of play and skill on the basketball court was (and remains) moving to anyone with an eye for beauty. Luka’s unique combination of joy and intensity, the way he mixes playfulness and ferocity, and the human connection between the player and the people are all things that cannot be replaced, even if the new roster succeeds. Yet, there was more than Luka’s greatness and artistry that forged him as a community pillar in north Texas. He embraced a team and a city that has not done much winning. He made surprise visits to area children’s hospitals. Sure, Luka has a reputation for complaining about calls, for drinking celebratory beers, and for refusing to conform to the image of a polished, corporate athlete that someone like Lebron James exudes. It was through these human foibles, not in spite of them that he was revered by the people of north Texas and basketball fans alike. 

In the excellent Roberto Clemente biography, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero by David Maraniss, longtime Pittsburgh sports writer Phil Musick reflected on Clemente’s untimely and heroic death (in a plane crash, taking relief to earthquake victims in Nicaragua) in these poignant words: “I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a hell of a guy. Because he was, and now it’s too late to tell him there were things he did on a ball field that made me wish I was Shakespeare.” Go to Pittsburgh today and you’ll see a Clemente statue. Talk to someone from Pittsburgh about Clemente, though, and you will see the indelible mark he made on the soul of a city. The mix of pride, ferocity, and big heartedness that constitutes the ethos of Pittsburgh can be traced partly to Clemente’s years playing for and living in the city. Luka Doncic did not die, of course, but fans protested the trade by bringing a coffin to the American Airlines Center, the team’s home arena. Fans said the situation was “like a death in the family” and a “betrayal.” Maraniss, in the aforementioned biography, noted that “The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on cliches of the innocent past…But Clemente’s myth arcs the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become.” As was the case with Clemente in Pittsburgh, so is the case with Luka in Dallas. He inspired both joy and optimism, contentness and awe, gratitude and delight in the fans who loved him. And he loved them back. The relationship between this player and these fans was founded on a fundamentally human basis: the quest for greatness and the need for participation in something bigger than oneself. Speaking to the 1984 US Olympic team then president (and former Chicago Cubs broadcaster) Ronald Reagan defined the pursuit of greatness as the heart of fan appreciation. “The American ideal is not just winning; it’s going as far as you can go. If by pushing yourself to the limit you set a record or win a medal, you’ll hear us. We’ll probably look a little silly expressing our pride in your accomplishment, but our affection and pride is something you can count on. We’ll be cheering–win, lose, or draw.” Reagan’s insight is something Mavericks leadership did not understand. The striving makes the winning sweet and the journey gives fandom its meaning.

When asked to address disappointed fans Harrison, the general manager that orchestrated this trade, responded that he was sorry for the frustration fans felt, but that he believed the team would win and those feelings would dissolve. Kirk Henderson, who writes for a prominent Mavericks fan site penned an open letter to Nico Harrison in response to Harrison’s insistence that fans would get over the trade was eloquent and representative of how many in the Dallas region feel: “We want to win, yes. But we want to win with our guy…Luka Doncic was our guy. You are not. We wanted to see our guy’s path along the Hero’s Journey as he worked his way through tribulation and triumph.”

The Business of Sports and the Duty of a Public Trust

Two years ago, Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics announced that the franchise would move to Las Vegas, ending the existence of one of baseball’s oldest and most storied franchises in its longstanding home. In the summer of 2021, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma jointly announced a move to the Southeastern Conference, the premiere and most lucrative college sports association. The next summer the four most important college sports entities on the west coast announced a move to the Big 10, a Chicago based conference long associated with the upper midwest. In each case the ascending teams set themselves up to make more money, but destroyed decades of tradition and former conference partners without a home. The Pac 12, which was the oldest conference in major college sports, essentially died after the Big 10 raid. A 2020 documentary “Throw a Billion Dollars From The Helicopter” chronicles how the billionaire owners of the Texas Rangers baseball club, with the help of an inept mayor, duped Arlington, TX, residents into paying hundreds of millions of dollars for a new stadium. Right now, the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns and Chicago Bears are pushing for new, publicly funded stadiums and alienating many of their longtime fans in the process. College football coaches, even uniquely unpopular ones without much success, routinely sign contracts worth around $100 million and still ask fans to donate more and more money to their team’s recruiting efforts. Both collegiate and professional sports have been aggressively cozying up to gambling interests, a sure sign that a healthy profit motive has turned into the type of greed that melts the wax wings of hubris. In each of these examples, leaders of a specific sports entity have broken faith with the real people that make up the specific place the team represents.

Sports in America has always been a business and that is a good thing. The United States hosts the world’s best leagues in baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. We possess an unrivaled college sports landscape. Both professional and collegiate sports are markers of community pride, identity forgers, and sources of friendship and familial connection. From Madison to Tocqueville to Putnam the best American political thinkers have cited the need for voluntary association, if we are to have a healthy republic. The American project has no replacement for the role that sports plays in our lives. It is incumbent on the owners and executives of professional teams, as well as university presidents and athletic directors to begin thinking of their jobs more holistically. Compete to win, yes. Fight for a larger market share, sure. But keep in mind the sacred trust that a city or state has placed in you. Remind yourself of the debt you owe to the past and the future, not merely the present. Keep in mind the role you play as a civic leader, not merely as a business executive.

Fox News host, former sports commentator, and lifelong Mavericks fan, Will Cain, aptly described the dominant feeling of the team’s fans when he said: “What has me most upset is there is no understanding from whoever made this decision…[of] the role Luka played in the psyche of the city of Dallas.” Cain went on to highlight how the logic of Maverick’s general manager, Nico Harrison, collided so spectacularly with fan sentiment. Cain said, “Nico saw Luka as an asset, not an icon. The problem is he’s not an asset. He’s not just another player, even a very good one. He’s an icon. And I don’t think just in Dallas.” That last line is key. If this story were only about the adoring relationship between an athlete and a city, it would not matter much beyond Dallas and Los Angeles. Fundamentally, though, this is a story about how sports in America has become more commodified, less personal, and increasingly detached from what it means to steward a civic institution.

Athens had Pericles, London had Shakesphere, and Vienna had Mozart. Brooklyn had the Dodgers and Dallas had Luka. Luka’s greatness now belongs to basketball’s most storied franchise and one of America’s signature cities. As you watch this story unfold over the next decade, whether you are a grieving Mavericks fan, an exuberant Lakers fan, or someone who simply does not care about sports, keep the larger picture in mind: Not all that glitters is gold. Luka and the Lakers is going to be as glitzier than Luka with the Mavericks, but it will be missing something important. A star player, dedicating a career to a single team and its fans is the kind of human story we need more of in sports. For a team whose unofficial motto is “loyalty never fades” to burn so much public goodwill by abruptly and coldly sending away the beloved heart of its team for a risky shot at short term gain reveals just how far American sports has drifted into a dangerous place.

A sports industry that does a better job caring about the athletes it employs and the community it represents is a step toward a healthier American republic. A sports world that is too guided by the thinking of assets, short-term planning, and value maximization might yet burn bright a while longer, but will exhaust the goodwill and investment of the people it says it represents. There is no sense in despairing. It is within the capacities of collegiate sports administrators and professional sports executives to begin keeping the interest of their players and fans in mind. There is plenty of money to be made, while acting to preserve the fan-team relationship. The health of American civic life depends on it.

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