How Sports Went Woke, Went Broke, And Accidentally Re-Elected Donald Trump

A review of 'Balls: How Trump, Young Men, and Sports Saved America' by Clay Travis

Sports coverage got suffused with identity politics because the sports media, like the rest of the legacy media, is staffed by people whose politics are to the left of the median voter. If anything, sports media is even worse about this than the rest of the media. This is how sports became ‘woke’ without any audience demand, Clay Travis writes in Balls: How Trump, Young Men, and Sports Saved America. The pattern recurs in the brands he discusses: Nike, Bud Light, and the NBA have all plummeted in market share by pushing ideological content that nobody asked for.

Travis says this drift is how Lia Thomas got on the women’s trophy stand in 2022, which in turn is the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 election, he writes. Travis’s fifth book is “a quick roadmap of the descent of sports from meritocracy, the best man or woman wins, to madness, the best man pretending to be a woman wins.” The NCAA forgot that it was a brand, and that dividing your customers against each other is usually bad for business.

Regular readers of The Distance will already know the chief means by which gender identity ideology has always advanced its program is through non-democratic, non-transparent, non-public policy capture. Per the 2019 ‘Denton’s Document’, as well as the recent revelations about the BBC, transgender activists always work behind the scenes to push their narratives and stifle any headlines that might question those narratives. Despite cancellation, Travis turned his website, OutKick.com, into an online sports juggernaut by simply counterprogramming that trend. Their coverage of Lia Thomas cheating in the pool circumvented the ‘old media’ filter by way of new media, feeding a cultural reaction.

A sports talker by trade, and a casual liberal who voted for Obama twice, Travis writes that the tipping point was the pointedly brief NFL career of Michael Sam. It was “the first true instance of identity politics capturing sports in the social media age” because “Sam’s athletic talents had virtually nothing to do with the attention he received. He was the first athlete I can recall dominating sports coverage without ever dominating sports at all.” ESPN chose to keep the camera focused on Sam kissing his boyfriend after he was selected very late in the 2014 NFL draft. Sam never played a regular season game. In retrospect, it all seems ominous to Travis, a harbinger of mediocrities to come.