The Great Bond of Politics and Sports: Their Ability to Dehumanize Us
What happened after Sunday's match at Wimbledon between players on opposite sides of their nations' role in the Russian-Ukraine war shows how too often sports and politics conspire to tear us apart
As I write this, I’ve just finished watching one of the most exciting, yet depressing, sporting events I’ve ever witnessed as a lifelong fan. Elina Svitolina of Ukraine and Victoria Azarenka of Belarus have just waged an epic duel in the fourth round of the Wimbledon ladies competition, with Svitonlina pulling out a scintillating third-set tiebreak that represented the true beauty of this sport (one of the few I still watch on a regular basis).
What should have come next was a warm embrace at the net by two fierce competitors who left everything on the grass of the world’s most legendary tennis tournament. But it didn’t. What should have come next was a standing ovation by the crowd for the tennis excellence displayed by these two women as they put on a show to remember. But it didn’t.
You probably don’t need me to tell you why. Belarus is a close ally of Russia, and Russia and Ukraine are at war for reasons neither of these two ladies have any control over, so there would be no handshake at the net, because whether Sviotlina or Azarenka want to or not, they are now sports proxies for the sins or heroics of their respective governments (Azarenka did acknowledge Sviotlina with a polite gesture of the hand, and it was Sviotlina who has made the decision not to shake hands with players from Russia or Belarus as long as the war continues). The British crowd chose to rain down boos on Azarenka, either for the lack of a handshake (though it wasn’t her choice) or for the crime of being a citizen of Belarus at a time when the country has become an international pariah (if the latter, they might want to do some brushing up of their own nation’s record of colonial terror over the centuries) .
Victoria Azarenka of Belarus leaves the court to boos, apparently because she was born in the wrong country.
Russia and Belarus, like America, are so much more than the individuals, evil or righteous or more frequently somewhere in between, who lead their governments. They are cultures, traditions, shared experiences and heritages, and, more than anything, a collection of human beings, all flawed and beautiful in their own way. Yet, after banning them altogether last year, Wimbledon was kind enough to let Russian and Belarusian players back to the tournament this year, only stripping them of their roots and heritage. Unlike every other player representing their home country, they are officially “neutral,” the flags of Russia and Belarus and country designations nowhere to be seen anywhere on the scoreboards or television screens of Wimbledon. In stigmatizing them for the sins of their nation’s leaders, one of the world’s greatest sporting events has succumbed to the same thing it purports to stand against. It has become an enabler and vehicle of hate.
I’ve been fascinated and obsessed with sports and politics my whole life, and what happened on this day in Wimbledon perfectly capsulizes the great damage both have done to our world and concept of humanity over the years. They’ve both made it so easy to dehumanize our opponents or enemies, whether on a tennis court, football field, halls of Congress or a battlefield. Or even in an Olympic pool (anyone know about the “Blood in the Water” water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary amid the 1956 Hungarian revolution?). They’ve both made it so easy to put our fellow humans into separate boxes, distinguished by their differences rather than their similarities, castigated for being on the wrong side or “team.”
And we love it. Because by wallowing in the primal tribalism that sports and politics enable, it makes it so much easier to ignore our own shortcomings, failures and foibles — or those of our homelands. Because when you’re too busy castigating the collective “them,” you don’t have time to look in the mirror at your own humanity, your own failures.
I know it because I experienced it. Growing up during the Cold War, I relished, whether in politics or sports, seeing “them” as the enemy that needed to be defeated at all costs. Like all Americans in 1980 who had never actually watched an ice hockey game, I viewed the “Miracle on Ice” at that year’s Winter Olympics as the ultimate triumph of good over evil, oblivious to the fact that the players who competed on the ice that day in Lake Placid were, at the end of the day, just human beings like myself, flawed, yet beautiful, playing a simple game that we couldn’t resist turning into something so much more, just as too many fans at Wimbledon had to do today with these two women who only wanted to play a game they loved for the enjoyment of thousands.
Except many of those American heroes of Lake Placid, who I thought as a 9-year-old represented all that was good and pure about America and what it stood for, showed up a few years ago at an event with Donald Trump donning “MAGA” hats, supporting a man who has repeatedly trampled on every basic principle and self-evident truth upon which our nation was supposedly founded — including democracy itself. Or maybe those great principles were just a figment of my imagination and the whitewashing of history that every American kid from my era was subjected to?
And the Soviets who went down to defeat that day, representing what would become Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire”? Were they any more responsible for the unjust Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the year before than Azarenka and her fellow Belarus citizens were for Putin’s brutal aggression in Ukraine? (A few years ago, I came across an ESPN documentary about the Soviet hockey players from that team, and I found myself hit with the realization for the first time that these people were not just Cold War pawns; they were actual human beings with actual lives).
The question is rhetorical. Because the answer is that it doesn’t really matter. We don’t care. They are all just proxies, like Trump and Biden, AOC and MTG, for the dehumanization of one another that we just can’t resist. And the dehumanization doesn’t stop there. It leads inevitably to football’s “BountyGate” and concussion scandals, the baseball and hockey brawls we lick up as much as the competition, the tolerance for cheating and flouting of sportsmanship, because at some point, the athletes to whom we glue ourselves stop being human beings, real people with real feelings, real problems and real dreams. They are robotic vehicles, there only to satiate our base desires, whether for entertainment, gratification or a sense of moral superiority that is ultimately a lie. And as soon as they lose their value as entertainers or proxies for our escapades into tribal warfare, we forget about them and move on to the next crop of fresh meat to feed our most primal instincts, because we never really saw them as human beings to begin with (how else to explain how easy it’s been for fans of the NFL to “move on” from the concussion coverup that destroyed so many lives, or the racist blackballing of Black players who took a stand for social justice?)
This is not about Sviotlina and Azarenka, regardless of who chose not to shake hands with whom, or the fans who, for whatever reason, chose to boo the Belarusian. Because at the end of the day, they are all caught up in something they can’t control, something that the worlds of sports and politics have conspired to inflict upon them and us all. Sviotlina surely doesn’t hold ill will against Azarenka for simply being born where she was. It’s not personal, except that it is. Because the toxic stew of politics and sports has created the framework that not only allows for the dehumanization of the opponent, but demands it, because the person can’t be separated from the country, the good can’t be separated from the evil. And yet how can I criticize her decision, when I can’t begin to relate to what she has seen and experienced in her homeland? I can’t, and I don’t need to, because the problem isn’t with Sviotlina or Azarenka; they are both victims of what we have all created and tolerated in merging politics, sports and human worth.
Regardless of who won and lost at Wimbledon on Sunday, what followed this match was a great victory for the Putins and Trumps of the world and their blind, hate-filled followers. They love the dehumanization that sports and politics enable. They want us all at each other’s throats, seeing one another as intrinsically evil by the nature of what team, political party or country we represent. At the end of the day, it’s all about hate, albeit a subtle, deceptive form of hate that we can’t see even as it envelops us.
Because hate isn’t just about actively working to harm another person by throwing a fist or pulling a trigger; it can be just as evil when it manifests itself in the inability to recognize the humanity in another person because they represent the “enemy," the “other,” rather than the truth they are really just like us in so many ways (except maybe that they can throw a fastball 100 mph or hit a serve 150 mph). Because that’s when it becomes most easy to ignore what binds us together, our common humanity, and that’s really what the Trump and Putin types want above all else.
I only pray that someday those who enabled and took part in this sad spectacle will learn the same lesson that it took me much too long to learn. We are all human beings occupying one beautiful planet for one beautiful purpose. If the Trumps and Putins have provided one service to humanity in recent years, it’s forcing those of us who are willing to open our hearts and minds to the hard truths and complex histories of our own heritages, and realize how easy it is to succumb to lies and hate in “othering” those on the other side of the net or border.
The harder that those who rule the worlds of politics and sports try to obscure that truth, the harder the rest of us must fight fight to bury their lies in the dustbin of history where they belong. No child in 2023 should be sucked into the dehumanization of sports and politics the way I was in 1980, and for many years after.
Postscript: After writing this, I came across this meditation by mystic Howard Thurman this morning from Catholic theologian Richard Rohr’s newsletter, which seemed as though it could have been written specifically in relation to what happened at Wimbledon on Sunday (Thurman died in 1981). Sometimes, I think these things aren’t a coincidence; there is something greater at work inspiring us to tackle these topics.
“Jesus, however, approaches life from the point of view of God. The serious problem for him had to be: Is the Roman a child of God? Is my enemy God’s child? If he is, I must work upon myself until I am willing to bring him back into the family .… If God loves them, that binds me. Can it be that God does not know how terrible my enemy is? No, God knows them as well as he knows himself and much better than I know them. It must be true, then, that there is something in every human that remains intact, inviolate, regardless of what he [or she] does. I wonder! Is this true? Is there an integrity of the person, so intrinsic in its value and significance that no deed, however evil, can ultimately undermine this given thing? If a person is of infinite worth in the sight of God, whether they are saint or sinner, whether they are a good person or a bad person, evil or not, if that is true, then I am never relieved of my responsibility for trying to make contact with this worthy thing in them.”
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/oneness-with-everyone-2023-07-10/
Love this perspective, Craig. It made me look back on events like the Miracle on Ice and see them differently.