Keep politics — and especially wokeness — off our sporting fields
From the NRL Grand Final to the NBA, the politics of offence is polluting the once-hallowed ground of sport, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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It has been said that, with belief declining and Sunday service attendance dwindling, sports stadiums are the new cathedrals.
That may be so.
But if that is the case, then the new faith being practised in these earthbound houses of worship would have to be the religion of right-on, holier than thou far-left, green-infused progressivism otherwise known as “wokeness”.
For years now, whether it has been the AFL’s relentless pushing of progressive causes or American football players taking a knee to protest the national anthem of the country that made them multi-millionaire superstars, left-wing activism has been infiltrating the very sports grounds that were once refuges from the political conflicts that are out there in the “real” world.
And lately, this new faith has taken a somewhat more, shall we say, inquisitorial tone.
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Consider the case of Gold Coast Titans star Ryan James — himself indigenous — who got nervous and fouled up his recitation of the traditional “welcome to country” at the NRL Grand Final.
After reciting a couple of sentences, James forgot his lines, smiled nervously, and said, “I’m lost”.
Watching the video, it is clear that James meant no disrespect.
Even for an athlete conditioned to hold his nerve and perform in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans, getting up and speaking — without notes — is a hell of a challenge.
But no, he screwed up, the performance was deemed “embarrassing” and “offensive” by event hire company TFH and — whatever else in the relationship between the team and the sponsor may have been brewing — James was sent to the virtual gulag.
Since then, the controversy has spread, with the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, the state’s peak indigenous group, attacking the NRL for using James to repeat words for the TV cameras which had already been said earlier by a local woman.
In some ways, the whole affair is even more distressing than the controversy over Israel Folau’s sacking by the Wallabies, which is now being considered by the courts.
After all, Folau proactively preached a message he knew cut against the commandments of Rugby Australia.
Ryan James, on the other hand, just stumbled into his controversy by accident.
Of course, for a truly disturbing display of what happens when sport and politics mix, look no further than the US.
By way of background it helps to note that the National Basketball Association, or NBA, is — and there is a lot of competition for the title — considered perhaps the most woke sports competition in America.
More than a week ago Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey fired off a brief tweet in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, angering communist leaders in Beijing and Chinese nationalists around the world.
Morey was made to back down with a series of humiliating tweets, but, what’s worse, basketball fans in America attending games were ejected from arenas for wearing pro-Hong Kong T-shirts, carrying pro-Hong Kong signs and calling out “Free Hong Kong’’.
The NBA, and sports broadcast network ESPN which televises the games, have hundreds of millions of fans in China, and the threat of losing access to them was too much to bear.
What’s worse, players such as LeBron James, who have had no trouble “calling out” Donald Trump, suddenly turned tail and ran from an opportunity to defend human rights, free speech and all that. Instead, the superstar criticised Morey, saying he “wasn’t educated” about the situation in Hong Kong.
Well, OK.
Here you have to wonder if the zillionaire elites of the NBA, and every other corporation that has shamefully kowtowed to an increasingly thin-skinned Beijing, are not so much being hypocrites as finding a happy medium.
It’s not hard to imagine that for many of the hyper-wealthy woke left elite, a system of social credit and repression where citizens are encouraged to be diligent workers and consumers and never say a word against the narrative might not seem like that bad a thing.
Think this is an exaggeration? Consider how many big corporates’ social media policies effectively bind their employees’ out-of-hours political expression to their company “values”.
Or that — to bring it back to the new religion again — criticising Greta Thunberg is just as likely to provoke a campaign to get you fired as saying foul nonsense about the Virgin Mary, as Kyle Sandilands recently discovered.
Of course, it may well be that sport, like every other thing in our world, is now so shot through with politics that the only thing people can do is have the fights on the field and hope they don’t spill over too much into real life.
If Britain’s defeat of Napoleon was set in motion, as the saying used to go, on the playing fields of their posher than posh prep school Eton, the forces of dreary, totalitarian wokeness seem to be having their victory on the playing fields of the world.
Catch James every Sunday morning on Outsiders, Sky News Australia, 9-11am