The Super Bowl and a Taylor Swift private jet meme fellow progressives cannot ignore
Safe sport includes sustainable sport. The media is ignoring that reality. It is of a piece with the wingnut outrage complex doing a virtual drive-by when the pop star jets to her beau's NFL games.
One already knows who is going to win the Super Bowl. Advertisers, CBS, Taylor Swift, and a red-and-gold team whose nickname glosses over a campaign of genocide.1
No worries, though, I will watch the game entre Kansas City et San Francisco ce dimanche soir. The FOMO supersedes being as insufferable as Britta Perry. Football has me since, for the majority of the year, there is no watchable footballing. After the Super Bowl, it is exactly 200 days from the Super Bowl to the Week 1 U.S. major-college slate. You could look it up.
Matchup-wise, if the K.C. Mahomeys play their way, they win. These things I believe: seventy percent of the time, that adage “the ball bounces for the team with the better quarterback” holds 100 percent of the time, like a crafty offensive guard. Patrick Mahomes can spin it, in the argot of QB rooms, like few have. San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy is the cap-friendly cool-backstory game-managing tryhard, à la early career Tom Brady. Teams sometimes win the Super Bowl with that kind of quarterbacking, and San Fran is so freakin’ good.
Who do you trust more to rise to the moment of going off-script or off-schedule, fourth-time Super Bowl contestant Mahomes or second-season passer Purdy? That is the basis of my preferred oversimplification, and if it plays out the other way, then so it goes. As long as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are together, I am good.
All of that is exposition about emissions. The ‘editorial We’ must talk about Taylor Swift and her private plane, even if she only owns one now.
Well, one meme in particular.
This is right, you know. The missing middle context is that you only know about a public figure’s carbon footprint if their politics have traces of being anywhere left of Attila the Hun. That cuts both ways. Mother Earth and air quality readings do not care how you voted or what party got your donation.
My line is asking for more media and social pressure to get leagues to reformat for our worldwide Sustainability Eras Tour.
Instead, the beat goes on. The National Football League keeps rolling out announcements about staging international games. Brazil and Spain are next. ¿Por qué? The lifestyle along the Iberian peninsula and in South America, not to mention the diet, are at odds with the stop-and-start tedium and the physical specs of Americanized gridiron football. Think of the caloric counts the bullhunkuses on the defensive and offensive lines need to stay above 300 pounds. Like Ben Fountain wrote, only in America, and the America Jr. that is so-called Canada, could football exist.2
Cue Homer Simpson voice: “Heh-heh-heh. Football’s so great.”
It is opportunistic as hell to get my screed on today. Förlåt mig if anyone should think this is about Taylor Swift, pro or con. Not even touching that ‘Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire?’ deal.3
It was just cheap chicanery to get your attention about the fact neither the sports or entertainment industries can carry on like this; they are a part of the problem. But we also will need them during the climate solution.
This feeling has been in my gut for a while, along with a lot of other rage I have swallowed since 2018. The sports and entertainment industries need to scale down (as much as I need to slim down; project much you ginger fatass?).
Two days before the Super Bowl is a good time to get into it. Let’s remember how air travel factors into the elaborate staging of an NFL game or a Taylor Swift stadium show.
The travel party of a National Football League team often spreads to nearly 200 people, plus all the equipment and other football infrastructure.
Taylor Swift likely also has a staff of a few dozen people travelling with her, if not necessarily in her plane. The is she will take a trans-Pacific flight after a show in Japan to get to Las Vegas and (Insert Corporate Name Here) Stadium to support her beau.
The pop stars who perform at halftime require a similar number of image up-keepers, too. Throw in other high rollers who flew into Vegas on private jets so they can have a poorer view of the gameplay than I will on a 31-inch TV that I bought 11 years ago.
Those are policy decisions.
They fall in the range of the climate crisis that threatens a livable future, where we will still want popular forms of live sports and entertainment. And I keep hoping for whoever is left in whatever is left of the sports media to start writing and discussing how the big leagues, and promotions, mindlessly participate in what a report calls “greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change (that) disproportionately originate from the actions of wealthy populations in the Global North and are tied to excessive energy use and overconsumption driven by the pursuit of economic growth.”
The same report adds, “Addressing this crisis requires significant societal transformations and individual behaviour change. Most of these changes will benefit not only the stability of the climate but will yield significant public health co-benefits.”4
All three authors of that paper are women scientists. I should not mansplain feminism, but supporting women telling us our public health policies are killing us and draining our wallets seems to be an obligation to the cause.
Any journalistic beat in 2024 needs a climate change lens, pure and simple. That includes the sports beat, although one does not hold their breath when the media outlets are partnered with the leagues, or partnered with gambling companies who are insatiable about having events to offer odds on.
But we need some coherence out of the centrist-left majority in the U.S. and Canada on those societal transformations. A solid, undeniable point here that liberal-left folks like me have been reluctant to concede is that individualizing climate adaptation is only mildly helpful. I carry reusable cups and metal straws for iced coffee. I have lived car-free for 18 years. That is hardly any counter-weight to car culture, and to whatever comes out of the industrial sector, where most heavy manufacturers all enjoy exemptions from emissions regulations.
A second one is that it has become hard to talk about those transitions without people taking it as an attack on them for owning a house and cars that seem to get larger and heavier. In this age, guiding people to greater-good green choices is a no-no in North American retail politics. Convenient comparison: Paris is now charging people more to park if they drive an SUV, but in ONTerrible, good old Doug Ford and the Perpetually Criming Party of Oligarchs stopped charging motorists for their annual vehicle registration … and now people are getting fines since they misread the change to mean they no longer had to update their registration every year. The hidden costs of common sense conservatism keep costing.
So the feel-good individual actions are often the extent of what we are offered. When the solutions and the restructuring cannot be easily understood, and people see that as a threat to what they know, they will tune out. And that leaves the opening for the bad-faith actors — premiers, or piffleswipe prime minister-in-waiting who are in the pocket of the planet-burners and probably Vladimir Putin too, to sell their slogans and snake oil.5 It adds up to revolting against the future having a political base.
The latter are linked with the wingnut outrage complex going after Taylor Swift. It is noise. Stupid, stupid noise. There was no clamor circa 2008 when Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo were the pop singer-quarterback romantic combo. Of course, neither of them were as respectively successful as Swift and Kelce. And Simpson was a Republican at the time.
I might have given, oh, 13.3 percent credence to conspiracism about Swift and Kelce being more partners than lovers. Multiple female friends have said, no Neate, no woman could fake that affection.
Swift makes an easy target for easy reasons. Attacking her is a shot across the bow of women having agency, women making their own choices at all, whether they are in a doctor’s office or giving a blue-liberal politician their deciding margin in a general election. This is what the chattering chuds want to re-litigate until humans can no longer inhabit vast swaths of the earth. They do not give a rip about burning fossil fuels. Their opponent is the future.
Unfortunately, a certain kind of second-wave whiteness-tinged liberal feminism that has fealty to the status quo is not the blocking scheme we need. One understands. Doors that have been closed so, so long are opened, and one might not say it is time to retrofit the entire building.
At least the future, like kindness, is undefeated. The future always arrives, 100 percent of the time! Score-board! The empiricism about collective failure to curb climatic hazards could also make one say Scoreboard! … just not with similar amounts of joy. And I would like to have some joy.
Sport, true, is only a small part of those societal transformations. But sport gives us joy. And sometimes the joy comes when it takes a lead with progress, regardless of the greater motive.
Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers two decades before the U.S. Civil Rights Act was passed. Canada selected sportswomen to go to the Olympics a year before the Persons Case was decided. Those are examples, within an imperfect work toward inclusion, of where sports opened people’s minds about how much we shortchange ourselves with white-male exceptionalism.
It would have had to be the wingnut outrage complex to raise this point about celebrities flying around everywhere. Far be it to point out that the far right’s equivalent to rodeo clowns have patrons (literal cough, the Koch brothers, et al.) bent on derailing the Existential Threat since it threatens their profits.
I do not see much of this truth in the sports media. Whenever the climate crisis comes into view of the press boxes, the focus is often only on the logistic ends — rescheduling games, pausing the action more frequently so athletes can rehydrate during ‘extreme heat events,’ and the like. There is little questioning about the necessity of MLB, the NBA, NHL, and NFL, playing so many regular-season games, or having east coast and west coast teams play each other in the regular season since Derp, Tradition. I know those last two examples are just wrong.
Some examples of how Big Sport keeps marching on with oblivious intent all came to the fore toward the end of summer 2023. Let me tweeze out the receipts from my mental rogue’s wallet.
Aug. 19, Los Angeles / San Diego
Major League Baseball now requires all 30 teams to play each other within the 162-game season. On this Saturday, all three Southern California teams played doubleheaders, scrubbing Sunday playing dates to allow travel to be completed before disruptions caused by Hurricane Hilary.
The rub is that both Los Angeles teams were hosting a Florida team. It is completely unnecessary to have that matchup any time before October.
Sept. 3, Denver
Another instance of MLB acing Creating Your Own Problem 101 with the schedule. On Labour Day Sunday, the Toronto Blue Jays had a getaway game against the Colorado Rockies. There was an electrical storm and rain showers in the area. The game was delayed 59 minutes at one stage.
As a Jays diehard, I was listening to the game via MLB.com audio. In the ninth inning, it started raining again, and there were lightning strikes. The crowd mic picked up a P.A. announcement asking fans to exit the seating areas. But the game went on, despite the effect on play, and despite the record of ballplayers being killed from a lightning strike. These interleague teams only play one series per season, and the Jays needed to catch their flight to Oakland.
Sept. 4, Calgary
Cliché: the CFL season truly begins on Labour Day. So the Edmonton-Calgary game went ahead even though the city’s weather station logged air quality readings “that are classified as high risk” due to wildfire smoke. Hey, Bell Media and TSN need the viewers, man.
Per the players’ association, via CBC Sports, players “noticed how smoky it was during the game, and that they are aware of the impact such conditions have on their lungs and respiratory systems after exerting themselves for that long outside.”
Within a half-week, there was an agreement to have third-party air quality monitoring to decide whether a game goes ahead, is paused, or rescheduled. And you already know people will complain when that happens because they were denied their entertainment.
Sept. 6, New York
The final Slam event of the tennis season, the U.S. Open, went ahead amid extreme humidity. During his quarterfinal match, world No. 3 Daniil Medvedev said into a camera, “One player is gonna die. And they’re gonna see.”
Remember, the body keeps the score.
It is just that environmental destruction puts up points that sometimes do not go on the board until after the athlete is out of the game … The sun shines, and people forget.6 The athlete exerting themself in poor air quality on the same spectrum as the factory worker or firefighter exposed to carcinogens, or the nurse or teacher expected to swallow so much stress.
Does the sports media get that? More to the point, is it allowed to talk about that?
Maybe you should ask Anthony Rendon, or look at the chain overreaction to the light-hearted answer the L.A. ballplayer gave to a light-hearted question on a podcast.
Rule of thumb when an athlete talks out of turn: they are not saying anything that has not been discussed in the dressing room, the bus, or the team flight.
On a certain social media platform, there are now groups that contain posts of ChatGPT-generated word-salad about forms of pop entertainment. With sports, the model is a graphic with an inflammatory pull quote from a player. Sometimes the quote is fabricated with sarcasm that may not scan with sports fans. Either way, it’s meant to stir conflict.
That came for Anthony Rendon, and I did not speak up since I am not Anthony Rendon. The media hit where Rendon, veteran third baseman of the L.A. Angels, made the “we gotta shorten the season” comment that got around the world twice before you could even get your boots on was just one small part of a 70-minute conversation with a podcaster named Jack Vita.
I do not know of Jack Vita. His channel includes some ‘big gets’ with ballplayers, actors, and some content about baseball and Christianity. He has about 1,430 subscribers, not big, but better than what I have.
The talk pointed up that Rendon is long-toothed in ballplayer years as he nears age 34, with a litany of injuries, but he is also a young dad. He mentioned that all of his children are now in school, and he misses them. I was reminded of the parenting maxim that a child will remember whether their dad(s) or mum(s) were there, not how much time they were at work. He seemed human, and engaging, not, to borrow from Will Leitch, a robotic stats producer.
Around 42 minutes in, Vita asked the ‘if you could change one thing’ question. Rendon said he would keep his response “light-hearted” and said the regular season needed to have fewer games.
There is no doubt a lot of the MLB rank-and-file feel similarly. But it was easy to add ChatGPT and pot-stir. Who is he to say that? Rendon has played less than one full season in the past three and has produced little with the bat.
He’s right, you know. But there were content farming fields to be tilled! Feigning Thunbergian levels of HowDareYou that a worker who has been injured on the job suggests they are overworked. And it does not matter what girds Rendon’s claim. The point is that no one bothered to say, hey, maybe he points out, even indirectly, that sports should consume less and use less.
Maybe it seems like a stretch. Maybe I connect the wrong dots.
Yet sports do not exist in a vacuum. This is a Hail Mary flare sent up asking for us to train our eyes about what we use, and how much, and expect industries to do the same. The training is like one most football fans learn to do. On passing plays, you know how to have one eye on the quarterback, and one eye watching to see if the dominant jersey colour changes in the battle along the lines.
That should mean shorter regular seasons. It should mean less cross-continent and inter-ocean travel in the regular season, even if it is possible to have floating EV chargers at 34,000 feet. The size of a roster and coaching staff — but not medical and training staff — might also change. It could mean reverting to an age of more regionalized competition.
The kicker is MLB and the NFL showed it was doable. To get the fakey COVID season in during 2020, baseball split into three regions (Central, East, West) for a compact season. Instead of travelling parties of up to 200, the NFL pared to about 70 that season.
These industries are must right-scale. Has to start somewhere, has to start sometime, as one band in particular sang back before certain people realized RATM are political.
Who knows? I do not know the future. I just know the trend lines. Urgency is a helluva kick in the arse. A Swift kick we need, although not at Taylor’s expense.
7 February 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Sorry/not sorry. “Before there was the NFL, there were real 49ers who fought against actual chiefs. It was history’s Version 1.0 of a non-gridiron battle where native sons fought Native Americans. This partly forgotten fight remains a shameful part of U.S. history. That long-ago chapter is relevant today, at a time when racism and foreign immigration remain hot-button political issues.” Markos Kounalakis, McClatchy Media Network, Jan. 31, 2020.
From the novel The Long Halftime Walk of Billy Lynn.
If you have to ask, then the answer is probably “no.”
Esther K. Papies, Kristian Steensen Nielsen, and Vera Araújo Soares, “Health psychology and climate change: time to address humanity’s most existential crisis,” Health Psychology Review, Feb. 6, 2024.
Dave Troy is a must-follow on this file.
The Who, “Eminence Front.”