COVID-19 and the Future of Sports

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, sports has been sideswiped by COVID. Could the pandemic cancel American college football? Well, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Mountain West are the big college football conferences pulling teams this fall. Sportswriter, Dave Zirin, and retired NFL defensive end and activist, Michael Bennett, co-authored “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.” Here’s our Hari Sreenivasan talking about collegiate athletes being empowered by the Black Lives Matter movement and demanding their safety against COVID with the hashtag, we are united and we want to play.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Thanks, Christiane. Thanks, Dave and Michael, for joining me. This seems like an intersection of so many things that are happening at this moment. We’ve got student athletes, their long-term struggles, we’ve got a pandemic, we’ve got Black Lives Matter, we’ve got restarting schools, and that’s part of why I wanted this conversation with you, because of what is happening with college football seems to give us a gateway into so many other interesting things. So, let me start with this about college football. Dave, have you ever seen anything like this where students successfully advocated on their own behalf in such a public way, where in a matter of weeks we actually saw action that would impact their lives and their collegiate careers?

DAVE ZIRIN, SPORTS EDITOR, THE NATION: No, I mean, you would have to go back to the late 1960s when you had a period of the revolt of the black athlete, when a lot of black student athletes, as they’re called, although I have problems with phrase, student athlete, as we can discuss, but a lot of them organized themselves against racist coaches, against not having any black cheerleaders against not being able to choose their own classes. I mean, there was a wave of that in the late ’60s and early ’70s by athletes who were empowered by the black freedom struggle. And I think that’s the reflection we’ve seen out today. A lot of these athletes feel empowered by the Black Lives Matter movement to actually speak out on their own behalf. And so, it’s not just the pandemic. It’s seeing people in the streets call out for racial justice, has them applying that to their own lives.

SREENIVASAN: Michael, I want you to take us back, if you could. When you were playing at Texas A&M, could you imagine a moment where students would just say, listen, I want scholarship protection. I want the costs of the medical care associated with this pandemic paid for. You know, I am not just your entertainment. I’m a human being. I mean, has this power dynamic shifted in just a short time between when you were in school and today?

MICHAEL BENNETT, RETIRED NFL PLAYER: No, I couldn’t imagine. I feel like, before, there was a lot of fear. We didn’t have Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. We didn’t have that moment, that climax moment to push everybody over the edge. There was a lot of quietness. And it was — people were subjugated to a lot of things. And I think, looking back, I don’t think we had the courage to be able to collectively unionize almost, in a sense, and really ask for what we really wanted, knowing that we were the product, knowing that we were the ones who were bringing an income into the school, and knowing the things that we face when we come into this, as Dave was talking about, being able to select your class, not being pushed into a certain way. And to see that, finally, they’re coming together as a whole and challenging the NCAA on their status, and knowing how it’s been — being ability to benefit and profit off of young amateur athletes, and not allowing them to make any income, and knowing that they have all almost put them in a situation where they had to deal with paying on their whole life in the continuation after they finished with the sport. I think any contract that you sign in perpetuity is a dangerous contract.

SREENIVASAN: Dave, there were two separate hashtags that seemed to merge. And in a way, these students accomplished something that the rest of the country has not. There was the #weareunited hashtag and then there was the #wewanttoplay. And for a while, those were almost wedged against each other. Walk us through what happened.

DAVE ZIRIN, “THE NATION”: Sure. Two of the big five conferences have now said, we are not going to be playing football this far — this fall. And what that did was, it agitated a lot of the athletes who were saying, we need to unite, we need to unionize, we need to have a say our health care, we need to have a say in how we’re treated during this pandemic. That shifted. And they started to say, like, well, wait a minute, we actually do want to play, though. We just want to be able to have a say in how this playing comes about. The problem, though, is that they don’t have a players association. The problem is that there is no centralized united leadership, like a commissioner, like you have in the NFL or the NBA. And so there’s no real way to organize and get what these college athletes so obviously deserve. So, instead, what you had was different conferences backbiting against each other, different medical experts, people were turning to at different times, saying what they necessarily wanted to hear about whether to open or not open. You had a lot of lawyers involved on the question of liability. And before you knew it, you had a good portion of the college football season, as of this recording, just completely up in smoke.

SREENIVASAN: Michael, tell us how important that last year of playing can be. I mean, in this context, it seems like, if you’re on the bubble or a good player, this could determine your placement in the draft, on how high you’re selected, how much money you might get as a signing bonus. And, then, alternatively, there’s also the potential here is your health from the virus itself or the health of one of your loved ones. I mean, how hard is it for a player to deal with that?

BENNETT: I think it’s a difficult decision. I mean, you have to the duality of wanting to achieve something at a high level, then also duality of just being a student athlete and having to deal with the health part. So, it’s like you’re in a conundrum because you don’t know what to do really. And being a student athlete or being actually in the final year of your collegiate years is really important to you trying to put yourself in a position to be able to be in combine. But I think this is bigger than that. I think this is the moment where the exploitation of the collegiate athlete is on the bubble of bursting. And I think, as a collegiate athlete, it’s hard to — some of the athletes might find it hard to sacrifice for the greater good. But, at this moment, the greater good is what is — what will be better for a lot of the younger athletes who are coming to the college level.

SREENIVASAN: Dave, you have called the college football system a plantation system. What do you mean by that?

ZIRIN: Well, because I feel like it’s been organized for a generation, at least, on the basis of the systematic exploitation of primary — primarily black athletes. And it has — there’s this big sucking sound in college football that involves the taking of black wealth that is created and putting it in the pockets of administrators, of coaches, and of primarily white administrators of the game itself. I mean, college football, you take a step back from it, it is the second most profitable and popular sport in all of the United States to the National Football League. That’s the only sport it’s behind in terms of ratings and money. There’s currently billions of dollars of television contracts out there to broadcast college football. College football coaches are the highest paid state employees in — I believe it’s 39 of the 50 states it’s the football coach in the state that’s the highest paid public employee. And to make it even more stark, just so people understand it, when Clemson won the national championship back in 1981, their coach, Danny Ford, made $50,000 a year. The coach now, Dabo Swinney, makes $10 million a year. So that’s when I call it — when I refer to it as a plantation system, it’s a system where the athletes do not get paid for the labor they put in. And it’s not a coincidence to me that the most exploitative sport, which is college football, is a sport that is absolutely dependent on black bodies for the purpose of its profitability.

SREENIVASAN: Michael, you have heard the familiar refrain from the NCAA: Listen, you’re — and Dave referenced this here — you’re getting an education. You’re still amateurs. This changes the dynamic if you were to get paid. Should college athletes be compensated? Should they be able to unionize?

BENNETT: I mean, if we’re going off of simply capitalism and a fair business deal would be, if you achieve a certain amount of success and you achieve — you bring in your company a lot of money, then you are — you would have a stock option, you would have dividends in some type of capacity. And I think, as a collegiate athlete, collegiate athletes should be paid, because, if you look at a lot of the collegiates, you go back to Johnny Manziel, and you look at his jersey being sold without his name on it, we know that he has the highest sold jersey. We look back at Cam Newton, and we look back at all these great athletes who were put — going to the NFL, but their jerseys were being sold in so many different ways. And they — and the university benefited off their names and benefited off the papers and benefited off that. You got collegiate athlete who can’t even have food, but they’re the number one prospect. But the athlete is stuck in a situation where he can’t achieve anything and get any amount of money for his service. And I think we do look back at the degree — I mean, depending on what degree you got, who knows what — a bachelor’s degrees isn’t worth much these days. And I think if the collegiate athlete isn’t allowed to benefit off of his skill, which is his brand, which is body, which the university is using, then what else is there for him to do, besides — they say, you got this degree, but it’s not worth the paper that it’s printed on, just quoting Dave.

SREENIVASAN: Michael, I want to also just touch on the NFL. Like, since training camp has started, somewhere around 60 — I think 56 players as of last week have already tested positive with this virus. You played a position, defensive end. You are literally face to face with a guy who — you guys are battling every down.

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BENNETT: Halitosis. Yes, you get a lot of halitosis coming right back at you.

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SREENIVASAN: So, is there any way possible for this sport to be played safely, even — what kind of testing regimen? What is some way that you could play such a close-contact, incredibly physical sport, where you’re exerting so much energy, safely?

BENNETT: Honestly, I think this whole idea of playing the sport safely, I think, when we look back at Donald Trump and the way that he was able to articulate a message around capitalism over the morality of the citizens, I think that was the opening gate into a lot of these jobs, and a lot of this pushback from a lot of the citizens realizing that a lot of these businesses and a lot of these things that they love don’t share the same amount of love. And we used to romanticize with our occupation and think that, wow, my job, I love it, it loves me in the same type of way. And now we’re looking back and realizing that, at the bare minimum, the most important thing of all was always achieving money. And I think it’s going to be really hard to find a safe way, and not allow — not to see any players get this virus, because, at the same time, we know it’s violent. We know that the sport of NFL, it — you have to be close, you have to be touching. So, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s — if it’s possible to go whole season and not spread the virus.

SREENIVASAN: I want to ask also about this moment that we’re in now. You were playing at a time when players, including Colin Kaepernick and yourself, were protesting silently. You got a lot of criticism for it. And here you are now. You turn on some of these NBA games, MLB games, you have entire teams taking a knee together. You see referees, players coaches doing it. What does that mean for you?

BENNETT: I mean, I kind of worry about the idea of symbolism. I’m worried that symbolism is — people see that as being the number one goal to achieving progress. And I think we have to be careful to not be a part of the moment, and continue thinking about it as a movement. I think looking back as being — seeing and being a part of those things, it felt more risky at those moments, because you — it wasn’t the popular thing to do. And I think now we are looking at something, and it’s becoming popularized in a culture, where things seem to be instant, when you look at Instagram, you look at Facebook. Everything seems to be trending. But I think we have to wait it out to see how far, how long and how strong those symbols really mean, because, at the end of the day, we have a lot of these owners and a lot of these teams saying that black lives matter, but we look at — we start to take a deep jog through their minds and deep job through their (INAUDIBLE) or who they’re connected to, we start to really see the arms and things of what they’re connected to. We will see a lot of contradictory notions. We will see support of Donald Trump. We will see a support of — we see a lot of different things that we don’t really want to see. And I think we have to be able to really be honest and be reconciled with what the truth of the ownerships of these teams do, and what the players do and who we really are. I think trying to be a part of this moment and trying to find a way to be a part of this social world, I think that’s the thing that we have to be careful of. I think, in some form, in some way, that the NFL needs to have honest conversations, not just with media, but being able to have honest conversation with its players publicly, such as being the commissioner having an honest conversation with some of the players about why did it take so long, because I think there’s a sense of a relationship that’s been broken between the players and the coaches, especially when it comes to Black Lives Matter.

ZIRIN: Michael said something really important that I want to underline. We have to remember that the goal was never to have the right to kneel or sit during the anthem. The goal was never to have free speech during the anthem. That’s not what this was about. This has been about police reform. And so the concern is that, when all the focus is on what the NBA players are doing during the anthem and whatnot, then it just basically becomes, like, commodifying dissent. Like, it becomes almost a marketing tool, like, look how woke we are, and not something that’s directed towards a particular movement goal, which is what this has been all about from beginning.

SREENIVASAN: Dave, I’m sure not surprised when you see the president talk about low ratings for NBA, it’s because of the activism. I mean, it’s part of the pattern of how he has used sports over the last several years.

ZIRIN: Yes, I think President Trump, the most disciplined part of his entire presidency has been to launder racial animus through sports. Or you want to call it racial dog whistling or you want to call it racism, whatever you want to call it. He has constantly use sports, particularly sports that are centered around black athletes, namely, the NFL and the NBA, as a place to sort of whip up his base. Like, if you notice what he said about the NBA, he said, look how bad their ratings are. They’re not doing a great job, like hockey. It’s like, you don’t need to be Al Sharpton to figure out what he’s saying. And, also, it would be worth pointing out that the NBA’s ratings are something like three times as high as hockey’s ratings. But when has he ever let facts get in the way? The point is to use the players as basically a distraction for people, as a way to — so, it’s like, don’t look at the pandemic, don’t look at how divided the country is, don’t look at how much pain people are in economically right now. Blame these wealthy athletes who don’t appreciate what a great country this is.

SREENIVASAN: But, Michael, why do you think that sports is such a proxy for all of these different types of culture wars that we have? I mean, on the one hand, what was very simple was cheering for your team, wearing your team’s colors, jersey, going to tailgate, whatever, having a great time. But all of a sudden, now it seems that your support of a team or a specific player or a league is a political statement in and of itself.

BENNETT: Oh, I think we’re living in a politicized world right now, because a lot of things are worried about the politics of how man is going to be treated. We’re looking at the racial disparities doing COVID. It showed. And I think, a lot of times, the teams and players are starting to grab back their humanity. There’s always been this sense of this subhumanism when you were an athlete. You were a part of this class that didn’t — that didn’t get sick. You didn’t — you didn’t associate with all these different things. And now athletes are having this awakening. And I think the whole world is having this awakening into its responsibility to its fellow citizen. When you look at an athlete, you like to not think that they’re a part of the system, but they are a part of it in every single way. So, now when an athlete stands, you look at Colin Kaepernick, and you look at what he did, a lot of people hated what he did, because they’re saying that, oh, he’s bringing sports and politics and religion into all these different things. But why would we — when we get on the field, why would our blackness be taken away when we go into this world, and people still see us as a color, they still see us as a threat, they still see us as something other than human? And I think, when we talk about our political views, that brings back the human side of this. And I think it’s important, as being an athlete, to recognize those things and recognize the responsibility of being able to speak up and recognize the responsibility of really being a full citizen.

SREENIVASAN: All right, Dave Zirin, Michael Bennett, thank you both.

ZIRIN: Thank you.