Will Ferrell is now a part-owner of the new MLS side Los Angeles FC, meaning supporters of the LA Galaxy or the Seattle Sounders may feel compelled, or even required, to dislike Ferrell and his movies. Such is the risk a celebrity takes when taking a side on anything: sports, politics, whether a hot dog is a sandwich, you name it.
It became harder to enjoy two mindless hours of a Tom Cruise action movie the more we learned about his role in Scientology, just as it no doubt is difficult for a diehard New York Giants or Yankees fan to forget that Ben Affleck loves the Patriots and Red Sox while watching Gone Girl or Argo. (You may feel that being a Boston fan in no way compares to espousing Scientology, but a New York fan would disagree.)
Pre-social media, James Woods was just a character who appeared in a bunch of very watchable TV shows and movies. Now he’s the angry uncle you try to avoid talking to at Thanksgiving. Curt Schilling used to be a star pitcher famous for his bloody sock; now he’s … well, pretty much James Woods with a few World Series rings.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there are those who want to boycott movies featuring Hollywood liberals, and there are all the outraged people who complained to the FCC about Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend during the 2014 NFL draft broadcast.
Everything is a culture war now. It’s everywhere. And it’s impossible to avoid, even in the movies and sports many of us go to in hopes of finding a brief respite from all the yelling we find online and off. Sometimes I just want to watch the game, you know? Maybe flip on the TV and forget for a few hours that Donald Trump could become president of the free world.
But then you see Tom “Donald Is A Good Friend Of Mine” Brady and all the garbage creeps back into your brain when all you want is to see one of the greatest quarterbacks ever throw a ball to a man named Gronk. Then a Cam Newton touchdown highlight comes on and you can just feel the disturbance in the atmosphere as millions of people instantly fill with outrage over his chosen celebration routine. Please don’t take sports from us, too, culture wars.
This is not an appeal for everyone to stick to sports, or in the case of Hollywood: stick to movies. Tom Brady obviously has just as much right to his opinion about things off-the-field as I do or you do – and probably even more of a right, since he’s rich and famous and this is America, after all. And one day, if (when?) he runs for national office, I’ll want to hear all of his opinions. Because they’ll have a potential impact on my life. But for now, I don’t want to know who he’s voting for or what is in his Netflix queue.
Thanks to social media and the omnipresent sports media, though, most of us now know exactly way too much about every athlete. I have decided I want to know less. Tell me, show me, teach me any and everything about what happens between the lines, but beyond that? My feelings are increasingly captured by the words of the great American social commentator Jay Cutler: “Doooonnnnnn’t caaaaaarrrrrrrrre.”
Growing up I knew two things about Michael Jordan: that he was awesome at basketball and that he wore Nikes. But if Jordan was playing today, something he said or did once would become meme’d and thinkpieced and over-analyzed until half the country got sick of hearing the man’s name. Imagine the ubiquity of the Jordan crying meme, but make it a partisan comment. It would be hell.
It might just be fun if sports and movies went back to being the place we can get away from all the partisanship that we find in so much of the rest of our lives. Yet somewhere online right now, you know there’s an article about Andy Dalton’s thumb injury devolving in the comments section into an argument about Obamacare. No, thanks. I don’t claim to be above the fray. I’m just tired of the fray. I’ll happily take every piece of personal information shared about an athlete to be prompted by a warning: “SPOILER ALERT: What we are about to tell you could make you dislike this person. If you want to keep enjoying him as an athlete, please mute your TV now.” Agree or disagree, I don’t want to know. I just want to watch sports again.
The Know-Nothing Party was an American political party in the mid-1800s that was staunchly anti-immigrant and opposed to people of a particular faith (Catholics). Interestingly (or perhaps terrifyingly), that party platform is exactly the one currently advanced by supporters of Donald Trump some 165 years later, just with Muslims in place of Catholics. Since Trump’s supporters, be they crazy-faced people or All-Pro quarterbacks, haven’t adopted the Know-Nothing name, I want to bring it back.
Trump can keep the ideology, but I want the name. I’m starting a group called the Know-Nothing Sports Fans. Join me. We will just watch sports for sports. We will watch every game on mute. We won’t care who athletes are dating or voting for or how they are celebrating. It will be wonderful. We will make being a sports fan great again.
