Sports fandom has long been a vehicle of escape, basketball fandom perhaps even more so. If you’re someone who toggles between NBA and WNBA, then you’ll never have a break in games you can escape into. If you’re purely an NBA watcher, then the league has done its willful best to make its product one that runs all year round, even if the games themselves take a break. If you’re even a little online then you can find something NBA-related to get excited/upset/anxious/overworked about any day the year, even in the deepest dregs of August.
Escapism is fine as a temporary measure. There’s no person alive that doesn’t seek it out in some shape or form, sometime. In basketball fandom the dangers of treating the game, and the people who play it, as a pure means of escape run fairly parallel to the dangers of this political moment.
To lose sight of the humanity of athletes, to range on the spectrum of othering to nullification of their personhood; to assume a franchise has only your interests as its sole, driving concern. To put so much stake into the outcome of a game, a season, that anything outside of pure dominance and control is considered failure. To take on defeat as a personality trait and grow miserable, hostile, blame serving both as vitriolic release and an easy balm.
This is perhaps a clumsy attempt to address the U.S. election results last night in a newsletter about NBA basketball, but it seemed a perfect encapsulation of my point of blind escapism to write about OKC’s pestering defence, or Joel Embiid’s three game suspension after shoving a reporter, and make no mention of Donald Trump’s second ascension.
Basketball isn’t apolitical. No sport is, but the NBA hasn’t been for a long time. Shut up and dribble, stop-work protests in the Orlando Bubble led by athletes personally the target of police brutality, taking a knee. Even when it isn’t trying to be, it is, because it’s a game played by people and beyond that, predominantly Black men. In October 1979, when the Knicks paired their roster from 13 players down to 11 — a move required by league regulation — media and fans jumped on the move because the remaining team became the first all Black roster in the league. “White people have to have white heroes,” Cavs owner, Ted Stepien said at the time, “I myself can’t equate to Black heroes, I’ll be truthful. I respect them, but I need white people.”
Being the target of someone’s desire for escapism can be enough to turn something from the political to the personal, and vice versa. We’re seeing a new iteration of it now with the rise of sports betting and the blurring of boundaries between athletes and fans, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saw and put it succinctly in the early 1970s. “Out there, you’re a vector for all the hostility in the stands,” he said.
As a conduit for escape, there are no political prerequisites. Fandom isn’t barred from you based on your voting patterns. There may be an urge now, regardless of how you hoped (even as an observer, as I am) this election ended up, to burrow into basketball as escape, almost as a reflexive action. The distinct humanitarian fracturing at play not only in this election but on a global scale, this onus of “us vs.them”, or blame over solution (blame as solution), the narrowing of scope to only have your own interests at heart, is all a symptom of escapism. Just as it’s crucial as an engaged fan to not lose sight of an athlete’s personhood, the same goes, albeit on a decidedly more critical scale, in the wider world.
