I’ve been a subscriber to The Athletic from its launch. At the outset, the site promised high-quality sports coverage with the added bonus of giving users the ability to tailor their app and website experience to feature their favorite teams and sports. For years, its coverage worked well that way; I had the best Georgia Bulldogs and Atlanta Braves coverage at my fingertips alongside thoughtful deep dives into college sports and baseball in general.
Four years ago, the New York Times bought The Athletic, and I had concerns. The handoff to new ownership was a little wobbly at first — heavy New York Mets notifications — but it didn’t take long for the site and app to settle back into good coverage. I even wrote a mea culpa a few months later.
Flashback No. 1: I Was Wrong for Doubting The Athletic After NYT Bought It — It's Essential Sports Coverage
The bloom has slowly begun falling off the rose in recent months. The coverage of my favorite teams isn’t as sharp, and I’ve seen those teams’ reporters getting assignments to cover more general topics.
I haven’t liked how the URLs for the articles come from the New York Times because it cheapens The Athletic’s brand. Worse, the site has begun to feel more like the New York Times itself.
Last year, the site ran a puff piece about then-vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s days as a football coach that tried to make him sound like Coach Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights. A recent column about the most respected personalities in sports featured coaches and players who are outspoken leftists front and center. But a Thursday column might have sworn me off The Athletic for good.
Flashback No.2: Even Sports Media Is Getting in on the Whitewashing of Tim Walz
Jerry Brewer’s column about the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team began well enough. It feels like one of those cinematic moments:
For a few hours on Sunday afternoon, the nation felt smaller. This America of vast divides and rickety social bridges deferred, briefly, to the unifying power of sports. Strangers high-fived in bars. Grownups hugged with wet eyes. Politics and culture wars were suspended for the length of three heart-stopping periods of hockey and one cathartic overtime.
The U.S. men’s hockey team won Olympic gold for the first time since the “Miracle on Ice” 46 years ago, and for a time, the joy belonged to everyone.
Of course, for Brewer, the inspiring story of Americans taking the gold took a dark turn when a villain entered the picture. And you can guess who that villain was.
In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the team took a customary, congratulatory call from President Donald Trump, and some players laughed at a misogynistic joke about the gold-winning women’s hockey team that many Americans wouldn’t find funny. They celebrated in the locker room with beer-chugging FBI Director Kash Patel, who is now under scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a sports getaway. Then, after a wild night of partying in Miami following their return from Italy, some members of the team announced plans to step in the House Chamber – a stage upon which symbolism is never neutral – and make an appearance at Trump’s State of the Union.
In normal times, this would be an obligatory celebration for a championship team. They take presidential calls. They party too hard. They visit Washington and stroll through the corridors of power.
But this isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive. America no longer experiences these rituals in the same way, and it may never again. Athletes would be wise to recognize that, in this climate, celebration is easily repurposed into political capital.
Give me a break. Would it have been a problem if Kamala Harris were in the Oval Office? Joe Biden? Of course not. Did Brewer have an issue with Jimmy Carter congratulating the 1980 gold-medal winners? Probably not. The issue is that Donald Trump congratulated this year’s team.
“It would be a copout for me to blame only the environment that they must navigate, to rant about how everything is poisonously political now, to lament the impossibility of sustained joy in a culture that incubates outrage,” Brewer writes later. But that’s exactly what he’s done.
If it’s a problem for The Athletic to let the current occupant of the White House congratulate a team that represents the whole nation, yet puff pieces on Walz are okay, then The Athletic is no longer for me. I’m not one to advocate announcing one’s departure from a platform, but as soon as I finished writing this column, I canceled my subscription. If it insults me as a Trump voter, it doesn’t deserve my money.
Editor’s Note: With President Trump back in the White House, the state of our Union is strong once again.
Support PJ Media’s coverage of the president’s State of the Union Address and help us report the truth the radical Left doesn’t want you to hear. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member