The Warts of Sports

Arthur Solomon, Public Relations ConsultantAs it does more often than a baseball player stealing home or a football player emerging from a game without pain, the warts of sports has once again festered. As in the children’s game of musical chairs, this time the sport left standing is the National Football League, which proudly announced it has solved the problem of its players not standing during the playing of the national anthem.The league’s new policy permits players to stay in the locker room during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” but prohibits them from sitting or taking a knee if they are on the field, (except, I guess, if they can’t get up without help after suffering a bone crushing or life altering tackle).The new policy, which will surely end up in court as a violation of the First Amendment, and already has been criticized by the player’s union, began in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers starting quarterback, took a knee to protest oppression of people of color. President Trump, who looks for opportunities to cause demagogic racial divisions with his inflammatory remarks, poured gasoline on the issue by saying the players were unpatriotic, and during a campaign rally in Alabama in 2017 said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” (Civil libertarians and many non-activist Americans might feel that way about Trump, who last week added, “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. Or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”)I guess that Trump’s PR flacks, led by White House press secretaries Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders – the see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil (of Trump) press secretaries – would defend the presidents right to use vulgar language as a constitutional right, but not condone a peaceful anti-violent protest by the NFL players protesting injustice to African-Americans. (If any person or entity has less journalistic credibility than Spicer, Sanders, and Trump’s speed-talking, filibuster-talking spokesperson Kellyanne Conway and the unofficial, but official, White House hack Sean Hannity, it must be execs of the American sports business, who change their stories as often as the president and his spokespeople do. Trump’s flack’s creed seems to be, “Speak loudly and carry a big stick.”)As a patriotic American, who served in the Army unlike the president, I always stand for the “Star Spangled Banner” at events and concerts. But I never understood what playing the national anthem at a ballgame has to do with sports or patriotism. I wonder if the team owners and President Trump pay attention to the activities of spectators during the playing of the anthem. Some talk on their cell phones, others speak to nearby fans and many go to the bathrooms and concession stands, so they can return before the game begins. But the NFL continues, more than other sports, to use patriotism as a major marketing tool, egged on by the fabulist draft dodger in the White House. Especially ludicrous to me is Trump’s claim of uber patriotism, given the fact that he used numerous deferments to avoid military service. As Mark Twain said, “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”As someone who has closely followed the NFL’s public relations statements for decades, (long before joining Burson-Marsteller, I was a sports reporter, a non-sports editor and worked for a political PR firm), I have thought a compilation of their responses to problems could be the basis for a sequel to “The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight,” the 1969 novel by Jimmy Breslin that was made into a movie staring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach.As all but the most fanatical sports fans, and many in the business, will admit, festering warts have been common in our sports culture forever, both in the professional and so-called amateur ranks.Here are only a few major examples, limited to the American stage:

• For decades the NFL not only denied that its employees would suffer brain damage from hard hits, but also attempted to destroy the reputation and career of a leading researcher in brain trauma.
• Only the actions of the NFL prevented Major League Baseball from being at the top of the sports warts list. For decades baseball was a lily white segregated business. It wasn’t until the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract in 1945 that the color line was broken. Even then, certain teams took a while before signing accomplished African-American players.
• The United States Olympic Committee has at least as many warts as a warthog. The U.S.O.C. stance is that protecting its athletes from harm is the job of various sports governing bodies, including gymnastics, swimming, taekwondo and volleyball, which have had sex scandals. But years before the recent sex scandals, despite the pleas from various politicians, religious leaders, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union and an American member of the International Olympic Committee, Ernst Lee Jahncke, to boycott the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, the then American Olympic Committee decided to participate in the Nazi Olympics. They sent its president Avery Brundage to examine prejudice against German Jewish athletes and he reported that he saw no discrimination, despite Nazi actions against Jews. (Jahncke, a former assistant U.S. Secretary of the Navy, was expelled from the IOC for his public opposition to the games and was replaced by Brundage.) A May 9, 1975 Associated Press obituary in the New York Times, quoted Brundage as saying, “The politics of a nation is of no concern to the International Olympic Committee. Nonparticipation would do more harm than good. Hitler would still go on. The Nazi would go on. . . . Certain Jews must now understand that they cannot use these games as a weapon in their boycott against the Nazis,” even though the move to boycott the Olympics was popular among all facets of American society and some of the most outspoken opponents of U.S. participation were Catholic government officials and “The Commonweal,” the Catholic journal.
• Football and baseball owners must be the most forgiving of all business executives. Despite multiple unsportsmanlike activities by its players, as long as an athlete can help a team the players are given several chances despite breaking the rules. (None professional athletes, like me, and probably you, would most likely be terminated after the first offence for similar action by a non-sport entity, unless we were high-ranking execs.)
• Even though in recent years it has improved, sports writers and commentators for decades covered up the unsportsmanlike-like actions of ballplayers by not reporting about it. Now because the media landscape has changed with so many watchdogs, keeping a secret is almost impossible.
• PR people for sports organizations and the great majority of sports marketing clients have no shame. They never see anything wrong. It’s as if sport organizations and sports sponsors are as pure as what ad agency creative people said about Ivory Soap.

There’s no doubt that the sport business has as many PR crises as other businesses. But there is a difference in the responses to crises by sports marketing execs and their partners and officials of non-sports entities. When caught red-handed, non-sports management will often make public apologies; many will be terminated. Sports executives and their partners seemingly don’t have the words, “We’re sorry, we were wrong, it won’t happen again,” in their vocabulary.Even though as a practitioner who fortunately has successfully distinguished the flames of PR crises on the national and international scenes, I believe that only the media can decide when to cease reporting on a problem. And where the actions of the moguls of sports and athletes are concerned, PR crisis specialists are as helpless in limiting negative press coverage as a guppy has of surviving in a thankful of hungry sharks.        [author]About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He now is a contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr@juno.com[/author]