14. Robert Lipsyte

“As fantasy leagues replaced real ones in the obsessions of bloggers and fans, the gap between the athlete and the spectator—it was already a physical and economic chasm—widened emotionally.” -Robert Lipsyte

            A few years ago, there was a sketch on Inside Amy Schumer in which the jocks turned the tables on the spectators. The sketch begins with a trio of schlubby men sitting at a bar complaining about the players on their fantasy team. A cut reveals that these men are actually on television and are being watched by four real NFL football players, also at a bar. The twist: the football players have these men on their “life” fantasy teams and spend the sketch watching them ineptly go about the mundane business of their daily existences. The jocks can’t believe what they’re seeing; these guys can’t do anything right. Among the things at which they fail: buying electronics without being suckered into an extended warranty, getting their co-workers to accept a LinkedIn invite, or, in the sketch’s funniest line, delivered by tight end Vernon Davis, adequately performing cunnilingus.

            It must have been satisfying for these players to exact a sort of revenge on the fantasy community, even if only in the context of a lightly comic roasting. I can’t speak to the feeling of being dehumanized in quite that way but I imagine that many athletes—even though they may themselves participate in fantasy sports—don’t particularly appreciate it. Many have said as much. But even from the fan’s point of view, the growing rise of fantasy leagues and the recent Supreme Court decision reversing a ban on sports betting, puts us in an increasingly strange and strained relationship with the athletes we watch on television. We have always put unfair expectations on sports figures, but in the past these expectations were mostly in the context of devoted fanship. Now, our allegiances are completely decontextualized (or at the least, semi-randomly recontextualized), are based instead on who we happen to draft or who looks good on the fantasy waiver wire. It seems to me—if perhaps not to most people—to be a very alienating way to follow sports.

            The rise of the fantasy game, though, is only one recent development in the evolving relationship between athletes and fans. In his 1975 book SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, which posits a toxicly symbiotic relationship between the world of sports and the world of American public life and from whose new edition’s introduction the above quote is taken, Robert Lipsyte explores the earlier history of this relationship. Spurred by the rise of boosterish, mythmaking sportswriters like Grantland Rice, athletes began to take on larger than life dimensions in the 1920s, becoming heroes people could project their fantasies onto, with the only fear of deflation coming through disappointing on-field performances. This changed in the 1960s, when a new breed of sportswriter, among whose number Lipsyte could be counted, pulled back the façade of godhood and revealed athletes to be flawed humans, no better, and sometimes much worse, than the average fan.

            Today, our relationship to the athlete has changed once again. They are at the same time closer to us, more remote, and less real than they once were. While we have access to many of their stray thoughts—or a carefully constructed version of their stray thoughts—via Twitter and Instagram, they remain further removed from us than ever. Whereas once we could project ourselves onto our athletes, today they are too rich (professional male athletes in the most popular sports, at least) and too big (the bodies more machine than human) to serve as plausible imaginary stand-ins for our most heroic selves. We further disconnect ourselves from their reality by using them as characters in video games and fantasy sports and reducing them to ever more detailed reams of statistics. The emotional gap has indeed widened. It would be folly to imagine too great a connection between ourselves and our favorite athletes and even greater folly to imagine them being some kind of morally superior heroes, but this current form of disconnection is still more than a little troubling. We choose to turn people into abstractions, even those who are there to entertain us, at a certain risk to our own humanity. They may only be jocks, but they deserve better than this perverse form of diminishment.