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Robert Lipsyte, Has Sports Been Trumped?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yes, 2025 is coming to an end and the world hardly seems cheerier than it did when I started TomDispatch not long after the 9/11 attacks on this country. Still, I certainly have kept at it all these years and, as we head into the unknown world of 2026 with You Know Who as president of the United States (again), I hope you’ll consider visiting our donation page and lending us a hand. And while I’m at it, let me remind you that if you want to give yourself (or anyone else) a book this Christmas, think about making it a copy of this site’s most recent Haymarket book (that I happen to have edited), TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy’s remarkable new history, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. I just got my own copy and, believe me, it’s quite something! Tom]

Once upon a time, the first thing I would have done on picking up the New York Times in the morning was turn to the sports page. And the last thing I would have done at night was watch or listen to a Mets or Knicks game as I was preparing for sleep. From the time I began going to Ebbets Field as a kid in the early 1950s to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was a fervent fan first of that team (and then of the Mets after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957), the New York (football) Giants, and somewhat later the New York Knicks basketball team. And honestly, for a kid from a distinctly nonreligious family, such fandom was probably as close as I ever got to a religious experience.

So, my question (to myself) now is: How in the world did I lose my — can I actually call it this? — faith in sports? Today, endless months pass and, unless I’m at my grandson’s house, I never see even a few moments of a ballgame of any sort. I no longer have the slightest idea what any of the New York teams have done or are doing this year and find I have no curiosity about it whatsoever — and if that isn’t a loss of faith, I don’t know what is!

And then, to my surprise, as I was leafing through the Times recently, a sports story caught my eye and I actually stopped to read it. The Mets, it reported, had lost — I had to look up his position — pitcher Edwin Díaz by offering him a mere (and indeed, let me italicize that!) three-year, $66 million dollar deal (yes again, $66 million!). Instead, he accepted a $69 million offer from the Dodgers. And the Times piece responded to that by suggesting that the Mets “have been curiously cautious in free agency.”

So, in the world I had long left behind, it wasn’t enough to offer a star $66 million. Of course, there were also significant sports salaries once upon a time. Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, at his peak in 1930, made $80,000 a year, the equivalent of about $1.7 million today. As it happens, though, baseball’s average salary at the moment tops $5 million, and the Mets led baseball with a $322.6 million payroll this year.

Now, mind you, I’m hardly against players being well paid. But I think those figures tell you something about a sports world that has entered another universe from the one most of the rest of us inhabit (if you leave aside this country’s 900-plus billionaires). And of course, we’re also in a world where the truly unmissable “sport” of any day is whatever President Donald Trump happens to be doing. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular and former New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, offer his own goodbye to a sports world that, in so many ways, has entered another universe. Tom

A Farewell to Sports

Winning and Losing Are Not So Clear Anymore

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In the year I was born, 1938, the White Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn’t look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers.

That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. It was called Farewell to Sport and in it he declaimed that the “colored brother” was so good at boxing because he “is not nearly so sensible to pain as his White brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands”; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, “like all people who spring from what we call low origins… never had any inhibitions”; and that the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew… is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness.”

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Nan Levinson, Legal Schmegal

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Speak of the devil! Or do I mean give Pete Hegseth credit? Once upon a distant time, today’s secretary of defense — sorry, my mistake! Secretary of war (and more and more war after that) — insisted repeatedly on Fox News that American military personnel should never follow an “unlawful” order from — yes, indeed! — a future President Trump. “You’re not just gonna follow that order if it’s unlawful,” he said. He then pointed out that military personnel could face criminal consequences if they issued or followed illegal commands. Even more devastatingly, he added, “Here’s the problem with Trump. He says: ‘Go ahead and kill the family. Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding.’ What happens when people follow those orders, or don’t follow them? It’s not clear that Donald Trump will have their back.”

That, of course, was in another century (or, to be more exact, during the election campaign of 2016). Now, we’re in a world where Pete Hegseth has repeatedly given orders to commit illegal extrajudicial killings by blowing seemingly random boats out of the water in the Caribbean Sea (and the Eastern Pacific Ocean), claiming they’re carrying drugs to the United States. In fact, his military blew away two helpless survivors of one of those airstrikes clinging to their overturned vessel after he evidently had given an order, as the Washington Post reported, “to kill everybody.” (He now denies ordering those two specific men killed with a second strike and was supported in that by presidential press secretary Karoline Leavitt with a statement one unnamed military official labelled “protect Pete bullshit” and another summarized as “it’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.”)

As Hegseth’s initial order was evidently “to kill everybody,” I have a feeling that, back in 2016, even he might indeed have considered that “unlawful.” At this point, though, with Donald Trump in the White House a second time, nothing either of them wants to do seems to be even faintly illegal (to them) and a distinctly Trumpian Supreme Court could well ensure that that’s so. What, you might wonder, would Hegseth have said back in 2016 about his own actions? “Even if the U.S. were at war with the [drug] traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” commented Todd Huntley, “a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign,” and now the director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

And in such a world, imagine what it’s like to be in the U.S. military or rather, let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson do that for you, as she also considers what it means to resist the Trumpian and Hegsethian military world from the inside. Tom

Doin’-the-Right-Thing Rag

Who’s Responsible When a Military Order is Illegal? (Don’t Ask Donald Trump!)

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Any story about resistance within the military must begin by recognizing that it's not an easy thing to do. Apparently, that’s true even for a much-decorated retired Navy commander, former astronaut, and sitting United States senator. I’m talking about Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. He was one of six Democratic legislators, all military veterans or former intelligence officers, who, on November 18th, released a 90-second video reminding members of the military that the oath they took on enlisting requires them to refuse illegal orders. The implicit context was the Trump administration's deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, but their message took on added urgency after the Washington Post published an exposé about an order coming from high up to kill survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean Sea. 

Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who served in the CIA, on the National Security Council, and at the Defense Department, and had three tours of duty as a CIA analyst in Iraq, spearheaded the action. She was joined by Kelly; Pennsylvania Representatives Chrissy Houlahan (former Air Force captain) and Chris Deluzio (former Navy lieutenant with one tour in Iraq); New Hampshire Representative Maggie Goodlander (Navy Reserve lieutenant, intelligence); and Colorado Representative Jason Crow (Army Ranger, three tours in Iraq).

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Rebecca Gordon, Sudan, the Forgotten Genocide

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Hold on a minute! I’ll get to this introduction to TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s latest superb piece as soon as I take the garbage down to the basement. Oh, wait, I can’t carry a Somali (no less congressional representative Ilhan Omar!) even to the elevator all by myself. Maybe Donald Trump can help me. After all, he was the one who insisted that Somali immigrants “contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you.” And after terming Omar like those other Somali immigrants “garbage,” he added, “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country… When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

In the meantime, of course, President Trump, with the aid of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and all too many others in his administration, is working hard to get rid not just of the “garbage” in Minnesota — Minneapolis being home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in this country — but in the Caribbean Sea, too (literally, blowing it out of the water).

And that is, unfortunately, likely to just be the beginning for our ever more unnerving and historically racist president. Unfortunately (again!), for the next three years, barring a surprise, there is, it seems, no way to take the actual garbage out of the White House, although, as Rep. Omar recently put it all too accurately: “The president knows he is failing, and so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.” And let me just quote her at greater length from a recent New York Times op-ed of hers: “This comment was only the latest in a series of remarks and Truth Social posts in which the president has demonized and spread conspiracy theories about the Somali community and about me personally. For years, the president has spewed hate speech in an effort to gin up contempt against me. He reaches for the same playbook of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and division again and again. At one 2019 rally, he egged on his crowd until it chanted ‘send her back’ when he said my name.” And, of course, he’s still doing it.

Yes, indeed, that is “our” garbage president to a T. And with that in mind, let Rebecca Gordon take you to that “shithole country” Sudan and remind us that the world out there, whatever its own horrific problems, still has a few lessons to teach us as we try to get ready to take out the presidential garbage in November 2026 and 2028. Tom

Surprising Lessons for the U.S. Resistance to Trump

In Sudan’s Recent History

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Follow a line south and west from the Gaza Strip, continue through Egypt, and you’ll end up in another place where a genocide is in progress. It’s one we don’t hear much about in the United States, probably because it’s happening in an African nation, one of those places Donald Trump refers to as “shithole countries.” (Interestingly, another of the places he included under that designation during his first term in office was El Salvador, which is run by his new BDF -- Best Dictator Friend -- Nayib Bukele. Nothing like providing access to your national torture center to get you back on Trump’s A-list, I guess.)

The place I’m talking about is the nation directly south of Egypt and across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia: Sudan. It’s big -- the 15th-largest country in the world and the third-largest in Africa -- with an area a quarter the size of the United States and around 50 million inhabitants. Its name derives from the Arabic for “Land of the Blacks.” The population is 70% Arab, with the remainder being mostly of northern and eastern African descent.

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