Funny Nigger Pictures

Jock the Vote

By Bryan Curtis

“I like basketball,” Newt Gingrich remarked recently. I pumped my fist. I did the Mississippi Mud Walk . Finally, the race to crown the fakest sports fan in America had begun.

The presidential campaign puts candidates in a miserable position sports-wise. To say you don't like sports would be more damning than admitting you're a Kenyan anti-colonialist. So Newt and company attempt—in ways that mix childhood longings with political exigency—to speak the language of ESPN. We sports fans flash a demonic Dick Butkus smile, because when the candidates talk sports, they reveal their true selves. To deploy a sportsism, we fans are dictating the tempo here, and we've got the candidates right where we want ‘em.    Mitt Romney is a phony who is also a phony sports fan. His sin is the geographical pander, which we might call Hillary's Boner . The pander is when you're caught with two “favorite” teams, one you grew up rooting for and another favored by your constituents. Romney was raised in the Detroit suburbs as an Al Kaline-worshipping Tigers fan. When he moved to Boston in the early 1970s, it became socially advantageous for him to root for the Red Sox. This despite the fact that, during Romney's second year at Harvard, the Tigers and Sox finished a half game apart at the top of the A.L. East. “I'm a Red Sox fan,” Romney likes to say now. With his baseball teams, as with his abortion policy, Romney surveyed a couple of contenders before finally settling on a winner.

Now, Romney acts like a regular in Bill Simmons' mailbag. He donned a Sox shirt during a July 4 parade in New Hampshire. He declared at his June campaign kickoff, “As the Red Sox like to remind the New York Yankees, there are no dynasties in America”—a weird statement, because this Sox squad probably qualifies as a dynasty and the son of George Romney definitely does. Is Romney a Red Sox “fan” as we understand it? He often brags that his family has season tickets at Fenway. But that doesn't prove Romney is a fan; that proves Romney is rich. No, to see how closely Romney follows his favorite team, we go to St. Petersburg, Florida on June 15. While the Republican front-runner watched Josh Beckett throw a one-hitter, he marveled that the Rays were playing home games indoors. “I thought I was going to be in sweltering heat,” Romney said, “but instead it's cool.” Tropicana Field has been hosting Major League games since 1998. The comment marked a watershed of sorts. Mitt Romney was an even phonier Red Sox fan than John Kerry .    Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, doesn't see sports as a way to make friends. He sees it as a way to grow a spine. The rap on Pawlenty is that he's too “nice”—that he doesn't want the GOP nomination enough. (Political pundits sizing up the candidates often sound like sportswriters sizing up athletes.) So in a January interview with AOL's Politics Daily, Pawlenty said, “I'm pro-beer and pro-hockey.” He told Time that if he weren't running for president the alternative would be to “go make some money and play hockey and drink beer.”     Pawlenty clearly sees hockey (and beer) as linemates in his quest for machismo. “I love hockey,” he writes in his memoir Courage to Stand, echoing Newt Gingrich's basketball jones. But Pawlenty's fandom, like Romney's, feels like an unscuffed baseball the umpire has just thrown into the game. In Courage to Stand, Pawlenty doesn't wax particularly nostalgic about the NHL's Minnesota Wild or the old North Stars or his alma mater the University of Minnesota. Instead he tells us that…he's a partial season-ticket holder of the Wild. The games are “completely engaging.

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