I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it yet or not, but last week, Kyle Green and I posted one of the first TSP white papers on the interrelationships between sport and politics in contemporary American culture. (https://thesocietypages.org/papers/politics-and-sport/).

Intended to coincide with the super bowl and in the middle of the republican primaries, the main point was to examine all of the ways in which sport and politics are intertwined, even if we don’t like it. We concluded that piece by saying that our goal was not necessarily to argue that the two should be separate but concluded that some might take it that way.

Well, what do you know but this week’s back page column in Sports Illustrated is a mock political campaign by columnist Phil Taylor to push for passage of a bill that would “ensure” the permanent “separation of sports and politics.”

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1194467/index.htm

Taylor is clearly having fun with the piece, mostly at the expense of politicians who have pretended to be sports fans and men of the people. (Joe Biden, John Kerry, Newt Gingritch, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney all take shots).  There are no great sociological insights here–just a number of great and revealing examples of the awkward, potentially combustable collusion of sport and politics in contemporary life.

My favorite part is Taylor’s speculation that this campaign might be one of the few arenas in which a bipartisan coalition in American politics might be possible. I love that line–both because it speaks to how deeply and broadly-held are our beliefs about the separation of sports and politics (“God bless any elected official who doesn’t pretend to care about the Super Bowl,” he writes) and as a commentary on how difficult it is to imagine Democrats and Republicans coming to consensus on anything these days.