"Love of the Game"
In the US, you know a holiday is a big deal when it gets a sport. The Fourth of July has baseball; Thanksgiving has the NFL; Christmas Day has the NBA. Of course, the original, and most obvious, example is New Year’s Day, which has been associated with college football since the Rose Parade added the Rose Bowl Game in 1916.
Of course, this means the athletes don’t celebrate like the rest of us. When I was a kid, I used to feel a little bad for them: The players can’t go out on New Year’s Eve because they have a game the next day! It didn’t occur to me that getting to play in the Rose Bowl might be worth missing a New Year’s Eve party. I also imagine that Steph Curry is OK with not opening presents Christmas morning, that Aaron Rodgers doesn’t mind missing Thanksgiving dinner, and that Mookie Betts is willing to skip a few barbecues, for the chance to play in these marquee games. They’re doing it for love of the game.
On Saturday, ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit went on TV and suggested that modern college football players skip bowl games because “this era of player just doesn’t love football.” This is a pretty dumb and insulting thing to say, for a number of reasons that people were quick to point out.
But even if college players are working for free… and even if ESPN has helped water down the value of bowl games by abetting the proliferation of minor bowls and chasing the most desperate sponsorship deals… and even if the College Football Playoff has officially elevated some bowls over others… and even if the players most interested in pursuing a career (who presumably “love football” the most) have the most reason to avoid injury in an exhibition—even if all of those things are true, Herbstreit’s line of thinking still retains a certain appeal for a lot of sports fans. It would be foolish to pretend there isn’t something admirable about players who put their team’s success ahead of their well-being as individuals.
This is just another way of saying that we like it when players play for love of the game. Doing so shouldn’t keep them from getting paid, of course, but that’s why we shouldn’t pretend that “paying workers fairly” and “loving work” are incompatible ideas.
When big sporting events take place on holidays, of course, it’s not just the athletes who miss the day off. There’s a whole brigade of workers who need to be mobilized to make sure these events go off without a hitch: coaches, towel boys, team doctors, concession workers, transit workers, parking lot attendants, security guards, etc. It’s a reminder of the importance of the working class. Even on the biggest of holidays, you still need to mobilize a massive number of workers just to make sure life can go on. Even when things are “shut down,” people still need to work.
Another recent reminder of the importance of the working class: the CDC’s decision, announced December 27th, to shorten the isolation window for certain Covid cases, from ten to five days. The decision, coming on the heels of a letter from Delta airlines complaining about a worker shortage, was clearly designed to get people back to work. Dr. Fauci said as much explicitly. Employers have, for months now, had trouble filling open positions, and the omicron wave has led to a surge in people calling out sick. Around the country right now, classrooms are missing teachers, hospitals are missing nurses, buses are missing drivers, and many other services have been disrupted.
But the CDC’s announcement still made people mad. Not because they don’t realize the value of teachers and nurses and bus drivers, but because the guidelines seemed designed to bring back a pre-Covid era of workplace precarity. The guidance seemed to be written with enough ambiguity (“if symptoms are resolving”) to let bosses decide if you were really sick enough to stay home—a situation that was far more common before the pandemic. Indeed, as soon as the CDC changed the rules, Walmart cut its paid Covid leave in half and stories filled social media of people being ordered back to work even though they were still sick.
This is the system we have for people who aren’t working “for love of the game”: Come to work or you’re fired. Pretend you’re not sick or don’t get paid. Suck it up or starve. When you think of all those workers who make the Rose Bowl possible on New Year’s Day—or the NBA on Christmas, or the NFL on Thanksgiving, or a Walgreen’s at 11:30PM on a Tuesday—how many of them are doing it for love of the game? And how many are doing it because they’re forced to by economic precarity?
In his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, the late David Graeber wrote about how we’re conditioned to think of “work” as a matter of production. We talk about the economy with words like “productivity” and the “Gross Domestic Product.” Jobs are, in short, where you produce things, whether it’s airplanes or iPhones or deli sandwiches. But that is really a relic of industrial age, and it doesn’t really describe most work very well unless you get really abstract: A maid produces… cleanliness. A doctor produces… health. A teacher produces… knowledge. Etc.
Instead, Graeber wrote, borrowing ideas from feminist theory, it might make more sense to think of jobs as a matter of caring. This is not only inclusive of more types of work, but it seems to get at what is fundamental about jobs. After all, the products we make are only valuable because someone cares enough to want to pay for them. But this paradigm also includes work that doesn’t make anything tangible. A maid cares for a home or an office or a hotel room because those places matter to someone. A doctor is caring for a patient who wants to be healthy. A teacher cares for students because someone wants them to learn.
And the players at the Rose Bowl were playing because we care who wins. And so do they—they love the game. That love can’t be a substitute for compensation, but we should not dismiss the value of doing something that people so obviously care about. For many jobs, it’s not clear who cares at all.
Capitalism does not really want workers to care about their job. It wants them to need their job, so they comply with whatever outrageous behavior is demanded of them, but workers who care about their jobs might prioritize the work itself over pleasing their boss. That’s how you get HR workers who meet with staff outside to shield them from retaliation, or flight staff who might care more about the health of their passengers and co-workers than the fiscal health of Delta Airlines. For the capitalist class, it’s better to have mindless, heartless workers who do what they’re told.
But for anyone outside the ownership class, it’s obvious that a worker who cares about what they are doing is better. When Kirk Herbstreit bemoans players who skip bowl games, he’s recognizing that people are at their best when they are self-motivated, and not merely doing whatever capital has decided is most profitable for them. He’s doing it in a shitty, reactionary way that is inconsiderate of the situation modern college athletes face, of course, but there is a kernel of leftism buried deep in that statement. Leftists and socialists should not cede “love of the game” to reactionaries. There is beauty in watching people do what they love. Sadly, it is a rare sight under capitalism, but you can sometimes see it on the football field.