On Feb. 23, Tiger Woods was in a car accident that left him with significant injuries to his lower body, requiring several hours of surgery. Fellow athletes expressed disbelief and wished the iconic golfer well. Media coverage, however, focused on how the accident would affect Woods’s pursuit of winning the most major championships in the sport, and reviewed personal scandals and previous comeback attempts.
For instance, NPR’s Rachel Martin and Tom Goldman discussed this as a setback in Woods’s comeback and compared him to Ben Hogan, another golf legend who broke his legs in a car accident but was able to recover and continue to win major tournaments.
When athletes have near-death experiences, why do the media so often focus on their productivity and economic impact, not their personal health or well-being? Athletes are unique in that their publicly perceived value lies in their physical abilities, which rapidly decrease as they age. Social science research suggests that capitalism, racism and that brief opportunity for victory combine to push the public to view athletes’ performance and economic value as more important than their worth as humans.
Professional sports portray athletes as one-dimensional
Burling Lowrey, an English professor and writer, argued that beginning in the mid-1970s, as athletes ceased to perform in many sports and instead began to specialize in one, sports became one of the most “dehumanizing institutions in our society.” That’s because specializing increases strain on parts of the body most relevant to the sport. Lowrey posited that a hyper-focus on one athletic skill transformed professional teams into factory-assembly-like systems. In keeping with capitalism’s pursuit of productivity and efficiency, players became focused on one particular task, such as kicking extra points in football or pitching fastballs in baseball, turning them into “zombie-like, one-dimensional creatures” in the public eye.
Like Woods, athletes across all sports feel pressure to overcome injury from an early age. Many young and healthy pitchers, sometimes as early as in their teens, are pressured to undergo preemptive Tommy John surgery — a procedure that repairs torn ligaments inside the elbow — to reduce the chances of being sidelined during their prime performance years. Sports culture commonly and casually urges athletes to “play through pain” and to treat major surgery as no big deal. With social media, players are well aware of fans’ pressure to return to the field.
Seeing athletes as products comes at the cost of seeing them as humans first
Sociologist Kazuo Uchiumi argues that this grows from a capitalist society’s commodification of sports, or the treatment of athletes as disposable labor. Uchiumi contends that high economic growth and the emergence of the welfare state created a class of professional athletes who generate “goods” through their performance. Those “goods” force “participation in matches … for the convenience of companies or the mass media, so that their lives as athletes are shortened.”
That’s visible in sports betting and prize fighting, which generated more than $203 billion globally in 2020. In a 1962 Sports Illustrated article, theologian Richard A. McCormick concluded that boxing was unquestionably unethical, given the brutality of knockouts, the inherent intent to harm and the knowledge that boxing led to brain injury. Despite overwhelming and growing evidence that concussions cause severe and lasting harm, football and other contact sports are thriving.
After a career-ending injury or an untimely death, sports commentators can fixate on what might have been had they played longer. Twenty years after Len Bias, a rising star for the Boston Celtics basketball team, died from a drug overdose at age 23, ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons agonized over “how many titles would Bias have been worth” and how players Larry Bird and Kevin McHale could have played longer if Bias had taken some of their bodily wear and tear.
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Athletes’ portrayal as products has racial undertones
The media and fans sometimes view athletes as otherworldly or inhuman, often with racial implications. Scholars, observers and players such as 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman have compared American football to the plantation system, given the control that its governing organizations — both the National College Athletics Association and the National Football League — have over player autonomy. Sports is no exception to the long history of Black images and bodies being leveraged for entertainment and profit.
Although Woods has earned millions during his career, golf also grew immensely from his participation. But along with Woods’s success has come racist disparagement. More generally, predominantly White league front offices have worked hard to block athletes’ salary increases. In the 1970s, Major League Baseball blacklisted center fielder Curt Flood for fighting for free agency after discovering that a White teammate had received a higher raise; according to the general manager, “White people required more money to live than black people.” Sportswriters and fans used racist insults to condemn Flood’s mission for greater player autonomy.
In 2018, after basketball great LeBron James spoke about U.S. racial injustice, Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham said he should “shut up and dribble,” saying she didn’t want to hear about politics from “someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” James was the latest in a long line of Black athletes who were criticized for speaking out against racial injustice, such as Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Colin Kaepernick.
Despite Woods’s contributions to golf, he faced significant discrimination in the sport, such as Golfweek’s infamous noose cover and analyst Kelly Tilghman saying that to stop him others should “lynch him in the back alley.” When Woods played in the Masters after personal scandals, Augusta National chief Billy Payne chastised him in the State of the Masters address, saying, “It is a fact that he disappointed all of us, and most importantly our kids and our grandkids.” Journalist Bryant Gumbel referred to Payne’s commentary on Woods’s private matters as a “public whipping” with “racial overtones.”
When an athlete is all used up
A day after Woods’s accident, Fox Business published an article titled, “Will Tiger Woods’ car accident affect his worth?” Not every commentator has treated Woods as a commodity; some have argued that the “comeback” focus ignored his humanity and satisfaction in his personal life as a father. But the many articles examining the odds of a comeback suggest that to fans and the media, Woods’s car accident was significant mainly for how it hurt the game and championship leader boards. The politics of sports is more apparent in the treatment of athletes than anything they can say on the field.
Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately attributed Kelly Tilghman’s comment to another analyst. We regret the error.
Tom Le (@profTLe) is an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College and author of “Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century” (Columbia University Press, May 2021).
Gabrielle Herzig (@GabbyHerzig) is a senior politics major at Pomona College.