Politics and Sports: Strange, Secret Bedfellows

So, are you more Super Bowl or Super Tuesday? No matter how you answer, if you are like most Americans, you probably think the two—sports and politics—are unrelated. You might even object to the suggestion of a tie on principle alone. We’re not so bold as to suggest there aren’t some good reasons for the separation of sport and politics, but this orientation is, in certain ways, unfortunate. It can blind us to the ways in which the two contested fields are intimately bound together in contemporary American culture.