Freakonomics Radio - 349. How Sports Became Us

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

Dollar-wise, the sports industry is surprisingly small, about the same size as the cardboard-box industry. So why does it make so much noise? Because it reflects — and often amplifies — just about every political, economic, and social issue of the day. Introducing a new series, “The Hidden Side of Sports.”

The fact of the matter is, superstars do win championships. Football is for the men. I hit her as hard as I could. San Francisco 49ers quarterback knelt during the national anthem. Sports has a social impact that is way, way bigger than its economic impact. Introducing a special series. This was the moment I realized that baseball is a business. I have an eight-year-old son. There's no way I'd let him play tackle football.

From Freakonomics Radio. My body took over. My mind shut off. Things hang in the balance. Outcomes are unclear. You cannot be afraid to fail. That could be the reason you're telling your second-grade daughter that she's moving next week. The hidden side of sports. I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged where grown men were hugging and kissing each other. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. On a damp, windy day in May 1954, a handful of runners were getting loose at the Ifley Road track in Oxford, England.

One of them was named Roger Bannister. Roger Bannister limbers up for a planned attack on that four-minute mile never before achieved by man. This isn't like the tracks we're used to thinking of now. This was cinders. That's David Epstein, a science journalist and author of The Sports Gene. And it was sort of a small, unimportant track meet, but it was known that Bannister would be making this attempt. Man against the mile, a supreme test of courage, of human will, of determination. Bannister, 25 years old, had finished fourth in the 1500 meters, the rough equivalent of a mile, in the Olympic Games two years earlier. He was, like many athletes of his era, an amateur.

In his case, a medical student working at St. Mary's Hospital in London. You know, just before he made the attempt, he went on a hiking vacation just to relax. And, you know, the morning of, he did medical rounds. Because of his studies, Bannister had less than an hour a day to train for his attempt on the four-minute mile. The day was so windy that he nearly canceled his run. It also rained a bit. There were barely a thousand spectators.

But then the wind died down and Roger Bannister towed the line. What do you think happened? Do you think we'd really be telling you this story if Roger Bannister hadn't finally broken the four-minute barrier? Here, in Bannister's own words, is how it unfolded. As the gun fired, my legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, almost as if impelled by an unknown force. And as he comes around each lap, he's just about directly on four-minute mile pace. By now, the crowd was roaring. A four-minute mile was possible. And then for the last lap, he basically has to run a little bit faster.

Somehow, to do it, I had to run the last lap in 59 seconds. And he gives it his all. Those last few seconds seem never ending. He leans through, breaks through the finishing tape with his mouth wide open. My effort was over, and I collapsed almost unconscious with an arm on either side. And one of the iconic photos is these men in trench coats leaning over with stopwatches. And someone reads off the time. There's no huge digital clock on a jumbotron.

I knew I had done it before I even heard it. Up to the finishing line. Time, three minutes, 59.4 seconds. Shattering the four-minute mile, the Everest of athletic achievement. The Everest comparison was no accident. Just a year earlier, a British-led expedition had been the first to summit the world's highest mountain. In a country still recovering from World War II, Roger Bannister paid attention to such accomplishments. And he viewed feats like the summit of Mount Everest as these beacons of hope and rebuilding for the United Kingdom. And he saw his quest to run under four minutes in the mile as part of that.

Could a simple foot race really affect the psyche of a nation? There are a lot of reasons that so many of us find sports so compelling. At the most basic level, we find thrill in the competition, the athleticism, the entertainment. But do we sometimes assign too much meaning to sports to mirror races and games and fights? Maybe. But you could also argue that sport has done a pretty good job throughout history of mirroring society at large, the politics, the economics, the social issues, as well as exploring the limits of human achievement. By 1954, the sub-four-minute mile had stood for years as a seemingly impassable

barrier. The number of other athletes kept getting closer and closer but not breaking through. Athletes were told like their legs would fall off if they ran fast enough to run under four minutes a mile. And so it sort of looked like it was this asymptote of human performance in certain ways. Pardon me? An asymptote of human performance? Yeah, I don't know what that means either. Here, let's ask a mathematician. So what is an asymptote? An asymptote is a straight line that approaches a curve and gets closer and closer, but never actually intersects it. This is the mathematical definition. That's John Urschel.

I'm a PhD student in mathematics at MIT. I work mainly in graph theory applied to things like machine learning and combinatorial optimization. So Roger Bannister proved the four-minute mile wasn't actually an asymptote. Is there a better example? Well, when you're skydiving, the longer you're in the air, the faster and faster you're falling, and the closer and closer you get to terminal velocity, but you never quite reach it. This is an asymptote. Okay, good to know. Also good to know, John Urschel, before getting his PhD in math, had a pretty solid first career. I'm a former NFL offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. Urschel played three seasons in the NFL, but retired abruptly

just before his fourth was about to start. I retired early mainly to focus on math. Urschel quit just as he was entering his peak years in terms of ability and earning potential. Why? One factor was a new report that seemed to strengthen the link between football and long-term brain damage.

How much brain damage do I have? I don't know, and it's extremely hard to know. Brain damage has become a huge concern in modern sports, especially in the obvious contact sports like football. Back in the 1950s, meanwhile, not so much. As David Epstein was telling us, Roger Bannister's era was less about self-preservation and more about pushing what seemed to be our natural limits, like the idea that it wasn't physiologically possible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes. But Bannister didn't feel that way.

He knew as a medical student that 4 flat.01 wasn't different than 359.9. And so there was no real barrier. My legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, almost as if impelled by an unknown force. Roger Bannister ran one more sub-four-minute mile after that gray day in Oxford and promptly retired as an athlete. He went on to have a long and distinguished career as a neurologist. He died just this year at age 88. Today, more than 1,500 men have run the mile in less than four minutes. The current world record is just over three minutes and 43 seconds.

What's the secret of this seemingly superhuman accomplishment? Here's how Bannister once put it. It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ. Mind over matter, another reason that sports intrigue us. And it seems to work in sports as non-traditional as competitive eating. Here's Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese eating superstar, telling us, through an interpreter, how he doubled the world record of 25 and one-eighth hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. It has nothing to do with how you normally enjoy a meal.

It's just a physical action. A physical action that Kobayashi performed by stretching the mind, by consciously challenging every piece of conventional wisdom, the training, the methodology, the strategy, and finding a better way to eat fast. I think the thing about human beings is that they make a limit in their mind of what their potential is. So if every human being actually threw away those thoughts, the potential of human beings, I think, is really great. I think it's huge compared to what they actually think of themselves.

I mean, if everyone could use it for everything, then everything could be much better. Everything could be much better? Can sport really deliver this kind of promise? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly delivers a unique set of attributes. I mean, sports are such an absorbing world that I never really knew about much or cared about much

until I had a child who was fascinated by all of it. That's Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. And it's amazing how they provide a kind of structure of meaning in people's lives. Teams that you root for, the business of sports, things hang in the balance, outcomes are unclear. There are infinite narratives to it. And it's something you can touch in all different areas of your life at all different times. I don't like sports, but you've got to admire the energy, creativity, innovation that goes into sports.

And that is Dana Gioia, the Poet Laureate of California and a former National Endowment for the Arts chairman. And it's very similar to arts. Joya, the Poet Laureate of California and a former National Endowment for the Arts chairman. And it's very similar to arts. It's a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters which have enormous emotional resonance to audiences. Emotional resonance, focusing human energy, infinite narratives and unclear outcomes, the business of sports, and of course, the costs and benefits of rooting for your

favorite team or for your kid. These are just some of the reasons that we're launching this special Freakonomics Radio series, The Hidden Side of Sports. Over the past several months, we've been interviewing dozens of world-class athletes, coaches, owners, union officials, league officials, and more. For instance. Mark Cuban. My name is Michaela Schifrin. owners, union officials, league officials, and more. For instance. Sportscaster. I'm Kim Ang of Major League Baseball. Daryl Morey, General Manager of the Houston Rockets. Lawrence Epstein, I'm the Chief Operating Officer at the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Jed York, I'm the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers. Carrie Walsh Jennings, I'm a professional beach volleyball player. Bob Tewksbury, I am the mental skills coach for the San Francisco Giants. Simone

Manuel, and I am a professional swimmer. Mark Teixeira, currently an ESPN analyst. Lauren Murphy, and I'm a UFC fighter. I'm Brandon McCarthy. I'm a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. Stephanie Labbe. I'm a professional soccer player. Demaris Smith. I'm the executive director of the NFL Players Association. What's up, guys? I'm Jimmy Garoppolo, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio. Hey, thanks, Jimmy. And don't worry, we also interviewed some economists. Our beliefs in streaks are much stronger than the data actually supports.

The chance of having soccer be your vehicle to get to college as opposed to fencing turns out to be about 75 or 80 times harder. The rule of thumb is a second round pick this year is equal to a first round pick next year. One question we'll ask the athletes is what exactly drives them to excel, to get back up after failure and injury, and to just keep pushing. Like Kerry Walsh Jennings, who's won four Olympic medals in beach volleyball, three of them gold. I'm going for my sixth Olympics and I'm turning 40 in a couple weeks. And I'm playing against these young kids who I was where they were obviously 20 years ago.

And it's so nutty, but I'm still going through the same process of leveling up, aspiring to go higher, looking in the mirror. Do you got it? Do you want it? Yes. Carry on. As much intrinsic motivation as sport may require, there's plainly a strong extrinsic motivator too. I don't mean the fame. I don't mean the glory. I mean the money. I think when all is said and done, I'll be maybe somewhere around 70 million having made. That's Brandon McCarthy, who's pitched for seven Major League Baseball teams over 13 seasons. There is a lot more money in sports today than there was 50 or 100 years ago,

at least for the athletes at the top of the pyramid. We spoke with another longtime baseball player, the recently retired Mark Teixeira, who made out even better than McCarthy. So your ultimate deal, which was in 2009, coming to the New York Yankees, correct? Yep. Eight-year, $180 million deal, correct? Yep. All guaranteed?

All guaranteed in baseball, yep. The money in basketball is pretty good, too. Here's longtime NBA player J.J. Redick. So you're going to have, in the next 10 to 15 years, you're going to have a ton of guys who have made $100 to $200 to $300 million in their career. But because the top-earning athletes are the most prominent, we tend to magnify how much most athletes get paid. Consider the NFL, which is the richest, most successful sports league in history.

There are 53 players on a given NFL team's roster, compared to 25 in baseball for most of the season, and an average of 14 in the NBA. 53 football players. That's a lot of salaries to pay. The average NFL salary is around $2 million, and the average career is just a few years long. John Urschel, the former NFL player who jumped ship for a math career, played offensive lineman, a position with an average salary of around $1.7 million a year when he entered the league. You take away taxes, you take away agent fees, you take away NFLPA fees. The NFLPA, that's the players union.

Now, let's say you're down to a million, under a million perhaps, and now this has to last you for the rest of your life paired with whatever your next career is, as opposed to say, well, how many doctors are there in the U.S.? The stable income over, say, 40 years beats the 1.6 million income over three years. And again, that is if you happen to be among the best of the best of the best athletes who make it into the richest sports league in history. What about the average player in the most popular global sport, soccer, or what the rest of the world calls football? Here's Andrew Orsatti, a former professional soccer player who now works for FIFPro,

the International Players Union. If you look at the media, of course, every player is a multi-millionaire driving a Ferrari. That's a myth because the tens of thousand players we represent, 14,000 of which we surveyed recently, are earning a thousand US dollars a month after tax, okay? Forget what you see of Cristiano Ronaldo moving to Juventus. Forget what you see of Lionel Messi, the English Premier League, La Liga. Forget it all. Think about the mechanism below which feeds those who get to the top, the very few who get to the top, the top 1%. That's not the reality. The reality is that soccer relies on what is essentially a massive global migrant labor workforce. Singapore, Australia, and the US, then Germany. After

Germany was Switzerland. That's David Lowe. He was born in Singapore and for about 10 years hopped all over the world playing pro soccer. He never earned more than about $2,000 a month and usually much less. And then I went to Thailand. After Thailand was Mongolia. After Mongolia was, I went to Iceland and then I trained in France. And then from France, I signed to play in New Zealand. After New Zealand, then I went to Italy. If you are an aspiring athlete, you quickly realize that while you may be the featured attraction, the compensation doesn't necessarily follow. The reality is they are management and we are labor. That's DeMora Smith, who runs the NFL Players Association. The history of labor and management in the United States has been one, for the most part,

where management has successfully lobbied and changed laws through litigation that have affected a net negative for employees. Some sports ecosystems are particularly warped. Consider college football and basketball in the U.S., where the athletes are paid zero dollars while generating billions for the universities. My freshman year in college,

my head coach got a $10 million extension, and that was when I was like, oh, we aren't a team, we're a business. And that was when the light went on for me. That's Dominique Foxworth. He played college football at Maryland, then six seasons in the NFL. His final contract paid him about $27 million over four years. But he learned early on that football is a business and a particularly high-risk one.

I've been on the field a couple of times where people have been paralyzed. I played in a preseason game in the NFL where a guy died in a locker room afterward. We had practice at Maryland where a helicopter came to take one player off the field and the coach said, move it down. And we kept doing the drills as the helicopter was taking one of our teammates who couldn't move to the hospital. Foxworth was at Maryland in the early 2000s. The current Maryland football coach, D.J. Durkin, was recently placed on administrative leave after a player died during a spring workout. Dominique Foxworth, for his part, got an MBA from Harvard after he left football. His wife has three graduate degrees, two from Harvard, including a law degree.

They have three kids, two girls and a boy. I asked Foxworth, considering his own history and the growing body of research about football and brain damage, what happens if his son wants to play? He's only five now, and I say no. I mean, it's not a problem that we're actually facing at this point, but I would say no. So if he comes to you and says, hey, Dad, I know before I was born you were amazing, NFL player, great career, et cetera. What do you mean no? What are you talking about?

I mean, I think the research it wasn't there i i suspect my parents would not have let me play when i was that age if there was um information available and like it's it's not even clear information but what is clear is that it it does put you at higher risk and like the best case scenario is that you play professional football and you make a lot of money like i i wasn't i was far from poor growing up, like middle class, but like I went to Baltimore County public schools. I was like,

that's not my son's experience. I didn't have access to the things that he'll have access to. So like, I, I frankly think that he is starting in a much better place than I am. So he should do much better than, than banging his head into other people's head for money like it seems like a step back to me honestly and and then what about you do you worry

about your brain does your wife worry about your brain absolutely I mean I it feels like you're living a horror movie honestly where it's like this thing lurking in the background and so I mean's scary. And I think that what is most frightening is right now I would do it all over because of what it's done for me and my family. Along with the fun of watching and playing and following sports, along with the emotional resonance, the infinite narratives and unclear outcomes, you can't deny that sports can also be complicated and full of conflict. Sport is, in fact, an exercise in conflict. You're trying to beat someone, to outrun, deceive them, to take what's theirs, make it yours. But there's a ton of conflict outside the game, too. And that's another reason we're launching this series, to explore those conflicts. For instance, the relationship between athletes and ownership.

There are going to be core philosophical differences between us. There's also the conflict between fair play and wanting to win maybe just a bit too badly. Here's the cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles after he was proven to have used the doping agent erythropoietin, or EPO. The sport of cycling in the mid-90s, EPO was like wildfire. And we were holding out, holding out, holding out. And we got to this moment, which we're like, oh my God, we don't have a choice. Well, we do have a choice. Our choice is to go home. We can just quit, retire. But if we want to stay and fight, we all walking around with knives because we were told we were going to a knife fight.

And next thing you know, everybody had guns. And we said, oh, these boys are carrying guns. And so in the spring of 95, we went to the gun store. We'll also explore the conflict between gut instinct in sports and the growing reliance on data and analytics. Here's the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl winning coach Doug Peterson. There's a lot of data available to us and, you know, it can be overwhelming, take you away from the football aspect of it, but I just take a slice of it and try to use it to our benefit, you know, for that week. And we'll hear the UFC fighter Lauren Murphy talk about the conflict between being a peace-loving human and a UFC fighter. The fight started and I hit her as hard as I could.

And she actually fell down. I knocked her down with the first punch. And I was so green and so naive, I didn't even realize what had happened. I remember distinctly looking at her and thinking, what are you doing on the floor? And so I let her get up just because I didn't know really what was going on. And then I hit her again. And that was it. So as you can see, we've got a lot of ground to cover in this Hidden Side of Sports series.

And we'll be exploring all of it over the next few weeks and then periodically over the next few months. After the break, we'll get things started with a look at just how big the sports industry is and how we got here. We've seen professionalized athletes in the world for, you know, at least 2,500 years now. Also, not everyone in sports fits the jock stereotype. And the flight attendant comes up to me and she says, so what did you do to get on this plane? That's coming up after the break. And if you want to hear our full unedited interviews with some of the athletes, coaches, executives,

and others featured in The Hidden Side of Sports, sign up for Stitcher Premium at stitcherpremium.com slash Freakonomics. We'll be releasing those interviews over the course of the series. We'll be releasing those interviews over the course of the series. We'll be right back. The National Football League, as you may have heard, is having some problems. A huge concern about player safety, as we heard from John Urschel and Dominique Foxworth.

The contentious national anthem protests, which we'll hear about later, and the NFL's audience has shrunk a bit. But let's be honest, the NFL is still a juggernaut. Of the top 50 shows on TV last year, 37 were football games. To understand why, to understand why sports are such a big deal to so many people, let's start with a man who pretty much asks himself that question every day. Sure. This is Victor Matheson. I'm a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Matheson specializes in the economics of sport. Yes, I'm one of the editors of the Journal of Sports Economics. I'm also the current president of the North American Association of Sports

Economists. And I'm also the author of the Economics of Sports, sixth edition, which is, I think, the top sports economics textbook in the world. So I kind of have a trifecta going on right now. Now, Victor, are you yourself now or have you ever been an athlete or otherwise seriously involved in sports? Yeah, so I was actually a referee for Major League Soccer for about 10 years. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, my college coach, when I was playing, took a look at me and said, hey, you know, I've been watching the way you play the game, and I think you might make an excellent referee.

Victor, how old are you, if you don't mind me asking? So I am turning 49 next week. Okay, happy birthday. Can you talk for a minute then about the ways in which sports, especially the business of sports, is different from when you were a kid? Sports have become bigger and bigger and bigger business. So a little before my childhood, but not much more before that, we would have athletes in the NBA and NFL have full-time jobs in the offseason because you're not making enough in the season to actually survive without having something to do in the offseason. I'm here at Holy Cross. Our most famous athlete is Bob Cousy, the first great point guard. He lives in a very modest house here in Worcester

because he never made $40 million a year like a top NBA player might make now. And so obviously that's a huge difference. Right, and other than, I guess, the obvious answer of we like to watch sports and consume all things around sports, why else do you think that sports have such an appeal that makes them so valuable, that ultimately generates so many dollars in eyeballs?

Well, number one, we make more money and we have more free time today than we did in the past. And so we have a lot more disposable income to spend on play and on recreation and on toys than we did a generation or two generations or three generations ago. Number two, we also have technology that helps us enjoy sports in a way we didn't in the past either. So I am not super old, but old enough to remember watching sports on the 19-inch black and white TV that we had. And obviously, my flat screen, 50-inch high-def TV that I can watch soccer from any country in the world at any time I want on demand is certainly a much better recreation option than trying to pick out exactly which kind of gray player was playing against what other kind of gray player back as a kid. So what can you tell us about the size of the sports industry and how it compares to other industries? So the answer here is actually surprisingly small.

So the biggest league in the world in terms of revenue generated is the NFL. And the NFL generates something like $14, $15 billion a year. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well, $14, $15, that sounds like a lot of money. That's roughly the same size as Sherwin-Williams. So the typical American buys as much paint from Sherwin-Williams as it does buying NFL products from the largest league in the world. You add in all these other American leagues, NBA, Major League Baseball, the NHL, Major League Soccer, plus the PGA and pro tennis and mixed martial arts and all these things, add them all up together, you've got maybe $50 billion of pro sports, a few more tens of billions of dollars in college sports,

but you're still only up at $60, $70 billion. That makes spectator sports in the United States roughly the same size as the cardboard box industry in the United States. Now, obviously, none of us, you know, gather around the water cooler on Monday morning saying, hey, man, do you see that awesome cardboard box that American Paper just put out? Of course we don't. So sports has a social impact that is way, way bigger than its economic impact. All right. So why does an industry that's only as big as the cardboard box industry matter so much? Here's one explanation.

Athletic competition has been around a long time. So we've seen professionalized athletes in the world for, you know, at least 2,500 years now. And so we see stories about people winning gold medals at the early Olympics, having lifetime supplies of food that you could eat anywhere in the city for free forever, or receiving large payments that are in the vicinity of hundreds of thousands of dollars, even back in the pre-BC days. But let's be clear. Long before there was professional sport, there was sport. I think the earliest sports were individual, so that Pharaoh Thutmose would strike the ball for Hathor, for the glory of the gods. That's John Thorne.

I'm the official historian for Major League Baseball. Thorne says sports have always been connected to sacrifice and to the regeneration of seasons. There's a reason why baseball begins in the spring and ends in the fall. And cricket, likewise. And what can you tell us about the ancient history of sport as a proxy for war and or violence? Well, one reasonably well-known episode was at Plurmel in a battle for a very small piece of land. Rather than have a massacre of hundreds of troops on each side, there were delegations formed.

The 30 best men of one side against the 30 best men of another, and both sides agreed to abide by the outcome. I believe this is the origin of team sport. This happened in 1351 during the Hundred Years' War between the English and the French. This event came to be known as the Combat of Thirty. Some of the historical details are disputed, but generally it's thought that 30 knights on each side engaged in controlled combat over several hours with breaks in between. The French won. It's believed that four of their men were killed while the English death toll was at least double that.

Over time, this contest came to be held up as a shining example of chivalry. Better a dozen dead than hundreds, yes? If you think it's a stretch to label this deadly encounter the beginning of team sport, well, when's the last time you watched an NFL game? Two opposing armies in offsetting uniforms, each with a captain, a rank and file, and marching orders, using physical violence to push into enemy territory. Even the language of war permeates the game. A blitzing linebacker penetrates the offensive line to sack the quarterback.

Some people may find this militarization off-putting. Some may enjoy it. And some, maybe the majority of sports fans, don't think about it at all. They just revel in the excitement of a physical battle with stakes that seem high, but compared to actual war, are absurdly low. Except, of course, for the Warriors themselves. How much brain damage do I have? I don't know. I played in a preseason game in the NFL where a guy died in a locker room afterwards. So sport seems to have been a proxy for war, at least as far back as the 14th century.

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, it became a tool for colonialism, which helps explain how sports went global. The British Empire, as it took over massive swaths of land and people, wasn't just spreading its politics and religion, but also its sports. It invented, codified, and evangelized a number of games, including cricket, soccer, and tennis. This was seen to serve many purposes, replacing native culture with a version the British considered superior,

increasing physical fitness of the native populations with an eye toward grooming the best soldiers, and instilling an appreciation for fair play, rule following, and, if you want to be just a tiny bit cynical, for subjugation. The United States, in its early days, thought of sport similarly, promoting it as a form of muscular Christianity. I asked John Thorne about this. I'm curious if you could talk about a few different elements of baseball and how they either exemplified or maybe even encouraged some of the behaviors that came to be known as hallmarks of Americanism. Jingoism, bragging, cheating, all of these things have a great tenure in baseball as in America. And those things that were barely tolerated in drawing rooms were absolutely adored on the ball field.

I was thinking of maybe some positive attributes like fair play and rule of law and so on. Well, fair play and rule of law are taming. The tendency to invite women to watch the games goes back to the 1850s because women were thought to be a civilizing influence, that men would not swear quite as much, they would not engage in physical confrontations.

Was baseball itself considered a civilizing influence, however, on Native Americans and perhaps other groups? The export of baseball to minority communities, to foreign countries, generally through military occupation, was a part of the rite of passage that if you were going to Americanize Japan, if you were going to Americanize Cuba, if you were going to Americanize Brazil, then you brought baseball with you. When Barack Obama and Raul Castro became closer and tried to end 50 years of hostilities, baseball was the mechanism. Because baseball, in the 19th century, baseball was a very great thing. It was a great thing because everyone could agree that it was a great thing. Baseball was a great thing for John Thorne himself.

I would say that sports was my way of becoming American. Thorne immigrated to the U.S. with his family in the 1950s when he was two years old. They were Jews from Poland. It was a matter of inclusion where perhaps not all other avenues were open to me. I became a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I think any self-respecting Jew would have to select the Dodgers. They were the outsiders and they included Jackie Robinson, who was an early hero for me. Jackie Robinson was the first black player allowed to play in Major League Baseball. I think what the Dodgers showed me

and what baseball showed me was that anybody could be an American, even me. So, John, how does baseball and or other sports affect the social and political and cultural objectives and dreams of America? That's what I really want to know. Well, I think sports is all about sublimation. We all think of sport as wonderful fun in and of itself,

whether engaged in or spectated. And in fact, when we go to a ball game or we watch one on TV, we are affiliating with a civic entity and we sublimate our martial instincts by pouring them into sport. For two hours, three hours, four hours, we allow ourselves and those around us to be somebody other than whom we are on a nine-to-five basis during the week or in our own households. We can paint our faces. We can wear silly hats. We can drink ourselves silly. We can yell insulting epithets at the umpire or certain players. And you argue that's generally a healthy function, correct?

Generally a healthy function because primitive instincts and aggression lurk at every moment. Right. And one component of that is tribalism, right? It's our team and the other team. And anything that our team does, one thing that I find really curious about sports is if you're watching your team and there's a questionable call, you don't have to question that it's a wrong call if it's against your team. You know it's the wrong call, whereas if it's against the other team, you know it's the right call. So we really... Intellect is put on hold. That's why I call it faith for the faithless. You have faith in your team and your faith may not be questioned.

Do you think that deep tribalism is essentially a positive force or negative or what's the tradeoff? It's a dangerous force when it is permitted to walk out of the stadium or out of the bar. Fans from both teams pummeled each other with punch after punch. But it didn't end there. Police are also investigating not one, but two shootings that happened outside the stadium after the game was over. It's a tribal identity, and a lot of football fans that I work with are very happy with that tribal label. It really rings true to them. It's Martha Newsom, a cognitive anthropologist at Oxford.

She studies group bonding and the extreme behavior that can result. So before I started all this research, I didn't have a huge interest in football. But I had a boyfriend who loved football. And we went to a match and I found it so fascinating. I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged where grown men were hugging and kissing each other and crying together. Newsom calls this kind of bonding identity fusion. And it's when a personal identity and the group identity

become so heavily invested in each other that they're fused. They completely merge. So any attack on yourself feels like an attack on your group. And likewise, any attack on your group feels like an attack on yourself. So you go to these extreme lengths to defend and honour your group. So that's the kind of psychology we're looking at in military insurgent groups,

religious groups, nationalists, and also in football fans. Newsom argues this phenomenon comes with costs and benefits. I think sport is wholeheartedly and unreservedly a great way to bring people together. The unifying effect, just watching a football match or even talking about it right now, I get goose pimples of all those people coming together for that collective goal, that ambition.

You know, it's really powerful. it's a good thing but with that comes great responsibility so responsibility for inclusion racism has been absolutely hideous in football it's an ongoing thing homophobia is a huge issue which it has not been tackled in football properly gender is another issue there's violence in gender. So when England lose a World Cup match, the rates of domestic abuse go up around 30 percent. That's disgusting. There's an interesting paradox here. Research has shown that being on a sports team is one of the best ways of building social trust, that is, creating strong bonds, even between people from very different backgrounds.

Being a sports fan doesn't necessarily seem to conjure the same magic. It might, in fact, facilitate a kind of sorting into like-minded tribes with common enemies. You can't deny there's a certain homogeneity to many sectors of the sporting universe, starting with the obvious fact that the big team sports that get most of our attention and dollars are male team sports. But just because the athletes are male, should it necessarily follow that the vast majority of team and league executives are male? It's unfortunate that we're not further along at this point. That's Kim Ang of Major League

Baseball. So I think we were ahead on the race side. I mean, Jackie Robinson is the one example that everyone points to. But on the gender side, it's been slow to come. We're not where we should be. Ang has been in baseball for more than 25 years. She's now a senior vice president of international baseball development for the league. So what we do is we try and help grow the game globally. And at the same time, I've monitored and established programs which would help clubs to scout players, evaluate them, bring parity to the market in terms of signing them. Ang grew up in Queens, New York. Playing stickball and running bases in the streets. I was really a sports nut, loved to play.

She went on to play softball at the University of Chicago, which is known slightly more for its academic rigor than its sports teams. She studied public policy, and she wrote her senior thesis on the 1972 federal legislation known as Title IX. And Title IX is basically a law that tries to enact equity and parity and you cannot discriminate based on gender, race, etc. to institutions who receive federal funding. Title IX led to a major surge in women's sports in America, putting it well ahead of most other countries. That's one of the big reasons the U.S. National Women's Soccer Team has been so dominant, especially compared to the U.S. men. So it's through that paper on Title IX

that I really started to think about a career in sports. After school, Ang got an internship with the Chicago White Sox and rose through the ranks. She moved on to the New York Yankees organization, winning three World Series rings there, then became assistant general manager with the Los Angeles Dodgers. What was it like being one of the very few female executives? I always had to be overprepared, and I did not have the leeway that a lot of the guys did. And I also didn't have necessarily the camaraderie that they had. A lot of them played minor league baseball together or major league baseball together. Even as an assistant GM,

Ang ran into a sort of exclusion that would seem to be driven by a baseline expectation. You know, I'm walking into a major league clubhouse of a visiting park and I have all the right credentials and the security guard would say, no, you can't go in there. I'd say, well, I actually can go in there. Look at my credentials. And there's just the automatic presumption of who you are or probably in this case, more of what you're not. You know, you're not an executive, you're not an official with the ball club, you're media, you're an interpreter, you know, something of that nature. So, and that takes into account both gender and, you know, being of color. So, I can tell you a funny story. I was traveling with the Dodgers,

and the executives and the coaching staff sit up in first class. I've got Joe Torre to my left, and I've got, you know, Don Mattingly, Rick Honeycutt, some of our coaches in first class as well, as the players are boarding. And the flight attendant comes up to me and she says, so what did you do to get on this plane? And I looked at her and I said, do you really want to know? And she said, yeah. And she leaned in closer and I said, you see all these guys? She said, yeah. And I said, well, they all report to me. When you hear this story, how much of a villain do you want to make the flight attendant out to be? It's the kind of judgment so many of us make every day on so many dimensions.

Something doesn't fit the pattern we've been conditioned to recognize, and we don't even consider the fact that the pattern may be evolving. The swimmer Simone Manuel, who's African-American, saw a pattern that she didn't think she fit into. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it just had to deal with difficulty fitting in. She grew up in an athletic family in Texas, played lots of sports from a young age. With the other sports, there were other Black individuals, and in the sport of swimming, there weren't. And so it was really hard sometimes for me to relate to others because I kind of questioned if swimming was the sport that I should be participating in. There was nobody else on deck that was black. There was another reason for Manuel's reluctance to swim.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it comes from the culture of African-Americans. 60% of African-Americans do not know how to swim. A lot of what keeps us out of the water is our hair. My mom would always tell me, Simone, it's just hair. And she continuously told me this so that I kind of started to believe it. She believed it so much that she wound up going to swim at Stanford. And then at the 2016 Olympics, where she won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle. And at the 2017 Worlds. Americans have a great chance. With less than 10 meters to go, here comes Simone Manuel.

It's going to be at the touch. Simone Manuel gets it done. Holy smokes. It doesn't matter what my hair looks like if I'm on the podium winning gold medals and inspiring somebody behind me to hopefully forget about their hair and do the same thing as me. Manuel wins gold. Barriers broken, and records too.

Inequities revealed, and sometimes addressed. Bonds formed, except when they're not. Sport is as imperfect as any corner of society, but it's a bit more exciting than most, don't you think?

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we go deep with one of the most successful teams in professional sports. Weiss has just set a Super Bowl record with 12 catches. He's in motion. Montana. Touchdown! It's a team that's won five Super Bowls. And that's it.

The game is over. San Francisco has won Super Bowl XXIII. But what happens when success turns into mediocrity and worse? Largest margin of victory over the 49ers going all the way back to 1980. The players are angry, fans even more so. They want to fire the owner. I own this football team. You don't dismiss owners. When you lose a game, a lot of noise happens. When you lose two, a ton happens.

Usually three is like Armageddon. Try nine. It was also the team where this was happening. Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial injustice seems to be gaining traction. And that led to this. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son

of a bitch off the field right now. But then, something magical happened. Moving to his left, looking towards the end zone, he throws! Touchdown! That magic led to this. Hakuna Matata.

We might be the happiest non-Super Bowl winning team in the league. Last year, the San Francisco 49ers had one of the strangest seasons in NFL history. With the new season just underway, we sit down with the owner, the coaches and executives and the players to find out what happens this year. It means no worries for the rest of your days. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Derek John and Anders Kelto with help from Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rosalski, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melleth, Zach Lipinski, and Andy Meisenheimer.

The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. Freakonomics Radio can be found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. If you sign up for Stitcher Premium, you'll get all our shows ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, including the full interviews with many of the athletes and other sports figures from this series. Just go to StitcherPremium.com slash Freakonomics. Use the promo code Freakonomics for one month free. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email at radio at Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.