The Era of Woke Sports Is Dead | Clay Travis
In the summer of 2016, before an otherwise meaningless preseason game, San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, heralding the birth of the woke sports era. On Saturday and Sunday, that era, mercifully, came to an end when first the UFC fighter Jon Jones and later white and black players on the Detroit Lions, the Tennessee Titans and the Las Vegas Raiders all celebrated on the football field with their own versions of the Donald Trump YMCA dance.
It speaks to Trump's innate marketing gifts that he managed to design a new, somehow more popular dance to the YMCA song that replaced the gay singers with the subtle fist pump movements and light swivel of a 78-year-old man.
In the space of eight years, the NFL, America's foremost sports obsession, went from woke sports to Trump sports, the return of an era when the country is celebrated in joyful ways as opposed to attacked for its supposed racial failings and toxic masculinity.
Already some are losing their minds at the Trump dance celebrations, demanding punishments from the NFL, but the woke lunatics demanding punishments have been defeated. Their left-wing oppression Olympics identity politics worldview was always incompatible with the overriding ethos of sport -- the ultimate meritocracy. The best man or woman wins in sports, not the best man pretending to be a woman. Athletes, coaches, and owners, who overwhelmingly support capitalism and individual excellence finally spoke out loudly enough to silence the small minority of athletes and coaches -- the LeBron James's, Greg Popovich's and Steve Kerr's among them -- who had decided to make left wing sports their hallmark.
In the end, we all won and the Michael Jordan era of sports has (mostly) returned with star athletes like Patrick Mahomes and Caitlin Clark, the most popular male and female athletes in America, both declining to make a political endorsement. This is smart, and healthy, for sports, since the vast majority of sports fans aren't political diehards. Jordan got it right decades ago when he explained his aversion to entering politics by saying, "Republicans buy sneakers, too," a line I would later use for my bestselling third book, which was released in the fall of 2018, right in the heart of the woke sports era and which you should all go read if you haven't already because I was right about everything I said in that book.
Woke movement started with Kaepernick
The 2016 Kaepernick kneeling moment, which reverberated across the sports and political world, set loose a cavalcade of immediate reactions, both pro and con, but the legacy of his kneeling came to extend far past Kaepernick himself – it marked the beginning of the woke sports era, a time when sports, which for many had been a bastion and refuge from politics, became the very essence of politics itself. The MSESPN era of sports was real and impossible to escape. ESPN essentially became MSNBC with bouncing balls.
Soon after Kaepernick's protest began, Donald Trump was elected president, whereupon he criticized athletes for kneeling during the anthem, and it wasn't long before kneeling for the national anthem began to overshadow the game of football itself.
Eli Harold #58, Colin Kaepernick #7 and Eric Reid #35 of the San Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during the anthem prior to the game against the New Orleans Saints at Levi Stadium on November 6, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images)
Sports reporters scrutinized the sidelines to see which players kneeled, kneeling spread from football, taking over basketball, the NBA in particular, which eventually, in the 2020 Covid bubble era, emblazoned the court with Black Lives Matter and replaced actual player names with political slogans on the backs of jerseys. For those of you who didn't live through this era, it can seem unbelievable that the era ever existed at all. But remember this: Cheered on by woke sportscasters at ESPN who, and I still can't believe this is real, led an actual moment of silence during the NCAA women's basketball tournament airing on the network because the morons on ESPN didn't understand the law passed by the state of Florida merely restricted the teaching of sexuality to young children in public schools.
But, of course, the woke sports era extended into Covid and found its peak cultural ascendence during the BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's death, when even Major League Baseball and the NHL put BLM logos inside their sports. Major League Baseball even canceled the All-Star Game in Atlanta because they accepted Democrat arguments that new voting bills would limit voting rights in Georgia. (After record turnout in 2022 and 2024 proved these arguments to be complete lies, MLB has since announced their All-Star Game will be coming back to Atlanta, a tacit admission of total overreach and manic overreaction to dishonest arguments.)
Sports fields across all leagues quickly became billboards for woke messaging during the 2020 season. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)
The craziest moment of the woke sports era might well have been when NBA players refused to take the court for playoff games after police in Wisconsin shot and killed a black man holding a knife, Jacob Blake, and then, unbelievably, mostly black women made T-shirts WITH THE NAME OF A WOULD BE DOMESTIC ABUSER OF A BLACK WOMAN ON THEM to take a stand against police violence as well.
Let me repeat for those of you who forgot this happened -- NBA players refused to play playoff games because a black man tried to attack a black woman and police kept it from happening after she called police to protect her from him.
And they were praised for doing so by almost every sports media member who covered the NBA!
The woke mind virus completely and totally took over sports.
To such an extent that the NBA fired an announcer who had the audacity to say "All Lives Matter," on Twitter.
ESPN fired a tennis announcer who said Venus Williams exhibited "guerrilla tactics" when she charged the net, claiming he had called her a gorilla.
MIAMI GARDENS, FLORIDA - MARCH 19: Venus Williams of the United States returns a shot to Diana Shnaider of Russia during her women's singles match during the Miami Open at Hard Rock Stadium on March 19, 2024 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
Before long, all criticism of any black quarterback was seen as racism. The NFL Draft was even called by Colin Kaepernick himself, and I can't believe this was real, a modern day slave market. As if this wasn't clear enough, a Netflix documentary turned NFL players at the combine from football players of all races auditioning for jobs worth millions of dollars into a modern day version of a slave auction. In the ultimate Netflix plot twist, Kaepernick himself sued the NFL, seeking to return to the league and be employed as a slave.
Woke sports media became too far left
Along the way, the sports media became, if anything, even more woke than the athletes and leagues, cheering on one abjectly crazy, woke idea after another. (The sports media has not recovered from the Kaepernick and Covid era because it once and for all demonstrated the huge difference between fan politics and sports media politics. Fans tend to be right of center in their politics, while sports media are far left wing.)
Kaepernick's kneeling became inextricably intertwined with the Covid era as well, leading to several years of teams, leagues and sports media mostly lighting themselves on fire and destroying their audience in the process. The NBA, for instance, has a fraction of the audience it had before Kaepernick kneeled, consistently setting new ratings lows year after year, even if most in the sports media won't cover the league's collapse. Indeed, so far this season, the NBA is setting new ratings lows yet again.
Through all of this, ESPN in particular, but aided by other sports media talents at Fox, CBS, and NBC, stoked racial division and played up woke sports to line their own pockets.
White men and women, often executives at these organizations, feared losing their own jobs if they stood up to the ugly racial divisions being preyed upon by left-wingers in sport. Identity politics, by the fall of 2020, as Joe Biden ran for president against Donald Trump, appeared to have won, race-baiters notched huge contracts, Twitter curtailed the sharing of criticisms of school shutdowns and masking. Athletes who refused to get the Covid shot were publicly shamed by sports media as infidels.
Most sports media demanded that no games be played, and all sports be shut down.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - JULY 24: A general view as members of the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins participate in pre-game ceremonies before the Opening Day game at Guaranteed Rate Field on July 24, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. The 2020 season had been postponed since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
And each positive Covid test was covered as a sign of immorality, of the sports world failing to live up to the eternal memory of Saint George Floyd.
Some people, and I know you will find this crazy, even called me racist and sexist!
Me.
The least racist and sexist person in the history of sports media.
Hell, I've known why the caged bird sings since at least 2012.
And nobody has been more supportive of hot, racially diverse strippers than me.
Ever.
I have the credit card bills to prove it.
But I digress, this column is not just about how I'm a hero and was right about everything for the past eight years – everyone already knows that – it's about how the woke mind virus, even as Joe Biden rode into the White House, had begun to devour itself.
Once Donald Trump, white supremacist in chief, was defeated, who could be the great Satan for woke sports?
There was no easy target.
So football itself, that aggressive sport played by men, came under attack.
Why did it have to be so masculine? (Witness the attempt to lionize Sarah Fuller, the Vanderbilt kicker, who remains to this day, the worst kicker in college sports history.)
Around that time, when they tried to tell us all that Sarah Fuller was a hero and made you wear masks to football games outdoors,, I went into a Target store to buy football cards for my then 10-year-old. As we walked into the store, he pointed to the shirts being sold in the store, a bevy of them that said, "Girl Power," on them in a variety of shapes and colors.
To me, it wasn't very noticeable, I'd long since internalized the celebration of womanhood as a corporate marketing play.
But my 10-year-old noticed. He and his friends were being raised in a very different era than the one you and I grew up in, "Dad," he said, "why do girls get shirts like that? How come there are no shirts that say, "Boy Power?"
The comment gave me pause.
Of course he was right, a boy power shirt wouldn't ever be sold by Target. And if it were, it would be seen as sexist and the same people buying the girl power shirts would demand their removal from the store.
But it struck me, one might even say it woke me up, it took me a while to realize it, but the left-wing attacks on white men weren't enough. All men would become their targets, white, black, Asian and Hispanic.
And guess who most sports fans are?
Dudes.
White, black, Asian and Hispanic.
No matter who you are or where you're from, you share much in common with many people if you are a sports fan. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)
We may live in different parts of the country, and we may have different incomes, but sports unites men like nothing else. Put a group of dudes of different races and ethnicities on a deserted island and before long they'd all be sitting around talking about their favorite wide receivers from the 1990's.
Most men, deep down, are pretty similar.
Talking sports became divisive because it became woke
Sports is our connective tissue, the fabric that unites us. I'm not deriding women's sports fans, there are many, but men, innately talk sports. It's in our DNA.
As the Kaepernick era took over sports and Covid threatened to shut down sports, something interesting began to happen – OutKick's audience, on radio, TV, and the web, began to skyrocket – and all I was saying was this, sports are good, we should play them during covid, and we can do so safely.
For that, I was labeled a heathen.
Every article about me from that era labels me controversial.
When I had the audacity to say kids shouldn't have to wear masks, I was included, accidentally, on a email thread of sportswriters ridiculing me for daring to speak out against kids wearing masks.
But a counter revolution was under way. I could feel it. Young men of all races were done with the woke era, they were becoming aware of how much they'd been lied to, of what they were being required to say to stay in good standing on the left – that boys were actually girls, that biology wasn't real.
At some point, the cult goes too far for most members of the cult.
Woke-mind virus took over
Yes, Joe Biden still rode this woke mental illness to a 2020 victory, but the seeds of woke sports's demise were already present in the result. Something very interesting happened in 2020, even if most didn't take note of it. Then, Donald Trump, erstwhile white supremacist, increased his support among all races. Joe Biden didn't win because of minorities, he won because of woke suburban WHITE college grads. It turned out that while many of the high-profile faces of the woke sports movement were black, the true supporters of woke sports were white, college-educated professionals, the richest and whitest people in America were actually, it turned out, the wokest.
Megan Rapinoe was the true face of woke sports, not Colin Kaepernick.
Megan Rapinoe became the new face of woke athletes after Kaepernick emerged. (Photo by Marcio Machado/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)
The undercurrent of support was building there in 2020, but in the summer of 2022, it stepped into public view.
That summer in Atlanta, Georgia, a man pretending to be a woman named Lia Thomas dove into a swimming pool and won a women's NCAA swimming championship.
Video of his victory in women's sports went mega-viral and a brave women's swimmer named Riley Gaines -- who we are proud to employ at Outkick today -- had enough, she had to turn down dental school and begin to speak out about what men were doing to women's sports. Enough, at long last, was enough. While Lia Thomas tried to label himself the Jackie Robinson of trans sports, most reasonable Americans saw his win for what it was, the logical extension of woke sports, a moment when inclusion became exclusion. When Lia Thomas dove into the pool that day, he set loose a small ripple that would become a red Trump tsunami in the fall of 2024.
GLENDALE, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former competitve swimmer Riley Gaines speaks during a campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024 in Glendale, Arizona. The rally, held in partnership with Turning Point PAC and Turning Point Action, comes come two weeks after Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Harris held a rally at the same location. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
But that was still to come.
History, contrary to the historians who have spent years predicting the future on MSNBC, is always much clearer in retrospect.
And it turned out all the people who had been lecturing you about being on the right side of history actually believed in "chicks" with dicks.
At OutKick, we had a crazy idea, biology was real.
And it turned out almost all sports fans agreed with me. Our OutKick audience continued to swell.
But the red tsunami I predicted didn't show up in 2022 yet, it was too soon. Yes, the House flipped, but the Senate stayed in Democrat control. Yet again, however, the ripples of the red tsunami were present, Florida and New York surged to the right, harbingers of the direction the country was poised to go. And, interestingly, Joe Biden took the lack of a red wave as a good sign, rather than step down and allow Democrats to pick a new nominee, he announced he would run again.
Fans grew tired of the one-sided woke cult
Woke sports continued its march. OutKick was regularly attacked for being racist and sexist, the oppression Olympics still had its stalwarts, the NFL was sued for racism based on its coaching hires, most in the sports media refused to acknowledge men shouldn't be able to win women's sports, but all those young men, they were turning off traditional television, and they were turning on male focused podcasts on all fronts.
They left behind the new woke scolds and sought out new voices.
From Andrew Tate to Jordan Petersen, Joe Rogan to Ben Shapiro, young men were seeking answers to why they were seen as the problem by everyone?
With Trump out of office, men of all races were attacked by the left. If you were male, you were the problem.
Joe Rogan. (Credit: Getty Images)
But young men were baffled by this. How was it that they could be so young, have so little power, and yet be blamed for everything that was going wrong in the world?
Back to my own sons and their friends, who I would find listening to right wing podcasts or YouTube channels. I asked them what they and their friends liked, for instance, about Andrew Tate. "Mostly," said one of my sons, "the fact that he just tells us to quit whining and do more push-ups."
I thought about this when I saw Lamar Jackson modeling a new T-shirt, "No one cares," it said, "work harder."
Blamed for everything wrong in society, this youngest generation of boys and men in America had come to embrace a profound and individualistic self-reliance. If everyone is convinced you're the problem, you stop expecting them to save you and try to find out how to save yourself.
That's what they were all doing, searching for life meaning's online, as we shut down their schools, shut down their teams, and left them alone in their homes.
For some young men, the answer comes in deep philosophical examinations of what it means to be a man – Jordan Petersen – for others it's a twinning of religious faith with politics – Ben Shapiro – and for others it's simply the bro-tastic desire to do more push-ups than you were able to do the day before. And, yes, for some, it's bang as many hot chicks as you can and don't apologize for it – Andrew Tate.
But for most, it's a unique era of self-exploration, a time for defining ones-self and embracing a profoundly unapologetic opinion – there's nothing wrong with being a man.
White, black, Asian and Hispanic, the boys and young men of America, were all coming to the same conclusion: Masculinity isn't toxic, despite all the lectures, most of us haven't done anything we should have to apologize for.
And, make no mistake, woke culture is one long apology.
It's a ritualized self-flagellation, paying penance for something you had no part in, a woke-mind virus that had to be expunged, rejected completely. What's more rebellious than deciding you haven't done anything at all wrong when everyone is telling you that you have?
This further crystallized for me when one of my friend's sons came home from sixth grade and complained about one of the lessons they were being taught, in Tennessee public school!, about how white men were evil and the cause of all the world's problems. "How can I be evil Mr. Clay," he asked me one day, "when my mom doesn't even let me pick what to eat for dinner!"
He laughed when he said it, but the message he and other young boys were getting all over the country was clear, you are the problem.
And all of this angst, all of this uncertainty, played out for all these young men in an era when suddenly the adults in their lives shut down their schools and wouldn't let them play sports. I fought harder for schools to open than I have for anything in my career because every grown man knows tons of young kids who only stayed in school and kept themselves on the straight and narrow because of sports! How many of you reading this right now owe much of your success in life to a coach who took the time to help guide you, to a teacher or religious leader who took his time to teach you what it was to be a man?
Most of you, I'd wager.
Because make no mistake, it wasn't just a feminized society telling young men they didn't matter, it was a host of their political leaders on a broad level and, sadly, an awful lot of men who still don't understand that the most powerful thing any man can actually do is raise boys to be men.
Being a great dad? That's what real hard work is.
ST. LOUIS, MO - MAY 24: A father and his young son as seen during a rain delay before a MLB game between the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals on May 24, 2024, at Busch Stadium, St. Louis, MO. (Photo by Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Many of the young men out there have decided they can only rely on themselves because the men who would otherwise raise them are absent from their lives too. Boys need men at home, women can't be both mom and dad. (By the way, every time I write or say this I get inundated with emails from women saying they are single parents and their boys don't need fathers. I appreciate the fact that you are doing both jobs and some of you will do both jobs well, but the data doesn't lie. Boys, far more than girls, suffer immensely when men aren't present in their lives. We need many more, better dads. And grand dads and uncles. Only men ultimately can save men.)
Imagine all this was happening, a generation of white, black, Asian and Hispanic boys that have been failed by our society are suddenly moving from boys to men.
And they're voting for the first time.
And who do they trust?
The men they've found online to raise them.
And those men are overwhelmingly Trump supporters.
In Trump, they've found the unapologetic and masculine figure they'd been seeking for most of their lives. It isn't a coincidence that he's called Daddy Trump by many of them, he's their avatar of masculinity, the swaggering badass who sees and hears them, tells them that they don't have to apologize for who they are or how they feel, or for being men.
Young men searching for answers helped end woke virus
Hell, he even says it's good to be a man!
If he had thought of it, he'd sell them all red boy power T-shirts. (And hats. And probably anything else he could brand too).
These young men have innate bullshit detectors, they know when they're being lied to because they've been lied to for their entire lives. We took sports from them, we took prom from them, we took graduation from them, we made them wear masks while they played sports outside.
We told them they might die from a virus less dangerous to them than the common cold.
And we didn't let them say goodbye in person when their grandpa died.
Would you trust the authority figures that did that to you?
I wouldn't.
I'm much older than them and I still don't.
Add all that up and then imagine that you were sitting in your house on July 13, killing time online on a summer Saturday as you often do.
And suddenly your phone blew up with a brand new viral video – Donald Trump, the alpha of Generation Alpha was on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania when someone tried to kill him.
Trump, who you may have first been exposed to when you were just 10 or so years old, Trump who all the same people who made you wear a mask and shut down your schools and told you men were the root of all evil and that the best girls were actually boys, had just been shot at.
BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA - JULY 13: Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump is whisked away by Secret Service after shots rang out at a campaign rally at Butler Farm Show Inc. on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump slumped and injuries were visible to the side of his head. Butler County district attorney Richard Goldinger said the shooter and one audience member are dead and another was injured. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
Trump, the paragon of all evil according to the people who took your freedom away for years, Hitler himself, had just been buzzed by an assassin's bullet, such that his ear was actually clipped.
He was there hidden behind the podium. You didn't know if he was dead or alive. Your heart pounded as you watched the viral video play out.
Then, suddenly, he rose.
Blood poured down his face,
Men rushed to cover him, begged him to hide, to stay safe, to avoid the potential danger around him.
In that moment, what did Trump do?
He stood, faced the cameras, and screamed, "Fight, fight, fight!"
It was, and still is, the baddest ass moment in American presidential history.
A quarter inch from death and Trump rose and risked it all to tell you he would fight for you to the point of death.
And that he wasn't scared of death and that being a man was actually something to be proud of.
Sure, later you might hear him talk to me at the Georgia-Alabama game, or talk to Theo Vonn or Joe Rogan or on many other male-focused shows, the places you went to hear from the people you trust online to talk to you about being a man, but in that instant all those kids who had been told they were the problem with America saw through all the bullshit.
All those kids who had been lied to for their entire lives saw Trump rise and scream that he would fight.
And the young men across America decided right then and there that they had found their champion, the man who would tell them that being male was okay. They might not know his political opinions or his tax and trade policy, but they knew, in that one instant, that everything they'd been told about him was wrong.
He was their fighter.
And they voted for him in record numbers.
Putting him back in the White House.
Young men now celebrating victory
And leading athletes, overwhelmingly young men themselves, back on the field of play to celebrate his election with a viral twist of their own, the Trump dance.
America, it turned out, wasn't a place of oppression and evil ruined by men, it turned out, it was a place of opportunity and bravery and joy and fun.
It was a place, after all, where men could be men.
And where better for men to be men than on fields of gridiron combat and on octogons covered in blood, the place where men have measured themselves for generations, where wins and losses reign supreme.
Yes, the Trump dance is joyful and spreading like wildfire, but look beneath the surface and the message is clear, it's a double middle finger to the feminized ruling class, hidden in fists and a subtle hip swivel, "Fuck, you," it's saying, "I'm not apologizing any more for being a man. Go Trump!"
And with that athlete gesture from New York City to San Francisco, Detroit to Nashville and all points in between, the message is loud, clear and strident. Say it with me: woke sports is over, the Kaeperick era is dead at long last, it's Daddy Trump time.
RIP woke sports, Trump and the young male athletes who love him killed you once and for all.