(Host) Commentator Brian Porto is Deputy Director of the Sports Law
Institute at Vermont Law School. And with both the baseball season and
the presidential election season well
under way, he’s been thinking about what happens
when sports and politics intersect.
(Porto) Sports and politics
are endlessly interesting, but they don’t necessarily mix well. Ozzie
Guillen, the manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team, learned that
the hard way earlier this spring, when he was suspended for five games
after expressing admiration for Cuban leader Fidel Castro during a
magazine interview. Guillen said that he admired Castro for having
remained in power despite numerous assassination attempts against him
during the past 60 years.
My first reaction, on learning of
Guillen’s remarks, was disbelief that a public figure could be so
politically tone deaf as to say anything favorable about Fidel Castro in
Miami. After all, the Marlins had just opened a new stadium located in
the Little Havana neighborhood, many of whose residents are Cuban
refugees (or their descendants) who view Castro as the embodiment of
evil. And the decision to build the stadium in Little Havana reflected
the Marlins’ recognition that much of their fan base is Cuban-Americans.
Thus, Guillen’s observations about Castro were a marketing director’s
worst nightmare, and the manager is lucky he still has a job because
many fans demanded his resignation.
After shaking my head in
disbelief at Guillen’s naivete, though, I realized that this incident
can teach important lessons to athletes, coaches, and fans at all levels
of athletic competition. One lesson is that no matter how much we love
sports in general and our favorite team in particular, we must remember
that politics and government trump sports because politics and
government determine the kind of world we and our families will inhabit.
Viewed in this way, the Ozzie Guillen incident had a silver lining,
namely, the willingness of baseball-loving Cuban-Americans to part with a
talented manager in order to stand up for a political principle. To the
extent that Miami’s Cuban-Americans put the need for human rights and
limited government in Cuba above sports, they taught a lesson that every
Vermonter should absorb.
But although the Cuban-American
community was within its rights to criticize Mr. Guillen, it mirrored
the authoritarianism it fled decades ago in trying to silence him by
demanding his resignation for expressing an unpopular political view.
This reaction missed the point that the price of freedom of expression
is that, occasionally, one must read or hear speech that one abhors.
Freedom of speech only for the ideas we share isn’t freedom at all.
Thus,
I hope that coaches and parents in Vermont will view the Ozzie Guillen
incident as a means of teaching young athletes that they should embrace
and discuss issues outside of sports, but that when doing so, they must
respect everyone’s right to speak, even when the speech is uniformed or
insensitive.