During the worst of it, when Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police a decade ago and Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest, when a widespread reaction was to tell the highly accomplished, overwhelmingly Black professional athletes they were un-American, or well-paid farmhands who needed to get back to work, or both, and some of his peers in the ownership class were releasing players as punishment for joining the protest, it was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft who positioned himself as the voice of reason.
Kraft attempted to broker peace between the ownership hawks who saw the high-paid kneelers as ungrateful mutineers and, after decades of docility, the radicalized players unwilling to collect their checks in exchange for political silence. Kraft encouraged two of his players – the twins Devin and Jason McCourty – into deeper citizenship, to engage with the legal and political systems and promote reforms. As a sign of compassion and a willingness to listen, Kraft visited the incarcerated rapper Meek Mill, and later the two partnered with another artist, Jay-Z, on various criminal justice initiatives.
On 6 January 2021, when so many of the voices loudest in their opposition to player protests, the ones who said the dissenting ballplayers were treasonous for disrespecting both the American flag and law enforcement at the behest of outgoing president Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol and contributed to the deaths of one policeman and the trauma and eventual deaths of several others, it was Kraft who was apparently so disgusted that he stopped talking to Trump, publicly distancing himself from the man to whose inauguration four years earlier he had donated $1m.
Five years later, as the Patriots return to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2019, the American sporting and political landscape is far less principled. In the wake of Trump’s second election the athlete voice has been rendered politically dormant. The George Floyd moment is over, the three-day “pause” after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that shut down the sports world a lost memory in the hostile onrush of a racial retrenchment and restorative whiteness this country hasn’t seen since the dawn of the first world war.
The players are silent, but the political aggression long attributed to the players remains. It just switched aisles. Trump’s return signaled to the NFL the coast was clear to retreat from its aspirational sloganeering. The flags and flyovers and remote shots of far-flung military bases are still embedded in the television broadcasts, but the words “End Racism” that once appeared in the back of end zones around the league have disappeared. The vague “It Takes All of Us” remains, but “to do what, exactly?” is still unclear. A coaching cycle with 10 job openings these past few weeks resulted in the hiring of zero Black coaches – recurring proof that teams hire minorities only when forced. The specter of Trump is omnipresent. The Harbaugh brothers – Giants coach John and Chargers coach Jim – openly embrace him. The feeling is mutual.
During this retrenchment, where was the former ostensible voice of reason? Kraft was back again with Trump, basking in toxic afterglow at the premiere of Melania, Amazon MGM Studios’ $40m documentary of Melania Trump. (The Guardian’s verdict: zero stars.) Bygones, it seems, are bygones.
Kraft’s reversal represents the malleable ethics of the billionaire class, of the consistent gaslighting of a sporting public that desperately wants to see goodness in their games, for sports to lack the stench of the myriad pollutants associated with power, from the willful breaking of brains and bodies, to gambling, to Trump, to somehow be separate from the entire noxious atmosphere. Such is not possible.
That leaves Kraft. His team is triumphantly back, but as the country slips deeper into authoritarianism, he now looks as exposed and weary as the players, a man who has lost his nerve and fallen predictably back in line. He did not have to go far. Kraft did not offer Trump another $1m for last year’s inauguration – according to Federal Election Commission filings, the slack was picked up by gambling titans DraftKings ($502,000) and FanDuel ($482,000) – but for all of his supposed outrage over January 6, there he was, dancing on stage with Trump, contributing to circuses even as the bread grows less affordable. Kraft has apparently made peace with the man who encouraged an attack on his own country, who swore he had nothing to with the violence, and then, once back in office, ordered the Department of Justice to settle with the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police while trying to breach a window into the Capitol. Babbitt’s family was awarded $5m and Babbitt posthumously restored full military honors by Trump, who then immediately pardoned roughly 1,500 of the convicted rioters.
When he first arrived 33 years ago, Kraft captured the Boston fan’s heart. The humble everyman season-ticket holder not only rose from the metal benches of old Schaefer Stadium to own the team and keep it in Massachusetts, but transformed the lowly, dysfunctional, often highly comical Patriots into something no New Englander ever imagined: an A-list championship standard that would so eclipse the foundational, bedrock names of the sport – Dallas and Pittsburgh, Oakland and Miami – that his success and influence would be met with a staggeringly small vindictiveness, evidenced by him and his legendary coach, Bill Belichick, failing to be inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame this year.
If his re-engagement with Trump may be forgiven as an innocuous example of pragmatic politics, it is not. Kraft certainly is a businessman first, and like most businessmen, he has been politically bipartisan, supporting Democratic candidates – including Barack Obama for president – as well as Republicans locally and nationally. By celebrating Trump, however, he has enjoined something more darker and less credible as the times darken and America deludes itself into believing today’s moment is merely uncomfortable for some, triumphant for others, but not defining. Kraft embodies a newer, far less heroic role that is nevertheless appropriate for an increasingly cynical world. He is the transactional billionaire, cynical possessor of fluid standards and dubious associations who may sometimes stand for something, but in the end, like so many of the rest, fell once again for Trump.
Howard Bryant’s latest book is Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America from Mariner Books.
