The Dallas Cowboys are touted as America’s Team, but have you ever encountered a fan of the Cowboys in the Northeast or the Rust Belt or on the West Coast? Not often, I’ll bet. There’s a good reason for this, but not one you’d automatically think of. The fact that the Cowboys are a very good football team that regularly humbles foes from the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific states plays a part, but only a small part. The real reason the Cowboys are loathed is they’re a conservative team.
Yes, not only are there liberal sports (soccer, baseball, jogging) and conservative sports (football, boxing, wrestling), but there are liberal and conservative teams. How can you tell which are which? It’s tricky, not to mention subjective, but four factors are determinative: the home, the owner, the fans, and the character of the team itself, including the coaches and the style of play.
Just listing these factors should be clue enough for you to figure out why the Cowboys are conservative. They’re from Dallas, for heaven’s sake, the most conservative big city in America. Owner Jerry Jones may not be a right- wing crazy, but he sure doesn’t act liberal. Nor do the fans. And the personnel? Tom Landry, coach for decades, is a pal of Sen. Jesse Helms. Roger Staubach, the Cowboys’ greatest quarterback, is a prominent Texas Republican and chum of Jack Kemp. Today’s Cowboy crew features QB Troy Aikman — liberals are never named Troy — and coach Barry Switzer, a winning-is- everything type.
Important as it is, location isn’t everything. The Atlanta Braves are the South’s favorite baseball team, but they’re not conservative despite their location and fans. In the Braves’ case, the owners matter a lot: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. Any team run by Turner, the world’s richest tree-hugger and Christian-basher, is a liberal team. Turner and Fonda do the tomahawk chop at Braves games, driving Indian — oops, I mean Native American — activists nuts. But they’re hardly politically incorrect. Turner is one of the Democratic party’s biggest donors. On the other hand, Wayne Huizenga, who owns the Florida Marlins, is a buddy of George Bush and a Team 100 member, making the Marlins a conservative team.
Absent owner Peter Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles might be a conservative team, too. He made his dough on asbestos lawsuits and broke ranks with fellow baseball owners who wanted to stand up to the players’ union. I once had to listen to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal but a Baltimore native, extol Angelos for siding with the greedy players. Liberals think players are workingclass even when they’re working for $ 30 million a season, like Michael Jordan.
Fans make a difference. All Philadelphia teams are conservative because nearly all Philly fans are Reagan Democrats. All Seattle teams are liberal because fans there invented the wave, a liberal innovation designed to keep spectators from following the action on the field. All Detroit teams are conservative because their fans are from the suburbs, which is Republican turf, and not the city, a Democratic stronghold. All Washington teams are liberal because the fans are, well, from Washington. The exception was the Washington Redskins of the 1970s under coach George Allen, father of the conservative Virginia governor. Allen and President Nixon were good friends.
A conservative playing style, however, is the best measure of a team’s ideology. If a team is rough, as eager to indulge in violence as finesse, if it’s opportunistic and obsessive about winning, it’s conservative. Because of their proclivity for violence, all hockey teams are conservative. But that’s not necessarily the case with football teams. The ones that really love to hit, like the always-brutal San Francisco 49ers, are conservative. Coincidentally, the 49ers’ star quarterback, Steve Young, did a TV ad for the Dole campaign.
My pick for the most conservative team of 1996 is surprising, even to me. It’s the New York Yankees, who won the World Series by whipping the liberal Atlanta Braves in six games. By the yardsticks of location and fans, they should be a liberal team. Besides, they’re a kind of halfway house, bringing back Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry from drug rehab. Their owner, George Steinbrenner, is also a product of rehab, having been convicted, then pardoned, of an illegal campaign contribution to Nixon.
But the reason the Yankees are conservative is their style of play. They were entrepreneurial in the extreme, using speed and fielding and good managing to make the most of their skills. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps after falling behind 6-0 in the crucial fourth game of the Series. Better yet, their star relief pitcher, John Wetteland, was nicknamed Psycho. At least that was his old nickname. Now he’s a born-again Christian.
FRED BARNES
