Interview: Dr. Adia Benton, Cultural Anthropologist on COVID Sports Bubbles and Fandom
In this episode, Jessica brings back Dr. Adia Benton, Cultural Anthropologist at Northwestern University, to talk all things COVID and sports. They discuss Dr. Benton's predictions from March (BIAD Episode 151), the socio-economic impact of COVID sports bubbles, and the ethics of watching sports during this time.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Jessica here. I’m joined today by Dr. Adia Benton, who you might remember from earlier this year when we had her on episode 151 back in March. Today we’re gonna talk once again about COVID and sports. If you haven’t yet listened to episode 183, which dropped earlier this week, I encourage you to, as Lindsay, Amira, and I had a wide-ranging discussion on this topic. Now Dr. Benton is here to provide us with even more context. Dr. Benton, will you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
Adia: I’m Adia Benton, I’m a cultural anthropologist. I study infectious disease outbreaks and I am a professor at Northwestern University.
Jessica: Do you have a favorite…Are you like a big Chicago sports person? I don’t think I even know this about you.
Adia: You know, I basically love the team where I live, it seems. Because I lived in Boston for a while I was like, I don’t even like baseball but my first year in Boston was 2004 so, yeah, I had to love baseball. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, when White Sox was possible I went to the White Sox. I dreamed of going to see the Bulls. I live not very far from where the Bears play.
Jessica: Okay.
Adia: So I basically indulge in the local sports culture and sports fandom whenever possible.
Jessica: Alright, so you’re like geographically bound rather than deep, generational things.
Adia: Basically. Yeah, which is weird, because at some point I remember we must’ve loved the Pittsburgh Steelers – I have no association with Pittsburgh whatsoever, but I remember that very small piece of my early childhood having a Pittsburgh Steelers situation in my house.
Jessica: [laughs] That’s so funny. Sports are so funny. Okay, so, we had Adia on in March, not long after everything in sports shut down. But I think it was before the official announcement of the Olympics being postponed. So this was really at a time when everything was up in the air, and there was no talk yet of bubbles or wubbles or any real sense of how or if sports was going to return. At the end of the interview – this is so mean of me, because I’m about to quote you to you from March – you told me, “I’m hoping we get our sports back…”
Adia: This is sad. I’m feeling selfish. I’m hoping we get our sports back by the end of the year.
Jessica: And here we are now, and it is the end of the year, COVID’s raging. Sports came back in all kinds of ways and at all different times. It’s kind of a mess now. I feel like that’s even an understatement. We’re about to start up an indoor basketball season. What do you think or what do you feel when I quote you to you? [laughs] What you said in March, about it was “selfish” of you to hope for sports by the end of the year?
Adia: Well, you know, I remember your reaction which was actually something like, “Wow…”
Jessica: End of the year. Wow.
Adia: Yeah. Does that seem too late, or too early?
Jessica: It seems far away.
Adia: [Jessica laughing] It was like somebody hit you in the gut! It punched you in the gut. You just didn’t know what to do with yourself.
Jessica: That’s fair! [laughs]
Adia: Right!
Jessica: Yes, that felt so far away. When you said it it was like, I just couldn’t even imagine that as a possibility. You were telling me that we’d be lucky to get them back by the end of the year.
Adia: Right, and I said that because I think there were a few miscalculations, and those miscalculations were essentially about value and values, right?
Jessica: Yeah. Oh, wow, yeah.
Adia: Right? Because I had been thinking like most people who think about sports critically, we think of it as an industry, right? And one of the things that I was thinking was not simply about the sort of ethical or moral state of sports as an industry but really like, okay, so how do you make your money when you don’t have spectators? You build up all of that hype and excitement around being there, you know? So that was the other thing, but also I overestimated the extent to which that kind of value mattered and I underestimated the extent to which liability and risk factored into how they think about their profit, their bottom line. Then there’s the secondary question of the human resources, right?
Jessica: Yes.
Adia: Which is, you know, what happens when people get sick? How do you fill a roster? How do you train people in such a way that whatever they put in comes out on the other side? Obviously I knew that the bubbles were possible, but I was like, these are humans…I mean, I was also thinking about different sports, right?
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: So, if you have a long season where you play like a hundred whatever games…I always forget how many games baseball has.
Jessica: It’s like 182…I feel like that’s too many. I actually don’t know. [laughter]
Adia: I think that’s close! It’s funny, when I say it to people who really love baseball they’re like, duh, it’s 181 or whatever it is!
Jessica: Yeah!
Adia: So how do you actually make sure that grown folk stay in a bubble, perform their duties…I think it’s actually easier with the women’s leagues, they did it better, obviously. But how do you do this when you have a season that spans 3, 4, 5 months; you travel, you do all of these things, and also maintain testing regimens and all of these things. We were dealing with a sort of…Even though we were experiencing a much smaller epidemic on much smaller scales, we were experiencing a shortage of tests. We were experiencing all of these things. So for me it was sort of like, how does the industry create a situation for itself, or these industries create a situation for themselves, where they make the money that they want to make, cultivate the market base and the fan base that they need to be able to do that – at minimal risk to themselves financially, liability-wise, whatever – and do it over this extended period of time. You know? That was the thing, it was always about managing resources. That was sort of the big question. So now here we are. Some leagues did it better than others.
Jessica: Right.
Adia: You know, sports like tennis did amazingly well in some ways, and in other ways terribly.
Jessica: Well, you know what’s interesting about talking to you at this point vs in March is that everything’s kind of the same as far as…I mean, we’re actually a little worse with the COVID numbers and where the pandemic is and how it’s spreading and sort of just community spread, at this point. It’s very bad. But I feel like this is such a huge topic right now because we have so many sports and all of the different ways they’ve come back. But I was thinking about the NBA in particular, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. They had what I would say was a successful bubble, overall, as far as COVID didn’t enter into the bubble. We could talk about all things around mental health and the separation and all the isolation and that sort of stuff, but as far as COVID goes the bubble worked. And now we’re weeks from the NBA just launching a regular season. [laughs] There’s travel, the Raptors have to come to Florida I think in order…Because Canada’s like, no way, this is a bad idea! So I don't even know how to square all that with the fact that the virus is so bad right now. We’ve seen football always struggle, both on the collegiate and on the professional level doing this kind of thing, and now we’re gonna be indoors. I don’t know what to make of the NBA, like, they did it so well and now this? What are your thoughts on what they’re doing?
Adia: You know, [laughs] I’m just sitting here laughing, sort of going, “What? Why…!” [Jessica laughs] Because basketball is its own sort of special little beast, right? Squads are pretty small and I’d say they’re relatively small. But the people who have to support a team like that is different. I think actually that’s why football had some problems.
Jessica: Because it’s so big?
Adia: It’s so big.
Jessica: Which is interesting because I almost wanna push back and say with basketball, if they have any kind of outbreak you have NO team, vs football we’ve seen like whatever the Ravens did last week.
Adia: Right.
Jessica: Whatever that team was they fielded, they still were able to field [laughs] a team, because there’s so many players.
Adia: Right. Also football’s outside.
Jessica: Football is outside.
Adia: But one thing that always gets me about football is the squads are bigger but they also train separately, so they train in essentially mini bubbles.
Jessica: Yes.
Adia: But the joke I always have about football is how many coaches do they have? There’s like a coach for every single position, and there’s dudes in the box, and like…[laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. There’s a main coach and then you have all the assistant coaches for all the different positions, that’s true. There is a huge staff around them.
Adia: Right, the staff is the thing.
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: Basketball, you have a few people who rub out some injuries. So it’s smaller, the squads are smaller, so you have a different bubble. You have people who are going to…I guess you could lose a whole team. The schedule is also more arduous.
Jessica: It’s a very different thing than a football schedule.
Adia: They play a lot of games, they play them inside…
Jessica: So how do we make sense of what the NBA is doing now?
Adia: You know, they were actually the first league to actually pony up money on research and diagnostics and those kinds of things. So I mean, it’s hard to kind of reconcile what they’re doing though, still. We’re still dealing with huge community spread and that was affecting these players in the spring, this was affecting the players in the summer – I don’t know why it wouldn’t affect them now. Can they fully bubble or sequester these people when there are, again, other people who do the work that makes their work possible? There’s still people who have to clean, cook, maintain, train, you know? Who cleans up and who does the care work, that’s a part of the story here. I mean, do they have to be in the bubble too?
Jessica: And what even is a bubble at this point?
Adia: Exactly.
Jessica: As soon as you get on an airplane and fly somewhere.
Adia: It sounds like to me the NBA is having to essentially become a mini-state. They have to govern.
Jessica: Yeah, they have something like a 150-page book of rules or expected behaviors.
Adia: Right. They’re basically having to set up rules, regulations, enforcements, safeguards, a financial infrastructure that manages…Basically they have to kind of create a kind of mini-state. They’re gonna have to ensure that every single contingency related to every person’s movements, they’re regulated. I don’t know how neoliberalism can even work in this mini-state. [Jessica laughs] You know what I mean? You can’t even contract out things because those people are also subject to those rules, and can you make them subject to those rules if they’re not a part of your little state? I don’t know. This is where we are. It’s now these little industries are creating their own little fiefdoms or something.
Jessica: Right.
Adia: Little kingdoms where they have a testing regime and a care regime, they have healthcare and they have…It’s like they’re living in their own wonderland.
Jessica: Yeah. But it’s still trusting that these players are gonna do what they’re supposed to, and even in the NBA bubble we saw Lou Williams [Adia laughs] drive up to Georgia. So, it’s still like, cross your fingers. Which is just so wild to think that we’re still at a cross-your-fingers kind of space with all of this. I’m really interested to get your opinion on this because I still feel really weird about sports being back, in part because I care a lot about all of the people you just talked about that can possibly get sick from that sports has returned. But also that it just makes it seem that normal life has resumed in some way. What's the role that sports has played in our society as far as how people are responding to the seriousness of this pandemic? Is sports just simply mirroring society where enough people are trying to go back to some kind of normal? Or is it that sports is really guiding people’s decision-making? How should we read that? Should we blame sports for some kind of normalization? I want you to say yes because that will make me feel better about all of my ideas!
Adia: You know–
Jessica: So thank you. [laughter]
Adia: There’s a part of me that feels like it goes both ways. One could possibly support bubbles. It would mean paying people, testing people, caring for people and thinking about people’s movements and facilitating that. On the other hand that is not how our society is currently operating, and we are not going to take our cues from professional sports. So, what it’s also showing us is that certain people will be protected, privileged or whatever, for the sake of our entertainment. I happened to watch a minor meltdown by a guy on CNBC, I don’t remember his name–
Jessica: Oh, I watched that this morning.
Adia: Right!
Jessica: Yes. Screaming about restaurants…
Adia: Right!
Rick Santelli: It’s not science! 500 people in a Lowe’s aren’t any safer than 150 people in a restaurant at 06:00. I don’t believe it, sorry! Don’t believe it.
Adia: He was like, are you telling me that church…He was basically saying “every space is the same” – that if one is open the other ones should be open and there’s no difference. It’s like, well, yeah, there’s a difference. In church people are quiet and then sing. In a Lowe’s you go in and then you go out. A restaurant you sit and you basically are just spreading, unmasked–
Jessica: Unmasked!
Adia: Eating, talking, enjoying yourself.
Jessica: Yeah, yeah.
Adia: You are basically spreading the virus.
Jessica: Right, there’s differences here.
Adia: Right, and that’s a social practice question. That’s like a bread and butter anthropology question. Yeah, all buildings are the same until you have different people doing different things in them. [laughs] To some extent I think one of the things about sports is you can kind of see some people making that leap, with going, well, if they’re playing basketball or football and those people aren’t caring about…They’re able to maintain a sort of safe space and continue to do whatever they’re doing, continue to do their work, then yes, then it’s possible for us to do that too. I think depending upon your orientation – and I sense that his orientation was “all of this is madness” – all spaces should be free, if we just minimize the number of people going in and out of it. I think there’s a kind of lumping problem here, which is: well, if sports are going on and they're able to maintain and they’re able to to this, and this is part of normal life, then we too can engage in our normal activities.
Jessica: And some of the ‘normal’ is getting together with other people to watch sports.
Adia: Absolutely.
Jessica: On Sundays when I take walks with the dog in my neighborhood I’m like, I bet those people with cars are all in there watching football! [Adia laughing] I mean, I know…But that’s where my brain goes. So yeah, that’s part of the normal.
Adia: Right.
Jessica: It’s this kind of resumption of getting together to watch sports that makes me so nervous.
Adia: That’s also part of the…There's a social element. We don’t know. That was the other thing I was thinking about, I was like, who is the audience now? I have so many friends who started watching the Premier League when it started back up with the piped in, canned audience noise, crowd noise. I was like, how are you guys watching this!? I started to think, well, there must be people watching this together with their friends and family and other things.
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: It’s not just Twitter watching. [laughs] So, there are always these sort of social interactional dimensions that we have to think about that are a part of this. So, yes, I think it’s highly possible that we’re putting ourselves into a position of cultivating our own little superspreader events. But again, that’s part of the calculation that was always being made in the sports industry, which is that we have a fan base, we have a market that still craves…There are people who still crave this and want it and need it, who build up their sociality rooted in fandom. I can’t think a way out of that, which is why I was also like, oh my god, I want my sports back by the end of the year!
Jessica: Yeah, and I feel like I just bring you onto Burn It All Down to ask you all the really difficult questions that there probably aren’t answers to. Like, this leads me perfectly to my question: what is the sports fan supposed to do now? And this completely unfair question of, like, is there an ethical sports consumption? I just feel bad at this point whenever I’m watching sports. [Adia laughs] But then that’s me admitting to you that I’m watching sports.
Adia: You’re watching!
Jessica: So, is there an ethical consumption at this point?
Adia: I have to say that I decided that I would not be watching sports because I was like, this is not…I don’t know how I feel about it, and I’m not sure if it’s a fully principled stance. [laughs] But I felt like I was supporting something that I wasn’t sure…You know, it’s like horror movies when you kind of cover your eyes.
Jessica: Yeah!
Adia: I actually felt like that’s what all sporting events would be like for me, being like, “Oh my god, I hope…Ooh! They just touched!” You know…? [laughs] “Did they just touch each other!?”
Jessica: Yes! So then you’re watching live sports and it’s just like, oh my gosh. I haven’t watched a ton of sports, but I happily watched the US Open. I felt good, even.
Adia: Okay, that is the thing I did watch…
Jessica: AHA! [laughter]
Adia: I was just about to say, actually I lied! I watched the entire US Open.
Jessica: And it was fun!
Adia: And it was amazing.
Jessica: But I just don’t know…
Adia: I also was watching through my hands and I would go, oh, look at them! They’re going back to their bubble!
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: I watched that because I was actually sort of curious about the bubble, I’ll be honest. I was like, let’s see what a tennis bubble looks like. I watched them go to their bubble and they showed them kind of in the bubble, and it made me feel better.
Jessica: It’s like bubble performance, for the fans.
Adia: It was absolutely. I mean, they talked about it like, “Oh look, each player got his or her own box…”
Jessica: Yes, all of them eating sushi or whatever.
Adia: All eating sushi. [laughs] Yeah, and they were all getting their own players’ box. There weren’t people sitting close to each other, these people were not leaving.
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: They were even forced to entertain themselves in the venue.
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: I mean, it seemed so strict.
Jessica: But is there…I think there’s no good way to watch sports at this point and feel okay with it. Is that a fair judgmental thing to say?
Adia: That’s how I feel.
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: I hadn’t thought about it until last week. I was like, I haven’t watched a game except for that US Open…Part of me was very concerned about the fact that these folks…I mean, I know a lot of them wanted to play, and I know that’s their job.
Jessica: Right. We’re all bored.
Adia: [laughs] We don’t have anything else. I mean, they have courts in their backyard, some of them. But I kind of felt like we’re all kind of working if we’re fortunate enough to have jobs that continue to pay us. We’re all kind of working under conditions that are bad. It made me feel like, why are these folks working? Is it just because they want to? Is it because they feel like they have to? We’re all in a pretty difficult space as workers, I think.
Jessica: I’m wondering…I don’t think we’re alone in how we’re feeling as sports fans. Like, here’s an unfair question, Adia – I’m just wondering, is there gonna be kind of a realignment for sports fans? I’m wondering once we get a vaccine, whatever the other side of this is, I now feel good that sports will exist on the other side because they’ve managed to exist during all of this. Are people just gonna go right back to the same kind of fan consumption? Do you think that all of this will change fans’ relationship to sport?
Adia: No.
Jessica: No. Yeah, okay.
Adia: Well, no, I do think that there’s a group of people who would have a very difficult time re-adjusting to gatherings, right? [laughs]
Jessica: Okay.
Adia: I think there’s straight up people who are absolutely straight up traumatized. I mean, I can tell because of how people have been actively policing others, right? All the judgement on Twitter, on social media, elsewhere. I always hear people go, “Oh my god, did you see those people together?” [laughs] You know?
Jessica: Yeah!
Adia: Right! “I hope this video isn’t from this year,” you know?
Jessica: Yeah! There’s a house on my neighborhood that I call the COVID house now which is really super unfair, but they had multiple unmasked people leaving their house at the same time on Thanksgiving and I just now call it the COVID house when we walk by because that just seemed deeply irresponsible. I don’t know these people at all, like, I have no relationships with them. I don’t know anything about them! But yeah, there’s such an easy way to fall into that, like, you see it and you judge it. Especially when you are feeling like you’re sacrificing.
Adia: Yeah. We actually adapted really quickly. We were conditioned pretty quickly actually to start to think about how we gather, what we touch, where we breathe, how we breathe, right? In ways that I think actively shape our ability and willingness to kind of get back to normal, specifically when it comes to gathering.
Jessica: Hm, interesting.
Adia: That said, I believe that you’ll absolutely see people in Alabama going “Roll tide!” or whatever, [laughs] like, whatever they do! You’ll see that happening next year. You’re gonna see “Go Cocks!” or whatever – I’m from South Carolina, so that’s my “Go Cocks!” Get 80,000 people in one stadium or whatever!
Jessica: Yeah.
Adia: That’s gonna happen again. But I do think that there’s going to be a little bit of an adaptation to get back to it. I also think it’s been interesting to watch how quickly people went from…I remember I was going to receptions in March or February and like, not getting too close to the cheese on a plate, sanitizing and everything. Everyone was like, what’s wrong with you? That could never happen now!
Jessica: Right.
Adia: I mean, we wouldn’t be having any receptions. But people were actually like, why are you doing that? And now there’s no question.
Jessica: It’s even like mask-wearing – there was a point when people wearing masks were the weirdos, and now that will be different going forward, I think.
Adia: Right. Absolutely, yeah.
Jessica: I kind of feel like everyone will just revert back to the fandom that they were comfortable with. Okay, I have one more question. Do you have any predictions for sports and COVID in 2021? [Adia laughing] You’re like, “I’m not giving you anything because I don’t wanna come back and answer for it!” [laughter]
Adia: No, I mean, I have to say, again, I underestimated the cravenness of the industry.
Jessica: Yeah, the aggressiveness was…I didn’t either.
Adia: And risk and liability. I really did underestimate or overestimate how much they cared about it, because that seems costly to me too. Liability is costly. You don’t know who’s gonna get sick and who’s gonna not come out of it, period. And I think that was probably part of the calculation which is, “Oh, these are healthy people.” That said, I think you were right. about the fact that people may just go back to where they were as soon as it seems like it’s possible and necessary, and at least with many of the professional sports that make tons of money, it seems to me that they will be ahead of everything because they were doing it anyway. That’s the first thing. But secondly is the resources are clearly there and it’s worth it to them to make it possible and necessary. And they showed that so clearly, they showed that so clearly.
One thing I wonder about though is if it actually fundamentally changes at least how some people are thinking about work and labor and compensation and liability and risk, in ways that sort of exceed our expectations for what happened this year and in previous years. Because there were actual movements, like social movements that coincided with this election, that coincided with this epidemic and all of the measures taken. So I think to some extent a lot of us having had time to think, a lot of us, even those of us who play sports and were sitting in a bubble, had to be thinking about some of these questions or concerns in a way that may change our relation to our employers, how we conceive of ourselves as workers. Maybe that’s pie in the sky but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, that people actually had to think about – people being the employers, but also fans, spectators, whoever – we aren’t just thinking about the athletes but all of the people who make the athletes work.
Jessica: Yeah, the ecosystem.
Adia: Right.
Jessica: It’s so enjoyable talking with you, Adia. Thank you so much for coming back on Burn It All Down. Will you remind our listeners where they can find you on the internets?
Adia: Oh, right. On Twitter I’m @Ethnography911 [laughs] and my blog which I don’t update as much but probably should be: ethnography911.org.
Jessica: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on.
Adia: Thank you! It was really fun.