Tim Walz and the politics of football: Democrats tackle the manhood game

I played a little more than a season of college football as a punter at Cornell University. The sport controlled me, stole my time, took my energy. Its culture manipulated my masculinity at a time when I had just begun to question it. On many fronts I felt unwelcome and unsafe, constantly coming up against words and actions I found unsettling. After a weightlifting session in the throes of the season, a teammate strolled past me in the locker room and, with the most malicious indifference, sneered, “Shut up, f****t.” This was the beginning of the end of my college football career. I would soon quit the sport for the same reasons the Democratic Party is now embracing it. 

Observers across the political spectrum say we’re in a “crisis of men,” and the opposing presidential campaigns are competing for masculinity on the gridiron. Kamala Harris introduced her vice-presidential pick as “Coach Walz,” and indeed he is a former high school football defensive coordinator. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s political identity features his long tenure in the armed forces, his enjoyment of hunting and, most importantly, his connection to the pinnacle of national manhood: football. During the campaign, Walz has used a myriad of metaphors to link the upcoming election to the game of football. One stop on the campaign trail was staged at a high school football practice in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where Walz contextualized American politics through football. At the Democratic National Convention, Walz was introduced by his former high school players and then gave a pep talk. As the DNC crowd chanted “Coach!” he proclaimed: “It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field and, boy, do we have the right team.” Some reports suggest Walz will attend upcoming Friday night football games in key battleground states. 

Democrats have deftly embraced this traditionally masculine sport, long identified with red states and small towns. Beyond Walz, Rep. Colin Allred of Texas, a former Tennessee Titans linebacker, is using his NFL experience to run against Sen. Ted Cruz; Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a former collegiate wide receiver, recently suited up for a practice; Democrats have even flown campaign banners over big college games at Michigan, Penn State and Wisconsin (all of those in swing states). 

The Republican response has seemed defensive and inconsistent, belittling Walz’s coaching experience, questioning his military service and dispensing the stale and misogynistic epithet “Tampon Tim.” In other words, to stake their claim for American men, Republicans have tried emasculating their opponent. 

After Walz’s performance at the DNC, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough remarked on "Morning Joe" that Democrats “seem to be the party of the NFL now.”

“It’s the party of football,” concurred sportswriter and podcaster Pablo Torre, while co-host Mika Brzezinski uttered, “What? Wait, what? I didn’t see it coming.”

But football hasn’t suddenly become progressive. It would be more accurate to say that Democrats are bending rightward into historically Republican territory. Just years ago, progressives were boycotting the NFL after the league shunned star quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem. As reports emerged about repeated concussions, brain damage and an apparent NFL cover-up, President Barack Obama said that if he had a son, he wouldn't let him play football. 

On the other hand, when the NFL officially committed to reducing concussions, Donald Trump protested that “football has become soft like our country has become soft.” As Democrats proclaim victory in what sportswriter David Zirin calls “the football wars,” they miss something sinister about what has made the sport the way it is — long before their efforts to co-opt it.

Football is a prime site of cultural formulation. It’s the game in which boys become men — in very particular ways. Once during a team meeting I attended at Cornell, an assistant coach rolled film of another team, mocking another player for not being physical and describing him as “soft,” a “p***y” and a “b***h.” With each taunt, the room filled with cackles from my teammates. I wondered what lesson we were learning. 

While the usual suspects of locker room talk — racism, bigotry and a petty necessity to keep calling the Washington Commanders the “Redskins” — featured prominently in the culture of football, what was most striking was the sport’s seemingly inherent drive to contort bodies into the political and social category of manly. 

Over a century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt — a war hawk, big-game hunter and football enthusiast — argued that pacifists “seeking to chinafy the country” [sic] were just as despicable as the “college sissy who disapproves of football… because it is rough.” Though the sport has bipartisan participation and viewership, it feels and plays conservative and misogynistic. During the COVID pandemic, Donald Trump claimed he was “the one that brought back football.” Before a game at Cornell, players complained about a pro-Palestinian protest on campus. One asked, “Can we gas those f**s?” 

Tim Walz is campaigning to be a different type of football-coaching man. “There's a very Judith Butler dimension to the Walz pick,” remarked New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, drawing an unlikely comparison between the Minnesota governor and the famed scholar of gender and sexuality. Trump and JD Vance “think they have some kind of monopoly over masculinity,” said Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in a “Late Show” conversation with Stephen Colbert. Walz, she continued, was “showing another way to be an upright man in America.” 

Walz’s performance of masculinity represents an attempt to shift the contentious definition of manhood, a potentially significant tactic for the party which has evidently been losing touch with traditionally masculine voters during the “crisis of men.”

In a patriarchal world that has historically valued and privileged men and boys, they now suffer from depression, loneliness and unemployment at higher rates than women. Men are falling behind women in high school, college and the workplace. Many are lonely, demoralized and depressed, in search of a way forward. The predicament of the American man has, until now, largely been a topic embraced by prominent conservatives.

“America needs good men,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley inveighed in a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Future of the American Man.” “So the question is,” he continued, “how are we gonna get them today?”’

Harrison Butker, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, went viral after he delivered a commencement address to a Catholic liberal arts school. “Be unapologetic in your masculinity,” he told the men in the audience, “fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.” Butker decried “the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion” and suggested that society’s issues are caused by disorder, a result of the alleged displacement of American men. The solution, he said, lies in traditional masculinity and “an ordered, Christ-centered existence” in which men and women confront “hard truths about accepting your lane and staying in it.” Predetermined gender roles, according to the kicker, keep society intact. 

When Tim Walz gave his State of the State Address in his old classroom at Mankato West High School in the midst of the pandemic, he likened the determination of the people of Minnesota to the school’s legendary state championship run: “Each player stayed in his lane, did his part to bring home that state title.” Conformity, a value preached to me by many coaches and team captains, is a winning strategy. 

In his speech on the crisis of men, Josh Hawley warned of a plot to “deconstruct America,” a “leftist project” that “depends on the deconstruction of American men.” The conservative Christian senator then took on critical race theory, the notion of systemic patriarchal oppression and the left’s disillusion with gender. 

“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” Hawley said, which is undeniably true. He said conservatives should send a different message: “American men are and can be an unrivaled force for good in the world if we will strengthen them, if we will challenge them, if we will empower them to be who they were made to be.” 

Who am I, and who was I made to be? To find myself, I can look to a man like Josh Hawley, a devotee of Teddy Roosevelt, or a man like Tim Walz, who, instead of being “toxic,” is said to represent what the Washington Post terms “tonic masculinity.” As a football coach in 1999, he made a calculated decision to serve as the faculty sponsor for his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. In effect, he used his unquestioned masculinity to empower others, an act that Hawley reserves solely for “the Republican tradition.”

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As I played football, I sought to figure out my masculinity. I liked being part of something tough and strong, but traditional manhood didn’t seem quite right. During the summer before I walked on and made the team at Cornell, I practiced punting with my coach. I was doing poorly, striking the ball awkwardly, and feeling discouraged. He took me aside and said sternly, “You can’t pussyfoot it.” I felt embarrassed and offended. Then I internalized his advice and absolutely crushed the next kick. I felt strong and manly — and also deeply ashamed. 

In football, masculinity is shaped and molded and weaponized to win games. The sport brings out the best of men, and also the worst of them — our most visceral insecurities which politicians and coaches exploit for gain. Those anxieties may help explain why, playing at an elite Ivy League university, I heard the phrase “That’s so gay” every single day. Despite having a head coach who was more like Walz than Hawley or Butker or Roosevelt, the team’s culture was conservative. Locker room talk was real. We bought into the sport just as much as we conformed to its caricature of manhood.

At one point in the season, I was sitting in the athletic training room with an injured knee as a trainer told me to look around at the room, where several offensive lineman were wrapping their injured limbs. He told me to realize that no one was ever “100 percent,” and that they all played through the pain. His implication was clear: I wasn’t like my teammates, who were tougher, who manned up. Whenever an opposing player was injured on the field, the game would stop and the word “p***y” was hurled by my teammates.

When Walz became his high school’s GSA sponsor, he was using football and his masculinity as a force for good. Walz transcended his stereotype and lent his support as what one of his queer students dubbed a “‘normal,’ strong, straight, masculine” ally. He played the role of mediator, bequeathing legitimacy to a group which seemingly needed his normalcy. “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz has said. But why was that? 

In hindsight, Walz’s actions feel, to me at least, more patronizing than liberating. And his recent strategy to rebuke “weirdness” further muddles his role as the “normal” ally of the GSA. If he was the “normal” one, then what were his gay students? 

I can’t tell if Walz’s normativity is ironic or ideal, or perhaps a combination of both. As a GSA sponsor, he lent his manhood to outsiders, while not quite renouncing the outcasting of “That’s so gay.” As a politician, he courts the center by patronizing what he sees as the fringe. As a coach, he uses football to gain male votes just as football uses masculinity to win games. 

In football, conservatism is conventional, intolerance is a sign of coherence, bigotry is just anger that can make a man hit harder. I once sat at the back of my high school auditorium as our star running back, a boy named Jake Bain, told the school he was gay. My high school rallied around the state champion, but Bain — who is now an LGBTQ activist — was repeatedly called a "f****t" by opponents. It wasn’t till I got to college that I actually realized, as Zirin notes, that “homophobia is baked so deeply into the cake of football.”

Football and politics pull and stretch the imaginary tendons of masculinity till they’re taut. Coaches and politicians bring out what they believe is the essence of men, and come down on everything else. “The point is: We need to go win games,” in the words of former NFL cornerback Domonique Foxworth. “Anything that gets in the way of that is going to be a problem.” This philosophy echoes the strategy of Kamala Harris, who chose Walz for very particular reasons. It’s the strategy of a changing Democratic Party, and it may help them win, but victory will come at a cost.