This sort of reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy with a stake in a restaurant close to a major sports arena development where I grew up. It totally changed the way I looked at economic impact reports on commercial developments, particularly sports arenas.
The city put up millions in taxpayer funds to get the arena built for the local high-profile college basketball team, and numerous reports were published around the positive economic impact of the stadium, citing increased spending around downtown, etc.
However, the report failed to account for "micro" details that can have a major impact on local business, like traffic congestion, entertainment capacity, etc. On game days, his restaurant is overcrowded and turning away patrons, which negatively impacts his staff and quality of experience. But there are only 15 or so games per year, and the off-season attractions are hit-or-miss in terms of attendance. And when nothing is going on, business is even more varied.
It's relatively easy to calculate how many people come to town for a big event and how much they spend, extrapolating that out to some great figure, but a restaurant can't reasonably rely on ~15 big days per year. Quite often, economic impact reports are commissioned by folks who have business or political interests at stake, thereby overlooking the potential bottlenecks that such developments expose. And because most of the public doesn't understand finance or real estate, and yet they love the basketball team, a more nuanced conversation around the topic is harder to find.
If you don't follow the sports schedule, then you will inevitably find yourself near some stadium at a time when sports are about to happen, or have just happened.
This is a mistake that you will only make once. It sometimes takes upwards of 2 hours to drive 5 miles. Since I don't want to have to follow sports to know if it's safe to drive that route, I just never drive that route. There are good things near there, but I will never plan to do them because I don't want to have to check the arena activity to determine how good my experience will be.
It's a similar experience on foot. One of my favorite local hangouts is in Wrigleyville. I almost never go there, because I won't go anywhere near Wrigleyville during baseball season, and in winter I'm in cocoon mode. That said, baseball season has enough game days to actually fuel a business.
Soldier Field is vaguely easier. It's still right in the middle of the city, but, being in a park, and not too far from the highway, game days don't really pose a challenge except when I've lost my mind and decided to drive to the aquarium instead of taking the train. On the other hand, I bet it's really awful for anyone whose regular routine forces them to use Lake Shore Drive or the spaghetti bowl.
I actually moonlight at one of those bars in Wrigleyville, the bar closes for the fall/winter because there's literally not enough business to justify keeping it open. The only reason it's still open however is because the owners have plenty of capital from other endeavors. If anyone were to try to start a new bar there without deep pockets, they would have a hard time surviving.
For me in Uptown, the Wrigleyville traffic doesn't seem too bad as long as I don't need to be _in_ Wrigleyville itself. The worst part is the Red Line--seems like game times seem to coincide with rush hour such that everyone needs to be going North at the same time. Soldier field traffic was pretty miserable when I lived in South Loop (all that traffic going to/from 90 via Roosevelt).
Funny, I was about to make a comment about Wrigleyville and you nailed it.
We now habitually check if there's a game or concert before visiting my cousin in the neighborhood.
A few years back I lived 3 blocks away from Wrigley Field. It was cool to hear the concerts and games from our back porch. But we basically locked ourselves in on game-days, since we knew it would be a pain in the ass to get anywhere.
100%. Usually it's not even clear to me why traffic is so bad... I just have a mental heatmap of averaged-out traffic shittiness and I stay away from the hot spots. Nothing has gotten better in the 15 years I've lived here, and basically everything has gotten worse, so I don't have much incentive to give the worst areas a second chance.
It means a lot of my city (Seattle) is off limits unless I'm really "going out" and not just going out for a bite or whatever.
Seattle's roads were most definitely not built for the amount of traffic they see. I remember watching from my porch as cars spent an hour inching their way through the mile to the 99 when I was living in Lower Queen Anne. This was five years ago. I went back recently and things were far worse.
Because, as traffic and transportation research is starting to show, traffic is supply-side (capacity) dominated, given time to reach equilibrium in a growing region.
It's a great example of a market with a fixed price (excluding some newer ppp toll schemes) and highly variable demand. (And where costs besides the direct price that end up controlling.)
The reverse of this is what justifies a lot of ped/cycle infrastructure projects even in areas where there don't currently seem to be a lot of people out walking or on foot— "build it and they will come".
That's true, but having GPS and being able to do studies that are based on actually tracking vehicles has been a game changer (instead of just point traffic counts or driver questionnaires).
I live relatively close to Patriot Stadium, and as a rule I never go down there on Sundays; I try to plan my Trader Joe's runs for Tuesday nights or some other time I'm relatively certain sportsball isn't going to make it a madhouse.
Good point, made me realize a bit of my own experience - since I moved out of downtown Toronto, the entire area has been a mental black hole to me precisely because on game nights, it can take 2-4 hours to extract yourself out of 3-4km of space, so I just don't risk it (especially since it's the kind of 2 hours that feels like 7...)
As a non-sports person, I never understood our country's obsession, preferential treatment, and worshiping of anything that has to do with NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, be it tax subsidies of stadium, cable bundling of sports channel, or looking down on people who are not into sports.
Just a quick, somewhat glib opinion in response to this.
Some experts believe that humans are, at best, only somewhat sentient, and only part of the time. Our mind automatically back-populates a story of thought and consideration before every decision, when in fact, our limbic system (more primitive, where our baser emotions come from) is pretty much running the show.
Many/most humans have the need to vigorously compete in groups. Again, some experts have compared this to troops of monkeys fighting over territory and/or dominance. This is still the case because while our neocortex has developed quite a bit, our emotional centers are still relatively primitive. At least, a lot more primitive than we're widely comfortable in admitting to.
I think that participation in sports is a necessary and mostly healthy outlet for these mental structures.
This can all come across as very high minded, and I don't mean to say that people who are into sports are more primitive than people who aren't.
I was never into sports, but I competed in different ways. And I've known people who were truly not competitive in any typical way, so it's complicated.
Also, the above paragraphs are loaded with simplifications and assumptions. (:
One way or another, I think organized sports are a useful and necessary thing for a large percentage of the human population. Of course, we as a society need to do it as 'well' as we can.
The NFL etc. are largely about watching sport, not participating in it. You'll find lots of countries that (i) have better publicly accessible sporting facilities than the USA and (ii) spend far less public and university money on sports teams.
Last year there were reports out about how watching sport might be tricking us into thinking we've participated in such a way that it increases sedentary behaviour.
Interesting. My friends that watch the most sports seem to be the most overweight. I expected this to be the opposite, but maybe this is normal. Probably just anecdotal.
In a sentence, "Participants that watched sports every day were at higher risk of obesity [odds ratio = 1.39, 95% CI, 1.15, 1.68) after adjustment for age, sex, smoking, alcohol, physical activity, total TV time, disability, and self-rated health."
Based on what they're controlling for, and assuming that the conclusions hold, my guess would be that watching sports on TV is also associated with increased snacking.
Was going to say something similar, but I guess in the early 2000's the articles were basically saying that all but a few of the top schools were losing money hand over fist on their athletic programs. Basically most of the sports don't pay for themselves, and if your a small school unable to make bank on TV/ticket/merchandising/etc deals for the football/basketball team its a giant amount of red ink to build those stadiums and pay for the exorbitant coaching, and support staff, equipment, etc.
Ballet companies, museums and philharmonics are money losing propositions in nearly every case, and cities invest in these typically without complaint. Complaining about about a sports stadium because it's low culture rather than high is elitist and undemocratic.
On the other hand complaining because the benefits of a ballet company are enjoyed by the city's ballet fans, while the benefits of a sports stadium are split between the team ownership and city's sports fans is legitimate.
What I would like to see more of is stadium deals in which the municipality gets an equity stake in the team.
> We generally don't build stadiums costing hundreds of millions so a billionaire can bring in Ballet.
I specifically pointed that out -- but I get it, you said 'billionaire' where I said 'team ownership'.
As your the other point, yes NYC built Lincoln Center to the benefit of generations. But they also put about $2.5 million annually into the New York City Ballet's operating budget. (Which is absolutely fine -- but don't kid yourself that they're self funding.)
>What I would like to see more of is stadium deals in which the municipality gets an equity stake in the team.
What other businesses should the government get involved in? FAANG companies bring tons of tax revenue to their cities, why not have every government have a VC arm too?
Politics itself has become sports, too. Red team or blue team.
From up here in Canada the weird fusion of school and sport down there is also bizarre. Yes, people play sports in our schools... but wow is it cultish down there.
This describes the majority of voters which do not have a clue as to what they are voting for, or the platform that their favorite candidate stand on. The just blindly vote the party ticket because that's their team. Generally, it is the swing voters that are more informed on politics and don't necessarily vote the party ticket.
I heard this argument a lot, and perhaps the people I find myself around are abnormal, but I'm trying and failing to come up with people I know who vote along party lines simply because it's one party or the other. Just about everyone has at least one major issue that keeps them from voting the other way, and most have multiple reasons.
I guess I have seen something like it, now that I'm thinking about it -- but it's generally a negative condition, i.e. "I'm not voting for X simply because they are part of party Y." They're not necessarily voting for their party because it's their party, but they're doing it because it's not another party, or more specifically, not a particular candidate.
One of my favorite things about the shitstorm that has been the last 4 years is the red and blue teams ripping eachother to pieces when Kaepernick kneeled, and then the NFL responded. Other sports drama has been fun as well. I suspect some people with a lot of power benefit a great deal by a binary division of the population, but sports throws a nice fat wrench into their Best Laid Plans.
I think it's interesting you added this. I am someone who does enjoy watching professional sports and to me it seems quite the opposite, I more often notice people who do not like watching sports vocalizing negative feelings towards people who do. But maybe I'm just noticing that because of where I stand on the liking/not-liking watching sports question.
Judging by the language you chose in your comment it is apparent you harbor some pretty negative feelings towards people who like to watch sports. Dare I say, it seems like you look down at them?
> I more often notice people who do not like watching sports vocalizing negative feelings towards people who do.
I'm on the not-liking sports side. I try to not vocalize negative feelings about it because I respect other people's choices, but I do have a lot of negative experiences around it:
* Sports, even spectator sports, remind me of my personal experience with sports. That was mostly being a very skinny unathletic kid who got picked on and bullied in PE every day. Sports fans remind me of jocks and jocks remind me of abuse. (Obviously, I understand that there is no logical connection between these groups of people. It's an irrational emotional reaction.)
* It's frustrating having to deal with entire sections of a city being sometimes off limits for events I have no interest in. I used to live in Baton Rouge and LSU games were so big there that they would turn streets one-way to get people in and out. If you were close to the stadium, you could literally find your home inaccessible by road — you could be trapped either in or out — until the game traffic was over. If you parked on allowed student parking, they'd tow your car to make room for tailgaters. When my kids' parkour class moved to close to CenturyLink Field, we just stopped going because it was too much of a nightmare dealing with traffic and parking.
* I get so tired of 80% of restaurants and bars being festooned with giant TVs blaring sports. My wife and daughter have ADHD and it's virtually impossible for them to tune out a TV if it's in their line of sight.
I have also enjoyed watching sports and playing them. I think sports are great and wish more people both participated in them. I like the community-building aspect of spectator sports. But America's spectator sport culture is generally a net negative in my life. And, like second-hand smoke, it's one I can never really escape because it is so pervasive in our culture.
I've never in my life met someone who looked down on people for not liking sports, but if I bring up sports in the wrong geek community, man I get eviscerated by holier-than-thou types who simply must explain why it's a waste of time and I'm stupid for liking it. (EDIT: I notice the other reply to you does exactly this, 'hurr durr sportsball', which is a perfect validation of my claim that this kind of attitude is very common. Unironic usage of 'handegg' is also very common -- they think it's really clever)
Is what it is, I suppose.
For those wondering why: Communication. Sports is one of the only things that truly transcends race, gender, religion, politics, etc. (EDIT: And the other reply to you describes someone who would rather fail to communicate with a dinner full of people than learn a shared topic, the exact case I worked to avoid!)
When I started waiting tables in college I needed an ice breaking subject that was far away from politics/current events and "the weather" is too boring. Sports is probably the #1 common discussion topic, even more than the most popular TV show of the time. For every "Game of Thrones" convo I could start, I could probably start 5 based on baseball, football or basketball.
Truly a great way to connect with different people that you'd otherwise not have basically anything to talk about with.
"hurr durr I watch the sportsball" seems to be a pretty common view. It's silly, but I get it somewhat. I've been at a dinner/drinks thing before and literally every person was talking about football.
It really sucks to not be part of the in crowd, but football also sucks so I'll just zone out on my phone rather than watch it.
I believe the deep interest in sports is partially genetic. Some people's brains have very strong "mirror neurons" so when their sports team does something great, they feel a portion of that success as a real thing in their head. Some people (actually a lot of people) are just hard wired to enjoy the bread and circuses:
That's not just some people, it's everyone. There are very strong survival benefits to being able to receive that chemical high for believing we belong to a particular group.
Watching sport had always made me want to go out and do it, as a kid I'd try to fit in but after 5mins I'd have to go out and play. Watching other people have fun playing football made no sense.
Why would it be "believing" we're part of a group that makes the high and not _being_ part of a group.
Because identifying as part of a group is part of the mechanism that lets humans act collectively. Same kind of thing as the need to belong to some group, organization, or clique. Humans acting collectively are safer, stronger, better fed, and in general reproduce more successfully than humans who do not.
Being able to essentially choose a group to belong with is beneficial - it's a shortcut to most of the benefits of group membership (in ancient history, I mean) without having to be born into the group or be one of the "O.G." members. There are advantages for the rest of the group, too - they can get more people on "their side" and committed to their welfare without having to birth/raise/feed them.
If you think we’re obsessed with sports now, try reading up on the Nika Riots in the Byzantine capital. There’s something about human nature that leads to sports fanaticism that I just don’t have, but team sports have always impacted matters of state.
Reminds of Juvenal's Satire X:
... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
As a sports person I understand it, but am still conflicted by it. There's something unsettling about teachers and police officers getting paid a sliver of what a pro athlete does and in some way I have contributed to this. But it's also a source of joy and inspiration for many people, that has to be a good thing.
Interesting thought though. Why do NFL players get paid so much? Where's the money actually coming from? I don't know too much about this industry but it seems their NFL salaries come from ticket sales and TV licensing deals, and the TV companies can pay them because of advertisements, which they can sell because people watch football thus tv thus ads.
Must be why NFL, NBA etc get so fuckin salty when people upload highlight reels and stuff to youtube.
I can't think of anyway to similarly monetize teaching and I really don't think anybody should go down that route, it sounds terrifying. But how do you convince a bunch of people watching football, which kinda costs them either nothing or like 90$ a month for their cable subscription, that they should also spend a % of their income on teachers?
Because their labor can be very cheaply duplicated by broadcasting the game to millions of spectators.
*> Where's the money actually coming from?
Ads, merchandising, and ticket sales, like you note.
Professional sports players are, economically, in the same category as musicians and actors. They produce media and the digital era means media can be duplicated at virtually no cost, so the value of their labor can be easily multiplied by a very large constant.
Police, doctors, and teachers provide their labor to individual humans in realspace which is much harder to scale so, unfortunately, their salaries reflect that.
Maybe teachers can scale with technology? Maybe we see some of this with online courses, MOOC's? If that were monetized in a way to give the proceeds directly to the teacher maybe that could work? Although some teaching does not lend itself well to that environment, in some cases classrooms and 1 on 1 interaction is something that cannot be substituted.
I agree for all the examples you give, there's nothing clear like there is for athletes and artists.
Yes that's right, that's what I meant by me contributing in some way, via ticket sales, merchandise, it all adds up to some athletes being mega millionaires. Although nowadays the big stars have lots of advertising deals and make big $$ outside of their regular paycheck also.
I don't know how to fix the teacher's pay. It's just unfortunate that by comparison they make pennies.
>There's something unsettling about teachers and police officers getting paid a sliver of what a pro athlete does
Price has to do with supply and demand curves. If there's tons of demand for people hand sewn clothes for hamsters, and very few people who are willing or wanting to do it, then the price will be high, even though one might think there is very little utility to society.
Similarly, there's very few people able and willing to provide the entertainment that an NFL player can, but very high demand for it, therefore, very high pay.
Pro atheletes are part of the rare group of workers who get paid close to value of their labour.
At the low end NFLers are underpaid if anything. They get a good salary but only for a few years and then they are in their mid 20s with a joke degree and not a whole lot of other skills.
Don't lump cops in with teachers. If you want a dangerous job pick roofer or garbageman or something else that's more dangerous than being a cop.
Being dangerous isn't the only qualification for a high paying job and not why I chose those 2, they are both in my opinion underpaid. Obviously for different reasons at face value, but they both provide a public service and get paid poorly historically.
But you are right about athletes only having a short viable career and that helps lower the gap, I was referring more to the high end athletes making millions. Even considering their short careers they make far more than an average teacher can hope to ever in their lifetime. On average I'm not really sure, that does depend on the individual sport and athlete.
I've had this discussion before on HN, if I find an easier way to search my comment history I'll try to turn it up.
But basically, I don't think that does it - there's a difference between, say, collecting watches, reading watch blogs, browsing eBay for watches, watching videos of watchmakers etc, and screaming gleefully at the pitch/field/TV as your favorite team plays.
Someone else is saying something about mirror neurons, I wonder if that's what I'm not having in enough abundance to "miss out" on the fun I see my dad have when he watches the Packers. I'd like to participate but I feel nothing beyond interest in watching the plays play out. Whether the Packers get it done or not, eh, I don't really care, and not for lack of trying.
I don't really think it is different.... sure, watch enthusiasts don't cheer for their favorite watch, but that is not how watch enthusiasts enjoy their hobby... cheering is how sports fans experience their hobby.
It's a civic pride thing. Even though I don't follow any sportsballs, I do take some pride in the fact that my city has professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey teams. It's a "we matter" thing. I may not love those sports, but many of my neighbors do.
Likewise, I take great pride in the fact that we have two world-class museums, one focused entirely on modern art, and I hope the sports fans see the value in that, too.
Except that the sports team has absolutely nothing to do with the city in which it is physically located.
This is like being personally proud of your city’s Apple Store (for cities that are not near silicon valley).
Much like nations, it is a way of making you proud of achievements that you did not perform, carried out by people whom you have never met and do not know and have no association with whatsoever.
Society is made of achievements we did not perform. This sort of hyper-individualist rejection of our sense of community is incredibly bleak and depressing to me.
What is the logical conclusion? How far do you take it? Should I, say, not be proud of my children's accomplishments? After all, I didn't do them, they did. I'm a musician and play in bands. Should I not be proud of things my band has accomplished? What my band does is stuff that I can't do alone, and they can't do without me.
Obsessively focusing on the individual and rejecting one's role in society is nihilistic and alienating. If you gotta do it, I suppose you do you, but please don't drag me into your sad, lonely world. I'm going to enjoy my place in my family, my town, my country, etc.
It is rather silly to conflate your immediate family or a band in which you actively participate with a bunch of athletes and business owners who have never met you and have no association with you whatsoever save for living in the same metropolitan area.
One is family or friends. The other is a bunch of rich strangers. They are not the same thing. To pretend that I was suggesting that they are equivalent is... baffling.
PS: My world is neither sad nor lonely, and I am not sure how you arrived at those conclusions.
Other than the fact that the games are played there, the people who live in the area watch the same teams and have conversations about the games (home or away), and it can be a sense of shared experience.
Most normal people in the US do relatively little, and 100% of the variety in their (IMO) boring lives comes from television programming, hollywood big-budget movies, and sports.
Remove those, and it’s just the usual identical routine of work, alcohol, driving, grocery shopping, dealing with kids, and sleep. We don’t really have third places besides church.
(Instagram falls somewhere in-between, depending on whether you only follow the forty boring people you know, or choose to use it as an adjunct to mass media feeds to keep up on celebrities and bikini models.)
Sports provides a regular stream of relatively unpredictable events that someone in need of such can make emotionally relevant.
I'm mostly against subsidizing sports venues with public money...
That said, you make a mostly valid point, except for one major consideration: most arenas have dozens of smaller events throughout the year: boat shows, rodeos, high school championships, concerts, etc.
If he's not drawing in appropriate sized crowds for those events, then it might just be his restaurant is viewed as a novelty or one of last resort.
Business owners love to explain how there's nothing wrong with their business model, it's the the externalities or market that's wrong.
One of my favourite examples of how the government moves the goalposts around to make the economy numbers go up is how they removed housing prices from the CPI in 1985.
Inflation is often used as a benchmark for economic health, but it completely ignores one of the biggest sources of inflation: the price of homes.
The utility of a house never increases (unless you make upgrades), so if the price goes up it's not really more valuable, assuming it rises at the same rate as nearby homes. It's not like you could sell and move into a fancier house nearby.
Selling and moving to a fancier place nearby is what many people do. You free up that equity and suddenly you can afford a sizable down payment on a nicer place that you couldn’t otherwise had you been renting the whole time.
> However, the report failed to account for "micro" details that can have a major impact on local business, like traffic congestion, entertainment capacity, etc. On game days, his restaurant is overcrowded and turning away patrons, which negatively impacts his staff and quality of experience. But there are only 15 or so games per year, and the off-season attractions are hit-or-miss in terms of attendance. And when nothing is going on, business is even more varied.
It all depends on the project. Lots of sports arenas are put near business districts that generate a lot of restaurant traffic during weekday lunch but less on the weekends and evenings.
In turn, a sporting arena can fill in those times, both with the big games and with other events.
> But there are only 15 or so games per year
I think you're talking about football, where you can expect 8 games per year at home plus some pre-season, possibly post-season, exhibition, etc. This is unusual, though-- baseball plays 81 games per year at home, basketball plays 41, hockey plays 41, soccer plays 17-- plus preseason, postseason, and exhibition.
If you build an arena and only use it for 15 games per year then the problem may be the poor design or under-utilization of the asset, not the asset in the first place. There is a huge and lucrative market for all sorts of private and corporate events, and arenas would seem to be desirable venues.
As the old saying goes. If the project is not economically viable then you get out of the project building business and get into the selling products/service/labor to the government business. You make more money selling the products/services/labor to the government than you would ever make actually building and owning the asset outright.
Which is funny because in countries that have high levels of corruption (Russia), you see those countries building the most expensive roads, stadiums and bridges in the world. More money spent doesn't mean a better road to say the least.
In Minneapolis, there's a great bbq place that is right across the street from Vikings Stadium. I'm sure it's great game days, but it's a pain to reach any other time. They're abandoning that location and moving into my residential neighborhood. I'm sure that being in walking distance will change it from a 2-3x/year treat for me to a 2-3x/month treat - and their business will be far more stable.
The whole sports economic impact mantra is pervasive.
I went to a college bowl game recently. They actually printed the amount of economic impact calculated ... on my ticket. And ran those numbers across the jubmotron a number of times.
I don't know who they're selling that to because I'm not local or approving anything, so I guess that's what I'm contributing to? yay? I was mildly amused.
I wonder what the difference between having an NFL stadium and having a MLB stadium is. MLB plays multiple games a week during a large part of the year, which might provide a more steady bump in traffic instead of occasional tsunamis of people.
It's funny - you're describing the city that I'm currently living in, right down to the arena and businesses around it.
We've gotten past that phase and now all the local businesses downtown are shutting down because the 2-ish companies that own all the real estate are raising the prices to absurd levels. Our end goal, in the likely near future, is them declaring bankruptcy so we can bail them out as a city and re-zone the retail/entertainment districts to business as originally lobbied.
This was true of downtown Denver, specifically the "LoDo" neighborhood, when the Colorado Rockies baseball team moved to Coors Stadium. Baseball's a little different, there's 76 home games or something, but restaurants were overwhelmed prior to the game, scaring people away. I think Denver has adjusted to this by now. Your points stand, however. 2nd order effects, which we're not used to considering, can be very large sometimes.
It eventually boils down to the fact that the whole economy is a very complex thing that can not be planned and secondary impacts are mostly unpredictable.
The city put up millions in taxpayer funds to get the arena built for the local high-profile college basketball team, and numerous reports were published around the positive economic impact of the stadium, citing increased spending around downtown, etc.
However, the report failed to account for "micro" details that can have a major impact on local business, like traffic congestion, entertainment capacity, etc. On game days, his restaurant is overcrowded and turning away patrons, which negatively impacts his staff and quality of experience. But there are only 15 or so games per year, and the off-season attractions are hit-or-miss in terms of attendance. And when nothing is going on, business is even more varied.
It's relatively easy to calculate how many people come to town for a big event and how much they spend, extrapolating that out to some great figure, but a restaurant can't reasonably rely on ~15 big days per year. Quite often, economic impact reports are commissioned by folks who have business or political interests at stake, thereby overlooking the potential bottlenecks that such developments expose. And because most of the public doesn't understand finance or real estate, and yet they love the basketball team, a more nuanced conversation around the topic is harder to find.