Pro sports in the Land of Oz; what’s behind the curtain?

The institution of American professional sports is showing its limitations and flaws in the way that the great and powerful Oz was revealed.

Oz lorded over the land as the omnipotent benefactor of a world of brick and mortar built on a flimsy foundation of illusion, pulling the levers and throwing the switches, directing the ultimate show.

Under the cover of an economic juggernaut that directly contributes to 456,000 jobs and earns $14.3 billion a year, a lot of indiscretions for a lot of years have been hidden in plain sight, shrouded beneath Nike sponsorships, Pepsi endorsements and television contracts that have as many zeros as the GDPs of first-world nations.

Compounded by an indirect economic benefit driven by various other industries tied to the consumption of sports entertainment, it’s easy for society as a whole to turn a blind eye to the rotting underpinnings of an industry that takes confrontation to the big top, and in the case of the NFL, thrives of violent conquests. And the gladiators of this world have often been the practitioners of the macho stereotypes that flourish among the negative creep of racism, sexism, misogyny, bigotry and homophobia.

We’re all talking about Ray Rice today and the beating he inflicted on his then-fiance, but Ray Rice is not a far cry from O.J. Simpson of 20 years ago, with his documented history of domestic violence.

In that same vein, the Michael Sam experiment was a bellwether moment for the NFL in response to a tidal shift in society on LGBT issues, but all of this still happened in the same orbit as punter Chris Kluwe’s accusations of institutional discrimination and homophobia within the Minnesota Vikings organization.

While we fostered a modern-day culture that was teaching our children to not idly sit by and watch other children be bullied, we witnessed the case of Richie Incognito, the beefy Miami Dolphin lineman who successfully bullied an equally beefy Jonathan Martin right out of the league.

Football players Rae Carruth and Aaron Hernandez each may or may not have directly had a hand in murder, rumors that plagued the most famous gladiator of them all, Ray Lewis, for the better part of his career.

Worst-case scenarios among hundreds of professional American athletes doing good works and being good people, there will always be bad apples in society. Yet professional sports makes it easier to forgive and forget in orchestrated and manipulative ways, with multimillion-dollar spin machines that protect multibillion-dollar dividends and the men who drive those dollars.

In many ways the leagues themselves are guilty for profiting off the competitive drive of some young men who simply can’t turn it off after the games end and the stadium lights fade to black. The leagues protect them, often haphazardly punish some and let others act with impunity, and most of all, cover their own butts by pushing the responsibility onto the men they exploit and accepting none of their own.

Ray Rice is a dog, a woman-beater and a criminal. In that same breath, NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell and league brass aren’t much better if they in fact lied about what they knew and when they knew it. The Ray Rices, the Aaron Hernandezes, the Richie Incognitos, they often act as the bullets in the NFL’s big gun — the ammo kills when someone else pulls the trigger of a weapon constructed by the culture of the sport and the lack of responsibility of the league.

Just as the curtain revealed almighty Oz to be a construction, the glacial pace of institutional change, of the response that a more nimble and faster society and culture demands today, of accountability, all of these things are helping to erode the carefully cultivated image the professional sports world has worked so hard to achieve.

Change will remain slow, enlightenment to things that are ingrained in the system will remain dark, because a large segment of the fan base will give a pass to what is right in front of them; we always do. And the profits that enrich the shareholders of the media conglomerates, the hospitality industry and the apparel manufacturers who make a killing on and off the field will grind down the gears of the machinery of progress.

Social media stands as the only real challenge to that status quo. Its speed, numbers and ability to storm the castle for change will be the great equalizer, like a million hungry ants eating the elephant alive. Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, when domestic violence, bigotry or worse crimes reared their heads in pro sports from time to time, they went underreported and often unchecked and covered up.

That won’t be so easy from here on out, where tens of thousands of tweets and hundreds of thousands of shares will move faster than any team of PR professionals. The American sports machine will have an increasingly harder time spinning things in its favor, losing more and more ground to an increasingly interconnected society that demands justice. As it should be.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Sept. 12, 2014.