Politics has replaced sports in American culture in all the worst ways

“When did you become friends with Charlie Johnson?”

Johnson ran against Mark Wright for state representative in north Springfield in one of the toughest Springfield political campaigns of 1998. Johnson accused Wright of being a Texas carpetbagger, running radio ads to the tune of “The Ides of Texas are Upon You.” Wright won and served three more terms.

Years later, the Wright family move to Republic, where Mark’s son played on the same high school football team as Charlie’s son. Time and sports turned old foes into friends.

Social media and politics can turn old friends into distant memories. Not long after I spoke with Mark and asked about his new friendship, he blocked me on social media.

Mark became a staunch Donald Trump supporter. I never liked Trump, even before he ran for president. I still consider Mark a friend. He gave me my first job in politics.

With the exception of Rep. Eric Burlison, I’ve lost almost every Republican friend since 2016. I have more friends who are Cubs fans than Trump supporters. That’s saying something being a St. Louis Cardinals fan.

If the NFL took Sunday away from churches, politics took Monday through Saturday away from everything else. A majority of American surveyed after the 2016 election say that they are more interested in politics than sports. The biggest drop in support is from older, white males, who are also more likely to support Trump.

It wasn’t just about Black players kneeling during the national anthem. Hockey players physically can’t kneel on ice, yet there’s no indication of a surge in Trump supporters watching a sport that has no kneeling and few Black players.

Trump himself is a sport’s team, complete with rallies in sport’s stadiums. If Team Trump tells the fans to hate the NFL, even though it’s well known that Trump has a decades-long vendetta against the league for refusing to give him an expansion team, you hate the NFL and sports in general.

That hatred spills over to fans for the other team. Technically, very few are actual “fans” of President Joe Biden, so it doesn’t make sense to lump everyone who dislikes Trump into the Joe Biden Fan Club. Being a political fanatic often doesn’t make sense.

It’s bad enough to lose friends. Losing family because of Team Trump is the worst. My ex-wife hasn’t allowed any communication with my two sons since Aug. 1, 2016, mostly because of her support for Trump.

What can be done to fix this? I wish I could invent a time machine and stop the Chicago Cubs from winning the 2016 World Series. Everyone knows that a sci-fi dystopian alternate reality, like Trump being elected president, happens after the Cubs win the World Series.

If politics is going to be America’s new favorite pastime, let’s make it more like an actual sports league.

Replace the two garbage Republican and Democrat teams with at least 10 new political teams. Have those teams compete in a voting tournament in November after the World Series ends. The winning team gets a trophy, and their fans get to burn down a city nobody likes (Cleveland).

At the end of the election, teams get to trade politicians and get political draft picks. Bad politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene get demoted to City Council or Cemetery Board Supervisor.

At the end of the voting tournament in November, political fans give thanks for another season and share a meal. It’s basically the same as Thanksgiving, except the only turkeys getting pardoned are the politicians.

Seriously, I would rather live in a world where people argue about sports than politics. When I left the GOP in 2016, I switched from Fox News to Fox Sports Radio. It’s better for my health, and it helps you understand the perspective of other teams and fans.

I feel the pain of those in Seattle who lost their Sonics, or the people of Oakland who just lost their A's. St. Louis football fans have lost two NFL teams and an expansion team (We didn’t forget that the NFL wanted to name the St. Louis team the Purple Stallions).

St. Louis Cardinals have one bad year, and everyone loses their minds. The Seattle Mariners manage to miss the playoffs by one or two games every year except last year. Mariners fans claim that when they die, they want to be buried by the Mariners so that they can be let down one last time.

Mark Wright once told me that he wanted to live long enough to see the Texas Rangers win the World Series. I felt a little bad in 2011 when the Cardinals beat the Rangers. Why couldn’t the Cardinals beat a less sad team like the Red Sox? They had two chances.

Not only did the Rangers win it all in 2023, they defeated the cheating Astros for the pennant. I thought about Mark and his son, Preston Nolan Wright, who is named after legendary pitcher Nolan Ryan.

I wish I could have celebrated with them. Let’s make sports great again and politics less important.

Ryan Cooper is a Missouri State graduate and former political columnist for the Springfield News-Leader. Ryan currently sells newspaper subscriptions in locations across America.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Politics has replaced sports in America, without the sportsmanship