Sport is an escape from the real world, but it is also a reflection of the real world.
Throughout 2022, sport is becoming another front in the cultural battle that is erupting across America and the world. Sport brings us great joy, but it also gives us new ways to fight old battles. Here’s a glimpse into the sports stories that defined 2022 and shaped how we view and discuss sport for the years to come.
Amazon takes over ‘Thursday Night Football’: When the Chiefs met the Chargers in Week 2, the game didn’t seem all that different from anything we’ve watched in our entire lives. Al Michaels dropped the commentary, Patrick Mahomes threw a touchdown and everything looked normal – everything except the channel the play was coming from.
Amazon becomes the first streaming provider to get exclusive weekly NFL games. No Amazon Prime subscription, no chance to watch Thursday night’s game. The days of broadcast TV domination have been over for years, and now cable’s pre-eminence is over too. With the recent news that Google’s YouTube will be home to the Sunday Ticket for the foreseeable future, the future of the NFL — like much of sports and entertainment — will be split across multiple streaming services.
Keep that remote—and that credit card— handy.
USC and UCLA shocked the collegiate sports world when the school decided to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. (Photo by Ric Tapia/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The College Football Revolution: No sport has seen as much upheaval in 2022 as college football, from every angle. Teams leapfrogged the conference in a frantic, tradition-overturning ground scramble that ended with USC and UCLA West Coast heading for the traditional Midwestern Big Ten, and stalwart Southwest Oklahoma and Texas heading for the Southeastern Conference.
The name, image, and likeness fund funnels millions of dollars into the pockets of players, who for the first time (legally) get to share in the wealth of the multibillion-dollar businesses they’ve helped create. The transfer portal morphs annually into the fantasy football draft, with players seeking greener pastures and universities peering into locker rooms to patch roster holes.
Finally, the announcement of a 12-team college playoff marked the final demise of the sports bowl-driven old championship format, and moved college football closer to the NFL’s lean, money-making profitability.
Novak Djokovic’s anti-COVID vaccine stance: The No. 1 tennis player. The world’s 1 became an unlikely but effective symbol for anti-COVID vaccine advocates after he was deported from Australia for his unvaccinated status. Djokovic entered the year tied with Rafael Nadal for the most men’s career Grand Slams with 21, but gave up opportunities to play at the Australian and US Open due to the tournament’s vaccine mandate.
Djokovic indicated that his desire for control of his body was such that he was willing to give up the chance to make history, and as of late 2022 now sits one Grand Slam behind Nadal. After initially banning Djokovic for three years, Australian officials relented and allowed Djokovic to enter the country next month for the 2023 Open.
Brittney Griner’s arrest and release: No sports story in 2022 better captures the fray of a divided nation than the story of Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was arrested in Russia in February for possession of small amounts of cannabis oil. His subsequent arrest, detention, and nine-year prison sentence made it clear that Griner was being held as a political hostage by a country engaged in an ugly war, and so the story goes.
The Biden administration agreed to trade Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer jailed in America, for Griner, a controversial move that drew both relief and outrage. Why did Griner and so many other WNBA players feel the need to travel to a potentially hostile country to play? Is it worth trading Griner with an arms dealer? Should all Americans imprisoned abroad receive the same intense attention to their cases that Griner did? Are Griner’s gender, race, sexuality, and political beliefs the reasons why so many Americans express disgust at the idea of trading his freedom — and why so many want him freed at any cost? Should Griner be released while the rest of the Americans stay?
Brittney Griner’s story remains one of many questions with few acceptable answers.
Aaron Judge’s Home Run Chase: 1998’s The Great Home Run Chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire was one of the most thrilling summers in recent sports history when it opened… and one of the most disappointing when the pharmaceutical truth behind it came to light. Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ gargantuan first baseman, recaptured the joy of every night of the era as he hit pitch after pitch into orbit.
In the performance of the greatest contract year in sports history, he ended his season with 62 home runs, surpassed the American League record held by fellow Yankee Roger Maris, immortalized himself as the Yankee immortal, and returned America’s attention to its national past.
LIV Golf: Imagine if Aaron Rodgers, Christian McCaffrey, Russell Wilson and Tyreek Hill decided to leave the NFL en masse and join a rival football league that only plays on YouTube. That’s effectively what happened in golf this year, as many of the sport’s biggest names—including Masters winners such as Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, and reigning British Open champion Cam Smith—left the PGA Tour to join the just-started Golf LIV tour.
Lured by the promise of phenomenal wealth – in some cases, nine-figure signing bonuses – marquee players willfully turn a blind eye to the source of the money: the Saudi government’s virtually bottomless Public Investment Fund. This marks the first major foray of Saudi money—a technique many have decried as “sportswashing” because of Saudi human rights violations—into American sports, but it won’t be the last.
Retirement: This is the year icons leave the scene, and some of them even stay on there. Roger Federer acknowledged the inevitable crush of injury with a tearful resignation to his old rival Nadal. Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski capped off a distinguished career due to his longevity, wins and ever-changing strategy. Sue Bird, WNBA and Olympic champion, completed one of America’s most decorated athlete careers. Serena Williams said goodbye to the US Open… and then hinted she might not finish at all. Tom Brady retired in February, and remained retired for a month and a half, returning for at least another season, perhaps at the cost of his family’s sobriety. Retiring for the best is nearly impossible, but it comes even for the GOAT.
Serena Williams’ last match at the US Open drew a huge crowd. Her last broadcast match, against Ajla Tomljanović, averaged 4.8 million viewers, the most-viewed tennis match in ESPN history. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
Lia Thomas’s Battle for Transgender Athlete Rights: Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas has become a focal point of national discussion about transgender athlete rights. After competing as a male early in her college career, Thomas began transitioning to hormone replacement therapy in 2019. After meeting the NCAA’s gender policy, she swam for the Penn women’s team in the 2021-22 season. He became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I championship in any sport when he won the 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022.
Meanwhile, she serves as an easy weapon in the ongoing, often grossly simplistic or hyperbolic debate about the rights of transgender athletes. Thomas had intended to participate in the 2024 Olympic Swimming Trials, but in June, FINA, the governing body for international swimming, banned most transgender athletes from international competition.
Kamila Valieva’s disastrous Olympic figure skating: No one has portrayed the immense gap between Olympic ideals and Olympic reality like Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian skater who was predicted to take gold at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. When test results from previous events showed that Valieva may have used a banned substance, she became a focal point of worldwide ridicule, a well-deserved and deserved symbol of Russia’s reputation for cheating on the international stage.
In her solo event, Valieva buckled under the pressure, finishing fourth, and the cold scorn of her coach only added to the disgust the world felt in that miserable place. And it’s all happening under China’s total COVID-19 lockdown, a stark demonstration of what an authoritarian government can do when the need for propaganda trumps the rights of its own citizens.
Deshaun Watson’s big return: Once pegged as one of the NFL’s elite future quarterbacks, Deshaun Watson spent the entire 2021 season sidelined by the Houston Texans following dozens of allegations of sexual harassment from several massage therapists. The Texans handed Watson over to the Cleveland Browns in March, and Cleveland signed Watson to the biggest and most secure contract in NFL history – a move that drew widespread criticism given the fact that legal action against Watson remains unresolved.
Many accusers would ultimately settle for Watson, who is serving an 11-game suspension to start the 2022 season. Watson’s story serves as a referendum on how the NFL and its teams balance women’s concerns and accusations with potential success on the field… and it’s no surprise that the year ended with Watson in uniform and starting .
Lionel Messi celebrates with the World Cup trophy in front of fans after winning the World Cup final soccer match between Argentina and France. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, Files)
World Cup: The year ends on a perfect, conflict-ridden note: One of the greatest matches in all of sporting history caps off a five-week World Cup run that was built on one of the most dismal foundations in sporting history. Argentina’s Lionel Messi won the long-awaited World Cup while France’s Kylian Mbappé established himself as an international superstar – but they did so in Qatar, a country whose corruption built the World Cup on the back of effectively enslaved migrant workers. The immense joy of on-field matches comes at the cost of immense human suffering on the outside – the perfect encapsulation of the contradictions of being a sports fan in 2022.
Other 2022 stories of note: The Los Angeles Rams answer the question of whether it pays to do everything in just one year to win the Super Bowl; creative cheaters, real or imagined, are taking over all corners of the sporting world, from fishing to chess to poker; Kyrie Irving — among other willful iconoclastic movements — promoted antisemitic films and served a suspension for doing so; Aaron Rodgers continues to trouble the media, Green Bay fans and the recipients themselves; Deion Sanders remade the University of Colorado in his own image; Robert Sarver agreed to sell the Phoenix Suns for a record $4 billion; Daniel Snyder and the Washington Commanders have battled their way through the acrimonious wave of scandal; Ime Udoka pulled a season-long suspension from the Boston Celtics following an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.
