The Ballad of LZ Granderson
Prologue
Ten Years Gone
In April 2015, Secretary Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, and Bruce Jenner invited Diane Sawyer into his home for a sit-down interview.
Since winning Olympic gold in the decathlon in 1976, Jenner has been in the public eye. Since 2007, that meant starring as the patriarch in the wildly popular reality TV show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”. Before the interview aired, Jenner made it clear his pronouns were he/him. When Sawyer asked the Olympic legend, “Are you a woman?” he took a beat to reflect. Then the 65-year-old Jenner looked Sawyer in the eyes and said, “Yes, for all intents and purposes, I am a woman”.
For Pride month in June, Jenner introduced “Caitlyn” on the cover of “Vanity Fair”. In mid-July, she took the ESPYs stage to accept the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN. By late July, she was the star of her own reality TV show. And in the middle of all of that legislative, political, economic, and cultural change, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage.
So, if you want to know why so many men love Donald Trump, that three-month-long convergence of sports, culture, and politics is a good place to start looking for answers.
In October 2016, Joe Rogan wrapped up his Netflix special “Triggered” with jokes about Jenner’s transition and a warning that masculinity was under attack. During the somewhat physical comedic bit, Rogan hops on a stool and casually shows off his dexterity, echoes of his background in martial arts. It was that background that helped Rogan become part of the original UFC broadcast team more than 20 years ago. Trump has also been associated with UFC for more than 20 years. And during the 2016 primary and general election, he was able to leverage his relationships within UFC, the NFL, boxing and other sports leagues to help him reach men in ways none of his other political opponents could.
In fact, President Trump’s decades long connection to the sports community was an essential element of all three of his campaigns. And he’s increased his percentage of the male vote in each of them.
That’s not a coincidence.
We are conditioned to think about sports, culture and politics in neat little silos for programming and consumption purposes, but the reality is we’re living in one of Escher’s “Impossible Constructions” lithographs. Every aspect of society leads to the other. No one understands that better than the folks who work in and around sports. Everything about the industry —from who is on the court, to the location of the stadium, to the music played during timeouts—is a byproduct of politics and culture. We form tribes to feel safe within the ecosystem, but at the end of the day, it’s all one ecosystem.
At the height of Monday Night Football in the 1970s, the late Howard Cosell—the original sports personality—considered leveraging his immense popularity to make a run at the Senate. When late NBA Commissioner David Stern was concerned about the league’s image, he could have turned to Anna Wintour to craft a dress code in 2005. Instead, he hired the Republican strategists who recently got George W. Bush re-elected. Rogan used his UFC stardom to launch “The Joe Rogan Experience” and is now an influential political voice despite little experience in politics or journalism.
Again, none of this is a coincidence.
“The Ballad of LZ Granderson” is my collection of essays and observations exploring the topics of sports, culture and politics—not as individual notes but as the sound they collectively make together. Like a song. The lyrics on the page originate from my published work in The Los Angeles Times between 2020-2024—otherwise known as four of the most consequential years in recent American history. After covering the ugliness of our last election as an OpEd columnist for the newspaper and a contributor for ABC News, I decided to write this book because my heart was broken. Not from the outcome in November but in seeing the ugly way we as a nation got there. By default, journalists like me don’t have the luxury of looking away from the fucked-up shit we do to each other. Often times we have a front row seat. My hope in writing this ballad is to foster more compassion for one another through understanding.
I lived in four states, three of which voted for Trump, between 2020-2024. I was in Scottsdale, Arizona when a councilman made an “I can’t breathe” joke in the shadow of George Floyd’s murder; San Antonio, Texas when 53 migrants were found dead in the back of a tractor trailer on a 103-degree day; Kalamazoo when Michelle Obama first joined Kamala Harris on the campaign trail; Inside Crypto when Lebron broke Kareem’s scoring record; In New York to cover Serena’s last match. One cold and wet day in March, President Biden made a campaign stop at a public golf course to court Black voters in Michigan. I was the only reporter he spoke with.
I have a lot of stories. Some of them are even written down.
The dates on the page reflect when the original publication date of my column in The Los Angeles Times. Think of them as you would the time stamp of a photograph or entry into the Captain’s Log on Star Trek. And as such, if aliens were to come down to Earth and me ask “Whatever happened to America?” this ballad shall be my humble offering.