.                                   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 intense 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.   

By the summer of 2016, elected officials in North Carolina had introduced a bathroom bill targeting the transgender community. It received both support from some Democrats and a response from the NBA, which re-located its All-Star weekend. That October, 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 displays a strong sense of balance and flexibility, echoes of his background in martial arts. It was that background that helped him become part of the original UFC broadcast team more than 20 years ago. And as life would have it, Donald Trump has been associated with UFC for more than 20 years as well.

During the primary and general election, President Trump was able to leverage his relationships within UFC, the NFL, 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 for 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 a stew. Every aspect of society is integrated with the other.  

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 now is one of the most influential voices in politics despite a lack of actual political experience. The sports-culture-politics vortex enabled ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith to cosplay as a political analyst during the 2024 general election for Fox News.

There was never such a thing as “stick to sports”. No one understands that better than the people who work in sports.

I was in that Microsoft Theater audience ten years ago when Jenner accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. I can tell you everyone there was not happy for her. “Frigid” is how I would describe the atmosphere, which included some of the most influential figures in sports. Ten years later a newly re-elected President Trump signs an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports.

Again, none of this is a coincidence.

“The Ballad of LZ Granderson” is a collection of essays exploring the topics of sports, culture and politics—not as individual notes but as the sound they collectively make together. Laws and cultural norms are a reflection of a society’s heart and mind.  I wrote this ballad with the hope of fostering more compassion in our country through understanding. 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.

During these four years I lived in four states, three of which voted for Trump in 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.

“The Ballad of LZ Granderson” is both a sports book for those who follow politics and a book about politics for those interested in pop culture. But it is not a book of answers. Instead consider the lyrics of this ballad to be important pieces of information to consider as we try to figure out this country’s next chapter.

The dates on the page reflect when the original publication date of the 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 “What happened to America?” this ballad shall be my humble offering.