There is an uncomfortable reality we rarely confront about professional sports.
We praise them as entertainment, community-building, and even character development. We admire their athleticism, their narratives of perseverance, and the sense of belonging they create among fans. But beneath these celebratory layers, there exists a much darker dynamic: professional sports have become one of our most effective cultural training grounds for cruelty.
While often celebrated as a force for good, American professional sports have become one of the most socially accepted channels through which we normalize public shaming, desensitize ourselves to human failure, and condition collective cruelty.
Increasingly, our engagement with professional sports is less about appreciation of skill and more about the spectacle of humiliation. We do not simply hope our team will win—we hope the opposing team will be crushed. We are not content with athleticism; we demand failure, scapegoats, and public collapse. And when these moments occur, we do not respond with compassion. We respond with derision, mockery, and relentless public shaming.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Cultural theorist Guy Debord called it the “society of the spectacle“: a condition where real human experiences are replaced by representations, consumed at a distance, and commodified for profit. The modern professional sports arena is an apex of this phenomenon. Athletes are both idols and sacrifices, their failures broadcast on loop, their humanity lost in the rush of narrative.
We saw it when Simone Biles stepped back from Olympic competition to prioritize her mental health and was vilified by some corners of sports media. Or when college football kickers receive death threats for missed field goals. Or when LeBron James is jeered not for lack of skill, but for failing to live up to impossible archetypes of masculinity and dominance. Or when Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL not for lack of talent, but for peacefully protesting systemic racism and police brutality—and became a national lightning rod for outrage and dehumanization.
What might have once been a demonstration of human potential has evolved into an arena for sanctioned dehumanization. Author Howard Bryant takes a look at this is in his important 2018 book,
The behaviors we normalize in sports become familiar scripts we carry into daily life. The jeering of mistakes, the public call for firings, the instant dismissal of failure—these seep into how we treat colleagues who falter, public figures who err, even friends and family who disappoint us. The reflex to condemn before we seek understanding has become second nature.
We can also see the echoes of this cruelty in adjacent cultural forms. Talk radio thrives on outrage, humiliation, and the mockery of those deemed weak or unworthy. Its cadence and content mirror the anger of the sports arena, often weaponizing failure and fanning division. Even in youth sports, the culture of cruelty has trickled down: aggressive parents scream at volunteer referees, berate their own children for mistakes, and turn recreational play into high-stakes emotional combat. These environments reveal how early and how deeply this conditioning takes root.
Psychologically, this offers catharsis. Spectator cruelty often functions as projection: our own frustrations, powerlessness, and internalized failures are displaced onto athletes who represent exaggerated versions of what we wish we could be. In 1956, researchers Donald Horton and Richard Wohl published a study on the parasocial relationship between fan and player, showing the creation of a false sense of ownership. When our expectations aren’t met, we lash out not with disappointment, but with rage. Social media platforms only accelerate this, providing real-time arenas for collective pile-ons that feel both personal and performative.
We also see how spectacle shapes coaching philosophy. In One and Not Done, ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary on then-Kentucky coach John Calipari, he defends his recruitment of “one-and-done” players—athletes who play one season before entering the NBA—by asking: “Morally, if you as a coach know your player is prepared to go pro, is it fair to let him stay?” The question cuts to the heart of public entitlement: fans often demand that young athletes, many of them Black and pursuing a dream of professional and generational uplift, sacrifice their futures to preserve the spectacle of college sports. Coaches like Calipari, in facilitating these paths, challenge that expectation.
Contrary to caricature, Calipari has sustained deep ties to the University of Massachusetts, where he coached from 1988 to 1996. Both of his daughters attended UMass, and his daughter Erin played for the women’s basketball team. His ongoing support for the university shows that championing players’ professional aspirations and honoring institutional loyalty are not mutually exclusive—though public narratives often insist they are.
And yet, this pattern is not inevitable. It is important to distinguish between levels and cultures within sport itself. At the amateur and collegiate levels—particularly outside the commercial pressures of Division I revenue sports—we can still observe a purer form of athletic pursuit. Olympians, lower-division college athletes, and many amateur competitors devote themselves to their disciplines not for fame or financial reward, but for personal growth, love of the game, and genuine community. In these settings, the emphasis remains on effort, resilience, and mutual respect, rather than humiliation.
Regrettably, these healthier models are overshadowed by the dominant professional spectacle. And this is not by accident. Professional sports are engineered to escalate tension and drama. Media coverage amplifies rivalries, sensationalizes missteps, and inflames public outrage.
It is no coincidence that our political discourse increasingly mirrors the zero-sum mentality of professional sports. Victory must be total; loss must be punished. Our workplaces adopt the same ethos: “crush the competition,” “dominate the market,” “zero tolerance for error.” Even our personal relationships are infected by this logic, as we hastily sever ties over minor grievances and weaponize public shaming as a form of resolution.
Professional sports do not exist in isolation. They are, in many ways, our most popular civic theatre—and their narratives condition us, subtly but powerfully, to conflate human worth with victory or defeat.
The consequences are profound. We are becoming a society that has lost patience for nuance, tolerance for imperfection, and capacity for empathy. We cheer not only for triumph but also, and perhaps even more so, for another’s downfall. We mistake cruelty for accountability, and public scorn for justice.
This isn’t an argument to disengage from sports. But it is a call to examine how we engage. Can we admire the extraordinary demands of sport without absorbing its most corrosive instincts? Can we choose to value perseverance over perfection, and humanity over humiliation?
If we want to remain a society that values more than domination, we must learn to cheer differently. The spectacle is not inherently wrong. But what we demand of it—and how we reflect it—can be reimagined.
Let the arena be a site of inspiration, not indoctrination.