The veteran host chops it up with Boardroom about her podcast, the relationship between sports and politics, labor unions, George Floyd, Title IX, and more.
As a frigid Thursday afternoon gave way to a snowy evening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last month, Jemele Hill held court at the On Air Festival for podcasts in conversation with political influencer Mehdi Hassan. The former ESPN anchor and current Atlantic writer started a podcast in October called Spolitics, delving into the intersection of sports and politics that’s seemingly in the spotlight now more than ever.
A thoughtful conversation about sports and politics with Hill followed, delving into the intersection of sports and politics, labor unions, George Floyd, Title IX, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and more.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
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Shlomo Sprung: You said when you were launching this podcast that the intersection between sports and politics touches every corner of our lives. That’s now true more than ever, but to so many it’s considered a third rail or taboo to talk about sports and politics. How have you navigated that intersection over the first several months of the show?
Jemele Hill: There’s always this assumption that people didn’t have an appetite to see these two things match together. And I actually think it’s kind of the opposite. People are much more open politically when you can get them to see politics through the lens of sports. We have so many examples across the history of sports of how courageous athletes have taken a stand on an issue and how it’s galvanized people, and so many examples of where sports leads the conversation on very serious issues.
Major League Baseball integrated in 1947. That was almost 20 years before we got the Civil Rights Act. So we’re able to see what we can be in sports because it’s one of the few things we actually do together across racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines. When sports is on the table, it’s able to bring people together in a way that other sectors of our society can not. And that was a really important starting place that helped me conceptualize this podcast. How can I explain what our political world looks like in sports? That was the entire idea.
SS: How have you seen your audience respond to all that so far?
JH: The response has been really phenomenal. I can tell I’m getting people to think. And this is not to suggest they always agree or they always should agree with what I present, but I came at it from an explanatory position as opposed to “here’s my opinion, and this is why you need to believe what I believe.” I just wanted to explain things. That’s been a very helpful way of engaging with the audience. I never wanted it to feel like I was lecturing them about a particular topic or issue. I wanted them to understand the nuances of what was happening in our world.
I had on the WNBA Players Association executive director Terri Jackson, who is the mother of Jaren Jackson, who plays for the Grizzlies in the NBA, great player. And through our conversation, people were able to better understand the labor movement in the United States. My setup to our conversation was explaining how sports unions were formed, why they were formed, and how that influenced the labor movement in America. And by understanding the labor movement through the lens of sports, maybe you’re able to understand why it’s important that we continue to focus on labor issues. The positive response to the content has been a further validation of why this kind of podcast was necessary.
SS: The podcast started right before the election. Did the result reinforce your dynamic?
JH: You had some very prominent Black male athletes who came out in support of Donald Trump, and it became an opportunity to discuss whether or not Donald Trump was appealing more to Black men this time around…It wasn’t just some advertisement for Democrats, it was just trying to understand how the politics of Black men changed in just the last four to six years. Because even from an athlete standpoint, the Black athletes that were out there supporting Joe Biden weren’t there anymore. I realized that 2020, which seems like a lifetime ago, there were other things driving the participation of Black athletes in the political space, namely the murder of George Floyd. And while there was no inciting incident like that, they’d been largely absent from the political discussion in 2024. Their presence wasn’t as known and as noteworthy. So it was looking at that issue and why that was and what was happening politically. The great thing about sports is it always provides some kind of entry point.
SS: How has the first month-plus of the administration changed the dynamic between sports and politics?
JH: It has in many ways. One of Trump’s first early executive orders was to ban trans athletes from competition. But even along the campaign trail, he had been promising to eliminate the Department of Education. And a question I continued to ask is, what does this mean for Title IX, which falls under the DOE. Title IX has been the single most important driver of female athletes participating at every level…It’s been such a driver and such a landmark legislative tool for female athletes.
So on top of banning trans athletes, then the next move was to roll back some Biden-era guidance about how NIL money is distributed from this ruling that’s going to take place in April that will determine what the payouts will be to schools regarding the House v NCAA lawsuit. Now it looks like a lot of female athletes will be largely frozen out of that money. And now that schools don’t have to adhere to some Title IX guidance, they’re free to funnel as much money as they want toward men’s basketball and college football. That’s going to have a dramatic impact on female athletes. And I know there’s a lot of people that say, “Well, they make the most money.” I guarantee you the first place this is going to show up is the Olympic sports because we forget about what we root for in the Olympics. Women were so dominant in Paris that if they’d been their own nation, they would’ve placed third among all countries in medals. They were by far the most dominant group at the Olympics.
So if schools are allowed to ignore or dole out pennies to female athletes, that’s going to impact swimming, volleyball, gymnastics, and these sports we root for at the Olympics. There are a lot of different sports issues that will particularly impact college sports, not just Title IX. Sen. Ted Cruz from Texas is very NCAA-friendly, and the NCAA wants Congress to step in and provide some parameters for NIL. Maybe college athletes weren’t really paying attention to that, is that this is going to dramatically impact how they’re able to earn their money.
And just in the early parts of this presidency, even with Trump appearing at the Super Bowl and at the Daytona 500, sports is very much going to be part of this political conversation in stronger ways than we could ever realize. When Tiger Woods was at the White House, part of the conversation he was having with Trump is about how LIV and the PGA can properly merge, which is another conversation to be had.
SS: Usually Republican administrations are favorable towards these billionaire sports owners. How do you think that’ll manifest itself over time?
JH: One pattern we already see emerging from this administration is that the more you’re able to curry favor, the more favorable the term you get. It was very telling to me to see Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, these are billionaires on billionaires, capitulating. This is the blueprint that I expect sports owners to follow because they want to continue making money, continue to be unregulated, and they want the blessing of this administration. It’s going to probably encourage them to have an even deeper connection with this administration. So much like the billionaires we’ve seen outside of sports, the billionaires in sports are going to be lining up and figuring out what their entry point is with Donald Trump to gain and create favor that could be good for their business.
SS: It seems like the stick-to-sports crowd from the first Trump administration no longer has that opinion.
JH: It’s funny how that works. When it’s opinions they agree with, suddenly they don’t want people to stick to sports. I didn’t hear it when Le’veon Bell and Antonio Brown were speakers at Trump’s rally in Pittsburgh. It’s funny how I never heard that same crowd say anything about whether or not they should stick to sports or any of these other sports connections that we’ve seen from the athletes who were imitating the Trump dance or Nick Bosa taking a MAGA hat on Sunday night football. That loud and boisterous crowd wasn’t there, which is why I always thought that their opinion was disingenuous. Everybody wants people to stick to sports when it’s something they don’t agree with. And even with athletes I vehemently disagree with and don’t align with their political beliefs, I never attacked their right to say it. I will attack what they said, and that’s the difference. That’s how I know that stick-to-sports crowd was always just presenting boogeyman, straw-man arguments. They really were much more upset about the fact that their opinions weren’t represented.
SS: How do you think sports media companies should play a role in this intersection between sports and politics?
JH: What I would do if I were them is not what they’re going to do. I would dig in deeper to it, but I think they’re very risk-averse and very worried and concerned about ticking off the wrong group. And if you’re in media, and especially if you consider yourself any level of a journalistic institution, and you’re worried about pissing people off, then you’re not in the right profession. Yes, they should be doing stories about what this administration, what it means for Title IX if they plan on destroying the Department of Education. It’s your job to report on that. How is this going to impact female athletes? Even the reporting that was done about trans athletes, I didn’t think was very good because it often was just responding to the reaction and not actually giving us the data and posing the question, is there actually a physical advantage that trans women have? You don’t see a ton of reporting diving deeper on why there are 23 states that have banned trans girls from participating in youth sports. When you look at the numbers of trans athletes in those states, it doesn’t add up.
You’re talking about the state of Florida that did the most consistent demonizing of this group, and they had one athlete [like that] in the whole state. You’re doing all this for a very low percentage that seems like a waste of energy. And the media has shied away from this issue because they’re frankly thinking too much about the response and not enough about the reporting. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real issues to be addressed. I’ve had conversations with female athletes who are afraid to speak their mind and don’t feel comfortable. And I think the media has done a really terrible job of presenting the nuance of this issue.
SS: What happens to the momentum of women’s sports if Title IX is no longer in the picture?
JH: We’ll see the most impact at the lower levels. And when we see it there, it will start to bleed upwards. So right now is one of the best moments in history for women’s sports. In 2024, it was the first time in history that women’s sports generated over $1 billion in revenue. And considering where we are in this moment, any level of rollback is going to undermine the progress that was made. Unfortunately, it follows a familiar pattern. The number one thing that undermines women’s sports is a lack of resources and a lack of investment in people. And by undercutting Title IX, you’re then giving people permission to say that female athletes and women’s sports aren’t worth the trouble.
SS: Which has clearly been proven to not be the case.
JH: Yes, because there’s long been this narrative that people aren’t interested in women’s sports and they don’t care about female athletes. And that’s been proven false so many times. The refusal to get away from that narrative has actually been bad business.
SS: We’ve been cheering on our female Olympians for decades.
JH: There’s been very clear models and data that supports that if the audience is there, you need to double down and invest. What happens is they treat every explosion of popularity as a novelty as opposed to business. And what we’ve seen with the explosion happening in the WNBA, NWSL, and women’s basketball as a whole is that if you invest in women, it’s the biggest area of growth in sports right now. Sports are always going to be popular, but who has the bigger upside? It’s definitely women’s sports.
SS: Last question: What’s the biggest way in which you think the relationship between sports and politics will change in 2025?
JH: We’ve seen this as a pattern elsewhere outside of sports. There’s going to be a lot of obedience in advance. And with the presence of these very polarizing policies, people are going to lean into obedience instead of disruption. So a lot of things that weren’t normal are going to be normalized, and my fear that the togetherness sports brings is going to be undermined by the very divisive political climate that we’re in. I don’t know what the World Cup and what the Olympics that’ll be in the States are going to look like. Of course, Americans will support Americans, but as we grow more divisive as a country with the rest of the world, other countries always want to beat America. I get that, but there’s going to be additional animosity towards Americans that athletes representing our country are going to have to deal with. Some athletes may decide that it’s not worth it to represent our country, or they don’t see the pride in doing that because they may be ashamed about some things that are happening here. So, I worry about what the experience of representing this country is going to look like given what we’ve already seen in just the first couple months.
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