Sports are an escape from the real world, but they’re also a reflection of it.
Throughout 2022, sports were another front in the cultural battles erupting across America and the world. Sports brought us immense joy, but sports also brought us new ways of fighting old battles. Here’s a look at the sports stories that defined 2022 and shaped how we’ll view and discuss sports for years to come.
Amazon takes over ‘Thursday Night Football’: When the Chiefs met the Chargers in Week 2, the game didn’t appear all that different from the one we’ve all spent our lives watching. Al Michaels was providing the commentary, Patrick Mahomes was slinging touchdowns and everything appeared normal — everything, that is, except for the channel on which the game appeared.
Amazon became the first streaming provider to nab an exclusive, weekly NFL game. No Amazon Prime subscription, no chance to watch Thursday night games. The days of broadcast TV’s dominance have been over for years, and now cable’s preeminence is ending, too. With the recent news that Google’s YouTube will be the home of Sunday Ticket going forward, the NFL’s future — like that of most sports and entertainment — will be fractured across multiple streaming services.
Keep that remote — and that credit card — handy.
College Football’s revolution: No sport saw as much upheaval in 2022 as college football, from every angle. Teams leaped conferences in a frantic, tradition-upending land grab that ended with the West Coast’s USC and UCLA heading to the traditionally Midwestern Big Ten, and Southwest stalwarts Oklahoma and Texas bound for the Southeastern Conference.
Name, image and likeness funds funneled millions of dollars into the pockets of players, who for the first time could (legally) share in the wealth of the multibillion-dollar business they’d helped create. The transfer portal turned every year into a fantasy football draft, with players seeking greener pastures and universities peering into each other’s locker rooms to patch roster holes.
Finally, the announcement of the 12-team college playoff signaled the final death of the sport’s old bowl-driven championship format, and moved college football closer to the sleek, money-printing profitability of the NFL.
Novak Djokovic’s anti-COVID vaccine stance: The world’s No. 1 tennis player became an unlikely but effective symbol for anti- COVID vaccine advocates after he was deported from Australia for his unvaccinated statu. Djokovic entered the year tied with Rafael Nadal for the most men’s career Grand Slams with 21, but gave up the chance to play in the Australian and U.S. Opens because of the tournaments’ vaccine mandates.
Djokovic indicated that his desire for control over his body was such that he was willing to give up the chance to make history, and as of the end of 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 detention and release: No sports story in 2022 better captured the divided national mood than the saga of Brittney Griner, the WNBA star arrested in Russia in February for carrying trace amounts of cannabis oil. The arrest, detention and subsequent nine-year prison sentence made it clear Griner was being held as a political hostage by a nation enmeshed in an ugly war, and that’s exactly how the story played out.
The Biden administration agreed to trade Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in America, for Griner, a controversial move that drew both relief and outrage. Why did Griner and many other WNBA players feel it necessary to travel to potentially hostile nations to play at all? Was it appropriate to trade Griner for an arms dealer? Should all Americans imprisoned overseas receive the same kind of intensive attention to their cases as Griner did? Were Griner’s gender, race, sexuality and political beliefs a reason why so many Americans expressed disgust at the idea of trading for her freedom — and why so many others wanted her freed at any cost? Should Griner have been freed while another American remained behind?
The Brittney Griner story remains one of many questions with few acceptable answers.
Aaron Judge’s Home Run Chase: The Great Home Run Chase of 1998 between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire was one of the most thrilling summers in recent sports history as it unfolded … and one of the most disappointing when the pharmaceutical truth behind it came to light. Aaron Judge, the mammoth Yankees outfielder, recaptured the tune-in-every-night joy of that era as he hammered pitch after pitch into orbit.
In the greatest contract-year performance in sports history, he ended his season with 62 home runs, eclipsing the American League record held by fellow Yankee Roger Maris, enshrining himself as a Yankee immortal, and bringing America’s eyes back to its former national pastime.
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 playing on only YouTube. That’s effectively what happened in golf this year, as many of the sport’s biggest names — including Masters winners like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, and reigning British Open champion Cam Smith — abandoned the PGA Tour to join the upstart LIV Golf tour.
Lured by the promise of phenomenal riches — in some cases, nine-figure signing bonuses — marquee players turned a willful blind eye to the source of the money: the Saudi government’s virtually bottomless Public Investment Fund. This marked the first major incursion of Saudi money — a technique many decry as “sportswashing” due to Saudi human rights abuses — into American sports, but it won’t be the last.
Retirements: This was the year icons left the stage, and several of them even stayed there. Roger Federer acknowledged the inevitable crush of injuries with a tearful retirement alongside his longtime rival Nadal. Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski brought the curtain down on a career remarkable for its longevity, victory and ever-changing strategy. Sue Bird, WNBA and Olympic champion, wrapped up one of the most decorated careers of any American athlete ever. Serena Williams bade farewell at the U.S. Open … and then hinted she might not be done after all. Tom Brady retired in February, and stayed retired for all of a month and a half, coming back for at least one more season, possibly at the cost of his family tranquility. Retirement for the best is a near-impossibility, but it comes even to the GOATs.
Lia Thomas’ battle for transgender athletes’ rights: A former swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas became the focal point of a nationwide discussion on the rights of transgender athletes. After competing as a man early in her collegiate career, Thomas began transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in 2019. After meeting the NCAA’s gender policies, she swam for Penn’s women’s team in the 2021-22 season. She became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I championship in any sport when she won the 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022.
All the while, she served as an easy weapon in ongoing, often highly simplistic or hyperbolic debates about the rights of transgender athletes. Thomas had intended to participate in the 2024 Olympic Swimming Trials, but in June, FINA, swimming’s international organizing body, banned most transgender athletes from international competition.
Kamila Valieva’s devastating Olympic skating: Nothing illustrated the vast gap between Olympic ideals and Olympic reality like Kamila Valieva, a 15-year-old Russian figure skater predicted to take gold at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. When test results from a prior event suggested that Valieva may have been using a banned substance, she became the focal point of worldwide scorn, a symbol of Russia’s well-earned and well-deserved reputation for cheating on the international stage.
In her solo event, Valieva cracked under the pressure, finishing fourth, and the cold scorn of her coach only added to the disgust the world felt at the wretched scene. And it all took place under a total China-enforced 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 quarterbacks of the future, Deshaun Watson spent the entire 2021 season sidelined by the Houston Texans following dozens of allegations of sexual assault from multiple massage therapists. The Texans dealt Watson to the Cleveland Browns in March, and Cleveland signed Watson to the largest and most-guaranteed contract in NFL history — a move that drew widespread condemnation given the fact that the legal action against Watson remained unresolved.
Many of the accusers would end up settling with Watson, who served out an 11-game suspension to start the 2022 season. The Watson story served as a referendum on how the NFL and its teams balance the concerns and allegations of women against the potential for on-field success … and it’s no surprise that the year ended with Watson in uniform and starting.
World Cup: The year ended on a perfect, conflicted note: One of the greatest games in all of sports history capped off a five-week World Cup run built on one of the most grim foundations in sports history. Argentina’s Lionel Messi won his long-awaited World Cup while France’s Kylian Mbappé established himself as an international superstar — but they did so in Qatar, a nation whose bone-deep corruption built the World Cup on the backs of effectively enslaved migrant workers. The transcendent joy of the match on the pitch came at the cost of immense human suffering beyond it — the perfect encapsulation of the contradiction of being a sports fan in 2022.
Other 2022 stories of note: The Los Angeles Rams answering the question of whether it’s worthwhile to go all-in for just one year to win a Super Bowl; creative cheating, real or alleged, taking over all corners of the sports world, from fishing to chess to poker; Kyrie Irving — among other willfully iconoclastic moves — promoting an antisemitic movie and serving a suspension for doing so; Aaron Rodgers continuing to vex the media, Green Bay fans and his own receivers; Deion Sanders remaking the University of Colorado in his own image; Robert Sarver agreeing to sell the Phoenix Suns for a record $ 4 billion; Daniel Snyder and the Washington Commanders continuing to fight through fierce waves of scandal; Ime Udoka drawing a season-long suspension from the Boston Celtics following an improper relationship with a subordinate.