The Gladiators We Watch While Rome Burns

I need to tell you something that's been eating at me, and I'm not sure you'll like it.

Actually, I know you're not going to like it. Because I don't like it either.

I'm done with sports. And before you click away or fire off that defensive comment about how I just don't get it, or how sports brought you closer to your dad, or how it's just harmless fun, let me tell you: I get it. Sports brought me closer to my dad, too. I wore the jerseys. I knew the stats. I had the posters on my wall. Ken Griffey Jr. Michael Jordan. I fantasized about being them the way other kids fantasized about being astronauts.

But something broke for me recently, and I can't unsee it. And if you keep reading, you might not be able to unsee it either.

The Show That Changed Everything

I just finished watching a six-part series called Heated Rivals. And yeah, it's a gay sports romance with graphic sex scenes. I can already hear some of you closing this tab. But here's what I want you to consider: put your judgment down for 90 minutes and watch what unfolds. Watch two men at the absolute peak of their profession, men who millions would idolize, men who represent everything we're told masculinity should be, living completely inauthentic lives because the industry they're in, the construct they're trapped in, won't let them be who they actually are.

Every therapist will tell you the same thing: when you hide who you really are, resentment builds. It festers. It metastasizes. And eventually, it explodes.

Keep that thought. We'll come back to it.

How We Learn to Love Men (And Then Forget How)

Think about your childhood for a minute. Who were your first heroes? If you're like me, they were men. Athletes, probably. Maybe rock stars. We wore their names on our backs. We had their cards, their posters. We didn't just admire them. We fantasized about them. About being them, sure, but also just... about them. Their power. Their grace. Their brotherhood.

Then we got to play. We joined teams. And something happened in those locker rooms, on those fields, in those buses riding home from away games. We experienced a version of intimacy with other boys and men that we didn't have language for. We prayed together. Cried together. Celebrated and mourned together. We slapped asses and hugged and felt something that, in hindsight, was probably the closest thing many of us ever got to vulnerable male intimacy.

Women were absent from all of this. Cheerleaders on the sidelines, girlfriends in the stands, moms who drove us home. But in the locker room, in the huddle, in the moments that mattered, it was just us and the guys.

And then high school ended. And we lost it. That vulnerability, that intimacy, that sense of brotherhood. Gone. And nobody taught us how to transfer that same emotional availability to the women we'd eventually partner with. In fact, we were actively discouraged from it. Be strong. Be a man. Don't talk about your feelings. Boys will be boys.

So we didn't. We shut down. We armored up. And every Sunday, every Monday night, every March Madness, we put on our jerseys and lived vicariously through men running around on a field, displaying all the emotion and vulnerability we've been told we're not allowed to have in our actual lives.

The Resentment Machine

Here's where it gets dark, and here's where I need you to stay with me.

Right now, as I write this and as you read this, ICE agents are pulling people out of their homes. Out of their cars. In broad daylight. Human beings are being caged, families are being destroyed, and generational trauma is being created in real time by men in tactical gear and masks, cosplaying as some kind of military force.

And what keeps showing up in the news? So many of these agents have secret Grindr accounts. Secret sexual histories. Secret identities they've been hiding for years or decades.

Think about Madison Cawthorn in drag. Think about J.D. Vance in drag. Think about Lindsey Graham and the whispers that never quite become stories. Think about every right-wing zealot who gets caught in an airport bathroom or with a male escort or with a browser history that contradicts every public stance they've ever taken.

These aren't isolated incidents. This is a pattern. These are men who've been forced by religion, by their jobs, by sports culture, by societal expectations to live inauthentically. To hide parts of themselves. To build resentment year after year until it curdles into rage. And that rage doesn't just disappear. It gets projected outward. It becomes cruel. It becomes othering. It becomes violence against the very people who remind them of what they've had to suppress.

If you can't be yourself, eventually you'll make sure nobody else can be themselves either.

The Distraction Economy

The Romans knew what they were doing with the gladiators. Give the peasants games. Give them blood sport. Give them something to cheer for, something to feel like they're part of, and they won't notice what the emperors are actually doing.

We're the peasants. The NFL, the NBA, March Madness, the Super Bowl: these are our gladiators. And we're so invested in whether our team wins, whether our guy gets the stats, whether we called it right on our fantasy lineup, that we're not paying attention to the fact that actual human beings are being hunted in the streets.

Every Sunday, millions of us men put on jerseys with other men's names on our backs and gather around screens to watch millionaires give themselves brain damage for our entertainment. We eat too much. We drink too much. We yell at referees who can't hear us. We bond with our friends and family over something that, when you really think about it, has zero bearing on our actual lives.

And while we're doing that, families are being ripped apart. People are experiencing life-altering trauma. The machinery of cruelty grinds on.

I'm not saying sports caused this. I'm saying sports are the perfect distraction from this.

What Are We Really Watching?

Here's the question I can't shake anymore: why am I watching?

I have a son. I've been encouraging him to play sports, to be an athlete, to maybe become one of those gladiators himself. But for what? So he can learn to hide his emotions except in carefully prescribed moments? So he can experience deep intimacy with other boys and then be told to shut it off as an adult? So he can bash his brain against other men's brains while millions watch and cheer?

Or so he has something to talk about with other men when he's older, because we've collectively decided that talking about what other men did yesterday is somehow more acceptable than talking about our fears, our hopes, our actual interior lives?

I think about my dad. Sports were our language. It's how we bonded. And I'm grateful for that because I know so many men don't even have that much with their fathers. But I also wonder: what if we'd had other languages? What if vulnerability and emotional honesty had been as available to us as batting averages and playoff brackets?

The Invitation

I'm not here to tell you to stop watching sports. I'm not your dad, and you're not mine.

But I am here to ask you to examine why you watch. What is it replacing? What would you be doing, feeling, or talking about if you weren't spending 6+ hours every Sunday watching men play a game? Who would you be if you couldn't use sports as your emotional vocabulary?

And here's the harder question: are you living authentically? Or are you, in some way, hiding parts of yourself because the constructs around you, your job, your religion, your social circle, the sports culture you're steeped in, won't let you be whole?

Because here's what I've learned: when men can't be authentic, when we're forced to mask and perform and hide, we don't just hurt ourselves. We hurt everyone around us. We become capable of cruelty we'd never imagine if we were allowed to just be human.

The resentment has to go somewhere. And right now, it's going into the streets in tactical gear. It's going into policy. It's going into the erosion of human dignity, one deportation, one cage, one family separation at a time.

What Happens Next

I don't know if I'll ever watch sports the same way again. Honestly, I don't know if I'll watch them at all. Because I can't pretend anymore that they're just games. They're not. They're a system. A distraction. A way we've learned to experience emotion and intimacy with men without ever actually being vulnerable. A way to avoid the work of being fully human.

And that work? It's hard. It's uncomfortable. It means talking about things we've been trained not to talk about. It means being honest about who we are, what we want, and what we're afraid of. It means building real intimacy with the people in our lives, rather than performing fan loyalty to millionaires who don't know we exist.

But it also means we stop being distracted. We stop cheering as peasants while Rome burns. We start paying attention to what's actually happening in our world, in our communities, in our own hearts.

So here's my challenge: this Sunday, when the game is on, ask yourself what you'd be doing instead. Ask yourself what you'd talk about with your friends if sports weren't on the table. Ask yourself who you'd be if you weren't performing the version of masculinity that sports fandom requires.

You might not like the answers. I didn't.

But I'd rather live with uncomfortable truths than comfortable distractions.

The gladiators will keep fighting whether we watch or not. The question is: what are we going to do with the time we get back?

If you're a man reading this and something resonated, I want to hear from you. Not about whether you agree or disagree about sports. But about what you're hiding. What you're afraid to say. What construct—job, religion, social circle, family expectation- is keeping you from being authentic? You can reach me at [email protected]. Let's talk about the hard stuff. Let's build something real.