Methods for the Sports Talk Presidency

The following describes the methodology I used to examine presidential sports rhetoric.

I chose the Public Papers of the Presidents, a repository for all presidential documents, as the source of presidential sports rhetoric.  My graduate school professor at UCSB, John Woolley, and a former classmate, Gerhard Peter, created a fantastic website called The American Presidency Project.  Their searchable dataset proved invaluable to this research.  

I employed over 100 keywords to search the Public Papers for references to sports (see Appendix A).  Because many of Donald Trump’s most important communications take place over social media, I also searched his Twitter feed for sports comments using the same search terms.

Despite this comprehensive search strategy, the approach surely undercounts the number of times presidents talked about sports given a widely varied sports vocabulary (e.g., wide receiver, wide right, and wide open) and the colorful athletes who play the game (e.g., Red Grange, Vida Blue, and Jim Brown).  I also had to make difficult choices about what is and what is not a sport.  The most important, and likely most controversial, choice was not to count hunting and fishing as sports.   Although this is not the place for an extended discussion of how to define sport, I will say here that since the early 1960s, hunting and fishing have not typically fit with the popular conception.   

This search yielded 4,549 documents in the Public Papers related to sports; 87% were transcripts of oral statements from the presidents (e.g., speeches, exchanges with reporters, radio addresses, etc.).  Given the preponderance of verbal communication, I often use terms like speeches and rhetoric to describe this data.   

I began by importing the relevant documents from the Public Papers into the content analysis software NVIVO and highlighting sports-related keywords wherever they appeared in the PDFs.   I then coded each sports reference for (1) the sport mentioned, (2) the president who did the mentioning, (3) the type of document (e.g., exchange with reporters, State of the Union address, executive order, etc.), (4) content, (5) the degree of polarization, and (6) tone. 

The central focus of coding was on four main categories of presidential sports rhetoric: instrumental, constitutive, ingratiation, and metaphorical.  It is important to note that these theoretical categories are not mutually exclusive; I might code a single presidential statement in two or more categories.  For instance, in the 1996 State of the Union, Bill Clinton remarked, “Now each of us must hold high the torch of citizenship in our own lives.  None of us can finish the race alone.  We can only achieve our destiny together, one hand, one generation, one American connecting to another.”  Clinton’s statement is an example of constitutive and metaphorical rhetoric.  

Additionally, I used 62 more fine-grained codes to examine how presidents talk about sports (see Appendix B).  I began the coding process with a list of likely categories and added new codes as new themes emerged.  I counted as a single reference one coherent statement, usually bounded by a sentence or paragraph; multiple codes were used when a single sports reference covered numerous themes.  All told, this project examined 19,727 presidential references to sports—totaling 1.3 million words—made by every president since the start of the 20th century (except Warren G. Harding, who died in office before having the chance to talk sports with the public).

I then coded presidents’ constitutive sports rhetoric for polarization and tone.  A president’s statement could be (a) unifying, (b) polarizing but positive, or (c) polarizing.  The tone could either be (a) positive, (b) mixed, or (c) negative.  Although similar, polarization and tone are analytically distinct concepts.  For instance, a president might comment that a shortstop made a boneheaded play by throwing the ball to the wrong base.  That would be coded as a negative statement but not necessarily a polarizing one (e.g., Democrats and Republicans can agree that throwing the ball to the wrong base is a boneheaded play).  The mixed category in tone includes rhetoric that is both polarizing and yet, somehow unifying.  Consider, for instance, this quote by Ronald Reagan: “I believe that we’ve all worked too hard, come too far to go back to those unhappy days of Washington controlling our destiny.  But if we believe in ourselves, stick together, set our sights high for growth and, like our Olympic athletes, go for the gold, then nothing can hold us back.  America will be a rocket of hope shooting to the stars.”  The start of the statement is a clear rebuke of big-government Democrats, but the rest is positive.  Therefore, I code this statement as “mixed.” 

Coding for tone and polarizing rhetoric is the most subjective part of my analysis.  I tried to maximize objectivity by searching for valiance words and thinking about whether others would find a president’s statement negative or polarizing regardless of what I believe.  Still, there are some difficult calls, and reasonable people may disagree with my choices.  For instance, Trump sent several well-publicized tweets criticizing NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem, including this one from September 2017: “We believe that every American should stand for the National Anthem, and we proudly pledge allegiance to one NATION UNDER GOD!” For many Republicans, especially Trump supporters, the president’s tweet is a positive message of patriotism and faith.  Nevertheless, the tweet is likely to offend those who believe the NFL players are exercising their First Amendment right to protest racial injustice in America.  As a result, I coded this statement, and others like it, as “negative” in tone and “polarizing” in effect.  

There is also some concern with using the Public Papers of the Presidents as the source of presidential rhetoric.  It is possible, even likely, that Public Papers have become more comprehensive over time.  That is, presidents in the digital age may have more of their speeches captured by the Public Papers, which makes longitudinal analysis problematic.  As discussed in “The Sports Talk Presidency,” I mitigate this problem by norming the data, but even relying on percentages instead of frequencies does not entirely eliminate this threat.  Nevertheless, inconsistent accumulation over time would be a problem with any source of presidential rhetoric.  On this score, the Public Papers is probably better than the alternatives (e.g., newspaper accounts or television coverage). 

Because I was the only coder, intercoder reliability was not a concern.  Nevertheless, a single-coder project like this does raise the possibility of a systematic bias—that is, I may have coded presidential sports talk in ways that others would not.  And in a large project like this, where the coding took well over three years to complete, there is always the possibility of inconsistency over time (i.e., I may have coded items differently at the beginning of the project than I did at the end).  Although inconsistency threatens validity, this study’s size means that miscoding a few presidential statements is unlikely to alter the conclusions. 

Appendix A: Search Terms for Presidents and Sports

1.     Steroid*/Performance Enhancing Drugs/PED

2.     Olymp*

a.     Gold Medal

3.     Basketball

a.     Michael Jordan

b.     Magic Johnson

c.     Searched every NBA team name

4.     Football

a.     Super Bowl

b.     Touchdown

c.     Quarterback

d.     Heisman

e.     NFL

f.      Searched every NFL team name

5.     Baseball

a.     Home run

b.     Curveball

c.     Fastball

d.     Little League

e.     World Series

f.      Searched every MLB Team name

6.     Hockey

a.     Stanley Cup

7.     Track and Field

a.     marathon

8.     Boxing/MMA

9.     Sport*

10.  Athlet*

11.  Golf

12.  Title IX

13.  Horseracing

14.  Wrestling

15.  Soccer

a.     World Cup

16.  Tennis

17.  Swimming/diving

18.  Skiing

19.  Softball

20.  Water polo

21.  NCAA

22.  Field Hockey

23.  Gymnastics

24.  Volleyball

25.  Lacrosse

26.  Rowing

27.  Table tennis/ping pong

28.  Bowling

29.  Auto racing/NASCAR

30.  Champion*

31.  Sailing/ Yachting / America’s Cup

32.  Coach

33.  Game

* indicates wildcard characters. 

Appendix B: Content Analysis Codes

1.     AIDS, HIV

2.     Analogy-comparisons-metaphors-similes

3.     Anti-Trust

4.     Appointment

5.     Athletic Performance (President)

6.     Boycott

7.     Brackets

8.     Broadcast, TV, Radio, Cable

9.     Coin

10.  Community

11.  Condolence

12.  Congrats or Recognition

13.  Criticism of Pres.  Playing Sports

14.  Criticism of Sports

15.  De-politicize sports

16.  Disabilities

17.  Disasters

18.  Doing Other Things

19.  Drug Testing Student Athletes

20.  Drug, Alcohol, Tobacco

21.  Education

22.  Energy and Environment

23.  Environment

24.  Athletes as Examples; Role Models; Inspirations

25.  Facilities-Stadiums

26.  Faith

27.  Family

28.  Fan

29.  Funding; Appropriations; Budget

30.  Gambling

31.  Health and Fitness

32.  Hosting of Games

33.  Human Rights

34.  Income, Salaries, Wealth

35.  Int’l Commendation/Diplomacy

36.  Int’l Condemnation

37.  Int’l Exemptions

38.  Joke

39.  Litigation

40.  Military Service

41.  Misc.

42.  Nat’l Prestige or American Exceptionalism

43.  Organization

44.  Policy

45.  Politics, Campaign Rhetoric

46.  Positive Results from Sports

47.  Race

48.  Relocation

49.  Rules of the Game (Sports)

50.  Safety, Player

51.  Security

52.  Sports as Goodwill, Sportsmanship

53.  Steroids

54.  Strikes

55.  Tax

56.  Terrorism

57.  Title IX

58.  Violence, Crime

59.  Visit

60.  Volunteer, Charities, or Community Service

61.  Women

62.  Youth