Born to Run
8 min read
Politics has come to look like sports in many ways: the big money, the intense rivalries, the infotainment coverage. And some of the boldface names are exactly the same, thanks to a string of high-profile retired sports stars running for, and sometimes winning, high office.
“Why should we exclude athletes? We’ve got enough lawyers!” said Bill Bradley, laughing, when I asked him about retired stars running for office. The basketball Hall of Famer represented New Jersey for three terms in the Senate and vied for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.
When Bradley first ran in 1978, just a year removed from the NBA, his path was unusual, and figures like Senator Jim Bunning (formerly of the MLB) and Representatives Jack Kemp and Steve Largent (both NFL) were rare enough to be curiosities. Now each election seems to feature enough former stars to stock a sideline.
This cycle alone, Steve Garvey (Republican of California, MLB) and Colin Allred (Democrat of Texas, NFL) are running for U.S. Senate; Herschel Walker (Republican of Georgia, NFL) came up short two years ago. The NFL-to-House pipeline has been strong in recent years, yielding current Representative Burgess Owens and former members Anthony Gonzalez and Heath Shuler. And the current New York Jets quarterback was apparently a serious (at least in one sense of the word) contender to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.
Precious little scholarly attention has been devoted to when, why, and how ex-athletes run, and how well they govern. But the political scientist David Canon found more than 30 years ago that nontraditional candidates (whom he called “amateurs” ) tend to flourish at times of political tumult like this one.
“Amateurs are disproportionately elected in periods of electoral upheaval, and current officeholders rapidly revise their calculations on how to advance their careers,” Canon wrote. “When experienced candidates choose to run, amateurs generally are pushed from the electoral process,” he noted—but frustration and dysfunction have driven many political veterans to exit politics altogether lately, producing a historic exodus from Congress.
Sue Altman, one such first-time candidate, has been running for most of her life. As a kid, she ran track and raced up and down the soccer pitch and basketball court. At Columbia University, where she was a standout point guard on the women’s basketball team, she ran the offense. She went running before games, because she was afraid that if she didn’t, she’d have too much energy and commit fouls (“which was borne out to be true,” she told me). She even joined the cross-country team on a lark. After college, she took off for Ireland and then Germany, where she played pro basketball.
Now she’s running again—this time for the U.S. House. Altman, a Democrat, is trying to unseat Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican, in a district in northwest New Jersey. After her pro-ball stints overseas, she returned to the Garden State and began teaching and coaching basketball. Battles over education policy drew her into politics, and she now hopes to move into elected office in a race that The Cook Political Report has judged a toss-up—or perhaps a jump ball.
Campaigns by former athletes to run for office have potential upsides for both political parties and for the would-be candidates. If two of the biggest challenges for any office seeker are building name recognition and raising money, a successful retired athlete has an edge on both.
Professional athletes are becoming more outspoken about political causes—Colin Kaepernick’s racial-justice activism and Harrison Butker’s recent traditionalist-Catholic commencement speech are just two examples. This has drawn a lot of shut-up-and-dribble commentary, but even in a time of partisan sorting and polarization, sports remain a topic that can unify voters across the political continuum, especially in the region where retired athletes played. (Fame can also be a draw for career politicians, who relish the opportunity to rub elbows with someone they’ve watched on TV.)
Bradley was not new to political issues when he first ran for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, having dabbled in public affairs during his career with the New York Knicks. He found that his fame was helpful, at least as a starting point. “They’d seen me on the court for 10 years in their living rooms. They saw me under pressure. They formed some opinion of who I was as a human being,” he told me. “After that, you have to deliver. I used to say, because I was a pro player, I’d have 70 people at my town-hall meeting instead of 30. That only meant I could fail in front of 70 people. I’ve seen too many people who were athletes lose because they thought that’s all they needed.”
Retired athletes also tend to know lots of other people of means and influence, which can help in the all-important area of fundraising, says David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati who teaches a class on sports and politics. “One of the very first questions anybody who’s thinking about running for office is going to be asked by political professionals is ‘How quickly can you raise your first $100,000? How quickly can you raise your first million?’ And for an athlete, the answer is like, ‘I’ll do that this afternoon.’”
For athletes, the benefits are more psychological. They may find that their first career is over by the time they turn 40, and that normal life is a bit pedestrian; politics provides the competition to which they are accustomed. “One of the things you read in so many accounts of former athletes is how difficult it is for them to live in the regular-world context where people just exist, they don’t win,” Niven told me. “But you know, in politics, people do win and lose.”
Bradley confirmed that’s true. “You have a moment of judgment, and that’s decided by numbers,” he told me, but added a word of caution: “Being a competitor helps, as long as you’re not a stupid competitor.”
Are these people any good at policy making, though? As in their athletic careers, some are good and some are bad; some are preening showboaters, and some grind it out every day.
Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher, was notorious for his prickliness in the Senate and was eventually all but forced out by other Republicans. Walker was so manifestly unserious about policy (in addition to having a spate of embarrassing personal scandals) that he lost a Senate race in the Republican-leaning state where he was a beloved college-football hero. On the other side are people such as Frank White, a five-time All-Star second baseman for the Kansas City Royals who has spent the past eight years as the county executive in Jackson County, Missouri, a grind-it-out role. Earlier this year, White vetoed an attempt to subsidize new stadiums for the Royals and the Chiefs.
Bradley believes that the skills that dictate success in sports, such as commitment and selflessness, tend to predict success in politics too. “You’d be surprised by how many people in basketball stop working. The same thing in Congress. If you’re there every day putting in the effort, that pays off in the long run,” he said. “The senator who was pushing to get to the front of the line at the press conference wasn’t always the best senator.”
If Altman wants to test those skills, she’ll have to win first. She told me that the balancing act of being a student-athlete at an Ivy League school is the best preparation she’s had for campaigning. “You wake up every day with a bunch of tasks at hand that have to get done, and your mood, your feeling, what you feel like doing today—none of that matters. What matters is you have a lot of things that have to get done,” she said. “Being a college athlete is that way.”
Altman speaks with an intensity that vibrates through a Zoom screen, and I was glad I’d passed up a spokesperson’s offer to play a friendly game of one-on-one with her. (Tom Flaherty, who coached Altman in AAU ball, told me, “I would be scared if she was my daughter … because she is so relentless.”)
Since she left the court, she’s turned that intensity toward politics. Altman grew up in a Republican family, and was herself once a registered Republican, but she began advocating against education cuts proposed by then–New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican. She won attention after a 2016 town-hall meeting in Camden, when the governor, frustrated by her interruptions, tossed the microphone to her at short range. She easily snagged it—“He didn’t know I was a professional basketball player”—and read him the riot act.
Three years later, state troopers hauled her out of a state Senate hearing after she confronted the businessman and New Jersey Democratic macher George Norcross over corporate tax breaks, in a moment that, The New York Times wrote, “laid bare the deepening fault lines within the Democratic Party in one of America’s bluest states.” (Norcross was indicted on state racketeering charges yesterday. He did not immediately comment on the charges.)
In her congressional campaign, Altman has sought to paint Kean as both a nepo baby—his father was governor of New Jersey—and an agent of the MAGA agenda, and like many Democrats nationwide, she has made abortion rights a campaign centerpiece. But she sees her clashes with Christie, Norcross, and Kean as similar challenges to the state’s old-boys’ club, regardless of its party. (In a statement, the Kean campaign accused Atlman of lying about the congressman’s record, adding, “But ultimately the voters in NJ-07 won’t be fooled.”)
“Politics should not be entirely sports, right? Sometimes we think of it like sports—you’re on the red team or you’re on the blue team, and you’re cheering really hard for your team, and I think that’s actually a really terrible way to think about politics,” she said.
But she told me that she still thinks athletics has some lessons for political leaders, especially in a time of polarized acrimony. “Are there any American shared values left? And I think there are. I think work ethic, perseverance, and courage are at the top of that list,” she said. “Sports is this really blunt distillation of those values.”
