Sorry Utah Jazz fans. The Gordon Hayward to Boston deal is not going to have much, if any, a political impact on Tanner Ainge this year.
Oh, sure. There will be some Utahns who decide to vote against Ainge because his dad stole the Jazz’s best player away from the state. But, there won’t be an overwhelming uprising against Ainge for that. It’s not like this is BYU football, which looms much larger on the Utah sports landscape.
Utah is not Boston, where the Celtics are a religion unto themselves. Most of the people who filled the Vivint Smart Home Arena this year were finally coming back because the Jazz were good again, making the playoffs for the first time since 2012. Rooting for the Jazz doesn’t cause “a stirring in the blood” for the vast majority of Utahns like BYU or even the University of Utah does. There are diehards, like with any team, but those are the minority. The rest of Utahns, like most other sports fans, are fair weather. They’ll show up when they’re winning, and barely pay attention when they aren’t.
I have seen Jazz mania firsthand, and this is nowhere near where it was in 1997 and 1998, when the team went to back-to-back NBA Finals. I was working at a local sports radio station then. I was there when a crowd of thousands met the team plane at the airport after John Stockton hit the shot in Houston to send the team to the finals for the first time. I spent the whole night at the station taking calls from joyous fans celebrating the achievement. Gordon Hayward is no John Stockton in the hearts of Utahns.
I think we’re also giving too much cache to Hayward. I would venture to guess most Utahns don’t know who he is apart from a cursory knowledge. There’s absolutely zero chance he becomes the deciding factor in a race for Congress.
If Tanner Ainge loses on August 15, it won’t be Gordon Hayward that sinks him. It will be the fact that voters don’t know much about him. For that, he has nobody to blame but himself. The rumored Ainge money machine looks like it’s not going to materialize. Instead of spending a couple of million dollars to make his case to voters, it looks like Ainge will be much more economical in his approach to the election, which is not going to help.
This is not scientific by any means, but I asked my father-in-law, a Utah County Republican voter, who he favored in the upcoming election. I thought he might go for Ainge simply because of the weight his last name carries in that part of the state. Surprisingly, he picked Provo Mayor John Curtis. I asked him why, and what he knew about the other candidates in the race. He said Curtis had a great local reputation. All he knew about Ainge is he’s Danny’s son. He didn’t know much, if anything, about Herrod.
Ainge won’t lose because of basketball, but he won’t win because of it either. Being Danny Ainge’s son only goes so far, and it won’t get him over the 40% or so it will take to win this race.
If only Ainge had spent less time tweeting at Gordon Hayward to stay in Utah, and more time making his case to voters, he might have a better chance of winning.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been.'”
