Ickey Shuffle (2007)

The political repurposing of the end-zone dance.

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I.

It began in the fall of 1971, with a rookie wide receiver for the Kansas City Chiefs named Elmo Wright, who caught a touchdown pass, tumbled to the ground, leapt back to his feet, and high-stepped for roughly three seconds before spiking the football to the turf. By today’s standards, Wright’s dance—which he’d actually invented while at the University of Houston—was far from extraordinary. These days, it feels like the celebratory equivalent of the guitar riff from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.”

This was, according to football historian Kevin Gallagher, was the first true end-zone dance in modern NFL history, and it was followed by the hijinks of Butch Johnson and Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, by the Mile-High Salute and the Lambeau Leap and the Ickey Shuffle, and by a reactionary backlash that led the NFL to become known as the “No Fun League,” and which led the league to periodically crack down on and penalize on-field celebrations before realizing that a lot of people didn’t actually mind them as much as the league thought they did. And this increasing acceptance of a more flamboyant era of professional football led Rush Limbaugh, a radio host who pioneered the era of modern-day bigotry and racism, to utter one of the most openly racist statements of his career.

Limbaugh was not technically railing about touchdown dances back in 2007; he was actually lamenting the fact that a handful of New England Patriots danced on the Chargers’ logo in the aftermath of a playoff victory in San Diego, which was then denounced by Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson, who Limbaugh called one of the “classiest” players in the league because “he doesn’t do a dance, he doesn’t spike the ball when he scores.” This led Limbaugh to lament what had happened to the culture of the NFL, and this is where he resorted to the Full Limbaugh, mentioning a Chargers player getting in the face of the Patriots player and declaring, “This is the reason these guys are getting shot in bars, folks, late at night.”

And then somehow it got worse, because Limbaugh couldn’t help himself. “Lookit, let me put it to you this way,” Limbaugh said. “The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”

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II.

I bring this up now because of the current touchdown-dance trend in modern sports, in which certain athletes have begun mimicking the masturbatory dance moves the president-elect makes while listening to an openly gay disco-era anthem. This is only controversial because the usual suspects have attempted to render the dance trend more meaningful than it actually is. That includes the worst human being to emerge from the ranks of modern sportswriting, a pale and impotent Limbaugh 2.0 who declared that the “woke” era of sports is somehow over because people are dancing in ways that he would have no doubt found perverse if it did not comport with his own worldview. But now certain people are using this direct connection of politics and sports to press the point that politics and sports should exist like church and state—except for the fact that they don’t seem to believe in that fundamental separation, either, but what does a little hypocrisy matter, because honestly, what does anything matter at this point?

I don’t blame the athletes for any of this, and I obviously don’t care if they do the dance, because they have a right to do whatever the hell they want. (Although it would certainly be nice if maybe they could explain why they’re doing it, and perhaps expand upon why a president who traffics in Limbaugh-ish bigotry nearly every day is somehow worthy of an on-field tribute.) I get the sense that many of them don’t have any political motivation behind it whatsoever; they just think it’s a ridiculous dance by a ridiculous man who happened to win a ridiculous election—which it is—and ridiculous dances are the currency of modern social media, and that’s as far as it goes. At this point, it feels odd to even bring it up, because these cultural touchstones serve as a misdirection from the rancidness of the man’s actual politics.

Yet here we are. To certain people, this dance is a symbol of how football shed its irreverence for all those years when we were arguing over Colin Kaepernick and things like police brutality and racism, and now it’s back, which means this new dance craze is a “double middle finger to the feminized ruling class, hidden in fists and a subtle hip swivel. ‘Fuck you,’ it's saying, ‘I'm not apologizing any more for being a man.’” Which, if true, is not just the polar opposite of demarcating politics from sports; it’s also in direct contradiction to decades of reactionary insistence that Black football players, merely by expressing emotion on the football field, were somehow being insolent and classless. And it also seems like a pretty bizarre way to give credit to a dude who admitted that he wasn’t enough of a man to play football in the first place because he was afraid of the people from “bad neighborhoods” who actually played it, but I guess that doesn’t matter anymore, either.

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