The United Center arena in Chicago is the home of basketball’s Bulls and hockey’s Blackhawks. But you would be forgiven, Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, for thinking it was a football stadium — or rather, a locker room.
“I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” said Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate. “But I have given a lot of pep talks.”
This was what Mr. Walz, a former high school football coach, gave, delivering a cheerfully combative speech in front of a sea of “COACH WALZ” signs. But his style, his biography and the production that the convention built around him also gave the Democrats something more.
To a campaign headed by a woman and backed prominently by female validaters — Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and on Wednesday, Oprah Winfrey — Mr. Walz contributed an idea of masculinity that contrasted with Donald Trump’s performative, pro-wrestling-influenced machismo. He answered Mr. Trump’s coarse bluster with his own version of locker-room talk. He counterprogrammed Mr. Trump’s endless production of “The Apprentice” with a reboot of “Friday Night Lights.”
Mr. Walz was introduced by Benjamin C. Ingman, a former student whom he coached in seventh-grade track, and preceded onstage by grown members of the football team he helped coach, stuffed into their high school jerseys.
There was enough dad energy onstage to power a nuclear submarine.
Not all coaches are men, but there are few pop-culture archetypes more male-coded. There’s the coach as paternalistic strongman — the my-way-or-the-highway leader whom you obey or you’re off the team. There’s the coach as icon — the Vince Lombardis and Tom Landrys whom fans hold equal to political leaders, or greater.
But there’s also the coach as nurturer, mentor, character builder, surrogate father, as embodied by Eric Taylor of TV’s “Friday Night Lights.” Coach Taylor, portrayed by Kyle Chandler, didn’t just design plays; he taught his players about community and resilience. He told them: “Every man, at some point in his life, is going to lose a battle. He’s going to fight and he’s going to lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle, he does not lose himself.”
This was the sort of coach figure that Mr. Walz’s rollout painted him as, a persona he displayed in a viral video from the campaign trail, speaking to high school football players and likening politics to a game that should be played with “dignity and hard work.”
Mr. Trump himself understands the power of the coach. He had Lou Holtz, the former Notre Dame coach, speak at his 2020 convention and once suggested to a Pennsylvania crowd that Penn State University should “bring back” a statue of Joe Paterno that had been removed, amid controversy, after a sex abuse scandal involving one of his assistant coaches. All of this meshes with Mr. Trump’s longtime affinity for figures of macho strength. (See also Hulk Hogan as his closing-night 2024 convention speaker.)
Now the Democrats — who had the N.B.A. and U.S. Olympics basketball coach Steve Kerr speak earlier in the week — were hyping their new recruit. “I’m glad we’ve got a championship-winning coach on our team,” said former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday. Senator Amy Klobuchar, from Mr. Walz’s state of Minnesota, quipped, “A former football coach knows how to level the playing field.” (“Expect to hear the word ‘coach’ a lot,” said NBC’s Hallie Jackson, the understatement of the night.)
Mr. Walz was not above a nudging football reference himself. Speaking of the conservative governing blueprint Project 2025, he said, “When someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
Beyond that, in his feisty, upbeat style, Mr. Walz was reclaiming conservative-associated cultural ideas for progressives. He played up his Nebraska roots, walking on to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he cast rural life as being about community, tolerance and interdependence. He used his history as a gun owner as bona fides to call for gun regulation.
In a campaign that has often seemed like a battle of the sexes, this has been a bit of a “Free to Be … You and Me” convention, answering the language of he-men and childless cat ladies with the message that gender roles can be varied and nuanced. Tuesday night, Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, played the doting, smitten spouse, singing the praises of his successful wife while also mentioning his fantasy football team named after Nirvana.
White-haired and un-slick, speaking in Midwestern vowels as flat and long as a prairie, Mr. Walz reads as a dad, but one modeling an evolved kind of manhood and fatherhood. Think coaches are stoic and rigid? There was Mr. Walz swooningly holding his hand to his heart as the crowd cheered. Think boys don’t cry? There was Mr. Walz’s son, Gus, in the crowd, teary-eyed, pointing and shouting, “That’s my dad!”
This is still a presidential election between a Republican man and a Democratic woman; polls have consistently shown a gender gap. But Wednesday’s production cast the Democrats as the party of both football and Oprah, balancing the ticket with a little inspirational, male-weepie sports drama.
On TV, clear eyes and full hearts can’t lose. Can they win the Electoral College?
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