By my count, Brett Kavanaugh, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, mentioned sports nearly fifty times. Coaching, football training camp, pro golf tournament, brutal training-camp schedule, legendary Five-Star Basketball camp, working out, lifting weights, playing baseball, great quarterback, workouts, lifted weights, football season, sporting events, workout, supported them in their sports, Title IX, played football, defensive tackle, quarterback, wide receiver, summer-league basketball games, captain of the varsity basketball team, wide receiver and defensive back, ran track, football workouts, Orioles vs. Red Sox, Georgetown vs. Louisville, Super Bowl, lift weights, Fenway Park, baseball tickets, Roger Clemens, George Brett, third base, left field: the testimony was as sweaty as a session at Tobin’s house. Borrowing glory from the playing field, Kavanaugh was exhibiting and exploiting the American patriarchal fallacy that competitiveness is tantamount to character.

Some of this was circumstantial. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations necessarily situated the conversation in the zone of late adolescence and its preoccupations. But Kavanaugh dwelled there, belaboring his fitness on the court as though it had some obvious connection to his fitness for the Court. “(A) I was in cross-campus library every night, and (b) I played basketball for the junior varsity. I tried out for the varsity,” he replied, when Senator Mazie Hirono asked whether, per a roommate’s description, he had been a “notably heavy drinker” in college. He added, “The first day I arrived on campus, we had captain’s workouts,” as though the captain were a meaningful figure of authority, and his training regimes well known to the majority of Americans. But this wasn’t really a time-wasting tactic, as Senator Patrick Leahy at one point suggested. Kavanaugh’s belief in the moral consequence of his athletic career was palpable, and likely touched a tender, folkloric place in the psyches of some of his interlocutors. Try to imagine a Supreme Court nominee returning fifty times to his or her interest in pottery—you can’t.

Make it to practice for four years and enjoy the presumption of integrity for the rest of your life: it’s a pretty good deal, one that is obviously more available to men than to women, even those who count sports among their passions. (Had Ford invoked surfing to establish her credibility, she would have been branded a nut job.) The privilege, more specifically, pertains to white men, whose accomplishments we are to take as earned, the result of grit rather than natural gifts. The white-boy amateur, the vaunted “scholar-athlete,” incarnates a set of genteel virtues from a homosocial and homogeneous world that many American conservatives would like to rediscover. (Anyone who doubts that race signalling was at play need look no further than the repeated, scoffing invocation by Kavanaugh and Republican senators of “gangs” and “gang rape,” as though they obviously couldn’t pertain to him.) He is suburban innocence, whether he is innocent or not. The same people who rage at the sight of a black receiver celebrating in the end zone have nothing but respect for the white judge touting his varsity letters on Capitol Hill.

More often than not, for a prep-school jock like Kavanaugh, the aim is to be good enough—whether in actual skill at a game or the perceived virtues of playing one—to get into a great college. “Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school,” Kavanaugh said. “Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College.” Never mind that he was conflating leisure with work, offering little but his privilege to prove that he deserved yet more. The American myth is that you don’t prevail because you’re bigger, stronger, or better-equipped, but because you dug deeper and tried harder. In showing his patrons that he would do anything to win, Kavanaugh drained the buzzer shot.