While many of Meryl Streep’s peers in Hollywood were vocal in their support of her using her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award as a way to criticize president-elect Donald Trump during the 2017 Golden Globes, not everyone was enthused about what she had to say — specifically fans of mixed martial arts (MMA) and football.
In her speech on Sunday night, Streep critiqued Trump’s political approaches and advocated for empathy and press freedom. However, she ruffled the feathers of sports fans when she used sports in a colorful hypothetical situation for the entertainment industry.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” she said.
Both MMA and NFL fans took to the Internet to voice their displeasure with Streep’s assertion that sports were not the arts, including Scott Coker, the president of Bellator MMA who went so far as to extend a personal invitation to Streep to watch a fight with him.
See more sports fans sounding off below.
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Write to Cady Lang at cady.lang@timemagazine.com