Leagues of Extraordinary Arrogance

 

 I’ve made a very tough decision to skip on sports this year. I try to work in at least one sports related piece per month but without the content I can’t write. I made the decision right after Drew Breese had to walk back his famous ‘I’ll never kneel to the flag’ interview in which he had the audacity to defend the anthem. What followed was faux outrage from players and media personalities.  This was a week or so after the George Floyd killing and subsequent rioting in Minneapolis. Actually it’s been a while ago, but it still feels fresh. I’ve done a few Colin Kaepernick-is-an-SOB articles and I wasn’t in the mood to do another one. We had this debate as a country a few years ago and I didn’t want to jump into it again. Better to just turn it off. That’s what people used to do when something bothered them, turn it off.

I decided if sports was going to be a platform for the woke I was out. That included baseball and football. Both firmly embraced Black Lives Matter, a cop hating Marxist organization that thinks white supremacy runs through the philosophical pillars of the nation like fluoride in the water. The NBA treats BLM like a brand that pays them with every mention, or hashtag or promotion. Yes, I’ve seen the uniforms and the courts and the dopey ads. I haven’t really been invested in basketball since college so I didn’t miss much there. I’m an avid sports talk radio listener, watcher too since the bigger shows simulcast their talent. It’s appropriate to put Colin Cowherd or Will Cain on the TV at a sporting goods store (where I work) so I watched a lot. About 1 week into the Floyd killing I’d seen enough, heard enough, had enough.

Not to disparage those particular shows but I just couldn’t hear anymore about America’s racist past, athletes’ and their dumb tweets or corporate sellout culture. The NBA comes off particularly bad. That they don’t recognize their inexplicable hypocrisy on China is reason enough to click it off. It’s understandable to want to sell into foreign markets and be apolitical when abroad, but wearing wokeness like a game jersey while in the US is a bit much. Whatever cause they’re about I’m against. Why? Because they play in a country where it’s possible to earn Scrooge Mcduck money playing basketball.

 There is a lot of extreme poverty and lot of extreme wealth in this country. Nathaniel Hawthorne said “Families are always rising and falling in America” and it’s still true today. There are some legitimate arguments out there on fairness in the tax system, inequality in minority communities and lack of access. The wealthy have built in advantages for nearly everything. But when you go Marxist you lose me. I’m not in the mood for having socio economic problems played out on T-shirt logos and hashtags connected with pro teams.

So yeah life after sports is slow and I’d like to pretend I’ve become a better man. Sadly I’m not using my time as wisely as I should. Don’t worry, I’m not a sour guy sitting in a corner scowling at a blank screen and stewing over the lack of decorum in sports, not during the week at least. I hope professional sports get back to what they do best make a sellable product without the cause-whoring. There has to be opposition within the front offices about all this forced wokeness. But people bend where the pressure is greatest. Like most organizations run by group think, no one wants to stick their head out lest it get cut off.

Some segment of professional sports has wanted this to happen for a while. They probably feel that their future audience wants a politically active (on the left) league, particularly in that prime 18-49 demographic. This could be right but I’d seriously doubt it. When you alienate half the audience you lose viewers. Even moderate types will be put off with in your-face-messaging enough to look elsewhere.   

 For now anyway professional football and baseball are spoiled products and like milk that’s gone bad we should dump them.