Should We Boycott Woke Sports

Sports is a business. It is a very big business. That means, it has customers and even fans. Someone ponies up all the money that athletes earn. And the numbers are obscene.

One thing you learn when you are in business is: don’t alienate your customers. Don’t insult them. Don’t talk down to them. Treat them with respect, with courtesy, with dignity and with decorum.

Otherwise, they will not be tuning in to watch your circus-like antics and will not be spending money on all of that swag. Declining attendance at games, declining television ratings, declining ad revenues… and, lo and behold, you can kiss those multimillion dollar contracts good-bye.

Evidently, the world of sports has been roiled by the Black Lives Matter protests. The athletes have all decided that they need to use their platforms to lecture the rest of us, the unenlightened, unwoke heathen elements who, incidentally, pay their salaries. It is condescending. It is obnoxious. It is disrespectful. They do not care… for now, at least.

David Solway is Canadian. Thus, he is a hockey fan. As in fanatic. In principle and in fact Canada has not seen the rioting and looting, the insurrection that has brought turmoil to America’s cities. It does not matter. Canadian hockey teams feel compelled, by their deficient moral sense, to lecture their fans about systemic racism.

So, Solway was watching a hockey game when he saw this:

Turning on the TV the other night for my ailing mother-in-law, a devotee of the Vancouver Canucks hockey team, we were pummeled by the public address announcer’s sanctimonious spiel about Black Lives Matter, the social sickness of “systemic racism,” and how these issues were “bigger than the game.” Some of the players were featured delivering solemn, not-entirely lucid homilies about justice for the oppressed and the need for brotherhood among the races. One could sense Saint Kaepernick kneeling in the background. 

Solway was not impressed, and he was certainly not amused. He did not feel especially woke or enlightened. He felt grievously offended:

I must say I did not appreciate being enlightened by an announcer reading a script he’d been provided by a cadre of sycophantic officials or lectured by a platoon of semi-literate multi-millionaires who had just presumably discovered they had a social conscience. They were being paid, I’d assumed, to play the game of hockey and entertain their fans, not preach like Savonarola to the sinful multitudes. 

Back in the day, athletes were gentlemen. To use that term to describe today’s athletes would invite ridicule:

I recall some of the greats of a bygone era, the Detroit Red Wings’ Gordie Howe (Mr. Hockey) or his close friend, the Montreal Canadiens’ Jean Béliveau (Le Gros Bill), who off the ice were intelligent observers of life, true gentlemen, and respected ambassadors for the game they played with such love and dedication. I cannot imagine them succumbing to the ideological fads and idiocies of the day, mouthing half-baked platitudes about “systemic racism” and “social justice,” or hobnobbing with anarchists and firebrands. They played hockey, not politics, and in retirement comported themselves with dignity.

Athletes today are extremely wealthy and extremely pampered. For them to become the face of a movement that decries American racism is absurd:

Today’s athletes, earning in one year what most of us earn in a lifetime—if we’re lucky—are in no position to complain about their treatment by society at large and are under no compulsion to become pious champions for movements they do not really comprehend or self-proclaimed victims of inequities from which they do not suffer.

Solway recommends that if athletes and team owners decide to begin games by lecturing us on racism, if they disrespect us at that level, we should cease supporting them. Time to boycott woke sports:

What they cannot be forgiven is that they have destroyed sports and deserve the only kind of retribution they might understand: rejection by their paying fans. When the regular season is renewed, stadiums and arenas should empty out. Financially obscene contracts should not be worth the paper they’re written on. Let these new evangelists rather march in protests and demonstrations to show they really believe in the clichés they so readily spout. If true to their word, let them spend their time with shills, camp followers, and agents of manufactured outrage learning the rhetoric of envy and resentment. Otherwise, let them do an honest day’s work in a demanding world they have managed to elude. Let them wonder what to do with the rest of their lives, until sanity may providentially return to the sports world. Only then would it be time to hear the crack of a bat or ponder the NFL draft or watch Carey’s lightspeed glove snag a sure goal from a head-shaking attacker.