Tuesday, September 8, 2020

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.


8 comments:

Giordano Bruno said...

Boycott sportsball? That's obvious. Guys like Solway are very late to the party. Why does it take people so long to connect the dots? Frogtwitter covered this long ago. Check out Woke Captital on twitter for the depth and breadth of the corruption.

The boycott should extend much further; I thought this out in great detail in 2018. I quote from a letter I composed over a year ago about a project I support that no mainstream conservative organization can fathom:

"What needs to be done? We must build the means to fight back, to wage economic war against the woke corporations. I intend to create a tool for normal Americans can grasp, and that by making a few simple personal choices, they can make an enormous difference on the entire corporate culture—and with almost no effort or inconvenience for them. That by simply refusing to purchase from one company, and instead choosing to purchase from another—while simultaneously letting people know why they made their decision—they can alter the economic calculations of the largest companies in the country. I intend to build an easy to use mobile application that runs on every phone and tablet in the country, supported by a strong, fact-based website, operating across all social media, and linking to videos and podcasts that will encourage people to reject woke products from woke corporations and purchase from neutral or conservative corporations.

...Just pointing out the perfidy and cowardice of the corporate culture isn’t going to get them to change. I repeat: pointing out that corporations are behaving badly means nothing to them—nothing. It is a waste of time. They must get hit hard, financially, for them to wise up. When they start losing money, a lot of money, then you get results. When they lose market share, you get spectacular results. When this site becomes a rally-point for the millions of Americans who are furious at having their traditions and culture treated with contempt, then we ride the tiger. To be clear: I’m planning to declare economic warfare against many of the largest companies in America with the full intent of destroying their brand, their market share, and their revenue streams—and subtracting from their economic power to enrich their direct competitors.

I’m proposing a nationwide strike against leftist corporations for one purpose only: to hurt their business and ruin their brand in retaliation for smearing and injuring the great name and brand of the United States of America and the common culture that lavished them with wealth and success. We are going to defend our brand, the parent company from which all other companies derive, and we are going to use the exact same rhetoric and symbolism against the corporate leftists that the old labor movement used against the mine owners and railway barons. We will use the blueprint that organized labor used in the 19th and early 20th century to hang this current gang of corporate villains with their own rope. I’ll make Samuel Gompers proud."

For starters? Take down the NFL. Ruin them. Destroy the NFL and the rest will cower. And they are the most dependent on US money, unlike the Chinese NBA. If the normies pulled the plug, it would send a shock through every corporate board in the US.

But as long as normals are addicted to their sportsball and their stupid TV shows, the left will get the double satisfaction of openly hating them, corrupting their children, and taking their money simultaneously. And there is very little more satisfying than enslaving a man like that. I think the left is addicted to that power, the power to hate a man while having him come round to be hated--and bring his kids.

urbane legend said...

I can't boycott professional sports because I never watch professional sports, never have. Watch the NFL? You have to be joking! 15 seconds of play, 3-5 minutes of waiting on officials, etc. etc. Grown men, strike that, men of legal age playing games.

And the intelligence level of these clowns. Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg, then his teammate Pierce hiding the gun. Different rules, or they want different rules, anyway.

Put your money where your mouth is, all of you, but fight for what's right. Stop taking drugs; go clean up a neighborhood. Support 5, 6, 10 single mothers sruggling to raise kids in a poor nieghborhood. You have the money. Do it through your lawyer. You already get enough credit just for being famous.

Stop telling the world how oppressed you are cause you black. You're a fool, and everyone knows it.

Janszoon said...

Being a Brit, sadly I cannot meaningfully boycott US sports. However, I completely support Giordano’s movement. The equivalent here is now the brewing battle over the BBC ‘license fee’ - in reality a mandatory tax imposed on everyone who owns a television set (sorry, how archaic did that phrase sound?). In bygone decades, one might have been happy to pay it in order to fund the incredible, innovative drama that the Beeb produced, but now, however, it has became a juggernaut of woke leftism, and seems to demonstrate almost hourly how much it loathes the majority of the population who both watch it and pay for it. With recent government mutterings about abolishing the license fee, and many fed-up people saying they are going to cease payment, there are some early signs that the BBC is starting to wake up to this new threat to its revenue. Let’s see if that has a similar effect to that on the NFL. I’m giving it up next year for sure now.

Anonymous said...

The reason sports were infiltrated by politics is that sports was bringing Americans together. The Marxists needed to end that and they succeeded by wrecking sports via the low-IQ players and owners. And it looks as though team owners don't care about losing money. Last NFL season saw a huge decrease in fans. They learned nothing and doubled down on wokeness. I have to assume they no longer care about profits.

Anonymous said...

What is the obsession with pro sports? Men analyzing, questioning, assessing, commenting, and obsessing on the physical prowess of other men. Just come out of the closet already. Nobody cares anymore, you'll be fine.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

I gave up on the NFL when Kaepernick took a knee during our nation’s anthem. Roger Goodall is a coward. I’m never coming back.

Professional sports has forgotten its true purpose: escape from the realities of life.

Politics ruins everything. Destroyers.

A Texan said...

Twas the hour before an NFL kick-off, when all through the country,
hardly a patriotic person was watching, because of kneeling, selfish, and overpaid simian monkeys.
Their hatred for America, the flag, and for all the good that America stood,
was on full display, and those fans with the money, now understood.
These BLM communist hate us all and we can't change that,
but we can take our money elsewhere,
and be had a better time than insulted with leftist political crap.
We came to be entertained, and take a break from the weekly grind,
but you will simply not allow us to have a good time.
We are not and ever 'da rasis', but you have forced our hand.
We will simply find better things to do on a Sunday afternoon.
So take heart oppressed players in your empty stadiums and reduced income to,
Good riddance and may every America hating sportsball player go bankrupt and soon.
Try making that kind of bank in Africa or Europe or anwhere, but it can only happen in
America where some dreams can still come true.

Sam L. said...

Two questions: How many black folks are there in Canada? How many black hockey players are there in Canada? OK three questions: How many in the U.S.?