I attended a county league baseball game today in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin, my home town. The weather was perfect with a cool breeze coming off the bay, pushing an array of Cirrus, Cumulus and a few rogue cumulonimbus clouds eastward. Everybody I saw had their hands over their hearts and not a single player kneeled when the National Anthem reverberated over the P.A. system. There were only a handful of maskers, less than five-percent. Nobody seemed deferential to social distancing mandates, not even the maskers. My mind was at peace for the entire game. It was true Americana. It was the way sporting events are supposed to be.
I was never a star athlete. I can downhill ski rather well and in my early twenties, while taking my emotional woes out at the gym, I was better than average in sandlot football, played weekly in a park near my home in a suburb of Chicago. I had a blast rooting for the eighty-five bears with Walter Payton, Richard Dent, the Fridge and Jim McMahon. When I moved to Wisconsin, I switched my NFL loyalty from the Bears to the Packers, not an easy transition. The Packers won two super-bowls, one with Favre and one with Rogers. My team, as the saying goes, which is actually two teams, has one three super-bowls during my fanhood. I’ve also represented a few Packers players in minor legal matters and I can assure you, they are not Gods, not even close. I loved Sunday football, Monday Night Football, too.
Sports was a place without politics, without nepotism (much), and over time, without prejudice. By the time I came around, it was a place where merit was everything and it didn’t matter what race, creed or religion you happened to be, as long as you could play the game. It was a place where racial barriers were broken, not by protests but by abilities. Americans were all in. Baseball was the national past time. Everybody but the Yankees’ fans hated the Yankees which was a sort of inverse love for whatever team a person happened to love. There was Mr. October and Michael Jordan and Walter Payton and Roger Staubach and the Great Gordie and a host of other super-stars that we admired, because after all, they were the same species we were and if they were great, it made our species seem a bit greater. The Miracle on Ice in 1980 reminded us what it meant to be an American, the underdog who always comes through. We moved from baseball season to football season to basketball season to hockey season, chatting up a storm on Mondays at work about how our teams performed. We felt that we were a part of their triumphs and that was the attraction of sports; it was unfiltered, pure, honest and true. We were able to put our own prejudices and gripes and worries aside during a game or even a discussion about a game, anesthetizing ourselves from the daily grind, all because beings of our very own species could do something so exceptionally well. There was a fabulous magic to it all.
And then Colin Kaepernick took a knee. He protested against the country I love which happened to be the same country that provided Colin Kaepernick the opportunity to make millions moving a bag of air wrapped in pigskin from one end of a field to another. Suddenly, the magic began to disappear and it hasn’t stopped. In fact, the diaspora of magic that once was sports is accelerating. More players are kneeling. Black Lives Matter, a communist anti-American front, is being displayed in endzones and on pitching mounds. Sports executives are genuflecting to it. The National Basketball Association crushed Daryl Morey, the general Manager of the Houston Rockets when he tweeted in support of the protestors in Hong Kong who were protesting against a disgraceful murderous brutally repressive one-party state that is putting people in concentration camps. He tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” and he got skewered. Proving that he is a eunuch, he walked it back, tweeting that he failed to adequately account for another perspective. I wonder if his castration was paid for by Obamacare? NBA announcer Grant Napear was fired from his sports talk radio program and resigned as the Sacramento Kings announcer after tweeting, “All lives matter.” The list goes on and it is a long list. The athletes and their handlers have betrayed America, conceding to social media pressures, political correctness and the woke movement. They are not behaving like Americans. They are not worthy of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Their actions and words are contrary to freedom and bravery.
So, what do we do? Easy. Stop watching. Whether a sports team wins or loses has almost zero effect on any meaningful aspect of a fan’s life. Your checking account balance doesn’t rise or fall with the final score. You don’t get in better or worse physical shape depending on your team’s performance. If your mental health is contingent on something you have no control over, like the final score, you need psychiatric help. Of course, you do. What if I told you I had an activity that could get your blood boiling, make you extraordinarily happy or extraordinarily angry, all you had to do was watch it and by the way, you have no control over whether it makes you happy or angry, none. Just put your arsh in a seat and spin the wheel, right? And just so you know, if it goes right and you get made happy, you get no genuine credit for it. It is not your success. You did not accomplish anything. You are not made a better, smarter, richer person. You had no part in your feeling of happiness other than risking your time and attention for something that has no concern for anything about you other than your money and attention, none. One more thing. Those athletes you claim to love will leave your sacred team in a second if they can make more money intoxicating couch potatoes somewhere else.
It is contrary to logic and well-being to put any stock in something you have absolutely no control over. It is also unhealthy to spend a Sunday afternoon, any time, planted on a couch or in a Lazy-boy watching other people engage in an activity that you are only observing. It is much healthier to be active yourself. Spend the time you used to spend only observing by doing things. Go fishing or hiking. Finish the project you’ve been neglecting for years. Hell, read a good book. I hear SWIMMER is excellent. Just do something, anything, other than enable the woke sporting institutions. If you watch them, you are part of the problem.
Another point of persuasion. Professional athletes are professional athletes because they are exceptional at the sport in which they play. The vast majority of athletes are simply skilled court jesters, hired to entertain and take our minds off things. They are not rocket scientists, engineers, physicists or oncologists. They have no special knowledge of history, politics or life. If anything, they are coddled minions who have matriculated into an obnoxious overpaid amalgam of arrogance and ignorance when it comes to anything off the playing field. Do we really care what Colin Kaepernick or Roger Goodell think beyond football? I don’t. They, all of the wokes in sports, are just court jesters, employed to entertain us, not to proselytize us into their new anti-American religion.
The Court jesters currently think they are the kings. I urge you to let them know they are not and never will be. Do so by not watching them. That’s it. For the record, notwithstanding the title of this blog, I am not advocating for the decapitation of the court jesters. However, if we fail to shut them down, they will decapitate us, unless we take a knee. If we do that, we’ll be fine, just not true Americans anymore.
That’s my REETZALITY for the day. Thanks for the read.
Brett Reetz
One Response
Excellent, Brett!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and opinions. I applaud you for taking the time to write what so many of us are thinking!
I is a sad but non the less so true.