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| Special to The Times
Growing up in Pittsburgh, sports were an integral part of our blue-collar lives. From an early age, we played pick up or organized baseball, softball, basketball, and even sandlot football, sometimes without pads or helmets. On Saturdays, we listened to Pitt or Penn State games on the radio while doing house chores. Sunday was listening to, and later watching, the Steelers in the hope they might someday win a championship. In college at Duquesne, it was cheering on Willie Somerset and others to get to the NIT.
Sports was about teamwork and drawing people together, and forgetting for a while the challenges of daily life, studying, the job, the Vietnam War, race riots, other troubles. But that has all changed forever, and for the worse.
First Hollywood and so-called stars decided they weren’t really there to entertain us, but to lecture us on a variety of their pet peeves. Performers at concerts aggravated the audience by interspersing political and social comment with music. They all added up to America not being a good place, never had been, and guilty of racism and so much more.
A baseball strike soured a lot of fans, and the national pastime became football. Identity politics engendered a mania to change sports teams’ names, and any owner who didn’t buckle under was immediately labeled a “racist.” Then thanks to Colin Kaepernick, egged on by his radical girlfriend, it was no longer about playing a sport, but social issues. The NFL, a monopoly that has morphed into a monster, tried to ignore him. They didn’t care that their fans were among the most patriotic in the country. Kneeling during the national anthem wasn’t really disrespectful, it was an expression of personal conviction.
Players who hate being “disrespected” were now disrespecting fans and the country that made them wealthy. In any other business where employees upset the customers, they would have been fired. But not in the NFL. And over in the NBA, the owners and players supported Communist China, because of their financial ties there. Didn’t matter that China has way worse human rights violations than the U.S.
Then George Floyd’s death, and subsequent events that couldn’t wait for the full investigation and justice to be done, started the avalanche of surrenders. Change your name, or we’ll pull our sponsorship. Ban the right of free speech in the form of the Confederate flag, which I do not endorse, to the current season’s madness.
So the owners and NFL caved, deciding playing sports was really not the point. So now we have end zones emblazoned with non-sports themes, the playing of the so-called Black national anthem while teams stay in the locker rooms during America’s national anthem, and NBA players deciding based on racial events if they really want to play games. These pampered, overpaid players must be listened to. By the way, with all the cries for diversity, where are Sharpton’s and Jackson’s and Obama’s pleas for more diversity in the NBA?
The Steelers’ efforts were predictable. The owners’ interests have been telegraphed since the push for the Rooney Rule. Now we have anti-police helmet emblems. Why not the names of children killed by Black-on-Black crimes in the inner city? Why aren’t these rich, pampered players spending their time and money in the inner cities stopping violence?
The fans’ reaction has been noticeable — booing during a moment of silence for “racial injustice” that was of course labeled racist. Attendance is down but immediately blamed on COVID, not fan disillusionment. Sportswriter Chris Mueller castigated fans for not going along, sheep-like, with this perversion of our sports. And Nancy Armour screamed the NFL hasn’t gone far enough.
I will never watch professional sports again, except hockey, and only until they are swept into the madness maelstrom. So you decide what you will do. Your sports, like the original Democrat Party, are dead. Do you want to continue to be played by these selfish, anti-American millionaires?
Joe Boscia, a former infantry officer, is a resident of Beaver.
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