At one time I was just about the biggest sports fan you could find. I had season tickets to the Knicks for around twenty years. I had season tickets to the Giants for ten years. I had season ticket plans for the Yankees for about thirty years. I mean not full plans. But a Saturday or a Sunday plan. I have been to innumerable playoff games. World Series Games. NBA championship games when the Knicks were in it.
But little by little my fandom has been stripped away. The greed of the owners and players has a lot to do with it. Giant fans used to be a family. The tickets were passed down from father to son. The waiting list had 20,000 people on it. You couldn't get a seat inYankee Stadium or the first Meadowlands unless you knew somebody. But then they started with the seat licenses. And most of the old timers gave up their seats. I mean they could pay even $100 a game but not twenty thousand in seat licenses. So new people came in. Tickets are easy to get on Stubhub or on the internet. You don't have to go to a broker. Or have to sell to a broker if you have extra seats.
The Yankees were a different case. When they decided to trash tradition and get a new Stadium I was heart broken. I had been to the old Stadium so many times it is impossible to count. I went to the original stadium with my dad in the sixties. I practically lived there in the 1970's and 1980's. I saw all the great Jeter teams with my season ticket package. But the new stadium leaves me cold. It is all cordoned off and they move you like cattle. No more sneaking down for a better seat. It just sucks.
I have dropped the NBA and the Knicks because of the Black Lives Matters activism. The players feel that their imagined grievances are something they have to wave in my face. It never stops. The game is not what it once was as far as I am concerned. The players come and go at a dizzying rate. I can't keep up with the roster changes. I don't want to anymore. When I saw Carmelo Anthony in that propaganda commercial with those other mooks I swore off b-ball.
Now football is getting into the act. As you know it is all the rage to protest the National Anthem. The league facilitates this. Instead of cutting or disciplining the players. Look you can do what you want to protest. Just not when you are in uniform on the field.But the league is all about protecting their rights. But when a player wanted to wear cleats honoring 911 first responders they threatened him with huge fines. When the Dallas players wanted to wear a patch honoring the cops murdered in Dallas by Black Lives Matters they refused and threatened them with fines and suspensions. The NFL has taken up the cause of cop killers. Not cops and fireman and soldiers and the flag. So I wash my hands of them. The NFL has made it's choice.
Baseball is the last bastion of Americanism in sports. Just as Lem stated in the prior post there is a reason. It is part of the coming realignment on identity grounds. If they succumb to political correctness they will lose me. Of course who am I? Just one idiot. Just one fan. Just one viewer. They don't care. They never did. But at one time I could fool myself that we valued the same things. Our country. Our flag. Our values. But that is obviously not the case. Football's entertainer of choice is Beyonce and the Black Panthers. Not Louie Prima or Frank Sinatra. Baseball should not follow suit. At least I hope not.
So the ship has sailed for me. I think if baseball follows suit they will find that it will have sailed for a lot of people. Sports and sports fandom is a luxury. It is easy to do without.
I can just as easy watch reruns on Youtube.
13 comments:
That's the point isn't it. To slowly steal away the American identity and replace it with one of their own. An identity of dystopian identity politics and the politics of personal destruction. To create an atmosphere where citizen is pitted against citizen. Where distrust is sewn into the cultural fabric. Where the controllers are protected by their multi-layered wall of guards from people who can never touch them, but can reach out and touch you if they so choose.
This is another attack on our institutions and this is why these people need to be removed. They are the wedges being hammered into the constructs of our country and they have no opposition. Instead people say, fuck it, I won't even participate and instead of fighting back and telling the NFL to go fuck themselves, do what we say or you will lose money, people just throw up their hands and take it. When is enough, enough?
At one time we could count on the football guys to stand up to this. The Wellington Mara and George Rooneys and George Halas. Even the Al Davis's of the world. The Chuck Howleys and Sam Huffs and Bart Stars and Johnny Unitas and Ben Davidsons and Mike Curtis and Mike Ditka's.
Those guys would have wishboned this jerkoff the next time he was on the field.
The NFL and NBA have reached critical mass. Past the tipping point. I didn't leave those games. They left me. And people like me in the basket of deplorables. Good luck with the hipsters and the millennials paying those ticket prices and buying your merchandise.
It is the same thing as this election. Not just ideology. But class and identity. These sports want a new identity. They think this will work for them. So they want to shed the white working class fans who have been the backbone of professional sports teams for as long as anyone can remember.
Things won't change immediately. There is still a great residual appeal. But in time the effects will be felt. In empty stadiums and full merchandise shelves.
That's the way to hit them - in the pocketbook.
When you hear fans say if the Dolphins (or anybody else) sit while the anthem plays, the team is dead to them, that is when the rubber hits the road.
I am tired of privileged, overpaid thugs doing anything they want and getting away with it because Roger Goodell (in this case) is a PC weenie.
You mention Sam Huff and Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas and Ben Davidson and Mike Curtis and Mike Ditka. How many of those guys were veterans? Just about all, I'm guessing
At Fenway, Kid Rock yells, "F*ck Colin Kaepernick".
Backlash, it's fan-tastic.
I was wounded in Viet Nam in Dec 1967. Since I had a broken bone, I was sent to a hospital in Tachikawa Japan. Some time around Feb maybe, I was still in the Staph Infection (Staphylococcus Aureus) ward, but the staph was gone and I just had a skin graft. One day I looked up and there was Bart Starr. He was visiting wounded GIs in Japan. A class act for sure.
With the NFL, its not really the players - its the owners. Like Trump says, they are cracking down on patriotism and pushing SJW behavior.
So Allen, how long before you were up and walking and back to normal?
Sports or self-aggrandizement based on lying narratives typical of a Hollywood awards show?
Which do you pay sports teams and their middlemen for? I wish I spent money on sports so I could stop doing it too. It makes perfect sense to end a relationship that takes you for granted and no longer holds up their end. I wish minorities would do that with Dems. I really hope this backfires in a huge way on the NFL. My 25 yr old step-son is extremely excited about the start of the season right now, and could care less about the politics being injected, so people like him will probably replace the boycotts. The NFL counts on you loving the game too much. I wish they got that idea smacked out of them this time, but ...
Most pro sports and college has long since lost its appeal for me. Too much baloney, politics and likely game fixing.
Baseball died for me with the 1994 strike. I was a teenager and said a pox on both their greedy houses. Ruined the Giants chances that year. I've not been to a game since I was a kid. The only time I really paid any attention was in '04 with the BoSox winning, because my Dad had been a lifelong fan. We used to go see them play the A's in Oakland. He died a few weeks before they won. I still want to go to Fenway, just to have been there but thats it.
I've not paid much attention to the NFL for over ten years, usually just the playoffs. I won't miss it. The niners haven't been the same since the 80s haydays anyway. The NBA has just gone full on hip-hop ghetto ball in the past 20 years. Which is fine, but I'm not going to support it. Just don't give me any of that crud like mentioned in the MLB post below on race differences.
Well, ok. I will still pay attention to the NFL in October to see how much pink the teams are wearing for boobie cancer month. SJW's, ruining everything.
The seat licenses for front row tiers I get, but for all the seats in the stadium? Jeez Louise.
About 3 months.
What a bummer.
The long march through American institutions one after another continues apace.
Did you feel the gears shift? This horse shit has speeded up. Finally noticed even by sports fans. Excluding youz guyz, of course, you all are well aware all along. But the apolitical sports fans must now be forced to take notice. While the young and new sports fans think this is how life is and should be, and your manner of enjoying sports is resigned to unfamiliar history.
Sigh, Old Men, you are now grandpa's whose values were formed in a previous era. Your complaints will be racked up old fogy syndrome and not to admired advanced experience and learning.
I just awoke from a dreadful dream initiated by recent reading of REDDIT post titles and other recent events. Its details somewhat amusing, while its development uncomfortably self-revealing and revealing of how butt-rapingly stupid and politically thick headed are the people that I know and had such fun with previously. I woke up just now totally bummed out. My most fun friends are truly too stupid to bear. And I say that humbly, rather stupid and thick headed myself. Bu they're self-righteous and set in concrete and I'm not. I'm open to change, in the world and myself, and they are not. And they cannot be taught. Anything.
Trying to get them to become aware of the real damage their party is doing to our country and doing that through their support, and the reason for their support being unacceptable identity politics has proven impossible. So that the only thing left is cut off the flow my energy to that, plug the hole and stop the energy drain. Life it too short, too precious to squander. Until I can think of something better, and my dreams keep informing me that is not going to happen.
Know what's better than all that? Trump rallies. That's what.
Allen, I know it doesn't mean squat now - but thanks for serving your country.
Sniff
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