Sport is life.
Or, to quote from the Apple TV series Ted Lasso, "Football is life."
"Football is life" are the words used by the Dani Rojas character. He bursts onto the scene with the bounding exuberance and joy of a puppy let off its leash. The character is eager to embrace life, his new team, and the game of football--i.e. soccer as we would call it. The show is on Apple TV and worth the subscription price. Binge, then cancel, if you like. Amid everything going on in the world, the Ted Lasso show is a welcome view of a game, a team, life, and the effect of a relentless positive attitude.
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| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDFBG7_0H5I |
Football is life goes both ways. Life is football. Life, including the behaviors of political life, shows up in sports. Something new and coarse is happening in crowd behavior, most recently and visibly among crowds at NBA games.
Jack Mullen was a multi-sport athlete in his youth in Medford. He is a lifelong sports fan. He also a close reader of political news. In our youths we thinned and picked pears together in Medford-area orchards. Later we both worked on the staff of SW Oregon Congressman Jim Weaver. Mullen asked to share this reflection.
Guest Post by Jack Mullen
Once my father took his nose out of the newspaper and showed me a photo of Stan Musial and Adlai Stevenson talking to each other. I was hooked. My lifelong love affair with sports and politics began that day and has never ceased.
I still have a hop in my step every morning, rain or shine, as I unfold my newspaper before entering my abode. I glance at the front page before moving to the sports page. On rare occasions, such as back in the days of Watergate, I stay on the front page. Usually I jump immediately to the sports page.
This week, the competition for my attention between the front page and sports page is intense. Zoe Lofgren and Liz Cheney are lifting my spirits just as the basketball fans in the Boston Garden are taking sports fandom to a new low. My concern that our fragile democracy is on its last legs haunts me daily. The efforts of those on the January 6 Committee give me hope that we still have a fighting chance to save our democracy, just as members of the Senate Watergate Committee saved our democracy in the 20th century, as Lincoln in the 19th century.
Meanwhile, in Boston, the hometown Boston Celtic fans showered opposing Golden State basketball players Draymond Green and Steph Curry with chants of “F*** You, Drey-mond” and “F*** You Steph-on”. Warrior coach Steve Kerr and player Klay Thompson, in the same vein as that Senator in 1954 said to Joe McCarthy “Have you no decency, Sir?”, at the post game press conference, said, “real classy, Boston”.
I am left to wonder, just what are we now in the last days of spring 2022? Will decency find its way back in America? It is a real struggle.
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Boston is both the home of Harvard and of Southies rioting against school integration in the 1960’s so it has no clear history of decorum. Back in the 1980’s I lived down the street from Wrigley Field in Chicago. You wouldn’t want to bring your child to an afternoon game, as all the young professionals on their expense accounts were swigging beer, yelling and cursing. After the games, the sidewalks in the neighborhood were land mine fields of vomit. European countries have banned soccer fans from some English cities due to the violence some bring to stadiums. In the UK they put up fencing to keep fans from the opposing teams apart. Even at suburban little league games, parents get ejected from the stands for “unsportspersonlike” (Woke enough for ya, dear reader?) behavior. In my humble opinion, and from my personal experience, competitive sports, both for participants and spectators, has always been a petri dish of overactive testosterone and under active prefrontal lobe. They don’t call it bread and circuses for nothing. Is it surprising that this type of behavior has now permeated the political sphere as well?
ReplyDeletePeople behave in certain ways if they are rewarded.
ReplyDeleteThe rudeness of the "fans" (they are not actually) is rewarded by the team, the league, and the entire sports infrastructure. The correct response would be to cancel the game, and admonish the attendees that they won't be entertained if they continue being stupid.
But that won't happen will it?
We all know about the behavior of crowds. In the anonymity of twenty thousand, individuals who would never shout a profanity in public are enabled, encouraged even, to express themselves any way they like. All their frustrations are projected onto the playing field and for the price of a ticket they can feel for a moment like they are winners, superior and most importantly, valued by the team they support.
There is a connection between this and "Let's go Brandon", a slogan that conveniently is code for an explicit epithet.
"real classy"...
I assume that Jack is a democrat, since he idolizes Zoe Lofgren and Liz Cheney (I don't). Jack rhetorically asks if decency will find its way back in America.
ReplyDeleteJack...
What do you think of the 100 days of rioting in Portland in 2020, where Antifa burned the Federal Courthouse, and killed people? Kate Brown and Ted Wheeler allowed the rioting and burning to occur unimpeded.
What do you think about Antifa taking-over the University District in Seattle in 2020, and killing people? Was it the Summer of Love?
What do you think about Joe Biden taking bribes from China, and altering his foreign policy towards China because of those bribes?
What do you think about Hillary Clinton fabricating the fraudulent "Russiagate" fiasco against Trump?
What do you think about Hillary Clinton having a private email system while employed by the government, and then destroying 30,000 government emails?
I'm just wondering if Jack's definition of decency is the same as mine, since I've never heard Jack being concerned about the criminal events I identified above. One thing I can't tolerate is inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Curt Ankerberg
Medford, OR
Some of life's best conversations occurred with Jay, Jack's brother. Jay would have loved this post, although he would have used more words, making each of them interesting.
ReplyDeleteOne note, the person who said, "Have you no decency, Sir?" was Joseph N. Welch, a lawyer representing the U.S. Army. The actual quote was, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" He is credited, with this statement as having broken McCarthy's power. Ironically, for this post, Mr. Welch was a Boston lawyer.
Worth watching is the movie, Anatomy of a Murder, in which Welch plays the Judge Weaver. His performance is at least as good as those of Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick and Ben Gazarra.
I, too, am finding some hope in the work of Ms. Cheney and Ms. Lofgren and the other members of the Committee. Thanks for the post, Jack.
Democracy in this country survived the Civil War. However bad things are now, they are not that bad.
ReplyDeleteAgree with Anon @ 8:08--English football fans, plus Rangers and Celtic fans in Glasgow, even though it's vastly improved since the worst hooliganism of the '70s and '80s, remain a whole different kettle of fish from the worst American sports fans. There it's longstanding territorial, class and religious rivalries and animosities. OK, hatred.
ReplyDeleteThis won't poop anyone's party, I'm sure--the show is well-acted and produced--so I'll go ahead and gripe that "Ted Lasso" makes my butt hurt, along with I suspect the butts of most serious football fans on either side of the pond. The premise is so stupidly implausible that suspension of disbelief is impossible. Unless it's pure farce?
I don't mean the deliberate tanking of the team with unexpected results a la "The Producers". I mean no successful American collegiate football coach at any level would switch to soccer for love nor money. Nor would any Premiership stakeholders stand for such a hire, from boardroom to fan base. Worst of all is the conceit that Lasso's new team is a perennial "failure" because they don't vie for the title. American viewers are largely unaware that every season three teams are dropped to an entirely lower league of play, the difference being hundreds of millions of pounds a year per year. For a smaller club to stay up in the "majors" year after year is a tremendous success. Once down, it can often take a generation to return, if ever.