“Labour thou under the notion I believe there be not significant exceptions to the narrative contained herein? Forbear it not for this is certainly untrue.”¹

Author

It was Sunday and the church was awash in a sea of color supporting the local NFL team taking afield that day. Noticing I was not similarly attired, a church member asked me why. I no longer watch the NFL because I am a retired police officer was my reply. Looking puzzled, he walked away saying nothing. How can anyone watch the NFL? Players, receiving enormous sums simply to play a game, use it as a platform to trash America’s police, military, and the flag. “Program Directors” have replaced pretty pom pom and baton twirling girls leading college marching bands at halftime with male dancers clad in unitard body suits prancing about trailing long multi-colored scarves. Female singers, more aptly described as “sexual livestock”, belt out paens to bedroom partners and political causes. What does any of this have to do with football? How can people of faith watch the NFL? Like Mafia enforcers, the NFL uses coercion and extortion threatening to take the Super Bowl from states daring to pass laws stipulating males and females use sex-appropriate bathrooms (G-d made them male and female, two sexes, not “genders”) a disgrace for which the NBA is equally guilty. How far must those who hate this country push until Americans fight back? Had the churchman stayed to listen, I would have explained my disgust for athletes who take a knee (group-hug in the case of the Seattle Seahawks) during the National Anthem. A fundamental problem also exists with respect to the role of sports and America’s institutions of higher learning.

The human race established it as the “natural order” from the start. Those winning the genetic lottery, the more attractive and athletically talented kids, grow up treated better by parents, teachers, peers, and society as a whole. Those fortunate to embody both attributes come closest to approaching divinity on earth. In the movies Carrie and Christine, based on Stephen King novels, a star athlete hangs out with friends who are awkward nerdy social outcasts. Not likely. If this was the norm, movies like She’s All That, starring Freddie Prinz, Jr., and Rachael Lee Cook (1999) or The Duff (Designated Ugly Fat Friend), starring Robbie Amell and Mae Whitman (2015), wherein on a dare or bet, school hunks attempt do-overs of girls deemed by peers as unattractive outcasts,² wouldn’t be wildly successful. These are modern Cinderella stories people wish were true. Should kids, based on looks, receive preference in college admissions? Most people would answer, no. Should universities extend admission preferences to children of the rich, the connected, and athletes there primarily to play sports? They do. Each takes a slot from non-scholarship kids who worked hard earning grades for admission. Should athletes uninterested in scholastics be able to trade on the names of academic universities using college as training camps for professional sports where they will enjoy lucrative salaries? These questions are perhaps more profound than the controversy of athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem.

Full disclosure; I love football. I always have going back to Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts. I grew up watching every game possible dreaming of the day I wore the blue quarterbacking the Colts. Alas, it was not to be. I tried two sports in high school and one in college but I was never meant to be a jock. Standing 6’ and weighing 120 pounds my high school senior year, I might have made a good javelin for someone to throw. I had no negative opinion of athletes whatsoever but then came high school.

Like flour, my first high school sifted kids into one of three sections; Academic: college bound, Commercial: junior college, maybe, and General: kids warehoused until graduation because they were too young to be tried as adults. Classes for each were completely different. Before my defenestration from the Academic Section, I met a kid named Thurman. He was a walking stereotype; brainy, large glasses, unkempt clothing, whose closest brush with exercise was getting on and off the bus. He posed no threat nor physical challenge to anyone. Nevertheless, high school football players singled him out for torment and persecution. Distances between classes at my large sprawling high school afforded jocks, patrolling the halls like packs of ravenous hyenas, ample time to spot prey. Separating Thurman from the herd, the jocks soon ran him down. They tore textbooks from his hands tossing them onto the breezeway, threw his lunches in the trash, broke his glasses, roughed him up, and shoved him inside the full sized lockers…regularly. The Phys-Ed department divided the 10^th grade course into short units covering sports from basketball, vaulting, volleyball, flag football, gymnastics, to climbing ropes where, hanging exposed, the jocks yanked Thurman’s shorts down in front of the girls. Coaches teaching the class did nothing. Thurman had no idea who they were. Sometimes they got others and me too but I had no glasses or lunch and General Section courses weren’t big on textbooks.

Kids soon learned wealthy kids from the North end’s Country Club, cheerleaders, and jocks were demigoddesses and demigods, untouchable. Jock cafeteria behavior was often obnoxious, they acted out in class, bullied lesser males, and forced others to allow them to copy homework and off answer sheets during tests. Was it because victims feared a beating if they snitched, other kids worshipped them, and teachers were indulgent that jocks seemed to suffer no consequences for their actions?³ At times students, usually girls, spoke out against their behavior. Jocks argued they were entitled to special treatment because of sacrifices they made in practice and games.

In my freshman gym class was a gangly uncoordinated white kid who towered 6’7’. He had no interest in sports. Our gym teacher, the basketball coach, asked him to try out for basketball but he said no. From that point on, the coach encouraged, pressured, then cajoled, mocked, and harassed the freshman until he broke and went out for the team. He was terrible. He showed up in gym class bruised and battered from practices. He attended basketball camp over the summer and returned a much better player. From then on girls hung on each arm of his Letterman’s jacket like Christmas ornaments. He no longer spoke or associated with his former freshman gym class chums.

Because I was “non-verbal” (a consequence of living in Philadelphia, a story for another time), my grades suffered. Summoned to the guidance counselor’s office, he waved my grades over his head like a Grand Jury indictment asking what I wanted to do after graduation. When I said, college, he laughed saying I had no chance of ever getting in. Anywhere. Upon his recommendation, the school humiliated, summarily dismissed, and sentenced me down to the General sections. School administrators and guidance counselors were notorious for relegating kids with emotional and behavioral problems, and those deemed “slow”, into those classes. Every student understood General Section meant “dummy classes”. For example, there were no labs, beakers, Bunsen burners, formulae, or experiments in Hoodlum Chemistry. I earned an A writing a short story detailing science problems astronauts would encounter going to Mars, including fighting lizard men living beneath the sand.

The high school football team’s field goal kicker sat behind me in Hoodlum English. Because I never said a word, teachers used me as a “buffer” to separate kids that would not shut up. It was Friday and a frustrated and very pregnant teacher admonished the class if any of us so much as said a word, she was giving us an F. She caught the field goal kicker talking and goofing off but gave him a pass because he was playing that evening. Anyone else would have been staring at a big fat red ‘F’. Then my family moved.

What passed for my second high school in Dog Patch, Appalachia, had a soccer and baseball but no football team. It was too small. Had poaching deer and guzzling Hillbilly beer been Olympic sports, they would have realized their dreams of glory. However, they did have homeroom based intramural flag football teams.

In my senior year, homeroom teacher Mr. ‘P’ announced he was posting a flag football sign-up sheet during lunch. We could choose any position on a first come first served basis. Back from lunch before anyone else, I signed up for wide receiver. Although skinny, I was fast and good at throwing and catching a football. Then the jocks got their hands on the list. By the end of the day, each “skill” position; quarterback, running back, tailback, field goal kicker, punter, and wide receivers belonged to jocks who played school sports. I was no longer a wide receiver. Soccer players Rodger (co-captain), Don, and other jocks erased mine and wrote in the name of a teammate. Six-foot nothing and one hundred and nothing and I was now an offensive lineman? My appeal to Mr. ‘P’, citing his first come first served rule, fell on deaf ears. He refused to overrule the jocks. I quit the team. At first, no one cared. Then coach ‘P’ and the jocks realized, with kids playing both sides of the ball, they needed every boy they could get their hands on and asked me to reconsider. I wouldn’t budge. They offered a compromise; I could play tight end and they would throw me the ball. Tight end means offensive lineman. Jim, a defensive lineman and jock twice my size, knocked me into the dirt so many times I looked like a crash test dummy. This was supposed to be flag football. Team hotdogs, the jocks, took complete control of the team, deciding on plays and who did what. No one else had a voice. Ask yourself why their sense of entitlement came so easily to them. Rodger was naturally the quarterback. The only time he threw me the ball was when he’d been flushed from the pocket and was about to be sacked in our end zone. I caught and took the ball all the way back to the line of scrimmage before being pile driven into the ground by defensive linemen. I never found out who punched me in the jaw on the way down. We made it to the championship game but the superstars were off their game that day. With nothing going right and backed up in our own territory, an angry Rodger insisted on being the punter and proceeded to kick the ball backward, over his head, into our end zone. Opposing players fell on the ball and it was game over. We lost.

At both high schools, kids complained teachers who were also coaches exhibited favoritism toward athletes in their classes. Girls made the same complaint about teacher-Cheerleader coaches with cheerleaders sitting in their classes. Sour grapes? Jealously? Possibly. I witnessed and heard the same later as a teacher. Just me? Maybe, but if true, you would have to explain the 1984 smash hit, Revenge of the Nerds. On to the university.

In college, a friend who double-majored in English and French, tutored at the University of Maryland. Most of her tutees were jocks. She described one as dumber than a sack of rocks, an insult to paper and minerals. He went on to enjoy a successful career with the Dallas Cowboys. My girlfriend at the time was a Parks and Recreation major. Jocks packed out her requisite classes. Coaches typically taught them and, naturally, they preferred “group” work. She was the “g to the p” in “group”, doing all the work. Nevertheless, phantom jock members received the same grade as her. Dark rumors circulated on campus about Jocks getting girls plastered at parties and taking turns having their way with them. In addition, it is common for students to become acquainted with professors in their discipline. Several confided in me that administrators pressured them to pass star athletes, especially those with scholarships, whose academic level wasn’t worthy of a high school freshman.

I tried sports my sophomore year. Too skinny for football, I chose a new sport, rugby, thinking it would help me meet girls. Practices were rougher than actual games and it was there I blew out my left knee. Orthoscopic surgery did not yet exist and I was terrified of needles so I chose home-rehab exercises. My limp lasted a year. As a final insult, the University Year Book staff left my name off the team photo. Outside of sports facilities, I rarely if ever saw a jock. So few, if any, college athletes were enrolled in the Art, History, and Science courses I took (I graduated three universities) the following observations are by nature anecdotal. Perhaps others saw it differently.

During Rugby tryouts the next year, my knee buckled like Jell-O. I hung up the cleats. The knee still bothers me. After Christmas break my junior year, I discovered a secret cabal of non-jocks had commandeered and turned the attic storage room of an old building into a weight room. Although I had never touched a bar or dumbbell, I asked to join them still hoping to rehab my knee. It was January, the attic unheated, and the equipment antique heavy-duty Anglo-Saxon stuff. Floorboards were warped, clouds of chalk hung in the air like fog, barbells rusted, and paint on plates was a distant memory. Risk of tetanus be damned, I loved it. Then came big news my senior year. The University closed our medieval attic gym but opened a multi-million dollar sports complex featuring an Olympic pool, tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts, and a fully fitted weight room. And it was heated. Although designed for all students, in no time power-lifter and football players migrated from their facilities soon taking over the Sports Complex weight room as their own. They did all in their power to intimidate and make non-jocks feel as unwelcome as possible. Lines for the bench presses, one of the few exercises performed by power-lifters, were always long. Jocks made their displeasure vocal and known over having to wait so long between sets because of us pencil necks. Their sense of god-like entitlement, probably germinating in elementary school, was on full display. They mocked and ridiculed us spaghetti armed and legged men unable to lift weight they manhandled with ease. My journey up from pencil-neckdom began by working out with five fellow spaghetti-men. One by one, jock intimidation drove them away. Not me.⁴

Over Easter Break, the weight room was deserted. A miracle. A young football coach came in and, in a rude manner, told me because of a water main leak, the facility was closed and to leave. I asked why that was a problem. Because there is no water for the showers, he said. I explained I lived off campus and never used the showers but he was unable to grasp this concept, became irate, and yelled at me to get out as if the Sports Complex belonged to him and his football players. My last semester arrived and, dilly-dallying too long looking for off-campus housing, I found none available. Football coaches had gone door to door snagging up everything for freshman athletes who had yet to attend a single class. Because a Maryland State Trooper finished rehabbing a house at the last minute, I found a room. Thanks Fred.

I often wondered why Monday Night Football announcers introduced players by giving their name and the university they attended. What difference did their college make? It’s a football game. Whether at work, shopping, or at places of worship, do the rest of us automatically tell people we meet the name of the college we attended? “Hi, my name is Tim, Auburn U”, or “I’m Sally; The Ohio State”. At least our speech would be comprehensible. It finally dawned on me. Professional football players were identifying the NFL Farm Team in which they had trained. Wow. Was I naïve or what? I thought colleges were scholastic institutions of higher learning not training camps for the NFL. Every “student” attending college to play sports, if they do not belong, displaces one who does. Taxpayer-subsidized Colleges deny deserving kids, admission to the university of their dreams, because they place so much emphasis on sports. Jocks, whose goal is raking in millions as professional athletes, take advantage of the “system”⁵. Some go on later to “tweet” while driving exotic SUVS costing more than most middle-class homes; America is a racist and unjust country.

Embarrassingly ignorant of history and fueled by the lies of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and their allies; liberals and self-loathing white people, NFL players began spitting, metaphorically, on police officers and America’s soldiers past and present by taking a knee during the National Anthem. Spokesmen for BLM have advocated violence and murder of cops claiming it is self-defense against a war of extermination waged by police officers on behalf of the white race. In previous articles, I documented that this narrative is false, myth, and a massive lie orchestrated and coordinated by the Left. Because public (dis)education so poorly serves today’s pop-culture saturated Americans, they believe this claptrap. Because so many of today’s youth lack any degree of inquisitiveness, and are scandalously gullible, they are oblivious to the fact their ignorance renders them accomplices to attacks on men and women who wear the blue.

Colin Kaepernick, multi-million dollar former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, a team notorious for involvement in anti-2^nd Amendment causes, became the face of BLM’s lie in 2015 when he took a knee during the National Anthem. Marcus Peters of the Kansas City Chiefs, and others soon copied him. Journalists reported Kaepernick was under the tutelage of girlfriend, Nessa Diab, an MTV-DJ, Islamic “activist”, and strong supporter of BLM. Kaepernick began posting quotes on social media from Malcolm X, communist mass murderer Che Guevara, communist Black Panthers founder Huey Newton, and cop-killer Assata Shakur. He celebrated Muslim holidays and wore T-shirts depicting Malcolm X and Fidel Castro with slogans deriding America’s police.⁶

Forty-Niners coach Chip Kelly refused to stand up for America’s police and military. He framed Kaepernick’s disgraceful and buffoonish attacks as a free speech issue⁷ as did most in the ESPN-Jock sports media Howard Cosell derided as the “Jockocracy”.⁸ Apparently, Kaepernick’s cheerleaders in the fawning liberal media and the Jockocracy are unaware 1^st Amendment speech protections are predicated upon one owning the platform from which he speaks. No one has the right to pop off on any topic tickling their fancy at their place of employment any more than in a neighbor’s living room. NFL players do not own the playing field, bleachers, locker room, training facility, stadium, and so forth. The NFL has hard and fast rules with respect to what players may wear or attach to their uniforms during games. Owners, general managers, and coaches maintain and enforce rules for proper behavior on and off the field, just ask Kareem Hunt (Kansas City Chiefs) and Antonio Brown (New England Patriots). NFL policy requires players to stand, helmet in left hand, and face the flag during the playing of the National Anthem. The NFL spells out disciplinary consequences for violators. But the NFL refuses to enforce these rules and is unwilling to stand up for the country whose citizens lavish millions of dollars on it and its players including tax-payer financed and supported stadiums. Instead, the NFL punishes with fervor any state daring to take a stand against what Archie Bunker called “sexual-preeverts”, men dressed as women, who insist on violating women’s bathrooms. NFL spokesmen claim respect for 1^st Amendment free speech rights motivates their tolerance for players kneeling during the National Anthem. Really? Ironically, the same vertebral-challenged NFL prohibits players from possessing or storing firearms at any location associated with the NFL including training facilities, in vehicles on parking lots, team planes, buses, and you name it. The same applies to fans. For the NFL, some rights are more rights than others. In a shameless display of hypocrisy, the craven NFL refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to wear decals on their helmets honoring the five Dallas police officers gunned down in a BLM inspired ambush.⁹

Perhaps huge profits, salaries, mansions, and exotic automobiles has blinded NFL panjandrums, team owners, and players to the fact that football is just a game. It possesses no inherent social value. Perhaps copying actors trying to deflect attention away from their mahoosive salaries and aristocratic lifestyles, teams exploit people’s emotions by sporting colored ribbons supporting the current cause de jure. Following public outrage over players taking a knee during the National Anthem, some teams, like the Seattle Seahawks, tried to have it both way by standing arm in arm instead of kneeling or placing hand over heart. Gutless. Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce, who graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in “Exploratory Studies”, and has a 5-year contract worth $46 million dollars stooped even lower placing hand over heart and kneeling. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t honor those who despise this country while standing up for this country. Journalists rank teams on a “Thug-Scale” based on the number of players arrested for DUI’s, drug charges, assaults, domestic violence, rape, and even murder possibly explaining player’s dislike of law enforcement.¹⁰ Attempting to clean up their image, the NFL ran commercials with players telling us not to hit our spouses. Who are they to give moral advice to anyone?

A lifelong fan who grew up watching every college and professional football game possible, it pains me to give it up. I am no longer able to stomach the hypocrisy of the NFL. Sports has perverted the purpose of colleges and universities. Scandals involving players who coasted through high school and now college with grades they never earned, graduating with diplomas they can barely read, and the cover-up for athletes who pawed and mauled girls too humiliated and intimidated to go public, has gone on for far too long. Players, who grew up treated by schools and society as demigods now inject themselves into politics supporting causes determined to destroy values and beliefs Americans hold dear. I watch no more.