Protest storm moves chains on America’s game
I may be old-fashioned, but I remember when a Las Vegas stripper releasing a video of an NFL offensive-line coach snorting cocaine off his desk because she was upset about the current racial inequalities in America would be the biggest story in any given week, more or less. I mean, it has everything: a stripper, cocaine, implied threats, video, the fight for racial equality. This may not sound like the Miami you know, but there it is.
But the Chris Foerster story lasted maybe an hour or so before it was relegated to a piece of relative trivia, and treated with almost as much indifference as Dolphins QB Jay Cutler treats literally everything. The NFL has always trusted the game to transcend any of its many controversies: no matter how calamitous the week, when the games came on, they pushed everything away for the day.
But this wasn’t that. Last week, with the protest issue slowing, the Vice-President of the United States attended a Colts-49ers game for the express purpose of leaving it, which under more sane political and societal circumstances would be pretty defensible, actually. I mean, the game was good enough, in the end, but it probably had no right to be.
But when Mike Pence flew to Indianapolis at taxpayer expense for the sole purpose of hammering a wedge deeper into the bottomless crevasse of America’s culture wars, the whole thing exploded again. He knew several 49ers would kneel: President Donald Trump said he sent Pence for the purpose of reacting. Then during the week Cowboys owner Jerry Jones jumped in with both feet, declaring that any player who kneeled during the national anthem would not play.
(That this last exact thing began as a fake meme being shared in the fever swamps of Facebook and came to life is a good metaphor for the current American situation , actually.)
This led to ESPN’s Jemele Hill raising the idea that Americans upset with Jones trampling on a peaceful protest against the racism baked into the American system should go to his sponsors with their displeasure, which led to ESPN suspending the SportsCenter anchor for two weeks, which led to the President of the United States lauding his friend Jones and attacking Hill and ESPN, between welcoming the Pittsburgh Penguins to the White House and letting Puerto Rico rot.
So now the NFL is panicking, and both commissioner Roger Goodell and representatives of the players will attend a league board of governors meeting next week to address the actual causes and goals behind the protests. Because what has happened is the NFL has finally run up against something bigger than itself. Remember when the Zach Galifianakis comedy series Between Two Ferns asked Goodell to come on, and the NFL said no, and they said, but President Barack Obama appeared on the show, and the league shot back, well he’s not the commissioner of the NFL? Remember when Beyoncé admitted that she lipsynched the national anthem at Obama’s second inaugural because she was too busy rehearsing for the Super Bowl halftime show?
These things actually happened. The NFL got called before Congressional committees, got taken to task for its treatment of concussions and exploitation of pro-military promotions, but when push came to shove it was in charge.
And now it’s not. The New York Times reported on findings from Morning Consult, which runs daily polls of about 5,000 adults on a number of issues, and found that suddenly the NFL is a wedge issue all by itself. Before Trump criticized NFL players in a speech in Alabama on Sept. 23 — can you imagine, criticizing African-Americans at a conservative rally in Alabama — voters from both parties approved of the NFL by about a 60-20 margin. Those numbers have since shifted dramatically, and now Trump voters say they disapprove of the NFL by a margin of about 62-30.
It’s a hell of a thing, having a nearmindless cult at your disposal. The NFL holds every record for TV ratings, for cultural dominance, for mass participation. Except now Donald Trump is the biggest show in America. You can’t escape him. He is trashing so much, so fast, so ineptly, but everybody has an opinion on him. The NFL is the biggest sports league on the continent, and one of the biggest on earth. But he can be bigger than anything.
Oh, and I hope all the Cowboys kneel Sunday. That would be hilarious.
Last week, this space, which warned you about all of this, went 5-9. As always, all lines could change.