Our nation of trolls needs men like Doug Glanville

Doug Glanville didn’t need this. He certainly didn’t deserve this. But we need him.

We need men like Glanville — learned, dignified — in the society of American sport. And not half of us. All of us.

For we have become a nation of 140-character trolls. Surely, you’ve noticed by now. We are led by the Troll-In-Chief. Donald J. Trump is the master of bringing out the most divisive angels of our nature.

This is the real reason the 2018 World Series champion Red Sox should have declined Trump’s invitation to Thursday’s visit to the White House. But first, Glanville. During the third inning of the Marlins-Cubs game at Wrigley Field on Tuesday night, Glanville, working for NBC Sports Chicago and standing near the dugout, was speaking on-air with announcer Len Kasper. Suddenly, a fan in a Cubs hooded sweatshirt flashed the upside-down “OK” sign.

Glanville is black. The fan is white. And the upside-down “OK” sign?

Depending on who you want to believe, it is:

⏩ The signal of white power used by racial supremacists.

⏩ Part of the “circle game,” in which one person makes the upside-down OK below his waist and when the other notices it, the first person gets to punch the other in the upper arm.

⏩ A hoax perpetrated on 4chan, an anonymous message board, that promoted the white power rumor everywhere to entice people to overreact about racism and then look stupid when informed the gesture was only part of the “circle game.”

The Cubs did the right thing. They banned the fan from Wrigley.

The fan has not stepped forward. The team has not identified him publicly. I

will. He is John Q. Troll. Unfortunately, he is us.

“We reached the conclusion that it’s more likely than not that this person was using that hand signal as a racist way of interfering with everyone’s enjoyment of the game,” Crane Kenney, Cubs president of business operations, told 670 The Score radio. “Whether this person is going to ultimately say he intended it, that he was playing the circle game or some other stunt, the judgment to use that in connection with a respected reporter who happens to be African American doing his job — that coincidence is not going to fly here.”

Social media has been filled with people arguing it was the circle game and the fan should sue the Cubs. Others responded that it was disgusting racism. And, just like everything else in America these days, the screaming was off and dividing us.

Review the three possibilities for the sign. If you believe it is reason B, you are hopelessly naïve. It’s either A or C, and either way the fan is fanning flames of discord and acrimony.

Calm down, right? The guy was just messing with people. Don’t be so sensitive. Tell that to the families of the 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. The murderer flashed the upside-down OK sign at his first court appearance. Maybe he was playing the circle game, too.

Reached by Hearst Connecticut Media Thursday, Glanville said he wanted to stand by an earlier statement in which he applauded the Cubs for supporting him and promoting an inclusive environment at Wrigley Field: “They have displayed sensitivity as to how the implications of this would affect me as a person of color.”

While Glanville playing nine years in the majors certainly qualified him to be in the dugout with a microphone Tuesday, that is not why men like him are so important to us. Glanville graduated from Penn in engineering. He has been a businessman, author and ESPN analyst. His father was a psychiatrist, his mother an educator and his wife a lawyer. He is a man of letters, and they aren’t all RBI and OPS. He taught a course at Penn, and this past semester taught a seminar at Yale called “Athletes,

Activism, Public Policy and the Media.”

He also has felt the sting. In 2014 he wrote his account in The Atlantic of how a West Hartford policeman had crossed the line into Hartford, approached him while he was shoveling snow and abruptly said, “So you trying to make a few extra bucks shoveling people’s driveways around here?” The Old Tudor behind them was the house Glanville owned. No apology; the cop left. Glanville later found out West Hartford has an ordinance against house-tohouse solicitation and someone had called in saying a guy resembling Glanville had violated it. Cross city lines to track down a shoveler? That’s some serious racial profiling.

A taxi driver at Los Angeles International Airport refused to give Glanville a ride in 2015 — he was traveling with an ESPN cameraman — and the cabbie kept yelling at him to take the bus. An LAX uniformed worker convinced Glanville to report the incident because such refusals had occurred repeatedly. After Glanville’s account in The Atlantic, the LA City Council called an emergency meeting, and according to the Los Angeles Times, it

led to an undercover sting and more confirmation. This had not nearly been the first time Glanville had been denied a taxi ride.

Glanville needs none of this, deserves none of this. But we need him.

Through college courses, through long-form narrative, through mature and unwavering presentation, we need Glanville and men like him to articulate to the rest of us how and why this happens. Men like Glanville are the antidote to the 140character blasts and counter blasts that accomplish nothing but divide us.

And that’s where Trump is the master. Divide. Conquer. Hail to the Chief Instigator! His frequent forays into sports are so casual with the facts, so flippant. He tweeted after Maximum Security’s disqualification from the Kentucky Derby that “only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur.” And just like that, anything ever tweeted about sports — and we include Skip Bayless — were all tied for second place for the stupidest ever … unless he was trolling to aggravate his enemies and rally his base.

He is so divisive that even when he does a good thing in awarding Tiger Woods the Presidential

Medal of Freedom, there is nasty blowback. No golfer should get it! Well, he’s the fourth one. He has had business dealings with Trump! Well, Trump is a businessman. It’s a conflict of interest! Well, Bruce Springsteen, who campaigned for Barack Obama, got one from President Obama. Tiger is a philanderer! Well, the list of winners certainly is not free of sin, and what happened to redemption? Nobody can deny Woods’ immense global impact on sports, his charities and his comeback for the ages.

But it’s Trump. So we troll each other. And the president tweets while we burn.

There was a day when I felt team visits to the White House were a time to bury all politics and revel in a moment joy and history. Harmless as the White House Easter egg roll. Cherished as the annual Christmas tree lighting. And there may be a day when I feel that way again. Not today. Not when every championship means teams bowing out, others uninvited, and some not being invited at all. This has nothing to with Republican and Democrat, conservative or liberal. This has to do with Trump.

When it becomes so personal that athletes can’t find it in their soul to go to the White House, something is wrong. And when the white Sox show up and the Sox of color don’t Thursday, something is terribly wrong. Trump didn’t do anything remarkably rude over 15 minutes, but he didn’t bother to mention men who didn’t show up, either. Men like American League MVP Mookie Betts and manager Alex Cora. Cora was clearly hurt by the problematic government response to the hurricane relief effort in his native Puerto Rico. Some felt he could have made a statement directly to the president on a day like this. He wrestled with that notion.

Still, think about any exchange between Trump and Cora. How do you think that would have gone? And, worse, what do you think the 3 a.m. tweet from Trump would have been? Cora insisted his baseball team will not be divided by this. But how about the rest of us? How are we doing? That’s a question for men like Doug Glanville to answer.