RUSH: Well, the NFL came down hard on Tom Brady yesterday. Four-game suspension, million-dollar fine for the club and the loss of two draft choices. Well, yeah, it’s hard. It’s fascinating to me to watch all the response to this. We have a slew of sound bites about this, folks, from all kinds of people all over the sporting and media worlds reacting to the suspension that Brady got, four games. You ought to hear the theories that people are coming up with to explain this.
Last week I was e-mailing back and forth with Drudge about this, and he made a prediction I thought was excessive. I said, “No, it’s gonna be four games, and then there’s gonna be an appeal, and it’ll be reduced to two. At the end of the day Brady’s gonna get a two-game suspension.” That’s what I said last week. Well, the first half of it’s come true, four games. And, as I say, the body of thought, the analytical opinions that people have weighed in over this is just fascinating. It can’t be what it is, is my point.
Okay, Brady, preponderance of the evidence suggests he was involved in deflating footballs. There’s enough circumstantial evidence here to draw that conclusion. The league’s worried about the integrity of the game, okay, so we’re gonna give him four games, million-dollar fine. It can’t be that. There’s gotta be all kinds of other things. Oh, yeah. Million dollars for the team, that’s gotta be they’re still getting even for Spygate, and they’re showing favoritism, or they’re not showing favoritism, either one.
Even some people are claiming there’s a racial component in this, Snerdley, that he had to get a significant number of games because of previous suspensions of African-American Americans. Had Goodell gone easy on Brady, then the African-American crowd would be upset. I mean, all of this has been thrown into the mix analyzing it. No, no, I didn’t say that. I’m just telling you I’ve heard it. It’s all over the place out there and there’s shock and surprise. I mean, here’s the marquee player of the league, four-game suspension, portrayed as a black hat guy now instead of a white hat savior of the league. They have gone ahead and they’ve tarnished the league by acknowledging what happened here via this suspension.
And you know something? Here’s the overall point I guess I want to make about this, and I know I’ve mentioned this on previous occasions. I am of the opinion, I’ve been convinced for a while, that the sports media, wittingly or unwittingly, and it could be unwittingly — because, remember, all of these people are liberals first. No matter what else, they cover sports, they cover news, they cover politics, they’re Jewish and you would think that they would support Israel.
They’re liberals first. It doesn’t matter. It may be feminism, may be animal rights or global warming. They’re liberals first and the cause is then second. Therefore, the Sports Drive-Bys have been, I think, covering this league in a way that does not promote it. It’s their livelihood. These Sports Drive-Bys need a successful NFL to have jobs, and the way it got started with the concussion business and the injuries…
The lawsuits, the danger, the calls for the game to be eliminated, banned at younger ages, the Drive-Bys all got on board all of this stuff because to them it’s still a corporate entity. As liberals, the corporate entity is always going to be wrong. The corporate entity is always going to be guilty, within the liberal mind-set. The corporate entity is always gonna be impersonal. The corporate entity isn’t going to care.
In other words, “It’ll be perfectly fine for its employees (i.e., players) to incur irreparable brain damage, all for the mighty profit!” This is the view of many in the Sports Drive-By Media about the game. So they’ve been chipping away at it. This is kind of hard to explain… It’s not hard. No, it isn’t hard. It’s hard to explain; not hard to understand. The trick for me is gonna be to explain this — in other words, verbalize an opinion I have or thought I have here.
It’s still kind of muddled in my head. But all of these suspensions… It has occurred to me long before we get to Brady, that the Sports Drive-Bys have really reveled in these suspensions. They have enthusiastically supported the meting out, the handing out of punishments and fines. Which, in and of itself, is not one thing or another. But in the context of making what happens in the game look bad.
The Sports Drive-Bys have been advancing that notion, that there is and are things terribly wrong in this game. And liberals also, as you know, tend to support and idolize central authority. I mean, many of the Sports Drive-Bys, if you could pigeonhole ’em, would probably happily agree with the idea that there needs to be federal government oversight of what’s happening in the NFL because of all the off-field and some on-field stuff.
That the people in the game themselves can’t be trusted to get it right, to police themselves, to regulate themselves. This is the part that’s hard for me to verbalize. It’s not… It’s not difficult to understand if I can explain this properly. It’s as though the media is more excited — some of them; not all. Some of them are more excited in reporting the flaws and the foibles of humanity in the game, instead of promoting the greatness that occurs in the game.
They have been eager to glom on to the stuff that is going to, in some cases, irreparably harm the reputation of the league and the game and the people who play it. It’s occurred to me within the past three seasons there has been a noticeable, if you pay close attention, transformational shift. The game is now a suspect rather than a national pastime that we can be totally proud of. You know my Harvard sociologist story.
“The great thing about sports, the thing that makes it different from anything else, is that it’s something you can invest total passion without consequence,” which is a good thing. Now the way this game is being covered, the way it’s being reported on, it’s risky to invest your passion in this game because you might end up being disappointed. You might learn that the game and the people who play it are not worthy of being on pedestals. Not that they ever were, but there was that aspect of marketing.
But now with social media, there’s no difference now in the stage and the stands. Now, I’ve always thought that wherever there are performances involved — be it movies or live theater or a radio show like this, or a concert, or sports event — what happens on the stage is special, it’s unique, it’s separate and apart from what goes on in the stands, precisely because of people in the stands can’t do what’s on stage.
Social media has blurred the lines, and as more and more athletes and media get involved in day-to-day contact with fans and each other, the foibles become more well known and reported. There’s a gradual reduction — lessening, if you will — of the mystique that was always present in professional sports. You only knew what was written about them athletically in the newspapers, sports pages, and, in some cases, TV.
But now, you know when they have a hot dog. You know what they think about the CO2 levels of their hybrids as they drive to practice, all this stuff. It’s changed, I think, the relationship between fan and players in some instances. And I think one of the downsides of this is it’s almost like a soft tsunami of liberal ideology taking control of the way the game is reported, and in some cases, played now (i.e., all-pink month).
Liberalism is invading every nook and cranny of the sport, and what liberalism does is wring its hands and whine and complain. You know liberalism doesn’t inspire; it doesn’t promote. It tears down. It’s microscopic from the days it started, but there’s been this little chipping away. The eagerness to report suspensions, the eagerness to report the foibles. The eagerness and the happiness when somebody gets a suspension. The happiness for off-field things. The eagerness with which sportswriters will now support a lifetime ban or a two-season ban or a full-season ban.
One day, Adrian Peterson was the greatest running back in the league. The next day, he doesn’t deserve to breathe because of what they found out about the way he raises his kid. It’s that kind of stuff I’m talking about. It’s something that I have noted, and so now we’ve got the Brady suspension, and it’s fascinating to me to watch the reaction to it through the prism of liberal sports media, which is undeniable now.