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genxlib

(5,506 posts)
Sat Sep 12, 2020, 01:14 PM Sep 2020

Dan Le Batard: With football's return, we can't forget past 4 years of NFL's cowardice

Great article from Dan LeBetard. He can be a goofball on his sports talk show but he can be very well spoken when the topics turn to serious subjects. He has gotten in trouble with ESPN a number of times for being too political

https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/dan-le-batard/article245683045.html#storylink=mainstage_lead


...

As the excitement and enthusiasm for football finally returns, now we’re supposed to just forget about the past four years of historic cowardice from the power in this sport and resume our cheering because the NFL painted some new slogans in the end zones that make the big, bold, brazen statement that racism is bad? The Miami Dolphins clearly haven’t forgotten. Via a slick video released Thursday, one punctuated by their Black coach, they announced their disgust and distrust with the league’s owners — and that they’d be staying in the locker room during the anthem Sunday — because they are tired of superficial symbols and gestures, and they demand real and substantive action against racism. They did this because they know how good the owners are at hiding behind their pillars of money in shadowy silence, rarely pressed to answer any difficult questions about how they can at once support their players with sanitized statements and support their president with unsanitary dollars.

When Kaepernick kneeled, we all saw where and how the NFL stood, and that can’t be unseen. It echoes and haunts four years later, the unprecedented way Kaepernick suffered the strangest of career-ending knee injuries. No amount of jellyfish flip-flopping from the league changes the following: Kaepernick is back in Madden, raising a Black fist, no less, but him being a part of “EAsportsit’sinthegame” isn’t the same as being in the actual game-game, no matter how realistic we can make the virtual.

The NFL’s owners not only refused to be on Kaepernick’s side regarding protests but exercised an obvious institutional pressure upon him and his peers ... choosing en masse, really, to kneel before Trump instead. These owners, with all their power and F-you money, either didn’t have the stomach for any kind of public fight or chose the wrong side, and they did so for almost four damn years, while Trump was at the height of his powers but they were also at the height of theirs. That the NFL has totally about-faced on this is not an act of nobility; it is the spineless swaying blown in by the day’s wind because of all the unrest in their huddles, in their banks, in their streets. Even as piñata Roger Goodell goes on an apology tour on their behalf, Kaepernick remains unemployed. The Dolphins are wondering: How can these owners be trusted to exert their power over anything in America when they can’t even get Kaepernick a job in their own sport?

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Too many great paragraphs to quote. Worth a read in full
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