WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DiMAGGIO…

OUR NATION LIFTS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU

    

          PART ONE

WE NEED CHARACTER,

NOT CHARACTERS

The Rocky Mountain News, July 11, 2004

Nowadays, being a champion isn’t enough.  You have to be a flamboyant champion.  Or foul-mouthed.  Or a womanizer.  Or you curse out the officials.  Or slam your racquet.  Or make outrageous statements.  Just being a superb athlete doesn’t cut it – at least according to some sports journalists.

Rocky Mountain News columnist, Bernie Lincicome isn’t happy with newly crowned Wimbledon champion Roger Federer.  He called him a “grim piece of work,” and “a quiet storm that doesn’t stop until it has ruined the crops.” Tennis, he tells us, needs “someone with personality.  It doesn’t need someone with character as much a character...”

Similarly, the press used to criticize tennis great Pete Sampras for the same reason: he was tedious.  “Bored on the Fourth of July,” wrote the British tabloid, Daily Mirror.  “It’s hard to embrace a young man with the demeanor of a gloomy robot,” whined the Daily Express.

The message we get from sports writers is that winning isn’t enough, you have to win with flair.  On and off the court, you should have charisma.  Being an egotist, a whiner or a bad sport are more desirable than being a workmanlike, clean-living champion.  We hear a lot about how athletes should be role models; kids look up to them for cues about proper behavior.  Evidently, the press prefers negative role models so it can write entertaining stories about their latest tantrums.

Until the early nineties, professional football players mocked opponents they had tackled.  One player got on all fours and lifted his leg like a urinating dog.  The NFL outlawed such practices, but this kind of juvenile and disgraceful behavior indicates the level of churlishness to which our role models have descended.

Most of us, I would hope, prefer character in everyone: our politicians, the plumber, the lawyer who won’t pad the bill, the guys who want to marry our daughters, the people who make our laws, and in the athletes we cheer.  Instead, we elected a womanizing character as President of the United States over George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, both of whom were World War II heroes, men with courage and integrity.

British sprinter, Eric Liddell, depicted in the film, Chariots of Fire, exhibited character at the 1924 Olympics.  Liddell, a Christian, refused to compete on Sunday, despite pleadings from the Prince of Whales.  Instead, he ran the 400 meters on Monday, a far longer race than his sprinter’s range.  And he won.

That’s championship character.

One of the best lines Paul Simon ever wrote was, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, a nation lifts its lonely eyes to you…”  DiMaggio was an athlete and a gentleman.  He was secure in himself.  He didn’t do fancy dances in center field.  He didn’t get into fights, and he didn’t brag.  He didn’t get on all fours and act like a dog. He just roamed the outfield like a gazelle, playing ball flawlessly. Like Sampras.   Like Federer.

Sadly, that’s not enough these days.  Lincicome wants “flamboyance and petulance.”  So, it seems, do the rest of us.  We want to be entertained and dazzled.  We choose celebrity over mere championship play.  Unfortunately, this does not bode well for the moral base and political future of this country.

                      PART II

        THE SPORTS HALL OF SHAME

                      August 28, 2024 

How is the sports world doing in the two decades since We Need Character, not Characters was published?  There are plenty of professional athletes to admire, to respect, who make it their business to give back to their communities.  These days it seems the lack of character in sports has gravitated from athletes and sports writers to top management.

                                ******************************************

I read sports statistics.  Always have.  I read the fine print of box scores and unindividual numbers.  Who are the NBA’s top scorers? Who are the league’s best quarterbacks? Who’s leading baseball’s West Division?  (It’s not the Colorado Rockies; they are locked so deeply in the basement, that not only Houdini could help them escape.) Since 1996 I’ve watched almost every Denver Broncos game, including pre-season.  Call me crazy, but I also look at golf scores.  I’ve never played golf and never watched a tournament, but I’m interested in the latest superstars.  So many are shooting in the low sixties. However, sometime around 2022, I took a deep breath, turned the page, turned off the TV and said, “I’m done.”  Here’s why.

                                         BASEBALL

Major League Baseball's 2021 All-Star Game was moved from Georgia to Colorado because the Commissioner, Rob Manfred, claimed that Georgia’s new voting laws limited absentee voting and mostly affected minority communities.  Manfred explained that Major League Baseball, “…fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.“

Well. We all oppose voting restrictions; but we also oppose ballot harvesting, proselytizing for illegal non-citizens to vote, refusing to insist on a photo ID to vote, early voting and voting by mail, all of which are subject to fraud.  Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp denounced the MLB move as a “figment of cancel culture."  Manfred called the move from Atlanta to Denver, "the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport…”

Correction.  It’s the best way for the Commissioner 1) to demonstrate his purposeful ignorance of the law, and 2) to wave the pure white flag of virtue signaling.

 What is it about the law that restricts voting? Here’s a sample. 

In the past, Georgia required identification – like a driver’s license or state ID number – to vote in person.  The new law requires those requesting mail-in ballots to have the same requirement.   In the past, signature matching on mail in ballots was used to confirm identities. That leaves verification of millions of ballots to subjective (possibly biased) opinions.  Instead, the new law will have to provide one form of identification.

Proponents of the bill say this method will make postal voting more secure, while critics argue the new measures are likely to disproportionately affect black Americans, who are less likely than white Americans to have voter identification.  Are they making the racist argument that black voters do not know how to get IDs?

Prior to the 2020 election, drop boxes weren't used in Georgia. They were brought in as part of emergency Covid action.  They weren’t meant to be permanent.  Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said of the reduced ballot boxes:  "People act like we're taking something away - it never existed until the pandemic, it was done by emergency rule, not by legislative action."

The 2021 law also stipulates the boxes will be held in buildings and can only be accessed in the hours that early voting is allowed, rather than 24 hours a day as was the case in 2020.  This negates any cheating with ballot harvesting in the middle of the night.

 Denver got a windfall of $40 million from the All-Star game.  But the guys who sell peanuts, beer and hot dogs in Atlanta got screwed; they fell victim to the divisive zeitgeist.

                                               FOOTBALL

The National Football League has said players should be allowed to protest during games by bending their knees during the playing of the national anthem. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, explained,

  We, the National Football League, believe black lives matter.

  Protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries

   of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches,

   fans and staff.

No one would disagree that slavery and Jim Crow were blots on this country’s history, but black players, coaches, fans and staff currently dominate college and professional football, basketball and track.  Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball almost seventy-five years ago. There is neither inequality nor oppression in professional sports.  The word “oppression” raises the red flag of Marxism, flying beside the pure white flag of virtue-signaling, blocking the red, white and blue of the American flag.

Centuries of oppression notwithstanding, African Americans live in a country that not only affords them the opportunity to profit from their skills but to be recognized and lauded for their achievements. 

                       TRANSVESTITE NUNS                       

In a pre-game ceremony earlier this year at Dodger Stadium, the announcer’s voice echoed through the arena:

"The Dodger’s community hero award goes to an organization reaching the LGBTQ+ community, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, LA chapter…Please join us in recognizing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for their outstanding service to the LGBTQ+ community."

The Sisters, men dressed as nuns with bizarre facial make-up, were honored – honored – for mocking Catholicism.  The display was divisive, disgusting and shameful.  But mostly it was pointless.

 "I did not hear a single boo,” [inside Dodger stadium] Sister Unity told USA TODAY Sports, “and I was delighted to hear so much of our community cheering,"

Well, not everyone was cheering

 Outside the stadium: Thousands of Catholics have shut down the main entrance to Dodger Stadium on Vin Scully Avenue in protest of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence being honored tonight. ( Savanah Hernandez reported.) 

                                 OLYMPIC-SIZED MADDNESS

The recently completed Summer Olympic Games indicate that American tribal animosities have metastasized to Europe. 

The opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics picked-up on the theme of mocking and denigrating Christians.

With sensitivity to everyone’s feelings reaching new heights, you would think that concern about offending minority groups would extend to all. While the Wokemeisters on the left would draw and quarter you for even thinking impure thoughts about the “oppressed,” they heartily approve of denigrating Christians.

                             BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER

The American and European insanity of transgendered athletes has now infected the premier quadrennial athletic event: the Olympics.  A female boxer whose gender identity has recently been questioned, won her first fight at the Paris Olympics.  Imane Khelif of Algeria defeated Angela Carini of Italy after Carini quit 46 seconds into the match, because Carini said she had never been hit that hard by a female opponent.  Last year Khelif was disqualified from the women’s world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) because she didn’t meet “eligibility rules,” IBA President Umar explained that it was “proven they (Khelif and another boxer) have XY chromosomes” — which is seen in men, as opposed to women.

Nevertheless, Khelif was allowed to compete in Paris, where she beat Chinese world champion Yang Liu by unanimous decision to win welterweight gold.  

I’m no biologist, to quote Ketanji Brown Jackson, but women rarely if ever have arms like Khelif’s.

Below is "Laurel" Hubbard competing in women’s weightlifting.  Draw your own conclusion.

   

Thanks to Substack writer, Jordan Schachtel, Dossier, who provided these

pictures.   He summarized the Olympics thusly. 

 There are seemingly infinite examples of a lack of honor in these

  2024 games. This extends to our broader societies too. Particularly

  in the West, we suffer from a sizeable honor deficit.

                  Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

Note - Regular readers of CRISIS will recognize that the decline in manners and civil discourse described twenty years ago, and the deficit of honor described today, are evidence of the divisive, civilizational decline that may be unstoppable.