There’s some kind of desperation going on. I don’t know if it’s Spinrad - a tragedy to my mind, but given his fiction he seems like someone who’s been riding the line of good and evil for a long time - but one or both are confused.
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Thanks for the warning.
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Local taxpayers pay for those stadiums, so even though almost all are officially “privately owned”, an argument could be made;
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The Green Bay Packers and everything to do with them are “owned” by the citizens of Green Bay, full stop.
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Great minds think alike!
It’s my mother’s family’s home team, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them.
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Gad, I didn’t even notice! 
I guess I’ve tried to remember as little about that Vox shithead as possible. My Google search for Spinrad’s story didn’t turn up much, and that was the only synopsis I found.
I kind of liked Spinrad’s stuff. I thought his story about tourists visiting a environmentally destroyed New York was very effective.
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Even better. It would have to be across the board, though to make a difference, I think, and white players would have to back their colleagues. It would only work if only the most talented guys were on board, too.
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No worries. I think they added the synopsis to be completionist about the topic of the article - not Spinrad’s fault.
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Thread doing a good job of dismantling the wharblgarble of “our men and women in uniform stand and salute the flag every day.”
Basically, no, they don’t.
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Here’s hoping.
Seconded
A bunch of the owners are saying “Um we never agreed to this”.
When I was in the Air Force, this would happen. We knew when it was time so people would try to be inside to avoid it.
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I’ve worked on military bases. Can confirm.
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I appreciate that there is such controversy about this, because it is getting people to talk about the place of sports in our culture.
Which, one must point out, is unfortunate because it means people have skipped past what the player protests were about in the first place. It’s easier to talk about sports culture and politics and economics than it is to talk about police violence against people of color.
I’m fully aware that that’s what I’m about to do too, just to be clear.
I have always been a classic nerd, useless at sports, and not interested in jock culture. At the same time, I actually love the idealistic idea of “sport”, as portrayed in e.g. “Chariots of Fire”. The old-school amateur Olympic spirit. I love baseball - in the old-school, “The Natural” spirit (little league didn’t agree with me, but I do love hitting the ball).
I can almost even get behind the old-school idea of American football - in the “Knute Rockne, All American” spirit - though it’s clearly always been about warlike violence, in a uniquely stupid, unabashedly American way, I get the appeal - I watch war movies and play war video games. I love “Gallipoli” because it combines the “Chariots of Fire” spirit with a poignant, and brutal, war setting. I get the deep-seated appeal of “us vs. them”, rooting for the underdog, and so on (best represented in World Cup soccer/football and the Olympics).
At least in my lifetime, sports haven’t really been about those things that appeal to me anymore - except for the World Cup and the Olympics, but those are obviously not without problems. It’s all about the money - massive amounts of money that go to already-rich people (though I don’t have a problem with the players getting paid). Even beyond that though, the whole culture is toxic and, frankly, unsportsmanlike - though I give a lot of credit to the professional players themselves, who for the most part maintain very high standards of sportsmanship. (Is there a gender-neutral term?)
There’s just so much in modern professional sports that is such a huge turn-off. The culture that has built up, presumably ever since the money started getting absurd, is just awful. It’s rotten to the core, culminating in this decision from the NFL. The NFL knows this is stupid, but they ran the numbers and decided they’ll make more money by reducing the ruffling of feathers.
Sports are more important in modern culture than most of what the government does, and the way sports are privately run now allows a lot of negative things to happen. The answer is obvious - teams should be owned by the cities (or maybe counties) they’re located in (and which paid for their stadiums as it is). Players and coaches should be paid well, but most of the money should go back into the community. The idea that rich assholes can own something like a team that’s so important to the local community is absurd (I’m originally from Buffalo - the city would be a post-apocalyptic wasteland if not for the Bills and the Sabres). Voters could even have a say in how the team is managed. One worries what the result of a vote about changing an offensive team name would be, of course.
It’s hard to say though if socialism would really bring back some purity to professional sports, and improve the toxic culture - examples from elsewhere in the world really don’t apply to the US.
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Well, just to play Devil’s Advocate, I’m originally from San Diego, and I haven’t lived there for about a quarter of a century, but…
…if the loss of the Chargers last year negatively affected the average San Diegan’s quality of life enough to notice, I’ll eat my hat.
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one thing i’ve always thought cool is how in other countries there are thriving amateur leagues.
in the states the closest is maybe college sports. only that seems entirely co-opted by capitalism as well now.
there’s something great about people doing their thing, to play, to compete, whatever, without it being about the money.
nhl folks are so well compensated they could quit to support their politics. only, the dollars it costs to support a team is so high, there’s literally nowhere else they could go to do the thing they’ve always loved to do.
maybe, i guess, time to start player owned teams.
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San Diego has a lot of other things going for it, of course, like pandas.
Buffalo, not so much - not that there’s nothing good there (they have a white tiger), but the sports teams really kind of tie the room together. I never had any interest myself but the obsession runs deep - in San Francisco there’s a Buffalo sports bar, which I hear becomes standing room only during any sports game with a Buffalo team in it.
One thing I do like is that the baseball team is called the Buffalo Bisons, but it’s not a major-league team.
@gatto I agree with everything you said. I forgot to touch on this specifically in my original post - there are of course amateur leagues and everything here. Youth leagues in particular really thrive, college sports are more popular than professional sports in many places, and you can find adult amateur and casual leagues in practically any town of more than a few thousand people. But the whole culture is rotten right down to the amateur and youth leagues, basically ruining them in my view. Not that even most people in those leagues are bad, but it only takes a few who take things too far to suck everyone else in.
There’s still room for personal pure sport - solitary pursuits like skiing and running, for example. Both also tainted by absurd capitalism too, of course, but it’s easy enough to avoid in solo pursuits.
That does remind me of one great remaining outpost of amateur pure sport, curling - one can argue its merits as a sport, but you have to admire that in this day and age, teams of amateur dads and working-class people make it to the Olympics - and compete well against more professional teams.
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There are some fan owned football clubs in the English Football league (AFC Wimbledon, Exeter City, Newport County and Wycombe Wanderers) which usually run on a one member, one vote system. It would be interesting to see that tried in American sports.
I know what that’s like, I was hopeless at association football until someone worked out I was being played out of position (he went on to become a professional footballer after school). I had the extremely rare experience of going from among the the last picked for sports to one of the first in just a few weeks.
It’s what I love about the FA Cup. Small non-league teams having the opportunity to play against teams from the Premier League and even sometimes beating them.
You sometimes get shock results in European competitions, but they are much rarer
British teams also never play the national anthem before games. It wouldn’t work too well at a Celtic vs Hibernian game.
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One things I really love about Premier League is the whole relegation thing. If you suck, you won’t be playing with the big boys next year and we’ll bring in some team nobody ever paid attention to before. That would be a very attractive feature in both American football and baseball.
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We also really hate franchises here. A lot of football fans still haven’t forgiven the original Wimbledon FCs move to Milton Keynes (against the Wimbledon fans wishes, who then formed AFC Wimbledon) 15 years after it happened.
If you want a successful team, you are expected to do it the hard way, ironically like Wimbledon managed between 1977 (promotion to the professional leagues) and 1988 (winning the FA Cup). Anything else is seen as cheating.
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Yes, and no (in Canada, at least). Yes, the way the system is set up, a group of average suburban moms could win the Scotties or qualify for the Olympics, but something devastating like a norovirus outbreak at each of the events would have to happen, first.
Our top teams are all sponsored, and for all intents and purposes, play professionally. Most play in money tournaments. Johnny Mo might be listed as a firefighter, but he trains with a slider and broom far more than with bunking gear and a hose, these days. I don’t know if Rachel Holman has ever had a job other than “professional curler”.
Closest we have to the ideal here would be women’s hockey.
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