Spectator Life

Normally Cockburn isn't much of a sports fan, notwithstanding the occasional boozy tailgate for his local kickball team (which was disbanded years ago). But even he couldn't help but blow his whistle this morning when he learned that the Washington Football Team, formerly the Washington Redskins, had changed its name to the Washington Commanders. At first blush, the Commanders isn't such a bad choice. The franchise, after all, is based in the very seat of our military-industrial complex. Certainly it's a better choice than, say, the Washington Corporals (too low-rank) or the Washington Raytheon Lobbyists (too on the nose). And Commanders does have a distinctly DC oomph to it.

The left has finally decided they can stomach deportations, so long as they involve high-profile unvaccinated sports stars. Novak Djokovic, the number one ranked player in men's professional tennis, is currently being detained by Australian authorities and is at risk of expulsion due to the country's strict vaccine mandates. The Covid-obsessed are cheering. Djokovic entered Australia this week to compete in the Australian Open, which he has won a record nine times. The event requires all players and staff to be vaccinated; however, players are offered exemptions for medical reasons or if they have tested positive for Covid in the past six months.

With the emergence of the Omicron variant, a new Covid panic has swept through the country, driven by twin forces: the New York and DC-based national media, and professional sports leagues. The National Hockey League suspended games through December 26 and all cross-border games until December 23. The National Football League scrambled to reschedule games based on over 150 players entering Covid protocols. Games were suspended, regardless of player vaccination status. The NHL touts an almost 99 percent vaccination rate. When the National Basketball Association suspended games and vaccinated Brooklyn Nets players went into the Covid protocol, they invited star player and anti-vaccination spokes-star Kyrie Irving back to the team.

The National Football League is the latest American sports league to cave to Chinese interests while pushing woke policies at home. The league announced Wednesday that it was expanding internationally by allowing eighteen of its thirty-two teams to market abroad. However, a map detailing the marketing agreement labeled Taiwan as part of China. Taiwan considers itself an independent country, but China has been aiming to take control and considers Taiwan one of its many provinces. In 2018, China demanded that international companies list Taiwan as a Chinese province or risk losing the ability to do business in China. The NFL has clearly accepted this attempted power grab in exchange for being able to market its games and merchandise in China.

I’m not very good at golf, but that’s OK. I no longer play enough to expect to be good. I’ve long since lost my touch with my woods, and since I lack the time and inclination to reacquire it, I just tee off with a four-iron. My short game is atrocious. If I can sink a par or two and come in below 110 for 18 holes, I’m happy. As the old joke goes, golf and sex are two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy. If golf is like sex, it’s more like a marital coupling than a hookup. To play a course skillfully requires familiarity with its every curve that can only be gained by a years-long relationship as well as a certain degree of respect (interspersed with bouts of frustration).

What’s an octogenarian to do when careless youth pay him no heed? Anthony Fauci never assented to COVID research energized by senior adolescents with hormones raging and frontal lobes still developing — yes, college kids, and no small number of them having topped up blood-alcohol levels by game time. Yet the college football season is well under way and producing “real-world data” to help determine whether it’s finally time to obsess less about virions and more about, say, Big 10 rankings. “I think it’s really unfortunate,” Dr Fauci has remarked, taking his cue from a CNBC host who noted crowded stadiums and fed him this prompt: “I thought COVID is about to have a feast. What do you think?

Remember when “Free Tibet” was a mainstay of the cool, hippie subculture that dominated the Nineties? Back when Hollywood cared about the fate of Buddhism’s Holy Land? Few will even remember that Disney — yes, the same Disney that recently filmed parts of the live-action Mulan in Xinjiang — produced a film, Kundun, about the early life of the Dalai Lama. China then retaliated by banning Disney films, causing the company to backtrack and attempt to bury the Scorsese-directed biopic. Disney's then-CEO even traveled to China to apologize. This series of events should sound familiar by now in the age of Western capitulation to China. Less commonplace these days is the sight of a celebrity sporting imagery of the Dalai Lama and any quaint talk of “freeing Tibet.

Imagine having a bad week by Jacksonville Jaguars standards. Such is the fate that has befallen Urban Meyer, the head coach of that star-crossed NFL franchise. Meyer was recently caught on video grind-dancing at an Ohio bar with a woman who was very much not his wife. This prompted sighs of relief from us '90s kids who were worried the term 'grind-dancing' had gone out of vogue forever. It's difficult to understate just what a mess Meyer's Jaguars are. The team is one of only four NFL franchises to have never made it to a Super Bowl. They've struggled for years with mediocre quarterbacks (who among us hasn't been walking down a sidewalk only to accidentally intercept a ball from Blake Bortles?). Meyer, along with rookie hotshot QB Trevor Lawrence, were supposed to turn all that around.

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden resigned Monday after insensitive emails he'd sent a decade ago were leaked to the media, gifting us the latest example of woke mob hypocrisy. Gruden's emails were admittedly, um, not great. He said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was a 'faggot’, called gay NFL players 'queers’ and said that NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith had 'lips the size of Michelin tires’. Gruden claims that last comment was not about race, but rather the fact that he has always referred to liars as having 'rubber lips’. Curious. There were other Gruden emails leaked to the media that weren't so bad, but they still signaled to the left that he is not on their team and thus not worthy of defense.

The mainstream media has spent months dancing on the graves of political personalities and normal people alike who refused a COVID-19 vaccine and then succumbed to the virus itself. They've created a totem of who these unwashed masses of zombie-horde anti-vaxxers are: MAGA hat-wearing, Boomer hicks more interested in their ‘free-dumb’ than their health. But as basketball season approaches, that caricature is about to vanish. According to NBC Sports, about 90 percent of all NBA players are vaccinated. But a small number of players are speaking out against vaccine mandates, offering nuanced opinions on the vaccine as it pertains to natural antibodies in those who have contracted COVID already.

’Tis a ritual of late summer, fitting somewhere between tossing the last of our CSA-farm kohlrabi into the compost bin and the first pit forming in my stomach when I contemplate the beginning of a new school year — even though my shade hasn’t darkened a classroom door for many a decade. I refer to my purchase and mirthful reading of the Athlon Sports college football preview magazine, which retails for a cool $11.99. First thing I do is check the forecast for the trio of teams I have pulled for since I first laced up (and tripped over) cleats: Brigham Young (though I am not Mormon), Army (though I am a pacifist) and Notre Dame (though I am a piss-poor Catholic). Next I pour myself a tumbler of rotgut and settle in with the names, these glorious names.

Who is on top of the gold medal table at the Tokyo Olympics? China? The United States? According to former European Parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt, it is, in fact, the European Union that is triumphing at the games. While you have to go down to seventh place in the Olympics leaderboard to find an EU country (Germany), Verhofstadt appears to have his own scoreboard: 'Fun fact,' he wrote on Twitter: 'EU combined has more gold medals than US or China'. Verhofstadt went on to say that he would 'love to see the EU flag next to the national on athletes’ clothes'. Cockburn wonders whether this is all just a ploy to ensure that Verhofstadt's Belgium — which has so far won just a single gold at the Games — stands a chance of beating Great Britain, which has 16.

Just a few days before the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony, my mom and I watched the gymnastics comedy Stick It. The movie is about a star gymnast fighting for redemption after dropping out of a World Championship right before the floor event. Reality seemed to mirror fiction on Tuesday when Simone Biles, the star of the US gymnastics team who is widely considered the greatest gymnast of all time, withdrew from competition during the Olympic team final. Biles botched her vault attempt, not performing the full trick she planned to do and taking a huge step upon landing, before being led away from the floor by a team trainer.

Can Trumpists still believe in ‘America First’ if they root against America in the Olympics? Yes, apparently. The US team had a rough start in the opening week of the Tokyo Olympics. For the first time in 50 years, not a single US athlete won a gold medal on day one of the Summer Games. So who was kicking our butts? That’s right, Asia. Eleven gold medals were handed out Saturday, with the first being won by Yang Qian from China for the 10-meter air rifle competition. She bested Mary Tucker, the American ranked second in the world, who ended up placing sixth. American Eli Dershwitz lost the bronze to Kim Jung-hwan of South Korea for saber despite also being No. 2 in the world.

This country is experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning — and the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball have failed another major test. The new name for the professional baseball franchise in Cleveland — Guardians — must go. As several states work to remove imperialistic statues of cis white men, the city of Cleveland has reached into its racist past to honor them. This is not the progress that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been dreaming of. The new mascot, for the team that will henceforth only be referenced as the ‘Cleveland Baseball Team’, is supposedly a reference to four giant stone statues that ‘guard’ the Hope Memorial Bridge just outside the city’s stadium.

Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game was never supposed to be political. It was designed as a casual gathering of the league’s best players to showcase their best skills. That all changed of course when the MLB decided to move the game out of Atlanta over Democrat calls to boycott the state over Georgia’s new voting law. The decision was rash, illiterate to the text of the law and based mostly on tweets and half-truths from popular celebrity Democrats like Stacey Abrams, along with Georgia senators, who later backtracked. When the MLB changed its mind, it transformed itself into a political league and its All-Star Game into a political lightning rod. Therefore the league has no excuse for dodging the political issues of the day.

London All is fair in love and war, and nothing is fair in sport. England rode their luck to their first final in a European Championship in London on Sunday night. They scored a stylish goal in the second minute, too — but then their luck ran out. Italy, always the favorites, regained control of the game. They equalized with only 23 minutes of normal time to run, forced a penalty shootout, and won. You make your own luck. England had the host nation’s home advantage. They had an off-pitch assist from their fans, too. For weeks the words 'Football’s coming home’ have echoed around this green and pleasant, small and crowded land. England’s game rose as the tournament progressed, until an entire nation waited on tenterhooks for Sunday night. For what?

My first summer back in my hometown was a dreary affair — COVID closures, canceled parties and paranoid friends diminished the pleasures of small-town living. But all across the country, the end of the pandemic has brought back one of the joys of living in a non-metropolitan city like mine: minor league baseball. Sure, it’s great to be able to watch the MLB again on split-screens at the bar — and if you’re really lucky, to pay $12 for a hot dog at a major league stadium — but the joys of the minors are all their own. Where else can you watch your very own neighborhood kids dress up in Styrofoam foodstuff costumes to compete in increasingly complex and obscure contests between each inning? With a merry-go-round, fireworks, the smell of popcorn in the air and the sound of P!

Well, it looks like the tennis world has found its Meghan Markle. Naomi Osaka, who may in theory be Japanese, but is to all intents and purposes Californian when it comes to worldview, will no longer be taking part in the French Open because she can’t handle the post match interviews, especially when she loses. She wants to go away and look after her mental health. It’s rough luck on other Japanese tennis players (and maybe the Japan Olympic team), on her sponsors (is she too shy to do endorsements too, the ones she’s getting tens of millions of dollars for?) and on the tournament organizers. But nowadays when you say you’ve got mental health issues, there’s no arguing with that. Except, of course, there is.

Thank heavens the Champions League final is being played in Portugal, now Turkey’s off the menu (sorry). It will certainly be a damn sight easier to get to than Wembley: have you tried to go round the North Circular these days? And at least the capital will not have to accommodate what is ominously described as ‘the Uefa family’, all 2,000 of them. Pity no one told them about family planning. And where would you prefer to go out for a post-match bite: Porto or Wembley Way? Anyway, then we will see quite how far Chelsea have got inside Manchester City’s head, with two very efficient victories in the League and the FA Cup in the past month. And the pressure on City with all that stuff about this being the owner’s dream will be seriously intense come the final.