The virtue signaling of carboard fans on multiple fronts, and the painfully off-key rhythm of live Korean professional baseball shouldering the responsibility for the entire sporting entertainment industry during the Covid-19 April terror hangover highlight the award winners of a year that should never be measured in winners and losers. Only the relentless stream of video selfies literally on steroids recording a bottomless cache filled with individual feats of strength produced in the backyard or driveway and packaged and branded for social media distribution and beamed directly into the subconscious of insatiable subscribers flailing in quarantine, earn a more extensive participation trophy worthy of a one fingered salute.
The common denominator in this entire cluster intercourse of ineptitude and cruelty towards sports aficionados, is ESPN, and the dominoes falling in every direction, for the much-maligned television network of plummeting ratings, and social justice warriors mistaken for anchors, and vise versa.
After all, the entire orgiastic idealistic failure of propagandized dime store rhetoric stolen from the five decades worth of university academic activism, culminated in the Heisman Trophy presented to a hive mind member of the Alabama football franchise, acknowledging the legacy and lucrative excellence of manufactured excellence, and not the individual. Nick Saban would tell skeptics to “hate the game, and not the player”, an overused catch phrase which has become whimsically tiresome as the small throngs of paid cheerleaders inhabiting the eerily empty South Korean ballparks and all dolled up with no place to go. The message of course relayed to US audiences, that a conforming society can still have fun during the initial stages of a pandemic, and the insufferable guilt gifted by overzealous television personalities masking up while on camera set a rather unbearable tone, that Covid-19 alarmists were making this political, and sports became a vehicle of servitude to deliver their incessant message unabashedly loud and clear.
While Alabama wide receiver Devonta Smith wrote a dazzling year of jaw dropping plays topped with gaudy numbers, he is destined to be an answer on bar trivia night in the early 2030’s, if the collected governors have not issued a mandate for prolonged lockdowns and stay at home orders based off of the sociological analytics and the propensity for a dog mom to forget a mask while making a circuit run of the boutique cafes in town. People will forget Smith, but not the vacuous stadiums of Major League baseball and the NFL laden with shaming cardboard cutouts, or the NBA bubble of solitude, where multi-millionaires gathered with their respective teams to play a glorified athletic club schedule, while the audience was left out in the cold and in the savage reticence of altered life, and left to the whim of reality and left to a sea of pathological panic.
LeBron just couldn’t keep his Twitter handle from matching the toxic rants of Trump, and the West coast found out that elected officials and athletic directors are indifferent to each other, and to the basics of addressing and solving a problem, in mismanaging the launch of college football, which funds the entirety of the student athlete experience. James and other celebrity/social justice ambassador hybrids valued at near $1 billion, are benign to the social media vaporization process, as a specific ideology trickling down from the billionaire tycoon leadership pervades.
Special mention has to go to Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, and along with the YouTube videos of stupid human pet tricks, Korean baseball, and the lack of parity on the NCAA Gridiron, earns honorable mention for a Maskie award, along with the $4 million a year to maintain a California-style attitude of passive aggressiveness in promoting diversity in sports gender protocol, and not ensuing that local government restrictions and athletic departments are conducive to playing the darn games. Note to members of major athletic conferences, do not hire a glorified Olympic sport commissioner to officiate the alpha egos and differing personalities responsible for the lucrative sums generated from football and men’s basketball. Speaking of hoops, the professional game has worn out its welcome with the indelible entertainers injecting strategic rants into the core of the audience with as much tact and wit of “Schoolhouse Rock” warping the young minds of cartoon viewers in editorializing the checks and balance system of the republic.
In fact, the entire assortment of NBA players and coaches seems to have approached the borders of overstimulation on social media in playing dime store philosopher and the “you do know what it’s like…” mental contortionist in pathologically baiting fans and keyboard cowboys to tempt eternal and scorn for responding viscerally to the open-ended statement leading to close-minded dead ended mentally taxing digital exchanges. The equal justice replacing names on jerseys did not help, a practice league commissioner David Silver hinted would end for the 2020-2021 season as a result of lukewarm revenues. When the collective end user unveils the insurmountable truth that posts on social networking are geared towards brash and reactionary outlandish critiques on the micro-present with a shelf life measured in seconds, the world retain a temperance of normalcy, where the pencil neck geeks of pocket protection unassuming brilliance, are not the undisputed rulers of the galaxy.
The only noteworthy solace was in the cancellation of the Tokyo Summer Olympic games, which constituted a brief respite for the skeptics of megaprojects well aware of the detriment caused by a$100 per hammer charge facilitated by the IOC in a continuous shockwave of kickbacks and corruption. At least the judges evaluating gymnastics routines were saved from the public scrutiny of sanctioned watchdogs coming forward with allegations of bribes and racketeering originating on the tragically ironic neutral shores of Lake Geneva.
After a shocking abyss in ratings after years of steady decline, the brass at ESPN promised that the tiresome liberal guilt and pandering to minorities would be toned down to a level where the average American sports fan could stomach browsing the broadcast giant’s website, and sitting through an hour of sports center, however empty gestures have produced content mirroring the national polarized political battlefield. A disturbing magnitude of hero worship towards the social justice motif of the isolated faux-competitive attenuated season, established a new low in the unhealthy fixation and chapped lips resulting from $30 million a year brand names achieving a deity level existence in the current hell on earth. The irony exists in the tantalizingly frustrating conundrum, that the driving consumer force behind the NBA, and the majority of sports well into the black, is predominance of white males between 25 to 54 residing in the middle of the country, who spending hours during the day obsessing about the advanced metrics of the Raptors. The remainder of the audience is left to endure the tedious fragmented phrases and soundbites on why America is such a horrendous nation in offering eternal wealth, and a free education with graduate level tutors to those who simply play ball, or wish to gain acceptance to the most prestigious, and esteemed education institutions.
As competition is meticulously engineered out of society, and the optics of differences clouded by rhetoric, the left is hoping that the temporary nightmare becomes second nature to especially, to individuals slowly forgetting the expectations for a whole lot more, and this begins and ends with coordinated attack on leisure by the marring of the sporting environment beyond recognition. The ESPN talking heads are simply oblivious to this horror or deliberately choose to hypnotize viewers through an intoxicating stream of visceral human interest stories and tantalizing analytics. Only the collective sneer is invisible from the studio feed across the airwaves.
While the carboard pieces of the future are assembled to build the ideal citizen, impervious to debate, and conditioned to perpetual change influenced by trending group think, the hive mind soul is not worth the recycled paper it is printed on. “Take me out the ballgame” will be sadly obsolete within two decades, as the societal architects have their way with the younger generations, and face little resistance from passive compartments of the political spectrum dulled after decades of ceaseless indoctrinating tactics.
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