Must Liberals Ruin Our Sports, Too?

By Douglas MacKinnon
Monday, December 06, 2010

For those of us who believe in traditional values, the rule-of-law, secure borders, smaller government, and lower taxes, it’s become slim pickings when it comes to the entertainment, news, education, and information spaces.

As a conservative who believes in the free exchange of ideas and who is anxious to hear reasoned and well articulated arguments from the left, I have watched in sadness and dismay as liberal group-think has systematically forced out conservative thought in movies, television, commercials, CDs, book publishing, the work place, colleges, universities, high schools, and even pre-school.

Facing this informational and educational tidal wave of bias, censorship, political correctness, intimidation, blacklisting, and denial, you would think that the liberals who reign supreme over these various domains would at least leave us knuckle-dragging conservatives with sports. But no. Not even that.

I spoke recently to an editor for a major newspaper about this subject. He confirmed what many of us suspect:

“Who do you think they are going to hire around here as sports reporters? Management is liberal and my fellow editors are liberal. Human nature dictates that they hire the reflection in the mirror.

“Consequently, we tend to hire sports reporters based on liberal diversity. Be that ethnic, religious, gender, or sexual preference. Many times, the people we hire never even played a sport and some actually have a chip on their shoulders because of how they perceived the ‘dumb jocks’ in high school and college.”

As a marginal athlete who spent a little time trying to play hockey for a living and was once invited to a major league baseball camp, I may not know as much about sports as the now “expert” reporters and commentators in the field, but I do understand a few things.

Chief among them being that the young men and women who choose to devote countless hours to their respective sports while often enduring high degrees of pain, suffering, and sacrifice, deserve to be covered by those who don’t bring a social-engineering bias or an agenda to the field, arena, or rink.

Period.

Much more than that, I understand that there are meaningful lessons in sports which translate and impact our everyday lives and the world around us. Sports is about winning and losing. But it’s also about character, perseverance, dedication, ability, and toughness.

While liberals can assign the thought police to insist that we give unlimited outs in pee-wee baseball, that no one keeps score, and that everyone gets a trophy for psycho-babble reasons, the better athletes will always keep score in their heads, don’t need mental-crutches masquerading as plastic trophies, and insist on knowing how many strikes they have against them.

They keep score, count strikes, and want penalties imposed for mistakes because they know that it is the only way they are going to get better. The only way they can measure themselves against the competition. The only way they can toughen-up and reach the next level or their own personal goals. Sports can and is a metaphor for life. Some certainly worry that with the “no strikes, no outs, everyone gets a trophy” philosophy of the left, we are creating a generation of overweight wimps who can’t handle real competition and real adversity.

The late, great comedian Richard Pryor spoke to this effect. He once joked -- sanitized here -- that the reason Japan bombed Pearl Harbor to start World War II was because before the war, many of the Japanese leadership had attended elite colleges in California and found them populated by rich, pampered, wimpy, entitled students who barely had the strength to carry their own books, let alone fight someone.

The Japanese leadership remembered those weaklings and collectively said, “Ah, we can beat those soft, coddled, country-club kids in a war.”

Pryor then joked that right after Pearl Harbor, the United States unchained and unleashed its incredibly tough, snarling, football-playing “unsophisticated” students from places like the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia and it was soon lights out for the Japanese.

Well, as we approach 2011, it would be good for the left and their politically correct sports “reporters” to keep in mind that Al Qaeda keeps score, North Korea does not give unlimited strikes, and there are no trophies for losing a battle, a war, or the values handed down by our Founding Fathers.

For the good of our nation, give us sports back.