rcfreak339 wrote:BTW, Earl, wtf is a "Sports Faciest"? lol.
Here's another long-winded response.
I regret my choice of words, although "sports fascist" does have a humorous ring to it. I never watched the
Seinfeld series on TV (except for one episode); but I did hear of the "soup Nazi" character, and would chuckle to myself over the image that would arise in my mind. But on the serious side of life, words such as "fascist," "Nazi," "Commie," and "Communist" (which designate totalitarian movements and regimes that have carried out mass murder) have been used way too loosely and inappropriately as insults for many years. So, I think a more appropriate designation would be "sports bigot."
A sports bigot is a person who thinks that nonathletic boys and men are inferior to athletes. At a website that was set up by a former high-school football player, I read about a high-school coach who was overheard in a fast-food restaurant saying, "Athletes are a better class of people (than nonathletes)." I once read in the sports section of a newspaper that while a former professional football player of my generation named Dave Meggysey was coaching high-school football, he told the players he was coaching that they were better than all of the other students at their school. Meggysey has been a staunch "progressive" politically, yet the comment he made to his players was hardly progressive. Perhaps all of the nonathletic students should have boycotted the school's football games in protest. And I've already dealt with the "latent" homosexual tendencies claim in previous posts -- which, again, is part of the mindset of the sports bigot.
A corresponding negative view of nonathletic girls and women doesn't seem to be found among women athletes, as far as I know. A sports bigot condescendingly feels that a boy who hasn't participated in sports is somehow deficient and unprepared for life. Hence, I've heard football fans say that "Football is life." A sports bigot who is the father of an athletic boy and a boy who is not athletically inclined will show partiality towards his athletic son and be ashamed of his nonathletic son, whom he rejects and mocks instead of showing a father's love.
Instead of viewing sports as just one of many legitimate expressions of the human experience, sports bigots view sports as being supreme and superior to everything else. Years ago a preacher once told me, "We're all ignorant. We're just ignorant in different areas." Sports bigots ignore this truth. A sports bigot has no appreciation for the accomplishments of nonathletes. Mastering a science such as physics, for example, means nothing to them. A nonathletic boy who shows proficiency in science or mathematics is simply dismissed as a nerd and is viewed with comtempt. Hence, Samdaman
(a former nerd-hating member of this forum who most definitely was a sports bigot and had to be banned because of his constant abuse and his desire to hurt the website) announces at a sports website that "Sports is Everything."
Sports bigots put a premium on physical courage, which certainly is needed in some situations, but have little (if any) appreciation for
moral courage, which is the sort of courage that throughout history has driven legitimate social reform movements. To the contrary, many sports bigots put a premium on personal conformity. (To be fair, historically so have some "anti-establishment" types, such as the hippies.) Sports bigots have no problem with physically strong student athletes bullying fellow classmates who are physically weaker. Instead of viewing this bullying as being unmanly and cowardly, sports bigots view it as the process of achieving "social dominance," and speak of "the natural cruelty of boys." (Yeah, I guess that adultery and child abuse are natural, too.) Four recent members of this forum that I know of -- Fat Man, greencom, rotten, and Geno -- were bullied for years when they were kids by
only sports bigots better known as "jocks." If you don't believe me, ask them. I know several guys who played football in high school and actually witnessed some of their teammates bullying nonathletic classmates.
Sports bigots think that student athletes should be given preferential treatment and do not believe that they should be held accountable for the way they treat others off the playing field, even if they commit violent crimes against them. A classic example of this took place at a certain university in the summer of 1974, when six members of the football team were accused of gang-raping an 18-year-old girl. The president of the university interviewed the players, but did not even bother meeting with the girl, who spent two days in a psychiatric ward. At the same time that he had publicly denounced the Nixon administration for staging a coverup in the Watergate scandal, he put a clamp on the student newspaper and staged a coverup of his own with the compliance of the local newspaper (which hardly gave any coverage to the scandal) and with the approval of many of the football fans, who rushed to the players' defense because they happened to be an asset to the team.
The circumstances that led up to this scandal were never investigated by the university administration or the sports media. I read about this scandal in an article that was published the following year in a magazine that specialized in investigative reporting. (By the way, the journalist who wrote this article is an alumnus of that university. He just happens to have believed what was taught in his journalism classes at that university; namely, that a journalist's duty is to report the
truth, regardless of whose toes get stepped on.) The alleged victim had had a girlfriend who had been impregnated by one of the players. The alleged victim had therefore blackmailed the player into giving her friend money for an abortion, or she would tell the university about the out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Months later she was dating one of the players and snuck into his dormitory to have sex with him in one of the dorm rooms. He excused himself, then the player she had blackmailed showed up almost immediately (quite a coincidence, wouldn't you say?) and told her that if she didn't submit to him that he would throw her out the window, which was three stories high. Four other players showed up and also had sex with her. Some of the players had sex with her twice. There were at least nine penetrations.
After the girl received death threats, she decided that she did not want the case to go to trial and stopped pressing charges. The six players were merely suspended for a year. (The next year all but one returned to the university, and three of them went on to play professional football.) In the same year the scandal occurred, a nonathletic student who had had consensual sex with a young woman in his dorm room was
expelled from the university, not suspended.
Am I saying that the six football players committed gang rape? No, because I can't know for sure. But I do know this: The players had a
possible motive (vengence) besides lust, and the university administration just didn't care about what really might have happened. If I had been the president of the university, I would have talked to
both the alleged victim
and the six players.
I also would have talked to the friend of the alleged victim and gotten her
story as well. And I would have had all of them take lie detector tests. That was not done, and (thanks to the sports media and sports columnists such as Mickey Herskowitz) the scandal was covered up successfully. A friend of mine who played football at another university says that there have been similar coverups at other universities.
The prevalence of this mindset depends on the sport. Certain sports don't seem to have it much.
None of the currently active members of this forum, including those who defend sports and crticize this website, are sports bigots. I repeat, none of them. The vast majority of those who have posted messages attacking this website, though,
are sports bigots. They would include Samdaman
(needless to say), SpeedofLeight, Captain America, Harold (in the "Letters 2009" column), and many others.
I'm fat and sassy! I love to sing & dance & stomp my feet & really rock your world!
