First things first: I love sports. Always have.
It would take a supercomputer to calculate the amount of time I’ve spent watching and attending games. Not to mention the nauseating amount of money I’ve spent on tickets, apparel, and $15 stadium beers.
And judging from the number of people I see lining up to blow similar amounts of money, I’m not alone. If there’s one thing Americans love, it’s sports. Sports are practically hard-wired into our civilization, passed down from our societal ancestors over thousands of years. Ancient Greece had the Olympics. Rome the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum. And in keeping with our own national character, we Americans have taken it to the extreme, creating entire cultures around sports franchises, complete with traditions, rivalries and sometimes even violence.
The tribal aspects of team fandom, it seems, are fundamental to human nature. Everyone, including me, wants to be part of something.
But while I love sports, it’s become very clear that sports, at least the professional variety, don’t love me back. As a Christian conservative I have the audacity to believe in objective reality and, even worse, that America is perhaps more exceptional than she is evil!
Such a worldview no longer holds water with today’s woke sports organizations, who have decided instead to hitch their wagons to an increasingly insane political left by championing its increasingly insane causes.
Take the NFL, for instance, where fans are now somehow shocked they are being waterboarded weekly with unsolicited Taylor Swift footage.
I find it hard to feel sorry for them.
They’re supporting a league that allowed the New York Jets to adorn their helmets with Ukraine flags (as if ten percent of the team could point to Ukraine on a map) and the Carolina Panthers to introduce the first trans cheerleader.
Seems like these days, teams would rather win the social justice Super Bowl than actual games (as of this writing both the Jets and Panthers were last in their divisions).
And all this, of course, after the league pushed the woke agenda via slogans such as “Stop Hate” and “Black Lives Matter” on jerseys and in end zones in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Stopping hate is an admirable goal, obviously, but it has nothing to do with the mission of the Black Lives Matter organization, a multimillion-dollar grift that did little outside of dividing the country and enriching some of America’s most vocal race hustlers.
Sadly, however the NFL isn’t alone when it comes to spitting in its fans’ faces.
Perhaps no sports organization in history has unapologetically trampled on the beliefs of its fanbase like the LA Dodgers, which invited a group of nun-mocking drag queens to perform for “Pride Night.” It’s hard to imagine the thousands of Hispanic, and therefore likely Catholic, Dodgers faithful not being repulsed by such a spectacle.
But everything must take a backseat to progressivism, including the fans who spend a week’s pay so their kids can see their favorite player swing a bat or dunk a basketball.
It’s not enough that “defense” is now a four-letter word in the NBA. The league’s loudest voices rarely, if ever, scream about sports at all, instead using their post-game pulpits to push politics. From LeBron to Kerr to Popovich, the NBA’s spokesmen are little more than megaphones parroting the left’s most deranged narratives.
I could cite other examples all day, but the bottom line is that the Big 3 sports leagues have abandoned the average American.
Which raises the question: Why are we doing this? Why are we paying people who hate us $35 for a beer and a hot dog?
Well, we don’t have to.
As the conservative boycotts against Bud Light and others (such as Disney and Target) have so clearly demonstrated, we have the means to right the ship.
Without conservatives, these leagues are doomed. It’s not as if the far left, which demonizes toxic masculinity at every turn, will suddenly start packing sports stadiums.
Roughly half of NFL fans identify as Republican, and roughly a third of MLB fans feel the same. And if national polls apply, far more are fed up with the wokeness pervading every nook and cranny of American society.
Pre-pandemic the NFL, MLB, and the NBA generated approximately $35 billion collectively, meaning we conservatives are forking over somewhere around $15-$20 billion — the GDP of Mozambique — to people who despise us.
If we refused to further finance our enemies, there would be an about-face overnight. It took mere months for conservatives to tank Bud Light’s sales by 26 percent, a decline that resulted in the marketing masterminds behind the Dylan Mulvaney campaign being terminated.
If those aren’t results, what is?
Even left-wing rag Vox was recently forced to admit that conservative boycotts are “kind of working.” Why would professional sports be immune?
To be clear, I’m not lobbying for some heavily conservative sports experience. In fact, I strongly believe that sports should be apolitical. We all deal with politics, either nationally or in our workplaces, day in and day out. Going to or watching a game should be an escape from such lunacy.
But as we are seeing more and more lately, anything will become political if we sit idly by.
It’s time to put our society ahead of our bread and circuses, and return professional sports to its rightful owner: Americans who work hard all week so they can have a little fun on the weekends.
Greg Jones is a conservative freelance writer and blogger.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.