Washington DC’s professional football team fled the District of Columbia back 1997 for a grand-new stadium in suburban Maryland. It’s pretty shabby now, and owner Daniel Snyder has been trying to get a sweetheart deal on a shiny new stadium in Maryland or Virginia, but locals aren’t eager to pony up. He’s now in Cannes, France, for a “business meeting.” Is he looking for a French stadium deal? After all, the Riviera has featured gladitorial sports before, in its ancient Roman amphitheaters.
On the other hand, Mr. Synder refused to testify before a U.S. Congressional committee about alleged financial and sexual irregularities with his team management, and he brought his 305-foot yacht and private jet to Cannes. Several non-extradition countries are only a short hop away across the Mediterranean.
The Super Bowl murders 22 cows, figures Meghan Walsh:
“Every cowhide makes about 10 balls, according to Kevin Murphy, the general manager of Wilson Football, official NFL ball-maker since 1941. Wilson wouldn’t say exactly how many balls it produces in a season, but the Chicago company did share that the Super Bowl alone requires 216 footballs — each team gets 54 for practice and 54 for game day (the Pats and Hawks had theirs within 24 hours of winning the AFC and NFC championships last year). Wilson, true to its roots, favors cattle from the Midwest — Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska — but all the leather eventually makes its way to a factory in Ada, Ohio.”
–“How Many Cows Does It Take to Make a Football?” Meghan Walsh, OZY
And then there are the 650 million chickens who died so the game’s TV viewers can eat their wings ….
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America’s National Football League has held a few games in the UK and is trying to form a franchise there. British writer Matthew Engel has let his compatriots in on the league’s radical secret:
“In the US, sport is the habitat of the nation’s secret socialism. Through revenue sharing, salary caps and the draft (which gives the worst teams first pick), the NFL pioneered the notions that the last must be allowed to finish first. To that end, the rich must subsidise the poor.
In part, this is a mechanism to make capitalism work better, though it is not a mechanism favoured in other aspects of American life ….”
“… I suspect the NFL is using London as it uses Los Angeles which, bizarrely, has been without a franchise for 20 years. If any city gets mean and refuses to subsidise a new stadium or whatever, there is a threat so obvious it hardly needs saying: ‘Pay up or LA will.’ In Britain, such geographical shifts are almost unknown and totally anathema. Another piece of secret socialism: American teams are subsidy junkies.”
— “‘Socialist’ NFL would fail in capitalist London,” Matthew Engel, Financial Times
In what has got to be history’s most desperate “Hail Mary” play, Virginia Republican Senate candidate Ed Gillespie has pledged he won’t back any legislation to change the racist name of Washington’s professional football team. His opponent, incumbent Senator John Warner, never voted for or supported any such bill. The term “political football” is no longer just a metaphor.
Here’s the kicker: Gillespie was an Eagles fan as late as December 2012.
Sportscasters Tony Dungy, Phil Simms, Tom Jackson, and Lisa Salters won’t use the racist, derogatory name of DC’s NFL team. Neither will ESPN’s Lindsay Czarniak, who comes from the DC area. But what if the FCC rules that name cannot be uttered over the public airwaves?
But former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Nicholas Johnson are urging the FCC to make an indecency case against broadcasters who use the name on the air.
Concepts like “equal access to places of public accommodation” likely mean nothing to Mrs. Brewer, but she surely remembers her state’s loss of business when Arizona passed a racist immigration law and earlier when it refused to recognize the King Holiday.
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