It never dawned on me that there could be a liberal sports writer. Sports are pretty cut and dried. I never would have thought that liberalism could invade an arena where politics is meaningless and where human effort alone is the test of what is good.
Sports are about effort, discipline, teamwork, and, of course, winners and losers. But, evidently, according to Amy Donaldson of the Deseret News, sports really aren’t about winning. Outside of randomly quoting Vince Lombardi and John Wooden, she doesn’t really say why sports aren’t about winning. She just knows she hates the whole idea – and she hates it most today in the form of Lebron James.
Ms. Donaldson writes that she was “ashamed” and “embarrassed,” even “humiliated,” for watching “The Decision” by Lebron James. Really? Evidently she’s disappointed about what sports has become – or what we have become and what we have done to sports. She laments, “One of our favorite pastimes is a business.”
Let’s recap the Lebron situation: he became a free agent – meaning he had signed a legal contract to work for his employer and then the contract legally expired; as a talented basketball player, he had his pick of employers; in fact, Lebron is so talented that money isn’t his biggest concern anymore – winning an NBA championship is; he chose to play for another team, a team with which he feels he has the best chance of attaining his personal goal. That’s it. That’s the recap. That’s all that happened.
Now what about that story heaps upon us shame, embarrassment, and humiliation? Yeah, you’re right, nothing – unless you’re a liberal. And Ms. Donaldson is the big, bleeding heart, kind of liberal. So liberal, in fact, that even sports aren’t safe from the pleadings and lamentations of her hypersensitive conscience.
But I should have seen it coming. Ms. Donaldson is a staunch defender of the Utah High School Activities Association – not because it helps to bring out the best in high school athletics, but because it’s the Great Leveler, as she sees it.
The sentimental line about sports having become a business is another clue. Is there something wrong with business? Is there something wrong with a human being using all of her faculties to make the best out of her life and bless her community and the people she loves? Now I see why Ms. Donaldson hates the race by high school kids (and their evil parents) for athletic scholarships – talented youth using their God-given gifts along with personal resolve to claim a coveted college scholarship must remind her of evil businessmen.
Instead of celebrating what basketball has done for just one more faceless, inner city kid from Akron, Ohio, named Lebron James, Ms. Donaldson is sad for him, for sports, for everyone.
I wonder what she thinks about crazed Olympic athletes who set aside most everything normal in a young boy’s or girl’s life to obsessively focus on sports? And just think how she must feel about the best of the best among these young people using their new status as “gold medalists” to cash in and become a part of the rich and famous! Get off that box of Wheaties, you greedy goose!!
Egalitarianism is a cruel evil. That’s what Ms. Donaldson champions – equality as ideology. Egalitarianism has resulted in more human misery than any other ideology on the face of the Earth – call it Marxism, call it communism, call it perversely Hitleresque – the quest to make “everyone the same” is a blight on human history.
And, yet, we can see it in its infancy – a seemingly innocuous, even virtuous, attitude that winning isn’t everything, that sports shouldn’t be a business, that a man’s own talents don’t really belong to him but to the broader community. Sorry folks, that’s just plain sick.
Vince Lombardi, whose name Ms. Donaldson invokes to correct us selfish people, said this about winning: Beginning his famous speech with the unforgettable lines, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing,” he closes with this impassioned ideal, “I don’t say these things because I believe in the ‘brute’ nature of man or that men must be brutalized to be combative. I believe in God, and I believe in human decency. But I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour – his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear – is that moment when he has to work his heart out in a good cause and he’s exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
Winning has its boundaries. But to say it’s not a vital and constructive part of human nature is to say something that is wholly foreign to every great American, every great citizen of every great country, that has ever existed. We should cherish results of such effort, not condemn them.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
