Blowback? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Posted by Pointman on September 28, 2017 · 29 Comments 

Watching a sports event alone or a team you totally support is okay, but it really isn’t a patch on doing it in company. Whether you go to the match as a family, gang of mates or just agree on whose house you’re all going to congregate at to watch it on the box, it’s always better. I know people who’ve paid handsomely to have all the games streamed directly to their TV at home, but always head out to a lively bar to watch the big ones in company.

It’s always the same great routine. Everybody comes around armed with strips of beer and the sort of junk food nibbles we all frown at the kids eating, but this is game time, so all that sensible stuff gets parked for the afternoon. Depending on how tense the game is, there’s going to be some alcohol excess involved as well, but that’s why they got themselves dropped around and there’ll be a taxi home.

Thirty minutes before half-time, the eternal debate begins about which type of take away we’re going to be having and after a lot of the usual “we had that last time” aggravation, a suitably junk cuisine is finally settled on, agonising decisions are then made on what exactly everyone is having, the order is phoned in and will be delivered to the ravenous lion’s den just in time for the start of the break.

On big game days, every takeaway for miles around will have been bracing themselves for the big avalanche of half-time and after game orders. Victory smells like a well constructed pizza to me, defeat is a greasy doner kebab that’s still got a bit of spicy kick left in it.

One time when it was my turn to play host, I looked around the living room and there were about fifteen people mostly blokes jammed into it. Some wives and girlfriends come along too just to enjoy the atmosphere, but usually end up being driven into the kitchen by the noise level. They always have a good old catch up chat spiced with some salacious gossip as they graze away at various tasty nibbles.

The blokes are all ages, all professions or trades, all different educational level exits and every man Jack of them screaming and shouting their hearts out for their team at the critical moments. Without a doubt, sport is the great leveller.

Fans of both teams are usually represented and nobody holds back in the usual stinging exchanges of banter delivered without an ounce of ill will. It’s a big part of the fun. A bloody good off the cuff comeback in response to an insult hurled across the room at your team is always savoured by both camps.

Every worry you’ve got is momentarily put aside and forgotten for the afternoon. The job, the kids, money, health, the economy, politics and all other varieties of nagging anxiety that you’ve learned to handle but are still always there in the background draining some element of joy out of your life. It’s a few precious hours of complete distraction.

It’s all been simplified. There’s only one single thing to worry about now and that’s how your team are going to do this day. At times, you can almost feel the sheer will of the fans behind them; supporting, pushing and driving them onwards.

For a few hours, you walk with giants and are in the company of heroes.

I wrote a couple of years back “It all means nothing in any larger sense, but a day spent with your kith and kin, your true brothers of whatever nationality, your soul kinsmen, the still unashamed warriors who have grace, is a fine day” and it still describes how I feel about being a fan at a big game.

If you ruin or take away those few simple hours of uncomplicated pleasure from a working man, you will be in a world of trouble.

It has become fashionable for players of American football to make political protests before the start of the game while the national anthem is being played, and it’s not going down well with the fans. There’s not a fan of the game out there who would deny any of them the right to protest, but that’s neither the time nor the place. One phone call to the press by any of these stars would secure an immediate press conference where they could highlight whatever injustice is bothering them.

All they’re doing is pissing off the fans by brutally wedging politics into sports against the wishes of fans who just want to do the simple thing of watching a game. They’re already enduring more than enough of that sort of crap from Hollywood and the media. Increasingly, it looks more like a bunch of prima donna footballers on multi-million dollar contracts striking postures in front of working slobs who in some cases have to actually balance the cost of affording NFL on cable and the utility bills.

What’s even worse is that now it’s developed into being some SJW gesture calling for the overthrow of the great dictator Donald Trump. Woah, just pull back hard on those there reins cowboy. Don’t forget, over sixty million people voted for him and unlike the coastal demographic luvvies who hate him so much, they tend to be the type of folks who actually do go to a match or buy cable to watch it. They also tend to be the type of people who voted Trump.

By offending their basic patriotism and then going on to attack the president they voted for, you’re actually alienating most of your customer base, so you can kiss a good chunk of money goodbye this season. From now on, they’d rather piss razor blades than give you a single red cent of their hard-earned money.

Once again, a pugnacious but astute Trump has elected to react to a particular provocation amongst a host of others because he knows it’s good ground on which to fight. He can’t lose on it and his opponents simply can’t win. Stung by a single tweet of his and through their own sheer prideful stupidity, they insisted on doubling down last weekend by even more of them taking a knee or other such antics, which is enraging their erstwhile fans even more.

Trump is not driving this issue. As usual, he’s simply reading the sentiment of the common man a lot better than the experts and merely giving voice to their anger. He’s also reading correctly the determined stupidity and ingrained arrogance of the NFL and their cheerleaders in the media egging them on over a cliff. It’s a win win for him whichever way you look at it. They’re already down in a hole and are determined to keep on digging even more furiously. Yet another zugzwang.

When the national anthem is being played and fans see the team they used to love and respect doing things like hiding in the tunnel like a bunch of cowards until it’s all over, resolutely sitting on the bench, linking arms, taking a knee or worst of all doing some stretching exercises all the way through it, they get angry. It no longer matters a damn what the protest was originally meant to be about – that’s long forgotten. Things have moved on.

All they see in front of them is a deliberate insult to the flag and therefore their patriotism. They’ve always known that old-fashioned things like that which they still place faith in are sneered at by their supposed betters but at least they got a break from that sort of crap watching a game of football. Not any more it seems.

Ignore what the sports press, MSM and the lying media are all saying about the whole issue because they simply don’t move in the same lower circles of consciousness as your average fan. One of their number attended a world series game and saw the umpire give the age-old three fingers out signal. He afterwards dashed off a suitably enraged and blistering article about how a KKK sign was now being used in major league baseball. The fact that it actually got published is a damning indictment of what’s laughingly called sports journalism these days.

Your average six-year-old knows more about sports and more importantly the fans, than that confederacy of dunces. If you want to get a feel for how angry the real lifelong fans are over the whole issue, watch some of the videos they’re putting up on the Goolag’s YouTube of them burning their team’s colours. That search currently comes back with 183,000 hits. You can see the bitterness, anger and sense of betrayal in their faces, and you don’t have to listen very hard to hear it in their voices too. They won’t be coming back.

The ratings look to be heading towards a bloodbath with subscribers to cable channels already cancelling or getting refunds on football packages. It’s approaching the point where watching football, never mind buying or God forbid wearing any of the merchandising in public, is seen as being unpatriotic.

On the way there, the big advertisers such as Budweiser will bail early and follow the fans to wherever they’ve stomped off to in disgust. There’s no reason why their brand should have to take a bullet as well for the NFL’s disastrous handling of the situation. You’re going to be taking an even bigger hit once the claw-back clauses with advertisers about minimum viewing numbers are dropped through, and I ain’t even got to the juicy part about the next round of renegotiating the screening rights with the cable companies.

Unless there’s an immediate major about turn by the NFL and some biblical grovelling, it’ll take years if ever to get back the level of fans it’s currently hemorrhaging. In the meantime, your revenue stream is going to take the sort of hit that Hollywood is currently suffering. They also managed to insult and piss off their customers, who promptly stopped buying their product which has led to their worst year in the last quarter century. And by the way, we’re still not yet at end of year and all the scheduled mega blockbusters that were supposed to be the big earners have already bombed, so the numbers might get even worse.

They, like the NFL, are also doubling down and delivering even greater numbers of tedious political lectures on inappropriate occasions in the delusional belief that once they’ve politically “educated” their ignorant customers, or at least had a good old snigger at them to shame them around to your righteous viewpoint, the dire situation with their numbers will magically right itself.

My apologies to Dolly Parton, a talented songwriter whom I admire, for using that clip as an example. Judging from the look on her face, she was obviously ambushed by the two smug bitches on either side of her who unlike her haven’t had a career for the last thirty years. Jane Fonda hasn’t lost any of her old ways when it comes to America, has she?

Anyway, Hollywood’s numbers won’t turn upward anytime soon and neither will yours.

There are certain things which have always been considered to be unarguably good in America – motherhood, apple pie and the flag. Insult or bad mouth any of those things in company and you can feel the room temperature around you drop. When that company consists of middle class and blue-collar America, you’ve just made a lot of enemies who have very long memories, as Hanoi Jane can attest to.

The NFL can kiss goodbye to that golden era of seemingly endless year on year revenue growth. That’s all over now. From now on, it’s all decline and fall, and it’s the fans you’ve mortally offended who’ll be keeping their dollars in their wallet who’re determined to do it to you.

Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool sports fan, let the whole fucking lot of them starve until they learn some respect.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

A visit to Cardiff.

The right stuff.

Silence doesn’t mean approval nor does it mean acceptance.

Zugzwang

American traitors.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with NFL, Taking a knee