But Let’s Discuss Something Wholesome: Sports

We are learning that the National Football League provides equal-opportunity fairness.

While encouraging male athletes to ruin their brains, one club has also put female cheerleaders in danger by shuttling them out of the country, confiscating their passports, and telling them to get naked around wealthy creeps.

Just about all sports are corrupt – from so-called “college” basketball and football to gymnastics to the National Hockey League. I’m not even getting into the steroid era of baseball.

The N.F.L. is the most popular sport in the U.S. as well as the most pompous, overlooking the fact that in recent years former athletes have been shooting themselves in the chest to preserve their brains for the autopsy that will confirm the trauma.

Now, my colleague Juliet Macur has written a grim and comprehensive article about the expectations of the Washington football team (that goes by a racist nickname.)

Under owner Daniel Snyder, the cheerleaders were expected to do more than the traditional NFL duties of performing while network camera-wielders wriggle on the ground for the so-called “honey shot.” (One TV production guy became famous for encouraging up-close-and-personal glimpses of cheerleaders.)

The Washington cheerleaders were encouraged to take evening cruises on the Potomac as part of their “job” (for which they receive minimal compensation, unless you want to count photo shoots observed by leering rich guys with yachts.)

In Macur’s excellent article, the female overseer of the cheerleaders expressed shock, shock, that some of her charges felt used by these experiences.

In fairness to the N.F.L., the league has been busy lately, dealing with evidence of brain damage – over 100 former players, by recent count. The league had third-and-long defensive specialists and snapping specialists for punting but for many years, for its neurological expertise, the N.F.L. relied on a doctor who, well, knew nothing about brains.

But don’t worry, the owners are vigilant about something: they are all over the kneeling demonstrations by some players during the national anthem.

In other recent sporting developments, it turns out that the sainted Karolyis, Bela and Martha, had a glimmer of the widespread abuse by the now-convicted gymnastics doctor in Michigan.
Martha Karolyi heard about it years ago but, in classic boarding-school in-loco-parentis tradition, she did nothing to warn the girls and their parents. After all, she and Bela had to keep the production line humming at their gymnastics ranch in deepest Texas.

Then there is the National Hockey League, which traditionally tolerated the unofficial but very real job of “goon” – a player paid to fight opponents. To its credit, the league has cut back on mass brawls that were common a generation ago, but too late to help Jeff Parker, a former enforcer who died last year at 53 and was diagnosed, posthumously, as having
C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The N.H.L. seems to be taking its medical advice from the long-time avoidance tactics of the N.F.L. At least the N.H.L. does not stoop to confiscating passports from cheerleaders ferried out of the country.

Enough of this sordid business. It’s time for a truly clean sport: Coming up next month – from Russia! – the FIFA World Cup.