Friday, October 9, 2009

Rush Isn't The Only Problem


There is absolutely no way the NFL can allow Dave Checketts to own a team.

No, you read that right. True enough, there’s no way it can allow Rush Limbaugh to own a team, and that cannot be emphasized enough nor played down in any way. Actually, I don’t even believe that Limbaugh will ever get close to it. Just as I don’t believe Limbaugh represents as large a percentage of America’s views on anything as he and his proponents want us to think, I don’t believe three-fourths of the other NFL owners will be swayed by whatever money Limbaugh brings into the bid for the St. Louis Rams’ ownership, into overlooking the damage this resolutely dangerous man will do to their select group, their league, their sport and its reputation.

You think the resistance to Michael Vick’s return was noisy? Just wait and see what happens if Limbaugh ever gets that far with the NFL. It's even got players, normally content to speak only when trash-talked to first, prepared to revolt. (UPDATE: ESPN reported Sunday that the NFL Players Association has notified the league of its opposition.)

Limbaugh’s an enormous problem, pun not intended at all (hopefully we’re all beyond the obvious, cheap weight jokes, with someone this frightening in the discussion). But once he’s disposed of, the only proper move for the NFL – or, if they get there first, the current owners of the Rams – is to summarily reject any subsequent bids by Checketts or anyone else left in his investment group.

Which is hard for me to say. In his years running the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden when I covered the team many years ago, and the years before that when he ran the Utah Jazz, I grew to respect Dave Checketts as a basketball executive and a person with character and integrity. He’s always come off as a good man, extremely sharp, very calculating and ruthless in his own way, which isn’t a crime. He might have political views I disagree with, but if I ever knew what they were, I don’t remember them now.

Yet you’re known by the company you keep. And anyone who would even invite as vile an example of humanity as Rush Limbaugh into a business proposition gets red flags planted all over him for the rest of eternity.

This isn’t even about being friends with someone like that; this is about associating with someone so closely that you’ll accept his money in order to achieve your personal goal. If reaching that goal requires a partnership with Rush Limbaugh, then your priorities, as well as everything about yourself, are rightly called into question.

You should never want anything so badly – whether it’s strictly money or the civic pride from keeping a struggling NFL team in town – that you would even invite his assistance in any way, much less give him a financial slice of it.

It doesn’t matter if, as many have suggested in response to this Limbaugh gambit, every sports league is run by people who look and sound a lot like Limbaugh. Of course racism and racist ideas infest America’s owners’ boxes, or else the NFL wouldn’t have needed a Rooney Rule to get black men hired as head coaches, and ballparks wouldn’t have the number 42 painted on their outfield walls. Plenty have been caught in the act, by their words (Marge Schott) or deeds (Donald Sterling).

Yet to even mention them in the same sentence as Limbaugh, in light of all that he has done and said to not only offend, but openly endanger, the black populace in this country, including the family living in the White House, is to minimize the deeply, pathologically incendiary nature of what he does. And how he has used that to become rich enough to buy into the NFL, all while avoiding any responsibility for the worst manifestations of the tales he spins three hours a day.

Whatever sins the NFL hierarchy has committed individually and collectively against blacks recently and over the years, they have at least done the right thing when either forced to or when their consciences mesh with their wallets. There is now a Rooney Rule, and it did once pull the Super Bowl out of Arizona while the state was patting itself on the back for rejecting a Martin Luther King holiday. Openly embracing a man who has built a career out of making black people the enemy (including, infamously, athletes), who repeatedly proclaims that he wants the black president to fail and who laughs at his setbacks and denigrates his successes – the NFL would be begging for a backlash that would scar it for years to come.

Bypassing that is easy enough. The tougher move would follow: to shun Checketts. To send a message that the days of owners being accountable only to themselves and each other are over, and that they are subject to a code of conduct, to the scrutiny of their associates, and to the image police, the same way the players are. If Vick needs to watch who he hangs around, then so does a prospective owner like Checketts. Limbaugh is far more of a threat to decent society than any of the knuckleheads Vick let get too close to him.

Tough break for Checketts, who otherwise seems like a decent person. But if he's palling around (to borrow an old campaign line) with Rush Limbaugh, maybe he's not what he seems.
(Photo: The Charlie Rose Show)

11 comments:

  1. It's very refreshing to see such a well written, non-biased, non-partisan article such as this one.
    You, my friend can prop yourself up with some of the great sportswriters of our time.

    Thanks again Keith Olbermann

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  2. What Limbaugh forgets about the NFL and the real deal about what's up with lib dirtbags is more than a clown like you will ever know.

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  3. This is obviously coming from someone who reads the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and probably watches MSNBC to get their "news." Dont post a link about the "worst manifestations" to a story about cops getting gunned down (this has exactly what to do with Limbaugh??) and ramble on and on about his supposed racism without facts. Be a real journalist and listen for your yourself or talk to the man. Oh wait thats not how you guys write your stories...

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  4. Liberalism 101:

    "Attack the messenger not the message"

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  5. Zowie! Keith Olbermann is writing a sports blog under an assumed name! Who knew?

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  6. another template article from the "black liberal sportswriter caucus"

    you must have gotten the memo

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  7. Dude- you just earned an invite to Lupica's show

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  8. the "big problem is sports writers, showing what blithering idiots they are,by bringing politics into their column. So why is Keith Oberman on Sunday night NFL?

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  9. What a ridiculous commentary. How did this get posted on Real Clear Sports? Don't they have any minimum standards? If I wanted to read this kind of drivel I would go to Democratic Underground not a sports site.

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  10. What the fuck, how did I get redirected to Daily Kos?

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