Every Knee Shall Bend

When I was younger, I was a sports nut. We had season tickets to the Phoenix Suns’ games from their second season in existence, 1969–70, until I was well into my 20s. I went to the very first regular season game the Suns ever played. All I remember about that night was that the other team had green uniforms and that the pages of the program smelled funny. At six, I didn’t pay much attention to the action on the court.

As I advanced through grade school, I came to love the game. We even showed up, when the home court was in the old Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum, while the state fair was going on and the whole place reeked of cow manure. The closest the Suns ever came to a title, in those early years, was in 1976, and I’m still inclined to think that the Celtics robbed us. It’s a vague feeling, probably not backed up by the facts, but fans in Western cities tended to feel that we weren’t getting a fair deal. The East Coast-based powers-that-be in the league and the media didn’t take us seriously, and treated our team as if it had broken some sort of a sacred rule by having dared to advance that far in the playoffs.

My childhood hero was Suns’ star forward-guard Dick Van Arsdale. He’s a gentleman through and through, and has always been gracious to his fans. I have about 50 of his autographs, and at least half a dozen of his identical twin brother, Tom, who played alongside him on the team in their final year as pros. In ’76, 13-year-old me wrote Dick a letter inviting him to our house for a postseason dinner. He actually took the time to send me a handwritten response (with all those autographs in my collection, I knew no secretary had penned it), thanking me for my kind offer but saying that his family was headed out of town for some much needed rest.

The Suns’ sister franchise, the Phoenix Mercury, captivated my attention from Day One of the WNBA. And my all-time highlight as a sports fan will always be the Arizona Diamondbacks’ World Series victory over the mighty New York Yankees in the turbulent wake of 9/11. I still follow the fortunes of the baseball and basketball teams of my college alma mater, Grand Canyon University. But over the years, my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned considerably. It has turned, of late, into a hearty dislike.

I’m certainly not a knee-jerk hater of sports in general, as I believe my history makes clear. But I find it increasingly difficult to overlook the fact that there are always any number of teams complaining that their arenas or stadia are out-of-date and attempting to extort the taxpayers into building them new ones. And few of the players, these days, have the humility or grace of a Dick Van Arsdale, a Luis Gonzalez, or a Michele Timms. Far too many behave like spoiled brats, and some are downright criminal. Moreover, a growing number expect us not only to be interested in their political opinions, but to pay them ever higher salaries and lionize them as heroes for having aired them.

Take the current controversy over former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Yes — and do take it, please. For those who’ve been hiding under a rock on the dark side of the moon, last season he refused to stand for the national anthem before some games, choosing to kneel instead. He was protesting something having to do with slavery, police brutality, racism, or oppression in general — take your pick of which. In any case, the young man was grievously aggrieved, and the whole world was expected to care.

He showed up at a press conference, supposedly to explain himself, in a Fidel Castro t-shirt and socks that mocked police officers as pigs. It was immediately apparent that we were supposed to care not only about the causes he espoused, but about him. Perhaps the reason it’s so difficult to figure out exactly what he’s been trying to say is that the message that drowns out any other has consistently been “Look at me!” Celebrities with high-profile opinions tend to have that effect on the public. Few of us remember what it is they want to tell us, because what we seem to be especially expected to notice is that they are saying it.

I think I’ve written somewhere before — maybe here — that professional sports are training Americans to be morons. In my own opinion, that is by far the worst strike against them. It isn’t only that the stars of the game try to manipulate us into supporting the causes and candidates they prefer. It’s that we come to see politics as spectator sports. The entire Republican-Democrat duopoly that keeps our nation’s doings in its iron grip is, indeed, modeled after a neverending game.

It’s all about who wins or loses. Fandom for the favored side is seldom based on any sort of rational thought. And the mega-rich who run the show from behind the scenes rake in endless boodle — at the taxpayers’ expense.

Now the overlords of the NFL are worried that, since the onset of the Kaepernick kerfuffle (now ramped up, for his own apparent political gain, by President Trump), attendance has declined. While this is terrible news for them, and for the crybaby players, it may actually be great news for We, the People. It shows where the power really lies — and how much of it we truly hold. It also proves that even in our increasingly socialized nation, the free market is still powerful enough to win the game.