About a week ago, a friend of my wife gave us a pleasant surprise by offering to share her sports streaming subscription with us so the missus could watch some Detroit Red Wings hockey. Before we were parents, she and I would spend the entire weekend watching the sports we liked. She grew up in the Detroit area as a Wings fan; I'd always liked the NFL and developed an affinity for rugby union after finding a cable channel that broadcast lots of matches. I also discovered some Australian and Gaelic football broadcasts and found those sports entertaining as well. Rugby union ultimately took over as my favorite sport to watch, knocking American football off its perch.
Then, somewhere along the way, we abandoned all our TV subscriptions. We got busy with being parents, and our focus shifted to different places. We stopped following sports, and watching TV, altogether.
And so with my crappy health getting crappier, I took my wife's friend's offer to share her sports service with us as a timely and welcome respite. Maybe enjoying some sports for the first time in years would take my mind off how miserable I constantly feel.
Turns out the hockey is still fun to watch, but the rugby clubs and leagues I used to follow have been split up among numerous services. There's really no practical way I could afford to subscribe to everything I'd like to see.
But now that I've indulged in some sports viewing for the first time in around a decade, I'm not sure I want to see any of it. To put it bluntly, I hate that the idiotic politics that have infected our world have also seeped into sports.
For example, I was excited at first to see we'd gotten back into sports viewership just in time to catch the Women's Rugby World Cup -- only it's not the Women's Rugby World Cup anymore, just the Rugby World Cup. That's right, there's now the men's Rugby World Cup... and the Rugby World Cup, apparently played by some strange species of non-men, because, you know, no one can define what a woman is. They're formless, like some strange etheric gas.
World Rugby's insane rationale for un-women-ing women is that the "women's" qualifier subordinates women's rugby to men's rugby. Apparently, it didn't occur to these pinheads that "women's" was a useful descriptor, or that they could have added "men's" to the name of the men's World Cup if they were concerned about having one game seem inferior to the other. So now, women have just been simply erased. How very depressingly typical of the gender madness today that pretends there's no difference between the sexes, that thinks "woman" is a tube of lipstick and a dress, and that expects actual women to give up their private spaces and be referred to as "people with a uterus," "menstruators," "chestfeeders," and "birthing persons" to accommodate a vanishingly small number of men who want to "identify" as something they aren't.
Accordingly, I wasn't at all surprised to find that World Rugby's ban on transgender "women" from playing women's rugby was greeted with outrage, rather than welcomed as the commonsense move that it was. "Absurd," reports The New York Times, which should know better. "Baffling," reports The Guardian, because it's The Guardian.
I get that people immersed in the irrational and emotion-driven Emperor-Has-No-Clothes religion of gender think "man" and "woman" are interchangeable, defined by feelings and apparel rather than by actual biological sex. But those of us who live in the real world understand that men are bigger, faster, and stronger than women, and that allowing men to play a violent contact sport against women is just asking for serious injury, if not worse.
Well, OK, let's set not-men's rugby aside for a moment and take a look at the game of cricket. The T20 version of the game is holding its own World Cup at the moment. I'd never sat down and watched the sport before, and I actually found it part mesmerizing and part deeply intriguing. Seems like quite a cerebral and strategic game, with a relaxing pace.
But it wasn't until after I'd gotten sucked in that I realized teams were taking a knee before their matches, a virtue-signaling action that apparently began with the death of career criminal George Floyd. Hey, guys, good for you that you oppose racism. How stunning and brave. Really taking an edgy risk there. But I don't watch sports to see you demonstrate to me what your political views are. Nor do I watch them to have you scold me over what a horrible person you think I am. I watch sports to forget about the crap in the real world and enjoy a diversion for a few hours.
Incidentally, about half of the American not-men's rugby team also took a knee during the playing of the national anthem during their World Cup games.
Even hockey is on the woke bandwagon: The Red Wings are hosting a rainbow-stuffed "pride night" in the near future. You need a special night to celebrate both your bedroom partners and one of the Seven Deadly Sins? Isn't an entire month enough?
Of course, football's Redskins and baseball's Indians are dead, along with the CFL's Edmonton Eskimos up north -- as dead as Aunt Jemima, the Land o' Lakes Indian, Uncle Ben, and the Cream of Wheat chef, ironically leaving an old white Quaker as practically the only classic food mascot left standing.
Sad to still see more than a few people still wearing useless face diapers at all these sporting events, too.
And then there are the ads. Good Lord. You'd think the entire world was black and gay. The HIV pharma ads featuring dudes kissing in romantic slow motion were just a delightful thing to see during a sports match, with my kid in the room, no less. (Don't say I didn't warn you if you click the link.) Meanwhile, Red Riding Hood has been race-swapped in an Amazon Christmas ad -- which of course only ever says "Holiday" and never the dreaded word "Christmas," that day that roughly only nine out of 10 people celebrate. Wouldn't want to offend anyone.
This gross ad from ESPN seems to sum up well the state of sports. It's no longer about entertainment and forgetting your problems, but about aggressive woke advocacy.
The more I think about it, the more I think it might be best to just let my wife watch hockey. We'll see. If you're looking for me, I'll just be over here watching Western civilization collapse.
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