by John Walters

Disperse Thy Neighbor*

*The judges will also accept “Bible Beltway”

Via my friend Andre (with a few editorial touches):

“Many people are saying this is a good book. I call it a great book, they call it a good book. But I call it great, maybe the greatest book ever. It’s the story of Jesus, but he wasn’t Mexican. He did a lot of great things for our country. A real patriot. I’ve read the book. Maybe not all of it, but probably more than anyone else has ever read.”

How many times during this presidency have you thought to yourself, I can’t even? And then it happens again. On the first day of June the president has his peeps tear gas and rubber-bullet a crowd peacefully assembling across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park so that he can stroll through the park and take this photo-op.

This right after he told America’s governors that they need to dominate protesters and threatened to turn the U.S. military on them (but who will be left to guard THE WALL???).

What a putz. Of course it’s all a part of the President’s and Jared’s and Stephen’s new program, or is that pogrom (in their case, what’s the difference), which we shall lovingly refer to as…

White, Hate American Summer!

Ah, yes. The temperatures are rising, the tempers are rising, millions more out of work than usual (why don’t they just watch CNBC and pivot to stay-at-home stocks?) and, oh yeah, the NBA Finals should be commencing right about now.

Can’t start a fire/Can’t start a fire without a spark/This gun’s for hire/Even if we’re just gassin’ em in the park…

It’s going to get uglier. We all know this, right? Even Richard Nixon felt bad about Kent State.

The Void

Writing in Sports Illustrated in 1962, the brilliant Robert H. Boyle cited another brilliant (albeit cynical, but we like it) mind in that of Albert Parry. Seems that Parry, writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, thought that sport might have a more sinister purpose than simply entertaining us.

“The wide interest of Anglo-Saxon masses in horse racing, football, baseball and similar sports tends to allay social unrest and lessens the possibility of political uprisings” Parry wrote, likely long before African-Americans were thought to matter in American life. He added that sports are a tool with which “the masses are to be kept in check, awed or distracted.”

Damn straight, A.P.

While we completely endorse what protesters, non-looting protesters, are doing nationwide, and while it is axiomatic that you need not be black to stand with the protesters, we do wonder if these demonstrations would be as widespread if baseball season were in full swing. And if LeBron and the Lakers were squaring off versus Giannis and the Bucks in the NBA Finals this week. Because that’s what shoulda been happening.

You wanna see large masses of humans gathering at night in early June of 2019? Go visit the outside of the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Just wondering what role the sports vacuum is playing in what’s happening right now.

By the way, today is the 31st anniversary of the Tianenmen Square uprising in Beijing. I wonder how that turned out.

Rock ‘n Roll Circus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQHqEpT9RJQ

You know how you know you’re a good band in 1969? John Lennon is in the crowd cheering. Here are the Rolling Stones in their lip-swagger Mick Jagger prime performing “Sympathy For The Devil.” Today is Charlie Watts’ 79th birthday, by the way.

The story behind this gig, which was filmed on December 11, 1968 but not released until 1996, is pretty fab. Mick and Pete Townshend envisioned an intimate festival of supergroups that would include the Stones, The Who, Jethro Tull and John Lennon. Led Zeppelin was considered, but were dropped (they weren’t yet Led Zep in ’68).

Anyway, the film was never released (at least not for 18 years). Some say the Stones were not thrilled with their performance, as they were exhausted (and high as kites). Others say The Who completely upstaged them, which got Mick to thinking the film shouldn’t be released. Maybe both.

Brian Jones would drown 7 months later.

Sports Year 1902

For the first time in recorded history, the year starts off right: with the Rose Bowl, making its debut on January 1. The otherwise sublime event was ruined by the Michigan Skunkbears trouncing the Stanford Indians 49-0.

Michigan finished 11-0 and won the national championship. Stanford literally quit after the third quarter (not surprised). So awful was the taste in everyone’s mouths that it would be another 13 years before the game was staged again.

****

On April 5, in a soccer match between England and Scotland in Glasgow’s Ibrox Park, an upper scaffold holding fans collapses. Dozens of people fall dozens of feet onto the cement ground beneath.

Two people die at the scene and 23 more will die from injuries sustained. After a brief respite, officials decide to continue the match in front of the 68,000 fans, fearing a cancellation will lead to more hysteria and death. Sadly, they were probably correct.

Twenty-five people die. The match ended in a 1-1 draw.

Sixty-nine years later, in 1971, this same park (now Stadium) will be the site of a crowd crush that kills 66, the worst soccer death toll until Hillsborough in 1989.

by John Walters

Toxic Cop Syndrome

It isn’t easy being a police officer. Sure, it looks glamorous on Blue Bloods, but not every cop’s dad is the police commissioner and they never show you the paper work and now that I’ve been subjected to a few episodes, I’ve noticed a disproportionately low number of African-American offenders on the series.

It isn’t easy being a cop. The pay’s not great, firefighters get the girls (women wonder, rightly, if you have anger-management issues), and you see the very worst of society day in and day out. You learn to not trust people, to assume the worst and yeah, a disproportionately high number of offenders you deal with are African-American (because when a CEO of a failing company takes $274,000 a month in retirement that’s not robbery but when a teenager lifts a pack of Skittles and a Squirt, that is).

It ain’t easy being the po po. But that’s the job. That’s what you signed up for. At every moment you must be better than your worst instincts. You must protect and serve. And too often cops release their aggression on black men.

People are protesting and rioting all over the country because of the murder of George Floyd. But only because it was caught on camera. This has been going on for more than a century . As someone wrote in graffiti near the White House this weekend, “How many times do we have to remind you that black lives matter?”

Delete Your Presidency

A pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans since the Super Bowl (and which any one reading this would have acted more promptly to stem and reduced the number of deaths by at least one-third). Roughly 75 cities enflamed and/or inflamed by riots and protesters—they looted Scottsdale Fashion Square, which is the whitest thing for 250 miles in any direction. Massive unemployment, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly 100 years.

And yet the president is tweeting out to his presidential rival that other nations are laughing at us because of him. Even when he’s in the Oval Office, Donald Trump tries to shift the blame. This is all on you, Donnie.

In Sunday’s New York Times Maureen Dowd had an excellent suggestion for Jack Dorsey which we full-heartedly endorse: block Donald Trump from Twitter. Forget about the possible legal ramifications or the stock market drop and put on the big boy pants: Do the right thing, Jack.

No one is abridging Donald Trump’s free speech. He’s the most powerful man on the planet. He can literally give the networks a few hours’ notice and be given a prime-time TV audience. Whenever he appears on camera, cable news will be there. And Twitter is a private company masquerading as a public service. It is not the latter, not legally.

But Twitter, where he can provoke and troll without really making it a soundbyte for the camera, where he can behave like the coward he is, is his preferred medium. Take it away, Jack. Just do it.

Mask Not What Your Country Can Do For You…

When the history of the demise of this country is finally written (from a cave somewhere in southern Arizona), historians will note that when the coronavirus was not even yet contained, hundreds of thousands of Americans assembled all over the country on the final weekend of May, 2020, to give the virus its own new booster shot.

Expect to see a surge in Covid-19 cases two to three weeks from now. No one’s saying people shouldn’t protest. We’ve never been in the “This isn’t the time to debate gun control/police brutality/” camp. It’s just an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances.

Ha-locaust

Two Holocaust jokes (it will always be too soon) from Ricky Gervais. The second one is quite profound.

Sports Year 1901

The American League repudiates its minor status and declares itself a “Major” league. Kind of like when I told that St. Mary’s junior in 1985 that “I’m kind of a big deal.” Anyway, it loses franchises in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Buffalo and Indianapolis and adds them in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia (the A’s) and Washington. Closer to what we now have. The Yankees do not yet exist.

***

Swede Ulrich Salchow wins the first of his 10 World Figure Skating Championships in the next 11 years. He also is the first to try, in competition, a jump in which he leaped off the back inside edge of one foot and landed on the back outside edge of the other. The leap has since been named after him.

***

Jim Caffrey shaves 10 minutes off his own record time in the Boston Marathon, winning in 2:29. Distance still at 25 miles.

****

In their first American League game ever, the Detroit Tigers trail 13-4 entering the bottom of the 9th versus Milwaukee. Of course the Tigers exploded for 10 runs to win 14-13.

The Tigers, by the way, found a creative way to obviate the city ordinance against playing on Sundays: owner James Burns built a small park on his own property just outside Detroit city limits, which is where the Tigers played home Sunday games for two years. It was known as Burns Park (no photos or diagrams are known to exist or else I’d have posted), which sat about 1,200.

***

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Baltimore manager John McGraw has signed a Cherokee Indian named Chief Tokohoma, but that he is actually an African-American player named Charlie Grant (who’d played on a minor league team in Cincy). When Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey got wind of the ruse, he threatened serious repercussions if the Orioles put Grant into a game. McGraw backed down and America would wait 46 years for Jackie Robinson.

***

On December 14 the first table tennis tournament is held at the Royal London Aquarium. But, in case you were wondering, not under water.

****

We only caught the last 15 minutes of the Lance Armstrong doc last night, but what we saw was incredible. We’ll get to it tomorrow, Susie B. The question about why he visited Jan Ullrich and the interviewer smartly keeping quiet and allowing Lance to roil himself into a slow furor, wow, that was perfect. It took a minute or so but the real Lance revealed himself. A more telling answer than the Floyd Landis quip that ESPN.com is hyping this morning.