by John Walters

Good Luck With That

I get it. The fans want their sports to return. The ESPN talkmeisters are gong to cheerlead cuz they want sports to return as well. Certainly the hundreds of thousands of people who work directly in the sports industry want the sport to return.

And I don’t watch ESPN (or FS1) enough so maybe they’ve asked these questions, but my first Q is, Has anybody thought this thing through? The NUMBER ONE thing you hear from any league executive or spokesperson is how they have enough testing kits available. Great. Then what?

No 1: Who’s administering the tests? Is it a team official, a league official, an independent third party?

No. 2: What happens when, not if but when, a player tests positive? And, returning to Question 1, would we even ever find out?

Scenario: the Lakers and Clippers advance to the Western Conference finals (2,500 miles east of their mutual home floor, but whatevs) and LeBron tests positive before Game 6 or Game 7. He feels great but he tests positive. Now what? Oh, and what if he plays but then he infects 8 other players and someone’s grand mama who raised him dies? Then what?

The NBA (and other leagues) pay lots of lip service to testing. I haven’t heard (but then I haven’t really been paying attention) what they plan to do when a player tests positive. Especially if it’s during the NBA playoffs.

Further, and especially in the NFL: these players won’t be spreading the virus to one another in combat. They’ll be doing so in the locker room. If you think you can keep an NFL locker room virus-free, you’ve never been inside of one.

Magic Market Ride

Amazon (AMZN): Hits an all-time high of $2,664 this morning, up more than $1,000 per share (or more than 50%) since March 12.

Tesla (TSLA): Hits an all-time high of $1,004 this morning (first time breaking 1K), or up more than 180% since March 18 ($350).

Chesapeake (CHK): Down to $16.85 after hitting a high of $69 just two days earlier.

George Washington Owned Slaves, Too

Calhoun had what my friend Smo would call “Crazy Eyes”

Have you been following this Clemson kerfuffle? Makes you wonder if Alabama fans are behind it. See, former American vice president John Calhoun owned a plantation on the very site where Clemson now sits. And some of the school’s buildings, such as its Honors College, bears Calhoun’s name.

NFL stars DeAndre Hopkins and Deshaun Watson, former Dabo Dynamos, have spoken out in the past week saying that the school should disassociate itself from any connection to Calhoun. And you can imagine that Dabo is looking at this entire issue through the prism of ‘CRUITIN!

Calhoun had a highly decorated political career, one of the greatest in American history: Secretary of War (1817-1825), Vice President (1825-1832), Senator (1832-1850) with a short interregnum in 1844 when he was Secretary of State.

Calhoun was redolent of a South Carolinian of the present day, Lindsay Graham, a Republican whose beliefs and behavior changed almost 180 degrees when he suddenly realized his state’s ways were threatened. To Calhoun that meant become an entrenched pro-slavery hawk, saying that it was “a positive good” for master and slave alike. He defended minority rights, but did not extend that defense to slaves. Kind of a moral juxtaposition, but then when you’re the one in power you don’t have to worry about your ideas making sense. Or haven’t you been watching the news the past few years?

Whatever a 21st century person might think of Calhoun, he was a brilliant politician who was acting in what he thought were the best interests of South Carolina and the South. And oh, by the way, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also owned slaves.

It’s a sticky issue. How do you judge a 19th century statesman through a 21st century lens? Hell, and I’ve said this before, why not throw out the entire lot of them for A) disobeying mother England and B) committing genocide to steal the land from Native Americans?

No one’s hands are clean here. I love democracy and the Bill of Rights as much as the next dude, but the country was founded by rich men who didn’t want to pay taxes and opportunists who took land away from its rightful inhabitants by use of superior weaponry. Let’s not sugarcoat this.

Finally, the other day I was in the post office and there was a (and I’m presuming here) very White Supremacist-looking dude wearing a tight T-shirt that read “Your 1st Amendment Rights Don’t Mean That You Have To Say Something Stupid” and it was all I could do to not approach him and say, “That’s an ironic T-shirt you’re wearing.”

But I let it go. Post-Twitter me is all kumbaya and stuff.