There are a lot of people who watch sports to watch sports, not to be subjected to political sermons. From Robert Weissberg at unz.com:
The fabulously rich often develop appetites for foods whose cost far exceeds what ordinary folk can possibly imagine–$295 hamburgers and $1782 slices of pie.
Many of today’s professional athletes, particularly in football and basketball (slightly less in baseball) likewise possess an extravagant appetite. This super-expensive gourmet item is the Goose whose golden eggs enrich these jocks. Now, thanks to their seemingly irrepressible hostility to American values and traditions, they are determined to kill and eat the Goose, perhaps by taking a knee on its neck. Ironically, these rich athletes seem unaware that those they denounce for a litany of race-related sins fund their extraordinary incomes. Do millionaire woke athletes believe that watching the NBA or NFL is so genetically hard-wired that the American public is terminally hooked?
Following the NBA or NFL is not an addiction. Eating the Goose may soon be replaced by jobs at Walmart and dining at McDonalds.
Prior to World War II professional basketball and football barely existed as spectator sports. Americans flocked to boxing and horse racing, not the Decatur Staleys, the forerunner of the NFL Chicago Bears. Public attention is fickle, and today’s Super Bowl mania may eventually be forgotten like when 120,557 fans packed Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia to watch the 1926 Dempsey-Tunney heavy-weight championship fight.
To understand today’s extraordinary salaries and why this affluence is hardly eternal, consider sports prior to TV. In a nutshell, it is TV revenue, directly and indirectly, that has generated these salaries and allows Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors to earn $40,281,758 while even mediocre player earn $10 million. Correctly understood, Curry is a TV star who just happens to play basketball,
