Posted on 10/16/2017 8:03:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
Y.A. Tittle died last week. A Hall of Fame quarterback for the New York Giants, he is best known for the taking a knee on a football field. Actually, it was two knees.
In September 1964, the Giants were facing the Pittsburgh Steelers at old Pitt Stadium. Tittle was 38 years old and at the tail end of a 17-year professional career. He had led his team to three straight NFL Championship Games, in ’61, ’62, and ’63, but did not win.
In the game against the Steelers, he dropped back into his own end zone to throw a pass. He was viciously knocked to the ground and his helmet flew off. The pass was intercepted for a touchdown.
He struggled to his knees and stared blankly into the open field, bleeding from his head. The other players backed off and left him to himself. At that moment, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette photographer Morris Berman snapped a picture.
It is among the greatest sports photographs ever taken. There is Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston and Ben Hogan with his one iron at Merion’s final hole. But those are about achievement and victory. This is about the struggle to rise after being knocked down.
People watch the NFL to revel in such mythology. A game where redemption is purchased at a great physical cost serves as an allegory for the common man.
In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.
In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.
The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.
Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.
A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.
He knew, no doubt, that protesting the national anthem would be offensive to some people. With Hillary Clinton’s inevitable triumph looming, it was generally considered okay to offend those people. They would be described by Hillary Clinton a few days after Kaepernick’s protest as a basket of deplorables. The NFL was just pandering to the prevailing sentiment when it green lighted Kaepernick’s cause. Then Trump won.
The rule before Trump was that half the country had to endure any scold, put up with all name calling, and generally be treated like idiots by popular culture. The brilliant lights who made the rules never considered that scolding half the country may, in itself, have been divisive. And that people have been stewing about it for years.
When the 2017 seasons started, President Trump railed at the NFL for permitting the protests. Rather than back down, the NFL doubled down, employing the double speak of the cornered weakling. Try to imagine John Facenda speaking the words, “The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture” – you can’t.
Television ratings have tanked. By permitting its games to become a forum for liberal politics, the NFL broke faith with its fan base.
Y.A. Tittle quit football after kneeling in the end zone and sold insurance. He hung Berman’s photograph in his office with the caption, “Nothing Comes Easy.” Last week, his death coincided with the end the NFL mythology he represented. The league is no longer a fanfare for the common man, an allegory about the struggle to get up after being knocked down.
It is easy to drop to one knee in a deliberate pose to protest something. Rising from two knees after spending yourself in a physical battle, that’s not so easy. It is why people watched, Roger.
As if the players haven’t. The druggies. The DUI’s. The get into fights at the strip clubs. Naw, he couldn’t do it all alone. He had a lot of help from the premadonna players.
“Why would the consumer pay more for a car that was a piece of sh!t?”
Things looked different back then. Absent a low-cost alternative, consumers would have jumped from one US company to another. Besides, without the illegal dumping, American autos need never have gotten as bad as they did.
“These weren’t Ford Escorts that were produced at that plant — they were Thunderbirds. Did Japanese companies even produce a car that competed for market share with a Thunderbird back then?”
Come on, negative effects on the company at large are negative effects on every model, especially when you’re talking about a niche product like the T-Bird.
The facts simply don’t bear that out. Ford didn’t stop making Thunderbirds. They just stopped making them at that plant because the highly compensated UAW workers couldn’t produce cars with the kind of quality that any normal human being would expect for the price they were paying.
“The facts simply don’t bear that out.”
If the ones you have don’t, then you need more information.
“Ford didn’t stop making Thunderbirds. They just stopped making them at that plant”
So, closing a plant is a sign that the company was doing very well?
“because the highly compensated UAW workers couldn’t produce cars with the kind of quality that any normal human being would expect for the price they were paying.”
Because the company was weak, they lacked the resources to take effective action to correct that. They were weak because the Japanese were underselling them something pitiful. The Japanese auto makers were able to do that because of subsidies from the Japanese government.
I don’t know why you are so intent on blaming American auto makers exclusively. Wake up. Crimes were committed against them. The Japanese got the elevator; our boys got the shaft.
60 minute MEN!!!
This was how the NFL hooked a generation, now aging out of the audience, and never to be replaced.
He didn’t kill it, but he’s been letting it get gang-raped.
NFL team owners are just as much at fault. Roger Goodell works for the owners and he doesn’t even fart without the NFL owners permission.
Numerous NFL owners came out attacking president Trump the same day that Goodell released his in his initial statement.
Pretty sure that was a tactical ploy hoping that in exchange for a week or two of solidarity and anti Trump rhetoric, the players would be satisfied, settle down a bit, and start standing for the anthem.
It didn’t work.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.