Thursday, July 23, 2015

Tom Brady vs. a Little League team

This is an insightful analysis of "Deflategate", the scandal involving the New England Patriots' cheating by deflating the footballs they played with.  The author points out the racial double standard in US pro sports, whereby Richard Sherman, after making a good play and bragging about it, is demonized as unsportsmanlike (not to mention thuggish and apelike), while Tom Brady, after shitting on the very principle of sportsmanlike conduct by repeatedly, calculatedly cheating, receives little criticism.  The author also cites an all black Little League team from Englewood, Chicago who was stripped of their national championship due to a minor technical violation.  (The rule the team broke was recruiting from "outside their zone", which is absurd considering that the Englewood neighborhood is a very transient place of school closures, public housing relocation, and people moving in and out as their fortunes change.  I imagine it would be almost impossible to field an entire team of kids just from the neighborhood that stayed in exactly the same place for a whole year.)  Anyway, those big bad Chicago pre-teens had to be made an example of, so they were stripped of their title, though no one would ever think of robbing the poor little millionaires on the New England Patriots of the titles they've won while systematically cheating.

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