Ea O Ka Aina: Sports

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Stop Fukushima as Olympic venue

SUBHEAD: Japan is expanding 2020 Olympic events to be held in Fukushima Prefecture.

By Staff on 8 April 2017 for the Fukushima is Still News -
(http://www.fukushima-is-still-news.com/2017/04/no-olympics-in-fukushima.html)

Image above: Mashup illustration of Japanese Olympic baseball pitcher wearing radiation filter as he plays near stacked radioactive waste from nearby Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. From original article.

Children are our most beloved and cherished gift and they are also the most vulnerable to the generational damage of man-made radiation in air, food, soil and water.

Around the world children who are currently adolescent and possibly younger are in training to compete at the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Japan.

Their parents most likely have no idea that some of the venues are near the most devastating and ongoing nuclear and industrial disaster in world history, Fukushima Daiichi.

Source:
(http://globalnews.ca/news/2571822/japan-olympics-minister-backs-fukushima-as-host-venue-for-2020/)
(http://in.reuters.com/news/picture/inside-fukushimas-j-village?articleId=INRTR2TVZW)

On March 11, 2016, the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima triple nuclear meltdowns, the Japanese Olympic minister Toshiaki Endo stated to the Associated Press that preliminary softball and baseball could be moved from the host city of Tokyo to Fukushima Prefecture.

But it gets worse, now soccer has been added too. This isn’t mere speculation, in fact organizers are developing J Village, only a few miles from Fukushima Daiichi, into a training facility for Japan’s soccer team and possibly more. J Village was used as a disaster staging and support facility during the early days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Source:
(http://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2016/01/30/soccer/j-village-to-serve-as-2020-olympic-soccer-training-center/#.VwWPM32AOko)

So how did we go from Fukushima the world's worst nuclear industrial disaster to one of the venues for the 2020 Olympic Games?

In a stunning development in 2013, Japan’s Olympic bid was won by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe when he promised the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that "it (Fukushima Daiichi) has never done, and will never do, any damage in Tokyo”.

Consequently, the IOC and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) are now left to engage in a dangerous game of bait and switch by using venues not only in Tokyo as originally agreed upon, but also in Fukushima Prefecture, not far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site.

Source:
(http://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1015905/how-tokyo-2020-won-its-olympics-and-paralympic-bid-despite-fukushima)

Holding Olympic games in Fukushima Prefecture will endanger young athletes. To date there is no solution in sight to the ongoing radiation releases leaking into air, soil, food and water not only from Fukushima Daiichi but also from areas around the country that have been used for the open storage and incineration of toxic and radioactive tsunami rubble and garbage.

The man in charge of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi, Naohiro Masuda, stated on NHK television in Japan that the solution to the radioactive leaks at Fukushima Daiichi “still needs to be invented” and appealed for international assistance.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government and IOC are planning for children, parents and coaches worldwide to travel to the region for the 2020 Olympics.

Source:
(http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/nuclearwatch/20150331.html)

Hundreds of types of radioisotopes are emitted in nuclear accidents, many of which are long-lived and remain hazardous for millions of years. Easily inhaled, they pose a significant danger to everyone in affected environments and certainly to athletes during strenuous competition. Consider these facts:

**There is no safe dose. Women are two times more vulnerable to the harmful effects of ionizing radiation than men. Girls are at 10 times more at risk, and boys are 5 times more at risk.

The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation 7 (BEIR 7) report states "it is unlikely that a threshold exists for the induction of cancers" meaning that any dose of radiation, no matter how small, carries health risks.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster it became scientifically evident that the DNA damaging effects of ionizing radiation are passed on to future generations.

Source:
(http://www.nirs.org/radiation/radhealth/radhealthhome.htm)
(http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/356082/23097333/1373633249137/radchild.pdf?token=tvHeUhkD2v%2BuhKtz620LTq25fEQ%3D)
(http://www.ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl/HEofC25yrsAC.html)

**Highly radioactive water used to cool Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged reactors is leaking and also being intentionally discharged into the Pacific Ocean every day. In addition, highly radioactive soil and other toxic waste has been moved to locations all over Japan and stored in open fields or incinerated by the ton. In one location, nearly 11 million tons of bagged radioactive garbage, soil and more is accumulating in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture.

Source:
(http://fukushima-diary.com/2016/03/2029900000-bq-of-cs-134137-leaked-as-contaminated-water-in-fukushima-plant/)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqTwxa2ir_E)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCP7PFT9coU)

**Radioactive hotspots have been detected in other areas of Japan including Tokyo. In one case even further south, in Yokohama, a petition on behalf of public schools and childcare facilities is pleading for the removal highly contaminated mud from rainwater recycling tanks, school roofs and gutters.

Source:
(https://ssl.form-mailer.jp/fms/b1285961429052)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBkrIgJUWLk)
(http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=10688)

**Bioaccumulation and migration of radionuclides are extremely complex issues. Greenpeace has reported high readings in areas of Fukushima Prefecture where extensive decontamination measures had already been taken by the government. This information has informed local citizens who had been told previously that they could return home.

Source:
(http://www.greenpeace.org/japan/ja/library/publication/20160304_report/)

**Tokyo Electric and Power Company (TEPCO) the owner of Fukushima Daiichi reactors, as of March 2017, has not been able to locate the molten fuel that continues to release significant amounts of radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean. TEPCO is incinerating more than 8 tons of garbage per day, much of it toxic and radioactive, with plans to burn 90% of all waste on site. It's just one example of an aggressive nationwide incineration campaign underway for several years.

Source:
(http://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsnew-incinerator-for-fukushima-waste-4849989)
(http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/tepco-group-contracts-kyoto-firms-to-incinerate-iwate-waste)

**To Mark THE 6th Anniversary of the ongoing Fukushima disaster, March 11, 2017, nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, provides the most recent update on the condition and near impossible task of "cleaning up" the Fukushima site:

Source:
(http://www.fairewinds.org/fukushima/)

**Drinking water and food are critical concerns, because internal contamination is the most dangerous form of radiation exposure. Trace amounts of radionuclides from Fukushima Daiichi have been found in the tap water of numerous cities, and some samples contain both Cesium 134 and 137. Cumulative trace amounts can pose a significant health problem because there is no safe dose.

Source:
(http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=15134)

**Laboratory tests have documented that some of the highest concentrations of radiation from Fukushima Daiichi are airborne which then settle to the ground. Recent samples from vacuum cleaner bags collected in Japan show readings as high as a shocking 4,454 Becquerel’s per kilogram.

Source:
(http://www.iwakisokuteishitu.com/pdf/e-monthly_data.pdf)

**The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) guideline for the public is 1 millisievert per year compared to Japan's 20 mSv/year since the disaster. By hosting the Olympics, Japan is willing to expose not only their own citizens but also children, young adults, families and coaches worldwide to higher than publicly acceptable levels of radiation per the ICRP. The emergency guideline of 20 mSv/year was never intended by ICRP to be a long term solution.

Source:
(http://www.icrp.org/docs/p111(special%20free%20release).pdf)

Allowing the Olympic and Paralympic games in Fukushima is nothing less than preposterous, because it's impossible to shield children from widespread radioactive contamination. Even after 30 years, the 30 km area around Chernobyl remains an exclusion zone, yet only 5 years after the Fukushima disaster began there are misguided plans to train young athletes in the town of Nahara at J Village, which is located 19 km (12 mi) from Fukushima Daiichi.

Source:
(http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Nuclear-reports/Nuclear-Scars/)
(http://kyodonews.net/news/2016/01/30/47883)

Here in the United States, Former PResidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has stated grave concerns about the dangers of nuclear power and has called for the immediate closure of the Indian Point nuclear reactors near New York City.

Now that you know the facts, we petition you to learn as much as possible too and then work to stop any and all plans that will endanger athletes, their families and coaches worldwide due to the Fukushima Daiichi ongoing nuclear disaster at the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics.

Holding the 2020 Games in Fukushima or in fact anywhere in Japan will not, in reality, make the Fukushima Daiichi humanitarian and environmental crisis go away. It will only spread it much farther afield. The whole world is watching this very dangerous game.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Continuing Fukushima danger 4/14/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima worse than ever 2/5/17

Football Fever is a disease

SUBHEAD: TGI knows the priorities on this island - football and gambling over pesticides, traffic, self-reliance and food sustainability.

By Juan Wilson on 9 September 2015 for the Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2015/09/football-fever-is-disease.html)

Image above: Phil Heath, the top rated finalist in the 2014 Mr. Olympia Contest. From (http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/2014-olympia-weekend-mr-olympia-final-results.html).

Today I read the article under the top "news" storyon the Forum page of Kauai's Garden Island News.

Its title was "Here's Hoping Kauai catches Football Fever". The article encouraged readers to enter a contest that had a weekly payoff of $250 for the who football season. You make the best "picks" you can and the winner is randomly selected from the best "picks".

The paper boasts; "A grand prize winner at season’s end determined by a random drawing from all entries will win a trip for two to Las Vegas and $500 cash."

I guess the "randomness" of selecting the winner makes this technically not gambling, but that's a fine point. It's not much different than the little yellow cards that used to be passed around the office on Friday afternoons with college and pro football team winners selected. "Het what's the spread?"

Somehow Hawaii has a fixation on Vegas and gambling. It seems as if that's about top choice destination for people here on Kauai. I know it's Elton John, Cirque du Soleil, and 2015 Mr. Olympia Contest scheduled for the Los Vegas Convention Center.

To me it's pathetic that this self promoting puff piece was the only "opinion" published on the TGI Forum. I guess the TGI knows the priorities on this island - football and gambling over pesticides, traffic, self-reliance and food sustainability.

Below is the TGI promo for more readers and another opinion by an ex Football Fever Fan.

Here's Hoping Kauai catches Football Fever

By Editorial Staff on 9 September 2015 for the Garden Island
(http://thegardenisland.com/lifestyles/opinion/here-s-hoping-kauai-catches-football-fever/article_2f804469-c577-567d-aa42-9c005cb4d4db.html)

There are some offers that are too good to be true.

There are some that are as good as presented.

The Garden Island’s Football Fever contest falls into the latter. Why, you ask, is that? We’ll explain and we’ll start with what is sure to get your attention: $250. That’s right. The winner, each week over the 20 weeks of the contest, wins $250 and who can’t use some extra cash.

The week one winner was Rory Rayno of Lihue. And yes, he won $250 cash. Congratulations to Rory.

To claim that money, all you have to do is fill out the ballot that’s in the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday TGI, match or beat the top-scoring panelist, and have your name randomly drawn from the qualified entries. On the panel are Richard Stein, operations manager of The Garden Island, Nick Celario, TGI sports writer, and our friends Ron Wiley and Marc Valentin of Kong Radio.

Before we go further, we should explain how Football Fever works. There are 15 college and pro games selected for the ballot each week. The Las Vegas point spread is also factored in, which makes it a bit more difficult. Still, all you have to do is pick which team you believe will win.

Some of this weekend’s intriguing matchups include Notre Dame at Virginia; Oregon at Michigan St.; Green Bay at Chicago; and Seattle at St. Louis.

A grand prize winner at season’s end determined by a random drawing from all entries will win a trip for two to Las Vegas and $500 cash. Not a bad deal at all.

The odds aren’t bad, either. About 200 folks usually in the weekly ballot, which makes us think this is either one of the best-kept secrets on the island, or people just don’t believe this offer is the real deal. It is.

All you have to do is turn in the completed form by 4 p.m. Thursday at any PS&D Tires/Napa Auto parts in Kapaa, Lihue, Hanapepe and Kalaheo, or 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday at TGI’s office, 3-3137 Kuhio Highway. Each Friday, we publish updates on how the panelists are doing.

We’re betting there aren’t better odds out there to win $250 each week. And if you chose to participate in Football Fever, your odds of winning that grand prize trip to Vegas and some spending money aren’t bad, either.

We’d love to see more folks join us because this deal is as good as it sounds.

Football Fever. Catch it.

Church of the Gridiron

David Cook talks with Steve Almond in September 2015 in the Sun
(http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/477/the_church_of_the_gridiron)

American football officially began in the years following the Civil War. A crude blend of soccer and rugby, the sport was brutal, with a fast-and-loose set of rules that gave it the appearance of a gang fight. In 1905, 19 players died, and another 137 were injured; the Chicago Tribune called the season a “death harvest.” President Theodore Roosevelt finally intervened, calling a group of influential sportsmen to the White House in order to help transform the game.

Reforms followed, such as legalizing the forward pass and penalizing unsportsmanlike conduct. The sport became safer, and by midcentury it had entered a golden age of players like quarterback Johnny Unitas and fullback Jim Brown. Games were televised, and in the late sixties the Super Bowl was created.

Today pro football is the unparalleled giant of the sports world. In 2014 forty-five of the fifty top-rated television broadcasts were football games. More Americans follow football than follow Major League Baseball, NBA basketball, and NASCAR racing combined. The National Football League (NFL) earns nearly $10 billion a year in profits, with an expressed goal of $25 billion. During the season, Americans spend more time watching football than going to religious services. Pro football has become the spectacle that unites people in this country more than any other.
“But it has a dark side,” says author Steve Almond.

For four decades Almond was a consummate fan, soaking up all that football offered. Then, in 2014, he did the unthinkable: he stopped. No more games. No more listening to sports talk radio. He would become football fandom’s conscientious objector.

In Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto he writes, “Our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.” A New York Times bestseller, the book is an eloquent examination of America’s most popular sport — in particular, the aspects many fans tend to ignore: its astounding injury rate, its exaggeration of gender stereotypes, and its inherent violence.

Born in 1966, Almond grew up an Oakland Raiders fan in Palo Alto, California. Like many Americans, he started watching football with his father. From an early age, however, he had misgivings about the sport, especially after seeing players suffer paralyzing injuries. Two years ago Almond’s mother experienced a terrifying delirium that landed her in an intensive-care unit. Her suffering helped him realize that he couldn’t in good conscience cheer for a sport that caused its players to endure similar symptoms.

Almond lives, writes, and teaches near Boston. In addition to novels and short stories, he has written memoirs about his love for candy (Candyfreak) and rock music (Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life). He and I spoke this past winter, at the height of football season, and Almond argued convincingly that to understand this country, we have to understand its favorite game.

Cook: What role does football play in the U.S. today?

Almond: It’s the largest shared narrative in the country: emotionally, psychologically, and maybe even financially. My sense is that more Americans — male and female, gay and straight, of all races and classes — are deeply invested in football than in any other single activity. For forty years I was a member in good standing of the Church of the Gridiron. The game can be brutal, but it’s also complex and satisfying to watch.

When Ernest Hemingway wanted to understand Spanish culture, he went to see the bullfights. Football is our bullfight: an expression of our cultural values and a profound statement about our national consciousness. It’s important to understand what it does for us and to us, what its pleasures are and its moral costs. But football means so much to so many Americans that we’re terrified of interrogating it.

Cook: What part of football does our conscience want to ignore?

Almond: Every time I sat down to watch a game, I was basically agreeing that this form of entertainment was worth whatever injuries the players might suffer. That’s true of any sport, but in the case of football, which is much more violent than most other sports, the price is higher, particularly when it comes to brain damage. In the fall of 2014 the NFL admitted that 30 percent of its players — nearly one in three — will suffer “long-term cognitive ailments,” and that they are likely to develop such problems at “notably younger ages” than the average American.

That means that if there are 1,700 active NFL players at any given time, about 500 will end up with permanent cognitive disabilities. And when we watch football, we’re not only OK with that: we pay good money to watch it happen.

That’s the first moral issue a football fan has to ignore, and the folks who serve up football make it easy to do. The helmets and uniforms and pads the players wear not only protect but dehumanize them. They look almost like robots. Most of the time we don’t see their faces. We never have to look at the dazed eyes of a player who’s just suffered a brain injury.

For the most part any player who’s seriously injured gets swept out of sight, and we don’t see him until he’s ready to play again. In this sense football is just a reflection of a broader American mentality: when something becomes too upsetting, it’s shuttled out of view, whether it’s the body of a soldier returning from Iraq or a mentally ill homeless person who finds his or her way into a wealthy neighborhood. They are all made to disappear.

It’s the same with any product we consume. We want our fancy cellphones, but we don’t want to think about the mistreated workers who make them. We want our bacon, but we don’t want to visit the slaughterhouse. We love our football, but we don’t want to see a former player in the late stages of dementia.

The people who market football have been pretty ingenious in portraying the game as wholesome and valorous. Obviously there are aspects of football that are laudable: the grace and athleticism on display, the teamwork, the viewers’ sense of connection with family and friends. The problem is that you’re also watching human beings get physically ruined. The announcer never says, “Hey, I hope you enjoyed that reception.

The receiver just sustained a grade-two concussion. If he enters the field of play again, he may be at risk for second-impact syndrome, which would cause his brain to swell until he dies. Enjoy your chicken wings!”

You might call what’s happening “assisted suppression.” With the help of those marketing geniuses, we’re suppressing our empathy and accepting violence and injury as the natural order of things. This is why, even with the clear evidence this past fall that the sport causes brain damage, the NFL didn’t come to a screeching halt. Fans felt bad for a few minutes, but the television ratings were the second highest ever.

Cook: How much is known about the relationship between football and neurodegenerative diseases?

Almond: It’s obvious that football players are at a greater risk for such diseases than the general population, but exactly how much greater isn’t known. One study, by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, examined almost 3,500 men who had played in the NFL from 1959 through 1988 and found that their risk for Alzheimer’s and ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, was four times greater than average. And you have to remember that football in 2015 is substantially different from football in 1988 or 1959.

The players now are bigger, faster, and stronger — and this is true at every level, from high school to college to the pros. There’s an expectation that players will become bigger, faster, and stronger each year, which means collisions of greater force, and nobody knows what the long-term results of that will be for today’s players.

Cook: Some former players with cognitive ailments have taken their own lives. Is there a link between concussions and suicide?

Almond: Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, who were huge NFL stars in their primes, both committed suicide after retirement. Duerson left a note asking that his brain be examined for trauma, and he was found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the symptoms of which include mood swings, violent behaviors, depression, and suicidal ideation. Seau was also found to have had CTE. Think about how you would feel if your brain no longer worked right. In a sense, those players were driven to kill themselves by dementia.

The problem isn’t concussions so much as subconcussive events — the hits and tackles that don’t cause immediate injury but that have a cumulative effect over time. Medical researchers at Boston University, the University of North Carolina, and elsewhere are working to figure out exactly what those effects are. It’s hard to do, though, because former players are reluctant to disclose the extent of their injuries, especially ones that affect their brains. These are guys who are used to being idolized.

They don’t want to be seen in a reduced state. And we don’t yet have the technology to determine the extent of brain injuries in living players. So most studies have to depend on autopsies. As of last year, those autopsies found that seventy-six out of seventy-nine former NFL players showed signs of CTE. But those are just the players whose families requested a brain exam after death. Nobody knows what the overall percentages are.

One thing is clear: the NFL and the National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA] want fans thinking as little as possible about brain damage. After all, you can’t sell football as an all-American family pastime if people are too aware of the harm it causes to players.

The NFL and NCAA are, of course, also working to make the game safer, but there are only so many rules that can be tweaked. In the end the primal spectacle of the contact — the hits — is a reason many fans love the game. Leagues can do only so much to reduce those hits before they start losing fans.

So, yes, the NFL and NCAA have instituted stiff penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits and even redesigned kickoffs to reduce high-speed collisions. But, again, all of this only helps limit concussions. The problem is that the permanent brain injuries arise in part because of those subconcussive hits, the ones players receive nearly every single play, and there’s no way to engineer those out. The tackle will always be part of the game.

Cook: What did you think of Chris Borland, the promising linebacker who retired earlier this year at the age of twenty-four because he believed the risks of playing football outweighed the rewards?

Almond: I think Borland had his consciousness raised. He talked to doctors, former players, researchers, and journalists, and he realized that he stood a good chance of getting brain damage. He made a rational decision that would be completely unsurprising in almost any other profession. But because he’s a football player, sportscasters and fans were astonished.

Cook: Many Americans say that football has taught them discipline, teamwork, and perseverance. Isn’t that a good thing?

Almond: There are great arguments to be made on behalf of organized sports, such as the way they test your physical limits and help you bond with teammates. All that is real. My argument would be: You don’t need to play a game in which people’s brains are at risk. You can get those same lessons from another sport — or from a great teacher or pastor. And it’s important to draw a distinction between the game, which is harder to judge, and the industry that has grown up around it, which is pretty much capitalism on steroids.

Saying football is a learning experience is just one of many arguments that people make in its defense. Any fan has a whole suitcase full of rationalizations for why he or she watches. I know, because I carried my own around for forty years.

For example, some people say that for “certain kids” — meaning poor kids, and usually kids of color — football is their only way to go to college. If that’s true, then we’ve got a problem, because it means we don’t give a damn about educating the poor unless they can knock down a middle linebacker. Then they deserve our attention because they entertain us, not because of the content of their character, mind, heart, and spirit.

I’m not trying to abolish football. I just want people to see the sport for what it is and ask themselves: Why do we need this beautifully savage game in our lives?

Cook: But football’s certainly not the only dangerous sport out there.

Almond: I’m not sure why the existence of other violent sports justifies our consumption of football. That feels like an absurd dodge. Regardless, football is by far the most dangerous of any major team sport, because frequent high-speed collisions between huge men are the norm. What other major sport ends almost every play with a tackle? How come there’s an ambulance on standby at high-school football games?

Hockey can be violent, but it’s not predicated on collisions. Those are incidental. Boxing is more violent than football, but it’s also more honest: fans are forced to see the gruesome results, to face the barbarism. This is why boxing has fallen out of favor, I think. What football has done is to mass-market sanitized and sanctioned violence. And there’s an entire ministry of propaganda — otherwise known as the sports media — whose goal is to keep fans from focusing on the violence and to downplay injuries by referring to a concussion, for instance, as “getting your bell rung.”

Cook: What do you say to those who argue that the players are compensated for the risk — that their pay grade at least matches the danger they are in?

Almond: I say they’re right. Pro players are well compensated. The most talented among them earn millions of dollars a season, and I can understand exactly why a young man who has spent his life dreaming of playing in the NFL would happily take the risk. My question is: Why do we, the fans, choose to consume the game, knowing that it causes permanent injury, including brain damage? After all, we are the ones who underwrite the football-industrial complex. We’re the reason the players get paid all that dough. And we’re the reason that many high-school and college kids regard football as a path to wealth and glory.

That’s another big lie. Only one out of every five hundred high-school seniors who play football will ever make the pros — and that’s according to the NFL Players Association. The vast majority of college players will never earn a dime playing the game, despite the profound risks they incur.

Most fans have no interest in pondering why they support such a violent pastime. They don’t want to feel complicit. And the sports media have a vested interest in protecting fans from feeling complicit, because they might stop watching. Instead the media vilify a few convenient scapegoats — out-of-control players, greedy owners — and we tell ourselves that they’re the problem, not us.

Cook: Is football, especially for males, a socially acceptable outlet for aggression?

Almond: Absolutely. Lots of cultures use athletic competition to sublimate aggression. Fandom is a relatively benign form of tribalism. We also use sports to celebrate physical strength and poise and teamwork and other virtues. But the question remains: What are the moral costs of a particular sport? The Mayans played a game in which members of the losing team were sometimes executed. By modern standards that’s barbaric, right? But we are OK with players getting maimed for the sake of entertainment. That’s a sign of a culture in serious trouble.

Football is a powerful refuge. When we watch, we get so absorbed that we forget our troubles. It’s existential relief. You are a part of some exalted event. I didn’t watch the 2014 Super Bowl, but 111 million people tuned in. We are desperate to find something that will connect us. Football is a quick and easy solution.

Yet, at a certain point, you have to step back and ask: Why is this the church I worship in? What is the nature of this religion we have created?

As a fan I did feel a connection to the people around me, especially if my team was winning, but I also felt lost inside. Watching football became a lonely experience, like feeding an addiction. It wasn’t a way for me to engage with my problems. It wasn’t enlarging my empathy or my moral imagination. It wasn’t satisfying a deeper spiritual need.

Having said that, I can’t say to other fans that the holy feeling they have when they walk into their team’s stadium isn’t real. It is. My beef is that those feelings — our devotion to athletic heroism, our sentimental loyalty to the teams we rooted for growing up, and that our dads rooted for — are being mercilessly exploited and turned into an engine of greed. Not only that, but we’re getting so sucked into the fan mind-set that we start to see everything as a competition. Think about it.

We have television programs that have turned singing, dancing, cooking, traveling, and even falling in love into competitions. It’s as if the only way a person in our culture can get what he or she wants is for another person to “lose.” This mind-set is ultimately martial. It’s what novelist Cormac McCarthy is referring to when he writes, in Blood Meridian, about warfare as a natural extension of sports. What ultimately matters is whether your team — and therefore you — wins. A lot of people these days feel that way about politics and religion: it’s all about vanquishing the socialist or the heathen or whatever. Football may not be the driving force behind this cultural mind-set, but it’s the purest expression of it.

Cook: If football culture is so morally and spiritually hollow, why doesn’t it collapse?

Almond: Maybe it will. Maybe our culture will collapse, too, like ancient Rome. As the empire declined, gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum allowed citizens to dull their empathy and enjoy the bloodshed. Maybe football is a symptom of our own imperial decline.

What amazes me about sport in general, and football in particular, is how objectively trivial it is. Yet it’s treated like this crucial undertaking. Every year the media devote more and more channels and pundits and column inches to the business of football. But really it’s just a game. Meanwhile we have all these actual threats to our existence that we ignore. Football is one of the ways we distract ourselves from what we should be doing to ensure the planet remains habitable for our species. We have become skilled at choosing the immediate pleasure and ignoring the long-term costs.

Maybe every empire falls in part because it’s unable to inspire a sense of civic responsibility in its citizens. Obviously Rome fell for complicated reasons, but part of what kept the population from recognizing corruption in its leadership was the distraction of violent spectacles. The Roman poet Juvenal talked about politicians giving the people “bread and circuses” as a way to generate approval through diversion rather than through public service or sound policy. The citizens focused on their own immediate gratification and ignored their civic duty, as well as the broader threats to their society. Does that sound familiar?

If the U.S. — and the planet — is to survive, we’re going to have to make do with less. We’re going to have to stop worshiping at the altar of convenience. California really is running out of water. Our climate really is changing. We really are seeing massive wildlife migrations and plagues. And football really is just a circus that’s helping distract us from these threats.

Football is a metaphor for the broader American experience: Because we can’t see the players’ wounds, we delude ourselves into thinking that the game isn’t dangerous. Because global warming hasn’t yet flooded us out of our homes, we delude ourselves into thinking that it won’t harm us.

Cook: Baseball used to be the “national pastime.” What happened?

Almond: Late-model capitalism. We went from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Baseball is a pastoral game. Football is more in tune with the modern American experience. The typical American worker today is trapped in an office with elaborate rules of conduct and a lot of technical jargon. You’ve got “units” of employees working on group projects and multiple levels of management. Jobs are increasingly specialized. That’s how football operates, too. There’s a giant playbook with dozens of contingencies for any given play, strategy sessions, tons of jargon, a hierarchy of coaches — all things office drones recognize from their jobs.

But here’s what makes football so alluring: When a play works, it’s not just that you got the third-quarter earnings report done. It’s Barry Sanders making a magnificent spin move to avoid a tackle and carrying the ball sixty yards to glory. That experience is ecstatic and unlike anything in our everyday lives.

Football is both a reflection of complex, brutal, and oppressive industrialization and, at the same time, a liberation from it; a return to the intuitive childhood pleasures of play.

Cook: You were a fan for most of your life. What was it like leaving football?

Almond: When people ask how I lost my faith in football, I always think of that saying from the Great Depression about how you lose a fortune: a little bit at a time, then all of a sudden.
The truth is, I had misgivings from the moment I saw Daryl Stingley, the great Patriots wide receiver, get paralyzed by Jack Tatum, who was my hero. Seeing that as an eleven-year-old, I knew that something was wrong. But football was a way to connect with my dad, and some part of me loved identifying with the Oakland Raiders, because I felt frightened and hopeless most of the time, and the Raiders seemed to be the opposite of that.

I’ve known for many years that the game was my way of coping with loneliness and boredom. To be honest, I was ashamed of it as an adult. I would sneak off alone to watch, hiding my enjoyment from the people closest to me. But I really started questioning my fandom a couple of years ago, when my mom became ill.

I got a call from my brother, who said that Mom had developed symptoms of dementia after a fall. I flew from Boston to California. She didn’t recognize me at first or know where she was. She sobbed because she was so confused. At that point the whole idea of a “cognitive ailment” stopped being an abstraction to me. All those stories I had ignored for years, about ex-players with dementia, suddenly became quite real.

Thankfully my mom recovered. The doctors thought her condition might have been triggered by a medication. But the experience made me realize that I needed to reexamine my relationship to football. I understood that once your brain is compromised, your self essentially begins to vanish. It’s heartbreaking to witness. And I realized that, by watching football, I was contributing to players losing brain function. It wasn’t something I could rationalize away anymore.

Cook: You talk about football as an addiction.

Almond: Just look at my behaviors: I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I hid the depth of my fandom. And now that I don’t watch anymore, I’m like a dry drunk in a liquor store. Football is everywhere: the gym, the dentist’s waiting room, on TV, in the newspaper. To make it through the fall in the U.S. and not see a single image of football, you would have to put on a blindfold.

Cook: How was Against Football received by other fans?

Almond: A few people suggested that I be turned over to the Islamic State for beheading, but most serious fans ignored the book, which I completely understand. There were some receptive reviews, though few of them engaged with the book’s broader critique.

The most provocative responses came from fans who talked about how football connected them to their families, allowed them to reach across divides, and made them feel alive. I can’t argue with any of that. But it’s also depressing to me that families and communities can’t bond over something more personal; that it has to be this brutal, corporatized game.

I did get a lot of thoughtful notes from fans who were growing ambivalent, and even a few who felt compelled to stop watching. But, again, my goal wasn’t to lead some kind of movement against football. It was to make readers think about everything the game entails, not just the entertaining parts.

Cook: How can we make fans think more about these issues?

Almond: If the NFL really wanted to give fans a taste of the game’s violence, it would put a suburban dad in uniform, line him up against six-foot-three, 262-pound Clay Matthews, and let him feel what it’s like to absorb a hit from someone that size: Feel that dizziness and disorientation? Feel that shooting pain and numbness in your arm? It’s called a “stinger,” and it lasts a couple of days. You play through it. Can you imagine what would happen if fans really understood how damaging the game is? Most players’ biggest fear is getting injured.

Cook: Is football culture damaging to women?

Almond: The whole pageant is medieval in terms of gender. Men are knights who go to battle. Women are sexual ornaments who bounce on the sideline. Those values aren’t just pre-suffrage; they’re pre-Enlightenment. I cannot put my eight-year-old daughter in front of a football game without her receiving the wrong message about her worth.

Cook: In your book you ask whether football provides white Americans “a continued sense of dominion over African American men.” How does football reflect our attitudes on race?

Almond: Most professional sports have a disproportionate number of players of color. That’s why, if you ask people to name a hundred famous African Americans, the list will be dominated by athletes.

Cook: Yet blacks are still underrepresented as coaches and quarterbacks.

Almond: You can add owners to that list. They’re pretty much all white and male. I think it’s because football reflects a legacy of racial inequality and reinforces racial stereotypes. White players are seen as more cerebral, African American players as more athletic. Sportscasters get in trouble if they say this out loud, but you hear it in their rhetoric. When a white player like Tom Brady makes a great play, he’s displayed “great football intelligence.” When an African American running back like Marshawn Lynch makes a great play, he’s gone into “beast mode.”

That language of “beast” and “stud” and “specimen” would have been right at home on the plantation. Think about the NFL Scouting Combine: a bunch of white coaches and owners judging young men — the majority of them African American — based on physical prowess, the same criteria used at slave auctions. It’s reinforcing grotesque stereo-types about African American masculinity.

Look at the Southeastern Conference in college football. These are schools located in the heart of what was once the Confederacy, a culture that brought Africans over to America and treated them as property and finally, reluctantly, freed them. Then came Reconstruction and Jim Crow and segregation. The South remains a place fraught with racial anxiety and misunderstanding.

So why is college football — a game played mostly by African Americans and watched mostly by whites — so hugely popular there? What is being played out? Is it a form of restitution? Some kind of strange worship and fetishization? Some special pleasure taken in seeing African American men perform dangerous feats for our amusement?

I’m not saying there’s no grace and beauty in the game. But we should ask ourselves: Why do so many white Americans get off on watching huge, mostly African American men stage a beautiful form of murder ballet?

.

The Death of Golf

SUBHEAD: Maybe some of these courses could be dug up and transformed into food forests.

By Karl Taro Greenfeld on 26 June 2015 for Mens Journal -
(http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-death-of-golf-20150625)

Image above: A cart path on the abandoned Northgate Golf Course in Reno, Nevada, May 22, 2012. From (http://maxwhittaker.photoshelter.com/image/I00007q36TuLgBwE).

One night last September, my 15-year-old daughter, Esmee, told me her plan to try out for the girls golf team here in Pacific Palisades, California. While I was pleased with her interest in golf — which I'd played semiseriously, along with seemingly every other man under 40 in the Tiger-dominated late '90s — I felt I had to prepare her for the inevitable letdown. She lacked the requisite power and the repeating, compact swing I assumed were required of a varsity golfer. Do your best, I told her, but be prepared for the possibility that you might not make the team.

When she texted me a week later to say she'd made the cut, I was stunned. In the years I'd gone to the school, the golf team was a bunch of country club regulars whose swings were nice right-path whips, golfers who'd been playing for a half-decade by the time they got to high school. I asked the coach, James Paleno, what had changed.

"There just isn't the interest we used to have 14, 15 years ago," he says. "Now I have kids showing up who have never hit a golf ball before. Kids are just less aware of golf. They have too many other options. And then when they find out it takes five and a half hours to play 18 holes, they're just not interested."

By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years.

Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge."

During the boom, most of those 20-somethings who were out hacking every weekend were out there because of one man: Tiger Woods. Golf's heyday coincided neatly with Tiger's run of 15 major golf championships between 1997 and 2008. If you listen to golf insiders, he's the individual most to blame for those thousands of Craigslist ads for used clubs.

When Tiger triple-bogeyed his marriage, dallied with porn stars, and seemingly misplaced his swing all at once, the game not only lost its best player; it also lost its leading salesman. The most common answer given by golf industry types when asked what would return the game to its former popularity is "Find another Tiger."

But you can't blame one man's wandering libido for the demise of an entire sport. The challenges golf faces are myriad, from millennials lacking the requisite attention span for a five-hour round, to an increasingly environmentally conscious public that's reluctant to take up a resource-intensive game played on nonnative grass requiring an almond farm's worth of water, to the recent economic crisis that curtailed discretionary spending. "Golf is an expensive, aspirational game," says Brewer, "and a lot of millennials are struggling with debt and jobs. If you don't have a job, golf doesn't really fit you very well."

Combine the game's cost with the fact that golf is perceived as stubbornly alienating to everyone but white males — Augusta National, home of the Masters and perhaps the most famous golf club in the world, didn't accept black members until 1990 and women until 2012 — and it's no wonder young people aren't flocking to it. "One of the major reasons golf hasn't been growing is because historically, it has not been welcoming enough," says Greg Nathan, senior vice president of the NGF. "We need to make people feel more comfortable."

Not long ago, the game could count on young fathers to hide out on the links, and weekend tee slots are still filled with plenty of off-duty dads. But it takes two to properly helicopter-parent a family these days, and that means parents are spending more of their weekends at the playground than at the country club.

During the Tiger boom, everything about the game seemed to expand, from the length of the putters to the size of driver heads to the scale of the courses themselves. "When I won the U.S. Open at Bellerive in 1965, the course measured 7,191 yards. It was a monster," notes Gary Player, the only non-American to win a career Grand Slam.

"Now," he says, "7,500-yard courses are everywhere." And those courses have raised their greens fees. Pebble Beach may be able to charge $495 for a round, but when your local public course wants $150, it gets steep. And many of those golf courses weren't designed merely for golf; they were the lure for tens of thousands of homes that aimed to deliver one version of the American dream: golf course frontage.

Lake Las Vegas could be the poster development for an entire era of American excess — the real estate boom, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the exuberant overinvestment in golf courses as bait to sell property.

The 3,600-acre community built around a 320-acre artificial lake in Henderson, Nevada, featured two Jack Nicklaus–designed golf courses and one Tom Weiskopf course, the primary selling points for homes ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. Ritz-Carlton opened a resort on the lake, which was declared a "Hot Spot" in 2004 by the Washington Post.

One of those three golf courses has since closed, the Ritz-Carlton is long gone (it's now a Hilton), and some of the luxury houses have hit the market for as little as $150,000. The golf course has been converted to scrubby trails, and it turns out that homes on a desert are a lot less desirable than homes on a golf course.

"For so many years, golf was a tool for developers to sell property," says Phil Smith, a golf course designer who worked with Nicklaus and Weiskopf during the boom. "There wasn't a sense of long-term viability in some of these developments."

As the homes around them hit foreclosure, courses often went neglected, leaving behind what has become a depressingly common sight and the enduring symbol of the sport's sad state in America: the abandoned course going feral.

They line the Carolina coast and pepper central Florida, and are littered throughout the West —fairways sprouting dandelion heads, water hazards infested with snapping turtles, rattlesnakes slithering out of bunkers. According to the NGF, a golf course in America closes roughly every two days, while just 11 courses were opened in 2014.

Ron Gorski, 59, was the manager of the Escondido Country Club when it closed down in 2013. It's one of a string of courses that have gone brown along the Avocado Highway corridor running north from San Diego. San Luis Rey Downs, a couple of miles north, closed in August 2014, and Carmel Highland, just down the highway, hosted its last round in March. Gorski, who resembles the actor and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, grew up in Colchester, Connecticut, spending summers playing shirtless at a local course where his parents dropped him off and picked him up in the afternoon a couple of days a week.

Now, as he drives his Jeep Cherokee down what used to be the first fairway, he shakes his head as he shows me the water hazards gone dry, the stumps where the pine trees used to be — the course now a nocturnal playpen for local wildlife. The tennis courts are cracked, the swimming pool drained, the pro shop gutted. Hawks circle overhead.

The last foursome walked off the course on March 31, 2013, wrote their scores on their Escondido Country Club cards, and drove off.

"It was a damn shame," Gorski says, "but we tried everything under the sun. Lowering greens fees. Kids play free. Two for one. The owners were doing all kinds of Groupon deals, and the remaining members didn't like it." By the time Escondido Country Club closed, there were only 120 members, most paying $300 a month. "That didn't even cover our water bill."

The course was designed in the early 1960s to play through the upscale Escondido neighborhood of midwestern transplants who came to claim their place in the sun in ranch- and mission-style homes backing onto the course. The homeowners could drive their golf carts off their backyards onto the fairway and then up to the clubhouse. Gorski remembers the good times: "On Friday nights the place was hopping. There were gin rummy games going in the back room. And now look at this."

We've parked and are making our way through the taproom. The San Diego County sheriff's department did canine training here for a while, hiding packages of drugs somewhere in the vast clubhouse and letting the hounds run through the place.

As Gorski steps over the old utility bills and bank statements scattered all over the floor, he looks around the front dining room, notices fresh chunks of missing drywall, and says, "Someone's been in here." Scavengers have returned, jimmying open a side door and trying to strip out the copper piping from the walls. "There's not much left to take in here."

The owner of the course, a development firm named, aptly, Stuck in the Rough, intends to turn the acreage into a residential development, an option available to resorts in prime residential areas. "What else could you do with the place?" Gorski asks. "Golf just didn't work. We couldn't get the young families to come out."

Even before it was shuttered last fall, the Malibu Golf Club decided to cut down drastically on its exorbitant water bill. "They were only watering the tee boxes and the greens," says former club pro Gene Hori. "The good news was you could hit these monster drives, because the fairways were like asphalt and the ball would skip forever."

Now, the manorial wrought iron gates in front of Malibu's only golf club are padlocked, and a sign hangs zip-tied to the metal: beware of guard dogs on patrol. The man who currently oversees the course, Tom Hix, 61, has gray hair in a thick shock and a forehead pork-belly pink from the California sun. He is a co-managing member of Malibu Associates, which bought the course near the peak of the golf boom, in 2006, and then filed for Chapter 11 last March.

They put up the guard dog signs shortly after, to ward off would-be trespassers. (There are actually no dogs.) Hix has been developing golf courses for 30 years, as president of real estate and golf course developer Hix Rubenstein, and will not let his clubhouse be scavenged for scraps.

Instead, he has a vision: cutting down the seven-figure water bill by reducing water consumption and introducing a water-saving sewage-treatment facility that will satisfy 10 percent of the course's water needs. And then turn the Malibu Golf Club into a health-and-wellness center that just happens to include a golf course. "The days of private golf clubs are numbered," he says, "and you have to have something different."

That means building 40 four-bedroom villas, Beverly Hills housewife–level spa facilities, several restaurants, conference centers, and screening rooms, all housed in LEED-certified buildings and largely powered by solar panels. "By the time we're done, golf will be really ancillary." He's reassuring potential investors that only 20 percent of the revenue from the club will come from golf; the rest will be from locally sourced produce, barre-method fitness classes, and spa treatments.

In other words, make a golf course seem less like a golf course. "There's nothing else we can do to make this work."

By now the various attempts to "save" golf by making the game faster, cheaper, and easier to play have all taken on an air of desperation. There have been a number of initiatives and innovations designed to lure younger players onto the course — most of them attempts to speed up the game. "Golf is losing fans because of time," says Phil Smith. "We need to provide for that."

That means shorter courses, some three- or four-hole loops that can be played "through" existing courses, or bigger holes or short-game areas — anything so that a player can go out and swing a club and get back before sundown. "We have to shorten the courses and change the equipment," Gary Player says. "Your average golfer will have a much better experience if he or she doesn't feel the need to hit a driver off of every tee box."

There is also FootGolf, essentially golf played with a soccer ball, and Big Hole Golf, where the game is played with cups as wide as 15 inches, and, of course, Frisbee golf. The PGA and USGA have introduced Tee It Forward, which encourages players to set their tees well ahead of their normal tees, with the hope that beginner players can finish a round in three hours. "I'd like to play a game that can take place in three hours," Nicklaus told CNN this past January. "And something that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg."

At every turn, the game is trying to lure younger golfers into the clubhouse. The USGA sponsors Drive, Chip & Putt, a skills program for juniors similar to the NFL's Punt, Pass & Kick, and one of last year's participants, 11-year-old Lucy Li, became the youngest player in history to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open. The First Tee, a partner of the PGA, LPGA, and several major corporations, has focused on introducing golf into schools by donating equipment and providing a golf-friendly curriculum.

Still, the sparse crowd on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Golf Show definitely skews more Arnold Palmer than Lucy Li. In fact, there's hardly anyone under the age of 50 who isn't manning a booth.

There were a few dozen golf courses and country clubs trolling for members: Angeles National, Rio Hondo, the Crossings at Carlsbad, each offering deeply discounted rounds and practically begging me to play at their courses. Their sales managers touted their yardage, conditions — "the only Nicklaus Design golf course in Los Angeles County," a "$44 weekday special including a hot dog and a soda" — and said they believed the golf business was finally rebounding.

But I didn't have to press very hard to get them to admit that business was slow. "It's a challenge," says Debora Main, marketing and sales manager of Candlewood. "It's been a tough few years."

Image above: One of 13 Topgolf locations in the United States. Photograph by Ben and Kelly Photography / Courtesy Top Golf. From original article.

Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges.

Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling.

The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.

"We're not in the golf business, or, OK, we are, but we're really in the hospitality business," says Ken May, 54, the Topgolf CEO. He was the chief executive who presided over the merger of FedEx and Kinko's and joined Topgolf in 2013. "I opened 500 FedEx Kinko's. I know how to open a lot of boxes," he says, "and that's what we're doing here."

May has a compact, even swing. He lines up a 7-iron on the second deck of a Topgolf facility in The Colony, Texas, takes a short backswing, scoops the ball nicely, and pops it out to about 150 yards. A score comes up on the screen behind him, giving him four points and informing him that his next shot is worth double. There are nine games golfers can play at Topgolf, which has targets spread all around the range. So that even though I top my first shot, it skitters along the turf and into a target I hadn't even been aiming for, and I, too, pick up a few points.

"See," says May. "You get some points!"

May, who worked his way through Memphis State unloading boxes for UPS, was a casual golfer before he came to Topgolf. But that's fine, he says, because he sees himself as being in the fun business, not the golf business. The first requirement for every aspiring Topgolf associate who shows up for a group interview is to get up and dance. "We want people who are outgoing, guest-focused. A lot of people wash themselves out of the process, because on a break, they're checking their phones instead of socializing."

The atmosphere on a typical Friday or Saturday night is more nightclub than country club, albeit with some of the fattiest, heaviest food this side of a Cheesecake Factory. While a DJ spins on a lounge level, golfers chow down on Mushi (Mexican sushi), Mac Daddy Burgers (hamburgers with macaroni and cheese piled on top), and Injectable Donut Holes, all while ordering cocktails from an attendant assigned to their hitting bay. The formula is working, with four-hour waits for hitting bays — the patrons killing time at a fully stocked sports bar with dozens of screens. So the golf is pretty much pure profit.

It's the opposite of a stuffy country club or even a posh public course, where arranging a tee time, or even finding the starter's window, can be intimidating for a novice golfer. On a recent Monday night, I watched a pair of 16-year-olds, an African-American male and his white date, walk into the Colony location and start hitting. When I asked the girl about the experience, she said it was the first time she had ever hit a golf ball. But based on how fun the whole experience was — the food, the games, DJ Snake and Lil John's "Turn Down for What" blaring on the PA — she thought they would be back.

I went back to my hitting bay, waved my 5-iron in front of a sensor, and a microchipped ball already tagged with my name for scoring purposes came rolling down the ramp. I was hitting 'em OK, fading a little but making 200 or so yards, scoring 75 after 20 balls. (I have no idea if that's a good score or not.)

At one point a guy in khaki pants interrupted me during my backswing to tell me I was picking at the ball instead of scooping. Jeff Johnston was a PGA professional who offered a half-dozen little tweaks and pointers for my swing — unwanted advice, in other words, after which my game completely fell apart, just like it would have on a real course.

A week after the golf show, my daughter, Esmee, and I drove to a local course to cash in one of my vouchers. Esmee hadn't had a great season on her team, becoming progressively demoralized as the season went on. I understood why: Golf is a difficult, humbling game.

Our nine-hole round that afternoon was the classic good walk spoiled: lovely sun, cooling breeze, shimmering eucalyptus trees, and poorly hit balls zigzagging back and forth across the fairway. Our pace annoyed those behind us, so we let a foursome play through. I could see my daughter's frustration mount as she bent over her balls, swung down, popped her head, topped her shots, and it was all she could do to resist stomping from the course and never playing again.

Somehow I resisted the temptation to tamper with her swing, forgoing urgings not to bend her left arm or to open her clubhead. Occasionally I urged her to keep her head down, to follow through, but mostly I just watched and waited as she struggled through a miserable round.

On the seventh hole, a straight par 4 up a little hill and then an elbow to the right, Esmee botched her 2-iron off the tee, sending the ball skittering up the fairway. But her second shot, a 3-iron from the rough just left of the fairway, was magnificent, her swing a rightward path from three till nine that followed through, the contact a satisfying thwack, and the ball soaring some 200 yards, coming to rest just shy of the green. She stood for a moment watching it, and then she looked at me and smiled.

I knew she would remember that one good shot for the rest of her life.
.

Mercenary Sports Militarism

SUBHEAD: Pentagon paid sports franchises to salute troops and “conjure up feelings of patriotism and pride”.

By Mac Slavo on 16 May 2015 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/pentagon-paid-sports-franchises-to-salute-troops-and-conjure-up-feelings-of-patriotism-and-pride_05162015)

Image above: Members of The United States Air Force Band's Singing Sergeants joined singers from the Army, Navy, and Marines to perform with Renee Fleming for telivized singing of the national anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. (US Air Force photo released from (http://www.usafband.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123401489).

How far will the establishment go to prop up support for its many wars and make average Americans believe we are overseas fighting for ‘freedom’?

Apparently, flag waving, crowd saluting, veteran tributes and declarations of support for the troops and other nods to the military/guard that take place at the average professional sports game during half time – while crowds eat stadium dogs and drink down beers and look on gloatingly – weren’t spontaneous displays of patriotism.

Instead, they were staged managed military PR events that came with a price tag for taxpayers. Expenditures by the Pentagon and National Guard to buy sponsorship and promotional deals with numerous NFL teams, NASCAR and other sporting arenas have come under scrutiny with some members of Congress:

The Pentagon would have to justify the military necessity of spending millions on sports sponsorships under a measure approved Thursday by the Senate.
[…]
The Pentagon has given millions to professional sports leagues in recent years in exchange for “patriotic tributes.”
[…]
From 2011 to 2013, the cost of the Guard’s NASCAR sponsorships totaled $88 million. Its sponsorship of NASCAR was aimed at building “brand awareness” for the service, according to the Guard. The Guard announced last summer that it was ending its relationship with NASCAR.
[…]
USA TODAY reported last year that the Guard had spent $26.5 million to sponsor NASCAR in 2012 but failed to sign up a single new recruit.

The Guard received about 25,000 recruiting prospects from the program in 2012, with prospects indicating the NASCAR affiliation made them seek more information. But of that group of 25,000, only 20 met the Guard’s qualifications for entry into the service. Not one of them joined.

So the justification is recruitment and awareness, but the deeper effort is the public image of the military itself as an organization.
Besides being wasteful spending, it basically amounts to sleazy, pay-for-play patriotism, giving major sports franchises lucrative incentives to embed military tributes and ceremonies into the game and create a picture in the minds of viewers that of an unwavering force for good.

“The intent of these advertising partnerships is to promote the (National Guard) brand within the thousands of communities in which we serve that results in increased awareness of opportunities the (National Guard) has to offer,” said Brown. (source)

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), for one, was kind of let down by the ruse of self-promotion:

[…] Flake wrote, “giving taxpayer funds to professional sports teams for activities that are portrayed to the public as paying homage to U.S. military personnel would seem inappropriate.

“Such promotions conjure up feelings of patriotism and pride for most sports fans, and the revelation that these are in fact paid arrangements is disappointing.”

In some cases, sports fans were misled on the source of the recognition. New Yorkers attending MetLife Stadium, for instance, were not made aware that a “hometown heroes segment” was anything but homegrown, and had instead been arranged and paid for by military campaigners.

During the 2012 and 2013 NFL seasons, for example, the New Jersey Army National Guard paid the franchise between $97,000 and $115,000 for a wide range of advertising and promotion, including a video board feature recognizing hometown heroes and 500,000 digital banner impressions inside MetLife Stadium.

A team official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue said the agreement with the New Jersey National Guard had expired but said the club would continue to honor members of the military. The person also said the team should have been clear that the hometown heroes segment was a paid advertisement for the New Jersey National Guard.

Here’s the war state in full effect – the repetitive calls to salute flag and “honor veterans” – all part of a larger effort to hide decades of war and foreign policy blunders behind uncritical calls to “support the troops” – no matter what.

Vmage above: A Fox News report titled "Paying the NFL to salute our troops?" . From original article and at (https://youtu.be/uZToqNx33Yo).

This topic has gained scrutiny only through the pressure of budgetary constraints, but the real offense comes from the subtle fascism displayed between mega-corporations, high profile sporting events and the military-industrial complex. Under the guise of recruitment, the Department of Defense and the National Guard paid millions of dollars for professional and college sporting teams to become part of the propaganda. The celebrity athletes beloved by crowd could lend credence to the endeavors of the military.

Meshed into this arrangement are taxpayer funds for new sports stadiums, tax breaks and exemptions for the NFL, NASCAR and other major sporting arenas and a routine housing for propaganda of all kinds. The population has been conditioned to feast at this bread and circuses, and bred to become indifferent and ignorant, and ultimately compliant with the war machine and complex larger military-entertainment empire.

And that’s just the way they’d like to keep it.

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