America continues its spiraling Romanesque social entropy with the Media’s celebratory acclamations this will be the first Super Bowl associated with legalized gambling. Rather than celebrating, NFC Commissioner Roger Goodell and every participating fan should hide their faces in shame. Goodell has once again mutilated the once sterling relationship between the public and professional football. Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry must be rolling in their graves.
It is a sign of our sorry social state to have to reiterate that gambling corrupts every activity it is involved in. It is undeniably run by organized crime either as a source of start up capital with usurious interest or as a source of money laundering and bribery of corrupt regulating officials. It mutates the motivation for the existence of the sport it taints. It hurts those who can afford it the least.
It is curious that “don” Goodell, a man with a reputation for imposing strict discipline on the field in the interest of safety and fair play, would endorse gambling on the sport. Seeing brothers Payton and Eli Manning sell their integrity endorsing gambling was devastating to the image of the game. They may have been paid a lot of money but it stained their reputations as indelibly as Pete Rose’s crime.
“don” Goodell has made professional football vie with professional boxing as “the red light district of sports.”
As a boy who played football from fourth grade in Oklahoma to high school in Georgia, I am disappointed and disheartened to see a sport that kept me off the streets and imbued me with the only guidelines I had to proper manhood soiled by an avalanche of the character cancer of gambling. I began losing my love and respect for football when the halftime shows became lewd, crass and insulting. It worsened exponentially when players knelt during the National Anthem and Critical Race Theory extorted race over sportsmanship. The more the players performed egoistic theater in the end zone the less I watched. The NFL’s attempt to have the Pittsburgh brain surgeon sent to prison and deported revealed a side of the sport that was damning (see: Concussion) The adoption of gambling is the last straw. Football is no longer the icon of non-combat warrior training I was brought up in.
Professional football has lost the spirit portrayed in Maker of Men (1931), Fighting Youth (1936), and Knute Rockne, All American (1940). There are still inspiring stories of the power of human will overcoming great obstacles (Rudy, The Blind Side, and The Greater) but they are more and more difficult to find as the sport’s addiction to greater and greater profits supersedes character.
Implementing a massive public relations campaign to counter the abortive support of Critical Race Theory jammed down our throats (remember the jersey burnings?), Goodell is repeating his proclivity for social suicide by introducing an income source irrefutably connected to organized crime. With one stroke of the pen, Goodell turned every sports bar in America into what David Stockman called the incestuous relationship between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street: a whorehouse in a casino (see: The Great Deformation).
It wasn’t that long ago when great baseball player Pete Rose was banned from baseball for life and ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame for gambling on baseball. Now admission into the hallowed halls of sports fame will be determined by how much money a player will have earned fans at the crap table of sports. Gambling by definition is the very antithesis to the spirit of sports.
It also wasn’t that long ago when congress and the Justice Department held hearings and investigations into organized crime’s involvement in gambling and sports. Which politicians and bureaucrats were bought off to slither this cancer into football?
Gambling cartels and their lackeys titillate the public’s greed with the mantra “You can’t win if you don’t play!” That’s the partial truth Satan will tell you. The rest of the Truth is you can’t lose either! Since the odds in gambling always favor the “house” the vast majority not only lose their money but their souls as well.
Will Rogers said it best: “The surest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your pocket.” Too bad integrity and character can’t be restored as easily.
