Athletes don’t have to be particularly bright people. Some are, but it’s not a requirement for the job. Their job is to entertain and amuse us by being very good at playing a game. To do their job, they just need to be really good at one or two specific skills. But, they don’t need to be smart.
When I watch sports, I want a distraction. I want an hour or two where I can forget about things and simply be entertained. Because that’s what professional sports is. It’s just entertainment. Their sole purpose during the time it takes to play whatever sport they’re playing is to amuse and entertain the audience.
Somewhere along the line, professional athletes got it in their heads that the value of their opinion much greater than it actually is. Somehow, they’ve come to believe that people really give a shit about what they have to say.
Unless what they have to say is directly related to their job of entertaining people, I don’t care what they think. Not even a little bit. Honestly, I don’t even care if they can think. They just need to be able to run fast, jump high, lift heavy things or throw things accurately.
Since intelligence isn’t required, we can assume that the average athlete is likely no smarter than you or I. And, since I’m perfectly capable of independent thought, I don’t need them to tell me what to think.
If they want to talk about how a brand of shoes made them perform better, I’m OK with that. If they want to tell everyone how clever they were because they went to the left when their opponent went to the right, that’s fine. But when they start telling me what I should believe, that’s when they’ve crossed the line.
As soon as they started bringing politics into sports, I lost interest. As soon as they started proclaiming their allegiance to the Black Lives Matter organization, or putting the names of criminals on their clothes, or playing the “Black National Anthem”, or disrespecting the U.S. Flag, they completely lost my support.
Why? Because I lost my distraction. By removing my distraction, they removed they only reason I had to watch them play.
I can find other ways of entertaining myself that don’t bombard me with images of virtue-signaling millionaires trying to show everybody how “woke” they are. There are other ways I can spend my time that will let me forget, just for a little while, about the craziness that’s happening in the real world.
So, until politics are completely removed from professional sports, they’ve lost a viewer. I won’t be coming back. Because I don’t care to know what they think. I just want to watch them run fast.
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