I’m through the first week of my one-man boycott of the NFL, which, admittedly, is making about as much a dent on the league’s bottom line as any other act of a single person yelling into the endless void would be expected to do.
I’ve sort of just had enough, as the saying goes, with the NFL dating way back, to the way the league banished Colin Kaepernick from its midst a decade ago.
Kaepernick, you may remember, was blacklisted for kneeling during the national anthem to bring attention to racial injustice; meanwhile, the league had no problem welcoming back, with open arms, the likes of Michael Vick, the infamous dogkiller who is currently on his latest image rehabilitation, as the head football coach at Norfolk State.
The latest line in the sand for me was the stupid controversy stoked by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft over the underwhelming White rapper Macklemore, who was booted off a U.S. tour featuring the underwhelming former busker Ed Sheeran for using his sets at the NFL stadium in New Jersey to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians.
Kraft engineered the blacklisting of Macklemore from other NFL stadiums on the Sheeran tour, which had the Streisand effect of taking the rapper’s message, that the Palestinians are being genocided by the hardline Israeli government, far beyond the confines of a cozy, comfy, non-threatening to the nth degree Ed Sheeran show.
Which, fine, such is the right of the hardline White billionaires who own NFL teams and control the schedules of NFL stadiums.
Same as it is the right of people in their customer base to say, I’m not going to watch.
I’ve felt uneasy, for a while now, about continuing to give my time and mental energy to an outfit that has no problem with hiring people who beat up women, and at the same time, taking a sanctimonious tone when it comes to those who want to use the platform they’ve earned by making it into the league to raise awareness of racial injustice or genocide.
I didn’t set out on this mission, boycotting watching NFL games, intending to make it a long-term thing, though, gotta say, this past five-day weekend – the NFL schedule begins on Thursday night, picks back up on Sunday, then closes out on Monday night – wasn’t hard to get through.
I haven’t had a favorite team in forever, is a key reason there.
I haven’t had a fantasy football team in probably 15 years.
I’m one of those psycho sports fans who enjoys watching the games, but has trouble with how we’re just supposed to ignore, in the case of the NFL, the damage the game does to the people who play.
You’re supposed to ooh and ahh the big hits, not think about how many years were just shaved off the end of that particular guy’s life because his brain just got scrambled for the umpteenth time.
Before my boycott, I rarely tuned in to the Thursday night game, because you have to find it on whatever streaming service it’s on – and I don’t think it’s just me here thinking this, but streaming isn’t always convenient for sports fans, when you want to be able to flip back and forth between games on different channels during commercials.
Sundays were spent with the RedZone channel on in the background as I went about my day, with my attention going in and out until the last half-hour or so of the early window, as games were wrapping.
If the Sunday and Monday night games were good matchups, which can be hit-or-miss, we’d tune them in.
This past Sunday, I caught up on some writing from the end of the work week, did some yard work, went for a long run on the greenway, then found things to watch in the evening on Netflix and YouTube, and actually felt at the end of the day that I hadn’t wasted my time watching games that I have no emotional attachment to, just for the sake of doing my duty as a sports fan.
I’m not sure I feel the need to tune in this weekend, and, being totally honest about it, I’m looking forward to getting the time back that I’d been piddling away in the fall watching a few plays of an NFL game around the endless commercials for beer, pizza and oversized trucks.
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Chris Graham
