In my younger years on Wall Street, I got to work with and rub elbows with any number of professional football players like Scott Eaton, Spider Lockhart, and Chuck Mercene who after being injured turned to Wall Street to make a living. These men would have never even thought of taking a knee they had so much respect for our country.
You never really saw things like this in the 70’s and 80’s but then athletes in those days didn’t become multi-millionaires playing sports in-fact many of the players had to go to work even in the offseason to supplement their incomes.
I do believe that the enormous sums of money paid to these sports figures is obscene and we treat them too much like celebrities. Sports has become a multibillion-dollar business and along with the money comes the feeling that they can get away with most anything because of the dollars they control. Maybe it’s time to pinch their wallets a bit by tuning them out of our homes and not going to their games which for a family of 4 now cost in the neighborhood of 4 to 500 dollars a game.
What the players and owners fail to realize is that most of their most ardent supporters are the same people who voted for Donald Trump and a good many of them support his stance on this kneeling situation. If indeed the fans decide to tune out the NFL it could be very costly for both the owners, players and TV networks with their contracts for broadcasting. It has already affected their ratings significantly and there is no reason to think that this will change anytime soon after recent actions by 200 NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem.
This is sure to seep into other sports and become a very sticky point amongst those who think it is unpatriotic to kneel during the anthem and as in the NFL more fans could be tuning out other sports. It’s time we stopped politicizing sports and it’s time for the players to get back to entertaining the fans which is what they are paid to do. The average cost of a ticket to an NFL game is $92.00 per person. No one wants to pay five or six hundred dollars to take their family to a game and have to watch a protest of our national anthem.
When you get to celebrity status, you should be setting a standard and an example for our children and everyone else in the nation but instead today everything is politicized. I believe in the right to protest, but there is a time and a place for everything and protesting during the national anthem is not one of those times and I think President Trump was right in berating those players who were protesting.nf
