The only way the team wins games
Chris Kluwe, a football (US football) player, tells Trump that even football players don’t say the kind of thing he said. I don’t really believe that claim, but he says some good things.
Now, Donald, I’m sure you’re wondering just what it is we talk about in a professional locker room, if we don’t spend all our time regarding 50 percent of the population as mobile fuck receptacles eagerly awaiting our tiny-handed grasp on their love lapels. I shall educate you!
We talk about our families. We talk about our significant others, our children, and our parents. We talk about our fears that if a Hitler wannabe who can’t even string together a coherent statement on domestic policy becomes president, what that might mean for those of us who are married to a member of a minority community, or are a member of a minority community, or have children going to schools where hopefully nobody screams racial epithets at them or tells them to go back to [insert foreign country they couldn’t identify on a map here].
And travel, and foreign cities, and money, and paying taxes – which they actually do, unlike some.
We talk about how all of us pay taxes, every year, and wonder what a presidential candidate might have to hide if he so stubbornly refuses to release his returns, what possible foreign debts might be lurking in that finance closet he so desperately holds shut with every ounce of his contemptible mental faculties.
They talk about accountability.
In a professional sports environment, all of us are accountable to each other. We’re a team. If one of us messes up on the field, it affects everyone. Just like if a president makes a bad decision, it affects everyone. And do you know, Donald, the only way the team wins games? The only way we win is if, in the locker room, we’re willing to accept that accountability, address our mistakes, and work as hard as we possibly can to make sure those mistakes don’t happen again.
We don’t double down on a shitty play simply because a small portion of the fan base got excited by it. We don’t try to carve the team apart from the inside to appease a certain position group. We don’t blame our mistakes on something someone else did, because if we do any of those things, we lose, something you’ve become intimately familiar with on a personal, financial, and political level, and I’m not having too many difficulties reviewing how that happened to you on the game film.
So let me conclude with some advice for you, Donald. The next time you want to claim that something is “locker room talk,” take a moment to recognize the fact that were you in an actual locker room, you would be universally reviled as a cancerous, egotistical train wreck of a disgrace that no team could possibly find the time to employ and, honestly, would never even have on their draft board to begin with.
I’ve been in locker rooms, Donald, and you’re the type of narcissistic, pants-soiling fecal eruption that just doesn’t belong. Even football players are smart enough to know that.
He can play football and he can write.
Well. What a refreshing read!!
He was the football player who frequently spoke out in support of same-sex marriage and against homophobia. He was also named the Grand Marshal of the Twin Cities pride festival in Minneapolis in 2013.
There’s more about his activism on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Kluwe#Same-sex_marriage
He’s also a non-believer who was the keynote speaker at FFRF a couple of years ago.
And a star guest at the American Atheists bash a couple of years ago.
There is some irony here that’s hard to explain. In American football the position of punter in the lowliest. There is no punter who is in the NFL Hall of Fame. Punters get paid the least compared to all other positions. They may only be involved in 4-8 plays per game, and they don’t score points, and they have a well-deserved reputation for being bad at tackling guys with the football, if it comes to that. It makes sense that Kluwe would not have put all his eggs in the pro football basket, knowing the odds, and he actually pursued an education in college, which many other football players don’t bother with as much.
So the strange irony is that Kluwe is a punter, but not a punter in the British sense.
Punters can dominate a game. Ray Guy, of the Oakland Raiders, more or less won games single-handed by putting the opposing team in terrible field position over and over.
It is possible the Kluwe’s personal report is accurate. Unless there is a ‘star’ or ‘leader’ imposing his warped sexual standards from above, in most groups of men, the predatory cliques will reinforce each other out of the sight and hearing of the rest.
Of course with PUA/MRA ‘culture’ being proliferated everywhere, the atmosphere is probably much more toxic than I would have experienced.
I’d actually believe it.
Professional athletes. By that time, especially once they have a couple of seasons in the pros under their belt, they are grown-ups for real. The older guys have kids and they are going to be setting the tone. Banging the cheerleaders is high school level shit.