Sports Cred: Can You Believe A Shred Of What You See?

The picture says it all. Leading the Memorial tournament by a whopping six strokes, Jon Rahm has been informed by a PGA Tour official that, after a week of testing negative for Covid, he suddenly has tested positive and must withdraw from the tournament.

His disappointment speaks for itself. The new father of a baby girl is devastated for himself and his family.

The approved story is Rahm was in contact with someone who tested positive and so was being monitored. (That unidentified person is not sick.) The real story about Rahm’s positive test is that he most probably tested well above the 30-cycle level of the #pcrtest when, as everyone now knows, you can’t work up enough sample at that level to get sick or transmit the virus. Even Dr. Tony Fauci conceded this months ago.

Rahm likely was not told of the cycle level they used to take his title away. If so this is inane. We know better. This is not April 2020. The Casedemic curse of lumping the truly ill into statistics of those not sick from Covid-19 has been shown to be better at creating fear than creating  good health. (Alameda, Ca., just announced it was removing 25 percent of cases previously considered Covid because they were from other causes.)

The PGA Tour is no doubt under great pressure from its sponsors and political allies to keep promoting the Casedemic deception. The message of change on PCR testing in America and Canada will have to come from where it started: with the public and private ®Health experts who’ve zealously dissembled and deceived since early 2020 to deflect their mistakes and shift blame to the naughty public. 

In this they’ll be aided by a supine media which has parroted approved Covid talking points. The Wuhan source revelations in the Fauci emails this past week— still being ignored by old timey liberal rags like the News York Times— show how the press gave its pals a pass while it gave its enemies a going-over.

Considering how pliant the sports media is the Naomi Osaka “I Won’t Talk, Don’t Ask Me” fiasco at the French Open seems a little surreal. The world’s top female tennis player, Osaka has withdrawn from the Grand Slam event because she says that her depression is exacerbated by an irresponsible media.

Osaka is hardly the first athlete to deal with the tremendous pressure of expectations. It reminded me of the mental-health issues in the Original Six players whose fight for their NHL pensions I chronicled in my book The Defense Never Rests. For those who can’t recall beyond Taylor Swift’s last release, stars such as Carl Brewer, Frank Mahovlich and Ron Ellis dealt with crippling depressions and took time away from the game as a result.

The toxic blend of pressure to win combined with media expectations breaks many athletes. “Am I worth the money? Am I liked for who I am or for what I am?” In Osaka’s case there is only herself and the media to please. (Enough on its own.) In team sports there is the added weight of peer judgement within teams added to the rest.

The meagre salaries of the former NHLers kept most from going public with their issues. They had no latitude for complaining. Osaka now has enough money, and thus has the ability, to do what she did in Paris: tell the French Open organizers to stuff it. 

(As an aside, why Osaka hasn’t employed the Nuke LaLoosh cliché strategy is curious. There’s no demand to empty your soul. Many interview subjects go blank-eyed and impassive. As Crash Davis told Nuke in Bull Durham, take ten answers, jumble them and feed them back to the press. Then stop reading social media.)

The contentious issue for Osaka was the attitude of the French Open which mocked her media boycott by showing her peers doing interviews. Were they being insensitive? Perhaps. Was she exercising her privilege?Somewhat. But the organizers cynically know that in ten years no one will give a fig about Osaka’s deep thoughts, and if they give one star a pass on stoking the press machine then the whole apparatus falls apart.

They point out, rightly, that they and Osaka benefit enormously from the free publicity of the media. The cost in advertising column inches or broadcast minutes compared with what is freely given by the press? Naomi’s hundreds of millions would be back to Billie Jean King’s tens of thousands if the media declared you irrelevant. Her bold fashion styles would be just another kid trying too hard. In other words, you take the cheque, you do the interviews.

To see just what can happen to a media that suddenly does its job, last weekend’s Belmont Stakes on NBC. Already dealing with the likelihood that Kentucky Derby winner Media Spirit will be disqualified for drug abuses by his training team (led by Bob Baffert), NBC had another dicey political story. 

The winner of the Belmont was a horse named Essential Quality. As winning trainer Brad Cox reminded the world in the winner’s circle the horse is owned by United Arab Emirates Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum. 

NBC’s Mike Tirico then popped in to note that some stories allege that the Sheikh was holding his adult daughters against their will. Last month, continued Tirico, images of Sheikha Latifa, a daughter of the ruler of Dubai, appeared on Instagram, three months after a video message in which she said she was being held captive in a barricaded villa.

Ouch. Hey, look at that object in the sky… Bet the advertisers loved that little exchange.,

If Tirico’s insertion into the gilded world of the ponies seemed brusque it’s only that it was reminiscent of the good-ol’ days when news divisions at networks actually did uncomfortable journalism, not narrative boosting. It was made all the more jarring because NBC— along with most major American and Canadian news outlets— have abandoned that role, preferring cheerleading to going beyond the cheers.

This past week was reminiscent of the old boxing chestnut: Only the ring was square.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx