Jason Whitlock, the black iconoclast at Outkick media, calls James the Black Trump: “His descent into politics and full-on embrace of Black Lives Matter have devastated the game. He extinguished the TV-ratings torch he inherited from (Michael) Jordan. The league that had dreams of matching the NFL’s relevancy is now toxic, polarizing and reliant on rigged Twitter algorithms for traction.”

Sports fans can only hope their stars can live with some SARSCoV2 risk, because hyper-cautious league officials show no appetite for leading the way back to normalcy by using less frightening PCR tests.

Hands up everyone who feels that this surreal NHL postseason is like a Netflix series you saved till you had more time to watch. Hockey in August? Talk about binge-watching. But in a funny way it works.

Useful idiots in the NFL such as Detroit QB Matthew Stafford and his wife continue to defend honouring frauds foisted on them by #BLM and leftist radicals. In their blithe acceptance of Jacob Blake et al. they are insulting women victims of violence and families of police killed in action. They need to folllow the lead of Steeler Maurkice Pouncey who now admits he was had by #BLM.

Polling now shows a significantly drop in opinions of the sports industry. Its positive score in 2019 sat at 45 percent, but fell by a third to 30 percent in 2020. While 25 percent held a negative view of sports in 2019, that number shot up to 40 percent in 2020. Independents’ views had a steep drop from +26 last year to -10 this year. Republican approval tumbled from +11 in 2019 to -35 in 2020. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) dropped only a fraction in approval.

To achieve a political climate so rancorous, so riven by hate, that it makes the DEM platform sound cogent you need a real villain. For the Left, moderates to maniacs, Trump has been tailor-made for the role of Dr. Evil, the cruel genius who has denied them their birthright as stewards of the nation.

It’s somehow comforting that, in a season where the NHL has done so much properly, the league still finds a way to seem like Bill the Butcher on player safety. Despite bold proclamations and new guidance the issue of player safety— particularly at playoff time—is fast frozen in the Brian Burke principle. That would be, no player is bigger than the playoffs

Depending on whom you ask, the Canadian Football League is either your grandfather’s sports league or a vibrant part of the national community. When you ask the government of Justin Trudeau about the importance of the CFL he’s apparently going to tell you that the Kielburgers don’t like it, so go fish.

For those of you who dreamt that the purging of Don Cherry might drag Hockey Night In Canada into the 21st century, sad news. Your grandfather’s TV program is still pounding the same fighting drums it always did when Grapes was the Grand PooBah of the sport.

There’s still time to save the NFL season, Mr. Goodell. Before you’re cancelling games because the equipment guy for the Rams or Bill Belichick’s sign stealer… er, research assistant… turn up positive, get a plan to have teams play in a hub city. Like the NHL.

In pro sports’ obsequious surrender to an organization that believes in the overthrow of society, putting political slogans on the diamond is the new normal in the grand old game. The NBA, too, has “Black Lives Matter” written on its courts. The NFL is choreographing a national anthem process that will put the Rockets to shame.

The descent of major sports reporting to an active arm of the progressive movement is edifying. There are days where ESPN’s reporting sounds more like corrective seminar on white entitlement than a news item. Sports, always an escape from reality, has been to turned into a re-education camp for viewers.

Where others hesitated, the NHL has decided to charge headlong in to the Valley of the Covid19. Using bubble cities Edmonton and Toronto it has created a format to protect the participants in the postseason from the virus as best as they can. Not only that, it has worked with the NHL Players Association to forge a new four-year extension of the collective agreement to deal with the expected plunge in revenues due to the pandemic.

Honestly, if you were making US$35, 40, 50 million a year playing in the NBA, MLB or NFL, would you not want to call your shots? If you could be golfing with a Hollywood star instead of sweating out a workout in Florida’s scorching sun what would you do?

The inimitable Dean Brown has captured the zeitgeist of the Covid-19 hockey draft: “The NHL has pulled off the impossible. Devise a system no one can understand to end up with a winner no one knows.”

We asked last week tinyurl.com/ycxrmcda how much political theatre fans will be willing to put up with as a price for their favourite sports. If Mike Gundy’s humiliation is any barometer of what lies ahead the optics will be uncomfortable in the extreme.

Has Pandora’s Box been opened in sports over charges of racism and indifference to fans? Will the public forgive and forget being vilified? Can sports get back to its profitable ways? We’re about to find out.

Like all appeasers Roger Goodell hopes this will buy him time and support from BLM. What will happen next, however, is that, having offered surrender on this cause, the white executives and stars of the league such as Brees will next be required to confess their previous racist history, chapter and verse. Think #MeBlackToo. Shaming will be a feature of the combines for young white players entering the NFL. “Prove you’re not a racist witch”.

When, in his almost 30 years as the face of the league, has Bettman ever proposed taking a risk before the other leagues had a chance to test-drive it first? (Okay, Winter Classics, maybe.) He was so slavish in his devotion to the other league’s salary caps that he cancelled an entire season to imitate them.

The new reduced “spread potential” for Covid-19 doesn’t seem to have caught up with many sports leagues who are still working from the March script of all-death/ all-the-time over touching a foreign surface.