I miss when ESPN still had something to do with sports

"Can we retire using ‘Mount Rushmore’? That should be offensive to all of us, especially Native Americans, indigenous people who were the first people here before Christopher Columbus," Rose said. "That land was stolen from them when it was discovered that it contained gold."","_id":"00000182-78a1-dd2e-a7df-f9bbdf9a0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b92f10002"}”><a label=”ESPN” class=”rte2-style-brightspot-core-link-LinkRichTextElement” href=”https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tag/espn”>ESPN</a> host Jalen Rose took to <a label=”Twitter” class=”rte2-style-brightspot-core-link-LinkRichTextElement” href=”https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tag/twitter”>Twitter</a> in an attempt to cancel the term “<a label=”Mount Rushmore” class=”rte2-style-brightspot-core-link-LinkRichTextElement” href=”https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/gov-noem-rails-against-national-park-service-over-mt-rushmore-fireworks-permit”>Mount Rushmore</a>.”

Rose recorded a 90-second video of himself discussing at length his problems with the “offensive” term.

“Can we retire using ‘Mount Rushmore’? That should be offensive to all of us, especially Native Americans, indigenous people who were the first people here before Christopher Columbus,” Rose said. “That land was stolen from them when it was discovered that it contained gold.”Every Sunday in the fall, when I was a kid in the early 1990s, I waited eagerly to watch Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, Joe Theismann, the late John Saunders, and Robin Roberts (and others, over the years) present their highlight films for the day’s NFL games. Their recounting was not only insightful but also highly entertaining, given the colorful commentary and hilarious player nicknames that they (Berman especially) either popularized for a national audience or coined themselves. There was “Neon” Deion Sanders (also known as “Prime Time”), Steve “a-Tisker-a” Tasker, Christian “the Nigerian Nightmare” Okoye, and “Frank Lloyd Reich, architect of all comebacks,” among so many others.

Remember, this was before you could just look up all the scores on the internet, so just having a full league roundup was already useful. But NFL Primetime was more than just a roundup. It was a different approach to the highlight reel — much more fun, and with plenty of expert commentary, rattled off quickly but still at a pace that causal fans could understand. Berman’s staccato and intentionally silly “He … could … go … all … the … way” is so widely known today that probably a lot of people don’t even know where it came from. Same with the “rumblin’ bumblin’ stumblin'” description he would belt out when describing how someone fumbled or muffed a snap.

At the time, I didn’t know what any of these anchors’ political views were, and I didn’t care. I still don’t. I wasn’t tuning in to ESPN to be told what I should think by a bunch of people who, for all I knew, had little or no insight about such unrelated matters. Rather, I was tuning in for one of the best sports shows ever made, put together by people who knew football.

Unfortunately, ESPN just isn’t about sports anymore. Sure, they produce the occasional documentary that is worth watching, but you can just buy the episodes you’re interested in on YouTube for a couple of bucks — a fraction of the cost of a cable or ESPN streaming bundle subscription. You don’t have to waste your money on the no longer entertaining or insightful but maximally woke stupidity that now passes for sports commentary on their network, like the above.

ESPN has mostly put sports aside. It has hired a crop of commentators, and that includes former players, who perhaps once knew how to play but are not deep thinkers about anything else. Their chief job now is to win hate clicks for ESPN’s website. Yes, Primetime has been resurrected, but in general, the network just doesn’t do interesting enough sports coverage anymore to make it worth the price. Not for me, especially when I can get better baseball highlights directly from MLB for free on-demand, either through their app or on YouTube.

Today, when I come across ESPN, it is usually for one of two reasons. The first is that the game I want to watch is being blacked out because it has become ESPN’s game of the week. That is always annoying, but it’s also the reason God created sports bars and radio. The only other reason you see ESPN in the headlines nowadays is when they publish or air stupid, inane, woke content like the above.

Which, by the way, doesn’t really need a response, but I’ll still offer one. First of all, if you’re going to be consistent, then we would have to start by pointing out that anything nice you have to say about New York City is ipso facto racist — sorry, Frank Sinatra and everyone who dares live on that stolen ground today. Perhaps we should force them all to leave and confiscate their property for good measure.

Second, nobody thinks Mount Rushmore is an American icon or a symbol of greatness because of how the land was acquired any more than anybody thinks the author of our historically groundbreaking Declaration of Independence was a great man because of his sin of owning slaves. If it helps you to understand what I mean, then let me put it this way: Those misguided souls who admire Karl Marx probably do not do so specifically because he was a vicious antisemite and racist who used the N-word to debase black people both individually and as a whole in his personal correspondence. And if your defense of Marx is “But context!” then yes, exactly — you have just made my point for me.

But most important is the fact that this controversy has nothing to do with Rushmore, Jefferson, or Marx. The real point is that complaints like Rose’s are almost never sincere or substantive. They are not about anything that is genuinely bothering anyone. The controversy is well behind us — we might as well be arguing about restoring Great Britain to its pre-Roman inhabitants or restoring the Ptolemaic dynasty. At best, they are novel woke arguments that take isolated historical facts and interpret them in the most tendentious way possible in order to get a rise out of people and make very dull and unintelligent commentators seem worth listening to. At worst, such complaints are being used to bully people out of loving their country — the greatest country on earth, still always imperfect yet ever more perfect, formed upon the highest ideals of self-government, equality, natural rights, and the rule of law.

In short, I miss what ESPN was and could be today, had it not embraced a particularly dumb, contentious brand of woke politics at the expense of its sports coverage. It is now part of a thoroughly corrupt corporate structure, as evinced by Disney’s appalling behavior in Florida — and yes, I have a huge problem with their lobbying to sexualize and gender-confuse young children behind their parents’ backs. (Those Marvel shoot-em-up movies are also awful, but that has nothing to do with politics.) I canceled my streaming subscriptions for both Disney and ESPN several months ago. Going forward, I’ll probably just sponge off whatever free trials I can find in the rare cases when something interesting crops up. They haven’t earned my money, such as it is. That wouldn’t matter on its own, but I suspect I’m not alone.