Does the Left spoil absolutely everything? Why, yes. All over the country right now, there are young men who dream of playing in the National Football League. The glamor, the glory, the girls, and above all, the gold — the lure is immense. Organized sports are an avenue for young people from poor and modest backgrounds to become fantastically rich and fast, so it’s no wonder that the competition is so very fierce in the major sports leagues. But that hasn’t stopped the Left’s culture of victimhood from entering even here. On Wednesday, an NFL executive likened the NFL scouting combine to a “slave auction.”
So Colin Kaepernick can’t get an NFL job, but his point of view has spread to the highest levels of the league. The woke activist and former quarterback famously likened the NFL draft to a slave auction last fall: “What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respect. No dignity left intact.”
Kaepernick didn’t mention, of course, that the players submit to this treatment voluntarily, as they are aware of the fantastic sums that await them if they make the grade. They aren’t hunted down in the woods by rapacious football player traders who then sell them to NFL owners, who reap all the proceeds from their labors. They aren’t chained up at night or whipped for poor performance. There is no Underground Railroad carrying fugitive NFL players to freedom in areas where football is illegal. Kaepernick was indulging the empty victimhood posturing that is so common these days, and nobody took him seriously outside of his fellow far-Left ideologues.
But Troy Vincent did. Vincent is himself a former NFL player (horror of horrors, the poor man) who is now the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations. Yes, that’s right: the NFL has an executive vice president who is so marinated in Leftism that he can’t even see the howling absurdity of his own statements. But his comment only made the news because some NFL owners took umbrage at what he said instead of docilely being an ally and accepting their re-education.
CBS News reported Thursday that “several NFL team owners took offense Wednesday at league meetings when NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent referred to the NFL scouting combine as having characteristics of a ‘slave auction.’”
It seems that Vincent was explaining to the team owners some changes in the scouting process, including “a less tedious medical evaluation process and a closer look at questions teams ask of draft prospects.” The changes have come about because “the combine and other pre-draft evaluations have been criticized for what some consider dehumanizing methods of getting information about players.”
Dehumanizing. Sure. No doubt the players are examined in all sorts of ways for all manner of things. There’s an unbelievable amount of money at stake, and before teams want to make a major investment in a player, they want to know as much as they can to help ensure that the money won’t be wasted.
Related: Now Kaepernick Is PLEADING for a Job on the NFL Plantation
But as far as Vincent was concerned, trying to make an NFL team strips a man of his dignity: “We just feel like the overall experience, talking to the players, we can be better in that particular aspect. So there was, I would say, a good discussion around what that looks like, where we could be, keeping in mind that the combine is the player’s first experience with the National Football League, and in that experience, there has to be dignity. It’s a great opportunity for the young men, but there has to be some form of dignity and level of dignity and respect as they go through that process. That was the overall theme around our combine [discussion.]” According to “sources within the ownership meeting,” Vincent also likened the whole process to a slave auction.
Two of the owners tried to steer the discussion back to sanity. Arthur Blank of the Atlanta Falcons, who has, CBS hastens to assure us, “a strong record on diversity and inclusion over his two decades in the NFL,” was offended at “the idea that he was either taking part in or helping to prop up an event that could be considered racist.” Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, who has recently been accused of racism for a sixty-year-old photo, reminded the group that playing in the NFL was a “privilege,” although “a Cowboys spokesman said Jones didn’t say ‘privilege’ but instead said ‘opportunity.’”
It’s a privilege and an opportunity. But poor Troy Vincent, who is no doubt working on a victimhood memoir entitled Fifteen Years In the NFL, suffered the immense indignity of going through it all. How did he survive? How does he live with the trauma? Why hasn’t the NFL been abolished already and the surviving players paid reparations? Oh, wait — that last part’s been done.
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