Midweek Fixture: President trumped at his own stupid game

Several New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem. Photo / AP

Not much good has come of Donald Trump's continual picking at the festering scab that is race relations in the US, but if there is a positive it is the reaction of the sports world to his senseless provocations.

Trump appears to be an unstable, reptilian character completely unsuited to any office of responsibility. (No matter the colour beside your tick on the Saturday just gone, feel grateful for the comparatively milquetoast politicians we have here.) In exciting his base when calling on NFL owners to break the law and fire the "sons of bitches" who have chosen to protest racial inequality, Trump achieved the impossible: getting a group of really wealthy, mainly white guys to condemn him.

There is no shortage of irony here. As former NFL star Shannon Sharpe articulated, many of the same wealthy men so suddenly aggrieved reacted to Trump calling out a gold star family, reacted to him calling Mexicans rapists, reacted to him saying it was okay to grab unwitting women by the "pussy" and reacted to him mocking a war-hero senator for being captured by the Viet Cong by donating seven-figure sums to his campaign and inauguration.

But ask the American people to boycott their product and hell hath no fury.

What is more noteworthy is the realisation of just how powerful the athletes' message - started by one man, Colin Kaepernick, who has paid for his conscience with unemployment - has become.

As Trump to deliver bursts of venom in 140-character tracts it had become clear that the mainly black athletes who continued this take-a-knee protest might be misunderstood, but they are not ignored.

"These athletes are filling the moral chasm created by a president whose sympathy and empathy are reserved for the 'very fine people' among the white supremacists, Nazis and otherwise bigoted racists marching unmasked in Charlottesville," wrote Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post.

Wrote Megan Garber, who covers culture for The Atlantic, of Trump's response to protesting athletes: "Here in Trump's words, tweeted and yelled, were the economic realities of football, ownership, physical labour - tauntingly racialised. Here was the president of the United States, flirting once again not just with casual authoritarianism, but with overt racism... Here was a who had full-throatedly supported free speech as it applies to college campuses, refusing to acknowledge those rights as applied to black sports figures."

Sports organisations and broadcast networks usually go out of their way to avoid politicising anything, often going to absurd lengths to avoid it, but the quiet dignity of the protest and the unhinged presidential response forced their hand.

The commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, no friend of player causes, was compelled to defend their rights and did so unambiguously. The networks, too, who pay billions for the rights to screen the NFL and attempt to make billions more out of it, also dedicated large chunks of time to discussing the issue. Wrote Richard Deitsch in Sports Illustrated: "None avoided it. Nor should they have. It was a very good week for a genre that too often feels like a bro-rally."

Part of me wants to steer this column in the direction of New Zealand, and ask the question as to whether athletes here should recognise the elevated platform they have and use it to highlight social issues... but it feels too glib by half.

The best movements are organic and have to come from a place of deep conviction.

The only time New Zealand rugby players have been overtly political en bloc was when they were caught in the paradox of trying hard to pretend they weren't: that is to say, when they hid behind the utterly disingenuous sport-and-politics-don't-mix curtain because they desperately wanted to play a Springbok side that was selected along racial lines.

It was the politics of self-interest - and aside from a few like Graham Mourie, Bob Burgess and Sandy McNicol, most ended up spectacularly on the wrong side of history - but politics nonetheless.

There have been other brief flirtations. Josh Kronfeld was stopped wearing headgear daubed with the No Nukes sign against France, while Kane Hames wore strapping supporting the Standing Rock pipeline protest while playing for the Maori in Chicago.

Both Richie McCaw and Dan Carter backed John Key's legacy bid for a flag change but again that felt opportunistic and not born of any long-held grievance.

The most politicised rugby player of recent generations was Samoan Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu whose bombast made it too easy for World Rugby to dismiss what should have been genuine discussion points: most pertinently, the appalling treatment of the Pacific Island nations despite their massive contribution to world rugby's playing stocks.

Players here often back noble charities, and some not so noble, but we should probably be thankful they usually need their voices only to promote their sport and craft.

We should be thankful, more especially, that our patriotism is rarely measured by how lustily we sing our national dirge or how rigidly we stand to attention for displays of military bravado.

We're not perfect here, not by a long shot, and you may even argue our imperfections as a nation are growing more pronounced as we grow ever more selfish.

But we're doing okay. Our next prime minister, whoever that might be, will have bigger things to worry about than athletes taking a knee, and I just can't see our best rugby player ever feeling compelled to call him or her a "bum".

It's been a curious week, watching Americans work themselves into a lather about a quintessential First Amendment moment.

Still, there's a strange pride, however tenuously connected, to be taken from the fact that it is sport that is pushing back against an appalling president, and a lingering sadness that they should feel the need to at all.

**

Trump might have top step on the podium for most ridiculous sports comment/s of the week but Joseph Parker's trainer Kevin Barry can take a spot next to him with this gem, lifted from Stuff:

"No matter what [Parker] does, even if he was to fight Anthony Joshua and knock him out, people would say, 'It was a lucky punch, why didn't he do it a round earlier, how come he got hit with those punches before he knocked him out?' It's like you can never win."

No people wouldn't. Here's what people would be more likely to say: "Wow, I didn't see that coming. Good on you Joe."

I have no problem with a trainer sticking up for his fighter but delusional tall-poppy-syndrome nonsense helps nobody. Parker has received plenty of kudos, party invitations and front-page treatment since becoming the first NZ-born fighter to hold a world heavyweight championship belt.

I sense no appetite at all from the public or media as a whole that he needs to be cut down to size.

There is a genuine hope he can elevate himself into the all-time heavyweight elites, but he hasn't shown enough in his last few fights to suggest he's there yet, and there has to be doubt as to whether he ever will be.

It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

**

I've had a fear for a wee while that New Zealand's playing depth in cricket is overstated and we're a couple of significant injuries or retirements away from some long days.

The performance of the 'A' team in India is not quelling those fears.

THE WEEK IN MEDIA ...

This is a cracking tale of an extraordinary human feat... or is it? From Deadspin.

I've given NFL Redzone a shout out before but I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is brilliantly conceived, terrifically executed television that has become Monday morning appointment viewing on ESPN. I struggle to watch an entire NFL game but the stop-start nature of the sport and the staggered scheduling of NFL Sundays play perfectly to this format of criss-crossing the country picking up the action hot-spots.

Just the infrastructure needed would preclude something similar happening with rugby - and the more fluid action would mean more delayed action than live - but wouldn't it be a great way to consume the NPC, which is instead condemned to horrible timeslots and minimal interest.