Betraying the Code

There was much hoopla over the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s infiltration of the previously all-white sport of baseball. And of course the liberals are right – it was an epoch shattering event. But the liberals are wrong when they view it as a good thing. Robinson’s enfranchisement accelerated the Negroization of American sports. And that development resulted in the end of sportsmanship. Sportsmanship, as practiced by Americans, had its roots in the British sporting tradition, which took its inspiration from the principles of Christian chivalry. Winning, in the British tradition, was not as important as adhering to the code. A loser who lived up to the code was more honored than someone who won, but who broke the code.

Jackie Robinson brought his own code, the barbarians’ code, into the game of baseball. He took bench jockeying to a new low. Statements about the opposing players’ sisters and mothers, which had previously been considered beyond the pale, were part of Jackie Robinson’s repertoire.

And of course those black athletes who followed Jackie Robinson were even worse. But the larger the pool of players to choose from, the better your chance of winning and making money. So the marriage between the capitalist and the Negro was consummated with Jackie Robinsons’ entry into baseball. And what a happy marriage it has been for them.

But what about the white folk? Should we give our blessing to that marriage by watching and attending sporting events where black athletes and white commentators degrade all the virtues of the heart and the soul that white people used to hold dear? When capitalism, the Negro, and sport are combined, the watching of sporting events becomes a vulgar indulgence akin to pornography. Presumably one would refuse to watch a film which approvingly depicted black cannibals cooking and eating white missionaries; why then should we watch all the values of our civilization being undermined in pagan rituals called sporting events?

In Walter Scott’s novel, Old Mortality, he depicts a period of Scottish history when the Covenanters felt that Charles II was not keeping his promise to grant them religious liberty. They regarded themselves as disenfranchised. The Crown sought to force them to feel enfranchised by requiring them to participate in state sanctioned sporting events. The Crown’s effort failed because it only strengthened the Covenanters’ resolve not to participate in the sporting events.

Two things emerge from Scott’s description of the mandatory participation edict of Charles II:

1) Sports are an integral part of a nation’s soul. They reflect the very essence of what the nation stands for. If you are at odds with your nation you must divorce yourself from that nation’s sporting life.

2) The seductive feminine approach (the Gingerbread House technique) is more likely to make converts than the straightforward masculine approach. Instead of forcing the Covenanters to participate in the sporting events, Charles II should have hired a marketing guru to put the proper spin on the events. Maybe a little Scripture reading at the beginning of the events and a few comely maidens, not too indecorous, to give out the prizes… You get the picture.

In point of fact, the Covenanters had nowhere near the cause that we have for divorcing ourselves from our nation’s (or more accurately our non-nation’s) civic sporting life. But we have eaten the soul-numbing honey of the locusts for so long that we are completely anesthetized. We truly love ‘Big Brother.’

Recently a “conservative” military man published a book equating God, the war in Iraq, and football. How telling. Sport is linked to our Faith. What, if we look at American sports, do Americans revere? They revere capitalism and Negroes.

How did we get from the sporting life exemplified in Tom Brown’s School Days and The Chariots of Fire to the pagan spectacles of today? We got there by the same process a man follows when, lured by the prospect of gold, he places a ladder into a mineshaft and climbs down, rung by rung. But surely by now we should see that the gold mine is a pit, and it stinks of sulphur.