Why Pittsburgh Booed Goodell
Pittsburgh, PA — It was hard to say what was louder at the NFL Draft late Thursday evening and through the weekend: the cheers of the black-and-gold faithful for the Pittsburgh Steelers, or their thunderous boos for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
The cheers were definitely louder when the jumbo screen blared a video montage of moments in Steelers history prior to the team’s underwhelming first-round selection. An NFL Draft Day record 350,000 fans (the entire city population is 310,000) went bonkers waving Terrible Towels when the legendary Myron Cope appeared on the screen and was followed by footage of ferocious hits by Mean Joe Greene, Jack Lambert, Mel Blount, and T. J. Watt, graceful receptions by Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, bomb throws by Terry Bradshaw and Big Ben Roethlisberger, epic runs by Franco Harris and Jerome “The Bus” Bettis. You get the point (and my excitement).
The fans in this city where football is faith went wild. ESPN beautifully caught it all. It was quite a scene. Viewers marveled.
Roger Goodell’s NFL is woke. How much of that is his personal doing is a fair question, but his office is woke nonetheless.
Also marveling was NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who was perplexed and troubled at why hundreds of thousands broke out into massive boos every time he appeared on stage. After all, though Roger isn’t quite a “Yinzer,” he grew up just across the northwestern border in Jamestown, New York and went to school only 30 minutes away at Washington & Jefferson College.
Isn’t he kind of a local guy? Not in some of his actions as commissioner. And here’s why.
Ultimately, Roger left the western PA region for New York City, and there lies the problem. His NFL models the values of Manhattan rather than the Midwest or Mainstreet USA. His NFL is woke. The second most popular acronym at the NFL offices on Park Avenue may well be LGBTQ. Certainly for every month of June.
Author Paul Kengor, The American Spectator Editor-in-Chief, attended the NFL Draft this weekend. (credit Paul Kengor)
Keep in mind that June is a dormant month for the NFL, following the April draft and preceding summer minicamp in July-August and then the kickoff to a too-long season that now runs into February and brutalizes players’ bodies with its unnecessary longevity. But under Roger Goodell, the NFL finds something to do every June, for sure. It celebrates Pride Month. It goes “gay.”
That’s no exaggeration. After all, as Roger Goodell’s NFL has so weirdly proclaimed, “football is gay.”
That’s the actual name of a promotional campaign created by Goodell’s Park Avenue cultural revolutionaries: the “Football is Gay” campaign.
You can be sure that the players hate this, just as hockey players do in the NHL and in other sports where the coat-and-tie radicals in charge can’t just let athletes be athletes and allow us fans a blessed break from all the junk of the culture. We go to games to escape the smell of the kultursmog. We don’t want to see the sexual revolution when we sit in the bleachers. But instead, we get the secular values of progressive New Yorkers shoved down our throats. When I go to a game, the only flag I want to see honored is the American flag, not a rainbow flag that has nothing to do with the action on the field that my children and I have come to watch. I’m there to explain to my kids what pass interference is, not what gender transitioning is.
Of course, most athletes feel the same way, but if they dare speak up, they are punished. All the hellfire of cancel culture rains down upon them. The NFL doesn’t care. It wants the players to shut up and salute the (rainbow) flag, even when their religious convictions tell them otherwise. And so many players — black and white and in between — are devoted Christians whose values reject this rot.
The NFL’s pagans are doing the same with their push for Christmas Day games, even when those games fall mid-week and force teams to play a brutal three-game stretch in less than two weeks. Goodell’s NFL is also now televising games on Sunday mornings during what Americans back in the bygone era of Christendom used to call “church time.” (READ MORE: Roger Goodell’s Pagan NFL)
I could say more, including the NFL’s awful adoption of the BLM line (another favorite acronym) during the dark days of the evil year 2020. That year, Goodell’s NFL, in the name of “social justice,” committed $250 million to “combat systemic racism.” Commissioner Goodell, after meeting with a group of activists who “demanded action from the league,” joined BLM by launching a Black Lives Matter campaign.
As if we didn’t know black people matter. If you can’t see with your own eyes that the NFL thinks black people matter, then you’re blind as a bat. We fans go to every game cheering like maniacs in support of black players, wearing their jerseys, and treating them like heroes (I’m wearing a Franco Harris t-shirt as I type this article). There was no need to hook up with the disgraced Patrisse Cullors and her Marxist vision at BLM, including her goal of abolishing the police and the traditional family. Eventually, the BLM organization booted Patrisse because of her corruption and far-left ideological agenda.
But the American Left has learned that it can shake down Roger Goodell’s NFL and have success getting apolitical football to adopt its pet causes and campaigns. The NFL and its commissioner should simply say no to anything that smacks of ideology and stay out of the culture war. Its fans not only don’t want it, but hate it, and yet the NFL and its commissioner either don’t care or are so removed from middle America that they don’t know.
As my colleague and fellow Pittsburgh native Salena Zito has pointed out, the problem with the NFL — and its commish — is that it’s located in Manhattan. (The same is true for Major League Baseball and its shamelessly political commissioner, Rob Manfred.) That removes the NFL far away and out of touch with its fanbase. It would be akin to putting NASCAR headquarters in San Francisco. As Salena has said (and I believe has said to Goodell himself), the NFL’s offices ought to be in a city like Pittsburgh, or Green Bay, or even like Indianapolis. Better yet, how about in Canton, Ohio, near the Football Hall of Fame?
But it’s in New York City. Thus, the NFL is staffed by progressives utterly clueless about the attitudes of its fan base. They reflect the metrosexual values of Manhattan and the liberal media, not the Iron City attitude of a place like Pittsburgh.
But alas, it is where it is, and as the saying goes, it is what it is. Roger Goodell’s NFL is woke. How much of that is his personal doing is a fair question, but his office is woke nonetheless. And that’s why Goodell was booed loudly and roundly every time he stepped to the podium here the last three days. If he and his office don’t like it, they should do something about it. Staying out of political, ideological, and cultural wars would be a good start.
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