A turning tide

Hard days now for the Anthem Police. They're running out of sports to watch.

First Colin Kaepernick knelt quietly and then a bunch of other NFL players knelt quietly and the Anthem Police, failing to recognize what they were doing was as American as apple pie, said they'd never watch another NFL game, uh-uh, no way, not on your life.

Then the baseball players wore Black Lives Matters shirts and knelt on Opening Day last week, and there went baseball for the Anthem Police, who insist on making it about the flag or the song or the troops when it's actually about everything the flag represents and the song is about and the troops defend.

Then came last night. And there went pro buckets.

There went pro buckets, because everyone wore Black Lives Matter shirts and everyone knelt, black and white alike, players and coaches and game officials. Opposing coaches linked arms. Even the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, recognizing a groundswell when he saw one, said he understood and waived the NBA's rule about standing for the anthem.

So that's the Big Three of professional sports in this country, and where does the Anthem Police go now? Because you  know the kneeling won't end with them. It will spread. It will happen on the college level and even the high school level in some places, because it is a groundswell and no amount of haranguing or threatening or suspending is going to stop it.

Or any amount of rubber bullets or teargas or totalitarian cosplay ordered up by an increasingly out-of-touch president.

I don't know if that means some unseen tide has turned in this country. I'd like to think so. And it certainly feels so.

It certainly feels so when it's not just blacks, but whites, too, who are out in the streets saying please stop shooting us. When it's not just Black Lives Matter but white suburban housewives and husbands and other just plain folks who are standing up. When three ex-presidents, two Democrat and one Republican, get up to honor a man who shed his blood for the very sort of American rights the out-of-touch president and his equally out-of-touch fellow travelers are working so hard to dismantle.

I don't know if that was a sea change we saw at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta yesterday, or inside the NBA bubble on opening night for the Weird Thrown-Together Summer Thing, aka "the restart." I do know what we saw was true leadership, eloquent and principled, while the alleged leader of the nation gibbered away on Twitter, trying to distract us by floating a preposterous notion about delaying the November election.

Too many folks were far too alarmed by that, given that it's completely impossible for it happen. It was simply a small, insecure man trying to divert our attention from the glaring contrast between him and his betters at Ebenezer Baptist.

And on those basketball floors beneath the bubble. That, too.

Full speed somewhere

Well, now. That was a day, right?

First the Indiana High School Athletic Association announces its full speed ahead for high school sports in Indiana, that everything's going to start on time, that the Bastard Plague isn't going to hold up anything. So, yay.

Couple of hours later, Marion County announces whoa, wait a second, maybe the IHSAA didn't get the memo, but our schools will push back the start of football, soccer and volleyball to October.

Not long after that, major pushback from Marion County school officials forced some cornerback-quality backpedaling, and now Marion County health officials say they're going to study the data some more before pushing anything back.

So, there ya go. Life in Bastard Plague America, it's so much fun. And so confusing.

It's confusing because, truth be told, no one really knows what's going to happen when you put a bunch of kids out there breathing on each other in a couple of weeks. Maybe they'll be fine. Maybe they'll all infect each other, and then go home and infect mom and dad and grandpa and grandma.

Or maybe Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, the crazy lady Our Only Available Impeached Jealous President is trotting out there now as a medical expert, will astral project some magic Hydroxchlorowhatsis cookies to protect them all.

I don't know. Neither does anyone else.

And so here is the part where the Blob points out that while Indiana is charging full speed ahead, Michigan is putting football, volleyball and soccer on hold for the time being. And Illinois is moving all its fall sports to next spring.

Because, again, no one really knows anything. This is undiscovered country we're entering, and there is no GPS or any other navigational aid to show us the way.

So here in Indiana, they'll play. And just see what happens.

I can't say that sounds wise, given that Indiana is in the midst of a spike that has moved it into the top nine nationally in new novel coronavirus cases. But I also can't say if Marion County's original plan would make any difference, either.

So, here we are. And I'm sure my skittishness will be interpreted  by some to mean I want the IHSAA's decision to prove reckless in retrospect, that I want kids to get sick and to see the Bastard Plague make a fine hash of everything.

This is absurd, of course. It's especially absurd given how much I love high school football in particular and want to see it again as soon as possible, want to see those beacon lights from miles off every Friday night as the weather cools and fall comes on.

So I hope this works. As I continue to say through all of this, I hope they get away with it.

But like everyone else, I just don't know.

Prank in the un-making

Well, it looks like we'll not get to see President Donald J. "Cognitive Ace" Trump throw out a first pitch into a bunch of grinning Joe Biden cutouts anytime soon. Too bad.

This after the New York Yankees said it was news to them Cognitive Ace was going to throw the first pitch in Yankee Stadium August 15, as Cognitive Ace said he'd been asked to do. Apparently he took two ten-penny nails and a dab of spackle and turned it into the Taj Mahal -- which is to say, he took some vague discussion that the Yankees might let him throw out a first pitch in the Stadium at some point in time and turned it into a done deal.

In other words, he  made the whole thing up. As he has been known to do before.

According to some reports, this happened because Our Only Available Impeached Jealous President was unhappy that the Washington Nationals asked Dr. Anthony Fauci to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day. Apparently the Nats wanted someone respectable on the bump -- and, besides, Fauci is a huge Nationals fan.

Apparently Our Only Available Impeached Jealous President reacted to this with all the dignity and  grace we've come to expect from him. Which is to say, he threw his cereal bowl on the floor and decided he'd find (or in this case, invent) his OWN first pitch to throw out.

And in Yankee Stadium! That'll show 'em!

Good lord. The crazy, it just goes on and on.

Worst cases

And now the inner skeptic is out of his box again, and he is telling me he was right. He is telling me it was a fool's notion to think baseball could blithely carry on its business in the middle of a pandemic, all those teams jetting all over the country just like always.

I hate the skeptic, that dour old pessimist. I wish I were in an airplane so I could push him out of it. I wish I were more proficient with poison darts. Something.

Because we barely made it through one weekend of baseball's 2020 startup, and everything the skeptic feared has happened. One team, the Marlins, had an outbreak of the Bastard Plague. Half their squad has shown red for it.

Which means they had to postpone their opening home stand against the Orioles and remain in Philadelphia, where they'd just played the Phillies. Which means the Phillies in had to postpone their game against the Yankees because they'd been in contact with the Marlins.

And so the dominoes go down, one by one by one. And so the skeptic says this is exactly what he feared would happen, that one team would have an outbreak and force other teams to stop and get tested and, bingo, the whole deal slides off the rails.

Rob Manfred says that's not gonna happen, that protocols are in place to keep everything humming along, but right now that just sounds like some fine whistling past the boneyard. Because even if protocols are in place -- even if every team has a pool of extra players in case what's happened to the Marlins happens to them -- how does that in itself not warp the season? How do you get a true measure of who's who if half the teams wind up fielding what amounts to minor-league nines?

I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm also not saying the Marlins weren't a de facto minor-league team to begin with, no matter who they put out there.

But if 30 games in we're watching Ratso Rizzo instead of Anthony Rizzo, how do you take it seriously? How does the season not go from Field of Dreams to Three Rings of Fun, with a calliope keeping accompaniment in the background?

Oh, the skeptic is out his box, all right. He is loose in the streets and I can't catch him.

Because now I'm looking ahead, and I'm thinking if baseball can't get through four days without an outbreak, what's gonna happen when NFL teams start jetting all over America? How does college football make it work with their conferences that sprawl across half the country and their bubble-proof campuses?

At least in baseball players can social distance to an extent, because of the nature of the game. Football players, because of the nature of their game, spend three hours breathing on one another. What chance does the latter have, if the former has already seen an outbreak?

I hate these thoughts. I hate the skeptic who puts them in my head. But how do you stop them, at this point?

Maybe a long walk off a short plank. Maybe that would work.

I hear the skeptic can't swim, after all.

Membership, and stuff

Maybe the ACC honchos will let Notre Dame in the club this week. I don't know. The whole business frankly has me addled.

OK, more addled.

It's got me that way because Notre Dame is already in the club. Mostly. I mean, basketball's in the club and golf and soccer and baseball and even fencing, but not football. Football is not.

This is because Notre Dame has a thing about being an independent in football. It's kinda their deal. So fencing can do what it wants -- I mean, they are all armed -- but way back when, Rockne or the Four Horsemen or Fair Catch Corby said uh-uh, we're not joinin' any group that would have us as a member (OK, that's not what they said, but you get the idea). And so Notre Dame football has gone its own solitary way to this day.

Except ...

Well, except it hasn't, really.

See, the thing is, Notre Dame football's not in the club officially, but it kind of is unofficially. Last season the Irish played almost half their schedule -- five games -- against ACC opponents. This season they were scheduled to play six. They're not eligible for the conference title or the Orange Bowl berth that comes with it, but Notre Dame football's a huge draw and so the ACC welcomes its quasi-presence.

Which means the Irish are that guy who's not a club member but who gets to hang around because he always springs for drinks.

Of course, then the Bastard Plague showed up.

And conferences decided to limit fall sports to conference games only.

And suddenly it wasn't so cool to be an independent anymore.

In a twinkle, Notre Dame lost the Wisconsin game and the Arkansas game and the USC game and the Stanford game. But it still has those six ACC games, and maybe more if the ACC decides to allow Notre Dame to be a full-fledged conference member for at least one season.

That's what everyone's voting on this week. And if they make the Irish a member of the club for 2020, with full rights and privileges and the club beanie and everything, some people will raise almighty heck that here we go again, Notre Dame's getting preferential treatment just because they're Notre Dame.

Well, you know what?

Those people are absolutely right.

This will be Notre Dame getting preferential treatment just because they're Notre Dame. And that's inevitable because big-ticket college football is as corporate as a Windsor knot in a boardroom.

It's guided by the same prerogatives as Microsoft or Amazon or ExxonMobil or General Electric. It is the SEC Inc., the Big Ten Inc., the Big 12 Inc.

And, yes, the ACC Inc.

They're all in it to generate revenue, and revenue is more crucial than ever now in the time of the Bastard Plague. So they all need more TV deals, more apparel deals, more "student-athletes" to use as unpaid billboards for their apparel deals. And more Notre Dame football.

Which is why Notre Dame football will likely get preferential treatment from the ACC this week.

It will happen because Notre Dame football is Notre Dame Football Inc., a mighty engine of commerce. The more ACC games it plays, the more financially beneficial it is for those ACC opponents. And for the conference in general.

And so the choice is between revenue and principle -- the principle being, Notre Dame made this independent bed and needs to lie in it. You can't put that in the wind now because it's not working out for you this season. You have to stick with it and muddle through.

If you don't -- if the ACC lets ND in because, let's face it, revenue's going to win here -- then ND's principle isn't a principle anymore. And the ACC can use that as leverage to finally haul Notre Dame football into the club for keeps.

This is not to say the ACC will do that. But that particular ball is definitely on its racquet now.

In the meantime, keep the screaming to a minimum if the ACC votes to let Notre Dame football in as a temporary member this fall.

It's just bidness, folks. And smart bidness at that.

Prank in the making

So apparently Our Only Available Impeached President, Donald J. "Cognitive Ace" Trump, has been invited to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees home game next month.

It'll be OK, because no fans will be present in Yankee Stadium to boo/heckle/make fun of how he throws like a girl (Sorry, any and all girls who don't throw like girls). Thanks, Bastard Plague!

In any event, it strikes the Blob this will be the perfect occasion to dress up those cutouts MLB is employing in its ballparks this strange season. If you think about it, and you're of a particular ornery mindset, they're a killer prank waiting to happen.

For instance, you could fill the section directly behind homeplate with cutouts of Joe Biden.

And next to them, you could fill a section with Nancy Pelosi cutouts.

And next to them, you could fill a section with Tammy Duckworth cutouts, AOC cutouts, Robert Mueller cutouts, and of course Barack Obama cutouts.

With one last cutout of Joe Biden, winking.

The downside, of course, will be the extra work the grounds crew has to do on the pitcher's mound.

I mean, there'll be a quite a mess to clean up when Trump's head explodes.

Box(ed) joy

Opening Day for baseball yesterday in our strange Season of the Bastard Plague, and there were fake fans behind homeplate and fake crowd noise and, who knows, maybe even the fake aroma of popcorn and hotdogs. Oh, and players sharing hand sanitizer, which wasn't fake.

("Thanks, Anthony Rizzo!" -- Orlando Arcia)

("No problem, dude!" -- Rizzo)

Strangeness cubed. And something comfortably familiar, too, the way a game that has changed little in 160 years is comfortably familiar, its rhythms as eternal as sunlight and green grass and the way dust hangs briefly in the thick summer air when a man kicks it up sliding into second.

There was the ball jumping off Rizzo's bat in Wrigley Field, the big smack in a 3-0 Cubs win.

There was the ball dancing around flailing sticks in Cleveland, where Shane Bieber struck out 14 Royals in a 2-0 Indians win.

There was, alas, the Blob's crummy Pittsburgh Pirates falling 5-4 to the Evil Cardinals in St. Louis, speaking of rhythms eternal.

Best of all, though, were the small things, the things you never realize you missed until they come back. A cold beer and the lolling murmur of a baseball game on the radio in the slow-cooling twilight. The tock of a well-struck ball. Getting up in the morning, putting the coffee on and finding those old, old American hieroglyphics awaiting you: The boxscore.

The boxscore for my crummy Pirates this morning tells me  J. Musgrove took the loss on the bump, striking out seven and walking three while surrendering two homers in 5 2/3 innings. It tells me C. Moran went 2-for-4 with two runs and J. Osuna went 2-for-4 with two RBI and J. Bell went 1-for-4 and scored two runs.

It tells me K. Newman made a throwing error. That J. Flaherty got the W for the Evil Cardinals. That for my crummy Pirates, J.  Stallings had a GIDP (Ground Into Double Play), and the Team RISP (Runners In Scoring Position) was 3-for-7, and the Team LOB (Left On Base) was four.

Mostly it told me the Pirates are 0-1 and now the pressure's off to go 60-0 in this Reader's Digest Condensed season. So they got that goin' for 'em.

It also told me this: That something normal -- something so everyday we barely notice it unless it isn't there -- has at last returned to the world.

Take that, 2020.

Non-name of the year

And now some fresh strangeness for y'all, just in case 2020 hasn't yet dropped truckloads enough to suit you.

The Washington Football Team has decided on a new name, albeit a temporary one.

The name will be "The Washington Football Team."

Yes, that's right, folks. Rather than rush to re-brand itself, it's decided to un-brand itself. Until the marketing department can come up with something suitable, and hopefully not racist or anything, the Washington Football Team has decided not to call itself anything.

And so the 2020 NFL season, which already promises to be bizarre and probably short-lived the way the Bastard Plague is going, gets even more bizarre. One of the league's teams is going to play the season as the football version of generic lunch meat.

As such, the Football Team will wear its usual colors of burgundy and gold, but the helmets will be adorned only with the numbers of the players. Which actually is kind of cool in a retro sort of way.

In any case, the Football Team, whose football promises to be as generic as its name, should inspire headline writers to new heights, if nothing else.

Imagine, for example, that the Football Team starts off 0-6 or something. The headline writes itself: "In Washington, There's No 'I' In Team. There's Also No 'W'."

And when they finally win one: "Team Calls Win A Team Effort."

I could go on, but people are throwing things at me now.

The danger here, as the Blob sees it, is what happens if the fan base decides it kind of likes this exercise in minimalism? What if they start wearing throwback burgundy-and-gold jerseys with no logos, only Sonny Jurgensen's name and number on the back? What if there's actually a backlash when Dan Snyder and the rest of the doofuses launch their re-brand sometime next summer?

I mean, we all know fans don't like change. So it's possible we could see headlines like this:

"Washington Football Team Fans Bash Re-Branding."

"'Anti-Generic Bias' Claim Washington Football Team Enthusiasts."

Underneath which the story reads thusly:

WASHINGTON -- Fans of the Washington Football Team are unhappy with the Team's new nickname, unveiled to great fanfare by owner Daniel Snyder and his staff this week.

The new name?

The Washington Flying Nouns.

"Stupid," one fan said. "What's wrong with the 'Washington Football Team'? Generics are cool these days. I just bought a bag of generic cheese puffs. They were delicious!"

"Great! Another change!" another fan exclaimed.

"Anti-generic bias!" claimed yet another fan.

Snyder reacted to the furor with his usual tact.

"I give up trying to please these knuckleheads," he said. "We chose a nickname that couldn't possibly offend anyone, and the fans act as if we burned Joe Theismann in effigy. To hell with all of  'em. They can go root for the Packers for all I care."

Unfortunately for Snyder, the uproar isn't likely to die down anytime soon. This week the National Society of Grammarians issued a release criticizing the Flying Nouns nickname, saying it "failed to recognize the contributions of verbs, gerunds and other vital components of the language."

OK. I'll show myself out now.

Home sweet home ... not

Well, crud. Looks like the state of Pennsylvania has pulled the plug on my crummy Pittsburgh Pirates' chance not to be the worst baseball team in PNC Park this cut-down season.

Typical. More losing for a team well-basted in losing.

God hates the Pirates. I swear He does.

Dice Roll 500

They have done it all correctly. Hit their marks in every corner, if you require a racing analogy.

The Indianapolis 500 will go on as scheduled August 23, but only because every detail for a sporting event in the age of the Bastard Plague has been meticulously lined out. The precautions fill 88 pages, and they include the following:

Attendance will be limited to 25 percent capacity, and tickets will be issued to allow proper social distancing.

Every fan who comes through the gates will have his or her temperature checked and be issued a mask and hand sanitizer upon entry.

Masks will be required on the grounds when not eating or drinking.

Most concession items will be pre-packaged.

The number of fans who have access to Gasoline Alley will be severely restricted.

And everyone will cross their fingers and hope.

This is because 25 percent capacity in the cavernous old place still comes to just shy of 90,000 people. That's admittedly not a lot in a venue that sprawls as extravagantly as the Speedway, and it's all outdoors under God's own sky. But it's still almost  90,000 souls occupying one space for an entire day.

Here's hoping far fewer than that actually show up. And you have to know what a hell of a thing that is for me to say.

See, I grew up loving Indy, from the moment I stepped foot in the place when I was 12 years old. It was the second weekend of qualifying in 1967, a glowering day with a gray lid of clouds overhead. Sometime in the afternoon there was a stir in the stands across from the pit area, because Parnelli Jones was rolling out of the pits in the No. 40 STP turbine -- one of the most iconic cars in the century-plus history of Indy.

It flew past us once, leaving that odd ruffling whoosh/scream in its wake. If flew past us twice, its Day-Glo orange skin glowing like a Monument Valley sunset.

I was hooked on Indy from that moment on. And I am still hooked to this day.

And yet I still hope they have a whole wad of unsold, or at least unused, tickets on August 23. Because no matter what extraordinary precautions are being taken, I think Roger Penske and the gang are rolling the dice here. I think the weight of history is compelling them to tempt fate by attempting at least a partial Spectacle, because the 500 has always been the Greatest Spectacle In Racing.

This year it's more like the Greatest Speculation In Racing. And they're gambling with people's lives to make it happen.

And, OK, sure, so there's a bit of melodrama in that. But it doesn't wander terribly far off the base, either.

The Bastard Plague is a killer. It kills quickly and it kills slowly, and even those who survive it don't always survive it. And if it kills mainly people who were sick anyway with various other afflictions, it is the Plague that finally put them in the ground.

Nearly 150,000 dead now in less than six months, if you believe the numbers. And even if you don't -- even if the wingnuts are right and the numbers have been wildly exaggerated in the service of some shadowy agenda -- you're still talking about a significant number of deaths in a relatively short time. 

Which brings us back to Indy, and putting almost 90,000 people in one place in a state where the Bastard Plague even now is staging a comeback. And where the athletic director at Notre Dame, Jack Swarbrick, said the other day that maybe trying to start the college football season on time might not be such a hot idea.

I think Jack Swarbrick is right. And I think the only thing left to say about the Sort of Spectacle coming August 23 is what I've said before many times this strange dark summer.

Which is, "Maybe they'll get away with it."

I hope so. I surely do.

Home sweet home, eh

Exciting news from the world of baseball today, and, no, it doesn't involve the thrill of turning on the radio right now and hearing the porch-swing summer sounds of actual live baseball.

The Toronto Blue Jays are apparently going to be the Pittsburgh Blue Jays (for now)!

Yes, the Blue Jays, barred from playing in Toronto this truncated season because the Canadians don't want to any crazy diseased Americans in their country, are expected to play most of their home games in Pittsburgh's PNC Park instead. So says ESPN, anyway.

As a long-suffering fan of my crummy Pittsburgh Pirates, PNC's permanent tenant, I can't wait.

After all, the Jays went 67-95 last year while my crummy Pirates went 69-93. The Jays wound up 36 games out of first in the AL East, and were saved from finishing last only by the epically horrific Baltimore Orioles; the Pirates finished 22 games out of first in the NL Central and did finish last, but only because the O's weren't in the NL Central.

You know what this means?

This means my crummy Pirates might not be the worst team to play in PNC Park this year.

Awesome.

A question of values

Kelly Loeffler can think what she wants, this being America and all. Heck, she might even be right.

So who is Kelly Loeffler, you ask?

Well, if you don't know, you're likely not alone. But she's a hard-right senator from Georgia who also happens to be co-owner of the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA, which -- let's be honest here -- isn't often the featured attraction on America's radar. Anyway, it seems Loeffler, somewhat predictably, is not happy with the league's support for Black Lives Matter.

She thinks some fans might feel snubbed by that.

"I think a lot of people feel that they may not have a place," Loeffler said the other day in an interview with ESPN. "They may feel excluded from this sport and other sports that make them feel like American values aren't at the core of what we're doing here."

This could well be true. I'm sure, for instance, the NASCAR fans who waved their Confederate flags and booed Bubba Wallace when he was introduced the other day probably do feel excluded these days. I'm sure even Our Only Available Impeached President feels excluded, too, because the Washington Football Club finally ditched the racist nickname he so passionately defended.

Of course, for decades upon decades folks like Bubba Wallace felt excluded, too. And not just from  basketball or motorsports, but from America itself.

The difference is, they didn't just feel excluded. They were excluded. And it was American values that excluded them.

Lest we forget, segregation and Jim Crow were "American values" for a big chunk of the country for nearly a century. Denying people of color access to the polls was an "American value." Hanging them from trees without fear of arrest was an "American value."

I could go on. But you get the idea.

The idea being, what exactly does Kelly Loeffler consider American values?

And what, exactly, is Black Lives Matter saying that runs counter to them?

Lots of nonsense about its protests has gushed like sewage from the usual suspects these past few weeks, with the consequence that even largely peaceful protests have come to be characterized as "rioting," "anarchy" and "violent." One knucklehead senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, even said what's going on in Portland, Ore., right now is an "insurrection," and compared the protesters to the Confederacy.

Maybe I missed it, but I haven't heard anyone yet lobby to secede from the nation. And I haven't heard of any of Homeland Security's "violent anarchists" doing anything more violent than wielding a can of spray paint or a piece of chalk.

Yet this is why they're being snatched off the street by Trump's gestapo. And this is why the protesters -- who include moms and Navy vets and other just-plain folks -- are being beaten, gassed and bull-rushed by the same gestapo.

Speaking of, you know, violence.

In any case, there has been some deliberate blurring of the lines here between the "violent anarchists" and the BLM and its allies.Yet the latter's message is pretty simple.

It's not about hating law enforcement, for the most part. It's about holding it accountable for its actions and shifting some of its burdens to other agencies (which is what "defund the police" actually means). And, oh, yeah: Could you please stop killing us?

That doesn't seem like a terribly big ask. Nor does it seem to betray American values.

But if Kelly Loeffler wants to think that ... hey, like I said, America. You can think any old thing you want to here.

Just remember on whom it reflects.

Master un-plan

NFL rooks report to training camps this week, as the Shield plows ahead with its 2020 timeline like a pulling guard leading a sweep. Nothing will stand in the way of its bullheaded stalwart-ness -- which is OK, because the Shield has a carefully detailed plan in place to deal with the Bastard Plague and all its repercussions.

Nah, I'm just kidding. The NFL actually has no coherent plan at all in place.

No details about testing and health and safety protocols. No Infectious Disease Emergency Response plan. No details about what happens if the schedule has to be rearranged to deal with outbreaks.

Even game-day plans are up in the air, with the NFL currently leaving it up to the individual teams and their cities to decide whether or not there will be fans in their respective stadiums.

In response to all this open-endedness, J.J. Watt, Patrick Mahomes and a score of other NFL players have taken to Twitter to plead with the league for answers to the aforementioned questions, and to address their safety concerns. Even Raiders owner Mark Davis, not notably one of the sharpest knives in that particular drawer, is wondering what the hell is going on.

"I don't even know if it's safe to play," says Davis, the lone dissenting vote in the NFL's decision to tarp off the first eight rows of seats in every stadium, its only coordinated game-day decision. "'Uncertainty' is the word."

Indeed it is. Camps haven't even opened, after all, and already some 70 NFL players have tested positive for COVID-19. What happens when everyone's in camp, and when they start breathing on one another in games? How long before teams have so many players in quarantine they'll be unable to field a unit that isn't down to a kicker, a punter and a bunch of XFL refugees?

And what happens to competitive balance if, say, one team with a dozen or more starters in quarantine plays a team with only a couple unavailable? And how do you square things if some teams allow fans and others don't?

The former will have a home-field advantage. The latter will not. How do you rectify that?

According to Davis, one of the options the NFL has is to push back the start until November and reduce the season to 12 games. That seems pretty sensible. It gives everyone two extra months for the pandemic to subside, for one thing. Or if it doesn't, it narrows the window for the virus to gut available rosters and bring the season to a screeching halt.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for a league that seems determined to forge ahead with the hammer down. Which means there's a good chance we'll see the start of the season, but not the end of it.  

In the meantime, the worker bees are getting nervous.

Hard to blame 'em.

The strangeness of it all

They played a baseball game at Citi Field in New York last night, but it was not like any baseball game the Babe would have recognized. There were no spectators. Occasional scratchy crowd noise was piped in. The players wore masks, and party tents were employed as dugouts.

But I'm just gettin' to the weird part, as Mac Davis' character once said in "North Dallas Forty."

The weird part was, there was a small section of spectators behind home plate. Except they weren't real spectators.

They were cardboard cutouts of spectators.

The Bastard Plague has thrown a lot of mind-altering curveballs at us these past five months or so. But this might have been the melted-clock, tilted-landscape, Picasso/Dali/Edward Hopper moment of them all.

Now, the Yankees and Mets were just playing a dry run, so who knows if this is what real baseball is going to look like. Certainly it's going to be a good Aaron Judge poke from normal; for one thing, Canada has closed its borders to the crazy Americans and decreed the Blue Jays will not be allowed to play in Toronto, which means they'll be the Buffalo Blue Jays or Tonawanda Blue Jays or some such thing.

So, yeah. It'll be ... different.

In which case I kinda like the cardboard cutout idea.

I mean, think of the possibilities. The Cubs could play in front of an entire "crowd" of Ernie Bankses. Jackie Robinson Day could actually be Jackie Robinson Day. Max Scherzer could come set in some visiting ballpark, stare in at the hitter and see an entire section of Max Scherzers staring back at him.

Would that freak a guy out or what? Talk about a home-field advantage.

And the reverse would be true, of course. How pumped would Kris Bryant get if he came to the plate and saw a whole pile of Kris Bryants in the seats behind homeplate? What sort of powerful juju would there be if the Babe, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and the Mick were occupying the seats behind home in Yankee Stadium?

And when the Red Sox came to town?

You fill those seats with dozens of Bucky (Bleeping) Dents. Of course.

I like it. I like it a lot.

The long echo of courage

And now the word comes down that John Lewis and C.T. Vivian have died, and so the Blob again is compelled to put aside childish things. Sportsball World can sit a spell. It's not like it's going anywhere, especially in these strange and troubled days.

The arc of history is long, Dr. Martin Luther King famously said once, but it bends toward justice. If so, it also provides a certain circularity that alternately comforts and disturbs. I suppose this is one of those times when it does both.

On the day two giants of the civil rights movement passed, after all, civil rights were again an issue in America, just as they were almost 60 years ago. People were marching in the streets again, just as Lewis and Vivian and so many others were then. And they were being met with brute force again, just as they were then.

The details have changed. But that is about all.

Sixty years ago, it was white mobs with lead pipes and clubs, and Bull Connor with his firehoses and police dogs. Today, it's tear gas, rubber bullets and shadowy goons pulling people off the street, throwing them into unmarked vans and driving them off to be detained and searched without   warrants, probable cause or other such legal niceties.

The latter is happening in Portland, Ore., right now, an American city. It is happening without the consent of city officials or any of the governed. It is happening at the behest of the corrupt Bull Connor wannabe in the White House, who preaches law and order while aligning himself with felons and miscreants.

Just as Connor and his ilk did then, the wannabe labels the protesters as dangerous radicals intent on the destruction of the country. The order to invade an American city with unidentified brownshirts referenced "violent anarchists." The violence they were accused of, and specified in the orders, was ... scrawling graffiti on federal buildings.

So America is being threatened by subversive spray paint. Time to send in the gestapo, surely.

John Lewis and C.T. Vivian would have recognized all of this, unfortunately. In their last days, they might have heard echoes of an earlier time. And they might have shaken their heads in dismay.

But in the two of them, there are other echoes. And they are the echoes most worth hearing today.

Lewis was an idealistic young man and Vivian one of those he looked up to sixty years ago. They were Freedom Riders together. Lewis was savagely beaten in a bus depot in Alabama; Vivian was savagely beaten while in custody in Mississippi. Both wound up for a short time in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm, as grim a penal institution as existed anywhere in America.

They could have retreated to the shadows, after all that. But after Lewis was beaten within an inch of his life in Alabama, he climbed right back on the bus again for the trip across Mississippi. And four years after Parchman Farm, both were on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala. -- where once again Lewis was beaten within an inch of his life.

If the arc of history is long, so are the echoes of that kind of courage.

From David Halberstam's "The Children":

John Lewis was in no condition to feel any exhilaration at the moment. He was lying on the ground in the bus depot soaked in his own blood, moving in and out of consciousness, hearing voices coming from distant place ... Lewis was, in his conscious flashes, still sure he was going to die. He had never seen so much blood. At least, he thought, his beliefs had not deserted him.

John Lewis was all of 21 years old when that happened.

Let the echoes ring long and loud.

Long distance disconnection

Once upon a time -- long, long ago, before we learned the moon landings were all faked and the astronauts were all Tom Hanks in various disguises -- Alan Shepard took out a golf club and hit a golf ball.

He was on the moon at the time (allegedly!). The golf ball, owing to the moon's having 1/6th the gravity of Earth, went forever. It may still be out there, sailing along toward the No. 6 green on Ceti Alpha 5 or something.

If so, it will probably find Bryson DeChambeau's ball there.

This is because DeChambeau hauled off and slugged a tee shot 423 yards at the Memorial yesterday, which is ridiculous and should not be possible unless, like Alan Shepard, you are on the moon. But DeChambeau did this because he is bigger now and stronger and golf clubs and golf balls are not what they used to be.

Golf clubs are registered firearms now. Golf balls are Superballs with dimples. Which means just about any weekend jamoke can go out there now and spank a tee shot to within hailing distance of 300 yards.

Which, you know, just ain't right.

Or so says this guy, who knows a little bit about golf.

The Memorial is Jack Nicklaus' tournament at Jack Nicklaus' track, and so Jack Nicklaus gets to weigh in on stuff there. As usual, he is absolutely right about this. You can't keep making golf balls that sail 423 yards when struck solidly, Nicklaus says, because eventually you'll have to re-configure every course on the PGA Tour. And there simply isn't enough land to do that unless, say, half of every state becomes one mammoth golf course.

Welcome to the Masters, a Tradition Unlike Any Other. I'm Jim Nantz, standing here on the veranda at Augusta National. Let's go to Verne Lundquist now in Atlanta, where Bryson DeChambeau has just made birdie after driving the green on No. 9, a 23-mile par-3 ...

You get the gist.

You also get, or should, that this is the classic example of technology not just advancing a game but overwhelming it. Back in the day, and it wasn't all that long ago a day, a 300-yard drive inspired gasps of awe. That's what John Daly was doing at Crooked Stick in the 1991 PGA. I was there, and every time he launched one, people's jaws hit the ground.

Today they'd say, "Wow, guess he didn't get all of that one."

This gets us back to Jack's point, which is that golf is getting perilously close to not being golf anymore.

His solution is to re-design golf balls by taking 20 percent off the distance they travel now, and then "rate" balls to match the course being played. That way, he says, the course would play the way it was designed to play.

This sounds astoundingly sensible. And apparently the USGA, after years of Nicklaus bending its ear about it, is starting to listen.

Which is good. After all, can you imagine how hard it would be to follow Tiger through an entire round at a reconfigured Muirfield Village?

I mean, Columbus to Cincinnati is a hike, man.

The (relative) value of games

NASCAR put 20,000 fans inside Bristol Motor Speedway last night, and maybe they'll get away with it. Maybe whole wads of people won't get sick or wind up on their stomachs breathing through ventilators, or accidentally send their frail grannies to a rendezvous with a pine box.

To be sure, NASCAR was responsible about it. They required fans to wear masks to gain entry, and they could take them off only when they were seated. And social distancing was in place and easily achievable, since 20,000 left the stands more than 80 percent unoccupied.

So we shall see. In the meantime, it's revealing what people were saying about it all, which is it was an important step toward getting America out from under the shadow of the Bastard Plague.

That's a theme we're hearing a lot these days, as baseball and basketball and hockey start up again in kinda-sorta fashion, twisted as they are into bizarre Dali-esque shapes. We're hearing our games are a vital component in getting America back on the road to normality. We're hearing we need our games the way we need food or shelter or any other necessity for a stable and happy life.

I suppose that could be true. I also suppose "need" is not necessarily the word I'd choose for something whose primary reason for existence is to give us something to watch while we're lying on the couch on Sunday afternoons.

I know. That's a hell of a thing for an old sportswriter to say.

I also know sports is Big Business, from professional baseball and football and basketball right on down to college football and basketball, which are Big Business themselves and thus operate by the same prerogatives. So in that sense they do play a part in getting the economy moving again.

On the other hand, they are still just games. They are still just a diversion in a nation that has come to think of its diversions as necessities.

Which brings us to this observation by Thomas Laforgia of Deadspin.

It's an excellent point he's making. Plunked down in a state where incoherent leadership has allowed the Bastard Plague to run rampant, it seems vaguely obscene that a whole ecosystem has been constructed to protect a bunch of basketball players. And not just basketball players, but basketball players who are getting tested everyday, and getting the results inside of two days.

Meanwhile, as Laforgia points out, regular Floridians out in the world are waiting up to two weeks for results. And there aren't enough tests to begin with. And this in a state where the Bastard Plague already has killed more than 4,500 and infected north of 300,000.

And, sure, your dad or uncle or aforementioned frail granny is not going to move product the way LeBron does. They are not a multibillion-dollar engine of commerce like the NBA. And they do not stand to lose those billions if they aren't protected and tested and allowed to proceed.

And so the push to get going again in our world of games. And so the narrative that this needs to happen because the games are crucial to our national interest, when in fact it all boils down to a dirty little secret: We've learned to get along without them.

And, yes, that's also a hell of a thing for an old sportswriter.

But I was with a group of other sportswriting and sportscasting colleagues the other day, and while we agreed we all missed sports, we didn't miss them as much as we thought we would. And the longer we went without them, the less at least a couple of us missed them.

That conversation would likely have scared the bejeezus out of the poobahs of our games. Because if sports journalists were saying that, imagine what large swatches of the general public are saying.

Most of whom were live-streaming "Hamilton" on Disney+ over the recent holiday weekend, of course.

Lin-Manuel Miranda over LeBron and K.D. and Luka Doncic and them?

Shudder.

Naming rights

Someone's not going to like it. You can take that to the bank and deposit it right now.

However the Football Team Previously Known As The Washington Racial Slurs decides to re-invent itself, someone -- probably a lot of someones -- will say, "You know, as inventions go, this ain't no electric light." Someone -- probably a lot of someones -- will take offense. Someone -- probably a lot of someones -- will say it objectifies, trivializes or marginalizes this, that or the other thing.

I know this because consensus is dead in an America tribalized by belief systems that grow more divorced from reality and perspective every day, led by a president who's divorced from those things himself.

I also know this because the First Rule of Nicknaming is people are always going to hate whatever you come up with.

People where I live, for instance, hated it when the city's new minor-league baseball franchise was named the Wizards. Some even thought it was satanic, because that's just how some people roll here.

Of course, 16 years later, when the team dumped "Wizards" in favor of "TinCaps," people hated that, too. They'd grown used to "Wizards," see. They'd bought the gear. They liked the cute dragon mascot.

So it will be with the Washington Fightin' Appropriations.

No, that's not the official nickname. I just threw that out there. And I've got others.

The Washington Lobbyists. The Washington Fili-Busters. The Washington Died-In-Committees.

The Washington Heat Rash, in honor of what it's like there in August.

Among the more intriguing actual suggestions right now is the Washington Red Tails, which would be a salute to the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. The logo possibilities have already been put out there -- including a silhouette of a P-51 Mustang, which is what the Airmen flew.

Of course, this being the country we are now, some people would hate it. Some would say it trivializes the accomplishments of black men. Some might even say it's racist.

Me?

I don't know. I'm a 65-year-old white guy. I'm also not a Tuskegee Airman.  I've heard those who are still alive and who've been asked, though, say they'd be honored.

Pretty much ends the debate for me.

Not that there is a debate at the moment.

Right now, after all, the Red Tails are about as official as the Fili-Busters. Or the Heat Rash. Or the Senators or Federals or Monuments or Wolves, which are other suggestions that have been bruited about.

Of course, if it's the latter, PETA will probably hate it. They'll say the mascot, Howl, is a cartoonish insult to a proud species.

So it goes.

Teachability

So maybe I was wrong. I know, first time for everything.

("I think you misspelled 'first time since five minutes ago'," you're saying)

See, I'm rethinking what I wrote the other day about DeSean Jackson, the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver who soiled social media with a lot of anti-Semitic excrement, and then was backed up by former NBA player Stephen Jackson (no relation), who soiled social media with more anti-Semitic excrement. I wrote that DeSean's "apology" was inexpressibly lame, and cast serious doubt on his vow to use the episode as a teachable moment to listen harder to and learn more about people from other cultures.

Well. I don't how coachable DeSean Jackson is. But apparently he is indeed teachable.

This upon the news that, last Friday, Jackson participated in a Zoom call with 94-year-old Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor. Mosberg invited Jackson to visit Auschwitz with him. Jackson
 accepted the invitation.

"Thank you, Mr. Mosberg, for your valuable time and insight today," Jackson posted on Instagram, under a screen grab of the two of them. "I'm taking this time to continue educating myself and bridging the gap between different cultures, communities and religions."

"I grew up in Los Angeles, and never really spent time with anyone from the Jewish community and didn't know much about their history," Jackson said on the call, according to the Jerusalem Post. "This has been such a powerful experience for me to learn and educate myself."

To which the Blob says, good on you, DeSean, and my bad. Maybe some good will come out of a profoundly un-good episode. If so, it will be as valuable as reaching out to and trying to understand others always is -- but now in particular, given that the presidential bully pulpit is commanded by a man who glories in demonizing anyone who disagrees with or opposes him.

Not surprisingly, therefore, he's the president of a nation riven now with seemingly irreparable fissures along any number of demographic fault lines. And, yes, some of those are religious lines, which is why anti-Semitism -- which never really goes away -- is on the rise again.

A high-profile professional athlete reaching across those divides?

Couldn't happen at a better time.

Bubbling over

You want to say, "Sure, this will work." That's what you want to say.

Because if you don't say "Sure, this will work," or "Maybe this will work," or "There's a chance this could work," you're just a crotchety cynic who doesn't want this to work. You want sports to go away -- even though they were your livelihood for four decades, even though it was a livelihood you considered yourself fortunate beyond words to pursue.

I don't know how to process the logic behind that. Perhaps because there isn't any.

What I do know is that's what I'm hearing from certain corners of social media right now, simply because I'm wondering how this is all going to work. And because the skeptic in me wonders if it can.

I wish that skeptic would starve to death, frankly. Unfortunately people keep feeding him.

And so to the NBA bubble in Orlando, where everything the skeptic suspected would happen is happening. They haven't even started with the games yet, but already Kawhi Leonard's showed red for the Bastard Plague and Russell Westbrook's showed red and one of his Rocket teammates, Bruno Caboclo, inadvertently broke quarantine.

And then there's Richaun Holmes of the Kings -- exhibit A for what the Blob suspected was going to happen.

Holmes is back in quarantine now after leaving the "bubble" to take a food delivery. I don't want to say I knew this was gonna happen, but I knew this was gonna happen.

It's why the NBA was outside its mind to make Orlando the site for its bubble to begin with. You couldn't pick a worse place to conduct its Weird Thrown-Together Thing (I'm sorry: "resumption of the season") if you threw a dart at a map blindfolded. Really, guys, Florida? Ground zero for the Bastard Plague? Come for the sunshine, stay for the hospitalization?

Not the best strategic move when the bubble you envision is not, and cannot be made, leak-proof. And so there will be more Richaun Holmeses, who likely just wasn't thinking when he stepped outside to take that delivery. Some of them will be inadvertent; some will happen because these are healthy young men and you can't keep them sealed off from the world indefinitely without them going stir crazy.

So, again, the skeptic wonders how this all works. The NBA, MLB, college football, the NHL's "Stanley Cup playoffs." And high school football.

The latter maybe makes me hate the skeptic worst, because I love high school football. I want them to figure out a way to do it. I want them to find a solution that doesn't involve possibly infected kids breathing on each other for 48 minutes on a Friday night. I just don't know what it is.

What I do know is our low-wattage Secretary of Edukashun has no solutions, only dictates. She wants kids filling up classrooms again, and she'll yank your funding if you don't comply.

But don't come to her or the administration she serves for help, because they've got none to give. Only magical thinking and the usual browbeating.

Already, however, educators not conversant with fairy dust are exercising the smartest option, which is to ignore the Edukashun secretary. The school system which includes North Central High School in Indianapolis is delaying in-classroom instruction for the time being, and has suspended all sports. Portage High School has suspended all athletic activities. I suspect they won't be the last.

To which I say this: Dammit.

New leaves, turned

He said he would never get rid of the racial slur. Remember that?

He said, Daniel Snyder did -- he vowed, actually -- he would never, ever, ever allow That Name to be changed, as long as he owned the Washington Football Club. It was a proud heritage, or something like that. It was a proud heritage even though the man who gave the team That Name was a diehard racist who refused to allow players of color on his football team until his team was the last team standing that hadn't.

That man's name was George Preston Marshall.  And it figured he would give his team a racial slur for a nickname, given his stance on such matters.

And Daniel Snyder?

Well. Let's just say "never" is never as final as it sounds.

Because today, according to sources, the Washington Football Club will announce it is, indeed, getting rid of the racial slur. It's dropping That Name like a hot rock. And it's doing so largely because a lot of its sponsors, and the sponsors that bankroll them, told Snyder the money train would be leaving the station if it didn't.

And suddenly "never" became "today." Surprise, surprise. Like we didn't know money outshouts everything else in America?

So another leaf turns in a nation finally turning some uncommonly stubborn ones, in defiance of the out-of-touch creature in the White House and his perpetually aggrieved base. They'll call this Political Correctness Run Amok, because that's the tune they always play when something wrong is made right. They're a veritable Johnny One Note when things like this happen.

And yet the earth will not shudder on its axis, when the Washington Racial Slurs become the Washington Something Else's. Nothing substantive will change because they're the Fightin' Appropriations or Congress Critters. The name will change, the logo will change, and a year from now all those new jerseys and hats and other gear will be flying off the shelves.

That's how it works. I know this because of what's in my closet.

Among a prolific jumble of other caps, see, there's a green one with a sneering red apple on it. It's a TinCaps cap, and you see them everywhere now. People wear them who couldn't find Fort Wayne on either a map or a bet, but who think the name and gear are coolly funky.

Which is odd, because when the team ditched the Wizards nickname to become the TinCaps, everyone hated the new name. Well, not everyone, but enough so you could get away with saying everyone.

Now TinCaps gear flies off the shelves.

And the Washington Something Else's?

Better get in line for your Something Else gear now.

Dependence Day cometh

Independence Day was a week ago, but up in that place where ghosts walk, Father Corby signals for the fair catch and lore grows like velvet leaf, a different kind of day is fast approaching.

Notre Dame football is about to go head-to-head with Dependence Day.

The Irish have been proudly independent since before Gus Dorais threw and Knute Rockne caught, and it has served them well. They've got their own TV deal and their pick of opponents, because every program that's any program eventually wants to come to Notre Dame.

But like so much else, all of that has gone on its head in 2020.

The dominoes are already toppling. The Big Ten announced it will limit its fall sports to conference games only, and a day later the Pac-12 followed suit. And you can bet the farm all the other Power 5s soon will do the same.

Which leaves Notre Dame football in something of a pickle.

See, the Irish are members of the ACC, but football is not, at least officially. It's the oddest of arrangements, because even though it allows Notre Dame to maintain its independence in football, the Irish still play half their schedule against ACC opponents. So it's kind of like being a member of a
the club without actually being a member of the club.

Everyone: "Wait, aren't you a member of the club?"

Notre Dame: "Nah, We just hang with 'em once in awhile."

That sort of deal.

Now, however, the Irish are going to have to hang with the ACC a lot. Because once the ACC gets in line and declares it will only play conference games this fall, Notre Dame's kinda-sorta independence will by necessity have to exit stage right. Otherwise it won't have a football season.

Already it's lost games against Wisconsin, USC and Stanford thanks to the Big Ten/Pac 12 edicts. Without becoming, at least for now, a de facto member of the ACC as is every other sport at N.D., it will lose six more games. And you can go ahead and make it seven after the SEC shuts down its non-conference games, because the Irish are also scheduled to play Arkansas.

Sooo, there it is. Welcome to the ACC, Coach Kelly.

At least for the time being.

The fall of the fall. Part Deux.

So I've got this map in front me, and a football schedule.  The football schedule is Indiana's, adjusted now to account for the Big Ten's desperate Hail Mary to save its fall sports.

I want to see how much eliminating everything but conference games, which is the Hail Mary, is really going to cut down on travel. And therefore lessen the risk of exposure to the Bastard Plague, the way the Big Ten says it will.

So here is this schedule, and here is this map. The schedule tells me Indiana plays at Rutgers on October 17. The map tells me Rutgers is 735 miles from Bloomington.

Now I have this other schedule. This one is Nebraska's. It tells me Nebraska plays at Rutgers a week after Indiana does. The map tells me Lincoln, Neb., is 1,162 miles from Piscataway, N.J.

It also tells me Lincoln is 625 miles from West Lafayette, In., which is where Purdue is. Purdue opens the season, if there is one, at Nebraska on Sept. 5.

Hmmm.

Look. I get it. Eliminating all non-conference games eliminates about a third of a team's schedule, which theoretically limits travel, which theoretically limits exposure.

But most of the non-conference games played by Power 5s are home games anyway. Only a relative handful compel Big Ten schools to travel somewhere else. And an even smaller handful compel them to travel ...

How far is Nebraska from New Jersey again? 1,162 miles?

So it's absurd to think a conference that now sprawls across half the country is going to be safer as a self-contained unit. That's a hell of a big bubble to operate under, after all. And all because the Big Ten decided some years back to stretch itself all out of round to grab some TV dollars.

So, yes, this is a Hail Mary. It's Doug Flutie going deep to Gerard Phelan as night comes down in Chestnut Hill -- except Gerard Phelan likely isn't down there to haul it in this time.

The Power 5s are probably headed where the Ivies have already decided to go, as the Blob noted yesterday. But, as the Blob also noted, they will move mountains to preserve what they can -- especially in football, whose money props up so much.

That means all of them will surely follow the Big Ten down this path. It also means the concept of women and children first has now been replaced by "To hell with them, we're saving ourselves."

Here's the thing, see: A lot of the non-conference games the Power 5s either have tossed or will toss overhead involve non-Power 5 schools who need those guarantee games to pay the bills.

As Gregg Doyel of the Indianapolis Star has pointed out, Ball State was scheduled to rake in $1.675 million for playing at Michigan and Indiana this season. That money represents a good chunk of its athletic budget. Now that money is gone.

Likewise a bunch of other MAC schools, some of whom are barely hanging on by their fingernails as it is. What happens to them without the guarantee-game windfall?

I'll tell you what: No more track-and-field.

Or wrestling, Or baseball and softball. Or soccer. Or whatever.

Lest we forget, even Stanford, a Power 5 school itself, is cutting 11 sports to deal with a Bastard Plague-induced budget crunch. That doesn't augur well for the Ball States or Bowling Greens or Central Michigans, especially without those guarantee games.

In the meantime ...

In the meantime, eight or nine games in the Big Ten still means eight or nine times student-athletes from all over half the country will be breathing on each other for three-plus hours on a Saturday afternoon or night. It means those student-athletes will then take the Bastard Plague back to their own campuses -- where, given how cavalier college kids tend to be about such things, it will likely already have taken hold anyway.

So, yes, expect the Power 5s to soon join the Ivies, just like they did in March. Everything else is a delaying action.

Sorry, Gerard Phelan. Don't think you're gonna catch this one.

The fall of fall

The Smart People, they see what's coming. They are not distracted by wishful thinking, or magical thinking, or whatever off-brand thinking animates Our Only Available Impeached President,  his Secretary of Edukashun and colleges and universities hooked on that football crack pipe.

The Smart People took a peek instead at where we're headed, and said "Yeaaah, don't think so." And so the Ivy League has pulled the plug on its fall sports -- including, of course, football.

It remains to be seen if the Ivies are as visionary as they were back in March, when they became the first to cancel their basketball tournament. Everyone said they were reactionary wusses, but then everyone wound up doing the same thing.

This time?

Hard to say. Basketball is money but football is the big money, and so the Power 5s will move heaven and earth to get their unpaid labor/apparel billboards on the field.  Commerce has always come before workplace safety in America, after all. And so all the pretty words about Keeping Our Student-Athletes Safe is just PR smoke, behind which hides the real message: We've Gotta Keep Our Student-Athletes On The Field.

Here's what I think: I think the Bastard Plague's going to win this one going away.

That delusion has set in as we creep closer to fall is manifest, taking its cue from a White House that's decided people are just going to have to get sick and die now, and that's all there is to it. And so the dim bulb in charge of Edukashun has all but threatened to cut off funding if schools don't open the doors and let everyone back in next month. And international students are going to have their visas yanked if colleges and universities decide to continue with online classes only.

Never mind asking how officials are supposed to maintain social distancing and other Plague precautions in schools that are overcrowded. And never mind that international students who haven't hurt and aren't hurting anyone are being used as chess pieces by the bully in the White House to strong-arm institutions of higher learning.

The bully has an election to win, after all. People are just going to have to get sick. And those international students are just foreigners who don't belong here anyway.

Nonetheless, the Plague's going to win this.

Already you can see college football unraveling. No sooner did players across the country report for preseason camps than players started showing red. Within a week after it came to campus, Kansas State's football team went from zero positives to 14. Clemson had 37. LSU reportedly had as many as 30 players in quarantine not long ago. School after school has either paused or postponed workouts.

By game time -- after the students come back to campus, because, you know, everything's all good now as long as everyone observes the rules, hyuk-hyuk -- half your football team could be in quarantine. How do you play, if that's the case?  And if you do, do you play in front of fans?

Because there's no point in playing college football in empty stadiums. None.

But if you let fans in ...

Well. Best intentions aside, fans are gonna be fans. They're gonna tailgate. They're gonna congregate in large groups because it will be impossible to keep them from doing so. And even if you limit seating to half in some of these vast football Colosseums, you're still talking 40, 50, 60 thousand humans in one place.

Good luck with policing the social distancing and mask-wearing if that's the case.

No, sir. Looks from here like the Ivies are on the leading edge again.

Looks from here like a silent fall, and maybe football in the spring. Or maybe just hit pause for this season and take it up again in 2021.

No one wants that, mind you. But if you're gonna do college football in particular, better it be college football than what-kind-of-joke-is-this college football.

Stay tuned.

And now, more bigotry

Never mind slowing  down the Bastard Plague. How do we slow down the ignorance-and-stupidity plague?

It's not enough that we've got a President who's a Confederate flag hugger. Now we've got Sportsball people saying Hitler made 'em do it.

This upon the uproar surrounding Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson posting a virulently anti-Semitic tweet, then offering an apology so lame it needed a walker. Essentially, here was the gist:

1. I didn't say it. Hitler said it. I was just quoting it.

2. And I really didn't understand what it was saying.

O-kaaay there, DeSean.

I guess we'll just forgo the obvious question, then, which is why you were posting a Hitler quote on Instagram to start with. Also the other obvious question, which is what about "(white Jews) will blackmail America, the will extort America" did you not understand?

Sorry, DeSean. But if apologies were pass routes, you quit on that one.

Look. Jackson isn't the first and won't be the last athlete on social media to hit "send" when he should have hit "delete." And he isn't the first and won't be the last to go into backpedal mode after he got caught out, promising "to do better" to "fully educate" himself and "seek out voices from other communities and listen to their words, thoughts and beliefs."

Sounds good. Hope he does it.

And as a first step toward educating himself, perhaps he should start with this: The names Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

Those are the three men they found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi  on a sweltering August day in 1964. They'd been murdered by racists six weeks before for the unforgivable crime of trying to register black voters.

James Chaney was a black man from Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were white men from New York.

They were both Jewish.

Race-ing to the bottom

You've gotta hand it to Our Only Available Impeached President.  He knows how to play to his base.

Or at least the basest part of his base.

And so here he was on the Magic Twitter Machine yesterday, wrapping himself in the Confederate flag. Saying it was a hell of country when Demon Political Correctness gets in the way of calling your favorite sports team a racial slur. Trashing yet another person of color with yet another sixpack of lies.

Pretty full day of channeling George Wallace there, for OOAIP. Or Lester Maddox or Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman or some other celebrated racist of old.

Look. It's a free country. There's nothing stopping OOAIP from tapping the thick vein of racism that animates the aforementioned basest of his base. If fear-mongering and race-baiting are all you've got to sell, that's what you sell.

But a few words, Mr. President, about going after Bubba Wallace the way you did.

Bubba Wallace drives race cars at cartoon speeds inches away from other race cars moving at cartoon speeds. A rotten tomato flung from the White House isn't gonna scare him any.

Nor will it scare NASCAR, which reacted to OOAIP's load of manure with a reiteration of support for Wallace .

If you missed OOAIP's shot at Wallace, it was straight out of the sheet-and-hood playbook. Basically he wondered when NASCAR's only African-American driver was going to apologize to his white supporters in NASCAR for perpetrating the noose "hoax." Then he threw the Confederate flag in there, too, saying NASCAR's ratings were at an all-time low since it decided the flag of a dead racist nation probably wasn't an appropriate backdrop here in 2020.

As usual, all of this was nonsense. Wallace, to begin with, isn't the one who found and reported the pull rope tied into a noose. Second, it was no "hoax"; the pull rope was, in fact, a noose, though it had been there since last October. And, third, reveling in NASCAR's  plummeting ratings was a big swing and miss since NASCAR viewership actually is up 8 percent since returning May 17.

All of this opened the door for NASCAR's response, which all but implied the President should go (whiz) up a rope. And it opened the door for Wallace's response, which put OOAIP in his customary mean, small, juvenile place.

"Your words and actions will always be held to a higher standard than others," Wallace wrote. "You have to be prepared for that. You don't learn these things in school. You learn them from trails and tribulations, the ups and downs this crazy world provides. You will always have people testing you. Seeing if they can knock you off your pedestal. I encourage you to keep your head high and walk proudly on the path you have chosen. Never let anybody tell you you can't do something! God put us all here for a reason. Find that reason and be proud of it and work your tails off every day towards it! All the haters are doing is elevating your voice and platform to much greater heights!"

Even, he added, "when it's hate from the POTUS."

I believe that's called getting owned, Mr. President.

Repeat after me ...

Maybe it's the words. Maybe they're too big.

Or maybe we're not speaking slowly enough. Or loudly enough.  Or ... something.

You might have missed it while watching "Hamilton" or ducking all the shrapnel in your neighborhood, but over the holiday weekend another professional athlete had another run-in with a media type. This time it was a golfer, Bryson DeChambeau, who's gotten some ink this summer for Big Mac-ing his way to a better golf game. More heft, skinnier numbers on the leaderboard, that's been the secret to his sudden emergence.

It worked to a fare-thee-well over the weekend, when DeChambeau won one of those bank/mortgage company/potted meat product tournaments in Detroit. But that's not why we're here today.

We're here today because of something that happened in the third round Saturday, when DeChambeau became the latest public figure not to get it.

It seems he took issue with a cameraman who caught him in a fit of temper after butchering a bunker shot on the seventh hole. DeChambeau smacked the sand with his club -- a relatively mild fit of pique, frankly -- then chased down the cameraman and had a brief, intense discussion with him about, well, journalism.

"He was literally watching me the whole entire way after getting out of the bunker, walking up to the next green," DeChambeau crabbed later. "I mean, I understand it's his job to video me, but at some point, I think we need to need to start protecting our players out here compared to showing a potential vulnerability and hurting someone's image."

Which brings us back to using too many big words or not enunciating properly.

See, we've repeated ourselves and repeated ourselves and repeated ourselves on the role of the media, and still some people (DeChambeau) don't get it. And so, repeating ourselves again a little louder for those of you in the back, allow us to reiterate:

1. Yes, Bryson, it is the cameraman's job to video you. End of story.

2. No, Bryson, it's not his job, or the job of anyone else in media, to "protect" your image.  Not unless you sign their paychecks, which you don't.

3. So if you don't want some cameraman filming you using your club as a garden hoe after a poor shot, then don't do it. You, and only you, are the guardian of your image. That's no one else's job but yours.

Got that?

Please?

The Indy triple, revisited

This holiday weekend they ran three races from two series on three sweltering days at that ancient pile on the corner of Georgetown Road and 16th Street, and here's what we know about that now: Heresy ain't heresy anymore.

Traditions are traditions but they are elastic at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and so the yard of brick did not burst into flames when American racing's matter (IndyCar) and anti-matter (NASCAR) occupied the same patch of ground.  The Borg-Warner Trophy did not melt like a Nazi's face at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." There was no discernible turning over in graves from Wilbur Shaw or Louis Meyer or any of that bunch.

Scott Dixon won a yawner of an IndyCar Grand Prix, a Hoosier (Chase Briscoe from Gus Grissom's hometown of Mitchell) won the Xfinity race, and Kevin Harvick won his second straight Brickyard 400 when Denny Hamlin crashed with seven laps to run. And we all learned a few things.

Primarily, that all y'all should listen to me once in awhile.

("Once a century work for you?" you're saying)

I've been beating the drums for sometime now that NASCAR needs to move the Brickyard off the oval, where it's largely a crashing bore, and run it on the Speedway infield road course. Having sat through too many Tournament of Roses parades on Brickyard day, it's become painfully obvious that the oval just isn't cut out for compelling racing by the tintop crowd. Too flat, straightaways are too long, the guy out front can just drive away. Yada-yada-yada.

The road course would be far more interesting. That's always seemed clear to me.

And now I've got evidence.

NASCAR ran the Xfinity race Saturday on the infield course, and, well, did you catch the closing laps of it? Guys bumping and banging, guys jockeying for position, Briscoe finding a hole and shooting the gap for the win. Racin', in other words, and not just followin'.

If you missed it, check it out. And then tell me I haven't been right all these years.

I know, it's hard. But you can do it.

A few brief words from the enemy

If stone could speak, I know what the four faces on the mountain would have said last night. I know how they would have addressed the ranting creature invoking their names down there in front of them.

Washington would have said, "Don't put words in my mouth, sonny."

Jefferson would have said, "Did you even read what I wrote?"

Teddy would have wanted to fight him.

And Lincoln ...

Well. Lincoln would have said "Wait, you think I'd have a problem with taking down monuments to men who led an armed revolt against the nation I was leading? The hell are you smoking, Chief?"

Happy 244th, America. And allow me, as one of those evil enemies the President of the United States accused last night of trying to destroy Our Sacred History, to forsake Sportsball World momentarily in honor of Independence Day.

Unlike the President, see, I've cracked a history book or two in my time. And what I've learned from that is what my generation was taught as history in school, and for which the President made an impassioned defense, was a bucket of whitewash. It was cheerleading dressed up as scholarship, and the less savory bits were glossed over with a breezy "Moving right along ..."

Look. I get it. History, especially American history, is messy. There are no clean angles and unobstructed sightlines. There is, rather, nuance that often lies beyond the grasp of schoolchildren -- and, clearly, beyond that of Our Only Available Impeached President.

And so our history books, the ones the President wants to get back to, simplify. They obfuscate. And sometimes they just out-and-out make stuff up.

Truth is, we're a nation founded on a set of high ideals we have often blithely ignored. We have committed wrongs that have never been made right. And we've been our own worst enemy too many times to count.

Pointing this out does not make us destroyers of history, as the President would have you believe. It makes us illuminators of it. It makes us, not revisionists, but anti-revisionists.

A nation unwilling to acknowledge its shortcomings is a nation whose shortcomings will eventually undo it. A nation invited to regard as enemies those who do not subscribe to a particular ideology -- or who oppose particular leaders -- is a nation well down the road to becoming exactly what those leaders warn about.

I am one of those enemies, apparently. I am not a True American. I do not love America; I am, in fact, someone who wishes to destroy America.

That's what I got from Our Only Available Impeached President last night, as he stood in the literal shadow of men whom he understands not at all. I was told, in so many words, that there is no place for me here. I was told if I don't love him or subscribe to his extraordinarily toxic vision of America, then I hate my country and I want to teach my children to hate it, too.

Hell of a speech to deliver on Independence Day weekend. Hell of a message to bring to a nation riven by divisions Our Only Available Impeached President has actively fomented, and which he went right on fomenting last night.

Happy 244th, America.

Despite what you've been told, I really don't hate you.

Conscience of the coin, Part Deux

So remember the other day, when the Blob noted that nothing gets Americans off the Stubborn Train faster than damming up the old revenue stream?

People of color and conscience have been raising dust for decades over the Confederate Stars and Bars in the corner of Mississippi's state flag, but it wasn't until the Southeastern Conference and NCAA decided to withhold their events over it that state legislators got religion. Magically, after all these years, the little wink to white supremacy in the state flag is going away.

And now?

Now we consider the Washington Football Club, whose racial slur of a nickname has been a similar point of contention for years.

The national uprising against stuff that just ain't right has caught the Racial Slurs in its sweep, and now the money is talking loud and proud. FedEx, which paid the Racial Slurs $205 million in 1998 for the naming rights to their stadium, has requested the team change its name. That 87 investment firms and investors worth a combined $620 billion in turn sent letters to FedEx -- and Nike and PepsiCo -- asking them to pressure the Racial Slurs on their behalf is surely no coincidence.

Washington Football Club owner Daniel Snyder has steadfastly stood by the Racial Slurs nickname, as the state of Mississippi stood by its flag. But how much longer before Snyder, too, has a sudden (and of course completely genuine, hyuk-hyuk) change of heart?

The Blob's answer: Start the clock.

Doubling down

Saw the weather forecast for the holiday weekend in Indianapolis this morning, and here is what I'm thinking, strange as it may sound:

I'm thinking Bill Elliott would have hated this.

I'm thinking he would have hated this not because NASCAR will be sharing the Indianapolis Motor Speedway stage with IndyCar this weekend -- Elliott's probably OK with that, it being historic and all -- but because it's supposed to be 92, 93 degrees all weekend, with a hammering sun and humidity like a wet sheet thrown across the roof of the world. It's gonna be the kind of weekend where the sky turns white in the mid-afternoon heat, and you bust a sweat just thinking about busting a sweat.

In other words, it's gonna be a lot like the day, some years ago, when we came upon Bill Elliott sitting on the steps of his hauler out behind Gasoline Alley.

It was late July, early August, back in the days when they ran the Brickyard then. Elliott was at the tail end of his career. And he was sitting there with his head down, mopping sweat, crabbing about the heat.

Bill Ellliott. From Dawsonville, Georgia. Complaining about the heat.

I say this because there won't be several hundred thousand more Bill Elliotts this weekend, roasting like rotisserie chicken in that panoramic sweep of grandstand. Which I guess is a blessing in an odd upside-down kind of way, as well as being weird and creepy and very much a curse, too.

See, this could have been the biggest weekend at IMS since the stock car boys came to town 26 years ago, or maybe even since they built the place on what was then nothing but farm fields. It's still hugely momentous -- IndyCar and NASCAR!  Dogs and cats, living together! -- and maybe only Roger Penske, with a foot in both worlds, could have pulled it off. But ...

But it will happen in a vacuum now, thanks to COVID-19. It will happen without fans.

The alto whine of Indy cars and throaty bass of stock cars will throw back only their own echoes, absent the accompanying thunder from the usual Mass O' Humanity. Simon Pagenaud gear will not go head-to-head with Brad Keselowski gear in the infield. Crotchety old bores like me will not watch the IndyCar Grand Prix on Saturday and then wonder aloud, for approximately the 2,431st time, why they don't just run Sunday's Brickyard on the road course, too.

Oh, wait. I guess I just did that.

In any case ... it won't be what it could have been. One more casualty of the Bastard Plague, and one more reason it's the Bastard it is.

But, hey. Think of the money everyone will save on sunscreen. And aloe.

Course correction

Some wrongs have never been right. It just takes awhile sometimes for someone to say so, manners being what they are and all.

 

And so no one wanted to point out that the Washington Football Club had a racial slur for a nickname, until someone finally did. No one wondered aloud, until they did, why the hell a statue of its racist founder, George Preston Marshall, greeted visitors to a stadium that was home to a whole pile of black football players.

 

This does not mean people weren't thinking that. It does not mean they weren't wondering, for years and years, how it made sense to name U.S. military installations for Confederate generals whose troops killed thousands of U.S. military personnel. Or why statues glorifying men who led an armed revolt against the United States graced town squares across the U.S.

 

People are speaking up about all that now because the time's right. It's not an indictment of their sincerity that they didn't before.

 

Which is how we get to Kenesaw Mountain Landis today.

 

The Judge is famous for casting the Black Sox into outer darkness, even though some of those he cast out shouldn't have been cast. He is less famous, but more notorious, for also keeping black players out of the major leagues for the entirety of his 24-year tenure.

 

It wasn't until 2 1/2 years after the old coot died that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. It was only several decades late, thanks to the Judge. All these years later baseball has black players and Japanese players and players from 19 other foreign countries, and the game is demonstrably better for it.

 

So of course Barry Larkin wondered why the National League Most Valuable Player trophy had Judge Landis' name and face on it when they handed it to him in 1995. He just didn't say anything.

 

He is now.

 

"Why is it on there?" the Reds' Hall of Famer told the Associated Press the other day. "(Because) I was always aware of his name and what that meant to slowing the color line in Major League Baseball, of the racial injustice and inequality that black players had to go through."

 

He's not the only one aware. And who wonders how it's at all appropriate in 2020.

 

Among others, fellow MVPs Mike Schmidt and Terry Pendleton are wondering the same thing. And wondering if perhaps it's time Landis' name was removed from a trophy that represents a game to which he's no longer relevant.

 

That's not revisionist history, no matter what the real revisionist would like you to think. It's merely a course correction, which is at times not just appropriate but necessary.

 

I mean, look what happened to the Titanic for not making one.