Politics and Sports Attention Surplus Syndrome

A lifelong victim of ASS

From the time my memories began in earnest, in late 1963, my life has been dominated by the worlds of politics and sports. The JFK assassination triggered my political impulses at age seven, and I’d already started playing and following sports, especially baseball. It was my father’s favorite sport, so it became mine.

The only real closeness my father and I ever experienced was in watching the NFL games every Sunday, as religiously as we would attend mass at St. Michael’s, or in following the hapless Washington Senators every summer. I relished those times with my father. I would even keep a scorecard of every Senators game, the vast majority of them losses. We’d have to listen to them on the radio most of the time, because the team had a typically cheap, fan-unfriendly deal with a local TV station, where they only broadcast about thirty of their eighty one road games each season. My father never displayed much emotion during any game, unlike me. Even as a little kid, I was ridiculously overcompetitive, and would throw a tantrum if my team lost.

I absorbed old baseball history, reading books by long forgotten figures like Ford Frick and Jimmie Dykes. I was fascinated with the old timers, who played before my father’s birth in 1912. I studied the Dead Ball era. My father was an exceptional baseball player, the starting second baseman for Washington, D.C.’s elite American Legion team. They won the championship, and my father was given a gold baseball as the most valuable player. He gave it to some girl who lost it. That would have been a nice heirloom to have. He was eventually offered a Minor League contract by the York, Pennsylvania club, a team in the New York Yankees’ farm system. He turned it down because they paid very little at the time, and he had to help support his family.

My dad took me to a handful of Washington Senators games, and my first view of the impossibly green grass and sculpted infield is imbedded in my memory. It was magic. The only time my father was ever proud of me was when I became a “rain man” type of statistical whiz at seven or eight years old, memorizing every batting average and other significant numbers for each player in the Major Leagues. I also memorized all the legends, and their career and best season numbers, beginning my lifelong pursuit of filling my head with information that was guaranteed to never make me any money. I memorized World Series winners and losers in chronological order, along with all the heavyweight champs, NFL champions, etc. At least it made my father proud.

My parents did come and watch my Little League games for the first few years I played. I wasn’t really any good yet, so they didn’t see much. As I’ve written before, when I did become really good, they weren’t there to cheer me on. It’s a bittersweet feeling to get the game-winning hit in the championship game, to feel as exultant as one can feel on a field of play, and not have anyone to share the experience with on the ride home. I guess it was kind of like that girl losing my father’s golden ball after his championship. Sort of a family legacy. My father did watch me pitch once while I was playing in the Babe Ruth League as a fifteen year old. It was after I’d transformed my appearance and was in good shape. His only comment was that he couldn’t believe that was me out there running so fast. That was the last time he saw me play.

Actually, he showed a bit of pride when I wrote a letter to Sports Illustrated as a thirteen year old, and they published it. We hung the issue on the wall. That was kind of a seminal moment for me, as it combined my two greatest interests in life; baseball and writing. Once I hit my teens, I realized the Major League dream was never going to happen. Somehow, I wasn’t as good a player after I lost weight. The Eric Cartman figure dominated. The teenage me didn’t. I also lost interest in playing sports in high school. I didn’t like the jockocracy, and I discovered marijuana. I sided with the “freaks” over the jocks. I grew to hate the popular crowd. I’m sure my perspective comes through loud and clear in my book Bullyocracy.

But I became a super sports fan again- it’s short for fanatic for a reason- as a young adult, after my late friend Joe Burton turned me on to hockey. I had season tickets for the Washington Capitals NHL games for three seasons. It briefly became my favorite sport. I went to lots of Baltimore Orioles games after the Senators moved to Texas, even though I despised them. And, of course, I continued to devote all Sundays during the fall to the NFL games. Even after I started telling everyone I knew that the games were obviously fixed. Even after they stopped letting more than a strict quota of White players on the field. Fantasy football drew me in further, and is the reason why I still halfway watch these rigged spectacles. I’ve compared my addiction to sports to a heroin addiction. I don’t seem to be able to kick it.

In baseball, since the Senators never had a chance of winning anything, I rooted for the Detroit Tigers. I also liked the Red Sox and the Cubs. The two most snake-bitten franchises in baseball history. Who else would I be expected to like? The Yankees? The Tigers won the World Series in 1968. That was the only time during my fandom that my favorite team in any sport won a championship. By the time the Red Sox broke their near-century long curse, and the Cubs won a World Series for the first time in over one hundred years, I was no longer really a fan. It felt empty. When the Nationals won the World Series in 2019, I was very happy. But it didn’t feel the same as if the Senators had won it in 1965, and my father had been there to celebrate, too.

I played golf a lot as a teenager and into my twenties. It’s become a game exclusively for the well heeled for years now. I feel bad that I couldn’t afford to take my son golfing. But we carried on the tradition I’d established with my father. We watched all the big sporting events together, but I also coached all his teams. Like my father, he rarely got upset over the results. Both he and my father were much better sports than I am. I hate to lose at anything. Greg Norman became my favorite golfer after I read an article about him that painted him in a particularly nice light. He was the only golfer I’ve ever seen who didn’t lean on his putter and make a divot when picking up his ball, out of consideration for others. So of course, I jinxed his career. He became the most notable hard-luck story in sports history. At least he’s very, very wealthy.

If sports was like heroin to me, I guess politics was like opium. I started getting into the minutiae of politics a bit later, at age eleven or so. Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign really triggered something in me. I found him to be an incredibly appealing figure, as he would push a lock of his longish hair out of his face, and evoke memories of the mythical Camelot he’d been an integral part of. He represented a nostalgia for the Kennedy presidency the country had been robbed of so suddenly. How many kids are nostalgic for anything at eleven years old? That was me- already looking at the past, with an intense interest in American history few other children had. I longed for a world that came before me, that I wasn’t a part of.

I still remember waking up the morning after the California primary, and shouting out to my father, “Did Bobby Kennedy win the California primary?” My father told me that he had won, but he’d been shot. I was absolutely crushed. That day at school, they brought a television set into the classroom, and while some kids were sad like me, others were inappropriately light-hearted and joking. There were several near fights. I knew somehow that he was going to be shot, like his brother, and that once he was it was inevitable that he’d die, too. I was listening to my transistor radio in our unfinished basement, throwing a tennis ball against the wall, when RFK’s press secretary Frank Mankiewicz announced that he was gone. I cried like a baby.

From that moment on, even though my favorite candidate had “lost” in the worst manner possible, I was hooked. I kept track of the leading Democratic Party candidates in 1972, and then 1976. I was holding out hope that Teddy Kennedy, as the sole survivor, would pick up the mantle left by his assassinated brothers. In 1972, my favorite was Edmund Muskie. Just as the sports teams I rooted for seemed to lose a lot more than they won, my political favorites were no more successful. Muskie was driven from the race when he cried about people attacking his wife or something. It seemed like a stupid disqualification for office, but I was young and very naive. I had no inkling yet of the wide, wide world of conspiracies.

By 1976, I was fully into my JFK assassination obsession. Thus, I looked to the Democratic candidates for any mention of the subject. Senator Fred Harris was the only candidate who promised to support a new investigation, so he became my top choice. Again, Teddy refused to run, or he would obviously have been my favorite. Harris didn’t last long, in the customary manner of all my choices. Then I backed Morris Udall. He did fairly well, but little known peanut farmer Jimmy Carter was anointed the “front runner” by a fawning media, and that was that. I was beginning to understand how influential this “front runner” tag could be, as well as how all the endless pre-election polls manipulated voters.

I was old enough to cast my first vote in 1976. I didn’t like Carter, but there was no way I could have voted for Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission. Still a die hard very liberal Democrat, there was in reality no chance I could vote for any Republican. After the fiasco of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which I had lobbied for as a volunteer with Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry, I grew disillusioned with politics. But in 1980, Ted Kennedy shockingly decided to run at long last, challenging President Carter in the primaries. It was years too late, and despite being far ahead in the initial polls, the media did a real hit job on him, and he failed in his belated bid for the White House.

By 1980, I was no longer any kind of Democrat. I’d become fiercely independent, and adopted much of the perspective all my readers have come to know and love. I don’t remember who I voted for in 1980 or 1984, surely some Third Party candidate. I think I voted for Lyndon Larouche in 1988. I voted for Ross Perot in both 1992 and 1996. I loved Pat Buchanan, and was part of his alleged one percent of the vote in 2000. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2004 and 2008. I was a strong supporter of Ron Paul in 2012, when he was cheated out of several primary wins. My son went door to door for him, and grew disillusioned himself at how few neighbors were receptive. He discovered just how many RINOs there are in our neck of the woods. That’s why I contend that they don’t really have to rig much of the vote. Most Americans simply are that stupid.

During both of Obama’s runs, I voted for the Libertarian candidate. I don’t even remember the names, and wasn’t enthusiastic in the least about doing it. By this time, I recognized the futility in voting, but like my sports addiction, I couldn’t stop myself from trudging to the polls, casting a vote I knew wouldn’t be honestly counted. I liked both Dennis Kucinich, and my friend Cynthia McKinney, but I knew when they ran that all those pre-election polls would claim they were mired at the bottom. Pat Buchanan’s one percent territory. I cast a bunch of pointless votes for Third Party candidates that never had a chance. I had a terrible record in presidential voting, with my first selection, Jimmy Carter, being the only time my candidate had won.

Then came Donald Trump. They sucked me back in, like they did millions of others. I knew that this obnoxious reality TV star couldn’t possibly be sincere, but when Roger Stone told me he knew about all the conspiracies, and had been biding his time while accumulating his fortune. I thought it was barely possible that this loud braggart might have some principles, and want to expose the corruption he’d seen from the inside. It didn’t take long for me to realize Trump was indeed what I’d thought he was. And so I came up with the Trumpenstein Project to explain this phenomenon, which rechanneled all the reformist, populist sentiment out there into the disastrous two party system. What do you like- red or blue? Tweedledee or Tweedledum?

When I voted for Trump in 2016, it was the first time I’d ever voted Republican. Also only the second time I’ve voted for a winner. It was hard to resist Trump’s entertaining comments about “fake news” and the like. Sure, he wasn’t doing anything he promised to do, but you couldn’t help but laugh at the reactions from the putrid men/women/its on the “Woke” Left. Only a few of them were an actual part of the Trumpenstein Project. The rest were like the millions of Americans who reacted to Trumpenstein’s persona like Pavlovian test subjects. On some juvenile level, it was fun to watch the food fights Trump engaged in with some veritable lunatics in the entertainment world.

I thought of writing this column after Ron DeSantis incomprehensibly dropped out of the presidential race, on the eve of the first primary in New Hampshire. This is a decidedly bizarre political move. Why spend such time and money on a campaign, and then quit before the first primary? DeSantis came in second in the Iowa caucuses, so there is really no logical reason for this. And who’s left standing next to Donald Trump, busy being prosecuted daily for some “crime” or other? The establishment favorite, Nikki Haley. The bride not of Trumpenstein, but of John McCainiac. Never met a war she didn’t like. And wants every internet user to be concretely identified. So she has a lot to offer those MAGA voters. Or anyone else.

So Nikki gave a campaign rally in Iowa right before the caucus. No one showed up. Not even the handful of probably paid participants that the likes of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden had at their “rallies.” They blamed the weather. On the same night, in the same weather, Vivek Ramaswamy filled two rooms with supporters. But we are supposed to believe that the “surging” Nikki came in third, several percentage points ahead of Vivek, who promptly quit and endorsed Trump, who had been blasting him on social media, in his humble and lovable fashion. DeSantis too quickly endorsed Trump. Now he is no longer DeSanctimonious. Keep an eye on Nikki. Someone that uncharismatic and hostile to everyday Americans has all the “right stuff.”

I’ll probably still pay attention to the primaries. Maybe Michelle Obama, whom it would be ludicrous to suggest is actually Big Mike, may be throwing his/her/their hat in the ring. It’s all over for the creepy guy with dementia in the White House if that happens. Or Gavin Newsom. Like Nikki, he is wrong on every issue, in terms of how average Americans are impacted. He enthusiastically embraces tyranny, and war, and hates civil liberties. What’s not to love? One of them will run against Trump or Nikki. Trump may be running from prison. Or at least they’ll film him from a prison set. Hollywood is pretty much dead, so there are lots of sets available. I have no idea how it will all turn out. I just know that, whatever happens, the people will lose. Bigly.

So I’m coming out of the closet to announce that I have Politics and Sports Attention Surplus Syndrome. Call it ASS for short. An appropriate name for people like me, who certainly ought to know better. But if it’s an affliction, like post partum depression or executive burnout, what can we do? We’re helpless and we need our rehab. First, we need to be celebrated as victims, then sent to some kind of therapy where we’ll feel good about ourselves and our choices. I don’t see myself virtue signaling about it on social media, but you never know. ASS is a powerful thing. If millions can’t stop drinking alcohol, or gambling irresponsibly, I should be able to not stop watching sports, or following politics, if I want. It’s out of my control.

I watched some of the NFL playoff games yesterday. Why? Why does a junkie keep shooting up? I am addicted to both of these circuses; sports and politics. I’ll keep track of the delegates in the presidential races, as I once did with Major League Baseball batting averages. Again, more useless information for me to process, and not make money with. I have an issue, like seemingly everyone in this country. I have both a sports disorder and a political disorder. I call it ASS; that’s catchy. But it could be Sportsaholism, or Deluded Politics Syndrome. Addicted to corrupt spectator events and “democratic” elections that I know are as illegitimate as pro ‘rassling. Stop me before I vote again. Or tune in to a sporting event. You’d think I’d be too smart to be so foolish, but in this single respect I am just one of the sheeple.