Super Bowl 50: NFL’s promotion of ‘love’ for soldiers, weaponry and war

The thoroughgoing militarization of professional sports is carried out through the collusion of the NFL, MLB and NHL cartels, paid for by the Pentagon.

An overall inside view of Raymond James Stadium November 11, 2013 in Tampa, Fla. before an NFL game between the Miami Dolphins and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The promotion was nationally televised on Monday Night Football. 50,000 cards were provided to fans by USAA, the official military appreciation sponsor of the NFL | David Drapkin/AP images for USAA

Super Bowl 50 – a “sporting event” held on February 7 in San Francisco featuring the Carolina Panthers, the Denver Broncos and the Pentagon. coated in military promotion and jingoism, from flypasts of military jets to ads for “Captain America” of Marvel comic book fame at $5 million for a 30 second spot. The event is an orchestrated assault on the social consciousness of the American people: the CBS broadcast was watched by an estimated 111.9 million USians; according to Neilson, 49 per cent of all households with a TV were tuned in. The thoroughgoing militarization of the US Superbowl is hardly exceptional.

Overall, from 2012 to 2015, 18 NFL teams received more than $5.6 million from the military. Fifty teams across the five major professional leagues had contracts with the military, including ten MLB teams that took nearly $900,000, and eight teams each from the NBA and MLS that had similar contracts. Six NHL teams received money, and the Air Force paid more than $1.5 million to NASCAR. – TS

DAVID SWANSON* (Photos and captions added by TS)

(February 6) – Super Bowl 50 will be the first National Football League championship to happen since it was reported that much of the pro-military hoopla at football games, the honouring of troops and glorifying of wars that most people had assumed was voluntary or part of a marketing scheme for the NFL, has actually been a money-making scheme for the NFL. The U.S. military has been dumping millions of dollars, part of a recruitment and advertising budget that’s in the billions, into paying the NFL to publicly display love for soldiers and weaponry.

Australian state sells off government agency to build more stadiums

Neil deMause, fieldofschemes.com

The premier of the Australian state of New South Wales is selling off an entire governmental department to raise money to upgrade Sydney’s sports stadiums. I am not shitting you:

Hot on the heels of the privatisation of the state’s electricity poles and wires, the Baird government is selling the operations of the Land and Property Information Service – hopefully for a 10-figure sum – to help fund its $1 billion-plus upgrade of Sydney’s sports stadiums. 

US sports monopolies market to women by insulting and degrading them

NFL broadcasts this year are stuffed with in-house ads marketing uniforms to American women. With fashion tips, cooking and dance lessons, and oogling of athletes, US sports monopolies “usher in a new age of empowerment” for women.–TS

By JULIA LURIE and EDWIN RIOS*

(August 22, 2015) – Last week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers launched a new campaign to entice female fans. The initiative, called RED, will “re-invent the female fan experience” and “usher in a new age of empowerment for the women of Tampa Bay,” explains team spokeswoman Casey Phillips in a promotional video. Sounds cool, right?

NFL: Goodell’s words are hollow and meaningless

No sport outside boxing is as dangerous as the one Goodell oversees as NFL commissioner. But he can continue to say things that are the opposite of true, and never more than about the things that truly matter.

Nazi origins of Adidas and Puma tennis shoes

Sneakers, Nazis, and a family feud. Two German brothers battled each other to build the Puma and Adidas empires

Review of Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud that Forever Changed the Business of Sport

NFL’s next play: Address brain trauma or fade away

David Bruton of the Denver Broncos after a play that would force him out of the game with a concussion | Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

The doctor who took a stand decades ago against boxing argues that the N.F.L. must acknowledge the high risk of brain injury.

By GEORGE D. LUNDBERGFEB*

IN late 1982, I was watching the heavyweight championship fight between Larry Holmes and Randall Cobb, known as Tex, on television. Even though I was a longtime fan of pretty much every sport, I was appalled by the ceaseless violence that the referee permitted to be inflicted on Cobb. As a pathologist who had autopsied hundreds of people, I knew the kind of damage the fight could be causing. I wasn’t the only one horrified by the spectacle: Howard Cosell, who was calling the fight, asked, “I wonder if that referee understands that he is constructing an advertisement for the abolition of the very sport that he’s a part of?”

The player who pioneered the jump shot in basketball

Former Wyoming basketball star Kenny Sailors waves to the crowd during a ceremony in Laramie, Wyo., honouring his election into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012. Sailors died at 95 on January 30 in Laramie | Michael Smith/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP

By WILLIAM MCDONALD

New York Times (February 1) – There was just one witness to the moment Kenny Sailors helped revolutionize the game of basketball — his brother, Bud — but by all accounts no one has ever doubted their story.

The moment came on a hot May day in 1934. The two were tussling, one on one, under an iron rim nailed to the side of the family’s windmill, a wood-shingled, big-bladed landmark that their neighbors on the Wyoming high plains recognized for miles around the way sailors of the usual kind know a lighthouse from miles out at sea.

US Super Bowl: Concussions swept under the carpet

This week, says one player who worries about the ramifications of his career decision, ‘is all about football.’ Reported concussions rose 58 per cent in the NFL this season, though reported is very different from actual.

Broncos receiver Emmanuel Sanders, left, is focused on Super Bowl 50, and not the possible effects of concussions. “If I’m going to die, at least I’m going to die doing stuff that I love to do,” he says. “And this is what I love to do.” | MARK REIS / TNS

By BRUCE ARTHER*

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.—One night Ryan Harris went to the movies with his wife. Harris is an eighth-year offensive lineman for the Denver Broncos, and started all 16 games this season. Going out was a nice way to unwind, until it wasn’t.

“My wife started crying,” says the six-foot-five, 302-pound Harris. “We were in another movie and they showed the preview for Concussion, and my wife started crying. I was like, we don’t need to see this movie.”