Does the NFL want to be the kind of club that would have Rush Limbaugh as a member?

ESPN's Tony Kornhiser and Michael Wilbon don't think the NFL would have any problem taking in Rush Limbaugh as an owner. They think it's only about the money. Could be!

by Ken

Groucho Marx wrote famously that he would never want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. It's kind of a shame Groucho isn't around to comment on a club that would consider having Rush Limbaugh as a member. Come to think of it, it's a shame Groucho isn't around to comment on Rush, period. I would love to hear Groucho go mouth-to-mouth with the blabbermouth-of-blabbermouths.

At the moment it's hard to say what the chances are that the NFL could be such a club. Mostly the criterion for joining that club is money. But although you might not be able to tell it from looking at the rogues' gallery they've let in, they really do draw lines. And I find it interesting that when we were e-chewing over the possibility of writing something about the prospect of Rush buying into the St. Louis Rams, Howie -- who pays less attention to the NFL than just about anybody I know -- expressed skepticism that the NFL owners would let Rush in for fear of the terrifying things he might say about race.

Now we really don't know how realistic any of this speculation is. All we know is that Rush himself has acknowledged that he is part of a group of investors putting together a bid for the Rams. We don't even know if the Rams are for sale. Hell, the Rams' ownership doesn't know if the team is for sale.

A SIDEBAR STROLL DOWN RAMS' MEMORY LANE

When you think of the princes, and princesses, who've been allowed to own NFL teams, sooner or later you've got to think about the late Carroll Rosenbloom, onetime owner of the Baltimore Colts and the then-Los Angeles Rams. Not at the same time, of course. No, our Carroll, eager to get the hell out of Baltimore, had the distinction of pulling off one of the fancier deals in sports history: the 1972 swap of his Colts for the Rams. (The new owner of the Colts, the now-late Robert Irsay, would achieve his own immortality by also getting the hell out of Baltimore, more or less sneaking the Colts, under cover of night, to Indianapolis. His son Jim now runs the team.)

Our Carroll's second most famous accomplishment is dying in his own swimming pool -- not in Los Angeles, as you might think, but in Golden Beach, Florida -- in 1979 under what have always been considered, well, odd circumstances. An unsourced note in the Wikipedia entry for his widow, Georgia Frontiere, says, "[I]t is rumored that Rosenbloom, a high-stakes gambler, was killed over failure to repay debts," and an unsourced note in Rosenbloom's own Wikipedia entry ventures:

Four years after his death, in the premiere episode of the PBS series Frontline, Rosenbloom's death was cited as an example of the seamy side of the National Football League. Using interviews with reported mobsters who claimed Rosenbloom's legs had been held to cause his drowning, the report showed gruesome autopsy photos of Rosenbloom's body.

After her husband's unfortunate demise, Georgia Rosenbloom, or rather Georgia Frontiere, as she became two months later when she married one Dominic Frontiere, took over the team, firing stepson Steven Rosenbloom, who had been running it, and in 1995 (with Mr. Frontiere, something like her eighth husband, out of the picture since 1988) she moved the team to her hometown of St. Louis, possibly less for sentimental reasons than for the gazillion-dollar incentive package that was put together.

The Rams had some glory years in St. Louis, when coach Dick Vermeil and QB Kurt Warner and that amazing corps of roadrunner receivers brought Arena Football to the NFL, but by 2007 the team was finishing 3-13. Our Georgia died of breast cancer in January 2008, precipitating the cloud of uncertainty that has descended over the Rams' future. Her 60 percent ownership stake was passed on to her son and daughter, Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez, and Forbes reported in September 2008 that the Chipster "hired the highly reputable sports banker John Moag to 'field phone calls' about the team this summer," possibly with a view to selling part of their share in consideration of their substantial inheritance-tax liability. Rumors have swirled ever since, and the kids are known to have hired Goldman Sachs to "review" their assets. Young Chip issued this statement: "Our strategic review of our ownership of the Rams continues. We will make an announcement upon the completion of the process."

Now you may wonder, who would want to go into business with Rush Limbaugh? It appears that the key man in Rush's Rams bid is Dave Checketts, whom New York sports fans remember rather fondly for his stewardship first of the basketball Knicks and then also of the hockey Rangers. Eventually he was put in charge of the whole Madison Square Garden shebang (including Radio City Music Hall!), until he was forced out for his free-spending ways. At least in those years competitive winter sports games were played at the Garden. Since then I believe that Knicks' and Rangers' games have come to be closed to the public. Or it could be that it's just worked out that way.

Checketts went on to create SCP (Sports Capital Partners), which in 1995 acquired control of the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues. As I say, I have rather fond memories of Checketts's time in New York. Glancing now at his bio, I remember that he first came to widespread public attention when, at 28, he became president and general manager of the National Basketball Association's Utah Jazz. (This may be the freakiest name in the history of professional sports, having come about from the relocation of the former New Orleans Jazz to Salt Lake City, where apparently nobody thought to rename the team. I mean, really: Utah . . . Jazz???) And he was a local boy, having attended the University of Utah and (for his business master's( Brigham Young University), and sure enough not only is a Mormon but, according to Wikipedia, is "featured in a book titled The Mormon Way of Doing Business."

So we have the Mormon way of doing business hooking up with the Limbaugh way of degrading humanity. Surely among those viewing Rush's possible entry into the NFL owners' circle with apprehension is the Washington Redskins' Daninel Snyder, who easily wrested the title of the NFL's Most Obnoxious Owner from the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones (who at least has maintained the Cowboys as a competitive franchise) when he stormed into the league in 1999, following the death of longtime Skins owner Jack Kent Cooke. I think Snyder as a principal owner is safe, but even as a minority stakeholder, when it comes to obnoxiousness, Rush is a competitor.

As we've seen even in this casual history, standards for NFL ownership aren't rigorous. The best strategy is either to (a) inherit a team or (b) be in the right place with a really big wallet or war chest when somebody else inherits a team.

Nevertheless, Howie has a point. The league can absolutely bar somebody it doesn't want from acquiring ownership. Specifically, Howie noted, "You might want to note the the NFL may be 'conservative' but they ain't stupid and they would never let someone who's made the kinds of racist remarks that Limbaugh has buy the team."

I think we all remember the fiasco of Rush's closest previous brush with the NFL, when somebody at ESPN had the brilliant idea of hiring him as a commentator for its Sunday night pregame show. The only mystery is why anyone thought he wouldn't implode.

I tell you what I remember about that fateful night: the expression on Tom Jackson's face: a look of betrayal, even helplessness.

Now T.J., you have to remember, was a linebacker, and not just a linebacker, but a great one -- a two-time all-pro and three-time Pro Bowler in his 14 seasons with the Denver Broncos ("voted Denver's Most Inspirational Player six times by his teammates," according to Wikipedia), which included two Super Bowl championships. Linebackers are tough guys, and great linebackers tend to be, well, killers.

Of course the T.J. we know now is a sweetheart, about as genial a presence as your TV screen can hold. I'm tempted to call him "jolly."


I love the guy. I don't know anything about him except what showed on the field and what shows now on the screen, but the feeling I get is that this is someone so fundamentally decent that he's incapable of malice or even hurtfulness. And on that fateful night, he found himself sharing air time with a man almost incapable of anything but malice, a raving, raging racist.

I don't remember it quite the same way Wikipedia does:

[I]n 2003, Jackson was roundly criticized by NFL players for not adequately responding to Rush Limbaugh's claim that Donovan McNabb was given too much attention and credit by the media because of his race. The incident led to Limbaugh's resignation from NFL Countdown in his short-lived ESPN experiment; Jackson himself had threatened to quit the show if Limbaugh had stayed. The Sunday after Limbaugh's resignation, Jackson delivered a speech in an attempt to compensate for his earlier acquiescence:

Let me just say that it was not our decision to have Rush Limbaugh on this show. I have seen replay after replay of Rush's comments with my face attached, as well as that of my colleagues. Comments that made us uncomfortable at the time, although the depth and insensitive nature of which weren't fully felt until it seemed too late to reply. Rush Limbaugh is known for the divisive nature of his rhetoric. He creates controversy, and what he said on this show is the same type of thing that he has said on radio for years...

Rush was brought here to talk football, and he broke that trust. Rush told us that the social commentary for which he is so well known would not cross over to our show, and that instead, he would represent the viewpoint of the intelligent, passionate fan. We know of few fans, passionate or otherwise, who see Donovan McNabb, a three-time Pro Bowler with two NFC Championship Game appearances, being somehow artificially hyped because of the color of his skin. The fact that Donovan McNabb's skin color was brought up at all was wrong—especially in the context of the brotherhood that we feel we have on this show...

Rush Limbaugh was not a fit for 'NFL Countdown.'

What I remember from that night is the spectacle of the most dishonest man on the planet, and one of the most ignorant and vicious, leaving a genuinely good man feeling violated, forced to deal on-air with a display of despicable bravado he probably didn't think he would ever have to, and shouldn't have had to. I expect Rush was and is extremely proud of that. You just have to hope that someday this God we hear so much about has a reckoning planned.

I'm assuming that Rush's opportunity with the Rams has to do with the limited abundance of fat cats eager to pony up megabucks for part ownership of a team that's committed to stay in St. Louis through 2014. (Rush is a native Missourian.) My guess is that the NFL, which survives with a hair-trigger-thin patchwork truce in the matter of race relations, is smart enough to have a healthy terror of what could come out of his mouth, and not just on race.

ESPN must have thought that hiring Rush would bring the network some extra media and public attention. (And look how well that worked out.) I don't see that he could bring any good added attention to the NFL, and I find it hard to believe the league needs his money that badly. There are an awful lot of guys out there with more money than they know what to do with, willing to shell it out for the privilege of jock-sniffing.


UPDATE: WHAT KIND OF DRUG-ADDLED GIBBERISH
MIGHT THE NFL OWNERS BE CONCERNED ABOUT?

Media Matters has a new post featuring an audio clip from an Oct. 7 Rush Limbaugh radio broadcast in which he refers to basketball as "the favorite sport of gangs," which doesn't by itself seem to me all that incriminating. To say, rightly or wrongly, that gangs love basketball isn't necessarily a statement about basketball, any more than saying that Thomas's is the favorite English muffin of mafiosi would necessarily be saying anything about English muffins. However, the MM post references some earlier Rush manure that would concern me a good deal if I were an NFL owner or exec.

Like this one, in which he says: "I think it's time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call 'em gangs. You have the Laker Gang, you have the Heat Gang, you have a Timberwolf Gang [distortions of official team names], and let 'em strap up out there, and let 'em market their CDs," and says the fans are "going in to watch the Crips and the Bloods out there wherever the neighborhood is where the arena happens to be."

Or this one, in which he more fully expounds his theory of "hip-hop culture," which to him means two things, (1) gangs and (2) "the common theme that I'm hearing":

"Well, I'm not going to be dissed. I'm simply not going to be disrespected. Somebody disrespects me, they're going to pay for it." Meaning, "A fan disrespects me, that fan's going to pay for it," not just another player.

And that comes right out of the hip-hop culture, and it's not just that. You look at NBA players and the uniforms, you don't have to go back very far. The uniforms have changed totally. They're now in gang colors. They are in gang styles. . . .

This is gang behavior on parade minus the guns. That's the culture that the NBA has become. So if anybody will be honest with you about it in the NBA, and a very few will have the courage to, because saying what I just said is going to be tagged as racist, but I, my friends, am fearless when it comes to this because the truth will out, and that's what's happening here . . .

But of course Rush has no access to or contact with "truth." All he has is the violent psychosis infesting his brain and the screeching of the very Right-Wing Noise Machine of which he is the epicenter.

Given the racial makeup of NFL rosters, do the owners really dare take him into the fold?

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