What Does The Bible Tell Us About College Football? And Hockey?

Brendan and Brian Burke

Ken is more apt to take note of a sports story than I am but yesterday he got to President Obama's evolutionary jump before I could so I just want to point out a somewhat related and totally extraordinary feature in Grantland by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Charles Pierce. Even if you have as little interest in commercial sports as I do, Gay (non) Panic is well worth your time. And I guarantee you, you don't have to know squat about football (or hockey) to understand it. I had dinner with my friend Adam Bink a couple weeks ago and he told me about someone I had never heard of, Brian Burke, the manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs (a hockey team). He was telling me why the Courage Campaign is going to give Burke an award this year and I've been meaning to blog about it ever since. Pierce just saved me the trouble.

Pierce's story gets underway because Ron Brown, one of the assistant coaches (whose wikipedia page has been recently deleted) from the University of Nebraska football team (the Huskers) "went up to Omaha and testified in opposition to a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance aimed at protecting gay citizens in that city. The ordinance passed, and then things got a little closer to home when the City Council in Lincoln took up a similar law." Lincoln is where the University of Nebraska is. Nebraska is one of the most conservative states in the country. Obama only got 42% of the vote against McCain. But Obama beat McCain in Lincoln. In fact, he did so well in Lincoln, that he took Lancaster County 52-47%, his best showing in the state (along with Omaha's Douglas County).

Brown's opposition was clear and unequivocal; he maintains that the anti-discrimination statute is contrary to what he believes are scriptural injunctions against gay sexual activity. (Brown has made a second career out of being an "inspirational" Christian speaker, and it was he who organized the prayer circle after the Penn State–Nebraska game last season just after the molestation scandal at Penn State had broken.) "The question I have for you all is, like Pontius Pilate, what are you going to do with Jesus?" Brown said in Omaha. "Ultimately, if you don't have a relationship with Him, and you don't have a Bible-believing mentality, really, anything goes …. At the end of the day, it matters what God thinks most." Brown also said he'd be "proud" if his views got him fired. After Brown's testimony, there were calls for his resignation that continue to this moment.

The Nebraska football community was seriously wrong-footed; the local talk-radio stations talked more about gay issues over the past few weeks than they had in the past five years. There are ongoing arguments about Brown's right to say what he feels, and what is perceived to be the city's-- and the university's-- commitment to the equal enforcement of the laws for their gay citizens and their gay students.

That Brown is speaking bigotry through the Scriptures seems undeniable. The laws he is opposing are purely secular ones, and if Brown thinks he can justify his stated beliefs through the Gospels, he hasn't read them closely enough. And it doesn't behoove any of us to take seriously a man who grounds that bigotry in the Old Testament if he doesn't also keep a kosher home, there being more dietary regulations therein than there are anything else. Since the issue exploded, Brown has gone to ground somewhat, declining to testify in opposition to the Lincoln anti-discrimination law at a hearing last night, and writing to a local newspaper that he would "tolerate" an openly gay player on the Nebraska roster. Say, fella, that's mighty straight of you.

However, that's the nut of the issue right there. Brown's views are narrow, intolerant, and not half as Christian as he thinks they are. But the laws in question ban actual discrimination. They do not ban approval of discrimination. They do not ban prayerful support of discrimination. Whatever Brown thinks, and whatever he says, ought not to be touched by any law. Whatever he does is the important thing, and the only thing that ought to cost him his job. But his case has emerged at an interesting time in the history of our games-- when the stranglehold of a certain splinter of American Protestantism over our public religious piety is weakening, and when the tough-guy macho culture of football is imploding under the grotesque weight of mounting medical evidence of the harmful effects of concussions, and when, slowly but certainly, sports are also emerging as places where all Americans, gay and straight, can gather together and cheer.

The real momentum has come from the National Hockey League, and, specifically, from Brian Burke, the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. No straight man has ever done more for the cause of toleration in sports than Burke has. His son, Brendan, an openly gay man and a hockey player himself, was killed in an automobile accident. Burke has taken on homophobia in sports as a tribute to Brendan, and he has done it with a vengeance. Last September, he demanded that the NHL punish players for using anti-gay slurs on the ice during the game. In addition to Burke's work on the issue, several teams-- including the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs-- have taken part in the It Gets Better Project, a series of advertisements aimed at empowering gay teenagers. And, when his team was rolling toward the Super Bowl, New Orleans Saints linebacker Scott Fujita stood up in support of gay marriage when asked about it; he later cut a television commercial supporting marriage equality. All of this was unthinkable a decade ago.

At the same time, of course, a reflexive fundamentalist religiosity still suffuses sports all the way down to the most basic level. Ron Brown is a product of that culture who has taken to proselytizing for it among impressionable young people. I have no doubt that he believes what he says. I have no doubt that he believes firmly in the rightness of what he sees to be his cause. He goes out and preaches it, using his considerable stature with the Nebraska football program to do so. In fact, the constitutional case for dismissing Brown is on the grounds of promoting religion on the public dime in his capacity as a high-profile employee of a public institution.

There was a time, and not so very long ago, when Brown could have said what he said with complete equanimity and secure in the knowledge that nobody of any influence would gainsay him on his beliefs. Being an anti-gay bigot was still deeply tolerated both within Brown's profession and within the culture at large. The only real opposition would come from the organized gay-rights community, which the panjandrums who run our major sports institutions felt safe in ignoring. It took until 1987 for President Reagan to mention the word "AIDS" in public, and even longer than that for his dilatory response to the epidemic to be considered a serious blot on his record by the public at large.

However, after some 40 years of vigorous advocacy, there is something like an equal power to push back against faith-based bigotry. As a resident of Massachusetts, where we've had legalized gay marriage since 2004, I can say with certainty that the resistance to that idea is pretty much doomed demographically. In 50 years, our grandchildren are going to wonder what all the fuss was about. Equality for our fellow citizens who happen to be gay has a cultural and social momentum behind it that can now, in certain specific instances like this one, be more than a match for people who believe the way Brown does, as he has learned to his own disadvantage over the past month.

In the past 10 years, we have seen the barriers to marriage equality fall. In the past year, we have seen the bar to gay people serving openly in the United States Armed Forces fall. (Pretty soon, at one of our bizarrely militarized major sporting events, we may have four gay pilots doing the flyby.) Sports were supposed to be the last real redoubt, and you can feel the ground shaking there, too. I do not believe that any action should be taken against Ron Brown based on what he says and what he believes. That's not what we should be doing to people in this country. But somebody should take him aside and explain to him that the world is changing around him and that, for everyone's sake, it's time for him to adjust or get out of the way. Nobody is asking him to abandon his faith. They're just asking him to grow within it, to take the essential message of love that is the heart of the Gospels and to apply it generally, as all Christians are called to do, and without any legalistic nonsense about "loving the sinner but hating the sin." If he's going to loosely toss around the name of Pontius Pilate, he should go back to his Bible and remember that Pilate was forced to provide a secular execution to appease the local religious authorities. "I find no basis for a charge against him," Pilate said, and then sent Jesus to Calvary anyway. There are lessons that Ron Brown needs to learn. He wouldn't have five minutes for a player who couldn't adjust on the fly. It's time for him to realize that it's his turn now.

Toilet Paper And Soap Are Recession-Proof... Expensive Concert Tickets? Not So Much

No ticket sales

Friday night I was in Glendale trying to find a book on Senegal since I'm going to Dakar for 4 or 5 days on my way to Mali. As long as I was there I figured I'd have dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant on the east side of L.A. They know me well and I can usually slide right in, although sometimes on a busy weekend night, it's not so smooth. Friday was plenty smooth. About a quarter of the tables were empty. I asked the owner how business has been. He said it's following the stock market, "one day up and three days down." He also said that there's no possibility of a profit for 2008 and he's praying he can pay his rent, taxes and employees. And his business is only off by 15%! I asked because another restaurant I love may have to close, their business off by 25%. I was there the other night and I was the only customer. They closed early.

That the entertainment business is notoriously resistant to macro-economic trends is a truism stemming from how well cheap entertainment managed to do during the Great Depression. It hasn't really be true-- or cheap-- since then. And this time around the Biz is being crushed by its own Bush-era greed and excesses. Despite boosterism from free-market admirerers, the entertainment business, especially the sectors involved in overpriced tickets, has been hemorrhaging red ink for a couple years; it's getting worse now.

Nobody in the Biz wants to talk about it-- or admit that ticket sales are in the toilet... or already flushed down it. I'm on the Board of a business 100% dependent on concert ticket prices. We spent virtually our entire last Board meeting discussing how to cut back... on everything, and to prepare for the worst case scenario.

I could be wrong about this but I think most music biz types shudder if they hear they or one of their projects has been mentioned in Bob Lefsetz's newsletters. His latest starts with a definitive attack on one of rock's last remaining heroes: "Neil Young is a jerk." I like Neil-- and his music-- a lot and I wouldn't categorize him in the same terms as Lefsetz. But Leftsetz isn't altogether wrong about one thing-- something that goes way beyond Neil. Concert tickets are way too high-- part of a bloated system as unrelated to delivering good music as HMOs are to delivering quality health.

With even the Wall Street guys unable to pay the ridiculous prices for great seats, the business is learning a big lesson. It is not recession-proof. As for the bands who've toured the same markets, year after year, with no new hit material? How many times do you need to see the Stones? They don't sell out anymore.

Some artists still do, usually one with cult audiences like Madonna. With tickets to her shows selling between $350 and $55 a pop, every single one of her recent concerts sold out including 4 nights at Madison Square Garden, 2 nights in Chicago, 2 nights in Oakland, 2 nights in Boston and a night in East Rutherford, NJ. Lucky for her all those shows were before the gays decided to put all their boundless energy into fighting for equality and against Mormons. And if you're not Madonna... ticket sales are looking dismal, even beyond dreck like Charlie Daniels, Five For Fighting or the must-see nostalgia combination of Great White, Asia, Dokken and Sweet. Last week a panic-stricken Ticketmaster started experimenting with a new concept: easing off on brutally ripping off their customers.

Ticketmaster is famous for fees that concert goers love to hate. Now the ticketing giant is experimenting with dropping those fees in an attempt to gain customers in an increasingly tough economic environment.

Tickets for the Eagles' upcoming concert will be available without any Ticketmaster convenience fees, and if you print your tickets at home, no delivery or handling fees.

The predatory monopolists have worked out a deal with The Eagles to bring down the cost of the tickets so that they band wouldn't suffer the fate of so many older artists and have to cancel their tour.

High prices are turning off concert goers, even though promoters have actually persuaded musicians to stop gouging their fans and have actually started lowering ticket prices slightly after two dismal years. As the reality of the Bush Economic Miracle and what appears to be a full-fledged economic collapse, it may be too late. And even if fans are willing to scrape up the money for overpriced tickets, there is widespread fear in the music biz that they will be spending far less on merchandise and at the concession stands, a major source of income.

The sports teams also having a tough time, having similarly priced themselves into a precarious situation in hard times. In Friday's NY Post Phil Mushnick reported an ugly scene in Memphis where the Knicks played the Grizzlies. Watching on TV he writes that "nearly every shot showed rows and rows of empty seats. The most expensive seats, from courtside and roughly 25 rows up, were almost all vacant. And expensive seats for Grizzlies games are on the NBA's low side, $100-$200 per. And this was just the Grizzlies' third home game of the season. The box score claimed that attendance was 10,129, eight more than the club's previous game in the 19,000-seat FedEx Forum. But if that were the case, most patrons were seated directly behind the TV cameras." An eyewitness claims there were 4,000 people there. And it gets worse.

In Sacramento, where the Kings would regularly sell out the 17,300-seat Arco Arena, the home opener was played to at least 5,000 empty seats - and attendance has fallen since. Indiana, Philly and Charlotte are way down, too.

By late spring, you'll likely hear and read that a couple of NBA and NHL teams are close to suspending operations, unable to make rent and payroll, that corporations that bought arena naming rights and businesses that bought big-ticket advertising are behind in payments. There will be more layoffs than layups, more undertakers and no underwriters.

There will be no new vanity-purchase buyers, no consortiums with which to consort. Even the new reliable among team investors and sponsors-- casino owners and operators-- are bleeding millions.

If you follow hockey, you probably already know what a disaster that's been. Pat Hickey reporting for the Montreal Gazette paints a bleak picture that is bound to get much, much bleaker.

In Atlanta, they have experienced the three smallest crowds of the past four seasons. Attendance has dropped 15.7 per cent to 13,384.

The Islanders are on life support as owner Charles Wang tries to get a new arena to replace the Nassau Mausoleum, which is the oldest and smallest building in the NHL. The latest rumbling is that a frustrated Wang would be willing to sell to the right bidder or, if he gets desperate, to Jim Balsillie.

The Lightning and Devils are down, and Columbus, which sold out every game in the 2001-02 season, had only 10,424 fans attend a Monday night game against Anaheim. That was the smallest crowd for the Blue Jackets in the history of Nationwide Arena.

Cheaper seats have helped Dallas turn things around, but attendance has dropped considerably in Colorado, where the Avalanche once sold out 487 consecutive games. That streak is a memory.

Attendance is down 6 per cent in Los Angeles, where the Staples Centre is filled to 83.4 per cent of capacity. But my spies there tell me that - as is the case in many other arenas - the nightly attendance figures are inflated.

Economic reality isn't going to be denied and vast empires based on unrestrained greed are crumbling before our eyes. Lucky so many of us get by so well with virtual entertainment (and Depression era cheap movie tickets) these days. Looks like NASCAR is about to lay off 1,000 employees.

Damn real estate market!