As football’s opening day approached, I was resigned to spending three hours of my weekend on “the game”. Like millions of other Americans, especially those of us in the middle-aged male demographic, I was long ago hooked on the weekly micro-hits of dopamine that every pass completion and goal-line stand elicited in my brain.
And then I was reminded that, over the past year, the three most prominent individuals identified with the New England Patriots — owner Robert Kraft, coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady — had each expressed their tender affection for Donald Trump. The bonding of these Patriot icons with Trump made me realize that by continuing my allegiance to this team I was implicitly standing behind, albeit at some distance, that toxic cartoon of a candidate.
I saw my opportunity. I could just walk away.
It’s not like there was a lack of good reasons for pulling the plug on football fandom. For starters, there was the unrelenting pre-game hype, the tiresome truck and beer commercials, the crypto-sexism and all the flag-waving quasi-military undercurrents.
Then there was that surreal drawn-out sideshow about the under-inflated footballs, during which Tom Brady offered up nuggets such as, “I’m not squeezing the balls. That’s not part of my process.”
A far more troubling concern was the questionable ethics of paying people extravagant salaries to engage in a sport that does irreparable harm to their brains. An article in the New York Times from last March detailed how the NFL grossly under-reported the number of concussions that players have sustained. The league has since acknowledged the link between concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an insidious degenerative brain disease that can lead to a long list of devastating pathologies. The crushing tackle you see today may be the seed of some player’s dementia ten years from now.
So even before this election year, I was primed to kick my football habit. But it was Trump who pushed me over the edge.
There’s a yawning disconnect between Trump’s high-profile supporters on the Patriots and the downtrodden, low-information types who comprise his base. The media inform us that Trump voters are high-school-educated white men with stagnant wages, whose jobs are threatened by globalization. They’re frustrated by the failure of the government to deliver on the promise of widespread prosperity, and they’re ready to lash out at any group whom they perceive as getting a free ride.
Kraft (Columbia and Harvard, a billionaire), Belichick (Wesleyan, $7.5M salary), and Brady (Michigan, $20.5M salary) are clearly in a different category of Trump supporter. These are educated men of estimable intellect and high achievement. Their support for Trump stems from their close relationships with him. They have been good pals, golfing buddies, and dinner guests at Mar-a-Lago. They like to hang out — the personal trumps the political.
So why should it matter? What does an athlete’s politics or associations have to do with the game? The reason that the Patriot trio’s enthusiasm for Trump soured me on football is that it signifies the class divide at the root of so many problems today.
The chummy relationship between the Patriots and Trump is symptomatic of a malaise that pervades and corrupts the social fabric. It is an ethos rooted in a hyper-concentration of wealth that distorts civic values. It genuflects to money. It is impressed by influence and enthralled by the trappings of obscene affluence. It sees virtue in power, but it is blind to the xenophobia, the dog whistles, the shameless misogyny, the blatant demagoguery, and the authoritarian bile that stains everything Trump touches.
The Patriot triumvirate forgives The Donald for his malodorous opinions because they all belong to the same club of ridiculously rich and powerful white guys. Their good fortune has decoupled them from the realities outside the realm of the NFL. As respected public figures, they’re squandering their stature on a bromance with a gilded con artist.
Whenever I see that Patriot’s logo now, the one with the minuteman’s hat morphing into a waving flag, it conjures up Trump’s swirling signature coiffure. So I choose to opt out. I will reclaim those three hours of my fall weekends, and I won’t look back.
Frederick Hewett
Frederick Hewett writes about climate, energy, and politics from Cambridge, Mass.
(AP photo) 
