From my post “Data Point – As Sports go Woke, People Turn It Off” that spoke about folks turning off watching sports because they think the athletes believe they’ve all graduated from Progressive Seminary and are to “go to all the world and preach the Socialist / Black Lives Matter / Critical Race Theory gospel”. I agree with OldNHMan – if I want to get me some preaching, I go to church:
Once the ‘Bigs’ started going woke, I lost all interest. No football. No baseball. No basketball. (I lost interest in hockey after Bobby Orr retired, so I don’t know if the NHL has gone woke.)
If I want to be preached to I go to church, not to a game.
When ‘woke’ becomes more important than the main purpose of professional sports or any business (pro sports is a business), the business suffers. How many times does corporate America have to learn the lesson of “Get woke, go broke” before the lesson takes? How long will it take before they realize pissing off a large percentage of their customer base is a money-losing proposition, and that a good portion of that customer base will not return? (An example of that is Gillette. It saw an $8 billion drop in sales after their ‘woke’ ad and those sales haven’t recovered.)
Why businesses (including sports) thinks pandering to a (very vocal) minority of the populace while pissing off a good portion of the customer base will somehow help their sales escapes me. Then again, I have found that ‘woke’ is not logical in any way, shape, or form. It is ‘feelz’, pure and simple, and it’s going to damage those businesses. Some of them may be damaged beyond repair and they will have done it to themselves.
Go Woke, Go Broke. This started with “The personal is political, the political is personal” and has now morphed into almost an emotional religious state with a theological foundation and a missionary zeal to ensuring that all are “assimilated”. What is also happening, to be short, curt, and not a little bit snarky, “the inmates are running the asylum(s)” with the New York Times and the NBA being prime examples (the junior staffers mutinying and forcing out senior editors at the NYT and the NBA owners letting the players run their teams).
They may learn. Or not. Time will tell.