The Canary Is Dead

Note: This is the time of year to be generous to those in need, so if you are looking for a place to give, here is an option. Most certainly know the story, but for those who do not here is the background.


If you live near a public tennis court, you may have noticed that there are not that many people playing tennis these days. Many courts have simply been abandoned to nature, due to a lack of interest. Depending upon where you live, you may see people playing pickleball, which has nothing to do with pickles. It is a game that is something like ping pong, except the players are on the table. They use paddles and a plastic ball, taking turns hitting the ball back and forth over a net.

According to the wiki page, the game was invented as a way to give kids something to do when they were bored. Over time it caught on around the neighborhood and soon it was becoming a thing. Recently the sport has caught on in a big way with tournaments and leagues around the country. It is very popular with Baby Boomers, because they can play the game while stationary. They just bat the ball back and forth to get some exercise and socialize with friends.

This is a bit ironic. Fifty years ago, tennis went from being a rich person sport, like polo and golf, to something of a national craze. In the 1970’s big tennis matches were must see television and the stars of the game were household names. Baby Boomers were young and fit, so they could play tennis. Then father time made tennis much less enjoyable and tennis went into decline. Fifty years later the Boomers are back on the court but playing pickleball instead.

It is hard to overstate the warping effect the Boomer generation has had on the American culture. The tennis to pickleball phenomenon is one example, but all of sports has been changed by the Boomers. Through most of the twentieth century, sports attendance was light, but then the Boomers got into sports and suddenly going to games was a thing. Hundreds of billions have been spent over the last half century creating sports arenas for the Boomers.

Of course, standing outside for three hours is tiring on the old back and knees, so sports attendance is in decline. College football, which is a quintessential Baby Boomer pastime is seeing a collapse in attendance. All of sudden the people who make a trip once a year to catch a game at their alma mater are finding a reason to watch the game from the comfort of the recliner. They can stay in touch with their old classmates on Facebook, so why make the trip to the game?

The decline in attendance is a serious threat to the college model because the infrastructure for this industry relies on donations from alumni. The rich donor wants his friends to see his name on the sports building. He wants his friends to party with him in the luxury suite. If all his friends are at the Villages watching the game on television, what is the point of writing the check? This is why those sagging attendance numbers have colleges in a panic.

Golf is another sport feeling the Boomer decline. This is the sport for the white suburban middle manager. Three decades ago, there were a lot of these people and they filled up golf course around the country. Demographics and the actuarial tables are thinning the ranks and so the number of golfers declines every year. Those little brown guys swimming over the Rio Grande may be natural conservatives, but they will not be taking up the game of golf any time soon.

This decline in participation will mean a decline in interest. Twenty years ago, the big names in sports talk radio were known throughout the culture, because tens of millions of people listened to these guys while at work. The core demographic for these shows was white men between the ages of 25 and 55. That demo is now in steep decline and the listenership is following them. Here is a list the top sports talkers and you probably recognize none of them.

What all this points to is a looming winter for sports entertainment. Some sports like the NFL have been gaming the cable system to tax the public for their product, but that model is facing the same demographic collapse. The grandparents still have a cable subscription, but their kids most likely cut the cord and their grandkids will never have a cable subscription. That assumes the grandkids even exist, which is highly unlikely according to the census.

The decline of the Baby Boomer generation was always going to bring a decline to the leisure industry, but the demographic decline promises a depression. Many will wonder why they should care, but the sports entertainment industry is driven by the same economic principles as the rest of the economy. Those billion dollar stadiums and multibillion dollar franchises are leveraged to the max. It all assumes a growing audience of middle class white people.

You can probably do this same exercise with other parts of the economy. How will the legal rackets maintain themselves when the law schools are forced to drop the LSAT requirement in the name of equity? A courtroom like this is amusing, but it is no way to keep the ambulance chasers in business. Even if the standards do not collapse, the legal profession is about to experience a great die off. Soon, simple cases will take years because of the lack of bodies.

It is easy to overstate things, but the country is about to undergo a demographic revolution, and this is before the Great Replacement discussion. All of the things that relied upon a massive number of suburban white people are going to find they lack the people to maintain the old model. The number of suburban whites as customers is in decline and the number to do the work is in decline. Sports entrainment is the canary in the coal mine and the canary is dead.


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336 thoughts on “The Canary Is Dead

  1. Pingback: The Canary is Dead | American Freedom News

  2. So we should see the threat as generational rather than civilisational – that is, incremental change, rather than a complete system overhaul? I think we’ve all been assuming the latter. Maybe we need to shift the goalposts.

  3. I love going on google street map, but I’m always suprised to see how USA’s cities and town are ugly.
    Even Manhattan become ugly. The new skyscrapers are awful.

    little tows=ugly too.

    The only pretty city in entire north america is old Quebec, and few boroughs of cities like Charleston (SC), Miami Beach (for art deco stuff)

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  4. The decline of sportsball overall is matched by the increase in sport betting across the board.

    If you won’t watch on your own White man, we’ll get you addicted.

  5. My dad is always amazed when we drive through town together. He can’t believe a suburb that was filled with disco dance clubs and all you can eat buffets is empty, with no one on the road. Another boomer from my church was complaining that the bowling alleys used to open at 8am but now they don’t open till 11am, and another was wondering why no one comes into the church gym to play basketball anymore… the boomers were a big group of people, and everything they liked to do is dying off. I’m looking forward to NFL and NBA disappearing, and something tells me once the boomer (((J’s))) have died off, suddenly people won’t have a “natural” interest in mumble rap music on the airwaves anymore…

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  6. This past November the Seattle Seahawks went up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Munich. It was the first NFL game to be played in Germany.

    Whether or not this will catch on with the younger German crowd has yet to be seen, but it’s clear the NFL is testing the waters for a fan base here in Europe.

    https://www.munich.travel/en/topics/sports-leisure/spirit-of-72/munich-football#:~:text=American%20Football%20at%20the%20Allianz%20Arena&text=On%20Sunday%2C%2013%20November%202022,be%20played%20on%20German%20soil.

    • Germany loves the finished product of the NFL which took 90 years to refine. The quality of the games. The slick presentations. Cheerleaders. Americana. An ecosystem for the sport has to develop. The money and infrastructure required for this is incredibly high.

      The Germans want to watch the US version, not their own version.

      Nothing wrong with that.

      Going to an NFL game will be like going to a broadway play. Something to enjoy and then go home to your regular life.

  7. To be honest, it’s posts like these that sadden me the most.

    I find myself living in a world that hates me by design. Everything that was normal, even ten years ago, is now “right wing extremism”. Television is unwatchable. The only things I watch these days are old A&E and History Channel documentaries, streaming on free platforms. The suffering is still there, however, because I have to endure 4-5 commercials featuring a gay interracial couple driving a four-wheel drive Ford F-250 up the side of a Colorado mountain to go to drag Queen story hour in Aspen. (Made that one up, but it’s coming)

    I have other interests, but most things cost money, and I’m planning for a retirement with extremely uncertain economic terms. I have a small RV trailer that I enjoy, but how much longer will we be able to afford the gasoline to drive trucks that can pull something like that up to a mountain campground?

    I have 2 sons, and I really fight back tears thinking about the world they’re going to have to adapt to. It truly is a sort of Stockholm syndrome that normal white people are having to endure. Even the ones who are “proudly liberal” live lives that are full of coping mechanisms.

    I tend to try to avoid bashing boomers, and I know that a lot if our problems were set in motion even before the boomers came along. I just wish they had been more diligent at protecting the legacy of this country, because that generation was the only one that really stood a chance at fixing things, but they prioritized things completely wrong.

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    • I agree with all you just said but these ones don’t depress me so much but force me into readiness.
      Hopefully I have a son soon, I have a daughter and she will need to attend school soon. It seems the public schools in Australia are teaching the same nonsense the US ones are. We don’t have the same demographic problems in Australia that the US has, but I fear that’s in our future, some crazy immigration policies have been implemented in the last year.
      All the best. You’re lucky to have two sons

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    • my sons are young adults . we fish , hunt ,and work on cars together.
      we also work out and attend trad mass either together or on our own . Neither lives at home. we do bowhunting , together every year.
      as far as media , I only do EWTN or Ave maria radio. hopefully you and your sons can find some things to do that keep you together like these kind of things . A number of their friends do them with us. the future? we will do what we can.

    • I share your feelings about the world your kids are inheriting. My wife and I are in the same boat.

      As a late Boomer myself, by 4 hours, I find it kind of hard to hold Boomers responsible for the Immigration Act when it was passed before I was even born. Only those who were born in the first couple years of the Boom, AND who lived in a state with an 18 voting age could possibly have cast a vote for the congresscritters who enacted that atrocity. There were more voters born in the 1800s who voted for those clowns than Boomers. I was 7 when a combination of closing the gold window, government overreach, and the brand new OPEC resulted in the steel mills of Gary going overseas, and Detroit losing to overseas competition. The recession of the early 80s didn’t destroy the rest of manufacturing; that would have to wait until the 90s and NAFTA.

      “Yeah, but Boomers could have elected people to do things differently.” True, you are right, it didn’t happen. But now that demographics are such than Gen X are more numerous than Boomers, what’s your excuse? You know why as well as I do — voting makes no difference. No matter who is declared to have cheated the best, the State always wins.

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      • I get you Steve. I am less that 2 years away from “full retirement age” (whatever that means now days), have three grown sons and come close to tears once a week thinking about what they are going to endure as white men in the coming years. Nothing I can do except try and hope that what I have drummed into their heads will be louder than the worlds noise. I have two very “based” sons who I hope will survive. My third might be a lost cause without direct intervention of God.

    • Nobody has yet witnessed what happens to markets in a time of declining world population. My guess is that “markets always go up over time” is highly correlated to population also having gone up over time. And the reverse will happen on the downside. Not necessarily anything to do with the boomers.

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      • In the first place, allow me to assure you that the world population is doing anything but shrinking. We just officially hit 8 billion people.

        Of course markets DON’T always go up. There is some precedent for what happens when a population declines but it’s spotty. During the Black Death, after up to a third of a local populace had been culled, for one thing, the value of labor increased. All else equal, the value of other things would decrease, since potential demand for it had been reduced by 33%. For a few years at least, common labor was relatively of higher value.

        That’s a poor analogy for the modern world. In the first place, barring a pandemic or other disaster worthy of the name, life expectancy of an aging population can be estimated to a fairly fine degree. Social and economic changes are thus somewhat predictable. It’s not as if all the boomers are going to sell all their stocks the same day. No matter, it is a potential drag on the market as retirees slowly cash out — or hope to.

        Sadly for white nationalists or other dissidents, on a world wide basis, or even with many nations, current demographic trends in motion foretell a not so happy future, although the details cannot be known. And the really depressing thing is that these population changes are all but certain to happen. Our future is browner, blacker and bleaker. (I should copyright that.)

        None of the above forbids a black swan event, another Great Crash, etc.

        • Population is shrinking pretty much everywhere but Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is growing rapidly. That’s the real population problem.

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  8. One problem is the quality of play. The NBA is exactly as Z says, a human flea circus where tall black dudes dunk, shoot 3’s, posture and do a lot of iso one-on-one playground BS that turns their four teammates into highly-paid spectators. Teams can’t get physical and play defense anymore because of rule changes to hide the fact that most of today’s players lack the skillset and basketball IQ of their forebears.

    The NFL is just boring, like the NBA and that’s because the rules are biased toward the quarterback and wideouts. You can’t even touch a QB these days without drawing a penalty and WRs are given carte blanche to push off DBs, who can’t lay a finger on them lest they draw a flag. The refs can’t keep up with the speed of the game and are either incompetent or trying to fix the games with some of the absurd calls they make.

    College football is similar as it is evolving into a junior NFL played on campus. The rules are similarly rigged toward offenses. The referees are even more incompetent or crooked than the ones in the NFL, making so many head-scratching calls that it mars play. There is free agency known as the transfer portal that allows unlimited movement between programs, paying players that was once verboten (name, image and likeness rights) where unmonitored “collectives” can pay athletes for whatever excuse they’d like and a 12-team playoff to decide a national championship that makes the regular season like the NFL, important, but not so much that losing a few games ends your season as it once did.

    With players transferring every year, the ability of coaches to maintain continuity is impeded and they have to re-recruit their players every December to keep them on the team. You could easily put the Benny Hill theme to college football games and just watch the stupidity unfold, which I don’t. Players can’t do the simple things like tackle in space, block, cover receivers without grabbing them, catch passes or hell, quarterbacks can’t even do a five- or seven-step drop since everyone plays out of the shotgun formation every down.

    The ratings and ticket sales, even with the accounting BS tricks they use to “massage” them are going down. People aren’t going to watch or donate to their alma mater when the quality of play is so abysmal. I haven’t decided whether this is an effect of so many things in the culture or it’ll be another nail in the coffin for the false idol called sports in this country or both. Either way, it’s just not fun to watch anymore.

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    • dr_mantis_toboggan_md: “The referees are even more incompetent or crooked than the ones in the NFL”

      Meyer Lansky Inc has controlled the officiating in professional sports [and possibly/likely the NCAA] for decades now.

      You don’t think Meyer Lansky Inc would allow the outcome of the average sporting event to be left up to chance, do you?

      It is to LOL.

      The Shape Shifters leave nothing to chance.

      And Meyer Lansky was the Ur-Shape-Shifter.

      I honestly feel like the Ghost of Meyer Lansky is still actively pulling all the strings of the various marionettes which are presented to us on Talmudvision as being politicians & celebutards & titans of industry & officers of the court & whatnot.

      Barnea, monster that he is, is a rank amateur compared to Lansky.

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  9. For virtually all colleges big time sports is a net revenue loser, even taking account of the broadcasting rights and donor gifts. Thus in theory colleges ought to be pleased to shed the burden from a financial POV. Alas in the real world costs are persistent. The capital costs show up as debt service for the next x years. And even operating costs are persistent. People may no longer go to the game but the game must go on, no?

    • The institutional obligation to chase the few schools that do make money (e.g. Ohio State, Alabama, etc.) is what has led to nonsense like USC/UCLA abandoning their regional conference to go play Midwest teams. It’s just destroyed the sport. It’s not nearly as compelling as it used to be. The wonderful local flavor of CFB that led to it being more popular than the NFL for most of the 20th century has been absolutely destroyed as teams try to field some lesser form of a SEC school. The organizers of the sport keep doubling down to bring in more revenue but at some point that gravy train is going to stop. College basketball is in even worse shape.

      Someone of my age and earning level would have been a contributor to the athletic program of my alma mater a generation ago, but now I don’t bother. I feel no real connection to it and it does not bring me pride. If I were to donate it would be to the academic department I graduated from. I find the concept of some “booster” willing to write checks and hand out cars to football players these days to be pretty pathetic. Maybe 40 years ago, you are talking about local kids from the area, but these days, it’s different and the athletes are mercenary in a way they were not before.

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      • I never much followed my alma matar in the past 10 years. But the final straw for me was when the head coach and 3 assistant coaches were fired for refusing the covid-19 shots that were mandated for all state employees (my alma matar is a “state” university) last year.

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        • OTOH, you oughtta be d@mned proud of the head coach & his assistants who had the gonads necessary to tell the state to GFI.

          Those are precisely the kinda guys you want as GOP candidates for Governor & federal Senator.

          They’ve got the gonads & they’ve got the name recognition.

          • Yep. Inslee is a POS. He made the vaccine mandates “permanent for state employees, meaning they must get each booster as it come out. He is also pushing some sort of “indigenous pedagogy” whatever the hell that it in the public schools.

            I’m pissed at the system, not the coaches that refused the clot shots. BTW. half of our state troopers are gone as well, with driving is becoming somewhat more reckless as a result. I also think there are a lot more drunk drivers as well.

          • Abelard Lindsey: “half of our state troopers are gone as well”

            Those State Troopers who refused the v@xxines are your Oath Keepers.

            The ones who submitted to the v@xxines only cared about their pensions.

            They’re the oath breakers.

  10. Somewhat O/T but on the general theme of national decline. The racial grift is going to kick into high gear very soon I think. Tucker did a segment on these racial wealth transfers that are already occurring right now in the most liberal h-llholes like CA and NY. As Dems became the uniparty expect a lot more of this.

    Anecdotally to support this, the DC area is right up there as the worst far left lib loonies. One of my neighbors lives in what is effectively racially mandated housing enforced at gunpoint on builders by the leftist local governments in the DC area. See, if you want to build expensive houses in DC and I’m guessing places like CA too, you must set aside a certain percent to give away to people who are ‘in need’.

    So peppered through my fairly expensive housing development are these houses that typically cost 500-700K (by today’s still inflated market rates) but which can be gotten for a small fraction of that if you ‘qualify’. It is Section 8 housing embedded into upscale neighborhoods. Part of me thinks it is quite funny because it forces GoodWhites to come face to face w/ their pets which is a rarity. Unfortunately, I happen to inhabit one of these neighborhoods so it affects me directly. (Hence, why I’m in high gear to evacuate in ’23)

    Long winded intro out of the way. One of these poor downtrodden brown families who are annoying AF and living in these expensive houses for a quarter of the actual price just parked a 2023 Tesla Model 3 outside his house. These cars retail for an average of about $65,000 dollars. I drive a 20 year old beater by comparison. When your mortgage is only 1/4 of the actual value of your home it allows for all sorts of disposable income to bling out your ride and lifestyle.

    It is all one massive grift and should the Dems get their way nationally it will be coming to a neighborhood near you sooner or later. I would be very curious to see a demographics report of who is being given these nice new houses at cut rates over say, the past 10 years in DC or any major metro area. You think the white former factory worker who is now working 2 minimum wage jobs is getting these houses? I’m guessing not… there are too many of them anyways so why give them any breaks?

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    • I apologize for not having a ready list of links of propaganda explaining how it’s normal for diverse peoples to be loud and boisterous aka “festive,” and how it’s raycist not to accept that, but I know I’ve seen it.

      Thus the messaging to convince whites to tolerate greater vibrancy has already been deployed. GoodWhites have been admonished to accept La’Quishia making a scene in her driveway or else face the consequences. Thus few will object, and those that do will be unpersoned. Think you can’t get fired from your job for objecting to the diverse twerking party in the front yard down the street? Guess again. Once you are outed as a racist all manner of consequences are possible.

      Learn to enjoy the subwoofer thumping of the neighbor’s car as he comes and goes.

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      • Jeffrey Zoar: Timely comment. Hubby and I finally made the unavoidable trek to the dealership to pay off our car leases. Because we leased the vehicles from a downtown dealer we were forced to pay them off there as well.

        All previous experience had been with a now deceased guy (who we first dealt with years ago in the burbs, but he kept moving around) in the main dealer building – still way too much diversity, but a superficially civilized place. For the payoff we ended up in the used car section. We were the only White people in there and they were playing Very Loud Rap as their in-house ‘background’ music.

        I flat out told the girl I would not sit and be assaulted by that noise – find another place or I would walk. We moved to the far back corner of the room, where she did not have her computer, and I still used my emergency hearing protection (always have those little string-connected earplugs in my purse . . . used them when called for jury duty too). She said she told the guy I didn’t like the music and he supposedly asked what I wanted to listen to instead.

        This is a major, large auto dealership and a supposed place of business. But the ‘businessmen’ were all black and brown and half the ‘customers’ were illegals and the other half had dreads and wore pjs and slippers.

        Hubby noted to me that between the noise and everyone engrossed in their phones or computer screens, he could have waved around one or both of the personal protection devices he had in his bag (because he had come straight from work and couldn’t leave them in the vehicle for its mandatory inspection) and no one would even notice. I agreed and said I’d add the one I always have in my purse and I’d want to do far more than just wave it around.

        May it all burn.

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        • I assume no one other than you and your husband were there to pay-off anything. Let me rephrase: pay anything. I’ll hazard a guess that each and every other person wasn’t the best credit risk. When this hits next year, hopefully you will have obtained a 4WD and live far, far away.

          • Jack – Absolutely correct – I think everyone else was applying for credit to buy a used car. It seems very few people pay off auto leases – they continually trade in and roll the money over into a new lease. These are not the vehicles we want long term, but they are 3 years old, we’ve put under 30k miles on each, and we just put new tires on both. Once we’ve moved (right now scheduled for Feb) and then sell our house in DFW (interior to be updated as soon as we leave it vacant so it can go back on the market early spring), one of these vehicles will go to our younger son. The other will be traded for a 4WD (prices are already dropping a bit) and then we’ll get a used small pickup truck for hubby. It’s hard to wait but all in due time.

          • 3g: do not get a small pickup. I have had a s10 and a silverado 2500. I would take the silverado over the light duty every day and twice on Sunday. Getting supplies, moving things, building supplies and firewood: the difference is huge. They get about the same gas mileage, and you never wish you had less power or a weaker chassis. As to 2500 vs 1500, Google for pictures of the difference in wheel hubs (front wheen bearings). You can always sell a 2500 or f250 and you can always find parts for them, and learning to repair and do maintenance on a Chevy ls truck is more common than drinking beer. You can change the oil on a silverado with 2 tools: a strap wrench and a 13mm combo wrench.

    • It’s not really a wealth transfer, though. They aren’t raising taxes or seizing assets to fund reparations, they’re issuing debt. Basically, they’re using someone else’s credit card to make a charitable donation which is, in a word, fraud.

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      • Of course it’s a wealth transfer. Wealth isn’t those slips of green paper or bits on a computer file somewhere. It’s actual stuff and services. Houses, food, fuel, etc.

        Issuing debt means nothing more or less than giving up funny money to buy up actual wealth. That means there is now both more funny money and less stuff to buy. More money chasing fewer goods.

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      • It absolutely is a wealth transfer. Debt and inflation are the taxes that do not even require a vote. And like all legislated taxes, it only really impacts one group: the white middle class.

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    • Requiring “affordable” housing is nothing new. In my “home county” of Fairfax, in the early 90s, I had the good fortune (?) to watch essentially the remaining undeveloped green spaces of Western Fairfax be developed. The very aged man who had originally built 1960s Reston (Robert Simon) even protested against some of the re-development of “his” planned community, to little avail. Reston Town Center was built somewhat in the style of vintage Washington, D.C. It is/was a quite pleasant place to shop or dine in pleasant weather. In winter there’s an ice rink, etc.Anyway, when RTC was being built in 1990s, there were “affordable” units set aside. To no one’s surprise, there was crime, including the occasional armed robbery. I can only imagine what it’s like now, nearly thirty years later.

      For amusement, I looked up the home I briefly owned in the general area > 20 years past. I’m surprised that, at least by the assessed value, it hasn’t quite doubled in price in two decades. That probably doesn’t speak well of the neighborhood, which was veering heavy Latino when I lived there.

    • Look on the bright side. The consequences of California paying slavery reparations will be a joy to watch.

      First, the Meso-Americans, many of whom actually work hard, are going to mighty miffed at giving money to layabout blacks for work the blacks’ ancestors did 150 or more years ago. Those ethnic groups aren’t too friendly right now, so expect some fireworks.

      Then, imagine the carpetbagging lawyers, quack geneticists and genealogists flooding the state to help the oppressed get their payouts–for a fee. A Tom Wolfe novel couldn’t cover in fiction what will happen in reality.

      And once the funds are disbursed, fools parting spectacularly from their money will be an orgy of bling and violence on a mythological scale.

      Let’s make the best of it and enjoy the show.

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  11. Not that I don’t agree (I do) with Z’s basic contention about changing demography, but he has a bad habit about linking to articles that don’t support his argument. The article about college football for example doesn’t blame the Baby Boomers, but leans on an economic explanation. Essentially, the price of attendance has become too expensive for many fans. The Baby Boomer alumni are still filling their share of the stands, but the students are staying away.

    The basic problem with college football is indeed a “Boomer” problem — not a “Baby Boomer” problem but a “Boomer” problem. A Boomer is someone who believes that the good times will never end. The Boomers are all those college presidents, athletic directors, etc. with dollar signs in their eyes.

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    • We seem to forget another partial explanation for such decline in college sports—DIE. Colleges that the Boomers went to are now cesspools of progressive dogma. Why should I donate a nickel to an institution such as that?

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      • I wish that were the central reason, but I fear it is marginal. Your average Griller–and these are the most reliable college football fans–cares one helluva lot more about his alma mama’s football team than he does about his granddaughter’s mind being pumped full of anti-white pollution. As long as his Wildcats are contending for a conference title on a regular basis he couldn’t care less about the horrific damage the professors and administrators are doing. Just one reason I hold Grillers in such profound contempt.

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    • At most football factories student tickets are already priced into tuition, thus they are not being priced out of the games.

  12. NHL is going full woke as well: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11534043/PICTURED-Trans-ice-hockey-player-formally-known-Kyle-left-female-male-rival-CONCUSSED.html

    They are doing things like hosting shemale vs. hemale tournaments. BLM worship. Indigenous ceremonies and land acknowledgements before games (mainly in Canada). Female commentators. Completely disgusting and unwatchable. That doesn’t even include commercials. It’s as if they said ‘American ads are 80% Africans – we need Canadian NHL ads to be 99% Africans!’ Very occasionally there is a white woman in a mixed race relationship or an ugly, dorky white guy.

    It seems like they have to go even more woke than the NFL and NBA, since most of their players are white. The league was mostly white and conservative, but there’s a new generation of players who are white and f*gs. It’s become an upper middle class sport only now and the youngest players seem to reflect those managerial class values. Lots of dirt whites still play on the local level but more and more cannot afford to play their kids in the top youth levels.

    Sports are super cringey to me now. It’s sad seeing working class white people drunk and howling at NFL games. I am so disinterested in sports that I feel pity when I see sports fans. I watch an occasional UFC match and that’s about it. UFC fighters and tough, skilled and manly which I can respect (that’s what NHL players used to be).

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      • Back circa the mid- to late-1990s, when analogue-to-digital conversion techniques went crazy, and file sharing exploded, the Frankfurt School realized that the writing was on the wall, and there were no longer any shekels to be made in the 75-year lifespan of 20th Century intellectual property rights [books, records, motion pictures], because everything would be immediately copied and posted on pirate file-sharing websites, and the value of the intellectual property rights would quickly fall to precisely zero.

        However, the Frankfurt School did see an opportunity in LIVE sporting events, because Bubba wants to experience his “Show Me The Money!!!!” kneegrolatry in real time [not from a pirated recording afterwards], so the Frankfurt School started spending all that money [which Alan Greenspan was sending to them from the Fed] on a massive buying spree, grabbing up every available NFL & NBA & MLB & NHL franchise.

        Ergo the Frankfurt School now owns almost the entirety of live sporting events.

        PS: Something structurally similar happened to the old Boomer Rock-N-Roll bands [both USA & UK]; they’re doing re-union tours & re-re-union tours & re-re-re-union tours because the only way they can earn money now is by charging people for the tickets to be physically present in a coliseum audience of a re-re-re-union tour.

        $0.99 per download from the Apple Store just ain’t cuttin’ it.

        12
        2
    • “Sports are super cringey to me now. It’s sad seeing working class white people drunk and howling at NFL games. I am so disinterested in sports that I feel pity when I see sports fans.”

      Nail on head for me as well. Which is really amazing. I grew up in NY state as a HUGE NY Giants, NY Yankees, NY Knicks and NY Rangers fan. I would watch every baseball, football, basketball and hockey game I could. My true love was Giants football. I never missed a game for 30+ years. Now? I don’t follow any of it. Haven’t watched a full NFL game since 2019. I miss it sometimes, or maybe I miss the time in our country when political activism for evil people didn’t ruin it.

      Now I see white people wearing their favorite brown man jersey cheering on as he promotes the fact that he hates them and wants them dead. It is embarrassing.

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    • I once saw a commercial during an NFL game where a white woman was dating/married to a white man and she neither mocked, cucked, or made him look like he was an idiot.

      Or did I? That seems so very long ago. Maybe it was a dream?

      17
    • I got rid of my TV and stopped ALL sportsball in 1987. Even then, it was nothing more than which rich white guy had the money to buy the best ni**ers, and today it’s FAR worse.

      No, thanks.

      Anybody still watching that s*it has only himself to blame.

      18
    • What is it about these non-binary trans people where they are so utterly unattractive? In past, you expect MtF trans people to be attractive enough they can fool you in a bar or nightclub. Kind of like the ladyboys of South East Asia. These “woke” non-binaries are utterly unattractive.

      • Abelard: They’re not supposed to be attractive. Their entire point is wearing makeup with a beard – to shove their dysgenic, satanic existence down your throat and make you celebrate it as whatever they claim it is. The Ontario ‘teacher’ with triple z fake boobs may think he’s attractive, but he knows he is also a deliberate parody and spectacle. And the students have been told if they notice or photograph him, they will be expelled. And their parents? Why, they keep sending their kids to the school, of course. What else would you expect them to do? Everyone knows home schooled kids aren’t ‘properly’ socialized.

        19
  13. The only people who still watch the NBA are boomers and some Gen X people that grew up in the Bird-Magic-Jordan era. The truth is, even if for some reason you wanted to follow the NBA, it’s hard because players all become mercs who change teams constantly, complain, take days off for no reason, and in general just show total contempt for the fans and league. As such, young people don’t watch the games and don’t root for teams, they just follow players and watch clips on social media, which does not hit the bottom line for the league. The CEO of Warner is playing hardball in TV rights, outright saying that the league is not as viable on TV as it used to be. Of course, these rights are the lifeblood of these sports and how teams can afford to play players billions of dollars every year collectively no matter how they behave. It will be interesting (and likely hilarious) to see how they respond if the money spigot starts to slow as a result of economic reality.

    17
    1
    • All of the youngsters in my family love the NBA and want all of the merch. It saddens me because this is another hooks into the minds of children. I am sure that is a reason why the New Religion was so eagerly taken up by these sports leagues. The politics are the politics of those who own and run them.

      I am working on a way to get the parents to give up the sportsball watching. It is an anti-white cancer.

      The, “land acknowledgements”, at NHL games do not surprise me. Abrogating the people’s claim on their land is unconscionable – it is suicide. But that is what those are there for. Whitey, this land is not even yours – now say it with me one more time. Sickening. What I do not understand is why BLM is even in Canada and why DIE, (which is a black run genocide institution), has taken hold there.

      18
      • Canada, like the rest of the anglosphere and most of Europe, is an adjunct of the GAE, BLM is the official anti-white terrorist organization of the GAE, and DIE is its ideology.

        • Different origin myths. Canadians are racist because we’re on stolen native land. Americans are racist because of slavery. Solution: open borders with China, India, and Mexico.

          Of course, Canadians also have a long history of anti-black oppression and slavery, and Americans are also on stolen land. But it’s not the primary origin story. Hence why certain stories are more prominent in some areas but still visible in other areas.

          None of it makes logical sense – they just hate white people and want us dead. Simple as.

          10
    • The restaurant closest to where I live is a sports bar. It sure as heck is not the Baby Boomers I see glued to the TVs. It’s all 20s and 30s. I’m one of the 3 or 4 greybeards I’ve ever seen there.

      11
      • If I were loaded with money (which I’m not), I’d like to open a restaurant with a difference. To wit: fewer than zero TV monitors; melodic jazz or classical background music at a volume that permits conversation; real (though not necessarily expensive) artistic decor; knowledgeable waiters and waitresses, not “servers” who’ve been trained to upsell (“how about a nice big juicy baked potato to go with that?”).

        Yeah, I know. It would probably go bust in the first six months, since the oafs who want loud theme restaurants way outnumber civilized diners. Then again … just maybe … once they got over the shock, enough customers might decide they like meeting friends or talking with a date over lunch or dinner absent sensory overload.

        And then imagine the concept being scaled into a coast-to-coast chain. It wouldn’t survive the cataclysm so many are expecting, but could help set the tone for a humanistic rebirth that follows after Dark Ages II.

  14. As well as dropping LSATs, medical schools in the US are dropping MCATs, or lowering the acceptable score for applicants from the favored demographics. There is serious discussion about lowering medical school GRADUATION requirements for folks who are vibrantly diverse enough. Your neurosurgeon in 2035 may have an IQ of 85.

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    • “Your neurosurgeon in 2035 may have an IQ of 85.”

      “Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Dr. Lexus, Idiocracy

      18
    • JDaveF: “Your neurosurgeon in 2035 may have an IQ of 85.”

      In the samizdat community, we’ve been talking a great deal about the v@xxines & the shedding of spike proteins, and moast of us now understand that simply entering a doctor’s office is becoming a very very risky endeavor in Klownworld.

      I’m especially terrified for parents of young children; imagining scenarios at the pediatrician’s office wherein the parents might turn their back for a just moment, and unbeknownst to them, a Nurse Karen Ratched would sneak into the room & v@xxinate a child & then slip back out the door, without the parents ever noticing what had happened.

      [And yes, the true-believing pediatricians & nurse karen ratcheds will behave in precisely that fashion – do not doubt it for a moment.]

      The bottom line is that if our ancestors could survive smallpox & measles & mumps & dysentery & typhoid fever & the like, then hopefully we can [and will], as well.

      For the time being, at least, we do have the advantage of vastly better public sanitation, especially regarding potable water.

      But we can no longer trust the KlownWorld Medical Industrial Complex.

      So stay slender, get a little cardio in your daily routine [simply walking the stairs rather than taking the elevator ought to suffice], sleep as much as is humanly possible, and DO NOT FRENCH-KISS V@XXED CHICKS!!!!!

      18
      • Sign seen on the web:
        Unvaxxed sperm will be the new Bitcoin

        (Homemade street sign held by an attractive young miss, that’s a white pill for sure)

    • Speaking of DIE in the medical field. The other day I had the distinct displeasure to show up at midnight in the local ER. Not a single White staff member to be seen. The doctor on the floor wore some type of civilian dress—jeans, tennis shoes, etc. and was a rough looking smallish brown/black guy who I’d cross the street to avoid. 3g4me called it right. Boomer’s get what they deserve.

      Before one jumps to too many conclusions, the doctor actually was helpful wrt the problem and the medication I told him was needed. I can be a pain in the ass as well, so he took the hint to get rid of this “gomer”. 😉

    • “Your neurosurgeon in 2035 may have an IQ of 85.”

      And why not? He already has a very sharp knife.

    • Recently I happened to notice on their website that the Veterinary Medical School at UC-Davis, one of the most prestigious in the country, has dropped the GRE as a requirement — they cited other schools doing so, as well as a study showing the test is biased.

      Given how long disparate impact has been a thing, I’m surprised these standard tests (SAT, LSAT, GRE, etc) have lasted this long.

    • Thank you. You have given me yet more reasons to avoid the medical system to the greatest extent I can, going forward.Picking up horse de-wormer and veterinary antibiotics at the feed store is starting to sound more sensible every day. 🙁

  15. I had never even heard of pickleball until Vox Day mentioned it on his blog a couple of years ago. Tennis was huge in the late 70’s and 80’s. I never played it. But I remember the tennis courts always being used at the time. Racket ball was another huge sport. It was the quintessential yuppie sport of the 80’s. Today you never hear about it.

    The decline of golf is to be expected. The boomers took it up. But even GenX had no interest in it, not to mention the Millennials. But the idea that old people can’t play it is silly. My grandfather was an avid golfer right up to about 3 months before he died at age 79. My father died young (age 63). But he played golf (and was good at it) right up to the last weekend before a died. I’m wondering if the boomers are dropping out of golf at an earlier age than my parents and grandparents generation is an indicator that they are actually in poorer health than the Silents. Certainly obesity is far more rampant today (at all ages) than it was, say, in 1980.

    I never had any interest in either golf or tennis. But I lift weights and do aerobic (swim, bike, hiking) regularly. I don’t care if sport ball as a spectator and money maker goes away. Other than soccer, there really is no sport ball outside the U.S.

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    • There are a lot of other sports besides soccer that are very popular in different parts of the world. Rugby, cricket, hockey, even volleyball and ping pong are hugely popular in varying places. And more. They don’t get any publicity in the US but they are big where they’re big.

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        • > But in terms of the revenue and economic impact, they are a lot smaller.

          This is due to the differences in the sizes of the economies: both raw and per-capita GDP. Revenue and economic impact of *everything* is smaller outside the U.S., not just in sports.

          • Also, cricket is a huge sport because it’s the most popular sport in India,Pakistan,Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

      • The popularity of soccer is easy to explain — all you need is a ball and it’s easy to fashion ad hoc goal posts. In South America you can see soccer being played on the streets or on pieces of dirt. Likewise for cricket, which just needs a bat, a ball, and wickets. But other sports can be expensive — such as golf.

    • No serious adult will play something with a name as idiotic as pickleball any more than he’ll use a digital function with a name as insipid as Twitter.

  16. I never understood the college sports phenomena, and the sooner it dies the better. These aren’t fellow students at your university, they’re ringers that the college went out and got. They’re barely literate. This story always stuck with me:

    https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-scores/index.html

    Highlight from the article:

    A study of UNC Chapel hill (a really good school) basketball and football players found 60% of players could read at a level between 4-8th grade, while 10% could read at a level less than 3rd grade. I certainly experienced this in college. I had one class where there were a few football ringers, and these guys were borderline retarded. Whenever they raised their hand, I paid close attention because it was going to be very entertaining.

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    • This was starting in the 1980’s when I was in college. I remember being in a dining hall where a lot of the football players ate in and saw that they were rather thuggish and ghetto like. They were not at all like the rest of the student body. No doubt its far worse today.

      23
    • But but but… who is going to rape the cheerleaders ?
      Good riddence to professional sports at public university.
      Things change, once upon a time long range target shooting was a hugely popular thing, hence Creedmore.
      There were even shooting contests in New York citys central park.
      Things change back, today there is a resurgence in marksmanship contests.of all types.
      Could there be underlying reasons ?

      21
    • More than 30 years ago, I was attending a school that had a mid-level D1 basketball team, with a single Final Four appearance in their historical pedigree. When the players were getting out of their “math” class, I had a class in the same room immediately afterwards and if I got there early enough I’d get to my desk before the teacher could erase the blackboard. Oh boy. It was 2nd or 3rd grade level problems, at best.

      17
      • Most basketball and football players today don’t even attend class. The whole academic side of the so-called “student-athlete” is every bit as fake as Our Democracy.

    • As a former college basketball player at what is now called a Group of 5 or midmajor, I can attest that most of my black teammates were just stone dumb. They had tutors who did all of their work for them and were coaxed by the Orwellian “academic support staff” into useless crib majors like sociology or exercise science. Even still, most of them would fail if not “guided” by the tutors and become ineligible. It was a farce. They’re athletes first, students second. A lot of them I know had other students take their ACT tests and were instructed to “not do too well, but just enough” after the proctors were paid off.

      When I told the staffers I was going to double-major in two engineering disciplines, they tried to talk me out of it until they saw my SAT scores and left me alone.

      I tried to help some of my teammates with math and it was like trying to explain to a beagle how to drive. They’d get mad and storm off and I stopped helping teammates with their work.

      I remember watching college football in the 1980s and they used to show the majors and many were “urban studies.”

      21
    • These are mild compared to the utter carnival that was the Wakausha trial for Mr. Parade Massacre.

      Darryl Brooks acted as his own lawyer and in the back of my mind I was thinking another few decades of dysgenics and this guy will be a star attorney. That Idiocracy clip Z displayed looks to be right on target.

      Objecshun! Grounz! Irrelevant testimony! Grounz! Its facts! Hours and hours of this circus and the judge, God bless her, played along because we have to pretend these creatures that lope and slouch around us are not missing links and are actual humans. Gods in fact, to some unfortunate souls they are.

      This monkey was yelling at the judge, behavior that would have an actual lawyer removed from the trial but she had to play along or maybe wanted to since Wisconsin is filled with GoodWhites, probably her included. He also wanted to declare a mistrial because the aggrieved party needs to be present. They are all dead, but of course, that didn’t stop his eeking and ooking rants.

      In a sane society the judge would have said, “Listen you dumb n-gger, you are destroying any chance you will ever have to see the light of day every time you open your mouth. Let a human represent you and stop embarrassing yourself!” But we long ago stopped being anything resembling a sane society.

      If you’d like to lose some braincells and get a bit more blackpilled go to Y-Tube and search for Darryl Brooks highlights if you’d like a preview of the future of legal proceedings in our glorious nation, The North American Globalist Kosher Bodega Economic Zone.

      24
    • I visit the county courthouse a few times a year, to pay property tax, renew a fishing license and the like. One day as I was walking through the parking lot, a Melanic Homonid™ woman and her mid-teens son were exiting the building. Little Jamal said “Mom, you gotta try weed!” Mom’s face was priceless 😀

  17. SCUBA diving is a sport first taken up in the general population by boomers. Im not sure if it’s done too much today except for young hot chicks on youtube breath holding (no breathing apparatus). Im curious if it too will die out as the population gets dumber due to the requirement for some basic understanding in physics and other technical knowhow. Ironically it should be a low effort sport perfect for the aging generation.

    16
    • Terrific sport!!! Got NAUI Certified when I was 12 yrs old (Dad was a Navy Diver). My formative years were spent diving wrecks off Ocean City, MD & Chincoteague, VA + numerous trips to the Caribbean: Cayman Islands, Jamaica, & Bonaire.

      @ one point divers were just above the pecking order from motorcycle gangs. I’m sure it’s been gentrified since then.

    • “Im curious if it too will die out as the population gets dumber … .”

      Ni**ers don’t swim. Can’t swim.

    • Dead on about a great “sport” for older folks. My family (ages 58/55/21/20) got certified years ago and we dive on almost every vacation. The only benefit of being in shape is that you breathe less oxygen so you can stay down longer. In fact, the whole goal is to exert as little energy as possible so you can enjoy the beauty longer. If you can move your legs, you can enjoy scuba, but it’s more like underwater sightseeing than a sport.

      • White seascaping for the win, then.

        Our great navies from tiny coastal nations conquered the world. Let us become the Benthics, the mermen- Captain Nemo had it right.

      • DLS: Excellent description. Fulfilled one of my dreams years ago when I got certified during my otherwise miserable Caribbean embassy tour of duty. Loved diving. Wish I had done more. Was able later to treat my then pre-teen son to a special class conducted in a local dive-shop swimming pool, although he’s never had the chance to properly dive since.

        I never enjoyed any of the standard team sports as either participant or spectator. Loved scuba, loved skiing, loved driving without speed limits on the Autobahn. Unfortunately learned/experienced these things in my late 20s and had only a few years to enjoy them before kids and no money for such pleasant diversions.

  18. “It is hard to overstate the warping effect the Boomer generation has had on the American culture.”

    Not for me it isn’t. As an early Gen Xer, I have been acutely aware of this my entire life. I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was shot. I was in nursery school during Woodstock and Vietnam. None of the classical Boomer shit means anything to me. By 1980 I was already sick and tired of hearing Zeppelin and Hendrix and Steppenwolf. Today there are people in their seventies still listening to that shit.

    Worse, the bottom fell out of the traditional economy during the 1980s, after the Boomers had already locked up all of the good jobs. It’s really weird for me to see a huge demand for employees in decent-paying blue-collar and government jobs (and young kids getting them) that have unavailable in my area since 1982 — now that I am too old to get them.

    The feminization and the non-whitening of the nation and the economy is a real thing, it seems that there are a small number of white kids who are keeping the infrastructure running as the Boomers retire while woke blacks and women get a number of high-paying make-work jobs and political positions. Seems that Gen X got skipped over, everything went from Boomer dominance to woke Millennials in just a few years — straight from Hillary Clinton to AOC.

    As a Gen Xer I definitely fell like a man without a country.

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    • I hear you Xman. I am a mid-boomer. I remember when the off shoring stared in earnest in the 80s. I was amazed at all of the people who thought it was a great idea. Rush Limbaugh was a cheerleader for all of the trade deals, due to his GOP establishment ties. I argued with my friends that the man was out of his mind on that issue but they just looked at me like I had two heads. I remember telling them that we will not have a way to generate real wealth. The traitors ripped out the core of America and shipped it to China.

      At the same time they began importing the third world at a rate not seen previously arriving at today where we basically have no Border.

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      • You’re not a mid-boomer. You are likely a late boomer., probably closer to Gen X than the mid-boomers. The mid-boomers to me are the guys who got out of HS around ’72-74 or so. They are my baby-sitters generation.

    • Right there with you on the age bracket and disgust for all things Boomer, especially their music. I have enjoyed a lot of great music in my life, much of it equal to, or far surpassing the best Classic Rock. But I still got tired of it all after a while! For fucks sake Boomers, find something new to listen to!

      I can’t say I noticed much of the 80s and 90s because I was otherwise occupied, looking for and finding adventure, and/or just plain being irresponsible. I’m definitely noticing now though.

      10
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        • Nora En Pure, Swiss-Afrikaaner, the absolute finest DJ on Planet Earth.

          “Deep House” Music so good it’ll drive you insane. Not jingles or singalongs, rave instrumentals that will put you In.The. Zone.
          (As the Dutchman told me)

    • Seems like X got stepped over; like Fredo. Xers are generally more sane than Millenials, but the majority zeitgeist of X was still fucking liberal and carrying-on the Boomer bullshit by and large. Certainly in regards to feminism, blacks, and illegals; the biggies.

      A lot of the conservative Xers who remembered Reagan fondly, got conned into enlisting for Iraq and Afghanistan!

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      • Your post got me nostalgic for one of, what I consider to be, the best Gen-X bands: X.

        I hardly listen to them or hear them at all, but when I do, they always impress me in new ways. Maybe that’s our version (“a” version at least) of the Beatles.

        We had our great music as well, but “our” version of Classic Rock is 80s Radio. I gotta be honest, much of what GenX-ers consider classic is really insufferable. To be fair, I hated most of it *then*.

        • Punk that predates “hardcore” is boomer rock, literally and aesthetically. X were one of the good ones, but I most remember them for berating their fans for rockin’ out macho-ly to their macho rock song about rape. *That* was very GenX.

        • That is because you likely haven’t turned on a radio in the past 10 years. Anything produced during the Gen X era may as well be Mozart compared to the atonal low complexity garbage blasting the airwaves today.

          N-gger music won, period. Everything is some flavor of hip-hop even country. Seeing young blonde white girls twerking their azz like a sheboon while covered in tats just reminds me how dysgenic this society is and how much I hate this timeline.

          22
        • Though a very late Boomer, I loved a lot of 80s music. I love(d) classic rock, even though I was too young for it when it was new. The reason I grew to hate it was the “Classic Rock” radio format of the 1980s-90s before it was killed off, or at least fierce competition arrived, from satellite and later digital formats. I recall reading that a typical station had a catalog of about 500 songs. As good as [insert your favorite song here] may be, you will probably get sick of hearing it every day or two. Do these stations even exist any more? The government should have killed off FM decades ago, and used the frequencies for something else.

          My favorite X song is “What’s Wrong With Me”*, available on YouTube, as is the case with nearly everything else in the world.

          *None of your goddamn business! 😀

    • I dislike piling on the Boomers, but find that I can’t help myself in this case.

      It took me at least 20 years before I could appreciate the Beatles due to the incessant promotion of that band at every conceivable opportunity by my elders. In 6th grade, we were made to watch the Yellow Submarine just because our hippy teacher wanted to. It went over our heads, we were bored, but the teacher got to swoon over Paul again.

      When you’re constantly told from birth that this is the greatest thing ever, you really hate them.

      My considered appraisal of the Beatles now: Mostly, they were annoying f@gs, especially John Lennon, but they write did great work with chords, chord changes, and bass lines.

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      • Paul was an underrated bassist in my humble opinion. And the unique chord shifts are partly why the Beatles songs are more difficult to play than you might think. One of the first songs I tried to teach myself on guitar was “I’m Looking Through You.” Its only 5ish chords but it was much harder for a beginner than I had anticipated.

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        • Reynard, I entirely agree. In my list of what I appreciate about the Beatles above, I see that I left out many amazing melodies. “When I’m 64,” for example, has great melody, chords, and bass. It’s still hard for me to give the Beatles their due.

          • They didn’t always, obsessively hew to the stripped down early R&R chord patterns or forms of the blues progression. They, particularly McCartney, hearkened back to the English music hall tradition for inspiration from time to time, sort of a specifically Great British Songbook. Very little of jazz among their overt influences, and in their partial lack of slavish emulation of American/black formulas, a breath of fresh air. While listening to When I’m 64, in your mind’s eye you could easily envision a vaudvillian soft shoe being the story board conceit for the video. Made for a nice change.

        • Johnny Ramone said that the Ramones wrote so many of their own songs because he “didn’t have time to learn all those Beatle chords” and play regular old Boomer music.

      • As an avocational audio engineer, I appreciate the Beatles mostly for what they did with the equipment that was available at the time, when plate reverb really was a plate of sheet metal with a couple transducers epoxied to it, and to get hall reverb, you had to record in a hall, with appropriate mike selection and placement.

        Yes, they had some songs with good chords and vocal harmonies, but far and away, it’s how they got the sound they did that captivates me.

        10
        • Steve –

          Playing 8 hour sets in Hamburg night after night. You can’t help but get good – & tight as a band – with a schedule like that. ;<)

          • Very Malcolm Gladwellian of you. It isn’t practice that made the Beatles so good. It was innate talent and creativity.

        • While they were not the only ones doing studio wizardry, what the Beatles and more precisely, their technical support, were able to do at the time was revolutionary. I’ve read that would-be copycats are still trying to figure out how they obtained some of the sounds they did. I’ve read similar claims for Hendrix. He was surely a competent guitarist but he had folks building him effects boxes that, apparently, remain mysteries.

      • Keep in mind, the Beatles were all in their 20s when they broke up. Imagine having their body of work at that age. In 8 years, they had 20 number one hits and 34 in the top ten. It’s hard not to appreciate that.

        11
      • As a late Boomer, I was only 10 when the Beatles broke up, but I have a female cousin who was a fanatic. All she played was the Beatles. Got caught up in the “Paul is dead” stuff. As a result I detested the Beatles…until I started really listening to them again in my 40’s. While they may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have learned to appreciate their musicality and influence on later bands. Also, as a drummer I really appreciated that Ringo was not a standard “drum roll on every rest” R&R type musician.

    • On the young end of GenX, and there is definitely a logjam for advancement at my firm unless you debase yourself to get patronage from one of the people in the good jobs.

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    • The return of blue collar work over the past 8 years or so has been astonishing. Your right we’ve not seen this since 1982. As an automation system integrator, I work in these fields all the time. As a control system integrator, I am fully able to capitalize on this trend.

      The music situation is funny. The older to mid boomers still listen to their 70’s music, most of which is crap. I tend to like the hard rock like Zepplin (as well as disco and funk). But I have not really listened to rock since the 80’s. I think 70’s rock like zepplin and Aerosmith will go away once the mid-boomers (those who got out of HS in the early 70’s) go away. The 80’s metal, often referred to as “hair” bands, have largely fallen to the way side because the early Gen-Xers that grew up on it have moved on. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of disco and fink from the 70’s. Yeah, I know its not fashionable to like disco and funk. But I don’t care what people think.

      The thing about rock is that, technically speaking, it is a very simple music. I prefer the more complexity and dynamic range of jazz to that of rock. However, I think prog rock is good. But most 70’s rock was not prog rock. Right now Jeff Lorber is my favorite.

      • Abelard-

        Thanks for sharing.

        Your first paragraph confirms my instinct that giving up international work in MBS-stan to take a role in industrial automation and control systems is probably a good move at this time.

        • I’ve received calls from two recruiters this week for industrial automation work. I probably won’t go for them because I’m happy where I am now. But its reassuring the opportunities are out there. \

          What did it for me 12 years ago was when Careerbuilder (remember them?) started showing the number of applicants for any given job posted. The high-level technical sales and marketing positions were attracting 120-150 applicants. The typical industrial automation and controls system engineering position attracted maybe 10-12 applicant, a magnitude or order less.

          I think the recession we’re headed into will be very similar to that of the early 90’s in that it will be a “white collar”recession where all those unproductive people at social media companies get let go.

          • Controls automation engineers will not lack for work if and until it all comes crumbling down. These are careers dominated by Whites and unfortunately Pashtu’s. Can’t remember the last black CE I saw in the last 30 years.

    • Please consider accepting a personal apology from a tail end boomer. I truly loath that most self absorbed generation in history. It may be a salve for your wounds to know 95%+ boomers have no savings or property of any real value, mostly due to their belief in their eternal youth, living as grasshoppers rather than ants. Unfortunatly those will continue to burden society. ( maybe Canada isn”t completely wrong advocating suicide) )
      I too was tired of most of the music you mentioned.
      However I do have a renewed appreciation for Steppinwolfs “Goddamn the pusher” seems more precient today than ever.

      4
      3
      • Twitter:
        “I need to go to school to be a lawyer because in 10 years there will not be enough lawyers to represent these kids,its gonna be epic”

        “Wait until they start suing their own parents when they detrans at a later age. Home owner insurance about to take on a new meaning.”

  19. The decline in college football attendance is probably related to demographics, both of the students and the players (everyone can see that most of them do not belong on a university campus), but this is conjecture.

    What isn’t conjecture is that demographic change at a HS in Fremont California was so dramatic (Whites replaced by Asians, mostly Chinese and Indians) that they were not able to put football teams on the field for at least one season due to lack of interest from the male students.

    However every HS in that league now has a girls and boys badminton team, which is very popular sport in Asia — the same is true of many HS sports leagues in the SFBA (personally I have nothing against badminton, which when played competitively is a difficult and demanding game, but I do resent the demographic change).

    19
    • And I was definitely part of the tennis boom in the 1970s — I played nearly every day from the mid-70s to mid-80s — at one time I could not imagine never picking up a racket, but it has now been 20 years since I did — I don’t miss it.

      14
    • I too have nothing against badminton but it’s easier for lightly muscled Asians to play — the racket is lighter and the shuttlecock lighter than a tennis ball. Table tennis is also more popular with Asians — and again the same logic.

      12
    • Badminton and table tennis invented by the British. If you don’t play American sports you’ll play British.

      You just cannot avoid the Anglo matrix.

      Laughs evilly.

      11
      • Evolution of sports

        British invent game
        Spread it other countries
        Other countries surpass Brits

        Brits invent game . . . .

        10
    • Fremont, I had rarely seen relatives there; not named in any wills, to my knowledge 🙂

      One salutary effect of the replacement sports you mention is that they are self-selecting to minimize participation by, shall we say, the less desirable fraction of society 😀

  20. I’m not a boomer, but I’m a middle aged Gen Xer.

    For me growing up, the local college football team was something most people lived and breathed. One can argue the healthiness of that level of fanaticism, but it was definitely good “water cooler” conversation, and it brought people together. I’ve cooled the last 10 years on college football, but there will always be a piece of me that cherishes the memories of my younger days and that naive love of the game.

    The difference between then, and now, is that 25 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable for any major college program to have a white quarterback, a white head coach, and a few white stars at skill positions like tailback, tight end, and wide receiver. There were still entire major college football teams that had at least an even split of white and black athletes on the field. (Even if the white kids heavily loaded up on the offensive or defensive line) And even with position coaches, the sidelines at least seemed to reflect typical demographics, with 75% or so of the sideline coaches being white guys and 25% or so being black.

    I didn’t mind cheering on my team that had a star black tailback, because I knew there was a good chance there’d be a white kid playing quarterback, tight end, both kicking positions, and at least one wide receiver.

    Nowadays, and this is no exaggeration, I’m straining my eyes to find a white kid on the field AT ALL on many teams. Quarterback does still seem to favor the white kid most of the time, but that, and kicking jobs, are just about the only ones that white kids still have any edge (and that’s slipping away too).

    Not to mention the endless commentary by sports “pundits” about how there need to be more black head coaches and black quarterbacks. The tone of the entire sport has been modified the last 2-3 decades to favor the black athlete.

    30 years ago, there were fantastic programs like Nebraska, as an example, that relied on physical strength and size more than speed. A solid “option” offense with a big, strong offensive line. Physical toughness. This used to be a sport tailored for the ancestors of Northern European men. Now it’s centered around African speed.

    Sure, it’s fun to watch still. But I feel nothing, no connection, no team spirit, I simply don’t really care.

    35
    • What is important is that young white children, adolescents and men abandon sportsball for more important and real warrior activities. It is clear that white men are not wanted. There are too many of us and not enough blacks. Why any white person wants to participate or spectate is a cause of deep sadness for me.

      We should take that message to heart and also be very practical about what lies ahead. We need to organize activities for our young men and make them feel wanted. Those activities should also provide a much more masculine and natural environment where practical skills are learned and mastered. It is time for a renaissance of the great outdoorsman. We need to organize and support each other in this task.

      30
      • My 12 year old’s classmate bagged a 120# deer on his far suburban property using a bow and arrow. Guts were left for the scavengers. Family friend was called who owned some knives and had some butchering skills. Everyone else hung out in the garage with Bambi hanging from the rafters.
        Head and leftovers were double bagged and left in the dumpster.
        The young Noname Boy asked Santa for a compound bow with a minimim 40# draw…
        These young men and their friends will own the future.

        34
        • Fantastic! In terms of skill, insist he learn the fundamentals of using a recurve. The compound is fine, but it takes far less skill. Skipping over skill development is skipping over personal development.

          Great to hear that some young ones are being manly and that the community is supporting it. There are some great survival and outdoorsman courses around that make great father/son and group men activities.

          13
          • Extra credit. He wants the compound because the little Rambo baked a recursive bow using PVC in his shop class over the summer.
            Strong enough to bring down squirrel and rabbit, but he doesn’t want to risk it with larger game.

    • They distracted us with sportsball while they commandeered our government and our country. I am as guilty as anyone so charged. What can I say, some of that stuff was pretty damn good.

      Sportsball is the opiate of Civnat Q. Normiecon, but today he has much less excuse for being so beguiled than he did 20 or 30 years ago.

      13
    • I used to be like this with CFB and the NHL.

      I’ve moved on because my boyhood heroes are retired or dead, sportsball is so mercenary that you’re rooting for laundry, and the players are all Facebook bros so there are no real rivalries anymore.

      10
  21. In my middle-class apartment complex, the tennis courts have been taken over by guys in their 20s and 30s practicing boxing while playing loud rap “music,” with the f-word and mf-word every word.

    10
    • Rap is best described as a multi-decade exploration to determine just how many words rhyme with “witch”.

    • Ah dammit, they gettin’ ready.

      They’re picking this up from their elders, fresh out of basic in prison* and learning squad unit tactics in the woke military.

      *(Cartel latinos hold unit training drills and group PE- physical exercise- in the state farms and the big house.)

  22. In Ktown ( LA), The tennis courts run by the city are surrounded by homeless encampments. There are people smoking meth, shooting dope into the veins of their toes, and screaming at the top of their lungs. On the courts is a different story. The Koreans show up expensive Izod tennis wear with floppy, white tennis hats, expensive carbon fiber rackets and of course a face diaper. They seem to have the ability to ignore the surrounding and act like they’re playing at Wimbledon. Things must be pretty bad in Korea. The Canary is dead? YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS!

    17
  23. What I learned during the plandemic is that the bread and circuses must and will go on, even when everything else is shut down, even when there is purportedly a great plague which is supposed to be making it dangerous for humans to interact. This allowed me to view public funding of stadiums from a whole new perspective which probably should have been obvious already.

    You could say that they went on because the participants were motivated by financial reasons, but the regime made no such accomodation for cruise lines, restaurants, concert venues, and beauty shops which also needed the money. Just to name a few.

    Specific circuses may fall in and out of fashion, and that’s not a new thing, i.e. not many decades ago baseball was dominantly #1 as America’s sport and pastime, now it’s at best a tepid 3rd, and that’s probably overstating it when you take into account other competitors like video games and porn, competitors which didn’t exist or hardly existed a half century ago. Yet perhaps ironically baseball is making more money now than ever, the players as rich as arab sheiks. Probably a separate discussion.

    It would be tempting to use this space to lament the ongoing self destruction of some sports which is happening irrespective of demographic changes, but that’s not really the point. After all, greater tragedies have befallen civilization than the commercialization and corruption of college athletics.

    I don’t feel qualified to speak for all of Latin America but Mexicans do love American football. The NFL anyway. On TV. Not sure if they will show up in person in any great numbers. Or care about Iowa vs Wisconsin on a Saturday afternoon.

    10
      • *Cough* — even whites have to think twice when looking at those prices. And $7 for a soda? It’s daylight robbery.

      • pyrrhus: That was not my husband’s experience when, pre-Covid, he had to attend Cowboys’ games at the office box with various customers. He used to come home claiming that the parking lot was filled with Mestizo families. His parking and ticket and food were covered; he could not imagine what those families were dropping for the same.

        He’s your quintessential tail-end boomer in that he’s still a football fan but hates the hassle of driving to the stadium and dealing with parking and the crowds to get to the box, where he then cannot even enjoy the game but must chat/socialize with the customers and business guests. He has cut way back on tv but still watches Cowboys’ games with our younger son (older was never interested in sportsball; always preferred guns). Wish the team would crash and burn and he’d cut the cord for good.

      • Considering a huge chunk of their income isn’t taxed because it’s cash under the table, their dollars go a bit further than your.

  24. I find this all to be good news. I would rather some young person get lost on the web, even that sad anime stuff they look at, than sitting there feeding (((sports entertainment))). “Look at the shiny object on the screen while we take your country from you.” I was probably a second wave cord cutter. I should have done it sooner. What really put me over the top was that line on the bill “regional sports fee.” Local pro teams getting an extra top off from EVERYONE. It was up to something like $8.00 a month too. A secular tithe to n-igg-er-s and (((them))).

    I’m guessing this would also financially fall on sports bars, although the one by me appears to be packed most days.

    22
    1
  25. My disdain for Boomers is second to none, but I have to admit the Boomers I play hockey with in the local beer league kick my ass on a regular basis, and good for them. Then again, I live in a part of the country where Boomers retire specifically NOT to play pickle ball.

    12
    1
    • If your local boomers don’t match your boomer stereotype, might that imply you might be overgeneralizing a tad?

      Nah. Hate of “other” is a powerful means of unearned self-esteem, as numerous historical examples show…

      16
      10
      • “Nah. Hate of “other” is a powerful means of unearned self-esteem, as numerous historical examples show…”

        Nah, the generalization stands. That sounds like a typical Boomer knee-jerk response as well.

        The Boomers who kick my ass are exceptions, and not in all ways. It was really just an effort to post a more light-hearted example to add to the discussion in a small way.

        Also, might want to refresh yourself with what a “generalization” …is.

        13
        1
        • Outdoorspro,
          I’m fascinated by all the boomer critics. The impression I get from our critics is how soft and effeminate we are, but my observation is most genX and millennials I’ve encountered have never even been in a fist fight, much less shot a firearm (nor know how to fight or shoot).
          Beating your chest to impress my circle with your masculinity is not impressive.

          6
          1
          • “Beating my chest”? You’ve got a strange definition of that phrase, when my example of masculinity is getting ass kicked by boomers. Man, you really need to get a clue.

            And yes Steve, Boomers who can kick my ass (if you recall, I was very specifically talking about beer league hockey, not street fighting, ffs) are not the exception. I’m a pretty low-level player, so most people I play with are better than me. Oh shit, there I go, beating my chest again… However, Boomers who are in good enough shape to lace up skates and get on the ice ARE the exception. I like playing with exceptional people.

        • I wasn’t being critical of you. What I was getting at is that maybe if you took a moment to look around, the “stereotypical” boomer is not very common. It’s not like every white dad was either Archie Bunker or Ted Bundy.

          Me, personally, I have an older brother who is not the stereotype, two younger brothers who are mid Gen X but fit your Boomer stereotype to a “T” except for the abortions, and a younger brother and sister who are early Gen X and play the role you seem to think they should.

  26. “Even if the standards do not collapse, the legal profession is about to experience a great die off.”

    Well, every grey cloud has a silver lining. We have way too many lawyers. The last thing we need is more ambulance chasers and class action suits.

    24
    • Oh, there will still be plenty of lawyers. They’ll just be drooling idiots. It’s possible you’ll be able to tell the difference.

      16
  27. Golf participation has picked up a bit in recent years, especially post-COVID as people found more leisure time. A big driver of this is off-course participation at places like Topgolf or simulators. The National Golf Foundation has a lot of data on this.

    https://www.ngf.org/

    Of course, the overall demographic changes and economic challenges should be headwinds for golf participation going forward, but for now COVID brought more people out to the golf course.

    • Yeah, Covid gave golf a huge boost.

      Golf is also one of the last place/activities where guys can get together with other guys and just be guys. Even the Millennials are figuring this out.

      Golf will last longer than people think.

      12
      • Yeah, but how many non-Boomers are going to go to the matches to watch or get the golf channel on cable?

        As far as a guy thing, they’re changing that. Nothing is safe. They actually are using women as commentators in boxing now. They are absolutely awful. I though Larry Merchant was a douche, now he’s the good old days of insightful and excellent commentary.

        18
      • The economics of golf are challenging even in good times.

        The early days of golf in this country, the 2 basic forms were clubs or municipal parks. Neither were money makers. The clubs required wealthy people (and still do) to in essence donate money through fees and dues to create a nice place to golf and socialize. Municipal golf courses were subsidized parks.

        As the 1980s rolled around, you had the creation of the suburban golf community, where a golf course was the centerpiece of an upscale housing development, and that golf course enhanced the value of the surrounding homes. Golf itself probably wasn’t a money-maker, but it enhanced the value of the real estate around it.

        In general, though, based on pure economics, dedicating 150 acres of suburban land to golf only usage is poor use of said land. The land is more valuable as a few hundred Pulte homes.

      • I started playing during covid-mania. I love it. Where else can I drink, swear, have a cigar, drive a golf cart, and enjoy being outside?

        Golf is a 4 (or 6) hour mini-vacation. It is the thing that sustains and recharges the family man. Early Mass and 18 holes is a perfect Sunday.

      • Yeah, you’re out on the course with your friends. So you can talk about anything you want without offending anyone. Being outdoors means you don’t have to concern yourself with thing covid-19 either. I can see how golf will last longer than most people think.

  28. (Almost) the Last of the Boomers

    Z’s essay considers the changing impact upon the sports industry. Let’s look at how changing demographics might affect other parts of our lives.

    I’m officially (within 3 years) the tail end of the Baby Boom generation. I don’t claim any special privilege from that, but thought I might muse on how being in that particular phase of the demographic progression has and will likely affect me, and of course, those close in age to me. Pay attention slightly younger folk, as these trends will surely affect you too, although perhaps to a greater or lesser degree.

    Benefits of being a late boomer:

    The facilities had already been built for us. Schools, universities, and so forth. Yes, in most cases they weren’t brand new, but on the upside, the bugs had been worked out. The 1950s era high school I attended was still serviceable twenty years later. Given the very long life span of solid buildings, it’s probably still in use.

    Present/future benefits: as we age, we’ll have more need of less happy facilities: hospitals and old folks’ homes. While I have yet to need those, their availability will be maximized by the time I need them.
    Overall,then, being at the end of the queue positively means that I’ll have maximized resources and personnel and experience benefiitting (or hurting) me. If I choose to look, I will be able to maximize predictions of how I’lll potentially be treated (say, in elder care.)

    Downsides:

    Who paid for all this stuff? Taxes and borrowings for the most part. Some of that is sunk costs. Other is in bonds that have just added to public debt. The younger generation(s) to some degree get stuck with the bills and will have less to show for it when their turn comes.

    In many localities, these facilities were built when Whites were the vast majority. Already today they are the minority many places. On the whole, brown and black replacements can’t uphold the same standards of quality. As standards crumble, so will the old buildings. They won’t be, can’t be maintained. Eventually they will be abandoned, as in our worst post industrial cities. At best, they’ll be razed and newer, shiner buildings will take their place but with at best mediocre occupants.

    Good/Bad?

    Social norms have changed a lot in my 60+ years and will continue to do so. Some for the better maybe, but some for the worse. I hope I won’t end my days in a nursing home. No one does. But it’s a near certainty that it won’t be white people providing my care. Certainly not the orderlies. I suspect that euthanasia will become more common. Preferably of the type that requires my consent, but a repeat of Cat Fancy medical policy cannot be ruled out.
    There’s much to be said, for dying at home, of natural causes, surrounded by family or friends.

    24
    • I think we’ll see some pretty dark times for late Boomers and early Gen-X. Boomers hold a great deal of the wealth of the country in the form of real estate and stocks and they are counting on social security. But all 3 are in serious danger and every day it gets worse with new retirees. As they need money they are going to sell stocks and downsize their real estate. Just as they have driven up prices on the way up, they are going to drive prices down as they try and unload these assets. Enormous pressure will be on social security.

      13
      • The math on Social Security is nothingburger compared to Medicare and Medicaid. SS can be patched up with an unnoticeable level of money printing while BigMed has a nation-ruining level funding gap. “Canadian” solution incoming.

        15
      • Yes, good points. On the up side, as Boomers seek to downsize, in theory that would make single family homes cheaper for younger families. But that’s not guaranteed. Smaller senior-friendly property gets bid up due to increasing demand, narrowing the spread. I’ve not seriously looked, but from time to time I see what 55+ communities are charging, and it makes my 4-BR SFH in the same town seem quite reasonable in comparison. Crazy. And I’m not talking about the senior places where meals, attendants and all services are included, either.

  29. Anyone else notice the over-representation of a certain tribe in the sports talker list? Greenberg, Finebaum, Kellerman, Eisen, Gottlieb, Schein, etc. So strange how such an nonathletic race loves to talk about athletic black men.

    44
    • Jews have always loved sports (in a way that only the unathletic can) and blacks. They also love words. They also love to dominate the media and help fellow tribesmen.

      Sports talk radio is the perfect place for loud-mouth Jews.

      37
      1
    • Kellerman is the worst of them. He’s enormously radical in his anti-racist ranting. He’s gone on rants where his black cohost has been like, bro you might be going a step too far (not an exaggeration).

      If you still have a shred of normie in you, as I do, and like to listen occasionally to the sportsball jibber jabber, Pat McAfee is wildly entertaining.

      10
      • I think it’s no accident that the massive decline in boxing (which was doing okay, for boxing, until 2014 or so) coincided with the rise of Kellerman. He killed that sport. It was amazing to see him contrasted with Lampley in HBO Boxing’s latter days. Lampley is a far-leftist nut of an earlier vintage–he believes in all of the old causes and, I’m sure, most of the new ones. But he’s also a class act who never brought politics ringside, ever. He would have to patiently redirect Kellerman when the latter would veer off into insane shitlibbery on-air.

        • I wouldn’t put it all on Kellerman, however odious he may be.

          The seeds of boxing’s decline were sown when they took it off national broadcast TV and put it on pay per view. They traded in the future of the sport for a big short term payday.

          One of the reasons Ali was such a popular and recognized champion was his fights were on primetime network tv.

  30. I play tennis, I picked it up again after a long break a few years ago. I played in college but got tired of it and quit, mainly because I realized I was never going to be as good as I wanted to be. When I started again, I was playing on the local college courts with adults and high school kids on the team. It amazed me just how unathletic most of the kids are now. A lot of them can’t throw or run, anything requiring coordination.

    Since I’ve started back, the collage has started tennis teams again. They have been amazingly competitive but unfortunately most of the players both men and women are not from this country. The Americans that have been on the teams don’t get to play or travel and usually drop off after a year or less. This was a problem when I was in school but at least we had chances to play. Now a native basically has no chance to play.

    14
    • > They have been amazingly competitive but unfortunately most of the players both men and women are not from this country.

      For whatever reason, Tennis is one of the easier sports to get an athletic scholarship in, so a ton of foreign parents make them play to get them into an American university.

    • I’ve noticed this as well when I occasionally watch college golf. Many foreign players – particularly from China and Korea. Hell, the Koreans dominate the lpga these days and are getting more numerous on the men’s tour as well. A sad commentary…

      • Asians dominate the LPGA because of intense training, but can’t hit the ball very far. If manly black athletes like Serena Williams had the money to train when young, they would dominate the sport with length like Jack did in the 60s and 70s.

        4
        3
        • Nope. Blacks wouldn’t not dominate golf. First, they’re athletic advantage is fast-twitch muscles, i.e., speed. That might help a bit at golf, but not much. It’s more about hand-eye coordination.

          That’s why small guys like Rory McIlroy can be at the top of the driving distance list. Size and power help, but so doesn’t technique.

          There’s also the fact that black lack the discipline to become great golfers. Blacks aren’t going to sit alone at a driving range for hours on end.

          This is why Asian women have come to dominate women’s golf. They’re grinders. Golf is made for them. White women just don’t want to sit alone at a golf course all day.

          This is also why Asian men remain only a small part of the top men golfers. There are white guys who will grind.

          21
          • Rory can bench 250, so I wouldn’t say he is not strong. Strength has become very important in golf. It’s much easier to come into a green with a wedge than a 7-iron. I agree blacks don’t have an advantage over whites in pure strength, and don’t have the patience for the sport, but Serena was the most manly woman I could think of to compare to small-framed Asian women.

          • Rory is strong, but he’s not a big guy. Also, there are other examples of guys who drive (or did drive) a long way but who weren’t ripped. Bubba Watson comes to mind.

            And, yes, Serena is very tough to look at. Black women in general are tough to look at. They are, by far, at the bottom of the dating totem pole – and they know it.

          • Not only does golf require hours of practice hitting a variety of shots, but there’s a large mental component to the game, requiring analytical skills, both on the course and when practicing. Even some of the big hitters, like Bryson DeChambeau, spend a lot of time with high-tech equipment studying his swing, trying to figure out how to hit it farther. (He also lifts weights.)

          • Citizen, it has been suggested that black women and asian men, who are both at the bottom of their respective dating totem poles, should start dating each other. Now that is a sport that would be entertaining to watch.

      • Golf is a grinder sport. This is a huge advantage to Asian women. Young white women just don’t want to spend every evening and weekend hitting golf balls with their dad. Asian girls do what their dad tells them to do.

        That advantage falls dramatically with guys, because there are plenty of young white guys who are willing to pound golf balls all day and night.

        • Strength training makes literally everything easier.
          It’s never too late. Cannot recomend practicle stength training enough. Not to be confused with body building.

  31. The slow demise of the Boomers will be very interesting to watch. Besides their technical and managerial expertise, they’re the last generation to actually believe in America the “idea.”

    They are the last line of defense for colorblind civic nationalism. That’s not to say that there aren’t a fair amount of Gen Xers and even a few Millennials who believe that as well, but they’re out numbered. The vast majority of Boomers, even Leftist Boomers, still believe in the Constitution and the ideals of the Founders. (For Leftists, they just remove the bad race awareness of the Founders and keep the “We’re all equal” stuff.)

    The only thing keeping the Dems from going full racial socialism is the Boomers.

    The stress on the economy of the Boomers retiring will be felt politically in ten or twenty years when the Boomers start to die. That’s when the country move forward and change into whatever comes next.

    32
    • Speaking as a late Boomer (they used to call us “Generation Jones” because we are different enough from the classic
      Woodstock/Vietnam Boomers to merit a different title) I can tell you that it is entirely possible to dislike and regret what the Boomers did as a generation, while recognizing that the country is going to be much, much worse off without them. Boomers and older Xers are the last large concentration of competence in America today despite the existence of a few quite competent Millennials and Zoomers. When they go, a lot of other things are going to go as well.

      23
      • You’re already seeing it in some professions, particularly ones that Asians and Indians have no interest, such as pilots.

        The Boomers are annoying in many ways, but they were competent at their jobs. They are not being fully replaced in higher skill jobs as they retire. This will cause issues.

        It’s just the natural progression as the US becomes “Brazil of the North.” Society will still function, just not as smoothly. Parts of cities will be very nice. Other parts will look like Africa. Some rural areas will be picturesque. Other areas will be dumps.

        We’ll see that progression in the economy first as the Boomers retire and then in politics as they die.

        • This is one of the reasons why I don’t the boomers the way guys like Vox Day do. Whatever their faults the two things about the boomers I’ve always found true were that they were competent in their work and careers and they had a good work ethic.The other factor is I never had much contact with the original Woodstock/Vietnam/Hippy boomers. All of my experience have been with the boomers that came out of high school in the early to mid 70’s, my baby-sitter’s generation. These people are roughly about 8-10 older than me and were the offspring of my parents’ friends. My family back ground is unusual in that my father was mid WW2 generation and my mother was the first of the Silents. So my parents were older (and much more stable and less flaky) than many of my friends’ parents.

      • Although it was in a very different context, 60s pianist and off-color comedian Tom Lehrer famously sung “We’ll all go together when we go.” 😀

  32. That courtroom scene from Idiocracy reminded me of the Derrick Chauvin trial. It was such a ridiculous display it insulted the whole idea of the “show trial”.

    40
    • There was no difference. The fix was in and an honorable policeman doing his job got crucified. Which led to one-one third of the Minneapolis police department resigning in fury and disgust. And the same people who applauded Chauvin getting sentenced are the same ones scratching their head in perplexity about why crime has gone up in leaps and bounds in Minneapolis. How is this different from “Idiocracy?”

      26
        • The guy who made Idiocracy, Mike Judge, needs to revise it to change the part he got the most wrong–that it’s set 500 years in the future.

        • It’s no laughing matter — the film got pulled down because it was too close to being a documentary. Don’t want the proles finally putting two and two together and realising they inhabit an actual idiocracy.

  33. The mRNA vaccines are going to significantly thin the ranks of the boomers very soon, so pissing & moaning about this demographic cohort is a waste of time. And no true dissident is going to shed a tear for the demise of sportsball, so what good is it to piss on them? Yes, the middle class is disappearing rapidly along with fecundity, but the old farts on this blog are not going to solve that problem either.

    So what to do? First, stop chasing the carrot. Voting harder-harder is not going to fix anything. Second, get the fat ass off the couch and shed those extra pounds. Third, get out of the big city now and simplify your life somewhere safe. Fourth, learn to disappear and become a nobody. Fifth, everything solely within the confines of your cranium. Survive and act only when opportune. Cunning is a word for a reason.

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    9
  34. What will happen with college sports is things will go back to the way they were. Our college basketball team in the mid 1990s played in a sweaty gym that seated about 2,000 people in bleachers that electrically retracted into the walls. There were no fancy luxury suites or jumbotrons. Most of our fans were bored students who swigged a 5th of JD or a case of beer before walking through the door or our families (grandparents and mothers for the black players of course and maybe an uncle or two). We saw how the other half in college sports live when we went for the payout games against the big conference teams in November and December and even beat a few of them in their own massive arenas.

    My son plays for a lower level NCAA team that plays in a similar gym, the games have no TV timeouts and I enjoy it far more than I do going to some massive, debt-ridden arena like my alma mater built a few years after I graduated.

    One great thing about this phenomena is that the public financing of pro sports stadiums will wither away. It’s abominable that taxpayers that have no interest in sports are forced to pay for playgrounds for teams owned by billionaires to help them make even more money.

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    • The financial studies showing the local economic benefits of sports stadiums were as phony as current day drug studies and vote counts.

      14
  35. If that’s the case, I suggest we all take up soccer. Cities can at least make the vig on some of those huge stadiums by renting them out for soccer matches, with seats at 10 pesos a throw. Start laying the groundwork now that there are a bunch of White kids becoming “football hooligans,” and then watch the fun as the FBI tries to work the crowd.

    14
    1
    • I don’t like what the NFL has done to football, still think it’s because they courted lady fans in the ‘00s. Yeah, lots of downtime, but at least you used to get 60 minutes to have fun and take out your frustrations, so you needed a breather.

      Also don’t understand the appeal of soccer. Running around and faking injuries for 88 minutes, 2 or so decisive minutes.

      26
      5
      • One of the major changes to football no one notices is they now keep the clock running on out-of-bounds plays. The rationale was to shorten games, but they still run at 3+ hours. So the result was even less plays, made up for with more advertising delays.

        11
      • 2 or so decisive minutes.

        That’s a feature, not a bug. Handegg is a superhero movie, explosions going off all the time, so it’s about polite golf claps and let’s have another hotdog. Soccer is a thriller, building the suspension slowly so when it’s finally discharged, the stadium explodes. In handegg, the best team always wins, in soccer there’s always the risk of seeing your world-beating team being knocked out by a lucky shot from Team Iceland or a poor decision by the referee.

        That said, soccer is not really about the game – not for the majority of fans. Soccer is about international tournaments, waving the flag, singing the anthem and humiliating your neighbor. None of the favorite US sportsballs have that because nobody but Americans play them.

        A few years ago, Z wrote a column about the USA vs. Soviet Union hockey match and reminisced on the tremendous outpouring of patriotism. Soccer fans experience this every second year, at World Cup and the UEFA Cup – that’s why soccer fans regularly trash cities and fight the police: we’re not cheering for corporations and waving cutesy-funny cartoon figures(tm) around, we’re cheering for the nation and waving the flag. English fans throwing paper planes at US fans and chanting “9-11” is a friendly ribbing in soccer-world.

        And yes, it’s not quite the same when your team is all foreigners, but there you have it.

        • Fair enough. Playing a sport changes how you watch it, so I’d probably enjoy soccer a lot more if I’d played it. I can’t imagine enjoying football as much if I hadn’t played it, either.

          • Well, yes, but it’s a bit beside my point. I’m not arguing the merits of soccer itself – I never played soccer and I never watched club tournaments, only national games. I’m arguing the merit of sportsball as a vehicle for unabashed, flag-waving, anthem-bawling, street-fighting patriotism.

            Imagine every four years the national coach would hand-pick the best players from all over America and for one month they’d be off the corporate payroll, working for only peanuts and honor to show Johnny Foreigner who was boss.

            And imagine that other countries fielded real teams, making it a real competition where America would be lucky to win the world cup once every fifty years.

            You think seeing America beat Germany or Russia would be more fun than seeing Team Amazon triumph over Team Walmart?

          • Idk. The olympics are kind of like that, and they don’t do much for me anymore. Mostly I only enjoy watching sports I’ve played, I guess.

          • Except nobody cares about shot putting or the 400 meter relay, nobody fights in the streets over the Olympics.

            Except, of course, the 1980 USA vs. USSR hockey finals, if you’re old enough to remember that.

            Now, imagine it wasn’t a fringe sport like hockey, but football. Or like Rocky vs. Dolph Lundgreen, only real.

  36. As long as the tourism and retirement industries follow, I’m OK with it.

    Getting serious, I wonder if the Great Replacement is also part of it. It all seems like the spirit of the age.

    There will be a big mess to clean up. The whole End Times narrative feeds the egos of the people who want to be the GOAT and the laziness of people who suck.

    • The great replacement is a proverbial hail Mary. It’s an attempt to keep the population growing in spite of declining birthrates because capitalism demands perpetual and remitting growth. In a sense, things like pensions, social security, and retirement accounts can only happen as long as the number of taxpaying workers greatly exceeds the number of non-working income receivers. Since white boomers didn’t birth a generation larger than theirs (but smaller than theirs), there are three strategies that have to be attempted to ensure that they can be financially safe in their non-productive years: reduced demand for energy (going green), immigration, and automation. Of the three, immigration is most likely to backfire. Reduced energy usage is simply a decline in the standard of living, so only robotics has a chance of breakthrough. Really, though, mass immigration is a sign of desperation.

      23
      • I doubt the people who own the robots will want to finance the pensions of people who don’t provide them value, so I’d guess boomers will be taken care of until they stop consuming. It’ll be a new reality for everybody.

        • The boomers who had kids will be glad they did as long as they didn’t alienate their posterity in the meantime.

        • Robots aren’t the breakthrough they’ve been hoped to be. The biggest issue is that they can’t handle variability or complexity cheaply. It takes lots of software and computational power to turn a machine into a bad driver. It’s currently unknown how much it would cost to make a machine into a perfect driver.

  37. The conservatives arriving through the southern border love soccer. Some of the stadiums will be repurposed, along with the focus of college sports and other parts of the culture.

    • True, plus these stadia have a very short lifespan. Few make it 40 years without major renovations, and that was factored into things at the time they were built. Even if it were in the trillions of dollars, spread over half a century, that’s basically round-off error.

      I see very few following sports. I hear more about it on this site than I do IRL, and my daughter is dating a hockey player.

      If E.B. White’s Decline of Sport comes to pass, I’ll shed no tears.

  38. From my perspective as a golfer, it still seems pretty popular, especially compared to tennis, despite being expensive. That said, the average age is certainly older and a few courses in my general area have closed down and gone to seed. Maybe it’s just the existing players getting funneled onto fewer courses. At any rate, Tiger Woods can’t disappear soon enough – it really is pathetic how the professional golf reporters all but cream their shorts anytime there’s a hint he might play in some tournament. Time to freaking move on.

    What continues to amaze me is the money these guys are making. It’s hard to believe the tv revenues are supporting it and the sponsors have to be wondering the same thing I would think. It’s the only “sport” I occasionally watch these days and I can’t be the only one – there’s a lot of better things to be doing.

    20
    • The Corona panic has been good for golf- lots of younger people played during the lockdowns because they were among the few recreational facilities that were open. Let’s see if they continue to play.

    • I’ve heard people say professional golf is a money laundering activity, and seeing all the money the Saudis are throwing at it now tells me they are probably onto something. Hard to picture a ROI for those astronomical sums.

      11
    • Tiger wasn’t the problem. He did a lot to popularize the sport. He was politically neutral, and identified honestly as about 20% black, 25% white and 50% Asian. It was the media that tried to make him into a BLM type symbol.

      13
      1
      • When Tiger emerged onto the golf scene, the assumption was that all of these inner-city black kids would take up golf. As usual, the magical thinking is based on the black kids seeing someone “who looks like them,” which is a foundational component of their quest to equalize racial outcomes.

      • Wolf, no doubt. I just appreciate that when he was at rock bottom in his personal life, he never played the “Whaaa, I’m too black for white people, but too white for black people” card.

  39. Baseball, was and should be, America’s sport. The fact that it isn’t would be great ore to be mined for a thesis. Just a rudimentary look at the underlying reasons and one gets a primer on why we are where, and what, we are today.

    10
    • In some sense there’s hope, as the sport is becoming oddly de-Africanized. The Phillies starting 9 in the World Series consisted of 8 whites and one Latin. Unfortunately, the whites act like groids and the Hispanics act like Hispanics.

      19
      • I didn’t think the Phils acted like groids, I found them pretty dignified in their cool demeanor and celebrations. Hoskins, Harper, Realmuto, the lanky 3B with the cool bouncy hair I forget his name now (Bohm?). The lone non-white was the Hispanic Segura. I was upset they lost to an almost entirely Latin Astros team.

        • The choreographed shucking and jiving after home runs is right out of the jogger playbook. Pete Rose or Larry Bowa would put a stop to those kinds of shenanigans, and rightly so.

  40. It’s not just playing sports (racquetball, tennis, golf, etc.) that are in decline as boomers age out (or die.) There are other activities that are in similar decline, like being a private pilot, wargaming, ham radio, the list goes on. I seriously wonder if the younger generation even has hobbies that don’t involve looking at a screen (social media, playing games on Xbox.)

    As for watching sports in person, I have no desire to go to a game (and I love hockey and baseball) and be assaulted during every stoppage by music so loud it’d put a Queensryche concert to shame. And on TV, the NHL and the various providers are doing everything they can to make the viewing experience worse, like animated ads on the side boards.

    It’s not worth the effort. I’ll go sit in my garage and read a book while smoking my pipe.

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    1
    • The Private Pilot angle is interesting as my late father had a private pilot’s license and owned an airplane. Kept it hangared at a somewhat local airport.

      About ten years after he passed I took lessons and got my private pilot’s license. I flew for a few years and gave it up in the early 2000s. The big stumbling block is airplanes are out of reach price wise for your “average Joe”. Lots of people buy “shares” in an airplane, like a condo timeshare, or join a flying club that owns an airplane or two and charges dues. I had to rent airplanes and as a VFR rated pilot I was at the mercy of the weather. You need to fly often to keep current and when a hobby becomes a chore you lose interest. Had I the cash to buy an airplane and maintain it my view might have been different.

      I suspect a lot of Greatest Gen/Silent/Boomer hobbies relied on disposable income and free time that Gen Xers/Millennials/Gen Zs don’t and won’t have as we have to pay off loans for cars, houses, schooling, and pay higher taxes bequeathed us by earlier generations.

      26
      • I read a statistic that said that there were something like 850,000 pilots with an airman certificate in 1975 when the country was only 200 million people, and something like 650,000 today, and the population is 330 million.

        The general aviation fleet remains largely built during the 1950s-1970s, with 1950s technology and instruments. Guys are still flying around in 1958 Cessnas today, it’s almost like having a 1958 Studebaker for your daily driver.

        Another Boomer activity in serious decline is hunting. Deer populations have rebounded significantly from the 1970s, but all the hunters are now 70+ years old…

        13
        • Can you imagine what it costs to fill to 80 gallon tanks in a plane plus the emergency reserve? Not to mention the cost of insurance? Most people can’t afford hobbies because everything has become finacialized because after we sent all our jobs to China, well we had to pass tokens around somehow.

          15
        • Hunting is an odd situation due to politics. My current state of residence has a huge hunting industry, trophy game and dangerous game, $10k a week package tours etc.. It has resulted in an absolutely Byzantine/Kafka-esque licensing and fees regime so dense that I dont even try. I get a small game license every now and then for pest control, but an actual game license? Fuggetaboutit.
          My home state is the opposite, they are overrun from the protection policies of thr 00’s and have no “sexy” game to draw sport hunters, to the point they have a problem with fatal car strikes. There, the licensing is infantile-simple and $25 for hoof-shooting, and I think they even started giving doe tags for free.
          Both states remain overrun though and have cwd endemic issues.
          But, a lot of the drop off in hunting (if real) is the “afternoon at the DMV” nature of licensing in populous states.

        • “The general aviation fleet remains largely built during the 1950s-1970s, with 1950s technology and instruments. Guys are still flying around in 1958 Cessnas today, it’s almost like having a 1958 Studebaker for your daily driver.”

          The thing about airplanes is at least for single engine, fixed gear aircraft like the Cessna 152s and 172s I flew, as long as the airframe is solid and corrosion free, the airplane will fly for a good long time. Upgrading electronics is pricey, but relatively easy. “Steam” gauges like I learned on in 172s keep working for years and years, and will work in the event of an electrical failure, unlike a “glass” (aka digital) cockpit.

          Also, your airplane has to undergo an “annual” inspection to keep its airworthiness certification, so that helps extend the aircraft’s useful life.

          Oh, if you’re going to roll around in a 1958, make mine Mopar, Forward Look please.

          https://assets.shannons.com.au/O90N7S32980305VD/Z6991285731LQI55/ugj91jdgcwad0m6n/jpg/2400x1800x3/vehicle/1958-plymouth-belvedere.jpg

          • Those instrument panels suck if you have bifocals, though, I can see the alt, inclinometer, and tach petty good, the ASI sort of, but all the switches under the yoke are a real bitch.

        • General aviation (piston engine planes, not turbo props) was generally devastated by liability lawsuits in the early to mid 80’s. This why so many people fly piston engine planes that were made in, say, 1974, and it stills costs more than a high end car. No one drives a car from 1974.

    • Despite living 2 hours from the nearest MLB park, 20 years ago I’d catch 10-15 games a year; now, maybe 1 or 2. I still go to a lot of college hockey games- we have a team in town; they’re good, (recent national champs) and convenient, not to mention the players are held to high standards on and off the ice by the coach.

      But the in arena experience, as you describe, is getting worse and worse. It’s an open question as to when/if the commotion of the in-venue experiences will drive me out.

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  41. I stopped watching basketball in the mid 80’s as the Showtime Lakers and Michael Jordan era turned the sport into a completely urban spectacle. College basketball is even worse in terms of combining hype and shvuggie culture. So it was refreshing last week to volunteer at and attend the basketball tournament at my daughter’s primary school. Most of the teams were from financially beleaguered Catholic schools or rural districts. The games were primarily contested between all-white squads and featured sportsmanship and team-based effort. It jarred me to realize after all this time that basketball is actually a fun sport when you get down to it. What a shame that it’s been taken over by cultural aliens, aided and abetted by disgusting members of my own demographics.

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      • I have fun memories of racquetball as a kid. If you were losing, you would just hit the hard rubber ball as hard as you could directly at your opponent with the intent of causing them pain. Good times…

        One more story: My racquet sports instructor in junior high school would punish us for misbehaving by viciously insulting us and making us hold uncomfortable physical stances for minutes, like the “dying cockroach.” Built character!

        12
        • In 1985, before a Saturday morning high school soccer road game, we were getting bored waiting for our coach and assistant to come out of the school. So we all piled off the bus, picked up the assistant’s Chevette and turned it around 180 degrees. When our coach stepped onto the bus a few minutes later, he had a face like thunder. He pointed at all of us and menacingly intoned, “you’ll pay for that on Monday”. Didn’t say another word. Monday after practice, he had us run separators until we nearly swallowed our tongues, screaming bloody murder at anyone who dared take a surreptitious sip of water. That too was a character building exercise that would send many of today’s cream puffs over a psychological cliff.

          10
          • When I played football in high school, we won our first game, and the coaches rewarded us with all the White Castles we could eat Monday in the cafeteria. So of course we ate ourselves sick and had a food fight. The coaches immediately took us out to the field and lined us up on our backs in one of the end zones. They then made us roll 100 yards to the other end zone. Guys were puking and rolling sideways and backwards before they even got to the 50 yard line. Good times.

            10
      • Yes, racquetball. It was huge in the 80s. There were numerous tournaments and it was a real thing. It was also hard on the knees and joints and boomers discovered that quickly. It’s a challenge finding courts these days.

        11
      • I remember in the mid-70s, I think right before racquetball took off, there was a brief period where American handball* was a thing. Similar to racquetball with out the racket and with a smaller, heavier, denser ball. You just wear lightly padded gloves that protect your hand from the repeated impact.

        I guess it is still played, but it seems like it has mostly dropped out of mainstream sight.

        We played it against the school wall as kids, due to the complete lack of required equipment other than a small rubber ball.

        *Completely different than the current olympic team sport.

        • I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and I remember well the men in their white wife-beater t-shirts playing handball for hours. I tried it once, but damn that ball hurt.

          • Huh. I never thought of it as an ethnic thing, but the neighborhood I lived in when we were playing handball was pretty heavily Italian!

  42. “Those little brown guys swimming over the Rio Grande may be natural conservatives, but they will not be taking up the game of golf any time soon”

    A couple of years ago I was playing a local municipal course and witnessed a Hispanic family preparing for a picnic on one of the greens. It was high entertainment watching the staff trying to explain, in English to a group that did not speak English, that although this nice green flat spot was located in a park, they couldn’t have a picnic there.

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  43. With a decline in golfers, it’s logical that a lot of golf courses will disappear. I know of one a few miles from home that’s now a housing development. It’s too bad, because golf courses are aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but many are on expensive land, especially in metro areas.

    18
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    • I live near The Villages in Florida. Every housing “village” surrounds a golf course. In fact many new 55+ communities going up here (and there are a LOT going up) have golf courses imbedded.

      It looks nice now, but I wonder how it’ll all look in 25 years.

      17
      • Florida is probably the exception to what we’re talking about here. Tennis is still a popular activity there.

          • One of the things I appreciate about Florida is that it really does feel like you’re back in the 80’s. The girls on the beaches are hot and there are no “hipster” styles like we have in the Portland area.

    • I belonged to a course in town for 25 years- it closed with the golf bust. They’re gonna put solar panels on it. I’d be happier if they built a nuclear plant.

      12
      • Well, at least the upper midwest is known for it’s constant sunlight, so you know the ROI will be strong and the energy produced will be reliable.
        Seeing the virtue solar fields in northern Wisconsin/ Minnesota/ North Dakota always makes my heart warm while my family freezes.

  44. The NFL is reporting record TV ratings, interest in watching seems unchanged to me, so I think they have to gaming the numbers by counting people who watch snippets of the games on their phones. The Thursday night games are only on Amazon this year which is what they are blaming for those numbers being down. This article claims that in person attendance is up which amazes me because going to a game in person is an expensive and much worse experience than watching it at home or in a sports bar.

    https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2022/11/14/Upfront/NFL-attendance.aspx

    • From the linked article: “Box score attendance data has limitations. They generally include all tickets distributed, whether sold or given away. Team and ticketing industry veterans say there’s little rigor or oversight to methodology, which changes from time to time. For instance, this year the Pittsburgh Steelers started including tickets distributed but not used — making their numbers appear larger than in prior years, when they counted actual attendees.”

      While I think NFL attendance has held up better than most sports, they all lie about their numbers.

      22
      • Right, all sports leagues have lied about attendance for years, baseball is particularly bad about doing this. The only way you could get a true feel for actual attendance would be if the teams released data on revenue from parking and concessions to compare from year to year. If food and drink revenue is down 10% there is no way attendance is up. I’m sure they will never do that.

        • I can see attendance going up and concessions going down. The latter are even more ridiculously priced than the former.

      • Every single industry that relies on gate receipts will game their numbers by papering the crowd or just flat-out lying about the actual number of attendees.

        In 1987, the WWF sold out Wrestlemania III at the Pontiac Silverdome weeks in advance. The crowd shots were amazing on the day of the event. It was a massive success by any imaginable standard. In the middle of the show they announced to the PPV audience that they had set a new indoor attendance record of 93,000+ people. But a few years later it became quietly acknowledged that the actual number was closer to 80,000. Why lie when the truth was already impressive? Well, why not? And if they’ll lie when it doesn’t matter at all, imagine how they’ll lie when they need to keep the plates spinning.

        30
      • Every day, my disgust with the Rooney family increases. It is kind of remarkable that in the NFL, the Rooneys, Potato Irish Yinzers from Pittsburgh, control the league, and not any of the upstarts from major markets like Jerry Jones. They have been there since 1933, and I have to assume part of that power comes from their very cozy relationship with national level Democratic politicians, who come to pay court to the Rooneys, not the other way around. Obama, Clinton, and Biden all did.

        I’ve thought that whoever the Rooneys support will be the next President of AINO in 2024.

        16
      • It used to be that the NL counted butts in seats (or clicks of the turnstile) ; while the AL counted tickets sold. Since the differences between the leagues are vanishing if not altogether gone, I doubt that that’s true today.

    • Gambling would be my guess. Going to an NFL game is the 21st century version of “going to the track”. (Also, as can be seen in everything from U.S. college enrollments to Japanese housing trends, the biggest names get bigger, even in a failing market, as they sponge up the failures of their competitors).

      15
      • Other than the specific game you are attending though, it is easier to keep track of gambling from home and you can bet from home. That is certainly driving some of the continued interest in pro sports, but I don’t think it is a factor for in person attendance.

        • I’m hard pressed to think of any acquittances who still closely follow the NFL who aren’t also in at least one fantasy league. Point being, interest in such gambling used to flow from interest in the sport, whereas now it appears flipped. Maybe it was always that way though and I just never noticed it.

      • Gambling and fantasy sports are driving professional and college sports today. The leagues have embraced gambling wholeheartedly with the accompanying risks of game fixing. Tennis has already had issues with this at its lower levels and the NBA, my guess, is rife with corruption.

  45. Doesn’t anybody care about the impending complete extinction of bowling? In the early years of television, when local programming was important, bowling was a mainstay of the tv scene. Local pro bowlers became minor celebrities and bowling leagues for the plebs were everywhere. Today, almost nada. Bowling’s blue collar complexion just doesn’t fit into upward social mobility, ergo the rise and now decline of golf.

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    • In my neck of the Rust Belt, which was traditionally a bowling strong hold, we’ve lost lots of bowling alleys but that corresponds to the decades-long bleeding of normie whites, who mostly move several states away to find jobs. In terms of the remaining whites, participation seems to be the same as it ever was on a per-capita basis. In other words, it’s not that the sport is losing popularity, it’s just that its core demographic is, by numbers, less and less. It’s not the same as sports like tennis, which people simply stopped playing altogether.

      12
      • The best sport of all is darts. After all, what other sport can be played–and played well I might add–with a beverage in one hand, the implement in the other, while smoking?

        Of course, in many places, the ban on Vitamin N has made the trifecta impossible, but still….
        NB: Easy on the joints too, so the Booms can part til they drop deap from old age, cirrhosis of the liver, or lung cancer.

        18
        • If you ever find yourself in our neck of the woods you can join our Thursday night dart 🎯 league. We play at a local brewery so there’s plenty of beer 🍺. Dudes only, we play Cricket or X01.

          • I was pretty fair at Cricket, but we are talking the Pleistocene era. Marlboro Red was my girl, and Bass Ale my drink. We were tough in those halcyon days. I recall jabbing one of my forearms with a dart to impress [??] a gal with my toughness [??]. If I ever get to wherever you are, I’m in, sans the jabbing.

    • The problem with bowling is that it became too rote: watching a pro is like watching a robot play. Baseball, in addition to it’s other flaws, has been combating the same issue with limited success (in both cases technology helped make a simple game a bit *too* simple).

      12
      • Truth to that. Today’s bowling ball technology is like having a video game on cheat mode. My grandfather built a small bowling alley/bar in North Bergan, NJ during the Hoover administration. As a young kid in the 70’s and early 80’s, Saturday afternoons at his house meant the PBA tour on ABC and the voices of Chris Schenkel and Bo Burton. But even before he died in the late 90’s he was lamenting the ridiculousness of scores. I have 5 cousins from that side of the family who have logged at least one 300 game, something our grandfather never dreamed of.

          • I recall seeing a documentary on the demise of bowling and one of the contributing factors was that precisely machined floorboards with a precisely implemented wax job led to *very* consistent results (I’m sure machining precision in the other equipment helped as well).

    • “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by robert putnam (2000) explores the decline of civic involvement, goodwill, social trust, etc. vis a vis bowling and other formerly normal social and civic activities.

      All old hat around here, but interesting to see hints at the underbelly of Progress “way back”in 1995-2000.

      One of his main points is that of “individualizing” one’s leisure time. We see that in full now but also some crossover in things like gaming that have become social with live real time multiplayers and recreation, if you will, around spectating and commentating in gaming.

      Even so, it should be clear by now that technology and individualization have many costs in that trade-off between bespoke social consumption from home and organic, free range social organizing and engagement outside the home.

      “Last Child in the Woods” explores this in what Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder”. Seems the dirt world is kind of important for more than just food.

      15
  46. “Of course, standing outside for three hours is tiring on the old back and knees, so sports attendance is in decline….”

    I made the boomer demographic by a couple months. I don’t go because I have way better things to do than watch black baboons chase a ball.

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  47. I think the canary was that so much time has been spent by so many people for so many years. I remember taking a business trip a couple of years ago and having my luggage lost – that had my laptop. For a bit, I moped about the hotel and turned on the tv. I was shocked that on a weekday there are countless sports talk shows with advertisers. Someone must be watching it. Those advertisers have an incentive to keep a large audience idle at home with enough money to buy their products. Then the rot and corruption of this former country really dawned on me.

    Then there is the unwatchable aspect of it. You can see the degeneration of the culture in the sport. Spiking the ball after a three yard gain or a catch you should have made with ease. The taunting and facial nut rubbings of end zone dances and post-dunk pant hooting all wildly celebrated by the managers in the crowd.

    It isn’t just the economics of the problem, it is the moral fall that you could see in the culture. It is all there. The infantalization too – announcers doing the score or explaining what you saw; the giving it 110% scripted answers to a super model asking the same questions at the between quarter update. The 24×7 discussions of sports.

    I haven’t seen a game in years. It became intolerable many years ago, but I still watched on occasion to see a great performance. Those days are long gone too. It is much better to go to the gun or archery range, do some reading, apply myself to my creative endeavors. Life is way too short to live in the Trance of The End Zone Dance.

    37
    • For a while I thought I was crazy when I tried to watch sports some time back. The number of commercials were outrageous, with the commentary as canned and sterile as a corporate office, and there was a sinking feeling the refs showed favoritism far more than I remembered. There’s no real John Madden in the pro level who puts personality into a game anymore, though in minors and college there’s still some of that raucous, unscripted spirit. Maybe it was just nostalgia, but none of the spirit I remembered as a youth seemed there.

      My local hockey team fired a commentator a while back after he got a little too spicy with some Taliban jokes, and the World Cup is going after soccer teams whose fans commit the crime of calling their opponents gay, so it’s going to get more sterile, which really shows the suffocating existence we now live in.

      23
      • A local sports radio jock was canned for some rather innocuous comment related to women in sports and overnight the conversations on the station went from light locker room humor to audibly terrified broadcasters afraid they might say something wrong. Braindead entertainment is okay, so long as it’s not also boring, which is what the regime has done to sports.

        16
        • A local wag got fired this week for commenting that women are the worst fans in sports. But the best part is he’s spent decades pushing woke nonsense from his perch. It’s extremely pleasurable to watch them eat their own.

          Especially when they get caught accidentally telling the truth. Women sports fans, especially white women wearing football jerseys with the names of ferals on the back, are the absolute worst.

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    • Spot-on. Back when I was a corporate drone with a long commute, I would have time to scan the AM dial. I wasn’t that much into sports watching but it was one of the few things that weren’t totally faggy even back then so I would tune in a bit.

      Guys like Jim Rome had a schtick that was admittedly engaging at the time because it was kind of a gen-x take on the sports culture. “Egdy”. Witty. Funny. That kind of interested-disinterest that brought together sports nuts and their literal inside baseball knowledge with commuters like me.

      Back then Rome ran this gig in his show where callers could sort of slam poem their “take” on some issue of the sports day. Rome would promote the good ones and lambast the bad ones.

      One of his absolute insta-DQ slams was if a caller tried to read a script instead of the nog-lite version of rap-takes that was the vernacular structure of the whole show.

      Fast forward to last year and a friend of a friend has apparently become one of the shows top callers and “throwdown” artists. So my friend had a recording of his winning call. It was an obvious read; a fully scripted and protracted version rivaling one of my worst effort-poasts in the blawgs. Super cringey. And this was the winner among all the other scripted takedowns.

      But there it is. A bunch of white guys in the sunset of negrophille worship who are so far gone that they have long abandoned even the pretense that there is anything natural or organic to be said. It has all been said. So now everyone just reads a script and pretends they share in something real until one day for no reason at all its all just gone.

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  48. I dunno. I seem to be surrounded by people who still watch sportsball. The boomer men do of course. My coworkers discuss college football all the time. Latins and hipster whites are watching the World Cup. My son is into the NBA.

    I hope you’re right and professional sports is collapsing, but I don’t see it. I think baseball and soccer will keep being popular, as the Latins are into those sports. But they’ll be popular on TV, not in spectating. I envision stadiums getting smaller and more humble, like they were in the 1920s. Like 15,000 seat baseball stadiums.

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    • Correction: not just hipster whites, but a lot of young whites are paying attention to the world cup.

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      • The only thing I have paid attention to related to the World Cup is the riots in European cities based on the results of non European teams. Went looking for articles about last night’s riots in Paris after Morocco lost to France. Sound like it happened in several major cities, not just Paris. I couldn’t find any U.S. news coverage of it. These people riot win or lose, but at least the lost ends their participation.

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  49. The demise of all of this can’t happen fast enough. I don’t perceive much of a difference between boomers and genx on all of this except the larger impact due to numbers from boomers.

    I don’t watch any sports but still see the occasional espn clip with sports analysts meltdowns. Skip Bayless is a something to behold when arguing with fellow professional jock sniffers and making them melt down. Nice carny act to keep interest up with fake drama.

    In so many ways the decline of all of this can’t happen fast enough.

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  50. “Those little brown guys swimming over the Rio Grande may be natural conservatives”

    Technically aren’t the swimming across the Rio Bravo?

  51. The decline of sports is the best news I’ve heard in a long time! It was such a misdirection of energy among white people. Instead worrying about their nation they were focused on sportsball.

    Japan has a similar problem of declining population but I doubt they will have a depression.

    A lot of structures in this country will decline but I don’t know that it means they will be a depression on a GDP per capita basis. I know conservatives are always hoping for that but I kind of doubt it.

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    • By the way, I meant to say the decline of big professional sports is a good thing. I’m not against sports in general. It can be a healthy way for young people to develop.

  52. “How will the legal rackets maintain themselves when the law schools are forced to drop the LSAT requirement in the name of equity? A courtroom like this is amusing, but it is no way to keep the ambulance chasers in business. Even if the standards do not collapse, the legal profession is about to experience a great die off. Soon, simple cases will take years because of the lack of bodies.”

    Wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea if the education, legal, and medical rackets implode and the country goes back to something closer to the late 19th century. Speaking of the legal racket, I think one third of the world’s lawyers are in the USA alone. Too many of them. The legal code is convoluted partly just to give all these shysters paid employment.

    On a broader note the two main drivers of the postwar economy were the military-industrial complex and suburbanisation. The latter has probably runs its course and all the paraphernalia that accompanied it — suburban shopping malls, golf courses. and the like — will suffer a corresponding decline. In other words the near future will not be like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyinD6ZDqeg

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    • We actually have an excess of lawyers. When the smart kids figured out that majoring in IT or STEM would likely only buy them a job that would promptly be outsourced to an H1-B, they all switched to law schools. The market is so flooded that unless you graduated from one of the Big 7 law schools, you’re unlikely to actually find employment as a lawyer.

      Of course, since the natives are no longer majoring in STEM or IT fields, that gets used as a further justification for importing more foreign talent.

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      • Salaries in the STEM space also top out quickly unless you come up with a lucrative patent or idea to build your own business around.

      • Those guys can’t be too smart if they ditched STEM for law (unless they were in useless STEM “fields” like math or physics.) Computer Science continues to be one of the most in-demand and highest paying majors even with the invasion of the turd world.

        “LeaRn tO CoDe” may be a meme, but it also remains one of the best and most reliable means to escape poverty for anybody with above-average IQ. And coders (unlike law) can find work without having to spend years and six figures going to a school to still need permission from an outside organization (the Bar) just to get a job.

        • “Those guys can’t be too smart if they ditched STEM for law (unless they were in useless STEM “fields” like math or physics.)”

          It’s a more complex picture. Math and physics are not taught well in US high schools and “math phobia” sets in early. The Asians going to the schools here face the same crud curriculum and teachers but they have a better support network in their family and community, with a correspondingly different cultural attitude towards STEM. And they are more driven.

          Without math and physics you can’t get into engineering. Or will face problems coping with the curriculum because of poor foundations.

          • > Without math and physics you can’t get into engineering. Or will face problems coping with the curriculum because of poor foundations.

            That’s exactly my point. Those fields are foundational to applied vocations like engineering or technology.

            It would be like “majoring” in wrench turning and wondering why actual plumbers get all the money.

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        • Mr. G-

          Part of the reason that segment of the labor market is tight is the unspoken truth that standards in college have plummeted over the years, resulting in largely garbage output cohorts.

          Combined with mass retirements and the elevated excess mortality rates and you have a situation where skilled technical people will have a lot of negotiating leverage for years, maybe decades.

        • Not so! My baby sister hit the one huge personal injury award, pocketed a third of it, and now does whatever the heck she wants.

          I ran and sold multiple companies over the years, and while I’m comfortable, I’m nowhere in her league.

      • Bruno: there are plenty of DA jobs, they just pay $32k a year. Which is about half the annual P&I payment on a ten year law school debt loan…
        My experience in two major legal markets is the opposite. Between sticker shock keeping down new additions ($125k easy just for the JD, then Barbri is another $7k while incomeless, then you can apply for an entry level job at 50-70k, rofl), bar failure rates and percentage of “non-licensed employment” for LS grads climbing slowly yet inexorably as the DIE degradation of talent filters up, and the great recession forcing the majority of my cohort into non-licensed work to make a paycheck back in the hard times of 2008-2014, there is a huge shortage of mid-career attorneys, at least west of the Mississippi.
        That’s confined to civil litigation in big cities, but I imagine the WTE, criminal/family, and corporate lackeys are about the same.
        Heh: probably going to see a big decline in DR/family practitioners, as the repeat-customer boomer divorcee ages out of the market.
        But the engineer thing: I have family and friends in coding and mech-E. Mechanical engineering is thankless and uneconomical, it has been as bad as current law for decades: a high-capable iq requirement, 4 years at 100k for a hard degree, then you can compete with Rajid Umpalumpur for a 50 hr a week job paying $52k with a 1% performance based raise where there is a FedGov diversity mandate (ie Jim Snow). Unless you REALLY want to do the work, it is a financial loser. Coding is different bc the lack of degree requirements and actual high pay gigs. You can make 6 figures by your 20s coding. Engineering you will never make 6 figures as a White male under 50, and law takes till your early 30s to get to 6 figures.

        As for an excess of lawyers, as long as people die, pay taxes, and hurt eachother (and we have mandatory car insurance), we will always have lots of lawyers. “The human condition (stupidity) is our job insurance.” We could have real tort reform to limit squishy damages to global norms (25k cap for pain and suffering or such), but that will never happen bc no one wants it. But that’s another topic.

  53. Another sport that has had a similar decline is Racquetball, which was and still is a mainly upper class sport. I’m in my early forties, and there are only a few people younger than me who play in these courts, all Indian as there seems to be a Racquetball subculture in that demographic.

    Sadly, it’s not just Boomers retiring, but young people simply eschewing actually playing sports altogether. Have to wonder if the parents incessantly putting their kids on travel teams when they are young kills any love of playing sports, along with kids who are content sitting on their phones all day on the other side of the spectrum.

    In addition to sports, the state piano chapter my wife is in is continuously lowing their standards to keep people in the program. It got so bad my wife had to switch her elite students to an international body to keep decent standards. There’s still a consistent base of elite players coming from tiger moms, but these kids stop playing piano the second their parents stop forcing them to. For the middle levels, they are giving away to practically nothing.

    It’s an across the board deterioration of average young people who can do the hard work to become truly excellent and can keep the motivation into their adult years.

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    • The “travel team” thing is a huge part of it, I’m sure. I played baseball through high school, and I was in the last cohort where it was possible to only play baseball during baseball season, because playing baseball was for fun. But it was happening even back then (late 80s / early 90s). Nowadays, if you’re not acting like a legit pro prospect by age 12, there’s something wrong with you. Any kid with any scrap of talent at all plays baseball year round. “Travel” doesn’t mean “plays the team from two towns over;” it means “spends three weeks in Florida in January for skills camp.”

      It’s obscene, frankly.

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      • A co-workers husband is a high school baseball coach and we hear stories about parents pestering him every year because their little major leaguer isn’t playing. The kids have been on travel teams and played despite being bad because the parents pay for play. I think the parents are pushing kids to do travel ball hoping they will get a scholarship so they can afford college without student loans.

      • It is obscene. “studies” have also shown that the curated kids aren’t really making the scholarships and pros any more often than the kids who are just genetically gifted and allowed to sample a lot of sports and then specialize more naturally as their bodies develop.

        One of the things I notice about these college-bound kid stars on the travel squad is how many of them end up having professional level injuries before they even get into those top sports colleges. Total knee blowout rebuilds. Shoulders gone at 15. Then there is all the concussion stuff.

        Seems to me a lot of that travel-team elite squad stuff is just another way in which anxiety among the suburban prog social strivers is converted into a virtual suburb.

        Because there is nowhere left to move-up, move-out. No more farms they can turn into Sunset Hills Phase XI. The burbs are the end of the line before dirt people kick in. And the dark city is creeping in from the other side.

        So, they create more ways to elevate the buy-in, separate from the lesser types and the diversities; to have more status differentiation among the landlocked. And to take their road show to only those other virtual burbs worth of their kids curated competition rituals.

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        • The injuries are another thing. I know a guy who got fired from his Little League coaching gig because he put his kids on a pitch count. Which is absolutely correct — until you hit late high school, you must NOT throw too many curveballs. Simple as that. And if that means Johnny gives up a few more base hits because he’s only throwing a fastball and a change, well, so be it…

          Except that’s anathema to Sports Mom, who is 10,000x worse than Sports Dad ever dreamed of being. How is Johnny ever going to get that scholarship / huge contract with the Yankees if he doesn’t throw his very best stuff all the time? Scouts are watching!! (Sadly, in this day and age, scouts ARE watching).

          And if it means the kid goes off to college with wicked degenerative arthritis already setting in, or has had Tommy John surgery by the time he’s 17, well, it’s a small price to pay.

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          • Sev, it may look like I’m stalking but you comeup with points that interest me. Scouting kids starts in the cradle now almost.

            At one point after I was out of school, I helped coach an AAU bball team, I think it was a 4th-5th grade age group. We had a couple of guys who went on to play D1 ball, black of course and they would be scouted by college coachs at our tourneys regularly.

    • “Have to wonder if the parents incessantly putting their kids on travel teams when they are young kills any love of playing sports, along with kids who are content sitting on their phones all day on the other side of the spectrum.”

      It’s funny, but when I was in grade school, Junior, and then Senior High, there were always the “sports kids” who were either big into playing one sport, or were talented enough to play multiple sports well. By High School a lot of them had burned out on sports, and this was when the only traveling teams were Little League Baseball. It’s been going on longer than we think.

      Now the arms race is so crazy that if you’re NOT in traveling leagues in a given sport (soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, etc.) you’re not making the school team unless you are a freakish walk on phenomenon. I saw this with my niece and nephew. The school coaches were scouting the traveling soccer teams. You would have thought it was NCAA football or basketball.

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      • Is this because of a coach’s bias for travel team players, or are they that much better due to travelling year round?

        • Column A/Column B, but perusing the traveling team standings and attending games gave school coaches the 411 on prospects that a series of tryouts never could.

        • it’s about money. if you want to be on the school team you have to pay to be on the coach’s club team.

          • Can confirm. Jr high and HS coaches live *nice”, because they double and triple dip. Club teams, skills camps, it’s all pay for play. A guy in my district is a silent partner in the big “fitness center” too. He really ought to cut a deal with a PT clinic and an orthopedic surgeon, cut out the middle man

    • This time of year, Mariah Carey is the Tiger Woods of Christmas songs. All I Want for Christmas [Is you…to be mute] is dead to me.

      Also, from when I used to watch the NFL, Ray Lewis got more facetime than Fauci

  54. I would add to the sports piece that the leagues and networks are doing all they can to alienate the last of their viewers.

    Many have dropped out of the NFL. NBA is a joke, MLB is sinking. NHL is finally jumping on the bandwagon and making all the woke noises. Not to mention CFB.

    Anyway, agreed the demo is shrinking, but the product is also in decline.

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    • But you have to admit, it was hilarious seeing white cucks being insulted to their face by their BBC’s (big black champions).

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      • Howard Cosell and Cassius Clay started it all. An unathletic loud mouth Jew being insulted by a trash talking Negro.

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