ESPN's Rachel Nichols, host of The Jump television show, points to the athletes who have raised millions of dollars for hurricane-ravaged Texas relief efforts as justification for her belief that the "stick to sports" phrase is "absurd" because it is not "caring."
Hurricane Harvey, Nichols says, has been "a stark reminder of the role that athletes have at the very core of our communities. It's also instructive for those people who spent so much of this summer telling athletes to stick to sports. The whole stick to sports thing is revealed as completely absurd when held up to the light of what we've been watching down in Texas."
Nichols is mixing rotten apples with tasty oranges. Athletes caring for communities ripped up by Hurricane Harvey and raising tens of millions of dollars is not a story that divides Americans along political lines. Everyone cares about that kind of compassion. What she compares this to are some things that are very different.
For example, the ESPN lefty makes no mention of actions that anger a major portion of the population and prompts the calls to stick to sports. It's the cop-hating, Castro-loving Colin Kaepernick and his successor NFL clones protesting the national anthem. It's a pro soccer team partnering with Planned Parenthood. Nichols doesn't even come close to these outrages in the parallels she actually draws.
Instead Nichols plays a shell game by inserting the following thinly veiled criticisms of people whose names and political affiliations are not too hard to guess:
You can't applaud athletes for putting their passion and resources into addressing the very real and physical damage caused when a person loses their house to a flood, but criticize athletes for putting those same passions and resources into addressing the very real and physical damage caused, when say, an unarmed person is shot and killed. It can't be socially acceptable for an athlete to give out food at a hurricane shelter but not acceptable for him or her to address a politician trying to defund school lunch programs. Either it's okay to care that kids have enough to eat or it isn't.
This assumption is a giant leap for dishonesty and a step backwards for "journalism." Any reasonable person can easily see through this charade.
Not finished yet, Nichols tries to trap viewers into an either/or corner as she says:
Either athletes should be invested in helping people in their communities or they shouldn't. No one on the outside gets to decide for them what kind of human suffering is okay to care about and what kind isn't.
Nichols apparently gets to decide, though, what pro athletes can care about. It's starving children myths and the assumption that police officers routinely go around killing unarmed people without cause. Athletes perpetuating these false narratives are no different than those who raise money for flood victims.
Summing up, "stick to sports" is now a sort of "remember the Alamo" battle cry for sports media on the Left who are freed to champion sports figures who diss President Trump, expose so-called rampant racism, support fringe social engineering groups and heap hate on America.
