Wembley Knee.
But, we’re not here to talk about the past.
Part 2 is about the Ghost of Baltimore Football Present and that begins with the President of The United States of America and the infamous purple Wembley Stadium knee taken by Ravens players as a response to unprecedented insults to them and their brothers of color in the NFL lobbed on Twitter by the guy running our country who has hated the NFL for three decades in the aftermath of an embarrassing defeat as the loudest, crankiest member of the ill-fated USFL and the $1 settlement.
And The Knee is not a sports story or a Ravens story or a football story. It’s a political story that has been by far the most polarizing event of my career and life locally. The Reality TV President, who has made a point of racially baiting or insulting just about everyone except Putin’s Russia, the KKK and the Nazis in Charlottesville, clearly baited NFL players and it “stoked the ratings.” The players took the bait. They played his game. They fought back. The fans saw it as an anti-patriotic hit on the military and Trump piled on. And his reality audience is still raging about it and how they’ll never come to another NFL game – tying The Knee to the military, which was never what the action or intent was from the players and that much has been made clear over and over again in words, deeds and actions.
As a sports radio host by trade, I’m familiar with public outrage and the dispensing of that buzzing sound of never-ending negativity. In the early days, I actually got sensible, educated, mostly awesome people as callers on the radio. By the end, it was truly insufferable.
I took phone calls for a quarter of a century in Baltimore and long before Twitter I was the dispensary for any jackass who could be screaming on my airwaves to fire Ozzie Newsome, can John Harbaugh, hang the offensive or defensive coordinator of the moment, bench Joe Flacco and blow up the organization at any time of the day. This is the same segment of the fan base eternally pissed off about how much money the players make and how much Flacco’s salary affects the team’s salary cap. And there is always time for the eternal race debate of the merits of Trent Dilfer vs. Tony Banks in 2000.
As I wrote three years ago when I changed my radio format, I got tired of sanctioning stupidity and giving it a microphone.
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I almost watched my wife die twice over the past three years and lost my mother and cat this summer. I’m simply not interested in hearing people bitch for a living. I just can’t do it. The Ravens are a good, fun part of my life. My radio conversations now are 100% experts and people I like to chat with about sports. I’m doing the best work of my career and conversations and information and observations that I’m very proud of at WNST.
If you want fact free conversations and low information opinions from hosts who don’t go to the games and callers who know even less than them, there’s a corporate radio station that CBS Radio sold to another out-of-town corporate group called Entercom for that and a Twitter feed full of whatever bile about the Ravens that you want to hear that might lower the bar on your information or sanity.
We also – as a community – loudly cheered an injured quarterback on “home turf” back during the Kyle Boller era so let’s not take the higher moral ground of “not living in Cleveland” to borrow an old Sam Wyche verbal gem/insult. And we’re only a tad below Philadelphia on the misery index as sports fans.
I worked in the sports “civic therapy” industry before the internet. And as Joe Flacco, that famous son of Philadelphia, always likes to point out to me at his most candid moment: “We win a lot of football games around here!”
One more Ghost of Baltimore Football Past is the constant civic bitching about the local gridiron squad even when times are good. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always been grateful we had a team because I spent a dozen years between 1984 and 1996 believing we’d never have a team.
And if you’ve been a true fan of the Baltimore Ravens over these 22 years, the times have been mostly very good.
Before Facebook and Twitter, I suppose I didn’t realize just how overtly negatively minded many people are while watching a football game. I would randomly hear stupid shouts in Section 513 from time to time from a mostly sophisticated football crowd but my timeline is now consistently a toilet of
