Get ready for Rush Limbaugh, the worst pro football team owner in the world
Pro-Steelers, anti-union, it makes total sense
Long, long ago, in galaxy far, far away, Rush Limbaugh was a football commentator for ESPN. That was until he made a racist statement about there being a “social concern” for Donovan McNabb to succeed as the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback. And then he ‘resigned’ from his on-air post.
But now it seems that Rush, instead of being on-air talent, wants to make Keith Olbermann’s head explode:
Limbaugh, a conservative political commentator, first mentioned his interest in the Rams last May. He was unavailable to the Post-Dispatch for comment but in a statement sent to KMOX radio, Limbaugh said: “Dave and I are part of a part of a bid to buy the Rams, and we are continuing the process.
via Limbaugh, Checketts join in bid for Rams – STLtoday.com.
Rush is a real football fan, of that there can be no question. When I first heard this reported on CBS on Sunday afternoon, I said oh my gosh. A pill popper in the Rams’ corporate office, lock the locker room’s dispensary! But that’s too easy. Jokes about Rush being a drug addict or fat are the easy way out. Especially when Limbaugh gives us so much better material to explain why not a single NFL owner should want Limbaugh to join their ranks.
I offer you Limbaugh’s 10 awesomest terriblest remarks about pro football that I found while watching the Steelers beat the Chargers on Sunday night.
1. Rush compared black football players on the field to fighting gang members.
In January 2007, commenting about the ‘class’ of NFL players, Rush stated:
Look it, let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.
He went back to this statement in January 2009, noting of a contest between the Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens:
They’re up next against the Crips and the Bloods, the Baltimore Ravens next Sunday at 6:30 in Pittsburgh at Heinz Field.
Rush in response, of course, will likely point out that he interviewed Tony Dungy, that he’s buddies with the Hutch. But just because you found a couple of black guys who can put up with you doesn’t mean you’re not a racist asshole.
2. Rush can’t let go of his enmity with McNabb and the Eagles.
Let’s not even get into his referring to the Eagles as Girl Scouts. And I won’t go into details, here, because it’s tiresome. But here’s two shows, one in 2007, another in 2008, where Rush revisits the McNabb affair that got him tossed off of ESPN. It’s still early in 2009, folks, just wait for McNabb to have a bad game before he brings it up again.
He can’t admit he was wrong, and he can’t let it go, which means that he’ll be talking about it more and more whenever the Rams play the Eagles. St. Lunatics, if you want your city pulled even deeper into race war than Rush has already tried to drag it, please let him buy your Rams.
3. Limbaugh thinks Michael Vick’s dog murder is funny.
Long story short – Texas Tech fratboys sell a t-shirt that says ‘Vick ‘Em’ and shows a Texas A&M mascot being hung by someone with a no. 7 on their chest, a la dog fighter/killer and now Philadelphia Eagles back-up QB Michael Vick. Frat gets suspended from campus. Rush’s reaction?
RUSH: This is funny.…Boy, if there are any of these shirts out there, do you realize what they are worth? Vick ‘em.
Check out the sickening image of the t-shirt at Rush’s site that old mouth-diarrhea thought was funny.
4. Rush will surely attract scores of female fans to the Edward Jones Dome.
Check out this high quality and welcoming analysis of why women prefer the Olympics to football:
You know, women don’t watch baseball as much as they watch the Olympics. They don’t watch football, basketball. They get out of the house. I mean, there are exceptions. There are some women that like football, but it’s not like women sitting down watching the Olympics. Now, why is this? There’s a reason, folks, and it is left to me to explain it to you.
[...]
Women couldn’t care less about any of that. It’s just, “Who won, and when’s it going to be over so we can go to dinner?” Men are invested in these sports because men, most men, would really rather love to be able to do that than their daily humdrum jobs. But women couldn’t be bothered with these kind of mundane things: free agency, trades, fantasy football and baseball leagues and all this. They couldn’t be bothered with it. But, you’ve got the Olympics every two years, summer Olympics every four years, you don’t need a scorecard. It’s real simple: Who won and who lost?
So much for Breast Cancer Awareness Week in the league…
5. Rush will help promote the NFL’s youth health initiatives.
You’ve probably seen the NFL Play 60 commercials where players encourage kids to get 60 hours of exercise or play outside every day. Here’s what Rush has to say about exercise:
No, see, I liked the football stuff because there was a purpose. I was playing a game, I was getting better at something….What I hate is exercise for the sake of it. “Okay, people, you need to go for a walk.” “Where?” “Well, you’ll end up back at home.” Well, I say, “Why leave?” If I’m going to end up where I started, why leave? I’d rather just stay here, because I frankly hate things that have no purpose.
Maybe he’ll share with children his tips about dealing with pain, too…oh dang it, I said I wouldn’t make drug addict jokes here.
6. Rush has a strong knowledge of sports gambling.
Here is Rush perhaps foreshadowing for the world how he could be the Pete Rose of NFL team ownership:
Have you ever bet on a professional football game with a bookie? Have you ever? They have the line. The odds makers make the line. Let’s say Patriots-Steelers is coming up Sunday; it’s at Foxboro, and let’s say they make the Patriots say a six-point favorite. A lot of people say, “Six points on the Patriots? They’re going to cream the Steelers.” The worst thing you can do when you get involved in betting the points in a football game is worry about your favorite team. You’re making a bet.
You are making a bet! The people that make the odds don’t care who wins. They’re trying to get equal amounts of money on both sides so that no matter who wins, they win. And they’ve gotta set a line that’s going to attract much money. So if Steelers fans think their team is going to get blown out by ten, and the line is six, they’ll take the six. If the Patriots fans think the opposite: “Wow, six points? We’re going to blow these people out by ten, 15. Sure, I’ll lay the six,” and they’ll take it. So the bookies are doing just what happens in the oil speculation market.
7. Rush will not welcome liberals at Edward Jones Dome.
Some Seattle Seahawks fans protested Matt Hasselbeck posing with President Bush. Silly, I agree. What is Rush’s reaction?
You people are just nuts. You people on the left are lunatics. You are certifiably insane. You can’t really be fans of the Seattle Seahawks if your fandom can be shaken and destroyed. What kind of emotional midgets are you? The new castrati, you don’t have any business being football fans. You’re not tough enough to be football fans.
Good thing Missouri isn’t a purple state that McCain won by 4,000 votes in 2008. St. Louis Democrats, the Rams welcome you, just not their partial owner….
8. Try not to win the Super Bowl or Rush might politicize the Rams’ visit to a Democratic White House.
Rush didn’t care for it when Seattle liberals got upset about their QB visiting President Bush; but the shoe was on the other foot when the Pittsburgh Steelers, which Rush and the President both were rooting for in the last Super Bowl, visited Obama at the White House.
He noted that the Steelers must not love the President as much as they love old Rush:
See, I am a student of the NFL. They did not give him locker room jerseys. They might be exact jerseys, I mean the same material, the same price, but you Steelers fans, I’m sure you know if you’ve gone out and bought the real thing, says NFL equipment on it, on field, and the label down in the lower left, you’ll notice when you look at the sleeves it’s not like the jerseys the Steelers wear on the field. The locker room jerseys in almost every case in the National Football League are different than what they sell retail. It’s the same material, it’s the same design, you would never notice it unless you were a pure student. And I’ve noticed that they are not locker room jerseys that Obama got.
9. Rush is ready to liquidate a couple of NFL teams.
If you’re from Detroit or Cincinnati, and you like football, and Rush ever gets any decision-making power in the league, well, you’d better find some new teams to root for:
You can just close down the Detroit Lions, close down the Cincinnati Bengals, and you wouldn’t have to cut anybody other than the players.
10. Rush has compared other football owners to rapists.
This one kind of speaks for itself, and also to Rush’s love of the free market:
I mean, they can rape you financially with ticket prices, but that’s up to you if you want to pay it.
On the other hand, in this show, Rush was taking issue with a sports page columnist saying he’d hold the Kansas City Chiefs’ management accountable for decisions they made about recruiting. And that freedom from the press is surely something that other NFL owners could happily get behind.
***
This is really just scratching the surface, as far down the memory hole as I could go in my limited time. So there’s gotta be more.
So NFL owners, it’s up to you. If you want a crypto-racist who doesn’t care for women or exercise, doesn’t appear all that concerned about dog-fighting jokes, and compares you to rapists to join you at your round table, Rush Limbaugh is going to make a great addition to your skyboxes in the years ahead.
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I think he might be the first non-player adicted to pain killers in the NFL.
There I said it…
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As a Rams fan already suffering through one of the worst teams in NFL history, all I can say is that I’d rather see the team move to a new city than have Rush Limbaugh as a co-owner. I’m all for Dave Checketts being a partial owner – he’s done wondrous things for the Blues here – but if Rush Limbaugh has any share of the Rams I will disavow my loyalty to the Rams. It’s not about the guy being a conservative; it’s about his bigoted, hateful comments reflecting a man who has no business being on radio, let alone owning a professional sports team and benefiting from St. Louis fans’ pain.
Can you imagine if Don Imus were allowed to take over a college athletic program after his “nappy-headed hoes” comment regarding the Rutgers women’s basketball team? This is the same thing, except that Rush has a long history of comments that should preclude him from ever being involved with any NFL franchise.
Good article.
Thanks!
In response to another comment. See in context »I wonder how he plans to win games after he fires all the black players for being gangsters. We know how much he loves black folks.
I didn’t even get into his disquisition about how white and Latino players (he then goes on to name Jeff Garcia as Latino) must really hate it when people talk about how tough it is to be a black quarterback.
In response to another comment. See in context »Of course, who can forget when Rush got knocked out by Obama?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6aCF7a9yE0
Priceless.
In response to another comment. See in context »Clearly, Rush’s daily(?) radio show would seem to give all the needed evidence to corroborate MR’s thesis (I don’t listen to it, but I’ve heard quite a few excerpts). However, the column is written at the level of 2nd grade name calling. Looking at it logically, all that one can conclude is that MR hates Rush, doesn’t understand the basic rules of logic and doesn’t care about truthful or accurate statements.
MR needlessly exaggerates and distorts. A bit more research, knowledge of logic and measured writing could have made the same point, but the column, as written, deserves an F- on all those scores and would tend to undermine the credibility of any future column – for any reader who’s looking for reason rather than hate, that is.
Nick, I can always gauge the quality of an argument by how long it takes the maker of said argument to resort to an insult to make their point. There you are in the second sentence. My 2nd grade name calling may get an F-, but at least I showed up to school. The truant officer is calling your moms at work right now.
In response to another comment. See in context »Michael,
I distinctly remember a poll, I think in Newsweek, as to what celeb people would want least as their neighbor. Rush, #1! I’m sure a lot of players, coaches, and other owners would be just as happy to see him in the NFL.
Let me see if I have this straight: Rush would be a bad NFL owner because he is conservative politically? I guess the fact that he has built an immensely profitable business from the ground up (he isn’t some trust fund baby like most NFL owners) isn’t any sort of indication of his potential to succeed as an NFL owner? If I were a Rams fan (thank God I am not), I would be dying for someone who has a successful track record as a businessman to take over this sorry franchise. Otherwise, your point is simply that conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to own sports franchises. In that case, you are proving once again that liberals are the ultimate hypocrites by being closed-minded and hateful of others for their beliefs while claiming ad nauseum that conservatives are “the haters.”
Hey everyone, look who showed up to the party, another dude who calls liberals ‘hypocrites’ but really means that two wrongs make a right. Welcome to the party, dude, there’s fresh beer in the fridge – liberal beer.
If being a racist asshole (“crips and bloods”) who says liberals don’t deserve to be football fans and believes that ‘Vicking’ someone is funny is how you’d like to define being a conservative, you’re welcome to that definition.
I didn’t question Rush’s business acumen. I just think NFL owners should ask whether or not they want a racist asshole of Rush’s caliber among their ranks.
In response to another comment. See in context »I initially found your article via the RealClearSports link and mistook it for an actual attempt at journalism. After reading your profile, I now undertand that you’re one of those liberal haters masquerading as a journalist. Best of luck with that anger and hate.
In response to another comment. See in context »I was going to wish you luck, too. But after observing your sizable talent for losing arguments, I think it would be demeaning to all the hard intellectual work you must have completed to arrive at this point in your anonymous Internet commenter career. Luck clearly has nothing to do with it.
In response to another comment. See in context »I don’t know what argument I’ve “lost.” I simply asked how a successful businessman acquiring ownership of the Rams wouldn’t be an improvement given the team’s current sorry state of affairs. Your initial answer was to continue calling Rush names rather than answering the question. It wasn’t until I checked your profile and saw you write for the Huffington Post that I fully understood that this wasn’t a legitimate sports or business article but simply an attack on Rush. I took a wrong turn off RealClearSports and found myself reading the rantings of a sad, little, hater. I guess you’re right – if the winner of an argument is decided by who was better at name-calling, hating, and broadly disparaging the other, you are the winner. Good luck saving the NFL from mean conservatives.
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Great article. Although I myself am a hockey man, I can certainly sympathize. Were Rush Limbaugh to become in any way affiliated with my beloved Red Wings it would surely but my long standing love and loyalty for Detroit hockey through the ringer.
I was unaware of his start as ESPN commentator. That a sports commentator who resigned for making racist comments went on to become the leading liar* for the lunatic fringe of the republican party is somehow not as ironic as it should be.
[...] as I documented last fall when the prospect emerged that Limbaugh might become a part owner of the ailing St. Louis [...]
You made the argument that I said a successful business owner should not be allowed to partly own a NFL franchise because he is a conservative. I pointed out that it’s a sad state of affairs when you equate being a racist asshole, i.e. comparing hard-working African-American athletes to street gang members, to being a conservative. I think you lose the argument about why I said Rush should not be welcomed as an NFL owner by other NFL owners – because there are plenty of good businessmen and women out there; most of them, conservative, liberal, or otherwise, are not racist assholes. I welcome conservatives, liberals, and the Green Bay Packers stockholders, who are secretly all cheese-sniffing Communists, as NFL franchise owners.
And yes, anonymous Internet commenter dude, I’m a former employee of the Huffington Post, and I’ve contributed a few random blog posts to their website since I was hired by the conservative New York Sun and later came to work here after it folded. In this, I share some characteristics with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA). Can you believe those guys wrote for the Huffington Post? They must make you sick.
I don’t listen to Rush so I don’t know whether you’ve taken the rest of his comments out of context, but as a Steelers fan and season ticket holder, I do know for certain you are misstating his intent re the bloods/crips = Steelers/Ravens comments. Rush is a long time Steelers fan and is often quoted in the Pittsburgh media and those comments were meant to describe the level of animosity and violent hitting that pervades the games b/w those two teams. So if saying the bloods and crips are violent, rival organizations makes someone a racist, maybe he is. Its interesting that you continue to deridingly refer to me as anonymous internet commenter when you work for a site that encourages such posting. I am, however, happy to contact you directly if you’d like (although I didn’t see an email or phone # listed with your bio). My personal information was also provided when I registered with this site and likely available to you, so I am hardly “anonymous”. I like that you conclude that you share some traits with a few Republicans, therefore you can’t be an angry liberal. Sounds similar to the argument that Limbaugh uses Dungy and a few other black men he admires as proof he isn’t a racist. Bottomline is you don’t like Rush’s politics, so therefore he shouldn’t be permitted to own an NFL team; you can dress that argument up with some Vick t shirt and “anti exercise” anecdotes (still trying to figure out the relevance of that one) but in the end you are doing exactly what those on the left claim so aggressively to stand against = exclusion based upon disagreement with one’s beliefs. All that said, I am glad I stumbled upon your article and this website as I’ve enjoyed the back and forth. Good evening.