I'm Going To Lose Most of My Remaining Friends This Football Season, Part Two

Now, I'd like to turn to another Tweeter of some celebrity import.

I have been (largely, past tense, thanks to the economic disintegration led by the seizure of the ownership rights of most of the product by the Internet fan-base) an anime fan for a number of years.

What small part of fandom I have left of it is almost exclusively due to the English-language voice-talents.

One of them, I am now in a Twitter altercation with.  Travis Willingham (Roy Mustang in the Full Metal Alchemist arc, Mori in Ouran High School Host Club, among numerous other anime and video game roles).

He tweeted yesterday:

"Some NFL Training Camps start today! It's all happening...! #hybernationisover"

Well, predictably, I couldn't let that go without a reply:

"The cult of football has done so much damage to this country that I begin to wonder about the sanity of a post like that."

To which Willingham responded with:

"Cult? Sanity? What, did "sports" cheat on you in high school or something?"

Travis, love ya...

But the short answer is...  YES!

But that's not why I said what I said.  (You'll see some of that if you click on the link to this post once I finish it.)

That doesn't mean I won't elaborate on your snarky answer.

Basically, the athletes at my old high school were allowed basically free reign over everybody else.

I hug someone in a way people don't like?  Fourth-degree Sexual Assault, they damn near call the police to have me locked up in juvy.

A football player uses a hockey stick to damn near non-consensually masturbate a cheerleader in front of the entire floor-hockey phy-ed section?  Perfectly OK, he's on the football team!

Most of the athletes in my senior class (and the one after me) basically act like bullies and underage drink and God knows what else they did?  Small punishments, if any, and not near the code they were to act up to.

I call them on it when they are finally suspended and the media asks about it?  I go to the principal's office for embarrassing them!

So, yes, "sports" cheated on me in high school.

But I am going to offer you a look at some of what I have witnessed go on in the grand name of Our Holy Obsession With Football.

I'd love to enjoy football.  I really, really would!  I had a four-hour discussion in which I almost lost one of my closest friends over posts I've made to the blog this week over a lot of this obsession and what has been done under it's cover.

I'm sick of coddling these motherfuckers, Travis!

I'm sick of seeing that, because these people have a hellacious 40 or vertical leap or the like, that they can pretty much do what they want to whomever they please.

You think a couple of these football players wouldn't want a non-consensual piece of your wife, Travis?  (Another VA, very good looking and an absolute sweetheart...)

The way a lot of these "athletes" act, they feel they own the world.  And until someone calls them on it, chances are that they do.

I'm sick of:

• A referee getting attacked in Florida by two coaches and a teenage player because they didn't like his calls.  And don't get me started on the criminal records of the coaches, or the real possibility that bets were being placed on the games and the kids being paid by drug and gang influences!
• A riot in Georgia over a visiting football team (who was probably threatened before the game even began) kicking the butts of a local team, so the home team instructs the visitors be locked out of the locker room, ambushed, and the coach is beaten within an inch of his life.  Neither the state association nor a grand jury (the latter, of course, empaneled in the home team's county!) do ANYTHING to punish them.
• Numerous, almost weekly, fights in which parents basically start pounding on anything that moves at what appears to be minimal provocation, all in the name of football.
• The fact that domestic violence increases after an NFL loss.
• Bounty-Gate
• Penn State

Shall I go on?

And we all accept this because it's FOOTBALL.

Yeah, "cult" and questioning "sanity" would be a nice way to go about it.

(And, apparently, at least one of the coaches is going to get less jail time and probation for leading the referee attack than I got for people actually thinking I was going to 1,000 miles to attack a famous star on Broadway!  Dexter Austin, one of the coaches, is being sought for 120 days in jail and two years' probation after the incident.  The other two coaches received probation ONLY.  I got three years probation and a year in the slammer for people THINKING I was going to attack Deborah Gibson.)

But it's all right because it's in the name of FOOTBALL.  The coach could've gotten five years in the slammer for this.