LeBron James latest in line of athletes to get away with being crude, clueless

We’re stuck watching a bad science fiction movie. They’ve barred the exits to the theater. 

This week, in his usual classy, expletive-laced public style, role model and Communist Chinese cheap labor-enriched Nike pusher LeBron James, attacked Celtics fans for their vulgar public incivility. 

James often delivers vulgar lectures, some quickly redacted, on right from wrong. He feels totally entitled to such flagrant hypocrisy, as he should, given the NBA’s public treatment of him with blind and deaf entitlement. 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver should have long ago read the riot act, demanding civil public conduct from both players and in-arena fans. 

But as the NBA becomes another sport in self-inflicted decay, Silver makes no such public suggestions, let alone demands. He must be pleased with what the NBA scene has become. Though I doubt it. As the assigned guardian of the sport, he’s seems unwilling — perhaps frightened — to offend the most offensive. 

Two weeks ago President Biden bestowed the nation’s highest civilian honor on “Me-gan” Rapinoe, who made herself known to American sports fans as a repugnant, profane, selfish, attention-starved bully, a creep eager to demonstrate her total disregard for her country on soccer’s international stages. 

That she was even considered for the highest American civilian award was revolting. 

This week, the prestigious University of Pennsylvania named transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, an also-swam on the men’s team as William Thomas but now an NCAA champion on the women’s team, its nominee for the NCAA’s Woman of the Year. 

Do the folks at Penn who nominated her truly believe that she competed on what was known as the fair and square? Or was this satire? Does the university truly believe that she represents athletic glory to the school fairly won? 

All other female athletes at Penn were less worthy? 

I support Thomas’ right to pursue happiness through gender engineering, but not at the cost of trampling on others’ pursuit of happiness by playing with a genetically marked deck. 

And so Penn chose politically correct pandering, the paragon of preposterous conspicuous inequality, as its champion of equality. 

Yet to point to such lunacy is to risk being condemned — run for your life! — as a bigot, as transphobic, more shallow name-calling supplanting self-evident facts. Yet I don’t recognize even a marginal benefit to the transgender community for supporting Thomas as the beneficiary of unfair play. To the contrary. 

But that’s the bag we’re in. And if you dare publicly state that James’ anointed status as a proponent of civility and the honors bestowed on Rapinoe and Thomas make jerks of us all as a matter of applied common sense, you must be the one with the problem. 

Next week a N.J. course owned by the great American patriot, ex-President Donald Trump, will be rented by the Saudi government for its pro golf event. The Saudis will spend an estimated $2 billion to show how their money can cause free-world Westerners to sit, roll over and beg. 

That has raised the derision of victims’ families and friends who lost loved ones among the 3,000 murdered in the 9/11 attacks by what they remain convinced — and for strong reasons — was a Saudi-sponsored plot. 

Trump couldn’t have turned this down? 

As Dennis McGinley, whose brother Daniel, died in the World Trade Center attacks, told NorthJersey.com, “Forget that it’s unpresidential. lt’s so hurtful to the 9/11 community.” 

So even if you’re among those who try to apply unfettered logic to issues, you’re vastly underrepresented by what passes as leadership. Enjoy the rest of the movie. 

Big Papi a big blowhard at All-Star Game

Why are TV execs always the last to know? For Fox to have indecipherable clown David Ortiz parade around Tuesday’s All-Star Game — record-low ratings, as richly deserved — emphasizes Fox’s conviction that we all love “Big Papi.” 

We don’t and never did. We didn’t trust him as an overnight slugger and we don’t trust him in his civilian life, as per that 2019 bar room shooting in Santo Domingo, the one with the changing cover stories. 

Although we by now know Rob Manfred, as short of foresight, blinded by anyone waving money in his face, we still can’t figure how he’d allow the Home Run Derby outfield to be packed with 10-year-olds in the paths of line drives smashed off 70 mph tosses. 

Do the kids sign waivers? Or does a kid catching one in the head become a 6-1 payoff DraftKings prop bet? 

Need a laugh? Apple TV+, one of MLB’s four exclusive streaming services, this week included a show hosted by analysts Chris Young and Hunter Pence to “reveal their most memorable [Apple TV+] Friday Night Baseball games” of this season. 

As reader Henry Cadra suggests, Manfred seems eager to do to baseball what boxing promoters did to boxing by removing even mildly interesting matches from mass view to pay-per-view until potentially good bouts became hidden by greed. 

Then boxing fell off the edge of the Earth. 

Saturday, at the same time Fox’s John Smoltz noted that both of Yankee Matt Carpenter’s two home runs hit that game against Boston were without batting gloves, Steve Gelbs, on SNY for Mets-Cubs, was reporting on the new batting gloves introduced to the Mets by Brandon Nimmo. 

Just wondering. When Carpenter bats in Yankee Stadium, does he gaze toward the right-field wall and think, “Where have you been all my life?” 

Saturday’s first Mets-Cubs game was right out of Manfred Land: In 11 innings, Mets won, 2-1, nine total hits, 29 strikeouts. 

And the go-ahead run in the 11th was knocked in with sac fly from Pete Alonso, credited with an RBI for driving in a runner who automatically started at second base as per Manfred’s applied genius. 

Bogey after bogey at Open 

NBC’s British Open coverage was predictably rotten. 

First, genuine coverage of the leaders was eliminated or significantly reduced until Tiger Woods, who was never in it, missed the cut. But you anticipated that, even in a major. 

Reader David Distefano notes that it was telling that David Feherty, now off to get his piece of that Saudi golf money, said that Tommy Fleetwood, always in contention — he finished fourth — had moved up “quietly.” That was code for NBC having ignored him. 

And NBC played TV’s usual Tiger-inspired popularity tricks with the leader board, sacrificing the old but useful standard of listing the leaders finished or nearly finished above those with the same score and still plenty of holes left. 

This cheap, shallow nonsense makes it impossible for viewers to determine third- and fourth-round pairings, which are based first on score and next on when you finished. 

But the best came in the final round, when Rory McIlroy, one back of winner Cameron Smith, teed off on 17, the famous/infamous “Road Hole” on St. Andrews. One must hit the tee shot over part of a hotel in order to hit the fairway. All in the Open, through four rounds, tried to do just that. 

But as McIlroy hit over the hotel, NBC’s crew marveled at his cold-blooded nerve, as if he were otherwise going to lay up and play for a bogey, one down with two to go in the Open. Tom Abbott even called McIlroy’s tee shot “Brave” 

Brave? There was nothing else McIlroy could do!