Professional sports turning grieving into a PR scam
When President George W. Bush took the mound at Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch following the horrific 9/11 attacks, sports helped bring the United States together as a country. As Howard Bryant recently wrote, sports were a “healing balm” for a hurting nation.
But since then, pro sports owners and big-time college sports administrators have seized on the feel-good aspect of patriotism and used it as just another marketing ploy.
As but one example, consider the NFL’s phoney soldier salute. From 2011 to 2014, the Department of Defense paid 14 NFL teams $5.4 million for promotional salutes to military personnel.
Consider the New York Jets’ Hometown Heroes promotion. During timeouts, the Jumbotron camera would zoom in on a U.S. soldier who was strategically placed in a given seat. The soldier smiled and waved to the crowd. Fans stood and cheered, bursting with patriotic feelings and happy that their favourite football team was honouring true American heroes. In reality, the whole thing was a marketing and public relations scam, just another revenue stream for NFL owners, not a feel-good gesture at all. Sad.