Behold the knee, a key joint in your leg that allows walking, running, jumping and all manner of symbolic kneeling.
The religious faithful show their respect and adoration by kneeling, or more correctly, genuflecting.
Subjects of royalty show their deference and servility by kneeling.
Men traditionally take a knee when proposing marriage to a woman. Perhaps men proposing to men and women proposing to women do the same.
To kneecap someone is to shoot them in the knee in order to inflict great pain and cause long-term mobility problems. Hammers or, in the case of ice skater Nancy Kerrigan, a collapsible baton, can be used instead of a gun.
A knee to the groin is, both in the literal and figurative senses, a popular way to lay low a male of the species.
Fast-forward to 2021 and the knee, specifically taking one symbolically, has become the universal standard of protest before athletic events.
These athletes turned social justice warriors seem to be clearing their collective consciences and virtue signaling at the same time by performing this empty gesture before the captive audiences in sporting venues and those whose opt to watch on television.
I guess donating 75 percent of their massive salaries to charity never occurred to them as a more meaningful way to address the world’s ills, be they real or imagined.
Regardless, my tactic is to tune in athletic events and then delay the feed, allowing me later to rush past these exercises in hollow gesturing and get on with the competition free of political posturing.
But I made an exception to watch the beginning of today’s European Soccer Cup final between kneeling England and follow-the-leader Italy.
This particular England team was attempting to win the country’s first championship in international soccer play since about the time of King George III.
But that hadn’t stopped them from adapting a rather smug and arrogant slogan “Bring it home,” a rallying cry mocked by a Danish player who wasn’t sure it, as in a major championship trophy, ever had been in England.
He can be forgiven for not knowing that England did win the World Cup in 1966, which in sporting terms is eons ago.
In the best tradition of schadenfreude, a German term for enjoying seeing the misfortune of others, I was hoping the kneeling Englanders would end up figuratively kneeling on each other’s necks, as in choking, a favorite sporting term for those athletes who do not perform in the clutch.
Some teams in the Euro Cup have been kneeling pregame and others have not. Italy, as befits a nation that’s been losing military conflicts since the fall of Rome, has been taking a stab at neutrality in this tournament by doing what the opposition does. They kneel, we kneel. They don’t kneel, we don’t kneel.
But, as Italian player captain Giorgio Chiellini was quick to explain, his team kneels “Not for the (Black Lives Matter) campaign itself, which we don’t share.” Instead, the Italians are showing respect for the opposing players choosing to kneel.
Because I was DVRing the soccer game and my satellite service was suffering weather-related outages as I tried to watch the NASCAR race, I switched over to the England-Italy game, which was in extra time, to see if it was available.
I discovered that England had scored in the first two minutes, then chose to play “safe” defensive football (soccer) and ended up conceding the game-tying goal with about 23 minutes left in regulation.
Eventually, the game went to overtime and then to penalty kicks, which was about the time the satellite signal crapped out again. It came back very late, allowing me to see the end of the penalty kicks and a fatal failure on the last England attempt.
This sent the English fans and the attending members of the royal family into fits of despair. Meanwhile, one person in the tiny assemblage of Italy fans allowed into England on a 12-hour pass for the game, captured the spirit of the thing with a sign reading, “Oops, it’s coming back to Rome.”
But it’s not all negative. Now that the tournament is over, it leaves the English players a lot of free time to work on their genuflection technique, and maybe on honing their penalty kicks while they’re at it.
On the latter, they were about as effective with their penalty kicks as they would have been taking those attempts from one knee.
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