It’s time to send the U.S. women’s hockey team to the penalty box — double minor, two minutes each for hypocrisy and embellishment and a 10-minute misconduct for running their mouths interminably about it all.
I mean, these sweet young things were traumatized by an offhand joke from President Trump, which has been lamented ad nauseam as being demeaning to them and women in general. These women hockey players blew off a State of the Union Address invitation due to their anger and are noncommittal about a future White House visit to celebrate and honor their winning of the gold medal in Italy.
Fair enough. But, if you are going to stand up for women and take major offense at a joke, then none of your squad should agree to go to a Las Vegas party hosted by rapper Flavor Flav, a guy who’s been arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges. Yet, reports are they’re going.
Let’s review the facts, the sort of perspective you won’t get from hyperventilating libtards posting on social media, or YouTube, or leftist media members always eager to stir the pot and omit perspective.
To recap, Trump, in a phone call to the American men after their gold-medal victory, invited them to the State of the Union speech and the White House, adding that they had to realize he also would be required to invite the women or he’d be impeached. Some of the guys laughed and the Trump Derangement Syndrome types rushed to their keyboards to express outrage, both at Trump and those players.
The women’s hockey team, fittingly, was passive aggressive about it all, with spokespeople citing scheduling and academics as reasons for turning down the invite to Washington, D.C. Players failed to comment directly at first, but waited eagerly for the first media toolbag to ask them about the remarks so they could spew.
Now, they can’t be shut up about it. Begin with captain Hilary Knight, who found Trump’s joke “distasteful” and “unfortunate.” She lectured how it was a teaching moment about being more respectful and celebratory about women’s achievements.
I don’t know much about women’s locker rooms, male sports writers not hanging around them back in my day for reasons that used to be apparent. But, I know from more than three decades spent covering sports, men’s locker rooms are the scene of some cutting barbs and jokes – among teammates. Thin-skinned types do not survive.
If you are a world-class athlete who can be cut to the quick by a joke, well, color me amazed.
As an aside, I knew several area coaches who at one time or another in their career, had the occasion to coach both high school boys and girls basketball teams.
Those coaches used to tell me that coaching the females was the greater challenge. The male athletes might hate each other, but they could put that aside on the court in the interest of winning. Girls, on the other hand, were cliquish and breaking that down was next to impossible.
But, let’s deal with what we can quantify.
Generally speaking, women’s sports pale in comparison with the popularity of men’s sports.
Case in point: The average viewership for the U.S. women’s gold medal win over Canada was 5.3 million, with a peak of 7.7 million. Hey, I even watched most of it.
The U.S. men’s gold medal win, also over Canada, AVERAGED 18.6 million viewers and peaked at 26 million. Incidentally, that game was an early morning start and set records for a sporting event with a pre-9 a.m. start east coast time.
Here’s the cruelest fact of all. Since populations tend to be split about evenly between men and women, those numbers suggest that even women were more interested in watching the men’s game.
You might read in some spaces that interest in women’s sports is growing faster than men’s interest. Be careful about such percentage comparisons, where starting from a large base is a disadvantage.
Consider if I had a company making $1 billion in profit a year and bumped that to $2 billion the next year. Pretty impressive stuff, a double. But, if your company made $1 and you increased that to $10 (dollars, not billions of dollars), you’ve gone up tenfold and blew me away in terms of growth rate.
Were I Trump, I’d tell the U.S. women never mind that Washington visit, no hard feelings. And enjoy partying with a guy who is reported to have pleaded guilty in 1991 in New York to assault on his then-girlfriend and mother of his three children, pleaded guilty again in 2014 in Nevada, for domestic battery and had to attend domestic violence counseling, and more recently in Nevada was arrested again for domestic battery. That charge was dropped, according to Wikipedia, when he pleaded no contest to coercion.
At least Flavor Flav didn’t tell any distasteful or unfortunate jokes; as far as we know.
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