With Great Sadness, I Did Not Watch the National Football League on Sunday
Rush Limbaugh
Sep 25, 2017
RUSH: I want to share with you first the way all of this affected me, because in many ways I think that I am fairly typical. I am smack-dab in the middle of the targeted marketing the NFL does to acquire and hold an audience, right smack-dab in the middle of it. And I have to tell you, I was so sad Sunday morning when all of this started falling out.
I was not sad after Friday night when the president made his comments. And I had no doubt afterward what the reaction was going to be and I had no doubt where public opinion was gonna fall. And I had no doubt how people in the NFL from players to the commissioner to media people were gonna get it wrong, and they have, and they did.
But if you’ll permit me first, I was personally saddened. I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.
The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone. And it’s been politicized. It has been politicized and corrupted, and it didn’t start this weekend. It started years ago. And if I wanted to, I could go back and get the transcripts from a few years ago on this program where I first sensed that this was happening and was going to happen.
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