Hey! Hey! It’s Rush Limbaugh!
It’s official: Rush Limbaugh will never own an National Football League franchise. Ever. The Associated Press confirmed such was the case after an ESPN report said as much last week, though it was not clear whether the controversial conservative entertainer knew it as of deadline.
NFL Bidder Almost Sparks Ownership, Morality Debate
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — It’s official: Rush Limbaugh will never own an National Football League franchise. Ever.
The Associated Press confirmed such was the case after an ESPN report said as much last week, though it was not clear whether the controversial conservative entertainer knew it as of deadline.
“I’m not even thinking of exiting,” Limbaugh said on his radio program, according to ESPN last Wednesday
But in trying to own part of the St. Louis Rams, he almost sparked a wider debate about the morality of ownership.
Once the Missouri native placed his bid with a consortium for ownership of the losing football team, it seemed everyone that could spell “NFL” sullied his chances immediately.
In fact, the Rev. Al Sharpton hailed Limbaugh’s ouster as “a moral victory for all Americans — especially the players that have been unfairly castigated” by him.
NFL players certainly hated the idea and expressed their disgust for Limbaugh with rare outspokenness in a league notorious for silencing dissent within the ranks, according to The Nation’s sports correspondent Dave Zirin.
“It’s about as rare as a hair on (former Vice President) Dick Cheney’s head. This never happens,” he told guest host David Shuster on The Rachel Maddow Show.
And there’s a reason.
“It’s because there are not guaranteed contracts in the NFL. Speaking out on any social issue — let along the issue of ownership — is something that rarely happens,” Zirin said.
Disgust for Limbaugh is so ripe that the head of the NFL players union even encouraged players to speak out against him.
And they have — including the league’s stars, especially Donovan McNabb, a three-time Pro Bowler, winner of two consecutive NFC championship games, and runner-up for NFL MVP in his first full season as a starter.
McNabb, Pro-Bowler New York Jets LB Bart Scott, and New York Giants DE Mathias Kiwanuka said that they themselves wouldn’t work for Limbaugh given the choice between him and essentially a Satanic slave owner.
Scott told the New York Daily News, “I wouldn’t play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can’t be bought.”
That said, Scott also called Limbaugh a “jerk.”
Kiwanuka also said he wouldn’t work for Limbaugh even if his former coordinator, Steve Spagnuolo, coaches the Rams with Limbaugh at the helm.
“[Limbaugh] can do whatever he wants, it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play,” Kiwanuka told the Daily News.
Kiwanuka added that he wouldn’t mind if a possible owner made a foot-in-mouth comment that was racist, but Limbaugh has made a $400 million empire from them.
Of the racist comments Limbaugh made over the years, several targeted the NFL players; one in particular cost him his job as an ESPN analyst on “Sunday NFL Countdown” in 2003.
The job-coster was his reference to Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb who had just led his team to a 23-13 victory over the Buffalo Bills; Limbaugh said:
“Sorry to say this, I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go, I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”
In 2007, he repeated the same idea in his 2003 comment: “If 100 percent of the players in the National Football League were black, the sports media would still treat them as though they just escaped bondage and, in fact, are still in it.”
And this year, Limbaugh compared members of NFL teams to street gangsters: “They’re up next against the Crips and the Bloods, the Baltimore Ravens… The Steelers have become bird exterminators now.”
He even said the same thing in January 2007: “The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”
Yup, he said it.
White players have also voiced outrage against Limbaugh, according to Zirin.
“This is not about black and white. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong,” he said.
But seeing as they don’t want a permenant controversy around their necks, owners of NFL franchises have gotten lippy against the cigar-smoking talk show host, too.
Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay told the Los Angeles Times that Limbaugh could become a team owner over his dead body.
“When there are comments that have been made that are inappropriate, incendiary and insensitive… our words do damage, and it’s something we don’t need,” he said.
However, while NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has poo-pooed “divisive” comments from persons of resposibility in the league, the NFL itself has stopped short of ousting Limbaugh’s bid.
“I obviously do not believe those comments are positive and they are divisive. That’s a negative thing for us, obviously,” said Goodell.
If the league took the advice of MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews, Limbaugh’s head will meet a fate not unlike the villain in the James Bond film “Live And Let Die.”
“I have to tell you. Rush Limbaugh is beginning to look more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody is going to jam a CO2 and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp,” Matthews said last week. “That day may come.”
Matthews’ MSNBC collegue Keith Olbermann, however, had a more non-violent approach to Limbaugh: let him have it.
In his “Worst Person in the World” segment, Olbermann, a former ESPN anchor himself, gave Limbaugh’s critics the world’s worst spot. Said Olbermann:
“There’re now gonna be character tests for sports owners? There’ll only be three of them left. Unless they beat the Vikings Sunday as of next Thursday it will have been a full year since the Rams won a game. My God, if Limbaugh wants to buy them far be it for me to tell him he’s flushing his money down a rat hole,”
To defend himself, Limbaugh appeared on the NBC’s The Today Show last week, claiming that he’s not an entertainer but a satirist and that his critics quote him out of context.
“Most of my critics don’t even listen to me; they are clueless,” Limbaugh said.
But Limbaugh, apparently, listens to his critics; to his 21 million regular radio listeners, he referred to Zirin, Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press as “scum.”
To Limbaugh, it’s all a day’s work to promote himself and his show.
“I know how to yank their chain,” he told The Today Show, referring to the mainstream media. “I know how to send them into insanity. I know how to make them spend the next two days talking about me.”
