What do you suppose it costs to run a 60-second ad in major markets during the NBA playoffs on ABC? And can you think of something better to do with the “significant investment” a California Indian tribe has made than to register disapproval of a sports mascot?
The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation isn’t saying how much it paid for the spots, airing in New York, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, L.A. San Francisco, Sacramento and Miami. It is saying that it ponied up for the anti-Redskins ad because, “It’s just a time to get people thinking about putting an end to outward hatred and using sports as a tool to focus on racism,” according to tribe spokesman Marshall McKay. Continued after video.
It’s all part of a pressure campaign to get Washington, D.C.’s NFL franchise to drop the name it’s had and nobody complained about for 80 years. The campaign is nominally the work of the National Congress of American Indians and the Oneida Indian Nation [1], but most of the heavy lifting has been done by sanctimonious liberal writers and sports journalists at the Washington Post, ESPN and elsewhere. Led by Mike Wise, The Most Important Sports Columnist in the World, Ever [2], The Post printed 31,562 words on the self-created controversy in just one year [3]. That’s just shy of the 32,241 words in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It’s more than seven times the words in the U.S. Constitution.
But the free publicity hasn’t managed to budge the Skins, or the NFL, so the aggrieved are turning things up. The ad runs though a list of terms “Native Americans call themselves,” including “Unyielding. Strong. Indomitable” before showing the one thing they won’t: a Redskins helmet.
Conveniently, the list of noble nouns and stirring adjectives leaves out “Uninterested in being used as a tool of the PC left,” which would accurately reflect polling of Native Americans on the Redskins issue. According to CBS News [4], “In the only recent poll to ask native people about the subject, 90 percent of respondents did not consider the term offensive, although many question the cultural credentials of the respondents.” Apparently “cultural credentials” means “ever-willing to take offense.”
So NBA fans trying to enjoy the finals will be interrupted by liberal politics – something they, and all sports fans, should be getting used to [5] by now.