Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
There is a pivotal scene in “Remember the Titans” where corrupt officials are making calls on every play against the Titans. They’ve been bribed by a group of racist “good ol’ boys” to make sure head coach Herman Boone loses the game and is fired.
Assistant coach Bill Yoast realizes what’s going on and calls a timeout. He confronts the officials, saying he’ll go to the papers, that he’ll go down with them if he has to, but to call the game fair.
He huddles his team and makes this inspiring message, “You blitz all night. If they cross the line of scrimmage, I’m gonna take every last one of you out. You make sure they remember, forever the night they played the Titans.”
The game rolls into a blowout, and the Titans advance to the Virginia state finals.
If you are or were an athlete playing a team sport, you know how that scene feels viscerally. If you’re not, or never were, it gets a little more challenging to see the point.
The Belgian soccer team saw the point.
As Americans, we like to believe we’re always the good guys, playing fair and winning against all odds, even ones stacked against us. If only that were true.
It’s hard to separate your allegiance to your country from blind allegiance to one doddering old man who daily shows more and more signs of mental decline. Even if you’re a faithful follower, you knew who was being written about above.
US player Folarin Balogun was tossed out of a game with Bosnia-Herzegovina with a red card. It suspended him for the Round of 16 World Cup match with Belgium.
Enter the man who ruins everything he touches, the economy, inflation, integrity, and especially honesty and fair play.
Balogun was reinstated by the ruling agency for World Cup Soccer, FIFA, after an admitted call from the White House.
It infuriated the Belgian team. Much like the Titans in that long-ago Virginia 3-A high school semi-final.
They destroyed the American team with Balogun playing.
Ironically, Balogun is exactly the type of person the present regime would deport. His parents are Nigerian. They were living in London and visiting New York when he was born. He became a dreaded “anchor baby.” If you don’t know what that is, check your MAGA playbook, it’s on page one.
Balogun wasn’t the only United States player of questionable ancestry. There were six other players from foreign nations on the American roster. Sebastian Berhalter, Antonee Robinson, and Gio Reyna, all born in the United Kingdom. Sergino Dest is from the Netherlands, Alejandros Zendejas was born in Juarez, Mexico, and Mark Tillman is from Nuremberg, Germany.
That’s seven of the 26 players on the American roster.
If Balogun had not played, and if FIFA President Gianni Infantino hadn’t been coerced into reversing the suspension, would the US have won? Doubtful; American soccer, even with a large contingent of foreign players, isn’t near the level of the world’s best national teams.
It’s no surprise that Infantino reversed the Red Card. He’s the one who invented a fake peace prize last winter to assuage the bruised ego of someone who has done nothing for world peace.
The message the Belgian team sent to Infantino and the entire world after their 4-1 blowout of the USA was succinct: “Reverse this.”
The infantile ego of the FIFA peace prize winner was battered a bit more when video emerged of the Belgian players doing his characteristic double-fist, don’t move your feet, dance move in their locker room after the match.
It’s not the first time politics have entered international athletic competition.
The most famous came in 1936 in Berlin during what is often called the “Nazi Olympics.” Adolph Hitler was furious that the United States brought African American athletes to compete. The exploits of Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf are the stuff of legend.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics. It was a controversial decision, one that contributed to his resounding defeat to Ronald Reagan that fall.
Carter infuriated hundreds of Olympic athletes who trained their entire lives for a chance to compete. Carter went further and pressured other nations to boycott as well.
In another ironic situation, he was protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, something we as a nation repeated three decades later.
One of the many reasons politics and sports should never mix.
The late Bob Harms, legendary Lander Valley High School track coach, told me about an athlete he considered the best ever to come out of Lander: Paul Fields.
Paul was a hurdler and triple-jumper extraordinaire for the Tigers. He became a decathlete at Western Colorado University. He scored 7,128 points, a school record that sent him to the Hall of Fame. Fields was training for a spot on the 1980 Olympic team when the boycott came.
Four years later, when the United States hosted the Olympics in Los Angeles, the Soviets returned the favor and boycotted the event.
The Olympics in the era of the Cold War were politics played out on the track, floor, and mat. The Russians and the Americans battled in track and field, boxing, wrestling, and basketball.
In 1972, the USA men’s basketball team entered the finals on an all-time 63-game win streak. In a blatantly biased final, the Soviets won 51-50 on three consecutive bad calls in the final seconds. The United States refused to accept the silver medal.
In those same Olympics, Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization infiltrated the Olympic compound. They killed two Israeli athletes, then took nine more hostage.
In a botched rescue attempt by West German police, the terrorists killed nine more Israelis. Only four Israeli athletes survived the 1972 Olympic Games.
The standing joke for generations in the Olympics came in diving and gymnastics, two sports dependent on the opinions of a panel of judges to determine how well an athlete performed.
The panel was made up of judges from different countries.
In gymnastics, a perfect score is a 10.
The joke was, “The scores are in for the girl from Atlanta, 10, 10, 10 and the Russian judge gave her a 4.”
It wasn’t far from reality.
The problem is that we’ve become the Russian judge. Politics, especially from the White House, should never sway an athletic event.
It never had on a personal level until last week, and as usual, that blew up.