It's an eye-catching quote, but that's the gist? That football is unethical but Americans do it anyway? That waterboarding isn't real torture, but only semi-torture, liked by Americans the way Americans love the ritualized, padded violence of football? That simulating drowning is about as much fun as watching football?
No clue who the guy is. I thought it was amusing b/c there's nothing inherently desirable to waterboarding, just like there isn't to football. It's not an inalienable right in any fashion - the one b/c it's an opposite of a right if anything, and the other b/c it has no relationship to rights at all. (Football's orthogonal to rights?) It was the amusement or "eye catching" sound bite -ness to it that grabbed me. I find him entertaining - he's not truly commenting upon politics, just sports, so I didn't read much into the comment.
He's by far the best sportswriter that Sports Illustrated has, an extremely gifted long-form magazine writer who just happens to write about sports. But if you listen to his NPR commentary pieces- I missed this one, but I've heard others- he comes off incredibly obnoxious, with constant attempts to find non-sports relevance and particularly political relevance in his sports-based commentary. He insists that he's commenting on sports and not on politics, yet last week's piece was a commentary on the presidential candidates disguised as a sports piece. It's insulting to my intelligence.
I mean, if you think about it for more than three seconds, it's not a comparison that scans at all. It's a feeble attempt at topicality, at best. And then he finishes up with his self-aggrandizing comments about how he belongs on the premium tier. Um... no? I would not pay 7 cents a month extra to hear you pontificate. The only people on NPR who've earned that are Ira Glass, Leonard Lopate, Garrison Keillor, the Marketplace people, and John Schaefer. And I would only pay for Ira Glass if he agreed to fire Sarah Vowell.
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Was that Frank Deford who said it?
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