A mid-summer grab-bag
Updates on the Blue Jays (still bad), Tiger Woods (same), Bronny James (meh), and football's racism problem (heavy sigh)
Hello, and welcome back to Unobstructed Views after what was a brief and somewhat unplanned summer hiatus.
Things are definitely slower here in mid-summer, and I was going to move to a weekly schedule through August, but then some unexpected internet challenges made even that tricky. Who knew there were parts of Ontario where cellular coverage is almost non-existent. (Probably lots of people know that, to be honest. Just not me.)
Anyway, I’ve been away for the early part of this week as well for a story that will feature in a future edition of this newsletter, but for now let us catch up on some of the limited happenings from the last week or so.
The Blue Jays: still bad
In one of the many weird things about the Toronto Blue Jays this season, they passed from Team in Full Crisis to Team of General Indifference without anyone really noticing. First it seemed like a massive problem that they were underperforming to such a degree given their payroll and contract status of key players — surely heads would roll! — and then they just kept struggling while almost nothing changed.
Now the only question is whether they blow it up a little or a lot at next week’s trade deadline. Actually, that’s not the only question: the job security of general manager Ross Atkins and manager John Schneider, which has been far more robust than one might imagine given the team’s 45-55 record, could have significant influence on what happens at the deadline. If Atkins thinks he has a chance to get this roster back to the playoffs next year, maybe he tinkers rather than sells big. If he’s done in October anyway, there’s a much better chance that he (or more, accurately, his boss Mark Shapiro) begins retooling right now.
I’d bet against Bo Bichette getting traded unless they can convince a team to bet on past performance rather than the production of this mess of a year, but the most intriguing trade candidate remains the would-be face of the franchise. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., has become something of an enigma. Elite hitter, still kind of disappointing. It’s a conundrum! My more fully-formed thoughts on Vladdy were published over at theScore late last week.
Tiger Woods: Ouch
Speaking of things that were published at theScore, one of my editors asked last week if I had any thoughts on Tiger and I sure did.
This piece was published before the Open Championship began (or as it was beginning, due to time zones and whatnot), and I wondered if I was playing down Tiger’s chances a bit too much. NOPE.
After a +14 score over two days to miss the cut at Royal Troon, that brings Tiger’s post-car-crash results in official tournaments to: three cuts made, three WDs, four missed cuts. It’s hard to imagine that he’s enjoying any of this, and it has to be 50/50 at this point whether he will enter the field at Augusta next April.
Bronny James: still meh
The biggest story of the NBA Summer League was the performance of the son of LeBron James, which is far from ideal.
It’s not that Bronny James was completely awful or amazingly good, he was just kind of middling, which would be perfectly normal for the 55th pick in the draft.
But because he is Bronny James, his uneventful professional debut was closely scrutinized and became a main story on the many talking-head sports shows that drive the sports-news agenda, especially in the slow days of summer.
And because Bronny was drafted by the Lakers, and given a four-year guaranteed contract, while his 39-year-old dad was re-upping with the same team for three years and about $150-million, the teenager will always be subject to criticism that he was gifted the roster spot to placate LBJ Sr.
Which, if we’re being honest, is fine. It’s the 55th pick in the draft, basically a lottery ticket, and even the roster-building implications of giving him a guaranteed deal are waaaaaaay down the list of challenges facing the Lakers in the coming seasons, but he and his family (and agent) have made himself a target by engineering a move to Los Angeles in this way.
If he was on literally any other NBA team, whatever happened from here on out could be reasonably assumed to be merit-based. But now? The questions about whether he is with the Lakers to keep dad happy will remain. It’s not fair, but it was avoidable.
Football’s racism problem
For a neutral, Argentina’s win at the Copa America was pleasant enough.
If nothing else, it solidified the national-team legacy of Lionel Messi, who until not that long ago was a figure of some derision in his homeland because for all of his amazing accomplishments in the sport, they had all come in Spain. A pair of Copas and a World Cup over his last three tournaments will do wonders for one’s reputation.
But then the livestream happened. While a bunch of Argentinians were celebrating the win over Colombia, Enzo Fernandez, the young midfielder, started livestreaming the ruckus. The celebrants, including Fernandez and presumably other members of the team and staff, started signing a song about the French national team, deriding them for the fact that several of the French players were born elsewhere.
Someone realized this was maybe not a great idea and ordered the livestream stopped. Too late, fellas.
The French Football Federation called the song ‘racist and discriminatory,’ which is plainly correct.
Here is a sampling of the (translated) lyrics:
They play for France, but their parents are from Angola. Their mother is from Cameroon, while their father is from Nigeria. But their passport says French.
Ok, then. You might be wondering why, exactly, Team Argentina was signing this thing after beating Colombia at a tournament in which the French were not involved. Fair question! The song/chant began at the 2022 World Cup, where Argentina beat France in the final.
It is all exceedingly depressing. Insulting a team because some of the players have immigrant parents? That’s a terrible sentiment on its own, but a particularly stupid one to apply to France, which is a developmental hotbed on its own. So racist AND dumb, then.
Fernandez and his fellow celebrants can’t claim to have been naive to the song’s meaning, either, since the French football authorities complained about its use at the World Cup. So they understood it was wrong and hurtful, and then after a tournament among non-French nations, they sang it anyway.
Wesley Fofana, a teammate of Fernandez at Premier League club Chelsea, posted a clip of the video on social media with the following caption: ‘Football in 2024: uninhibited racism.’ People responded to that with racist abuse.
He is, unfortunately, correct. For the life of me I cannot understand why so many around the sport think that mocking someone’s race is an acceptable form of behaviour toward a rival team and its players. This stuff has been going on for decades. Fernandez has been contrite, saying the song contained offensive language and that there was no excuse for using those words. Then he offered a bit of an excuse:
I stand against discrimination in all forms and apologise for getting caught up in the euphoria of our Copa America celebrations. That video, that moment, those words, do not reflect my beliefs or my character. I am truly sorry.
Personally, I think that ‘sorry I was racist, I was just excited’ is not the greatest of defences, but opinions may vary on the matter.
Fernandez, who may yet be subject to punishment by Chelsea, was at least a far sight better than Argentina’s vice-president, who offered this:
I mean … sigh. It is, of course, responses like that which ensures incidents like the one involving the celebratory Argentinians keep happening.
Reece James, the Chelsea club captain, who is Black, said on Wednesday that he wants the team to move on from all this. Many of his teammates might not feel the same.