Casual
_Casual Liberal Sports: An Update The Dallas Cowboys are touted as America's Team, but have you ever encountered a fan of the Cowboys in the Northeast or the Rust Belt or on the West Coast? Not...
...At least that was his old nickname...
...Tom Landry, coach for decades, is a pal of Sen...
...Absent owner Peter Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles might be a conservative team, too...
...Roger Stau-bach, the Cowboys' greatest quarterback, is a prominent Texas Republican and chum of Jack Kemp...
...By the yardsticks of location and fans, they should be a liberal team...
...Important as it is, location isn't everything...
...Just listing these factors should be clue enough for you to figure out why the Cowboys are conservative...
...They were entrepreneurial in the extreme, using speed and fielding and good managing to make the most of their skills...
...And the personnel...
...Coinciden-tally, the 49ers' star quarterback, Steve Young, did a TV ad for the Dole campaign...
...It's tricky, not to mention subjective, but four factors are determinative: the home, the owner, the fans, and the character of the team itself, including the coaches and the style of play...
...Now he's a born-again Christian...
...Yes, not only are there liberal sports (soccer, baseball, jogging) and conservative sports (football, boxing, wrestling), but there are liberal and conservative teams...
...All Detroit teams are conservative because their fans are from the suburbs, which is Republican turf, and not the city, a Democratic stronghold...
...The real reason the Cowboys are loathed is they're a conservative team...
...But that's not necessarily the case with football teams...
...It's the New York Yankees, who won the World Series by whipping the liberal Atlanta Braves in six games...
...In the Braves' case, the owners matter a lot: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda...
...Turner is one of the Democratic party's biggest donors...
...My pick for the most conservative team of 1996 is surprising, even to me...
...They're from Dallas, for heaven's sake, the most conservative big city in America...
...All Washington teams are liberal because the fans are, well, from Washington...
...The exception was the Washington Redskins of the 1970s under coach George Allen, father of the conservative Virginia governor...
...Better yet, their star relief pitcher, John Wetteland, was nicknamed Psycho...
...But they're hardly politically incorrect...
...On the other hand, Wayne Huizenga, who owns the Florida Marlins, is a buddy of George Bush and a Team 100 member, making the Marlins a conservative team...
...Today's Cowboy crew features QB Troy Aikman—liberals are never named Troy—and coach Barry Switzer, a winning-is-everything type...
...Because of their proclivity for violence, all hockey teams are conservative...
...All Seattle teams are liberal because fans there invented the wave, a liberal innovation designed to keep spectators from following the action on the field...
...Not often, I'll bet...
...Fred Barnes...
...Liberals think players are working-class even when they're working for $30 million a season, like Michael Jordan...
...He made his dough on asbestos lawsuits and broke ranks with fellow baseball owners who wanted to stand up to the players' union...
...The Atlanta Braves are the South's favorite baseball team, but they're not conservative despite their location and fans...
...They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps after falling behind 6-0 in the crucial fourth game of the Series...
...Besides, they're a kind of halfway house, bringing back Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry from drug rehab...
...Owner Jerry Jones may not be a right-wing crazy, but he sure doesn't act liberal...
...The fact that the Cowboys are a very good football team that regularly humbles foes from the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific states plays a part, but only a small part...
...The ones that really love to hit, like the always-brutal San Francisco 49ers, are conservative...
...Nor do the fans...
...Jesse Helms...
...Fans make a difference...
...A conservative playing style, however, is the best measure of a team's ideology...
...Turner and Fonda do the tomahawk chop at Braves games, driving Indian—oops, I mean Native American—activists nuts...
...How can you tell which are which...
...But the reason the Yankees are conservative is their style of play...
...Their owner, George Steinbrenner, is also a product of rehab, having been convicted, then pardoned, of an illegal campaign contribution to Nixon...
...All Philadelphia teams are conservative because nearly all Philly fans are Reagan Democrats...
...There's a good reason for this, but not one you'd automatically think of...
...Allen and President Nixon were good friends...
...If a team is rough, as eager to indulge in violence as finesse, if it's opportunistic and obsessive about winning, it's conservative...
...I once had to listen to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal but a Baltimore native, extol Angelos for siding with the greedy players...
...Any team run by Turner, the world's richest tree-hugger and Christian-basher, is a liberal team...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 13
