Chadron Hazelbaker

Advertisers tap into fears of men being too soft and not fully male.  One radio commercial for nutritional supplements asks when it became OK for men to be soft and lack physical power – coupling these questions with a call to make men great again.   

I have spent much time researching and teaching about the ills of sport, especially at the collegiate level where the cultural tradition is that sports is vital to the industrial-education complex, but in reality, the educational value is dubious at best. 

Recently, in a discussion of UCLA quarterback and projected high first round draft pick Josh Rosen, the language that is used to discuss the Jewish player’s draft-ability came to up. 

As a father and a teacher, each school shooting brings a visceral reaction.  I recognize the young, white, male perpetrators, filled with great pain, confusion, and isolation.

While money is one of the key drivers of which advertising content is selected, it is far from the only one.  Both the media companies and the NFL work to control the content that is presented as a part of their brand conscious marketing in and around the game.

On Friday, Octo. 27, Spokane Civic Theatre is presenting a one night only reader’s theatre production of "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," a one-act play that uses the poetry and art produced in Terezin, Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1945 as Nazi Germany transformed the town into a ghetto and transit camp, where thousands of Jewish people were transported to concentration camps and the furnaces of Aushwitz. 

Many people who are staking out a position of protest against the various actions and reactions of sports figures have called for politics to be kept out of sports.