Trouble in ‘Red Pill’ Land

Posted on | October 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

Rollo Tomassi speaking in 2018.

This past spring, I traveled to Florida for the 21 Convention, a gathering of the “Red Pill” community (a/k/a, “The Manosphere”). What especially drew me to Orlando was a desire to see first-hand the men whose movement represents hope of turning back the tide of Third Wave feminism. There is only so much you can learn about people online, and the opportunity to meet these guys in person was important.

Scarcely had that event ended, however, than a schism of sorts emerged in the manosphere. There was a falling-out between the 21 Convention’s Anthony Johnson and Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi. While I don’t know the details of this quarrel, and am averse to being forced to choose sides in such a dispute where all participants are potential allies in the Culture Wars, I perceive that envy of Tomassi’s influence may be at the root of this schism. At any rate, several of Tomassi’s critics have formed a sort of alliance against him, and one of these critics, Jared Trueheart, sent me a copy of his new book The Red Pill Ideology: The Love Child of Pick-Up Artists and Feminists. Trueheart’s argument is essentially that the Red Pill movement peaked circa 2016 and is now passé, that changes in social and economic circumstances have rendered Tomassi’s insights on “intersexual dynamics” irrelevant. Well, I don’t think so.

Far be it from me to endorse every argument Rollo Tomassi has ever made, but the proof is in the pudding. That is to say, there are men who have read The Rational Male and assert that it literally saved their lives. By explaining female behavior, he helps readers understand their own romantic failures and find hope of future success. Consider one of Rollo’s controversial bits of advice (and one that Trueheart criticizes), that of “spinning plates.” The smart young bachelor, Rollo advises, should develop his options with multiple women, rather than succumbing to the temptation of “one-itis” (investing all his energy and resources in an idealized Dream Girl). This is just good common sense, especially when you consider how men are perceived from a woman’s perspective.

Two time-proven adages — “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Familiarity breeds contempt” — express the problem of the guy who clings too closely to a girlfriend (or potential girlfriend) in such a way that he seems helpless and desperate. What this looks like, from the girl’s perspective, is that this guy has no other options. No other woman wants him, and therefore his value is diminished in her eyes.

What the guy with a “one-itis” problem has done is to forfeit his power.

Despite everything that has changed in the sexual marketplace in recent decades, the fact remains that a young man who is going places in life — the guy with obvious future potential — is viewed as a highly desirable companion by young women. The labels “Alpha male” and “Beta male,” as used in the manosphere, may fail to capture this dynamic. Young women can be quite foolish in their choices, and feminism’s influence tends to rationalize and encourage female folly, but the wise young woman (the one who aspires to be “wife material”) assesses men according to their suitability as future husbands. Well, the high-quality young man is a commodity much in demand, his companionship is valuable, and such a man ought not to act like a desperate loser.

When Rollo tells guys to think in terms of “spinning plates,” he’s encouraging them to avoid a mentality that makes a guy seem like a loser. Your behavior when interacting with a woman you find attractive will tend to convey desperation if you feel you have no other options, that you must “close this sale” or be doomed to loneliness. Whereas, by contrast, if you’ve got in your speed-dial the numbers of a half-dozen girls you sometimes date, and who would be glad to drop in for “Netflix and chill,” your behavior with a new female acquaintance will tend to be more confident and casual — The Attitude:

Damone: All right… where did you see her?
Ratner: She’s in my biology class.
Damone: Did you get her number?
Ratner: No.
Damone: Did you get her name?
Ratner: No. It’s too soon.
Damone: It’s never too soon! Girls decide how far to let you go in the first five minutes.
Ratner: Well, what do you want me to do? Go up to this strange girl in my biology class and say, ‘Hello! I’d like you to take your clothes off and jump on me?’
Damone: I would. Yeah.
Ratner: Really?
Damone: I can see it all now. This is going to be just like the girl you fell in love with at Fotomat this summer. You bought forty bucks of f–kin’ film and you never even talked to her. You don’t even own a camera.
Ratner: You tell me, Mike. What do I do? . . .
Damone: This is what you do — start from the minute you walk into biology. I mean, don’t just walk in. You move across the room. And you don’t talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That’s what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Damone: That’s the idea, Rat. That’s the attitude.
Ratner: The attitude?
Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don’t care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin’. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.

That scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High ought to be mandatory viewing for young losers who don’t understand why they’re losing.

Having the appropriate mindset is as essential to winning at romance as it is to winning at sports. The problem with many young men nowadays is that they don’t have a positive male influence in their lives — Dads, older brothers, etc. — who can help them figure this stuff out. Too much of what young men think they “know” about women is either picked up from their (equally clueless) peers, or else a regurgitation of some feminist-friendly formula popularized by the media. What Rollo Tomassi is trying to do, it seems to me, is to provide his readers with the kind of knowledge that will be genuinely helpful to them. Oh, and by the way — this seems obvious to me, but perhaps it needs to be pointed out — the one thing a Red Pill guy should never do, when dealing with women, is to act as if he’s following some kind of script or using tactics.

One of the problems with the Red Pill community, which as Trueheart says grew out of pickup-artist (PUA) forums, is that once Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game became a bestseller, every would-be PUA in the country was operating according to the same script. And once all the little tricks of the PUA craft were published online, women could learn to spot a player’s game the minute he made his approach. The tactic of “negging,” for example, won’t work if the target knows it’s a tactic.

Back in the day — I speak of the late 1970s and early ’80s — it was just assumed that every guy in the disco was trying to score. There wasn’t much subtlety about that scene, and the only question was who would pair up with whom, and which guys would leave the disco alone. A lot has changed since then, but one of the constant factors is this: Male demand for sex, collectively, always exceeds the available female supply.

What this means is that men are always in competition against other men, and unless a guy is a natural winner — the true Alpha, who is irresistible to women — he will automatically lose out in this competition, unless he can otherwise develop some advantage.

This is basically an eternal problem for young men, but what has made the competition more ruthless in recent decades is the influence of feminism which teaches young women that the sexual competition is not men versus other men, but rather male versus female. According to the zero-sum-game mentality of feminism, male success is always harmful to women — he is her enemy, rather than her potential partner — and the goal of women should be not to find a desirable male companion, but rather to be completely independent of males. Feminism encourages young women to develop a hostile anti-male attitude, and young men are baffled in their attempts to understand and cope with this hostility.

What the Washington Post has called “the Great American Sex Drought” is the best evidence of feminism’s destructive “success.” Men and women are having less sex, and this is exactly the goal feminism seeks: Men are bad, and it is wrong for women to have sex with men.

Jared Trueheart suggests, and I think he may be onto something, that we can expect more men to return to religious morality in the near future. (He cites PUA legend Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh’s recent conversion to orthodox Christianity as portending such a trend.) However that may be, I don’t think it invalidates the Red Pill insights that Rollo Tomassi shares with his readers. Insofar as Tomassi is accurately describing patterns of female behavior, it does not matter whether one approves or disapproves of this at a moral level. The facts are still the facts, and while a genuinely Christian woman would not act like a party girl on the club scene, the temptation to sin is never really far away.

Jesus told his disciples: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” In other words, the Christian must necessarily be wise to the ways of the world, even as he seeks to avoid sinful temptation. The kind of secular wisdom conveyed by The Rational Male and its sequels has been applauded by Rollo Tomassi’s readers as life-saving knowledge, and we therefore ought not to disparage his work, simply because he doesn’t preach against fornication. If you want a sermon against sin, go to church. But if you want to understand women’s behavior — as it actually is, rather than what we might ideally hope it would be — I think you can learn a lot from Rollo Tomassi. And so I hope that somehow the schism in the manosphere can be mended, because it ill behooves men to be divided against each other, when feminists seek to unite all women against us.

Category: The Red Pill

‘Naked Democratic Congresswoman’

Posted on | October 21, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Naked Democratic Congresswoman’

Well, there’s three words you don’t often see in a headline:

An explicit photograph sheds light on California Democratic Rep. Katie Hill’s three-way relationship with her husband and a staffer, which lasted over a year before she broke off the arrangement early this year.
Unknown to the staffer or Hill’s husband, the congresswoman had allegedly been having an affair with another staffer, her legislative director Graham Kelly, for about a year when she broke off the throuple, according to texts and photos received by RedState.
The staffer involved in the three-way relationship is a young woman who joined Hill’s campaign for Congress in 2017 right after graduating college. The romance began shortly after the staffer, then 22 years old, joined the campaign. Hill’s side-affair with Kelly began sometime in 2018 when Kelly was her finance director. Hill’s husband filed for divorce after discovering the California representative’s relationship with Kelly.
Pictures and texts provided to RedState confirm Hill’s relationship with her female staffer, which was previously unknown before the outlet broke the news on Friday.
During the throuple’s relationship, the staffer began joining the married couple on vacations, including one to Alaska. Several photos of Hill and the staffer taken during that vacation have leaked, with the staffer’s face blurred.

But who are we to judge? Let he who has never been in a three-way with a House Democrat staffer throw the first stone!

Category: Congress, Democrats, Scandal

Emily (a/k/a ‘Ross’) McFarland ‘Harbored Animosity’ Toward Victim, Police Say

Posted on | October 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Emily (a/k/a ‘Ross’) McFarland ‘Harbored Animosity’ Toward Victim, Police Say

Sunday, we reported on the murder of Martha White, 66, in Auburn, Alabama. A news account stated that the suspect in that case, named as Ross Jonathan McFarland, 16, was “publicly known to identify as male” and yet was “being held at the Lee County Detention Facility as a female.” The latest news clarifies the circumstances of the case:

An affidavit filed in Lee County court details the murder of an Auburn woman shot last Thursday and claims she was killed by her previous soon-to-be teenage step-son.
Ross Jonathan McFarland, formerly known as Emily Ruth McFarland, 16, is charged with the murder of Martha “Marti” Jones White, 66.
White was engaged to McFarland’s father, according to the affidavit obtained by the Opelika-Auburn News on Monday afternoon.
Auburn police responded to a subdivision in the 700 block of Burke Place at about 7 p.m. Thursday after receiving a call reporting an unresponsive female.
When officers arrived they located White, who was lying on the floor suffering from an apparent gunshot wound to the face. She was pronounced deceased at the scene.
McFarland was developed as a suspect during the investigation.
Police discovered that there was a missing Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun missing from the residence while interviewing an unidentified individual, the affidavit said.
Police later located a witness who was a close friend with McFarland. The witness stated that she and McFarland were in the residence earlier and she saw McFarland shoot White as she turned her head to look away from him, said the affidavit.
McFarland then picked up the shell casing and the two left the residence, the witness stated to police.
“The witness also stated that McFarland harbored animosity towards White for being engaged to his father in such a short time after his mother’s death,” the affidavit reads.

The suspect is the daughter of Dr. John H. McFarland, 68, and his late wife Donna, who died last November at age 45. So, the doctor’s wife dies and his daughter now identifies as his “son,” who shot his fiancée to death. It’s a latter-day Peyton Place down in East Alabama, ain’t it?

Category: Alabama, Crime, The Transgender Cult

‘You’re White, You Know’

Posted on | October 21, 2019 | 1 Comment

One of my former co-defendant John Hoge‘s favorite stories about our lengthy legal entanglement with Brett Kimberlin is a moment in the 2014 Maryland trial when I was on the witness stand being questioned by Kimberlin, who was acting as his own attorney, pro se. Kimberlin kept trying to bring up my alleged “racism,” a legend largely manufactured by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and our attorney Patrick Ostronic would respond: “Objection, your honor — irrelevant.”

The judge in the case was black, as was the foreman and several members of the jury, and the fact that Ali Akbar was among the co-defendants with whom Kimberlin alleged I had conspired against him was rather an obvious rebuttal of any accusation of racism on my part.

We could tell that the judge was irritated by Kimberlin’s repeated attempts to bring up this “racism” angle, as it was obvious he merely meant to smear my reputation, to prejudice the jury against me.

Having prayed hard prior to my appearance on the witness stand, I think I acquitted myself rather well. At one point, in fact, Kimberlin tried to cut off my testimony by making an objection and the judge responded to the effect, Hey, you asked the question and he’s answering. Overruled.

Being the defendant in a lawsuit is not fun, and it is an experience I’d encourage others to avoid. Even when you are dealing with a nuisance suit you know you’re bound to win, the legal hassle is a drain on your time and energy. Nevertheless, I have to admit my time on the witness stand was rather enjoyable, and after Kimberlin finished his questioning, I leaned into the microphone and said, “You’re white, you know.”

This is one of my pet peeves about modern “social justice” rhetoric. Five or six decades ago, when you had Klansmen burning crosses or lynching black people, everybody knew what actual racism was, and even among people who might disagree about civil rights as a matter of policy, there was widespread consensus in condemnation of terroristic violence and overt expressions of racial prejudice. What has happened more recently is that liberals have attempted to hijack “civil rights” as an all-purpose political weapon to wield against anyone who might oppose them — or even against their own allies, as witness the attempt of Democratic presidential candidates to throw Joe Biden under the bus for his long-ago statements in opposition to court-imposed school busing.

What we so often see nowadays is one white person pointing the accusing finger at another white person: “RAAAAACIST!”

Do white liberals think black people haven’t caught onto this game by now? Do you really think the SPLC’s crooked hustle is not obvious?

Last week, I noticed that there has been a mysterious surge of traffic to my “About” page. My online biography, which had averaged 10 clicks a day for the past two years, was suddenly getting hundreds of visitors daily, amounting to about 4,000 visits in two weeks. What has happened, I wondered, that could have created such interest in me?

The answer, it turns out, is Ginger Gorman.

Longtime readers may recognize Gorman’s name. She is the Australian journalist who in 2010 did a feature about a gay couple who had adopted a little boy with the headline: “Two Dads Are Better Than One.”

Three years later, there was another headline:

Two Gay Men Used Russian Surrogate
Mother to Create Boy for Sex Abuse Ring

That headline appeared on my July 1, 2013, post about the sentencing of the two men, Mark Newton and Peter Truong, who had been convicted of heinous crimes as part of an international child-pornography scheme known as the “Boy Lovers Network.” It seemed to me obvious at that time — and many people agreed — that Ginger Gorman had been guilty of journalistic incompetence in failing to adequately investigate the two men she depicted in 2010 as “a loving family and a loving household.”

Well, it turns out, Ginger Gorman turned that incident into a book deal, and she has lately been promoting her book, Troll Hunting. Believe it or not, Gorman now claims she was the real victim in all this:

Within 72 hours of Mark Newton being sentenced, I started to get scores of hateful tweets, mostly from people in the United States calling themselves conservatives. They were responding to the article I’d written two years earlier, which was still online.
My trolls insisted I should have known what was going on behind closed doors. They wanted me shamed. . . .
My husband Don and I quickly realised that location services were turned on for my Twitter feed and you could just about pinpoint our house on Google Maps. That night we both lay awake in bed wondering if our children were in danger.
Six days after Newton was sentenced in 2013 came the second frightening moment. Don found a photo of our family on the fascist social network Iron March. The now-defunct website carried the slogan “Gas the kikes” on its homepage.

According to Gorman, the real issue here is not her own incompetence as a reporter; rather, it’s that people on the Internet said mean things about her. And guess what? She blames . . . me.

In her book she devotes hundreds of words to portraying me as a “white supremacist” who “helped to create a tsunami of hate” against her. And I suppose that in media appearances promoting her book, she invokes my name, thus inspiring people to look me up. And just as her depiction of Mark Newton and Peter Truong as a “loving family” was a blunder inspired by her own bias, so likewise her defamatory portrayal of me is a function of her refusal to take responsibility for her own errors.

It reminds me very much of Brett Kimberlin, a convicted bomber-turned-“progressive-activist, suing me because I told the truth about him. It is not enough for such people to defend themselves with lies. They feel a need to destroy the reputations of those who speak the truth.

Category: Australia, Gays, Media Bias, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: Roll Tide!

Posted on | October 20, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Quick and dirty since I have to pack up and drive to Carson City tonight so the State Bureau of Disability Adjudication can’t lose my paperwork again. Give it up for the 2019 Alabama Dance Team.

Roll Tide.

90 Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #776, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Fusion Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: June Allyson, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Emma Corrin, Jessica Ellerby, Sarah Stiles, From Tulsi With Love, Blondie, Mathilde Olivier, and Bikini Kill.

A View From The Beach: Sylvie Meis, The Young of the Year Numbers for Striped Bass Are In, Fish Pic Friday – Sara Salt, Balloons Banned in Boston?, Tattoo Thursday, Another Wet Shirt Wednesday, “Me and Bobby McGee”, They Can Kiss My A$$, and Hanoi Jane Arrested in D.C. Climate Protest

Proof Positive: Ingrid Bergman

Nitzakhon: Women At The Table

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

Transgender Teen Charged With Murdering Father’s Fiancée in Alabama

Posted on | October 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Transgender Teen Charged With Murdering Father’s Fiancée in Alabama

Pay close attention or you could miss the transgender angle:

A Lee County Judge has ordered an Auburn teen charged with Murder be held without bond due to public safety concerns on behalf of the Lee Co. District Attorney’s Office.
16-year-old Ross McFarland is charged in Thursday’s shooting death of 66-year-old Martha White. White was the fiancé of McFarland’s father, a prominent east Alabama physician.
“I requested an extraordinary bond in this case as a result of evidence obtained during the investigation. I presented this information to the court in support of my public safety concerns and the judge ordered the defendant to be held without bond,” shared Lee Co. District Attorney Brandon Hughes.
Prosecutors declined to comment specifically on why McFarland’s release would cause them to be concerned for the safety of the public.
Ross McFarland, who is publicly known to identify as male, is being held at the Lee County Detention Facility as a female according to detention facility records.
Coroner Bill Harris says White appears to have been killed by a single gunshot based on a preliminary exam.
Auburn police arrested the 16-year-old early Friday morning on Murder charges after the Thursday night homicide along Burke Place.
“On Oct. 18, 2019, at approximately 6:30 a.m., Auburn Police along with the assistance of members of the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and Tallapoosa County Drug Task Force arrested Ross Jonathan McFarland, 16, of Auburn, on a warrant for Murder,” said Auburn Police Captain Lorenzo Dorsey.
Investigators say analysis of the scene resulted in McFarland, who resides at the residence on Burke Place, being developed as a suspect in the death.
“McFarland, a truck missing from the residence and what is believed to be the weapon used in the homicide, was located in the 10,000 block of Highway 50 near Dadeville and taken into custody,” said Dorsey.
McFarland has been charged with Murder, transported to the Lee County jail and was held under a $150,000 bond until a no bond was issued in a Friday afternoon hearing. This means McFarland will be held until a possible trial unless a new bond is set in the case.

My brother Kirby called my attention to this case, but when I did a Google search, none of the other news stories I found made any mention of “Ross” being, in fact, a girl who “identifies” as a boy. This account from WRBL-TV turns out to be the only article that mentions it. My guess is that “Ross” has undergone a legal name change and had been on testosterone prior to the murder. But unless journalists start asking questions — and reporting the answers — we’re not going to know all the facts. Also, if a transgender teenager had been the victim of homicide, you’d see it all over the national media, but because this case involves a suspected transgender perpetrator, it’s just “local news.”

UPDATE: OK, it appears the case may be opposite of what I’d presumed. Ross McFarland may actually be a male who “identifies” as female. Ross’s father is Dr. John H. McFarland, age 68. Ross’s mother, Donna, who was the doctor’s second wife, died last year at age 45. The couple married in 1996 and Ross was the youngest of their three children. Dr. McFarland apparently had two children by his previous marriage. So the question is why Ross is identified as female on jail records. We must wait for further reporting to clarify this issue.

Category: Alabama, Crime, The Transgender Cult

Roll Tide!

Posted on | October 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Roll Tide!

After the conclusion of The Other Podcast Saturday night, my colleague John Hoge and I went to dinner with my brother Kirby who, thanks to generous support from the tip-jar hitters is now recuperating here. After dinner, Hoge dropped Kirby and I off at my son Jim’s house, where we watched the Alabama Crimson Tide defeat Tennessee, 35-13. The game was actually closer than the final score would imply. In the fourth quarter, Tennessee drove down to the Alabama 1-yard-line where their quarterback ran a keeper and fumbled while trying to extend the ball over the goal line. The loose ball was scooped up by Tide cornerback Trevon Diggs. As Diggs streaked down the sideline in the opposite direction, Kirby said, “Ain’t gonna catch him. He’s the fastest man on the field.”

It was this 100-yard fumble return that put the victory away, but despite their undefeated season so far, Alabama is a team with problems. There are true freshmen starting in the Tide defense which, as Coach Nick Saban said in a post-game interview, is “a work in progress.” Meanwhile, Alabama’s quarterback Tua Tagovailoa left the game with an ankle injury that will keep him out of the lineup at least until the Nov. 9 meeting with undefeated LSU, currently ranked No. 3 nationally.

Perhaps the best news to come out of Saturday’s game, however, was something Kirby called to my attention in the second half.

“A black punter — you don’t see that much,” he said.

This is one of those facts that you’re never supposed to mention. All behavioral patterns involving race are taboo in our society, so that anyone who merely points out an observable pattern automatically becomes suspected of racism. And I must confess that this was a question that never occurred to me: Why are the punters and kickers in football always white? In a sport where black players excel at every other other position, you simply take it for granted that the kickers are always white. Yet here was a black punter coming into the game for Alabama, a fact that turns out to be newsworthy for other reasons:

Ty Perine is a punting sensation.
The walk-on freshman from Prattville High School entered the second half of Alabama’s game against Tennessee and instantly became a fan favorite.
Alabama fans have been dealing with kicking woes for years and the Crimson Tide have ranked near the bottom of college football in punting average this season.
So it’s no surprise that the crowd at Bryant-Denny Stadium cheered wildly for Perine who started his career with two successful punts for a 46.5 yard average. . . .
“He’s a guy that’s a walk-on that’s gotten better throughout the course of the year and we thought it was time for him to get an opportunity based on some of the struggles we’ve had at that position,” head coach Nick Saban said after the game. “And I thought he responded really well.” . . .
Perine entered in place of freshman Will Reichard, who played his first game in a month after suffering a hip flexor but left the game late in the second quarter with another apparent injury. Reichard had a 33-yard punt in his only attempt Saturday before leaving after apparently re-injuring the hip flexor injury that cost him two the past two games. . . .
At Prattville, Perine had quite the successful career, helping the Lions reach the playoffs his senior year and an extremely high average hang time on his punts. He was also on the soccer team.
In Week 10 of last year’s high school football season, he had a 57-yard punt downed on 1-yard line against Smiths Station with 4 minutes remaining in a 23-18 win that coach Caleb Ross called the play of the game. . . .
He was the Montgomery Advertiser’s All-Metro punter in 2017 when he averaged 42 yards per punt and had nine punts landed inside the 20. He was the news organization’s All-Metro placekicker in 2018 when he was 8-of-13 on field goals with a long of 35, including a last-minute, game-winning 28-yarder at Stanhope Elmore. He also averaged 38.2 yards on 40 punts with seven downed inside the 20 last year.

The question here is why this kid had to walk on at Alabama. Shouldn’t this high-school standout have been recruited for a scholarship? And you have to wonder if some subtle racism explains this. Because nearly all kickers and punters are white, perhaps this has become an expectation that would cause college coaches to overlook a talented black kicker, in the same way white running backs and receivers are often overlooked.

Also, notice that Perine played soccer in high school. Soccer is one area of U.S. athletics where African-Americans are severely underrepresented, in the same way (and perhaps for the same reasons) that blacks were underrepresented in golf (before Tiger Woods) and gymnastics (before Dominique Dawes) — these are sports where economic privilege matters, where private lessons and other expenses limit opportunities for poor kids. Whereas in the rest of the world, soccer is a sport of the masses, in the United States it’s a game of the suburban middle class, and parents have to pay for their kids to participate in youth leagues. Also uniquely to the United States, football attracts top athletes who might, in other countries, be playing soccer. In the South, at least, high-school soccer is played in the spring, and most high-school football coaches don’t want their players participating in soccer, mostly because of the risk of leg injuries. If you’re a high-school football star, you coach would rather you play baseball or run track in the spring. Anyway . . .

Alabama may have finally solved their punting problem, and now if the defense can get its act together, we’ll have a shot at the title.

Category: Alabama, Football