If more people listened, players wouldn't have to kneel

What is it that NFL players and others are trying to say when they're kneeling during the national anthem? 

Maybe we should look beyond the debate over the message itself and take a moment to study the body language.

There's been a lot of talk about the fact that some players have chosen not to stand during the anthem, but not much has been written — that I've seen — about the gesture they've chosen to make their point.

Kneeling isn't a gesture of repudiation. You're not flipping the bird or raising your fist. You're not throwing down a gantlet and challenging anyone to a duel. 

Players who kneel before NFL games aren't burning the flag, and they aren'teven turning their back on it. They're kneeling, and that's an important distinction in terms of what they're communicating.

Kneeling is what guys do when they propose marriage. It's what the faithful do when they pray. It's saying, "I have a request to make. Please hear me." Kneeling and bowing your head can indicate sadness or sorrow.

The nature of the gesture itself appears to have been lost in the debate over what players are upset about. Some are protesting racial inequality and police brutality. Others are doubtless upset that the president of the United States has said they should be fired for peacefully expressing their opinions.

Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954.

They're not alone. It might surprise some to learn that Jackie Robinson was among those who refused to stand for the anthem. This is the same Jackie Robinson who broke baseball's color barrier and who received an honorable discharge after serving in the Army during World War II.

Robinson wrote in his 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made, "As I write this twenty years later (after his first World Series appearance in 1952), I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

If Donald Trump wants the NFL to fire players who don't stand for the anthem, would he also evict Robinson from baseball's Hall of Fame?

DISUNITY UNMASKED

The flag and anthem are supposed to be symbols of unity (this is, after all, the United States of America). I can understand why some might object to those they think are disrupting that unity by choosing not to stand for the anthem.

But I would pose the following question: Are these players really causing disunity, or are they simply unmasking it?

True disunity: Assigning 2nd Lt. Jackie Robinson to an all-black unit of the U.S. Army and forcing him to begin his professional baseball career in the segregated "Negro Leagues."

True disunity: Erecting monuments that celebrate the leaders of a secessionist movement that left more than 600,000 people dead and nearly destroyed the country — all for the sake of preserving another form of disunity: slavery.

True disunity: Waving the Confederate battle flag, war symbol of that secessionist movement, 150-plus years later.

Race aside, slavery aside, how is it acceptable to anyone that an American citizen standing for the national anthem should also display a flag that was carried into battle against men who raised the Stars and Stripes? 

How can anyone defend such a flag of treason and, at the same time, object to someone kneeling and perhaps bowing his head before a sporting event? Someone who doesn't want to fight, but just wants to be heard. And acknowledged. And valued.

That's what this is about. It's not too much to ask. Indeed, it's exactly what our flag is supposed to represent.

Mayweather-McGregor: We just got sucker punched

There's a sucker born every minute, and maybe half of them are fight fans. Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor are well aware of this, which is why they're both laughing all the way to the bank.

Now, I'm a fight fan, but I'm not a sucker: I didn’t watch the Mayweather-McGregor fiasco for the simple reason that I had no interest in paying $100 to line either man’s pockets. McGregor's a loudmouth, and Mayweather has a history of domestic violence. And they have this in common: They're both con artists.

Now that the fight is over, some commentators are saying it was a decent fight and worth the money.

I didn’t watch, but I beg to differ.

These commentators apparently are reacting to the fight exceeding expectations. But consider: When you expect to be served stale Spam, an undercooked hot dog can taste downright delicious, and that’s what these to combatants were – undercooked hot dogs.

The result just confirms how bad they both really are.

Mayweather, a 40-year-old ex-champ inactive for the past two years, knocked McGregor out (technically) in the 10th round. This tells us two things:

1. McGregor had to be pretty lousy to get knocked out by a defensive specialist who hadn’t KO’d anybody in seven – count ’em, seven – years.

2. Mayweather’s skills must have eroded markedly to let a novice like McGregor win a single round, let alone land more punches than Manny Pacquiao tagged him with a couple of years back.

This fight wasn’t for any titles. It had a single raison d'être: Making an over-the-hill has-been and a never-was greenhorn both look a lot better than they really are by pitting them against each other. And in doing so, suckering the American public into paying mega-millions to watch it. That's it.

Mayweather, who even tried to bet $400,000 on himself, retired (again) a rich man. McGregor made so much money he never needs to enter the ring again, either.

Thanks to us. We’re so damned gullible.

Well, not me. Remember, I didn’t buy into this malarkey. The fact that I predicted this would happen doesn’t make me a genius – almost everyone with half a brain cell forecast the same outcome. But it does mean I don’t have to wash the stale Spam out of my mouth with a gallon of liquid bleach.

And it also means I’m not $100 poorer.

Mayweather vs. McGregor: Why do we keep buying empty hype?

Hype sells. And we keep buying it (then demanding our money back when we don’t get what was promised).

But I’m here to tell you, caveat emptor, baby!

Let the buyer beware. To those of you willing to plunk down $100, or whatever they end up charging, for a farce of a fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, be my guest. But don’t say you weren’t warned.

The whole premise of this fight doesn’t involve fists, but mouths. Mayweather has a big one, and a lot of people want to see someone shut it. McGregor has a big one, too, and some other people would love to see … well, you get the idea.

What you’re more likely to see is, well, a whole bunch of nothing. Mayweather isn’t known for shutting people’s mouths. He’s known for avoiding punches, playing pitter-pat with his jab and piling up enough points to win the kind of decision that leaves fight fans disappointed and disgusted at themselves for wasting their money.

Mayweather has knocked out barely half his opponents and hasn’t KO’d anyone out in almost six years. But he’s never lost.

McGregor lost barely a year ago in a mixed martial arts fight to Nate Diaz. That fight didn’t go the distance, and although McGregor won the rematch, but only by a majority decision in an extremely close contest.

So what makes Mayweather-McGregor a fight worth seeing?

I honestly don’t know. You tell me.

In his most famous fight (and the biggest money-maker of all time), Mayweather danced around for 12 rounds and won a decision against Manny Pacquiao in a lackluster fight that left boxing fans frustrated that they’d paid big money to be bored stiff.

There’s nothing to suggest the same thing won’t happen this time. McGregor, much like Pacquiao, will probably stalk Mayweather, who will dance away, land jabs and flurries of light punches, make McGregor look like an amateur and walk away with win No. 50.

There’s no title at stake, but there’s precedent for this sort of spectacle.

In 1976, Muhammad Ali fought a sumo wrestler named Antonio Inoki in a boxing-wrestling hybrid match. Inoki spent most of the time on his back, kicking at Ali’s legs. Ali's incentive? As with Mayweather, it was all about the Benjamins: in this case a $6 million payday.

Three years later, Ali took on Denver Broncos defensive end Lyle Alzado in an exhibition match that was all boxing. Alzado, who had boxed as an amateur, was threatening to leave pro football and devote himself to the ring full time (it was, mainly, a stunt designed to get him a better contract).

Alzado actually put on a somewhat credible performance. But the fight, such as it was, turned out to be better than expected largely because Ali was out of shape and didn’t seem to take it seriously. He still managed to win the unofficial decision after eight rounds.

Ali was officially retired at the time, and when he came out of retirement later, he was a shadow of the champion he had once been.

That’s about the only hope McGregor has of winning a fight against Mayweather: that the guy who calls himself "Money" has deteriorated to such a degree that McGregor has a puncher's chance of winning.

It's a slim chance. But hype is built on such slim chances, especially when a white guy is stepping into the ring to challenge a less-than-popular African-American champion. Yes, I’ll say it: This is another one of those “great white hope” boondoggles that goes all the way back to Johnson vs. Jefferies and has a not-so-illustrious timeline that extends right on up through Holmes-Cooney.

At least Jefferies and Cooney were actual boxers.

Racial overtones aside, it seems farfetched (to put it mildly) to think that a guy from a different sport can waltz into the ring and beat a heretofore undefeated boxer. I just don’t buy it. And if you do, feel free to complain all you want when the fight turns out to be a predictable yawner. Just don’t expect me to listen.

Everybody's doing it: The decline and fall of American sport

The Russians did it.

They didn’t act alone, it wasn’t planned, and they had no idea the chain of events they were setting in motion when they did it, but I’m going to blame them, even so.

I blame them for the steady decline in the credibility of American athletics since that day in the summer of ’72 that referees – whether out of confusion or bias or something else – gave the Russians not two but three chances to defeat the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team in the Olympic finals at Munich, West Germany (for those of you too young to remember, there was still a West Germany then).

It all came to a head for me on nearly 45 years later, when the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI(e). I added that lowercase Roman letter after the uppercase Roman numerals to illustrate a point: American sports have lost credibility with me, because a team built by a couple of cheaters won the biggest game on the biggest stage.

I’m not suggesting that the Patriots cheated to win this particular game; there’s no evidence they did. But they did cheat by videotaping signals used by the New York Jets defensive coaches back in 2007, and a report suggests they recorded 40 other games played by opponents starting as far back as 2000 in what’s now known as the Spygate scandal. The subsequent Deflategate controversy pales in comparison to that, at least in my mind, but it’s another example of the same team breaking the rules in order to get an edge.

The funny thing is, the Patriots didn’t need that edge most of the time. They could have probably won without it, as they did against the Falcons on Sunday. Or did they? That’s the thing: You never really know. The Patriots have already fooled us twice and gotten caught. Shame on us. How many other times have they fooled us without anyone even knowing?

In fact, that’s an argument I’ve heard used by more than one person defending the Patriots: “Everybody does it; they just happened to get caught.”

Maybe, maybe not. But if so, it only validates my current feeling of estrangement from American sports, because if everybody’s doing it, why bother? What do the results really mean, anyway? That one team is better at cheating than the other?

That seems like the logical conclusion to me.

Hackers and users

In the month before the Super Bowl, Major League Baseball fined the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking into the Houston Astros’ computer database, penalizing them a couple of draft picks and banning the hacker for life.

I wondered at the time why the NFL hadn’t banned Patriots coach Bill Belichick for life in response to Spygate, but the answer appears obvious: Does anyone know the name of the Cardinals hacker before the Astros incident, or was he just another Star Trek redshirt who could be vaporized without anyone really caring?

Belichick, the most successful coach of the most successful team in the NFL, was a different matter. Ban him, and it would reflect poorly on a league whose mantra is to “protect the shield” – supposedly referring to the NFL logo. Don’t let that fool you, though. It’s really about protecting the cash cow behind the shield.

At the same time baseball was doing the right thing in banning the St. Louis hacker, though, Hall of Fame voters were waffling on the idea of giving their blessing to various players linked to steroid use in the 1990s and 2000s.

Players such as Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds – a pair referred to by one writer as “the pharmaceutical daily double” – both received 54 percent of the votes in 2017 after getting just 35 percent three years earlier. You need 75 percent to make it into the Hall, and they’re trending in that direction. The consensus among journalists seems to be that they’ll both get in.

The excuse, again, is that “everybody was doing it,” so to deprive them of a place in Cooperstown would be to, essentially, condemn an entire generation of baseball as illegitimate.

Unfortunately, it was.

The suspicion that everyone was doing it doesn’t make it more legitimate, but less so – except, apparently, in the minds of the majority of Hall of Fame voters.

The turning point: 1972

Scandals are nothing new to American sports, but the way we deal with them is. This is where the Russian debacle of ’72 comes in. Americans were so incensed that they began a campaign to allow pro basketball players to compete in the Olympics. We’d show those no good, cheating sons of Boris and Natasha! We’d assemble a “dream team”of the NBA’s best, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly what we did. And, I’ll admit, I was standing right there cheering the process along. Karma might be a bitch, but Michael and Magic and Larry were basketball gods looking down from Mount Olympus on those puny humans hiding behind their iron curtain. The Russians didn’t stand a chance.

Neither did we, though, because when we decided to beat those commies over the head with our capitalist might, we ushered in an era of the almighty dollar in sports. It probably would have happened anyway, but it’s fun to blame the Russians, don’t you think? Besides, the 1972 game serves as a convenient dividing line between the era of small-time athletics and big business sports.

We’ve been boiling like frogs as we’ve gone from zero tolerance to zero credibility. Consider:

In 1919, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned Shoeless Joe Jackson for life based on the mere accusation that he helped throw the 1919 World Series. A jury acquitted him, but it didn’t matter to Landis, who decreed that Jackson never play again and never be eligible for the Hall of Fame. Modern Hall voters, by contrast, are likely to let Bonds and Clemens in. What the heck, right? Everybody was doing it.

In Green Bay, the last bastion of the small-town American football dream, the Packers play in a stadium built 60 years ago and are owned by the city itself. Meanwhile, the money-grubbing owner of the Chargers turns his back on the city of San Diego because it won’t give him hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to replace a stadium built a decade after the Packers built theirs.

The Rollerball prophecy

All in all, the NFL itself is looking more and more like Rollerball every day. For those of you who don’t remember that 1975 movie, let me refresh your memories: It centers on a then-futuristic sports league that puts corporate greed ahead of everything else and self-destructs in a vain attempt to keep its most popular player from undermining the “brand.”

The film is set in 2018. Its hero, portrayed by James Caan, plays for a team based in Houston that’s owned by the Energy Corporation. Flash forward to this year’s Super Bowl, which was played in Houston at something called NRG Stadium.

Hmmm.

Rollerball destroyed itself by making its players expendable, allowing them to maim and kill one another in bloodfests and looked more like gladiatorial combat than sport. The NFL hasn’t gone quite that far. But many players have paid a heavy physical and cognitive price for the steroids they used and the head injuries they sustained during their careers. In one study, researchers found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 players they examined.

College football, meanwhile, has become a cash cow for “educational” institutions that rake in money hand-over-fist from bloated TV contracts. The schools lucky enough to be in elite Power 5 conferences don’t want to share much of that money with the less fortunate, though. They’ve transformed schools that used to be called mid-majors into irrelevant minors, denying them a seat at the championship table – and the cash register.

It didn’t used to be that way.

Backlash and fatigue

Maybe our collective patience is starting to wear thin. San Diegans refused to finance the glitzy stadium that owner Dean Spanos demanded. The NFL’s television ratings fell 9 percent during the regular season and 6 percent for the playoffs. Fewer people watched the college football championship game, too. Fantasy football participation, which has driven much of the NFL’s growth the past few years, plateaued.

None of this means that the NFL, the Power 5 or big-money sports in general is on the verge of imminent collapse. Far from it. Still, more and more of us have grown tired of it all. We pay through the nose for cable access or box seats. And for what? To watch one group of cheaters play another group of might-be-cheaters? To pay for the fat cats to operate their assembly line of athletes, so many of whom wind up disabled or brain damaged for the sake of the almighty dollar?

I’m not on some holier-than-thou crusade here. I’ve loved watching sports all my life, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty for that. But I woke up the morning after the Super Bowl and realized I just don’t love it anymore. I’m not even sure I like it. I’m not trying to claim any moral high ground, I’m just not sure I care.

I’m not saying I’ll never watch sports again, but I seriously doubt I’ll ever enjoy it the way I used to. In an era where “everybody does it,” there’s no one left to root for. Except maybe the Green Bay Packers.

I always did like cheese.

Chargers in L.A.: A marriage of inconvenience

I’m known for being diplomatic – even overly subtle – and I don’t like calling people names, but I’ll come right out and say it: Dean Spanos is an idiot.

Only an idiot would use a bad deal as leverage to get a better one, and that’s what Spanos did with his Los Angeles gambit. When the better deal didn’t come through, because San Diego didn’t want to pony up millions of dollars to keep the Chargers, Spanos probably had no choice but to follow through on his threat and move to L.A.

San Diego called his bluff, and instead of folding, he decided to pull his bid off the table and leave in a huff.

Nice.

Now he’s stuck in a city that doesn’t support losing teams – which the Chargers most definitely are at the moment, having lost five in a row to finish 5-11. Not only that, he’ll be playing second fiddle to the Rams, who have won even fewer games (4) than the Chargers did this past season.

The Rams sold a lot of tickets in their first year back, but thousands of those ticketholders stopped bothering to show up when the team’s fortunes took a nosedive. That’s how it works in L.A. People have better things to do than to sit around and watch bad teams play bad football. Fans there have attention spans shorter than the last movie trailer they saw … which they probably don’t remember, anyway.

I spent six years in L.A. back when the Dodgers were a baseball powerhouse, regularly contending for the National League championship. Even then, the joke was that fans would show up at Dodger Stadium in the third inning and hang around a few innings, then hightail it for the exits at the seventh-inning stretch. And it wasn’t far from the truth.

(The Chargers new logo, incidentally, is a blatant ripoff of the Dodgers'.)

Supply, but no demand

Even with all that, it might have made sense to move the Chargers if there was a yearning among Angelenos to make the team their own. But there’s not. There was significant support for the Rams to move back, but no one I know of – except Mr. Spanos – seems to care about having the Chargers in the City of Angels. To quote one old car dealer’s vintage commercials, “Nobody, but noooooobody.”

Spanos probably feels like he has to move because San Diego voters turned down a ballot measure that would have thrown millions of public dollars his way to finance a new stadium. Now Rams owner Stan Kroenke will be paying for the move instead: Under the deal, the Chargers will pay $1 in rent to use Kroenke’s brand-spanking-new Inglewood stadium when it opens.

You have to hand it to Spanos. At least he’s consistent: He always wants someone else to pay for his failures.

The problem is, with no support in L.A., he’ll ultimately be on the hook anyway, even with the sweet rent deal. There’s little doubt that the metroplex will turn up its collective noses at the Chargers, who have virtually no history there and even less history of winning.

The one season they did play in Los Angeles (1960) was actually one of their best: They actually made it to the AFL Championship Game. But that wasn’t good enough to interest L.A. fans back then: The Chargers’ crowds were so sparse they wound up moving to San Diego the next season.

Now they’re back. But what makes Spanos think a losing team will do any better this time around – even if the team is more established, and pro football is a far bigger deal than it was back then?

Artless dud

You might think a businessman like Spanos would know a bad deal when it hits him over the head, but you have to remember that Dean inherited the team from dear old daddy, the guy who really made the family fortune.

And the current fiasco only proves the younger Spanos’ ineptitude as a businessman. Forget “Art of the Deal,” this was one artless dud.

First he alienated Charger fans by threatening to move – to such an extent that attendance fell significantly this past season. Memo to Dean: When you’ve got one foot out the door, you’re not a very attractive suitor. After support in San Diego (predictably) withered, he had little choice but to take that other foot and step out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

But if fewer people wanted him in San Diego than before, fewer still want him in L.A.

Winning is the only way

The Chargers are a team without a country, and they're likely to remain so unless they become very big winners very fast. The former San Diego Clippers will always play second fiddle to the Lakers in Los Angeles, even though they're winning these days and the Lakers have spent the past couple of seasons at the bottom of the NBA barrel.

Spanos should have been paying attention.

None of this matters now, though. Spanos has made his decision to pack his bags for Los Angeles, and all the pieces are in place for the Los Angeles Chargers to become the biggest football flop since Vince McMahon’s XFL. It took just a little more than a decade for the Raiders to hightail it out of L.A. and back to Oakland; I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen here.

And considering how Dean Spanos has treated the fans of San Diego, I hope I’m right.

Postscript: I fully expect we’re at the end of that era when NFL owners are able to demand massive public funds for shiny new stadiums every 10 years. San Diego said, “No.” And with the NFL’s TV ratings down an average of 8 percent in 2016, cities may soon have a lot more leverage than they do now. Stay tuned …

Trump’s playbook: Hail Marys and forfeits

On Nov. 23, 1984, a young quarterback from Boston College threw a pass that will be forever engrained in the minds of college football fans.

Trailing by four points and down to his last play, Doug Flutie dropped back to pass, scrambled around, and heaved a Hail Mary pass from his own 37-yard line. Flutie was small for a quarterback – just 5 feet, 9 inches – and he had already thrown the ball 45 times during the game. Throwing into a 30 mph wind, there was no way he could get the pass all the way to the University of Miami’s end zone.

Or so Miami’s defensive backs thought: Three of them moved up in front of the goal line, positioning themselves to intercept Flutie’s pass … which instead sailed over their heads and into the waiting arms of Boston College receiver Gerard Phelan.

The touchdown gave Boston College a 47-45 win on national television, and Flutie went on to win the Heisman Trophy, presented each year to the best player in college football.

After Flutie graduated, he had a chance to sign a contract with the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, but he chose a different course. There was, at the time, a second professional football league: the United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring, and the man who owned that league’s New Jersey Generals franchise was offering Flutie an $8.3 million contract.

That man was real estate tycoon Donald Trump – the same man who would win the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2016. He was relatively unknown then, outside of the Eastern Seaboard, and ownership of the Generals catapulted him to national prominence.

Flutie’s folly?

Why did he sign Flutie? Despite his college success, pro scouts tend to shy away from quarterbacks shorter than about 6-foot-2. They have a harder time seeing over the line, and they often have to scramble around a lot – as Flutie did on that Hail Mary play – to get a good look downfield. Seattle’s Russell Wilson, who’s 2 inches taller than Flutie, has been one of the few quarterbacks shorter than 6 feet tall to have success as a pro.)

The Generals’ coach at the time, Walt Michaels, wanted to draft Randall Cunningham, an African-American quarterback out of UNLV who stood 6-3 and was a better quarterback than the scrambling Flutie. He would go on to throw for 207 touchdowns and run for 35 more, winning the Most Valuable Player award twice in a 16-year NFL career.

Flutie, who wound up throwing more interceptions than touchdown passes in just one season for the Generals, only played more than seven games in an NFL season five times, although he did put up some big numbers during eight seasons in the Canadian Football League.

But Flutie had what Trump was looking for (and Cunningham lacked). He had golden-boy looks – think Tom Cruise or Steve Garvey – a marketable name and a reputation for doing the impossible: three things Trump saw in himself. And if you get Donald Trump to look in a mirror, you’ve got his attention, just as surely as if he were the evil queen from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Trump’s own golden boy looks have faded to orange since then, but he’s defined himself based on those other two qualities he shared with Flutie back in 1984. He’s put his name on everything from steaks to casinos, and he has repeatedly tried to do the impossible.

Far more often than not, he’s failed.

Six bankruptcies related to his resorts and casinos, and a portfolio littered with bad ideas and shuttered businesses. Trump Airlines. Trump casinos. Trump Magazine. Trump Mortgages. Trump University. Trump Vodka. Trump the Game.

Using the USFL

And then there was the USFL. The league had been founded in 1983 on a business model geared toward meeting a demand for football during the spring, after the NFL had completed its season, and using a salary cap to operate on a tighter budget. It made some sense: Don’t go head to head with the big boys, who have more money, an established reputation and a huge fan base. Instead, build your own brand in a different niche.

But some of the league’s owners soon abandoned the league’s frugal model in a race for big-name players, signing them to outsized “personal services” contracts as a way around the salary cap. They paid the price for opening up their wallets when revenues failed to keep pace with salary demands.

About the same time Flutie was making a splash during his senior year at Boston College, Trump was urging USFL owners to abandon the other major component of their business plan and throw a Hail Mary pass of their own by ditching the spring-season format and going head-to-head with the NFL in the fall.

With the red ink already rising on their ledgers, the league was hardly in a position to mount a realistic challenge to the sport’s burgeoning behemoth, so Trump hatched a plan to sue the NFL under U.S. antitrust laws, claiming it was acting as a monopoly.

A jury did indeed find in favor of the USFL, but it also found that the league had switched to a fall schedule, not in order to save itself, but to force a merger with the NFL. The result? The jury awarded the USFL just $1 in damages (trebled to $3 under rules applied to antitrust lawsuits), effectively putting the league – and Trump’s team – out of business.

His Hail Mary had fallen flat. As with his bankruptcies, he had no choice but to forfeit the game.

Shifting the blame

Trump, however, blamed the league’s other owners, writing in The Art of the Deal, “If there was a single key miscalculation I made with the USFL, it was evaluating the strength of my fellow owners.”

Trump’s handling of the USFL became the template for his strategy in business and in life: Promise great things, throw a Hail Mary pass, and hope it works. Then, when it falls incomplete and the clock runs out, blame the referee. Or the other team. Or your fans. Or anybody, except yourself for taking such an outrageous risk in the first place.

No matter how many times we might enjoy watching replays of Doug Flutie throwing that magical pass against Miami, he only did it once. Trump has had successes, but with the exception of TV’s “The Apprentice,” they’ve all been in a single arena: real estate – an industry in which he’s also seen plenty of failure even though his father paved the way for him with both capital and presumed know-how.

Trump knows something about real estate. But he doesn’t know anything about vodka, or universities, or airlines, or football.

Or governing.

The thrill of the hunt

When he entered the 2016 presidential race, Trump was just launching another Hail Mary pass in a game he knows nothing about. All that’s important to him is that it’s a game. “It’s all about the hunt,” he was quoted as saying in Timothy O’Brien’s 2005 book TrumpNation, “and once you get it, it loses some of its energy. I think competitive, successful men feel that way about women.”

It there’s a clearer way of saying that women are a piece of meat without coming right out and using those words, I don’t know what it is.

The quote not only speaks volumes about Trump’s predatory attitude toward women, as reflected in the 2005 tape from Access Hollywood that sent his presidential campaign floundering, it says something even bigger about his attitude toward life. It’s not just women who are trophies; it’s everything. When Trump says he loves women, he’s not lying; he just “loves” them in the same way Teddy Roosevelt loved bagging a lion, an elephant or a black rhino. He “loves” business associates and voters the same way. No wonder he has so few close friends.

It’s noteworthy that his sons have taken after him in the literal sense, becoming big-game hunters.

Trump’s obsession with the hunt explains why he starts ventures that quickly fail: He has neither the patience nor the inclination to see them through to the end, whether they be a marriage, an investment in a football team or an airline. He loses interest, and he’s on to the next thing. He’s like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan: so consumed with conquest that he undermines any opportunity for lasting success, because he doesn’t really care about it.

Hail Mary presidency

Other than real estate and “The Apprentice,” he’s seldom stuck with anything long enough to make it work. Now imagine that attitude applied to the presidency. If he were to be elected and follow his familiar pattern, he would quickly lose interest and turn his attention to other things … then blame others for his – and the nation’s – failures, wash his hands of the whole mess and go on to his next big promise. His next Hail Mary.

Or maybe he’d use the office of the presidency as the platform to launch his next campaign for conquest, whether it be a war, an overhaul of the Constitution, an assault on civil liberties or his already-stated objective of building a $12 billion wall … and making Mexico pay for it. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether his last name is really Trump or Quixote.

But it doesn’t matter how outlandish his goals seem or how impossible. Remember, he’s all about throwing up Hail Marys to prove he can do the impossible. And this penchant is precisely what makes him so dangerous: It actually behooves him, for the sake of his ego, to create crises so he can set the stage for the adrenalin rush he gets if he manages to solve them. The more desperate the situation looks, the better.

Forget me not

This helps explain why Trump isn’t about keeping promises or taking responsibility for his failures. He famously never apologizes, because he’d be doing it all the time – and because he’s too busy looking in the mirror and talking about how wonderful he is.

And he’s so convinced of it, people believe him.

We still remember Doug Flutie, even though he never won a Super Bowl and spent much of his NFL career as a backup, because he threw that crazy pass against Miami and it worked.

“Without the Hail Mary pass, I think I could have been very easily forgotten,” Flutie would say later.

If we watch that pass over and over again and ignore his NFL career, we might come to believe that Flutie was the best quarterback ever to play the game. And if we listen to Donald Trump tell us he can “make America great again” often enough, we might believe that, too.

That’s what he’s counting on. And once we accept his proposal, the hunt will be over. We’ll be just another trophy for his wall – mounted, stuffed and displayed for all to see. Except no one will be looking at us anymore, because Trump demands that everyone look at him. We’ll be forgotten on the sidelines of history, just like the old New Jersey Generals, while Trump is off on the prowl, looking for his next conquest.

In any hunt, you have to have a quarry. We’re it. And if Trump bags us, we might as well be dead meat.