Gentlemen's Quarterly magazine gave up all pretense of being gentleman-like when it hired Keith Olbermann (who has since returned to ESPN) and the profane writer Drew Magary (see photograph). The latter is holding down the fort outrageously, as evidenced by a torrent of language not fit for men, women or children. On the day the NFL preseason opened with the annual Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio, Magary threw every vile insult at President Donald Trump, Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones and those opposed to NFL protests imaginable.
In his GQ post, The NFL isn't Ready for How Big of a Disaster This Season will be, Magary writes that he doesn't want to hear about NFL protests, then subjects his readers to a disgusting, vile torrent of hate toward those opposed to them:
"President Trump has two hobbyhorses that he clings to in this, his dreadful, seemingly endless existence. The first is saying the most racist shit possible about immigrants or about people who, to him, look like immigrants. The other is the national anthem. The man already told Cowboys owner and sun-baked penis lizard Jerry Jones that the anthem was a winning issue for him, and this is a man who has no compunction whatsoever about repeating himself."
Magary mentions the NFL's suspension of its short-lived policy banning anthem protests and Jones' proclamation that if you're a Cowboys' player, you will stand toe the line. "That was enough to get the president’s flag boner to stir and get him tweeting from the shitter yet again":
Bulldozing ahead, Magary wrote the NFL owners could have offered the players something to get them to stand for the anthem, as NBA players do, "but their greed and their lust for bullying their own players apparently prevented that from happening. As a result, nothing is going to stop these pregame festivities from being a lightning magnet for opportunists, racists, and grandstanding assholes."
Magary predicts September's early season games are "going to suck and ratings will go down a bit because of it":
"A few players will demonstrate during the anthem, the Eye of Sauron will fall upon them, and then Trump will hammer the NFL day after day, constructing his own reality in which NFL ratings are down because of the anthem and because he willed them to be, and not because of the game’s much more obvious shortcomings. This will be ALL YOU FUCKING HEAR ABOUT all fall. Whatever brilliant spurts of football happen to occur in between all those flags and all that bloviating will be fleeting…as difficult to recall as your own dreams. The NFL, through its own patriotic machinations, has unwittingly found itself as the main conduit of the culture wars, and it will remain there all season long, with the games themselves serving as an inadequate respite. It’s going to be awful."
The worst part of it, Magary fumes, is that it was all preventable. The NFL could have avoided "this anthem shit entirely if they had worked with the players to institute an anthem policy everyone could live with (or, better yet, if they ditched the goddamn pageantry altogether)."
That did not happen, because "the NFL possesses a near-superhuman tone-deafness and because it is terminally incapable of taking away the correct lessons from a PR crisis. And both the players and you, the viewer at home, will bear the brunt of that idiocy. The result is a coming 2018 season that promises to be more divisive and slovenly than any that came before it."
Complaining about the NFL has become a national pastime, Magary writes. Between the issues surrounding concussions, what is a catch and the protests, the league is "giving endless amounts of oxygen to distractions they claim to abhor, and soon the politicization of the NFL will be all that’s left. And the NFL owners are making too much money to care."
Angry as he is at the NFL, Magary will keep watching, "stupidly hoping my team will win and that the NFL will get its head out of its ass. But by now, it’s clear that it’ll take a true catastrophe for the latter to occur, and that’s exactly what the NFL has coming its way in roughly five weeks. They can’t say no one warned them."
The NFL is a catastrophe, though not because of the patriotic Americans who have been insulted throughout the past two seasons. But catastrophe is also the right word for the subterranean level of the so-called "gutter journalism" practiced at GQ.
