The Wisdom of Sports Night
The big three television networks rarely have much wisdom to offer American viewers, especially regarding the major issues of the day. But there are exceptions to the rule, as I discovered watching a DVD of the late 90’s ABC series, Sports Night.
Sports Night, by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, was a comedic drama portraying the cast and team behind a nightly national sports program akin to ESPN Sportscenter. In an episode titled "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," the show’s executive manager Isaac Jaffe delivered a special on-air editorial regarding a group of college football players who refused to take the field as long as their school continued to use the Confederate flag as its symbol. What Jaffe (played by Robert Guillaume) said may be the most succinct and powerful argument I've heard against the display of the Confederate flag by public institutions:
This afternoon, an extraordinary young man named Roland Shepard made what had to have been an excrutiating decision. He said he wasn't playing football under a Confederate flag. Six of his teammates then chose not to let Shepard stand alone. I don't know how many people witnessed this spectacle, but it was a sight to see. Seven men, the oldest of them not yet 21 and all of them knowing full well the potential consequence of their actions. And I choose to join them at this moment.
In the history of the South, there's much to celebrate. And that flag is a desecration of all of it. It's a banner of hatred and separation. It's a banner of ignorance and violence and a war that pitted brother against brother, and to ask young black men and women, young Jewish men and women, Asians, Native Americans, to ask Americans to walk beneath its shadow is a humiliation of irreducable proportions. And we all know it.
In pieces such as "Confederacy of Dunces" and "Banning True Flag Desecration," I railed against the abomination that is the display of the Confederate flag and symbols by state governments. But nothing I offered approached the eloquence, elegance or simplicity of a prime TV show about sports.
For its part, Sports Night got cancelled after three seasons.
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