The View from the Cheap Seat (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I’m not a sports fan, but I’ve been married to one for almost 29 years. Rob Moritz’s formative years were spent in a suburb of Pittsburgh when the Steelers were as good a football team as had ever been seen and the Pirates won their division title more often than not. If you want to hear a sweet story, ask him how he, at 11, came to be in Three Rivers Stadium to see Roberto Clemente get his 3,000th hit — his last regular-season hit before he died in a plane crash on the last day of 1972.

When Alcoa reassigned his father to Saline County, Arkansas, in January 1977, Rob immediately became a devoted Razorbacks fan. So while I’m not personally invested in the outcome of any sporting event, I have plenty of experience observing the thrill of victory and the need to lie down in the dark to compose oneself after a disappointing defeat. And I think I grasp how important having heroes to admire can be for sports fans of all ages.

Football is always in the news a lot at this time of year, and Razorbacks fans by now have plenty of experience with disappointment. Calculating the cost — in dollars and in recruiting — of ditching the Razorbacks head football coach is almost as seasonal as the day when it becomes mathematically impossible for the Pirates to win the pennant.

Even the phenomenon of certain professional football players protesting racial injustice in America by kneeling rather than standing during the playing of the national anthem is not new this season, although having a president eager to use a legal, nonviolent protest as fuel for political outrage is.

President Trump, a marketing savant, has taken the popular position, and there may never come a day when the national anthem is widely seen as an appropriate time for political protest. But opinions, even on symbolic speech, change. When I was a kid and the Vietnam War was the popular subject of unpopular protest, the U.S. Flag Code’s prohibition on flag apparel was taken seriously. Today flag designs on clothes — even bikinis — seem to be considered patriotic rather than disrespectful.

FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s stat-geek website, had a rundown last week of unpopular protests that eventually became mainstream. The Vietnam War, also back in the news with the PBS broadcast of Ken Burns’ multipart documentary, is one of those things about which popular opinion has changed.

Muhammad Ali, an athlete of unquestioned ability, risked far more than Colin Kaepernick when he protested the war by refusing to be inducted into the Army. He was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison, but was free on bond until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality. When he died last year, he was hailed as much as a courageous man of conscience outside the ring as for his boxing exploits.

In 1969, only 19 percent of Americans approved of antiwar protests; today Vietnam is widely seen as a mistake perpetuated by dishonest politicians. By comparison, 38 percent of Americans polled by Quinnipiac University approved of football players choosing not to stand during the anthem — and that was a year ago. Will condemnation by President Trump, whose performance in office has been losing popularity even among Republicans, help or hurt the cause of the protesters? I make no predictions, but it will be interesting to watch.

FiveThirtyEight noted that other unpopular positions have also become mainstream. Last week Little Rock marked the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. I don’t have room here to explore the problems that continue to plague public education in Little Rock, but there’s no question that history considers the unpopular students rather than the popular segregationists to be the heroes of 1957 and their unpopular cause to be a righteous one.

There’s an item that circulates on the internet about Pope Francis preparing to beatify Roberto Clemente. It’s a hoax, but — like the most successful fake news — it persists because it’s something a lot of people can imagine being true.

Clemente was 38 when his chartered plane loaded with relief supplies for survivors of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua crashed shortly after takeoff. It was the fourth shipment he had arranged in eight days, decades before online fundraising.

I think I know what he, a Puerto Rican, would have been doing last week had he lived to be 83.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.