“[S]ome NFL players have been moved to eloquence by the [Rush/ESPN]incident. ‘The athletic arena is the one thing that unites us. It takes away racial and religious affiliation,’ Eagles defensive tackle Corey Simon told The Post’s Leonard Shapiro. ‘To bring this guy out of the political arena to the purity of football I think is uncalled for. . . . It kind of sickens you.’ Despite its violence, the NFL does possess a purity. Merit is honored. Race, religion and origin are, largely, ignored. Best of all, like sports in general, every premise is measured against reality, not molded to ideology.” — Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell in a thoroughly Limbaugh-bashing column, Friday.
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“It’s indecent, during a recession, for ballplayers to make a million dollars a man while the people in the stands, or watching on TV, can’t pay the mortgage. Of course it’s indecent. Welcome to capitalism, the best little economic whorehouse on earth. The rich squeeze the rest of us until our screaming gets loud enough to make them step back from the trough for a couple of years. What is the deficit except 10 years of checks written by the rich on the bank accounts of everyone else?” — Washington Post sportswriter Tom Boswell in a March 22, 1992 Washington Post Magazine profile of Baltimore Orioles star Cal Ripken.