It is fortunate that Sports Illustrated has Peter King and Paul Zimmerman, the two best football writers now working. Their writing is enriched by the personality they bring to their columns. In reading the former, I have learned about the highs and lows of raising two daughters while regularly travelling from New Jersey to cover the National Football League; in reading the latter, I have learned how a shared love of good wines can keep together a gridiron curmugeon and his long-suffering, red-headed artist/wife. I have also learned a tremedous amount about football. These two gentlemen never let their personal lives, and personal opinions, overshadow their knowledge of the game, but it has been great to get to know the men behind the words over, say, the past decade or so.
It seems to me that Mr. King has suffered, however, during this interminable presidential election campaign in the United States. It is none of my business whether he is a registered Democrat, but I could draw a reasonable conclusion that he was not terribly disappointed that Barack Obama won the recent election, and if the United States is able to negotiate an orderly, honorable withdrawal from Iraq that allows us all to maintain some of the principles that took them there in the first place, I am pretty certain that Mr. King would raise a cheer. These positions, whether he holds them or not, are not unreasonable. What I find unreasonable, however, is that on the few occasions he has suggested that some change to the status quo might enrich the lives of all Americans, he has received for his trouble a deluge of correspondence from readers who want him to stick to football.
What rubbish.
These readers have profited from Mr. King's catholic interests, as well as his pragmatic judgment of everything from coffee to television programs. (I am dismayed only that he does not appear to be the rabid fan of Mad Men that I am!) Mr. King's columns are not political, nor should they be. But people who object to a sportswriter discussing how black NFL athletes responded to Mr. Obama's election are the kinds of people who enjoy the internet only because it allows them to restrict their reading to people who think exactly as they do.
Insofar as today's media has become a small series of echo chambers where our own thoughts can be communicated back to us, we are an impoverished people. So long as Peter King fills my Monday mornings with pages and pages of football information stuck together with the other stuff of American life, I will consider myself lucky.
