inevitability foiled again
a case in point
Dr. Cassandra Lewis will discuss cyber, a particularly relevant Timely Topic webinar in light of the last few days, on Thursday, 20th April between 1000-1100 eastern. Dr. Lewis is the Chancellor of the College of Information & Cyberspace at the National Defense University. I circulated the webinar link last week but please let me know if you still need it. Please invite anyone interested in the topic to log in.
You know, if you have read my musings over the past fortnight, that I don’t put a lot of stock in people arguing things are inevitable. Yes, there are exceptions: we all depart this planet at some point and the overwhelming majority of us pay taxes, even if unwillingly.
It was inevitable that the Washington Redskins would always own the heart of this city…until it wasn’t.
Today’s Washington Post had a pathetic but completely true story about the abandonment of those formerly known as the Washington Redskins by the once-rabid football fans. In truth, I did not grow up a Redskins fan but have spent enough years, beginning in 1968, that watching them was the norm. for me. I never had season tickets as they were a boatload of bucks, the queue for them was measured in decades when I returned in 1992, and I am not ecstatic abour driving D.C. roads with sloshed folks who I instinctively knew were the other attendees. But, the Skins were this town, no question.
The Post’s story, ‘From Passion to Pariah’1, details the quarter century it took for this rock-solid fan base to depart the pattern. I worked in Washington for 15 months in the late 1970s after having been travelling here on and off for several years to visit family. I recall, in the height of my football frenzy, being truly astonished at how visceral the support was for the Redskins.
The 1970s were the glory days of George Allen where ‘Dallas’ became a household word invoking fury; one did not even have to add Cowboys as people knew, they knew was Dallas meant as the Redskins’ primary foe. This was the rivalry: forget the Chiefs and Raiders or the Bears and Packers. That the ‘Skins were able to whomp on the Cowboys ever so often as the Pokies were still helmed by Tom Landry and Roger Staubach was what people talked about on Monday. In truth, the era was a relatively balanced rivalry but Redskins fans seemed to forget the losses (unless close so there was something to whine about) because the victories were oh so sweet. Having someone with season tickets inviting you to a game was the ultimate power surge.
I decided in the 70s that Washingtonians must hate their jobs (a little projecting there) and football was an outlet. But it went well beyond that for several reasons.
Washington was never ever ever short on colourful figures and quarterback controversies and who doesn’t enjoy that as long as it isn’t personally pertinent? Who can forget running back and hard partier John Riggins advising the equally legendary and more restrained Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ‘come on, loosen up, Sandy baby, you’re too tight’ at a 1985 public event?2 Right. Only in D.C. but other controversies on the field began earlier.
In the late 1960s, Sonny Jurgenson and Billy Kilmer followed in the footsteps of earlier quarterbacks like the legendary Sammy Baugh but there was invariably a controversy about who would start. Even Vince Lombardi as coach did not solve this issue as the two stars continued battling for the starting position and fans assumed their roles as cheerleaders for one or the other. This was big controversy during the Watergate era, a diversion from national humiliation but few realised it at the time.
As the George Allen era unfolded, however, a more costly, if entertaining habit began to affect the team: trading draft choices (youth) for considerably older stars in various positions whose stars were dimming on other teams. It became a joke to consider how far into the future Allen mortgaged the team.
George Allen and later Joe Gibbs were coaches who still led Washington to victories over the Cowboys and the occasional division rivals north in other minor cities, as locals saw it. No, the Redskins did not win the Super Bowl year after year but their fans were absolutely unswervingly dedicated. The ‘Hogs’ were the offensive line famous across the city and the NFL for their size and their number of supporters showing up at games with various facial gear to denote hogs. People obsessed about everything else on the team. The Washington Redskins were the city and the city responded with unadulterated love, scarfing up tickets at astronomical prices in an aging RFK Stadium in the heart of the District.
Washington was a radically different city back then. it was rare to meet someone born here through the 1980s; most people immigrated for their federal jobs. After 1990s, Clinton/Gore downsizing of government, the private sector in this area is also considerable, even if they are associated indirectly to the federal government and supporters were...different as was the sports environment. The African-American population was not yet driven out by whites returning to oust them, bringing more suburban sports like soccer, yoga, and more individualised forms of relaxation.
There was no baseball team between 1971 when the Senators fled to Arlington, Texas (wait, wait, isn’t that near the Cowboys? Seriously???) and 2005 when the Montreal Expos relocated to the Navy Yard with a brand-spanking new park. The Washington Bullets-renamed Wizards won a the National Basketball Association championship in 1978 but the rapidly became a minor memory as did many of the years from the hockey team, the Capitals who actually played in Landover, Maryland. The blood of sports fans in this town bled Red-skins.
The Skins won their last Super Bowl in 1992 under Coach Joe Gibbs and qb Mark Rypien. I doubt the aging owner, Jack Kent Cooke, expected that he or his youngish advertising guy successor, Dan Snyder, ever had any clue of any sort that the glory days were over.
Instead, Joe Gibbs retired. Rypien became one a a seemingly never ending continuation of quarterbacks departing. The most popular players aged as happens everywhere (one more inevitability indeed). Snyder as a life-long Washingtonian became quite hands-on about running the team, including firing the long-time General Manager Charley Casserly and many of the long-time employees of the organisation. Over the years since assuming control in 1999, employees and fans accused Snyder both of encouraging a culture hostile to women and trying to hide the facts. Ultimately, the NFL pressured the owner to confess, not undermine investigations, to uncover the difficulties he was imposing on a league already beginning to struggle with competition from soccer as youth worried about medical problems resulting from football.
Snyder adamantly refused to entertain discussion of altering the team name which critics argued demeaned Native Americans; he vowed to prohibit any such change. During the pandemic, in fact the Redskins formally became the Washington Commanders to the laughter of many fans who saw it as incredibly pretentious. Accompanied by Snyder’s demands for a new stadium to replace one build in suburban Maryland just short of thirty years ago, he increasingly seemed a man out of touch.
Perhaps Snyder had not noticed fans were no longer undying in their support. Televising games showed empty seats and the vaunted years’ long waiting list vanished. Perhaps he was unaware that the Nationals won the World Series the year following the Capitals seizing the Lord Stanley’s Cup in 2018. Even the Wizards, long a weak team in the face of the Laker and Bull dynasties, showed life as the team moved forward with a new generation. Washingtonians were no longer wedded to a team that still brought in more quarterbacks in the twilight of their careers than seemed appropriate to rebuilding the city’s hold on NFL championship status.
When the sale of the Commanders hit the news this week for a staggering $6.05 billion dollars, other owners grumbled that Snyder undersold the team—and their own teams, of course.3
As humans, we think we love change and we hate what is old; in truth, we want most things both ways. I suspect, hard as it might be to believe, Washington will miss Danny Snyder in some manner as terrible frustration often softens with time. Then again, who knows as there are few inevitabilities as we see. FIN
Marc Fisher and Liz Clarke, ‘From Passion to Pariah: How Washington Fell out of Love with its NFL Team—and came to dispise its owner’, Washingtonpost.com, 15 April 2023, retrieved at https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/04/15/dan-snyder-commanders-ownership/
Chris Chase, ‘The oral history of John riggins’ boozy night with a Surpreme Court Justice’, USAToday.com, 11 July 2013, retrieved at https://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/07/john-riggins-sandra-day-oconnor-loosen-up
Daniel Chavkin, ‘NFL Owners ‘Disappointed’ despite $6+ billion sales price per report’, msn.com, retrieved at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/nfl-owners-disappointed-despite-6-billion-commanders-sale-price-per-report/ar-AA19UjPY