Sports Business Daily Tabs Trump Most Influential Person in Sports Business. What?
By Ken Reed
Sports Business Daily has tabbed our nation’s Divider-In-Chief as 2017’s most influential sports business person.
What a sad choice by a publication that has a lot of respect in the industry. First of all, Trump isn’t even in the sports business. Second, his sports involvement amounts to the couple minutes it takes him to type his antagonistic tweets or throw out an off-the-cuff remark at one of his pep rallies.
Trump decided to weigh-in last year on the Colin Kaepernick-led social justice protests during the national anthem. The result was like pouring gasoline on a smoldering campfire. As a result of Trump’s visceral seat-of-the-pants commentary, the debate became louder, more angry, and more hate-filled. Nothing positive came out of Trump’s comments.
He also sent out a few stream-of-consciousness tweets about LaVar Ball, father of Los Angeles Lakers guard Lonzo Ball. Are you serious? The President of the United States has nothing better to do than jump in the weeds with a self-promoting loudmouth like LaVar Ball? Hmm, “self-promoting loudmouth” … Perhaps Trump and Ball going back and forth at each other in the Twitterverse was a perfect match of egomaniacs.
Irregardless of your beliefs about Trump, it’s hard to imagine Sports Business Daily giving its “Most Influential Person in Sports Business” award to someone who spent about 10 minutes thinking and writing about sports all year.
Brace yourself, the kind of ego-boosting recognition that Sports Business Daily dropped on him will only encourage the Divider-In-Chief to stick his nose into SportsWorld even more in 2018.
Luckily, we have the San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich, leader of SportsWorld’s anti-Trump movement, to take on Trump. I would pay big money to watch a debate between Trump and Popovich — on any topic. I have little doubt that Pop, a true renaissance man, would win in a blowout.
After Trump was elected president, Popovich said the result made him “sick to his stomach.” I had a similar feeling when I saw Sports Business Daily’s award.
Hey, Sports Business Daily, don’t feed Trump’s ugliness. Next year, pick someone who actually is a sports person, someone who actually spends more than a few minutes during the year thinking, talking and writing about sports. And someone besides a person whose only influence on sports is of the negative variety.
— Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans
Sports Forum Podcast
Episode #28 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: A Chat With Mano Watsa, a Leading Basketball and Life Educator – Watsa is President of PGC Basketball, the largest education basketball camp in the world, with over 150 camps in 30+ U.S. states and Canada. We discuss problems in youth sports today, including single sport specialization, the growing gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” the high drop-out rate in competitive sports, and the growing mental health challenges young athletes are dealing with today.
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Episode #27 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Kids’ Sports: How We Can Take Back the Game and Restore Quality Family Time In the Process – Linda Flanagan is author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why It Matters.” We discuss how commercialized and professionalized youth sports are hurting kids and their families.
Episode #26 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: How Can We Fix Youth Sports? – John O’Sullivan is Founder and CEO of Changing the Game Project and author of “Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids.”
Episode #25 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Physical Education Should Be a Critical Component of K-12 School Design – Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Episode #24 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Mental Health and Athletes: Ending the Stigma – Nathan Braaten and Taylor Ricci are the founders of Dam Worth It, a non-profit created to end the stigma around mental health at colleges and universities through sport, storytelling, and community creation.
Episode #23 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Olympian Benita Fitzgerald Mosley Talks Title IX, Youth Sports and the Olympics.
Media
"How We Can Save Sports" author Ken Reed appears on Fox & Friends to explain how there's "too much adult in youth sports."
Ken Reed appears on Mornings with Gail from KFKA Radio in Colorado to discuss bad parenting in youth athletics.
“Should College Athletes Be Paid?” Ken Reed on The Morning Show from Wisconsin Public Radio
Ken Reed appears on KGNU Community Radio in Colorado (at 02:30) to discuss equality in sports and Title IX.
Ken Reed appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour (at 38:35) to discuss his book The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place, and to talk about some current sports issues.
- League of Fans Sports Policy Director Ken Reed quoted in Washington Post column titled "What happened to P.E.? It’s losing ground in our push for academic improvement," by Jay Mathews
League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.
Vanderbilt Sport & Society - On The Ball with Andrew Maraniss with guest Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for League of Fans and author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan
Sports & Torts – Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans – at the American Museum of Tort Law
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