Plague of Strength

I realized today that this article was unreadable due to formatting issues, so I fixed and reposted it. The grip article I promised over a month ago will drop at least in part today, having grown to at least a two parter over the intervening weeks 🤣🤣. Originally posted 2.12.21.

Where most people bitch when a rule is enacted to prevent an outstanding athlete from maintaining their dominance, I smile. If I could, I’d give that person the biggest motherfucking hug a human has ever given because it is the greatest honor a person could be given to have humanity claim it is too weak to compete with you. It basically recognizes that person as a demi god with whom normal humans cannot compete- it means that person beat/finished/cleared that fucking game with a high score so high no one can ever touch it. That person is then a legend.

Certainly, it’s bittersweet when pussies do this sort of thing, but pussies are going to pussy, so it’s not generally worth getting upset about.

Nor is the a phenomenon with which we’re only afflicted in the present. For whatever reason it’s commonplace to bemoan the current generation as the biggest pussies the Earth has ever seen, but I’d caution you not to join that chorus of complete fucking idiots and recognize people have always been exactly as they are now. If anything, we have the ability to be far better than we’ve ever been in the past, and some could make the point that a refusal to do so makes them somehow worse. Whether or not you agree is a matter of opinion rather than fact, but I’d suggest your outlook is likely a projection of your own opinion of how you stack up against your forebears.

Here are some of the people in history who’ve had the rules changed to bar their participation out of fear that the “purity” of the game was jeopardized by someone else’s awesome:

After proving to her coach that her uterus didn’t serve as a significant impediment to jogging as he thought, Katherine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon and completed it even after being attacked midrace by the event’s limp-dicked organizer. Afterward, the AAU barred women from entering men’s races and vowed to ban women who violated the rule from lifetime participation in the AAU, a penalty so draconian and ridiculous you can easily picture the author’s lifted pickup truck without knowing anything else about him. When a women’s race was finally organized in 1972, Switzer won it and finished 59th overall… having only run her first marathon five years prior.

Major-league baseball briefly banned the curve ball after it’s invention by Candy Cummings (1848-1924), who retired after playing in the National League’s inaugural year (and America’s centennial, 1876). No one could figure out how he was throwing the curve ball, so no one could practice hitting it, making Cummings fucking deadly on the mound. The ban was lifted pretty quickly, but there is no better stamp of approval on an innovator than that, but it also changed the way catchers played their position as well.

The NBA banned dunking for almost ten years to try to shut down Kareem Abdul Jabbar (b. 1947). Not only did it not work (he held almost every record the league had when he retired and is considered the second greatest basketball player of all time), but he probably fucked the wives of every one of the bitter pussies behind the rule change.

Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins (b. 1957) forced another rule change almost immediately after the dunk was re-instituted, as Dr. Dunkenstein shattered two glass backboards in two separate games, pissing off league officials. Immediately after the second backboard, the league established a rule making any athlete who dunk so fucking brutally they shatter the backboard subject to a fine and suspension. Chocolate Thunder, as Stevie Wonder nicknamed him, spoke about it exactly to my point, saying ”The first one was an accident, but I wanted to see if I could do it again when I got back to Philadelphia. All the fans were hollering, ‘You’ve got to do one for the home crowd,’ so I went ahead and brought it down. Everybody was in awe. Fans were running out grabbing the glass. People’s hands were bleeding. I felt like I was doing something no other human could do.”

Unlike most goalies, Martin Brodeur (b. 1972) was so good at handling the puck that the league changed the rules regarding where on the ice goalies could do it, confining them to a tiny trapezoid of space. Brodeur had been an active part of the New Jersey Devils’ and St Louis Blues’ defense throughout his career, and he was fucking pissed at the rule change, which was obviously done by pussies, for pussies. Note the lack of trapezoid in this gif, wherein he scores from his own goal.

“You can’t be happy, taking away something I’ve worked on all my life to do and help my teammates and help my defense. It’s just part of me, playing the puck. So, definitely, you can’t be happy. It’s just the fact that the NHL wants to show the talent to their fans and stuff. And I think this is not doing it. I think it goes the other way around. It goes taking away a talent from guys. There’s a lot of guys that can’t play the puck, and that doesn’t affect them.”

With these precedents, it should not have surprised me that pussies banned an entire race of people from two professions only after members of that race had demonstrated themselves so unquestionably superior that pussies began looking for reasons to prevent them from doing so. I was nevertheless surprised, however, to discover that this is exactly what happened in both federal law enforcement and baseball at roughly the same time. To my mind, that is far more horrible than just barring it right out of the gate, especially given the timing- in the Reconstruction Era (just after the American Civil War) it was genuinely the most cruel time in history that the establishment could have dangled the promise of a fair shake in front of the most downtrodden and often hopeless people in the nation and then snatched it away after those people proved their value to humanity as a whole. Seriously, it would be like luring a massive band of starving people to an all you can eat buffet, letting one person in, and after seeing that person conduct themselves with the utmost in impeccable manners, civility, and refinement, bar the remaining starving people from eating while they’re patiently and quietly standing in line.

In other words, some real pussy shit.

In the case of baseball it was Moses Fleetwood Walker (1856-1924) and his brother Weldy Walker (1860-1937), who became the first two black men to play professional baseball while Bass Reeves was twisting back caps and earning a shitload of money as a marshal. Though Weldy was a college standout he was really just a fill-in on a team depleted by injuries, while Fleet is considered to be one of the most impactful catchers of early major league baseball in spite of the fact his own pitchers ignored his signs and threw at him to hurt HIM, opposing pitchers plunked him 152 times, everyone spiked him sliding into home, and he played barehanded and without a chest protector (Source). He was so fucking good that MLB barred black people from playing baseball again for 60 years.

If you are like me and already hate baseball, there’s yet one more reason. If you’re curious about his team, he played for the Toledo Blue Stockings, which was an American Association team that played against NL teams in the early version of the World Series. The AA was like the ABA was in basketball decades later- they were the fun, flashy bunch playing the button-down dickheads of the establishment. Unlike the National League, the AA sold concessions and booze at games, and generally tried to make baseball less awful than it generally is. The only remaining teams from that league are the Dodgers (originally the Brooklyn Bridegrooms), the Reds, and the Cards.

The shit went on in law enforcement with Bass Reeves, who is perhaps the greatest lawman to ever live. In spite of arresting over 3000 people in the wild-assed Indian Territory (Oklahoma, for the Republicans and foreigners who don’t know anything about American history), serving a warrant on his own son (who was a model prisoner and was released only 10 years into a life sentence as a result of his behavior and his father’s sterling reputation), and proving to be the indisputable greatest pacifying influence on a region that a single person has had in the entirety of human history, he was kicked out of the US Marshals for being too black for the head marshal in that district after 18 years of rad as fuck service, so he became a cop in Tuskegee.

Bass Reeves wasn’t the sole melanin-rich human among marshals, but he is the only one to shoot a man in the face for torturing a dog and then walk away scot free, John Wick-style (Source). The marshals never fully segregated because they didn’t have to- each local marshal hired their own deputies, and there were no shortage of shitty people who resented being outworked, outfought, and outshot. As such, dark faces became scarce in the marshals until the 1970s in an effort to keep from having to do to much work, I would imagine- Bass Reeves set one hell of a pace.

Shit’s weak, but so is almost every human being I have ever encountered.

If you cherry-pick your competition to avoid losing, you’re a fucking bitch.

Be better than you are EVERY FUCKING DAY and you won’t have to worry about the competition (or their genitalia), because you won’t have any competition to worry about.

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