I’ve got a pebble in my shoe and it’s bugging me. I’ve got to get it out. That pebble is ESPN and their ESPY Awards show.

ESPN gave the Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Caitlyn Jenner Wednesday night during the ESPY’s Award Show.  Yes, THAT Caitlyn Jenner, previously known as Bruce Jenner, Olympic decathlon winner and late a part of the Kardashian clan that brought us reality television. For that alone, he is to be banished!

Maura Mandt, ESPY’s co-executive producer says, “Caitlyn Jenner displayed enormous courage and self-acceptance in dealing publicly with his/her issues.”

Now Maura, you can’t have it both ways. The ESPY’s award is for an ATHLETE that exhibited great courage. Caitlyn Jenner is not an athlete. Look it up. She never won a decathlon. Bruce Jenner did. So who are we awarding here, Caitlyn or Bruce?  You, and others, tell me they ARE NOT the same person yet you want to give an award to one of them when the other was the athlete.

The silliness that this is has become  common with ESPN’s new-found “social direction”.  Founded as a pioneer of sports television, ESPN in recent years has taken it on themselves to provide all of us with that social direction. A liberal, socialistic dogma has become a requirement of their writers and their editorials, promoting a lifestyle that most of their readers do not agree with. It is not unlike what has happened to the entire entertainment industry. ESPN has become much more than a television channel that broadcasts sporting events, they’ve tried to become our moral plumb line. Personally, I don’t like it.

Sportscaster Bob Costas commented earlier that this was a “tabloid play, that they could have found someone more deserving of what the award represents.” Mr. Costas is dead right on that one!

By now you’ve gathered I didn’t watch the show. First of all, I don’t watch award shows. Mostly they are self gratification parties of one bunch giving another some award and then, a few weeks later, they trade places and give awards to the other bunch.

Perhaps the most telling comment concerning  all of this was from Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner himself/herself: “What the hell am I going to wear?”  I know what I will be wearing; some other channel on the remote control!


                                             
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