Jim C. at Rittenhouse Review has a thorough rundown of the Philadelphia reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s racist dissing of No. 5 this weekend on ESPN.
No. 5 — Donovan McNabb’s number with the Philadelphia Eagles — is just about the only number you’ll see on Philly fans wearing their team’s colors. We like Donovan. He’s really, really good.
Good enough that even our large share of Afrophobic white fans admire him.
In a perceptive Salon column, Allen Barra spoke aloud the unspoken truth about how race and racism affects professional sports and its fans here:
Philly is still what Curt Flood called it when he started the modern players’ revolution by refusing to be traded there in 1970, namely the most racist town in America. That’s largely the unspoken appeal of hockey around the suburbs of Philadelphia, the only area in the country where I heard the words “Thank God he’s white” when Mark McGwire approached Roger Maris’ home run record three years ago.
This presents a genuine dilemma for the rabid sports fan, of which Philadelphia has more than any comparable area in the country. Philadelphia is a baseball town, completely and totally, a fact that is all the more ironic as everyone in the city and the surrounding area seems to have forgotten it. (How backward is the Philly sports scene? I think you’d have to go north of the border to find another city where hockey is more popular than baseball.)
The only time this city has come together since the Constitutional Convention was in 1980 when the Phillies won the Series, and the resulting celebration was louder than if the Eagles, Sixers and Flyers combined had won. But that was long ago, and a lot of white flight to the suburbs and very bad baseball management has occurred since then, and the city now ignores baseball as if in sullen remembrance of a time when Pete Rose was everything it ever hoped a sports star could be.
You will still find people in Philadelphia who will, with apparent sincerity, argue that Keith Van Horn is a better basketball player than Allen Iverson — that backup A.J. Feeley should be starting instead of McNabb for the Eagles. There’s only one reason a person would ever say such a thing.
Yet nothing unites like a common enemy. Philly fans will rally to defend when outsiders attack, just like they rallied around Dr. J. when he and Larry Bird wrapped their hands around one another’s throats during the playoffs.
Rush Limbaugh, an outsider, had no right to say this:
I’m sorry to say this, I don’t think [Donovan McNabb’s] been that good from the get-go. I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well …
Rush didn’t say anything that hasn’t been said in a thousand conversations in the Greater Northeast or in the bars of Macdade Boulevard, but by saying it as an outsider, he has inadvertently dragged this ugly, covert prejudice into the sunlight and some sports fans may be seeing it clearly for the first time.
By making his pasty self the repellent poster child for racist white sports fans, Limbaugh may have done more to improve race relations among Philadelphia fans than anyone since John Kennedy.
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