Punch-drunk McCrory Rampages against NCAA

by | Jun 28, 2021 | Politics

If you’ve ever wondered why Pat McCrory is not taken seriously by the North Carolina political establishment, consider his relationship to the sports industry. It is long and tortured. As mayor of Charlotte, he bulldozed fiscal conservatives to lavish a sum of millions on the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Years later, that temple of stock car racing draws barely any visitors. But McCrory would turn on the so-called “sports and entertainment elite” when National Basketball Association executives withdrew their league’s all-star game from North Carolina due to McCrory’s signature, bigoted HB2. The NC State baseball-vaccination fiasco has pulled this ex-governor back into a pitched battle with America’s sports world.

McCrory seems upset with the NCAA for booting NC State from their berth in the College World Series due to failure to implement the Association’s required vaccine policy. Anti-vaxx-ism seems rather new to McCrory, though it is perhaps unsurprising due to his long history of robust engagement in the Republican War on Science. (Remember when his DEQ secretary called oil a renewable energy source?) Enraged, the one-term governor exclaimed that “The NCAA is starting to starting to look just like Washington, D.C.; lacking commonsense and totally going off the rails!”

His ensuing twitter rant would contain more than one Trumpian exclamation point. Going further, he said “The best-kept secret in sports is that the NCAA is mostly run by liberal university presidents, who sadly are running down many of our great Universities!” Note the Trumpy, random capitalization. McCrory continued in this vein for a number of tweets, lathering them in exclamation points and wild invective like tomato sauce on a western North Carolina-style barbecue sandwich. The most revealing of his outbursts may have been “The NCAA is [sic] a bunch of cowards.” How ungrammatical and so very McCrory.

Assuming the stance of populist hero, McCrory is circulating a petition to “DEMAND” (all caps) NCAA president Mark Emmert “be FIRED” (also all caps). This is all irrational, and arguably good fun for those of us who have long thought McCrory an unserious, disorganized figure. But the cold hard fact it indicates is that McCrory’s campaign is already desperate. Even such an undisciplined campaigner as this one-term governor knew to run a campaign based on restraint when he was leading Walter Dalton. For McCrory to take runs at the NCAA like a drunken goat must suggest that he’s desperate to change the dynamics of a race that has shifted definitively toward Donald Trump’s favorite, Ted Budd.

Or perhaps there’s another explanation. Maybe McCrory got the keys to the twitter account and decided to take it for a joy ride. This has happened before: who can forget when the then-governor effused that journalists wanted “to psychoanalyze & categorize me and put me in a box.” He’s worried about boxes again, the pitcher’s box. Sports elite, be warned.

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