Too Much Pink in the NFL?

RUSH: We start on the phones in Sacramento, my adopted hometown. This is Frank, and welcome, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Well, good day, Rush. Dittos. First-time caller. I’ve been listening since my brother, Fritz, in Boise told me about you in 1991.

RUSH: Great. Thank you very much.

CALLER: I’m calling today, heartfelt, asking for your help. I love the NFL, but this year’s push for breast cancer money seems over the top. I don’t mean to be cynical but my mom had a mastectomy 25 years ago, and I don’t see them making real progress no matter how much money they have, and when I’m watching the game it feels like there’s a guy at my door banging on it, you know, with his hand out and he won’t go away. I’m hoping you would have some insight or some help to get me past this attitude.

RUSH: You’re basically saying you’re not happy with all the pink on Sunday afternoon NFL games? You don’t like the guys wearing pink shoes, pink chin straps, pink towels, pink gloves. Is it basically you don’t think the color pink works well with the National Football League?

CALLER: There’s some of that, and I would be very happy with a pink ribbon on the back of the helmet, but, you know, who pays for this stuff? I mean, did the breast Cancer Society buy this stuff? I know they’re going to auction it off at the end of the month and hopefully make the money and get in the black on that, but it just feels like just —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean, who buys what stuff? You mean the gloves, the pink stuff?

CALLER: Yeah. Who put out the money to buy the shoes, the gloves, the chin straps to later on be auctioned off?

RUSH: Well, now, you’ve come to the right place. Now I can help out.

CALLER: Please.

RUSH: (interruption) What? Somebody warning me not to go any further here? Somebody in my IFB telling me not to go any further? Okay. The NFL has an agreement with Reebok. If you’ll notice, on every NFL jersey and every NFL pair of pants and almost every NFL pair of shoes you’ll see the Reebok logo. Now, the NFL in their arrangement with Reebok, some people think that Reebok totally donates all that equipment to the teams in exchange for the exclusivity in use of the product. It’s not a total donation. But it’s a combination of Reebok and the NFL spending what’s necessary to outfit, as a charitable donation. It’s an outreach to women by the group, by the league, as much of what’s happening in the league now is an outreach to women (Ahem.)

In fact, I didn’t tell you this. I’m gonna announce it now. If he has time, the Hutch, Ken Hutcherson, is gonna call the program in the next hour to talk specifically about this. He played for the Dallas Cowboys, Seattle Seahawks. He’s very concerned about the chickification of the league, and he’s going to call here and share his thoughts on this. Now, I have to tell you something, Frank. … It’s … (interruption) Now… (laughing) Now, they’re saying, ‘Now be careful.’ Why? What do you think I need to be careful about? (interruption) What…? (interruption) Well, I just… (interruption) I was just gonna say… I don’t know. I’m watching the games and I had the same feeling last year as I did this past Sunday. It’s just a little too much pink out there. I don’t know. (sigh) I just. You know me. I’m not into symbolism over substance. I’m into substance.

I remember once on my immensely popular television show one night, I wore every colored ribbon that there was at the time on my suit jacket. The pink, the red, the yellow, whatever. And I pointed and said, ‘See, I’m wearing all these ribbons. I care more than you do.’ Just like, ‘I drive this hybrid. That means I care more than you do,’ and you don’t really know that. You don’t know that. It makes you feel good. But this is a marketing thing the league’s into here. It’s an outreach to women, trying to broaden the overall base of the audience of the NFL. Do you know (I’m going to have to look this up and confirm it; I’ve heard it from a number of different people) that more men come down with prostate cancer every year than women do with breast cancer? But you don’t see that. I mean, what color would the NFL have to wear to raise consciousness for prostate cancer? Now, on the other side of this, last year Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback of the Steelers, had a great game, first game in October, wearing the pink shoes. He wanted to wear ’em the next week, as he thought the pink empowered him, sort of like long hair and Samson before Delilah came along.

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Look, I don’t mean to impugn the people that wear the ribbons. I’m sure that there are a lot of people who wear the ribbons and it’s a private thing. They believe in the cause and it means something to the people that wear the ribbons. But at the same time there are a lot of people that are doing it to make a statement, to make a political statement. People that drive certain cars do this, wear certain color ribbons. Now, we looked it up here during the break. From the National Institute of Health, the estimate is in 2010 over 209,000 men and women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, far more women, of course, and 40,230 will die from it. Two-hundred seventeen thousand men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 32,050 will die. So the total for men and women, breast cancer, is 209,000, the estimate this year. Prostate cancer, men only, is 217,000.

Now, Snerdley is our resident sexist, and during the break he was weighing in on this. He said, ‘You’re dancing around the point. I understand even you, you’re getting afraid of this stuff, I can tell, Rush. You’re getting afraid.’ I’m not afraid of it. ‘Yes, you are.’ Snerdley, if you had guts, what you’d really say is there’s not one single male endeavor that women haven’t invaded now. They are invading virtually everything. They’ve invaded the country clubs, the business clubs, and now the National Football League. And Snerdley said, ‘I’ll believe all this when I see the WNBA wear latex gloves for Prostate Cancer Month.’ So this is the range of emotion out there. I did think it was pretty clever. Latex gloves for prostate cancer month. September was prostate awareness month. Did you hear anything about it? You didn’t, did you? Because men are not a minority. Women are considered an oppressed minority, so breast cancer — and folks, there’s one thing you have to say. I mean it works, no matter what people think of it. Everybody saw pink in the NFL that was watching it, no matter what they thought of it they saw it, and, ‘What the hell is that?’ And those who didn’t know what it meant found out, ‘breast cancer awareness.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ Now, at that point people’s own personal beliefs then take over as to what they think of it, how they react to it. But women are the only genuine majority that get by as a minority. There are more women at any one time in the country, any country, except China, than men, by design, by efficient intelligent design.

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RUSH: Now, I checked subscriber line e-mail, website e-mail. I got an interesting e-mail here from woman who thinks that the NFL is the going about attracting women the wrong way with pink. That isn’t the way to do it. The women they can attract to football are going to be by definition not going to be the type to respond to pink stuff. She says what they ought to do is give Sarah Palin a moose gun and do a commercial, and that would attract women to the National Football League. But, folks, look, there has to be some compromise here. (sigh) We can agree that there’s too much pink in the NFL, but can we also agree that good-looking women wearing an NFL jersey is cool? I mean, we don’t want to bifurcate things here. There has to be a way to bring us all together.

There has to be a way to bring all of us, men and women, together on this. Men love football and women. They should not have to choose one or the other. There has to be a way to show our support for both without dipping NFL apparel into a paint bucket of pink paint. There’s gotta be a better way. We need a bigender… (interruption) No, the cheerleaders don’t cut it, Snerdley. Maybe in college football, they don’t cut it in the pros. No, no, no. We need a bigender plan, I think, to preserve the integrity of the National Football League while at the same time acknowledging the role of attractive women to bring us beer and wear sexy clothes while we watch. If we can find some common ground along these lines, then we could all get along. We don’t need to start running around wearing pink shoes during the game and that kind of stuff.

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RUSH: Tommy, Richmond, Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you. Mega Pittsburgh Steelers dittos.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I wanted to call and talk about the chickification of football.

RUSH: Yes, ma’am.

CALLER: I don’t think you need to do pink breast cancer awareness to get women to like football. Either you like it or you don’t. And if you’re a woman, you want to see men being men and hitting hard and hard hitting football. I don’t want to wear a pink Steelers jersey, I want to wear a black and gold jersey.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I also do bring my husband beers while we’re watching the game. So I thought you would like that.

RUSH: Well, hubba hubba. All right, so you want men to be men, you want —

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: — to watch manly?

CALLER: Yes, I do. I want to watch Troy Polamalu jumping over the pile.