As sports cheers go, the tomahawk chop’s always been kinda lame…
Not as lame arguably as drunken Chiefs fans who slather on war paint and don indian headdresses, but still lame nonetheless. Speaking of which, has it occurred to anybody that playing dress up to try and like Sitting Bull might be the equivalent of wearing blackface?
I digress.
At this point in time, we pretty much all know political correctness is out of control.
So rather than getting overly caught up in a guilt trip, maybe we can just agree that if it makes people who’s great, great grand pappy had a hand in giving George Armstrong Custer a really bad haircut – and it ticks them off to see inebriated football fans in American indian drag – why not just let it go?
Ditto for the the chop. I mean, what’s the point?
A few years back one Chiefs season ticket holder put it this way:
“(The Chiefs) should stop playing the music that encourages the chop, they shouldn’t encourage that,” he said. “The inescapable mistake they make every week is when they play that music – the old Hollywood music from when the indians were about to attack and kill all the white people – the movies played it when the indians were coming to take the white women away.”
The between the lines messaging on KC’s hokey Native American getups, war chants and chops, a) our football thugs are gonna scalp yours; b) and they may take the white women.
The reason for the current spate of tomahawk chop bashing; Native American St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Ryan Helsley; asked the Atlanta Braves not to distribute foam tomahawks in Game 5 of the playoffs. Atlanta then put the kibosh on the tomahawks and agreed to not play the chop music when Helsley was playing.
Their reward for doing away with the bad juju: St. Louis obliterated them.
The bottom line: This is like the fourth or so time, dating back to the early ’90s where so-called Native American watchdog groups and complicit liberal media pressured sports teams to dump the chop.
At one point early on, the Chiefs agreed not to play the catchy “war chant” music.
“As an STH I can assure you that the chop was never banned and doing the chop was never subject to ejection,” said comments dude balconies moleskin a few years back. “For about half a season in the early ’90s over 20 years ago they decided to not play the chop music. Fans didn’t care and did the chop anyway, which led them to bring back the Tony DiPardo band accompaniment. When the people that actually pay the money speak, you listen. The world isnt governed by people who are professionally offended with signs in parking lots and around fountains.”
Most tomahawk chop critiques complain that it makes fun of Native American culture
Not that there haven’t been tackier sports cheers by area teams…
Take the KU Football student section kickoff chant, “Rip his fucking head off!”
Surprisingly, that one lasted for years until KU football got and stayed bad for so long that few students even bothered to go to the games and it died a quiet death.
The odds of a similar quiet death at Arrowhead: Would you believe slim to none?
The tomhawk chop is lame, unoriginal, and at best racially insensitive.
Yeah but the Chiefs obviously love it…all they need to do is stop playing the music and it will go away. Or som it would seem
It is also a rip off of Florida State, ( and Atlanta) who started the whole thing. C’mon Chiefs fans, can’t you develop your own tradition, rather than stealing someone else’s? And PC or not, it is stolen from a couple of extremely lame fan bases to boot.
I used tom think Atlanta had it before KC because of how high profile Ted Turner and Jane Fonda were in the playoff games in the early ’90s. But after some research, I learned that the Chiefs had it first via a band conductor that had gone to Florida State who introduced in at a Chiefs game
So the Chiefs are only guilty of ripping off one team, and not two. So…there’s that. It’s still incredibly lame and anyone that does it here in KC is a complete rube.
Lotsa rubes here by that rubric
Uh yeah. And this is news?
If you say so…actually it leans more in the direction of perspective and commentary, which is also a form of news…
What it’s probably not; so-called breaking news
Some Native Americans tell me they’re not offended at all the names (Chiefs, Braves, Redskins et al), or the acts (tomahawk chop, etc.), while others tell me that they are; as everything in life, appears a matter personal opinion/preference (too, we’ve got a lot of other things to be offended by today that we can all agree on… each other.)
Once upon a time Chiefs official literature/memorabilia pictured a Native American – tomahawk in one hand/football the other – running through a background featuring the greater five state surrounding area. Was referred to as ‘marketing’, takeoff of the Dallas Texans design featuring a cowboy six-shooter in one hand, and football other (no records on how many cowboys were offended (or injured) in the design process/ making of the pennant.
1960’s variations included ‘Kansas City Chiefs’ preceded by the word ‘savages’, others showed a warrior doing a ‘hot foot’ (sans the football and minus the… and what is that – a medicine bag or scalp his other hand replaced pigskin? (link)
http://feltfootball.com/kansas-city-chiefs/
Empathy or lip service, tomahawk chop (looks suspiciously like Andy Reid’s chop that second pic) and wearing Native American accoutrements to games remaining and use of the word ‘savages’ as ‘the running Indian’ design departed, where we’re at 2019, for better or worse.
So, what else is new? Call it change for the better or worse, long gone if not forgotten: Hank Stram’s sport coat, tie and dress hat (Championship football too, that’s another sad tale for another sad Sunday recap.)
NFL preference today – CHA-CHA-CHING! Sponsor logos stadium to field, coaching attire to uniforms; head to toe and points in between, players are starting to look like sandwich boards… NBA having already ‘$old out’, can NFL jersey ads be far behind?
Nod not offending anyone – unless there’s a buck to be lost/made – present day climate our (sort of) politically correct but bass ackwards lot. Purity, as being on the up and up sports? LOL. From rule changes variously allow advantage one side expense the other, cheating the game and fans (PEDS), manipulated equipment (from footballs to juiced baseballs) and selling of souls for more silver and gold – players, Managers as referees variously, sports.
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Keeping with our theme of Cowboys and Indians/Texans and Chiefs, some something other tomahawk, warpaint, headdress and rain dance: the slings & arrows outrageous fortune – Deshaun Watson, QB of the Houston Texans – and the AFC’s top ranked QB – visits narrowhead gymnasium on Sunday.
Watson – ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’ – and the best QB from the NFL Draft class of 2017, ranks second in the NFL’s QB ratings at 115.9, trailing only SEATT Seahawks veteran QB Russell ‘DangeRuss’ Wilson at 126.3 (both of them ahead of – say whaaat? – Patrick ‘Choke’ Mahomes, who comes in third place, an meager 114.7 (this a stat you won’t hear reported Mid-America, land of the ‘three’ and ‘home of the swiss’.)
Watson/Texans should depart KC with another ‘W’ in the process shooting down like ducks in a barrel that which kc refers to as d-fens, by, oh… say (this one’s for you, CG)
Texans 591
@swiss 10
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Kerouac nails another 😀
Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, swiss chiefs are here. Where have all the swiss fans gone, long time waiting… Texans in a rout. Almost 500 yards of offense by the Texans as it was, and it could have very easily been over 65o yards sans self-inflicted mistakes by the Texans… what a total *** whipping by HOU.
FINAL SCORE: Deshaun Watson 1 ‘Choke’ Mahomes 0… there is no longer any doubt who the best young QB in the NFL is: his name is Watson – ‘The Man With The Golden Gun!
5 td passes (1 of them actually caught – 4 more dropped in the endzone or on the goal line), o ints (negating any had his wr’s actually done their job) and 280 passing yards (better than ‘Choke’ Mahomes) – and that’s not all. Watson added 2 rushing tds while ‘Pattycakes’ had zero – but he did lose a fumble).
The game wasn’t even close reality. How bad was it?
Those td passes aren’t dropped by HOU, their extra point isn’t missed, fg isn’t missed and the poor call vs HOU on the swiss chiefs first drive is called correctly / the play is brought back, and that unmolested fumble ‘not’ occurring, the game is a 60-14 Texans rout… FACT. Still, a win is a win is a win, and the 4-2 Texans now have the advantage head-to-head, and the sieve known as the kc d is wilting like an 10¢ orchid… and they haven’t even made it halfway through the season yet.
Two weeks in a row now, that Superbowl express has jumped the tracks, the reality is clear: as Kerouac stated aft watching the first drive this pre-season, this 2019 version of defense is even worse than the 2018 pile effluvium (and somewhere, Bob Sutton is smiling, saying ‘how do you like me now – told you so.’)
Time to put away ‘this is our year!’ again for another season… bye bye. Cue the next in fandumb’s annual line of succession: ‘WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR!’, part 2020, verse 51
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