“For the media to publicly admit that Cal Ripken Jr. is a fitting representative of his people due to his character, his success, his family’s closeness, and his work ethic, would be to admit that those qualities are lacking in other peoples.”
by J. B. Cash
http://www.castefootball.us
Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. was showered with praise over the last week in the prelude to his Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Sunday. Ripken is that rare white athlete that receives almost unrestrained positive coverage from the media. Even in his finest hour they are unable to muster up some long ago minor slight or imagined transgression involving a minority with which to tarnish his sterling legacy. All that was left for the media mavens in their unending quest to worship the Gods of diversity was to ensure that Ripken did not receive any more praise than his fellow inductee, Tony Gwynn.
Ripken’s greatness, and the quality that separates him from so many other athletes, is that he embodies the qualities that white America cherishes. It’s not just that he represents what we value, but how he represents it, and how his career was a homage to old fashioned values and morality. Those values are “old fashioned” because the morality that once guided white society has been altered so as to be nearly non-existent today.
Everything about the man’s career seemed to epitomize the very idea of a life well lived. He was first and foremost a baseball star. Americans, who created the game of baseball, and nurtured and developed it through 150 years, once saw the game as the defining activity of our sporting life. That is no longer true. But like our obsolete Constitution and our faux patriotism, baseball still evokes memories of a time when we were actually great and good. Perhaps because we are no longer either of those, the bittersweet memories still stir strong feelings. And Cal Ripken Jr. was not merely a baseball star, he was a star at shortstop, the single most difficult position to play. He not only was great at shortstop but he redefined the position. What was once a place to put the best glove on the team so as to generate ground ball outs, which means it was filled with no-hit/good field guys that had a job merely because they could catch, became the position it is today. A position manned not just by the team’s best gloveman but sometimes its best hitter too.
Cal Ripken was not only a good hitter he was a power hitter. Not only did he play the toughest position, he batted clean-up. He hit home runs and singles and doubles. He amassed over 3,000 hits AND over 400 homeruns. However, if it were just about the hits and homers then Ripken would have been just another good player. But there was more. He was a leader. He won two AL MVP awards. He led his team to a World Series championship. He won Gold Gloves, he went to the All-Star game (frequently), but still those are just the numbers of a great player.
Cal Ripken Jr. was so much more than that. A lot of it was due to the “Jr.” in his name. We as a people can define ourselves as distinct from the other peoples of the world in the close relationships that fathers build with sons. While half of the world’s non-white fathers desert their sons at the first opportunity and the other half treats them as a rival to be beaten down and controlled, amongst our people the father-son relationship is one of our great strengths.
The fathers of our culture value their relationship with their sons, working with them from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, overseeing their development with an interest to seeing them succeed. Their success is rightly understood as a clear sign to all that the father has done his job properly.
Is there another culture that developed anything like the Boy Scouts, or Little League baseball, the Boy’s Club, the YMCA, Pop Warner football, American Legion baseball, soap box derbys, or any of the hundred other father-son organizations? No, of course not. Those are white institutions, and while other cultures may be beginning to copy them, they could not, and would not, have created them.
A game of catch between father and son is practically a ritual with American white families. Cal Ripken Jr. embodied that ritual through his close lifelong relationship with his father, the late Cal Ripken Senior. Cal the father, taught his boy how to play ball; in the end he taught the son to be better than the father, the single most impressive thing a man can do. He nurtured his skills while he was a manager and coach in the Orioles organization and guided his son to become a superstar and now a Hall of Fame member.
And it was not only Cal Jr. in the family that made the big leagues but younger brother Billy, too. How many brothers have played ball together in the backyards and playgrounds across our land? How many brothers have turned the double play together on the sandlot diamond and then dreamed of doing it some day in the big leagues? Thousands? Millions more likely. So the continuing theme of family, of father, of son, of brothers, the continuity of male kinship which has made our people great is illustrated so well through the career of Cal Ripken Jr. and his family.
What sets Cal Ripken Jr. apart from all other players that have ever played the game of baseball in America is his work ethic. His record of playing in 2,632 straight games is a record that will never be broken. He played when sore, when injured, when sick, when tired. It his most shining moment, the very reason he is revered. Even in a society that gets lazier and lazier with each generation, the sacrifice Cal Ripken made over those many years still resonates with us all. His is the ultimate image of the working class, blue collar, white American worker. It is a tremendous feat to show up for work every day for 16 years. How many can say they have done that?
Thus Cal Ripken Jr. and the work ethic he represents is the very embodiment of a people that have worked hard to carve civilization out of wilderness on every continent on the planet. From the frigid Antarctic to the squalid tropics, from the ocean depths to the moon. While other peoples refuse to “go out in the midday sun” or require siestas in the middle of the work day, or simply refuse to work at all and insist on living off of the hard work of others by collecting welfare or unemployment, the admirable people of our culture show up for work every day.
There was a lot of praise heaped upon Cal Ripken Jr. by the media during his Hall of Fame week. None of it pointed out that the qualities he embodies, the qualities that were instilled in him, are the product not of diversity, not of a multicultural world, but are rather the honest representation of the hardest working people ever to exist on Earth.
For the media to publicly admit that Cal Ripken Jr. is a fitting representative of his people due to his character, his success, his family’s closeness, and his work ethic, would be to admit that those qualities are lacking in other peoples. But they are, we all know it and ignoring it won’t change it. It just reminds us of who we are and who they are.
The people that Cal Ripken Jr. represented so admirably during his career owe him a debt of thanks for pointing out for all to see, though none have the courage to acknowledge, those qualities that signify Europeans and all their descendants in far away lands, as a great people. The greatest of peoples.