https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/megan-rapinoe-wrongly-thinks-shes-a-preacher-not-a-player/OPINION
Megan Rapinoe wrongly thinks she’s a preacher — not a player
By Kyle Smith July 13, 2019 | 11:55am
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World Cup soccer champion Megan Rapinoe is milking her “victimhood” in the wake of her World Cup victory.
Arrogant, abrasive, sanctimonious, whiny, humorless, unpatriotic, self-important and immensely boring, Megan Rapinoe has made the least of her sudden ascent to fame as the captain of the World Cup-winning US women’s soccer team. With unprecedented alacrity, she has become America’s anti-sweetheart.
Instead of coming across as delighted about the team’s championship run, and humbled by all of the support, Rapinoe cast herself as a foe of President Trump, first aggressively, then passive-aggressively. Trump, like everybody else, had probably never heard of her until last month, when she told an obscure magazine called Eight by Eight, “I’m not going to the f–king White House” if the women’s soccer team should be invited there. This week Rapinoe sounded a more muted tone about Trump, saying she was against him because she figured he was against her: “You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people that look like me, you’re excluding people of color, you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you,” she said she would like to tell Trump, on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“I hate you for hating me, you hater,” has to be the quintessential taunt of this decade.
Jeez, and we were all trying to enjoy the summer. We certainly all lapped up teammate Alex Morgan’s witty tea-sipping gesture when she scored against England. Soccer was fun! But now it’s as if Rapinoe dropped a Baby Ruth in the swimming pool everyone had been loving.
Athletes are, as a group, imbued with more self-confidence than most of us can imagine. They have to be; no matter how tough your job is, you never find your mistakes getting televised to 50 million people. But the trick to being an athlete-endorser is performative humility. Peyton Manning and Michael Jordan were brilliant at this. Failing that, try a hilariously exaggerated braggadocio, like Muhammad Ali.
What no athlete should do is turn victory into victimhood, to go from champion athlete to champion complainer, to be so sanctimonious as to advise America to “love more, hate less,”as Rapinoe did in her speech at the ticker-tape parade Wednesday.
“Love more, hate less?” Rapinoe might as well have told us to eat more spinach and less pizza. Is there anything more abrasive than being told you’re a hater? Can you imagine Manning or Jordan lecturing us like this? Nor would Manning or Jordan pop up on a show as divisive as Rachel Maddow’s, as Rapinoe did, where she said “I try to … keep myself woke.”
“It’s our responsibility to make this world a better place,” she said at the parade last week. No, it isn’t. With athletes, their responsibility is limited to entertaining the rest of us with their excellence, and if they reach the very highest level, maybe make us laugh in a Nationwide commercial during time-outs. At ticker-tape parades celebrating national pride, a simple “USA! USA!” would suffice.
Rapinoe couldn’t manage that. She used to take a knee for the national anthem until her coach made her knock it off. Kneeling in front of Old Glory, by the way, now means nothing more or less than, “I am an angry leftist in need of attention.”
At the same time, she has been spewing garbage about imaginary pay disparities. She joined a lawsuit seeking pay commensurate with men and keeps talking about her pay in interviews, saying the attitude toward women is, “How cheap can we do this while sort of keeping them happy?’” Yet women’s team sports are essentially the minor leagues, so we need not feign surprise that the players are compensated less. She may recall that her own team was trounced 5-2 by a group of under-15-year-old Dallas schoolboys in 2017.
These weren’t the world’s best 14-year-old boys. They weren’t the country’s best 14-year-old boys. They were just the 14-year-old boys of Dallas. The men’s World Cup brought in $6 billion in revenue; the women’s, $130 million.
Rapinoe imagines herself to be a principle embodied, like Jackie Robinson (who suffered racism) or Ali (who was jailed), but her grievances are all in her head. To the extent she stands for anything, it’s a mythical pay disparity problem. She’s a fake victim.
“I’m excited to kind of dig in and see really where I can take this,” she said on Maddow’s show. “How do we bring it out of just sports and . . . into something way bigger? . . . What’s the best way to get people mobilized, whether that’s in voting or just getting people more educated and more plugged into what’s happening, you know, in our politics and in our lives?”
“More plugged in to what’s happening”? We’re all so plugged in to what’s happening that our hair is standing on end. We need to unplug. When it comes to soccer, let’s have more tea-sipping and less pounding the lectern.
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.
