Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What makes you a fan of a person, group or brand?

It’s not the end-all, be-all of my fandom, but one thing that meat it makes me a fan of a person in a group or brand is their political views. It’s sad to say, but our political affiliations, at least here in America, have become so intertwined with our personal ideologies that it is almost impossible – for me anyway – to separate them.

My love-hate relationship with King James

Here’s the funny thing: there are entertainers whose work I’m not even a big fan of, and yet I will respect the hell out of them for their political views. My case in point is LeBron James.

No one can deny that LeBron James is perhaps the greatest basketball player of this generation. Some would go as far as to call him the greatest player of all time, claiming he has even surpassed Michael Jordan. But as a professional athlete, I cannot stand him. I feel like he is entitled. I feel like he whines too much. I feel like he has taken “flopping” in the NBA to a new level, desperately trying to draw fouls when no infraction was committed. I hate the way that he prematurely took to the moniker “King James” when he was straight out of high school.

But I’ve heard a great deal about James’s off-the-court endeavors: his charity work, the fact that he has funded both private schools and even college education for underprivileged people. His endeavors in the film industry also caught my attention. For all of these things, I applaud Lebron James. But as I said, I’m not a fan of his professional work.

My toxic relationship with WWE

On the other hand, there are people and brands whose political views I despise; and yet I still consume the product. Enter the WWE.

As I’ve written about on numerous occasions on this blog, I’ve been a fan of professional wrestling for most of my life. having said that, there is a definite stereotype about fans of professional wrestling. They’re usually perceived to be slow, dimwitted, and somehow people still think that wrestling fans don’t understand that the product is predetermined. I like to think that I defy that stereotype entirely.

However, many recent fans, and in turn WWE itself are quite conservative in their political leanings. In fact, Linda McMahon, once the matriarch of World Wrestling Entertainment, briefly served as head of the Small Business Administration (SBA) during Trump’s first term.

Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, there was a photo taken of him and Vince McMahon’s entire family in the Oval Office. That really made me cringe, needless to say. For many years, I bit my tongue, I gritted my teeth, and I continued to consume the WWE product. I even attended a few live events and bought a couple of wrestlers T-shirts over the years.

However, I can say that with their recent decision to move their premium live events (PLEs) over to ESPN‘s new premium streaming service, I finally drew the line. I refuse to pay additional money for the ESPN streaming platform, or give additional money to WWE at this point. This is to say nothing about the 10 year contract WWE has with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to hold 10 PLEs in the kingdom. .

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related (and perhaps, not-so-related) posts:

• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy
• Where Do We Go From Here? Five Years Since January 6.
• Bugs, Boundaries, and the Art of Not Being Invisible

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The article “The Fan’s Ethical Dilemma: When Politics & Product Clash” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.