Justin Cliburn made his Fantasy Football brothers the darkest era of his life.
Cliburn and more than 40 former and existing army worker corps compete each year in the OklahomIraqis League (OIL), a network of Iraq war veterans founded through U. S. Oklahoma infantrymen in 2006. Initial purpose a healthy distraction while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This became a post-deployment fraternity that Zachary Jessen, the league’s founder, described as “a fantasy treatment organization (football) as a cover. “
Cliburn, who was sent to Iraq in 2005 with the Oklahoma National Guard, is the league commissioner and reports symptoms of post-traumatic tension disorder and lost his brother and nieces to a murder-suicide at this time last year.
“All the boys were there for me after that. That an organization of ‘virile’ adult men has a giant network of friends to depend on helped save lives in our organization,” Cliburn said. “It’s a kind of undeclared connection, and the camaraderie of the fantasy league is the vector, where you can call to communicate about football, but you’re really having a bad day of intellectual health. Avoiding this isolation prevents you from thinking about hurting yourself. “
But this year, many league members felt conflicted over the message sent by some NFL players when they knelt during the national anthem to protest social injustice and police brutality. Several members said they wouldn’t see the NFL, though they’ll update their elegant list. .
In this year’s Fantasy League draft, held in Konawa, Oklahoma, with a majority of OIL members, Cliburn said it was once again an outlier as a liberal in an organization of Republicans who supported Trump. debates about protests introduced through Colin Kaepernick in 2016, which have been amplified this season as a component of the Black Lives Matter movement.
This year, several other occasions took the national anthem, with players kneeling and standing, with their arms folded while wearing social justice shirts. Each NFL team has taken its own approach. The Seattle Seahawks, for example, all knelt in uniesonuming during the Week. On January 1, when only one Dallas Cowboys player, Dontari Poe, knelt down, the Miami Dolphins stayed in the locker room for the anthem, opting to release a video instead.
In the NBA, all two players knelt in the first games of the season in their 22s when they resumed in August.
President Donald Trump has criticized the protests as “a lack of respect for the flag” of his presidency. In 2017, more than two hundred NFL players knelt in reaction to Trump’s perorata at a rally in which they asked owners to “return” protesting players.
Jessen said he supports the message that several athletes are driving. However, he is offended and injured when he sees him kneeling after serving from 2001 to 2013 for the Oklahoma National Guard.
It me off, I probably wouldn’t lie, said Jessen. But what we did when we joined the military was take an oath to protect the Constitution so that we could fight for americans’ right to express that right to protest. I just don’t think that’s the right way to protest. I hope there’s a bigger approach.
“Personally, I have a feeling that if an NFL player were to serve his country, he wouldn’t kneel. There’s a feeling stuck to the flag that can’t be erased. “
Cliburn said that when he heard the hymn, he put on goose bumps and could perceive how veterans felt disrespect and revulsion when they saw them kneeling. prism of emotion.
“I personally players with their freedom of speech,” Cliburn said. “I sense the context and I know you’re not protesting against the flag. (NFL) are protesting very serious disorders in their network that many of us cannot. “perceive, they are employing kneeling as a vehicle for change. It has been tried in many other ways, but it has never attracted people’s attention as it has lately. “
Fantastic football and NFL fandom are closely linked and, according to Rick Wolf, president of fantasy alarm sports network, the army has been one of the biggest internet-age enthusiasts. He claimed that a significant portion of his clients use an army reduction and that his radio display on fantastic sports will put his veteran guest ahead of other visitors because they served in the army.
Ulysses Henderson, a police officer who is another member of the OIL League for a long time, said the practice of fantasy sports only reinforced his fandom as an unconditional fan of the Cowboys, but was distracted by the message of kneeling the anthem.
“I can see how that would be a decisive thing for some,” Henderson said. “Many of us need football to be an escape from all the disorders that exist and the things we go through personally. On the other hand, the game is a microcosa for life. I just don’t like the idea that kneeling is the center of football.
“Even if the goal is good, it has a lot to do with how it is perceived, which to me is disrespectful. The greatest harmful component is that the message (kneeling) can offend an organization of other people so easily and our emotions are not “not taken into account. If you have the right to protest, I have the right as (veteran) to be harmed by this protest. “
Cliburn adds: “The challenge is that it’s a polarization factor and can easily make me opposed to them. This is not necessarily the case, but at the end of the day, the flag we are defining values the right to freedom of expression and individual differences. That’s what I’ll stand for. “
Follow journalist Scott Gleeson on Twitter @ScottMGleeson.