The Los Angeles Lakers have signed an endorsement deal with Korean packaged food manufacturer Bibigo to have its logo on the Lakers jersey for the next five years. The deal is worth $100 million to the Lakers.

Lakers 🤝 @bibigoUSA

We’re proud to introduce our new patch partner and first ever global marketing partner. pic.twitter.com/xwxUPQOgtV

— Los Angeles Lakers (@Lakers) September 21, 2021

While this, in and of itself, is hardly the stuff of which headlines are made, it does point out an inconvenient fact for those self-ensconced in their “I don’t watch the NBA (or whichever professional sport one chooses to name) anymore because LeBron (or whichever professional athlete one chooses to name) is a FOOFOOHEAD!” world. See, much as one may wish to believe that going woke invariably equals going broke, professional sports are still raking in the big bucks plus capturing the attention of people worldwide. And all of our ranting against same is so much spitting into the wind.

It’s not that detailing the rank hypocrisy and shallow capitulation to radical fringe groups that permeates professional sports today is an exercise in useless raging against the dying of the light. However, in terms of success in alerting the world at large to the fallaciousness and facetiousness of these exercises in woke gone amok, right now we are effecting slightly less change than someone trying to take out the Rock of Gibraltar with an emery board. It might make us feel better to know we are putting our convictions into action by not watching sports, not buying tickets or team apparel, and so on. But as deals such as the Lakers and Bibigo arrangement, or the recently signed contracts between different television networks and the NFL that will pad each of the league’s thirty-two team’s bank account to the tune of some $300 million a year, amply demonstrate, even as the ball doesn’t care what color skin throws, catches, shoots, hits, or what have you with it, the professional sports world doesn’t care that many conservatives don’t care. Why should it? It hasn’t decreased the paycheck any. What, then, can be done?

We can start by regarding professional sports much in the same manner as we contemplate pop culture. Why? Because sports, like it or not, are part of pop culture and societal culture in general. Even as one does not need to spend every waking hour keeping tabs concerning who’s who this week on TikTok in order to be sufficiently aware of what’s going on in the world beyond politics to be conversant on things, one can at least occasionally glance at the sports headlines so you know the score. No pun intended.

As previously mentioned here, be prepared to educate those under the influence of sports figures and/or media when someone or some entity goes off the rails. Quoting from a previous post:

To start, one can speak from the mind and heart, not the jerking knee. Knowledge is power. Read Adam Smith. Read Henry Hazlitt. Read Friedrich Hayek. Above all else, read the Book penned by multiple writers yet written by only one Author. From such references we can learn how to differentiate between silly stupidity and genuine evil. We can also learn how to educate others, not with the wild-eyed rants so beloved by the Left but from discourse that is rational and cordial, yet unyielding on matters of truth.

A near infinitely greater number of people care about how the Lakers are going to do this year than such moments as the hot off the grill theater of the absurd Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez and company indulged themselves in while decrying funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Unless one wishes to live in the conservative ghetto, refusing contact with the politically unclean, having an idea of what is going on in the world, including the sports world, is necessary in order to successfully propagate the conservative evangel. You might not care, but it won’t kill you to stay aware.