On Frozen Blog

Somewhere on the path to the Rose Garden perhaps 10 or 15 years ago the unending parade of championship-winning sports teams visiting the White House became rote and cliched. The visits have lost all of their novelty and pizzaz — they’re as inevitable as the setting sun and recorded greetings at federal agency phone numbers. The athletes themselves, I’m sure, still get a kick out of the gig, but for the rest of us, they’ve become the twelfth season of ‘Cheers’ or ‘Friends’ . . . and worse, yet another government entitlement. It’s time to mercy kill them out of existence.

The World Champion Miami Heat were in town this week to White House glad-hand with the Prez. Inexplicably, Washington Post reporters covered it. Maybe I’m irritated over this because as we’re a nation at war I feel strongly that a President — any President — has better things to do than pretend he gives a rodent’s rear end about Shaquille O’Neal’s prowess in the low post. And make no mistake: the Heat will be just one of at least 3,000 victorious sports teams to visit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this year.

This silly style over substance plot started out as a homage to professional sports champions almost three decades ago, but it’s evolved to include, these days, even the field hockey legends from Prairie View. The Little League World Series victors? No f’in doubt. Thus far, we’ve avoided including only regional church bingo champions on the conveyor belt congrats from the leader of the free world.

I may also be irritable in this matter because the phoniness of this event is underscored most dramatically when Stanley Cup champions visit the President hailing from Texas . . . or Arkansas . . . or wherever. Let’s say, hypothetically, that the Buffalo Sabres win Lord Stanley in three months’ time. Lasting Middle East peace would be achieved before this or any non-Minnesotan President could tell his domestic advisor “Let’s keep this visit brief . . . Briere speared our guy in the balls.”

Ronald Reagan started this scheme, but back in 1981 or ‘82, I’d argue that it was defensible, and actually, a clever bit of political psychology. Reagan inherited a nation battered by gas lines, high interest rates, the Iranian hostage crisis . . . but also the Miracle on Ice. You’d have an easier time dislodging Dustin Penner from in front of the crease than convincing me that Herbie’s Heroes didn’t instill in Ronnie a sense that welcoming the nation’s sporting heroes to the people’s house was a wise bit of spirits boosting for a beleaguered nation. This was the dawn, too, of the Magic-Bird era on the hardwood, so more fantastic feats could be chronicled by White House photographers.

But times have changed — the Department of Homeland Security likely has 40 percent of today’s pro athletes on a watch list — and so should outdated, ridiculously scripted, and altogether phony rituals.

Instead, I’d advocate the adoption of a rigid criteria for athletes’ earning a White House visit. Here’s my five-point plan for reform:

1. Miracle workers — genuine, one-in-a-million odds overcomers — get a visit. Chemical-free Tour de France winners come immediately to mind.

2. *The 2004 Boston Red Sox get a visit. They ended a curse. The next Chicago Cubs’ team to win in October gets one as well — they’ll have eradicated a disease.

* With my inclusion of modern pro baseball here I must restrict White House access to these two teams, as the rest of the Majors is basically pharmacologically poisoned, and my reformed system of admission is going to be strict as it relates to performance-enhanced cheaters and thugs. One lone rostered athlete appearing in a perp walk or detox and his teammates — even if their season is dynastic — are off to the Secretary of Commerce’s weekend beach house instead.

3. Obviously, because of this moral turpitude clause, the entirety of the NBA would be excluded from admission.

4. Nation-engrossing triumphs that tug on the heartstrings merit White House visits. I was a college freshman in 1986 and in my campus’ student union and glued to the big screen television broadcast of Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters at age 46. I’m a non-golfer, but that day, like seemingly every other student around me, I had tears of awe-joy streaming down my cheeks. Jack and similar authors of such feel-goodness are White House-bound.

5. No college kids, no X Gamers. They’re one in the same, aren’t they? The collegians spend too little time in the classroom as it is. If their governors wanna fete them, fine.

We should be down then to fewer than seven sports-related visits each year, which sounds about right. This is, after all, a busy man, with a lot on hs mind, and I also think there ought to be more Boys and Girls Scouts and firemen and women and EMT heroes than dropout jocks clogging the President’s greeting line.

When the Caps win the Cup, I don’t want them celebrating at the White House — unless Dick Patrick is President. They can come to my house, for strippers, kegs, and tattoos. Actually, when the Caps last won something really significant, the 1998 Eastern Conference title, they did precisely the right thing. They hastily organized a reception very late that night at the team’s Piney Orchard practice facility. Those of us who were there that night will never forget it, turning on to Piney Orchard Parkway after midnight and seeing cars crammed next to one another miles short of the rink. Ken Beatrice played a lead role in fomenting such an outpouring, fairly ordering all Caps’ fans to Piney that night. As I recall, the team bus eventually pulled up around 2:30 in the morning. There wasn’t six inches of free space within that facility in the middle of the night. No pomp, no circumstance, no prepared remarks, just an underdog out on the Piney ice in the middle of the night lavishing the love from a success-starved fanbase.

Not one iota of phoniness.