There is Only One Way to Hurt Jimmy Haslam
In a way that won't land you in federal prison, of course.
Oligarch Jimmy Haslam is an organized criminal who would be in prison in a functioning democracy. In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, however, he is described as a gas station magnate and owner of the Cleveland Browns and Columbus Crew.
Haslam and his wife, “Sweet” Dee, have financially supported every odious political cause imaginable within Tennessee, Ohio, and on the national level. They have been honored for their co at Republican summits.
You’re probably shocked right now that a 68-year-old obscenely wealthy white man gladly advances the right’s reactionary culture wars as the window dressing for points off his annual check to Uncle Sam.
But we’ve known what kind of greasy huckster we’ve been dealing with since Haslam’s company, Flying Pilot J, got caught defrauding its trucker customers for millions of dollars.
Here’s what a former Pilot J executive said on an FBI wiretap:
“I mean, I called Jimmy and told him I got busted at Western Express [a trucking company that discovered it was being defrauded]. … Oh he knew it — absolutely. I mean, [Haslam] knew all along that I was cost-plussin’ this guy. He knew it all along. Loved it. We were making $450,000 a month on [Western Express] … why wouldn’t he love it?”
Thankfully for the Haslams, their patriarch had acquired enough wealth to the point that statement didn’t immediately bring the full weight of the federal government down upon his head despite three of his executives eventually going to prison for the $50 million scheme.
Pilot J paid the federal government $92 in fines and an undisclosed settlement to eight trucking firms to avoid a class action lawsuit from the 20 trucking firms it defrauded.
Then, earlier this year, the Haslams co-signed on the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history for quarterback Deshaun Watson, an unrepentant sex pest who shelled out an undisclosed amount of money to silence a majority of the 26 women who accuse him of sexual misconduct.
Months later, the Republican Party that Haslam spent his entire career supporting achieved its ultimate goal of stripping abortion access from people in a pathetic attempt to regulate the sexuality of strangers. In Ohio, we’ve already seen a cancer patient and a 10-year-old rape victim have to flee to Indiana, who will soon have their own abortion ban, to access safe medical care.
This has fans of the Cleveland Browns and the Columbus Crew looking to remind Haslam that unlike him, they didn’t buy their way into the fandom. He is simply the incompetent rich guy who writes the checks—literally the easiest job in the entire organization, right down to the guy selling beer.
The Crew’s most-famous supporters group devised a way to register their disgust after the club failed to put out a milquetoast statement defending “a woman’s right to choose.” That came during Sunday’s home fixture against the Philadelphia Union, which resulted in a 0-0 tie:
It should be noted that pink was prevalent throughout the broadcast, and the Nordecke unfurled a “WE DISSENT” banner. This is how the bare minimum response from fans made one of the richest men in the country look:
Now imagine if every fan had worn a shirt that said “Lock Him Up” and chanted “Fuck Jimmy Haslam” for 90 minutes while every fan turned their back to the proceedings. He probably would have left the stadium.
But there is only one way to actually hurt the soul of a billionaire that doesn’t involve that famous tool from the French Revolution you might have read about in a history book guys like Haslam don’t want you to read.
His weak spot is ostensibly what makes him strong: His financial bottom line. In that metric, Sunday was a failure.
The official attendance for Sunday’s contest, which featured post-game fireworks, was listed at 20,469 — a sellout. He did not give a damn about the lack of drums if he attended. Hell, he probably enjoyed not having to listen to that racket throughout the game.
The Rooster understands it was a holiday weekend. Folks had long-standing plans with friends and/or family and the tickets and transportation arrangements were already booked. Even if nobody attended the game—Haslam already got his.
But if nobody showed up, it would have garnered much more press than some fans wearing shirts or refusing to bang drums or hoist flags. That at least would have shown Haslam he drew the ire of the hive, and worse, the bees were organized.
If Crew and Browns fans are serious about sending Haslam a message, they need to understand it’s going to be protracted warfare and not a one-off skirmish. We already know who wins the latter affair.
You don’t have to give up supporting your team, either. There is no ethical sports fandom in this stage of capitalism. However, it’s never been easier to support your team without putting money in its coffers.
Don’t attend games. Don’t buy officially licensed gear. Cancel next season’s seasons tickets. Watch the games at bars or through pirated streams. That last one might be hard to accomplish, especially if you’re not attending in-person games, so it’s offered as a suggestion and not a moral purity test.
If we start hitting Haslam in the pockets and he will fold like origami. He cannot possibly care about our dumb little sports teams as much as us. We’re doing it out of mental illness and he’s doing it for the check and personal prestige.
Worse yet, he’s incompetent. Sure, the Crew nicked a championship in 2020, but Haslam still shit on the brand by replacing the team’s iconic crest with something that can only be described as the opposite of iconic.
As for his reign with the Browns, well, that list of failures is another column entirely. The latest blunder will be when he gave $250 million guaranteed to a massage pervert who never claim close to returning to his former level of play.
Haslam views us with the same contempt that every drug dealer has for their clientele. Why would he ever change anything he does when, despite his awfulness and personal failures, we continue to appear in his publicly financed fiefdoms to cheer our teams and line his pockets?
This action, to be clear, won’t come from Browns fans. The brain rot runs too deep to ever accomplish something of this nature. I say that as a terminal patient myself.
But Crew fans have shown an ability to organize en masse when they saved the team in the first place. The smaller number of fans makes it easier to achieve the needed scale as long as they remember that refusing to attend games and buy officially licensed merchandise is not the same as quitting on your team.
THOSE WMDs. Remembering the time R. Kelly got booted from a Columbus music festival… How we got addicted to using Q-tips the wrong way… How America’s hottest city is battling extreme heat… Don’t celebrate RadioShack’s crypto pivot; it’s just a Tai Lopez scheme… What’s the deal with all those weird wrong number texts?