The UFC night he held at the White House for his birthday got lost amid the froth and excitement of the World Cup. The Great American State Fair on the Washington DC National Mall was a dud. The president’s jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner all bombed.
Could the Patriot Games, a nationwide competition to find the American schoolchildren most adept at traversing a set of monkey bars, help rescue the summer? Last night we got our answer: no. A one-hour prime-time special brought us the best of the Patriot Games, and in a crowded field it managed to offer some of the most leaden TV of the American semiquincentennial.
Freedom 250, the White House-backed non-profit that hosted the UFC fight at the White House and the Great American State Fair, produced the event, and put up the $125,000 in college scholarship winnings that went to each winner on the boys’ and girls’ side of the competition. The final round of the Games actually took place earlier this week, at a sports training facility outside Cleveland, Ohio. Last night we just got the best bits, and judging by what that amounted to, we should all be thankful we never had to endure the other bits.
This was Trumpworld’s answer to the Hunger Games, but it’s unlikely there will be much clamor for a sequel. The patriots may be hungry for more, but the rest of us? The climax of this hour-long trudge was its final quarter, in which the four most athletically talented schoolchildren in the (Maga-aligned) nation faced off to see who could negotiate the “Patriot Course”, a gladiatorial obstacle course featuring ropes, hoops, kettle bells, something called “the freedom gate”, the monkey bars of “American traverse”, and a final climb up “patriot’s peak”, fastest.
But to get there ABC put us through 45 minutes of highlights from the Games’ qualifying rounds, a test of spectator endurance every bit as trying as anything inflicted on the competition’s collection of awkward 15-year-olds. To a soundtrack of rap-rock and screeching eagles, we watched as various high schoolers – “one male and one female from every state and some tribal nations and territories”, as the broadcast put it, and almost all of them white – tested themselves on the medicine ball toss, the agility shuttle, the 55m hurdles, and the flexed arm hang. The kids next had to prove themselves in various dork sports (my term) – dodgeball, kickball, and the like.
Then came the Varsity Circuit (please respect the capital letters), Operation Endurance Course (“You like to see these different athletes step up and crush the monkey bars”), and the tug of war, a contest so powerfully traditional it resisted upper-case Trumpification. Finally: Victory Hoops, an arcade-style basketball shootout game. From the living rooms of red America, you could almost hear the sigh of relief that greeted these words: the kids are alright.
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