Barry Sanders used to celebrate touchdowns by tossing the ball gently to the ref.
There was some class to this. Let the run speak for itself.
I blame everything on air guitar and the high five, and maybe a little on Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad Ali was the first athlete I ever saw who made no effort to be thankful or humble.
It shocked people at first, but because he was the first, and charming and funny, people accepted him.
He was the exception. People loved that there was someone so brash and confident like Ali. It only worked when there was just one of him.
Like, it is okay to have a few prankers out there, but if everyone is pranking all the time, like now, things slow down and don't work so well.
In the seventies there was only the low five, and it was casual, cool, done in passing. Can't even find a gif of it or a photo.
Someone brought it up over the head and then everyone was doing it, not just the players. High Fives. Then High Tens, then airborne High Tens.
People used to think guitar solos were cool with the faces they made, but the skill was the price of admission to the face. Suddenly everyone was doing it, skill or no skill.
And the celebrating and the signalling went from being punctuation to an amazing feat and became an end in its own.
Still, Billy 'White Shoes' Johnson supposedly started the over the top celebration in the end zone in the early seventies.
A thing of great ugliness that set the stage for everything that has happened since.
Dishonorable mention goes to Mark Gastineau who, in the eighties, took the self aggrandizing celebration out of the realm of something special, like a touchdown, and now could be applied to a tackle or anything else:
It has been down hill ever since. It isn't enough to do something amazing, you have to do a dance to brag about it, and even if you didn't do anything amazing, you can still do the dance to brag about it because you watched it, and even if you didn't watch it, you can still do the dance just because you're you.
So this dude did a black power salute after a play? What is the significance?
I mean, if you are concerned with race issues in a white world in the sixties, and decide to make a gesture at a world event, that takes some guts.
It is not a dance in the end zone.
Nowadays though? Black Power salute? Please. Today, everything is larping and signalling.
It is just the millennial twist on the attention getting celebration after a play. The twist being, you want to do something to show off, but you also want moral bragging rights, so you combine the two.
It is hard to see most political gestures these days as anything other than a selfie with moral superiority.
And I guess we won't go back to just tossing the ball gently to the ref at the end of a play.