Former Dallas Stars play-by-play man Ralph Strangis wrote an Op-Ed in the Dallas Morning News last year about “injecting patriotism in sports”. It was enough to convince me that the whole exercise has become borderline meaningless; just a box we check.

In my days as a ramp agent (the term most U.S. airlines use for “baggage handler”), my coworkers and I never went out of our way to destroy a bag or viewed bags as “challenges”...but, we also didn’t go out of our way to be super careful with anything that didn’t have a fragile tag on it, either. As the linked article…

Former baggage handler and airline commuter here. About ten years ago, I bit the bullet and bought one of those metal-framed bags you see pilots carrying (LuggageWorks Stealth 22"). Ten years later, I’ve dragged that bag around the planet and carried it on nearly 700 flights...sometimes in the cabin, sometimes…