Bad Sport

I am not a person who follows sport with any great fervor, with the sole exception of the St. Louis Cardinals, whom I have loved since childhood. A combination of the sounds of it setting off my autistic noise sensitivity and its players being the worse amongst my boyhood bullies has meant I hold something of an irrational contempt for basketball. Football is actually the only major American sport I ever played, which I did in the seventh grade as part of an unwise campaign to impress a girl in whose contempt I was, and insofar as I know am still, held. My relationship with the game though is not one of love or hate. Like all sport, I possess no talent for it, but it hasn't wronged me and I can, and have done, attend a game of it, if I must, without the experience being torturous. So it is with neither antipathy or admiration that I comment on what is happening to the public image of the modern NFL.

Recent years have seen NFL players involved in dog fighting rings, domestic abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, and probably more things I have missed. There is an element to the resulting fallout from these incidents where the NFL has my sympathy. Now, I've actually much more sympathy for the good men who strap on the pads every day and have worked hard to get where they are. Professional football players, as a group, cannot be convicted for the sins of some of their number. Each crime has a name to go with it and the owner of said name carries sole responsibility for whatever he might have done. However, as I have written before, no one can be above the law. Much as terrible crimes were merely handled internally at Penn State, rather than contacting the actual authorities regarding the worst sin available having occurred, there seems to be a sense within the NFL that infernal punishments such as suspensions and the like are the remedy when these situations arise. I simply don't care how valuable a player is because that doesn't change the moral obligation of officials to report crimes to police when they become aware of them.

Pedestals are for cakes, sculpture, and other things as might wish to admire at a bit higher level. They have always been a poor placement for human beings, however. When we try and place anyone on them, they fall eventually and we've no right to be surprised at this. These ordinary men running around out there in sweaty and heavy pads playing a game for a living aren't perfect. They're just a bunch of guy in uniforms playing a game for your amusement. Some of them are going to be jerks and some of them are going to be criminals, just like the rest of the population. What is most reasonable is to scrutinize the NFL itself, but also to prosecute its players for any crimes they may commute.

-Frank