Sports Gone Insane, Day Ten, Part Three: The Box Is Opened Some More

I really do feel that, given time, we are truly opening a Pandora's Box in this situation regarding the absolute marriage of football and violent abuse of all forms.


Grantland, today, did the NFL no favors with it's article:  "Together, We Make Football".


It goes into a list of NFL players (not nearly exhaustive) since 2005 who actually got caught in domestic violence:

• January 1, 2005:  Willie Middlebrooks (DEN, traded to SF after the incident, SF glosses it over).  Grabbed girlfriend by the neck and lifted her off the ground -- pled guilty to a misdemeanor.  Played another year in the league in SF, returned to Denver, was cut, out of football two years, played in the CFL, retired in 2010. 
• February 14, 2005:  Samari Rolle (FA).  Hit his wife, three stitches, pled guilty.  Fined one game check by the league.  Signed by the Ravens THREE WEEKS LATER.  Was on the Ravens four years, and a fifth in which he did not play.  Out of the league in 2010.
• April 26, 2005:  Brad Hopkins (TEN).  Choked his wife over a car insurance dispute.  Pled guilty.  Suspended one game by the league.  2005 was his last year in the NFL.
• August 28, 2005:  Kevin Williams (MIN).  In a significant altercation with his wife.  He was drunk and angry she was not wearing her wedding ring.  Pled out to disorderly conduct, $1,000 fine, one year probation.  NO LEAGUE PENALTY.  Made five more consecutive Pro Bowls 2006-2010 and the all-2000's decade team on the defensive line.  Finally left Minnesota after last season, where he was signed by...  the Seattle Seahawks.
• At least eleven players were arrested in 2005 for domestic violence incidents.

The article then goes into the Ray Rice situation, and then states something that very few people are willing to admit:


"But Roger Goodell isn’t what’s really wrong with football."


And then the article goes into the ratings numbers I talked about in a previous post.


And then...


"Football encourages some deep tremor of romance about what it means to be a man — even, it should be said, among the sport’s many female fans.


Save for the military — with which it has a symbiotic relationship — the NFL is the biggest and strongest exponent of American masculinity.


And integral to that notion of American masculinity is violence. Football is our culture’s great spectacle of violence, our version of the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome."


Then it shows a picture of Baltimore Raven Terrell Suggs in a gladiator mask -- the same Terrell Suggs who forced his then-girlfriend and now-wife to get a protection order against him in 2012, culminating at least three years of abuse.


But they still have value.  Why?  Ask Arizona GM Steve Keim:


"“It’s a bully division,” Arizona’s general manager, Steve Keim, told Grantland’s Robert Mays earlier this year, “so we had to add our number of bullies to our defense.” He meant that as a good thing."


And why would he not, when the biggest bullies on the block just lifted the Lombardi Trophy?  Arizona is now one of the seven remaining 2-0 teams.  Coincidence?


Read this article -- and this indictment of why the games must be stopped to ever prevent domestic violence...


"The NFL calls itself a family. If that’s the case, it’s a family of fathers and sons but not wives and daughters. It’s a family that more closely resembles the mob than a family connected by blood or love. It’s a family that protects its own by cutting others, a family that privileges loyalty over what’s right. But loyalty goes only so far in the NFL — because at some not-so-distant point, the family turns into a business. When concussions enter into it, or salary caps, or age, the family becomes about winning Sunday’s big game or about the business’s bottom line. If it’s a family, then it’s a fucked-up family."