StarCat/CatStar

selectively invoked to stave off condemnation and punishment. Athletes enjoy a
great deal of political and cultural sway, which they utilize to great effect.
Immense swathes of the population who wouldn't have given a rat's ass about
Ferguson or Eric Garner were forced to educate themselves after the St. Louis
Rams held up their hands and Lebron wore his “I can't breathe” t-shirt. Michael
Sam and Jason Collins and Orlando Cruz have rendered an entire slew of
homophobic stereotypes inapplicable. Athletes recruit volunteers and donations
for disaster relief and The Boys and Girls Club and children’s hospitals and a
thousand other causes of great merit by modeling the generous behavior that
their fans, thankfully, emulate. But you can’t promote the positive and then
declare the whole forum voyeuristic and irrelevant when somebody does
something disgraceful. The job of “professional athlete” doesn't exist without a
passionately dedicated audience, and every athlete, as a performer, an
entertainer, has signed on for a life in the public eye, like it or not. You don’t go to
work and then selectively choose which duties you will and won’t be discharging.
To insist “I just play football, I’m no role model,” is akin to a landscaper
announcing “I just mow grass, I’m no hedge-trimmer.”
Kierkegaard says, “Once you label me, you negate me.” A fan from Wisconsin,
when asked about Ben Roethlisberger's moral turpitude, says “He's a football
player. His responsibility is to know the playbook and win football games.” And
here we have the root of it. The athlete is supposed to be simplistic and
subhuman, suitable for fast, easy consumption. When we sit down to watch the
game, we don't want to think about Ferguson, and we don't want to evaluate why
we’re wishing health and prosperity on a violent criminal. Can't there be a single
facet of life that isn't complicated by ethical controversy?
And the answer is no. Not a facet of public life, at least. And not when the
pertinent ethical issue is the institutionalized condoning of brutal violence, and
not when the collateral damage includes a generation of young athletes who grow
up thinking sexual violence and domestic abuse are ubiquitous and excusable
accompaniments to success.
The solution is for ownership and the league to stop posturing and fire the
perpetrators. There might be a few “gray area” casualties, but those will more
than justify themselves in the long run, by encouraging a more stringent
unofficial code of personal conduct. It's not as if the Duke lacrosse team or Colin
Kaepernick were blindsided by wild accusations while reading to orphans. If this
new policy forces athletes to choose their company more carefully, or impinges
upon their right to party with strippers, I think we can live with that. Penalize
the team. If tomorrow's newspaper runs a story about a waiter pissing in the
soup, that restaurant's finished. Even the billion-dollar corporate juggernauts
that are NFL teams would be terrified of a one-year post-season ban. If one of
your players is accused of a violent offense, and sufficient evidence exists to
obtain a conviction or a plea-bargain or a settlement, then you're not going to the
playoffs that year. Imagine the hysterical reaction of die-hard fans to their team’s
banishment. Sport is rare, as an industry, in that a hell of a lot more power lies
with the ticket-and-merchandise-buying public than with the oligarchy. When
teams can no longer risk taking a rider on a player who comports himself like a
violent moron in college, pretty quickly we'll have a lot fewer athletes acting like
violent morons in college. And for those players who are too good to pass up, but
too psychotic to corral, the organization could assign a battalion of round-theclock
babysitters. As strange and pathetic as that scenario might sound, there
are quite a few innocent people who would have been a lot better off if Aaron