Monthly Archives: January 2014

Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Sherman, Society

Lessons from a King

mlk604233On Monday, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

I might have used “celebrated”, but that would be a stretch. We were far too focused on Richard Sherman’s WWE style promo cut on Erin Andrews following the NFC Championship to celebrate the life and work of Dr. King.

The vast majority of us sits and hides from the Polar Vortex, hitting the snooze button – or not even setting an alarm on this typically cold January Monday each year. Turns out, that makes quite the metaphor for our lives.

We have hit the snooze button one too many times.

The reasons are many, but mostly are due to the false sense of security we have about progress. Too many of us are oblivious to the problems we face, as a nation, as a society. The collective majority of us believe we are simply better than those generations before us.

While it may be true that we do not have many of the problems of the 1960s, we have the issues of today. And we are flat out ignoring them. In yet another call to arms and minds, this wonderful nation that could is quickly becoming a nation that can’t.

We can’t sustain this beast.

We can’t survive in political gridlock.

We can’t keep shooting each other with machine guns in schools.

We can’t keep striping away the fabric of our morality and rights by either vague posturing or blind ignorance.

We can’t live beyond our means for much longer.

But we can do so much more to improve our personal situations and those we call neighbors.

As I read some of the fantastic pieces commemorating Dr. King this week, I wondered: what would he think of the world now? Had he not been assassinated in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 85, no doubt an even bigger social, political and cultural icon for all that he would have accomplished in the 40-plus years since.

And it’s difficult to think about him without thinking of Bobby Kennedy, who was also assassinated in 1968. What might he have done had he lived? What would he think of the world now?

If we are honest, as interesting as it may be to speculate on such things, it really does not matter.

What matters is what we think of the world today.

What are we going to do to make it better?

If you actually study their measured words, Dr. King, and his contemporaries, truly transcended time and place. Their words are still relevant and important today. We just fail to heed them, listen to them, and implement them is all.

richard-sherman-elite-daily-600x300For example, let us return to Mr. Sherman, Seattle Seahawks cornerback and perhaps the best player at his position in the NFL. From the moment his amazing athletic feat occurred through today, we could run about a million different case studies of what still plagues us as a society.

We are a bit too obsessed with inconsequential things, like football and the famous. Far too many people cared about two teams from the West coast in the middle and eastern parts of this country. Sherman gained nearly 225,000 followers between the end of the game and Monday evening. My social media feeds were flooded with comments – mostly negative – about Sherman scaring Erin Andrews half to death.

We’re more prone to comment on something like Sherman’s outrage than we are on things like abortion, crime, or helping find homeless men, women and children shelter from freezing temperatures.

Why? Because if we ignore it long enough, we can pretend it is not there.

Everything is a personal choice or belief, therefore private, and in modern America, the private decisions and stances we have trump humility, human dignity and the betterment of our society. This is because most people do not want to have some other liberty infringed upon, so we willfully ignore others to save the ones we personally identify with.

But in the end, we all lose.

How does that relate to pro football? Simple – we can easily find common ground on the surface of any topic – like the fact Sherman seemed like a selfish, boastful jerk during the interview. But most will fall silent when we discuss a more substantive topic outside a sporting event or reality TV.

As Dr. King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

King also said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

It might help if we knew what was right.

We seem to have forgotten grace, sportsmanship and humility. Sherman mocked the receiver he tipped the ball from, Michael Crabtree, who had, apparently, disrespected him. So, by all means, disrespect right back.

I cannot remember the last time I saw a tremendous play that the athlete who made it did not find it imperative to let the entire world (that just watched it) know what happened.

Why can we not let our actions speak for themselves? Maybe it has something to do with our lust for attention. Then again, it might be worth looking at what we do with the attention once we have it. Ask for the grand stage, and you must put on a grand show, right?

Dr. King’s thoughts: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

And where do we stand during others times of challenge and controversy? We distance ourselves as quickly as possible.

A player caught cheating in sports: “I never liked the guy, always suspected he was a cheater.” Really? Interesting you never came out and said as much.

I’ll admit to liking Lance Armstrong during his years on top and being duped by Mark McGwire. It was believable, yet not. It was borderline heroic. And it was a lie. Now we know. But I cannot re-write history – and neither can you.

It probably says more about who you would stand next to during a controversy of theirs than what you would do during one of your own.

We give a pass for emotion in the moment. After the initial backlash on Sherman, there was a backlash to the backlash. I read far too many “don’t stick a mic in an athlete’s face in that environment” and “the media begs for crazy moments and then freaks when they get one” type comments.

Far too often and far too easily we give a pass to people for their reactions “in the heat of the moment.” We should hold people accountable for their actions, reactions and emotions. It is indeed the measure of a man. As it is the measure of our society. We all reacted in the same manner as Sherman did. Neither was appropriate or befitting.

Until we can get a grip on ourselves and acknowledge how far we still have to go – that the journey of personal and societal growth never ends, only evolves – then we will continue to struggle with the reality that we are losing everything we say we value.

WE must stop hitting snooze.

WE must stop wasting our collective time and societies time by passively participating and only engaging in the stuff that does not matter.

Maybe WE could do something to transcend time and place, where memories are not just words, but live in action.

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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2014 AFC Championship Game, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady

The Great Debate

After four long months, we have come away with a familiar match-up in the AFC Championship.

Brady vs. Manning.

ImageThis Sunday, it will be nearly 10 years to the day since two of the greatest professional quarterbacks in any lifetime met in the playoffs. It feels like this could realistically be the last time they meet with the stakes so high.

They are intrinsically linked, despite their football narratives taking entirely opposite paths, they remain relatively the same.

Peyton Manning could never quite get over the hump in the playoffs, despite stellar numbers and regular season records that nearly every QB would trade for. Then, he broke through the New England and Super Bowl barrier in 2006.

All seemed settled, the monkey removed from his back. Yet as time has passed from that magical day in Miami, when the Colts beat the Bears in an ugly, wet game, Manning’s place among the elite of the elite remains a question for some, due largely – if not entirely – to his continuing poor performance in the playoffs.

Tom Brady had it pretty good the first half of his career. With a masterful coach, a tremendous defense and a clutch kicker, the Patriots won three Super Bowls in four years. But he never had the stats or regular season records to match the Mannings, Marinos and Elways. Then 2007 happened. Finally armed with two receivers not found at a Dollar General store, Brady shattered records and the Patriots had the first undefeated regular season since Nixon was in office.

But Brady had found life to be a bit tougher in recent years – with two Super Bowl losses at the hands of Tom Coughlin, Peyton’s little brother Eli and the New York Giants. As Gisele said so eloquently, Tom can’t catch the ball or play defense, too. He’s just a man. A man in Uggs.

As we often find, there’s more to it than just that. The Patriots have had the better organization, which means their team is often well-rounded, while Manning’s days with the Colts were often marked by a defense that never materialized into anything more than subpar.

Though not necessarily by choice, Manning has moved on to Denver in his NFL golden years and found a team chalked with talent on both sides of the ball, leading to a superior team in each of the past two regular seasons. As the numbers and MVPs pile it, it is safe to assume that he really should not need anything else to stake claim to the label of greatest quarterback ever.

But a second Super Bowl ring sure would put it to rest.

Brady has survived and thrived long enough that the Patriots have been forced to basically overhaul their team in chunks over the past two or three seasons. While that has not stopped New England from piling up more division titles and first round byes and AFC Championship or Super Bowl appearances, the fact remains Brady and Belichick have not won a Super Bowl since February 2005 – remember, when Terrell Owens actually mattered and Donovan McNabb was throwing up in the fourth quarter? If it seems so long ago – it is.

Even without the gaudy, long term stats, Brady will always have a logical claim to the label of greatest quarterback ever.

But a fourth Super Bowl ring sure would help drive the point home.

ImageHowever, it should be obvious: this debate will not end come Sunday. For those who actually pay attention, there is far too much else that happens on and off the field to allow this conversation to be settled. It might never be – and maybe it should not.

They have taken turns breaking each other’s records. Each has probably been at their very best not when breaking those marks, but in the seasons where they excelled when they probably should not have.

Like the years Manning and the Colts offense was actually their defense, used to keep other teams – and the porous Colts defense – off the field. Or this season, when Brady has guided the Patriots to another double-digit win total with huge injuries and lack of experience on both sides of the ball.

Plainly stated, both are in many minds, the best of all time. No other quarterbacks have done it in so many different ways and for so long.

Their stories have a different arc, but a similar tone. Manning was perhaps relied on more (at least up ‘til now) than Brady. As a friend stated, it must be nice to have a running game like the Patriots did on Saturday against the Colts, or to play against a young Andrew Luck, who threw four interceptions.

Perhaps, but just the same as I am sure Brady would trade his receiving core for Manning’s at any point in their careers except for possibly 2007. Just the same as Manning would probably take the Patriots defense over any the Colts had in every year but the 2006 playoffs.

You see, they are at the same time very similar, yet very different. They have defined their teams and the NFL for the past decade-plus.

And really, all this comes down to are a bunch of largely superfluous factors that really are more telling of us than they are them.

For example, where you live, what your favorite team is, what you appreciate in football, what you value in a quarterback. Do you enjoy winning consistently and your team having a chance, or do you value championship trophies more? Do you like a cerebral quarterback with a master command or a quarterback so precise between 15-35 yards he could hit Lincoln’s nose on a penny?

So what are we arguing about? The simple fact we like one guy or another. That’s it.

Manning and Brady do not think of this the same way we do. They like and respect each other. In fact, they are better friends than most people know, often talking and texting about life – and football; like sharing game plans on how to beat other teams. Of course they want to win, but I doubt if they sit around comparing resumes and arguing about who is better.

We’ve been wasting so much time pointing out all the things we don’t like, or what we think is the reason one is better than the other. It is just what we do. We need to know. We need people to agree with us. We want a clear-cut winner in this.

But no matter the outcome, we won’t know any more after this game than we did before it. Perhaps it is time to stop finding so much strength or fault in either man and appreciate them both at the same time.

Let us just enjoy the show before the final credits.

This great debate is nothing more than a distraction to the show.

In the words of T.O., grab your popcorn.

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Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball Writers of America, Major League Baseball, Morals

Voter Frauds

We might want to remember yesterday, January 8, 2014, as a date we will not remember. We can forget that this was the date that everyone left stopped caring about the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Just look at this mess.

From who got in to who did not, from who voted and whom they voted for to who gave their vote away, this has become one of the single dumbest topics in all of sports.

Oh, I used to care – even when my friends who had long since cared were forced to reckon with my soapbox about steroids and Pete Rose and why baseball still mattered.

But this nonsense is stripping away the final remaining people who actually cared.

The last thing most of us want to do is listen to these smug little men take their 15 minutes every year and give superfluous reasons as to why they put Craig Biggio 11th on their ballot.

Greg MadduxOr why Greg Maddux – GREG MADDUX (that’s right, all CAPS) – didn’t deserve their vote due to some preposterous unwritten rule that says because Babe Ruth wasn’t a unanimous Hall of Fame choice in 1936, no one can be.

If 11 voters left Ruth off their ballot nearly 80 years ago, then by Zeus, Greg Maddux should be left off dozens more, right? Is this an SNL sketch about Bill Bradsky? What are we doing?

Has any of these voters taken a moment to think about how comical this is? They are taking themselves and this process so serious that it is scaring people away from the topic at all.

There was a time that the debate on what to do with the players who admitted or allegedly used steroids was a decent conversation worth having. Leave them out? Create a separate wing? Change their plaques? And if we ever actually addressed that issue, Rose would have to be allowed in, too.

Now? Well, like a growing legion of baseball fans, I’m of the opinion it just doesn’t matter. We’re so caught up in the minutia; the whole thing comes off as childish as the game’s very nature.

We’re looking at you, writer guy who says he will not vote for anyone from the steroid era, then defined it with beginning and end dates and goofed when admitting you voted for a player within those dates.

Oy.

And we’re glaring at you, indigent, self-righteous hypocrites obsessed with slamming Dan LeBatard for allowing Deadpsin.com readers to vote on his ballot and proclaiming LeBatard unqualified to vote anyway – but left Maddux off your ballot entirely.

Yikes.

Who said these writers are “worthy” of casting a vote, anyway? Because they write the “beat”? Because they “cover” baseball? Thank goodness our American government doesn’t allow the same voting process. Only talk show hosts and political pundits would be allowed to choose the president, based on the fact they “cover” it for media outlets.

That coverage, as outlined in a fantastic piece on Grantland yesterday, including ignoring steroids in baseball, forgetting to cover it like Sammy Sosa forgot the English language during his suspicion period, or just not covering it at all until enough people started covering it they switched sides and picked up a pitchfork and started finally talking about what they’d seen and heard for 15 years.

It’s easy to be honest after the truth has come out.

You cannot pretend these players did not play. You cannot ignore an era. You just have to deal with it. Just like all the collegiate banners brought down, we still know who played and what year they went to the Final Four or won the National Championship. It cannot be erased from our memories. There are pictures and everything!

hall of fameIf this stance of ignoring players from the steroid era because the playing field was unequal, then why did the sportswriter forefathers allow in players prior to African Americans involvement in the league? Was that a level playing field? How about the cleats those guys wore versus today?

But the absolute worst offense is throwing stones inside a house of glass. Baseball is trying to do the impossible: create a perfect center of worship to compare all players from all generations equally.

It cannot be done. It should not be done. And until we can get over that, the process will be as convoluted, unintelligible and comedic as it was during yesterday’s afternoon of shouting.

Major League Baseball ought to just have a voting day where every fan – informed or not, just like the rest of our voting systems – can cast one vote for one player. Top three make the Hall of Fame, with a minimum number of votes or a certain percentage of the vote.

Is that a good idea? Probably not. In fact, I am certain it could be a terrible one, with many flaws and loopholes. But it can be no worse than listening to this nauseating yearly dissertation from sports writers who take themselves far too seriously.

And the worthless exercise where we try to convince them all how flawed their logic is has not made bit of difference. Trying to convince someone with flawed logic is an ironic oxymoron. It is a noble exercise in futility.

So I do not care if someone gave away their Hall of Fame vote to a poll on Deadspin.com any more than I do to listen or read another rationalization on why a handful of guys do not belong in the Hall based on reasons that have nothing to do with numbers and statistics, yet everything to do with morality, honesty and various shades of gray.

Until there is less lack of intelligence in this entire, much broader conversation about the process in general, there is probably going to be fewer and fewer people paying attention and caring to this sideshow.

Kind of like politics, with its sniping, arguing over points of emphasis that are not really points at all, backroom deals, dark corners, suspicion and biased, media driven stories.

Baseball really has become as absurd and obscure as our political system.

And, if you are looking to continue to push that whole America’s game status, well, that’s about as American as you can get these days.

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Aaron Rodgers, acceptance, New Year's Eve, Peyton Manning, Society, tolerance, Tom Brady

Accepted Assumptions

Watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve has become a tradition for many Americans, though we cannot state with certainty why we still tune in. Perhaps out of tradition – and age – or both.

While watching the NBC crew kill time before everyone awkwardly – and poorly – counted down the last 10 seconds of the year (again), I found myself only casually listening to the conversation between Carson Daly and his co-hosts.


There was talk of Twitter gaffes and resolutions that are never kept. And in the next breath, I caught the mention of how they hoped 2014 would be a better year for us as a nation, how we could start accepting more, make better decisions and stop judging so much that we don’t enjoy life.

Not a great resolution if we just established we don’t keep them.

At that same moment, scrolling through Twitter, I came across a re-tweet that seemed like something off a grocery store checkout lane trash headline: Aaron Rodgers reportedly gay.

Sigh.

I read the story, and just as I suspected, it appeared to be written by someone who was 15 and thought “Burn Books” were a super idea. But it was filled with all sorts of supposed “facts” (read: rumors, gossip, heresy), so I sent a quick text to one of my best friends.

He had not heard this rumor either, but said it would not surprise him, yet nor would be care. After a little digging, we discovered that Rodgers had earlier that day felt it necessary to respond to said rumors on local Milwaukee radio that he “really, really likes women.”

Um, OK.

But there are so many layers here, that I wonder if this sort of resolution of acceptance has more to do with how we think and how we react than to how we feel?

What if Rodgers was gay? Would it matter? Obviously, it would not really, truly matter. But the reaction would from the standpoint that perceptions would be changed – from within his locker room, to the NFL, to the Wisconsin community. The sports world would be changed to have a league-MVP; Super Bowl MVP and Top 5 player announce to the world what his private life is.

And I can’t help but wonder, why? To what point and for what purpose? Whose business is it? And if it somehow changes your opinion of him, that is your issue.

There seems to be an ongoing search to out someone high up in professional sports, to the point we have athletes emphatically answering they do not have a closet to emerge from, which then makes them look bad – as if they have to put the Seinfeld “not that there’s anything wrong with that” reference tag at the end, just so the quote does not come across wrong.

Yet I wonder, what are we searching for? And why? What point are we trying to prove? What if gay athletes are not coming out simply because they just do not want to make their private life public? Is not enough of their life public and scrutinized as it is?

I cannot help but feel this process is a rushed exercise to make our society feel better, or to demand acceptance, or to prove that acceptance is not possible all in the name of winning some publicity battle over political correctness.

Because let us be brutally honest for a moment. We are the ultimate jury. We constantly judge people all of the time. We judge based on religion, race, line of employment, physical appearance, where we live, what we eat, what phones we use, our political ideologies, sports teams, shoes – and on and on.

We say we want to accept people for who they are, but we only do that if our perception of who they are actually matches, you know, who they are. So we judge on that, as well.

So, we are fine with Peyton Manning throwing 55 touchdowns and breaking all kinds of single season passing records, even though there’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest the Broncos ran up the score on their opponents. You know, the very same thing we shredded Tom Brady and the Patriots for in 2007, when he set the mark at 50 TDs.

The difference is simple in our minds: Brady was a bad guy, who played for a publicly despised coach, coming off Spygate and winners of three Super Bowls in the previous five years. Brady broke up with an actress he was having a child with and married a supermodel. He is a spokesman for Uggs. Manning is a spokesman for Cadillac and having football on your phone, married his college girlfriend and keeps his twins out of the media.

Our perception dictates our reaction and our acceptance of someone. Peyton Manning comes off as awe-shucks; a hard-working guy who is obsessed with football. Brady comes off as too cool for school, a little silver spoon-ish and seems to have other interests outside of the game, like posing for fashion magazines. This bothers us for a variety of totally personal, perception-based reasons.

Yet we choose to forget that Manning grew up the son of a college legend and NFL star, whose dad made the top salary in the league at one time and is actually much closer to the silver spoon moniker than Brady. We ignore the pedigree, No. 1 pick status of Manning and seem to constantly forget (despite media reminders) that Brady was seventh on the depth chart at Michigan when he arrived and split time with Drew Henson and was drafted in the 6th Round, with the body of a 14-year-old.

Yet we still don’t like it. We consistently form our collective narrative on famous people based off a very finite amount of information – and then make wild, grandiose assumptions.

We want all our stars obsessed with their respective sport, watching film 25 hours a day, saying all the right things and keeping out of trouble. And then, when they do, we say they have no personality. It’s why Manning’s turn on SNL a few years ago was so shocking – who knew Mr. Quarterback could be so funny? Who knew he had – gasp – a personality and comedic timing?

The American culture is heavily dictated by assumptions of what we already think we know, which in turn, kind of jumps into what we will inwardly and outwardly accept. People are shocked when they learn something that they don’t believe fits the profile of what they perceive.

For instance, would it not seem strange to the majority of us to learn that Johnny Manziel loves fine art? What about if we learn that Tony Romo was a huge Grateful Dead fan, and lived in a Bohemian style apartment and just keep money in the bank? What if we learned that LeBron James read Shakespeare and listened to Mozart before every game? Or Jay Cutler helped the elderly into their seats three hours before game time?

These things do not seem to jive with what we have already placed inside the box of what we expect based on a stereotype that fits a commonly held assumption.

Do these things matter? No. But you have to be careful with your brand now. More often than not, it would befit us to keep up the visual and verbal presentation of what is expected instead of what actually is. It is just easier for everyone involved. Some of us go on pretending, others go on assuming.

Almost like some sort of accepted game of charades. 

This is why we have still got quite a bit of work to do before we actually make the strides we’re aiming for in our society.

Actions speak louder than words, as they say. So it really does not matter if Aaron Rodgers is gay or not – only our reaction to whether or not we even assume it is plausible.

Either way, that collective reaction says more about us than it does about him or anyone else. Perhaps we could cut down on the assumptions we make about others.
That would be a resolution worth keeping.


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