Football 'Culture'
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Author Notes about this Blog
Football 'Culture'
When Professional Football Players contend that the nature of their game justifies locker room behavior more akin to street gang mentality/language/taunts along with trash talking throughout the game, it just seems rather strange that certain professional athletes are the only ones in an American civilized culture who need this special 'culture' in order to function.
We can all understand adolescent kids getting carried away with juvenile indiscretions. But it is quite another issue to claim adult males, many of whom are married with kids, need some sort of exceptional license to remain adolescents in adulthood. Why do grown men with exceptional athletic abilities need to communicate during a game with endless vulgar nonsensical trash talk? If there is such a need why doesn't it extend to the owners and coaches and why, when the game ends, should the league then expect them to step before microphones and recite canned meaningless noble and lofty sentiments about just everything? This Jeckle and Hyde nonsense needs to cease. If such a need really exists for trash talk to each other during the game, then for the sake of forthrightness, be the same when you step to the microphone: "These motherfuckers are sorry ass wussies, and we whipped their sorry asses and sent them home to their mommas crying. They ain't nothin but a bunch of cocksuckin chokers in a big game." Well, you get the idea. It approaches inane ridiculousness to claim these very same athletes can't try just as hard, train just as hard, and be just as good during a game acting like adult civilized men. Of course this is the extreme. Taunting during games is a common practice when young and in neighborhood pick-up games. It is part of maturation. But shouldn't professional sports mean that maturation has taken place, both in physical skills and mindset? What need really, is there to taunt at the professional level? The whole nation watches a player fumble or miss a tackle or make a bad throw etc. Part of being a professional player, it seems to me, is to elevate oneself above adolescent taunting. Well, we might say, how can you stop it? Simple, if a player complains another player is taunting him he can wire himself and the offender subsequently be fined or suspended, whatever. It just seems professional players should be concentrating on their play out there on the field---that's what the great players do. The Payton Mannings, Walter Paytons, Terrell Owens', and so on have no room in their focus on the game for taunting another player during the game. Name calling is something best left for neighborhood pick-up games where social skills are still primitive.
There is no reason when out in public --bars included--- they can't act like upperclass affluent professionals which they are handsomely paid to be. Perhaps some of them have been cuddled spoiled brats since junior high but that hardly gives them license to take our national culture and act on the job like Neanderthaloid retards. Trash talking on the field ought to be an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty---period. Civilized tolerant society demands it.
Then there are the locker rooms. Forget all the adolescent hazing, name calling, bullying, and shaking down other players financially to participate in 'adventures' they care not to be a part of. This highly paid select group of superior athletes can't relate to each other without endless adolescent adjectives about their fellow teammates? It is understood that some players are pretty much exempt from most of this atmosphere, but there is no reason why any players should be subjected to it. No wonder impressionable kids start to think so much of it is 'cool'. Every Sherman like outburst will be duplicated by kids in a host of situations just as inappropriate as it was for Sherman. Parents, teachers, police, and so on, will have their jobs made more difficult because some professional sport players claim they need to behave this way as part of their traditional culture.
Sherman is not alone in using his emotions to act and think. All of us do to varying degrees. Sherman may be emotionally unstable but he is not a mental retard. He knows, like all players, coaches, owners, and any serious fans know---that the winner of any single football game between teams relatively equal in talent cannot be predicted with any remote degree of accuracy. There are simply too many uncontrollable variables. Thus, the winner has every reasonable basis to simply rejoice to have won and be gracious to the loser. Talent-wise there are no losers, since every player has long since proved his talent as a player or he wouldn't be in the game. Sherman may be a poster-boy for character assassination of his opponents but he is not much different than many media player character assassins like Peter King, et al and the accompanying trash talk only on a slightly higher plane. Sherman has boxed himself in. His coach may kindly and honestly refer to him as a spirited player, but the players certainly resent him making the game all about Sherman's disrespect for certain other players or teams. Bragging about your own play is no sin, but trashing the play of an opponent is. Graciousness elevates your own status as a person.
When Sherman says he is not a villainous or disrespectful person, just ask his friends, his family, his teammates, his coaches-----well, that is just the point Sherman. In an ethical civilized society, it isn't just your own chosen cabal of associates, of any sort, that deserve tolerance, respect, and a kindly demeanor toward them. When a championship game is over, everyone should be allowed to be proud of the effort they gave---not be the subject of a personal tirade by another player, short some egregious behavior on the field by the player targeted. After all, the game was not about who Sherman may personally like or dislike.
I suspect most professional football players would not object to working in an atmosphere that was more professional and adult-like. The vast majority of them are not going to be in football that long anyway, and will need to behave differently on a job after football. These athletes work hard under all sorts of pressures and deserve admiration for their skill and effort. Their play on the field speaks volumes, regardless of who wins or loses. Their relations with each other, on or off the field, should be as exemplary as their play on the field. Otherwise, don't call it professional football, call it juvenilized adult football.
Postscript:
This is a quote from Sherman about a week after I wrote the above:
""No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is. That’s not mine. It belongs to Irvin Himmel. Somebody tweeted it at me after the NFC Championship Game. If I could pass a lesson on to the kids it would be this: Don’t attack anybody. I shouldn’t have attacked Michael Crabtree the way I did. You don’t have to put anybody else down to make yourself bigger."
Good. If he follows through on this, I call that progress. When Peter King follows suit I would call that a miracle. 
