“I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling in going on in
here,” says Captain Renault in the film Casablanca as he
collects his winnings and shuts down Rick’s Café.
That famous line — now a common metaphor for hypocrisy —
keeps coming back to me as I watch the NFL brass pretending to be
surprised that American football has become a brutal sport with
money involved. They are shocked, shocked.
Where have they been for the past 50 years?
Okay, defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has admitted
wrongdoing as he slipped the toughest men of the New Orleans Saints
and the Washington Redskins small change for hitting as hard as
they could. At the Saints, cart-off cases were earning the hitter
$1500 bounty bonuses. Investigations are spreading fast, with the
Titans, Jaguars, Bills and others on the list of possible
offenders.
And okay, it’s better to have rules and to avoid these
incentives to ever greater violence in contact sports. Even boxing
has its Queensberry Rules.
But hurtball has been the norm in this sport forever. The
players love it. Fans love it. Advertisers love it. It’s as
American as apple pie.
Brett Favre
says, with a manly chuckle, he wonders what all the fuss is
about. He feels he was some kind of bounty target on every play. He
just dealt with it.
Facemasks and neck braces were developed because of the
unavoidable violence. I doubt that the brutality will ever go
away.
But this scandal is as much about the payments as the
crippling violence.
I come from Big Ten country where every high school
lineman learns to hit hard. My coach was a former Purdue
Boilermaker (admittedly a benchwarmer) who taught us how it’s done
— mainly with knees and elbows. Worry about injuries? Never. He
would bellow, “What are you? Some kind of girl?”
Midwest fans remember a Purdue-Indiana game that broke out
in fist fights in midfield. At one point the marching bands dropped
their instruments and went at it. The crowd cheered them
on.
And hardcore fans fondly recall the aggressive style of
Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, the Kansas City Chiefs All-Star who
perfected a forearm blow to the head that was intended to knock
opposing players into next week. He was a media star.
Woe betide players who object to getting clocked.
Sportswriters just a few years ago mocked Patriots quarterback Tom
Brady for his haste in asking for “roughing the passer” penalties
in the Patriots-Ravens conference championship game. When Haloti
Ngata grazed his helmet, Brady “begged for a flag to be thrown”
wrote one New England scribe. “Maybe Brady was
worried Ngata would mess up his hair.”
“At what point do we just give these guys a red jersey and
make it a game of touch football?” this sportswriter
asked.
How swiftly the sands can shift. Now the sports pages are
brimming with indignation.
I am worried that Pro Bowl Rules may become the future of
professional football. No blitzing, no rushing the punter, no
sacking. A Pro Bowl tackle is now more like a prolonged hug until
two guys fall down together. I stayed up late to watch this
seasons’s game but switched it off in disgust after one
quarter.
I don’t like the direction this scandal is taking. The big
guys on the field don’t need the money, and they like the roughness
anyway. Let them carry on but without the extra cash.
Retired NFL linebacker Coy Wire had the most hopeful
comment. He does not approve of the bounty payments he told
CNN, but “you can still play the game of football
competitively with viciousness. It can be a violent game and… we
can do it with integrity and with good old-fashioned
sportsmanship.”
