Wednesday, Cam Newton, the quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, said something that he could well live to regret.
It was sexist. It was outrageous. And most of all it was stupid.
He wasn’t goaded into saying it. It didn’t come out of a conversation so that he could claim it was taken out of context. He said it of his own volition.
Newton was asked by a female reporter, Jourdan Rodrigue (and, really, in 2017 the fact that we have to differentiate by gender is absurd), whether he enjoyed a teammate’s physical route-running. Newton replied that it “funny to hear a woman talk about routes.”
Rodrigue wasn’t amused, though. Nor should she be. Women have worked far too hard, and been subjected to far too much in the way of harassment, to take such a gratuitous barb lying down.
If there’s ever been a more male-dominated club than sports writing it would be hard to find it.
It was only in 1990 that Lisa Olson, then with the Boston Herald, was in the Patriots locker room, having been assigned the beat, only to have three members of the team gang up on her and be both verbally and physically inappropriate.
So this is a step backwards. After enduring all of the snide remarks from territorial males who objected to women in locker rooms, all the comments and conjecture about why they wanted to be there in the first place, I’m sure women figured they’d cleared this particular hurdle.
But whatever we thought had been resolved over the years with regards to issues of equality have quite clearly become un-resolved.
And this apparently is one of them.
What would possess anyone of Cam Newton’s stature to be so cavalierly obtuse on a subject that has never stopped being sensitive (and obviously with good reason)?
This is wrong on so many levels. He’s a professional and so is Jourdan Rodrigue. He puts in long hours, and works hard, to perfect what he does. So does she. For every reason he has to feel confident about his abilities, she has just as many to feel the same way about hers.
So to ridicule a fellow professional in the manner in which he treated Rodrigue is unconscionable. And he wouldn’t have dared do it had the reporter been a man.
And has Newton been on Mars for his whole life? Does he understand women watch sports, have opinions, and can discuss them intelligently? He’d better catch up.
And he’s in for a rough few weeks regardless of whether he sees the light or continues to toil in the dark. Because he’s about to be a star among the talking heads of sports, if he isn’t already. And that is a very unforgiving medium.
At one point Thursday morning, the conversation on ESPN, ESPN2 and the NFL Channel was all about Newton and how foolish his remark was. He made all the early-morning news shows.
Stories like this have legs. And people are going to run as far as they can with this one. It is made for TV. Newton will be branded as a sexist for saying something ridiculously dumb.
But this is yet another lesson, though, that we do not have the luxury of unguarded moments anymore. The world is an open mic and everybody’s a critic, ready to pounce on every word.
Newton should have known better. And anyone else, from the president on down, should also know better. Newton will have to swallow this medicine for a while. The worst of this will eventually go away, like everything else does. But a part of this will live with him forever.
