I think we can all agree that professional sports in this country are the proverbial golden geese. If you’re fortunate enough, good enough, and have traveled the right path, you can be wealthy beyond your wildest imagination.
Think about it. What would Rob Gronkowski be doing if he couldn’t play football? Or how would Roger Clemens had done in life if he wasn’t able to throw a baseball 95 mph? Once, the writer Mike Barnacle painted a picture of how he thought Clemens would have ended up: sitting on a tractor, in bib overalls, brushing his tooth.
So if we can agree that professional sports are endless reservoirs of wealth for people who would have no other way to make a living, can we agree that too many athletes enriched by them are too stupid to understand how good they have it?
And football players are the absolute dumbest.
Let’s start with Sunday’s Patriots game. Gronkowski is a pretty big guy, and, as such, is going to be whaled on by smaller safeties so he doesn’t run them ragged all over the field. And these guys are going to get away with it more often not because there’s a latent desire in all of us, even referees, to keep things fair. If Gronk puts a finger on a defensive back, he’s going to be called every time. But if he gets mugged every time he runs a pass pattern, he’s not going to get the call every time.
So whatever justification he may have felt for doing a swan dive on Buffalo’s Tre’Davious White is totally unjustified. He did it, he deserves the suspension, and he should have had a game added to it from wasting everyone’s time appealing it.
But this is how clueless some of the NFL’s players are. They don’t understand where all this is heading. There’s already a groundswell to keep kids from playing football. Ask any high school coach, and he’ll tell you that numbers are way down. People are more and more reluctant to subject their sons to the type of bodily violence the game metes out.
If today’s pros are oblivious to that fact, then shame on them. But they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when the worm finally turns — and it will — and people lose interest in the organized mayhem that professional football has become.
There’s already way too much lawlessness on football fields. As disgraceful as Gronkowski’s stunt against Buffalo was Sunday (and he could have broken White’s neck), its small potatoes compared to the things done every week as a matter of course — the clothesline hits, the blind side hits, cheap shots after the whistle, leading with the helmet, and helmet-to-helmet hits.
Monday night, in the Pittsburgh-Cincinnati game, a Steelers rookie JuJu Smith-Schuster put a vicious hit on Cincinnati’s Vontaze Burfict, no stranger himself to cheap-shot artistry. Burfict went down like a sack of cement, and Smith-Schuster stood over him and taunted him. That was worth two penalties.
What happened was bad enough. Worse, there had been a near-tragic hit earlier in the game where Ryan Shazier had to be taken off the field on a stretcher after a hard hit.
One of these times, it’s not going to be a “could have been.” One of these times, a victim of a late hit, or a cheap hit, or an illegal hit, isn’t going to get up. One of these times, there won’t be post-game status report. There will be an autopsy.
I mean, what’s it going to take? Already, we have to have a prescribed concussion protocol because there are so many head injuries. Because of the nature of football violence, we’ve all come to understand what the term Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy means. There’s plenty of evidence already floating in the air that should make even the dumbest and most sociopathic football player stop and consider the damage he’s doing when he goes to level someone with his helmet.
There’s going to come a time when none of this will matter. Enough fans will come to understand that toughness is more than how often my team rips your team apart, and just stop watching.
And when they stop watching, there’s no reason to pay anyone to play the game. And thus, they’ve killed the golden goose.
