Not that you haven’t noticed, but this is the way we now have to cover sports: We have to check everyone’s tweets, everyone’s (anti) social media vehicles to see who’s daily trashing whom, who’s cursing someone out, who’s crossing a line into outrageous incivility, who’s starting trouble.
And there’s always someone.
As reported in Thursday’s Post, from seemingly nowhere — nowhere intelligent, nowhere good — two of the NFL’s best DBs, the Jet Darrelle Revis and Seattle’s Robert Sherman, are engaged in a pathetic boast and putdown-filled dialogue, one that reveals both to be stuck somewhere deep in both childhood and a dangerous neighborhood.
Yep, someone dissed someone and now two all-pros are acting as if they’re auditioning for the leads in an updated, Glock-inclusive reprisal of West Side Story.
Problem is, they’re both too self-smitten to be embarrassed.
“My season stats looking like Revis career stats,” Sherman, a Stanford man, posted on Twitter as part of a sustained self-promotional campaign loaded with conceit and gratuitous insults of Revis.
“I never seen a man before run his mouth like [a] girl,” Revis, a University of Pittsburgh man counter-tweeted. “This dude just steady putting my name in his mouth to get notoriety.”
Hmmm.
This is the kind of dirty-look, bad-ass challenge dialogue now commonly found in junior high lunchrooms, high school hallways, among gang-bangers, gangsta rappers and, increasingly,
young professional athletes straight out of our colleges.
And increasingly such mindless garbage-talk and stare-downs are followed by the appearance of guns, from which is followed the appearance of blood and then body bags, followed by the explanation by the homicide detectives that the whole thing began with nothing more nefarious than perceived “disrespect.”
In other words, another business-as-usual week for the NFL.
Buccaneers defensive end Da’Quan Bowers was arrested for carrying a gun, with ammo, in his carry-on bag at LaGuardia; Patriots cornerback Alfonzo Dennard was convicted of felony assault on a cop, and Cowboys defensive lineman Josh Brent, facing a DWI vehicular homicide charge for the December death of teammate Jerry Brown, was reported to have been driving at least 110 mph when he crashed his Mercedes at 2:20 a.m. on Dec. 7, after leaving a nightclub.
All college men, too.
For his $30 million in pay and that cameo appearance hugging player concussionist and police obstructionist Ray Lewis, commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL have more than an on-field safety problem. Goodell’s NFL has a growing civility problem that points to a crime problem. Crimes are committed by criminals.
Goodell’s NFL has a criminal problem. There are too many of them playing in the NFL.
The incidence of arrests of NFL and even college football players for assaults against women is staggering.
The high incidence of crimes committed from 1-5 a.m. — hours generally reserved for the illogical and indiscriminant to be at the tops of their games — has become boiler-plate stuff as it appears in next-day stories reporting the latest nightclub brawl, DWI, resisting arrest and gun-found-in-the-glove-box.
If the most physically imposing men in any establishment or venue feel the need to carry a concealed weapon, does it not stand to reason that they’re attracted to places that invite the kind of trouble that involves shootings and stabbings?
For crying out loud, being flagged for driving with a suspended license seems like a parking ticket. But how does one have his license suspended? Then how does one drive — anywhere, but especially to or from a nightclub at 3 a.m. — without a license?
TV, especially ESPN — its sensitivities and sensibilities stuck in “He Got Jacked Up!” mode — goes so far out of its way to hire recently
retired NFL wrongdoers that issues of obvious rights vs. obvious wrongs are debated! And obvious wrongs have a good chance to win!
Imagine, last month “SportsCenter” called on ESPN analyst Antonio Pierce, the ex-Giants linebacker, to present an advice segment on how players should behave during Super Bowl week. At age 30, Pierce pled guilty and paid a fine for abandoning his two pit bulls — outdoors, no less; one badly malnourished — during his Super Bowl XLII week!
Such conduct didn’t rub ESPN the wrong way, didn’t present a yellow flag, let alone a red one.
As Disney-owned ESPN prepares to introduce Lewis as its very own, one wonders if it realizes there is no statute of limitations on murder and that not all cold cases remain cold.
The 4 a.m. double-homicide in 2000 — the police investigation into which Lewis obstructed (among other things, prosecutors said he misplaced the blood-soaked white suit he was seen wearing) — was committed in Atlanta roughly 6-7 hours after the Super Bowl was played there.
For this coming Super Bowl, perhaps ESPN can have Pierce and Lewis team up to present a seminar — provide advice and counsel — on how to behave while at the Super Bowl. One can handle the “Do’s,” the other the “Don’ts.”
TV wants kids up too late
A RECENT note, here — about the Patriots’ 12-game home schedule this past season, including two must-buy exhibitions, was so TV-driven that there were just two 1 p.m. starts — has brought missives from longtime subscribers who claim to be giving up their tickets or will try to sell most-to-all of them.
Apparently, paying a bundle to sit in the cold at night, then arriving home anywhere between 9:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. on work nights gets old, fast.
Oh, and don’t forget tonight’s Grizzlies-Nets is “Kids’ Day” at the Barclay Center, a game moved from 3:30 to 7 p.m. for ESPN money. Yep, a Sunday night game makes for must-see national TV. All kids, 13 and under, can go to hell.
* Tiger Woods
and
Rory McIlroy out after the first round of NBC’s match play championship. Worst thing to happen to Nike since factory workers demanded an extra half-scoop of rice.
* After Rex Ryan’s quote Friday on trading Darrelle Revis — “If you got Jim Brown in that trade, you’d look into it” — Atlanta reader Tom Cunningham writes, “Only the Jets would trade the best DB in the league for a 77-year-old RB.”
* You didn’t think Danica Patrick winning the pole at Daytona was an invite to cheap vulgarity that WFAN/MSG’s Craig Carton was going to pass on, did ya?
* Looking at the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated — Bryce Harper in his Washington Nationals uniform — moved a neighborhood woman to remark, “I didn’t know Wegmans had a baseball team.”