CRIME TIME: Aaron Hernandez (above, being arrested) didn’t learn from Ray Lewis’ brush with murder charges — and ESPN has chosen to ignore employee Lewis as well, as it closely covers Hernandez. (Boston Globe via Getty Images)
It doesn’t matter if it’s a matter of minimalist superstar Robinson Cano jogging toward the next base, or ESPN’s coverage of arrested-for-murder NFL star Aaron Hernandez. We’re supposed to be too stupid to see what we see, know what we know.
The similarities between the Hernandez case and the 2000 Atlanta Super Bowl double-homicide case that involved Ray Lewis are too remarkable, too bold-faced to miss. Yet, ESPN, which has been all over the Hernandez story, seems to have chosen to miss them in self-service to its recent, unconscionable, this-is-how-we-roll hire of Lewis.
As in the Hernandez case, in the hours after the murder investigation began, Lewis was unavailable or uncooperative. Lewis then admittedly gave police “misleading information.”
As in the Hernandez case, significant evidence either disappeared or was destroyed. In Hernandez’s case, a cell phone and an elaborate home security system were destroyed, and his home was thoroughly and suspiciously cleansed by a professional service.
But as detectives learn on Day 1, “There are no coincidences” — let alone a string of them.
In the Lewis case, the bloody clothing in which he was seen bolting the scene never was found. Lewis apparently misplaced the clothes. Imagine that: “Now, where did I leave my fabulous white suit, the one I wore last night to party, the one with all the blood on it? Oh, well.”
The only difference, thus far, is that in the Super Bowl double-murder stabbings, witnesses significantly changed their original stories to detectives. The Hernandez case perhaps has not yet provided such an opportunity.
Again, though, ESPN has aggressively pursued the Hernandez story. A been-there, done-that interview with Ray Lewis would be in order — except we’re too stupid to know ESPN doesn’t want to remind us we know Lewis is now on ESPN’s staff.
It remains unfathomable ESPN’s shot-callers would select Lewis for employment on their national networks after he paid a financial settlement to the families of those two murdered men.
Did no one in a position of highest authority — in charge of ESPN’s reputation and minimal responsibility to the public and other employees — ask why Lewis would make such a payment, or even consider it, if he had nothing to do with those murders?
Even in an age of grotesquely twisted and diminished-by-the-day standards (Where did ESPN place that Bobby Knight Goes Nuts Reel?) it remains stunning that following this year’s Super Bowl the very last person who ESPN could choose to embrace as its own — place on its payroll, especially with looming layoffs — became the very first it hired.
Now, thanks to Aaron Hernandez, ESPN has to pretend those 2000 Super Bowl murders, Ray Lewis’ inability to provide the bloodied clothing he wore while leaving the scene, his obstruction-of-justice plea in those murders, his payments to the victims’ families and his hiring by ESPN never happened.
And we’re expected to be too stupid to know any of that, too.
Treating all viewers as if they’re Sapps
It doesn’t matter Warren Sapp behaved like a creep while a student-athlete at Miami and throughout his NFL career. Today, at 40 and inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he still talks trash like a 14-year-old. That’s why both the NFL Network and CBS’s Showtime concluded Sapp’s the guy for them!
* People are so picky. So what if ESPN missed a live point in Steve Darcis’s upset of Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon? It’s not as if ESPN didn’t have something better — slo-mo of Darcis fist-pumping after winning the previous point — to show.
* Last One In’s a Rotten Student-Athlete: Although Nebraska is fondly known to its fans as “Big Red,” its football team — on adidas’s orders and ABC/ESPN’s dime and time — will wear black jerseys at home against UCLA, Sept. 14. What kept ’em?
* Not sure why NBC found “Hits” totals so noteworthy throughout its Stanley Cup coverage, as in the more hits, the better. The team most available to be hit is the one with the puck, no?
* More odd nicknames: Reader Wayne Brown of Tuskegee, Ala., notes a middle school in Waukegan, Ill., is nicknamed the 39ers. Why so? It’s the Jack Benny Middle School and Benny, who was raised in Waukegan, famously admitted to being no older than 39.
* Leave it to Mike Francesa to exploit the death of James Gandolfini to remind an audience (that knows far better) he, Francesa, is a big shot.
* Friday morning, a Fox News Channel graphic carried the news that the Heat were the NBA’s first back-to-back champs “since 2010.” Has it been that long?
YES not getting the full picture
Greed Kills: Although YES’s Yankees voices missed it, YES’s TV cameras couldn’t. Those were empty up-front, moat-protected seats — between 5,000 and 7,000 by one regular eyewitness account — throughout Sunday’s Yankees Old-Timers’ Day and the game that followed.
Speaking of YES voices versus YES cameras, on Wednesday with the Yankees down, 4-3, and none out in the bottom of the sixth, Robinson Cano naturally slowed into second on Travis Hafner’s ground single to right. YES then showed tape of third base coach Rob Thomson waving Cano to third.
As Michael Kay and Paul O’Neill excused Cano — right field is short, good arm by the right fielder, etc. — YES cut to a shot of Thomson, then Joe Girardi. It seemed someone in the truck figured there might be a shot of one or both shaking his head.
Funny, O’Neill had just stated the Yankees have to rely on the first half of their batting order to score. Hafner was hitting fourth. He was right; the inning ended with the score still 4-3.
* Long before many of us knew Dave Jennings went out of his way to learn the rules of football, reader Ian Winograd knew.
The Sporting News for years included a feature, “Ask Hal The Referee,” written by the late Hal Lebovitz. In the mid-1970’s Winograd’s question to Hal — a ruling following a hypothetical situation in which a Giants punter makes a “weak kick” — was published, his name and hometown included.
Soon after, Jennings wrote Winograd to let him know 1) “Ask Hal” was his favorite feature, and 2) “He didn’t appreciate me writing that a Giants’ punter got off a weak kick because he is the Giants’ punter and he doesn’t punt the ball weakly.
“He signed it, ‘Kiddingly yours, Dave Jennings.’ ”