Roger Goodell: Is he hamstrung on NFL domestic violence issues by the NFL Players Association? Photograph by Staff Sgt. Bradley Lail, USAF.
Lost amid preoccupations with Super Bowl 50 and various teams’ quarterback problems – Whither Colin Kaepernick? How’s Andrew Luck’s lacerated kidney and torn abdominal muscle? – is the domestic violence scandal that rocked the NFL last season.
Things were pretty quiet on that front until a recent article in Deadspin revealed photographs of bruises on the former girlfriend of Dallas Cowboys’ defensive end Greg Hardy.
When he was with the Carolina Panthers last season, Hardy was arrested for assaulting her. But the charges were dropped and the record later expunged as she settled a civil suit with him.
The photographs, the story, cannot be expunged from the mind, however. They tell a complex tale in which virtually everyone is complicit. Begin with commissioner Roger Goodell. There’s no doubt in my mind that he wants to eradicate domestic abuse from the NFL if only to protect “the shield,” that is, the reputation of the game. (I have no illusions that the female victims are the primary concern here.) Regardless, I honestly believe Goodell wants to remove this cancer. The problem is that he has gone about it in a contradictory way that suggests a lack of bold, decisive, responsible Alexandrian leadership. And this weakens his authority.
In this, he is hamstrung by the NFL Players Association, which under the collective bargaining agreement must represent all the players without prejudice and so must fight to reinstate those who probably shouldn’t be so quickly welcomed back into the fold, if at all.
Then there are the owners who can’t afford to have their carefully constructed teams destabilized. So they sweep domestic violence under the rug. Note that Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones has described Hardy as a “leader.” But then, so was Attila the Hun.
And there are the fans. It’s hard for us to believe the players we invest so much in emotionally and economically could do anything felonious. It’s much easier to say, “As long as they deliver on the field, their private lives are their own.” But does that include criminal behavior?
Finally, there is the game itself. Sports are supposed to replace war and other acts of violence as an outlet for man’s aggression. (We see how well that’s worked.) Instead, sports – particularly a sport like football – become war as theater, a theme of my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding,” the second in my series “The Games Men Play.” It’s not so easy to turn off the mayhem when you step off the gridiron into the kitchen or the bedroom. Indeed, it is context that drives perception: The very qualities that make players so effective in blocking and tackling on the field are precisely those that can make them brutal off it. The key word is “can.” It doesn’t have to be this way. But without proper awareness, education and training, it is.
Everything and everyone conspires then to keep the wrongdoers in place, to create a prison of violence. But as in prison, retribution takes over when justice is not served.
Members of the Philadelphia Eagles said they put “a little extra mustard” on blocking Hardy in their Nov. 8 game. His opponents especially won’t have any reason to view him as a bro. Indeed, some may see him as the man who beat their mothers, their sisters, themselves when they were kids.
If I were Hardy, I’d watch my back.
I’m not saying that’s the way it should be – only that it’s the way it is.