‘The way it is’: Kaepernick and the NFL protests

October 17, 2017

On Tuesday, the NFL owners and representative players will meet to discuss the National Anthem protest that has been a driving issue this season – this as protest initiator and former San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, saying the 32 owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his activism.

A bit of background: “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been played before NFL games since at least 2009 at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense, ostensibly to bolster recruiting. The NFL rulebook says that teams must be suited up and on the field before the Anthem begins, standing facing the flag, with their helmets in their left hands and their right hands over their hearts. In the third preseason game of 2016, a reporter noted Kaepernick sitting through the Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color.

‘He got game’ – not: Trump, race and sports

September 25, 2017

We think of sports and the arts – as House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described them to “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd – as the great unifiers.

That’s partly because we expect athletes and artists of every ilk to entertain us in a manner devoid of politics. The thinking goes that since artists and athletes make a lot of dough – well, at least those in the popular sports and arts do – they should “play” and keep their mouths otherwise shut.

But what happens when politics interjects itself into sports and the arts? ...

The NFL’s continuing female trouble

October 27, 2016

Well, just when you think gender news couldn’t be any more depressing in this “election cycle” – “Is that what we’re calling it?” one wag asked me – comes word that New York Giants kicker Josh Brown was released from the team Tuesday after new information surfaced that he had assaulted his then-wife, Molly, two dozen times, including at least once when she was pregnant. After a botched initial NFL investigation that in effect blamed Molly Brown for not cooperating – yes, always good to blame the victim – Josh Brown was suspended for a big one game.

“He’s admitted to us that he’s abused his wife in the past,” the Giants co-owner John K. Mara said Thursday (Oct. 20) on WFAN in New York.

“And I think that’s what’s a little unclear, is the extent of that.”

Translation: It was OK for the Giants to resign Brown, because he may have knocked around the missus only a bit some time ago. ...

Brain freeze: The NFL and concussions

November 25, 2015

Every time I despair of the psychological truth and realism of “The Penalty for Holding” – the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play” – I’m given a sign from the universe.

There’s a crucial moment in the story in which Quinn Novak, star quarterback of the New York Templars, chooses to play on despite sustaining a sub-concussion. I agonized over this plot point because of the new protocols in place that pull players who’ve sustained such injuries immediately from the game. It didn’t seem authentic not to reflect this in my book.

But truth really is stranger than fiction. In the St. Louis Rams’ 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Ravens Sunday, Rams’ QB Case Keenum sustained a concussion and continued to play. ...

Tom Brady – the NFL’s Nixon?

July 29, 2015

From the standpoint of stupid, it’s hard to beat Deflategate. It’s a writer’s dream, a story that keeps getting more and more bizarro.

NFL commish Roger Goodell – hardly the paragon of Alexandrian leadership – has nonetheless grown a spine and upheld his four-game ban of New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, which followed an NFL-commissioned report concluding Brady probably knew that two Pats’ employees had deflated the team’s footballs before the A.F.C. Championship game with the Indianapolis Colts. ...

(Read more)

Colin Kaepernick and Tom Brady’s balls

May 10, 2015

Yet another country heard from in Deflategate. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has tweeted this: “No football in the world is going to help you win by 38! Let it go and let Tom be great! On to the 2015 season #7tormsComing‬”

Notice the rhyme – 8 and great. He’s a poet and doesn’t know it.

As for the comment, uhuh. Yeah, it’s true that it takes a lot more than squishy balls to win football games. But if you have what it takes, then squishy balls or steroids or whatever cheating poison you pick might give you an advantage against a close rival (the Baltimore Ravens) or help you annihilate a much weaker one (the Indianapolis Colts, who lost by the poetic 38). ...

Tom Brady’s shadow in the sun

May 8, 2015

Paging Gisele.

Because Ms. Bündchen – a tiger wife if there ever was one – is all that stands between hubby Tom Brady and his squishy balls on the one hand and ignominy on the other.

As even the horses that ran the recent Kentucky Derby now know, a report issued by the Manhattan law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison on behalf of the NFL has concluded that Brady was probably aware that two lower-level employees of the New England Patriots were deflating balls.

Probably? Here are excerpts of text messages between Jim McNally, the longtime locker-room attendant responsible for the air pressure in Brady’s balls, so to speak, and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant who seems to have served as a go-between...