For four years, I went to high school with Miami Dolphin's player Jonathan Martin. He was built like an NFL player even when I first met him while he was in the ninth grade, but he was intelligent, sweet, welcoming, and nothing but kind. Everyone at school knew him by the nickname Moose. Early last week, my older brother sent me a link to an ESPN article about Moose leaving the Dolphins after having a breakdown in the team's cafeteria. I assumed this was just some overblown report, but after talking to mutual friends I found out it was not, and that there had been a history of offensive lineman Richie Incognito bullying his fellow OL Jon. Here is a timeline:
- October 30: Jonathan Martin leaves the Dolphins
- November 1: Richie Incognito is reportedly under investigation
- November 3: Incognito goes on Twitter to claim he is innocent; it is revealed Martin was forced by Incognito to pay 15k for a Las Vegas trip he did not attend; Incognito is suspended indefinitely by the Dolphins
- November 4: The following transcript of a voicemail left for Martin from Incognito is released by ESPN: “Hey, wassup, you half n——- piece of s—-. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] s—- in your f—-ing mouth. [I’m going to] slap your f—-ing mouth. [I’m going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. F—- you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.” It is reported that the racist words used by Incognito are not a one time thing.
- November 6: Dolphins players come forward to say Incognito was Martin's best friend, and that Incognito was an "honorary black man."
- November 7: It is revealed Dolphins personnel told Martin to deal with Incognito by fighting him.
1 comment:
To me it seems that the high purpose of sports is to distill and foster admirable character traits in participants. There are many ways in which organized sports culture could be useful to society and yet it's so often not. Athletes have insights into rarely experienced aspects of human nature, yet they don't usually seem like more-than-normally sensitive people. We've all had experience with athletes from some team who are just jerks together. This is not a product of sports but of organized sports culture. Why is it like this?
Insensitivity is not an inevitable result of the physicality of some sports: I'm no expert, but martial arts often give the impression of being pretty non-aggressive in the midst of the most extreme physicality.
I think that our world needs to seriously re-evaluate the purpose of organized sports. As the next generation of adults and parents, we need to try to improve the institutions we bring our children into. We need progressive coaching and an emphasis on what we really want our youth to get out of their organized activities; else we could just not involve them. We also need to be critical of our own activities and commitments.
Personally, I played lacrosse and baseball from elementary school until the beginning of high school, and I played for a few jerky coaches. Kids who were not good players usually felt bad not just about about their performance but about themselves as a result. What's up with that?
I guess I'm not surprised to see something like this in professional sports. While some great athletes have something very zen about them, they don't all, and I bet a lot of professional athletes have been acting the same way their whole lives.
I don't want to offend athletes - there's nothing bad about being an athlete.
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