Not players. Have you HEARD some of the things that are said by fans? Listened to the crowds at Cameron Indoor, or in any professional stadium in the land? It's RIDICULOUS. I don't go to non-baseball sporting events live. Maybe hockey. Hockey fans are actually pretty cool, and I enjoy watching both college and professional hockey in person (it's way better than on TV, where you can't really appreciate the speed and skill of the game).
I might be able to go to an NCAA tournament game because most of the teams playing are not rivals, so you don't get the vitriol and bile vomited out for hour after hour, spewing across seats and onto the playing surface.
But the drunken ridiculousness of the modern sporting event makes the Roman debaucheries pale in comparison.
And we expect the players never to trash talk, never to mouth off, to be the model citizens that their fans AREN'T? Sherman, by all accounts, was responding to previous and non-published comments by Crabtree that he carried as a spur to his motivation. Did he cuss at Crabtree? No. Did he question his manhood and skill level? Yeah. Is that the worst thing in sports?
Stick a microphone in the stands for 5 minutes. What Sherman actually said won't register on the insult scale. College fans distribute the cell numbers for star players so that they can get hateful texts the night before the game. They publish bios on their families. They chant about dead family members while someone is making a free throw.
And when all that fails, fans beat and stab and shoot other fans to death in stadium parking lots.
Demanding a white-wash (pun intended) for an on-the-field participant and allowing the fan interactions that occur to continue unabated is pathetic. Some of the things that have been said to him since his 30 seconds on a microphone are egregious. What he did was not.
I don't want to hear any more about Sherman's "trash talk." It was NOTHING. He - and we -deserve better from the rest of us, not from him.
~G
Add new comment
1