A Sports Scandal Resolved
A coach goes into into another room…
One day, a coach for the Atlanta Falcons goes into another room. He leaves his iPad open, a not-uncommon oversight. Passing by, his son sees a phone number on the device: the contact number of an athlete. The NFL draft is happening at the same time, so the athlete, in turn, probably is tense and alert waiting for phone calls from coaches just like his dad. Television cameras are there to record the moment.
The son punches in the number, calls the athlete, claims to be an NFL general manager, and offers him a job. The athlete takes the call and of course is elated to hear from a general manager. Then, as you’d expect, the athlete finds out the call was a prank. He is embarrassed and humiliated as the national audience watches.
Whatever you do, don’t awaken the sports commentariat.
Prank calls are not uncommon among certain circles of certain sons of a certain age. (The son is 21.) While we all agree it was a stupid and hurtful prank and feel sorry for the victim, the sports commentators awaken. They are outraged. The call gets about the same amount of ink as sending secret war plans to the Houthis. They recommend harsh correctives:
1. The coach is to resign or, lacking that, be fired.
2. The NFL is to reform itself. Sports talk DJs assert It would not have happened if the league hadn’t recklessly let coaches have the phone numbers of the prospects they might need to contact. (I wish I was kidding.)
3. Then, an equal and opposite reaction: in some corners of the profession it is decided that the victimized athlete isn’t all that good anyway or, for that matter, all that nice.* Pranking a so-so player might not be all that significant.
Happily, some human affairs are washable. To make the story go away, the NFL fines the Falcons $250,000 (CNBC estimates the team has $625 million in annual revenue) and fines the coach $100,000 (his estimated annual contract value: $1.6 million).
But the coach’s fine apparently falls short of matching the crime. A columnist for The Athletic complains it was “just” 1/16th of the coach’s salary.
For perspective, Comparably helpfully estimates that in 2023 sports columnists made anywhere from $30,857 to $321,191, depending on the size of the market they work in. The average was $70,019. (One-sixteenth of the average columnist’s salary would be $4,375.)
The son who made the call isn’t fined at all, much like the guy who sent secrets to the Houthis.
Don’t get me wrong. I love most sports. I especially like Catholic high school football headlines (“Denver Christian mauls Holy Family”).
There are, however, many things about football especially that I can do without: sports columnists, end zone dances, jet flyovers, brain injuries, blotto-ed fans, lawlessness, and the ill-paid, often barely clad women bumping and frolicking just out-of-bounds under the guise of cheerleading. I don’t object to out-of-context arousal as much as to the very existence of modern cheerleaders. Above us giant, eardrum-shattering scoreboards with national emergency-grade sound systems have long taken over leading us – and the cheerleaders – into marginally related frenzies with music, chants and what once might have been called cheers. These poor women are as related to genuine football enthusiasm as hood ornaments are to internal-combustion car engines, or as some secretaries of Defense are to national security.
And sports columnists …
Them, I hate. I hate their smug and angry demands about how owners’, coaches’ and athletes’ should spend their money, do their jobs or keep their careers. The difference between success and failure in the sports they observe, of course, is typically determined by scant movements and microscopic misses made at high speeds under the threat of physical pain. The columnists nevertheless advise and condemn the outcomes, moreover, with Pete Hegseth-level expertise, Hegseth-level tolerance as well as a Hegseth-level eye for talent. (Hegseth was the scout who keenly spotted the ominous presence of “unknown Middle Easterners” in a 2018 migrant “caravan” heading our way. No one else in the world – no one – was as smart or perceptive to have seen them either at the time or since. Also, it wasn’t really a caravan.)
We stopped finding hypocrisy, mendacity and bullshit objectionable a while ago. I think sports columnists (and Fox News hosts) may have been the ones who made ignoring - or, in the case of Fox News, actually lauding - them the new norm. It’s hard to forgive. All told, it’s taken morality down another couple of pegs.
* The young man subsequently visited a children’s hospital accompanied, as it happened, by an entourage of reporters. The gesture, the reporters noted, was enough to suggest he just might be a good guy, after all.