Professional football players who batter their significant others will now receive a harsher slap on the wrist.
On Thursday, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league is strengthening its personal-conduct policy. Active immediately, any NFL employee who uses physical force to commit an act of assault, battery, domestic violence or sexual assault will receive an unpaid six-game suspension on first offense. Second offenders will be banished from the league for at least one year.
The stricter punishment is no doubt a response to the backlash fired at Goodell after his decision in July to levy a pathetically weak two-game suspension at Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens star running back who, in February, was accused of knocking out and then dragging his fiancée-now-wife from a hotel elevator.
Let’s face it: if the backlash didn’t occur, the policy wouldn’t have changed. The NFL is both a sport and an entertainment business. Athletes are celebrities. If the NFL doesn’t showcase its top stars, they lose revenue. Who wants to watch a game played by second or third stringers? Nobody. Hell, people were angry when backup referees took over in 2012.
The fact that the penalty for substance-abuse was stronger than – and now about equal to – the penalty for domestic assault is proof of the backwardness of professional sports. Leagues test players’ urine not for the sanctity of the game, but for the image of the league itself. If a guy somehow manages to fail a urine test for illegal substances, the league suspends him and appears morally upright. Violence is another issue.
The NFL is a league where guys receive two-game suspensions for on-field hits. It’s ironic that, in a violent sport, the more heavily disapproved violence committed by NFL players generally takes place on the field where the sport is played. Players like James Harrison and Brandon Meriweather have become household names virtually because of the suspensions and fines they have incurred for illegal hits. Last time anyone checked, hitting your fiancée for no apparent reason is illegal. But it didn’t take place on the field, so it’s really not a black eye to the NFL. Or so Goodell thought.
The difference this time is that a lot of people voiced their disapproval, including women’s rights advocates and members of congress. It seems that league officials hoped that incidents like this would go unnoticed or cause little commotion because they aren’t happening in a stadium in front of millions of people. After all, sports fans have short memories.
Accused of rape? No problem – win a Super Bowl. Run a dog-fighting ring? Make some highlight-worthy plays and all is forgiven. The pedestal we as sports fans place elite athletes on is absurd. We care too much about entertainment and too little about character. These guys are often considered role models. Why? Because they have rocket arms, run fast and jump high?
We excuse players’ inexcusable behavior because they wow us with gifts we don’t possess. For many of them, all this does is inflate their egos and elevate their demigod-like status. They believe their legal as well as their physical limits extend beyond ours. And when we don’t speak up, we reinforce that belief.
Sure, Rice eventually apologized a few months after the incident and Goodell enforced stricter punishment a few months after that. But if you believe either of those actions were sincere, I have a bridge to sell you.
