Richard Sherman's Freak-out: Frankenstein's NFL?

By now everyone's heard about the Richard Sherman freak-out after an NFL playoff game. Soon after it happened, it became a hot topic on Twitter and people started throwing around accusations of racism at anyone who criticized the guy; others criticized him mercilessly. Sherman tried to play the incident down by L-O-ELLING about it on Twitter.

The long and short of it is that the guy acted like an ass on national television. He flipped out so severely that it left Erin Andrews blinking with the ancient fear-response. 

The problem is, almost everyone is attacking the guy for what he did: he acted like an ass. On the flip, people are defending him: "Well, remember, he is a Stanford grad and he talked real nice afterward."

Why, in this increasingly tolerant society (one that, in my opinion, might sometimes tolerate too much bad behavior) do we want to sum up this guy by the way he acted after a playoff win? 

I repeat: he acted like an ass. He should be embarrassed. But does that make him a piece of garbage?  Of course not.

A Modest Proposal for Eliminating Bad Behavior in Football Fans: The NFFL

Let's face it: fans of both American and European football can be disgusting. I'm not sure what to do about soccer -- it seems the riots continue and there will always be select beatings of unfortunate visiting fans. But I think I have an answer for American football...and it came to me after I watched a video of an Eagles fan (they lost) spitting in the face of a Saints fan (they won) at the end of a recent playoff game.

We can all agree that this is bad form. Perhaps we can all agree it is disgusting, no? But, perhaps -- as I often point out to my writing students on the verge of their "problem solution" papers -- we can eliminate the problem by simply recognizing and removing its cause.

Look: we can't very well turn apes in to diplomats, and, let's face this as well, some guys are and always will be Cro-Magnon. So those, we rule out. I think, however, if we rethink the whole nature of football, we may be able to eliminate the bad behavior of those chaps for whom we can hold out at least some hope: the hotheads who fall apart after their teams lose but who really are, at heart, okay guys -- and I believe that includes most of the guys in the stands...

"Multidimensional" vs."Unfocused"

I guess that, for years, in one form or another, I have been trying to figure out if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I wind up wanting to do all of the things that I see and admire. I've never been good at sitting back and admiring.

Does anyone else have this problem/blessing? Is it an ego thing?

The great one. 

The result of it is, I think, that I was never one of those people that we are supposed to admire in -- at least the -- "American" ideal.

I remember an old soccer coach telling us as a team about a former player's dedication -- how this player used to clear a circle in the snow in the yard in the off season (kids had those back then) and practice juggling the ball six hours a day, seven days a week. "That's dedication," the coach said.

Does NFL Football Need a Pope?

I get that standards of dress have relaxed over the years. My dad, born in the mid-thirties, says he and his family always used to put on suits and ties to go to the doctor's. And if you can rely on old movies, no one went outside without a jacket or hat from the dawn of hats (which some experts place at the first time a chinchilla died on the head of a particularly sedentary neolithic man) until about 1960. But things are changing, even in church. In an era where churches can't afford to force people to be uncomfortable in the already uncomfortable pews, the dress codes are relaxing.

Regardless of this faltering standard of dress, people seem to make an effort to do something to spruce up in church: jeans and not shorts in the summer; maybe a sports jacket over the golf shirt for the older chaps. You know, a hat tip to the people's respective version of the Almighty. Just a kind of, "Hey, God. You hooked up the world with . . . you know . . . being a world, and stuff, so the least we could do is not come in with our knobby, hairy knees jutting out all over the place."

But I am baffled these days, watching the faithful shuffle in under the ringing bells on Sundays. Have we actually allowed the football jersey to replace the suit jacket? I can't believe the numbers of folks who wear their teams' gear to worship -- presumably worship of the deity to whom they have committed and not the team to which they have committed. But it does look foggy.

I'm not making a cry for return to tradition. In fact, I hate dressing up and I have said elsewhere that I would prefer to see symphony orchestras in jeans and T-shirts. But, honestly, this all shows sort of a spooky split in faith. For believers, half of Sunday goes to the heavens and half goes to football? (Actually, if we are talking time, more than half goes to football -- maybe five times as much.) Man, if that doesn't say something about American sensibilities, I don't know what does. I mean, people actually "dress up" in their football regalia to go to church, now.

So let's organize this -- just give football its own Supreme Pontiff. Then we can make people choose between football and their current faith. It could be the new schism. Henceforth, we could work out the problems with the pigskin instead of the sword. Of course, we will have to add football strategy to the curriculum in the seminaries of the world. Does anyone know a priest or minister who can throw a guided missile through a defensive line?