Well, things are
going swimmingly for the NFL. It appears
that the Ravens and even the commissioner knew about the video of Ray Rice
punching his fiancée in the side of the head from early on, not last week as
the football establishment has been trying to say. One Ravens’ official living in denial said
the “recently” released video “looks very different than what we understood the
facts to be.” And what facts were those,
that the woman mysteriously passed out in the elevator and Rice carried her
out, albeit awkwardly? Oh, and the
Ravens’ owner, whose director of security had a full report of the incident
within hours of it transpiring, went to his buddy Commissioner Goodell to argue
on behalf of his star running back. On
another front, Vikings’ special-teams coach Mike Priefer was welcomed back to
the team on Monday with a standing ovation from players. Priefer had been suspended for a string of
antigay comments.
What does all
this mean? That some players don’t care
and probably a lot of fans, too. My
guess is that the more intense the fan, the less outrage there is over what a
player or coach says or does. Just win,
baby. Yes, sponsors are pressuring the
NFL, but I’ll bet that’s because they’re getting grief from non-sports groups
that are capable of generating sustained negative publicity. Any number of women’s groups qualifies here.
As I’ve said,
baseball tends to be different. We have
our police-blotter items, but not as many as in football. The MLB, though, is very good at extortion in
full public view. Take my White Sox, who
are spending the weekend at god-awful Tropicana Field in Tampa, one of the
weakest franchises in all of baseball.
But once upon a time, Florida was held up as the Promised Land for the
first team to locate there. And the
White Sox threatened to if they didn’t get a publicly funded replacement for
Comiskey Park. The team went so far as
to send someone from the front-office to “advise” Tampa on its stadium-building
efforts. Look at Tropicana Field along
with the Cell, and you wonder what kind of taste our robber baron Mr. Reinsdorf
has in architecture.
As long as it’s
free, he doesn’t care.
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