Guest Author
The saga involving Miami Dolphins teammates Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito is a case of hazing, plain and simple. It’s also about bullying and a testosterone-fueled post-pubescent culture of men being boys run amok.
For those who might have missed it, Dolphins offensive tackle Martin recently walked away from the team after repeatedly being the butt of pranks and abusive text and voicemail messages, especially from Incognito. Incognito was suspended indefinitely. The NFL is investigating.
I’ve never played football. It seemed to be a meat grinder of a sport, the type that required a new kind of gladiator for our television age.
But this is more than a sports story. The revelations have pulled the tarpaulin off a culture drastically in need of change. A second-year player, Martin is the sort of teammate who is an increasing rarity in the NFL — middle class by birth, affluent by breeding, not just by vocation. He is the son of Harvard-educated lawyers. In the eyes of some of his nonwhite teammates, Martin was just not black enough. He needed to be toughened up, hazed into line.
Hazing is the price rookies are willing to pay as the price of admission to the fraternity of the NFL. It works because of the silence and collusion of teammates and coaches. Martin was an atypical victim. He had enough and so should the Dolphins and the NFL.
According to news reports, Incognito was a major player with the Dolphins, despite his troubled history. He was part of the players’ leadership council; he called team meetings at strip joints. His language was profane. Yet, Incognito sat straight-faced in an interview with Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer and proclaimed his love, friendship and brotherhood for Martin. That despite leaving a voicemail laced with the N-word. This is a familiar script. It never ends well.
ESPN.com columnist Jason Whitlock eloquently wrote: “Mass incarceration has turned segments of Black America so upside down that a tatted-up, N-word-tossing white goon is more respected and accepted than a soft-spoken, highly intelligent black Stanford graduate.”
We know who is the goon and who is the Stanford graduate in this sideshow. The culture of the prison yard has so permeated the locker room that it’s no wonder that inhabitants move so comfortably between the two settings.
The NFL is a billion-dollar entertainment industry whose ranks are replenished constantly by those driven by the dreams of a short payday and special moments on Sunday. But any enterprise that treats its primary physical and intellectual capital with such contempt is unsustainable.
