Seven months ago, a video of now-former Baltimore running back Ray Rice dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator surfaced. Monday saw the release of the full tape, a savage affair where Rice completely knocks out his wife and coolly steps over her prone body.
Had this tape not been released by TMZ, Rice is playing in Week 3. It appears the only reason the Ravens and the NFL penalized Rice is because if there’s one thing that major corporations can’t tolerate, it’s bad press and the possibility of that press affecting income.
And it’s not just the brass in Baltimore. If Rice plays for any other team, does anything change? The fact is, it’s highly unlikely.
The realization of that fact should be shocking and disturbing to anyone who’s halfway intelligent. A lot of football fans (including myself) have to address the cognitive dissonance of loving football, but also realizing that the NFL keeps proving it’s a gargantuan supercult that praises profit over everything else. That includes the well-being of its players, the lives of people around those players and anyone else who manages to get in the way.
How in the hell are we supposed to enjoy football knowing the depths the league will go to maintain the status quo? Given that we’re now aware that the NFL had plenty of information on the correlation between concussions and big hits, why are we still cheering for people getting laid out on kickoffs?
The NFL is a monolith that has embedded itself so deeply into the culture of this country that it provides a sense of identity for wherever you happened to be born/claim as your home. That identity is the reason people are out here questioning a victim of domestic violence and what she did to get hit and why blowhard talking heads on Fox News are making “Wow, I guess she should have taken the stairs” jokes.
Nothing will change because we’ve entered into an unspoken agreement with football: We get entertainment and a sense of camaraderie and purpose, and we accept that the league doesn’t care about you, players, coaches or anything other than the bottom line.
How hypocritical is it going to look next month when the league decks itself out in pink, claiming to celebrate and cherish the lives of women and to bring awareness to breast cancer when it’s also out here scheduling press conferences where a battered woman has to sit in a room and basically apologize for getting knocked unconscious?
It’s the NFL! The league that is home to my beloved Bears!
You mean the team that openly threatened beloved fans with a potential move to Gary, Ind., in 1995 because it wanted to squeeze more money from the taxpayers to fund a new stadium?
No, I mean the Bears who captured the nation with “The Super Bowl Shuffle” in 1985, beating the crap out of every team they came across en route to winning the Super Bowl!
Oh, THOSE Bears! You mean the team with the secondary led by Dave Duerson, the four-time Pro Bowler who killed himself due to suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease associated with depression?
The disconnect is blatant and frustrating. It’s too much. So how does it stop? First, I think the league needs to put its money where its mouth is and dedicate efforts to championing and providing education on domestic violence. Starting with, oh, I don’t know, letting women dictate the conversation that takes place?
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These issues come as a result of a complicit culture that puts more focus on the victim than the attacker (We can spend all day on the systemic issues that are a direct result of this culture, but I trust you know how to Google.)
The unparalleled power the 32 franchises have could be a seismic shift toward creating a genuine conversation about issues like domestic violence, and it’s our responsibility to put the heat on them.
Allow me to start: The Bears is the only NFL franchise principally owned by a woman. While I’m aware Virginia McCaskey isn’t in charge of day-to-day operations, it would mean the world (and would be a genuine sonic boom of a statement) to have her weigh in on this topic, even if it were simply to state that people suspected of issues related to domestic violence would never be welcome into the Bears family.
Can you imagine the impact that kind of statement could make? Yeah, yeah, I know. I guess that’s just me dreaming big again.
Ernest Wilkins is Chicago’s wingman.