by Becca Russo
With the latest release of the video of Ray Rice striking his then fiancé, Janay, in an elevator in Atlantic City and knocking her out cold, everyone is in an uproar. As a result of this egregious act, Rice lost his position as a star running back with the Baltimore Ravens football team and is on indeterminate suspension from the NFL. I would guess that they are waiting for the smoke to clear before they figure out just how long they need to keep him at bay before the dust settles, thus giving the team the opportunity to bring him back. After all, the Ravens have millions invested in him and he played (plays) a prominent part in their future plans.
The video was disgusting. Rice hit this woman so hard that she knocked her head against an elevator railing and was completely unconscious as he dragged her body out of the elevator like she was a sack of flour. He is truly a piece of you-know-what. What’s really disturbing, though, is the blind eye that the NFL turns (or has tried to turn up till now) on this type of behavior. They suspended him for two games when the story first broke. Two games — that’s probably less time than it took for her bruises to heal.
The sad thing is that the NFL is full of criminals and I’d like to understand why. My son played both baseball and football in school and I fervently hoped that he would stick with baseball since, while it’s not entirely crime-free, it has a lot less abusive jerks than the NFL seems to sport. Let’s take a quick look at some of the “boys behaving very badly” incidents that have surfaced in “America’s sport” in recent years:
Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs killed his girlfriend, the mother of his 6 month old child, by shooting her multiple times in the apartment they shared. He then finished his day by shooting himself in the head at the Chief’s stadium in front of his coach and the owner of the team. I felt sorry for this guy at first, until I learned that he’d been stepping out on the mother of his child and was still drunk from the night before at the time of the morning murder.
Darren Sharper, a perennial All-Star, who finished his career with the New Orleans Saints, has been accused of being a serial rapist, and at least 3 states want a crack at convicting him for slipping roofies to women and raping them while they were out cold. And to think that he was a respected football TV personality after his playing career ended!
Rae Caruth hired a man to kill his pregnant ex-girlfriend because she refused to have an abortion. She was murdered when Caruth pulled his car in front of hers to block her vehicle as another car pulled up alongside her and pumped bullets into her and her car. Cherica Adams, the girlfriend, succumbed to her injuries but her unborn child was saved at the hospital. I guess the joke was on Carruth in this instance considering he is the father of a child and is serving 18 to 24 years in prison with a possible release date of 2018.
As is well-known, Aaron Hernandez is facing charges for three murders in Massachusetts in two separate incidents. He had also been previously accused of a non-fatal shooting in Florida. Hernandez seems to be an extreme example of thug culture writ large in the NFL.
And we should not neglect the most notorious of them all — OJ Simpson — who in many people’s minds, famously got away with murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and the unfortunate waiter who’d stopped by to bring her a pair of glasses she’d left at his restaurant earlier in the evening. You’d think that his near miss with prison would have taught Simpson a lesson, but not old OJ, he’s currently in prison for assault and kidnapping.
The league is also littered with arrests for DUIs, drugs and assaults. The assaults are usually bar fights or beating up on the women in the player’s lives, and most of them get off with a slap on the wrist by the courts and a few games suspension by the NFL. Take Josh Brent for instance, who had repeated DUIs before he was indicted for manslaughter in the 2012 drunk driving accident that killed his teammate, Jerry Brown. Early this year, he was found guilty and sentenced to a whopping 6 months of jail time. He’ll be back on the playing field for America’s team, the Dallas Cowboys, later this season.
What is wrong here? Are we treating these football stars like such heroes that they believe themselves to be above the law? I think we must be since very few of them seem to be held accountable for their behavior off the field. Getting suspended for a few games is not enough to change this atrocious behavior. Is it the explosiveness of the game itself that carries over into their lives off the field? Obvious anger issues abound. Or have they spent their whole adult lives being catered to so that they assume based on an extreme sense of entitlement, that someone will sweep their deeds under the carpet? I do know that many of them have had less than ideal childhoods; is this a factor? I don’t know what the answer is but I do know that many of these guys are nothing more than thugs and should be treated accordingly. Does everyone deserve a second chance? Probably, depending on the severity of the crime, but habitual offenses that would land the rest of us firmly behind bars, need to be treated with severity. Isn’t it about time that we took these criminals off their pedestals to remind them that they too are subject to the same rules that the rest of us take for granted?
If you think I’m exaggerating the problem, I encourage you to have a look at the UT San Diego NFL Arrest Database. Yes, there really is one and it’s an eye-opener. http://www.utsandiego.com/nfl/arrests-database/
Becca Russo is a mom, wife and recovering housewife living in the San Francisco Bay area. She self-identifies as a true crime junkie and Mexican food addict.