What level of insanity do we behold in the National Football League?
©opyright Wynne Alexander 2015
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 Source: Wynne Alexander Wynne Alexander |
| By: Wynne Alexander Political Director, CollegeHipHop.com Wynne Alexander is an investigative journalist who has interviewed national and international artists, icons, sports stars, business and political leaders including Muhammed Ali and Coretta Scott King. She is also the author of the pioneering civil rights book, Get It From the Drums. |
What level of invectives and foul language do I have to refrain from using to describe the disgust over what they allow their players to do to women and children?
And let’s not forget what the NFL itself does to its own players’ physical and mental health.
This September was quite a culmination of hell for the NFL, starting with the Ray Rice Scandal.
Then that very week comes word that big-time running back Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings punished his son to the point where the child was hospitalized with multiple injuries and Peterson was indicted for child abuse.
INDICTED for God’s sake.
Doesn’t anyone around there think the player-millionaires have a duty to stay humane and at least keep their kids out of the hospital and their names off the police blotter?
And he’s the exception – in the good old days, many of the NFL lawbreakers never had to worry about making it to court. It’s all handled internally by that great bastion of morality – the NFL.
But why be surprised. You have this very violent sport, many participants pulverizing each other for money, every week on world-wide TV and the trickle-down theory is more ‘trickle-around’ in reality, from the front office to the playing field to the homes of the players.
So of course they blew the Ray Rice diagnosis of his severe mental illness and criminal violence.
No one should ever forget – the Ravens and the NFL were in full and complete denial until that damn tape surfaced thanks to TMZ. They not only gave Rice the mere two game suspension, they had the wife sign off on a Ravens produced tweet where she blamed herself. They condoned it, engineered it on-line and it was ‘live’ on the internet until the TMZ truth serum video forced them to take it down because I guess they figured out it was in bad taste to look that stupid.
Then came all the arguing from one NFL front office to the other, about how they couldn’t possibly have seen that tape any sooner than it going public.
Oh Puh-Leeese! Tell me another story big daddy.
All those great big power-monger rich guys with their high-power lawyers and not one of them managed to think they may need to see that tape so they could continue to protect their franchises and the National Football League? Right. Very believable and now I would like to buy that bridge in Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated magazine reporter Peter King says NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell saw the knock out video this summer, July 2014 and did nothing significant. What Goodell did do a lot of was deny he ever saw the Rice cold-cocking before September 2014. According to CBS Sports News, two other reporters saw the video way before TMZ performed their outstanding public service. ESPN’s Hall of Famer Cris Carter and fellow reporter Chris Mortenson said they both saw it and Mortenson was very accurate in his recollection which matched the actions in that chillingly cold Rice video. The way Rice just stands there even after security shows up. He just stands there like nothing’s wrong and then when he finally goes to pick her limp and seemingly lifeless body up, he drags her in the much more injury-inducing face down position, scraping her knees over the grating between the elevator and the hotel corridor.
Goodell botched every managerial move he had to make. The weak-assed suspension, the apology that was still lacking sincere indignation and shock over such grotesque behavior.
Genuine superstar and Minnesota Vikings Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton got it right when he criticized Goodell’s make-up sex (oops) press conference declaring it a: “Whitewash. …They have got to show outrage. They (the NFL) have got to yell and scream at their teams and say, ‘You have got to do better.’ ”
How Goodell still has a job I’ll never know. He should thank his lucky stars he’s not a woman cause he’d have definitely been fired by now. Especially if he was a black woman.
And look at the Ravens and their trickle-down Goodell Crisis Management. They put it out there that Mrs. Jayna Rice was somehow responsible for her husband knocking her cold. Let’s make it clear here – they allowed, or perhaps encouraged, the wife to blame herself.
–Check the date – it’s May and the Ravens kept this tweet up until September 2014, taking it down
only because that was the day TMZ released their video – September 8, 2014
With their caveman, blame-the-victim mentality, I am frankly shocked that they stopped there and didn’t put out the tweet that she actually conked herself on the head because after all, they seemed pretty sure the public was never going to see that video tape. (In retrospect, I wonder why they acted so sure. Mr. Goodell, were other copies ‘secured’ and was the TMZ copy something that wasn’t supposed to surface at all? Did Time Magazine buy it and stick it with the Zapruder film? Maybe we need a grand jury or congressional investigation on that little question.)
And why should we think they would have any concern about a player’s wife when this is the league that doesn’t even care about the health and safety of its own superstar players. The NFL suppressed, quashed, and squelched any reports or accountability regarding concussions and the terrible effects their own stars were suffering. Finally the whole scandal got so bad the United States Congress had to hold hearings, 4500 players filed lawsuits and a $765 million set-aside fund for injured players tells me the NFL is guilty of screwing their own men. PBS did a fabulous documentary on the whole stinking mess – checkout FRONTLINES: A League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.
The suppression of the concussions is the same model they tried to pull with their criminal behavior problems. They’ve got crazy violent cases all over the place:
• 2012’s Kansas City Chief’s Jovan Belcher shooting his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins to death and then killing himself. Do you believe that was his first infraction with a gun? God only knows what other horrors that poor girlfriend had to live through, with the big hush-it-up routine, only to provide the worst kind of cheater’s proof with their double deaths by his own hand and warped, untreated mind.
• Just after the Rice TMZ video smoke was clearing, the Phoenix Cardinal’s Jonathan Dwyer broke his wife’s nose in a domestic dispute.
• Football god Jerry Rice joined Steve Young in trying to school San Francisco 49’ers management, urging that Defensive End [is that a position or his fortune cookie warning] Ray McDonald should not be playing until his name is cleared. McDonald is accused of beating his pregnant fiancé. For the record, Commissioner Goodell also let him play instead of immediately suspending him.
• The above-incident was August of 2014 and the month before, The Carolina Panther’s Greg Hardy was convicted of domestic assault and as of press-time, he was not officially censured by the team or Commissioner Goodell’s office.
Meanwhile, a day after TMZ’s September video whistle-blow, Mrs. Janay Rice stepped out there with the saddest of all Instagrams. She’s standing by her man again (I guess as long as he doesn’t deck her). With it she dominates the news cycle with the headlines all screaming : “This Is Our Life. What don’t you all get?”
Well, unfortunately Mrs. Rice, it’s not just your life or business now. You and Ray are public figures and violence of any kind and especially these days, violence against women, is everybody’s business from here to the Middle East and Africa. It’s the People’s business as we try to fix our very sick society in this very troubling and often deadly area. Some of us care very deeply about your situation and all those that went before it and new incidents that are occurring right now. I am so deeply sorry that Mrs. Rice appears to be suffering herself from a profound case of ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’
Named for a week-long attempted bank take-over in Stockholm, Sweden; the main symptom of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ is: victims in hostage scenarios develop sympathy, empathy and/or generally side with their oppressors and captors. Dr. Napoleon Vaughn
Mrs. Ray Rice has it bad.
Noted psychologist Dr. Napoleon Vaughn spoke with College Hip Hop’s Wynne Alexander about NFL money being more important than the health of the Rice’s.
Why was the NFL ever allowed to make their own rules and not answer to public laws?
What a great scam.
Have we learned nothing from the Catholic Church scandals of all those abused children from here to Europe, with no initial arrests and no court dates until decades later? Matters like the Rice assault and all the others are rightfully adjudicated in courts of law. And that’s what really needs to happen for the NFL. The jig is up. The party‘s over.
They, like the Catholic Church, should not be able to police themselves when there is a clear violation of the law such as lethal violence, physical or mental abuse, sexual assault or child abuse-all of which the NFL has on its recent menu of headlines. Commissioner Goodell is not judge, jury, healer, lawyer and police chief. Far from it. He has shown himself to be from the classic line of stuffed shirts-American style. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he is inept, devoid of 21st century management skills, particularly in cases of physical and mental abuse and violence against women.
But listen, no hard feelings. I actually want to thank Goodell and Ray Rice for bringing all this good old boys network filth to the public’s undeniable attention. Thank you for exposing this tragic garbage, which activists knew for years, but so many others would not and could not believe. Big Thanks to you two callous featherweights and your sick, socially benighted minions for making sure the NFL Violence Cavalcade finally made it to public arenas and stadiums everywhere. Thanks for your explosive display of ignorance, leaving no question on the NFL’s genuine and thorough disregard for safety, health and humanity.
