Sherm: I’m no villain!
FROM THE start of his press conference, broadcast live across the country, Richard Sherman had a big smile that never left his face. He laughed a lot, too, and that couldn’t have been easy since the questions were about whether he was a bad sport, a bad guy, or perhaps a “thug.” He was clearly enjoying the moment because he knew something that everyone else should’ve known – that he can’t be defined by an 18-second, nationally televised outburst that landed somewhere between mildly inappropriate and refreshingly honest. Yes, the Seahawks cornerback may have looked like a fool to some during his now infamous interview on Fox after last Sunday’s NFC Championship Game. But does that mean he should be cast as the villain in the story of Super Bowl XLVIII?
“I don’t think I’m a villain,” Sherman said Wednesday in Renton, Wash. “I think people always say the old cliché ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ but they’re judging a book by its cover. They’re judging me on the football field during a game, right after a game, and they’re not judging me off of who I am. Now if I had gotten arrested 10 times or committed all these crimes or got suspended for fighting off the field, then I could accept being a villain. But I’ve done nothing villainous.”
No he hasn’t, and watching the 25-year-old on the podium, it was easy to believe that he has been miscast in this Super Bowl storyline. Once you get past the cover of the book — the dreadlocks, the brash attitude on the field, the uncomfortable postgame chat with Erin Andrews — the story is tremendous. By all accounts, he’s one of the good guys. He’s great with children and does a lot with charity. And he has an inspirational story, climbing out of Compton, Calif., earning a ticket to Stanford, and then, after being just a fifth-round draft pick, turning himself into one of the best defensive players in the NFL. He knows his antics — which included taunting 49ers receiver Michael Crabtree and doing the choke sign toward the 49ers bench — tarnished what should be a shiny image. He knows his attempt to be a little bit more like Muhammad Ali or Deion Sanders detracted from his gamesaving deflection. And he apologized for the way it overshadowed the great games some of his teammates played. Then he laughed, at least a little, because he also knows it’s absurd that the world has spent this much time debating his behavior, or that racial taunts were hurled in his direction and he was rebranded a “thug.”
“I know some thugs, and they know I’m the furthest thing from a thug,” Sherman said. “I fought that my whole life, just coming from where I’m coming from. You hear Compton, you hear Watts, you hear things like that and you just think ‘Thug. He’s a gangster.’ And then you hear ‘Stanford’ and you think ‘That doesn’t even make sense. That’s an oxymoron.’ You fight it for so long and to have it come back up and for people to start to use it again, it’s really . . . it’s frustrating.”
The real ugly stuff came at him via Twitter, which often seems to have the sole purpose of lowering the common denominator for the rest of the world. But Sherman believes the word “thug” had racial overtones in the context of this discussion. He called it “the accepted way of calling someone the N-word nowadays.”
“And that’s where it kind of takes me aback and it’s kind of disappointing, because they know,” he said. “What’s the definition of a thug, really? There was a hockey game (between the Canucks and Flames on Saturday) where they didn’t even play hockey. They just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that and I was saying ‘Oh man, I’m the thug?’ ”
Of course, he did this to himself. Had he shown even a little bit of class in those 18 awkward seconds, there’d be no national referendum on whether or not he’s really a good guy. But a good guy can have a few bad seconds that really weren’t so bad at all. He was what we always hope athletes will be I — unrestrained. t will be a much more entertaining Super Bowl week if he stays that way. “I really don’t know how to be anybody else,” Sherman said. “I’ll obviously learn from my mistakes and try to do it better and be more mature about the situation and understand the moment. But you can’t be anybody else. You can’t make things up now. I can only be myself.”