BERATE OF THE UNION
NFLPA turns back on hit victim to defend offender
IF WE didn’t know that Donald Fehr, during Bud Selig’s hushmoney rule, was head of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, we easily would confuse him as the head of some mobbed-up labor union, a front for organized crime.
After all, Fehr, in silent concert with Selig’s see/speak-no-evil steroid indulgence-as-policy, made sure to protect the best multimillion dollar interests of drug-dirty players, placing the MLBPA’s clean members at great and lasting career disadvantage.
The NFLPA, under the leadership of DeMaurice Smith, similarly supports the best interests of the union’s worst, most dangerous acts to the peril of the organization’s innocents.
Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict, an Arizona State man who was conspicuously talented but went undrafted as both a proven and projected societal risk, has stayed his course. He has been a relentless, remorseless, bleach-resistant stain on the sport since turning pro in 2012.
In addition to his well-deserved reputation as an unconscionably dirty player with multiple fines, suspensions and accusations adding proof, his uncivilized post-play activities have been such that he and Adam “Pacman” Jones’ consecutive misconduct penalties — Burfict nailed Pittsburgh receiver Antonio Brown in the head with 18 seconds left in a January 2016 playoff game — gifted the Steelers a late, winning field goal.
On Aug. 19, during a game, he lowered his shoulder to needlessly and excessively wipe out Chiefs’ fullback Anthony Sherman with a blow to the neck and head. Sherman, unsuspecting and defenseless, was nowhere near the long pass thrown on the play.
As a recidivist offender, Burfict was suspended by the NFL for five games.
But then the NFLPA, as if Sherman was some interloper who didn’t belong on the field or in the NFLPA, stepped in to plead on Burfict’s behalf. The suspension was reduced to three games, perhaps because Johnson escaped immediate spinal or brain trauma.
So instead of going to bat for the rank-and-file victim — declaring Burfict’s style of play as incompatible with both the NFLPA’s sense of football and humanity, or at least silently allowing the five-game suspension to stand — the NFLPA fronted Burfict’s appeal.
Though Burfict’s persistent, needless and senseless “play” jeopardizes the careers and health of fellow unionists, the union feels obligated to support such perpetrators.
As reader Douglas McBroom suggests, the NFLPA in this, yet another case of backing the guilty to the detriment of the innocent, resembles the DDAA — Drunk Drivers Association of America — a powerful lobby that backs those who drive, and maim, while inebriated.