TIME TO TACKLE NFL’S HYPOCRISY
Forget old No Fun League axiom, it’s all about cultural control, writes Kevin B. Blackistone.
In between the fine Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown said the NFL handed him Thursday and the touchdown dance Oct. 2 for which he was docked that pay, the football league that employs him noted his touchdown and celebration in another manner: celebratory tweets.
And both included a pixelated, animated version of Brown dancing after his score, as well as congratulatory words.
Yet, that — fining Brown for breaking its rules against how one can celebrate a touchdown, while using his celebration to promote its game — isn’t the height of the NFL’s disingenuousness.
Instead, it is that the EA Sports video game Madden NFL, reportedly the league’s second-highest source of revenue, includes functions that allow gamers to celebrate touchdowns in manners the league would probably deem unsportsmanlike enough to draw a 15-yard penalty during a game and a financial penalty afterward.
Is it not amazing that we can spell hypocrisy without NFL? The Brown penalty is as incongruous as the league penalizing Washington cornerback Josh Norman for pantomiming violence. He pulled an imaginary arrow and fired it into the sky. Oh, the horror in a sport of violent collisions the league’s broadcasters describe with words and phrases from real battlefields.
Officially, Brown was cited for violating Section 3, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Note 4 of the NFL Rule Book. It states: “Violations of (c) will be penalized if any of the acts occur anywhere on the field. These acts include but are not limited to: throat slash; machinegun salute; sexually suggestive gestures, prolonged gyrations; or stomping on a team logo.”
The dance Brown performed, twerking, is defined by the Urban Dictionary as a “rhythmic gyrating of the lower fleshy extremities in a lascivious manner with the intent to elicit sexual arousal or laughter in one’s intended audience.” Writer Christiana Mbakwe at xojane.com noted twerking is appropriated from “... the Mapouka dance from Cote d’Ivoire, a dance done by women that focuses on the buttocks. It’s existed for centuries.”
Why Brown would want to perform a historic West African woman’s dance that jumped the shark once white entertainers such as Miley Cyrus started doing it is a valid question. But the most pertinent question is why the NFL would find a touchdown celebration with “sexually suggestive gestures, prolonged gyrations” on a football field surrounded by women sanctioned by the league, dressed in little more than bikinis and doing “sexually suggestive gestures, prolonged gyrations” offensive at all, particularly given it has absolutely no impact on the outcome of the game?
The easy answer is to chuckle and repeat the trite criticism NFL stands for No Fun League. But the truth is there is something pernicious about these overly officious rules. It is that sports have come to be implemented by dominant cultures that organize and run them as means to control those who they allow to participate, but without sharing with those participants any power.
We heard echoes of this in the past few days in reference to the histrionics of Giants’ wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. He has become another target of the league’s unsportsmanlike crackdown and, as a result, of media and public tongue-lashings as well. He needs to learn how “to behave,” the critics chirped, because he is acting “out of control.” He’s a “big boy” now, said an ESPN commentator, infantilizing a man whose 24th birthday is next month.
“When I thought of Antonio Brown’s thing,” Morgan State media professor Jared Ball said Wednesday during a panel discussion on athletes and protest, “the first thing I thought of was the work of (Texas sociologist) Ben Carrington, who looked at the work of (Afro-Caribbean philosopher) Frantz Fanon and others and the relation between state and sport. What we have here, again, is this issue of mostly black men from a certain socioeconomic background being judged and evaluated and written about and discussed and performing before a white, often-male and affluent audience.
“I thought of the film, Pele: Birth of a Legend, Ball said. “There’s a great scene in this film where an elder comes to the
young Pele to tell him one of the reasons the Brazilian team wants to get rid of (him). The reason they don’t like (his) style of play is it’s reminiscent of the ancient struggle between the Portuguese and enslaved Africans, that the style of play was reminding them of a history they were trying to suppress and keep separated from the players.
“So what I think we see here (with the NFL crackdown on conduct) is ... black male virility and black male performance and physical expertise corralled and limited. If it starts to spill over, whether in conversation or in play or in style or in performance or in political act (as with Colin Kaepernick), it starts to raise certain levels of discomfort.”
It isn’t just the NFL that wrestles with what its owners decided is inappropriate comportment for its athletes. The WNBA sought to fine primarily black women who turned their court into a platform for protest against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of unarmed black men.
In the wake of the brawl in Detroit between the Pistons, Pacers and fans, then-NBA commissioner David Stern attempted to hire Republican image-maker Matthew Dowd to redo the image of his league. Stern did, however, succeed at coercing the players’ union to implement a dress code to cloak his 20-something black athletic workforce in the uniform of older white male lawyers he
lunched with on Fifth Avenue.
Baseball continues to wrestle with the style with which Latin players play the game and attempts to reel them in with on-the-field justice like fastballs purposely thrown at offenders.
The assessment of unsportsmanlike conduct penalties caught the attention of the late pioneering academic in the field of sports, Herb Simons of Cal-Berkeley. In 2003, he authored a journal article titled Race and Penalized Sports Behaviors. He observed: “The major underlying reason why the behaviours under discussion have passed the undue attention test is that they pose a threat to white male control of sports and their right to define and interpret meaning. In response to this threat, they have made normal African-American behavioural expression abnormal and deviant by penalizing these behaviours.”
It is one thing if our sports leagues were going out of their way to enforce rules that protect player safety and the outcome of their games. We’ve wondered why players who appear concussed in contact sports continue to play and why those coaches who allow them to risk their health further aren’t held accountable.
But dancing in an end zone or verbally sparring with an opponent do not endanger health or fairness. All they threaten is the old cultural norm with a new one called diversity.
What I think we see here (with the NFL crackdown on conduct) is ... black male virility and black male performance and physical expertise corralled and limited.