THE NFL AND ITS MORAL HYPOCRISY
THE LEAGUE THAT FINES ITS PLAYERS FOR TWERKING REAPS PROFIT BY ENDORSING THAT BEHAVIOUR ONLINE
In between t he f i ne Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Antonio Brown said the NFL handed him Thursday and the touchdown dance Oct. 2 for which he was docked, the 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 and a financial penalty afterward.
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 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; machine- gun 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 appropri- ated 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 per- form a 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 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?
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.
“What we have here, again,” said Morgan State media professor Jared Ball, “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.
“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.”