There is a saying about sausage being made, about how if you enjoy the final product, you might not really want to know its origins.
Well, here is the wiener that is professional football, the most popular sports entertainment product in North America by a long shot.
And here is what it looks like when you peel back the skin.
There is plenty of shock and horror now flying around about the Miami Dolphins hazing story, about the abusive, racist language used by Richie Incognito in his voicemail to Jonathan Martin, about the sudden realization that the team’s culture seems to have been shaped by Lord of the Flies.
But people who are actually in the game, who have actually spent a good part of their lives inside those locker rooms, don’t seem to be surprised at all.
On Monday CNN interviewed Ricky Williams, no doubt calling on him because of his reputation as a sensitive, intelligent soul who teaches yoga and who for a time dropped out of the National Football League and turned his back on the riches it gave him in order to lie on a beach and smoke dope. Hard to think of anyone with that kind of intimate, first-person knowledge who would provide a more new age, outside-the-box take on the world of professional football.
Williams, though, didn’t supply the expected narrative.
“I don’t think the media, I don’t think the fans, I don’t think that anyone outside is really in a position to really fully understand what occurs inside of a locker room and inside of a football team…” he said.
“The NFL, it’s really like a closed fraternity. It’s really not made for everyone. There are certain people that can play in the NFL, and certain people that can’t.”
The implication being that Martin was one of those who can’t—because those who can would have dealt with Incognito by fighting back.
No, that’s not a pretty picture. Martin, by all accounts is both talented enough to start in the NFL, and an extremely smart guy. The idea of him being tortured to the point where he walked away from his team brings to mind the worst kind of bullying.
Meanwhile, Incognito, most observers would conclude, is a crude, vile jerk. Reports from his checkered past going back to his early days at the University of Nebraska paint a rather vivid picture of someone you wouldn’t want to run into in a bar.
But Incognito is also an extraordinarily good football player, a Pro Bowler last year, which is one reason he’d been given a pass up until this episode went public and he was thrown off the team.
The other is that football, up close, isn’t nice. Especially in the trenches, it is a game of violence. It is dirty and it is mean.
Watching on television, following the ball, listening to the commentators, switching to a crowd shot when the play stops, you don’t see that. The sport is effectively sanitized. But talk to anyone who has played on the line and they’ll describe a scene that is angry and bloody and primitive.
Discipline is required, and technique. You have to understand your job on every play. But at some point, it boils down to hand-to-hand combat, trying to physically dominate the man in front of you, and in that—unless the referee happens to see it—pretty much anything goes.
The fact that Incognito is a very good offensive lineman isn’t purely because he’s a cruel, pumped-up, bad guy, but the two are hardly antithetical.
And these aren’t high school kids, or college kids—or junior hockey players—we’re talking about, whose parents have entrusted their well-being to an institution having a reasonable expectation that they’ll be protected.
They’re men. They’re grown-ups.
This a workplace, and so there are rules of behaviour that ideally should apply, but it’s a very specific kind of workplace, a closed, entirely male system populated with people whose job it is to knock someone’s block off on Sunday afternoon. (Cops and soldiers are the closest parallel, but minus the celebrity, the wealth, the foreshortened careers, the need to be flying high for three hours a week, those comparisons fall short.)
This glimpse inside, seeing that it is a rough, nasty, profane, unforgiving environment in which the laws of the jungle prevail, has been an eye-opener for a lot of people.
Just not for the players, who live there.