My #LukewarmSportsTake On Greg Hardy
I usually don’t write to “get something off my chest.” I am not easily irritated by others unless it involves chewing with your mouth open or picking at scabs. Gross. I’m also rarely motivated to respond to opinions or stances regarding sports. A lot of people are dumb and have dumb things to say, but that’s the way it is and the sports world we live in. It typically doesn’t bother me. However, this whole Greg Hardy situation and the domestic violence epidemic in the NFL really grinds my gears. Allow me to explain.
First off, I do not think Greg Hardy should be playing football on Sunday based on the guilty verdict rendered by a judge in, ahem, July. I do not think he should’ve played last week. There is a decent chance Hardy is found innocent by a jury in a trial that is scheduled to begin in November but likely won’t until after the season. However, right now he is guilty of assaulting a female and communicating threats, both misdemeanor charges. He should have been punished by the NFL accordingly.
However, Hardy was not punished in May when he was arrested, nor in July when he was found guilty or before training camp, during the preseason or before week one. Yet, all of a sudden, two months after the verdict people are clamoring for his suspension or termination. The Charlotte Observer of all publications printed a column this week saying Hardy should sit. Where has this been the past few months? That paper has done a great job covering this story since the beginning. Why now? Did it really take a video of Ray Rice disgustingly slugging his fiancee to suddenly convince folks that Hardy must go too?
Don’t get me wrong. Just because nobody spoke up in the past doesn’t mean they shouldn’t now or that their opinion is wrong. However, I find it incredibly disingenuous and self-serving to all of a sudden be aware of a situation that has been well-documented since May simply because it’s now all over the national headlines.
This might just be me, but it irks me that there are suddenly so many people pushing for Hardy to lose his job now who weren’t aware enough to care about the issue a month ago. Ray Rice’s video didn’t change anything with Hardy. It’s just made it easier for people to act like they are the conductor of the morality locomotive chugging down the tracks from Baltimore through Charlotte and now up to Minneapolis.
Where was all of this outrage last week, last month or last spring when all of this went down? Again, this doesn’t mean it is wrong. It just highlights how folks care more about hanging somebody than fixing a problem. Blood is more important than solving problems.
These stories have become about Roger Goodell, the NFL, Ray Rice, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson. Instead, they should all be about the crimes the three players are alleged to have committed. These cases are about domestic abuse, not about getting players cut, suspended or whatever.
To some degree, society is obsessed with trying to assign blame and hang someone rather than fixing the related problem. Rather than focus on Rice and Hardy, why don’t we figure out how to mitigate domestic violence in the NFL and society at large? I’d argue that while Rice and Hardy deserve suspensions, that should not be the focus of these efforts. Focus on fixing the issue, not solely punishing the culprits.
Not to go too far out of my sports comfort zone but we commonly see this in the tragically frequent mass shootings in this country, particularly school shootings. The media and public are obsessed with finding out who did it and plastering their image all over the place. Then the conversation morphs into a unending cycle of debate about gun laws. The issue that is rarely addressed is mental health, which is at the heart of many of these shootings. I don’t know if the issue isn’t sexy enough or if people simply don’t understand mental health, but I see that as an analogy to what is going on in the NFL right now.
The story right now is Rice, Hardy and Peterson. It’s secondary to learn why they did what they did and how to prevent it in the future. Instead, the focus is on the punishment and people losing their jobs. To learn more about domestic violence, you can visit the website for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. You’ll learn more there than you will reading about Rice or Hardy on TMZ or elsewhere.
I believe Jerry Richardson and the Panthers are stuck between a rock and a hard place in this situation. Despite the calls for Hardy to be cut, suspended or whatever, the Panthers won’t be praised for doing so. They’ll just be criticized for catering to public pressure and for waiting so long. The Panthers and the NFL have made their bed with Hardy. Even though it was the wrong decision not to act earlier, that does not mean they condone domestic violence. And it certainly does not mean Jerry Richardson is not a man of high character and morals. That doesn’t even warrant a deeper explanation.
In short, I am not saying all of this grandstanding is wrong in its intentions. Folks want to see consequences for disgusting actions. I’m all for that. I just question the convenience of the motivation as well as the focus of the outrage.
Go Heels Go America