As a sports fan since a young age, I enjoy listening to sports talk radio shows on WFAN and ESPN. Since October 30th the phone lines have been burning up over the Jonathan Martin-Richie Incognito controversy. These are two offensive linemen (in Incognito’s case, a double entendre) from the Miami Dolphins National Football League team who are antagonists in “hazing” incidents that left Martin on leave for what amounted to a mental breakdown and Incognito suspended for role as chief hazer. Commentators have also referred to the actions as “bullying”, something that appeared confusing at first since Martin is 6’5” tall and 312 pounds. I was bullied in high school but I was shorter and weaker than the boys who bullied me. How does someone who makes a living colliding with other huge men become a victim of “bullying”?
There is also some question as to whether the term hazing applies since Martin is a second year player. Rookies are routinely harassed in institutions like private schools, fraternities, sports teams, and the military but once you have gotten past the first year, you are off the hook.
There is a marked contrast in identity. Both of Jonathan Martin’s parents are Harvard graduates with law degrees. The dad is a Cal State professor and the mom an attorney for Toyota. Their son could have easily gotten into Harvard but preferred to enroll at Stanford (a top school with a top athletics program) in order to pursue his ambitions as a football player while studying the classics.
Incognito was asked by the coach to “toughen” Martin up. Ordinarily when a football player is not playing up to expectations, he is supposed to go through some drills to improve his game, like blocking a dummy or running wind sprints. In this instance, “toughening” him up meant harassing him day and night. The first report on the “toughening up” campaign was reported on NBC Sports on October 30:
Glazer said Martin had an incident in the team cafeteria this week in which teammates jokingly said they wouldn’t sit with him, and that Martin’s reaction to the joke was that he “flipped out, smashed a food tray on the ground, took off, and they haven’t seen him since.”
You’ll note the “jokingly” thrown in here as if to say it was all in good humor, and the obfuscation as to whether they actually got up from the table when he sat down or just “jokingly” threatened to do so. The Glazer referred to here is Jay Glazer, a reporter who is close friends with and mixed martial arts trainer for Incognito. Just recently Glazer did an interview with Incognito that was anything but probing.
In the days following this initial report, much more information came out that painted an incriminating portrait of Incognito as an abusive twitterer and someone who left crazed and violent phone and text messages:
Hey, wassup, you half-nigger piece of shit. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] shit in your fucking mouth. [I’m going to] slap your fucking mouth. [I’m going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. Fuck you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you
When Martin’s agent went to the team’s general manager, one Jeff Ireland, to complain about the mistreatment, Ireland’s response was to urge Martin to “punch” Incognito. This is the same general manager who asked a potential draftee in 2010 whether his mother was a prostitute just because she had spent some time in jail for selling drugs.
With management like this, it is no wonder that they would not only put Incognito in charge of “toughening” Martin up. His teammates were just as derelict as management, voting him onto the team’s leadership council in utter disregard of his long record as a miscreant. He was kicked off the team at University of Nebraska for various offenses both against opposing teams and his own, so egregious that he was sent to the Menninger Clinic for anger management treatment. He then transferred to the University of Oregon where he was kicked off the team a week after joining it. Once he turned pro, he went from team to team, always being forced to move on for the same kind of problems. In 2009, NFL players picked him as the dirtiest player in the league.
Since Jonathan Martin has not given an interview since taking his leave, we do not know his side of the story. In his interview with Glazer, Incognito argues that he was Martin’s most reliable ally on the team, which speaks more about the horrors he faced than anything else.
It does raise the question, however, why it might have been possible for Martin to put up with such abuse as long as he did. My own experience with bullying in high school tells me that you often put up with it in order to be accepted. When your ego structure has not been fully developed, you feel much more of a need to be approved by your peers, even if they have a sadistic need to humiliate and beat you. From what I have seen of Richie Incognito, it appears that he never grew up. Furthermore, despite Jonathan Martin’s blue chip upbringing and Stanford degree, he still felt the need to be “part of the crowd”. Maybe now that he is outside the sport he will find a different crowd not fueled by testosterone and volcanic fits of rage.
His off-the-field problems were just as serious. In 2012 a drunken Richie Incognito stuck a gulf club into the crotch of a 34-year-old African-American female volunteer and then emptied a bottle of water in her face according to a police report. This is just what you would expect from a character that called for a team meeting in a strip club.
One might reasonably assume that Incognito is a racist based on the “half-nigger” tweet and the abuse of the Black volunteer but it is a bit more complicated than that. There is no apparent racial division on the team, with Black players considering him an “honorary Black man” according to the Miami Herald. Furthermore, one of Incognito’s most diehard supporters is a Mike Pouncey, an African-American who plays center on the offensive line (his job is to hike the football to the quarterback), who apparently does not hold Incognito’s reference to him as a “nigger” in the Youtube clip against him. Pouncey has stated that he “loves” and “respects” Incognito.
We have to take into account, however, that Pouncey might not be the best judge of character since he is a close friend of Aaron Hernandez, the New England tight end that is awaiting trial on the murder of his sister’s fiancé. He is expected to testify in a grand jury on Hernandez’s illegal gun trafficking, transactions he was supposedly well aware of. Here is Maurkice Pouncey (r), also a pro football player, and his twin brother Mike (l) wearing “Free [Aaron] Hernandez” caps.
The brothers, who played with Hernandez at the U. of Florida, were with him at a Gainesville nightclub in 2007 on the night of a shooting that left two men seriously wounded. Hernandez was not charged at the time but cops are now looking at the possibility of adding this charge to the one for murder.
Pro football is continuously being roiled by controversies such as this for a good reason. The sport is simply a modern version of the gladiator games that were a hallmark of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. If the goal is not necessarily to kill your opponent, it is certainly implicitly a goal to maim them. That is why Incognito was drafted by a number of teams. His brand of aggression was considered key to a team’s success. One wonders whether Martin had any concerns as a classics student about what it meant to be a modern-day gladiator. That’s a question I would love to pose to him. Edward Gibbon, the author of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, wrote that “History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Doesn’t that apply to American history as well?
The owners and the NFL officialdom will most certainly draft new rules against hazing but they do not really speak to the essence of the sport that values victory using any means at one’s disposal, just as is the case in warfare. Not too long ago, the NFL had to deal with the bountygate scandal. Gregg Williams, the defensive coach for the New Orleans Saints paid bonuses to any player who would inflict an injury on an opposing player severe enough to make him leave the game. In a rant to his team before a game with the San Francisco 49’ers, Williams told him to aim for wide receiver Kyle Williams’s head and “the body will follow”, an especially ominous statement given the 49er player’s history of concussions.
The NFL is also embroiled in scandals over its refusal to investigate the epidemic of Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, ALS, and early Alzheimer’s among players who suffered repeated concussions, the latest of which is Dallas Cowboy’s running back hall of famer Tony Dorsett. ESPN reported:
Two weeks ago, upon arriving in California for his evaluation and brain scan at UCLA, Dorsett described to “Outside the Lines” the symptoms that compelled him to seek testing: memory loss, depression and thoughts of suicide.
The former Cowboys running back, now 59, said that when he took his Oct. 21 flight from Dallas to Los Angeles for testing, he repeatedly struggled to remember why he was aboard the plane and where he was going. Such episodes, he said, are commonplace when he travels.
Dorsett said he also gets lost when he drives his two youngest daughters, ages 15 and 10, to their soccer and volleyball games.
“I’ve got to take them to places that I’ve been going to for many, many, many years, and then I don’t know how to get there,” he said.
It is entirely conceivable that fear of concussion might dry up the well upon which professional football relies, at least among the more privileged players like Jonathan Martin not willing to exchange their brains for a hefty salary. Football might evolve into a sport like boxing in which the only participants are from the most poverty-stricken.
Like warfare, football always seems to find a way to survive. In 2011 Harper Collins published “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football”, written by John J. Miller. Miller, a rightwing slug from National Review, portrayed Roosevelt as a savior of a sport that had not yet become professional, even though it was arguably a lot more brutal. A Wall Street Journal review ties the book to current events:
Today a major problem is concussions. One study sponsored by the NFL found that professional veterans over the age of 50 are five times as likely as the general population to suffer from dementia. Those numbers are bad, but consider the situation in 1905, when 18 people died on the gridiron. Back then, foes likened the game to gladiatorial combat in Roman amphitheaters and launched a crusade. Led by Harvard President Charles Eliot and joined by the Nation magazine and muckraking journalists, Progressive-era prohibitionists wanted to sack the increasingly popular sport.
At one point, Harvard actually quit playing the game. So did Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of California and several smaller colleges. Following the 1897 death of Richard Von Gammon, a fullback at the University of Georgia, the Georgia state legislature voted to ban football. The governor vetoed the bill, but only after hearing from Gammon’s mother, who urged him not to outlaw a sport that her son had loved.
Harvard’s Eliot was adamant. No honorable sport, he wrote in a 1905 report, embraces “the barbarous ethics of warfare.”
Roosevelt had little patience for such talk. “Harvard will be doing the baby act if she takes any such foolish course as President Eliot advises,” he wrote. Elsewhere, he worried about producing “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”
As is the case today, football was a vital part of a culture of Empire. In Roosevelt’s day, it was gunboat diplomacy; now we have drone diplomacy. If you have the stomach to watch the pregame ceremonies of a Super Bowl, you will be struck by the salutes to the troops, the overhead flights of jet fighters, the American flags, and all the rest. It is our version of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.
On August 4, 2013, Michael Perelman posted an excerpt from his latest book titled “The Matrix: The Intersection of War, Economic Theory, and the Economy” on his blog that has a chapter titled “Muscular Christianity and Football” that you can read it in its entirety here. The first paragraph referring to a problem with “softness” might tell you that as long as there is capitalism and imperialism, there will always be professional football and the Richie Incognito’s who serve as its gladiators:
In the late nineteenth century, a fear about the softness of American society raised doubts about the capacity of the United States to carry out its imperial destiny. This problem was associated with the final settlement of the frontier. As important as the development of open space was to the expansion of the territory of the United States, the completion of the continental expansion brought an attendant fear that traditional masculinity was on the wane and would bring about a withering of the individual and the national body. This fear spread to the church as well, where the result was thought to be a moral softening (Miller 2011, p. 38). To make matters worse, waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were flooding American cities with foreign cultures. This concern became so pressing that talk of “race suicide” became common.
Frederic Wiseman
