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Zennie Abraham/flickr
So, I have some bad news for everyone.
There’s no karma in sports.
When you get past the whole freakish physical gifts/insane work ethic and commitment thing, athletes are just like the rest of us. Human. Flawed. No better, no worse.
Just like real life, in sports, there are people who succeed in spite of being horrible people and people who don’t in spite of being exemplary people.
Because of all that, I have yet to understand the notion of rooting for a team or against one because they do things the “right way” or the “wrong way”.
I’m looking at you, Florida State haters.
Let me back up a minute, though, because Florida State is far from the first team to be hated because of its off-the-field issues. Or even the first winning team to be hated for that reason.
Sports and social issues are often closely intertwined, and that’s completely okay. Just look at the awareness brought to domestic violence via the Ray Rice issue. It made America understand it better. There are some who never will — largely because they don’t want to — but it’s a step, and many educated themselves as a result of what happened. Many who probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
So there’s nothing wrong with, say, looking at the Jameis Winston rape allegations and their initial mishandling and learn a lesson in the way that rape victims — alleged or real — are often victims once more at the hands of a justice system not designed to serve them. It doesn’t matter if star quarterback was the alleged perpetrator, or a random college kid, or a friend. Even if they have all the evidence in the world, it’s still difficult to prove in court and the process to go about proving it is arduous, shameful and ultimately, far too often, fruitless. It’s fine that a high-profile case can bring these things to light.
What complicates this however is that there’s a corrupting aspect of sports and sports culture that would make it more likely those allegations get swept under the rug. (Read “The System” if you need a lesson in how that works, commonplace at many schools, with rape and plenty of other crime.) The problem with this is that somehow, in the Winston case, that’s the part that everyone tends to get caught up in. And in my opinion, it’s a huge detriment to the issue. If you care at all about how rape as a crime is handled — and you should, because it’s handled terribly — then that’s what we should be talking about. But instead, all we want to talk about is some sort of culture of corruption and cover-ups in Tallahassee. As if the way Winston’s case was handled is all that different from the way a lot of rape cases are handled.
Here are the facts: 60% of sexual assaults are not reported to police, and 97% of rapists never spend a day in jail. That’s true everywhere. That’s a problem.
And it’s a problem that doesn’t suddenly become fixable if Winston and Florida State lose a stupid freaking football game.
The other part of it that is troublesome to me is the way that Winston’s alleged rape just became another item on a list of mostly fairly harmless “crimes” — shoplifting crab legs (“shoplifting” might be code for “football players got the hook up but someone didn’t tell that one dude”), yelling an inappropriate meme and shooting squirrels with a BB gun or something? I don’t even know.
It’s almost as if people were okay on some level with the idea that this rape allegation couldn’t necessarily be proven — until Jameis decided not to be humble anymore. Like it was totally okay if he got away with it, as long as he transformed himself into a different person altogether and thanked his lucky stars every day that he got away with something that he believes he did not do. Obviously, that line of thinking ties in far too close for my taste to the whole idea of so-called “good guys” don’t rape women. (They do, all the time.)
So all that is problematic to me. In a lot of ways. But not nearly as problematic as the notion that, say, some football god is supposed to come down from the heavens in the form of Knute Rockne or something and smite Florida State for their hubris.
Or, that somehow, rooting against them — if we all do it together, as a nation — can somehow rectify the wrong that may or may not have occurred, and that they continue to get away with. A LOSS! THAT IS WHAT WILL SHOW THEM! A LOSS ON THE FIELD OF PLAY! IF THEY DON’T WIN, THAT MEANS WE ALL WIN!
I see this from the fans, of course, and it’s understandable. But I also see it from some in my profession, and I find that almost as disturbing. Because we should know better. We DO know better. But we’re not all that unlike the rest of you.
Sports are supposed to be our escape from society. We all get caught up in a feel-good story. We like to think that sports is morally just, and that the good guys win and the bad guys lose. We like to root for the good guys and against the bad guys. FSU has, of course, become the bad guys.
And so we roll our eyes at Jimbo Fisher talking about the character of his team, as if any other coach in his position wouldn’t be saying and doing the exact same things. And we convince ourselves that rooting against Florida State will bring us to some sort of higher level of spiritual existence.
To the media, how often have you heard or seen a coach lie to your face about something that you know happened differently, sometimes something pretty serious? How often does that same coach talk about his program’s integrity and such? Why is he not as hypocritical as Fisher?
To the fans, though, I’ll just say this: the odds are very, very good that there’s at least one player on your team who’s attempted or succeeded in a sexual assault, or struck a female. If it didn’t happen with someone on the current roster, the head coach (or someone on staff, because the head coach separates himself necessarily) probably knew about it happening with someone who was on the roster once and did nothing, or helped hide it.
I don’t say this to make you angry, or to accuse your program or its players of anything nefarious. I have a hard time believing most of the guys I cover regularly could ever do something like that. Of course, I think we all feel that way about most of the people we interact with regularly and statistics would show us that we’re wrong about some of them, at least.
And this too, fans – FSU Twitter has become easy to vilify. But put yourselves in the position of an FSU fan. If you felt like your program and team were being attacked unfairly on a regular basis, how would YOU react? There are ugly elements of FSU Twitter. But it’s not a monolithic entity. There are plenty of people who root for the Seminoles that are just normal, everyday people. Many of them are probably troubled by some of what’s happened, just like you would be. But they still love their team, and now they find themselves striking back at the backlash. That’s just human nature.
If I thought rooting against Florida State would somehow eradicate the problem of football programs run amok (so-called, of course) or violence against women (sexual or otherwise), I would do it in a half a heartbeat. Hating on FSU has almost become confused with standing up for rape victims — when it’s obviously not.
But, I’ve met and conversed with guys like Rashad Greene, Cam Erving, Jalen Ramsey. I like those guys. Sorry, but I do. Maybe they’re horrible people and I just don’t know it. Maybe half the guys I cover locally are horrible and I just don’t know it. All I can do is my job, and hope that the good I think I see in so many shines through – not just football players, but every day, just in life. All the while, I’m aware of the ugly reality that we face as a society on so many fronts, particularly women.
And so I sincerely hope even a quarter of the people so up in arms about Winston will take the time to donate to a rape crisis center in their area, or even help work for legislation to help victims. That’s a constructive way of dealing with this, not mentally willing a stupid football team to lose a stupid football game.
Somehow, though, I doubt it. And that makes me sad.
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