Gruden and the Carnage to Come

 

Jon Gruden has resigned as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, a professional football team.  Why? Because over the past several years he wrote some emails that contained allegedly racist language and language denigrating the NFL commissioner and then Vice President Biden.  He used what have been labeled misogynistic and homophobic words as well.  Per the NFL, no other significant instances of such language were found among the 650,000 emails which it has scoured.

I don’t condone the language Gruden used.  But . . . yes, there is a but . . .

As an example of the . . .  but . . . some guy named William Rhodden, writing at the Undefeated (here: Gruden is Gone ) exemplifies the kind of exaggerated and predictable response to these sorts of events.  Rhodden suggests there has been an “avalanche” of emails showing how racist, homophobic, bigoted, and misogynistic Gruden is and that his “enablers” in the NFL all need to be outed and publicly flogged, too.  More importantly, per Rhodden, this handful of emails exemplifies the entire culture within the NFL (“trust me” he says).

I have a suggestion for Mr. Rhodden: release all of your emails for the past ten years, including all private emails you thought were between you and friends.  All of them.  I wonder if you ever said anything in one of those emails that might be construed as less than cordial.  Then I’ll “trust” you. Mr. Rhodden won’t because there is a religious fervor to this nonsense – and he is one of the priestly class of holier-than-thou commentators to whom obeisance is required.  Proof is not part of his calling – ironically, the demand here is one of faith and blind acceptance, not reason and thoughtful analysis.

The so-called avalanche Rhodden relies on to claim Gruden deserved what he got is apparently a handful of emails. It turns out this was it.  The sum total.  Monday morning quarterbacking by talking heads from ESPN (where were they all these years when Gruden was supposedly being such a monster?) and other venues is not only questionable, it’s downright hypocritical. This is standard cancel-culture stuff: write a handful of bad tweets or emails that become public and you’re a goner, case closed, no matter what you or anyone else says and no matter that some of it was ten years ago, and no matter anything else you’ve ever done in your life. 

How about the following possibility: Jon Gruden is a foul mouthed and arrogant jerk who uses that kind of language because he’s a foul mouthed arrogant jerk.  We refuse to ever believe there is any viable, alternative explanation to people’s use of language – if someone utters a racist statement it’s because that person has always been and inevitably always will be a racist and racism is so pervasive in our society it’s shocking the entire world hasn’t crashed into a pit of unrelenting despair.

I don’t know Jon Gruden (and 99.9999% of you don’t either).  My sense from limited observation and some very limited insider information is that he is a standard football coach who cares about one thing and one thing only: winning football games.  If you can help Jon Gruden win football games, I seriously doubt he cares about your ethnic background, your skin color, your sexual preferences, what you call yourself, what religion you practice or any other feature you may actually have or claim you have.  If you’re a 6 foot 7, 330 behemoth who can move like a ballerina and you claim you’re actually a woman in a man’s body, but you can pancake defensive linemen at the snap of a finger, I suspect Jon Gruden won’t care and you will be his starting left tackle.

Don’t misunderstand me – I’m NOT in agreement with the things Jon Gruden said, nor do I think they were appropriate, wise, or decent.  I’m NOT defending his words.  Where I am not on board is with the idea that one can glean from a handful of emails (or one), written about a very specific topic under very specific circumstances, the nature of a person’s heart and character for all time. 

The faux outrage is absurd. It’s very likely that anyone who’s written more than a handful of emails, texts, tweets, Facebook or other social media posts, or actual written letters hasn’t at some point used wording they’d like to take back.  Moreover, the idea that mean things said by Jon Gruden in the past point to the overwhelming existence of systemic and unremitting racism in the NFL is not merely stupid, it’s demeaning to everyone in the NFL, regardless of skin color, who has worked for years to remove racism as much as possible.  It says to those folks: nothing you’ve done was of any value and it hasn’t mattered at all.  Might as well have never bothered you pathetic losers.

There was a time in the NFL when a black quarterback was simply not possible.  There was a time in the NFL when a black head coach was unthinkable.  There was a time in the NFL when a black general manager was a pipe dream.  All those things have come to pass and the NFL has not only remained the most popular sport in America but has actually grown during that time.

Does that mean the NFL is perfect?  Of course not.  Does that mean the NFL can’t continue to work on race relations?  Of course not. 

But a few emails from a potty mouth, arrogant jerk like Jon Gruden doesn’t mean the NFL is a cesspool of unmitigated racist horrors, either.  Claiming this to be the case and demanding the “outing” of Gruden’s “enablers” as if Gruden was sitting at his keyboard grinding this stuff out minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day is nonsense.  The scary part of all this is that the people making these demands, like Mr. Rhodden, have had their victory and will now move on to the next victim, indifferent to the carnage they leave behind.  They will never be satiated, they will never stop, and they don’t care who they hurt in the process.