Life Lessons From the NFL

In the good old days, we watched football on Sundays.

Today, we follow The Sport of Modern Man from games on Sunday, Monday and Thursday to hi-jinks and escapades all week long.  The season ends with the Super Bowl in January and begins with the first arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm in February.  Baseball has the Hot Stove League, but football has 1,700 or so young men who, thanks to large doses of human growth hormone, money and entitlement, participate in a virtual laboratory of civilization all year long as the league lurches from guns and drugs to dog fighting and domestic violence.  For those of you too afraid to finish Lord of the Flies, you can now see the final chapters play out each morning on ESPN.

Fortunately for all of us, there are important lessons to be learned, and lessons that may yet enhance civilization.  It seems like only yesterday that a defensive back for the Oakland Raiders lined up a defenseless receiver and broke his cervical vertebrae with a vicious and entirely gratuitous blow, causing a gifted athlete to become a quadriplegic.  It was all part of a meaningless preseason game.  The NFL's defense: It was a legal hit.  The receiver's autobiography: Happy To Be Alive.  The defensive back's autobiography: Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum.  And Jack Tatum never apologized, saying that if you want to play football, you're going to get injured.  The NFL eventually outlawed this especially vicious kind of hit of a defenseless player, just as the law doesn't allow a sucker punch at a bar.  But, like Bogie and Bergman, we'll always have Oakland.

Pre-Lesson: If you want to play, expect to get injured.  A simple enough life lesson.  But there's more.  Suppose for brevity's sake we simply stick to the last decade or so?

Last night's sports headlines on ESPN.  See any sports there?

Lesson One:  Torturing animals may briefly disrupt your career.  Michael Vick is another gifted athlete who decided in 2001, his first year in the NFL, to launch with three associates the Bad Newz Kennels in Surrey County, Virginia.  The organization housed and trained some 50 pit bulls for high stakes fighting.  Dogs who fought and lost were killed.  Other dogs were tested and if they did not fight well were also killed--maybe drowned in a 5 gallon bucket of water, slammed to the ground till their backs broke, hung or electrocuted.  When Vick was busted, other NFL players rushed to his defense, one saying, "It's his property; it's his dogs.  If that's what he wants to do, do it."  (Dog fighting has a long and romantic history in America.)  When Vick was sentenced he received 23 months in jail--beyond the 18 max--with the extra time tacked on by the judge for his lying, not taking responsibility and for testing positive for marijuana.  In the three months before he entered prison Michael Vick managed to spend $3M, including purchasing a $100K Mercedes.  Today, having served his sentence, Vick is being paid $5M to play as a quarterback for the New York Jets.

Lesson Two: If you carry an illegal firearm in your underwear, best not shoot yourself.  New York Giant Plaxico Burress was sentenced to two years in prison in 2009 for possession of an unlicensed firearm, a Glock pistol he carried to a Manhattan nightclub only to have it slip from his waistband and accidentally fire into his thigh.  Burress had a license to carry a concealed firearm; it was unfortunate that it happened to be for Florida.  And it had expired.  Since serving his sentence, Burress has appeared on Celebrity Wife Swap and is now an NFL analyst.

Lesson Three: Best not shoot other people during your vacation time.  Here in New England we have watched one of the best tight ends in football sit in jail since a 2013 indictment on murder.  This was followed by a second indictment this year for the murder of two other people.  Not to mention a shooting incident in Miami that has apparently been forgiven and forgotten.  The murders are alleged and the player, Aaron Hernandez, has maintained his innocence throughout--which we presume to be true because we are Americans.  But no matter how things turn out, we don't have the tight end we need, Hernandez had to forfeit $19 million in bonuses, and the lesson is clear.

Lessons Four and Five: Don't punch women in the head.  Don't beat 4-year-olds with weapons. I'm certain you're pretty well up to speed on these two.  On that second lesson, of course, the fact that your parents did it to you (and you turned out OK) is the most ironic answer possible.  And on the first lesson, fortunately, we're down to just a dozen active players in the NFL arrested for domestic violence.  You can watch them all on Sunday.  That's progress.





Last Lesson: When purveyors of alcohol begin questioning your ethical judgment, it really is time to change your game.  Budweiser has told the NFL that it's disappointed and expects things to change.  It could be worse; Camel cigarettes could lecture the league on health, or the NRA on Constitutional law.  But it's pretty bad.

Fear not, though.  The next crop of extraordinarily talented young kids is getting ready to enter the NFL.  Jameis Winston is one of them.  (You can see him on Saturday, but only the second half; he's been suspended for the first half, a punishment calculated by his school to still give him time to pull the game out against a weak opponent if need be.  Jameis is still staring down the wrong end of a 2012 rape allegation as well.)  Jameis can run and throw with the best of them.  I hope he and the other kids will be ready for the NFL on draft day, but more than that, I sure hope the NFL is ready for them.

At least now you won't have to finish Lord of the Flies.  You already know how it turns out.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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