The first is the violation of the locker room code. When Martin left the Dolphins, he went public with stuff that should have remained private. If he had a problem that necessitated that he leave the team, it should have been handled as “personal reasons” and left at that. I haven’t seen anything in the actual reports that seem to support the media speculation of hazing gone wild, with a wimp being targeted by a racist. This violation of the locker room code is among the biggest transgressions there is for a team sport athlete. It causes a break in the trust necessary for a strong team and is almost impossible to fix.
The reason for this is obvious. The things that are normal in a team locker room aren’t normal in real life. They can’t be described or understood with PC thinking. And if you don;t live in that environment, you can’t understand it. Teams are more like elite combat units than employees in a company. Your teammates are guys with whom you go to war with and fight to the bitter end. Team relationships are more than friendships.
When the public tries to peek inside, what they see defies common sense. Remember, a team is made up of ultra- competitive, physically commanding guys who play winner take all every day. That kind of environment doesn’t exist in the real world.
The other issue is that Jonathan Martin is a smart guy – maybe too smart. I can identify with this part, as I had some of the same issues in my career. As an academic, I tended to look at everything as a word problem to be solved. In pro sports, it sometimes comes down to two animals getting down and dirty and fighting it out. That is incompatible with the common workplace, rational thought and logic. Very often, players are physically and mentally challenged to the point of being overwhelmed.
Somewhere along the line, in my opinion, Jonathan Martin took it personally. And it got to him.
What I have seen happen is that one player had a cascade of issues pile up that caused him to overload from stress. Then there is a blowup, as the pressure has to go somewhere. From the outside, it looks like simple cause and effect. One guy did this and Boom! But in actuality there is a lot behind it.
I had a teammate once who took perverse pride in messing with me. I was the quiet academic type and he viewed me as a goody-goody guy who needed some toughening up. He played practical jokes on me. One day, my car was mysteriously keyed at practice. Another day, there was baby powder waiting for me in my blow dryer. He would tell the rest of the team so they could wait and watch.
I took the high road and dodged the bullets the best I could until one day, when some personal stuff about me ended up in print. The next time we got into it in practice, I blew up and went after him. The team stepped in to prevent any damage, but I made it clear that I was on the warpath. Miraculously, it all stopped.
Years later, this person approached me to apologize for being a bad teammate. We had a real clearing conversation. It still took me some time to let it go. I hadn’t realized that I was still holding on to some hate about it.
In reality, these things are more complex than meets the eye. Once the private becomes public, then intelligent people start to look stupid when they have to explain non-PC actions to a PC audience. It can’t be done easily and doesn’t compute very well. It really shows why these things rarely come to the public light.
The truth is when these things go public, everybody suffers. The real kiss of death is when hired lawyers start making public statements. The first thing they do is try the case in the court of public opinion. That’s where things get really ugly, because public opinion doesn’t understand locker room privacy.
There will be no winners in the Dolphins case. As the team works to minimize the fallout, people will lose their jobs, players will have their reputations smeared, and careers will be adversely affected.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Danny Schayes is a retired 18-year-veteran of the NBA, a professional broadcaster and soon-to-be-published author now penning NBA columns for SheridanHoops. Follow him on Twitter.
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I completely agree.
We coddle these players and make them leave a game just because of a “concussion”. Professional sports are just like war (without the stakes). I wouldn’t want a soldier/tight end next to me on the battlefield/practice field who hasn’t shown themselves able to hide their emotions until a later time (preferably in retirement or in the offseason).
Tom has a great point as well, if Royce White had been bullied- it would have cured his mental issues- look it up, it’s science. He was actually diagnosed with “Softness” I think. I guess it may have led to something bad, but isn’t that why you have malpractice insurance?
We don’t want to watch sports to see the best athletes, we want to see the ones who can take the most verbal abuse. This is how we teach our kids to suck it up and get tougher.
Look, I appreciate that I will never have the insight into the lockerroom that a former athlete has.
But to take his experience and then extrapolate it across all sports and all lockerrooms in all situations is absurd.
“There are no hardcore racists in sports”
Really? You feel comfortable making that absolute a statement when you yourself have only intimate familiarity with one? Please. Unless you’re telling me ALL professional athletes are more enlightened than your average racist, I would guess that the percent of “racists” in the real world isn’t that much larger than the percent of racists in a lockerroom.
You guys have a very different job in an industry that is very different than most others. That does not mean you all suddenly escape general societal woes that everyone falls victim to. I guarantee you’ve played with at least one “hard-core” racist before. And what is the difference between a hard-core racist and a regular one? Are you saying you did play with “normal” racists but were OK with them?
Also, your numerous points contradict yourself on a number of occasions.
You know as little as we do about what happened; you’re just upset some unspoken code was broken. I would think the lockerroom would have codes about not saying stuff about each other’s sisters the way Incognito did. I’m not calling him a racist, but in any context, what he said there was inappropriate and unacceptable; between brothers, between teammates, between whatever you want to call yourselves – you don’t have to sacrifice your humanity to play a sport. It’s the choice you all have decided to make when you write stuff like this.
Well written, honest, and interesting comments on this hot topic. I do however, wish that Royce White could have been bullied before that loon’s career ended…Great work by Sheridan to add Danny Shayes as a columnist.