Athletes have a code, one that’s missing on social media and in politics.
Athletes have a code, one that’s missing on social media and in politics.
O n March 26, 1997, the Detroit Red Wings’ Darren McCarty launched himself at Claude Lemieux of the Colorado Avalanche. As fights broke out all over the ice at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena, McCarty began pummeling Lemieux in the head, eventually dragging him over to the boards and slamming him against the wall.
“When I pulled that fist back, I had the power of the whole city of Detroit and the power of a million Red Wings fans in that fist,” McCarty would later say. “I didn’t even feel it.”
Fighting had always been a part of hockey culture, but even so, McCarty’s attack was especially violent. Without context, it may have seemed way over the line. But everyone in the league understood that it was simply the sports justice system at work.
In a playoff game 301 days earlier, Lemieux had delivered a cheap shot on McCarty’s teammate, Kris Draper, that left Draper with a face so badly broken it required wiring his jaw shut in four places.
“I got this,” McCarty told Draper. “I got you.”
McCarty got his violent revenge on Lemieux nearly a year later, and yet he wasn’t even thrown out of the game. In fact, after all the blood was cleared from the ice, he scored the winning goal to beat the Avalanche that night.
“The fact that McCarty wasn’t kicked out and was in there to score the winning goal, that tells me that even the NHL, from a distance, allowed justice to happen and condoned it,” said Detroit News columnist Bob Wojnowski.
As long as team sports have existed, there has been an internal, self-regulating system of justice among their participants. If a player steps out of line, there are ways of exacting revenge on the field, court, or ice. Just this past weekend, the St. Louis Cardinals’ first baseman, Willson Contreras, broke an unwritten rule by standing in the baseline as the Milwaukee Brewers’ Caleb Durbin barreled into him trying to run out a ground ball. Later in the game, the Brewers’ pitcher smoked Contreras in the arm with a pitch to pay him back for his earlier breach of etiquette.
And lest anyone think this is a testosterone-fueled code enforced by males, just look to women’s sports, which recognize the same rules of justice. On Tuesday night, Indiana Fever forward Sophie Cunningham clotheslined Jacy Sheldon of the Connecticut Sun to pay her back for Sheldon’s rough treatment of the Fever’s Caitlin Clark. A scuffle and several ejections ensued, but Cunningham is largely being lauded for defending her teammate through physical means.
If sports justice is a sort of frontier justice, it’s what Americans crave. Nobody likes seeing the bad guys get away. Rarely in movies or television shows do the good guys fail to deliver the villains the cold revenge they deserve.
But the story of America now is that people not only get away with terrible acts, but some try to turn them into heroes.
Take U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah), part politician, part toxic online edgelord, who over the weekend made jokes about the murder of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband. On his personal X (formerly Twitter) account, Lee posted a photo of the alleged shooter in a mask, quipping, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” attempting to tie the man to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Lee also tried to push the early narrative that the man was a left-winger, offering up the evidence-free observation, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Simple decency would require a U.S. senator to remain quiet when the facts weren’t known, especially when some of his congressional colleagues were on the alleged shooter’s hit list. But that is not the way of X, where the urge to sh**post is simply too much to resist. When Democratic Minnesota Senator Tina Smith confronted Lee in person to tell him how much pain he was causing with his toxic posts, she said Lee seemed surprised. “I don’t think this is a person who is used to being confronted,” she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Lee deleted the offending posts. But he was right back at it on Monday night, chatting with a user going by the handle “@BubbleBathGirl” about whether he needs other senators’ “permission” to post online.
Some Republicans have expressed support for Smith without naming Lee, but his terrible behavior went largely uncriticized by his party. Obviously, they can’t — and shouldn’t — dispense justice in Darren McCarty “fists of fury” fashion, but what GOP senator is going to stand up and say “enough”? Or will they all continue to hope this all simply passes?
Lee’s conduct, of course, is part of the rise of social media, in which behaving badly is the easiest way to get attention. A few years ago, for instance, the owner of X joked about the attack on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a hammer-wielding maniac. But upholding standards of decency on X is a losing battle, if it’s even joined. In fact, the incentives trend the other way.
The very structure of social media boosts the desire for keyboard cowboys to be vile, given that they are rarely confronted in person. In the pre-internet days, saying something harmful about someone carried with it the risk of physical harm. If delivered in close proximity, an insult could result in the necessity of retrieving one’s teeth from the ground. But when done anonymously or in cyberspace, it gives awful people the cover they need to act out.
In the Donald Trump era, made possible by the anarchy of social media, the concept of “justice” has been scrambled. At the same time that he complained about politically motivated criminal cases against him, for example, he promised to conduct the same type of cases against his political enemies. He pardoned people who beat and spit on Capitol law enforcement in his name. He tried to drop a criminal corruption case against a Democratic mayor so the mayor would do his bidding.
On the Republican side, the best one can expect is for GOP leaders to stay silent when lines are crossed, whether by a senator or by a president.
As for the Democrats, they could use their own enforcer. Will justice come for those who lied about Joe Biden’s physical and mental capabilities? Perhaps it did come when the terrible candidate they elevated in his place lost, ushering Trump back into the White House.
And will all those university diversity officers who spent years fomenting racial discord on campuses get their comeuppance?
All this is anathema to the American spirit, in which a good guy will always be there to dispense retribution against those who break the rules. To this day, Claude Lemieux has a large bump on his skull delivered by Darren McCarty’s knee. In the political world, justice should not be done violently — but at some point, actions have to have nonviolent consequences. We need a code of decency once more.