This Thanksgiving, spare a thought for Robert Griffin III, who at just 24 seems to have reached the end of his career with the Redskins and may be washed up as an NFL quarterback. An impossibly promising rookie, a guy born to be a franchise QB (and, I’ve always suspected, a secret conservative), RG3 has been plagued by injuries and one of the rottenest strings of games in living memory. He’s now been benched in favor of Colt McCoy, an older thrower who has, it must be said, one of the coolest football names imaginable. Given that this is his second season of bitter disappointment, Griffin’s demotion is looking less like a temporary setback than the end of an epoch.
A page-one eulogy in today’s Washington Post by Dave Sheinin and Liz Clarke is that rare thing: a piece wherein the melodramatic and pretentious stylings of sports writing are actually appropriate for the heartrending material:
The enormous cost of the Griffin era can be measured in cold football terms: from the three first-round and one second-round pick the Redskins had to surrender to the St. Louis Rams to secure his draft rights in March 2012 to the firing of Mike Shanahan as head coach at the end of last season to the unsightly 4-14 record Griffin has compiled as a starter the past two seasons.
But what makes Griffin’s downfall an athletic tragedy worthy of Shakespeare is human cost. Far from the magnetic superstar with the sprinter’s speed and a persona that made him millions from Madison Avenue before he took his first NFL snap, he now appears a shell of his former self, broken of body and spirit.
“You hate to see anybody beat up the way Robert has been beat up,” Joe Theismann, arguably the last Redskins signal-caller to earn the title of franchise quarterback, said in a telephone interview. “He is being beaten physically; he’s being beaten mentally. And in the court of public opinion, he is being destroyed. It’s a fickle business. The only way to keep the lions at the gate is to produce.”
Griffin has so far been paid almost $18 million by the ’Skins, so there are plenty of people more deserving of your sympathy. But there is something tragic about seeing a young superstar transformed from what Sheinin and Clarke call “an Olympic-caliber athlete” into “a halting, limping man who has been sacked four times per game this season and who seems to get up more gingerly with each crushing blow.”
“I am always thankful for all of my successes, but along with that comes my failures,” Griffin wrote in a Thanksgiving piece for Time last week. “Without the latter, I would not be able to learn from my mistakes and correct my path to create success. Going through the highs and lows of life has made me the man that I am today, and I am very thankful for that.”
Better times:
